<> II
^< OU 166020 > 5
^ LL XJ x^
^CQ ^CO
^ i >
(tonania ntoer$ttp
nM&flA<C. Collection
Accession No. . $.34 ^4-
IRISHMEN OF TO-DAY
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Poetry :
A VISION OF LIFE. 1909
THE CRUCIBLES OF TIME. 1911
QUEEN TARA : A TRAGEDY. 1913
THE MOUNT OF TRANSFIGURATION. 1915
Novels :
BROKEN ARCS. 1911
JACOB ELTHORNE. 1914
CHILDREN OF EARTH. (Shortly)
Studies:
SHAKESPEARE : A STUDY. 1911
STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS. 1912
THE LYRIC CRY : AN ANTHOLOGY. (Shortly)
(GEORGE W. RUSSELL)
A STUDY OF A MAN AND A NATION
BY
DARRELL FIGGIS
MAUNSEL & CO. LTD.
DUBLIN AND LONDON
1916
TO
CON AND HELEN CURRAN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS . . .1
CHAPTER II
DISCOVERIES . . . .22
CHAPTER III
PREPARATIONS . . . .61
CHAPTER IV
A NATION, A STATE; A STATE, A NATION 94
CHAPTER V
BYE-PATHS J AND PATHS EMERGING . 185
CHAPTER I
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
STANDISH O'GiiADY, one fair Sunday in
summer, returned home a puzzled and an
arrested man. He brought with him the
news that he had heard, on the sea-front
at Bray, the bearded figure of a young man
in a tweed suit addressing the human flood
before him, evangelizing (if one may use that
word) the ancient pagan gods of Ireland.
It was a lone spectacle. The sight of other
young men, lit by a later faith and loud
with tunes that made up in clamour what
they lacked in music, or others more brightly
apparelled, with big drums and brass instru-
ments twisted into the likeness of the serpents
they fought, and slightly indecent in the
matter of past reminiscence, would have been
appropriate enough to the scene. They
would not have arrested the least incuri-
ous. Besides that, they would have been
gregarious : they would have fortified them-
selves with bigness as they fortified them-
1 B
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
selves with loudness. This other was quite
another thing. Spectacularly it was lonely.
Lifted into the imagination it was lonelier
yet; and something tragic withal. Its in-
appropriateness was its occasion, but that
very fact gave it a gesture strange and
appealing, gave it a voice that was like a
slender rune of music that had wandered
out of its place. What did these people,
with one half of their devotions over for
the day, or with the height of their weekly
holiday come, want to know of Earth, the
mother of us all, the Dana of ancient
reverence, on whose bosom they trod un-
heedingly, having first hidden it beneath
asphalt, like fleas on some elephant's back,
thinking nothing of the great life, the deep
knowledge, the throb of power beneath
them ; or of the great Shining Ones that
are houselled within her or that throng the
heavenly places in hierarchy on hierarchy
of brightness and beauty and power, dimly
perceived and dimly reverenced under many
an ancient name in days when reverence had
not been withered by tawdry pleasure, a
huckster's vulgar gain, or the desperate
oath from slumdom ? Were they not the
heirs of civilization ? Had they not religions
cut and suited to their order or the order
of their masters ? Who then was this
strange, wild man, whom they would not
hear, and w r hom some few of them may
2
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
have recognized as a clerk at Pirn's and a
mere shop-assistant accordingly ? What to
them was the shining Lugh? This man at
least was no Lugh, they would have rashly
agreed. What of Balor ? Balor, if they had
heard of him, was, like Lugh, a myth ; and
they did not know themselves to be held
in his one-eyed spell. As for Manannan,
whose lips so lazily caressed the shore, could
they not push their skiffs out upon his
waters, and make the rowlocks, if need were,
strain in contempt of such an one ? Besides
the man, though young, was not shaven.
Plainly a peculiar case.
Standish O'Grady's thoughts are not
recorded. We do not know if he felt
like Oisin, that he would rather be
with Finn and Caoilte in hell than with
Patrick's God who took so queer a delight
in burning. Very likely he did. Very likely
he felt his place was rather beside this lonely
figure than with the driftage of which he
formed a part. It needs no imagination,
however, to conceive that he felt less as if
he had seen a strange sight than as if he
had looked upon a portent. For the voice
of ancient Ireland was speaking through this
man ; and speaking in an Anglicized water-
ing-place.
In truth, it was a portent ; and if Standish
O'Grady had been the wise man we know
him to be, he would have prayed, even
2
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
without committing himself to the religious
fire which burned in the young man's soul,
that the portent might be of happy omen.
For the social doctrine which it lit, and of
which it formed an inevitable part, gave it
a shrewdness of application. This was no
fantastic faith that was being declared. Nor
was this man an esoteric mystic who had
been led away by the real light he saw
to a lack of proportion the more dis-
proportionate by being insistent and pro-
pagandist. Life seen through the eyes of a
man concerned for ideals, that is to say,
through the eyes of a man to whom religion
is quite other than a matter of formal belief,
resolves itself into something very sane and
clean. Its essential, and because essential
always possible, dignity and splendour are
not to be waived by reference to modern
complexities. Idealists are often quick
logicians : this idealist particularly was so :
and it would not avail to commit the first
of logical fallacies by begging the very issue
that was at debate. To create a degrading
complexity, and then to argue the complexity
in defence of the degradation, was hardly
a procedure that would at any time, then
or now, have confused for the preacher of
the Bray promenade the battle in which
he was engaged. Man the child of Dana,
and man crushed by a vast and nightmare
engine, were not for him two persons, but
4
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
one and the same person. Earth did not
differentiate, though it was pitifully, tragi-
cally true that where some of her children
bowed themselves before her others failed
from her. Therefore would he not differen-
tiate. And so a social doctrine emerged in
these Bray discourses that was shrewd in
its simplicity, and worldly-wise because
earthly-wise in its arraignment of a life
that had fallen from greatness.
It was not from books that this came :
certainly not from the writings of men who
in those years prostrated themselves before
the accomplished fact of degradation and
saw in it the fine flower of civilization. As
M confesses, between the ages of eighteen
and thirty he hardly so much as read a
newspaper; though that the affairs of his
country did not pass unheeded many of his
writings at that time show very clearly. His
life was one of mystical experiment and
experience ; of study over the writings of
ancient seers and initiates into the mys-
teries of the heavens and the earth, and
over a wisdom once dearly cherished but
now almost relinquished for the passions of
the body and the irritations of the intellect ;
of contemplation and meditation ; of a very
rare circle of friendship that became finally,
before its members were scattered through
the world, almost a community of mind;
and of a larger circle that acknowledged his
5
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
leadership we may hoj>e, not too obsequi-
ously that turned to him for counsel, and
accepted, it would appear, almost a spiritual
dictatorship.
It is, or at least it should be, a whimsical
humour with men who thereafter become
more widely known when the private hazards
of their life are greeted with attention. It
must be a terrible moment in a man's life
when he begins to live in the light of a
coming biography just as it is sometimes
rather terrible for a reader when he begins
to write letters for a coming collection of
them. There is, however, none of the glance
aside into a personal domestic rectitude that
makes one vaguely uncomfortable when poets
write of white flowers of blameless lives, in
these days and private hours apart. That
is just their significance. The best, because
the deepest, part of them, not only may
not be searched, but cannot be told : because
it is forbidden : because, even if it were
not forbidden, there would be no words to
tell them, since the only communication of
them could be in the like experiences. They
may only be known in their result. Four
men who lived so rich, again because so
experiential, a life together that they grew
to something like a community of person-
ality, where each was the fuller because of
the others, each giving each his dividual and
essential quality, where yet none could have
6
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
a strictly privy life because the community
attained was so complete that their inter-
changes could dispense with words this
plainly is a matter that challenges to be
divulged. And when it is remembered that
the experiences and experiments that formed
the groundwork of this community were
mystical wisdom, discovered anew or housed
in ancient writings, clearly the matter must
be left to rest very tenderly as it was, though
others who had to fight a somewhat lonely
hand might covet the tale that would be
told.
The only light we are suffered, other
than that the mind engenders by brooding
on the relation, is given in an incident
related in a magazine to which they all, in
the circle of which they formed a part, con-
tributed. It was not told " because it is
extraordinary," but " because it was a reve-
lation of the secret of power, a secret which
the wise in good and the wise in evil alike
have knowledge of"; and it is told, as we
divine, of one of that community who had
come to a crisis in his spiritual life in which
" two paths were open before him." " On
one side lay the dazzling mystery of pas-
sion ; on the other * the small old path '
held out its secret and spiritual allure-
ments. I had hope," he says, that his friend
" would choose the latter, and as I was
keenly interested in his decision, I invested
7
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
the struggle going on in his mind with
something of universal significance, seeing
in it a symbol of the strife between * light
and darkness, which are the world's eternal
ways/ He came in late one evening. I
saw at once by the dim light that there was
something strange in his manner. I spoke
to him in enquiry ; he answered me in a
harsh, dry voice quite foreign to his usual
manner. ' Oh, I am not going to trouble
myself any more, I will let things take
their course.' ... I soon saw what had
happened; his mind, in which forces so
evenly balanced had fought so strenuously,
had become utterly wearied out and could
work no longer. A flash of old intuition
illumined it at last it was not wise to
strive with such bitterness over life there-
fore he said to me in memory of this intui-
tion, ' I am going to let things take their
course.' A larger tribunal would decide; he
had appealed unto Caesar. I sent him up
to his room and tried to quiet his fever by
magnetization with some success. He fell
asleep, and as I was rather weary myself I
retired soon after."
To sleep came vision. In a "space opened
on every side with pale, clear light," "a
slight wavering figure caught my eye, a
figure that swayed to and fro ; I was struck
with its utter feebleness, yet I understood
it was its own will or some quality of its
8
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
nature which determined that palpitating
movement towards the poles between which
it swung." Above this figure "two figures,
awful in their power, opposed each other;
the frail being wavering between them could
by putting out its arms have touched them
botn. It alone wavered, for they were silent,
resolute, and knit in the conflict of will ; they
stirred not a hand nor a foot ; there was only
a still quivering now and then as of intense
effort, but they made no other movement.
Their heads were bent forward slightly,
their arms folded, their bodies straight, rigid,
and inclined slightly backwards from each
other like two spokes of a gigantic wheel."
These two " were the culminations of the
human, towering images of the good and
evil man may aspire to. I looked at the face
of the evil adept. His bright red-brown eyes
burned with a strange radiance of power ;
I felt an answering emotion of pride, of
personal intoxication, of psychic richness, rise
up within me, gazing on him. His face was
archetypal ; the abstract passion which eluded
me in the features of many people I knew
was here declared, exultant, defiant, giant-
esque ; it seemed to leap like fire, to be free.
In this face I was close to the legendary
past, to the hopeless worlds where men were
martyred by stony kings, where prayer
was hopeless, where pity was none. I traced
a resemblance to many of the great De-
9
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
stroyers in history whose features have been
preserved, Napoleon, Rameses, and a hundred
others, named and nameless, the long line
of those who were crowned and sceptered in
cruelty. His strength was in human weak-
ness I saw this, for space and the hearts of
men were bare before me. Out of space there
flowed to him a stream half invisible of red ; it
nourished that rich, radiant energy of passion; it
flowed from men as they walked and brooded
in loneliness, or as they tossed in sleep."
From this figure he turned to the other.
" An aura of pale soft blue was around this
figure, through which gleamed an underlight
as of universal gold. ... I caught a glimpse
of a face godlike in its calm, terrible in the
beauty of a life we know only in dreams,
with strength which is the end of the hero's
toil, which belongs to the many times martyred
soul. ... I understood how easy it would
have been for this one to have ended the
conflict, to have gained a material victory
by its power, but this would not have touched
on or furthered its spiritual ends. Only its
real being had force to attract that real being
which was shrouded in the wavering figure.
This truth the adept of darkness knew also,
and therefore he intensified within the sense
of pride and passionate personality. There-
fore they stirred not a hand nor a foot while
under the stimulus of their presence cul-
minated the good and evil in the life which
10
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
had appealed to a higher tribunal to decide.
Then this figure wavering between the two
moved forward and touched with its hand
the Son of Light. All at once the scene
and actors vanished, and the eye that saw
them was closed ; I was alone with darkness
and a hurricane of thoughts."
Dreams are sometimes the body's torment ;
more happily they are the spirit's liberation;
and here in dream one friend saw the issue
that befel another in the deep world whence
Life takes its rise, for the after-days revealed
the fact that the conflict had been so decided.
It tells little, yet a little, of what lay behind
in the friendship it revealed; and it was
only told, as it is told at some length here,
because of the help it might give to others
in like issue, for "although the gods and
cosmic powers may war over us for ever, it
is we alone declare them victors or van-
quished " ; but in it we may also see not a
little of the conflicts of the inner life of those
days, in the nest of that friendship and in
the spiritual history of the man who was
to emerge to more public hours.
The mind distantly perceives that such
a community, once it was attained, would
have to be broken before stagnation, or
uniformity which is the same thing, should
succeed ; and when that happened one of that
community was left in Ireland because his
life belonged to Ireland, where one feels that
11
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
the others did not. Born in Lurgan, in
the County Armagh, on the 10th April, 1867,
he came to the City of Dublin when he was
about seven or eight years of age. He
was put to school with one Doctor Benson
in Rathmines, whose title to fame is this,
and the fact that at the same time a fellow-
student was one who thereafter became
known as Father George Tyrrell, of whom,
however, JK has no memory. It has never
yet been satisfactorily decided why men
are sent to school, though it is accounted a
virtue in biography to discover the remark-
able in that noisy comradeship. Except in
certain modern instances, that happily
invert the old procedure, and seek to educe
rather than to cram, to differentiate rather
than to demand conformity, and to help
the divine in man to create the man by
deftly providing it with chances for the
display of itself rather than to contrive a
series of formal qualifications, schooldom is
a dull business, and the thing that shines
out before and after is mysteriously ex-
tinguished (though not completely extin-
guished, as schoolmasters will be apt to
complain) within its curriculum. Life
triumphs in spite of rather than by reason
of schooldom ; arid it is when, at the age
of sixteen, ^B passed to the School of Art,
where some degree of experiment was
possible, that tuition may be said to begin.
12
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
It was here that he met W. B. Yeats,
who was then prolific of verse, not having
arrived at the caution of later years, and
who, as a page of reminiscence recalls, "had
a tendency to chant his verses to all in
heaven and earth." A friendship was formed,
based on ^E's part on sincere admiration.
Both were Art students ; and it was ^E's
desire, then to follow that gleam. The
Master of Life (who must not, however, be
weighted with all the decrees of livelihood)
had another decision. JE took his taste of
what gentility has decided to call, in the
case of those whom it afterwards decides
to honour, economic pressure ; and the fol-
lowing year found him in Pirn's, a drapery
house of the city.
The profoundest parts of a life are not
its deeds but the long and slow preparations
of personality necessary to those deeds ; and
these are untellable. Partly they are so
because to seek to expound in round terms
what were originally compounded of adven-
tures, hesitancies, much incertitude and a
slow dawning of light, mixed pitifully with
bright illuminations and blackest despair,
is to turn the facts of living into the lie of
print ; but partly also by what is implied in
the modern making of books. Publicity has
become a prohibition. Books are not pub-
lished, as proclamations are supposed to be,
for those whom it may concern, but for every
13
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
curious eye to greet ; and the result, how-
ever honesty may deplore it, has been a
tighter drawing of the curtains about the
secrets of the soul. If it were possible, as
of old, to pass books about, like manuscripts,
for those to read whom they would advance in
the spiritual understanding which it is the
essential function of a book to promote, what
truer declarations of soul would result ! what
increased honesty when honesty was a hand
outstretched to one yet in the waters by one
who had found a place for his feet!
Many perplexed literary matters would also
become answered. One thinks of the publi-
cation, as a case in point, of the Browning
Love Letters, that we would not willingly be
without, despite the cheap journalist copy
they have made. And when we face the
next dozen odd years of ^E's life the question
arises sharply. Thousands work in drapers'
shops at differing tasks with the same mad-
dening uniformity, and pass to their evening
pleasures (called, with a grim enough irony,
re-creations), the dim corners of their private
lives, expecting the one day of liberty, happily
unknowing that the six days of bondage are
already deflowering that liberty in advance,
and who is to tell the ruin or painful achieve-
ment, the hopeful reachings-forward, the bitter
relinquishments, each has in his own lonely
world apart amid all the seeming dull and
cheapened satisfaction? That is so when
U
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
there is no ray of light to fall on any one
soul of all the passing stream ; but in the
case of JEi the curiosity is sharpened by the
fact that it was in those years that the man
was formed and made.
Dublin is a human and humane city.
Though an ominous Castle be in it, it is yet
Irish in the preservation of homeliness, spon-
taneity, and the carelessness with which
life should be worn if it is to have the
grace proper to its dignity. Not only are
friendships possible in it as (Dubliners would
fain believe) they are not possible in less
humane cities, but it is in itself, as a city,
friendly. It caresses. It laughs. It is lit
with understanding. It has a dignity that is
easy, and in which all, save those that
cluster about the ominous Castle, share with
an accepted comradeliness. The result that
we now know as JE would not have been
possible in any other city. Nor, it is worthy
of remark, would it have been possible in a
company that did not regard that edifice,
and all it signified, with aversion, if not
with the hostility with which a body reacts
against a sore set in its midst.
Moreover if indeed it be not part of the
same large grace hills are set about the
city that are magical, although for the most
part they refrain from austerity. They had
their part in the making of the city's grace,
for we may thank God that few parts of
15
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
Ireland are, in physical distance or emotional
kinship, far from Earth ; and they had also
their separate part in the making of the man.
It was about the time that the lad went
first to drapery that he went first also to
the Dublin hills. Until that time he lived
in the city, and the hills were only a guardian
company in mists of blue through some vista
of the streets. And even when he went at
last to the hills, it was with other boys to
play, long before they unveiled themselves to
him. Earth that cradles her brood of men
nourishes them even when they do not
recognize her ; for it was not till he was
sixteen or seventeen years of age, at a time
when the body is tortured with desires that
darken all the ways of life and make of the
mind a torment of shame, that illumination
first came to him, bringing with it the
quickening of spiritual life.
It came quite spontaneously, without any
definite prompting, for there were at that
time no friendships capable in themselves of
awakening it ; and he took more continually
to the company of the hills, while in his
mind the new spiritual life warred with the
old living. And when that occurs, the mind
itself, the field of the issue, is in perplexity
to know which life is more truly his, the
new or the old, or which spirit is more
truly owner of himself.
Thus the illumination came, actually while
16
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
on a visit to Armagh, and opened the new
life that was to run beside the old to mock
it by its contrast. It brought with it its
own problems; for such new life comes
like a strange thing inhabiting the blood.
Nevertheless, illumination is illumination, for
all its problems. For the world became
transfigured ; and, although dark days might
come with the new torment of a lost glory,
with the new torment of an old dead bodily
life, Earth stood before him in an infinitely
tender and living relation. It was about
that time that he sang of her in a song
of his earliest verse :
She is rapt in dreams divine.
As her clouds of beauty pass
On our glowing hearts they shine,
Mirrored there as in a glass.
Earfch, whose dreams are we and they,
With her deep heart's gladness fills
All our human lips can say
Or the dawn-fired singer trills.
So he came to the conviction that the
Youth of the World and the Age of Gold
are not a past glory, but that it is only men
revolting perhaps from what they stupidly
condemn as paganism who have blinded
themselves to a glory that ever remains
new and young ; and that conviction coming
on illumination underlies all his thought and
17 c
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
work. Unfortunately such a vision gives
an added stress to other things not at all
so golden. Lit, thus, with a vision that gives
a purpose to life, that arrays it like a battle
wnile filling its hours with rich understanding ;
forming very rare friendships, the fitter be-
cause they gathered about that purpose and
deepened it by enquiry and spiritual experi-
ment ; becoming, as time proceeded, the
leader, and even dictator, to a wider circle
that searched into the mysteries of the un-
veiled Earth (always a pleasing thing, even to
the purest of heart) ; and learning to utter in
song and prose, and limning by brush in colour
and outline, the things which his spirit beheld
in that world of enquiry: M was fortunate
beside many another who had a lonelier track
to take. Moreover, was there not among
rare things that rarest : a city humane and
friendly when it is the first law of cities to
be inhuman and callous, and engirdled and
guarded by wise hills, easy to be seen through
some vista of the streets, in a world where the
very fact of a city signifies a collective fear
of the brown-visaged and beautiful mother?
Surely he was fortunate. Yet it needs but
a little sympathy and, let it be said, ex-
perience, without which sympathy is a groping
in darkness to discover the darker thread in
his days.
In the warp and woof that go to make the
pattern of manhood in the loom of the years,
18
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
it is the darker threads, happily or unhappily,
that can least be guessed at. The life had its
tragedy : in the truest sense, since there can be
no tragedy where there is no splendour, missed
or defeated : and there is a poem of that title
to mark it :
A man went forth one day at eve :
The long day's toil for him was done :
The eye that scanned the page could leave
Its task until to-inorrow's sun.
Upon the threshold where he stood
Flared on his tired eyes the sight,
Where host on host the multitude
Burned fiercely in the dusky night.
The starry lights at play at play
The giant children of the blue,
Heaped scorn upon his trembling clay
And with their laughter pierced him through.
They seemed to say in scorn of him,
" The power we have was once in thee.
King, is thy spirit grown so dim,
That thou art slave and we are free ? "
As out of him the power the power
The free the fearless, whirled in play,
He knew himself that bitter hour
The close of all his royal day.
And from the stars' exultant dance
Within the fiery furnace glow,
Exile of all the vast expanse,
He turned him homeward sick and slow.
19
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
Many have known that bitter hour; and
many have painfully relinquished a light
that civilization, proud of its elaborate ex-
ploits and belauded by darkened minds, has
not suffered to let live, though older and
simpler hours, labelled in contempt by the
queer terms of modern bookmaking as bar-
baric, desired to preserve it. Many have
known the spirit of " Weariness," and have
asked :
Where are now the dreams divine,
Fires that lit the dawning soul ?
and have complained :
I think
Old companions of the prime
From our garments well might shrink,
Muddied with the lees of Time.
