No More Learning

1897.


I could have written this essay with much more precision and have much
better illustrated my meaning if I had waited until Lady Gregory had
finished her book of legends, _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_, a book to set
beside the _Morte d'Arthur_ and the _Mabinogion_.

1902.




THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY


OUR thoughts and emotions are often but spray flung up from hidden
tides that follow a moon no eye can see. I remember that when I first
began to write I desired to describe outward things as vividly as
possible, and took pleasure, in which there was, perhaps, a little
discontent, in picturesque and declamatory books. And then quite
suddenly I lost the desire of describing outward things, and found
that I took little pleasure in a book unless it was spiritual and
unemphatic. I did not then understand that the change was from beyond
my own mind, but I understand now that writers are struggling all over
Europe, though not often with a philosophic understanding of their
struggle, against that picturesque and declamatory way of writing,
against that 'externality' which a time of scientific and political
thought has brought into literature. This struggle has been going on
for some years, but it has only just become strong enough to draw
within itself the little inner world which alone seeks more than
amusement in the arts. In France, where movements are more marked,
because the people are pre-eminently logical, _The Temptation of S.
Anthony_, the last great dramatic invention of the old romanticism,
contrasts very plainly with _Axel_, the first great dramatic invention
of the new; and Maeterlinck has followed Count Villiers de L'Isle
Adam. Flaubert wrote unforgettable descriptions of grotesque, bizarre,
and beautiful scenes and persons, as they show to the ear and to the
eye, and crowded them with historic and ethnographical details; but
Count Villiers de L'Isle Adam swept together, by what seemed a sudden
energy, words behind which glimmered a spiritual and passionate mood,
as the flame glimmers behind the dusky blue and red glass in an Eastern
lamp; and created persons from whom has fallen all even of personal
characteristic except a thirst for that hour when all things shall pass
away like a cloud, and a pride like that of the Magi following their
star over many mountains; while Maeterlinck has plucked away even this
thirst and this pride and set before us faint souls, naked and pathetic
shadows already half vapour and sighing to one another upon the border
of the last abyss. There has been, as I think, a like change in French
painting, for one sees everywhere, instead of the dramatic stories and
picturesque moments of an older school, frail and tremulous bodies
unfitted for the labour of life, and landscape where subtle rhythms of
colour and of form have overcome the clear outline of things as we see
them in the labour of life.

There has been a like change in England, but it has come more gradually
and is more mixed with lesser changes than in France. The poetry which
found its expression in the poems of writers like Browning and of
Tennyson, and even of writers, who are seldom classed with them, like
Swinburne, and like Shelley in his earlier years, pushed its limits
as far as possible, and tried to absorb into itself the science and
politics, the philosophy and morality of its time; but a new poetry,
which is always contracting its limits, has grown up under the shadow
of the old. Rossetti began it, but was too much of a painter in his
poetry to follow it with a perfect devotion; and it became a movement
when Mr. Lang and Mr. Gosse and Mr. Dobson devoted themselves to
the most condensed of lyric poems, and when Mr. Bridges, a more
considerable poet, elaborated a rhythm too delicate for any but an
almost bodiless emotion, and repeated over and over the most ancient
notes of poetry, and none but these. The poets who followed have
either, like Mr. Kipling, turned from serious poetry altogether, and
so passed out of the processional order, or speak out of some personal
or spiritual passion in words and types and metaphors that draw one's
imagination as far as possible from the complexities of modern life and
thought. The change has been more marked in English painting, which,
when intense enough to belong to the procession order, began to cast
out things, as they are seen by minds plunged in the labour of life, so
much before French painting that ideal art is sometimes called English
art upon the Continent.

