I read an historic entertainment in the appearance of the waiters; they were more clean and spruce and watchful than usual; the best shirts had been ordered from the laundry, every button-hole held its stud, shoes had been blacked scrupulously; and the head waiter, a tall, thin man, confident in his responsibilities, pointed out the way to the cloak-room, and in subdued voice told us that we should find Mr Gill in the ante-room.

And we found him receiving his guests, blithe and alert as a bird in the spring-time. All his seriousness had vanished from him, he stroked his beard and he laughed, and his eye brightened as he told of his successes ... the extreme ends of Dublin had yielded to his persuasiveness, and under the same roof-tree that night Trinity College and the Gaelic League would dine together. Hyde was coming, and John O'Leary, the Fenian leader, was over yonder. And looking through the evening coats and shirt-fronts, I caught sight of the patriarchal beard that had bored me years ago in Paris, for John would talk about Ireland when I wanted to talk about Ingres and Cabanel. All the same I went to him, and he angered me for the last time by asking for news of Marshall, my friend in the Confessions, instead of speaking to me about the Gaelic literary movement. As tedious as ever, I said, escaping from him; and seeing nobody who might amuse me, I returned to Gill to reproach him for not having asked his guests to bring their females with them.

At these public repasts there is nothing to distract our eyes from the food but the eternal feminine, and when that is absent, the eternal masculine confronts us shamelessly in his office clothes; and looking round I said to myself not an opera-hat among them; and lowering my eyes, I noticed that some of the men had not even taken the trouble to change their shoes. Perhaps they haven't even changed their socks, and to pass the time away I began to wonder how it was that women could take any faint interest in men. Every kind seemed present: men with bellies and without, men with hair on their heads, bald men, short-legged men and long-legged men; but looking up and down the long tables, I could not find one that might inspire passion in a woman; no one even looked as if he would like to do such a thing. And with this sad thought in my head I sought for my chair, and found it next to a bald, obese professor, with Yeats on the other side, next to Gill, at the head of the table. It is always nice to see dear Edward, and he was not far away, on Gill's left hand, as happy as a priest at a wedding. He sat, chewing his cud of happiness, a twig from The Heather Field; slightly triumphant, I thought, over Yeats, whose Countess Cathleen had not been received quite so favourably.

Beside me, on my right, was a young man, clean-shaven and demure; the upper lip was long, but the nose and eyes and forehead were delicately cut, like a cameo, and his bright auburn hair was brushed over his white forehead, making a line that a girl might have envied if she were inclined to that style of coiffure. He answered my questions, but he answered them somewhat dryly. Yeats would not speak, but sat all profile, like a drawing on an Egyptian monument, thinking his speech; and it was not until we had eaten the soup and the fish, and a glass of champagne had been drunk, that I discovered the young man at my right elbow to be full of information about the people present.

The very person, I said, I stand in need of. And that is why Gill put him next to me. So I began to speak of our host, of his kind and genial nature. My young friend knew him (he was one of the writers on the Express), and seemed to be much amused at my story of Gill's plan to introduce Continental culture into Dublin. As we talked of Gill our eyes went towards him, and we admired in silence, thinking how like he was to some portraits we had seen in the Louvre, or in the National Gallery—we were not sure which.

Bellini, I think.

My young friend had some knowledge of the art of painting, for he corrected me, saying that Giorgione was the first designer of that round brow, shaded by pretty curling hair. I believe you're right, I said. It was he who started the fashion for a certain wisdom which Gill seems to have caught admirably, and which, though enhanced by, is not dependent upon the beauty of a blond and highly trimmed beard.

Did you see a portrait of Gill done before he grew his beard?

I answered that I had not seen it, surprised a little by the question. My young friend smiled.

He rarely shows that photograph now. Perhaps he has destroyed it.

But at what are you smiling?

Well, you see, he answered, Gill was nothing before he grew his beard. His face is so thin, and falls away at the chin so quickly, that no one credited him with any deep and commanding intelligence.

The round, prettily drawn eyes have nothing to recommend them. One couldn't call them crafty eyes.

My young friend smiled, but as I was about to ask him why he was smiling. Gill addressed some remarks to me over Yeats's head, disturbing, I feared, some wondrous array of imagery collecting in the poet's mind. The professor I had perforce to fall back upon, and I succeeded in engaging his attention with a remark regarding Tennyson's proneness to write the sentiment of his time rather than the ideas of all time.