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.
There is a settled hopelessness in these
poems that tell of the man in the midst of
the " petty tasks " to which he was a daily
slave. They were born of utter weariness,
of fagged and defeated energies, when the
20
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS
will will hardly be persuaded that the light
once gone can ever return. There is a
louder revolt in " A Return " :
We turned back mad : we thought of the morrow,
The iron clang of the far-away town ;
We could not weep in our bitter sorrow,
But joy as the Arctic sun went down.
That, tells the tale of a concluded holi-
day (the attentive ear, to whom these
things are not the chance of a poem, will
notice the plural instead of the singular
pronoun !) ; but in each there is something
nearer to tragedy than in the in-and-out of
kings, for it concerns a kingship less acci-
dental and nearer sympathy. At worst an
idle interest, at best a distant rumour, to
those who have not lived through such hours,
to those who know, and the world is of such,
such poems will be of special significance in
the life of a man who was to emerge to days
when work was work indeed, however fatigu-
ing, and not a dull monotonous labour.
Acquainted with what is called "economic
stress," but for which a wit has presented
them with the apter word "wagery," they
will know the value of the anvil and the
hammer in the making of the man because
both anvil and hammer are so very familiar.
21
CHAPTER II
DISCOVERIES
DURING these years manhood and the man
were in the making. The purpose of his
days, without the discovery of which a man's
life is as spilled water, became clearer to
him. The rhythms that swing through dark-
ness and brightness carry a man onward to
a finer certitude if the will is not unbent
like a tired archer's bow ; and there is a
despair, though it seem hopeless when it
comes, that is more full of hope than content-
ment. It is by his aspirations, not by his
achievements, that a man is to be measured,
We know very well, in spite of so much
that lies hidden in the involutions of living,
what these years meant for ^E. We have
not only the more mature result. We have
his discoveries by the way. It is the common
thought that poets write to* declare their
visions to others ; and this is in some
measure true, in that songs would not be
sung were there not an audience to attend,
and visions would not be declared were there
not the hope that there were some whom it
would concern ; yet at heart the poet finds
that he sings to declare his vision to himself,
22
DISCOVERIES
to expound and complete it for himself, to
record for himself his discoveries in the
spiritual thrift of his soul. With the higher
company of poets, with those whom in
glib phrase we undertake to call major poets,
this is so. In English poetry where Herrick
made songs Shelley made discoveries, and
therefore where Herrick bettered his art
Shelley bettered his vision. In the defter
use of words of one we do not see a deeper
vision, whereas with Shelley the greater
clarity of his music inevitably, as the mind
perceives, flowed down from the purer heights
to which he had ascended. To pass from
the poems he wrote when he thought himself
an atheist at Oxford to the great chorus
in " Hellas " is not to read a volume of
poetry, it is to pass through a spiritual
history. So it was with Whitman, with
Beethoven, with Michaelangelo, with Ms-
chylus, in their several arts, and with all
of those whom the world in calling artists
recognizes as the recorders of spiritual aspira-
tion, the creators of great and pure decisions
of the soul.
There is therefore a slight grudge against
M when in his "Collected Poems" he dis-
persed the order which in conversation he
always recognizes. To think of life as an
ideal splendour is only in a coward's shrift
to release it from the details of living. If
there were times when the accountant from
23
DISCOVERIES
Pirn's came out upon the threshold of the
building for the stars of heaven to mock his
tired brain with the taunt of a kingship
grown so dim, as "he turned him home-
ward sick and slow," it was also true that
there were times when the accountant's
desk was whirled away while distant sights
with strange people in unfamiliar surround-
ings came clearly before the eye. Poems
such as " Om," " Oversoul," and " The Earth
Breath," are records of such experiences ;
and from the sight the poet gives us of the
man who went forth one day at eve, for the
just balance of those days we may turn to
the sight the poet, seated at his desk, him-
self had, where
the restless ploughman pauses,
Turns and, wondering,
Deep within his rustic habit
Finds himself a king ;
For a fiery moment looking
With the eyes of God
Over fields a slave at morning
Bowed him to the sod.
His first volume, " Homeward, Songs by
the Way," published in 1894, and many of
the poems in " The Earth Breath," pub-
lished three years later, were the fruit of
this time. They pretended to be no more
than a garner of spiritual experiences, a
portion of his life from one who regarded
this public canvassing of his inmost life with
24
DISCOVERIES
aversion. Such an aversion is not a singu-
lar fact in authorship. It may, paradox
though it be, like the heart of man, be
said to be the ruling fact of authorship;
for none like to display their holy or their
unholy things before a throng ; and the very
lewdest of honesty is not exempt from that.
It is right, for instance, to conceive of Hazlitt
putting out his "Liber Amoris" with a
gesture of shuddering. Authorship is not
the trite affair the modern trade of writing
has made it to seem. With ^E, however,
the facts were singular. All the poems had
appeared already in the Irish Theosophist,
a magazine that was privately printed by
the circle into which M had drifted when
the " divine visitations " led him to seek
out companionship in spiritual enquiry ; and
it was to this circle he put his case, and
it was they who decided that the poems
should be published. He had become the
leader of this circle ; and he was the main
scribe for the monthly magazine they
printed, writing from various points of view
in a variety of deliberately conceived styles
under different pen-names. Wanting at
one time a new pen-name, he subscribed
himself as ^EON. His penmanship not at
all times being of the legiblest, the printer
deciphered the first diphthong and set a
query for the rest ; whereupon the writer,
in his proof-sheets, stroked out the query
25
DISCOVERIES
and stood by the diphthong. And to mark
the detachment with which "Homeward,
Songs by the Way" was to be published,
an escape was made into this pen-name,
though the authorship was at no time a
secret.
For some years W. B. Yeats had lived
in London, engaging in literary journalism.
Already he had established himself as a poet
of very rare beauty; and his choice of sub-
ject, a certain atmosphere laden with mist
that wrapped the beauty (for which he him-
self "coined the funny nickname" "The Celtic
Twilight "), and the fact that he travelled
to and fro between Ireland and England,
caused the right ascription of his poetry to this
country, though it was framed in the Eng-
lish tongue. He and M were close friends.
He knew the circle that met in Ely Place.
He even once for a short while joined the
" household " that lived in Ely Place, sharing
the life of spiritual experiment. Admiring
J, as he was in turn admired by M. and
conceivably not being averse to another
text in his own special subject in London
journalism (for to succeed in London jour-
nalism, then as now, was to make a special
corner, with a certain allowance for versa-
tility), it came about therefore, with the
publication of "Homeward, Songs by the
Way," that he and M were hailed as the
leaders of a queer thing known as the Irish
26
DISCOVERIES
Literary Revival. It was queer in this,
that neither of them knew Irish; but they
came at a time when Englishmen had the
inward conviction, hardly to be publicly
admitted, that their language had exhausted
its chances of beautiful usage, and was only
of avail thenceforward for journalism. There
was, to be sure, some justification for this
suspicion, for poets and prose-men had be-
come afraid of beauty ; they regarded fine
writing askance (and do yet) ; they defied
new forms that should give greater supple-
ness, and had long and bitterly fought the
greatest living master of their language ;
and it was therefore not altogether a strange
thing that the best of its music at the
time was won by those who used the
tongue as foreigners, these two Irishmen
in verse and Joseph Conrad, a Pole, in
prose. Even the very great poem that
succeeded to them from the pen of an
Englishman, "The Dynasts," was cast into a
verse that simulated prose; and was a feat
of imagination rather in the greatness of
its conception than in the making of its
verses, being fearful of the metaphor in which
the elder poets delighted, and tucking its
legerdemain into stage-directions.
What was called the "Irish Literary Re-
vival " was truly an English Literary Revival
conducted by Irishmen. In this W. B. Yeats
had a conscious part ; but M was rather caught
27
DISCOVERIES
into it from his own separate world, that
was only literary in the sense that to convey
spiritual experiences from soul to soul was
to put them into writing, and that to convey
them justly was to write them finely, with a
commensurate music and imagination. W. B.
Yeats' apostleship was designed and delibe-
rate, and the immediate results were excellent
though the work became spoiled in time ; but
M was rather an unsuspecting apostle, a little
bewildered in the white light of publicity
that had so suddenly fallen about him in his
emergence from the household in Ely Place.
The difference may be seen in their work. In
Yeats' poetry there is the same deliberate
disavowal of splendour that marked the work
of his peers in London ; and it arose from the
same literary fear of the past a fear that if
splendour were permitted it would slip into
the grooves cut by the prowess of the elder
poets. Francis Thompson might have re-
assured them ; but the critics took good care
that he should not by at once likening him,
in much dreary nonsense, to Crashaw, and
deriving him from the Restoration poets, till
one wonders if they had bothered to read
Thompson's fiery page of metaphors or had
turned down Crashaw's taut music from its
slumber on the shelves. However, for the
most part the critics were the poets and the
poets were the critics, and in this literary
genealogy-hunting they showed their own fear
28
DISCOVERIES
of the past. In this fear Yeats shared ; but,
coming to it from the County Sligo and the
city of Dublin, and with the soul of a poet
born not made, he made beautiful poetry
where Ernest Dowson (save for one solitary
cry of passion) played with trivialities, where
Lionel Johnson wrought scholarly verse, and
Robert Bridges relied for the most part on
bald statement. He made a convention as
they did. "The Celtic Twilight" was a
literary convention, conceived in London and
conceivably revolting from London ; for the
old Gaelic poets were not afraid of splendour,
of metaphor, of big musics; indeed, they
rioted in them; they splashed in them as a
swimmer glad of the sea, laughing back to
the bright laughter of the wave. Yet con-
ventions are a little thing, for he made poetry;
and "The Countess Cathleen," wrought in
those days, justifies nothing, and asks to
justify nothing, but itself, for Beauty needs
no creed for its making or its defence.
M, however, was not even aware of the
stones on which W. B. Yeats had sharp-
ened his literary tools. His nights were spent
in psychic experiment or in brooding over
the " Bhagavad Gita," the " Upanishads," and
song-offerings and ancient wisdom hid of old
in the secret house of books ; and thus, along
these lines, with no mere literary interest,
coming to the old gods which the race once
saw peopling the hills of Ireland. He had
29
DISCOVERIES
no fear for echoes from the past, if echoes
from the past gave him what he wanted.
His "Symbolism" was not a fantastic Pari-
sian creed, but something much simpler and
more direct.
Now when the spirit in us wakes and broods,
Filled with home yearnings, drowsily it flings
From its deep heart high dreams and mystic moods,
Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things :
Clothing the vast with a familiar face ;
Reaching its right hand forth to greet the starry race.
He lost as he gained : he was more con-
tent to record his discovery than to commu-
nicate it : had he as a poet been more
self-aware he might by a better craft, born
of brooding, have more often lit a flame in
his verse, to burn intensely there and to light
other brains, where it is content to tell of a
fire in the poet himself altogether so much
brighter than in the poetry he made. There
is no poem, so sincere is this poet, and
especially in his early verse, that does not
tell of a vision that he does not feel that
it is important we should know. He was
never at heart interested in the poem only
for the poem's sake; and he never in his
verse took a holiday at least in his pub-
lished verse. And we feel this. We feel
that there is no poem, however it fail, that
does not record a spiritual discovery ; but we
are often baffled, because the poem, while it
30
DISCOVERIES
tells us of the discovery, is not itself the
fine ritual in which the discovery is in-
volved. The poet has his vision, we know;
though visions are by no means always the
starting-point for song, yet we are seldom
uncertain in this case. Indeed, that is the
thing that tantalizes. For the magician's
sleight sometimes is lacking ; and thus we
hear him telling us of things, sometimes
facilely and always mellifluously, but we are
disappointed because he cannot make his vision
ours for ever. At such times we feel that if
he had brooded over his craft as he brooded
over the things he wished to convey by his
craft he would have made us better sharers
of the things that remain his.
For the poems of these days are one con-
tinuous inspiration of theme. " Homeward,
Songs by the Way" is an unbroken series.
It is linked with " The Earth Breath " by the
inclusion in that volume of many poems of
the first song ; the last of which appeared in
"The Divine Vision," where the poet first
begins definitely to turn to speechcraft from
songcraft, and to utter in a fine pomp what he
first had sung in purity, even though the song
were not always uniformly magical.
These are hard things, not easy to under-
stand, that the lover only will consider. The
poet himself would fain believe that the
vision uplifting him will bring its own song
with it, that the beauty and splendour of the
31
DISCOVERIES
one will be the infallible beauty and splendour
of the other. He will agree that the song
may rush straight upon his lips from the thing
seen, or that the certainty of a poem may
come in some rare uplifting of the mind
though that poem will lie buried for months,
its shape and fashion all unknown, to flow
forth finally with a deeper earthly wisdom,
though with not so clear a light : he will agree
that the vision itself, for all that it is, will not
be clear to him till its poem come, and that
he will make the vision his by the making of
the poem, rising upon it by being now finished
with it : but it will seem to him that these
things should argue a poem to match equally
with the exaltation given to him, and that if
the poem be faulty there was something
amiss with the exaltation. So, indeed, at
heart it mostly is ; but not always. All men
are more than they can express of themselves.
No man can give another all of his own
enlightenment. And if a man passes rapidly
on from one thing to another, content with
equally rapid expressions, others will lose in
the degree in which he gains though it is
equally true that he himself will also lose
in the end. He thus becomes the converse
of the man who stays at a few poems all
his life, whittling at them till much of
their early beauty is gone, he having passed
away from the mood in which they came
to him.
32
DISCOVERIES
We feel this most in some of JE's later
poems, published in "The Divine Vision"
in 1908 ; in his early poems the case is
even more difficult. It is an impertinence
to question the form in which a poem comes
to us ; it is doubly an impertinence from one
poet to another, for poets should be, though
they are not always, glad when a brother adds
to the created beauty of the world as this
poet happily gives thanks for the gift of M's
book of song. Yet a poem may be taken
where the clearness of the vision is indis-
putable and the result one to be pondered on,
where, however, the answering mood in us is
not uplifted to an equal height. Such a poem
is " Om." We know how it came. As the
accountant sat at his desk, it and all around
him were whirled away while he looked
intently on the sight before his open eyes.
Faint grew the yellow buds of light
Far flickering beyond the snows,
As leaning o'er the shadowy white
Morn glimmered like a pale primrose.
Within an Indian vale below
A child said, " Om " with tender heart,
Watching, with loving eyes, the glow
In dayshine fade and night depart.
The word which Brahma at his dawn
Outbreathes and endeth at his night,
Whose tide of sound so rolling on
Gives birth to orbs of pearly light ;
33 D
DISCOVERIES
And beauty, wisdom, love, and youth,
By its enchantment gathered, grow
In agelong wandering to the truth,
Through many a cycle's ebb and flow.
And here the voice of earth was stilled,
The child was lifted to the Wise :
A strange delight his spirit filled
And Brahm looked from his shining eyes.
The record of the thing seen is complete,
told with music and wisdom. But what
have we missed? We have missed just what
it brought to the poet. The ecstasy it wrought
in him he has not wrought in us, for all that
we know well, from the record and some
alchemy in its making, that the ecstasy was
there. The very chord he heard is hardly,
heard by us, for it is strange that the tone
conveyed by the word " Om " is not the tone-
dominant of the poem. Pedants may wrangle
over some ill-befitting slender vowels, but
the fact remains, for we know that there are
tones, and a sequence in tones, could men but
find them, that are more meaningful, more
profoundly significant, than all the poor logical
conveyances of words, upbuilding and creating
souls and shattering unworthy moods, lifting
the spirit through circles and circles of
light. It is the poet's business to find these
tones that shall express by their utterance,
each in its own utterance, all that he would
put into words ; and when he finds them we
near the ecstasy. That is his high prophetic
DISCOVERIES
task, that the musician himself may envy
him. When he has heard his tone, when
the meaningful chord of its music sings
through his soul, he has what we tritely call
his divine afflatus. Patience, an intent and
watchful calm, and care will give him the
rest of the poem, as the tone rolls onward
and concludes itself; and then the afflatus is
communicated to us.
So hear this other, " The Great Breath,"
by contrast.
Its edges foamed with amethyst and rose,
Withers once more the old blue flower of day :
There where the ether like a diamond glows
Its petals fade away.
A shadowy tumult stirs the dusky air ;
Sparkle the delicate dews, the distant snows ;
The great deep thrills, for through it everywhere
The breath of Beauty blows.
I saw how all the trembling ages past,
Moulded to her by deep and deeper breath,
Neared to the hour when Beauty breathes her last
And knows herself in death.
We are told nothing here, but, despite the
slight stumble at the opening of the last stanza,
we are lifted to an equal mood ; the ecstasy
that was in the singer is the ecstasy that
passes to us. So it is with " The Unknown
God," with its higher, clearer tone, and
" Refuge " from his later volume, with its deep
35
DISCOVERIES
mature reticence. Yet, whether we hear or
do not hear his ecstasy, never was there so
exact a poet as this. Many of his poems
come not only from the inmost circle of
spiritual insight, but also from the outer
circle of psychic vision ; and much that
might seem, at a cursory glance, extravagant
imagery, will be found to be no more than
meticulous accuracy to what he has beheld.
Perhaps they too much demand a knowledge
of mystic signs and symbols ; perhaps they
unwisely, in some cases, decree for us a like
psychic experience if not learning unwisely
for poetry, which should not need annotation
but should address itself directly to the pure
and aspiring spirit of man : that may very
well be; but there are none of his poems
that we may set aside as inexact. "The
Robing of the King," for example, records
precisely what in vision he beheld, rightly
or wrongly, as the meaning of the Crucifixion,
surrendering, as he does, its outward appear-
ance to those who did not know the esoteric
event that was happening. And there are
many poems of this sort, that are rather less
poems than texts, like the texts of the East,
to be brooded upon like symbols and un-
ravelled like mysteries. Not only, however,
are the visions of the " household " so written.
On the hills of Ireland, aflame once with
mystic fires, this man may have beheld the
great ones once again, have seen things not
36
DISCOVERIES
easy to be told, and have recorded them with
the care of a man of faith. These things
are not lightly to be spoken of; but to be
passed from hand to nand ; and Irishmen
at least will read " The Child of Destiny "
with attention.
For this poet conceived highly of Life,
and conceived highly of Poetry, the first
and purest handmaiden of Life. He never
used Poetry for his own hand, or suborned
it with his prejudices. He might lightly say
of himself:
He has built his monument
With the winds of time at strife,
Who could have before he went
Written on the book of life ;
but it is because he wrote first in the book
of life that his book of poetry will be
esteemed by the wise. What his thought
of poetry was he declared when another
poet, not so clean of heart, slandered his
country. Irishmen are not, as a rule, among
those who highly esteem Rudyard Kipling.
His book of verse wakes few echoes in
them. That he should insolently have tra-
duced their dear land he who has no land,
but only a windy Empire wherein to wander
is perhaps a small matter; that he should
have debauched song is a deeper trouble in
a land where the poet was of old time
honoured because the poet honoured his
37
DISCOVERIES
craft. And when this man laid foul words
at Ireland's door in a simulation of poetry,
taking Scripture as a text for his baseness,
M replied in prose. As that reply is not
elsewhere available, it shall be recorded here
in full, as much of the man is in it.
I speak to you, brother, because you have spoken
to me, or rather you have spoken for me. I am a
native of Ulster. So far back as I can trace the
faith of my forefathers they held the faith for whose
free observance you are afraid.
I call you brother, for so far as I am known
beyond the circle of my personal friends it is as a
poet. We are not a numerous tribe, but the world
has held t/s in honour because on the whole in poetry
is found the highest and sincerest utterance of man's
spirit. In this manner of speaking if a man is not
sincere his speech brtrayeth him, for all true poetry
was written on the Mount of Transfiguration, and
there is revelation in it and the mingling of heaven
and earth. I am jealous of the honour of poetry,
and I am jealous of the good name of my country,
and I am impelled by both ei notions to speak to you.
You have Irish blood in you. I have heard,
indeed, Ireland is your mother's land, and you
may, perhaps, have some knowledge of Irish senti-
ment. You have offended against one of our noblest
literary traditions in the manner in ivhich you
have published your thoughts. You begin by quoting
Scripture. You preface your verses on Ulster by
words from the mysterious oracles of humanity as
if you had been inflamed and inspired by the
prophet of God ; and you go on to sing of faith in
peril and patriotism betrayed and the danger of
death and oppression by those who do murder by
nighty which things, if one truly feels, he speaks of
38
DISCOVERIES
without consideration of commerce or what it shall
profit him to speak. But you, brother, have with-
held your fears for your country and mine until
they could yield you a profit in two continents.
After all this high speech about the Lord and the
hour of national darkness it shocks me to find this
following your verses : " Copyrighted in the United
States of America by Rudyard Kipling." You are
not in want. You are the most successful man of
letters of your time, and yet you are not above
making profit out of the perils of your country.
You ape the lordly speech of the prophets, and you
conclude by warning everybody not to reprint your
words at their peril. In Ireland every poet we
honour has dedicated his genius to his country with-
out gain, and has given without stint, without
any niggardly withholding of his gift when his
nation was in dark and evil days. Not one of our
writers when deeply moved about Ireland has tried
to sell the gift of the spirit. . . . You, brother \ hurt
me when you declare your principles and declare
a dividend to yourself out of your patriotism openly
and at the same time.
I would not reason with you, but that I know
there is something truly great and noble in you,
and there have been hours when the immortal in
you secured your immortality in literature, when
you ceased to see life with that hard cinematograph
eye of yours and saw with the eyes of the spirit,
and power and tenderness and insight were mixed
in magical tales. Surely you were far from the
innermost when, for the first time I think, you
wrote of your mother's land and my countrymen.
I have lived all my life in Ireland holding a
different faith from that held by the majority. I
know Ireland as few Irishmen know it, county by
county, for I travelled all over Ireland for years,
and, Ulster man as I am, and proud of the Ulster
39
DISCOVERIES
people, I resent the crowning of Ulster with all the
virtues and the dismissal of other Irishmen as
thieves and rollers. I resent the cruelty with
which you, a stranger, speak of the most lovable
and kindly people I know.
