In 1894 Edward Martyn and I were living in the Temple, I in a garret in King's Bench Walk, he in a garret in Pump Court. At the time I was very poor and had to work for my living; all the hours of the day were spent writing some chapter of Esther Waters or of Modern Painting; and after dinner I often returned to my work. But towards midnight a wish to go out to speak to somebody would come upon me: Edward returned about that time from his club, and I used to go to Pump Court, sure of finding him seated in his high, canonical chair, sheltered by a screen, reading his book, his glass of grog beside him, his long clay pipe in his hand; and we used to talk literature and drama until two or three in the morning.

I wish I knew enough Irish to write my plays in Irish, he said one night, speaking out of himself suddenly.

You'd like to write your plays in Irish! I exclaimed. I thought nobody did anything in Irish except bring turf from the bog and say prayers.

Edward did not answer, and when I pressed him he said:

You've always lived in France and England, and have forgotten Ireland.

You're wrong: I remember the boatmen speaking to each other in Irish on Lough Carra! And Father James Browne preaching in Irish in Carnacun! But I've never heard of anybody wanting to write in it ... and plays, too!

Everything is different now; a new literature is springing up.

In Irish? I said; and my brain fluttered with ideas regarding the relation of the poem to the language in which it is born.

A new language to enwomb new thoughts, I cried out to Edward.

On the subject of nationality in art one can talk a long while, and it was past one o'clock when I groped my way down the rough-timbered staircase, lit by dusty lanterns, and wandered from Pump Court into the cloister, loitering by the wig-maker's shop in the dim corner, so like what London must have been once, some hundreds of years after the Templars.

On my way back to King's Bench Walk I passed their church! And, standing before the carven porch, I thought what a happy accident it was that Edward Martyn and myself had drifted into the Temple, the last vestige of old London—combining, as some one has said, the silence of the cloister with the licence of the brothel—Edward attracted by the church of the Templars, I by the fleeting mistress, so it pleased me to think.

One is making for the southern gate, hoping that the aged porter will pull the string and let her pass out without molesting her with observations, and, when the door closed behind her, there seemed to be nothing in the Temple but silence and moonlight: a round moon sailing westward let fall a cold ray along the muddy foreshore and along the river, revealing some barges moored in mid-stream.

The tide is out, I said, and I wondered at the spots and gleams of light, amid the shrubs in the garden, till I began to wonder at my own wonderment, for, after all, this was not the first time the moon had sailed over Lambeth. Even so the spectacle of the moonlit gardens and the river excited me to the point of making me forget my bed; and, watching the white torch of Jupiter and the red ember of Mars, I began to think of the soul which Edward Martyn had told me I had lost in Paris and in London, and if it were true that whoever casts off tradition is like a tree transplanted into uncongenial soil. Turgenev was of that opinion: Russia can do without any one of us, but none of us can do without Russia—one of his sentimental homilies grown wearisome from constant repetition, true, perhaps, of Russia, but utterly untrue of Ireland. Far more true would it be to say that an Irishman must fly from Ireland if he would be himself. Englishmen, Scotchmen, Jews, do well in Ireland—Irishmen never; even the patriot has to leave Ireland to get a hearing. We must leave Ireland; and I did well to listen in Montmartre. All the same, a remembrance of Edward Martyn's conversation could not be stifled. Had I not myself written, only half conscious of the truth, that art must be parochial in the beginning to become cosmopolitan in the end? And isn't a great deal of the savour of a poem owing to the language in which it is written? If Dante had continued his comedy in Latin! He wrote two cantos in Latin! Or was it two stanzas?

So Ireland is awaking at last out of the great sleep of Catholicism! And I walked about the King's Bench Walk, thinking what a wonderful thing it would be to write a book in a new language or in an old language revived and sharpened to literary usage for the first time. We men of letters are always sad when we hear of a mode of literary expression not available to us, or a subject we cannot treat. After discussing the Humbert case for some time, Dujardin and a friend fell to talking of what a wonderful subject it would have been for Balzac, and I listened to them in sad silence. Moore is sad, Dujardin said. He is always sad when he hears a subject which he may never hope to write.

The Humbert case being involved in such a mass of French jurisprudence that—And they laughed at me.

But in the Temple, in Edward's rooms, I had heard that a new literature was springing up in my own parish, and forthwith began to doubt if the liberty my father's death had given me was an unmixed blessing. The talent I brought into the world might have produced rarer fruit if it had been cultivated less sedulously. Ballinrobe or the Nouvelle Athènes—which?

The bitterness of my meditation was relieved, somewhat, on remembering that those who had remained in Ireland had written nothing of any worth—miserable stuff, no narrative of any seriousness, only broad farce. Lever and Lover and a rudiment, a peasant whose works I had once looked into, and whose name it was impossible to remember. Strange that Ireland should have produced so little literature, for there is a pathos in Ireland, in its people, in its landscape, and in its ruins. And that night I roamed in imagination from castle to castle, following them from hillside to hillside, along the edges of the lake, going up a staircase built between the thickness of the walls, and on to the ramparts, remembering that Castle Carra must have been a great place some four or five hundred years ago. Only the centre of the castle remains; the headland is covered with ruins, overgrown with thorn and hazel; but great men must have gone forth from Castle Carra; and Castle Island and Castle Hag were defended with battle-axe and sword, and these were wielded as tremendously, from island to island, and along the shores of my lake, as ever they were under the walls of Troy. But of what use are such deeds if there be no chroniclers to relate them? Heroes are dependent upon chroniclers, and Ireland never produced any, only a few rather foolish bards, no one who could rank with Froissart; and I thought of my friend up in Pump Court writing by a window, deep set in a castle wall, a history of his times. That was just the sort of thing he might do, and do very well, for he is painstaking. An heroic tale of robbers issuing from the keep of Castle Carra and returning with cattle and a beautiful woman would be more than he could accomplish. I had heard of Grania for the first time that night, and she might be written about; but not by me, for only what my eye has seen, and my heart has felt, interests me. A book about the turbulent life of Castle Carra would be merely inventions, cela ne serait que du chiqué; I should be following in the tracks of other marchands de camelote, Scott and Stevenson, and their like. But modern Ireland! What of it as a subject for artistic treatment?