But his language is always so exquisite. You must know the line—something you know: Doves murmuring in immemorial elms, not since Milton, and I am not sure that I don't prefer Tennyson's imagery, excepting that immortal line: Blazed in the forehead of the morning sky. Give me, said the professor, the sublime diction. You can have all the rest—the sentiments, the ideas, the thoughts ... all. You remember that wonderful line when he addresses Virgil, that ... that ... (I waited for the rare adjective), that excellent line. The waiter interposed a bottle between us. This excellent wine goes very well with the entrée. He was then called into the conversation which Gill was holding with Edward, regarding the necessity of founding a school of acting, and I found myself free to return to the young gentleman on my right.

You mentioned just now that Gill's beard was the origin of Gill.

Lowering his voice, my young neighbour said:

I'm afraid the story is difficult to tell here.

Nobody is listening; everybody is engaged in different conversations.

Gill is not very strong, and has often to go away in quest of health. It was in Paris that it happened.

We were interrupted many times by the waiters, and our neighbours, seeing that we were amused, sought to share our amusement. All the same, the young man succeeded in telling me how, at the end of a long convalescence, Gill had entered a barber's shop, his beard neglected, growing in patches, thicker on one side of the face than on the other. He fell wearily into a chair, murmuring, La barbe, and exhausted by illness and the heat of the saloon, he did not notice for some time that no one had come to attend upon him. The silence at last awoke him out of the lethargy or light doze into which he had slipped, and looking round it seemed to him that his dream had come true; that the barber had gone: that he was alone, for some reason unaccountable, in the shop. A little alarmed he turned in his chair, and for a moment could find nobody. The barber had retreated to the steps leading to the ladies' saloon, whence he could study his customer intently, as a painter might a picture. As Gill was about to speak the barber struck his brow, saying, Style Henri Quatre, and drew his scissors from the pocket of his apron.

Gill does not remember experiencing any particular emotion while his beard was being trimmed. It was not until the barber gave him the glass that he felt the sudden transformation—felt rather than saw, for the transformation effected in his face was little compared with that which had happened in his soul. In the beginning was the beard, and the beard was with God, who in this case happened to be a barber; and glory be to the Lord and to his shears that a statesman of the Renaissance walked that day up the Champs Élysées, his thoughts turning—and we think not unnaturally—towards Machiavelli. A Catholic Machiavelli is not possible, nor an Alexander the Sixth, a Caesar Borgia, nor a Julius the Second; but if one is possessed of the sense of compromise, difficulties can be removed, and Gill's alembicated mind soon discovered that it was possible to conceive Machiavelli with all that great statesman's bad qualities removed and the good retained. As he walked it seemed to him all the learning of his time had sprung up in him. He found himself like the great men of the sixteenth century, well versed in the arts of war and peace, a patron of the arts and sciences.

But at that moment reality thrust itself forward, shattering his dream. Gill had been an active Nationalist—that is to say, he had driven about the country on outside cars, occasionally stopping at crossroads to tell little boys to throw stones at the police; in other words, he had been a campaigner, and had felt that he was serving his country by being one. But since he had set eyes on his new beard the conviction quickened in him that he would be able to serve his country much better by dispensing his prodigal wisdom than by engaging in the rough-and-tumble fights of party politics. The inside of gaols were well enough for such simple minds as Davitt and O'Brien, but not for a mind grown from a Henri Quatre beard; and remembering the celebrated saying of him who had worn the beard four hundred years ago—Paris vaut bien une messe-Gill muttered in his beard, Ma barbe vaut mieux que le plan.

About the time of Gill's beard Horace Plunkett was engaged in laying the foundations of what he believed to be a great social reformation in Ireland. But Plunkett, Gill reflected as he walked gaily, with an alert step and brightening eye, did not know Ireland. A Protestant can never know Ireland intimately. Such was Gill's conviction, and there was the still deeper conviction that he was the only man who could advise Plunkett, and save him from the many pitfalls into which he was sure to tumble. All that Plunkett required was something of the genial spirit of the Renaissance. Again beguiled by the delicious temptation, Gill paused in his walk. Plunkett could not associate himself with one who had been engaged in the Plan of Campaign. The Plan had faded with the trimming of his beard; and he could hardly believe that he had been connected with it, except, indeed, as a romantic incident in his career. The only difficulty—if it were a difficulty—was to find a means of explaining his repudiation of the Plan satisfactorily. The Irish atmosphere is dense, and to tell the people that it had all gone away with the shaggy ends of his beard would hardly satisfy them. But in Ireland there is always Our Holy Mother the Church, and the Church had quite lately condemned the Plan. Gill is a faithful son of the Church. Of course, of course. The error into which he had fallen had gone with the shaggy beard, and with his trimmed beard, and his trimmed soul, Gill appeared in Dublin, henceforth known to his friends as Tom the Trimmer.

