As the play was being written a good deal of discussion about it found its way into the newspapers. It was rumored that it would be translated into Irish, and then back again, by Lady Gregory, into English, but no such fantastic scheme as that Mr. Moore tells us of in "Ave" was suggested in any of the paragraphs that came my way. Because they could not agree on the kind of diction they were to use in the play, Mr. Yeats, who wanted a peasant Grania, agreed, writes Mr. Moore, to his suggestion that he write the play in French. Mr. Moore gives these as the words of Mr. Yeats: "Lady Gregory will translate your text into English. Taidgh O'Donoghue will translate the English text into Irish, and Lady Gregory will translate the Irish text back into English." "And then," Mr. Moore makes himself reply to Mr. Yeats, "you'll put style upon it."

More remarkable than the scheme was the actual attempt of Mr. Moore to realize it. On leaving Galway, where he and Mr. Yeats had been collaborating at Coole, Mr. Moore began the second act in French. He gives us enough of the dialogue (pages 370 to 376 of "Ave") to show us his high pride in his French, the tolerance of his humor, and his idea of the kind of style the play should have.

If Mr. Moore had given the subject to Mr. Yeats and to Lady Gregory, as he had some thought of doing, it would only have been a return of a subject already theirs by right of their long discussion of it together. Lady Gregory was not yet working upon it for "Gods and Fighting Men" (1904); but it was she who had reduced it to the proportions of a scenario for them to work upon. This scenario was published in "Samhain" of October, 1901, that all of the audiences of the play might be in possession of the story as a Grecian audience was in possession of the story of Elektra. And did not Mr. Moore say in his speech at the dinner given to the supporters of "The Irish Literary Theatre" in February, 1900, in speaking of his collaboration with Mr. Yeats in "Diarmid and Grania": "It would be difficult to name any poet that Ireland has yet produced more truly elected by his individual and racial genius to interpret the old legend than the distinguished poet whose contemporary and collaborateur I have the honor to be"?

The story, of course, had been retold only less often than the story of Deirdre by Irish writers, in one form or another, but there had been no memorable play made out of it. Mr. Yeats had met it in "The Death of Dermid," which Sir Samuel Ferguson included in "The Lays of the Western Gael" (1864), as well as in the direct translations of such scholars as Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady and in the versions of such popularizers as Dr. Joyce. One cannot, not having read the play, declare it is not what Mr. Moore would have it, "that dramatic telling of the story which Ireland has been waiting for these many years," but it does not seem so to have impressed those who saw it and heard it at the performances in the Gaiety Theatre.

Now that Lady Gregory has done her "Grania" (1912), it is hardly likely that Mr. Yeats will return to the story, and with the waning of Mr. Moore's interest in old Irish legend it is very unlikely that he will wish to rewrite the play. It would seem we have lost it, whatever its value, until the "literary remains" of Mr. Moore are given to the public.

The quarrel with Mr. Yeats over "Diarmid and Grania," coming as it did at the end of the three years' venture of "The Irish Literary Theatre," explains why Mr. Moore wrote no plays for the Irish National Dramatic Company and its successors on through the Abbey Theatre Players. He was still interested, however, in the "cause" as far as it was possible for one of his temperament and taste, and he was conspicuous on first nights at the Abbey Theatre down to the time of his departure from Dublin in 1911.

Since "Diarmid and Grania" (1901) Mr. Moore has published the two books of his that since "A Drama in Muslin" (1886) reveal his deepest knowledge of Irish life, the volume of stories of varying length to which he gives that title, so symbolic, "The Untilled Field" (1903), and "The Lake" (1905), but there are few incidents in either that he is likely to develop into plays. "The Lake" could not be dramatized, but if it could be dramatized, it would be as little likely to be presented in Ireland as "The Tinker's Wedding." Mr. Moore, for all that he was born a Catholic, would not hesitate any more than did the son of the Protestant minister to put a priest into a realistic modern play, and that, of course, would be a mild audacity for Mr. Moore now that he has published the scenario of "The Apostle" (1911). His Paul, in "The Apostle," a "thick-set man, of rugged appearance, hairy in the face and with a belly," is wonderfully alive, and his Jesus is a distinct and realizable personality, if not the Jesus of Christian dream. It is a curious illustration of Mr. Moore's almost disciple-like attitude toward Mr. G.W. Russell that he should make his Christ talk like "A.E." It seemed to me, as I read the words that Mr. Moore puts first on the lips of Jesus, that they were phrases that I had heard on the lips of Mr. Russell. They are of the very quality of his speech and writing: "How beautiful is the evening light as it dies, revealing every crest; the outline of the hills is evident now, evident as the will of God." And now each time, as I re-read them, they sound in my ears to the remembered rhythm of Mr. Russell's voice. Should Mr. Moore ever evolve a play from this scenario, and the play be played—and why should it not, now that the way is so plainly blazed by the score and more of miracle plays of the past decade?—it will have to be chanted as "A.E." chants his verse, as one would wish mass to be chanted.

Only a year ago Mr. Moore made his last adventure of the theatre. With the help of Mr. Lennox Robinson he dramatized "Esther Waters," but later he threw out the latter's work, feeling, no doubt, about it as Mr. Martyn felt about Mr. Moore's rewriting of his "A Tale of a Town"; and when it was put on, in the early winter of 1911-12 by the Stage Society, "Esther Waters" the play was like "Esther Waters" the novel, solely the work of Mr. Moore. The critics seem agreed that it was long drawn out and undramatic, but that it was well written and well acted. I suppose that the preoccupation with "Esther Waters" that this dramatization reveals is because "Esther Waters" was written in that period of his life when Mr. Moore was most himself. After ten years in London he had escaped considerably from the French influence of his young manhood, and his genius had not been warped out of its true plane, as he would doubtless now say, by Irish mists. Mr. Moore must have felt that there was something not wholly himself in much of "The Untilled Field" and in much of "The Lake," that the minds of Mr. Yeats and Mr. Russell had in a way dominated his mind, and that not even the hardly tolerated Mr. Martyn had been without influence upon him.

Such a realization is not the professed motive for the return of Mr. Moore to England, but I have no doubt at all that it is somewhere in the back of his mind, where he would like it to be hidden and forgot. At any rate, by the time of his return to England, Mr. Moore had come to see clearly that the Celtic episode of his maturity was closed.

It is not, I think, particularly difficult for one who understands the old-fashioned camp-meeting "getting of religion" to understand this "Celtic episode." Mr. Moore got Celtomania; a sort of "spiritual consumption," he calls his possession in one place, as a certain other type of sinner "got religion" in the old shouting days. That is, Mr. Moore wrought himself up partly in the spirit of the Playboy, and was wrought up to some degree willy-nilly until he could write his speech of February, 1900, on "Literature and the Irish Language," and, finally, a little later, could return happily to the country that until then he could endure only now and again.

But as a matter of fact the motive that led Mr. Moore back to Ireland matters not at all to literature. What beauty of writing that return led to matters a great deal. Had he not returned to Ireland, we should not have had a good deal that adds to the joy we win from satiric laughter, we should not have had "Hail and Farewell"; had he not returned we should not have had a book that adds to the treasure of beautiful feeling and beautiful writing there is in English literature, a treasure that there is no chance of ever having too large; we should not have had "The Lake," which is Ireland, West Ireland, Catholic Ireland, a land under gray skies that the priests its masters would, too many of them, make a land of gray lives.



CHAPTER V

MR. GEORGE W. RUSSELL ("A.E.")

Synge is the one instinctive dramatist of the earlier group of writers of the Celtic Renaissance, the one to whom drama was the inevitable medium for the expression of the best that was in him. Yet even Synge came to write plays only through an external stimulus, the urging of Mr. Yeats on their meeting in Paris. It was fortunate for the Irish drama, this meeting, and fortunate for Synge. If he had not been brought to the theatre of his own country, he would probably never have written anything of first importance. Mr. Yeats himself, of course, had been interested in verse plays from boyhood, but he, for all the energy he has expended in learning his own particular art of the stage, speaks more beautifully through his lyrics and the lyrical passages of his plays than through their passages that are dramatic speech, and not only more beautifully but with more of dignity and power. Nor is Lady Gregory, any more than Mr. Yeats, essentially a dramatist. Her great power is the power of dialogue, and dialogue, of course, is as often employed in the service of the story as in the service of the play. Yet it is not difficult to understand how in Lady Gregory the dialogue and in Mr. Yeats the love of the spoken word led, when opportunity was made, to writing for the stage, and for success on the stage. But in the case of "A.E." it is as difficult to find a foreshadowing of the playwright in the mystical poet as it would be to see in all but all of the essays of "The Treasure of the Humble," any proof that their author was a playwright. To those who knew Mr. Russell only through his verses, and were unaware of the versatility of the man, his turning dramatist was as surprising as Emerson turned dramatist would have been to the America of anti-slavery days.