And noiselessly, like a ghost, modern Ireland glided into my thoughts, ruinous as ancient Ireland, more so, for she is clothed not only with the ruins of the thirteenth century, but with the ruins of every succeeding century. In Ireland we have ruins of several centuries standing side by side, from the fifth to the eighteenth. By the ruins of Castle Carra stand the ruins of a modern house, to which the chieftains of Castle Carra retired when brigandage declined; and the life that was lived there is evinced by the great stone fox standing in the middle of the courtyard—was evinced, for within the last few years the fox and the two hounds of gigantic stature on either side of the gateway have been overthrown.

When I was a small child I used to go with my mother and governess to Castle Carra for goat's milk, and we picnicked in the great banqueting-hall overgrown with ivy. If ever the novel I am dreaming is written, Ruin and Weed shall be its title—ruined castles in a weedy country. In Ireland men and women die without realising any of the qualities they bring into the world, and I remembered those I had known long ago, dimly, and in fragments, as one remembers pictures—the colour of a young woman's hair, an old woman's stoop, a man's bulk; and then a group of peasants trooped past me—Mulhair recognised by his stubbly chin, Pat Plunket by his voice, Carabine by his eyes—and these were followed by recollection of an old servant, Appleby, his unstarched collar and the frock-coat too large for him which he wore always, and his covert dislike of the other servants in the house, especially the old housemaids.

All these people have gone to their rest; they are all happily forgotten, no one ever thinks of them; but to me they are clearer than they were in life, because the present changes so quickly that we are not aware of our life at the moment of living it. But the past never changes; it is like a long picture-gallery. Many of the pictures are covered with grey cloths, as is usual in picture-galleries; but we can uncover any picture we wish to see, and not infrequently a cloth will fall as if by magic, revealing a forgotten one, and it is often as clear in outline and as fresh in paint as a Van der Meer.

That night in the Temple I met a memory as tender in colour and outline as the Van der Meer in the National Gallery. It was at the end of a long summer's day, five-and-twenty years ago, that I first saw her among some ruins in the Dublin mountains, and in her reappearance she seemed so startlingly like Ireland that I felt she formed part of the book I was dreaming, and that nothing of the circumstances in which I found her could be changed or altered. My thoughts fastened on to her, carrying me out of the Temple, back to Ireland, to the time when the ravages of the Land League had recalled me from the Nouvelle Athènes—a magnificent young Montmartrian, with a blonde beard à la Capoul, trousers hanging wide over the foot, and a hat so small that my sister had once mistaken it for her riding-hat. And still in my Montmartrian clothes I had come back from the West with a story in my head, which could only be written in some poetical spot, probably in one of the old houses among the Dublin mountains. And I had set out to look for one on a hot day in July, when the trees in Merrion Square seemed like painted trees, so still were they in the grey silence; the sparrows had ceased to twitter; the carmen spat without speaking, too weary to solicit my fare; and the horses continued to doze on the bridles. Even the red brick, I said, seems to weary in the heat. Too hot a day for walking, but I must walk if I'm to sleep tonight.

My way led through Stephen's Green, and the long decay of Dublin that began with the Union engaged my thoughts, and I fared sighing for the old-time mansions that had been turned into colleges and presbyteries. There were lodging-houses in Harcourt Street, and beyond Harcourt Street the town dwindled, first into small shops, then into shabby-genteel villas; at Terenure, I was among cottages, and within sight of purple hills, and when the Dodder was crossed, at the end of the village street, a great wall began, high as a prison wall; it might well have been mistaken for one, but the trees told it was a park wall, and the great ornamental gateway was a pleasant object. It came into sight suddenly—a great pointed edifice finely designed, and after admiring it I wandered on, crossing an old grey bridge. The Dodder again, I said. And the beautiful green country unfolded, a little melancholy for lack of light and shade, for lack, I added, of a ray to gild the fields. A beautiful country falling into ruin. The beauty of neglect—yet there is none in thrift. My eyes followed the long herds wandering knee-deep in succulent herbage, and I remembered that every other country I had seen was spoilt more or less by human beings, but this country was nearly empty, only an occasional herdsman to remind me of myself in this drift of ruined suburb, with a wistful line of mountains enclosing it, and one road curving among the hills, and everywhere high walls—parks, in the centre of which stand stately eighteenth-century mansions. How the eighteenth century sought privacy! I said, and walked on dreaming of the lives that were lived in these sequestered domains.

No road ever wound so beautifully, I cried, and there are no cottages, only an occasional ruin to make the road attractive. How much more attractive it is now, redeemed from its humanities—large families flowing over doorways, probably in and out of cesspools! I had seen such cottages in the West, and had wished them in ruins, for ruins are wistful, especially when a foxglove finds root-hold in the crannies, and tall grasses flourish round the doorway, and withdrawing my eyes from the pretty cottage, I admired the spotted shade, and the road itself, now twisting abruptly, now winding leisurely up the hill, among woods ascending on my left and descending on my right. But what seemed most wonderful of all was the view that accompanied the road—glimpses of a great plain showing between comely trees shooting out of the hillside—a dim green plain, divided by hedges, traversed by long herds, and enclosed, if I remember rightly, by a line of low grey hills, far, ever so far, away.

