Irish Plays and Playwrights/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
MR. GEORGE W. RUSSELL ("A. E.")
Synge is the one instinctive dramatist of the earlier group of writers of the Celtic Renaissance, the one to whom drama was the inevitable medium for the expression of the best that was in him. Yet even Synge came to write plays only through an external stimulus, the urging of Mr. Yeats on their meeting in Paris. It was fortunate for the Irish drama, this meeting, and fortunate for Synge. If he had not been brought to the theatre of his own country, he would probably never have written anything of first importance. Mr. Yeats himself, of course, had been interested in verse plays from boyhood, but he, for all the energy he has expended in learning his own particular art of the stage, speaks more beautifully through his lyrics and the lyrical passages of his plays than through their passages that are dramatic speech, and not only more beautifully but with more of dignity and power. Nor is Lady Gregory, any more than Mr. Yeats, essentially a dramatist. Her great power is the power of dialogue, and dialogue, of course, is as often employed in the service of the story as in the service of the play. Yet it is not difficult to understand how in Lady Gregory the dialogue and in Mr. Yeats the love of the spoken word led, when opportunity was made, to writing for the stage, and for success on the stage. But in the case of "A.E." it is as
GEORGE W. RUSSELL difficult to find a foreshadowing of the playwright in the mystical poet as it would be to see in all but all of the essays of "The Treasure of the Humble," any proof that their author was a playwright. To those who knew Mr. Russell only through his verses, and were unaware of the versatility of the man, his turning dramatist was as surprising as Emerson turned dramatist would have been to the America of anti-slavery days.
It was not, of course, because of an impulse from within that Mr. Russell attempted drama in "Deirdre" (1902), but because the young enthusiasts of Ireland's national literary movement wanted plays that should be at once native in quality and the work of writers of standing. It did not seem a strange request to Cumann nan Gaedheal to ask Mr. Russell for a play. What if he had never written a play? He was hardly in their estimation more of an amateur than Mr. Yeats or Mr. Moore or Mr. Martyn, who had written plays for "The Irish Literary Theatre" that had achieved success of a kind, and he was surely as ardent a Nationalist as any of these. So he was asked for a play to be played at the Spring Festival of 1902 by the Irish National Dramatic Company that was forming, and he did what he was asked to do, blocking it all out in six hours, and finishing it sufficiently in three days for it to be put in rehearsal. It was in the summer following its first presentation that I saw it again in rehearsal in a little hall back of a produce shop in Dublin, and got to know Mr. Russell as playwright before I read his play. One of the actors, himself maker of verses and plays, gave me his copy of "Deirdre," with cues marked. I had seen notices of its first performance in the Irish papers and I had written Mr. Russell to see if I could get a copy, but he had not yet published it. Then he wrote me of young poets I met this night in Dublin, and the names on the lips of the enthusiasts we talked to, and their names were names Mr. Russell had written me of four months before. Here were they introducing me to his work as he had thus introduced me to theirs: "There are many poets here who write beautiful lyrics who are quite unknown out of Ireland because they never collected them from the pages of obscure magazines.... I have seen many verses signed 'I. O,' 'Alice Milligan,' 'Ethna Carberry,' 'Oghma,' 'Paul Gregan,' which I enviously wish I could claim as my own.... I think myself many of these unknown poets and poetesses write verses which no living English writer could surpass." The best of the verses of some of these and of others among his following Mr. Russell collected in "New Songs" (1904), which bore out much that he claimed for them.
It was to six of these young poets he dedicated his last volume of verse, "The Divine Vision" (1904), as he had dedicated his two earlier volumes to poet-mystics, "Homeward" (1894) to Mr. Charles Weekes and "The Earth Breath" (1898) to Mr. Yeats. The young writers (for they were almost all writers as well as actors) we met this Saturday night in Dublin, one and all, looked to "A. E." as leader, and some of them looked to him as high priest of their cult, as seer of that ancient type that combined as its functions the deliverance of religious dicta, prophecy, and song. My thoughts went back to our Concord of half a century ago, yet I wondered was Emerson's fascination as compelling as this.
