Scene 5


SCENE.--The house of SHEMUS RUA. There is an alcove at the back
with curtains; in it a bed, and on the bed is the body of MARY
with candles round it. The two MERCHANTS while they speak put a
large book upon a table, arrange money, and so on.

FIRST MERCHANT. Thanks to that lie I told about her ships
And that about the herdsman lying sick,
We shall be too much thronged with souls to-morrow.

SECOND MERCHANT. What has she in her coffers now but mice?

FIRST MERCHANT. When the night fell and I had shaped myself
Into the image of the man-headed owl,
I hurried to the cliffs of Donegal,
And saw with all their canvas full of wind
And rushing through the parti-coloured sea
Those ships that bring the woman grain and meal.
They're but three days from us.

SECOND MERCHANT. When the dew rose
I hurried in like feathers to the east,
And saw nine hundred oxen driven through Meath
With goads of iron, They're but three days from us.

FIRST MERCHANT. Three days for traffic.

(PEASANTS crowd in with TEIG and SHEMUS.)

SHEMUS. Come in, come in, you are welcome.
That is my wife. She mocked at my great masters,
And would not deal with them. Now there she is;
She does not even know she was a fool,
So great a fool she was.

TEIG. She would not eat
One crumb of bread bought with our master's money,
But lived on nettles, dock, and dandelion.

SHEMUS. There's nobody could put into her head

That Death is the worst thing can happen us.
Though that sounds simple, for her tongue grew rank
With all the lies that she had heard in chapel.
Draw to the curtain.

(TEIG draws it.)

You'll not play the fool
While these good gentlemen are there to save you.

SECOND MERCHANT.
Since the drought came they drift about in a throng,
Like autumn leaves blown by the dreary winds.
Come, deal--come, deal.

FIRST MERCHANT. Who will come deal with us?

SHEMUS. They are out of spirit, Sir, with lack of food,
Save four or five. Here, sir, is one of these;
The others will gain courage in good time.

MIDDLE-AGED-MAN. I come to deal--if you give honest price.

FIRST MERCHANT (reading in a book)
John Maher, a man of substance, with dull mind,
And quiet senses and unventurous heart.
The angels think him safe." Two hundred crowns,
All for a soul, a little breath of wind.

THE MAN. I ask three hundred crowns. You have read there
That no mere lapse of days can make me yours.

FIRST MERCHANT.
There is something more writ here--"often at night
He is wakeful from a dread of growing poor,
And thereon wonders if there's any man
That he could rob in safety."

A PEASANT. Who'd have thought it?
And I was once alone with him at midnight.

ANOTHER PEASANT. I will not trust my mother after this.

FIRST MERCHANT. There is this crack in you--two hundred crowns.

A PEASANT. That's plenty for a rogue.

ANOTHER PEASANT. I'd give him nothing.

SHEMUS. You'll get no more--so take what's offered you.

(A general murmur, during which the MIDDLE-AGED-MAN takes money,
and slips into background, where he sinks on to a seat.)

FIRST MERCHANT. Has no one got a better soul than that?
If only for the credit of your parishes, Traffic with us.

A WOMAN. What will you give for mine?

FIRST MERCHANT (reading in book)
"Soft, handsome, and still young "--not much, I think."
It's certain that the man she's married to
Knows nothing of what's hidden in the jar
Between the hour-glass and the pepper-pot."

THE WOMAN. The scandalous book.

FIRST MERCHANT. "Nor how when he's away
At the horse fair the hand that wrote what's hid
Will tap three times upon the window-pane."

THE WOMAN. And if there is a letter, that is no reason
Why I should have less money than the others.

FIRST MERCHANT. You're almost safe, I give you fifty crowns

(She turns to go.)

A hundred, then.

SHEMUS. Woman, have sense-come, Come.
Is this a time to haggle at the price?
There, take it up. There, there. That's right.

(She takes them and goes into the crowd.)

FIRST MERCHANT. Come, deal, deal, deal. It is but for charity
We buy such souls at all; a thousand sins
Made them our Master's long before we came.

(ALEEL enters.)

ALEEL. Here, take my soul, for I am tired of it.
I do not ask a price.

SHEMUS. Not ask a price?
How can you sell your soul without a price?
I would not listen to his broken wits;
His love for Countess Cathleen has so crazed him
He hardly understands what he is saying.

ALEEL. The trouble that has come on Countess Cathleen,
The sorrow that is in her wasted face,
The burden in her eyes, have broke my wits,
And yet I know I'd have you take my soul.

FIRST MERCHANT. We cannot take your soul, for it is hers.

ALEEL. No. but you must. Seeing it cannot help her
I have grown tired of it.

FIRST MERCHANT. Begone from me
I may not touch it.

ALEEL. Is your power so small?
And must I bear it with me all my days?
May you be scorned and mocked!

FIRST MERCHANT. Drag him away.
He troubles me.

(TEIG and SHEMUS lead ALEEL into the crowd.)

SECOND MERCHANT. His gaze has filled me, brother,
With shaking and a dreadful fear.

FIRST MERCHANT. Lean forward
And kiss the circlet where my Master's lips
Were pressed upon it when he sent us hither;
You shall have peace once more.

(SECOND MERCHANT kisses the gold circlet that is about the
head of the FIRST MERCHANT.)
I, too, grow weary,
But there is something moving in my heart
Whereby I know that what we seek the most
Is drawing near--our labour will soon end.
Come, deal, deal, deal, deal, deal; are you all dumb?
What, will you keep me from our ancient home
And from the eternal revelry?

SECOND MERCHANT. Deal, deal.

SHEMUS. They say you beat the woman down too low.

FIRST MERCHANT. I offer this great price: a-thousand crowns
For an old woman who was always ugly.

(An Old PEASANT WOMAN comes forward, and he takes up a book and
reads.)

There is but little set down here against her.
"She has stolen eggs and fowl when times were bad,
But when the times grew better has confessed it;
She never missed her chapel of a Sunday
And when she could, paid dues." Take up your money.

OLD WOMAN. God bless you, Sir.

(She screams.)

Oh, sir, a pain went through me!

FIRST MERCHANT. That name is like a fire to all damned souls.

(Murmur among the PEASANTS, who shrink back from her as she goes
out.)

A PEASANT. How she screamed out!

SECOND PEASANT. And maybe we shall scream so.

THIRD PEASANT. I tell you there is no such place as hell.

FIRST MERCHANT. Can such a trifle turn you from your profit?
Come, deal; come, deal,

MIDDLE-AGED MAN. Master, I am afraid.

FIRST MERCHANT. I bought your soul, and there's no sense in fear
Now the soul's gone.

MIDDLE-AGED MAN. Give me my soul again.

WOMAN (going on her knees and clinging to MERCHANT)
And take this money too, and give me mine.

SECOND MERCHANT. Bear bastards, drink or follow some wild fancy;
For sighs and cries are the soul's work,
And you have none.

(Throws the woman off.)

PEASANT. Come, let's away.

ANOTHER PEASANT. Yes, yes.

ANOTHER PEASANT. Come quickly; if that woman had not screamed
I would have lost my soul.

ANOTHER PEASANT. Come, come away.

(They turn to door, but are stopped by shouts of "Countess
Cathleen! Countess Cathleen!")


CATHLEEN (entering) And so you trade once more?

FIRST MERCHANT. In spite of you.
What brings you here, saint with the sapphire eyes?

CATHLEEN. I come to barter a soul for a great price.