You are not even accurate in your history when
you speak of Ulster's traditions and the blood our
forefathers spilt. Over a century ago Ulster was
the strong and fast place of rebellion, and it was
in Ulster that the Volunteers stood beside their
cannon and wrung the gift of political freedom for
the Irish Parliament. You are blundering in
your blame. You speak of Irish greed in I know
not what connection, unless you speak of the war
waged over the land; and yet you ought to know
that both parties in England have by Act after
Act confessed the absolute justice and rightness of
that agitation. Unionist no less than Liberal, and
both boast of their share in answering the Irish
appeal. They are both proud to-day of what they
did. They made enquiry into wrong and redressed it.
But you, it seems, can only feel sore and angry
that intolerable conditions imposed by your laws
were not borne in patience and silence. For what
party do you speak ? When an Irishman has a
grievance you smite him. How differently would
you have written of Runnymeade and the valiant
men of England who rebelled whenever they thought
fit. You would have made heroes out of them. , . .
Have you no soul left, after admiring the
rebels in your own history, to sympathize with
other rebels suffering deeper wrongs ? Can you
not see deeper into the motives for rebellion than
the hireling reporter who is sent to make up a case
for the paper of a party? The best men in Ulster,
the best Unionists in Ireland, will not be grateful
to you for libelling their countrymen in your verse.
For, let the truth be known, the mass of Irish
40
DISCOVERIES
Unionists are much more in love with Ireland
than with England. They think Irish Nationalists
are mistaken, and they fight with them, and they
use hard words, and all the time they believe Irish-
men of any party are better in the sight of God
than Englishmen. They think Ireland is the best
country in the world to live in, and they hate to
hear Irish people spoken of as murderers and greedy
scoundrels. Murderers ! Why there is more murder
done in any four English shires in a year than in
the whole of the four provinces of Ireland. Greedy !
The Nation never accepted a bribe, or took it as an
equivalent or payment for an ideal, and what
bribe would not have been offered to Ireland if it
had been willing to forswear its traditions.
I am a person whose whole being goes into a
blaze at the thought of oppression of faith, and yet
I think my Catholic countrymen infinitely more
tolerant than those who hold the faith I was born
in. I am a heretic judged by their standards, a
heretic who has written and made public his
heresies, and I have never suffered in friendship
or found my heresies an obstacle in life. I set my
knowledge, the knowledge of a lifetime, against your
ignorance, and I say you have used your genius
to do Ireland and its people a wrong. You have
intervened in a quarrel of which you do not know
the merits like any brawling bully who passes and
only takes sides to use his strength. If there was a
high court of poetry, and those in power jealous of
the noble name of poet and that none should use it
save those who were truly Knights of the Holy
Ghost, they would hack the golden spurs from your
heels and turn you out of the Court. You had the
ear of the world and you poisoned it with prejudice
and ignorance. You had the power of song, and
you have always used it on behalf of the strong
against the weak. You have smitten with all your
41
DISCOVERIES
might at creatures who are frail on earth but
mighty in the heavens, at generosity, at truth, at
justice, and Heaven has withheld vision and power
and beauty from you, for this your verse is only a
shallow newspaper article made to rhyme. Truly
ought the golden spurs to be hacked from your heels
and you be thrust out of the Court*
More than once it has happened that a petty
deed awoke a memorable rebuke ; and this
rebuke is memorable because of what it reveals
of the austere faith of a poet who happens also
to be, whatever the rank of his poetry in the
judgment of time, possibly the greatest writer,
certainly one of the very great writers, of
English prose of his time. That his prose
dares to be eloquent, daring also to be
gorgeous without any of the trappings of
prose feudaldom, is itself a rare excellence in
a day when the writing of prose has come
under the bondage of the journalist. That
it has hitherto only been accessible in stray
pamphlets and booklets, some of the best of
it being even yet hidden in old numbers of
mystical papers and early national journals,
has obscured its united excellence. It is
curious, and yet not strange, that three such
writers of English prose as ^E, Standish
O'Grady, and " John Eglinton," each so dis-
* It is worthy of record also that the editor of
the journal printing this cut away its sterner parts.
Malignity on the one hand and a very timorous
friendship on the other are very typical of the
attitudes towards Ireland.
42
DISCOVERIES
tinct, each eloquent though in such differing
ways the calm river of John Eglinton's
prose, where the music ripples over smooth
stones under the deceptive appearance of
baldness, the pomp of Standish O'Grady's
periods, like the brave chant of an ancient
Gael, and M 9 rich with a subtle music, deal-
ing with things hard to relate, full of colour
and allusion and eloquence should have been
working together, John Eglinton touching ^E
on the mystical side and Standish O'Grady
arousing him to the bardic glory of the race
and to its reverence for the hero-heart. But
then Dublin, as has been said, is a friendly
city. And these writers of prose have not
yet won their due place where the makers
of poetry have already passed from the first
glory of estimation a curious inversion of
the usual treatment accorded to prose and
poetry.
It always happens, if a man be a poet,
that his prose will be an elaboration, in a
differing ritual of words, of the ideas which
received their quintessential form in his
poetry. Either that, or his prose will be, as
Milton haughtily said his was, writ with his
left hand. "I ask with Mitchell," says JE,*
" who was told of the laying of the Atlantic
cable : < Will a lie told at one end come out
truth at the other ? ' The spiritual question is
the only really important one." That is the
* The Internationalist, vol. i. p. 36.
43
DISCOVERIES
poet looking out on life, fallen so far from
the greatness it yet remembers. "Poets,"
says Shelley, " are the unacknowledged legis-
lators of the world " ; but M comes forward
in his prose, as all poets in their measure
do, and presses for the acknowledgment.
It is a light thing that they should be ac-
knowledged by this or that trivial honour,
too often given not as an acknowledg-
ment but as a deft and social grace with
which to avoid the real case at issue.
Rather, the poet, building his temple of
beauty, each stone of which in its careful
hewing is an implicit condemnation of the
city without, and finding his temple
neglected, as such temples are too often
wont to be, or merely extolled in set
terms from the distance, comes forth and
addresses the city. As his building was
so will his address be, for it is his single-
mindedness that brings him out. Would he
not rather be at his building ? But what
use to build if the city, instead of remem-
bering the Heavenly City which his temple
was to recall, denies every line of his
beauty (while perhaps giving it some light
lip-fealty) by erecting monstrous structures
without as it sings some queer and un-
intelligible chant about progress? Even if
he does not fall into the quite false logic
of thinking that his building in such a
case would be mere selfishness, he will at
44
DISCOVERIES
least rightly ask himself if it is not high
time he challenged his fellow-citizens as to
the first principles of their buildings and
of his. He will know that he holds the
logic of the position, for they give a cer-
tain kind of fealty to his building, whereas
he gives none to theirs.
Later on M was called upon to go out
and give a hand in the building of the
city itself, when his prose took a workaday
directness. Tracts on pig-breeding, and
journalism that had to deal with any sub-
jects that might chance to come within his
reach and insist, patiently or impatiently,
on certain essential things week-in and
week-out, are not that portion of a man's
endeavours that he hopes to pass as a
cherished possession to a wider and a
later world ; but there are other parts of
his later work as a nation-builder where a
simple and direct economy was demanded
of him ; which he gave ; giving it eloquence
moreover, such as bestows on it other
qualities than that of shrewd sense, and
makes it memorable for reasons deeper than
that of logic. For his audience then was
not elect: it was desirable that the simple
should hear him; it was inevitable that
knavery would hear him, and seek to per-
vert his words, to represent him as mere
fool of a poet or, alternatively, as deeper
knave even than they, with an even
45
DISCOVERIES
craftier design on the pockets of the simple.
Before that time, however, his audience
was elect. They were the few who had
gathered about the temple, were even
within the temple, with some very few who
had helped to hew its stones ; and to these
he could speak all of his mind.
It is usually faulty thinking to speak of
one style being simpler than another.
Pedantries there are ; but in the main the
difference between one style and another
is in the matter that it contains, and the cir-
cumstances attending its presentation. To
say of ^E's later style that it is simple is
really only to say that he stated in it the
results of his thinking in final and orderly
terms. All of his mind was not in it ;
only its last conclusions : not the visions,
not the spiritual convictions that the visions
brought, not the outlook on life, the fine
inspiration, the intense uplifting, linked with
those convictions, not the delicate percep-
tions between this and that uplifting, this
and that Beauty, this and that Truth, be-
tween inspiration and aspiration, not the
processes leading outward from the experi-
ences of a man of such an involution of
spiritual life to his conclusions of the kind
of world in which the greatness which is
in man would best thrive : nothing of all
this ; but just those last conclusions, put
together with a certain show of reason and
46
DISCOVERIES
a certain logical structure. The other things
belong to the fine intimacies of spiritual
life, whereas the conclusions deal only with
the apt environment for that spiritual life.
If a man has to write, however, of those
fine intimacies the writing will be just as
complex as the spiritual life is complex, and
will seem obscure in exactly the same rela-
tion as his experiences and discoveries will
defy expression. He will have to ambush
the shy things that lurk in the thicket of
his soul, and net them subtly and quickly
in the tones and colours and rhythms of
words rather than in their bold and limited
meanings. That will not lead to clarity ;
clarity in such a case would be a profound
lie ; for precious things are precious in both
meanings of the word,
It is a very delicate net of words, for
instance, he has thrown round some of the
intimations of the spiritual meaning of Life
in his essay " The Renewal of Youth."
" We came out of the Great Mother-Life
for the purposes of soul," he says ; and in
the wonderful music of that essay he writes
of the source and destiny of that experience
for which we have been lent to Life.
In some moment of more complete imagination
the thought-born may go forth and look on the ancient
Beauty. So it was in the mysteries long ago and
may well be to-day. The poor dead shadow was laid
to sleep, forgotten in its darkness, as the fiery power,
47
DISCOVERIES
mounting from heart to head, went forth in radiance.
Not then did it rest, nor ought we. The dim worlds
dropped behind it, the lights of earth disappeared as
it neared the heights of the immortals. There was
One seated on a throne, One dark and bright with
ethereal glory. It arose in greeting. The radiant
figure laid its head against the breast which grew
suddenly golden, and Father and Son vanished in
that which has no place or name.
That of which he writes is the same, we
divine, as he sang of in " The Robing of the
King"; and to say of it, as of the essay,
that it is prose at its highest, is to give it
but half its praise. It is the writing of a
seer: a seer who sees the golden end with
the golden uprise, and who perceives, there-
fore, that "every word which really inspires
is spoken as if the Golden Age had never
passed," for " the great teachers ignore the
personal identity and speak to the eternal
pilgrim." It may be true, in the opening
words of this essay, that "humanity is no
longer the child it was at the beginning of
the world," that "its gay, wonderful child-
hood gave way, as cycle after cycle coiled
itself into slumber, to more definite pur-
poses, and now it is old and burdened with
experiences " experiences gathered, as his
profound faith is, not merely as written
in histories dealing with the outward life
of nations and the race, but in renewed
reincarnations of innumerable souls but it
48
DISCOVERIES
is equally true that the life that runs now
is the life that ever ran ; and if we could but
strike down to that depth, or if some seer
could do so, or if some artist, who is the
seer expressing himself in Beauty, could do
so, then we would renew our youth, we
would smile in the face of old Circumstance
with the youngling joy that is our true
heritage, and like happy children wise with
understanding refashion Seeming into the
ideal truth of Being. The true poems, says
Whitman, whom he quotes with approba-
tion
Bring none to his or to her terminus or to be con-
tent and full,
Whom they take they take into space to behold the
birth of stars, to learn one of the meanings,
To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through
the ceaseless rings and never be quiet again.
Therefore he says of himself : " I am one of
those who would bring back the old reverence
for the Mother, the magic, the love"; for
it is to the Mother we go, to lay our head
there, and learn again the secrets of ourselves
and to the Father too, the bright and
lonely Spirit from whom all things emerge,
though he does not speak of this here.
"The Renewal of Youth" is great prose,
quite conceivably the greatest prose of its
time; but it is this firstly because it is, in
strict terms, a holy book. It is not concerned
49 B
DISCOVERIES
with dead things, with ethics and moralities,
but with the fount from which these things
arise, and in connection with which they
are not dead but alive. "Our companion
struggles in some labyrinth of passion. We
help him, we think, with ethics arid moralities.
Ah, very well they are ; well to know and to
keep, but wherefore? For their own sake?
No, but that the King may arise in his
beauty. . . . Let a man but feel for what
high cause is his battle, for what is his cyclic
labour, and a warrior who is invincible fight
for him and he draws upon divine powers,"
Life looked at as the writer of this book
regards it is a great and holy thing. Mysti-
cism, is it ? Then not mysticism as modernly
conceived, a thing of study rather than of
experience. " The soul of the modern mystic,"
as he himself says in this very essay, "is
becoming a mere hoarding-place for uncomely
theories. He creates an uncouth symbolism,
and obscures his soul within with names drawn
from the Kabala or ancient Sanskrit, and
makes alien to himself the intimate powers of
his spirit, things which in truth are more his
than the beatings of his heart " ; and any one
who has had knowledge of the charlatanry of
much of modern Theosophy will know how
true this is, and why M shrinks at the use of
that word. Setting aside names of sects and
movements that obscure because they label
living things, the vision seen here is a thing
90
DISCOVERIES
of spiritual experience, which, because it is
spiritual and therefore central, defines all the
parts of life as they present themselves to
view.
In his other essays that definition is seen,
or that experience further expounded. " The
Renewal of Youth " itself is woven together
from articles in the Irish Theosophist. In
that magazine he wrote under many pen-
names ; but apart from his own initials or the
signature of " JK " there is only one other
token that at all comes near the central out-
look of the man. Many of these essays have
not been published, or gathered up in the
sweep of other work. Some of them, indeed,
as is inevitable in all work that remains
occasional though it be writ with a burning
purpose, must rest where it is. The writer
will hardly disentangle it from a hurried
mood, or rescue it from an hour that could
not wait for the complete maturing of a
thought. Some of it, both from this magazine
and the Internationalist that succeeded to
it, has already been recovered. Others not
less valuable remain yet unpublished. And in
all of them the thought of the man or, since
words decline from their former meanings,
less the thought than the vision of the man
shines clearly, viewing the circumstances of
Life from the certitudes to which he has
attained.
Life for him having flowed from the great
51
DISCOVERIES
life of the Mother, rolling through ages when
the sources of that life were more clearly
known and when therefore the sources of
power, of splendour, of simple dignity were
more purely taught by the wise, he is desirous
of putting himself into touch with that older
wisdom, because thereby he will more purely
express in himself the meaning of that life,
and in him, and in others of like meditation,
its wisdom will be kept alive in the world,
till the new cycle comes and the mystic fires
shine out again in the mysterious respirations
and aspirations of time. "Read less, think
more," he once advised one of that circle that
turned to him for leadership. Why ? Be-
cause modern books are a confusion of that
simplicity; too often a denial of it, or an
argumentation about it; but the splendour
lies in man, even though a base conception
of life dwell in his mind, and by medita-
tion he may evoke it. By meditation he
may put himself in the midst of wisdom,
and knowledge, even the knowledge con-
sidered proper to the test-tubes of modern
Science, will flow forth naturally, for the
life of the Universe is in him, and in
himself, if he can but powerfully centre
himself within himself, he will lay hold
of that life and understand it. Scientists
themselves, indeed, prove this. There was
no great "discovery ' made by test-tubes or
the like apparatus. The history of Science
52
DISCOVERIES
proves well enough that every great discovery
came in some rare and lucid intuition, when
the knowledge hidden in the depths of man's
being, and borne unwittingly by him through
his days in some tacit function of that being,
suddenly evoked may be, though not neces-
sarily, by the sight of a little part of the
universe working in picture in a test-tube
flashes before his thinking brain. For dis-
coveries, indeed, are less discoveries than
recoveries.
So he writes of " The Hero in Man." He
who sang of Earth
The tender kiss hath memory we are kings
For all our wanderings,
declares, " There is a spirit in us deeper than
our intellectual being which I think of as the
Hero in man, who feels the nobility of its
place in the midst of all this, and who would
fain equal the greatness of perception with
deeds as great," and adds in a premonition
of the work to which he was so soon to be
bidden : " The weariness and sense of futility
which often falls upon the mystic after much
thought is due to this, that he has not
recognized that he must be worker as well
as seer, that here he has duties demanding a
more sustained endurance, just as the inner life
is so much vaster and more intense than the
life he has left behind." And again : " Here
I may say that the love of the Mother,
53
DISCOVERIES
which, acting through the burnished will
of the hero, is wrought to highest uses, is
in reality everywhere, and pervades with
profoundest tenderness the homeliest cir-
cumstance of daily life; and there is not
lacking, even among the humblest, an under-
standing of the spiritual tragedy which follows
upon every effort of the divine nature bowing
itself down in pity to our shadowy sphere;
an understanding in which the nature of the
love is gauged through the extent of the
sacrifice and the pain which is overcome."
In the pale light which plays around such
dream-stories as " The Mask of Apollo," and
" A Dream of Angus Oge," and " The Story
of a Star," there shine the intimations of
those things that came to him in early days.
In the last, for instance, to the question, " To
what end is this life poured forth and with-
drawn ? " the answer comes : " The end is
creation, and creation is joy. The One
awakens out of quiescence as we come forth,
and knows itself in us ; as we return, we
enter it in gladness, knowing ourselves."
From this, with the faint rhythms of the
prose in which these dreams were imaged,
he came to the greater dignity of the prose
of " The Hero in Man," commensurate as it
is with the greater dignity of the thought
that man does not need to learn of the hero
"by observance of the superficial life and
actions of a spiritual teacher," but that "it
54
DISCOVERIES
is only in the deeper life of meditation and
imagination that it can be truly realized."
So the old writing said that God made man
in His own image ; and though that image
be deflowered and defaced it may yet be
recovered, for the most sordid have the
memory of its presence in them. And this
it was that William James meant when he
said that he knew that F. W. H. Myers was
right in what he sought, for it made him
more beautiful to look on every day he lived.
With such things the builder of the
temple came to those who had gathered in
its garden. It was an Irish garden. It was
not for nothing that the speaker of such
words came of the Irish race. We say,
when we see men taking the common like-
ness of a country, that Earth, in different
places, subdues men to the local parts of
herself, obscuring a brighter mystery with
that easy phrase ; and, whatever may be the
truth of race, we know that there is this
strange thing, a thing that defies, and finally
disrupts, all Imperial ambitions. It was on
the hills of Ireland that illumination
descended on JE on one of that company
of hills that guard its shores, and which the
race once saw peopled with the Danaan
gods, the tribes of the god Dana, the
Mother's bright emanations, her mysterious
and majestic presences. Therefore when he
thinks of the glory that was on the earth,
55 , _ f ,
DISCOVERIES
which we know by the wise and great
things that were sung in it, his mind reverts
to the fires that once lit the hills of Erin ;
and the names of the old heroes come to
his lips and what they meant to the race
and to the poets of the race arises in his
mind. Synge, turning from these things, to
which he nevertheless had to revert, might
say, " after looking at one of ^E's pictures " :
Adieu, sweet Angus, Maeve and Fand,
Ye plumed yet skinny Shee,
That poets played with hand in hand
To learn their ecstasy.
We'll stretch in Red Dan Sally's ditch,
And drink in Tubber fair,
Or poach with Red Dan Philly's bitch
The badger and the hare.
Yet it was no poet's fancy they aroused
in M ; but something far nearer to Earth
than poaching hares, good and zestful
though that might be. "Leaving aside
that mystic sense of union with another
world and looking only at the tales of battle,
when we read of heroes whose knightly
vows forbade the use of stratagem in war,
and all but the equal strife with equals in
opportunity ; when we hear of the reverence
for truth among the Fianna, ' We the
Fianna of Erin never lied, falsehood was
never attributed to us' a reverence for
truth carried so far that they did not believe
56
DISCOVERIES
their foemen even could speak falsely I
say that in these days when our public life
is filled with slander and unworthy imputa-
tion, we might do worse than turn back
to that ideal Paganism of the past, and
learn some lessons of noble trust, and this
truth that greatness of soul alone insures
victory to us who live and move and have
our being in the life of God."
So When he turns forward to the next
inspiration of Earth he writes of " The
Awakening of the Fires," from which this
quotation is given. For Ireland is not as
other countries in Europe. Even as every
great Empire of the world has failed at her
shores, so every modern movement has left
her cold. " The literature of Europe has
had but little influence on the Celt in this
isle," he says. " Its philosophies and revolu-
tionary ideas have stayed their waves at his
coast ; they had no message of interpretation
for him, no potent electric thought to light
up the mystery of his nature." Again in
" Nationality and Cosmopolitanism in Art "
he says : " The psychic maladies which attack
all races when their civilization grows old
must needs be understood to be dealt with:
and they cannot be understood without being
revealed in literature or art. But in Ireland
we are not yet sick with this sickness."
Turning to our nearest neighbour he says,
in " The Awakening of the Fires" : " Consider
57
DISCOVERIES
what a thousand years of empire brought to
England. Wealth without parallel, but at
what expense ! The lover of his kind must
feel as if a knife were entering his heart
when he looks at those black centres of
boasted prosperity, at factory, smoke and
mire, the arid life and spiritual death. Do
you call these miserable myriads a humanity ?
We look at those people in despair and
pity. Where is the ancient image of divinity
in man's face : where in man's heart the
promptings of the divine ? There is nothing
but a ceaseless energy without ; a night
terrible as hell within."
We have our faults in our land ; most of
us are not blind to them ; but the fact that
these things are true are their own hope for
the future. When the next cycle of inspi-
ration comes, as the cycle of respiration now
completes itself, we are readier than any
nation. Before the city begin to be built
as M was soon to set out to that
work, and to the preparation for that work
no colossal and revolutionary destruction is
necessary, as after a great war colossal and
revolutionary destruction will come in every
other land. "During all these centuries the
Celt has kept in his heart some affinity with
the mighty beings ruling in the unseen, once
so evident to the heroic races who preceded
him. His legends and fairy tales have con-
nected his soul with the inner lives of air
58
DISCOVERIES
and water and earth, and they in turn have
kept his heart sweet with hidden influence."
