"Æ": (George William Russell)

by DIARMUID RUSSELL

1

IN HIS home life Æ was not what one would call a domestic man. Because of his many activities, we tacitly understood that he was not to be bothered with domestic details. One of the family stories about my early days relates how I once answered the door. When a visitor inquired for “Mr. Russell, your father?” I first looked puzzled and then brightened up to say, “Oh! You mean George. He’s not my father. He just lives here.”

This might suggest that I suffered from lack of attention, but in fact I had a happier life than most children. My father and I were each glad to be allowed to go our separate ways, and our relations were confined to his dispensing my allowance and to my cleaning his palettes for a small sum and fetching his Sunday papers. So for most of my childhood he was little more than a benign, bearded figure, kindly but rather remote. Children, I think, take parents for granted; and though I had vaguely gathered that my father was a little out of the usual run of parents, I had put this fact down to his beard. At that time not many men had beards, and though there might have been other things to distinguish him from other men, a beard was a noticeable fact and a difference that a child could understand. Later on in life, for a period of three years, I acted as his assistant on the Irish Statesman, of which he was editor. The office of the Statesman was a pleasant place, a large airy room in one of those high-ceilinged Georgian houses which surround so many Dublin squares. The walls were covered with what looked like brown wrapping paper, and on these walls Father had painted scenes of trees and glades with human beings and fairies. It was, indeed, the way he saw life, the way he was himself, a mixture of realistic hardheadedness and mysticism that must have puzzled many people. Incidentally, his pen name “Æ” came about because of his illegible handwriting; a printer could not make out the pen name “Æon” attached to an article, and printed as much as he could make out — the first two letters.

In this room was a desk so covered with piles of old letters and other documents that, in order to see Æ, visitors had to circle around to the side. I myself was quietly obscured by an ancient roll-top desk, and from this niche was able to listen to conversations and to become acquainted with the innumerable sides of Father’s character as represented by the varied people who came to see him — farmers, clergymen, economists, artists, writers, Hindu mystics, young poets with their first verses. It was surprising that he managed to do any work, and it was only his remarkable powers of concentration that allowed him to bear the many interruptions patiently. Often an editorial might be interrupted half a dozen times, and after each interruption he would turn to writing again without hesitation, his mind having completely switched away from the subjects he might have been discussing — coöperation, poetry, painting, or mysticism, in all of which he had a wide knowledge.

It is not because he was my father or because of his activities that I think of him as being more memorable than anyone else I have known. But he possessed, more than any other person I have met, an air of spiritual power, an emanation of sweetness and tenderness that was almost as perceptible as the light from a lamp — and as hard to describe. Our language is ill-equipped to say what the essence of a man is, rather than what he does or looks like. But all who met him were affected by it. Although Father’s views on religion would not have been accepted by any of the churches, it was a good Catholic who remarked of him, “The peace of God which passeth understanding lies all about him,” and this is perhaps as good a way as any to describe his personality.

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Neither his education nor his parents were responsible for his character. He was himself as much his own creation as his poems or his paintings. He was always saying, “You become what you contemplate,” or in another form, “You become nobly like what you love and ignobly like what you hate.” As he himself spent much of his time studying the religious literatures of the world, and as these, above all writings, exalt what is noblest and best in man, it is perhaps natural he should have taken on some of these characteristics. Whether by act of will or unconsciously, he became like what he admired.

Spiritually-minded people are often thought of as being unfit for the grim struggle of life, as if there were no possibility of reconciling practical affairs with spiritual thoughts. Father seemed to find no difficulty in reconciling these two aspects of existence. For some years he held a dull job in a dry goods store, and I am told he was so efficient that he could have had a career there if he had so wished. But he moved on to the coöperative movement through the agency of his friend, the poet Yeats.

