*~^ • ■•: <n 
 
 CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 FROM 
 
 ifoodforj Patterson 
 
The original of tliis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013219146 
 
IRISHMEN OF TO-DAY 
 
 JE 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 Poetry : 
 
 A Vision of Life. 1909 
 
 The Crucibles of Time. 1911 
 
 Queen Taka : A Tragedy. 1913 
 
 The Mount of Transfiguration. 1915 
 
 Novels : 
 
 Broken Arcs. 1911 
 Jacob Blthorne. 1914 
 Children of Earth. (Shortly) 
 
 Studies : 
 
 Shakespeare : A Study. 1911 
 
 Studies and Appreciations. 1912 
 
 The Lyric Cry : An Anthology. {Shortly) 
 
(GEORGE W. RUSSELL) 
 
 A STUDY OF A MAN AND A NATION 
 
 BY 
 
 DARRELL FIGGIS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 
 
 1916 
 
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GEESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON 
 
TO 
 
 qON AND H^LEN GURRAN 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE MAN IN HIS DAYS . . .1 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 DISCOVERIES . . . .22 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 PREPARATIONS . . . .61 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 A NATION, A STATE ; A STATE, A NATION 94 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 BYE-PATHS : AND PATHS EMERGING . 135 
 
JE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 Standish O'Grady, one fair Sunday in 
 summer, returned home a puzzled and an 
 arrested man. He brought with him the 
 news that he had heard, on the sea-front 
 at Bray, the bearded figure of a young man 
 in a tweed suit addressing the human flood 
 before him, evangeUzing (if one may use that 
 word) the ancient pagan gods of Ireland. 
 It was a lone spectacle. -'The sight of other 
 young men, lit by a later faith and loud 
 with tunes that made up in clamour what 
 they lacked in music, or others more brightly 
 apparelled, with big drums and brass instru- 
 ments twisted into the hkeness of the serpents 
 they fought, and slightly indecent in the 
 matter of past reminiscence, would have been 
 appropriate enough to the scene. They 
 would not have arrested the least incuri- 
 ous. Besides that, they would have been 
 gregarious : they would have fortified them- 
 selves with bigness as they fortified them- 
 
 1 B 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 selves with loudness. This other was quite 
 another thing. Spectacularly it was lonely. 
 Lifted into the imagination it was lonelier 
 yet ; and spniething tragic withal. Its in- 
 appropriateness was its occasion, but that 
 very fact gave it a gesture strange and 
 appeaUng, gave it a voice that was like a 
 slender rune of music that had wandered 
 
 , out of its place. What did these people, 
 with one half of their devotions over for 
 the day, or with the height of their weekly 
 holiday come, want to know of Earth, the 
 mother of us all, the Dana of ancient 
 reverence, on whose bosom they trod un- 
 heedingly, having first hidden it beneath 
 asphalt, like fleas on some elephant's back, 
 thinking nothing of the great life, the deep 
 knowledge, the throb of power beneath 
 them ; or of the great Shining Ones that 
 are houselled within her or that throng the 
 heavenly places in hierarchy on hierarchy 
 of brightness and beauty and power, dimly 
 perceived and dimly reverenced under many 
 an ancient name in days when reverence had 
 not been withered by tawdry pleasure); a 
 huckster's vulgar gain, or the desperate 
 oath from slumdom ? Were they not the 
 
 \ heirs of civilization ? , Had they not religions 
 cut and suited to their order — or the order 
 of their masters ? / Who then was this 
 strange, wild mm, whom they would not 
 hear, and whom some few of them may 
 
 2 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 have recognized as a clerk at Pirn's and a 
 mere shop-assistant accordingly ? What to 
 them was the shining Lugh? This man at 
 least was no Lugh, they would have rashly 
 agreed. What of Balor ? Balor, if they had 
 heard of him, was, like Lugh, a myth ; and 
 they did not know themselves to be held 
 in his one-eyed spell. As for Manannan, 
 whose lips so lazily caressed the shore, could 
 they not push their skiffs out upon his 
 waters, and make the rowlocks, if need were, 
 strain in contempt of such an one ? Besides 
 the man, though young, was not shaven. 
 Plainly a peculiar case. 
 
 Standish O'Grady's thoughts are not 
 recorded. We do not know if he felt 
 like Oisin, that he would rather be 
 with Finn and Caoilte in hell than with 
 Patrick's God who took so queer a delight 
 in burning. Very likely he did. Very likely 
 he felt his place was rather beside this lonely 
 figure than with the driftage of which he 
 formed a part. It needs no imagination, 
 however, to conceive that he felt less as if 
 he had seen a strange sight than as if he 
 had looked upon a portent. For the voice 
 of ancient Ireland was speaking through tiiis 
 man; and speaking in an Anglicized water- 
 ing-place. 
 
 In truth, it was a portent ; and if Standish 
 O'Grady had been the wise man we know 
 him to be, he would have prayed, even 
 
 3 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 without committing himself to the religious 
 fire which burned in the young man's soul, 
 that the portent might be of happy omen. 
 For the social doctrine which it lit, and of 
 which it formed an inevitable part, gave it 
 a shrewdness of application. This was no 
 fantastic faith that was being declared. Nor 
 was this man an esoteric mystic who had 
 been led away by the real light he saw 
 to a lack of proportion the more dis- 
 proportionate by being insistent and pro- 
 pagandist. Life seen through the eyes of a 
 man concerned for ideals, that is to say, 
 through the eyes of a man to whom religion 
 is quite other than a matter of formal behef, 
 resolves itself into something very sane and 
 clean. Its essential, and because essential 
 always possible, dignity and splendour are 
 not to be waived by reference to modern 
 complexities. Idealists are often quick 
 logicians : this idealist particularly was so : 
 and it would not avaU to commit the first 
 of logical fallacies by begging the very issue 
 that was at debate. To create a degrading 
 complexity, and then to argue the complexity 
 in defence of the degradation, was hardly 
 a procedure that would at any time, then 
 or now, have confused for the preacher of 
 the Bray promenade the battle in which 
 he was engaged. Man the child of Dana, 
 and man crushed by a vast and nightmare 
 engine, were not for him two persons, but 
 
 4 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 one and the same person. Earth did not 
 differentiate, though it was pitifully, tragi- 
 cally true that where some of her children 
 bowed themselves before her others failed 
 from her. Therefore would he not differen- 
 tiate. And so a social doctrine emerged in 
 these Bray discourses that was shrewd in 
 its simplicity, and worldly-wise because 
 earthly-wise in its arraignment of a life 
 that had fallen from greatness. 
 
 It was not from books that this came : 
 certainly not from the writings of men who 
 in those years prostrated themselves before 
 the accomplished fact of degradation and 
 saw in it the fine flower of civilization. As 
 M confesses, between the ages of eighteen 
 and thirty he hardly so much as read a 
 newspaper ; though that the affairs of his 
 country did not pass unheeded many of his 
 writings at that time show very clearly. His 
 life was one of mystical experiment and 
 experience ; of study over the writings of 
 aincient seers and initiates into the mys- 
 teries of the heavens and the earth, and 
 over a wisdom once dearly cherished but 
 now almost relinquished for the passions of 
 the body and the irritations of the intellect ; 
 of contemplation and meditation ; of a very 
 rare circle of friendship that became finally, 
 before its members were scattered through 
 the world, almost a community of mind; 
 and of a larger circle that acknowledged his 
 
 5 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 leadership — we may hope, not too obsequi- 
 ously — that turned to him for counsel, and 
 accepted, it would appear, almost a spiritual 
 dictatorship. 
 
 It is, or at least it should be, a whimsical 
 humour with men who thereafter become 
 more widely known when the private hazards 
 of their life are greeted with attention. It 
 must be a terrible moment in a man's life 
 when he begins to live in the light of a 
 coming biography — just as it is sometimes 
 rather terrible for a reader when he begins 
 to write letters for a coming collection of 
 them. There is, however, none of the glance 
 aside into a personal domestic rectitude that 
 makes one vaguely uncomfortable when poets 
 write of white flowers of blameless lives, in 
 these days and private hours apart. That 
 is just their significance. The best, because 
 the deepest, part of them, not only may 
 not be searched, but cannot be told : because 
 it is forbidden : because, even if it were 
 not forbidden, there would be no words to 
 tell them, since the only communication of 
 them could be in the like experiences. They 
 may only be known in their result. Four 
 men who lived so rich, again because so 
 experiential, a life together that they grew 
 to something like a community of person- 
 ality, where each was the fuller because of 
 the others, each giving each his dividual and 
 essential quality, where yet none could have 
 
 6 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 a strictly privy life because the community 
 attained was so complete that their inter- 
 changes could dispense with words — this 
 plainly is a matter that challenges to be 
 divulged. And when it is remembered that 
 the experiences and experiments that formed 
 the groundwork of this community were 
 mystical wisdom, discovered anew or housed 
 in ancient writings, clearly the matter must 
 be left to rest very tenderly as it was, though 
 others who had to fight a somewhat lonely 
 hand might covet the tale that would be 
 told. 
 
 The only light we are suffered, other 
 than that the mind engenders by brooding 
 on the relation, is given in an incident 
 related in a magazine to which they all, in 
 the circle of which they formed a part, con- 
 tributed. It was not told " because it is 
 extraordinary," but " because it was a reve- 
 lation of the secret of power, a secret which 
 the wise in good and the wise in evil aUke 
 have knowledge of"; and it is told, as we 
 divine, of one of that community who had 
 come to a crisis in his spiritual life in which 
 "two paths were open before him." "On 
 one side lay the dazzling mystery of pas- 
 sion ; on the other ' the small old path ' 
 held out its secret and spiritual allure- 
 ments. I had hope," he says, that his friend 
 " would choose the latter, and as I was 
 keenly interested in his decision, I invested 
 
 7 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 the struggle going on in his mind with 
 something of universal significance, seeing 
 in it a symbol of the strife between ' light 
 and darkness, which are the world's eternal 
 ways.' He came in late one evening. I 
 saw at once by the dim light that there was 
 something strange in his manner. I spoke 
 to him in enquiry ; he answered me in a 
 harsh, dry voice quite foreign to his usual 
 manner. 'Oh, I am not going to trouble 
 myself any more, I will let things take 
 their course.' ... I soon saw what had 
 happened; his mind, in which forces so 
 evenly balanced had fought so strenuously, 
 had become utterly wearied out and could 
 work no longer. A flash of old intuition 
 illumined it at last — it was not wise to 
 strive with such bitterness over life — there- 
 fore he said to me in memory of this intui- 
 tion, 'I am going to let things take their 
 course.' A larger tribunal would decide; he 
 had appealed unto Cassar. I sent him up 
 to his room and tried to quiet his fever by 
 magnetization with some success. He fell 
 asleep, and as I was rather weary' myself I 
 retired soon after." 
 
 To sleep came vision. In a "space opened 
 on every side with pale, clear light," "a 
 slight wavering figure caught my eye, a 
 figure that swayed to and fro ; I was struck 
 with its utter feebleness, yet I understood 
 it was its own will or some quality of its 
 
 8 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 nature which determined that palpitating 
 movement towards the poles between which 
 it swung." Above this figure "two figures, 
 awful in their power, opposed each other ; 
 the frail being wavering between them could 
 by putting out its arms have touched them 
 both. It alone wavered, for they were silent, 
 resolute, and knit in the conflict of wiU ; they 
 stirred not a hand nor a foot ; there was only 
 a still quivering now and then as of intense 
 effort, but they made no other movement. 
 Their heads were bent forward slightly, 
 their arms folded, their bodies straight, rigid, 
 and inclined slightly backwards from each 
 other like two spokes of a gigantic wheel." 
 These two " were the culminations of the 
 human, towering images of the good and 
 evil man may aspire to. I looked at the face 
 of the evil adept. His bright red-brown eyes 
 burned with a strange radiance of power ; 
 I felt an answering emotion of pride, of 
 personal intoxication, of psychic richness, rise 
 up within me, gazing on him. His face was 
 archetypal ; the abstract passion which eluded 
 me in the features of many people I knew 
 was here declared, exultant, defiant, giant- 
 esque ; it seemed to leap like fire, to be free. 
 In this face I was close to the legendary 
 past, to the hopeless worlds where men were 
 martyred by stony kings^ where prayer 
 was hopeless, where pity was none. I traced 
 a resemblance to many of the great De- 
 
 9 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 stroyers in history whose features have been 
 preserved, Napoleon, Rameses, and a hundred 
 others, named and nameless, the long line 
 of those who were crowned and sceptered in 
 cruelty. His strength was in human weak- 
 ness — I saw this, for space and the hearts of 
 men were bare before me. Out of space there 
 flowed to him a stream half invisible of red ; it 
 nourished that rich, radiant energy of passion ; it 
 flowed from men as they walked and brooded 
 in loneliness, or as they tossed in <*leep." 
 
 From this figure he turned to the other. 
 " An aura of pale soft blue was around this 
 figure, through which gleamed an underlight 
 as of universal gold. ... I caught a glimpse 
 of a face godlike in its calm, terrible in the 
 beauty of a life we know only in dreams, 
 with strength which is the end of the hero's 
 toU, which belongs to the many times martyred 
 soul. ... I understood how easy it would 
 have been for this one to have ended the 
 conflict, to have gained a material victory 
 by its power, but this would not have touched 
 on or furthered its spiritual ends. Only its 
 real being had force to attract that real being 
 which was shrouded in the wavering figure. 
 This truth the adept of darkness knew also, 
 and therefore he intensified within the sense 
 of pride and passionate personality. There- 
 fore they stirred not a hand nor a foot while 
 under the stimulus of their presence cul- 
 minated the good and evil in the life which 
 
 10 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 had appealed to a higher tribunal to decide. 
 Then this figure wavering between the two 
 moved forward and touched with its hand 
 the Son of Light. All at once the scene 
 and actors vanished, and the eye that saw 
 them was closed ; I was alone with darkness 
 and a hurricane of thoughts." 
 
 Dreams are sometimes the body's torment ; 
 more happily they are the spirit's liberation ; 
 and here in dream one friend saw the issue 
 that befel another in the deep world whence 
 Life takes its rise, for the after-days revealed 
 the fact that the conflict had been so decided. 
 It tells little, yet a little, of what lay behind 
 in the friendship it revealed ; and it was 
 only told, as it is told at some length here, 
 because of the help it might give to others 
 in like issue, for "although the gods and 
 cosmic powers may war over us for ever, it 
 is we alone declare them victors or van- 
 quished " ; but in it we may also see not a 
 little of the conflicts of the inner life of those 
 days, in the nest of that friendship and in 
 the spiritual history of the man who was 
 to emerge to more public hours. 
 
 The mind distantly perceives that such 
 a community, once it was attained, would 
 have to be broken before stagnation, or 
 uniformity which is the same thing, should 
 succeed ; and when that happened one of that 
 community was left in Ireland because his 
 life belonged to Ireland, where one feels that 
 
 11 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 the others did not. Born in Lurgan, in 
 the County Armagh, on the 10th April, 1867, 
 he came to the City of DubKn when he was 
 about seven or eight years of age. He 
 was put to school with one Doctor Benson 
 in Rathmines, whose title to fame is this, 
 and the fact that at the same time a fellow- 
 student was one who thereafter became 
 known as Father George Tyrrell, of whom, 
 however, M has no memory. It has never 
 yet been satisfactorily decided why men 
 are sent to school, though it is accounted a 
 virtue in biography to discover the remark- 
 able in that noisy comradeship. Except in 
 certain modern instances, that happily 
 invert the old procedure, and seek to educe 
 rather than to cram, to differentiate rather 
 than to demand conformity, and to help 
 the divine in man to create the man by 
 deftly providing it with chances for the 
 display of itself rather than to contrive a 
 series of formal qualifications, schooldom is 
 a dull business, and the thing that shines 
 out before and after is mysteriously ex- 
 tinguished (though not completely extin- 
 guished, as schoolmasters will be apt to 
 complain) within its curriculum. Life 
 triumphs in spite of rather than by reason 
 of schooldom ; and it is when, at the age 
 of sixteen, M passed to the School of Art, 
 where some degree of experiment was 
 possible, that tuition may be said to begin. 
 
 12 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 It was here that he met W. B. Yeats, 
 who was then prohfic of verse, not having 
 arrived at the caution of later years, and 
 who, as a page of reminiscence recalls, "had 
 a tendency to chant his verses to all in 
 heaven and «arth." A friendship was formed, 
 based on iE's part on sincere admiration. 
 Both were Art students ; and it was -^'s 
 desire then to follow that gleam. The 
 Master of Life (who must not, however, be 
 weighted with all the decrees of livelihood) 
 had another decision. M took his taste of 
 what gentility has decided to call, in the 
 case of those whom it afterwards decides 
 to honour, economic pressure ; and the fol- 
 lowing year found him in Pirn's, a drapery 
 house of the city. 
 
 The profoundest parts of a life are not 
 its deeds but the long and slow preparations 
 of personality necessary to those deeds ; and 
 these are untellable. Partly they are so 
 because to seek to expound in round terms 
 what were originally compounded of adven- 
 tures, hesitancies, much incertitude and a 
 slow dawning of hght, mixed pitifully with 
 bright illuminations and blackest despair, 
 is to turn the facts of living into the he of 
 print ; but partly also by what is implied in 
 the modern making of books. Publicity has 
 become a prohibition. Books are not pub- 
 lished, as proclamations are supposed to be, 
 for those whom it may concern, but for every 
 
 13 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 curious eye to greet ; and the result, how- 
 ever honesty may deplore it, has been a 
 tighter drawing of the curtains about the 
 secrets of the soul. If it were possible, as 
 of old, to pass books about, like manuscripts, 
 for those to read whom they would advance in 
 the spiritual understanding which it is the 
 essential function of a book to promote, what 
 truer declarations of soul would result 1 what 
 increased honesty when honesty was a hand 
 outstretched to one yet in the waters by one 
 who had found a place for his feet! 
 
 Many perplexed literary matters would also 
 become answered. One thinks of the publi- 
 cation, as a case in point, of the Browning 
 Love Letters, that we would not willingly be 
 without, despite the cheap journalist copy 
 they have made. And when we face the 
 next dozen odd years of iE's life the question 
 arises sharply. Thousands work in drapers' 
 shops at differing tasks with the same mad- 
 dening uniformity, and pass to their evening 
 pleasures (called, with a grim enough irony, 
 re-creations), the dim corners of their private 
 lives, expecting the one day of liberty, happily 
 unknowing that the six days of bondage are 
 already deflowering that liberty in advance, 
 and who is to tell the ruin or painful achieve- 
 ment, the hopeful reachings-forward, the bitter 
 relinquishments, each has in his own lonely 
 world apart amid all the seeming dull and 
 cheapened satisfaction? That is so when 
 
 U 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 there is no ray of light to fall on any one 
 soul of all the passing stream ; but in the 
 case of M the curiosity is sharpened by the 
 fact that it was in those years that the man 
 was formed and made. 
 
 Dublin is a human and humane city. 
 Though an ominous Castle be in it, it is yet 
 Irish in the preservation of homeliness, spon- 
 taneity, and the carelessness with which 
 life should be worn if it is to have the 
 grace proper to its dignity. Not only are 
 friendships possible in it as (Dubliners would 
 fain believe) they are not possible in less 
 humane cities, but it is in itself, as a city, 
 friendly. It caresses. It laughs. It is lit 
 with understanding. It has a dignity that is 
 easy, and in which all, save those that 
 cluster about the ominous Castle, share with 
 an accepted comradeliness. The result that 
 we now know as M would not have been 
 possible in any other city. Nor, it is worthy 
 of remark, would it have been possible in a 
 company that did not regard that edifice, 
 and all it signified, with aversion, if not 
 with the hostility with which a body reacts 
 against a sore set in its midst. 
 
 Moreover — if indeed it be not part of the 
 same large grace — hills are set about the 
 city that are magical, although for the most 
 part they refrain from austerity. They had 
 their part in the making of the city's grace, 
 for we may thank God that few parts of 
 
 15 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 Ireland are, in physical distance or emotional 
 kinship, far from Earth ; and they had also 
 their separate part in the making of the man. 
 It was about the time that the lad went 
 first to drapery that he went first also to 
 the Dublin hills. Until that time he lived 
 in the city, and the hills were only a guardian 
 company in mists of blue through some vista 
 of the streets. And even when he went at 
 last to the hills, it was with other boys to 
 play, long before they unveiled themselves to 
 him. Earth that cradles her brood of men 
 nourishes them even when they do not 
 recognize her ; for it was not tiU he was 
 sixteen or seventeen years of age, at a time 
 when the body is tortured with desires that 
 darken all the ways of life and make of the 
 mind a torment of shame, that illumination 
 first came to him, bringing with it the 
 quickening of spiritual life. 
 
 It came quite spontaneously, without any 
 definite prompting, for there were at that 
 time no friendships capable in themselves of 
 awakening it ; and he took more continually 
 to the company of the hills, while in his 
 mind the new spiritual life warred with the 
 old living. And when that occurs, the mind 
 itself, the field of the issue, is in perplexity 
 to know which life is more truly his, the 
 new or the old, or which spirit is more 
 truly owner of himself. 
 
 Thus the illumination came, actually while 
 16 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 on a visit to Armagh, and opened the new 
 life that was to run beside the old to mock 
 it by its contrast. It brought with it its 
 own problems ; for such new life comes 
 like a strange thing inhabiting the blood. 
 Nevertheless, illumination is illumination, for 
 all its problems. For the world became 
 transfigured ; and, although dark days might 
 come with the new torment of a lost glory, 
 with the new torment of an old dead bodily 
 life, Earth stood before him in an infinitely 
 tender and living relation. It was about 
 that time that he sang of her in a song 
 of his earliest verse : — 
 
 She is rapt in dreams divine. 
 As her clouds of beauty pass 
 On our glowing hearts they shine, 
 Mirrored there as in a glass. 
 
 Earth, whose dreams are we and they, 
 With her deep heart's gladness fills 
 All our human lips can say 
 Or the dawn-fired singer trills. 
 
 So he came to the conviction that the 
 Youth of the World and the A^e of Gold 
 are not a past glory, but that it is only men 
 — revolting perhaps from what they stupidly 
 condemn as paganism — who have blinded 
 themselves to a glory that ever remains 
 new and young ; and that conviction coming 
 on illumination underlies all his thought and 
 
 17 c 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 work. Unfortunately such a vision gives 
 an added stress to other things not at all 
 so golden. Lit, thus, with a vision that gives 
 a purpose to life, that arrays it like a battle 
 while filling its hours with rich understanding ; 
 forming very rare friendships, the fitter be- 
 cause they gathered about that purpose and 
 deepened it by enquiry and spiritual experi- 
 ment ; becoming, as time proceeded, the 
 leader, and even dictator, to a wider circle 
 that searched into the mysteries of the un- 
 veiled Earth (always a pleasing thing, even to 
 the purest of heart) ; and learning to utter in 
 song and prose, and limning by brush in colour 
 and outline, the things which his spirit beheld 
 in that world of enquiry : M was fortunate 
 beside many another who had a lonelier track 
 to take. Moreover, was there not among 
 rare things that rarest : a city humane and 
 friendly when it is the first law of cities to 
 be inhuman and callous, and engirdled and 
 guarded by wise hills, easy to be seen through 
 some vista of the streets, in a world where the 
 very fact of a city signifies a collective fear 
 of the brown- visaged and beautiful mother? 
 Surely he was fortunate. Yet it needs but 
 a little sympathy — and, let it be said, ex- 
 perience, without which sympathy is a groping 
 in darkness — to discover the darker thread in 
 his days. 
 
 In the warp and woof that go to make the 
 pattern of manhood in the loom of the years, 
 
 18 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 it is the darker threads, happily or unhappily, 
 that can least be guessed at. The life had its 
 tragedy : in the truest sense, since there can be 
 no tragedy where there is no splendour, missed 
 or defeated : and there is a poem of that title 
 to mark it : — 
 
 A man went forth one day at eve : 
 The long day's toil for him was done : 
 The eye that scanned the page could leave 
 Its task until to-morrow's sun. 
 
 Upon the threshold where he stood 
 Flared on his tired eyes the sight, 
 Where host on host the multitude 
 Burned fiercely in the dusky night. 
 
 The starry lights at play — at play — 
 
 The giant children of the blue, 
 
 Heaped scorn upon his trembling clay 
 
 And with their laughter pierced him through. 
 
 They seemed to say in scorn of him, 
 " The power we have was once in thee. 
 King, is thy spirit grown so dim, 
 That thou art slave and we are free ? " 
 
 As out of him the power — the power — 
 The free — the fearless, whirled in play, 
 He knew himself that bitter hour 
 The close of all his royal day. 
 
 And from the stars' exultant dance 
 
 Within the fiery furnace glow, 
 
 Exile of all the vast expanse, 
 
 He turned him homeward sick and slow. 
 
 19 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 Many have known that bitter hour; and 
 many have painfully relinquished a light 
 that civilization, proud of its elaborate ex- 
 ploits and belauded by darkened minds, has 
 not suffered to let live, though older and 
 simpler hours, labelled in contempt by the 
 queer terms of modern bookmaking as bar- 
 baric, desired to preserve it. Many have 
 known the spirit of " Weariness," and have 
 asked : — 
 
 "Where are now the dreams divine, 
 Fires that lit the dawning soul ? 
 
 and have complained: — 
 
 I think 
 Qld companions of the prime 
 From our garments well might shrink, 
 Muddied with the lees of Time. 
 
