I have read hardly any books this summer but
Cervantes
and
Boccaccio and some Greek plays.
Boccaccio and some Greek plays.
Yeats
No one man is like
another, but one coachman should be as like another as possible, though
he may assert himself a little when he meets the gardener. The patriots
would impose on us heroes and heroines, like those young couples in the
Gaelic plays, who might all change brides or bridegrooms in the dance
and never find out the difference. The personifications need not be
true even, if they are about our enemy, for it might be more difficult
to fight out our necessary fight if we remembered his virtue at wrong
moments; and might not Teig and Bacach, that are light in the head, go
over to his party?
Ireland is indeed poor, is indeed hunted by misfortune, and has indeed
to give up much that makes life desirable and lovely, but is she so
very poor that she can afford no better literature than this? Perhaps
so, but if it is a Spirit from beyond the world that decides when a
nation shall awake into imaginative energy, and no philosopher has ever
found what brings the moment, it cannot be for us to judge. It may be
coming upon us now, for it is certain that we have more writers who are
thinking, as men of letters understand thought, than we have had for
a century, and he who wilfully makes their work harder may be setting
himself against the purpose of that Spirit.
I would not be trying to form an Irish National Theatre if I did not
believe that there existed in Ireland, whether in the minds of a
few people or of a great number I do not know, an energy of thought
about life itself, a vivid sensitiveness as to the reality of things,
powerful enough to overcome all those phantoms of the night. One thing
calls up its contrary, unreality calls up reality, and, besides, life
here has been sufficiently perilous to make men think. I do not think
it a national prejudice that makes me believe we are a harder, a more
masterful race than the comfortable English of our time, and that this
comes from an essential nearness to reality of those few scattered
people who have the right to call themselves the Irish race. It is
only in the exceptions, in the few minds, where the flame has burnt as
it were pure, that one can see the permanent character of a race. If
one remembers the men who have dominated Ireland for the last hundred
and fifty years, one understands that it is strength of personality,
the individualizing quality in a man, that stirs Irish imagination
most deeply in the end. There is scarcely a man who has led the Irish
people, at any time, who may not give some day to a great writer
precisely that symbol he may require for the expression of himself. The
critical mind of Ireland is far more subjugated than the critical mind
of England by the phantoms and misapprehensions of politics and social
necessity, but the life of Ireland has rejected them more resolutely.
Indeed, it is in life itself in England that one finds the dominion of
what is not human life.
We have no longer in any country a literature as great as the
literature of the old world, and that is because the newspapers, all
kinds of second-rate books, the preoccupation of men with all kinds
of practical changes, have driven the living imagination out of the
world.
I have read hardly any books this summer but Cervantes and
Boccaccio and some Greek plays. I have felt that these men, divided
from one another by so many hundreds of years, had the same mind.
It is we who are different; and then the thought would come to me,
that has come to me so often before, that they lived at times when
the imagination turned to life itself for excitement. The world was
not changing quickly about them. There was nothing to draw their
imagination from the ripening of their fields, from the birth and death
of their children, from the destiny of their souls, from all that is
the unchanging substance of literature. They had not to deal with the
world in such great masses that it could only be represented to their
minds by figures and by abstract generalisations. Everything that
their minds ran on came to them vivid with the colour of the senses,
and when they wrote it was out of their own rich experience, and they
found their symbols of expression in things that they had known all
their life long. Their very words were more vigorous than ours, for
their phrases came from a common mint, from the market, or the tavern,
or from the great poets of a still older time. It is the change, that
followed the Renaissance and was completed by newspaper government and
the scientific movement, that has brought upon us all these phrases and
generalisations, made by minds that would grasp what they have never
seen. Yesterday I went out to see the reddening apples in the garden,
and they faded from my imagination sooner than they would have from
the imagination of that old poet, who made the songs of the seasons
for the Fianna, or out of Chaucer's, that celebrated so many trees.
Theories, opinions, these opinions among the rest, flowed in upon me
and blotted them away. Even our greatest poets see the world with
preoccupied minds. Great as Shelley is, those theories about the coming
changes of the world, which he has built up with so much elaborate
passion, hurry him from life continually. There is a phrase in some old
cabalistic writer about man falling into his own circumference, and
every generation we get further away from life itself, and come more
and more under the influence which Blake had in his mind when he said,
'Kings and Parliament seem to me something other than human life. '
We lose our freedom more and more as we get away from ourselves, and
not merely because our minds are overthrown by abstract phrases and
generalisations, reflections in a mirror that seem living, but because
we have turned the table of value upside down, and believe that the
root of reality is not in the centre but somewhere in that whirling
circumference. How can we create like the ancients, while innumerable
considerations of external probability or social utility or of what is
becoming in so meritorious a person as ourselves, destroy the seeming
irresponsible creative power that is life itself?
another, but one coachman should be as like another as possible, though
he may assert himself a little when he meets the gardener. The patriots
would impose on us heroes and heroines, like those young couples in the
Gaelic plays, who might all change brides or bridegrooms in the dance
and never find out the difference. The personifications need not be
true even, if they are about our enemy, for it might be more difficult
to fight out our necessary fight if we remembered his virtue at wrong
moments; and might not Teig and Bacach, that are light in the head, go
over to his party?
