George [“Æ”] Russell (1867-1935)

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Bibliographical details

The Candle of Vision (London: Macmillan 1918, 1920), viii,175pp.; Do. (London: Macmillan 1928), [2], ix [1], 175, [1], 4pp., ill. [ink & crayon vignette on t.p.]; Do., rep. as The Candle of Vision, Autobiography of a Mystic, introduction by Leslie Shepard [Quest Ser.] (London: Theosophical Publishing House 1974), xv,175pp.; Do. [same title] (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1975), 175pp.; Do., as The Candle of Vision: Inner Worlds of the Imagination (Bridgeport: Prism 1990), 102pp., 22cm.; and Do. [another edn.], The Candle of Vision (Coracle Press 2008); Do. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform 2016), 56pp.

Imaginations and Reveries (NY: Macmillan 1916), xi, 255pp. [ded. to John Quinn] CONTENTS - Nationality or Cosmopolitanism; Standish O’Grady; The Dramatic Treatment of Legend; The Character of Heroic Literature; A Poet of Shadows; The Boyhood of a Poet; The Poetry of James Stephens; A Note on Seumas O’Sullivan; Art and Literature; An Artist of Gaelic Ireland Two Irish Artists; “Ulster”; Ideals of the New Rural Society; Thoughts for a Convention; The New Nation; The Spiritual Conflict; On an Irish Hill; Religion and Love; The Renewal of Youth the Hero in Man the Meditation of Ananda; The Midnight Blossom; The Childhood of Apollo; The Mask of Apollo; The Cave of Lilith; The Story of a Star; The Dream of Angus Oge; Deirdre. Dramatis Personae. (Available at Gutenberg Project - online; see copy in RICORSO Library - via index or as .docx - attached.)

Note: A Maunsel edition appeared with no date [1916?] and the New York Macmillan edition is conjecturally dated to 1916 in the TCD and Liverpool U Cats. (reflected in COPAC). There is a Maunsel & Roberts 2nd edition of 1921 (listed in the BL Cat/COPAC). This edition is also held at Cambridge, Hull, London Library, Nat. Lib. Scotland, Oxford ULibs, QUB and Warwick. There are various photocopy and internet editions - e.g., Do. (Coracle Press 2007), 328pp. [online] and Do. (Echo Library 2007), 152pp. [online] (accessed 21.03.2022.)

The Descent of the Gods: AE's Mystical Writings, ed. Raghavan Iyer & Nandini Iyer [Collected Works of AE] (Colin Smythe 1988), 780pp. Contains Æ"s known mystical writings, including his four major works, The Avatars (1933), The Candle of Vision (1918), The Interpreters (1922), and Song and its Fountains (1932), together with his letters and other prose contributions to Dana, Ethical Echo, The Internationalist, The Irish Theosophist, Lucifer, and Ourselves, W.Y. Evans Wentz's interview with A.E. in The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, Æ"s first independent publication, To the Fellows of the Theosophical Society, his introduction to City Without Walls, and many other spiritual books, reviews and his hitherto unpublished story ‘The Return’.

[See George Russell, review of A Vision by W. B. Yeats, in The Irish Statesman (13 Feb. 1926), pp.714-16 & review of A Packet for Ezra Pound by W. B. Yeats, in The Irish Statesman (7 Sept. 1929), pp.11-12 - in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Major Writers” - via index or as attached.]

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References

Justin McCarthy, Irish Literature (1904), gives selection of poetry, and excerpt from ‘Nationality and Imperialism’, printed in [Lady Gregory, ed.,] Ideals in Ireland (1901).

D. J. O’Donoghue, Geographical Distribution of Irish Ability (1906), end papers advertise New Songs, a lyric selection made by George Russell [poems of P McCormac Colm, Alice Milligan, etc.], front. by Jack B. Yeats.

D. J. O’Donoghue, Poets of Ireland (Dublin: Hodges Figgis 1912) lists Homeward Songs [1894]; The Earth’s Breath; Nuts of Knowledge; The Divine Vision; and By Still Waters; notes that he is in Yeats’s Book of Irish Verse, and in E C Steadman, Victorian Anthology (1896) and Lyra Celtica (18896), and all later Irish anthologies; The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories (Dublin 1905); New Songs, selected by AE from the Poems of Padraic Colum, Eva Gore Booth, Thomas Keohler, Alice Milligan, Susan Mitchell, Seumas O’Sullivan, George Roberts, and Ella Young (Dublin: O’Donoghue & Co. 1904), 56pp., fb. ill. Jack B. Yeats; Geo. W. Russell writes on Popular Credit, Irish Year Book (Sinn Féin [c.1919]), pp.285-89. Also Violet Russell, wife of AE, Heroes of the Dawn (Dublin 1913), the Finn Cycle retold.

