Some volumes of Lingard's History of England were brought down from my grandfather's library about fifty years ago, and Miss Westby had striven to teach me reading and history out of them. Now, Lingard was a Catholic, and Pascal, too, in spite of his many doubts. His thoughts (Les Pensées) were written in the hope that doubts might be reasoned away; it must have been in a moment of irritation that he scribbled that sacraments stupefy the recipient, for in the celebrated dialogue the believer escapes from the dilemma into which the unbeliever is pressing him by offering to make the matter between them the subject of a bet. The Kingdom of Earth is such a poor pleasure-ground that the believer decides to put his money on the Kingdom of Heaven; even if it should prove mythical my plight will not be worse than thine, he says; and if it should out a reality—how much better!

When I was half-way up Merrion Square I caught myself considering the word belief—the vainest word in the language, and the cause of all our misunderstandings, for nobody knows what he believes or disbelieves. We attach ourselves to certain ideas and detach ourselves from others; so runs the world away; and it was by the gateway in Ely Place that I remembered Saint-Simon and La Bruyère, two fine writers, and both of them Catholics. La Fontaine reached literary perfection in his Fables, but he could not have been interested in bird-life, else he would not have written of the reed bending beneath the weight of the wren. The image is charming, but wrens do not live among reeds. Was it the rhyme that lured him—roseau and fardeau? Rhyme never lured Shelley into mistakes about the habits of birds and flowers. But in the seventeenth century there was little love of Nature. However, it is with La Fontaine's Catholicism and not his ornithology that I am concerned. He wrote some improper stories. Fénelon, the author of Télémaque (fie upon it!), was a very poor writer, but he seems to have been an amiable gentleman, and we like to think of him, and hate to think of Bossuet, that detestable man, who persecuted Madame de Genlis and wrote a very artificial style. I cannot think of any other writers, but all the same, the seventeenth century shows up far better than I thought for. The eighteenth is, of course, Agnostic from end to end, unless we count Chateaubriand as an eighteenth-century writer, and we may, for he was born about 1760, and lived a long way into the nineteenth, dying at the end of the 'thirties ... he may have lived right into the 'forties. Montalembert remained a staunch Catholic in spite of the Infallibility, declared about that time; and there were some Abbés who did not write badly, one Lamennais, whose writings got him into trouble with Rome.

English literature is, of course, Protestant—back, belly, and sides. Chaucer was pre-Reformation; Crashaw and Dryden returned to Catholicism; Pope seems to have called himself a Catholic, but his Essay on Man proves him to be an Agnostic. In the beginning of the nineteenth century there were a good many conversions, and some writers should be found among them. Newman! Arthur Symons mentioned him in the Saturday Review as having a style, so I suppose he must have one. I must read his Apologia, for Symons may have taken him on trust. Among the present-day writers are W. S. Lilly and Hilaire Belloc, professional Catholics, always ready to argue that the English decadence began with the suppression of the monasteries. Hilarious regards the sixteenth century as altogether blameworthy, from an artistic point of view, I suppose, for in one of his polemics he declared himself to be no theologian, a strange admission from a professional Catholic, ranking him in my eyes with the veterinary surgeon who admits that he knows nothing about spavins. W. S. Lilly is more thoroughly interpenetrated with Catholic doctrine; his articles in the Fortnightly are harder, weightier, denser; he reads Aquinas every day, and dear Edward looks upon him as an admirable defender of the faith. Of late years the shepherds have taken up novel-writing, hoping, no doubt to beguile their flocks away from the dangerous bowers of the lady-novelists, the beds of rose-leaves, the tiger-skins, and the other lustful displays and temptations. Amiable and educated gentlemen, every one of them, no doubt, but without any faintest literary gift. They would do better to return to their slums, where work suitable to their heads and hands awaits them.

I turned over in bed, and must have dozed a little while, for I suddenly found myself thinking of a tall sallow girl, with brown eyes and a receding chin, who used to show me her poems in manuscript ages ago. I thought them very beautiful at the time, and this early appreciation I need not be ashamed, for the poems have lived a pleasant modest life ever since in a slight volume tediously illustrated, entitled Preludes. Unfortunately these poems preluded nothing but a great deal of Catholic journalism, a Catholic husband who once read me a chaplet of sixty sonnets which he had written to his wife, and a numerous Catholic progeny who have published their love of God in a volume entitled Eyes of Youth, which I might never have seen had not the title been mentioned one day by a friend who, fearing my sacrilegious mind, refused to lend me the book. But moved by a remembrance of Alice Meynell, I sent immediately for a copy.

