Part 4

What do you think of when alone at night? Do not the things your mothers spoke about, Before they took the candle from the bedside, Rush up into the mind and master it, Till you believe in them against your will?

SECOND PUPIL (_to first pupil_)

You answer for us.

THIRD PUPIL (_in a whisper to first pupil_)

Be careful what you say; If he persuades you to an argument, He will but turn us all to mockery.

FIRST PUPIL

We had no minds until you made them for us; Our bodies only were our mothers' work.

WISE MAN

You answer with incredible things. It is certain That there is one,--though it may be but one-- Believes in God and in some heaven and hell-- In all those things we put into our prayers.

FIRST PUPIL

We thought those things before our minds were born, But that was long ago--we are not children.

WISE MAN

You are afraid to tell me what you think Because I am hot and angry when I am crossed. I do not blame you for it; but have no fear, For if there's one that sat on smiling there, As though my arguments were sweet as milk Yet found them bitter, I will thank him for it, If he but speak his mind.

FIRST PUPIL

There is no one, Master, There is not one but found them sweet as milk.

WISE MAN

The things that have been told us in our childhood Are not so fragile.

SECOND PUPIL

We are no longer children.

THIRD PUPIL

We all believe in you and in what you have taught.

OTHER PUPILS

All, all, all, all, in you, nothing but you.

WISE MAN

I have deceived you--where shall I go for words-- I have no thoughts--my mind has been swept bare. The messengers that stand in the fiery cloud, Fling themselves out, if we but dare to question, And after that, the Babylonian moon Blots all away.

FIRST PUPIL (_to other pupils_)

I take his words to mean That visionaries, and martyrs when they are raised Above translunary things, and there enlightened, As the contention is, may lose the light, And flounder in their speech when the eyes open.

SECOND PUPIL

How well he imitates their trick of speech.

THIRD PUPIL

Their air of mystery.

FOURTH PUPIL

Their empty gaze, As though they'd looked upon some winged thing, And would not condescend to mankind after.

FIRST PUPIL

Master, we have all learnt that truth is learnt When the intellect's deliberate and cold, As it were a polished mirror that reflects An unchanged world; and not when the steel melts, Bubbling and hissing, till there's naught but fume.

WISE MAN

When it is melted, when it all fumes up, They walk, as when beside those three in the furnace The form of the fourth.

FIRST PUPIL

Master, there's none among us That has not heard your mockery of these, Or thoughts like these, and we have not forgot.

WISE MAN

Something incredible has happened--some one has come Suddenly like a grey hawk out of the air, And all that I declared untrue is true.

FIRST PUPIL (_to other pupils_)

You'd think the way he says it, that he felt it. There's not a mummer to compare with him. He's something like a man.

SECOND PUPIL

Give us some proof.

WISE MAN

What proof have I to give, but that an angel An instant ago was standing on that spot.

[_The pupils rise._

THIRD PUPIL

You dreamed it.

WISE MAN

I was awake as I am now.

FIRST PUPIL (_to the others_)

I may be dreaming now for all I know. He wants to show we have no certain proof Of anything in the world.

SECOND PUPIL

There is this proof That shows we are awake--we have all one world While every dreamer has a world of his own, And sees what no one else can.

THIRD PUPIL

Teigue sees angels. So when the Master says he has seen an angel, He may have seen one.

FIRST PUPIL

Both may still be dreamers; Unless it's proved the angels were alike.

SECOND PUPIL

What sort are the angels, Teigue?

THIRD PUPIL

That will prove nothing, Unless we are sure prolonged obedience Has made one angel like another angel As they were eggs.

FIRST PUPIL

The Master's silent now: For he has found that to dispute with us-- Seeing that he has taught us what we know-- Is but to reason with himself. Let us away, And find if there is one believer left.

WISE MAN

Yes, yes. Find me but one that still believes The things that we were told when we were children.

THIRD PUPIL

He'll mock and maul him.

