I wrote the most of these thoughts in my diary on the coast of
Normandy, and as I finished came upon Mont Saint Michel, and thereupon
doubted for a day the foundation of my school. Here I saw the places of
assembly, those cloisters on the rock's summit, the church, the great
halls where monks, or knights, or men at arms sat at meals, beautiful
from ornament or proportion. I remembered ordinances of the Popes
forbidding drinking-cups with stems of gold to these monks who had but
a bare dormitory to sleep in. Even when imagining, the individual had
taken more from his fellows and his fathers than he gave; one man
finishing what another had begun; and all that majestic fantasy,
seeming more of Egypt than of Christendom, spoke nothing to the
solitary soul, but seemed to announce whether past or yet to come an
heroic temper of social men, a bondage of adventure and of wisdom. Then
I thought more patiently and I saw that what had made these but as one
and given them for a thousand years the miracles of their shrine and
temporal rule by land and sea, was not a condescension to knave or
dolt, an impoverishment of the common thought to make it serviceable
and easy, but a dead language and a communion in whatever, even to the
greatest saint, is of incredible difficulty. Only by the substantiation
of the soul I thought, whether in literature or in sanctity, can we
come upon those agreements, those separations from all else that fasten
men together lastingly; for while a popular and picturesque Burns and
Scott can but create a province, and our Irish cries and grammars serve
some passing need, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and all who travel
in their road with however poor a stride, define races and create
everlasting loyalties. Synge, like all of the great kin, sought for the
race, not through the eyes or in history, or even in the future, but
where those monks found God, in the depths of the mind, and in all art
like his, although it does not command--indeed because it does not--may
lie the roots of far-branching events. Only that which does not teach,
which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not
condescend, which does not explain is irresistible. It is made by men
who expressed themselves to the full, and it works through the best
minds; whereas the external and picturesque and declamatory writers,
that they may create kilts and bagpipes and newspapers and guide-books,
leave the best minds empty, and in Ireland and Scotland England runs
into the hole. It has no array of arguments and maxims, because the
great and the simple (and the Muses have never known which of the two
most pleases them) need their deliberate thought for the day's work,
and yet will do it worse if they have not grown into or found about
them, most perhaps in the minds of women, the nobleness of emotion,
associated with the scenery and events of their country, by those great
poets, who have dreamed it in solitude, and who to this day in Europe
are creating indestructible spiritual races, like those religion has
created in the East.
W. B. Yeats.
September 14th. 1910.
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