And "so this Isle, once called the Sacred
Isle and also the Isle of Destiny, may find
a destiny worthy of fulfilment : not to be a
petty peasant republic, nor a miniature dupli-
cate in life and aims of great material empires,
but that its children out of their faith, which
has never failed, may realize this immemorial
truth of man's inmost divinity, and in ex-
Eressing it may ray their light over every
ind."
Lest any should level the old foolish taunt
against the dreamer, he is quick to show that
he knows the other side of his country also.
He can pair discovery with experience.
At that time Parnell, the people's "natural
choice of hero," had been brought low by
an appeal that no Irishman now contem-
plates without a sense of shame ; and he
faces this. " I say that where this takes
place to any great extent, as it has with
us, it is not a land a freeman can think
of with pride. It is not a place where
the lover of freedom can rest, but he must
spend sleepless nights, must brood, must
scheme, must wait to strike a blow." It is
well not to see only an obverse; but it is well,
too, not to see only a reverse ; and it is true
that when M made his discoveries of Man's
cosmic life he also, and therewith, made dis-
coveries as an Irishman, for the fairest tree
59
DISCOVERIES
that reaches its leaves to heaven must plant
its roots in some portion of the Earth, and
the higher it aspires the more deeply must
it strike its root.
It needed work ahead. Not to be wise
after the event, the signs pointed to the
builder of the temple going forth to the
city. Writing of W. B. Yeats in " The Poet
of Shadows," he said : " We, all of us, poets,
artists, and musicians, who work in shadows,
must sometime begin to work in substance,
and why should we grieve if one labour ends
and another begins ? 1 am interested more
in life than in the shadows of life, and as
Ildathach grows fainter I await eagerly the
revelation of the real nature of one who has
built so many mansions in the heavens."
That was some years before his summons to
the city- builders : another of those curious
intimations one meets among his discoveries :
for the other labour of which he here spoke in
ignorance of its existence was soon to begin.
60
CHAPTER III
PREPARATIONS
IN 1830, at the height of the Land Agita-
tion, a landlord by the name of John Scott
Vandeleur, puzzled by the problem of his
estates in the County Clare a problem that
was, for him, as rarely for his class, a matter
of humanity as well as a matter of rental
and having fallen under the teaching of
Robert Owen, decided to take an appropriate
and decidedly novel advantage of the execution
of his steward by establishing a co-operative
society, based on the equally novel principle
that a man is not naturally a knave and only
accidentally a fool, but primarily a good fellow
with an odd chance of splendour and with
an enormous faculty of reacting against his
circumstances with a fit and meet reply.
Since, therefore, anger met anger, denial met
denial, and since outrage against human
property answered the far deeper outrage
against human and national dignity, he decided
to organize " The Ralahine Agricultural and
Manufacturing Co-operative Association." It
was conducted by him and the upright
English secretary he employed with a queer
mixture of kindliness, shrewd common sense,
61
PREPARATIONS
and national blatancy. He made over certain
portions of land to a community, to be elected
in the first instance by the ballot of the
tenants, and later to be increased by the
ballot of itself, for which and the houses he
had erected they were to pay by a fixed
rental to be paid in kind. He provided stock
and implements of husbandry for the com-
munity, which belonged to him until such
time as the community had sufficient to pay
for them, whereupon they became the joint pro-
perty of the society. No drink, no tobacco,
and no gaming were permitted ; and a com-
mittee of management was elected to control
life and work, each night putting up a notice
of what each man's and woman's work was to
be for the following day. Moreover, every
manner of labour had its fixed wage, and the
community bought of its own store, all profits
realizable from the joint husbandry or the
joint store to go, firstly, to purchasing the
stock and implements provided by the land-
lord, and then in division among the
members.
Together with such and other wise pro-
visions * were certain tendencies not so wise,
nor, we may say, at all so disinterested. For
the children were to be taught to speak
English instead of Irish, in spite of the pro-
hibition of their parents ; English country
* " Co-operative Agriculture : A Solution of the
Land Question," by Edward Pares. 1870.
62
PREPARATIONS
dances were vainly encouraged to displace
Irish jigs; and for Harvest-home certain verses
were penned, of which the following are the
first two :
The social brotherhood of man
Alone can bless the boon of birth ;
And Nature, in her generous plan,
Has taught us how to use the earth.
Gkoms.
Hail ! brothers, hail ! in bark, or hut, or hall :
Hail ! for each must live for all !
Why should not generous sympathy
Prevail throughout the breathing world,
And o'er the human family
The flag of Union float unfurled ?
This they were required to sing to the tune
of " Rule Britannia." Nature's generous plan,
"Rule Britannia," the flag of Union and
County Clare peasantry in the days of Land
Agitation at Harvest-home, suggest a picture
that would be infinitely humorous were it
not so tragic. There is a certain kind ot
paternal and national benevolence that is
more profoundly irritating than the most
virulent enmity. However, the County Clare
peasantry took very kindly to the "system"
after a very natural suspicion. The his-
torian of these things says that though, before
this time, they "might be accounted as so
many IshmaeUtes," bandits, robbers, mur-
63
PREPARA TIONS
derers, and what-not, they now became keer
and willing, with a fine sense of responsi
bility and dignity, indefatigable in industry
and requiring no overseer to see that the)
worked capably and hard at whatever tasli
to which they might be appointed by theii
committee. Moreover, they displayed a fine
communal sense without any reference tc
profits, providing for sick and aged, and goin^
forth in a body to reap the harvests of those
who, through age, were incapable of labour
though such did not belong to their com
munity. Such things were put down to the
magic of the " system " : they can be ex
plained by a much simpler and more natura
magic, that received, as will be seen, ar
excellent exposition in the old Irish way o
life that was deliberately destroyed.
The first question that the mind natur
ally asks with regard to such a community
is touching the end of it all. What wouk
happen if John Scott Vandeleur died o
changed his mind ? Unhappily John Scot
Vandeleur did not heed his own gooc
instruction in the matter of gaming, and ii
1833 he fled the country ; and the nex
comer resumed the land, and with it resumee
the improvements made upon it by thi
little deluded Tolstoian community. Anothe
landlord bequeathed certain lands and money
for the establishment of another such com
munity ; but the law set his will aside on th<
64
PREPARATIONS
ground of insanity. And so co-operation,
even of this mild paternal sort, languished
in Ireland for some decades.
Though the experiment proceeded from
a paternal benevolence whose habit of mind
it is to pay less heed to the desires and
motives of humankind than to the formal
excellence of its doctrines, it yet hit upon the
strong instinct of our race that once erected
as wise a conception of civil polity as the
world has yet seen. And when in 1889
Horace Plunkett came forward with a solu-
tion for Irish agriculture, he hit upon the
same instinct, though he came with a pro-
posal that addressed itself directly to the
solution of an acute problem and was little
concerned with abstract benevolence. There
is no hint that at the time he saw what was
implied in his proposals, or what might
thereafter be the flower from the root he
had in mind to plant. Ireland was of old
an agricultural people: in 1889 she was so
still ; not only because she still clave to
Earth with the same ancient affection, though
that was, and is, true, but also because each
of her industries in turn had been deliberately
and of foresight strangled in the interests of
English industries. Ireland was of old, for
the main part, a nation of smallholders :
in 1889 she was so still; not now by
ancestral continuity but rather by a par-
ticularly malign desire for discontinuity
65 F
PREPARA TIONS
exerted on the country through centuries of
oppression. But where other peoples inclined
to agriculture could turn it to advantage
by effective organization and better economy
in procedure, Ireland could do little because
her farmers had no organization, and were
thus, apart from the natural disabilities of
this, the prey of middlemen who sold dearly
to them the raw stuff of their work and
bought cheaply from them the tilth of their
labour. There was no remedy. Smallholders
cannot buy the expensive implements with
which sowing and harvest are made speedy
and cheap ; and therefore they cannot win
the best from the soil, though they would
have to accept the prices decreed by these
speedier and cheaper methods in other parts
of the world. Lacking organization, more-
over, they could not even know what these
prices were; or, knowing them, they could
not demand them. Yet whatever they pur-
chased they had to purchase at a range of
prices decided by a play and interplay in
the exchange of various commodities in a
social economy of which they knew nothing.
They were even fortunate when they could
claim that range of prices in their purchase.
For the longer they struggled the poorer
they became ; the poorer they became the
more they fell into the debt of the middle-
man; and when they fell into his debt he
could demand that they should purchase
66
PREPARATIONS
only from him and sell only to him at what
prices he in his judgment should decree.
The middleman in Ireland thus became a
gaimbin?* and the farmer his helot.
The solution to this, as suggested by
Horace Plunkett, was simple enough. The
human mind always believes that the obvious
barely needs statement, whereas the obvious,
in a world of tangled interests, demands the
hardest battles where the most elaborate
perversion, however implausible, will find a
nost of interested folk to guide it to success
or maintain it in power. So Horace Plunkett
found it when he suggested that Irish
farmers should, instead of acting as hitherto
in detached and helpless units, band them-
selves together in companies, and buy col-
lectively for their collective use the imple-
ments they could not afford to buy separately
for their separate use, buy moreover, as
corporate bodies could afford to do, directly
from the main sources without the inter-
position of the middleman and sell directly
in the world's markets without the interposi-
tion of the middleman. Or, as M was to
put it afterwards, they should recognize that
farmers were manufacturers, and as manu-
facturers they should buy wholesale and sell
* Qaimbin is the Irish for usurer. It is sometimes
written "gombeen," but why the Irish language
should be less entitled than any other to have its own
spelling honoured it is hard to say.
67
PREPARA TIONS
retail, instead of buying retail and selling
wholesale as hitherto ; into which advan-
tageous position, however, they could only
advance by abandoning their helpless position
as detached and separate units and acting
co-operatively together.
Simple enough and obvious enough ; yet
it took long labour before it could win
practical acceptance. Men who are in debt
are not only men in bondage but also men
in fear ; and men in fear are they who have
lost the certitude or hope of success. That
is to say, not only was it necessary that they
should be able to clear their books with the
local gaimbin before they could shake their
wills free of his, but they had lost the mental
resiliency for initiative. Men who are the
heirs of centuries of such abominable oppres-
sion as has never yet in history been inflicted
by one nation upon another, and the victims
of a system that made all attempts to rise
seem folly to conceive, will not suddenly
arise to strength though an angel be sent
to them. Moreover, the gaimbin were soon
alert. The strings that pull the actions of
this world are shaped of gold, and none
other are of avail. The gainibin shaped these
strings, and a political party needs financing.
One of the leaders of that political party,
besides, was one of the greatest gaimbin in
the country; and it was easy to advance the
plausible argument that a doctrine of self-
68
PREPARA TIONS
help weakens the case for national self-
governance, though this plea was eventually
surrendered for naked opposition in the in-
terests of the gaimbin.
These things shaped themselves from the
beginning. Yet, though progress was slow
progress was made. In 1894 the Irish
Agricultural Organization Society was formed
for the completer organization of the various
co-operative societies and agricultural banks
that had been established, and for the more
vigorous prosecution of the idea. Further
organisers and propagandists were required ;
and in 1897, when Horace Plunkett was
looking about for another such organizer,
W. B. Yeats suggested to him one who,
though he was a mystic and an idealist
besides having published a couple of volumes
of poetry, might notwithstanding be supposed
to have a little practical experience by the
quaint chance of his being an accountant
at the drapery house of Pirn's. Moreover,
a man who could expound the Upanishads
conceivably could expound co-operation.
The records of that particular conversation
have unfortunately not been preserved. The
mind dwells upon the scene with a certain
intense satisfaction. The picture of the poet
of " The Wind Among the Reeds " speaking
with the Vice- President of the Department
of Agriculture and Technical Education
for he was soon to arrive at official dignity
69
PREPARA TIONS
after a career of tilting at windmills and
recommending as an organizer of co-opera-
tion a certain friend of his who was something
of a mystic, something of a visionary, some-
thing of a poet and prose-writer, but funda-
mentally, fundamentally, an accountant at a
drapery house, has a quiet and peaceful
humour ; and those who know the persons
engaged in that conversation, arid the subject
thereof, will find that humour deepened by
filling in the personal details of that scene.
Assuredly Ireland is the country of all
countries in which to live and to work.
The three men concerned, however, were
men of intellect, and as in Ireland intellect
is not departmentalized the result passes into
history. M left his desk at Pirn's, utterly
weary of its soulless monotony, took a bicycle,
and set out through Ireland with his evangel.
Founding Raffeisen banks in aid of the half-
converted or those thereby likely to be con-
verted, addressing the wary, contending with
the caviller, refuting the cynic, fighting the
usurer, giving a decent man's aid in the
matter of pigs, dipping a mystic's pen in ink,
indeed, for the betterment of pigs, gathering
together co-operative societies in poultry,
co-operative creameries, co-operative societies
for the purchase of expensive machinery in
farm-use, artificial manures scientifically
adjusted for differing soils, fodder where
necessary, and unadulterated seeds (a sub-
70
PREPARA TIONS
sequent enquiry proved that the seeds then
sold to Irish farmers were adulterated up
to and over sixty per cent), and pedalling
from county to county, through barony after
barony, was to be sure new occupation for
the mystic, though by no means an untheo-
sophical occupation. That Life is comprised
in no thinker's terms needs no saying. That
Life to be comprised in a poet's vision
requires to be experienced needs insistence,
though it seem truism enough, for a good
deal of the world's song has been a leisured
hobby. And henceforward over ^B's work
the smell of turf-reek was to pass, and he
who had seen Ireland afar in vision was to
look on her with closer and clearer eyes.
The lack of beauty, in its more obvious
sense, in his future writing might seem to
suggest a lack of continuity in his life.
Other superficial signs there are that seem
to suggest that same lack of continuity; for
that rare prose, so delicate in its rhythms
and rising at its height to an impassioned
ecstasy, began to be less frequently heard ;
song was heard less often on his lips, and
when it revisited him its themes were more
obvious, less incommensurable, and, indeed,
it was oftener a noble speechcraft than the
craft of singing; the visions and mystical
experiences of the " household," in the course
of time, died away, though they recurred at
whiles with a new power, and with their
71
PREPARATIONS
passing the painter, in course of time, turned
from their record to the more familiar sights
of the earth. A workaday directness took
their place ; and the mind that was acute in
translating the obscure experiences of the
spirit in terms of the intellect without
essential loss of meaning, turned at last to
public debate with a shrewd humour and
ability that foemen learned to respect and
which he himself lusted to display. In a
superficial sense it might be said that a
change had occurred. Changes always occur,
and are always superficial, when a man turns
another side of his being toward life.
Looked at more closely, it is the continuity
rather than the discontinuity that reveals
itself; and to miss this is not only to miss
the meaning of JB's days, but the very
curious thing that happened to the I.A.O.S.
Horace Plunkett, who had been a rancher in
America and who came of a family habituated
to public affairs, mixed the two things by
coming forward with a very simple, and there-
fore startling, solution of the difficulties of the
Irish farmer. It was of those difficulties he
had thought, and it was the problem those
difficulties presented he wished to unriddle.
He did unriddle them, very satisfactorily :
so satisfactorily that out of the difficulties of
the Irish farmer sprang an idea that became
an inspiration to farming as far removed as
the Western States of America and India.
72
PREPARA TIONS
It was sound economics applied to a dis-
astrously uneconomical situation ; and it was
meant as no more. The very fact that it
meant the breaking up of usury and a
particularly virulent form of usury proves
now sound the economics were, for the usurer
is an economic pest. But, in the course of
organizing his economic scheme, while under
the incantations of a poet he was induced to
commit a part of his scheme to quite another
sort of a man with quite another outlook
on life.
This does not mean that M organized
better or worse than any of the other or-
ganizers, or that his organizing differed in
any essential from the instructions according
to which he proceeded. Even had it done so
as might have been the case for all the
world will ever know he and his bicycle
had to pass on their baronial way, and head-
quarters might be trusted to produce uni-
formity. But who was this traveller through
the baronies, and what was the impact of his
present experiences on his past discoveries ?
Though we cannot answer for Sir Horace
Plunkett's soul we may assume that when-
ever he unriddled his problem, in his own
day of organizing and propaganda, unriddled
it was, and the farmers' situation so far be-
came a straighter, a neater, a more pros-
perous, and also a manlier, affair. This other
man, however, had lived quite another sort
73
PREPARA TIONS
of life ; he had made spiritual discoveries,
and had caught or had cast them in beauty,
to make them his own and to pass them to
others. Was an uneconomic problem un-
riddled with a suitable economic reply the
end-all and be-all of his organizing ? He had
in vision seen life as a steady flame mount-
ing up fragrantly to the throne of God, where
the light was like a cloud, dense and unbear-
able ; he had heard His Voice borne through the
universe and in chord on chord of music build
up the souls of Earth and her children, with
the fine memory in them of the Beauty from
whence they came and wherein only they could
live if Life was to be more than breathing;
he had seen Life softly irradiate and disperse
the troubled clouds of perplexity with the
vision of auspicious destinies yet to serve, and
with a troubled and travailing past growing
into the triumph of a life yet to be ; he had
seen Power silently shining forth, Love trans-
figuring, Beauty transforming, Being mantled
in an ecstasy of flame ; he had seen the
thought of God in man's mind and the
image of God in man's body and the passions
of God for beauty and holiness beating
swiftly in his blood ; he had seen these things,
not as a dreamer's dream, but as the very
certitudes of his soul; and he had seen
Ireland where the hills had once shone with
mystic fires, a precious place, where in the next
mysterious rhythm of Earth glory was to
74
PREPARA TIONS
come again, and a new teaching go forth,
as once of old, through the world : was he
answered with the answering of a farmer's
problem, of pure seeds, of wholesale buying
and retail selling, and a victory over the stul-
tifying, blighting usurer squatting astraddle
across the nation's life ?
What was it he saw as he and his bicycle
went on their travels ? How did it compare
with what he had seen in vision ? When he
matched vision with sight what was the
reaction of his mind after the co-operative
organizer had completed his task and replaced
disorder with order and disunion with union ?
The thought of men returning to wisdom and
dignity as they returned to the bosom of
Mother had shone as a fair thing before his
eye ; but now as he went through the country,
though he found wisdom and dignity there in
the heart of the same, and even more acute,
poverty that in the cities implied squalor and
vulgarity, yet he saw young men and young
women streaming away to cities cities not
in Ireland, but in America, each district in
Ireland having its counterpart in some city
in America, Aran passing to Chicago, Achill
to Cleveland, and so forth. Life had fallen
from its ancient usage ; the stir of the modern
world had brought unrest; the praise of
education had come, with withered scraps
of knowledge that were extolled as a kind
of currency, to be changed later in life for
75
PREPARATIONS
hard cash, so noble was the conception of it,
though after-days sadly belied those preten-
sions ; the rail and the telegraph had narrowed
the world ; so that with lowered values of Life
and a heightened interest and curiosity a life
near to Earth connoted nothing but intolerable
tedium. The herded cities shone like glit-
tering palaces. Values were lost : dignity
and wisdom, though they still splendidly
remained, were lightly esteemed for the most
part beside the modern counterparts of success
and passing information. A naturally aristo-
cratic people do not easily change ; but the
change was astir; and the cities promised
information true or false, what did it matter,
so long as it helped life to slip away unnoticed
and helped gregariousness ? arid the cities
tempted with success, though it was true that
rumour had it that this success came hardly
and only to a few.
Added to that was the hardihood of it all.
A life near to Earth connoted not only tedium
but a desperate struggle, a nightmare of
drudgery, of failure and debt, of malnutrition
and depressed vitality, and thus of disease
and early decrepitude. For not only had
values changed, standards also had changed.
Speedier methods, a completer organization,
a oetter use of the scientific discoveries more
easily available in places where farming was
conducted by syndicates, were demanded of a
life near to Earth before its continuance was
76
PREPARA TIONS
even possible. Economics have fallen into
disrepute among healthy men because of the
type of person who conducts their discussion.
It was once, for instance, gravely propounded
in a certain School of Economics as to "whether
a margin of unemployment was not necessary in
order that in times of trade prosperity a larger
body of labour might not in that emergency
be called upon " ; to which the only honour-
able answer was, not to hear and discuss the
thesis, but to strike the lecturer upon the
mouth, and, after having picked him up, to
point out to him that by "a larger body
of labour" he really meant starving men.
Economics, however, means mutual aid ; and
mutual aid means decent comradeliness ; and
decent comradeliness means fair living; and
those who discuss economics in terms of cash
instead of in terms of men are those who
do, or those who hope to, or those who are
hired by those who do or hope to, trample
on their fellows. Pedantry is a confusion of
clear thinking ; but sometimes that lack of clear
thinking arises from something not at all so
innocent as frailty or clumsiness of mind.
The cynic, conscious or unconscious, sneers
at the poet's terms ; but the poet's terms
always justify themselves by the disaster that
ensues when they are neglected. The poet
had spoken of a life near to Earth ; he had
seen Man in a high comradeship of Life.
What now did he find ? He saw that the
77
PREPARA TIONS
life near to Earth became impossible because
that high comradeship had been replaced by
exploitation ; and then the poet became
economist. He saw goods becoming coin of
the realm, with a most subtle confusion re-
sulting ; he saw an ancient form of barter
conducted as an elaborate trick instead of as
a simple interchange. He saw the farmer egg
buying the gaimbin tea, the egg at well below
current wholesale rates (was there not a debt
outstanding ?) and the tea at retail rate, bear-
ing twenty to twenty-five per cent profit.
He might also have seen the smallholder
farmer smoking his duidin till the bowl blis-
tered his lips with the heat, and taking an egg
(value two or three halfpennies) to buy a pipe
(value one halfpenny), and without any remedy.