It was in a commonplace-looking editorial sanctum that I found "A. E." on the following morning, at 22, Lincoln Place, to which he had descended from his office in the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, to edit "The Homestead" in its editor's absence. I was to see him, in the hour I was to spend with him there, in many rôles. First was that of one of the beginners of the Irish Literary Revival. He has himself given the credit to Mr. Standish James O'Grady for furnishing the initial stimulus to the movement, in his "Heroic Period" and "Cuchulain and his Contemporaries" of 1878 and 1880; but to "A. E." and Mr. Yeats and Dr. Hyde also is due much of the credit. Mr. Russell said that when he came up to Dublin, a boy from Lurgan, there was no independent thought in Dublin, but now he thought there was a good deal, and he and his fellows of the Hermetic Society, he took mild pride in believing, had had something to do with the change. Even then, as a boy, he could not read most English literature, and so he took to reading the literature of the East, the Bhagavad-Gîta and the Sufis. From his reading of these, with other young men that somehow found each other out, came the Hermetic Society, at whose meetings everything mystic from the Upanishads to Thomas Taylor was discussed. From the study of the universal, he said, they came at last to the national, to the study of the ancient folk-lore and stories of their people, which, had it not been for the Danes and Normans, would have been shaped into literary form long before now, when, he said, they were only being so shaped.
His disciples had told me the night before that "A. E." had helped them much in the National Dramatic Company, painting scenery for them, designing costumes, and aiding in a hundred other ways. He was silent about these matters and not very proud of the play. "Of course," he said, "I was very familiar with the story of Deirdre, and I had thought of its dramatic effectiveness, but I knew nothing of the stage and I was very much surprised it went so well." That it went well, I, who had seen it but the night before, could testify, though that rehearsal could give but a suggestion of the beautiful stage pictures it presents when played in the costume of the Heroic Age. Despite its intensely dramatic situations, it is, however, essentially a decorative rather than a dramatic play, and its exalted prose is seldom true dramatic speech. But you carry from it the memory of beautiful pictures, and a feeling that something noble has passed your way, to enter into and become a part of you.
As we were talking of the "movement," in came a young Roscommon landlord, and with him another of its phases and my discovery of Mr. Russell, man of business, organizer of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society. The talk was now of the erection of a hall, and Mr. Russell seemed as familiar with stone and lime and sand as with mysticism and poetry, which we had discussed, and with painting, which we were considering in a few minutes, when Mr. J. B. Yeats, Jr., arrived, to talk over an exhibition of his pictures to be held in Dublin the following week. A few days later I was reading Mr. Russell's review of Mr. Yeats's pictures, but before I left 22, Lincoln Place, I had a mental picture of "art critic" added to the already long list of titles after "A. E.'s" name, and I had still another evidence of his impressiveness. Mr. J. B. Yeats, Sr., his son said, would be around to have Mr. Russell sit for him next morning, in order to get on with the two orders he had of portraits of the mystic, one of them from an admirer in America. It was pleasant on leaving him to go away with his laugh ringing in my ears as a surety that the high seriousness of his purpose, and the higher seriousness with which some of his admirers take him, had not dulled his sense of humor.
Eight o'clock the next evening saw us in the eminently Philistine suburban street where was the little house of conventional exterior that sheltered the high dreams of "the Irish Emerson." Once entered, his embodied visions attract you from all four walls of the study. Piles of them in corners make you wonder is Mrs. Russell a saint. The pictures are of Irish landscape; of "the Other People"; of heroes and heroines of Ireland's prehistoric days; of souls that have yet to be born; of souls that have passed through incarnation after incarnation, never to rise above an animal existence; of souls whose every rebirth has taken them to higher spirituality, and that now wait to pass along the "path of liberation" into that immortality from which they shall never be born again. These visions have come to him, as the visions whose presence he records in his poetry, in all places—as he left the office and looked down the sun-gilded streets at close of day; as he wandered in the mountains under the stars with peasants who had "second sight"; as he talked with fellow Hermetists in meeting-rooms in back streets whose shabby interiors grew rosy gloom as the talk turned on mysteries.
To us Mr. Russell talked much, talked kindly of all men, talked well of many things, said startling things of society and art and poetry so gently that you did not think until afterwards that in another you would hold them gages of combat. I can hear him yet, as I sat and tried at the same time to listen to him and to look at his flaming-hearted spirits with luminous angel wings and flashing halos enveloped in an atmosphere in which "the peacock twilight rays aloft its plumes and blooms of shadowy fire"—I can hear him saying, "You can't read Shakespeare, can you?" As I thought over this question later, I understood. Then I was too far rapt by the pictures to wonder at it greatly. Later came to mind Emerson's declaration that Homer, Milton, and Shakespeare "do not fully content us," that the "heavenly bread" is to be found in Zoroaster, Plato, St. John, and Menu. Both Emerson and Mr. Russell fail to use art as the standard. To the mystic, to whom this world is not reality, what appeal may have its seeming truths and shows as compared to the certain truth of the idealists and the beauties of the eternal life? The deep human knowledge, the great pageants of Shakespeare's kings and queens, are but "glories of our blood and state ... shadows, not substantial things."
