SOURCE: Dyer, Joyce Coyne. “Desire in the Prose of James Stephens, 1920–1928.” Eire Ireland 19, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 119–36.

[In the following essay, Dyer explores the theme of desire in Stephens's short fiction.]

James Stephens's famous poem of 1929, “Theme with Variations,” eloquently summarizes his attitude toward desire, an attitude that marks most of his fiction throughout the 1920s. “Who wishes,” writes Stephens, “Hath not: / And to wish / Is to have lived / In vain: / I do not / Wish / For anything; / And shall not wish / Again.”¹ Stephens's attitude toward the person “Who wishes” is as important to the meaning and structure of his major prose works between 1920 and 1928 as it is to the meaning and structure of his long 1929 poem. The artist's concern with the desirer appears in Deirdre, In the Land of Youth, and Etched in Moonlight and is deeply responsible for the idea, form, and beauty of each work.

Desire is not just a very simple concept developed somewhat randomly in a passage here and there of the artist's 1920s prose. Rather, desire for Stephens becomes an extremely complex theme and, in some sense, the principle by which his prose develops. He consistently points to the selfish motive underlying the actions of all his desirers. Stephens feels the need to explore, as well, the nature of specific varieties of desire—greed, lust, covetousness, and ambition—and to examine the destructive mental states each produces, and to offer ways of escape. With persistence, Stephens suggests that desire can be “rightful” and “good” only when it takes the form of a simple wish from which all living things can benefit, even the “little things, that run, and quail,” like “—The lamb, the linnet, and the hare—”² All other desires produce tormented tormentors.

Stephens's concern with desire does not, of course, suddenly emerge in 1923 with the publication of Deirdre. As Brigit Bramsbäck knows, even Stephens's early prose articles in the Sinn Féin begin to explore later literary themes and “cannot be dismissed as unimportant work irrelevant to his later literary output, or to his development as a writer.”³ In “Tattered Thoughts,” an essay which appeared in 1907, Stephens begins to touch on “ethical problems, such as good and evil, vice and virtue, passion and self-control.”⁴ But perhaps The Crock of Gold, Stephens's 1912 fable, which brought him literary acclaim, best illustrates the artist's early concern with desire. At this time and throughout the 1920s, Stephens was still partially under the influence of theosophy, a cult which proposed that life's goal was the unity of all living things in an Absolute Being.⁵ To achieve such unity, the theosophist felt, “life on earth must be spent in attaining self-perfection through the inspiration of the divine will.”⁶ The combining of theosophy and fairy faith by figures like W. B. Yeats, George Russell, William Sharp (Fiona Macleod), and Maud Gonne was intended “to transfigure the world and make of Tara a new Jerusalem.”⁷ Stephens in The Crock of Gold recognized desire as the quality which prevented men from living in such a state of unified perfection.

The Crock of Gold is largely about desire. Although the novel sports clever conversations between the most unlikely pairs—an ass and a spider, a cow and a fly—and although it is rich in imaginative playfulness—leprechauns steal wash-boards, revenge robberies, and play with Seumas Beg and Brigid Beg in “the hole at the foot of the tree”⁸—the central story concerns the desires and adventures of the Philosopher and Caitilin Ni Murrachu, a farmer's daughter.⁹ Indeed, in an unpublished letter to James B. Pinker (July 13, 1912), Stephens's publisher, the novelist even tried to persuade Pinker to change the title of this book to The Thin, Thin Woman's Husband.¹⁰ The story is the Philosopher's story and Caitilin's story. Both have wrong desires, both eventually become aware of these desires, and both discover how to attain happiness and that more perfect state of existence Stephens searches to find for himself, for his characters, and—we might imagine—for his readers.

The adventures of the Philosopher and Caitilin seem, on the surface, as full of charm as the leprechauns' adventures. The Philosopher, a strange man whose face looks “as though [it] were made of parchment,” and who has “ink under [his nails]” (CG 3) all the time, lives in a Dark Wood, thinking, and dispenses his thoughts to neighbors who request advice. One day the farmer Meehawl O Murrachu asks the Philosopher's counsel about Caitilin, the farmer's daughter who has run away with the god Pan. The Philosopher offers to call on the services of Angus Óg. Angus Óg does intercede, taking Caitilin as his own lover. After various adventures, the Philosopher returns home, only to be arrested by police, rescued by leprechauns, but eventually imprisoned in the city. The Thin Woman of Inis Magrath, the Philosopher's wife, goes to Angus Óg for help. The book ends as Angus Óg musters the host of fairy Ireland. They, together, “panting for joy, dancing, dancing, dancing for joy” (CG 228), release the Philosopher from his prison. Within this charming plot, however, Caitilin and the Philosopher make the most significant discoveries of their lives. Before Angus Óg appears, Caitilin lusts for Pan: she loves the shaggy legs of the god because they appeal to the beast within her. Although Pan carefully explains the advantages of the sensual life to Caitilin before she chooses to live with him, she does not go with him “because of love, nor because his words have been understood by her, but only because he was naked and unashamed” (CG 46).