And it came to me some hours later brought by a messenger, a slim grey volume of poems, with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton, an able journalist, it is true, but that is hardly a reason for asking him to introduce a number of young Catholic writers to Protestant readers unless he has gone over to Rome. He could not have done that without reading the Fathers; and he could not have read them without their influencing his style. It rollicks down Fleet Street as pleasantly as ever, and we are there in the first lines, when he writes that all serious critics class Francis Thompson with Shelley and Keats. A critic may be learned, ignorant, discriminating, dense, subtle, venial, honest, and a hundred other things, but serious seems just the one adjective that Mr Chesterton should have avoided. He must have been thinking with the surface of his brain when he compared Francis Thompson with Shelley; casual thinking always puts wrong words into our heads; a thoughtful critic would have classed Thompson with Crashaw; un fond de Crashaw avec une garniture de Shelley is a definition of Francis Thompson which I put forward, hoping that it may please somebody. Francis Thompson accepted Catholic dogma; it provided him with themes, whereupon he might exercise his art; he wrote for the sake of words, they were his all, and avoided piety, for piety is incompatible with a great wealth of poetic diction. He left piety to his poetic inferiors, to the sisters Meynell, Olivia and Viola, who seem to be drawn to verse-writing because it allows them to speak of Mary's knee, the blood-stained Cross, the Fold, the Shepherd, and the Lamb. They must have deplored Monica Saleeby's Retrospect, for it does not contain a single pious allusion, and welcomed her Rebuke, for in this poem Monica makes amends for her abstinence, and uses up all her sister's pious phrases, and adds to them. (I am assuming that Monica Saleeby was originally a Meynell, for her verse is so distinctly Meynell that one hardly believes it to be an imitation.) The volume concludes with the poems of Francis Meynell; but, though the name of God occurs six times in a poem of four stanzas, I think he lacks the piety of his sisters; he does not produce the word with the admirable unction and sanctimonious grace of Maurice Healy, Ruth Lindsay, and Judith Lytton. Were Judith and Ruth like Monica originally Meynells, or are they merely of the school of Meynell? I have pondered their poems now for nearly an hour without being able to satisfy myself on this point. Francis is a Meynell with a drop of Coventry Patmore, but the drop must have gone crossways in him, as we say in Ireland, for even when writing about the marriage-bed he cannot refrain from pietistic allusion:

For when she dreams, who is beloved, The ancient miracle stands proved— Virginity's much motherhood! For O the unborn babes she keeps, The unthought glory, lips unwooed.

But I must be thinking of my readers, for not a doubt of it every one of them is saying: We will assume that the ladies go to confession once a week, and the gentlemen once a month. Get on with your story. Tell us, is there any Catholic literature in Scandinavia?

My dear readers, Scandinavia seems to be entirely free from Catholic literature; and, looking from Ibsen and Björnson towards Russia, I am afraid that Turgenev, the most thoughtful of all tale-tellers, must be reckoned as an Agnostic writer, and Tolstoy, for his lack of belief in the Resurrection, would have been denied Christian burial by St Paul. Lermontov was certainly an Agnostic. My dear readers, it seems impossible to discover a Catholic writer of importance in Europe.

A voice cries in my ear, Have you looked into German literature? and I answer back, I know nothing of German literature, but will call upon John Eglinton tonight. But John will only tell me that Goethe and Schiller were Protestants, and that Heine was a Jew. He may mention that the Schlegels turned Catholic in their old age. Perhaps Best will be able to tell me. Best is John's coadjutor in the National Library: a young man with beautiful shining hair and features so fine and delicate that many a young girl must have dreamed of him at her casement window, and would have loved him if he had not been so passionately interested in the in-fixed pronoun—one of the great difficulties of ancient Irish. So I went to Best at the end of the evening (John Eglinton being on duty in the mornings).

Kuno Meyer, he said, will be here at the end of the month, and he'll be able to tell you all that you want to know about German literature.

