'Hail and farewell!' ...

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'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

♦HAIL AND FAREWELL r

A TKII. OGY
1. AVE

II. SALVE
III. \'ALE [In preparation

'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

SALVE

BY

GEORGE MOORE

LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN

1912

Copyright, London, 1912

'S I returned home after the dinner at
Tonks' (it is mentioned in the last
chapter of the volume entitled Ave),
my departure from London seemed to
become suddenly imminent. I did not
know if I should leave London in a week or in six
weeks, only that my departure could not be much
longer delayed ; and while passing through Grosvenor
Gardens, I began to wonder by what means the
Destiny I had just heard would pull me out of my
flat in Victoi-ia Street. Two years or eighteen
months of my lease still remained ; this lag end had
been advertised, but no desirable tenant had pre-
sented himself, and it did not seem to me that I
could go away to Dublin leaving the flat empty, taking
with me all my pictures and furniture. A house in
Dublin would be part of my equipment as a Gaelic
League propagandist, and it would cost me a hundred
pounds a year ; houses in Dublin are rarely in good
repair, some hundreds might have to be spent upon
it ; and falling into an arm-chair, I asked myself
where all this money was to come from, my will
receding. It is always at ebb when the necessity
arises of writing to my banker to ask him how many
hundred pounds are between me and destitution.
We are but a heredity. My father was a spend-

A

i 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

thrift and hated accounts ; to me accounts are as
mysterious as Chinese, and curiously rej)ellent. We
are the same man with a difference ; the pain that
his pecuniary embarrassment caused him seems to
have inrticted me with such a fear of money that I
am the most economical of men, as my agent said
when he visited me in the Temple. His remark
that verj' few would be content to live in a cock-loft
and my lady's objection to the three flights of stairs,
tem{)ted me out of the Temple, and now hatred of
the Boer War was forcing me into what seemed a
gulf of ruin.

* Two hundred and fifty a year I shall be paying
for houses,' I said, ' and yet I must go ; even if I am
to end my days in the workhouse I must go, even
though to engage in Gaelic League propaganda may
break up the mould of my mind. The mould of my
mind doesn't interest me any longer, it is an English
mould ; better break it up at once and have done
with it.'

My thoughts faded away into a vague meditiition
in which ideas did not shape themselves, and next
morning I rose from my bed undecided whether I
.should go or stay, but knowing all the while that
I was going. It was a queer feeling, day passing
over day, and myself saying to myself, ' I am twelve
hours nearer departure than I was yesterday,' yet
having no idea how I was going to be freed from
my flat, but certain that something would come to
free me. And the something that came was the
Westminster Trust, a Company that had been formed
fur the purpose of acquiring property in Victoria
Street.

SALVE S

It had been creeping up from Westminster for
some time past, absorbing house after house, turning
the grey austere residential mansions built in 1830
into shops. It had reached within a few doors of
me about the time of my landlord's death, and, as
soon as his property passed into the hands of the
Trust, notice was served upon the tenants that their
leases would not be renewed. One lease, that of a
peaceable general officer who lived above my head
and never played the jDiano, expired about that time,
and as arrangements could not be made for turning
his flat at once into offices it was let, temporarily, to
a foreign financier, who demanded more light. The
extra windows that were put in to suit his pleasure
and convenience seemed to the company's architect
such an improvement that the company offered to
put extra ■w'indows into my rooms free of cost.

' But don't you see that if two windows be put in,
the present admirable relation of wall space to
window will be destroyed ?'

' Light, after all '

' You see,' I said, ' I engaged those rooms because
I believed that they would affoi'd me the quiet
necessary for the composition of books, but for the
last three weeks I haven't heard the sweet voice of
a silent hour. Have you an ear for music .'' Tell
me, if you have, if a silent hour is not comparable to
a melody by Mozart .'' You live in a quiet suburban
neighbourhood, I'm sure, and can tell me. All the
beautiful peace of Peckham is in your face.'

The manager regretted that the improvements
over my head had caused me inconvenience, and he
suggested putting me upon half-rent until these

4 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

were completed ; a surprisingly generous offer, so
thought I at the time ; but very soon I discovered
that the reduction of my rent gave him all kinds ol
rights, including the building of a wall depriving my
pmtry of eight or nine inches of light, and the
chij)ping awtiy of my window-sills. The news that
I was about to lose my window-sills brought me out
of my bedroom in pyjamas, and, throwing up the
window, I got out hurriedly and seated myself on
the sill, thinking that by so doing I could defy
the workmen. ' Bill, drop yer 'ammer on his
finger-nails.' ' Better wait and see 'ow long 'e'U
stand this fine frosty morning in his pi-jamas.' The
wisdom of this workman inspired my servant to cry
to me to come in. We both feared pneumonia, but
if I did not dress myself very quickly, the workmen
would have knocked away the window-sill. It was
a race between us, and I thuik that half the sill was
gone when I was partially dressed, so I seated myselt
on the last half,

' Let him bide,' cried one workman to his mate
who was threatening my fingers with the hammer ;
and they continued their improvements about my
windows, filling my rooms with dust and noise. I
know not liow it started, but a tussle began between
me and one of the stone-cutters. * We'll see what
the magistrate will have to say about this bloody
assault,' said the man as he climbed down the
ladder, and when I had finished my dressing I vent
to my solicitor, who seemed to look upon the
struggle on the scaffolding as very serious. His
apj)lication for redress was answered by a letter
saying that if a sunnnons were issued against the

SALVE 5

Company, a cross-summons would be issued against
me for assault on one of the workmen. A civil
action, the solicitor said, was my remedy ; and I
should have gone on with this if the Company had
not expressed a good deal of regret when the trades-
men engaged in laying down a parquet floor for the
financier brought down my dining-room ceiling with
a crash. The director sent men at once to sweep up
the litter, and he ordered his new tenant, the
financier, to restore the ceiling ; but my solicitor
advised me to refuse the tradesmen admission, and
by doing so I found that I had again put myself in
the wrong ; the ceiling was put up at my expense
after a long interval during Avhich I dined in the
drawing-room. My solicitor's correspondence with
the Company did not procure me any special
terms ; the Company merely repeated an offer they
had previously made, which was to buy up the end
of my lease for £100, a very inadequate compensa-
tion, it seemed to me, for the annoyance I had en-
dured ; but as I felt that my solicitor could not cope
with the Company, I came gradually to the conclu-
sion that I had better accept the £100. It would
pay for the removal of all my furniture and pictures
to Dublin, leaving something over for the house
which I would have to hire and at once, for the offer
of the Company was subject to my giving up posses-
sion at the end of the month.

I ordered my trunk to be packed that evening,
and next morning was at the house-agent's office in
Grafton Street ; and while the clerk made out a
long list of houses for me I told him my require-
ments. The houses in Merrion Square were too

6 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

large for a single man of limited income ; I had lived
with my mother in one when boycotting brought
rae back from France ; the houses in Stephen's
Green are as line, but even if one could have been
gotten at a reasonable rental, Stejihen's Green
did not tempt me, niv imairination turning rather to
a quiet, old-fiishioncd house with a garden situated
in some sequestered, half- forgotten street in which
old ladies live — pious women who would pass my
window every Sunday morning along the pavement
on their way to church. The house-agent did not
think he had exactly the house, street, and the in-
habitants I described ujion his books, but there was
a house he thought would suit me in L'pper Mount
Street. I remembered the street dimly ; a chilly
street with an uninteresting church at the end of it.
A bucolic relation had taken a house in Upper
Mount Street in the 'eighties and had given parties
with a view to ridding himself of two uninteresting
sisters-in-law, but the experiment had failed. So I
knew what the houses in Upper Mount Street were
like — ugly, common, expensive. Why trouble to
visit them ? All the same, I visited two or three,
and from the doorstep of one I caught sight of
Mount Street Crescent, bending prettily about a
church — about a Protestant church. But there
were no bills in any window, and the jarvey was
asked why he didn't take me to Lower Mount
Street.

' Because,' he said, ' all the houses there are
lodging-houses,' and he turned his horse's head and
drove me into a delightful draggle-tailed end of the
town, silhouetting charmingly, I remembered, on the

SALVE 7

evening sky, for I had never failed to admire Baggot
Street when I visited Dublin. There is always
something strangely attractive in a declining neigh-
bourhood, and thinking of the powdered lackeys that
must have stood on steps that now a poor slavey
washes, I began to dream. The house that I had
been directed to was no doubt a fine one, but its fate
is declension, for it lives in my memory not by
marble chimneypieces nor Adams ceilings, but by the
bite of the most ferocious flea that I ever met,
caught from the caretaker, no doubt, at the last
moment, for I was on the car before he nipped me
in the middle of the back, ' exactly,' I said, ' where
I can't scratch,' and from there he jumped down
upon my loins and nipped me again and again, until
I arrived at the Shelbourne, where I had to strip
naked to discover him.

' If the Creator of fleas had not endowed them
with a passion for whiteness, humanity would perish,'
I muttered, descending the stairs.

' Are you after catching him, sir ?' the jarvey asked.

' Yes, and easily, for he was drunk with my blood
as you might be upon John Jameson on Saturday
night,' and we drove away to Fitzwilliam Square.

The houses there are large and clean, but the
rents were higher than I wished to pay, and it did
not seem to me that I should occupy an important
enough position in the Square. ' Something a little
more personal,' I said to myself, and drove away to
Leeson Street : a repetition of Baggot Street, de-
crepit houses that had once sheltered an aristocracy,
now falling into the hands of nuns and lodging-
house keepers. It was abandoned for Harcourt

8 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

Street. The trams screech as they pass up that
street, and despite the attraction of some magnificent
areas and lamp-ix)sts with old lanterns, I decided
that I would not live in Harcourt Street and
returned to the agent who had already begun to
think of me as a difficult client. He produced
another list and next day I visited Pembroke Road
and admired the great flights of granite steps that
lead to the doorways, down wliich a man might
easily break his leg. * If nothing else the architects
of the eighteenth century were sober men,' I said.

The houses seemed to bespeak a wife and family
so emphatically, that I drove to Clyde Road. It
seemed too jrompous and suburban for me, 'a society
of distillers and brewers. Does any other trade
prosper in Ireland?' I asked myself as the car
stopped somewhere in the Waterloo Road, a long,
monotonous road, but with some pretty houses and
gardens, connecting Pembroke Road with Upper
lyeeson Street, but unconnected, it seemed to me,
with my mission to Ireland ; and again vre drove
away and visited some shabby-genteel villas in
Gistlewood Avenue ; after that we turned up Rath-
mines Road and into Clonskeagh, where there were
some pleasant houses, but none to let. After that it
seemed to me that I discovered myself in a desolate
region which the jarvey told me was Clondalkin,
and we followed a lonely road that seemed to lead
me awHV fnjin all human habitation, right into the
heart of the country.

' But you see,' I said to the driver, ' I'm looking
for a house in the town.'

* It's to The Moat that we're going.'

SALVE 9

'The Moat?'

In about another half-hour our horse stopped
before a drawbridge, which very probably could not
be lifted any longer. ' But it would be a wonderful
thing/ I said, ' to live in a house with a drawbridge.
If it were lifted my friends would know that I was
composing, and about tea-time it would be let down
for them to cross into the moated g-ranffe. A
picturesque existence mine would be in this house,'
I said, while following the caretaker from room to
room, dreaming a life which I knew would never be
mine. About a thousand pounds, she said, would
make the place quite comfortable, and I answ^ered
that The Moat appealed to me in many ways, but
that I had not come to Ireland in search of a
picturesque residence, but in the hope of reviving
the language of the tribe that used to come down
from the rim of blue hills that could be seen from
the windows enclosing the plain, to invade Dublin
and to be repulsed by different garrisons of the Pale.
One was no doubt ensconced here, and I drove away
through the empty fields, merged in the cold spring
twilight, in Avhich Iamb bleated after ewe, thinking
of the house that I had visited high up in the Dublin
mountains many years ago. Mount Venus, wondering
whether it would suit me better to live there than
to live at The Moat, ' for it seems,' I said to myself,
' that I shall have to live in one or the other. There
doesn't seem to be any other house to let in Dublin
City.'

The lamps were being lit in the streets when w^e
returned, and the house-agent's clerk listened to the
tale of my wasted day

10 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

' The houses you sent me to are all very dull and
commonplace — all except The Moat, and several
hundred pounds would have to be spent upon it.'

' Two hundred ?'

* A thousand at least to make it habitable, and it
is too far for the Gaelic League to come out to
see me.'

The clerk searched his book and gave me another
list of houses, and I promised that I would visit
them all.

' But I don't believe that there are any houses
suited to my requirements : a dining-room, where I
can receive ten or a dozen people to dinner, a well-
lighted drawing-room, for my pictures must be con-
sidered, .a couple of bedrooms, and a couple of
servants' rooms. Surely you can discover that
for me ?'

* We ought to be able to do that,' the clerk
replied, and again he searched the book. A few
more addresses were added to the list.

' I'll try these to-morrow,' I said, and, leaving the
office, I followed the pavement along Trinity College
Gardens, my feet taking me instinctively to JE,
who settles ever}'body's difficulties and consoles the
afflicted, * and who needs greater consolation than I
do now ?'

' If I don't find a house,' I said to him, ' in Dublin,
I shall have to return to that Inferno which is
London,' and I gave him a description of Mafeking
night and other nights. ' There are no houses, M,
to let. I've searched everywhere and can find
nothuig but The Moat, and Mount Veims, no doubt,
is still vacant, but it's a good five miles distant from

SALVE 11

Ranfarnham, and you Avon't be able to come to see
me very often. If you weren't in Dublin perhaps
my instincts would have led me to France.'

^'s grey eyes lit up with a kindly, witty smile.

' Nature/ he said, ' has given you energy, vitality,
and perseverance, my dear Moore, but she has denied
you the gift of patience, and patience above all
things is necessary when seeking for a house.'

'But I've searched Merrion Square, Fitzwilliam
Square, Harcourt Street, and many a suburb.'

Another smile kindled in his eyes, and he listened,
though my story was a long one, and there were at
the time three bank managers waiting to receive
instructions from him regarding the repayment of
certain loans. M gets through more work than
any other ten men in Dublin, and perhaps for that
very reason he has always time for everybody, and
I noticed that the anxious typist with a sheaf of
letters in her hand did not distract his attention
from me ; he dismissed her, but without abruptness,
and came down to the door refusing to believe my
story that it would be impossible for me to find a
house in Dublin.

' I will see what can be done for you,' he said, and
his voice encouraged me as it encourages everybody.
For two days I did not hear from him, and on the
third morning, as I was asking myself if it would be
worth while to hire another car and go forth asrain
to hunt through Mountjoy Square and Rutland Square
where the aristocracy before the Union had built their
mansions, the porter came to tell me that a gentleman
wanted to see me. It was M. He had come to
tell me that he had found me a house.

12 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

' I don't believe it. I have tried for a house all
over Dublin. House or no house, I shall have the
pleasure of your company.' My stick went up, and
I called out 'car'; but the house he was taking me
to was in the centre of Dublin, within a few minutes
walk of Stephen's Green ; the ideal residence, he
said, for a man of letters ; one of five little eighteenth-
century houses shut off from the thoroughfare, and
with an orchard opposite which might be mine for
two or three jwinids a year if 1 knew how to bargain
with the landlord.

' .-E, is this a vision, a dream-tale, a story you have
written or would like to write.'''

At that moment we turned a corner and came
into sight of an old iron gateway ; behind it were
the five eighteenth -century houses . . . and the
orchard ! But to the houses first. Five modest
little houses, but every one with tall windows ; a
single window above the area, no doubt the dining-
room, and above it a pair of windows with bal-
conies ; behind them were the drawing-rooms, and
the windows above these were the bedroom
windows.

' Not a single pane of plate-glass in the house, IE !
The room above mine is the cook's room. If there
are some back rooms .'''

jE assured me that the houses were deep and
had several back rooms ; the drawing-rooms were
large and l(»fty, and, as well as he remembered, the
back windows in the dining and drawing-rooms
overlooked the convent garden.

' I might have tramped round Dublin for a month
and found nothing ; whereas, in three days you have

SALVE 13

found the house that suits me. Tell me how you
did it.'

'Number 3 was the home of the Theosophical
Society, and I thought one of the houses in the
street might be vacant. I remember, while editing
the Review, I used to envy those that had the right
to walk in the orchard.'

' And now you can walk there whenever you
please, and dine with me under that apple-tree, JE,
if your Irish summers are warm enough.'

' But you haven't seen the house yet.'

' I don't want to see the house until my furniture
is in it, JE. I'm no judge of unfurnished houses.'

But in spite of my remonstrance JE , insisted on
ringing the bell, and while he was making inquiries
about the state of the roof and the kitchen flue, I
was upstairs admiring marble mantelpieces of no
mean design, and cottages that the back windows
overlooked.

' JE, I beseech you to leave off talking about
boilers and cisterns and all such tiresome things.
Come upstairs at once and see the dear little slum,
and the two washerwomen in it. I wish we could
hear what they're saying.'

' One does hear some bad language sometimes,'
the caretaker murmured, turning her head away.

'I'm sure they blaspheme splendidly. Blasphemy
is the literature of Catholic countries. JE, what an
inveterate mystic you are, as practical as St. Teresa ;
whereas, I am content if the windows and mantel-
pieces are eighteenth-century. Don't let the slum
trouble you, my good woman. A man of letters
never objects to a slum. He sharpens his pen there.'

14 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

* The convent garden, sir, on the right—

' Yes, I see, .uid a great many night-shirts out
dr^nng.'

' No, sir, the nun's underwear.'

'Better and better. Into what Eden have you
led me, JE} Who is the agent of this Paradise?
Is his name Peter?'

' No, sir; Mr. Thom.is Burton.'

' And his address ?'

' He Hves at the Hill, Wimbledon. The landlord
lives in Wicklow.'

* How extraordinary ! The landlord of an Irish
proj)erty living iji Ireland and the agent in London.
Shall I have to go back to England and interview
this agent ? IE, I can't go back.'

' You won't be quit of England until your affairs
are settled.'

' But I can't go back.'

JE smiled so kindly that I half forgot my anger,
and my impulsiveness began to amuse me.

* You're always right, JE.'

' Don't say so, for there's nobody so boring '

* As the righteous man. . . . But come into the
garden, " where we shall dine, I hope, often. A
horrible wilderness it seems at present, hen-coops ;
but these things can be removed.' JE took out his
watch, and said that he must be getting back to his
office. ' Damn that office !' I answered. It seemed
to me that all my life was on my lips that afternoon,
and I begged him to stay. He .said he couldn't,
and bade me good - bye quickly. ' But, JE, I'm
going '

Whither I was going that evening it is impossible

SALVE 15

to remember at this distance of time ; all I know
for certain is that at some assembly of people, men
and women, not at the Mansion House nor in the
Rotunda, therefore in some private house (I am sure
it was in some private house, for I remember
gaseliers, silk cushions, ladies' necks) I rushed up to
Hyde, both hands extended, my news upon my lips.

' Hyde, I've come over ; it's all settled. I've been
driving about Dublin for a week without finding a
house, and would have had to go away, leave you —
think of it ? — if tE hadn't come to my help in the
nick of time. He has found me such a beautiful
house, Hyde, where you'll come to dine, and where,
perhaps, we'll be able to talk together in Irish, for I
am determined to learn the language.'

' You don't mean it ? You don't tell me that
you've left London for good ? You're only joking,'
and he laughed that vacant little laugh which is so
irritating.

' But tell me, are you advancing ?'

' We're getting on finely. If we could only get
the Intermediate '

* The Intermediate is most important ; but what I
want to know is if I shall be able to help you.'

'You've done a great deal already, but '

' But what ?'

' Your book Parnell and His Island will go against
you with the League.'

' I should have thought the League was here to
accept those that are willing to help Ireland to re-
cover her language, and not to bother about my past.'

' That's the way we are over here,' he said, and
again I had to endure his irritating little laugh.

16 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

' But I'm thinking. . . . The League might be
reconciled to your book if you were to issue it with a
subtitle — Pamell and His Island, or Ireland Without
Her language. I was reading your book the other
dav, and do you know I wouldn't say that it wasn't
your bobt book ?'

* It is mere gabble/ I answered, * and cannot be
re-issued.'

* You can't think that ?' And dropping a hint
that I might be more useful to them in England than
in Ireland, he turned away to tell dear Edward that
he was delighted to see him. ' Now have you come
up from the West for the meetmg ? You don't tell
me so ? I don't believe you.' Edward re-assured
him. ' And your friend, George Moore, has come
over from London ; and with you both to back the
League '

' How are you, George ? 1 heard you had arrived.'

* What, already !'

' Father Dineen saw you ; I met him in Kildare
Street this afternoon and he told me to tell you that
the Keating Branch were saying that you're coming
over here to write them up in the English jiapers.'

' You start your rumours very quickly in Dublin,'
I answered angrily, ' and a stupider one I never
heard. I don't •wTite for the papers ; even if I did,
the Keating Branch — I know nothing about it.
Hyde, 1 wish you would use your influence to
stop '

* I was just telling him that he should re-issue
Pamell and His Island with a subtitle Ireland Jl'ilh-
uiit Her Language. Now, what do you think .'' We're
all very anxious to liear what you think, Martyn.'

SALVE 17

' It would have been much better if he had never
written that book. I told him so at the time. I
have always told you, George, that I understand
Ireland. I mayn't understand England '

' But what do you mean when you say that you
understand Ireland ?'

Yeats joined our group, and when Edward said
that I had decided to come to live in Dublin he tried
a joke, but it got lost in the folds of his style, and
he looked at Hyde and at Martyn disconsolate.
MacNeill, the ^'^ice-President of the Gaelic League,
sidled through the crowd — an honest fellow with a
great deal of brown beard. But I couldn't get him
to express any opinion regarding my coming, or the
view that the League would take of it.

' But your subscription will be received grate-
fully,' he said, moving away to avoid further interro-
gation.

'^ Money,' I answered, 'is always received with
gratitude, but I've come to work for the League as
well as to subscribe to it, and shall be glad to hear
what kind of work you propose to put me to.
Would you care to send me to America to collect
funds ? What do you think ? A Gaelic League
missionary ?'

MacNeill answered that if I went to America and
collected money the League would be glad to
receive it ; but he didn't think that the League
would send me over as its representative. They
would be glad, however, to receive some journalistic
help from me. One of the questions that was en-
gaging the League's attention at the present time
was how to improve The Claidheam Solids, and he

B

16 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

suggested that I should call upon the Editor at my
convenience. The last words ' at my convenience '
seemed unnecessary, for had I not come to Dublin to
serve the Gaelic League ?

Next morning, in great impatience, I sought the
offices of the Gaelic League, and after many inquiries
of the passers-by, discovered the number hidden
away in a passage, and then the offices themselves at
the top of a dusty staircase. An inscription in a
strange language was assuring, and a memory of
the County of Mayo in my childhood told me that
the syllables that bade me enter were Gaelic and not
German. A couple of rough-looking men, peasants,
no doubt, native Irish speakers, sat on either side of
a large table with account books before them, and
in answer to my question if I could see the Editor,
one of them told me that he was not in at present.

' But you sj)eak Irish ?' I said.

Both of them nodded, and, forgetful of the business
upon which I had come, I began to question them as
to their knowledge of the language, and I am sure
that my eyes beamed when they told me that they
both contributed to tlie Claidheam.

' Your V'ice-President MacXeill sent me here. He
would like me to write an article. I am George
Moore.'

' I'll tell the Editor when he comes in, and if
you'll send in your article he'll consider it. The
next few numbers are full up.'

'This man must be a member of the Keating
Branch,' I said to myself; and, though aware of my
folly, I could not restrain my words, but fell to
assuring him at once that I had not come to Ireland

SALVE 19

to write the Keating Branch up in the English
papers. He was sure I hadn't, but my article would
have to be submitted to the Editor all the same.

' I appreciate your independence, and I'll submit
an article, but in England editors are not quite so
Ol^Tnpian to me.'

The men returned to their account-books, and I
left the office a little crestfallen, seeking somebody
who would neither look upon my coming with
suspicion, nor treat it as a joke ; but finding no one
until I met M in College Green coming out of a
vegetarian eating-house, lighting his pipe after his
dish of lentils,

' Ah, my dear Moore !'

It is a great good fortune to have a friend whose
eyes light up always when they see one, and whose
mind stoops or lifts itself instinctively to one's
trouble, divining it, whether it be spiritual or material.
Before I had time to speak myself he had begun to
feel that Cathleen ni Houlihan was not treating me
very kindly, and he allowed me to entertain him
with an account of my visit to the Gaelic League,
and the rebuffs that I had received from the assistant
editors of the Claidheam Solids.

' Neither of them knew my name, neither had
seen my article in the ISHneteenth Century, and last
night Hyde said perhaps I would be more use to
them over in England. Nobody wants me here,
M, and yet I'm coming. I know I am.'

' But there is other work to do here,' JE answered,
'beside the Gaelic League.'

' None that would interest me. And when I told
Hyde that I had disposed of the lease of my flat he

20 'HAIL AND I- AKEWELL !'

said : " Now, is that so ? You don't tell me you've
left London for jiood ?" — evidently looking on my
coming with suspicion. Yeats tried to treat it as
an exquisite joke. Edward is afraid to approve ; he
sees in me one who may trouble somebody's religious
convictions. Nobody wants me, JE. I wish you
would tell me why I am coming to Dublin. If you
do you're a cleverer man than I am. You are that
in any case. All 1 know for certain is that I am
coming despite jokes and suspicion. All I hoped
for was a welcome and some enthusiasm ; no bon-
fires, torchlight processions, banners, bands, Cead
inille J'ailte's, nothing of that kind, only a welcome.
It may be that 1 did expect some appreciation of the
sacrifice I was making, for you see I'm throwing
everj-thing into the flames. Isn't it strange, JE ?
You understand, but the others don't. I'll tell you
something that I heard Whistler say years ago. It
was in the Old Grosvenor Gallery. I have forgotten
what we were talking about ; one remembers the
words but not what led up to them. " Nothing," he
said, "I suppose, matters to you except your writing."
And his words went to the very bottom of my soul,
frightening me ; and I have asked myself, again and
again if I were capable of sacrificing brother, sister,
mother, fortune, friend, for a work of art. One is
near madness when nothing really matters but one's
work, and I tell you that Whistler's words frightened
me just as Rochefoucauld's famous epigram has
frightened thousands. You know it ? Something
about the misfortunes of our best friends never being
wholly disagreeable to us. We don't take pleasure
in hearing of the misfortunes of our friends, but

SALVE 21

there is a truth in Rochefoucauld's words all the
same ; and it wasn't until the Boer War drove me
out of England that I began to think that Whistler's
words mightn't be truer than Rochefoucauld's.'

JE took out his watch and said he must be getting
back to his office.

' I'm crossing to-night/ I cried after him, and
in the steamer's saloon all I had not said to
him rambled on and on in my head, and the
summary of it all is that it might be better for
me if Whistler's words were true, for in leaving
England there could be no doubt that I was leaving
a literary career behind me. England had been
my inspiration, and all the while of that cross-
ing A Mummer's Wife and Esther Waters seemed
conclusive proof that I could only write about
England. Is it likely, I asked, that he who wrote
the most English of all novels should be able to
describe Ireland ? A wistful lake and some elusive
hills rose up in my mind, and I felt that if
England were hateful Ireland was somewhat repug-
nant to me.

' Then, what is it,' I cried, starting up from my
berth, ' that is driving me out of England ? for it is
not natural to feel as determined as I feel, especially
for me, who am not at all self-willed. There is no
will in me. I am being di-iven, and I am being
pushed headlong into the unknown.'

There was no motion on board ; the steamer was
being steered through windless waters, and, believing
that we must be by this time nearing the W^elsh
coast, I climbed the brassy stairs and stood watching
the unwrinkled tide sweeping round the great

22 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

rock. Nor was there a wind among tlie clouds ; as
moveless as marble they lay under the moon. 'A
marmoreal sky/ I said^ ' whereas the sea was never
marmoreal.'

Along the foreland the shapes of the fields were
visible in the moon-haze^ and, while studying the
beauty of the wurkl by night, a lone star reminded
me of Stella and I said :

' A man is never wholly unhappy as long as he is
sure of his mistress's love.'

* After all/ she said, some hours later, ' a month
isn't a long while.'

* It will pass too quickly,' I answered, and to avoid
reproaches, and in the hope of enticing her to
Ireland, I told her of a garden in the midst of
Dublin with apple-trees and fig-trees and an avenue
of lilac bushes as one eomes down the steps from the
wicket.

' For the garden is lower than the street and in
the ditch (I know not how else to explain it) there
are hawthorns and laburnums.'

' Four walks,' she said, ' and a grass plot.'

* There's a walk down the middle.'

'That can be sodded over. But why should I
trouble to arrange your garden for you since 1 shall
not see you any more ?'

' But you will come to paint in Ireland ?'
' Do you think that you'd like me to ?'
' My dear Stella, the question is can I live in
Ireland without you ?' and I besought her for the
sake of her art. * 'I'lic Irish mountains are as beauti-
ful as the Welsh. Dublin is backed by blue hills,
and you won't be obliged to live in a detestable

SALVE 2S

cottage as you were last year in Wales, but in a fine
house.' And I told her that in my search for one to
live in I had come across a house in Clondalkin, or
near it^ that would suit her perfectly — a moated stead
built in the time of Anne, and, seeing she was
interested, I described how I had crossed the moat
by a little bridge, and between the bridge and the
front door there were about thirty yards of gravel.
' The left wall of the house rises sheer out of the
moat ; on the other side there is a pathway, and at
the back a fairly large garden — close on a hundred
yards, I should say — and you like gardening, Stella.'

' I'm afraid that so much stagnant water '

' But, dear one, the water of the moat is not
stagnant ; it is fed at the upper end by a stream, and
it trickles away by the bridge into a brook.'

'And the house itself?' she asked,

' It is two-storeyed and there are some fine rooms
in it, one that I think you could paint in. My re-
collection is a little dim, but I remember a dining-room
and a very handsome drawing-room, and I think my
impression was that a thousand pounds spent upon
it would give you such a house as you couldn't get
anywhere else. Of that I am sure, and the country
about it is all that your art requires. I remember a
row of fine chestnuts, and beyond it a far-reaching
stretch of tilth to the valley of the LifFey. Promise
me that you'll come ?' She promised. ' And now,
dear one, tell me of someone who will remove my
furniture.'

24 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

II

A descrii)tion of a furniture removal would have
appealed to my a-sthetie sense twenty years ago, and
my style of Medan thread was strong enough to
capture packers and their burdens ; but the net that
I cast now is woven of fine silk for the capture of
dreams, memories, hoj^es, aspirations, sorrows, with
here and there a secret shame. 1 was out of the
house, then, one morning early, lest I should see a man
seize the coal-scuttle and walk away with it, and on
returning home that night I found everything in the
drawing-room and the dining-room and the spare-
room and the ante-room had been taken away, only
the bedroom remained intact, and I wandered round
the shell that I had lived in so long, jwndering on
the strange fact that my life in Victoria Street was
no more than a dream, ' and w ith no more reality in
it,' I added, ' than the dream that I shall dream here
to-night.'

'Jane, this is the last time you'll call me for I'm
going away by tlie mail at half-past eight ft-om
Euston.'

' Your life is all pleasure and glory, but I shall
have to look round for another place,' I heard her
say, as she pulled at the straps of my portmanteau,
and her resentment against me increased when 1 put
a sovereign into her haiid. She cooked me excellent
dinners, making life infinitely agreeable to me ; a
• present of five pounds was certainly her due, and a
sovereign was more than enough for the porter whom
I suspected ol j)oisoning my cat — a large, grey and

SALVE 25

aft'ectionate animal upon wliom Jane, without the aid
of a doctor, had impressed the virtue of chastity so
successfully that he never sought the she, but re-
mained at home, a quiet, sober animal that did not
drink milk, only water, and who, when thrown up to
the ceiling refrained from turning round, content to
curl himself into a ball, convinced that my hands
would receive him — an animal to whom I was so much
attached that I had decided to bring: him with me
in a basket ; but a few weeks before my departure
he died of a stoppage in his entrails, brought about
probably by a morsel of sponge fried in grease — a
detestable and cruel way of poisoning cats often
practised by porters. It was pitiful to watch the
poor animal go to his pan and try to relieve himself,
but he never succeeded in passing anything, and
after the third day refused to try any more. We
had recourse to a dose of castor oil, but it did not
move him and after consultation we resolved to give
an enema if he would allow us. The poor animal
allowed us to do our will ; he seemed to know that
we were trying to help him, and received my caresses
and my words with kindly looks while Jane ad-
ministered the enema, saying that she didn't mind it
the whole courtyard saw her do it, all she cared for
was to save Jim's life. But the enema did not helj)
him, and after it he neither ate nor drank, but lay
down stoically to die. Death did not come to him
for a long while ; it seemed as if he would never drop
off, and at last, unable to bear the sight of his suffer-
ings any longer, Jane held his head in a pail of water,
and after a few gasps the trial of life was over. It
may have been that he died of the fur that he

26 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

licked away, collecting in a ball in his entrails, and
that there is no cause for me to regret the sovereign
given to the porter when the great van drove up to
my door to take away the bedroom and kitchen
furniture.

Everything except my jiersoiial luggage was going
to Ireland by a small coasting steamer, which would
not arrive for three >veeks, and my hope was that
the house in Upper Ely Place would then be ready
to receive my furniture ; but next morning only one
workman could be discovered in my new house, and
he lazily sweeping. The builder was rung up on
the telephone ; he promised many things. Three
weeks passed away ; the furniture arrived, but the
vans had to go away again ; communications were
received from the firm who removed my furniture,
demanding the return of the vans. All the usual
inconvenience was endured, and it was not until a
fortnight later that my Aubusson carpet was unrolled
in the drawing-room one afternoon about two o'clock,
JE's leisure hour after his dinner.

He who remembers JE in Ave will not be sur-
prised to hear that the purple architecture and
the bunches of roses shocked him so much that I
think he was on the point of asking me to burn
my carpet. It affected him so much that it was
with difficulty that I persuaded him to withdraw
his eyes from it and look at the pictures. I
would conceal the fact if I dared, but a desire of
truth compels me to record that when he first saw
Manet's jwrtrait of Madame Manet, it seemed to
him commonplace Impressionist painting, and on the
whole uncouth.

SALVE 27

'It seems to you, JE, like the prose of painting
mther than the poetry ; I know it does.'

' Did it never strike you in the same light ?'

' Not quite. Let me draw your attention to the
beautiful grey of the background in harmony with the
grey of the dress. Can you not see that the paint
is spilt upon the canvas like cream — not brushed
hither and thither with brushes — and that the
suffused colour in a tea-rose is not more beautiful .'''

' Oh, Moore !'

' Dear M,' I answered, ' if you will not admire the
beauty of Manet's paint, admire its morality. How
winningly it whispers, " Be not ashamed of anything
but to be ashamed." And I chose this mauve wall-
paper, for upon it this grey portrait will be triumphant.
The other Manet is but a sketch, and the casual
critic only sees that she is cock-eyed ; the whiteness
of her shoulders escapes him, and the pink of her
breast's blossoms. Manet's pink — almost a white !
I remember a peony. . . . I'll turn the picture a
little more to the light. Now, JE, I beseech you to
look upon it. No, it doesn't please you. Well, look
at my Monet instead ; a flooded meadow and willows
evanescent in the mist. Compared with Monet,
Constable's vision is a journeyman's, and he is by no
means seen at his worst in that little picture. But
look again at the willows. No one ever looked at
Nature so frankly. The Impressionists brought a
delicacy of vision into art undreamt-of before. In
their pictures the world is young again. Look at
this channing girl by Bertlie Morisot. Tell me,
was a girl ever so young before ? — an April girl,
hyacinth-coloured dress and daffodil hair.'

28 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

JE liked better Berthe Morisot's picture of her
little daughter coining to see the maid who is sewing
under a dove-cot.

' She has caught the mystery of the child's wonder-
ing eyes. \N'e call it mystery/ he added, ' but it is
merely stupidity.' The remark is quite true, but it
surprised me. . . . People often say things that
are not in the least like them, therefore criticism
will rei)rove me for recording words that JE may
have uttered, but which are admittedly not like
him. I would argue with criticism if I weren't so
busy with my pictures.

' Ah, here's my Conder ! You can't but like this
picture of Brighton — the blue sea breaking into
foam so cheerfully ; a happy lady looks from her
balcony at other happy ladies walking in the sun-
shine. The o))timism of painting !' JE sighed.
' You don't like it ? Here is a Mark Fisher ; women
singing under trees. The Laiid of IVine and So?ig,
he calls it, and if you look through the trees
you will see an estuary and a town in long per-
spective dying in the distance. Like my Mark
Fisher, JE. Why do you hesitate ?'

' 1 do like it, but '

' But what ?'

' It is a landscape in some small world, a third the
size of our world.'

' I know what is the matter with you, JE ; you're
longing for Watts. You try to disguise it, but you
are sighing for Thne lre(uling on the Big Toe of
FAemily, or Death bridging Chaos, or Tlie Triumph of
Purgatory over Heaven.'

' Admit '

SALVE 29

' No, JE, I'll admit nothing, except that he painted
a heron rather well, and then dropped into sixteenth-
century treacle. Impressionism is a new melodic
invention invisible to you at present. One of these
days you'll see it. But there's no use talking about
painting. Come into the garden. I'm expecting a
lady ; she will join us there, and if you'll take her
out among the hills she'll show you how to draw a
round brush from one side of the canvas to the
other without letting it turn round in the middle,
leaving a delicious ridge of paint with a lot of little
waggles " '

' But little waggles, my dear Moore, are not '

' JE, we've talked enough about painting for one
afternoon. Come into the garden.'

JE took out his watch ; it was nearly three, he
must be getting back to his office ; but would I tell
the lady that he'd be glad to go out painting with
her any Sunday morning ?

It was sad to lose him, and while walking to the
wicket it seemed to me clear that he was the one
who could restore to me my confidence in life ; and
when he left me, a certain mental sweetness seemed
to have gone out of the air, and, thinking of him, I
began to wonder if he were aware of his own sweet-
ness. It is as spontaneous and instinctive in him
as ... A breath of scent from the lilac bushes
seemed to finish my sentence for me, and it carried
my mind into a little story I had heai-d from Hughes.
He and JE were students together in the Art School
in Dublin, and in a few weeks masters and students
were alike amazed at JE's talent for drawing and
composition ; he sketched the naked model from

30 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

sight with an ease that was unknown to them, and,
turning from the model, he designed a great assembly
of Gods about the shores of the lake renowned in
Celtic tradition. 'Compared with him we seemed
at that time no more than miserable scratchers and
soilers of paper.' Hughes' very words ! Yet, in
spite of an extraordinary fluency of expression,
abundant inspiration, and the belief of the whole
school that a great artist was in him, /E laid aside
his brushes, determined not to pick them up again
until he had mastered the besetting temptation that
art presented at that moment. He feared it as a
sort of self-indulgence which, if yielded to, would
stint his life ; art with him is a means ratlier than
an end ; it should be sought, for by its help we can
live more purely, more intensely, but we must never
forget that to live as fully as possible is, after all,
our main concern ; and he had kno^\Ti this truth
ever since he had defied God on the road to Armagh.
But his life did not take its definite direction until
an Indian missionary arrived in Dublin. It seemed
odd that I should have personal knowledge of this
very Brahmin. Chance had thrown me in his way ; I
had met him in West Kensington, and had fled
before him ; but JE had gone to him instinctively as
to a destiny ; and a few months later the Upanishads
and the Vedas were born again in verse and in
prose — the metrical version better than the prose ;
in the twenties our thoughts run into verse, and
JE's flowed into rhyme and metre as easily as into
line and colour. But, deriving the same pleasure
from the writing of verse as he did from painting,
he was again assailed by scruples of conscience, and

SALVE 31

to free himself from the suspicion that he might be
still living in time rather than in eternity, he charged
his disciples to decide whether he should contribute
essays or poems. It is to their wise decision that
we owe the two inspired volumes The Earth Breath
and Homeward.

As the reader follows my tracing of Ms soul at a
very difficult point in his life, he must be careful to
avoid any inference that M endeavoured to escape
from the sensual will because he believed it to be
the business of everyone to tear it out of his life ; an
intellect suckled on the lore of the East does not
fall into the error of the parish priest, who accepts
chastity as a virtue in itself, thinking that if he
foregoes the pleasure of Bridget's he is free to devote
himself to that of his own belly ; and I smiled, for
in my imagination I could see a Yogi raising his
Oriental eyes in contempt at the strange jargon of
metaphysics that a burly fellow from Connaught,
out of breath from the steep ascent, pours over his
bowl of rice.

My thoughts melted away and I dreamed a long
while, or a moment, I know not which, on the pure
wisdom of the East and our own gi'ossness.

'But of course,' I said, waking up suddenly, 'we
have all to yield something to gain a great deal.
Were it otherwise, Society would come to pieces like
a rotten sponge. The right of property holds good
in all Society ; but in the West ethics invade the
personal life in a manner unknown to the East, so
much so that the Oriental stands agape at our folly,
knowing well that every man brings different
instincts and ideas into the world with him. The

32 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

East says to tlie West, " You prate incessantly about
monogamy, and the fruit of all your labour is a house
divided against itself, for man is polygamous if he is
an}i;hing, and if our deeds go down one set of lines
and our ideas go down another, our lives are wasted,

and in the end "

A sudden thought darting across my mind left my
sentence unfinished, and I asked myself what manner
of man I was. The question had often been asked
before, had always remained unanswered ; but that
day, sitting under my apple-tree, it seemed to me
that I had suddenly come upon the secret lair in
which the soul hides itself. An extraordinarily clear
and inflexible moral sense rose up and confronted
me, and, looking down my past life, I was astonished
to see how dependent my deeds had always been
upon my ideas. I had never been able to do any-
thing that I thought wi'ong, and my conscience had
inspired my books. A Modem Lover is half- forgotten,
but it seems to me that even in those early days I
was interested in the relation of thought and deed.
The Mummer's Wife declines, for she is without
sufficient personal conscience to detach herself from
the conventions in which she has been brought up.
A Drama in Muslin — Holy Mitslin, would be a better
title, ?/« peu mievre cependant — a better one would
be Balblanc . . . the English equivalent is far to
seek, and Esther Waters is the exposition of the
j)ersonal conscience striving against the communal,
and, feeling that I had learned to know myself at
last, I rose from the seat, and looked round, thinking
that in .E as in myself thought and action are at one.
We are alike in essentials, though to the casual

SALVE 33

obsen^er regions apart. . . . But everybody in
Dublin thinks that he is like JE as everybody in the
world thinks he is like Hamlet.

He comes to see me every day between two and
three riding his old bicycle through the gateway ; I
run to the wicket to let him in, and we walk
together to the great apple-tree and sit there talking
of Manet and the immortality of the soul.

It is pleasant to remember these weeks for I was
very happy in these first conversations ; but the
reader knows how impossible it is for me to believe
that anyone likes me for my own sake, and at the
end of a week — my happiness may have lasted half-
way into the second week — at the end of eight or
nine days I was trying to find sufficient reason why
M should seek me out in my garden every afternoon.
It could not be the pleasure of my society that
attracted him. ' He is clearly attracted by some-
thing in me that he has been seeking.' But there
did not seem to be much sense in this, and on think-
ing it over again I hit on the idea that he might be
seeking me because he recognized me as the spiritual
influence that Ireland had been waiting for so long.
He was the only one in Dublin who had shown no
surprise at my coming, and I dreamed on until his
voice called me out of my dream of himself and
myself ; and, as if he had been aware all the time
that I had been thinking about him, he said :

' As soon as you had lived as much of your life as
was necessai-y for you to live in Paris and in London
you were led back to us through Yeats ?'

' No, JE, not through Yeats. At most he was an
instrument, and it is possible to go further back than

c

34 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

him. Martyu was before Yeats. I began to be
interested in Ireland ■when Edward spoke about
writmg liis plays in Irish ; but, like Yeats, he was no
more than an instrument, for neither of them
wanted me to come back. But you did, and some-
how I can't help feeling that you knew I was coming
back. You had read my books, and it was my books,
perhaps, that made you wish for my return. Wish —
not as one wishes to smoke a cigarette, but you
really did want to have me here ?*

' I certainly did wish that England would return
to us some of our men of talent.'

But this wasn't the answer that I wanted.

'What I would like to know, .E, is did you wish
to have me back for my own sake, because you felt
that something was lacking in my books ? Or was it
merely for the sake of Ireland ? I'm afraid the
questions I'm putting to you make me seem very
silly and egotistical, yet I don't feel either.'

' Perhaps Ireland needs you a little.'

* I w'onder. I suppose Ireland needs us all. But
there is something I have never told you — something
I have never told anybody.'

M puffed at his pipe in silence, and I strove
against the temptation to confide in him the story of
the summons I had received on the road to Chelsea.
^'s idea of me was not of one that saw visions orheard
spirit voices, yet he believed me to be the spiritual
influence that Ireland was waiting for. ' How com-
plicated ever^-thing is ! . . . Nothing will be gained
by telling him. I won't tell him.' And I sat asking
myself if I should be able to resist the temptation.
The conversation took a diHerent turn ; I felt

SALVE 35

relieved ; the temptation seemed to have passed
from me, but a few minutes after my story slipped
from my lips as nearly as possible in these words :

' You know that I came over here to publish an
article in The Freeman's Journal about the Boer War,
and the article attracted a great deal of attention ?'
M nodded, and I could see that he was listening
intently. ' If it hadn't been for that article all the
Boers would have been murdered and England would
have saved two hundred million pounds. Providence
has to make a choice of an instrument ; you are
chosen to-day, another to-morrow ; that day I was
the chosen instrument, and on the road to Chelsea,
thinking of this great and merciful Providence, I
heard a voice bidding me back to Ireland. It is
difficult to know for certain what one hears and what
one imagines one has heard ; one's thoughts are
sometimes very loud, but the voice was from without.
I am sure it was, M. Three or four days afterwards
I heard the same words spoken within my ear while
I was lying in bed asleep. But the voice spoke so
distinctly and so clearly that I threw out my arms to
retain the speaker. Nobody was there. Nor is this
all. Very soon afterwards, in my drawing-room in
Victoria Street about eleven o'clock at night, I ex-
perienced an extraordinary desire to pray, which I
resisted for a long time. The temptation proved
stronger than my power to resist it ; and I shall
never forget how I fell forward and buried my face
in the arm-chair and prayed.'
* What prayer did you say ?'
' One can pray without words, surely ?'
' When the hooker that was taking Yeats over to

36 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

Aran or takiui^ him back to Gahvay was caught in a
storm Yeats fell upon his knees and tried to say a
prayer ; but the nearest tiling to one he could think
of was " Of man's first disobedience and the fruit,"
and he spoke as much of Paradise Lost as he could
remember.'

' But, yE, you either believe or you don't believe
what I say.'

* I can quite understiind that you're deeply in-
terested in the voice you heard, or think you heard ;
but our concern isn't so much with it as with the fact
that you have been brought back to Ireland.'

A cloud then seemed to come between us, and out
of this cloud 1 heard /E saying that if he were to tell
people that all his drawings were done from sittings
given to him by the gods, it would be easy for him
to sell every stroke he put on canvas, and to pass
himself off as a very wonderful person.

' But your drawings are done from sittings given
to you by the gods. I remember your telling me
that three stood at the end of your bed looking at
you one morning.'

' Three great beings came to my bedside, but I
cannot tell you if I saw them directly, as I see you
(if I see you directly), or whether I saw them re-
flected as in a mirror. In either case they came from
a spiritual world.'

' A vision was vouchsafed to you. Why not to
me ?'

*I don't disj)ute the authenticity of your vision, my
dear Moore. Why should 1 ? How could 1 even
wish to disj)ute it? On what grounds ?'

' But you seem to doubt it ?'

SALVE 37

' No. A vision is the personal concern of the
visionary.'

' No more ! Who sent the vision ? Whose voice
did I hear ? An angel's ?'

'Angels are Jehovah's messengers and apparitors.
And this I can say : the gods that inspired your coming
were not Asiatic'

' No, indeed ; I long ago disassociated myself from
the Asiatic gods, to whom the English are praying
that strength may be given them to destroy the
Boers quickly and at little cost — a poor little nation,
no bigger than Connaught ! England became so
beastly that I had to come away. The lust for blood
was in everybody's face. If the news came in that
five hundred Boers were taken prisoners faces
darkened, and brightened if the news were that five
hundred had been killed. England has made me
detest Christianity. . . . Born in the amphitheatre,
it didn't leave it without acquiring a taste for blood,
and the newspapers are filled with scorn of Kruger
because he reads the Bible. Think of it, JE !
Because he reads his Bible !'

' But don't think of it, my dear Moore.'

' It would be better not, for when I do life seems
too shameful to be endured. . . . The Bishops of
York and Canterbury praying to Jesus or to His
Father — which ?'

' Probably to His Father. But go on with your
story.'

' What story ?'

' The message that you received didn't come round
to you by way of Judaea.'

' No, indeed, the gods that inspired me are among

38 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

our native divinities. Angus, so far as I know him,
seems to have been kind and compassionate. So far
as I know, his clergy never ordered that anyone
should be burnt at the stake for holding that it was
not the kisses but the songs of the birds circling
about his forehead that created love. All the same,
the Druids '

No one may speak ill of the Druids in JE's
presence, and he told me that he did not know of
any mention in Irish legends of human sacrifices, and
if there had been, the Christian revisei's of the
legends would not have failed to mention them.

' You loVe the Druids,' I said, looking into his
calm and earnest face. ' When you were earning
fifty pounds a year in Pim's shop you used to go to
Bray Head and address a wondering crowd ! Standing
on a bit of broken wall, all your hair flowing in the
wind, you cried out to them to return to the kind,
compassionate gods that never ordered burnings in
the market-place, and I don't see why, JE, we should
not go forth together and preach the Danaan
divinities, north, south, east, and west. You shall
be Paul. Barnabas quarrelled with Paul. I'll be
Luke and take down your words.'

' It would be your own thoughts, my dear Moore,
that you would be rej)orting, not mine ; and, though
Ireland stands in need of a new religion '

' And a new language. One is no good without
the other.'

We fell to talking of the Irish language, I main-
taining that it would be necessary to revive it, JE
thinking that the Anglo-Irish idiom would be
sufficient for literature, until the thought emerged

SALVE 39

that perhaps it might have been Diarmuid tliat bade
me to Ireland.

' I'd Hke to see the cromlechs under which the
lovers slept^ but I don't know where to find them.'

Ni answered that at Whitsuntide he would have
three or four days' holiday, and proposed to visit the
sacred places with me.

'We'll seek the ancient divinities of the Gael to-
gether.' Sj pulled out his watch and said he must
be going, and we strolled across the greensward to
the wicket. 'The ash will be in leaf the day we
start. I hope, R, that nothing will happen to pre-
vent us ' ; and I jumped out of bed every morning to
see if the promise were for a fine or a wet day.

I had arrived in Ireland in March ; it was raining
then, but the weather had taken a turn in the
middle of April; the fifteenth was the first fine day,
and ever since the days had played in the garden
like children, shadows of apple-trees and lilac-bushes
moving over the sweet grass with skies of ashen blue
overhead fading into a dim, creamy pink in the South
and East. The hawthorns were in full leaf, and
among the little metallic leaves white and pink stars
had just begun to appear, and the scent of these
floated after us, for no sinister accident had happened.
Ri called for me as he had promised, and we went
away together on bicycles — myself on a new machine
bought for the occasion, R on the old one that he
has ridden all over Ireland, from village to village,
establishing co-operative creameries and banks.
And side by side we rode together through the early
streets to Amiens Street Station, where we took
second-class tickets to Drogheda — an hour's journey

10 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

from Dublin. At Droghcda we jumped on our
bicycles a^ain ; two tramjjs we were that day, en-
joying the wide world, and so intoxicating was the
sunlight that it was with difficulty I kept myself
from calling to JE that I felt certain the Gods would
answer us. I would have done this if a river had
not been passing by, and such a pretty river — a
brook rather than a river.
* M, JE, look and admire it !'

A few minutes afterwards our brook or river
acquired such a picturesqueness that perforce he
jumped from his bicycle and unslung his box of
pastels which he wore over his shoulder.

'Trees,' he said, 'emerging like vapours,' and
while he discovered the drawing of a brook purling
round many a miniature isle between low mossy
banks, I lay beside him, forgetful of everything but
the faint stirring of the breeze in the willows and
the song of a bird in the reeds — a reed-warbler no
doubt ; and while I lay wondering if the bird were
really a warbler, JE finished his jiastel. He leaned
it against a tree, looked at it, and asked me if I
liked it. . . . It was a spiritual seeing of the world,
and I told him that no one had ever seen Nature
more beautifully. He put his picture into his port-
folio, I put mine into my memory, and we went away
on our bicycles through the pretty neglected country
until we came to a grey bridge standing thirty,
perhaps fifty, feet above the shallow river ; the
beauty of its slim arches compelled me to dismount,
and, leaning on the parapet, I sbirted this lamen-
tation :

* No more stone bridges will be built, JE. It has

SALVE 41

come to this, that a crack in one of those arches will
sujiply a zealous county councillor with a pretext for
an iron bridge. The pleasure of these modern days
is to tear down beautiful yesteryear.'

' No arch will fall within the next ten years/ M
answered. ' Admire the bridge without troubling
yourself as to what its fate will be when you are
gone.'

JE's optimism is delightful, but, while approving it,
I could not keep back the argument that a mountain
fails to move our sympathies, for it is always with us,
whereas a cloud curls and uncurls and disappears.

' We cling to life because it is for ever slipping
from us. Don't you think so ? It is strange, M,
that, although you know more poetry by heart than
anyone I ever met, I have never heard you repeat a
verse fi'om Omar Khayyam. You love what is per-
manent, M, and believe yourself immortal. That is
why, perhaps, Shelley's Hymn to Pan is for you the
most beautiful l^Tic in the world. Do say it again
— "Sileni and Fauns" and that lovely line ending
"moist river lawns." One sees it all — something
about Tempe outgrowing the light of the dying day.
Say it all over again, M.'

He repeated the verses as we ascended the hill.

' Look at that hound !'

He came towards us, trotting amiably, gambolling
now and again for sheer pleasure. The loneliness of
the road had awakened the affection that his nature
was capable of. He leaned himself up against me ;
his paws rested upon my shoulders ; I fondled the
silken ears and he yawned, perha})s because he
wished me to admire his teeth — beautiful they were

42 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

and skilfully designed for their purpose, to seize and
to tear.

'Yet, JE, his eyes are gentle. Tell me, is his soul
in his eyes or in these fangs ?'

' My dear Moore, you've been asking me questions
since eight o'clock this morning ' ; and we all three
went on together till we reached a farmhouse in
which the hound lived with an old woman. She
told us that he had been brought to her very ill.

' It was distemper, but I brought him through it,
and now they'll soon be taking him from me. And
you'll be sorry to leave me, won't you, Sampson ?'

The dog put his long nose into her hand.

'At the end of September,' I said to M, 'he'll be
taken away to scent out foxes with his brethren in
the woods over yonder, and to lead them across the
green plains, for he is a swift hound. Don't you
think he is ? But you Avon't look at him. If he
were called Bran or Lomaire '

We hopped on our bicycles and rode on till we
came to a great river with large sloping banks,
covered with pleasant turf and shadowed by trees.
M told me that the river we were looking at was the
famous Boyne, and he pointed out the monument
erected in conmiemoration of the battle.

' The beastly English won that battle. If they'd
only been beaten !'

We rode on again until we came to a road as
straight as an arrow stretching indefinitely into the
country with hedges on cither side — a tiresome road
and so commonplace that the suspicion entered my
mind that this journey to Meath was but a practical
joke, and that M. would lead me up and down these

SALVE 43

roads from morning till noon^ from noon till evening,
and then would burst out laughing in my face ; or,
perhaps, by some dodge he would lose me and return
to Dublin alone with a fine tale to tell about me.
But such a trick would be a mean one, and there
is no meanness in JE. Besides the object of the
journey was a search for Divinity. M does not joke
on sacred subjects. So I rode in silence until a
woman appeared with candles and matches in her
hand.

' But why should we light candles in broad day-
light, JE ? There isn't a cloud in the sky.'

JE told me to buy a candle and a box of matches
and follow him across the stile, Avhich I did, and
down a field until we came to a hole in the ground,
and in the hole was a ladder. He descended into
it and, fearing to show the white feather, I stepped
down after him. At twenty feet from the surface he
went on his hands and knees and began to crawl
through a passage narrow as a burrow. I crawled
behind him, and, after crawling for some yards, found
myself in a small chamber about ten feet in height
and ten in width. A short passage connected it with
a larger chamber, perhaps twenty feet in width and
height, and built of great unhewn stones leaned
together, each stone jutting a little in front of the
other till they almost met, a large flat stone covering
in the vault.

' And it was here,' I said, ' that the ancient tribes
came to do honour to the great divinities — tribes, but
not savage tribes, for these stones were placed so
that not one ' has changed its place though four
thousand years have gone by. Look, JE, at this

44 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

great hollowed stone. Maybe many a sacrificial rite
has been perforEied in it.'

M did not answer this remark, and I regretted
having made it, for it seemed to betray a belief that
the Druids had indulged in blood sacrifice, and, to
banish the thought from Ms mind, I asked him if he
could read the strange designs scribbled ujjon the
walls.

' The spot within the first circle is the earth and
the first circle is the sea ; the second circle is the
heavens, and the third circle the Infinite Lir, the
God over all Gods, the great fate that surrounds
mankind and (iodkind.'

' Lfet us sit down,' I said, ' and talk of the
mysteries of the Druids, for they were here for
certain ; and, as nothing dies, ^, something remains
of tiiem and of the demigods and of the Gods.'

' The Druids,' he answered, ' refrained from com-
mitting their mysteries into writing, for writing is
the source of heresies and confusions, and it was not
well that the folk should discuss Divine things
among themselves ; for them the arts of war and
the chase, and for the Druids meditation on eternal
things. But there is no doubt that the Druids were
well instructed in the heavens ; and the orientiition
of the stones that surround their temples implies
elaborate calculations. At the same hour every
year the sun shines through certain apertures.'

' But, M, since nothing dies, and all things are as
they have ever been, the Gods should a])pear to us,
for we believe in them, and not in the gods that
men have brought from Asia. Angus is more real
to me than Christ. Why should he not appear to

SALVE 45

me, his worshipper ? I am afraid to call upon
Manaanan or on Dana, but do you make appeal.'

JE acquiesced, and he soon was on the ground, his
legs tucked under him like a Yogi, waiting for the
vision, and, not knowing what else to do, I withdrew
to the second chamber, and ventured to call upon
Angus, Diarmuid's father, that he or his son might
show himself to me. There were moments when it
seemed that a divine visitation was about to be
vouchsafed to me, and I strove to concentrate all my
thoughts upon him that lives in the circle that
streams about our circle. But the great being
within the light that dawned faded into nothingness.
Again I strove ; my thoughts were gathered up, and
all my soul went out to him, and again the darkness
lightened. ' He is near me ; in another moment he
will be by me.' But that moment did not come,
and, fearing my presence in the tomb might en-
danger ^'s chance of converse with the Immortals,
I crept along the passage and climbed into the upper
air and lay down, disappointed at my failure, thinking
that if I had tried a third time I might have seen
Angus or Diarmuid. There are three cii-cles, and it
is at the third call that he should appear. But it
would be useless to return to the tomb ; Angus
would not gratify so weak a worshipper with vision,
and my hopes were now centred in JE, who was
doubtless in the midst of some great spiritual ad-
venture which he Avould tell me presently.

The sun stood overhead, and never shall I forget
the stillness of that blue day, and the beauty of the
blue silence with no troublesome lark in it ; a very
faint blue when I raised my eyes, fading into grey.

46 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

perhaps with some pink colour behind the distant
trees — >i sky nowise more remarkable in colour than
any piece of faded silk, but beautiful because of the
light that it shed over the green undulations, greener
than any I had seen before, yet without a harsh tone
in it, softened by a delicate haze, trees emerging like
vapours just as JE had painted them. And lying in
the warm grass on the tumulus, the green country
unfolded before my eyes, mile after mile, dreaming
under the sun, half asleep, half awake, trees breaking
into leaf, hedgerows into leaf and flower, long herds
winding knee-deep in succulent herbage. It is
wonderful to sit on a tumulus and see one's own
country under a divine light. An ache came into my
heart, and a longing for the time when the ancient
Irish gathered about the tumulus on which I was
lying to celebrate the marriage of earth and sky.
On days as beautiful as this day they came to make
thanksgiving for the return of the sun ; and as I saw
them in my imagination arrive with their Druids, two
opaque-looking creatures, the least spiritual of men,
with nothing in their heads but some ignorant
Christian routine, lifted their bicycles over the style.

' They're not going to descend into the sacred
places !' I said. ' They shall not interrupt ^'s
vision ; they shall not !'

As they approached me I saw that they had
candles and matches in their hands, and, resolved at
any cost to save the tomb from sacrilege, I strove to
detain them with speech about the beauty of the
summer-time and the endless herbage in which kine
were fattening. ' Fattening ' was the word I used,
thuiking to interest them.

SALVE 47

' The finest fattening land in all Ireland,' one of
them said, ' but we're going below.'

I should have told them the truth, that a great
poet, a great painter, and a great seer was, in their
own phraseology, ' below,' and it might be that the
Gods would vouchsafe a vision to him. Would they
be good enough to wait till he ascended ? Mere
Christian brutes they were, approvers of the Boer
War, but they might have been persuaded to talk
with me for ten or fifteen minutes ; they might have
been persuaded to sit upon the mound if I had told
them the truth. I leaned over the opening, listening,
hoping their bellies might stick in the narrow passage ;
but as they seemed to have succeeded in passing
through, I returned to the tumulus hopeless. ' The
Gods will not shoAv themselves while Presbyterian
ministers are about ; M will not stay in the tomb with
them ' ; and at every moment I expected to see him
rise out of the earth. But it was the ministers who
appeared a few minutes afterwai'ds, and, blowing out
their candles in the blue daylight, they asked me if
I had been below.

' I have been in the temple,' I answered.

' Did you see the fellow below ?'

' I'm waiting for him — a great writer and a great
painter,' I answered indignantly.

' Is it a history he's brooding down there ?' one of
them asked, laughing ; and I lay down on the warm
grass thinking of the pain their coarse remarks must
have caused M. He came out of the hill soon after.
It was just as I had expected. The vision was about
to aj)pear, but the clergymen had interrupted it, and
when they left the mood had passed.

48 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

Ill

As we rode to Newgrange along smooth roads,
between tall hedges, the green undulating country
flowing on either side melting into grey distances,
jE told me that we should see at Newgrange the
greater temples of the Druids ; and through his
discourses the hope glimmered that perhaps we
might be more fortunate at Newgrange than we had
been at Dowth. It was only reasonable that the
Gods should show themselves to us if they deemed
us wortliy, and if we were not worthy — JE at least —
who were worthy among living men ? The Presby-
terian ministers would be absent from Newgrange ;
and we rode on, JE thinking of Angus and his
singing birds, myself of Midir at the feast among
the sj)ears and tlie wine-cups, his arm round Etain,
the two passing through the window in the roof,
and how all that the host assembled below saw was
two white swans circling in the air above the palace.

' Whither did they go, JE ?'

' Did who go ?' he answered.

' Etaui and Midir.'

' Towards the fairy mountains of Slievenamon, and
on the lake there Etain rtjoint-d her kindred.'

' A beautiful story,' I replied. ' Tell me another,
for these legends beguile the monotony of endless
roads and hedges ' ; and, seeing JE hesitate at the
next cross-roads, I said : ' JE, I'm sure you don't
know the way. Hadn't we better ask ?'