SECOND MERCHANT. What matter, if the soul be worth the price?

CATHLEEN. The people starve, therefore the people go
Thronging to you. I hear a cry come from them
And it is in my ears by night and day,
And I would have five hundred thousand crowns
That I may feed them till the dearth go by.

FIRST MERCHANT. . It may be the soul's worth it.

CATHLEEN. There is more:
The souls that you have bought must be set free.

FIRST MERCHANT. We know of but one soul that's worth the price.

CATHLEEN. Being my own it seems a priceless thing.

SECOND MERCHANT. You offer us--

CATHLEEN. I offer my own soul.

A PEASANT. Do not, do not, for souls the like of ours
Are not precious to God as your soul is.
O! what would Heaven do without you, lady?

ANOTHER PEASANT.
Look how their claws clutch in their leathern gloves.

FIRST MERCHANT. Five hundred thousand crowns; we give the price.
The gold is here; the souls even while you speak
Have slipped out of our bond, because your face
Has shed a light on them and filled their hearts.
But you must sign, for we omit no form
In buying a soul like yours.

SECOND MERCHANT. Sign with this quill.
It was a feather growing on the cock
That crowed when Peter dared deny his Master,
And all who use it have great honour in Hell.

(CATHLEEN leans forward to sign.)

ALEEL (rushing forward and snatching the parchment from her)
Leave all things to the builder of the heavens.

CATHLEEN. I have no thoughts; I hear a cry--a cry.

ALEEL (casting the parchment on the ground)
I have seen a vision under a green hedge,
A hedge of hips and haws-men yet shall hear
The Archangels rolling Satan's empty skull
Over the mountain-tops.

FIRST MERCHANT. Take him away.

(TEIG and SHEMUS drag him roughly away so that he falls upon the
floor among the PEASANTS. CATHLEEN picks up parchment and signs,
then turns towards the PEASANTS.)

CATHLEEN. Take up the money, and now come with me;
When we are far from this polluted place
I will give everybody money enough.

(She goes out, the PEASANTS crowding round her and kissing her
dress. ALEEL and the two MERCHANTS are left alone.)

SECOND MERCHANT. We must away and wait until she dies,
Sitting above her tower as two grey owls,
Waiting as many years as may be, guarding
Our precious jewel; waiting to seize her soul.

FIRST MERCHANT. We need but hover over her head in the air,
For she has only minutes. When she signed
Her heart began to break. Hush, hush, I hear
The brazen door of Hell move on its hinges,
And the eternal revelry float hither
To hearten us.

SECOND MERCHANT. Leap feathered on the air
And meet them with her soul caught in your claws.

(They rush Out. ALEEL crawls into the middle of the room. The
twilight has fallen and gradually darkens as the scene goes on.
There is a distant muttering of thunder and a sound of rising
storm.)

ALEEL. The brazen door stands wide, and Balor comes
Borne in his heavy car, and demons have lifted
The age-weary eyelids from the eyes that of old
Turned gods to stone; Barach, the traitor, comes
And the lascivious race, Cailitin,
That cast a druid weakness and decay
Over Sualtem's and old Dectera's child;
And that great king Hell first took hold upon
When he killed Naisi and broke Deirdre's heart,
And all their heads are twisted to one side,
For when they lived they warred on beauty and peace
With obstinate, crafty, sidelong bitterness.
(He moves about as though the air was full of spirits. OONA
enters.)

Crouch down, old heron, out of the blind storm.

OONA. Where is the Countess Cathleen? All this day
Her eyes were full of tears, and when for a moment
Her hand was laid upon my hand it trembled,
And now I do not know where she is gone.

ALEEL. Cathleen has chosen other friends than us,
And they are rising through the hollow world.
Demons are out, old heron.

OONA. God guard her soul.

ALEEL. She's bartered it away this very hour,
As though we two were never in the world.
And they are rising through the hollow world.

(He Points downward.)

First, Orchill, her pale, beautiful head alive,
Her body shadowy as vapour drifting
Under the dawn, for she who awoke desire
Has but a heart of blood when others die;
About her is a vapoury multitude
    Of women alluring devils with soft laughter
Behind her a host heat of the blood made sin,
But all the little pink-white nails have grown
To be great talons.

(He seizes OONA and drags her into the middle of the room
and Points downward with vehement gestures. The wind roars.)

They begin a song
And there is still some music on their tongues.

OONA (casting herself face downwards on the floor)
O, Maker of all, protect her from the demons,
And if a soul must need be lost, take mine.

(ALEEL kneels beside her, but does not seem to hear her words.
The PEASANTS return. They carry the COUNTESS CATHLEEN and lay
her upon the ground before OONA and ALEEL. She lies there as if
dead.)

OONA. O, that so many pitchers of rough clay
Should prosper and the porcelain break in two!

(She kisses the hands of CATHLEEN.)

A PEASANT. We were under the tree where the path turns,
When she grew pale as death and fainted away.
And while we bore her hither cloudy gusts
Blackened the world and shook us on our feet
Draw the great bolt, for no man has beheld
So black, bitter, blinding, and sudden a storm.

(One who is near the door draws the bolt.)

CATHLEEN. O, hold me, and hold me tightly, for the storm
Is dragging me away.

(OONA takes her in her arms. A WOMAN begins to wail.)

PEASANT. Hush!

PEASANTS. Hush!

PEASANT WOMEN Hush!

OTHER PEASANT WOMEN Hush!

CATHLEEN (half rising) Lay all the bags of money in a heap,
And when I am gone, old Oona, share them out
To every man and woman: judge, and give
According to their needs.

A PEASANT WOMAN. And will she give
Enough to keep my children through the dearth?

ANOTHER PEASANT WOMAN.
O, Queen of Heaven, and all you blessed saints,
Let us and ours be lost so she be shriven.

CATHLEEN. Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel;
I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes
Upon the nest under the eave, before
She wander the loud waters. Do not weep
Too great a while, for there is many a candle
On the High Altar though one fall. Aleel,
Who sang about the dancers of the woods,
That know not the hard burden of the world,
Having but breath in their kind bodies, farewell
And farewell, Oona, you who played with me,
And bore me in your arms about the house
When I was but a child and therefore happy,
Therefore happy, even like those that dance.
The storm is in my hair and I must go.

(She dies.)

OONA. Bring me the looking-glass.

(A WOMAN brings it to her out of the inner room. OONA holds it
over the lips Of CATHLEEN. All is silent for a moment. And then
she speaks in a half scream:)

O, she is dead!

A PEASANT. She was the great white lily of the world.

A PEASANT. She was more beautiful than the pale stars.

AN OLD PEASANT WOMAN. The little plant I love is broken in two.

(ALEEL takes looking-glass from OONA and flings it upon the floor
so that it is broken in many pieces.)

ALEEL. I shatter you in fragments, for the face
That brimmed you up with beauty is no more:
And die, dull heart, for she whose mournful words
Made you a living spirit has passed away
And left you but a ball of passionate dust.
And you, proud earth and plumy sea, fade out!
For you may hear no more her faltering feet,
But are left lonely amid the clamorous war
Of angels upon devils.

(He stands up; almost every one is kneeling, but it has grown so
dark that only confused forms can be seen.)

And I who weep
Call curses on you, Time and Fate and Change,
And have no excellent hope but the great hour
When you shall plunge headlong through bottomless space.

(A flash of lightning followed immediately by thunder.)

