TOPIC, hunting trip in the West of Ireland, around Arranmore, provides the occasion for a meditation on the topic of pain in animals. Seal Bay. Gweebarra. Errigal. Burton Port. TREATMENT, This is a one handed piece, a stylistically uniform meditation against the background of personal philosophical sources. It is limited by this medium. He finds that, in nature, the only law is ‘the law of compensation’. EPIGRAM from Gibran, ‘Make me, O God, the prey of the lion ere you make the rabbit my prey.’ PREFACE: ‘[...] temporary [phase of] consciousness [and] record of 36 hours in a lonely and little-visited district of Ireland ... the drama plays itself out to the bitter end both for beasts and men, in spite of the sentimentalists.’ TEXT: ‘.. [girl] the fatalism of her race ... tireless giant of a man ... his wife ... a pretty woman, freckled buit with a delicacy and refinement of feature that might make her the Phryne of some Greek vase ... the child [looks like] one of the exiles whom Gregory saw in Rome. ... Irish peasant ...’ [22]. Chap. Animal Kingdom, ‘The sparrows are in God’s care, but their exact status is His kingodm has never been defined and does not seem to have troubled the theologians. I have a keen nose for priestcraft as any inquisitor ever had for heresy ... It is in the interest of the priest ot gloss anything that would take man’s attention off the pressing business of saving his own immortal soul ..’ [23] ‘Von Hugel ... an exceptional Catholic’ [quoted on transmigration and evolution]. W. P. Kelly, Katherine Tynan, Father Tom Finlay, Thomas Bodkin; AE, ‘one of the loveliest souls that has ever found itself in Ireland’ [27]. ‘Our respect for life is insufficient, unimaginative, blunted ... not identifying ourselves with the rest of nature ..’ [29] Life and death in animals, ‘that nothing, intangible, invisible and imponderable, appears to have been all. Instead of movement, immobility ... inertia, limp and meaningless.’ [38-9] ‘pity crustaceans ... steer clear of the canine race. [42] At Gweebarra, This is one of the finest views in the world, equal to the bay of Palermo, equal to that superb view from Virgil’s tomb across the bay to Vesuvius and Sorrento [43] ... it is impossible to give in words the serentity and colour of the foreground or the silence and grandeur of that heat-hazed background of mountains [45]. ‘Nature is cruel ... from the point of view of individuals [50].

‘A church or a social convention which terrifies a girl to the extent of making her murder her child, sooner than admit that life had flowered in her without their sanction, is blood guilty; just as a church or social convention which terrifies an adulteress so that she prefers to be guilty of murder rather than to be thought guilty of adultery, is blood guilty in degree also. [56] ... morbid satisfaction over the details of their crimes, not realizing that our interest in crime is really our interest in the repressed criminal in ourselves.’ [57].

Robert Bridges’s poetry, Gibbons’s poetry [58] Seal Bay compared with Naxos [61] Iniskeel, place of pilgrimage [61] ...; CREDO, ‘I find it hard to say which I hate most, the hard, pagan, sterile modern spirit which sees no cause for wonder in anything and reviles all, even life itself, for its emptiness; or the superstitious terror and intellectual cowardice which sometimes accompanies all that is most pious and God-alert in the heart of the devout. Between these two extremes, scepticism and folly, all reverent and humble aspirants to truth—Catholic, Protestant, rationalist, scientific—must hold their lonely way. [63].

IRISH MYSTICISM, ‘Are the children sent out on the roadway to attract the pity of the passer-by, and are those hazel mystical eyes, belonging to another world, more practical than they seem?’; Dungloe, ‘The Irish have never succeeded in building a town that was anything but a nightmare’ [79].

Natives abandon Irish [91] similarities between Greek and Irish races [95].

Arranmore as Delos, ‘A scared island, if ever there was one, and indeed it reminds me of Delos ... only when the sun touched it and brought it to life, did something of its magic rekindle, making it once more seem sacred soil.’ [111] The Irish have never worshipped beauty in the way the Greeks did. They have not had the chance. [112].

cites Thoreau, ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ [125].

‘Until the times prophesied by Isaiah come, cam will be confronted with this problm. He can survive at the expense of the other species, or they must survive at his ... here, if nowhere else, the sportsman seeks justification.’ [141].

