I cannot think that any two men ever bore names more appropriate to their characters than Bouvard and Pecuchet, not even Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Are not the vanity and kindliness and stupidity of Bouvard set forth in the two heavy syllables? And do not the three little snappy syllables represent with equal clearness Pecuchet's narrow intellect ... and cunning on occasions? Again, the dissyllable Bouvard evokes indistinct outlines, pale, perplexed eyes, and a vague and somewhat neglected appearance, whereas we naturally associate Pecuchet with a neat necktie, a pointed beard, and catchwords rather than ideas. Bouvard has tried to think out one or two questions, but Pecuchet was content from his early youth with words. He began with Nationalism, and when he met Bouvard he picked up Co-operation—the word; and when he got into the Department he discovered Delegation; and Heaven only knows how the word Co-ordination got into his head; but it stuck there, and he could not get it out of his talk, bothering us all with it. But nothing lasts for ever, and when he wearied of Co-ordination he happened to meet the word Compromise; and this word must have been a great event in his life, for it revealed to him the Pecuchet of his dreams, the statesman which he always believed to be latent in him, and which more fortunate circumstances would have realised. It was a great treat to hear him on the subject of statesmanship the day that Sir Anthony MacDonnell found himself forced to resign. I led him round Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Square, over many bridges, through Herbert Street, round again, and on again; and on leaving him I should have rushed to the scrivener's, but could not resist the temptation to run up the steps of Plunkett House to tell AE all about it, regretting all the while that my weakness would cost me many admirable pages. I shall never be able to improvise it all again. My memory is wonderful, I admit, but Pecuchet's slumberous phrases, tall, bent weeds, and matted grasses, with the snapping of an occasional aphorism, a dead branch, should be dictated at once and to the nearest scrivener. I am paying dearly for the pleasure of your company.

I can see you, AE answered, his imagination enabling him to see us in our walk, and his wit putting just the right words into his mouth—I can see you stopping at the pavement's edge asking Pecuchet to repeat one of the dead branch aphorisms; I can see you hanging on his words with a sort of literary affection; and I could listen to you for a good deal longer, but I am due tonight at the Hermetic Society, and must get home. Won't you walk a little way with me?

The proposal that we should walk a little way together reminded me that the old bicycle that had carried Bouvard's ideas all over Ireland so valiantly was now enjoying a well-earned rest in some outhouse or garden shed. AE would not like to sell it for scrap-iron or to buy another; or it may be that he thinks bicycle riding unsuited to a fat man. He has fattened. A great roll of flesh rises to his ears, and his interests have gone so much into practical things that we think the AE of other days is dead. We are mistaken, the AE of our deepest affection is not dead, but sleeping; an unexpected word tells us that he has not changed at all. Relieve him, we say to ourselves, of his work at The Homestead, loose him among the mountains, and in a few weeks he will be hearing the fairy bells again. And happy at heart, though sorry to part with him, I returned home to a lonely meal, hoping to find courage about eight to do some reading.

A lecture was stirring in me at that time—a lecture showing that it is impossible to form any idea of the author of the plays. We can see Virgil, I said to myself, Dante, and Balzac, but Shakespeare is an abstraction, and as invisible as Jehovah. We know that somebody must have written the plays; but of one thing only are we sure—that Sidney Lee is always wrong. But I will think no more, I will read. I took down the dreaded volume, and a smile began to trickle round my lips as a picture of the dusty room at the end of many dusty corridors rose up before me, with AE sitting at a small table teaching that there is an essential oneness in all the different revelations that Eternity has vouchsafed to mankind.

I returned to my chair, and, falling into it, listened, hearing his voice getting calmer every minute, solemn and awe-inspiring when he commended toleration to the Hermetics. You need not be, he said, too disdainful of the essential worshippers of lacchus-Iesus, better known in Dublin under the name of Christ.... He, too, was a God. There were moments when it seemed to me that I could hear his voice refuting Colum, who had ventured to remind him of Diocletian. It was not for its Christianity that the ancient creed had persecuted the new, but for its intolerance and profanity.

