In his 'Legends of St. Patrick,' a subject he had already touched upon in 'Inisfail,' he would seem to have found a theme far more congenial to his special gifts. Here, in so much of the cycle as he elects for treatment, it is perforce the divine passion of the soul which is called upon to play the part taken by human passions of the heart in—to name two representative works of narrative romance-Morris's Earthly Paradise series, or Tennyson's Arthurian cycle. And having once conceded the motif, it follows that the interest of the poem is limited. Religious romance is necessarily subject to restrictions in as much as it deals with one single and always the same-object of devotion. It is further narrowed by the fact that, normally, only one side of the relationship between the lover and the loved is presented to our view. Diversity the poet must seek in the diversities of the fashion, the individual fashion, of loving. He can depict according to his pleasure the loves of worship, the loves of obedience, of gratitude, or, if he desire to enter the domain of the psychological romanticist of religion, he can paint in their direct or reflex bearings, loves transcendental: the love of the spirit, or loves emotional: the love of the heart, in their connection with the divine idea. Or again, setting aside subjective and psychological distinctions, which in poetry scarcely admit of analytical developement, he can escape monotony by dwelling not on the spiritual passion as directed and in relation to its object, but on its effects as manifested in the varied relationships of the lover with his fellows, in the endeavours of the soul, whose love is single and divine, to win other souls, whose loves are multiple and of earth, as thralls to the same aspiration, as serfs to the same allegiance, to force them, unwilling or willing, to participate in his passion. For to the God-lover all monopolies dear to human love are forbidden. The love-gifts God bestows on him are his only by virtue of his readiness to share them with all who seek, or who, seeking not, may yet be found of God. And not less is that other deadlier jealousy prohibited, the pang of the heart which grudges even more that another lover should transcend his love towards the beloved than that the love of the beloved should include another in its grace.

In the Legends of St. Patrick'—which may be taken as representing de Vere's religious poetry at its best-the spiritual passion is treated from this point of view. Here, as in all his poetry, the picture of religious romance stands

far removed from the types familiar to most readers. It has little or nothing of the homely, winning, and graceful simplicities of those saintly legends typified by the 'Fioretti' of the saint of poverty, Francis of Assisi, where the realism characteristic of the Italian novelle of early centuries finds full play. It has, on the other hand, absolutely no trace of the emotionalism, scarcely distinguishable from spiritual sensuality, of another equally familiar type of religious romance, closely associated with sainthood by the spiritual love-legends of medieval ecstatics. The saints and penitents of Irish tradition belong to another plane of sentiment and temperament. It is a sainthood eminently dignified, it is also eminently sane, wholesome, and of the open air. St. Patrick's own figure, lifted shoulder high above the train of disciples who followed his footsteps, is that of an apostle of Thought, a man grave and wise, of profound counsel and calm judgement, a man of a great heart surely, but likewise of a great mind, luminous, strong and balanced. His visions are the visions of the seer, who, looking inwards, beholds in his own infinite spirit the mirror where the things of time and space lie reflected; they have nothing in common with those of the rapturous ecstatic who, casting the inborn imaginations of his fantasy upon the outward world, claims for his sensual eye the sight of things invisible, for his sensual ear the sound of the inaudible. Nor is there any accentuation of the fierce and savage asceticism which underlies the gentle and gay trivialities, the childish charm of many a saintly tradition of other lands; the body, long subdued, remained with St. Patrick to the end, a reconciled companion to an emancipated soul:

'When Patrick now was old and nigh to death,

Undimmed was still his eye; his tread was strong,
And there was ever laughter in his heart,

And music in his laughter.

And thus he passes, in the legend before us, brought now face to face with the young, now with the old, here converting the thronging clans of men awestruck with a great gladness, there wrestling all night long with those prayers which are deeds, for pity of some solitary broken heart of womanhood; or, turn the page, and the grave-eyed saint is at play with a child or in gay strife with a bard. And each episode has its own beauty, its wealth of Celtic tenderness, its delicacy of Celtic sentiment, its store of decorative ornament. The vast cathedral church shall be

built, and built alone, there where, under the white-thorn on the hill, the doe's frightened fawn had made its lair in the grass. And the doe, white as the hawthorn flowers, paces fearlessly at Patrick's side as he bears her fawn safe from the hunters, safe-sheltered in his arms. The legend of the boy singer-child-in-song to the great bardwho, fearing sorely lest Patrick should win his master to monkhood, offers his own gold head to the tonsure, and from a son of music becomes a brother of silence, is full of fair images. Even fairer images abound in the story of the Two Princesses' Snow-white and Rose-red (the Red Rose' and the Fair One,' to give them their Celtic appellations), who race at dawn to bathe in the green woodland fountain, and are by Patrick washed in that other fount, the fount baptismal; who then in that brief hour of dew and sunrise, the race unrun, the battle unfought, the vineyard unlaboured, pass from the joys of earth to enter straightway the bridehouse of their new-learnt God, while angels sing with woodbirds, glad Requiem overhead.

