The arts have failed; fewer people are interested in them every
generation. The mere business of living, of making money, of amusing
oneself, occupies people more and more, and makes them less and less
capable of the difficult art of appreciation. When they buy a picture it
generally shows a long-current idea, or some conventional form that can be
admired in that lax mood one admires a fine carriage in or fine horses in;
and when they buy a book it is so much in the manner of the picture that
it is forgotten, when its moment is over, as a glass of wine is forgotten.
We who care deeply about the arts find ourselves the priesthood of an
almost forgotten faith, and we must, I think, if we would win the people
again, take upon ourselves the method and the fervour of a priesthood. We
must be half humble and half proud. We see the perfect more than others,
it may be, but we must find the passions among the people. We must
baptize as well as preach.
The makers of religions have established their ceremonies, their form of
art, upon fear of death, on the hope of the father in his child, upon the
love of man and woman. They have even gathered into their ceremonies the
ceremonies of more ancient faiths, for fear a grain of the dust turned
into crystal in some past fire, a passion that had mingled with the
religious idea, might perish if the ancient ceremony perished. They have
renamed wells and images and given new meanings to ceremonies of spring
and midsummer and harvest. In very early days the arts were so possessed
by this method that they were almost inseparable from religion, going side
by side with it into all life. But, to-day, they have grown, as I think,
too proud, too anxious to live alone with the perfect, and so one sees
them, as I think, like charioteers standing by deserted chariots and
holding broken reins in their hands, or seeking to go upon their way drawn
by the one passion which alone remains to them out of the passions of the
world. We should not blame them, but rather a mysterious tendency in
things which will have its end some day. In England, men like William
Morris, seeing about them passions so long separated from the perfect that
it seemed as if they could not be changed until society had been changed,
tried to unite the arts once more to life by uniting them to use. They
advised painters to paint fewer pictures upon canvas, and to burn more of
them on plates; and they tried to persuade sculptors that a candlestick
might be as beautiful as a statue. But here in Ireland, when the arts have
grown humble, they will find two passions ready to their hands, love of
the Unseen Life and love of country. I would have a devout writer or
painter often content himself with subjects taken from his religious
beliefs; and if his religious beliefs are those of the majority, he may at
last move hearts in every cottage. While even if his religious beliefs are
those of some minority, he will have a better welcome than if he wrote of
the rape of Persephone, or painted the burning of Shelley's body. He will
have founded his work on a passion which will bring him to many besides
those who have been trained to care for beautiful things by a special
education. If he is a painter or a sculptor he will find churches awaiting
his hand everywhere, and if he follows the masters of his craft our other
passion will come into his work also, for he will show his Holy Family
winding among hills like those of Ireland, and his Bearer of the Cross
among faces copied from the faces of his own town. Our art teachers should
urge their pupils into this work, for I can remember, when I was myself a
Dublin art student, how I used to despond, when eagerness burned low, as
it always must now and then, at seeing no market at all.
But I would rather speak to those who, while moved in other things than
the arts by love of country, are beginning to write, as I was some sixteen
years ago, without any decided impulse to one thing more than another, and
especially to those who are convinced, as I was convinced, that art is
tribeless, nationless, a blossom gathered in No Man's Land. The Greeks,
the only perfect artists of the world, looked within their own borders,
and we, like them, have a history fuller than any modern history of
imaginative events; and legends which surpass, as I think, all legends but
theirs in wild beauty, and in our land, as in theirs, there is no river or
mountain that is not associated in the memory with some event or legend;
while political reasons have made love of country, as I think, even
greater among us than among them. I would have our writers and craftsmen
of many kinds master this history and these legends, and fix upon their
memory the appearance of mountains and rivers and make it all visible
again in their arts, so that Irishmen, even though they had gone thousands
of miles away, would still be in their own country. Whether they chose for
the subject the carrying off of the Brown Bull, or the coming of Patrick,
or the political struggle of later times, the other world comes so much
into it all that their love of it would move in their hands also, and as
much, it may be, as in the hands of the Greek craftsmen. In other words, I
would have Ireland recreate the ancient arts, the arts as they were
understood in Judæa, in India, in Scandinavia, in Greece and Rome, in
every ancient land; as they were understood when they moved a whole people
and not a few people who have grown up in a leisured class and made this
understanding their business.
I think that my reader[2] will have agreed with most that I have said up
till now, for we all hope for arts like these. I think indeed I first
learned to hope for them myself in Young Ireland Societies, or in reading
the essays of Davis. An Englishman, with his belief in progress, with his
instinctive preference for the cosmopolitan literature of the last
century, may think arts like these parochial, but they are the arts we
have begun the making of.
