A room had been hired at the Shelbourne Hotel, and the mornings were spent writing The Bending of the Bough It could be finished in the next three weeks if I fortuned upon somebody who could explain the various sections and parties in Irish politics, all striving for mastery at that time; somebody acquainted enough with the country to unravel the Lord Castletown incident, and expound the Healy problem, the O'Brien problem, the Redmond problem, and the great many other political problems with which the play is beset.

There is little use in writing when there is no clear vision in the mind; the pen stops of its own accord, and I often rose from my chair and walked about the room, my feet at last finding their way through the hotel, and down the street as far as the Kildare Street Club, to ask Edward if he would tell me. He would tell me nothing. His present to the Irish Literary Theatre was his play, and I was free to alter it as I pleased, putting the last act first and the first act last, but he would not help me to alter it; and it was impossible not to feel that it was reasonable for him to refuse.

What do you think of the title—The Bending of the Bough?

The Tale of a Town is a better title. And after some heated words we left the Club one evening together. You must sign the play, he said, turning suddenly.

I sign the play! I answered, all my literary vanity ablaze. No; but I'll put adapted from.

I'll have no adaptations; I'll have nothing to do with your version; and he wrenched himself free from me, leaving me to go my way, thinking that here was nothing for it but to sign a work that was not mine. I, too, am sacrificing to Cathleen ni Houlihan; one sacrifice brings many. And to escape from the hag whom I could see wrapped in a faded shawl, her legs in grey worsted stockings, her feet in brogues, I packed my trunk and went away by the mail-boat laughing at myself, and at the same time not quite sure that she was not still at my heels. Cathleen follows her sons across the seas; and she did not seem to be very far away in the morning in Victoria Street, while Edward's play was before me. After writing some lines of vituperation quite in the Irish style, I would lay down the pen and cry: Cathleen, art thou satisfied with me? And it seemed an exquisite joke to voice Ireland's woes, until one day I stopped in Ebury Street, abashed; for it was not a victory for our soldiers that I desired to read in the paper just bought from the boy who had rushed past me, yelling News from the Front, but one for the Boers. The war was forgotten, and I walked on slowly, frightened lest this sudden and inexplicable movement of soul should be something more than a merely accidental mental vacillation.

It may be no more, and it may be that I am changing, I whispered under my breath; and then, charging myself with faint-heartedness and superstition, I walked on, trying to believe that I should be myself again next morning.

It was a bad sign to lie awake all night, thinking of what happened in Ebury Street the evening before, and asking if I really did desire that the Boers should win the fight and keep their country; and it was a worse sign to read without interest headlines announcing a forward movement of our troops. On turning over the pages, a rumour (it was given as a rumour) that the Boers were retreating northward caught my eye; the paper was thrown aside, and an hour was spent wondering why the paper had been tossed aside so negligently. Was it because I had become, without knowing it, Pro-Boer? That was it, for next morning, on reading that five hundred of our troops had been taken prisoners, I was swept away by a great joy, and it was a long time before I could recover sufficient calm of mind to ask myself the reason of all this sympathy for illiterate farmers speaking a Dutch dialect in which no book had yet been written; a people without any sentiment of art, without a past, without folklore, and therefore, in some respect, a less reputable people than the Irish. I had seen some finely designed swords in the Dublin Museum, forged, without doubt, in the late Bronze Age, and Coffey had shown me the splendid bits that the ancient Irish put into their horses' jaws. There was the monkish Book of Kells, a beautiful thing in a way; the Cross of Cong was made in Roscommon, and by an Irish artist; it bears the name of its maker, an Irish name, so there can be no doubt as to its nationality. There are some fine legends, the rudiments of a literature that had not been carried into culture, the Irish not being a thinking race ... perhaps.

After that I must have fallen into a deep lethargy. On awakening, I remembered the autumn evening in Edward's park, when Cathleen ni Houlihan rose out of the plain that lies at the foot of the Burran Mountains, and came, foot-sore and weary, up through the beech-grove to me. I had not the heart to repulse her, so hapless did she seem; nor did I remember the danger of listening to her till I had stood before Edward telling him the story of the meeting in the park.