A PEASANT WOMAN. Pull him upon his knees before his curses
Have plucked thunder and lightning on our heads.

ALEEL. Angels and devils clash in the middle air,
And brazen swords clang upon brazen helms.

(A flash of lightning followed immediately by thunder.)

Yonder a bright spear, cast out of a sling,
Has torn through Balor's eye, and the dark clans
Fly screaming as they fled Moytura of old.

(Everything is lost in darkness.)

AN OLD MAN. The Almighty wrath at our great weakness and sin
Has blotted out the world and we must die.

(The darkness is broken by a visionary light. The PEASANTS seem
to be kneeling upon the rocky slope of a mountain, and
vapour full of storm and ever-changing light is sweeping above
them and behind them. Half in the light, haff in the shadow,
stand armed angels. Their armour is old and worn, and their
drawn swords dim and dinted. They stand as if upon the air
in formation of battle and look downward with stern faces.
The PEASANTS cast themselves on the ground.)

ALEEL. Look no more on the half-closed gates of Hell,
But speak to me, whose mind is smitten of God,
That it may be no more with mortal things,
And tell of her who lies there.

(He seizes one of the angels.)

Till you speak
You shall not drift into eternity.

THE ANGEL. The light beats down; the gates of pearl are wide.
And she is passing to the floor of peace,
And Mary of the seven times wounded heart
Has kissed her lips, and the long blessed hair
Has fallen on her face; The Light of Lights
Looks always on the motive, not the deed,
The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.

(ALEEL releases the ANGEL and kneels.)

OONA. Tell them who walk upon the floor of peace
That I would die and go to her I love;
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.

(A sound of far-off horns seems to come from the heart of the
Light. The vision melts away, and the forms of the kneeling
PEASANTS appear faintly in the darkness.)

  Notes


I found the story of the Countess Cathleen in what professed to
be a collection of Irish folk-lore in an Irish newspaper some
years ago.  I wrote to the compiler, asking about its source,
but got no answer, but have since heard that it was translated
from Les Matin`ees de Timoth`e Trimm a good many years ago, and
has been drifting about the Irish press ever since. L`eo Lesp`es
gives it as an Irish story, and though the editor of Folklore has
kindly advertised for information, the only Christian variant I
know of is a Donegal tale, given by Mr. Larminie in his West
Irish Folk Tales and Romances, of a woman who goes to hell for
ten years to save her husband, and stays there another ten,
having been granted permission to carry away as many souls as
could cling to her skirt. L`eo Lesp`es may have added a few
details, but I have no doubt of the essential antiquity of what
seems to me the most impressive form of one of the supreme
parables of the world. The parable came to the Greeks in the
sacrifice of Alcestis, but her sacrifice was less overwhelming,
less apparently irremediable. L`eo Lesp`es tells the story as
follows:--

Ce que je vais vous dire est un r`ecit du car`eme Irlandais. Le
boiteux, l'aveugle, le paralytique des rues de Dublin ou de
Limerick, vous le diraient mieux que moi, cher lecteur, si vous
alliez le leur demander, un sixpense d'argent  `a la main.-Il
n'est pas une jeune fille catholique `a laquelle on ne Fait
appris pendant les jours de pr`eparation `a la communion sainte,
pas un berger des bords de la Blackwater qui ne le puisse redire
`a la veill`ee.

Il y a bien longtemps qu'il apparut tout-`a-coup dans la vielle
Irlande deux marchands inconnus dont personne n'avait oui parler,
et qui parlaient n`eanmoins avec la plus grande perfection la
langue du pays. Leurs cheveux `etaient noirs et ferr`es avec de
l'or et leurs robes d'une grande magnificence.

Tous deux semblaient avoir le m`eme age; ils paraissaient `etre
des hommes de cinquante ans, car leur barbe grisormait un peu.

Or, `a cette `epoque, comme aujourd'hui, l'Irlande `etait pauvre,
car le soleil avait `et`e rare, et des r`ecoltes presque nulles.
Les indigents ne savaient `a quel sainte se vouer, et la mis`ere
devenai de plus en plus terrible.

Dans l'h`otellerie o`u descendirent les marchands fastueux on
chercha `a p`en`etrer leurs desseins: mais cc fut en vain, ils
demeur`erent silencieux et discrets.

Et pendant qu'ils demeur`erent dans l'h`otellerie, ils ne
cess`erent de compter et de recompter des sacs de pi`eces d'or,
dont la vive clart`e s'apercevait `a travers les vitres du logis.

Gentlemen, leur dit l'h`otesse un jour, d'o`u vient que vous
`etes si opulents, et que, venus pour secourir la mis`ere
publique, vous ne fassiez pas de bonnes oeuvres?

-Belle h`otesse, r`epondit l'un d'eux, nous n'avons pas voulu
aller au-devant d'infortunes honorables, dans la crainte d'`etre
tromp`es par des mis`eres fictives: que la douleur frappe `a la
porte, nous ouvrirons.

Le lendemain, quand on sut qu'il existait deux opulents
`etrangers pr`ets `a prodiguer l'or, la foule assi`egea leur
logis; mais les figures des gens qui en sortaient `etaient bien
diverses.  Les uns avaient la fiert`e dans le regard, les autres
portaient la honte au front.  Les deux trafiquants achetaient
des `ames pour le d`emon.  L'`ame d'un vieillard valait vingt
pi`eces d'or, pas un penny de plus; car Satan avait eu le temps
d'y former hypoth`eque.  L'`ame d'une `pouse en valait cinquante
quand elle `etait jolie, ou cent quand elle `etait laide. L'`Ame
d'une jeune fille se payait des prix fous: les fleurs les plus
belles et les plus pures sont les plus ch`eres.

Pendant ce temps, il existait dans la ville un ange de beaut`e,
la comtesse Ketty O'Connor. Elle `etait l'idole du peuple, et la
providence des indigents.  D`es qu'elle eut appris que des
m`ecr`eants profitaient de la mis`ere publique pour d`erober des
coeurs `a Dieu, elle fit appeler son majordome.

- Master Patrick, lui dit elle, combien ai-je de pi`eces d'or
dans mon coffre?

- Cent mille.

- Combien de bijoux?

- Pour autant d'argent.

- Combien de ch`ateaux, de bois et de terres?

- Pour le double de ces sommes.

- Eh bien! Patrick, vendez tout cc qui n'est pas or et
apportez-m'en le montant. je ne veux garder `a moi que ce castel
et le champs qui l'entoure.

Deux jours apr`es, les ordres de la pieuse Ketty `etaient
ex`ecues et le tr`esor `etait distribu`e aux pauvres au fur et `a
mesure de leurs besoins.

Ceci ne faisait pas le compte, dit la tradition, des
commisvoyageurs du malin esprit, qui ne trouvaient plus d'`ames
`a acheter.

Aides par un valet infame, ils p`en`etr`erent dans la retraite de
la noble dame et lui d`erob`erent le reste de son tr`esor. . . en
vain lutta-t-elle de toutes ses forces pour sauver le contenu de
son coffre, les larrons diaboliques furent les plus forts. Si
Ketty avait eu les moyens de faire un signe de croix, ajoute la
l`egende Irlandaise, elle les eut mis en fuite, mais ses mains
`etaient captives-Le larcin fut effectu`e.