For a number of years he acted as an organizer, traveling all over Ireland by train, by jaunting car, and on a bicycle. It can’t have been an easy job, for even in his later years, when time had mellowed details, he would speak to me of the wretchedly long journeys involved and the miserable rawness of the weather. But it must have had its romantic moments, for he wrote to one friend about being met in the middle of nowhere late at night by a small child who led him over mountainy paths to where a meeting was to be held; and when the meeting was over, the same small hand was waiting to lead him back. But the experience of organizer, if strenuous, gave him the firsthand knowledge of farmers and their problems which he displayed when he became editor of the Irish Homestead — later the Irish Statesman. It was not the kind of life for an impractical person, — or a lazy one, — for added to his editorial duties were the tasks of testifying before government commissions and drawing up bills to be put through Parliament; and on the outside he still found time to see his innumerable friends, to paint pictures, and to write books. On occasions he would precipitate himself into more public affairs, such as his defense of the workers in a protracted transport strike in Dublin and his speech in Albert Hall in London during the last war, made at the request of the English Labor Party.

The versatility of these activities can be set down to his strong belief that a man can always do what he wants to do. A friend remembers walking with him when Æ was in middle age. While they were resting on a wall, the friend remarked that a branch of a near-by tree was a good long jump away. “You could make it,” said Father. “I could not,” said the friend, who was sensibly aware of the effects of age on energy. “Well, I can,” the friend was astonished to hear him say, and with that he made the leap.

Although he was born in and worked in Ireland all his life, he was in many respects curiously American in his principles. Perhaps for this reason he found so much to like in this country when, in later life, he came over here. I remember his attacking with some fury an eminent man who had been lecturing here and who had returned with nothing but adverse comments in his mind.

Father had no use for any kind of aristocracy save that of character and merit. He might well have thought otherwise, for the Ireland in which he had spent his youth more often than not sacrificed efficiency for friendship. Nor had he any use for the hampering hand of tradition, which lay heavily on his country. An exasperated appeal to the younger generation to dismiss the past and the idea of doing things as they had been done before was the motive behind the poem which ended: —

He always had hopes and liking for young people and they in turn liked him. Around him, at one time or another, gathered most of the young Irish writers — James Stephens, Fred Higgins, Frank O’Connor, Seán O’Faoláin, Liam O ‘Flaherty, and many others, to all of whom he gave what aid and encouragement he could. It might easily have been a temptation to him to inculcate in them his own ideas. He was noticeably free from this tendency, and I can remember his delight when one of the younger writers in effect called him a has-been. I resented the statements myself, but he said, “No young man should really respect his elders. In other countries people respect a name. In Ireland, if you stick your head up, someone will throw a stone at it, and it stops you from getting a swelled head.”

His combination of hard-headedness and mysticism was rather like Emerson, an author he much admired. He discerned the spiritual basis in the qualities of independence and self-reliance. He was, in his way, a determined individualist who wanted all people to stand on their own feet. The cooperative movement did not appeal to him so much because it brought economic gains to the Irish farmer as because it showed the farmer how to prosper by his own efforts. He had a contempt for the spineless apathy of the man without will power or energy who was always crying for help. It was not that Æ was unaware of social injustices, but he thought that gifts of money were only temporary help and that real aid should arouse the spirit of independence.

On one occasion, indeed, he spoke against the acceptance of a government grant for farmers, partially because he thought the farmer would fall too easily into the habit of dipping into the government pocket, but also, I think, because he had a deep-seated dislike of the growth of government power. He once remarked, “The worse our habits, the more we have what is called good government. When there are good habits in a country the business of the state dwindles.” He was, however, aware of the growing power of the state; in an essay written in 1915 he remarked prophetically that in twenty-five years the state would be the single most important influence in people’s lives, and that its actions and power would reach into the lives of the most obscure and humble persons.

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Of his reputation as a mystic I write with some hesitation. Mystical experiences cannot be disproved or proved. He did believe that faculties of a higher order than those normally exercised lay latent in all human beings and could be aroused and controlled by certain means, mainly exercises in meditation and concentration. It is a belief that has been held by many people in many countries over a long period of time. He told me it was many years before he could concentrate for as little a time as five minutes. I tried myself for some six months the exercise he told me he had used when in bed at night: he would close his eyes and imagine a white triangle, and then try to hold it in the imagination steadily. I can testify that it is not an easy exercise, for the mind is a natural rebel against discipline.