Stephens does not condemn the enjoyment of physical pleasures. His works are full of song and dance and loveliness. But this pleasure-seeking nature of Stephens's men and women, as his biographer Hilary Pyle observes, must be “gaily united with the spiritual.”¹¹ Caitilin, thus, comes to realize that the happiness Pan promises her is partial at best. “Pan had told her that he was the giver of happiness, but he had given her only unrest and fever and a longing which could not be satisfied” (CG 107–108). Contentment and peace come to Caitilin only after she forsakes Pan, her desire, and chooses to unite herself with Angus Óg, a figure Augustine Martin labels “intellect spiritualized.”¹² This time she follows a man not because “she had understood his words, nor because he was naked and unashamed, but only because his need of her was very great.” Therefore, “she loved him, and stayed his feet in the way, and was concerned lest he should stumble” (CG 115). As Pyle recognizes, in this work, “Realization of the doctrine of annihilation of self alone brings Happiness.”¹³ Caitilin goes with Angus Óg for no reason or desire of her own, but only because he has announced with humility, “‘I want you, because the world has forgotten me’” (CG 113).¹⁴

We must, of course, remember at this point that, although his plea is poignant, humble, and “spiritualized,” as Martin observes, something is not quite right. For if desire is a negative quality in Stephens, will not Angus Óg's desire be a negative force in this relationship? The problem seems one of style—Stephens's use of allegory—rather than of characterization. His formula is inexact, but the confusion that results is only temporary and brief. What matters most is that Caitilin discovers that “happiness is not laughter or satisfaction, and that no person can be happy for themselves alone.” She was not an individual any longer but, rather, “part of a mighty organism” in which “all things were her brothers and sisters.”

The Philosopher must learn how to rid himself of his greed for knowledge. Although, in the second chapter of The Crock of Gold he considers the possibility that life might contain more than intellect,¹⁵ his greed for wisdom continues until he confronts Caitilin and Angus Óg. Before this, the Philosopher, whenever asked to consider a genuine human concern of another individual, finds exploring the full intellectual implications of the problem much more worthwhile than offering compassionate advice and encouragement. At one point, for example, the leprechauns of Gort na Cloca Mora kidnap the Philosopher's own children. His wife, the Thin Woman, cannot, even in her despair, make him understand the emotional significance of the situation. Instead, he can only answer her repeated question—“‘Will you not understand?’”—by defining “kidnapping” historically and by comparing it to the practices of ants and of other “insectivora” (CG 32–33). The Thin Woman can put lumps in his stirabout and afflict him with “the most extraordinary attack of rheumatism he had ever known” (CG 34), but she cannot make him see beyond his treasured intellect.

The Philosopher overcomes his desire for intellectual superiority and achieves a more perfect state of existence only after he learns, from Caitilin's beauty and Angus Óg's sympathy, that “‘the head does not hear anything until the heart has listened, and that what the heart knows to-day the head will understand tomorrow’” (CG 128). He begins to show signs of softening when he kisses an ugly fat woman by the wayside even before he reaches the god Angus Óg. Entering the god's cave, he symbolically prostrates himself before Angus Óg, showing what Martin rightly calls “the homage of the celebrating intellect to the higher spirituality.”¹⁶ Cured of his desire, the Philosopher now can give to others, call all “brothers and sisters.” On the return from his journey, for instance, he shares a small piece of cake with four men and three women: “‘All men are brothers, and it may be that these people are as hungry as I am’” (CG 125), the Philosopher comments. Arriving home, he kisses his wife with “unaccustomed tenderness” and tells her freely, “‘Wife, I cannot say how joyful I am to see your good face again’.” His wife weeps, praising loudly her husband's new-found “comeliness and goodness” (CG 141).

The Stephens of the 1920s did not forget his exploration of desire in his 1912 The Crock of Gold. From 1920 to 1928 he expanded, refined, and further analyzed ideas which first appeared in this early work. A short story, first published in the June, 1920, edition of Dial and later in Etched in Moonlight, even takes its title from this theme—“Desire.” In the story, a businessman is confronted with an age-old dilemma. For having saved him from being hit by a car, a religiously symbolic pedestrian, who speaks of religion, life, death, mind,”¹⁷ offers the man anything he desires. Within this framework, Stephens continues to examine sins resulting from selfish wishes, wishes that deny the theosophic principle of the unity of all living things and place a single individual above the community of all living creatures. Although the relationship of the businessman-husband and wife in “Desire” differs in obvious ways from the relationship of Pan and Caitilin, and from that of the Philosopher and Thin Woman at the beginning of the novel, Stephens seems here to be continuing his look into relationships made up of people who “take” instead of “give.” Here avarice and ambition replace lust and greed for knowledge, but the selfish motive behind all four types of desire remains essentially the same.

