Part 4

One day stands out very distinctly in my memory. George Hart was at home, working over law papers which he had brought into the drawing-room, and all the family were there, and by good luck there came that day, to enliven us and add its background to the happy scene, a tremendous thunder-storm. And by further good luck there was present Hart's maiden aunt who was very much afraid of thunder-storms. The house was on the top of Howth Hill, a wild peninsula of mountain and heather, jutting out into Dublin Bay. All around the house the lightening played incessantly, the flames seeming to lick the windows of the room, and the thunder was continuous, while the maiden aunt grew more and more alarmed. She was pious also, which I have always noticed makes people more afraid of thunder-storms. 'Dear, Dear,' Hart would say, after a particularly frightful crash shaking the whole house. 'Dear, Dear! I hope those lightening rods are well oiled.' And again after another crash 'Well, Well, I should not like a volcano on Ireland's Eye' which was a little rocky islet just outside the harbour. Knowing that Hart was a geologist, I foolishly asked if Ireland's Eye had ever been a volcano. 'Not in my time' came the answer in his deep voice. The storm lasted for a long time and through it all we talked and listened and were merry and afraid, except the maiden aunt who was only afraid, while I pursued steadily the painting of my beautiful model. I pity anyone who is not afraid of a thunder-storm. Terror is a delightful feeling if beauty be added to it. The Hebraic conception of Jehovah fascinates the imagination, because it combines terror with its beauty. If children are frightened by a thunder-storm, take them to a window and bid them watch the lightening play among the clouds, and their fears will change into a kind of exultation more delightful than listening to a fairy tale. Beauty cleanses feeling. What more distressing, what more profoundly disturbing than the ache inspired by sex passion; yet add romance and beauty, and while the feeling remains, the ache is gone. It has been cleansed. A tragedy acted on the stage inspires pity and terror, but if that play be written by Shakespeare these feelings are cleansed--they remain, but the ache is gone. Laughter also, like beauty, cleanses the feelings. Its special value, I think, is as a cure for anger. Yet it does not destroy the anger. The energy is still there, but changed into merriment. There is the sunshine of beauty and the sunshine of laughter, and in the great writers they often mingle and become one. All through the beauty of 'Romeo and Juliet' laughter vibrates so that we do not know whether to laugh or to cry.

Of this mirthfulness my friend George Hart had an ample supply. He was a barrister and often engaged in important cases. When contention ran high and everybody was very angry. Hart would still some portion of the troubled waters by a comment, audible only to the barristers immediately about him. My friend was not a wit, he was something infinitely better, he was a humorist. Your wit is an aggressively sociable fellow who makes his thrusts at other people, getting his fun out of their confusion, or alarm, or astonishment. He wants a social success. Your humorist is only amusing himself and surprising himself, getting enjoyment out of the absurdities of life, and is quite as solitary as a poet or nightingale.

Beside his house was a lovely garden. I never saw so many flowers crowded together in so small a space. All his spare time was given to that oasis among the rocks and heather. He was tall and spare & for hours together would work very quietly, making deliberate movements lest he should break a stem or petal. Mrs. Hart told me that more than once she had seen a robin alight on his head, and she insisted that, perched on that eminence, one of them sang its thin little song. Every thing that Hart knew he knew accurately, so that whether it was flowers or law or practical business his judgement was infallible. What he did not know, or could not know accurately and thoroughly, he put away from him, and for that reason was a rigid conservative. A buoyant American full of courage with the key of the future in his pocket was to him only another absurdity in an amazing world. My own politics, which are akin to those of American hopefulness, I never uncovered. I was afraid of that ironic smile. Hart called his house Woodside, since it was close to a little wood. Doctor Mahaffy, the late Provost of Trinity College, renamed it 'Heart's Ease' and so addressed his letters. Probably he did not quite approve of that easy unambitious life. Adam in the Garden in the age of Innocence, before Care had entered, would not have seemed an impressive figure to a modern advocate of the strenuous and the progressive. My friend ought to have been gardener and botanist always, but care entered & drove him out into a world of malodorous Law Courts down beside the river Liffey.