Of what particular value this and similar exercises may have proved, no outside person can assess. There were a sufficient number of incidents to suggest that he had powers of an unusual kind. On several occasions he told people facts about themselves he could not possibly have known. One friend remembers walking with him all day and suddenly wondering what the time was. He started to reach for his watch and was interrupted by Father, who said, “Let me tell you what the time is.” Father knit his brows for a moment and then said, “It is twenty-three minutes past five,” which was the time the watch showed. During the first performance of his only play, Deirdre, the impulse took him to try to suggest to the audience the idea of water at a certain point in the play. Many people the next day spoke about the queer illusion they had of water pouring out over them from the stage.

Out of my own knowledge I can only recall one incident. A childhood friend of Father, living many thousands of miles away, wrote a letter which said he was engaged in translating some old Greek manuscripts. He added that he had attempted to give to the paper of the letter a certain impression and he wondered if Father could receive it. As a result of this, Father painted a picture of a distinctive head which lacked all hair, even eyebrows and eyelashes. Later came a letter, enclosing the translation, which spoke of a Roman general who had lost all his hair as a result of a fever.

But incidents like these can be regarded as mere curiosities, and Father disliked having attention called to them. He has written about this side of his life in his book The Candle of Vision. The exercises themselves may indirectly have had something to do with his character. In speaking to me about them he continually stressed the fact that, for one step forward in knowledge, three must be taken in self-perfection. All knowledge, of course, is a form of power, and the world would be saved many a trouble if those who had power could free themselves from the baser thoughts and emotions.

He also had a most amazing memory, partly natural I suspect, but I think also aided by his exercises in concentration. He could repeat poems from any poet one could name. On one occasion, out of curiosity and with a faintly impish desire to see him break down, I tested him. He had commented on the book which I was reading, referring to the beauty of a particular passage. As it happened, that book, borrowed fifteen years before by an anonymous friend, had that day been returned equally anonymously. The book itself was out of print and I felt sure he could not have read it since the time it had been borrowed. I asked him if he would mind saying the passage he referred to and he repeated five pages of prose with not more than two or three minor slips — this after fifteen years and in a prose work with none of the aids to memory that poetry gives.

His beliefs certainly made his life free from the doubts, perplexities, and compromises that harass most people. I don’t mean that he was immune to the small accidents of living. When, in quick succession, he had burned out the pockets of two suits by putting lighted pipes in them, he could do no more than stand before Mother like a penitent apostle, waving his hands gently and helplessly before her reproaches.

What he was free from were all questions of what was right and proper for him to do, and he was never troubled by the emotions of greed or envy or hatred. His life was so faultless that George Moore could only complain that he didn’t know the difference between turbot and halibut. Another critic, in a mildly exasperated way, referred to his flawless moral nature. In writing, as in gossip, the bad is more exciting than the good, and the only weaknesses in Father’s nature were some small vanities, so innocent and childlike as to be more lovable than anything else. He would, for example, assert the superiority of his own smoking mixture, made by adulterating his tobacco with the herb coltsfoot. And he used to argue with me, occasionally with some asperity, about the merits of billiard and cricket players, although neither of us knew anything about either subject.

4

Contrary to popular thought about mystics, he was not at all an ascetic-looking person. He was large, healthy, bulky, and bearded and usually had a pipe in his mouth. Someone remarked that he looked as if an angel had come to earth and seized the first human body it had come across. New suits wrinkled in a day and his overcoat looked — as James Stephens remarked in a novel — as if it had been put on with a shovel. He was just as indifferent to food as he was to dress, stoking his body with fuel as a boiler is fed with coal. He was, in fact, without worldly sophistication, and had none of the vanities that go with that quality.

