That Myriad Minded Man: A Biography of George Russell – A.E. by Henry Summerfield (review)

428 LETTERS IN CANADA 1976 there were no comparable English poems like the Irish originals. The translations of Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory's Kiltartanese, and the lilting of Synge's peasants have prepared us, in retrospect, to appreciate Ferguson's translations, but his work must have seemed strange and clumsy to his contemporaries. Perhaps this seeming confusion might be cleared up by a firmer distinction between the free, 'adaptive' translation and the literal one which assiduously imitates the form and the vocabulary of the original. The most valuable quality of this book is O'Driscoll's imaginative sympathy for his subject. Aside from offering us original inSights into the Ferguson translations, this book gives a valuable background to the literary revival which was to come. All too often we look back from Yeats and his school to the pioneers who prepared his way as if their only importance was as precursors. This book is from the opposite perspective . It is Ferguson who is important here (and justifiably so) and Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Synge who are the distant thunder. (JOHN P. FRAYNE) Henry Summerfield. Thai Myriad Minded Man: A Biography of George Russell A .E. Gerrards Cross, Bucks. 1975 (distributed by Macmillan of Canada). xiii; 354· $22·5° A full biography of AE, making use of his published work and extensive literary remains, many memoirs of him, and the very large body of commentary on the Ireland of his time was a desideratum of too long standing before the appearance of Professor Summerfield's book. Here at last is the awaited biography and, in the event, it was worth waiting to have the work done so well. Standish O'Grady returned home one day and said to his wife: 'Meg, I heard to-day on the Esplanade of Bray a young man glorifying the ancient gods ofIreland.' George Russell was the young man. By a curious coincidence (worthy of Ulysses) the author who had inspired him happened to be one of the listeners on the day that, overcoming his shyness, AE told the seaside crowd that 'the golden age was all about them, thatthe earth underfoot was sacred as Judaea.' The response of the audience is not recorded but it was certainly more favourable, or at least less antagonistic , than that accorded Michael Robartes - partly modelled from AE - at the end of Yeats's 'Rosa Alchemica.' There were times, though, when AE, perhaps correctly, supposed that he would be stoned if he really opened his mind to his idolatrous (as he saw them) countrymen, as for instance on the occasion of the great Eucharistic Congress which so disgusted him. That AE was not stoned but widely loved was a recognition of his spirituality, 'an air of spiritual power, an emanation of sweetness and tenderness,' as his son put it. HUMANITIES 429 As to the visions, with which he was so abundantly blessed as to make the general run of mystics seem blinkered, the generality regarded them more as expressions of the man than of the other-world. They were certainly a godsend to a man who spent several years working long hours in the dreary occupation of cashier at Pim's drapery. More than personal compensation for AE, the visions were essential to the artistiefabric of the Irish Revival. It was his visionary Deirdre played by the Fays and their little company that first indicated clearly an artistic direction for the new Irish theatre. AE first put Cuchulain on the stage. If Leopold Bloom was not quite the avatar envisioned by AE in 1896, still the idea of such an incarnation in modern Ireland was virtually an AE patent. As poet and painter for whom art was secondary (and usually a temptation to be resisted), AE was the marvellously fertile matrix of ideas which readily found adoptive fathers in the Yeats brothers and other stronger imaginations . AE himself seems to have had a weak, diffuse artistic imagination though I think Summerfield might regard it as profound. 'Young man,' said AE to Joyce, 'there is not enough chaos in your mind,' and Summerfield , quoting the remark, notes: 'AS'S original judgement proved in one sense sound. Joyce produced his work by...