... prurience and prudery almost seem to rise at the same source, an uncomfortable sense of guilt where the physical is concerned. Modesty is a different matter ... Modesty is a much maligned virtue today; but there is a modesty which is beautiful, the natural instinctive modesty of adolescence which, as Hearn points out, is part of its protection.’ [185].

dislikes Scott’s castle-Gothicism on account of the smell of old ruins with their redolence of passers[’] faeces; ‘I prefer to believe that we bring out preferences into this life with us, from some former life or from some deep well of being that we do not yet understand.’ [191].

Death in war, ‘It seems inconceivable ... that an ounce of lead ... should be capable of destroying the most delicate and beautiful mechanism in nature. Life, that amazing efflorescence, caple of infinitely sublte gradations and variations; the human brain, in which lies all the hope, courage and tenderness, all the ingenuity and questfulness of which heart and soul are capable, goes down before the spurt of a rifle ... before hate, zeal, or submissiveness in the human spirit.’ [198].

I belong to the old-fashioned school who would like to believe that a robin would willingly wear worsted socks in winter if we knitted them for it; thanking us for then into the bargain with more or less intelligible chirrups. This is the effect of reading Hans Andersen in childhood.’ [209].

‘... dramatizing animal creation in human terms ... dramatizing humanity in terms of the beasts’ [214].

‘... the peasantry and the landed gentry are nearer to each other than any two classes. The landed gentry is the highest form of the peasantry. ... Interwoven as they have always been with the life of the country, their tastes remain the same, they think the same thoughts, they have very much the same interests. Consequently they meet, if not on terms of equality, certainly on those of mutual respect.’ [224].

Man flatters himself when he remains indifferent to any death except the death of his own species. ... all life appears inestimably precision and the cessation of it in one small body as serious as its cessation in another. Such moments impinge on the mystical. [237].

‘the fanatics of social equality are equally fond of the guillotine and the firing squad ...’ [241].

‘Whatever our ethical judgement of the matter, there is something predestined, health-giving, in all hunting activities; our whole heredity cries out to us that this is the life we were intended to live, pitting out wits against our fell-creatures, rather than pacing the grey streets of cities with a little bloodless happiness ..’ [244].

‘.... man’s basic instinct is possibly kindness. He is only cruel when he becomes afraid, when he believes himself and his interests are threatened ...’

For years I had a complex about the events described in this book ... I had turned my back on death when others were rushing to meet him. Every minute of my post-war life seemed in a sense stolen ... a retrospective excursion into self-understanding [xii].

in the Second World War the German army butchered 5,000 male and female civilians in the town of Kragujevac in Yugoslavia as a reprisal ... whole classes of schoolboys marched out to execution, led by their teachers. [xiii] it is almost certainly surprise which Skeffington felt as he was marched into that small yard not so many minutes after he had asked me to send a message to his wife to say that he was in safe hands [xiv].

Only faith in a cause or deep disgust with existence itself can make death tolerable to the young. [xiii].

commissioned Jan. 1916 [1] At the beginning of 1916, it looked as though Ireland was in the business almost as enthusiastically as any other part of the British Isles. My family were ardently Unionist. It had been considered a mild eccentricity when, at sixteen, under the influence of a clever cousin, I announced that there might be something to be said for Home Rule. This aberration was forgotten when the war came. [14].

MG reprints Sinn Fein poster detering Irishmen from enlisting in ‘the demoralised decadent crime-stained blood-sodden Brithish’ and to be ‘mindful of their inalienable heritage’. [15].

‘Murder in Portobello Barracks’; For the duration of the rebellion it could be said that the sympathies of all parts of Dublin, including the slums, were on our side. There were far too many Dubliners fighting with Irish regiments, in Franc and elsewhere, for the population to feel that this was the right moment to embarrass England. ... My own sympathies, if they can be called that, must have been among the very first to be transferred in some small measure to Sinn Fein for reasons soon to be given. [32].

I was sharing with an R.I.R. subaltern who had been a Sandhurst cadet. [32]; Sir Francis Fletcher Vane [34 et passim]. Davy’s pub; Emmet and Sears [sic] [35].

