Insurrections, he called his first book. It came out seven years ago, and in it James Stephens of Dublin seemed to declare a young man’s war upon all the beliefs that belong to cloisters. If Stephens is a believer at all, he is not orthodox; his creed has more to do with the beauty of living things, and especially of all young things, than with anything apostolic. So far as mere words go, he is a believer, in the words that are sincere and pungent, forming speech after Synge’s recipe - “as fully flavoured as a nut or apple” - and holding the thousand miracles of nature above those of the New Testament, which he cheerfully resigns to Mr. George Moore. People who care for labels would call Stephens, in prose as in poetry, a Pantheist.

Do you remember W. B. Yeat’ sarcastic words about “AE’s Canaries”? - AE being the big man with a golden beard who is Secretary of Sir Horace Plunkett’s Agricultural Organization Society, Editor of the Irish Homestead, mystic poet, eloquent apologist for Jim Larkin in the Great Dublin Stories, mystic painter of Irish landscapes and seascapes, oriental philosopher - and friend. George W. Russell is the name AE’s parents gave to him - and by “Canaries” Mr. Yeats designates this big-hearted Mr. Russell’s younger choir, to whose carolings he listens so hopefully and kindly. And AE himself told me, while we puffed our peaceful pipes at Plunkett House in Merrion Square, before the Irish rebellion broke and failed, how Stephens used to be a typist in some dingy Dublin law-office, earning a guinea a week - till he contributed something to Arthur Griffith’s newspaper, Sinn Fein, and AE read it, and discovered therein “some splash of genius,” and hunted the writer up, and became his best friend with all the generosity of a man who can love and serve his juniors without reservation and without patronage. “A great head and two soft brown eyes” is the phrase for Stephens in George Moore’s Hail and Farewell. It serves. He is a wisp of a man, below that head; his moustache too is a wisp; he is a pale, slender presence, a creature of moods and nerves. Katharine Tynan - Mrs. Hinkson - describes him prosaically enough as “little, lively, overflowing with words, with a somewhat excited, over-emphatic manner; and ... very lovably humble and simple about his doings.”

Yet he is a man - not to be afraid of, perhaps; not to be put on a distant pedestal, but certainly one to inspire something of immediate respect (even before you read his books); and, along with that respect, a desire to shield him from the hard realities - that he has come to know well enough to fend off without your assistance, thank you.

*

When AE invited Stephens to bring him some of his work for perusal and advice, it was a massy brown-paper parcel that he carried out to the house in the Dublin suburbs. Poems dramatic and lyric and elegiac. There was a great quantity, and they were very uneven (perhaps ragged would describe some of them) and alarmingly voluminous; yet AE was firmer than ever in the conviction that there was “some splash of genius” in the guinea typist, and counselled the issue of a slim volume - Insurrections, in fine. The book runs only to fifty-something pages and it got good reviews in Ireland and England and America, yet literary Dublin was skeptical thus far. “We were impressed by his wit and whimsicality of mind,” wrote George Moore after meeting him in AE’s studio, “but we thought AE exaggerated the talents of the young man. True that all his discoveries had come to something, but it was clear to us that he was anxious to put this new man alongside Synge, and that we could not consent to do.” To engage his friends and their active interest in Stephens, AE told them stories from the lips of his new poet, who was a truer vagrant than the author of The Aran Islands and The Shadow of the Glen. “For Synge had fifty pounds a year [Mr. J. B. Yeats says “thirty”]; but Stephens, a poor boy, without education or a penny, had wandered all over Ireland, and would have lost his life in Belfast from hunger had it not been for a charitable apple-woman.” So prattles George Moore. (p.77; cont. on p.136.)

*

Stephen’s first three books of verse - Insurrections, The Hill of Vision, and Songs from the Clay - mark a certain progression both metrically and intellectually, though I am inclined to insist upon The Hill of Vision as my favorite. “The Higher Fooling,” one English critic calls Stephen’s poetry, and proceeds to add that, like Shelley, the author is “gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars.” But the best of Stephens is that part of his work which is, in form, least trammeled. A native whimsy, and raciness of earth, and conversation that is Irish conversation at its unconventional, unbookish, best; - for these gifts, one looks to his rare prose. He is, too, deliciously unafraid of being found egotistic; not for nothing is Walt Whitman his favorite American. Anatole France tells in The Garden of Epicurus of a little nine-year-old girl “sager than the sages.” He quotes her wisdom: “You see in books what you can’t see in reality, because it is too far or because it has happened already. But what you see in books you see badly, and sadly. Little children oughtn’t to have to read books. There are so many good things to see, that they haven’t seen: lakes, mountains, rivers, towns and country, the sea and the boats, the sky and the stars!” “I am quite of her opinion,” is France’s comment. “Nous avons une heure a vivre; pourquoi nous charger de tant de choses? Pourquoi tant apprendre puisque nous savons que nous ne saurons jamais rien? Nous ressemblons a ce niais de Pline le jeune qui etudiait un orateur grec pendant que sous ses yeux le Vesuve engloutissait cinq villes sous la cendre.” - But in reading Stephen’s books, we are confident that we have under our eyes both the book, and the world; we are at once under the spell of his style and under his Irish sky and stars.

