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AE
THE POET OF THE SPIRIT
IN the previous chapter I referred to AE as Mr. Yeats' " frugal and intensive contemporary in song." But AE being, like Yeats, a typical Celt, though in quite a different way, is not only frugal and intensive, but also prodigal and extensive. His work, as Yeats has said, is the nearest approach in literature to disembodied verse. Not many of his poems run on to a second page. He is a niggard in language— in poetry only, for in conversation he is a geyser, a foaming torrent, and a calm estuary laden with shipping for and from the ends of the earth. Yet the content of his poetry is among the most precious possessions of the soul. Lesser poets will scatter largesse of copper, with an occasional bit of silver as a special gift ; but AE, quietly outspends the lot with a little piece of pure gold. Out of a profound personal emotion or realisation he throws into a line or a stanza some deep generalisation, some quivering flame of truth that evokes illumination in the darkest recesses of the reader's mind. In this respect he is a Seer in the truest sense of the term, that is, in the power to make others see. He is a Prophet, too, not only in definite utterance as to the future, but supremely in his gift of pressing into speech the fundamentals of life, whose roots are in the spirit and whose leaves and flowers are in time and space ; in which fundamentals we have the potentiality of history, if only we possess " that dangerous and superior faculty " attributed by Taine to Balzac, by which we may " discover in an isolated fact all its possibilities."
" AE " is the pen-name, or, rather, the occult symbol indicating the immortal spirit who, in this life, as George W. Russell, a native of an ill-favoured manufacturing town in Ulster, edits the organ of agricultural co-operation in Ireland, paints pictures of the worlds visible and invisible, and distils into everlasting lyrics the Wisdom and Beauty of the Infinite. His first slender volume, which came out quietly in Dublin twenty years ago, soon found hearers who recognised in the " still, small voice " of the unknown poet something more potent and lasting than the sounding brass and tinkling cymbals of the poetry of the time. " Homeward Songs by the Way " was followed by " The Earth Breath" and " The Divine Vision ;" and in 1913 the whole poetical work of AE. was brought out by Macmillan in one volume.
Like his illustrious contemporary, Yeats, AE was drawn into the dramatic phase of the Irish- renaissance some fifteen years ago, but Deirdre "—one of the first plays of the movement to be presented by native actors, of whom the writer was one—remains AE's sole contribution to the drama. Its delicate beauty and spiritual significance were too tenuous for the ordinary stage; and as AE had no mind save for the expression of moods and experiences of the inner life, he stood apart from the hurly-burly of the theatre. Yeats, on the other hand, with perhaps a great renunciation, gave himself for almost twenty precious years to the building of a National Theatre. The disparity between his natural genius and the needs of the stage provoked in Yeats — unlike AE—a determined effort to achieve something like physical strength in drama. The result was, however, not a general infusion of power through his subsequent dramatic work, but the appearance of unassimilated lumps of strength which collide ungraciously with the evocations of his truer moments.
The fact is that the genius of these essentially lyrical poets is out of place on the stage. Lyrical drama or dramatic lyric, as forms of expression, are amongst the mongrels of the Arts. They have their place, but it is not in the company of the distinctive species of either the pure lyric or pure drama. To the drama belongs the office of presenting a transcript of the limitations and passions of humanity. By its nature it is predominantly analytical and derivative. It holds " as 'twere a mirror up to nature ;" but it is only a mirror, in which we view " as in a glass darkly " the shadows and superficies of things. But poetry, and supremely lyrical poetry, springs with a challenge and revelation from the inner planes of being; it utters reality, and the unworthy things of life quail at its glance ; it holds, not a mirror up to nature, but nature up to a mirror.
To both drama and poetry belongs the seeing eye, inasmuch as both deal with life itself, and not merely with the spectacle of life in the descriptive sense ; but the dramatic eye is that of the observer, the poetic eye that of the seer. So, too, in their common power to move, we are conscious of the fingers of the dramatist among our nerves, but of the cry of the poet at an inner ear. If the poet wishes to catch the ear of the time, let him turn dramatist; if the dramatist has a wish to linger in the ear of all time, let him turn poet. Shakespeare the dramatist may preserve a dusty and reverent immortality in the libraries ; but Shakespeare the poet has not had to die in order to become immortal: he lives in line and speech that are as buoys to the monstrous net of his life's work, which otherwise might sink in the ocean of forgetfulness.
It is impossible to dogmatise as to the rightness or wrongness of the path taken by the artist. His nearness to the creative sources of things gives us an assurance of spiritual necessity, howsoever his diversions may wander from the way in which we should have him travel. We may philosophically cover up a secret sense of disappointment that Yeats the lyrical poet was for a period banished by Yeats the dramatist; but our sense of the rightness of things may have free rein in gratification that AE has remained AE, the most purely spiritual poet in the English language until the advent of Tagore, by which I mean that his work is almost solely concerned with the life of the spirit both in the body and out of the body. Its technique is refined to such a simplicity of word and phrase, and suffused with such a - luminosity from somewhere behind the region of thought, that we feel as if we might draw the film of speech aside, and gaze on naked Truth. Lacking this power, we are thrown back on the process of following out the intellectual forms in which his vision has clothed itself, and which is unified in a philosophy of life.
