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Imaginations and Reveries

by George William Russell · English · Gutenberg #8105 · 434,102 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Imaginations and Reveries

Author: George William Russell


        
Release date: May 1, 2005 [eBook #8105]
                Most recently updated: July 29, 2009

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8105

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IMAGINATIONS AND REVERIES ***




Produced by Jake Jaqua





IMAGINATIONS AND REVERIES


By AE [George William Russell]





PREFACE


The publishers of this book thought that a volume of articles and tales
written by me during the past twenty-five years would have interest
enough to justify publication, and asked me to make a selection. I have
not been able to make up a book with only one theme. My temperament
would only allow me to be happy when I was working at art. My conscience
would not let me have peace unless I worked with other Irishmen at the
reconstruction of Irish life. Birth in Ireland gave me a bias towards
Irish nationalism, while the spirit which inhabits my body told me the
politics of eternity ought to be my only concern, and that all other
races equally with my own were children of the Great King. To aid in
movements one must be orthodox. My desire to help prompted agreement,
while my intellect was always heretical. I had written out of every
mood, and could not retain any mood for long. If I advocated a
national ideal I felt immediately I could make an equal plea for more
cosmopolitan and universal ideas. I have observed my intuitions wherever
they drew me, for I felt that the Light within us knows better than any
other the need and the way. So I have no book on one theme, and the only
unity which connects what is here written is a common origin. The reader
must try a balance between the contraries which exist here as they
exist in us all, as they exist and are harmonized in that multitudinous
meditation which is the universe.--A.E.




PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION


To this edition four essays have been added. Two of these, "Thoughts
for a Convention" and "The New Nation," made some little stir when they
first appeared. Ireland since then has passed away from the mood which
made it possible to consider the reconciliations suggested, and has
set its heart on more fundamental changes, and these essays have only
interest as marking a moment of transition in national life before it
took a new road leading to another destiny.



CONTENTS

     NATIONALITY OR COSMOPOLITANISM
     STANDISH O'GRADY
     THE DRAMATIC TREATMENT OF LEGEND
     THE CHARACTER OF HEROIC LITERATURE
     A POET OF SHADOWS
     THE BOYHOOD OF A POET
     THE POETRY OF JAMES STEPHENS
     A NOTE ON SEUMAS O'SULLIVAN
     ART AND LITERATURE
     AN ARTIST OF GARLIC IRELAND
     TWO IRISH ARTISTS
     "ULSTER"
     IDEALS OF THE NEW RURAL SOCIETY
     THOUGHTS FOR A CONVENTION
     THE NEW NATION
     THE SPIRITUAL CONFLICT
     ON AN IRISH HILL
     RELIGION AND LOVE
     THE RENEWAL OF YOUTH
     THE HERO IN MAN
     THE MEDITATION OF ANANDA
     THE MIDNIGHT BLOSSOM
     THE CHILDHOOD OF APOLLO
     THE MASK OF APOLLO
     The CAVE OF LILITH
     THE STORY OF A STAR
     THE DREAM OF ANGUS OGE
     DEIRDRE





NATIONALITY OR COSMOPOLITANISM

As one of those who believe that the literature of a country is for
ever creating a new soul among its people, I do not like to think that
literature with us must follow an inexorable law of sequence, and gain a
spiritual character only after the bodily passions have grown weary and
exhausted themselves. In the essay called The Autumn of the Body, Mr.
Yeats seems to indicate such a sequence. Yet, whether the art of any
of the writers of the decadence does really express spiritual things is
open to doubt. The mood in which their work is conceived, a distempered
emotion, through which no new joy quivers, seems too often to tell
rather of exhausted vitality than of the ecstasy of a new life. However
much, too, their art refines itself, choosing, ever rarer and more
exquisite forms of expression, underneath it all an intuition seems to
disclose only the old wolfish lust, hiding itself beneath the golden
fleece of the spirit. It is not the spirit breaking through corruption,
but the life of the senses longing to shine with the light which makes
saintly things beautiful: and it would put on the jeweled raiment of
seraphim, retaining still a heart of clay smitten through and through
with the unappeasable desire of the flesh: so Rossetti's women, who have
around them all the circumstance of poetry and romantic beauty, seem
through their sucked-in lips to express a thirst which could be allayed
in no spiritual paradise. Art in the decadence in our time might be
symbolized as a crimson figure undergoing a dark crucifixion: the hosts
of light are overcoming it, and it is dying filled with anguish and
despair at a beauty it cannot attain. All these strange emotions have a
profound psychological interest. I do not think because a spiritual
flaw can be urged against a certain phase of life that it should remain
unexpressed. The psychic maladies which attack all races when their
civilization grows old must needs be understood to be dealt with: and
they cannot be understood without being revealed in literature or art.
But in Ireland we are not yet sick with this sickness. As psychology
it concerns only the curious. Our intellectual life is in suspense. The
national spirit seems to be making a last effort to assert itself
in literature and to overcome cosmopolitan influences and the art
of writers who express a purely personal feeling. It is true that
nationality may express itself in many ways: it may not be at all
evident in the subject matter, but it may be very evident in the
sentiment. But a literature loosely held together by some emotional
characteristics common to the writers, however great it may be, does not
fulfill the purpose of a literature or art created by a number of men
who have a common aim in building up an overwhelming ideal--who create,
in a sense, a soul for their country, and who have a common pride in the
achievement of all. The world has not seen this since the great antique
civilizations of Egypt and Greece passed away. We cannot imagine an
Egyptian artist daring enough to set aside the majestic attainment of
many centuries. An Egyptian boy as he grew up must have been overawed by
the national tradition, and have felt that it was not to be set aside:
it was beyond his individual rivalry. The soul of Egypt incarnated in
him, and, using its immemorial language and its mysterious lines, the
efforts of the least workman who decorated a tomb seem to have been
directed by the same hand that carved the Sphinx. This adherence to a
traditional form is true of Greece, though to a less extent. Some
little Tanagra terra-cottas might have been fashioned by Phidias, and
in literature Ulysses and Agamemnon were not the heroes of one epic, but
appeared endlessly in epic and drama. Since the Greek civilization no
European nation has had an intellectual literature which was genuinely
national. In the present century, leaving aside a few things in outward
circumstance, there is little to distinguish the work of the
best English writers or artists from that of their Continental
contemporaries. Milliais, Leighton, Rossetti, Turner--how different from
each other, and yet they might have painted the same pictures as born
Frenchmen, and it would not have excited any great surprise as a marked
divergence from French art. The cosmopolitan spirit, whether for good or
for evil, is hastily obliterating all distinctions. What is distinctly
national in these countries is less valuable than the immense wealth of
universal ideas; and the writers who use this wealth appeal to no narrow
circle: the foremost writers, the Tolstois and Ibsens, are conscious of
addressing a European audience.

If nationality is to justify itself in the face of all this, it must be
because the country which preserves its individuality does so with the
profound conviction that its peculiar ideal is nobler than that which
the cosmopolitan spirit suggests--that this ideal is so precious to it
that its loss would be as the loss of the soul, and that it could not
be realized without an aloofness from, if not an actual indifference to,
the ideals which are spreading so rapidly over Europe. Is it possible
for any nationality to make such a defense of its isolation? If not,
let us read Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoi, men so much greater than any we
can show, try to absorb their universal wisdom, and no longer confine
ourselves to local traditions. But nationality was never so strong in
Ireland as at the present time. It is beginning to be felt, less as a
political movement than as a spiritual force. It seems to be gathering
itself together, joining men who were hostile before, in a new
intellectual fellowship: and if all these could unite on fundamentals,
it would be possible in a generation to create a national Ideal in
Ireland, or rather to let that spirit incarnate fully which began among
the ancient peoples, which has haunted the hearts and whispered a dim
revelation of itself through the lips of the bards and peasant story
tellers.

Every Irishman forms some vague ideal of his country, born from his
reading of history, or from contemporary politics, or from imaginative
intuition; and this Ireland in the mind it is, not the actual Ireland,
which kindles his enthusiasm. For this he works and makes sacrifices;
but because it has never had any philosophical definition or a supremely
beautiful statement in literature which gathered all aspirations about
it, the ideal remains vague. This passionate love cannot explain itself;
it cannot make another understand its devotion. To reveal Ireland in
clear and beautiful light, to create the Ireland in the heart, is the
province of a national literature. Other arts would add to this ideal
hereafter, and social life and politics must in the end be in harmony.
We are yet before our dawn, in a period comparable to Egypt before the
first of her solemn temples constrained its people to an equal mystery,
or to Greece before the first perfect statue had fixed an ideal of
beauty which mothers dreamed of to mould their yet unborn children. We
can see, however, as the ideal of Ireland grows from mind to mind, it
tends to assume the character of a sacred land. The Dark Rosaleen of
Mangan expresses an almost religious adoration, and to a later writer it
seems to be nigher to the spiritual beauty than other lands:

     And still the thoughts of Ireland brood
     Upon her holy quietude.

The faculty of abstracting from the land their eyes beheld another
Ireland through which they wandered in dream, has always been a
characteristic of the Celtic poets. This inner Ireland which the
visionary eye saw was the Tirnanoge, the Country of Immortal Youth, for
they peopled it only with the young and beautiful. It was the Land of
the Living Heart, a tender name which showed that it had become dearer
than the heart of woman, and overtopped all other dreams as the last
hope of the spirit, the bosom where it would rest after it had passed
from the fading shelter of the world. And sure a strange and beautiful
land this Ireland is, with a mystic beauty which closes the eyes of
the body as in sleep, and opens the eyes of the spirit as in dreams and
never a poet has lain on our hillsides but gentle, stately figures,
with hearts shining like the sun, move through his dreams, over radiant
grasses, in an enchanted world of their own: and it has become alive
through every haunted rath and wood and mountain and lake, so that we
can hardly think of it otherwise than as the shadow of the thought of
God. The last Irish poet who has appeared shows the spiritual qualities
of the first, when he writes of the gray rivers in their "enraptured"
wanderings, and when he sees in the jeweled bow which arches the
heavens--

     The Lord's seven spirits that shine through the rain

This mystical view of nature, peculiar to but one English poet,
Wordsworth is a national characteristic; and much in the creation of the
Ireland in the mind is already done, and only needs retelling by the new
writers. More important, however, for the literature we are imagining
as an offset to the cosmopolitan ideal would be the creation of heroic
figures, types, whether legendary or taken from history, and enlarged
to epic proportions by our writers, who would use them in common, as
Cuculain, Fionn, Ossian, and Oscar were used by the generations of poets
who have left us the bardic history of Ireland, wherein one would write
of the battle fury of a hero, and another of a moment when his fire
would turn to gentleness, and another of his love for some beauty of his
time, and yet another tell how the rivalry of a spiritual beauty made
him tire of love; and so from iteration and persistent dwelling on a few
heroes, their imaginative images found echoes in life, and other heroes
arose, continuing their tradition of chivalry.

That such types are of the highest importance, and have the most
ennobling influence on a country, cannot be denied. It was this idea led
Whitman to exploit himself as the typical American. He felt that what
he termed a "stock personality" was needed to elevate and harmonize the
incongruous human elements in the States. English literature has always
been more sympathetic with actual beings than with ideal types, and
cannot help us much. A man who loves Dickens, for example, may grow
to have a great tolerance for the grotesque characters which are the
outcome of the social order in England, but he will not be assisted
in the conception of a higher humanity: and this is true of very many
English writers who lack a fundamental philosophy, and are content to
take man as he seems to be for the moment, rather than as the pilgrim of
eternity--as one who is flesh today but who may hereafter grow divine,
and who may shine at last like the stars of the morning, triumphant
among the sons of God.

Mr. Standish O'Grady, in his notable epic of Cuculain, was in our time
the first to treat the Celtic tradition worthily. He has contributed one
hero who awaits equal comrades, if indeed the tales of the Red Branch do
not absorb the thoughts of many imaginative writers, and Cuculain remain
the typical hero of the Gael, becoming to every boy who reads the story
a revelation of what his own spirit is.

I know John Eglinton, one of our most thoughtful writers, our first
cosmopolitan, thinks that "these ancient legends refuse to be taken out
of their old environment." But I believe that the tales which have been
preserved for a hundred generations in the heart of the people must have
had their power, because they had in them a core of eternal truth. Truth
is not a thing of today or tomorrow. Beauty, heroism, and spirituality
do not change like fashion, being the reflection of an unchanging
spirit. The face of faces which looks at us through so many shifting
shadows has never altered the form of its perfection since the face of
man, made after its image, first looked back on its original:

     For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
     Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
          And Usna's children died.

These dreams, antiquities, traditions, once actual, living, and
historical, have passed from the world of sense into the world of memory
and thought: and time, it seems to me, has not taken away from their
power, nor made them more remote from sympathy, but has rather purified
them by removing them from earth to heaven: from things which the eye
can see and the ear can hear they have become what the heart ponders
over, and are so much nearer, more familiar, more suitable for literary
use than the day they were begotten. They have now the character of
symbol, and, as symbol, are more potent than history. They have crept
through veil after veil of the manifold nature of man; and now each
dream, heroism, or beauty has laid itself nigh the divine power it
represents, the suggestion of which made it first beloved: and they
are ready for the use of the spirit, a speech of which every word has
a significance beyond itself, and Deirdre is, like Helen, a symbol of
eternal beauty; and Cuculain represents as much as Prometheus the heroic
spirit, the redeemer in man.

In so far as these ancient traditions live in the memory of man, they
are contemporary to us as much as electrical science: for the images
which time brings now to our senses, before they can be used in
literature, have to enter into exactly the same world of human
imagination as the Celtic traditions live in. And their fitness for
literary use is not there determined by their freshness but by their
power of suggestion. Modern literature, where it is really literature
and not book-making, grows more subjective year after year, and the mind
has a wider range over time than the physical nature has. Many things
live in it--empires which have never crumbled, beauty which has never
perished, love whose fires have never waned: and, in this formidable
competition for use in the artist's mind, today stands only its chance
with a thousand days. To question the historical accuracy of the use of
such memories is not a matter which can be rightly raised. The question
is--do they express lofty things to the soul? If they do they have
justified themselves.

I have written at some length on the two paths which lie before us, for
we have arrived at a parting of ways. One path leads, and has already
led many Irishmen, to obliterate all nationality from their work. The
other path winds upward to a mountain-top of our own, which may be in
the future the Mecca to which many worshippers will turn. To remain
where we are as a people, indifferent to literature, to art, to ideas,
wasting the precious gift of public spirit we possess so abundantly in
the sordid political rivalries, without practical or ideal ends, is to
justify those who have chosen the other path, and followed another star
than ours. I do not wish any one to infer from this a contempt for those
who, for the last hundred years, have guided public opinion in Ireland.
If they failed in one respect, it was out of a passionate sympathy for
wrongs of which many are memories, thanks to them, and to them is due
the creation of a force which may be turned in other directions, not
without a memory of those pale sleepers to whom we may turn in thought,
placing--

     A kiss of fire on the dim brow of failure,
     A crown upon her uncrowned head.

1899





STANDISH O'GRADY


In this age we read so much that we lay too great a burden on the
imagination. It is unable to create images which are the spiritual
equivalent of the words on the printed page, and reading becomes for too
many an occupation of the eye rather than of the mind. How rarely, out
of the multitude of volumes a man reads in his lifetime, can he remember
where or when he read any particular book, or with any vividness recall
the mood it evoked in him. When I close my eyes, and brood in memory
over the books which most profoundly affected me, I find none excited my
imagination more than Standish O'Grady's epical narrative of Cuculain.
Whitman said of his Leaves of Grass: "Camerado, this is no book. Who
touches this touches a man," and O'Grady might have boasted of his
Bardic History of Ireland, written with his whole being, that there was
more than a man in it, there was the soul of a people, its noblest and
most exalted life symbolized in the story of one heroic character.

With reference to Ireland, I was at the time I read like many others who
were bereaved of the history of their race. I was as a man who, through
some accident, had lost memory of his past, Who could recall no more
than a few months of new life, and could not say to what songs his
cradle had been rocked, what mother had nursed him, who were the
playmates of childhood, or by what woods and streams he had wandered.
When I read O'Grady I was as such a man who suddenly feels ancient
memories rushing at him, and knows he was born in a royal house, that he
had mixed with the mighty of heaven and earth and had the very noblest
for his companions. It was the memory of race which rose up within me as
I read, and I felt exalted as one who learns he is among the children
of kings. That is what O'Grady did for me and for others who were my
contemporaries, and I welcome the reprints, of his tales in the hope
that he will go on magically recreating for generations yet unborn the
ancestral life of their race in Ireland. For many centuries the youth
of Ireland as it grew up was made aware of the life of bygone ages, and
there were always some who remade themselves in the heroic mould before
they passed on. The sentiment engendered by the Gaelic literature was an
arcane presence, though unconscious of itself, in those who for the
past hundred years had learned another speech. In O'Grady's writings the
submerged river of national culture rose up again, a shining torrent,
and I realized as I bathed in that stream, that the greatest spiritual
evil one nation could inflict on another was to cut off from it the
story of the national soul. For not all music can be played upon any
instrument, and human nature for most of us is like a harp on which can
be rendered the music written for the harp but nor that written for the
violin. The harp strings quiver for the harp-player alone, and he who
can utter his passion through the violin is silent before an unfamiliar
instrument. That is why the Irish have rarely been deeply stirred by
English literature, though it is one of the great literatures of the
world. Our history was different and the evolutionary product was a
peculiarity of character, and the strings of our being vibrate most in
ecstasy when the music evokes ancestral moods or embodies emotions akin
to these. I am not going to argue the comparative worth of the Gaelic
and English tradition. All that I can say is that the traditions of our
own country move us more than the traditions of any other. Even if there
was not essential greatness in them we would love them for the same
reasons which bring back so many exiles to revisit the haunts of
childhood. But there was essential greatness in that neglected bardic
literature which O'Grady was the first to reveal in a noble manner. He
had the spirit of an ancient epic poet. He is a comrade of Homer, his
birth delayed in time perhaps that he might renew for a sophisticated
people the elemental simplicity and hardihood men had when the world
was young and manhood was prized more than any of its parts, more than
thought or beauty or feeling. He has created for us, or rediscovered,
one figure which looms in the imagination as a high comrade of Hector,
Achilles, Ulysses, Rama or Yudisthira, as great in spirit as any. Who
could extol enough his Cuculain, that incarnation of Gaelic chivalry,
the fire and gentleness, the beauty and heroic ardour or the imaginative
splendor of the episodes in his retelling of the ancient story. There
are writers who bewitch you by a magical use of words whose lines
glitter like jewels, whose effects are gained by an elaborate art and
who deal with the subtlest emotions. Others again are simple as an
Egyptian image, and yet are more impressive, and you remember them
less for the sentence than for a grandiose effect. They are not so much
concerned with the art of words as with the creation of great images
informed with magnificence of spirit. They are not lesser artists but
greater, for there is a greater art in the simplification of form in the
statue of Memnon than there is in the intricate detail of a bronze by
Benvenuto Cellini. Standish O'Grady had in his best moments that epic
wholeness and simplicity, and the figure of Cuculain amid his companions
of the Red Branch which he discovered and refashioned for us is, I
think, the greatest spiritual gift any Irishman for centuries has given
to Ireland.

