My work in Ireland has continually set this thought before me: 'How can
I make my work mean something to vigorous and simple men whose attention
is not given to art but to a shop, or teaching in a National School, or
dispensing medicine?' I had not wanted to 'elevate them' or 'educate
them,' as these words are understood, but to make them understand my
vision, and I had not wanted a large audience, certainly not what is
called a national audience, but enough people for what is accidental and
temporary to lose itself in the lump. In England, where there have been
so many changing activities and so much systematic education, one only
escapes from crudities and temporary interests among students, but here
there is the right audience, could one but get its ears. I have always
come to this certainty: what moves natural men in the arts is what
moves them in life, and that is, intensity of personal life, intonations
that show them in a book or a play, the strength, the essential moment
of a man who would be exciting in the market or at the dispensary door.
They must go out of the theatre with the strength they live by
strengthened with looking upon some passion that could, whatever its
chosen way of life, strike down an enemy, fill a long stocking with
money or move a girl's heart. They have not much to do with the
speculations of science, though they have a little, or with the
speculations of metaphysics, though they have a little. Their legs will
tire on the road if there is nothing in their hearts but vague
sentiment, and though it is charming to have an affectionate feeling
about flowers, that will not pull the cart out of the ditch. An exciting
person, whether the hero of a play or the maker of poems, will display
the greatest volume of personal energy, and this energy must seem to
come out of the body as out of the mind. We must say to ourselves
continually when we imagine a character: 'Have I given him the roots,
as it were, of all faculties necessary for life?' And only when one is
certain of that may one give him the one faculty that fills the
imagination with joy. I even doubt if any play had ever a great
popularity that did not use, or seem to use, the bodily energies of its
principal actor to the full. Villon the robber could have delighted
these Irishmen with plays and songs, if he and they had been born to the
same traditions of word and symbol, but Shelley could not; and as men
came to live in towns and to read printed books and to have many
specialised activities, it has become more possible to produce Shelleys
and less and less possible to produce Villons. The last Villon dwindled
into Robert Burns because the highest faculties had faded, taking the
sense of beauty with them, into some sort of vague heaven and left the
lower to lumber where they best could. In literature, partly from the
lack of that spoken word which knits us to normal man, we have lost in
personality, in our delight in the whole man--blood, imagination,
intellect, running together--but have found a new delight, in essences,
in states of mind, in pure imagination, in all that comes to us most
easily in elaborate music. There are two ways before literature--upward
into ever-growing subtlety, with Verhaeren, with Mallarme, with
Maeterlinck, until at last, it may be, a new agreement among refined and
studious men gives birth to a new passion, and what seems literature
becomes religion; or downward, taking the soul with us until all is
simplified and solidified again. That is the choice of choices--the way
of the bird until common eyes have lost us, or to the market carts; but
we must see to it that the soul goes with us, for the bird's song is
beautiful, and the traditions of modern imagination, growing always more
musical, more lyrical, more melancholy, casting up now a Shelley, now a
Swinburne, now a Wagner, are, it may be, the frenzy of those that are
about to see what the magic hymn printed by the Abbe de Villars has
called the Crown of Living and Melodious Diamonds. If the carts have
hit our fancy we must have the soul tight within our bodies, for it has
grown so fond of a beauty accumulated by subtle generations that it will
for a long time be impatient with our thirst for mere force, mere
personality, for the tumult of the blood. If it begin to slip away we
must go after it, for Shelley's Chapel of the Morning Star is better
than Burns's beer-house--surely it was beer, not barleycorn--except at
the day's weary end; and it is always better than that uncomfortable
place where there is no beer, the machine shop of the realists.