It is dangerous, I had said to him, to listen to Cathleen even for a moment; she has brought no good luck or good health to any one.

The morning paper was picked up from the hearthrug, and the news of the capture of our troops read again and again, the same thrill of joy coming into my heart. The Englishman that was in me (he that wrote Esther Waters) had been overtaken and captured by the Irishman. Strange, for all my life had been lived in England. When I went to Ireland I always experienced a sense of being a stranger in my own country, and, like many another Irishman, had come to think that I was immune from the disease that overtakes all Irishmen sooner or later—that moment in Edward's park was enough for me, and ever since the disease had been multiplying in secret: the incident in Ebury Street was only a symptom.... A moment after I was asking myself if the microbe were sown that evening in Edward's park, or if the introduction of it could be traced back to the afternoon in Victoria Street, when Edward and Yeats had called to ask me to join in their attempt to give a National Literary Theatre to Ireland. It might be traced further back still, to the evening in the Temple when Edward had told me that he would like to write his plays in Irish; and there arose up in me the memory of that midnight when I wandered among the courts and halls, dreaming of Ireland, of the story of wild country life that I might write.

It was then that I caught the disease, I said; a sort of spiritual consumption; it was then that the microbe first got into my soul and ate away most of it without my being aware of its presence, or of the ravages caused by it, until the greater part of me collapsed in Ebury Street.

And what was still more serious was that out of the wreck and rubble of my former self a new self had arisen. It could not be that the old self that had worshipped pride, strength, courage, and egoism should now crave for justice and righteousness, and should pause to consider humility and obedience as virtues, and might be moved to advocate chastity tomorrow. Such a thing could not be. A new self had grown up within me, or had taken possession of me. It is hard to analyse a spiritual transformation; one knows little about oneself; life is mysterious. Only this can I say for certain, that I learnt then that ideas are as necessary to us as our skins; and, like one that has been flayed, I sat wondering whether new ideas would clothe me again, until a piece of burning coal falling from the grate into the fender awoke me from my reverie. When I had put it back among the live embers, I said: My past life crumbles away like that piece of coal; in a few moments it will be all gone from me, and my new self will then be alone in me, and powerful enough to lead me into a new life. Into what life will it lead me? Into what Christianity?

I wandered across the room to consult the looking-glass, curious to know if the great spiritual changes that were happening in me were recognisable upon my face; but the mirror does not give back characteristic expression, and to find out whether the expression of my face had changed I should have to consult my portrait-painters: Steer, Tonks, and Sickert would be able to tell me. And that night at Steer's, after a passionate protest against the wickedness and the stupidity of the Boer War delivered across his dining-table, I got up and walked round the room, feeling myself to be unlike the portraits they had painted of me, every one of which had been done before the war. The external appearance no doubt remained, but the acquisition of a moral conscience must have modified it. As I was about to launch my question on the company, I caught sight of the little black eyes that Steer screws up when he looks at anything; all the other features are insignificant; the eyes are all that one notices, and the full, sleek outlines of the face. His shoulders slope a little, like mine, and the body is long, and the large feet shuffle down the street in goloshes if the weather be wet, and in the studio in carpet slippers. Long white hands droop from his cuffs—hands that I remember carrying canvases from one easel to another. Tonks is lank and long in every limb, and one remembers him as a herring-gutted fellow, with a high bridge on his nose; and one remembers him much more for the true, honest heart that always goes with his appearance. I could see that he sympathised with the Boer women and children dying in concentration camps, and that Steer was thinking of the pictures he had brought home from the country. It was shameful that any one should be able to think of pictures at such a time, but Steer takes no interest in morals; his world is an external world; and I abandoned myself somewhat cowardly to his pictures till the end of the evening, thinking all the while that Tonks would understand my perplexities better, and that the time to speak to him would be when we walked home together.

