VII
Sometimes I say to myself that "A. E." has lived too long and too exclusively in Ireland. He is not free from the mush of sentimentality with which Irishmen regard themselves, this everlasting self-congratulation that Irishmen are not as Englishmen, this smug preoccupation with their own virtues and bland disregard of their vices, this eternal denial that they have any demerits. If the Irish people are to recover the dignity and the stature of the gods, they must display god-like qualities or prove that they possess them. It is not sufficient to assert that they possess these qualities, at the same time denying them by nagging continually at their neighbours. I have wished at times that "A. E." could be removed from the atmosphere of adulation which envelopes him in Dublin, and sent, without letters of introduction, on a tour round the world. He has probably travelled less than any other educated man in Ireland. He passes from his home in Rathmines, a suburb of Dublin, to the office of the Irish Homestead in Merrion Square, from one centre of adulation to another, with occasional visits to the home of James Stephens, where he meets the same people that visit him on Sunday nights, or to the Hermetic Society, where he meets them again. He is too fine a spirit to be seriously affected by the paltry gabble of the third-rate minds he encounters on most occasions in Dublin, and perhaps it hardly matters that he seldom leaves Dublin and hardly ever leaves Ireland; but even so rare a man as "A. E." must suffer contraction within the narrow limits of Dublin. He has resources that few men possess: a quiet mind, a vivid faith and the love and respect of very dissimilar people. He can turn from the consideration of agricultural prices in the Irish Homestead to the esoteric alphabet with which he speaks to the Gods, or he can go off to the mountains of Donegal and make pictures. When painting no longer delights him, he can spend his nights and days in making poems. He is extravagantly generous to young writers, giving greater praise to them sometimes than they deserve, giving less of criticism than is necessary. There are minor poets in Dublin, authors of thin books of thin verse, who have persuaded themselves, because of "A. E's." praise, that they are more meritable than they are. There are people in Dublin who seem to believe that Ireland has produced a greater literature than England and will denounce you as a traitor to your country if you protest that she cannot show poets of the stature of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Browning and Tennyson, with the exception of Mr. Yeats. I am the sort of patriot who would like to see his country raise herself to the level of other countries, but I am not the sort of patriot who will pretend that she is on the level of England and France and Germany when, in fact, she is far below it. "A. E." is not entirely free from blame for this. He could have given Ireland a sense of proportion, had he cared to do so.
VIII
I have a picture by "A. E." of an ascending road on the side of a mountain. There is rain in the air, and the road has a lonely, unfrequented look. Yet, though there is no living creature visible in the picture, Life fills it. I feel sometimes when I sit back in my chair and look at "The Mountain Road" that there are divine beings behind the bushes, that if I could only climb up that road and turn the corner of the mountain, I should come upon the Golden Age. Is it not ungracious to make complaint, even if the complaint be a slight one, of a man who can make the invisible world so powerfully felt as that? And if he persuades me, by nature sceptical, almost to believe in the Shining Ones, how much more strong must his influence be on those who are eager to believe! When the evil temper which possesses Ireland at this moment has subsided, the fine temper of "A. E." will rise again and call Irishmen to a kindlier mood. The little town of Lurgan, in which he was born, is notorious in Ulster for the harshness of its religious dissensions. A base bigotry flourishes there. It is in the nature of things that from a place of great bitterness should have come a man of reconciliation, bidding Catholic and Protestant to meet, not in Geneva or in Rome, but on the holy hills of Ireland, under the protection of the ancient gods.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Mr. Darrell Figgis, in his book on "A. E.", explains the pen-name thus: "Wanting at one time a new pen-name, he subscribed himself as Aeon. His penmanship not at all times being of the legiblest, the printer deciphered the first diphthong and set a query for the rest; whereupon the writer, in his proof-sheets, stroked out the query and stood by the diphthong." Since then, however, Mr. Russell has abandoned the diphthong and prints his pen name as two separate letters.
[2] I leave that passage unmodified, despite the fact that the Black-and-Tans in the course of their fight with the Sinn Feiners (equally disgraceful to both of them) burnt down many of the creameries. They will be built again. Mr. Lloyd George jeered at Sir Horace Plunkett soon after the Black-and-Tans had performed most of their infamous work, but any decent person would infinitely prefer to be Sir Horace with his burnt creameries than Mr. Lloyd George with his burnt principles.
[3] Parnell, the greatest political leader the Irish Catholics have ever had, was a Protestant of Anglo-Saxon origin. Like Synge, he belonged to a family which came to Ireland originally from Cheshire in the North of England.