The middle years

Front matter

MIDDLE YEARS

KATHARINE TYNAN

A book of unusual vivacity and charm, presenting an intimate picture of English social, literary, and political life and of such diverse personalities as King Edward VII, Mr. Balfour, Hilaire Belloc, Thomas ne Hardy, Madame Blavatsky, George |} Meredith, William Dean Howells, ae Fiona MacLeod, and nearly a hundred other well-known characters.

Contents

189I—92 : FRANCIS THOMPSON : 2 JOHN O'LEARY AND OTHERS

LADY ABERDEEN AND DONEGAL LAST DAYS IN IRELAND .

1894 : : ;

Chapter I I89i—9q2

THERE were funeral airs over those days after the _ death of Mr. Parnell. I have never been able to look at white chrysanthemums since without seeing a grave. It was autumn, and winter weather in the world and in our hearts.

‘Sheep without a shepherd when the snow shuts out the sky ”*—that was what we were; and all we could do was to render pious offices to the dead.

There was a ladies’ committee to keep the grave. How well I remember going up to Glasnevin of a late autumn afternoon with a burden of flowers. By the grave itself one was not afraid, but once, as I left the cemetery with one companion, and that a woman, in the gathering dusk I was scared by a small tap-tapping down the long avenues of the dead. It was like the withered leaves which follow you down a dark road on an autumn afternoon, pitter-patter, like the tiny feet of little ghosts. There was really something following—a folded MS. which had fallen from a pocket of my cloak and held on by my skirt.

We were not in favour with the heads of the Catholic Church in those days. For some of us it was a poignant difference: none of us liked it. But it gave, perhaps, the final touch of exaltation to our devotion. All were not so brave as we were. There came to us offerings

M.Y. B from grandes dames among the Dublin Catholics. We did not blame their desire to be anonymous. We were not exacting in those days. Our sore hearts were warm to those who were with us, even if they preferred anonymity. Wives of Government officials, ladies whose families were identified with all that was against the National Movement, sent us flowers and money for the upkeep of the grave. The romantic figure of the Irish Chief had an extraordinary fascination for women —for good women.

It is characteristic of my state of mind then that for many days after that fatal 6th of October my little diary of work and play remained unfilled. Presently the entries began again. I must have been well started in literature. I was approved by those whose approval was best worth having. I was writing for the Anti-Jacobin under Frederick Greenwood ; for the National Observer under Henley. J was contributing sketches of Irish country life to the Speaker. I was really doing remarkably well considering that I had not yet published a volume of prose, excepting my “ Life of a Nun,” which had been torn to rags and tatters by the Anti-Parnellite organ, the National Press, to the great distress of the poor nuns for whom this biography of one of their number had been written.

How kind the great men were in those days to the young aspirant! Here is a letter from Frederick Greenwood, dated December 2, whether 1891 or 1892 I am not sure.

*“* Yes, my dear Miss Tynan, this I do call a ‘more than pretty ” piece of verse. It is in the printer’s hands. You shall have a proof. For, it may be well to put in a note about the superstition on which it is founded. And I fancy I spied one of your lines running off upon two more feet than properly belong to it.

“Yours faithfully, “‘ F. GREENWOOD.”

I find on looking up my own diary that it was 1891, and my first acceptance from the Anti-Facobin, to which I contributed regularly during its too short life.

Another piety of those days was to the newspaper which Mr. Parnell had been about to launch when he died. The first meeting of its promoters had taken place while he was with us. Immediately after his funeral there was a large meeting at the Rotunda. The great funeral of the day before had stiffened the backs of the weak and satisfied those who were for expediency. Dublin certainly was with us. ‘“ What Dublin thinks to-day Ireland will think to-morrow,” we used to say in the beginning of the struggle; and the editor of the Freemans ‘Fournal had said triumphantly: ‘‘ We have the League ; we have the newspaper ; we have the Chief.” Well, those days of hope and cheer were past. We had lost the Chief. We had lost—not the League ; Timothy Harrington had kept that for us, more than any other man—but we had lost the Party. We had nine “ Stalwarts,” as we liked tocallthem. The Freeman’s Fournal had ratted. The country had followed the priests. But the Dublin meeting that day—the 12th of October —was a large and enthusiastic one, and the paper started under favourable auspices.

