THE
ENNEADS

STEPHEN MACKENNA: A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH¹

Stephen MacKenna was born on 15 January 1872, son of a flamboyant and improvident Irish officer in the Indian Army who actually deserted his regiment in India in the 1860s to go and fight with Garibaldi in Italy. After many exciting adventures there, Captain Stephen Joseph MacKenna returned to England in 1869, married a girl of mixed Irish and English blood, Elizabeth Deane, and settled down, without any resources to speak of, to start a family.

His adventures in India and Italy had yielded him nothing but romantic memories, and he tried to make a living from turning these into romantic fiction for the young. His efforts were not blessed by much success, and some of Stephen’s earliest memories were of rejection slips coming in the post. To make matters worse, in 1883, having by now fathered ten children, Captain MacKenna died of malaria, leaving his family almost entirely unprovided for. Two of the boys, Stephen and Robert, were taken in by two maiden aunts. Stephen was sent to a small boarding school in Leicestershire, Ratcliffe College. He was a rather strange, quiet, child, physically awkward, but precociously interested in both literature and politics, and specifically in the politics of Irish nationalism. He excelled at Classics and English, but was hopeless at mathematics – later, in his Journal for February 1908, he described algebra in particular as ‘not only loathsome, but even in principle unintelligible’.

It was decided, therefore, that he should take a Classical degree at London University. However, he unexpectedly failed the examination in English – an astonishing result for one who was even then a passionate stylist, but it may have been that he displeased the examiners by being ‘too clever’, or otherwise perverse. This strange development, at any rate, ended at a stroke his chances of formal higher education, and contributed powerfully to a certain fatal diffidence, or ‘chip on the shoulder’, which manifested itself repeatedly in his later career, and which really denied MacKenna a good deal of the success as a writer he might otherwise have had.

After a brief brush with the religious life, he was next found a position by his aunts in a bank. They had by this time returned to live in Dublin, in the eminently respectable suburb of Rathmines, so it was in Dublin that he spent the next five or six years as a bank clerk, an activity for which he was profoundly ill-suited, and which made him increasingly restless. Two elements of his makeup, however, manifested themselves in this period: a sympathy with Irish nationalism, even in its most extreme forms, and a gift for translating. Even at school, a contemporary remembers his beautifully-turned renderings of Virgil and Sophocles. Now, in 1896, he produced an English version of the Imitatio Christi, and had it accepted by a Dublin publisher.

He was still only 24, but he now decided to break loose from respectability, in the form of the bank. He resolved to become a writer. His eldest brother Theobald was a journalist with the Daily Chronicle in London, and he helped Stephen to get a job on a London newspaper. He reported events such as fires and accidents for a year, while living with his family in Brixton, using up most of his money buying books, and most of his spare time reading them. He also joined a number of Irish patriotic societies, and flattered himself that he had attracted the notice of the Brixton police.

There was here, perhaps, an element of swashbuckling inherited from his father, though much sublimated. MacKenna was never a man of violence, on any practical level. A reflection in his journal for 27 June 1907 illustrates nicely his feeling of being an outsider: ‘There is deep down in me something lawless. Always, whether my mind wills it or not, I find myself on the side not of the weeder but of the weeds.’

In the winter of 1896, he moved to Paris, as the Paris correspondent for an English Catholic journal. This began a particularly formative period of his life. He became a close friend of the playwright J. M. Synge, and of a number of other Irish exiles, political or aesthetic, and they starved happily together, frequenting the literary cafés of the time. MacKenna supplemented his Irish nationalism by developing broader sympathies for oppressed races elsewhere, particularly the Armenians and the Greeks.

In the spring of 1897, war broke out between Greece and Turkey, and MacKenna’s romantic philhellenism was fired. When he heard that the son of Garibaldi had organized an international brigade to help the Greeks, he resolved to join it, and set off for Athens. Despite many exciting, and some amusing, adventures, he never got involved in actual battle with the Turks, and by late autumn was back in Paris, quite penniless. In an article he wrote for the Dublin Weekly Freeman on the war that October, he makes some sharp, though affectionate, comments on Greece and the Greek character:

It is a land of speeches, and you need never be afraid of delivering richly coloured orations which could make you ridiculous in these colder-blooded countries… Almost every plunge which you make into the realms of the ridiculous brings you closer and closer into the core of their hearts.