FOURTH PUPIL

From the first I knew He wanted somebody to argue with.

[_They go._

WISE MAN

I have no reason left. All dark, all dark!

[_Pupils return laughing. They push forward fourth pupil._

FIRST PUPIL

Here, Master, is the very man you want. He said, when we were studying the book, That maybe after all the monks were right, And you mistaken, and if we but gave him time, He'd prove that it was so.

FOURTH PUPIL

I never said it.

WISE MAN

Dear friend, dear friend, do you believe in God?

FOURTH PUPIL

Master, they have invented this to mock me.

WISE MAN

You are afraid of me.

FOURTH PUPIL

They know well, Master, That all I said was but to make them argue. They've pushed me in to make a mock of me, Because they knew I could take either side And beat them at it.

WISE MAN

If you believe in God, You are my soul's one friend.

[_Pupils laugh._

Mistress or wife Can give us but our good or evil luck Amid the howling world, but you shall give Eternity, and those sweet-throated things That drift above the moon.

[_The pupils look at one another and are silent._

SECOND PUPIL

How strange he is.

WISE MAN

The angel that stood there upon that spot, Said that my soul was lost unless I found out One that believed.

FOURTH PUPIL

Cease mocking at me, Master, For I am certain that there is no God Nor immortality, and they that said it Made a fantastic tale from a starved dream To plague our hearts. Will that content you, Master?

WISE MAN

The giddy glass is emptier every moment, And you stand there, debating, laughing and wrangling. Out of my sight! Out of my sight, I say.

[_He drives them out._

I'll call my wife, for what can women do, That carry us in the darkness of their bodies, But mock the reason that lets nothing grow Unless it grow in light. Bridget, Bridget. A woman never ceases to believe, Say what we will. Bridget, come quickly, Bridget.

[_Bridget comes in wearing her apron. Her sleeves turned up from her arms, which are covered with flour._

Wife, what do you believe in? Tell me the truth, And not--as is the habit with you all-- Something you think will please me. Do you pray? Sometimes when you're alone in the house, do you pray?

BRIDGET

Prayers--no, you taught me to leave them off long ago. At first I was sorry, but I am glad now, for I am sleepy in the evenings.

WISE MAN

Do you believe in God?

BRIDGET

Oh, a good wife only believes in what her husband tells her.

WISE MAN

But sometimes, when the children are asleep And I am in the school, do you not think About the Martyrs and the saints and the angels, And all the things that you believed in once?

BRIDGET

I think about nothing--sometimes I wonder if the linen is bleaching white, or I go out to see if the crows are picking up the chickens' food.

WISE MAN

My God,--my God! I will go out myself. My pupils said that they would find a man Whose faith I never shook--they may have found him. Therefore I will go out--but if I go, The glass will let the sands run out unseen. I cannot go--I cannot leave the glass. Go call my pupils--I can explain all now, Only when all our hold on life is troubled, Only in spiritual terror can the Truth Come through the broken mind--as the pease burst Out of a broken pease-cod.

[_He clutches Bridget as she is going._

Say to them, That Nature would lack all in her most need, Could not the soul find truth as in a flash, Upon the battle-field, or in the midst Of overwhelming waves, and say to them-- But no, they would but answer as I bid.

BRIDGET

You want somebody to get up an argument with.

WISE MAN

Look out and see if there is any one There in the street--I cannot leave the glass, For somebody might shake it, and the sand If it were shaken might run down on the instant.

BRIDGET

I don't understand a word you are saying. There's a crowd of people talking to your pupils.

WISE MAN

Go out and find if they have found a man Who did not understand me when I taught, Or did not listen.

BRIDGET

It is a hard thing to be married to a man of learning that must always be having arguments.

[_She goes out._

WISE MAN

Strange that I should be blind to the great secret, And that so simple a man might write it out Upon a blade of grass or bit of rush With naught but berry juice, and laugh to himself Writing it out, because it was so simple.

