Читать книгу Some Impressions of My Elders - St. John G. Ervine - Страница 6

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Very often have writers told the story of how Sir Horace Plunkett, a tongue-tied, hesitant man with very delicate health, returned to Ireland after a long stay in America, to begin the Co-operative Movement, and found, in a Dublin shop, keeping accounts for a tea-merchant, a poet and a painter, a mystic who was also an economist with the capacity, as it afterwards proved, to become the ablest journalist in Ireland. This man of multiple energies was George William Russell, who was born in Lurgan, in the County of Armagh, on April 10, 1867. He is two years younger than Mr. Yeats, eleven years younger than Mr. Shaw, and fifteen years younger than Mr. George Moore. The order of these births is significant. Observe how an aloof artist has been succeeded by a furious economist! Mr. Moore, who began life as a realist after the manner, but not after the style, of Zola, and then turned his back on Zola and sought the company of Turgeniev so that he might pursue apt and beautiful words and delicate and elusive thoughts, was followed by Mr. Shaw, who began life by filling his mind with the ideas of Henry George and Karl Marx, and then turned his back on both of them in order that he might consort with Mr. Sidney Webb. Mr. Yeats, with his vague poetry and vague mysticism—none the less vague because of the curious care for exactness which causes him to count the nine and fifty swans at Coole and the nine bean rows on Innisfree—followed Mr. Shaw, and in his turn was followed by "A. E." so closely connected with economics that a wag, when asked what was the meaning of "A. E's." pen-name, replied "agricultural economist."[1]

One cannot, however, leave the matter as simply as that. Mr. Shaw likes to think of himself as an economist, but he is more than an economist; he is John the Baptist pretending to be Karl Marx. "A. E." likes to think of himself as an expert on the price of butter and milk and cows and sheep, but he is more than an expert on these things: he is Blake pretending to be Sir Horace Plunkett. Or Walt Whitman pretending to be President Wilson. It has always seemed to me that Sir Horace Plunkett and "A. E.," colleagues in a great enterprise, are the embodiment of the peculiarly interwoven strands of Irish character, of that queer mingling of the material and the spiritual in the Irish people which at once allures and astounds the Englishman, accustomed to keeping his materialism and his spirituality in separate compartments. Sir Horace has a neat and unexpected wit, but he does not appear to me to have much feeling for poetry or for any other literature or art. He has respect for these things and will talk on them sometimes with singular incisiveness, but his interest in them is an outside interest. If he had to choose between a co-operative creamery and the Heroic Legends of Ireland, I do not doubt for a moment that he would choose the co-operative creamery. "A. E.," on the contrary, would choose the Heroic Legends and would give the good reason for so doing that without the Heroic Legends, the co-operative creamery is useless. When "A. E." pleads for the co-operative societies, he does so because he believes that these are part of the means whereby the Irish people will be restored to their ancient stature.

Organize your industry, he said to the farmers, so that you may become what your fathers were, fit company for the Shining Ones, for Lugh and Balor and Manannan, the great and brave and beautiful Pagan gods. Each by himself, Sir Horace or "A. E.," might have failed to make much out of the co-operative movement in Ireland, but both together, each possessed of a different, yet complementary, crusading spirit, could not fail to make a happy issue of it. When Garibaldi appealed for recruits for his Thousand, he offered them wounds and death. When Sir Horace Plunkett appealed for helpers in the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, he offered them hard and discouraging labour and poor wages. Mankind, which responds to a noble appeal as readily as it responds to a base appeal, offered its best to both of them. Garibaldi got his Thousand, and Sir Horace Plunkett got his colleagues.

They were diverse in character, and included Nationalists and Unionists, Catholics and Protestants, peers and peasants. For the first time in Irish history, Irishmen of all classes were united on a matter which had no relationship with passions! There were no angry emotions astir when the I. A. O. S. brought the diverse elements of the Irish entity into accord as there had been when the union of the North and the South was made many years earlier; and consequently the movement could not be split, as that Union was, by the collision of one angry emotion with another. In face of every conceivable discouragement and even of active enmity and in spite of the grave unhealth of Sir Horace himself, the movement grew in strength until now it is indestructible.[2] Chief among the colleagues whom Sir Horace gathered about him was "A. E." Mr. Russell could, without doubt, earn a large income as a journalist if he were to offer his pen to a rich newspaper proprietor—his weekly review, the Irish Homestead, is the most ably-edited and skillfully-written organ in Ireland—and he could probably earn as much as, if not more than, he receives from his Co-operative work if he were to devote himself exclusively to his mystical and poetical writings; but just as Mazzini felt himself compelled to sacrifice his heart's desire, the life of a man of letters, in order to devote himself to a political career which was distasteful to him, so "A. E." felt compelled to hitch his star to Sir Horace Plunkett's wagon, and for many years now he has preached, week after week, the gospel of co-operation to Irish farmers when he would, perhaps, have preferred exclusively to tell stories of the ancient gods and heroes.