It was not, of course, because of an impulse from within that Mr. Russell attempted drama in "Deirdre" (1902), but because the young enthusiasts of Ireland's national literary movement wanted plays that should be at once native in quality and the work of writers of standing. It did not seem a strange request to Cumann nan Gaedheal to ask Mr. Russell for a play. What if he had never written a play? He was hardly in their estimation more of an amateur than Mr. Yeats or Mr. Moore or Mr. Martyn, who had written plays for "The Irish Literary Theatre" that had achieved success of a kind, and he was surely as ardent a Nationalist as any of these. So he was asked for a play to be played at the Spring Festival of 1902 by the Irish National Dramatic Company that was forming, and he did what he was asked to do, blocking it all out in six hours, and finishing it sufficiently in three days for it to be put in rehearsal. It was in the summer following its first presentation that I saw it again in rehearsal in a little hall back of a produce shop in Dublin, and got to know Mr. Russell as playwright before I read his play. One of the actors, himself maker of verses and plays, gave me his copy of "Deirdre," with cues marked. I had seen notices of its first performance in the Irish papers and I had written Mr. Russell to see if I could get a copy, but he had not yet published it. Then he wrote me of young poets I met this night in Dublin, and the names on the lips of the enthusiasts we talked to, and their names were names Mr. Russell had written me of four months before. Here were they introducing me to his work as he had thus introduced me to theirs: "There are many poets here who write beautiful lyrics who are quite unknown out of Ireland because they never collected them from the pages of obscure magazines.... I have seen many verses signed 'I.O,' 'Alice Milligan,' 'Ethna Carberry,' 'Oghma,' 'Paul Gregan,' which I enviously wish I could claim as my own.... I think myself many of these unknown poets and poetesses write verses which no living English writer could surpass." The best of the verses of some of these and of others among his following Mr. Russell collected in "New Songs" (1904), which bore out much that he claimed for them.

It was to six of these young poets he dedicated his last volume of verse, "The Divine Vision" (1904), as he had dedicated his two earlier volumes to poet-mystics, "Homeward" (1894) to Mr. Charles Weekes and "The Earth Breath" (1898) to Mr. Yeats. The young writers (for they were almost all writers as well as actors) we met this Saturday night in Dublin, one and all, looked to "A.E." as leader, and some of them looked to him as high priest of their cult, as seer of that ancient type that combined as its functions the deliverance of religious dicta, prophecy, and song. My thoughts went back to our Concord of half a century ago, yet I wondered was Emerson's fascination as compelling as this.

It was in a commonplace-looking editorial sanctum that I found "A.E." on the following morning, at 22, Lincoln Place, to which he had descended from his office in the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, to edit "The Homestead" in its editor's absence. I was to see him, in the hour I was to spend with him there, in many roles. First was that of one of the beginners of the Irish Literary Revival. He has himself given the credit to Mr. Standish James O'Grady for furnishing the initial stimulus to the movement, in his "Heroic Period" and "Cuchulain and his Contemporaries" of 1878 and 1880; but to "A.E." and Mr. Yeats and Dr. Hyde also is due much of the credit. Mr. Russell said that when he came up to Dublin, a boy from Lurgan, there was no independent thought in Dublin, but now he thought there was a good deal, and he and his fellows of the Hermetic Society, he took mild pride in believing, had had something to do with the change. Even then, as a boy, he could not read most English literature, and so he took to reading the literature of the East, the Bhagavad-Gita and the Sufis. From his reading of these, with other young men that somehow found each other out, came the Hermetic Society, at whose meetings everything mystic from the Upanishads to Thomas Taylor was discussed. From the study of the universal, he said, they came at last to the national, to the study of the ancient folk-lore and stories of their people, which, had it not been for the Danes and Normans, would have been shaped into literary form long before now, when, he said, they were only being so shaped.

His disciples had told me the night before that "A.E." had helped them much in the National Dramatic Company, painting scenery for them, designing costumes, and aiding in a hundred other ways. He was silent about these matters and not very proud of the play. "Of course," he said, "I was very familiar with the story of Deirdre, and I had thought of its dramatic effectiveness, but I knew nothing of the stage and I was very much surprised it went so well." That it went well, I, who had seen it but the night before, could testify, though that rehearsal could give but a suggestion of the beautiful stage pictures it presents when played in the costume of the Heroic Age. Despite its intensely dramatic situations, it is, however, essentially a decorative rather than a dramatic play, and its exalted prose is seldom true dramatic speech. But you carry from it the memory of beautiful pictures, and a feeling that something noble has passed your way, to enter into and become a part of you.

As we were talking of the "movement," in came a young Roscommon landlord, and with him another of its phases and my discovery of Mr. Russell, man of business, organizer of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society. The talk was now of the erection of a hall, and Mr. Russell seemed as familiar with stone and lime and sand as with mysticism and poetry, which we had discussed, and with painting, which we were considering in a few minutes, when Mr. J.B. Yeats, Jr., arrived, to talk over an exhibition of his pictures to be held in Dublin the following week. A few days later I was reading Mr. Russell's review of Mr. Yeats's pictures, but before I left 22, Lincoln Place, I had a mental picture of "art critic" added to the already long list of titles after "A.E.'s" name, and I had still another evidence of his impressiveness. Mr. J.B. Yeats, Sr., his son said, would be around to have Mr. Russell sit for him next morning, in order to get on with the two orders he had of portraits of the mystic, one of them from an admirer in America. It was pleasant on leaving him to go away with his laugh ringing in my ears as a surety that the high seriousness of his purpose, and the higher seriousness with which some of his admirers take him, had not dulled his sense of humor.

Eight o'clock the next evening saw us in the eminently Philistine suburban street where was the little house of conventional exterior that sheltered the high dreams of "the Irish Emerson." Once entered, his embodied visions attract you from all four walls of the study. Piles of them in corners make you wonder is Mrs. Russell a saint. The pictures are of Irish landscape; of "the Other People"; of heroes and heroines of Ireland's prehistoric days; of souls that have yet to be born; of souls that have passed through incarnation after incarnation, never to rise above an animal existence; of souls whose every rebirth has taken them to higher spirituality, and that now wait to pass along the "path of liberation" into that immortality from which they shall never be born again. These visions have come to him, as the visions whose presence he records in his poetry, in all places—as he left the office and looked down the sun-gilded streets at close of day; as he wandered in the mountains under the stars with peasants who had "second sight"; as he talked with fellow Hermetists in meeting-rooms in back streets whose shabby interiors grew rosy gloom as the talk turned on mysteries.

To us Mr. Russell talked much, talked kindly of all men, talked well of many things, said startling things of society and art and poetry so gently that you did not think until afterwards that in another you would hold them gages of combat. I can hear him yet, as I sat and tried at the same time to listen to him and to look at his flaming-hearted spirits with luminous angel wings and flashing halos enveloped in an atmosphere in which "the peacock twilight rays aloft its plumes and blooms of shadowy fire"—I can hear him saying, "You can't read Shakespeare, can you?" As I thought over this question later, I understood. Then I was too far rapt by the pictures to wonder at it greatly. Later came to mind Emerson's declaration that Homer, Milton, and Shakespeare "do not fully content us," that the "heavenly bread" is to be found in Zoroaster, Plato, St. John, and Menu. Both Emerson and Mr. Russell fail to use art as the standard. To the mystic, to whom this world is not reality, what appeal may have its seeming truths and shows as compared to the certain truth of the idealists and the beauties of the eternal life? The deep human knowledge, the great pageants of Shakespeare's kings and queens, are but "glories of our blood and state ... shadows, not substantial things."

Mr. Russell talked very simply of his pictures, of how their subjects came to him, and of his enjoyment in thus recording them. He does not consider himself a painter, but he thinks there was the making of a painter in him had he had instruction in his earlier years. This attitude towards his various powers, as well as the attitude towards him of ardent young countrymen of his, came out in a story he told us of a boy that he found waiting for him one night at a street corner near his home. The boy timidly asked him was he not Mr. Russell, and then walked silently by his side until the house was reached. They entered and the boy mustered up courage to say he had waited for him two hours at the head of the street. "A.E." had been waiting for the boy to say what brought him, but he was obliged to encourage the boy before he would out with it. Said "A.E.," "You came here to talk with me. You must be interested in one of the three interests I have given much time to. Is it economics?" "No," replied the boy, indignantly. "Is it mysticism?" continued "A.E." "No," cried the boy, almost angry at such an interest being attributed to him. "It must be literary art, then?" "Yes," said the boy, with a sigh, his haven reached at last. "A.E." soon found the boy an exquisite who thought the literary movement was becoming vulgarized through so many people becoming interested in it. Finally the boy turned questioner and found that "A.E." was seeking the Absolute. Having found this out, he again sighed, this time regretfully, and said decidedly that "A.E." could not be his Messiah, as he abhorred the Absolute above everything else. He was infected with Pater's Relative, said Mr. Russell, "which has fallen like a blight on all English literature." So the boy—he was not yet twenty-one—went out into the night with, I suppose, another of his idols fallen.