I know it will be said that this is a scientific age, the world is so
full of necessitous life that it is waste of time for young Ireland to
brood upon tales of legendary heroes, who fought with enchanters, who
harnessed wild fairy horses to magic chariots and who talked with
the ancient gods, and that it would be much better for youth to be
scientific and practical. Do not believe it, dear Irish boy, dear Irish
girl, I know as well as any the economic needs of our people. They must
not be overlooked, but keep still in your hearts some desires which
might enter Paradise. Keep in your souls some images of magnificence
so that hereafter the halls of heaven and the divine folk may not seem
altogether alien to the spirit. These legends have passed the test
of generations for century after century, and they were treasured
and passed on to those who followed, and that was because there was
something in them akin to the immortal spirit. Humanity cannot carry
with it through time the memory of all its deeds and imaginations, and
it burdens itself only in a new era with what was highest among the
imaginations of the ancestors. What is essentially noble is never out
of date. The figures carved by Pheidias for the Parthenon still shine by
the side of the greatest modern sculpture. There has been no evolution
of the human form to a greater beauty than the ancient Greek saw, and
the forms they carved are not strange to us, and if this is true of the
outward form it is true of the indwelling spirit. What is essentially
noble is contemporary with all that is splendid today, and until the
mass of men are equal in spirit the great figures of the past will
affect us less as memories than as prophecies of the Golden Age to which
youth is ever hurrying in its heart.

O'Grady in his stories of the Red Branch rescued from the past what was
contemporary to the best in us today, and he was equal in his gifts as
a writer to the greatest of his bardic predecessors in Ireland. His
sentences are charged with a heroic energy, and, when he is telling a
great tale, their rise and fall is like the flashing and falling of the
bright sword of some great battle, or like the onset and withdrawal of
Atlantic surges. He can at need be beautifully tender and quiet. Who
that has read his tale of the young Finn and the Seven Ancients will
forget the weeping of Finn over the kindness of the famine-stricken old
men, and their wonder at his weeping, and the self-forgetful pathos
of their meditation unconscious that it was their own sacrifice called
forth the tears of Finn. "Youth," they said, "has many sorrows that cold
age cannot comprehend."

There are critics repelled by the abounding energy in O'Grady's
sentences. It is easy to point to faults due to excess and abundance,
but how rare in literature is that heroic energy and power. There is
something arcane and elemental in it, a quality that the most careful
stylist cannot attain, however he uses the file, however subtle he is.
O'Grady has noticed this power in the ancient bards and we find it in
his own writing. It ran all through the Bardic History, the Critical
and Philosophical History, and through the political books, The Tory
Democracy and All Ireland. There is this imaginative energy in the tale
of Cuculain, in all its episodes, the slaying of the hound, the capture
of the Liath Macha, the hunting of the enchanted deer, the capture of
the Wild swans, the fight at the ford, and the awakening of the Red
Branch. In the later tale of Red Hugh which, he calls The Flight of
the Eagle there is the same quality of power joined with a shining
simplicity in the narrative which rises into a poetic ecstasy in that
wonderful chapter where Red Hugh, escaping from the Pale, rides through
the Mountain Gates of Ulster and sees high above him Sheve Gullion,
a mountain of the Gods, the birth-place of legend "more mythic than
Avernus"; and O'Grady evokes for us and his hero the legendary past and
the great hill seems to be like Mount Sinai, thronged with immortals,
and it lives and speaks to the fugitive boy, "the last great secular
champion of the Gael," and inspires him for the fulfillment of his
destiny. We might say of Red Hugh, and indeed of all O'Grady's heroes,
that they are the spiritual progeny of Cuculain. From Red Hugh down to
the boys who have such enchanting adventures in Lost on Du Corrig and
The Chain of Gold they have all a natural and hardy purity of mind, a
beautiful simplicity of character, and one can imagine them all in an
hour of need, being faithful to any trust like the darling of the Red
Branch. These shining lads never grew up amid books. They are as much
children of nature as the Lucy of Wordsworth's poetry. It might be said
of them as the poet of the Kalevala sang of himself: "Winds and waters
my instructors."

These were O'Grady's own earliest companions, and no man can find better
comrades than earth, water, air and sun. I imagine O'Grady's own
youth was not so very different from the youth of Red Hugh before his
captivity; that he lived on the wild and rocky western coast, that he
rowed in coracles, explored the caves, spoke much with hardy natural
people, fishermen and workers on the land, primitive folk, simple in
speech but with that fundamental depth men have who are much in nature
in companionship with the elements, the elder brothers of humanity. It
must have been out of such a boyhood and such intimacies with natural
and unsophisticated people that there came to him the understanding of
the heroes of the Red Branch. How pallid, beside the ruddy chivalry
who pass, huge and fleet and bright, through O'Grady's pages, appear
Tennyson's bloodless Knights of the Round Table, fabricated in the study
to be read in the drawing room, as anemic as Burne Jones' lifeless men
in armour. The heroes of ancient Irish legend reincarnated in the mind
of a man who could breathe into them the fire of life, caught from sun
and wind, their ancient deities, and send them forth to the world to do
greater deeds, to act through many men and speak through many voices.
What sorcery was in the Irish mind that it has taken so many years to
win but a little recognition for this splendid spirit; and that others
who came after him, who diluted the pure fiery wine of romance he gave
us with literary water, should be as well known or more widely read. For
my own, part I can only point back to him and say whatever is Irish
in me he kindled to life, and I am humble when I read his epic tale,
feeling how much greater a thing it is for the soul of a writer to
have been the habitation of a demi-god than to have had the subtlest
intellections.

We praise the man who rushes into a burning mansion and brings out its
greatest treasure. So ought we to praise this man who rescued from the
perishing Gaelic tradition its darling hero and restored him to us,
and I think now that Cuculain will not perish, and he will be invisibly
present at many a council of youth, and he will be the daring which
lifts the will beyond itself and fires it for great causes, and he will
be also the courtesy which shall overcome the enemy that nothing else
may overcome.

I am sure that Standish O'Grady would rather I should speak of his work
and its bearing on the spiritual life of Ireland, than about himself,
and, because I think so, in this reverie I have followed no set plan but
have let my thoughts run as they will. But I would not have any to think
that this man was only a writer, or that he could have had the heroes
of the past for spiritual companions, without himself being inspired to
fight dragons and wizardry. I have sometimes regretted that contemporary
politics drew O'Grady away from the work he began so greatly. I have
said to myself he might have given us an Oscar, a Diarmuid or a Caolte,
an equal comrade to Cuculain, but he could not, being lit up by the
spirit of his hero, he merely the bard and not the fighter, and no man
in Ireland intervened in the affairs of his country with a superior
nobility of aim. He was the last champion of the Irish aristocracy, and
still more the voice of conscience for them, and he spoke to them of
their duty to the nation as one might imagine some fearless prophet
speaking to a council of degenerate princes. When the aristocracy failed
Ireland he bade them farewell, and wrote the epitaph of their class in
words whose scorn we almost forget because of their sounding melody
and beauty. He turned his mind to the problems of democracy and more
especially of those workers who are trapped in the city, and he pointed
out for them the way of escape and how they might renew life in the
green fields close to Earth, their ancient mother and nurse. He used
too exalted a language for those to whom he spoke to understand, and it
might seem that all these vehement appeals had failed but that we know
that what is fine never really fails. When a man is in advance of his
age, a generation, unborn when he speaks, is born in due time and finds
in him its inspiration. O'Grady may have failed in his appeal to the
aristocracy of his own time but he may yet create an aristocracy of
character and intellect in Ireland. The political and economic writings
will remain to uplift and inspire and to remind us that the man who
wrote the stories of heroes had a bravery of his own and a wisdom of his
own. I owe so much to Standish O'Grady that I would like to leave it
on record that it was he made me conscious and proud of my country, and
recalled to my mind, that might have wandered otherwise over too wide
and vague a field of thought, to think of the earth under my feet and
the children of our common mother. There hangs in the Municipal Gallery
of Dublin the portrait of a man with melancholy eyes, and scrawled on
the canvas is the subject of his bitter brooding: "'The Lost Land."
I hope that O'Grady will find before he goes back to Tir na noge that
Ireland has found again through him what seemed lost for ever, the law
of its own being, and its memories which go back to the beginning of the
world.





THE DRAMATIC TREATMENT OF LEGEND


     "The Red Branch ought not to be staged.... That
     literature ought not to be produced for popular consumption
     for the edification of the crowd.... I say to you drop
     this thing at your peril.... You may succeed in
     degrading Irish ideals, and banishing the soul of the land.
     ... Leave the heroic cycles alone, and don't bring them
     down to the crowd..."  (Standish O'Grady in All Ireland
     Review).

Years ago, in the adventurous youth of his mind, Mr. O'Grady found the
Gaelic tradition like a neglected antique dun with the doors barred, and
there was little or no egress. Listening, he heard from within the hum
of an immense chivalry, and he opened the doors and the wild riders went
forth to work their will. Now he would recall them. But it is in vain.
The wild riders have gone forth, and their labors in the human mind are
only beginning. They will do their deeds over again, and now they
will act through many men and speak through many voices. The spirit of
Cuculain will stand at many a lonely place in the heart, and he will win
as of old against multitudes. The children of Turann will start afresh
still eager to take up and renew their cyclic labors, and they will
gain, not for themselves, the Apples of the Tree of Life, and the Spear
of the Will, and the Fleece which is the immortal body. All the heroes
and demigods returning will have a wider field than Erin for their
deeds, and they will not grow weary warning upon things that die but
will be fighters in the spirit against immortal powers, and, as before,
the acts will be sometimes noble and sometimes base. They cannot be
stayed from their deeds, for they are still in the strength of a youth
which is ever renewing itself. Not for all the wrong which may be done
should they be restrained. Mr. O'Grady would now have the tales kept
from the crowd to be the poetic luxury of a few. Yet would we, for all
the martyrs who perished in the fires of the Middle Ages, counsel the
placing of the Gospels on the list of books to be read only by a few
esoteric worshippers?

The literature which should be unpublished is that which holds the
secret of the magical powers. The legends of Ireland are not of this
kind. They have no special message to the aristocrat more than to the
man of the people. The men who made the literature of Ireland were by
no means nobly born, and it was the bards who placed the heroes, each
in his rank, and crowned them for after ages, and gave them their famous
names. They have placed on the brow of others a crown which belonged to
themselves, and all the heroic literature of the world was made by
the sacrifice of the nameless kings of men who have given a sceptre to
others they never wielded while living, and who bestowed the powers, of
beauty and pity on women who perhaps had never uplifted a heart in their
day, and who now sway us from the grave with a grace only imagined in
the dreaming soul of the poet. Mr. O'Grady has been the bardic champion
of the ancient Irish aristocracy. He has thrown on them the sunrise
colors of his own brilliant spirit, and now would restrain others from
the use of their names lest a new kingship should be established over
them, and another law than that of his own will, lest the poets of the
democracy looking back on the heroes of the past should overcome them
with the ideas of a later day, and the Atticottic nature find a loftier
spirit in those who felt the unendurable pride of the Fianna and rose
against it. Well, it is only natural he should try to protect the
children of his thought, but they need no later word from him. If
writers of a less noble mind than his deal with these things they will
not rob his heroes of a single power to uplift or inspire. In Greece,
after Eschylus and his stupendous deities, came Sophocles, who
restrained them with a calm wisdom, and Euripides, who made them human,
but still the mysterious Orphic deities remain and stir us when reading
the earlier page. Mr. O'Grady would not have the Red Branch cycle
cast in dramatic form or given to the people. They are too great to be
staged; and he quotes, mistaking the gigantic for the heroic, a story of
Cuculain reeling round Ireland on his fairy steed the Liath Macha. This
may be phantasy or extravagance, but it is not heroism. Cuculain is
often heroic, but it is a quality of the soul and not of the body; it
is shown by his tears over Ferdiad, in his gentleness to women. A more
grandiose and heroic figure than Cuculain was seen on the Athenian
stage; and no one will say that the Titan Prometheus, chained on the
rock in his age-long suffering for men, is not a nobler figure than
Cuculain in any aspect in which he appears to us in the tales.
Divine traditions, the like of which were listened to with awe by the
Athenians, should not be too lofty for our Christian people, whose
morals Mr. O'Grady, here hardly candid, professes to be anxious about.
What is great in literature is a greatness springing out of the human
heart. Though we fall short today of the bodily stature of the giants of
the prime, the spirit still remains and can express an equal greatness.
I can well understand how a man of our own day, by the enlargement of
his spirit, and the passion and sincerity of his speech, could express
the greatness of the past. The drama in its mystical beginning was the
vehicle through which divine ideas, which are beyond the sphere even of
heroic life and passion, were expressed; and if the later Irish writers
fail of such greatness, it is not for that reason that the soul of
Ireland will depart. I can hardly believe Mr. O'Grady to be serious when
he fears that many forbidden subjects will be themes for dramatic art,
that Maeve with her many husbands will walk the stage, and the lusts of
an earlier age be revived to please the lusts of today. The danger of
art is not in its subjects, but in the attitude of the artist's mind.
The nobler influences of art arise, not because heroes are the theme,
but because of noble treatment and the intuition which perceives the
inflexible working out of great moral laws.

The abysses of human nature may well be sounded if the plummet be
dropped by a spirit from the heights. The lust which leads on to death
may be a terrible thing to contemplate, but in the event there is
consolation; and the eye of faith can see even in the very exultation
of corruption how God the Regenerator is working His will, leading man
onward to his destiny of inevitable beauty. Mr. O'Grady in his youth
had the epic imagination, and I think few people realize how great and
heroic that inspiration was; but the net that is spread for Leviathan
will not capture all the creatures of the deep, and neither epic nor
romance will manifest fully the power of the mythical ancestors of
the modern Gael who now seek incarnation anew in the minds of their
children. Men too often forget, in this age of printed books, that
literature is, after all, only an ineffectual record of speech. The
literary man has gone into strange byways through long contemplation of
books, and he writes with elaboration what could never be spoken, and he
loses that power of the bards on whom tongues of fire had descended, who
were masters of the magic of utterance, whose thoughts were not meant
to be silently absorbed from the lifeless page. For there never can be,
while man lives in a body, a greater means of expression for him than
the voice of man affords, and no instrument of music will ever rival in
power the flowing of the music of the spheres through his lips. In all
its tones, from the chanting of the magi which compelled the elements,
to those gentle voices which guide the dying into peace, there is a
power which will never be stricken from tympan or harp, for in all
speech there is life, and with the greatest speech the deep tones of
another Voice may mingle. Has not the Lord spoken through His prophets?
And man, when he has returned to himself, and to the knowledge of
himself, may find a greater power in his voice than those which he has
painfully harnessed to perform his will, in steamship or railway. It is
through drama alone that the writer can summon, even if vicariously,
so great a power to his aid; and it is possible we yet may hear on the
stage, not merely the mimicry of human speech, but the old forgotten
music which was heard in the duns of great warriors to bow low their
faces in their hands. Dear O'Grady, if we do not succeed it is not for
you to blame us, for our aims are at least as high as your own.

1902





THE CHARACTER OF HEROIC LITERATURE


Lady Gregory, a fairy godmother, has given to Young Ireland the gift of
her Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which should be henceforward the book of
its dream. I do not doubt but there will be a great change in the
next generation, for the character of many children will have grown to
maturity brooding over the memories of heroes who were themselves half
children, half demigods. Though the hero tales will have their greatest
power over the young, no one mind could measure their depth. They seem
simple and primitive, yet they draw us strangely aside from life, and
the emotions they awaken are not simple but complex. Here are twenty
tales, and they are so alike in imaginative character that they seem all
to have poured from one mind; and to these twenty we could add a hundred
others, all endlessly fertile in difference of incident, but all seeming
to own the same imaginative creator. It was so for many centuries,
and then the maker of the song seems to have grown weary, and distinct
voices not overladen with the tradition of the ages were heard; and
today every one wanders in a path of his own, finding or losing the way,
the truth, and the life of art in the free play of his desires. There
was something more to cause this later period of diverse utterance than
the interruption of other races and the claims of the world upon us.
Surely the ancient Egyptian met in Memphis or Thebes as many strangers
as we did, but he wept on through many dynasties carving the same
face of mystery and rarely altering the peculiar forms which were his
inheritance from the craftsmen of a thousand years before. It was not
the introduction of something new, but the loss of something which
finally vexed the calm of the Sphinx and marred the Phidian beauty which
in Greece was a long dream for many generations. It was not because the
Dane or Norman came and dwelt among us that the signature of the Sidhe
was withdrawn from the Gaelic mind. I do not know how to express this
loss otherwise than by saying we appear to have fallen away from our
archetype. We find in all the early stories the presence of one being
who may be the genius of our land if that old idea of race divinities be
a true one. A strange similitude unites all the characters. We infer
an interior identity. The same spirit flashes out in hostile clans, and
then Cuculain kisses Ferdiad. They all confidently appeal to; it in
each other. Maeve flying after the great battle can ask a gift from her
conqueror and obtains it. Fand and Emer dispute who shall make the last
sacrifice of love and give the beloved to a rival. The conflicts seem
half in play or in dream, and we do not know when an awakening of love
will disarm the foes. In spite of the bloodshed the heroes seem like
children who fight steadily through a mock battle, but the night will
see these children at peace, and they will dream with arms around each
other in the same cot. No literature ever had a more beautiful heart of
childhood in it. The bards could hate no one consistently. If they took
away the heroic chivalry from Conchobar in one tale they restored it
to him in another. They have the confident trust--and expectation of
goodness that children have, who may have suffered punishment, but who
come later on and smile on the chastiser. It is this quality which gives
the tales their extraordinary charm. I know no other literature which
has it to the same degree. I do not like to speculate on the absence
of this spirit in our later literature, which was written under other
influences. It cannot be because there was a less spiritual life in
the apostles than in the bards. We cannot compare Cuculain, the most
complete ideal of Gaelic chivalry, with that supreme figure whose coming
to the world was the effacement of whole pantheons of divinities, and
yet it is true that since the thoughts of men were turned from the old
ideals our literature has been filled with a less noble life. I think
a due may be found in the withdrawal of thought from nature, the great
mother who, is the giver of all life, and without whose life ideals
become inoperative and listless dwellers in the heart. The eyes of the
ancient Gael were fixed in wonder on the rocks and hills, and the waste
places of the earth were piled with phantasmal palaces where the Sidhe
sat on their thrones. Everywhere there was life, and as they saw so
they felt. To conceive of nature in any way, as beautiful and living, as
friendly or hostile, is to receive from her in like measure out of
her fullness. With whatever face we approach the mirror a similar face
approaches ours. "Let him approach it, saying, 'This is the Mighty,'
he becomes mighty," says an ancient scripture, teaching us that as
our aspiration is so will be our inspiration and power. Out of this
comradeship with earth there came a commingling of natures, and we do
not know when we read who are the Sidhe and who are human. The great
energies are all in the heroes. They bound to themselves, like the
Talkend, the strength of the fire, the brightness of the sun, and the
swiftness of the wind. They seem truly the earth-born. The waves respond
to their deeds; the elemental creatures respond and there are clashing
echoes and allies innumerable, and armies in the air continuing their
battles illimitably beyond: a proud race, who felt with bursting heart
the heavens were watching them, who defied their gods and exiled them
to have free play for their own deeds. A very different humanity indeed
from those who have come to walk the earth with humility, who are afraid
of heaven and its rulers, and whose dread is the greatest of all sins,
for in it is a denial of their own divinity. Surely the sight heroes is
more welcome to the King, in whose heaven are sworded seraphim, than the
bowed knees and the spirits who make themselves as worms in His sight.
In the symbolic expression of our spiritual life the eagle has become
a dove brooding peace. Oh, that it might rebecome the eagle and take to
the upper airs!