I see, indeed, in the arts of every country those faint lights and
faint colours and faint outlines and faint energies which many call
'the decadence,' and which I, because I believe that the arts lie
dreaming of things to come, prefer to call the autumn of the body.
An Irish poet whose rhythms are like the cry of a sea-bird in autumn
twilight has told its meaning in the line, 'The very sunlight's weary,
and it's time to quit the plough. ' Its importance is the greater
because it comes to us at the moment when we are beginning to be
interested in many things which positive science, the interpreter
of exterior law, has always denied: communion of mind with mind in
thought and without words, foreknowledge in dreams and in visions, and
the coming among us of the dead, and of much else. We are, it may be,
at a crowning crisis of the world, at the moment when man is about
to ascend, with the wealth, he has been so long gathering, upon his
shoulders, the stairway he has been descending from the first days.
The first poets, if one may find their images in the _Kalevala_, had
not Homer's preoccupation with things, and he was not so full of their
excitement as Virgil. Dante added to poetry a dialectic which, although
he made it serve his laborious ecstasy, was the invention of minds
trained by the labour of life, by a traffic among many things, and
not a spontaneous expression of an interior life; while Shakespeare
shattered the symmetry of verse and of drama that he might fill them
with things and their accidental relations to one another.

Each of these writers had come further down the stairway than those
who had lived before him, but it was only with the modern poets, with
Goethe and Wordsworth and Browning, that poetry gave up the right to
consider all things in the world as a dictionary of types and symbols
and began to call itself a critic of life and an interpreter of things
as they are. Painting, music, science, politics, and even religion,
because they have felt a growing belief that we know nothing but the
fading and flowering of the world, have changed in numberless elaborate
ways. Man has wooed and won the world, and has fallen weary, and not,
I think, for a time, but with a weariness that will not end until the
last autumn, when the stars shall be blown away like withered leaves.
He grew weary when he said, 'These things that I touch and see and hear
are alone real,' for he saw them without illusion at last, and found
them but air and dust and moisture. And now he must be philosophical
above everything, even about the arts, for he can only return the way
he came, and so escape from weariness, by philosophy. The arts are,
I believe, about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have
fallen from the shoulders of priests, and to lead us back upon our
journey by filling our thoughts with the essences of things, and not
with things. We are about to substitute once more the distillation of
alchemy for the analyses of chemistry and for some other sciences; and
certain of us are looking everywhere for the perfect alembic that no
silver or golden drop may escape. Mr. Symons has written lately on M.
Mallarme's method, and has quoted him as saying that we should 'abolish
the pretension, aesthetically an error, despite its dominion over
almost all the masterpieces, to enclose within the subtle pages other
than--for example--the horror of the forest or the silent thunder in the
leaves, not the intense dense wood of the trees,' and as desiring to
substitute for 'the old lyric afflatus or the enthusiastic personal
direction of the phrase' words 'that take light from mutual reflection,
like an actual trail of fire over precious stones,' and 'to make an
entire word hitherto unknown to the language' 'out of many vocables. '
Mr. Symons understands these and other sentences to mean that poetry
will henceforth be a poetry of essences, separated one from another in
little and intense poems. I think there will be much poetry of this
kind, because of an ever more arduous search for an almost disembodied
ecstasy, but I think we will not cease to write long poems, but rather
that we will write them more and more as our new belief makes the world
plastic under our hands again. I think that we will learn again how to
describe at great length an old man wandering among enchanted islands,
his return home at last, his slow-gathering vengeance, a flitting shape
of a goddess, and a flight of arrows, and yet to make all of these
so different things 'take light by mutual reflection, like an actual
trail of fire over precious stones,' and become 'an entire word,' the
signature or symbol of a mood of the divine imagination as imponderable
as 'the horror of the forest or the silent thunder in the leaves. '

1898.




THE MOODS


LITERATURE differs from explanatory and scientific writing in being
wrought about a mood, or a community of moods, as the body is wrought
about an invisible soul; and if it uses argument, theory, erudition,
observation, and seems to grow hot in assertion or denial, it does so
merely to make us partakers at the banquet of the moods. It seems to me
that these moods are the labourers and messengers of the Ruler of All,
the gods of ancient days still dwelling on their secret Olympus, the
angels of more modern days ascending and descending upon their shining
ladder; and that argument, theory, erudition, observation, are merely
what Blake called 'little devils who fight for themselves,' illusions
of our visible passing life, who must be made serve the moods, or
we have no part in eternity. Everything that can be seen, touched,
measured, explained, understood, argued over, is to the imaginative
artist nothing more than a means, for he belongs to the invisible
life, and delivers its ever new and ever ancient revelation. We hear
much of his need for the restraints of reason, but the only restraint
he can obey is the mysterious instinct that has made him an artist,
and that teaches him to discover immortal moods in mortal desires,
an undecaying hope in our trivial ambitions, a divine love in sexual
passion.