An excellent story that probably started from some remark of Gill's, and was developed as it passed from mouth to mouth. A piece of folk. If a story be told three or four times by different people it becomes folk. You have, no doubt, stories of the same kind about everybody?

This last remark was injudicious, for I seemed to frighten my neighbour, and I had some difficulty in tempting him into gossip again.

Are there any other contributors to the Express present?

Yes, he said, yielding again to his temptation to talk. T. W. Rolleston. Do you see that handsome man a head above everybody else, sitting a little way down the table?

Yes, I said. And what a splendid head and shoulders! Byron said he would give many a poem for Southey's, and Southey's were not finer than that man's.

As if guessing that somebody was admiring him, Rolleston looked down the table, and I saw how little back there was to his head.

He lacks something, my neighbour said; and I was told how Rolleston came down every evening to write his leader in a great cloak and in leggings if it were raining, bringing with him his own pens and ink and blotting-pad, all the paraphernalia of his literature.

A man like that writing leaders! I said. Nothing short of an Odyssey, one would have thought—

So many people did think. He was a great scholar at Trinity, and in Germany he translated, or helped to translate, Walt Whitman into German. When he came back, the prophet, the old man, John O'Leary, whom you told me you knew in France, the ancient beard at the end of the room, accepted him as Parnell's successor.

And now he is writing leaders for the Express! How did the transformation happen?

O'Grady tells a story—

Who is O'Grady? I asked, enjoying the gossip hugely; and my neighbour drew my attention to a grey, round-headed man, and after looking at him for some time I said: How lonely he seems among all these people! Does he know nobody? Or is he very unpopular?

He is very little read, but we all admire him. He is our past; and my neighbour told me that O'Grady had written passages that for fiery eloquence and energy were equal to any that I would find in Anglo-Irish literature. Only—

Only what? I asked.

And he told me that O'Grady's talent reminded him of the shaft of a beautiful column rising from amid rubble-heaps. After a pause, during which we mused on the melancholy spectacle, I said:

Rolleston—you were going to tell me about Rolleston.

O'Grady tells that he found Rolleston a West Briton, but after a few lessons in Irish history Rolleston donned a long black cloak and a slouch hat, and attended meetings, speaking in favour of secret societies, persuading John O'Leary to look upon him as one that might rouse the country, going much further than I had ever dreamed of going, O'Grady said. His extreme views frightened me a little, but when I met him next time and began to speak to him about the Holy Protestant Empire, he read me a paper on Imperialism.

And when did that happen?

About ten years ago, a Messiah that punctured while the others were going by on inflated tyres ... poor Rolleston punctured ten years ago.

And we talked of Messiahs, going back and back until we arrived at last at Krishna, the second person of the Hindoo Trinity, whose crucifixion, it is related, happened between heaven and earth.

Two beautiful poems and a great deal of scholarship which he doesn't know what to do with. How very sad! And looking at him, I said: A noble head and shoulders. What a good tutor he would make if I had children!

So from one remark to another I was led into saying spiteful things about men whom I did not know, and who were destined afterwards to become my friends.

Tell me about some of your other contributors—about the professor who writes Latin and Greek verses as well as he writes English. He reviews books for you, doesn't he?

Yes; but I beg of you to speak a little lower, or he'll hear you.

No, no; he's talking with Gill and Yeats.

Gill is terrified, my young friend said, lest Yeats should speak disrespectfully of Trinity College. He has taken a great deal of trouble about this dinner, and believes that it will unite the country in a common policy if Yeats doesn't split it up on him again.

At that moment the professor turned to me, and asked me to lunch the following day at Trinity, impressing upon me the necessity of coming down a little early, in time to have just a glass of wine before lunch. His doctor had forbidden him all stimulants in the morning, and by stimulants he understood whisky. But a bottle of wine, he said, was a tenuous thing, and he would like to avail himself of my visit to Dublin to drink one with me. I could see that we had now struck upon his interest in life, and with a show of interest which he had not manifested in Virgil's poetry, he said:

Just a glass of Marsala, the ancient Lilybaeum. You know, the grape is so abundant there that they never think of mixing it with bad brandy.

At that moment somebody spoke to me, and when I had answered a few questions I heard the professor saying that he had gone down for lunch to some restaurant. Nothing much today, John. Just a dozen of oysters and a few cutlets, and a quart of that excellent ale.

Again my attention was distracted by a waiter pressing some ice-pudding upon me, and I lost a good deal of information regarding the professor's arduous day. As soon, however, as I had helped myself I heard a story, whether it related to yesterday or some previous time I cannot say.

