The great French writers of the nineteenth century were Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Balzac, Gautier, Michelet, Renan, Taine, Sainte-Beuve, Gérard de Nerval, Mérimée, les Goncourts, George Sand, Flaubert, Zola. Maupassant, and all these were Agnostics; Guizot was a Protestant, his historical works have I suppose some value; John Eglinton will tell me about him, and glad of an excuse for a visit to the National Library, I went forth after dinner to talk literature again, arriving in Kildare Street about half past nine, when John Eglinton was writing the last of those mysterious slips of paper, cataloguing, I think he calls it. A visitor is welcome after half past nine, and in the sizzle of electric light we debate till ten. Then he comes back to smoke a cigar with me or I go home with him. He lacks the long, clear vision of AE, but when an idea is brought close to him he appreciates it shrewdly and it is the surety that he will understand, a little later, my idea better than I understand it myself, that makes his first embarrassment so attractive to me.

In the evening I am about to relate I found him a little more short-sighted than usual; his little face wrinkled up as he sought to grasp, to understand my discovery that Catholics had not produced a book worth reading since the Reformation, for John Eglinton only understands his own thoughts, and it is with difficulty that he is rolled out of them.

You mean that all English literature has been produced in the Protestant tradition, but I'm afraid that Protestants will think this is a somewhat too obvious truth. Of course, we all know that Chaucer is the only English Catholic poet—

My dear John Eglinton, you've not understood! A worried look came into his face, and in his desire to understand he seemed like getting cross with me. My belief is that Catholic countries haven't produced a book.

John gasped.

But France?

We went into that question, and were talking of Pascal when the attendant came in to ask John for the keys; it was three minutes to ten.

Shall I ring the bell, sir?

John agreed that the bell might be rung, and we watched the odd mixture of men and women leave their books on the counter and go through the turnstiles. John had to wait till the last left, and the last was a little old gentleman about five feet high who has come to the library every night for the last thirty years to read Dickens and nothing but Dickens. He passed through the turnstile; we followed him; the fireman was consulted; and when all the lights were out John was free to go for a walk with me, and I think it was in Baggot Street that I succeeded in bringing home to him the importance of my discovery.

But Spain? he interjected. Don Quixote?

Spanish literature is contemporaneous with the Council of Trent when the Church defined her dogmas, and—

And Don Quixote is as unethical, he said, as David Copperfield.

Whatever merit Lope de Vega may have had in his day, he has none now; and we discussed for a while the interesting question whether the merits of books are permanent or temporary. Byron's poetry conquered Europe, and today everybody knows it to be doggerel; and in our understanding Calderon's plays are merely rows of little wooden figures moved hither and thither by a mind that seems gracious despite his conviction that the Inquisition was a kind and beneficent institution. All the same Shelley and Goethe admired Calderon; Shelley translated some pages, and John Eglinton agreed with me that these are the only pages of Shelley that we cannot read. He spoke of St Patrick's Purgatory.

It passes beyond perception, and he laughed steadily.

Calderon, in spite of his piety, didn't succeed in avoiding heresy, for in ecclesiastic zeal he seems to have identified himself with Antinomianism. Perhaps he was condemned. You quite understand that my point isn't that a Catholic hasn't written a book since the Reformation, but that ninety and nine per cent, well, ninety and five per cent of the literature of the world has been produced by Protestants and Agnostics.

I see what you mean now, and the dear little man of the puckered face listened on his doorstep to an exhortation to write a little more of that beautiful English which he so wastefully spends in his conversation. He listened, but unwillingly; he does not like my literary exhortations, and I pondered on his future as I walked home. He will sink deeper and deeper into his armchair, and into his own thoughts.

The closing of the public-houses told me that it must be near eleven, and the thought of dear Edward sitting behind his screen, smoking, led me to Leinster Street. The Sword Motive brought the candle-light glimmering down the stairs; the door opened, and two old cronies went upstairs to talk once more of painting and literature—two old cronies who had known each other in boyhood, who had talked all through our lives on the same subjects, Edward feeling things perhaps a little deeper than I have ever done. When the Master Builder has been played he walks from the theatre into the Green, and sits under the hawthorns in some secluded spot, his eyes filled with tears at the memory, as he would say it himself, of so much beauty. Was it Yeats described him as the sketch of a great man—the sketch, he said; l'ébauche better realises his idea of dear Edward; but Yeats does not know French; and while my eyes followed Edward about the room I wondered if it would be wise for me to exchange, were it possible, a wine-glass of intelligence for a rummer of temperament. We have gone through life together, myself charging windmills, Edward holding up his hands in amazement.

