by George Moore
Ned suggested Belgium as the best recruiting ground. But it was the prelate’s own business to find recruits, it was only Ned’s business to say that Ireland had done enough for the conversion of the world. And this prelate with the Irish name and cosmopolitan heart, who thought it an admirable thing that the clerical population should increase, while the lay population declined; who thought that with the declining population Ireland should still send out priests and nuns to convert the world — was no true Irishman. He cared not a jot what became of his country, so long as Ireland continued to furnish him with priests and nuns for the foreign mission. This prelate was willing to bleed Ireland to death to make a Roman holiday. Ireland did not matter to him, Ireland was a speck — Ned would like to have said, a chicken that the prelate would drop into the caldron which he was boiling for the cosmopolitan restaurant; but this would be an attack upon religion, it would be too direct to be easily understood by the audience, and as the words came to his lips he changed the phrase and said, “a pinch of snuff in the Roman snuff-box.” After this, Ned passed on to perhaps the most important part of his speech — to the acquisition of wealth by the clergy. He said that if the lay population had declined, and if the clerical population had increased, there was one thing that had increased with the clergy, and that was the wealth of the clergy. “I wish the cosmopolitan prelate had spoken upon this subject. I wonder if he inquired how much land has passed into the hands of the clergy in the last twenty years, and how many mortgages the religious hold upon land. I wonder if he inquired how many poultry-farms the nuns and the friars are adding to their convents and their monasteries; and now they are starting new manufactories for weaving — the weaving industry is falling into their hands. And there are no lay teachers in Ireland, now all the teaching is done by clerics. The Church is very rich in Ireland. If Ireland is the poorest country in the world, the Irish Church is richer than any other. All the money in Ireland goes into religion. There is only one other trade that can compete with it. Heaven may be for the laity, but this world is certainly for the clergy.”
More money was spent upon religion in Ireland than in any other country. Too much money was spent for the moment in building churches, and the great sums of money that were being spent on religion were not fairly divided. And passing rapidly on, Ned very adroitly touched upon the relative positions of the bishops and the priests and the curates. He told harrowing stories of the destitution of the curates, and he managed so well that his audience had not time to stop him. Everything he thought that they could not agree with he sandwiched between things that he knew they would agree with.
Father Murphy stood a little distance on his right, a thick-set man, and as the sentences fell from Ned’s lips he could see that Father Murphy was preparing his answer, and he guessed what Father Murphy’s answer would be like. He knew Father Murphy to be an adroit speaker, and the priest began in a low key as Ned had expected him to do. He began by deploring the evils of emigration, and Mr. Carmady deserved their best thanks for attracting popular attention to this evil. They were indebted to him for having done this. Others had denounced the evil, but Mr. Carmady’s eloquence had enabled him to do so as well, perhaps even better than it had been done before. He complimented Mr. Carmady on the picturesque manner in which he described the emptying of the country, but he could not agree with Mr. Carmady regarding the causes that had brought about this lamentable desire to leave the fatherland. Mr. Carmady’s theory was that the emptying of Ireland was due to the fact that the Irish priests had succeeded in inducing men to refrain from the commission of sin. Mr. Carmady did not reproach the priests with having failed; he reproached them with having succeeded. A strange complaint. The cause of the emigration, which we all agreed in deploring, was, according to Mr. Carmady, the desire of a sinless people for sin. A strange accusation. The people, according to Mr. Carmady, were leaving Ireland because they wished to indulge in indecent living. Mr. Carmady did not use these words; the words he used were “The joy of life,” but the meaning of the words was well known.
“No race,” he said, “had perhaps ever been libelled as the Irish race had been, but of all the libels that had ever been levelled against it, no libel had ever equalled the libel which he had heard uttered to-day, that the Irish were leaving Ireland in search of sin.
“They had heard a great deal about the dancing-girl, and according to Mr. Carmady it would seem that a nation could save itself by jigging.”
“He is speaking very well, from his point of view,” said Ned to himself.
Father Murphy was a stout, bald-headed man with small pig-like eyes, and a piece seemed to have been taken from the top of his bony forehead. He was elegantly dressed in broadcloth and he wore a gold chain and he dangled his chain from time to time. He was clearly the well-fed, well-housed cleric who was making, in this world, an excellent living of his advocacy for the next, and Ned wondered how it was that the people did not perceive a discrepancy between Father Murphy’s appearance and the theories he propounded. “The idealism of the Irish people,” said the priest, “was inveterate,” and he settled himself on his short legs and began his peroration.