He saw, as he says, "hordes of keen-witted
business men " who " began to handle " the
farmer's "produce; they occupied all the
roads to the markets, they did all his busi-
ness for him, fixed the prices for his stock
and crops, and saw to it that riches should
not prove hereafter a stumbling-block at his
entrance to Heaven. Those who brought his
requirements into the district had the same
watchful care over his chances of future
happiness. He was doubly saved. I do not
say," he adds, "that these forces acted with
conscious enmity to the farmer. They were
mostly efforts to help him, as well-intentioned
as the elephant who, seeing some motherless
78
PREPARA TIONS
chickens, said, * I will be a mother to the poor
little things,' and lay down on them to keep
them warm. Tragi-comic legend thought it
unnecessary to develop the further history of
that clutch. The Irish elephants have lain
down heavily on the farmers, and have oblit-
erated many of the brood they have intended
to bear"* obliterating also the life near
Earth, the dignity of man, the hero in man,
the renewal of youth, the intimations of
splendour and the high comradeship and
divine purpose, in all at least that was out-
wardly visible.
The poet had sung of Earth that her
"tender kiss hath memory we are kings for
all our wanderings " ; but the business done
on Earth's bosom had such consequences that
the only chance her child had of realizing
himself as a king was by a good dose of
porter or whisky. It is easy to blame that
child ; it is right to blame him ; and JE has
some exquisite scorn for the seekers after as
well as for the ennobled purveyors of that
immagical summoner of hidden kingship ;
but the follies of man are often an inverted
wisdom, and are at most an escape from a
life that he is only wishful to deny as his.
No man felt a king when drunk who had
not a reasonable chance of realizing that
kingship when sober if only things were
reasonably ordered. Drunkenness, when not
* " Co-operation and Nationality."
79
PEEPARA TIONS
a physical disease or an unhappy (or happy)
accident, is generally the result of misery or
malnutrition ; and the dweller on the bosom
of Earth coming to a sordid town on a fair-
day, with a life behind him and before him
of hardship and monotony and unremitting
struggle, with only potatoes and bread to eat,
and tea to drink so strong that it quelled
hunger by reaction, fleeced by the higgler at
home in his petty sales and swindled at the
fair in his larger purchases by dealers and
jobbers with a prearranged scale of prices
that he knew to be below the rates prevail-
ing, but reduced to helplessness by their
parasites the tanglers and blockers, in debt
to the gaimbin and with rent or instalment
falling due such a man turning to whisky
is riot at all a confutation of his kingship,
or of the warrior-hero or bard in him, as he
will occasionally display in fine order, with
seanchas or cudgel.
So the poet conceiving of civilization,
ancient or modern, and especially of days
before the bragged-of " dawn of civilization,"
was faced by an order with nothing whatso-
ever that was civil in it, except perhaps the
feelings of the drunken king faced by the
hills and the sky or the rolling stretch of
bog on the following morning. What was
the impact on him of this new discovery?
How did he face his discoveries of the past,
of the " household " and the mystical society,
80
PREPARA TIONS
with the footing beneath him of his dis-
coveries as an organizer of co-operation ?
After some years of organizing he was
appointed assistant-secretary to the I.A.O.S.
Then in 1905 he was appointed the editor
of the official organ of the I.A.O.S., The
Irish Homestead. For awhile he con-
tinued the tradition of that organ by
dealing with matters essential to homestead
and farmer. But even as the "feel" of
a shillelagh in the hand of some men is
fatal to order, so the "feel" of a pen in
the hand of a poet is fatal to disorder.
The poet arose again now, in his new
guise as economist. Matching discovery
with discovery he faced his past with his
present, and undertook to devise a state
of affairs, by the shrewd application of
common sense, in which his old dreams
could become possible by the adoption, and
expansion, of the very economic gospel he
had been sent to preach.
In view of the result it is right to
remember how this came to be. When it
is said that he " undertook to devise a
state of affairs," that does not mean that
Athena sprang full-armed from the head
of this particular Zeus. The obstetrics
erred, as a point of fact, on the other
side of inhumanity. It was difficult to say
what portion of the anatomy of the new
social order was going to be presented
81 G
PREPAEA TION&
next. Our Zeus himself was in ignorance.
It was much later that he became his
own midwife, and patted Athena into
shapeliness and order. The seed of the
new experience on the ovum of the old
vision put him in labour for many years,
even while he dealt with what are called the
exigencies of modern journalism. There
was no premeditation as to the result, ex-
cept in so far as the mind works by a
tacit and orderly wisdom beyond cognizance
of its own brain. The procedure was simply
the answering of questions that arose in his
mind, induced in main part by the weekly
problems that affected the Irish farmer. It
is important to note that fact, inasmuch as the
social order he evolved was the counterpart in
modern times of something that had existed
before in the history of the race, before
the stranger had kicked his way brutishly
through the land. Our Zeus himself did
not know this, till some few of his friends
saw the likeness and pointed out to his
delighted paternal gaze that Athena was a
re-birth not a birth, a re-birth of race
wisdom. And then the mind suddenly
remembers that about a year before he
had joined the I.A.O.S., thinking of the
past glory of Ireland and of "The
Awaking of the Fires," he had written
this sentence: "In hoping for another such
day I do not of course mean the renewal
82
PREPARATIONS
of the ancient order, but rather look for
the return of the same light which was
manifest in the past." It is not every
man, to be sure, who is permitted to be
both Zeus and Prometheus.
Therefore it is difficult to see of what sort
Athena is in the strange labours of her birth
in the columns of The Irish Homestead
week by week ; it is comelier to avert our
eyes till she be patted and cleaned and
reduced to some kind of tentative order in
the pages of " Co-operation and Nationality,"
published seven years later. It is a remark-
able book: probably the first piece of thinking
from facts rather than from the terminology of
other books, in economic literature. It was
born of work ; not of reading in a study. In
it he faces his old visions bravely, and finds
them the truer because of what his further
experience has shown him. "Nature," he
says, " has no intention of allowing her divine
brood, made in the image of Deity, to dwindle
away into a crew of little, feeble, feverish
city folk. She has other and more grandiose
futures before humanity if ancient prophecy
and our deepest, most spiritual, intuitions
have any truth in them." That becomes the
base of his thinking. Sir Horace Plunkett
had already decreed as the triple watchword
of the co-operative movement, " Better farm-
ing, better business, better living." It was a
statesmanlike watchword. But M, seeing
83
PREPARATIONS
further, sees more deeply, and eliminates any
possible littleness of conception, eliminating
therewith the things that inevitably lead to
degradation of personal and national life.
The life near Earth is deeper and more
spiritual. How is it to be ordered so that
this may approve itself in fact? If the
spiritual life of man be deeper and truer
than a material compromise with sloth and
selfishiness, and spiritual and physical degra-
dation that is to say, if it be better, not as
a pleasing transcendentalism the surrender of
which only creates a sentimental pang, but as
a cardinal thing which, if it cannot approve
itself in experience, must be bravely cast
aside as a delusion, and every preacher thereof
in pulpits stoned as liar and trickster what
is to be done with a state of affairs which, by
its very continuance, denied that fact ? That
was the challenge to the poet. Was he, like
the most of poets and preachers and pro-
fessors of faiths, to bow his mind to truth and
square his life with its denial ; or was he to
take up the challenge he himself had offered
to himself?
Already as organizer for the I.A.O.S. he
had answered a part of his problem. The
Life near Earth had become impossible.
Why ? Because men lived lives of individual
selfishness, suspicion and greed, each man
separate from his fellows and struggling
against his fellows : a state of affairs the
PREPARATIONS
baseness of which was disguised by those
who chanced to be successful in the sordid
game by the fair phrase " competitive
interests " that was cast as a cloak about it ;
but a state of affairs that worked itself out
in desperation for the huge mass of those
struggling and separated men. Directly
they were called to the nobler conception
of mutual aid, what happened ? Not only
did they at once stand on a nobler plane of
life ; not only did the greater part of them
for the first time in their lives realize in
little measure the teaching of the Christ ;
but at once their economic disabilities dis-
appeared. The higgler, the dealer, the jobber,
the tangler, the blocker, the middleman,
and the gaimbin, were at once cut away ; and
the click was heard in every place of a
machinery that began to fall together as a
harmonious unit because the key for its
well-working had been discovered. The co-
operative societies, each member of which
in working for and with, instead of against,
his fellows, worked the better and the more
freely for himself, began to federate together
for greater power and freedom. Especially
was this necessary when the army of middle-
men, finding they could no longer put their
hands into their fellows' pockets, threw the
whole weight of their earlier winnings
against them in naked fight and bought
misrepresentation. Then the co-operative
85
PREPARA TIONS
federations created the Irish Agricultural
Wholesale Society, guaranteeing to them-
selves thus the bottom prices in the purchase
of machinery arid goods and guaranteed
purity of seeds. And from top to bottom
men became their own economic masters
when they ceased to desire economic mastery
over others or refused to permit others to
assume economic mastery over themselves,
and decided in free debate and election the
vital concerns of their lives instead of having
these decided by others.
It was better business ; and therefore made
a life on the land more possible. It was
saner and manlier ; and so it helped the
dignity of man ; for even as the little Rala-
hine Society turned out to gather the harvest
of the infirm so these co-operative societies
began to realize civic duties and responsi-
bilities. Men of sharply divided political
opinions, at the very height of political con-
troversies, acted together, not only in
business interests, but with a civic purpose ;
and instead of dividing all their profits
began to allocate some portion of these to
public purposes within the community, begin-
ning therewith intelligently to discuss those
public purposes. In other words, the co-
operative societies became rural communities.
Out of the disorder that had prevailed
a civilization emerged. The men who had
struggled pitifully against conditions too hard
86
PREPARATIONS
for them, preserving, however, for the most
part (as it is part of the instinct of our race
to preserve) a dignity and fellow-kindliness
amazing under the circumstances, now became
citizens. They were compelled to think for
themselves ; and that gave them new in-
terests. Prosperity quickened those interests.
A larger reach of science came in with the
chemistry of manures and the soil. A better
knowledge of peoples and events at a distance
came with the ability to reach that distance
directly in selling power. Nationality mean-
ing now a tissue of live interests instead of
a medley of ancient catchwords, clearer poli-
tical thinking resulted. Better independence
and a stronger dignity resulted from the right
to take the responsibility of important de-
cisions ; which concluded in logic what began
in justice with the land agitation, for the
imposition of the middleman, and especially
the gaimbin variety, was now broken as the
imposition of the landlord had been broken.
As men became their own masters the pride
of life arose. And the basis of all this was
a rural community where, if a man were
prosperous, it was not as a result of exploit-
ing his fellows, but by helping them in the
degree in which he helped himself.
So the conception slowly and tentatively
emerged that gave the economist's answer
to the poet emerged hand in hand, and
pace by pace, with their results in fact.
87
PREPARATIONS
" Sometimes," he says, " one feels as if there
were some higher mind in humanity which
could not act through individuals, but only
through brotherhoods and groups of men " ;
and here were brotherhoods and groups
working out some part of that higher mind.
Yet, so far, they were farming, and not
social, brotherhoods, civic only in some chance
extension of their powers. Until the farming
brotherhood was made also a social brother-
hood the further possibility was little more
than hinted. " Fine character in a race is
evolved and not taught. It is not due to
copybook headings or moral maxims given
to the youth of the country. It arises from
the structure of society and the appeal it
makes to them." So he writes, so simply
and truly ; and our bitter history is such
that "we have not had a social order since
the time of the clans," for the stranger's
ruthless foot of set design kicked that social
order to pieces, though it left fragments of
it dispersed about the country. He says,
"We will yet see the electric light and the
telephone in rural districts, and the village
hall with a hum of friendship in it," but the
village hall had first to be made, and a com-
pany to avail itself of that hall in other than
as a promiscuous charity, half welcomed, half
resented, had first to be ordered. The demand
for it exists, caused by the modern tedium
with an insufficient mental life or as Sir
88
PREP A RA TIONS
Horace Plunkett has said * : "If the domestic
and social life of the country does not
advance with its economic life, all but the
dullards will fly to the town." But first
a society must be created, and behind that
again a social order, and behind that a
sufficient social conception. For it was
not at random that -52 wrote: "I hate to
hear of stagnant societies who think because
they have made butter well that they have
crowned their parochial generation with a
halo of glory, and can rest content with the
fame of it all, listening to the whirr of steam
separators and pouching in peace of mind
the extra penny a gallon for their milk.
And I dislike the little groups who meet a
couple of times a year and call themselves
co-operators, because they have got their
fertilizers more cheaply, and have done
nothing else."
So " The United Irishwomen " t arose, for
"we cannot build a rural civilization in
Ireland without the aid of women." It
began with, or rather was awoken and crystal-
lized by, M as he, week by week in The
Irish Homestead, faced the problems that
he the poet put to himself the economist
and practical farmer. It worked from the
* " The United Irishwomen," p. 6.
t See "The United Irish womem; Their Place, Work
and Ideals," by Horace Plunkett, Elllce Pilkington,
and George Russell (^E). Maunsell.
89
PREPARA TIONS
house toward the village hall. It sought to
free women from onerous work on the land,
and succeeded in some places with the co-
operation of the men; it organized nursing
in home and village ; it taught domestic
economy and hygiene ; it gave care to the
woman's part of agricultural life, such as
poultry, home-dairying, pig-breeding, bee-
keeping, and cottage-gardening ; and it
created a social life. Such things it did : and
does, for the movement has a long furrow to
plough. It is a work most full of pitfalls ;
for in such work it is easy to de-nationalize ;
and to de-nationalize is to other-nationalize,
and finally alienize, in both meanings of the
word. Yet as the work approaches the
village hall it joins, in fact as well as in
theory, with the Gaelic League; with which
it must finally co-operate as indeed the
whole of the co-operative movement must
finally work with the Gaelic League in re-
building a distinctively Irish State, drawing
on its own separate sources and traditions,
despite the Statutes of Kilkenny.
Thus the economist tentatively felt his
way, relying, on no path blazed in text-books,
but on his own inner light, hardly knowing
where he would finally emerge. Yet there
was one part of the city-building to which he
had been called that he had not canvassed
in his thinking. That was the slums of
citydom. They lay outside his work and his
90
PREPARA TIONS
thinking. He was not, however, suffered
to forget them. All of Ireland, for good
or ill, had to be reckoned with before the
thought of the National Being could justly
ensue. And so M came to one of the most
honourable moments of his life.
At the very moment that farm labourers
were on strike, under the direction of the
Irish Transport Union, against the farmers
for whom he had thought and laboured,
under the same direction a great and historic
strike broke out in Dublin. Rather, it was
not a strike but a lock-out in which the
employers federated to break the Union, and
reminded the workers that while the strife
continued the masters could rely on their
three square meals a day while the workers
could but starve. Never was such unan-
imity procured in Ireland. Political parties
and journals forgot their strife, and rallied
against the workers. In a world of debased,
because commercialized, honour, money com-
mands ; and money commanded. To the
honour of Dublin poets be it said that they
rallied to the workers ; but they were a small
and helpless company. Then M's "being
went up in a blaze." He came into the fray
with an open letter " To the Masters of
Dublin." At a meeting organized in Lon-
don to help the workers, apologizing first
to his countrymen for departing from his
custom by speaking on an English plat-
91
PREPARATIONS
form while yet the wrongs done to his
country were unredressed, he attacked those
who deserted the poor when their Master
would have been with them. Hatred as-
sailed him on every side, for his entry into
the fray had lifted the issue on to the plane
of ideals : he had made the issue one of
faith espoused or deserted. Speaking in
conversation at that time, he spoke of him-
self as a psychic person who felt hate
striking on him like darts from every
quarter ; and it was idle to remind him
that that hatred, where ignorant, was pitiful,
for the poor, were they but rightly informed,
would aid their fellows in poverty, and that
where it was not ignorant it was contemp-
tible, since it sprang from monetary interests ;
for he knew that already.
The storm rolled by not in honour. It
left, however, two results. His ideas had
spread : the thought of a Co-operative Com-
monwealth defined itself on both sides. Few
words were more frequently heard in the
ranks of the workers : it took a higher rank
in their thoughts than even the question of
increased wages with men who were starv-
ing. A new thought had come to them:
a thought of the State, which if it be riot
based on fellowship in control, in ideas, and
in profits, must be based on exploitation,
against which, rather than against this or
that scale of wages, they were revolting.
92
PREPARATIONS
The system of "wagery," inherent in them
till that time for the lack of any other
system that seemed possible, received its
first blow ; and that idea captured other
minds than those of the workers. But a
new thought came to JE. Rather a new
challenge came to the poet, to the man
before whom Life was something other than
an accepted baseness, a commerce in sordure.
He accepted the challenge. He began to
think out the National Being anew from
that point.
93
CHAPTER IV
A NATION, A STATE ; A STATE, A
NATION
OF old among the many secret names by
which Ireland was known to her children,
there was one that arrests the mind with its
mysterious faith. That name is Inis Fail:
the Isle of Destiny. There have been times,
with a bull's hoof planted in her face, when
that strange appellation has seemed to be a
consummate cynicism : there are pages in her
history that it is scarcely possible to read.
There are times also, even when she has
seemed at the depth of enforced degradation,
when that title comes to wear a quite
curious significance.
Such a time was the rise and culmination
of the nineteenth century. Every kind of
brutality and humiliation was visited upon
her, until it seemed that no nation could
emerge from the ordeal in which malignity
had subdued her. And yet it is true that
her very disabilities then saved her from
the blight, the deeper, the seeming ineradic-
able blight, that visited some other nations.
Early in that century a poet whom we claim
Q/fl
A STATE, A NATION
as an Irishman, and an O'Neill moreover,
sang
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land ;
but when we survey England now, and ask
how shall a fair State be made of her, the
question at once arises, What shall be done
with the monstrous cities, built on miles of
slumdom, that blister the fair side of Earth,
and make so many of her mortal-kind to
seem less men than a hopeless putrefaction
of humanity ? Even as Blake sang one of
the fairest shires of the " green and pleasant
land " was nearing a time when it would be
turned into one vast clinker-patch, and its
men, a sturdy race of copyholders farming
the fields and cultivating a home industry,
turned into wage-slaves, living in darkened
streets, their faces stamped with the image of
the god they were enforced to serve, passing
in their deadened multitudes into the midst
of whirring machinery at the blast of a steam-
whistle, and passing out again at another
blast into homes where no light comes, no
flowers shine, and green fields are first an
unimagined splendour and finally an undesired
freedom. There are no green fields : there
are only miles and miles of clinkers. There
is no sunlight and blue sky: there is only
95
A NATION, A STATE
smoke belched out from the steeples of the
new temples man has built to his new god.
And in the midst of this scene, and under
this dark panoply, the tenement-house from
which they issue, the foul factories where they
labour for some begrudged pittance, and the
gin-palace where they forget, comprise the
last form of civilization that man made in
the image of God has devised for the just
display of that image. Yet man does display
the image of God : whatever god he serves,
that image will he display.
To what end ? one asks. If some fire
of God swept away this ghastly hell it
would take three generations of green fields
and blue skies to recover what was lost ;
and to what end shall men be blasted in
their souls, and the fair face of Earth be
despoiled? That some cotton mills in India,
serving their country satisfactorily and well,
should be ruined by being undersold in
their own markets, and more misery caused
out there? A fair goal this, indeed: to
debase Life at one end of the world in order
to be able to debase it more effectually at
the other end ! No : but, in plain terms,
that some score of men may amass their
millions of Hard Cash, and thereby become
as degraded in their own minds as they
demand that the minds of their slaves shall
be degraded.
Blasphemy? Atheism? It is right maybe
96
A STATE, A NATION
to revive these ancient terms; but it is
very strange that men in Inis Fail should
be called upon to rebuild their State with
the hell before them out of which other
nations have won their success. Only in
two places in Ireland has this terrible con-
ception at all established itself; and in
one of them the full horror faced M in
the midst of one of the bitterest industrial
struggles of modern times. There was
little of it that he could have evaded, such
was the effect on him. The sight of
Liberty Hall on a bleak Winter's evening
teeming in every part with hungry men
and women waiting for soup and bread
tickets, men and women, actually in their
thousands, clustered on ill-lit and grimy
stairs and along murky passages, coming
from the very depths of Life, was a sight
that can as easily be forgotten as described.
Nothing proved more highly the honour
of Dublin than their infallible courtesy and
kindliness and dignity dignity, even though
the wearer of that dignity were waiting
hungrily for a ticket that would entitle him
to food. Nothing proved it better, unless it
were a cluster of men and women, poets
and writers for the most part, who met
there, waiting for a task that might be
found for them. Among these was M ;
and even had any man the desire to for-
get these things, having once seen them,
97 H
A NATION, A STATE
it would be hard to purchase the faculty of
forgetfulness save with the costly payment
of cynicism.
So in the coming months in The Irish
Homestead he took up the new challenge.
In " Co-operation and Nationality," dealing
carefully with the beginnings of things, chiefly
rural, he had said, " No country can marry
any particular solution of its problems and
live happily ever afterwards," but now as he
struck more deeply towards the roots of
national being, and embraced the whole
existence of the State, a finer certitude, a
more assured conviction, marks his attitude.
Yet that attitude is the same. The man is
the same. A man's spiritual discoveries are
the only certitudes he knows in a world in
flux, for they are his insight into the world
of which this world of the senses is but a
partial appearance. "The spiritual question
is the only one," he had said. He says it
yet, though his present concern is to devise
a State that shall fit the most rigorous re-
quirements, that shall even be, if we so
choose to regard it, abreast with modern
thinking. It is for the spirit of the nation
he is concerned when thinking of the State
in which it shall be adequately housed.
Civilizations, even when they be least civil
(and maybe chiefly then), are the expression
in outward fact of the inhabiting soul within.
Civilizations also, it is worthy of note, help
98
A STATE, A NATION
to mould and fashion that soul by the con-
ceptions on which they are based. To the
wise statesman the nationality makes the
State, or it becomes an empty doctrinaire
shell that is soon neglected ; but the wise
statesman also remembers that the State
makes the nationality. States are not emitted
from a fertile brain as constitutions may be,
as th6 Abb Sieyes so admirably proved by
example ; for the outward circumstance is
created by an indwelling soul and intellectual
life. Hence ^B's impatience with what he
calls pseudo-military bodies that muster they
know not what for: though in this, despite
the essential justice of what he says, he
over-rashly assumes that the lack of a fine
intellectual consciousness supposes the equal
lack of a dawning soul, thus brushing aside
what should be examined because it gives
little of that which he rightly and im-
periously demands. It may be true, as he
says, that feelings do not presuppose thoughts ;
but feelings, if they be clean and healthy,
may define themselves into thoughts if a
thoughtful man identify himself with them,
as they assuredly never will if thoughtful
men deride them. It is to the high credit
of M that he combined clear vision with
clear thinking, suffering in himself neither
the learned antics of lecture-rooms or round-
tables nor the vague inchoate sentiments of the
manifold organizations that exist in the country.
