While strolling with him, or sitting beside him smoking cigars, listening to him talking about the success of The Heather Field, the thought often crossed my mind that his life had flowered in the present year, and that after it all would be decline. He was to me a pathetic figure as he sat sunning himself in the light of Ibsen and Parnell, his exterior placid as a parish priest's; for knowing him from the very beginning of his life, and having seen the play written, I was not duped like the others. He is thinking that his dreams are coming to pass, and believes himself to be the Messiah—he who will give Ireland literature and her political freedom; and I wondered how far he would go before puncturing like the others.

He was talking about his new comedy, The Tale of a Town. Politicians were satirised and things were said in it that might create a riot, and the riot in the theatre might spread to the streets, and a flame run all over Ireland. We cannot afford, Edward, to have the Gaiety Theatre wrecked. A shadow used to come into his face when he thought of the moral responsibility he was incurring by writing The Tale of a Town; but heresies frighten him more than the destruction of property; he was prepared to risk the play, and took refuge in generalities, saying he was no good at telling a plot. A doubt rises up in my mind always when I hear an author say he cannot tell his plot, for if there be one, a baby can tell it, and it is the plot that counts; the rest is working out, and can be accomplished if one is a writer. All I could learn from him was that the play was nearly finished. He was going down to Galway to work over the dialogue for the last time, and then the manuscript would be sent to Yeats, and when it was read it would be sent to London to me, for the rules of the Irish Literary Theatre were that no play could be performed without the approval of the three directors.

You may expect it in about three weeks.

And a memorable morning it was in Victoria Street when I received the parcel and cut the string, saying:

We shall be able to talk about this comedy, and to discuss its production, on our way to Bayreuth, when we have said all we have to say about Wagner and his Ring.

The first half-dozen pages pleased me, and then Edward's mind, which can never think clearly, revealed itself in an entanglement; which will be easily removed, I said, picking up the second act. But the second act did not please me as much as the first, and I laid it down, saying: Muddle, muddle, muddle. In the third act Edward seemed to fall into gross farcical situations, and I took up the fourth act sadly. It and the fifth dissipated every hope, and I lay back in my chair in a state of coma, unable to drag myself to the writing-table. But getting there at last, I wrote—after complimenting him about a certain improvement in the dialogue—that the play seemed to me very inferior to The Heather Field and to Maeve.



So I wrote: There is not one act in the five you have sent me which, in my opinion, could interest any possible audience—Irish, English, or Esquimaux. There you have it, my dear friend; that is my opinion. But perhaps we shall be able to straighten it out on our way to Bayreuth, and on our way home.

After posting such a letter one is seized with scruples, and I walked about the room asking myself if a pinch of human kindness but not worth more than a cartload of disagreeable truths. Edward was my friend, the friend of my boyhood, and I had written to say that the play he had been working upon for the last two years was worthless. Why not have saddled Yeats and Lady Gregory with the duty? One looks at the question from different points of view, worrying a great deal, coming back to the point—that lies would not have saved our trip abroad. Be that as it may, my letter had probably wrecked it.

We were to meet at Victoria Station, and if Edward were to turn rusty what would happen? The theatre tickets would be lost. No Bayreuth for me that year; impossible to travel in Germany when one doesn't know a word of German. I regretted again the letter I had written, and watched the post. Letters came, but none from Edward. This was a good sign, for if he were not coming he would let me know. All the same, the quarter of an hour before the train started was full of anxiety.

Ah, there he is! We're going to Bayreuth after all!

There he was—huge and puffy, his back to the engine, his belly curling splendidly between his short fat thighs, his straw hat perched on the top of his head, broader at the base than at the crown, a string dangling from it. We sat embarrassed; Edward did not seem embarrassed, but I suppose he must have been; I was embarrassed enough for two. The play would have to be talked about. But who would open the conversation? Edward did not seem inclined to speak about it, and for me to do so before Clapham Junction would be lacking in courtesy. Ask him for a cigar! But one cannot talk of the quality of a cigar beyond Croydon, and when we had passed through the station the strain became unbearable. Besides, I was anxious to aestheticise.

I am sorry I didn't like your play, but you see you asked my opinion, and there was no use my giving you a false one.

I dare say you are right. I'm no critic; all the same, it was a great disappointment to me to hear that you didn't like it.

I had expected a note of agony in his voice, and was shocked to find that he could enjoy a cigar while I gave him some of my reasons for thinking his play unpresentable. If he were a real man of letters it would be otherwise—so why should I pity him? And the pity for him which had been gathering in my heart melted away, and suddenly I found myself angry with him, and would have said some unpleasant things about his religion if he had not dropped the remark that my letter had entirely spoilt the pleasure of his trip round the coast of Ireland in a steamer with a party of archaeologists. I begged for an account of this trip, and he told me that they had visited pagan remains in Donegal and Arran, and many Christian ruins, monasteries and round towers, and my naturally kind heart was touched by the thought of Edward lagging in the rear, thinking of his unfortunate play and the letter I had written him, his step quickening when Coffey began his discourses, but proving only an indifferent listener.