 Fade the heaven-assailing moods : 
 Slave to petty tasks I pine 
 For the quiet of the woods, 
 And the sunlight seems divine. 
 
 And I yearn to lay my head 
 Where the grass is green and sweet ; 
 Mother, all the dreams are fled 
 From the tired child at thy feet. 
 
 There is a settled hopelessness in these 
 poems that tell of the man in the midst of 
 the " petty tasks " to which he was a daily 
 slave. They were born of utter weariness, 
 of fagged and defeated energies, when the 
 
 20 
 
THE MAN IN HIS DAYS 
 
 will will hardly be persuaded that the light 
 once gone can ever return. There is a 
 louder revolt in "A Return": — 
 
 We turned back mad : we thought of the morrow, 
 The iron clang of the far-away town ; 
 "We could not weep in our bitter sorrow, 
 But joy as the Arctic sun went down. 
 
 That tells the tale of a concluded holi- 
 day (the attentive ear, to whom these 
 things are not the chance of a poem, will 
 notice the plural instead of the singular 
 pronoun !) ; but in each there is something 
 nearer to tragedy than in the in-and-out of 
 kings, for it concerns a kingship less acci- 
 dental and nearer sympathy. At worst an 
 idle interest, at best a distant rumour, to 
 those who have not lived through such hours, 
 to those who know, and the world is of such, 
 such poems will be of special significance in 
 the hfe of a man who was to emerge to days 
 when work was work indeed, however fatigu- 
 ing, and not a dull monotonous labour. 
 Acquainted with what is called "economic 
 stress," but for which a wit has presented 
 them with the apter word "wagery," they 
 will know the value of the anvil and the 
 hammer in the making of the man because 
 both anvil and hammer are so very familiar. 
 
 21 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 DISCOVERIES 
 
 During these years manhood and the man 
 were in the making. The purpose of his 
 days, without the discovery of which a man's 
 life is as spilled water, became clearer to 
 him. The rhythms that swing through dark- 
 ness and brightness carry a man onward to 
 a finer certitude if the will is not unbent 
 like a tired archer's bow ; and there is a 
 despair, though it seem hopeless when it 
 comes, that is more full of hope than content- 
 ment. It is by his aspirations, not by his 
 achievements, that a man is to be measured. 
 We know very well, in spite of so much 
 that lies hidden in the involutions of living, 
 what these years meant for M. We have 
 not only the more mature result. We have 
 his discoveries by the way. It is the common 
 thought that poets write to declare their 
 visions to others ; and this is in some 
 measure true, in that songs would not be 
 sung were there not an audience to attend, 
 and visions would not be declared were there 
 not the hope that there were some whom it 
 would concern ; yet at heart the poet finds 
 that he sings to declare his vision to himself, 
 
 22 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 to expound and complete it for himself, to 
 record for himself his discoveries in the 
 spiritual thrift of his soul. With the higher 
 company of poets, with those whom in 
 glib phrase we undertake to call major poets, 
 this is so. In English poetry where Herrick 
 made songs Shelley made discoveries, and 
 therefore where Herrick bettered his art 
 Shelley bettered his vision. In the defter 
 use of words of one we do not see a deeper 
 vision, whereas with Shelley the greater 
 clarity of his music inevitably, as the mind 
 perceives, flowed down from the purer heights 
 to which he had ascended. To pass from 
 the poems he wrote when he thought himself 
 an atheist at Oxford to the great chorus 
 in " Hellas " is not to read a volume of 
 poetry, it is to pass through a spiritual 
 history. So it was with Whitman, with 
 Beethoven, with Michaelangelo, with ^Es- 
 chylus, in their several arts, and with all 
 of those whom the world in calling artists 
 recognizes as the recorders of spiritual aspira- 
 tion, the creators of great and pure decisions 
 of the soul. 
 
 There is therefore a slight grudge against 
 M when in his " Collected Poems " he dis- 
 persed the order which in conversation he 
 always recognizes. To think of life as an 
 ideal splendour is only in a coward's shrift 
 to release it from the details of living. If 
 there were times when the accountant from 
 
 S3 
 
DISCOVEBIES 
 
 Pirn's came out upon the threshold of the 
 building for the stars of heaven to liiock his 
 tired brain with the taunt of a kingship 
 grown so dim, as "he turned him home- 
 ward sick and slow," it was also true that 
 thfere were times when the accountant's 
 desk was whirled away while distant sights 
 with strange people in unfamiliar surround- 
 ings came clearly before the eye. Poems 
 such as " Om," " Oversoul," and " The Earth 
 Breath," are records of such experiences ; 
 and from the sight the poet gives us of the 
 man who went forth one day at eve, for the 
 just balance of those days we may turn to 
 the sight the poet, seated at his desk, him- 
 self had, where — 
 
 the restless ploughman pauses, 
 
 Turns and, wondering, 
 Deep within his rustic habit 
 
 Finds himself a king ; 
 For a fiery moment looking 
 
 With the eyes of God 
 Over fields a slave at morning 
 
 Bowed him to the sod. 
 
 His first volume, " Homeward, Songs by 
 the Way," published in 1894, and many of 
 the poems in " The Earth Breath," pub- 
 lished three years later, were the fruit of 
 this time. They pretended to be no more 
 than a gamer of spiritual experiences, a 
 portion of his life from one who regarded 
 this public cianvassing of his inmost life with 
 
 24 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 aversion. Such an aversion is not a singu- 
 lar fact in authorship. It may, paradox 
 though it be, Hke the heart of man, be 
 said to be the ruUng fact of authorship ; 
 for none like to display their holy or their 
 unholy things before a throng ; and the very 
 lewdest of honesty is not exempt from that. 
 It is right, for instance, to conceive of Hazlitt 
 putting out his "Liber Amoris" w^ith a 
 gesture of shuddering. Authorship is not 
 the trite affair the modern trade of writing 
 has made it to seem. With M, however, 
 the facts were singular. All the poems had 
 appeared already in the Irish Theosophist, 
 a magazine that was privately printed by 
 the circle into which M had drifted when 
 the " divine visitations " led him to seek 
 out companionship in spiritual enquiry; and 
 it was to this circle he put his case, and 
 it was they who decided that the poems 
 should be published. He had become the 
 leader of this circle; and he was the main 
 scribe for the monthly magazine they 
 printed, writing from various points of view 
 in a variety of deliberately conceived styles 
 under different pen-names. Wanting at 
 one time a new pen-name, he subscribed 
 himself as -^ON. His penmanship not at 
 all times being of the legiblest, the printer 
 deciphered the first diphthong and set a 
 query for the rest ; whereupon the writer, 
 in his proof-sheets, stroked out the query 
 
 25 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 and stood by the diphthong. And to mark 
 the detachment with which "Homeward, 
 Songs by the Way" was to be pubHshed, 
 an escape was made into this pen-name, 
 though the authorship was at no time a 
 secret. 
 
 For some years W. B. Yeats had Hved 
 in London, engaging in literary journalism. 
 Already he had established himself as a poet 
 of very rare beauty ; and his choice of sub- 
 ject, a certain atmosphere laden with mist 
 that wrapped the beauty (for which he him- 
 self "coined the funny nickname" "The Celtic 
 Twilight "), and the fact that he travelled 
 to and fro between Ireland and England, 
 caused the right ascription of his poetry to this 
 country, though it was framed in the Eng- 
 lish tongue. He and M were close friends. 
 He knew the circle that met in Ely Place. 
 He even once for a short while joined the 
 " household " that lived in Ely Place, sharing 
 the life of spiritual experiment. Admiring 
 M, as he was in turn admired by M, and 
 conceivably not being averse to another 
 text in his own special subject in London 
 journalism (for to succeed in London jour- 
 nalism, then as now, was to make a special 
 corner, with a certain allowance for versa- 
 tility), it came about therefore, with the 
 publication of "Homeward, Songs by the 
 Way," that he and M were hailed as the 
 leaders of a queer thing known as the Irish 
 
 26 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 Literary Revival. It was queer in this, 
 that neither of them knew Irish; but they 
 came at a time when Englishmen had the 
 inward conviction, hardly to be publicly 
 admitted, that their language had exhausted 
 its chances of beautiful usage, and was only 
 of avail thenceforward for journalism. There 
 was, to be sure, some justification for this 
 suspicion, for poets and prose-men had be- 
 come afraid of beauty ; they regarded fine 
 writing askance (and do yet) ; they defied 
 new forms that should give greater supple- 
 ness, and had long and bitterly fought the 
 greatest living master of their language ; 
 and it was therefore not altogether a strange 
 thing that the best of its music at the 
 time was won by those who used the 
 tongue as foreigners, these two Irishmen 
 in verse and Joseph Conrad, a Pole, in 
 prose. Even the very great poem that 
 succeeded to them from the pen of an 
 Englishman, "The Dynasts," was cast into a 
 verse that simulated prose ; and was a feat 
 of imagination rather in the greatness of 
 its conception than in the making of its 
 verses, being fearful of the metaphor in which 
 the elder poets dehghted, and tucking its 
 legerdemain into stage-directions. 
 
 What was called the " Irish Literary Re- 
 vival " was truly an English Literary Revival 
 conducted by Irishmen. In this W. B. Yeats 
 had a conscious part ; but M was rather caught 
 
 27 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 into it from his own separate world, that 
 was only literary in the sense that to convey 
 spiritual experiences from soul to soul was 
 to put them into writing, and that to convey 
 them justly was to write them finely, with a 
 commensurate music and imagination. W. B. 
 Yeats' apostleship was designed and delibe- 
 rate, and the immediate results were excellent 
 though the work became spoiled in time ; but 
 M was rather an unsuspecting apostle, a little 
 bewildered in the white light of publicity 
 that had so syddenly fallen about him in his 
 emergence from the household in Ely Place. 
 The difference may be seen in their work. In 
 Yeats' poetry there is the same deliberate 
 disavowal of splendour that marked the work 
 of his peers in London ; and it arose from the 
 same literary fear of the past— :& fear that if 
 splendour were permitted it would slip into 
 the gpoves cut by the prowess of the elder 
 poets. Francis Thompson might have re- 
 assured them ; but the critics took good care 
 that he should not by at once likening him, 
 in much dreary nonsense, to Crashaw, and 
 deriving him from the Restoration poets, tiU 
 one wonders if they had bothered to read 
 Thompson's fiery page of metaphors or had 
 turned down Crashaw's taut music from its 
 slumber on the slxelves. However, for the 
 most part the critics were the poets and the 
 poets were the critics, and in this literary 
 genealogy-hunting they showed their own fear 
 
 28 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 of the past. In this fear Yeats shared ; but, 
 coming to it from the County Sligo and the 
 city of Dublin, and with the soul of a poet 
 born not made, he made beautiful poetry 
 where Ernest Dowson (save for one solitary 
 cry of passion) played with trivialities, where 
 Lionel Johnson wrought scholarly verse, and 
 Robert Bridges relied for the most part on 
 bald statement. He made a convention as 
 they did. "The Celtic Twilight" was a 
 literary convention, conceived in London and 
 conceivably revolting from London ; for the 
 old Gaelic poets were not afraid of splendour, 
 of metaphor, of big musics; indeed, they 
 rioted in them; they splashed in them as a 
 swimmer glad of the sea, laughing back to 
 the bright laughter of the wave. Yet con- 
 ventions are a little thing, for he made poetry; 
 and "The Countess Cathleen," wrought in 
 those days, justifies nothing, and asks to 
 justify nothing, but itself, for Beauty needs 
 no creed for its making or its defence. 
 
 M, however, was not even aware of the 
 stones on which W. B. Yeats had sharp- 
 ened his literary tools. His nights were spent 
 in psychic experiment or in brooding over 
 the " Bhagavad Gita," the " Upanishads," and 
 song-ofFerings and ancient wisdom hid of old 
 in the secret -house of books ; and thus, along 
 these lines, with no mere literary interest, 
 coming to the old gods which the race once 
 saw peophng the huls of Ireland. He had 
 
 29 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 no fear for echoes from the past, if echoes 
 from the past gave him what he wanted. 
 His "Symbolism" was not a fantastic Pari- 
 sian creed, but something much simpler and 
 more direct. 
 
 Now when the spirit in us wakes and broods, 
 Filled with home yearnings, drowsily it flings 
 From its deep heart high dreams and mystic moods, 
 Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things : 
 Clothing the vast with a familiar face ; 
 Reaching its right hand forth to greet the starry race. 
 
 He lost as he gained : he was more con- 
 tent to record his discovery than to commu- 
 nicate it : had he as a poet been more 
 self-aware he might by a better craft, born 
 of brooding, have more often lit a flame in 
 his verse, to burn intensely there and to Ught 
 other brains, where it is content to tell of a 
 fire in the poet himself altogether so much 
 brighter than in the poetry he made. There 
 is no poem, so sincere is this poet, and 
 especially in his early verse, that does not 
 tell of a vision that he does not feel that 
 it is important we should know. He was 
 never at heart interested in the poem only 
 for the poem's sake; and he never in his 
 verse took a holiday — at least in his pub- 
 lished verse. And we feel this. We feel 
 that there is no poem, however it fail, that 
 does not record a spiritual discovery ; but we 
 are often baffled, because the poem, while it 
 
 30 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 tells us of the discovery, is not itself the 
 fine ritual in which the discovery is in- 
 volved. The poet has his vision, we know ; 
 though visions are by no means always the 
 starting-point for song, yet we are seldom 
 uncertain in this case. Indeed, that is the 
 thing that tantalizes. For the magician's 
 sleight sometimes is lacking ; and thus we 
 hear him telling us of things, sometimes 
 facilely and always mellifluously, but we are 
 disappointed because he cannot make his vision 
 ours for ever. At such times we feel that if 
 he had brooded over his craft as he brooded 
 over the things he wished to convey by his 
 craft he would have made us better sharers 
 of the things that remain his. 
 
 For the poems of these days are one con- 
 tinuous inspiration of theme. " Homeward, 
 Songs by the Way" is an unbroken series. 
 It is linked with " The Earth Breath " by the 
 inclusion in that volume of many poems of 
 the first song ; the last of which appeared in 
 "The Divine Vision," where the poet first 
 begins definitely to turn to speechcraft from 
 songcraft, and to utter in a fine pomp what he 
 first had sung in purity, even though the song 
 were not always uniformly magical. 
 
 These are hard things, not easy to imder- 
 stand, that the lover only will consider. The 
 poet himself would fain believe that the 
 vision uplifting him will bring its own song 
 with it, that the beauty and splendour of the 
 
 31 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 one will be the infallible beauty and splendour 
 of the other. He will agree that the song 
 may rush straight upon his lips from the thing 
 seen, or that the certainty of a poem may 
 come in some rare uplifting of the mind 
 though that poem will lie buried for months, 
 its shape and fashion all unknown, to flow 
 forth finally with a deeper earthly wisdom, 
 though with not so clear a light : he will agree 
 that the vision itself, for all that it is, will not 
 be clear to him till its poem come, and that 
 he will make the vision his by the making of 
 the poem, rising upon it by being now finished 
 with it : but it will seem to him that these 
 things should argue a poem to match equally 
 with the exaltation given to him, and that if 
 the poem be faulty there was something 
 amiss with the exaltation. So, indeed, at 
 heart it mostly is ; but not always. All men 
 are more than they can express of themselves. 
 No man can give another aU of his own 
 enlightenment. And if a man passes rapidly 
 on from one thing to another, content with 
 equally rapid expressions, others will lose in 
 the degree in which he gains — though it is 
 equally true that he himself will also lose 
 in the end. He thus becomes the converse 
 of the man who stays at a few poems all 
 his life, whittling at them till much of 
 their early beauty is gone, he having passed 
 away from the mood in which they came 
 to him. 
 
 32 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 We feel this most in some of M'% later 
 poems, published in "The Divine Vision" 
 in 1908 ; in his early poems the case is 
 even more difficult. It is an impertinence 
 to question the form in which a poem comes 
 to us ; it is doubly an impertinence from one 
 poet to another, for poets should be, though 
 they are not always, glad when a brother adds 
 to the created beauty of the world — as this 
 poet happUy gives thanks for the gift of iE's 
 book of song. Yet a poem may be taken 
 where the clearness of the vision is indis- 
 putable and the result one to be pondered on, 
 where, however, the answering mood in us is 
 not uplifted to an equal height. Such a poem 
 is " Om." We know how it came. As the 
 accountant sat at his desk, it and all around 
 him were whirled away while he looked 
 intently on the sight before his open eyes. 
 
 Faint grew the yellow buds of light 
 Far flickering beyond the snows, 
 As leaning o'er the shadowy white 
 Morn glimmered like a pale primroset. 
 
 Within an Indian vale below 
 A child said, "Om" with tender heart. 
 Watching, with loving eyes, the glow 
 In dayshine fade and night depart. 
 
 The word which Brahma at his dawn 
 Outbreathes and endeth at his night, 
 Whose tide of sound so rolling on 
 Gives birth to orbs of pearly light ; 
 
 33 o 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 And beauty, wisdom, love, and youtli, 
 By its enchantment gathered, grow 
 In agelong wandering to the truth. 
 Through many a cycle's ebb and flow. 
 
 And here the voice of earth was stilled. 
 
 The child was lifted to the Wise : 
 
 A strange delight his spirit filled 
 
 And Brahm looked from his shining eyes. 
 
 The record of the thing seen is complete, 
 told with music and wisdom. But what 
 have we missed ? We have missed just what 
 it brought to the poet. The ecstasy it wrought 
 in him he has not wrought in us, for all that 
 we know well, from the record and some 
 alchemy in its making, that the ecstasy was 
 there. The very chord he heard is hardly 
 heard by us, for it is strange that the tone 
 conveyed by the word " Om " is not the tone- 
 dominant of the poem. Pedants may wrangle 
 over some ill-befitting slender vowels, but 
 the fact remains, for we know that there are 
 tones, and a sequence in tones, could men but 
 find them, that are more meaningful, more 
 profoundly significant, than all the poor logical 
 conveyances of words, upbuilding and creating 
 souls and shattering unworthy moods, liftiag 
 the spirit through circles and circles of 
 light. It is the poet's business to find these . 
 tones that shall express by their utteranog, 
 each in its own utterance, all that he would 
 put into words ; and when he finds them we 
 hear the ecstasy. That is his high prophetic 
 
 34 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 task, that the musician himself may envy 
 him. When he has heard his tone, when 
 the meaningful chord of its music sings 
 through his soul, he has what we tritely call 
 his divine afflatus. Patience, an intent and 
 watchful calm, and care will give him the 
 rest of the poem, as the tone rolls onward 
 and concludes itself; and then the afflatus is 
 communicated to us. 
 
 So hear this other, " The Great Breath," 
 by contrast. 
 
 Its edges foamed with amethyst and rose, 
 Withers once more the old blue flower of day : 
 There where the ether like a diamond glows 
 Its petals fade away. 
 
 A shadowy tumult stirs the dusky air ; 
 Sparkle the delicate dews, the distant snows ; 
 The great deep thrills, for through it everywhere 
 The breath of Beauty blows. 
 
 I saw how all the trembling ages past. 
 Moulded to her by deep and deeper breath, 
 Neared to the hour when Beauty breathes her last 
 And knows herself in death. 
 
 We are told nothing here, but, despite the 
 slight stumble at the opening of the last stanza, 
 we are lifted to an equal mood ; the ecstasy 
 that was in the singer is the ecstasy that 
 passes to us. So it is with " The UnJcnown 
 God," with its higher, clearer tone, and 
 " Refuge " from his later volume, with its deep 
 
 35 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 mature reticence. Yet, whether we hear or 
 do not hear his ecstasy, never was there so 
 exact a poet as this. Many of his poems 
 come not only from the inmost circle of 
 spiritual insight, but also from the outer 
 circle of psychic vision ; and much that 
 might seem, at a cursory glance, extravagant 
 imagery, will be found to be no more than 
 meticulous accuracy to what he has beheld. 
 Perhaps they too much demand a knowledge 
 of mystic signs and symbols ; perhaps they 
 unwisely, in some cases, decree for us a like 
 psychic experience if not learning — unwisely 
 for poetry, which should not need annotation 
 but should address itself directly to the pure 
 and aspiring spirit of man : that may very 
 well be ; but there are none of his poems 
 that we may set aside as inexact. " The 
 Robing of the King," for example, records 
 precisely what in vision he beheld, rightly 
 or wrongly, as the meaning of the Crucifixion, 
 surrendering, as he does, its outward appear- 
 ance to those who did not know the esoteric 
 event that was happening. And there are 
 many poems of this sort, that are rather less 
 poems than texts, like the texts of the East, 
 to be brooded upon like symbols and un- 
 ravelled like mysteries. Not only, however, 
 are the visions of the " household " so written. 
 On the hills of Ireland, aflame once with 
 mystic fires, this man may have beheld the 
 great ones once again, have seen things not 
 
 36 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 easy to be told, and have recorded them with 
 the care of a man of faith. These things 
 are not lightly to be spoken of; but to be 
 passed from hand to hand ; and Irishmen 
 at least will read « The Child of Destiny " 
 with attention. 
 
 For this poet conceived highly of Life, 
 and conceived highly of Poetry, the first 
 and purest handmaiden of Life. He never 
 used Poetry for his own hand, or suborned 
 it with his prejudices. He might lightly say 
 of himself: — 
 
 He has built his monument 
 "With the winds of time at strife, 
 Who could have before' he went 
 "Written on the book of life ; 
 
 but it is because he wrote first in the book 
 of life that his book of poetry will be 
 esteemed by the wise. What his thought 
 of poetry was he declared when another 
 poet, not so clean of heart, slandered his 
 country. Irishmen are not, as a rule, among 
 those who highly esteem Rudyard Kipling. 
 His book of verse wakes few echoes in 
 them. That he should insolently have tra- 
 duced their dear land — he who has no land, 
 but only a windy Empire wherein to wander 
 — is perhaps a small matter; that he should 
 have debauched song is a deeper trouble in 
 a land where the poet was of old time 
 honoured because the poet honoured his 
 
 37 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 craft. And when this man laid foul words 
 at Ireland's door in a simulation of poetry, 
 taking Scripture as a text for his baseness, 
 M replied in prose. As that reply is not 
 elsewhere available, it shall be recorded here 
 in full, as much of the man is in it. 
 
 I speak to you, brother, because you have spoken 
 to me, or rather you have spoken for me. I am a 
 native of Ulster. So far back as I can trace the 
 faith of my forefathers they held the faith for whose 
 free observance you are afraid. 
 
 I call you brother, for so far as I am known 
 beyond the circle of my personal friends it is as a 
 poet. We are not a numerous tribe, but the world 
 has held us in honour because on the whole in poetry 
 is found the highest and sincerest utterance of man's 
 spirit. In this manner of speaking if a man is not 
 sincere his speech betrayeth him, for all true poetry 
 was written on the Mount of Transfiguration, and 
 there is revelation in it and the mingling of heaven 
 and earth. I am jealous of the honour of poetry, 
 and I am jealous of the good name of my country, 
 and I am impelled by both emotions to speak to you. 
 
 You have Irish blood in you. I have heard, 
 indeed, Ireland is your mother^s land, and you 
 7nay, perhaps, have some knowledge of Irish senti- 
 ment. You have offended against one of our noblest 
 literary traditions in the manner in which you 
 hav4 published your thoughts. You begin by quoting 
 Scripture. You preface your verses on Ulster by 
 words from the mysterious oracles of humanity as 
 if you had been inflamed and inspired by the 
 prophet of God ; and you go on to sing of faith in 
 peril and patriotism betrayed and the danger of 
 death and oppression by those who do murder by 
 night, which things, if one truly feels, he speaks of 
 
 38 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 without consideration of commerce or what it shall 
 profit him to speak. But you, brother, have with- 
 held your fears for your country and mine until 
 they could yield you a profit in two continents. 
 After all this high speech about the Lord and the 
 hour of national darkness it shocks me to find this 
 following your verses : " Copyrighted in the United 
 States of America by Rudyard Kipling." Tou are 
 not in want. You are the most successful man of 
 letters of your time, and yet you are not above 
 making profit out of the perils of your country. 
 You wpe the lordly speech of the prophets, and you 
 conclude by warning everybody not to reprint your 
 words at their peril. In Ireland every poet we 
 honour has dedicated his genius to his country with- 
 out gain, and has given without stint, without 
 any niggardly withholding of his gift when his 
 nation was in dark and evil days. Not one of our 
 writers when deeply moved about Ireland has tried 
 to sell the gift of the spirit. . . . You, brother, hurt 
 me when you declare your principles and declare 
 a dividend to yourself out of your patriotism openly 
 and at the same time. 
 
 I would not reason with you but that I know 
 there is something truly great and noble_, in you, 
 and there have been Jwurs when the immortal in 
 you seciired your immortality in literature, when 
 you ceased to see life with that hard cinematograph 
 eye of yours and saw with the eyes of the spirit, 
 and power and tenderness and insight were mixed 
 in magical tales. Surely you were far from the 
 innermost when, for the first time I think, you 
 wrote of your mother's land and my countrymen. 
 
 I have lived all my life in Ireland holding a 
 different faith from that held by the majority. I 
 know Ireland as few Irishmen know it, county by 
 county, for I travelled all over Ireland for years, 
 and, Ulster man as I am, and proud of the Ulster 
 
 39 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 people, I resent the crowning of Ulster with all the 
 virtues and the dismissal of other Irishmen as 
 thieves and robbers. I resent the cruelty with 
 which you, a stranger, speak of the most lovable 
 and kindly people I know. 
 
