Irish Writers I Have Known

by LORD DUNSANY

1

ALTHOUGH I think little of literary movements, believing that great work comes from an individual rather than from a limited company, yet it must be admitted that of the world’s writers of this half century the number that came from Ireland is out of all proportion to the size of the country. I do not know what made this sudden flowering of genius in Ireland. It may even not have been a sudden flowering at all, but merely a harvest; and there may have been in all centuries as many singing on Irish hills as were singing when this century was young, and, for all I know, they may have been without opportunity or recognition. Indeed this is quite likely; for a singer upon the hills whose words never came to print cannot be estimated in other centuries, except by those who are in close touch with legend, which preserves the memory of such singers among a simple folk. But we grow less simple every year; and as we read more and more, the voice of legend grows fainter and fainter in our ears. In the Irish literary harvest of the early part of this century one of the granaries was the Shanachie, and I remember one number containing among other good things a fine piece of prose by George Moore and a magnificent story by Bernard Shaw. Bernard Shaw did not write many short stories; but this one, which I remember to this day, was worthy of a place among the masterpieces of Kipling, de Maupassant, or O. Henry.

And in those days in Dublin magazines one might come on one of the lovely poems of Padraic Colum, made of pure I rish air and t he sunlight on I rish hills. Alas that he so rarely writes one of them for us now. Another granary of that harvest, as all the world knows, was the Abbey Theatre, t he presiding genius of which was W. B. Yeats and the munificent patroness Miss Horniman, who deserves more thanks than she ever got. The other principal benefactress of Yeats was Lady Gregory, who was also a writer herself; and the most famous sheaf of that harvest was Synge. Of course all peoples have a view of themselves, and all artists look out each through a window of his own, so that, when one of them shows life on the stage, it may sometimes come as a shock to those in the house to find their well-known view being regarded from another angle. And so Synge and Shaw arrived with a shock to many.

England perhaps bothers less about what she is than about what is the correct thing to do, or at any rate did so fifty years ago; but both England and Ireland were shocked, the one by Shaw and the other by Synge, and both got over it. The genius of Synge, deliberately planted by him in the Aran Isles, where it grew and flowered for its brief season, was very dissimilar to the talent of Lady Gregory. He, having got an idea, would clothe it in the language of the peasantry, and so express it. But Lady Gregory always struck me as a lady with a notebook, with which she would go into market places or workhouse wards, as Florence Nightingale went into hospitals with her lamp, and there would accurately write down the actual phrases she heard, and make out of them a play. So she and Synge seemed to me to begin at opposite ends, Synge’s seeming to me to be the right method; for, as the work of the architect comes before that of the bricklayer, so I believe that, the primary work of the dramatist is drama, of which dialogue is merely an audible expression, whenever it expresses it at all.

I do not know whence Synge got his ideas, but one of them, and one of the most dramatic, he got from Rudyard Kipling, who also had some Irish blood in his veins: it is that great moment in Riders to the Sea when the woman whose last son has been drowned cries out: “The sea can do no more harm to me.” The idea comes from Kipling’s “The Gilt of the Sea,” written in 1890, the second verse: —

When the shock of seeing that other eyes had looked at a familiar scene and found some difference in it had died down, a large number of writers was attracted to the Abbey Theatre, all inspired by Synge, and his influence upon them has not yet faded away. It was he more than anyone else who showed at the dawning of this century that the scene of all plays need not be laid in a London drawing room. A heroic life seemed to lure Yeats as jam tarts lure hungry children from the other side of a thick sheet of plate glass; and, as though dissatisfied with his own quiet days in peaceful surroundings, he wrote plays of heroes and ancient wars. I still remember three lines read nearly fifty years ago with which one of these plays ended: —

Æ, a contemporary and friend of Yeats, but a very different man, searched for no opposites to his own life, but lived it naturally, always himself. He was a prophet and wrote as a prophet, and spoke as one quite naturally. No one who saw the face of Æ and his inspired eyes or heard the ringing notes of his organ voice could ever have doubted that all he said was sincere. With many men I have had interesting conversations, but with Æ I always felt that he was prophesying unto us. And with the voice and eyes and face of a prophet he had also the generous heart of one, and not only helped, but made, some of the younger writers.

That voice is lost and there will remain only his poems when the memory of t he man has faded with the last of the generation that knew him, but the beautiful melody of those poems, in which is enshrined so much of the twilight on Irish hills, should be enough for posterity to know him as the greatest poet that Ireland ever produced. Alas that these poems were so few. This was the fault of my uncle, Sir Horace Plunkett, who found him in a shop, where he was doing no harm, and set him down at a desk to work for the rest of his life at a trivial journal — very useful of course and well-informed, but ridiculous when compared with the works of genius at which such a bard were better employed. As well harness a desert-wandering dromedary to a roller — which I once saw in the Canary Islands far from its deserts, and always thought of afterwards whenever I saw Æ at his trivial work. Once a year he escaped for a month and fled to Donegal, whence he came back with some of its twilights captured with canvas and paint. It is something to have known a prophet.