Narratives of 1916 quoted from Desmond Ryan; Skeffington, rescues wounded British captain under fire at Dublin Castle [38]; letter to Statesman on Govt. attempt to disarm ICA [39]; comment by James Stephens, ‘most absurdly courageous man I have ever men [40].

other victims were Dickson and MacIntyre [43]; last words, ‘you are making a terrible mistake’ [47]; raid on Skeffington’s house to found ‘treasonable’ materials [60]; Owen Skeffington hears the news of his father’s death from Vane [67].

I was a junior subaltern. If I had known what was about to happen I might have tried in some way to avert it, but it is unlikely. Once violence is let loose, we find ourselves in an irrational world. Men have surrendered to abstractions. Slogans and catch-words, and political convicitions of dubios ancestry govern their actions. Only the true and valid abstractions such as goodness and compassion, and justice, which are rooted deeply in the conscience of all races and all religions, can be trusted. These are absolutes. The others pose as moral imperatives but are often only false flares lit to excuse some passsion of hatred or envy, of which the individual is scarcely aware himself. [45].

[Later, Gibbon dreams of Skeffington during ’flu fever:] This volitional resurrection of Sheey Skeffington, part of the early and more confused stage of my illness, though I never mentioned it to a sould the or afterwards, and was ashamed to have let my sick imagination indulge in such fanatasy - fantasy analagous to the return of an adolescent to the toy-theatre with which he has played as a child and a surrender to the sudden temptation to stage a marvellous transformation scene -throws light on the whole series of my mentla processes from the moment when I left Portobello Barracks and reported back to the horse transport depot ... In Dublin I had talked with a hand-cuffed prisoner in whom I recognised a dozen and more traits which showed a gentle and lovely human spirit. And then, a few minutes later, I had seen his inert form carried past me on a stretcher with its hands - the hands of the murdered, not the murderer - dripping with blood. In that moment there was sown in me a distaste for all mobilisations of hatred and wrath, and a deeply-buried unconscious resolution never myself to become the engine of destruction. ... [t]he first use I made of my magic wand was to call back to life the man whose existence I had sen terminated in such a sudden and tragic fashion. He had saved me from blood guilt, and a tide of relief swept over me now at the inward intimation that it was only an unkind jest, a testing of the soul, to have thought for a time ... that he was dead. [317-18].

Colthurst-Bowen’s text, ‘And these mine enemies which will not have me rule over them bring them forth and slay them.’; In our post-Darwin, post-Freud, post-Kinsey world all terminology which lacks a measure of scientific pretentiousness is despised, and any phrase which carries moral implications is particularily suspect. The ancients could speak of ‘the good man,’ or ‘the just man’; and, those these classifications may seem a little vague, there was no difficulty in recognising the types intended, even if the good man remained ignorant of how much he owed tohis hormones and the just man sublimely unconscious of the unconscious. These labels corresponded to actualities. Moreover, they became direction posts for the aspirations of the young. ... Chaos had overtaken us in Dublin, but the ancient classifications still held good. It was possible to recognise the just man, the man of violence, the frightened man; and the various categories in which individuals took their place corresponded to some qualities within themselves, innate or cultivated, which the same set of circumstances had called forth, but which differed completely accroding to personal character. [51] Narrative of attack on South Dublin Union [55ff].

A nurse in uniform was shot dead when she suddenly appeared in a doorway on which two kneeling British solddiers had their rifles trained. [56].

Gibbon finds sheets of Sinn Fein stamps. [62].

The 1916 executions [71] GBS’s letter, ‘the shot Irishmen will now take their place beside Emmet and the Manchester Martyrs in Ireland ... and nothing in heaven or earth can prevent it.’ [71].

It was the cold deliberation of the firing squad which made these executions seem more terrible to the inflammable imagination of the Irish than the actually much more ghastly ordeal of death in a crater in No Man’s Land after days of torture and pain and thirst [72].

The Irish mail boats were fast too, zig-zagging across the Irish Channel, but that had not prevented a German submarine from waiting for the Leinster a few miles out, and sinking it with considerable loss of life. [85].

[Irish officers in WWI singing] The Boys of Wexford, A Nation Once Again, God save Ireland, and even ditties of the modest calible of I’m a bold man from the town of Mullingar. [87].