Mr. Russell talked very simply of his pictures, of how their subjects came to him, and of his enjoyment in thus recording them. He does not consider himself a painter, but he thinks there was the making of a painter in him had he had instruction in his earlier years. This attitude towards his various powers, as well as the attitude towards him of ardent young countrymen of his, came out in a story he told us of a boy that he found waiting for him one night at a street corner near his home. The boy timidly asked him was he not Mr. Russell, and then walked silently by his side until the house was reached. They entered and the boy mustered up courage to say he had waited for him two hours at the head of the street. "A. E." had been waiting for the boy to say what brought him, but he was obliged to encourage the boy before he would out with it. Said "A. E.," "You came here to talk with me. You must be interested in one of the three interests I have given much time to. Is it economics?" "No," replied the boy, indignantly. "Is it mysticism?" continued "A. E." "No," cried the boy, almost angry at such an interest being attributed to him. "It must be literary art, then?" "Yes," said the boy, with a sigh, his haven reached at last. "A. E." soon found the boy an exquisite who thought the literary movement was becoming vulgarized through so many people becoming interested in it. Finally the boy turned questioner and found that "A. E." was seeking the Absolute. Having found this out, he again sighed, this time regretfully, and said decidedly that "A. E." could not be his Messiah, as he abhorred the Absolute above everything else. He was infected with Pater's Relative, said Mr. Russell, "which has fallen like a blight on all English literature." So the boy—he was not yet twenty-one—went out into the night with, I suppose, another of his idols fallen.
As this boy came to "A. E.," so come scores of others, and most of those that have real troubles go away comforted, to return for advice and counsel and friendship, as their need is. This I knew before I met "A. E.," and his kindness I felt and certain magnetism, but the qualities that make him the leader of men, and hierophant to his personal following, do not lie on the surface to be quickly distinguished by every comer. Neither, we are told, did Emerson's, who was leader of men and hierophant. I thought often of "A. E.'s" pictures as I looked at the pictures of Watts in the Tate Gallery in London, and I have thought more often of them since I have come to know haloed Rosicrucian drawings and strange symbols in such books as our own Wissahickon mystics, Kelpius and his brethren, brought with them to "The Woman in the Wilderness" from Germany late in the seventeenth century. How notable the impression of Mr. Russell's paintings and visions upon two Irish writers the English-speaking world reads to-day may be learned from their exploitation in Mr. Stephen Gwynn's "The Old Knowledge" (1901), whose Owen Conroy owes being to "A. E." and his pictures, and from Mr. George Moore's "Evelyn Innes" (revised edition, 1901), whose Ulick Dean has his appearance and his power of seeing visions.
As the evening wore on, Mr. Russell picked up a manuscript collection of poems—that we were to have two years later as "The Divine Vision"—and read us several. Most distinctly of these I remember " Reconciliation," which he chanted most lovingly of all he read. It is a poem I do not pretend to understand in detail, but I do feel its drift, and I can never read out its stately music, or even read it silently, without hearing his sonorous chanting. Many of his poems are like this poem in that you must content yourself with their general drift and not insist on understanding their every phrase. I suppose to the initiate mystic they are more definite, but I doubt whether some of them are more than presentations of emotions that need not be translated into terms of thought for their desired effect.
To Mr. Russell poetry is a high and holy thing; like his friend Mr. Yeats he is at one with Spenser in believing it the fruit of a "certain enthousiasmos and celestial inspiration"; it is his religion that Mr. Russell is celebrating in his verses, many of which are in a sense hymns to the Universal Spirit, and all of which are informed by such sincerity that you do not wonder that his followers make them their gospel. In his own words:—
The spirit in man is not a product of nature, but antecedes nature, and is above it as sovereign, being of the very essence of that spirit which breathed on the face of the waters, and whose song, flowing from the silence as an incantation, summoned the stars into being out of chaos. To regain that spiritual consciousness, with its untrammelled ecstasy, is the hope of every mystic. That ecstasy is the poetic passion.... The act which is inspired by the Holy Breath must needs speak of things which have no sensuous existence, of hopes all unearthly, and fires of which the colors of day are only shadows.