[_Enter Bridget followed by the Fool._

FOOL

Give me something; give me a penny to buy bacon in the shops and nuts in the market, and strong drink for the time when the sun is weak.

BRIDGET

I have no pennies. (_To Wise Man_) Your pupils cannot find anybody to argue with you. There's nobody in the whole country with belief enough for a lover's oath. Can't you be quiet now, and not always wanting to have arguments? It must be terrible to have a mind like that.

WISE MAN

Then I am lost indeed.

BRIDGET

Leave me alone now, I have to make the bread for you and the children.

[_She goes into kitchen._

WISE MAN

Children, children!

BRIDGET

Your father wants you, run to him.

[_Children run in._

WISE MAN

Come to me, children. Do not be afraid. I want to know if you believe in Heaven, God or the soul--no, do not tell me yet; You need not be afraid I shall be angry, Say what you please--so that it is your thought-- I wanted you to know before you spoke, That I shall not be angry.

FIRST CHILD

We have not forgotten, Father.

SECOND CHILD

Oh no, Father.

BOTH CHILDREN

(_As if repeating a lesson_) There is nothing we cannot see, nothing we cannot touch.

FIRST CHILD

Foolish people used to say that there was, but you have taught us better.

WISE MAN

Go to your mother, go--yet do not go. What can she say? If I am dumb you are lost; And yet, because the sands are running out, I have but a moment to show it all in. Children, The sap would die out of the blades of grass Had they a doubt. They understand it all, Being the fingers of God's certainty, Yet can but make their sign into the air; But could they find their tongues they'd show it all; But what am I to say that am but one, When they are millions and they will not speak--

[_Children have run out._

But they are gone; what made them run away?

[_The Fool comes in with a dandelion._

Look at me, tell me if my face is changed, Is there a notch of the fiend's nail upon it Already? Is it terrible to sight? Because the moment's near.

[_Going to glass._

I dare not look, I dare not know the moment when they come. No, no, I dare not. (_Covers glass._) Will there be a footfall, Or will there be a sort of rending sound, Or else a cracking, as though an iron claw Had gripped the threshold stone?

[_Fool has begun to blow the dandelion._

What are you doing?

FOOL

Wait a minute--four--five--six--

WISE MAN

What are you doing that for?

FOOL

I am blowing the dandelion to find out what hour it is.

WISE MAN

You have heard everything, and that is why You'd find what hour it is--you'd find that out, That you may look upon a fleet of devils Dragging my soul away. You shall not stop, I will have no one here when they come in, I will have no one sitting there--no one-- And yet--and yet--there is something strange about you. I half remember something. What is it? Do you believe in God and in the soul?

FOOL

So you ask me now. I thought when you were asking your pupils, 'Will he ask Teigue the Fool? Yes, he will, he will; no, he will not--yes, he will.' But Teigue will say nothing. Teigue will say nothing.

WISE MAN

Tell me quickly.

FOOL

I said, 'Teigue knows everything, not even the green-eyed cats and the hares that milk the cows have Teigue's wisdom'; but Teigue will not speak, he says nothing.

WISE MAN

Speak, speak, for underneath the cover there The sand is running from the upper glass, And when the last grain's through, I shall be lost.

FOOL

I will not speak. I will not tell you what is in my mind. I will not tell you what is in my bag. You might steal away my thoughts. I met a bodach on the road yesterday, and he said, 'Teigue, tell me how many pennies are in your bag; I will wager three pennies that there are not twenty pennies in your bag; let me put in my hand and count them.' But I gripped the bag the tighter, and when I go to sleep at night I hide the bag where nobody knows.

WISE MAN

There's but one pinch of sand, and I am lost If you are not he I seek.

FOOL

O, what a lot the Fool knows, but he says nothing.

WISE MAN

Yes, I remember now. You spoke of angels. You said but now that you had seen an angel. You are the one I seek, and I am saved.

FOOL

Oh no. How could poor Teigue see angels? Oh, Teigue tells one tale here, another there, and everybody gives him pennies. If Teigue had not his tales he would starve.