1895.




THE BODY OF THE FATHER CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX


THE followers of the Father Christian Rosencrux, says the old
tradition, wrapped his imperishable body in noble raiment and laid it
under the house of their order, in a tomb containing the symbols of all
things in heaven and earth, and in the waters under the earth, and set
about him inextinguishable magical lamps, which burnt on generation
after generation, until other students of the order came upon the
tomb by chance. It seems to me that the imagination has had no very
different history during the last two hundred years, but has been laid
in a great tomb of criticism, and had set over it inextinguishable
magical lamps of wisdom and romance, and has been altogether so nobly
housed and apparelled that we have forgotten that its wizard lips
are closed, or but opened for the complaining of some melancholy and
ghostly voice. The ancients and the Elizabethans abandoned themselves
to imagination as a woman abandons herself to love, and created great
beings who made the people of this world seem but shadows, and great
passions which made our loves and hatreds appear but ephemeral and
trivial phantasies; but now it is not the great persons, or the great
passions we imagine, which absorb us, for the persons and passions in
our poems are mainly reflections our mirror has caught from older poems
or from the life about us, but the wise comments we make upon them, the
criticism of life we wring from their fortunes. Arthur and his Court
are nothing, but the many-coloured lights that play about them are as
beautiful as the lights from cathedral windows; Pompilia and Guido are
but little, while the ever-recurring meditations and expositions which
climax in the mouth of the Pope are among the wisest of the Christian
age. I cannot get it out of my mind that this age of criticism is
about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of moods, of
revelation, about to come in its place; for certainly belief in a
supersensual world is at hand again; and when the notion that we are
'phantoms of the earth and water' has gone down the wind, we will trust
our own being and all it desires to invent; and when the external
world is no more the standard of reality, we will learn again that the
great Passions are angels of God, and that to embody them 'uncurbed
in their eternal glory,' even in their labour for the ending of man's
peace and prosperity, is more than to comment, however wisely, upon the
tendencies of our time, or to express the socialistic, or humanitarian,
or other forces of our time, or even 'to sum up' our time, as the
phrase is; for Art is a revelation, and not a criticism, and the life
of the artist is in the old saying, 'The wind bloweth where it listeth,
and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh
and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the spirit. '

1895.




_THE RETURN OF ULYSSES_


I

M. MAETERLINCK, in his beautiful _Treasure of the Humble_, compares
the dramas of our stage to the paintings of an obsolete taste; and the
dramas of the stage for which he hopes, to the paintings of a taste
that cannot become obsolete. 'The true artist,' he says, 'no longer
chooses Marius triumphing over the Cimbrians, or the assassination
of the Duke of Guise, as fit subjects for his art; for he is well
aware that the psychology of victory or murder is but elementary and
exceptional, and that the solemn voice of men and things, the voice
that issues forth so timidly and hesitatingly, cannot be heard amidst
the idle uproar of acts of violence. And therefore will he place on his
canvas a house lost in the heart of the country, a door open at the end
of a passage, a face or hands at rest. ' I do not understand him to mean
that our dramas should have no victories or murders, for he quotes
for our example plays that have both, but only that their victories
and murders shall not be to excite our nerves, but to illustrate the
reveries of a wisdom which shall be as much a part of the daily life of
the wise as a face or hands at rest. And certainly the greater plays
of the past ages have been built after such a fashion. If this fashion
is about to become our fashion also, and there are signs that it is,
plays like some of Mr. Robert Bridges will come out of that obscurity
into which all poetry, that is not lyrical poetry, has fallen, and even
popular criticism will begin to know something about them. Some day
the few among us, who care for poetry more than any temporal thing,
and who believe that its delights cannot be perfect when we read it
alone in our rooms and long for one to share its delights, but that
they might be perfect in the theatre, when we share them friend with
friend, lover with beloved, will persuade a few idealists to seek
out the lost art of speaking, and seek out ourselves the lost art,
that is perhaps nearest of all arts to eternity, the subtle art of
listening. When that day comes we will talk much of Mr. Bridges; for
did he not write scrupulous, passionate poetry to be sung and to be
spoken, when there were few to sing and as yet none to speak? There
is one play especially, _The Return of Ulysses_, which we will praise
for perfect after its kind, the kind of our new drama of wisdom, for
it moulds into dramatic shape, and with as much as possible of literal
translation, those closing books of the Odyssey which are perhaps the
most perfect poetry of the world, and compels that great tide of song
to flow through delicate dramatic verse, with little abatement of its
own leaping and clamorous speed. As I read, the gathering passion
overwhelms me, as it did when Homer himself was the singer, and when
I read at last the lines in which the maid describes to Penelope the
battle with the suitors, at which she looks through the open door, I
tremble with excitement.