*

I can imagine Anatole France savouring this merit of Stephen’s prose to the full. France, too, has his angels and Demi-Gods - but they seem a corrupt and bookish crew when we return to them from Stephen’s Irishmen with feathers. I can hear the voice of M. France, seated in his study at La Bichellarie, among his bibelots and figurines, and stroking the fur of Hamilcar’s successor (whatever he is named): “This young man from over the Channel is bien de nous. He is as fond of faery-lore as I am of my saintly legends.

His week-end angels are less documented than mine, Hamilcar; their dialogues and those of the wise men in The Crock of Gold attest perhaps that their creator is no licenciate of the Sorbonne; yet it might likely have but dulled his whimsy had he studied at my elbow in the Normal School. ... He has written about Ireland and spied new wonders in the Celtic twilight; that, in itself, stamps him a genius! And his spirit is all the nimbler for his carrying no too great store of book-baggage gleaned from long years of futile dalliance in libraries. Stephens is no literary rag-picker like the rest of us. How bird-like are his winged creations! I do not taste his verses with much relish, me; but that may be the fault of my ignorance of his barbarous language - for the English remains a little barbarous to my thinking, in spite of the robust eloquence of English guns by the Somme ... . Moreover, this young man is by no means disciplined or tamed enough to write verse for my reading. But when James Stephens writes his prose, he seems to toss his cap with joy at racing through the forest of idea, and all his words (leaves of that green forest) are fresh and vivid with the life of sap. He reacts to the liberty of English prose as a country boy, escaped from a factory town, to the wine of his own mountain air. Life is unspoiled for him by machines and by machine-made impressions; he has seen life and felt its intoxications directly, without having all the best in it translated for him first of all in the works of rival authors. Also he is a stylist among stylists; you remember that I once explained how a simple style is like a white light: complex in all but appearance. You ask me do I think Stephens a better artist in his tinkers or in his hedge-wenches? Do I prefer his verisimilar donkeys or his pleasantly paganized archangels? That question shall rest where I lay it, Hamilcar: on the lap of the Demi-Gods. But Stephens is a new voice, Hamilcar; a musical voice and quite unawed by the taboos of that British bourgeoisie which he has never known - lucky Irishman! - and which - less lucky - will never know James Stephens.”

*

So might France speak, gravely but smilingly, to the indifferent Hamilcar on his cushion of feathers, with his nose comfortably resting between two padded paws. ...

There is in Mr. Stephen’s work the vagueness of air supported by the solidity of earth. And just as you try to make up your mind whether to treat him lightly, as an amiable and delicious trifler, you are confused by finding, on the next page, profundity itself; the profundity of one who thinks for himself, and is apostle of free-thinking and free living. Nowhere is Stephens surer of himself than in his playful reflections of character - of character not as it ought to be, but of character as it is.

Let us recall that in this talk from “The Demi-Gods,” chosen at hazard, Caeltia is an archangel, and Patsy is a tramp.
“Do you not like that woman,” Caeltia enquired. “She’s a bad woman,” replied Patsy.
“What sort of a bad woman is she?”
“She’s the sort that commits adultery with every kind of man,” said he harshly.
Caeltia turned over that accusation for a moment. “Did she ever commit adultery with yourself?” said he.
“She did not,” said Patsy, “and that’s why I don’t like her.”
Caeltia considered that statement also, and found it reasonable.
“I think,” said he, “that the reason you don’t like that woman is because you like her too much.”
“It’s so,” said Patsy, “but there is no reason for her taking on with every kind of man and not taking on with me at all.”

To me, one of the best things about reading Stephens in war-time is that there is, in his books, nothing of hate. That in itself is enough to distinguish The Demi-Gods and Songs from the Clay and The Adventures of Seumas Beg, from other books, but there is added the spell cast over men’s imaginations by an irresponsible story-teller, whose stories are told with all the artless artistry of the Irish genius - a genius above all for words of movement and melancholy and music-making. The Demi-Gods is as free from conventionality and imitativeness as any book in the novel form may be. James Stephens is tonic reading for Americans in an age which is rich in novels of perfunctory mediocrity and in short stories of perfect technique and equally perfect emptiness.