In the midst of all these adventures, MacKenna was developing a philosophy, or view of life, which already brings him close to Plotinus. In a commonplace book which he began to keep in December 1897, we find such things as the following:

Behind and above the thinking and feeling and willing soul, or souls, is the real Man – the unalloyed soul, which studies and judges the others. It does not so much feel as see that the inferior souls of him, the outer husk of the spirit, feels. This is the calm, lovely thing, really untroubled by the vagaries of life, which presides over all…

or this, on Art:

The art of expression in poetry and philosophy is the art of descent: it is limiting and cabining the wide vision of the Spirit: it is telling a truth so as to be understood, not so as to be true; it is materialising the spiritual and losing much in the decanting.

MacKenna now entered on a period of three or four years of mere survival, during which he journeyed to London, Dublin and even New York, but always back to Paris, doing a little journalism, but often more menial jobs. Finally, in 1900, he came to the notice of Gordon Bennett, who edited the New York Herald in Paris, and Bennett put him to work as an interviewer, in which capacity he questioned such disparate figures as J. D. Rockefeller and Rodin (which led to a friendship with the latter).

At some point in 1902, he met at a friend’s studio a young American girl of Irish ancestry named Mary Bray, and they appear to have fallen immediately in love. They were married in London in January 1903, and not long after that MacKenna’s fortunes took a decided turn for the better. Indeed, between 1903 and 1907 he briefly attained a prosperity and a success to which he never again rose.

What happened was that his work for the Herald brought him to the notice of Joseph Pulitzer, owner and editor of the New York World, which led to Pulitzer appointing him continental representative of the World, with a large salary, an office in Paris, and a staff of assistants. In this capacity he travelled widely about Europe, and covered many notable events. The most significant of these, however, in the present context was the 1905 revolution in Russia. In the course of covering this event (which produced many memorable incidents, including visiting Tolstoy, in company with the Irish nationalist leader Michael Davitt), he was brought first into contact with Plotinus in St Petersburg, where he chanced upon a copy of Creuzer’s Oxford edition of the Enneads, which he then began to read while confined temporarily in his hotel room. One can only wonder how much progress he made, but by the beginning of 1907, as we can see from an entry in his journal for 29 March, he had already formed the idea of translating Plotinus into English. The idea grew on him, and later, on 5 December, he writes: ‘It seems to me that I must be born for him, and that somehow, some day, I must have nobly translated him.’

At this time also, as an antidote to a strong feeling that assailed him on his thirty-fifth birthday that he had achieved nothing of substance (which was, after all, true), he began to keep a powerfully introspective journal, which he maintained for about two and a half years, to June 1909. Its contents illustrate strikingly the importance that the project of translating Plotinus came to have in his life, and also makes painfully clear the streak of futility in his character which would certainly, as we shall see presently, have prevented the fulfilment of his ambition of translating the Enneads, had he not been kept relentlessly at it by others, in particular Sir Ernest Debenham.

Shortly after beginning the journal, he had a row with his employer, Joseph Pulitzer, and resigned his post on 4 May. The occasion for the row was absurd (Pulitzer had highhandedly ordered him to deliver some chickens and ducklings to the Gare de Lyon, for despatch to his yacht on the Riviera), but the reasons for the break ran deeper. MacKenna was really not comfortable doing anything so vulgar as making money. He rather despised journalism, although he was inextricably involved with it, and longed for a chance to do some ‘pure’ writing. The journal entry for 29 March 1907 is significant:

There is something high fantastical in the thought that if every day of my life I had a good hot piece of gossip, about some millionaire fool or some powerful businessman at play, to cable to New York, I should be well off and considered from New Year to Christmas; but if I put comely English about Plotinus and give him for the first time – and perhaps for all time – entire and clear and pleasantly readable to America and Australia and England, I shall certainly go about in old clothes and shrink from facing a post-office clerk. When I did very little and that better left wholly undone, I was a fatted bourgeois: work begins only when the ‘dear little cheques’ that paid me for an ugly idleness cease to flutter in.

There is a grimly prophetic quality about this entry, as we shall see. After his resignation, he and his wife Marie (as she now preferred to be called) stayed for a few months in their cottage at Clamart, and then in July moved to London. Marie actually had an income of her own, on which they could live modestly, but MacKenna did not wish to be dependent on this, so he continued to write for the Freeman’s Journal (the leading Irish nationalist daily), and in the summer of 1908 they moved back to Dublin, which was to be his home, with one interval, for the next sixteen years.