Whom to ask was the question, for no living being
seemed to inhabit the green wilderness. If we

SALVE 49

came upon a cottage it was locked^ the herdsman
being, without doubt, away, opening gates, changing
his cattle from pasture to pasture. We rode mile after
mile, seeking somebody who could guide us, until
at last we came to a ruined dwelling, and a curious
one — not exactly a cabin, for it was built of brick
and stood above the level of the road. A rubble heap
had to be scaled to reach the one room that remained,
and it was in this lonely tenement that we found
our guide, a child of seven or eight, dressed in a
little shirt and an immense pair of trousers, which
he hitched up from time to time, a sharp-witted
little fellow, and as alert as a terrier.

' You've come out of your road altogether and
will have to go back a couple of miles. Or maybe
it'd be best for you to go on up this road till you
come to the big hill beyant, and then turn to your
left.'

The little fellow took our fancy, and, as we were
leaving, we turned back to ask him if he were living
alone. He said his mother lived with him, but she
went out every day to the neighbours to try to get a
bit!

' But there are no neighbours. We've seen nobody
and have ridden many miles.' The little fellow
looked puzzled, and, on pressing him to say where
his mother had gone, he mentioned the name of some
town which JE told me was twenty miles away.
' Can your mother walk twenty miles ?'

' Faith she can, sir, and back again.'

' And she leaves you all alone ?'

We gave him a slice of bread and butter, which he
held in his hand, not daring to eat in our presence.

D

50 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

We pressed him to eat. and he took a bite timidly,
and moved away hke a shy animal. As a slice of
bread and butter did not seem to us to be a sufficient
reward for his directions to Newgrange, I felt in my
pocket for a shilling, and asked him how much his
mother brought back ■with her.

' Sometimes a few coppers.'

His eyes lit up when I handed him the shilling,
and he said :

' That'll buy us two grand dinners ; she won't
have to be going away again for a long time.'

' You don't like your mother to leave you here all
day long ?' Agam the little fellow seemed unwilling
to answer us. ' But she'll be coming back to-night ?'

' She will if she don't get a sup too much.'

' And if she does you'll stay here all night by
yourself ? Aren't you afraid all alone at night ?'

' I am when the big dog does come.'

' What dog ?'

' A mad dog. He does wake me up out of my
bed.' We looked and saw his bed, a few rags in a
comer,

' But the dog doesn't come into the room ?'

' No ; but I do be hearing him tearing the stones
outside.'

' And do you ever see him ?'

' When he gets up there I do/ and he pointed to
the broken wall. ' He was up there last night and
he looking down at me, and his eyes red as fire, and
his hair all stuck up agin the moon.'

' What did you do ?'

' I got down under the clothes.'

' A nightmare,' I whispered to JE. ' But if the

SALVE 51

dog be mad/ I said to the little chap, ' he shouldn't
be allowed to run about the country. He ought to
be shot. Why don't the police ?'

' How could they shoot him and he dead already ?'

' But if he be dead how is that he comes up on the
rafters ?'

' I dunno, sir.'

' Whose dog is it ?'

' Martin Spellacy ownded him.' And we learned
that Martin Spellacy lived about a mile down the
road [and had bought the dog at Drogheda to guard
his orchard which was robbed every year ; but the
dog turned out to be a sleepy old thing that no one
was afraid of, and the apples were robbed every year
until the dog died.

* Then wei'e they robbed no longer ?'

' No, because they do be afeard of his ghost ; he's
in the oi'chard every night, a terrible black baste, and
nobody Avould go within a mile of that orchard as
soon as the dark evening comes on.'

' But if the ghost is in the orchard watching, how
is it that he comes here ?'

The little fellow looked at me with a puzzled stare,
and answered that he didn't know, but accepted the
suggestion that ghosts could be in two places at once.
We rode away, a little overcome at the thought of the
child asleep that night among the i*ags in the corner,
fearing every moment lest the dog should appear on
the rafters. But we couldn't take him with us ; and
we bicycled on, thinking of his strange story, how
Martin Spellacy's apples were better watched over
by the ghost of a dog than by a real dog, until we
came to a part of the road shaded by trees, and we

52 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

got off our bicycles and went througli a gate into a
drove-way. I can see the trees and the gateway
quite clearly ; there must have been a drove-way,
and when 1 rub my memory a cottage begins to
appear. A woman comes from the cottage and I
hear her — the simile of the i)icture no longer holds
good ; memory retains sound as well as colour. I
hear her saying :

' You won't be writing your names on the stones ?'

* On the sacred stones !' I answered.

' Well, you see, sir, tourists do be coming from all
parts, and my orders are to get a promise from
everyone visiting the cave not to write on the walls.
Of course, one can't be knowing everybody that
comes here, but I'm sure that no gentleman like you
would be doing such a thing.'

' Don't stay to expostulate,' and M took me by
the arm, and we jiassed out of the shadow of the
trees into the blue daylight. A little to the left was
the tuuuilus, a small hill overgrown with hazel and
blackthorn thickets, with here and there a young
ash coming into leaf. On all sides great stones
stood on end, or had fallen, and I would have stayed
to examine the carvings or the scratches with which
these were covered, but i'E pointed to the entrance
of the temple — a triangular opening, something no
larger than a fox's or a badger's den ; and I went
down on my hands and knees, remembering that we
had not come to Newgrange to investigate but to
evoke.

And in the tumulus we remained upwards of an
hour, and on leaving it we climbed through the
thickets, plucking the tall grasses, mentally tired and

SALVE 53

and humbled in spirit. The Gods had not answered
our prayers. It could not have been because they
deemed us unworthy that they had not sliown
themselves, but because of some hostile j^resence !
But we were alone ! Could the Gods, then, be
looking upon me as hostile ! If they did they must
know very little about the human heart. The
wisdom of the Gods may not be questioned ; and I
listened to a robin that was singing in a blackthorn,
thinking that the Druids had listened to it. And,
stepping over the stones that our ancestors had
placed so cunningly that they had lasted for four
thousand yeai's at least, I asked JE whence the
stones had come, for we had not passed anything
like a quarry since early morning.

Our talk very likely branched into some learned
discussion regarding the antiquity of man. On such
occasions one mutters to one's fellow that about a
million years ago man separated himself from the
ape ; but my memory is like an old picture, and on
certain places Time's shadows fall heavily, and I
have forgotten everything that happened after we
descended the hillside, until JE and I sat down in
front of the temple to munch bread and butter. A
restless fellow, for no sooner were the slices finished
than he began to sketch the stones ; and I remember
thinking that it was as well he had an occupation,
for one cannot talk in front of a Druid temple four
thousand years old.

The same landscape lay before me as had astonished
me at Dowth, the same green wilderness ; groups
of trees had been added to the foreground some
hundred yards away, but beyond them were the

54 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

same green iiiidiilations. The slender green land-
scape lay under a heavy, sulky summer-time, her
bosom swelling into womanhood ; in another month
the landscape would be all luigainly and melancholy
as a woman with child. ... A numbness stole upon
my eyelids, and I began to see the strange folk
plainer, coming in procession to the altar headed
by the Druids. Ireland was w'onderful then . . .
and, opening my eyes, Ireland seemed wonderful in
the blue morning that hung about her, unfolding
like a flower — a great blue convolvulus hanging
above the green land, swelling like the sea. My
eyes closed again. It seemed to me that I could
dream for ever of the Gods, and the mysteries or
Time, and the changes in the life of Man, of the
listless beauty of the sky above, fading imperceptibly
as the hours went by. ' Roseate grey and purple,'
I said, coming into it. My eyes closed and dreams
began, and when my eyes opened again and I looked
out across the country, a giant outline showed
through the sun-haze miles away.

' Has Angus risen to greet us, or MacLir come up
from the sea?' I said, pointing. ' That wasn't there
an hour ago.'

The giant outline grew clearer, and, shading his
eyes with his hand, M studied it for a long time.

' It's Tara,' he said, ' that you're looking at. On
a clear evening Tara can be seen from Newgrange.'

'Tara, /E ! Tara aj^pearing in })erson to him who
is relatuig the story of her lovers. A sign from the
Gods, iE ! I'm sure and certain that there is more
in this apparition than accidental weather !'

I started to my feet, and at that moment sounds

SALVE 55

of voices called me back again to 1901 . . . the
clergymen were coming through the gate, and
askance we watched them cross the field and go
down on their hands and knees. We did not hope
exactly against hope, for the larger failed to squeeze
himself through the stones and came towards us.

' Let us go, JE.'

^Yes, let us go to Tara and escape from these
Chi'istian belly -gods.'

' But Tara lies out of our road some twenty miles,'
M objected as we rode away.

' But the Gods have shown Tara to us because
they await us.'

' It isn't there that they'd be waiting for us/ M
answered, and when I asked him why he thought
we should be more likely^ to meet the Gods else-
where, he told me that he did not remember that
the Gods had ever been seen at Tara.

' And therefore you thmk that the apparition of
the hill as we lay among the cromlechs was acci-
dental ? Of course you know best ; but even
though the hand of Providence be not in it, I'd like
to go to Tara, for then I could get a glimpse of the
great plains about the hill into my dialogue.'

JE did not think that descriptions of Nature should
enter very largely into this play, and he said that
any allusions to the woods that Grania roamed with
Laban should be drawn from my knowledge of
Nature rather than from any particular observation
of a particular place.

' No one can imagine a landscape that he has not
seen, JE.'

' All my best landscapes come to me in a vision.

56 'HAIL AND FAREWELL?'

Last niglit I saw giants rolling great stones up a
hillside with intent to destroy a city.'

' Perhaps the hillside you saw was Tara.'

' No/ he said, ' it wasn't. Tara was not destroyed
by giants but by an ecclesiastic.'

' And therefore was worthless,' I muttered. And
we talked a long while of the monk that had walked
round Tara, ringing a bell and cursing the city,
which was then abandoned and Ireland given over
to division — ' whicli has endured ever since,' I added.
^'E admitted that this memory of Tara did not endear
the hill to him, but that was not his reason for not
wishing to go there.

' It is at least twenty miles from here,' he said,
' and I don't think there's an iini on this side, nor
am I sure that there is one on the other. We would

have to sleep at ' and he mentioned the name of

some village which 1 have forgotten. ' But Mon-
asterboice is only six miles from here, and the
herdsman's wife will be able to give us tea and
bread and butter.'

I remember a man telling me that he had gone to
Wales to track Borrow from village to village. ' I
shall not be accused by anyone,' he said, ' of lacking
S3'mpathy for any place visited by Borrow, but all I
remember of my walk from Caernarvon to Ethel-
gebert is that the beer at Ethelgebert was the best
I ever drank.' This story has always seemed to me
so human that I am now tempted to fit it into this
narrative, turning excellent beer into tea so delicious
that its flavour lingers for ever in the palate. But if
I were to introduce a thread of fiction into this
narrative, the weft would be torn asunder ; and

SALVE 57

anyone who knows me at all would not believe that
in a cup of tea^ however delicious, I could drink
oblivion of the lonely ruins of the great abbey
through which we wandered one evening. In the
hallowed light of a dying day, voices seemed to
whisper ajjout the arches, the infoliated capitals, and
the worn and broken carvings. The darkness of
time seemed to lighten, and we saw monks reading
and painting in their cells. Within our sight one
rose, delighted, from the Scriptures — he had suc-
ceeded in clearing up in a gloss an obscure point
that had troubled him for years. We watched
another bent over a pattern of endless complexity ;
his hand moved over the parchment quickly and
surely ; and in the ghostly silence of the ruins, we
heard the mutter of a monk scanning a poem, a
saint, no doubt, that had begun to weary of the
promiscuousness of a great monastery, and was
meditating further retirement from the world. We
rode away, thinking that his poem was in praise of
some lake island, whither he would go, like Marban.
JE remembered some of Marban's lines, and he told
me that they were written in the halcyon days
in which Ireland lay dreaming, century after century,
arriving gradually at the art of the jeweller, the
illuminator, and the carver of symbols. Marban is a
great jioet ; the lines JE repeated to me are as native
as the hazels under which the poet lived, and as
sweet as the nuts he gathered from the bi'anches.

Unlike Borrow's admirer, we rode forgetful of the
excellence of the tea that the herdsman's wife had
set before us, full of dreams of a forgotten civilization,
each maintaining to the other that the art of ancient

58 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

Ireland must have been considerable, since a little
handful has come doA\ni to us, despite the ravening
Dane, and the Norman, worse than the Dane ; for
the Dane only destroyed, whereas the Norman came
with a new culture, and just when Ireland was begin-
ning to realize herself. If he had come a few
centuries later, we should have had an art as original
as the Chinese. Ireland would have found her voice,
but now Ireland will never be able to justify her
existence, for small countries are being absorbed one
after the other, and great empires are intellectually
sterile. Italy, mistress of the world, produced no
art worth speaking about, but when Italy was divided
into numberless small states, she outstripped all
nations in genius, all except Greece. ' Florence
compares with Athens, Michael Angelo, Donatello,
Andrea del Sarto, Leonardo da Vinci, and how many
more ? There can be no doubt, IE, tliat Empire is
fatal to art. England produced Shakespeare, and
the British Empire the six-shilling novel. Think,
JE, of living in a world without art ?' And the
thought was so painful that I could not speak again.

The miles flowed under our wheels. We had
come so far that it seemed as if we might go on for
another hundred miles without feeling tired, and
the day, too, seemed as if it could not tire and darken
into night. There Avas no sign of night in the sky,
but the earth was darkening under the tall liedges ;
we passed a girl driving her cows homeward. She
drew her sliawl over her liead, and I said that I
remembered having seen her long ago in Mayo, and
JE answered, ' Before the tumuli, she was.'

We cycled mile after mile, descending the great

SALVE 59

road that leads into Droglieda, and as we came down
the hill we saw the lamps in the main street ; all the
rest of the town was lost in shadow, and beyond the
town a blue background, as likely as not the sea
... if Drogheda be a seaport town.

IV

' You've punctured !' IE said, and I could see that
he looked upon the incident as ominous. ' I can
mend your puncture for you, but perhaps the quickest
way will be to go back ; the shop isn't more than a
quarter of a mile from here.'

And in it we met a young man, who advanced to
meet us on long, thin legs, his blue, Celtic eyes full
of inquiry ; after listening, I thought sympathetically,
to my mishap (he was really thinking of something
else) he asked me what he could do for me, and, on
my telling him again that I had punctured, he seemed
to wake up sufficiently to call his partner, a thick-
set man, who seized my machine and told me that
he was just tightening a gentleman's wheel for
him, but it wouldn't take more than a coujDle of
minutes. In a quarter of an hour . . . could I wait
that long ?

He spoke with a Lancashire burr, and I began to
wonder how the Celt and the Saxon had come
together, so different were they, and why the red-
headed Celt lingered about the shop instead of going
to the help of his fellow. And it was to escape from
unpleasant thoughts of my country's idleness that I
asked him if the language movement was making

60 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

profjross in Duiulalk ; but wlien he told me that a
branch of the Gaelic League liad been sfcirted about
two years ago, and that he was a constant attendant
at the classes, I apologized to him, inwardly, for a
hasty judgment, and, seeing in him, perhaps, a future
apostle, I commenced preaching. A few {)eople had
iust dropped in for a chat after dinner, and taking
for my text the words that I had heard spoken on
the road to Chelsea, I said :

' A few days after the voice spoke to me again,
this time not out of the clouds, but within a few
inches of my ear, and the words that it spoke were,
"Go to Ireland, go to Ireland," and not long after
this second revelation, a force completely outside of
myself, compelled me to fall upon my knees, and I
prayed for the first time for many years. But it was
not to any Christian God that I prayed.'

ffa looked up, hoping, no doubt, that I would not
shock the young man's Catholic susceptibilities to the
point of his asking me to leave his shop; and, thinking
that in saying I had not prayed to a Christian God I
had said enough, I admitted that the future religion
of Ireland was not our business, but one for the next
generation to settle. Our business was to revive the
Irish language, for the soul of Ireland was implicit
in it, and, ))ulling out of my pocket a copy of the
Claidheam Soltiis, I described the aims and ambitions
of the paper. But a cloud came into the young
man's face and into the faces of the three or four
people present, whom I invited to subscribe to it,
and the thought dashed through my mind that I was
being mistaken for an advertising agent, and to
remove such sordid suspicion I told them that I liad

SALVE 61

no pecunuary interest in the paper whatever, but was
working for the language of our forefathers, and to
support this paper (the organ of the League) seemed
to me part of the work I had been sent to do in
Ireland. The best way to do this was by getting
advertisements for the paper, and my way of getting
advertisements was simple and advantageous to all
parties. I had rented a house in Dublin. The root
was leaking, and a builder had to be called in ; he
had been given the job of repairing the roof on con-
dition that he advertised in the Claidheain Solids.
The upholsterer had furnished my house under the
same conditions, and as soon as I came to live in it I
had gone to the butcher, the grocer, the chandler,
the green-grocer, the apothecary, the baker, the
tailor, the draper, the boot-maker : " You shall have
my custom if you advertise in the Claidheain Sobiis.
. . . And you, sir, having bicycles to sell, might
like to do business with me on the same terms.'

The young Celt agreed that he would like to do
business with me, but, being somewhat slow-witted,
said he must refer the matter to his partner.

' But why refer it to your partner ?' I answered.
* Everybody will advertise if he is sure of getting
custom. I am the only advertising agent in the
world who can insure a speedy return for the money
laid out.'

As the young man hesitated, IE took me aside and
reminded me that my method was not as applicable
to bicycles as to furniture and food, for if I were to
buy a bicycle every time I punctured I should have
more machines on my hands than it would be possible
for me to ffnd use for.

62 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

' If you'll be good enough to wait till my partner
comes back/ chimed in the young Celt, ' I'll be able
to give you your answer.*

And when the Lancashire man came in with the
bicycle on liis shoulder, the conditions of sale were
explained to him (conditions which I could see by
the jjartner's face, he was quite willing to accept).

' We shan't get to Slievegullion to-day if you don't
hasten/ IE said ; but the Lancashire man, loath to lose
a chance of sellmg a bicycle, sent the young Celt
along with us, the pretext being to put us on the
right road ; and we all three pedalled away together,
myself riding in the middle, explaining to the young
Celt that language wears out like a coat, and just as
a man has to change his coat when it becomes thread-
bare, a nation has to change its language if it is to
produce a new literature. There could be no doubt
about this. Italy had produced a new literature
because Italy had changed her language ; whereas
Greece had not changed hers, and there was no
literature in Greece, and there could be none until
the modern language had separated itself sufficiently
from the ancient.

The young man seemed to wish to intei'pose a
a remark, but I dashed into a new theory. Ideas
were climatic ; the climate of Ireland had produced
certain modes of thought, and these could only
transpire in the language of the country, for of course
language is only the echo of the mind. The young
man again tried to interpose a remark, and JE tried,
too, but neither succeeded in getting heard, for it
seemed to me of primary importance to convince the
young man that literary genius depended upon the

SALVE 63

language as much as upon the writer, and Ireland
was })roof of it, for, though Irishmen had been speak-
ing English for centuries, they liad never mastered
that language.

' If Irishmen would only read English literature,
but they read the daily paper,' JE shouted from the
other side of the road.

' But, iE, a nation reads the literature that itself
produces. Ireland cannot be as much interested in
Shakespeare as England is, or in the Bible, Ireland
having accepted the Church of Rome, and the two
ways of learning English are through the Bible and
Shakespeare.'

' But there is an excellent Irish translation of the
Bible, nearly as good as the English Bible,' and JE
appealed to the young Celt, who admitted that he
had heard that Bedell's Bible was in very good Irish.
' But it isn't read in the classes.'
* And why isn't it read in the classes ?' I asked,
" Well, you see, it was done by a Protestant.'
I screamed at him that it was ridiculous to reject
good Irish because a Protestant wrote it.
' You are a native speaker, sir ?'
' No,' I answered, ' I don't know any Irish.'
The young man gazed at me, and JE began to
laugh.

' You should begin to learn, and I hope you
won't mind taking this little book from me ; it
is O'Growney's. I am in the fifth. And now,' he
said, ' I don't think I can go any farther with you.
The cromlech — you can't miss it when you come to
the first gate on the left.'

He left us so abruptly that I could not return the

6t 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

book to him, and had to put it into ray pocket ; and
the incident amused JE until we came to a gate
about half a mile up the roadj which we passed
throusrh, coming upon the altar of our forefathers
in the middle of a large green field — a great rock
poised upon three or four upright stones, nine or
ten feet high, and one stone worn away at the base,
but rebuilt by some pious hand, for the belief abides
that Diarmuid and Grania slept under the cromlech
in their flight from Finn.

'Traditions are often more truthful than scripts,'
JE said, and, believing in this as in ever)i;hing he
says, I walked round the cromlech three times, pray-
ing, and when my devotions were finished, I returned
to JE, who was putting the last touches to a beautiful
drawing of the altar, a little nervous lest he should
question me as to the prayers I had offered up.
But instead of gropmg in anyone's religious belief
M talks sjTnpathetically of Gods ascending and
descending in many-coloured spirals of flame, and
of the ages before men turned from the reading
of earth to the reading of scrolls and of the earth
herself, the origin of all things and the miracle of
miracles. JE is extraordinarily forthcoming, and
while speaking on a subject that interests him,
nothing of himself remains behind, the revelation
is continuous, and the belief imminent that he comes
of Divine stock, and has been sent into the world on
an errand.

This was my meditation as I watched him packing
up his pastels. We went together to the warrior's
grave at the other end of the field, and stood by it,
wondering what his story might be in the beautiful

SALVE 65

summer weatlier. Aiid then my memory disappears.
It emerges again some miles farther on, for we were
brought to a standstill by another puncture, and this
second puncture so greatly stirred JE's fears lest the
Gods did not wish to see me on the top of their
mountain, that it was difficult for me to persuade
him to go into the cottage for a basin of water. At
last he consented, and, while he worked hard, heaving
the tyre from off the wheel with many curious
instruments, which he extracted from a leather
pocket behind the saddle of his machine, I talked
to him of Ireland, hopmg thei'eby to distract his
attention from the heat of the day. It was not
difficult to do this, for JE, like Dujardin, can be
interested in ideas at any time of the day and night,
though the sweat pours from his forehead ; and I
could see that he was listening while I told him
that we should have room to dream and think in
Ireland when America had drawn from us another
million and a half of the population.

' Two millions is the ideal population for Ireland
and about four for England. Do you know, JE,
there could not have been more than two million
people in England when Robin Hood and his merry
men haunted Sherwood Forest. How much more
variegated the world was then ! At any moment one
might come upon an archer who had just split a
willow wand distant a hundred yards, or upon
charcoal-burners with their fingers and thumbs cut
off for shooting deer, or jugglers standing on each
other's heads in the middle of sunlit interspaces ! A
little later, on tlie fringe of the forest, the wayfarer
stops to Usten to the hymn of pilgrims on their way

E

66 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

to Canterbury ! Oil, how beautiful is the world of
vagrancy lost to us for ever, JE !'

' There is plenty of vagrancy still in Ireland/ he
answered, and we spoke seriously of the destiny of
the two countries. As England had undertaken to
supply Ireland with hardware, he would not hang
the pall cloud of Wolverhampton over Dundalk.

* The economic conditions of the two countries are
quite different,' he said, and many other interesting
things which would have gladdened Plunkett's heart,
but my memory curls and rushes into darkness at
the word ' economic,' and a considerable time must
have elapsed, for we were well on our way when I
heard ni}- own voice saying :
' Will this hill never cease ?'
' We're going to Slievegullion.'
' True for you,' I said, ' for at every half-mile the
road gets steeper, which I suppose is always the
case when one is going towards a mountain.' But,
despite the steepness which should have left no
doubt uj)on his mind, .'E was not satisfied that we
were in the right road, and he jumped off his bicycle
to call to a man, who left his work willingly to come
to our assistance, whether from Irish j)oliteness or
because of the heat of the day, I am still in doubt.
As he came towards us his pale and perplexed eyes
attracted my attention ; they recalled to mind the
ratlike faces with the long upper lip that used to
come from the mountains to Moore Hall, with bank-
notes in their tall hats, a little decaying race in
knee-breeches, worsted stockings and heavy shoon,
whom we used to despise because they could not
speak English. Now it was the other way round ; I

J

SALVE 67

was angry with this little fellow because he had no
Irish. But his fathei% he said, was a great Irish
speaker, and he would have told us the story of the
decline of the language in the district if M had not
suddenly interrupted him with questions regai'ding
the distance to Slievegullion.

'If it's to the tip-top you're thinking of going,
about another four miles,' and he told us we would
come upon a cabin about half a mile up the road, and
the woman in it would mind our bicycles while we
were at the top of the hill, and from her house he
had always heard that it was three miles to the top
of the mountain ; that was how he reckoned it was
four miles from where we stood to the lake. He
had never been to the top of Slievegullion himself,
but he had heard of the lake from those that had
been up there, and he thought that he had heard of
Finn from his father, but he disremembered if Finn
had plunged into the lake after some beautiful
queen.

' Things that have lived too long in the same
place become melancholy, JE. Let him emigrate.
He is no use to us. He has forgotten his Irish and
the old stories that carried the soul of the ancient
Gael right down to the present generation. I'm
afraid, M, that ancient Ireland died at the beginning
of the nineteenth century and beyond hope of
resurrection.'

JE was thinking at that moment if the peasant had
directed us rightly, and impatient for an answer I
continued :

' Can the dreams, the aspirations and traditions of
the ancient Gael be translated into English ?' And

68 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

being easily cast down, I asked if the beliefs of the
ancient Gael were not a part of his civilization and
have lost all meaning for us?

* That would be so/ JE answered, ' if truth were a
casual thing of to-day and to-morrow, but men knew
the great truths thousands of years ago, and it seems
to me that these truths are returning, and that we
shall soon possess them, not j)erhaps exactly as the
ancient Gael '

' I hope that you are right, JE, for all my life is
engaged in this adventure. I think that you are
right, and that the ancient Gael was nearer to
Nature than we have ever been since we turned for
inspiration to Galilee.'

' The fault I find with Christianity is that it is no
more than a code of morals, whereas three things are
required for a religion — a cosmogony, a psychology
and a moral code.'

' I'm sure you're right, JE, but the heat is so great
that I feel I cainiot push this bicycle up the hill any
farther. You must wait for me till 1 take off my
drawers.' And behind a hedge I rid myself of them.
' You were telling me that the dreams and aspira-
tions and visions of the Celtic race have lost none
of their ancient power as they descended from
generation to generation.'

* I don't think thev have.' And I listened to him
telling how these have crept through dream after
dream of the manifold nature of man, and how each
dream, heroism, or beauty, has laid itself nigh the
Divine j)ower it represents. Deirdre was like Helen.
... It went to my heart to interrupt him, but the
heat was so great that to listen to him as I must,

SALVE 69

with all my soul, I must rid myself of the rest of
my hosiery, and so again retired behind a hedge,
and, returning with nothing on my moist body but
a pair of trousers and a shirt, I leaned over the
handle-bars, and by putting forth all my strength,
mental as well as physical, contrived to reach the
cottage.

We left our bicycles with the woman of the house
and started for the top of the mountain. The spare,
scant fields were cracked and hot underfoot, but JE
seemed unaware of any physical discomfort. Miracu-
lously sustained by the hope of reaching the sacred
lake, he hopped over the walls dividing the fields
like a goat, though these were built out of loose
stones, every one as hot as if it had just come out
of a fire ; and I heard him say, as 1 fell back exhausted
among some brambles, that man was not a momentary
seeming but a pilgrim of eternity.

' What is the matter, Moore ? Can't you get up ?'

' I am unbearably tired, JE, and the heat is so
great that I can't get over this wall.'

' Take a little rest, and then you'll be able to come
along with me.'

' No, no, JE, I'm certain that to-day it would be
impossible, all the way up that mountain, a long
struggle over stones and through heather. No, no !
If there were a donkey or a pony !'

JE conjured me to rise.

' I'm sorry, but I can't. It is very unfortunate, for
you will see Finn, and I might see him, too, whether
in the spirit or in the flesh I know not ; we should
come down from that mountain different beings, that
I know ; but it's impossible.'

70 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

' Get up. I tell you to get up. You must get up.'
A lithe figure in grey clothes and an old brown
hat !)ade me arise and walk ; his shining grey eyes
were filled with all the will he had taught himself
to concentrate when, after a long day's work at Pirn's
as accountant, he retired to his little room and com-
municated with Weekes and Johnson, though they
were hundreds of miles away ; but, great as the force
of his will undoubtedly is, he could not infuse in me
sufKcient energy to proceed ; my body remained
inert, and he left me, saying that alone he would
climb the niount;iin, and I saw him going away, and
the grittv and grimy mountiun showing aloft in ugly
outline upon a burning sky.

* Going to sec Finn,' I murmured. ' I would sit
with him by the holy lake waiting for the vision ;
but I may not get there. Two hours' climb ! I
couldn't, I couldn't ! He'll certainly spend an hour
by the lake, and he will bike two hours to come
back, and all that time I shall sit in a baking field.
O, Lord !' Catching sight of some hazels growing
in the corner of the field, I struggled to mj- feet.
But there was no shade to speak of in the hazel
copse, and my feet M-ere burnt by the sun striking
through the scanty leafage. My tongue was like
a drj' stick, and the touch of the hazel leaves put
my teeth on edge, and, remembering that IE would
be away for hours, I walked across the field towards
the cottage where we had left our bicycles.

* May I have a drink of water ?' I asked, looking
over the half-door.

Two women came out of the gloom, and, after
talking between themselves, one of them asked

SALVE 71

wouldn't I rather have a drop of milk? — a fine-
looking girl with soft grey eyes and a friendly
manner ; the other was a rougher, an uglier sort.

I drank from the bowl, and could have easily
finished the milk, but lifting my eyes suddenly I
caught sight of a flat-faced child with flaxen hair
all in curl watching me, and it occurring to me at
that moment that it might be his milk I was drink-
ing, I put down the bowl and my hand went to my
pocket.

' How much is the milk ?'

' You're heartily welcome to it, six-,' the young
woman answered. ' Sure, it was only a sup.'

* No, I must pay you.'

But all uiy money had been left in Dundalk, and
I stood penniless befoi'e these poor people, having
drunk their milk.

' My friend will come from the mountain to fetch
his bicycle, and he will pay you.' Again the young
woman said I was welcome to the milk ; but I didn't
know that M, had any money upon him, and it
occurred to me to offer her my vest and drawers.
She said she couldn't think of taking them, eyeing
them all the while. At last she took them and
asked me to sit down and take the weight off" my
limbs. ' Thank you kindly,' and, sitting on the
proffered stool, I asked if they were Irish speakers.

' Himself s mother can speak it,' and I turned
towards the old woman who sat by the ashes of a
peat fire, her yellow hands hanging over her knees,
her thick white hair showing under a black knitted
cap. Her eyes never left me, but she made no
attempt to answer my questions. ' She's gone a

72 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

little bothered lately and wouldn't know what you'd
be asking; her.' I could make nothing of the
younfjer women, the child and the grandmother only
stared. It was like being in a den with some shy
animals, so I left a message with them for jE, that I
would bicycle on to Dundalk very slowly, and hoped
he would overtake me. And it was about two hours
after he came up with me, not a bit tired after his
long walk, and very willing to tell me how he had
had to rest under the rocks on his way to the
suumiit, enduring dreadful thirst, for there was no
rill ; all Avere dry, and he had been glad to dip his
hat into the lake and drink the soft bog water, and
then to lie at length among the heather. So intense
wjis the silence that his thoughts were afraid to
move, and he lay, his eyes roving over boundless
space, seeing nothing but the phantom tops of
distant mountains, the outer rim of the world, so
did they seem to him. At each end of the crescent-
shaped lake there is a great cairn built of cyclopean
stones ; and into one of these cairns he had de-
scended and had followed the passage leading into
the heart of the mountain till he came upon a great
boulder, which twenty men could not move, and
which looked as if it had been hurled by some giant
down there.

' Perchance to save the Druid mysteries from
curious eyes,' I said, and a great regret welled up in
me that I had not been strong enough to climb that
mountain with him. ' What have I missed, JE ?
Oh, what have I missed ?' And as if to console me
for my weakness ^ told me that he had made a
drawing of the cairn, which he would show me as

SALVE 73

soon as we reached Dundalk. All the while 1 was
afraid to ask him if he had seen Finn, for if he had
seen the hero plunge into the lake after the queen's
white limbs, I should have looked upon myself as
among the most unfortunate of men. But JE had
not seen Finn. He spoke of alien influences, and as
we rode down the long roads under the deepening
sky, we wondered how the powers of the material
world could have reached as far as the sacred lake,
violating even the mysterious silence that sings about
the Gods. That the silence of the lake had been
violated was certain, for the trance that was begin-
ning to gather melted away ; his eyes had opened in
the knowledge that the Gods were no longer by
him, and, seeing that the evening was gathering on
the mountain he had packed up his drawings.

' But the night will be starlit. If I had been able
to get there I shouldn't have minded Avaiting.
Were you on the mountain, now, JE, you would be
seeing that horned moon reflected in the crescent-
shaped lake. It was faint-hearted of you.'

At that moment two broad backs bicycling in
front of us explained the sudden withdrawal of the
Gods. Our two Christian Avayfarers had been
prowling about Slievegullion, and our wheels had
not revolved many times before we had overtaken
them.

' We meet again, sir, and your day has been a
jileasant one, I hope ?'

' It has been very hot,' he answered, ' too hot for
Slievegullion. We couldn't get more than half-way
It was my friend that sat down overcome by the
heat.'

74 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

JF. bejjan to lau^'li.

' What is your friend lau<Tliin<T at ?'

And the story of how my streiii^th had failed me
at tlic third wall was t(tld.

' I quite s}^llJlathize with you,' said the one that
had been overtaken like myself from the heat. ' Did
the poet fjet to the top ?'

* Yes, he did,' I replied sharj)ly.

' And did the \iew compensate you for the
walk ?'

' There is no view,' JE answered ; ' only a rim of
pearl-coloured mountains, the edge of the world they
seemed, and an intense silence.'

'That isn't enough to climb a thousand feet for,'
said the chubbier of the two.

' But it wasn't for the view he went there,' I
replied indignantly, ' but for the Gods.'

' For the Gods !'

' And why not ? Are there no Gods but your's ?'

My question was not answered and at the end of
an awkward silence we talked about indifferent
things till we came to Dundalk, where we hajjpened
to be staging at the same inn, and JE suggested that
we should ask the Presbyterians to dine with us,
having in mind not the dinner but the supper of
ideas which he was preparing for them ; and that
supjier began with the dinner ; even before the
arrival of the chops they were being told that Slieve-
gullion was the most celebrated mountain in all
Celtic theology, and enveloped in the most beautiful
gospels. It distressed me to see JE neglect his
diimer, and I insisted that he must finish his chop
before he unpacked his portfolio and showed the

SALVE 75

drawing he had made of the crescent-shaped lake.
He ate for a little while, but it was impossible to
restrain him from telling how Finn had seen a fairy
face rise above the waters of the lake and had
plunged after it. Whether Finn captured the
nymph, and for how long he had enjoyed her, he did
not tell, only that when Finn rose to the surface
again he was an old man, old as the mountains and
the rocks of the world. But his youth was given
back to him by enchantment, and of the adventure
nothing remained except his snow-Avhite hair, Avhich
was so beautiful and became him so well, that it had
not been altered back to its original colour. It was
on this mountain that Cuchulain had found the
fabled horse, Leath Macha, and M told us, in
language which still rings in my memory, of the great
battle of the ford and the giant chivalry of the
Ultonians. He spoke to us of the untamable man-
hood, and of the exploits of Cuchulain, and the
children of Rury, ' more admirable,' he said, ' as
types, more noble and inspiring than the hierarchy
of little saints who came later and cursed their
meinories.'

This last passage seemed to conciliate the Presby-
terians ; they looked approvingly ; but ^'s soul
refuses to recognize the miserable disputes of certain
Christian sects. He was thinking of Choulain, the
smith, who lived in the mountain and who forged
the Ultonians their armour. And when that story
had been i-elated he remembered that he had not
told them of Manaanan MacLir, the most remote and
most spiritual of all Gaelic divinities, the uttermost
God, of the Feast of Age, the Druid counterpart of

76 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

the mysteries, and how anyone who partook of that
Feast became himself immortal.

It is a great grief to me that no single note was
taken at the time of that extraordinary evening
spent with JE in the inn at Duudalk, eating hard
chops and drinking stale beer. The fare was poor,
but what thoughts and what eloquence ! A short-
hand writer should have been by me. She is never
with us when she should be. I might have gone
to my room and taken notes, but no note was taken,
alas ! . . . A change came into the faces of the
Presbyterians as they listened to ^-E ; even their
attitudes seemed to become noble. JE did not see
them ; he was too absorbed in his ideas ; but I saw
them, and thought the while of barren rocks that
the sun gilds for a moment. And then, not satisfied
with that simile, I thought how at midday a ray
finds its way even into the darkest valley. We had
remained in the valley of the senses — our weak flesh
had kept us there, but JE had ascended the mountain
of the spirit and a Divine light was about him. It is
the mission of some men to enable their fellows to
live beyond themselves. JE possesses this power in
an extraordinary degree, and we were lifted above
ourselves.

My memory of that evening is one which Time
is powerless to efface, and though years have passed
by, the moment is remembered when ^E said that
religion must always be exotic which makes a far-off
land sacred rather than the earth underfoot ; and
then he denied that the Genius of the Gael had ever
owed any of its inspiration to priestly teaching. Its
own folk-tales — our talk is always rejjorted incorrectly.

SALVE 77

and in these memories of JE there must be a great
deal of myself, it sounds so like myself, that I
hesitate to attribute this sentence to him ; yet it
seems to me that I can still hear him speaking it —
the folk-tales of Connaught have ever lain nearer to
the hearts of the people than those of Galilee.
Whatever there is of worth in Celtic song and story
is woven into them, imagery handed down from the
dim Druidic ages. And did I not hear him say that
soon the children of Eri, a new race, shall roll out
their thoughts on the hillsides before your very
doors, O priests ! calling your flocks from your dark
chapels and twilit sanctuaries to a temple not built
with hands, sunlit, starlit, sweet with the odour
and incense of earth, from your altars call them to
the altai's of the hills, soon to be lit up as of old,
soon to be blazing torches of God over the land.
These heroes I see emerging. Have they not come
forth in every land and race when there was need ?
Here, too, they will arise. My ears retain memories
of his voice when he cried, ' Ah, my darlings, you
will have to fight and suffer ; you must endure lone-
liness, the coldness of friends, the alienation of love,
warmed only by the bright interior hope of a future
you must toil for but may never see, letting the deed
be its own reward ; laying in dark places the founda-
tions of that high and holy Eri of prophecy, the isle
of enchantment, burning with Druidic splendours,
bright with immortal presences, with the face of the
everlasting Beauty looking in upon all its ways.
Divine with ten-estrial mingling till God and the
world are one.'
But how much more eloquent were thy words

78 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

than any that my memory recalls ! Yet sometimes
it seems to me that thy words have floated back
almost as thou didst speak them, aggravating the
calunmy of an imperfect record. But for the record
to be jierfect the accent of thy voice and the light
in thine eves, and the whole scene — the maculated
tiiblccloth, the clu)ps, everything would have to be
reproduced. How vain is art ! That hour in the inn
in Dundalk is lost for ever — the drifting of the
ministers to their beds. Faint, indeed, is the
memory of their passing, so faint that it will be
better not to attemj)t to record it, but to pass on to
another event, to the portrait which JE drew that
evening ; for, kept awake by the presences of the
Gods on the mountain, he said he must do a portrait
of me, and the portrait is a better record of the
dream that he brought down with him from the
mountiiin than any words of mine. It hangs in a
house in Galway, and it is clearly the work of one
who has been with the Gods, for in it my hair is
hyacinthine and my eyes are full of holy light. Tlie
portrait was executed in an hour, and even this work
could not quell ^-E's ardour. He would have sat up
till morning had I allowed him, telling me his theory
of numbers, but I said :

* Suppose we reserve that theory for to-morrow ?
Sufficient for the day is the blessing thereof.'

SALVE 79

V

A suspicion stops my pen that I am caricaturing
IE, setting him forth hke the hero of a girl's imagina-
tion. It may be that this criticism is not altogether
unfounded, and to redeem my portrait I will tell how
I saw ]Sj roused like a lion out of his lair. A man
sitting opposite to him in the railway carriage began
to lament that Queen Victoria had not been received
with more profuse expressions of loyalty ; !£. took
this West Briton very gently at first, getting him to
define what he meant by the word ' loyalty/ and, when
it transpired that the stranger attached the same
meaning to the word as the newspapers, that, for him,
as for the newspapei's, a queen or king is a fetish, an
idol, an effigy, a thing for men to hail and to bow
before, he bui'st out into a fiery denunciation of this
base and witless conception of loyalty, as insulting to
the worshipped as to the worshipper. The man
quailed before ^'s face, so stern w^as it ; ^'s eyes
flashed, and a torrent of righteous indignation poured
from his lips, and I admired his chivalrous respect for
his foe, feeling sure that if the fight had been fought
out with swords M would not have forgotten that he
is himself an Ultonian. If I had been in his place I
should certainly have insulted the West Briton and
made him feel that his soul was base, but M, while
fiercely defending his principles, appealed to the
man's deeper nature, assuming that it was as deep as
his own, and I remember him saying, ' In your heart
you think as I do, but, shocked at the desire of some
people to affront an aged woman, you fall into the

80 'HAIl, AND FAHKWKLL!'

other t\f nine, and wmilil like to see the Irish niee
di|; a hoh* and hith- itself, leaving nothing of itself
alM)ve ^roiniii hut an iiisiiiuatin;; tail.'

Mv ears kee|i tlie \ civ words he utitred, ns the
shell keeps the sound ol the sea, and I ean still hear
our ijood-hve at the corner of llunu- Street, and still
feel the sadness that I felt as I rode throujujh the
^fatewav into my little eul-de-sae. Four such beautiful
days I shall m vcr have aijain. l''verv enehantnient
brink's .-i feelin;^ of sadness in its train ; we know that
sonu'thiny; is over, that part of our life is behind us,
never to be reeaptured. Ihil.thoiiuh these days were
over, other days with .¥. would eonie, and, dropping
into an armchair, 1 be;j;an to rejoice in the nieniory of
A't's \Mmd( ilul awakening; of self-respecl in I lie man
whosi" ambilion il was In abase himsell before his
follow, lie ean be seven' enough when the occasion
recjuires it , and I remembered his s«'verities towards
me the moment I showed any desire to pluck a single
leaf from the crown In- was weaving for IMunkett.
' IMiinkctl ! IMunkelt !' is his cry all over Inl.ind, .iiid
I lell to thinking how to-niorrow morning, without a
thought for himsi-lf he would trundle his old bicycle
down to tlu" odiees of the l..\.().S. in I-incnln IMaoe,
to take his orders from Anderson.

Hut I In re must be some readerswho cannot translate
these letters into the Irish Agricultural Organization
Society, and who know nothing of the Society, when
it was founded, or for what pin|)ose it exists. The
best story in the world bi-comes the worst if the
narrator is not caniiil to explain certain essential
facts that will enable his listeners to understand it.
.So here goes.

SALVE 81

Years apjo the idea of co-operation overtook Plun-
kett in America. It is unnecessary to inquire out
wliethcr he liad seen co-operation at work in America,
or liad read a book in America, or liad spoken to
somebody in America, or had (h-eamed a dream in
America. Sufiice it to say that he hurried home,
anxious to tell it to his countrymen, and travelled all
over Ireland, telling farmers at more than a hundred
meetings that through co-operation they would be
able to get imadulterated manure at forty per cent,
less than they were paying the gombeen man for
rubbish. At more than a hundred meetings he told
the farmers that a foreign country was exploiting the
dairy industry that rightly belonged to Ireland, and
that the Dane was doing this successfully because he
had learned to do his own business for himself — a
very sim]>le idea, almost a platitude, but Plunkett
liad the courage of his platitudes, and preached them
in and out of season, without, however, making a
single convert. Some time after he chanced on
Anderson, a man with a gift of organization and an
exact knowledge of Irish rural life, two things Plun-
kett did not possess, but which he knew were neces-
sary for his enterprise. Away they went together,
and they preached, and they preached, and back they
came together to Dublin, feeling that something was
wanting, something which they had not gotten.
What was it ? Neither could say. Plunkett looked
into Anderson's eyes, and Anderson looked into Plun-
kett's. At last Anderson said: 'The idea is right

enough, but ' And Plunkett answered ' Yes,

Anderson.'

Plunkett had brought the skeleton ; Anderson had

F

82 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

brought the flesh ; but the body lay stark, and all
their efforts to breathe life into it were so unavailing
that they had ceased to try. They walked round
their dead idea, or perhaps I should say the idea that
had not yet come to life ; they -watched by it, and
they bemoaned its inaction night and day. Plunkett
chanted the litany of the economic man and the un-
economic holding, and when he had finished Ander-
son clianted the litany of the uneconomic man and
the economic holding, and this continued until their
chants brought out of the brushwood a tall figure,
wearing a long black cloak, with a manuscript sticking
out of the pocket. He asked them what they were
doing, and they said, 'Trying to revive Ireland.'
'But Ireland is deaf,' he answered, 'she is deaf to
your economics, for you do not know her folk-tales,
and cannot croon them by the firesides.' Plunkett
looked at Anderson, and took Yeats for a little trip
on an outside car through a mountainous district.
It appears that Plunkett was, unfortunately, suffering
from toothache, and only half-listened to Yeats, who
was telling him across the car that he was going to
make his speech more interesting by introducing into
it the folk-tales that the people for generation after
generation had been telling over their firesides. And,
for example, he told how three men in a bam were
playing cards, and so intently, that they did not per-
ceive that a hare with a white ear jumped out of the
cards and ran out of the door and away over the hills.
More cards were dealt, and then a greyhound
jumped out of the cards and ran out of the door after
the hare. The story was symbolical of man's desire ;
Plunkett understood co-operation, and Yeats may h?ive

SALVE 83

mentioned the blessed word, but at the meeting it
was a boar witliout bristles that rushed out of the
cards, and went away into the East, rooting the sun
and the moon and the stars out of the sky. And
while Plunkett was wondering why this story should
portend co-operative movement, a voice from the back
of the hall cried out, ' The blessings of God on him
if he rooted up Limerick. A bad day it was for

us ' and a murmur began at the back of the hall.

Yeats' s allusion to the pig was an unfortunate one ;
the people had lost a great deal of money by follow-
ing Plunkett's advice to send their pigs to Limerick.
It was quite true that Limerick gave better prices
for pigs than the jobbers, but only for the pigs that
it wanted. Yeats, however, is an accomplished plat-
fomi speaker, and not easily cowed, and he soon re-
captured the attention of the audience. ' We always
know,' he said, 'when we are among our own people.'
That pleased everybody ; and Plunkett had to admit
that the meeting had gone better than usual. A
poet was necessary, that was clear, but he did not
think that Yeats was exactly the poet they wanted.
If they could get a poet with some knowledge of
detail (Plunkett reserved the right to dream to
himself), the country might be awakened to the
advantages of co-operation.

' I think I know somebody,' Yeats answered, ' who
might suit you.' Plunkett and Anderson forthwith
lent their ears to the story of a young man, a poet,
who was at present earning his living as accountant
in Pim's. 'A poet-accountant sounds well,' Plunkett
muttered, and looked at Anderson, and Anderson
nodded significantly ; and Yeats murmured some

84 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

phrase about beautiful verses, and seemed to lose
hiinself ; but Anderson woke him up, and said : * Tell
us about this young man. Why do you think he
would suit us ?'

' Well,' said Yeats, ' his personal influence pervades
the whole shop, from the smallest clerk up to the
manager, and all eyes go to him when he passes.'
Plunkett and Ajiderson looked across the table at
each other, and Yeats went on to tell a stor}', how a
young man, a ne'er-do-well, had once seen ^-E crossing
from one desk to another with some papers in his
hand, and had gone to him, saj-ing, ' Something tells
me you are the man who may redeem me.' Plunkett
and Anderson frowned a little, for they foresaw a
preacher; and Yeats, guessing what was in Anderson's
mind, said :

' What will surprise you is that he never preaches.
The influence he exercises is entirely involuntary.
He told the young man that if he came round to see
him he would introduce him to new friends. He is
at present running a theosophical society, and the
young man came, and heard .E talking, and forthwith
beat his wife no more, forswore the public-house and
is now an admirable member of society.'

There was no further doubt in the minds of Plun-
kett and Anderson that M was the man they
wanted. Plunkett sent him an invitation to come to
see him, and the ^E that appeared did not corre-
spond in the least with the conception that Plunkett
and Anderson had formed from Yeats' description.
They saw a tall, thin man, overflowing with wild
humour ; the ends of his eyes went up and he seemed
to them like a kindly satyr, something that had not

SALVE 85

yet experienced civiUzntion, for the first stipulation
was that he should not receive more tlian three
pounds a week. No man's work, according to liim,
was worth more.

They gave him a bicycle, and he rode through
Ireland, preaching the doctrine of co-operation and
dairy-farming from village to village, winning friends
to the movement by the personal magnetism which
he exercises wherever he goes, and the eloquence of
his belief in Plunkett. As soon as he arrived in a
village everybody's heart became a little warmer, a
little friendlier ; the sensation of isolation and loneli-
ness which all human beings feel, thawed a little ;
everybody must have felt happier the night that
that kindly man mounted a platform, threw back his
long hair, and began to talk to them, giving them
shrewd advice and making them feel that he loved
them and that they were not unworthy of his love.
The only house in the poor village in which he could
lodge would be the priest's house, and the lonely
village priest, who does not meet a friend with whom
he can exchange an idea once every three months,
would spend a memorable evening with M. The
priests in these villages have little bookshelves along
their rooms, and JE would go to these shelves and
find a book that had not interested the priest since
the enthusiasm of his youth had died down ; he
would open this book, and read passages, and awaken
the heart of the pi'iest. In the morning the old
bicycle would be brought out, and away M Avould go,
and the priest, I am sure, looked after him, sorry that
he was going. Protestants, Catholics, Presbyterians,
Methodists — all united in loving JE. Although other

86 'HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

things might be wroii^f, one thing was right — JE ;
and they followed him, captivated by the tune he
played on his pipes, and before the year was out the
skeleton that was Phmkett's, and the flesh and the
muscles that were Anderson's began to stir. The
watchers called to each other. ' Anderson, see, it
has shifted its leg !' ' Plunkett, see, it h.is moved an
inch ; life is creeping over it, from the crown of its
head to the sole of its feet.' Creameries wei'e spring-
ing up in every part of the country, and then Plun-
kett conceived again. A great State Department
must be created, to direct, but not to supplant, the
original movement.

He was a member for South Dublin, and on the
friendliest terms with the Unionist Government, so
he had no difficulty in forming a committee to inquire
into what had been done on the Continent for the
co-ordination of State and voluntary action. Many
members of this committee were members of Parlia-
ment ; the committee met during Recess, and was
called the Recess Committee.

To the best of my recollection Gill's beard was
being trimmed in France while the Recess Com-
mittee was forming. He was called over by Plunkett
to be his secretary. Gill knew French and it was
understood that he had talked co-operative economics
with Frenchmen. A newspaper was re(iuired, to
exj)lain these ideas to the public. The Express had
been jjurchased by Mr. Dalziel who made over the
control to Plunkett ; Gill was a})pointed editor ;
Rolleston, Healy, Longworth, JE, Yeats, John Eglin-
ton, all contributed articles ; economics and folklore,
Celtic and Indian gods, all went into the same pot —

SALVE 87

an extraordinary brotli very much disliked by the
Freeman's Journal and the Parhamentary Party.
Dillon made wr}' faces, all the same the broth was
swallowed. Gerald Balfour brought in his Bill for
the creation of a State Department ; Plunkett was
appointed Vice-President, and it was understood that
the whole central authority should be in his hands,
though the nominal head was the Home Secretary.
About one hundred and seventy thousand a year was
voted, and a great part of this money would go in
providing for an immense staff of secretaries, inspec-
tors, and lecturers. JE could have had any one of
these i)laces for the asking, luxurious places from
three hundred to a thousand a year ; but he pre-
ferred to remain with the I.A.O.S. If it was not his
own child, he had reared it and taught it to walk.
Now should he desert it ? Besides, a comfortable
house and servants, a quiet walk down to his office in
the morning to sign a few letters, and the quiet con-
viction that he is running the country by doing so,
is not like JE ; his soul is too personal for office life,
he must be doing his own work; the work is of
different kinds, but it is always his own work. He is
himself when he rides all over the country, preaching
co-opei-ation to the farmers, as much as when he
returns to Dublin and begins a poem or paints a
picture. Besides, the post of secretary seemed from
the very beginning to belong to Gill. During the
year he edited the Express he had prepared the
public and the official mind for the Department
of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, consti-
tuted on Continental lines ; but Gill had been
a Plan-of-Campaigner, and a Nationalist member of

88 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

Parliament, and at Tillyra, wliile the adaptiition
of ' The Tale of a Town ' was in progress, Gill's
dilemma was often under eonsidtration. Edward
was a large recipient of his confidences and often
spoke to me, and very seriously, on the matter.
He believed Gill to be, if not in the flesh, at
least in the spirit a member of the Parliamentary
Party, and his unalterable opinion was that a
Nationalist should never accept otHce under an
English Government. But it seemed to me that
Gill would act very unwisely if he refused the Secre-
Uiryship, and I think 1 remember saying to Edward
that Gill should have consulted me instead, for he
would have gotten from me the advice that would
have been agreeable to him — ' to take the primrose
path, the scent of which is already in his nostrils.'
One of the charms of Edward's character is its
simj)licity ; he knows so little about life that it was a
surprise to him to hear that men do not consult their
friends when their determination is to walk in the
thorny path.

' The martyr/ I said, ' doesn't consult among his
brethren ; his resolve hardens in the loneliness of his
heart.'

* I see what you mean — I see what you mean/

Edward answered. ' So then you think '

' No, my dear Edward, we are among the com-
plexities of human nature. Our hesitations continue,
even though we know, in our sub-consciousness, that
the end is decreed. Gill's nationalism is quite sincere ;
the flame doesn't burn very fiercely, but then his
nature is not a great nature like Davitt's, and our
natures give — overlook the j)latitude — only what they

SALVE 89

are capable of cfiving. But thougli a flame throw
out little heat and light, it is a flame for all that, and
the faintest flame is worthy of our respect.'

' All the same, I don't think that a Nationalist
should ever take oflice from the English Government,'
and Edward marched off" to his tower to reconsider
his third act, which Yeats and I had agreed he never
would be able to write satisfactorily. Gill came to
Tillyra a little before Edward's play was finally
refused by Yeats and myself, and seated himself
firmly on the fence, as is his wont. Edward, I
believe, continued to consult him regarding the re-
visions Yeats and I were daily proposing. All the
same, his name was omitted from that part of my
narrative — he seemed a side issue — and in Dublin I
was obliged to cast him out again. But now my
narrative demands his presence and his voice, and I
hasten to tell that as soon as Edward left me in
Meri'ion Street (the reader remembers that he refused
to advise me regarding the political situation). Gill's
name occurred to me ; he seemed to be, on the instant,
the very person who could guide me through the
maze of Irish political intrigue, and my steps turned
mechanically from the Shelbourne Hotel, whither I
was going, towards Clare Street. A few minutes
later I was on Gill's door-step asking myself why
Gill had chosen to confide in Edward rather than in
me, and hoping for a long talk with him, after the
reading of the play. Scruples of conscience are my
speciality, and I was genuinely concerned about his
future, being naturally tres hon pour la vie, that is to
say, tres ojficieux mix voisins. On the doorstep it
seemed to me that he was bound to consider not only

90 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

himself but his wife and liis cliildren. My thoughts
turned about tliem while I read the play, and when
the reading was over, for (nil's talk threw no light
upon the politieal <|uestions that then agit;itcd Ireland.
He is always dilluse and yague without mueh power
of concentration, but that night it was easy to see
that his thoughts were elsewhere. * He will confide
in me presently,' I said, and, to lead him into con-
fidence, I spoke of the Express, which liad then spent
all the capital that had been advanced by Mr. Dalziel.
It was not likely that Horace Plunkett would put any
more capital into the newspaper, and, after a little
discourse as to what might be done with this news-
paper, if a capitiilist could be found. Gill mentioned
that he liad been offered the post of Secretary to the
Department.

' That's the best bit of news I've heard this
long while. Edward told me that you had con-
sulted him, but he thinks that, on account of the

pledge '

' I am no longer a member of Parliament, but my
symjiathies are with my friend, John Redmond, who,

to tiike the rough w ith the smooth, seems to be doing

very well.'

* But, Gill, Edward and some others who advised

you against accepting the post haven't considered your

interests.'

' And they do right,' Gill answered, ' not to consider

my interests. My interests don't count with me for

a moment. What I am thinking is that Plunkett

may miss a magnificent chance if he has nobody by

him who knows the country.'
' But Plunkett is an Irishman.'

SALVE 91

' Plunkett is a Protestant^ and a Protestant can
never know Ireland.'

' A Protestant that has always lived in Ireland ?'
* Even so. Ireland is Catholic if she is anything.'
' And you're a Catholic first of all^ Gill, for you
abandoned the Plan of Campaign when the Church
condemned it.'

' Certainly I did, and what strikes me now is that
it is hard if Ireland should be deprived of the labour
of one of her sons because he once was. . . . I've
written to Gerald Balfour on the subject/ and he rose
from his chair and walked to his writing-table.
' Will you read me the letter ?'
'Yes, I'll read it to you.' And when he had
finished I said :

' The letter you've just read me is a very good
letter, but it fills me with apprehension, for it seems
to me that you leave Gerald Balfour to decide whether
you should accept the appointment that he is offering
you. Remember your wife and children.'

' If I were convinced that the best service I could

render to Ireland '

' But what could you do for Ireland better than to
put your gift of co-ordination at the country's service?'
' Yes, co-ordination is the thing, the delegation of
all detail to subordinates, reserving to oneself the
consideration of the main outline, the general scheme,
yet I am not sure that at the head of a great news-
paper I shouldn't be able to serve Ireland better than
as the Secretary of the Department. Or perhaps
the great newspaper might come after the Secretary-
ship. It will take some years to get the Department
into working order ; Home Rule is bound to come

92 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

sooner or later, and the Department will create an
immense batch of" officials, all well equipjied with
ideas, and the jireparation of this <jreat machine would
be a task worthy of any man's talent. When Home
Rule conies there will be an immense change in the
govenmient of the country, and very likely the old
civil servants will be pensioned off. If such a change
were to happen it would interest me to take charge
of a great daily.'

' And have you any idea of a policy for the paper ?
What line do you think Ireland should take in the
present crisis ?'

And while drawing the golden hair of his beard
through his insignificant little hands, Gill began to tell
me that, unlike England, Ireland had never known
how to compromise. I gathered that he had been
reading John Morley, and had discovered arguments
that had satisfied him it would not be wise for the
race, or for the individual, to persevere in the
Nationalism begotten of a belief that a great European
conflagration might give birth to a hero who would
conquer England, and, incidentally, give Ireland her
freedom. ' He is beginning to see,' I thought, 'that
if the long-dreamed-of hero did arise he might pro-
pose to enlist Ireland's help for his own purposes,
and not surrender her for ever to Donnybrook Fair
and an eternal singing of "The Wearin' o' the Green."
He has just reached the age when the Catholic Celt
begins to see that, though he may continue in his
belief in magicians with power to turn God into a
wafer, to forgive sins and redeem souls from Purgatory,
it would be wise for him to put by his dreams of
Brian Boru, to keep them in the background of his

SALVE 93

mind, a sort of Tir-nan-og into which he retires in the
evening in moments of lassitude and leisure. Eng-
land allows the Catholic Celt to continue his idle
dreaming, knowing well that as soon as sappy youth
is over he will come asking for terms. Some become
policemen, some soldiers, some barristers ; only a
negligible minority fails to fall into line, and that is
why the Celt is so ineffectual ; his dreams go one
way and his actions go another. But why blame the
race ? Every race px'oduces more Gills than Davitts ;
a man like Davitt, immune from the temptations of
compromise, whose ideas and whose actions are
identical '

My thoughts, breaking off, returned to Gill, and,
while listening to hina drawing political wisdom from
the very ends of his beard, it seemed to me a pity
that Edward had not confided his plot to me from
the beginning, for then we should have been able
to create a character quite different from Jasper
Deane, and much more real. But the play would
have to be finished at once, and next morning I went
away to London, to patch up one that should not
compromise too flagrantly Yeats' literary integrity.

It seems to me now that I have made up some
arrears of story, and am free to tell that in the year
1901, when I came to live in Ireland, I found Gill
the centre of the Irish Literary and Agricultural
party, and looked upon by it as the one man who
could weather the political peril and bring the Irish
nation into port. WTien I ai-rived I found Yeats
speaking of Gill as a man of very serious ability, but
as if afraid lest he might compromise literature, he
always added ' an excellent journalist.' JE may have

94 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

thought with Edward that Gill should have refused
the post of Secretary, but to criticize Gill's hobby for
compromise would be to criticize Plunkett, and, as
well as I recollect, yE's view of the a}ipointment was
that Gill understood Catholic Ireland, and would be
able to give effect to Plunkett's ideas. Edward,
whenever the subject M'as mentioned, growled out
that he had not hesitated to tell Gill when he came
to him for advice, that, in his opinion, a Nationalist
should never accept office from an English Govern-
ment.

He rolled out this opinion like a great rock, and,
after having done it, he seemed duly impressed by
his own steadfastness of purpose, and his own strength
of mind. It may be that abstract morality of every
kind is repugnant to me, for I used to resent
Edward's apothegm. Or was it that the temptiition
could not be resisted to measure Edward's intellect
once agam ?

' Your political morality is of course impeccable ;
but, dear Edward, will you tell me why you are coming
out to Dalkey on this Sunday afternoon to see Gill ?
Why you associate with people of whose political
morality you cannot altogether approve ?'

' My dear George, all my life I have lived with
people whose moralities I do not appro\'e of You
don't think that I approve of yours, do you ? But,
you know, I never believed that your life is am-thing
else but pure ; it is only your mind that is indecent,'
and Edward laughed, enjoying himself hugely.

* As soon as you have finished your joke perhaps
you'll tell me what you think Gill ought to have
done ?'

SALVE 95

' I don't see why he shouldn't have got his Hving
by journahsm. He did so before.'

' But you don't know what it is to get your living
by journalism ; you can't, for you've got three thou-
sand a year, or is it four ? And not a wife, not even
a mistress '

' Now, George !'

As the tram passed Blackrock Catholic Church I
said :

' You used to insist on sending me to Mass when I
was staying Mith you in Galway. Do you know,
Edward, that Whelan suggested he should turn the
horse's head into Coole, and, while you thought
we were at Mass, Yeats and I were talking over
" Diarmuid and Crania "? '

A great blankness swept over Edward's face, and
very often between Blackrock and Dalkey, in the
pauses of our conversation, I reproached myself for
having shaken his belief that he had made himself
secure against God's reproaches for the conduct of
his guests at Tillyra.

' Did Gill abstain from meat on Fridays when he
was at Tillyra ?'

' Gill is a good Catholic, but you are a bad
Catholic'

To call me a bad Catholic is one of Edward's jokes,
and my retort is always that Rome would not regard
me as such, that no man is answerable for his
baptism.

' In calling me a bad Catholic you are very near to
heresy.'

His face became grave again, and he muttered
' Mon ami Moore, man ami Moore.'