The man can reasonably discuss the harmful effects of wanting wealth and superior wisdom, but he cannot recognize the destructiveness of his own personal vanity and ambition. He reasons that his and his wife's needs and fancies “can be readily satisfied by the money [they] already have” (EM 7). And he thinks that great knowledge would only alienate him from his friends and associates. At one point he is almost ready to give up desiring entirely. The man asks the pedestrian what the pedestrian would wish for in his place; the pedestrian's answer, “that he should not ask for anything,” astonishes, almost alarms the man at first. Gradually, though, he comes to consider it seriously. But his vanity prevents him from vowing allegiance to this restful-sounding position. At last he informs the pedestrian that he desires to remain forty-eight until he dies, “with all the equipment of [his] present state unimpaired” (EM 9). His wife, however, obtuse throughout the rest of the story, does, upon learning of her husband's decision, make a comment which the reader has perhaps already thought about:

“It is not fair to me,” she explained. “You are older than I am now, but in a few years this will mean that I shall be needlessly older than you. I think it was not a loyal wish.”

(EM 10)

The man proceeds to explain that he has already considered his wife's objection, but his explanation is insensitive and incomplete, the utterance of a vain man who refuses to admit his vanity. But Stephens does not give his businessman the chance he gives his Philosopher, the chance to awaken to his sin and repent. The man dies the night after he wishes to be forever forty-eight.¹⁸

The avarice of the man's wife is perhaps more obvious than the man's own greed, but although Stephens feels the need to explore her particular weakness, he also again seems to suggest that selfishness is selfishness, no matter what form it takes. Desire to possess great wealth and numerous possessions symbolically consumes the wife. She cannot believe her husband had not chosen to ask for money. “‘One always has need of money’” (EM 7), she reminds him. During the night, the woman dreams of taking a journey to the Arctic. Nearly all talk on board ship centers on baggage, the symbol of material possessions. The woman is “greatly concerned with baggage, and with counting and going over the various articles that she had brought against arctic weather” (EM 12). But the foolish woman prefers to hoard her things, delighting in their possession rather than in their use. Eventually, the rest of the people on board as well as the ship itself abandon her to a wilderness of frozen ice. Her desire, at least in dream, proves fatal.

In Deirdre, Stephens's 1923 treatment of a chapter from the Ulster epic, Táin Bó Cuálnge, we find an epic retelling structured largely on the artist's concern with the desires of two figures, Conachúr and Deirdre. But Stephens's Deidre is a novel that bears the mark of not only a skillful narrator, but also of an artist greatly interested in examining psychological motives. Stephens views the lust and ambition of Conachúr as the primary factor which brings disaster to the sons of Usnach: Stephens could never have, like Lady Gregory, titled his treatment “Fate of the Sons of Usnach.”¹⁹ Conachúr's character is far too developed and his motives much too clearly defined for Stephens's few brief references to fate to be very convincing. The king's desires are those desires of a man growing old: the wish to satisfy the last fires of lust and to possess “Absolute Beauty” so that he, too, might still feel beautiful and powerful, the finest and most desirable match in the kingdom.

After Deirdre flees with Naoise to Alba, Conachúr confides to Levarcham, Deirdre's guardian, that his sleep is poisoned by his lust for Deirdre. Young men go wild once in awhile, he comments, “‘and it is their right: but older men can be of a wildness that no young man can understand’.”²⁰ His definition of love is marked by the strange and perverse “wildness” of his character: love, he tells Levarcham,

… is savagery in the blood, and pain in the bone, and greed and despair in the mind. It is to be thirsty in the night and unslaked in the day. It is to carry memory like a thorn in the heart. It is to drip one's blood as one walks.

(D 118)

As a detached narrator, Stephens notes, “Conachúr's hard mind would not flinch when once his lusts were aroused” (D 11). His concern with the place of desire in existence is so vital to his personal and artistic philosophy, however, that he later remarks as an involved commentator and moralizer. “While one desire remains in the heart happiness may not come there,” Stephens explains.

For to desire is to be incomplete and it is the badge of dependence, the signal of unhappiness, and to be freed from that is to be freed from every fetter that can possibly be forged. Man becomes god when he finds his satisfactions within himself, but his dreams then are others than those that harried Concachúr as a pack of hounds harry a fox.

(D 110)

No longer working with allegory, as in The Crock of Gold, Stephens here creates a unique figure, upon whose motives he comments directly and forcefully.