When I left school I entered Trinity College, and for the next four or five years the man most dominant in my life was my uncle Robert Corbet. I think of my poor uncle as a man of generous impulses who lived up to his creed of being a gentleman, a worldling and a club man, nor did he forget that he was a citizen of Dublin, of the type that flourished in the eighteenth century. If he suspected his Catholic neighbours, all the same he liked them; and if he had a certain respect for Englishmen, no less he disliked them. Before I was born, he bought or leased, I never knew which it was, Sandymount Castle, and then began creating all around him beautiful gardens. Of business he knew little or nothing, and probably neglected it, but he did not neglect his gardens. Every morning he rose early, and would wander all over the grounds, sometimes with a small saw and hatchet, making among the trees what he called 'vistas.' He employed four or five gardeners, and as long as I knew Sandymount Castle, none of these men ever left him and no one ever interfered with them. So treated, they were gentle, pleasant and diligent, and the gardens were lovely. There was a piece of water called the 'pond' on which we boys did much boating, and there were plenty of wild ducks and swans, and there was also an island on which was a one-roomed thatched cottage, in which was a collection of souvenirs and relics brought back from India and the Colonies by my uncle's brothers who had all been soldiers. Outside the cottage were two chained eagles. As a child I feared these eagles, and when I was a man they were there still, and when my uncle, an old man, left Sandymount for good, they were sent to the Zoological gardens, where for all I know they may still shriek and flap their wings as was their habit on the Island. In and about Sandymount Castle were various relics of departed worthies, among them a wicked looking sword with a very long handle which my uncle Pat had wrested from an enemy when leading the Forlorn Hope at the taking of Rangoon. This uncle became Governor of Penang. All these things have disappeared and no one remembers them but myself, and I mention them now, not because I think they're likely to interest anybody, but because I think it will please my old uncle to know that I have done so.

My father because of ill-health had retired from active work in his parish and lived in a pretty house (it is at present the Presbyterian College) surrounded by a high wall and separated from the Castle grounds by a wicket-gate. All through my College days I lived the Sandymount Castle life. It was my Capua and only too welcome after my school life. I had been braced too tight, now I was braced too lightly: self-abandoned to a complete relaxation. I left that school, weakened morally by its constant discipline and vigilance, to live all my College days in that pleasant Capua. I did not think, I did not work, I had no ambition, I dreamed. Week after week went by, and no one criticised. As far as the demands of that sympathetic circle went, I satisfied everybody, and was well-behaved. The only thing that ever troubled my uncle was my habit of going long walks in the mountains, all by myself. His old-fashioned, eighteenth century gregarious worldliness was shocked that I should walk all by myself, it seemed to him abnormal and he distrusted the abnormal.

At school I had been well grounded as regards Latin and Greek, therefore the ordinary college examinations gave me no trouble. In my last year I read for honours in metaphysics and logic, but on the days of the examination I was ill with rheumatic fever. Possibly had I read sternly for these courses I should have turned away to the abstract side of life and deserted, for good and all, the concrete world of colour and of images. After taking my degree I won a prize in political economy, and became acquainted with the works of J. S. Mill, and I began to think; but though Capua vanished, I do not think that I thereby became a better man. Certainly I was more disagreeable, for I wanted to quarrel with everyone, making the mistake, common among polemical minded people, of thinking that when I was severe to other people and the world generally, I was severe to myself, although in reality I was acquiring the most disagreeable of qualities, picking up the habits of dictatorial emphasis & dogmatism, which I shall now never get rid of. This was not due to Mill's teaching. Mill must have been the most persuasive man, while I in my crudeness must have been the most dissuasive. Never would he have allowed any authoritative self-conceit to come between him and the truth. I once had the good fortune to hear him make a speech to workingmen, and I thought that both as a speaker and a man he was of all men the most winning. His audience did not cheer, they laughed as with an intensity of enjoyment. At the time I compared the laughter in my own mind to the sound made by the stringing of Ulysses' bow when he was about to shoot the suitors, which Homer likened to the singing of swallows. My own excuse for myself is that I lived for six years under that severe Scotch school-master, who was all authority and self-assertion, and that man is essentially an imitative animal. When I began to think for myself I walked in the footsteps of my school-master.

With my uncle lived three old ladies, his mother who died when ninety three, and her two sisters who lived to be over eighty. After the death of these old people he continued to live alone in Sandymount and hoped to die, as they did, in the odours of a well approved and well-tested worldliness, but fickle and cruel fortune ruled otherwise. He lost his money. How it went I don't know, I don't believe he himself knew, and when he died an old man broken by creeping paralysis, there were some debts whereof his assets sufficed to pay fifteen shillings in the pound, his assets consisting of a collection of pictures, china and silver, very valuable had Dublin only known it.

A sort of incrustation of legend had gathered about my uncle. One was that he was an old Peninsular officer who had seen battles and sieges. As a fact, his nearest approach to actual war was that, when quartered in Hastings, he had had living with him a prisoner of war, a French officer. Very pleasantly they lived together, going to a great many parties and picnics, neither knowing the other's language, so there was no possibility of disputes. Of that friendship the only trace remaining was that my uncle always pronounced the word 'presentiment' with a French accent.