'_Penelope_: Alas! what cries! Say, is the prince still safe?

_The Maid_: He shieldeth himself well, and striketh surely;
His foes fall down before him. Ah! now what can I see?
Who cometh? Lo! a dazzling helm, a spear
Of silver or electron; share and swift
The piercings. How they fall! Ha! shields are raised
In vain. I am blinded, or the beggar-man
Hath waxed in strength. He is changed, he is young. O strange!
He is all in golden armour. These are gods
That slay the suitors. (_Runs to Penelope. _) O lady, forgive me.
'Tis Ares' self. I saw his crisped beard;
I saw beneath his helm his curled locks. '

The coming of Athene helmed 'in silver or electron' and her
transformation of Ulysses are not, as the way is with the only modern
dramas that popular criticism holds to be dramatic, the climax of an
excitement of the nerves, but of that unearthly excitement which has
wisdom for fruit, and is of like kind with the ecstasy of the seers,
an altar flame, unshaken by the winds of the world, and burning every
moment with whiter and purer brilliance.

Mr. Bridges has written it in what is practically the classical manner,
as he has done in _Achilles in Scyros_--a placid and charming setting
for many placid and charming lyrics--

'And ever we keep a feast of delight
The betrothal of hearts, when spirits unite,
Creating an offspring of joy, a treasure
Unknown to the bad, for whom
The gods foredoom
The glitter of pleasure
And a dark tomb. '

The poet who writes best in the Shakespearian manner is a poet with
a circumstantial and instinctive mind, who delights to speak with
strange voices and to see his mind in the mirror of Nature; while Mr.
Bridges, like most of us to-day, has a lyrical and meditative mind, and
delights to speak with his own voice and to see Nature in the mirror of
his mind. In reading his plays in a Shakespearian manner, I find that
he is constantly arranging his story in such and such a way because he
has read that the persons he is writing of did such and such things,
and not because his soul has passed into the soul of their world and
understood its unchangeable destinies. His _Return of Ulysses_ is
admirable in beauty, because its classical gravity of speech, which
does not, like Shakespeare's verse, desire the vivacity of common
life, purifies and subdues all passion into lyrical and meditative
ecstasies, and because the unity of place and time in the late acts
compels a logical rather than instinctive procession of incidents; and
if the Shakespearian _Nero: Second Part_ approaches it in beauty and in
dramatic power, it is because it eddies about Nero and Seneca, who had
both, to a great extent, lyrical and meditative minds. Had Mr. Bridges
been a true Shakespearian, the pomp and glory of the world would have
drowned that subtle voice that speaks amid our heterogeneous lives of
a life lived in obedience to a lonely and distinguished ideal.


II

The more a poet rids his verses of heterogeneous knowledge and
irrelevant analysis, and purifies his mind with elaborate art, the
more does the little ritual of his verse resemble the great ritual of
Nature, and become mysterious and inscrutable. He becomes, as all the
great mystics have believed, a vessel of the creative power of God; and
whether he be a great poet or a small poet, we can praise the poems,
which but seem to be his, with the extremity of praise that we give
this great ritual which is but copied from the same eternal model.
There is poetry that is like the white light of noon, and poetry that
has the heaviness of woods, and poetry that has the golden light of
dawn or of sunset; and I find in the poetry of Mr. Bridges in the
plays, but still more in the lyrics, the pale colours, the delicate
silence, the low murmurs of cloudy country days, when the plough is in
the earth, and the clouds darkening towards sunset; and had I the great
gift of praising, I would praise it as I would praise these things.