Arthur Quiller Couch, ed., Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918 (new ed. 1929), pp.910-12.

Robert Hogan, ed., A Dictionary of Irish Literature, 2 vols. [rev. edn.] (Conn: Greenwood Press 1996), notes a capacity for self-mockery in a parody of Seumas O’Sullivan by AE as ‘S O’S’ in Secret Springs of Dublin Song (1918), which opens with the line, ‘Child, there are mists in my mind’.

D. E. S. Maxwell, Modern Irish Drama (1984), lists Deirdre (Maunsel 1907); Selected Poems (Lon. 1935); The Irish Statesman, 1923-30. Studies, Robert Davis, George William Russell - ‘AE’ (NY: Twayne, 1977); Richard Kain and James O’Brien, George Russell, A.E. (Bucknell UP 1976).

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991), Vol. 2, selects Letters to W. B. Yeats; from Collected Poems, ‘Carrowmore’ [541-42]; also ‘Faith’, ‘Three Counsellors’, ‘Symbolism’, ‘Immortality’, ‘In Connemara’, ‘Truth’, ‘The Twilight of Earth’, ‘On Behalf of Some Irishmen not Followers of Tradition’; Vale and Other Poems, ‘A Prisoner’ [Terence MacSwiney]; Russell, Connolly, and Shaw speak in London for Larkin’s strike (Shaw’s pamphlet), 513; Irish protestant contributors to cultural nationalism [Terence Brown, ed.], 517; his Deirdre sourced in Standish O’Grady’s History of Ireland, Vol I, 521; dissatisfaction with the existing state of things converting into mysticism [Deane, ed.], 721; Joyce lumps together Yeats and Russell in The Holy Office, 769; [Yeats biog., 830; some of the most spirited attacks on cosmopolitanism came [ironically] from leading Anglo-Irish figures such as [Gibbon, ed.], 953; [do. 954-55], in Literary Ideals in Ireland (1899), 956; [implied reference, ‘symbolic school’, DP Moran, 971]; [cited in TW Rolleston, 973], ‘not belong’ in Corkery’s Thurles GAA crowd (1931), 1010; Irish Homestead, inter al., 1026; James Stephen’s discovered working in solicitors office by AE, on reading one of his poems in Griffith’s Sinn Fein, 1219; 560. ALSO, Beckett on AE, ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, FDA3 345 [.. protrudes in to the void’.] FDA2, AE’s weekly review The Irish Stateman was revived in 1923 after a three year gap by Horace Plunkett and was ed. by AE from that date until 1930, 547n.

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991), Vol. 3: WORKS [a shortlist only; as in Works, supra]. FDA3 selects ‘Seven Years’ Change’ [94-95]; REFS & REMS at 51n [Ulysses, Telemachus, ‘Our mighty mother!’, phrase used by AE in several poems]; 60 [Ulysses, Proteus, ‘AE, pimander, good shephard of men’]; 61 [AE represents ethereal mode in Ulysses, Scylla]; 62n [Ulysses, Scylla, quotes ‘What of all the will to do?/It has vanished long ago’, from ‘Sung on a By-Way’ by AE]; 87 [Dubliners stories in AE’s Irish Homestead (sic)]; 90-91 [Irish Stateman’s strenuous efforts to maintain idealism of pre-revolutionary period, ed. Terence Brown]; 92 [period’s dominant realism which AE had anticipated and identified]; 131 [early poem of Kavanagh in one of the final issues of The Irish Statesman]; 245 [Beckett, ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ essay, ‘George Russell, who, when thoroughly galvanised by the protracted apathies, rigidities and abstractions, enters his heart’s desire with such precipitation as positively to protrude into the void’, Bookman, 1934], 248n [S. O’Grady ‘father of the Irish Renaissance’ for AE and Yeats]; 480 [AE ‘passed into exile’, O’Faolain, Vive Moi]; 482 [‘I knew Russell, in the common, intimate, unbuttoned way in which men know men, and it was apparent that Russell never knew him [Yeats] that way, O’Faolain, ibid]; 499 [MacDopagh, on AE, ‘His mysticism is too vague’, he remarked, comparing it with that of St Johnof the Cross. Secretly, I resented what he said, for I admired the poems of AE, but I kept respectful silence’, Clarke, Penny from the Clouds, Chp. 3.iii]; 546 [Hubert Butler in relation to; ed. note]; 547 [see supra]; 548 [‘AE had travelled hundreds of miles on his bicycle’, Hubert Butler, Escape from the Anthill (1985)]; 692n [Irish Homestead, 1895, ed. AE, under Plunket, Ireland in the New Century, but not named in text]; 808 [biog. Plunkett]; 939 [Frank O’Connor notes in 1942 that the pre-revolutionary unity of nationalists, Catholic and Protestant, aristocratic and labour, exemplified by AE and others, fell apart]; 940 [AE left, finding post-revolutionary Ireland unacceptable, ed. John Wilson Foster]; 941.