96 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

Old friends have always their own jokes, and this
joke has tickled Edward in his sense of humour for
the last twenty years or more. It appears that in
a moment of intense boredom I had asked a very
dignified old lady in a solemn salon in the Faubourg
St. Germain * Si elle jouait aux cartes, si die aimait le
Jen ' ; and, on receiving an answer in the negative, I
had replied : ' Vans aimez sans doute bieti mieux,
madame, le petit jeu d'amour.' The old lady appealed
to her husband, and explanations had ensued, and my
friend Marshall, of ' The Confessions,' had to explain
* que son ami Moore rCa pas voulu ' — what, history
does not relate.

The story has no other point except that it has
tickled Edward in all his fat for twenty years, and that
he regaled Gill with it that afternoon, shaking with
laughter all the while, and repeating the phrase
' voiis aimez sans doide, madame, le petit Jeu d'ajnoiir,'
until at last, to stop him, I had to say :

* My dear Edward, I am ashamed to find you
indulging in such improper conversation,

A pleasant place on Sunday afternoons was that
terrace, hanging some hundred feet or more above the
sea, for on that terrace between the grey house and
the cliff's edge Gill often forgot that he was wise,
and was willing to let us enjoy his real self, his cheer-
ful superficial nature, a pleasant coming and going of
light impressions, and this real self M'as to us, strenu-
ous ones, what a quiet pool is to the thirsty deer at
noontide. He reflected all our aspirations, giving
back to Yeats ' The Wanderings of Usheen,' as the
one Irish epic, and to Edward 'The Heatherfield,'
translated into pure Ibsen. Sometimes JE was with

SALVE 97

us, and I remember that he used to scan the waters
of the pool eagerly for a glimpse of economic
Ireland. It is a pity I forgot to look out for my own
reflection. I was too anxiously engaged in admiring
the reflection of others and the admirable imparti-
ality of the pool until Edward roused it into ripples
of laughter by a reproof. Gill was not bringing up
his children as Irish speakers. He was going to send
his boys to Trinity College, where, as Yeats said,
our own folk-tales had never been crooned over
the fireside. Yeats was splendid that afternoon ; it
was not myths from Palestine, nor from India,
that had inspired the Celt, but remembrances of
the many beautiful women that had lived long ago
and the deeds of the heroes. Edward bit his lips at
the words 'myths from Palestine,' and took me aside
to confide the fact that words like these hurt him
just as if he had sat upon a pin. Gill knew that such
words hurt nobody, and he continued airy, cheerful,
benign, until he thought it time to return to his
wisdom, and then he spoke of what he thought the
policy of the Gaelic League should be in Irish-speak-
ing districts, long-drawn-out platitudes and aphorisms
of lead falling from his lips ; and, to escape from
these, I began to take an interest in the colour and
texture of his necktie, both of which were exquisite,
and then in the beauty of the flight of a tired
gull, floating down the quiet air to its roost among
the clefts. A flutter of wings and it alighted ; the
fishing boats beat up to windward ; and I thought of
the lonely, silent night that awaited the fishers, until
Edward's voice roused me from my meditations. He
was telling Yeats that he liked the English language

G

98 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

and the Irish, but he hated the Anglo-Irish. Yeats
spoke of h\ ing speech and the peasant.

' I hate the peasant,' Edward answered. ' I like
the drama of intellect.'

Yeats sniggered, and a cormorant came over the
sea, and alighted upon a rock, ' with a fish for the
chicks in the nest,' Gill said to his children, who had
come to tell him that supper was on the table. All
our literary differences were laid to rest in the
interest that we soon began to feel for the food.
Only K- prefers his ideas to his food ; Yeats pecked,
and Edward gobbled, and, looking round this hapjjy
table, it seemed to me that we liked coming to Dalkey
because Gill liked to have us about him. Our
pleasure was dependent on the pleasure that our
host felt in our comjiany ; ' as kind-tempered a man
as ever lived,' I said to myself, and listened with
more indulgence to him than I had been able to
show in the afternoon, when, stretched out on the
sofa, he abandoned himself to memories of the days
when he was a Plan-of-Campaigner. They were
driving along the road on an outside car when a boy
lepped out from behind a hedge and whispered
' polis !' The driver immediately turned the horse's
head down the boreen, and I asked ' Was that the
night you were arrested ?' He told us of his trial
and conviction, and we felt, despite the languor of
the narrative, that he was telling us of what was
most real and intense in his life. All that had gone
before was a leading up to those days, and all that
would come after would be mere background, very
pleasant background, it is true, but still background.

Some men spend their lives watching bees and

SALVE 99

ants, noting down the habits of these insects ; my
pleasure is to watch the human mind, noting how
unselfish instincts rise to the surface and sink back
again, making way for selfish instincts, each equally
necessary, for the woi-ld would perish were it to
become entii*ely selfish or entirely unselfish. While
Gill narrated, we thought how this kindly-tempered
man had floated down the tide of casual ideas into the
harbour of thii'teen hundred a year, ' and he has done
this,' I said, ' instinctively, almost without knowing
whither he was drifting ; that is what is so wonderful.'

And all the way home on top of the tram we
thought of Gill's kindly sympathetic nature. A few
weeks later it was exhibited to me in a still more
lovable light. A rumour had reached me that JE was
sick and dangerously ill with a bad cold and cough
which he did not seem able to shake off, and which

whoever brought me the news did not finish the

sentence. One does not like to mention the word
consumption in Ireland.

' If he starts out again on another bicycle tour,
riding his old bicycle in all kinds of weathers, sleep-
ing in any inn — you know how he neglects his
food ?'

* He must leave Ireland for a long holiday,' I said,
and went down to see Gill.

' The shame of it. Gill, the application of the finest
intelligence we have in Ireland to preaching economics
in Connemara villages. Plunkett should do his own
work. A great poet must needs be chosen, a great
spirit ! Were the moon to drop out of the sky the
nights would be darker, but Dublin without JE would
be like the sky without a sun in it. Gill, come out

100 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

for a walk ; this is a matter on whieli I must speak
to you seriously.'

' It is indeed a serious matter/ Gill answered. ' I
will come out with you.'

It was a ^reat relief to me to see that my story
had moved him to the very quick.

' We must get him out of the country. I know
of nothing more serious than this cough and cold you
speak of How long do you say it has been upon
him ?'

* He has been ailing for the last six weeks, and
now, in this beautiful month of July, he is lying in
his bed without sufficient attendance. You know
how careless he is. He will not send for a doctor,
nor will he have a nurse.'

' We certainly must get him out of the country.
I will devise some excuse to send him to Ihily to
report on ' Gill mentioned some system of agri-
culture which had been tried successfully in Italy,
and which might be reproduced successfully here.
' But no matter whether it can or not, it will serve
as an excuse, and it will be easy for me to provide for
the expenses of the journey. But he'll never consent
to go to Italy alone. Will you go with him ?'

'Yes, I'll go with him and look after him as best
I can. Three months in Italy will throw me back
with my work, but never mind, coute que conie, 1 will
go to Italy. And you agree with me, that JE is the
most important man in Ireland ?'

SALVE 101

VI

Sienna, Assisi, and Ravenna appeared in the
imagination, and ourselves toiling up the narrow
streets, talking of Raphael, and as we would
return through France, we might well stop at
Montauban to see Ingres at home — Raphael re-
arisen after three centuries, a Raphael of finer
perceptions. JE would have been delightful on
this subject, but the journey to Italy was not upon
the chart of our destinies ; he recovered rapidly ;
Plunkett arranged that he was to edit The Homestead,
and every Saturday evening he was in my house at
dinner, talking about poetry, pictures and W, B.
Yeats, who came every morning to edit the dialogue
I had written for Diarmuid and Grania, and to regret
that I had not persevered with the French version,
which Lady Gregory was to translate into English,
Taidgh O'Donoghue into Irish, Lady Gregory back
into English, and Yeats was to put style upon. This
literary brewing used to remind M of an American

drink :

' The bar-keeper present.
His two arms describing a crescent ;'

(most readers know Bret Harte's celebrated parody) ;
and then, feeling that he had laughed too long at his
old friend, his face would become suddenly grave,
and he would quote long passages from Yeats' early
poems, the original and the amended versions,
always preferring the original.

' That's just it,' I answered. ' The words that he
likes to-day he will weary of and alter a few days
afterwards.'

102 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

' ForgettinjT,' JE said, ' that words wear out like
even-thing else. He once said to me that he would
like to spend the rest of his life rewriting the poems
that he had already written.'

' He is a very clever man, and the worst of it is
that there is something to be said for the alterations,
even the most trivial. Miss Gough pointed out to
me the other day that he had altered " Here is a
drug that will put the Fianna to sleep" into "Here
is a drug I have made sleepy." Of course it's better,
more like folk, but his alterations seem to drain the
text of all vitiility. An operatic text is what we
should be writing together, for we are always agreed
about the construction, and the musician would be
free from his criticism.'

JE was not quite sure that Yeats would not want
a caoine, and would propose to the musician a journey
to Aran.

'But, iE, we shall require some music for the play.'
And in the silence that followed this remark the
memory of some music I had heard long ago at Leeds,
bj' Edward Elgar, came into my mind. ' If I knew
Elgar, I'd write and ask him to send me a horn-call.
Do you know, I think I will.'

' Mr. Benson,' I wrote, * is going to produce
Diarmuid and Grania, a drama written by Mr. Yeats
and myself on the great Irish legend. Finn's horn
is heard in the second act, and all my pleasure in
the performance will be spoilt if a cornet-j^layer
tootles out wliatever comes into his head, perhaps
some vulgar phrase the audience has heard already
in the streets. Beautiful phrases come into the
mind while one is doing odd jobs, and if you do not

SALVE 103

look upon my request as an impertinence, and if you
will provide youi'self with a sheet of music-paper
before you shave in the morning, and if you do not
forget the pencil, you will be able to write down a
horn-call, before you turn from the right to the left
cheek, that will save my play from a moment of
intolerable vulgarity.'

Elgar sent me six horn-calls to choose from, and,
in my letter thankmg him for his courtesy, I told
him of the scene in the third act, when Diarmuid,
mortally wounded by the boar, asks Finn to fetch
water from the spring. Finn brings it in his helmet,
but, seeing that Grania and Finn stand looking at
each other, Diarmuid refuses to drink. ' This, and
the scene which follows, the making of the litter on
Avhich the body of Diarmuid is borne away to the
funeral pyre, seem to me to crave a musical setting.
It is a pity to leave such a scene unrealized ; and
how impressive a death -mai*ch would come after
Grania's description of the burning of Diarmuid !'

Elgar wrote, asking for the act, and it went to
him by the next post, but without much hope that
he would write the music, it being my way always
to take disappointment by the forelock, thereby
softening the blows of evil fortune. And without
this precautionary dose of pessimism Elgar's manu-
script would not have given me anji;hing like the
pleasure that it did. I was so tired of ' thats ' and
' whichs,' ' fors ' and ' buts,' that I stood for a long
time admiring the crotchets, the quavers, the lovely
rests ; and the long columns set apart for violins,
columns for flutes, and further columns for oboes,
fairly transported me. Elgar sent a letter with it

104 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

saying that the manuscrii)t was the only one in
existence, and that if it were lost he could not
supply me with another ; so it was put hurriedly
under lock and key, and the rest of my day was
spent going up one mean street and down another,
climbing small staircases, opening bedroom doors,
and meeting disappointment everywhere. At last,
a tenor from a cathedral-choir was discovered, swear-
ing from among the bedclothes that he could do
musical copying with anyone in the world, and
pledging his word of honour that he would be with
me at ten o'clock next morning. He smelt like a
corpse, but no matter, a score is a score, and Benson
had to receive a copy of it Mithin the next fortnight.
The conductor at the Gaiety said he would like to
copy the parts ; in copying them he would learn the
music, so I yielded to him Elgar's score, begging ot
him not to lose it, at which he laughed ; and some
days afterwards he said, ' Will you come up to the
music-room ?' and called upon his orchestra to follow.
The fiddles, the horns, the clarionets, the oboes and
the flutes, trooped up after us ; the j^arts were dis-
tributed, and the conductor took up his baton.

' Of course there will be plenty of mistakes in the
first reading, but we'll do our best.' He signed to
the fiddles, and the slow and melancholy march
began, the conductor singing the entrance of every
instrument, preserving an um-uffled demeanour till
the horn went quack. ' We will start that again,
number seventeen.' The horn again went quack,
and I shall always remember how the player shook
his head and looked at the conductor as if to say
that the composer should have been warned that, in

SALVE 105

such long intervals, thei'e is no depending on the
horn. When it was over, the conductor turned to
me, saying :

* There's your march. What do you think of it ?*

' It will have to be played better than that before
I can tell,' a remark the orchestra did not like, and
for which I felt sorry, but it is difficult to have the
courage of one's opinions on the spot, and, while
walking home, I thought of the many fine things
that I might have said ; that Elgar had drawn all
the wail of the caoine into the languorous rhythm of
his march, and that he had been able to do this
because he had not thought for a single instant of
the external forms of native music, but had allowed
the sentiment of the scene to inspire him. Out of
the harmony a little melody floats, pathetic as an
autumn leaf, and it seemed to me that Elgar must
have seen the primeval forest as he wrote, and the
tribe moving among the falling leaves — oak-leaves,
hazel-leaves, for the world began with oak and hazel.

His mourners — Diarmuid's mourners — were with-
out doubt wistful folk with eyes as sad as the waters
of western lakes, very like their descendants whom
I found waiting for me in my dining-room. Irish
speakers I knew them to be by their long upper
lips, and it was almost unnecessary for them to tell
me that they wei*e the actors and actresses chosen
for Dr. Hyde's play. The Twisting of the Rope.

'We've never acted before,' said a fine healthy
countrywoman, speaking with a rich brogue. ' But
we can all speak Irish.'

* I suppose you can, as you're going to act in an
Irish play.'

106 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!*

' We mean that we are all native speakers except
Miss O' Kennedy and Miss O'SuIlivan, and they have
learned Irish as well as you've learnt French/ she
added, somewhat tartly.

' I hope they've learnt it a great deal better,' I
answered, ' for I've never been able to learn that
language.

'What we mean is/ said Taidgh O'Donoghue,
' that we can speak Irish fluently.'

Of course I was very anxious to know how long it
would take to learn Irish perfectly, and if Miss
O'SuIlivan and Miss O' Kennedy knew it as well as
English ? We talked for about half an hour, and
then they all stood up together.

' I suppose the best thing we can do is to go
home and learn our parts.'

' If I am to rehearse the play I would sooner that
you learnt your parts with me at rehearsal.' Again
we engaged in conversation, and I learned that
they all made their living by teaching Irish ; pupils
were waiting for them at that moment, and that was
why they could not stay to tea. They would, how-
ever, meet me to-morrow evening in the rooms of
the Keating Branch of the Gaelic League. Dr. Hyde
was coming at the end of the week. And for three
weeks I followed the Irish play in a translation made
by Hyde himself, teaching everyone his or her part,
throwing all my energy into the production, giving
it as much attention as the most conscientious
regisseur ever gave to a play at the Fratiqaise.

And while we were rehearsing The Twisting oj the
Rope, Mr. Benson was rehearsing Diarmuid and Grania
in Birmingham. A letter came from him one morn-

SALVE 107

ing, telling rae that he did not feel altogether sure
that I would be satisfied with the casting of the part
of Laban, and YeatSj who sometimes attended my
rehearsals, said —

* You had better go over to Bii-mingham and see if
you can't get another woman to play the part.'

' But our play doesn't matter, Yeats ; what matters
is The Trvisting of the Rope. We either want to
make Irish the language of Ireland, or we don't ; and
if we do, nothing else matters. Hyde is excellent in
his part, and if I can get the rest straightened out,
and if the play be well received, the Irish language
will at last have gotten its chance.'

Yeats did not take so exaggerated a view of the
perfomiance of Hyde's play as I did.

* I see that Benson says that the lady who is going
to play Laban has a beautiful voice, and he suggests
that you might write to Elgar, asking him if he
would contribute a song to the first act.'

^The more music we get from Elgar the better.
Now, Yeats, if you'll go home and -write some verses
and let me go on with the rehearsal, we'll send them
to Elgar to-night.'

Yeats said he would see what he could do, and, to my
surprise, brought back that afternoon a very pretty un-
rhymed lyric, nothing, however, to do with the play. It
was sent to Elgar, who sent back a very beautiful melody
by return of post, and both went away to Benson and
were forgotten until I went to the Gaiety Theatre
with Yeats to a rehearsal of our play. The lady that
played Laban sang the lyric very well, but Schubert's
Ave Maria could not have been more out of place ;
as for the acting — Benson was right, the lady was

108 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

not a tragic actress ; even if she had been she could
not have acted the part, so much was her appearance
against her. She looked more like a quiet nun than
a Druidess, and, drawing aside Yeats, who was telling
her how she should hold a ^ine-cup, I said :

' It's no use, Yeats ; you're only wasting time. The
performance will be ridiculous.'

' Why didn't you go to Binningham, as I asked you ?'

* Because Hyde's play would have suffered. One
can't have one's cake and eat it. Of course, it's
dreadfully disappointing ; it is quite hopeless. I
shall not go to see the play to-night.'

I meant what I said, and was reading in my arm-
chair about eight o'clock when Frank Fay called to tell
me he was writing about the play, and would be better
able to do so if I could lend him the manuscript.

* I'll try to find you one.' And after searching for
some time in my secretary's room I came back with
some loose sheets. 'This is the best I can do for
you,' I said, bidding him good-bye.

* But aren't you coming to the theatre ?'

' No. I saw the play rehearsed this afternoon.
Benson is very good as Diarmuid, and I like
Mrs. Benson. Rodney plays the part of Finn. He
is one of the best actors in England, and Conan will
please you.' . . .

* Then why won't you come ?'

* The lady that plays Laban sings a ballad very
beautifully in the first act ; but '

' You will come to see your play. You won't sit
here all night. . . . No, you'll come.'

' For nothing in the world ; I couldn't bear it !'
All the same he succeeded in persuading me.

SALVE 109

VII

' But who is Frank Fay ?' the reader asks. In the
days of Diarmnid and Grania he was earning his Hving
as a shorthand writer and typist in an accountant's
office, and when his day's woi-k was over he went to
the National Library to read books on stage history.
His brother Willie was a clerk in some gas-works,
and painted scenery when his work was over, and
both brothei's, whenever the opportunity offered, were
ready to arrange for the performances of sketches,
farces, one-act plays in temperance halls. But
Box and Cox did not satisfy their ambitions ; and
the enthusiasm which The Twisting of the Rope had
evoked brought Willie Fay to my house one evening,
to ask me if I would use my influence with the Gaelic
League to send himself and his brother out, with a
little stock company, to play an equal number of plays
in English and Irish.

' But do you know Irish sufficiently ?'

He admitted that neither of them had any Irish at
all, and my brow clouded.

' We must have a few plays in English ; we
wouldn't always be sure of an Irish - speaking
audience.'

' If English plays are allowed, precedence will be
given to them. The line of least resistance,' I said ;
but the idea of a stock company travelling all over
the country seemed an excellent one, and I promised
that on the morrow, as soon as I had finished my
writing, I would go down to the Gaelic League
oflices and lay the project before the secretary.

no 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

We writers are always ^lad of any little excuse for
an afternoon walk. Our brains are exhausted after
five or six hours of composition, and the question
arises how are the hours before dinner to be whiled
away, and the hours after dinner, for if we go to bed
before twelve we may lie awake thinking of what we
have written during the day, and of what we hope to
write on the morrow. The reader sees us spending
our evenings reading, but we have read all the books
that we want to read ; the modern theatre is merely
servant-girlism (I make no difference between the
kitchen and the drawing-room variety). After forty,
shooting and hunting amuse us no longer, and
women, though still enchanting, are not quite so
enclianting as they used to be. There's one. . . .
She turned round the corner into Baggot Street, and
I stood hesitating between a choice of ways. The
Green tempted me, and I thought of Grafton Street
and of the women running in and out of its shops,
and after each other, talking and gathering up the
finery which brings the young barristers from the
Courts — spruce young fellows, whom I had often seen
in little groups of threes and fours, each one trying
to look as if he were busy disentangling some knotty
point of law, but thinking all the while of his coloured
socks and of the women going by. In Grafton Street
I should meet little Tommy O'Shaughnessy on his
way home from Green Street Court House which he
never really leaves, talking to himself, and ta})ping
his snuff-box from time to time ; and Gill would be
floating along there, lost in admiration of his own
wisdom. Sir Thornlcy Stoker rarely misses Grafton
Street between four and five ; I should certainly catch

SALVE 111

sight of him hopping about a silversmith's, like an old
magpie, prying out spoons and forks, and the im-
modest bulk of Larky Waldron, waiting outside for
him, looking into the window. A hundred other
odds and oddments I should meet there, everyone
amusing to see and to hear ; all the same for a
change of spectacle it might be as well to stroll to
the Gaelic League offices through Merrion Street and
along Nassau Street. I should meet students on
their way to the National Library, girls and boys, and
an old derelict Jesuit whom I liked to see going by
in his threadbare coat, tightly buttoned, a great
Irish scholar ; and then there are the clerics to see,
out for their afternoon walks, with perhaps a glimpse
of Edward talking to them. He always says that he
likes Bohemians or priests. The rural clergy tell him
about the country, and he tells the urban priest that
he has very nearly succeeded in inveigling Archbishop
Walsh into accepting ten thousand pounds for the
establishment of a choir to sing Palestrina and
Orlando di Lasso. The priests go away, smiling
inwardly, thinking him a little eccentric, but a very
good Catholic. If Edward is out of town and my
taste runs that day towards trees and greenswards,
all I have to do is to go down Leinster Street and
through a gateway into Trinity College Gardens.
Professor Mahaffy sometimes walks in the path under
the railings shaded by beautiful trees, and if it had
not been for a ferocious article published at the time,
attacking him for his lack of sympathy for the
Gaelic Movement we might have spent many
pleasant hours together under the hawthorns. Pro-
fessor Tyrrell's hostility to our movement was less

112 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

aggressive, and I liked to meet liim in the gardens,
and to walk a little way with him, listening to his
pleasant ancient warble about tlie literature that he
has lived in all his life, and with which he is so
saturated that, involuntarily, he trans))orts me out of
the grey modern day to Athens, where Aristophanes
walked to the Piranis to watch for the galleys from
Sicily.

If these two men are not about, there are other
professors, and I have often been through the gardens
talking with the fellow that teaches French. He is
of course, learned in Corneille, Racine and Ronsard,
and, by some strange chance, he knows Stuart Merrill,
a poet of some distinction, a contributor to the old
Revue Indt'pendante, Dujardin's Revue, but unfortu-
nately he never met Dujardin, and as it is impossible
to talk of Stuart Merrill for more than half an hour,
he was generally sent away at Carlisle Bridge. On
the other side one was sure to run up against Taidgh
O'Donoghue, the modern Irish poet, the rival of the
Munster poets of the eighteenth century, and my Irish
translator, though O'Neill Russell had begged me
to beware of him, saying that the Irish that Taidgh
wrote would not be understood out of Munster — a
libel on the Irish language, proved to be one soon
after the arrival of a boy from Galway, my nephew's
Irish tutor, for Comber, who had never been out
of Galway before, understood every word of Taidgh's
beautiful translation of my story, 'The Wedding
Gown.'

A great old cock was O'Neill Russell, whom we
never looked upon as an old man, despite his eighty
years. How could we, since he was straight as a

SALVE 113

maypole, and went for walks of two-and-twenty
miles among the Dublin mountains ? He came back
to me one day after one of these strolls, the news
bubbling upon his lips that he had composed an entire
scenario on the subject of an heroic adventure that
had happened to an Irish king in the thirteenth
century ; but he would not stay to dinner, nor even
to I'clate it ; he was in too great a hurry to verify a
fact in the National Libraiy, to get his scenario down
on paper. For one reason or another he never dined
at my house, though he liked to come in after dinner
for a talk on Saturday nights. It was no use offering
him a cigar, he always begged to be allowed to smoke
his pipe, and there being no spittoons in my dining-
room the coal-scuttle was put by him. A great old
cock, head up-reared, fine neck, grand shoulders, a
stately piece of architecture, fine in detail as in
general effect. A big nose divided the face, wander-
ing grey eyes lit it. The large hands had worked
for sixty years in America, in France, in the East.
He had been all over the world, and had returned
to Ireland with some seventy, eighty, perhaps a
hundred pounds a year. He was gibed in songs,
for he had gone away as a boy, speaking bad
Irish, and come back after sixty years, ' speaking
bad Irish still ' ; so said the song's refrain, and
a story followed at his heels that he had vilified a
man for twenty years in the American newspapers,
denouncing him as a renegade Irishman, because
he had advocated a certain use of the genitive. A
great old cock, as young as the youngest of the men
that came to my house, were it not for a certain
sadness — a very beautiful sadness, not for himself,

H

1 U ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

but for his country. He had hoped all his life
for Ireland's resurrection, but at the end of his life
it seemed as far distant as ever.

He haunted the Gaelic League offices, and the
day he pushed the door open, entering the room
with a great stride, I began to wonder who the
intruder could be — this great tall man, dressed in a
faded blue jacket and a pair of grey trousers, and a
calico shirt. The Editor of the Claidheam introduced
us, and my heart went out to him at once, as every
heart did, for he was the recognizable Irishman,
the adventurer, the wild goose. And after that
meeting we met frequently between five and six
o'clock ; the Gaelic League offices were then a
pleasant resort ; all kinds and conditions of men
assembled there, and we discussed the Irish lan-
guage sitting upon tables while smoking cigarettes.
It apj)eared every week in the Claidheam Soliiis, and
I liked to dictate a paragraph for somebody to turn
into Irish before my eyes, and, when the editor paused
for an equivalent, everyone ransacked his memory,
but our dictionary was always O'Neill Russell — a
rambling, incoherent, untrustworthy, old dictionary
— but one that none of us would have willingly been
without. It is pleasant to remember that he was in
the offices of the League the day that I called to un-
fold my project for a little travelling company to the
secretary and that he approved of it ; but his con-
versation soon diverged from the matter in hand into
an argument regarding the relative merits of Munster
and Connaught Irish.

' I'm afraid,' he said, ' that you've come too late to
revive the Irish language. There are only three

SALVE 115

men in Ireland who can write pure Irish. It's dialect,
sir, they write.'

'This may be true, my dear Mr. O'Neill Russell,
but bad Irish is better than good English and I
care little what Irish we get so long as we get
ourselves out of English.'

A few days after, I returned triumphant to the
secretary, Kuno Meyer having told me the night
before that Goethe, when he was asked how the
German language might be fostered in Poland, had
answered, ' Not so much by schools, or by books, but
by travelling companies that will play, not necessarily
good plays — good plays are not even desirable — but
homely little plays that will interest the villagers.
Everybody likes the theatre, and people will take
the trouble to learn a language so that they may
understand plays.'

' I'm giving you Goethe's own words, and you'll be
well advised to accept the wisdom of the wisest man
since Antiquity.' The secretary did not answer, and I
continued angrily : ' Up to the present you have done
nothing but tell the people that they should learn
Irish, and the people are asking themselves what good
it will do them. You must make Irish worth their
while. Now a unique opportunity for doing this is at
hand. Willie Fay, an energetic and talented young
actor, whose acquaintance I made during the rehearsals
of The Twisting of the Rope, is willing to undertake the
management of the little touring company. . . . WTiat
do you think ?' The secretary did not answer. ' You
don't agree with me that a company acting little
plays in Irish Avould interest the people in the lan-
guage, and encoui'age them to study it. You're not

116 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

of Goethe's opinion ? You think that what may have
been right in Germany may be wrong in Ireland ?'

'That is not what I was going to say, sir. I was
thinking of our finances, and whether it would be
possible for the Gaelic League to spend any more
money for the present. The organizers are costing
the League a great deal of money.'

' But your organizers will not be able to do half as
much for the language as a company of strolling
players. How much do you pay your organizers ?'

' About two hundred a year.'

'Two hundred a year to bawl from market-place
to market-place : " Now, my fine fellows, will you be
telling me why don't you speak the language of your
forefathers ? If it was good enough for them it
ought to be good enough for you. And you, Joe
Maguire, why aren't you talking Irish ?" '

The secretary was not disposed to admit that the
organizers of the League were as uncouth as I wished
to represent them.

' It doesn't matter whether they be couth or
uncouth, my good sir ; you must pro\'ide a reason
for the learning of Irish, and there are only two
valid reasons — to read books and to understand plays.'

Bedell's Bible was mentioned ; a masterpiece of
modern Irish, the secretary admitted it to be.

' But what would Father Riley be sajing if we
were caught putting forward a Protestant book ?
We can't afford to have the priests against us.'

' I know that ; but the priest couldn't object to
the travelling company ?'

' I don't see how he could,' and the secretary
promised to lay my project for the financing of a

SALVE 117

small company of strolling players before the Coisde
Gnotha on the eighteenth. On the nineteenth he
told me the matter had been carefully considered,
but

'If the Coisde Gnotha would only give me an
opportunity of laying my project before them. You
see it is impossible for you to tell them all that is
in my mind.' The secretary said he thought he
had listened very carefully to me, and had repeated
all I had said. ' You will excuse me if I say
that I could plead my own case better than you.
Among other things I forgot to tell you that the
travelling company might prove a paying concern. If
it were to pay ten pounds a week after expenses ?'

'Of course if it did that. . . . But besides the
money there are other difficulties/ he said. ' There
are women's parts in the plays you propose to have
acted ? The ladies who play these parts could
hardly travel about unprotected. Father Riley, who
is on the Coisde Gnotha '

' He is every^vhere.'

' He's a great man for the Irish, and he brought
out this point very clearly, and everybody agreed
with him.'

' Of course, if Ireland is to be governed by parish
priests !' and I fumed about the office, talking of the
Italian Renaissance.

'There is nothing to hinder you and Mr. Martyn
from starting a company.'

' Fiddlesticks. The Moore and Martyn Company
would have no success whatever. If it is to be done
at all it will have to be called The Gaelic League
Touring Company. Besides, Mr. Martyn wouldn't

118 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

go into any project tliat the priests opposed on the
ground of faith and morals ; so I suppose the thing
is at an end.'

' I wouldn't advise you to go on with it, for I've
always noticed that nothing succeeds in Ireland
unless the j)riests take it up.'

' So the Irish language is going to be sacrificed for
the sake of a little female virtue. But girls are
seducing young men . . . and old men, too, for
matter of that, all over the world, and every hour of
the night and day. That such a profligacy is not
desirable in England I readily understand ; but in
Ireland ! You know what I mean.'

'I'm afraid I don't.'

' You surprise me.' And taking a sovereign out of
my pocket, I held it up to his gaze. ' The deprecia-
tion of the gold species. Now you understand ?'

' I'm afraid I don't.'

' If a man emplovs fifty girls in a factory he wishes
them to practise virtue, for if they don't they will
not be able to give him that amount of work which
will enable him to pay dividends. But in Ireland
there are no factories, and consequently female
virtue is not a natural necessity, as in England.'

' I'm afraid you'll never get Father Riley to see
it from your point of view-.'

* Probably not. Irish Catholics have taken their
morality from English Puritans. I should have said
economists. Good-morning.'

But half-way down the stairs a new idea occurred
to me, and the temptation was very great to return
and tell the secretary that the safety bicycle has
brought a new morality into the world, even into

SALVE 119

Ireland, for, by freeing girls from the control of
their mothers, it has given them the right to earn
their own living ; and the right of women to earn
their living on their feet has — and I paused to con-
sider the question — has brought to a close the oldest
of all the trades. The light-of-love is becoming as
rare as the chough, and on the dusty stairs of the
Gaelic League I remembered how numerous they
used to be on Kingstowzi Pier on Sundays, all of
them beautifully dressed in sea-green dresses and
seal-skin jackets. ' All the same, there is no reason
why the moralist should rejoice ; their places are
being taken by bands of enthusiastic amateurs.
Thousands of years ago in India,' I said, 'the
Buddhist spoke of the wheel of Life, or was it the
wheel of Change ?' And, thinking how quickly this
wheel revolves in our midst, I imagined myself in a
pulpit, preaching a great sermon on morality, its
cause and cure; and the wonderful things I could
say on this subject ran on in my head until I
caught sight of three large, healthy-looking priests
standing on the kerb, dressed in admirable broad-
cloth, and wearing finely-stitched American boots,
their fat and freckled hands playing with their watch-
chains. At that moment dear Edward joined them,
and from the complacency that his arrival brought
into the clerical faces it seemed certain that he was
asking how the country was looking, meaning there-
by, how is the Irish language going along ? ' And
they are answering his questions sympathetically,' I
said ; but on approaching the group the words ' Her
Excellency' caught my ear, and I guessed that they
were talking of the caravan which Lady Aberdeen

1 20 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

had sent round the country — a caravan of plastic
protests and warnings against the danger of spitting,
and of sleeping within closed windows.

' But it will not occur to them that insufficient
food is the cause of much consumption,' I said,
thinking of the vannian who goes out at six o'clock
in the morning and returns home at midday wet to
the skin, and, after a dinner of potatoes and dripping
(lucky if he gets a bit of American bacon), goes out
again, and comes back about eight or nine to a cup ot
tea, lucky if he gets that before l}ing down in his wet
shirt.' Father Riley had set me against the clerics,
and it was in a spirit of rebuke that I listened to the
priests proposing that sermons denouncing spitting
should be delivered in every parish from the altar.

Edward introduced me to the holy ones, and,
after listening to them for a while, the temptation
stole over me to tell them that I had written to Her
Excellency last night, asking her to use her very
great influence to make known the cure that had
been discovered.

' And what cure is that ?' Edward asked innocently.

' Holy Orders. Now, listen ! I've inquired the
matter out and have succeeded in discovering the
fact that for the last hundred years no Archbishop
has died from consumption, nor a Bishop, nor a parish
priest, only two or three out-lying curates. There-
fore, my letter to Her Excellency is a serious advocacy
that all Ireland should take Orders, those who want
to lead celibate lives remaining or becoming Catholics,
those who wish to enter the marriage state remaining,
or discovering themselves, Protestants. In this way,
and only in this way, will Her Excellency be able

SALVE 121

to kill a fatal disease and rid Ireland of religious
diiferences. What do you think of the new cure,
gentlemen ? But, Edward, wait a moment.' As the
priests did not seem ready with an answer, I bade
them good-bye abruptly, and hurried after Edward.
' Why all this haste ?' I asked, overtaking him.

' I don't like that kind of talk. It's most offensive

to me ; and I, after introducing you '

' But, my dear Edward, how can it be offensive to
propose tliat all Ireland shall take Orders ? Didn't
Father Sheehan say in his last masterpiece that he
looked forward to the day when Ireland should be
one vast monastery ?'

' When that day comes they'll make short work of
fellows like you— ship you all off. But I daren't
linger at the corner talking ; I'll catch another cold.'
'But, Edward, I've just come from the Gaelic
League, and have to speak to you on a matter of
importance.'

' Well, then, come along.'
'We might follow the quays to Ringsend.'
' That way means loitering, looking at ships,' and
Edward, who had been feeling a little bit livery
lately, proposed that we should walk to Ballsbridge
and follow the Dodder on to Donnybrook, returning
home by Leeson Street. W^e crossed Carlisle Bridge
at the rate of four miles an houi*, and at the end of
Westmoreland Street Edward said 'This way,' and
we turned into Brunswick Street. At Westland Row
he said, ' We'll turn up here and avoid the back
streets,' and away we went, through Merrion Square
and Lower Mount Street, Edward thinking all the
time of his liver, never for a moment of the business

122 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

that I wished to speak to him about, and my irritation
increased against him at every lamp-post in Lower
Mount Street, but I restrained myself till we reached
Ballsbridge.

' Was a man ever absorbed in himself as you are,
I wonder ?'

' How is that ?' he asked, becoming interested at
once.

' You've forgotten that I told you I had an impor-
tant matter to speak to you about.'

' No, I liaven't. But I'm waiting for you to speak
about it.'

' And all this while '

' Come now, no fussing. What liave you got to say ?'

Feeling the uselessness of being angry with him,
I told him of my interview with the secretary.
^Apparently the touring company is all off; and,
though you were in favour of it a fortnight ago, you
weren't enthusiastic when it came up for discussion.
You were asleep.'

' Who told you I was asleep ? You'd fall asleep,
too, if you were kept out of your bed till three o'clock
in the morning, listening to them saying the same
things over and over again.'

' Well, when you woke up you voted against me
with Father Riley. Deny it if you can.'

' It wasn't till Father Riley brought out the
point '

' But you were asleep.'

' No, I wasn't asleep. I followed the argument
verj' closely, and I agree with Father Riley that it
would be a very serious thing, indeed, to induce four
or five girls to leave their mothers, and cast them

SALVE V23

into the promiscuous current of theatrical life without
proper chaperons.'

' A breath of theology blows you hither and thither.
You'd have yielded to the persuasion of the learned
friar to throw out The Countess Cathleen, if you hadn't
found a backing in Father Barry and Father Tom
Finlay. Your own play a\ ould hav^e had to go with
it ; even that sacrifice would not have stopped you ;
and because we wouldn't produce your play, The Tale
of a Town '

' I don't know that anybody else would have acted
as I did. When you sided with Yeats against me, I
gave you my play to adapt, to cut up, to turn inside out,
for I had always preached unity, and was determined
that nobody should say I didn't practise what I
preached when my turn came.'

'We produced Maeve instead of The Tale of a Town.
You didn't expect that we were going to produce two
plays by you in one year, did you ? We preferred
Maeve. All the same you threw us over. Your
agreement with Yeats was to provide money for
three years, and when you backed out we had to go
to Benson. Heagreed to produce Dianmnd and Crania,
else the Irish Literary Theatre would not have com-
pleted its three years.'

'There was a great deal in Diarrnuid and Crania
which I didn't approve of — many coarse expressions,
and a tendency to place pagan Ireland above Christian
Ireland. I'm not taken in — I'm not taken in by you
and Yeats and . . . the old proselytizer in the back-
ground.'

The long loose mouth tightened ; a look of resolu-
tion came into the eyes ; the woollen gloves grasped

124 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

the umbrella, and the step grew quicker. I lagged
a little behind to obtain a better view of the great
boots. Years ago, in London, I had asked him to
come and see the Robinsons with me, not noticing
the size of his boots until he was seated in their
drawing-room ; on the hearthrug at Earl's Terrace they
seemed to take up so much room that I felt obliged to
tell Edward that he would do well to get himself a
pair of patent leathers, which, I am bound to say, he
ordered at once, and in Jermyn Street, presenting on
his next visit a more spruce appearance. But he had
always felt out of his element in drawing-rooms, and
had long ago returned to the original boots and to
the black overcoat, in which he wraps himself in
winter as in a blanket. Under the brim of the bowler
hat I could just catch sight of the line of his aquiline
nose — a drop hung at the end of it ; it fell as we
entered Leeson Street, at the moment when he was
telling me of the agreement he would draw up if he
succeeded in persuading the Archbishop to accept his
ten tliousand pounds for the support of the polyi)honic
choir. Edward is shrewd enough in business, and I
admired the scru))ulosity of the wording of the bond
which would prevent the clerics from ever returning
to Gounod's Ave Maria.

' My money will be tied up in such a way that
there will be no setting aside of Palestrina for Verdi's
Requiem when I'm out of the way.'

It amused me to think of the embarrassment of the
Archbisho]) fairly caught between the devil and the
deep sea, reduced to the necessity of refusing ten thou-
sand pounds, or entering into the strictest covenant
for the performance of sixteenth-century polyjihonic

SALVE 125

music for ever and ever. On one point, however,
Edward was inclined to yield. If some great com-
poser of religious music should arise, the fact that
he was born out of due time, should not exclude his
works from performance at the Dublin Cathedral.

' But as that possibility is very remote, it is not
probable that my choir will ever stray beyond Pales-
trina, Vittoria, Orlando di Lasso, and Clemens non
Papa.'

His appearance seemed so strangely at variance
with his tastes that I could not help smiling ; the
old grey trousers challenged the eye at that moment,
and I thought of the thin decadent youth, very
fastidious in his dress, wi'iting Latin, Greek, or
French poems, that one would have naturally imagined
as the revivalist of old polyphonic music. An old
castle would be the inevitable dwelling of this youth ;
he would have purchased one for the purpose. But
Edward had inherited the castle. He is, as his mother
used to say, the last male of his race. A very old race
the Martyns are, having been in Ireland since the
earliest times. It is said that they came over with
William the Conqueror from France, so Edward is
a descendant of ancient knights on one side, the very
lineage that the Parsifal side of Edward's nature
would choose, but the Parsifal side is remote and
intermittent, it does not form part of his actual life.
There is no faintest trace of snobbery in Edward, and
he is prouder of the Smiths than the Martyns, attri-
buting any talent that he may have to his grandfather,
John Smith of Masonbrook, a pure peasant, a man of
great original genius, who, without education or
assistance from anyone, succeeded in piling up a great

126 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

fortune in the county of Gahvay. When estates •were
being sold in the Encumbered Estates Court, he had
invested his money in land, and so successful were his
speculations that he was able to marry his daughter
to old John Martyn of Tillyra, to whom she brought
a fortune of ten thousand pounds. She had inherited
from her father some good looks, a distinguished ap-
pearance, many refined tastes, and the reader of Ave
has not forgotten altogether her grief at Edward's
celibacy, which would deprive the Gothic house he
built to please her of an heir.

My recollections of the twain go back to the very
beginning of my life, to the time when Edward
returned from Oxford, %\Titing poems that I admired
for their merit, and probably a little for the sake of
my friend, in whom I discerned an original nature.
' I am too different from other people,' he used to
say, 'ever to be a success.'

The poems were ultimately burnt, because they
seemed to him to be, on reflection, in disagreement
with the teachings of his Church. ' So he was in
the beginning what he is in the end,' I said, ' and a
great psychologist might have predicted his solitary
life in two musty rooms above a tobacconist's shop,
and his last habits, such as pouring his tea into a
saucer, balancing the saucer on three fingers like an
old woman in the country. Edward is all right if
he gets his Mass in the morning and his pipe in the
evening. A great bulk of peasantry with a delicious
strain of Palestrina running thi'ough it.'

' I must be getting my dinner,' he said.

' But won't you come home and dine with me ?
There are many other points '

SALVE 127

' No/ he said, ' I don't care to dine with you.
You're never agreeable at table. You find fault with
the cooking.'

* If you come back I swear to you that whatever
the cook may send me up '

'The last time I dined at your house you made
remarks about my appetite.'

' If I did, it was because I feared appoplexy.
Several parish priests have died lately.'

His great back disappeared in the direction of a
tavern.

VIII

As it seemed easier to tell Willie Fay the bad news
than to write a letter I left a message with one of
his friends asking him to call at my house. Any
evening except Saturday would suit me. On Satur-
day evenings I received my friends, and it would be
difficult to discuss the matter freely before them.
It was one Thursday night that he came and perched
himself on the highest chair in the room in spite ot
my protests. He fidgeted in it like a man in a
hurry, anxious to get through an interview which had
no longer any interest for him, answering me with a
' yes ' and a ' no,' receiving the suggestion very
coldly that in a few months new members would be
elected to the Coisde Gnotha.

' Men,' I said, ' who will take a different view from
Father Riley. I suppose you wouldn't care to wait ?'

'They'll go their way and I'll go mine,' he
answered, and with such a gi-and air of indifference
that I began to suspect he had already heard of my

128 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

failure to persuade the Gaelic League to accept him
as the manager of a touring company and had gotten
sometliing else in view. The acoustics of Dublin are
very perfect. But when I questioned him regarding
his plans he gave a vague answer and took his leave
as soon as he decently could.

A secret there certainly was, and I thought it over
till JE mentioned on Saturday night that the Fays' had
come to ask him to allow them to perform his Deirdre.

* Your Deirdre !'

And forthwith he confided to me that one morning,
about six weeks before, as he rose from his bed, he had
seen her in the woods, ' where she lived,' he added
(I was not then instructed in the legends) ' with
Levarcam, a Druidess, that King Concubar had set to
guard her maidenhood. I saw the lilacs bloom-
ing in the corner of the yard, and herself running
through the woods towards the dun. She came
crying to her dear foster-mother, half for protection^
half for glee — she had seen a young man for the
first time, Naisi, who, in pursuit of a deer, had passed
through the glen unperceived, though it was strictly
guarded by the king's spearmen.'

' And what happens then ?' I asked, interested in
the setting forth of the story.

' A love-scene with Naisi, who begs Deirdre to fly
with him to Scotland, for only by putting a sea
between them can they escape the wrath of
Ck)ncubar.'

' He arrives too late. Scene with Levarcam,' I said,
and regretted the words for they seemed to jar JE's
gentle, but compelling, conception of the story.
' Now for your second act.'

SALVE 129

Up to the present he had received no faintest idea
of itj but the first act had been transmitted so clearly
that even Plunkett's work had to be deferred till he
had written it. He had finished it at a single
sitting and the Fays' were busy rehearsing it every
evening.

' So I suppose I shall have to go on with it.'

My excited curiosity compelled me to ask him how
they had heard of this sudden inspiration.

'Standish O' Grady wrote to me for an article to
fill up a number of the All Ireland Review, but I had
no article by me^ nor any time to write one^ having
spent all my spare time on the act, which I sent
along, saying that he was welcome to print it if he
liked.'

' O' Grady must have pulled a wry face when he
received it,' I thought. ' He has retold the legends
himself and can have little taste for dramatic versions
of them ; but an editor short of copy cannot be too
particular ' — a parenthetical i-eflection of my own of
no particular moment. M's act went away to the
printers, and the Fays' arrived a little late at their
offices next morning, the reading of the act having
delayed them in the street. They were up at ^'s
that evening, begging him to let them produce the
play, and assuring him they would be glad to have
the second and third acts at his early convenience.

It was while returning home over Portobello
Bridge that he saw Naisi in his Scottish dun mending
a spear, ' a memory of the chivalry of the Ultonians
ha^^ng kindled in him during the night.' But the
gift of prophecy is upon Deirdre, who begins to
bewail her lover's return to Ireland and to foretell

130 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

great misfortunes. Tlirough the boom of the sea
a horn is heard. ' The horn of Fergus ! I know it/
Naisi cries.

' So far have I written,' ]E said, ' and as soon as I
get another free evening I shall finish the act for
them.'

But he had to wait a few weeks for his next
inspiration, when he finished the act which he
repeated to us one Saturday night, for M holds all
that he writes in his heart, comma for comma. It
was a long time, however, before a third free evening
could be found, and in great patience the actors and
actresses continued to chant their parts through the
winter nights until the third act was brought to
them.

It was then discovered that ^^'s play was too short
for an evening's entertainment, and Yeats was asked
for his Cathlcen ni Houlihau ; he had met her last
summer in one of the Seven Woods of Coole — in which
a future historian will decide ; for me it is to tell
merely that the two plays were performed on
April 15 in St. Teresa's Hall, Clarendon Street,
before an enthusiastic and demonstrative crowd of
men and women. A later historian will also have to
determine whether Nj took the part of the God
Manaanan MacLir at this performance, or whether
he only appeared in the part at the preliminary per-
formance in Coffey's drawing-room. All I know for
certain is that none will ever forget the terrible
emphasis he gave to the syllables Man-aan-nawn Mac-
Leer in Coffey's drawing-room. He very likely had
something to do with the bringing over of Maud
Gonne from France to play the part of Cathleen ni

SALVE 131

Houlihan. Or did she come for Yeats' sake ? How-
ever, she came, and dreaming of the many rebel
societies that awaited her coming she gave point to
the line since become famous :

' They have taken from me my four beautiful fields,'

a line which I have no hesitation in taking from
Lady Gregory and attributing to Yeats.

An Irish audience always likes to be reminded of
the time when Ireland was a nation, and the Fays'
determined that some organization must be started
to keep the idea alive ; the Presidency of the
National Theatre Society was offered to M, but he
seemed to have considered his dramatic mission over,
and contented himself with drawing up the rules
and advising the members to elect Yeats as their
President. He may have noticed that Yeats had been
seeking an outlet for Irish dramatic genius ever since
the break-up of the Irish Literary Theatre, and for
sure the fact was not lost upon him that Yeats' ears
pricked up only when the word 'play' was men-
tioned, and that his eyes were never lifted from the
ground in his walks except to overlook a piece of waste
ground as a possible site for a theatre. He could not
but have heard Yeats mutter on more than one occa-
sion, 'Goethe had a theatre . . . Wagner had a theatre' ;
and he had drawn the just conclusion that Yeats was
seeking an outlet for Irish dramatic talent, and would
bring courage and energy to the aid of the new
movement. Oh, the wise JE, for as soon as Yeats
was elected President he took the Fays' in hand,
discovering almost immediately that their art was
of French descent and could be traced back to

132 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

the middle of the seventeenth century in France.
Some explanation of this kind was necessary, for
Dublin had to be persuaded that two little clerks
had suddenly become great artists, and to confirm
Dublin in this belief the newspapers were re-
quested to state that Mr. W. B. Yeats was writing
a play for Mr. William Fay on the subject of The
Pot of Broth.

W^ell, the best of us are sometimes short-sighted
and superficial, and let it be freely confessed, that
it seemed to me at the time disgraceful that the
author of The Wanderings of Ushcen should stoop to
writing a farce, for the subject Yeats had chosen
was farcical, and the word represented to me only
the merely conventional drolleries that I had seen
on the London stage. My excuse for my blindness
is that I have spent much of my life in France
among French writers ; folk lore was unknown in
Montmartre in my time, and no French writer that I
know of, except Moliere and George Sand, has made
use of patois in literature ; we are only beginning
to become alive to the beauty of living speech when
living speech is fast being driven out by journalists.
But to return to Yeats, whose claim to immortiility is
well founded, for he knew from the first that literature
rises in the mountains like a spring and descends,
enlarging into a rivulet and then into a river. All
this is clear to me to-day, but when he spoke to me
of The Pot of Broth, I asked him if he weren't
ashamed of himself; and when he proposed that I
should choose a similar subject and -wTite a farce for
Willie Fay, I rose from my chair, relying on gesture
to express my abhorrence of his scheme. But not

SALVE 133

liking to be left out of anything, I consented, at last,
to write half a dozen plays to be translated into Irish.

' It may not be necessary to have them translated.
Wouldn't it do you as well if Lady Gregory put
idiom on them ?

' We shall get the idiom much better,' I answered,
'by having the plays translated into Irish. I will
publish the Irish text, and you can do what you like
with the brogue.'

The stupid answer of a man intellectually run
down ; but next day I was down at the Gaelic
League unfolding my project to the secretary, who
thought it a very good one for the advancement of the
Irish language. As soon as the plays were written
he would hand them in, and the Coisde Gnotha could
decide.

' My good man, do you think that I came over
from England to submit plays to the Coisde Gnotha ?'

And we two stood looking at each other until the
futility of my question began to dawn upon me ;
and then, to pass the matter over, I asked him if he
knew of any Irish writers who could clothe the
skeletons which I would supply with suitable dia-
logue. He said that Taidgh O'Donoghue was very
busy at present, but a Feis was being held in Galway,
and suggested that I should go down and seek what
I wanted among the prize-winners.

' Mr. Edward Martyn is one of the judges of
traditional singing ; you'll see him.'

' And Yeats and Lady Gregory are certain to be
there.' And away I went gleefully to mterview the
Irish language chez elle in the historic town of Galway.
Of the journey there my mind retains no memory.

134 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

■which is a pity, for I must liave met in tlie train
interesting people whose conversation is lost to
these pages. My memory does not begin again till
I entered the long low room in which the Feis was
being held. A pleasing impression it was : the May
sunlight flowing gently through its square windows,
lighting up in patches the people sitting on the
benclies ; the peasant stimding on the stage singing ;
and Edward with his hand to his ear.

' How are you, Edward ?'

' A great singer come from Connemara. I've often
told you of traditional singing. Will you listen to it ?'

The old melomaniac's face was a study ; but, how-
ever closely I lent my ear to the singer, I could not
distinguish anv music, only a vague melancholy drift
of sound, rising and falling, unmeasured as the wind
soughing among the trees or the lament of the waves
on the shore, something that might go on all day long,
and the old fellow thatching his cabin all the while.
The singer was followed by a i)i}>er, and the music that
Michael Fluddery, a blind man from Connemara, drew
from his pipes was liardly more articulate. At first it
seemed to me that I could follow the tune, but very
soon all sequence died out of it, and it became a
mere tangle of natural sounds which quickly trans-
ported me to the edge of a marsh that I had
known in childhood. I could sec the black water
of the lough and a bittern drinking from a bog
drain. The bird went away on slow wings into a
darkling sky ; and then it seemed to me that I could
hear the sound of widgeons passing overhead. The
series of little cries that followed reminded me
of snipe rising out of the reeds in front of the lough.

SALVE 135

My thoughts melted into a long meditation, until
a long wail from the pipes stai'tled me, and then
I looked up as if I had heard a swan that had
been flying all day drop with a cry into the
dark waters of Lough Navadogue. But I was
awake again in the long low room with May
sunlight streaming through the square windows,
Edward's hand was at his ear, just as if he
was afraid of missing a note ; and at a little dis-
tance away Yeats and Lady Gregory sat colloguing
together, their faces telling me nothing. And
when the pipes burst forth again it was into a
noisy jig. But to my ears it was not much more
than mere clatter, a high note, and a low one
dropped in here and there. Dancers rushed in,
hopped up and down, round about and back again,
the women's petticoats whirling above grey worsted
legs, the tails of the men's frieze coats flying behind
them, their hobnails hammering a great dust out ot
the floor. There were no pauses. As soon as the
jig was over the story-teller came in, and, taking a
chair, he warmed his hands over an imaginary peat
fire, and began his traditional narrative, which did
not differ very much from traditional singing. Now
and then he seemed to wander, and I thought
he must be telling of somebody lost in a field,
who had to turn his coat inside out to rid himself of
the fairy spell ; and, glancing round the audience, I
could see the eyes of the Irish speakers kindling (it
was easy to pick them out), the wandering Celtic
eye, pale as their own hills. How they listened !
interested in the narrative, recognizing themselves
and their forlorn lives in it. Creatures of marsh and

\36 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

jungle they seemed to me, sad as the primitive
Nature in which they Hved. I had known them
from childhood but was always afraid of them,
and used to run into the woods when I saw the
women coming with the men's dinners from Der-
rinanny (the name is like them), and the marsh
behind the village and the dim line of the Partry
Mountains were always alien to me.

' Edward, let's get away. We're losing all the
sunlight.'

He could not leave the Feis just then, but if I
would wait till the story-teller had finished he might
be able to get away for an hour.

' We're expecting a piper from Aran, the great
piper of the middle island '

' And a great number of story-tellers,' Yeats added.

' You see, I'm the President of the Pipers' Club,'
Edward broke in.

' They should be here by now, only there is no
wind in the bay,' Yeats muttered.

I begged of him to come away, but he did not know
if he could leave Lady Gregory. He leaned over her,
and at the end of some affable murmuring she seemed
satisfied to let him go, accepting his jiromise to come
back to fetch her in tiuae for lunch ; and we three went
out together for a walk through the town.

' How happy the sunlight makes me ! Don't you
feel a little tipsy, Edward ? How could you have
wanted to sit listening any longer to that eternal
rigmarole without beginning or end ?'

* You mean the traditional singer ? He wasn't
very good, and only got poor marks,' Edward said,
and he asked me what I thought of the piper.

SALVE 137

' He recalled many memories and a landscape.
But if you like folk music how is it that you don't
like folk-tales ?'

' I do like folk-tales in the Irish language or in the
English '

' Folk is our refuge from vulgarity,' Yeats answered,
and we strolled aimlessly through the sunlight.

' Where would you like to go ?' Edward asked me
abruptly.

' To see the salmon. All my life I've heard of the
salmon lying in the river, four and five deep, like
sardines in a box.'

' Well, you'll see them to-day,' Yeats answered.

There were other idlers besides ourselves enjoying
the fair weather, and their arms resting on the
stone bridge they looked into the brown rippling
water, remarking from time to time that the river
was very low (no one had ever seen it lower), and
that the fish would have to wait a long time before
there was sufficient water for them to get up the
weir. But my eyes could not distinguish a fish till
Yeats told me to look sti-aight down through the
brown water, and I saw one, and immediately after-
wards a second and a third and a fourth. And then
the great shoal, hundreds, thousands of salmon, each
fish keeping its place in the current, a slight move-
ment of the tail being sufficient.

' But if they should get tired of waiting and return
to the sea ?'

Yeats is a bit of a naturalist, and in an indolent
mood it was pleasant to listen to him telling of the
habits of the salmon which only feeds in the sea.
If the fishermen were to get a rise it would be because

138 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

tlie fish were tired of waiting and snapped at any-
thing to relieve the tedium of existence.

A lovely day it was, the town lying under a white
canopy of cloud, not a wind in all the air, but a line
of houses sheer and dim along the river mingling
with grey shadows ; and on the other bank there
were waste places difficult to account for, ruins show-
ing dimly through the soft diffused light, like old
castles, but Yeats said they were the ruins of ancient
mills, for Gal way had once been a prosperous town.

' Maybe,' my spirit answered, ' but less beautiful
than she is to-day.' More distinct is my memory of
the rock on which the fisherman sat throwing his fly
in vain, for the fish were too absorbed in their natural
instinct to think of an^-thing but the coming flood
which would carry them up the river. He changed
his fly many times, and at last, with some strange
medley of red and blue and purple, he roused a fish
out of its lethargy. It snapped ; the hook caught in
its gills, and a battle began which lasted up and down
the stream, till at last a wearied fish was drawn up to
the bank for the gillie to gaff. We saw it laid upon
a rock, its head was broken with a mallet, and the
fisherman prepared to throw his fly again across the
river. Another silly fish would be tempted to snap
at the gaudy thing dragged across its very nose
sooner or later. . . . But we had seen enough of
fishing for one day, and, proposing to show us old
Galway, Edward led us through a dusty, dilapidated
square ; and by the broken railings of the garden we
sto])ped, for in the middle of the grass-plot somebody
had set up an ancient gateway, all that remained of
some great house ; and when we had admired it we

SALVE 139

followed him through some crumbling streets to the
town house of the Martyns, for in the eighteenth
century the western gentry did not go to Dublin for
the season. Dublin was two long days' journey away ;
going to Dublin meant spending a night on the
road, and so every important county family had its
town house in Galway. My grandfathers must have
danced in Galway, there being no important town
in MayOj and in fine houses, if one may judge from
what remains of Edward's. Edward regretted that
his house had been let out in tenements. It was nearly
a ruin, he said, when it came into his hands ; the root
was falling, and the police had ordered him to have it
taken down, as it was a public danger. We listened
to him, pondering the while, the archway under which
the four-horsed coach used to pass into the courtyard ;
Edward pointed out some marble chimney-pieces
high up on the naked walls, saying he had better
have them taken away, but I hoped he would leave
them, for a scattered vision of ladies in high-peaked
bodices and gentlemen with swoi'ds had just appeared
to me, dancing in mid-air.

' Leave them, and these steps where the lackeys
have set down sedan chairs ; embroidered shoes have
run up these steps, flowered trains following, to dance
minuet or gavotte ... or waltzes.'

And arguing whether the waltz had penetrated to
Galway in the eighteenth century, we followed
Edward to the cathedral. He liked being there,
though its worship was Protestant, and he made him-
self very agreeable, telling us that it was built late in
the fifteenth century, and we wandered down the
aisles, deploring the vulgarity of the modern world.

UO 'HAIL AND FARE\\TLL!'

* It would be impossible to build as beautiful a
cathedral to-day, for it is in keeping with the town,
yet there could not have been much culture in
Galway in the fifteenth century.'

' Galway was then without knowledge/ Yeats
muttered.

' Quite so/ I answered. ' We corrupt in know-
ledge and purify ourselves in ignorance.'

* Wlio said that ?' Yeats asked sharply.

* Balzac, but I cannot answer for the exact words.'

' How true ! How true !' Edward repeated, and,
leading us down a lane-way, he pointed out some
stone carvings which seemed to him conclusive of
the fifteenth, but which might be sixteenth century
sculpture, Ireland being always a century behind
England, and England being always a century behind
France. All the same he believed that the gateway
was late fifteenth century, for at that time Galway
was trading with Spain and the gateway bore traces
of Spanish influence. He spoke of the great
galleons from Spain that once came floating up the
bay, their sails filled with the sunset, and called our
attention to the wide sweeping outlines of the head-
lands stretching for away into the Atlantic. ' Not
only in certiiin buildings but in flesh and blood are
traces of the Spaniard to be found in Galway,' I said,
and pointed to a group of yellow-skinned boys basking
among the brown nets drying along the great wharf.
Edward told me that these were Claddagh boys,
and that the Claddagh are all Irish speakers ; and we
stopped to question them as to what language they
were in the habit of using, only to learn with sorrow
that English and Irish were all the same to them.

SALVE 141

' That is how a language dies/ Edward said. ' The
parents speak \l, the children understand it, but don't
speak it, and the grandchildren neither speak nor
understand. I like the English language and I like
the Irish, but I hate the mixture.'

Yeats sighed, and the boys told us that the hooker
from Aran was lying out there in the west, becalmed,
and we need not expect her before evening, unless
the men put out the oars, and she was too heavy for
rowing.

' On a warm day like this, not likely,' I answered
and the indolent boys laughed, and we continued our
walk down the wharf, thinking of the great labour
spent upon it. The bringing of all these stones and
the building of them so firmly and for such a long
way into the sea could only have been done in
famine times. A long wharf, so long that we had
not walked half its length when Yeats and Edward
began to speak of returning to the Feis ; and, leaving
them undecided, staring into the mist, hoping to
catch sight every moment of the black hull of the
hooker, I strayed on ahead, looking round, wonder-
ing, tempted to explore the mystery of the wharf's
end. Yet what mystery could there be ? Only a
lot of tumbled stones. But the wonder of the world
has hardly decreased for me since the days when I
longed to explore the wilderness of rocks at the end
of Kingstown Pier, the great clefts frightening
me, sending me back, ashamed of my cowardice,
to where my uncles and aunts and cousins were
seated, listening to the band (in the sixties fashion-
able Dublin used to assemble on the pier on Sunday
afternoons). One day I was bolder, and descended

142 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

into the wilderness, returning after a long absence,
very excited, and telling that I had met the King ot
the Fairies fishing at the mouth of the cave. The
story that I had brought back was that he had
caught three fish when I had met him and had
given me one. I was silent when asked why I had
forgotten to bring it back with me, my interest in
the adventure being centred in the fact that in
answer to my question how far Fairyland was from
Kingstown, he had told me that a great wave rises
out of the sea every month, and that I must go away
upon it, and then wait for another great wave, which
would take me another piece of the way. I must
wait for a third wave, and it would be the ninth that
would throw me right up on to Fairyland.

