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,[2] 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,[3]--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.