When the boots asked me in the morning if I would like to have my water 'otted, it seemed to me that I was back in London; but the bareness of the hotel bedroom soon stimulated my consciousness, and with a pang yesterday returned to me—its telegram, its journey, and the hissing of The Countess Cathleen in the Antient Concert Rooms.

I haven't been shown Ireland as a land of endless enchantment, I said, turning over, and perhaps the wisest thing for me to do would be to go away by the morning boat. But the morning boat was already in the offing; word should have been left overnight that I was to be called at seven. An impulsive departure would be in strict keeping with myself ... a note for Yeats, enclosing a paragraph to be sent to the papers: Mr George Moore arrived in Dublin for the performance of The Countess Cathleen, but the hissing of the play so shocked his artistic sensibilities that he could not bide another day in Dublin, and went away by the eight o'clock boat. The right thing to do, without a doubt, only I had not done it, and to go away by the eleven o'clock boat from the North Wall would not be quite the same thing. There was an evening boat at eight to consider; it would give me time to see Yeats, with whom I had an appointment, and to find out if there was stuffing enough in Edward to hold out against the scandal that this pamphlet had provoked.

The Cross or the Guillotine. Into what land have I drifted? and slipping out of bed, I stood in pyjamas for some moments asking myself if a paragraph in the paper announcing my sudden departure would cause Ireland to blush for her disgraceful Catholicism....

But it is difficult to be angry with Ireland on a May morning when the sun is shining, and through clouds slightly more broken than yesterday's, but full of the same gentle, encouraging light—dim, ashen clouds out of which a white edging rose slowly, calling attention to the bright blue, the robe that perhaps noon would wear. All about the square the old brick houses stood sunning themselves, and I could see a chimney-stack steeped in rich shadow, touched with light, and beyond it, and under it, upon an illuminated wall, the direct outline of a gable; and at the end of the streets the mountains appeared, veiled in haze, delicate and refined as The Countess Cathleen.

A town wandering between mountain and sea, I said as I stood before my glass shaving, forgetful of Edward, for below me was Stephen's Green, and it took me back to the beginning of my childhood, to one day when I stole away, and inspired by an uncontrollable desire to break the monotony of infancy, stripped myself of my clothes, and ran naked in front of my nurse or governess, screaming with delight at the embarrassment I was causing her. She could not take me home along the streets naked, and I had thrown my clothes out of reach into a hawthorn—cap and jacket, shirt and trousers. Since those days the Green had been turned into an ornamental park by a neighbour of mine in Mayo, and given to the public; and telling the hall-porter that if Mr Yeats called he would find me in the Green, I went out thinking how little the soul of man changes. It declares itself in the beginning, and remains with us to the end. Was this visit to Ireland any thing more than a desire to break the monotony of my life by stripping myself of my clothes and running ahead a naked Gael, screaming Brian Boru?

There is no one in the world that amuses one as much as oneself. Whoever is conscious of his acts cannot fail to see life as a comedy and himself as an actor in it; but the faculty of seeing oneself as from afar does not save a man from his destiny. In spite of his foreseeing he is dragged on to the dreaded bourne like an animal, supposing always that animals do not foresee. But a spring morning will not tolerate thought of destiny, and of dreaded bournes. A glow of sunlight catches our cheeks, and we begin to think that life is a perfect gift, and that all things are glad to be alive. Our eyes go to the horse between the shafts; he seems to munch in his nosebag, conscious of the goodness of the day, and the dogs bark gaily and run, delighted with the world, interested in everything. The first thing I saw on entering the Green was a girl loosening her hair to the wind, and following her down a sunny alley, I found myself suddenly by a brimming lake curving like some wonderful caligraphy round a thickly planted headland, the shadows of some great elms reflected in the water, and the long, young leaves of the willow sweeping the surface. The span of a stone bridge hastened my steps, and leaning over the parapet I stood enchanted by the view of rough shores thickly wooded, and high rocks down which the water came foaming to linger in a quiet pool. I enjoyed standing on the bridge, feeling the breeze that came rustling by, flowing through me as if I were plant or cloud. The water-fowl beguiled me; many varieties of ducks, green-headed sheldrakes, beautiful, vivacious teal hurried for the bread that the children were throwing, and over them a tumult of gulls passed to and fro; the shapely little black-headed gull, the larger gull whose wings are mauve and whose breast is white, and a herring gull, I think, its dun-coloured porpoise-like body hanging out of great wings. Whither had they come? From their nests among the cliffs of Howth? Anyhow, they are here, being fed by children and admired by me.... A nurse-maid rushes forward, a boy is led away screaming; and wondering what the cause of his grief might be, I went in quest of new interests, finding one in an equestrian statue that ornamented the centre of the Green. There were parterres of flowers about it, and in the shadow people of all ages sat half asleep, half awake, enjoying the spring morning like myself; perhaps more than I did, they being less conscious of their enjoyment.