 You are not even accurate in your history when 
 you speak of Ulster's traditions and the blood our 
 forefathers spilt. Over a century ago Ulster was 
 the strong and fast place of rebellion, and it was 
 in Ulster that the Volunteers stood beside their 
 cannon and wrung the gift of political freedom for 
 the Irish Parliament. You are blundering in 
 your blame. You speak of Irish greed in I know 
 not what connection, unless you speak of the war 
 waged over the land; and yet you ought to know 
 that both parties in England have by Act after 
 Act confessed the absolute justice and rightness of 
 that agitation. Unionist no less than Liberal, and 
 both boast of their share in answering the Irish 
 appeal. ITiey are both proud to-day of what they 
 did. They made enquiry into wrong and redressed it. 
 
 But you, it seems, can only feel sore and angry 
 that intolerable conditions imposed hy your laws 
 were not borne in patience and silence. For what 
 party do you speak? When an Irishman has a 
 grievance you smite him. How differently would 
 you have written of Bunnymeade and the valiant 
 men of England who rebelled whenever they thought 
 fit. You would have made heroes out of them. . . . 
 
 Have you no soul left, after admiring the 
 rebels in your own history, to sympathize with 
 other rebels suffering deeper wrongs ? Can you 
 not see deeper into the motives for rebellion than 
 the hireling reporter who is sent to make up a case 
 for the paper of a party? The best men in Ulster, 
 the best Unionists in Ireland, will not be grateful 
 to you for libelling their countrymen in your verse. 
 For, let the truth be known, the mass of Irish 
 
 40 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 Unionists are much more in love with Ireland 
 than with England. They think Irish Nationalists 
 are mistaken, and they fight with them, and they 
 use hard words, and all the time they believe Irish- 
 men of any party are better in the sight of God 
 than Englishmen. They think Ireland is the best 
 country in the world to live in, and they hate to 
 hear Irish people spoken of as murderers and greedy 
 scoundrels. Murderers ! Why there is more murder 
 done in any four English shires in a year than in 
 the whole of the four provinces of Ireland. Greedy I 
 The Nation never accepted a bribe, or took it as an 
 equivalent or payment for an ideal, and what 
 bribe would not have been offered to Ireland if it 
 had been willing to forswear its traditions. 
 
 I am a person whose whole being goes into a 
 blase at the thought of oppression of faith, and yet 
 I think my Catholic countrymen infinitely more 
 tolerant than those who hold the faith I was born 
 in. I am a heretic judged by their standards, a 
 heretic who has written and made public his 
 heresies, and I have never suffered in friendship 
 or found my heresies an obstacle in life. I set my 
 knowledge, the knowledge of a lifetime, against your 
 ignorance, and I say you have used your genius 
 to do Ireland and its people a wrong. You have 
 intervened in a quarrel of which you do not know 
 the merits like any brawling bully who passes and 
 only takes sides to use his strength. If there was a 
 high court of poetry, and those in poiver jealous of 
 the noble name of poet and that none should use it 
 save those who were truly Knights of the Holy 
 Ghost, they would hack the golden spurs from your 
 heels and turn you out of the Court. You had the 
 ear of the world and you poisoned it with prejudice 
 and ignorance. You had the power of song, and 
 you have always used it on behalf of the strong 
 against the weak. You have smitten with all your 
 
 41 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 might at creatures who are frail on earth hut 
 mighty in the heavens, at generosity, at truth, at 
 justice, and Heaven has withheld vision and power 
 and beauty from you, for this your verse is only a 
 shallow newspaper article made to rhyme. Truly 
 ought the golden spurs to be hacked from your heels 
 and you be thrust out of the Court.* 
 
 More than once it has happened that a petty 
 deed awoke a memorable rebuke ; and this 
 rebuke is memorable because of what it reveals 
 of the austere faith of a poet who happens also 
 to be, whatever the rank of his poetry in the 
 judgment of time, possibly the greatest writer, 
 certainly one of the very great writers, of 
 English prose of his time. That his prose 
 dares to be eloquent, daring also to be 
 gorgeous without any of the trappings of 
 prose feudaldom, is itself a rare excellence in 
 a day when the writing of prose has come 
 under the bondage of the journalist. That 
 it has hitherto only been accessible in stray 
 pamphlets and booklets, some of the best of 
 it being even yet hidden in old numbers of 
 mystical papers and early national journals, 
 has obscured its united excellence. It is 
 curious, and yet not strange, that three such 
 writers of English prose as M, Standish 
 O'Grady, and " John Eglinton," each so dis- 
 
 * It is worthy of record also that the editor of 
 the journal printing this cut away its sterner parts. 
 Malignity on the one hand and a very timorous 
 friendship on the other are very typical of the 
 attitudes towards Ireland. 
 
 42 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 tinct, each eloquent though in such differing 
 ways — the calm river of John Eglinton's 
 prose, where the music ripples over smooth 
 stones under the deceptive appearance of 
 baldness, the pomp of Standish O'Grady's 
 periods, like the brave chant of an ancient 
 Gael, and M, rich with a subtle music, deal- 
 ing with things hard to relate, full of colour 
 and allusion and eloquence — should have been 
 working together, John Eglinton touching M 
 on the mystical side and Standish O'Grady 
 arousing him to the bardic glory of the race 
 and to its reverence for the hero-heart. But 
 then Dublin, as has been said, is a friendly 
 city. And these writers of prose have not 
 yet won their due place where the makers 
 of poetry have already passed from the first 
 glory of estimation — a curious inversion of 
 the usual treatment accorded to prose and 
 poetry. 
 
 It always happens, if a man be a poet, 
 that his prose will be an elaboration, in a 
 differing ritual of words, of the ideas which 
 received their quintessential form in his 
 poetry. Either that, or his prose will be, as 
 Milton haughtily said his was, writ with his 
 left hand. "I ask with Mitchell," says iE,* 
 " who was told of the laying of the Atlantic 
 cable : ' WiU a lie told at one end come out 
 truth at the other ? ' The spiritual question is 
 the only reaUy important one.*' That is the 
 * The Internationalist, vol. i. p. 36. 
 43 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 poet looking out on life, fallen so far from 
 the greatness it yet remembers. "Poets," 
 says Shelley, " are the unacknowledged legis- 
 lators of the world " ; but M comes forward 
 in his prose, as all poets in their measure 
 do, and presses for the acknowledgment. 
 It is a light thing that they should be ac- 
 knowledged by this or that trivial honour, 
 too often given not as an acknowledg- 
 ment but as a deft and social grace with 
 which to avoid the real case at issue. 
 Rather, the poet, building his temple of 
 beauty, each stone of which in its careful 
 hewing is an implicit condemnation of the 
 city without, and finding his temple 
 neglected, as such temples are too often 
 wont to be, or merely extolled in set 
 terms from the distance, comes forth and 
 addresses the city. As his building was 
 so will his address be, for it is his single- 
 mindedness that brings him out. Would he 
 not rather be at his building ? But what 
 use to build if the city, instead of remem- 
 bering the Heavenly City which his temple 
 was to recall, denies every line of his 
 beauty (while perhaps giving it some light 
 lip-fealty) by erecting monstrous structures 
 without as it sings some queer and un- 
 intelligible chant about progress ? Even if 
 he does not fall into the quite false logic 
 of thinking that his building in such a 
 case would be mere selfishness, he will at 
 
 44 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 least rightly ask himself if it is not high 
 time he challenged his fellow-citizens as to 
 the first principles of their buildings and 
 of his. He will know that he holds the 
 logic of the position, for they give a cer- 
 tain kind of fealty to his building, whereas 
 he gives none to theirs. 
 
 Later on M was called upon to go out 
 and give a hand in the building of the 
 city itself, when his prose took a workaday 
 directness. Tracts on pig-breeding, and 
 journalism that had to deal with any sub- 
 jects that might chance to come within his 
 reach and insist, patiently or impatiently, 
 on certain essential things week-in and 
 week-out, are not that portion of a man's 
 endeavours that he hopes to pass as a 
 cherished possession to a wider and a 
 later world ; but there are other parts of 
 his later work as a nation-builder where a 
 simple and direct economy was demanded 
 of him ; which he gave ; giving it eloquence 
 moreover, such as bestows on it other 
 qualities than that of shrewd sense, and 
 makes it memorable for reasons deeper than 
 that of logic. For his audience then was 
 not elect : it was desirable that the simple 
 should hear him ; it was inevitable that 
 knavery would hear him, and seek to per- 
 vert his words, to represent him as mere 
 fool of a poet or, alternatively, as deeper 
 knave even than they, with an even 
 
 45 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 craftier design on the pockets of the simple. 
 Before that time, however, his audience 
 was elect. They were the few who had 
 gathered about the temple, were even 
 within the temple, with some very few who 
 had helped to hew its stones ; and to these 
 he could speak all of his mind. 
 
 It is usually faulty thinking to speak of 
 one style being simpler than another. 
 Pedantries there are ; but in the main the 
 difference between one style and another 
 is in the matter that it contains, and the cir- 
 cumstances attending its presentation. To 
 say of iE's later style that it is simple is 
 really only to say that he stated in it the 
 results of his thinking in final and orderly 
 terms. All of his mind was not in it ; 
 only its last conclusions : not the visions, 
 not the spiritual convictions that the visions 
 brought, not the outlook on Ufe, the fine 
 inspiration, the intense uplifting, linked with 
 those convictions, not the delicate percep- 
 tions between this and that uplifting, this 
 and that Beauty, this and that Truth, be- 
 tween inspiration and aspiration, not the 
 processes leading outward from the experi- 
 ences of a man of such an involution of 
 spiritual life to his conclusions of the kind 
 of world in which the greatness which is 
 in man would best thrive : nothing of all 
 this; but just those last conclusions, put 
 together with a certain show of reason and 
 
 46 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 a certain logical structure. The other things 
 belong to the fine intimacies of spiritual 
 life, whereas the conclusions deal only with 
 the apt environment for that spiritual life. 
 If a man has to write, however, of those 
 fine intimacies the writing will be just as 
 complex as the spiritual hfe is complex, and 
 will seem obscure in exactly the same rela- 
 tion as his experiences and discoveries will 
 defy expression. He wUl have to ambush 
 the shy things that lurk in the thicket of 
 his soul, and net them subtly and quickly 
 in the tones and colours and rhythms of 
 words rather than in their bold and limited 
 meanings. That will not lead to clarity ; 
 clarity in such a case would be a profound 
 lie ; for precious things are precious in both 
 meanings of the word. 
 
 It is a very delicate net of words, for 
 instance, he has thrown round some of the 
 intimations of the spiritual meaning of Life 
 in his essay " The Renewal of Youth." 
 " We came out of the Great Mother-Life 
 for the purposes of soul," he says; and in 
 the wonderful music of that essay he writes 
 of the source and destiny of that experience 
 for which we have been lent to Life. 
 
 In some moment of more complete imagination 
 the thought-born may go forth and look on the ancient 
 Beauty. So it was in the mysteries long ago and 
 may well be to-day. The poor dead shadow was laid 
 to sleep, forgotten in its darkness, as the fiery power, 
 
 47 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 mounting from heart to head, went forth in radiance. 
 Not then did it rest, nor ought we. The dim worlds 
 dropped behind it, the lights of earth disappeared as 
 it neared the heights of the immortals. There was 
 One seated on a throne, One dark and bright with 
 ethereal glory. It arose in greeting. The radiant 
 figure laid its head against the breast which grew 
 suddenly golden, and Father and Son vanished in 
 that which has no place or name. 
 
 That of which he writes is the same, we 
 divine, as he sang of in " The Robing of the 
 King " ; and to say of it, as of the essay, 
 that it is prose at its highest, is to give it 
 but half its praise. It is the writing of a 
 seer : a seer who sees the golden end with 
 the golden uprise, and who perceives, there- 
 fore, that "every word which really inspires 
 is spoken as if the Golden Age had never 
 passed," for " the great teachers ignore the 
 personal identity and speak to the eternal 
 pilgrim." It may be true, in the opening 
 words of this essay, that " humanity is no 
 longer the child it was at the beginning of 
 the world," that "its gay, wonderful child- 
 hood gave way, as cycle after cycle coiled 
 itself into slumber, to more definite pur- 
 poses, and now it is old and burdened with 
 experiences " — experiences gathered, as his 
 profound faith is, not merely as written 
 in histories dealing with the outward life 
 of nations and the race, but in renewed 
 reincarnations of innumerable souls — but it 
 
 48 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 is equally true that the life that runs now 
 is the life that ever ran ; and if we could but 
 strike down to that depth, or if some seer 
 could do so, or if some artist, who is the 
 seer expressing himself in Beauty, could do 
 so, then we would renew our youth, we 
 would smile in the face of old Circumstance 
 with the youngling joy that is our true 
 heritage, and like happy children wise with 
 understanding refashion Seeming into the. 
 ideal truth of Being, The true poems, says 
 Whitman, whom he quotes with approba- 
 tion — 
 
 Bring none to his or to her terminus or to be con- 
 tent and full, 
 
 Whom they take they take into space to behold the 
 birth of stars, to learn one of the meanings, 
 
 To launch off -with absolute faith, to sweep through 
 the ceaseless rings and never be quiet again. 
 
 Therefore he says of himself : " I am one of 
 those who would bring back the old reverence 
 for the Mother, the magic, the love " ; for 
 it is to the Mother we go, to lay our head 
 there, and learn again the secrets of ourselves 
 — and to the Father too, the bright and 
 lonely Spirit from whom all things emerge, 
 though he does not speak of this here. 
 
 "The Renewal of Youth" is great prose, 
 quite conceivably the greatest prose of its 
 time; but it is this firstly because it is, in 
 strict terms, a holy book. It is not concerned 
 
 49 B 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 with dead things, with ethics and moralities, 
 but with the fount from which these things 
 arise, and in connection with which they 
 are not dead but alive. " Our companion 
 struggles in some labyrinth of passion. We 
 help him, we think, with ethics and moralities. 
 Ah, very well they are ; well to know and to 
 keep, but wherefore? For their own sake? 
 No, but that the King may arise in his 
 beauty. . . . Let a man but feel for what 
 high cause is his battle, for what is his cyclic 
 labour, and a warrior who is invincible fight 
 for him and he draws upon divine powers." 
 Life looked at as the writer of this book 
 regards it is a great and holy thing. Mysti- 
 cism, is it ? Then not mysticism as modernly 
 conceived, a thing of study rather than of 
 experience. " The soul of the modern mystic," 
 as he himself says in this very essay, "is 
 becoming a mere hoarding-place for uncomely 
 theories. He creates an uncouth symbolism, 
 and obscures his soul within with names drawn 
 from the Kabala or ancient Sanskrit, and 
 makes alien to himself the intimate powers of 
 his spirit, things which in truth are more his 
 than the beatings of his heart " ; and any one 
 who has had knowledge of the charlatanry of 
 much of modern Theosophy will know how 
 true this is, and why M shrinks at the use of 
 that word. Setting aside names of sects and 
 movements that obscure because they label 
 living things, the vision seen here is a thing 
 
 50 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 of spiritual experience, which, because it is 
 spiritual and therefore central, defines all the 
 parts of life as they present themselves to 
 view. 
 
 In his other essays that definition is seen, 
 or that experience further expounded. " The 
 Renewal of Youth " itself is woven together 
 from articles in the Irish Theosophist. In 
 that magazine he wrote under many pen- 
 names ; but apart from his own initials or the 
 signature of " M " there is only one other 
 token that at all comes near the central out- 
 look of the man. Many of these essays have 
 not been published, or gathered up in the 
 sweep of other work. Some of them, indeed, 
 as is inevitable in all work that remains 
 occasional though it be writ with a burning 
 purpose, must rest where it is. The writer 
 will hardly disentangle it from a hurried 
 mood, or rescue it from an hour that could 
 not wait for the complete maturing of a 
 thought. Some of it, both from this magazine 
 and the Internationalist that succeeded to 
 it, has already been recovered. Others not 
 less valuable remain yet unpublished. And in 
 all of them the thought of the man — or, since 
 words decline from their former meanings, 
 less the thought than the vision of the man — 
 shines clearly, viewing the circumstances of 
 Life from the certitudes to which he has 
 attained. 
 
 Life for him having flowed from the great 
 51 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 life of the Mother, rolling through ages when 
 the sources of that life were more clearly 
 known and when therefore the sources of 
 power, of splendour, of simple dignity were 
 more purely taught by the wise, he is desirous 
 of putting himself into touch with that older 
 wisdom, because thereby he wiU more purely 
 express in himself the meaning of that life, 
 and in him, and in others of like meditation, 
 its wisdom will be kept alive in the world, 
 till the new cycle comes and the mystic fires 
 shine out again in the mysterious respirations 
 and aspirations of time. "Read less, think 
 more," he once advised one of that circle that 
 turned to him for leadership. Why ? Be- 
 cause modern books are -^ confusirn of that 
 simplicity ; too often a denial of it, or an 
 "argumentation about it; but the splendour 
 lies in man, even though a base conception 
 of life dwell in his mind, and by medita- 
 tion he may evoke it. By meditation he 
 may put himself in the midst of wisdom, 
 and knowledge, even the knowledge con- 
 sidered proper to the test-tubes of modern 
 Science, will flow forth naturally, for the 
 life of the Universe is in him, and in 
 himself, if he can but powerfully centre 
 himself within himself, he will lay hold 
 of that hfe and understand it. Scientists 
 themselves, indeed, prove this. There was 
 no great "discovery ' made by test-tubes or 
 the like apparatus. The history of Science 
 
 52 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 proves well enough that every great discovery 
 came in some rare and lucid intuition, when 
 the knowledge hidden in the depths of man's 
 being, and borne unwittingly by him through 
 his days in some tacit function of that being, 
 suddenly — evoked may be, though not neces- 
 sarily, by the sight of a little part of the 
 universe working in picture in a test-tube — 
 flashes before his thinking brain. For dis- 
 coveries, indeed, are less discoveries than 
 recoveries. 
 
 So he writes of " The Hero in Man." He 
 who sang of Earth — 
 
 The tender kiss hath memory we are kings 
 For all our wanderings, 
 
 declares, " There is a spirit in us deeper than 
 our intellectual being which I think of as the 
 Hero in man, who feels the nobility of its 
 place in the midst of all this, and who would 
 fain equal the greatness of perception with 
 deeds as great," and adds in a premonition 
 of the work to which he was so soon to be 
 bidden : " The weariness and sense of futility 
 which often falls upon the mystic after much 
 thought is due to this, that he has not 
 recognized that he must be worker as well 
 as seer, that here he has duties demanding a 
 more sustained endurance, just as the inner life 
 is so much vaster and more intense than the 
 life he has left behind." And again : " Here 
 I may say that the love of the Mother, 
 
 53 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 which, acting through the burnished will 
 of the hero, is wrought to highest uses, is 
 in reality everywhere, and pervades with 
 profoundest tenderness the homeliest cir- 
 cumstance of daily life ; and there is not 
 lacking, even among the humblest, an under- 
 standing of the spiritual tragedy which follows 
 upon every effort of the divine nature bowing 
 itself down in pity to our shadowy sphere; 
 an understanding in which the nature of the 
 love is gauged through the extent of the 
 sacrifice and the pain which is overcome." 
 In the pale light which plays around such 
 dream-stories as " The Mask of Apollo," and 
 " A Dream of Angus Oge," and " The Story 
 of a Star," there shine the intimations of 
 those things that came to him in early days. 
 In the last, for instance, to the question, " To 
 what end is this life poured forth and with- 
 drawn ? " the answer comes : '• The end is 
 creation, and creation is joy. The One 
 awakens out of quiescence as we come forth, 
 and knows itself in us ; as we return, we 
 enter it in gladness, knowing ourselves." 
 From this, with the faint rhythms of the 
 prose in which these dreams were imaged, 
 he came to the greater dignity of the prose 
 of " The Hero in Man," commensurate as it 
 is with the greater dignity of the thought 
 that man does not need to learn of the hero 
 "by observance of the superficial life and 
 actions of a spiritual teacher," but that "it 
 
 54 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 is only in the deeper life of meditation and 
 imagination that it can be truly realized." 
 So the old writing said that God made man 
 in His own image ; and though that image 
 be dedowered and defaced it may yet be 
 recovered, for the most sordid have the 
 memory of its presence in them. And this 
 it was that William James meant when he 
 said that he knew that F. W. H. Myers was 
 right in what he sought, for it made him 
 more beautiful to look on every day he lived. 
 With such things the builder of the 
 temple came to those who had gathered in 
 its garden. It was an Irish garden. It was 
 not for nothing that the speaker of such 
 words came of the Irish race. We say, 
 when we see men taking the common like- 
 ness of a country, that Earth, in different 
 places, subdues men to the local parts of 
 herself, obscuring a brighter mystery with 
 that easy phrase ; and, whatever may be the 
 truth of race, we know that there is this 
 strange thing, a thing that defies, and finally 
 disrupts, all Imperial ambitions. It was on 
 the hills of Ireland that illumination 
 descended on M — on one of that company 
 of hills that guard its shores, and which the 
 race once saw peopled with the Danaan 
 gods, the tribes of the god Dana, the 
 Mother's bright emanations, her mysterious 
 and majestic presences. Therefore when he 
 thinks of the glory that was on the earth, 
 
 55 
 
DISCOFEBIES 
 
 which we know by the wise and great 
 things that were sung in it, his mind reverts 
 to the fires that once ht the hills of Erin ; 
 and the names of the old heroes come to 
 his lips and what they meant to the race 
 and to the poets of the race arises in his 
 mind. Synge, turning from these things, to 
 which he nevertheless had to revert, might 
 say, " after looking at one of iE's pictures " : — 
 
 Adieu, sweet Angus, Maeve and Fand, 
 Ye plumed yet skinny Shee, 
 That poets played with hand in hand 
 To learn their ecstasy. 
 
 We'll stretch in Red Dan Sally's ditch, 
 And drink in Tubber fair, 
 Or poach with Red Dan Philly's bitch 
 The badger and the hare. 
 
 Yet it was no poet's fancy they aroused 
 in M ; but something far nearer to Earth 
 than poaching hares, good and zestful 
 though that might be. "Leaving aside 
 that mystic sense of union with another 
 world and looking only at the tales of battle, 
 when we read of heroes whose knightly 
 vows forbade the use of stratagem in war, 
 and all but the equal strife with equals in 
 opportunity ; when we hear of the reverence 
 for truth among the Fianna, ' We the 
 Fianna of Erin never lied, falsehood was 
 never attributed to us' — a reverence for 
 truth carried so far that they did not believe 
 ^56 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 their foemen even could speak falsely — I 
 say that in these days when our public life 
 is filled with slander and unworthy imputa- 
 tion, we might do worse than turn back 
 to that ideal Paganism of the past, and 
 learn some lessons of noble trust, and this 
 truth that greatness of soul alone insures 
 victory to us who live and move and have 
 our being in the life of God." 
 
 So when he turns forward to the next 
 inspiration of Earth he writes of " The 
 Awakening of the Fires," from which this 
 quotation is given. For Ireland is not as 
 other countries in Europe. Even as every 
 great Empire of the world has failed at her 
 shores, so every modern movement has left 
 her cold. " The literature of Europe has 
 had but little influence on the Celt in this 
 isle," he says. "Its philosophies and revolu- 
 tionary ideas have stayed their waves at his 
 coast ; they had no message of interpretation 
 for him, no potent electric thought to Ught 
 up the mystery of his nature." Again in 
 " Nationality and Cosmopohtanism in Art " 
 he says : " The psychic maladies which attack 
 all races when their civilization grows old 
 must needs be understood to be dealt with : 
 and they cannot be understood vdthout being 
 revealed in literature or art. But in Ireland 
 we are not yet sick with this sickness." 
 Turning to our nearest neighbour he says, 
 in " The Awakening of the Fires" : " Consider 
 
 57 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 what a thousand years of empire brought to 
 England. Wealth without parallel, but at 
 what expense I The lover of his kind must 
 feel as if a knife were entering his heart 
 when he looks at those black centres of 
 boasted prosperity, at factory, smoke and 
 mire, the arid life and spiritual death. Do 
 you call these miserable myriads a humanity ? 
 We look at those people in despair and 
 pity. Where is the ancient image of divinity 
 in man's face: where in man's heart the 
 promptings of the divine ? There is nothing 
 but a ceaseless energy without ; a night 
 terrible as hell within." 
 
 We have our faults in our land ; most of 
 us are not bUnd to them ; but the fact that 
 these things are true are their own hope for 
 the future. When the next cycle of inspi- 
 ration comes, as the cycle of respiration now 
 completes itself, we are readier than any 
 nation. Before the city begin to be built 
 — as M was soon to set out to that 
 work, and to the preparation for that work 
 — no colossal and revolutionary destruction is 
 necessary, as after a great war colossal and 
 revolutionary destruction will come in every 
 other land. "During all these centuries the 
 Celt has kept in his heart some affinity with 
 the mighty beings ruling in the unseen, once 
 so evident to the heroic races who preceded 
 him. ]HisJLege»d3-a«d...^ iry tale s have con- 
 nected his soul -witfe themriCT7tt^^~or~air 
 
 58 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 and water and earth, and they in turn have 
 kept his heart sweet^with hidderLmHuience?' 
 And "so "ffisTsTer" once called the Sacred 
 Isle and also the Isle of Destiny, may find 
 a destiny worthy of fulfilment: not to be a 
 petty peasant republic, nor a miniature dupli- 
 cate in life and aims of great material empires, 
 but that its children out of their faith, which 
 has never failed, may realize this immemorial 
 truth of man's inmost divinity, and in ex- 
 pressing it may ray their light over every 
 land." 
 