There never was anybody like him, I said, and my thoughts melted into a long meditation, from which I awoke, saying: His conversion, or whatever it was, gave him such an iron grip on himself that, when Indian mysticism flourished in No 3, Upper Ely Place, he submitted his genius to the directors of the movement, asking them if they would prefer his contributions to the Theosophical Review in verse or in prose. The directors answered: In verse, and AE wrote Homeward Songs. But even these would not have strayed beyond the pages of the review if his friend, Weekes, had not insisted that the further publication of these poems would bring comfort and peace to many, and it appears that these poems consoled the beautiful Duchess of Leinster in her passing as no other poems could have done. AE could have been a painter if he had wished it; but a man's whole life is seldom long enough for him to acquire the craft of the painter; and, setting life above craftsmanship, he had denied himself the touch that separates the artist from the amateur, and he had done well. Accomplishment estranges from the comprehension of the many, and for the first time in the world's history we get a man stopped midway by a scruple of conscience or love of his kindred—which? If he had devoted all his days to art, his Thursday evenings at the Hermetic Society would have had to be abandoned, and the editing of The Homestead too. He could not be a painter and write eight or nine columns of notes and a couple of articles on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. A man must have a terrible hold on himself to pursue the routine of The Homestead week after week without hope of reward, and it is this uncanny hold that he has on himself that makes him seem different from other men, for though in many ways more human than any of us, he wears the air of one that has lived before and will live again. How shall I word it? A demonic air, using the word in the Goethian sense, a Lohengrin come to fight the battle of others. One day he announced to us that he was going to publish the verses of his disciples, with a preface by himself, and we muttered among ourselves: Our beloved AE is going to stumble. But the volume was received by the English press as a complete vindication of Celtic genius. Contrairy John answered all the effusive articles that appeared with one sentence: The English have so completely lost all standard of poetic excellence that any one can impose upon them. A very materialistic explanation which we were loath to accept, preferring to attribute the success of the volume to the demonic power that AE inherits from the great theosophical days when he sat up in bed with his legs tucked under his nightshirt.

He was offered some hundreds of pounds by Lord Dunsany to found a review, but he had not time to edit it, and proposed the task to John Eglinton. Contrairy John wanted to see life steadily, and to see it whole; and Yeats came along with a sneer, and said: I hear, Lord Dunsany, that you are going to supply groundsel for AE's canaries. The sneer brought the project to naught, and Yeats went away laughing, putting the south of Ireland above the north and the east and the west, saying that Munster was always Ireland's literary portion. The first harpers of Ireland and the first story-tellers were Munstermen, and his own writers came to him from Munster. He had gotten nothing from Dublin. Murray and Ray and Robinson had all begun by writing for the Cork Examiner and the Constitutional. And AE may search the columns of Sinn Fein for ever and ever without finding, I said, a blackbird or thrush, skylark or nightingale.

The portentous critic giggled a little in his stride down the incline of Rathmines Avenue, and was moved to change the conversation from Sinn Fein, that journal having spoken of him disrespectfully since he had accepted a pension from the English Government. Griffith, the editor of Sinn Fein, or Ourselves Alone, had butted him severely in several paragraphs—butted him is the word, for in appearance and mentality Griffith may be compared to a ram. He butts against England every week with admirable perseverance, and while he butts, he allows all the poets of Rathmines to carol.

A pretty banner, I said as we crossed the bridge, for Sinn Fein would be a tree full of small singing birds carolling sonnets and rondeaux, ballades and villanelles, with a butting-ram underneath, and this for device: Believe that England doesn't exist, and it won't.

Yes, there is an element of Christian Science in our friend Griffith, Yeats answered, and we crossed the bridge.

You don't think that AE will ever discover any one in Sinn Fein comparable to Synge?