One would have to lack the common sympathies not to feel for Edward, and to myself I seemed a sort of executioner while telling him that the play would have to be altered, and extensively altered. It was not a matter of a few cuts; my letter must have made that clear; but he had not been told the whole truth. He probably suspected it would be forthcoming, if not on board the train, on board the boat. A courageous fellow is Edward before criticism, perhaps because art is not the great concern of his life; and he would have listened to the bitter end; but it seemed to me that it would be well to allow my criticism to work down into his mind. The subject was dropped; we talked about The Ring all the way to Dover, and on board the boat he whistled the motives, looking over the taffrail until it was time to go to bed. His manner was propitious, and it seemed to me that in the morning he would listen to the half-dozen alterations that were of an elemental necessity, and turning these over in my mind, I fell asleep, and awoke thinking of them, and nothing could have prevented me from telling Edward how the third act might be reconstructed the moment we got on deck but the appearance of the foreland as we steamed into Holland.

A dim light had just begun to filter through some grey clouds, like the clouds in Van Goyen's pictures; and the foreland—sand and tussocked grass, with a grey sea slopping about it—was drawn exactly as he would have drawn it.

The country has never quite recovered from his genius and the genius of his contemporaries though two hundred years have passed away, I said, mentioning, as we climbed into the train, that painting was no longer possible in Holland.

Edward wished to know why this was, and I kept him waiting till breakfast for an answer, saying then: The country is itself a picture. See! A breeze has just awakened a splendid Ruysdael in the bay. A little farther on we shall pass a wood which Hobbema certainly painted. We did, and we had not got many miles before we came upon some fields with cattle in them. Dujardin and Berghem. And afterwards the train sped through flat meadows intersected by drains, for the country, once marish, had been redeemed by the labour of the Dutchmen—indefatigable labour, I said. When they drove the Catholics out of Holland, art and Protestantism began together. Look! See those winding herds. Cuyp! Look into the mist and you'll see him in his leathern jerkin, and his great beaver hat with a plume in it, stalking the cattle, drawing bits at a time—heads and hind quarters. I don't like Holland; it looks too much like pictures—and pictures I have weared of.

It seemed to me that we were wasting time. What was important was The Tale of a Town, for another alteration had come into my mind; and anxious to know how it would strike Edward, I asked him to give me his attention.

Don't look at those fields any more; forget Dujardin and Berghem, forget Cuyp; let us think of The Tale of a Town.

His lack of eagerness was discouraging; all the same I began my serious criticism, to which was given an excellent but somewhat stolid attention.

There is no growth in the first act, and very little in the second, and the scene of the meeting in which Jasper Dean makes his great speech must come in the middle of the play, and not at the beginning of it.

I waited for some acknowledgment from Edward, but was unable to get from him either assent or dissent.

You're a very good critic, he repeated again and again, and that irritated me, for, of course, one thinks one is something more than a critic.

Is it possible that he thinks his play perfect? Or is it that he would not like to bring any outside influence into it, because to do so might impair its originality. It must be one of these things. Which?

Edward opened his valise, and took a book out of it, and began to read, and I was left to continue my meditations. Was it that Edward was what I had often believed him to be: merely an amateur? An amateur of talent, but an amateur. That was Symons's opinion. He said: Martyn will always remain an amateur, whereas you, notwithstanding your deficiences, can be considered a writer.

His words were remembered, for Edward's aversion from my suggestions discovered the amateur in him. It was not that he disapproved of the alterations, but he did not like to accept them because they were not his. The amateur always puts himself before his work, and it is only natural that he should do so, for the amateur writes or paints when he has time. When weary of the glory that a title or a motor-car brings him, he writes a book about Shakespeare's Sonnets, or David Cox's slushy water-colours, or maybe an appreciation of Napoleon; whereas the artist is interested in the thing itself, and will accept readily a suggestion from any one, if he thinks that it will be to the advantage of the work to do so. Je prends mon bien où je le trouve is his device, the motto upon his shield. Anybody who can improve a sentence of mine by the omission of a comma or by the placing of a comma is looked upon as my dearest friend. But Edward....