Perhaps in the councils of the Eternal, or whatever you call the Providence who shapes our ends, no time is lost and nothing whatever wasted. Looking back on my uncle's long and pleasant life, ending in a close so sombre, I will pass no judgement on the ways of Providence, beyond saying that he was by nature a good man and deserved to be happy to the end. He was fond of his friends, and wished to be only good to them, and with his money he benefited hundreds. There are people who if they do anything for you do thereby fix a hook in your jaws which you can never get rid of. I think when he did you a kindness he forgot about it and wished you to forget it. Of course his sympathies were extremely narrow and did not extend beyond his relations and friends. Humanitarism, which I had learned from Mill's philosophy, I would not have dared speak of in his presence. Theory was my uncle's aversion; an old Tory, he regarded theory as the Enemy. He was extraordinarily fond of children. When we lived in the North of Ireland, his advent among us was a radiant event. I can remember that one late winter's evening, when with my mother and father he had just left for the mail coach that was to take him to Dublin, out of pure affection and loneliness I went over to the table and drank out of his tea-cup.

Having now spoken of the master of Sandymount Castle, let me now speak of one whom my eldest sister called the Deputy Master, old Michael, who for more than forty years was my uncle's butler. It was my mother who hired him when he was a young man with black hair and blue eyes. Some weeks afterwards he was found drunk. He at once, at my uncle's demand, took the pledge, and never after broke it, even though we youngsters, out of pure mischief, often tried to tempt him. I remember him as a man of white hair with an amusing resemblance to John Stuart Mill--I say amusing because Michael was short in stature and sturdily built, whereas we all know J. S. M. was tall and slender. Before coming to my uncle he had been butler to an English general whom he left because 'the Mistress had insulted his religion,' which so distressed the general that he had insisted on Michael driving from the house in the family carriage. Michael himself told me this, and that when he had got to some distance from the house, he transferred himself to a Dublin jaunting-car. He was a perfect servant, yet I never knew a man of greater self-respect. The Irish make good servants and their gentry make good masters, because both are still mediævalists, and belong to an age when it was accepted by everybody from the king to the peasant that to serve is honourable. My uncle's manner with all his servants was brief and authoritative, as though he could still send them to the guardroom, and these relations with Michael never relaxed during all the forty years. All the same Michael was Deputy Master. Sometimes when we were at dinner and Michael attending us, he would say 'Mr. So-and-So called to day' & my uncle would invariably reply 'Did you ask him to dinner?' 'Yes Sir'. My Uncle came to see me in London, a few years before his death, and after he had left Sandymount, and said 'When I told Michael of my intention, I declare to God I don't know which of us should have been most pitied.' When last I saw Michael he was ill and visibly failing. He came from his bed-room with a blanket around his shoulders but his bright blue eyes were the same as ever and he told me one of the old stories.

'Did I ever tell you, Mr. Johnnie, the story of Mr. O'Connell and the officer?'

I had heard it at least fifty times, but I said it was new to me. The officer was a witness called in some law case in which O'Connell was employed.

'Mr. Soldier' said O'Connell, 'what do you know of this matter?'

'I am not a soldier, I am an officer' said the witness. 'Then' said Mr. O'Connell 'Mr. Officer and no soldier, what do you know of this matter?'

Shortly before I left Ireland and law, to go to London and study art, and while my uncle was still at Sandymount, Michael told me a conversation he had with Butt. He said he was standing at the side door when he saw Butt at a distance, and that Butt came over to him and shook hands with him, and that he brought Butt into the oak room, and gave him luncheon and wine, and that Butt talked to him of many things and that finally Michael had said 'Now Sir, Mr. Johnnie is a Barrister, and you ought to do something for him,' and Butt answered 'Michael, I will.' And he did, in a way that, because of my resolution to go to England, was vain, but it would have been a substantial help to me.

At that time my uncle and Butt had not been on speaking terms for some years. In Butt's magnanimous mind and imagination were tides of feeling and of old memory connected with Sandymount and with those that had been its inmates that no quarrel could stand against. That was Butt all over. In the old days he and his family constantly came to Sandymount, and while his wife & children would scatter over the gardens and ground, he would stay inside talking to the old ladies. They liked especially playing backgammon with him. His reckless way of leaving blots stimulated their imagination and made them feel that he really was a man of genius. At this time he was the opponent of O'Connell and the hope of the Tories, and Disraeli had walked in the lobby of the House of Commons with his arm through his and said, 'Butt we must get you into the Cabinet.' Afterwards, when Butt had gone over to the Nationalists, my grandmother would say, 'I have a sneaking regard for Isaac Butt,' and her sister would say, 'Indeed I know you have.'