The paper was our bantling. Someone had bought a Hoe printing machine at a great reduction. It looked all that a printing machine ought to be. An expert from the Hoe Company came to place it in position. The first issue of the paper promised to be a great success. There were big contracts for advertisements. We longed for the advent of that paper which should be a vindication of our Chief and his policy.

All was ready, when a dreadful thing happened. The Hoe was holding a reception. All the leading _Parnellites in Dublin were there to-welcome the first

B!a nie THE MIDDLE YEARS issue of the paper. Did they begin with the evening paper, the Herald? I have an idea that they did. It seems unlikely that I should have been present at the printing of the morning paper. The Hoe at first behaved beautifully. It was a miracle to see it flinging out the printed sheets so easily and smoothly. When, suddenly, it began to devour its children, seizing with a savage wrath on the fine printed pages and tearing them to rags.

There was weeping and gnashing of teeth—the Hoe’s teeth that tore our paper to pieces. The enemy got wind of it. Editions of his evening paper began to come out with the solemn item of news in the “ Stop press”? column: ‘‘ The Mule has kicked.” ‘“‘ The Mule is still kicking.” ‘* Despite all the Efforts of the Muleteers, the Mule refuses to leave off kicking.”

I remember the Hoe expert in those days and his unmoved air under the cloud of suspicion, the angry and contemptuous glances, which followed him wherever he went. The one who had bought the machine a bargain was scarcely less under a cloud. The Hoe was certainly a fiend. The printing would go on so perfectly—so cleanly efficient—up to the last point, when the awful tearing would begin. I remember covering my face with my hands when it started its work of destruction, after a long anguish of suspense. And still the bulletins came from Abbey Street that the Mule was restive, the Mule was kicking; the Mule was high-kicking; the Muleteers were at their wits’ ends. We laughed when it came to the Muleteers.

The Hoe expert was not at all down in the dust, as we expected him to be. He insisted all the time that the new concrete bed on which the machine was set had sagged, putting the machine out of gear, while we looked at him with eyes of bitter distrust. But he proved to be quite right. The defect was remedied. The Mule gave up kicking, but it was quite a long time before the Muleteers ceased to amuse the enemy in Middle Abbey Street.

I did the reviewing for the Irish Datly Independent, the new paper. I used to send in about three columns per week, with an occasional sub-leader. What industry! Whenever the reviews were crushed out—which was often—the “‘ copy ”’ was lost, but I sent in my next week’s supply undauntedly. My industry seems to have been prodigious, judging by the entries of work done in my little diary. I was gadding hither and thither. Oh, they were crowded hours, even though the funeral airs blew in them. They were days of good loyalties. How we stuck together! How good it was to meet each other! What a cold, aloof eye we turned on the Anti-Parnellite! We held ourselves the very salt of Ireland. Even yet an old Parnellite will say to another: “ When I meet a Parnellite I know I can trust him.”

Now and again we had a contested election. I was in bed with influenza—the specially bad influenza of those days—on Christmas Eve, 1891. I find this entry in the little old faded diary: “In bed till evening. News came that Redmond was in for Waterford. Got up, feeling much better.” We were all good Redmondites in those days, and used to go about singing “* The Boys of Wexford ” in honour of the two Redmond brothers.