99
A NATION, A STATE
It profits a nation nothing if it gain a
whole Empire and lose its own soul. It is
not to Rome we look for a memorable
beauty as we look to Athens ; and the
Roman wars that lusted for things that
were not Roman, and whose crushing im-
poverished the world by just so much
individuality, have not the honour of the
Greek wars that defended things that were
Grecian. Rome exacted brute dominance ;
it demanded fealty in the only form in
which States value it, in Hard Cash; but
every Roman poet and prose-writer gave
intellectual fealty to Greece. Even while
Athens was under the heel of the Roman
brute-power Athenic intellect and beauty
were masters in Rome. And M, enamoured
of the things that signify, is not solicitous
for the trappings of power on Ireland's
behalf but anxious for such an awakening
of spiritual life as will build up a notable
beauty in the land. Already Ireland had
won a fealty from other lands ; and that
fealty had come of work done partly
under his own hand ; for the making of a
rural civilization, in all the departments
of living, had attracted deputations from
many places, who had returned home to
imitate the things they had seen. To win
such a tribute for one's country is a worthy
ambition for noble men. A nation that
can win such a tribute has dominion, with-
inn
A STATE, A NATION
out a single official hired to enforce it ;
it has governance, without a single soldier
to leave its shores ; but an Empire of this
sort the only sort that stirs a mind en-
franchised from an ancient circus-pomp
can only be gained when a nation has
gained its own soul, its nationality, and has
oused it in a State fit to receive it.
But what came they out for to see ? We
know, for they have told us ; but we might
have guessed had they kept their secret.
They came to see a new up-growing
civilization that was answering the hardest
problem of the modern world, the problem
of a life on the land ; answering it by
making it successful and desirable ; and
answering it, not by the financial lord-
ship of one man over another, but by
the mutual aid of the whole community
governing itself, where the prosperity of one
man advantaged his fellows, and where the
loss of one man weakened the community.
Addressing one such delegation M said : " We
often hear the expression 'the rural com-
munity,' but where do we find rural com-
munities ? There are rural populations, but
that is altogether a different thing. The word
' community ' implies an association of people
having common interests and common pos-
sessions, bound together by laws and regu-
lations which express these common interests
and ideals and define the relation of the
101
A NATION, A STATE
individual to the community. Our rural
populations are no more closely connected,
for the most part, than the shifting sands on
the seashore. Their life is almost entirely
individualistic. There are personal friendships,
of course, but few economic or social partner-
ships. Everybody pursues his own occupation
without regard to the occupation of his neigh-
bours. If a man emigrates it does not affect
the occupation of those who farm the land
all about him. They go on ploughing and
digging, buying and selling, just as before.
They suffer no perceptible economic loss by
the departure of half a dozen men from the
district. A true community would, of course,
be affected by the loss of its members. A
co-operative society if it loses a dozen mem-
bers, the milk of their cows, their orders for
fertilizers, seeds, and feeding-stuffs, receives
serious injury to its prosperity. . . . That is
the difference between a community and an
unorganized population." *
Yet what of the cities, since cities must
be ? " If we build our civilization," he
says, speaking of cities, " without integrating
labour into its economic structure, it will
wreck that civilization; and it will do that
more swiftly to-day than a thousand years
ago, because there is no longer the dis-
parity of culture between high and low
which existed in past centuries." In truth
* " The Rural Community."
102
A STATE, A NATION
it is doing so now, for that very cause ;
and it will do so with startling rapidity
after a great war. Already the change is in
progress. Men are demanding to fix the terms
and conditions under which they will labour ;
they are drawing together in unions that are
rapidly becoming guilds to enforce these
things, and they bring statesmen to hear and
solicit them. Soon, and inevitably, they will
demand to elect the captains of their labour ;
and thus inevitably, sooner or later, into
the hands of these guilds will pass the in-
dustries with which they are concerned. It
needs no amazing prevision to perceive these
things. They pursue their way with a certain
high honour, to which men prove their
folly, and darker things than folly, when
they shut their eyes. The hireling knows,
for instance as only they know who have
experienced it in a continued bitterness that
darkens the sun the deep dishonour done
him by the insecurity of his employment,
when, for a little displeasure, he may be sent
out to starve, he and those who look to his
hand for food ; and a thousand are willing
to forgo weeks of wages, with the chance
of never getting back their posts, for one
man who is lightly dismissed. Half the
strikes of modern times have been, not for
wages, but for principles ; and when men
by their thousands are willing to lose all
for a principle it is time for the poet,
103
A NATION, A STATE
not indeed to cavil, but to rub his eyes, and
stare, and wonder if his kingdom be coming.
So this poet started up when he heard that
most of the working men in Dublin had
gone out to starvation rather than be ordered
not to join a Union that they, till then,
never had had a thought of joining, and to
sign a document giving a pledge to that
effect. Here already was the makings of a
community ; and an honourable community.
If such could be made part of an economic
community in the city, decreeing for itself
as the rural community was beginning to do,
and in like fashion creating its own prosperity
without permitting the exploitation of itself,
here then were the two parts of the Co-
operative Commonwealth. Common-wealth 1
M has written with the bitterness many have
felt of those who speak of the increasing
prosperity of a country, judging that pros-
perity by statistics that signify nothing to
the people at large indeed that signify, in
the present framework of society, and in-
evitably signify, more freedom enslaved and
more decency debauched. To speak so is
to speak as they did who turned Lancashire
in England into a clinker-patch and degraded
its manhood, in order that increased statistics
should swell the pockets of a few. In Ireland
that example is before us while we seek
nobler destinies to serve. Wealth is not
national wealth if it pass only to a few and
104
A STATE, A NATION
give those few power to exploit their fellows.
It is not so in the economic sense. It is not
so even in the political sense, for in all
countries men become less national in the
degree in which they amass riches. Wealth
is only estimable when it is a common-
wealth ; and what is called industrial develop-
ment, when it does not signify industry
developed in a commonwealth, signifies
national loss and not gain whatever the trade
returns may say.
It is the custom to bend the knee to the
faith of the idealist in an elaborate cynic
fealty that assumes the sheer impracticability
of the schemes he so bravely devises; and
it is not the least crafty trick by which the
exploiter fobs off enquiry into the first
principles of the business of Life. Yet these
things have been justified of life. Farmers
have co-operated on just such impracticable
principles; stripped away middlemen and
exploiters ; and created, out of desperate
poverty, a wealth which is a commonwealth.
" I am familiar with a district," says M. . . .
" It was one of the most wretchedly poor
districts in Ireland. The farmers were at
the mercy of the gombeen traders and the
agricultural middlemen. Then a dozen
years ago a co-operative society was formed.
. . . The reign of the gombeen man is
over. The farmers control their own buying
and selling. Their organization markets for
105
A NATION, A STATE
them the eggs and poultry. It procures
seeds, fertilizers, and domestic requirements.
It turns the members' pigs into bacon. They
have a village hall and an allied women's
organization. They sell the products of the
women's industry. They have a co-operative
band, social gatherings, and concerts. They
have spread out into half a dozen parishes.
They have gone southward to A with
their propaganda and eastward towards F ,
and in half a dozen years in all that district,
previously without organization, there will
be well-organized farmers' guilds, concen-
trating in themselves all the trade of their
district, having meeting-places where the
opinion of the members can be taken ; having
a machinery, committees, and executive
officers to carry out whatever may be decided
on, and having funds, or profits, the joint
property of the community, which can be
drawn upon to finance their undertakings."
Another such guild of farmers, anticipating
an inevitable development, has undertaken
the supply of electricity to a neighbouring
town from the generating plant for their
machinery. Such things have been done,
issuing from and emerging into ideals, but
wrought in healthy economic success.
The question M faces is: How shall this
be done in the complexity of modern cities?
Here again it is right to be reminded of
things that are being done elsewhere. In
106
A STATE, A NATION
Italy workmen's guilds own and conduct in-
dustries. They display no parsimony in the
payment of competent managers and general
directors ; but such managers and directors
are responsible to a guild of the workers
who understand the conditions of their in-
dustry, who own the industry in which each
of them has his particular function, and not
to a company of shareholders ignorant of
the conditions, and therefore easily manipu-
lated. This is the counterpart in the factory
of what the farmers had wrought in the fields
of Ireland. The farmers of Ireland, if not
free, have at least in their power now the
beginnings of their freedom. But how may
workers in factories win an equal freedom ?
And here M displays a shrewd tactical
wisdom. The farmer first captured the
organization of his manufactures by the
guild he created for that purpose, and then,
having the guild, used it for the direct pur-
chase of his requirements on the farm and in
the homestead : the middleman who bought
from him went first, and the middleman who
sold to him followed in due course. Plainly
the worker in the city cannot do this. It
would be to court certain failure if a guild
of workmen erected a factory co-operatively
owned. The requisite experience would not
be with them in a complex state of affairs.
A huge power of finance would be wielded
against them. They would find, not only
107
A NATION, A STATE
that they would not sell so cheaply as their
opponents, who would be willing at once to
pool finances and run at a loss to break
them ; but they would not be able to sell at
all, for the distributive shops would be forced
by the big manufacturers, acting together,
not to stock co-operative goods under pain of
having higher prices levied against them, by a
withdrawal of discounts if not by direct in-
crease. The peril of that course must not be
considered : not at once. The worker in the
city must invert the procedure of the farmer.
He must first create his distributive stores ;
then, having that outlet, create his guild
factories ; and make his distributive stores
discriminate against the goods that do not
come from such guild- owned factories, as
the manufacturers would have done against
him if he had at first challenged com-
petition.
If trade unions, instead of conducting a
series of strikes that are often unsuccessful,
and which even when successful only erect a
temporary new platform of wages that will
soon be submerged as competition advances
to a new level, were to employ their
funds in creating co-operative stores and in
compelling their members to deal exclu-
sively at them, they would soon create a
new economic dignity for workers. In
times of strike they would consume their
own funds, because inasmuch as trade
108
A STATE, A NATION
union tickets would only be available at
the trade union co-operative stores, the sepa-
rate funds of the trade unions, instead of
being depleted in favour of middlemen who
are usually opposed to the demands of the
workers, would pass to the financially
distinct trade union store. When it is
remembered how large a percentage of a
city population either are, or soon will be,
trade union, it will be seen what enormous
power would thus pass to the workers.
For the employers for the most part depend
on what the poor buy, though they give the
poor little wherewith to buy. The worker
would, in strike or in work, have created the
basis of his commonwealth, and the em-
ployer would find the enemy, who had
thrown an army around his flank, encamped
within striking distance of his sources of
supply. Then the worker would proceed
with caution and circumspection. He would
choose what industry he would create for a
beginning ; choose with great care ; throw
his full weight into it (and trade union
finances these days run into heavy moneys) ;
find capable men, and pay them well; bring
the latest science to bear on production;
enrploy, especially in foodstuffs, the best of
hygiene ; and generally strive for the com-
pletest efficiency, while at the same time,
even as the individual co-operative stores
were pledged to buy from the Co-operative
109
A NATION, A STATE
Wholesale, so the Co-operative Wholesale
would discriminate always in favour of the Co-
operative Manufacture. Indeed, such pledges
would not be necessary, though they would
be advisable, inasmuch as each higher organ-
ization being created by the funds of the
lower it would be financially necessary for
the lower organizations fully to support the
higher in protection of their own funds. And
thus finally a self-existent wide organization
would evolve that would belong to the guilds
of workers in commonwealth. Indeed, it is
not too much to say that if in the early days
of trades unions this policy had been adopted
the workers' battle would by now have been
won and the commonwealth be partly now
in existence, a civilization being thus created
that would " provide for essential freedom
for the individual and for solidarity of the
nation " instead of weaving difficulties that
now tend to disrupt the nationality and
frustrate its State. " Men will gladly labour
if they feel that their labour conspires with
that of all other workers for the general good ;
but there is something loathsome for the spirit
in the condition of the labour market, where
labour is regarded as a commodity to be
bought and sold like soap and candles." So
says M, conceiving of a State as something
other than a mere constitution; and history
attests the truth of what he says, for men
will sacrifice themselves for their State,
110 /
A STATE, A NATION
whereas they regard a constitution as some-
thing separate from themselves.
Regarded from the point of view of labour,
this state of affairs might be regarded as
victory, victory won by organization instead
of long warfare ; and M is concerned for
labour, being concerned for the dignity of
man. Regarded from the point of view of
the State it might be regarded as success,
when the present system of exploitation,
phrased as competition, is a pitiful failure ;
and M being concerned for Beauty and its
implications and its concomitants, is con-
cerned for the State. Yet the State itself
does not emerge till all sides of the national
life are co-ordinated; or, since a State is
rather an expression than a device, it would
be juster to say until all sides should co-
ordinate themselves. And to this M turns.
Already, it is worthy of remark, the prob-
lem has half answered itself. Even before
the co-operative stores had created guild
factories in cities in favour of which to dis-
criminate, certain co-operative manufactures
exist in favour of which discrimination could
begin. These are the farmers' organizations,
who are looking for markets, especially
markets that would enable them directly to
reach the consumer and in which they could
become partners. With the very creation of
co-operative stores for the cities co-ordination,
organized and economic, would begin. It
111
A NATION, A STATE
would be for the interest of the farmers'
guilds to promote such stores, and to ex-
change share holdings with them ; and in
truth one wonders why this has not already
been done, since it is to the farmers' interest
to banish the last of the middlemen and
directly approach the consumer. So when,
for instance, it came to the manufacture of
farming implements, and indeed anything
required for home or farm by the farmer,
he could join with workmen's guilds in
creating factories for the production of such
things, and banish the last of the middlemen
on the other side. The Commonwealth
would then exist in completion, and the
State emerge. The chief hindrance to so
obvious a step is a certain prejudice based
on ignorance. It faced M sharply when he
saw how the farmers turned against the
Dublin strikers; and so, with both sides of
the false opposition claiming his sympathy, he
faced the issue in an address at the annual
meeting of the I.A.O.S.
His address was to farmers. How should
they, in their own interests, wish to see
town life develop ? The articles which they,
with help of Earth, manufactured, were
not manufactured for the few and elect of
the earth, not for the wealthy and privileged,
but for all; they were indispensable if all
were to live. Clearly, then, the more
people who could afford to purchase them
112
A STATE, A NATION
in sufficient quantities (seeing that men
cannot eat more than a certain amount) the
more they would be advantaged. Nay, more:
rich men, having little manual toil, are fas-
tidious of appetite, whereas working men
are simple of taste and robust of appetite.
If every man could afford to get for himself
and his family as much food as they required,
the spending power of the towns would at
once be enormously increased to the direct
benefit of the farmer, arid every penny of
that extra spending power would come from
the poor, those who are continually striking
in cities and towns for that extra food. " If
there is, let us say," M says, "a sum of
fifteen hundred pounds a week to be paid
away in a town, it is to the interest of
farmers that that sum should be paid to a
thousand men at the rate of thirty shillings
a week rather than to fifty men at thirty
pounds a week. In the case of the workers
a greater part of the money will be spent
on food. But if fifty men have thirty pounds
a week each it will be spent to satisfy the
appetites of a much smaller number of
people. A larger proportion will be spent
on furniture, pictures, motor-cars, and what
not. It may be spent so as to give some
kind of employment, but it will not be a
division of money so much to the interest
of the farmer." So also should the farmer
help the worker to eliminate the middlemen
113 i
A NATION, A STATE
who stand betwixt them, for the cheaper
food is the more freely will money be spent
on it. Either way the farmer should support
the worker's demands and his organizations
in his own ripening interests.
Equally should the worker support the
farmer of his own country in preference to
the farmers of other countries. If he fail
to support his own countrymen or if he give
an equal welcome to produce coming from
the four quarters of the world, the result
will be that the home agriculturist will find
the struggle hard against him, and will
stream into the towns to produce black-
leg labour : thus to cheapen his own wages,
and thus, by depleting the agricultural army,
to raise the cost of food against himself*
Furthermore, by impoverishing his country
he impoverishes himself. If a sack of oats
be worth, say, a pound, every sack of oats
grown in the country increases the financial
reserve of that country by that pound. Men
think too much in terms of the currency by
the aid of which goods are bartered and not
enough in terms of the goods, of which
foodstuffs are the base, that are the real
wealth. The present great war has provided
an instance that M 9 and others besides, little
considered at that time. Germany con-
serves her gold reserves by making a food-
creating entity of herself, whereas England is
continually depleting her gold reserves by
114
A STATE, A NATION
despatching bullion overseas for the purchase
of food ; and so England, though she started
infinitely the richer country, is rapidly ap-
proaching bankruptcy. Her industrial work-
ers little dream what that will mean for the
future. So also her merchant tonnage is
being steadily reduced by submarine warfare
and the need for troop transports, to an
extent that few consider, so that foodstuffs
cannot come to the country in the bulk
that was once available. Thus, always,
it is to the interest of the town-worker to
support the farmer of his own country,
even as it is to the interest of that farmer
to support the demands of that worker for
economic security. Each is a producer of
something that the other cannot produce,
and needs ; each thus is a purchaser of the
other's commodity ; and it is to their mutual
interests to see that they directly approach
each other without the intermediary of
profiteers, each producer taking, and being
incited to take, an interest in the stores
created by the other, and both by binding
themselves together thus building up a State
of Commonwealth.
So the economist displays his vigorous
sense ; so the poet shrewdly justifies his
visions that are challenged, and finds a
scope for their realization in a life of which
he has experience. Ideals are always justified
of Life, though some poets have avoided
115
A NATION, A STATE
that challenge ; and the poet here elaborates
a State, every step of which is possible,
many steps of which have been taken, many
other steps of which are even now defining
themselves for the future. It is a State that
is democratic in the business of living, and it
leaves freer play for the aristocracy of thought
and emotion by withdrawing the individual
from the absorption of money-grabbing. It
makes a space for the fine fiow T ers of divinity
that will riot blossom on the present soil,
where titles of nobility are bestowed on men
who have spent their lives brutalizing them-
selves and others. It invites those flowers,
indeed. When a rural community exists
as a tribe, decreeing for the whole of its
functions within its prescribed area, it will
have to provide hedgerows and halls from
its profits, and those hedgerows will be fruit-
trees and those halls will demand architecture
without and beautification within. The
difference will be small to each member
when allotted out of the total available funds ;
and when one community has begun to
aspire towards those flowers the spirit of
emulation will stir other communities. The
poet, the musician, the painter, the archi-
tect, and the historian will have their honoured
part in the life of the community as the
possessions of that community, and will be
matched against the like possessions in other
communities. They would be attached to
116
A STATE, A NATION
the court of the elected head of that commu-
nity, the president of its deliberations ; and
the community would find it worth its while
to endow them, that their making of beauty
should be to the honour of itself, instead of
compelling them to huckster their wares in a
sordid competition of cash from which it had
rescued itself. It is no dream, this. The
spirit of it is not dead in Ireland. Even
now, in a tradition dating from ancient times,
little local poets " live on the community,"
and the people are content that they should
do so. In a saner scheme of life they would
have an allotted place ; and the intellectual
life of rural places, near the bosom of Earth,
would not only vie with, but, drawing from
simpler, from purer, from grander sources,
would outrival, the intellectual life of cities ;
and that which the world now so grievously
needs, a new inspiration in Art, that has
worn its old manner to shreds, would come
of a new inspiration in Life and of larger
experiences to canvas.
For what is this that the poet, pitting
himself to find a hard economic answer for
hard economic facts and not looking outside
his immediate problem, has struck upon ? It
is even startling to conceive. It is nothing
less than a translation into modern conditions
of the ancient Polity of Ireland. The State
for which we work in the future in answer
to the problems of the present is the State
117
A NATION, A STATE
that dwelt in our past. It is a conception
of civilization that is our peculiar heritage ;
and it waits till it can come into our minds
not as a patriot's dream (though all of this,
and finely this), but as the unriddling of the
tangle of Life into which we have got our-
selves. When taunted once as not being
at heart or by lineage an Irishman, he wrote
a poem " On Behalf of Some Irishmen Not
Followers of Tradition."
They call us aliens, we are told,
Because our wayward visions stray
From that dim banner they unfold,
The dreams of worn-out yesterday.
So he sings ; and " flings his answer back in
scorn " :
We are less children of this clime
Than of some nation yet unborn
Or empire in the womb of time.
We hold the Ireland in the heart
More than the land our eyes have seen,
And love the goal for which we start
More than the tale of what has been.
He turns from the " life men lived before " :
We leave the easy peace it brings :
The few we are shall still unite
In fealty to unseen kings
Or unimaginable light.
We would no Irish sign efface,
But yet our lips would gladlier hail
The firstborn of the Coming Race
Than the last splendour of the Gael.
118
A STATE, A NATION
Yet he who sang thus thought more as a
Gael than all the tribe of those who taunted
him. He looked in his soul, and found
ideals that have slumbered in our race
through long oppression and repression :
they looked at the foe against whose
dominion they fought, and became bewitched
by his ideals, wishing to plant another form
of that alien thing in this country. Each
became like the thing they steadfastly con-
templated, in love or in hate; for it is the
infallible rule of the soul that men become
like the thing upon which they meditate.
