AE: Some Critical PerspectivesAuthor(s): William DanielsSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 223-227Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25477133 .

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William Daniels

AE: Some Critical Perspectives Mr Summerfield's biography is written from a wide arid deep

knowledge of AE and his work. He has gone through most of the

sources turned up by Denson, and it is difficult to do more than praise him for his years of research. For the first time, we have a well

documented account of AE's life.

Thompson and Sheaffer's biographies of Frost and O'Neill are the

ideal. They concentrate on the man behind the work without trying to

use the life to explain the work and they perform the invaluable task of

showing obvious relationships between the man's life and work

whenever possible. AE himself said that anyone who wanted to know

about him should read his work. Unfortunately, until Summerfield's

biography came out, that is all that most would-be biographers of AE

did. They explained his life almost entirely through such early stories

as "A Strange Awakening", or through the two volumes, The Candle of Vision and Song and Its Fountains. Now we have before us the task of

relating AE's poetry and prose to his life.

Summerfield occasionally performs this task. He points out that

AE's love poems written during the 1894-97 period "reflected the

struggle" AE had in choosing between a chela's chastity and that of a

married man. But he shows us little of AE's relationship to Violet

North. He and Miss North visited Sligo together before their

marriage, and she wrote one of the first essays on the Yeats Country. Some of her other writings offer interesting insights into AE at this

period. Her pictures of Loch Leane and Muckross Abbey probably

portray the place where AE once had a vision of ancient Catholic

services. AE's joy in his first son, Brian, was shared by Lady Gregory, and the correspondence between them about him shows both figures in

Henry Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man: a Biography of George William Russell "AE" 1867-1935. Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe,

1975. 354 pages. ?8.75.

Alan Denson, Printed Writings by George W. Russell (AE): A Bibliography. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1961. 255 pages. ?4.

AE (George William Russell), The Candle of Vision. Wheaton, Illinois:

The Theosophical Publishing House. 19?. 175 pages. ?1.35.

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a lovely light. But I wonder what happened to this Brian later? I have

always been puzzled, too, about that young boy and girl who run

through AE's poems and prose from beginning to end. How do they relate to AE's life? Could they come from AE and his sister who died

at eighteen?

Every student of Irish literature knows the dark shadow cast upon AE as a strayed angel by Moore and Joyce. This shadow needs to be

faced. Summerfield cites Eglinton's claim that Susan Mitchell's

"friendship was not without some adverse influence on his home life"; and he tells how AE threatened Moore with a suit if he charged him in

Vale "with neglecting his wife for another lady". Surely a closer look

at the AE/Susan Mitchell relationship is justified, especially in light of

AE's "birthday book" of poems to her up in Armagh. On the back wrapper of his biography, Summerfield announces a

forthcoming six-volume selection of AE's writing. In addition to this, students of AE's place in Irish literature will need someday a more

complete set of letters to supplement Denson's Letters from AE. They will also need the four journals most closely associated with him: The

Irish Theosophist, The Internationalist, The Irish Homestead, and The Irish

Statesman. They will need, as we are getting with Yeats, his

uncollected works not found in the above journals. Unfortunately, Colin Smythe has seen fit to reoffer Denson's first bibliography of AE

without bringing it up to date. The first bibliography by Denson was

the bedrock of AE scholarship, but it is almost totally useless to the

scholar interested in AE's Homestead and Statesman (indexes of those

journals have been made by other men). Again, its list of secondary articles and books on AE has been supplemented by Denson elsewhere, but these need to be presented critically by someone like Summerfield.

Much still needs to be done in showing the relationship between AE

and other Irishmen, especially Joyce, Synge, O'Casey, Yeats and

Beckett. I have just finished a careful study of AE's work in the west of

Ireland, and found that Synge's "In the Congested Districts" almost

retraces routes blazed earlier by AE. Coole Park was a frequent

resting place for AE on his lecturing and organising tours; and we

cannot avoid thinking of O'Casey when we read in Lady Gregory's 1922 journal that AE had suggested "someone should write a play" about Cathleen ni Houlihan as a "fierce vituperative old hag". It

would be interesting to attempt to follow AE's seemingly changing attitude towards the western farmers. Summerfield points out how

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AE: SOME CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

surprised AE had been at first to find "these country people most often

[doing] quite simply without thinking they were doing anything fine at

all most of the good deeds and kindnesses to each other which it needed

whole eloquent perorations and exhortations to induce people to do in

towns." Surely constant attacks from his critics did as much as old age and illness to drive AE to his often-quoted statement about the "kind

of people we meet in the West, their minds a clotted mass of

superstition and ignorance, animated by a half-crazy energy." Synge's

contemporary critics have been frequently quoted. It would be helpful in understanding how long-suffering both AE and Yeats were if

someone were to make a study of their contemporary detractors.