My mood being sylvan, I sought the forest, and after wandering for some time among the hawthorns, came upon a nook seemingly unknown to anybody but a bee that a sweet scent had tempted out of the hive. The insect was bustling about in the lilac bloom, reminding me that yesterday the crocuses were coming; and though they are ugly flowers, like cheap crockery, it was a sad surprise to find them over, and daffodils nodding in woods already beginning to smell rooky. And the rooks. How soon they had finished building! Before their eggs were hatched the hyacinths were wasting and the tulips opening—the pale yellow tulip which I admire so much, and the purple tulip which I detest, for it reminds me of an Arab drapery that I once used to see hanging out of a shop in the Rue de Rivoli. But the red tulip with yellow stripes is as beautiful as a Chinese vase, and it is never so beautiful as when it is growing among a bed of forget-me-nots—the tall feudal flower swaying over the lowly forget-me-nots, well named, indeed, for one can easily forget them. And thinking of Gautier's sonnet, Moi, je suis la tulipe, une fleur de Hollande, I remembered that lilies would succeed the tulips, and after the lilies would come roses, and then carnations. A woman once told me that all that goes before is a preliminary, a leading up to the carnation. After them are dahlias, to be sure, and I love them, but the garden is over in September, and the year declines into mist and shortening days and those papery flowers, ugly as the mops with which the coachmen wash carriage-wheels. All the same, this much can be said in praise of the winter months, that they are long, and sorrow with us, but the spring passes by, mocking us, telling us that the flowers return as youthful as last year's, but we....

I wandered on, now enchanted by the going and coming of the sun, one moment implanting a delicious warmth between my shoulder-blades, and at the next leaving me cold, forgetful of Yeats until I saw him in his black cloak striding in a green alley, his gait more than ever like a rook's. But the simile that had once amused me began to weary me from repetition, and resolving to banish it from my mind for evermore, I listened to him telling that he had been to the Kildare Street Club without finding Edward. Mr Martyn had gone out earlier than usual that morning, the hall-porter had said, and I growled out to Yeats: Why couldn't he came to see the tulips in the Green instead of bustling off in search of a theologian ... listening to nonsense in some frowsy presbytery? The sparrows, Yeats! How full of quarrel they are! And now they have all gone away into that thorn-bush!

By the water's edge we met a willing duck pursued by two drakes—a lover and a moralist. In my good nature I intervened, for the lover was being hustled off again and again, but mistaking the moralist for the lover, I drove the lover away, and left the moralist, who feeling that he could not give the duck the explanation expected from him, looked extremely vexed and embarrassed. And this little incident seemed to me full of human nature, but Yeats's thoughts were far above nature that morning, and he refused to listen, even when a boy pinched a nurse-maid and she answered his rude question very prettily with—she would be badly off without one.

The spring-time! The spring-time! Wake up and see it, Yeats, I cried, poking him up with this objection—that before he met the Indian who had taught him metaphysics his wont was to take pleasure in the otter in the stream, the magpie in the hawthorn and the heron in the marsh, the brown mice in and out of the corn-bin, and the ousel that had her nest in the willow under the bank. Your best poems came to you through your eyes. You were never olfactory. I don't remember any poems about flowers or flowering trees. But is there anything, Yeats, in the world more beautiful than a pink hawthorn in flower? For all the world like one of those purfled waistcoats that men wore in the sixteenth century. And then, changing the conversation, I told him about an article which I should write, entitled, The Soul of Edward Martyn, if dear Edward should yield to popular outcry and withdraw The Countess Cathleen. But I wouldn't be walking about all the morning, Yeats; let us sit on a bench where the breeze comes filled with the scent of the gillyflowers. What do you say to coming with me to see one of the old Dublin theatres—a wreck down by the quays? Some say it was a great place once ... before the Union.

The ghost of a theatre down by the quays? I answered.

One does not like to speak of a double self, having so often heard young women say they fear they never can be really in love, because of a second self which spies upon the first, forcing them to see the comic side even when a lover pleads. Yet if I am to give a full account of my visit to Dublin, it seems necessary that I should speak of my self-consciousness, a quality which I share with every human being; but as no two human beings are alike in anything, perhaps my self-consciousness may be different from another's. The reader will be able to judge if this be so when he reads how mine has been a good friend to me all my life, helping me to while away the tediousness of walks taken for health's sake, covering my face with smiles as I go along the streets; many have wondered, and never before have I told the secret of my smiling face. In my walks comedy after comedy rises up in my mind, or I should say scene after scene, for there are empty interspaces between the scenes, in which I play parts that would have suited Charles Mathews excellently well. The dialogue flows along, sparkling like a May morning, quite different from any dialogue that I should be likely to find pen in hand, for in my novels I can write only tragedy, and in life play nothing but light comedy, and the one explanation that occurs to me of this dual personality is that I write according to my soul, and act according to my appearance.