As this boy came to "A.E.," so come scores of others, and most of those that have real troubles go away comforted, to return for advice and counsel and friendship, as their need is. This I knew before I met "A.E.," and his kindness I felt and certain magnetism, but the qualities that make him the leader of men, and hierophant to his personal following, do not lie on the surface to be quickly distinguished by every comer. Neither, we are told, did Emerson's, who was leader of men and hierophant. I thought often of "A.E.'s" pictures as I looked at the pictures of Watts in the Tate Gallery in London, and I have thought more often of them since I have come to know haloed Rosicrucian drawings and strange symbols in such books as our own Wissahickon mystics, Kelpius and his brethren, brought with them to "The Woman in the Wilderness" from Germany late in the seventeenth century. How notable the impression of Mr. Russell's paintings and visions upon two Irish writers the English-speaking world reads to-day may be learned from their exploitation in Mr. Stephen Gwynn's "The Old Knowledge" (1901), whose Owen Conroy owes being to "A.E." and his pictures, and from Mr. George Moore's "Evelyn Innes" (revised edition, 1901), whose Ulick Dean has his appearance and his power of seeing visions.

As the evening wore on, Mr. Russell picked up a manuscript collection of poems—that we were to have two years later as "The Divine Vision"—and read us several. Most distinctly of these I remember "Reconciliation" which he chanted most lovingly of all he read. It is a poem I do not pretend to understand in detail, but I do feel its drift, and I can never read out its stately music, or even read it silently, without hearing his sonorous chanting. Many of his poems are like this poem in that you must content yourself with their general drift and not insist on understanding their every phrase. I suppose to the initiate mystic they are more definite, but I doubt whether some of them are more than presentations of emotions that need not be translated into terms of thought for their desired effect.

To Mr. Russell poetry is a high and holy thing; like his friend Mr. Yeats he is at one with Spenser in believing it the fruit of a "certain enthousiasmos and celestial inspiration"; it is his religion that Mr. Russell is celebrating in his verses, many of which are in a sense hymns to the Universal Spirit, and all of which are informed by such sincerity that you do not wonder that his followers make them their gospel. In his own words:—

The spirit in man is not a product of nature, but antecedes nature, and is above it as sovereign, being of the very essence of that spirit which breathed on the face of the waters, and whose song, flowing from the silence as an incantation, summoned the stars into being out of chaos. To regain that spiritual consciousness, with its untrammelled ecstasy, is the hope of every mystic. That ecstasy is the poetic passion.... The act which is inspired by the Holy Breath must needs speak of things which have no sensuous existence, of hopes all unearthly, and fires of which the colors of day are only shadows.

About a score of the less than tenscore poems of "A.E." are definitely declarations of belief, but declarations so personal, so undogmatic, that you would hardly write him down a didactic poet at first reading "A New Theme" tells of his desertion of subjects "that win the easy praise," of his venturing

"in the untrodden woods To carve the future ways."

Here he acknowledges that the things he has to tell are "shadowy," that his breath in "the magic horn" can make but feeble murmurs. In the prologue to "The Divine Vision" he states the conditions of his inspiration:—

"When twilight over the mountains fluttered And night with its starry millions came, I too had dreams: the songs I have uttered Came from this heart that was touched by the flame";—

that is, the flame of his being that, "mad for the night and the deep unknown," leaps back to the "unphenomenal" world whence his spirit came and blends his spirit into one with the Universal Spirit. This same union through the soul's flame "A.E." presents in his pictures, and in his prologue to "The Divine Vision" he writes that he wishes to give his reader

"To see one elemental pain, One light of everlasting joy."

This elemental pain, as I take it, is the pain of the soul shut up in its robe of clay in this physical, phenomenal world, and so shut off from the spiritual world, the world of the unphenomenal or unknowable. The "everlasting joy" I take to be the certainty of eventual union with the Universal Spirit in the unphenomenal world, a union and a joy anticipated in the occasional temporary absorptions of the soul into the Universal Spirit in moments Emerson experienced as "revelation" and Plotinus as ecstasy.

"A.E.'s" friend, Mr. Charles Johnston, records the two young Irishmen's joint attempts to attain ecstasy, when he writes of those days when "we lay on our backs in the grass, and, looking up into the blue, tried to think ourselves into that new world which we had suddenly discovered ourselves to inhabit." Do not think this ecstasy too rare and wonderful a thing. To Plotinus it meant an utter blotting-out of self, a rapture of peace, and to Mr. Russell it frequently means that he is entirely "heart-hidden from the outer things," but I suspect it means sometimes mere lift of the heart through lungs full of fresh air, or through green fields for tired eyes, or through mountain air for worn nerves, or through skies thick-sown with stars for the vexed spirit.

The typical poem of "A.E." is that in which the sight of beautiful things of this phenomenal world in which we live lifts his soul to participation in the Universal Spirit. It is most often through some beauty of the sky at sunset, when

"Withers once more the old blue flower of day,"

as in "The Great Breath"; or at twilight, when

"Dusk wraps the village in its dim caress,"

as in "Dusk"; or at night, when

"The yellow constellations shine with pale and tender glory In the lilac-scented stillness,"

as in "The Singing Silences"; or at sunrise, when there is

"Fire on the altar of the hills,"

as in "Dawn";—it is most often through some beauty of the sky at such times that he becomes one with the Universal Spirit in "the rapture of the fire," that he is "lost within the 'Mother's Being,'" he would say that the soul returns to the Oversoul, Emerson would There are ways by which the soul homes other than these—sometimes it is

"By the hand of a child I am led to the throne of the King."

but it is most often by way of beauties of the sky. Some reasons are not far to seek. From sunset to sunrise the poet is free as he may be from the treadmill of the "common daily ways," and the high moods he tries to express are most easily symbolized by skyey images—massed clouds and sweeping lights of diamond, sapphire, amethyst; the still blue black of heaven thrilling with far stars; the purples of twilight horizons. In his use of these splendid symbols he is but following Proclus, whom he found quoted by Emerson as saying that "the mighty heaven exhibits, in its transfiguration, clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions, being moved in conjunction with the unapparent period of intellectual natures."

How important the symbol is to "A.E."—as important as it is to Emerson—may be gathered from "Symbolism," which, read in the light of what I have quoted, needs, I hope, no further interpretation.

"Now when the giant in us wakes and broods, Filled with home-yearnings, drowsily he flings From his deep heart high dreams and mystic moods. Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things: Clothing the vast with a familiar face; Reaching his right hand forth to greet the starry race.

Wondrously near and clear the great warm fires Stare from the blue; so shows the cottage light To the field laborer whose heart desires The old folk by the nook, the welcome bright From the housewife long parted from at dawn— So the star villages in God's great depths withdrawn.

"Nearer to Thee, not by delusion led, Though there no house-fires burn nor bright eyes gaze: We rise, but by the symbol charioted, Through loved things rising up to Love's own ways: By these the soul unto the vast has wings And sets the seal celestial on all mortal things."

In this poem is the proof of how intimately "A.E." could write of the sweet things of earth did he so choose. But he does not so choose, except rarely, and sometimes he leaves out the statement of beautiful material things by which he customarily bids farewell to earth in his aspiration to spiritual things, and writes only of unearthly things—as of some girl that he, an Irishman living in the Dublin of to-day, loves in the Babylon of three thousand years ago, to the annihilation of space and time. This is written in the very spirit of Emerson's declaration that "before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and Nature shrink away." Need I quote further to show that "A.E.," like Emerson, holds that the true poet is he who "gives men glimpses of the law of the Universe; shows them the circumstance as illusion; shows that Nature is only a language to express the laws, which are grand and beautiful; and lets them, by his songs, into some of the realities"? Emerson yearns that "the old forgotten splendors of the Universe should glow again for us," and "A.E." believes that we at times attain "the high ancestral Self"; his restless ploughman, "walking through the woodland's purple" under "the diamond night"

"Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a King"

"A.E.'s" poems on death are little different from those in which he celebrates the soul's absorption into the Universal Spirit, since death means to him only a longer absorption into the Universal Spirit or sometimes such absorption forever. In the event of this last, he in some moods sees

"Life and joy forever vanish as a tale is told. Lost within the 'Mother's Being,'"

or no sense of individuality in souls in heaven; in other moods he sees individuality preserved after death among those "High souls," that,—

"Absolved from grief and sin, Leaning from out ancestral spheres, Beckon the wounded spirit in."