The philosophy of AE—I pause to make due recognition of the fact that in Ireland, as elsewhere, it is held by some that a poet is no poet if he has so dull a thing as a philosophy about him. I can well imagine AE the artist protesting as Tagore might, against AE the philosopher. I heard him once at his fireside denounce the holding of preconceived notions on the subject of the arts. A lady artist broke in saying : " What a lot of nonsense you sometimes talk, George. You prove to us how wrong it is to have artistic theories; and you do so by a whole series of theories of your own!" The humourist smiled through the kind' eyes of the poet, and the subject was changed— or tea was handed round.
The keynote of AE's philosophy, as of that of Tagore and Emerson, is unity. Like Emerson he has a deep sympathy with eastern thought, but with the difference that he possesses a direct, racher than a reasoned or derivative, knowledge of the hidden side of things. He is not an occultist like Yeats, but a natural-born seer, a pure clairvoyant. He sees the universe, like Tagore, as not merely the creation of God, but the very being of God, and to him the earth's meanest sod Is thrilled with fires of hidden day, And haunted by all mystery.
Between the source of things and the things themselves there is a ' great gulf;' but it is not 'fixed.' By the process mystically called the Pall in Christian theology, supreme Deity chose to pass from abstract freedom into limitation and relativity. By the process mystically called Redemption, man is workings his way back to recognition of and union with his true source.
This is AE's whole evangel. Janus-like, it " looks before and after;" now contemplating: the urge outwards of the human spirit, and marking
......how desire, which cast them in the deep. Called God too from his sleep ;
now meditating on the backward, which is the true forward, trend of mankind
In age-long wandering to the Truth Through many a cycle's ebb and flow.
In these processes, and between their extremes, lies all the art of AE; set up like this all through the book and since he is mainly preoccupied with the " homeward " process, his art is not that of the artist pure and simple, with its mental arrogance and cruelty, hut of the seer and the sayer who uses the things of art for the purpose of the spirit. He is, in the noblest sense of the term, a man with a message. He knows himself as "the sole poet of my generation who has never written a single poem which did not try to -express a spiritual mood." Yet his message is primarily to himself, and only concerned With others for the simple philosophical reason that the others and himself are essentially in union. In the innermost of his being he knows himself as one with all souls ; and, addressing his inner self, he sets out in a line the ulterior motive of his art, and its differentiation from the art of the poet who is exclusively a poet:
......some there be Seek thee only for a song; I, to lose myself in thee.
This absorption of the lower into the higher is, in art, the parallel of the inevitable process whereby (to use the technical phraseology of philosophy) the microcosm seeks, or is driven, to merge itself into God the Macrocosm. To the eye and ear of the mystic, and so to AE, the universe is one vast invitation from the Eternal Spirit to the spirit in the bonds of manifestation. Thus he sings:
Out of the vast the voice of one replies Whose words are clouds and stars. and night and day, When for the light the anguished spirit cries Deep in its house of clay.
In the conception of the unity of all things in the Divine, which comes by unbroken inheritance from the ancient makers of the Celtic myth-stories to this supreme Celt (albeit he himself repudiates the boundaries of race and country), we have perhaps the master-key to the trait in Irish character which the uniformed call fatalistic, but which the informed know to be an intuitive apprehension of the One Will in the cosmos working out its own beneficent end, which end is also the end of each personal will, whether it be acquiescent or perverse. Of that Will, AE sings :
Like winds or waters were her ways ; They heed not immemorial cries ; They move to their high destinies
Beyond the little voice that prays. But it is necessary to round off his thought with the remembrance of other lines that fill -the cold gap between the "little voice" and the " winds or waters." There is no absolute aloofness between whole and part. They are one ; but the terminology of relativity needs must be used : its correction and completion are found in diverse presentations. Elsewhere AE sees in things commonly regarded as offences, " errant rays .... at their roots divine." The Fall of Man is to him no cataclysm of sin, but a renunciation in ages back.
Some bright one of old time laid his sceptre down,
So his heart might learn of sweet and bitter truth. He himself has an ear for " the little voice :'' the love of one became the doorway to love of the many :
We bade adieu to love the old ; We heard another lover then, Whose forms are myriad and untold, Sigh to us from the hearts of men ;
and AE, in complete identity with the " still sad music of humanity" that another compassionate poet heard, utters the admonition that displaces the compulsions of human laws and creeds and moral codes, since it sets the admonished with his face to the spiritual sun
We are, in our distant hope, One with all the great and wise ; Comrade, do not turn or grope For some lesser light that dies.
To AE the fundamental Beauty, which is the first garment of the Divine Unity, is not— as Yeats figures it—a wonderer, but self-existent now. All things disclose it according to the measure of their possibility. Even the beloved of the human heart may not claim to be beautiful in her own right, but as an intermediary. " Let me," he says, " first kneel to the essential Beauty of which you are an ex- pression, before I bow the knee to you in person; then,
I shall not on thy beauty rest, But Beauty's ray in you."