Alors les pauvres sollicit`erent
en vain pr`es de Ketty d`epouill`ee, elle ne pouvait plus
secourir leur mis`ere;-elle les abandonnait `a la tentation.
Pourtant il n'y avait plus que huit jours `a passer pour que les
grains et les fourrages arrivassent en abondance des pays
d'Orient. Mais, huit jours, c'`etait un si`ecle : huit jours
n`ecessitaient une somme immense pour subvenir aux exigences de
la disette, et les pauvres allaient ou expirer dans les angoisses
de la faim, ou, reniant les saintes maximes de l'Evangile,
vendre `a vil prix leur `ame, le plus beau pr`esent de la
munificence du Seigneur toutpuissant.

Et Ketty n'avait plus une obole, car elle avait abandonn`e son
ch`ateaux aux malheureux.

Elle passa douze heures dans les larmes et le deuil, arrachant
ses cheveux couleur de soleil et meurtrissant son sein couleur du
lis: puis elle se leva r`esolue, anim`ee par un vif sentiment de
d`esespoir.

Elle se rendit chez les marchands d'`ames.

- Que voulez-vous? dirent ils.

- Vous achetez des `ames?

- Oui, un peu malgr`e vous, n'est ce pas, sainte aux yeux de
sapbir?

- Aujourd'hui je viens vous proposer un march`e, reprit elle.

- Lequel?

- J'ai une `ame `a vendre; mais elle est ch`ere.

- Qu'importe si elle est pr`ecieuse? L'`ame, comme le diamant,
s'appr`ecie `a sa blancheur.

- C'est la mienne, dit Ketty.

Les deux envoy`es de Satan tressaillirent, Leurs griffes
s'allong`erent sous leurs gants de cuir; leurs yeux gris
`etincel`erent:--l'`ame, pure, immacul`ee, virginale de Ketty
c'`etait une acquisition inappr`eciable.

- Gentille dame, combien voulez-vouz?

- Cent cinquante mille `ecus d'or.

- C'est fait, dirent les marchands: et ils tendirent `a Ketty un
parchemin  cachet`e de noir, qu'elle signa en frissonnant.

La somme lui fut compt`ee.

Des qu'elle fut rentr`ee, elle dit au majordome:

- Tenez, distribuez ceci. Avec la somme que je vous donne les
pauvres attendront la huitaine n`ecessaire et pas une de leurs
`ames ne sera livr`ee au d`emon.


Puis elle s'enferma et recommanda qu'on ne vint pas la d`eranger.

Trois jours se pass`erent; elle n'appela pas; elle ne sortit pas.

Quand on ouvrit sa porte, on la trouva raide et froide: elle
`etait morte de douleur.

Mais la vente de cette `ame si adorable dans sa charit`e fut
d`eclar`ee nulle par le Seigneur: car elle avait sauv`e ses
concitoyens de la morte `eternelle.

Apr`es la huitaine, des vaisseaux nombreux amen`erent l'Irlande
affam`ee d'immenses provisions de grains.

La famine n'`etait plus possible. Quant aux marchands, ils
disparurent de leur h`otellerie, sans qu'on s`ut jamais ce qu'ils
`etaient devenus.

Toutefois, les p`echeurs de la Blackwater pr`etendent qu'ils sont
enchain`es dans une prison souterraine par ordre de Lucifer
jusqu'au moment o`u ils pourront livrer l'`ame de Ketty qui leur
a `echapp`e. je vous dis la l`egende telle que je la sais.

-Mais les pauvres l'ont racont`e d'`age en `age et les enfants de
Cork et de Dublin chantent encore la ballade dont voici les
derniers couplets:-

Pour sauver les pauvres qu'elle aime
Ketty donna
Son esprit, sa croyance m`eme
Satan paya
Cette `ame au d`evoument sublime,
En `ecus d'or,
Disons pour racheter son crime,
Confiteor.

Mais l'ange qui se fit coupable
Par charit`e

Au s`ejour d'amour ineffable
Est remont`e.
Satan vaincu n'eut pas de prise

Sur ce coeur d'or;
Chantons sous la nef de l'`eglise,
Confiteor.

N'est ce pas que ce r`ecit, n`e de l'imagination des po`etes
catholiques de la verte Erin, est une V`eritable r`ecit
de car`eme?


The Countess Cathleen was acted in Dublin in 1899, with Mr.
Marcus St. John and Mr. Trevor Lowe as the First and Second
Demon, Mr. Valentine Grace as Shemus Rua, Master Charles Sefton
as Teig, Madame San Carola as Mary, Miss Florence Farr as Aleel,
Miss Anna Mather as Oona, Mr. Charles Holmes as the Herdsman, Mr.
Jack Wilcox as the Gardener, Mr. Walford as a Peasant, Miss
Dorothy Paget as a Spirit, Miss M. Kelly as a Peasant Woman, Mr.
T. E. Wilkinson as a Servant, and Miss May Whitty as The Countess
Kathleen. They had to face a very vehement opposition stirred up
by a politician and a newspaper, the one accusing me in a
pamphlet, the other in long articles day after day, of blasphemy
because of the language of the demons or of Shemus Rua, and
because I made a woman sell her soul and yet escape damnation,
and of a lack of patriotism because I made Irish men and women,
who, it seems, never did such a thing, sell theirs. The
politician or the newspaper persuaded some forty Catholic
students to sign a protest against the play, and a Cardinal, who
avowed that he had not read it, to make another, and both
politician and newspaper made such obvious appeals to the
audience to break the peace, that a score or so of police were
sent to the theatre to see that they did not. I had, however, no
reason to regret the result, for the stalls, containing almost
all that was distinguished in Dublin, and a gallery of artisans
alike insisted on the freedom of literature.

After the performance in 1899 I added the love scene between
Aleel and the Countess, and in this new form the play was revived
in New York by Miss Wycherley as well as being played a good deal
in England and America by amateurs. Now at last I have made a
complete revision to make it suitable for performance at the
Abbey Theatre. The first two scenes are almost wholly new, and
throughout the play I have added or left out such passages as a
stage experience of some years showed me encumbered the action;
the play in its first form having been written before I knew
anything of the theatre. I have left the old end, however, in the
version printed in the body of this book, because the change for
dramatic purposes has been made for no better reason than that
audiences--even at the Abbey Theatre--are almost ignorant of Irish
mythology or because a shallow stage made the elaborate vision of
armed angels upon a mountain-side impossible.            The new
end is particularly suited to the Abbey stage, where the stage
platform can be brought out in front of the prosceniurn and have
a flight of steps at one side up which the Angel comes, crossing
towards the back of the stage at the opposite side. The principal
lighting is from two arc lights in the balcony which throw their
lights into the faces of the players, making footlights
unnecessary. The room at Shemus Rua's house is suggested by a
great grey curtain-a colour which becomes full of rich tints
under the stream of light from the arcs. The two or more arches
in the third scene permit the use of a gauze. The short front
scene before the last is just long enough when played with
incidental music to allow the scene set behind it to be changed.
The play when played without interval in this way lasts a little
over an hour.

The play was performed at the Abbey Theatre for the first time on
December 14, 1911, Miss Maire O'Neill taking the part
of the Countess, and the last scene from the going out of the
Merchants was as follows:-

(MERCHANTS rush out. ALEEL crawls into the middle of the room;
the twilight has fallen and gradually darkens as the scene goes
on.)

ALEEL. They're rising up-they're rising through the earth,
Fat Asmodel and giddy Belial,
And all the fiends. Now they       leap in the air.
But why does Hell's gate creak     so? Round and round,
Hither and hither, to and fro they're running.