You are quite right, Best. Meyer is my man; he'll understand at once. Best is Kuno Meyer's favourite lamb and Kuno Meyer is a great German scholar who comes over to Dublin from Liverpool occasionally to shepherd the little flock that browses about this Celtic erudition; and a pressing invitation was sent to him next day, asking him to spend a week or a fortnight with me. An invitation of a fortnight did not strike me as excessive. We had been friends for over a year, ever since the day he had come to a rehearsal of The Tinker and the Fairy, a delightful one-act play that Hyde had written for the entertainment of a Gaelic assembly in my garden. He was prompting Hyde, who was not sure of his words, when I came into the room, and my surprise was great, for it is not usual to meet the Irish language in a light brown overcoat and a large, soft brown hat; beards are uncommon among Gaelic speakers, and long, flowing moustaches unknown. A Gaelic Leaguer's eyes are not clear and quiet, and he does not speak with a smooth even voice; his mind is not a comfortable mind; and by these contraries, in defiance of Aristotle, I am describing Kuno Meyer, the great scholar-artist, the pleasure of whose life it has been to disinter the literature of the ancient Celt, and to translate it so faithfully that when we read we seem to see those early times as in a mirror.

It would be a pleasure to me to write some pages on this subject, and I would write them now if the man did not stand before me as he was when I first saw him, a wreck with rheumatism, looking at me sideways, unable to move his neck, his hands and feet swollen. He must have suffered a good deal of pain, but it never showed itself in his face, and though he was well aware that his disease was progressive ossification, he did not complain of his hardship in being so strangely afflicted. At that time death did not seem to be very far away, but he did not fear death, and I admired his unruffled mind, often reminding me of a calm evening, and thought myself the most fortunate of men when he promised to stay at my house next time he came to Dublin. His intelligence and his learning were a great temptation, and during the long evenings we spent together my constant effort was to get him to talk about himself. But he did not seem very much interested in the subject; he does not see himself as a separate entity; and the facts that dribbled out were that he had come to England when he was seventeen, the first visit not being a long one. He returned, however, two years later, and thought that it had taken him about five years to learn English and to capture the spirit of the language. I seemed to get a better sight of him when he mentioned that he had been private tutor for two years. A studious German, I said to myself, who, when not engaged with his pupils, was preparing himself for a University career. He must have told me how he became a Professor of Romantic Languages at Queen's College, Liverpool, but he could not have made much of the story, else I should have remembered it. I learnt from Best that he was once an excellent cricketer, and though now crippled with rheumatism it was easy to see that he must have looked well on the cricket-field in white flannels and a blue belt, and he must have been a strong man, but never a fast runner, I am sure of that, therefore I place him at point ... and can see him in my imagination, the sleeves of his shirt turned up, revealing a sinewy brown arm.

But the cause of his illness, his affection? The cause may have been the Liverpool climate, or his disease may have been constitutional. Who shall trace the disease back to its source? Not the specialists, certainly; for years they were consulted. What do you eat? said the first. I often eat beef, was Meyer's answer. Beef is poison to you, mutton as much as you like. Meyer did not touch beef again for three months, but the disease continued. He consulted another specialist. What do you eat? Mutton? Mutton is poison to you; beef as much as you like. To be on the safe side Meyer ate neither one nor the other, but, notwithstanding his obedience to the different diets imposed upon him, his disease continued unabated. Another specialist was consulted. What do you drink? Claret? Claret is poison to you; whisky as much as you like. With whisky for his daily drink his disease developed alarmingly; Meyer went abroad; he consulted French and German specialists; some gave him pills, some recommended champagne and Rhine wines; but his disease gained steadily, and at last the doctors contented themselves by advising him to avoid everything that he found disagreed with him, which was the best advice they could have given, for a man is often his own best doctor. Meyer's instincts prompted him to spend some months in a warm climate, and it was while travelling in Portugal that Meyer drank some champagne, feeling very depressed, and during a night of agony it occurred to him that perhaps alcohol was the bane. He determined to give abstinence from alcohol a trial, avoiding it in its every form, even light claret. The disease seemed to stop; and, speaking of his affliction to a fellow-traveller in the train from Lisbon to Oporto, he heard of some baths in Hungary.