Ned had begun to feel that he had failed, he began to think of his passage back to America. Father Murphy was followed by a young curate, and the curate began by saying that Mr. Carmady would be able to defend his theories, and that he had no concern with Mr. Carmady’s theories, though, indeed, he did not hear Mr. Carmady say anything which was contrary to the doctrine of our “holy religion.” Father Murphy had understood Mr. Carmady’s speech in quite a different light, and it seemed to the curate that he, Father Murphy, had put a wrong interpretation upon it; at all events he had put one which the curate could not share. Mr. Carmady had ventured, and, he thought, very properly, to call attention to the number of churches that were being built and the number of people who were daily entering the orders. He did not wish to criticise men and women who gave up their lives to God, but Mr. Carmady was quite right when he said that without a laity there could be no country. In Ireland the clergy were apt to forget this simple fact that celibates do not continue the race. Mr. Carmady had quoted from a book written by a priest in which the distinguished author had said he looked forward to the day when Ireland would be one vast monastery, and the curate agreed with Mr. Carmady that no more foolish wish had ever found its way into a book. He agreed with Mr. Carmady that a real vocation is a rare thing. No country had produced many painters or many sculptors or many poets, and a true religious vocation was equally rare. Mr. Carmady had pointed out that although the population had diminished the nuns and priests had increased, and Father Murphy must hold that Ireland must become one vast monastery, and the laity ought to become extinct, or he must agree with Mr. Carmady that there was a point when a too numerous clergy would overbalance the laity.
Altogether an unexpected and plucky little speech, and long before it closed Ned saw that Father Murphy’s triumph was not complete. Father Murphy’s face told the same tale.
The curate’s argument was taken up by other curates, and Ned began to see he had the youth of the country on his side.
He was speaking at the end of the week at another great meeting, and received even better support at this meeting than he had done at the first, and he returned home wondering what his wife was thinking of his success. But what matter? Ireland was waking from her sleep.... The agitation was running from parish to parish, it seemed as if the impossible were going to happen, and that the Gael was going to be free.
The curates had grievances, and he applied himself to setting the inferior clergy against their superiors, and as the agitation developed he told the curates that they were no better than ecclesiastical serfs, that although the parish priests dozed in comfortable arm-chairs and drank champagne, the curates lived by the wayside and ate and drank very little and did all the work.
But one day at Maynooth it was decided that curates had legitimate grievances, and that the people had grievances that
were likewise legitimate. And at this great council it was decided that the heavy marriage fees and the baptismal fees demanded by the priests should be reduced. Concessions were accompanied by threats. Even so it required all the power of the Church to put down the agitation. Everyone stood agape, saying the bishops must win in the end. An indiscretion on Ned’s part gave them the victory. In a moment of excitement he was unwise enough to quote John Mitchel’s words “that the Irish would be free long ago only for their damned souls.” A priest wrote to the newspapers pointing out that after these words there could be no further doubt that it was the doctrine of the French Revolution that Mr. Carmady was trying to force upon a Christian people. A bishop wrote saying that the words quoted were fit words for Anti-Christ. After that it was difficult for a priest to appear on the same platform, and the curates whose grievances had been redressed deserted, and the fight became an impossible one.
Very soon Ned’s meetings were interrupted, disagreeable scenes began to happen, and his letters were not admitted to the newspapers. A great solitude formed about him.
“Well,” he said one morning, “I suppose you have read the account in the paper of my ignominious escape. That is what they called it.”
“The wheel,” Ellen said, “is always going round. You may be at the bottom now, but the wheel is going round, only there is no use opposing the people in their traditions, in their instinct... . And whether the race is destined to disappear or to continue it is certain that the last Gael will die a Catholic.”
“And the Red Indian will die with the scalp at his girdle.”
“We won’t talk about religion, we’ll talk about things we are agreed upon. I have heard you say yourself that you would not go back to America again, that you never enjoyed life until you came here.”
“That was because I met you, Ellen.”
“I have heard you praise Ireland as being the most beautiful and sympathetic country in the world.”
“It is true that I love these people, and I wish I could become one of them.”
“You would become one of them, and yet you would tear them to pieces because they are not what you want them to be.”
Sometimes he thought he would like to write “A Western Thibet,” but he was more a man of action than of letters. His writings had been so long confined to newspaper articles that he could not see his way from chapter to chapter. He might have overcome the difficulty, but doubt began to poison his mind. “Every race,” he said, “has its own special genius. The Germans have or have had music. The French and Italians have or have had painting and sculpture. The English have or have had poetry. The Irish had, and alas! they still have their special genius, religious vocation.”
He used to go for long walks on the hills, and one day, lying in the furze amid the rough grass, his eyes following the course of the ships in the bay, he said: “Was it accident or my own fantastic temperament that brought me back from Cuba?” It seemed as if a net had been thrown over him and he had been drawn along like a fish in a net. “For some purpose,” he said. “But for what purpose? I can perceive none, and yet I cannot believe that an accident brought me to Ireland and involved me in the destiny of Ireland for no purpose.”
