Welsh Journals

believe himself to be a good man simply because he went to chapel and abstained from drinking beer while at the same time he could stoop to intrigue and sharp practice to enrich himself without the slightest twinge of conscience seemed to Will a madly inexplicable inversion of values. And he detected the same topsy-turveydom throughout. Moral molehills were everywhere magnified into moral IT must have been many years ago now that W. B. Yeats told that arch-cynic, George Moore, the story of the Irish child, who, as he walked along a country road near Armagh, suddenly began to think, and in a few minutes had thought out the whole problem of the injustice of the creed that told him that God would punish him for doing things which he had never promised not to do. That moment when the strange child, who was ultimately to grow up and become A.E. (George Russell), under- stood (as Moore lucidly puts it) that there is but one life the dog at his heels and the stars he would soon see (for the dusk was gathering) were not different things but one thing," will some day in the future be regarded as one of the great deciding moments in the story of the develop- ment of modem Ireland-a moment of the same order and kind as that in Welsh history when William Williams, Pantycelyn, one Sunday morning as he walked home from the old county academy at Gelli, chanced to arrive at Talgarth at the very hour when Howell Harris was preach- ing in front of the Church, and the immortal hymnologist first heard the voice of heaven. Both moments gave birth to prophets, and opened up a new national opportunity. What his conversion meant to A.E., and what it may mean to Ireland, these two volumes indicate. George Moore has told the story of the com- mencement of A.E.'s apostolic pilgrimage. There is but one life," said A.E. to himself, differing endlessly, differing in degree, but not in kind," and at once he had begun to preach the new gospel. I had heard how, when earning £ 40 a year in an accountant's office, he used to look at his boots, wondering whether they would carry him to the sacred places where the Druids ascended and descended in many coloured spirals of flame; and fearing they could not hold together for forty miles, he had gone to Bray Head and had addressed the holiday folk." (Standish O'Grady actually witnessed the scene). I could hear the tumult, the ecstasy of it all. I could see him standing on a bit of wall, his long, thin, picturesque figure with grey clothes drooping about it, his arms ex- tended in feverish gesture, throwing back his thick hair from his face, telling the crowd of the Druids of long ago, and their mysteries, and how much more potent these were than the dead beliefs they still clung to I could hear him (1) The Candle of Vision," by A.E. Macmillan & Co. 6s. (2) The National Being, some Thoughts on an Irish Polity," by A.E. Maunsel & Co. Is. 6d. mountains the real mountains were minimised into mole- hills. And if it had not been for his love for Mari Lewis and Abel Huws, Will would have been forced to conclude that religion was sheer humbug from beginning to end. This revolt of Will Bryan and Bob Lewis is significant for Daniel Owen himself. For through this door Daniel Owen entered the new age. LIFE AND LETTERS A MODERN PROPHET telling that the genius of the Gael, awakening in Ireland after a night of troubled dreams, returns instinctively to the belief of its former days and finds again the old inspiration. That, apparently, is intended to be a somewhat humorous picture of A.E.'s first missionary journey, but since that day his boots have carried him all over Ireland to preach in all the aspects of national life the spiritual gospel which amazed the holiday makers of Bray Head-in art, in literature, in economics, in politics, in every task of hand or mind in the life of his countrymen. And judging by the freshness and vigour of his marvellous gospel, those boots have many times since stood the journey to the sacred places for which he longed, where the understanding pilgrim drinks in the waters of wisdom and courage. But A.E.'s mission must not be confined to Ireland. It will, surely, not be deemed ungenerous of a Welshman to say that since the day when St. Patrick left the Vale of Roses in Pembrokeshire and sailed for the island which he dimly saw from the Dyved Coast, Ireland has owed a heavy debt to Wales, and at last an opportunity has come for the honourable discharge of the debt. Wales once gave to Ireland the saint who silenced the noisy quarrellings of the myriad old gods by preaching Him who was their com- plete fulfilment. To-day Ireland can give Wales the message of a man, who-more than anyone else of his time and generation-possesses the vision and the power to break the tyranny of those who bear the name of the Lord of St. Patrick-" so degraded by misuse in the world, that we could almost hate it with the loathing we have for evil, if we did not know that Hell can as disguise put on the outward garments of Heaven." The moving passion of the life of this most spiritual of men is his hunger and thirst for the recovery of a real and intense spiritual experience-that power which will make it possible for the man of heavy soul, if he willed, to play the lyre of Apollo," and for the drunkard, to be god intoxicated the power which will make earth and life upon it "an utterance of the Gods." There is some- thing of the simplicity of the revivalist about him when he relates the effect of the play of this wondrous force on his own life. The tinted air glowed before me with in- telligible significance like a face, a voice. The visible world became like a tapestry blown and stirred by winds behind t. If it would but raise for an instant I knew I would be in Paradise. Every form on that tapestry