 Lest any should level the old fooUsh taunt 
 against the dreamer, he is quick to show that 
 he knows the other side of his country also. 
 He can pair discovery with experience. 
 At that time Parnell, the people's "natural 
 choice of hero," had been brought low by 
 an appeal that no Irishman now contem- 
 plates without a sense of shame ; and he 
 faces this. " I say that where this takes 
 place to any great extent, as it has with 
 us, it is not a land a freeman can think 
 of with pride. It is not a place where 
 the lover of freedom can rest, but he must 
 spend sleepless nights, must brood, must 
 scheme, must wait to strike a blow." It is 
 well not to see only an obverse ; but it is well, 
 too, not to see only a reverse ; and it is true 
 that when M made his discoveries of Man's 
 cosmic life he also, and therewith, made dis- 
 coveries as an Irishman, for the fairest tree 
 
 59 
 
DISCOVERIES 
 
 that reaches its leaves to heaven must plant 
 its roots in some portion of the Earth, and 
 the higher it aspires the more deeply must 
 it strike its root. 
 
 It needed work ahead. Not to be wise 
 after the event, the signs pointed to the 
 buUder of the temple going forth to the 
 city. Writing of W. B. Yeats in " The Poet 
 of Shadows," he said : " We, all of us, poets, 
 artists, and musicians, who work in shadows, 
 must sometime begin to work ia substance, 
 and why should we grieve if one labour ends 
 and another begins? I am interested more 
 in life than _ in. the.sEadg.WS of lite, ahd'as' 
 lldaffiacli grows fainter I await eagerly^tlie 
 i-pve1a±inn nf thp r^pA nature of one who has 
 buHt SO nian^ mansions in the heavens." 
 That'waTsome years" before his summons to 
 the city- builders : another of those curious 
 intimations one meets among his discoveries : 
 for the other labour of which he here spoke in 
 ignorance of its existence was soon to begin. 
 
 60 
 
CHAPTEE III 
 
 PREPARATIONS 
 
 In 1830, at the height of the Land Agita- 
 tion, a landlord by the name of John Scott 
 Vandeleur, puzzled by the problem of his 
 estates in the County Clare — a problem that 
 was, for him, as rarely for his class, a matter 
 of humanity as well as a matter of rental — 
 and having fallen under the teaching of 
 Robert Owen, decided to take an appropriate 
 and decidedly novel advantage of the execution 
 of his steward by establishing a co-operative 
 society, based on the equally novel principle 
 that a man is not naturally a knave and only 
 accidentally a fool, but primarily a good fellow 
 with an odd chance of splendour and with 
 an enormous faculty of reacting against his 
 circumstances with a fit and meet reply. 
 Since, therefore, anger met anger, denial met 
 denial, and since outrage against human 
 property answered the far deeper outrage 
 against human and national dignity, he decided 
 to organize "The Ralahine Agricultural and 
 Manufacturing Co-operative Association." It 
 was conducted by him and the upright 
 English secretary he employed with a queer 
 mixture of kindliness, shrewd common sense, 
 
 61 
 
PREPARA TIONS 
 
 and national blatancy. He made over certain 
 portions of land to a community, to be elected 
 in the first instance by the ballot of the 
 tenants, and later to be increased by the 
 ballot of itself, for which and the houses he 
 had erected they were to pay by a fixed 
 rental to be paid in kind. He provided stock 
 and implements of husbandry for the com- 
 munity, which belonged to him until such 
 time as the community had suflftcient to pay 
 for them, whereupon they became the joint pro- 
 perty of the society. No drink, no tobacco, 
 and no gaming were permitted ; and a com- 
 mittee of management was elected to control 
 life and work, each night putting up a notice 
 of what each man's and woman's work was to 
 be for the following day. Moreover, every 
 manner of labour had its fixed wage, and the 
 community bought of its own store, all profits 
 realizable from the joint husbandry or the 
 joint store to go, firstly, to purchasing the 
 stock and implements provided by the land- 
 lord, and then in division among the 
 members. 
 
 Together with such and other wise pro- 
 visions * were certain tendencies not so wise, 
 nor, we may say, at all so disinterested. For 
 the children were to be taught to speak 
 English instead of Irish, in spite of the pro- 
 hibition of their parents; English country 
 
 * " Co-operative Agriculture : A Solution of the 
 Land Question," by Edward Pares. 1870. 
 
 62 
 
PBEPABA TIONS 
 
 dances were vainly encouraged to displace 
 Irish jigs ; and for Harvest-home certain verses 
 were penned, of which the following are the 
 first two : — 
 
 The social brotherhood of man 
 
 Alone can bless the boon of birth ; 
 
 And Nature, in her generous plan, 
 Has taught us how to use the earth. 
 
 Chorus. 
 
 Hail ! brothers, hail ! in bark, or hut, or hall : 
 Hail ! for each must live for all ! 
 
 Why should not generous sympathy 
 
 Prevail throughout the breathing world, 
 
 And o'er the human family 
 
 The flag of Union float unfurled ? 
 
 This they were required to sing to the tune 
 of " Rule Britannia." Nature's generous plan, 
 "Rule Britannia," the flag of Union and 
 County Clare peasantry in the days of Land 
 Agitation at Harvest-home, suggest a picture 
 that would be infinitely humorous were it 
 not so tragic. There is a certain kind ot 
 paternal and national benevolence that is 
 more profoundly irritating than the most 
 virulent enmity. However, the County Clare 
 peasantry took very kindly to the "system" 
 after a very natural suspicion. The his- 
 torian of these things says that though, before 
 this time, they " might be accounted as so 
 many Ishmaelites," bandits, robbers, mur- 
 
 63 
 
PREPARA TIONS 
 
 derers, and what-not, they now became keen 
 and willing, with a fine sense of responsi- 
 bility and dignity, indefatigable in industry, 
 and requiring no overseer to see that they 
 worked capably and hard at whatever task 
 to which they might be appointed by their 
 committee. Moreover, they displayed a fine 
 communal sense without any reference to 
 profits, providing for sick and aged, and going 
 forth in a body to reap the harvests of those 
 who, through age, were incapable of labour, 
 though such did not belong to their com- 
 munity. Such things were put down to the 
 magic of the " system " : they can be ex- 
 plained by a much simpler and more natural 
 magic, that received, as will be seen, an 
 excellent exposition in the old Irish way of 
 life that was deliberately destroyed. 
 
 The first question that the mind natur- 
 ally asks with regard to such a community 
 is touching the end of it all. What would 
 happen if John Scott Vandeleur died or 
 changed his mind ? Unhappily John Scott 
 Vandeleur did not heed his own good 
 instruction in the matter of gaming, and in 
 1833 he fled the country ; and the next 
 comer resumed the land, and with it resumed 
 the improvements made upon it by this 
 little deluded Tolstoian community. Another 
 landlord bequeathed certain lands and moneys 
 for the establishment of another such com- 
 munity ; but the law set his wUl aside on the 
 
 64 
 
PBEPARA TIONS 
 
 ground of insanity. And so co-operation, 
 even of this mild paternal sort, languished 
 in Ireland for some decades. 
 
 Though the experiment proceeded from 
 a paternal benevolence whose habit of mind 
 it is to pay less heed t ^^ t^^f; flesi-i^g ai;irl 
 motives_jDf_ humankind_ Jhan to jbhe form al 
 excellence of Its'd^trineSiJt yet hit upon the 
 strongs instinct of our race that once erected 
 as wise a conception of civil polity as the 
 world has yet seen. And when in 1889 
 Horace Plunkett came forward with a solu- 
 tion for Irish agriculture, he hit upon the 
 same instinct, though he came with a pro- 
 posal that addressed itself directly to the 
 solution of an acute problem and was little 
 concerned with abstract benevolence. There 
 is no hint that at the time he saw what was 
 implied in his proposals, or what might 
 thereafter be the flower from the root he 
 had in mind to plant. Ireland was of old 
 an agricultural people : in 1889 she was so 
 still ; not only because she still clave to 
 Earth with the same ancient affection, though 
 that was, and is, true, but also because each 
 of her industries in turn had been deliberately 
 and of foresight strangled in the interests of 
 English industries. Ireland was of old, for 
 the main part, a nation of smallholders : 
 in 1889 she was so still ; not now by 
 ancestral continuity but rather by a par- 
 ticularly malign desire for discontinuity 
 
 65 F 
 
PBEPARA TIONS 
 
 exerted on "the country through centuries of 
 oppression. But where other peoples inchned 
 to agriculture could turn it to advantage 
 by effective organization and better economy 
 in procedure, Ireland could do little because 
 her farmers had no organization, and were 
 thus, apart from the natural disabilities of 
 this, the prey of middlemen who sold dearly 
 to them the raw stuff of their work and 
 bought cheaply from them the tilth of their 
 labour. There was no remedy. Smallholders 
 cannot buy the expensive implements with 
 which sowing and harvest are made speedy 
 and cheap ; and therefore they cannot win 
 the best from the soil, though they would 
 have to accept the prices decreed by these 
 speedier and cheaper methods in other parts 
 of the world. Lacking organization, more- 
 over, they could not even know what these 
 prices were; or, knowing them, they could 
 not demand them. Yet whatever they pur- 
 chased they had to purchase at a range of 
 prices decided by a play and interplay in 
 the exchange of various commodities in a 
 social economy of which they knew nothing. 
 They were even fortunate when they could 
 claim that range of prices in their purchase. 
 For the longer they struggled the poorer 
 they became ; the poorer they became the 
 more they fell into the debt of the middle- 
 man; and when they fell into his debt he 
 could demand that they should purchase 
 
 66 
 
PREPARATIONS 
 
 only from him and sell only to him at what 
 prices he in his judgment should decree. 
 The middleman in Ireland thus became a 
 gaimhin,* and the farmer his helot. 
 
 The solution to this, as suggested by 
 Horace Plunkett, was simple enough. The 
 human mind always believes that the obvious 
 barely needs statement, whereas the obvious, 
 in a world of tangled interests, demands the 
 hardest battles where the most elaborate 
 perversion, however implausible, will find a 
 host of interested folk to guide it to success 
 or maintain it in power. So Horace Plunkett 
 found it when he suggested that Irish 
 farmers should, instead of acting as hitherto 
 in detached and helpless units, band them- 
 selves together in companies, and buy col- 
 lectively for their collective use the imple- 
 ments they could not afford to buy separately 
 for their separate use, buy moreover, as 
 corporate bodies could afford to do, directly 
 from the main sources without the inter- 
 position of the middleman and sell directly 
 in the world's markets without the interposi- 
 tion of the middleman. Or, as M was to 
 put it afterwards, they should recognize that 
 farmers were manufacturers, and as manu- 
 facturers they should buy wholesale and sell 
 
 * Qaimbin is the Irish for usurer. It is sometimes 
 written "gombeen," but why the Irish language 
 should be less entitled than any other to have its own 
 spelling honoured it is hard to say. 
 
 67 
 
PBEPARA TIONS 
 
 retail, instead of buying retail and selling 
 wholesale as hitherto ; into which advan- 
 tageous position, however, they could only 
 advance by abandoning their helpless position 
 as detached and separate units and acting 
 co-operatively together. 
 
 Simple enough and obvious enough ; yet 
 it took long labour before it could win 
 practical acceptance. Men who are in debt 
 are not only men in bondage but also men 
 in fear ; and men in fear are they who have 
 lost the certitude or hope of success. That 
 is to say, not only was it necessary that they 
 should be able to clear their books with the 
 local gaimbin before they could shake their 
 wills free of his, but they had lost the mental 
 resiliency for initiative. Men who are the 
 heirs of centuries of such abominable oppres- 
 sion as has never yet in history been inflicted 
 by one nation upon another, and the victims 
 of a system that made all attempts to rise 
 seem folly to conceive, will not suddenly, 
 arise to strength though an angel be sent 
 to them. Moreover, the gaimbin were soon 
 alert. The strings that pull the actions of 
 this world are shaped of gold, and none 
 other are of avail. The gaimbin shaped these 
 strings, and a political party needs financing. 
 One of the leaders of that political party, 
 besides, was one of the greatest gaimbin in 
 the country ; and it was easy to advance the 
 plausible argument that a doctrine of self- 
 
 68 
 
PREPABA TIONS 
 
 help weakens the case for national self- 
 governance, though this plea was eventually 
 surrendered for naked opposition in the in- 
 terests of the gaimbin. 
 
 These things shaped themselves from the 
 beginning. Yet, though progress was slow 
 progress was made. In 1894 the Irish 
 Agricultural Organization Society was formed 
 for the completer organization of the various 
 co-operative societies and agricultural banks 
 that had been established, and for the more 
 vigorous prosecution of the idea. Further 
 organisers and propagandists were required ; 
 and in 1897, when Horace Plunkett was 
 looking about for another such organizer, 
 W. B. Yeats suggested to him one who, 
 though he was a mystic and an idealist 
 besides having published a couple of volumes 
 of poetry, might notwithstanding be supposed 
 to have a little practical experience by the 
 quaint chance of his being an accountant 
 at the drapery house of Pim's. Moreover, 
 a man who could expound the Upanishads 
 conceivably could expound co-operation. 
 The records of that particular conversation 
 have unfortunately not been preserved. The 
 mind dwells upon the scene with a certain 
 intense satisfaction. The picture of the poet 
 of " The Wind Among the Reeds " speaking 
 with the Vice-President of the Department 
 of Agriculture and Technical Education — 
 for he was soon to arrive at official dignity 
 
 69 
 
PBEPABA TIONS 
 
 after a career of tilting at windmills — and 
 recommending as an organizer of co-opera- 
 tion a certain friend of his who was something 
 of a mystic, something of a visionary, some- 
 thing of a poet and prose-writer, but funda- 
 mentally, fundamentally, an accountant at a 
 drapery house, has a quiet and peaceful 
 humour ; and those who know the persons 
 engaged in that conversation, and the subject 
 thereof, will find that humour deepened by 
 filling in the personal details of that scene. 
 Assuredly Ireland is the country of all 
 countries in which to live and to work. 
 
 The three men concerned, however, were 
 men of intellect, and as in Ireland intellect 
 is not departmentalized the result passes into 
 history. M left his desk at Pim's, utterly 
 weary of its soulless monotony, took a bicycle, 
 and set out through Ireland with his evangel. 
 Founding RafFeisen banks in aid of the half- 
 converted or those thereby likely to be con- 
 verted, addressing the wary, contending with 
 the caviller, refuting the cynic, fighting the 
 usurer, giving a decent man's aid in the 
 matter of pigs, dipping a mystic's pen in ink, 
 indeed, for the betterment of pigs, gathering 
 together co-operative societies in poultry, 
 co-operative creameries, co-operative societies 
 for the purchase of expensive machinery in 
 farm-use, artificial manures scientifically 
 adjusted for differing soils, fodder where 
 necessary, and unadulterated seeds (a sub- 
 
 70 
 
PREPARATIONS 
 
 sequent enquiry proved that the seeds then 
 sold to Irish farmers were adulterated up 
 to and over sixty per cent), and pedalling 
 from county to county, through barony after 
 barony, was to be sure new occupation for 
 the mystic, though by no means an untheo- 
 sophical occupation. That Life is comprised 
 in no thinker's terms needs no saying. That 
 Life to be comprised in a poet's vision 
 requires to be experienced needs insistence, 
 though it seem truism enough, for a good 
 deal of the world's song has been a leisured 
 hobby. And henceforward over iE's work 
 the smell of turf-reek was to pass, and he 
 who had seen Ireland afar in vision was to 
 look on her with closer and clearer eyes. 
 
 Thejack of beauty, in jt-s _ more obvious 
 sense, in his future js£Eiting-niight_seem_J;o 
 sia^esir a" lac£7^.con.timuty in.^his life. 
 Omer superficiai signs there are that seem 
 to suggest that same lack of continuity ; for 
 that rare prose, so delicate in its rhythms 
 and rising at its height to an impassioned 
 ecstasy, began to be less frequently heard ; 
 song was heard less often on his lips, and 
 when it revisited him its themes were more 
 obvious, less incommensurable, and, indeed, 
 it was oftener a noble speechcraft than the 
 craft of singing; the visions and mystical 
 experiences of the " household," in the course 
 of time, died away, though they recurred at 
 whiles with a new power, and with their 
 
 71 
 
PBEPABA TIONS 
 
 passing the painter, in course of time, turned 
 from their record to the more familiar sights 
 of the earth. A workaday directness took 
 their place ; and the mind that was acute in 
 translating the obscure experiences of the 
 spirit in terms of the intellect without 
 essential loss of meaning, turned at last to 
 public debate with a shrewd humour and 
 ability that foemen learned to respect and 
 which he himself lusted to display. In a 
 superficial sense it might be said that a 
 change had occurred. Changes always occur, 
 and are always superficial, when a man turns 
 another side of his being toward life. 
 
 Looked at more closely, it is the continuity 
 rather than the discontinuity that reveals 
 itself; and to miss this is not only to miss 
 the meaning of jE's days, but the very 
 curious thing that happened to the I.A.O.S. 
 Horace Plunkett, who had been a rancher in 
 America and who came of a family habituated 
 to public affairs, mixed the two things by 
 coming forward with a very simple, and there- 
 fore startling, solution of the difficulties of the 
 Irish farmer. It was of those difficulties he 
 had thought, and it was the problem those 
 difficulties presented he wished to unriddle. 
 He did unriddle them, very satisfactorily: 
 so satisfactorily that out of the difficulties of 
 the Irish farmer sprang an idea that became 
 an inspiration to farming as far removed as 
 the Western States of America and India. 
 
 72 
 
PBEPABA TIONS 
 
 It was sound economics applied to a dis- 
 astrously uneconomical situation ; and it was 
 meant as no more. The very fact that it 
 meant the breaking up of usury — and a 
 
 Particularly virulent form of usury — proves 
 ow sound the economics were, for the usurer 
 is an economic pest. But, in the course of 
 organizing his economic scheme, while under 
 the incantations of a poet he was induced to 
 commit a part of his scheme to quite another 
 sort of a man with quite another outlook 
 on life. 
 
 This does not mean that M organized 
 better or worse than any of the other or- 
 ganizers, or that his organizing differed in 
 any essential from the instructions according 
 to which he proceeded. Even had it done so 
 — as might have been the case for all the 
 world wiU ever know — he and his bicycle 
 had to pass on their baronial way, and head- 
 quarters might be trusted to produce uni- 
 formity. But who was this traveller through 
 the baronies, and what was the impact of his 
 present experiences on his past discoveries ? 
 Though we cannot answer for Sir Horace 
 Plunkett's soul we may assume that when- 
 ever he unriddled his problem, in his own 
 day of organizing and propaganda, unriddled 
 it was, and the farmers' situation so far be- 
 came a straighter, a neater, a more pros- 
 perous, and also a manlier, affair. This other 
 man, however, had lived quite another sort 
 
 73 
 
PBEPABA TIONS 
 
 of life ; he had made spiritual discoveries, 
 and had caught or had cast them in beauty, 
 to make them his own and to pass them to 
 others. Was an uneconomic problem un- 
 riddled with a suitable economic reply the 
 end-all and be-all of his organizing ? He had 
 in vision seen life as a steady flame mount- 
 ing up fragrantly to the throne'of God, where 
 the light was like a cloud, dense and unbear- 
 able ; he had heard HisVoice borne through the 
 universe and in chord on chord of music build 
 up the souls of Earth and her children, with 
 the fine memory in them of the Beauty from 
 whence they came and wherein only they could 
 live if Life was to be more than breathing; 
 he had seen Life softly irradiate and disperse 
 the troubled clouds of perplexity with the 
 vision of auspicious destinies yet to serve, and 
 with a troubled and travailing past growing 
 into the triumph of a life yet to be ; he had 
 seen Power silently shining forth, Love trans- 
 figuring. Beauty transforming. Being mantled 
 in an ecstasy of flame; he had seen the 
 thought of God in man's mind and the 
 image of God in man's body and the passions 
 of God for beauty and holiness beating 
 swiftly in his blood ; he had seen these things, 
 not as a dreamer's dream, but as the very 
 certitudes of his soul ; and he had seen 
 Ireland where the hills had once shone with 
 mystic fires, a precious place, where in the next 
 mysterious rhythm of Earth glory was to 
 
 74 
 
PREPABA TIONS 
 
 come again, and a new teaching go forth, 
 as once of old, through the world : was he 
 answered with the answering of a farmer's 
 problem, of pure seeds, of wholesale buying 
 and retail selling, and a victory over the stul- 
 tifying, blighting usurer squatting astraddle 
 across the nation's life ? 
 
 What was it he saw as he and his bicycle 
 went on their travels ? How did it compare 
 vpith what he had seen in vision ? When he 
 matched vision with sight what was the 
 reaction of his mind after the co-operative 
 organizer had completed his task and replaced 
 disorder with order and disunion with union ? 
 The thought of men returning to wisdom and 
 dignity as they returned to the bosom of 
 Mother had shone as a fair thing before his 
 eye ; but now as he went through the country, 
 though he found wisdom and dignity there in 
 the heart of the same, and even more acute, 
 poverty that in the cities implied squalor and 
 vulgarity, yet he saw young men and young 
 women streaming away to cities — cities not 
 in Ireland, but in America, each district in 
 Ireland having its counterpart in some city 
 in America, Aran passing to Chicago, Achill 
 to Cleveland, and so forth. Life had fallen 
 from its ancient usage ; the stir of the modern 
 world had brought unrest ; the praise of 
 education had come, with withered scraps 
 of knowledge that were extoUed as a kind 
 of currency, to be changed later in life for 
 
 75 
 
PBEPA BA TIONS 
 
 hard cash, so noble was the conception of it, 
 though after-days sadly belied those preten- 
 sions ; the rail and the telegraph had narrowed 
 the world ; so that with lowered values of Life 
 and a heightened interest and curiosity a life 
 near to Earth connoted nothing but intolerable 
 tedium. The herded cities shone like glit- 
 tering palaces. Values were lost: dignity 
 and wisdom, though they still splendidly 
 remained, were lightly esteemed for the most 
 part beside the modern counterparts of success 
 and passing information. A naturally aristo- 
 cratic people do not easily change ; but the 
 change was astir; and the cities promised 
 information — true or false, what did it matter, 
 so long as it helped life to slip away unnoticed 
 and helped gregariousness ? — and the cities 
 tempted with success, though it was true that 
 rumour had it that this success came hardly 
 and only to a few. 
 
 Added to that was the hardihood of it all. 
 A life near to Earth connoted not only tedium 
 but a desperate struggle, a nightmare of 
 drudgery, of failure and debt, of malnutrition 
 and depressed vitality, and thus of disease 
 and early decrepitude. For not only had 
 values changed, standards also had changed. 
 Speedier methods, a completer organization, 
 a better use of the scientific discoveries more 
 easily available in places where farming was 
 conducted by syndicates, were demanded of a 
 life near to Earth before its continuance was 
 
 76 
 
PBEPABA TIONS 
 
 even possible. Economics have fallen into 
 disrepute among healthy men because of the 
 type of person who conducts their discussion. 
 It was once, for instance, gravely propounded 
 in a certain School of Economics as to "whether 
 a margin of unemployment was not necessary in 
 order that in times of trade prosperity a larger 
 body of labour might not in that emergency 
 be called upon " ; to which the only honour- 
 able answer was, not to hear and discuss the 
 thesis, but to strike the lecturer upon the 
 mouth, and, after having picked him up, to 
 point out to him that by "a larger body 
 of labour" he really meant starving men. 
 Economics, however, means mutual aid ; and 
 mutual aid means decent comradeliness ; and 
 decent comradeliness means fair living; and 
 those who discuss economics in terms of cash 
 instead of in terms of men are those who 
 do, or those who hope to, or those who are 
 hired by those who do or hope to, trample 
 on their fellows. Pedantry is a confusion of 
 clear thinking ; but sometimes that lack of clear 
 thinking arises from something not at all so 
 innocent as frailty or clumsiness of mind. 
 
 The cynic, conscious or unconscious, sneers 
 at the poet's terms ; but the poet's terms 
 always justify themselves by the disaster that 
 ensues when they are neglected. The poet 
 had spoken of a life near to Earth ; he had 
 seen Man in a high comradeship of Life. 
 What now did he find ? He saw that the 
 
 77 
 
PREPABA TIONS 
 
 life near. to^a£thbecam^Jj21go§giJjlfiJbecause 
 |fiat Jiigh comrgiksEiliu^^ by 
 
 exploitation j^ and then the poet becanae 
 economist. He saw goods becoming coin of 
 the realm, with a most subtle confusion re- 
 sulting ; he saw an ancient form of barter 
 conducted as an elaborate trick instead of as 
 a simple interchange. He saw the farmer egg 
 buying the gaimbin tea, the egg at well below 
 current wholesale rates (was there not a debt 
 outstanding ?) and the tea at retail rate, bear- 
 ing twenty to twenty-five per cent profit. 
 He might also have seen the smallholder 
 farmer smoking his duidin till the bowl blis- 
 tered his lips with the heat, and taking an egg 
 (value two or three halfpennies) to buy a pipe 
 (value one halfpenny), and without any remedy. 
 He saw, as he says, " hordes of keen-witted 
 business men " who " began to handle " the 
 farmer's " produce ; they occupied all the 
 roads to the markets, they did all his busi- 
 ness for him, fixed the prices for his stock 
 and crops, and saw to it that riches should 
 not prove hereafter a stumbUng-block at his 
 entrance to Heaven. Those who brought his 
 requirements into the district had the same 
 watchful care over his chances of future 
 happiness. He was doubly saved. I do not 
 say," he adds, " that these forces acted with 
 conscious enmity to the farmer. They were 
 mostly efforts to help him, as well-intentioned 
 as the elephant who, seeing some motherless 
 
 78 
 
PREPARATIONS 
 
 chickens, said, ' I will be a mother to the poor 
 little things,' and lay down on them to keep 
 them warm, Tragi-comic legend thought it 
 unnecessary to develop the further history of 
 that clutch. The Irish elephants have lain 
 down heavily on the farmers, and have oblit- 
 erated many of the brood they have intended 
 to bear"* — obliterating also the life near 
 Earth, the dignity of man, the hero in man, 
 the renewal of youth, the intimations of 
 splendour and the high comradeship and 
 divine purpose, in all at least that was out- 
 wardly visible. 
 