A generosity and greatness of spirit are in the heroes of the Red
Branch, and out of their strength grows a bloom of beauty never fully
revealed until Lady Gregory compiled these tales. As we read our
eyes are dazzled by strange graces of color flowing over the pages:
everywhere there is mystery and magnificence. Procession's pass by in
Druid ritual, kings and queens, and harpers who look like kings. When
the wind passes over them and stirs their garments a sweetness comes
over the teller of the tale, who felt that delight in draperies blown
over shapely forms which is the inspiration of the Winged Victory and
many Greek marbles. The bards will not have the hands of those proud
people touch anything which is not beautiful. "It was a beautiful
chessboard they had, all of white bronze, and the chessmen of gold and
silver, and a candlestick of precious stones lighting it." The wasting
of time has spared us a few things to show that this rare and intricate
metal work was not a myth, and we are forced by an inexorable logic
to accept as mainly true the narration of the pride, the beauty, the
generosity, and the large lovable character of the ancient heroes. We
may come to realize that, losing their Druid vision of a more shining
world mingling with this, we have lost the vision of that life into the
likeness of which it is the true labor of the spirit to transform this
life. For the Tirnanoge is that Garden where, in the mind of the Lord,
the flowers and trees blossomed before they grew in the fields, where
man lived in the Golden Age before the outer darkness of the earth
was built and he was outcast from Paradise. There is no true art or
literature which has not some image of the Golden Life lurking within
it, and through the archaic rudeness of these legends the light shines
as sunlight through the hoary branches of ancient oaks. Lady Gregory
has done her work, as compiler with a judgment which could hardly be too
much praised, and she has translated the stories into an idiom which
is a reflection of the original Gaelic and is full of charm. We are
indebted to her for this labor as much as to any of those who sang to
sweeten Ireland's wrong.

1902





A POET OF SHADOWS


When I was asked to write "anything" about Yeats, our Irish poet, my
thoughts were like rambling flocks that have no shepherd, and without
guidance my rambling thoughts have run anywhere.

I confess I have feared to enter or linger too long in the many-colored
land of Druid twilights and tunes. A beauty not our own, more perfect
than we can ourselves conceive, is a danger to the imagination. I am
too often tempted to wander with Usheen in Timanoge and to forget my own
heart and its more rarely accorded vision of truth. I know I like my own
heart best, but I never look into the world of my friend without feeling
that my region lies in the temperate zone and is near the Arctic
circle; the flowers grow more rarely and are paler, and the struggle for
existence is keener. Southward and in the warm west are the Happy Isles
among the Shadowy Waters. The pearly phantoms are dancing there with
blown hair amid cloud tail daffodils. They have known nothing but
beauty, or at the most a beautiful unhappiness. Everything there moves
in procession or according to ritual, and the agony of grief, it is
felt, must be concealed. There are no faces blurred with tears there;
some traditional gesture signifying sorrow is all that is allowed. I
have looked with longing eyes into this world. It is Ildathach, the
Many-Colored Land, but not the Land of the Living Heart. That island
where the multitudinous beatings of many hearts became one is yet
unvisited; but the isle of our poet is the more beautiful of all the
isles the mystic voyagers have found during the thousands of years
literature has recorded in Ireland. What wonder that many wish to follow
him, and already other voices are singing amid its twilights.

They will make and unmake. They will discover new wonders; and will
perhaps make commonplace some beauty which but for repetition would have
seemed rare. I would that no one but the first discoverer should enter
Ildathach, or at least report of it. No voyage to the new world, however
memorable, will hold us like the voyage of Columbus. I sigh sometimes
thinking on the light dominion dreams have over the heart. We cannot
hold a dream for long, and that early joy of the poet in his new-found
world has passed. It has seemed to him too luxuriant. He seeks for
something more, and has tried to make its tropical tangle orthodox;
and the glimmering waters and winds are no longer beautiful natural
presences, but have become symbolic voices and preach obscurely some
doctrine of their power to quench the light in the soul or to fan it to
a brighter flame.

I like their old voiceless motion and their natural wandering best, and
would rather roam in the bee-loud glade than under the boughs of beryl
and chrysoberyl, where I am put to school to learn the significance
of every jewel. I like that natural infinity which a prodigal beauty
suggests more than that revealed in esoteric hieroglyphs, even though
the writing be in precious stones. Sometimes I wonder whether that
insatiable desire of the mind for something more than it has yet
attained, which blows the perfume from every flower, and plucks the
flower from every tree, and hews down every tree in the valley until it
goes forth gnawing itself in a last hunger, does not threaten all the
cloudy turrets of the Poet's soul. But whatever end or transformation,
or unveiling may happen, that which creates beauty must have beauty in
its essence, and the soul must cast off many vestures before it comes
to itself. We, all of us, poets, artists, and musicians, who work in
shadows, must sometime begin to work in substance, and why should we
grieve if one labor ends and another begins? I am interested more in
life than in the shadows of life, and as Ildathach grows fainter I await
eagerly the revelation of the real nature of one who has built so
many mansions in the heavens. The poet has concealed himself under the
embroidered cloths and has moved in secretness, and only at rare times,
as when he says, "A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of
love," do we find a love which is not the love of the Sidhe; and more
rarely still do recognizable human figures, like the Old Pensioner
or Moll Magee, meet us. All the rest are from another world and
are survivals of the proud and golden races who move with the old
stateliness and an added sorrow for the dark age which breaks in upon
their loveliness. They do not war upon the new age, but build up about
themselves in imagination the ancient beauty, and love with a love a
little colored by the passion of the darkness from which they could not
escape. They are the sole inheritors of many traditions, and have now
come to the end of the ways, and so are unhappy. We know why they are
unhappy, but not the cause of a strange merriment which sometimes
they feel, unless it be that beauty within itself has a joy in its own
rhythmic being. They are changing, too, as the winds and waters have
changed. They are not like Usheen, seekers and romantic wanderers, but
have each found some mood in themselves where all quest ceases; they
utter oracles, and even in the swaying of a hand or the dropping of hair
there is less suggestion of individual action than of a divinity living
within them, shaping an elaborate beauty in dream for his own delight,
and for no other end than the delight in his dream. Other poets have
written of Wisdom overshadowing man and speaking through his lips, or a
Will working within the human will, but I think in this poetry we find
for the first time the revelation of the Spirit as the weaver of beauty.
Hence it comes that little hitherto unnoticed motions are adored:

     You need but lift a pearl-pale hand,
     And bind up your long hair and sigh;
     And all men's hearts must burn and beat.

This woman is less the beloved than the priestess of beauty who reveals
the divinity, not as the inspired prophetesses filled with the Holy
Breath did in the ancient mysteries, but in casual gestures and in a
waving of her white arms, in the stillness of her eyes, in her hair
which trembles like a faery flood of unloosed shadowy light over pale
breasts, and in many glimmering motions so beautiful that it is at once
seen whose footfall it is we hear, and that the place where she stands
is holy ground. This, it seems to me, is what is essential in this
poetry, what is peculiar and individual in it--the revelation of
great mysteries in unnoticed things; and as not a sparrow may fall
unconsidered by Him, so even in the swaying of a human hand His sceptre
may have dominion over the heart and His paradise be entered in the
lifting of an eyelid.

1902





THE BOYHOOD OF A POET


When I was a boy I knew another who has since become famous and who has
now written Reveries over Childhood and Youth. I searched the pages to
meet the boy I knew and could not find him. He has told us what he saw
and what he remembered of others, but from himself he seems to have
passed away and remembers himself not. The boy I knew was darkly
beautiful to look on, fiery yet playful and full of lovely and elfin
fancies. He was swift of response, indeed over-generous to the fancies
of others because a nature so charged with beauty could not but emit
beauty at every challenge. Even so water, however ugly the object we
cast upon it, can but break out in a foam of beauty and a bewilderment
of lovely curves.

Our fancies were in reality nothing to him but the affinities which by
the slightest similitude evoked out of the infinitely richer being
the prodigality of beautiful images with which it was endowed and made
itself conscious of itself. I have often thought how strange it is that
artist and poet have never yet revealed themselves to us except in verse
and painting, that there was among them no psychologist who could turn
back upon himself to search for the law of his own being, who could tell
us how his brain first became illuminated with images, and who tried
to track the inspiration to its secret fount and the images to their
ancestral beauty. Few of the psychologists who have written about
imagination were endowed with it themselves: and here is a poet, the
most imaginative of his generation, who has written about his youth and
has told us only about external circumstances and nothing about himself,
nothing about that flowering of strange beauty in poetry in him where
the Gaelic imagination that had sunk underground when the Gaelic speech
had died, rose up again transfiguring an alien language until that
new poetry became like the record of another mystic voyager to
the Heaven-world of our ancestors. But poet and artist are rarely
self-conscious of the processes of their own minds. They deliver their
message with exultation but they find nothing worth recording in the
descent upon them of the fiery tongues. So our poet has told us little
about himself but much about circumstance, and I recall in his pages the
Dublin of thirty years ago, and note how faithful the memory of eye and
ear are, and how forgetful the heart is of its own fancies. Is nature
behind this distaste for intimate self-analysis in the poet? Are our own
emanations poisonous to us if we do not rapidly clear ourselves of them?
Is it best to forget ourselves and hurry away once the deed is done or
the end is attained to some remoter valley in the Golden World and look
for a new beauty if we would continue to create beauty?

I know how readily our poet forgets his own songs. I once quoted to him
some early verses of his own as comment on something he had said. He
asked eagerly "Who wrote that?" and when I said "Do you not remember?"
he petulantly waved the poem aside for he had forsaken his past. Again
at a later period he told me his early verses sometimes aroused him to a
frenzy of dislike. Of the feelings which beset the young poet of genius
little or nothing is revealed in this Reverie. Yet what would we not
give for a book which would tell how beauty beset that youth in his
walks about Dublin and Sligo; how the sensitive response to color, form,
music and tradition began, how he came to recognize the moods which
incarnated in him as immortal moods. Perhaps it is too much to expect
from the creative imagination that it shall also be capable of exact and
subtle analysis. In this work I walk down the streets of Dublin I walked
with Yeats over thirty years ago. I mix with the people who then were
living in the city, O'Leary, Taylor, Dowden, Hughes and the rest; but
the poet himself does not walk with me. It is a new voice speaking of
the past of others, pointing out the doorways entered by dead youth. The
new voice has distinction and dignity of its own, and we are grateful
for this history, others more so than myself, because most of what
is written therein I knew already, and I wanted a secret which is not
revealed. I wanted to know more about the working of the imagination
which planted the little snow-white feet in the sally garden, and which
heard the kettle on the hob sing peace into the breast, and was intimate
with twilight and the creatures that move in the dusk and undergrowths,
with weasel, heron, rabbit, hare, mouse and coney; which plucked the
Flower of Immortality in the Island of Statues and wandered with Usheen
in Timanogue. I wanted to know what all that magic-making meant to the
magician, but he has kept his own secret, and I must be content and
grateful to one who has revealed more of beauty than any other in his
time.

1916





THE POETRY OF JAMES STEPHENS


For a generation the Irish bards have endeavored to live in a palace of
art, in chambers hung with the embroidered cloths and made dim with pale
lights and Druid twilights, and the melodies they most sought for were
half soundless. The art of an early age began softly, to end its songs
with a rhetorical blare of sound. The melodies of the new school began
close to the ear and died away in distances of the soul. Even as the
prophet of old was warned to take off his shoes because the place he
stood on was holy ground, so it seemed for a while in Ireland as if no
poet could be accepted unless he left outside the demesnes of poetry
that very useful animal, the body, and lost all concern about its
habits. He could not enter unless he moved with the light and dreamy
foot-fall of spirit. Mr. Yeats was the chief of this eclectic school,
and his poetry at its best is the most beautiful in Irish literature.
But there crowded after him a whole horde of verse-writers, who seized
the most obvious symbols he used and standardized them, and in their
writings one wandered about, gasping for fresh air land sunlight, for
the Celtic soul seemed bound for ever pale lights of fairyland on the
north and by the by the darkness of forbidden passion on the south, and
on the east by the shadowiness of all things human, and on the west by
everything that was infinite, without form, and void.

It was a great relief to me, personally, who had lived in the palace of
Irish art for a time, and had even contributed a little to its dimness,
to hear outside the walls a few years ago a sturdy voice blaspheming
against all the formula, and violating the tenuous atmosphere with its
"Insurrections." There are poets who cannot write with half their being,
and who must write with their whole being, and they bring their poor
relation, the body, with them wherever they go, and are not ashamed of
it. They are not at warfare with the spirit, but have a kind of instinct
that the clan of human powers ought to cling together as one family.
With the best poets of this school, like Shakespeare and Whitman,
one rarely can separate body and soul, for we feel the whole man is
speaking. With Keats, Shelley, Swinburne, and our own Yeats, one feels
that they have all sought shelter from disagreeable actualities in the
world of imagination. James Stephens, as he chanted his Insurrections,
sang with his whole being. Let no one say I am comparing him with
Shakespeare. One may say the blackbird has wings as well as the eagle,
without insisting that the bird in the hedgerows is peer of the winged
creature beyond the mountain-tops. But how refreshing it was to
find somebody who was a poet without a formula, who did not ransack
dictionaries for dead words, as Rossetti did to get living speech, whose
natural passions declared themselves without the least idea that they
ought to be ashamed of themselves, or be thrice refined in the crucible
by the careful alchemist before they could appear in the drawing-room.
Nature has an art of its own, and the natural emotions in their natural
and passionate expression have that kind of picturesque beauty which
Marcus Aurelius, tired, perhaps, of the severe orthodoxies of Greek and
Roman art, referred to when he spoke of the foam on the jaws of the wild
boar and the mane of the lion.

There were evidences of such an art in Insurrections, the first book of
James Stephens. In the poem called "Fossils," the girl who flies and the
boy who hunts her are followed in flight and pursuit with a swift energy
by the poet, and the lines pant and gasp, and the figures flare up and
down the pages. The energy created a new form in verse, not an orthodox
beauty, which the classic artists would have admitted, but such
picturesque beauty as Marcus Aurelius found in the foam on the jaws of
the wild boar.

I always want to find the fundamental emotion out of which a poet
writes. It is easy to do this with some, with writers like Shelley and
Wordsworth, for they talked much of abstract things, and a man never
reveals himself so fully as when he does this, when he tries to
interpret nature, when he has to fill darkness with light, and chaos
with meaning. A man may speak about his own heart and may deceive
himself and others, but ask him to fill empty space with significance,
and what he projects on that screen will be himself, and you can know
him even as hereafter he will be known. When a poet puts his ear to a
shell, I know if he listens long enough he will hear his own destiny. I
knew after reading "The Shell" that in James Stephens we were going to
have no singer of the abstract. There was no human quality or stir in
the blind elemental murmur, and the poet drops it with a sigh of relief:

     O, it was sweet
     To hear a cart go jolting down the street.

From the tradition of the world too he breaks away, from the great
murmuring shell which gives back to us our cries and questionings
and protests soothed into soft, easeful things and smooth orthodox
complacencies, for it was shaped by humanity to whisper back to it
what it wished to hear. From all soft, easeful beliefs and
silken complacencies the last Irish poet breaks away in a book of
insurrections. He is doubtful even of love, the greatest orthodoxy of
any, which so few have questioned, which has preceded all religions and
will survive them all. When he writes of love in "The Red-haired Man's
Wife" and "The Rebel" he is not sure that that old intoxication of
self-surrender is not a wrong to the soul and a disloyalty to the
highest in us. His "Dancer" revolts from the applauding crowd. The
wind cries out against the inference that the beauty of nature points
inevitably to an equal beauty of spirit within. His enemies revolt
against their hate; his old man against his own grumblings, and the poet
himself rebels against his own revolt in that quaint scrap of verse he
prefixes to the volume:

     What's the use
     Of my abuse?
     The world will run
     Around the sun
     As it has done
     Since time begun
     When I have drifted to the deuce:
     And what's the use
     Of my abuse?

He does not revolt against the abstract like so many because he is
incapable of thinking. Indeed, he is one of the few Irish poets we have
who is always thinking as he goes along. He does not rebel against love
because he is not himself sweet at heart, for the best thing in the book
is its unfeigned humanity. So we have a personal puzzle to solve with
this perplexing writer which makes us all the more eager to hear him
again. A man might be difficult to understand and the problem of his
personality might not be worth solution, but it is not so with James
Stephens. From a man who can write with such power as he shows in these
two stanzas taken from "The Street behind Yours" we may expect high
things. It is a vision seen with distended imagination as if by some
child strayed from light:

     And though 'tis silent, though no sound
     Crawls from the darkness thickly spread,
     Yet darkness brings
     Grim noiseless things
     That walk as they were dead,
     They glide and peer and steal around
     With stealthy silent tread.

     You dare not walk; that awful crew
     Might speak or laugh as you pass by.
     Might touch or paw
     With a formless claw
     Or leer from a sodden eye,
     Might whisper awful things they knew,
     Or wring their hands and cry.

There is nothing more grim and powerful than that in The City of
Dreadful Night. It has all the vaporous horror of a Dore grotesque and
will bear examination better. But our poet does not as a rule write with
such unrelieved gloom. He keeps a stoical cheerfulness, and even when
he faces terrible things we feel encouraged to take his hand and go with
him, for he is master of his own soul, and you cannot get a whimper
out of him. He likes the storm of things, and is out for it. He has
a perfect craft in recording wild natural emotions. The verse in this
first book has occasional faults, but as a rule the lines move, driven
by that inner energy of emotion which will sometimes work more metrical
wonders than the most conscious art. The words hiss at you sometimes,
as in "The Dancer," and again will melt away with the delicacy of fairy
bells as in "The Watcher," or will run like deep river water, as in "The
Whisperer," which in some moods I think is the best poem in the book
until I read "Fossils" or "What Tomas an Buile said in a Pub." They are
too long to print, but I must give myself the pleasure of quoting the
beautiful "Slan Leat," with which he concludes the book, bidding us, not
farewell, but to accompany him on further adventure:

     And now, dear heart, the night is closing in,
     The lamps are not yet ready, and the gloom
     Of this sad winter evening, and the din
     The wind makes in the streets fills all the room.
     You have listened to my stories--Seumas Beg
     Has finished the adventures of his youth,
     And no more hopes to find a buried keg
     Stuffed to the lid with silver.  He, in truth,
     And all alas! grew up: but he has found
     The path to truer romance, and with you
     May easily seek wonders.  We are bound
     Out to the storm of things, and all is new.
     Give me your hand, so, keeping close to me,
     Shut tight your eyes, step forward... where are we?

Our new Irish poet declared he was bound "out to the storm of things,"
and we all waited with interest for his next utterance. Would he wear
the red cap as the poet of the social revolution, now long overdue in
these islands, or would he sing the Marsellaise of womanhood, emerging
in hordes from their underground kitchens to make a still greater
revolution? He did neither. He forgot all about the storm of things, and
delighted us with his story of Mary, the charwoman's daughter, a tale of
Dublin life, so, kindly, so humane, so vivid, so wise, so witty, and so
true, that it would not be exaggerating to say that natural humanity in
Ireland found its first worthy chronicler in this tale.