Steer's pictures are the best he has done, Tonks said, as soon as we had left our friend's doorstep, and he asked me if I liked the wooded hillside better than the ruins.

I can't talk of pictures just now, Tonks. The war has put pictures clean out of my head, and I don't mind telling you that Steer's indifference to everything except his values has disgusted me. I don't know if you noticed it, I hardly looked at anything. Were you interested?

Well, Moore, I can always admire Steer's pictures, but it is difficult to detach oneself from the war to admire them sufficiently. I'm sure we shall admire his work more at some other time; so far I am with you.

Only as far as that? Can't you see that the war has changed me utterly?

I can see that you take it very much to heart.

I don't mean that, Tonks; it seems to me to have changed me outwardly. I can't believe that I present the same appearance. After all, it is the mind that makes the man. Tell me, hasn't the war put a new look on my face?

When you mention it, you change; there's no doubt about it, you seem a different person. I'll say that.



I'll do a drawing of it, and then you'll see. You glare at us across the dinner-table. Steer and I were talking about it only yesterday, and Steer said: Moore looks like that when he remembers we are Englishmen. Now, isn't it so?

I shouldn't like to say it wasn't, though it seems silly to admit it. You don't approve of the war, do you, Tonks?

I think it is a very unfortunate affair.

Those concentration camps!

At the words the kind melancholy of the surgeon appeared in Tonks's face. He was a surgeon before he was a painter, and, seeing that he was genuinely afflicted, I told him the Ebury Street episode, and my fears lest my life had been changed, and radically, and that there was no place now in it for admiration of pictures or of literature.

But what will you do, my dear Moore? Tonks asked, his voice tight with sympathy.

I don't know; anything may happen to me, for I don't think as I used to. When it is assumed that justice must give way to expediency, concentration camps are established and women and children kept prisoners so that they may die of typhoid and enteric.

No, Moore, it isn't as bad as that. They couldn't be left on the veldt; we had to do something with the women and children.

Tonks, I'm ashamed of you! After having burnt down their houses you had to keep them, and as it would be an advantage to you to destroy the Boer race, you keep them in concentration camps where they drop off like flies.

Now, my dear Moore, I'm not going to quarrel with you. I'm quite ready to admit—

When I think of it I feel as if I were going mad, and that I must do something. This evening when I jumped up from my chair and walked about the room I could hardly keep myself from breaking Steer's Chelsea china; those shepherds and shepherdesses were too cynical. Men and women in roses and ribbons twanging guitars! Why—

Of course, I can see what you mean, but I can't help laughing when you say you were tempted to break Steer's Chelsea figures.

It is easy, Tonks, to see an absurdity; very little intelligence is required for that; much more is required to see the abomination of—At that moment we were joined by Sickert. He had stopped behind to exchange a few words with Steer.

You really shouldn't, Sickert, Tonks said. The last time you detained him on the doorstep he was laid up with influenza.

An attack of influenza! And thousands of women and children kept prisoners in concentration camps—children without milk to drink; water, perhaps, from springs fouled with the staling of mules!

But if we had Steer laid up, what would happen to the models? Sickert asked. One is coming at ten tomorrow. Who would support the models? Would you? And the New English Art Club without a work by Steer! Six feet by four; a fine Old English prospect with a romantic castle in the foreground. An august site. As soon as the war is over, one of those sites will be bought for the Pretoria Art Gallery, and the tax-payer will be charged an extra halfpenny in the pound for improving the intellectual status of the Kaffirs, which will be indefinitely raised.