And he did not need to take the book from his pocket, he knew the passage well, and he repeated it word for word while he watched the ships in the bay.
“We were friends and we have become strangers, one to the other. Ah, yes; but it is so, and we do not wish to hide our strangerhood, or to dissemble as if we were ashamed of it. We are two ships each with a goal and a way; and our ways may draw together again and we may make holiday as before. And how peacefully the good ships used to lie in the same harbour, under the same sun; it seemed as if they had reached their goal, and it seemed as if there was a goal. But soon the mighty sway of our tasks laid on us as from of old sundered and drove us into different seas and different zones; and it may be that we shall never meet again and it may be that we shall meet and not know each other, so deeply have the different seas and suns changed us. The law that is over us decreed that we must become strangers one to the other; and for this we must reverence each other the more, and for this the memory of our past friendship becomes more sacred. Perhaps there is a vast invisible curve and orbit and our different goals and ways are parcel of it, infinitesimal segments. Let us uplift ourselves to this thought! But our life is too short and our sight too feeble for us to be friends except in the sense of this sublime possibility. So, let us believe in our stellar friendship though we must be enemies on earth.”
“A deep and mysterious truth,” he said, “I must go, I must go,” he said to himself. “My Irish life is ended. There is a starry orbit, and Ireland and I are parts of it, ‘and we must believe in our stellar friendship though we are enemies upon earth.’”
He wandered about admiring the large windless evening and the bright bay. Great men had risen up in Ireland and had failed before him, and it were easy to account for their failure by saying they were not close enough to the tradition of their race, that they had just missed it, but some of the fault must be the fault of Ireland.... The anecdote varies, but substantially it is always the same story: The interests of Ireland sacrificed to the interests of Rome.
There came a whirring sound, and high overhead he saw three great birds flying through the still air, and he knew them to be wild geese flying south....
War had broken out in South Africa, Irishmen were going out to fight once again; they were going to fight the stranger abroad when they could fight him at home no longer. The birds died down on the horizon, and there was the sea before him, bright and beautiful, with ships passing into the glimmering dusk, and among the hills a little mist was gathering. He remembered the great pagans who had wandered over these hills before scapulars and rosaries were invented. His thoughts came in flashes, and his happiness grew intense. He had wanted to go and the birds had shown him where he might go. His instinct was to go, he was stifling in Ireland. He might never find the country he desired, but he must get out of Ireland, “a mean ineffectual atmosphere,” he said, “of nuns and rosaries.”
A mist was rising, the lovely outlines of Howth reminded him of pagan Ireland. “They’re like music,” he said, and he thought of Usheen and his harp. “Will Usheen ever come again?” he said. “Better to die than to live here.” And the mist thickened — he could see Howth no longer. “The land is dolorous,” he said, and as if in answer to his words the most dolorous melody he had ever heard came out of the mist. “The wailing of an abandoned race,” he said. “This is the soul-sickness from which we are fleeing.” And he wandered about calling to the shepherd, and the shepherd answered, but the mist was so thick in the hollows that neither could find the other. After a little while the shepherd began to play his flageolet again; and Ned listened to it, singing it after him, and he walked home quickly, and the moment he entered the drawing-room he said to Ellen, “Don’t speak to me; I am going to write something down,” and this is what he wrote: —
THE WILD GOOSE.
[musical excerpt]
“A mist came on suddenly, and I heard a shepherd playing this folk-tune. Listen to it. Is it not like the people? Is it not like Ireland? Is it not like everything that has happened? It is melancholy enough in this room, but no words can describe its melancholy on a flageolet played by a shepherd in the mist. It is the song of the exile; it is the cry of one driven out in the night — into a night of wind and rain. It is night, and the exile on the edge of the waste. It is like the wind sighing over bog water. It is a prophetic echo and final despair of a people who knew they were done for from the beginning. A mere folk-tune, mere nature, raw and unintellectual; and these raw folk-tunes are all that we shall have done: and by these and these alone, shall we be remembered.”
“Ned,” she said at last, “I think you had better go away. I can see you’re wearing out your heart here.”
“Why do you think I should go? What put that idea into your head?”
“But you said that the wheel would turn, and that what was lowest would come to the top.”
“Yes, Ned; but sometimes the wheel is a long time in turning, and maybe it would be better for you to go away for a while.”
He told her that he had seen wild geese on the hill.
“And it was from you I heard about the wild geese. You told me the history of Ireland, sitting on a Druid stone?”
“You want to go, Ned? And the desire to go is as strong in you as in the wild geese.”
“Maybe; but I shall come back, Ellen.”
“Do you think you will, Ned? How can you if you go to fight for the Boers?”
“There’s nothing for me to do here. I want new life. It was you who said that I should go.”