Even if what one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continual
apology, whatever the cause, makes the mind barren because it kills
intellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the
mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that
must come before all true thought and emotion. A zealous Irishman,
especially if he lives much out of Ireland, spends his time in a
never-ending argument about Oliver Cromwell, the Danes, the penal laws,
the rebellion of 1798, the famine, the Irish peasant, and ends by
substituting a traditional casuistry for a country; and if he be a
Catholic, yet another casuistry that has professors, schoolmasters,
letter-writing priests and the authors of manuals to make the meshes
fine, comes between him and English literature, substituting arguments
and hesitations for the excitement at the first reading of the great
poets which should be a sort of violent imaginative puberty. His
hesitations and arguments may have been right, the Catholic philosophy
may be more profound than Milton's morality, or Shelley's vehement
vision; but none the less do we lose life by losing that recklessness
Castiglione thought necessary even in good manners, and offend our Lady
Truth, who would never, had she desired an anxious courtship, have
digged a well to be her parlour.
I admired, though we were always quarrelling, J. F. Taylor, the orator,
who died just before the first controversy over these plays. It often
seemed to me that when he spoke Ireland herself had spoken, one got that
sense of surprise that comes when a man has said what is unforeseen
because it is far from the common thought, and yet obvious because when
it has been spoken, the gate of the mind seems suddenly to roll back and
reveal forgotten sights and let loose lost passions. I have never heard
him speak except in some Irish literary or political society, but there
at any rate, as in conversation, I found a man whose life was a
ceaseless reverie over the religious and political history of Ireland.
He saw himself pleading for his country before an invisible jury,
perhaps of the great dead, against traitors at home and enemies abroad,
and a sort of frenzy in his voice and the moral elevation of his
thoughts gave him for the moment style and music. One asked oneself
again and again, 'Why is not this man an artist, a man of genius, a
creator of some kind?' The other day under the influence of memory, I
read through his one book, a life of Owen Roe O'Neill, and found there
no sentence detachable from its context because of wisdom or beauty.
Everything was argued from a premise; and wisdom and style, whether in
life or letters, come from the presence of what is self-evident, from
that which requires but statement, from what Blake called 'naked beauty
displayed.' The sense of what was unforeseen and obvious, the rolling
backward of the gates, had gone with the living voice, with the nobility
of will that made one understand what he saw and felt in what was now
but argument and logic. I found myself in the presence of a mind like
some noisy and powerful machine, of thought that was no part of wisdom
but the apologetic of a moment, a woven thing, no intricacy of leaf and
twig, of words with no more of salt and of savour than those of a Jesuit
professor of literature, or of any other who does not know that there is
no lasting writing which does not define the quality, or carry the
substance of some pleasure. How can one, if one's mind be full of
abstractions and images created not for their own sake but for the sake
of party, even if there were still the need, make pictures for the
mind's eye and sounds that delight the ear, or discover thoughts that
tighten the muscles, or quiver and tingle in the flesh, and so stand
like St. Michael with the trumpet that calls the body to resurrection?