1896.




IRELAND AND THE ARTS


THE arts have failed; fewer people are interested in them every
generation. The mere business of living, of making money, of amusing
oneself, occupies people more and more, and makes them less and less
capable of the difficult art of appreciation. When they buy a picture
it generally shows a long-current idea, or some conventional form that
can be admired in that lax mood one admires a fine carriage in or fine
horses in; and when they buy a book it is so much in the manner of the
picture that it is forgotten, when its moment is over, as a glass of
wine is forgotten. We who care deeply about the arts find ourselves
the priesthood of an almost forgotten faith, and we must, I think, if
we would win the people again, take upon ourselves the method and the
fervour of a priesthood. We must be half humble and half proud. We see
the perfect more than others, it may be, but we must find the passions
among the people. We must baptize as well as preach.

The makers of religions have established their ceremonies, their form
of art, upon fear of death, on the hope of the father in his child,
upon the love of man and woman. They have even gathered into their
ceremonies the ceremonies of more ancient faiths, for fear a grain of
the dust turned into crystal in some past fire, a passion that had
mingled with the religious idea, might perish if the ancient ceremony
perished. They have renamed wells and images and given new meanings to
ceremonies of spring and midsummer and harvest. In very early days the
arts were so possessed by this method that they were almost inseparable
from religion, going side by side with it into all life. But, to-day,
they have grown, as I think, too proud, too anxious to live alone
with the perfect, and so one sees them, as I think, like charioteers
standing by deserted chariots and holding broken reins in their hands,
or seeking to go upon their way drawn by the one passion which alone
remains to them out of the passions of the world. We should not blame
them, but rather a mysterious tendency in things which will have its
end some day. In England, men like William Morris, seeing about them
passions so long separated from the perfect that it seemed as if they
could not be changed until society had been changed, tried to unite the
arts once more to life by uniting them to use. They advised painters to
paint fewer pictures upon canvas, and to burn more of them on plates;
and they tried to persuade sculptors that a candlestick might be as
beautiful as a statue. But here in Ireland, when the arts have grown
humble, they will find two passions ready to their hands, love of
the Unseen Life and love of country. I would have a devout writer or
painter often content himself with subjects taken from his religious
beliefs; and if his religious beliefs are those of the majority, he
may at last move hearts in every cottage. While even if his religious
beliefs are those of some minority, he will have a better welcome
than if he wrote of the rape of Persephone, or painted the burning
of Shelley's body. He will have founded his work on a passion which
will bring him to many besides those who have been trained to care
for beautiful things by a special education. If he is a painter or a
sculptor he will find churches awaiting his hand everywhere, and if he
follows the masters of his craft our other passion will come into his
work also, for he will show his Holy Family winding among hills like
those of Ireland, and his Bearer of the Cross among faces copied from
the faces of his own town. Our art teachers should urge their pupils
into this work, for I can remember, when I was myself a Dublin art
student, how I used to despond, when eagerness burned low, as it always
must now and then, at seeing no market at all.

But I would rather speak to those who, while moved in other things
than the arts by love of country, are beginning to write, as I was
some sixteen years ago, without any decided impulse to one thing more
than another, and especially to those who are convinced, as I was
convinced, that art is tribeless, nationless, a blossom gathered in No
Man's Land. The Greeks, the only perfect artists of the world, looked
within their own borders, and we, like them, have a history fuller than
any modern history of imaginative events; and legends which surpass,
as I think, all legends but theirs in wild beauty, and in our land,
as in theirs, there is no river or mountain that is not associated in
the memory with some event or legend; while political reasons have
made love of country, as I think, even greater among us than among
them. I would have our writers and craftsmen of many kinds master this
history and these legends, and fix upon their memory the appearance
of mountains and rivers and make it all visible again in their arts,
so that Irishmen, even though they had gone thousands of miles away,
would still be in their own country. Whether they chose for the subject
the carrying off of the Brown Bull, or the coming of Patrick, or the
political struggle of later times, the other world comes so much into
it all that their love of it would move in their hands also, and as
much, it may be, as in the hands of the Greek craftsmen. In other
words, I would have Ireland recreate the ancient arts, the arts as they
were understood in Judaea, in India, in Scandinavia, in Greece and Rome,
in every ancient land; as they were understood when they moved a whole
people and not a few people who have grown up in a leisured class and
made this understanding their business.