In literary theory, MacKenna was in some ways ahead of his time, and if he had come to maturity in the 1920s he might have become a successful avant-garde novelist; but his literary ideals were out of tune with Edwardian sensibility, which called for tightly-constructed plots and concrete detail, whereas he looked forward to a day when ‘plot will go by the board and real life will be taboo… the matter of books will be delicately critical, piercingly “psychological”, or wholly fantastic: we shall have the novel of the otherworld and of the deeper man’ (from a journal entry which Dodds quotes (Journal and Letters of Stephen MacKenna, p. 34), but does not for some reason include in his edition). This is indeed remarkably prescient (though there is no evidence that MacKenna much appreciated Joyce when he came along), but one may still doubt whether he would have had the stamina, without external compulsion, to complete such a novel.

During 1908, besides reading voluminously and brooding about problems of style, he essayed a specimen of Plotinus translation, producing the essay On Beauty (Enn. I. 6), with Bullen as publisher. This first effort, printed in a limited edition of 300 copies, sold out (though without much profit to its author). MacKenna later came to regard it as unsatisfactory, but it was a tangible start. In November, he joined the Freeman’s Journal on a permanent basis as a leader writer, and this gave him an occupation. He turned to learning Irish (another lifelong enthusiasm), and became involved in nationalist politics, literary and otherwise. Dublin was then, and for long afterwards, a great centre of conversation, and MacKenna was a superb practitioner of the art, in company with such friends as the poet and mystic A. E. (George Russell), the art critic and poet Thomas Bodkin, the Celtic scholar Osborne Bergin, the historian Edmund Curtis, and the young poets Padraic Colum, Thomas Mac-Donagh (later to be one of the leaders of the 1916 Insurrection), and James Stephens. From 1908 to 1913, the MacKennas’ house was a meeting place, on Saturday evenings, for all these and others, and the talk was brilliant.

E. R. Dodds’s description of his first encounter with MacKenna at about this time gives a most vivid and characteristic picture of him:

Entering what had been the drawing-room of some Georgian hostess, I saw a long lean man with grizzled hair and liquid brown eyes remote and melancholy as a peatbog; he was walking with a peculiar grace of movement very softly up and down the twilit room, swerving now and again in his course to avoid a jutting piece of furniture or a heap of books on the floor; his face, upturned and serious, wore the illuminated look of an El Greco saint; and as he walked he played upon a concertina.

He did not interrupt his stride or his music for our entrance, but as the tune ended his grave mouth suddenly wrinkled into a grin of welcome. I gaped, uncertain if what I had seen were pose or passion. Doubtless, like much of MacKenna’s behaviour, it was both – passion inviting you to laugh at it as pose, in the secret fear that you might laugh at it as passion.

Nothing further, however, was done with Plotinus. MacKenna had brought with him from Paris drafts of considerable portions of the Enneads, and originally had every hope of getting the whole project polished off in a few years. However, what gradually dawned on him (unassisted as he was by any trained Greek scholar) was both how fearfully difficult the syntax and word usage of Plotinus really is, and how bad a state the text was still in. The texts on which he was dependent, the 1883 Teubner edition of Richard Volkmann, and the earlier (1835) Oxford edition of Friedrich Creuzer, were – from the perspective of the present day, with the splendid Henry and Schwyzer edition (which took twenty-two years, indeed, from 1951 to 1973, to complete), and the Loeb edition of A. H. Armstrong (dependent on, but also improving on, Henry and Schwyzer) – grossly inadequate tools, in places making no sense at all. As for translations, the only respectable one was that of H. F. Müller into German (1878–80), and that, though competent, did no more, in obscure passages, than reproduce the obscurities of the original. What was needed was an interpretative translation, which would boldly tease out all the nuances of Plotinus’ crabbed and condensed language, and reproduce it in English of proper nobility. Such a task was something that no professional scholar would dare to take on, being all too aware of the obstacles. Of these MacKenna was initially blissfully ignorant.