You have tried so many remedies that I don't dare to ask you to go there, but if you should ever find yourself in Hungary you might try them.

Meyer went to Hungary, hopeless; but he returned convinced that if he had gone there some years earlier the treatment would have boiled all the stiffness out of his neck and shoulders; he had gone, however, soon enough to rid himself of the greater part of his affection, and to secure himself against any further advances.

He will die like another, but not of ossification, I muttered, as I paced the greensward, looking at every turn through the hawthorn-boughs. Why, there he is! and, banging the wicket, I ran across the street to let him in with my latchkey.

Let me help you off with your overcoat, I said, as soon as we were in the passage. You got my letter? It was kind of you to come over so soon, and my eyes dropped to the papers in his hand.

I've long wanted to come to Dublin.

And for why? I asked sympathetically.

You have always taken a kindly and very appreciative interest in the ancient Irish poems which I have been fortunate enough to discover.

And to translate so exquisitely that you and Lang are our only translators, I said, my eyes going back to the papers in his hand. When did you arrive?

He admitted that he had been a couple of days in Dublin without finding time to come to see me, and I thought of Best, who is always frisking about Meyer, gathering up every scrap of his time, sometimes unjustifiably, as I thought in the present case, for Best knew how necessary Meyer's learning was to me.

And where are you staying? I asked.

As far back as three months ago I promised Best to stay with him, but my visit to Percy Place is now over, and when you are tired of me I'm going to take a lodging at Kingstown, so we shall see a good deal of each other.

You are on the track of something important, I said. Do tell me about it. Have you discovered another Marban—another Liadain and Curithir?

Meyer smiled at my enthusiasm through his long moustache, and told me that he had spent the morning in Trinity College library and had come upon—

Another Nature Poem?

No, but a very curious religious poem. My face clouded. I think it will interest you. It throws a light on the life of those times, for the author, a monk, tells us that he left his monastery, which had become noisy, as he required perfect quiet for the composition of his poem, God's Grandfather.

Whose grandfather?

God's Grandfather; that is the title of the poem.

I never knew God had a grandfather.

Mary had a mother; the Biblical narrative is silent regarding her parentage, but the early Greek writers were known to our author, and he read in Epiphanius that Mary's mother, Anne, had had three husbands—Joachim, Cleophas, and Salomas, and that she had been brought to bed of a daughter by each husband. Each daughter was called Mary, but only one Conception was Immaculate. By an Immaculate Conception he understood a conception outside of common sensuality, brought about by some spiritual longing into which obedience to the will of God entered largely.

How very curious! I wonder if the Meynells would have included the poem in their collection?

Meyer became interested at once, but his interest slackened when he heard that their poems were modern, and a kindly smile began in his gold-brown moustache, and he said:



Like your hermits, I said; but the Catholicism of the desert is more interesting than the Catholicism of the suburbs. Let's get back to the thirteenth century.

His monastery was too noisy for the composition of God's Grandfather, and he retired into the wilderness to think out the circumstances of Mary's Immaculate Conception. And this is how he imagined it: Joachim, as he was driving his cattle home one evening, met some travellers who wished to purchase a bullock from him. He begged of them to choose an animal; they did so, asking Joachim to name a price. But instead of putting the money agreed upon into his hand the travellers poured several blessings on Joachim and told him to return home as quickly as he could. He was at first loath to go without his money, but the travellers told him he must accept the blessings they had poured over him in lieu of money, and on his asking innocently what he was to do with the blessings, he was told that the use of the blessings would be revealed to him when he reached home. And being a man of faith, he ran with the blessings he had received clasped to his bosom, not stopping till he saw Anne, his wife, who happened to be gathering some brushwood to light the fire for their evening meal, and sure enough, as the travellers had told him, unexpected words were put into his mouth; Anne, put down the sticks thou art gathering, and follow me into the inner room. She did his bidding, as a wife should do, and, as they lay face to face, Joachim showered upon her the blessings that the travellers had given him, and it was these blessings that caused the conception recognised as miraculous by Joachim, and afterwards by the Church.