He moves about as though the air was full of spirits.
OONA enters.)

Crouch down, old heron, out of the blind storm.

OONA. Where is the Countess Cathleen?  All this day
Her eyes were full of tears, and when for a moment
Her hand was laid upon my hand, it trembled.
And now I do not know where she is gone.

ALEEL. Cathleen has chosen other friends than us,
And they are rising through the hollow world.
Demons are out, old  heron.

OONA. God guard her soul.

ALEEL. She's bartered it away this very hour,
As though we two were never in the world.

(He kneels beside her, but does not seem to hear her words. The
PEASANTS return. They carry the COUNTESS CATHLEEN and lay her
upon the ground before OONA and ALEEL. She lies there as if
dead.)

OONA. O, that so many pitchers of rough clay
Should prosper and the porcelain break in two!

(She kisses the hands Of CATHLEEN.)

A PEASANT. We were under the tree where the path turns
When she grew pale as death and fainted away.

CATHLEEN. O! hold me, and hold me tightly, for the storm
is dragging me away.

(OONA takes her in her arms. A WOMAN begins to wail.)

PEASANTS. Hush!

PEASANTS Hush!

PEASANT WOMEN. Hush!

OTHER PEASANT WOMEN. Hush!

CATHLEEN. (half rising) Lay all the bags of money in a heap,
And when I am gone, old Oona, share them out
To every man and woman: judge, and give
According to their needs.

A PEASANT WOMAN. And will she give
Enough to keep my children through the dearth?

ANOTHER PEASANT WOMAN.
O, Queen of Heaven, and all you blessed saints,
Let us and ours be lost, so she be shriven.

CATHLEEN. Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel;
I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes
Upon the nest under the eave, before
She wander the loud waters. Do not weep
Too great a while, for there is many a candle
On the High Altar though one fall. Aleel,
Who sang about the dancers of the woods,
That know not the hard burden of the world,
Having but breath in their kind bodies, farewell
And farewell, Oona, you who played with me
And bore me in your arms about the house
When I was but a child-and therefore happy,
Therefore happy even like those that dance.
The storm is in my hair and I must go.

(She dies.)

OONA. Bring me the looking-glass.

(A WOMAN brings it to her out of inner room. OONA holds glass
over the lips of CATHLEEN. All is Silent for a moment, then she
speaks in a half-scream.)

O, she is dead!

A PEASANT. She was the great white lily of the world.

A PEASANT. She was more beautiful than the pale stars.

AN OLD PEASANT WOMAN. The little plant I loved is broken in two.

(ALEEL takes looking-glass from OONA and flings it upon fkoor, so
that it is broken in manypieces.)

ALEEL. I shatter you in fragments, for the face
That brimmed you up with beauty is no more;
And die, dull heart, for you that were a mirror
Are but a ball of passionate dust again!
And level earth and plumy sea, rise up!
And haughty sky, fall down!

A PEASANT WOMAN. Pull him upon his knees,
His curses will pluck lightning on our heads.

ALEEL. Angels and devils clash in the middle air,
And brazen swords clang upon brazen helms.
Look, look, a spear has gone through Belial's eye!

(A winged ANGEL, carrying a torch and a sword, enters from the R.
with eyes fixed upon some distant thing. The ANGEL is about to
pass out to the L. when ALEEL speaks. The ANGEL Stops
a moment and turns.)

Look no more on the half-closed gates of Hell,
But speak to me whose mind is smitten of God,
That it may be no more with mortal things:
And tell of her who lies there.

(The ANGEL turns again and is about to go, but is seized by
ALEEL.)

Till you speak
You shall not drift into eternity.
ANGEL. The light beats down; the gates of pearl are wide.
And she is passing to the floor of peace,
And Mary of the seven times wounded heart
Has kissed her lips, and the long blessed hair
Has fallen on her face; the Light of Lights
Looks always on the motive, not the deed,
The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.

(ALEEL releases the ANGEL and kneels.)

OONA. Tell them who walk upon the floor of peace,

That I would die and go to her I love,
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.

Four Years 1887-1891.

At the end of the eighties my father and mother, my brother and
sisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in
Bedford Park in a red-brick house with several wood mantlepieces
copied from marble mantlepieces by the brothers Adam, a balcony,
and a little garden shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years
before we had lived there, when the crooked, ostentatiously
picturesque streets, with great trees casting great shadows, had
been anew enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite movement at last
affecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken the place
of enthusiasm; the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were
said to leak, which they did not, & the drains to be bad, though
that was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap. I
remember feeling disappointed because the co-operative stores,
with their little seventeenth century panes, were so like any
common shop; and because the public house, called 'The Tabard'
after Chaucer's Inn, was so plainly a common public house; and
because the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the Pre-
Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand. The
big red-brick church had never pleased me, and I was accustomed,
when I saw the wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edge
of the roof, where nobody ever walked or could walk, to remember
the opinion of some architect friend of my father's, that it had
been put there to keep the birds from falling off. Still, however,
it had some village characters and helped us to feel not wholly
lost in the metropolis. I no longer went to church as a regular
habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning I saw these
words painted on a board in the porch: 'The congregation are
requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to
be hung upon pegs provided for the purpose.' In front of every
seat hung a little cushion, and these cushions were called
'kneelers.' Presently the joke ran through the community, where
there were many artists, who considered religion at best an
unimportant accessory to good architecture and who disliked that
particular church.

II


I could not understand where the charm had gone that I had felt,
when as a school-boy of twelve or thirteen, I had played among the
unfinished houses, once leaving the marks of my two hands, blacked
by a fall among some paint, upon a white balustrade. Sometimes I
thought it was because these were real houses, while my play had
been among toy-houses some day to be inhabited by imaginary people
full of the happiness that one can see in picture books. I was in
all things Pre-Raphaelite. When I was fifteen or sixteen, my
father had told me about Rossetti and Blake and given me their
poetry to read; & once in Liverpool on my way to Sligo, "I had
seen 'Dante's Dream' in the gallery there--a picture painted when
Rossetti had lost his dramatic power, and to-day not very pleasing
to me--and its colour, its people, its romantic architecture had
blotted all other pictures away." It was a perpetual bewilderment
that my father, who had begun life as a Pre-Raphaelite painter,
now painted portraits of the first comer, children selling
newspapers, or a consumptive girl with a basket offish upon her
head, and that when, moved perhaps by memory of his youth, he
chose some theme from poetic tradition, he would soon weary and
leave it unfinished. I had seen the change coming bit by bit and
its defence elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art-
schools. 'We must paint what is in front of us,' or 'A man must be
of his own time,' they would say, and if I spoke of Blake or
Rossetti they would point out his bad drawing and tell me to
admire Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage. Then, too, they were very
ignorant men; they read nothing, for nothing mattered but 'Knowing
how to paint,' being in reaction against a generation that seemed
to have wasted its time upon so many things. I thought myself
alone in hating these young men, now indeed getting towards middle
life, their contempt for the past, their monopoly of the future,
but in a few months I was to discover others of my own age, who
thought as I did, for it is not true that youth looks before it
with the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled soldier. Its quarrel is
not with the past, but with the present, where its elders are so
obviously powerful, and no cause seems lost if it seem to threaten
that power. Does cultivated youth ever really love the future,
where the eye can discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among oak
leaves, though from it certainly does come so much proletarian
rhetoric? I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only.
I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I
detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had
made a new religion, almost an infallible church, out of poetic
tradition: a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of
emotions, a bundle of images and of masks passed on from
generation to generation by poets & painters with some help from
philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world where I could
discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and in
poems only, but in tiles round the chimney-piece and in the
hangings that kept out the draught. I had even created a dogma:
'Because those imaginary people are created out of the deepest
instinct of man, to be his measure and his norm, whatever I can
imagine those mouths speaking may be the nearest I can go to
truth.' When I listened they seemed always to speak of one thing
only: they, their loves, every incident of their lives, were
steeped in the supernatural. Could even Titian's 'Ariosto' that I
loved beyond other portraits, have its grave look, as if waiting
for some perfect final event, if the painters, before Titian, had
not learned portraiture, while painting into the corner of
compositions, full of saints and Madonnas, their kneeling patrons?
At seventeen years old I was already an old-fashioned brass cannon
full of shot, and nothing kept me from going off but a doubt as to
my capacity to shoot straight.