Yeats threw up his hands.

It would be better, he said, if all his little folk went back to their desks.

When this remark was repeated to AE, he said: Colum was earning seventy-eight pounds a year when he was at his desk at the Railway Clearing House, and now he is earning four or five pounds a week. So Willie says that I shall never find anything that will compare with Synge. Well, we shall see.

And every Thursday evening the columns of Sin Fein were searched, and every lilt considered, and every accent noted; but the days and the weeks went by without a new peep-o-peep, sweet, sweet, until the day that James Stephens began to trill; and recognising at once a new songster, AE put on his hat and went away with his cage, discovering him in a lawyer's office. A great head and two soft brown eyes looked at him over a typewriter, and an alert and intelligent voice asked him whom he wanted to see. AE said that he was looking for James Stephens, a poet, and the typist answered: I am he.

And next Sunday evening he was admitted to the circle, and we were impressed by his wit and whimsicality of mind, but we thought AE exaggerated the talents of the young man. True that all his discoveries had come to something, but it was clear to us that he was anxious to put this new man alongside of Synge, and this we could not consent to do. He was a little distressed at our apathy, our unwillingness, our short-sightedness, for he was certain that James Stephens was a new note in Irish poetry. Our visions were not as clear as his. I was conscious of little more than harsh versification, and crude courage in the choice of subjects. Contrairy John was confused and round about, and at the end of many an argument found himself defending the very principles that he had started out to controvert. It was clear, however, that he did not think more of James Stephens than we ourselves. Yeats was the blindest of us all, and it was with ill grace that he consented to hear AE read the poems, giving his opinion casually; and when AE spoke of the advantage the publication of a volume would be to Stephens, he answered: For me, the aesthetical question; for you, my dear friend, the philanthropic. AE was hurt, but not discouraged; and to interest us he told us stories from the life of the new poet, who was a truer vagrant than ever Synge had been. Synge had fifty pounds a year; but Stephens, a poor boy without education or a penny, had wandered all over Ireland, and would have lost his life in Belfast from hunger had it not been for a charitable apple-woman. AE was delighted at the thought of the material that his pet would have to draw upon later on when he turned from verse to prose, for AE divined that this would be so.

James Stephens has enough poetry in him, he said to me, to be a great prose-writer.

But when he left the apple-woman? I answered, always curious.

AE could not tell me how Stephens had picked up his education, or had learnt typewriting and shorthand and got employment in a lawyer's office at five-and-twenty shillings a week—well enough for a girl who has a home, but a bare sufficiency for a man whose head is full of dreams and who has a wife and child to support. His life must have been very hard to bear, without the solitude of a room in which to write his poems or intellectual comradeship, until he met AE, a friend always ready to listen to him, to be enthusiastic about his literary projects. What a door was opened to him when he met AE! Of what help AE was to him in his first prose composition (no one can help another with poetry) none knows but Stephens himself; AE forgets what he gives, but it is difficult for me to believe that Stephens did not benefit enormously, as much as I did myself. How much that was I cannot tell, for AE was always helping me directly or indirectly. Shall I ever forget the day when, after three weeks' torture trying to write the second chapter of Ave, I went down to Plunkett House to see if he could help me out of my difficulty?

I am waiting for proofs, and am free for an hour. If you like we will walk round Merrion Square, and you can tell me all about it.

We turned to the east and walked along the north side, and it was opposite the National Gallery that he told me my second chapter must be in Victoria Street; and after a little argument, to which he listened very gently, he led me as a mother leads a child. I saw the error of my ways, and said: Goodbye; I see it all. Goodbye.

As well as anything I can think of, this anecdote shows how we run to our good friend in time of need, and never run in vain; but now I find myself in a difficulty out of which he will not be able to help me. He is not satisfied with his portrait, and complains that I have represented him in Ave and Salve as a blameless hero of a young girl's novel.