 The poet had sung of Earth that her 
 " tender kiss hath memory we are kings for 
 all our wanderings"; but the business done 
 on Earth's bosom had such consequences that 
 the only chance her child had of realizing 
 himself as a king was by a good dose of 
 porter or whisky. It is easy to blame that 
 child ; it is right to blame him ; and M has 
 some exquisite scorn for the seekers after as 
 well as for the ennobled purveyors of that 
 immagical summoner of hidden kingship ; 
 but the foUies of man are often an inverted 
 wisdom, and are at most an escape from a 
 life that he is only wishful to deny as his. 
 No man felt a king when drunk who had 
 not a reasonable chance of realizing that 
 kingship when sober if only things were 
 reasonably ordered. Drunkenness, when not 
 * " Co-operation and Nationality." 
 79 
 
PBEPARA TIONS 
 
 a physical disease or an unhappy (or happy) 
 accident, is generally the result of misery or 
 malnutrition ; and the dweller on the bosom 
 of Earth coming to a sordid town on a fair- 
 day, with a life behind him and before him 
 of hardship and monotony and unremitting 
 struggle, with only potatoes and bread to eat, 
 and tea to drink so strong that it quelled 
 hunger by reaction, fleeced by the higgler at 
 home in his petty sales and swindled at the 
 fair in his larger purchases by dealers and 
 jobbers with a prearranged scale of prices 
 that he knew to be below the rates prevail- 
 ing, but reduced to helplessness by their 
 parasites the tanglers and blockers, in debt 
 to the gaimbin and with rent or instalment 
 falling due — such a man turning to whisky 
 is not at all a confutation of his kingship, 
 or of the warrior-hero or bard in him, as he 
 will occasionally display in fine order, with 
 seanchas or cudgel. 
 
 So the poet conceiving of civilization, 
 ancient or modern, and especially of days 
 before the bragged-of " dawn of civilization," 
 was faced by an order with nothing whatso- 
 ever that was civil in it, except perhaps the 
 feelings of the drunken king faced by the 
 hills and the sky or the rolUng stretch of 
 bog on the following morning. What was 
 the impact on him of this new discovery? 
 How did he face his discoveries of the past, 
 of the " household " and the mystical society, 
 
 80 
 
PREPARA TIONS 
 
 with the footing beneath him of his dis- 
 coveries as an organizer of co-operation ? 
 
 After some years of organizing he was 
 appointed assistant-secretary to the I.A.O.S. 
 Then in 1905 he was appointed the editor 
 of the official organ of the I.A.O.S., The 
 Irish Homestead. For awhile he con- 
 tinued the tradition of that organ by 
 dealing with matters essential to homestead 
 and farmer. But even as the "feel" of 
 a shillelagh in the hand of some men is 
 fatal to order, so the "feel" of a pen in 
 the hand of a poet is fatal to disorder. 
 The poet arose again now, in his new 
 guise as economist. Matching discovery 
 with discovery he faced his past with his 
 present, and undertook to devise a state 
 of affairs, by the shrewd application of 
 common sense, in which his old dreams 
 could become possible by the adoption, and 
 expansion, of the very economic gospel he 
 had been sent to preach. 
 
 In view of the result it is right to 
 remember how this came to be. When it 
 is said that he " undertook to devise a 
 state of affairs," that does not mean that 
 Athena sprang full-armed from the head 
 of this particular Zeus. The obstetrics 
 erred, as a point of fact, on the other 
 side of inhumanity. It was difficult to say 
 what portion of the anatomy of the new 
 social order was going to be presented 
 
 81 Q 
 
PBEPABA TIONS 
 
 next. Our Zeus himself was in ignorance. 
 It was much later that he became his 
 own midwife, and patted Athena into 
 shapeliness and order. The seed of the 
 new experience on the ovum of the old 
 vision put him in labour for many years, 
 even whUe he dealt with what are called the 
 exigencies of modern journalism. There 
 was no premeditation as to the result, ex- 
 cept in so far as the mind works by a 
 tacit and orderly wisdom beyond cognizance 
 of its own brain. The procedure was simply 
 the answering of questions that arose in his 
 mind, induced in main part by the weekly 
 problems that affected the Irish farmer. It 
 is important to note that fact, inasmuch as the 
 social order he evolved was the counterpart in 
 modern times of something that had existed 
 before in the history of the race, before 
 the stranger had kicked his way brutishly 
 through the land. Our Zeus himself did 
 not know this, till some few of his friends 
 saw the likeness and pointed out to his 
 delighted paternal gaze that Athena was a 
 re-birth not a birth, a re-birth of race 
 wisdom. And then the mind suddenly 
 remembers that about a year before he 
 had joined the I.A.O.S., thinking of the 
 past glory of Ireland and of "The 
 Awaking of the Fires," he had written 
 this sentence: "In hoping for another such 
 day I do not of course mean the renewal 
 
 82 
 
PBEPARA TIONS 
 
 of the ancient order, but rather look for 
 the return of the same light which was 
 manifest in the past." It is not every 
 man, to be sure, who is permitted to be 
 both Zeus and Prometheus. 
 
 Therefore it is difficult to see of what sort 
 Athena is in the strange labours of her birth 
 in the columns of The ■ Irish Homestead 
 week by week ; it is comelier to avert our 
 eyes till she be patted and cleaned and 
 reduced to some kind of tentative order in 
 the pages of " Co-operation and Nationality," 
 published seven years later. It is a remark- 
 able book: probably the first piece of thinking 
 from facts rather than from the terminology of 
 other books, in economic literature. It was 
 born of work ; not of reading in a study. In 
 it he faces his old visions bravely, and finds 
 them the truer because of what his further 
 experience has shown him. " Nature ," he 
 says, " has^Qjflteatioiiua£j!llpmngJie£dL^ 
 brood, made in the image of Deity, to dwia^e 
 awayinto "a" crew of littlcTleeH^^ feverish 
 city folk. She has other and more grandiose 
 futures before humanity if ancient prophecy 
 aird^our deepest, most spiritual, iritmtions 
 have any truth in them." That becomes the 
 base" of his thinking. Sir Horace Plunkett 
 had already decreed as the triple watchword 
 of the co-operative movement, " Better farm- 
 ing, better business, better Uving." It was a 
 statesmanhke watchword. But M, seeing 
 
 83 
 
PBEPARA TIONS 
 
 further, sees more deeply, and eliminates any- 
 possible littleness of conception, eliminating 
 therewith the things that inevitably lead to 
 degradation of personal and national life. 
 
 The life near Earth is deeper and more 
 spiritual. How is it to be ordered so that 
 this may approve itself in fact? If the 
 spiritual life of man be deeper and truer 
 than a material compromise with sloth and 
 selfishiness, and spiritual and physical degra- 
 dation — that is to say, if it be better, not as 
 a pleasing transcendentalism the surrender of 
 which only creates a sentimental pang, but as 
 a cardinal thing which, if it cannot approve 
 itself in experience, must be bravely cast 
 aside as a delusion, and ev^ery preacher thereof 
 in pulpits stoned as liar and trickster — what 
 ■is to be done with a state of affairs which, by 
 its very continuance, denied that fact ? That 
 was the challenge to the poet. Was he, Uke 
 the most of poets and preachers and pro- 
 fessors of faiths, to bow his mind to truth and 
 square his life with its denial ; or was he to 
 take up the challenge he himself had offered 
 to himself? 
 
 "* Already as organizer for the I.A.O.S. he 
 had answered a part of his problem. The 
 Life near Earth had become impossible. 
 Why ? Because men lived lives of individual 
 selfishness, suspicion and greed, each man 
 separate from his fellows and struggling 
 against his fellows : a state of affairs the 
 
 84 
 
PREPARATIONS 
 
 baseness of which was disguised by those 
 who chanced to be successful in the sordid 
 game by the fair phrase "competitive 
 interests " that was cast as a cloak about it ; 
 but a state of affairs that worked itself out 
 in desperation for the huge mass of those 
 struggling and separated men. Directly 
 they were called to the nobler conception 
 of mutual aid, what happened? Not only 
 did they at once stand on a nobler plane of 
 life ; not only did the greater part of them 
 for the first time in their lives realize in 
 little measure the teaching of the Christ ; 
 but at once their economic disabilities dis- 
 appeared. The higgler, the dealer, the jobber, 
 the tangler, the blocker, the middleman, 
 and the gaimbin, were at once cut away ; and 
 the click was heard in every place of a 
 machinery that began to fall together as a 
 harmonious unit because the key for its 
 well-working had been discovered. The co- 
 operative societies, each member of which 
 in working for and with, instead of against, 
 his fellows, worked the better and the more 
 freely for himself, began to federate together 
 for greater power and freedom. Especially 
 was this necessary when the army of middle- 
 men, finding they could no longer put their 
 hands into their fellows' pockets, threw the 
 whole weight of their earlier winnings 
 against them in naked fight and bought 
 misrepresentation. Then the co-operative 
 
 85 
 
PBEPARA TIONS 
 
 federations created the Irish Agricultural 
 Wholesale Society, guaranteeing to them- 
 selves thus the bottom prices in the purchase 
 of machinery and goods and guaranteed 
 purity of seeds. And from top to bottom 
 men became their own economic masters 
 when they ceased to desire economic mastery 
 over others or refused to permit others to 
 assume economic mastery over themselves, 
 and decided in free debate and election the 
 vital concerns of their lives instead of having 
 these decided by others. 
 
 It was better business ; and therefore made 
 a life on the land more possible. It was 
 saner and manlier ; and so it helped the 
 dignity of man ; for even as the little Rala- 
 hine Society turned out to gather the harvest 
 of the infirm so these co-operative societies 
 began to realize civic duties and responsi- 
 bilities. Men of sharply divided political 
 opinions, at the very height of political con- 
 troversies, acted together, not only in 
 business interests, but with a civic purpose ; 
 and instead of dividing all their profits 
 began to allocate some portion of these to 
 public purposes within the community, begin- 
 ning therewith intelligently to discuss those 
 public purposes. In other words, the co- 
 operative societies became rural communities. 
 Out of the disorder that had prevailed 
 a civilization emerged. The men who had 
 struggled pitifully against conditions too hard 
 
 86 
 
PBEPABA TIONS 
 
 for them, preserving, however, for the most 
 part (as it is part of the instinct of our race 
 to preserve) a dignity and fellow-kindliness 
 amazing under the circumstances, now became 
 citizens. They were compelled to think for 
 themselves ; and that gave them new in- 
 terests. Prosperity quickened those interests. 
 A larger reach of science came in with the 
 chemistry of manures and the soil. A better 
 knowledge of peoples and events at a distance 
 came with the abihty to reach that distance 
 directly in selling power. Nationality mean- 
 ing now a tissue of live interests instead of 
 a medley of ancient catchwords, clearer poli- 
 tical thinking resulted. Better independence 
 and a stronger dignity resulted from the right 
 to take the responsibility of important de- 
 cisions ; which concluded in logic what began 
 in justice with the land agitation, for the 
 imposition of the middleman, and especially 
 the gaimbin variety, was now broken as the 
 imposition of the landlord had been broken. 
 As men became their own masters the pride 
 of^^Tarose. And the basis of all this was 
 a rural community where, if a man were 
 prosperous, it was not as a result of exploit- 
 ing his fellows, but by helping them in the 
 deg re e in which he helped himself. 
 
 aio'~the conception slowly and tentatively 
 emerged that gave the economist's answer 
 to the poet — emerged hand in hand, and 
 pace by pace, with their results in fact, 
 
 87 
 
PREPABA TIONS 
 
 " Sometimes," he says, " one feels as if there 
 were some higher mind in humanity which 
 could not act through individuals, but only 
 through brotherhoods and groups of men"; 
 and here were brotherhoods and groups 
 working out some part of that higher mind. 
 Yet, so far, they were farming, and not 
 social, brotherhoods, civic only in some chance 
 extension of their powers. Until the farming 
 brotherhood was made also a social brother- 
 hood the further possibility was little more 
 than hinted. " Fine character in a race is 
 evolved and not taught. It is not due to 
 copybook headings or moral maxims given 
 to the youth of the country. It arises from 
 the structure of society and the appeal it 
 makes to them." So he writes, so simply 
 and truly; and our bitter history is such 
 that "we have not had a social order since 
 the time of the clans," for the stranger's 
 ruthless foot of set design kicked that social 
 order to pieces, though it left fragments of 
 it dispersed about the country. He says, 
 "We will yet see the electric light and the 
 telephone in rural districts, and the village 
 hall with a hum of friendship in it," but the 
 village hall had first to be made, and a com- 
 pany to avail itself of that hall in other than 
 as a promiscuous charity, half welcomed, half 
 resented, had first to be ordered. The demand 
 for it exists, caused by the modern tedium 
 with an insufficient mental life — or as Sir 
 
 88 
 
PREP A RA 2' IONS 
 
 Horace Plunkett has said * : "If the domestic 
 and social hfe of the country does not 
 advance with its economic life, aU but the 
 dullards will fly to the town." But first 
 a society must be created, and behind that 
 again a social order, and behind that a 
 sufficient social conception. For it was 
 not at random that M wrote: "I hate to 
 hear of stagnant societies who think because 
 they have made butter well that they have 
 crowned their parochial generation with a 
 halo of glory, and can rest content with the 
 fame of it all, listening to the whirr of steam 
 separators and pouching in peace of mind 
 the extra penny a gallon for their milk. 
 And I dislike the little groups who meet a 
 couple of times a year and call themselves 
 co-operators, because they have got their 
 fertilizers more cheaply, and have done 
 nothing else." 
 
 So " The United Irishwomen " t arose, for 
 "we cannot build a rural civilization in 
 Ireland without the aid of women." It 
 began with, or rather was awoken and crystal- 
 lized by, M as he, week by week in The 
 Irish Homestead, faced the problems that 
 he the poet put to himself the economist 
 and practical farmer. It worked from the 
 
 * "The United Irishwomen," p. 6. 
 
 t See "The United Irish womeni; Their Place, Work 
 and Ideals," by Horace Plunkett, EUice Pilkington, 
 and George Russell (,M). Maunsell. 
 
 89 
 
PBEPABA TIONS 
 
 house toward the village hall. It sought to 
 free women from onerous work on the land, 
 and succeeded in some places with the co- 
 operation of the men; it organized nursing 
 in home and village ; it taught domestic 
 economy and hygiene; it gave care to the 
 woman's part of agricultural life, such as 
 poultry, home-dairying, pig-breeding, bee- 
 keeping, and cottage-gardening ; and it 
 created a social life. Such things it did : and 
 does, for the movement has a long furrow to 
 plough. It is a work most full of pitfalls ; 
 for in such work it is easy to de-nationalize ; 
 and to de-nationalize is to other-nationalize, 
 and finally alienize, in both meanings of the 
 word. Yet as the work approaches the 
 village hall it joins, in fact as well as in 
 theory, with the Gaelic League ; with which 
 it must finally co-operate — as indeed the 
 whole of the co-operative movement must 
 finally work with the Gaelic League in re- 
 building a distinctively Irish State, drawing 
 on its own separate sources and traditions, 
 despite the Statutes of Kilkenny. 
 
 Thus the economist tentatively felt his 
 way, relying, on no path blazed in text-books, 
 but on his own inner light, hardly knowing 
 where he would finally emerge. Yet there 
 was one part of the city-building to which he 
 had been called that he had not canvassed 
 in his thinking. That was the slums of 
 citydom. They lay outside his work and his 
 
 90 
 
PBEPABA TIONS 
 
 thinking. He was not, however, suffered 
 to forget them. All of Ireland, for good 
 or ill, had to be reckoned with before the 
 thought of the National Being could justly 
 ensue. And so M came to , one of the most 
 honourable moments of his life. 
 
 At the very moment that farm labourers 
 were on strike, under the direction of the 
 Irish Transport Union, against the farmers 
 for whom he had thought and laboured, 
 under the same direction a great and historic 
 strike broke out in Dublin. Rather, it was 
 not a strike but a lock-out in which the 
 employers federated to break the Union, and 
 reminded the workers that while the strife 
 continued the masters could rely on their 
 three square meals a day while the workers 
 could but starve. Never was such unan- 
 imity procured in Ireland. Political parties 
 and journals forgot their strife, and rallied 
 against the workers. In a world of debased, 
 because commercialized, honour, money com- 
 mands ; and money commanded. To the 
 honour of Dublin poets be it said that they 
 rallied to the workers ; but they were a small 
 and helpless company. Then iE's "being 
 went up in a blaze." He came into the fray 
 with an open letter " To the Masters of 
 Dublin." At a meeting organized in Lon- 
 don to help the workers, apologizing first 
 to his countrymen for departing from his 
 custom by speaking on an English plat- 
 
 91 
 
PBEPABA TIONS 
 
 form while yet the wrongs done to his 
 country were unredressed, he attacked those 
 who deserted the poor when their Master 
 would have been with them. Hatred as- 
 sailed him on every side, for his entry into 
 the fray had lifted the issue on to the plane 
 of ideals : he had made the issue one of 
 faith espoused or deserted. Speaking in 
 conversation at that time, he spoke of him- 
 self as a psychic person who felt hate 
 striking on him like darts from every 
 quarter; and it was idle to remind him 
 that that hatred, where ignorant, was pitiful, 
 for the poor, were they but rightly informed, 
 would aid their fellows in poverty, and that 
 where it was not ignorant it was contemp- 
 tible, since it sprang from monetary interests ; 
 for he knew that already. 
 
 The storm rolled by — not in honour. It 
 left, however, two results. His ideas had 
 spread : the thought of a Co-operative Com- 
 monwealth defined itself on both sides. Few 
 words were more frequently heard in the 
 ranks of the workers : it took a higher rank 
 in their thoughts than even the question of 
 increased wages with men who were starv- 
 ing. A new thought had come to them: 
 a thought of the State, which if it be not 
 based on fellowship in control, in ideas, and 
 in profits, must be based on exploitation, 
 against which, rather than against this or 
 that s'cale of wages, they were revolting. 
 
 92 
 
PBEPABA TIONS 
 
 The system of "wagery," inherent in them 
 till that time for the lack of any other 
 system that seemed possible, received its 
 first blow ; and that idea captured other 
 minds than those of the workers. But a 
 new thought came to M. Rather a new 
 challenge came to the poet, to the man 
 before whom Life was something other than 
 an accepted baseness, a commerce in sordure. 
 He accepted the challenge. He began to 
 think out the National Being anew from 
 that point. 
 
 93 
 
CHAPTEK IV 
 
 A NATION, A STATE ; A STATE, A 
 NATION 
 
 Of old among the many secret names by 
 which Ireland was known to her children, 
 there was one that arrests the mind with its 
 mysterious faith. That name is Inis Fail: 
 the Isle of Destiny. There have been times, 
 with a bull's hoof planted in her face, when 
 that strange appellation has seemed to be a 
 consummate cynicism : there are pages in her 
 history that it is scarcely possible to read. 
 There are times also, even when she has 
 seemed at the depth of enforced degradation, 
 when that title comes to wear a quite 
 curious significance. 
 
 Such a time was the rise and culmination 
 of the nineteenth century. Every kind of 
 brutality and humiliation was visited upon 
 her, until it seemed that no nation could 
 emerge from the ordeal in which malignity 
 had subdued her. And yet it is true that 
 her very disabiUties then saved her from 
 the blight, the deeper, the seeming ineradic- 
 able blight, that visited some other nations. 
 Early in that century a poet whom we claim 
 
 94 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 as an Irishman, and an O'Neill moreover, 
 sang — 
 
 I will not cease from mental fight, 
 Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand 
 Till we have built Jerusalem 
 In England's green and pleasant land ; 
 
 but when we survey England now, and ask 
 how shall a fair State be made of her, the 
 question at once arises. What shall be done 
 with the monstrous cities, built on miles of 
 slumdom, that blister the fair side of Earth, 
 and make so many of her mortal-kind to 
 seem less men than a hopeless putrefaction 
 of humanity? Even as Blake sang one of 
 the fairest shires of the "green and pleasant 
 land " was nearing a time when it would be 
 turned into one vast clinker-patch, and its 
 men, a sturdy race of copyholders farming 
 the fields and cultivating a home industry, 
 turned into wage-slaves, living in darkened 
 streets, their faces stamped with the image of 
 the god they were enforced to serve, passing 
 in their deadened multitudes into the midst 
 of whirring machinery at the blast of a steam- 
 whistle, and passing out again at another 
 blast into homes where no light comes, no 
 flowers shine, and green fields are first an 
 unimagined splendour and finally an undesired 
 freedom. There are no green fields : there 
 are only miles and miles of clinkers. There 
 is no sunlight and blue sky : there is only 
 
 95 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 smoke belched out from the steeples of the 
 new temples man has built to his new god. 
 And in the midst of this scene, and under 
 this dark panoply, the tenement-house from 
 which they issue, the foul factories where they 
 labour for some begrudged pittance, and the 
 gin-palace where they forget, comprise the 
 last form of civilization that man made in 
 the image of God has devised for the just 
 display of that image. Yet_n|.§n_does_disgJay 
 the image of God: whatever, gad. he jgrses, 
 t'Kat image wiir he display."^ 
 -^ ^6''"wKat end ? one asks. If some fire 
 of God swept away this ghastly hell it 
 would take three generations of green fields 
 and blue skies to recover what was lost ; 
 and to what end shall men be blasted in 
 their souls, and the fair face of Earth be 
 despoiled? That some cotton mills in India, 
 serving their country satisfactorily and well, 
 should be ruined by being undersold in 
 their own markets, and more misery caused 
 out there? A fair goal this, indeed: to 
 debase Life at one end of the world in order 
 to be able to debase it more effectually at 
 the other end ! No : but, in plain terms, 
 that some score of men may amass their 
 millions of Hard Cash, and thereby become 
 as degraded in their avra minds as they 
 demand that the minds of their slaves shall 
 be degraded. 
 
 Blasphemy ? Atheism ? It is right maybe 
 96 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 to revive these ancient terms ; but it is 
 very strange that men in Inis Fail should 
 be called upon to rebuild their State with 
 the hell before them out of which other 
 nations have won their success. Only in 
 two places in Ireland has this terrible con- 
 ception at all established itself; and in 
 one of them the full horror faced M in 
 the midst of one of the bitterest industrial 
 struggles of modern times. There was 
 little of it that he could have evaded, such 
 was the effect on him. The sight of 
 Liberty Hall on a bleak Winter's evening 
 teeming in every part with hungry men 
 and women waiting for soup and bread 
 tickets, men and women, actually in their 
 thousands, clustered on ill-lit and grimy 
 stairs and along murky passages, coming 
 from the very depths of Life, was a sight 
 that can as easily be forgotten as described. 
 Nothing proved more highly the honour 
 of Dublin than their infallible courtesy and 
 kindliness and dignity — dignity, even though 
 the wearer of that dignity were waiting 
 hungrily for a ticket that would entitle him 
 to food. Nothing proved it better, unless it 
 were a cluster of men and women, poets 
 and writers for the most part, who met 
 there, waiting for a task that might be 
 found for them. Among these was M ; 
 and even had any man the desire to for- 
 get these things, having once seen them, 
 
 97 H 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 it would be hard to purchase the faculty of 
 forgetfubiess save with the costly payment 
 of cynicism. 
 
 So in the coming months in The Irish 
 Homestead he took up the new challenge. 
 In " Co-operation and Nationality," dealing 
 carefully with the beginnings of things, chiefly 
 rural, he had said, " No country can marry 
 any particular solution of its problems and 
 live happily ever afterwards," but now as he 
 struck more deeply towards the roots of 
 national being, and embraced the whole 
 existence of the State, a finer certitude, a 
 more assured conviction, marks his attitude. 
 Yet that attitude is the same. The man is 
 the same. A man's spiritual discoveries are 
 the only certitudes he knows in a world in 
 flux, for they are his insight into the world 
 of which this world of the senses is but a 
 partial appearance. "The spiritual question 
 is the only one," he had said. He says it 
 yet, though his present concern is to devise 
 a State that shall fit the most rigorous re- 
 quirements, that shall even be, if we so 
 choose to regard it, abreast with modern 
 thinking. It is for the spirit of the nation 
 he is concerned when thinking of the State 
 in which it shall be adequately housed. 
 Civilizations, even when they be least civil 
 (and maybe chiefly then), are the expression 
 in outward fact of the inhabiting soul within. 
 Civilizations also, it is worthy of note, help 
 
 98 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 to mould and fashion that soul by the con- 
 ceptions on which they are based. To the 
 wise statesman the nationality makes the 
 State, or it becomes an empty doctrinaire 
 shell that is soon neglected ; but the wise 
 statesman also remembers that the State 
 makes the nationality. States are not emitted 
 from a fertile brain as constitutions may be, 
 as the Abbd Siey^s so admirably proved by 
 example ; for the outward circumstance is 
 created by an indwelling soul and intellectual 
 life. Hence -^'s impatience with what he 
 calls pseudo-military bodies that muster they 
 know not what for: though in this, despite 
 the essential justice of what he says, he 
 over-rashly assumes that the lack of a fine 
 intellectual consciousness supposes the equal 
 lack of a dawning soul, thus brushing aside 
 what should be examined because it gives 
 little of that which he rightly and im- 
 periously demands. It may be true, as he 
 says, that feelings do not presuppose thoughts; 
 but feelings, if they be clean and healthy, 
 may define themselves into thoughts if a 
 thoughtful man identify himself with them, 
 as they assuredly never wUl if thoughtful 
 men deride them. It is to the high credit 
 of M that he combined clear vision with 
 clear thinking, suflFering in himself neither 
 the learned antics of lecture-rooms or round- 
 tables nor the vague inchoate sentiments of the 
 manifold organizations that exist in the country. 
 