After that I had nothing at all, until something brought me to the cupboard, and there, behold! I found a bottle of lager. I said: Smith has been remiss. He has mixed the Bass and the lager. But no. They were all full, twelve bottles of Bass and only one of lager; so I took it, as it seemed a stray and lonely thing.

It appears that the professor then continued his annotations of Aristophanes until the light began to fade.

I thought of calling again on Lilybaeum. Really, the more I drink of it the more honest and excellent I find it. When the bottle was finished it was time to return home to dinner, and I learned that the professor's abstinence was rewarded by the delight he took in the first whisky and soda after dinner.

An excellent old pagan he seems to be, Quintus Horatius Flaccus of Dublin, untroubled by any Messianic idea. Now Hyde—I've heard a good deal about him. Can you point him out to me?

As my neighbour was about to do so Gill rose up at the head of the table.

Speech time has come, I said.

Gill read a letter from W. E. H. Lecky, who regretted that he was prevented from being present at the dinner, and then went on to say that the other letter was from a gentleman whose absence he was sure was greatly regretted. He alluded to his friend, Mr Horace Plunkett, who was, if he might be allowed to say so, one of the truest and noblest sons that Ireland had ever begotten.

I've noticed, I said to my young friend, even within a few days I have been in Ireland, that Ireland is spoken of, not as a geographical, but a sort of human entity. You are all working for Ireland, and I hear now that Ireland begets you; a sort of Wotan who goes about—

Somebody looked in our direction, somebody said Hush! And Gill continued, saying they had had an exciting week in Ireland, one that would be memorable in the history of the country. For the first time Ireland had been profoundly stirred upon the intellectual question. He said he regarded the controversy which Yeats's play had aroused as one of the best signs of the times. It showed that they had reached at last the end of the intellectual stagnation of Ireland, and that, so to speak, the grey matter of Ireland's brain was at last becoming active.

Ireland's brain! Just now it was the loins of Ireland.

Gill's soul set free flowed on rejoicing in journalistic vapidities that had a depressing effect upon Yeats, who seemed to sink farther and farther into himself. But continuing unabashed his gentle rigmarole, Gill talked on. He for one had always regarded Yeats, broadly, as one who held the sword of the spirit in his hand, and waged war upon the gross host of materialism, and as an Irishman of genius who had devoted a noble enthusiasm to honouring his country by the production of beautiful work.... What should he say of Mr Martyn? There was no controversy about him. Their minds were not occupied by controversy, but with that which must be gratifying to Mr Martyn and to all of them—the knowledge that he had produced a great and original play, and that Ireland had discovered in him a dramatist fitted to take rank among the first in Europe.

I think everybody present thought this eulogy a little exaggerated, for I noticed that everybody hung down his head and looked into his plate, everybody except Edward, who stared down the room unabashed, which, indeed, was the only thing for him to do, for it is better when a writer is praised that he should accept the praise loftily than that he should attempt to excuse himself, a mistake that I fell into at the St James's Theatre.

Gill continued in the same high key. This gathering of Irishmen, which he thought he might say was representative of the intellect of Dublin, and included men of the utmost differences of opinion on every question which now divided Irishmen, was, to his mind, a symbol of what they were moving towards in this country. He thought they had now reached the stage at which they had begun to recognise the profundity of the saying:

The mills of God grind slowly, Yet they grind exceeding small.

They all felt, instinctively now, that the time for the reconstruction of Ireland had begun. They stood among the wreckage of old society and felt that out of the ruins they were called upon to build a new Ireland. No matter what their different opinions on various questions might be, they all felt within them a throb of enthusiasm for their new life, their own country, and a determination that, irrespective of different views, they would give their country an intellectual and a political future worthy of all the sufferings that every class and creed of the country had gone through in the past.



My young friend's cynicism now began to get upon my nerves, and turning upon him rudely, I said:

Then you don't believe in the language movement?

His reply not being satisfactory, and his accent not convincing of his Celtic origin, I grew suddenly hostile, and resolved not to speak to him again during dinner; and to show how entirely I disapproved of his attitude towards Ireland, I affected a deep interest in the rest of Gill's speech, which, needless to say, was all about working for Ireland. Amid the applause which followed I heard a voice at the end of the table saying, We want more of that in Ireland.