Why have you found no fault with me? If you wish to create human beings you must discover their faults.

Wherefore I am put to discovering a stain upon his character. I cannot accuse him of theft, and he never speaks of his love affairs; he may be a pure man; be that as it may, it is not for me to cast the first stone at him; lying and blackmail—of what use to make charges that no one will believe? If he will not sin, why should he object to my white flower in his button-hole? And feeling that humanity was on the whole very difficult and tiresome, I fell to thinking.... But of what I cannot tell; I only know I was awakened suddenly by a memory of a young painter in London, one who brought imagination and wit and epigram and laughter into our midst, and when he left us we rarely failed to ponder on the unmerited good fortune of his wife, for to live with him always seemed to us an unreasonable share of human happiness. But one day I made the acquaintance of this woman whom I had only known faintly during her married life, and heard from her that her husband did not speak to her at dinner, but propped a book up against a glass and read; and after dinner sat in his chair composing, and often went up to bed forgetting to bid her goodnight. If she reproached him, he assured her there was no other woman in the world he loved as much as her; but being a man of genius his mind was away among his works. But what proof have I, she said, that he is a man of genius? Of course, if I were certain, it would be different.... All the same, it is a little trying, she added. And her case is the case of every woman who marries a man of genius. A trying tribe, especially at meal-times; ideas and food being apparently irreconcilable. I have often regretted that our good friend did not leave some of his ideas on the landing with his hat and coat, for it is distressing to hear a man say that he could not tell the difference between halibut and turbot when you have just apologised to him for an unaccountable mistake on the part of your cook. This painful incident once happened in Ely Place; and I reflected, duly, that if he were indifferent to my food he might show scant courtesy to the food that his wife provided—excellent I am sure it is—but a man of ideas cannot be catered for by friend or wife. I followed him in imagination all the way up the long Rathmines Road, and saw him picking a little from his plate, and then, becoming forgetful, his eyes would rove into dark corners. (His definition of ideas are formless spiritual essences, and the room in 17 Rathgar Avenue is full of them, economic, pictorial, and poetic.) I have it at last! A blemish, and one is enough for my portrait; a little irregularity of feature will satisfy my sitter; in the eyes of the world absent-mindedness is a blemish. But if it be none in his wife's eyes then there is no blemish, and I remembered that he chose her for her intelligence, and it is no mean one. She had abandoned papistry before he met her, and had written some beautiful phrases in her pages of the Theosophical Review; and these won his heart. A very gracious presence and personality, too distinct to seem invidious to her husband's genius, or to deem it an injustice to herself that he should be beloved by all. But in his indifference to money we may seek and find cause for complaint. It is possible that in the eyes of women who have not succeeded in marrying men of genius he should apply his talents to increasing his income, for the common belief is that a man's life is not his exclusive possession to dispose of as pleases his good will, but a sort of family banking account on which his wife and children may draw checks. This is not AE's view. He has often said to me, I came into the world without money or possessions, and have done very well without either. Why shouldn't my children do the same? His life is in his ideas as much as Christ's, and I will avouch that his wife has never tried to come between him and his ideas. As much cannot be said for Mary, whom Christ had to reprove for trying to dissuade him from his mission, which he did on many occasions.... But again I am hoeing and raking, shovelling up merits instead of picking out the small but necessary fault. If I dig deeper perhaps my search will be rewarded. He gives his wife all the money she asks for, but she does not know what money he has in the bank. AE does not know himself, and feeling that AE was about to be born into my text, a real man rather than an ideal one, my heart rose, and I said: It is not long ago since he told me that he had given a man who had asked him for a contribution a long screed for which he could have had thirty pounds from a certain magazine. In giving his screed for nothing he acted as all the great dispensers of ideas have done, and the many will find fault with him, for though they would like to have prophets and poets they would like them domesticated, each one bringing home to a little house in the suburbs a reel of office chit-chat to unwind for his wife's pleasure, the poet on one side of the hearth, the wife on the other, the cat between them. Jane and Minna would listen attentively, but Violet's thoughts would stray and she would find herself very soon with Cuchulain, Caolte, and Finn, and picking up from the table her beautiful book of fairy tales, I read them until I was awakened by a knocking at my front door. The servants had gone to bed. Who could this be? AE perhaps. It was John Eglinton.

