AVE

An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter:

OVERTURE

In 1894 Edward Martyn and I were living in the Temple, I in a garret in King's Bench Walk, he in a garret in Pump Court. At the time I was very poor and had to work for my living; all the hours of the day were spent writing some chapter of Esther Waters or of Modern Painting; and after dinner I often returned to my work. But towards midnight a wish to go out to speak to somebody would come upon me: Edward returned about that time from his club, and I used to go to Pump Court, sure of finding him seated in his high, canonical chair, sheltered by a screen, reading his book, his glass of grog beside him, his long clay pipe in his hand; and we used to talk literature and drama until two or three in the morning.
I wish I knew enough Irish to write my plays in Irish, he said one night, speaking out of himself suddenly.
You'd like to write your plays in Irish! I exclaimed. I thought nobody did anything in Irish except bring turf from the bog and say prayers.

Edward did not answer, and when I pressed him he said:

You've always lived in France and England, and have forgotten Ireland.

You're wrong: I remember the boatmen speaking to each other in Irish on Lough Carra! And Father James Browne preaching in Irish in Carnacun! But I've never heard of anybody wanting to write in it ... and plays, too!
Everything is different now; a new literature is springing up.

In Irish? I said; and my brain fluttered with ideas regarding the relation of the poem to the language in which it is born.

A new language to enwomb new thoughts, I cried out to Edward.

On the subject of nationality in art one can talk a long while, and it was past one o'clock when I groped my way down the rough-timbered staircase, lit by dusty lanterns, and wandered from Pump Court into the cloister, loitering by the wig-maker's shop in the dim corner, so like what London must have been once, some hundreds of years after the Templars.
On my way back to King's Bench Walk I passed their church! And, standing before the carven porch, I thought what a happy accident it was that Edward Martyn and myself had drifted into the Temple, the last vestige of old London — combining, as some one has said, the silence of the cloister with the licence of the brothel — Edward attracted by the church of the Templars, I by the fleeting mistress, so it pleased me to think.
One is making for the southern gate, hoping that the aged porter will pull the string and let her pass out without molesting her with observations, and, when the door closed behind her, there seemed to be nothing in the Temple but silence and moonlight: a round moon sailing westward let fall a cold ray along the muddy foreshore and along the river, revealing some barges moored in mid-stream.

The tide is out, I said, and I wondered at the spots and gleams of light, amid the shrubs in the garden, till I began to wonder at my own wonderment, for, after all, this was not the first time the moon had sailed over Lambeth. Even so the spectacle of the moonlit gardens and the river excited me to the point of making me forget my bed; and, watching the white torch of Jupiter and the red ember of Mars, I began to think of the soul which Edward Martyn had told me I had lost in Paris and in London, and if it were true that whoever casts off tradition is like a tree transplanted into uncongenial soil. Turgenev was of that opinion: Russia can do without any one of us, but none of us can do without Russia — one of his sentimental homilies grown wearisome from constant repetition, true, perhaps, of Russia, but utterly untrue of Ireland. Far more true would it be to say that an Irishman must fly from Ireland if he would be himself.