More culture and less common sense than the Spanish original, I said, and I watched him moving ponderously about his ungainly room, so like himself. There is something eternal about Edward, an entity come down through the ages, and myself another entity. Reciprocating entities, I said, glancing at some pictures of famous churches. (Edward pins photographic reproductions on the dusty wallpaper.) A beautiful church caught my eye, and, desiring Edward's criticism of it, as one desires an old familiar tune, I asked him if the church were an ancient or a modern one; and, answering that it was one of Pugin's churches, he lifted his glasses up on his nose and peered into the photograph, absorbed for some moments by the beauty which he perceived in it.

The church set us talking of Pugin's genius, and whether the world would ever invent a new form of architecture, or whether the age of architecture was over and done like the Stone and the Bronze Ages. Edward's churchwarden was now drawing famously, his glass of grog was by his side, and the nights in the Temple, when he used to tell me that he would like to write his plays in Irish, rose up before me. All his prejudices are the same, I said, more intense, perhaps; he is a little older, a little more liable to catch cold, and he spoke to me of the necessity of a screen to protect him from the draught coming under the door.

Have a cigar. He pushed the box towards me and continued to smoke his pipe.

Although not a priest, there is something hierarchic about him, and I thought of Ancient Egypt and then of our friendship. It was drawing to a close mysteriously as a long summer evening. We shall not see much of each other at the end of our lives, I said, wondering how the separation was going to come about, not liking to tell him of my great discovery, fearing to pain him.

You're very silent tonight, George, he jerked out, breaking the silence at last. Of what are you thinking?

Of a great discovery—

What, another! I thought you had come to the end of them. Your first was the naturalistic novel, your second impressionistic painting—

My third was your plays, Edward, and the Irish Renaissance which is but a bubble.

Oh, it's only a bubble, is it? he said, his jolly great purple face shaking like a jelly.

You may laugh, I said, but it is no laughing matter for the Catholic Church if it can be shown that no Catholic has written a book since the Reformation. I wish you wouldn't laugh like that.

At the end of the next fit of laughter he bit a piece off the end of his churchwarden, and, getting up from the sofa, he searched for another along the chimney-piece, and, when he had filled it, he said to me, who had been sitting quite silent:

Now, tell me about this new mare's-nest.

I've told you already. There has been no Catholic literature since the Reformation, and very little before it. Boccaccio and Ariosto were pagans, Michael Angelo and Raphael—

But Michael Angelo painted The Last Judgment and Raphael The Holy Family.

We talked for an hour, and, his brain cleaning suddenly, he said: Raphael and Michael Angelo lived in a Catholic country, came of Catholic inheritance, and painted Christian subjects.

You seem to me, Edward, to be satisfied with a very simple inquiry, I might say superficial inquiry, into a matter of great interest and intimately concerned with our movement; for why should we change the language of a country in which literature is forbidden? unless indeed some special indulgences are granted for prayers in Irish. Of course, if so, the Irish Renaissance is but a bubble.

And what about your mission?

Good God! I hadn't thought of that, I said. And getting out of my chair, I walked up and down the room, overcome.

What are you thinking of? Edward asked at the end of a long silence.

Of what am I thinking? Of what you said just now.

What did I say?

You reminded me of my mission. Great God, Edward!

I wish you wouldn't take the Sacred Name in vain.

My life has been sacrificed for a bubble.

But you knew Ireland was a Catholic country.

I was bidden here. If some nun said she had seen a troop of angels and the Virgin Mary, you would believe it all, but when I tell you that on the road to Chelsea—

Seeing that I was profoundly moved, Edward ceased laughing, and began to speak of Newman.

Newman was a convert, I said, and he brought some of the original liberty of the Protestant into his Catholicism; isn't that so?

Edward puffed at his pipe and seemed to think that perhaps the convert was not quite so obedient as the born Catholic.

It's a very serious thing for me, I said, rising. I suppose I must be getting home.



I haven't examined the question thoroughly. I may discover some Catholic writers. Do you know of any?

Edward said he could not say offhand, and I crossed the tramline, thinking how I had been ensnared, and wondering who was the snarer.