We have a second volume of poetry from James Stephens, The Hill of
Vision. He has climbed a hill, indeed, but has found cross roads there
leading in many directions, and seems to be a little perplexed whether
the storm of things was his destiny after all. When one is in a cave
there is only one road which leads out, but when one stands in the
sunlight there are endless roads. We enjoy his perplexity, for he has
seated himself by his cross-roads, and has tried many tunes on his lute,
obviously in doubt which sounds sweetest to his own ear. I am not at
all in doubt as to what is best, and I hope he will go on like Whitman,
carrying "the old delicious burdens, men and women," wherever he goes.
For his references to Deity, Plato undoubtedly would have expelled him
from his Republic; and justly so, for James Stephens treats his god very
much as the African savage treats his fetish. Now it is supplicated,
and the next minute the idol is buffeted for an unanswered prayer or a
neglected duty, and then a little later our Irish African is crooning
sweetly with his idol, arranging its domestic affairs and the marriage
of Heaven and Earth. Sometimes our poet essays the pastoral, and in
sheer gaiety: flies like any bird under the boughs, and up into the
sunlight. There are in his company imps and grotesques, and fauns and
satyrs, who come summoned by his piping. Sometimes, as in "Eve," the
poem of the mystery of womanhood, he is purely beautiful, but I find
myself going back to his men and women; and I hope he will not be angry
with me when I say I prefer his tinker drunken to his Deity sober. None
of our Irish poets has found God, at least a god any but themselves
would not be ashamed to acknowledge. But our poet does know his men
and his women. They are not the shadowy, Whistler-like decorative
suggestions of humanity made by our poetic dramatists. They have entered
like living creatures into his mind, and they break out there in an
instant's unforgettable passion or agony, and the wild words fly up
to the poet's brain to match their emotion. I do not know whether the
verses entitled "The Brute" are poetry, but they have an amazing energy
of expression.

But our poet can be beautiful when he wills, and sometimes, too, he has
largeness and grandeur of vision and expression. Look at this picture of
the earth, seen from mid-heaven:

     And so he looked to where the earth, asleep,
     Rocked with the moon.  He saw the whirling sea
     Swing round the world in surgent energy,
     Tangling the moonlight in its netted foam,
     And nearer saw the white and fretted dome
     Of the ice-capped pole spin back a larded ray
     To whistling stars, bright as a wizard's day,
     But these he passed with eyes intently wide,
     Till closer still the mountains he espied,
     Squatting tremendous on the broad-backed earth,
     Each nursing twenty rivers at a birth.

I would like to quote the verses entitled "Shame." Never have I read
anywhere such an anguished cowering before Conscience, a mighty creature
full of eyes within and without, and pointing fingers and asped tongues,
anticipating in secret the blazing condemnation of the world. And there
is "Bessie Bobtail," staggering down the streets with her reiterated,
inarticulate expression of grief, moving like one of those wretched whom
Blake described in a marvelous phrase as "drunken with woe forgotten";
and there is "Satan," where the reconcilement of light and darkness in
the twilights of time is perfectly and imaginatively expressed.

The Hill of Vision is a very unequal book. There are many verses full
of power, which move with the free easy motion of the literary athlete.
Others betray awkwardness, and stumble as if the writer had stepped too
suddenly into the sunlight of his power, and was dazed and bewildered.
There is some diffusion of his faculties in what I feel are byways of
his mind, but the main current of his energies will, I am convinced,
urge him on to his inevitable portrayal of humanity. With writers like
Synge and Stephens the Celtic imagination is leaving its Timanoges, its
Ildathachs, its Many Colored Lands and impersonal moods, and is coming
down to earth intent on vigorous life and individual humanity. I can see
that there are great tales to be told and great songs to be sung, and I
watch the doings of the new-comers with sympathy, all the while feeling
I am somewhat remote from their world, for I belong to an earlier day,
and listen to these robust songs somewhat as a ghost who hears the cock
crow, and knows his hours are over, and he and his tribe must disappear
into tradition.

1912





A NOTE ON SEUMAS O'SULLIVAN


As I grow older I get more songless. I am now exiled irrevocably from
the Country of the Young, but I hope I can listen without jealousy and
even with delight to those who still make music in the enchanted land. I
often searched in the "Poet's Corner" of the country papers with a
wild surmise that there, amid reports of Boards of Guardians and Rural
Councils, some poetic young kinsman may be taking council with the
stars, watching more closely the Plough in the furrows of the heavens
than the county instructor at his task of making farmers drive the
plough straight in the fields. I found many years ago in a country paper
a local poet making genuine music. I remember a line:

     And hidden rivers were murmuring in the dark.

     I went on in the strength of this poem through the desert
of country journalism for many years, hoping to find more hidden rivers
of song murmuring in the darkness. It was a patient life of unrequited
toil, and I have returned to civilization to search publishers' lists
for more easily procurable pleasure. A few years ago I mined out of the
still darker region of manuscripts some poetic crystals which I thought
were valuable, and edited New Songs. Nearly all my young singers have
since then taken flight on their own account. Some have volumes in the
booksellers and some in the hands of the printers. But there is one
shy singer of the group of writers in New Songs who might easily get
overlooked because his verse takes little or no thought of the past
or present or future of his country: yet the slim book in which is
collected Seumas O'Sullivan's verses reveals a true poet, and if he is
too shy to claim his country in his verses there is no reason why his
country should not claim him, for he is in his way as Irish as any of
our singers. He is, as Mr. W. B. Yeats was in his earlier days, the
literary successor of those old Gaelic poets who were fastidious in
their verse, who loved little in this world but some chance light in it
which reminded them of fairyland, or who, if they were in love, loved
their mistress less for her own sake than because some turn of her head,
or "a foam-pale breast," carried their impetuous imaginations past her
beauty into memories of Helen of Troy, Deirdre, or some other symbol
of that remote and perfect beauty which, however man desires, he shall
embrace only at the end of time. I think the wives or mistresses of
these old poets must have been very unhappy, for women wish to be loved
for what they know about themselves, and for the tenderness which is in
their hearts, and not because some colored twilight invests them with a
shadowy beauty not their own, and which they know they can never
carry into the light of day. These poets of the transient look and the
evanescent light do not help us to live our daily life, but they do
something which is as necessary. They educate and refine the spirit so
that it shall not come altogether without any understanding of delicate
loveliness into the Kingdom of Heaven, or gaze on Timanoge with the
crude blank misunderstanding of Cockney tourists staring up at the
stupendous dreams pictured on the roof of the Sistine Chapel. These
fastidious scorners of every day and its interests are always looking
through nature for "the herbs before they were in the field and every
flower before it grew," and through women for the Eve who was in the
imagination of the Lord before she was embodied, and we all need this
refining vision more than we know. It may be asked of us hereafter when
we would mount up into the towers of vision, "How can you desire the
beauty you have not seen, who have not sought or loved its shadow in
the world?" and the Gates of Ivory may not swing open at our knock. This
will never be said to Seumas O'Sullivan, who is always waiting on
the transient look and the evanescent light to build up out of their
remembered beauty the Kingdom of his Heaven:

     Round you light tresses, delicate,
     Wind blown, wander and climb
     Immortal, transitory.

Earth has no steady beauty as the calm-eyed immortals have, but their
image glimmers on the waves of time, and out of what instantly vanishes
we can build up something within us which may yet grow into a calm-eyed
immortality of loveliness, we becoming gradually what we dream of. I
have heard people complain of the frailty of these verses of Seumas
O'Sullivan. They want war songs, plough songs, to nerve the soul to
fight or the hand to do its work. I will never make that complaint. I
will only complain if the strife or the work ever blunt my senses so
that I will pass by with an impatient disdain these delicate snatchings
at a beauty which is ever fleeting. But I would ask him to remember that
life never allures us twice with exactly the same enchantment. Never
again will that tress drift like a woven wind made visible out of
Paradise; never again will that lifted hand, foam-pale, seem like the
springing up of beauty in the world; never a second time will that white
brow remind him of the wonderful white towers of the city of the
gods. To seek a second inspiration is to receive only a second-rate
inspiration, and our poet is a little too fond of lingering in his verse
round a few things, a face, the swaying poplars, or sighing reeds which
had once piped an alluring music in his ears, and which he longs to hear
again. He lives not in too frail a world, but in too narrow a world, and
he should adventure out into new worlds in the old quest. He, has become
a master of delicate and musical rhythms. I remember reading Seumas
O'Sulivan's first manuscripts with mingled pleasure and horror, for his
lines often ran anyhow, and scansion seemed to him an unknown art, but I
feel humbly now that he can get a subtle quality into his music which I
could not hope to acquire. I would like him to catch some new and rare
birds with that subtle net of his, and to begin to invent more beauty
of his own and to seek for it less. I believe he has got it in him to
do well, to do better than he has done if he will now try to use his
invention more. The poems with a slight narrative in them, like "The
Portent" or the "Saint Anthony," seem to me the most perfect, and it is
in this direction, I think, he will succeed best. He wants a story to
keep him from beating musical and ineffective wings in the void. I have
not said half what I want to say about Seumas O'Sullivan's verses, but
I know the world will not listen long to the musings of one verse-writer
on another. I only hope this note may send some readers to their
bookseller for Seumas O'Sullivan's poems, and that it may help them to
study with more understanding a mind that I love.

1909





ART AND LITERATURE



A LECTURE ON THE ART OF G. F. WATTS


After the publication of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies the writer who
ventures to speak of art and literature in the same breath needs
some courage. Since the death of Whistler, his opinions about the
independence of art from the moral ideas with which literature is
preoccupied have been generally accepted in the studios. The artist
who is praised by a literary man would hardly be human if he was not
pleased; but he listens with impatience to any criticism or suggestion
about the substance of his art or the form it should take. I had a
friend, an artist of genius, and when we were both young we argued
together about art on equal terms. It had not then occurred to him that
any intelligence I might have displayed in writing verse did not entitle
me to an opinion about modeling; but one day I found him reading Mr.
Whistler's Ten O'clock. The revolt of art against literature had reached
Ireland. After that, while we were still good friends, he made me feel
that I was an outsider, and when I ventured to plead for a national
character in sculpture, his righteous anger--I might say his
ferocity--forced me to talk of something else.

I was not convinced he was right, but years after I began to use the
brush a little, and I remember painting a twilight from love of some
strange colors and harmonious lines, and when one of my literary friends
found that its interest depended on color and form, and that the idea
in it could not readily be translated into words, and that it left
him wishing that I would illustrate my poems or something that had a
meaning, I veered round at once and understood Whistler, and how foolish
I was to argue with John Hughes. I joined in the general insurrection
of art against the domination of literature. But being a writer and
much concerned with abstract ideas, I have never had the comfort and
happiness of those who embrace this opinion with their whole being, and
when I was asked to lecture, I thought that as I had no Irish Whistler
to fear, I might speak of art in relation to these universal ideas which
artists hold are for literature and not subject matter for art at all.

I must first say it was not my wish to speak. With a world of noble and
immortal forms all about us, it seemed to me as unfitting that words
without art or long labor in their making should be advertised as an
attraction; that any one should be expected to sit here for an hour to
listen to me or another upon a genius which speaks for itself. I was
overruled by Mr. Lane. But it is all wrong, this desire to hear and hold
opinions about art rather than to be moved by the art itself. I know
twenty charlatans who will talk about art, but never lift their eyes
to look at the pictures on the wall. I remember an Irish poet speaking
about art a whole evening in a room hung round with pictures by
Constable, Monet, and others, and he came into that room and went out
of it without looking at those pictures. His interest in art was in the
holding of opinions about it, and in hearing other opinions, which
he could again talk about. I hope I have made some of you feel
uncomfortable. This may, perhaps, seem malicious, but it is necessary to
release artists from the dogmas of critics who are not artists.

I would not venture to speak here tonight if I thought that anything
I said could be laid hold of and be turned into a formula, and used
afterwards to torment some unfortunate artist. An artist will take
with readiness advice or criticism from a fellow-artist, so far as
his natural vanity permits; but he writhes under opinions derived from
Ruskin or Tolstoi, the great theorists. You may ask indignantly, Can no
one, then, speak about paintings or statues except painters or
modelers? No; no one would condemn you to such painful silence and
self-suppression. Artists would wish you to talk unceasingly about
the emotions their pain of making pictures arouse in you; but, under
lifelong enemies, do not suggest to artists the theories under which
they should paint. That is hitting below the belt. The poor artist is as
God made him; and no one, not even a Tolstoi, is competent to undertake
his re-creation. His fellow-artists will pass on to him the tradition of
using the brush. He may use it well or ill; but when you ask him to use
his art to illustrate literary ideas, or ethical ideas, you are asking
him to become a literary man or a preacher. The other arts have their
obvious limitations. The literary man does not dare to demand of the
musician that he shall be scientific or moral. The latter is safe
in uttering every kind of profanity in sound so long as it is music.
Musicians have their art to themselves. But the artist is tormented, and
asked to reflect the thought of his time. Beauty is primarily what he
is concerned with; and the only moral ideas which he can impart in a
satisfactory way are the moral ideas naturally associated with beauty in
its higher or lower forms. But I think, some of you are confuting me in
your own minds at this moment. You say to yourselves: "But we have all
about us the works of great artists whose inspiration not one will deny.
He used his art to express great ethical ideas. He spoke again and again
about these ideas. He was proud that his art was dedicated to their
expression." I am sorry to say that he did say many things which would
have endeared him to Tolstoi and Ruskin, and for which I respect him
as a man, and which as an artist I deplore. I deplore his speaking of
ethical ideas as the inspiration of his art, because I think they were
only the inspiration of his life; and where he is weakest in his appeal
as an artist is where he summons consciously to his aid ethical ideas
which find their proper expression in religion or literature or life.

Watts wished to ennoble art by summoning to its aid the highest
conceptions of literature; but in doing so he seems to me to imply that
art needed such conceptions for its justification, that the pure artist
mind, careless of these ideas, and only careful to make for itself
a beautiful vision of things, was in a lower plane, and had a less
spiritual message. Now that I deny. I deny absolutely that art needs to
call to its aid, in order to justify or ennoble it, any abstract ideas
about love or justice or mercy.

It may express none of these ideas, and yet express truths of its own
as high and as essential to the being of man; and it is in spite of
himself, in spite of his theories, that the work of Watts will have
an enduring place in the history of art. You will ask then, "Can art
express no moral ideas? Is it unmoral?" In the definite and restricted
sense in which the words "ethical" and "moral" are generally used, art
is, and must by its nature be unmoral. I do not mean "immoral," and let
no one represent me as saying art must be immoral by its very nature.
There are dear newspaper men to whom it would be a delight to attribute
to me such a saying; and never to let me forget that I said it. When I
say that art is essentially unmoral, I mean that the first impulse to
paint comes from something seen, either beauty of color or form or tone.
It may be light which attracts the artist, or it may be some dimming of
natural forms, until they seem to have more of the loveliness of mind
than of nature. But it is the aesthetic, not the moral or ethical,
nature which is stirred. The picture may afterwards be called "Charity,"
or "Faith," or "Hope"--and any of these words may make an apt title. But
what looms up before the vision of the artist first of all is an image,
and that is accepted on account of its fitness for a picture; and an
image which was not pictorial would be rejected at once by any true
artist, whether it was an illustration of the noblest moral conception
or not. Whether a picture is moral or immoral will depend upon
the character of the artist, and not upon the subject. A man will
communicate his character in everything he touches. He cannot escape
communicating it. He must be content with that silent witness, and not
try to let the virtues shout out from his pictures. The fact is, art is
essentially a spiritual thing, and its vision is perpetually turned
to Ultimates. It is indefinable as spirit is. It perceives in life and
nature those indefinable relations of one thing to another which to the
religious thinker suggest a master mind in nature--a magician of
the beautiful at work from hour to hour, from moment to moment, in a
never-ceasing and solemn chariot motion in the heavens, in the perpetual
and marvelous breathing forth of winds, in the motion of waters, and in
the unending evolution of gay and delicate forms of leaf and wing.

The artist may be no philosopher, no mystic; he may be with or without a
moral sense, he may not believe in more than his eye can see; but in so
far as he can shape clay into beautiful and moving forms he is imitating
Deity; when his eye has caught with delight some subtle relation between
color and color there is mysticism in his vision. I am not concerned
here to prove that there is a spirit in nature or humanity; but for
those who ask from art a serious message, here, I say, is a way of
receiving from art an inspiration the most profound that man can
receive. When you ask from the artist that he should teach you,
be careful that you are not asking him to be obvious, to utter
platitudes--that you are not asking him to debase his art to make things
easy for you, who are too indolent to climb to the mountain, but want
it brought to your feet. There are people who pass by a nocturne by
Whistler, a misty twilight by Corot, and who whisper solemnly before a
Noel Paton as if they were in a Cathedral. Is God, then, only present
when His Name is uttered? When we call a figure Time or Death, does
it add dignity to it? What is the real inspiration we derive from that
noble design by Mr. Watts? Not the comprehension of Time, not the nature
of Death, but a revelation human form can express of the heroic dignity.
Is it not more to us to know that man or woman can look half-divine,
that they can wear an aspect such as we imagine belongs to the
immortals, and to feel that if man is made in the image of his Creator,
his Creator is the archetype of no ignoble thing? There were immortal
powers in Watts' mind when those figures surged up in it; but they were
neither Time nor Death. He was rather near to his own archetype, and in
that mood in which Emerson was when he said, "I the imperfect adore
my own perfect." Touch by touch, as the picture was built up, he was
becoming conscious of some interior majesty in his own nature, and
it was for himself more than for us he worked. "The oration is to the
orator," says Whitman, "and comes most back to him." The artist, too, as
he creates a beautiful form outside himself, creates within himself,
or admits to his being a nobler beauty than his eyes have seen. His
inspiration is spiritual in its origin, and there is always in it some
strange story of the glory of the King.

With man and his work we must take either a spiritual or a material
point of view. All half-way beliefs are temporary and illogical. I
prefer the spiritual with its admission of incalculable mystery and
romance in nature, where we find the infinite folded in the atom, and
feel how in the unconscious result and labor of man's hand the Eternal
is working Its will. You may say that this belongs more to psychology
than to art criticism, but I am trying to make clear to you and to
myself the relation which the mind which is in literature may rightly
bear to the vision which is art. Are literature and ethics to dictate
to Art its subjects? Is it right to demand that the artist's work shall
have an obviously intelligible message or meaning, which the intellect
can abstract from it and relate to the conduct of life? My belief is
that the most literature can do is to help to interpret art, and that
art offers to it, as nature does, a vision of beauty, but of undefined
significance.

No one asks or expects the clouds to shape themselves into ethical
forms, or the sun to shine only on the just and not on the unjust
also. It is vain to expect it, but there is something written about the
heavens declaring the beauty of the Creator and the firmament showing
His handiwork. If the artist can bring whatever of that vision has
touched him into his work we should ask no more, and must not expect him
to be more righteously minded than his Creator, or to add a finishing
tag of moral to justify it all, to show that Deity is solemnly minded
and no mere idle trifler with beauty like Whistler.

I have stated my belief that art is spiritual, that its genuine
inspirations come from a higher plane of our being than the ethical
or intellectual; and I think wherever literature or ethics have so
dominated the mind of the artist that they change the form of his
inspiration, his art loses its own peculiar power and gains nothing. We
have here a picture of "Love steering the bark of Humanity." I may put
it rather crudely when I say that pictures like this are supposed to
exert a power on the man who, for example, would beat his wife, so that
love will be his after inspiration. Anyhow, ethical pictures are painted
with some such intention belief. Now, art has great influence, but I do
not believe this or any other picture would stop a man beating his wife
if he wanted to. Art does not call sinners to repentance; that is not
one of its powers. It fulfils rather another saying: "Unto them that
have much shall be given," bringing delight to those that are already
sensitive to beauty. My own conviction is that ethical pictures are,
if anything, immoral in their influence, as everything must be that
forsakes the law of its own being, and that pictures like this only add
to the vanity of people so righteously minded as to be aware of their
own virtue. We will always have these concessions to passing phases of
thought. We have had requests for the scientific painter--the man who
will paint nature with geological accuracy, and man in accordance
with evolutionary dogmas. He will find his eloquent literary defenders
enchanted to find so much learning to point to in his work, but it will
all pass. The true artist will still be instinctively spiritual.