Are you sure you aren't busy? If you are, don't hesitate—

I was sitting by the fire thinking.

I am loath to disturb a thinking man; and he stopped half-way between the armchair and the door.

I assure you I had come to the end of my thinking.

On what subject?

One that you know very well—AE. Among my portraits he is the least living, and that is a pity. He does not silhouette as Yeats does or as dear Edward. Edward's round head and bluff shoulders and big thighs and long feet correspond with his blunt mind. And Yeats's solemn height and hieratic appearance authorise the literary dogmas that he pronounces every season. He is the type of the literary fop, and the most complete that has ever appeared in literature. But AE! I wonder if we could get him into a phrase, John. After a while I said: He has the kindly mind of a shepherd, and ten years ago he was thin, lithe, active, shaggy, and I can see him leaning on his crook meditating.

That is just what I don't think he does. He talks about meditation, but his mind is much too alert. There is this resemblance, however: the shepherd knows little but the needs of his flock, and the other day, at Horace Plunkett's, I heard that AE exhibited a surprising ignorance in an argument with some English economists. He did not know that Athenian society was founded on slavery.

I am glad to hear it, for if he knew all the things that one learns out of books I should never get him into a literary silhouette.

You admit, John said, inspiration in his painting, but you think it lacks quality; and in your study of him you will explain—

Of course, a most important point. AE has come out of many previous existences and is going toward many others, and looks upon this life as an episode of no importance.

An interesting explanation, but the real one is—

Is what? I asked eagerly.



I prefer my explanation, I answered.

It is the more poetic, but temperament goes deeper than belief, John replied.

Not deeper than AE's belief in his own eternity, I said; and my answer had the effect of rolling John for a moment out of his ideas. He'll soon be back in them again, I said to myself. At the end of another long silence John told me that somebody had said that AE was an unhappy man.

It never struck me that he was unhappy. He always seems among the happiest. And I began to wonder if John Eglinton looked upon me as a happy man.

You're happy in your work, but I don't know if you are happy in your life.

And you, John, I said, are happy in your thoughts.

Yes, he answered, and my unhappiness is caused by the fact that I get so little time for enjoying them.

It was pleasant for two old cronies to sit by the fire, wondering what they had gotten out of life; and when John bade me goodbye at the door he admonished me to be very careful what I said about AE's home life.

But he has asked me to tack him on to life, and now you think, since he has been tacked on, he won't like it.