Daniel Karlin, ed., The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (London: Penguin 1997), incls. George William Russell [AE] - with 8 other Irish poets: William Allingham, Jane Barlow, Edmund Dowden, William Larminie, James Clarence Mangan, , John Todhunter, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats ... amidst tens of English poets.

Brian M. Walker, et al. eds, Faces of Ireland (Belfast: Appletree Press 1992), selects from Co-operation and Nationality (Dublin 1912), pp.82-3, 88-91; photo of committee membership, Irish Co-Operative Women’s Guild Belfast; also creamery at Donemana Co Tyrone, c.1910; notes 381 local branches and membership of 95,000 in IAOS by 1910.

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Booksellers
Cathach Books (Cat. No. 12) lists The National Being, Some Thoughts on Irish Policy (Dub 1917) [?2nd edn.]; Collected Poems (London: 1918; The Candle of Vision (London: 1918); Homeward Songs (London: 1901); The Interpreters (London: 1927); Vale & Other Poems (London: 1931); New Songs (Dub. 1904); The House of the Titans (London: 1934); also AE, by Darrell Figgis (London: 1934), biog.

Cathach Books (Winter 1996-97) lists Francis Hackett, intro., George Russell, AE, The Economics of Ireland and the Policy of the British Government [The Freeman Pamphlets] (NY: Huebsch 1921); Ireland and the Empire at the Court of Conscience (Dublin: Talbot 1921), 16pp.; AE, Horace Plunkett, John Quinn, The Irish Home-Rule convention, ‘Thoughts for a Convention’ [3rd edn. 1917], by AE; A ‘Defence of the Convention’, by Plunkett, and ‘An American Opinion’, by Quinn (NY: Macmillan 1917), 183pp.

Hyland Books (Cat. No. 224) lists The Hero in Man (1909, 1910); The Renewal of Youth [Orpheus Ser. No. VII] (1911); Salutation [priv.; single sheet typescript, 5 stanzas]; Thoughts for a Convention (2nd & 3rd edns. 1917) [corrects Denson 1918]; Voices of the Stones (1925); foreword to Sir F F Vane, Agin the Governments (1929) [Hyland 214]. The Renewal of Youth [Orpheus Ser. No. VII] (1911) [Denson 18]; Imaginations and Reveries (1915); The National Being: Some Thoughts on Irish Polity (1916) [Denson 30]; The Inner and Outer Ireland (1921) [Denson 41b]; Enchantment and Other Poems (NY 1930) [Denson 48]; The House of the Titans and Other Poems (1934) [Denson 53]; Selected Poems (1935) [Denson 54]; AE’s Letters to Minanlabain, introd. by L. K. Porter (NY: 1937); Alan Denson, ed., Letters from AE (1961); Printed Writings by George W. Russell (AE), A bibliography, with some Notes on his Pictures and Portraits, foreword by Padraic Colum (Evanston 1961).

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Notes
Henry Cousins quotes AE in The Hound of Uladh: ‘These myths were born / Out of the spirit of man, and drew their meaning / From that unplumbed profundity. I think / In after ages they will speak to us / With deeper voices and meanings ...’