Now I have used the word "spiritual" so often in connection with art
that you may reasonably ask for some definition of my meaning. I am
afraid it is easier to define spirituality in literature than in art.
But a literary definition may help. Spirituality is the power certain
minds have of apprehending formless spiritual essences, of seeing the
eternal in the transitory, of relating the particular to the universal,
the type to the archetype.

While I give this definition, I hope no artist will ever be insane
enough to make it the guiding principle of his art. I shudder to
think of any conscious attempt in a picture to relate the type to the
archetype. It is a philosophical definition, solely intended for the
spectator. I wish the artist only to paint his vision, and whether
he paints this, or another world he imagines, if it is art it will be
spiritual. I have given a definition of spirituality in literature, but
how now relate it to art? How illustrate its presence? When Pater wrote
his famous description of the Mona Lisa, that intense and enigmatic face
had evoked a spiritual mood. When he saw in it the summed-up experience
of many generations of humanity, he felt in the picture that relation
of the particular to the universal I have spoken of. When we find human
forms suggesting a superhuman dignity, as in Watts' figures of Time and
Death, or in the Phidian marbles, the type is there melting into the
archetype. When Millet paints a peasant figure of today with some
gesture we imagine the first Sower must have used, it is the eternal
in it which makes the transitory impressive. But these are obvious
instances, you will say, chosen from artists whose pictures lend
themselves to this kind of exposition. What about the art of the
landscape painter? Undeniably a form of art, where is the spirituality?

I am afraid my intellect is not equal to talking up every picture that
might be suggested and using it to illustrate my meaning, though I do
not think I would despair of finally discovering the spiritual element
in any picture I felt was art. However, I will go further. We have all
felt some element of art lacking in the painter who goes to Killarney,
Italy, or Switzerland, and brings us back a faithful representation of
undeniably beautiful places. It is all there--the lofty mountains, the
lakes, the local color; but what enchanted us in nature does not touch
us in the picture. What we want is the spirit of the place evoked in us
rather than the place itself. Art is neither pictured botany or geology.
A great landscape is the expression of a mood of the human mind as
definitely as music or poetry is. The artist is communicating his own
emotions. There is some mystic significance in the color he employs; and
then the doorways are opened, and we pass from sense into soul. We
are looking into a soul when we are looking at a Turner, a Carot, or a
Whistler, as surely as when in dream we find ourselves moving in strange
countries which are yet within us, contained for all their seeming
infinitudes in the little hollow of the brain. All this, I think, is
undeniable; but perhaps not many of you will follow me, though you
may understand me, if I go further and say, that in this, art is
unconsciously also reaching out to archetypes, is lifting itself up to
walk in that garden of the divine mind where, as the first Scripture
says, it created "flowers before they were in the field and every herb
before it grew." A man may sit in an armchair and travel farther than
ever Columbus traveled; and no one can say how far Turner, in his search
after light, had not journeyed into the lost Eden, and he himself may
have been there most surely at the last when his pictures had become a
blaze of incoherent light.

You may say now that I have objected to literature dominating the arts,
and yet I have drawn from pictures a most complicated theory. I have
felt a little, indeed, as if I was marching through subtleties to
the dismemberment of my mind, but I do not think I have anywhere
contradicted myself or suggested that an artist should work on these
speculations. These may rightly arise in the mind of the onlooker who
will regard a work of art with his whole nature, not merely with the
aesthetic sense, and who will naturally pass from the first delight
of vision into a psychological analysis. A profound nature will always
awaken profound reflections. There are heads by Da Vinci as interesting
in their humanity as Hamlet. When we see eyes that tempt and allure with
lips virginal in their purity, we feel in the face a union of things
which the dual nature of man is eternally desiring. It is the marriage
of heaven and hell, the union of spirit and flesh, each with their
uncurbed desires; and what is impossible in life is in his art, and is
one of the secrets of its strange fascination. It may seem paradoxical
to say of Watts--a man of genius, who was always preaching through his
art--that it is very difficult to find what he really expresses. No
one is ever for a moment in doubt about what is expressed by Rossetti,
Turner, Millet, Corot, or many contemporary artists who never preached
at all, but whose mood or vision peculiar to themselves is easily
definable. With Watts the effort at analyses is confused: first by his
own statement about the ethical significance of his works, which I think
misleading, because while we may come away from his pictures with many
feelings of majesty or beauty or mystery, the ethical spirit is not
the predominant one. That rapturous winged spirit which he calls Love
Triumphant might just as easily be called Music or Song, and another
allegory be attached to it without our feeling any more special fitness
or unfitness in the explanation. I see a beautiful exultant figure, but
I do not feel love as the fundamental mood in the painter, as I feel the
religious mood is fundamental in the Angelus of Millet. I do not need to
look for a title to that or for the painting of The Shepherdess to feel
how earth and her children have become one in the vision of the painter;
that the shepherdess is not the subject, nor the sheep, nor the still
evening, but altogether are one mood, one being, in which all things
move in harmony and are guided by the Great Shepherd. Well, I do not
feel that Love; or Charity, or Hope are expressed in this way in Watts,
and that the ethical spirit is not fundamental with him as the religious
spirit is with Millet. He has an intellectual conception of his moral
idea, but is not emotionally obsessed by it, and the basis of a man's
art is not to be found in his intellectual conceptions, which are light
things, but in his character or rather in his temperament. We know, for
all the poetical circumstances of Rossetti's pictures, what desire it is
that shines out of those ardent faces, and how with Leighton "the form
alone is eloquent," and that Tumer's God was light as surely as with any
Persian worshipper of the sun. Here and there they may have been tempted
otherwise, but they never strayed far from their temperamental way of
expressing themselves in art. So that the first thing to be dismissed
in trying to understand Watts is Watts' own view of his art and its
inspiration. He is not the first distinguished man whose intellect has
not proved equal to explaining rightly its sources of power. Our next
difficulty in discovering the real Watts arises because he did not look
at nature or life directly. He was overcome by great traditions. He
almost persistently looks at nature through one or two veils. There is
a Phidian veil and a Venetian or rather an Italian veil, and almost
everything in life and nature which could not be expressed in terms of
these traditions he ignored. I might say that no artist of equal genius
ever painted pictures and brought so little fresh observation into his
art except, perhaps, Burne-Jones. Both these artists seem to have a
secret and refined sympathy with Fuseli's famous outburst, "Damn Nature,
she always puts me out!" Even when the sitter came, Watts seems to have
been uneasy unless he could turn him into a Venetian nobleman or person
of the Middle Ages, or could disguise in some way the fact that Artist
and Sitter belonged to the nineteenth century. He does not seem to be
aware that people must breathe even in pictures. His skies rest solidly
on the shoulders of his figures as if they were cut out to let the
figures be inserted. If he were not a man of genius there would have
been an end of him. But he was a man of genius, and we must try to
understand the meaning of his acceptance of tradition. If we understand
it in Watts we will understand a great deal of contemporary art and
literature which is called derivative, art issuing out of art, and
literature out of literature.

The fact is that this kind of art in which Watts and Burne-Jones were
pioneers is an art which has not yet come to its culmination or to any
perfect expression of itself. There is a genuinely individual impulse in
it, and it is not derivative merely, although almost every phase of
it can be related to earlier art. It has nothing in common with the
so-called grand school of painting which produced worthless imitations
of Michael Angelo and Raphael. It is feeling out for a new world, and it
is trying to use the older tradition as a bridge. The older art held up
a mirror to natural forms and brought them nearer to man. In the perfect
culmination of this new art one feels how a complete change might take
place and natural forms be used to express an internal nature or the
soul of the artist. Colors and forms, like words after the lapse of
centuries, enlarge their significance. The earliest art was probably
simple and literal--there may have been the outline of a figure filled
up with some flat color. Then as art became more complex, colors began
to have an emotional meaning quite apart from their original relation
to an object. The artist begins unconsciously to relate color more
intimately to his own temperament than to external nature. At last,
after the lapse of ages, some sensitive artist begins to imagine that
he has discovered a complete language capable of expressing any mood
of mind. The passing of centuries has enriched every color, and left
it related to some new phase of the soul. Phidian or Michael Angelesque
forms gather their own peculiar associations of divinity or power. In
fact, this new art uses the forms of the old as symbols or hieroglyphs
to express more complicated ideas than the older artists tried to
depict.

Watts never attempted, for all his admiration of these men, to
follow them in their efforts to realize perfectly the forms that they
conceived. They had done this once and for all, and repetition may have
seemed unnecessary. But the lofty temper awakened by those stupendous
creations could be aroused by a suggestion of their peculiar
characteristics. Association of ideas will in some subtle way bring us
back to the Phidian demigods when we look at forms and draperies
vaguely suggestive of the Parthenon. I do not say that Watt's did this
consciously, but instinctively he felt compelled, with the gradual
development of his own mind, to use the imaginative traditions created
by other artists as a language through which he might find expression
peculiar to himself. It is a highly intellectual art to which tradition
was a necessity, as much as it is to the poet, who when he speaks of
"beauty" draws upon a sentiment created by millions of long-dead lovers,
or who, when he thinks of the "spirit," is, in his use of the word, the
heir of countless generations who brooded upon the mysteries.

Just as in Millet, the painter of peasants, there was a religious spirit
shaping all things into austere and elemental simplicities, so in Watts
there was an intellectual spirit, seeking everywhere for the traces of
mind trying to express the bodiless and abstract. With Whitman he seems
to cry out, "The soul for ever and ever!" It is there in the astonishing
head of Swinburne, whom he reveals, if I may use a vulgar phrase, as a
poetic "bounder," but illuminated and etherealized by genius. It is in
the head of Mill, the very symbol of the moral reasoning--mind. It is in
the face of Tennyson, with its too self-conscious seership, and in
all those vague faces of the imaginative paintings, into which, to use
Pater's phrase, "the soul with all its maladies has passed." In his
pictures he draws on the effects of earlier art, and throws his sitters
back until they seem to belong to some nondescript mediaeval country,
like the Bohemia of the dramatists; and he darkens and shuts out the
light of day that this starlight of soul may be more clearly seen, and
destroys, as far as he can, all traces of the century they live in, for
the mind lives in all the ages, and he would show it as the pilgrim of
eternity. Because Watts' art was necessarily so brooding and meditative,
looking at life with half-closed eyes and then shutting them to be alone
with memory and the interpreter, his painting, so beautiful and full
of surety in early pictures like the Wounded Heron, grows to be often
labored and muddy, and his drawing uncertain. That he could draw and
paint with the greatest, he every now and then gave proof; but the
surety of beautiful craftsmanship deserts those who have not always
their eye fixed on an object of vision; and Watts was not, like Blake
or Shelley, one of the proud seers whose visions are of "forms more real
than living man." He seemed to feel what his effects should be rather
than to see them, or else his vision was fleeting and his art was a
laborious brooding to recapture the lost impression. In his color he
always seems to me to be second-hand, as if the bloom and freshness of
his paint had worn off through previous use by other artists. It
seemed to be a necessity of his curiously intellectual art that only
traditional colors and forms should be employed, and it is only rarely
we get the shock of a new creation, and absolutely original design, as
in Orpheus, where the passionate figure turns to hold what is already a
vanishing shadow.

Watts' art was an effort to invest his own age, an age of reason, with
the nobilities engendered in an age of faith. At the time Watts was
at his prime his contemporaries were everywhere losing belief in
the spiritual conceptions of earlier periods; they were analyzing
everything, and were deciding that what was really true in religion,
what gave it nobility, was its ethical teaching; retain that, and
religion might go, illustrating the truth of the Chinese philosopher
who said: "When the spirit is lost, men follow after charity and duty
to one's neighbors." The unity of belief was broken up into diverse
intellectual conceptions. Men talked about love and liberty, patriotism,
duty, charity, and a whole host of abstractions moral and intellectual,
which they had convinced themselves were the essence of religion and
the real cause of its power over man. Whether Watts lost faith like his
contemporaries I do not know, but their spirit infected his art. He set
himself to paint these abstractions; and because we cannot imagine these
abstractions with a form, we feel something fundamentally false in this
side of his art. He who paints a man, an angelic being, or a divine
being, paints something we feel may have life. But it is impossible
to imagine Time with a body as it is to imagine a painting embodying
Newton's law of gravitation. It is because such abstractions do not
readily take shape that Watts drew so much on the imaginative tradition
of his predecessors. Where these pictures are impressive is where the
artist slipped by his conscious aim, and laid hold of the nobility
peculiar to the men and women he used as symbols. It is not Time
or Death which awes us in Watts' picture, but majestical images of
humanity; and Watts is at his greatest as an inventor when humanity
itself most occupies him when he depicts human life only, and lets
it suggest its own natural infinity, as in those images of the lovers
drifting through the Inferno, with whom every passion is burnt out and
exhausted but the love through which they fell.

Life itself is more infinite, noble, and suggestive than thought. We
soon come to the end of the ingenious allegory. It tells only one story
but where there is a perfect image of life there is infinitude and
mystery. We do not tire considering the long ancestry of expression in
a face. It may lead us back through the ages; but we do tire of the art
which imprisons itself within formulae, and says to the spectator: "In
this way and in no other shall you regard what is before you." No man is
profound enough to explain the nature of his own inspiration. Socrates
says that the poet utters many things which are truer than he himself
understands. The same thing applies to many a great artist, who, when he
paints tree or field, or face, or form, finds that there comes on him a
mysterious quickening of his nature, and he paints he knows not what.
It is like and unlike what his eyes have seen. It may be the same field,
but we feel there the presence of the spirit. It may be the same figure,
but it is made transcendental, as when the Word had become flesh and
dwelt among us. His inspiration is akin to that of the prophets of old,
whose words rang but for an instant and were still, yet they created
nations whose only boundaries were the silences where their speech had
not been heard. His majestical figures are prophecies. His ecstatic
landscapes bring us nigh to the beauty which was in Eden. His art is a
divine adventure, in which he, like all of us who are traveling in so
many ways, seeks, consciously or unconsciously, to regain the lost unity
with nature and the knowledge of his own immortal being, and it is so
you will best understand it.

1906





AN ARTIST OF GAELIC IRELAND


The art of Hone and the elder Yeats, while in spirit filled with a
sentiment which was the persistence of ancient moods into modern times,
still has not the external characteristics of Gaeldom; but looking at
the pictures of the younger Yeats it seemed to me that for the first
time we had something which could be called altogether Gaelic. The
incompleteness of the sketches suggests the term "folk" as expressing
exactly the inspiration of this very genuine art. We have had abundance
of Irish folk-lore, but we knew nothing of folk-art until the figures of
Jack Yeats first romped into our imagination a few years ago. It was the
folk-feeling lit up by genius and interpreted by love. It was not, and
is now less than ever, the patronage bestowed by the intellectual artist
on the evidently picturesque forms of a life below his own.

I suspect Jack Yeats thinks the life of the Sligo fisherman is as good
a method of life as any, and that he could share it for a long time
without being in the least desirous of a return to the comfortable
life of convention. The name of Muglas Hyde suggests itself to me as a
literary parallel. These sketches have all the prodigality of invention,
the exuberance of gesture, and animation of "The Twisting of the Rope,"
and the poetry is of as high or higher an order. In the drawing called
"Midsummer Eve" there is a mystery which is not merely the mystery
of night and shadow. It is the mystery of the mingling of spirit with
spirit which is suggested by the solitary figure with face upturned
to the stars. We have all memories of such summer nights when into the
charmed heart falls the enchantment we call ancient, though the days
have no fellows, nor will ever have any, when the earth glows with the
dusky hues of rich pottery, and the stars, far withdrawn into faery
altitudes, dance with a gaiety which is more tremendous and solemn than
any repose. The night of this picture is steeped in such a dream, and I
know not whether it is communicated, or a feeling arising in myself; but
there seems everywhere in it the breathing of life, subtle, exultant,
penetrating. It is conceived in the mood of awe and prayer, which makes
Millet's pictures as religious as any whichever hung over the altar, for
surely the "Angelus" is one of the most spiritual of pictures, though
the peasants bow their heads and worship in a temple not built with
hands. I do not, of course, compare otherwise than in the mood the
"Midsummer Eve" to such a masterpiece; but there is a kinship between
the beauty revealed in great and in little things, and our thought turns
from the stars to the flowers with no feeling of descent into an
alien world. But this mood is rare in life as in art, and it is only
occasionally that the younger Yeats becomes the interpreter of the
spirituality of the peasant. He is more often the recorder of the
extravagant energies of the race-course and the market-place, where he
finds herded together all the grotesque humors of West Irish life.

We recognize his figures as distinctly Irish. Here the old rollicking
Lever and Lover type of Irishmen reappear, hunting like the very devil,
with faces set in the last ecstasy of rapid motion. There is an excess
of energy in these furious riders which almost gives them a symbolic
character. They seem to ride on some passionate business of the soul
rather than for any transitory excitement of the body. And besides these
wild horse-men there are quiet and lovely figures like "A Mother of
the Rosses," holding her child to her breast in an opalescent twilight,
through which the boat that carries her moves. There are always large
and noble outlines, which suggest that if Jack Yeats had more grandiose
ambitions he might have been the Millet of Irish rural life, but he is
too much the symbolist, hating all but essentials, to elaborate his art.

In writing of Jack Yeats mention must be made of his black and white
work, which at its best has a primitive intensity. The lines have a
kind of Gothic quality, reminding one of the rude glooms, the lights
and lines of some half-barbarian cathedral. They are very expressive and
never undecided. The artist always knows what he is going to do. There
is no doubt he has a clear image before him when he takes up pen or
brush. A strong will is always directing the strong lines, forcing them
to repeat an image present to the inner eye. In his early days Jack
Yeats loafed about the quays at Sligo, and we may be sure he was at all
the races, and paid his penny to go into the side-shows, and see the
freaks, the Fat Woman and the Skeleton Man. It was probably at this
period of his life he was captured by pirates of the Spanish Main. My
remembrance of Irish county towns at that time is that no literature
flourished except the Penny Dreadful and the local press. I may be
doing Jack Yeats an injustice when hailing him at the beginning of a
fascinating career I yet suspect a long background of Penny Dreadfuls
behind it. How else could he have drawn his pirates? They are the only
pirates in art who manifest the true pride, glory, beauty, and terror
of their calling as the romantic heart of childhood conceives of it. The
pirate has been lifted up to a strange kind of poetry in some of Jack
Yeats' pictures. I remember one called "Walking the Plank." The solemn
theatrical face, lifted up to the blue sky in a last farewell to the
wild world and its lawless freedom, haunted me for days. There was also
a pen-and-ink drawing I wish I could reproduce here. A young buccaneer,
splendid in evil bravery, leaned across a bar where a strange, beastly,
little, old, withered, rat-like figure was drawing the drink. The little
figure was like a devil with the soul all concentrated into malice,
and the whole picture affected one with terror like a descent into some
ferocious human hell.

In all these figures, pirates or peasants, there is an ever present
suggestion of poetry; it is in the skies, or in the distance, or in the
colors; and these people who laugh in the fairs will have after hours
as solemn as the quiet star-gazer in the "Midsummer Eve." This poetry
is evident in the oddest ways, and escapes analysis, so elusive and so
original is it, as in the "Street of Shows." Nothing at first thought
seems more hopelessly remote from poetry than the country circus, with
its lurid posters of the Giant Schoolgirl, the Petrified Man, and the
Mermaid, all in strong sunlight; but the heart carries with it its
own mood, and this flaring scene has undergone some indefinite
transformation by the alchemy of genius, and it assumes the character of
a fairy tale or Arabian Nights Entertainment imagined in the fantastic
dreams of childhood. The sleepy doorkeeper is a goblin or gnome. Perhaps
the charm of it all is that it is so evidently illusion, for when the
heart is strong in its own surety it can look out on the world, and
smile on things which would be unendurable if felt to be permanent,
knowing they are only dreams.

