At the end of the 'forties Ruskin preached: Let us abandon ourselves unreservedly to Nature, and his teaching gave birth to Pre-Raphaelitism, unless indeed the truth is that the painters Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt stood up one evening in a studio in Newman Street, all three crying together: If we purify ourselves in ignorance and put our trust in Nature, we shall rediscover the innocency of the painters of the fifteenth century. So did Robert Ross relate to me the story of the movement, and perceiving that he was intimately acquainted with it, I often tried to persuade him to write it: but he could not be persuaded, for to do so, he said, would deprive him of the pleasure of talking it, and I was disappointed, for no more perfect beginning of a story was ever invented than the three—a Robespierre, a Danton, a Marat, standing up together proclaiming their faith in Nature. A little too dramatic and self-conscious they were for an aesthetic Revolution, some may think, but for many no more than a few moments of reflection are needed to remember that the natural would be for the painters to discover the truth themselves and find their Apostle afterwards in Ruskin.

But however our feelings go, whether in the direction of Ruskin or the painters, we must not forget that Ruskin was a craftsman, a master of the lead pencil, whose drawings bear comparison with the best of their kind, if we except Turner's. His architectural drawings must have been admired by Whistler in secret, and there are drawings in which his pencil followed a range of hills revealing the beauty of every fold and the swerve of every outline. An exquisite draughtsman! and the question now comes whether these drawings were done in the 'forties. If Robert Ross were alive he could tell me; but assuming that some were accomplished about that time and were accompanied by literary comment (which is not unlikely, his pen and pencil being as dependent one upon the other as the musical notes of a song are upon the words they enhance and illustrate), we find ourselves unable to consider Ruskin as a mere propagandist, and are obliged to admit that his handicraft counted for a little in the declaration that was destined to give to England an art entirely her own.

Hitherto England had derived her inspiration from abroad, but the Pre-Raphaelite movement was English as a Surrey hedgerow. But before the hedgerow there were scattered bushes, and before the Pre-Raphaelite movement there were quakings and stirrings. Mulready is reported to have said: Yes, but what you tell me is no more than what I have been trying to do all my life! words that tell plainly how unable Mulready was by temperament to appreciate the love of beauty that inspired the brotherhood and directed their choice to beautiful things with a view to making them seem even more beautiful than they were by a beautiful handicraft, of which I should speak at length if the subject of this paper was the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood or Pre-Raphaelitism. As it is neither one nor the other I shall say no more than that the desire of Man to discover the source of things led critics even to the beginning of the century, to William Dyce, and to hang a pretty, romantic movement round the neck of one of the most prosaic of all painters, dry and punctilious.

So things are misrepresented in this world even by the best intentioned! But truth is stronger than good intentions, and of late years Dyce's name as a possible claimant has been dropped and the Newman Street episode accepted as the authorised version.

A small thing Pre-Raphaelitism may be, no more than a daisy in the great flower garden of the world's art; but a daisy that is your own is perhaps better than a sunflower that is somebody else's, and it is with reluctance I remark that Rossetti was an Italian—born in England, nurtured in England, it is true—and that Millais came from the Channel Islands and was perhaps of French stock. But Holman Hunt's English blood has never been called into question, happily; so we are in possession of an artistic movement more or less exclusively our own, and one that lasted more than twenty years. The dates are approximately from 1850 to 1870. Millais was painting the three Miss Armstrongs in Cromwell Place in the 'seventies, and drooping, the movement lingered on still a few years, till in the 'eighties a great painter, James M'Neill Whistler, felt himself called upon to pronounce what may be described as a funeral oration over it. None was necessary, for the Pre-Raphaelite movement was dead and beyond hope of resurrection before a goodly assembly of ladies and gentlemen was called to the Dudley Gallery to hear the artist exalted, placed above Nature, and his business declared to be to take hints from Nature, to interpret and to amplify, to use Nature as a musician uses the piano. All the same, James M'Neill (I drop the Whistler, the name being an absurd one and a disparagement to his painting) could not do else than concede a part of every picture to Nature, an admission that will be regarded as a weakness by many who have followed after him. In his Ten o'Clock he admits that Nature can on occasions create a picture:

'The sun blares, the wind blows from the east, the sky is bereft of cloud, and without, all is of iron. The windows of the Crystal Palace are seen from all points of London. The holiday-maker rejoices in the glorious day, and the painter turns aside to shut his eyes.

'How little this is understood, and how dutifully the casual in Nature is accepted as sublime, may be gathered from the unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset.

'The dignity of the snow-capped mountain is lost in distinctness, but the joy of the tourist is to recognise the traveller on the top. The desire to see, for the sake of seeing, is, with the mass, alone the one to be gratified, hence the delight in detail.



'And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master—her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.'

