I-
When Mr. O’Leary died I could
not bring myself to go to his funeral, though I had
been once his close fellow-worker, for I shrank from
seeing about his grave so many whose Nationalism was
different from anything he had taught or that I could
share. He belonged, as did his friend John F.
Taylor, to the romantic conception of Irish Nationality
on which Lionel Johnson and myself founded, so far
as it was founded on anything but literature, our
Art and our Irish criticism. Perhaps his spirit,
if it can care for or can see old friends now, will
accept this apology for an absence that has troubled
me. I learned much from him and much from Taylor,
who will always seem to me the greatest orator I have
heard; and that ideal Ireland, perhaps from this out
an imaginary Ireland, in whose service I labour, will
always be in many essentials their Ireland. They
were the last to speak an understanding of life and
Nationality, built up by the generation of Grattan,
which read Homer and Virgil, and by the generation
of Davis, which had been pierced through by the idealism
of Mazzini, and of the European revolutionists
of the mid-century.
O’Leary had joined the Fenian
movement with no hope of success as we know, but because
he believed such a movement good for the moral character
of the people; and had taken his long imprisonment
without complaining. Even to the very end, while
often speaking of his prison life, he would have thought
it took from his Roman courage to describe its hardship.
The worth of a man’s acts in the moral memory,
a continual height of mind in the doing of them, seemed
more to him than their immediate result, if, indeed,
the sight of many failures had not taken away the
thought of success. A man was not to lie, or even
to give up his dignity, on any patriotic plea, and
I have heard him say, ’I have but one religion,
the old Persian: to bend the bow and tell the
truth,’ and again, ‘There are things a
man must not do to save a nation,’ and again,
‘A man must not cry in public to save a nation,’
and that we might not forget justice in the passion
of controversy, ’There was never cause so bad
that it has not been defended by good men for what
seemed to them good reasons.’ His friend
had a burning and brooding imagination that divided
men not according to their achievement but by their
degrees of sincerity, and by their mastery over a
straight and, to my thought, too obvious logic that
seemed to him essential to sincerity. Neither
man had an understanding of style or of literature
in the right sense of the word, though both were great
readers, but because their imagination could come
to rest no place short of greatness, they hoped, John
O’Leary especially, for an Irish literature
of the greatest kind. When Lionel Johnson and
Katharine Tynan (as she was then), and I, myself, began
to reform Irish poetry, we thought to keep unbroken
the thread running up to Grattan which John O’Leary
had put into our hands, though it might be our business
to explore new paths of the labyrinth. We sought
to make a more subtle rhythm, a more organic form,
than that of the older Irish poets who wrote in English,
but always to remember certain ardent ideas and high
attitudes of mind which were the nation itself, to
our belief, so far as a nation can be summarised in
the intellect. If you had asked an ancient Spartan
what made Sparta Sparta, he would have answered, The
Laws of Lycurgus, and many Englishmen look back to
Bunyan and to Milton as we did to Grattan and to Mitchell.
Lionel Johnson was able to take up into his Art one
portion of this tradition that I could not, for he
had a gift of speaking political thought in fine verse
that I have always lacked. I, on the other hand,
was more preoccupied with Ireland (for he had other
interests), and took from Allingham and Walsh their
passion for country spiritism, and from Ferguson his
pleasure in heroic legend, and while seeing all in
the light of European literature found my symbols
of expression in Ireland. One thought often possessed
me very strongly. New from the influence, mainly
the personal influence, of William Morris, I dreamed
of enlarging Irish hate, till we had come to hate
with a passion of patriotism what Morris and Ruskin
hated. Mitchell had already all but poured some
of that hate drawn from Carlyle, who had it of an
earlier and, as I think, cruder sort, into the blood
of Ireland, and were we not a poor nation with ancient
courage, unblackened fields and a barbarous gift of
self-sacrifice? Ruskin and Morris had spent themselves
in vain because they had found no passion to harness
to their thought, but here was unwasted passion and
precedents in the popular memory for every needed
thought and action. Perhaps, too, it would be
possible to find in that new philosophy of spiritism
coming to a seeming climax in the work of Fredrick
Myers, and in the investigations of uncounted obscure
persons, what could change the country spiritism into
a reasoned belief that would put its might into all
the rest. A new belief seemed coming that could
be so simple and demonstrable and above all so mixed
into the common scenery of the world, that it would
set the whole man on fire and liberate him from a
thousand obediences and complexities. We were
to forge in Ireland a new sword on our old traditional
anvil for that great battle that must in the end re-establish
the old, confident, joyous world. All the while
I worked with this idea, founding societies that became
quickly or slowly everything I despised. One
part of me looked on, mischievous and mocking, and
the other part spoke words which were more and more
unreal, as the attitude of mind became more and more
strained and difficult. Madame Maud Gonne could
still draw great crowds out of the slums by her beauty
and sincerity, and speak to them of ’Mother Ireland
with the crown of stars about her head.’