All the same, the road ascends very steeply, I growled, beginning to doubt the veracity of the agent who had informed me that a house existed in the neighbourhood. In the neighbourhood, I repeated, for the word appeared singularly inappropriate. In the solitude, he should have said. A little higher up in the hills a chance herdsman offered me some goat's milk; but it was like drinking Camembert cheese, and the least epicurean amongst us would prefer his milk and cheese separate. He had no other, and, in answer to my questions regarding a house to let, said there was one a mile up the road: Mount Venus.

Mount Venus! Who may have given it that name?

The question brought all his stupidity into his face, and after a short talk with him about his goats, I said I must be getting on to Mount Venus ... if it be no more than a mile.

Nothing in Ireland lasts long except the miles, and the last mile to Mount Venus is the longest mile in Ireland; and the road is the steepest. It wound past another ruined cottage, and then a gateway appeared—heavy wrought-iron gates hanging between great stone pillars, the drive ascending through lonely grass-lands with no house in view, for the house lay on the farther side of the hill, a grove of beech trees reserving it as a surprise for the visitor. A more beautiful grove I have never seen, some two hundred years old, and the house as old as it—a long house built with picturesque chimney-stacks, well placed at each end, a resolute house, emphatic as an oath, with great steps before the door, and each made out of a single stone, a house at which one knocks timidly, lest mastiffs should rush out, eager for the strangling. But no fierce voices answered my knocking, only a vague echo. Maybe I'll find somebody in the back premises, and wandering through a gateway, I came upon many ruins of barns and byres, and upon a heap of stones probably once used for the crushing of apples. No cow in the byre, nor pony in the stable, nor dog in the kennel, nor pig in the sty, nor gaunt Irish fowl stalking about what seemed to be the kitchen-door. An empty dovecot hung on the wall above it. Mount Venus without doves, I said. And as no answer came to my knocking I wandered back to the front of the house to enjoy the view of the sea and the line of the shore, drawn as beautifully as if Corot had drawn it. Dublin City appeared in the distance a mere murky mass, with here and there a building, faintly indicated. Nearer still the suburbs came trickling into the fields, the very fields in which I had seen herds of cattle feeding.



By standing on some loose stones it was possible to look into the first-floor rooms, and I could see marble chimney-pieces set in a long room, up and down which I could walk while arranging my ideas; and when ideas failed me I could suckle my imagination on the view. This is the house I'm in search of, and there seems to be enough furniture for my wants. I'll return tomorrow.... But my pleasure will be lost if I've to wait till tomorrow. Somebody must be here. I'll try again. The silence that answered my knocking strengthened my determination to see Mount Venus that night, and I returned to the empty yard, and peeped and pried through all the outhouses, discovering at last a pail of newly peeled potatoes. There must be somebody about, and I waited, peeling the potatoes that remained unpeeled to pass the time.

I'm afraid I'm wasting your potatoes, I said to the woman who appeared in the doorway—a peasant woman wearing a rough, dark grey petticoat and heavy boots, men's boots (they were almost the first thing I noticed)—just the woman who I expected would come, the caretaker. She spoke with her head turned aside, showing a thin well-cut face with a shapely forehead, iron-grey hair, a nose, long and thin, with fine nostrils, and a mouth a pretty line I think ... but that is all I can say about her, for when I try to remember more I seem to lose sight of her...

'You've come to see the house?

She stopped and looked at me.

Is there any reason why I shouldn't see it?'



She doesn't speak like a caretaker, I thought, nor look like one.

Is it a lease of the house you'd like, or do you wish only to hire it for the season, sir?

Only for the season, I said. It is to be let furnished?

There's not much furniture, but sufficient—

So long as there are beds, and a table to write upon, and a few chairs.

Yes, there's that, and more than that, she answered, smiling. This is the kitchen, and she showed me into a vast stone room; and the passages leading from the kitchen were wide and high, and built in stone. The walls seemed of great thickness, and when we came to the staircase, she said: Mind you don't slip. The stairs are very slippery, but can easily be put right. The stonemason will only have to run his chisel over them.

I'm more interested in the rooms in which I'm to live myself ... if I take the house.

These are the drawing-rooms, she said, and drew my attention to the chimney-piece.

It's very beautiful, I answered, turning from the parti-coloured marbles to the pictures. All the ordinary subjects of pictorial art lined the walls, but I passed on without noticing any, so poor and provincial was the painting, until I came suddenly upon the portrait of a young girl. The painting was hardly better than any I had already seen, but her natural gracefulness transpired in classical folds as she stood leaning on her bow, a Diana of the 'forties, looking across the greensward waiting to hear if the arrow had reached its mark.

Into what kind of old age has she drifted? I asked myself, and the recollection of the thin clear-cut eager face brought me back again to the portrait, and forgetful of the woman I had found in the outhouse peeling potatoes for her dinner, I studied the face, certain that I had seen it before. But where?

Several generations seem to be on these walls, and I asked the caretaker if she knew anything about the people who had lived in the house? It was built about two hundred years ago, I should say, and we wandered into another room. I should like to hear something about the girl whose portrait I've been looking at. There's nothing to conceal? No story—

There's nothing in her story that any one need be ashamed of. But why do you ask? And the manner in which she put the question still further excited my curiosity.

Because it seems to me that I've seen the face before.

Yes, she answered, you have. The portrait in the next room is my portrait ... as I was forty years ago. But I didn't think that any one would see the likeness.