The reader will kindly look into his mind, and when the point has been considered he will be in a mood to take up my book again and to read my story with profit to himself.

These unwritten dialogues are often so brilliant that I stop in my walk to repeat a phrase, making as much of it as Mathews or Wyndham would make, regretting the while that none of my friends is by to hear me. All my friends are actors in these unwritten plays, and almost any event is sufficient for a theme on which I can improvise. But never did Nature furnish me with so rich a theme as she did when Yeats and Edward came to see me in Victoria Street. The subject was apparent to me from the beginning, and the reason given for my having agreed to act with them in the matter of the Irish Literary Theatre (the temptation to have a finger in every literary pie) has to be supplemented. There was another, and a greater temptation—the desire to secure a good part in the comedy which I foresaw, and which had for the last three weeks unrolled itself, scene after scene, exceeding any imagination of mine. Who could have invented the extraordinary rehearsals, Miss Vernon and her psaltery? Or the incident of Yeats's annunciation that Edward had consulted a theologian in London? My anger was not assumed; Yeats told me he never saw a man so angry; how could it be otherwise, ready as I am always to shed the last drop of my blood to defend art? Yet the spectacle of Edward and the theologian heresy-hunting through the pages of Yeats's plays was behind my anger always, an irresistible comicality that I should be able to enjoy some day. And then the telegram saying that the sceptre of intelligence had passed from London to Dublin. Who could have invented it? Neither Shakespeare nor Cervantes. Nor could either have invented Yeats's letter speaking of the Elizabethan audiences at the Antient Concert Rooms. The hissing of The Countess Cathleen had enraged me as every insult upon art must enrage me—my rage was not factitious; all the same, when Yeats spoke to me of his arch-enemy the author of the pamphlet The Cross or the Guillotine, the West Kensington conspirators and the President of the Order of the Golden Door who had expelled the entire society and gone away to Paris, I felt that the comedy was not begotten by any poor human Aristophanes below, but was the invention of the greater Aristophanes above.

We had only just finished the first act of the comedy in which I found myself playing a principal part, and the second act promised to exceed the first, as all second acts should, for I learned from Yeats that The Cross or the Guillotine had been sent to Cardinal Logue, and that a pronouncement was expected from him in the evening papers. If Logue's opinion was adverse to the play, Yeats was afraid that Edward would not dare to challenge his authority, he being Primate of all Ireland. Further rumours were current in Dublin that morning—the names of the priests to whom Gill had sent the play; it had gone, so it was said, to a Jesuit of high repute as an educationalist, and to a priest of some literary reputation in England. Yeats wouldn't vouch for the truth of these rumours, but if there were any truth in them he felt sure that Edward would be advised that to stop the play would raise the question whether Catholicism was incompatible with modern literature; and this was a question that no Jesuit would care to raise. The line Yeats said that the pamphlet laid special stress on was: And smiling, the Almighty condemns the lost. I begged for an explanation, for, as we can only conceive the Almighty in the likeness of a man, we must conceive him as smiling or frowning from his Judgment-seat. Frowning, I suppose, would mean that he was angry with those who had disobeyed the commands of his priests, and smiling would mean that he wasn't thinking of priests at all, which, of course, would be very offensive to a majority of the population. Yeats laughed, but could not be pressed into a theological argument. You look upon theology, Yeats, as a dead science. At that he cawed a little—the kindly caw of the jackdaw it was, and I wondered why he was not more angry with Edward and with the priests.

Ecclesiastical interference is intolerable, I said, trying to rouse him. But if he were indifferent to the fate of his play, if he did not care for literature as much as I thought he did, why was it that he did not notice the spring-time? Have tulips and nursemaids no part in the Celtic Renaissance? It isn't kind not to look at them; they have come out to be looked at. Do notice the fragrance of the lilacs. Are all of you Irish indifferent to the spring-time? Upon my word, it wouldn't surprise me if the spring forgot one of these days to turn up in Ireland. Yeats, I looked forward to finding Ireland a land of endless enchantment, but so far as I can see at present Ireland isn't bigger than a priest's back.

We passed out of the gates and walked up the sunny pavement; girls were going by in pretty frocks. That one, Yeats. How delightful she is in her lavender dress.