So sustained is the habitual altitude of Mr. Russell's thought, so preoccupied his mood with spiritual things, that the human reader must feel lonely at times, must feel the regions of the poet's thought alien to him. At such times it is a positive relief to find the poet yearning for the concrete sweet things of earth. It is perhaps only in "Weariness" that Mr. Russell's high mood does fail, but I rejoice when that failure makes him acknowledge—

"Fade the heaven-assailing moods: Slave to petty tasks I pine For the quiet of the woods, And the sunlight seems divine.

"And I yearn to lay my head Where the grass is green and sweet; Mother, all the dreams are fled From the tired child at thy feet."

It is love, love of country, love of countryside, and love of woman that he writes of when he does write of "loved earth things." "A Woman's Voice" and "Forgiveness" are poems so simple that none may misunderstand; they have the human call so rare in "A.E.," but it is not a strong human call. Of such love songs he has written but few—poems out of the peace and not out of the passion of love; of passion other than spiritual ecstasy and rapt delight in nature there is none in his verse. Although he has been given "a ruby-flaming heart," he has been given also "a pure cold spirit." Only about a fourth of his poems have the human note dominant, and even when it is so dominant, as when he writes of his country, he is very seldom content to rest with a description of the beauty of place or legend; the beautiful place must be threshold to the Other World, as "The Gates of Dreamland," which he finds at the end of "the lonely road through bogland to the lake at Carrowmore," Carrowmore, the great cemetery of the great dead of prehistoric Ireland under Knocknarea near Sligo; or the legend must be symbol of some mystic belief—"Connla's well is a Celtic equivalent of the First Fountain of mysticism."

He can draw starkly, when he will, a picture of bare Irish landscape:—

"Still rests the heavy share on the dark soil: Upon the black mould thick the dew-damp lies: The horse waits patient: from his lowly toil The ploughboy to the morning lifts his eyes.

"The unbudding hedgerows dark against day's fires Glitter with gold-lit crystals: on the rim Over the unregarding city's spires The lonely beauty shines alone for him."

In "In Connemara" and "An Irish Face," poems with earthly titles, you expect only things earthly, but in these too, he uses the picture of the concrete only as the symbol of the universal. The reason Mr. Russell must take you to the supernatural in these poems is because he sees spirits everywhere he goes in Ireland. "Never a poet," he writes, "has lain on our hillsides, but gentle, stately figures, with hearts shining like the sun, move through his dreams, over radiant grasses, in an enchanted world of their own." Start "The Memory of Earth" and you think you are to read one of the many fine poems of twilight in our literature, but the fourth line undeceives you:—

"In the wet dusk silver sweet, Down the violet-scented ways, As I moved with quiet feet I was met by mighty days.

"On the hedge the hanging dew Glassed the eve and stars and skies; While I gazed a madness grew Into thundered battle-cries.

"Where the hawthorn glimmered white, Flashed the spear and fell the stroke— Ah, what faces pale and bright Where the dazzling battle broke!

"There a hero-hearted queen With young beauty lit the van. Gone! the darkness flowed between All the ancient wars of man.

"While I paced the valley's gloom Where the rabbits pattered near, Shone a temple and a tomb With the legend carven clear.

"Time put by a myriad fates That her day might dawn in glory; Death made wide a million gates So to close her tragic story."

And so it is in "A.E.'s" score and more poems that are suggested by Irish places and Irish legends and Irish loves. Never an Irish exile but will have a dear home place brought before him by such lines as

"The Greyhound River windeth through a loneliness so deep Scarce a wild fowl shakes the quiet that the purple boglands keep";

and a story of the home place brought before him by such lines as

"Tarry thou yet, late lingerer in the twilight's glory; Gay are the hills with song: earth's fairy children leave More dim abodes to roam the primrose-hearted eve, Opening their glimmering lips to breathe some wondrous story";

and a girl of the home place brought before him by such lines as

"Dusk, a pearl-grey river, o'er Hill and vale puts out the day— What do you wonder at, asthore, What's away in yonder grey?"

but all these poems, of which these lines are the fine onsets, lead past "the dim stars" and "unto the Light of Lights."

A man that believes that his spirit is one with the Universal Spirit cannot but be an optimist if he believe that Spirit is the Spirit of Good, and that a Platonist must believe. Yet "A.E." so longs to be rapt into everlasting union with the Universal Spirit that he tires of the earth, where that union is interrupted by the necessities of daily life. The fairies call to him and he would away—

"'Come away,' the red lips whisper, 'all the world is weary now; 'Tis the twilight of the ages and it's time to quit the plough. Oh, the very sunlight's weary ere it lightens up the dew, And its gold is changed and faded before it falls to you.'"

But it is not always twilight to him, and there are many blither moods. Over against these lines you may put,

"I always dwell with morning in my heart,"

and

"Oh, but life is sweet, is sweet."

Earth is not an unhappy place, but he sighs sometimes for the happiness unalloyed of heaven.

When we come to consider the technique of Mr. Russell's art, we find him anything but Emersonian. Mr. Russell has, in general, command of form, melody, harmony, distinction. Who reads carefully will remember many fine lines; who reads only once will be as one lost in sun-filled fog like that of "A E.'s" own Irish mountains, but he should be patient, he should wait and look again and again, and finally he will see, even if earth be still dimmed with fogbanks, much of the heavens, free of fog, and radiant with cold white light.

"Forest glooms Rumorous of old romance"

and

"But joy as an Arctic sun went down"

the kind of lines rarest in his verse; more characteristic are,

"Hearts like cloisters dim and grey,"

"the great star swings Along the sapphire zone,"

"The Angel childhood of the earth,"

"Glint the bubble planets tossing in the dead black sea of night,"

"The old enchantment lingers in the honey heart of earth."

There are comparatively few "purple patches" in Mr. Russell's poetry, for the reasons that each poem depends for its chief appeal on one mood or thought or dream immanent in it, rather than on any fine phrasing. The effort to catch the meaning of the verse—seldom apparent at first glance—prevents the noting of as many purple lines as there are. Nor when noted are such lines readily memorable, since they are apt to lack association with known and loved things to bring them home to the reader. And again the poems are very short,—intimations, suggestions rather than expressions,—and their intangible themes are often much alike, and poem becomes confused with poem in the memory.

It may be that to those to whom the Other World is very instant, as it is to many Irishmen, or to those that go about daily preparing for the world beyond the grave, as did our Puritan ancestors of the seventeenth century, these poems of Mr. Russell's speak familiar language, as they of a certainty do to the mystic, but to the many modern art lovers who hold to Pater's "New Cyrenaicism,"—as Mr. Russell would say, "those under the blight of the Relative,"—as well as to the man in the street their language is new and difficult to understand. But the poems have found their audience—there is no doubt about that—and they are regarded as oracular by hundreds. This is the more curious in that there is so little personality in them, surprisingly little when one knows how strong is the personality of the man that made them But this lack of personality follows naturally on the mystic's creed—he must put into his writings chiefly his relation with God,—for all other relations are as nothing to that,—and if he attain his desire he is rapt away from himself and his fellows into oneness with God.

Quality, a very definite quality, these verses of Mr. Russell's have, but it is an almost unchanging sameness of quality; almost all his verses, as I have said, have the same theme. So there is a monotony about them, and their reader is apt to cry out that mysticism is inimical to art. It may well be that this unswerving following of one theme is of definite purpose; that Mr. Russell feels that he as Irishman and mystic has a mission, as indeed Mr. Charles Johnston owns. Speaking of Irishmen, in "Ireland" (1902), he says,—

We live in the invisible world. If I rightly understand our mission and our destiny, it is this: To restore to other men the sense of that invisible; that world of our immortality; as of old our race went forth carrying the Galilean Evangel. We shall first learn and then teach, that not with wealth can the soul of man be satisfied; that our enduring interest is not here but there, in the unseen, the hidden, the immortal, for whose purposes exist all the visible beauties of the world. If this be our mission and our purpose, well may our fair mysterious land deserve her name: Inis Fail, the Isle of Destiny.

Very like Emerson this, too, but very Irish. Let us not forget that Berkeley and Scotus Erigena were Irishmen.

I do not wish to overemphasize the influence of Emerson on "A.E.," and indeed it is no greater than Emerson's influence over M. Maeterlinck. I believe Emerson was as much guide as master, that he pointed "A.E." the way to the mystics. I might dwell on the resemblance between thoughts common to the two much more than I have—there are even lines of the younger man's that show the influence of lines of the elder. But that is not my object. I wish to point out that Puritanism in Ireland has flowered up into the mystic poetry of "A.E.," into poetry of that strange quality, cold ecstasy, as Puritanism in America has flowered up into the mystic poetry of Emerson, poetry of cold ecstasy. In England, so far as I know, Puritanism, that has given us so great a poet as Milton, has never so flowered. Crashaw was born of a Puritan father, but it was through the Old Faith his greatest inspiration came, and his ecstasy, as that of his latter-day disciple, Francis Thompson, is warm ecstasy, not cold like that of the two Puritan poets. Henry More, Platonist and seer of visions, never attained ecstasy in his poetry. It may be that it required transplantation of Englishmen into Ireland and into America to bring about this phenomenon. Nor is it the only quality these two earliest bodies of English colonists alike developed. But it is more than dangerous to dogmatize where so many races went to the making of a people as went to the making of Anglo-Irishmen and Americans.