 99 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 It profits a nation nothing if it gain a 
 whole Empire and lose its own soul. It is 
 not to Rome we look for a memorable 
 beauty as we look to Athens ; and the 
 Roman wars that lusted for things that 
 were not Roman, and whose crushing im- 
 poverished the world by just so much 
 individuality, have not the honour of the 
 Greek wars that defended things that were 
 Grecian. Rome exacted brute dominance ; 
 it demanded fealty in the only form in 
 which States value it, in Hard Cash ; but 
 every Roman poet and prose-writer gave 
 intellectual fealty to Greece. Even while 
 Athens was under the heel of the Roman 
 brute-power Athenic intellect and beauty 
 were masters in Rome. And M, enamoured 
 of the things that signify, is not solicitous 
 for the trappings of power on Ireland's 
 behalf but anxious for such an awakening 
 of spiritual life as will build up a notable 
 beauty in the land. Already Ireland had 
 won a fealty from other lands ; and that 
 fealty had come of work done partly 
 under his own hand ; for the making of a 
 rural civiUzation, in aU the departments 
 of living, had attracted deputations from 
 many places, who had returned home to 
 imitate the things they had seen. To win 
 such a tribute for one's country is a worthy 
 ambition for noble men. A nation that 
 can win such a tribute has dominion, with- 
 
 100 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 out a single official hired to enforce it ; 
 it has governance, without a single soldier 
 to leave its shores ; but an Empire of this 
 sort — the only sort that stirs a mind en- 
 franchised from an ancient circus-pomp — 
 can only be gained when a nation has 
 gained its own soul, its nationality, and has 
 housed it in a State fit to receive it. 
 
 But what came they out for to see ? We 
 know, for they have told us ; but we might 
 have guessed had they kept their secret. 
 They came to see a new up-growing 
 civilization that was answering the hardest 
 problem of the modern world, the problem 
 of a life on the land ; answering it by 
 making it successful and desirable ; and 
 answering it, not by the financial lord- 
 ship of one man over another, but by 
 the mutual aid of the whole community 
 governing itself, where the prosperity of one 
 man advantaged his fellows, and where the 
 loss of one man weakened the community. 
 Addressing one such delegation M said : " We 
 often hear the expression 'the rural com- 
 munity,' but where do we find rural com- 
 munities ? There are rural populations, but 
 that is altogether a different thing. The word 
 * community ' implies an association of people 
 having common interests and common pos- 
 sessions, bound together by laws and regu- 
 lations which express these common interests 
 and ideals and define the relation of the 
 
 101 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 individual to the community. Our rural 
 populations are no more closely connected, 
 for the most part, than the shifting sands on 
 the seashore. Their life is almost entirely 
 individualistic. There are personal friendships, 
 of course, but few economic or social partner- 
 ships. Everybody pursues his ovvn occupation 
 without regard to the occupation of his neigh- 
 bours. If a man emigrates it does not affect 
 the occupation of those who farm the land 
 all about him. They go on ploughing and 
 digging, buying and selling, just as before. 
 They suffer no perceptible economic loss by 
 the departure of half a dozen men from the 
 district. A true community would, of course, 
 be affected by the loss of its members. A 
 co-operative society if it loses a dozen mem- 
 bers, the mUk of their cows, their orders for 
 fertilizers, seeds, and feeding-stuffs, receives 
 serious injury to its prosperity. . . . That is 
 the difference between a community and an 
 unorganized population." * 
 
 Yet what of the cities, since cities must 
 be? "If we build our civiUzation," he 
 says, speaking of cities, " without integrating 
 labour into its economic structure, it will 
 wreck that civilization; and it will do that 
 more swiftly to-day than a thousand years 
 ago, because there is no longer the dis- 
 parity of culture between high and low 
 which existed in past centuries." In truth 
 * " The Rural Community." 
 102 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 it is doing so now, for that very cause; 
 and it will do so with startling rapidity 
 after a great war. Already the change is in 
 progress. Men are demanding to fix the terms 
 and conditions under which they will labour ; 
 they are drawing together in unions that are 
 rapidly becoming guilds to enforce these 
 things, and they bring statesmen to hear and 
 solicit them. Soon, and inevitably, they will 
 demand to elect the captains of their labour ; 
 and thus inevitably, sooner or later, into 
 the hands of these guilds will pass the in- 
 dustries with which they are concerned. It 
 needs no amazing prevision to perceive these 
 things. They pursue their way with a certain 
 high honour, to which men prove their 
 folly, and darker things than folly, when 
 they shut their eyes. The hireling knows, 
 for instance — as only they know who have 
 experienced it in a continued bitterness that 
 darkens the sun — the deep dishonour done 
 him by the insecurity of his employment, 
 when, for a little displeasure, he may be sent 
 out to starve, he and those who look to his 
 hand for food ; and a thousand are willing 
 to forgo weeks of wages, with the chance 
 of never getting back their posts, for one 
 man who is Hghtly dismissed. Half the 
 strikes of modem times have been, not for 
 wages, but for principles ; and when men 
 by their thousands are willing to lose all 
 for a principle it is time for the poet, 
 
 103 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 not indeed to cavil, but to rub his eyes, and 
 stare, and wonder if his kingdom be coming. 
 
 So this poet started up when he heard that 
 most of the working men in Dubhn had 
 gone out to starvation rather than be ordered 
 not to join a Union that they, till then, 
 never had had a thought of joining, and to 
 sign a document giving a pledge to that 
 effect. Here already was the makings of a 
 community ; and an honourable community. 
 If such could be made part of an economic 
 community in the city, decreeing for itself 
 as the rural community was beginning to do, 
 and in like fashion creating its own prosperity 
 without permitting the exploitation of itself, 
 here then were the two parts of the Co- 
 operative Commonwealth. Common-wealth 1 
 M has written with the bitterness many have 
 felt of those who speak of the increasing 
 prosperity of a country, judging that pros- 
 perity by statistics that signify nothing to 
 the people at large— indeed that signify, in 
 the present framework of society, and in- 
 evitably signify, more freedom enslaved and 
 more decency debauched. To speak so is 
 to speak as they did who turned Lancashire 
 in England into a clinker-patch and degraded 
 its manhood, in order that increased statistics 
 should swell the pockets of a few. In Ireland 
 that example is before us while we seek 
 nobler destinies to serve. Wealth is not 
 national wealth if it pass only to a few and 
 
 104 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 give those few power to exploit their fellows. 
 It is not so in the economic sense. It is not 
 so even in the political sense, for in all 
 countries men become less national in the 
 degree in which they amass riches. Wealth 
 is only estimable when it is a common- 
 wealth ; and what is called industrial develop- 
 ment, when it does not signify industry 
 developed in a commonwealth, signifies 
 national loss and not gain whatever the trade 
 returns may say. 
 
 It is the custom to bend the knee to the 
 faith of the idealist in an elaborate cynic 
 fealty that assumes the sheer impracticability 
 of the schemes he so bravely devises ; and 
 it is not the least crafty trick by which the 
 exploiter fobs off enquiry into the first 
 principles of the business of Life. Yet these 
 things have been justified of life. Farmers 
 have co-operated on just such impracticable 
 principles ; stripped away middlemen and 
 exploiters ; and created, out of desperate 
 poverty, a wealth which is a commonwealth. 
 " I am familiar with a district," says M. . . . 
 "It was one of the most wretchedly poor 
 districts in Ireland. The farmers were at 
 the mercy of the gombeen traders and the 
 agricultural middlemen. Then a dozen 
 years ago a co-operative society was formed. 
 . . . The reign of the gombeen man is 
 over. The farmers control their own buying 
 and selling. Their organization markets for 
 
 105 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 them the eggs and poultry. It procures 
 seeds, fertilizers, and domestic requirements. 
 It turns the members' pigs into bacon. They 
 have a village hall and an allied women's 
 organization. They sell the products of the 
 women's industry. They have a co-operative 
 band, social gatherings, and concerts. They 
 have spread out into half a dozen parishes. 
 
 They have gone southward to A with 
 
 their propaganda and eastward towards F , 
 
 and in half a dozen years in all that district, 
 previously without organization, there will 
 be well-organized farmers' guilds, concen- 
 trating in themselves aU the trade of their 
 district, having meeting-places where the 
 opinion of the members can be taken ; having 
 a machinery, committees, and executive 
 officers to carry out whatever may be decided 
 on, and having funds, or profits, the joint 
 property of the community, which can be 
 drawn upon to finance their undertakings." 
 Another such guild of farmers, anticipating 
 an inevitable development, has undertaken 
 the supply of electricity to a neighbouring 
 town from the generating plant for their 
 machinery. Such things have been done, 
 issuihg from and emerging into ideals, but 
 wrought in healthy economic success. 
 
 The question M faces is : How shall this 
 be done in the complexity of modern cities? 
 Here again it is right to be reminded of 
 things that are being done elsewhere. In 
 
 106 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 Italy workmen's guilds own and conduct in- 
 dustries. They display no parsimony in the 
 payment of competent managers and general 
 directors ; but such managers and directors 
 are responsible to a guild of the workers 
 who understand the conditions of their in- 
 dustry, who own the industry in which each 
 of them has his particular function, and not 
 to a compahy of shareholders ignorant of 
 the conditions, and therefore easily manipu- 
 lated. This is the counterpart in the factory 
 of what the farmers had wrought in the fields 
 of Ireland. The farmers of Ireland, if not 
 free, have at least in their power now the 
 beginnings of their freedom. But how may 
 workers in factories win an equal freedom ? 
 And here M displays a shrewd tactical 
 wisdom. The farmer first captured the 
 organization of his manufactures by the 
 guild he created for that purpose, and then, 
 having the guUd, used it for the direct pur- 
 chase of his requirements on the farm and in 
 the homestead : the middleman who bought 
 from him went first, and the middleman who 
 sold to him followed in due course. Plainly 
 the worker in the city cannot do this. It 
 would be to court certain failure if a guild 
 of workmen erected a factory co-operatively 
 owned. The requisite experience would not 
 be with them in a complex state of affairs. 
 A huge power of finance would be wielded 
 against them. They would find, not only 
 
 107 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 that they would not sell so cheaply as their 
 opponents, who would be willing at once to 
 pool finances and run at a loss to break 
 them ; but they would not be able to sell at 
 all, for the distributive shops would be forced 
 by the big manufacturers, acting together, 
 not to stock co-operative goods under pain of 
 having higher prices levied against them, by a 
 withdrawal of discounts if not by direct in- 
 crease. The peril of that course must not be 
 considered : not at once. The worker in the 
 city must invert the procedure of the farmer. 
 He must first create his distributive stores ; 
 then, having that outlet, create his guild 
 factories ; and make his distributive stores 
 discriminate against the goods that do not 
 come from such guild- owned factories, as 
 the manufacturers would have done against 
 him if he had at first challenged com- 
 petition. 
 
 If trade unions, instead of conducting a 
 series of strikes that are often unsuccessful, 
 and which even when successful only erect a 
 temporary new platform of wages that will 
 soon be submerged as competition advances 
 to a new level, were to employ their 
 funds in creating co-operative stores and in 
 compelling their members to deal exclu- 
 sively at them, they would soon create a 
 new economic dignity for workers. In 
 times of strike they would consume their 
 own funds, because inasmuch as trade 
 
 108 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 union tickets would only be available at 
 the trade union co-operative stores, the sepa- 
 rate funds of the trade unions, instead of 
 being depleted in favour of middlemen who 
 are usually opposed to the demands of the 
 workers, would pass to the financially 
 distinct trade union store. When it is 
 remembered how large a percentage of a 
 city population either are, or soon wUl be, 
 trade union, it will be seen what enormous 
 power would thus pass to the workers. 
 For the employers for the most part depend 
 on what the poor buy, though they give the 
 poor little wherewith to buy. The worker 
 would, in strike or in work, have created the 
 basis of his commonwealth, and the em- 
 ployer would find the enemy, who had 
 thrown an army around his flank, encamped 
 within striking distance of his sources of 
 supply. Then the worker would proceed 
 with caution and circumspection. He would 
 choose what industry he would create for a 
 beginning ; choose with great care ; throw 
 his full weight into it (and trade union 
 finances these days run into heavy moneys) ; 
 find capable men, and pay them well ; bring 
 the latest science to bear on production ; 
 employ, especially in foodstufi^s, the best of 
 hygiene ; and generally strive for the com- 
 pletest efficiency, while at the same time, 
 even as the individual co-operative stores 
 were pledged to buy from the Co-operative 
 
 109 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 Wholesale, so the Co-operative Wholesale 
 would discriminate always in favour of the Co- 
 operative Manufacture. Indeed, such pledges 
 would not be necessary, though they would 
 be advisable, inasmuch as each higher organ- 
 ization being created by the funds of the 
 lower it would be financially necessary for 
 the lower organizations fully to support the 
 higher in protection of their own funds. And 
 thus finally a self-existent wide organization 
 would evolve that would belong to the guilds 
 of workers in commonwealth. Indeed, it is 
 not too much to say that if in the early days 
 of trades unions this policy had been adopted 
 the workers' battle would by now have been 
 won and the commonwealth be partly now 
 in existence, a civilization being thus created 
 that would "provide for essential freedom 
 for the individual and for solidarity of the 
 nation" instead of weaving difficulties that 
 now tend to disrupt the nationality and 
 frustrate its State, " Men wUl gladly labour 
 if they feel that their labour conspires with 
 that of all other workers for the general good ; 
 but there is something loathsome for the spirit 
 in the condition of the labour market, where 
 labour is regarded as a commodity to be 
 bought and sold like soap and candles." So 
 says M, conceiving of a State as something 
 other than a mere constitution; and history 
 attests the truth of what he says, for men 
 will sacrifice themselves for their State, 
 
 110 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 whereas they regard a constitution as some- 
 thing separate from themselves. 
 
 Regarded from the point of view of labour, 
 this state of affairs might be regarded as 
 victory, victory won by organization instead 
 of long warfare ; and M is concerned for 
 labour, being concerned for the dignity of 
 man. Regarded from the point of view of 
 the State it might be regarded as success, 
 when the present system of exploitation, 
 phrased as competition, is a pitiful failure ; 
 and M being concerned for Beauty and its 
 implications and its concomitants, is con- 
 cerned for the State. Yet the State itself 
 does not emerge till all sides of the national 
 life are co-ordinated ; or, since a State is 
 rather an expression than a device, it would 
 be juster to say until all sides should co- 
 ordinate themselves. And to this M turns. 
 Already, it is worthy of remark, the prob- 
 lem has half answered itself. Even before 
 the co-operative stores had created guild 
 factories in cities in favour of which to dis- 
 criminate, certain co-operative manufactures 
 exist iQ favour of which discrimination could 
 begin. These are the farmers' organizations, 
 who are looking for markets, especially 
 markets that would enable them directly to 
 reach the consumer and in which they could 
 become partners. With the very creation of 
 co-operative stores for the cities co-ordination, 
 organized and economic, would begin. It 
 
 111 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 would be for the interest of the farmers' 
 guilds to promote such stores, and to ex- 
 change share holdings with them ; and in 
 truth one wonders why this has not already 
 been done, since it is to the farmers' interest 
 to banish the last of the middlemen and 
 directly approach the consumer. So when, 
 for instance, it came to the manufacture of 
 farming implements, and indeed anything 
 required for home or farm by the farmer, 
 he could join with workmen's guilds in 
 creating factories for the production of such 
 things, and banish the last of the middlemen 
 on the other side.. The Commonwealth 
 would then exist in completion, and the 
 State emerge. The chief hindrance to so 
 obvious a step is a certain prejudice based 
 on ignorance. It faced M sharply when he 
 saw how the farmers turned against the 
 Dublin strikers ; and so, with both sides of 
 the false opposition claiming his sympathy, he 
 faced the issue in an address at the annual 
 meeting of the I.A.O.S. 
 
 His address was to farmers. How should 
 they, in their own interests, wish to see 
 town life develop ? The articles which they, 
 with help of Earth, manufactured, were 
 not manufactured for the few and elect of 
 the earth, not for the wealthy and privileged, 
 but for all; they were indispensable if all 
 were to live. Clearly, then, the more 
 people who could aflFord to purchase them 
 
 112 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 in sufficient quantities (seeing that men 
 cannot eat more than a certain amount) the 
 more they would be advantaged. Nay, more: 
 rich men, having little manual toil, are fas- 
 tidious of appetite, whereas working men 
 are simple of taste and robust of appetite. 
 If every man could afford to get for himself 
 and his family as much food as they required, 
 the spending power of the towns would at 
 once be enormously increased to the direct 
 benefit of the farmer, and every penny of 
 that extra spending power would come from 
 the poor, those who are continually striking 
 in cities and towns for that extra food. " If 
 there is, let us say," M says, " a sum of 
 fifteen hundred pounds a week to be paid 
 away in a town, it is to the interest of 
 farmers that that sum should be paid to a 
 thousand men at the rate of thirty shillings 
 a week rather than to fifty men at thirty 
 pounds a week. In the case of the workers 
 a greater part of the money will be spent 
 on food. But if fifty men have thirty pounds 
 a week each it will be spent to satisfy the 
 appetites of a much smaller number of 
 people. A larger proportion wiU be spent 
 on furniture, pictures, motor-cars, and what 
 not. It may be spent so as to give some 
 kind of employment, but it will not be a 
 division of money so much to the interest 
 of the farmer." So also should the farmer 
 help the worker to eliminate the middlemen 
 
 113 I 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 who stand betwixt them, for the cheaper 
 food is the more freely will money be spent 
 on it. Either way the farmer should support 
 the worker's demands and his organizations 
 in his own ripening interests. 
 
 Equally should the worker support the 
 farmer of his own country in preference to 
 the farmers of other countries. If he fail 
 to support his own countrymen or if he give 
 an equal welcome to produce coming from 
 the four quarters of the world, the result 
 will be that the home agriculturist will find 
 the struggle hard against him, and wUl 
 stream into the towns to produce black- 
 leg labour : thus to cheapen his own wages, 
 and thus, by depleting the agricultural army, 
 to raise the cost of food against himself. 
 Furthermore, by impoverishing his country 
 he impoverishes himself. If a sack of oats 
 be worth, say, a pound, pvery sack of oats 
 grown in the country increases the financial 
 reserve of that country by that pound. Men 
 think too much in terms of the currency by 
 the aid of which goods are bartered and not 
 enough in terms of the goods, of which 
 foodstuffs are the base, that are the real 
 wealth. The present great war has provided 
 an instance that M, and others besides, little 
 considered at that time. Germany con- 
 serves her gold reserves by making a food- 
 creating entity of herself, whereas England is 
 continually depleting her gold reserves by 
 
 114 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 despatching bullion overseas for the purchase 
 of food ; and so England, though she started 
 infinitely the richer country, is rapidly ap- 
 proaching bankruptcy. Her industrial work- 
 ers little dream what that will mean for the 
 future. So also her merchant tonnage is 
 being steadily reduced by submarine warfare 
 and the need for troop transports, to an 
 extent that few consider, so that foodstuffs 
 cannot come to the country in the bulk 
 that was once available. Thus, always, 
 it is to the interest of the town-worker to 
 support the farmer of his own country, 
 even as it is to the interest of that farmer 
 to support the demands of that worker for 
 economic security. Each is a producer of 
 something that the other cannot produce, 
 and needs ; each thus is a purchaser of the 
 other's commodity; and it is to their mutual 
 interests to see that they directly approach 
 each other without the intermediary of 
 profiteers, each producer taking, and being 
 incited to take, an interest in the stores 
 created by the other, and both by binding 
 themselves together thus building up a State 
 of Commonwealth. 
 
 So the economist displays his vigorous 
 sense ; so the poet shrewdly justifies his 
 visions that are challenged, and finds a 
 scope for their realization in a life of which 
 he has experience. Ideals are always justified 
 of Life, though some poets have avoided 
 
 115 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 that challenge ; and the poet here elaborates 
 a State, every step of which is possible, 
 many steps of which have been taken, many 
 other steps of which are even now defining 
 themselves for the future. It is a State that 
 is democratic in the business of living, and it 
 leaves freer play for the aristocracy of thought 
 and emotion by withdrawing the individual 
 from the absorption of money-grabbing. It 
 makes a space for the fine flowers of divinity 
 that will not blossom on the present soil, 
 where titles of nobility are bestowed on men 
 who have spent their lives brutalizing them- 
 selves and others. It invites those flowers, 
 indeed. When a rural community exists 
 as a tribe, decreeing for the whole of its 
 functions within its prescribed area, it wiU 
 have to provide hedgerows and halls from 
 its profits, and those hedgerows will be fruit- 
 trees and those halls will demand architecture 
 without and beautification within. The 
 difierence will be small to each member 
 when allotted out of the total available funds ; 
 and when one community has begun to 
 aspire towards those flowers the spirit of 
 emulation will stir other communities. The 
 poet, the musician, the painter, the archi- 
 tect, and the historian will have their honoured 
 part in the life of the community as the 
 possessions of that community, and will be 
 matched against the like possessions in other 
 communities. They would be attached to 
 
 116 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 the court of the elected head of that commu- 
 nity, the president of its deliberations ; and 
 the community would find it worth its while 
 to endow them, that their making of beauty 
 should be to the honour of itself, instead of 
 compelling them to huckster their wares in a 
 sordid competition of cash from which it had 
 rescued itself. It is no dream, this. The 
 spirit of it is not dead in Ireland. Even 
 now, in a tradition dating from ancient times, 
 little local poets " live on the community," 
 and the people are content that they should 
 do so. In a saner scheme of life they would 
 have an allotted place ; and the intellectual 
 life of rural places, near the bosom of Earth, 
 would not only vie with, but, drawing from 
 simpler, from purer, from grander sources, 
 would outrival, the intellectual life of cities ; 
 and that which the world now so grievously 
 needs, a new inspiration in Art, that has 
 worn its old manner to shreds, would come 
 of a new inspiration in Life and of larger 
 experiences to canvas. 
 
 For what is this that the poet, pitting 
 himself to find a hard economic answer for 
 hard economic facts and not looking outside 
 his immediate problem, has struck upon ? It 
 is even startling to conceive. It is nothing 
 less than a translation into modern conditions 
 of the ancient Polity of Ireland. The State 
 for which we work in the future in answer 
 to the problems of the present is the State 
 
 117 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 that dwelt in our past. It is a conception 
 of civilization that is our peculiar heritage ; 
 and it waits till it can come into our minds 
 not as a patriot's dream (though all of this, 
 and finely this), but as the unriddling of the 
 tangle of Life into which we have got our- 
 selves. When taunted once as not being 
 at heart or by lineage an Irishman, he wrote 
 a poem " On Behalf of Some Irishmen Not 
 Followers of Tradition." 
 
 They call us aliens, we are told, 
 Because our wayward visions stray 
 From that dim banner they unfold, 
 The dreams of worn-out yesterday. 
 
 So he sings ; and " flings his answer back in 
 scorn " : — 
 
 We are less children of this clime 
 Than of some nation yet unborn 
 Or empire in the womb of time. 
 We hold the Ireland in the heart 
 More than the land our eyes have seen. 
 And love the goal for which we start 
 More than the tale of what has been. 
 
 He turns from the " life men lived before " : — 
 
 We leave the easy peace it brings : 
 The few we are shall still unite 
 In fealty to unseen kings 
 Or unimaginable light. 
 We would no Irish sign efface. 
 But yet our lips would gladlier hail 
 The firstborn of the Coming Race 
 Than the last splendour of the Gael. 
 
 118 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 Yet he who sang thus thought more as a 
 Gael than all the tribe of those who taunted 
 him. He looked in his soul, and found 
 ideals that have slumbered in our race 
 through long oppression and repression : 
 they looked at the foe against whose 
 dominion they fought, and became bewitched 
 by his ideals, wishing to plant another form 
 of that alien thing in this country. Each 
 became like the thing they steadfastly con- 
 templated, in love or in hate ; for it is the 
 infallible rule of the soul that men become 
 like the thing upon which they meditate. 
 