But do you wish to take the house, sir? If not—

In some ways it would suit me well enough. I'll write and let you know. And your portrait I shall always remember, I added, thinking to please her. But seeing that my remark failed to do so, I spoke of the water supply, and she told me there was another well: an excellent spring, only the cattle went there to drink; but it would be easy to put an iron fence round it.

And now, if you'll excuse me. It's my dinner-time.

I let her go and wandered whither she had advised me—to the cromlech, one of the grandest in Ireland.

I could not miss it, she had said: I'd find it if I followed the path round the hill in the beech dell: a great rock laid upon three upright stones; one had fallen lately and, in the words of a shepherd I'd consulted, the altar was out of repair. Even Druid altars do not survive the nineteenth century in Ireland, I answered, and still lingering, detained by the ancient stones, my thoughts returned to her whom an artist had painted as Diana the Huntress. A man of some talent, for he had painted her in an attitude that atoned to some extent for the poverty of the painting. Or was it she who gave him the attitude leaning on her bow? Was it she who settled the folds about her limbs, and decided the turn of her head, the eyes looking across the greensward towards the target? Had she fled with somebody whom she had loved dearly and been deserted and cast away on that hillside? Does the house belong to her? Or is she the caretaker? Does she live there with a servant? Or alone, cooking her own dinner? None of my questions would be answered, and I invented story after story to explain her as I returned through the grey evening in which no star appeared, only a red moon rising up through the woods like a fire in the branches.

My single meeting with this woman happened twenty-five years ago, and it is more than likely she is now dead, and the ruins among which she lived are probably a quarry whence the peasants go to fetch stones to build their cottages; many of the beech trees have been felled. Mount Venus has passed away, never to be revived again. But enough of its story is remembered to fill a corner of the book I am dreaming; no more than that, for the book I am dreaming is a man's book, and it should be made of the life that lingered in Mayo till the end of the 'sixties: landlords, their retainers and serfs.

At these words, in the middle of the Temple, a scene rose up before me of a pack of harriers—or shall I say wild dogs?—running into a hare on a bleak hillside, and far away, showing faintly on a pale line of melancholy mountains, a horse rising up in the act of jumping. And on and on came horse and rider, over stone wall after stone wall, till stopped by a wall so high that no horse could jump it, so I thought. The gate of the park was miles away, so the hounds had time, not only to devour the hare they had killed, but to eat many a rabbit. Surrounding the furze, they drove the rabbits this way and that, the whole pack working in concert, as wild dogs might, and the whip, all the while, talking to a group of countrymen, until the hunt began to appear. I must be getting to my hounds now, and picking up the snaffle-rein, he drove the pony at the wall, who, to the admiration of the group, rose at it, kicking it with her hind hooves, landing in style among the hounds quarrelling over bits of skin and bone. The wild huntsman blew his horn and, gathering his hounds round him, said to me, before putting his pony again at the wall: A great little pony, isn't she? And what's half a dozen of rabbits between twenty-two couple of hounds? It'll only give them an appetite, though they've always that. Bedad if they weren't the most intelligent hounds in the country it's dead long ago they'd be of hunger. Do you know of an old jackass? he said, turning to a country-man. If you do you might have a shilling for bringing him. You can have the skin back if you like to come for it.

By this time all the field were up, the master, florid and elderly, and a quarrel began between him and the huntsman, whom he threatened to sack in the morning for not being up with the hounds.

Wasn't there six foot of a wall between us? And they as hungry as hawks?

But if the pony was able to lep the wall, why didn't you ride her at it at once?

And so I did, your honour.

And the countrymen were called and they testified.

Well, Pat, you must be up in time to get the next hare from them, for if you don't, it's myself and Johnny Malone that will be drinking our punch on empty bellies, which isn't good for any man. And away went the master in search of his dinner over the grey plain, under rolling clouds threatening rain, the hounds trying the patches of furze for another hare, and the field—a dozen huntsmen with a lady amongst them—waiting, talking to each other about their horses. I could see Pat pressing his wonderful pony forward, on the alert for stragglers, assuring Bell-Ringer with a terrific crack of his whip that he was not likely to find a hare where he was looking for one, and must get into the furze instantly; and then I caught a glimpse of the ragged peasantry following the hunt over the plains of Ballyglass, just as they used to follow it, a fierce wind thrilling in their shaggy chests, and they speaking Irish to each other, calling to the master in English.

A place must be found, I said to myself, in my story for that pack of hounds, for its master, for its whip, and for the marvellous pony, and for a race-meeting, whether at Ballinrobe or Breaghwy or Castlebar. Castlebar for preference. The horde of peasantry would look well amid the line of hills enclosing the plain: old men in knee-breeches and tall hats, young men in trousers, cattle-dealers in great overcoats reaching to their heels, wearing broad-brimmed hats, everybody with a broad Irish grin on his face, and everybody with his blackthorn. Of a sudden I could see a crowd gathered to watch a bucking chestnut, a sixteen-hands horse with a small boy in pink upon his back. Now the horse hunches himself up till he seems like a hillock; his head is down between his legs, his hind legs are in the air, but he doesn't rid himself of his burden. He plunges forward, he rises—up, coming down again, his head between his legs; and the boy, still unstirred, recalls the ancient dream of the Centaur.

Bedad! he's the greatest rider in Ireland, a crowd of tinkers and peasants are saying, the tinkers hurrying up to see the sport, retiring hurriedly as the horse plunges in their direction, running great danger of being kicked.