But the story interested nobody but me ; my uncles
and aunts looked at me, evidently considering if I
weren't a little daft ; and one of the crudest of
the Blakes, a girl with a wide, ugly mouth and a
loud voice, laughed harshly, saying that I could not
be taken anyAvhere, even to Kingstown Pier, with-
out something wonderful happening to me. These
Blakes were my first critics, and their gibes filled me
with shame, and I remember coming to a resolve that
night to avoid all the places where one would be
likely to meet a fairy fisherman, and if I did come
across another by ill-chance, to run away from him,
my fingers in my ears. But notwithstanding that
early vow and many subsequent vows, I have failed
to see and hear as the Blakes do, and I go on meet-
ing adventures everywhere, even on the wharf at
Galway, which should have been safe from them.
By Edward one is always safe from adventures, and

SALVE 143

it would have been well for me not to have stirred
from his side. I only strayed fifty yards, but that
short distance was enough, for while looking down
into the summer sea, thinking how it moved up against
the land's side like a soft, feline animal, the voices of
some women engaged my attention and turning I saw
that three girls had come down to a jiool sequestered
out of observation, in a hollow of the headland.
Sitting on the bank, they drew off their shoes and
stockings and advanced into the water, kilting their
petticoats above their knees as it deepened. On seeing
me they laughed invitingly ; and, as if desiring my
appreciation one girl walked across the pool, lifting
her red petticoat to her waist, and forgetting to
drop it when the water shallowed, she showed me
thighs whiter and rounder than any I have ever seen,
their country coarseness heightening the temptation.
And she continued to come towards me. A few
steps would have taken me behind a hillock. They
might have bathed naked before me, and it would
have been the boldest I should have chosen, if fortune
had favoured me. But Yeats and Edward began
calling, and, dropping her petticoats, she waded away
from me.

' What are you doing down there, George ? Hurry
up ! Here's the hooker being rowed into the bay
bringing the piper and the story-tellers from Aran.'

144 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

IX

' Edward/ I said, ' if the Irish language is to be
revived something in the way of reading must be pro-
vided for the jicople.'

' Haven't they Hyde's Folk Tales f

' Yes, and these are well enough in their way, but
a work is what is needed — a book.'

Edward thought that as soon as the Irish people
had learnt their language somebody would be sure to
write a national work.

' There's plenty of talent about.'

' But, my dear friend, there isn't sufficient
application.'

' You're quite right.' And we talked of atmosphere
and literary tradition, neither of which we had nor
could have for a hundred years. ' And therefore are
without hope of an original Avork in the Irish language.
But we can get a translation of a masterpiece. We
want a book and can't go on any farther without
one. I hear everybody complaining that when he
has learnt Irish there is nothing for him to read.'

' But do you think they would deign to read a
translation ?' Edward answered, laughing, and he
agreed with me that, outside of folklore, there is no
art except that which comes of great culture.

' A translation of a world-wide masterpiece is what
we want, and we have to decide on a -work before we
reach Athlone.'

' Why Athlone ?'

' Athlone or Mullingar. Now, Edward, you are to
give your whole mind to the question.'

SALVE 145

* Nothing English/ he said resolutely. ' Some-
thing Continental — some great Continental work.'
His eyes became fixed, and I saw that he was think-
ing. ' Telemaque,' he said at last.

'" T6Umnque'' would be quite safe, but aren't you
afraid that it is a little tedious ?'
' Gil Bias r

'I never read Gil Bias, but have heard man)^
people say that they couldn't get through it. What
do you think of Do7i Quixote ? It comes from a great
Catholic country, and it was written by a Catholic ;'
and until we remembered the story of The Curious
Impertinent, and the other stories interwoven into
the narrative, Don Quixote, seemed to be the very
thing we needed. ' We want short stories,' I said.
' A selection of tales from Maupassant.'
' The Gaelic League might object.'
' It certainly would if my name were mentioned.
I've got it, Edward ! — The Arabian Nights. There
are no stories the people would read so readily.'

Edward was inclined to agree with me, and before
we reached Dublin it was arranged that he should
give fifty pounds and I five-and-twenty towards
the publication of Taidgh O'Donoghue's transla-
tion.

' And if more is wanted,' Edward said, ' they can
have it. But remember one thing. It must be
sanctioned by the Gaelic League and published
under its auspices ; as you well know, my interests are
in public life. I have no private life.'

' Oh yes, you have, Edward ; I'm your private life.'

Edward snorted and took refuge in his joke ' Mon

ami Moore' ; but this time he showed himself trust-

K

146 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

wortliy. He wrote to the Freeman's Journal, disclosing
our project, and winding up his letter with an ex-
pression of belief that the entire cost of the work
could not be much more than one liundred and fifty,
and that he Mas quite sure there were many who
would like to help.

Many were willing to help us — with advice. The
Freeman's Juumal came out next day full up ot
letters signed by various Dublin litterati, ajiprov-
ing of the project, but suggesting a different
book for translation. One writer thought that
Plutarch's Lives would supply the people with a
certiiin culture, which he ventured to say was
needed in the country. Another was disposed to
look favourably upon a translation of St. Thomas
Aquinas ; another proposed Ccesar s Commentaries ;
and the debate was continued until the truth
leaked out that the proposed translation of The
Arabian Nights was due to my suggestion. Then, ot
course, all the fat was in the fire. ' Sacerdotus ' con-
tributed a column and a half wiiich may be reduced
to this sentence : ' Mr. George Moore has selected
The Arabian Nights because he wishes an mdecent
book to be put into the hands of every Irish peasant.
We do not take our ideas of love from Moham-
medan countries ; we are a pure race.'

The paper slij)j)ed from my hand and I lay back
in m.y chair overwhelmed, presenting a very mournful
spectacle to anyone coming into the room. How
long I lay inert I don't know, but I remember
skirting out of my chair, crying, ' I must go and see
Edward !'

' W^ell, George, you see you've got the reputation

SALVE 147

for a certain kind of writing, and you can't blame the
priests if '

' Edward, Edward !'

' After all it is their business to watch over their
flocks, and to see that none is corrupted.'

' Ba, ba, ba ! ba, ba, ba !'

' " M.on ami Moore, Mo?i ami Moore !" '

' You'll drive me mad, Edward, if you continue
that idiotic joke any longer. The matter is a serious
one. I came over to Ireland '

' You have no patience.'

' No patience !' I cried, looking at the great man.
' He is the Irish Catholic people,' I said, and later in
the afternoon, my disappointment caused me to doze
away in front of my beautiful, grey Manet, my exquisite
mauve Monet, and my sad Pissaro. ' The Irish are
a cantankerous, hateful race,' I muttered, on awaking.
And the mood of hate endured for some days,
myself continually asking myself why I had ventured
back into Ireland. But at the end of the week a
new plan for the regeneration of the Irish race came
into my head. It seemed an excellent thing for
me to Avrite a volume of short stories dealing with
peasant life, and these would be saved from the
criticism of Sacerdotus and his clan if they were
first published in a clerical review. ' One can only
get the better of the clergy by setting the clergy
against the clergy. In that way Louis XV. ridded
France of the Jesuits, and obtained possession of all
their property ; and in Ireland, no more than in
France, are the Jesuits on the best of terms with
the secular clergy . . . they might be inclined to
take me up.'

148 * HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

My hopes in this direction were not altogether
unwarranted. I liad read a paper wlien I came over
to Ireland for the performance of The Bending of the
Bough, on the necessity of the revival of the Irish
language, for literary as well as for national reasons,
at a public luncheon given by the Irish Literary
Society, and a few days after the reading of this
paper, a neighbour of mine in Mayo wrote to me,
saying that a friend of hers desired to make my
acquaintance. It was natural to suppose that it could
not be anyone but some tiresome woman, and up went
my nose. ' No, it isn't a woman ; it is a priest.' My
nose went up still higher. ' Father Finlay,' she said,
and I was at once overjoyed, for I had long desired to
make Father Tom's acquaintance. But it was not
to Father Tom, but to his brother Peter that she
proposed to introduce me. ' A much superior person,'
she said, 'a man of great learning, who has lived in
Rome many years and speaks Latin.'

' As well as he should be able to speak Irish,' I
clamoured.

' You will like him much better than the agri-
culturist,' she answered earnestly.

It did not seem at all sure to me that she was
right ; but, not wishing to lose a chance of winning
friends for the Irish language, I accompanied
her somewhat reluctiintly to the Jesuit College in
Milltown.

A curious and absurd little meeting it was ; myself
producing all my arguments, trying to convince the
Jesuit with them, and the Jesuit taking up a different
position, and the lady listening to our wearisome
talk with long patience. At last it sti'uck me that

SALVE 149

Dante must be boi'ing her prodigiously, and getting
up to go I spoke about trains.

Father Peter accompanied us to the College gate,
and on the way there he asked me if I would give
the paper that I had read at the luncheon for publi-
cation in their review.

' But I thought your brother was the Editor ?'

* He is/ Peter answered, ' but that doesn't make
any difference.'

As I did not know Tom, the paper went to
Peter, and it was published in the New Ireland
Review. My contribution did not, however, seem
to bring me any nearer Father Tom. He did
not write to me about it, nor did he write asking
•me to contribute again ; and when I came to
live in Dublin, though I heard everybody speaking
of him, no one offered to introduce us — not even
Peter, whom I often met in the streets and once in
the house where the young lady who had introduced
us lodged. No one seemed willing to undertake the
risk of introducing me to Tom, and the mystery so
heightened my desire of Tom's acquaintance that
one day I invited Peter to walk round Stephen's
Green with me, in the hope that he might say,
' Let's call on Tom.' But at every step my aversion
from Peter increased, without ever prompting the
thought that I might dislike Tom equally. Peter
Finlay is not an attractive name ; there seems to
be a little snivel in it, but Tom is a fine, robust
name, and it goes well with Finlay ; and all that
I had heard about him had excited my curiosity.
My friends were his friends, and they spoke of him
as of a cryptogram which nobody could decipher, and

150 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

this had set me wonderinff if I should succeed where
others had failed. Lord, how I desired to meet him
durint; those first months ! But the months went
by without my meeting him. At last the ridiculous
superstition glided into my mind that Father Tom
looked upon me as a dangerous person, one to
be avoided — which was tantamount to the belief that
Father Tom lacked courage, that he was afraid ot
me, as absurd a thought as ever strayed into a
man's head. But human nature is such that we seek
an explanation in every accident.

One day IE stopped to speak to somebody in
Merrion Street. Turning suddenly, he said : ' Let
me introduce you to Father Tom Finlay.' I felt a
look of pleasure come into my face, and I knew
myself at once to be in sympathy with this long-
bodied man, flesliy everywhere — hands, paunch,
calves, thighs, foreanai, and neck. I liked the
russet-coloured face, withered like an apple, the
small, bright, affectionate eyes, the insignificant nose,
the short grey hair. I liked his speech — simple,
direct, and intimate, and his rough clothes. I was
whirled away into admiration of Father Tom, and
for the next few days thought of nothing but when
I should see him again. A few days after, seeing
him coming towards me, hurrying along on his short
legs (one cannot imagine Father Tom strolling),
I tried to sunmion courage to speak to him. He
passed, saluting me, lifting his hat with a smile in
his little eyes — a smile which passed rapidly. One
sees that his salute and his smile are a mere formality.
So I nearly let him pass me, but summoning all my
courage at the last moment I called to him, and he

SALVE 151

stopped at once, like one ready to render a service to
whoever required one.

* I thought of writing to you, Father Tom, about
a matter wliich has been troubhng me ; but refrained.
On consideration it seemed too absurd.'

Father Tom waited for me to continue, but my
courage forsook me suddenly, and I began to speak
about other things. Father Tom listened — probably
to Gaelic League propaganda — with kindness and
deference ; and it was not till I was about to bid him
good-bye that he said :

' But what was the matter to which you alluded in
the beginning of our conversation ? You said you
wished to consult me upon something.'

'Well, it is so stupid that I am afraid to tell you.'
' I shall be glad if you will tell me, he answered,
taki)ig me into his confidence ; and I told him that
I had been down at the Freeman office to ask the
Editor if he would publish a letter from me.'

' But Father Tom, what I'm going to say is
absurd.'

Father Tom smiled encouragingly ; his smile
seemed to say, ' Nothing you can say is absurd.'

* Well, it doesn't seem to me that people are
dancing enough in L-eland.'

' You mean there isn't enough amusement in
Ireland ? I quite agree with you.*

' It's a relief to find oneself in agreement Avith
somebody, especially with you. Father Tom.' Father
Tom smiled amiably, and then, becoming suddenly
serious, I said, ' Ever since I've beeii here I find
myself up against somebody or something,' and I told
him about the touring company, admitting that

152 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

perhaps the League did not find itself justified in
incurring any further expenses. ' But our jiroject for
The Arabian Sights translation — could anything

be more inoffensive — yet the Freeman What

is one to do ?'

' One mustn't pay any attention to criticism. The
best way is to go on doing what one has to do.' In
these words Father Tom seemed to reveal himself a
little, and we talked about the cross-road dances. He
said he would speak on the subject ; and he did,
astonishing the Editor of the Freeman, and, when I
next ran across Father Tom, he told me he had just
come back from his holidays in Donegal, where he
had attended a gathering of young peojile — ' the young
girls came with their mothers and went home with
them after the dance.' These words were spoken
with a certain fat unction, a certain gross moral
satisfaction which did not seem like Father Tom, and
I was much inclined to tell him that to dance under
the eye of a priest and be taken home by one's
mother must seem a somewhat trite amusement
to a healthy country girl, unless, indeed, the Irish
people experience little passion in their courtships or
their marriages. These opinions, were, however, not
vented, and we walked on side by side till the
silence became painful, and, to interrujit it. Father
Tom asked if I had seen Peter lately.

' Peter ?' I answered. ' What Peter ?' For I had
completely forgotten him. Father Tom answered,
* My brother,' and I said, * No, I haven't seen him
this long while,' and we walked on, I listening to
Tom with half my mind, and the other half medita-
ting on the difference between the two brothers.

SALVE 153

Whereas Peter seemed to me to be sunk in the
Order, Father Tom seemed to have struck out and
saved himself. It was possible to imagine Peter
reading the Exercises of St. Ignatius, and by their
help quelling all original speculation regarding the
value of life and death ; for he that reads often of the
beatific faces in Heaven, and the flames that lick up
the entrails of the damned without ever consuming
them, is not troubled with doubt that perhaps, after
all, the flower in the grass, the cloud in the sky,
and his own beating heart may be parcel of Divinity.
Tom must have studied these Exercises too, but it
would seem that they had influenced Peter more
deeply, and, thinking of Peter again, it seemed to me
that to them might be fairly attributed the dryness
and the angularity of mind that I observed in him.
But how was it that these Exercises passed so lightly
over Tom's mind ? For it was difficult to think he
had ever been tempted by pantheism. He has had
his temptations, like all of us, but pantheism was not
one of them, and, on thinking the matter out, the con-
clusion was forced upon me that he had escaped from
the influences of the Exercises by throAving himself
into all manners and kinds of work. He is the busiest
man in Ireland — on every Board, pushing the wheel
of education and industry, the editor of a review, the
author of innumerable textbooks, a friend to those
who need a friend, finding time somehow for every-
body and everything, and himself full of good-
humour and kindness, outspoken and impetuous, a
keen intellect, a ready and incisive speaker, a 2:)oli-
tician at heart, who, if he had been one in reality,
would have led his own party and not been led by it.

154 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

One has to think for a while to discover some trace
of the disciphne of the Order in him. If he were
a secular jiriest he would not bow so elaborately
perhaps, nor wear so enigmatic a smile in his eyes.
Father Tom is a little conscious of his intellectual
superiority, I think. He is looked upon as a mystery
by many people, and perhaps is a little eccentric.
Intelligence and moral courage are eccentricities in
the Irish character, and one would not look for them
in a Jesuit priest. It seems to me that I understand
him, but one may understand without being able to
interpret, and to write Father Tom's Apology would
require the genius of Robert Browning. He could
write his own Apology, and if he set himself to the
task he would produce a book much more interesting
than Newman's. But Father Tom would not care to
write about himself unless he wrote quite sincerely,
and it would be necessaiy to tell the waverings that
preceded his decision to become a Jesuit. He must
have known that by joining the Order he risked
losing his personality, the chief business of the Order
being to blot out personality. Now, how was this
problem solved by Father Tom ? Did the Order
present such an irresistible attraction to his imagina-
tion that he resolved to risk liimself in the Order ?
Or did he know himself to be so strong that he
would be able to survive the discipline to which he
would have to submit ? If he MTote his Apology he
would have to tell us whether he does things because
he likes to do things eHiciently, or because he thinks
it right they should be done. This chapter should
be especially interesting, and the one in which
Father Tom would speculate on the relation of his

SALVE 155

soul to his intelligence ! He values his intelligence
— indeed, I think he prides himself on it. As a
priest he would have to place his soul above his in-
telligence, and he would do this very skilfully. . . .
But oneself is a dangerous subject for a priest to
write about, and perhaps Father Tom avoids the
subject, foreseeing the several difficulties that would
confront him before he had gone very far. Once his
pen was set going, however, he would not abandon his
work, and any misunderstanding which might arise
out of his Apology would revert to the co-operative
movement of which he is so able an advocate. ' AH
the same,' I reflected, ' it's a pity that so delightful an
intelligence should be wasted on agriculture,' and I
thought how I might ensnare Father Tom's literary
instincts.

' I've been thinking, Father Tom,' I said, in our
next walk, ' about the book you told me you once
wished to write — The Psychology of Religion. A
more interesting subject I cannot imagine, or one
more suited to your genius, and I am full of hope
that you will write that book.'

Father Tom muttered a little to himself, and I
think I heard him say that there was more important
work to be done in Ireland.
' WTiat work ?'

Father Tom did not seem to like being questioned,
and when I pressed him for an answer, he spoke of
the regeneration of the country-side.

' Mere agriculture, that anybody can do ; but this
book would be yourself, and Ireland is without ideas
and literary ideals. We would prefer your book to
agriculture, and you must write it. And ... I

156 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

wonder how it is that you have never written a
book ; you are full of literary interests.'

Then, very coquettishl}^, Father Tom admitted that
he had once written a novel.

' A novel ! You must let me see it.' And I stared
at him nervously, frightened lest he might refuse.

' I don't think it would interest you.'

' Oh, but it would.' I was afraid to say how much
it would interest me — more it seemed to me than
any novel by Balzac or Tourgueneff", for it would
reveal Father Tom to me. However inadequate the
words might be, I should be able to see the man
behind them ; and I pleaded for the book all the
way to the College in Stephen's Green.

* I shall have to go upstairs to my bedroom to
fetch it.'

' I'll wait.' And I waited in the hall, saying to
myself, ' Something will prevent him from giving it
to me. He maj' stop to think on the stairs, or,
overtaken by a sudden scruple, he may go to Father
Delany's room to ask his advice. Father Delany
may say, " Perhaps it will be better not to lend him
the book." If that happens he will have to obey
his Superior. So did my thoughts wander till he
appeared on the staircase with the book in his hand
— a repellent-looking book, bound in red boards,
which I grasped eagerly, and stopped under a lamp
to examine. The print seemed as uninviting as tin-
tacks, but a book cannot be read under a street
lamp and in the rain, so I slipped the volume into
my overcoat and hurried home.

' JE, I've discovered a novel by a well-known
Irishman — a friend of yours.'

SALVE 157

' Have I read it ?'

' I don't think so ; you'd have spoken about it
to me if you had. You'll never guess — the most
unhkely man in Ireland.'

' The most unlikely man in Ireland to have
written a novel ?' M answered. * Then it must be
Plunkett.'

' You're near it.'

' Anderson ?'

'No.'

' Father Tom ?'

I nodded, very proud of myself at having found
out something about Father Tom that M did not
know.

* If Father Tom has written a novel I think I
shall be able to read the man behind the words.'

' Just what I said to myself as I came along the
Green/ and I watched N^ reading.

' With a cast-iron style like that, a man has nothing
to fear from the prying eyes/ and he handed the
book back to me.

' But let us/ I replied, ' discover the story that he
has to tell.'

Nj looked through some pages and said, ' There
seems to be an insurrection going on somewhere ;
the soldiers have arrived, and are surrounding a
castle in the moonlight.' Sj always finds something
to say about a book, even if it be in cast-iron, and I
loved him better than before, when he said, ' Father
Tom loves Ireland.' That Father Tom's love of
Ireland should have penetrated his cast-iron style
mitigated my disappointment.

' I wonder why he lent me the book ?'

158 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

' Possibly to prevent you worrying him any more
to write The Psychology of Jieligion.'

'Ever}' time I go for a bicycle ride with liim, or a
walk, I am at him about that book — but it's no use.'

A cloud appeared in ^^'s face. ' He suspects
Father Tom/ I said to myself, ' of angling for my
soul ' ; and, to tease IE, I told him that I often spent
my evenings talking to Father Tom, in his bedroom,
on literary subjects, and that I had arranged with
him for the publication of several short stories in the
New Ireland Review.

' These stories are to be translated into Irish by
Taidgh O'Donoghue, and Father Tom will probably
get the book accepted as a textbook by the Inter-
mediate Board of Education.'

* But do you think that it was to write these stories
that you came from England ?'

' Well, for what other purpose do you think I
came ? And to what better purpose can a man's
energy be devoted, and his talents, than the resusci-
tation of his country's language ? What do you
think I came for ?'

' I hoped that you would do in Ireland what
Voltaire did in France, that, whenever Walsh or
Logue said something stupid in the papers, you would
just rei>ly to them in some sharp cutting letter,
showing them up in the most ridiculous light,
terrifying them into silence.'

' I'm afraid you were mistaken if you thought that
I came to Ireland on any enterprise so trivial. I
came to give back to Ireland her language.'

' But what use will her language be to Ireland if
she is not granted the right to think ?

SALVE 159

' The filing of theological fetters will be a task for
the next generation.'

' Oh, Moore, Moore, Moore !' he muttered, in his
chimney corner. And then, seeing him disappointed,
the temptation to tread on his corns overcame me.

' Of what avail,' I asked, ' are our ideas if they be
expressed in a worn-out language ? Moreover, it
is not ideas that Ave are seeking. An idea is so
impersonal ; it is yours to-day and the whole world's
to-morrow. We would isolate Ireland from what
you call ideas, from all European influence ; we
believe that art will arise in Ireland if we segregate
Ireland, and the language will enable us to do that.'

' However fast the language movement might
progress,' JE answered, ' Ireland will not be an Irish-
speaking country for the next fifty or sixty years,
and a hundred years will have to pass before litera-
ture will begin in Ireland ; besides, you can't have
literature without ideas.'

' The only time Ireland had a literature was when
she had no ideas — in the eighth and ninth centuries.'

' Oh, Moore, Moore, Moore !'

The bell rang, and we wondered who the visitor
might be. Walter Osborne ? John Eglinton ?
Hughes? Which of our friends? Edward, by all
that's holy ! We were surprised and pleased to see
him, for Edward lives outside my ring of friends ;
they meet him in the streets, and he is glad to stand
and talk with them at the kerb, if the wind be not
blowing too sharply. Thinking, therefore, that he
had for a wonder yielded to a desire to go out to talk
to somebody, my welcome was affectionate. But,
alas ! he had come to speak to me on some Gaelic

]60 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

League business, an opera that somebody had written,
and hoped he was not interrupting our conversation.
I cried, ' Good Heaven !' and handed him the
cigar-box, and we began to talk about Yeats, and
when we could find nothing more to say about either
his mistakes or his genius, ]E spake to us about
Plunkett's ' ideas,' and when these were exhausted
we started on Hyde and his mistakes, and these
were discussed with passion by Edward and me, for
what we wanted was a forward policy.

' If the Boers,' I said, ' had only pressed forward
after their first victories '

' I beg your pardon,' Edward suddenly interrupted,
' but have either of you heard the news ? The Boers
seem to have brought it off this time,' and he told us
that Lord Methuen and fifteen hundred troops had
been captured by the Boers.

' But what you say can't be true, Edward. You
are joking.'

' No, I'm not. It is all in the evening papers.'

' And you come here to talk Gaelic League business,
forgetful of the greatest event that has happened
since Thermopylae. If the Boers should win after
all!'

' It will be the same in the end, only prolonging
the war.'

His words shocked me, and immediately the
conviction overpoAvered me that nothing would be
the same again, and I was lifted suddenly out
of my ordinary senses. The walls about me seemed
to recede, and myself to be transported ineffably
above a dim plain rolling on and on till it
mingled with the sky. An encampment was there

SALVE 161

in a hallowed light, and one face, stem and strong,
yet gentle, was taken by me for the face of the
Eternal Good, upreared after combat with the Eternal
Evil. What I saw was a symbol of a guiding
Providence in the world. 'There is one, there is
one !' I exclaimed. ' It is about me and in me.'
And all the night long I heard as the deaf hear, and
answered as the dumb answer. A night of fierce
exultations and prolonged joys murmuring through
the darkness like a river. ' For how can it be other-
wise,' I cried, starting up in bed. ' Yet I believed this
many a year that all was blind chance.' And I fell
back and lay like one consumed by a secret fire.
Life seemed to have no more for giving, and I cried
out : ' It is terrible to feel things so violently. It
were better to pass through life quietly like Edward ; '
and on these words, or soon after, I must have dropped
away into sleep.

X

One day, while walking home with John Eglinton
from Professor Dowden's, I mentioned that I was
thinking of writing a volume of short stories about
Irish life.

* Like Tourgueneff 's Tales of a Sportsman ?' And
the face that would be ugly if unlighted by the
intelligence lit up. ' And you will require how
many stories to make the volume ?'

' Nine, ten, or a dozen — a year's work.'

' Do you think you'll be able to find subjects all
the while ?'

The question kindled my vanity, and I answered :

L

162 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

* Tourgueneft" wrote The Tales of a Sportsman in
Paris, and sent them to a Russian newspaper week
by week. Maupassant contributed two stories a
week to the Gil Bias, but it does not follow that
because Maupassant and Tourgueneff were alwaj's
able to find new subjects that I sliall, and Father
Tom restricting the zone of my stories. The stories
I am thinking of are longer than Maupassant's.'

As soon as I had bidden him good-bye my thouglits
went away in search of subjects, and before many
steps were taken I remembered Dick Lennox, the
fat man in A Mu miner's Wife. He used to lodge in a
factors-town in Lancashire in the house of a maiden
lady, and one day she ojiened a drawer and showed
him her wedding-gown. It had never gone to churcli,
but how she had lost her swain it was impossible to
remember — Dick Lennox may never have told me
— but the wedding-gown I remembered, and a new
story was woven round it that same evening, and one
that pleased Father Tom so much that he wished
to publish the English text with the Irish.

The })ublication of the English text seemed to me
to render useless the publication of the story, and
Father Tom failed to persuade me ; and only Taidgh
O'Donoghue's translation appeared in the New
Ireland Review — an ideal translation, if I can judge
it from Rolleston's retranslation, full of exquisite
little turns of phrase. Kuno Meyer — and who knows
better ? — tells me that the Irish text exhales the folk-
flavour that I sought for and missed, and Hyde,
who will never take sides on any subject, admits
that the Irish version gives him more pleasure, ' for,
though I often meet good English, it is seldom I

SALVE 163

come across a good piece of Irisli.' Alms-giving and
The Clerk's Quest were jiublishcd subsequently in the
New Ireland Review, and both pleased Father Tom —
The Clerk's Quest especially.

It was not till the fourth month that I began to
feel the restrictions of the New Ireland Review
subjects. I had plenty in stock, but not one that
I thought Father Tom would think suitable. Home
Sickness might go into the Review, but, somehow, I
could not see it included in a school-book — The Exile
still less, and the worst of it was that The Exile was
nearly written ; it had taken a fortnight to write — a
longish short story, and a downright good subject
for narrative, if I may say so without impertinence.
And it Avas for no fault in the writing that Father
Tom rejected it. He liked the story, and he liked
Home Sickness even better than The Exile, but he
made me feel that it could hardly be included in a
collection of stories which he could recommend as a
textbook for the Intermediate.

' Yes,' I answered, ' I quite see. Stories about
things, without moral or literary tendencies — stories
like Tourgueneff's, of the horse that is stolen and
recovered again, so the owner thinks at first, but
after a little Avhile he begins to think the horse
less wonderful than the horse he lost, and the un-
certainty preys upon his mind to such an extent that
he ends by shooting the horse.

' That is what we want — a wonderful story, and
one excellently well suited to a textbook, for all
children love horses ; it is one of their first interests.'

But my mind seemed closed for the time being to
the stories suitable to a textbook, and wide open to

16-t 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

those that would lead me away from Father Tom and
the Xciv Ireland Revietv. And this was a grief to me,
for I knew full well that my contributions to the New
Ireland Reiietv were the link that bound me to my
friend, if he will allow me to call him friend. We
shall not meet again, and if we do, of what use ?
We are like shijis ; all and sundry hav-e destinies and
destinations. There is very little Nietzsche in me,
but this much of him I remember, that we must pur-
sue our courses valiantly, come what may. Father
Tom and I had lain side by side in hai-bour for a while,
but the magnetism of the ocean drew me, and I
continued to write, feeling all the M'hile that my
stories were drawing me away from Catholic Ireland.
Story followed story, each coming into my mind
before the story on the blotting-pad was finished, and
each suggested by something seen or something
heard. When I was called to Castlebar to fulfil the
office of High Sheriff', Father Lyons showed me the
theatre he had built, and it was ^E, I think, who told
me that he knew a priest who lived in the great waste
lying between Crossmalina and Bclmullet. He once
liked reading, but he now spent his evenings knitting.
' I can see your priest,' I cried, and wrote The Play-
house in the Waste, and A Letter to Rome. A little
wreath of stories was woven one evening at the
Moat House out of the gossip of a maid who was
prone to relate the whole country-side, and she
did this so well that she seemed to be relating a
\illage Odyssey, incident following incident with
bewildering prodigality. To omit any seemed a
losing. But in writing order and sequence are
necessary, and all I could make use of were the

SALVE 165

four little tales entitled Some Parishioners. It is a
pity that more time was not spent on the writing
of them, but the English language was still abhorrent
to me ; and my text was looked upon by me as a
mere foundation for an Irish, and the stories might
never have been finished, or not finished at the time,
for I could trust Taidgh O'Donoghue to fill up the
ruts for me, if it had not been for Stella's interest
in them. It was jjart of our bargain that I should
read them to her in the drawing-room in the Moat
House after dinner, and her mind being one of those
large tidy minds that can find no pleasure in broken
stories or harsh or incomplete sentences, I was urged
to put the finishing hand to the stories before sending
them to Taidgh.

' Whose task,' she said, ' will be much lightened
thereby.'

'What you say is quite true. It is difficult to
translate badly-constructed sentences.'

We stood by the bi'idge, looking into the moat,
hearing water faintly trickling through the summer
tangle of wild weeds and flowers. Stella knew the
names of all — that one three or four feet high with
long, narrow leaves and reddish flowers was willow-
weed. She pointed out the mallow to me, and
the patches of wild forget-me-nots growing here and
there where the water shallowed ; and wondering
why was it not deeper, for a great deal of water
came into it from the stream, we fetched a pole and
discovered the mud to be five or six feet deep.
The pole encountered a flagged bottom everywhere,
' which proved,' I said, ' that in former times trout
had been bred in it.'

166 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

But if trout had once been bred in the moat,
trout could be bred in it again, and StelUi was at
last persuaded that the cleansing of the moat would
be a pleasant summer's work for the villagers, and
that we should take great interest in the lading
down of the s])awn and in netting the fish when
they had grown to half a pound. Trout grew to
that size in a piscina, and, talking of the pleasure
of the netting, she trailing the net on one side of the
stream and I on the other, we passed round the
house into the rich garden she had planted ; the
scent of the stock filled the evening air, and that ot
the tobacco plant was extraordinarily intense.

* I think you care more for weeds than for flowers,'
she said.

Her little hardship was my lack of interest in her
garden, for a garden w^as part of her instinct as much
as her painting — an inheritance from her father, who
could not be long in any house before the needs ot
the garden reached him, and he would ask if he
might go out and attend to the flowers. The instinct
of a garden is a beautiful one, and my clearest re-
membrance of Stella is a tall figure in the evening
light moving through the flower-beds.

In front of us was a great sweeping cornfield
covering several acres, rare in Ireland, where all the
country is grass ; and on the other side the Valley
of the Liffey extended mile after mile, blue hills
gathering the landscape up into its rest at last.
Our eyes sought for Rathfarnham, four or five miles
awav, and we s])oke of the two rivers, the Liffey and
the Dodder, and of the herdsmen that followed the
cattle. Ireland was new to us both, almost as new

SALVE 167

to mc as it was to hcr^ and we were interested in
the country we had come to live in, she more play-
fully and more humanely than I, being a painter,
whereas the Boer War still continued to pester me,
driving me forward relentlessly, and making me a
tiresome companion at times. Men never get free
from morality, only women. Stella's cordial unmoral
appreciation of Ireland was a great help to me, and
her fine ear for idiom drew my attention to the
beauty of peasant speech in our walks through the
Valley of the LifFey, her eyes measuring the land-
scape all the while, noting the shapely trees and the
lonely farmhouses, the subjects of her pictures.
These led us sometimes as far as Rathfarnham and
Tallaght. Another of Stella's instincts was for
camping out ; she and Florence used to spend nights
together in the Sussex woods, and now, inspired by
the summer-time, she began to speak to me of a
night out upon the mountain. Stella never asked me
directly to do anything ; she relied on suggestion ;
and one evening we drove to the end of the mountain
road, and leaving the pony and trap with a cottager,
walked half a mile farther with our rugs and lay down
under the ruins of the Hell Fire Club. The dark lines
of the hills showed against the last traces of purple
in the sky, and I listened to Stella telling me that I
must try to sleep at once, for the dawn began soon
after two and one awoke naturally as soon as the sun
began to shine. Hard by is the gaunt ruin of an
unfinished castle, begun with reckless extravagance
— by whom ? Names slip away, but the sight of the
ruin against the hillside remains distinct.

And for two long summers we drove and walked

168 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

through these neiglibourhoods. Coming one day
upon a picturesque farmhouse^ and wondering who
the folk might be that lived within walls as strong
as a fortress, we wandered round the house, looking
into the great areas. The farmer introduced us to
his daughter, a pretty red-headed girl, about twenty,
who said they were just going to sit down to tea,
and would we join thejn ? Among other things, they
spoke of a cousin from America who was coming to
Ireland for a rest ; he had been all through Cuba,
rei)orting the war for the American papers. The
incident excited my imagination, and as we walked
home througli the summer evening it seemed to me
that I should find nobody more representative of a
certain side of Irish character than this journalist,
who went to Cuba because he wanted to see some
fighting, and at the end of the war was taken with
a desire to see the Old Country, and before we
reached the Moat House I had begun to see him
strolling about Tara, dreaming of Ireland's past, till
he fell in love with the farmer's pretty daughter.
He would live with her, loving her tenderly, sensual
love bridging over, for a while, intellectual differ-
ences. And when he could no longer bear with her
soft Catholic eyes, he would desert her honourably.
This story seemed to me so representative of Irish
life that I decided to include it in the collection,
though in length it did not correspond with the
others. Every one in the volume entitled The Un-
lilled Field had helped me to understand my own
country, but it was wliile writing The Wild Goose
that it occurred to me fur the first time that, it
being impossible to enjoy independence of body

SALVE 169

and soul in Ireland, the thought of every brave-
hearted boy is to cry, ' Now, off with my coat so
that I may earn five pounds to take me out of
the country.'

' They bring their Catholicism with them wherever
they go, and cling to it in spite of the example of all
the world. Every race gets the religion it deserves,
and only as policemen, pugilists, and priests have
they succeeded, here and there a successful lawyer,
but nothing more serious. Tlie theory of the germ
cell floated in my mind, and I said : ' It may be
that Nature did not intend them to advance beyond
the stage of the herdsmen — the finest herdsmen in
the world !' I cried, rising from the composition
of The Wild Goose. ' They were that in the
beginning, when the greater part of Ireland was
forest and marsh, with great pasture lands through
which long herds of cattle wandered from dawn
to evening, watched over by barbarous men in
kilts with terrible dogs ; and since those days we
have lost the civilization that obtained in the monas-
teries. We have declined in ever^^thing except our
cattle . . . and our herdsmen, the finest in the Avorld,
divining the steak in the bullock with the same
certainty as the Greek divined the statue in the
block of marble.'

My discovery produced in me a kind of rapture,
and I sat looking at my Monet for a long while,
thinking that perhajis, after all, it is unnecessary for
a race to produce pictures or literature or sculpture
or music, for to do one thing extremely Avell justifies
the existence of a race, and the beef-steaks that
Ireland produces justify Ireland — in a way, for

170 'HAIL AND FARE\\'ELL !'

though the Irish have produced the finest steaks,
they have never invented a sauce for the steak ;
and I fell to thinking that if some meditative herds-
man, -while leaning over a gate, had been inspired
to comp>ose a sauce whereby the steak might be
eaten with relish, the Irish race would be able
to hold up its head in the world. One finds
excuses always for one's country's shortcomings,
and it pleased me to think that if none had imagined
Sauce Bemaise it was because his attention was
always needed to keep the cattle from straying.
There were wolves in Ireland always lurking round
the herd, ready to separate a heifer or a calf from the
protection of the bulls. But to find an excuse for
the monks dwelling in commodious monasteries is
more difficult. The talk of the monks must have
been frequently about the pleasures of the table,
yet none was inspired to go to the Prior with the
sacred word Bemaise upon his lips. That one would
have secured an immortality as secure as Chateau-
briand, who is read no more, but is eaten every day.
The intellect perishes, but the belly is always with
us. Or may we acquit the race of lack of imagina-
tion, and lay the blame upon the Irish language,
which is, perhaps, too harsh and bitter for such
a buttery word as Bemaise ? And could a language
in which there is no butter be capable of invent-
ing a succvdent sauce ? It may be that the Irish
language was merely intended for the sale of bullocks
— a language that has never been to school, as John
Eglinton once said. If it had only fled to the
kitchen one might forgive it for ha\ing played truant
— the Irish language, a language that has never been

SALVE 171

spoken in a draAving-roonij only in rude towers, and
very like those towers are the blocks of rough sound
that a Gaelic speaker hurls at one when he speaks.
WTiereas one can hardly imagine any other language
but French being spoken along the beautiful winding
roads of France, lined with poplar-trees, and about
the hillsides dotted A\ith red-tiled roofs, and behind
the pierced gi*een shutters, which enchant us when we
see them as the train moves on towards Paris from
Amiens. The French language is implicit in the
balconies, lanterns, perrons, that we see as the train
nears Paris, and still more implicit in the high-
pitched roofs of the chateau of Fontainebleau when
allames and allates came naturally into conversation.
In a trice we leave the Court of Louis XV. for
a fete at Melun, and there, though the past tenses
are no longer in use, the language still sparkles ;
it foams and goes to the head, a lovely language,
very like champagne. True that the English lan-
guage has never been much in the kitchen nor in
the vineyard, but it has been spoken in the dales
and along the downs, and there is a finer breeze in
it than there is in French, and a bite in it like
Elizabethan ale — all the same, a declining language ;
' thee ' and ' thou ' have been lost beyond hope of
restoration, and many w^ords that I remember in
common use are now nearly archaic ; a language
wearied with child-bearing, and I pondered the
endless poetry of England, and admitted English
literature to be the most beautiful, Boer War or no
Boer War. Whereas the Irish language, notwith-
standing its declensions and its grammatical use of
' thee ' and ' thou,' has failed. As Bergin said once

172 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

to rae, ' We did nothing with it wlien we had it,'
By this, did he mean that the Irish race was never
destined to rise above the herdsman ? And if he
did, his instinctive judgment is important ; it shows
that we know ourselves. ' We see/ I cried, ' the
rump-steak in the animal as clearly as the Greek
saw the statue in the mai'ble,' and the epigram
pleased me so much that I felt I must go out at once
to collogue with somebody.

But it was eleven o'clock, and no one is available
at that hour but dear Edward ; a few hundred yards
are as nothing to one with a passion for literary
conversation ; and away I went down Ely Place,
across Merrion Row, through Merrion Street, and as
soon as the corner of Clare Street was turned, I
began to look out for the light above the tobacconist's
shop. The light was there ! My heart was as faint
as a lover's, and the serenade which I used to beguile
him down from his books rose to my li])s. He Avill
only answer to this one, or to a motive from The Ring.
And it is necessary to whistle very loudly, for the
trams make a great deal of noise, and Edward some-
times dozes on the sofa.

On the other side is a public-house, and the
serenading of Edward draws comments from the
topers as they go away wiping their mouths. One
has to choose a quiet moment between the trams ;
and when the serenade has been whistled twice, the
light of Edward's candle appears, coming very slowly
down the sfciirs, and there he is in the doorway, if
anj-thing larger than life, in the voluminous grey
trousers, and over his shoulders a buff jacket which
he wears in the evening. Two short flights of stairs

SALVE 173

and we are in his room. It never changes — the
same litter from day to day, from year to year,
the same old and broken mahogany furniture, the
same musty wall-paper, dusty manuscrij)ts lying
about in heaps, and many dusty books. If one
likes a man one likes his habits, and never do I
go into Edward's room without admiring the old
prints that he tacks on the wall, or looking through
the books on the great round table, or admiring
the little sofa between the round table and the
Japanese screen, which Edwai-d bought for a few
shillings down on the quays — a torn, dusty, ragged
screen, but serviceable enough ; it keeps out the
draught ; and Edward is especially susceptible to
draughts, the very slightest will give him a cold.
Between the folds of the screen one will find a small
harmonium of about three octaves, and on it a score
of Palestrina. As well might one try to play the
Mass upon a flute, and one can only think that it
serves to give the keynote to a choir-boy. On the
table is a candlestick made out of white tin, designed
probably by Edward himself, for it holds four candles.
He prefers candles for reading, but he snuffs them
when I enter and lights the gas, offers me a cigar,
refills his churchwarden, and closes his book.

' Wliat book are you reading, Edward ?'

' I am reading Ruskin's Modem Painters, but it
is very long and rather prosy, and the fifth volume is
inexpressibly tedious. It doesn't seem to me that I
shall ever get through it.'

' But if it doesn't mterest you why do you read it ?'
Oh, I don't like to leave a book.'

' You })refer reading a tiresome book to my con-
versation.'

174 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

' But yon live so far away.'

* How far, Edward ? Fi\e Imndred yards.'

' And after dinner I like to get liome to my pipe.
You see, I'm at business all day; I've business relations
with a great number of people. Our lives aren't the
same ; and I assure you that in the evening a quiet
hour is a luxury to me.'

' But how can you find business to do all day ?
There is Mass in the morning and the Angelus at
twelve ?'

' I know what all that kind of talk is worth.' And
Edward jjuffed sullenly at his churchwarden while I
assured him that I was thinking of his play.

' All this public business/ I said, ' leaves very
little time for your work.'

* In the afternoon between four and seven I get a
couple of hours. Yesterday I had a run ; I got off
thirty lines, but to-day I'm stuck again, and shall
have to invent something to get one of the characters
off the stage naturally. You see, I'm still in the
pencil stage. In about two years I shall be in ink,
and then I'll give you the play to read.'

As my help would not be needed for the next two
years, it seemed to me that I might speak of The
Wild Goose, and Edward listened, giving his whole
mind to the story.

' But why,' he asked, ' should Ned Cannody object
to his wife suckling her baby ?'

' He fears that it might spoil her figure.'

' Is that so ? I didn't know.' And he puffed at
his pipe in silence. ' But do you think Ned Carmody
would bother ?'

' You think it introduces a streak of Sir Frederick

I

SALVE 175

Leigliton ? But who can say that an aesthetic
aspiration may not break out even in a Celt, who is
but a herdsman, the finest in the world,' and I
launched my epigram. But it met with no response.
Edward's face deepened into monumental solemnity,
and I understood that the proposition that the Irish
race was not destined to rise above the herdsman
was too disagreeable to be entertained. ' Shutting
our eyes to facts will not change the facts.'

' It the eighth and ninth centuries '

* The decline of art was coincident with the union
of the Irish Church with Rome ; till then Ireland was
a Protestant country.'

' A Protestant country ! St. Patrick a Protestant !'

' Protestant in the sense that he merely preached
Christianity, and the Irish Church was Protestant up
to the eleventh or twelfth century; I don't know the
exact date.' I crossed the room to get myself another
cigar ; and returned, muttering something about a
peasant people that had never risen out of the vague
emotions of the clan.

' We were talking about a very interesting question
— that as soon as the Irish Church became united to
Rome, art declined in Ireland. That isn't a matter
of opinion, but of fact.'

Edward spoke of the Penal Laws.

' But the Penal Laws aren't hereditary, like syphilis.
It is impossible to deny that Irish Catholics have
written very little. Father Tom admitted that.'

Edward was curious to hear if I still went for
bicycle rides in the country with Father Tom, and
smoked cigarettes with him in his bedroom.

' What can it matter how intimate my relations

176 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

may or may not be with Fatlier Tom ? We are
talking now on a serious subject, Edward, and I was
about to tell you, wlien you interruj)ted me, that one
evening, as I was walking round the green with
Father Tom, I said to him ; " It is strange that
Catholics have written so little in Ireland." " It is,
indeed," he answered, " and Maynooth is a case in
point ; after a hundred years of education it has not
succeeded in producing a book of any value, not even
a theological work." ' '

' I don't know that Father Tom has jiroduced
anything very wonderful himself.'

' Very likely he hasn't. Father Tom's lack of
original literary inspiration is a matter of no impor-
tance to anyone except to Father Tom. The question
before us is, WTiich is at fault — the race or Catho-
licism?'

Jldward would not admit that it could be Catholicism.

' Don't you think that yourself have suffered ?' I
said, as I went down the stairs. ' You burnt a volume
of poems, and if Father Tom had not abandoned The
Psychology of Religion he would have found himself
uj) against half a dozen heresies before he had written
fifty pages.'

It seemed to me that I was on the threshold of a
great discovery.

XI

' Highly favoured, indeed, am 1 among authors,' I
said, pushing open the wicket; but before many turns
had been taken up and down the greensward, I
began to fear that my reading had been too parti-

SALVE 177

cular. My heart sank at the prospect of the years
I should have to spend in the National Library, for
a knowledge of all the literature of the world was
necessary for the writing of the article I had in my
mind. Then with a rising heart I remembered that
I could engage the services of some poor scholar —
John Eglinton knew for certain many who had read
everything without having learnt to make use of their
learnmg. ' My quickest way will be to lay the nose
of one of these fellows on the scent ; he will run
it through many literatures, and with the results of
his reading before me I shall be able to deal Catho-
licism such a blow as has not been dealt since the
Reformation.'

A light breeze rustled the lilacs, and I stood for a
long time, forgetful of my idea, seeking within the
long, pointed leaves for the blossom breaking into
purple and white. It seemed to me that the tran-
quil little path under the bushes was just the one
Pater would choose for philosophic meditation, but,
feeling that the sunlight beguiled my mind into
thought, I wandered round the garden, thinking,
while noticing the changes that had come into it
within the last few days. 'The great ash by the
garden gate seems to be making some progress.
The catkins are gone, and in about three weeks
the plumy foliage will be fluttering in the light
breezes of the summer-time. The laburnum blossom
is still enclosed in grey-green ears about the size of a
caterpillar,' I added, ' with here and there a spot of
yellow.' And pondering on Nature's unending
miracles, I walked under the hawthorns, stopping, of
course, to admire the hard little leaves 'like the

M

178 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

medals that Catholics wear/ I said, on my way to the
corner where the Solomon -seal flourishes year after
year, and the blooms of the everlasting pea creep
up the wall nine or ten feet, to the level of the
street, hard by the rosemary, which should perfume
the whole garden, but the smoke from Plunkctt's
chimney robs the flowers of their perfume. The little
blossom freckling the dark green spiky foliage held
me at gaze. Above the rosemary is thick ivy ; it was
clipped close a few years ago, but it is again swarm-
ing up the wall, and Gogarty, the arch-mocker, the
author of all the jokes that enable us to live in
Dublin — Gogarty, the author of the Limericks of
the Golden Age, the youngest of my friends, full
in the face, with a smile in his eyes and always a
witticism on his lips, overflowing -with quotation,
called yesterday to ask me to send a man with a
shears, saying, ' Your ivy is threatening my slates.'
A survival of the Bardic Age he is, reciting whole
ballads to me when we go for walks ; and when I
tell him my great discovery he will say, ' Sparrows
and sweet peas are as incompatible as Literature and
Dogma ; and you will cut the ivy, won't you ?'

And wandering across my greensward, I came to
my apple-trees, now in bridal attire ; ' Not a petal
yet fallen, but to-morrow or the day after the grass
will be covered with them,' I said. Gogarty told
me yesterday how the poet rose early to see the
daisy open. He describes himself ' a-kneeling always
till it unclosed was upon the softe, sweete, smalle
grass.' But if he liked the grass so much, why did
he love the daisy ? For if sparrows and sweet-peas
are incompatible, it may be said with equal truth

SALVE 179

that the daisy is the grass's natural enemy ; and
M'orse than daisies are dandehons. A few still
remain, though poison was poured upon them last
year. My flower-beds are a sad spectacle ; wall-
flowers straggling — sad are they as Plunkett's beard.
Sweet peas once grew there ; the first year a tall
hedge sprung up, despite the College of Science ;
for the soil was almost virgin then, and it sent forth
plenty of canterbury bells, columbine, poppies and
larkspur ; but year by year my flowers have died,
and the garden will now grow only a few lilies and
pinks, carnations, larkspur, poppies. At that moment
a smut fell across my knuckles, and, looking up, I saw
a great black cloud issuing from the chimney of the
College of Science. ' Isn't it a poor thing that all my
flowers should die, so that a few students should be
allowed the privilege of burning their eyelids for the
sake of Ireland ?'

My garden is but a rood, and the only beauty it
can boast of is its grass and its apple-trees — one tree
as large as a house, under whose boughs I might
dine in the summer-time were it not for the smuts
from Plunkett's chimney. It is the biggest apple-
tree in all Ireland, and a blackbird sings in it all the
summer-time. One of its great boughs is dying,
and will have to be cut away lest it should poison
the rest of the tree. My garden is but a rood, and
following the walk round the square of ' glad grass,'
I am back again in a few minutes, admiring tall
bushes flourishing over the high wall, and, as if to
greet me, the robin sings the little roundelay that
he utters all the year — a saucy little bird that will
take bread from my hand in winter, but now it is

180 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

easy to see he is thinking of his mate, whose nest is
in the great tangle of traveller's-joy that covers the
southern wall, somewhere near the bush where a
thrush is sitting on her eggs — not so bold a bird as
the robin. My curiosity last year drove her from
her eggs ; and it will be well for me to walk the
other way.

Now, wliich ^vill my countr^nnen choose — Litera-
ture or Dogma ?

It is difficult to think in a garden where amorous
birds are going hither and thither, so amorous that
one cannot but be interested in them. If one had
to think about books, one would choose to think of
Gogarty's extravagances, or Gogarty's remembrances
of the poets ; and these would be especially pleasant
while a blackbird is singing the same rich lay that
he sang by a lake's edge a thousand years ago. It
delighted a certain liermit-poet, and one is grateful
to him for having recorded his pleasure in the bird's
song, and for the adjective that defines it, and to
Kuno Meyer, who discovered the old Irish poem and
translated it.

My garden is an enchantment in the spring, and
I sat bewitched by the sunlight and by my idea.

A man of letters goes into a garden >vith an idea ;
he and his idea spend happy days under apple-
boughs in the sun : he plays with his idea as a
mother with her child, chasing it about the lilac-
bushes ; sometimes the child cries with rage, and the
mother cannot pacify her baby, but, however naughty
her baby may be, she never wearies ; her patience is
endless, and the patience of a man of letters is end-
less too. His idea becomes unmanageable, but he

SALVE 181

does not weary of it ; and then his idea grows up,
just like the child, passing from blue smock and
sash into knickerbockers, in other words into type-
writing, and as every mother looks back upon the
days of smocks and sashes, we authors look back
upon the days when our ideas were meditated in a
garden within hearing of amorous sparrows in the
ivy, the soft coo — for it is nearly a coo — of the jack-
daw as he passes to some disused chimney where he
nests, the shrill of the starling and the reiterated
little rigmai'ole of the chaffinch. The swallows
arrive in Dublin in the middle of May ; they fly
over my garden in the June evenings, and I con-
tinued to think of them coming hither over the sea —
' like my thoughts,' I said. And while listening to
the breeze in the apple-boughs, my thoughts drifted
unconsciously across the centuries to the beginning
of Christian literature. ' It began well,' I said,
' with the Confessions of that most sympathetic of
saints, Augustine, who was not all theology, but
began his life, and began it well, in free thought
and free love ; his mistress and his illegitimate child
endear him to us, and the music of his prose — those
beautiful pages when he and Monica, his mother,
stand by a window overlooking the Tiber ! We are
all spirit while we read the flight of his soul and
Monica's Godward, each sentence lifting them a little
higher till he and she seem to dissolve before our
eyes in white rapture.'

I have read that Augustine owed something of the
ecstasy of his style to the Alexandrian mystics — and
this is not unlikely, for he came from Africa and saw
the end of paganism and the beginning of Christi-

182 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

anity. ... He was Julian's contemporary, a thing
which never struck anybody before. Augustine
and JuUan — how wonderful ! Landor should have
thought of the learned twain as a subject for
dialogue, or Shakespeare might have taken Julian
for hero. The ascetic Emperor was a subject for
him . . . but I am thinking casually. Shakespeare
could not have done much with Julian. So perhaps
it is well that one day the sudden interruption of
his secretary, Ben Jonson, jerked his thoughts
away from Julian, leaving the Emperor for Ibsen —
two rather clumsy dramas. Emperor and Galilean, con-
taining, however, many splendid scenes. But there
was more in Julian than the bleak Norwegian could
understand, and Ibsen does little more than follow
the bare outline that history gave him, including,
of course, the story of the old priest sitting on the
steps of a fallen temple with a goose in his lap — the
only trace of ancient worship that the Emperor
could discover in the countries he passed through
while leading his army against the Persians.

Were Gogarty here he would tell me the verses
in which Swinburne includes the Emperor's last
words ; unable to remember them, I loitered, amused
by the paraphrase of the lines from the Hym?i to
Proserpine that the circumstance of the moment had
put into my head :

' Thou hast conquered, O pale GaUleo, the world has
moved on since thy deatli.
We cared liardly tuppence for Leo, and on Pius we waste
not our breath.'

' The last line is weak,' I said, — ' so weak that I

SALVE 183

must ask Gogarty to alter it, but I like " The world
has moved on since thy death." '

I should like Ibsen's Julian better if some reason
for the Emperor's opposition to Christianity were
given ; a mere caprice for the ancient divinities is
not sufficient for a philosopher who might have
foreseen the Middle Ages. A vision for him would
have been a procession of monks, and over against
them the lights of the Renaissance beginning
among the Tuscan hills. I should like him to have
foreseen Borgia. But which would he have liked
— Alexander or Caesar ? Neither. Their paganism
was not at all of the kind that appealed to Julian,
and the revival of Christianity with Luther at its
head would have shocked him more than the gross
materialism into which it had declined. He would
have hated the Christian monk who said that every
man likes a wife with rosy cheeks and white legs,
which is true of every man except Julian, who chose
for wife one whose age might be pleaded for his
abstinence from her bed. Julian is one of Nature's
perversities ; none but Nature herself would have
thought of setting up an ascetic mystic to oppose
Christianity — a real believer, for he prayed at the
ancient shrines, looking on the Gods not merely as
symbols, like many of his predecessors, but as Divine
entities.

But after his death the belief gained ground every-
where that the secret of life and death had been
discovered in a monastery ; and men no longer went
to the academies of the ai'ts, but into the wilderness ;
and there interpreted the fable according to their
temperaments. Chi'istianity was soon split up into

184 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

sects, all at variance one with the other ; texts which
could not be explained by common sense were
disputed by the theologians, till the founding of a
town became less important than the meaning of
a text : that one * he knew her not till she had
brought forth her first-born Son,' was the cause of
much perplexity and comment^ the opinions of the
theologians being divided, many going farther than
the strict letter of the text, averring that nothing
had ever happened under the quilt in Galilee before
or after the birth of the Saviour, Joseph being a virgin
even as Mary. And battles were fought and many
slain because men could not agree about the meaning
of the word Jilioque. The world went clean mad
about the new God just come over from Asia. They
had been coming for some seven hundred years. The
first, or one of the first, was Mithras, and he had
obtained a very considerable following ; none can say
why he failed to capture Europe. He brought the
Trinity with him, I think, — certainly the sacraments,
but he forgot the pathetic story of the Passion.
Mark wrote it well, and his excellent narrative
turned the scale. Mithras was many hundred

years before Jesus, and he was succeeded by

my scholar would come in useful here. He would
furnish me with a list of Gods, whereas the only
names that come up in my mind at the moment are
Adonis, Cybele, Attis, Isis, Serapis ; but there were
many more. And as for religions — they came like
locusts from the desert — Arians, Nestorians, Dona-
tists, Manicheans. A century or a century and a half
later the Mohammedans poured out of Arabia, crying,
' Allah, Allah,' all round Persia and Asia Minor,

SALVE 185

figliting their way along the North of Africa, crossing
the Straits into Sjiain, getting througli the Pyrenees
and tlie South of France as far as Tours.

The French seem to have been especially created
to save us from Asiatics ; they defeated Attila at
Clialons two hundred years before ; his God would
not have plagued us with tlieology ; he was plain
Mr. Booty. But if it had not been for the defeat
of the Arabs at Tours we might have all been
Mohammedans, and the question arises whether the
succeeding centuries would have been crueller under
Allah than they were under Jesus. The Middle Ages
were the cruellest of all the centuries, and the most
ignorant. It would be difficult to choose between
Byzantine mosaics and arabesques ; literature disap-
peared after the death of Augustine. Catholicism
claims the cathedrals ; the claim is a valid one, and
it claims Dante, born in 1265, the great anti-cleric,
he, who walks before men's eyes like a figure
risen from a medieval tomb, pedantic, cruel, unclean,
like the Middle Ages, venting his hatred on Popes,
Cardinals, Bishops, priests, and on his OAvn country-
men, hating them with the hatred of his own
Asiatic God. But Dante is likewise the tremulous
lover. There is the poet of the Fita Nuova and
the poet of The Divine Comedy. Landor reveals
both to us. The first in a love -scene in a garden
between Dante and Beatrice. The twain have
wandered from some fete in progress, in the garden
itself or in an adjacent house, to some quiet marble
seat shaded by myrtles, and in this dialogue we
see Dante pale and tremulous with passion, and
Beatrice admonishing him with grave eyes and tlie

1«6 'HAIL AND FARE^^-ELLr

of tbe seraphic doctor that Dante met in
the Poradbft. One thinks of TrisUat (the second act),
when Beatrice b^rs her lover not to take her hands
Tiolentlr ; she recogniies him as heir to all etemitr,
and h^* miss>>m to inspire him to write the poem
which viU outlast aU other poems and nuke them
and their lore wander for erer among the genera-
tions. Not in this dialogue, bat in another. Land<v
sets Petrarch and Boccaccio discoursing on their
great contcsnpoiaiT — Petrarch onhr saw Dante once,
Boccaccio nerer saw him, bat ther talk aboat him
as if he were their contemporarr. Landor does not
se^ to diierentiate between Boccaccio's criticism
c»f Dante and Petrarch's : ideas are impersonal, and
everr wise remark about Dante might have been
uttered by either speaker. But would Petrarch
have accepted the statement that less than a
twentieth part of Tke Dicim^ Comtdjf is good, as
representing his own cyinion^r And would Boc-
caccio admit that he loved Tke Ditiae Comedy merely
because it fatings him ha{^pia^ dreams ? It is Petrarch
who sajs that the filthiness <^ some passages in Tke
Duime CtmieJw would disgrace the drunkenest horse-
dealer, aiMl that the names of such criminals are
recorded by the poet as would be forgotten by the
hangman in six months. A little later in the dia-
logue Boccaccio reminds Petrarch that the scenes
from Tke Imt'ermo, Tke Pttrgaiorio, and Tke Paradiso
are Uttle more than pictures from the walls of
churches turned into verse, and that in several of these
we detect the cruelty, the satire and the indecency
of the 3kfiddle Ages. Yes. and Boccaccio adds that
he does not see the necessitv for three verses out of

I

SALVE 187

six of the third canto of The Inferno, and he does
not hesitate to say that there are passages in which
he cannot find his way, and where he suspects the
poet could not show it to him. Petrarch answers
quickly that Dante not only throws together the
most opposite and distant characters, he even makes
Jupiter and the Saviour the same person, and in a
prose lofty and hallowed, the Italian poets continue
their ingenious fault-finding page after page, but
neither doubts the justice of placing Dante higher
than any of the Latin poets.

It is disappointing that I cannot remember to
whom to attribute ' They have less hair-cloth about
them and smell less cloisterly, yet they are only
choristers.' It sounds more like Boccaccio than
Petrarch, and this placing of Dante above the Latin
poets endears one to Landor, for he loved the Latin
poets and understood them very well. He was the
last of the Latinists, and a great deal of himself
must have found expression in Latin verse. It is
likely that Horace would read Landor's verses with
more indulgence than the verses of any other
Latinist ; Landor's refinement of feeling and sense of
beauty would find abundant expression in his Latin.
And Horace would relish Landor's wisdom. But is
it sure — is it certain that Landor's wisdom would not
seem oppressive at times ? Wisdom estranges an
author from his fellows, and in no writer does the
intellect shine more clearly than in Landoi*. He
was ruled by his intelligence ; he did not like Dante
instinctively ; it was his intellect that enabled him
to see what is beautiful in Dante — that which Dante
owed to the Renaissance — and to forget the filth —

188 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

tliat wliich Dante owed to tlie Middle Ages. As well
as I remember, neither jioet refers to Dante's anti-
clericalism; its importance was overlooked by Landor;
but Boccaccio and Petrarch would not have over-
looked it; either might have approved or disapproved,
but one or the other would have mentioned it, and
Petrarch might have had qualms for the faith of
the next generation ; he might have foreseen easily
that the anti-clericalism of one generation would be
followed by a pagan revival. And this is what hap-
pened. Borgia was on the throne, two hundred years
later, and a reactionary priest was being told that
everybody was prepared to admit in theory that
Jesus was an interesting figure, but, for the moment,
everybody was anxious to talk about a new torso
that had been unearthed. But instead of running
to see the Greek God, and contributing to the
general enthusiasm by his praise of the pectoral
muscles, Savonarola gathered a few disciples about
him and told the people that a much greater dis-
covery would have been part of the tree on M'hich
the Saviour hung. Of course, Borgia did not like
signing the order for the burning of Savonarola and
his monks, but he could not allow the Renaissance to
be stopped, and if he had not intervened, the Renais-
sance would have stojiped at Fra Angelico ; Pintur-
ricchio might have been allowed to continue his little
religious anecdotes, but Mantegna would have been
told that his vases and draperies hark back to the
heathen, before Christ was, and as likely as not
Botticelli's light-hearted women might have had
tears painted into their eyes. The world had had
enough of the Middle Ages, and the reaction was a

SALVE 189

Pope who loved his own daughter Lucretia, and
ordered the murder of his own son. Or was it
Caesar who planned this murder ? A wonderful day
it was when he pursued the Pope's chambei'lain
into the Vatican and stabbed him to death in his
father's arms, for such a deed attests, perhaps better
than any argument, that men's thoughts had turned
definitely fi-om the Kingdom of Heaven. The King-
dom of Earth had been swallowed up in theology for
some eight or nine centuries, and it was the genius
of the sixteenth century to disinter it, and to make
merry in it without giving a thought to the super-
man— the silly vanity of a Christian gone wrong. In
this re-arisen kingdom were all the arts, sculpture,
painting, literature, and music, and with the dis-
covery of America the world seemed indefinitely
enlarged. A hint was in the air that the world moved.
Borgia sat on the Papal chair ; Caesar his son might
have succeeded him ; and, with the genius of Italy,
insurgent since 1 265, behind him, it is not unlikely
that he would have triumphed where Napoleon,
another Italian, one born out of due time failed.
Machiavelli tells us that Caesar's plans were well laid
and would not have miscarried, had it not been for a
certain fatal accident, his eating of the poisoned
meats at a banquet which Alexander had prepared
for a dozen Cardinals, his enemies. Alexander ate,
too, of these meats, and being an old man, succumbed
to the poison ; Caesar recovered partially, and when
he staggered convalescent from his bed, he was told
that his father had been a fortnight in the tomb,
and that a new Pope, entirely out of sympathy with
the Renaissance, had been elected. Caesar had to

190 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

withdraw from Rome to Neppi, where he nearly died
of a second attack — of what ? Of Roman fever ? —
for I do not beheve in the story of the poisoned
meats. The French were on foot for Naples, and
having nowhere to lay his head, he begged permis-
sion to return to Rome.