The interruption in my thoughts concerning him was caused by a sudden motion to ask him which was our first halting-place. I expected him to answer Cologne, where we had stopped before to hear a contrapuntal Mass; two choirs, as well as I remember, answering each other from different sides of the cathedral, the voices dividing and uniting, seeking each other along and across the aisles. It was my first experience of this kind of music, and I had preserved a vague, perhaps, but intense memory of it, and feeling somewhat disappointed that we were not going to hear another Mass by Palestrina, I asked Edward for his reasons for this change of route, and my astonishment was great when he began to speak disparagingly of the Cologne music, and my astonishment passed into amazement when he told me that the music we had heard was not by Palestrina at all, but only a modern imitation of his manner. It had seemed to me so beautiful that I did not like to hear its authenticity called into question, but Edward was very firm, and it soon became plain that he knew he had been deceived, and that all mention of Cologne was disagreeable to him. We shall never stop there again, I said to myself, and to fall in with his humour, spoke of the cathedral, which we looked upon as an ugly building. How could it be otherwise? It was begun in the Middle Ages and finished somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century. But the cathedral at Aix, where we stopped, he declared to be pure thirteenth century, with a good deal of old glass still in the windows; and he looked forward to hearing Mass, his eyes raised to some wonderful purples which a friend of his in London, in whom he placed great faith, had told him to be sure not to miss seeing.

Ugly glass, ugly vestments, ugly architecture, distract one's attention from one's prayers. The music is simple at Aix, but I hear it is excellent; and he pressed me to go with him in the morning, saying that I would be able to appreciate the glass better during the service than afterwards. The purples you speak of must be wonderful when there is a prayer in the heart, but I cannot pray in a church, Edward, and the rather in a Roman Catholic church. There are times when Edward is afraid to understand, others when he cannot; and asking myself which is the real Edward I directed my steps towards the church.

The folk were coming out, but Edward was not among them, and I feared that my opportunity was lost of learning something definite about architecture. He might, however, be in the church, and was discovered after a long search at the end of a pew, in a distant corner, still praying heavily. Reluctant to interrupt him, I stood watching, touched by his piety. He crossed himself, came out of the pew, genuflected before the altar, and hastened towards me, now ready to explain the difference between the Romanesque and the Gothic, and that day I learned that the Romanesque windows are round and the Gothic pointed.

It is always interesting to add to one's store of information; all the simple facts of the world are not known to everybody; and when Edward had told me that the cathedral at Aix bore traces of both styles, we went to study the stained glass, stopping before a large window, the beauty of which, he said, filled him with enthusiasm for the genius of the thirteenth century.

But, my dear Edward, I'm sure that is a modern window.

Whereupon he blazed out. He respected my judgment, but not about stained glass, nor about architecture, and he reminded me that five minutes before I did not know the difference between the Gothic and the Romanesque.

That is quite true; all the same, I know the window to be modern; and after a heated argument we went in search of a beadle, who produced a guide-book and a little English; Edward produced a little German, and between the three—guide-book, German-English, and English-German—it was established beyond doubt that the window was exactly six years old. But let no one conclude that this story is told in order to show that dear Edward is one of the nine hundred and ninety and nine who cannot distinguish between the thirteenth century and a modern imitation of it. Were the story told for this purpose I should be a false friend, and, what is worse, a superficial writer. The story is told in order to show Edward when the fog descends upon him. His comprehension is never the same. There is always a little mist about; sometimes it is no more than a white, evanescent mist sufficient to dim the outlines of things, making them seem more beautiful; sometimes the mist thickens into yellow fog through which nothing is seen. It trails along the streets of his mind, filling every alley, and then the fog lifts and pinnacles are seen again. He is like Ireland, the country he came from; sometimes a muddling fog, sometimes a delicious mist with a ray of light striking through; and that is why he is the most delightful of travelling companions. One comes very soon to the end of a mind that thinks clearly, but one never comes to the end of Edward.

After the cathedral we went to the picture-gallery, and I remember a number of small rooms—hung with pictures, of course, since it was a picture-gallery—and going down these with Edward, and being stopped suddenly by the sight of one picture so beautiful that all the others are forgotten. Who can have painted it? Let us stand here—don't go near it; let us try to work it out. Some Dutch or Flemish master. A Flemish master rather than a Dutch master—I cannot get nearer to it than that; but one of the most beautiful pieces of paintings in the world,—a picture, let us say, twenty-four by thirty-six (remember, it is ten or a dozen years since I have seen it!) painted on canvas or on a panel; for aught I know it may be painted on copper; but if I have forgotten the details that interest the bric-à-brac hunter, I have not forgotten the painting. But no more than this will I say about it—that it is not by Hondecoeter nor by Cuyp, who painted barn-door fowls occasionally, nor by Snyders. Its brilliant beauty is beyond the scope of their palettes. Shall I satisfy the curiosity of the reader, or shall I excite it by concealing the name? Excite it by telling him to be sure to stop at Aix-la-Chapelle on his way to Bayreuth to see the most beautiful cock that ever trod a hen on a dunghill—a glowing, golden bird.