The second aspect of Conachúr's desire centers on his ambition to possess “Absolute Beauty” and to gain fame and youth from such an acquisition. In The Crock of Gold, the Thin Woman meets three men upon her journey to Angus Óg, the Three Absolutes—“the Most Beautiful Man, the Strongest Man and the Ugliest Man” (CG 214). They claim that they are “what humanity desire” (CG 215). The Thin Woman perceives the disaster of desiring any one of these Absolutes. “No mere appetite or passion of any kind dare become imperative in the presence of the Shining One,” she notes, “and this, in a more limited degree is true also of every form of beauty.” In the presence of beauty, we must rid ourselves of “the desire of materiality”; we must look on beauty not with lust, but with “fear and sadness” (CG 210–211).

Vain, ambitious Conachúr, however, never has the Thin Woman's insight. To him, Deirdre's beauty continues to represent a final goal, a treasured possession. Pathetically, thinking about possessing such a perfect creature makes Conachúr dream that he is the center of the universe, master and light of all the world. He imagines that “all swing about him as the world swings round the sun” (D 96). Deirdre's beauty to Conachúr becomes an object he desires through his vanity and ambition. His comment after seeing her as a young woman for the first time, “‘She is for no man but the king. She shall be my wife until Doom’” (D 80), reveals none of the reverence the Thin Woman speaks of, none of the humble reverence the speaker of Stephens's poem “Deirdre” also expresses:

No man can bend before her! No man say—
What could one say to her? There are no words
That one could say to her!(21)

When Levarcham deceptively tells Conachúr that Deirdre's hard life in Alba has made her cheeks hollow and her eyes red, has indeed ruined her beauty, the king does not “go apart and mourn” the loss of beauty, but quickly and selfishly loses all desire for her. “‘There ends a tale and seven of my poor years!’” (D 165) he laments. One cannot and must not desire beauty, Stephens seems to say, though, as his poem indicates, one can humbly revere it in fear and sadness.

Deirdre also desires. Stephens views her desire for Naoise, however, as a natural part of the awakening of young love: perhaps not “lust” but “youthful passion” best describes this variety of desire. Deirdre becomes an heroic figure in Stephens's work because she eventually loses desire through self-sacrifice and self-renunication, unlike the unredeemed Conachúr. Deirdre is in many ways a carefully, lyrically developed Caitilin. She is definitely part of a fiction that moves much closer to realism than The Crock of Gold. Although she is unified, simple, and immediately understandable, she is too well-rounded to be strictly allegorical, like her predecessor. The reader watches Deirdre as she tries to order the vague, unfamiliar desires awakening within her. After seeing Naoise, she does not know exactly what she wants, but whatever it is, Stephens notes, “her senses wanted it with a whole uncontrollable mental greed that made her a person she did not recognize and could not battle with” (D 63). But Stephens does not condemn her desire, because for the young “desire is though not yet translated” (D 70).

Fortunately, Deirdre eventually translates her desire into surrender. Standing before her lover in the moonlit forest, “A lethargy that was utter surrender stole into her limbs” and “she did not desire” (D 71) any longer. Her existence from this transformation until her death is marked by complete devotion to and concern for Naoise and his brothers; “while his hand continued to guide she would go, and when it ceased she would no longer be capable of either movement or repose” (D 71). Naoise is for her “her beloved, her comrade, the very red of her heart, and her choice choice” (D 98). As Deirdre considers returning to Ireland, her fear for Naoise's life leads her to renounce every reminder of her own identity: “‘I am not Deirdre any more, I am Misery’” (D 148).

Stephens keeps the ending of his story in line with his development Deirdre. Unlike Lady Gregory's Deirdre, Stephens's Deirdre does not steal a knife from a carpenter and kill herself on the shore at night. No weapon, no outside force brings Deirdre death. Naoise is, indeed, “the very red of her heart,” and she cannot survive without him. After singing a keen for the sons of Usnach, she recites a poem, and, the author writes, “bowed over her husband's body: she sipped of his blood, and she died there upon his body” (D 202). She renounces her “Self” to Naoise, and when breath leaves him, she loses that self because it belongs to her lover. In the process, she restores order to the world, to the extent that she is able, by accepting responsibility for the tragic consequences of hubris.

Stephens's In the Land of Youth (1924), consists of two separate books. Part One recounts Nera's adventures in the land of the Shí, the story of Friuc and Rucht, the two swineherds who change into the Brown and the White-Horned bulls, and the tale of Angus Óg's search for Caer, a tale Lady Gregory examines in her chapter, “The Dream of Angus Óg.” Part Two deals with a single event, the history of Etain. Hilary Pyle, in her chapter “Irish Epic,” finds the two parts linked “by Maeve and her companions and the pending Tain.”²² Yet, the theme of desire also helps unify In the Land of Youth.

