"A. E.," THE IRISH EMERSON

The poet of "The Divine Vision" has gone a long way since he left Lurgan for Dublin twenty years ago. Then he was George W. Russell, now he is "A. E." The happy boy that was, knew no land save Ireland, and no University training had taught him of the greatness and harmony of the world; the happy man that is, is no traveler, but, with Emerson to point the way, he has journeyed far on the paths blazed by the wise men of the Upanishads and followed by all the mystics that come after Neo-Platonists, Kabbalists, Theosophists. He has journeyed so far that he believes the road he is following must be "the pathway of the Gods," for before him now and then he sees bright flashes from "the doorway of the sun." In his poems he tells us of his soul's pilgrimage through its past incarnations, and of its absorptions into the World-Soul, and of its aspirations toward everlasting union with the Immortal, tells us in symbols of great beauty — purple twilights, flashing dawns, noondays glowing with diamond light; but few may interpret these symbols unless they have some acquaintance with the mystics, unless they have studied a little Irish mythology. To those without such knowledge much of "A. E.'s' poetry must seem inconsequential or meaningless, but none can read without carrying away with him many pictures of sky-scape, dominant among them all a picture of the black dome of night, palpitant with quick-hearted stars.

That the man is a painter the reader of his poems might guess, yet he seldom paints in his verses the "Other People" he sees in Irish bogs and woods and paints upon canvas so vividly you may not forget them. That he is a practical business man, Sir Horace Plunkett's right hand in the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, you would guess from his poems no more than from reading "The Oversoul" you would guess that Emerson made $200,000. I failed to come across the little book through which "A. E." made his first appeal as a poet, "Homeward: Songs by the Way," obscurely published in Dublin in 1894, until I picked up a damaged copy of its American reprint

at an after-Christmas sale in 1898. This I read but half understandingly, admiring it for its music and for its fine phrasing and for well-caught bits of nature and human emotion. In the same year I read on its publication his second collection of verses, "The Earth Breath and Other Poems," and found no deeper meaning or higher beauties there than in the earlier book. Then, in re-reading Mr. Yeats' "A Visionary," I came across quoted verses that seemed familiar, and looking into "Homeward," I found that love-song of dreamland entitled "Parting" and knew that "A. E." and "A Visionary" were one. I could now find more definite meaning in the poems and I now had an interest in the personality of the poems' maker, which, however, did not make me hold the poems any dearer. From Mr. Yeats' essay I learned "A. E." was a painter. Other sides of this man of many parts I was to learn later. And thus it was I learned them.

At Carrick-on-Shannon the twenty-odd labourers bound for the fair tumbled out of our third-class compartment, forbidden to more than twelve, that they had occupied for a half-hour's run, and left four very crushed occupants to regain their tempers as best they could. One, a girl, made friendly by fellow suffering, looked over to the touzled dress of one of two Americans in the far corner and said to her, "So you're there yet." We three fell to conversation with great goodwill, and after a while I asked her, "Do you go to the plays of the Irish National Dramatic Company?" "That I do," she replied. "The young man I am taking writes some of them. They're rehearsing some plays tonight, one of 'A. E.'s' among them."

That night at Dublin we were conducted to a door by the side of a produce shop, which door we were told led to the hall where the company rehearsed. We knocked, and at last heard steps coming nearer and nearer. The door opened and revealed a young man in prosaic black suit and derby, with a candle in one hand and a property spear in the other. He conducted us down a narrow, draughty hallway, into a hall with wooden benches across, as rude as those in a bandstand of a backwoods countryfair in the States, and a slightly raised platform at the further end. One American caught her breath for she had seen just

this place in dream before. We were soon in eager conversation with young clerks and artisans that were now to work at interpreting plays out of Ireland's heart with fervour and high aim. What talk it was with those young people, boys and girls all in their keen zest and great hope, though some were on the grayer side of thirty. Their high-souled enthusiasm carried through "Connal," "The Racing Lug" and "Deirdre" with real impressiveness. Of Mr. Cousins' two plays one is realistic of North of Ireland shore life of to-day, and the other, "Connal," like "A. E.'s" "Deirdre," made out of the wars and loves and dreams of Ireland's Heroic Age.

Thus I came to know "A. E." as playwright before having read his play. One of the actors, himself maker of verses and plays, gave me his copy of "Deirdre," with cues marked. I had seen in the Irish papers notices of the play's first performance, which had taken place the previous spring, and I had then written Mr. Russell to see if I could get a copy, but he had not then published it. Then he wrote me of the young poets I met this night in Dublin, and the names on the lips of the enthusiasts we talked to, were names Mr. Russell had written me of four months before. Here were they introducing me to his work as he had thus introduced me to theirs: "There are many poets here who write beautiful lyrics who are quite unknown out of Ireland because they never collected them from the pages of obscure magazines. . I have seen many verses signed 'J. O.,' 'Alice Milligan,' 'Ethna Carberry,' 'Ogham,' 'Paul Cregan,' which I enviously wish I could claim as my own.