My gardener's rake ceased suddenly, and, opening
my eyes, I saw him snail-hunting among the long
blades of the irises.

It had been raining in the morning ; he would get
a good many ; and my thoughts droj^ped back into a
pleasant mediUition regarding the nature of man and
our lack of reverence for Caesar, who represented,
more than anyone who ever lived, the qualities that
have enabled men to raise themselves above the
lower animals. He was, I remember now, allowed
to return to Rome ; but no sooner was he there
than it became plain to him that it would be useless
to reassume the Cardinalate which he had abandoned.
He had no chance of being elected to the Papacy,
the late Pope having created many new Cardinals, all
of whom were determined to oppose him. But Caesar
had influence among the Spanish Cardinals, and he
promised their votes to Julius in exchange for the
office of Standard-Bearer to the Church. Julius
agreed, but Caesar was deprived of the office, or per-
haps it was never given to him. It seems a pity that
Catholic history should be robbed of so picturesque
an event as the accession of Caesar to the Papacy,
but the next best thing happened : another Renais-
sance Pope was elected, Julius the Second — a
warrior-Pope who entered Merandola sword in
hand, and gave Rome back to the paganism of

SALVE 191

Michael Angelo^ Raphael, Del Sarto, Leonardo da
Vinci, and Donatello.

These five great artists lived contemporaneously,
and in a city called Florence, at that time not
much bigger than Rathmines, every one of them
as pagan as Caesar himself in their lives, and as
Phidias in their art. Were Tonks here he would
at once interrupt me, for he paints anecdotes ; and,
very anxious to defend his principles, he would say,
' Explain yourself,' and if I know him, he would
ask why the art of Michael Angelo is as pagan as
that of Phidias. My answer would be that 7'ke Last
Judgment is not an anecdote, but merely a pretext
for drawing, and that Michael Angelo chose it for
the same reason as Phidias chose Olyvipus — because
it gave him an opportunity of exhibiting man in all
his attributes and perfections. In The Holy Family
Raphael discovered a like opportunity ; and to make
the Fornarina seem more beautiful he placed a child
in her arms and another against her knees. Leonardo
was not less a pagan than Raphael ; it was pagan
mysticism that inspired Our Lady of the Rocks and
St. Anne; and these pictures would certainly have
been admired by the Apostate. ' Thou hast not
conquered, Galilean,' he would have cried out when
he raised his eyes to the great temple that Michael
Angelo was building for the glory of a Roman
Emperor. He would have believed in Tetzel who
went along the road shaking his money-box, crying
' As your money falls into my till your soul will jump
out of Hell ; ' for he attached great importance to
medals and amulets ; but on meeting Luther he
would have said, ' Why, this is Christianity over

192 'HAIL AND FARE^\'ELL!•

again ; St. Paul re-arisen.' Julian hated St. Paul
and wrote confuting his doctrines, and he -would
have written against Luther who, ever since his visit
to Rome, had been translating the Scriptures and
praying that grace might be given to Rome to regain
her lost Christianity — the very Christianity that
Julian had striven against in the fourth century, a
democratic Christianity, without a hierarchy, without
external forms, in the heart, dear to Luther whose
teaching was that, since Christ died on the Cross to
save our souls, and left a Gospel for our guidance, it
may be assumed that he left one that could be
comprehended by everybody, otherwise he had
died in vain. And everybody wondered why he had
not understood before that Christianity is a personal
thing given into every man's own keeping, whereby
he may save his own soul or lose it. ' The priest
comes between me and Christ,' was the universal cry
in North Germany ; England followed Germany, and
the spirit of the Reformation swept through Sweden,
Norway, Holland. France, the eldest daughter of
the Church, nearly went over to Protestantism,
Henry IV. declaring that he would become a
Catholic for the sake of Paris. The Papacy was in
tragic times, two-thirds of Europe had slipped away
from her, and to save the third that remained a
Council assembled at Trent.

The shell has been cracked, and we are at the
kernel of the argument, that hitherto everybody
had gone his own way and thought very much as he
pleased ; but at Trent the Church drew a circle
about faith and morals, forbidding speculation on the
meaning of life and the conduct of life, and arranging

SALVE 193

the Catholic's journey from the cradle to the grave
as carefully as any tour planned by that excellent
firm, Messrs. Cook and Sons. He who puts himself
in the hands of this firm does not waste time
inquiring out the departure and the arrival of trains
and steamboats. Edward knows that if he goes to
confession his sins will be forgiven him ; that if he
misses Mass he is guilty of mortal sin ; that if he
loses his temper of venial sin. If he didn't believe
these things he wouldn't be a Catholic. So there
we are, and all this is as simple as Columbus's
egg, but how strange that nobody should have
seen before that Catholicism is an intellectual
desert !

XII

In Mayo, almost in my own parish, was fought the
most famous battle in Irish legend ; from Mayo
came Davitt, the Land League, and now a discovery
which will recreate Ireland. The shepherds will
fight hard, but the sword I found in my garden will
prevail against the crozier, and by degrees the parish
priest will pass away, like his ancestor the Druid.

I remembered the absurd review the Times pub-
lished about the Descent of M(m, and Matthew
Arnold's fine phrase about the difficulty of persuad-
ing men to rise out of the unclean straw of their
intellectual habits — his very words, no doubt — and his
wisest, for the human mind declines if not turned out
occasionally ; mental, like bodily, cleanliness, is a
habit ; and when Papists have been persuaded to
bring up their children Protestants the next genera-

N

194 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

tion may cross over to the agnostic end of the
quadrille. My co-religionists will not like to hear
me say it, but I will say it all the same : Protestant-
ism is but a stage in the human journey ; and man
will continue to follow his natural evolution despite
the endless solemnity of \\'olfgang Goethe, who
captured the admiration of all the pundits when he
said that it would have been better if Luther had never
been born, meaning thereby that Luther saved perish-
ing Christianity. Arnold, who is nearly as pompous
and more \indictive than Goethe, saw that man
likes to bide like a pig in a stye. But enough of
Arnold ; I must not lead my readers into thinking
that a single striking phrase is sufficient condonation
for his very Rugby prose, epitomised in that absurd
line about seeing life steadily and seeing it whole, a
line that led one generation gaping into the wilder-
ness, John Eglinton heading it. . . . To John I
shall have to go presently, but I shall have to tell
JE the great news first. To-day is Wednesday,
Thursday, Friday — on Saturday night !

And on Saturday night I was out on my doorstep,
looking dowii the street to see if JE were coming,
trying to discover his appearance in that of every
distant passer-by. He did not come, and dinner
dragged itself slowly through its three courses, and
vowing that I didn't care a brass farthing whetlier he
came or stayed, I got up from table and pitched
myself into an arm-chair. All the same I was glad
to hear his knock about nine. He came in sweep-
ing a great mass of hair from his forehead and tell-
ing me that he had had to go to Foxrock to meet
some man from Germany who had written a book

(

SALVE 195

about economics, and, having discussed rural banks
all the afternoon, he was ready to talk to me about
impressionist painting till midnight, and to read me
an article which would have interested me if I had
not been already absorbed by my idea.

' JE, I've made a discovery that will revolutionize
Ireland.'

It seemed to me that he should start up from his
chair and wave his hands ; but he continued smoking
his old pipe, looking at me from time to time, till, at
last, there was nothing else for me to do but to throw
myself upon his mercy, asking him if it weren't very
wonderful that nobody had noticed the fact that
dogma and literature were incompatible. He seemed
to think that everybody knew that this was so ;
and is there an3rthing more discouraging than to
find one's daring definitions accepted as common-
place truths ?

' Then, my dear JE, you've been extraordinarily
remiss. You should have gone down and preached
in Bray, taking for your text, " Dogma corrodes the
intelligence. " You weren' t stoned when you preached
that '

'The Catholics will not admit their intellectual
inferiority.'

' But if the history of the world proves it ?'

' All the same '

'When I say no Catholic literature, of course I
mean that ninety and five per cent, of the world's
literature was written by Protestants and agnostics.'

' Even so,' M answered, ' Catholics will continue to
bring up their children in a faith that hasn't produced
a book worth reading since the Reformation.'

196 ' HAIL AND FARP:WELL !'

* Well, what's to be done ?'

iE was dry, very dry. The German economist
seemed to have taken all the sting out of him, and
I began to see that in this new adventure he would
be of little use to me. Rolleston has read every
literature, but he had retired to Wicklow, his family
having outgrown the house on Pembroke Road, and
it was reported that he now was more interested in
sheep than in books. Besides, he is a Protestant,
and it would be more enlightening to hear a Catholic
on the subject of my great discovery. A Catholic
would have to put up some sort of defence, unless,
indeed, he entrenched himself in theology, saying
that it was no part of the business of Catholicism to
consider whether dogma tended to encourage or re-
press literary activities. To this defence, the true
one, I should have no answer.

' Gill is my man,* I said, as I got out of bed on
Monday morning. ' He was educated at Trinity,
and has lived in France. It will no doubt be dis-
agreeable to him to listen to my proofs one after the
other, but my business to-day is not to take Gill out
for a pleasant walk, but to find out what defence an
educated Catholic can put up.'

' Hullo, my dear Moore !' Gill said, raising his eyes
from his writing-table.

* I've come to take you for a walk. Gill.'
' I'll be ready in a few minutes.'

And I watched my friend, who closed one eye curi-
ously as he signed his letters, his secretary standing
over him, handing them to him, one after the other,
and answering questions until one of his lecturers
came in, a man called Fletcher. Then he and Gill

SALVE 197

talked away, each taking pleasure, so it seemed to
me, in answering the other emptily as echoes do
down a mountain-side, until at last I had to beg
Fletcher to desist, and getting Gill his hat, I per-
suaded him out of the office down the stairs. Even
when we were in the street he was undecided
whether we should go along the square, wandering
down Grafton Street, or whether we should treat
ourselves to the Pembroke Road. ' The hawthorns
are in flower and thrushes are singing there.' Gill
agreed and we tripped along together. Gill yawn-
ing in the midst of his enjoyment, as is his wont —
delightful little yawns. We yawn like dogs, a
sudden gape and all is over ; but Gill yawns like a
cat, and a cat yawns as he eats, with gourmandise.
We can read a cat's yawn in his eyes long before it
appears in his jaws. Tom settles himself and waits
for the yawn, enjoying it in anticipation. His
sensuality is expressed in his yawn ; his moustaches
go up just like a cat's. His yaAvn is one of the
sights of our town, and is on exhibition constantly
at the Abbey Theatre. We do not go to the Abbey
Theatre to watch it, but we watch it when we are
at the Abbey, and we enjoy it oftener during a bad
play than we do during a good one — The Play Boy
distracts our attention from it, but when Deirdre is
pei-formed his yawns while our tedium away. His
yawn is what is most real, most essential in him ;
it is himself; it inspires him; and out of his yawn
wisdom comes. (Does this theory regarding the source
of his wisdom conflict with an earlier theory ?) He
yawns in the middle of his own speeches, oftener, so
I am assured, than any one of his auditors. He has

198 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

oeen seen yawning in chapel, and it is said that he
yawns even in tliose intimate moments of existence

when but I will not labour the point ; we can

have no exact knowledge on this subject whether or

no Gill yawns when he we will dismiss all the

stories that have collected about these yawns as
apocr^'jjhalj restricting our account to those yawns that
ha])pen — well, in our faces.

Gill and I leaned over Baggot Street Bridge,
watching the canal-boat rising up in the lock, the
opening of the gates to allow the boat to go through,
and the hitching on of the rope to the cross-bar.
The browsing horse, roused by a cry, stuck his toes
into the towing-path, and the strain began again all
the way to the next lock, the boy flourishing a
leafy bough, just pulled from the hedge. We
continued our interrupted walk, glad that we had
not been born canal-horses. Gill's step as airy as his
thoughts, and, as we walked under flowering boughs,
he began to talk to me about my volume of peasant
stories. I was glad he did, for I had just found
another translator, an Irish speaker, a Kerry man,
and reckoned on this piece of news to interest him.
But as soon as I mentioned that my friend was a
Protestant and was going to take Orders, Gill spoke
of * Soupers,' and on my asking him his reason for
doing so, he said a man with so Irish a name and
coming from so catholic a part of the country, could
not have come from any but catholic stock.

It has always seemed to me that if a man may
modify his political attitude as Gill had done, the
right to modify liis spiritual can hardly be denied.
But among Catholics the ' vert ' is regarded with

SALVE 199

detestation. With them reHgion is looked upon as a
family inheritance, even more than politics. ' A
damned irreligious lot,' I thought, but did not speak
my thought, for I wished the subject, ' Dogma or
Literature,' to arise naturally out of the conversa-
tion ; I did not attempt to guide it, but just dropped
a remark that even if the man in question came of
catholic stock and had separated himself from Roman
formula for worldly reasons, it did not seem to me
that we should blame him, life being what it is, a
tangle of motives. But it is difficult to stmt one-
self, and I was soon asking Gill for what reason would
he have a man change his religion if pecuniary and
sexual motives were excluded ?

' No man " verts " for theological,' I said ; ' no
man ever did so foolish a thing, except Newman,
Avho wasted a good deal of time rummaging in the
sajings of the Fathers of the foui-th century, as if
what they said mattered a jot to anybody. All con-
versions can be traced to sex, or to money, or hysteria,
or the desire of rule and formula. I never thought
of it before, but it would seem that Newman is the
solitary example of a man changing his religion for
theological reasons. I am speaking of modern time.
Do you know another ?'

Gill spoke of Manning, and his case was discussed
for some time, myself maintaining that Manning was
a Protestant of Protestants, liking Quakers far better
than Catholics, but believing that the Roman Church
might become a great political influence. We dis-
cussed all the reasons used for ' verting ' during this
walk. ' All, Gill,' I said, ' except one — a new reason
has just occurred to me — literature.'

aoo 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

' Rome was always the patron of the arts.'

' Pagan Rome, yes. Alexander the Sixth saved
the world from a revival of the Middle Ages by burn-
ing that disagreeable monk, Savonarola ; and Julius
saved the Renaissance, but, since the Council of Trent
Rome has lost her paganism, especially in Ireland. I
don't think that Irish Catholics have written much.
I'm not sure that Catholics in any country have
written much ... an odd book here and there.
You must admit. Gill, that this is an extraordinary
fact, if it be a fact, and will have to be explained,
accounted for.'

Gill laughed a little recklessly and contented him-
self with saying, ' Yes, it is very extraordinary . , .
if it be a fact.'

' But, Gill, why not consider this question in our
walk ?'

' I would sooner that the defence of Catholicism
were taken by one more capable than myself.'

' Who would you care to see undertake the task if
not yourself?' He spoke of Father Tom Finlay.
' But it was Father Tom that set me thinking on
this very subject, for when I said that Irish
Catholics had written very little, he concurred,
saying that Maynooth, with all its education, had not
j)roduced even a theological work — his very words.'

' Did he say that ?' Gill asked, with the interest
that all Catholics take in every word that comes from
their priests.

' But I would sooner hear what you, a layman,
have to say,'

Flattered by the invitation. Gill's somewhat meagre
mind began to put forth long weedy sentences, and

SALVE 201

from these I gathered that I was possibly right in
saying that the Church had defined her doctrines at
the Council of Trent, and therefore it might be said
that the catholic mind was not as free in the
twentieth century as it was in the Middle Ages.

* All the same, the great period of French litera-
ture came after the Reformation.'

* Yon know French literature as well as I do,
Gill, and we'll just run through it. French litera-
ture in the sixteenth century is represented by
Descartes, Rabelais, and Montaigne, all three agnos-
tics. In the seventeenth century French literature
in the Court of Louis Quatorze, which you look upon
as the Golden Age, began with Corneille and Racine,
and both these writers were Catholics, and for all I
know to the contrary, excellent Catholics. But the
tragedies of Corneille and Racine do not affect the
question ; they are but imitations of Greek drama,
and do not attempt any criticism of life and the
conduct of life.' Gill asked why not. ' Because
their heroes and heroines were not Christians, and
therefore their ideas could not come under the ban
of the Church.'

* Fenelon ?'

* A gentle light suited to weak eyes, but remember
always that my contention is not that no Catholic
ever wrote a book, but that ninety-five per cent, of
the world's literature is written by agnostics and
Protestants.'

' Bossuet ?'

' A very elaborate and erudite rhetorician, whom
Louis XIV. employed to unite all the Protestant
sects in one Gallican Church. He set himself to

202 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

this task, but before it was finished Louis XIV. had
settled his differences with the Pope.

' The beauty of Pascal's writing you will not deny,
and his Catholicism '

' Is more than doubtful, Gill. The Port Royal
School has always been suspected of Protest^intism,
and you will not deny that Pascal's repudiation of the
Sacraments justified the suspicion. h'aiurcUemeiit
meme cela I'ons fera croire et vous ahetira. A difficult
phrase to translate, Gill ; the best that I can do
at this moment is " Sacraments help you to believe,
but they stupefy you." But you know French as
well as I do.'

Gill protested against my interpretation.

' Then why was the phrase suppressed in the
Port Royal edition by the Jesuits ? Cousin restored
it after referring to the original manuscrij^t. Now, in
the eighteenth century we have Voltaire, the deist,
the arch-mocker, the real briseur de fers ; Rousseau,
a Protestant, whose writings it is said brought about
the French Revolution ; Diderot and Montesquieu.
The nineteenth century in France was all agnostic'

' Chateaubriand !'

' You can have him and welcome, for through him
we shall escape the danger of proving too much,
but '

' But what ?'

' I was thinking of liis name which is very like
him. 'Pon my word, Gill, our names arc our souls.
A most suitable name lor the author of Le Genie du
Chrislianisme, a name to be incised on the sejjulchre
at St. Malo among the rocks out at sea, but he
ordered that none should be put upon the slab ; a

SALVE 203

name for an ambassador, a diplomatist, a religious
reformer, but not one for a poet, an artist, a pom-
pous I'idiculous name, a soft, unreal name, a grandiose
name, a windy name, a spongy name, spongy as a
brioche — Chateaubrioche, Gill, what do you think of
it ? Doesn't it hit him oif ? Chateaubrioche !'

And looking into Gill's face I read a gentle
distress,

' His books were a means to an end instead of
being an end in themselves. To criticize him in a
phrase that he would have appreciated, I might say,
Je ne trouve dans ses oeuvres que la vapeur et le tumulte.'

' Whatever you may think of his writings, you can-
not deny his Catholicism, and one of these days when
I'm feeling less tired '

' He wrote Le Ghiie du Chnstianisme in his mistress's
house, reading her a chapter every night before they
went to bed. It is true that Catholics must have
mistresses, as well as Protestants, but you are an
Irish Catholic and would be loath to admit as much.
Chateaubriand was content to regret Atala, but
Edward burnt his early poems. Verlaine was a
Catholic and he was a great poet, there is no question
about that. Gill. You see I am dealing fairly with
you, but like Chateaubriand, Verlaine' s Catholicism
ne V a nullement gene dans sa vie. He wrote the most
beautiful poems in the French language, some were
pious, some were indecent, and he spaced them out in
Parallelement, He did not look upon Catholicism as
a means of government, he just liked the Liturgy ;
Mary and the saints were pleasing to him in stained
glass, and when he came out of pi-ison he was re-
pentant and wrote Sagesse. Paul A'^erlaine ! Since

204 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

the Elizabetlian days, was a poet ever dowered with
a more beautiful name ? And his verses correspond
to his name. " Ou done est lame de I'erloine ?"
What a beautiful refrain for a ballad ! What shall
we say about the Catholicism of my old friend Huys-
manns ? Out of hatred of the V^oltairean grocer he
plunged into magic. The more ridiculous the miracle
the more he believed in it ; and the French ecclesi-
astics would be sorry to have about them many
Catholics like him. Upon my word, Gill, my theory
that Catholicism hasn't produced a readable book
since the Reformation stands on more legs than four.'

Some carts were passing at the time, and when
the rattle of their wheels died down, I asked Gill
what he thought of my discovery, but, detecting or
seeming to detect a certain petulance in his voice, I
interrupted :

' But, Gill, I don't see why the discussion should
annoy you. It isn't as if I were asking you to re-
consider your position regarding the doctrine of the
Immaculate Conception, of Transubstantiation and
the Pope's Infallibility. So far as I know there is
no dogma declaring that Catholics are not intel-
lectually inferior to Protestants and Agnostics.
Your religion leaves you quite free to accept my
theory ; indeed, I think it encourages you to do so,
for does not Catholicism always prefer the obedient
and the poor in spirit to the courageous, the learned,
and the wise ?' And I spoke of the Imitaliun of
Christ till Gill became so petulant that I thought it
would be well to desist, and began to speak instead
on one of his favourite subjects — compromise. At
once he held forth, disclaiming the idealogues of the

SALVE 205

French Revolution, who would re -make the world
according to their idea, without regard to the facts
of human nature, and then, as if pre-occupied by
his intellectual relationship with Machiavelli, Gill
entered upon a discussion regarding the duties of a
statesman, saying that all great reforms had been
effected by compromise, and it was by her genius for
compromise that England had built up the Empire ;
and he continued in this strain until at last it was
impossible for me to resist the temptation to ask him
to explain to me the difference between trimming
and compromise, which he did very well, inflicting
defeat upon me. The trimmer, he said, com-
promises for his own advantage, irrespective of the
welfare of the State, but the statesman who com-
promises is influenced by his sympathy for the needs
of humanity, which cannot be changed too quickly.

And this, the lag end of our argument, carried us
pleasantly back over Baggot Street Bridge, but at
the corner of Herbert Street, the street in which
Gill lives, I could not resist a Parthian shot.

' But, Gill, if compromise be so essential in human
affairs, is it not a pity that the Irish haven't followed
the example of the English ? Especially in religion,'
I said.

As Gill did not answer me at once I followed him
to the door of his house.

' It can't be denied that Protestantism is a com-
promise ?' This Gill had to admit. ' But it is not
one,' I said, ' that you are likely to accept.' He
laughed and I returned to Ely Place, pleased by the
rickety lodging-house appearance of Baggot Street
against the evening sky, and, for the moment forget-

206 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

ful of the incompatibility of dogma and literature,
my thoiii;lits melted into a meditation, the subject of
M'hich was that the sun sets nowhere so beautifully
as it does at the end of Ba^jgot Street.

The clocks had not yet struck seven, and, as I
did not dine till lialf-past, I turned into Stephen's
Green and followed the sleek borders of the
brimming lake, admiring the willow-trees in their
first greenness and their reflections in the tranquil
water. The old eighteenth - century brick was
beautiful in the warm glow of the sunset ; and the
slender balconies and the wide flights of steps
seemed conscious that they had fallen into evil
modern days ; and horrified at the sight of a shop
that had been run up at the corner of the Green, I
cried, ' Other shops will follow it, and this beautiful
city of Dublin Avill become in very few years as
garish as London. To keep Dublin it might be well
to allow it to slumber in its Catholicism wherein
nothing alters. These Catholics,' I said, ' are
strangely pathetic. How they love the darkness,
and cry against me because I would throw the
shutters open and bring light into the room.'

My talk with Gill, which had already become a
memory, rose up before me. ' He isn't a stupid
man,' I said, * but why does his intelligence differ
from mine and from the intelligence of every Pro-
testant and Agnostic ? We are different. Catholics
lack initiative, I suppose that that is it. The
catholic mind loses its edge quickly. Sex sharpens
it for a little while, but when the Catholic marries
and settles down he very soon becomes like an old
carving-knife. The two whetstones are sex and

A

SALVE 207

religious discussion^ and we must keep passing our
intelligences up one and down the other. After
fifty sex dies, and religious discussion becomes more
than ever essential. I have heard a man say, ' One
can't go on considering the pi'oblems of life
and death always, one just accepts, and by ac-
cepting gets free for other things.' But that is the
Catholic's mistake ; theology is the whetstone, and
Scotchmen know it,' and the story of the Scotchman
who was heard at the railway-station crying to his
departing friend, ' I give you James but I take my
stand on Timothy,' came into my head, and I
muttered, ' Quite true ; we become rusted, broken
blades, or empty scabbards for a child to ride a cock-
horse upon.'

The ducks climbed out of the water. And the
gulls ? There was not one in the air nor on the
water ; and, after wondering a while if they had
returned to the sea, I decided for good and all
that I owed the preservation of my own intelligence
to my theological interests. Some readers may pre-
fer, or think they prefer, my earlier books, but none
will deny that my intelligence has sharpened, whereas

Gill's ' My cook will grumble if I keep dinner

waiting,' and I returned to Ely Place to eat, and to
meditate on the effect of dogma on literature.

XIII

The great French writers of the nineteenth cen-
tury were Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Balzac, Gautier,
Michelet, Renan, Taine, Saint-Beuve, Gerard de
Nerval, Merimee, Les Goncourts, Georges Sand,

208 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, and all these were
Agnostics ; Guizot was a Protestant, his historical
works have I suppose some value ; John Eglinton
will tell me about him, and glad of an excuse for
a visit to the National Library, I went forth after
dinner to talk literature again, arriving in Kildare
Street about half-past nine, when John Eglinton was
writing the last of those mysterious slips of paper,
cataloguing, I think he calls it. A visitor is wel-
come after half-past nine, and in the sizzle of electric
light we debate till ten. Then he comes back to
smoke a cigar with me or I go home with him. He
lacks the long, clear vision of JE, but when an idea
is brought close to him he appreciates it shrewdly,
and it is the surety that he will understand, a little
later, my idea better than I understand it myself, that
makes his first embarrassment so attractive to me.

In the evening I am about to relate I found him
a little more short-sighted than usual ; his little
face wrinkled up as he sought to grasp, to under-
stand my discovery that Catholics had not pro-
duced a book worth reading since the Reformation,
for John Eglinton only understands his own thoughts,
and it is with difficulty that he is rolled out of
them,

' You mean that all English literature has been
produced in the Protestant tradition, but I'm afraid
that Protestants will think this is a somewhat too
obvious truth. Of course, we all know that Chaucer
is the only English Catholic poet '

' My dear John Eglinton, you've not understood !'
A worried look came into his face, and in his desire
to understand he seemed like getting cross with

SALVE 209

me. ' My belief is that catholic countries haven't
produced a book.'

John gasped.

' But France ?'

We went into that question^ and were talking of
Pascal when the attendant came in to ask John for
the keys ; it was three minutes to ten,

' Shall I ring the bell, sir ?'

John agreed that the bell might be rung, and we
watched the odd mixture of men and women leave
their books on the counter and go through the tui'n-
stiles. John had to wait till the last left, and the
last was a little old gentleman about five feet high who
has come to the library every night for the last thirty
years to read Dickens and nothing but Dickens. He
passed through the turnstile ; we followed him ;
the fireman was consulted ; and when all the lights
were out John was free to go for a walk with me, and
I think it was in Baggot Street that I succeeded in
bringing home to him the importance of my dis-
covery.

' But Spain ?' he interjected. ' Don Quixote ?'

' Spanish literature is contempoi'aneous with the
Council of Trent when the Church defined her
dogmas, and '

' And Don Quixote is as unethical,' he said, ' as
David Copperjield'

' WTiatever merit Lope de Vega may have had in
his day, he has none now;' and we discussed for a
while the interesting question whether the merits of
books are permanent or temporary. ' BjTon's poetry
conquered Europe, and to-day everybody knows it to
be illiterate doggerel ; and in our understanding

210 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

Calderon's plays are merely rows of little ■wooden
figures moved hither and thither by a mind that
seems gracious despite his conviction that tlie Inquisi-
tion was a kind and beneficent institution. All the
same Shelley and Goethe admired Calderon ; Shelley
translated some pages/ and John Eglinton agreed
with me that these are the only pages of Shelley
that we cannot read. He spoke of St. Patrick's
Purgatory.

' It passes beyond perception/ and he laughed
steadily.

' Calderon, in spite of his piety, didn't succeed in
avoiding heresy, for in ecclesiastic zeal he seems to
have identified himself with Antinomianism. Per-
haps he was condemned. You quite understand that
my point isn't that a Catholic hasn't written a book
since the Reformation, but that ninety and nine per
cent., well, ninety and five per cent, of the literature
of the world has been produced by Protestants and
Agnostics,'

' I see what you mean now,' and the dear little
man of the puckered face listened on his doorstep to
an exhortation to write a little more of tliat beautiful
English which he so wastefully s])ends in his conver-
sation. He listened, but unwillingly ; he does not
like my literary exhortations, and I pondered on his
future as I walked home. ' He will sink deeper
and deeper into his arm-chair, and into his own
thoughts.'

The closing of the public-houses told me that it
must be near eleven and the thought of dear
Edward sitting behind his screen, smoking, led me
to Leinster Street, The Sword Motive brought

SALVE 211

the candle-light glimmering down the stairs ; the
door opened, and two old cronies went upstairs to
talk once more of painting and literature — two old
cronies who had known each other in boyhood, who
had talked all through our lives on the same sub-
jects, Edward feeling things perhaps a little deeper
than I have ever done. When the Master Builder is
played he walks from the theatre into the Green,
and sits under the hawthorns in some secluded
spot, his eyes filled with tears at the memory, as he
would say it himself, of so much beauty. Was it
Yeats described him as ' the sketch of a great man '
— the sketch, he said; I'ehauche better realises his idea
of dear Edward ; but Yeats does not know French ;
and while my eyes followed Edward about the room
I wondered if it would be wise for me to exchange,
were it possible, a wine-glass of intelligence for a
rummer of temperament. . . . We have gone through
life together, myself charging windmills, Edward
holding up his hands in amazement.

' More culture and less common sense than the
Spanish original,' I said, and I watched him moving
ponderously about his ungainly room, so like himself.
There is something eternal about Edward, an entity
come down through the ages, and myself another
entity. ' Reciprocating entities,' I said, glancing at
some pictures of famous churches. (Edward pins
photographic reproductions on the dusty wall-paper.)
A beautiful church caught my eye, and, desiring
Edward's criticism of it, as one desires an old
familiar tune, I asked him if the church were an
ancient or a modern one ; and, answering that it was
one of Pugin's churches, he lifted his glasses up on

212 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

his nose and peered into the j^hotograph, absorbed
for some moments by the beauty -whicli he perceived
in it.

The church set us talking of Pugin's genius, and
■whether the world would ever invent a new form of
architecture, or whether the age of architecture was
over and done like the Stone and the Bronze Ages.
Edward's churchwarden was now drawing famously,
his glass of grog was by his side, and the nights in
the Temple, when he used to tell me that he would
like to write his plays in Irish, rose up before me.
' All his prejudices are the same,' I said, ' more
intense, perhaps ; he is a little older, a little more
liable to catch cold,' and he spoke to me of the
necessity of a screen to protect him from the draught
coming under the door.

' Have a cigar.' He pushed the box towards me
and continued to smoke his pipe.

Although not a priest, there is something hierarchic
about him, and I thought of Ancient Eg}^t and
then of our friendship. It was drawing to a close
mysteriously as a long summer evening. ' We shall
not see much of each other at the end of our lives,'
I said, wondering how the separation was going to
come about, not liking to tell him of my gi*eat dis-
covery, fearing to pain him.

' You're very silent to-night, George,' he jerked
out, breaking the silence at last. ' Of what are you
thinking ?'

' Of a great discovery '

' ^\^^at, another ! I thought you had come to the
end of them. Your first was the naturalistic novel,
your second impressionistic painting '

SALVE 213

' My third was your plays, Edward, and the Irish
Renaissance, which is but a bubble.'

' Oh, it's only a bubble,' he said, his jolly great
purple face shaking like a jelly.

' You may laugh,' I said, ' but it is no laughing
matter for the Catholic Church if it can be shown
that no Catholic has written a book since the
Reformation. ... I wish you wouldn't laugh like
that.'

At the end of the next fit of laughter he bit a
piece off the end of his churchwarden, and, getting
up from the sofa, he searched for another along the
chimneypiece, and when he had filled it, he said to
me, who had been sitting quite silent :

' Now, tell me about this new mare's-nest.'

' I've told you already. There has been no
Catholic literature since the Reformation, and very
little before it. Boccaccio and Ariosto were pagans,
Michael Angelo and Raphael '

' But Michael Angelo painted The Last Judgment
and Raphael The Holy FaynUy.'

We talked for an hour and, his brain cleai'ing
suddenly, he said : ' Raphael and Michael Angelo
lived in a catholic country, came of catholic inheri-
tance, and painted christian subjects.'

' And you don't care to inquire further into the
matter. How very catholic !'

' But what has all this got to do with the Irish
Renaissance ?'

' Only this, Edward : of what use is it to change the
language of Ireland since Catholics cannot wi'ite ?
Unless some special indulgences are granted for
prayers in Irish. Of course, if so '

2U 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

I know all about that ; ' and Edward puffed sul-
lenly at his pipe. ' So your great discovery is that
the Irish Renaissance is nothing but a bubble.
What about your mission ?'

' Good God ! I hadn't thouglit of that,' I said.
And, getting out of my chair, I walked up and down
the room, overcome.

' What are you thinking of ?' Edward asked at the
end of a long silence.

' Of what am I thinking ? Of what you said just
now.'

' What did I say ?'

' You reminded me of my mission. Great God,
Edward !'

*I wish you wouldn't take the Sacred Name in vain.'

' My life has been sacrificed for a bubble.'

' But you knew Ireland was a catholic country.'

* I was bidden here. If some nun said she had
seen a troop of angels and the Virgin Mary, you
would believe it all, but when I tell you that on the
road to Chelsea '

Seeing that I was profoundly moved, Edward
ceased laughing, and began to speak of Newman.

* NcAvman was a convert,' I said, ' and he brought
some of the original liberty of the Protestant into
his Catholicism ; isn't that so ?'

Edward ])uffed at his pipe and seemed to think
that [)erhaps the convert was not quite so obedient
as the born catholic.

' It's a very serious thing for me,' I said, rismg. ' I
su])pose I must be getting home.'

He lit the candle and took me downstairs, and at the
grating which guards the tobacconist's door I said :

SALVE 215

' I haven't examined the question thoroughly. I
may discover some Catholic writers. Do you know
of any ?'

Edward said he could not say offhand, and I
crossed the tram-line, ^thinking how I had been
ensnared, and wondering who was the snarer.

XIV

Edward had mentioned Lingard, my earliest
literary acquaintance ; some volumes of his Histoiy
of England had been brought down from my grand-
father's library about fifty years ago, and Miss Westby
had striven to teach me reading and history out of
them. Now, Lingard was a Catholic, and Pascal, too,
in spite of his many doubts. His thoughts {Les
Pens^es) were written in the hope that doubts might
be reasoned away ; it must have been in a moment
of irritation that he scribbled that sacraments stupefy
the recipient, for in the celebrated dialogue the
believer escapes from the dilemma into which the
unbeliever is pressing him by offering to make the
matter between them the subject of a bet. The
Kingdom of Earth is such a poor pleasure-ground
that the believer decides to put his money on the
Kingdom of Heaven ; ' even if it should prove
m}i;hical my plight will not be worse than thine,' he
says ; ' and if it should turn out a reality — how much
better !'

When I was halfway up Merrion Square I caught
myself considering the word 'belief — the vainest
word in the language, and the cause of all our

216 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

misunderstandings, for nobody knows what he
believes or disbelieves. We attach ourselves to
certain ideas and detach ourselves from others ; so
runs the world away ; and it was by the gateway in
Ely Place that I remembered Saint-Simon and La
Bruyerc, two fine writers, and both of them Catholics.
La Fontaine reached literary perfection in his Fables,
but he could not have been interested in bird-life,
else he would not have written of the reed bend-
ing beneath the weight of the wren. The image
is charming, but wrens do not live among reeds.
Was it the rh)Tne that lured him — roseau and
fardeau ? The rh^nne never lured Shelley into
mistakes about the habits of birds or flowers. But
in the seventeenth century there was little love of
Nature. However, it is with La Fontaine's Catholi-
cism and not his ornithology that I am concerned
He wrote some improper stories. Fenelon, the
author of TeUmaque, (fie upon it !) was a very
poor writer, but he seems to have been an ami-
able gentleman, and we like to think of him, and
hate to think of Bossuet, that detestable man, who
persecuted Madame de Genlis and wrote a very
artificial style. I cannot think of any other writers,
but all the same, the seventeenth century shows
up far better than I thought for. The eighteenth
is, of course. Agnostic from end to end, unless we
count Chateaubi-iand as an eighteenth - century
writer, and we may, for he was born about 1760,
and lived a long way into the nineteenth, dying
at the end of the thirties ... he may have lived
right into the forties. Montalcmbert remained
a staunch Catholic in spite of the ' Infallibility,'

SALVE 217

declared about that time ; and there were some
Abb^s who did not write badly, one Lamennais,
whose writin,f^s got him into trouble with Rome.

English literature is, of course, Protestant — back,
belly, and sides. . . . Chaucer was pre-Reformation ;
Crashaw and Dryden returned to Catholicism ; Pope
seems to have called himself a Catholic, but his Essay
on Man proves him to be an Agnostic. In the
beginning of the nineteenth century there were a
good many conversions, and some writers should be
found among them. Newman ! Arthur Symons
mentioned him in the Saturday Review as having a
style, so I sujjpose he must have one. ' I must read
his Apologia, for Symons may have taken him on
trust.' Among the present-day writers are W. S.
Lilly and Hilaire Belloc, professional Catholics,
always ready to argue that the English decadence
began with the suppression of the monasteries.
Hilarious regards the sixteenth century as altogether
blameworthy, from an artistic point of view, I
suppose, for in one of his polemics he declared
himself to be no theologian, a strange admission
from a professional Catholic, ranking him in my
eyes with the veterinary surgeon who admits that
he knows nothing about spavins. W. S. Lilly is
more thoroughly interpenetrated with Catholic doc-
trine ; his articles in the Fortnightly are harder,
weightier, denser ; he reads Jqimias every day, and
dear Edward looks upon him as an admirable
defender of the faith. Of late years the shepherds
have taken up novel-writing, hoping, no doubt, to
beguile their flocks away from the dangerous bowers
of the lady-novelists, the beds of rose-leaves, the

218 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

tiger-skins, and the other lustful displays and tempta-
tions. Amiable and educated gentlemen, every one of
them, no doubt, but without any faintest literary gift.
They would do better to return to their slums, where
work suitable to their heads and hands awaits them.

I turned over in bed, and must have dozed a little
while, for I suddenly found myself thinking of a tall
sallow girl, with brown eyes and a receding chin,
who used to show me her poems in manuscript
ages ago. 1 thought them very beautiful at the
time, and of this early appreciation I need not
be ashamed, for the poems have lived a pleasant
modest life ever since in a slight volume tediously
illustrated, entitled Preludes. Unfortunately these
poems preluded nothing but a gi-eat deal of catholic
journalism, a catholic husband who once read me
a chaplet of sixty sonnets which he had written to
his wife, and a numerous cathoUc progeny who have
published their love of God in a volume entitled
Eyes of Youth, which I might never have seen had
not the title been mentioned one day by a friend who,
fearing my sacrilegious mind, refused to lend me the
book. But moved by a remembrance of Alice Mey-
nell, I sent immediately for a copy.

And it came to me some hours later, brought by
a messenger, a slim grey volume of poems, with an
introduction by G. K. Chesterton, an able journalist,
it is true, but that is hardly a reason for asking him
to introduce a number of young catholic writers to
Protestant readers . . . unless he has gone over to
Rome. He could not have done that without read-
ing the Fathers ; and lie could not have read them
without their influencing his style. It roUicks down

SALVE 219

Fleet Street as pleasantly as ever^ and we are there in
the first lines^ when he writes that all ' serious critics
class Francis Thompson with Shelley and Keats.'
A critic may be learned, ignorant, discriminating,
dense, subtle, venial, honest, and a hundred other
things, but serious seems just the one adjective that
Mr. Chesterton should have avoided. He must have
been thinking with the surface of his brain when he
compared Francis Thompson with Shelley; casual
thinking always puts wrong words into our heads ;
a thoughtful critic would have ' classed ' Thompson
with Crashaw ; mi fond de Crosharv avec une garniture
de Shelley is a definition of Francis Thompson which
I put forward, hoping that it may please somebody.
Francis Thompson accepted Catholic dogma ; it pro-
vided him with themes, whereupon he might exercise
his art ; he wrote for the sake of words, they were
his all, and avoided piety, for piety is incompatible
with a great wealth of poetic diction. He left piety to
his poetic inferiors, to the sisters Meynell, Olivia and
Viola, who seem to be drawn to verse-writing because
it allows them to speak of Mary's knee, the blood-
stained Cross, the Fold, the Shepherd, and the Lamb.
They must have deplored Monica Saleeby's Retrospect,
for it does not contain a single pious allusion, and
welcomed her Rebuke, for in this poem Monica makes
amends for her abstinence, and uses up all her sister's
pious phrases, and adds to them. (I am assuming that
Monica Saleeby was originally a Meynell, for her verse
is so distinctly Meynell that one hardly believes it
to be an imitation.) The volume concludes with the
poems of Fi-ancis Meynell ; but, though the name of
God occurs six times in a poem of four stanzas, I

220 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

think he lacks the piety of his sisters ; he does not
produce the word with the admirable unction and
Siuictimonious grace of Maurice Healey, Ruth
Lindsay, and Judith Lytton. Were Judith and
Ruth like Monica ori<finally Meynells, or are they
merely of the school of Meynell ? I have pondered
their poems now for nearly an hour without being
able to satisfy myself on this point. It was unwise
for me to have ventured out on the stormy sea of
attributions at all. Francis is a Me^Tiell with a drop
of Coventry Patmore, but the drop must have gone
crossways in him, as we say in Ireland, for even
when AVTiting about the marriage-bed he camiot
refrain from pietistic allusion :

'For when she dreams, who is beloved,
The ancient miracle stands proved, —
Virginity's mucli motherliood !
For O the unborn babes she keeps,
The unthought glory, lips unwooed.'

But I must be thinking of my readers, for not
a doubt of it everyone of them is sapng : ' Our
author is Avasting too much time on the examination
of this volume. We will assume that the ladies go
to confession once a week, and the gentlemen once a
month. Get on with your story. Tell us, is there
any Catholic literature in Scandinavia ?'

My dear readers, Scandinavia seems to be entirely
free from Catholic literature; and, looking from Ibsen
and Rjornson towards Russia, I am afraid that Tourgue-
n6fr, the most thoughtful of all tale-tellers, must be
reckoned as an agnostic writer, and Tolstoy, for his
lack of belief in the Resurrection, would have been
denied Christian burial by St. Paul. Lennontov was

SALVE 22 J

certainly an agnostic. My dear readers^ it seems
impossible to discover a Catholic writer of import-
ance in Europe.

A voice cries in my ear, ' Have you looked into
German literature ?' and I answer back, ' I know
nothing of German literature, but will call upon John
Eglinton to-night. But John will only tell me that
Goethe and Schiller were Protestants, and that Heine
was a Jew, He may mention that the Schlegels
turned Catholic in their old age. Perhaps Best will
be able to tell me. He knows German literature.'

He is John's coadjutor in the National Library : a
young man with beautiful shining hair and features
so fine and delicate that many a young girl must
have dreamed of him at her casement window, and
would have loved him if he had not been so passion-
ately interested in the affixed pronoun — one of the
great difficulties of ancient Irish.

' Kuno Meyer will be here at the end of the
month, and he'll be able to tell you all that you want
to know about German literature.'

' You are quite right. Best. Meyer is my man ;
he'll understand at once.' Best is Kuno Meyer's
favourite lamb, and Kuno Meyer is a great German
scholar who comes over to Dublin from Liverpool
occasionally to shepherd the little flock that browses
about his Celtic erudition ; and a pressing invitation
was sent to him next day, asking him to spend a
week or a fortnight with me. An invitation of a
fortnight did not strike me as excessive. We had
been friends for over a year, ever since the day he
had come to a rehearsal of 7'Ae Tinker and the Fairy,
a delightful one-act play that Hyde had written for

222 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

the entertainment of a Gaelic assembly in my garden.
He was prompting Hyde, who was not sure of his
wordSj when I came into the room, and my surprise
was great, for it is not usual to meet the Irish language
in a light brown overcoat and a large, soft, browTi
hat ; beards are uncommon among Gaelic speakers,
and long, flowing moustaches unkno^\Ti. A Gaelic
Leaguer's eyes are not clear and quiet, and he does
not speak with a smooth even voice ; his mind is not
a comfortable mind ; and by these contraries, in
defiance of Aristotle, I am describing Kuno Meyer,
the great scholar artist, the pleasure of whose life it
has been to disinter the literature of the ancient Celt,
and to translate it so faithfully that when we read we
seem to see those early times as in a mirror.

It would be a pleasure to me to write some pages
on this subject, and I would write them now if the
man did not stand before me as he was when I first
saw him, a wreck with rheumatism, looking at me
sideways, unable to move his neck, his hands and
feet swollen. He must have suffered a good deal
of pain, but it never showed itself in his face, and
though he was well aware that his disease was pro-
gressive ossification, he did not complain of his hard-
ship in being so strangely afflicted. At that time
deatli did not seem to be very far away, but he did not
fear death, and I admired his unruffled mind, often
reminding me of a calm evening, and thought my-
self the most fortunate of men when he promised
to stay at my house next time he came to Dublin.
His intelligence and his learning were a great temp-
tation, and during the long evenings we spent
together my constant effort was to get him to talk

SALVE 223

about himself. But he did not seem very much in-
terested in the subject ; certainly he does not see
himself as a separate entity ; and the facts that drib-
bled out were that he had come to England when
he was seventeen, the first visit not being a long one.
He had returned, however, two years later, and he
thought that it had taken him about five years to
leai-n English and to capture the spirit of the lan-
guage. I seemed to get a better sight of him when
he mentioned that he had been private tutor for two
years, and I said to myself, ' A studious German, who,
when not engaged with his pupils was preparing him-
self for a University career.' He must have told me
how he became a Pi'ofessor of Romantic languages at
Queen's College, Liverpool, but he could not have
made much of the story, else I should have re-
membered it. It was from Best that I learnt he was
once an excellent cricketer, and though now crippled
with rheumatism it was easy to see that he must have
looked well on the cricket-field in white flannels and
a blue belt, and he must have been a strong man,
but never a fast runner, I am sure of that, there-
fore I place him at point. ... I can see him there,
the sleeves of his shirt turned up, revealing a sinewy
brown ann.

But the cause of his illness, his affection ? The
cause may have been the Liverpool climate, or
his disease may have been constitutional. Who
shall trace the disease back to its furthest source ?
Not the specialists, certainly ; for years they were
consulted. ' What do you eat ?' said the first.
' I often eat beef,' was Meyer's answer. ' Beef
is poison to you ; mutton as much as you like.'

224 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

Meyer did not touch beef again for three months,
but the disease continued. He consulted another
speciahst. 'What do you eat? Mutton? Mutton
is poison to you ; beef as much as you hke.' To be
on the safe side Meyer ate neither one nor the other,
but, notwithstanding his obedience to the different
diets imposed upon him, his disease continued un-
abated. Another speciahst was consulted. ' What
do you drink ? Claret ? Claret is poison to you ;
whisky as much as you like.' With whisky for his
daily drink liis disease developed alarmingly ; Meyer
went abroad ; he consulted French and CJerman
specialists ; some gave him pills, some recommended
chami)agne and Rhine wines ; but his disease gained
steadily, and at last the doctors contented themselves
by advising him to avoid everything that he found
disagreed with him, which was the best advice they
could have given, for a man is often his own best
doctor. Meyer's instincts prompted him to spend
some months in a warm climate, and it was while
travelling in Portugal that Meyer drank some cham-
pagne, feeling very depressed, and during a night of
agony it occurred to him that perhaps alcohol was
the bane. He detei-mined to give abstinence from
alcohol a trial, avoiding it in its every form, even
hght claret. The disease seemed to stop ; and,
speaking of his affliction to a fellow-traveller in the
train from Lisbon to Oporto, he heard of some baths
in Hungary.

'You have tried so many remedies that I don't
dare to ask you to go there, but if you should ever
find yourself in Hungary, you might try them.'

Meyer went to Hungary, hopeless ; but he returned

SALVE 225

convinced that if he had gone there some years earlier
the treatment would have boiled all the stiffness out
of his neck and shoulders ; he had gone, however,
soon enough to rid himself of the greater part of his
affection, and to secure himself against any further
advances.

' He will die like another, but not of ossification,' I
muttered, as I paced the greensward, looking at every
turn through the hawthorn boughs. ' Why, there
he is !' and, banging the wicket, I ran across the
street to let him in with my latchkey.

' Let me help you off" with your overcoat,' I said,
as soon as we were in the j)assage. ' You got my
letter ? How kind of you to come over so soon,' and
my eyes dropped to the papers in his hand.

' Your letter was veiy welcome, for, to tell the
truth, I've long wanted to come to Dublin.'

' And for why ?' I asked sympathetically, wishing
to divest Meyer of any fointest suspicion of an ulterior
object behuad the invitation that I had sent him.

' Well, in a way you are concerned in my desire
to spend some time in Dublin. You have always
taken a kindly and very appreciative interest in the
ancient Irish poems which I have been fortunate
enough to discover.'

' And to translate so exquisitely that you and Lang
are our only translators,' I said, my eyes going back
to the papers in his hand. ' When did you arrive ?'

He admitted that he had been a couple of days in
Dublin without finding time to come to see me,
and I thought of Best, who is always frisking about
Meyer, gathering up every scrap of his time, some-
times unjustifiably, as I thought in the present case,

p

226 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

for Best knew how necessary Meyer's learning was
to me.

' And wliere are you staying ?' I asked, keeping as
far as possible any trace of annoyance out of my
voice. The question seemed to embarrass Meyer for
a moment, but he quickly recovered himself.

' As far back as three months ago I promised Best
to stay with him, but my visit to Percy Place is now
over, and when you are tired of me I'm going to take
a lodging at Kingstown, so we shall see a good deal
of each other.'

* You are on the track of something important,'
I said. ' Do tell me about it. Have you discovered
another Marban — another Laon and Curithir ?'

Meyer smiled at my enthusiasm through his long
moustache, and told me that he had spent the morn-
ing in Trinity College library and had come upon

' Another Nature Poem ?'

' No, but a very curious religious poem.' My face
clouded. ' I think it will interest you. It throws
a light on the life of those times, for the author,
a monk, tells us that he left his monastery, which
had become noisy, for he required perfect quiet for
the composition of his poem, God's Grandfather.

' Whose grandfather ?'

' God's Grandfather ; that is the title of the poem.'

* I never knew God had a grandfather.'

' Mary had a mother ; the Biblical narrative is
silent regarding her parentage, but the early Greek
writers were known to our author, and he read in
Ej)hanius that Mary's mother, Anne, had had three
husbands — Joachim, Cleophas, and Salomas, and that
she had boon l)ronght to bed of a daughter by each

J

SALVE 227

husband. Each daughter was called Mary, but only
one Conception was Immaculate. By an Immaculate
Conception he understood a conception outside of
common sensuality, brought about by some spiritual
longing into which obedience to the will of God
entered lai'gely.'

' How very curious ! I wonder if the Meynells
would have included the poem in their collection ?'

Meyer became interested at once, but his interest
slackened when he heard that their poems were
modern, and a kindly smile began in his gold-brown
moustache, and he said :

' A long family separating in the afternoon for the
composition of pious poems.'

' Like your hermits,' I said ; ' but the Catholicism
of the desert is more interesting than the Catholicism
of the suburbs. Let's get back to the thirteenth
century.'

' His monastery was too noisy for the composition
of God's Grandfather, and he retired into the wilder-
ness to think out the circumstances of Mary's Im-
maculate Conception. And this is how he imagined
it : Joachim, as he was driving his cattle home
one evening, met some travellers who wished to
purchase a bullock from him. He begged of them
to choose an animal ; they did so, asking Joachim
to name a price. But instead of putting the
money agreed upon into his hand the travellers
poured several blessings on Joachim and told him
to return home as quickly as he could. He was at
first loath to go without his money, but the travellers
told him he must accept the blessings they had
poured over him in lieu of money, and on his asking

228 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

innocently what he was to do with the blessings, he
was told that the use of the blessings would be
revealed to hira when he got home. And being a
man of faith, he ran away with the blessings he had
received clasjied to his bosom ; nor did he stop till
he saw Anne, his wife. At tlie time she was gather-
some brushwood to light the fire for their evening
meal, and sure enough, as the travellers had told
him, unexpected words were put into his mouth :
" Amie, put down the sticks thou art gathering, and
follow me into the inner room." She did his bidding,
as a M'ife should do, and, as they lay face to face,
Joachim showered upon her the blessings that the
travellers had given him, and it was these blessings
that caused the conception recognized as miraculous
by Joachim, and afterwards by the Chui'ch.'

' And you have translated that poem ?'

' I have made a rougli translation of some stanzas,'
and while he read them to me I marvelled at the
realism of early Christianity.

' How different from our slopj^y modern piety !
In the poem you have just read to me, there isn't
a single abstract term. Meyer, you are making
wonderful literary discoveries, unearthing a buried
civilization.'

The conversation drojiped, and I could no longei
resist the temptation to tell Meyer that I, too, was
making discoveries. His cigar was only half-way
through, and it was i)lain that the suave and lucid
mind of Meyer was at my disposal. My argument
had been repeated so often that it had become a little
trite, and a suspicion intruded uj)on my mind as I
hurried from St. Augustine, througli Dante, Boccaccio,

SALVE 229

and Ariosto, that my naiTative had grown weary.
Or was it that Meyer, being a professor, could not
grasp at once that Ave must choose between literature
and dogma ? A })erplexed look came into his face as
I sketched out in broad lines the sixteenth and
seventeenth century literature in France. As I was
about to proceed northward through Denmark,
Sweden, and Norway, Meyer asked questions which
revealed the professor latent in him, and while
answering him and tr3dng to persuade him out of his
professorial humours, I fell to thinking that perhaps
he would enjoy himself better in a debate on the
Shakespearean drama, or the debt that the dramatists
of the Restoration owed to Moliere. He would
delight in satisfying our curiosity regarding the
inevitable Mademoiselle de Scudery, whose festoons
and astragals are of course plainly to be descried in
the works of Pope and Prior. So do we often criticize
our friend and he sitting opposite to us, little think-
ing how he is being torn to pieces.

' You find that Catholicism draws men's thoughts
away from this world, and that Catholic literature
lacks healthy realism ; but surely literature has
nothing to do with theology ?'

' Of course it hasn't, Meyer. I'm afraid I haven't
succeeded in explaining myself. I must begin it all
over again. St. Augustine . . . but perhaps it is not
necessary to go over it all again. In the Middle Ages
there was no literature, only some legends, and a good
deal of theology. Why was this ? Because if you
plant an acoi'n in a vase the oak must burst the vase
or become dwarfed. I can't put it plainer. Do you
understand ?'

230 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

' You spoke just now of the intense realism of the
Irish poets.'

' The poem you read me was pre-Reformation.'

* It seems to me that if one outlet be closed to
man's thought he will find another, and perhaps in a
more concentrated and \ iolent form. Even in Spain,'
he said, ' where thought was stifled by such potent
organizations as Church and State, Ave find man
expressing himself daringly. Velasquez.'

'You mean the Venus in the National Gallery —
that stupid thing for which the nation paid forty-five
thousand pounds ; the thighs and the back are very
likely by ^'elasquez, but not the head nor the curtain
nor the Cupid. But, Meyer, B.T.M.'s have never been
actually condemned by the Church; they merely
lead men to sin, and sin can be forgiven, and for the
moment I am not interested in the fact that realistic
painting throve in Spain when the Inquisition was
most powerful.'

' Goethe speaks of free spirits ;' and from that
moment Meyer began to rouse himself.

* Of course the spirit must be free. And Germany,
being divided equally between Catholics and Pro-
testants '

A troubled look came into Meyer's face. ' I fail
to see how your theory can be settled one way or the
other by German literature, but if you want me to
tell you the names of the great German writers,' he
answered in his most professorial manner, ' those that
occur to me at the moment are Lessing, Goethe,
Schiller, Heine, the Schlegels, Kant, Schelling,
Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Jean Paul Richter,
Herder, Lenan, and Nietzsche.'

SALVE 231

' And all these were North Gemiran writers ? None
came from the South. Are there no Catholics among
them, not one ?'

' No/ he said, ' none. One of the Schlegels
turned Catholic in his old age.'

' And did he write after he turned Catholic ?'

' No ; as well as I remember he wrote nothing
aftei*^vards.'

' Austi-ia is a great country. Has it pi'oduced no
Catholic writers ?'

' None of any note/ Meyer answered. ' There was
— ' and he mentioned the names of two writers, and
as they were unknown to me I asked him to tell me
about them. ' Writers of fairy-tales,' he said ' of feeble
novels — writers of the fifth and sixth and seventh
rank. No one outside Austria knows their names.'

' Then,' I said, ' I'm done for.' Meyer raised his
eyes.

' Done for ?'

' I was led into this country in the hopes of
reviving the language. It seemed to me that a new
language was required to enwomb a new literature.
I am done for. Ireland will not forego her super-
stitions for the sake of literature — accursed super-
stitions that have lowered her in intelligence and
made her a slut among nations. It is very strange
that you don't see that Dogma and Literature are
incompatible. I sujjpose the idea is new to you.'

We talked for a little while longer, and then Meyer
asked me if he might go to the writing-table and
continue the translation of his poem.

' Of course.' And while listening to his pen
moving over the paper it seemed to me that a

232 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!

chance still remained, a smnll one, for the evidence
that Germany offered could hardly be refuted. All
the same, Justice demanded that a Catholic should
be heard. The Colonel would be able to put up a
good defence ; and while Meyer corrected his poem
a letter to him began in my head, half a dozen lines,
reminding him that he had been away a long time
in the country, and that evening I wrote asking him
to come up and spend a few days with me,

XV

When I rushed uji to tell him of my discovery he
was in breeches and riding-boots, presenting in my
drawing-room an incongruous spectacle of sport on a
background of impressionist pictures.

' You don't mean to tell me that you brought me all
the way from Mayo to argue with you about religion,
and I in tlie middle of most important work ?'

' What work ?'

' Clearing the stone park.'

A darker cloud than that I had anticipated ap-
peared in his long, narrow face, and as he seemed
very angry I thought it better to listen to his plan
for allowing the villagers to cut wood in the stone
park. But the temptation to hear him argue that
Literature and Dogma were compatible compelled
me to break in.

' Do let me tell you ; it won't take more than ten
minutes for me to state my case. And this is a
matter tliat interests me much more than the stone
park. The question must be threshed out.'

He protested much, beseeching me to believe

SALVE 233

that he had neither the learninjr nor the ability to
argue with me.

'Father Finlay ■'

* That's what Gill said. But the matter is one that
can be decided by anybody of ordinary education ;
even education isn't necessary, for it must be clear
to anybody who will face the question without
prejudice that the mind petrifies if a circle be drawn
round it, and it can hardly be denied that Dogma
draws a circle round the mind.'

The Colonel grew very wroth, and said that ever
since I had come to live in Ireland I had lived
among Protestants, who were inclined to use me as
a stalking-horse.

' That is not so. I came to Ireland, as you know,
to help Literature, and if I see that Dogma and
Literature are incompatible, I must say so.'

At that moment the parlourmaid opened the door
and announced dinner.

* You'll be late for dinner, Maurice.'

' It is your own fault/ he cried, as he rushed
upstairs.

As we sat down to dinner he begged me, in French,
to drop the subject, Teresa being a Catholic.

* I suppose you are afraid she might hear some-
thing to cause her to lose her faith,' I said as she
went out with the soup-tureen.

' I think one should respect her principles.'
The word inflamed me. ' Superstitions that wei*e
rammed into her.'

She returned with the roast chicken, and the
question had to be dropped until she went to the
kitchen to fetch an apple dumpling ; and Ave did not

234 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

really settle down to * Literature or Dogma ' until
coffee was brought in and my cigar Avas alight.

'It's a great pity that you always set yourself
in opposition to all received ideas. I was full ot
hope when you wrote saying you were coming to
Ireland. I suppose there's no use asking you not
to publish. You will always go your own way.'

' But if I limit myself to an essay entitled " Litera-
ture or Dogma" — you don't object to that.'''

' No, I don't say I object to it ; but I'd rather
not have the question raised just now.'

' I see you don't wish to discuss it. Isn't that so ?'

'No, I don't mind discussing it. But I must
understand you. Two pro])ositions are involved in
your statement — which is the one you wish to put
fonvard.'' Do you mean that all books, which in
your opinion may be classed as literature, contain
things that are contrary to Catholic Dogma ? Or do
you inean that no man jirofessing the Catholic faith
has written a book which, in your opinion, may be
classed as literature since the Reformation ?'

' I put forward both propositions. But my main
contention is that the Catholic may not speculate ;
and the greatest literature has come out of speculation
on the value of life. Shakespeare '

* There is nothing in Shakespeare contrary to
Catholic Dogma.'

' You are very prompt.'

' Moreover, I deny that England had, at that
time, gone over entirely to Protestantism. It^ilian
culture had found its way into England ; England
had discovered her voice, I might say her language.
A Renaissance has nothing in common with Puri-

SALVE 235

tanism . . . and there is reason for thinking this.
The Brownites ?' And the Colonel, who is an ex-
tremely well-read man, gave me an interesting
account of these earliest Puritans.

' The larger part of the English people may have
been Protestant/ he continued, 'in 1590; but England
hadn't entirely gone over to Protestantism. Besides,
England's faith has nothing to do with Shakespeare.
Nor does anyone know who wrote the plays.'

' My dear friend, you won't allow me to develop
my argument. It matters nothing to me whether
you prefer the lord or the mummer. The plays
were written, I suppose, by an Englishman ; that, at

least, Avill not be denied ; and my contention is

No, thei'e is no reason why I should contend, for it
is sufficiently obvious that only an agnostic mind
could have woven the fabric of the stories and set
the characters one against the other. A sectarian
soul would not have been satisfied to exhibit merely
the passions.'

' Will you charge me again with interrupting your
argument if I say that I know nothing in Shake-
speare that a Catholic might not have written ?'

' Well, I think if I were to take down a volume
and read it, I could find a hundred verses. I see
your answer trembling on your lips, that you don't
require a hundred, but two or three. Very well.
A Catholic couldn't have written, " There is nothing
serious in mortality," for he believes the very contrary ;
nor could a Catholic have written " A tale told by an
idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." '

' What reason have you to suppose that Shake-
speare was speaking in his own person .'' It seems

236 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

to me that by assuming he was doing so, you im-
jnign liis art as a dramatist, Avliich is to give appro-
priate speeches to each of his characters ; the writer
must never transpire in a drama.'

* I'm afraid your religious zeal spurs you into
dangerous statements, and you are in an entangle-
ment from which you will find it difficult to extricate
yourself. Shakespeare weaves a plot and sets will
against will, desire against desire, but his ])lays are
suffused by his spirit, and it is always the same spirit
breathing, whether he be writing about carls or
kings, virgins or lights-o'-love. The passage quoted
from Macbeth is an excellent example of the all-
pervading personality of the })oet, who knew when
to forget the temporal character of Macbeth, and to
put into the mouth of the cattle-spoiler phrases that
seem to us more suited to Hamlet. The poet-
philoso})her, at once gracious and cynical, wise with
the wisdom of the ages, and yet akin to the daily
necessity of men's foibles and fashions, is as present
in the play of Macbeth as in King Lear ; and the
same fine agnostic mind we trace throughout the
comedies, and the poems, and the sonnets, smiling at
all systems of thought, knowing well that there is
none that outlasts a generation.'