About a score of the less than tenscore poems of "A. E." are definitely declarations of belief, but declarations so personal, so undogmatic, that you would hardly write him down a didactic poet at first reading "A New Theme" tells of his desertion of subjects "that win the easy praise," of his venturing
"in the untrodden woods
To carve the future ways."
Here he acknowledges that the things he has to tell are "shadowy," that his breath in "the magic horn" can make but feeble murmurs. In the prologue to "The Divine Vision" he states the conditions of his inspiration:—
"When twilight over the mountains fluttered
And night with its starry millions came,
I too had dreams: the songs I have uttered
Came from this heart that was touched by the flame";—
that is, the flame of his being that, "mad for the night and the deep unknown," leaps back to the "unphenomenal" world whence his spirit came and blends his spirit into one with the Universal Spirit. This same union through the soul's flame "A. E." presents in his pictures, and in his prologue to "The Divine Vision" he writes that he wishes to give his reader
"To see one elemental pain,
One light of everlasting joy."
This elemental pain, as I take it, is the pain of the soul shut up in its robe of clay in this physical, phenomenal world, and so shut off from the spiritual world, the world of the unphenomenal or unknowable. The "everlasting joy" I take to be the certainty of eventual union with the Universal Spirit in the unphenomenal world, a union and a joy anticipated in the occasional temporary absorptions of the soul into the Universal Spirit in moments Emerson experienced as "revelation" and Plotinus as ecstasy.
"A. E.'s" friend, Mr. Charles Johnston, records the two young Irishmen's joint attempts to attain ecstasy, when he writes of those days when "we lay on our backs in the grass, and, looking up into the blue, tried to think ourselves into that new world which we had suddenly discovered ourselves to inhabit." Do not think this ecstasy too rare and wonderful a thing. To Plotinus it meant an utter blotting-out of self, a rapture of peace, and to Mr. Russell it frequently means that he is entirely "heart-hidden from the outer things," but I suspect it means sometimes mere lift of the heart through lungs full of fresh air, or through green fields for tired eyes, or through mountain air for worn nerves, or through skies thick-sown with stars for the vexed spirit.
The typical poem of "A. E." is that in which the sight of beautiful things of this phenomenal world in which we live lifts his soul to participation in the Universal Spirit. It is most often through some beauty of the sky at sunset, when
"Withers once more the old blue flower of day,"
as in "The Great Breath"; or at twilight, when
"Dusk wraps the village in its dim caress,"
as in "Dusk"; or at night, when
"The yellow constellations shine with pale and tender glory
In the lilac-scented stillness,"
as in "The Singing Silences"; or at sunrise, when there is
"Fire on the altar of the hills,"
"By the hand of a child I am led to the throne of the King."
but it is most often by way of beauties of the sky. Some reasons are not far to seek. From sunset to sunrise the poet is free as he may be from the treadmill of the "common daily ways," and the high moods he tries to express are most easily symbolized by skyey images—massed clouds and sweeping lights of diamond, sapphire, amethyst; the still blue black of heaven thrilling with far stars; the purples of twilight horizons. In his use of these splendid symbols he is but following Proclus, whom he found quoted by Emerson as saying that "the mighty heaven exhibits, in its transfiguration, clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions, being moved in conjunction with the unapparent period of intellectual natures."
How important the symbol is to "A. E."—as important as it is to Emerson—may be gathered from "Symbolism," which, read in the light of what I have quoted, needs, I hope, no further interpretation.
"Now when the giant in us wakes and broods,
Filled with home-yearnings, drowsily he flings
From his deep heart high dreams and mystic moods.
Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things:
Clothing the vast with a familiar face;
Reaching his right hand forth to greet the starry race.
"Wondrously near and clear the great warm fires
Stare from the blue; so shows the cottage light
To the field laborer whose heart desires
The old folk by the nook, the welcome bright
From the housewife long parted from at dawn—
So the star villages in God's great depths withdrawn.
"Nearer to Thee, not by delusion led,
Though there no house-fires burn nor bright eyes gaze:
We rise, but by the symbol charioted,
Through loved things rising up to Love's own ways:
By these the soul unto the vast has wings
And sets the seal celestial on all mortal things."