In January 1912 a remarkable development occurred, which jogged Mac-Kenna’s elbow at a critical time. He received a letter from a certain Ernest Debenham, a wealthy British industrialist (founder of Debenham’s Stores) with literary and philosophical interests. Debenham had read and admired the translation of On Beauty, and now ventured to enquire when the complete Plotinus might be expected. This put MacKenna on the spot. He wrote back a rather waffling letter about working very slowly, and not letting any piece of the translation out of his hands before it was perfect. Debenham was intrigued by the discovery that MacKenna was not a Classical scholar, but a journalist without even a university degree, and actually offered to subsidize him, to give him leisure to complete the translation. This proposal MacKenna initially refused, partly through high-mindedness, no doubt, but partly, one must suspect, because he realized that this would nail him down to a task which he by this time might have preferred to leave in the realm of unrealized dreams, together with so many others of his projects. However, Debenham persisted, and outwitted him by arranging an ‘advance payment’ from the prospective publisher, Philip Lee Warner (publisher to the Medici Society). This MacKenna was prepared to accept. It was not until the first volume of the translation appeared in 1917 that MacKenna discovered that it was in fact Debenham who was paying, and by that time he was fairly launched on the great enterprise.

Before that, however, many complications supervened. In 1913, MacKenna became ill, initially with a mastoid, which required an operation, but then with neurasthenia, which caused headaches and dizzy spells, as well as debilitating bouts of depression and futility, such as were to afflict him for the rest of his life. These symptoms probably had a considerable psychosomatic element, brought on by the strain of being faced at last with the challenge of delivering on his long-standing dream, or having his bluff called.

In the autumn of 1913, MacKenna was persuaded to go to London for treatment, so he and Marie gave up their house in Dublin, and moved to a flat in Kensington. Here too there were interesting people to talk with, but MacKenna continued to be unwell and miserable. The outbreak of war found him profoundly ambivalent as to what Ireland’s role should be, but he did not favour the enthusiastic support of Britain being extended by the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, John Redmond. In the autumn of 1914, the MacKennas retired to Hove, where proximity to the sea revived him somewhat, but he was still unable, as he confessed in letters to Debenham, to face Plotinus without it bringing on fierce headaches, though he still saw it as his life’s work. In spring 1915 they returned to Hampstead, London, and then in early autumn, feeling homesick, to Dublin.

In Dublin, however, MacKenna would not resume work as a leader writer for the Freeman’s Journal, since he disapproved of its support for the War. He contributed only occasional articles (which were consequently ill paid), and devoted his energies to Plotinus. The Insurrection of Easter 1916 came as a complete surprise to him, despite his sympathies in that direction (his friend MacDonagh had told him nothing), and he even made an attempt to join the rebels in the General Post Office, an offer that was courteously declined by the leadership. He wrote, a year or so later, under an assumed name, a pamphlet commemorating the leaders who died, entitled Memories of the Dead.

In the face of these distractions, however, the translating of Plotinus went forward and, despite the endless squabbles with his publisher, Lee Warner, the first of the five splendid volumes appeared in 1917, containing the introductory material (most of which is reproduced in this edition), the Life of Plotinus by Porphyry, and the First Ennead. The format was more luxurious than MacKenna would have wished. He had hoped (unrealistically) for a popular format (such as Penguin Books is now providing!), which would make Plotinus available to all. The book received respectful praise from its few reviewers (it was warmly commended by Dean Inge, which pleased MacKenna greatly), but it was appearing at a bad time for such ventures, and sales were disappointingly small. MacKenna was hurt and defiant. In a letter to Amy Drucker some time after its publication he is uncompromising:

Delightful to hear from you, and the article very welcome though the poor man who did it exhibited himself, as most of them do, no more capable of noticing a philosophical book than the soldier-monkey of an organ-grinder. I hope if you do me the honour of looking into my book you will not stick at the first tractate as most people do, sticking in it: Plotinus was no yellow-journalist; he puts uppermost the dreariest and least tempting of his wares². Believe me, there are many fine and succulent things as you go on: I’d skip the first tract <and> read ‘Evil’, ‘Happiness’, and the ‘Preller–Ritter’ Extracts³ which combine, as I fondly imagine, passages of great beauty and moving power – though these Ritter–Preller things have not received my dernière main. Your old lady at the library irritates me with her ‘best translation’ she had read: there’s no other: there’s only the pretence of one other man, Taylor,⁴ who ‘mar yeah’ as we say (i.e. soi-distant) translated a good many treatises – not by any means all, but all vilely, neither English nor fidelity to the Greek nor understanding of the sequence of thought. I will imitate the frankness of artists and say boldly ‘I am unique’. There is one Plotinus and one MacKenna his fidus Achates and only nursing mother.