So did I remember the scene as I walked about the Temple that moonlit night, the very words of the tinkers chiming in my head after many years: Isn't he a devil? cries one; it's in the circus he ought to be. Mickey was near off that time, cries another, and while the great fight was waged between horse and jockey, my father rode up, crying to the crowd to disperse, threatening that if the course was not cleared in a few minutes he would ride in amongst them, and he on a great bay stallion. I'll ride in amongst you; you'll get kicked, you'll get kicked. Even at this distance of time I can feel the very pang of fear which I endured, lest the horse my father was riding should kick some peasant and kill him, for, even in those feudal days, a peasant's life was considered of some value, and the horse my father rode quivered with excitement and impatience. Get back! Get back or there'll be no racing today. And you, Mickey Ford, if you can't get that horse to the post, I'll start without you. Give him his head, put the spurs into him, thrash him! And taking my father at his word, Mickey raised his whip, and down it came sounding along the golden hide. The horse bounded higher, but without getting any nearer to unseating his rider, and away they went towards the starting-point, my father crying to the jockeys that they must get into line, telling Mickey that if he didn't walk his horse to the post he would disqualify him, and Mickey swearing that his horse was unmanageable, and my father swearing that the jockey was touching him on the offside with his spur. It seemed to me my father was very cruel to the poor boy whose horse wouldn't keep quiet. A moment after they were galloping over the rough fields, bounding over the stone walls, the ragged peasantry rebuilding the walls for the next race, waving their sticks, running from one corner of the field to another, and no one thinking at all of the melancholy line of wandering hills enclosing the plain.

A scene to be included in the novel I was dreaming, and, for the moment, my father appeared to me as the principal character; but only for a moment. Something much rougher, more Irish, more uncouth, more Catholic, was required. My father was a Catholic, but only of one generation, and to produce the pure Catholic several are necessary. The hero of my novel must be sought and found among the Catholic end of my family, a combination of sportsman and cattle-dealer. Andy on his grey mare careering after the Blazers, rolling about like a sack in the saddle, but always leading the field, tempted me, until my thoughts were suddenly diverted by a remembrance of a Curragh meeting, with Dan who had brought up a crack from Galway and was going to break the ring.

Dan, aren't you going to see your horse run? cried I. He'll run the same whether I'm looking at him or not. And Dan, in his long yellow mackintosh, hurrying through the bookies, rose up in my mind, as true and distinct and characteristic of Ireland as the poor woman I had discovered among the Dublin mountains. She had fixed herself on my mind as she was in a single moment. Dan I had seen many times, in all kinds of different circumstances; all the same, it is in his mackintosh at the Curragh meeting, on his way to the urinal, that I remember him—in his tall silk hat (every one wore a tall silk hat at the Curragh in the 'seventies); but Dan was only half himself in a hat, for whoever saw him remembers the long white skull over which he trailed a lock of black hair—the long skull which I have inherited from my mother's family—and the long pale face; and his hands were like mine, long, delicate, female hands; one of Dan's sisters had the most beautiful hands I ever saw. He'll run the same whether I'm looking at him or not, and Dan laughed craftily, for craft and innocency were mingled strangely in his face. Dan had a sense of humour. Or did I mistake a certain naturalness for humour? Be that as it may, when I was in Galway I was often tempted to ride over to see him.

It will be difficult to get him on to paper, I reflected. His humour will not transpire if I'm not very careful, for, though I may transcribe the very words he uttered, they will mean little on paper unless I get his atmosphere: the empty house at Dunamon, the stables about it filled with racehorses, most of them broken down, for no four legs ever stood more than two years' training over the rough fields which Dan called his racecourse. A four-year-old, with back sinews and suspensory ligaments sound, rarely stood in the Dunamon stables, a chaser or two perchance. All the same Dan did not lose money on the turf; a stroke of luck kept him going for a long time, and these strokes of luck happened every five or six years. Every five or six years he would arrive at the Curragh with a two-year-old, which, on account of its predecessors' failures, would be quoted on the list at ten to one. Dan knew how to back him quietly; his backing was done surreptitiously, without taking any one into his confidence, not even his cousins. It was no use going to Dunamon to ask him questions; the only answer one ever got was:

There he is, quite well, but whether he can gallop or not, I can't tell you. I've nothing to try him with. There he is; go and look at him.

At the post he might advise us to put a fiver on him, if he wasn't in too great a hurry. Is your money on him, Dan? one of his cousins cried. Dan turned only to say: it's all right, and from his words we guessed, and guessed rightly, that the horse had been backed to win seven or eight thousand pounds, enough to keep the Dunamon establishment going for the next four or five years.

As soon as a horse broke down he was let loose on Lagaphouca, a rocky headland, where the cracks of yesteryear picked up a living as best they could. He treated his horses as the master of the harriers treated his hounds: intelligent animals who could be counted upon to feed themselves. He loved them, too, in his own queer way, for he never made any attempt to sell them, knowing that the only use they could be put to, after he had finished training them, would be to draw cabs; and though food was scarce in Lagaphouca in winter, they were probably happier there than they would have been in a livery-stable. Only once did Dan sell his horses. My brother, the Colonel, succeeded in buying three from him. Any three you like, Dan said, at twenty-five pounds apiece. At that time Lagaphouca was full of wild horses, and the Colonel's story is that he only just escaped being eaten, which is probably an exaggeration. But he chose three, and his choice was successful. He won may races.... But I must keep to my own story.