Here was living proof there were plenty of hundred per cent Irishmen in France, and that Redmond had not been romancing when he offered the services of the National Volunteers to England at the beginning of the war. It had taken the Easter executions to make Dunbar begin to doubt the wisdom of the step he had taken. His irritation with England seemed to grow daily. ... Though his language could be profane he was a fairly devoit R.C. who believed in God and even said his prayers. A streak of the puritanical Irishman came out ... [91].

Memory of a boy drowning, these are things which affect men in their lives, for I never felt as much the divinity of life or the seriousness of death, as when this child was drowned beside me. For he was very young. / Things which affect men in their lives. My ten days in Portobello were beginning to affect me in just this fashion. Casement was this moment being tried for his life in London. Bowen-Colthurst, thanks to Kitchener’s directive, had been court-martialled, declared insane and consigned to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. He had appared before a court martial in Richmond Barracks ... [103].

Actually I was as ignorant of the nature of the sexual act as a child of seven. ... I had grown up in a houseful of woman [sic], surrounded by the feminine fripperies and fineries of the Edwardian age. In epochs when women are intent on guarding their virtue they also see most resolved, sartorially, that we shall not forget for a moment that they ar women. The only boy in a household of teenage girls, I was perpetually being banished when dresses were being tried on or taken off, and in this way curiosity was being continually aroused. [123].

Patrick Magill’s The Red Horizon and The Great Push, perhaps the first books to delineate the protagonists on the western front as they actually were. [133].

landmark ... one of the towers ... Parthenon ... The place had become a text of the incredible extravagance of war. To prevent one epigonos climbing the ruin and scanning the landscape, countless other epigonoi had laboured, loaded, sweated, and toiled, rather as though a man should break every mirror and priceless piece of porcelain in a drawing room in an attempt to swat a single fly. / One squa[re] corner o[n] the summit of the less damaged tower was still standing, a mere pedestal, balanced upon a slender pillar. An observer could still get up the narrot case, and, if his nerve held, reach the highest point. [191-92].

[Gibbon adopts pacificist views] There is nothing strikingly original in the truths expressed so schoolboyishly here. But in the Spring of 1917 they were still very much minority views. Criticism of the war on any wide scale had scarcely begun at this time. ... The discovery that they have been misled by a vast propaganda is one which the vast majority of mankind prefers not to make. [footnote includes quotations from Michael Balfour and Winston Churchill admitting the lack of rights on the British side vis-a-vis German expansionism. [194-95].

.. few casualties [in MG’s company] [199] Arras ecrase [203].

Other dreams of a rather different nature were worrying me at this time, since I imagined that their after-effects were debilitating. ... [the doctor] gave me bromide and some tonic pills which he said would meet the case [209].

Letter to OC, ‘I am convinced of this - that war under any circumstances is wrong. No matter whose the initial responsibility may been, all participants - just as in a feud - become bloodguilty. A righteous war is a contradiction in terms.’ [222].

neurasthenia ... George Vth Military Hosp. near gates of Phoenix Park. [270] A number of years would pass before I would reach this conclusion and see escape into genuine altruis as a cardinal factor in the neurasthenic’s cure [272].

Oratory and politics were not for me, although I would, in time, write twenty books. [278].

Oh What a Lovely War, Littlewood and Chilton. [279].

The doctrinaire liberal is in certain ways a greater danger to the race than realists, like Disraeli and Bismarck, who despite their cynicism, have a certain fundamental compassion for humanity. Whereas the theorists are out-and-outers; the zealous in undermining their position at home, furious, and even vindictive, if their theories go amiss. In this way they make themselves allies of Roaring Bill [of Belloc’s poem].

‘Edie, let me kiss your breast,’ and she replied ‘No. No. It is as though the Devil were speaking to me.’ / Not the devil. Only a passion-inflamed, ignorant child, who knew no more than Daphnis and Chloe did what was expected of them. ... three nights in the course of which I had had very little sleep ... weighed down by incomprehensible and overwhelming weariness [314]

The autobiographical account of his falling in love with a female student at the school in Swanage, Dorest, where he taught. This emotion was tolerated by a wife, who understood him. It was insistently platonic. It relating it, Gibbon goes on the offensive against the anti-romantic tendency of the modern theory and practice of love. The date is 1939. [See p. 1951, 1951 minus 12 is the date of Anne’s leaving Swanage school.].