But gradually the political movement she was associated
with, finding it hard to build up any fine lasting
thing, became content to attack little persons and
little things. All movements are held together
more by what they hate than by what they love, for
love separates and individualises and quiets, but the
nobler movements, the only movements on which literature
can found itself, hate great and lasting things.
All who have any old traditions have something of
aristocracy, but we had opposing us from the first,
though not strongly from the first, a type of mind
which had been without influence in the generation
of Grattan, and almost without it in that of Davis,
and which has made a new nation out of Ireland, that
was once old and full of memories.
I remember, when I was twenty years
old, arguing, on my way home from a Young Ireland
Society, that Ireland, with its hieratic Church, its
readiness to accept leadership in intellectual things, and
John O’Leary spoke much of this readiness, its
Latin hatred of middle paths and uncompleted arguments,
could never create a democratic poet of the type of
Burns, although it had tried to do so more than once,
but that its genius would in the long run be aristocratic
and lonely. Whenever I had known some old countryman,
I had heard stories and sayings that arose out of
an imagination that would have understood Homer better
than The Cotter’s Saturday Night or Highland
Mary, because it was an ancient imagination, where
the sediment had found the time to settle, and I believe
that the makers of deliberate literature could still
take passion and theme, though but little thought,
from such as he. On some such old and broken
stem, I thought, have all the most beautiful roses
been grafted.
II-
Him who trembles before the flame and
the flood,
And the winds that blow through the starry
ways;
Let the starry winds and the flame and
the flood
Cover over and hide, for he has no part
With the proud, majestical multitude.
Three types of men have made all beautiful
things. Aristocracies have made beautiful manners,
because their place in the world puts them above the
fear of life, and the countrymen have made beautiful
stories and beliefs, because they have nothing to
lose and so do not fear, and the artists have made
all the rest, because Providence has filled them with
recklessness. All these look backward to a long
tradition, for, being without fear, they have held
to whatever pleased them. The others being always
anxious have come to possess little that is good in
itself, and are always changing from thing to thing,
for whatever they do or have must be a means to something
else, and they have so little belief that anything
can be an end in itself, that they cannot understand
you if you say, ‘All the most valuable things
are useless.’ They prefer the stalk to
the flower, and believe that painting and poetry exist
that there may be instruction, and love that there
may be children, and theatres that busy men may rest,
and holidays that busy men may go on being busy.
At all times they fear and even hate the things that
have worth in themselves, for that worth may suddenly,
as it were a fire, consume their book of Life, where
the world is represented by cyphers and symbols; and
before all else, they fear irreverent joy and unserviceable
sorrow. It seems to them, that those who have
been freed by position, by poverty, or by the traditions
of Art, have something terrible about them, a light
that is unendurable to eyesight. They complain
much of that commandment that we can do almost what
we will, if we do it gaily, and think that freedom
is but a trifling with the world.
If we would find a company of our
own way of thinking, we must go backward to turreted
walls, to courts, to high rocky places, to little
walled towns, to jesters like that jester of Charles
the Fifth who made mirth out of his own death; to
the Duke Guidobaldo in his sickness, or Duke Frederick
in his strength, to all those who understood that life
is not lived, if not lived for contemplation or excitement.
Certainly we could not delight in
that so courtly thing, the poetry of light love, if
it were sad; for only when we are gay over a thing,
and can play with it, do we show ourselves its master,
and have minds clear enough for strength. The
raging fire and the destructive sword are portions
of eternity, too great for the eye of man, wrote Blake,
and it is only before such things, before a love like
that of Tristan and Iseult, before noble or ennobled
death, that the free mind permits itself aught but
brief sorrow. That we may be free from all the
rest, sullen anger, solemn virtue, calculating anxiety,
gloomy suspicion, prevaricating hope, we should be
reborn in gaiety. Because there is submission
in a pure sorrow, we should sorrow alone over what
is greater than ourselves, nor too soon admit that
greatness, but all that is less than we are should
stir us to some joy, for pure joy masters and impregnates;
and so to world end, strength shall laugh and wisdom
mourn.
III-
In life courtesy and self-possession,
and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions
of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate
shaping of all things, and from never being swept away,
whatever the emotion, into confusion or dulness.
The Japanese have numbered with heroic things courtesy
at all times whatsoever, and though a writer, who
has to withdraw so much of his thought out of his life
that he may learn his craft, may find many his betters
in daily courtesy, he should never be without style,
which is but high breeding in words and in argument.