Many of these sketches have a largeness, almost a nobility, of
conception, which is, I think, a gift from father to son. "After the
Harvest's Saved" is something elemental. The "Post-car" suggests the
horses of the sun, or the stage coach in De Quincey's extraordinary
dream, when the opium had finally rioted in his brain, and transformed
his stage-coach into a chariot carrying news of some everlasting
victory. Blake has said "exuberance is genius," and there is an excess
of energy or passion, or a dilation of the forms, or a peace deeper than
mere quietude in the figures of Mr. Yeats' pictures, which gives them
that symbolic character which genius always impresses on its works.

The coloring grows better every year; it is more varied and purer. It
is sometimes sombre, as in the tragic and dramatic "Simon the Cyrenian,"
and sometimes rich and flowerlike, but always charged with sentiment,
and there is a curious fitness in it even when it is evidently unreal.
These blues and purples and pale greens--what crowd ever seemed clad
in such twilight colors? And yet we accept it as natural, for this
opalescence is always in the mist-laden air of the West; it enters into
the soul today as it did into the soul of the ancient Gael, who called
it Ildathach--the many-colored land; it becomes part of the atmosphere
of the mind; and I think Mr. Yeats means here to express, by one of the
inventions of genius, that this dim radiant coloring of his figures is
the fitting symbol of the fairyland which is in their hearts. I have not
felt so envious of any artist's gift for a long time; not envy of his
power of expression, but of his way of seeing things. We are all seeking
today for some glimpse of the fairyland our fathers knew; but all the
fairylands, the Silver Cloud World, the Tirnanoge, the Land of Heart's
Desire, rose like dreams out of the human soul, and in tracking them
there Mr. Yeats has been more fortunate than us all, for he has come to
the truth, perhaps hardly conscious of it himself.

1902




TWO IRISH ARTISTS


It is unjust to an artist to write on the spur of the moment of his
work--of the just seen picture which pleases or displeases. For what
instantly delights the eye may never win its way into the heart, and
what repels at first may steal later on into the understanding, and find
its interpretation in a deeper mood. The final test of a picture, or of
any work of art, is its power of enduring charm. There are many circles
in the Paradise of Beautiful Memories, and half unconsciously, but with
a justice, we at last place each in its hierarchy, remote or near to
the centre of our being; and I propose here rather to speak of the
impression left in my memory after seeing the work of Yeats and Hone
for many years, than to describe in detail the pictures--some new,
some familiar--which by a happy thought have been gathered together for
exhibition. To tell an artist that you remember his pictures with
love after many years is the highest praise you can give him; and to
distinguish the impression produced from others is a pleasure I am glad
to be here allowed.

An artist like Mr. Yeats, whose main work has been in portraiture, must
often find himself before sitters with whom he has little sympathy, and
we all expect to find portraits which do not interest us, because the
interpreter has been at fault, and has failed in his vision. With the
born craftsman, who always gives us beautiful brushwork, we do not
expect these inequalities, but with Mr. Yeats technical power is not the
most prominent characteristic. He broods or dreams over his sitters,
and his meditation always tends to the discovery of some spiritual
or intellectual life in them, or some hidden charm in the nature, or
something to love; and if he finds what he seeks, we are sure, not
always of a complete picture, but of a poetic illumination, a revelation
of character, a secret sweetness for which we forgive the weakness or
indecision manifest here and there, and which are relics of the hours
before the final surety was attained.

I do not know what Mr. Yeats' philosophy of life is, but in his work
he has been over-mastered by the spirit of his race, and he belongs to
those who from the earliest dawn of Ireland have sought for the Heart's
Desire, and who have refined away the world, until only fragments
remained to them. They have not accepted life as it is, and Mr. Yeats
could not paint like Reynolds or Romney the beauty of every day in its
best attire. He is like the Irish poets who have rarely left a complete
description of women, but who speak of some transitory motion or fragile
charm--"a thin palm like foam of the sea," "a white body," or in such
vague phrases, until it seems a spirit is praised and not flesh and
blood. I remember the faces of women and children in his pictures where
everything is blurred or obscured, save faces which have a nameless
charm. They look at you with long-remembered glances out of the brooding
hour of twilight, out of reverie and dream. It is the hidden heart which
looks out, and we love these women and children for this, for surely the
heart's desire is its own secret.

His portraits of men have kindred qualities, and the magnificent picture
of John O'Leary shows him at his best. It is itself a symbol of the
movement of which O'Leary was the last great representative. The stately
patriarchal head of the old chief is the head of the idealist, so sure
of his own truth that he must act, and, if needs be, become the
martyr for his ideal. But the delicate hands are not the hands of an
empire-breaker. This portrait will probably find its last resting-place
in the National Gallery, where, with a curious irony, the Government
places the portraits of the dead rebels who gave its statesmen many an
anxious day and many a nightmare; and so it will go on, perhaps, until
the contemplation of these pictures inspires some boy with an equal or
better head and a stronger hand, and then--.

But to return to Mr. Yeats. Some earlier pictures show him attempting to
paint directly the ideal world of romance and poetry; yet interesting
as these are, they do not convey the same impression of mystery as the
pictures of today. Indeed, the light seen behind or through a veil
is always more suggestive than the unveiled light. It may be that
the spirit is a formless breath which pervades form, and it is better
revealed as a light in the eyes, as a brooding expression, than by the
choice of ancient days and other-world subjects, where the shapes can be
molded to ideal forms by the artist's will. However it is, it is certain
that Millet, the realist, is more spiritual than Moreau or Burne-Jones
for all their archaic design; and Mr. Yeats, who, as his King Goll
shows, might have been a great romantic painter, has probably chosen
wisely, and has painted more memorable pictures than if he had gone back
to the fairyland of Celtic mythology.

To turn from Yeats to Hone is to turn from the lighted hearth to the
wilderness. Humanity is very far away, or is huddled up under immense
skies, where it seems of less importance than the rocks. The earth on
which men have lived, where the work of their hand is evident, with all
the sentiment of the presence of man, with smoke arising from numberless
homes, is foreign to Mr. Hone. The monsters of the primeval world might
sprawl on the rocks, for all the evidence of lapse of time since their
day, in many of his pictures. He, too, has refined away his world until
only fragments of the earth remain to him where he can dream in; and
these are waste places, where the salt of the sea is in the wind, and
the skies are gray and vapor-laden, or the loneliness of dim twilights
are over level sands. Whatever else he paints is devoid of its proper
interest, for he seems to impose on the cattle in the fields and on the
habitable places a sentiment alien to their nature. He has a mind with
but one impressive mood, and his spirit is never kindled, save in the
society where none intrude; but in his own domain he is a master, and is
always sure of himself and his effect. There is no tentative, undecisive
brushwork, such as we often see in the subtle search for the unrevealed,
which makes or mars Mr. Yeats' work. He is at home in his peculiar
world, while the other is always seeking for it.

"A Sunset on Malahide Sands" shows a greater intensity than is usual
even in Mr. Hone's work. There is something thrilling in this twilight
trembling over the deserted world. Philosophies may prove very well in
the lecture-room, says Whitman, and not prove at all under the sky and
stars. Pictures likewise may seem beautiful in a gallery, yet look thin
and unreal where, with a turn of the head, one could look out at the
pictures created hour after hour by the Master of the Beautiful; but
there is some magic in this vision made up of elemental light, darkness,
and loneliness, and we feel awed as if we knew the Spirit was hidden
in His works. But primitive as this peculiar world is, and remote from
humanity, it is just here we find a human revelation; for is not all
art a symbol of the creative mind, and if we were wise enough we would
understand that in art the light on every cloud, and the clear spaces
above the cloud, and the shadows of the earth beneath are made out of
the lights, infinitudes, and shadows of the soul, and are selected from
nature because of some correspondence, unconscious or half felt. But
these things belong more to the psychology of the artist mind than to
the appreciation of its work. I have said enough, I hope, to attract to
the work of these artists, in a mood of true understanding, those who
would like to believe in the existence in Ireland of a genuine art. For
ignored and uncared for as art is, we have some names to be proud of,
and of these Mr. Yeats and Mr. Hone are foremost.

1902




"ULSTER"


AN OPEN LETTER TO MR. RUDYARD KIPLING


I Speak to you, brother, because you have spoken to me, or rather you
have spoken for me. I am a native of Ulster. So far back as I can
trace the faith of my forefathers they held the faith for whose free
observance you are afraid.

I call you brother, for so far as I am known beyond the circle of my
personal friends it is as a poet. We are not a numerous tribe, but the
world has held us in honor, because on the whole in poetry is found
the highest and sincerest utterance of man's spirit. In this manner of
speaking if a man is not sincere his speech betrayeth him, for all
true poetry was written on the Mount of Transfiguration, and there is
revelation in it and the mingling of heaven and earth. I am jealous of
the honor of poetry, and I am jealous of the good name of my country,
and I am impelled by both emotions to speak to you.

You have blood of our race in you, and you may, perhaps, have some
knowledge of Irish sentiment. You have offended against one of our
noblest literary traditions in the manner in which you have published
your thoughts. You begin by quoting Scripture. You preface your verses
on Ulster by words from the mysterious oracles of humanity as if you had
been inflamed and inspired by the prophet of God; and you go on to sing
of faith in peril and patriotism betrayed and the danger of death and
oppression by those who do murder by night, which things, if one truly
feels, he speaks of without consideration of commerce or what it shall
profit him to speak. But you, brother, have withheld your fears for your
country and mine until they could yield you a profit in two continents.
After all this high speech about the Lord and the hour of national
darkness it shocks me to find this following your verses: "Copyrighted
in the United States of America by Rudyard Kipling." You are not in
want. You are the most successful man of letters of your time, and yet
you are not above making profit out of the perils of your country.
You ape the lordly speech of the prophets, and you conclude by warning
everybody not to reprint your words at their peril. In Ireland every
poet we honor has dedicated his genius to his country without gain, and
has given without stint, without any niggardly withholding of his gift
when his nation was dark and evil days. Not one of our writers, when
deeply moved about Ireland, has tried to sell the gift of the spirit.
You, brother, hurt me when you declare your principles, and declare a
dividend to yourself out of your patriotism openly and at the same time.

I would not reason with you, but that I know there is something truly
great and noble in you, and there have been hours when the immortal in
you secured your immortality in literature, when you ceased to see life
with that hard cinematograph eye of yours, and saw with the eyes of
the spirit, and power and tenderness and insight were mixed in magical
tales. But you were far from the innermost when you wrote of my
countrymen us you did.

I have lived all my life in Ireland, holding a different faith from that
held by the majority. I know Ireland as few Irishmen know it, county by
county, for I traveled all over Ireland for years, and, Ulster man as I
am, and proud of the Ulster people, I resent the crowning of Ulster
with all the virtues and the dismissal of other Irishmen as thieves and
robbers. I resent the cruelty with which you, a stranger, speak of the
lovable and kindly people I know.

You are not even accurate in your history when you speak of Ulster's
traditions and the blood our forefathers spilt. Over a century ago
Ulster was the strong and fast place of rebellion, and it was in Ulster
that the Volunteers stood beside their cannon and wrung the gift of
political freedom for the Irish Parliament. You are blundering in your
blame. You speak of Irish greed in I know not what connection, unless
you speak of the war waged over the land; and yet you ought to know that
both parties in England have by Act after Act confessed the absolute
justice and rightness of that agitation, Unionist no less than Liberal,
and both boast of their share in answering the Irish appeal. They are
both proud today of what they did. They made inquiry into wrong and
redressed it. But you, it seems, can only feel sore and angry that
intolerable conditions imposed by your laws were not borne in patience
and silence. For what party do you speak? What political ideal inspires
you? When an Irishman has a grievance you smite him. How differently
would you have written of Runnymede and the valiant men who rebelled
when oppressed. You would have made heroes out of them. Have you no soul
left, after admiring the rebels in your own history, to sympathize with
other rebels suffering deeper wrongs? Can you not see deeper into the
motives for rebellion than the hireling reporter who is sent to make
up a case for the paper of a party? The best men in Ulster, the best
Unionists in Ireland will not be grateful to you for libeling their
countrymen in your verse. For, let the truth be known, the mass of Irish
Unionists are much more in love with Ireland than with England. They
think Irish Nationalists are mistaken, and they fight with them and
use hard words, and all the time they believe Irishmen of any party are
better in the sight of God than Englishmen. They think Ireland is the
best country in the world to live in, and they hate to hear Irish people
spoken of as murderers and greedy scoundrels. Murderers! Why, there is
more murder done in any four English shires in a year than in the whole
of the four provinces of Ireland! Greedy! The nation never accepted a
bribe, or took it as an equivalent or payment for an ideal, and what
bribe would not have been offered to Ireland if it had been willing to
forswear its traditions.

I am a person whose whole being goes into a blaze at the thought
of oppression of faith, and yet I think my Catholic countrymen more
tolerant than those who hold the faith I was born in. I am a heretic
judged by their standards, a heretic who has written and made public his
heresies, and I have never suffered in friendship or found my heresies
an obstacle in life. I set my knowledge, the knowledge of a lifetime,
against your ignorance, and I say you have used your genius to do
Ireland and its people a wrong. You have intervened in a quarrel of
which you do not know the merits like any brawling bully, who passes,
and only takes sides to use his strength. If there was a high court of
poetry, and those in power jealous of the noble name of poet, and that
none should use it save those who were truly Knights of the Holy Ghost,
they would hack the golden spurs from your heels and turn you out of the
Court. You had the ear of the world and you poisoned it with prejudice
and ignorance. You had the power of song, and you have always used it
on behalf of the strong against the weak. You have smitten with all your
might at creatures who are frail on earth but mighty in the heavens,
at generosity, at truth, at justice, and heaven has withheld vision
and power and beauty from you, for this your verse is but a shallow
newspaper article made to rhyme. Truly ought the golden spurs to be
hacked from your heels and you be thrust out of the Court.

1912




IDEALS OF THE NEW RURAL SOCIETY


For a country where political agitations follow each other as rapidly
as plagues in an Eastern city, it is curious how little constructive
thought we can show on the ideals of a rural civilization. But economic
peace ought surely to have its victories to show as well as political
war. I would a thousand times rather dwell on what men and women working
together may do than on what may result from majorities at Westminster.
The beauty of great civilizations has been built up far more by the
people working together than by any corporate action of the State. In
these socialistic days we grow pessimistic about our own efforts and
optimistic about the working of the legislature. I think we do right to
expect great things from the State, but we ought to expect still greater
things from ourselves. We ought to know full well that, if the State did
twice as much as it does, we shall never rise out of mediocrity among
the nations unless we have unlimited faith in the power of our personal
efforts to raise and transform Ireland, and unless we translate the
faith into works. The State can give a man an economic holding, but
only the man himself can make it into Earthly Paradise, and it is a dull
business, unworthy of a being made in the image of God, to grind away
at work without some noble end to be served, some glowing ideal to be
attained.

Ireland is a horribly melancholy and cynical country. Our literary men
and poets, who ought to give us courage, have taken to writing about
the Irish as people who "went forth to battle, but always fell,"
sentimentalizing over incompetence instead of invigorating us and
liberating us and directing our energies. We have developed a new and
clever school of Irish dramatists who say they are holding up the mirror
to Irish peasant nature, but they reflect nothing but decadence. They
delight in the broken lights of insanity, the ruffian who beats his
wife, the weakling who is unfortunate in love and who goes and drinks
himself to death, while the little decaying country towns are seized on
with avidity and exhibited on the stage in every kind of decay and human
futility and meanness. Well, it is good to be chastened in spirit,
but it is a thousand times better to be invigorated in spirit. To be
positive is always better than to be negative. These writers understand
and sympathize with Ireland more through their lower nature than their
higher nature. Judging by the things people write in Ireland, and by
what they go to see performed on the stage, it is more pleasing to them
to see enacted characters they know are meaner than themselves than to
see characters which they know are nobler than themselves.

All this is helping on our national pessimism and self-mistrust. It
helps to fix these features permanently in our national character,
which were excusable enough as temporary moods after defeat. The
younger generation should hear nothing about failures. It should not be
hypnotized into self-contempt. Our energies in Ireland are sapped by a
cynical self-mistrust which is spread everywhere through society. It
is natural enough that the elder generation, who were promised so many
millenniums, but who actually saw four million people deducted from the
population, should be cynical. But it is not right they should give only
to the younger generation the heritage of their disappointments without
any heritage of hope. From early childhood parents and friends are
hypnotizing the child into beliefs and unbeliefs, and too often they are
exiling all nobility out of life, all confidence, all trust, all hope;
they are insinuating a mean self-seeking, a self-mistrust, a vulgar
spirit which laughs at every high ideal, until at last the hypnotized
child is blinded to the presence of any beauty or nobility in life. No
country can ever hope to rise beyond a vulgar mediocrity where there is
not unbounded confidence in what its humanity can do. The self-confident
American will make a great civilization yet, because he believes with
all his heart and soul in the future of his country and in the powers of
the American people. What Whitman called their "barbaric yawp" may yet
turn into the lordliest speech and thought, but without self-confidence
a race will go no whither. If Irish people do not believe they can equal
or surpass the stature of any humanity which has been upon the globe,
then they had better all emigrate and become servants to some superior
race, and leave Ireland to new settlers who may come here with the same
high hopes as the Pilgrim Fathers had when they went to America.

We must go on imagining better than the best we know. Even in their
ruins now, Greece and Italy seem noble and beautiful with broken pillars
and temples made in their day of glory. But before ever there was a
white marble temple shining on a hill it shone with a more brilliant
beauty in the mind of some artist who designed it. Do many people know
how that marvelous Greek civilization spread along the shores of the
Mediterranean? Little nations owning hardly more land than would make up
an Irish barony sent out colony after colony. The seed of beautiful
life they sowed grew and blossomed out into great cities and half-divine
civilizations. Italy had a later blossoming of beauty in the Middle
Ages, and travelers today go into little Italian towns and find them
filled with masterpieces of painting and architecture and sculpture,
witnesses of a time when nations no larger than an Irish county rolled
their thoughts up to Heaven and miked their imagination with the angels.
Can we be contented in Ireland with the mean streets of our country
towns and the sordid heaps of our villages dominated in their economics
by the vendors of alcohol, and inspired as to their ideals by the
vendors of political animosities?

I would not mind people fighting in a passion to get rid of all that
barred some lordly scheme of life, but quarrels over political bones
from which there is little or nothing wholesome to be picked only
disgust. People tell me that the countryside must always be stupid and
backward, and I get angry, as if it were said that only townspeople had
immortal souls, and it was only in the city that the flame of divinity
breathed into the first men had any unobscured glow. The countryside in
Ireland could blossom into as much beauty as the hillsides in mediaeval
Italy if we could but get rid of our self-mistrust. We have all that
any race ever had to inspire them, the heavens overhead, the earth
underneath, and the breath of life in our nostrils. I would like to
exile the man who would set limits to what we can do, who would take the
crown and sceptre from the human will and say, marking out some petty
enterprise as the limit--"Thus far can we go and no farther, and
here shall our life be stayed." Therefore I hate to hear of stagnant
societies who think because they have made butter well that they have
crowned their parochial generation with a halo of glory, and can rest
content with the fame of it all, listening to the whirr of the steam
separators and pouching in peace of mind the extra penny a gallon for
their milk. And I dislike the little groups who meet a couple of times
a year and call themselves co-operators because they have got their
fertilizers more cheaply, and have done nothing else. Why, the village
gombeen man has done more than that! He has at least brought most of
the necessaries of life there by his activities; and I say if we
co-operators do not aim at doing more than the Irish Scribes and
Pharisees we shall have little to be proud of. A poet, interpreting the
words of Christ to His followers, who had scorned the followers of the
old order, made Him say:

     Scorn ye their hopes, their tears, their inward prayers?
     I say unto you, see that your souls live
     A deeper life than theirs.