The one who was almost my dearest friend at that time, whose house was a second home to me, had an Anti-Parnellite husband. He was an old-fashioned, Whiggish Catholic, and, coming of convert stock, he was more a priest’s man than the born Catholic. He was a very kind, dear host to me during many happy years, and after one tremendous set-to we had agreed not to discuss politics. He always took the Freeman, which at that time I scorned to touch. But the coachman, an old family servant and an Englishman, was a strong

Parnellite and took the Independent. When I was staying at that kind house he always obligingly sent me in his Independent to read. It gave me great joy when there was a contested election in South Co. Dublin to see Wilson driving his master to vote. The master recorded his vote for the Anti-Parnellite, the man for the Parnellite, so that they might just as well have stayed at home.

One day in that summer of 1892 I came into my own little room and found to my indignation a prominent Anti-Parnellite of the county sprawling on one of my chairs. He had come in with my father, having some business or other with him. My father always turned instinctively to my bright and pretty room: there was some sense of my presence there. I used to come in — from an absence to find him asleep in a chair, after a strenuous day, beginning perhaps by rising at 4 o’clock in the morning for market or fair. It is one of my poignant memories of him that when he was growing old it became more and more difficult to waken him, yet he would go off in the dark of the morning, without breakfast, scorning to ask anyone else to wake when he did.

His dear presence was there and dearly welcome as always; but not so the obnoxious Anti-Parnellite, at whom I, standing, glared.

My father, looking about for a match to light his pipe, tried to effect an introduction but failed to remember the visitor’s name.

*¢ This is Mr. I'll forget my own name next! What the devil is it? My memory’s leaving me completely. He lives up on the hill. You know his name —don’t you?”

I did; but I scorned to speak it. Mr. Boylan— that was not his name, by the way—grinned with embarrassment and afforded no assistance.

Meanwhile my dear father went on with various items about Mr. Boylan, designed to assist me to a remembrance of his name, which I knew very well. At last he finished up.

“The d——d fellow went against Parnell. Now you know who he is. Why—Boylan, to be sure! My daughter, Mr. Boylan.”

There was the Tercentenary of Trinity College that: summer, when for several days Dublin bloomed amazingly with brilliant academic hoods and gowns. All learning was in the streets for a few days. There were unusual gaieties at Trinity College or in connection with its celebrations—balls, banquets, garden-parties, entertainments of many kinds. Great men from all over the world were present; and not only laurelled age, but rose-crowned youth, for all the universities had sent deputations of their students, which latter fact very much added to the joys for the Dublin young ladies. Oddly enough the two men who stand out in my memory after the lapse of years are Arminius Vambery and Lord Dufferin. The latter I thought a person of the most extraordinary fascination. But I did not touch with the great people. My share of the visitors was a Heidelberg student with two or three sword slashes across his face, who promised in later life to be like the Great Tun of Heidelberg—or is it Heidelberg the Tun belongs to ?—and a slim fair Swiss from Lausanne. There were very rowdy doings in T.C.D. during that Tercentenary week, but of those I have only, of course, hearsay evidence.

At that time I used to find material for my sketches in the life about me. This I found to be a dangerous practice. My sketches were all idyllic, and, of course, there was a very slight substratum of truth in their happenings. As for the people, they were so idealised from the original suggestion that if any thought he or she had been portrayed, he or she should have been immensely flattered. But, while that might apply to English people it did not to Irish, who are very resentful of exploitation. A sketch of mine called ‘‘ A House of Roses,” the background of which was a picturesque cottage in the dear green country lane that led from the steam tram to my home, gave great offence, because the old couple were childless, and I had invented a son, Pat, who died in Australia. That invention they resented deeply, and the locale of the cottage made their resentment an inconvenient thing, since I have a rooted objection to coming up against anything unpleasant. I used to say at that time that I should have to get home by balloon—aeroplanes were as yet undreamt of—since there was a resentful person who had figured in one or other of my sketches waiting for me on every road of approach.