M even worked in the Irish way. The
Feineacas or Brehou laws, which image
for us the old Irish State, have never
received the attention they deserve ; and
there is a political reason for that. They
have even been edited with misconceiving
and belittling introductions from an English
point of view, and with translations altered
from those made by the far finer Irish
scholars, O'Donovan and O'Curry. The
Napoleonic Code, the Roman Code, even
the far-removed Hammurabi Code, have not
failed of adequate exposition, whereas the
Feineacas have not yet taken their place
in international comparison, though they
challenge comparison with any in a noble
conception of Life. Yet how did they come
to be ? Those other laws were, as all other
laws have been, abstractly conceived in
119
A NATION, A STATE
legislative assembly or princely edict ; and
abstractly codified ; yet in none of them is
there an arresting ideal of Life. They are
just workaday administrative instruments,
all that a lawyer would desire, though,
being abstractly conceived, there was both
time and opportunity to introduce into them
some higher ideal. The Feineacas, on the
other hand, are just a medley of ad hoc
adjudications, the rough gathering together
of judgments given by brehons in their
function as civil arbitrators, hard to dis-
entangle in their lack of systematic form.
Yet what is the result ? Arising as they
do from the clash of life in its least savoury
aspects, emerging as they do from disputes
and wrangles arid their settlements, they
yet display a conception of Life that arrests
the mind with its dignity, humanity, and
decency. Even so is it with the re-
emergence of this ancient Polity after long
years in Irish life. John Stuart Mill sat in
his study and schemed a system of Economics.
Coming from that aloof and scholarly retire-
ment it would have been excusable had it
worn a beauty too fair and too virginal for
the shock of Life. But it came calling itself
Utilitarianism, and was one of the intellectual
fathers of a scheme of Life that the world
is beginning now to revolt from as a sordid
cynicism. ^E, and his comrades in work,
went out to a rough experience, to handle
120
A STATE, A NATION
tough financial facts, to make a workable
business organization, to think of pigs,
cows, and poultry, living and dead, milk
and eggs, manures and seeds, and to
adjudicate in farming matters; and a system
of Economics emerged with an arresting
ideal of Life, dignified, humane, and decent,
and with a hope for the future of humanity.
It is not for nothing that the old Irish Polity
is re-incarnated in the same experience as
that in which it first was born an experi-
ence, not only direct from the hard problems
of life and their settlement, but from a
farming life at that.
It is very strange to watch, and to
participate in, this emergence of a distinctive
and intensive Irish civilization, for it has
been so long forgotten, even by the heroes
of the nation. Ireland has fought long
against England with no other hope than to
make another England of Ireland. That is
only to break a political union to make a
union of ideals ; and that again is to abrogate
nationality while espousing its cause. It is
a hard thing to say, but true notwithstanding,
that many of our later heroes have stood for
nothing more than this. The splendid
audacity of Wolfe Tone, simple and fearless
and exuberant as that of a great child, the
gentle nobility of Emmet, the forensic passion
of Curran, the turgid eloquence of O'Connell,
the pompous ineffectuality of Butt, dimmed
121
A NATION, A STATE
by the clean hard mind that came after him
what distinctive Irish State did all this
seek to achieve ? Can any say ? They
opposed England with Ireland, which was
fine ; but they did not oppose English civili-
zation with Irish civilization, and that is
a great difference. There were only two
minds that showed an understanding of
the difference ; and it is curious that both
of them should have been charged (very
falsely, let us say) with an alien charac-
teristic. The scholarly Davis had glimpses
of it in some of his essays ; and there are
implications in some of Parnell's speeches,
dealing severely with tactical issues as they
did, that seem as though he had some under-
standing of the difference. And what was
Grattan's Parliament but a thing of the
English Pale, with a vast and inarticulate
Irish thought in the country, deliberately
submerged, never permitted to raise its
head ? Grattan, though he acclaimed Ireland
as " free " because she had won an abortive
Parliament, was afraid of the Irish people
as " people," Charlemont at the head of the
Volunteers was afraid of the Irish people
as ''Catholics," and Flood was afraid of
them as " Irish," standing as he did for
ascendancy. Ireland may in her tragic
history look back upon that Parliament
within her own shores with some wistful-
ness, but the plain truth is this, that it was
122
A STATE, A NATION
an alien thing, hostile to, and in craven
fear of, the Irish Ireland that waited
outside its doors.
It was left to this latter time to evolve,
outside of Parliament, and despite the bitter
opposition of Irishmen whose minds are sub-
dued to English thinking, a distinctive Irish
polity, the Feineacas beginning to be re-
born in modern conditions, to construct an
Irish State out of the practical experience
of life, and to oppose English civilization,
that is already self-condemned, with a dis-
tinctive Irish conception of civilization that
has some hope for the future of Irish-
men. And it is to M that the praise of this
is due more than to any other. For what
are his Rural Communities? They are
neither more nor less than a reconstitution
of the tuatha, the economic, social and political
units of the old "tribal" organization of
Ireland. " We have not had a social order
since the time of the clans," * he says in
" Co-operation and Nationality " ; and he is
right ; but that is due to no fault of ours,
but due to those who feared lest we should
* Strictly it is inaccurate to speak so. The clann
was a gathering within the tuath due to its elaboration.
The tuath was the equivalent of the " rural com-
munity." Nor are right terms in this matter a mere
pedantry. To speak of the clann instead of the tuath
is to miss the economic and political character of an
exceedingly well-organized unit.
123
A NATION, A STATE
put their own professed faith for the rights
of small nationalities into good effect upon
our own behalf. In " The Rural Commun-
ity " he says : " We had true rural com-
munities in ancient Ireland, though the
organization was rather military than eco-
nomic"; but there he is wrong. The tuath
was hardly even military in a secondary sense,
and certainly it was not so primarily. From
early times a certain order of tuath could
claim the complete subordination of military
duties to their economic life : they could not
be called away at Spring or at Harvest, and
if at other times a provincial hosting should
last for more than six weeks, at the end of
that six weeks they had liberty to return
home.* Therefore the Fianna were raised
as a national militia from the older Firbolgs
and Cruithni, or Picts, and were part of
the army with which the great Niall harassed
and defeated the Roman power through
Britain and into Gaul. Cuchulainn, the
" little dark man " and lord of the marches
to Conchobhar, was such a man. When
later they were suppressed for political reasons
it was the very economic preoccupation of the
tuatha that made them the prey of the Normans,
who were professional marauders without
any economic life. And as the economic
life of the tuatha still restricted their military
power, foreign soldiers (gall-ogldigh, Englished
* See " The Tribes and Customs of Hy-Many,"p. 67.
124
A STATE, A NATION
into galloglass, means foreign soldier) were
imported and settled on the land by the
consent of the tuatha to relieve them of the
continual fighting to which they were com-
pelled by the presence of this professional
marauder. These gall-ogldigh came from the
Hebrides, and were thus descended from
the Irish conquest of the Isles mixing with the
earlier and later Norse ; but their introduc-
tion proves how intense was the economic
preoccupation of these old rural com-
munities ; and proves also how the life of
their modern counterpart reflects the life of
their national original.
Each of these older communities was a
recognized political unit, over which all con-
quest flowed, but indivisible because of the
high social and economic organization it pos-
sessed ; and towards this social and economic
organization its modern counterpart is inevit-
ably drifting, though clearer knowledge would
shape that course better and effect it with
less waste of experiment. The intuitions of
a nation are not lost, though they be
deliberately repressed ; and what those intui-
tions first achieved as a conceivably fair
civilization they will achieve again, though
with the differences attendant on the different
conditions affecting the accidentals of life.
For those intuitions are nationality; and
without them nationality is but a windy
word. If wise statesmanship were to act
125
A NATION, A STATE
from such intuitions, looking within at the
continuing mind of its own nation instead
of looking without at the mind of other
nations, and give a political place to such
economic and social units political, that is
to say, in the sense of being a unit in the
Polity or State of the Nation the conditions
would repeat themselves even as in the past,
and the State of the past would simply and
automatically repeat itself in the future with-
out the modern confusion of a continuing
series of legislative instruments, none of
which fit the complex need they seek to
remedy, most of which are amended out
of all recognition in practice, many of which
are quietly dropped out of memory with
nothing to remain of them but the pompous
frivolity of their debate. And such a con-
tinuance would approve Nationality as a
lasting fact, and not leave it as a protestation
right or wrong.
For the conditions are the same. They are
embedded, not only in national intuitions, but
in the plain requirements of the case. The
modern community needs a centre, a place
where its necessary business may be con-
ducted, its officers elected, around which its
factories and creameries, its smithies and
attendant crafts and industries, should be
situated, and where it should engage in its
recreations and its social pleasures, where
lectures would be delivered, not only on
126
A STATE, A NATION
matters arising out of its economic business,
but also on wider national subjects, where
those national issues might be debated,
where, in the Anticipations that our hope,
faith, and love have prompted, the communal
historian might discourse, the communal poet
sing, the communal musician stir to emula-
tion, and which the artist might design and
beautify ; and where, in a development
happily native to our race, the community
might extend its hospitality to strangers with
dignity and good manners. The old com-
munity had such a need ; and met it. The
centre of its activities, social, economic, and
public, was a . building called the Bruighin,
presided over by one who was called a
Bruigh-fer or BiadJitach. It had land al-
lotted to it by the tuath for its maintenance.
Strangers received hospitality there. The
two legislative and deliberative assemblies
of the tuath met there to transact all busi-
ness. The freemen of the tuath met there
to elect their officers and to discuss public
matters. Legal matters were settled there.
And around it the craftsmen, artificers, and
industrial workers lived, each with their
separate guilds. The whole formed the
capital township of the tuath. The Bruighin
in no sense belonged to the Bruigh-fer,
though he had his separate land, but
was the joint property of the tuath. He
was the officer of the community, dis-
127
A NATION, A STATE
pensing its hospitality and calling its as-
semblies.
So if the communities rising now should
wisely elect to endow artist and writer, it
would have its example in the past. Such
endowments are no necessary part of fantasy.
Men in collective capacity acting together
arise to public spirit as they are freed from
personal competition. They esteem the dig-
nities that give honour to life ; and they
esteem them the more if they can directly ac-
knowledge them in small communities, and
take honour by that direct acknowledgment,
where a national acknowledgment by some
public person, in which they have no hand,
will leave them cold. That is human nature ;
even as it is human nature to care nothing
for the honour and aspiration of Life when
the whole business of living means a relent-
less and unremitting struggle of each man
against all his fellows. Cleaner living means
better leisure and higher dignity. Certainly
the modern community will need to pay,
which is to endow, its chemists and scientists
for its factories : were it not to do so, it
would lose markets for its products. So
it would need to endow its musician, as he
would at once take his place in its dignities
and its pleasures. Its seanchaidhe too, in the
full meaning of the word, would soon find his
place as lecturer. Since, therefore, the poet
and the imaginative writer have an economic
128
A STATE, A NATION
place in a community that is to say, since
their works must in some measure bring
them profit the community might well
desire to absorb that economic place and
yet find for the writer some security.* For
it is not rash to assume that a life that
depended on the application of individual
thinking in large responsibilities would bring
clean thinking in other matters than that of
business. These things are no fantasy. The
tuath did not find them so; but rather
endowed its historian, its poets, and its
musicians, even as it endowed its brehons
and its public officers.
The tuath, however, was a complete eco-
nomic entity. That is to say, it not only
held land in community, not only did
many of its members, as the Crith Gablach
makes clear, hold farming implements in
community, but it was its own source of
self-help in all matters. It had its own local
government ; taxes, in modern phrase, being
charged upon itself as a whole, for itself to
recharge upon its members. JE has spoken
* The writer of hard or unpalatable things would be
in no worse case than he is at present. Yet this might
even be mended. Was not Basle well pleased to have
Nietzsche for a professor, though it either did not
read him or was outraged by his opinions ? For
Nietzsche's works were discussed and debated in
other countries ; and there is something pleasing in
owning a celebrity, though he be only a notoriety.
129 K
A NATION, A STATE
in " The Rural Community " of the modern
co-operative community electing to beautify
its hedgerows by planting fruit-trees, as has
been done by some communities in Europe.
Such things look forward to the rural com-
munity finding itself sole arbiter for its
district, a community self-existent and in-
divisible, a political as well as an economic
and social unit, relying on its self-aid and
sufficient unto itself, though allying with
others in larger federations and blending into
a national conception. In that he looks
back (though almost unwittingly) even as he
looks forward : in desiring the Ireland that
would answer his visions, and be based upon
the answer experience has found for those
visions, he sees " The Awakening of the
Fires," for this is the Ireland of old born
again. He sees not only a continuing
Nation : he sees a continuing State, lying
dormant a long while in dim intuitions
but re-emerging at last in experience. It
is strange how close the identity sometimes
proves to be, and in ways of which he is
unaware. For instance, while facing the
whole of his rural problem he comes
naturally to the case of the farm labourer. No
State is fair, or worthy of all a man's effort,
he says in effect, that bases itself on injustice
in any of its parts. How is the problem
of the farm labourer to be answered? The
better prosperity of the farmer will in great
130
A STATE, A NATION
measure help him ; and the greater sense of
responsibility of farmers in a co-operative
society will help him, especially as he will
inevitably form himself into a large union
in the course of time. But then he throws
out a suggestion. He says that labourers,
while unable individually to hold land,
might profitably hold and work land in a
company together, winning a dignity to-
gether that they could not severally compel.
He does no more than leave it as a sug-
gestion ; yet it is straight from the ancient
economy. In the tuath the lowest form of
un-freeman was the Fuidhir. He was lower
than the jack-boys and hirelings of the tuath,
being generally a prisoner taken in war or
an outlaw from some other tuath. Yet the
Feineacas allowed him to join in some com-
pany of not less than five, to hold land
together, and to appoint some one of their
number to claim the rights of a freeman
on behalf of the others if their several
prosperity was consonant with the dignity,
that consonancy being defined and decreed.
The two things would in fact work them-
selves out to a close likeness, both being
based on the land. And, indeed, it would
not be difficult to speak of other develop-
ments towards which these co-operative
societies of to-day are searching their way as
they take their path towards becoming rural
communities, in which they will find them-
131
A NATION, A STATE
selves like those who think they have broken
into new country, who afterwards discover
signs and ruins of the cities of their fathers
who had lived here before them.
A man who preaches so completely the
doctrine of self-help as the maker of muscle
and thew in a nation is not disposed to pro-
fess too loud a faith in parliamentarianism.
In his eyes parliaments have completed their
function in the world. So long as they stood
for a nation's general rights the right to free
thought, the right to free faith, the right to
national action without the interference or
prohibition of kingship so long were they
justified, so long had they their part to fill.
But now that these things are in great
measure fulfilled the questions before parlia-
ments have narrowed to those of particular
rights : the right, for example, of the poor
to economic freedom, to the control of the
industries in which they are employed and
which they by their labour build, the right
to combine in order to effect these things.
And here the poor always find that the jury
is packed against them. In the liberties
parliaments once achieved the rich benefited
with the poor ; now the issues have narrowed
against the rich, with the consequence that
they have rallied together to capture parlia-
ments, one company of them in one party
nodding to another company in an opposite
party with almost complete understanding.
Nothing the poor can do can alter that fact.
132
A STATE, A NATION
They must organize and work outside parlia-
ments if they would win their freedom
which in truth is national freedom, for their
overwhelming numbers make them the con-
stituency of the nation. They must help
themselves, for none other will help them ;
and in co-operation is the clue to that self-
help, whereas nearly every act of a parlia-
ment avowedly or hiddenly desires to harness
them, or sometimes feed them, in the
interests of the wealthy, as they themselves
too bitterly know. That is to say, they
must legislate for themselves by creating for
themselves the conditions of life and labour,
and they must subordinate legislatures to
the life of a nation instead of waiting for
legislatures to dictate to that life in the
interests of a few. They must be their own
statesmen by being statesmen in fact.
It is little to be wondered at that M should
so shrewdly suspect parliaments. In his early
days he had had his fighting heart aroused by
seeing a hero of his nation stand single-handed
in the ford to hack and hew an ancient par-
liament till it fell misshapen from his sword.
When Parnell went to Westminster the Eng-
lish House of Commons had a certain dignity
and pomp of debate ; and it was the centre
of admiring attention ; but as he sat on its
benches he divined a certain heart of humbug
in this pomp. He saw Bright espouse the
cause of freedom in noble periods while giving
the poor over to a system that should enslave
133
A NATION, A STATE
them as never before. He heard Gladstone
torrentially denounce the keeping of political
prisoners in Neapolitan prisons while pre-
serving a national silence over the Irish
political prisoners less excusably kept in
English prisons. These things he saw, and
other things moreover. Then he rose up
out of silence. He became the best hated
man in England and the hero of Ireland ;
but he gave as little heed to applause as to
anger. With deadly coldness he judged where
his sword-play should fall, and judged with
what strength it should fall ; and when he
ceased from his work, though a conspiracy
not yet unfolded had brought him low, the
assembly that had come to him with pomp and
prestige left his hand a more or less submis-
sive registration machine that was content to
endorse the decisions of a secret committee.
It is not for Irishmen, therefore, to praise the
fair health and manliness of a figure that one
of themselves left so misshapen ; and JB does
not praise it, because he knows the powers that
control that secret committee by the support
of its war-chest. Yet that does not mean
that he consents to the manacles placed on
one nation by another with brute-strength, or
the occasional kindness done with the lofty
mien of the conqueror. His thought is far
otherwise. He sees a distinct nationality
with its own conception of civilization ; and
he would house that nationality in a distinct
State worthy of the praise of nohl
134
CHAPTER V
BYE-PATHS ; AND PATHS
EMERGING
To inaugurate the new century W. B. Yeats
brought George Moore to a sense of style,
as Philip Skelton brought the sinner "to a
sense of religion," "by long perseverance, by
his awful lectures, and the divine aid." To
celebrate that fact they wrote a play together,
" Diarmid and Grania," and persuaded Frank
Benson to produce it at the Gaiety Theatre,
Dublin. It is unnecessary to give the details
of that enterprise. They have been preserved
with meticulous accuracy by George Moore,
the careful historian of latter-day art in
Ireland. M, however, went to see the pro-
duction of " Diarmid and Grania," and came
to the conclusion that if this was drama then
drama was an exceedingly easy thing to
do. When he reached home that night he
straightway wrote the first act of a play
dealing with Deidre. Having thus proved to
himself that the playwright's art was just the
simple thing he had thought it to be, he put
the thing away in a drawer, went to bed, and
thought no more of the matter.
135
BYE-PATHS
Yet that lone act lying in a drawer was to
provide an important link. For some years
before this the brothers W. G. and Frank
Fay had been working at dramatic matters
in Dublin, and had trained an amateur com-
pany to correct the loud theatricality of acting
on the professional stage. Through diversity
and adversity of experience, presenting plays
in little halls where neither place, play, nor
audience stirred the imagination, they yet
kept before them the chance of finding a
better scope for their effort. That chance
came when they heard that M had become
dramatist to the extent of one act of a play.
Borrowing it, admiring it, and becoming am-
bitious of producing it, they persuaded M to
finish the other two acts. This was very easily
done. In the meantime W. B. Yeats had not
forgotten his plays, some of which, including
" The Countess Cathleen," had been produced
the previous year with an English company
in what was known as the Irish Literary
Theatre : for a poet with a play to be produced
is a lean and restless hunter in the world, a
searcher with a swift eye for nobility in actors
and still greater nobility in financiers. There
were other such lean hunters. There was
even a financier on the prowl with plays,
one of the earlier company. Little wonder,
then, that these fell together in a new dramatic
fellowship. M, Edward Martyn, Padraic
Colum, W. B. Yeats, Fred Ryan, Seumas
136
AND PATHS EMERGING
O'Sullivan, and others, with Synge to join
them rather later, and George Moore as
embarrassing adviser, comprised that fellow-
ship. The presidency was first offered to JEt,
who declined it, as he felt that the writing of
plays was not to be the highroad of his life,
and suggested W. B. Yeats.
Later, when they were searching for
more permanent headquarters at the Abbey
Theatre, the fact of that presidency gave
the leadership of the movement to W. B.
Yeats, who associated with him J. M.
Synge, and Lady Gregory who then joined
the movement. There were other causes
also. Miss Horniman gave the movement
money through Yeats, and under him it was
formed into a Joint Stock Company, to the
indignation of those who had made it what
it was. jfi& was too busy as co-operative
organizer to write further plays, and thus fell
away. George Moore turned again to thoughts
of London. Edward Martyn had ecclesi-
astical doubts. The only playwrights of the
original enterprise who remained with Yeats
were Synge and Padraic Colum. The brothers
Fay continued in control of the stage pro-
duction. In the course of time Padraic
Colum's plays were no longer produced ; and
the brothers Fay also found it necessary to
leave the company. Later historians have
been too apt to judge of the beginnings of
the movement by those whom they found
137
BYE-PATHS
in it at its latter end, when the earlier struggles
had been won and the principles of acting
learnt under masters who no longer appeared.
It was Frank Fay, and no other man, who
was responsible for the beautiful speaking of
English and of verse, and for the just sim-
plicity of gesture and position, that marked
the acting of the company ; and it was from
him that Yeats received his ideas on these
subjects. The fact that the Abbey Theatre
afterwards reached a certain popular success
by rejecting the ideals with which the con-
federacy began made that misconception
easier, but it made it the more unjust. For
those ideals, wherein it was sought to produce
plays that were beautiful in a comradeship
and co-operation as beautiful to match, remain
the only possible way in which drama in
Dublin will again become possible.
The moment from which events flowed
was when Frank Fay, having heard of
" Deidre," came to see M ; and on
April 2, 1902, "Deidre" was the first play
to be produced, followed by W. B. Yeats'
"Kathleen ni Houlihan." It attempted to
be no more than a simple presentation of a
tale of tragic beauty told in a prose as simple ;
but great tragedy comes not only from the
tragic end of the tale that is told, but from
some tragic weighting of it in the mind of
the writer where it was received. The tragic-
poet is of the lineage of the prophets. He
138
AND PATHS EMERGING
looks not only at his fable : his fable is only
a medium through which he looks at the
whole or a part of life. That is true also
of the writer of comedy ; and the distinction
between tragedy and comedy, when each is at
its best, is not so great in the end. In the loose
and utterly foolish distinction raised by the
tribe of critics between subjective and objective
writing, it has been easily assumed that a
lyric is subjective and the drama objective.