The co-operative movement is delivering over the shaping of the rural
life of Ireland, and the building up of its rural civilization, into
the hands of Irish farmers. The old order of things has left Ireland
unlovely. But if we do not passionately strive to build it better,
better for the men, for the women, for the children, of what worth are
we? We continually come across the phrase "the dull Saxon" in our Irish
papers, it crops up in the speeches of our public orators, but it was an
English poet who said:

     I will not cease from mental fight,
     Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
     Till we have built Jerusalem
     In England's green and pleasant land.

And it was the last great, poet England has produced, who had so much
hope for humanity in his country that in his latest song he could mix
earth with heaven, and say that to human eyes:

     Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
     Hung betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Shall we think more meanly of the future of Ireland than these "dull
Saxons" think of the future of their island? Shall we be content with
humble crumbs fallen from the table of life, and sit like beggars
waiting only for what the commonwealth can do for us, leaving all high
hopes and aims to our rulers, whether they be English or Irish? Every
people get the kind of Government they deserve. A nation can exhibit no
greater political wisdom in the mass than it generates in its units.
It is the pregnant idealism of the multitude which gives power to the
makers of great nations, otherwise the prophets of civilization are
helpless as preachers in the desert and solitary places. So I have
always preached self-help above all other kinds of help, knowing that if
we strove passionately after this righteousness all other kinds of help
would be at our service. So, too, I would brush aside the officious
interferer in co-operative affairs, who would offer on behalf of the
State to do for us what we should, and could, do far better ourselves.
We can build up a rural civilization in Ireland, shaping it to our
hearts' desires, warming it with life, but our rulers and officials
can never be warmer than a stepfather, and have no "large, divine, and
comfortable words" for us; they tinker at the body when it is the soul
which requires to be healed and made whole. The soul of Ireland has to
be kindled, and it can be kindled only by the thought of great deeds and
not by the hope of petty parsimonies or petty gains.

Now, great deeds are never done vicariously. They are done directly and
personally. No country has grown to greatness mainly by the acts of
some great ruler, but by the aggregate activities of all its people.
Therefore, every Irish community should make its own ideals and
should work for them. As great work can be done in a parish as in the
legislative assemblies with a nation at gaze. Do people say: "It is
easier to work well with a nation at gaze?" I answer that true greatness
becomes the North Pole of humanity, and when it appears all the needles
of Being point to it. You of the young generation, who have not yet lost
the generous ardour of youth, believe it is as possible to do great work
and make noble sacrifices, and to roll the acceptable smoke of offering
to Heaven by your work in an Irish parish, as in any city in the world.
Like the Greek architects--who saw in their dreams hills crowned with
white marble pillared palaces and images of beauty, until these rose up
in actuality--so should you, not forgetting national ideals, still most
of all set before yourselves the ideal of your own neighborhood. How can
you speak of working for all Ireland, which you have not seen, if you do
not labor and dream for the Ireland before your eyes, which you see as
you look out of your own door in the morning, and on which you walk up
and down through the day?

"What dream shall we dream or what labor shall we undertake?" you may
ask, and it is right that those who exhort should be asked in what
manner and how precisely they would have the listener act or think. I
answer: the first thing to do is to create and realize the feeling for
the community, and break up the evil and petty isolation of man from
man. This can be done by every kind of co-operative effort where
combined action is better than individual action. The parish cannot take
care of the child as well as the parents, but you will find in most
of the labors of life combined action is more fruitful than individual
action. Some of you have found this out in many branches of agriculture,
of which your dairying, agricultural, credit, poultry, and flax
societies are witness. Some of you have combined to manufacture; some
to buy in common, some to sell in common. Some of you have the common
ownership of thousands of pounds' worth of expensive machinery. Some of
you have carried the idea of co-operation for economic ends farther, and
have used the power which combination gives you to erect village halls
and to have libraries of books, the windows through which the life
and wonder and power of humanity can be seen. Some of you have
light-heartedly, in the growing sympathy of unity, revived the dances
and songs and sports which are the right relaxation of labor. Some
Irishwomen here and there have heard beyond the four walls in which so
much of their lives are spent the music of a new day, and have started
out to help and inspire the men and be good comrades to them; and
calling themselves United Irish-women, they have joined, as men have
joined, to help their sisters who are in economic servitude, or who
suffer from the ignorance and indifference to their special needs in
life which pervade the administration of local government. We cannot
build up a rural civilization in Ireland without the aid of Irish women.
It will help life little if we have methods of the twentieth century in
the fields, and those of the fifth century in the home. A great writer
said: "Woman is the last thing man will civilize." If a woman had
written on that subject she would have said: "Woman is the last thing
a man thinks about when he is building up his empires." It is true that
the consciousness of woman has been always centered too close to the
dark and obscure roots of the Tree of Life, while men have branched
out more to the sun an wind, and today the starved soul of womanhood is
crying out over the world for an intellectual life and for more chance
of earning a living. If Ireland will not listen to this cry, its
daughters will go on slipping silently away to other countries, as they
have been doing--all the best of them, all the bravest, all those most
mentally alive, all those who would have made the best wives and the
best mothers--and they will leave at home the timid, the stupid and
the dull to help in the deterioration of the race and to breed sons as
sluggish as themselves. In the New World women have taken an important
part in the work of the National Grange, the greatest agency in
bettering the economic and social conditions of the agricultural
population in the States. In Ireland the women must be welcomed into
the work of building up a rural civilization, and be aided by men in the
promotion of those industries with which women have been immemorially
associated. We should not want to see women separated from the
activities and ideals and inspirations of men. We should want to see
them working together and in harmony. If the women carry on their work
in connection with the associations by which men earn their living they
will have a greater certainty of permanence. I have seen too many little
industries and little associations of women workers spring up and perish
in Ireland, which depended on the efforts of some one person who had not
drunk of the elixir of immortal youth, and could not always continue
the work she started; and I have come to the conclusion that the women's
organizations must be connected with the men's organizations, must use
their premises, village halls, and rooms for women's meetings. I do not
believe women's work can be promoted so well in any other way. Men and
women have been companions in the world from the dawn of time. I do not
know where they are journeying to, but I believe they will never get to
the Delectable City if they journey apart from each other, and do not
share each other's burdens.

Working so, we create the conditions in which the spirit of the
community grows strong. We create the true communal idea, which
the Socialists miss in their dream of a vast amalgamation of whole
nationalities in one great commercial undertaking. The true idea of the
clan or commune or tribe is to have in it as many people as will give
it strength and importance, and so few people that a personal tie may
be established between them. Humanity has always grouped itself
instinctively in this way. It did so in the ancient clans and rural
communes, and it does so in the parishes and co-operative associations.
If they were larger they would lose the sense of unity. If they were
smaller they would be too feeble for effectual work, and could not take
over the affairs of their district. A rural commune or co-operative
community ought to have, to a large extent, the character of a nation.
It should manufacture for its members all things which it profitably can
manufacture for them, employing its own workmen, carpenters, bootmakers,
makers and menders of farming equipment, saddlery, harness, etc. It
should aim at feeding its members and their families cheaply and well,
as far as possible, out of the meat and grain produced in the district.
It should have a mill to grind their grain, a creamery to manufacture
their butter; or where certain enterprises like a bacon factory are too
great for it, it should unite with other co-operative communities to
furnish out such an enterprise. It should sell for the members their
produce, and buy for them their requirements, and hold for them
labor-saving machinery. It should put aside a certain portion of its
profits every year for the creation of halls, libraries, places for
recreation and games, and it should pursue this plan steadily with the
purpose of giving its members every social and educational advantage
which the civilization of their time affords. It should have its
councils or village parliaments, where improvements and new ventures
could be discussed. Such a community would soon generate a passionate
devotion to its own ideals and interests among the members, who would
feel how their fortunes rose with the fortunes of the associations of
which they were all members. It would kindle and quicken the intellect
of every person in the community. It would create the atmosphere in
which national genius would emerge and find opportunities for its
activity. The clan ought to be the antechamber of the nation and the
training ground for its statesmen. What opportunity leadership in the
councils of such a rural community would give to the best minds! The man
of social genius at present finds an unorganized community, and he does
not know how to affect his fellow-citizens. A man might easily despair
of affecting the destinies of a nation of forty million people, but yet
start with eagerness to build up a kingdom of the size of Sligo, and
shape it nearer to the heart's desire. The organization of the rural
population of Ireland in co-operative associations will provide the
instrument ready to the hand of the social reformer.

Some associations will be more dowered with ability than others, but
one will learn from another, and a vast network of living, progressive
organizations will cover rural Ireland, democratic in constitution and
governed by the aristocracy of intellect and character.

Such associations would have great economic advantages in that they
would be self-reliant and self-contained, and would be less subject to
fluctuation in their prosperity brought about by national disasters and
commercial crises than the present unorganized rural communities are.
They would have all their business under local control; and, aiming at
feeding, clothing, and manufacturing locally from local resources as far
as possible, the slumps in foreign trade, the shortage in supplies, the
dislocations of commerce would affect them but little. They would make
the community wealthier. Every step towards this organization already
taken in Ireland has brought with it increased prosperity, and the
towns benefit by increased purchasing power on the part of these rural
associations. New arts and industries would spring up under the aegis of
the local associations. Here we should find the weaving of rugs,
there the manufacture of toys, elsewhere the women would be engaged
in embroidery or lace-making, and, perhaps, everywhere we might get a
revival of the old local industry of weaving homespuns. We are dreaming
of nothing impossible, nothing which has not been done somewhere
already, nothing which we could not do here in Ireland. True, it cannot
be done all at once, but if we get the idea clearly in our minds of the
building up of a rural civilization in Ireland, we can labor at it with
the grand persistence of medieval burghers in their little towns, where
one generation laid down the foundations of a great cathedral, and saw
only in hope and faith the gorgeous glooms over altar and sanctuary,
and the blaze and flame of stained glass, where apostles, prophets, and
angelic presences were pictured in fire: and the next generation raised
high the walls, and only the third generation saw the realization of
what their grandsires had dreamed. We in Ireland should not live only
from day to day, for the day only, like the beasts in the field, but
should think of where all this long cavalcade of the Gael is tending,
and how and in what manner their tents will be pitched in the evening
of their generation. A national purpose is the most unconquerable and
victorious of all things on earth. It can raise up Babylons from the
sands of the desert, and make imperial civilizations spring from out a
score of huts, and after it has wrought its will it can leave monuments
that seem as everlasting a portion of nature as the rocks. The Pyramids
and the Sphinx in the sands of Egypt have seemed to humanity for
centuries as much a portion of nature as Erigal, or Benbulben, or Slieve
Gullion have seemed a portion of nature to our eyes in Ireland.

We must have some purpose or plan in building up an Irish civilization.
No artist takes up his paints and brushes and begins to work on his
canvas without a clear idea burning in his brain of what he has to do,
else were his work all smudges. Does anyone think that out of all these
little cabins and farmhouses dotting the green of Ireland there will
come harmonious effort to a common end without organization and set
purpose? The idea and plan of a great rural civilization must shine like
a burning lamp in the imagination of the youth of Ireland, or we shall
only be at cross-purposes and end in little fatuities. We are very fond
in Ireland of talking of Ireland a nation. The word "nation" has a kind
of satisfying sound, but I am afraid it is an empty word with no rich
significance to most who use it. The word "laboratory" has as fine a
sound, but only the practical scientist has a true conception of what
may take place there, what roar of strange forces, what mingling of
subtle elements, what mystery and magnificence in atomic life. The word
without the idea is like the purse without the coin, the skull without
the soul, or any other sham or empty deceit. Nations are not built up by
the repetition of words, but by the organizing of intellectual forces.
If any of my readers would like to know what kind of thought goes to
the building up of a great nation, let him read the life of Alexander
Hamilton by Oliver. To that extraordinary man the United States owe
their constitution, almost their existence. To him, far more than to
Washington, the idea, plan, shape of all that marvelous dominion owes
its origin and character. He seemed to hold in his brain, while America
was yet a group of half-barbaric settlements, the idea of what it might
become. He laid down the plans, the constitution, the foreign policy,
the trade policy, the relation of State to State, and it is only within
the last few years almost, that America has realized that she had
in Hamilton a supreme political and social intelligence, the true
fountain-head of what she has since become.

We have not half a continent to deal with, but size matters nothing. The
Russian Empire, which covers half Europe, and stretches over the Ural
Mountains to the Pacific, would weigh light as a feather in the balance
if we compare its services to humanity with those of the little State of
Attica, which was no larger than Tipperary. Every State which has come
to command the admiration of the world has had clearly conceived ideals
which it realized before it went the way which all empires, even the
greatest, must go; becoming finally a legend, a fable, or a symbol. We
have to lay down the foundations of a new social order in Ireland, and,
if the possibilities of it are realized, our thousand years of sorrow
and darkness may be followed by as long a cycle of happy effort and
ever-growing prosperity. We shall want all these plans whether we
are ruled from Westminster or College Green. Without an imaginative
conception of what kind of civilization we wish to create, the best
government from either quarter will never avail to lift us beyond
national mediocrity. I write for those who have joined the ranks of the
co-operators without perhaps realizing all that the movement meant, or
all that it tended to. Because we hold in our hearts and keep holy there
the vision of a great future, I have fought passionately for the entire
freedom of our movement from external control, lest the meddling of
politicians or official persons without any inspiration should deflect,
for some petty purpose or official gratification, the strength of that
current which was flowing and gathering strength unto the realization
of great ideals. Every country has its proportion of little souls which
could find ample room on a threepenny bit, and be majestically housed in
a thimble, who follow out some little minute practice in an ecstasy of
self-satisfaction, seeking some little job which is the El Dorado of
their desires as if there were naught else, as if humanity were not
going from the Great Deep to the Great Deep of Deity, with wind and
water, fire and earth, stars and sun, lordly companions for it on its
path to a divine destiny. We have our share of these in Ireland in high
and low places, but I do not write for them. This essay is for those
who are working at laying deep the foundations of a new social order, to
hearten them with some thought of what their labor may bring to Ireland.
I welcome to this work the United Irishwomen. As one of their poetesses
has said in a beautiful song, the services of women to Ireland in the
past have been the services of mourners to the stricken. But for today
and tomorrow we need hope and courage and gaiety, and I repeat for them
the last passionate words of her verse:

     Rise to your feet, O daughters, rise,
     Our mother still is young and fair.
     Let the world look into your eyes
     And see her beauty shining there.
     Grant of that beauty but one ray,
     Heroes shall leap from every hill;
     Today shall be as yesterday,
     The red blood burns in Ireland still.





THOUGHTS FOR A CONVENTION


1. There are moments in history when by the urgency of circumstance
everyone in a country is drawn from normal pursuits to consider the
affairs of the nation. The merchant is turned from his warehouse, the
bookman from his books, the farmer from his fields, because they realize
that the very foundations of the society, under whose shelter they were
able to carry on their avocation, are being shaken, and they can no
longer be voiceless, or leave it to deputies, unadvised by them,
to arrange national destinies. We are all accustomed to endure the
annoyances and irritations caused by legislation which is not agreeable
to us, and solace ourselves by remembering that the things which
really matter are not affected. But when the destiny of a nation, the
principles by which life is to be guided are at stake, all are on a
level, are equally affected and are bound to give expression to their
opinions. Ireland is in one of these moments of history. Circumstances
with which we are all familiar and the fever in which the world exists
have infected it, and it is like molten metal the skilled political
artificer might pour into a desirable mould. But if it is not handled
rightly, if any factor is ignored, there may be an explosion which would
bring on us a fate as tragic as anything in our past history. Irishmen
can no longer afford to remain aloof from each other, or to address each
other distantly and defiantly from press or platform, but must strive
to understand each other truly, and to give due weight to each other's
opinions, and, if possible, arrive at a compromise, a balancing of
their diversities, which may save our country from anarchy and chaos for
generations to come.

2. An agreement about Irish Government must be an agreement, not between
two but three Irish parties first of all, and afterwards with Great
Britain. The Premier of a Coalition Cabinet has declared that there is
no measure of self government which Great Britain would not assent to
being set up in Ireland, if Irishmen themselves could but come to an
agreement. Before such a compromise between Irish parties is possible
there must be a clear understanding of the ideals of these parties,
as they are understood by themselves, and not as they are presented
in party controversy by special pleaders whose object too often is to
pervert or discredit the principles and actions of opponents, a
thing which is easy to do because all parties, even the noblest, have
followers who do them disservice by ignorant advocacy or excited action.
If we are to unite Ireland we can only do so by recognizing what truly
are the principles each party stands for, and will not forsake, and for
which, if necessary they will risk life. True understanding is to see
ideas as they are held by men between themselves and Heaven; and in this
mood I will try, first of all, to understand the position of Unionists,
Sinn Feiners and Constitutional Nationalists as they have been explained
to me by the best minds among them, those who have induced others of
their countrymen to accept those ideals. When this is done we will see
if compromise, a balancing of diversities be not possible in an
Irish State where all that is essential in these varied ideals may be
harmonized and retained.

3. I will take first of all the position of Unionists. They are, many
of them, the descendants of settlers who by their entrance into Ireland
broke up the Gaelic uniformity and introduced the speech, the thoughts,
characteristic of another race. While they have grown to love their
country as much as any of Gaelic origin, and their peculiarities have
been modified by centuries of life in Ireland and by intermarriage,
so that they are much more akin to their fellow-countrymen in mind and
manner than they are to any other people, they still retain habits,
beliefs and traditions from which they will not part. They form a class
economically powerful. They have openness and energy of character, great
organizing power and a mastery over materials, all qualities invaluable
in an Irish State. In North-East Ulster, where they are most homogeneous
they conduct the affairs of their cities with great efficiency, carrying
on an international trade not only with Great Britain but with the rest
of the world. They have made these industries famous. They believe that
their prosperity is in large measure due to their acceptance of the
Union, that it would be lessened if they threw in their lot with the
other Ireland and accepted its ideals, that business which now goes to
their shipyards and factories would cease if they were absorbed in
a self-governing Ireland whose spokesmen had an unfortunate habit of
nagging their neighbors and of conveying the impression that they are
inspired by race hatred. They believe that an Irish legislature would be
controlled by a majority, representatives mainly of small farmers, men
who had no knowledge of affairs, or of the peculiar needs of Ulster
industry, or the intricacy of the problems involved in carrying on an
international trade; that the religious ideas of the majority would be
so favored in education and government that the favoritism would amount
to religious oppression. They are also convinced that no small country
in the present state of the world can really be independent, that
such only exist by sufferance of their mighty neighbors, and must be
subservient in trade policy and military policy to retain even a nominal
freedom; and that an independent Ireland would by its position be a
focus for the intrigues of powers hostile to Great Britain, and if it
achieved independence Great Britain in self protection would be forced
to conquer it again. They consider that security for industry and
freedom for the individual can best be preserved in Ireland by the
maintenance of the Union, and that the world spirit is with the great
empires.