Nera's adventure which begins Part One, “The Feast of Samhain,” provides not only a temporal frame, as Pyle suggests, but also a thematic one. True, Nera does locate Maeve in time and he does begin the “storytelling” process that leads to Maeve's tales. On the night of Samhain, the night mortals may enter the land of Faery, Nera accepts Maeve and Ailill's challenge to “‘go to the hill where the outlaws were hanged yesterday,’” and “‘tie a withy round the foot of one of the hanging man.’” For this Ailill promises, “‘I will give you a present.’”²³ On his return from the task, Nera sees the realm of Cruachan Ai aflame and, lost and confused, follows the men of the Shi because “he could not conceive of anything else to do” (LY 20). Not until he spends thirteen days faery time and thirteen minutes mortal time in the Land of Youth does Nera return to Maeve, and to a kingdom that has not really been destroyed by the faery king Ethal Anbual and his followers after all. He narrates his fantastic experience, which in turn leads Maeve to her retelling of her attack on the Shí of Cruachan.

But, during the precious thirteen days or minutes Nera spends in faery, he becomes acquainted, through his lovely unearthly female “Companion,” with a theory of desire unknown and unaccepted by mortals. Nera's Companion's first statement concerning the land of wonder he has happened upon seems to indicate a community marked by undisciplined, rampant desire. “‘We wish, and what we wish we get’” (LY 35), she says. But Nera soon discovers that desire is carefully controlled and exercised in the Land of the Young. Wishes have to be for simple things all can enjoy, and they never can consist of requests for what is another's. The will and the emotions determine together what should be wished for. Nera soon discovers that “what he had regarded as wishing was merely a lax wandering of the mind; a superficial fancying in which, although his sympathies were engaged, his mind or will was quiescent” (LY 38–40). The Companion isolates those things worth wishing for: “Sunlight and the song of birds, good food and health, a contented mind and a good understanding” (LY 44). The Companion remembers that before she came to the Land of Youth, she had little peace, and she attributes this to the mortal concept of desire—coveting what another has or wants.

Though Nera is momentarily content to live peacefully in a small pastoral faery cottage with his Companion, he quickly grows restless with her idea of desire, the controlling idea of the Land of the Young. He becomes proof that his Companion's concept of mortal desire is, indeed, correct. Even here, Nera continues to believe that “the things worth having were those which other people owned or lacked, and he thought there was small value in possessions which anybody might enjoy who cared to want them” (LY 44). Remembering the gold-hilted sword Ailill has promised him upon safe return from the swinging miscreants, Nera cries, “‘I want the prize I won; I have been cheated out of my prize’” (LY 44), turns a deep purple, strikes the table, clenches his fists, and personifies the “torment” the Companion has outlined. He flees the Land of Youth and his weeping Companion not primarily for the reason Lady Gregory's Nera leaves—to warn Maeve of the danger from the Shí next Samhain Feast—but to receive the gold sword he covets.

Stephens further stresses the link between the tormented soul and covetousness when he notes that Nera thinks only “of the gold-hilted blade which would leave a King's side to be strapped on his own lean thigh” (LY 55) as he journeys back to Maeve and Ailill, and that with such thoughts he becomes “impatient, bewildered, tormented [italics mine]” (LY 55). Nera finds permanent contentment only after he decides to return to the Land of the Shí forever, to give up desire as he has known it among mortals. Nera's experience, thus, is still more than a frame for the rest of Part One, as Pyle suggests, and still more than a story of “How he finds a love there, and eventually returns to her,”²⁴ as George B. Saul claims. It represents an examination of healthy desires, wishes that benefit all creatures, and unhealthy desires, covetous, greedy, ambitious wishes that hurt or harm fellow creatures. Unhealthy desiring, particularly in the forms of covetousness and ambition, becomes the theme for the remaining two sections of Part One and for the single event in Part Two.

After Nera announces his plan to return to the Land of the Young, Maeve begins to explain to the inquisitive Fergus why she sacked the Shí of Cruachan. Her explanation concerns Angus Óg's desire for Caer, daughter of Ethal Anbual, and Stephens's previously presented comments on covetous desire. The men of the Shí—Dagda, Fergne, and Bove—know that Angus Óg's desire for Caer, an ethereal creature he has only seen in a vision which makes him “sick from desire and dissatisfaction” (LY 68), is unhealthy. They recognize that Angus Óg, possessor of youth, beauty, and magic, does not exhibit the desire Nera's companion defines—desire based on will, emotion, and selflessness. When Ethal Anbual announces that the Dagda has no right to demand Caer, the Dagda says, “‘And it is true that I have no such right. And therefore, there is no more to be said on this matter, and we may all go home’” (LY 107). Even Angus Óg recognizes the danger of his desire “‘I have no power,’” he cries peevishly “‘I am consumed by desire, and cannot control my will’” (LY 106).