Although he was an efficient and practical person in business, he was far from being materialistic. He never wanted, or tried to get, more money than would take care of the essential needs — food, clothing, housing, and an education for his children. These taken care of, he thought further money was not only a nuisance but also a hindrance to freedom. On numerous occasions he turned down offers that would have brought him in as much money for a week’s work as he normally earned in a year. To anxious friends who reproached him he would say, “Let the joy be in the doing and not in the end.” He was doing the work he wished to do, which he thought helped his country and the people in it, and in which he found pleasure. I believe he thought no man’s work was worth more than some small amount to take care of the necessities of existence. I learned that he had once refused a position at a thousand pounds a year — but had said he would do the work for two hundred.

As he grew older and his reputation spread, many people came to call on him, and to all — young and unknown writer, or visiting celebrity — he was the same, always giving of his best. I have seen enough of well-known people to realize that this side of Father was particularly charming—and also rather instructive. There are many moments when, through boredom or with the feeling that what we have to say will be wasted, all of us lapse into a kind of superior apathy. It would never have occurred to Father to give less than his best—and more important, he would never have thought so badly about people as to think anyone could deserve less than the best.

Father was a good conversationalist and could talk with equal interest and wisdom about good butter, the soul, or international politics. William Lyon Phelps recalls with delight a visit Father paid him in which Æ talked for ten hours more or less continuously. But the many friends he accumulated did not gather around him just for the delights of good conversation. His presence was as warming as a fire, and people not only felt better to be with him but were better. “He is a tribunal before whom the ignoble dwindles,” a friend declared.

His help to people was not only that of his presence; it could, on occasion, be practical. Only a few months ago a friend revealed to me that she had once visited him, obviously ill and needing a course of expensive treatments beyond her resources, and he had pressed on her the not inconsiderable sum required. He had never sought wealth and so could not have had much to give away, but I think he must have given when he could, and more than his family knew about. Another friend records with gratitude, and some astonishment, his competence in taking over affairs after the sudden death of her husband. In a somewhat lighter vein a friend told me how he was incompetently trying to get a meal, having arrived home unexpectedly, when Father called. “Man,” he said, “you don’t need all that grease in the pan. Give me a bowl; I must pour off three quarters of it. You slice the potatoes while I cook the cutlets.” And so the astonished friend stood aside to let the mystic prepare the meal.

For people in general he had nothing but a vast understanding and toleration, for he seemed to know intuitively why people acted, what moods or emotions dominated them. His lifelong friend, the poet Yeats, said of him: “He has the capacity, beyond any man I have seen, to put with entire justice not only the thoughts but emotions of the most opposite parties and personalities — and men who hated each other must sometimes have been reconciled because each heard his enemy’s arguments put into better words than his own.”

It is difficult to talk or write of Father, for in a sense his chief work was himself, and the things for which he was known seemed a by-product. His poetry contains his thought in a concentrated and somewhat difficult verse, but there are many instances of people who found in it great spiritual solace. In the last war many soldiers wrote him that reading his poetry was the one thing that kept them sane during the horrors of war. The Municipal Art Gallery in Dublin has paintings by Watts, the English painter, sent by him because his wife, in an illness in which her life was despaired of, murmured some of Æ’s poetry to herself and felt that it carried her through to health. Two viceroys of India, the Earl of Lytton and Lord Curzon, also found solace in his poems when dying.

In America he was touched — and surprised— when two reporters who had come to interview him burst into tears when he recited some of his poems at their request. What can be found in the poems could be found in the man himself: the recognition that here, at least, was one man who had been able to replace all the emotions that make life a turmoil by a vast compassion for all men. Perhaps, as Olive Schreiner says in The Story of an African Farm, “to be holy is to have great compassion.”

5

It was inevitable that Æ’s poetry and that of Yeats should have been compared, not only privately but publicly, because the two were at the time by general recognition the two leading poets in Ireland. They had been friends since boyhood, and I once asked him if the situation had never been a source of embarrassment. He only laughed and said, “Willie is a much better poet than I am. He is a great poet. He devotes all his time to his art and can spend days reworking a line or a verse till it has reached his ultimate in perfection. I, on the other hand, have to do many, many things, some by desire and some by compulsion.” He went on to explain that what merit his own poems had was in the truth of the subject and less in the imagery. I got the feeling, though it was never openly stated, that he thought Yeats with his marvelous technique and command of language sometimes used his art on poor subjects.