 M even worked in the Irish way. The 
 Feineacas or Brehon laws, which image 
 for us the old Irish State, have never 
 received the attention they deserve ; and 
 there is a political reason for that. They 
 have even been edited with misconceiving 
 and belittling introductions from an English 
 point of view, and with translations altered 
 from those made by the far finer Irish 
 scholars, O'Donovan and O'Curry. The 
 Napoleonic Co^e, the Roman Code, even 
 the far-removed Hammurabi Code, have not 
 failed of adequate exposition, whereas the 
 Feineacas have not yet taken their place 
 in international comparison, though they 
 challenge comparison with any in a noble 
 conception of Life. Yet how did they come 
 to be ? Those other laws were, as aU other 
 laws have been, abstractly conceived in 
 
 119 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 legislative assembly or princely edict ; and 
 abstractly codified ; yet in none of them is 
 there an arresting ideal of Life. They are 
 just workaday administrative instruments, 
 all that a lawyer would desire, though, 
 being abstractly conceived, there was both 
 time and opportunity to introduce into them 
 some higher ideal. The Feineacas, on the 
 other hand, are just a medley of ad hoc 
 adjudications, the rough gathering together 
 of judgments given by brehons in their 
 function as civil arbitrators, hard to dis- 
 entangle in their lack of systematic form. 
 Yet what is the result? Arising as they 
 do from the clash of life in its least savoury 
 aspects, emerging as they do from disputes 
 and wrangles and their settlements, they 
 yet display a conception of Life that arrests 
 the mind with its dignity, humanity, and 
 decency. Even so is it with the re- 
 emergence of this ancient Polity after long 
 years in Irish life. John Stuart Mill sat in 
 his study and schemed a system of Economics. 
 Coming from that aloof and scholarly retire- 
 ment it would have been excusable had it 
 worn a beauty too fair and too virginal for 
 the shock of Life. But it came calling itself 
 Utilitarianism, and was one of the intellectual 
 fathers of a scheme of Life that the world 
 is beginning now to revolt from as a sordid 
 cynicism. M, and his comrades in work, 
 went out to a rough experience, to handle 
 
 120 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 tough financial facts, to make a workable 
 business organization, to think of pigs, 
 cows, and poultry, living and dead, milk 
 and eggs, manures and seeds, and to 
 adjudicate in farming matters ; and a system 
 of Economics emerged with an arresting 
 ideal of Life, dignified, humane, and decent, 
 and with a hope for the future of humanity. 
 It is not for nothing that the old Irish Polity 
 is re-incarnated in the same experience as 
 that in which it first was born — an experi- 
 ence, not only direct from the hard problems 
 of life and their settlement, but from a 
 farming Ufe at that. 
 
 It is very strange to watch, and to 
 participate in, this emergence of a distinctive 
 and intensive Irish civilization, for it has 
 been so long forgotten, even by the heroes 
 of the nation. Ireland has fought long 
 against England with no other hope than to 
 make another England of Ireland. That is 
 only to break a political union to make a 
 union of ideals ; and that again is to abrogate 
 nationality while espousing its cause. It is 
 a hard thing to say, but true notwithstanding, 
 that many of our later heroes have stood for 
 nothing more than this. The splendid 
 audacity of Wolfe Tone, simple and fearless 
 and exuberant as that of a great child, the 
 gentle nobility of Emmet, the forensic passion 
 of Curran, the turgid eloquence of O'Connell, 
 the pompous ineffectuality of Butt, dimmed 
 
 121 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 by the clean hard mind that came after him 
 — what distinctive Irish State did all this 
 seek to achieve ? Can any say ? They 
 opposed England with Ireland, which was 
 fine ; but they did not oppose English civiU- 
 zation with Irish civilization, and that is 
 a great difference. There were only two 
 minds that showed an understanding of 
 the difference ; and it is curious that both 
 of them should have been charged (very 
 falsely, let us say) with an alien charac- 
 teristic. The scholarly Davis had glimpses 
 of it in some of his essays ; and there are 
 implications in some of Parnell's speeches, 
 dealing severely with tactical issues as they 
 did, that seem as though he had some under- 
 standing of the difference. And what was 
 Grattan's Parliament but a thing of the 
 English Pale, with a vast and inarticulate 
 Irish thought in the country, deliberately 
 submerged, never permitted to raise its 
 head ? Grattan, though he acclaimed Ireland 
 as " free " because she had won an abortive 
 Parliament, was afraid of the Irish people 
 as " people," Charlemont at the head of the 
 Volunteers was afraid of the Irish people 
 as " Cathohcs," and Flood was afraid of 
 them as "Irish," standing as he did for 
 ascendancy. Ireland may in her tragic 
 history look back upon that Parliament 
 within her own shores with some wistful- 
 ness, but the plain truth is this, that it was 
 
 122 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 an alien thing, hostile to, and in craven 
 fear of, the Irish Ireland that waited 
 outside its doors. 
 
 It was left to this latter time to evolve, 
 outside of Parliament, and despite the bitter 
 opposition of Irishmen whose minds are sub- 
 dued to English thinking, a distinctive Irish 
 polity, the Fdneacas beginning to be re- 
 born in modern conditions, to construct an 
 Irish State out of the practical experience 
 of hfe, and to oppose English civilization, 
 that is already self-condemned, with a dis- 
 tinctive Irish conception of civilization that 
 has some hope for the future of Irish- 
 men. And it is to M that the praise of this 
 is due more than to any other. For what 
 are his Rural Communities ? They are 
 neither more nor less than a reconstitution 
 of the tuatha, the economic, social and political 
 units of the old " tribal " organization of 
 Ireland. " We have not had a social order 
 since the time of the clans," * he says in 
 " Co-operation and Nationality " ; and he is 
 right ; but that is due to no fault of ours, 
 but due to those who feared lest we should 
 
 * Strictly it is inaccurate to speak so. The clann 
 was a gathering within the tuath due to its elaboration. 
 The tuath was the equivalent of the "riwal com- 
 munity." Nor are right terms in this matter a mere 
 pedantry. To spe9,k of the clann instead of the tuath 
 is to miss the economic and political character of an 
 exceedingly well-organized unit. 
 
 123 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 put their own professed faith for the rights 
 of small nationalities into good effect upon 
 our own behalf. In " The Rural Commun- 
 ity " he says : " We had true rural com- 
 munities in ancient Ireland, though the 
 organization was rather military than eco- 
 nomic " ; but there he is wrong. The tuath 
 was hardly even military in a secondary sense, 
 and certainly it was not so primarily. From 
 early times a certain order of tuath could 
 claim the complete subordination of military 
 duties to their economic life : they could not 
 be called away at Spring or at Harvest, and 
 if at other times a provincial hosting should 
 last for more than six weeks, at the end of 
 that six weeks they had liberty to return 
 home.* Therefore the Fianna were raised 
 as a national militia from the older Firbolgs 
 and Cruithni, or Picts, and were part of 
 the army with which the great Niall harassed 
 and defeated the Roman power through 
 Britain and into Gaul. Cuchulainn, the 
 " little dark man " and lord of the marches 
 to Conchobhar, was such a man. When 
 later they were suppressed for political reasons 
 it was the very economic preoccupation of the 
 tuatha that made them the prey of the Normans, 
 who were professional marauders without 
 any economic life. And as the economic 
 life of the tuatha still restricted their military 
 power, foreign soldiers {gall-ogldigh, Englished 
 • See " The Tribes and Customs of Hy-Maiiy,"p. 67. 
 124 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 into galloglass, means foreign soldier) were 
 imported and settled on the land by the 
 consent of the tuatha to relieve them of the 
 continual fighting to which they were com- 
 pelled by the presence of this professional 
 marauder. These gall-ogldigh came from the 
 Hebrides, and were thus descended from 
 the Irish conquest of the Isles mixing with the 
 earlier and later Norse ; but their introduc- 
 tion proves how intense was the economic 
 preoccupation of these old rural com- 
 munities ; and proves also how the life of 
 their modern counterpart reflects the life of 
 their national original. 
 
 Each of these older communities was a 
 recognized political unit, over which all con- 
 quest flowed, but indivisible because of the 
 high social and economic organization it pos- 
 sessed ; and towards this social and economic 
 organization its modern counterpart is inevit- 
 ably drifting, though clearer knowledge would 
 shape that course better and effect it with 
 less waste of experiment. The intuitions of 
 a nation are not lost, though they be 
 deliberately repressed ; and what those intui- 
 tions first achieved as a conceivably fair 
 civilization they will achieve again, though 
 with the differences attendant on the different 
 conditions aflfecting the accidentals of life. 
 For those intuitions are nationality ; and 
 without them nationality is but a windy 
 word. If wise statesmanship were to act 
 
 125 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 from such intuitions, looking within at the 
 continuing mind of its own nation instead 
 of looking without at the mind of other 
 nations, and give a political place to such 
 economic and social units — political, that is 
 to say, in the sense of being a unit in the 
 Polity or State of the Nation — the conditions 
 would repeat themselves even as in the past, 
 and the State of the past would simply and 
 automatically repeat itself in the future with- 
 out the modern confusion of a continuing 
 series of legislative instruments, none of 
 which fit the complex need they seek to 
 remedy, most of which are amended out 
 of all recognition in practice, many of which 
 are quietly dropped out of memory with 
 nothing to remain of them but the pompous 
 frivolity of their debate. And such a con- 
 tinuance would approve Nationality as a 
 lasting fact, and not leave it as a protestation 
 right or wrong. 
 
 For the conditions are the same. They are 
 embedded, not only in national intuitions, but 
 in the plain requirements of the case. The 
 modern community needs a centre, a place 
 where its necessary business may be con- 
 ducted, its officers elected, around which its 
 factories and creameries, its smithies and 
 attendant crafts and industries, should be 
 situated, and where it should engage in its 
 recreations and its social pleasures, where 
 lectures would be delivered, not only on 
 
 126 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 matters arising out of its economic business, 
 but also on wider national subjects, where 
 those national issues might be debated, 
 where, in the Anticipations that our hope, 
 faith, and love have prompted, the communal 
 historian might discourse, the communal poet 
 sing, the communal musician stir to emula- 
 tion, and which the artist might design and 
 beautify ; and where, in a development 
 happily native to our race, the community 
 might extend its hospitality to strangers with 
 dignity and good maimers. The old com- 
 munity had such a need ; and met it. The 
 centre of its activities, social, economic, and 
 public, was a building called the Bruighin, 
 presided over by one who was called a 
 Bruigh-fer or Biadhtach. It had land al- 
 lotted to it by the tuath for its maintenance. 
 Strangers received hospitality there. The 
 two legislative and deliberative assemblies 
 of the tuath met there to transact all busi- 
 ness. The freemen of the tuath met there 
 to elect their officers and to discuss pubUc 
 matters. Legal matters were settled there. 
 And around it the craftsmen, artificers, and 
 industrial workers lived, each with their 
 separate guilds. The whole formed the 
 capital township of the tuath. The Bruighin 
 in no sense belonged to the Bruigh-fer, 
 though he had his separate land, but 
 was the joint property of the tuath. He 
 was the officer of the community, dis- 
 
 127 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 pensing its hospitality and calling its as- 
 semblies. 
 
 So if the communities rising now should 
 wisely elect to endow artist and writer, it 
 would have its example in the past. Such 
 endowments are no necessary part of fantasy. 
 Men in collective capacity acting together 
 arise to public spirit as they are freed from 
 personal competition. They esteem the dig- 
 nities that give honour to life ; and they 
 esteem them the more if they can directly ac- 
 knowledge them in small communities, and 
 take honour by that direct acknowledgment, 
 where a national acknowledgment by some 
 public person, in which they have no hand, 
 will leave them cold. That is human nature ; 
 even as it is human nature to care nothing 
 for the honour and aspiration of Life when 
 the whole business of living means a relent- 
 less and unremitting struggle of each man 
 against all his fellows. Cleaner living means 
 better leisure and higher dignity. Certainly 
 the modern community will need to pay, 
 which is to endow, its chemists and scientists 
 for its factories : were it not to do so, it 
 would lose markets for its products. So 
 it would need to endow its musician, as he 
 would at once take his place in its dignities 
 and its pleasures. Its seanchaidhe too, in the 
 full meaning of the word, would soon find his 
 place as lecturer. Since, therefore, the poet 
 and the imaginative writer have an economic 
 
 128 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 place in a community — that is to say, since 
 their works must in some measure bring 
 them profit — the community might well 
 desire to absorb that economic place and 
 yet find for the writer some security.* For 
 it is not rash to assume that a life that 
 depended on the application of individual 
 thinking in large responsibilities would bring 
 clean thinking in other matters than that of 
 business. These things are no fantasy. The 
 tuath did not find them so ; but rather 
 endowed its historian, its poets, and its 
 musicians, even as it endowed its brehons 
 and its public officers. 
 
 The tuath, however, was a complete eco- 
 nomic entity. That is to say, it not only 
 held land in community, not only did 
 many of its members, as the Crith Gablach 
 makes clear, hold farming implements in 
 community, but it was its own source of 
 self-help in all matters. It had its own local 
 government ; taxes, in modern phrase, being 
 charged upon itself as a whole, for itself to 
 recharge upon its members. M has spoken 
 
 * The writer of hard or unpalatable things would be 
 in no worse case than he is at present. Yet this might 
 even be mended. Was not Basle well pleased to have 
 Nietzsche for a professor, though it either did not 
 read him or was outraged by his opinions ? For 
 Nietzsche's works were discussed and debated in 
 other countries ; and there is something pleasing in 
 owning a celebrity, though he be only a notoriety. 
 
 129 K 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 in " The Rural Community " of the modern 
 co-operative community electing to beautify 
 its hedgerows by planting fruit-trees, as has 
 been done by some communities in Europe, 
 Such things look forward to the rural com- 
 munity finding itself sole arbiter for its 
 district, a community self-existent and in- 
 divisible, a political as well as an economic 
 and social unit, relying on its self-aid and 
 sufficient unto itself, though allying with 
 others in larger federations and blending into 
 a national conception. In that he looks 
 back (though almost imwittingly) even as he 
 looks forward : in desiring the Ireland that 
 would answer his visions, and be based upon 
 the answer experience has found for those 
 visions, he sees " The Awakening of the 
 Fires," for this is the Ireland of old born 
 again. He sees not only a continuing 
 Nation : he sees a continuing State, lying 
 dormant a long while in dim intuitions 
 but re-emerging at last in experience. It 
 is strange how close the identity sometimes 
 proves to be, and in ways of which he is 
 unaware. For instance, while facing the 
 whole of his rural problem he comes 
 naturally to the case of the farm labourer. No 
 State is fair, or worthy of all a man's effort, 
 he says in effect, that bases itself on injustice 
 in any of its parts. How is the problem 
 of the farm labourer to be answered? The 
 better prosperity of the farmer will in great 
 
 130 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 measure help him; and the greater sense of 
 responsibihty of farmers in a co-operative 
 society will help him, especially as he will 
 inevitably form himself into a large union 
 in the course of time. But then he throws 
 out a suggestion. He says that labourers, 
 while unable individually to hold land, 
 might profitably hold and work land in a 
 company together, winning a dignity to- 
 gether that they could not severally compel. 
 He does no more than leave it as a sug- 
 gestion ; yet it is straight from the ancient 
 economy. In the tuath the lowest form of 
 un-freeman was the Fuidhir. He was lower 
 than the jack-boys and hirelings of the tuath, 
 being generally a prisoner ^;aken in war or 
 an outlaw from some other tuath. Yet the 
 Feineacas allowed him to join in some com- 
 pany of not less than five, to hold land 
 together, and to appoint some one of their 
 number to claim the rights of a freeman 
 on behalf of the others if their several 
 prosperity was consonant with the dignity, 
 that consonancy being defined and decreed. 
 The .two things would in fact work them- 
 selves out to a close likeness, both being 
 based on the land. And, indeed, it would 
 not be difficult to speak of other develop- 
 ments towards which these co-operative 
 societies of to-day are searching their way as 
 they take their path towards becoming rural 
 communities, in which they will find them- 
 
 131 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 selves like those who think they have broken 
 into new country, who afterwards discover 
 signs and ruins of the cities of their fathers 
 who had lived here before them. 
 
 A man who preaches so completely the 
 doctrine of self-help as the maker of muscle 
 and thew in a nation is not disposed to pro- 
 fess too loud a faith in parliamentarianism. 
 In his eyes parliaments have completed their 
 function in the world. So long as they stood 
 for a nation's general rights — the right to free 
 thought, the right to free faith, the right to 
 national action without the interference or 
 prohibition of kingship — so long were they 
 justified, so long had they their part to fill. 
 But now that these things are in great 
 measure fulfilled the questions before parlia- 
 ments have narrowed to those of particular 
 rights : the right, for example, of the poor 
 to economic freedom, to the control of the 
 industries in which they are employed and 
 which they by their labour build, the right 
 to combine in order to effect these things. 
 And here the poor always find that the jury 
 is packed against them. In the liberties 
 parliaments once achieved the rich benefited 
 with the poor ; now the issues have narrowed 
 against the rich, with the consequence that 
 they have rallied together to capture parlia- 
 ments, one company of them in one party 
 nodding to another company in an opposite 
 party with almost complete understanding. 
 Nothing the poor can do can alter that fact. 
 
 132 
 
A STATE, A NATION 
 
 They must organize and work outside parlia- 
 ments if they would win their freedom — 
 which in truth is national freedom, for their 
 overwhelming numbers make them the con- 
 stituency of the nation. They must help 
 themselves, for none other will help them; 
 and in co-operation is the clue to that self- 
 help, whereas nearly every act of a parlia- 
 ment avowedly or hiddenly desires to harness 
 them, or sometimes feed them, in the 
 interests of the wealthy, as they themselves 
 too bitterly know. That is to say, they 
 must legislate for themselves by creating for 
 themselves the conditions of life and labour, 
 and they must subordinate legislatures to 
 the life of a nation instead of waiting for 
 legislatures to dictate to that life in the 
 interests of a few. They must be their own 
 statesmen by being statesmen in fact. 
 
 It is little to be wondered at that M should 
 so shrewdly suspect parliaments. In his early 
 days he had had his fighting heart aroused by 
 seeing a hero of his nation stand single-handed 
 in the ford to hack and hew an ancient par- 
 liament till it fell misshapen from his sword. 
 When Parnell went to Westminster the Eng- 
 lish House of Commons had a certain dignity 
 and pomp of debate ; and it was the centre 
 of admiring attention ; but as he sat on its 
 benches he divined a certain heart of humbug 
 in this pomp. He saw Bright espouse the 
 cause of freedom in noble periods while giving 
 the poor over to a system that should enslave 
 
 133 
 
A NATION, A STATE 
 
 them as never before. He heard Gladstone 
 torrentially denounce the keeping of political 
 prisoners in Neapolitan prisons while pre- 
 serving a national silence over the Irish 
 political prisoners less excusably kept in 
 English prisons. These things he saw, and 
 other things moreover. Then he rose up 
 out of silence. He became the best hated 
 man in England and the hero of Ireland ; 
 but he gave as little heed to applause as to 
 anger. With deadly coldness he judged where 
 his sword-play should fall, and judged with 
 what strength it should fall; and when he 
 ceased from his work, though a conspiracy 
 not yet unfolded had brought him low, the 
 assembly that had come to him with pomp and 
 prestige left his hand a more or less submis- 
 sive registration machine that was content to 
 endorse the decisions of a secret committee. 
 It is not for Irishmen, therefore, to praise the 
 fair health and manhness of a figure that one 
 of themselves left so misshapen ; and M does 
 not praise it, because he knows the powers that 
 control that secret committee by the support 
 of its war-chest. Yet that does not mean 
 that he consents to the manacles placed on 
 one nation by another with brute-strength, or 
 the occasional kindness done with the lofty 
 mien of the conqueror. His thought is far 
 otherwise. He sees a distinct nationality 
 with its own conception of civUization; and 
 he would house that nationality in a distinct 
 State worthy of the praise of noble men. 
 
 134 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 BYE-PATHS ; AND PATHS 
 EMERGING 
 
 To inaugurate the new century W. B. Yeats 
 brought George Moore to a sense of style, 
 as Philip Skeltbn brought the sinner "to a 
 sense of religion," "by long perseverance, by 
 his awful lectures, and the divine aid." To 
 celebrate that fact they wrote a play together, 
 " Diarmid and Grania," and persuaded Frank 
 Benson to produce it at the Gaiety Theatre, 
 Dublin. It is unnecessary to give the details 
 of that enterprise. They have been preserved 
 with meticulous accuracy by George Moore, 
 the careful historian of latter-day art in 
 Ireland. M, however, went to see the pro- 
 duction of " Diarmid and Grania," and came 
 to the conclusion that if this was drama then 
 drama was an exceedingly easy thing to 
 do. When he reached home that night he 
 straightway wrote the first act of a play 
 dealing with Deidre. Having thus proved to 
 himself that the playwright's art was just the 
 simple thing he had thought it to be, he put 
 the thing away in a drawer, went to bed, and 
 thought no more of the matter. 
 
 135 
 
BYE-PATHS 
 
 Yet that lone act lying in a drawer was to 
 provide an important link. For some years 
 before this the brothers W. G. and Frank 
 Fay had been working at dramatic matters 
 in Dublin, and had trained an amateur com- 
 pany to correct the loud theatricality of acting 
 on the professional stage. Through diversity 
 and adversity of experience, presenting plays 
 in little halls where neither place, play, nor 
 audience stirred the imagination, they yet 
 kept before them the chance of finding a 
 better scope for their effort. That chance 
 came when they heard that M had become 
 dramatist to the extent of one act of a play. 
 Borrowing it, admiring it, and becoming am- 
 bitious of producing it, they persuaded M to 
 finish the other two acts. This was very easily 
 done. In the meantime W. B. Yeats had not 
 forgotten his plays, some of which, including 
 " The Countess Cathleen," had been produced 
 the previous year with an English company 
 in what was known as the Irish Literary 
 Theatre : for a poet with a play to be produced 
 is a lean and restless hunter in the world, a 
 searcher with a swift eye for nobility in actors 
 and still greater nobility in financiers. There 
 were other such lean hunters. There was 
 even a financier on the prowl with plays, 
 one of the earlier company. Little wonder, 
 then, that these fell together in a new dramatic 
 fellowship. M, Edward Martyn, Padraic 
 Colum, W. B. Yeats, Fred Ryan, Seumas 
 
 136 
 
AND PATHS EMERGING 
 
 O'Sullivan, and others, with Synge to join 
 them rather later, and George Moore as 
 embarrassing adviser, comprised that fellow- 
 ship. The presidency was first offered to M, 
 who declined it, as he felt that the writing of 
 plays was not to be the highroad of his life, 
 and suggested W. B. Yeats. 
 
 Later, when they were searching for 
 more permanent headquarters at the Abbey 
 Theatre, the fact of that presidency gave 
 the leadership of the movement to W. B. 
 Yeats, who associated with him J. M. 
 Synge, and Lady Gregory who then joined 
 the movement. There were other causes 
 also. Miss Horniman gave the movement 
 money through Yeats, and under him it was 
 formed into a Joint Stock Company, to the 
 indignation of those who had made it what 
 it was. M was too busy as co-operative 
 organizer to write further plays, and thus fell 
 away. George Moore turned again to thoughts 
 of London. Edward Martyn had ecclesi- 
 astical doubts. The only playwrights of the 
 original enterprise who remained with Yeats 
 were Synge and Padraic Colum. The brothers 
 Fay continued in control of the stage pro- 
 duction. In the course of time Padraic 
 Colum's plays were no longer produced ; and 
 the brothers Fay also found it necessary to 
 leave the company. Later historians have 
 been too apt to judge of the beginnings of 
 the movement by those whom they found 
 
 137 
 
BYE-PATHS 
 
 in it at its latter end, when the earher struggles 
 had been won and the principles of acting 
 learnt under masters who no longer appeared. 
 It was Frank Fay, and no other man, who 
 was responsible for the beautiful speaking of 
 English and of verse, and for the just sim- 
 plicity of gesture and position, that marked 
 the acting of the company ; and it was from 
 him that Yeats received his ideas on these 
 subjects. The fact that the Abbey Theatre 
 afterwards reached a certain popular success 
 by rejecting the ideals with which the con- 
 federacy began made that misconception 
 easier, but it made it the more unjust. For 
 those ideals, wherein it was sought to produce 
 plays that were beautiful in a comradeship 
 and co-operation as beautiful to match, remain 
 the only possible way in which drama in 
 Dublin will again become possible. 
 
 The moment from which events flowed 
 was when Frank Fay, having heard of 
 " Deidre," came to see M ; and on 
 April 2, 1902, "Deidre" was the first play 
 to be produced, followed by W, B. Yeats' 
 "Kathleen ni Houhhan." It attempted to 
 be no more than a simple presentation of a 
 tale of tragic beauty told in a prose as simple ; 
 but great tragedy comes not only from the 
 tragic end of the tale that is told, but from 
 some tragic weighting of it in the mind of 
 the writer where it was received. The tragic- 
 poet is of the lineage of the prophets. He 
 
 138 
 
AND PATHS EMERGING 
 
 looks not only at his fable : his fable is only 
 a medium through which he looks at the 
 whole or a part of life. That is true also 
 of the writer of comedy ; and the distinction 
 between tragedy and comedy, when each is at 
 its best, is not so great in the end. In the loose 
 and utterly foohsh distinction raised by the 
 tribe of critics between subjective and objective 
 writing, it has been easily assumed that a 
 lyric is subjective and the drama objective. 
 What that means it is not easy to say. The 
 truth is that a lyric may be easily disengaged 
 from personality, springing up from some 
 temporary mood, whereas a drama comes 
 from the centre of an artist's conception 
 of Life, it is coloured with the colours in 
 which Life appears to him, it is weighted 
 with the implications of all that seems for 
 him involved in the issue of men together 
 when they are charged with the deepest 
 emotions. At its lowest it hardens and 
 crystallizes into the enunciation of a doctrine. 
 At its highest it is in that perfect solution 
 from which many doctrines may be crystal- 
 lized, and to which therefore philosophers 
 turn as they would to Life itself, seeing some 
 sharp vision of it through an intense mind. 
 But always it is personality flowering in its 
 bravest beauty; where the fable, and the 
 casting of the fable, and the conflict of 
 character through which the fable moves, 
 and the manner of the solution into which 
 
 139 
 
BYE-PATHS 
 
 it emerges and with which it suggests the 
 untold thought, all utter to us a man's 
 passionate vision of Life, And the height 
 and depth of that vision, and the breadth 
 and wisdom of it, becomes for us finally the 
 clue by which we discover the greatness of 
 the dramatist. 
 