Bove, trying to solve the affair, makes the distinction Nera's Companion has previously made between god-like and mortal desire. “‘It's wrong for us to do wrong,’” he says, “‘but let's have mortals do our wrong: wrongdoing is the base of their existence’” (LY 107). And one day is, indeed, sufficient time for Maeve to ravage the Shí. Not only does she take the lovely daughter of Ethnal Anbual, but also she takes his two prized bulls, the White-Horned and the Brown. Maeve partially defends her capture of Caer, claiming that Caer willingly wants to go with Angus Óg, that the girl sent the vision herself and “‘she sent it because she wanted Angus Óg to see her and to desire her, and to come after her’” (LY 118), but she cannot justify her taking of the bulls. Stephens, directly, seems to suggest that the War of the Bull of Cúalnge results from Maeve's desire to possess the treasure of another.

While narrating the story of Angus mac an Óg, Maeve includes Bove's explanation of the feud of Friuc and Rucht, the two swineherds who eventually become the Brown and White-Horned bulls that play such a major role in the war between Connacht and Ulster. The disagreement between the Munster swineherd and the Connacht swineherd emerges here from selfish ambition. Both swineherds wish to be acclaimed the best swineherd in Ireland. Possession of such a title on the part of either will immediately hurt the other, however. Unable to see this, or refusing to recognize it, Friuc and Rucht continue to fight for mortal acclaim. In the form of birds, dragons, and finally bulls, they battle for the title that torments their souls and bodies. Maeve's desire for the bulls is matched by the bulls' desire for an equally unhealthy, selfish treasure.

In Part Two, “The Feast of Lugnasa,” Maeve tells another story across still another banquet table. Recalling the incidents that led to her uncle Eochaid Airmen's sacking of the Shí, she narrates the desires, some selfless and some selfish, of many men for the beautiful Etain, as well as the desires of other women for Etain's lovers. We learn as Maeve's tale commences that Midir, lord of the Shí of Bri Leith, has two wives: Fuamnach and Etain. He adores Etain and endures Fuamnach. But when Angus Óg, his pupil for a time, expresses his love for Etain and Etain admits her eagerness to live with Angus Óg, Midir agrees. Perfect desire, he knows, does not allow one to keep an unwilling partner. Fuamnach, however, has also fallen in love with Angus Óg. Being ruled by imperfect desire, she cannot give up someone belonging to another, as Midir has. Fuamnach cannot “recall her mind from Angus” (LY 143). She hires the druid Bresil Etarlaim to turn Etain into an insect and send her into the world of mortals. Rather justly, we feel, Angus Óg beheads Fuamnach, “druidess” and “she wolf,” for her selfish act, her unreasonable desire.

Etain becomes involved in a second complex web of desire after she is reborn, through Etar, as a mortal into a mortal world. For a time she shares perfect love and harmony with Eochaid Airem, the high ruler of Tara. Their love is marked by emotion, understanding, and sacrifice: “They were not alone: they were together. They were not lonely: they were together. They were not uncared for: they cared for one another” (LY 187). But, after a time, Midir, unable to maintain his perfect desire, covets Etain and returns in the form of Ailill, Eochaid's younger brother, to win her back. No longer does he consider the feelings of the pair of contented mortal lovers: he wants Etain, willing or unwilling. As Ailill, he tries to woo her with the sensual promises of the Shí's Death Song, but she stops her ears and thinks only of Eochaid's words, “—My branch! My Love! My Lamb!” (LY 227). Maeve ends her tale by having Midir return during the Feast of Gracious Commemoration to try again to sieze Etain. Against her will, he turns her into a swan and they fly away together. Maeve does not disclose the sacking of the Shí by Eochaid, but in terms of wrong and rightful desire, she certainly justifies the action her narrative anticipates.

Once again, Stephens seems to say that we must not desire a thing that belongs to another. Such desire, as Nera illustrates in the very beginning of In the Land of Youth, brings only torment to the covetor's soul and only sorrow, unhappiness, and grief to the person forced to relinquish his possession. Willing love is the only sort worth having, and those who desire the love of an unwilling member become tormentors of the innocent.

Four years elapsed before Stephens published another prose work.²⁵ Not surprisingly, the volume that appeared in 1928, Etched in Moonlight, contained several short and not-so-short stories that once again pursued the theme of desire. His philosophy here, several years later, is remarkably consistent with that in his earlier works. In her conclusion, Hilary Pyle regretted there was “no history of an internal struggle and resultant triumph.”²⁶ Yet, although Stephens continues to examine the nature and mental state of the covetor in “Etched in Moonlight,” his advice for escaping desire does change, slightly, owing partly to the increasing influence of Oriental religion on his life, an influence that eventually resulted in his acceptance of Buddhist doctrine. In both his early work of the 1920s and in “Etched in Moonlight,” the self must be annihilated, but in this later work such annihilation can be best accomplished through the disciplined mind rather than the compassionate, generous heart.