My neighbour laughed, but his laughter only irritated me still more against him, and my eyes went to Yeats, who sat, his head drooping on his shirt-front, like a crane, uncertain whether he should fold himself up for the night, and I wondered what was the beautiful eloquence that was germinating in his mind. He would speak to us about the Gods, of course, and about Time and Fate and the Gods being at war; and the moment seemed so long that I grew irritated with Gill for not calling upon him at once for a speech. At length this happened, and Yeats rose, and a beautiful commanding figure he seemed at the end of the table, pale and in profile, with long nervous hands and a voice resonant and clear as a silver trumpet. He drew himself up and spoke against Trinity College, saying that it had always taught the ideas of the stranger, and the songs of the stranger, and the literature of the stranger, and that was why Ireland had never listened and Trinity College had been a sterile influence. The influences that had moved Ireland deeply were the old influences that had come down from generation to generation, handed on by the story-tellers that collected in the evenings round the fire, creating for learned and unlearned a communion of heroes. But my memory fails me; I am disfiguring and blotting the beautiful thoughts that I heard that night clothed in lovely language. He spoke of Cherubim and Seraphim, and the hierarchies and the clouds of angels that the Church had set against the ancient culture, and then he told us that Gods had been brought vainly from Rome and Greece and Judaea. In the imaginations of the people only the heroes had survived, and from the places where they had walked their shadows fell often across the doorways; and then there was something wonderfully beautiful about the blue ragged mountains and the mystery that lay behind them, ragged mountains flowing southward. But that speech has gone for ever. I have searched the newspapers, but the journalist's report is feebler even than my partial memory. It seemed to me that while Yeats spoke I was lifted up and floated in mid-air.... But I will no longer attempt the impossible; suffice it to say that I remember Yeats sinking back like an ancient oracle exhausted by prophesying.

A shabby, old, and woolly-headed man seated at the head of the second table rose up and said he could not accept Yeats's defence of the ancient beliefs—Ireland had not begun to be Ireland until Patrick arrived; and he went on till everybody was wearied. Then it was my turn to read the lines I had dictated to the typist.

After some words hastily improvised, some stuttering apology for daring to speak in the land of oratory (perhaps I said something about the misfortune of having to speak after Demosthenes, alluding, of course, to Yeats), I explained the reason for my return to Ireland: how in my youth I had gone to France because art was there, and how, when art died in France, I had returned to England; and now that art was dead in England I was looking out like one in a watch-tower to find which way art was winging. Westward, probably, for all the countries of Europe had been visited by art, and art never visits a country twice. It was not improbable that art might rest awhile in this lonely Northern island; so my native country had again attracted me. And when I had said that I had come, like Bran, to see how they were getting on at home, I spoke of Yeats's poetry, saying that there had been since the ancient bards poets of merit, competent poets, poets whom I did not propose they should either forget or think less of; but Ireland, so it seemed to me, had no poet who compared for a moment with the great poet of whom it was my honour to speak that night. It was because I believed that in the author of The Countess Cathleen Ireland had recovered her ancient voice that I had undertaken the journey from London, and consented to what I had hitherto considered the most disagreeable task that could befall me—a public speech. I told them I would not have put myself to the inconvenience of a public speech for anything in the world except a great poet—that is to say, a man of exceptional genius, who was born at a moment of great national energy. This was the advantage of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, as well as of Yeats. The works of Yeats were not yet, and probably never would be, as voluminous as those of either the French or the English poet, but I could not admit that they are less perfect. I pointed out that the art of writing a blank-verse play was so difficult that none except Shakespeare and Yeats had succeeded in this form.

The assertion, I said, seems extravagant; but think a moment, and you will see that it is nearer the truth than you suppose. We must not be afraid of praising Mr Yeats's poetry too much; we must not hesitate to say that there are lyrics in the collected poems as beautiful as any in the world. We must, I said, be courageous in front of the Philistine, and insist that the lyric entitled Innisfree is unsurpassable.

And I concluded by saying that twenty years hence this week in Ireland would be looked back upon with reverence. Then things would have falled into their true perspective. The Saxon would have recovered from his bout of blackguardism and would recognise with sorrow that while he was celebrating Mr Kipling, Marie Corelli, Mrs Humphry Ward, and Mr Pinero, the Celt was celebrating in a poor wayside house the idealism of Mr Yeats.

My paper irritated a red-bearded man sitting some way down the table. He wore no moustache, but his beard was like a horse's collar under his chin, and his face was like glass, and his voice was like the breaking of glass, and everybody wondered why he should speak so sourly about everybody, myself included. Now that Mr Moore thinks that Ireland has raised herself to his level, Mr Moore has been kind enough to return to Ireland, like Bran.

Who is he? I asked Yeats.

Bran is one of the greatest of our legends.

Yes, I know that. But the man who is speaking?

A great lawyer, Yeats answered, who has never quite come into his inheritance.

And the gritty voice went on proclaiming the genius of the Irish race.

But, Yeats, I said, he is talking nonsense. All races are the same; none much better or worse than another: merely blowing dust; the dust higher up the road is no better than the dust lower down.