I think that my reader[B] will have agreed with most that I have said
up till now, for we all hope for arts like these. I think indeed I
first learned to hope for them myself in Young Ireland Societies,
or in reading the essays of Davis. An Englishman, with his belief
in progress, with his instinctive preference for the cosmopolitan
literature of the last century, may think arts like these parochial,
but they are the arts we have begun the making of.

I will not, however, have all my readers with me when I say that no
writer, no artist, even though he choose Brian Boroihme or Saint
Patrick for his subject, should try to make his work popular. Once he
has chosen a subject he must think of nothing but giving it such an
expression as will please himself. As Walt Whitman has written--

'The oration is to the orator, the acting is to the
actor and actress, not to the audience:
And no man understands any greatness or goodness,
but his own or the indication of his own. '

He must make his work a part of his own journey towards beauty and
truth. He must picture saint or hero, or hillside, as he sees them, not
as he is expected to see them, and he must comfort himself, when others
cry out against what he has seen, by remembering that no two men are
alike, and that there is no 'excellent beauty without strangeness. '
In this matter he must be without humility. He may, indeed, doubt the
reality of his vision if men do not quarrel with him as they did with
the Apostles, for there is only one perfection and only one search for
perfection, and it sometimes has the form of the religious life and
sometimes of the artistic life; and I do not think these lives differ
in their wages, for 'The end of art is peace,' and out of the one as
out of the other comes the cry: _Sero te amavi, Pulchritudo tam antiqua
et tam nova! Sero te amavi! _

The Catholic Church is not the less the Church of the people because
the Mass is spoken in Latin, and art is not less the art of the people
because it does not always speak in the language they are used to.
I once heard my friend Mr. Ellis say, speaking at a celebration in
honour of a writer whose fame had not come till long after his death,
'It is not the business of a poet to make himself understood, but it
is the business of the people to understand him. That they are at last
compelled to do so is the proof of his authority. ' And certainly if
you take from art its martyrdom, you will take from it its glory. It
might still reflect the passing modes of mankind, but it would cease to
reflect the face of God.

If our craftsmen were to choose their subjects under what we may call,
if we understand faith to mean that belief in a spiritual life which is
not confined to one Church, the persuasion of their faith and their
country, they would soon discover that although their choice seemed
arbitrary at first, it had obeyed what was deepest in them. I could
not now write of any other country but Ireland, for my style has been
shaped by the subjects I have worked on, but there was a time when
my imagination seemed unwilling, when I found myself writing of some
Irish event in words that would have better fitted some Italian or
Eastern event, for my style had been shaped in that general stream of
European literature which has come from so many watersheds, and it was
slowly, very slowly, that I made a new style. It was years before I
could rid myself of Shelley's Italian light, but now I think my style
is myself. I might have found more of Ireland if I had written in
Irish, but I have found a little, and I have found all myself. I am
persuaded that if the Irishmen who are painting conventional pictures
or writing conventional books on alien subjects, which have been worn
away like pebbles on the shore, would do the same, they, too, might
find themselves. Even the landscape-painter, who paints a place that he
loves, and that no other man has painted, soon discovers that no style
learned in the studios is wholly fitted to his purpose. And I cannot
but believe that if our painters of Highland cattle and moss-covered
barns were to care enough for their country to care for what makes it
different from other countries, they would discover, when struggling,
it may be, to paint the exact grey of the bare Burren Hills, and of a
sudden it may be, a new style, their very selves. And I admit, though
in this I am moved by some touch of fanaticism, that even when I see an
old subject written of or painted in a new way, I am yet jealous for
Cuchulain, and for Baile, and Aillinn, and for those grey mountains
that still are lacking their celebration. I sometimes reproach myself
because I cannot admire Mr. Hughes' beautiful, piteous _Orpheus and
Eurydice_ with an unquestioning mind. I say with my lips, 'The Spirit
made it, for it is beautiful, and the Spirit bloweth where it listeth,'
but I say in my heart, 'Aengus and Etain would have served his turn';
but one cannot, perhaps, love or believe at all if one does not love or
believe a little too much.