To exaggerate one's ignorance of Dublin seemed to me to be parcel of the character of the returned native, and though I knew well enough that we were walking down Grafton Street, Yeats was asked what street we were in. When he mentioned the name, I told him the name was familiar, but the street was changed, or my memory of it imperfect. For such parade—for parade it was—I have no fault to find with myself, nor for stopping Yeats several times and begging of him to admire the rich shadows that slumbered in the brick entanglements, making an ugly street seem beautiful. But I cannot recall, without frowning disapproval, the fact that I compared the sky at the end of Grafton Street to a beautiful sky by Corot. The sky I mean rises above yellow sand and walls, blue slates, and iron railings; and these enhance its beauty very much in the same way as the terra-cotta shop fronts in Grafton Street enhanced the loveliness of the pale blue sky that I saw the day I walked down Grafton Street with Yeats. To exalt art above nature has become a platitude; and resolving never to be guilty of this platitude again, I asked Yeats if the grey walls at the end of the street were Trinity College, and standing on my toes insisted on looking through the railings and admiring the greenswards, and the trees, and the cricket-match in progress. Yeats was willing to talk of Trinity, but not to look at it; and though I have no taste or knowledge in architecture, it was pleasant, even with Yeats, to admire the Provost's House and the ironwork over the gateway, and the beautiful proportions of the courtyard. It was pleasant to allow one's enthusiasm to flow over like a mug of ale at the sight of the front of Trinity, to contrast the curious differences in style that the Bank presented to the College—the College severe and in straight lines, the Bank all in curves.

The Venus de Milo facing the Antinous, I cried.

Yeats laughed a somewhat chilling approval as is his wont; all the same, he joined me in admiration of the curve of the parapet cutting the sky, the up-springing statues breaking the line and the beautiful pillared porticoes up and down the street, the one in Westmorland Street reminding me of a walk with my father when I was a child of ten. In those times a trade in umbrellas was permitted under the great portico, and though it could interest Yeats nowise, I insisted on telling him that I remembered my father buying an umbrella there, and that my affection for Dublin was wilting for lack of an umbrella-stand under the portico. Impossible to interest Yeats in that umbrella my father bought in the 'sixties, he seemed absorbed in some project on the other side of the street, and when the opposite pavement was reached he began to tell me of a friend of his, a clerk in a lawyer's office who I gathered was a revolutionary of some kind (after business hours), a follower of Miss Gonne. I refused, however, to listen to his account in Miss Gonne's prophecies or in the mild-eyed clerk on the third landing, who said he would join us on the quays when he had finished drafting a lease.

The quays were delightful that day, and I wished Yeats to agree with me that there is nothing in the world more delightful than to dawdle among seagulls floating to and fro through a pleasant dawdling light. But how is it, Yeats, you can only talk in the evening by the fire, that yellow hand drooping over the chair as if seeking a harp of apple-wood? Yeats cawed; he could only caw that morning, but he cawed softly, and my thoughts sang so deliciously in my head that I soon began to feel his ideas to be unnecessary to my happiness, and that it did not matter how long the clerk kept us waiting. When he appeared he and Yeats walked on together, and I followed them up an alley discreetly remaining in the rear, fearing that they might be muttering some great revolutionary scheme. I followed them up a staircase full of dust, and found myself to my great surprise in an old library. Very like a drawing by Phiz, I said to myself, bowing, for Yeats and the clerk were bowing apologies for our intrusion to twenty or more shabby-genteel scholars who sat reading ancient books under immemorial spider webs. At the end of the library there was another staircase, and we ascended, leaving footprints in the dust. We went along a passage, which opened upon a gallery overlooking a theatre, one that I had no difficulty in recognising as part of the work done in Dublin by the architects that were brought over in the eighteenth century from Italy. The garlands on the ceiling were of Italian workmanship, and the reliefs that remained on the walls. Once the pit was furnished with Chippendale chairs, carved mahogany chairs, perhaps gilded chairs in which ladies in high-bosomed dresses and slippered feet had sat listening to some comedy or tragedy when their lovers were not talking to them; and in those times the two boxes on either side of the stage let out at a guinea or two guineas for the evening.

Once supper-parties were served in them, for Abbey Street is only a few yards from the old Houses of Parliament, and even Grattan may have come to this theatre to meet a lady, whom he kissed after giving her an account of his speech. It amused me to imagine the love-scene, the lady's beauty and Grattan's passion for her, and I wondered what her end might have been, if she had died poor, without money to buy paint for her cheeks or dye for her hair, old, decrepit, and alone like that fair helm-maker who had lived five hundred years ago in France, or the helm-maker who had lived a thousand years ago in Ireland. She, too, had been sought by kings for her sweet breasts, her soft hair, her live mouth and sweet kissing tongue; and she, too, tells how she fell from love's high estate into shameful loves at nightfall in the wind and rain. I looked on the plank benches that were all the furniture of this theatre, I thought of the stevedores, the carters, the bullies and their trulls, eating their suppers, listening the while to some farce or tragedy written nobody knows by whom. Grattan's mistress may have sat among such, eating her bread and onions about eighty years ago. A little later she may have fallen below even the lust of the quays, and in her great want may have written to Grattan some simple letter, and her words were put into my mind. Dear Henry,—You will be surprised to hear from me after all these years. I am sorry to say that I am in very poor health, and distress. I had to leave a good place last Christmas, and have not been able to do much since. I thought you might send me a few shillings. If you do I shall be very grateful and will not trouble you again. Send them for old time's sake. Do you know that next year it will be forty years since we met for the first time? Looking over an old newspaper, I saw your speech, and am sending this to the House of Commons. My address is 24 Liffey Street; Mrs Mulhall, my proper name.