In “Etched in Moonlight” Stephens focuses on another tormented character. Yet, Stephens here dwells much more deeply on the character's mental sufferings than on even Nera's. In the story, a man—we never learn his name—recounts a strange dream to his friend. In the dream, a beautiful woman must choose to marry him or another man, a strong, fair, blue-eyed figure. She chooses the second, but accepts the dreamer as a sincere friend and companion and innocently includes him in all of her decisions, plans, and hopes. But the dreamer, driven by envy and covetousness, cannot be at peace with the offerings the pair makes to him—“friendship, companionship, and more than all, gaiety” (EM 122). He hopes to kill the lovers by immuring them in an old castle. But they escape. After several years, he himself is locked within the castle, also to be freed, not only from the ancient structure, but also from his self.

The Stephens of the late 1920s sees the will as the creator of reality and seeks peace through training and disciplining this will. The trained mind must annihilate desire for, when desire controls the will, a person's reality consists not of peace, but of anguish, torment, and ignorance. In this man's dream, “it is true that the mind thinks only what desire dictates” (EM 94). The dreamer has no peace; desire shapes his world. Even before the central character learns of his lady's refusal, his mind is “full of disquietude, impatience, anger” (EM 81). After learning of his position, he tries to control his will: “I justified myself in the thought that nothing was worth this trouble; and that nothing was so desirable but it could be matched elsewhere, or done without” (EM 94). But he finds that he cannot do without the pride of having been chosen by his lady, and soon his mood again quickly changes “from impatience to anger, and from that to almost blind fury” (EM 104). He abandons his imprisoned companions and flees the country. A new place provides no additional contentment, however. Even after ten years, the man cannot forget his crime, the jealousy that drove him to desert two innocents enclosed by fifteen-foot thick walls. “A buried thought like a buried body will rot,” the dreamer knows. “And it will spread a pestilence through the moral being that is its grave or its gaoler” (EM 107). He returns to his country to learn that his friends are safe. Yet, peace still remains a distant possession until he himself finds a way out of the castle.

In the final phase of the dream, Stephens asserts his belief that joy and peace fill the man whose self is blotted out by concentration on a single object, on “Ultimate Reality.” Thus, the central character in “Etched in Moonlight” learns to calm himself in the dungeon by thinking of God. It seems to him “that God was the blankness behind, which might advance. And that nothing was so awful as the thought of Him—unimaginable and real! withheld, and imminent, and threatening, and terrific!” (EM 137). Concentration translates him: desire leaves; happiness, contentment, and peace replace it. The knowledge that he “was nowhere, and it was real,” that he “was nothing and [he] was enduring” (EM 139), knowledge symbolized by the man's removal from the moon, here a symbol of complete subjectivity, allows him to forget the desires and shame of the past and to enjoy thoroughly “this new-found rest and contentment” (EM 144). The final lines of “Etched in Moonlight” are ambiguous, but seem most appropriately interpreted as a symbolic loss of self. The dreamer recalls,

Then something, a self of me, detached itself from me, and stood forward and looked also. I saw myself. My mouth was twisted sidewards in a jolly grin. My eyes were turned inwards in a comical squint, and my chin was all a sop of my own saliva. I looked at myself for a mortal moment, and I awakened.

(EM 144–145)

Perhaps his life ends, or the man goes mad, as Pyle suggests,²⁷ but no matter, he has in any case been able to blot the self out.

In The Crock of Gold, Caitilin learns that “the duty of life is the sacrifice of self; it is to renounce the ltttle ego that the mighty ego may be freed” (CG 221). Stephens's early distinction between “the little ego” and “the mighty ego” is an important one that informs his prose throughout the 1920s. The “little ego” is always the product of the desirous soul: the Philosopher wants “Absolute Wisdom,” Caitilin seeks intense sexual experience; Deirdre hopes for a sensual awakening; Nera covets another's gold-hilted sword; the dreamer years for his lost lady and lost pride. When these characters do repudiate their selves, they blot out the selfhood associated with desire and a new self, “the mighty ego” can be loosed by giving love and compassion to another individual. The “mighty ego” then unites itself with all mankind, a power Stephens speaks of in his essay “On Prose and Verse” as “the attitude of universal self identification.”²⁸

In “Theme with Variations,” Stephens's previously mentioned long poem of 1929, he describes this new selfhood.

He says
—Come,
And give,
And serve
Through all thy day:
And, all what time
We live,
I, too,
Will serve,
And give—
Every woman knows
When she doth give,
Not take,
That she doth live,
Not fake:(29)

Serving, giving, and finally, loving, are the qualities of the “mighty ego.” The “mighty ego” in Stephens's 1928 “Etched in Moonlight” is set free in a slightly different manner, as we have seen. Stephens here encourages those who desire to discipline their minds and through concentration on “Ultimate Reality,” to drive out the desirous “little self” and create the reality of a self that is alone and at peace, actively contemplating the unity of all life.