In this poem is the proof of how intimately "A. E." could write of the sweet things of earth did he so choose. But he does not so choose, except rarely, and sometimes he leaves out the statement of beautiful material things by which he customarily bids farewell to earth in his aspiration to spiritual things, and writes only of unearthly things—as of some girl that he, an Irishman living in the Dublin of to-day, loves in the Babylon of three thousand years ago, to the annihilation of space and time. This is written in the very spirit of Emerson's declaration that "before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and Nature shrink away." Need I quote further to show that "A. E.," like Emerson, holds that the true poet is he who "gives men glimpses of the law of the Universe; shows them the circumstance as illusion; shows that Nature is only a language to express the laws, which are grand and beautiful; and lets them, by his songs, into some of the realities"? Emerson yearns that "the old forgotten splendors of the Universe should glow again for us," and "A. E." believes that we at times attain "the high ancestral Self"; his restless ploughman, "walking through the woodland's purple" under "the diamond night"
"Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a King"
"A. E.'s" poems on death are little different from those in which he celebrates the soul's absorption into the Universal Spirit, since death means to him only a longer absorption into the Universal Spirit or sometimes such absorption forever. In the event of this last, he in some moods sees
"Life and joy forever vanish as a tale is told.
Lost within the 'Mother's Being,'"
or no sense of individuality in souls in heaven; in other moods he sees individuality preserved after death among those "High souls," that,—
"Absolved from grief and sin,
Leaning from out ancestral spheres,
Beckon the wounded spirit in."
So sustained is the habitual altitude of Mr. Russell's thought, so preoccupied his mood with spiritual things, that the human reader must feel lonely at times, must feel the regions of the poet's thought alien to him. At such times it is a positive relief to find the poet yearning for the concrete sweet things of earth. It is perhaps only in "Weariness" that Mr. Russell's high mood does fail, but I rejoice when that failure makes him acknowledge—
"Fade the heaven-assailing moods:
Slave to petty tasks I pine
For the quiet of the woods,
And the sunlight seems divine.
"And I yearn to lay my head
Where the grass is green and sweet;
Mother, all the dreams are fled
From the tired child at thy feet."
It is love, love of country, love of countryside, and love of woman that he writes of when he does write of "loved earth things." "A Woman's Voice" and "Forgiveness" are poems so simple that none may misunderstand; they have the human call so rare in "A. E.," but it is not a strong human call. Of such love songs he has written but few—poems out of the peace and not out of the passion of love; of passion other than spiritual ecstasy and rapt delight in nature there is none in his verse. Although he has been given "a ruby-flaming heart," he has been given also "a pure cold spirit." Only about a fourth of his poems have the human note dominant, and even when it is so dominant, as when he writes of his country, he is very seldom content to rest with a description of the beauty of place or legend; the beautiful place must be threshold to the Other World, as "The Gates of Dreamland," which he finds at the end of "the lonely road through bogland to the lake at Carrowmore," Carrowmore, the great cemetery of the great dead of prehistoric Ireland under Knocknarea near Sligo; or the legend must be symbol of some mystic belief—"Connla's well is a Celtic equivalent of the First Fountain of mysticism."
He can draw starkly, when he will, a picture of bare Irish landscape:—
"Still rests the heavy share on the dark soil:
Upon the black mould thick the dew-damp lies:
The horse waits patient: from his lowly toil
The ploughboy to the morning lifts his eyes.
The unbudding hedgerows dark against day's fires
Glitter with gold-lit crystals: on the rim
Over the unregarding city's spires
The lonely beauty shines alone for him."
In "In Connemara" and "An Irish Face," poems with earthly titles, you expect only things earthly, but in these too, he uses the picture of the concrete only as the symbol of the universal. The reason Mr. Russell must take you to the supernatural in these poems is because he sees spirits everywhere he goes in Ireland. "Never a poet," he writes, "has lain on our hillsides, but gentle, stately figures, with hearts shining like the sun, move through his dreams, over radiant grasses, in an enchanted world of their own." Start "The Memory of Earth" and you think you are to read one of the many fine poems of twilight in our literature, but the fourth line undeceives you:—
"In the wet dusk silver sweet,
Down the violet-scented ways,
As I moved with quiet feet
I was met by mighty days.