This is rousing stuff, but he was very much disappointed with the general reception. Nevertheless, he turned doggedly to the final revision of the second Ennead. One might usefully quote here, I think, an extract from an earlier letter to Debenham (January 1916?), which gives a good idea of his aims in translation:

I notice from a former letter of yours I just turned up that you are anxious about cadence. If it were not for two things, I could have printed a year ago: they are perfect clearness and expressive cadence: perfect clearness to those, bien entendu, who will take the trouble to understand the terms and what the whole is about; cadence that shall help to clearness, and that shall further be a satisfaction in itself. I am labouring more cadence than in the famous Christmas Card:⁵ the Card itself is rewritten mainly for cadence’ sake. I think the new cadence far better than the old; others may like it less; on that point I can say nothing except that I will permanently, continuously, disagree with them. I like pebbles in my brooks and little bends in my roads and raggedy edges to my clouds, and I don’t like Noah’s Ark trees or wooden legs and regular spots of my cows. This is my testament littéraire.

This is obviously an important passage. To see what it translates into in practice, perhaps one may take a short extract from the rewritten version of the tractate On Beauty (I. 6, 8), and compare it with the more prosaic version of A. H. Armstrong:⁶

But what must we do? How lies the path? How come to visions of the inaccessible Beauty, dwelling as if in consecrated precincts, apart from the common ways where all may see, even the profane?

He that has the strength, let him arise and withdraw into himself, forgoing all that is known by the eyes, turning away forever from the material beauty that once made his joy. When he perceives those shapes of grace in bodies, let him not pursue: he must know them for copies, vestiges, shadows, and hasten away towards That they tell of.

And now Armstrong – himself a great Plotinian scholar, and a pretty fair stylist:

But how shall we find the way? What method shall we devise? How can one sec the ‘inconceivable beauty’⁷ which stays within the holy sanctuary and does not come out where the profane may see it? Let him who can, follow and come within, and leave outside the sight of his eyes and not turn back to the bodily splendours which he saw before.

MacKenna’s version certainly has a distinctive cadence, and even pebbles and little bends and raggedy edges (as, after all, has Plotinus’ Greek), but it has to be said that Armstrong’s is truer to the original on the literal level. What MacKenna is doing, like many great translators, is creating a work of art in its own right, rising out of the original.

But to return to the thread of the narrative. MacKenna turned straight away to the preparation of the second volume, but later in 1917 he suffered a recurrence of his nervous symptoms, and before the end of the year his wife was struck down by the mysterious, but very real, illness which was to cause her death some five years later (in July 1923). At this point Plotinus might very well have gone by the board, had not Sir Ernest Debenham intervened, and persuaded MacKenna to accept an advance of £250 in respect of each projected volume.

This, while being a magnanimous gesture which relieved the MacKennas’ acute financial embarrassment, also proved a shrewd move which very probably saved the whole project. The thought of his indebtedness nagged at MacKenna frequently in the years ahead, but it kept his nose to the grindstone. His letters to Debenham over the next few years, besides reflecting his deep concern with the struggle for Irish nationhood, are a litany of his miseries. A letter written in July 1919 is representative:

I have bitterly deplored my ever entering into a contract, and I abhor myself for having taken your money, not only that personal subsidy but also the expenses of publication. Even in journalism I was never bound before… I had arranged with my wife that once she got over the danger point we were to take no more of this money; but there’s the past and there’s the contract. And there are people who bought the first volume on the pledge of the rest to come duly.

The next few years, between the increasing savagery of the struggle against the British and his wife’s lingering illness, were worse still. He could work only in bits and snatches, and his nerves seemed on the point of collapsing altogether. His friends worried constantly about his mental and physical state, as many letters of James Stephens, both to him and to others, attest. His wife’s death in July 1923 was initially a partial release, much though he had loved her, but in the months after that he became more than ever depressed. He now saw the whole enterprise of translating Plotinus as a hideous blunder. He wrote at the time to E. R. Dodds: ‘It is not through my own fault that I am, in the fact, what I think I loathe most of all things, a humbug in scholarship. I took up, honestly, what was beyond my powers; I was taken up by others, and am caught in a net.’

But Ernest Debenham, a benevolent tyrant, was not going to let him escape. In February 1924, after the death of his remaining aunt in Dublin, MacKenna proposed to use the small legacy he had now come into to hire a professional scholar (ideally Dodds) to complete the work, and himself retire to an Irish-speaking village in Connemara, there to pursue another only half-realized ambition, the mastery of the Gaelic tongue. He wanted to put an announcement to this effect in the third volume, which appeared in this year.

But Debenham would have none of this backsliding. He summoned MacKenna over to England, and sent him for a four-month holiday in the Dorset countryside. This rest actually pulled MacKenna through, and he was ever afterwards grateful for it. It changed the basis of his life. He was to live for ten more years, six of them spent wrestling with Plotinus, but henceforth he knew comparative peace.

