I have already told of Lecky’s help to our theatre. He had a real affection for his country, but was not prone to join societies or leagues. He had given us his name as one of our first guarantors, offering £5 instead of the £1 I had asked. But he publicly withdrew his name later, without his usual reasonableness, because of letters written by Mr. Yeats and Mr. George Moore at the time of Queen Victoria’s visit to Dublin. This had been announced as a private visit, and Nationalists had promised a welcome. Then it was turned into a public one, and there was a good deal of angry feeling, and it seemed as if the theatre—although quite outside politics—would suffer for a while. Though Mr. Yeats, wrote: “I don’t think you need be anxious about next year’s theatre. Clever Unionists will take us on our merits, and the rest would never like us at any time. I have found a greatly increased friendliness on the part of some of the younger men here. In a battle like Ireland’s, which is one of poverty against wealth, one must prove one’s sincerity by making oneself unpopular to wealth. One must accept the baptism of the gutter. Have not all teachers done the like?” I answered that I preferred the baptism of clean water. I was troubled by the misunderstanding of friends.
Trinity College is not keeping aloof now, and as to Mr. Lecky himself, the House of Commons took away some prejudices. He spoke to me of Mr. John Redmond and his leadership with great admiration and esteem. I find a note written after a pleasant dinner with him and Mrs. Lecky in Onslow Gardens: “He grieved over the exaggerated statements of the financial reformers. I pressed Land Purchase as the solution of our trouble, but he says what is true, ‘It means changing every hundred pounds into seventy.’ Talking of Robert’s future, he said, ‘It is a great thing to have a competence behind one.’ He said he had been brought up for the Church, but found he could not enter it, and went abroad and drifted, never thinking he would marry, and leading a solitary life, and so took to letters and succeeded. He thinks Parliament lessens one’s interest in political questions,—so much connected with them is of no value, and there is so much empty noise.”
I often heard of his speaking well and even boasting of our Theatre and its work, but though he often came to see me, he would not quite give up fault-finding. “Dined at Lecky’s; he rather cross. He took me down to dinner and said first thing, ‘What silly speeches your Celtic people have been making.’ ‘Moore?’ I asked. ‘Yes, and Yeats. Oh, very silly!’ He is in bad humour because Blackrock, which he has known, and known to speak English all his life, has sent him a copy of resolutions in favour of the revival of Irish. In revenge I told him how a Deputy Lieutenant (Edward Martyn) was proclaiming himself a convert to Nationalism through reading his Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland. But that book, he used to say, had been a long time in influencing anybody, for of its first edition only thirty copies had been sold.”
He forgave us all after a while, used to come and ask for news whenever I had come to London from home, and told me quite proudly after a visit to Oxford that the undergraduates there accepted no living poet but Yeats. But to the last he would say to me plaintively on parting, “Do not do anything incendiary when you go back to Ireland.”
My first meeting with Douglas Hyde had been when he came in one day with a broken bicycle during lunch at my neighbour Mr. Martyn’s house where I was staying. He had been coming by train, but had got out at a village, Craughwell (as I myself did a good while afterwards on the same errand), in search of memories of Raftery, the Connacht poet. I had my own pony carriage with me, and that afternoon I drove to the Round Tower and the seven churches of Kilmacduagh, taking with me Douglas Hyde and Mr. William Sharp, whom I even then suspected of being “Fiona Macleod.” Mr. Sharp—not by my invitation—took the place beside me, and left the back seat for the poet-dramatist, the founder of the Gaelic League of Ireland.
He often came to stay with me and my son at Coole after that. The first time was in winter, for a shooting party. Some old ladies—our neighbours—asked our keeper who our party was, and on hearing that one was a gentleman who spoke to the beaters in Irish, they said, “he can not be a gentleman if he speaks Irish.” With all his culture and learning, his delight was in talking with the people and hearing their poems and fragments of the legends. I remember one day, he went into a thatched cottage to change his boots after shooting snipe on Kilmacduagh bog, and talked with an old woman who had not much English and who welcomed him when he spoke in her own tongue. But when she heard he was from Mayo, looked down on by dwellers in Galway, she laughed very much and repeated a line of a song in Irish which runs:
“There’ll be boots on me yet, says the man from the county Mayo!”
Near Kilmacduagh also he was told a long story, having Aristotle for its hero. Sometimes he was less lucky. I brought an old man to see him, I was sure could give him stories. But he only told one of a beggar who went to Castle ——, a neighbouring house, the master of which had given him a half-penny, saying, “that is for my father’s and mother’s soul.” “And the beggar added another half-penny to it, and laid it down on the step, and, ‘There’s a half-penny for my father’s soul and a half-penny for my mother’s, and I wouldn’t go to the meanness of putting them both in one.’”