There was a moment's hesitation between anger and laughter, but no one is angry when Sickert is by. He has kept in middle age a great deal of his youth, and during dinner I had noticed that not a streak of grey showed in the thick rippling shock of yellow-brown hair. The golden moustache has been shaved away, and the long mouth and closely set lips give him a distinct clerical look. There was always something of the cleric and the actor in him, I thought, as I overlooked his new appearance, drawing conclusions from the special bowler-hat of French shape that he wore. He had just come over from Dieppe and his trousers were French corduroy, amazingly peg-top, and the wide braid on the coat recalled 1860. He was, at this time, addicted to 1860, living in a hotel in the Tottenham Court Road in which all the steads were four-posted and all the beds feather, and he was full of contempt for Steer's collection of Chelsea china, and in favour of wax fruit and rep curtains, and advocated heavy mahogany sideboards.

He was as Pro-Boer as myself, with less indignation and more wit, and Tonks and I yielded that night, as we always do, to the charm of his whimsical imagination, and we laughed when he said:

Our latest casualties are the capture of four hundred Piccadilly dandies who had been foolish enough to go out to fight the veterans of the veldt. They were stripped of their clothes, patted on their backs, and sent home to camp in silk fleshings and embroidered braces.... Hope Bros., Regent Street.

Sickert's wide, shaven lip laughed, and he looked so like himself in his overcoat and his French bowler-hat that we walked for some yards delighting in his personality—Tonks a little hurt, but pleased all the same, myself treasuring up each contemptuous word for further use, and considering at which of my friends' houses the repetition of Sickert's wit would give most offence.

Tonks bade us goodnight in the King's Road. Sickert came on with me; his way took him through Victoria Street, and we stopped outside my doorway drawn into tense communion by our detestation of the war.

I'm so glad to have met you after this long while, he said, for I wanted to know if you held the same opinion of Mr Gladstone. Do you remember how we used to laugh at him? Now we see what a great man he was.

England is, at present, the ugliest country. Oh, I have changed towards England. I try to forget that I once thought differently, for when I remember myself (my former self) I hate myself as much as I hate England.

Doesn't the lack of humour in the newspapers surprise you? This morning I read in the Pall Mall that we are an Imperial people, and being an Imperial people we must think Imperially, and presumably do everything else Imperially. Splendid, isn't it? Everything, the apple trees included, must be Imperial. We won't eat apples except Imperial apples, and the trees are conjured to bear no others, but the apple trees go on flowering and bearing the same fruit as before, and Sickert burst into joyous laughter in which I joined.

We bade each other good night, and I went up to my bed looking forward to the morning paper. Which may bring us some further news of the Piccadilly dandies, I muttered into my pillow.

In old times my servant would find me in my drawing-room looking at a picture that I had bought a few days before at Christie's, or at one that had been some time in my possession, uncertain whether I liked it as much as last year; but, as I told Tonks, art and literature had ceased to interest me, and now she found me every morning in the dining-room reading the paper. The morning after Steer's dinner-party she came upon me in a very exultant mood. Another win for the Boers, I told her, and took the paper back to bed with me, thinking how I should go down and humiliate my tobacconist. The day before he had said: Buller has trapped the Boers; we shall see a change within the next few days. He was right. A very nice change, too, and I went out to ask him if he had any new cigars that would suit me. I did not like his cigars, and told him so after a ten minutes' discussion as to the reason for our defeat at Spion Kop. From the tobacconist's I went to the Stores in the hope of waylaying a friend or two there. A lady that I knew very well always shopped there in the morning, and it would be only a kindness to advise her to take her money out of South African mines.

Parents take pleasure in putting a horrible powder called Gregory into a spoon, and covering it with jam, and telling the unfortunate child that he must swallow it; and that afternoon I called on all my friends, taking a grim pleasure in watching their faces while I assured them that the recall of our troops would be the wisest thing we could do.