He left Ireland now for ever, as it turned out. Various influences conspired to bring this about: personal memories, his detestation for the compromise represented by the Irish Free State (he always remained a non-violent, but unbending Republican), and also a desire to break publicly with the Catholic Church. He had long been deeply dissatisfied with many of the Church’s attitudes and dogmas, as many entries in his Journal for 1907–8 testify, but he had been content to remain nominally within the fold. ‘To be a bad Catholic,’ he liked to maintain, ‘is the best religion in the world.’

But by 1924 he had decided that he could no longer compromise with a Church which itself had compromised with British imperialism by backing the Free State. It was time to become a non-denominational Christian Platonist, and that was easier to do out of Ireland. ‘Since the Bishops intoned their credo in unum Johannem Bullium omnipotentem,’ he wrote to his friend Thomas Bodkin at this time, ‘I’ve become a Christian, and read my Bible like George Moore and Mr. Wesley.’ This also, as he told Debenham at the same time, made it easier for him to be ‘a good Plotinian’.

Not that he was absolutely uncritical of Plotinus either. The lack of social concern in the rather rarefied Neoplatonist world-view bothered him. As he remarked to another friend, the Celtic scholar Osborne Bergin, ‘[Plotinus] builds the soul a fairy palace. Enchanted, you follow him through the lovely labyrinthine structure; you mount, breathless, by successive stairways of the spirit, each more pure, more tenuous, more aspiring than the last – but sooner or later comes a time when you ask yourself where the W.C. is.’

By the autumn of 1924 MacKenna was sufficiently restored to start work again, and to accept Debenham’s subsidy for the next volume. He had great expenses arising from his wife’s long illness, but he now had an income of about £150 a year from his aunt’s legacy, and this, with Debenham’s subsidies, provided just enough to live on. He settled in lodgings on the outskirts of Bournemouth, and made good progress with the translation during the winter. By the spring, however, his nervous troubles were recurring, and the fourth volume did not appear till 1926. In that year, his mother (whom he had been supporting from his tiny income) died, relieving him of yet another tie, and he bought himself a little cottage at Wallis Down, outside Bournemouth, which he named Vinecot. This cottage, overlooking the moors, remained his home for only eighteen months, when financial problems forced him to sell it, and move into two rooms in a cottage in the village of Ringwood.

A young lady who became a valued friend of his for the last years of his life, Margaret Nunn, remembers Vinecot as ‘from floor to ceiling in each room lined with books, except where in spaces hung musical instruments, mostly stringed ones, guitars, mandolines, balalaika; there were also clarinets and squeegees (concertinas). And there were Lord Buddhas of all shapes, sizes and postures, and these were perched quaintly in corners where they caught the eye as you entered or left a room.’ This description reminds us of MacKenna’s great love of music, and his valiant attempts to master, in particular, the guitar and the concertina (on which he used to have frequent correspondence with James Stephens, in particular). It is probable that attempting to play these instruments helped to keep him sane in very difficult times.

At this period he became much interested in Unitarianism, under the influence of a clergyman of unusual intelligence and broadmindedness named Henry Hall, who was the local Unitarian minister. It was indeed the most suitable Christian creed for a man of MacKenna’s interests, but he was never a very orthodox Unitarian, and when Hall left to take up another appointment he became disillusioned. ‘Unitarianism,’ he wrote in 1931 in a letter to his brother Robert, ‘is of course a lost cause – largely, I think, because like the concertina (a most noble instrument of the most astonishing capabilities) it has fallen into the hands of idiots and never been given a fair chance.’ In a purified, non-institutional form, though, he saw it as the religion of the future.

The two rooms in Ringwood, predictably, soon bulged with books and Buddhas (MacKenna had a personal reverence for the Buddha, without ever wishing to become a Buddhist). He even got hold of a disused corrugated-iron Catholic chapel, had it re-erected in the garden, and made that into a further work-room, serviceable at least in the summer. Here he held court for occasional visitors and a number of interested and interesting neighbours, including the local rector, who had an interest in Plotinus, and the Anglo-Irish scholar and essayist W. K. Magee (‘John Eglinton’), who had left the Irish Free State for opposite reasons to those of MacKenna, but who got on with him quite well none the less.