What that means it is not easy to say. The
truth is that a lyric may be easily disengaged
from personality, springing up from some
temporary mood, whereas a drama comes
from the centre of an artist's conception
of Life, it is coloured with the colours in
which Life appears to him, it is weighted
with the implications of all that seems for
him involved in the issue of men together
when they are charged with the deepest
emotions. At its lowest it hardens and
crystallizes into the enunciation of a doctrine.
At its highest it is in that perfect solution
from which many doctrines may be crystal-
lized, and to which therefore philosophers
turn as they would to Life itself, seeing some
sharp vision of it through an intense mind.
But always it is personality flowering in its
bravest beauty; where the fable, and the
casting of the fable, and the conflict of
character through which the fable moves,
and the manner of the solution into which
139
BYE-PATHS
it emerges and with which it suggests the
untold thought, all utter to us a man's
passionate vision of Life. And the height
and depth of that vision, and the breadth
and wisdom of it, becomes for us finally the
clue by which we discover the greatness of
the dramatist.
It is just this loading of the fable that
we miss in "Deidre." It tells its tale a
pitiful tale that could be charged with so
many significances justly and truly as it
came to M 9 and in pure and musical prose.
It does not express M to us : or rather,
since it is impossible for a man to write
without in some degree expressing himself,
it merely carries off the things that had
lightly gathered on the surface of his mind.
The manner of its inception precluded a deep
and meditated utterance ; and leaves us with
the thought that if M had not written with
that marvellous facility of his, some of his later
writings might more constantly have come
burthened with permanent vision rather than
radiant with a wonderful casual insight. In
his essay on " The Dramatic Treatment of
Heroic Literature" he contends against
Standish O'Grady's protest that to serve the
heroes of the past for pleasure on the stage
is to degrade the ideals of the race. Later
he came to something of Standish O'Grady's
opinion ; and at least believed that an
adequate heroic drama was impossible. It
140
AND PATHS EMERGING
seems worth while suggesting, more particu-
larly in interpretation of " Deidre," that they
both missed the essential matter. We are not
interested in the deeds of the Red Branch as
something that happened at some moment in
the past : we are interested in those deeds in
precisely the degree in which they happen
in our minds to-day ; and we are interested in
the heroes that enacted them in the degree in
which they are, or may by the intensity of
the artist be made, qualities of our mind
in the spiritual warfare in which we live,
move, and have our being. If the dramatist
can do this for us he will make the heroes
great in the heroic thoughts that enrich our
intellectual being ; and that will only be
because he has lived out their heroism in
his measure in the familiar things of his
own intellectual being. The world loses its
heroes if it sees them in the past ; but it
gains them if it sees them in the perpetual
present.
The dramatist who can do this will always
be mocked with the intellectual sloth and
derision of the many. That proves nothing.
Or rather, it proves that that dramatist comes
in good hour : it is a tribute, not to his
inopportuneness, but to his punctuality. No
true vision comes with peace, but with a
sword. "Deidre," swiftly written for the
brothers Fay to produce, did not bring that
sword and it was well, maybe, for the
BYE-PATHS
brothers Fay that this was so. At times,
in sudden flashing lights, the play becomes
charged with a further significance, as when
Lavarcham (that significant figure in the old
story) harps on the deep string that sounds
the doom of Red Branch in the hour when
Concobar should try to turn the natural
flowing of the world to his own pleasure.
But these lights when they flash up die
away again, and the tale runs smoothly on
again to its ordered end. Though to
demand highly of drama is right, especially
when that demand is to be made of M,
yet that demand in the case of " Deidre "
will savour somewhat of churlishness, if not,
indeed, of pedantry, for if the fable be not
transformed and transfigured in its making it
is at least purely formed and figured ; and
that is as much as he intended us to ask
of it.
For he was putting his vision into other
things. About that time he had returned
to Dublin from organizing in the West, and
occupied the position of Assistant-Secretary
to the I. A.O.S. Living and married in Dublin,
the painter's brush inevitably came into his
hand again. When he had been in Dublin
before he had painted some of the visions
he saw in the spiritual experience of the
" household," illustrating both his poetry and
his prose with the visions of the things that
had prompted their writing. Now, however,
142
AND PATHS EMERGING
he turned to a more systematic attempt to
put in colour what in his experience he had
seen so clearly; and to deepen that vision
by recording as vision some of the deepest
intuitions that had been stirred by his reading
of the prophetic books of the world. These
paintings were nearly all mystical, for he
worked, assiduously enough and with in-
creasing absorption, yet for his own enlighten-
ment and pleasure, making gifts of his
paintings to his friends, never thinking of a
public display of them. But Count Markie-
wicz, who came to Ireland about that time,
met him, saw his paintings, and, liking them,
persuaded M to join him in an exhibition.
There others also liked them ; and exhibition
followed exhibition through the years.
So, with time, a wider outlook began to
mark his work. Though it be true that
the mental decision with which M turned
from mystical painting to the painting of
landscape was prompted by the thought
that he could better express mystical vision
by poems, yet the true causes are deeper.
The thought that prompts a decision is
generally with men the first emergence
of the decision from the hidden causes
involved in many things : it is not in itself
a cause but the first beginning of the actual
result. When M resolved to turn to land-
scape painting, that result had already been
decreed by the wider and more public concep-
143
BYE-PATHS
tion of himself as an artist. A certain quality
of his mind has divided him more sharply
than with most into two men : the man who
chooses things fit for public display before
he displays them publicly, and the man who
guards his esoteric things carefully from public
curiosity. The two things do not often
merge in ^E. It is not difficult, therefore,
to see how he would shrink from letting a
casual public pry into the hidden chambers
of his life, with curiosity at best, and maybe
with derision. Besides that, with the coming
of the public it was inevitable that the artist
should with the passage of time include a
larger as well as a more immediate range of
subject, that thus a greater scope should
keep pace with the increasing maturity of
touch and conviction of experience. And so
he sought in the rhythms of figure and
landscape for the beauty he had at first
seen in psychic vision.
In his earlier pictures it is not the quali-
ties of composition, symphony, and brush-
work that chiefly arrest the eye, although
intensity of interest indeed, sometimes
in his case an unworldly absorption of
interest includes all the qualities of crafts-
manship with the readiness with which in-
tuition, reaching forward to certitude of
vision, subordinates all means, even the least
familiar, to its shining ends. Such qualities
are always incidental to any artist who is
144
AND PATHS EMERGING
other than a technician, to be sure; and
they are the essential magic of art, whereby
the artist becomes the great spiritual dis-
coverer as the things that seem incommu-
nicable begin to glow wonderfully in his
own technique; but in M's early work they
are, we may say, peculiarly incidental. A
fellow-craftsman may admire the composition
with which he blends some great figures of
the Sidhe in a slant perspective, a perspective
that balances itself with a suggestion of what
does not appear, like a gesture outside the
canvas ; or he may praise the ornamental skill
with which two figures in radiant glory are
utilized to fill the canvas without being
themselves defined ; but though an artist
secretly covets the approbation of his fellows,
he does not often address his canvases to
them. We feel in these paintings that the
artist was in labour to communicate a part
of his assurance with regard to the spiritual
beings in the midst of which we are set,
of the spiritual beings we ourselves truly
are ; however fantastic his designs may at
first sight seem to us, that certitude of ours
is the first thing we have ; and the result
is that we hear the voice of the critical
exponent or analyst like a vague murmur
in our ears while we bend our minds to
search into things that become incom-
parably more than the artist and his art.
Blake, who also painted mystical pictures,
145 L
BYE-PATHS
leaves us with this impression even less than
j3B, because Blake, though a mystic, is more
wholeheartedly an artist, and M, though
an artist, is in these early pictures we are
at present considering more wholeheartedly
a mystic. In colour, for instance, Blake's
colours are ordered by the symphonic value
of the whole result, whereas it seems to us
that M's colours, even while achieving it
may be a gorgeous or very pure symphony
of colour, are marked by a very earnest
attempt at fidelity to psychic vision. They
are both artists ; but, while not wishing to
be misunderstood, we may say that many
of ^E's early pictures may almost by adepts
be accepted as mystical charts, because these
pictures are directly related to his mystical
experience. Looking at them we begin to
understand that when old warriors decked
themselves with helmets or feathers suggesting
plumes of light above the spinal cord, or wings
branching from the temples, they were not
merely fanciful ; we remember that they lived
in a day when vision and the psychic powers
were not slighted in the world. So it is
with line. Blake's rhythms, as for instance
in the flames of hell that whirl a multitude
of dead lovers while displaying Paolo and
Francesca to us, M was afterwards to attempt
in a different conception of his art; but in
his early paintings his lines have another
kind of fidelity altogether. It is different,
146
AND PATHS EMERGING
naturally, with composition. Some of the
best of his composition is seen when he
seeks to bring within his canvas, in whole
or in part, some very large design, and to
suggest by his device what cannot be
included.
This may seem to fall foul of his contention
in the lecture on "Art and Literature"
he delivered in the Royal Hibernian
Academy to open a Watts Exhibition.
There he protests against literary men who
attempt to harness the artist with a formula
of art ; the Ruskins and Tolstois who w r ould
make artists subserve some ethical preconcep-
tion of their own. It is worthy of remark
that it is not only the artist in colour who
has to endure wanderers from the pulpit:
poets also have to exercise some sufferance ;
but the question is much deeper than that.
Watts might paint some picture because
he wished to impress us with some ethical
sermon on Love and Life, and we might take
some delight in his figures as things seen
by the artist without at all knowing or at
all caring which was meant to be Life and
which Love ; but when JE paints some
mystical picture, and we stand in gaze
before it, seeing something more in it
than its deftness or device of technique
(which we afterwards recall), it is riot
because we have in our mind some ready
literary doctrine of an ulterior purpose
BYE-PATHS
in Art. Not at all. And yet there is an
ulterior purpose in Art ; or it may be said,
in a rapid paradox, that Art is itself that
ulterior purpose. The artist, says ^E justly
and truly, painted his pictures because he
delighted in what he saw. True ; but that
is not all ; or very rarely is it all. For the
artist paints his pictures also because he
wishes us to delight in, or be awed by,
what he saw. The whole of his composi-
tion is ordained to that end ; and that fact
gives it not the least of its definitions. From
the point of view of the artist his art is a
series of momentous decisions for himself;
but these decisions are momentous also be-
cause each of them is a communication.
Among the many things that delighted him
the artist chooses one to pass to others. That
very choice implies an ulterior purpose. And,
assuming a competency of skill lying ready
for use, the rank of the result will be the
rank of that purpose. The deftest skill will
not atone for an unworthy conception,
whereas a blundering craft will not often
obscure a noble intention. That is to put
the case in its extremest form ; and the
Ruskins and Tolstois of this world are
chiefly annoying because it is not easy to
see where it is and how it is they have
managed to make a thing that is right
appear so grotesquely wrong.
It may, or may not, be an exaggeration
148
AND PATHS EMERGING
to say that when JE painted his early
pictures he wished each of them to com-
municate some spiritual or psychic vision
that he judged of high importance that we
should perceive if we are to thrive as
spiritual beings in a spiritual world. Yet
that is in essence true. They are like nothing
that has been in latter-day art : they date
back to an earlier conception of art, before
art became a creed to itself. He is not
therefore a national artist as Jack Yeats is;
or even as Paul Henry is, though the latter's
art may seem only to be national in the
sense that a fine and finished craftsmanship
learned in Continental schools is engaged
upon national scenes and typical figures.
These three are possibly the outstanding
figures working with the brush in Ireland
to-day, for the great and venerable person-
ality of Nathaniel Hone, perhaps the greatest
artist Ireland has produced, may be con-
ceived as resting in a finished work. Of
the three Jack Yeats is the complete national
figure, unthinkable save in terms of Ireland.
His technique itself is national ; it is national
as statuary is when it is memorable; for
though it might be said that the sculptor
belongs to the Stone Age, and Epstein as
wittily reply that he must then be a
Troglodyte, yet when a nation exerts itself
in artistic expression it does so most ener-
getically by the sculptor or the architect.
149
BYE-PATHS
Jack Yeats's art has a national quality. Foolish
people have said that he has no technique,
whereas they only mean that they do not
understand his astonishing technique. His
technique gives a perfect expression of his
vision; and that is all that technique is
meant to do. If he, for instance, revises in
his drawing the relative sizes of things as
they appear to the eye, he yet convinces
that he is just to the relative sizes as they
appear to his mind ; he is like Gaelic syntax,
that does not lay down an arbitrary and
artificial sequence of subject, predicate, and
object, but simply and precisely takes these
things in the order in which the mental
emotion approaches them. So he trans-
figures Ireland with a wonderful loving
humour, where Paul Henry sees intensely
and arrests what he sees in a fine economy
of colour.
Yet M the artist is also national, though
chiefly in his earlier work. It is difficult to
conceive of just those mystical pictures
being done in any other country. He lost
that when circumstances compelled him to
a less intensive range of themes, and
the influences of other artists sometimes
trail across his work. For those influences
to be kept away, especially in a world that
is hoary with memories of Art, an artist
must be intensive in his work ; and circum-
stances have caused M to be extensive.
150
AND PATHS EMERGING
Yet he carries his spiritual intention with
him. In a grouping of subjects and rhythm
of line he suggests the spiritual world of
which the world of landscape is an appear-
ance ; and the spiritual world does shine out
through the world of appearance by the
design and the symphony of colour into
which he has inveigled it deftly ; for in such
pictures we see, though not always infallibly,
that the mystic has never failed to search
for spiritual things, knowing that the spiritual
never passes away where material things are
in continual flow and change.
For M faces life from many sides. It is
difficult to write of a man in the midst of
his work, with the tilth of it yet to be
garnered. It is difficult to write, with that
personal honesty without which books become
only a profitable trade, of a friend. It is
most difficult especially as these other
difficulties are attendant to write of a man
whose intellectual curiosity is so wide just
because his spiritual curiosity is so intense.
His speed of thought, and the intellectual
impatience that that inevitably brings, arise
from just that combination in the man.
Whatever gives him aid in his spiritual
interest is welcomed a Wordsworthian
cadence slipping into his poetry from his
extraordinary literary memory, or some
influence of Millet in his painting, or what-
ever it may chance to be. Whatever fails
151
BYE-PATHS
from spiritual understanding, or does not
seem to him at that moment to possess
spiritual endeavour, is dropped aside at once ;
and if it persist in forcing itself upon his
attention it is attacked in the name of the
high things for which he stands, and attacked
lustily. It may be that sometimes he does
not serve life so well by that impatience ; for
there is always the chance with impatience
that it comes from imperfect understanding.
When, for instance, bodies were mustering
and arming throughout the country in the
name of national freedom ^E asked of them
at once, and very rightly asked, for what
spiritual idea in the country were they arming.
It was a noble question ; and the leaders of
that mustering, dear men though they be, failed
in intellectual courage and nobility in not
conceiving of the national consciousness for
which they stood, and in not defining, at
least tentatively, the forms in which it should
be cast as a just expression of itself. Arms
are only noble when they are taken in defence
of a noble thing that bravely faces all its
consequences with clean sincerity. That is
true ; and very splendidly true ; and coming
from one who had faced his spiritual con-
ception of the nation and thought out its
consequences fearlessly, it was a just reproof.
But national freedom, even when carried to
its extremest limit, is also a spiritual ideal,
that has proved itself worthy of the espousal
152
AND PATHS EMERGING
of the noblest in the world's history ; and
they who claim it for one nation, where their
influence does not extend, while denying it
to another, arouse the disgust of honest
men.
M has praised Alexander Hamilton. It
is right also to praise George Washington,
who made his work possible, and who was
an equally noble figure. It was not while
the right to a State in America was denied
that the thought was possible that should
engage itself in building that State. Irish-
men all over the world have proved them-
selves quite sufficient statesmen; in fact, as
M well claims, they are proving that already
in the business and economic discussions of
the various Co-operative Societies and Federa-
tions. Indeed, the right to a State of Ireland
is not denied because of a fear that if it
were granted it would be bungled, but because
of the far more deeply seated fear that it
would not be bungled. And that fear
springs from something more nauseous even
than cowardice. It is, within its limits,
justified ; for the work of Co-operation in
Ireland, directly it begins to win results that
will challenge their place in the world, will
then at once arouse the national hostility that
piecemeal and deliberately in the past killed
every Irish industry by some foreign State
enactment, if by that time that hostility has
not been stripped of its power to do harm.
153
BYE-PATHS
To think otherwise is to read history like
a sentimentalist : is to deny that like things
produce like results, as the teaching of
history is.
Yet, in feeling that a public impatience
(however apparently justified) sometimes may
undo jSS's own good work, it is not necessary
to go outside his life to find a certain pleasing
parallel. It was not because he had thought
out a place in the National Polity for factory
workers that he sprang, like the fine fighter
he is, into the fray on behalf of the Dublin
strikers. No ; it was because his being
" went up in a blaze," because he was fighting
before he well knew where he was, because
every man's hand was against him whom
till that time of trial he would have credited
with philanthropic intent, that he began
to think out the case of those who had
so injuriously been done-by. And that is
the human way. To think on the history
of Ireland is to be maddened and sickened,
for no nation in the whole course of
history, past or present, has received from
another the brutalities that have been
accorded to Ireland : brutalities that are
approved and endorsed in any man's mind
who shrinks from their fullest reparation,
whatever that entail, as no glossing can
obscure ; and it should be significant to ^E
that it was the cleanest and best blood in
the country, as one who knows may testify,
154
AND PATHS EMERGING
that snatched arms for their country's liberty,
even though they had not thought out the
State in which the Nationality for which
they stood should be expressed. If they
wanted a creed, though they lacked defini-
tion of a State, one of the noblest of ^B's
writings, dealing with "Nationality and Im-
perialism/' would have provided it for them :
"Some, even those who are Celts, protest
against our movements as forlorn hopes.
Yet what does it matter whether every Celt
perished in the land, so that our wills, inviolate
to the last, make obeisance only to the light
which God has set for guidance in our souls ?
Would not that be spiritual victory and the
greatest success ? What would be the suc-
cess we are assured of if we lay aside our
hopes ? What could we have or what could
we give to humanity if our mental integrity
is broken? God gives no second gift to a
nation if it flings aside its birthright. We
cannot put on the ideals of another people
as a garment. We cannot, with every higher
instinct of our nature shocked and violated,
express ourselves as lovers of the law that
rules us. We would be slaves if we did.
The incarnate Love came not with peace but
a sword. It does not speak only with the
Holy Breath, but has in its armoury death
and the strong weapons of the other im-
mortals. It is better to remain unbroken
to the last, and I count it as noble to fight
155
BYE-PATHS
God's battles as to keep His peace. ..."
Those are great and noble words. The
man who wrote them belongs not to a
social aristocracy, though a social aristocracy
flatter him. He is of the people of Ireland,
even as he conceives the State that shall do
honour to their nationality.
Other things may also temporarily upset
him. A great war that is no less than a
toppling civilization has disturbed him as it
was bound to do. Not only, however, has
it disturbed him by the fact of its being, but
no less in the manner of its conduct. He
expressed this, and also expressed himself,
in a sonnet entitled "Chivalry":
I dreamed I saw that ancient Irish queen,
Who, from her dun, as dawn had opened wide
Saw the tall foemen rise on every side,
And gazed with kindling eye upon the scene,
And in delight cried, " Noble is their mien."
" Most kingly are they," her own host replied,
Praising the beauty, bravery and pride,
As if the foe their very kin had been.
And then I heard the innumerable hiss
Of human adders, nation with poisonous breath
Spitting at nation, as if the dragon rage
Would claw the spirit ; and I woke at this,
Knowing the soul of man was sick to death
And I was weeping in the Iron Age.
So, in the well-knit speechcraft of his later
verse, he comes to the making of the sonnet,
the honoured vehicle of such saying as distinct
156
AND PATHS EMERGING
from singing; and it leads him to the con-
clusion of "Tragedy," so deep in its appli-
cation to more things than one :
Love, the magician, and the wizard Hate,
Though one be like white fire, and one dark flame,
Work the same miracle, and all are wrought
Into the image that they contemplate.
None ever hated in the world but came
To every baseness of the foe he fought.
Yet out of that shock of conflict he sees
new things coming ; he sees the two foes that
merge in battle in ideas also merging, each
bestowing upon the other the very qualities
against which the other is contending. That
is for him "The Spiritual Conflict," whereby
in the world of ideas the loser may become
the victor, even as by contending against
the new French democracy in the last great
war the democratic idea became implanted
in each nation. So in the future, he
says, linking this new vision to the older
body of his thought, " the coming solidarity
is the domination of the State." There are,
he adds, certain reactions " within one being,
humanity," and these " indicate eternal desires
of the soul. They seem to urge on us the
idea that there is a pleroma, or human full-
ness, in which the opposites may be recon-
ciled, and that the divine event to which we
are moving is a State in which there will be
essential freedom combined with an organic
157
BYE-PATHS
unity." * The bearing of this on what he had
conceived of the State of Ireland is obvious,
and is an enrichment of that conception. The
irony of this spiritual conflict as reflected in
the vital earnestness of the material conflict
hardly needs mention. Believing that "the
Universe exists for the purposes of soul," he
looks for those purposes, and so fortifies him-
self in the bewilderment of change, for the
changes are only apparent, and the purposes
continue. So for the moment he steadies
himself till he recover his old certitude.
Thus it is that nothing can better conclude
a Study that has to arrest itself at the height
of ^E's powers than his own forward glance,
which he entitles " Continuity."
No sign is made while empires pass.
The flowers and stars are still His care,
The constellations hid in grass
The golden miracles in air.
Life in an instant will be rent
When death is glittering blind and wild
The Heavenly Brooding is intent
To that last instant on Its child.
It breathes the glow in brain and heart.
Life is made magical, until
Body and spirit are apart,
The Everlasting works Its will.
* This was printed in the London Times, not in
" rebel " Irish journal.
158
AND PATHS EMERGING
In that wild orchid that your feet
In their next falling shall destroy,
Minute and passionate and sweet
The Mighty Master holds His joy.
Though the crushed jewels droop and fade,
The Artist's labours will not cease,
And of the ruins shall be made
Some yet more lovely masterpiece.
159