2

PERHAPS nobody boasts like a collector, because a pebble or an egg or a wrongly printed stamp is to him such a treasure (according to which he collects) that he cannot help displaying it w ith pride and delight, though neither egg nor stamp nor pebble owes anything whatever to him. And when I was kindly invited not long ago by the Irish Literary Society to a dinner in London, and irked by the rather difficult question that I was asked us to what title I should give to what remarks I might make when the dinner was over, I was rescued from my difficulty by a sudden idea, and said that I would call my talk Reminiscences of a Colleetor of Genius. For I have had the rare luck to make a small collection of genius, my first piece collected having been Francis Ledwidge; and, knowing the speed with which he wrote and his amazing fluency, his Keats-like diction and his piercing eye, peering into t he innermost of t he beauties of nature, I say now what can never be proved: that had he survived the First World War he might have been the greatest of all living poets. That can never be proved now, but at any rate, to take a very small thing, the blackbird, I can challenge anyone to find any more beautiful words written to it anywhere in the world than were written by Francis Ledwidge.

When I said the speed with which he wrote, I should rather have said the speed with which he assimilated new influences. For once I gave him a book of Keats to read, and in a few days he was writing with a similar beauty — not with any kind of imitation, but as though his genius had transmuted some rare element to another, such as platinum into gold, or gold into platinum. I will quote three of his lines that have never been published: —

I know no clearer mirror reflecting Irish fields than the spirit of Francis Ledwidge.

And then there was James Stephens, that leprechaun of a man who came into cities and saw their ways and laughed at them. I think that if a leprechaun were caught on an Irish bog and dressed in modern clothes and taken into a city and forced to work in it by our economic conditions, his attitude towards such unwonted surroundings would be just that of James Stephens. There is so much truth in the old Roman saying that poets are born and not made that I can hardly say that James Stephens was made by Æ; but, were I not bound to recognize the truth of that Latin saw, I should say that Æ had made him. I remember meeting him at Æ’s house in Rathfarnham before his first book was published, and his very natural, almost childish, delight in the anticipation of it. And I remember his first novel being rejected and Æ writing to say that it must be published; and Æ’s advice was taken. And so, sheltered by the cloak of Æ, he grew to his full stature, when he needed nobody’s cloak to shelter him anymore. Let it be remembered of James Stephens that he went from Ireland to London without any particular sympathies for England; and happening to find himself there when the war started, he stayed there all through it, and endured there for all those years all that was endured by those that were native to London. His verses remain like the shapely lines that the waves leave on the sand, but the liveliness and charm of his conversation were like the glitter of the sun on those waves, to be missed by all who knew him.

Of all those Irish writers whom I knew and who are now dead, the most lovable was Æ. Bernard Shaw with his querulous postcards had the reputation of being gruff; but, as I never knew him to be rude to me, but always kind, I have never believed that gruffness to be any more than a pose such as those with which some poets will sometimes choose to cloak themselves. I never had a quarrel with George Moore, but many seem to have quarreled with him, so that it might be that quarrelsomeness was no pose with George Moore. He seems to have been a Parisian by nature, and to have thought better of it when he came to live in Ireland, from which before the end London lured him away, as though he were always susceptible to the gravitational pull thrown out by a capital city. If Æ was most like a prophet of all the men I have known, George Moore deliberately uttered one very clear prophecy, in his Confessions of a Young Man, which I read during the war. He said that the increase of the population made it mathematically certain that the streets would run with blood. And he was perfectly right: they did. And I believe that the sole cause of war is that very increase. Only, George Moore had not given Europe credit for its vast powers of organization, and believed that the bloodshed which he so accurately foresaw would be a domestic concern.

And then there was Dr. Edith Somerville, whom I knew but slightly; but to writeof the Ireland of the last fifty years without mentioning her and her companion Miss Martin, from whom she would not allow even death to separate her, would be as blind as to tell of seventeenth-century Holland without mentioning Rembrandt or Cuyp. For Ireland lives in their stories as bygone scenes live on in the pictures of the Old Masters.

And to this list of dead writers whom I knew I should like to add one name little known, the name of a lady who took to writing too late to make much mark in her lifetime, Mrs. Hamilton, whose autobiography, diaphanously veiled as fiction, and entitled Green and Gold, is a very charming picture of life in Ireland. And then there was Katharine Tynan, a poet of much charm, who was one of the galaxy of poets that shone on our land in those days.

And among all these writers that I have mentioned, and among many more, Oliver St. John Gogarty went to and fro like Mercury among the other gods, and with something of Mercury’s volatile nature, cheering them with the brilliance of his conversation and chaffing them when they needed it, and every now and then writing a book, himself, either of poet ry or garrulous prose — which scarcely scintillate with quite the wit of his conversation, as the reader may upon fortunate occasions judge for himself, for that wit is still luckily with us, though America seems just now to be taking more than its share.

I do not think that the poetry of today equals the work of any of these Irish poets I knew, because, worse than the magician’s apprentice who stole one of his master’s spells, too many modern writers have turned away from that magic arrangement of syllables that we call meter, to try to touch the hearts of men by some other means. But it cannot be done. Only the old spells have power to reach with their rhythms the hushed attention of the generations, or to hold them listening for longer than such brief period as is given to hear a new or an odd thing.

But novelists we have, of which the newest is Anne Crone; and storytellers, of whom the most brilliant is, to my mind, MaryLavin. And when had Ireland not storytellers?