III


I was not an industrious student and knew only what I had found by
accident, and I had found "nothing I cared for after Titian--and
Titian I knew chiefly from a copy of 'the supper of Emmaus' in
Dublin--till Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites;" and among my father's
friends were no Pre-Raphaelites. Some indeed had come to Bedford
Park in the enthusiasm of the first building, and others to be
near those that had. There was Todhunter, a well-off man who had
bought my father's pictures while my father was still Pre-
Raphaelite. Once a Dublin doctor he was a poet and a writer of
poetical plays: a tall, sallow, lank, melancholy man, a good
scholar and a good intellect; and with him my father carried on a
warm exasperated friendship, fed I think by old memories and
wasted by quarrels over matters of opinion. Of all the survivors
he was the most dejected, and the least estranged, and I remember
encouraging him, with a sense of worship shared, to buy a very
expensive carpet designed by Morris. He displayed it without
strong liking and would have agreed had there been any to find
fault. If he had liked anything strongly he might have been a
famous man, for a few years later he was to write, under some
casual patriotic impulse, certain excellent verses now in all
Irish anthologies; but with him every book was a new planting and
not a new bud on an old bough. He had I think no peace in himself.
But my father's chief friend was York Powell, a famous Oxford
Professor of history, a broad-built, broad-headed, brown-bearded
man, clothed in heavy blue cloth and looking, but for his glasses
and the dim sight of a student, like some captain in the merchant
service. One often passed with pleasure from Todhunter's company
to that of one who was almost ostentatiously at peace. He cared
nothing for philosophy, nothing for economics, nothing for the
policy of nations, for history, as he saw it, was a memory of men
who were amusing or exciting to think about. He impressed all who
met him & seemed to some a man of genius, but he had not enough
ambition to shape his thought, or conviction to give rhythm to his
style, and remained always a poor writer. I was too full of
unfinished speculations and premature convictions to value rightly
his conversation, in-formed by a vast erudition, which would give
itself to every casual association of speech and company precisely
because he had neither cause nor design. My father, however, found
Powell's concrete narrative manner a necessary completion of his
own; and when I asked him, in a letter many years later, where he
got his philosophy, replied 'From York Powell' and thereon added,
no doubt remembering that Powell was without ideas, 'By looking at
him.' Then there was a good listener, a painter in whose hall hung
a big picture, painted in his student days, of Ulysses sailing
home from the Phaeacian court, an orange and a skin of wine at his
side, blue mountains towering behind; but who lived by drawing
domestic scenes and lovers' meetings for a weekly magazine that
had an immense circulation among the imperfectly educated. To
escape the boredom of work, which he never turned to but under
pressure of necessity, and usually late at night with the
publisher's messenger in the hall, he had half filled his studio
with mechanical toys of his own invention, and perpetually
increased their number. A model railway train at intervals puffed
its way along the walls, passing several railway stations and
signal boxes; and on the floor lay a camp with attacking and
defending soldiers and a fortification that blew up when the
attackers fired a pea through a certain window; while a large
model of a Thames barge hung from the ceiling. Opposite our house
lived an old artist who worked also for the illustrated papers for
a living, but painted landscapes for his pleasure, and of him I
remember nothing except that he had outlived ambition, was a good
listener, and that my father explained his gaunt appearance by his
descent from Pocahontas. If all these men were a little like
becalmed ships, there was certainly one man whose sails were full.
Three or four doors off, on our side of the road, lived a
decorative artist in all the naive confidence of popular ideals
and the public approval. He was our daily comedy. 'I myself and
Sir Frederick Leighton are the greatest decorative artists of the
age,' was among his sayings, & a great lych-gate, bought from some
country church-yard, reared its thatched roof, meant to shelter
bearers and coffin, above the entrance to his front garden, to
show that he at any rate knew nothing of discouragement. In this
fairly numerous company--there were others though no other face
rises before me--my father and York Powell found listeners for a
conversation that had no special loyalties, or antagonisms; while
I could only talk upon set topics, being in the heat of my youth,
and the topics that filled me with excitement were never spoken
of.

IV


Some quarter of an hour's walk from Bedford Park, out on the high
road to Richmond, lived W. E. Henley, and I, like many others,
began under him my education. His portrait, a lithograph by
Rothenstein, hangs over my mantlepiece among portraits of other
friends. He is drawn standing, but, because doubtless of his
crippled legs, he leans forward, resting his elbows upon some
slightly suggested object--a table or a window-sill. His heavy
figure and powerful head, the disordered hair standing upright,
his short irregular beard and moustache, his lined and wrinkled
face, his eyes steadily fixed upon some object, in complete
confidence and self-possession, and yet as in half-broken reverie,
all are exactly as I remember him. I have seen other portraits and
they too show him exactly as I remember him, as though he had but
one appearance and that seen fully at the first glance and by all
alike. He was most human--human, I used to say, like one of
Shakespeare's characters--and yet pressed and pummelled, as it
were, into a single attitude, almost into a gesture and a speech,
as by some overwhelming situation. I disagreed with him about
everything, but I admired him beyond words. With the exception of
some early poems founded upon old French models, I disliked his
poetry, mainly because he wrote _Vers Libre_, which I associated
with Tyndall and Huxley and Bastien-Lepage's clownish peasant
staring with vacant eyes at her great boots; and filled it
with unimpassioned description of an hospital ward where his leg
had been amputated. I wanted the strongest passions, passions that
had nothing to do with observation, and metrical forms that seemed
old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey.
Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelitism affected him as some people are
affected by a cat in the room, and though he professed himself at
our first meeting without political interests or convictions, he
soon grew into a violent unionist and imperialist. I used to say
when I spoke of his poems: 'He is like a great actor with a bad
part; yet who would look at Hamlet in the grave scene if Salvini
played the grave-digger?' and I might so have explained much that
he said and did. I meant that he was like a great actor of
passion--character-acting meant nothing to me for many years--and
an actor of passion will display some one quality of soul,
personified again and again, just as a great poetical painter,
Titian, Botticelli, Rossetti may depend for his greatness upon a
type of beauty which presently we call by his name. Irving, the
last of the sort on the English stage, and in modern England and
France it is the rarest sort, never moved me but in the expression
of intellectual pride; and though I saw Salvini but once, I am
convinced that his genius was a kind of animal nobility. Henley,
half inarticulate--'I am very costive,' he would say--beset with
personal quarrels, built up an image of power and magnanimity till
it became, at moments, when seen as it were by lightning, his true
self. Half his opinions were the contrivance of a sub-consciousness
that sought always to bring life to the dramatic crisis, and
expression to that point of artifice where the true self could
find its tongue. Without opponents there had been no drama,
and in his youth Ruskinism and Pre-Raphaelitism, for he was
of my father's generation, were the only possible opponents. How
could one resent his prejudice when, that he himself might play a
worthy part, he must find beyond the common rout, whom he derided
and flouted daily, opponents he could imagine moulded like
himself? Once he said to me in the height of his imperial
propaganda, 'Tell those young men in Ireland that this great thing
must go on. They say Ireland is not fit for self-government but
that is nonsense. It is as fit as any other European country but
we cannot grant it.' And then he spoke of his desire to found and
edit a Dublin newspaper. It would have expounded the Gaelic
propaganda then beginning, though Dr. Hyde had as yet no league,
our old stories, our modern literature--everything that did not
demand any shred or patch of government. He dreamed of a tyranny
but it was that of Cosimo de Medici.