Yeats said this would be an excellent point to make in my answer, and Gill said that I must get up; but I shook my head, and sat listening to my speech, seeing it quite clearly, and the annihilation of my enemy in every stinging sentence, but without the power to rise up and speak it.

Who would care for France, I whispered to Yeats, if it only consisted of peasants, industrious or idle? The race is anonymous, and passes away if it does not produce great men who do great deeds, and if there be no great contemporary writers to chronicle their valour. What nonsense that man is talking, Yeats! Do get up and speak for me. Tell him that the fields are speechless, and the rocks are dumb. In the last analysis everything depends upon the poet. Tell him that, and that it is for Ireland to admire us, not for us to admire Ireland. Dear me, what nonsense, Yeats! Do speak for me.

Yeats tried to push me on to my feet.



Gill waited for me, and looking at him steadily, I said, No; and he answered:

Then I will call upon Hyde.

Hyde, I said; that is the man I want to see.

He had been sitting on my side of the table, and I could catch glimpses only of his profile between the courses when he looked up at the waiter and asked him for more champagne, and the sparkling wine and the great yellow skull sloping backwards had seemed a little incongruous. A shape strangely opposite, I said, to Rolleston, who has very little back to his head. All Hyde's head seemed at the back, like a walrus, and the drooping black moustache seemed to bear out the likeness. As nothing libels a man a much as his own profile, I resolved to reserve my opinion of his appearance until I had seen his full face. His volubility was as extreme as a peasant's come to ask for a reduction of rent. It was interrupted, however, by Edward calling on him to speak in Irish, and then a torrent of dark, muddied stuff flowed from him, much like the porter which used to come up from Carnacun to be drunk by the peasants on midsummer nights when a bonfire was lighted. It seemed to me a language suitable for the celebration of an antique Celtic rite, but too remote for modern use. It had never been spoken by ladies in silken gowns with fans in their hands or by gentlemen going out to kill each other with engraved rapiers or pistols. Men had merely cudgelled each other, yelling strange oaths the while in Irish, and I remembered it in the mouths of the old fellows dressed in breeches and worsted stockings, swallow-tail coats and tall hats full of dirty bank-notes which they used to give to my father. Since those days I had not heard Irish, and when Hyde began to speak it an instinctive repulsion rose up in me, quelled with difficulty, for I was already a Gaelic Leaguer. Hyde, too, perhaps on account of the language, perhaps it was his appearance, inspired a certain repulsion in me, which, however, I did not attempt to quell. He looked so like a native Irish speaker; or was it?—and perhaps it was this—he looked like an imitation native Irish speaker; in other words, like a stage Irishman.

Passing without comment over the speeches of the various professors of Trinity, I will tell exactly how I saw Hyde in the ante-room from a quiet corner whence I could observe him accurately. He was talking to a group of friends. Is he always so hilarious, so voluble? I'm so delighted, I could hear him saying to some new-comer, so delighted to see you again. Well, this is really a pleasure.

His three-quarter face did not satisfy me, but, determined to be just, I refused to allow any opinion of him to creep into my mind until I had seen him in full face; and when he turned, and I saw the full face, I was forced to admit that something of the real man appeared in it: I sat admiring the great sloping, sallow skull, the eyebrows like blackthorn bushes growing over the edge of a cliff, the black hair hanging in lank locks, a black moustache streaking the yellow-complexioned face, dropping away about the mouth and chin.

Without doubt an aboriginal, I said.

He spoke with his head thrust over his thin chest, as they do in Connemara. Yet what name more English than Hyde? It must have some to him from some English ancestor—far back, indeed, for it would require many generations of intermarriage with Celtic women to produce so Celtic an appearance.

At this moment my reflections were interrupted by Hyde himself. A common friend brought him over and introduced him to me, and when I told him of my interest in the language movement, he was vociferously enthusiastic, and I said to myself: He has the one manner for everybody.

Some of his writings were known to me—some translations he had made of the peasant songs of Connaught—and I admired them, though they seemed untidily written, the verse and the prose. I had read some of his propagandist literature, and this, too, was of a very untidy kind. So the conclusion was forced upon me that in no circumstance could Hyde have been a man of letters in English or in Irish.

The leader has absorbed the scholar. So perhaps the language movement is his one chance of doing something.

Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of AE. I had read his articles in the Express, and looking at him I remembered the delight and the wonder which his verse and prose had awakened in me. It had been just as if somebody had suddenly put his hand into mine, and had led me away into a young world which I recognised at once as the fabled Arcady that had flourished before man discovered gold, and forged the gold into a ring which gave him power to enslave. White mist curled along the edge of the woods, and the trees were all in blossom. There were tall flowers in the grass, and gossamer threads glittered in the rays of the rising sun. Under the trees every youth and maiden was engaged in some effusive moment of personal love, or in groups they wove garlands for the pleasure of the children, or for the honour of some God or Goddess. Suddenly the songs of the birds were silenced by the sound of a lyre; Apollo and his Muses appeared on the hillside; for in these stories the Gods and mortals mixed in delightful comradeship, the mortals not having lost all trace of their divine origin, and the Gods themselves being the kind, beneficent Gods that live in Arcady.

The paper had dropped from my hands, and I said: Here is the mind of Corot in verse and prose; the happiness of immemorial moments under blossoming boughs, when the soul rises to the lips and the feet are moved to dance. Here is the inspired hour of sunset and it seemed to me that this man must live always in this hour, and that he not only believed in Arcady, but that Arcady was always in him. While we strive after happiness he holds it in his hand, I said, and it was to meet this man that I had come to Ireland as much as to see the plays.

He had refused to dine with us because he did not wish to put on evening clothes, but he had come in afterwards, more attractive than anybody else in the room in his grey tweeds, his wild beard, and shaggy mane of hair. Some friends we seem to have known always, and try as we will we cannot remember the first time we saw them; whereas our first meetings with others are fixed in our mind, and as clearly as if it had happened no later than yesterday, I remember AE coming forward to meet me, and the sweetness of his long grey eyes. He was more winning than I had imagined, for, building out of what Yeats had told me in London, I had imagined a sterner, rougher, ruder man. Yeats had told me how a child, while walking along a country road near Armagh, had suddenly begun to think, and in a few minutes the child had thought out the whole problem of the injustice of a creed which tells that God will punish him for doing things which he never promised not to do.

The day was a beautiful summer's day, the larks were singing in the sky, and in a moment of extraordinary joy AE realised that he had a mind capable of thinking out everything that was necessary for him to think out for himself, realising in a moment that he had been flung into the world without his consent, and had never promised not to do one thing or to do another. It was hardly five minutes since he had left his aunt's house, yet in this short space his imagination had shot up into heaven and defied the Deity who had condemned him to the plight of the damned because—he repeated the phrase to himself—he had done something which he had never promised not to do. It mattered nothing what that thing was—the point was that he had made no promise; and his mind embracing the whole universe in one moment, he understood that there is but one life: the dog at his heels and the stars he would soon see (for the dusk was gathering) were not different things, but one thing.

There is but one life, he had said to himself, divided endlessly, differing in degree, but not in kind; and at once he had begun to preach the new gospel.

I had heard how, when earning forty pounds a year in an accountant's office, he used to look at his boots, wondering whether they would carry him to the sacred places where the Druids ascended and descended in many-coloured spirals of flame; and fearing that they would not hold together for forty long miles, he had gone to Bray Head and had addressed the holiday folk. I could hear the tumult, the ecstasy of it all! I could see him standing on a bit of wall, his long, thin, picturesque figure with grey clothes drooping about it, his arms extended in feverish gesture, throwing back his thick hair from his face, telling the crowd of the sacred places of Ireland, of the Druids of long ago, and their mysteries, and how much more potent these were than the dead beliefs which they still clung to; I could hear him telling them that the genius of the Gael, awakening in Ireland after a night of troubled dreams, returns instinctively to the belief of its former days, and finds again the old inspiration.

The Gael seeks again the Gods of the mountains, where they live enfolded in a mantle of multitudinous tradition. Once more out of the heart of mystery he had heard the call Come away; and after that no other voice had power to lure—there remained only the long heroic labours which end in the companionship of the Gods.

The reason I have not included any personal description of AE is because he exists rather in one's imagination, dreams, sentiments, feelings, than in one's ordinary sight and hearing, and try as I will to catch the fleeting outlines, they escape me; and all I remember are the long, grey, pantheistic eyes that have looked so often into my soul and with such a kindly gaze.

Those are the eyes, I said, that have seen the old Celtic Gods; for certainly AE saw them when he wandered out of the accountant's office in his old shoes, into Meath, and lay under the trees that wave about the Druid hills; or, sitting on some mountain-side, Angus and Diarmuid and Grania and Deirdre have appeared to him, and Mannanan MacLir has risen out of the surge before him, and Dana the great Earth Spirit has chanted in his ears. If she had not, he could not have written those articles which enchanted me. Never did a doubt cross my mind that these great folk had appeared to AE until he put a doubt into my mind himself, for he not only admitted that he did not know Irish (that might not be his fault, and the Gods might have overlooked it, knowing that he was not responsible for his ignorance), but that he did not believe in the usefulness of the Irish language.

