George William Russell was a remarkable and distinguished man who played a prominent role in a number of aspects of Irish and British cultural and public life over a period of change and challenge. He made his mark in quite disparate fields, not only as a painter but in the words of the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature as poet, mystic and social reformer. The McMillan Dictionary of Irish Literature adds economist and editor and completeness requires me to add essayist and novelist. It can be seen therefore that this was a man of exceptional energy and creativity.

He was born in the house here beside us on 10 April 1867 and baptised in Shankill Parish Church. His father was a bookkeeper in Bell's cambric factory. The family moved after a time to a cottage at the North Street entrance to Lord Lurgan's estate, according to Eglinton's Memoir of AE. At the age of 3 years 10 months he attended the Model School in Brownlow Terrace and remained there for about 7 years. His father then obtained employment with the well known firm of accountants in Dublin, Messrs Craig Gardner and the family moved to that city, though Russell returned for many holidays to relatives here in County Armagh, sometimes in nearby Drumgor where he heard the folklore of the people of the Lough shore. It is interesting to note given Russell's own later activities that his father attended both the Parish church on Sunday morning and the Primitive Methodist Church on Sunday afternoons. They obviously shared the same interest in spiritual matters as his son, while arriving at very different conclusions.

In Dublin George attended Rathmines School and then the Metropolitan School of Art where he formed a close friendship with the future Nobel Laureate W B Yeats. Indeed when AE published his first volume of verse Homeward: Songs by the Way in 1894 he was hailed as a poet equal to Yeats. He was to go on to publish seven further volumes of poetry and a Collected Poems which went through successive editions and enlargements. His pen name of AE , which will be familiar to most here, was adopted from a proof readers query about his use of an earlier pseudonym, Aeon.

At the School of Art he learnt to paint and he continued to do so for the rest of his life but the demands of his many other activities means that his oeuvre was rather smaller than some other contemporary painters. Nevertheless his works are found in a number of major public collections and sell readily at auction. They are accessible in a way that his poetry is not always. The subjects are often children or fairies, are more often in pastels or water colour than in oil, and are usually bright and attractive. The poet Yeats contributed to a third very important part of Russell's life, namely-spiritualism: He became a member of the Irish Theosophists, edited the magazine of that movement and founded the Hermetic Society in 1898 for the study of the work of Madam. Blavatsky. This once famous mystical teacher and medium is perhaps mare remembered now because Louis McNiece used her surname in his parody of society in the 1930s poem Bagpipe Music.

A poem that still has the power to shock 70 years on. The centenary of the birth of McNeice, a very different Ulster poet, is being celebrated in Queen's University next week.

As so often the arts did not pay the bills and he earned a living for himself and later his wife and children by working, initially, as a clerk in Dublin, earning £40 per year. He then became active in the Co-operative movement and from 1905 on edited the Irish Homestead. In 1923 it was incorporated into the Irish Statesman which he continued to edit until 1930. Throughout that period he was an influential figure in supporting co-operation among farmers and workers throughout the whole of the island of Ireland. His was a voice of reason and progress. He was a moderate Nationalist, involved in the founding of the original Irish National Theatre with Yeats. He used his journal also to encourage young writers, most notably Padraic Colum, Eva Gore-Booth and Seamus O'Sullivan. As well as his leading articles and other articles in those journals he published a series of pamphlets on issues of public controversy. He was consistently opposed to the physical force tradition in Irish life, from whatever corner. Following the Easter Rising he was one of those to take a leading role in the Irish Convention which sought to arrive at a consensus on the issues on home rule and partition.

After the establishment of the Irish Free State he was offered a seat in the Senate, but, unlike Yeats, declined it. He continued to publish poetry in the 1920s and two novels, The Interpreters and The Avatars. Archbishop Gregg called him "that myriad- minded man". I have some of AE's own books and one of them contains a letter from the author of the book, Fiona McLeod, saying the gift of the book was "but a small acknowledgement of the keen pleasure your own beautiful work in verse has given me." This has an added piquancy as in fact Fiona McLeod was the pseudonym of a famously fierce male critic called William Sharp. The secret only emerged after his death when Who's Who did not get back the proof of her entry sent to Sharp's address.

A.E. was not afraid to use humour in his writings. In 1918 he contributed to Secret Springs of Dublin Song a volume of parodies of poets including a number of his own friends. He may have been responsible for the penultimate poem in the volume entitled To George Moore on the Occasion of his Wedding (an expressive nuptial song) which proceeds with three long verses consisting entirely of one asterisk after another instead of letters, arranged as words and followed by an Envoi, also consisting entirely of an asterisk for every letter. I think this is a reference to Russell's view that, despite his fame as a novelist, a lot of Moore's writing and language was ribald and improper and not fit to be printed for reasons of delicacy.

It has been said that the best picture of AE is to be found in the memoirs or Moore, Hail and Farewell!. I quote a brief ............. from page 138 of the 1925 edition to give a flavour of Moore's view of Russell.

He had refused to dine with us because he did not wish to put on evening clothes, but he had come in afterwards, more attractive than anybody else in the room in his grey tweeds, his wild beard, and shaggy mane of hair. Some friends seemed to have known always, and try as we will we cannot remember the first time we saw them; whereas our first meetings with others are fixed in our mind, and is clearly as if it had happened no later yesterday, I remember AE coming forward to meet me, and the sweetness of long grey eyes. He was more winning than I had imagined, for, building out of what Yeats had told me in London, I had imagined a sterner, rougher, ruder man.

His friendship with Yeats had its ups and downs. AE was, after all, a Lurgan man and not afraid to speak frankly and even robustly to his more famous friend. In the precis to the Ten Principal Upanishads, published a few months after Russell's death , Yeats says: "For some forty years my friend George Russell has quoted me passages from some Upanishads, and for those forty years I have said to myself - some day I will find out if he knows what he is talking about. Between us existed from the beginning the antagonism that unites dear friends." Russell's wife Violet, also a writer, died in 1932 and this contributed to disenchantment with the narrow and censorious society in which he found himself living. He moved to England and died there at the age of 68 in 1935.

His influence in Irish life was always positive and benign and led him to having a reputation extending far beyond the island. For example he visited Washington to advise the United States Government on agricultural co-operatives. His personal view point can best be summarised in the closing eight lines of his famous poem entitled "On behalf of some Irishmen not Followers of Tradition".

© Donnell J.P.Deeny 2007