 It is just this loading of the fable that 
 we miss in "Deidre." It tells its tale — a 
 pitiful tale that could be charged with so 
 many significances — justly and truly as it 
 came to M, and in pure and musical prose. 
 It does not express M to us : or rather, 
 since it is impossible for a man to write 
 without in some degree expressing himself, 
 it merely carries off the things that had 
 lightly gathered on the surface of his mind. 
 The manner of its inception precluded a deep 
 and meditated utterance ; and leaves us with 
 the thought that if M had not written with 
 that marvellous facility of his, some of his later 
 writings might more constantly have come 
 burthened with permanent vision rather than 
 radiant with a wonderful casual insight. In 
 his essay on " The Dramatic Treatment of 
 Heroic Literature " he contends against 
 Standish O 'Grady's protest that to serve the 
 heroes of the past for pleasure on the stage 
 is to degrade the ideals of the race. Later 
 he came to something of Standish O'Grady's 
 opinion ; and at least believed that an 
 adequate heroic drama was impossible. It 
 
 140 
 
AND PATHS EMERGING 
 
 seems worth while suggesting, more particu- 
 larly in interpretation of " Deidre," that they 
 both missed the essential matter. We are not 
 interested in the deeds of the Red Branch as 
 something that happened at some moment in 
 the past : we are interested in those deeds in 
 precisely the degree in which they happen 
 in our minds to-day ; and we are interested in 
 the heroes that enacted them in the degree in 
 which they are, or may by the intensity of 
 the artist be made, qualities of our mind 
 in the spiritual warfare in which we Uve, 
 move, and have our beiag. If the dramatist 
 can do this for us he will make the heroes 
 great in the heroic thoughts that enrich our 
 intellectual being ; and that will only be 
 because he has lived out their heroism in 
 his measure in the familiar things of his 
 own intellectual being. Tl^e world los es its 
 heroes if it g^pg thfiTT* i3ar-Hi:&i^::^^^2k^^ 
 •gsSns tfcem'irTt sees them in_±he™pje£petual 
 present. 
 
 "The dramatist who can do this will always 
 be mocked with the intellectual sloth and 
 derision of the many. That proves nothing. 
 Or rather, it proves that that dramatist comes 
 in good hour : it is a tribute, not to his 
 inopportuneness, but to his punctuality. No 
 true vision comes with peace, but with a 
 sword. "Deidre," swiftly written for the 
 brothers Fay to produce, did not bring that 
 sword — and it was well, maybe, for the 
 
 141 
 
BYE-PATHS 
 
 brothers Fay that this was so. At times, 
 in sudden flashing lights, the play becomes 
 charged with a further significance, as when 
 Lavarcham (that significant figure in the old 
 story) harps on the deep string that sounds 
 the doom of Red Branch in the hour when 
 Concobar should try to turn the natural 
 flowing of the world to his own pleasure. 
 But these lights when they flash up die 
 away again, and the tale runs smoothly on 
 again to its ordered end. Though to 
 demand highly of drama is right, especially 
 when that demand is to be made of M, 
 yet that demand in the case of "Deidre" 
 will savour somewhat of churlishness, if not, 
 indeed, of pedantry, for if the fable be not 
 transformed and transfigured in its making it 
 is at least purely formed and figured ; and 
 that is as much as he intended us to ask 
 of it. 
 
 For he was putting his vision into other 
 things. About that time he had returned 
 to Dubhn from organizing in the West, and 
 occupied the position of Assistant-Secretary 
 tothe I.A.O.S. Living and married in Dublin, 
 the painter's brush inevitably came into his 
 hand again. When he had been in Dublin 
 before he had painted some of the visions 
 he saw in the spiritual experience of the 
 " household," illustrating both his poetry and 
 his prose with the visions of the things that 
 had prompted their writing. Now, however, 
 
 142 
 
AND PATHS EMERGING 
 
 he turned to a more systematic attempt to 
 put in colour what in his experience he had 
 seen so clearly; and to deepen that vision 
 by recording as vision some of the deepest 
 intuitions that had been stirred by his reading 
 of the prophetic books of the world. These 
 paintings were nearly aU mystical, for he 
 worked, assiduously enough and with in- 
 creasing absorption, yet for his own enhghten- 
 ment and pleasure, making gifts of his 
 paintings to his friends, never thinking of a 
 public display of them. But Count Markie- 
 wicz, who came to Ireland about that time, 
 met him, saw his paintings, and, liking them, 
 persuaded M to join him in an exhibition. 
 There others also liked them ; and exhibition 
 followed exhibition through the years. 
 
 So, with time, a wider outlook began to 
 mark his work. Though it be true, that 
 the mental decision with which M turned 
 from mystical painting to the painting of 
 landscape was prompted by the thought 
 that he could better express mystical vision 
 by poems, yet the true causes are deeper. 
 The thought that prompts a decision is 
 generally with men the first emergence 
 of the decision from the hidden causes 
 involved in many things: it is not in itself 
 a cause but the first beginning of the actual 
 result. When M resolved to turn to land- 
 scape painting, that result had already been 
 decreed by the wider and more public concep- 
 
 143 
 
BYE-PATHS 
 
 tion of himself as an artist. A certain quality 
 of his mind has divided him more sharply 
 than with most into two men : the man who 
 chooses things fit for public display before 
 he displays them pubhcly, and the man who 
 guards his esoteric things carefully from public 
 curiosity. The two things do not often 
 merge in M. It is not difficult, therefore, 
 to see how he would shrink from letting a 
 casual public pry into the hidden chambers 
 of his life, with curiosity at best, and maybe 
 with derision. Besides that, with the coming 
 of the public it was inevitable that the artist 
 should with the passage of time include a 
 larger as well as a more immediate range of 
 subject, that thus a greater scope should 
 keep pace with the increasing maturity of 
 touch and conviction of experience. And so 
 he sought in the rhythms of figure and 
 landscape for the beauty he had at first 
 seen in psychic vision. 
 
 In his earlier pictures it is not the quali- 
 ties of composition, symphony, and brush- 
 work that chiefly arrest the eye, although 
 intensity of interest — indeed, sometimes 
 in his case an unworldly absorption of 
 interest — includes all the qualities of crafts- 
 manship with the readiness with which in- 
 tuition, reaching forward to certitude of 
 vision, subordinates all means, even the least 
 familiar, to its shining ends. Such qualities 
 are always incidental to any artist who is 
 
 144 
 
AND PATHS EMERGING 
 
 other than a technician, to be sure ; and 
 they are the essential magic of art, whereby 
 the artist becomes the great spiritual dis- 
 coverer as the things that seem incommu- 
 nicable begin to glow wonderfully in his 
 own technique ; but in ^'s early work they 
 are, we may say, pecuUarly incidental. A 
 fellow-craftsman may admire the composition 
 with which he blends some great figures of 
 the Sidhe in a slant perspective, a perspective 
 that balances itself with a suggestion of what 
 does not appear, like a gesture outside the 
 canvas ; or he may praise the ornamental skill 
 with which two figures in radiant glory are 
 utilized to fiU the canvas without being 
 themselves defined ; but though an artist 
 secretly covets the approbation of his fellows, 
 he does not often address his canvases to 
 them. We feel in these paintings that the 
 artist was in labour to communicate a part 
 of his assurance with regard to the spiritual 
 beings in the midst of which we are set, 
 of the spiritual beings we ourselves truly 
 are ; however fantastic his designs may at 
 first sight seem to us, that certitude of ours 
 is the first thing we have ; and the result 
 is that we hear the voice of the critical 
 exponent or analyst like a vague murmur 
 in our ears while we bend our minds to 
 search into things that become incom- 
 parably more than the artist and his art. 
 Blake, who also painted mystical pictures, 
 145 L 
 
BYE-PATHS 
 
 leaves us with this impression even less than 
 M, because Blake, though a mystic, is more 
 wholeheartedly an artist, and M, though 
 an artist, is in these early pictures we are 
 at present considering more wholeheartedly 
 a mystic. In colour, for instance, Blake's 
 colours are ordered by the symphonic value 
 of the whole result, whereas it seems to us 
 that ^'s colours, even while achieving it 
 may be a gorgeous or very pure symphony 
 of colour, are marked by a very earnest 
 attempt at fidelity to psychic vision. They 
 are both artists ; but, while not wishing to 
 be misunderstood, we may say that many 
 of ^'s early pictures may almost by adepts 
 be accepted as mystical charts, because these 
 pictures are directly related to his mystical 
 experience. Looking at them we begin to 
 understand that when old warriors decked 
 themselves with helmets or feathers suggesting 
 plumes of light above the spinal cord, or wings 
 branching from the temples, they were not 
 merely fanciful ; we remember that they lived 
 in a day when vision and the psychic powers 
 were not slighted in the world. So it is 
 with line. Blake's rhythms, as for instance 
 in the flames of hell that whirl a multitude 
 of dead lovers while displaying Paolo and 
 Francesca to us, M was afterwards to attempt 
 in a different conception of his art; but in 
 his early paintings his lines have another 
 kind of fidelity altogether. It is different, 
 
 146 
 
AND PATHS EMERGING 
 
 naturally, with composition. Some of the 
 best of his composition is seen when he 
 Seeks to bring within his canvas, in whole 
 or in part, some very large design, and to 
 suggest by his device what cannot be 
 included. 
 
 This may seem to fall foul of his contention 
 in the lecture on "Art and Literature" 
 he deUvered in the Royal Hibernian 
 Academy to open a Watts Exhibition. 
 There he protests against literary men who 
 attempt to harness the artist with a formula 
 of art ; the Raskins and Tolstois who would 
 make artists subserve some ethicdl preconcep- 
 tion of their own. It is worthy of remark 
 that it is not only the artist in colour who 
 has to endure wanderers from the pulpit : 
 poets also have to exercise some sufferance ; 
 but the question is much deeper than that. 
 Watts might paint some picture because 
 he wished to impress us with some ethical 
 sermon on Love and Life, and we might take 
 some deUght in his figures as things seen 
 by the artist without at all knowing or at 
 afl caring which was meant to be Life and 
 which Love ; but when M paints some 
 mystical picture, and we stand in gaze 
 before it, seeing something more in it 
 than its deftness or device of technique 
 (which we afterwards recall), it is not 
 because we have in our mind some ready 
 literary doctrine of an ulterior purpose 
 
 147 
 
BYE-PATHS 
 
 in Art. Not at all. And yet there is an 
 ulterior purpose in Art ; or it may be said, 
 in a rapid paradox, that Art is itself that 
 ulterior purpose. The artist, says M justly 
 and truly, painted his pictures because he 
 delighted in what he saw. True ; but that 
 is not all ; or very rarely is it all. For the 
 artist paints his pictures also because he 
 wishes us to delight in, or be awed by, 
 what he saw. The whole of his composi- 
 tion is ordained to that end ; and that fact 
 gives it not the least of its definitions. From 
 the point of view of the artist his art is a 
 series of momentous decisions for himself; 
 but these decisions are momentous also be- 
 cause each of them is a communication. 
 Among the many things that delighted him 
 the artist chooses one to pass to others. That 
 very choice implies an ulterior purpose. And, 
 assuming a competency of skill lying ready 
 for use, the rank of the result wiU be the 
 rank of that purpose. The deftest skill will 
 not atone for an unworthy conception, 
 whereas a blundering craft will not often 
 obscure a noble intention. That is to put 
 the case in its extremest form ; and the 
 Ruskins and Tolstois of this world are 
 chiefly annoying because it is not easy to 
 see where it is and how it is they have 
 managed to make a thing that is right 
 appear so grotesquely wrong. 
 
 It may, or may not, be an exaggeration 
 148 
 
ANB PATHS EMERGING 
 
 to say that when M painted his early- 
 pictures he wished each of them to com- 
 municate some spiritual or psychic vision 
 that he judged of high importance that we 
 should perceive if we are to thrive as 
 spiritual beings in a spiritual world. Yet 
 that is in essence true. They are like nothing 
 that has been in latter-day art : they date 
 back to an earlier conception of art, before 
 art became a creed to itself He is not 
 therefore a national artist as Jack Yeats is ; 
 or even as Paul Henry is, though the latter's 
 art may seem only to be national in the 
 sense that a fine and finished craftsmanship 
 learned in Continental schools is engaged 
 upon national scenes and typical figures. 
 These three are possibly the outstanding 
 figures working with the brush in Ireland 
 to-day, for the great and venerable person- 
 ality of Nathaniel Hone, perhaps the greatest 
 artist Ireland has produced, may be con- 
 ceived as resting in a finished work. Of 
 the three Jack Yeats is the complete national 
 figure, unthinkable save in terms of Ireland. 
 His technique itself is national ; it is national 
 as statuary is when it is memorable; for 
 though it might be said that the sculptor 
 belongs to the Stone Age, and Epstein as 
 wittily reply that he must then be a 
 Troglodyte, yet when a nation exerts itself 
 in artistic expression it does so most ener- 
 getically by the sculptor or the architect. 
 
 149 
 
BYE-PATHS 
 
 Jack Yeats's art has a national quality. Foolish 
 people have said that he has no technique, 
 whereas they only mean that they do not 
 understand his astonishing technique. His 
 technique gives a perfect expression of his 
 vision ; and that is all that technique is 
 meant to do. If he, for instance, revises in 
 his drawing the relative sizes of things as 
 they appear to the eye, he yet convinces 
 that he is just to the relative sizes as they 
 appear to his mind ; he is like Gaelic syntax, 
 that does not lay down an arbitrary and 
 artificial sequence of subject, predicate, and 
 object, but simply and precisely takes these 
 things in the order in which the mental 
 emotion approaches them. So he trans- 
 figures Ireland with a wonderful loving 
 humour, where Paul Henry sees intensely 
 and arrests what he sees in a fine economy 
 of colour. 
 
 Yet M the artist is also national, though 
 chiefly in his earher work. It is difficult to 
 conceive of just those mystical pictures 
 being done in any other country. He lost 
 that when circumstances compelled him to 
 a less intensive range of themes, and 
 the influences of other artists sometimes 
 trail across his work. For those influences 
 to be kept away, especially in a world that 
 is hoary with memories of Art, an artist 
 must be intensive in his work ; and circum- 
 stances have caused M to be extensive. 
 
 150 
 
AND PATHS EMERGING 
 
 Yet he carries his spiritual intention with 
 him. In a grouping of subjects and rhythm 
 of Hne he suggests the spiritual world of 
 which the world of landscape is an appear- 
 ance ; and the spiritual world does shine out 
 through the world of appearance by the 
 design and the symphony of colour into 
 which he has inveigled it deftly ; for in such 
 pictures we see, though not always infallibly, 
 that the mystic has never failed to search 
 for spiritual things, knowing that the spiritual 
 never passes away where material things are 
 in continual flow and change. 
 
 For M faces life from many sides. It is 
 difficult to write of a man in the midst of 
 his work, with the tUth of it yet to be 
 garnered. It is difficult to write, with that 
 personal honesty without which books become 
 only a profitable trade, of a friend. It is 
 most difficult — especially as these other 
 difficulties are attendant — to write of a man 
 whose intellectual curiosity is so wide just 
 because his spiritual curiosity is so intense. 
 His speed of thought, and the intellectual 
 impatience that that inevitably brings, arise 
 from just that combination in the man. 
 Whatever gives him aid in his spiritual 
 interest is welcomed — a Wordsworthian 
 cadence slipping into his poetry from his 
 extraordinary literary memory, or some 
 influence of Millet in his painting, or what- 
 ever it may chance to be. Whatever fails 
 
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BYE-PATHS 
 
 from spiritual understanding, or does not 
 seem to him at that moment to possess 
 spiritual endeavour, is dropped aside at once ; 
 and if it persist in forcing itself upon his 
 attention it is attacked in the name of the 
 high things for which he stands, and attacked 
 lustily. It may be that sometimes he does 
 not serve life so well by that impatience ; for 
 there is always the chance with impatience 
 that it comes from imperfect understanding. 
 When, for instance, bodies were mustering 
 and arming throughout the country in the 
 name of national freedom M asked of them 
 at once, and very rightly asked, for what 
 spiritual idea in the country were they arming. 
 It was a noble question ; and the leaders of 
 that mustering, dear men though they be, failed 
 in intellectual courage and nobility in not 
 conceiving of the national consciousness for 
 which they stotfd, and in not defining, at 
 least tentatively, the forms in which it should 
 be cast as a just expression of itself. Arms 
 are only noble when they are taken in defence 
 of a noble thing that bravely faces all its 
 consequences with clean sincerity. That is 
 true ; and very splendidly true ; and coming 
 from one who had faced his spiritual con- 
 ception of the nation and thought out its 
 consequences fearlessly, it was a just reproof. 
 But national freedom, even when carried to 
 its extremest limit, is also a spiritual ideal, 
 that has proved itself worthy of the espousal 
 
 152 
 
AND PATHS EMERGING 
 
 of the noblest in the world's history ; and 
 they who claim it for one nation, where their 
 influence does not extend, while denying it 
 to another, arouse the disgust of honest 
 men. 
 
 M has praised Alexander Hamilton. It 
 is right also to praise George Washington, 
 who made his work possible, and who was 
 an equally noble figure. It was not while 
 the right to a State in America was denied 
 that the thought was possible that should 
 engage itself in building that State. Irish- 
 men all over the world have proved them- 
 selves quite sufficient statesmen ; in fact, as 
 M well claims, they are proving that already 
 in the business and economic discussions of 
 the various Co-operative Societies and Federa- 
 tions. Indeed, the right to a State of Ireland 
 is not denied because of a fear that if it 
 were granted it would be bungled, but because 
 of the far more deeply seated fear that it 
 would not be bungled. And that fear 
 springs from something more nauseous even 
 than cowardice. It is, within its limits, 
 justified ; for the work of Co-operation in 
 Ireland, directly it begins to win results that 
 will challenge their place in the world, will 
 then at once arouse the national hostility that 
 piecemeal and deliberately in the past killed 
 every Irish industry by some foreign State 
 enactment, if by that time that hostility has 
 not been stripped of its power to do harm. 
 
 153 
 
BYE-PATHS 
 
 To think otherwise is to read history like 
 a sentimentalist : is to deny that like things 
 produce Uke results, as the teaching of 
 history is. 
 
 Yet, in feeling that a public impatience 
 (however apparently justified) sometimes may 
 undo .^'s own good work, it is not necessary 
 to go outside his life to find a certain pleasing 
 parallel. It was not because he had thought 
 out a place in the National Polity for factory 
 workers that he sprang, like the fine fighter 
 he is, into the fray on behalf of the Dublin 
 strikers. No ; it was because his being 
 "went upjn a blaze," because hejwas^ghfTng 
 before Tie we]irRnew.jgKh!er£. he was^ because 
 every man's hand was against him whom 
 till that time of trial he would have credited 
 with philanthropic intent, that he began 
 to think out the case of those who had 
 so injuriously been done-by. And that is 
 the human way. To think on the histoiy 
 of Ireland is to be maddened and sickened, 
 for no nation in the whole course of 
 history, past or present, has received from 
 another the brutalities that have been 
 accorded to Ireland : brutalities that are 
 approved and endorsed in any man's mind 
 who shrinks from their fullest reparation, 
 whatever that entail, as no glossmg can 
 obscure ; and it should be significant to M 
 that it was the cleanest and best blood in 
 the countiy, as one who knows may testify, 
 
 154 
 
AND PATHS EMERGING 
 
 that snatched arms for their country's liberty, 
 even though they had not thought out the 
 State in which the NationaUty for which 
 they stood should be expressed. If they 
 wanted a creed, though they lacked defini- 
 tion of a State, one of the noblest of ^E's 
 writings, dealing with "Nationality and Im- 
 perialism," would have provided it for them : 
 " Some, even those who are Celts, protest 
 against our movements as forlorn hopeSi 
 Yet what does it matter whether every Celt 
 perished in the land, so that our wills, inviolate 
 to the last, make obeisance only to the light 
 which God has set for guidance in our souls ? 
 Would not that be spiritual victory and the 
 greatest success ? What would be the suc- 
 cess we are assured of if we lay aside our 
 hopes ? What could we have or what could 
 we give to humanity if our mental integrity 
 is broken? God gives no second gift to a 
 nation if it flings aside its birthright. We 
 cannot put on the ideals of another people 
 as a garment. We cannot, with every higher 
 instinct of our nature shocked and violated, 
 express ourselves as lovers of the law that 
 rules us. We would be slaves if we did. 
 The incarnate Love came not with peace but 
 a sword. It does not speak only with the 
 Holy Breath, but has in its armoury death 
 and the strong weapons of the other im- 
 mortals. It is better to remain unbroken 
 to the last, and I count it as noble to fight 
 
 155 
 
BYE-PATHS 
 
 God's battles as to keep His peace. ..." 
 Those are great and noble words. The 
 man who wrote them belongs not to a 
 social aristocracy, though a social aristocracy 
 flatter him. He is of the people of Ireland, 
 even as he conceives the State that shall do 
 honour to their nationality. 
 
 Other things may also temporarily upset 
 him. A great war that is no less than a 
 toppling civilization has disturbed him as it 
 was bound to do. Not only, however, has 
 it disturbed him by the fact of its being, but 
 no less in the manner of its conduct. He 
 expressed this, and also expressed himself, 
 in a sonnet entitled " Chivalry " : 
 
 I dreamed I saw that ancient Irish queen, 
 Who, from her dun, as dawn had opened wide 
 Saw the tall foemen rise on every side, 
 And gazed with kindling eye upon the scene, 
 And in delight cried, " Noble is their mien." 
 " Most kingly are they," her own host replied, 
 Praising the beauty, bravery and pride. 
 As if the foe their very kin had been. 
 And then I heard the innumerable hiss 
 Of human adders, nation with poisonous breath 
 Spitting at nation, as if the dragon rage 
 Would claw the spirit ; and I woke at this. 
 Knowing the soul of man was sick to death 
 And I was weeping in the Iron Age. 
 
 So, in the well-knit speechcraft of his later 
 verse, he comes to the making of the sonnet, 
 the honoured vehicle of such saying as distinct 
 
 156 
 
AND PATHS EMERGING 
 
 from singing; and it leads him to the con- 
 clusion of "Tragedy," so deep in its appli- 
 cation to more things than one : 
 
 Love, the magician, and the wizard Hate, 
 Though one be like white fire, and one dark flame. 
 Work the same miracle, and all are wrought 
 Into the image that they contemplate. 
 None ever hated in the world but came 
 To every baseness of the foe he fought. 
 
 Yet out of that shock of conflict he sees 
 new things coming ; he sees the two foes that 
 merge in battle in ideas also merging, each 
 bestowing upon the other the very qualities 
 against which the other is contending. That 
 is for him "The Spiritual Conflict," whereby 
 in the world of ideas the loser may become 
 the victor, even as by contending against 
 the new French democracy in the last great 
 war the democratic idea became implanted 
 in each nation. So in the future, he 
 says, linking this new vision to the older 
 body of his thought, " the coming solidarity 
 is the domination of the State." There are, 
 he adds, certain reactions "within one being, 
 humanity," and these " indicate eternal desires 
 of the soul. They seem to urge on us the 
 idea that there is a pleroma, or human full- 
 ness, in which the opposites may be recon- 
 ciled, and that the divine event to which we 
 are moving is a State in which there will be 
 essential freedom combined with an organic 
 
 157 
 
BYE-PATHS 
 
 unity." * The bearing of this on what he had 
 conceived of the State of Ireland is obvious, 
 and is an enrichment of that conception. The 
 irony of this spiritual conflict as reflected in 
 the vital earnestness of the material conflict 
 hardly needs mention. Believing that "the 
 Universe exists for the purposes of soul," he 
 looks for those purposes, and so fortifies him- 
 self in the bewilderment of change, for the 
 changes are only apparent, and the purposes 
 continue. So for the moment he steadies 
 himself tiU he recover his old certitude. 
 Thus it is that nothing can better conclude 
 a Study that has to arrest itself at the height 
 of iE's powers than his own forward glance, 
 which he entitles " Continuity." 
 
 No sign is made while empires pass. 
 The flowers and stars are still His care, 
 The constellations hid in grass 
 The golden miracles in air. 
 
 Life in an instant will be rent 
 
 When death is glittering blind and wild — 
 
 The Heavenly Brooding is intent 
 
 To that last instant on Its child. 
 
 It breathes the glow in brain and heart. 
 
 Life is made magical, until 
 
 Body and spirit are apart, 
 
 The Everlasting works Its will. 
 
 • This was printed in the London Times, not in 
 a "rebel" Irish journal. 
 
 158 
 
AND PATHS EMERGING 
 
 In that wild orchid that your feet 
 In their next falling shall destroy, 
 Minute and pasBionate and sweet 
 The Mighty Master holds His joy. 
 
 Though the crushed jewels droop and fade, 
 The Artist's labours will not cease, 
 And of the ruins shall be made 
 Some yet more lovely masterpiece. 
 
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Cornell University Library 
 PR 6035.U87Z6 
 
 /E (George W. Russell)a study of a man an 
 
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