And I do not think with unbroken pleasure of our scholars who write
about German writers or about periods of Greek history. I always
remember that they could give us a number of little books which would
tell, each book for some one country, or some one parish, the verses,
or the stories, or the events that would make every lake or mountain
a man can see from his own door an excitement in his imagination. I
would have some of them leave that work of theirs which will never
lack hands, and begin to dig in Ireland, the garden of the future,
understanding that here in Ireland the spirit of man may be about to
wed the soil of the world.

Art and scholarship like these I have described would give Ireland
more than they received from her, for they would make love of the
unseen more unshakable, more ready to plunge deep into the abyss, and
they would make love of country more fruitful in the mind, more a part
of daily life. One would know an Irishman into whose life they had
come--and in a few generations they would come into the life of all,
rich and poor--by something that set him apart among men. He himself
would understand that more was expected of him than of others because
he had greater possessions. The Irish race would have become a chosen
race, one of the pillars that uphold the world.

1901.

FOOTNOTE:

[Footnote B: This essay was first published in the _United Irishman_. ]




THE GALWAY PLAINS


LADY GREGORY has just given me her beautiful _Poets and Dreamers_, and
it has brought to mind a day two or three years ago when I stood on the
side of Slieve Echtge, looking out over Galway. The Burren Hills were
to my left, and though I forget whether I could see the cairn over Bald
Conan of the Fianna, I could certainly see many places there that are
in poems and stories. In front of me, over many miles of level Galway
plains, I saw a low blue hill flooded with evening light. I asked a
countryman who was with me what hill that was, and he told me it was
Cruachmaa of the Sidhe. I had often heard of Cruachmaa of the Sidhe
even as far north as Sligo, for the country people have told me a great
many stories of the great host of the Sidhe who live there, still
fighting and holding festivals.

I asked the old countryman about it, and he told me of strange women
who had come from it, and who would come into a house having the
appearance of countrywomen, but would know all that happened in that
house; and how they would always pay back with increase, though not by
their own hands, whatever was given to them. And he had heard, too, of
people who had been carried away into the hill, and how one man went to
look for his wife there, and dug into the hill and all but got his wife
again, but at the very moment she was coming out to him, the pick he
was digging with struck her upon the head and killed her. I asked him
if he had himself seen any of its enchantments, and he said, 'Sometimes
when I look over to the hill, I see a mist lying on the top of it, that
goes away after a while. '

A great part of the poems and stories in Lady Gregory's book were made
or gathered between Burren and Cruachmaa. It was here that Raftery,
the wandering country poet of ninety years ago, praised and blamed,
chanting fine verses, and playing badly on his fiddle. It is here
the ballads of meeting and parting have been sung, and some whose
lamentations for defeat are still remembered may have passed through
this plain flying from the battle of Aughrim.

'I will go up on the mountain alone; and I will come hither from it
again. It is there I saw the camp of the Gael, the poor troop thinned,
not keeping with one another; Och Ochone! ' And here, if one can believe
many devout people whose stories are in the book, Christ has walked
upon the roads, bringing the needy to some warm fire-side, and sending
one of His Saints to anoint the dying.

I do not think these country imaginations have changed much for
centuries, for they are still busy with those two themes of the ancient
Irish poets, the sternness of battle and the sadness of parting and
death. The emotion that in other countries has made many love songs has
here been given, in a long wooing, to danger, that ghostly bride. It is
not a difference in the substance of things that the lamentations that
were sung after battles are now sung for men who have died upon the
gallows.

The emotion has become not less, but more noble, by the change, for the
man who goes to death with the thought--

'It is with the people I was,
It is not with the law I was,'

has behind him generations of poetry and poetical life.