When the beautifully proportioned brown, square book drops upon my lap, my mind reverts to the Nocturnes, and I have not long to wait before a pale grey-green waste of waters rises up in my thoughts, with shadowy shores, receding lights, and on the horizon dimmer lights, and half submerged in the swelling tide a trailing seaweed of lovely design. A mingling of night and day is on the waters, and the artist hears the song that Nature sings, this time in tune, and returns home to report it in paint and afterwards in words so beautiful that we do not forget the warehouses like palaces in the night, nor the artist who declares himself Nature's son and master—her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her. A beautiful prose this is, beautiful as the artist's paint. Can I say more? And it is with regret that I pick a hole in it; but my argument compels. James M'Neill's point is that Nature is rarely an artist. But may we not say the same of Man? Indeed, James M'Neill says it on the first page of his book. Are not then Man and Nature equal, both of them being seldom artists? James M'Neill would have found no way out of the dilemma, and if he had sought to do so I should have asked him to come to the Royal Academy with me. Nature sings in tune many times in the course of a single year, and sings in vain, there being no artist about who understands her; and taking Nature's adventures into painting as being on the whole equal to those of Man, we will turn to Nature's novels.

A novel is the story of a man's life, and I think we shall find that Nature provides ends for lives more strangely significant than any invented by story-tellers. The end of Beau Brummel at Nice seems to me one of Nature's triumphs; in it she has surpassed anything that I remember for the moment in Tolstoy, or Turgenev, or Tchekov, or Balzac. We all have a hearsay knowledge of Beau Brummel. We have heard, or think we have heard, that he came to London with a fifty-pound note in his pocket, no more, and a talent for dressing himself so remarkable that he soon began to set the fashion in clothes and was much sought after by tailors. His wit was ready and he reigned in London for twenty years, till one evening he said, addressing the Regent: George, ring the bell! The Regent rang the bell, and the servant was told to send round for Mr Brummel's carriage. Everybody wondered, and everybody understood that the knell of his popularity had been rung. The friends who had endured the Beau's authority, accepting rebuffs, sarcasms, and insolences of every kind complacently, foresaw their release from tyranny in the incident, and soon after, if not immediately after, the Beau found himself without a friend in London. And for some years, I know not for how many, he lived in Nice with an ever-fading brain, without friends or money, his only entertainment being the donning of his gala clothes of other days and listening to his servant announcing the high-sounding titles of his former friends, till the cracking of the sconces restored him to sanity and the sadness thereof.

For another great conqueror, Napoleon, Nature invented an end that equals in beauty the one she devised for Beau Brummel: she placed him on the rock of St Helena to watch and listen to the Atlantic, a wonderful end. And Tolstoy's end is very wonderful if we connect it with the strange morality that he preached from the Steppes, a veritable Jeremiah, telling that a wife who left her husband would meet a violent end; however kind and good her lover may have been, she would not escape her fate. We are asked to believe in Anna Karenina's suicide, and we do whilst the book is in our hands; but we do not follow the great writer in The Kreutzer Sonata, for the morality preached in that book is that unless we marry a woman who is physically disagreeable to us, we shall plunge of a certainty a stiletto through the exquisite jersey that tempted us in the beginning. Mad indeed is the moralist who would reform our natures; and Nature, having watched the preacher all the while, decreed an end the significance of which cannot escape even the most casual reader: a flight from his wife and home in his eighty-second year, and his death in the waiting-room of a wayside railway station in the early hours of a March morning.

The correlation of the end of a story to the story itself is that of the hand to the arm; neither is complete without the other. The end of Héloïse and Abélard is very beautiful. Nature furnished it, together with a large part of the narrative, for Nature does not stint her literary activities to ends. Sometimes she undertakes the entire composition, as in Hail and Farewell; every episode and every character was a gift from Nature, even the subject itself. And I shall not be misunderstood if due attention be paid to the call that was vouchsafed to me whilst walking in the Hospital Road, and if the fact be borne in mind that from that day forward I never seemed to have doubted that I was needed in Ireland, and that the words: Highly favoured am I among authors! rose to my lips instinctively, I might say incontinently, as I opened my garden gate one morning in May, for the true significance of the words was not perceived by me whilst I worked at Nature's bidding, taking down her many surprising inventions, thinking they were my own because they happened to come my way. For Nature is a sly puss; she sets us working, but we know nothing of her designs; and for years I believed myself to be the author of Hail and Farewell, whereas I was nothing more than the secretary, and though the reader may doubt me in the sentence I am now writing, he will believe that I am telling no more than the truth when the narrative leads him to Coole Park and he meets the hieratic Yeats and Lady Gregory out walking, seeking living speech from cottage to cottage, Yeats remaining seated under the stunted hawthorn usually found growing at the corner of the field, Lady Gregory braving the suffocating interior for the sacred cause of Idiom. And the feeling that there is something providential in the art of Hail and Farewell will be strengthened when the reader comes upon Yeats standing lost in meditation before a white congregation of swans assembled on the lake, looking himself in his old cloak like a huge umbrella left behind by some picnic-party; and raising his eyes from the book, the reader will say: This is Nature, not Art! and his thoughts reverting to the name upon the title-page, he will add: A puny author indeed, who merits a severe reprimand, if not punishment: with such a figure as Yeats he should have created something overtopping Don Quixote. He has done well, of course, for with such material he could not have done badly, but...