I think myself many of these unknown poets and poetesses write verses which no living English writer could surpass." The best of the verses of some of these and of others among his following Mr. Russell collected in "New Songs," 1904, which bore out much that he claimed for them.

It was to six of these young poets he dedicated his last volume of verse, "The Divine Vision," as he had dedicated his two earlier volumes to poet-mystics; "Homeward" to Mr. Charles Weeks and "The Earth Breath" to Mr. Yeats. The young writers (for they were almost all writers as well as actors) we met this Saturday night in Dublin, one and all looked to “A.

E." as leader, some of them looked to him as high-priest of their cult, as seer of that ancient type that combined as his functions the deliverance of religious dicta, prophesy and song. My thoughts went back to our own Concord of half a century ago, yet I wondered was Emerson's fascination as compelling as this. It was in a commonplace looking editorial sanctum that I found "A. E." on the following morning, at 22 Lincoln Place, to which he had descended from his office in the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, to edit The Homestead in its editor's absence. I was to see him, in the hour I was to spend with him there, in many roles. First was that of one of the beginners of the Irish Literary Revival. He has himself given the credit to Mr. Standish James O'Grady for furnishing the initial stimulus to the movement in his "Heroic Period" and "Cuculain and His Contemporaries" of 1876 and 1880; but to "A. E." and Mr. Yeats and Dr. Hyde also is due much of the credit. Mr. Russell said that when he came up to Dublin a boy from Lurgan there was no independent thought in Dublin, but now he thought there was a good deal, and he and his fellows of the Hermetic Society, he took mild pride in believing, had had something to do with the change. Even then, as a boy, he could not read most English literature and so he took to reading the literature of the East, the Bhagavad-Gita and the Sufis. From his reading of these with other young men that somehow found each other out, came the Hermetic Society, at whose meetings everything mystic from the Upanishads to Thomas Taylor was discussed. From the study of the universal, he said, they came at last to the national, to the study of the ancient folk-lore and stories of their people, which had it not been for the Danes and Normans would have been shaped into literary form long before now, when, he said, they were only being so shaped.

His disciples had told me the night before that "A. E." had helped them much in the National Dramatic Company, painting scenery for them, designing costumes, and aiding in a hundred other ways. They had come to him, Mr. Russell now told me, the young people of the company, and had asked him to write them a play. He sat down and wrote out "Deirdre" in six hours.

"Of course, I was very familiar with the story and I

had thought of its dramatic effectiveness, but I knew nothing of the stage and I was very much surprised it went so well." That it went well, I, who had seen it but the night before, could testify, but that rehearsal could give but a suggestion of the beautiful stage pictures it presents when played in costume of the Heroic Age. Despite its intensely dramatic situations it is essentially a decorative, rather than a dramatic play, and its exalted prose is seldom true dramatic speech. But you carry from it the memory of beautiful pictures, and a feeling that something noble has passed your way, to enter into and become a part of you.

As we were talking of the "movement," in came a young Roscommon landlord and with him another of its phases and my discovery of Mr. Russell, man of business, organizer of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society. The talk was now of the erection of a hall, and Mr. Russell seemed as familiar with stone and lime and sand as with mysticism and poetry, which we had talked of, and painting, which we were to be talking of in a few minutes, when Mr. J. B. Yeats, Jr., called to talk over an exhibition of his pictures to be held in Dublin the following week. A few days later I was reading Mr. Russell's review of Mr. Yeats' pictures, but before I left 22 Lincoln Place I had a mental picture of "art-critic" added to the already long list of titles after "A. E.'s" name, and I had still another evidence of his impressiveness. Mr. J. B. Yeats, Sr., his son said, would be around for Mr. Russell to sit for him next morning, in order to get on with the two orders he had of portraits of the mystic, one of them from an admirer in America.

"It is most extraordinary," said Mr. Russell, and so it was. I suppose some devout mystic of us wanted the picture of this master of occultism among his household gods. It was pleasant on leaving him to go away with his laugh ringing in my ears as a surety that the high seriousness with which some of his admirers take him, has not dulled his sense of humour.

Eight o'clock the next evening saw us in the eminently Philistine suburban street where is the little house of conventional exterior that shelters the high dreams of "the Irish Emerson." Once entered, his embodied visions attract you from all four