He is indeed the Creator of the standards of manners
in their subtlety, for he alone can know the ancient
records and be like some mystic courtier who has stolen
the keys from the girdle of time, and can wander where
it please him amid the splendours of ancient courts.
Sometimes, it may be, he is permitted
the license of cap and bell, or even the madman’s
bunch of straws, but he never forgets or leaves at
home the seal and the signature. He has at all
times the freedom of the well-bred, and being bred
to the tact of words can take what theme he pleases,
unlike the linen drapers, who are rightly compelled
to be very strict in their conversation. Who
should be free if he were not? for none other has
a continual deliberate self-delighting happiness style,
‘the only thing that is immortal in literature,’
as Sainte-Beuve has said, a still unexpended energy,
after all that the argument or the story need, a still
unbroken pleasure after the immediate end has been
accomplished and builds this up into a most
personal and wilful fire, transfiguring words and
sounds and events. It is the playing of strength
when the day’s work is done, a secret between
a craftsman and his craft, and is so inseparate in
his nature, that he has it most of all amid overwhelming
emotion, and in the face of death. Shakespeare’s
persons, when the last darkness has gathered about
them, speak out of an ecstasy that is one half the
self-surrender of sorrow, and one half the last playing
and mockery of the victorious sword, before the defeated
world.
It is in the arrangement of events
as in the words, and in that touch of extravagance,
of irony, of surprise, which is set there after the
desire of logic has been satisfied and all that is
merely necessary established, and that leaves one,
not in the circling necessity, but caught up into
the freedom of self-delight: it is, as it were,
the foam upon the cup, the long pheasant’s feather
on the horse’s head, the spread peacock over
the pasty. If it be very conscious, very deliberate,
as it may be in comedy, for comedy is more personal
than tragedy, we call it phantasy, perhaps even mischievous
phantasy, recognising how disturbing it is to all
that drag a ball at the ankle. This joy, because
it must be always making and mastering, remains in
the hands and in the tongue of the artist, but with
his eyes he enters upon a submissive, sorrowful contemplation
of the great irremediable things, and he is known
from other men by making all he handles like himself,
and yet by the unlikeness to himself of all that comes
before him in a pure contemplation. It may have
been his enemy or his love or his cause that set him
dreaming, and certainly the phoenix can but open her
young wings in a flaming nest; but all hate and hope
vanishes in the dream, and if his mistress brag of
the song or his enemy fear it, it is not that either
has its praise or blame, but that the twigs of the
holy nest are not easily set afire. The verses
may make his mistress famous as Helen or give a victory
to his cause, not because he has been either’s
servant, but because men delight to honour and to remember
all that have served contemplation. It had been
easier to fight, to die even, for Charles’s
house with Marvel’s poem in the memory, but there
is no zeal of service that had not been an impurity
in the pure soil where the marvel grew. Timon
of Athens contemplates his own end, and orders his
tomb by the beachy margent of the flood, and Cleopatra
sets the asp to her bosom, and their words move us
because their sorrow is not their own at tomb or asp,
but for all men’s fate. That shaping joy
has kept the sorrow pure, as it had kept it were the
emotion love or hate, for the nobleness of the Arts
is in the mingling of contraries, the extremity of
sorrow, the extremity of joy, perfection of personality,
the perfection of its surrender, overflowing turbulent
energy, and marmorean stillness; and its red rose
opens at the meeting of the two beams of the cross,
and at the trysting-place of mortal and immortal,
time and eternity. No new man has ever plucked
that rose, or found that trysting-place, for he could
but come to the understanding of himself, to the mastery
of unlocking words after long frequenting of the great
Masters, hardly without ancestral memory of the like.
Even knowledge is not enough, for the ‘recklessness’
Castiglione thought necessary in good manners is necessary
in this likewise, and if a man has it not he will be
gloomy, and had better to his marketing again.
IV-
When I saw John O’Leary first,
every young catholic man who had intellectual ambition
fed his imagination with the poetry of Young Ireland;
and the verses of even the least known of its poets
were expounded with a devout ardour at Young Ireland
Societies and the like, and their birthdays celebrated.
The School of writers I belonged to tried to found
itself on much of the subject-matter of this poetry,
and, what was almost more in our thoughts, to begin
a more imaginative tradition in Irish literature,
by a criticism at once remorseless and enthusiastic.
It was our criticism, I think, that set Clarence Mangan
at the head of the Young Ireland poets in the place
of Davis, and put Sir Samuel Ferguson, who had died
with but little fame as a poet, next in the succession.