How different are the types of Anglo-Irish I could not but ponder as we left "A E.'s" home and went out into the chill rain of that August night. To the right hand, as we walked with "A.E.'s" disciples, they pointed to Maud Gonne's house. "Irish Joan of Arc" they call her, leader of men whom men worship at first sight; most exciting of Ireland's mob orators, all proclaim her, a very Pytho whose prophecies stir unrest and tumult! And here next door the Quietist, the man of dreams and visions, to whom all the war of the world is of as little moment as all other unrealities, since here in this world he has begun already the real, the spiritual life. Both are types that have been as long as Ireland has been; both Pytho and priest were among the high order of druid and druidess of old time; agitator and reconciler, by Mr. Russell's belief, might well be reincarnations of the wise women and wise men of prehistoric days. To the world Maud Gonne is more representative of Ireland than Mr. Russell, but he is just as truly a symbol of Ireland as she: to those who know Irish history the thought of her quiet monasteries of the seventh century, whence she sent out teachers to all of Europe, is as recurrent as her political agitation of the nineteenth, and to those who know her countryside the memories of soft sunny rains and moonlit evenings are as lingering as those of black angry days and wild blind nights. Her very colors, her grays and greens and purples, proclaim her peace. It is of this peace and of the greater peace of that unphenomenal or spiritual world, that lies nearer to Ireland than to any Western land, that Mr. Russell is interpreter.

You may think of Mr. Russell as you will, as organizer of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, as stimulator of the Irish Literary Revival, as economist, playwright, poet, painter, preacher, but always as you put by his books you will think of him as mystic, as stargazer, wandering, as he so often tells us in his poems, on the mountains by night, with his eyes keener with wonder at the skies than ever shepherd's under the Star of Bethlehem; you will see him, the human atom, on the bare Dublin mountains, thrilling as he watches the sweep of world beyond world; and yet, atom that he is, the possessor of it all;—you will think of him as stargazer whose "spirit rolls into the vast of God."



CHAPTER VI

LADY GREGORY

When one stops to think how much of the blood of the Gael, Irish and Scotch, there is in us in America, one realizes that we owe a debt of gratitude to Lady Gregory second only to that owed her by "The Men of Ireland and Alban" themselves. For it is Lady Gregory, in her "Cuchulain of Muirthemne" (1902) and in her "Gods and Fighting Men" (1904) and in her "Book of Saints and Wonders" (1908), who has done more than any other writer of the Gaelic countries to bring home to us the wonders of Gaelic romance. That they should have to be brought home to us is a shame to us. With so much of Irish and Scotch blood in us the names of the heroes of the Red Branch and Fenian Cycles should not be so foreign in aspect and sound as they undoubtedly are, and their deeds should be as familiar as those of Robin Hood. A hundred years ago our grandfathers had, indeed, "Ossian" on their shelves, as we had in boyhood Dean Church's stories of Greece and Rome, or, in some cases, the stories of his doings in their memories, learned from their parents were they old-country born, or of their nurses were it their privilege, as it was that of many more Americans of the second half of the nineteenth century, to have as foster mothers "kindly Irish of the Irish."



To her own countrymen the work of Lady Gregory, valuable as it is, is not the revelation it is to us. Those of them that have not been brought up on the stories that she translates could read at least many of them in the "Old Celtic Romances" (1879) of Dr. P.W. Joyce, or in the versions of the Cuchulain and the Finn legends by Mr. Standish James O'Grady (1878 and 1880), books that somehow or other never came to be widely read in America. Mr. Yeats admits it was Mr. O'Grady that "started us all," that is, the writers who began the Renaissance in the late eighties. It may be, of course, that the added beauty and dignity the stories take on in the versions of Lady Gregory will inspire to nobler writing poets and dramatists and novelists that already owe much to Mr. O'Grady or Dr. Joyce or to the scholars they were sent back to by these popularizers. It is certain that the writers of the younger group, the group of those that are only now nearing distinction, owe much to Lady Gregory. After all is said, however, her work is to be judged not for its value to others, but as in itself an art product, of a class kindred to "The Wanderings of Oisin" of Mr. Yeats, although differing in form. I am not forgetting, of course, that she is following faithfully, or rather as faithfully as an artist may follow, the old legends. She has, she owns, clarified them, condensed them, left out contradictory episodes, woven now and then a Scotch version of an incident into a cycle arranged in one complete whole from many Irish versions. When Lady Gregory has owned this she has owned that she has added something more of her own than a "connecting sentence." Although she has labored carefully to keep herself out of the stories, and although, if you have read only her versions of them, you may feel that she has succeeded in keeping herself out of them, you will recognize, if you turn to her originals in O'Curry or in Whitley Stokes or in Standish Hayes O'Grady, that she has added that all-important thing, a personality. Some scholars object to this as "too literary." And some literary men would rather have the old stories, they say, "just as they are" There is the crux. How can we get them, even in an exact translation, "just as they are"? We cannot. This is not the place to discuss this most vexed question of translation, but I must go into it so far as to point again to the fact that we are more likely to have made upon us, by an interpretative translation, an effect more nearly like that made upon the listener contemporary to the time of the making of the story than if the translation were literal. We are always forgetting the so obvious fact that the kind of metaphor or descriptive epithet of this sort or that, which would make a certain effect on the listener of the tenth century, will make a very different effect on the reader of to-day. As Lady Gregory points out, the description of the contortion of Cuchulain in his fight with Ferdiad seems very unheroic to us, and is therefore best left out of the translation, or, if retained, conveyed in terms that will make an effect on us similar to the effect the detailed description had on the audience of the old bards. Here again, however, is trouble. How can we get that effect? We cannot surely, but an imaginative translation by one who is scholar and litterateur both will take us nearest to it. We want, as a matter of fact, both kinds of translations, the interpretative and artistic translation of Lady Gregory and the literal translation of Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady. The one is needed to check the other. We would have a gauge by which to measure how much such such a translator as Lady Gregory has taken from and added to the old story. We would know how great is the freedom in which we willingly acquiesce, remembering that the translations which we treasure as great in literature are in greater or less measure "free." So checking Lady Gregory's translations we find that they represent a fair measure of freedom, as so checking the verses of FitzGerald's "Omar Khayyam" we find in them the utmost measure of freedom, a freedom indeed that, in certain verses, is virtually a re-creation.

Many, both scholars and literary men, object to the kind of English into which Lady Gregory translates the stories of Ireland's heroic age, her "Kiltartan English," the English of the people of her home country on the borders of Clare and Galway, the English made by a people who think in Irish. This familiar language, they say, has lessened the dignity of the old tales, bringing them all to one level by a diction and style that is one, whether they are romance or folk-tale. This objection can be taken, however, only to the Cuchulain stories, which were court romance, and not to the Finn stories, which come out of the thatched houses. This "Kiltartan English" seems to me in its more familiar moments, less imposing than that in which I first heard stories of Finn McCool told by our old gardener, Lawrence Kelly of County Wexford, but it may be I remember less clearly the homeliness of his "discourse" than its "grand speaking." It is, however, as peasant English, a fitting medium for the telling of the stories of Brigit and St. Patrick in her "Book of Saints and Wonders," for Brigit and Patrick are still household words among all the children of the Gael. But by its very difference from the English of all other artists in words save of a few of her own country and generation, and from such conversational English as I know well, this "Kiltartan English" brings me a foreign quality. I feel that the art of these tale-tellers is an art of another race than the English, just as I feel that the art of the teller of Beowulf is an art of another race than the English. The literature in our ancestral tongue is not to me English until it sloughs off the Germanic sentence-structure of Anglo-Saxon. Here lies, I think, the greatest difficulty in translating Old English literature. And it will not be successfully translated, I think, without the use of the syntax of some dialect that preserves an archaic sentence-structure.

To me, then, it seems singularly fortunate for Lady Gregory to have her "Kiltartan English" to fall back upon to give that foreign flavor that we intuitively feel the need of in a translation. There may be a slight loss of dignity through its use, but there is a great gain in folk atmosphere.

