Sometimes I say to myself that "A. E." has lived too long and
too exclusively in Ireland. He is not free from the mush of
sentimentality with which Irishmen regard themselves, this everlasting
self-congratulation that Irishmen are not as Englishmen, this smug
preoccupation with their own virtues and bland disregard of their
vices, this eternal denial that they have any demerits. If the Irish
people are to recover the dignity and the stature of the gods, they
must display god-like qualities or prove that they possess them. It
is not sufficient to assert that they possess these qualities, at the
same time denying them by nagging continually at their neighbours. I
have wished at times that "A. E." could be removed from the atmosphere
of adulation which envelopes him in Dublin, and sent, without letters
of introduction, on a tour round the world. He has probably travelled
less than any other educated man in Ireland. He passes from his
home in Rathmines, a suburb of Dublin, to the office of the _Irish
Homestead_ in Merrion Square, from one centre of adulation to another,
with occasional visits to the home of James Stephens, where he meets
the same people that visit him on Sunday nights, or to the Hermetic
Society, where he meets them again. He is too fine a spirit to be
seriously affected by the paltry gabble of the third-rate minds he
encounters on most occasions in Dublin, and perhaps it hardly matters
that he seldom leaves Dublin and hardly ever leaves Ireland; but even
so rare a man as "A. E." must suffer contraction within the narrow
limits of Dublin. He has resources that few men possess: a quiet mind,
a vivid faith and the love and respect of very dissimilar people. He
can turn from the consideration of agricultural prices in the _Irish
Homestead_ to the esoteric alphabet with which he speaks to the Gods,
or he can go off to the mountains of Donegal and make pictures. When
painting no longer delights him, he can spend his nights and days in
making poems. He is extravagantly generous to young writers, giving
greater praise to them sometimes than they deserve, giving less of
criticism than is necessary. There are minor poets in Dublin, authors
of thin books of thin verse, who have persuaded themselves, because of
"A. E's." praise, that they are more meritable than they are. There
are people in Dublin who seem to believe that Ireland has produced a
greater literature than England and will denounce you as a traitor to
your country if you protest that she cannot show poets of the stature
of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Browning
and Tennyson, with the exception of Mr. Yeats. I am the sort of patriot
who would like to see his country raise herself to the level of other
countries, but I am not the sort of patriot who will pretend that she
is on the level of England and France and Germany when, in fact, she
is far below it. "A. E." is not entirely free from blame for this. He
could have given Ireland a sense of proportion, had he cared to do so.