I had wandered round the church of the Templars, and, after admiring the old porch, and the wig-maker's shop, and the cloister, turned into Pump Court. Up there aloft Edward was sleeping. Then, leaving Pump Court, I found my way through a brick passage to a seat under the plane trees in Fountain Court, and I sat there waiting for Symons, who returned home generally about one. The Temple clock clanged out the half-hour, and I said: Tonight he must be sleeping out, and continued my memories to the tune of water dripping, startled now and then by the carp plunging in the silence, recollecting suddenly that the last time I went to Dunamon, Dan was discovered by me before an immense peat fire burning in an open grate. The chimney-piece had fallen some time ago; one of the marbles had been broken, and it was difficult to replace the slab. No mason in the country could undertake the job; all the skilled workmen had gone out of the country, he said. But one did not discuss the evils of emigration with Dan, knowing what his answer would be.

As long, he would say, as the people want to go to America they'll go, and when America is out of fashion they'll stay at home.... There will always be enough people here for me.

On one occasion when I rode over to Dunamon to get news of what horses Dan was going to run at the next meeting of the Curragh, Bridget opened the door to me. The master is not in the house, she said, but if you'll wait in the drawing-room I'll go and find him for you. I would have preferred to go round to the stables to seek Dan myself; he was generally to be found in the stables, but not wishing to distress Bridget I walked into the room and my eyes went at once to the piano on which his sisters had played, and to the pictures they had admired. The room was empty, cheerless, dilapidated, but it was strangely clean for a room in the charge of an Irish peasant of Bridget's class. I shall speak of her anon; now I must speak of the two pictures of dogs going after birds, reddish dogs with long ears, for I used to detest them when I was a child—why I never knew, they seemed foolish; now they seemed merely quaint, and I wondered at my former aversion. Under one of them stood the piano—a grand, made in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Virgin's Prayer lay still on top of a heap of music unlocked into by Dan, for when he touched a piano it was to play his memories of operas heard long ago in his youth. No doubt he often turned for refreshment to this piano after an excellent dinner cooked by Bridget, who, when she had done washing up, would appear in the drawing-room, for she was not confined to the bedroom and the kitchen. Dan was a human fellow, who would not keep his mistress unduly in the kitchen, and I can see Bridget bringing her knitting with her, and hear Dan playing to her, until, overtaken by love or weariness, he would cease to strum Traviata or Trovatore and go to her.

Nobody ever witnessed this scene, but it must have happened just as I tell it.

A pretty girl Bridget certainly was, and one that any man would have liked to kiss, and one whom I should like to have kissed had I not been prevented by a prejudice. We are all victims of prejudice of one kind or another, and as the prejudice which prevented me from kissing Bridget inclines towards those which are regarded as virtues, I will tell the reader that the reason I refrained from kissing Dan's mistress was because it has always been the tradition in the West that my family never yielded to such indulgences as peasant mistresses or the esuriences of hot punch: nobody but Archbishop McHale was allowed punch in my father's house; the common priests who dined there at election times had to lap claret. And, proud of my family's fortitudes, I refrained from Bridget.

But if you respect your family so much, why do you lift the veil on Dan's frailties? I often asked myself, and the answer my heart gave back was: if I did not do so, I should not think of Dan at all; and what we all dread most is to be forgotten. If I don't write about him I shall not be able to forget the large sums of money I lost by being put on the wrong horses. I am sure he would like to make amends to me for those losses; and the only way he can do this now is by giving me sittings. His brother and sisters will, no doubt, think my portrait in bad taste, the prejudices of our time being that a man's frailties should not be written about. It is difficult to understand why a mistress should be looked upon as a frailty, and writing about the sin more grievous than the sin itself. These are questions which might be debated till morning, and as it is very nearly morning now, it will be well to leave their consideration to some later time, and to decide at once that Dan shall become a piece of literature in my hands. It is no part of my morality to urge that nobody's feelings should be regarded if the object be literature. But I would ask why one set of feelings should be placed above another? Why the feelings of my relations should be placed above Dan's? For, if Dan were in a position to express himself now, who would dare to say that he would like his love of Bridget to be forgotten? There is nothing more human, as Pater remarks, than the wish to be remembered for some years after death, and Dan was essentially a human being, and Bridget was a human being. So why should I defraud them of an immortality opened up to them by a chance word spoken by Edward Martyn in his garret in Pump Court? If my cousins complain, I'll answer them: We see things from different sides: you from a catholic, I from a literary. What a side of life to choose! I hear them saying, and myself answering: Dan's love of Bridget was what was best in him, and what was most like him. It is in this preference that Dan is above you, for alone among you he sought beauty. Bridget was a pretty girl, and beauty in a woman is all that a man like Dan could be expected to seek. Whoever amongst you has bought an Impressionist picture or a Pre-Raphaelite picture let him first cast a stone. But not one of you ever bought any object because you thought it beautiful, so leave me to tell Dan's story in my own way. His love of Bridget I hold in higher esteem than Mat's desire, during the last ten years of his life, to buy himself a seat in Heaven in the front row, a desire which, by the way, cost him many hundreds a year.



A carp splashed in the fountain basin. How foolish that fish would think me if he could think at all, wasting my time sitting here, thinking of Dan instead of going to bed! But being a human being, and not a carp, and Dan being a side of humanity which appealed to me, I continued to think of him and Bridget—dead days rising up in my mind one after the other. I had gone to Mayo to write A Mummer's Wife, and Dan had lent me a riding-horse, a great black beast with no shoulders, but good enough to ride after a long morning's work, and a rumour having reached me that something had gone wrong with one of his cracks, I rode over to Dunamon. The horse was restive and seventeen hands high, so I did not venture to dismount but halloed outside, and receiving no answer rode round to the stables, and inquired for the master of every stableman and jockey, without getting a satisfactory answer. Every one seemed reticent. The master had gone to Dublin, said one; another, slinking away, mentioned he was thinking of going, perhaps he had gone, and seeing they did not wish to answer me, I called to one, slung myself out of the saddle and walked into the kitchen.