Here and there, too, those to whom de Vere's 'Recollections' are familiar will find the poet transferring the incidents of real life to the legends:

'Have I not seen old oes embrace? Seen him,

That white-haired man who dashed him to the ground,
Crying aloud, "My buried son, forgive!

Thy sire hath touched the hand that shed thy blood."'

The scene is taken verbatim from fact. Two old greyhaired men (it was a "Reconciliation") advanced slowly 'from the opposite ends of the church; stood silent, face 'to face, at last shook hands. The next moment one dashed himself down on the stone pavement and cried aloud, "O my son, my son, I have clasped the hand that shed 'the last drop of thy blood."'*

66

All these and stories kin to these are retold with something of the quiet silvered monotone of twilight spaces and wide horizons. And their background is hillside and seashore and meadow land, hills where the poet's own feet wandered, shores where his own eyes dwelt on the moonlit or sun-glinted waves, meadows and woods where he breathed the field-fragrances and welcomed the first herald-flowers

*Recollections.

of soft Irish springs, or watched, as in the most beautifu. of his odes, the wood spirits of the autumn, when

'Silent they stand beside dead Summer's bier,
With folded palms and faces to the west,

And their loose tresses sweep the dewy ground.'

And amongst the pastures or on the slopes, rise palaces and halls recalling those Morris loved so well describing in his placid secular romances, The Well at the World's End' or 'The Sundering Flood.' The halls have tables spread with gem-wrought cups, the walls are rich with carving and hung with gold-fringed marvels of the loom, warriors move there wrapped in gold-clasped mantles of crimson and blue, and women, violet-eyed, white clad, walk silver-shod, and green rushes strew the floor. And through every scene of peace or war, of feasting, of rejoicings, of sorrowing, always, always, that dark-robed train, Patrick and his apostles, passes; priests, bishops, brethren, of God's clan, croisés, whose goal is the Holy Sepulchre of each separate human soul, theirs to battle for, theirs to save from the defilement of sin, the desecration of misbelief. Slowly they pass on that long march throughout the land, a land already with hope or foreboding, with outstretched welcome or sullen fear, awaiting the destiny of the Unknown God, and their march keeps time with the unhurried foot-fall of fate. So the sequence, the cycle of the Christianisation of Ireland, works itself out with a dignity all its own, a sunlit seriousness only at wide intervals merging into laughterthe laughter of saints, almost never into those trivialities which make the sum total of human life a medley where tragedy and comedy alternate each with the other as the revolving flashlights of far-off lighthouses gleam now red, now green, from rocks or headlands of dusk seas.

It is a lack of the stronger vibrations of a more primitive and elementary humanity that leaves this poem, in spite of its beauty, its tenderness and its pathos, inadequate and incomplete as a great work of literary art. Those elements are absent which would have lent to it the tincture of the wormwood and the gall without whose sharpness art seldom imprints its stamp upon the imagination of men who suffer, who hate, who love and who die. Set these calm Celtic records beside the sagas of the North and at once we recognise what De Vere's poems miss, either deliberately and of choice, from a conscientious endeavour to represent truly his interpretation of history, or from a preconceived

VOL. CCI. NO. CCCCXI.

E

moral ideal of aesthetic principles. In the Saga of Olaf—a section of the Heimskringla,' we have the story of the conversion of another land and another race, but the picture, fragmentary as it is, of the contest between the old faith and the new is, to its least detail, fraught with a power and a passion which can stir the slow pulses of unzealous believers of later years with the ebb and flow of the tide of battle. The Irish received the Gospel gladly,' de Vere asserts. In the main the institutions and 'traditions were favourable to Christianity. . . . The great ' and learned, in other nations the last to believe, among 'them, commonly set the example. the Christian clergy turned to account the Irish traditions. . . . St. 'Patrick waged no needless war against the ancient laws.' To the people

'God's truth seemed some remembered thing,

To them God's Kingdom smiled, their native haunt.'

Contrast this with episodes taken from the Sagas of the Christianising kings of Norway, when Olaf Trygvison spread with torture, fire and sword the holy faith and good customs; when he invited every man to accept Christianity, and those who opposed him he punished severely, killing some, mutilating others,' when Rand the Heathen suffered martyrdom, gnawed to death with adder's teeth, the words of fierce denial on his tongue; when St. Lawrence's sufferings and St. Lawrence's constancy were emulated by Eyvind the Warlock, the impenitent Merlin of Paganism. The gods of Asgard strove with fate, the war-arrow flew from fiord to fiord, through the vast forests and across the ice-fields; temples were razed to the ground; idols outraged, but the faces of the defeated were ever turned to their foes; they died, but they died hard. Truce was there none nor any compromise between these wild pagans, who clung with desperate courage to their old worship, and the wild Vikings who drank Christ's health before they set forth to lay waste and to slay; to take by force the daughters of rival chiefs; to fill their ships with blood-wet gold. Odin or Christ, one or the other must be outcast and overthrown, one or the other outraged or enthroned. The whole Northern atmosphere was coloured by the setting sun of the old faith's agony. In Ireland, paganism may have held its own with this clan, that individual, king, druid or bard; but the brand which flared torch-red amongst the snows of