Love of cruelty is inveterate in the human being, and remembering this, remorse would sometimes overtake me in the street, and a passionate resolution surge up not to offend again, and it often happened to me to go to another house to approve myself; but some chance phrase would set me talking again; my tongue could not be checked, not even when the lady, to distract my attention from De Wet, asked my opinion of some picture or knick-knack. She did not succeed any better when she strove to engage my attention by an allusion to a book. Not only books and pictures had lost interest for me, but human characteristics; opinions were what I demanded, and from everybody. I remember coming from the North of England in company with a prosaic middle-aged man who had brought into the carriage with him for his relaxation three newspapers—the Builder, the Athenaeum, and Vanity Fair—and in the long journey from Darlington to London I watched him taking up these papers, one after the other, and reading them with the same attention. At any other time I should have been eager to make the acquaintance of one who could find something to interest him in these papers and should have been much disappointed if I did not succeed in becoming intimate with him by the end of the journey. But, strange as it will seem to the reader, who by this time has begun to know me, I am forced to admit that I was only anxious to hear his opinion of the war, and my curiosity becoming at last intolerable, I interrupted his architectural, social, or literary meditation with the statement that the Daily Telegraph contained some very grave news. Two eyes looked at me over spectacles, and on the phrase, Well, the war was bound to come sooner or later, we began to argue, and it was not until we reached Finsbury Park—he got out there—that I remembered I had forgotten to ask him if he were a constant reader of the three newspapers that he rolled up and put away carefully into a black bag.

The incident is one among hundreds of similar incidents, all pointing to the same fact that nothing but the war interested me as a subject of conversation or of thought. Every day the obsession became more terrible, and the surrender of my sanity more imminent. I shall try to tell the story as it happened, but I fear that some of it will escape my pen; yet it is all before me clear as my reflection in the glass: that evening, for instance, when I walked with a friend through Berkeley Square and fell out with my friend's appearance, so English did it seem to me, for he wore his clothes arrogantly; yet it was not his clothes so much as his sheeplike face that angered me. We were dining at the same house that night, and on looking round the dinner-table I saw the same sheep in everybody, in the women as much as in the men. Next day in Piccadilly I caught sight of it in every passer-by; every man and woman seemed to wear it, and everybody's bearing and appearance suggested to me a repugnant, sensual cosmopolitanism; a heartless lust for gold was read by me in their faces—for the goldfields of Pretoria which they haven't gotten yet, and never will get, I hope.



And then I grew interested in my case, and went for long walks with a view to discovering how much I had been deceived, taking a certain bitter pleasure in noticing that Westminster Abbey was not comparable to Notre Dame (nobody ever thought it was, but that was a matter that did not concern me); Westminster was merely an echo of French genius, the church that a Norman King had built in a provincial city; and, going up Parliament Street, I shook my head over my past life, for there had been a time when the Horse Guards had seemed no mean structure. The National Gallery was compared to the Madeleine and to the Bourse; St Martin's Church roused me to special anger, and I went down the Strand wondering how any one who had seen the beautiful French churches could admire it. I walked past St Clement Danes, thinking it at best a poor thing. The Temple Church was built by Normans, and it pleased me to remember that there were no avenues in London, no great boulevards. There are parks in London, but they have not been laid out. Hyde Park is no more than a great enclosure, and St James's Park, which used to awaken such delicate sympathies in my heart as I stood on the bridge, seemed to me in 1900 a rather foolish counterfeit, shamming some French model, I said. The detestable race has produced nothing original; not one sculptor, nor a great painter, except, perhaps, John Millais. He came from one of the Channel Islands. A Frenchman! If English painting can be repudiated, English literature cannot: Shakespeare, Shelley, and Wordsworth—above all Shelley, whose poetry I loved more than anything else in the world. Was he free from the taint of England?

The question occupied my thoughts one evening all the way home, and after dinner I took down a volume and read, or looked through, the last act of Prometheus. I cast my eyes over The Sensitive Plant; it might have been beautiful once, but all the beauty seemed to have faded out of it, and I could discover none in the Ode to the West Wind. Nor did any of the hymns interest me, not even the Hymn of Pan, the most beautiful lyric in the world. My indifference to English poetry extended to the language itself; English seemed to me to lack consistency that evening—a woolly language without a verbal system or agreement between the adjectives and nouns. So did I rave until, wearied of finding fault with everything English, my thoughts melted away into memories of the French poets.