Stephens never fails to see desire as the mark of an incomplete, imperfect human being and selfishness as the cause of such imperfection. In his manuscript for The Symbol Song (1929), Stephens interprets the twelve symbols that accompany this old song. The eleventh question—“I'll give you Eleven-O; / (Green grow the rushes-O: / What is your Eleven-O?,”—is answered by the line, “Eleven for the Eleven who went to heaven.” Stephens notes that this line signifies “The Apostles, less Judas.”³⁰ Judas, the desirer, is indeed a central symbol for Stephens. This imperfect human being, like Stephens's desirers, will have little chance of ever reaching heaven or being counted among Stephens's true disciples.

Notes

1. Kings and the Moon (London: MacMillan, 1938), pp. 55–56.

2. “Little Things,” Manuscript Collection: Kent State University Library, 1924.

3. James Stephens. A Literary and Bibliographical Study (Upsala: A.-B. Lundequistska Bokhandeln, 1959), p. 41.

4. Ibid., p. 36.

5. Although only theosophy and, later, Buddhism, will be mentioned for this particular study, at work in Stephens' life were, of course, other philosophical influences: his putative Presbyterian experience; his lifelong preoccupation with Blake; his interest in Freud and Plotinus; and the unusual version of Judiasm propounded by his friend Koteliansky.

6. Hilary Pyle, James Stephens. His Work and an Account of His Life (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 67.

7. Augustine Martin, “The Crock of Gold: Fifty Years After,” Colby Library Quarterly, Series VI, 151.

8. James Stephens, The Crock of Gold (New York: MacMillan, 1947), p. 54. Future references to this work will be parenthetically cited in the text, thus: (CG 54).

9. The Old Philosopher first appears in Stephens' Sinn Féin articles. As Brigit Bramsbäck notes, most of these original passages were revised and included in The Crock of Gold or in the section “There is a Tavern in the Town” in Here Are the Ladies (Bramsbäck, p. 30).

10. Manuscript Collection: Kent State University Library.

11. Pyle, pp. 51–52.

12. Martin, p. 153.

13. Pyle, p. 51.

14. Clarice Short, in her article “James Stephens' Women,” Western Humanities Review, X (1955), 285–288, views Caitilin's self-sacrifice as well as the Thin Woman's as the product of “an innate compulsion to mother and protect” (288). Her analysis of this point, as well as her general thesis that women for Stephens represent “the return to primitivism” (285)—seen as those basic responses that predate “intellectualism”?)—continues to suggest that Stephens more frequently idealizes women and men.

15. The Philosopher's friend, another Philosopher, commits suicide—by intensely gyrating on his toes!—because he feels he can gather no more wisdon. “‘I have attained to all the wisdom which I am fitted to bear. … All that I have read lately I knew before: all that I have thought has been but a recapitulation of old and wearisome ideas.’” The second Philosopher reflects, “‘It has occurred to me, brother, that wisdom may not be the end of everything. Goodness and kindliness are, perhaps, beyond wisdom. Is it not possible that the ultimate end is gaiety and music and a dance of joy?’” (CG 11–12).

16. Martin, p. 153.

17. Etched in Moonlight (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1928), p. 10. Future references to this work will be parenthetically cited in the text, thus: (EM 10).

18. This death, obviously, is similar to the suicide of the First Philosopher in The Crock of Gold Both deaths are mysterious and supernatural, beyond rational explanation.

19. Lady Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), Chapter VII.

20. James Stephens, Deirdre (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 118. Future references to this work will be parenthetically cited in the text, thus: (D 118).

21. Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1926), p. 69.

22. Pyle, p. 103.

23. James Stephens, In the Land of Youth (New York: Macmillan, 1924), p. 6. Future references to this work will be parenthetically cited in the text, thus: (LY 6).

24. Withdrawn in Gold: Three Commentaries on Genius (The Hague: Mouton and Company, 1970), p. 26.

25. In an unpublished letter to André Brule (October 2, 1927) in the Manuscript Collection of the Kent State University Library, James Stephens writes, “I've been doing nothing except to make myself adept in the art of not being a literary man. i.e., not writing, and not even wanting to write. However, the wolf will begin to howl shortly, and I shall have to write again to stay his clamours.” We cannot help but wonder, however, how much his inactivity might have been linked with his own unwillingness to desire. Stephens' progressive literary concern to give up desire might be linked to his own surrender of the active life.

26. Pyle, p. 174.

27. Pyle, p. 125.

28. Manuscript Collection: Kent State University Library, 1928.

29. Kings and the Moon, pp. 56–57.

30. The manuscript of The Symbol Song, as well as Stephens's introductory comments and music for the song, can be found in the Manuscript Collection at the Kent State University Library.