"On the hedge the hanging dew
Glassed the eve and stars and skies;
While I gazed a madness grew
Into thundered battle-cries.
"Where the hawthorn glimmered white,
Flashed the spear and fell the stroke—
Ah, what faces pale and bright
Where the dazzling battle broke!
"There a hero-hearted queen
With young beauty lit the van.
Gone! the darkness flowed between
All the ancient wars of man.
"While I paced the valley's gloom
Where the rabbits pattered near,
Shone a temple and a tomb
With the legend carven clear.
"Time put by a myriad fates
That her day might dawn in glory;
Death made wide a million gates
So to close her tragic story."
And so it is in "A. E.'s" score and more poems that are suggested by Irish places and Irish legends and Irish loves. Never an Irish exile but will have a dear home place brought before him by such lines as
"The Greyhound River windeth through a loneliness so deep
Scarce a wild fowl shakes the quiet that the purple boglands keep";
and a story of the home place brought before him by such lines as
"Tarry thou yet, late lingerer in the twilight's glory;
Gay are the hills with song: earth's fairy children leave
More dim abodes to roam the primrose-hearted eve,
Opening their glimmering lips to breathe some wondrous story";
and a girl of the home place brought before him by such lines as
"Dusk, a pearl-grey river, o'er
Hill and vale puts out the day—
What do you wonder at, asthore,
What's away in yonder grey?"
but all these poems, of which these lines are the fine onsets, lead past "the dim stars" and "unto the Light of Lights."
A man that believes that his spirit is one with the Universal Spirit cannot but be an optimist if he believe that Spirit is the Spirit of Good, and that a Platonist must believe. Yet "A. E." so longs to be rapt into everlasting union with the Universal Spirit that he tires of the earth, where that union is interrupted by the necessities of daily life. The fairies call to him and he would away—
"'Come away,' the red lips whisper, 'all the world is weary now;
'Tis the twilight of the ages and it's time to quit the plough.
Oh, the very sunlight's weary ere it lightens up the dew,
And its gold is changed and faded before it falls to you.'"
But it is not always twilight to him, and there are many blither moods. Over against these lines you may put,
"I always dwell with morning in my heart,"
and
"Oh, but life is sweet, is sweet."
Earth is not an unhappy place, but he sighs sometimes for the happiness unalloyed of heaven.
When we come to consider the technique of Mr. Russell's art, we find him anything but Emersonian. Mr. Russell has, in general, command of form, melody, harmony, distinction. Who reads carefully will remember many fine lines; who reads only once will be as one lost in sun-filled fog like that of "A E.'s" own Irish mountains, but he should be patient, he should wait and look again and again, and finally he will see, even if earth be still dimmed with fogbanks, much of the heavens, free of fog, and radiant with cold white light.
"Forest glooms
Rumorous of old romance"
and
"But joy as an Arctic sun went down"
"Hearts like cloisters dim and grey,"
"the great star swings
Along the sapphire zone,"
"The Angel childhood of the earth,"
"Glint the bubble planets tossing in the dead black sea of night,"
"The old enchantment lingers in the honey heart of earth."
There are comparatively few "purple patches" in Mr. Russell's poetry, for the reasons that each poem depends for its chief appeal on one mood or thought or dream immanent in it, rather than on any fine phrasing. The effort to catch the meaning of the verse—seldom apparent at first glance—prevents the noting of as many purple lines as there are. Nor when noted are such lines readily memorable, since they are apt to lack association with known and loved things to bring them home to the reader. And again the poems are very short,—intimations, suggestions rather than expressions,—and their intangible themes are often much alike, and poem becomes confused with poem in the memory.
It may be that to those to whom the Other World is very instant, as it is to many Irishmen, or to those that go about daily preparing for the world beyond the grave, as did our Puritan ancestors of the seventeenth century, these poems of Mr. Russell's speak familiar language, as they of a certainty do to the mystic, but to the many modern art lovers who hold to Pater's "New Cyrenaicism," —as Mr. Russell would say, "those under the blight of the Relative,"—as well as to the man in the street their language is new and difficult to understand. But the poems have found their audience—there is no doubt about that—and they are regarded as oracular by hundreds. This is the more curious in that there is so little personality in them, surprisingly little when one knows how strong is the personality of the man that made them But this lack of personality follows naturally on the mystic's creed—he must put into his writings chiefly his relation with God,—for all other relations are as nothing to that,—and if he attain his desire he is rapt away from himself and his fellows into oneness with God.