Summerfield sketches the AE/Yeats relationship lightly. No one has

brought out that AE was in Sligo (Skreen) as a young man,: nor seemed

to notice how AE blurs Kilmashogue with Ben Bulben in recalling

early visions of the Sidhe. Yeats once blurred himself into Standish

O'Grady's picture of AE in his Flight of the Eagle. Summerfield mentions

that "W. B. YEATS" is blocked beneath a winged angel in the Ely Place murals, yet fails to point out the "G. W. RUSSELL" blocked just beneath that. Summerfield's reference to that winged angel as the

"overshadowing daimon of Yeats" may have said more than he

realised. The two friends were alter egos more than were AE and Violet

North (to whom AE once so inscribed himself). In the light of Yeats's

Vision, too, AE's ideas about the "Mount of Transfiguration" are

moving. Summerfield tells of AE "describing how ideas and

speculations pass from the conscious mind through the psyche and

upwards towards the Spirit; where inner and outer meet, and at what

he came to call the Mount of Transfiguration, they are miraculously remoulded, and thence they return suffering a greater or lesser degree of distortion according to the condition of the psyche." Yeats burned

Cuchulainn into Irish minds, while AE tried his best to place there the

image of the friendship between the greater warrior and Ferdiad. AE

even held up Maeve's one Helen-of-Troy-like moment of

magnanimity in the Tain as Ireland's ideal of chivalry. Yeats's Oxford Book of Modern Verse selections of AE shed light on his own work. AE's

"On Behalf of Some Irishmen Not Followers of Tradition" is in the

tradition of Yeats's public poems, while the mood of AE's "Germinal"

is reflected in Yeats's "Long-Legged Fly". In Beckett's Murphy, Miss Car ridge turns from Celia on the stairs to

AE's Candle of Vision. AE's book has its place in other parts of Murphy,

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too, as I noticed when reading Summerfield on one of AE's early visions,. "But he thought of the danger which besets the man, who,

insufficiently purified, calls forth the divine fire, and he forebore to

open the Eye 'by which, when it is fully awakened, we dead shall be

raised.'"

Summerfield, one of the very few students of Irish literature

familiar with the works of H.P. Blavatsky and with Eastern writing,

suggests several fine parallels between AE's terms and those of the

traditional Christian Trinity: between "word", "lamp", and

"shepherd" and Christianity's "logos"; between "spirit", "breath"

and "light" and the Third Person of the Trinity. And when we find

"Mac Lir" paralleling the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit suggesting

Angus and his birds, we are inspired to reread AE. Take this: "The

great secret which the Upanishads proclaim is that the apparently individual soul of man is in reality identical with the Absolute." Isn't

that at least close to Paul's idea of the Mystical Body of Christ? AE

declares that "By acting without any desire of reward, by making of

all one's actions a sacrifice to the Lord, one can work without

attachment to anything in the realm of Maya and so one's deeds will

produce no Karma." If we drop the Eastern terms, that, too, is a

familiar Christian commonplace. Obviously in pointing out the

influence of Protestant hymns on AE's rhythms, Frank O'Connor only scratched the surface.

I find AE's frequently exact images one of the most attractive

aspects of his poetry. "Michael", as Summerfield notes, gives

"surprisingly fresh and clear" descriptions of Donegal's beauty.

Turning to that poem, we find Michael going through "a low valley of

dark hills,/And trees so tempest-bowed that they/Seemed to seek

double root in clay." Below him, "all about the rocky bay/Leaped up

grey forests of wild spray." At the base of the cliffs, he saw "ice-tinted

mounds of water rise/Glinting as with a million eyes,/Reel in and out

of light and shade,/Show depths of ivory and jade." In Dublin, Michael "would climb where quiet fills/With dream the shepherd on

the hills,/Where he could see as from high land/The golden sickle of

the sand/Curving around the bay to where/The granite cliffs were

worn by air." We know that many of AE's images became habitual,

perhaps blurred by theosophical precision, but we have not enough noted those that are sketched clearly and sensitively.

We need to reread and study AE's prose volumes, too. Summerfield

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believes the National Being AE's best stylistically, for he finds it coming closer to journalistic clarity than the other volumes which he finds

"impressionistic rather than precise". Summerfield well describes the

blend of AE and his acquaintances to be found in both The Interpreters and The Avatars. I find these volumes valuable, too, for showing AE

approaching, reacting to, and reacting from Ireland's gaining of

independence. One of Summerfield's most moving achievements is his suggested

sketch of AE's involvement with his co-operative societies. AE had his

emotional ups-and-downs about them from the beginning, of course,

but his heartbreak is evident when so many were destroyed during the

early twenties. When police and soldiers attacked and wrecked them, AE saw that the "newly emerging spirit of enterprise and hardJwon

technical competence would be lost." In 1921, he wrote: "To those

who have spent their lives in the effort to build up a non-political movement, uniting men of all parties and creeds in Ireland in work for

the common good, these reports come with peculiar poignancy, more

perhaps than is created by the death of individuals." His Plea for Justice

brought none. Then, during the society-splitting civil war, AE saw the

Republicans remaking "themselves in the image of the Black-and-Tans

they hated." In 1971 I frequently found myself visiting areas where AE

had established societies out west and often heard Shaw-like stories of

once co-operative societies turned into family-run exclusive

enterprises. Yet AE kept his faith for a long time. "I cannot believe

that the legend of the Gael, which began among the gods, will die out

in some petty peasant republic." At his best, Summerfield makes us wish AE were alive today,

looking around, and commenting on what he sees. How unique it

would be today to pick up a pamphlet and find there Man undistorted

picture of the fears and aspirations of Unionists and Nationalists"

written by a man "realistic enough to doubt its effect on the north."

AE knew that-it was "essential that [the Irish] should enjoy self

government before they were caught up in the inevitable spread of

socialistic and revolutionary ideas from Russia to the West." "There is

going", he proclaimed, "to be wild weather through the world, and

we want an Irish Captain and an Irish crew in command of the Irish

ship." The other day I read how the early Soviets had recognised a

good thing when they saw it in the tight central control of the Tsarist

regime, and they made it stronger. As AE pointed out, we become the

thing we hate.

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