PREFACE, ... ‘we have passed onto an age when only ‘the primal urge’ is acceptable as a valid explanation of even the most sublimated personal attachment. It would be philosophical cheating to minimise the importance of that urge in people’s lives. It can play an appreciable role even in tentative romance. Sexual tendernesss offers itself as a temporary alleviation of love’s infinite longing. It is the ultimate expression of mutual approval. But it can also be a frenzied attempt to insist that body must in some way furnish a solution to the predicament into which spirit has led us ... why allow [sex] to take over a word to which it has only partial claim?’ [8].

‘Each of us decides for himself what is or is not of importance to him. Waht are we here for? To eat, to drink, to sleep, to make love, to copulate, to raise a family, to die? There is always the further obligation upon us, not merely to live but to feel life deeply. My response to the brief presence of Anne de Selincourt in the school at Swanage proves, if nothing else, that I was capable of feeling. [8].

‘... admit to myself, and only to myself, that I was in love with her. ... now I realise that of course I was in love with her, and for the very best of reasons; that is for no reason at all. This surrender to the irrational is at the very core of that mysterious condition which we term ‘being in love’. ... love is ... the discovery of an unsuspected and exceptional value in a particular individual. And it may of course find it natural expression in sexual tenderness. But not necessarily so. How much tenderness was there between Dante and Beatrice. Between Petrarch and Laura? Between Yeats and Maud Gonne?’ [52].

‘contact with Anne tended to re-kindle a part of one’s essential nature which seemed in danger of suffering extinction.’ ‘I have a feeling all the time that I am defending a position; and even at times counter-attacking. People today see ‘love’ merely as the emotional trimmings of a physiological urge. That won’t do. [Quotes Yeats, ‘and laughed upon his breast to think/beast gave beast as much’; I am not advocating a return to the unsublimated realities of Victorian sentiment. But if the human spirit comes into it at all, let us admit the fact and not reduce ‘love’ to the level of a pressing physical need. Plato ... [54].

Lurking inside me has always been that curious Noli me Tangere, a dread that any living creature should experience for me the kind of idealised affection which I am capable of feeling for them. All I have ever asked is permission to love and admire. [64].

‘“You are in love with Anne, and you will always be in love with the immeasurable ... you like Anne because she is the nearest thing to a living poem in this school ... a damning indictment [a]nd in a sense it was all true.’ [66].

‘Where I was concerned, Anne was a complete irrelevance in any even remotely sexual respect ... the same was axiomatic when it came to defining her attitude to me. ... my wife invariably present ... perceptive ... she realised that ... love is less threatened by a straying eye or a romantic disposition than it is by the iron fetters of an enforced devotion ... not a crime in her eyes to recognise beauty or charm; she would have felt sorry for any wife whose husband was completely incapable of such recognition ..’ [71].

‘I did not even take the trouble to see Anne to say good-bye toi her when she left a few days before the rest of the school. Her departure passed unnoticed. this gives some idea of how little I allowed myself to indulge sentiment.’ [106].

ref. to De Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon. [110].

Meets Anne at the Covent Garden opera, 1951. [111].

Meets again two years after. ‘She leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. It was entirely unexpected, a magical moment for anyone as shy as myself. Here kiss was the warm spontaneous kiss of genuine affection ... She probably knew her man. It was a safe kiss to give, a kiss simply of remembrance with a slight tincture perhaps of gratitude. ... I am not here to defend or explain my own vagaries of mood. all I would point out is that one of the recognisable facets of love is that it places us outside time. [117] Funny to have waited seventeen years for a kiss. Well it was worth waiting for!” ... Only then does the chord cease to vibrate. It is just the same with the music which life makes for us. It has a resonance all its own.’ [118].

Critical views of Monk Gibbon cited on the end page include Barbara Wright, Rebecca West, Lord Reith, and Eavan Boland, while letters from W. B. Yeats and AE are also given. Yeats, ‘You have found your voice ...’. Boland calls him a stylist.