There was a village genius who used to come to see me in those days. He was not a genius, by the way, but only a village shoemaker, tremendously interested in literature. The need to talk would send him rushing over the couple of miles from the village to Whitehall, still wearing his leather apron. I was really and truly good to him. I always welcomed his visits however untimely. I lent him books. I gave him papers. I listened to his strange poems and his views about all manner of things. I had then something of my father’s open heart to his world—that true warm hospitality of the mind and heart which could not conceive closing the door upon an appeal for friendship. I fear I have lost something of that golden quality in the hardening process of the years. I believe he and I, in those days, never found anyone a bore. Perhaps we were too keenly interested in people: perhaps we supplied what they lacked.

My poor friend died. One of these village sketches in the Speaker—I wrote nothing but idylls in those days —reached his brother and earned for me his undying hatred. That was nothing to smile over. He even hated my dear big, lovable father, who had nothing to do with my transgressions. I[hadmyrevenge. The“ fierce old father ”’—that was the phrase which offended, I believe—of the Village Genius came to see me. With unexpected forbearance they had kept him ignorant of my offence. I treated him like a king; and I and the Village Genius are friends to this day: I keep his name in my prayers.

I remember now how I used to criticise his poems and attempt to clarify his too-florid style. I tried to get him to read the Bible—the Old Testament—but he refused, saying that he never knew anyone who talked about the Bible who was not a hypocrite. In those days— perhaps to-day—the Irish Protestants looked upon the Bible as a Protestant book and the Irish Catholic peasants had no doubt of its being an exclusively sectarian production. It had been used against them so often in the hands of their enemies.

To write about Irish people craves wary walking. Last year a young lady in the North of Ireland, who lived on the lands given by Queen Elizabeth to Cecil— the house was later—implored me to put her into a book. She was almost tearful about it. “ You can say anything you like,” she said; “ make me hateful or ugly or anything, only put mein.” This showed an excessive desire to see one’s self in print. But then she was North of Ireland.

How I have strayed from 1892! The year was not tame for me, despite the débdcle, as it might have been under altered circumstances. My diary records Sunday visits from Douglas Hyde, John O’Leary, the Sigersons,

George Russell—at intervals Willie Yeats, but he was most of the year away in England. Frances Wynne, too, appears in these entries, but only as a letter-writer. She had married at the end of December, 1891, and gone to live among the drearinesses of Whitechapel, where her husband was a curate. Other names of interest appear as my correspondents: among them W. D. Howells —he was editor of the Cosmopolitan for a too-brief period. I thought my fortune was made when through his old friend and mine, Mr. Piatt, he began to ask for my articles. America has dashed more cups of hope from my lips than I care to recall.

There occurs “ Joseph Devlin” several times among the entries of letters written and received. What had I to do with that Man o’ the North? I cannot the least bit in the world remember. Was he a youth then editing a college magazine? I think our correspondence must have had a literary foundation. Or was it another Joseph Devlin ?

We loved John O’Leary all the more because he, the old Fenian chief, had stood by Mr. Parnell. I have some letters of his of that year written in his characteristic telegraphic manner, with all unnecessary words cut out. He used to sit buried in books to the knees. If you paid him a visit, you had to spill the books off a chair before sitting down. Those latter years of his great, simple, peaceful life he took his pleasures in Dublin, as he had taken them in Paris on the Quai d’Orsay (am I right, or is it a confusion with the old bookshops of the Dublin quays ?), hunting among the second-hand bookshops. I don’t think he ever found a —material—treasure. It would have been quite unlike him ; but he found many things to give joy to himself and his friends. Dusty treasure trove—of the spiritual kind—came in bundles between the pages of magazines, in the folds of newspapers. Fanatically high-minded in the conduct of life, he had his little divergences. He invariably cheated the Post Office—a Government office, of course. I record in my diary many an idle morning spent over John O’Leary’s clippings; or I had the heart to call them idle.

Nothing of his was ever dusted. Fortunately the freedom from an exact housewifeliness of the Irishwoman prevented anyone undertaking that Sisyphus task.