[_He breaks away and goes out._

WISE MAN

The last hope is gone, And now that it's too late I see it all, We perish into God and sink away Into reality--the rest's a dream.

[_The Fool comes back._

FOOL

There was one there--there by the threshold stone, waiting there; and he said, 'Go in, Teigue, and tell him everything that he asks you. He will give you a penny if you tell him.'

WISE MAN

I know enough, that know God's will prevails.

FOOL

Waiting till the moment had come--That is what the one out there was saying, but I might tell you what you asked. That is what he was saying.

WISE MAN

Be silent. May God's will prevail on the instant, Although His will be my eternal pain. I have no question: It is enough, I know what fixed the station Of star and cloud. And knowing all, I cry That what so God has willed On the instant be fulfilled, Though that be my damnation. The stream of the world has changed its course, And with the stream my thoughts have run Into some cloudy thunderous spring That is its mountain source-- Aye, to some frenzy of the mind, For all that we have done's undone, Our speculation but as the wind.

[_He dies._

FOOL

Wise man--Wise man, wake up and I will tell you everything for a penny. It is I, poor Teigue the Fool. Why don't you wake up, and say, 'There is a penny for you, Teigue'? No, no, you will say nothing. You and I, we are the two fools, we know everything, but we will not speak.

[_Angel enters holding a casket._

O, look what has come from his mouth! O, look what has come from his mouth--the white butterfly! He is dead, and I have taken his soul in my hands; but I know why you open the lid of that golden box. I must give it to you. There then, (_he puts butterfly in casket_) he has gone through his pains, and you will open the lid in the Garden of Paradise. (_He closes curtain and remains outside it._) He is gone, he is gone, he is gone, but come in, everybody in the world, and look at me.

'I hear the wind a blow I hear the grass a grow, And all that I know, I know.' But I will not speak, I will run away.

[_He goes out._

* * * * *

NOTES

PREFATORY POEM

'Free of the ten and four' is an error I cannot now correct, without more rewriting than I have a mind for. Some merchant in Villon, I forget the reference, was 'free of the ten and four.' Irish merchants exempted from certain duties by the Irish Parliament were, unless memory deceives me again for I am writing away from books, 'free of the eight and six.'

POEMS BEGINNING WITH THAT 'TO A WEALTHY MAN' AND ENDING WITH THAT 'TO A SHADE'

During the thirty years or so during which I have been reading Irish newspapers, three public controversies have stirred my imagination. The first was the Parnell controversy. There were reasons to justify a man's joining either party, but there were none to justify, on one side or on the other, lying accusations forgetful of past service, a frenzy of detraction. And another was the dispute over 'The Playboy.' There were reasons for opposing as for supporting that violent, laughing thing, but none for the lies, for the unscrupulous rhetoric spread against it in Ireland, and from Ireland to America. The third prepared for the Corporation's refusal of a building for Sir Hugh Lane's famous collection of pictures.

One could respect the argument that Dublin, with much poverty and many slums, could not afford the L22,000 the building was to cost the city, but not the minds that used it. One frenzied man compared the pictures to Troy horse which 'destroyed a city,' and innumerable correspondents described Sir Hugh Lane and those who had subscribed many thousands to give Dublin paintings by Corot, Manet, Monet, Degas, and Renoir, as 'self-seekers,' 'self-advertisers,' 'picture-dealers,' 'log-rolling cranks and faddists,' and one clerical paper told 'picture-dealer Lane' to take himself and his pictures out of that. A member of the Corporation said there were Irish artists who could paint as good if they had a mind to, and another described a half-hour in the temporary gallery in Harcourt Street as the most dismal of his life. Some one else asked instead of these eccentric pictures to be given pictures 'like those beautiful productions displayed in the windows of our city picture shops.' Another thought that we would all be more patriotic if we devoted our energy to fighting the Insurance Act. Another would not hang them in his kitchen, while yet another described the vogue of French impressionist painting as having gone to such a length among 'log-rolling enthusiasts' that they even admired 'works that were rejected from the Salon forty years ago by the finest critics in the world.'