W. B. Yeats: Yeats’s personal library, now held in the NLI (Dublin) contains a copies of the following texts and papers, each with sheets of notes slipped in: The Candle of Vision (MS 40,568 / 200; O’Shea Cat., 1799: 2 shts being copy of a letter from WBY to Sturge Moore); Collected Poems (MS 40,568 / 201; O’Shea Cat. 1800: 5 shts.) The Earth Breath … (MS 40,568 / 202; O’Shea Cat. 1803 (33 shts.); Songs and its Fountains (MS 40,568 / 203; O’Shea Cat. 1812 (4 shts.)

James Joyce (1): Joyce visited AE at Garville Rd., Rathgar, on 18 Aug. 1902 and was told by him that he would never be a real poet as he had not enough chaos in him. (For Richard Kain’s account of the oft-narrated meetings with Russell and with Yeats, see Commentary, supra.)

At-homes: Sunday was the evening of Russell’s evenings “at-homes”. For Russell's words to Stanislaus Joyce about his brother, see under Stanislaus [q.v.].

James Joyce (2): See Joyce’s bon mot about his debts to Russell: “A.E.I.O.U.” (Ulysses, Bodley Head Edn., 1865 &c., p.243.) Note: Declan Kiberd remarks that Joyce's debt to the mystic poet Russell extend beyond the financial since the older man gave him his first literary break - i.e., “The Sisters” and other stories in Irish Homestead. (Kiberd, Ulysses and Us, 2009, p.139.)

James Joyce (3): in publishing Joyce’s first three Dubliners stories (‘The Sisters’, ‘Eveline’, and ‘After the Race’) in the Irish Homestead, George Russell became the first publisher of Joyce’s fiction; see Michael Groden, A Textual and Publishing History’, in A Companion to Joyce Studies, ed. Zack Bowen, and James Carens (1984), p. 78ff. Note also, a restored Ulysses refers to ‘AE, pimander, good shepherd [sic] of men’ (James Joyce, Ulysses, Corrected Edn., ed. Hans Walter Gabler, 1984; Penguin edn., p.36.)

Liam O’Flaherty wrote to Russell at the Irish Statesman criticising editorial policy: ‘I don’t for a moment claim that your paper is not doing good work,’ [he] wrote, ‘But I do claim that it is not Irish, that it is not national, and that it is not representative in any respect of the cultural forces, in all spheres, that are trying to find room for birth in this country at present.’ (20 June 1925; cited in S.B. Kennedy, Irish Art & Modernism, 1991.)

Monk Gibbon calls AE [George Russell] ‘one of the loveliest souls that has ever found itself in Ireland’, in The Seals (1935, rep. Dublin: Allen Figgis 1970), p.27.

Anthony Allen: Allen’s First Songs ([Dublin]: Maunsel & Co. 1918), is dedicated to Russell [Intro., viii, 56pp.; printed by George Roberts.

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Celtic inspiration: In an open letter to editor of Daily Express (10 Sept. 1898) Russell noted that no Irish artist had found inspiration in traditional Celtic sources as had the writers, blaming this lack of ‘national’ art on the absence of great paintings on display in exhibitions. (S.B. Kennedy, Irish Art & Modernism, 1991, pp.5-6.)

Candle of Vision: the title is apparently inspired by the biblical verses: ‘The Spirit of man is the candle of the Lord’ (Proverbs), and: ‘When his candle shined on my head and by his light I walked through darkness.’ (Job.)

The Lodge: In April 1891, a month before death of Mme. Blavatsky, AE moved into The Lodge, at No. 3 Upper Ely Place, recently purchased and placed at the disposal of the Theosophical Society by Frederick and Annie Dicks; shared the accommodation with Daniel Dunlop, Malcolm Magee (br. of John Eglinton), Arthur Dwyer (with both of whom he shared a room at times), James Noal, Charles Johnston’s sister Georgie, Violet North, and James Pryse. (Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man, 1975, p.33.) Note further, The firm Whaley which published his first collection was started by Charles Weekes.

Julian Symons, reviewing Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot and Pound (Camb. UP ?1993), cites North as saying that one historian of Fascism regarded AE’s The National Being as a ‘virtual blueprint for Italian Fascism’.

Graham Greene: a favourite quotation of his was the lines from George Russell, ‘In the lost childhood of Judas/Christ was portrayed.’ (See Augustine Martin, reviewing biography of Green by Norman Sherry, Irish Times, 17 Sept. 1994.)