In quoting to show the style of Lady Gregory I should quote description rather than narrative, as the description seems to me better as well as briefer. The three famous tales of Old Irish literature, "The Three Sorrows of Story-Telling," are "The Fate of the Children of Usnach," comparable, in the great wars it led to, to the rape of Helen; "The Fate of the Children of Lir," a story that has as its base the folk-tale that underlies "Lohengrin," but which takes us back farther into the past in its kinship to "Medea"; and "The Sons of Tuireann," which has been called the Irish Odyssey. Of these the first is incomparably the finest story, and Lady Gregory has told it nobly in "Cuchulain of Muirthemne," but it alone of all the stories in her three books of translations has enough of humanity in it to put it side by side with the story of Sigurd and Brunhilde or the story of Paris and Helen. When one remembers that Greek and Scandinavian literature may boast five stories each, at least, but little short of these their greatest stories, and that Irish literature has but "Diarmuid and Grania" to boast as in any way comparable to the story of Deirdre, it must be admitted that early Irish literature representing Ireland's heroic age is not so beautiful as the literature that represents the heroic ages of Scandinavia and Greece. "The Fate of the Children of Usnach" is rich in beautiful detail of incident and of description of nature; it preserves for us much of the inner life of old time; and it has dignity of proportion. It has not the fundamental weakness, as great art, of most of these old Irish stories, their characters' lack of interest because of their lack of body, their lack of personality, their running to type rather than moulding into individuals; yet the feats performed by Cuchulain are so wholly superhuman, most of them, that they often put their doer beyond our sympathy, and at their worst make him absurd.

If these stories were simply extravagant folk-fancy, such as the Jack the Giant Killer story, to delight children, we should not quarrel with this quality in them, but there is so much in them of dignity that we must take them seriously, as we take Homer. When their heroes are definitely gods we can accept almost any of their deeds, so we can delight in the earlier stories of "Gods and Fighting Men," the stories of the Tuatha de Danaan, Lugh and Angus, Midhir and Etain, Bran and Connla, as we cannot in those of Finn and Goll and Cuchulain and Conchubar, who, because of their historical setting and more definite characterization, have more of the appeal of humanity. We know Cuchulain, in Lady Gregory's pages, as a small dark man, constant in love in comparison with his fellows, faithful to his friends, loyal to his king; and we know Finn as a fair old man of ruddy countenance, a lover of women, somewhat pompous and somewhat quarrelsome; but neither hero is a clear-cut personality like Sigurd or Ajax. If either Cuchulain or Finn were surely a god we should accept his deeds as now we cannot accept them, and were either brought home to us as wholly human and divested of his supernatural powers, and given a personality, we should be far more moved by his fortunes.

It is in enchantments, visits to worlds oversea and under wave, and in praises of the beauties of this world, its woods, its waters, its real wonders, and in the celebration of sorrow and delight that "Gods and Fighting Men" is at its best, not in the celebration of happy loves, or of wild loves, or of great victories. So it is that Gabhra, where the Fianna were broken, is finer than "The Battle of the White Strand," where they won against great odds.

Finer, however, than any narrative power possessed by the old Irish bards is their power in the lyrical passages so freely interspersed throughout the stories, and in the lyrics that come into them on the lips of the poets and warriors and on the lips of the women who have lost their lovers in fight. The farewell of Deirdre to Alban and her lament over Naoise, the song of the woman from oversea to Bran, the poem Finn made to prove his power of poetry, the sleepy song of Grania over Diarmuid, the lament of Neargach's wife, the song of Tir-nan-Og that Niave made to Oisin, and Oisin's own praise of the good times of the Fianna—these are the passages in which the old tales reach their highest poetry. Once read, these remain in memory, but certain episodes and certain sayings remain also. Mr. Yeats has picked out one of the sayings in his introduction to "Gods and Fighting Men" that will do for sample. It is the answer of Osgar dying, to the man who asks him how he is: "I am as you would have me be." Starker even, perhaps, is the absolute simplicity of the description of that last fight in "The Battle of the White Strand," in which Cael and Finnachta go, locked in each other's arms, to their death under the waves without a word.

Wild nature is always about these warriors. The storm in the trees, the sorrow of the sea, the clatter of wild geese and the singing of swans find echo in the poems that praise them. We see, too, at times, fields heavy with harvest, and often the apple trees in bloom and the cuckoo calling among them,—indeed, the sweet scent of apple gardens, like the keenness of the winds of spring, beautiful as are the phrases that present them, become almost stock phrases. Always, too, there are wonders of the other world about the heroes; women from undersea and underground come into their halls as naturally as the members of their own clans, and the twilight mists unfolding from familiar hills will reveal their marvelous duns, whitewalled with silver or marble, and thatched with the wings of white birds.

There has been frequent quarreling in certain quarters with Mr. Russell and Mr. Johnston and Mr. Yeats for introducing mysticism and a definite symbolism and the ways of Eastern thought into their versions of Irish mythic tales and their records of Irish mood. There will be found some justification for such practices in Lady Gregory's translations. Manannan, the sea-god, is here presented doing tricks like those of the East Indian fakirs; Finn is reincarnated in later great leaders of the Gael; and in "The Hospitality of Cuanna's House" there is out-and-out allegory, to say nothing of a possible symbolistic interpretation of episodes in almost every other story. Even the willful obscurity of the modern poetry can be paralleled by the riddling of Cuchulain and Emer.

It is, perhaps, because Lady Gregory has found the old stories not only in the dignity of their bardic presentation, but also in the happy familiarity of their telling by the people of the thatched houses in her own district, that she has been able to bring them so near to us. From these same people, too, she has got some of her stories of St. Bride and Columba and poems and stories of recent and contemporary inspiration, poems and stories that have to do with humble life as well as with the highly colored heroic life that those who live bare lives themselves are so fond of imagining. In her "Poets and Dreamers" (1903) are records of this collecting and of her study of local ways about Coole and on the Connemara coast and in the Aran Isles. One of the most interesting of her chapters is that on the poet Raftery, whose poems Dr. Hyde has published. Blind and bitter, Raftery wandered about Connacht until about 1840, when death took him, an old man, but still vigorous in mind and spirit. Another chapter of "Poets and Dreamers" is "On the Edge of the World." Each reading of this is to me like a return to West Ireland, the very quality of whose life it gives. It should be the first chapter of the book turned to by the reader, for it gives one the note on which to read all. As Lady Gregory drives by the sea, people about her on the roadside and in the cabins are singing in Irish. The little experiences of the day are, for them, experiences to brood over; and for her, too. And this thought is the last of her brooding: "The rising again of Ireland, of her old speech, of her last leader [Parnell], dreams all, as we are told. But here on the edge of the world, dreams are real things, and every heart is watching for the opening of one or another grave."

There is creative writing in these essays of Lady Gregory's, for all that she is playing middleman between her people and the reading public of the English-speaking world in many of them; and, as I would emphasize again, in her three books of translations. But, after all translation will not content, and the essay that is not self-revelation will not content, the writer who would have his writing a "reading of life." So it is not surprising that Lady Gregory turned toward drama. And yet I do not ever feel, after many readings of her plays, that Lady Gregory took to drama because of any overmastering impulse toward this most difficult of all literary forms. She has learned to handle some orders of drama pleasantly, the farce more than pleasantly, and, very recently, the folk-tragedy nobly; but had it not been that plays of other than romantic tone were needed for the Abbey Theatre as a foil to those of Mr. Yeats and of Synge, I doubt whether it is drama that Lady Gregory would have chosen as the medium through which to express her reading of life. I can just as well imagine her shrewd kindliness of judgment upon the foibles and virtues of her countrymen in stories whose form is very like that employed by Miss Barlow in her "Irish Idylls" (1892) as in these so original little plays that she has wrought out without precedent, under the tutelage of Mr. Yeats.

It is more than likely, as I say, that had it not been that drama was needed for the Abbey Theatre she would not have attempted drama. But more than likely it is, too, that had she written plays not made to order they had reached wider through Irish society and plumbed deeper into Irish life. Lady Gregory knows Irish life, from bottom to top, as few Irishwomen and few Irishmen of her day know it; she has large heart, wide tolerance, and abounding charity; and yet she was long content to limit her plays of modern Ireland to farce, at times of a serious enough purpose, but because it is farce, not of the first seriousness. It may be, of course, that Lady Gregory knows best of any one her own powers, and it is true that in the plays she has written she is at her best when they are at their merriest. I cannot, however, but feel that this is a success of intention rather than a success of instinct. She would have them the most successful in a quality as far removed as might be from that quality of troubled dreaminess which is the best of the dramas of Mr. Yeats. Synge, it must be remembered, did not begin as a writer of comedy, and there is little of that ripe irony that has no precedent in English literature in that first play that he wrote for the Abbey Theatre, "Riders to the Sea" (1903). Is it a coincidence that later, as he found his bent for that sort of writing that culminated in "The Playboy," Lady Gregory turned at times to historical drama and a farce that grew as serious as comedy? There is, of course, in all her plays serious indictment of national weaknesses, sometimes obvious indictment, as in "The Deliverer" (1911), which records, in terms of folk-biblical allegory, his countrymen's desertion of Parnell; sometimes indictment not so obvious, as in "The Canavans" (1906), which rebukes that shoneenism in high places which has for generations been one of the curses of Ireland. To him who knows only a little of Irish life it is easy to see the meaning but superficially concealed by the farcical bustle, the laughter, and the lamentations. But to him who looks but on the surface there is merriness enough and wittiness enough and wisdom enough to make his loss of the deeper meaning, for him, but a little loss.