Our attacks, mine especially, on verse which owed its
position to its moral or political worth, roused a
resentment which even I find it hard to imagine to-day,
and our verse was attacked in return, and not for
anything peculiar to ourselves, but for all that it
had in common with the accepted poetry of the world,
and most of all for its lack of rhetoric, its refusal
to preach a doctrine or to consider the seeming necessities
of a cause. Now, after so many years, I can see
how natural, how poetical, even, an opposition was,
that shows what large numbers could not call up certain
high feelings without accustomed verses, or believe
we had not wronged the feeling when we did but attack
the verses. I have just read in a newspaper that
Sir Charles Gavan Duffy recited upon his death bed
his favourite poem, one of the worst of the patriotic
poems of Young Ireland, and it has brought all this
to mind, for the opposition to our School claimed
him as its leader. When I was at Siena, I noticed
that the Byzantine style persisted in faces of Madonnas
for several generations after it had given way to a
more natural style, in the less loved faces of saints
and martyrs. Passion had grown accustomed to
those sloping and narrow eyes, which are almost Japanese,
and to those gaunt cheeks, and would have thought it
sacrilege to change. We would not, it is likely,
have found listeners if John O’Leary, the irreproachable
patriot, had not supported us. It was as clear
to him that a writer must not write badly, or ignore
the examples of the great masters in the fancied or
real service of a cause, as it was that he must not
lie for it or grow hysterical. I believed in those
days that a new intellectual life would begin, like
that of Young Ireland, but more profound and personal,
and that could we but get a few plain principles accepted,
new poets and writers of prose would make an immortal
music. I think I was more blind than Johnson,
though I judge this from his poems rather than anything
I remember of his talk, for he never talked ideas,
but, as was common with his generation in Oxford,
facts and immediate impressions from life. With
others this renunciation was but a pose, a superficial
reaction from the disordered abundance of the middle
century, but with him it was the radical life.
He was in all a traditionalist, gathering out of the
past phrases, moods, attitudes, and disliking ideas
less for their uncertainty than because they made
the mind itself changing and restless. He measured
the Irish tradition by another greater than itself,
and was quick to feel any falling asunder of the two,
yet at many moments they seemed but one in his imagination.
Ireland, all through his poem of that name, speaks
to him with the voice of the great poets, and in Ireland
Dead she is still mother of perfect heroism, but
there doubt comes too.
Can it be they do repent
That they went, thy chivalry,
Those sad ways magnificent?
And in Ways of War, dedicated
to John O’Leary, he dismissed the belief in
an heroic Ireland as but a dream.
A dream! a dream! an ancient dream!
Yet ere peace come to Innisfail,
Some weapons on some field must gleam,
Some burning glory fire the Gael.
That field may lie beneath the sun,
Fair for the treading of an host:
That field in realms of thought be won,
And armed hands do their uttermost:
Some way, to faithful Innisfail,
Shall come the majesty and awe
Of martial truth, that must prevail
To lay on all the eternal law.
I do not think either of us saw that,
as belief in the possibility of armed insurrection
withered, the old romantic nationalism would wither
too, and that the young would become less ready to
find pleasure in whatever they believed to be literature.
Poetical tragedy, and indeed all the more intense
forms of literature, had lost their hold on the general
mass of men in other countries as life grew safe, and
the sense of comedy which is the social bond in times
of peace as tragic feeling is in times of war, had
become the inspiration of popular art. I always
knew this, but I believed that the memory of danger,
and the reality of it seemed near enough sometimes,
would last long enough to give Ireland her imaginative
opportunity. I could not foresee that a new class,
which had begun to rise into power under the shadow
of Parnell, would change the nature of the Irish movement,
which, needing no longer great sacrifices, nor bringing
any great risk to individuals, could do without exceptional
men, and those activities of the mind that are founded
on the exceptional moment. John O’Leary had
spent much of his thought in an unavailing war with
the agrarian party, believing it the root of change,
but the fox that crept into the badger’s hole
did not come from there. Power passed to small
shop-keepers, to clerks, to that very class who had
seemed to John O’Leary so ready to bend to the
power of others, to men who had risen above the traditions
of the countryman, without learning those of cultivated
life or even educating themselves, and who because
of their poverty, their ignorance, their superstitious
piety, are much subject to all kinds of fear.
Immediate victory, immediate utility, became everything,
and the conviction, which is in all who have run great
risks for a cause’s sake, in the O’Learys
and Mazzinis as in all rich natures, that life is
greater than the cause, withered, and we artists,
who are the servants not of any cause but of mere naked
life, and above all of that life in its nobler forms,
where joy and sorrow are one, Artificers of the Great
Moment, became as elsewhere in Europe protesting individual
voices. Ireland’s great moment had passed,
and she had filled no roomy vessels with strong sweet
wine, where we have filled our porcelain jars against
the coming winter.
August, 1907.