There was a something in Butt, was it poetical genius or intellectual power, was it the head or the heart, or was it merely primeval goodness, that no one could resist. It followed him everywhere, and it followed him into Court. I have seen a jury listening in constrained attitude of painful attention, with the air of men resolved to do their duty at any cost. Then the other Lawyer would cease to speak, and Butt would rise, and every man of them would smile, like watchers by a sick bed who at last saw arrive a great doctor who could work miracles, and Butt would explain things in a language so simple that the dullest brain among them would understand. It was part of his genius that he understood simple people. It was well-known among solicitors that in a case in which his feelings were not concerned he was no better than any other barrister, but that where they were concerned he was irresistible. My father was present at a dinner where there were assembled all the magnates of the Irish Bar, and one and all declared that they never knew how a case would go until they had heard Butt's speech, and, if I remember rightly. Butt at this time was not over thirty years of age. There had been a murder in County Donegal of which Butt was a native, and the family did not wish him to take a part in the defence. Friends of the accused called on him and, to put them off, he asked what he thought was an impossible fee. They went away disappointed. Butt's imagination caught fire from what they told him, and all night he walked his library thinking about it, and when, contrary to his expectations, the men called in the morning with the money, he had convinced himself and undertook the defence, and so moving was his speech, that the jury, all of them Presbyterians, when they left the Court and entered the Jury Room, fell on their knees and prayed for guidance and help. The man was acquitted. A friend of mine living in London, who had been a Dublin solicitor in large practice, told me the following story. The Dublin Corporation at the time he spoke of was composed of Protestants, and in a very important case, for which my friend was solicitor, wanted to employ Butt. He and his clients sought him everywhere and could not find him. There was Sir This and Sir That--men whose names he spoke with a kind of awe, yet neither he nor they could find Butt. Then, receiving certain hints and rumours, they took cars and cabs and drove many miles out of Dublin into the country & did at last find Butt, down on his hands and knees in a field, studying a water-course, all on the behalf of the poor ragged man who was standing beside him--a case, said my friend, for which he wouldn't get five pounds, and at this time Butt was a Tory politician, pledged to the service of the rich and powerful. My friend was a big, heavily-built man, with a wheezy voice and irritable eyes, punctiliously honest and truthful. He hated Home Rule and he loathed the Catholic Church, a bitter Protestant of the Cromwellian type, yet he liked to talk about Butt, and would rail against the people who deserted him. I have often heard him say 'Of all the men I've ever known. Butt had the best qualities.' The relation between these two men was like that between Timon of Athens and his steward. With Flavius my friend might have said:

'O Monument And wonder of good deeds evilly bestowed'

Archer Butler, in his day a famous Platonist, once said in my father's hearing, 'Butt, I leave you to the God who made you.' And so said all men, the reason being, I think, that in Butt himself was such a fountain of naturalness and humanity that people said 'This is the thing itself, compared to which our moral codes are only the scaffolding.'

Archer Butler had just been appointed, by the Board of Trinity College, Professor of Moral Philosophy. Butt knew that he had written an erotic poem, very mild for these days but very terrible in those Victorian days, and he went to congratulate him, bringing a copy of the Dublin University Review with this identical poem inserted. Butt said to him 'Why on earth did you do such a thing as publish this poem?' Butler was in consternation and believed himself lost. At this time the magazine was very famous and widely read, publishing, as it did, the stories of Lever and Carleton. It was of course a joke, for the copy showed to Butler was the only one that contained the poem, and all contrived by Butt who at that time was editor of the magazine. When Butt was Member for Harwich, and the hope of the Tories, being as yet untouched by any Irish heresies, Mrs. Butt, my father and mother, uncle Robert Corbet, a cousin and I, all went in a body to visit Madame Tussaud's Wax-work Exhibition. As we passed along among these figures, ghastly by an imitation of life which seemed to be its sad mockery, Butt constituted himself our guide, telling strange histories, partly true but mostly imaginary. At all times Butt shone in this kind of inventions. A crowd of strangers drew near, among them a little Clergyman particularly active and vociferous in his applause and encouragement, and Butt was in his element. Mrs. Butt at this time was young, as were all the party, and the situation amused her so much that she sat down on a chair, the better to enjoy her laughter. Seeing this Butt made pointed and appealing allusions, and the crowd gave her black looks, which only increased her merriment. My matter of fact cousin did not know that a joke was in progress, and when the little Clergyman approached him and said 'What a remarkable guide they keep in this establishment' he was shocked and said 'He's not a guide, he is the member for Harwich.' The crowd melted away, and Butt was indignant. 'Why' he said 'I meant to have got sixpence apiece all round.'

The Irish spurn convention and are called cynical, and the English make of it a religion and for their pains are called hypocrites. The fact being that, while the English like the beaten way, we prefer the untrodden way that leads to the surprising.