There are enough characters presented, too, peasants generally and townsfolk of the lower class, to make the farces a "reading of life." What is wanting to him who looks for more than what farce may do is the largeness of utterance that will make a "reading of life" memorable. Take "the image" (1910), for instance, in which Lady Gregory is attempting more than in "Spreading the News" (1904) or "Hyacinth Halvey" (1906). This play, the longest that Lady Gregory has written, is what the stage would call the character farce. She owns it a presentation of dreams of old men and old women which crumble at the touch of reality, but it is not only this, but a symbolizing of the proneness of all Ireland to accept as certainties on the eve of realization what are really only signs that point to possibilities in a far to-morrow. In the play four old men of a little village on the west coast are debating what they will do with their share of a windfall that has come to the village in the shape of two whales that have drifted up on the beach. When the priest determines that all the proceeds from the sale of the oil from the whales be spent on something that will benefit the whole community they plan a statue (one of them is a stone-cutter) to some great celebrity. The motives that lead them to choose Hugh O'Lorrha are telling satire not only of Irishmen, but of all men. It would hardly be, however, in any other country than Ireland that the name of the one come at by way of accident would, unidentified for some time by any, be finally revealed as that of the hero of a folk-tale. Four days after the whales had come ashore, days wasted in planning what the village will do with the prize money, and unutilized in securing the blubber and rendering out the oil, the quartette learned that "the Connemara lads have the oil drawn from the one of them, and the other one was swept away with the spring tide."

Though "The Image" be farce, its characters are the characters of comedy, and its purpose whole-heartedly serious. And even "Spreading the News" has its lesson, of rumor's wild riot in Irish crowds. On the slightest grounds the reciting of an errand of helpfulness is turned by quick imagination into a story of a murder. Lightly sketched as are the people here, from a caricature of a magistrate to the more serious presentment of Mrs. Fallon's "nice quiet little man," they are very true to Ireland. Slighter even are the butcher and the postmistress and the model sub-sanitary inspector in "Hyacinth Halvey," though all are fully understood and fully blocked out in their author's mind, if impossible of complete realization within limits so narrow; but the farce itself is not lifted into dignity by any noble underlying attitude. "The Jack Daw" (1907) has rumor again as its motive, as had "Spreading the News," but it is not the motive of the play or any of its incidents that is the best thing about it, but the character of Michael Cooney, of the "seventh generation of Cooneys who trusted nobody living or dead." He is, of course, caricatured, but he has possibilities of personality, and he could have been worked into the fullness of a universal character had "The Jack Daw" been comedy, we will say, instead of farce. Of all her characters, that of Hyacinth Halvey is most nearly rounded out, but then Lady Gregory has taken two little plays in which to present his portrait, "The Full Moon" (1911) recording some of his later experiences in Cloon and his final departure from the town, his introduction to which was recorded in the play bearing his name.

"The Workhouse Ward" (1908), reaching from wild farce to sentimental comedy, is hardly more than a dialogue, but it is given body by the truth to Irish life out of which it is written, that quarreling is better than loneliness. Lady Gregory has disowned "Twenty-five" (1902), which is frankly melodrama, her only other experiment in which, in her plays of modern Ireland, is "The Rising of the Moon" (1903). This play relates the allowed escape from a police officer of a political prisoner through that prisoner's persuading the officer that "patriotism" is above his sworn duty to England.

Of the plays that may be called historical, "The Canavans" (1906) is the best, because it is of the peasantry, I suppose, who change so little with the years, and whom Lady Gregory presents so amusingly and so truly in her modern farce comedy. "Kincora" (1903) takes us all the way back to the eleventh century, deriving its name from Brian's Seat on the Shannon and ending with his death at Clontarf. It is undistinguished melodrama. "The White Cockade" (1905) is better only in so far as it involves farce, farce in the kitchen of an inn on the Wexford coast just after the Battle of the Boyne. "Devorgilla" (1908) is of a time between the times of the two other historical plays, of the time a generation later than the coming of the Normans to Ireland. It is pitched to a higher key than any other of her historic plays, and it is held better to its key, but its tragedy is far less impressive than the tragedy of "The Gaol Gate" (1906) which pictures the effects upon his wife and his mother of the imprisonment of an Irish lad of to-day, and their learning that "Denis Cahel died for his neighbor." This little play is out of the life that Lady Gregory knows and can deal with; it is finely conceived and finely executed, lingering in the mind as does the keen heard rising from some bare graveyard fronting the Atlantic.

Just why Lady Gregory, who has rendered in prose so well old legends, should render old Irish historic life so much less well I cannot explain. Sometimes I think it is because she has found less of that history than of that legend among the people. Yet in "A Travelling Man" (1907), her little miracle, somewhat in the manner of Dr. Hyde's, that brings Christ into a modern peasant home, she has made a play of a tender and reconciling beauty. With the success of "A Travelling Man" and "The Gaol Gate" before me I cannot say it is because her genius is for farce; and to say that it is because her genius is for the plays of modern peasant life does not help to account for the fact.

The idiom of all these plays is racy of the soil, and when it need be, eloquent with the eloquence that is almost always in the English of the Irish. It is full of wise saws and proverbs, quips and quirks of expression, the picturesquenesses and homelinesses of speech that are characteristic of a peasant to whom talk is the half of life. These range from sayings like those of the clowns of Elizabethan drama, such as "He had great wisdom I tell you, being silly-like, and blind," and such country wisdom as "What would the cat's son do but kill mice," up through the elaborate maledictions of the two old paupers in "The Workhouse Ward" and such delightful asperities as that of Maelmora anent his bitter sister Gormleith, "You were surely born on a Friday, and the briars breaking through the green sod," to aphorisms that have an accent of eternity, as, "It is the poor know all the troubles of the world," and "The swift, unflinching, terrible judgment of the young."

The characters, even when they are purposely almost caricatures, have in them the possibility of complete portrayals. There is no flagging of the invention in any of them, no slipshod or careless composition. Her technique, too, at least in farce, is masterful, and in her plays of modern life of other form adequate. That she could master historical drama, as I have said, I must doubt, but that she need restrict herself so largely to farce and farce comedy in her plays of modern life, I do not for a moment believe. "The Gaol Gate," in fact, proved that she need not so restrict herself, and "MacDaragh's Wife" (1911), written by Lady Gregory at sea on her way to America, but perhaps for that all the fuller of the wild old life of her native Connacht. It would almost seem that with "Grania" (1912), a tragedy too, following "MacDaragh's Wife," Lady Gregory is widening the scope of her work, as she well can, now that there are other dramatists to provide comedies and farces for the Abbey Theatre. It is a haunting story that "MacDaragh's Wife" tells, and largely a true story, the story of a piper who, though a pauper, draws all the countryside to the funeral of his wife, draws them, through the wild lamenting of his pipes, from the fair where they are sporting to follow, with a full fellowship, to the grave, her who died all but alone. Lady Gregory tells us in a note just what of it she gathered from old people about her girlhood's home at Roxborough, and what about her home of to-day at Coole, how she has shaped it, and what emotion is back of it, the "lasting pride of the artist of all ages."

As Lady Gregory had restricted herself, until recently, in the forms of modern life which she wrote of and in the kinds of people she selected to write of, so, too, she had restricted herself, until recently, in the motives she considered. It is true that the motive most recurrent in her plays, that of fear of the opinion of the neighbor, an attitude probably sprung of the clan system, is dominant in Irish life; and it is equally true that the motive most notably absent, love, was until yesterday far from a dominant motive in the Irish life that Lady Gregory presents: yet there are many other motives that, in true comedy, and even in farcical comedy, might well have place. That these motives are not there is, I think, not only that Lady Gregory, self-effacingly, put into her plays what was wanted to make them foils to the plays of Mr. Yeats and Synge, but also because of the practice of one type of gentlewoman in literature, of which Jane Austen is characteristic. And yet the mere mention of Jane Austen increases the wonderment that Lady Gregory has not written of people of every condition in her neighborhood, whether that be London or Dublin or Gort, as Miss Austen did of people of every condition in her neighborhood, whether that be Steventon or Bath or Chawton. It can hardly be said, even, that "Grania" her last play, is a play about love. In her note to the play, Lady Gregory declares, "Love itself, with its shadow Jealousy, is the true protagonist!" And yet, I think it is Jealousy only that is the true protagonist. There is much talk about love, but it is not from love, but from jealousy that the action of the play arises. Among all this talk about love, among many eloquent sayings about love, true readings of love, there stands out most clearly in my memory this part of a speech of Finn, a speech uttered before Grania had turned from him to Diarmuid—

And as for youngsters, they do not know how to love because there is always some to-morrow's love possible in the shadow of the love of to-day. It is only the old it goes through and through entirely because they know all the last honey of the summer-time has come to its ferment in their cup, and there is no new summer coming to meet them forever.