The first serious opposition began in the _Irish Catholic_, the chief Dublin clerical paper, and Mr. William Murphy, the organiser of the recent lock-out and Mr. Healy's financial supporter in his attack upon Parnell, a man of great influence, brought to its support a few days later his newspapers _The Evening Herald_ and _The Irish Independent_, the most popular of Irish daily papers. He replied to my poem 'To a Wealthy Man' (I was thinking of a very different wealthy man) from what he described as 'Paudeen's point of view,' and 'Paudeen's point of view' it was. The enthusiasm for 'Sir Hugh Lane's Corots'--one paper spelled the name repeatedly 'Crot'--being but 'an exotic fashion,' waited 'some satirist like Gilbert' who 'killed the aesthetic craze,' and as for the rest 'there were no greater humbugs in the world than art critics and so-called experts.' As the first avowed reason for opposition, the necessities of the poor got but a few lines, not so many certainly as the objection of various persons to supply Sir Hugh Lane with 'a monument at the city's expense,' and as the gallery was supported by Mr. James Larkin, the chief Labour leader, and important slum workers, I assume that the purpose of the opposition was not exclusively charitable.

These controversies, political, literary, and artistic, have showed that neither religion nor politics can of itself create minds with enough receptivity to become wise, or just and generous enough to make a nation. Other cities have been as stupid--Samuel Butler laughs at shocked Montreal for hiding the Discobolus in a cellar--but Dublin is the capital of a nation, and an ancient race has nowhere else to look for an education. Goethe in _Wilhelm Meister_ describes a saintly and naturally gracious woman, who getting into a quarrel over some trumpery detail of religious observance, grows--she and all her little religious community--angry and vindictive. In Ireland I am constantly reminded of that fable of the futility of all discipline that is not of the whole being. Religious Ireland--and the pious Protestants of my childhood were signal examples--thinks of divine things as a round of duties separated from life and not as an element that may be discovered in all circumstance and emotion, while political Ireland sees the good citizen but as a man who holds to certain opinions and not as a man of good will. Against all this we have but a few educated men and the remnants of an old traditional culture among the poor. Both were stronger forty years ago, before the rise of our new middle class which showed as its first public event, during the nine years of the Parnellite split, how base at moments of excitement are minds without culture. 1914.

'Romantic Ireland's dead and gone' sounds old-fashioned now. It seemed true in 1913, but I did not foresee 1916. The late Dublin Rebellion, whatever one can say of its wisdom, will long be remembered for its heroism. 'They weighed so lightly what they gave,' and gave too in some cases without hope of success. July 1916.

THE DOLLS

The fable for this poem came into my head while I was giving some lectures in Dublin. I had noticed once again how all thought among us is frozen into 'something other than human life.' After I had made the poem, I looked up one day into the blue of the sky, and suddenly imagined, as if lost in the blue of the sky, stiff figures in procession. I remembered that they were the habitual image suggested by blue sky, and looking for a second fable called them 'The Magi', complimentary forms to those enraged dolls.

THE HOUR-GLASS

A friend suggested to me the subject of this play, an Irish folk-tale from Lady Wilde's _Ancient Legends_. I have for years struggled with something which is charming in the naive legend but a platitude on the stage. I did not discover till a year ago that if the wise man humbled himself to the fool and received salvation as his reward, so much more powerful are pictures than words, no explanatory dialogue could set the matter right. I was faintly pleased when I converted a music-hall singer and kept him going to Mass for six weeks, so little responsibility does one feel for those to whom one has never been introduced; but I was always ashamed when I saw any friend of my own in the theatre. Now I have made my philosopher accept God's will, whatever it is, and find his courage again, and helped by the elaboration of verse, have so changed the fable that it is not false to my own thoughts of the world.

* * * * *

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