Chapter VIII

I have a picture by "A. E." of an ascending road on the side of a mountain. There is rain in the air, and the road has a lonely, unfrequented look. Yet, though there is no living creature visible in the picture, Life fills it. I feel sometimes when I sit back in my chair and look at "The Mountain Road" that there are divine beings behind the bushes, that if I could only climb up that road and turn the corner of the mountain, I should come upon the Golden Age. Is it not ungracious to make complaint, even if the complaint be a slight one, of a man who can make the invisible world so powerfully felt as that? And if he persuades me, by nature sceptical, almost to believe in the Shining Ones, how much more strong must his influence be on those who are eager to believe! When the evil temper which possesses Ireland at this moment has subsided, the fine temper of "A. E." will rise again and call Irishmen to a kindlier mood. The little town of Lurgan, in which he was born, is notorious in Ulster for the harshness of its religious dissensions. A base bigotry flourishes there. It is in the nature of things that from a place of great bitterness should have come a man of reconciliation, bidding Catholic and Protestant to meet, not in Geneva or in Rome, but on the holy hills of Ireland, under the protection of the ancient gods.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Mr. Darrell Figgis, in his book on "A. E.", explains the pen-name thus: "Wanting at one time a new pen-name, he subscribed himself as Aeon. His penmanship not at all times being of the legiblest, the printer deciphered the first diphthong and set a query for the rest; whereupon the writer, in his proof-sheets, stroked out the query and stood by the diphthong." Since then, however, Mr. Russell has abandoned the diphthong and prints his pen name as two separate letters.

[2] I leave that passage unmodified, despite the fact that the Black-and-Tans in the course of their fight with the Sinn Feiners (equally disgraceful to both of them) burnt down many of the creameries. They will be built again. Mr. Lloyd George jeered at Sir Horace Plunkett soon after the Black-and-Tans had performed most of their infamous work, but any decent person would infinitely prefer to be Sir Horace with his burnt creameries than Mr. Lloyd George with his burnt principles.

[3] Parnell, the greatest political leader the Irish Catholics have ever had, was a Protestant of Anglo-Saxon origin. Like Synge, he belonged to a family which came to Ireland originally from Cheshire in the North of England.

ARNOLD BENNETT