And you have translated that poem? I asked. He answered that he had made a rough translation of some stanzas, and while he read them to me I marvelled at the realism of early Christianity, and when he had finished reading, I cried: How different from our sloppy modern piety! In the poem you have just read to me, there isn't a single abstract term. Meyer, you are making wonderful literary discoveries, unearthing a buried civilisation. And on these words the conversation dropped. The moment had come for me to tell Meyer that I, too, was making discoveries. His cigar was only half-way through, and it was plain that the suave and lucid mind of Meyer was at my disposal. My argument had been repeated so often that it had become a little trite, and a suspicion intruded upon my mind as I hurried from St Augustine, through Dante, Boccaccio, and Ariosto, that my narrative had grown weary. Or was it that Meyer, being a professor, could not grasp at once that we must choose between literature and dogma? A perplexed look came into his face as I sketched in broad lines the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century literature in France, and as I was about to proceed northward through Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, he asked questions which revealed the professor latent in him; and whilst I sought to persuade him out of his professorial humours, it began to dawn upon me that he would show to better advantage in a debate on the Shakespearean drama, or on the debt that the dramatists of the Restoration owed to Molière. A better subject still for discussion, I continued on a rising temper, would be Mademoiselle de Scudéry, whose festoons and astragals are of course plainly to be descried in the works of Pope and Prior. But I still hoped that Meyer's intelligence would awaken, and so I restrained snarl and sneer, exhibiting myself for at least five minutes as a miracle of patience.

You find that Catholicism draws men's thoughts away from this world, and that Catholic literature lacks healthy realism; but surely literature has nothing to do with theology?

Of course it hasn't, Meyer. But I haven't succeeded in explaining myself, and I must begin it all over again. St Augustine—but perhaps it is not necessary to go over it all again. In the Middle Ages there was no literature, only some legends, and a good deal of theology. Why was this? Because if you plant an acorn in a vase the oak must burst the vase or become dwarfed. I can't put it plainer. Do you understand?

You spoke just now of the intense realism of the Irish poets.

The poem you read me was pre-Reformation.

It seems to me that if one outlet be closed to man's thoughts he will find another, and perhaps in a more concentrated and violent form. Even in Spain, he said, where thought was stifled by such potent organisations as Church and State, we find man expressing himself daringly. Velasquez.

You mean the Venus in the National Gallery—that stupid thing for which the nation paid forty-five thousand pounds; the thighs and the back are very likely by Velasquez, but not the head nor the curtain nor the Cupid. But, Meyer, bums have never been actually condemned by the Church, and for the moment I am not interested in the fact that realistic painting throve in Spain when the Inquisition was most powerful.

Goethe speaks of free spirits, and from that moment Meyer began to rouse himself.

Of course the spirit must be free. And Germany, being divided equally between Catholics and Protestants—

A troubled look came into Meyer's face. I fail to see how your theory can be settled one way or the other by German literature, but if you want me to tell you the names of the great German writers, he answered in his most professorial manner, those that occur to me at the moment are Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, the Schlegels, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Jean Paul Richter, Herder, Lenau, and Nietzsche.

And all these were North German writers? None came from the South. Are there no Catholics among them, not one?

No, he said, none. One of the Schlegels turned Catholic in his old age.

And did he write after he turned Catholic?

No; as well as I remember he wrote nothing afterwards.

Austria is a great country. Has it produced no Catholic writers?

None of any note, Meyer answered. There was—and he mentioned the names of two writers, and as they were unknown to me I asked him to tell me about them. Writers of fairy-tales, he said, of feeble novels—writers of the fifth and sixth and seventh rank. No one outside Austria knows their names.

Then, I said, I'm done for. Meyer raised his eyes.

Done for?

I was led into this country in the hopes of reviving the language. It seemed to me that a new language was required to enwomb a new literature. I am done for. Ireland will not forgo her superstitions for the sake of literature—accursed superstitions that have lowered her in intelligence and made her a slut among nations. All the same it is strange that you fail to see that dogma and literature are incompatible. I suppose the idea is new to you.

We talked for a little while longer, and then Meyer asked me if he might go to the writing-table and continue the translation of his poem. And while listening to his pen moving over the paper it seemed to me that a chance still remained, a small one, for the evidence that Germany offered could hardly be refuted. Justice demanded that a Catholic should be heard, and the Colonel would be able to put up as good a defence as another; and a letter to him began in my head, half a dozen lines, reminding him that he had been away a long time in the country, and asking him to come up to Dublin and spend a few days with me.