Grattan would read this letter, hurriedly thrusting it into the brown frock-coat with brass buttons which he wore, and that night, and the next day, and for many a week, the phrase of the old light-o'-love: Do you know that next year it will be forty years since we met for the first time? would startle him, and would recall a beautiful young girl whom he had met in some promenade, listening to music, walking under trees—the Vauxhall Gardens of Dublin—and he would say, Now she is old with grey hair and broken teeth, and he would wonder what was the good place she had lost last Christmas. He would send her something, or tell somebody to give her a few pounds, and then would think no more of her.

Yeats and the clerk were talking about the rebuilding of the theatre, saying that the outer walls seemed sound enough, but all the rest would have to be rebuilt, and I wandered round the gallery wondering what were Yeats's dreams while looking into the broken decorations and the faded paint. Plays were still acted in this bygone theatre. But what plays? And who were the mummers that came to play them?

As if in answer, a man and two women came on the stage. I heard their voices, happily not the words they were speaking, for at the bottom of my heart a suspicion lingered that it might be The Colleen Bawn they were rehearsing, and not to hear that this was so I moved up the gallery and joined Yeats, saying that we had been among dust and gloom long enough, that I detected drains, and would like to get back into the open air.

We moved out of the theatre, Yeats still talking to the clerk about the price of the building, telling him that the proprietor must never know from whom the offer came; for if he were to hear that there was a project on foot for the establishment of an Irish Literary Theatre his price would go up fifty per cent. The clerk muttered something about a hundred per cent. And if he were to hear that Mr Edward Martyn was as the back of it—Yeats muttered. The clerk interjected that if he were to hear that it would be hard to say what price he would not be putting upon his old walls.

A dried-up, dusty fellow was the clerk, a man about fifty, and I wondered what manner of revolution it might be that he was supposed to be stirring, and how deep was his belief that Maud Gonne would prove herself to be an Irish Joan of Arc; not very much deeper than Yeats's belief that he would one day become possessed of a theatre in Dublin and produce literary plays in it for a people unendowed with any literary sense whatever. Yet they continued shepherding their dreams up the quays, just as if The Countess Cathleen had not been hissed the night before, as if Cardinal Logue were not about to publish an interdiction, as if Edward were the one that could be recovered from ecclesiasticism.



It's extraordinary what conviction they can put into their dreams, I thought, and we walked on in silence, for in spite of myself Yeats's words had revealed to me a courage and a steadfastness in his character that I had not suspected. There is more stuffing in him than I thought for, and I shouldn't be surprised if he carried something through. What that will be, and how he will carry it, it is impossible to form any idea.

Stopping suddenly, he told me that T. P. Gill, the editor of the Daily Express, expected me to lunch, and he was anxious I should meet him, for he was one of the leaders of the movement; an excellent journalist, he said, who had been editing the paper with great brilliancy ever since he and Horace Plunkett had changed it from an organ of mouldering Unionism into one interested in the new Ireland.

Somebody—Gill, perhaps—had been kind enough to send me the Express during the winter, and I used to read it, thinking it even more unworldly than any of the little reviews of my youth edited by Parnassians and Realists. All the winter I had read in it stories of the Celtic Gods—Angus, Dana, and Lir, intermingled with controversies between Yeats and John Eglinton regarding the literary value of national legend in modern literature; and when the Irish Literary Theatre was spoken of, the Express seemed to have discovered its mission—the advancement of Celtic drama. Angus and Lir were lifted out of, and Yeats and Edward lifted into their thrones; and on the Saturday before the arrival of the company in Dublin the Express had printed short but succinct biographies of the actors and actresses whom I had picked up in the casual Strand. If the entire Comédie Française had come over with plays by Racine and Victor Hugo, not the old plays, but new ones lately discovered, which had not yet been acted, the Express could not have displayed more literary enthusiasm. A newspaper so confused and disparate that I had never been able to imagine what manner of man its editor might be. A tall, dark, and thin man with feverish, restless hands and exalted diction whenever he spoke, was dismissed for a short, square, and thick-set man like a bull-dog, with great melancholy eyes, and he in turn was dismissed for a stout, elderly man with spectacles, very commonplace and polite, speaking little, and not interested at all in literature or in theosophy, but in something quite different, and I had often sat thinking what this might be, without being able to satisfy myself, getting up from my chair at last, saying that only Balzac could solve the problem; only he could imagine the inevitable personality of the editor of the Daily Express.

