all, with masks in their hands. They must not wear the masks for
that would not express my scorn for reality."

* * * * *

I go to the first performance of Alfred Jarry's _Ubu Roi_, at the Theatre
de L'Oeuvre, with the Rhymer who had been so attractive to the girl in the
bicycling costume. The audience shake their fists at one another, and the
Rhymer whispers to me, "There are often duels after these performances,"
and he explains to me what is happening on the stage. The players are
supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like
wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is
some kind of King, carries for Sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to
clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have
shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad,
for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say,
"After Stephane Mallarme, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after
Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and
nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is
possible? After us the Savage God."

BOOK V

THE STIRRING OF THE BONES

_THE STIRRING OF THE BONES_

I

It may have been the Spring of 1897 that Maud Gonne, who was passing
through London, told me that for some reason unknown to her, she had
failed to get a Dublin authorization for an American lecturing tour. The
young Dublin Nationalists planned a monument to Wolfe Tone which, it was
hoped, might exceed in bulk and in height that of the too compromised and
compromising Daniel O'Connell, and she proposed to raise money for it by
these lectures. I had left the Temple and taken two rooms in Bloomsbury,
and in Bloomsbury lived important London Nationalists, elderly doctors,
who had been medical students during the Fenian movement. So I was able to
gather a sufficient committee to pass the necessary resolution. She had no
sooner sailed than I found out why the Dublin committee had refused it, or
rather put it off by delay and vague promises. A prominent Irish American
had been murdered for political reasons, and another Irish American had
been tried and acquitted, but was still accused by his political
opponents, and the dispute had spread to London and to Ireland, and had
there intermixed itself with current politics and gathered new bitterness