V


We gathered on Sunday evenings in two rooms, with folding doors
between, & hung, I think, with photographs from Dutch masters, and
in one room there was always, I think, a table with cold meat. I
can recall but one elderly man--Dunn his name was--rather silent
and full of good sense, an old friend of Henley's. We were young
men, none as yet established in his own, or in the world's
opinion, and Henley was our leader and our confidant. One evening
I found him alone amused and exasperated.

He cried: 'Young A... has just been round to ask my advice. Would
I think it a wise thing if he bolted with Mrs. B...? "Have you
quite determined to do it?" I asked him. "Quite." "Well," I said,
"in that case I refuse to give you any advice."' Mrs. B... was a
beautiful talented woman, who, as the Welsh triad said of
Guinevere, 'was much given to being carried off.' I think we
listened to him, and often obeyed him, partly because he was quite
plainly not upon the side of our parents. We might have a
different ground of quarrel, but the result seemed more important
than the ground, and his confident manner and speech made us
believe, perhaps for the first time, in victory. And besides, if
he did denounce, and in my case he certainly did, what we held in
secret reverence, he never failed to associate it with things, or
persons, that did not move us to reverence. Once I found him just
returned from some art congress in Liverpool or in Manchester.
'The Salvation Armyism of art,' he called it, & gave a grotesque
description of some city councillor he had found admiring Turner.
Henley, who hated all that Ruskin praised, thereupon derided
Turner, and finding the city councillor the next day on the other
side of the gallery, admiring some Pre-Raphaelite there, derided
that Pre-Raphaelite. The third day Henley discovered the poor man
on a chair in the middle of the room, staring disconsolately upon
the floor. He terrified us also, and certainly I did not dare, and
I think none of us dared, to speak our admiration for book or
picture he condemned, but he made us feel always our importance,
and no man among us could do good work, or show the promise of it,
and lack his praise.

I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth
Grahame, author of 'The Golden Age,' Barry Pain, now a well known
novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker,
George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief
secretary, and Oscar Wilde, who was some eight years or ten older
than the rest. But faces and names are vague to me and, while
faces that I met but once may rise clearly before me, a face met
on many a Sunday has perhaps vanished. Kipling came sometimes, I
think, but I never met him; and Stepniak, the nihilist, whom I
knew well elsewhere but not there, said 'I cannot go more than
once a year, it is too exhausting.' Henley got the best out of us
all, because he had made us accept him as our judge and we knew
that his judgment could neither sleep, nor be softened, nor
changed, nor turned aside. When I think of him, the antithesis
that is the foundation of human nature being ever in my sight, I
see his crippled legs as though he were some Vulcan perpetually
forging swords for other men to use; and certainly I always
thought of C..., a fine classical scholar, a pale and seemingly
gentle man, as our chief swordsman and bravo. When Henley founded
his weekly newspaper, first the 'Scots,' afterwards 'The National
Observer,' this young man wrote articles and reviews notorious for
savage wit; and years afterwards when 'The National Observer' was
dead, Henley dying & our cavern of outlaws empty, I met him in
Paris very sad and I think very poor. 'Nobody will employ me now,'
he said. 'Your master is gone,' I answered, 'and you are like the
spear in an old Irish story that had to be kept dipped in poppy-
juice that it might not go about killing people on its own
account.' I wrote my first good lyrics and tolerable essays for
'The National Obsever' and as I always signed my work could go my
own road in some measure. Henley often revised my lyrics, crossing
out a line or a stanza and writing in one of his own, and I was
comforted by my belief that he also re-wrote Kipling then in the
first flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of
being re-written and thought that others were not, and only began
investigation when the editorial characteristics--epigrams,
archaisms and all--appeared in the article upon Paris fashions and
in that upon opium by an Egyptian Pasha. I was not compelled to
full conformity for verse is plainly stubborn; and in prose, that
I might avoid unacceptable opinions, I wrote nothing but ghost or
fairy stories, picked up from my mother, or some pilot at Rosses
Point, and Henley saw that I must needs mix a palette fitted to my
subject matter. But if he had changed every 'has' into 'hath' I
would have let him, for had not we sunned ourselves in his
generosity? 'My young men out-dome and they write better than I,'
he wrote in some letter praising Charles Whibley's work, and to
another friend with a copy of my 'Man who dreamed of Fairyland:'
'See what a fine thing has been written by one of my lads.'

VI


My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never
before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had
written them all over night with labour and yet all spontaneous.
There was present that night at Henley's, by right of propinquity
or of accident, a man full of the secret spite of dullness, who
interrupted from time to time and always to check or disorder
thought; and I noticed with what mastery he was foiled and thrown.
I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality that I think
all Wilde's listeners have recorded, came from the perfect
rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it
possible. That very impression helped him as the effect of metre,
or of the antithetical prose of the seventeenth century, which is
itself a true metre, helps a writer, for he could pass without
incongruity from some unforeseen swift stroke of wit to elaborate
reverie. I heard him say a few nights later: 'Give me "The
Winter's Tale," "Daffodils that come before the swallow dare" but
not "King Lear." What is "King Lear" but poor life staggering in
the fog?' and the slow cadence, modulated with so great precision,
sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter
Pater's 'Essays on the Renaissance:' 'It is my golden book; I
never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of
decadence. The last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was
written.' 'But,' said the dull man, 'would you not have given us
time to read it?' 'Oh no,' was the retort, 'there would have been
plenty of time afterwards--in either world.' I think he seemed to
us, baffled as we were by youth, or by infirmity, a triumphant
figure, and to some of us a figure from another age, an audacious
Italian fifteenth century figure. A few weeks before I had heard
one of my father's friends, an official in a publishing firm that
had employed both Wilde and Henley as editors, blaming Henley who
was 'no use except under control' and praising Wilde, 'so indolent
but such a genius;' and now the firm became the topic of our talk.
'How often do you go to the office?' said Henley. 'I used to go
three times a week,' said Wilde, 'for an hour a day but I have
since struck off one of the days.' 'My God,' said Henley, 'I went
five times a week for five hours a day and when I wanted to strike
off a day they had a special committee meeting.' 'Furthermore,'
was Wilde's answer, 'I never answered their letters. I have known
men come to London full of bright prospects and seen them complete
wrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters.' He
too knew how to keep our elders in their place, and his method was
plainly the more successful for Henley had been dismissed. 'No he
is not an aesthete,' Henley commented later, being somewhat
embarrassed by Wilde's Pre-Raphaelite entanglement. 'One soon
finds that he is a scholar and a gentleman.' And when I dined with
Wilde a few days afterwards he began at once, 'I had to strain
every nerve to equal that man at all;' and I was too loyal to
speak my thought: 'You & not he' said all the brilliant things. He
like the rest of us had felt the strain of an intensity that
seemed to hold life at the point of drama. He had said, on that
first meeting, 'The basis of literary friendship is mixing the
poisoned bowl;' and for a few weeks Henley and he became close
friends till, the astonishment of their meeting over, diversity of
character and ambition pushed them apart, and, with half the
cavern helping, Henley began mixing the poisoned bowl for Wilde.
Yet Henley never wholly lost that first admiration, for after
Wilde's downfall he said to me: 'Why did he do it? I told my lads
to attack him and yet we might have fought under his banner.'