He would have foreseen that the editor of this extraordinary sheet wore a Henri Quatre beard; whereas the beard, the smile, the courtesy, the flow of affable conversation, were a surprise to me. Balzac would have foreseen the wife and children, and their different appearances and personalities; whereas I had always imagined the editor of the Express a bachelor. Balzac would have divined the family man in his every instinct, despite the round white brows shaded by light hair, curling prettily; despite the eyes—the word that comes to the pen is furtive, but for some reason, perhaps from repetition, the expression furtive eyes has come to mean very little. Gill's eyes seem to follow a dream and then they suddenly return, and he watches his listener, evidently curious to know what effect he is producing upon him, and then the eyes wander away again in pursuit of the dream. The coming and going of his eyes interested me until the nose caught my attention—a large one with a high bridge, and with those clean-cut nostrils without which every nose is ugly. But the nose is said to be an index of character, telling of resolution; and the hand, too, is said to be a tell-tale feature: I noticed that Gill's hands were small and white, with somewhat crooked and ill-shapen nails. A hand of languid movement—one that went to the beard, caressing it constantly, reminding one of a cat licking its fur, with this difference, however, that a cat is silent while it licks itself, whereas Gill could talk while he dallied with his beard. It has been said, too, that a man's character transpires in his dress, and Gill was carefully dressed. His shirt-collar looked more like London than Dublin washing, and I asked myself if his washing went to London while I admired the carefully chosen necktie and the pin. The grey suit fitted his shoulders so well that I decided he must have gone back and forwards a good many times to try on, and then that he did not give his tailor much trouble, for his figure was well knit, square shoulders, clean-cut flanks. A delicate man withal, said the hollow chest, and I remembered that Yeats had told me that last winter Gill had been obliged to go abroad in search of health.

We were not altogether strangers, as he reminded me—he had had the pleasure of meeting me in London. We had been fellow-workers on the Speaker, and so it gave him much pleasure to see me in Ireland. I'm afraid that Ireland doesn't want either Yeats or me, I growled out; and this remark carried us right into the middle of the controversy regarding The Countess Cathleen. When he was in London Martyn had spoken to him on the subject, and had told him that a learned theologian had been consulted and that the incident of the crucifix kicked about the stage by the starving peasantry had been cut out.

I don't remember the incident you speak of. Martyn insisted on its omission, you say? Without answering me, Gill continued, speaking very slowly, hesitating between his words. He seemed to take pleasure in hearing himself talk, and this was strange to me, for he was saying nothing of importance, merely that the subject of the play was calculated to wound the religious susceptibilities of the Irish people; and while stroking his beard he continued to speak of the famine times and of the proselytising by the Protestants: memories like these were too deep to be washed away by mere poetry, though, indeed, he would yield to nobody in his admiration of Yeats's poetry; and if Yeats had consulted him regarding the choice of a subject for a play, he certainly would not have advised him to choose The Countess Cathleen. All the same, he had done all that he possibly could do for the Irish Literary Theatre, as I must have seen by his paper. He had even done more than what had appeared in the paper, for he had, himself, sent The Countess Cathleen to two priests, and placing himself in the light of a wise mediator, he told me that both these priests had given their verdict in favour of the play. One of them, a Jesuit of considerable attainments, had pointed out that the language objected to was put into the mouths of demons.

Who could not be expected to say altogether kind things of their Creator, I interjected. Gill laughed, and his laughter seemed to reveal a temperament that ripples, pleasantly murmuring, over shallows, never sinking into a deep pool or falling from any great height. A pleasant stream, I said to myself, only I wish it would flow a little faster. The opposition to The Countess Cathleen in the Antient Concert Rooms was no doubt regrettable, but I must not judge Ireland too harshly. The famine times were remembered in Ireland; and I had lived too long out of Ireland to sympathise with the people on this point. Yeats had lived more in Ireland; but he, too, was liable to misjudge Ireland, being a Protestant. Gill felt that there was an Ireland in Ireland that Protestants could not understand, and he repeated that if Yeats had come to him in the first instance he certainly would have advised him to choose another subject. When Parnell consulted him at the time of the split—I begin to be interested, I said to myself, and wondering what advice Gill had given to Parnell, all my attention was strained to hear. The fault was mine, no doubt, but at the supreme moment Gill's words and voice began to ripple vaguely, like the stream, and I heard that if a great Liberal newspaper had existed then (he used the word Liberal in its broadest sense), it would have been possible to arrive at some compromise between Parnell and the party, and himself would have gone to the prelates, and knowing Ireland as well as he did, he thought that the situation might have been saved. The present situation might be saved if somebody came forward and gave Ireland a newspaper, a newspaper bien entendu, that would give expression to all the different minds now working in Ireland. He was doing this in the Express, in a small way, for his enterprise was checked by lack of capital. All the same, he had managed to bring more culture into the Express than had ever entered into it before—John Eglinton, AE, Yeats. Under his direction the Express was the first paper that had attempted to realise that Ireland had an aesthetic spirit of her own.