Good show!: ‘From August 23rd to September 3rd, 1904, together with Constance Gore-Booth and her Polish husband, Count Casimir Dunin Markievicz, “AE” showed 63 out of the 220 paintings in an exhibition in Dublin entitled Pictures of Two Countries.’ He said: “My exhibition has just opened and my heart is full of woe because I have sold over half of them the first day.”. Further, ‘In a memorial catalogue of John Quinn’s collection issued in 1926, no fewer than 62 paintings by AE were listed.’(Diane Beale, report on new Russell show, The Irish Times, 23 Aug. 2004.)

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Un-typical Ulster: Russell is a character in St. John Ervine’s Changing Winds (1917): ‘Was there any one on earth less like the typical Ulsterman than George Russell, who preached mysicism and better business, or Ernest Harper [fict. char.], who took penny tramrides to pay visits to the faries.’ (p.135; cited in Richard Mills, DPhil, UUC 1997.)

At homes: Alcohol free Sunday “at homes” chez George and Violet Russell were attended by guests such as Osborn Bergin, Padraic Colum, Susan Mitchell, Sean O’Casey (twice and with bad grace), Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, Seamus O’Sullivan, James Stephens and Yeats. The last-named held Mondays’ which drew many away. After Violet died in 1932 AE moved to London and later Bournemouth; buried Mt. Jerome, Dublin, with mile-long cortège. There is an account of one such evening in Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H (1971).

Last things: signs his Will, 14 June, witnessed by Mrs Sophie Jacobs and Miss Kathlen Goodfellow, bequeathing all to his second son Diarmuid; moves to Havenhurst nursing home, Canford Cliffs, Bournemouth, being taken accompanied by Charles Weekes on the train; undergoes abdominal operation, Stagsden Nursing Home, Bournemouth, 10 July 1935; visited by C. P. Curran, and accepts messages from Dublin friends, 16 July 1935; joined by Oliver St. John Gogarty (by plane), 17 July; receives affectionate message from Yeats, solicited by C. P. Curran and Pamela Travers, removing a cloud from his mind, d. shortly after 11 p.m., 17 July 1935 of rectal cancer [carcinoma], with Curran, Weekes, Gogarty and W. K. Magee [John Eglinton] at his bedside; coffin escorted to Holyhead by James Stephens, Helen Waddell and others; aeroplane escort provided for ship on arrival in Dun Laoghaire; funeral in form of modified Anglican service conducted by Rev. C. C. Duggan; funeral mourners led by his eldest son Brian Hartley Russell, Diarmuid arriving by plane in London afterwards; attended by Eamon de Valera (Pres. of Ireland), W. B. Yeats, R. A. Anderson, Seumas O’Sullivan, Joseph O’Neill, F. R. Higgins, W. T. Cosgrave, Gogarty and James Stephens; oration delivered by Frank O’Connor for Irish Academy of Letters; bur. Mt. Jerome, Co. Dublin, 19 July. (See Alan Denson, Letters from AE, London: Abelard Schuman 1961, Chronological table, p.xl.)

Cordial haters: It was George Russell, not George Moore as often alleged, who coined the description of a literary movement as ‘five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.’ (See Richard Kain, Dublin in the Age of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, Oklahoma UP 1962; Newton Abbot: David Charles 1972, p.75.)

Portrait: Seated portrait in oil by John Butler Yeats, 1903, NGI; See also Hilary Pyle, Estelle Solomons, Patriot Portraits (1966) for portrait. Also, George Russell by Hilda Russell (1929), Ulst. Museum; see Anne Crookshank, Irish Portraits Exhibition, Ulster Mus. 1965. See remarks on Russell in Gogarty’s Memoir of Yeats. Also, an oil portrait by Nigel Newton [NGI].

Kith & Kin: Diarmuid Russell issued The Portable Irish Reader (1946) and Selected Prose of G. B. Shaw (1953), 1004pp.

Namesake: not to be confused with the Rt. Hon. George W. E[rskine] Russell (1853-1919) who was among the most prominent converts to Catholicism from the Church of England - a son of Lord Charles Russell and one-time MP, he was a friend of Gladstone whose life he wrote (1891), and of Sydney Smith (ditto, 1904) and Cardinal Manning. He edited the collected works of Matthew Arnold (1903-04) and issued a study of Arnold (1907), as well as Spirit of England (1915) and num. works. There is a life of G. W. E. Russell by Arthur Stanton (Longmans, 1917).

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