I will not, however, have all my readers with me when I say that no
writer, no artist, even though he choose Brian Boroihme or S. Patrick for
his subject, should try to make his work popular. Once he has chosen a
subject he must think of nothing but giving it such an expression as will
please himself. As Walt Whitman has written--
'The oration is to the orator, the acting is to the actor and actress,
not to the audience:
And no man understands any greatness or goodness but his own or the
indication of his own.'
He must make his work a part of his own journey towards beauty and truth.
He must picture saint or hero, or hillside, as he sees them, not as he is
expected to see them, and he must comfort himself, when others cry out
against what he has seen, by remembering that no two men are alike, and
that there is no 'excellent beauty without strangeness.' In this matter he
must be without humility. He may, indeed, doubt the reality of his vision
if men do not quarrel with him as they did with the Apostles, for there is
only one perfection and only one search for perfection, and it sometimes
has the form of the religious life and sometimes of the artistic life; and
I do not think these lives differ in their wages, for 'The end of art is
peace,' and out of the one as out of the other comes the cry: _Sero te
amavi, Pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova! Sero te amavi!_
The Catholic Church is not the less the Church of the people because the
Mass is spoken in Latin, and art is not less the art of the people
because it does not always speak in the language they are used to. I once
heard my friend Mr. Ellis say, speaking at a celebration in honour of a
writer whose fame had not come till long after his death, 'It is not the
business of a poet to make himself understood, but it is the business of
the people to understand him. That they are at last compelled to do so is
the proof of his authority.' And certainly if you take from art its
martyrdom, you will take from it its glory. It might still reflect the
passing modes of mankind, but it would cease to reflect the face of God.
If our craftsmen were to choose their subjects under what we may call, if
we understand faith to mean that belief in a spiritual life which is not
confined to one Church, the persuasion of their faith and their country,
they would soon discover that although their choice seemed arbitrary at
first, it had obeyed what was deepest in them. I could not now write of
any other country but Ireland, for my style has been shaped by the
subjects I have worked on, but there was a time when my imagination seemed
unwilling, when I found myself writing of some Irish event in words that
would have better fitted some Italian or Eastern event, for my style had
been shaped in that general stream of European literature which has come
from so many watersheds, and it was slowly, very slowly, that I made a new
style. It was years before I could rid myself of Shelley's Italian light,
but now I think my style is myself. I might have found more of Ireland if
I had written in Irish, but I have found a little, and I have found all
myself. I am persuaded that if the Irishmen who are painting conventional
pictures or writing conventional books on alien subjects, which have been
worn away like pebbles on the shore, would do the same, they, too, might
find themselves. Even the landscape-painter, who paints a place that he
loves, and that no other man has painted, soon discovers that no style
learned in the studios is wholly fitted to his purpose. And I cannot but
believe that if our painters of Highland cattle and moss-covered barns
were to care enough for their country to care for what makes it different
from other countries, they would discover, when struggling, it may be, to
paint the exact grey of the bare Burren Hills, and of a sudden it may be,
a new style, their very selves. And I admit, though in this I am moved by
some touch of fanaticism, that even when I see an old subject written of
or painted in a new way, I am yet jealous for Cuchulain, and for Baile,
and Aillinn, and for those grey mountains that still are lacking their
celebration. I sometimes reproach myself because I cannot admire Mr.
Hughes' beautiful, piteous _Orpheus and Eurydice_ with an unquestioning
mind. I say with my lips, 'The Spirit made it, for it is beautiful, and
the Spirit bloweth where it listeth,' but I say in my heart, 'Aengus and
Etain would have served his turn;' but one cannot, perhaps, love or
believe at all if one does not love or believe a little too much.
And I do not think with unbroken pleasure of our scholars who write about
German writers or about periods of Greek history. I always remember that
they could give us a number of little books which would tell, each book
for some one country, or some one parish, the verses, or the stories, or
the events that would make every lake or mountain a man can see from his
own door an excitement in his imagination. I would have some of them leave
that work of theirs which will never lack hands, and begin to dig in
Ireland, the garden of the future, understanding that here in Ireland the
spirit of man may be about to wed the soil of the world.
Art and scholarship like these I have described would give Ireland more
than they received from her, for they would make love of the unseen more
unshakable, more ready to plunge deep into the abyss, and they would make
love of country more fruitful in the mind, more a part of daily life. One
would know an Irishman into whose life they had come--and in a few
generations they would come into the life of all, rich and poor--by
something that set him apart among men. He himself would understand that
more was expected of him than of others because he had greater
possessions. The Irish race would have become a chosen race, one of the
pillars that uphold the world.
1901.