4. The second political group may be described as the spiritual
inheritors of the more ancient race in Ireland. They regard the
preservation of their nationality as a sacred charge, themselves as a
conquered people owing no allegiance to the dominant race. They cannot
be called traitors to it because neither they nor their predecessors
have ever admitted the right of another people to govern them against
their will. They are inspired by an ancient history, a literature
stretching beyond the Christian era, a national culture and distinct
national ideals which they desire to manifest in a civilization which
shall not be an echo or imitation of any other. While they do not
depreciate the worth of English culture or its political system they are
as angry at its being imposed on them as a young man with a passion for
art would be if his guardian insisted on his adopting another profession
and denied him any chance of manifesting his own genius. Few hatreds
equal those caused by the denial or obstruction of national aptitudes.
Many of those who fought in the last Irish insurrection were fighters
not merely for a political change but were rather desperate and
despairing champions of a culture which they held was being stifled from
infancy in Irish children in the schools of the nation. They believe
that the national genius cannot manifest itself in a civilization and
is not allowed to manifest itself while the Union persists. They wish
Ireland to be as much itself as Japan, and as free to make its own
choice of political principles, its culture and social order, and
to develop its industries unfettered by the trade policy of their
neighbors. Their mood is unconquerable, and while often overcome it
has emerged again and again in Irish history, and it has perhaps more
adherents today than at any period since the Act of Union, and this
has been helped on by the incarnation of the Gaelic spirit in the modern
Anglo-Irish literature, and a host of brilliant poets, dramatists and
prose writers who have won international recognition, and have increased
the dignity of spirit and the self-respect of the followers of this
tradition. They assert that the Union kills the soul of the people; that
empires do not permit the intensive cultivation of human life: that
they destroy the richness and variety of existence by the extinction of
peculiar and unique gifts, and the substitution therefor of a culture
which has its value mainly for the people who created it, but is as
alien to our race as the mood of the scientist is to the artist or poet.

5. The third group occupies a middle position between those who desire
the perfecting of the Union and those whose claim is for complete
independence: and because they occupy a middle position, and have taken
coloring from the extremes between which they exist they have been
exposed to the charge of insincerity, which is unjust so far as the best
minds among them are concerned. They have aimed at a middle course, not
going far enough on one side or another to secure the confidence of the
extremists. They have sought to maintain the connection with the empire,
and at the same time to acquire an Irish control over administration
and legislation. They have been more practical than ideal, and to their
credit must be placed the organizing of the movements which secured most
of the reforms in Ireland since the Union, such as religious equality,
the acts securing to farmers fair rents and fixity of tenure, the wise
and salutary measures making possible the transfer of land from landlord
to tenant, facilities for education at popular universities, the
laborers' acts and many others. They are a practical party taking what
they could get, and because they could show ostensible results they have
had a greater following in Ireland than any other party. This is natural
because the average man in all countries is a realist. But this reliance
on material results to secure support meant that they must always show
results, or the minds of their countrymen veered to those ultimates
and fundamentals which await settlement here as they do in all
civilizations. As in the race with Atalanta the golden apples had to be
thrown in order to win the race. The intellect of Ireland is now fixed
on fundamentals, and the compromise this middle party is able to offer
does not make provision for the ideals of either of the extremists, and
indeed meets little favor anywhere in a country excited by recent
events in world history, where revolutionary changes are expected and a
settlement far more in accord with fundamental principles.

6. It is possible that many of the rank and file of these parties will
not at first agree with the portraits painted of their opponents, and
that is because the special pleaders of the press, who in Ireland are,
as a rule, allowed little freedom to state private convictions, have
come to regard themselves as barristers paid to conduct a case, and have
acquired the habit of isolating particular events, the hasty speech or
violent action of individuals in localities, and of exhibiting these as
indicating the whole character of the party attacked. They misrepresent
Irishmen to each other. The Ulster advocates of the Union, for example,
are accustomed to hear from their advisers that the favorite employment
of Irish farmers in the three southern provinces is cattle driving, if
not worse. They are told that Protestants in these provinces live in
fear of their lives, whereas anybody who has knowledge of the true
conditions knows that, so far from being riotous and unbusinesslike,
the farmers in these provinces have developed a net-work of rural
associations, dairies, bacon factories, agricultural and poultry
societies, etc., doing their business efficiently, applying the
teachings of science in their factories, competing in quality of output
with the very best of the same class of society in Ulster and obtaining
as good prices in the same market. As a matter of fact this method of
organization now largely adopted by Ulster farmers was initiated in the
South. With regard to the charge of intolerance I do not believe it.
Here, as in all other countries, there are unfortunate souls obsessed by
dark powers, whose human malignity takes the form of religious hatreds,
but I believe, and the thousands of Irish Protestants in the Southern
Counties will affirm it as true that they have nothing to complain of in
this respect. I am sure that in this matter of religious tolerance these
provinces can stand favorable comparison with any country in the world
where there are varieties of religions, even with Great Britain. I would
plead with my Ulster compatriots not to gaze too long or too credulously
into that distorting mirror held up to them, nor be tempted to take
individual action as representative of the mass. How would they like
to have the depth or quality of spiritual life in their great city
represented by the scrawlings and revilings about the head of the
Catholic Church to be found occasionally on the blank walls of Belfast.
If the same method of distortion by selection of facts was carried out
there is not a single city or nation which could not be made to appear
baser than Sodom or Gomorrah and as deserving of their fate.

7. The Ulster character is better appreciated by Southern Ireland, and
there is little reason to vindicate it against any charges except the
slander that Ulster Unionists do not regard themselves as Irishmen, and
that they have no love for their own country. Their position is that
they are Unionists, not merely because it is for the good of Great
Britain, but because they hold it to be for the good of Ireland, and it
is the Irish argument weighs with them, and if they were convinced it
would be better for Ireland to be self-governed they would throw in
their lot with the rest of Ireland, which would accept them gladly and
greet them as a prodigal son who had returned, having made, unlike most
prodigal sons, a fortune, and well able to be the wisest adviser in
family affairs. It is necessary to preface what I have to say by way of
argument or remonstrance to Irish parties by words making it clear that
I write without prejudice against any party, and that I do not in the
least underestimate their good qualities or the weight to be attached
to their opinions and ideals. It is the traditional Irish way, which
we have too often forgotten, to notice the good in the opponent before
battling with what is evil. So Maeve, the ancient Queen of Connacht,
looking over the walls of her city of Cruachan at the Ulster foemen,
said of them, "Noble and regal is their appearance," and her own
followers said, "Noble and regal are those of whom you speak." When we
lost the old Irish culture we lost the tradition of courtesy to each
other which lessens the difficulties of life and makes it possible to
conduct controversy without creating bitter memories.

8. I desire first to argue with Irish Unionists whether it is accurate
to say of them, as it would appear to be from their spokesmen, that the
principle of nationality cannot be recognized by them or allowed to take
root in the commonwealth of dominions which form the Empire. Must one
culture only exist? Must all citizens have their minds poured into
the same mould, and varieties of gifts and cultural traditions be
extinguished? What would India with its myriad races say to that theory?
What would Canada enclosing in its dominion and cherishing a French
Canadian nation say? Unionists have by every means in their power
discouraged the study of the national literature of Ireland though it
is one of the most ancient in Europe, though the scholars of France and
Germany have founded journals for its study, and its beauty is being
recognized by all who have read it. It contains the race memory of
Ireland, its imaginations and thoughts for two thousand years. Must that
be obliterated? Must national character be sterilized of all taint of
its peculiar beauty? Must Ireland have no character of its own but be
servilely imitative of its neighbor in all things and be nothing of
itself? It is objected that the study of Irish history, Irish literature
and the national culture generates hostility to the Empire. Is that a
true psychological analysis? Is it not true in all human happenings
that if people are denied what is right and natural they will instantly
assume an attitude of hostility to the power which denies? The hostility
is not inherent in the subject but is evoked by the denial. I put it
to my Unionist compatriots that the ideal is to aim at a diversity of
culture, and the greatest freedom, richness and variety of thought. The
more this richness and variety prevail in a nation the less likelihood
is there of the tyranny of one culture over the rest. We should aim in
Ireland at that freedom of the ancient Athenians, who, as Pericles said,
listened gladly to the opinions of others and did not turn sour faces
on those who disagreed with them. A culture which is allowed essential
freedom to develop will soon perish if it does not in itself contain the
elements of human worth which make for immortality. The world has to its
sorrow many instances of freak religions which were persecuted and by
natural opposition were perpetuated and hardened in belief. We should
allow the greatest freedom in respect of cultural developments in
Ireland so that the best may triumph by reason of superior beauty and
not because the police are relied upon to maintain one culture in a
dominant position.

9. I have also an argument to address to the extremists whose claim,
uttered lately with more openness and vehemence, is for the complete
independence of the whole of Ireland, who cry out against partition, who
will not have a square mile of Irish soil subject to foreign rule.
That implies they desire the inclusion of Ulster and the inhabitants
of Ulster in their Irish State. I tell them frankly that if they expect
Ulster to throw its lot in with a self-governing Ireland they must
remain within the commonwealth of dominions which constitute the Empire,
be prepared loyally, once Ireland has complete control over its internal
affairs, to accept the status of a dominion and the responsibilities of
that wider union. If they will not accept that status as the Boers did,
they will never draw that important and powerful Irish party into an
Irish State except by force, and do they think there is any possibility
of that? It is extremely doubtful whether if the world stood aloof, and
allowed Irishmen to fight out their own quarrels among themselves, that
the fighters for complete independence could conquer a community so
numerous, so determined, so wealthy, so much more capable of providing
for themselves the plentiful munitions by which alone one army can hope
to conquer another. In South Africa men who had fiercer traditional
hostilities than Irishmen of different parties here have had, who
belonged to different races, who had a few years before been engaged in
a racial war, were great enough to rise above these past antagonisms,
to make an agreement and abide faithfully by it. Is the same magnanimity
not possible in Ireland? I say to my countrymen who cry out for the
complete separation of Ireland from the Empire, that they will not in
this generation bring with them the most powerful and wealthy, if not
the most numerous, party in their country. Complete control of Irish
affairs is a possibility, and I suggest to the extremists that the
status of a self-governing dominion inside a federation of dominions
is a proposal which, if other safeguards for minority interests are
incorporated, would attract Unionist attention. But if these men who
depend so much in their economic enterprises upon a friendly relation
with their largest customers are to be allured into self-governing
Ireland there must be acceptance of the Empire as an essential
condition. The Boers found it not impossible to accept this status for
the sake of a United South Africa. Are our Irish Boers not prepared
to make a compromise and abide by it loyally for the sake of a United
Ireland?

10. A remonstrance must also be addressed to the middle party in that
it has made no real effort to understand and conciliate the feelings of
Irish Unionists. They have indeed made promises, no doubt sincerely, but
they have undone the effect of all they said by encouraging of recent
years the growth of sectarian organizations with political aims and have
relied on these as on a party machine. It may be said that in Ulster
a similar organization, sectarian with political objects, has long
existed, and that this justified a counter organization. Both in
my opinion are unjustifiable and evil, but the backing of such an
organization was specially foolish in the case of the majority, whose
main object ought to be to allure the minority into the same political
fold. The baser elements in society, the intriguers, the job seekers,
and all who would acquire by influence what they cannot attain by merit,
flock into such bodies, and create a sinister impression as to their
objects and deliberations. If we are to have national concord among
Irishmen religion must be left to the Churches whose duty it is to
promote it, and be dissevered from party politics, and it should
be regarded as contrary to national idealism to organize men of one
religion into secret societies with political or economic aims. So shall
be left to Caesar the realm which is Caesar's, and it shall not appear
part of the politics of eternity that Michael's sister's son obtains a
particular post beginning at thirty shillings a week. I am not certain
that it should not be an essential condition of any Irish settlement
that all such sectarian organizations should be disbanded in so far as
their objects are political, and remain solely as friendly societies. It
is useless assuring a minority already suspicious, of the tolerance it
may expect from the majority, if the party machine of the majority is
sectarian and semi-secret, if no one of the religion of the minority can
join it. I believe in spite of the recent growth of sectarian societies
that it has affected but little the general tolerant spirit in Ireland,
and where the evils have appeared they have speedily resulted in the
break up of the organization in the locality. Irishmen individually as
a rule are much nobler in spirit than the political organizations they
belong to.

11. It is necessary to speak with the utmost frankness and not to slur
over any real difficulty in the way of a settlement. Irish parties must
rise above themselves if they are to bring about an Irish unity. They
appear on the surface irreconcilable, but that, in my opinion, is
because the spokesmen of parties are under the illusion that they should
never indicate in public that they might possibly abate one jot of the
claims of their party. A crowd or organization is often more extreme
than its individual members. I have spoken to Unionists and Sinn Feiners
and find them as reasonable in private as they are unreasonable in
public. I am convinced that an immense relief would be felt by all
Irishmen if a real settlement of the Irish question could be arrived at,
a compromise which would reconcile them to living under one government,
and would at the same time enable us to live at peace with our
neighbors. The suggestions which follow were the result of discussions
between a group of Unionists, Nationalists and Sinn Feiners, and as they
found it possible to agree upon a compromise it is hoped that the policy
which harmonized their diversities may help to bring about a similar
result in Ireland.

12. I may now turn to consider the Anglo-Irish problem and to make
specific suggestions for its solution and the character of the
government to be established in Ireland. The factors are triple.
There is first the desire many centuries old of Irish nationalists for
self-government and the political unity of the people: secondly, there
is the problem of the Unionists who require that the self-governing
Ireland they enter shall be friendly to the imperial connection, and
that their religious and economic interests shall be safeguarded by real
and not merely by verbal guarantees; and, thirdly, there is the
position of Great Britain which requires, reasonably enough, that any
self-governing dominion set up alongside it shall be friendly to
the Empire. In this matter Great Britain has priority of claim to
consideration, for it has first proposed a solution, the Home Rule Act
which is on the Statute Book, though later variants of that have been
outlined because of the attitude of Unionists in North-East Ulster,
variants which suggest the partition of Ireland, the elimination of six
counties from the area controlled by the Irish government. This Act, or
the variants of it offered to Ireland, is the British contribution to
the settlement of the Anglo-Irish problem.

13. If it is believed that this scheme, or any diminutive of it, will
settle the Anglo-Irish problem, British statesmen and people who trust
them are only preparing for themselves bitter disappointment. I believe
that nothing less than complete self-government has ever been the object
of Irish Nationalism. However ready certain sections have been to accept
installments, no Irish political leader had authority to pledge his
countrymen to ever accept a half measure as a final settlement of the
Irish claim. The Home Rule Act, if put into operation tomorrow, even if
Ulster were cajoled or coerced into accepting it, would not be regarded
by Irish Nationalists as a final settlement, no matter what may be
said at Westminster. Nowhere in Ireland has it been accepted as final.
Received without enthusiasm at first, every year which has passed
since the Bill was introduced has seen the system of self-government
formulated there subjected to more acute and hostile criticism: and I
believe it would be perfectly accurate to say that its passing tomorrow
would only be the preliminary for another agitation, made fiercer by the
unrest of the world, where revolutions and the upsetting of dynasties
are in the air, and where the claims of nationalities no more ancient
than the Irish, like the Poles, the Finns, and the Arabs, to political
freedom are admitted by the spokesmen of the great powers, Great Britain
included, or are already conceded. If any partition of Ireland is
contemplated this will intensify the bitterness now existing. I believe
it is to the interest of Great Britain to settle the Anglo-Irish
dispute. It has been countered in many of its policies in America and
the Colonies by the vengeful feelings of Irish exiles. There may yet
come a time when the refusal of the Irish mouse to gnaw at a net spread
about the lion may bring about the downfall of the Empire. It cannot be
to the interest of Great Britain to have on its flank some millions of
people who, whenever Great Britain is engaged in a war which threatens
its existence, feel a thrill running through them, as prisoners do
hearing the guns sounding closer of an army which comes, as they think,
to liberate them. Nations denied essential freedom ever feel like that
when the power which dominates them is itself in peril. Who can doubt
but for the creation of Dominion Government in South Africa that the
present war would have found the Boers thirsty for revenge, and the
Home Government incapable of dealing with a distant people who taxed its
resources but a few years previously. I have no doubt that if Ireland
was granted the essential freedom and wholeness in its political life
it desires, its mood also would be turned. I have no feelings of race
hatred, no exultation in thought of the downfall of any race; but as a
close observer of the mood of millions in Ireland, I feel certain that
if their claim is not met they will brood and scheme and Wait to strike
a blow, though the dream may be handed on from them to their children
and their children's children, yet they will hope, sometime, to give the
last vengeful thrust of enmity at the stricken heart of the Empire.

14. Any measure which is not a settlement which leaves Ireland still
actively discontented is a waste of effort, and the sooner English
statesmen realize the futility of half measures the better. A man who
claims a debt he believes is due to him, who is offered half of it in
payment, is not going to be conciliated or to be one iota more friendly,
if he knows that the other is able to pay the full amount and it could
be yielded without detriment to the donor. Ireland will never be content
with a system of self-government which lessens its representation in the
Imperial Parliament, and still retains for that Parliament control over
all-important matters like taxation and trade policy. Whoever controls
these controls the character of an Irish civilization, and the demand
of Ireland is not merely for administrative powers, but the power to
fashion its own national policy, and to build up a civilization of
its own with an economic character in keeping by self-devised and
self-checked efforts. To misunderstand this is to suppose there is
no such thing as national idealism, and that a people will accept
substitutes for the principle of nationality, whereas the past history
of the world and present circumstance in Europe are evidence that
nothing is more unconquerable and immortal than national feeling, and
that it emerges from centuries of alien government, and is ready at any
time to flare out in insurrection. At no period in Irish history was
that sentiment more self-conscious than it is today.

15. Nationalist Ireland requires that the Home Rule Act should be
radically changed to give Ireland unfettered control over taxation,
customs, excise and trade policy. These powers are at present denied,
and if the Act were in operation, Irish people instead of trying to make
the best of it, would begin at once to use whatever powers they had as
a lever to gain the desired control, and this would lead to fresh
antagonism and a prolonged struggle between the two countries, and
in this last effort Irish Nationalists would have the support of that
wealthy class now Unionist in the three southern provinces, and also
in Ulster if it were included, for they would then desire as much as
Nationalists that, while they live in a self-governing Ireland, the
powers of the Irish government should be such as would enable it to
build up Irish industries by an Irish trade policy, and to impose
taxation in a way to suit Irish conditions. As the object of British
consent to Irish self-government is to dispose of Irish antagonism
nothing is to be gained by passing measures which will not dispose of
it. The practically unanimous claim of Nationalists as exhibited in
the press in Ireland is for the status and power of economic control
possessed by the self-governing dominions. By this alone will the causes
of friction between the two nations be removed, and a real solidarity of
interest based on a federal union for joint defense of the freedom and
well-being of the federated communities be possible and I have no doubt
it would take place. I do not believe that hatreds remain for long among
people when the causes which created them are removed. We have seen in
Europe and in the dominions the continual reversals of feeling which
have taken place when a sore has been removed. Antagonisms are replaced
by alliances. It is mercifully true of human nature that it prefers to
exercise goodwill to hatred when it can, and the common sense of the
best in Ireland would operate once there was no longer interference
in our internal affairs, to allay and keep in order these turbulent
elements which exist in every country, but which only become a danger to
society when real grievances based on the violation of true principles
of government are present.

16. The Union has failed absolutely to conciliate Ireland. Every
generation there have been rebellions and shootings and agitations of
a vehement and exhausting chara

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