He used to come on Sundays, walking from Dublin infine weather. He carried a bottle of tea which he drank onthejourney. After that he only wanted his ‘‘ smoak,” as he pronounced it in broad Tipperaryese. Those who accompanied him required fortification on arrival, but he could wait for dinner, which, following the example of the Irish priests—and the eighteenth century—was supposed to take place about 4 o’clock. It was really *“ when it was ready,” quite a movable feast ; but since refreshments were always to be had no one need go hungry or thirsty.

Politics almost ousted literature at these Sunday symposia in that year; and the politics were always harmonious, since none came, except once a temetarious lady, who was not Parnellite. Poor lady! She has since appeared on many suffragette platforms of the turbulent days. Perhaps that visit was her preparation.

We were all—led by Willie Yeats—very loyal to John O’Leary, setting him, where he liked to be, on a little pedestal as literary critic and adviser.

The old Fenian chief was very sweet to women. He was apt to be a little intolerant with men. He used to say: ‘‘ Good God, man, what the devil do you know about it?” And “ You display a faultless ignorance of everything under the sun.’’ But a woman could always depend on his kindness. Willie Yeats used to complain in those days that my mind had no speculation in it. I daresay I was irritatingly cocksure to one who went on from speculation to speculation. John O’Leary used to throw back his old lion head and laugh and say “ Let her alone ; she’s all right.”

Someone said to me the other day: “Think of John O’Leary spending five years in penal servitude! Good God! What an indictment of our rulers!”

Chapter II

In those days I corresponded, of course, faithfully with my dear Meynells, whose loving friendship is one of the best gifts of my life.

I wish I could lay my hand on the Parnell poems written by Sir William Butler in United Ireland, some time in the early part of 1892. Some of them, I believe, were reprinted by Wilfred Meynell in the Weekly Register, which he then edited. They were very good fighting poems, and, though they were only signed with a “ B,” the knowledge of their authorship was as balm to hearts suffering from the loss of the incomparable Leader.

Since I had begun to review for the Independent I was in constant touch with books and writers, adding to my already considerable list of friends and acquaintances of like tastes with myself. Francis Thompson was by this time contributing constantly to Merry England, a magazine edited by Wilfred Meynell, in which “‘ Dream Tryst” had first arisen upon our amazed eyes with its assurance of a new star of the first magnitude. That had been in the early months of the *nineties. I had kept my Independent readers pretty well acquainted with Francis Thompson’s doings. He was as gentle and simple as any young great poet ever was. He was greatly pleased with the things I said about his poems, and I hope my readers were at least equally pleased by their introduction to an immortal. Certainly those were palmy days for the readers of that journal who had a feeling for poetry.

Under date July 20, 1892, I find in my diary—I had apparently returned from one of my usual visits to Dublin—“ Letters. F. Thompson...” Here follows a list of ordinary names of ordinary correspondents. So simple may memorable happenings seem at the time !

Here is the letter :—

“1, FERNHEAD Roap, Pappincton, W.

“Dear Miss Tynan,—It has long weighed on my conscience _ that I never answered your charming and only too generous letter in which you thanked me for ‘ The Sere of the Leaf.’ The fact is that I am more ignorant than a school-boy of social conventions and so I do not know whether it would be en régle for me to write to you without a personal acquaintance. When at length I consulted Mr. Meynell, he told me to wait until you came to London and thank you in person. At that time, you see, he was expecting a speedy visit from you. The result was —unintentionally, I have no doubt—to confirm me in the idea that I should transgress conventions by writing. But you have been so kind and appreciative in reviewing the Manning verses and ‘The Making of Viola’ in the Independent, that I can no longer resist writing to you. The latter review has especially delighted me. I despise the conventional modesty of these days, and see no reason why a poet should pretend to see no merit in his own verse, when in his heart he believes it tobe good. WhenI finda poet doing so, I always exclaim internally :—‘ What the deuce ' did you publish it for then? Your only possible justification for cumbering paper with it is that you honestly believed it poetry.’ Therefore I frankly say that I think your criticism of ‘ The Making of Viola’ exactly what wanted saying about it, and condensed into a few beautiful words, as only a poet could have doneit. Not the least among the alleviations of a not very appreciated lot I count that I should have had some of my poems praised in a few significant words by two poets—yourself and Mrs.