He comes, therefore, the nearest of any poet in the English language to fulfilling Meredith's ideal of
The song seraphically free From taint of personality,
not in the sense of hiding the personality behind objective subject-matter (a necessity to the dramatist, an impossibility to the lyrical poet), but by disclosing the fundamental impersonality that unifies the apparently divergent, and by seeking to merge the outer self with the Inner Self and the laws of its life.
It is this characteristic in the work of AE that has placed it, according to some critics, outside the traditional development of Irish literature, and also outside the pale of Christian literature. The fact, however, is that the distinctively Eastern attitude of AE's poetry is the Western axis of the great Aryan pole, and is no less distinctively Celtic than the spiritual monism of the old myth-makers of Ireland, or the philosophical unitarianism of the Irish religious, John the Scot, at the court of the Gaulish King in the ninth century; and the non-Christian element is but an expression of "the light that lighteneth every man that cometh into the world." In short,, the poetry of AE, being esoteric, touches all places and times, and moves likewise above time and place; and nowhere is this quality better shown than in such a poem as his " Ares," which appeared in The Times of April 5th, 1905. in which the spirit of the Celt, the Greek, and the Vedantist unite to make one of the few war-poems worthy of the great. name of Poetry.
It was only natural that a man with such a message, and with a benign accessibility, should soon find himself surrounded by some of the new order of enquiring souls that have come into Ireland. His home became a centre in the great awakening, and many and varied were the personalities that from time to time came into the Free Aristocracy of Intellect that organised itself under his genius ; a peer of the realm with a penchant for dreaming in prose; an enthusiastic woman leader in extreme politics who later commanded a troop in the Irish Rebellion of 1916, for which she was sentenced to death, reprieved and released, and later still was the first and only woman member elected to the British Parliament; a poor clerk interested in the stage; a lady who smoked cigarettes and talked Fabian ; a lean and silent youth who became a poet; and others equally individual.
I think it was the great simplicity of AE that drew so many diverse and complicated characters to him. I do not speak paradoxically, save in so far as truth is a paradox. I have met no man West or East who can talk with so much knowledge on such a variety of vital subjects as AE. His reading is monumental, and ranges from the most Eastern Scriptures to the most modern Western treatises on Butter-making and Egg-producing ; and his memory is amazing. But bis genius has sifted the details gathered by the active mind, seized essentials, and co-ordinated all to one simple consciousness of Divinity in every atom of the universe. However he may wander along different paths of thought, illuminating them in a manner peculiarly his own, he never loses himself, never gives the impression that he, the central self, is under the tyranny of his own thoughts. Life and consciousness are to AE much more than their images in creeds and systems; and for this reason, being bound only to his own spiritual experience, and to the convictions of unfettered thought and intuition, and having no vested interests, intellectual or religious, he is ever ready to meet the questions of the simplest enquirer, and to give forth without stint to all.
In personality AE must be, I imagine, some, thing like what Tennyson was, for he is large, shaggy, strong, yet exceedingly fine in texture, and as gentle as his little hands. But there is afire, a versality, and a brilliant though kindly humour in AE that were foreign to the English poet. In spiritual vision—which he translates into exquisite pictures to cover his hospitable walls he is true brother of Swedenborgand all the seers, and especially of the seer-poetpainter, William Blake. And, withal, he is a man of affairs. It was to him that Sir Horace Plunkett pointed when he said that the most practical man in the Irish Agricultural movement was a poet. In several years wanderings through every town in Ireland, he talked economics to thousands of farmers, and inspired the organisation of creameries, poultry-runs and banks. Then a change in his Society set him permanently in the editorial chair of "The Irish Homestead," Which to-day stands at the head of all agricultural papers, and is read by hundreds of people who would not know to what groups of the animal kingdom an Orpington or a Hereford belong, but who rejoice in philosophy, imagination, and wit in the service of toiling humanity.
The production of AE's beautiful play (in prose that is so lyrical that listeners think it is in lines), " Deirdre," was one of the earliest and most significant events in the movement that blossomed into the Abbey Theatre. It was rendered doubly so by having Yeats' ever-memorable " Kathleen ni Houlihan " produced along with it.
The Hermetic Society, with AE as its head, arose out of the crushing necessity to find more space for the increasing numbers who found their way to AE's home. It began to be a nuisance to have to sit on the edge of a table in close association with wet paintings and twisted tubes, or to crouch on the floor and get neck-ache looking up at the benevolent giant who hated "speaking" but smoked a plain wooden pipe and talked—talked—talked, sometimes of the fairies he had seen; then of the theory and practice of art; at other times of the modernity of the hoary Laotze whose complete writings he appeared to have committed to memory; occasionally, with acute knowledge, of physical and psychical science ; always with a fascination, a generosity, an impersonality, that sent us home in the small hours of the morning hungering for more of it and oftener.
The Society rented a small room in the city, furnished it with a few chairs, a small table, an oil lamp, and a couple of AE's visionary paintings; and it is still meeting, though now in finer rooms; and AE still talks to an " audience fit though few." |