Damn these models! I said, returning to my room. Models are calamitous, and it would perhaps be calamitous to be without them. Shakespeare, too, is a calamity. And, dismayed by the number of plays I should have to read, my thoughts turned to dear little John Eglinton, to the little shrivelled face and the round head with a great deal of back to it, to the reddish hair into which grey is coming, to the gaunt figure, and I fell to thinking how his trousers had wound round his legs as he had walked down the street. It seemed to me that I should never find anything more suitable to my talent as a narrator and as a psychologist than this dear little man that had just left me, dry, determined, and all of a piece, valiant in his ideas and in his life, come straight down from the hard North into the soft Catholic Dublin atmosphere, which was not, however, able to rob him of any of his individuality. The Catholic atmosphere has intensified John Eglinton—boiled him down, as it were—made him a sort of Liebig extract of himself, and I seemed to realise more than ever I had done before how like he was to himself: the well-backed head and the square shoulders, and the hesitating, puzzled look that comes into his face. I had often sought a reason for that look. Now I know the cause of it: because he gets so little time for his ideas. He does not wish to write them out any more than Steer wishes to exhibit his Chelsea figures; he rearranges them and dusts them, and sits among them conscious of familiar presences, and as the years go by he seems to us to sink deeper into his armchair, and his contempt of our literary activities strengthens; he is careful to hide the fact from us lest he should wound our feelings, but it transpired the evening I ran over to the Library to tell him of Goethe's craving for information on all subjects, including even a little midwifery. So that he might continue a little dribble of ink in the morning, he said, for John never lacks a picturesque phrase, but that is neither here nor there; the sentiment it expresses is John Eglinton—a lack of faith in all things. Of late years he seems to have been drawn toward Buddhism, and goes out to a lonely cottage among the Dublin mountains in the hope that the esoteric lore of the East may allow him to look a little over the border. I shall never find a better model than John Eglinton. It seems to me that I understand him; and what a fine foil he would make to the soft and peaty Hyde, the softest of all our natural products, a Protestant that Protestantism has not been able to harden! A moment after I sat pondering on his yellow skull floating back from the temples, collecting hugely on the crown; his black eyebrows and a drooping black moustache; his laugh, shallow and a little vacant, a little mechanical; and his words and thoughts, casual as the stage Irishman's. We would pick him out for a Catholic in a tram, and if there were a priest in the tram Hyde would be interested in him at once, and he would like nothing better than to visit Clare Island with a batch of ecclesiastics, a dozen or fifteen parish priests, not one of them weighing less than fifteen stone, and the bishop eighteen. It would be a pleasure to Hyde to drop the words Your Grace into as many sentences as possible; whether he would kiss the bishop's ring may be doubted—being a Protestant, he could hardly do so—but he would fly for a pillow to put under His Grace's throbbing head. On Clare Island the parish priest would have prepared legs of mutton and sirloins of beef, chickens and geese, and Hyde's comment to His Grace would be: The hospitality of the Irish priest is unequalled. He will crack a bottle of champagne with any visitor. A gathering of this kind is very agreeable to the Catholic Protestant, and the Catholic bishop likes to do business with the Catholic Protestant better than with anybody else. The Catholic might stand up to him; there are one or two, perhaps, who would venture to disagree with His Grace, but the Catholic Protestant melts like peat into fine ash before His Grace's ring. But Hyde was not always Catholic Protestant. In the old Roscommon glebe there was sufficient Protestantism in him to set him learning Irish. He has written some very beautiful poems in Irish, and it is to Hyde that we owe the jargon since become so famous, for the great discovery was his that to write beautiful English one has only to translate literally from the Irish; his prose translations of the Love Songs of Connaught are as beautiful as Synge's, and it is a pity he was stopped by Father Tom Finlay, who said: Write in Irish or in English, but our review does not like mixed languages. And these words and his election to the Presidency of the Gaelic League made an end to Hyde as a man of letters. I took his measure at the banquet at the Shelbourne Hotel, his noisy demonstration in Irish and English convincing me that the potential scholar would be swallowed up in the demagogue, for the Gaelic League must make no enemies; and that the way to success is to stand well with everybody—members of Parliament, priests, farmers, shopkeepers—and by standing well with these people, especially with the priests, Hyde has become the archetype of the Catholic Protestant, cunning, subtle, cajoling, superficial, and affable, and these qualities have enabled him to paddle the old dug-out of the Gaelic League up from the marshes through many an old bog, lake, and river, reaching at last Portobello Bridge, where he took on board two passengers, Agnes O'Farrelly and Mary Hayden, and, having placed them in the stern, he paddled the old dug-out to the steps of the National University. He gallantly handed them up the steps, and so amazed were the three at the salaries that were offered to them that they forgot the old dug-out; and worn and broken and water-logged, it has drifted back to the original Connemara bog-hole, to sink under the brown water out of sight of the quiet evening sky, unwatched, unmourned save by dear Edward, who will weep a few tears, I am sure, when the last bubbles arise and break.