Quality, a very definite quality, these verses of Mr. Russell's have, but it is an almost unchanging sameness of quality; almost all his verses, as I have said, have the same theme. So there is a monotony about them, and their reader is apt to cry out that mysticism is inimical to art. It may well be that this unswerving following of one theme is of definite purpose; that Mr. Russell feels that he as Irishman and mystic has a mission, as indeed Mr. Charles Johnston owns. Speaking of Irishmen, in "Ireland" (1902), he says,—
We live in the invisible world. If I rightly understand our mission and our destiny, it is this: To restore to other men the sense of that invisible; that world of our immortality; as of old our race went forth carrying the Galilean Evangel. We shall first learn and then teach, that not with wealth can the soul of man be satisfied; that our enduring interest is not here but there, in the unseen, the hidden, the immortal, for whose purposes exist all the visible beauties of the world. If this be our mission and our purpose, well may our fair mysterious land deserve her name: Inis Fail, the Isle of Destiny.
Very like Emerson this, too, but very Irish. Let us not forget that Berkeley and Scotus Erigena were Irishmen.
I do not wish to overemphasize the influence of Emerson on "A. E.," and indeed it is no greater than Emerson's influence over M. Maeterlinck. I believe Emerson was as much guide as master, that he pointed "A. E." the way to the mystics. I might dwell on the resemblance between thoughts common to the two much more than I have—there are even lines of the younger man's that show the influence of lines of the elder. But that is not my object. I wish to point out that Puritanism in Ireland has flowered up into the mystic poetry of "A. E.," into poetry of that strange quality, cold ecstasy, as Puritanism in America has flowered up into the mystic poetry of Emerson, poetry of cold ecstasy. In England, so far as I know, Puritanism, that has given us so great a poet as Milton, has never so flowered. Crashaw was born of a Puritan father, but it was through the Old Faith his greatest inspiration came, and his ecstasy, as that of his latter-day disciple, Francis Thompson, is warm ecstasy, not cold like that of the two Puritan poets. Henry More, Platonist and seer of visions, never attained ecstasy in his poetry. It may be that it required transplantation of Englishmen into Ireland and into America to bring about this phenomenon. Nor is it the only quality these two earliest bodies of English colonists alike developed. But it is more than dangerous to dogmatize where so many races went to the making of a people as went to the making of Anglo-Irishmen and Americans.
How different are the types of Anglo-Irish I could not but ponder as we left "A E.'s" home and went out into the chill rain of that August night. To the right hand, as we walked with "A. E.'s" disciples, they pointed to Maud Gonne's house. "Irish Joan of Arc" they call her, leader of men whom men worship at first sight; most exciting of Ireland's mob orators, all proclaim her, a very Pytho whose prophecies stir unrest and tumult! And here next door the Quietist, the man of dreams and visions, to whom all the war of the world is of as little moment as all other unrealities, since here in this world he has begun already the real, the spiritual life. Both are types that have been as long as Ireland has been; both Pytho and priest were among the high order of druid and druidess of old time; agitator and reconciler, by Mr. Russell's belief, might well be reincarnations of the wise women and wise men of prehistoric days. To the world Maud Gonne is more representative of Ireland than Mr. Russell, but he is just as truly a symbol of Ireland as she: to those who know Irish history the thought of her quiet monasteries of the seventh century, whence she sent out teachers to all of Europe, is as recurrent as her political agitation of the nineteenth, and to those who know her countryside the memories of soft sunny rains and moonlit evenings are as lingering as those of black angry days and wild blind nights. Her very colors, her grays and greens and purples, proclaim her peace. It is of this peace and of the greater peace of that unphenomenal or spiritual world, that lies nearer to Ireland than to any Western land, that Mr. Russell is interpreter.
You may think of Mr. Russell as you will, as organizer of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, as stimulator of the Irish Literary Revival, as economist, playwright, poet, painter, preacher, but always as you put by his books you will think of him as mystic, as stargazer, wandering, as he so often tells us in his poems, on the mountains by night, with his eyes keener with wonder at the skies than ever shepherd's under the Star of Bethlehem; you will see him, the human atom, on the bare Dublin mountains, thrilling as he watches the sweep of world beyond world; and yet, atom that he is, the possessor of it all;—you will think of him as stargazer whose "spirit rolls into the vast of God."