His remarkable memory made it easy for him to recall any poem he had written, and he would say, with perhaps a slight touch of vanity, that if all his books were burned, he would be able to rewrite all of them without difficulty. Yeats’s memory, I gather, must have been more defective, for Father used to chuckle over the fact that once, when Yeats had been rather scorning his own early poems, he had recited a number of them to him. Yeats was excited and pleased over the poems and asked who wrote them — and was displeased when he was informed that he himself was the author.

I suppose Father had favorites among his own poems, but I would not know what they were; for if asked to recite he would ask what poems were wanted. Perhaps here again his faint vanity about his memory was responsible, as if he wanted to show that nothing he had written had been forgotten. I know he was pleased with Yeats’s liking for the poem which began: —

Whether he agreed with Yeats’s liking, I don’t know. I myself think the verses entitled “Promise” are as lovely as anything he ever wrote: —

What merit there is in his poems, as well as the faults, probably comes from their origin. He told me poems came into his head and were usually written down quickly, needing few changes, and that they arose from a process of subconscious meditation. Sometimes one verse would come and he might have to wait a few days or a week before the other verses would spring into his mind — in one case there was a gap of thirty years between first and succeeding verses.

I don’t think it would be wrong to say that what he would have liked most to do would have been to paint. Summer after summer he would depart for Donegal to bring back twenty or thirty canvases sufficienlly finished so that he could work on them during the winter at his leisure. He told me at one time the urge to paint was so strong that he had contemplated doing nothing else, but had been restrained by some feeling that a single pursuit would be bad for him; in a similar fashion, years before, he had been obsessed by mysticism and the same austerity had made him relegate that to being just a part of his life.

He must have had considerable strength of will to relegate painting to being just a hobby, for he not only found great pleasure in painting but competent people thought he could have been a great painter. A former director of the National Gallery in Ireland remarked that if Father had ever taken lessons he would have become one of the foremost painters of his time; and an old friend, a Dublin art dealer, on my last visit, offered it as his opinion that Æ would be remembered as an artist long after his poems were forgotten.

His prices for paintings must have infuriated other artists, for Father felt he had no right to make money out of a hobby, and so had calculated carefully the cost of the materials — canvases and paint and oils and brushes. Adding a small charge for his time, — which couldn’t have amounted to fifty cents an hour, — he had arrived at the figure of five pounds for a small canvas and ten pounds for a large one. This figure was revised upwards a little as costs increased over the years, but other Irish artists may have felt aggrieved at the unfair competition. Maybe Father felt there was something in this, for he stopped showing his pictures and kept them in the house, where only friends could see them.

These numerous interests — coöperation, painting, poetry, mysticism, the editing of a weekly journal — were all kept going by a gigantic energy which left little time for relaxation. The latter usually took the form of mystery stories, of which he read from six to ten a week, and it was one of my household duties to see that a constant supply was at hand at all times. If the output of mystery stories — as sometimes happened — didn’t equal his capacity for reading them, he would prowl unhappily about the house, hoping that somewhere or other one would materialize.

I might have wondered why, in an age of specialization, he had not chosen to become a master of one talent, if he had not once used an illuminating phrase in discussing with me a famous scientist. “He is not really intelligent,” he said, “for his mind embraces little outside his profession. A candle does not shine light only in one direction.” It was a revealing sentence, for it made me see that his real preoccupation had nothing to do with worldly success, but was with the completion of his own character. It was the kind of pursuit of self-perfection which mystics through the ages have been intent upon, and in Father’s case it produced a kind of warm serenity, a saintliness of character so moving and so lovable that when he was dying, as a friend wrote, “even the surgeon, whose skill must defend itself against sentimentality, turned away for a moment in tears.”