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.[4] 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.