Whilst Yeats contemplates the lake and its water-fowl, esurient Edward devours huge loin chops, followed by stewed chicken and platesful of curried eggs, for he is suffering terrific qualms of conscience. And finding that food cannot allay thief, he founds a choir for the singing of Palestrina Masses, hoping to do something for his Church; but the only result of Palestrina is the emptying of two churches. How the emptying of the two churches came about I will suffer the reader to find out for himself, for I feel that the episode will once more strengthen the conviction in him that the book he is reading is Nature's own book, wrought by providential hands; but when he meets AE in Salve he will discard the belief that Nature is the real author of the book and will attribute the authorship to Erin. On reflection it may seem to him that the name Erin has been turned to derision by much bad poetry in modern times, and being a student of ancient Ireland the name Banva may occur to him. Banva was Ireland's name when the Druids flourished, and AE is the last believer in Druid mysteries. Yeats is hieratic, Edward is esurient (eating procured his death), but AE is neither hieratic nor esurient; indeed, he is apt to forget his food, so subject is he to ideas, so willing to deliver everybody of his ideas, if he have one. He has helped all and sundry through the labours of parturition, with the single exception of Lady Gregory, who delivers herself, and very easily, of her own plays and stories. Now is there a word that would represent him as hieratic represents Yeats, as esurient represents Edward? I am sure there is a word—yes, it is coming, it is coming ... I've got it, maieutic! The maieutic AE! A trilogy, if ever there was one, each character so far above anything one meets in fiction that the reader's thoughts will return to Banva as the author, thinly disguised by the puerile name of George Moore, of this extraordinary work. And if any doubt regarding the authorship still remains in his mind, it will be dispelled, I think, by the labours of Plunkett and Gill in Ireland during the ten years which Hail and Farewell chronicles.

Yeats and dear Edward and AE are outside and beyond anything that has ever appeared before in print; there is no standard by which we can judge them; but in the case of Plunkett and Gill there is a standard, and a literary standard. The reader has read or has heard of Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, two clerks whom a fortune beguiles from their offices and an evil spirit urges to experiment in all directions, one of which is horticulture, and their efforts produce a melon that has all the qualities a melon should have except one—the monstrous fruit is uneatable. France has laughed at the joke for forty years, appreciating the point of it: the wrecking of a theory by a simple fact overlooked by the theorists; and Plunkett and Gill reproduced the originals almost line for line, with this difference, that they exceeded the originals, which is not surprising if the theory advanced in this paper be true, that Nature's inventions exceed the artist's. Whosoever doubts this I would invite to compare Flaubert's invention of the melon with some of the disasters that followed Plunkett's and Gill's philanthropic career in Ireland. Some of these disasters the reader will discover in the book, succinctly related, but the crowning disaster is the one that I hope will engage his attention. Inspired by a very noble desire for the advancement of Banva, it occurred to them that the breed of Irish asses might be improved; and having sent to the library for all the books on the subject, the twain spent six days reading, with a view to avoiding the mistakes that had been made hitherto in the breeding of asses. On the seventh day several hundred pounds were sent to Alexandria for the purchase of sires—but no, I will not deflower the joke by reporting what happened to the unfortunate asses on the voyage. A broad smile will illumine the face of the reader and the smile will wax broader till he bursts into laughter, and when he comes to the impotent jackass that brays at Foxrock, he will cry aloud: Bravo! and clap his hands. But I would not give a false impression of Banva's book. The reader will find many touching incidents in it. Tchekov should have written the story of the snow lion; he would have, had not Banva been busy dictating it to me.



So far my task of introducing Hail and Farewell to the reader has been an easy one. All the merits of the book belong to Banva, and the demerits, alas! to me. In this new edition I have not, needless to say, meddled with Banva's inventions and with the characters that she brought into the book. For me to lay hands upon these would be as unseemly as if I were to undertake to rearrange, to emendate, to revise the work of some great author—more unseemly, perhaps, for Banva is a spiritual entity; the Irish themselves are always willing to strike a blow for Banva. So my editing was limited to re-knitting and mending the literary texture, which seemed to me in many places loose and casual. I have done my best with it, and even now, despite all my stitching and unstitching, as Yeats would say, I have not woven a garment worthy of Banva.

G.M.