Well, Bridget, how are you today?

Well, thank you, sir.

What's this I'm hearing in the stables about the master going to Dublin?

Ah, you've been hearing that? and a smile lit up Bridget's pretty eyes.

Isn't it true? Bridget hesitated, and I added: Is it that he doesn't want to see me?

Indeed, sir, he's always glad to see you.

And my curiosity excited, I pressed her.

It's just that he don't want to be showing himself to everybody.

To deceive her my face assumed a grave air.

No trouble with the tenants, I hope? Nothing of that sort?

The people are quiet enough round here.

Well, Bridget, I've always thought you a pretty girl. Tell me, what has happened? And to lead her further I said: But you and the master are just as good friends as ever, aren't you? Nothing to do with you, Bridget? I'd be sorry—

With me, sir? Sure, it isn't from me he'd be hiding in the garden.



How is that, sir?

He cries out in the middle of Mass that God may spare his soul, interrupting everybody else's prayers. I never liked that sort of thing myself, Bridget, and have never understood how God could be pleased with a man for sending his children and their mother to America. You know of whom I'm talking?

Bridget did not answer for a while, and when I repeated my question she said:

Of course I do. Of Ellen Ford.

Yes, that is of whom I'm thinking.

And then, looking round to see if anybody was within hearing, she told me how two of Mr Mat's sons had come back from America, bothering Mr Dan for their father's address.

Two fine young fellows, the two of them as tall as Mr Mat himself.

And to escape from his nephews the master locks himself up in the garden? Excellent security in eighteen feet of a wall.

But didn't they get into the trees—Mr Mat's two big sons—and Mr Dan never suspecting it walked underneath them, and then it was that they gave him the length and breadth of their tongues, and the whole stable listening. The smile died out of her eyes, and fearing that one day her lot might be Ellen Ford's, Bridget said: Wouldn't it be more natural for Mr Mat to have married Ellen and made a good wife of her than sending her to America and her sons coming back to bother Mr Dan?

It was a cruel thing, Bridget.

That's always the way, Bridget answered, and she moved a big saucepan from one side of the range to the other. You'll find him in the garden if you knock three times.

I'll go and fetch him presently.

Will you be staying to dinner, sir?

That depends on what you're cooking.

A pair of boiled ducks today.

Boiled ducks!

Don't you like them boiled? You won't be saying anything against my cooking, if you stay to dinner, will you?

Not a word against your cooking. Excellent cooking, Bridget.

And as she busied herself about the range, thinking of the ducks boiling in the saucepan, or thinking of what her fate would be if Dan died before making a good wife of her, I studied the swing of her hips, still shapely, but at thirty a peasant's figure begins to tell of the hard work she has done, and as she bent over the range I noticed that she wore a little more apron-string than she used to wear.

The return of Mat's two sons from America seemed to have made her a little anxious about her own future. Any day, I said, another girl may be brought up from the village, and then Bridget will be seen less frequently upstairs. She'll receive ten or twelve pounds a year for cleaning and cooking, and perhaps after a little while drift away like a piece of broken furniture into the outhouses. That will be her fate, unless she becomes my cousin, and the possibility of finding myself suddenly related to Bridget caused a little pensiveness to come into my walk. It was not necessary that Dan should marry her, but he should make her a handsome allowance if some years of damned hard luck on the turf should compel him to marry his neighbour's daughter; enlarged suspensory ligaments have made many marriages in Mayo and Galway; and I went about the Temple remembering that when —— was going to marry ——, the bride's relations had gathered round the fire to decide the fate of the peasant girl and her children. They were all at sixes and sevens until a pious old lady muttered: Let him emigrate them; whereupon they rubbed their shins complacently. But Bridget was not put away; Dan died in her arms. After that her story becomes legendary. It has been said that she remained at Dunamon, and washed and cooked and scrubbed for the next of kin, and wore her life away there as a humble servant at the smallest wage that could be offered to her. And it has been said that she made terms with the next of kin and got a considerable sum from him, and went to America and keeps a boarding-house in Chicago. And I have heard, too, that she ended her days in the workhouse, a little crumpled ruin, amid other ruins, every one with her own story.

Bridget is a type in the West of Ireland, and I have known so many that perhaps I am confusing one story with another. For the purpose of my book any one of these endings would do. The best would, perhaps, be a warm cottage, a pleasant thatch, a garden, hollyhocks, and bee-hives. In such a cottage I can see Bridget an old woman. But the end of a life is not a thing that can be settled at once, walking about in moonlight, for what seems true then may seem fictitious next day. And already Dan and Bridget had begun to seem a little too trite and respectable for my purpose. When he came to be written out Dan would differ little from the characters to be found in Lever and Lover. They would have served him up with the usual sauce, a sort of restaurant gravy which makes everything taste alike, whereas painted by me, Dan would get into something like reality, he would attain a certain dignity; but a rougher being would suit my purpose better, and I fell to thinking of one of Dan's hirelings, Carmody, a poacher, the most notorious in Mayo and Galway, and so wary that he escaped convictions again and again; and when Dan appointed him as gamekeeper there was no further use to think about bringing him for trial, for wasn't Dan on the Bench?

Carmody shot and fished over what land and what rivers he pleased. My friend's grouse, woodcock, snipe, wild duck, teal, widgeon, hares, and rabbits, went to Dunamon, and during the composition of A Mummer's Wife, when my palate longed for some change from beef and mutton, I had to invite Carmody to shoot with me or eat my dinner at Dunamon. He knew where ducks went by in the evening, and Carmody never fired without bringing down his bird—a real poaching shot and a genial companion, full of stories of the country. It is regrettable that I did not put them into my pocket-book at the time, for if I had I should be able now to write a book original in every line.