* I cannot see why a Githolic might not have
written the phrases you quote. One can only judge
these things by one's own conscience, and if 1 had
thought of these verses '

'You would liavc written them.'' I've always
suspected you of being an Agnostic Catholic'

' The difference between the Agnostic and the
Catholic mind seems to me to be this — we all doubt

SALVE 237

(to doubt is human), only in the ultimate analysis
the Catholic accepts and the Agnostic rejects.'

' We know that the saints suffered from doubt,
but tlie Agnostic doesn't doubt, though he is often
without hope of a survival of his personality. A
good case might be made out, metaphysically, if it
weren't that most of us are without any earthly
personality. Why then a heavenly one ? I remember
that you used to be a great admirer of Fitzgerald's
Omar Kfimii)dm ... in your agnostic days ; I presume
that you will not, in the fervour of your Catholicism,
tell me that a Catholic could have written the
Rubdiydt ?'

The Colonel was at first inclined to agree with me
that there was a great deal that a Catholic could not
have written in Fitzgerald's poem ; but he soon
recovered himself, and began to argue that all that
Fitzgei'ald had done was to contrast ideas, maintaining
that the argument was conducted very fairly, and
that if the poem were examined it would be difficult
to adduce proof from it of the author's agnosticism,

' But we know Fitzgerald was an agnostic ?'

' You're shifting ground. You started by saying
that the poems of Shakespeare and Fitzgerald revealed
the agnosticism of the writers, you now fall back
upon contempoi'ary evidence.'

' I don't think Fve shifted my ground at all. It
we knew nothing about Fitzgerald's beliefs, there is
abundant proof in his writings that he was an Agnostic.
You'll have to admit that his opinions on the nothing-
ness of life and the futility of all human effort,
whether it strives after pleasure or pain, would read
as oddly if inti'oduced into the writings of Augustine

238 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

and Thomas Aquinas as sympatlietic remarks about
the Immaculate Conception would read in the works
of Mr. Swinburne or Professor Huxley. The nothing-
ness of our lives and the length of the sleep out of
which we came, and the still greater length of the
sleep which will very soon fall upon us, is the sprmg
whence all great poetry flows, and this spring is
perforce closed to Catholic writers for ever. Do
you know the beautiful stanza in Moschus' Latnetit
for Bion ?

" Ah me ! when the mallows wither in the garden,
and the green parsley and the curled tendrils of the
anise, on a later day these live again and sj)ring in
another year ; but we, men, we, the great and mighty,
or wise, when once we have died, in the hollow earth
we sleep, gone down into silence, a right long, and
endless and unawakening sleep."

Could these lines have been written by a Catholic ?'

The Colonel could not see why not.

' Because . . . but, my dear friend, I won't waste
time explaining the ob\ious. This you'll admit —
tliat no such verses occur in Catholic poems ?'

' As poignant expressions regarding the nothing-
ness of life as any in Moschus, Shakespeare or
Fitzgerald are to be found in the Psalms and
Ecclesiastes. " Man walketh in a vain shadow and
troubleth himself in vain." '

' The Bible wasn't written by Catholics,'

The Colonel had to admit that it wasn't, and after
watching and rejoicing in his discomfiture for a while
I went on to speak of Shakespeare's contemporaries,
declaring them to be robust livers, whose philosophy
was to live out their day as intensely as possible.

SALVE 239

lovers of wine and women, frequenters of the Mer-
maid Tavern and of wenches, haters of the Puritan,

' You'll not claim Marlowe, I suppose ? You'll
admit that there was very little Catholic about him
except a very Catholic taste for life. You mentioned
just now the Brownites ; they were overcome, you
tell me, for the time being. But Puritanism is an
enemy, if it be really one, that I can meet in a
friendly spirit. Landor says that Virgil and St. Tliomas
Aquinas could never cordially shake hands ; but I
dare say I could shake hands with Knox. The
Puritan closed the theatres, an act which I won't
pretend to sympathize with ; but England's dramatic
genius had spent itself, and for its intolerance of
amusement Puritanism made satisfactory amends by
giving us Milton, and a literature of its own. Of
course everything can be argued, and some will
argue that Milton's poem was written in spite of
Puritan influence ; but this I do think, that if ever a
religious movement may be said to have brought a
Literature along with it, Puritanism is that one. As
much as any man that ever lived, Milton's whole
life was spent in emancipating himself from Dogma.
In his old age he was a Unitarian.'

' You've forgotten The Pilgrim s Progress, written
out of the very heart of the language, and out of the
mind of the nation.'

' Thank you for reminding me of it. A manly fellow
was Bunyan, without clerical unction, and a courage
in his heart that nothing could cast down, the glory
and sjTnbol of Puritanism for ever and ever.'

' Puritanism is more inspiring than Protestantism ;
it is a more original attitude of mind '

240 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

' Original, yes, I agree -with you. . . . The
agnostic mind is the general mind, the mind which
we bring into the world.'

' Milton was a Unitarian, liunyan a Purit;ui ;
where does your Protestantism come in ? Who is
the great Protestant poet ?'

' I don't limit Protestantism to the Established
Church. Protestantism is a stage in human develop-
ment. But if you want a poet who would shed the
last drop of his blood for the Established Church,
there is one, Wordsworth, and he is still considered
to be a pretty good poet ; Coleridge was nearly a
divine.'

' You make a point with Wordsworth, I admit it.
He seems, however, to have overstepped the line in
his Intimations oflmniorlality.'

' But you miss my j)oint somewhat ; it is that there
is hardly any line of Protestantism to overstep.'

* I set Newman against '

' Against whom ? Not against Wordsworth, surely ?
And if you do think of the others — shall I enumerate ?'

' It wouldn't be worth while ; it is evident that all
that is best in England has gone into agnosticism.'

* And into Protestantism ; confronted by Words-
worth and Coleridge, you can't deny to Protest;mtism
a large share in the sha))ing of modern jooetry. But
there isn't a Catholic writer, only a few converts.'

* Newman.'

' But, my dear Colonel, we cannot for one moment
compare Newman's mind to W^ordsworth's or Coler-
ridge's? To do so I may contend is ridiculous,
without laying myself open to a charge of being
much addicted to either writer. Wordsworth

SALVE 241

moralized Nature away, and it is impossible, for me,
at least, to forgive him his :

" A primrose at the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him—
And it was nothing more."

That ''nothing more" is a moral stain that no time shall
wash away. One would have thought that flowers,
especially wild flowers, might be freed from all moral
obligations. I am an Objectivist, reared among the
Parnassians, an exile from the Nouvelle Ath^nes,
and neither poet has ever unduly attracted me.
Three or four beautiful poems more or less in the
world aren't as important as a new mind, a new way
of feeling and seeing. Mere writing '

' A theory invented on the spot so as to rid
yourself of Newman.'

' There you are mistaken. Allow me to follow the
train of my thoughts, and you will understand me
better. And don't lose your head and run away
frightened if I dare to say that Newman could not
Avrite at all. But you have dislocated my ideas a
little. Allow me to continue in my o^vn way, for
what I'm saying to you to-day will be written
to-morrow or after, and talking my mind to you
is a great help. I'm using you as an audience.
Now, we were speaking about Coleridge, and I was
sajong that the mere fact that a man has written
three or four beautiful poems is not sufficient ; my
primary interest in a writer being in the mind that
he brings into the world ; by a mind I mean a new
way of feeling and seeing. I think I've said that
before, but no harm is done by repeating it.'

Q

242 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

' If you'll allow me to interrupt you once more,
I will suggest that Ne'wman brought a new way
of feeling and seeing into the world — a new
soul.'

' I suppose he did ; a sort of ragged weed which
withered on till it was ninety. It is a mistake to
speak of him as a convert to Catholicism ; he was
a bom Catholic if ever a man was born one. Were
it not for him the term "a born Catholic" would be
a solecism, for at first sight it doesn't seem very easy
to understand how a man can be born a Catholic.
A man is born blind, or deaf, or dumb, a hunchback,
or an idiot, but it's difficult to see how he can be
born a Catholic. Yet it is so ; Ne\\Tnan proves it.
A born Catholic would seem to mean one predisposed
to rely upon the help of priests, sacraments, texts,
amulets, medals, indulgences ; and, Newman, you
will not deny, brought into the world an inordinate
appetite for texts, decrees, councils, and the like ;
even when he was a Protestant he was always talking
about his Bishop. He was disposed from the begin-
ning to seek authority for his every thought. Obedi-
ence in spiritual matters is the watchword of the
Catholic, and surely Ne^NTnan was always replete
with it. He was a born Catholic ; he justified the
phrase. Mj' dear Colonel, I'm aware that I'm
delivering a little sermon, but to speak to you like
this is a great help to me. . . . He seems to have
been the least spiritual of men, bereft of all sense of
divinity. He seems to have lived his life in ignorance
that religion existed before Christianity, that Bud-
dhism preceded it, and that in China But we need

not wander so far afield. Newman was a Sectarian,

SALVE 243

if ever there was one, astride on a rail between Pro-
testantism and Catholicism, timidly letting down one
leg, drawing it back, and then letting down the other
leg. In the 'sixties men were very much frightened
lest their ancestors might turn out to be monkeys,
and a great many ran after Newman clai)ping their
hands in praise of his broken English.'

' Broken English !' interrupted the Colonel.

' Yes, broken mutterings about an Edict in the
fourth century, and that the world has been going
astray ever since. He seems to have really believed
that the destiny of nations depended on the chatter
of the Fathers, and he totters after them, like an old
man in a dark corridor with a tallow-dip in his hand.
A simple-minded fellow, who meant well, I think ;
one can see his pale soul through his eyes, and his
pale style is on his face. The best that can be said
about it is that it is homely. You never saAv The
Private Secretary, did you ?'

The Colonel shook his head.

'When Mr. Spalding came on the stage, saying,
" I obey my Bishop," I at once thought of Newman,
and, though I have no shred of evidence to support
my case, I shall always maintain that that amusing
comedy was suggested by The Apologia. It seems to
have risen out of it, and I can imagine the writer
walking up and down his study, his face radiant,
seeing Mr. Spalding as a human truth, a human
objectification of an interest in texts, decrees, and in
Bishops. I never thought of it before, but Newman
confesses to Mr. Spalding's wee sexuality in The
Apologia. I have been reading The Apologia this
morning, and for the first time. Here it is :

244 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

" I am obliged to mention, though I do it with
great reluctance, another deep imagination, which
at this time, the autumn of I8I6, took possession
of me, — there can be no mistake about the fact; viz.,
that it would be the will of God that I should lead
a single life. This anticipation, which has held its
ground almost continuously ever since, — with tlie
break of a month now and a month then, up to 1829,
and, after that date, without any break at all, — was
more or less connected in my mind with the notion,
that my calling in life would require such a sacrifice
as celibacy involved."

He is himself in this paragraph, and nothing but
himself. Even on a subject in which his whole life
is concerned he can only write dryly.'

And we wrangled for some time over ' the anticipa-
tion which has held its ground almost continuously.'

' I admit that it isn't very good ; but how do you
explain that he has always been considered a master
of English ?'

' All in good time, my dear Colonel. We are now
concerned with Newman's mind ; it is the mind that
produces the style. Listen to this :

" The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun
and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail,
and for all the many millions on it to die of starva-
tion in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction
goes, than tliat one soul, I will not say, should be
lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should
tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor
farthing without excuse."

This passage, I believe, was read with considerable
piety and interest by the age which produced it, and

SALVE 245

I wonder why it has fallen out of favour ; for to
sentimentalize is to succeed, and it was really very
kind of Newman to sentimentalize over the miseries
which our lightest sins cause our Creator. An
unfoi'tunate case his is indeed, since the Catholic
Church holds that venial sins are committed every
moment of the day and night. The Creator torments
us after we are dead by putting us into hell, but
while we are on earth we give him hell. And our
difficulties don't end with the statement that we
make the Creator's life a hell for him, for we are
told that it would be better that all humanity should
perish in extremest agony than that, etc. If that be
so, why doesn't the Creator bring humanity to an
end ? The only possible answer to this question
is that the Creator and the Catholic Church are not
agreed on the point, and it would be pretentious on
my part to offer arbitration. They must settle their
differences as best they can. I'm afraid, Colonel, you
look at me a little contemptuously, as if you thought
my criticism frivolous.'

' Logically, of course,' the Colonel answered —
'logically, of course, Newman is right.'

We wasted at least ten minutes discussing how
something that seemed utterly absurd could be said
to be logical ; and to bring the discussion to an end,
I reminded the Colonel that Carlyle had said that
Newman's mind was not much greater than that of
a half-grown rabbit.

' Pei'haps Carlyle libelled the rabbit ; he should
have said the brain of a half-grown insect, a black-
beetle.'

But,' said the Colonel, ' do you believe the black-

246 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

beetle to be less intelligent than the rabbit ? In my
experience-: '

' I'm inclined to agree with you, but we're wander-
ing from the point. I want to draw your attention
to some passages, and to ask you if they are as badly
written as they seem to be ?'

' \\\\tn you say that Newman wrote very badly, do
you mean that he wrote in a way which does not
commend itself to your t^iste, or that he wrote
incorrectly ?'

' His sentences are ft-equently incorrect, but I
don't lay stress on their occasional incorrectness.
An ungrammatical sentence is by no means incom-
patible with beauty of style ; all the great writers
have written ungrammatically ; I suppose idiom
means ungrammatical phrases made acceptable by
usage ; dialect, is generally ungrammatical ; but
Newman's slips do not help his style in the least.
You're watching me, my dear Colonel, with a smile
in your eyes, wondering into what further exag-
geration my detestiition of Catholicism will cany
me.'

' You have abused Newman enough. Let us get
to facts. You say that he writes incorrectly.'

' The passage in which he deplores the suffering
that man causes God, convinced me that his mind
was but a weed, and, though there was no necessity
for my doing so, I said : " Let us see how lie expresses
himself." You will admit that a man of weak intellect
cannot write a fine style.'

' Let us get to the grammatical blunders which
you say you have discovered in Newman,'

I turned to the first pages and read ;

SALVE 247

* He, emphatically, opened my mind, and tauglit
me to think and to use my reason.'

' Don't you think, Colonel, that " emphatically
opened my mind" is a queer sentence for "a master
of English style " to write, and that we should search
in Carlyle or Landor a long while before we came
upon such draggle-tailed English as we read on
page 7 :

" He, emphatically, opened my mind, and taught
me to think and to use my reason. After being first
noticed by him in 1822, I became very intimate with
him in 1825, when I was his Vice-Principal at Alban
Hall. I gave up that office in 1826, when I became
Tutor of my College, and his hold upon me gradually
relaxed. He had done his work towards me or nearly
so, when he had taught me to see with my own eyes
and to walk with my own feet. Not that I had not
a good deal to learn from others still, but I influenced
them as well as they me, and co-operated rather than
merely concurred with them. As to Dr. Whately,
his mind was too different from mine for us to remain
long on one line."

I know folks that is in the vegetable line, and I
think I know one chap who should be " tuk " up for
the murder of the King's English if he warn't dead
already.

" I recollect how dissatisfied he was with an Article
of mine in the Loiidon Review, which Blanco White,
good-humouredly, only called Platonic. When I was
diverging from him in opinion (which he did not
like), I thought of dedicating my first book to him,
in words to the effect that he had not only taught
me to think, but to think for myself He left
Oxford in 1831 ; after that, as far as f can recollect.

248 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

I never saw him but twice, when he visited the
University ; once in the street in ] S3 i, once in a room
in I83S. From the time that he left, I have always
felt a real affection for what I must call his memory ;
for, at least from the year 18St, he made himself
dead to me. He had practically indeed give?i me
up from the time tliat he became Archbishop in
1831 ; but in 183t a correspondence took place
between us/'

A prize fight takes place ; a correspondence begins.

" which, though conducted, especially on his side in a
friendly spirit, was the expression of differences of
opinion which acled as a final close to our intercourse.
My reason told me that it was impossible we could
have got on together longer, had he stayed in Oxford ;
yet I loved him too much to bid him farewell without
pain. After a few years had passed, I began to
believe that his influence on me in a higher respect
than intellectual advance,'

He means "than that of" intellectual advance.

" (I will not say through his fault) had not been satis-
factory. I believe that he has inserted sharp things in
his later works about me. They have not come in
ray way, and I have not thought it necessary to seek
out what would pain me so much in the reading."

The next page consists mainly of quotations from
Dr. Wliately, who apparently is capable of expressing
himself, and we pick up Newman further on.

" The case was this : though at that time I had
not read Bishoj) Bull's Defensio nor the Fathers, I
was just then vcn/ strong for that ante-Nicene view
of the Trinitarian doctrine, which some writers, both
Catholic and non-Catholic, have accused of wearing a
sort of Arian exterior."

SALVE 249

' I really don't see,' said the Colonel, ' that that
sentence is '

' Don't trouble to defend it. There is worse to
come. But liow is it that the writer of such sen-
tences is still spoken about as a master of style ? Am
I the only man living who has read The Apologia ?
It is almost impossible to read ; that I admit.

" It would be against my nature to act othei-wise
than I do ; but besides, it would be to forget the
lessons which I gained in the experience of my own
history in the past."

One doesn't gain lessons. How shall we amend it ? —
" the experience I gained from the lessons of my own
history."

" The Bishop has hut said that a certain Tract is
'objectionable,' no reason being stated."

" without giving his reasons, the Bishop has only said
that a certain Tract is objectionable," is how the
editor of the halfpenny paper would probably revise
Newman's sentence. And who will say that the
revised text is not better than the original ?

" As I declared on occasion of Tract 90, I claimed,
in behalf of ivho would in the Anglican Church,"

Can he mean those who so desired in the Anglican
Church } But it would take too long to put this
passage right, for it is impossible to know exactly
what "the greatest master of lucid English " meant —

" the right of holding with Bramhall a compreca-
tion with the Saints, and the Mass all but Tran-
substantiation with Andre wes, or with Hooker that
Transubstantiation itself is not a point for Churches
to part communion upon,"

250 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

The kind of English that one would rap a boy of
twelve over the kmiekles for Avriting !

" or with Hammond tliat a General Council, truly
such, never did, never shall err in a matter of
foith,"

L^l^on my word, I believe the present Duke of
Norfolk to be the author of The Apologia. A
thousand years of Catholicism is required for anyone
to write like this.

" or with Bull that man had in Paradise, and lost
on the fall, a supernatural habit of grace,"

The style is the man, a sim})leton cleric, especially
anxious about his soul ; no, I am mistaken — about a
Text.

" or with Thorndike that penance is a propitiation
for post-baptismal sin, or with Pearson that the all-
powerful name of Jesus is no otherwise given than in
the Catholic Church."

Wliat does he mean by "given"? In what sense?
Does he mean that the name of Jesus is " rendu " in
all churches in the same way? But, then, what
exactly does he mean by " given "? '

The Colonel, who writes a letter to a newspaper
as well as anybody I know, took the book from my
hand, saying :

'It is barely credible ... I can write as well
as that myself

' A great deal better,' I answered, and we con-
tinued to look through The Apologia, astonished at
the feebleness of the mind behind the words, and at
the wurds themselves.

SALVE 251

' Like dead leaves/ I said.

' What surprises me is tlie lack of distinction/ the
Colonel murmured.

' If the writing were a little worse it would be
better/ I answered. ' Am I going too far, my dear
Colonel, if I say that The Apologia reads more like a
mock at Catholic literature than anything else ; and
that it would pass for such if Ave didn't know that
it was written in great seriousness of spirit, and
read with the same seriousness ? No Protestant

divine ever wrote so badly. Perhaps NcAvman '

' Haven't you read anything but The Apologia ?'
' No, and there is no reason why I should.'
' How would you like to be judged by one book ?'
' I have shown my friends the passages I have been
quoting, and they think he wrote better when he was
a Protestant.'

' I see your article on Newman from end to end.
That Newman was a great writer until he became a
Catholic is a pretty paradox which will suit your style.
You will be able to discover passages in his Protestant
sermons better written, no doubt, than the passages
you select from The Apologia.' The Colonel lit his
candle, and I could hear him laughing good-
humouredly as he went upstairs to bed.

' It is dangerous to name a quality,' I said to
him next morning at breakfast, ' whereby we
may recognize a great writer, for as soon as we
have done so somebody names somebody whom
we must confess deficient in the quality mentioned.
The perils of definition are numerous, but most
people will agree with me that all great writers
have possessed an extraordinary' gift of creating

252 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

images, and if that be so, Newman cannot be called
a writer. We search vainly in the barren, sandy
tract of The Apologia for one, finding only dead
phrases, very often used so incorrectly that it is
difficult to tell what he is driving at ; " driving at " is
just the kind of worn-out phrase he would use with-
out a scruple.'

'You are judging Newman by The Apologia.'
' I admit I haven't read any other book. But dear
Edward once invited me to look into — I have
forgotten the title^ but I remember the sentence that
caught my eye — " Heresy stalks the land," and you
will agree with me that it is hardly an exaggeration
to say that the average reporter would be ashamed
to write the words . . . unless he were in a very
great hurry.'

'Newman wrote The Apologia in a great hurry.'
' However great your hurry, you couldn't, nor
could any of the friends who come here on Saturday
night, write as badly, and unless we hold that to be

always thin and colourless is a style '

' You've a good case against him, but I'm afraid
you'll spoil it by overstatement.'

' My concern is neither to overstate nor to under-
state, but to follow my own mind, faithfully, tracing
its every turn. An idea has been running in my
head that books lose and gain qualities in the course
of time, and 1 have worried over it a good deal, for
what seemed to be a paradox I felt to be a truth.
Our fathers weren't so foolish as they appear to us
to be in their admiration of Lara, The Corsair, The
Biide of Ahydos, The Giaour ; they breathed into the
clay and vivified it, and when weary of "romance"

SALVE 253

they wandered into theology, and were lured by a
mirage, seeing groves of palm-trees, flowers, and
a bubbling rill, where in truth there was nothing
but rocks and sand and a puddle. And while Byron
and Newman turn to dust Shakespeare is becoming
eternal.'

' There are degrees, then, in immortality ?'

' Of course. The longer the immortality the more
perfect it becomes. Time putting a patina upon the
bronze and the marble and the wood, and I think
upon texts ; you never will persuade me that the
text that we read is the text read in 1623.'

The Colonel raised his sad eyes from The Apologia
into which they had been plunged.

' I'll admit that we never seem to get any further
in metaphysics than Bishop Berkeley. I see,' he
said a few minutes later, ' that Newman has written
a preface for this new and insufficiently revised
edition. Have you read it ?'

' No, but I shall be glad to listen if you'll read
it to me after breakfast.'

As soon as he had finished his eggs and bacon, the
Colonel fixed his glasses a little higher on his nose,
and it was not long before we began to feel that
our tasks were hard, one as hard as the other,
and when the last sentence was pronounced, the
Colonel, despite his reluctance to decry anything
Catholic, was forced to admit a lack of focus in the
composition.

' He wanders from one subject to another, never
finishing.'

' Excellent criticism ! What you say is in agree-
ment with Stevenson, who told an interviewer that if

254 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

a man can group his ideas he is a good writer, though
the words in which he expresses himself be tasteless,
and, as you say, Newman, before lie has finished with
his third section, returns to his first ; from the fifth
he returns to the fourth, and in the sixth section we
find some points that should have been included in
the second.'

The Colonel did not answer ; and feeling that I
owed something to my guest, I said :

' The last time you were here you mentioned that
you hoped to be able to get one of the gateways
from Newbrook.'

The Colonel brightened up at once, and told me
that he was only just in time, for the stones were
about to be utilized by the peasants for the building
of pigstyes and cottages. But he had followed them
in his gig through the country, and had brought
them all to Moore Hall, and was now only waiting
for me to decide whether I would like the gateway
built in a half-circle or in a straight line. The saw-
mill he hoped to get into working order very soon.

' It will be of great use for cutting up the timber
that we shall get out of the stone park.'

' Isn't it in working order ?'

With emphasis and interest the Colonel began to
relate the accident the saw-mill had met with on the
way from Ballinrobe ; as it was entering the farm-
yard one of the horses had shied, bringing the boiler
right up against a stone pillar, starting some of the
rivets. A dark cloud came into his face, and I
learned from him that he had very foolishly given
heed to the smith at Ballinrobe, a braggart who had
sworn he could rivet a boiler with any man in Ireland ;

SALVE 255

but when it came to the point he could do nothing.
Tlie Castlebar smith, a very clever man, had not
succeeded any better, but there was a smith at
Cong

'A real Cuchulain.'

' The story, I admit, is assuming all the propor-
tions of an epic,' the Colonel replied joyously, and I
allowed him to tell me the whole of it, listening to it
with half my brain, while with the other half I
considered the height of the Colonel's skull and its
narrowness across the temples.

' A refined head,' I said to myself, and it seemed
to me that I had seen, at some time or other, the
same pinched skull in certain portraits of ecclesiastics
by Bellini and the School of Bellini : ' but not the
Colonel's vague, inconclusive eyes,' I added. ' Italy
has always retained a great deal of her ancient
Paganism ; but Catholicism absorbed Spain and
Ireland. It is into Spanish painting that we must
look for the Colonel, and we find most of him in
Velasquez, a somewhat icy painter who, however,
relished and stated with great skill the Colonel's
high-pitched nose, the drawing of the small nostrils,
the hard, grizzled moustache. He pamted the true
Catholic in all his portraits of Philip, never failing to
catch the faded, empty look that is so essentially a
part of the Catholic face. Our ideas mould a likeness
quickly if Nature supplies certain proportions, and the
Colonel — when he fattens out a little, which he some-
times does, and when his mind is away — reminds me
of the dead King. Of course, there are dissimilarities.
Kingship creates formalities, and the Spanish Court
must have robbed Philip of all sense of humour, or

256 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

buried it very deeply in his breast, for it is recorded
that he was so pleased on one occasion with tlie
splendid fight that a bull put up against the picadors,
that he did not deem any swordsman in Spain Avorthy
of the honour of killing him ; the bull had earned his
death from the highest hand in the land, and arming
himself with an arquebuse or caliver, he walked
across the arena and shot the bull with his own
kinffly hand. He must have walked towards the
bull with a kingly stride — a sloven stride and a kingly
act would be incompatible — he must have walked as
if to music ; but the Colonel has little or no ear for
music, and his walk is, for this reason or another, the
very opposite to Philip's. He slouches from side to
side, a curious gait, the reader will say, for a soldier
of thirty years, but very like himself, and therefore
one likes to see it, and to see him preparing for it,
hustling himself into his old yellow overcoat in the
passage. He never carries a stick or umbrella ; he
slouches along, his hands dangling ugly out of the
ends of the cuffs. To what business he is going,
I often wonder, as I stand at the Anndow watching
him, remembering all the while how he had lain
back in his arm-chair after breakfast, reading a
book, his subconsciousness suggesting to him many
different errands, and at last detaching him from
his book or his manuscript, for the G^lonel has
always meditated a literary career for himself as
soon as he was free from the anny.

There are people of to-day, to-morrow, and yester-
day ; and the Colonel is much more of yesterday than
of to-day. If he does not defend the Inquisition
directly, he does so indirectly — aD religions have

SALVE 257

persecuted, for it is the nature of man to persecute,
and he is unable to understand that Protestantism
and Rationalism together redeemed the world from
the disgrace of the Middle Ages. His ideas clank
like chains about him, but not to the ordinary ear,
for the Colonel is resei-ved by nature ; only a fine ear
can hear the clanks. Balzac would never have
thought of the Colonel for a modern story, but
would have placed him I have sufficient con-
fidence in Balzac's genius to believe that he would
have placed him in a Spanish setting ; for the
Colonel's mind is so archaic that his clothes distress
even me. I am not good at clothes, but I am sure it
is because his natural garment, the doublet, is for-
bidden him that he dresses himself in dim grey hues
or in pepper-and-salt. He has never been seen in
checks or fancy waistcoats, or in a bright-coloured tie.
He goes, however, willingly into breeches ; at Moore
Hall he is never out of breeches ; breeches remind
him of his racing and hunting days, besides being con-
venient. So far can his country gear be explained, but
why he sometimes comes up to Dublin in breeches,
presenting, as I have said, an incongruous spectacle of
sport in my drawing-room on a background of impres-
sionist pictures, I am unable to offer any opinion.

XVI

' A telegram, sir.'

' Will you please to get the Colonel's room ready,
and tell him, when he arrives, that I shan't be free
for a couple of hours? I'm busy with The Lake.'
And about half-past four I went down to the dining-

258 ^HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

room and found liim in an arm-chair surrounded by
books : Imaginary Portraits, Evelyn Innes, Wild li'ales,
and a book of Irish Folk-Talcs, and he was reading
Strauss's Life of Jesus.

' He makes some ver}' good points,' he said, and I
encouraged him to continue in his appreciation
of Strauss's skill as a dialectician ; but on pressing
him to say that the book was influencing him, he
said that his mind had been made up long ago.

' Then you are merely reading languidly, without
taking sides ; a cricket-match seen from the windows
of a railway train — that's about all.'

The Colonel laughed, and admitted that I had
correctly described the interest which he took in
Strauss's book, and this opened up an interesting
discussion.

' It seems to me that to read without drawing
conclusions is fatal. We have known many men and
women in our youth who could neither read nor write,
but who were very clever at their trades, far cleverer
than those who have taken their place and learned
the piano. Mahomet could neither read nor write.'

' Universal education is one of the mistakes of the
century,' the Colonel said.

' It may be that you're right, and it may be that
you're wrong, but the Catholic method, which is to
encourage the acquisition of knowledge while en-
joining that the student must refrain from drawing
conclusions, seems to me especially well adapted to
the destruction of the intellect.'

Tea was brought in, and the Colonel said he had
come up for a meeting of the Coisde Gnotha, and
must go back on Saturday.

SALVE 259

' On Saturd.ay !'

' I must get back to look after the men.'

* Your sawyers ? I suppose Paddy Walshe wants
some I'afters for his barn ?'

' No, there's the garden. Kavanagh is a splendid
vegetable grower, but he doesn't understand the
fruit-trees. I have to look after them myself.
The meeting begins at eight. Would you mind if
we were to dine at seven or a little before ?'

It was irritating to be asked to change the hour of
dinner for the sake of so futile a thing as a meeting
of the Coisde Gnotha, and though I replied ' Of
course/ I could not refrain from adding : ' In fifty
years' time no one will speak Irish unless you procure
a parrot and teach her. Parrots live a long while ;
an Irish-speaking Polly in a hundred years' time !
what do you think, Maurice .'' And about that time
Christianity will be extinct.'

The Colonel laughed good humouredly, he hustled
himself into his old yellow overcoat, and went away
leaving me disconcerted, irritated against him, and
still more against myself, for it was impossible not to
feel that I was abominably unsympathetic to other
people's ideas. But am I .'' Only when phantoms
are cherished because they are phantoms. We are
all liable to mistake the phantom for reality. I
followed the Irish language for a while, but as soon
as I discovered my mistake I retraced my steps. Not
so the Colonel. He knows at the bottom of his
heart that the Irish language cannot be revived,
that it would take two hundred years to revive it,
and that even if it were revived nothing would come
of it unless Ireland di'opped Catholicism.

260 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

The lamp burned briffhtly on the table, and, rising
from the arm-cliair to light a cigar, I caught sight of
my face and wondered at my anger against my
brother, a sort of incoherent, interior rumbling, ex-
pressing itself in single words and fragments of
'sentences. An evil self seemed to be stirring within
me ; or was it that part of our nature which lurks in
a distant corner of our being and sometimes breaks
its chain and overpowers the normal self which we
are pleased to regard as our true self? Every-
one has exjierienced the sensation of spiritual
forces at war within himself, but does he ever
suspect that the abnormal self which has come up
to the surface and is influencing him may be in-
fluencing him for his good ; at all events, for some
purjTOse other than the generally received one — the
desire to lead poor human nature into temptation.
The Christian idea of horns and hooves and tail has
been rammed into us so thoroughly that we seldom
cease to be Christians ; but I must have nearly ceased
to be one in the evening I am describing, for I
seemed to be aware all the while that there was good
purpose behind my anger at my brother's untidy
mind. I was not certain what adjective to apply to
it — untidy, unfinished, or prejudiced.

' He reads Strauss's Life q/\/e*M5, admitting that no
proofs, however conclusive, would persuade him that
the son of Mary and Joseph was an^iihing else but
the Son of God. Christ never said that he was, and
I suppose he knew. Even St. Paul. . . . Hoav
precisely I can see that brother of mine,' I cried,
surprised myself at the clearness with which I
remembered the long, pear-shaped head with some

SALVE 261

fine lines in it ; ' but too narrow at the temples/ I
muttered, ' and the eyes are vague and lacking in
the light of any great spiritual conviction, and they
tell the truth, for has he not admitted to me that
substantially the Host does not change, and the rest
is merely whatever philosophical idea you like to
attach to it ? Worse still, he has said that the Decrees
the Pope issues affecting excommunication do not
interest him in the least, and this proves him to be
a heretic, a Modernist. He always eats meat on
Friday ; of course he may have obtained a dispen-
sation to eat the chicken as well as the e^g^, but I
am not at all sure that he acquiesces in priestly rule
enough to apply for a dispensation ; and I began to
wonder how long it was since his last confession.
When the Bishop questioned the parish priest on the
subject, the Colonel was very angry, and said it was hit-
ting below the belt. He did not go to Mass when he
came to see me in Dublin until I reproached him for
neglect of his duties, and then he never failed after-
wards to step away to Westland Row, his white hair
blowing over the collar of the old yellow overcoat —
never failed while I was in the house, but when I left
it he remained in bed, so I have been told. He may
have been ill, but I don't believe it. There has
always been a vein of humbug in the depths of his
deeply affectionate nature ; when he was a little child
of four or five he was caught with his fingers in a jam-
pot, but instead of saying, " I took the jam because I
liked it," he fled to his mother and flung himself into
her arms, begging of her not to believe the nurse,
crying, " I am your own innocent yam " (lamb).'
The Colonel's key in the lock interrupted my

262 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

thoughts, and tliere he was before me, overflowing
with anecdote, his Iiilarity as unpleasing as it was sur-
prising ; high spirits sit ill upon the constitutionally
melancholy, and the humorous sententious are very
trying at times. His chatter about the doings of the
League seemed endless, and I felt that I could not
abide that family attitude into which he at once fell :
the hand held in front of the fire, the elbow resting
on the knee. The Colonel had fattened in the face
since his last visit. Everybody should cultivate a
kindly patience, imitating JE, who, while going his
way, can watch others going theirs without seeming
invidious or disdainful. But M was born with a
beautiful mind, and can pass a criticism on a copy of
bad verses, and send the poet home unwounded in
his self-resi)ect. He will never change. He knows
himself to be immortal, and is content to overlook or
claim my periodical aggressiveness as part of my
character. But not being as ^vise as /E, I would
alter myself if I could. How often have I tried ! In
vain, in vain ! We are what we are, for better or
worse, and there are no ' stepping stones "... except
in bad verses. Enough of myself and back to the
Colonel.

He was telling me how one orator's loquacity had
driven his suj)porters out of the room, and when the
amendment was put there was nobody to support it.
The incident amused me for a moment, and then a
sudden sense of the triviality of the proceedings
boiled up in my mind.

* Of course,' I said, ' the amendment you speak of
was invaluable, and its loss a great blow to the
movement. But tell me, do you propose to spend

SALVE 263

the rest of your life coming up from Mayo to listen
to these fellows chattering about the best means of
reviving a language which the few who can speak it
are ashamed to speak, or have fallen out of the habit
of speaking it, like Alec McDonnell and his wife ? '

' I have never denied that the difficulties are very
great.'

' But of what use would the lan<;uas:e be to
anybody if it could be revived ? Prayers, I have
often said, are equally valuable in whatever language
they may be said.'

The Colonel smiled a little contemptuously, and
his smile irritated me still further.

*As I have said a thousand times, unless Ireland
ceases to be Catholic '

' That question has been gone into '

' Gone into ; but you've never been able to explain
why there is so little Catholic literature. It must
be clear to everybody that Dogma draws a circle
round the mind ; within this circle you may think,
but outside of it your thoughts may not stray. An
acorn planted in a pot '

'But what has that got to do with the Irish
language } Even if what you say be true, it seems
to me that the small languages should be preserved.
You were in favour of the movement till '

'There's no use going over the whole argument
again. You've tried to bring up your children Irish
speakers, and have failed.'

The Colonel laughed, for he could not deny that
he had failed in this respect.

' They must have professions.'

* You'd like other people to sacrifice their children's

26'4 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

chances of life for the sake of the Irisli language,
but }ou aren't prepared to go as far as you'd like
others to go. You will only go half-way.'

' How is that ?'

' You bring them up Catholics. The younger is in
a convent school, and the elder is now with the
Jesuits. I duii't think that our father would have
approved of the narrow, bigoted education which
they are receiving.*

' I can't see why. He never disapproved of the
religious orders.'

' You must feel that the atmosphere of a convent
isn't manly, and will rob tlie mind of something,
warp or bias it in a direction '

* Of which you don't approve ?'

' It seems to me that the mind of the child should
be allowed to grow up more naturally.'

' You can't let a boy grow up naturally. He nmst
be brought up in some theory of what is right and
what is wrong. Now, I ask why my children should
be taught your right and wrong rather than mine ?'

'I admit that they must be taught something.'

' Once you admit that it seems to me tliat the
parent is tlie proper person.'

' It all depends on what you mean by teaching.
Tlie Jesuit says : " Give me the boy till he is fourteen
and I don't care who gets him after." And his
words mean that the mind shall be so crushed tliat
he will for ever remain dependent. I don't know if
you remember a story . . . our motlier used to tell
of a beggar woman who went about Ireland with
four or five blind children, their eyes resembling the
eyes of those who are born blind so closely that

SALVP: 265

every oculist was deceived. But one day a cliild's
crying attracted attention, and it Avas discovered that
the mother had tied wahiut-shells over its eyes, and
in each shell was a beetle ; the scratching of the
beetle on the eyeball produced the appearance of
natural blindness — an ingenious method, part, no
doubt, of the common folklore of Europe, come
down to us from the Middle Ages when the Courts
of Kings had to be kept supplied with dwarfs,
eunuchs, buffoons ; amusing disfigurements were the
fashion, and high prices were paid for them. We
are too sensitive to hear even how a permanent leer
may be put on a child's face, but we are very
much interested in the crushing, I should say the
moulding, of children's minds, and all over Europe
the Jesuits are busy preparing monstrosities for the
Courts of Heaven.'

' My dear George, St. Francis Assisi and St. Teresa,
whom you admire so much, were prepared for
Heaven in the Catholic religion, and there are others.
St. John of the Cross is one to whom I am sure you
will graciously extend your admiration.'

' To them, certainly, much rather than to the
inevitable Aquinas ; but every one of those belong
to the Middle Ages.'

' Not St. Teresa.'

' The Middle Ages existed in Spain long after
St. Teresa, for the burning of heretics went on till
the end of the eighteenth century. Religions ! The
world is littered with religions ; they grow, flourish,
and die, and if you can't see that Christianity is
dying '

The Colonel spoke of revivals.

266 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

* After each revival/ I said, ' it grtms fainter, and
would be dead long ago if it hadn't been tliat
cliildren are taken young and their minds crushed.
The Jesuits have admitted that that is so. " Give me
the child," they cry.'

' Toby has learned nothing from the nuns except
a shocking accent, and Rory is learning very little,
and dislikes the Jesuits. I'm thinking of sending
him to the Benedictines.'

' Monks or priests, it's all the same. You know
how worthless the education was which we received
at Oscott.'

' There was none. I admit that priests don't seem
to be very good educationalists.'

* Then why have your sons educated by priests ?
Priests are in all the Catholic schools, but there are
excellent Protestant schools '

' And bring them up Protestants ?'

' Why not ?'

' You, an Agnostic !'

' Protestantism is harmless, as I have often pointed
out to you. It leaves the mind free, or very nearly.'

' I can understand that you, who seem constitu-
tionally incapable of seeing anything in life but art,
should prefer Agnosticism, but I don't understand
your proposing a Christian dogma for my children
that you yourself don't believe in.'

' Don't you ? Would you like to hear ?'

' Very much.'

' I'll give you three excellent reasons. I look upon
Protestantism as a sort of safeguard '

* A sort of vaccine ?'

'Just so. If the Agnostic catches the small-

SALVE 267

pox he generally catches it in an acute form ; and
ninety-five per cent, remain in the religion they are
brought up in. Isn't that so ?'

' Well, let us hear your second reason.'

' Protestantism supplies a book out of which the
child can learn. I think it is John Eglinton who
says in one of his essays that, however beautifully
a book may be written, it will not be read by the
multitude for the sake of its style. Shakespeare is
read in England, for England produced Shakespeare ;
and the Bible is read in England, for the Bible pro-
duced Protestantism. And Protestantism produced
the Irish Bible, the one beautiful book you have.
Catholics are forbidden to read it.'

' A stupid prohibition, for the difference between
the Catholic and the Protestant version is so slight
that not one reader in ten thousand would be able
to trace it.'

' Yes, isn't it stupid ? But what is to be done ?
I can think of nothing — can you ? We learned no
English at Oscott ; any English I know I learned in
Sussex out of the Prayer-Book, and gossiping with
the labourers, bailiffs, and especially with game-
keepers ; game-keepers speak the best English. I
can't tell why, but it is so.'

' A new reason for preserving the game laws.* A
sally at which we both laughed.

' But I was going to give you a third reason for
my preference for Protestantism. Protestantism
engenders religious discussion. You'll admit that ?'

* Indeed I will, and can imagine nothing more
useless or tedious.'

' Useless it may be for the Catholic, who goes from

268 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

the cradle to the grave with every point of interest
settled for him. How, then, can Catholics be
intelligent? We know tliey're not. But what is
much more interesting is the fact that they know
themselves they aren't intelligent. They admit it
freely. At dinner the other day I met a Catholic
and spoke to him on this subject. He answered me
that the Catholic religion absorbs a man's mind so
completely that no energy is left for literary
activities, only enough for the practical business of
life.'

' I hate Catholics who speak like that. They're
worse than Protestants. There are Uriah Heeps,
I admit, and plenty of them, in our Church.'

'Servant-maids and working-folk are quite free
from hypocrisy, and often I've heard them say, " It's
strange we don't get on as well as Protestants."
Once I lieard a beggar in Galway saying, " There
must be something in Protestants since they get
on so well in the world." A wiser man than you,
my dear friend, or shall I say a less prejudiced
one? You remember I told you there was no
Catliolic literature when you were last in Dublin,
but I didn't half state my case; the discussion
wandered into an argument about Newman.'

' And what liave you discovered since then ?'

'That Russian literature is against you, Scandi-
navian, too, and, worst of all, North and South
America.'

The mention of North and South America roused
the Colonel, and he did not hesitate to say that it
always astonished him that North America had pro-
duced so little literature.

SALVE 269

' However little you may think of Poe, Emerson,
Whitman, Hawthorn, and Prescott, you'll admit
North America compares very favourably with South
America. I believe that South America can show
some records of missionary work done among the
Indians.'

The Colonel replied that South America was
colonized much later than North America — an answer
which angered me, for I knew that the Colonel was
relying on my ignorance of history.

'The first colonizations were made in Peru and
Brazil, you know that very well. But what can it
profit you to insist that Catholics have written books
since the Reformation ? WTiat can it profit you to
deny facts ? Of course there is a book or two — one
per cent., two per cent, of the world's hterature —
but if you were to tell me that there is no negro
literature, you would think me very stupid if I were
to answer, " Yes, there is. I can produce a good
many songs from Hayti ; I once knew a negro who
had written a novel." Cathohc literature has de-
clined steadily since the Reformation, and to-day it
is one degree better than Sambo.'

No sooner had the words passed my lips than I
saw I had, as the phrase goes, ' given myself away,'
for the negroes are nearly all Methodists or
Wesleyans, and I mentioned the fact to the Colonel,
feeling sure that if I did not do so he would
mention it himself, but he refused to accept my
suggestion, saying that he had once believed that
religion was race and climate, but he thought so no
longer. ' He has sunk deeper into Catholicism than
I thought, he believes now in a universal truth ;

270 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

for him there is no hope, but I can't allow his
children to perish without saying a word in their
favour,' and I spoke of Rory and Toby again.

' My children will have as good a chance of making
their way as I have had. I was brought up a
Catholic'

' Why shouldn't your children have a better chance
than we had ? We were brought up in hunger and
cold and superstition. You wouldn't subject your
children to the same hardships ?'

' The hardships at Oscott provided us with excellent
constitutions.'

' Maybe so ; but we learned nothing.'

' The only way,' said the impassible Colonel, ' that
children may be educated is cither by abolishing
religious education in the schools, and nobody is in
favour of that, or by sending them to schools, in
which they will be taught the religion of their
parents.'

' But what you call bringing up children in the
religion of their parents is estranging them from
every other influence, until they become incapable
of thinking for themselves. " Give me the child till
he's fourteen, and I don't care who gets him after-
wards." There is no question of religious truth ;
there is no such thing, we know that ; what concerns
me is that your truth is being forced upon your boys
to the exclusion of every other. You keep thein
from me lest they should hear mine.'

' I hope you will never say anything in the
presence of my children that would be likely to
destroy their faith. I rely on your honour.'

' It is no part of my honour to Mithold the truth.

SALVE 271

or wheat I believe to be the truth, from any human
being. Tlie fact tliat you happen to be their father
doesn't give you the right over their minds to deform
and mutilate them as you please, any move than it
gives you the right to mutilate their bodies. Geld-
ing and splaying You don't claim such rights,

do you ?'

' And do you claim the right to seek my children
out and destroy their faith ?'

' Can you define the difference between faith and
superstition ? The right I claim is that of every
human being, to speak what he believes to be the
truth to whomever he may meet on his way.
Brotherhood doesn't forfeit me that right.'

' Then I am to understand that you Avill seek my
children out ?'

' Seek them out, no. But do you keep them out
of my way. But, if you think like this, you'd have
done better not to have married a Protestant. I
suppose your children believe their mother will go
to hell ; and if you love Ireland as well as you profess
to, why did go into the English Army ?'

' It's impossible for me to continue this argument
any longer, your intention being to say what you
think will wound me most. . . . What you have
just said I know to have been said with a view to
wounding my feelings.'

' No, but to express my mind. So they're not to
get a chance ? Well, it's a shame. Why shouldn't
their mother have as much voice as you have in
their education ? Why shouldn't I have a voice ?'

' In the education of my children !'

' We haven't an idea in common. We are as much

272 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

separated as though we came from the ends of the
earth ; yet we were brought up together in the
same house, we learned the same lessons. That
accursed religion has set us apart for ever.'

The Colonel walked out of the room suddenly,
and I heard him take his hat from the table in the
hall and go out of the house. The door closed
behind him, and I sat in the silence, alarmed
by his sudden departure. It seemed to me that I
could see him walking, hardly conscious of the street
he was passing through, absorbed by the horrible
quarrel that had been thrust upon us, a quarrel that
might never. . . . And I began to quake at the
thought that we might never be friends again.

The argument had been conducted in quite a
friendl}' spirit, here and there a little heated, but
no more, till words had been put into my mouth that
wounded him to the quick, sending him out of the
house. He would come back and forgive me, no
doubt.

But was it sure that he would ? And even if he
did, the quarrel would begin again the next time we
met ; the discussion had never ceased since the day
he had unsuspectingly come up from Mayo to argue
against me that Literature and Dogma are not incom-
patible. No matter what the subject of our conver-
sation might be, it drifted sooner or later into religious
argument, into something about Protestants and
Catholics, and a moment after we were angry, hostile,
alienated. Since boyhood our lives had been lived
apart, but we had been united by mutual love and
remembrances, and as the years went by we had
begun to dream that the end of our lives should be

. SALVE 27S

lived out together. He had written from South
Africa that there was no one he would care to live
with as much as with me, and no words that I can
call upon can tell the eagerness with which I awaited
his return from the Boer War. He was coming home
on six months' leave ; and three of these he spent
with me in Ely Place — delightful months in which
we seemed to realize the dearest wishes of our
hearts. Our mutual love of Ireland brought us
closer together than we had hoped was possible . . .
and then ? Bitterness, strife, disunion. He had
been an idol in my eyes, and my idol lay broken in
pieces about me — broken, and by whom ? God
knows ; not by me ... I swear it. That he would
not write a book about camp-life in South Africa
was a disappointment to me ; his dilatoriness in
getting grandfather's manuscript in order was
another ; and now his sticking to Catholicism, despite
the proofs that I had laid before him of its inherent
illiteracy, had estranged us completely.

An endless whirl of thoughts, and a sudden pause
on a recollection of the words I had used : ' If you
hate Protestantism, why did yoii marry a Protestant }'
There could be no great harm in saying that. A
man who has been married for fifteen years generally
knows his wife's religion. Nor in the remark that
followed it, that notwithstanding his love of Ireland
he had gone into the English Army ; for a man
doesn't go into the English Army and remain in it
for thirty years without knowing that he is in it ;
and I began to wonder if he had gone into the army
because he was afraid he could not make his living
in any other way ? Or was there behind his mind,

274 * HAIL AND FAREWELL !*

far back in it, some little flickering thought that if
Ireland rose against English dominion lie would be
able to bring to the service of his country the tactics
he had learnt in the enemy's ranks ? A sentiment
of that kind would be very like him, and I fell to
thinking of him, following his life from the beginning
of his manhood up to the present time. All his
dreams had been of tlie Irish race, of its literature,
of its traditions, and his clinging to Catholicism can
be accounted for by his love of Ireland. Or was it
that his mind lacked elasticity, and that he failed at
the right moment to twist himself out of the theo-
logical snare ? It must have been so, for one day,
while playing at Red Indians in the woods of Moore
Hall, during a rest under the lilac-bush that grows
at the turn of the drive, I had asked him if he
intended to continue to believe in all the priest said
about his Sacraments and about God. A look came
into his face, and he answered that he couldn't do
without it — meaning religion. ' But why that
religion ?' I asked. The idea of changing his
religion seemed to frighten liim even more than
dropping religion altogether ; he has persisted
in that faith, trying to believe all it enjoins, his
thoughts and his deeds going down parallel lines —
a true Irishman, his dreams always in conflict with
reality. . . .

It seemed to me that some time had passed, for
when I awoke from my reverie I was tliinking of
Balzac, thinking that I had read somewhere that it
is not ideas which divide us, but le choc des caracleres.
Balzac must have written very casually when he
wrote that, for surely the very opposite is the case.

SALVE 275

Men are drawn together by their ideas ; temperament
counts for nothing, or for very httle. ' But it is
temperament/ I said, 'that creates our ideas,' and
my mind reverted to the Colonel, and he stood up
in my mind, Ireland in essence, the refined melan-
choly of her mountains and lakes, and her old
castles crumbling among the last echoes of a
dying language. In his face, so refined and melan-
choly, I could trace a constant conflict between
dreams and reality, and it is this conflict that makes
Ireland so unsuccessful. But I stop, perceiving that
I am falling into the stuff" one writes in the news-
papers. Why judge anybody ? Analyze, state the
case ; that is interesting, but pass no judgments, for
all judgments are superficial and transitory. The
Colonel has always been a sentimentalist. Something
seemed to break in my mind. ' Yes, a sentimentalist
he has always been. Now I understand him,' and I
thought for a long while, understanding not only my
brother, but human nature much better than I had
done at the beginning of the evening. It was like
looking under the waves, seeing down to the depths
where strange vegetation moves and lives. The
waves flowed on and on, and I peered, and I dreamed,
and I thought, awaking suddenly with this cry upon
my lips : ' Freed from the artificial life of the army
he is free to follow an idea, and the Gael loves to
follow an idea rather than a thing, and the more
shadowy and elusive the idea the greater the en-
chantment it lends, and he follows the ghost of his
language now with outstretched arms. But how
little feeling there is in me !' I cried, starting up
from my chair. ' My brother all this while walking

276 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

the streets, his heart rent, and I sitting, meditating,
dissecting him, arguing with myself.'

Now, the question to be settled was whether I
should go to bed or wait for him to come in. To go
to bed would be wiser, and speak to him in the
morning. But I should lie awake all night, thinking.
It seemed impossible to go to sleep until some
understanding had been arrived at.

XVII

There seemed a little strain in his voice, and I
wondered what thoughts had passed through his
mind last night about me, and if his affection for me
had really changed.

* If you leave like this it will never be the same
again,' and I begged of him not to go away. ' You
thought that I spoke with the express intention of
wounding your feelings, but you are wrong.'

He did not answer for some time, and when I
pressed him he repeated what he had said before,
adding that the engagement could not be broken.
' And when are you going back to the West ?'
' At the end of next week or the week following.'
' But won't you spend the interval here ?'
' No ; I'm going on to see some other friends.'

* And then ?'

' Well, then I shall go back to the West.'
' I'm sorry, I'm sorry . . . this religion has
estranged us.'

' Don't let us speak on that subject again.'
' No, let us never speak on that subject again.'

SALVE 277

' But you can't help yourself.'

' By going away you'll give importance to words
which they really don't deserve. Nothing has
happened, only a few woi'ds — nothing more. And
after all, you can't blame me if I'm interested in
your children. It's only natural.'

' You said you'd seek my children out for the
express purpose '

' Excuse me ; I said I wouldn't seek them out.'

And as I stood looking at him the thought crossed
my mind that there was a good deal to be said in
support of his view. ' I suppose that if the father's
right to bring up his children as he chooses be taken
from him, he loses all his pleasure in his children.'

' It seems the more humane view.'

His voice altered, and, seeing that we were on the
point of being reconciled, I said : ' You always had
more conscience than I had, even when you were
four years old you objected to my putting back the
clock in the passage to deceive Miss Westby.'

In the hope of distracting his thoughts from last
night's quarrel, I asked him if he remembered my
first govei'ness. Miss Beard. I remember crying Avhen
she went away to be married ; and it was possibly for
those tears that she came to see me at Oscott, and
brought a cake with her. A tall, blond girl succeeded
her, but she had to leave because of something the
matter with her hip.

The Colonel did not remember either.

' Nor grandmother ?'

' Oh yes, I remember grandmother quite well.'

' But only as a cripple. My first memoiy is going
along the passage with her to the dining-room, and

278 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

hearing her say the gingerbread nuts were too hard,
and my first disaiipointmcnt was at seeing them sent
back to the kitchen. She promised that some more
should be made. But a few days or a few weeks
after she was picked up at the foot of the stairs.
She never recovered from that fall ; she never walked
again, but was carried out by two villagers in a chair
on poles.'

' I remember seeing her dead, and the funeral
train going up the narrow path tlirough the dark
wood to Kiltoon.'

' Half-way up that pathway there is a stone seat.
It was she who had it put there. She walked to
Kiltoon every day till her accident. She is there
now, and father and mother are there. The tomb
must be nearly full of us. Are you going there?
I'm not. Does it ever occur to you that we have
very little more life to live, only the lag end of the
journey? I can't believe myself to be an old man.'

'You're not.'

' I don't know what else to call myself How
unreal it all is ! For if we look back, we discover
very few traces of our flight. Our lives float away
like the clouds. Father was in London fighting
Ireland's battle when mother and I used to spend
the evening together in the summer room — she in
one arm-chair, I in another. Our lives begin in a
grey dusk. I can remember settling myself in the
chair every night and waiting for her to begin her
t;ile of loneliness ; and I must have enjoyed it, for
when she started up out of her chair, crying, " Why,
it's eleven o'clock ; we must get to bed," I was loath
to go. She used to read father's speeches.'

SALVE 279

* To whom ?'

' To grandmother. She was a young woman at
the time — not thirty, and was glad when father's
pohtical career ended and he returned to Uve in
Moore Hall with her. You're writing his life, and
have read in Ave how he was pricked by a sudden
curiosity to hear me read aloud, and how the long
ff"s broke me down again and again. My mother
and Miss Westby were called in, and father assured
us that he used to read the Times aloud to his
parents when he was three. And then I think he
ceased to interest himself in my education for some
while — a respite much appreciated by me and my
governess. He turned to racing '

' The usual thing for an Ii'ish gentleman of those
days to do when he left politics.'

' You know al)out Wolf Dog and Carenna — you
have read the subject up ; but you don't remember
the old Cook — the last of the first racing stud : an
old mare that had drifted into the shafts of the
side-car that used to take us to church and to
Balliiirobe. How very Irish it all is ! But when
father gave up politics, she was sent to the Curragh
to be served by Mountain Deer. Her first foal was a
chestnut filly — Molly Carew — but she was too slow
to win a selling I'ace, and I don't know what became
of her. She bred another chestnut filly — the Cat — •
and she was as slow as her sister — a very vicious
animal that nearly killed both my father and mother.
After her came Croagh Patrick, a brown colt. There
seems never to have been any doubt that he was a
good one. I remember hearing — and perhaps you
do, too —that when the grooms appeared at the gate

280 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

with sieves of oats Croagli Patrick alM'ays came up
the field streets ahead.'

' No, I never heard that. I'm glad you told me.'

' All the same, he didn't win his two-year-old
races at the Curragh.'

' Yes he did ; he won the Madrids, for I saw him
•win. He was a black, ratlike horse, with four
white leffs. And what I remember best is how I
made my way to the railings, and gradually slipped
down them till I was on my knees, for I wanted to
say a little prayer that the horse might win ; and I
remember then how I looked round, terribly fright-
ened lest anyone had seen me pray.'

' He couldn't have won the Madrids befoi-e he
won the Steward's Cup for the handicapper let
him m at six stone. It must have been as a four-
year-old you saw him run, or in the autumn.
You were a baby-boy when Croagh Patrick went to
Cliff's to do his last gallops before running at
Goodwood. I was at Cliff's at the time and saw
him do them. Father and mother went away with
the horse '

' And what became of you ?'

' I was left at Cliff's, and enjoyed myself im-
mensely among the stable-boys. There was a gi-een
))arrot in the parlour — it was the first time I had
ever seen a parrot, and Polly was often brought out
into the stable-yard, and I thought it cruel to throw
water on her, till it was pointed out to me that the
bird enjoyed her bath.'

' Who looked after you at Cliff's ?'

' I don't know. Mrs. Cliff probably saw that I
put on my trousers. But I remember the pony I

SALVE 281

used to ride out on the downs, and Vulture, a horse
so vicious that if he had succeeded in ridding himself
of the boy he would have eaten him. The Lawyer
was there at the time, the last half-bred that won a
flat race. Once I lost myself on the downs. You
never heard of my stay at Cliff's .'"'

' I always thought that you went straight from
Moore Hall to Oscott.'

' After Goodwood father and mother went off
somewhere, and presumably forgot all about me. Of
course, they knew I was quite safe.'

' Among stable-boys ! I don't think I should care
to leave Rory and Ulick at a racing-stable for three
weeks. How long were you there ?'

' A month, perhaps ; but I can't say. And then a
little kid of nine was pitched headlong into the
midst of a hundred and fifty boys. How well I
remember leaving Cliff's for Oscott ! My one
thought at the time was that the train didn't travel
fast enough, and all the way I was asking father how
far we were from Oscott, and if we should get there
before evening. You remember the fringe of trees
and the gatehouse rising above them, and the great
red brick building, the castellated tower with the
clock in it, and the tall belfry ? I left father and
mother talking with the President in the pompous
room reserved for visitors, and raced through the
empty playgrounds (it was class-time) delirious with
excitement ; and it was with difficulty that I was
found when the time came for father and mother to
bid me good-bye. They were a little shocked, I
think, at my seeming heartlessness, but I could only
think of the boys waiting to make my acquaintance.

282 * HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

A tew hours later they came trooping out of the class-
rooms, formed a procession, and marched into the re-
fectory, I bringing up the rear. Father Martin came
down the refectory and, to my great surprise, told me
that I must liold my tongue. As soon as he had turned
his back I asked my neighbour in a loud voice why
the priest had told me I wasn't to talk. The ques-
tion caused a loud titter, and before the meal had
ended I had become a little character in the school.
I never told you of my first day at Oscott. ... It
seemed to me a fine thing to offer to match myself
to fight the smallest boy present in the play-room
after supper. But he was two or three years older
than I was, and, though a Peruvian, he ])ummelled
me, and the glamour of school-life must have begun
to dim very soon — probably that very night, as soon
as my swollen head was laid on the pillow. At
Hedgeford Mrs. Cliff must have helped me a little,
but at Oscott there was no one to help me. Imagine
a child of nine getting up at half-past six, dressing
himself, and beaten if he was not down in time for
Mass. There was no matron, no kindness, no pity,
nor, as well as I can remember, the faintest recogni-
tion of the fact that I was but a baby. It isn't to be
wondered that, when my parents returned to see
how their little boy was getting on, they found that
the high-spirited child they had left at Oscott
had been clianged into a frightened, blubbering
little coward that begged to be taken home. In
those days children were not treated mercifully, and
I remained at Oscott till my health yielded to cold
and hunger and floggings. You remember my

SALVE 283

coming home and hearing that I wasn't returning to
Oscott for a year or two.'

' You very nearly died^ and if it hadn't been for
cod-hver oil you would have died. But how difficult
it was to get you to take it !'

' One's whole nature revolts against it. Those
two years spent at Moore Hall were the best part of
my childhood. Long days spent on the lake, two
boatmen rowing us from island to island, fishing for
trout and eels. How delightful ! We sought for
birds' -nests in the woods and the bogs ; I made a
collection of wild birds' -eggs, and wrote to my
school-fellows of my finds. One of our tutors,
Feeney, passed you afterwards for the army. We
had many tutors, but Father James Browne is
the only one that I remember with real affection.
He loved literature for its own sake. Father
didn't. I always felt he didn't, and that's what
separated us.'

' He was a man of action.'

* Yes, I suppose he was, and could, therefore, learn
lessons.'

' He seems to have been a model schoolboy. It
was not till he went to Cambridge '

' Whereas I couldn't learn.'

' You could learn quickly enough when there was
anything to be gained that you wanted especially ; '
and the Colonel reminded me that I had learnt up
Greek and Latin history in a few weeks, because the
award was a day's outing in Warwickshire.

' Anyone can learn a little history. I often asked
mother if I was really stupid, but was never able to

284 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

get a clear answer from her. But you often see our
old governess — would you mind asking her ?'

' I have asked her^ and she remembers you as the
most amiable child she ever knew.'

* Did she tell you anything more about me ?'
' No ; I think that's all she said.'

' You like seeing the old jieople who knew us in
childhood, but I don't. I never know what to say
to them.'

The Colonel did not answer, and at the end of a
long silence I asked him if he remembered being
taken to Castlebar and measured for clothes, and
travelling over to England in the charge of Father
Lavelle, who was going to Birmingham to spend his
holidays with his cousin, a provision-dealer.'

* I can never forget that shop,' the Colonel said ;
* the smell of the cheese is in my nostrils at this
moment. I always hated cheese.'

'You didn't like to stay the night there. You
asked me, "Why did you agree to stay here?" I
think it was because the })eople were so common.'

' I remember nothing of that, but I remember the
provision dealer's shirt-sleeves clearly ; his face is
indistinct.'

* A plump, cheery fellow, who came round the great
piles of butter and cheese and shook hands with
Father Lavelle, and was introduced to us, and begged
that we should stay to dinner. Dinner was served
in the back-parlour, and was interrupted many times
by customers.'

* I don't remember the dinner, but what I re-
member very well is that a number of peo])le came in
after dinner, and that a piper was sent for, and that

SALVE 285

we were asked to say if he was as good as our Con-
naught pipers. They all turned towards us, waiting
for us to speak, and I can remember my embarrass-
ment, and my effort to get at a fair decision, and
wishing to say that Moran was the better piper.'

