THE TRIBUTE TO JE
[To the Editor of the SrEcraron.]
Sra,—The British Press has recently been commenting on the gift of money which has been offered to Mr. George Russell (1E) by a number of his friends. For a year or so he has slowly been extricating his roots from Irish soil. It must have been a painful and a dangerous process : painful for him because his roots had grown so deep and so minutely ramified ; dangerous for Ireland because of the likelihood of the uprooting carrying all the soil with it, and leaving a mere hollow for the waters of chaos to enter. Everyone has watched this process with regret, for 1E is one of the few people on earth, and certainly the only one in Ireland, against whom no man spoke a bad word. He is a Socrates without the sententiousness, and has therefore escaped the hemlock. For some forty years men and women of all kinds have been able to come to him for advice in their affairs and counsel on their spiritual and mental troubles. He sent nobody away without some form of renewed self-confidence which enabled that gratified being to attack and defeat the difficult problem. Politicians and poets, teetotallers and bacchanalians, artists and dairy farmers, nationalists and cosmological mystics, heartbroken women and pride-broken men, are only a few of the strange complementaries which have floated within the range of his tobacco smoke and waited for the ray of enlightenment to break through it.
In no case was the pilgrim received as a pupil or suppliant. The counsel was given and taken between equals who were passionately filled with interest for the object. He possessed a lovely detachment ; lovely because psychic ; a judgment that sits at the centre of life surveying the stage of existence. How that judgment finds its unity and strength may be discovered by the person who rereads his poems and his "Candle of Vision." The curious thing is that this judgment, or personality, in spite of its incisive power for immediate" action and understanding, remains obscure when we try to locate it. In locating, we ask to see logical machinery, an intellectual technique. Though these weapons are there, JE does not show them. The poems present an opalescent cloud, and The Candle of Vision" parts that cloud to reveal a momentary gleam of armour. It may be the ancestral giants of the Irish race, or it may be Prometheus who has assumed that Celtic mail to enable him to snatch the fiery alphabet from the gods and to set it in the intuitions of man's mind like oil within a sacred lamp.
At any rate, what we discover is a spectacle, a panorama, rather than a concrete personality. That is the paradox of this man, and it is that which makes him a Proteus. Compare him with Mr. W. B. Yeats, a great poet who, by fools, is said to be so vague and elusive. There is a diamond-hard indi- viduality, with a tempered mind that shears through matter- of-fact problems so cleanly that their halves unite again, for some duller weapon to attack. There are many ways of getting to the heart of life. These two poets, one a legislator and the other an administrator, represent most diametrically two distinct ways. At felt that his career as an administrator was complete, and proposed to return to poetry : but suddenly he has been summoned to America to lecture there on rural matters, and thus the work of which he was so keen an amateur is again deferred.—I am, Sir, &c., RICHARD CHURCH.
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