This is true, I said to myself, and I lent to Gill an attentive ear, thinking he was interested in art; but he glided away from my questions, passing into an account of the co-operative movement, apparently as much concerned in dairies as in statues; and for an hour I listened to his slumbrous talk until at last it seemed to me that a firkin rolled out of the door of one of the dairies, and that I could see a dainty little man fixed upon it for ever, a sort of petrifaction having taken place, a statue upon butter or—

My reverie was broken by Gill, who questioned me regarding my first impressions of Dublin, if I would be kind enough to write them out for him, and if not, he was interested to hear them for his own pleasure. On the subject of Dublin the leader of the Renaissance seemed to hold far-reaching views. He knew Paris well, and feeling that the conversation would be agreeable to me, he spoke of the immense benefit of the work that Baron Haussmann had done there; and then, as if spurred by a sense of rivalry, he described the great boulevards he would cut through Dublin if he were entrusted with the dictatorship of Ireland for fifteen years. Nor was this all. The University question could be dealt with, and the Home Rule question to the satisfaction of all parties. It seemed to me that I had come upon the original fount of all wisdom; it flowed from him in a slow but continual stream, bearing along in its current different schemes; one, I remember, was for the construction of a new bank, for the bankers would have to be housed when they were turned out of the old House of Parliament. Whereas I was thinking whether his father was Balzac or Turgenev, and perhaps this point might never have been decided if he had not suddenly begun to talk about Trinity College, saying there was a wider and more Bohemian culture, one to which he would like to give effect. By means of the newspaper you were speaking of just now? I asked.

The newspaper would be necessary, but a café was necessary too. A café was Continental, and the new Dublin should model itself more upon Continental than British ideas; and we talked on, discussing the effect of the café on the intellectual life in Dublin. The café would be useless unless it remained open until two in the morning. A short Act of Parliament might easily be introduced, and the best site would be the corner of Grafton Street and the Green. The site, however, had this disadvantage—it would go to make Stephen's Green the centre of Dublin, and this was not desirable. The old centre of Dublin, which was in the north, should be restored to its former prosperity. Another café might be established on the quays, an excellent site were it not for the Liffey. I mentioned that I had only seen the river when the tide was up, and Gill told me that when it was out the smell was not pleasant. The new drainage, however, would soon be completed, and a café could be opened at the corner of O'Connell Street, but for the moment the corner of Grafton Street seemed the more practicable site.

A question regarding the probable cost of the café brought a slight cloud into his face, but it vanished quickly as soon as he had stroked his beard, and he spoke to me at great length about a man whom he had met in America, and with whom he had become great friends. This man was a millionaire, and his ambition was to build hotels in Ireland, whether for the sake of adding to his millions, or diminishing them for the sake of Ireland, Gill did not know. Probably his friend was influenced by both reasons, for, of course, to found hotels that did not pay some dividend would be of no benefit to anybody. Gill continued to talk of possible dividends, and I listened to him with difficulty, for my curiosity was now keen to hear from him the reciprocation of the millionaire in the building of hotels and the founding of a real Parisian café at the corner of Stephen's Green and Grafton Street, and I waited almost breathless for the answer to this conundrum. It was simple enough when it came. After the building of the hotels a great deal of money would remain over, and with this money the millionaire would build the café.

There isn't a drop of Balzac blood in him, I said to myself; he is pure Turgenev, and perhaps Ireland is a little Russia in which the longest way round is always the shortest way home, and the means more important than the end.

Two or three young men who wrote in the Express every night had been invited to come to take coffee with us after lunch, and their arrival was a relief to both Gill and myself. We had been talking of Ireland for several hours, and Gill had begun to speak of the time when he would have to go down to the office. The young men, too, wished to speak to him about what they were to write that evening, for Gill explained that he did not write very much himself in his newspaper; his notion of editing was to pump ideas into people; and after listening for some time I got up to go. It was then that Gill told me that the newspaper of which he was the editor was offering a great dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel to the Irish Literary Theatre, and he hoped that I would be present.

On this we parted, and a few moments afterwards I found myself lost in Nassau Street, for Nature has denied me all sense of topography, and while looking up and down the street wondering how I should get to Merrion Square, I caught sight of Yeats coming out of a bun-shop. By calling wildly I succeeded in awakening him from his reverie. He stopped, and in answer to my question told me that he had been to Edward's club; but Edward was not there. With one of his theologians, no doubt, both deep in your heresies, I said, and we walked on in silence until a newsboy posted his placard against some railings, and we read: Letter from Cardinal Logue condemning The Countess Cathleen.