' It is curious how one man remembers one thing
and another another. No man remembers every-
thing. The people coming in, and the piper and the
discussion about the piping have passed completely
out of my memory, but I do remember very well lying
down together side by side on flock mattresses in a
long garret-room under a window for which there
was no blind, and you reproaching me again for
having consented to stay the night, and I suppose to
your complaint I must have answered, " You don't
know Oscott." But perhaps I didn't wish to dis-
courage you. In the morning we got into a cab ;
our trunks went on top, and I congratulated myself
that there were six miles still between us and that
detestable college, and wished the horse would fall
down and break his leg.'

It was on my lips to say ' My God ! you remember
Oscott, and yet you're sending your son to be educated
by priests.' But quarrelling with my brother would
not save the boy, and I said :

' Things must have improved since then. Let us
hope the windows in the corridors have been mended,
and that a matron has been engaged to look after
the smaller boys. Do you remember the dormitories,
and thirty or forty boys, and a priest in a room at
the end to see that we didn't speak to each other ?
All that was thought of was the modesty of the
wooden partition. There were not sufficient bed-

286 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

clothes^ we were often kept awake by the cold, and
as for washing — none in winter was possible, the
water in the jug being a solid lump of ice in the
morning ; but our ears were pinched by the Prefect
because our necks were dirty. The injustice, the
beastliness of that place — is it possible to forget it ?'

' I remember prating on those cold mornings that
I might not be sent to the Prefect's room to be
beaten. Do you remember the order, " Go to the
Prefect's room and ask for four or six," and we had
to wander down a long passage, doors all the way on
the right and left till we came to the last door ? If
the Prefect wasn't in we had to wait, and when he
came to his room we told him who had sent us to
him, and he took out of a cupboard a stick with a
piece of waxed leather on the end of it, told us to hold
out our hands, and we received four or six strokes
delivered with all his strength.'

' He enjoyed it ; men do enjoy cruelty, especially
priests. I hope the food isn't so bad now as it was
in the 'sixties.'

' The food that was given us at Oscott was worse
than bad — it was disgusting,' the Colonel answered.

* Do you remember the bowl of slop called tea, and
the other bowl of slop called coffee, and the pat of
grease called butter ? Some stale bread was handed
about in a basket, and that was our breakfast ; never
an Q^^^ — a bleak meal, succeeded by half an hour's
recreation, and then more lessons. At dinner, do
you remember the iridescent beef, purple, with blue
lines in it ?'

' I'm convinced that very often it wasn't beef at
all, but the carcass of some decayed jackass !'

SALVE 287

'Whatever it was, I never touched it, but ate a
little bread and drank a little beer. You couldn't
touch the beef nor the cheese. Nor could my love
of cheese enable me to eat it. What was it most
like — soap, or decayed cork ? It was like nothing
but itself Forty years have gone by and I remember
it still.'

' One day in the week there were ribs of beef '

' Those I used to eat ; but the worst day of all was
Thursday, for it was on that day large dishes of
mince came up. I never touched it — did you ?'

' Never/ the Colonel answered.

' Do you remember one morning at breakfast lumps
of mince were discovered in the tea ? The prefect
looked into the bowl, handed to him, and acquiesced
in the opinion that perhaps no tea or coffee had better
be drunk that morning.'

But if the Colonel had forgotten that incident, he
remembered the tarts : sour damson jam poured into
crusts as hard as bricks, and these tarts were alter-
nated with a greasy suet-pudding served with a
white sauce that made it even more disagreeable.

'A horrible place !' I muttered ; and we continued
to speak of those meals, eaten in silence, listening to
a boy reading, the Prefect walking up and down
watching us. ' Was any place ever more detestable
than Oscott ? At five o'clock beer was served out —
vinegar would have been better. And the bread !'

' At seven sloppy tea and coffee, greasy butter,
bread that looked as if it had been thrown about the
floors ! And then the dormitories !'

The Colonel would not, of course, agree with me
that any great harm is done to a boy by giving him

288 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

over, body and soul, to a priest ; but he remembered
that our Castlebar clotlies were soon thre;idbare and
in holes, and our letters home, begging for an order
for new clothes, were disregarded.

' 1 think it must have been that father had lost
money at racing, and as he hadn't paid the school
fees, he didn't like to write to the President. When
I left Oscott I used to hear people say they were cold,
but I didn't understand what they meant. The liard
life of Oscott gave us splendid health, which has
lasted ever since.'

* Yes, it seems to have done that ; and that's
about all. W^e learned nothing.'

' Nothing whatever; in many respects we unlearned
a great deal. I had learnt a good deal of French
from our governess, but I forgot it all ; yet we were
taught French at Oscott.'

' Taught French ! We weren't even taught
English.'

' It was assumed that we knew English.'

* The English language begins in the Bible, and
Catholics don't read the Bible. Do you remember
the Bible stories we were given, written in very
Catholic English ?'

' Yes, I remember,' the Colonel answered ; * and I
think it's a great mistake that the Bible isn't taught
in Catholic schools. There is nothing that I admire
more than the Psalms — those gi'eat solemn rhytlims.'

' We used to hear the Gospels read out in
chapel '

The door opened : the parlourmaid had come to
tell the Colonel that a man downstairs would like to
speak to him, and he left the room abruj)tly.

SALVE 289

* He never seems free from business/ I muttered.
' Just as the conversation was beginning to get in-
teresting. Oscott had every cliance of turning out
a well-educated boy in him, for he was willing to
learn ; but with me it was difi'erent. Oscott didn't
get a fair chance.' And I sat perplexed, unable to
decide whether I could or would not learn, thinking
it probable that my brain developed slowly, remem-
bering that my mother had told me that father used
to say, ' George is a chrysalis out of which a moth or
butterfly may come.' Now, which am I ? Would
father have been able to tell if he had lived ? Can
anybody tell me ? But why should I want anybody to
tell me ? I am a reasonable being, and should know
whether I am moth or butterfly. But I don't. Every
man has asked himself if he is moth or butterfly, and,
receiving no answer, he begins to wonder at the
silence that has so suddenly gathered round him.
Out of the void memories arise, and he wonders if
they have arisen to answer his question. There was
a round table in grandfather's library and it was
filled with books — illustrated editions of Gulliver's
Travels and the Arabian Nights ; and on the page
facing the picture of Gulliver astride on the nipple
of a young Brobdingnagian's breast, I used to read
how she undressed Gulliver for the amusement of her
girl-friends setting him astride on the nipple of one
of her breasts. As she was forty-five feet high,
Gulliver used to lean forward, clasping with both his
arms the prodigious breast, very frightened lest he
should fall ; and I used to think that if she held out
her apron I should not mind. But Swift speaks of
the smells that these hides used to exhale, and dis-

T

290 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

gusted I would close the book and open the Arabian
Nights and read again and again the story of the two
travellers who saw a huge wreath of smoke rise out
of the sea ; it quickly shaped itself into a Genie, and,
frightened out of their wits, they climbed into a high
tree and watched him come ashore and unlock a
crystal casket. A beautiful lady stepped out, and,
when he had fully enjoyed himself, he fell asleep.
As soon as the lady saw she was released from his
vigilance, she wandered a little way looking round as
if to find somebody, seeking behind the rocks and
looking up into the trees. On perceiving the
travellers, she called to them to come down, and on
their refusal to descend from fear of the Genie, she
threatened to awake him and deliver them over to
him. Branch by brancli they descended tremblingly,
and when they were by her she invited one to follow
her into a dark part of the wood, telling the other
to wait till she returned. After a little Avhile she
returned and retired with the second, and when
she came back she said : ' I see rings upon your
fingers ; you must each give me a ring, and your ring
added to the ninety-eight in this handkerchief will
make a hundred. I have sworn to deceive the Genie
who keeps me locked in that casket, a hundred times.'
Even more than the tale of the two travellers, that
of the two men who went by night to a tomb
appealed to my imagination, for it was related that
they descended a staircase, spread with the rarest
carpets, through burning perfumes, to a great tapes-
tried saloon, where lamps were burning as if for a
festival. A table was spread with delicate meats
and wines. But the feasters were only two — a

SALVE 291

young man and woman, now lying side by side on
a couch, dead. As soon as the elder man catches
sight of the twain he draws off his slipper and slaps
the faces of the dead and spits upon them, to the
great horror of his companion, who seizes him by
the arms, asking why he insults the dead. 'The
dead whom you see lying before you are my son and
daughter ;' whereupon he begins to tell how his son
conceived a fatal passion for his sister. ' His passion
was unfortunately returned, and, to escape from the
world which holds such love in abhorrence, they
retired to this dwelling. But even here, you see,
the vengeance of God has overtaken them.'

It had seemed to me that the bi'other and sister had
probably lighted a pan of charcoal, choosing to die
rather than their love might die before them ; and
their love, so reprobate that it could only be enjoyed
in a tomb, appealed to my perverse mind, prone to
sympathize with every revolt against the common
law. Each age selects a special sin to protest against,
and in the beginning of the nineteenth century it
was incest that excited the poetical imagination.
B}Ton loved his half-sister, and Genesis sheltered
his Cain. Shelley's poem Laon and Cythna was not
in print when I was a child, but a note in the
edition of Shelley's works that I discovered in my
grandfather's library and took to Oscott College
with me infomied me that The Revolt of Islam was
a revised version of it — revised by Shelley himself at
the instigation of his publisher, who thought that
England was not yet ripe for a poem on the subject
of the incest of brother and sister. The title The
Revolt of Islam appealed to my imagination more

292 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

than the first title, and connected the story in my
mind with the story that I had read in tlie Arabian
Nights ; and, delighted by the beautiful names of the
lovers, I used to allow my thoughts to wander away
during class-time^ wondering if they loved each other
as deeply as the brother and sister that had perished
in the tomb, and Marlow — where the poem was
written in the ideal company of his mistress, Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin — was for ever sanctified in
my eyes.

I was as much given to dreaming as to games,
and, detei-mined to indulge myself to the top of my
bent, I would lean over my desk, a Latin grammar
in front of me, my head clasped between my hands,
and abandon myself to mv imagination. However
cold the morning might be, I could kick the world
of rule away and pass into one in which all I knew
of love was accom})lished amid pale yellow, slowly
moving tapestries, within fumes of burning perfume :
dim forms of lovers, speaking with hushed voices,
floated before me, and their stories followed them,
woven without effort. I looked forward to the time
apportioned out for the learning of our lessons, for it
was only then that I could be sure of being able to
leave Oscott without fear of interruj)ting. It was in
my mind that I found reality — Oscott and its masters
were but a detestable dream. One priest and only
one suspected my practice, and he would walk
behind me and lay his hand on my shoulder, or rap
my skull with his knuckles, rousing me so suddenly
that I could not suppress a cry. And tlien, what
agony to look round and find myself in the cold
study with an unlearnt lesson before me, and the

SALVE 293

certainty in my heart that when I was called to
repeat it I should be sent to the Prefect for a
flogging for my stupidity or for my idleness, or for
both !

One day coming out of the refectory I said to the
Prefect, ' I brought a volume of Shelley's poems from
home with me. I have been reading it ever since,
and have begun to wonder if it is wrong to read his
poems, for he denies the existence of God.'

He just asked me to give him the book. The
days went by witliout hearing any more of the
volume. It had been sacrificed for nothing, and as
soon as the Colonel returned I told him how I had
sacrificed my volume of Shelley in the hope of being
expelled for introducing an atheistical work into
school.

' You see you were in the big division and only
rumours of your trouble used to reach me. I
remember, however, the row you got into about
betting ; you used to lay the odds.'

' And once overlaid myself against one horse that
had come along in the betting and had to send ten
shillings to London to back him. The Prefect gave
me the book-maker's letter and asked me to open it
in his presence.'

'The prize fight created some little stir.'

* I remember it came off in the band-room, a
sovereign a side, but before either was beaten the
watch came running up the stairs to announce that
the Prefect was going his rounds.'

' You were always in a row of some kind, always
in that study place learning Latin lines.'

' Oscott was a vile hole, a reek of priest. Every

294 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

kind of priest. I remember one, a tall bald-headed
fellow about five-and-thirty who kept me one whole
summer afternoon learning and re-learning lines that
I knew quite well. Every time I went up to the
desk to say them his arm used to droop about
my shoulders, and with some endearing phrase he
would send me back. We were alone, and I could
hear my fellows playing cricket outside. " I must
send you back once more," and when I came up
again with the lines quite perfect his hand nearly
slipped into my trouscr pocket. At last the five
o'clock bell rang and I was still there with the lines
unlearnt. To be revenged on him for keeping me
in the M-hole afternoon, I went to confession and
mentioned the circumstance ; I was curious to test
the secrecy of the confessional. I was quite in-
nocent as to his intentions, and the result of my
confession was that a few days afterwards we heard
he was leaving Oscott, and a rumour went round the
school that he used to ask the boys to his room and
give them cake and wine.'

* It doesn't follow that '

* I know that a Catholic believes that a priest may
murder, steal, fornicate, but he will never betray a
secret revealed in the confessional. But we won't
argue it. Do you remember the little housemaid ?'

* I remember hearing that you had discovered a
pretty maid-servant among the hideous lot that used
to collect in the back benches, and I wondered
how you managed to distinguish her looks, for you
could only get sight of her by glancing over your
shoulder.'

' You were nearly three years younger than I was

SALVE 295

at the time, and had not reached the age of puberty ;
myself and a chosen few used to walk together
round the playground, telling each other the ad-
ventures that had befallen us during the vacations.

Do you remember Frank ? He was one of my

pals and used to have numerous adventures among
maid-servants when he went home for the holidays.
We could not stand his introductory chapters^ long
as Sir Walter Scott's, and used to cry, " Begin with
the bubbies." '

' But what has this story got to do with the pretty
housemaid that you spotted at the back of the
chapel ?'

' Only this. An innocent question revealed my
ignorance of woman, and, fearful lest Fi'ank should
tell on me, I spoke of Agnes.'
' Was that her name ?'

' I don't know. The name started up in my mind
and it seems to me in keeping with my memory of
her, a low-sized girl, the shoulders slightly too high,
a pointed oval face and demure overshadowed eyes.
No one at Oscott had ever looked at a maid-servant
before, and in a sudden inspiration I said that I
would present Agnes with a bouquet. The project
astonished and delighted my companions, and every
evening I waited for her at the foot of the stairs
leading to the organ-loft. It wouldn't be possible to
offer her my bouquet till she came alone, and every
day I answered my companions, " No ; I didn't get
a chance last night. " At last my chance came, and,
descending the stairs, I offered the girl my flowers,
mentioning that they would look well in the bosom
of her dress. On another occasion I met her in the

296 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

dormitories, but she begged me not to speak to her,
for if I did she would be sent away.'

' Is that all ?■

' It was the only thing I could think of to break
the monotony of the Oscott day ; and if I suggest
that one of my boon companions may have yielded
to scruples of conscience and betrayed me in con-
fession *

'A Catholic is only obliged to tell the sins he
connnits liimself.'

' By acquiescing in my poor gallantries he may
have thought he made himself responsible for them,'

* You very likely talked openly yourself, and '

' Anything rather than admit that the confessional
is used as a means of government. For what else do
you think the sacrament was substituted ?'

' I was many years at Oscott and never had any
reason to suspect that an improper use was made of
the confessional.'

' The secret leaked out ; all secrets do in Catholic
conmiunities, and some great trouble must have
arisen, or I should not have written to father.'

' I knew nothing about that.'

' I wrote the miserable little story to him, adding
that if the girl were sent away my conscience would
leave me no peace, and that I should marry her as
soon as I got the opportunity.'

* 1 had no idea it was so serious.'

' It was mother who told me years after that, on
receiving my letter, father ordered one of the grey
ponies to be saddled and galloped away to Clare-
morris to catch the train. I did not think for a
minute that my letter would bring him all that way.

SALVE 297

and when one of the priests^ or deacons, or sub-
deacons, or bunkers — do you remember the fellows
we used to call the bunkers ?'

* Of course I do ; the sons of English tradesmen
who were educated at Oscott, at our expense, for
the priesthood.'

' When one of those cads came up to me in the
jilayground and told me I Avas wanted in the visitor's
room, my heart sank, and I could hardly crawl up
the Gotliic staircase. I was in an awful funk, for I
could not think of father as being anything else but
dreadfully angry with me ; whereas he was surpris-
ingly gentle, and listened to my foolish stoiy without
reproving me. I don't know if you remember father's
eyes — clear, blue eyes— they embarrassed me all the
while, making me feel a little hy))ocrite, for I didn't
intend to carry out my threat. Even in those
times I was just as I have ever been, very provident
about my own life, and determined to make the
most of it. I was a little hypocrite, for all the time
I was cajoling him, I was thinking what my chances
were of being taken out to Birmingham and given
a dinner at the Queen's Hotel, a meal which I sadly
needed. I wish I could remember his words ; the
sensation of the scene is present in my mind,
but as soon as I seek his words they elude me.
Northcote came into the room, and I think it
became plain to me at once that he had already
been speaking to father, and that the girl was
not going to be dismissed. You remember North-
cote— a great-bellied, big, ugly fellow, wliom we
used to call the Gorilla. He was almost as hairy,
great tufts starting out of his ears and out of his

298 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

nostrils ; the backs of his hands were covered, and
hair grew thickly between the knuckles. I was
thinking how cleverly I had escaped a thrashing
and of the pleasure in store for me — a long drive
with my father in a hansom, and of the dinner in the
coffee-room of the Queen's Hotel, when the Gorilla
startled me out of my reverie. " George/' he said,
" has refused to go to confession." At once I felt
my father's eyes grow sterner, and my dream at
that moment seemed a mirage. " George," he said,
"is this true?" "The Prefect told me the other
day to go to confession, but I had nothing to confess.
He insisted, and when I answered that I'd go to the
confessor but I could tell him nothing, he ordered
me to his room for a flogging. I said I'd like to see
the President about that, and I told Dr. Northcote
that I had written to you about the housemaid."
And then our father agreed with the Gorilla that
there are always sins to confess for him who
chooses to look for them, and I remember the
Gorilla reminding me that, probably, I had not
examined my conscience sufficiently. The authorities
are all old coaxers when parents are present.'

' I always liked the Gorilla.'

' Did you ? He asked me if my attention had never
wandered at Mass ? if I had never lost my temper ?
or been disobedient to my master ? or lazy ? It was
impossible for me to deny that some of these things
had happened, and, feeling that I must be truthful
if I were to win my father over to my side, I said —
and the words slipped out quite easily — " But, Dr.
Northcote, I'm not sure that I believe in confession,
so why should I be obliged to go to confession ?"

SALVE 299

The President raised his shaggy eyebroAvs. " It
isn't my fault, and to communicate when in doubt

would be " A very grave look must have come into

his face, and a certain gravity stole into my father's,
and then, in answer to another question, posed with
awful deliberation, I remember saying, and in these
very words, " But, Dr. Northcote, you didn't always
believe in confession yourself." Dr. Northcote was
a convert to Catholicism ; he had become a priest at
his wife's death, and his son was in my class. Our
father turned away from the table and walked
towards the window, and I can still see his plump
back in shadow and one side whisker showing against
the light. The Gorilla hesitated, unable to think
of an appropriate answer, and father, as if he divined
the priest's embarrassment, returned from the win-
dow. But I could see he had been laughing.'

' And did he take you out to Birmingham on that
occasion ?'

' I think he did, for I remember a conversation
about Shelley's poems with him. But he couldn't
have taken me out to Birmingham and left you
behmd.'

' I don't ever remember driving out to Birmingham
with father.'

' Not on any occasion ?'

'No.'

' How very odd. If the Queen's Hotel still exists
I could find the table in the coffee-room at which
we used to sit. I remember listening in admii'ation
to father talking to Judge Fitzgerald. All the Fitz-
geralds were there.'

'The Fitzgeralds left Oscott together, just before

300 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

I went there. One of them -wrote a book or verses
about the bunkers, and there was a law-suit. I only
once remember our father at Oscott, and forget the
occasion ; but I can still see him giving an exhibi-
tion of billiards and showing off some strokes.'

' I don't recollect a billiard-table at Oscott — not
in my time. Where was it ?'

' A top room where I never was before. You say
you remember a conversation with father about
Shelley. Did he admire Shelley ?'

'Not much, I think. He didn't like The Pine
Forest hij the Sea, for I remember liis very words,
" Why do you waste time learning bad verses ?"
He liked the o])ening lines of Queen Mah, " How
wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleej),"
and spoke of Byron and quoted some verses from
Sardanapalus which I thought very fine. I remember
him saying to me at the end of a religious argument
that out of the many religious reformers Christ was
the only one that liad declared himself to be God
and had been accepted as such by his disciples. A
very flimsy proof this seemed to me to be of Christ's
divinity, and my admiration of father's mtelligence
declined from that moment. My admiration for him
as a kindly human being increased. Our })arting
was most affectionate ; I don't think that he told
me ; it must have been the Prefect that told me I
was not returning to Oscott after the long vacation.
I was not to speak, he said, to any of my school-
mates during the remainder of the term. But
rumour was soon busy that I had successfully defied
the whole College, and many Mere the attempts
made to speak to me, but I used to shake my head

SALVE 301

and smile and pass on. The outcast is never as
unhappy as the herd imagines him to be, and these
last six weeks of my Oscott life were not disagree-
able to me, and the pleasantest moment of all was
when I asked the Prefect on the last day of the term
for his permission to say good-bye to my school-
fellows. So I left Oscott,' I said to the Colonel, ' in
flying colours, at least flying the colours which I
wished to fly. A detestable place it was to me,
mentally and physically. You only suffered physical
cold, hunger, and canings, but I suffered in my mind.
I couldn't breathe in Catholicism.'

' You always hated Christianity, especially in its
Catholic form.'

' Only in its Catholic form.'

' When you were at Oscott there was no question
of your becoming a Protestant ?'

' My dear Colonel, I answer you as I answered
Edward ; one doesn't become a Protestant, one
discovers oneself to be a Protestant, and I discovered
in those days that magicians and their sacraments
estranged me from all religious belief, instead of
drawing me closer to it.'

The Colonel smiled sadly.

' We shall get you back one of these days.'

' When I lose my reason, perhaps. I have often
wondered at my hatred of Catholicism, so original, so
inherent is it. Sometimes I have wondered if it may
not be an inheritance of some remote ancestor.*

' Not so very remote,' the Colonel said.

' Why ? Weren't we originally a Catholic family ?'

' No, it was our great-grandfather at the end of the
eighteenth century that changed his religion.'

302 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

' So our great-grandfather became a Catholic. He
went to S|)ain, I know that, and made a great
fortune and married in Spain ; but whom did he
marry ? A Spaniard ?'

'A Miss O' Kelly.'

* An Irishwoman, a Catholic of course ? And it
was she who persuaded him to change his religion.
Theolog}' and sex go together. If there were no sex
there would be no theology.'

' Her family,' the Colonel said, ' had been in Spain
so long that she was practically a Spaniard.'

' And grandfather was an Agnostic, mother told
me, so there is only one generation of pure Catholi-
cism behind me. You don't know how happy you've
made me. Your news comes as sweetly as the south
wind blowing over the downs.'

XVIII

The Colonel stayed with me a few days longer,
and we spent our evenings in such friendly con-
versation that none would have suspected that a
great storm had passed over our heads. And when
the morning came for him to go, we bade each other
good-bye with empressement, a little more than usual,
as if to convince ourselves that we loved each other
as before ; but neither was deceived, and I went up
to the drawing-room with a heavy heart.

Miss Gough was waiting there, and she began to
read aloud from yesterday's dictation, but her voice
was soon drowned in the tumult of my thoughts.
' Of what use for us to see each other if we may only
talk of superficial things ? Never more can there be

SALVE 303

any sympathy of spirit between us. We are solitary
beings who may at most exchange words about
tenants and saw-mills. How horrible ! And while
talking of things that do not interest me in the
least, there will be always a rancour in my heart.
We shall drift farther and farther apart ; the fissure
will widen into a chasm. We are divided utterly,
and sooner or later he Avill leave Moore Hall and will
go to live abroad.' The cessation of Miss Gough's
voice awoke me, and looking up I caught sight of
her eyes fixed upon me reproachfully.

' You're not listening.'

' I beg your pardon ; I've been away. Now we'll
go on.'

But the scene of the story I was dictating was laid
in Mayo round the shores of Lough Cara, and the
woods and the islands and the people whom I had
known long ago drew my thoughts from the narrative,
and before long they had drifted to a house that my
brother and I had built with some planks high up in a
beech-tree. One day a quarrel had arisen regarding
the building of this house, and to get my own way I
had pretended not to believe in his love of me, caus-
ing him to burst into tears. His tears provoked my
curiosity, and it was not long before I began to think
that I would like to see him cry again. But to my
surprise and sorrow the gibe did not succeed in pro-
ducing a single tear. He seemed indifferent whether
I thought he loved me or not.

It was after fifty years had gone by that this long-
forgotten episode floated up out of the depths.

' I was as detestable in the beginning as I am
in the end,' I said, like one speaking in his

304 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

sleep ; and catching Miss Gough's eyes again, I
laughed a little. ' I'm terribly absent-minded this
afternoon.'

' You've been working too hard lately, and you
didn't go for your valk yesterday.'

' You think it would be better for me to go for a
long walk than to sit here dreaming or dictating
rubbish ? I dare say you're right ; I give you your
liberty.' She closed her notebook and rose from
the table. ' But I don't know where to walk.'

' Why not go to Merrion and call on John Eglin-
ton ? You always like talking to him.'

' He's at the Library this afternoon.'

' And there are your cousins at Blackrock.'

' Yes, I might go to see them.'

'Then till to-morrow.'

She went away leaving me stretched in an arm-chair
by the window staring at the drooping ash by the
wicket, trying to think of some way of passing the
time, but unable to discover any except by going
into the garden and helping the gardener to collect
the large box snails with which the plants were
infested. He threw them into a pail of salt
and water, saying ' it is fine stuff for them ; ' but
I liked to spill a circle of salt and watch them
trying to crawl out of it. Alas ! one does not
change — not materially. When I Mas a boy I used
to hunt the laundry cats with dugs, but the Colonel
was never cruel. ' No one corrected me, no one
reproved me ; I grew up a wilding . . .' and on this
my thoughts dissolved into a meditation on the
worthlessness of my own character and my power-
lessness to mend it. ' I shall remain wiiat I am

SALVE 305

now to the end, and that wouldn't matter so much
if '

The sentence remained unfinished, for at that
moment I remembered the intonation in the Colonel's
voice : ' It will be a great grief to me if you declare
yourself a Protestant.' The words were simple
enough, but intonation is more important than words ;
it goes deeper, like music, to the very roots of
feeling, to the heart's core.

' But if I sit here brooding any longer I shall go
mad,' and I rushed upstairs and shaved myself, and
buttoned myself into a new suit of clothes. ' The
apparel oft creates a new man,' I said, stepping
briskly over the threshold, hastening my pace down
Baggot Street, assuring myself that meditation is
impossible when the pace is more than four miles an
hour. But at the canal bridge it was necessary to
stop, not to watch the boats as is my wont, but to
consider which way I should take, for I had gone
down Baggot Street and the Pembroke Road, over
Ballsbridge, and followed the Dodder to Donny-
brook so often that my imagination craved for some
new scenery. ' But there is no other,' I cried, and
it was not until the trees of the Botanic Gardens
came into view that I roused a little out of my
despondency. I had never asked for a key, or
sohcited admission to these gardens, so gloomy
did they seem ; but thinking that I might meet
some student from Trinity whom I could watch while
pursuing knowledge from flower to flower, from tree to
tree, who might even be kind enough to instruct me
a little and divert me, I crossed the tram-line and
peered through the tall railings into the dark and

u

306

HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

dismal thickets. There did not seem to be anything
in these gardens but ilex-trees ; ' the most unsuitable
tree to my present mood/ I muttered, and went
aM'ay in the direction of Blackrock, thinking of my
handsome cousin Fenella and her good-natured
innocent brothers. It seemed to me that I should
like to pay them a visit, that their house would
soothe me. One likes certixin houses, not because
the people that live in them are especially clever
and amusing, but because one finds it agreeable to
be there. But in Mount Merrion questions would
be put to me about the Colonel. Mount Merrion
Avould ])riiig all the miserable business up again,
and I stopped at the corner of Serpentine Avenue
undecided.

' If I could only think of something,' I said ; 'any-
thing . . . provided I have not done it a hundred
times before, I have never followed the Dodder
to the sea !' And wondering how it got there,
I turned into Serpentine Avenue. As there was
no sign of the I'iver at this side of the railway, I
concluded that it must lie on the other side, for all
rivers reach the sea unless they go underground.
The gates of the level-crossing were closed when
I arrived, and a sound of angiy voices reached my
ears. ' A little group of wayfarers,' I said, ' cursing
a gate-keeper in Dublin brogue.' 'Will you come
out to Hell ower that. The divil take you, what are
you doing in there ? Is it asleep you are ?' and so
forth, until at last an old sluggard rolled out of his
box with a dream still in his eyes, and, grumbling,
opened tlic gates, receiving damnations from every-
body but me, who was nowise in a hurry.

SALVE 307

A 2")asser-by directed me, and I followed a beauti-
ful shady road, admiring the houses with gardens at
the back, until I came to a great stone bridge,
unfortunately a modern one, but built out of large
blocks of fine stone. A black, drain-like river flowed
through the arches, for the Dodder is nowhere an
attractive river in its passage thi'ough Dublin, though
it passes through many ])icturesque places. The woods
at Dartry are as picturesque as any, and even at the
Landsdowne Road there is a wood and a turnstile,
and at the end of the wood a pleasant green bank
overhung with hawthorn boughs where I should
like to sit and rest were it not facing a black stream
inert as a crocodile in its last mile before it soaks
past Ringsend into the sea. 'The current moves
hardly at all,' I said, ' and my priest would prefer to
face a couple of miles of Lough Cara on a moonlight
night rather than twenty yards of this river. He
would come out on the other side clothed in mud,
but out of Lough Cara he would rise like Leander
from the Hellespont, but with no Hero to meet him.'

And throwing myself on the green bank, my
thoughts began to follow the priest's moods as he
wandered round the thickets of Derrinrush — mood
rising out of mood and melting into mood. The
story seemed to be moving on very smoothly in my
imagination, and I know not what chance association
of images or ideas led my thoughts away from
it and back to the evening when the Colonel had
left my house on my telling him that he might as
well castrate his children as bring them up Catholics.
He had forgiven me my atrocious language, it is true,
for the Colonel's beautiful nature can do more than

308 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

pardon ; he is one of those rare human beings who
can forgive. He is unable to acquire new ideas, the
old are too intimate and intense ; family ties are
dear to him, and he is a Catholic because he was
taught Catholic prayers when he was a little child
and taken to Carnacun Chapel. His life is set in his
feelings rather than in his ideas, and he expressed
himself fully and perfectly Avhen he said : ' It will be a
great grief to me if you declare yourself a Protestant,'
and it seemed to me that I should be guilty of a das-
tardly act if I were to bring grief into my brother's
life. 'God knows,' thought I, 'he has received stabs
enough from fortune, as do all those whose hearts
compel them as his did on Carlisle Bridge, six months
ago.' It pleased me to remember the scuffle. We
had heard a woman cry out as we returned from a
Gaelic League meeting, and looking back I said : ' A
Jack cuffing his Jill round a cockle stall, one of the
many hundred women that are cuffed nightly in
Dublin.' Before I could say a word the Colonel had
rushed to her assistance, and a fine old boxing-match
began between the cad and the Colonel at one in
the morning ; and if the cad had happened to have
some pals about, the Colonel would certainly have
been flung into the Liffey. He did not think of
the danger he was running, only of rescuing some
oppressed woman.

' A diabolical act it would be to grieve liim mortally
in the autumn of his life, now that he is settled in
Moore Hall in the enjoyment of his first freedom after
thirty years of military discipline. I can't do it.' The
Colonel did not come into the world, as the sa}'inggoes,
with a silver spoon in his mouth, and had to make up

SALVE 309

his mind before he was twenty how he was to get a
living. There was no time for consideration as to the
direction in which he would like to develop. If he
had had a little money he might have gone to the Bar,
and he would have made a good lawyer ; but success
at the Bar comes after many years. In those days
the Army examination was difficult ; he was plucked
the first time, and was sufficiently pooh-poohed at
home, very likely by me who could never pass any
examination. He said very little, but his mind con-
centrated in a fierce detei'mination to get through,
and he passed high up. Mother began at the bottom
of the list trying to find him, but the housemaid
cried out : ' Why he's here, ma'am, ninth !' He was
first out of Sandhurst, went to India and was stationed
in the Mauritius, and fought in the first South
African War.

He returned to India, and was not long at home
before he had to go out again to South Africa, where
he commanded his regiment through all the fierce
fighting of Colenso and Pieter's Hill. He had to
risk his life again and again, and submit himself to
a coil of duties for thirty years before he had earned
sufficient to support a wife and children, and it is
outrageous that I, who have enjoyed my life always,
never knowing an ache or a want, should dare to
intervene and tell him — I could not repeat the
atrocious words again. It seemed to me, as I lay
on the green bank, that I had no right to declare
myself a Protestant. It is bad that the children
should see their parents divided in religion ; it
would aggi-avate the evil were their uncle to de-
clare himself on their mother's side. But I wonder

310 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

wliy he married a Protestant ? Because he was
coin})elled by his heart, and did not meanly stop to
consider the vahie of the sacrifice he was makinjj^.
* That is why,' and I got up from the green bank
and walked towards the next bridge, wondering how
it was that I was never able to bask in the sun like
the couples to be seen every fine evening in the
Park ; rough boys and girls sitting on the benches,
their arms about each other, content to lie in the
warmth of each other's company without uttering a
word, at most, ' Are you comfy, dear ?' 'I'm all
right.' But I have never been able to enjoy life
without thought, and should not have lain on that
green bank.

On the other side of the bridge there are no
sweet hawthorns, only waste lands, and a ragged
path along the water's edge interrupted by stiles ;
at the third bridge this path ceases altogether ;
warehouses and factories rise up steeply ; the
Dodder cannot be followed to the sea by that
bank ; but a flight of steps exists on the other
side, and these took me down to a black cindery
place intersected by canals. It was amusing to trip
across several lock gates and to find oneself sud-
denly on the quays. But where was the Dodder ?
To re-cross the lock gates and go up that flight of
steps would be tiresome, and I decided to miss the
honour of discovering the moutli of that river, and
give my attention to a great four-master, the hull
of the ship standing thirty feet out of the water,
and all the spars and yards and ropes delicate yet
clear upon the grey sky.

SALVE Sll

But there seemed to be nobody about to whom I
could aj)j)ly for permission to visit the ship, and my
choice lay between continuing my walk regretfully
along the quays or going up the gangway uninvited
and exjilaining to the first sailor that my intentions
were strictly honest. ' There must be somebody on
board ; the ship wouldn't be left unprotected/ and
up the gangway I went. But the ship seemed as
empty as the shells that used to lie along the
mantelpieces in the 'sixties, and I walked about for
a long time before haj)pening upon anybody. At last
a sim})le, good-natured Breton sailor appeared whom
I had no difficulty in engaging in conversation. He
told me that the ship had come from Australia with
corn and would go away in ballast, first to Glasgow,
and if the wind were favourable they would get to
Glasgow in about eighteen hours. The ship's next
destination was San Francisco, and to get there they
would have to double Cape Horn, and I thought of
the sailor ordered aloft to take in sail. He would
have to cling to the ropes, however black the night
might be, however the vessel might heave from
billow to billow, and if the ship doubled the Cape in
safety he would be up among the yards furling sail
after sail as she floated through the Golden Gates.
At San Francisco they would take in corn and —

' E?i dix-hmt mois nous serons revenus avec du hle.^

' Et apres ?'

' Alois J e reverrai ma polrie et mon /I'ls,' and he took
me into a little closet and showed me his son's
photograph. And when I had admired the young
man, he asked me if I would like to go over the

312 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

ship, and we -walked about together, but there was
nothing to see . . . only a number of bonhams.

' Foild le iTuniger dcs matelols.'

' Pas puiir fioiis, monsieur. Cesi le capitaine el les
officiers qui mangenl le pore frais.'

' Vous eles Breton, mais vous paries bien Franqais ;
peul-etre encore mieux que le Breton.'

' Nan pas, moiisieur ; je suis du Finislere, une des
provinces oii on parte Breton.'

The sailor revived my ardour for the preservation
of small languages, and we talked enthusiastically of
the Bretons, the remnant of the race that had once
possessed all France and colonized Britain. The
Irish Celts were a different race, and spoke a language
that he would not understand ; but he would under-
stand some Welsh, and the Cornish language better
still. . . .

' La deiiiiere personne qui parlait le Cornouailles fu.
une vieille femme, morte il y a cent ans. On sail son
nom, mais pour le moment . . .'

' Vous ne vous le rappelez pas, monsieur ?'

' N'importe. Cela ne vous semhle pas drole d' entendre
les syllahes celtiques lorsque vous grimpez sur la vergue
du per roquet dix ou douze metres au-dessus des viers
houleuses du Cap Horn ?'

' Non, mo7isieur, puisque je travaille avec vies com-
patriotes.'

' Bien silr, hicn siir ; vous ctes tons Bretons.'

And, slipping a shilling into his hand, I pursued my
way along the quays, stopping to admire the cut-
stone front of a house in ruins ; its pillared gateway
and iron railings seemed to tell that this indigent
riverside had seen better days. Behind it was a

SALVE 313

little purlieu overflowing with children, and a few
odd trades were esconced amid the ruins of ware-
houses. A little farther on I came upon a tavern, a
resort of sailors. It looked as if some Avild scenes
might happen there of an evening, but very likely
the crews from the fishing-smacks only came up to
play a game of cards and get a little tipsy — nowadays
the end of an Irishman's adventure. We are supposed
to be a most romantic and adventurous race, and
veiy likely we were centuries ago ; but we are now
the smuggest and the most prosaic people in the
world ; our spiritual adventures are limited to going
to Mass, and our enjoyment to a race meeting. A
mild climate, without an accent upon it, does not
breed adventurers. Quay followed quay. There
were plenty of fishing smacks in the LifFey, and
these interested me till I came to Carlisle Bridge ;
and leaning over the parapet, my thoughts followed
the LifFey beyond Chapelizod. It is between Chapel-
izod and Lucan that it begins to gurgle alongside of
high hedges through a flat country enclosed by a line
of blue hills about seven or eight miles distant ;
after Chapelizod it is a brown and bonny river, that
would have inspired the Celt to write poetry if he
had not preferred priests to the muses. As I said
just now, he is supposed to be romantic and ad-
venturous, but he is the smuggest and most prosaic
fellow in the world. As Edward says, men in Dublin
do not burn. The Celt is supposed to be humorous,
but he is merely loquacious. We read of Celtic
glamour, but what is known as Celtic glamour came
out of Sussex. Shelley came to Ireland to redeem
the Celt. What a mad freak that was ! as mad as

S14 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

mine, or very nearly. But he got some beautiful
j)oetry out of Ireland :

' The oak-
Expanding its imnieasuralile arms,
Enihraces tlie lii,'-lit beech. The pyramids
Of tlif tall cedar overarchiufr, frame
Most solemn domes within, and far below.
Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky,
Tlie ash and tlie acacia floating hang
Tremulous and pale.'

And those lines :

' A well.
Dark, gleaming, and of most translucent wave.
Images all the woven boughs above.
And each depending leaf, and every speck
Of azure sky , , .'

are very like Lucan ; and there are other passages
still more like Lucan. But unable to capture the
elusive lines, my tlioughts followed the river as far
as I knew it, as far as Blessington, to Poulaphouea.
' Phtca ' is a foiry in Irish, and no doubt the fairies
assembled there long ago ; but they have hidden
themselves far away among the hills, between the
source of the Liffey and the Dodder. When O'Grady
wrote ' the divine Dodder,' he must have been think-
ing of long ago, when the Dodder roared down from
the hills, a great and terrible river, sweeping the
cattle out of the fields, killing even its otters, wearing
through the land a great chasm, now often dry save
for a peevish trickle which, after many weeks of rain,
swells into a harmless flood and falls over the great
weir at Tallaght, but only to run away quickly or
collect into pools among great boulders, reaching
Ratlifarnham a quiet and demure little river. At
Dartry it flows through mud, but the wood above it

SALVE 315

is beautiful ; not great and noble as the wood at
Pangbourne ; Dartry is a small place, no doubt, but
the trees that crowd the banks are tall and shapely,
and along one bank there is a rich growth of cow-
parsley and hemlock, and there are sedges and Hags
and beds of wild forget-me-nots in the stream itself.
The trees reach over the stream, and there are
pleasant spots under the hawthorns in the meadows
Avhere the lovers may sit hand in hand, and nooks
under the high banks where they can lie conscious
of each other and of the soft summer evening. A
man should go there with a girl, for the intrusion of
the mere wayfarer is resented. There is a beautiful
bend in the stream near the dye-works, and the trees
grow straight and tall, and out of them the wood-
pigeon clatters. Green, slimy, stenchy at Donny-
brook, at Ballsbridge the Dodder reminds one of a
steep, ill-paven street into which many wash-tubs
have been emptied ; and after Ballsbridge, it reaches
the sea ; as has been said, black and inert as a
crocodile.

If O'Grady had called the Dodder 'the Union
river,' he would have described it better, for the
Dodder must have been entirely disassociated from
Dublin till about a hundred years ago. The aris-
tocracy that inliabited the great squares and streets
in the north side of Dublin could have known very
little about this river; but as soon as the Union
became an established fact, Dublin showed a
tendency to move towards tlie south-east, towards
the Dodder. Every other city in the world moves
westward, but we are an odd people, and Dublin is
as odd as ourselves. . . . The building of iMerrion

316 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

Square must have been undertaken a little before,
or very soon after the Union ; Stephen's Green is
late eighteenth century ; Fitzw illiam Square looks
like 1850. The houses in the Pembroke Road seem
a little older, but we cannot date them earlier than
1820. Within the memory of man, Donnybrook was
a little village lying outside Dublin ; to-day it is only
connected with Dublin by a long, straggling street ;
and beyond Donnybrook is a beautifully wooded
district through which the Stillorgan Road rises in
gentle ascents, sycamores, beeches, and chestnuts of
great height and size shadowing it mile after mile.
On either side of the roadway there are cut-stone
gateways ; the smooth drives curve and disaj)pear
behind hollies and cedars, and we often catch sight
of the blue hills between the trees.

' At this moment,' I said, ' the transparent leaves
are shining like emeralds set in filigree gold ; the fruit
has fallen from the branches, the shucks are broken,
boys are picking out the red-brown nuts for hack-
ing. And the same sun is lighting uj) the chestnut
avenue leading to the Moat House. Stella's shadow
lengthens down her garden walk. She would like
me to startle her solitude with my voice. Why not ?'
And, while watching her in imagination lifting the
pots off the dahlias and shaking the earwigs out, the
thought shot through my heart that I might not be
able to bear the disgrace of Catholicism for the
Colonel's sake, causing me to quail and to sink as if
I had been struck by a knife.

' It has begun all over again,' I said, ' and all the
evening it will take me unawares as it did just
now. It will return again and again to con-

SALVE 317

quer mc in the end ... or at every assault the
temptation may be less vehement. Go home I
cannot. Distraction is what I need — company. I'll
go to Stella, and we will walk round the garden
together ; she will enjoy showing me her carnations
and dahlias, teasing me because I cannot remember
the name of every trivial weed. I suppose it is
that men don't care for flowers as women do ; we
never come back from the country our arms filled
with flowers. We are interested in dogmas ; they
in flowers. A mother never turned her daughter
out of doors because she could not believe in the
doctrine of the Atonement. They are without a
theological sense, thank God ! We shall linger by the
moat watching the trout darting to and fro, thinking
of nothing but the trout, and after supper we'll stray
into the painting-room and go over all the can-
vases, talking of quality, values, and drawing.

And then '

But she may not be at home ; she may have gone
to Rathfarnham in search of subjects ; she may have
gone to Sligo ; she spoke last week of going there
to stay with friends. To find the Moat House empty
and to have to come back and spend the evening
alone, would be very disappointing, and I walked up
and down the bridge wondering if I should risk it.
' All my life long I shall have to bear the brand of
Catholicism. I shall never escape fi-om my promise
except by breaking it,' and forgetful of Stella, I fol-
lowed the pavement, seeing nothing, hearing nothing,
lost in surprise at my own lack of power to keep my
promise. ' Sooner or later I shall yield to the tempta-
tion, so why not at once ? But it may pass away.

318 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

Stella will be able to advise me better than anybody/
and I fell to thinking how she had been the refuge
whither I could run ever since I had come to Ireland,
sure of finding comfort and wise counsel.
'Car!'

XIX

' She is quite right,' I said to myself, as I took a
seat under the apple-tree by the table laid for dinner
under the great bough — ' she is quite right. It is
the only way out of the difficulty. If I wouldn't
grieve my brother, I must leave Ireland. And it
would be well to spread the news, for as soon as
everybody knows that I'm going, I shall be free
to stay as long as I please. JE will miss me and
John Eglinton ; Yeats will bear up manfully. Long-
worth will miss me. I shall miss them all. . , .
But are they my kin ? And if not, who are my kin ?
Steer, Tonks, Sickert, Dujardin — why enumerate ?
Ah, here is he who cast his spell over me from across
the seas and keeps me here for some great purpose,
else why am I here ?'

' The warm hour prompted you, JE, to look through
the ha'wthorns.'

' It was the whiteness of the cloth that caught my
eye.'

' And you were surprised to see the table laid
under the apple-tree in this late season .'' But the
only change is an hour less of light than a month
ago ; the evenings are as dry as they were in July ;
no dew falls ; so I consulted Teresa, who never
opposes my wishes — her only virtue. Here she comes

SALVE 319

across the sward with lamps ; and we shall dine in
the midst of mystery. My fear is that the mystery
may be deepened suddenly by the going out of the
lamps. Teresa is not very capable, but I keep her
for her amiability and her conversation behind my
chair when I dine alone. . . . Teresa, are you sure
you've wound the lamps ; you've seen the oil floAving
over the rim ?' She assured me that she had. ' You
cannot have seen anything of the kind, Teresa. The
lamps have clearly not been wound.' The wicket
slammed. ' Whoever this may be, M, do you enter-
tain him. I must give my attention to this lamp.
It wouldn't be pleasant to find ourselves suddenly in
the dark. It is you, John Eglinton ? Well, I'm
engaged with this lamp. You see, Teresa, the oil
is rising ; give me a match. . . . Teresa and
Moderator Lamps are incompatible. But next year
I shall devise some system of arboreal illumination.'

' Next year ! But to-day I heard, and on the
fullest authority, that you're thinking of leaving us.'

' Who has been tittle-tattling in the Library this
afternoon ?'

' I wasn't in the Libraiy this afternoon ; so it must
have been yesterday that I overheard some conver-
sation as it passed through the turnstile.'

' But you aren't thinking of leaving us ?' IE asked.

' Not to-morrow, nor the day after, nor next year ;
I can't leave till the end of my lease . . . and by
then you'll have had enough of me ; don't you
think so ?'

' You're not really thinking of leaving us ?'

'The only foundation for the rumour is, that I
nientioned to a lady the other day that I didn't look

320 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

upon Ireland as the end of my earthly adventure.
And she must have told one of her neighbours.
Twenty-four hours are all that is required for news
to reach the National Library.' John's face darkened.
The National Library should not be spoken of as a
house of gossip, even in joke.

' But you'll never find elsewhere a house as suit-
able to your pictures, as beautiful a garden to walk
in, or friends as appreciative of your conversation.
You'll not find a finer intelligence than Yeats' in
London, or John Eglinton's.'

' I quite agree with you, /E, that I shall never
chance on a more agreeable circle of friends. And
all of you are so necessary to me that I am heart-
broken when I think that the day will come sooner
or later wlien '

' I should like to hear what JE stands for in your
mind. Can you tell us ?'

' He makes me feel at times that the thither side is
not dark but dusk, and that an invisible hand weaves
a thread of destiny through the uniform woof of life.
He makes me feel that our friendship was begun in
some anterior existence.'

' And will be continued '

' Perhaps, JE. How conscious he is of his own
eternity !' I said, turning to John Eglinton.

' Yet you are leaving us.'

' How insistent he is, John ! And yet, for all we
know, he may be the first to leave us. He has
certain knowledge of different incarnations. The
first was in India, the second in Persia, his third,
of which he keeps a distinct memory, happened
in Egypt. About Babylon I am not so sure.' But

SALVE 321

JE dislikes irreverence, especially a light treatment
of his ideas, and I did not dare to add that in Heaven
he is known as Albar, but asked him instead if he
were redeemed from the task of earning his daily
bread, would he retire to Bengal and spend the rest
of his life translating the Sacred Books of the East.
His answer to this interesting question we shall
never know, for, yielding to the impulse of a sudden
conviction, John Eglinton interjected :

' If M leaves Dublin it will not be for Bengal but
for Ross's Point, formerly haunted by Manaanan
MacLir and the Dagda, and now the Palestine of an
interesting heresy known as iEtheism.'

At the end of our laughter JE said :

' Now, will you tell us what idea John Eglinton
stands for ?'

' He and you are opposite poles,' I answered.
' You stand for belief, John Eglinton for unbelief.
On one side of me sits the Great Everything, and
on the other the Great Nothing.*

' And which would you prefer that death should
reveal to you ?' John Eglinton asked. ' Nothing
or Everything ? . . , You don't answer. Admit
that you would just as lief that death discovered
Nothing.'

' It is easy to imagine a return to the darkness
out of which we came — out of which I came ; and
difficult to imagine my life in the grey dusk that
JE's eyes have revealed to me. But since you deny
the worth of this life '

' I do not deny,' John Eglinton answered.

' Yes, by your abstinence from your prose you
deny the value of your life. He doubts everything,

X

322 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

JE — the future of Ireland^ tlie value of literature,
even the value of his own beautiful i)roso. Watch
the frown coming into his face ! I am foroetting —
we mustn't speak of a collected edition of his works
lest we spoil for him the taste of that melon.'

' W^ho else is coming to dinner ?' John Eglinton
asked.

' Conan said he would come, and he will turn up
probably in the middle of dinner, pleading that he
missed his train.'

' Let us hear what idea Conan stands for,' said
John Eglinton.

*An invisible hand introduces a special thread
mto the woof which we must follow or perish, and
as we stand with girt loins a peal of laughter often
causes us to hesitate.'

* Laughter behind the veil,' said John, and he
spoke to me of a poem that he had received from
Conan for publication in Dana. He had it in his
pocket, and would be glad if I would say how it
struck me. ' Only two stanzas, hardly longer than
a Limerick.' But the poem could not be found
among the bundle of pajicrs he drew from his
pocket, and when he gave up the search definitely,
JE said :

* I'm going to write the myth of your appearance
and e vanishment from Dublin, Moore ; the legend
of & Phooka Avho ap]ieared some years ago, and the
young people crowded about him and lie smelted
them in the fires of fierce heresies, and petrified
them with tales of frigid immoralities, and anybody
who wilted from the heat the Phooka flung from
him, and anybody who was petrified, he broke in

SALVE 323

twain and flung aside as of no use, and at last only
four stood the test : ^olius, because he was an artist
and was enchanted with the performances of the
Phooka ; Johannes also remained, because he was
of a contrairy disposition and was only happy when
contrairy or contradicting, and the Phooka gave him
the time of his life. There was Olius, who was
naturally more ribald than the Phooka, and had
nothing to learn in blasphemy from him, but under-
took to complete his education ; and there was
Ernestius, who practised Law, and could not be
brow -beat ; and to these four the Phooka revealed
his true being.'

/You'll write that little pastoral for the next
number of Dana, won't you, M ? We're short of an
article.'

' When I find the true reason of the Phooka's
sudden disappearance, I'll write it.'

' You mean that you would like me to tell you the
true reason. But is there a true reason for anything ?
There are a hundred reasons why I should not remain
in Ireland always.' And then, it being impossible
for me to resist ^'s eyes, I said : ' Well, the imme-
diate reason is the Colonel, who says it will be a
great grief to him if I declare myself a Protestant.'

' But you aren't thinking of doing any such thing ?
You can't,' said John Eglinton. As I was about to
answer M interrupted :

' But I never thought of the Colonel as a Catholic.
I used to know him very well some years ago, and I
always looked upon him as an Agnostic'

' He may have been in his youth, like others ; but
he is sinking into Catholicism. The last time he

32i ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

came to Dublin we quarrelled, and I thouojht for ever,
on account of what I said to him about his children.
Don't ask me, JE, to repeat what I said ; it would be
too painful, and I wish to forfjjet the words. We
shall never be the same friends as we were once, but
we are still friends. I succeeded in persuading him
to stop a few days longer, and during those days,
while trying to avoid all religious questions, we fell
to talking of family history, and he mentioned,
accidentally of course, that my family isn't a
Catholic family, that it was my great-grandfather
that 'verted — my grandfather wasn't a Catholic, but
my father was, more or less, in his old age. I assure
you the news that there was only one generation
of Catholicism behind me came as sweetly as the
south wind blowing over the downs, and I said at once
I should like to declare myself a Protestant. It was
then that he answered that it would be a great grief
to him if I did so. I shouldn't so much mind grieving
him in so good a cause if I hadn't used words that
drove him out of the house. My dilemma was most
painful — to bear the shame of being considered a

Catholic all my lile or so I consulted a friend

of mine in whom I have great confidence, and she
said : "If you can't remain in Ireland without de-
claring yourself a Protestant, and wouldn't grieve
your brother, you had better leave Ireland." '

' But wore you in earnest when you told your
brother you'd like to declare yourself a Protestant ?'
John Eglinton asked.

' I don't joke on such subjects.'

' What means did you propose to take ? A letter
to the Times ?'

SALVE 325

' I had tliouffht of that and of a lecture, but
decided that the first step to take would be to write
to the Archbishop.'

' But the Archbishop would ask if you believed in
a great many things which you don't believe in.'

' Everything can be explained. I take it for
granted that, being a man of the world, he would
not press me to say that I believed in the resurrec-
tion of the body. St. Paul didn't believe in it. I
can cite you text after text '

' We're not in disagreement with you ; but we're
thinking whether Dr. Peacock will accept your
interpretation of the texts.'

^ You think that the Archbishop would ask me to
accept the bodily resurrection of Christ ?'

' I'm afraid/ said John Eglinton, ' that you'll have
to accept both body and spirit.'

* I hadn't foreseen these difficulties. M tried to
prove to me that I should stay in Ireland, and now
you are providing me with excellent reasons for
leaving.'

' It's only contraiiy John that's talking,' said M in
his most dulcet tones. ' You'll never leave us.'

'Well, I've told you, M, that I can't leave till the
end of my lease. My dear M, sufficient for the day,
or for the evening, I should have said. I see Teresa
and the gardener coming down the greensward, and
soon the refreshing odour of pea soup will arise
through the branches. Noav, the question is, whether
we shall eat the melon with salt and pepper before
the soup, or reserve it till the end of dinner and eat
it with sugar. But where's Conan ? Teresa, will
you kindly walk across and ask '

326 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

The wicket clanged, and we watched tlie autlior
of most of the great Limericks coming towards us.

'There was a young man of St. John's/ I
cried.

' My masterpiece ... it was always popular,' he
added, dropping his voice, as Yeats does when he is
complimented on Innisfree. ' It was always popular,
and from the first. But you remind me of a tale of
long ago — not the Trinity, though there are bread
and wine by you. I am thinking of some Latin
poet — it is Moore that puts the story into my head —
a Latin poet banished to the Pontic seas — Ovid
sitting with his friends.'

' So you've heard the news ?'

' I have heard no news, none since my parlour-
maid burst into my study with the news tliat the
lamps were lighted in the garden and that tlie
company were at table ; and what better news could
I hear than that ?'

' You haven't heard that Moore is leaving us ?'

' Leaving us ! I hope his friend Sir Thornley
Stoker liasn't discovered anything very special in
Liftey Street. He has been up and down there
many times lately on the trail of a Sheraton side-
board, and Naylor has been asked to keep it till
an appendicitis should turn up. The Chinese
Chi])pendale mirror over the di-awing-room chimney-
piece originated in an unsuccessful operation for
cancer ; the Aubusson carpet in the back drawing-
room represents a hernia ; the Renaissance bronze
on the landing a set of gall-stones; the Ming
Cloisonnde a floating kidney ; the Buhl cabinet his
opinion on an enlarged liver ; and Lady Stoker's

SALVE 327

jewels a series of small ojjerations performed over a
term of years.'

We broke into laujjhter ; ' he is very amusing,'
M Avhispered ; and at the end of our laughter I ex-
plained that Sir Thornley was supreme in the
suburbs of ai-t ; but as soon as he attempted to
stoi-m the citadel, to buy pictures, he was as helpless
as an old housewife.

' How many Sir Joshuas and Gainsboroughs have
I saved him from !'

'If he ever sells his collection I suppose it will
fetch a great deal of money.'

' It never will be sold in his lifetime, John, but at
his death there will be a great auction. The terms of
the will are exj)licit, arranging not only for his own
departure but for the departure of the curiosities.
Wound in an old Florentine brocade, he will be
laid in a second-hand coffin, 1 b.c, and driven to
Mount Jerome ; and on the same evening the
curiosities will leave for England, Naylor, Sir
Thornley's chief agent, accompanying them to Kings-
town ; and standing at the end of the pier, two
yards of crepe floating from his hat like a gon-
falon, and a Renaissance wand in his hand, his sighs
will fill the sails of the parting ship, without,
however, his tears sensibly increasing the volume
of the I'ising tide, and when the last speck dis-
appears over the horizon he will fall suddenly
forward.'

' But for what feat of surgery did a grateful patient
send him the second-hand coffin ?'

Conan continued to pile imagination upon
imagination until the conversation drifted back to

328 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

the point from Avhich it had started. Had I really
made up my mind to leave Dublin ?

' My dear Conan, if you'll stop talkin*^ Moore
will tell you why he conceives himself to be under
an obligation to leave us.'

' I'm sure I beg pardon. I didn't believe in the
possibility of losing you till you're carried to the
woods in Kiltoom, the spot mentioned in the chapter
of The Lake which you read to us last Saturday under
this tree.'

' It's only this, Conan, that John Eglinton heard
in the National Library '

' Well, of course, if it Avas heard in the National

Library ' and Conan went off into a peal of

laughter, bringing a dark and perplexed look into
John's eyes.

' Well, Conan, if you want to hear why I thought
of leaving Ireland, not to-day or to-morrow, but
eventually, I'll tell you, but I nuist not be interrupted
again. yE and John Eglinton, who have no Catholic
relations, will have some difficulty in understanding
me, but you'll understand, and they will understjind,
too, when I remind them that at Tillyra years ago
dear Edward insisted on my making my dinner off
the egg instead of the chicken, and on going to
Mass on Sunday. He is interested, and so ex-
clusively, in his own soul that he regards mine, when
I am visiting him, as essential to the upkeep of his.
Now, I can't help thinking that if I remain in Ireland
and were to fall dangerously ill at Tillyra, the
spiritual tyranny of years ago might be revived in
a more serious form. Plis anxiety about his soul
would force him to bring a Catholic priest to my

SALVE 329

bedside, and if this were to happen, and I failed to
yell out in the holy man's ear when he bent over me
to hear my confession "To hell with the Pope," the
rumour would go forth that I died fortified by the
rites of the Holy Catholic Church.'

'But you aren't leavinjr us because you think
you're goinj^f to die at Tillyra, and that Edward will
bring a priest to your bedside ?'

' No, that would be hardly a sufficient reason for
leaving my friends ; but I confess that I should
like to die in a Pi'otestant country among my
co-religionists.'

' Moore is thinking of declaring himself a Pi'o-
testant.'

' The Colonel has said that it would be a great
grief to him if I were to do so ; but you'll excuse me,
Conan, if I don't stop to explain, for I notice that
JE hasn't touched his fish, and that Teresa has begun
to despair of being able to attract his attention to
the lobster sauce. JE, I shall be obliged to ask
everybody present to cease talking, so that you may
eat your fish. The spirit in you must have acquired
a great command over the flesh for that turbot not
to tempt you. It tastes to me as if it had only just
come out of the sea. A capon follows the turbot,
the whole of our dinner ; but have no fear, the bird
is one of the finest, weighing nearly five pounds.'

* What beneficent Providence led it into such
excesses of fat ?' cried Conan. ' It neither delved,
nor span, nor wasted its tissues in vain flirtation ; a
little operation released it from all feminine trouble,
and allowed it to spend its days in attaining a glory
to which Moore, with all his literature, will never

330 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!"

attain — the pflory of fat capon.' At the end of
our laughter, Conan cried : ' The unlabouring
brood of the coop. You know Yeats's line, " The
unlabouring brood of the skies ?" For a long time
I thought that Yeats was referring to the priests,
but he must have been thinking of capons ; no, he
knows nothing of capons. He must have been
thinking of the stars.

"Ohj songless bird, far sweeter than the rose !
And virgin as a parish priest, God knows !" '

Fearing that Conan's jests might scandalize
the gardener, and remembering that there was only
white wine on the table, I sent him to the house to
fetch the red wine, that Ave might drink it with the
chicken. Teresa could remain, for she had told me
she had not been to her duties for many a year, and
I had come to look upon her as one of my sheaves.

* A more fragrant bird was never carved, and I beg
of you, JE, to eat the wing that the Gods have given
you. He lived and died for us, and should not be
eaten thirsty. Here is the gardener with the m iue
that comes to me from Bordeaux in barrels — a
pleasant, soimd dinner wine. I don't press it upon
you as a vintage wine, but I am told that it is
by no means disgraceful. You see I am dependent
upon others, only knowing vin ordinaire from
Chateau Lq/ilte because of my preference for the
former. I warrant that the innocent nuns up
there, now all abed, wondering why the lights are
burning in my garden, are better wine-bibbers than
anybody at this t;ible, except perhaps Conan. All
a-row in their cells they lie, wondering what impiety

SALVE 331

their nei^libour is organizing. I suppose you have
all heard the report that I have re-establislied the
worship of Venus in this garden, bringing flowers
to her statue every morning ?'

' Perhaps they think these lamps are an illumina-
tion in her honour/ JE suggested.

* Causing them to look into their mirrors oftener
than the rule allows. There was a time when I liked
to stand at my back window and watch them follow-
ing winding walks under beautiful trees, while their
neighbours, the washerwomen, blasphemed over their
wash-tubs. The contrast between the slum and the
convent garden, separated by a nine-inch wall, used
to amuse me ; but now I take no further interest in my
nuns, not since they have put uj) that horrible red-brick

building — an examination hall or music-room '

' Spoiling excellent material for kitchen-maids,'
said Conan.

' Be that as it may, the most doleful sounds of harp
and violin come through the window, spoiling my
meditations. In Dublin there is no escape from the
religious. If I walk to Carlisle Bridge to take a car to
the Moat House I meet seminarists all along the pave-
ment, groups of threes and fours ; and full-blown
priests flaunt past me — rosy-cheeked, pompous men,
dangling gold watch-chains across their paunches,

and tipping silk hats over their benign brows '

' Their vulpine brows,' Conan said.
* A black queue stretching right across Dublin,
from Drumcondra along the Merrion Road The
other day a particularly aggressive priest walked
step for step Avith me as far as Sydney Parade,
and it seemed to me that when I altered my pace he

332 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

altered his. I was goinj; on to see John Efjlinton,
and no sooner had I outstepped the priest tlian the
great wall of the convent confronted me. I wonder
where all the money comes from ?'