Even this regime did not last, though, and by the autumn of 1929, after having his finances once again straightened out by Sir Ernest, MacKenna moved to a little house in Harrow, ‘Eldene’, where once again a circle formed around him, meeting on Saturdays mainly, for talk, tea and guitar-playing. During all this time, through these three moves, the last and most troublesome volume of Plotinus was being laboriously ground out. Already in 1928, E. R. Dodds had received a despairing plea for help. ‘I’m in agonies over the Sixth, and not the difficulter parts’, MacKenna wrote. ‘’Tis all too difficult for me and I wish I were dead – tho’ even that has its risks: I figure myself sometimes flying down the corridors of Hades pursued by Plotty and him roaring.’ Dodds did not feel able himself to render the large-scale assistance required, but he introduced MacKenna to a young scholar named B. S. Page who, in the event, relieved him (with Debenham’s grudging permission) of the translation of Ennead VI. 1–3, a particularly rebarbative tractate containing Plotinus’ criticism of Aristotle’s system of Categories, and (in VI. 2) a presentation of an alternative system of his own.⁸

In May 1930 the last proof-sheets went to the printer, and MacKenna’s life’s work was over. He was not entirely satisfied, feeling that ‘a few more decades could well be spent on bringing it up to a really fine polish’, as he said to Debenham, but he was content to leave it so. With its completion, he entered on four years of comparative calm and happiness, despite the grinding poverty that was always his lot. Living largely on milk, eggs and brown bread, he devoted himself to such long-standing hobbies as music and Irish, though with the usual indifferent success. An attempt to turn Sophocles’ Antigone into Irish many years before had foundered when his friend, the Gaelic short-story writer Padraic O Conaire, told him that ‘it didn’t mean anything, least of all anything Irish’. An attempt to translate Epictetus into Irish met the same fate. At the time of his death, he was at work trying to put Irish on Horace’s Satires and Epistles.

But he was having fun now. He had made the acquaintance of a kindred spirit in the person of the Classicist George Thomson, who combined an interest in Greek with both Marxism and a love for Gaelic, which led him for a time in the 1930s to go off to teach in University College, Galway, and while there arrange the publication of one of the ‘classics’ of modern Irish literature, the memoirs of Muiris O Súilleabháin, Fiche Blian ag Fás (‘Twenty Years A-Growing’). MacKenna was tempted to follow him to Connemara, but he was now too old and too ill.

Poverty eventually compelled him to sell the little house in Harrow, and he made what turned out to be his final move to a labourer’s cottage in a Cornish mining village, Reskadinnick, where he was cut off, except by mail, from all his friends, but made friends among the villagers, especially the children. In the early summer of 1933 he had an expensive and futile operation, and at the beginning of 1934 he entered a London hospital for a further operation. He survived it, but had lost his will to live (he had no fear of dying, discoursing on this freely to Dodds), and on 8 March he passed peacefully away, still in hospital, at the age of 62.

MacKenna had declared that to translate Plotinus was ‘worth a life’, and indeed he largely gave his life to that task, with much blood, sweat and tears. Was it worth it, or can such a question properly be asked? It seems fitting on this point to quote his friend E. R. Dodds:⁹

Whether in fact MacKenna’s Plotinus is worth the enormous price that was paid for it not only in effort and suffering, but in the sacrifice of other potentialities that lay in his rich natural endowment – is a question which I will not attempt to answer. But two things are certain: it is a noble monument to an Irishman’s courage, an Englishman’s generosity, and the idealism of both; and it is one of the very few great translations of our day.

EXTRACTS FROM THE EXPLANATORY MATTER IN THE FIRST EDITION

I. THE TEXT

The text on which this translation has been made is that of Richard Volkmann (Teubner, Leipzig, 1883): occasionally a reading has been adopted from the text variations or spacious commentary given in the three-volume edition of Friedrich Creuzer (Oxford, 1835): very rarely the translator has been driven to venture an emendation of his own.

II. PREVIOUS TRANSLATIONS

The present translation has been scrupulously compared, clause by clause, over and over again, with those undermentioned:

THE LATIN OF FICINO (in Creuzer’s edition).

THE FRENCH OF M. N. BOUILLET (3 vols., Paris, 1875, &c).

A complete version; often inaccurate, often only vaguely conveying the meaning; furnished with the most copious and fascinating notes and commentary. To the elucidation of Plotinus’ general themes Bouillet brings illustrations from the entire range of religious and mystical thought, beginning with the earliest thinkers, minutely comparing Plato, borrowing from the Fathers of the Church, from works of the Eastern mysticism, from the Kabbalah, from the medieval theologians, from Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Bossuet, Thomassin, &c. He also uses Macrobius very effectively.