Yeats pointed, saying, There's Edward, and I saw him in his short black jacket and voluminous grey trousers reading the newspaper at the kerb. There will be no plays tonight! we cried. His glasses dropped from his high nose, but he caught them as they fell. You haven't seen Logue's letter, then? He admits that he hasn't read the play; he has only judged it by extracts. And you can't judge a work by extracts. Besides, I said, the two priests to whom the play was sent have decided in its favour. Gill told me that he showed you some letters from them. As well as I remember he showed me—But, my dear friend, you must know whether he showed you a letter or not. Yes, I'm practically sure that I saw a letter, but I'm not affected by stray opinions, whether they are in favour of the play or against it. You may not have sent the play to two priests, but you brought it to a theologian. That was in England. Of course you were then in a Protestant country. And did he decide in favour of the play? No, he didn't. Very much the other way.

Edward's sense of humour does not desert him even when he fears that his soul may be grilled; and he entertained us with an account of the evening he had spent with the theologian.



He read aloud the best opinions on the subject. It was like going to a lawyer. Blackstone writes according to So-and-so Vic. Who was this theologian? Edward refused to give up his name, and I could not guess it, although he allowed me many guesses. Somebody you never heard of. Then I am to understand the plays will go on as usual? I see no reason why not. The Cardinal hasn't read the play; he has put himself out of court. But if he had read the play, Edward, and had interdicted it?

An interdiction would be quite another matter. I'm not obliged to accept stray opinions, but an interdiction would be very serious. It would be a very serious matter for me to persist in supporting a play that the head of the Church in Ireland deemed harmful!

I suggested that Dr Walshe was a sufficient authority in his own diocese.

There's that, too, and I wouldn't be surprised if Walshe said some of those sharp things that ecclesiastics can, on occasion, say about each other.

What enrages me, I said, turning to Yeats, is the insult offered to mankind by this Cardinal. But you don't seem interested, Yeats. I can't understand why you are so little interested in the general question, apart from the particular.

I am interested; but the matter isn't so serious as you think. I know Ireland better than you, and am more patient.

Yeats's words appeased me, and without knowing it my thoughts were drawn away from the peasant Cardinal to the spring weather, and I relinquished myself to the delight of the warm air, to the beauty of the sunlight among the flowering trees, to the sky, so blue, so ecstatic, lifting the heart to rapture; and knowing Edward's love of architecture, and feeling he needed a little compensation for the courage he had shown, I called his attention to a piece of monumented wall, designed to conceal the rear of a gardener's cottage, but a beautiful thing in itself, and adding to the beauty of the square.

Two curving wings, an arched recess, vases and terra-cotta plaques—very eighteenth century, a century to which Edward has never been able to extend his sympathy, calling it with some truth a century of boudoirs, and its genius the decoration of an alcove. His sympathies flow out more naturally to the cathedral, to the monastery, and to the palace, never very generously to the dwelling-house.



Edward is always willing to discuss his ideas, but for the moment he was taken with the beauty of the monumented wall.

As a screen, he said, it is beautiful, but the sixteenth century would have built—

Built a cottage that would have been beautiful all the way round? No, it wouldn't. As I have said, you've never understood the eighteenth century, Edward, and your misunderstanding is quite natural; a century of feminine intrigue, subtle women devoted to the arts and to the delightful abbes, who visited artists in their studios, drawing attention to the points of their female models. In the sixteenth century Roman priests no longer spoke of their sons as their nephews, and went into the church laughing at the Mass they were going to celebrate. A sixteenth-century Cardinal would have been highly amused at the thought of condemning a beautiful play because the writer spoke of the Almighty smiling as He condemned the lost. He would have said, But if the line is beautiful? and taking Logue by the arm, he would have told him that religion is interesting until we are twenty. After that it becomes a means to an end, and the mission of every Cardinal should be to find a mistress who would respect his nerves, and to collect some passable pictures. My dear friends, how you have duped me! Do you remember what you told me about the Celtic Renaissance? Poets and painters burgeoning on every bush.

I laid a hand on Edward's shoulder and another on Yeats's, and looked into their faces. Now, Edward—Well, all I can say is, the Irish people liked my play, and it wouldn't have been listened to in London ... any more than Ibsen is.

And what about Yeats?

His would have been listened to if he had not put things into it which shocked people's feelings. I know there are many calling themselves Christians who are only Christians in name, but it is very hurtful for those who really believe to have to listen to lines.... And Edward stopped, fearing to wound Yeats's feelings.

He bade us goodbye soon after. Perhaps he is going to Vespers, I said. A good fellow—an excellent one, and a man who would have written well if his mother hadn't put it into his head that he had a soul. The soul is a veritable pitfall. I'm afraid, Yeats, you'll find it difficult to persuade him to buy the theatre for you. He would live in terror lest you should let him in for some heresy.