The old woodranger looked at me askance when I brought Carmody from Dunamon to shoot over my friend's lands. The worst man that ever saw daylight, he would say. I pressed him to tell me of Carmody's misdeeds, and he told me many ... but at this distance of time it is difficult to recall the tales I heard of Carmody's life among the mountains, trapping rabbits, and setting springes for woodcocks, going down to the village at night, battering in doors, saying he must have a sheaf of straw to lie on.

We used to row out to the islands and lie waiting for the ducks until they came in from the marshes; and those cold hours Carmody would while away with stories of the wrongs that had been done him, and the hardships he had endured before he found a protector in Dan. The account he gave of himself differed a good deal from the one which I heard from the woodranger, and looking into his pale eyes, I often wondered if it were true that he used to entice boys into the woods, and when he had led them far enough, turn upon them savagely, beating them, leaving them for dead. Why should he commit such devilry? I often asked myself without discovering any reason, except that finding the world against him he thought he might as well have a blow at the world when he got the chance.

Many a poor girl was sorry she ever met with him, the woodranger would say, and I asked him how, if he were such a wild man, girls would follow him into the woods? Them tramps always have a following; and he told me a story he had heard from a boy in the village. A knocking at the door had waked the boy, and he lay quaking, listening to his young sister telling Carmody it was too late to let him in, but Carmody caught a hold of her and dragged her out through the door, so the boy told me, and he heard them going down the road, Carmody crying: Begob, I've seen that much of you that you'll be no use to anybody else.

And what became of the girl? Did he marry her?

Sorra marry; he sold her to a tinker, it is said to the one who used to play the pipes. I thought you said he was a tinker. So he was; but he used to play the pipes in the dancing-houses on a Sunday night, till one night Father O'Farrell got out of his bed and walked across the bog and pushed open the door without a By your leave or With your leave, and making straight for the old tinker in the corner, snatched the pipes from him and threw them on the floor, and began dancing upon them himself, and them squeaking all the time, and he saying every time he jumped on them: Ah, the divil is in them still. Do you hear him roarin'?

I closed my eyes a little and licked my lips as I walked, thinking of the pleasure it would be to tell this story ... and to tell it in its place. The priest would have to be a friend of the family that lived in the Big House; he would perhaps come up to teach the children Latin, or they might go to him. Dan and his lass were typical of Catholic Ireland, tainted through and through with peasantry. True that every family begins with the peasant; it rises, when it rises, through its own genius. The cross is the worst stock of all, the pure decadent. But he must come into the book. Never was there such a subject, I said, as the one I am dreaming. Dan, Bridget, Carmody and his friends the tinkers—with these it should be possible to write something that would be read as long as—

And while thinking of a simile wherewith to express the durability of the book, I remembered that Ireland had not been seen by me for many years, and to put the smack of immortality upon it, it would be necessary to live in Ireland, in a cabin in the West; only in that way could I learn the people, become intimate with them again. The present is an English-speaking generation, or very nearly, so Edward told me; mine was an Irish-speaking. The workmen that came up from the village to the Big House spoke it always, and the boatmen on the lake whispered it over their oars to my annoyance, until at last the temptation came along to learn it; and the memory of that day floated up like a wraith from the lake: the two boatmen and myself, they anxious to teach me the language—a decisive day for Ireland, for if I had learned the language from the boatmen (it would have been easy to do so then) a book would have been written about Carmody and the tinker that would have set all Europe talking; and the novel dreamed in the Temple by me, written in a new language, or in a language revived, would have been a great literary event, and the Irish language would now be a flourishing concern. Now it is too late. That day on Lough Carra its fate was decided, unless, indeed, genius awakens in one of the islanders off the coast where Edward tells me only Irish is spoken. If such a one were to write a book about his island he would rank above all living writers, and he would be known for evermore as the Irish Dante. But the possibility of genius, completely equipped, arising in the Arran Islands seemed a little remote. To quote that very trite, mutton-chop-whiskered gentleman, Matthew Arnold, not only the man is required, but the moment.

The novel dreamed that night in the Temple could not be written by an Arran islander, so it will never be written, for alas! the impulse in me to redeem Ireland from obscurity was not strong enough to propel me from London to Holyhead, and then into a steamboat, and across Ireland to Galway, whence I should take a hooker whose destination was some fishing harbour in the Atlantic. No, it was not strong enough, and nothing is more depressing than the conviction that one is not a hero. And, feeling that I was not the predestined hero whom Cathleen ni Houlihan had been waiting for through the centuries, I fell to sighing, not for Cathleen ni Houlihan's sake, but my own, till my senses stiffening a little with sleep, thoughts began to repeat themselves.

Other men are sad because their wives and mistresses are ill, or because they die, or because there has been a fall in Consols, because their names have not appeared in the list of newly created peers, baronets, and knights; but the man of letters ... my energy for that evening was exhausted, and I was too weary to try to remember what Dujardin had said on the subject.

A chill came into the air, corresponding exactly with the chill that had fallen upon my spirit; the silence grew more intense and grey, and all the buildings stood stark and ominous.

Out of such stuff as Ireland dreams are made.... I haven't thought of Ireland for ten years, and tonight in an hour's space I have dreamed Ireland from end to end. When shall I think of her again? In another ten years; that will be time enough to think of her again. And on these words I climbed the long stone stairs leading to my garret.