The poets of to-day speak with the voice of the unknown priest who
wrote, some two hundred years ago, that _Sorrowful Lament for Ireland_,
Lady Gregory has put into passionate and rhythmical prose--

'I do not know of anything under the sky
That is friendly or favourable to the Gael,
But only the sea that our need brings us to,
Or the wind that blows to the harbour
The ship that is bearing us away from Ireland;
And there is reason that these are reconciled with us,
For we increase the sea with our tears,
And the wandering wind with our sighs. '

There is still in truth upon these great level plains a people, a
community bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and
poems which have grown out of its own life, and by a past of great
passions which can still waken the heart to imaginative action. One
could still, if one had the genius, and had been born to Irish, write
for these people plays and poems like those of Greece. Does not the
greatest poetry always require a people to listen to it? England or
any other country which takes its tune from the great cities and gets
its taste from schools and not from old custom, may have a mob, but it
cannot have a people. In England there are a few groups of men and
women who have good taste, whether in cookery or in books; and the
great multitudes but copy them or their copiers. The poet must always
prefer the community where the perfected minds express the people, to a
community that is vainly seeking to copy the perfected minds. To have
even perfectly the thoughts than can be weighed, the knowledge that
can be got from books, the precision that can be learned at school, to
belong to any aristocracy, is to be a little pool that will soon dry
up. A people alone are a great river; and that is why I am persuaded
that where a people has died, a nation is about to die.

1903.




EMOTION OF MULTITUDE


I HAVE been thinking a good deal about plays lately, and I have been
wondering why I dislike the clear and logical construction which seems
necessary if one is to succeed on the Modern Stage. It came into my
head the other day that this construction, which all the world has
learnt from France, has everything of high literature except the
emotion of multitude. The Greek drama has got the emotion of multitude
from its chorus, which called up famous sorrows, long-leaguered Troy,
much-enduring Odysseus, and all the gods and heroes to witness, as it
were, some well-ordered fable, some action separated but for this from
all but itself. The French play delights in the well-ordered fable,
but by leaving out the chorus it has created an art where poetry and
imagination, always the children of far-off multitudinous things,
must of necessity grow less important than the mere will. This is
why, I said to myself, French dramatic poetry is so often a little
rhetorical, for rhetoric is the will trying to do the work of the
imagination. The Shakespearian Drama gets the emotion of multitude out
of the sub-plot which copies the main plot, much as a shadow upon the
wall copies one's body in the firelight. We think of King Lear less
as the history of one man and his sorrows than as the history of a
whole evil time.
Lear's shadow is in Gloster, who also has ungrateful
children, and the mind goes on imagining other shadows, shadow beyond
shadow till it has pictured the world. In _Hamlet_, one hardly notices,
so subtly is the web woven, that the murder of Hamlet's father and the
sorrow of Hamlet are shadowed in the lives of Fortinbras and Ophelia
and Laertes, whose fathers, too, have been killed. It is so in all the
plays, or in all but all, and very commonly the sub-plot is the main
plot working itself out in more ordinary men and women, and so doubly
calling up before us the image of multitude. Ibsen and Maeterlinck
have on the other hand created a new form, for they get multitude from
the Wild Duck in the Attic, or from the Crown at the bottom of the
Fountain, vague symbols that set the mind wandering from idea to idea,
emotion to emotion. Indeed all the great Masters have understood,
that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the
fable, which is always the better the simpler it is, and the rich,
far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it. There
are some who understand that the simple unmysterious things living as
in a clear noonlight are of the nature of the sun, and that vague,
many-imaged things have in them the strength of the moon. Did not the
Egyptian carve it on emerald that all living things have the sun for
father and the moon for mother, and has it not been said that a man of
genius takes the most after his mother?

1903.




_Printed by_ A. H. BULLEN, _at The Shakespeare Head Press,
Stratford-on-Avon. _

* * * * *

Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious punctuation errors repaired.

Page 33, "spirit" changed to "spirits" (spirits did not and)

Page 39, "battle-fielde" changed to "battle-fields" (studies and
battle-fields)

Page 139, "difcult" changed to "difficult" (have not been difficult)

Page 246, "Shakepearian" changed to "Shakespearian" (best in the
Shakespearian)





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