But how, then, am I to believe that the Gods have appeared to you? I answered. That Angus and Diarmuid, Son of Angus, have conversed with you? That Dana the Earth Spirit has chanted in your ears?

The Gods, he answered, speak not in any mortal language; one becomes aware of their immortal Presences.

Granted. But the Gods of the Gael have never spoken in the English language; it has never been spoken by any Gods.



That is begging the question. I can't accept you as the redeemer of the Gael; and I turned from him petulantly, let it be confessed, and asked somebody to introduce me to John Eglinton. I'm vexed, AE, I said, and will go and talk with John Eglinton. For not having ever communed with the Gods he is at liberty to deny their speech.

And John Eglinton told me that it was not from the Gods that he had learned what he knew of the Irish language; that his was only a very slight knowledge acquired from O'Growney and some of Hyde's folk-tales.

So you've learned Irish enough to read it? And I grew at once interested in John Eglinton, and pressed him to continue his studies, averring that I had not time to learn the language myself. And now what is your opinion about it as a medium of literary expression?

Before he could answer me I had asked him if he did not think that English was becoming a lean language, and all I remember is that in the middle of the discussion John Eglinton dropped the phrase: The Irish language strikes me as one that has never been to school.

Of course it hasn't. How could it? But is a language the worse for that?

We began to argue how much a language must be written in before it becomes fitted for literary usage, and during the discussion I studied John Eglinton, wondering why he had said that the Irish language had never been to school. There was something of the schoolmaster in his appearance and in his talk. The articles he had published in the Express were written in a style of his own; but he had no valiant ideas like AE, and AE had cast a spell, and only his eloquence could appeal to me. John Eglinton had seemed to me dryly a writer, and I could only regard as intolerable that an editor should be found so tolerant as to allow John Eglinton to contravene AE, and remembering all this, I noticed a thin, small man with dark red hair growing stiffly over a small skull; and I studied the round head and the high forehead, and the face somewhat shrivelled and thickly freckled.

A gnarled, solitary life, I said, lived out in all the discomforts inherent in a bachelor's lodging, a sort of lonely thorn tree. One sees one sometimes on a hillside and not another tree near it. The comparison amused me, for John Eglinton argued with me in a thorny, tenacious way, and remembering his beautiful prose, I said: The thorn breaks to flower, and continued to discover analogies. A sturdy life has the thorn, bent on one side by the wind, looking as if sometimes it had been almost strangled by the blast. John Eglinton, too, looked as if he had battled; and I am always attracted by those who have battled, and who know how to live alone. Looking at him more attentively, I said: If he isn't a schoolmaster he is engaged in some business: an accountant's office, perhaps; and the tram takes him there every morning at the same hour. A bachelor he certainly is, and an inveterate one; but not because all women appeal to him, or nearly all; rather because no woman appeals to him much, not sufficiently to induce him to change his habits. He sits in the tram, his hands clasped over his stick, and no flowered skirt rouses him from his literary reverie.

So did I see him in my thoughts going into Dublin in the morning, without a feminine trouble in his life. If there had ever been such a trouble, it must have been a faint one, a little surprise to himself as soon as it was over. A woman must feel as if there was a stone wall between them. Many will think that this seems to imply a lack of humanity, for the many appreciate humanity in the sexual instinct only, an instinct which we share with all animals and insects; only the very lowest forms of life are epicene. Yet, somehow, we are all inclined to think that man is never so much man as when he is in pursuit of the female. Perhaps he is never less man than at the moment. We are apt to think we are living intensely when we congregate in numbers in drawing-rooms and gossip about the latest publications, social and literary, and there is a tendency in us all to look askance at the man who likes to spend the evening alone with his book and his cat, who looks forward to lonely holidays, seeing in them long solitary walks in the country, much the same walks as he enjoyed the summer before, when he wandered through pleasantly wooded prospects, seeing hills unfolding as he walked mile after mile, pleasantly conscious of himself, and of the great harmony of which he is a part.

The man of whom I am dreaming, shy, unobtrusive and lonely, whose interests are literary, and whose life is not troubled by women, feels intensely and hoards in his heart secret enthusiasms and sentiments which in other men flow in solution here and there down any feminine gutter. I thought of Emerson and then of Thoreau—a Thoreau of the suburbs. And remembering how beautiful John Eglinton's writings are, how gnarled and personal, like the man himself, my heart went out to him a little, and I wondered if we should ever become friends. I hoped we should, for I felt myself inclining to the belief that the hard North is better than the soft, peaty, Catholic stuff which comes from Connaught.