Young Ireland had taught a study of our history with the glory of
Ireland for event, and this for lack, when less than Taylor studied, of
comparison with that of other countries wrecked the historical instinct.
An old man with an academic appointment, who was a leader in the attack
upon Synge sees in the eleventh century romance of Deirdre a retelling
of the first five-act tragedy outside the classic languages, and this
tragedy from his description of it was certainly written on the
Elizabethan model; while an allusion to a copper boat, a marvel of magic
like Cinderella's slipper, persuades him that the ancient Irish had
forestalled the modern dockyards in the making of metal ships. The man
who doubted, let us say, our fabulous ancient kings running up to Adam,
or found but mythology in some old tale, was as hated as if he had
doubted the authority of Scripture. Above all no man was so ignorant,
that he had not by rote familiar arguments and statistics to drive away
amid familiar applause all those had they but found strange truth in the
world or in their mind, whose knowledge has passed out of memory and
become an instinct of hand or eye. There was no literature, for
literature is a child of experience always, of knowledge never; and the
nation itself, instead of being a dumb struggling thought seeking a
mouth to utter it or hand to show it, a teeming delight that would
re-create the world, had become, at best, a subject of knowledge.
V
Taylor always spoke with confidence, though he was no determined man,
being easily flattered or jostled from his way; and this, putting as it
were his fiery heart into his mouth, made him formidable. And I have
noticed that all those who speak the thoughts of many, speak
confidently, while those who speak their own thoughts are hesitating and
timid, as though they spoke out of a mind and body grown sensitive to
the edge of bewilderment among many impressions. They speak to us that
we may give them certainty, by seeing what they have seen; and so it is,
that enlargement of experience does not come from those oratorical
thinkers, or from those decisive rhythms that move large numbers of men,
but from writers that seem by contrast as feminine as the soul when it
explores in Blake's picture the recesses of the grave, carrying its
faint lamp trembling and astonished; or as the Muses who are never
pictured as one-breasted Amazons, but as women needing protection.
Indeed, all art which appeals to individual man and awaits the
confirmation of his senses and his reveries, seems when arrayed against
the moral zeal, the confident logic, the ordered proof of journalism, a
trifling, impertinent, vexatious thing, a tumbler who has unrolled his
carpet in the way of a marching army.