THE GERMAN OF HERMANN FRIEDRICH MUELLER (2 vols., Berlin: Weidmann, 1878–80).

This valuable translation is described by its author as ‘literal, but scarcely palatable unless taken in conjunction with the Greek text’: both statements are true: in parts the version is even meaningless without a close study of the original.

THE GERMAN OF OTTO KIEFER (2 vols., Diederichs: Jena and Leipzig, 1905).

This is a book of selections, very extensive, purporting, indeed, to omit only what is judged to be out of date, futile, or incomprehensible in the original: it is substantially a Mueller made very much more readable with often improvement in sense and sometimes, it is to be feared, a deterioration.

[The translator upon reading some of the treatises translated into English by Thomas Taylor decided, for reasons mainly literary, that the work of this devoted pioneer would not be helpful in the present undertaking: it has, therefore, not been used in any part of this work except possibly by indirect suggestion from the quotations made occasionally in the commentaries of Bouillet and Creuzer.]

III. METHOD OF THE PRESENT TRANSLATION

Inevitably the present translator has sometimes differed from all his predecessors, as they have sometimes differed each from all the others: he hopes it will not be thought an insolence in him to remark that his rendering of any given passage is not to be tested finally by the authority of any of these scholars, still less by any preconceived idea of Plotinus’ meaning or by any hasty memory of controversy and decisions as to the peculiar uses of words in Plato or Aristotle. The text of the Enneads may be taken to be very fairly well established, but it would be absurd to suppose that as yet Plotinus, so little cautious or consistent in verbal expression, yields his precise meaning, or full content, as Plato, for example, may be supposed now to do after the scholarly scrutiny of generations. It may, indeed, be said with a rough truth that Plotinus’ terms, shifting at best and depending upon context and again upon the context of the context, are never to be more carefully examined than when they seem to be most true to the Platonic or Aristotelian uses: the confusion is a constant pitfall: Plotinus was pouring a quite new wine into very old bottles. Plotinus is often to be understood rather by swift and broad rushes of the mind – the mind trained to his methods – than by laborious word-racking investigation: we must know him through and through before we can be quite sure of his minuter meanings anywhere: there must be many a scholar at work yet, many an order of mind, before we can hope to have a perfectly true translation of the Enneads in any language. The present worker must have made mistakes, some perhaps that to himself will one day appear inexcusable: his one consolation is that the thing he will that day welcome from other hands has most certainly passed through his own, and been deliberately rejected. Where he appears most surely to have sinned against the light, it is most sure that he has passed through an agony of hesitation.

People seem always anxious to know whether a work of translation is what they call literal; the important question is rather whether it is faithful: the present work pretends to be faithful – and, if we must be precise, literary rather than literal. This is not to say that it is a paraphrase.

Probably every translator from the classic tongues sets out gaily in the firm purpose of achieving the impossible, of making a crib that shall also be a piece of sound and flowing idiomatic writing; and certainly many critics demand the miracle. Some years ago, on the publication of a preliminary specimen of this present venture, one very highly accomplished scholar wrote complaining with utter seriousness of an English past tense which had dared to translate a ‘frequentative aorist’ of the Greek original; he had apparently never asked himself whether an English past may not be as frequentative as any Greek aorist: in any case, readers who desire their translations to serve as an unfailing treasury of illustrations to ‘X. on Greek Idioms’ are not asked to like this version.

Again, various arbitrary principles, laid down by translators of a formally precise school, have been quite ignored here. For example, it has been decreed that ‘one word must translate one word’, and this in a double application:

1   That if, for example, the word ϕύσις is once translated Nature, ϕύσις must stand as Nature at every repetition, never Kind or Essence, or Being or any other word which happens, in a particular context, to be equally clear and precise or even imperative in English to the sense and connexion of thought.

2  That ϕύσις, for example, may never be translated by such a double as ‘Nature or Hypostasis’, δóξα, for example, never by such a double as ‘Opinion or Seeming-Knowledge’, still less, as several times here, by ‘Ordinary Mentation’, with or without an alternative or an addition.

All such bans have been treated as belonging to the childish pedantry of a game of skill, not to the serious task of conveying to the reader a grave body of foreign thought. Probably in every writer – certainly in Plotinus – such a word as ϕύσις, such a word as θεóς, or again θεîóς