Meynell. You have a special right to praise ‘The Making of Viola,’ for you are partly its parent—not on the poetical, but.on the metrical side. It is, as no one is better qualified to discern than yourself, founded on the bold application of a metrical principle which has lain dormant since the decay of the early alliterative metre—what Mrs. Meynell calls felicitously the tempo rubato principle. ‘There are but traces of it in Elizabethan poets; and from then to now it has simply dropped out of the knowledge of Englishmen. In late days there has been some revival of it, but it has been an unintelligent revival. Swinburne alone has used it beautifully, though slightly, in a lyric or two; but you beautifully and often. George Meredith has employed it with the most utter and unmusical misconception of its object. Its purpose in the Saxon and early English poets was to vary a set metre. Meredith uses it to constitute the metre, and therefore stereotypes it in most obvious and mechanical fashion.. The true law is that you take a metre (the more received and definite the better) and then vary it by the omission of syllables, leaving the lines so treated to be read into given length by pause, and by dwelling on the syllables preceding or following the Azatus. The omission of syllables is the exception not the system of the metre; and the art of the poet is shown in skilfully varying the position and manner of the omissions. In this way the most delightful effects of loving, lingering and delicate modulation on the one hand, or airy, dance-like measure and emphasis on the other, may be compassed. But Meredith regularly omits the same syllable, in the same position, in every single line; producing a pendulumlike monotony of insistent beat, instead of the variety which our ancestors employed the device to effect. [or instance :—

‘ Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping, Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.’

And that triple accent is iterated with clockwork precision in every line, till it becomes a horror, contrary to the most delicate principle of rhythmic music. Now the true use of the principle was first revealed to me by my beloved ‘ Poppies.’ That, and a poem in your ‘ Shamrocks,’ sent me to the early English writers, where I studied the principle at its source, till I had thoroughly grasped its various uses. In ‘ Viola’ I designed to bring out its capacity for dance-like effects. Its capacity for dainty lingering effects I attempted to work out a year agoin a poem unpublished. But I find that you have achieved precisely the same effects as this later poem in St. Francis’s hymn in your first published volume. Enough of myself. Only that if there be anything happy in the metre of ‘ Viola,’ you were my mistress init. You must allow me to say how charming I thought your poem ‘Sweets.’ That delightful art of repetition, so difficult to achieve, is handled in it with fascinating effect. I hear that you are engaged to be married. Let me wish you all the delight that you have given me by your poems. I can well remember my coming into possession of a copy of ‘ Poppies.’ I found an old Merry England containing it on a second-hand bookstall, and the twopence I gave for it was a truer gauge of admiration than many a sovereign. For at that time I was struggling for mere existence, and a penny spent on aught but necessaries of life was a plank removed between me and starvation. Once more thanking you for all your kindness, which includes a most appreciative notice of my verses on the Cardinal, I will conclude this letter, which I hope you will neither resent as an intrusion, nor for its lateness, nor yet for the space I have wasted in lecturing you on a point of metre where you are far better qualified to instruct me. ‘Yours always sincerely,

“‘Francis THOMPSON.

“Excuse my writing to you on Merry England paper, which happened to be the only note-paper at hand when I took up my pen. Forgetting that I had just changed my lodgings, I unthinkingly began by putting my former address at the head of my paper.

He had done me the immense honour to make a poem for me and my poems, “ The Sere of the Leaf,’ which appears at page 192 of the first volume of his “ Collected Works ” (Burns and Oates, 1913).