' Out of Purgatory's bank,' Conan answered
cheerfully ; ' and there is no fear of them over-
drawing their account^ for money is always dribbling
in. Nothing thrives in Ireland like a convent, a
public-house, and a race-meeting. Any small house
will do for a beginning ; a poor box is put in the
wall, a couple of blind girls are taken in, and so
salubrious is our climate that the nuns find them-
selves in five years in a Georgian house situated in
the middle of a beautiful park. The convent whose
music distracts your meditations, is occupied by
Loreto nuns — a teaching order, where the daughters
of Dublin shopkeepers are sure of acquiring a nice
accent in French and English. St. Vincent's Hospital,
at the corner, is run by nuns who employ trained
nurses to tend the sick. The eyes of the modern
nun may not look under the bed-clothes; the medieval
nun had no such scruples. Our neighbourhood is a
little overdone in convents ; the north side is still
richer. But let's count what we have around us :
two in Leeson Street, one in Baggot Street and a
training college, one in Ballsbridge, two in Donny-
brook, one in Ranelugh ; there is a convent at
Sandymount, and then there is John Eglinton's con-
vent at Merrion ; there is another in Booterstown.
Stillorgan Road is still free from them ; but I hear
that a foreign order is watching the beautiful resi-
dences on the right and left, and as soon as one
comes into the market You have been hawking,

SALVE 333

my dear Moore, and I appeal to you that the hen bird
is much stronger, fiercer, swifter than the '

'The tiercel.'

' The tiercel, of course, for while he was pursuing
some quarry at Blackrock, the larger and the stronger
birds, the Sister of Mercy and the Sister of the
Sacred Heart struck down Mount Annville, Mill-
town, and Linden. All the same, the little tiercel
has managed to secure Stillorgan Castle on the
adjacent hillside, a home for lunatic gentlemen,,
most of them Dublin publicans.'

' Like my neighbour Cunningham, who only just
escaped incarceration.'

' His was a very tragic story,' said John Eglinton.
' Did you never suspect him of being a bit queer ?'

' It did often seem odd not to exchange a good-
morning from doorstep to doorstep, and always to
go off M ithout ever looking my way. But his old
housekeeper was affable enough ; she used to bid me
a kindly greeting when I returned home after a short
absence in the West, and she must have gossiped with
my servants, for some of the mystery with which he
surrounded himself vanished. I certainly did hear
from somebody that his rule was never to have a bite
or sup outside his own house ; it must have been my
cook who told me, and now I come to think of it she
added, somewhat contemptuously, that he dined in the
middle of the day and went out for his walk at three
o'clock.

'As the clock struck he sallied forth, a most
laughable and absurd little man, not more than two
inches over five feet ; a long, thick body was set on
the shortest possible legs, and he was always dressed

334 'HAIL AND FAREWELL I'

the same, in a yellow ovei'coat and wide jxi'cy trousers
not unlike dear Edward's. It would be an exafj-
geration to say that Cunningham was one of the
sights of Dublin when he rolled down the pavement
for his walk with a thick stick in his hand, a cor-
pulent cigar between his teeth, a white flower in
his button-hole. He was one of the minor sights
of Dublin as he went away towards the Phctnix
Park, a jolly little fellow to the casual observer, but to
me, who saw him every day, his good humour seemed
superficial and to overlie a deep-set melancholy.'

' The melancholy of the dwarf,' Conan said under
his breath.

' His walk M'as always up the main road of the
Phoenix Park, as far as Castleknock Gate and back
again, and I think his old housekeeper told Miss
Gough that he wouldn't miss his walk for the King
of England. You asked me if I knew him ; I never
saw anybody more determined not to make my
acquaintance. When we passed each other in the
street he always averted his eyes, and if I had been
polite I should have imitated him, but I could not
keep myself from looking into his comical eyes
turned up at the corners, and wondering at the
great roll of flesh from ear to ear, and at the chins
descending step by step into his bosom. It was
from Sir Thornley Stoker that I learnt how deter-
mined he was not to make my acquaintance. " You
can't guess," he said one day, "whom I have let out of
the room ? Your next-door neighbour, Cunningham.
1 begged him to stay to meet you, but it was im-
possible to persuade him. He said, ' Oh, no, I
won't meet George" '; and on Sir Thornley pressing

SALVE SS.O

him to give a reason, he refused, urging as an excuse
that I was an enemy of the Church. But I think
myself that he was afraid I would })ut into print
some of the stories that he used to tell against the
priests. He had stories about everybody, even
about me. That very afternoon Sir Thornley could
hardly speak for laughing. " If you had only heard

him just now telling " " But tell me what it

was." " I can't tell you. It's the Dublin accent
and the Dublin dialect. It was all about Eveli/n
Innes. You don't know what you've missed," and
he turned over in his chair to laugh again. " No,
there's no use my trying to tell it ; you should hear
Cunningham." " But I can't hear Cunningham ; he
won't know me." At last apologizing for spoiling
the story. Sir Thornley told me that I must take for
granted the racy description of two workmen who
had come to Upper Ely Place to mend the drains in
front of my house. After having dug a hole, they
took a seat at either end, and sat spitting into it
from time to time in solemn silence, until at last one
said to the other, "Do you know the fellow that
lives in the house forninst us ? You don't ? Well,
I'll tell you who he is : he's the fellow that wrote
Evelyn Innes." "And who was she ?" "She was a
great opera-singer. And the story is all about the
ould hat. She was lying on a crimson sofa with
mother-of-peai-1 legs when the baronet came into
the room, his eyes jumping out of his head and he
as hot as be damned. Without as much as a good-
morrow, he jumped down on his knees alongside of
her, and the next chapter is in Italy." '

' " The crimson sofa with the mother-of-pearl legs,"

336 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

and the baronet "as hot as be damned," would be
about as much of your story as a DubHn workman
would be hkely to gather from the book/ John
Eglinton said.

'The touch that Evelyn Innes is all about the old
hat is excellent/ Conan added, and then became
grave like a dog that licks his lips after a savoury
morsel. And, continuing, I told them how, in the
last three months before his death, we all noticed
a great change in Cunningham ; his face turned the
colour of lead, and the old housekeeper used to talk
to Miss Gough about him, not saying much, expres-
sing her alarm as old women do, with a shake of the
head. One day she said the master had gone very
queer lately, that he would sit for hours brooding,
not saying a word to anybody ; and it was about
three weeks after that she rushed into our house
distracted, M-ringing her hands, speaking incoherently,
telling us that, not finding her master in his bed-
room when she took him up his cup of tea, she had
gone to seek him in the closet, and not finding him
there, she had rushed up to the top landing. ' He
was after hanging himself from the banisters,' she
wailed, ' and I sent for the police and for his solicitor
and sat on the stairs till they came. No one will
ever know what he suffered. Didn't I tell Miss
Gough that he would sit for hours, and he not saying
a word to anyone } He must have been thinking of
it all that time, and little did I undersbind him when
he said — many and many's the time he said it as he
went ujistairs to bed : " They'll never get me as long
as I've got this right hand on my body." '

' 1 don't know if the tragedy transpires in my tell-

SALVE 337

ingj but what I see is a retired publican overcome by
scruples of conscience, his failing brain filled with
memories of how he had beguiled customers with
stories about the clergy into drinking more than was
good for them. A man of that kind would very soon
begin to believe that the allies of the clergy, the
demons, were after him, and that he could only save
himself by giving all his money for Masses for tlie
repose of his soul. And that is what he did. It all
went in Masses, or nearly all ; the relations got a
very small part, after threatening to contest the will.
But what interests me is the agony of mind that he
must have suffered week in, week out, repeating,
" They'll never get me as long as I've got this right
hand on my body." The phrase must have run in
the old housekeeper's head, and somebody, seeing
that his mind was giving way and fearing lest he
might kill himself, may have said to him : " You had
better put yourself under restraint." His adviser
may have suggested John of God's, and this advice,
though well-meant, may, perhaps, have destroyed
what remained of his poor mind. "They'll never
get me as long as I've got this right hand on my
body." It was with that phrase he went up to bed
one evening and hanged himself next morning from
the banisters with a leather strap. Miss Gough met
him coming home the evening before he killed him-
self, and she tells me that she'll never forget the
look in his face. Have you ever seen a maniac, and the
cunning look out of the corner of the eyes which says :
"Now you think you're going to get the best of me, but
you aren't." She remembers noticing that look in his
face as he passed her, his two hands thrust into the

Y

338 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

pockets of his short overcoat. He was brmging home
tlie strap, for the old woman said at the inquest that
he had bought it that evening. I suppose he was
hiding it under his overcoat. I wonder why he
waited till early next morning before hanging him-
self. Poor little man! That strap was the great
romance of his life.'

The phrase jarred a little. No one answered,
and then his voice hardly breaking the silence,
John Eglinton spoke of a tragedy that occurred
almost under his own windows, the barred windows
of an old coachmg inn, at the end of a little avenue
of elm-trees, down at Merrion, overlooking the great
park in which the convent stands. A nun had been
found drowned, whether by her companions or by
the gardener was not related in the newspapers —
merely the fact that she had been found in the pond
one morning. It was stated at the inquest that the
nun was a sleep-walker, and the verdict returned
was one of accidental death. The verdict of suicide
in a moment of temporaiy insanity would not have
been agreeable to the nuns, but to me, a teller of
tales, it is more interesting to think that she had
gone down in the night to escape from some
thought, some fear, some suffering that could be
endured no longer. She was free to leave the
convent ; the bars that restrained her were not iron
bars, but they were not less secui-e for that. She
may have suffered, like Cunningham, from scruples
of conscience, and gone down in despair to the pond.
'And while you were dressing yourself to go to
the National Library, she was floating among water-
weeds and flowers.'

SALVE 339

' Moore is tliinking of Millais's Ophelia,' said JE.

'Yes, and I was thinking of Evelyn Innes. The
most literary end for her would be to have drowned
herself in the fish-pond.'

' I'm sorry it didn't occur to you.'

' It did occur to me many times, and I could see
and hear the nuns coming down in the morning and
finding her floating.'

'A body doesn't float/ M said, 'till nine days
after. He can't shake himself free from the memory
of Ophelia'

Conan, who had been left out of the conversation
for a long time, was getting irritated, and he jumped
into it as an athlete jumps into the arena.

' Moore is wondering what thought, what fear, what
scruple of conscience may have sent her down to
that pond, as if it were not quite obvious what drove
her down there. She was in love with John, who
would not listen to her, and one night, finding that
he had put bars on his window, she walked towards
the pond, as Moore would say, like one overtaken
by an irreparable catastrophe.'

M and I laughed. John looked a little puzzled
and a little vexed, as he always does at any illusion
to himself. The wicket-gate clanged, and Teresa
came across the greensward, saying, ' Please, sir,
you're wanted on the telephone,' and Conan dis-
appeared quickly into the darkness.

We all wished — or perhaps it would be more
exact if I said that I wished — to discuss Conan
now that he had left us, and, seeking for some
natural transition, I watched a moth buzzing round
the globe of the lamp, and thought of the desire of

340 * HAIL AND FAREWELL!

the moth for the star. Conan would be able to
repeat the poem, but that transition would be too
obvious. It was the moon that gave me one — the
yellow sickle rising on a leaden sky among the arches
and chimneys of the convent.

' We have heard what Conan thinks of the
nuns ; now I wonder what the nuns would think of
Conan ?'

JE spoke of his reckless imagination and his power
of perceiving distant analogies, connecting the capon
and the priests with Yeats's line, ' The unlabouring
brood of the skies ' ; and, better still, the house of
symbols, the antique coffin, and the disconsolate
dealer standing at the end of Kingstown Pier
watching the furniture departing under a smoke
jiall.

' I wonder what he will become ?'

' I was much struck,' John Eglinton said, ' at
Meyer's prophecy. Do you remember it ? He said
that he had known many young men like Conan,
all very defiant until they were thirty ; and every
one, after thirty, had developed into common-
place fathers of families, renowned for all the
virtues.'

' I wonder will that be the end of Conan ?'

A deep silence followed, and then, half to myself
and half to my companions, I said :

' Do you think he has shaken himself free from
Catholic superstitions ?'

John Eglinton was not sure that he had done this.

' Merely telling stories about the avarice of priests
is not sufficient ; one must think oneself out of it,
and I'm not sure that Meyer isn't i-ight. Catholics

SALVE 341

are Agnostic in youth^ quiescent in middle age, craw-
thumpers between fifty and sixty.'

Then we began to talk, as all Irishmen do, of what
Ireland was, what she is, and what she is becoming.

' There is no becoming in Ireland,' I answered ;
'she is always the same — a great inert mass of
superstition.'

* Home Rule,' said M, ' will set free a flood of
intelligence.'

' And perhaps the parish priest will drown in this
flood.'

JE did not think this necessary.

' Do you think the flood of intelligence will pene-
trate into the convents and release the poor women
wasting their lives ?'

' I'm not thinking of nuns,' John Eglinton said ;
' those who have gone into convents had better
remain in them ; and Home Rule will be of no avail
unless somebody comes with it, like Fox or like
Bunyan, bringing the Bible or writing a book like

the Pilgrim s Progress Moore is too much of a

toff.'

' The Messiah will not wear the appearance that
you expect him to wear. Salvation always comes
from an unexpected quarter. It may come from M,
it may come from me, it may come from you.'

John laughed scornfully at the idea that he should
bring anybody anything.

' It was against my advice, John, that you named
your magazine after the goddess ; you should have
called it The Heretic'

' You are quite right, JE. We want heresy in
Ireland, for there can be no religious thought with-

342 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

out heresj'. Spain declined as soon as she rid lierself
of lier hereticSj if one can call Mohammedanism
a lieresy ; at least, it was a competitive religion ;
the persecution of the Protestants in France was
followed by the expulsion of the Jesuits and the
confiscation of their lands. No country can afford
to be without heretics, and, in view of the tendency
of Catholic countries to rid themselves of their clerg}',
wouldn't it be a good thing for the Irish Bishops to
send Logue to the Vatican so that he might exjilain
to His Holiness the necessity of Protestantism? "You
needn't look further than Ireland for an apt illustra-
tion,holy Father. If, on the passing of the Home Rule
Bill, we are set to work to persecute the Protestant
minority, the terrible fate of exile may be mine.
We must look ahead, holy Father." '

'Logue may beg His Holiness to withdraw the
Ne Tcmere decree,' said John Eglinton.

' I wouldn't advise Logue to be too exj)licit. The
decree can be politely ignored by the Irish Bishops.
When a Catholic girl who is going to marry a
Protestant approaches the priest to learn in what
religion her children shall be brought up, he will
answer her : " In tlie religion of your husband." " But
my husband is a Protestant." " M}' dear daughter,
we do not know if he'll remain a Protestant ; we
rely on you to use every effort to persuade him from
the errors of Protestantism, so that your children
may be brought up in our Holy Church." And to
the young man who wishes to marry a I'rotestfuit girl
the priest will say : " Your children will be brought
up in the religion of their mother." " But tlieir
mother is a Protestant." " We do not know, my

SALVE 343

dear son, that your wife will remain a Protestant ;
if you will do all in your power to bring her into the
one true fold, I am eonfident that you'll succeed." '

' The idea is an ingenious one/ said John Eglinton,
and Teresa came across the sward to tell me that
Mr. Osborne, Mr. Hughes, Mr. Longworth, Mr.
Seumas O' Sullivan, Mr. Atkinson, and Mr. Yeats,
were waiting in the dining-room.

' Will you have coffee in the house or out here,
sir ?'

' We had better have it in the house. The table
has to be cleared. And Teresa, please place a lamp
at the wicket, for if you don't you'll certainly break
my dessert service and hurt yourself. Come, M, I've
got a cigar for you that I think will please you, and
afterwards you can smoke your pipe.'

XX

' In what part of London do you think of settling ?'
John Eglinton asked, as we passed out of the
Library.

' I haven't given the matter a thought,' I answered.

The fireman accosted John in the vestibule, and we
waited till the last stragglers had passed out and the
great doors were closed.

' Would you care for a walk down the Pembroke
Road and back by Northumberland Road over the
canal bridge before going to bed ?'

^Of course I should ; I haven't been out all day,
but '

' You're tired ?'

344 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

* No, I'm not tired/ and, hupin^r that he would
not speak again of my departure from Ireland, we
stepped out together, the lie that I had told him
reverberating all the while unpleasantly, awaking in
my memory every sentence of the letter which I had
written to Tonks asking him to look out for a house
for me.

He had written telling me that Steer was looking
forward to seeing me again, and that together they
had found a house that would suit me in Swan Walk ;
but it would be well if I would come over to see it at
once, for it was just one of those houses that would
not remain long without a tenant. ' Of course I'll
go,' I had said to myself moving towards the writing-
table. But no sooner had I reached it than an
unaccountable apathy seized me, and after a short
struggle with myself the writing of the letter was
postponed till next morning ; but next morning,
when I thought of it, I turned hurriedly to my own
writings. And this had hapjiened again and again,
until my reluctance to answer Tonks' letter suggested
the possibility that my subconscious self desired to go
and live in Paris. Whereupon I had written to Dujar-
din, who is always looking forward to seeing me in an
appartevient in Paris where we could continue our theo-
logical discussions till one in the morning, pulling all
the while at our cigars. The dear man must have
put himself to some trouble, for he had discovered
an apparteineiit in which I could hang all my pictures,
five or six vast rooms on the Boulevard St. Germain,
and the rent only four thousand francs a year.
Again I had gone to the writing-table, with the
intention of writing that I would go over at the end

SALVE 345

of the week ; but on picking up the pen I liad
experienced the same unaccountable apatliy. I
could not write to my landlord telling him that I
intended to give up my house at the end of my lease.
And I went out every evening brooding on Rome and
Canterbmy . . . There are past moments that come
up with the sensual conviction of a present moment ;
and one of these is a dark September night at the
corner of the Appian Way. I must have come
through the Clyde Road admiring, as I passed, the
tall pillared porticoes which give the villas a certain
elegance, and the lofty trees, elms, beeches, dense
chestnuts, and dark hollies, amid which the villas
stand. In my humour it was a sort of solace to stop
and to remember Auteuil. The Rue de Ranelagh
exists, doesn't it ? Elle donne sur la rue de V Assomp-
tion n'est-ce pas ? Some such random association of
names may have caused me to keep to the left in the
direction of Upper Leeson Street, or it may have
been that I kept on that way because the Tyrrells
used to live there ; now they are in Clonskeagh.
I am aware of that dark September night at the
corner of the Appian Way as I am of the moment
I am now living ; the sky grey above the trees,
and a sycamore leaf fluttering down from a great
bough to my feet, and myself, yielding to a vague
feeling of apprehension, stepping aside to avoid
treading on it, and it was immediately after that the
temptation rose again, coming up as it were out of
my very bowels ; yet the temptation was not of a
woman or any part of a woman, but a desire to enter
the Irish Church in the sense of identifying myself
with it.

3^6 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !*

Hitherto my desire had been merely to disassociate
myself from a Chui'ch which I deemed shameful,
whereas I was now conscious of a desire of unity with a
Church in sjnnpathy with my religious as])irations . . .
to some extent. But I had promised the Colonel not
to declare myself a Protestant, meaning thereby that
I would not write to the papers on the subject, nor
call Dublin together to hear a lecture on the in-
comj)alibility of Literature and Dogma. ' But my
promise to the Colonel,' I said, ' keeps me out of
St. Patrick's every Sunda}'. For me to be seen
there would be equivalent to a declaration of
Protestantism. This is a great privation, for I
like to go to church occasionally and to pray with
the congregation. To whom I know not, but I
pray. . . .*

A little later in the evening I found myself stand-
ing before a tall iron gate peering through the bars,
admiring some golden tassels. ' Golden rod,' I
said, ' and the borders, I am sure, are blue with
lobelia.' A sudden scent of honey warned me that
arabis was there in plenty, and I walked on, thinking
of a dense cushion of pure white flowers, till my steps
were again stayed, and this time it was by the sight

of It seemed like a quince, but the quince does

not bear beautiful jjink and white blossoms, bell-
shaped blossoms like the azalea, only larger. The
blossom is more like a mallow than an azalea ... Is
it fair of the Colonel to ask me to leave this beautiful
place ?' I came upon another garden-gate overhung
with s}Tinga. Its flowering season was long over, but
I remembered how sweetly it had perfumed the
whole neighbourhood two months ago.

SALVE 347

Our belief in the existence of God and of heaven
and of liell may drop from us, but we never lose
our belief that a destiny is leading us by the hand ;
and it was on my way home from Clonskeagh that I
asked myself if it were because destiny claimed my
allegiance to the Irish Church that I found myself
unable to leave Dublin. The explanation was more
acceptable to me than the stupid superstition that
Cathleen ni Houlihan had bewitched me again ; and
next day, in the middle of a dictation, I stopped,
overcome by the temptation to declare myself a
Protestant. . . . John Eglinton had said that the
Archbishop would have me believe in the resurrec-
tion of the body. Again I became despondent, and
it seemed for two or three days that my difficulties
could not be disentangled.

A letter came one morning, and I said : ' This is
an invitation to stay with friends in England.' To
my great surprise, it required no effort on my part
to write a note accepting the invitation and to post
it, nor did I experience any difficulty in telling
my servant that my clothes were to be packed. A
car took me in the morning without accident to the
North Wall ; I stepped on board the steamer, and
it moved away from the quay so easily that I
believed no longer in destiny.

' The woof of life,' I said, ' is merely a tangle, and
our imagination deceives us when we think that we
perceive any design in it.'

The friends I was going to see live in an English
village grouped round a church, and a few days
afterwards the parson asked me to read the Lessons
for him. The hard names caused me some apijrehen-

348 «HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

sion, but I continued in a clear voice, and after lunch,
when the parson and I went for a walk together, he
thanked me and hoped that while I remained at

1 would be kind enouoli to read the Lessons for

him. He had to take three services every Sunday,
and it was necessary for him to save his voice as much
as possible.

In the course of our conversation I soon discovered
him to be an excellent scholar, and we spoke about
Oxford, about the advantage of a classical education,
about Elizabethan English and how well it had served
Andrew Lang in his translation of the Odyssey. The
old man won my confidence, and I told him I
had always felt Roman superstitions to be a low
fomi of paganism, and did not believe Romanism to
be compatible with civilization. He seemed to think
this an exaggerated statement, but I explained that
England had never been a Catholic country at any
time, the English Church having always been an
independent Church, and this was proved by tlie
fact that England was always in trouble with Rome,
from Henry H.'s time onward until Henry Will.
finally cut the knot. Elizabeth had tied another
knot which we hoped would never be undone. Nor
could France be looked upon as a Catholic country.
The Refomiation had been stamped out only after
many massacres, and these massacres had created
an independent spirit.

' Literature, my dear sir, has always been Agnostic
in France ; only Spain and Ireland can be looked
upon as truly Catholic'

This excellent man asked me to his house, and
I spent some delightful evenings with him, discuss-

SALVE 349

ing the questions that were near our intellects and
our hearts, while his wife sewed on the other side
of the fireplace ; and every Sunday I read the
Lessons for him, and when I returned to Ireland
at the end of the month I brought back with me
a superficial, but sincere, admiration of the language
of our Bible and a fixed determination to read it, from
Genesis to Revelation.

I approached the Bible in a twofold spirit — as a
man of letters and as one interested in religious
problems — and found Genesis to be a collection of
beautiful folk-tales, less subtle, less cultured than
the Greek, a rougher and more primitive art. A rocky
landscape, indeed, is Genesis, with here and there
a few palm-trees and a rivulet, and in the distance
the patriarchs moving their flocks onwards. A cruel
and barbarous people their folk-lore exhibits them
to be, with but one instinct — that of race preservation.
' Never did a people believe in the race they belong
to as firmly as these Hebrews,' I said, after reading
how the daughters of Lot, finding themselves alone
with their father, without hope of other men, engage
to make him drunken so that they may lie with him,
turn and turn about, and the excuses they give for
their incest is that they must do this so that they
may preserve the seed of their father. And this
belief in the importance of the preservation of the
race seems to have been the sole morality of the
Hebrews. It transpires again in the story of Abraham
and Sarah. Sarah, Abraham's wife and half-sister,
bare him no children, and feeling that before all
things the race must be preserved, she said to him :
' I pray thee go in unto my maid ; it may be that I

350 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

may obtain children by her.' Ishmacl is born, but
as soon as Sarah has conceived Isaac, she turns
Hagar and her son Ishmael into the wilderness
with a bottle of water and a loaf of bread. When
the Lord commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the
poor boy is laid upon the sacrificial rock, and the
Lord, wishing to try his servant, does not stay his
servant's hand until the last moment. The staying
of the hand at the last moment read to me like an
emendation introduced into the text at some later
period, and my suspicions were confirmed by certain
passages in Kings and Judges. But my attention
was distracted from the ancient rites of the Israelites
by a story crueller than any I had hitherto read.
A Levite went up from Mount Ephraim to Bethlehem-
Judah to bring back a concubine who had played
the M'hore against him and then gone to live in her
father's house. The damsel's father persuades the
Levite to remain five days, and at the end of five
days he departs with his concubine, resting in
Gibeah, where he can find no one to give him
shelter for the night except an old man whom he
meets coming from his work in the fields. That
night, as they are making their hearts merry, certain
sons of Belial beset the house and call on the old
man to bring forth the stranger so tliat they may
know him. Ajid the old man goes out of the house
and says to them, ' Nay, my brethren ; nay, I pray
you, do not so wickedly ; seeing that this man is
come into mine house, do not this folly. Behold,
here is my daughter, a maiden, and his concubine ;
them I will bring out now and humble ye them,
and do with them what seemeth good unto you ;

SALVE 3.51

but unto this man do not so vile a thiufj.' But the
men would not hearken unto him ; so the man took
his concubine and brought her forth unto them ;
and they knew her^ and abused her all the night
until the morning, and when the day began to
spring they let her go.

* Then came the woman in the dawnmg of the day
and fell down at the door of the man's house where
her lord was till it was light. And her lord rose up
in the morning and opened the doors of the house
and went out to go his way ; and behold ! the
woman, his concubine, was fallen down at the door
of the house, and her hands were upon the threshold.
And he said unto her: " Up, and let us be going."
But none answered. Then the man took her up
upon an ass, and the man rose up and gat him unto
his place. And when he was come into his house
he took a knife and laid hold on his concubme, and
divided her, together with her bones, into twelve
pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel.'

In the Book of Samuel we come upon a story of
rape and incest which it would be difficult to match
— the story of Tamar and her brother Anuion, the
son of David. The poor girl after violation is turned
out of the house. She says to Amnon : ' This evil in
sending me away is greater than the other that
thou didst unto me.' But he would not hearken to
her, and she returned desolate to Absalom's house.
Absalom never forgave his brother for this crime ;
and after two years he persuades David to allow
Amnon to accompany him to Baal-hazor for sheep-
shearing, and it is there that he orders his servants
to kill Amnon.

352 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

*It is lucky,' I said, 'that morals are not de-
pendent upon literature, for if they were we should
still be as the Hebrews ;' and I thought for a long
time of the enormous circulation of this book.

As a child I used to hear my father speak of the
Book of Job. He used to quote a verse in which
God spoke out of the whirlwind, and I still remember
my perplexity, for it was difficult for me at that time
to understand why this phrase should be considered
more beautiful than the many beautiful things I had
read in Shelley's Prometheus ; and wlien I came to
read the story I was disappointed to find it little
more than a crude folk-tale, which various rhetoricians
had striven to lift into tragedy, and not by developing
the human motive of purification by suffering as
Tourgueneflf' would have done, but by overlaying it
with rhetoric. If I dare to criticize a story that all
the world admires, it is because it seems to me that
the Hebrew rhetorician appears for the first time in
Job. He fails to win my sympathy, and the most I
can do is to admit him to be a man of disordered
genius, who screams out everything that comes into
his head, caring not at all for composition, or even
for sequence in his phrases. His intention is to
coerce and to frighten, and if now and then he
blasts out a striking phrase, it is peradventure.

And they that rewrote the Book of Job also
wrote the Psalms. The method and the intention
are the same — to coerce and to frighten. It is true
that occasionally the Psalmist desired to sing some-
thing, but he never seems to have made up his mind
clearly as to what he wanted to sing. He seems to
have always preferred the roar of his heart's disquiet

SALVE 353

to composition, and it often happened to me to lay
my Bible aside so that I might wonder more easily
why the ordinary reader should like this literature
better than any other. The ordinary reader demands
some sort of sequence, and is not very liable to be
taken by the beauty of a phrase ; nor can it be
averred that an occasional beautiful plu'ase makes
good literature. A gipsy following his mood on his
fiddle may hit on a fine phrase, but he is not a great
musician for that.

To make a long story short, my quarrel with all
tliis literature is the absence of piano passages.

But the disquiet of the Psalmist is not difficult to
understand. He lives in terror of a God, a jealous,
revengeful God, always ready to destroy, a God that
gave ' his people also unto the sword and was wroth
with his inheritance.' The fire we are told ' con-
sumed their young men, and their maidens were not
given in marriage ; their priests fell by the sword,
and their widows made no lamentation.' And when
all this was done ' The Lord awaked as one out of
sleep, and like a giant refreshed with wine, he
smote his enemies in the hinder parts and put them
to a perpetual shame.'

After Proverbs comes Ecclesiastes, a beautiful
Agnostic work in which God for the first time in the
Bible seems to get the worst of it ; he recedes into
the background ; over him, too, a fate seems to hang,
and were it not for this book, it might well be that I
had not continued the Bible into Isaiah. And for
all the profit I have gotten out of this prophet he might
have been passed over. Almost at once did I l)egin
to read that ^ the daA' of the Lord cometh to lay the

354 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

land desolate and to destroy sinners out of it ; that
the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof
shall not give light, and that the earth shall be
removed out of her place in the wrath of the Lord of
Hosts, and be chased as a roe, and as a sheep that no
man taketh up ;' and that everyone that is found
' shall be thrust through, and everyone that is joined
unto them shall fall by the sword, that their children
also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes, their
houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.'
Isaiah, like the Psalmist, always speaks at the top of
his voice : ' Moab shall liowl for Moab ; everyone
shall howl.' ' Pass ye over to Tarshish ; howl ye
inhabitants of the isle.' And the Psalmist continues
to howl without a single piano passage, until his
howl is taken up by Jeremiah, whose howls are
shriller than any in literature. Jeremiah howls in
and out of season, until at last he is thrown into a
well, and I confess that I despaired when he was
drawn out of it, for I knew that he would continue
his Lamentations as before . . . and he did.

Ezekiel follows Jeremiah, and, tempted by the
picturesqueness of his name, I cast my eyes down
the narrative of a vision in which four winged
creatures appear out of fire and flame, whose wings
were joined one to another, and they had hands
under their wings. After these came the Lord who
commanded his prophet to go to the children of
Israel that had rebelled against him, and so that he
might be able to speak to them the prophet was
given a roll of a book which was written within and
without and told to eat it. He did eat it, little
thinking of the next course the Lord had prepared

SALVE 355

for him. He was to do this tJiat and the other
thing, and finally the Lord laid ujjonhim the iniquity
of the House of Israel and of the House of Judah and
commanded him to drink water by measure and to
eat it as barley cakes and to bake it witli ' the dung
that cometh out of man ' ; whereupon the pro})het
implores mercy, and the merciful God allows his pro-
phet to spread his bread with cow-dung instead.

' The filthiest God that ever came out of Asia/
I said, and, throwing down the book, walked out of
the house, feeling that I could not stand a moment
longer the reek of sacrifice and the howls of Der-
vishes. My garden seemed too small and confined,
and I rushed away to Stephen's Green, the Dublin
mountains being so far away that my mood would
have passed, and daylight too, before I reached
them. ' The Green must suffice,' I said, and turned
into it, glad to see again the brimming lake. The
reader remembers it curving like a wonderful piece
of caligraphy among the lawns, flowing about, and
found again in many backwaters where the ducks
preen themselves and resent any intrusion on their
privacy, going away as if they were real wild ducks,
with a rush of wings and querulous quackings. They
will not desert their beloved lake, where they should
be happy if anything in the world is happy, but will
alight somewhere near the island, under the high
shores, where the river tumbles over high rocks. It
was beguiled from underground, and somewhere near
where I am standing it bubbles away in a moist and
sedgy corner, no doubt satisfied with all the great show
it has made for us during its brief visit above ground.

But though soothed in a measure by the loveliness

356 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

of the evening on the quiet lake, it was impossible
to forget the terrible God, whicli we have accepted,
throwing out our own fair Divinities to make way
for him, a God that seems to be getting crueller as
he gets older. ' Now he has a hell/ I said, ' where
demons baste the buttocks of those who refuse to
adore him.' That such a father should have had
such a son ! The willows dipi)ed their leaves in the
quiet water, and the great elms whispered their
secret in my ear as I went in search of the humble
hawthorns — dour little trees, not remarkable for
height of stem or length of branch.

On my way to them I came upon foreign trees,
but they had no word of comfort for me ; and I
turned to the birch that bent over the waterfall,
graceful as a naiad. And my reverie over, I admired
the geese grazing persistently, undeterred by the fail-
ing light and the ducks climbing out of the water.
Some had put their heads under their wings — ' which
serves them for bedclothes,' I said. After a brief doze
a head would reappear, the duck would look round, a
little vexed, seeing that it was not yet night, and I
began to wonder if the gulls had gone away to
Howth and Bray Head, or if they roosted among
the clefts over against the waterfall or in the caves
of the isle. The sparrows Avere shrilling in the
hawthorns — their trees — when suddenly an infinite
and furious flock rose out of the branches, unable
to bear the company of some intolerable companion.
A moon, pale and shapeless, appeared in the southern
sky, and soon afterwards the star that leads all
thiiiirs homeward — the lamb to the ewe and the
child to its mother. Sappho saw and heard these

SALVE 357

natural sights and sounds, and sang them three
thousand years ago. A glade opened up before
me, and I crossed it, meeting at the otiier end Ernest
Longworth, the young man that had entertained
me at the banquet at the Shelbourne Hotel with
many diverting anecdotes.

He had estranged my sympathies after the ice-
pudding by some remark regai-ding the literary value
of the Irish language ; and the estrangement had
become more marked after a certain speech delivered
in some disused chambers. Lady Gregory had
invited some young men from Trinity to hear Yeats
speak about art and the mission of the artist. 'One
mustn't think only of oneself, but of the next genera-
tion,' she said to Hughes, Walter Osborne and myself,
and we had sat down to listen resignedly to the
usual luscious talk that the mission of the artist is to
create beautiful things — ' Sydney's sister, Pembroke's
mother ' — and when this had gone on for about half
an hour and the poet had sat down, Lady Gregory
had called on Ernest to continue the discussion.
He had done so as well as another ; his talk was no
worse nor better than what one hears on these
occasions, and it was foolish of me to be angry with
him, and to keep him at a distance for many months ;
I might have gone on depriving myself of the
pleasure of his entertaining and instructive com-
panionship for ever if a few words spoken at the
corner of the street had not revealed the immensity
of my mistake to me. That evening at the corner
of Hume Street we became friends, and the evening
in the Green he appeared to me to be the very
companion that I had been seeking all my life.

358 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

After the first few casual remarks I knew he would
be sure to ask me what I had been writing or what
I had been reading.

* I have been reading the Bible/ I said, ' for the
last week or ten days, giving the Book more attention
than I have ever given to any book before. At the
present moment, however, I feel like never opening
the Jiook again. I got as far as Ezekiel,' and I told
him the disgusting anecdote that sent me out of the
house in search of fresh air.

' You've been shocked, I can see, by certain inci-
dents of a kind '

' Always the same kind, nothing else. At this
moment I cannot tliink of a single noble action
recorded.'

' You would if you weren't so indignant. It seems
to me that you have only seen one thing in the Bible
— the brutality '

' Of the filthiest of people, without art or science or
anjiihing to recommend them.'

' You overlook the fact, if I may be allowed to say
so, that the Bible is something more than a theo-
logical work. It is a history of a race which
develo])ed, as no other race has done, a sense of life
in its most important aspect.

' Solomon had to send to Tyre lor workmen to
build his temple.'

' Very likely he had. The genius of the Jewish
race did not find expression in the arts and sciences,
but in morals.'

' Morals !'

' The Bible is a rule of conduct.'

' Good God ! What paradox is this, Ernest ? This

SALVE 359

evening you are exceeding yourself. Go on, I
beseech you. Conduct of life ! Murder, rape,
sodomy, incest. Heavens ! Go on. Conduct of
life !'

' You mistake certain incidents related in the
Bible for the teaching of the Bible, 'J'he idea is not
mine, but Matthew Arnold's. It was he who pointed
out that, while the genius of the Greeks was to aim at
and to attain, perfect beauty in sculpture and litera-
ture, while they had in an especial degree the sense
for science and art, the Hebrews had the sense for
conduct and righteousness. The law of righteous-
ness was the main concern of their thinking, of their
literature. Their idea of a God may have been —
doubtless was — primitive and barbarous, but Israel
at no time lost his sense of the connection between
conduct and happiness. If you have read tlie Book
of Ezra, you have seen that the life of a Hebrew
is laid down there from the cradle to the
grave.'

'A race without statues, or literature, or original
music'

' It may be that conduct does not tend to produce
great art.'

' Perhaps the Hebrew paid too dearly for his
survival.'

'That is another question. You'd better read
Arnold's book.'

' No ; his prose is much too Rugby for me. But
I hke his idea ; there seems to be something in it.
The feeling that one is mad, or all the rest of the
w^orld is mad, is not altogether pleasant. Has he
anything to say about the New Testament ?'

360 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

' Yes ; I think liis theory is that the Old Testa-
ment is conduct, and the New conduct touched
with emotion. But it is fifteen years since 1 saw
the book,'

XXI

' Are you free tliis evening ? You might come
home with me, and we'll talk the matter out.'

He was dining with the Tyrrells, and I went home
alone to try to discover what he meant when he said
that the Gospels were conduct touched with emotion.
' That the Bible is a book of conduct is arguable/ I
said ; ' all the prophets, the greater and the lesser,
are moralists — vulgar, uncouth, if you will, but
moralists in a sense that the Greeks were never, and
the commercial idea of Western Europe needed an
explicit code, for the Bible and commerce go hand-
in-hand among Protestants as well as among Jews,
and wherever the Catholic Church has become
dominant, and set itself above the Bible and
abolished the Bible, the industrial and commercial
civilization has decaj-ed, Belgium being a tiny ex-
ce])tion to the rule ; even Catholicism cannot invalidate
the advantages of a port like Antwerp.'

But what did Ernest mean when he said that the
New Testament was conduct touched witli emotion ?
It was too late to go to the National Library to look
up Arnold's essay, and in vain did I turn the words
over and over. It was not until midnight that it
occurred to me to read the Gospels themselves.
The Sermon on the Mount revealed Arnold's meaning
to me. He meant that the Psalmist was insufficiently

SALVE 361

endowed with literary expression ; he had been
trying for centuries to say ' Blessed are the poor in
spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven/ but
the idea had remained rudimentary until Christ
came. I continued to read, my ravishment in-
creasing at every sentence, until, weary with too
much emotion, I had to lay the Book aside, asking
myself, as I fell back in my chair, how it was that
I had remained so long stuck in the belief that
Christianity had brought nothing into the world but
chastity and melancholia.

' How ignorant are our teachers !' I muttered.
' How little do they understand what they teach !'
and I grew indignant at the wrongs that had been
done and are still being done, the tacking on of things
that do not belong to Christianity, and the neglecting
of the essential, the great literary art of its Founder.
The story of the Passion is beautiful, but it would not
have captured men's minds without Christ's own
words. 'A Divine artist, whether God or man,' I said,
'and I know an artist when I meet him.'

After this little outburst I turned to the Book
again and read on, my admiration deepening always,
till at last I began to feel that before going to bed
I must go and tell it to somebody. JE was away on
his holidays, painting in Donegal ; John Eglinton
was sleeping quietly in his bed over against the
convent; Best is only moderately interested in
literature ; he is too completely absorbed in the
affixed pronoun, and I walked about the room, asking
myself how much I would give that night for assuage-
ment in somebody's intellectual arms. ' I must do
something,' I said, 'or I shall not close my eyes

362 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

to-nicrht. But what can I do ? I can't go to
Merrion Square and deliver an oration ; there would
be nobody to listen to me but the policeman, and he
might take me to the station.'

A vehement desire finds an outlet always, and
suddenly I felt myself projjelled to my writing-
table to write to the Archbishop, 'who, after all,' I
said, Ms the right person, the person whose business
it is to hear me. A simple statement is the best.
We shall be able to go into particulars after-
wards.'

' Your Grace,

' For the last three years, since I came to live
in Ireland, my thoughts have been directed towards
religion, and I have come to see that Christianity in
its purest form is to be found in the Anglican rather
than in the Church of Rome. I am anxious to
become a member of your Church, and shall be glad
to hear from your Grace regarding the steps I am
to take.'

And before the directed envelope I stood, trying
to collect my thoughts sufficiently to decide whether
I should take my letter to His Grace's house and
drop it into his box myself, or post it in the pillar.
' It should come to him through the post,' I said,
and after posting it walked home much relieved.

The Bible lay on the table. ' No, I'll not read it
again — not to-night.' Next morning after breakfast
my tlioughts went at once to the Book, and by
midday many s])urious passages had been discovered,
for instance, that very commonplace, reeking-of-
Bishop, passage : ' Thou art Peter, and upon this

SALVE 363

rock I will build my church ; and the gates of
hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give
unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven ;
and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be
bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose
on earth shall be loosed in heaven/ — a passage so
obviously needful for the founding of a Church that
the policeman round the corner, if one were to bring
him in, would say, ' Well, sir, it doesn't look much
like the genuhie article, do it ? We'd call it " fake "
up at the station.' Yes, of course, fake — and the most
blatant 'fake.' It was necessary to have Christ's
authority for an apostolic succession and the right
to collect money, to lay down the law, to judge
others — all the things that Christ expressly de-
clared should not be done ; and in my indignation
I compared the ordinary Christians, Avho accejjt
this piece of ecclesiasticism as Christ's words, to
the artistic people we meet every day who admire
equally Botticelli, Burne-Jones, Corot, Sir Alfred
East, Tourgudneff, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. ' The
common man,' I said, 'makes the same mess of
pottage out of religion as he does out of art.'

This sad thought caused me to drop into a long
meditation, and I remembei-ed, on awaking, that the
passage from Matthew, the utility of which the police-
man round the corner could not fail to see, had been
improved upon by the Bishoj) who wrote about one
hundred and fiftyyears after the Crucifixion. The need
for a more explicit text than the one from Matthew
had begun to be felt, and the Bishop su))j)lied,
' Whosesoever sins ye remit they are remitted unto
them ; whosesoever sins ye retain they are retained.'

364- ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

And, so disturbed was I by tlie retoucliing of the text
by ecclesiastics that I resolved to compile for my
own use and benefit a list of the autlientic sayings,
and, calling Miss Gough, I dictated them to her,
adding as a little appendix all the words that had
obviously been inserted by the Fathers ; for in-
st^mce, 'Be not angry with thy brother without just
cause.'

' " Without just cause " degrades Christ. These
three words turn him into a reasonable and common-
place person. It will be interesting. Miss Gough —
won't it ? — to have the Archbishop's opinion uj)on
these texts when I go to the Palace.'

I had expected a letter from Dr. Peacock by
return of post, and not receiving one, it seemed to
me that the interval could not be better employed
than by looking into the Acts. The first words
that fixed my attention were the words of the
beginning of the fifth chapter : ' But a certain
man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold
a possession, and ke)»t buck part of the price, his
wife also being privy to it, and brought a certain
part, and laid it at the Apostles' feet. But Peter
said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to
lie to the Holy Ghost and to keep back jiart of the
price of the land } Whiles it remained, was it not
thine own ? and after it was sold, was it not in thine
own power .'' Why hast thou conceived this thing in
thine heart ? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto
God.' Whetlier Peter was ever Bishop of Rome is
a matter on which ecclesiastical authorities are un-
decided, but there can be no doubt that he was,
and is, and ever will be. Parish Priest in the county

SALVE 365

of Galway. ' Stephen was stoned in the streets of
Jerusalem, and Paul standing by/ I said, and rushed
on to the story of Paul's conversion on the road to
Damascus. It was not, however, until Paul bade
good-bye to his disciples and friends at Ei)hesus that
he won all my admiration and instinctive s}anpathy.
In this most beautiful farewell, one of the most
moving and touching things in literature, Paul takes
us to his bosom ; two thousand years cannot separate
us — we become one with Paul and glorify God in
him.

And these noble verses are not Paul's single con-
tribution to the Acts; he is so evident in these
narratives of adventure that it is difficult to imasrine
how they came to be attributed to Luke. The
narrative of the shipwreck and the journey to Rome
could only have been written by a man of literary
genius, and there are never two at the same time.
The trial at Caesarea is Paul's own renderinff of his
defence. Of course it is, and I wondered how anyone
could have entertained, even for a moment, the
notion that Luke ' made it up.' How did he make
it up ? From hearsay ? Blind men and deaf know-
ing nothing of the art of writing ! Luke may have
edited Paul's manuscripts, and his recension may be
the farewell at Ephesus, the trial at Ca?sarea, and
the journey to Rome. But it is certaiiv tliat Paul's
voice, and no other voice, is heard in these narratives ;
and it is a voice that is always recognizable from
every other voice. We do not hear it in the Epistle
to the Hebrews, nor do we hear it in the thirteenth
chapter of 1st Corinthians, a chapter which I have
no hesitation whatever in taking from Paul and

366 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

attributing to a disciple of John's. But I do not
know if any other exegetist has rejected this chapter.
Many liave rejected the Epistles to the Ephesians, the
Philip})ians, the first and second Colossians, but it
seems to me that I hear Paul's voice in all of these.
The Archbishop will no doubt be surprised that I
should admit so much. All Avill go well if he
doesn't press upon me the E})istle to the Hebrews.
John Eglinton has warned me that I shall be asked
to accept the resurrection of the body, and if this
dogma is pressed upon me, I shall have to answer :
' I'm afraid, Your Grace, it is impossible for me to
go further than Paul, who isn't very explicit on this
point.'

The postman's knock startled me. He brouglit
the long-wished-for letter, and it was treasured
for many years, but it has been unfortunately
lost and a hiatus occurs in my narrative which it
is only possible for me to fill up inadequately. He
began his letter by exj)laining that he was staying
at the seaside with his family, and there had been
some delay at the Palace in forwarding my letter.
It was a great joy to him to hear that my coming to
Ireland had been the means of leading me back to
Christ ; and he admitted, I think, that there might
be many little points which he would be able to clear
up for me, but as he was not returning to Dublin
for some weeks the most natural course, he said,
was to send my letter to my parish priest : the
Reverend Gilbert Mahaffy would call upon me.

It would be unreasonable to expect him to leave
his family and come to Dublin to engage in a Biblical
discussion with a neophyte. All the same it was a

SALVE 367

disappointment to have to discuss certain inipoi'tant
points with my ' parish priest ' instead of with the
Archbishop himself. The words ' parish priest '
always seemed to me to savour of Rome. His letter
slipped from my fingers, and I sat for a long time
thinking of what this Archbishop was like. His
name conveyed the idea of a tall, formal man,
and perhaps the interview that I had desired, a
cosy talk, our chairs drawn up to the fire, would
not have happened. I am sure it would have
been a very stiff and formal aiTair, myself and the
Archbishop on either side of a mahogany table
covered with papers and piles of letters held together
by elastic bands. So what did happen was perhaps
the best of all happenings. I had always desired to
make the Reverend Gilbert Mahaffy's acquaintance.
We had been neighbours for a long time ; the
Rectory was No. 13, Ely Place, one door from the
great iron gateway that divides my little cul-de-sac
from Ely Place ; and he was known to me as a man
of the very kindliest disposition. Gill often told me
in our walks of his work among the poor, of his effu-
sive enthusiasm and energy. 'A rare soul,' I had
often said as he passed me on his charitable errands,
absorbed in his thoughts, his short legs moving so
quickly under the long frock-coat buttoned to the
chin, that he seemed to be running. I could recall
the high shoulders showing straight and pointed,
the wide head shaded by the soft felt hat, the large
straight nose, the cheeks and chin covered with a soft
greying beard and the kindly eyes — ' Eyes,' I said,
' that always seem to be on the lookout for somebody's
trouble.'

368 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!*

Gilbert Mahaffy's appearance had appealed to me,
■winning me before a word had been exchanged be-
tween us ; all the same, I was conscious of a little
resentment. He had never called upon me ; he
looked the other way when we passed in tlie street,
treating me exactly like poor Cunningham. It
seemed to me that he should have called upon me
when I came to Dublin first, and not waited for the
Archbishop to tell him to call. However, there it
was ; he was coming to see me. And taking up the
New Testament once more, I fell to thinking what
his literary and critical qualifications were. A good
man he certainly is, but from his appearance one
Avould hardly credit him with a subtle mind ; and
a subtle mind seemed to be necessary ... in
my case. We are safe if we admit that Jesus
was God and was sent by his Father into the world
to atone by his death on the Cross for the sins of
men. But Jesus in his own words seems to deny
the enormous pretensions that the ecclesiastics would
cast upon him. In Matthew he says, * Why do you
call me good ? None is good but God,' and no less
striking words were uttered by him on the Cross :
'My God, why hast thou abandoned me?' The
Colonel had once reminded me that .Jesus had said,
' Before Moses was I was,' but these Orientals spoke
in images, and it is easy to understand that we all
were before Moses, that is to say, before Moses
existed in the flesh. But the words, ' Why do you
call me good ? None is good but (Jod,' seemed to me
very difficult to explain away, and the words spoken
on the Cross even more so. Nor is it very clear that
Paul believed m the separate Divinity of Christ.

SALVE 369

Christ will disappear in the end to be merged into
his Father.' ' A puzzling view of Christ's Divinity,'
I said, and sat for a long time looking into the fire,
thinking how pleasant it would be if MahafFy were
here, we two sitting on either side of the fire, our
Bibles on our knees.

It was the next day that my servant told me the
Reverend Mahaffy had called. ' Retreat is now out
of the question,' I said. ' To-morrow he'll call again :
or perhaps he'll wait for me to return his visit, and
for me to return it will be more polite. But it is
impossible to wait till to-morrow. I must talk the
matter out with somebody. Why not with Sir
Thornley? Only he is generally occupied with
patients at this hour.'

' You know, I've been thinking of joining the
Church of Ii'eland for some time.'

' So I have heard it said, but I thought it was one
of your jokes.'

' One doesn't choose such subjects for joking ;' and
I showed him the Archbishop's letter. ' Now, what
is to be done ? The Reverend Gilbert Mahaffy called
this afternoon, and he'll call to-morrow if I don't
return his visit. It will be better, I think, to call
upon him this evening and get it over, only I can't
think what he'll say to me. Can you give me any idea?'

' He'll ask you if you abjure the errors of Rome.'

' He can't ask that, because I never believed in
Rome. Do you think he'll ask me to say a prayer
with him ?'

Sir Thornley began to laugh, and his laughter
shocked me a little, but I did not get up to leave
the room until he said :

A 2

370 ' HAIL AND FAREWELL !'

' Did the Archbishop send you an order for coals
and blankets ?'

' I wonder how you, who are a Protestant, and
respect your religion I wonder what your co-
religionists ' and without attempting to finish my

sentence I walked out of the room abruptly, and
opened the hall-door, but had to draw back into the
hall, for Gilbert Mahaffy was coming down Hume
Street, and, thinking of him in his strenuous, useful
life, I came to be ashamed of the disappointment I
had experienced when the Archbishop had referred
my spiritual needs to him instead of undertaking
them himself. * No man,' I said, ' is more likely to
inspire in me the faith I am seeking. . . . After
dinner I will call upon him.'

My dinner was hardly tasted that evening, so per-
turbed was I ; and I still can recall the glow behind
the houses as I went towards the gateway.

' Is Mr. Mahaffy at home ?'

' Yes, sir.'

Portentous words, and the study itself portentous
in its simplicity. I had just time to look over the
great writing-table covered with papers — ' all on
parochial business,' I said— before he entered. He
came running into the room, his eyes and his hands
welcoming me.

' I'm so glad to see you.*

' We have hved near each other for a long time,'
I answered, ' and I have often wished to know you,
Mr. Mahaffy.'

' Yes ; His Grace asked me to call. Yes-s.'

In moments of great mental excitement one
notices everything, and Mr. Mahafly's manner of

SALVE .371

saying ' 3'es-s/ trying to turn the word from a mono-
syllable to a dissyllable^ and his habit of rubbing his
hands after the pronunciation^ struck me. And very
nervously I began to explain that I had written to
the Archbishop, saying tliat since I had come to live
in Ireland

' His Grace sent me your letter — yes-s.'

' You see, Mr. Mahafly, in England one has no
opportunity of noticing the evil influence of the
Church of Rome ; it wasn't until I came here . . .*
It seemed to me that I had better tell him of my
great discovery — the illiteracy of Rome since tlie
Reformation. I did — Avithout, however, interesting
him very deeply. ' He is more interested in the
theological side of the question/ I said to myself,
and sought for a transitional phrase, but before find-
ing one Mr. Mahafty mentioned Newman, and I told
him that Newman could hardly write English at all,
at which he showed some surprise. ' The Roman
Church relies upon its converts, for after two or
three generations of Catholicism the intelligence
dies.'

It was plain to me that the conversation was not
altogether to his taste, and, thinking to interest him,
I said :

' You know. Cardinal Manning was of this opinion.
He told a friend of mine that he was glad he had
been brought up a Protestant.'

' Did he ? I didn't know that.'

And, my thoughts running on ahead, I began to
describe a new Utopia — a State so well ordered that
no one in it was allowed to be a Papist unless he or
she could prove some bodily or mental infirmity, or

372 ^HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

until he or she had attained a certain age, which put
them beyond the business of the world — the age of
seventy, perhaps, the earliest at which a conversion
would be legal. 'A sort of spiritual Old Age Pension
Scheme/ I said ; and a picture rose up before my
mind of a crowd of young and old, all inferior,
ph3'sically or intellectually, struggling round the
door of a Roman Catholic Church, with papers in
their hands, on the first Friday of every month.

' It is quite possible, Mr. Moore, that there is more
intelligence in Protestantism than in Catholicism ;
but the question before us is hardly one of literature.
In the letter to His Grace I understood you to say
that Christianity is to be found in its purest form in
the Anglican Church. We are concerned, really,
with spiritual rather than with aesthetic truths.'

' You are quite right. Perhaps I was wrong ; but
a sense of humour does not preclude sincerity, and
many reasons lead one towards spiritual truth. If
I introduced aesthetics into our conversation, it was
because I have spoken to Catholics on this matter,
and they have always, Avith one exception — a convert
— failed to put the case as you did — that religion
really has nothing to do with aesthetics.'

The interview had certainly taken an unexpected
turn, and an unfortunate one, and while I was think-
ing of something to say to Dr. Mahaffy, he asked me
suddenly if he were to understand that I accepted
the Divinity of our Lord ?

'Of course I am aware that you accept the
Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ in a very literal
sense, but is it sure that we do not mean the same
thing in the end ? All things tend towards God,

SALVE 373

and what is higliest in Nature is nearest to God, and
certainly Jesus Christ was the noblest human being
in many respects that ever lived.'

A cloud had come into his face, and, seeing that
it was deepening, I became more sincere in the sense
that I tried to get nearer to the truth.

' I should like to believe as you do, to share your
belief.'

' And you will,' he said. ' You will be with us one
of these days if you aren't witli us wholly to-day,'
and we talked on religious subjects until it was time
for me to go. Then he asked me to come again ;
I promised to do so in a few days, and went away
asking myself if it were ever likely that I should
be able to answer ti'uthfully and say ' Yes, I believe
in the Divinity of Christ as you do.' * I should liave
to know exactly what he meant, and it is doubtful
if he would be able to tell me, for we cannot undei'-
stand God, and if we cannot understand what God
is, how is it that we speak of the Son of God ?
St. Paul himself had no conception of the Trinity.
If Christ were God, equal to his Fathei', how is it
that — what are Paul's words ? — Christ will disappear
in the end to be merged into his Father .'' It is all
very puzzling.'

A few days after I went again to see Mr. Maliaffy,
and I remember telling him that I had been question-
ing myself on the subject of Christ's Divinity.

' You see, Mr. MahafFy, one doesn't kiinv/ v.hat one
believes. None of us thinks alike, and no man can
tell his soul to another. Is it not sufficient if I say
that in my belief there is more Divinity in Christ
than in any other human being ?'

374 ^HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

' You su}- ill your letter to the Arclibishop tliat
you wished to join the coninuinion of the Anglican
Church, and the belief of that communion is not so
vague as yours, Mr. Moore. We believe that Christ
is the Son of God, and came into the world to
redeem the world from sin, that he died on tlie
Cross and rose three days afterwards from the dead,
ascended into Heaven '

* Tolstoy didn't believe in the physical resurrec-
tion, and it may be doubted if St. Paul believed
in it ; yet you Avill not deny that Tolstoy was a
Christian.'

' He was a Christian, no doubt, but not in the full
sense of the word as we understand it.'

' Well, St. Paul. I take my stand upon Paul,
Mr. Mahaffy. He seems to have had very little sense
of the Trinity. Paul was a Unitarian. The passage
in which he says that " Christ will disappear in the
end to be merged into his Father. . . ." '

We wrangled about texts for a long time, Mahaffy
quoting one, I quoting another, until it seemed
impolite for me to press my point further ; and
accepting him as an authority, I bade him good-
night, asking him when I might see him again.

Three days afterwards I was again in the Rectory,
and we talked for an hour together and parted on
the same terms.

' I shall be in to-morrow evening ; will you come
to see me .'''

I promised I would, and all the time I felt that
this evening would not end without his asking me
to say a prayer with him. If we could only pray
standing up I shouldn't so much mind, I thought ;

SALVE 375

but prayers are never said standing, and the tlioiiglit
of the prayer haunted my mind all the time I was
speaking to him, and wlicn 1 got up to go the long
expected words were spoken.

' Will you say a prayer with me ?'

He went down upon his knees, and I repeated
the Lord's Prayer after him.

' I have been dreading this prayer all the week,
and I could hardly conquer my fear, and at the
same tune a force behind myself prompted me
to you.'

'Let me give you a Prayer-Book,' he said, and
I returned home to read it absorbed in a deep
emotion. The prayer said with Mr. Mahatty had
come out of my heart, and the memory of it con-
tinued to burn, shedding a soft radiance. ' How
happy I am ! What a blessed peace this is !' I often
said. ' My difficulties have melted away. How
strange, it no longer seems to matter to me whether
the world thinks me Catholic or Protestant ; 1 am
with Christ.'

But the storm of life is never over until it ceases
for ever, and before a week had gone by a co])y of
an Irish review came to me, containing a criticism
of my book. The Unlilled Field; 'himself a Catholic'
were the words that upset my mental balance, forcing
me into an uncontrollable rage. ' Is this shame
eternal ?' I cried. ' Of what use is writing ? I have
been writing all my life that I never had hand, act,
or part '

Very little emotion robs me of words, and, witli a
great storm raging M'ithin my breast, I walked about
the room, conscious that a great injustice Mas being

376 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

done to nie. Merely because my father was a Papist am
I to remain one ? Despite lonij protests and practice,
not only this paper calls me a Catholic^ but Edward,
my most intimate friend, calls me one. His words
are : 'You are a bad Catholic ; but you are a Catholic ' ;
and he persists in those words, though, according to
the Catholic Church, I am not one, never having
acquiesced in any of its dogmas. He continues to
reiterate the shameful accusation — shameful to me,
at least. His mind is so stultified in superstitions
that he does not remember that those who do not
confess and communicate cease to belong to the
Roman Church. I believe that to be the rule, and
if I remind him of it his face becomes overcast.
Any thought of transgression frightens him ; but so
paralyzed is his mind, that he clings to the base
superstition that if a little water is poured on the
head of an infant in a Catholic church the child
remains a Catholic, just as a child born of black
parents remains a nigger, no matter what country he
is born in or the nationality he elects. Now I
wonder if it be orthodox to hold that a Sacrament
confers benefits on the recipient without some co-
operation on the part of the recipient ? I suj^pose
that is Roman Catholic doctrine ; even if the recipient
protests the Sacrament overrules his objections.
' We live in a mad world, my masters !' But I think
Edward goes a step further than Catholic doctrine
warrants him to do. He seems to hold that Catholic
baptism confers perpetual Catholicism on the indi-
vidual. I do his theology a wrong. ' If you aren't a
Catholic, why don't you become a Protestant?' he said
at Tillyra. I corrected him. ' One doesn't become

SALVE 377

a Protestant/ I said ; but the correction was wasted.
His theological knowledge is slight, but he knows the

country— his own phrase, 'I know the country'

and in Ireland one must be one or the other.

A light seemed to break in my mind suddenly ; J
remembered that the welcome the j^riests had gi\en
Edward VII. when he came to Ireland had not
pleased the patriotic Gaelic League, and it occurred
to me that I might get a nice revenge for the words
' himself a Catholic ' if I were to write to the Irish
Times declaring that I had passed from the Churcli
of Rome to the Church of Ireland, shocked beyond
measure at the lack of patriotism of the Irish priests.
' Nothing will annoy them more, and in writing this
I shall not be writing a lie. Magicians I have called
them, and with good reason. Their magical ])owers
are as great in politics as in religion, for haven't they
persuaded Ireland to accept them as patriots ?'

I wrote for an hour, and then went out in search
oi M: it is essential to consult M on every matter of
importance, and the matter on which I was about to
consult him seemed to me of the very highest. The
night was Thursday, and every Thursday night after
finishing the last pages of The Homestead, he goes to
the Hermetic Society to teach till eleven o'clock.
But the rooms were not knoAvn to me, and I must
have met a member of the Society who directed me
to the house in Dawson Street, a great decaying
building let out in rooms, traversed by diiRty passages,
intersected by innumerable staircases ; and through
this great ramshackle I wandered, losing myself again
and again. The doors were numbered, but the
number I sought seemed undiscoverable. At last,

378 'HAIL AND FAREWELL!'

at the end of a shoi't, dusty corridor, I found the
number I was seeking, and on opening the door
caught sight of JE among his disciples. He was
sitting at a bare table, teacliing, and his disciples
sat on chairs, circlewise, listening. There was a
lamp on the table, and it lit up his ardent, earnest
face, and some of the faces of the men and
women, others were lost in shadows. He bade me
welcome, and continued to teach as if I had not been
there. He even appealed to me on one occasion,
but the subject was foreign to me, and it was im-
possible to detach my thoughts from the business
on which I had come to speak to him. It seemed
as if the disciples would never leave. The last
stragglers clung about him, and I wondered why
he did not send them away ; but JE never tries to
rid himself of anybody, not even the most im-
portunate. At last the door closed, and I was free
to tell him that it was impossible for me to bear with
this constantly recurring imputation of Catholicism
any longer.

' I have written a letter,' I said, ' wliich should
bring it to an end and for ever. But before pub-
lishing it I should like to show it to you ; it may
contain things of which you would not approve.'
The pages were spread upon the table, and JE began
to suggest emendations. The phrases I had written
would wound many people, and JE is instinctively
against wounding anybody. But his emendations
seemed to me to destroj' the character of my letter,
and I said :

' JE, I can't accept your alterations. It has come

I

SALVE 379

to me to write this letter. You see, I am speaking
out of a profound conviction.'

' Then, my dear Moore, if you feel the necessity
of speech as much as that, and the conviction is
within you, it is not for me to advise you. You have
been advised already.'

END OF VOLUME II

BII.LINO AND SONS, LTD., I'RINTERS, GUILDFORD

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