This I remember not only for its thought but for its style, the rhythm of its prose. It is Lady Gregory at her best, as "Grania" as a whole is Lady Gregory at her best in tragedy. If "Grania" in every detail were as inspired as its explanation of the queen's quick turn from Diarmuid to Finn, it would be a great play, indeed. Grania is no light woman, and yet she turns, in the old legend, from the man who sacrificed all but all for her, on his death, to the High King who brought about his death, with a suddenness inexplicable. Lady Gregory makes that sudden turn plausible, for two reasons. One is that for seven years of wandering all over Ireland, Diarmuid by his own will and because of loyalty to Finn, had kept Grania a maid, making her his wife only after he found her being carried off by the King of Foreign. The other reason is that as Diarmuid lies dying, wounded to death by that King of Foreign whom he has killed, his thoughts are all of his long-delayed disloyalty to Finn, and not at all of Grania. Thus, she justifies herself, speaking to Finn:—

Grania. He had no love for me at any time. It is easy to know it now. I knew it all the while, but I would not give in to believe it. His desire was all the time with you yourself and Almhuin. He let on to be taken up with me, and it was but letting on. Why would I fret after him that so soon forgot his wife, and left her in a wretched way?

Finn. You are not judging him right. You are distracted with the weight of your loss.

Grania. Does any man at all speak lies at the very brink of death, or hold any secret in his heart? It was at that time he had done with deceit, and he showed where his thought was, and had no word at all for me that had left the whole world for his sake, and that went wearing out my youth, pushing here and there as far as the course of the stars of Heaven. And my thousand curses upon death not to have taken him at daybreak, and I believing his words! It is then I would have waked him well and would have cried my seven generations after him! And I have lost all on this side of the world, losing that trust and faith I had, and finding him to think of me no more than of a flock of stars would cast their shadow on his path. And I to die with this scald upon my heart; it is hard thistles would spring up out of my grave.

I have spoken of Lady Gregory as translator, as collector of folk-lore, as essayist, and as dramatist; but there is another role in which she has brought no less advantage to the Celtic Renaissance, though it is a role that has not brought her, as have these other, the joys of recapturing or of creating beautiful things. Always objective, though never wholly able to subordinate personality, however near she may have come to effacing it in her plays, Lady Gregory has in this role considered herself solely as an agent in the service of Irish letters. The Irishman is naturally a pamphleteer, and Mr. Yeats, poet of the Other World though he be, can give as good blows in controversy as Mr. George Moore. Almost all who have part in the Renaissance have skill in the art of publicity. They have needed no publicists to fight their battles as the Pre-Raphaelites needed Ruskin. Still, in some measure in the way of publicity, and in large measure in other ways, Lady Gregory has been to the Celtic Renaissance what Ruskin was to that last renaissance of wonder. She has edited pamphlets on things national and artistic in Ireland, she has helped Dr. Hyde and Mr. Yeats in their collecting of folk-lore and to a deeper knowledge of the people; she has been one of the forces that have made possible the Abbey Theatre, giving to it her power of organization as well as plays and patronage. More than this, she has welcomed to Coole Park many a worker in the movement, who in the comfort of a holiday there has been refreshed by the gray and green land so near the sea and reinspired by the contact with that Irish Ireland so close to her doors. Like Ruskin, Lady Gregory is a great patron of letters, but like Ruskin she is much more. Lady Gregory is an artist in words who is to be valued as a presenter of Irish life, past and present, with a beauty that was not in English literature before she made it.



CHAPTER VII

JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE

It is Synge himself who puts the just phrase on what his life was to him, and it is, as it could not else be, from the lips of his Deirdre that it falls. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if it's for a short space only." It is Deirdre alone of his men and women that is introspective at all, Deirdre—and Naisi when he is mastered by thoughts of home that will not down. Synge wrote the play of her triumph over death as he himself was dying, and he wrote it with high heart, and, what is higher, gladness, despite his foreknowledge of his doom. It was to fulfill his dream of the most queenly girl of old Irish legend that he wrote "Deirdre of the Sorrows," but he could not keep out of his writing, had he wished to keep it out, his own love that death was so soon to end, and the thoughts of what was the worth of life. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if it's for a short space only." It is not a new saying, but it is not to be identified with the proverbial "a short life and a merry," with which some confuse it, and of Synge it was a true saying. There are those who, because of the irony of his writing, an irony that is new to literature, and, maybe, to some cruel, or at least disillusionizing, may think there was little joy for him; but the truth is there was never a writer in whom there was more joy. This "strange still man" as he was even to those who knew him best, gentle or simple, found all life that was natural life, even of the barest and rudest, as thrilling as first love. It is this man, his enemies at home the sated Parisian, who knew a gusto in living greater than that of any English writer since Borrow. Let no one forget those lines with which Christy Mahon cries defiance to the Mayo folk who have known his greatness and his fall: "Ten thousand blessings upon all that's here, for you've turned me a likely gaffer in the end of all, the way I'll go romancing through a romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day." I do not deny that these words are in a sense wrung from the Playboy, but what I do hold is that they prove how vital was the genius of the man who wrote them, who saw the joy there was yet in life for this braggart wastrel just as he saw that even such a miserable boyhood as Christy's knew a kind of poacher's joy in running wild on the bogs. Even for poor Nora, turned out on the roads with a tramp for companion, there is the joy of the road once she learns to know it. The tramp knows it surely:—

You'll be hearing the herons crying out over the black lakes, and you'll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks and the big thrushes when the days are warm: and it's not from the like of them you'll be hearing a tale of getting old like Peggy Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you and the light of your eyes, but it's fine songs you'll be hearing when the sun goes up, and there'll be no old fellow wheezing the like of a sick sheep, close to your ear.

Of like gusto, too, is the joy of Martin Doul and Mary Doul in their blindness; and the joy of the three tinkers in the escape of themselves and their half-sovereign from the priest and in the prospect of "A great time drinking that bit with the trampers in the green of Clash." And from such joys as these, wild and earthy and rallying, his exultations range to the exalted serenity and sadness of Naisi and Deirdre as they look back on their seven year of love in Glen Masain, of love almost too perfect and too happy to be human.



Yes, joy is as distinctive as irony and extravagance of the writing of Synge, joy in mere living, in life even at the worst, and joy, too, in life at the best. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if it's for a short space only." It was for a short space of years that Synge had "what is best and richest," hardly for the seven years of his great lovers. He did not have it when his thought homed to Ireland in 1899, as a result of a meeting with Mr. Yeats in Paris. His writing, then, was of little moment, but it grew better when, at home again, he realized what Irish life was to him, when once renewed contact with the Irish peasant brought back the familiarity that had been his in the nursery. It was the Wicklow glens, to which memories of his people drew him, and the Aran Islands, where he went to study Irish—until then little more than a book language to him—and to live a life perhaps "more primitive than any in Europe," that enabled him to find himself. Further 'prentice work, though of a new sort, followed his sojourns in Wicklow and Aran, but by 1903 his art had matured to the ripe power of "In the Shadow of the Glen" and "Riders to the Sea," which, after adjustment to the stage, were put on respectively October 8, 1903, and February 25, 1904, at Molesworth Hall, Dublin. "The Tinker's Wedding" which has been played only once, and then in London, dates from about the same time. "The Well of the Saints" was produced on February 4, 1905, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and "The Playboy of the Western World" on January 26, 1907, at the same place, to the accompaniment of an uproar that a certain element of Irishmen have considered it proper to create ever since on its first appearance in all cities whatsoever, whether in Great Britain or America. One wonders what they would have done had he made it as biting as Ibsen made "Peer Gynt." "Deirdre of the Sorrows," which Synge left unrevised, was first produced at the Abbey Theatre on January 13, 1910, the last of the six plays of his maturity. It was in the years from 1902 to 1909 that he had "what is best and richest"—a full life, lived largely in the Ireland that he loved; the artist's joy in making that life into a new beauty, a beauty that was all compact of exaltation and extravagance and irony; and love for a woman in whom his man's life and his artist's life were united, for her who embodied his dream of Pegeen Mike and added her life and her art of the stage to his dream of Deirdre, as day by day it emerged from his mind. And so great was his joy in these good things that his precarious health, and even his year—long last illness, could not, while he had any strength, lessen the high spirit of his writing. There is none of his plays more vital than "Deirdre of the Sorrows."