"A.E." MEMORIES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 170, 20 July 1935, Page 7

"A.E." MEMORIES.

MAN AND POET.

A GREAT PERSONALITY.

SERVICE TO IRELAND,

(By ALISON GRANT)

Some little way out of the city of Dublin, but not beyond the rattle of trams and the hollow-sounding trot of the jaunting cars, there is a point where many roads meet. One leads to a lane, elm-sliaded, beside a stream that threads a way through W. B. Yeats' garden. Another turns an abrupt corner into a street of little houses, shabby with comfort and age. One is square and weather-beaten. It is set high, its door is reached by a little flight of steps and on either side its windows look out on a minute tangle of garden. It is 17, Ratligar Avenue, and! was the home of George Russell, the | Irish poet, who died this week. It is known to many hundreds of those who take, or have taken, beauty seriously — to many who are masters and makersof it—in literature, in poetry, in paint and in music too. For "A.E." fostered and fathered these things in all and sundry, and never lived remote from his disciples. And now he has gone.

It is a significant thing that among the others, those who have made a more spectacular ascent in the world of letters, one has never heard him derided. Always he is the "grand old man." He was not merely a man of remarkable intellect and ability. He was also simple, sincere and quite without ostentation. A Giant. We had exchanged letters, to and from London, concerning the inclusion of his stories in a projected anthology. Later I was sent over to Ireland by the publishing firm to conclude the arrangement. I rang him from my hotel. Mr. Kussell would be pleased to see me. I had been prepared for an impressive

character. When, however, I entered the long room littered, stacked, heaped with paintings on every conceivable subject, and saw him seated in their midst before his easel, the thought sprang, "Here is a giant among men!" It is diflicult to convey the awareness of strength I experienced at this encounter —a virility of mind and body that had suffered little change with the years. He was then sixty-six. He was a huge man, proportionately built. His massive head, with its untidy grizzled beard, his squared shoulders, his large shapely hands, gave him an almost lion-like appearance of power. IT!s eyes were blue as a child's.

"Why do you come to me? I am an old fellow now. I should have been done with long ago —what are the youngsters doing?" But I had forgotten my errand in contemplation of a portrait, quite small, on the floor. It was of James Stephens as a young man—age doesn't exist with a man like Stephens—it was James Stephens.

"Yes," Russell's voice boomed in my ear, "I think it must be like him, because he thinks so."

"You don't want me," he continued, "I'm not a man who matters. It's the men whom Ireland has forgotten. Listen." He leaned back and, in a voice that from low, resonant tones rose to a thunder of sound that filled the room, he quoted line on line of the ancient poets wlio told of glories and superstitions when Irish kings yet strode the earth.

The Glory of Ireland. "That is the glory of Ireland. These men of to-day . . He flung out a hand in a gesture of dismissal. Yet he had fathered them. "We have," as Yeats put it to-me later, "all been through his hands."

One could see him in his own youth, striding the streets of Dublin, shaggy, forgetful, yet efficient, unkempt, books bursting from his pockets, his great head bared to all weather, his beard red as it should be—and one needed to go little farther to conjure a vision of one of his own Irish kings.

Presently Herbert Trench came. He brought with him a student from India, a lean shy lad but with extraordinary living eyes, who handed over a sheaf of verses to the colossal critic. He received them with grave reverence, for he loves the young. I have a letter of his before me. In part it reads, "So far

as I am concerned you have permission to use the 'Meditation of Ananda.' It was written when I was very young indeed, but I do not repudiate it because I was young. I only wish I had the fervour of intuition I had then and could write more like it." ■

He has stood for mysticism and legends out of the past. He has repeopled the earth with the Irish ghosts. He was right. He is past and over. The Realists have it —the cleaving shock of realism that is, say, Liam O'Flalierty. But whatever may be said now in criticism of George Russell, he did a thing for Ireland which, at the time, was essential and good. He re-established a belief and a pride in Ireland's poetry that urged many a man to creative work and stimulated here and there a genius. He re-painted, as it were, the background, the drop scene before which the new players mm»t stride, and gave fresh heart to the company of the poets.