VII


It became the custom, both at Henley's and at Bedford Park, to say
that R. A. M. Stevenson, who frequented both circles, was the
better talker. Wilde had been trussed up like a turkey by
undergraduates, dragged up and down a hill, his champagne emptied
into the ice tub, hooted in the streets of various towns and I
think stoned, and no newspaper named him but in scorn; his manner
had hardened to meet opposition and at times he allowed one to see
an unpardonable insolence. His charm was acquired and systematised,
a mask which he wore only when it pleased him, while the charm
of Stevenson belonged to him like the colour of his hair. If
Stevenson's talk became monologue we did not know it, because
our one object was to show by our attention that he need never
leave off. If thought failed him we would not combat what he
had said, or start some new theme, but would encourage him with a
question; and one felt that it had been always so from childhood
up. His mind was full of phantasy for phantasy's sake and he gave
as good entertainment in monologue as his cousin Robert Louis in
poem or story. He was always 'supposing:' 'Suppose you had two
millions what would you do with it?' and 'Suppose you were in
Spain and in love how would you propose?' I recall him one
afternoon at our house at Bedford Park, surrounded by my brother
and sisters and a little group of my father's friends, describing
proposals in half a dozen countries. There your father did it,
dressed in such and such a way with such and such words, and there
a friend must wait for the lady outside the chapel door, sprinkle
her with holy water and say 'My friend Jones is dying for love of
you.' But when it was over, those quaint descriptions, so full of
laughter and sympathy, faded or remained in the memory as
something alien from one's own life like a dance I once saw in a
great house, where beautifully dressed children wound a long
ribbon in and out as they danced. I was not of Stevenson's party
and mainly I think because he had written a book in praise of
Velasquez, praise at that time universal wherever Pre-Raphaelitism
was accurst, and to my mind, that had to pick its symbols where
its ignorance permitted, Velasquez seemed the first bored
celebrant of boredom. I was convinced, from some obscure
meditation, that Stevenson's conversational method had joined him
to my elders and to the indifferent world, as though it were right
for old men, and unambitious men and all women, to be content with
charm and humour. It was the prerogative of youth to take sides
and when Wilde said: 'Mr. Bernard Shaw has no enemies but is
intensely disliked by all his friends,' I knew it to be a phrase I
should never forget, and felt revenged upon a notorious hater of
romance, whose generosity and courage I could not fathom.

VIII


I saw a good deal of Wilde at that time--was it 1887 or 1888?--I
have no way of fixing the date except that I had published my
first book 'The Wanderings of Usheen' and that Wilde had not yet
published his 'Decay of Lying.' He had, before our first meeting,
reviewed my book and despite its vagueness of intention, and the
inexactness of its speech, praised without qualification; and what
was worth more than any review had talked about it, and now he
asked me to eat my Xmas dinner with him, believing, I imagine,
that I was alone in London.

He had just renounced his velveteen, and even those cuffs turned
backward over the sleeves, and had begun to dress very carefully
in the fashion of the moment. He lived in a little house at
Chelsea that the architect Godwin had decorated with an elegance
that owed something to Whistler. There was nothing mediaeval, nor
Pre-Raphaelite, no cupboard door with figures upon flat gold, no
peacock blue, no dark background. I remember vaguely a white
drawing room with Whistler etchings, 'let in' to white panels, and
a dining room all white: chairs, walls, mantlepiece, carpet,
except for a diamond-shaped piece of red cloth in the middle of
the table under a terra cotta statuette, and I think a red shaded
lamp hanging from the ceiling to a little above the statuette. It
was perhaps too perfect in its unity, his past of a few years
before had gone too completely, and I remember thinking that the
perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and his
two young children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition.

He commended, & dispraised himself, during dinner by attributing
characteristics like his own to his country: 'We Irish are too
poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but
we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.' When dinner was
over he read me from the proofs of 'The Decay of Lying' and when
he came to the sentence: 'Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism
that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The
world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy,' I
said, 'Why do you change "sad" to "melancholy?"' He replied that
he wanted a full sound at the close of his sentence, and I thought
it no excuse and an example of the vague impressiveness that
spoilt his writing for me. Only when he spoke, or when his writing
was the mirror of his speech, or in some simple fairytale, had he
words exact enough to hold a subtle ear. He alarmed me, though not
as Henley did for I never left his house thinking myself fool or
dunce. He flattered the intellect of every man he liked; he made
me tell him long Irish stories and compared my art of story-telling
to Homer's; and once when he had described himself as writing in
the census paper 'age 19, profession genius, infirmity talent,'
the other guest, a young journalist fresh from Oxford or Cambridge,
said 'What should I have written?' and was told that it should
have been 'profession talent, infirmity genius.' When, however,
I called, wearing shoes a little too yellow--unblackened leather
had just become fashionable--I understood their extravagence when
I saw his eyes fixed upon them; an another day Wilde asked me to
tell his little boy a fairy story, and I had but got as far as
'Once upon a time there was a giant' when the little boy screamed
and ran out of the room. Wilde looked grave and I was plunged into
the shame of clumsiness that afflicts the young. When I asked for
some literary gossip for some provincial newspaper, that paid me
a few shillings a month, he explained very explicitly that writing
literary gossip was no job for a gentleman. Though to be compared
to Homer passed the time pleasantly, I had not been greatly
perturbed had he stopped me with 'Is it a long story?' as
Henley would certainly have done. I was abashed before him as wit
and man of the world alone. I remember that he deprecated the very
general belief in his success or his efficiency, and I think with
sincerity. One form of success had gone: he was no more the lion
of the season, and he had not discovered his gift for writing
comedy, yet I think I knew him at the happiest moment of his life.
No scandal had darkened his fame, his fame as a talker was growing
among his equals, & he seemed to live in the enjoyment of his own
spontaneity. One day he began: 'I have been inventing a Christian
heresy,' and he told a detailed story, in the style of some early
father, of how Christ recovered after the Crucifixion and,
escaping from the tomb, lived on for many years, the one man upon
earth who knew the falsehood of Christianity. Once St. Paul
visited his town and he alone in the carpenters' quarter did not
go to hear him preach. The other carpenters noticed that
henceforth, for some unknown reason, he kept his hands covered. A
few days afterwards I found Wilde, with smock frocks in various
colours spread out upon the floor in front of him, while a
missionary explained that he did not object to the heathen going
naked upon week days, but insisted upon clothes in church. He had
brought the smock frocks in a cab that the only art-critic whose
fame had reached Central Africa might select a colour; so Wilde
sat there weighing all with a conscious ecclesiastic solemnity.