Ireland is indeed poor, is indeed hunted by misfortune, and has indeed
to give up much that makes life desirable and lovely, but is she so
very poor that she can afford no better literature than this? Perhaps
so, but if it is a Spirit from beyond the world that decides when a
nation shall awake into imaginative energy, and no philosopher has ever
found what brings the moment, it cannot be for us to judge. It may be
coming upon us now, for it is certain that we have more writers who are
thinking, as men of letters understand thought, than we have had for
a century, and he who wilfully makes their work harder may be setting
himself against the purpose of that Spirit.
I would not be trying to form an Irish National Theatre if I did not
believe that there existed in Ireland, whether in the minds of a
few people or of a great number I do not know, an energy of thought
about life itself, a vivid sensitiveness as to the reality of things,
powerful enough to overcome all those phantoms of the night. One thing
calls up its contrary, unreality calls up reality, and, besides, life
here has been sufficiently perilous to make men think. I do not think
it a national prejudice that makes me believe we are a harder, a more
masterful race than the comfortable English of our time, and that this
comes from an essential nearness to reality of those few scattered
people who have the right to call themselves the Irish race. It is
only in the exceptions, in the few minds, where the flame has burnt as
it were pure, that one can see the permanent character of a race. If
one remembers the men who have dominated Ireland for the last hundred
and fifty years, one understands that it is strength of personality,
the individualizing quality in a man, that stirs Irish imagination
most deeply in the end. There is scarcely a man who has led the Irish
people, at any time, who may not give some day to a great writer
precisely that symbol he may require for the expression of himself. The
critical mind of Ireland is far more subjugated than the critical mind
of England by the phantoms and misapprehensions of politics and social
necessity, but the life of Ireland has rejected them more resolutely.
Indeed, it is in life itself in England that one finds the dominion of
what is not human life.
We have no longer in any country a literature as great as the
literature of the old world, and that is because the newspapers, all
kinds of second-rate books, the preoccupation of men with all kinds
of practical changes, have driven the living imagination out of the
world.
I have read hardly any books this summer but Cervantes and
Boccaccio and some Greek plays. I have felt that these men, divided
from one another by so many hundreds of years, had the same mind.
It is we who are different; and then the thought would come to me,
that has come to me so often before, that they lived at times when
the imagination turned to life itself for excitement. The world was
not changing quickly about them. There was nothing to draw their
imagination from the ripening of their fields, from the birth and death
of their children, from the destiny of their souls, from all that is
the unchanging substance of literature. They had not to deal with the
world in such great masses that it could only be represented to their
minds by figures and by abstract generalisations. Everything that
their minds ran on came to them vivid with the colour of the senses,
and when they wrote it was out of their own rich experience, and they
found their symbols of expression in things that they had known all
their life long. Their very words were more vigorous than ours, for
their phrases came from a common mint, from the market, or the tavern,
or from the great poets of a still older time. It is the change, that
followed the Renaissance and was completed by newspaper government and
the scientific movement, that has brought upon us all these phrases and
generalisations, made by minds that would grasp what they have never
seen. Yesterday I went out to see the reddening apples in the garden,
and they faded from my imagination sooner than they would have from
the imagination of that old poet, who made the songs of the seasons
for the Fianna, or out of Chaucer's, that celebrated so many trees.
Theories, opinions, these opinions among the rest, flowed in upon me
and blotted them away. Even our greatest poets see the world with
preoccupied minds. Great as Shelley is, those theories about the coming
changes of the world, which he has built up with so much elaborate
passion, hurry him from life continually. There is a phrase in some old
cabalistic writer about man falling into his own circumference, and
every generation we get further away from life itself, and come more
and more under the influence which Blake had in his mind when he said,
'Kings and Parliament seem to me something other than human life. '
We lose our freedom more and more as we get away from ourselves, and
not merely because our minds are overthrown by abstract phrases and
generalisations, reflections in a mirror that seem living, but because
we have turned the table of value upside down, and believe that the
root of reality is not in the centre but somewhere in that whirling
circumference. How can we create like the ancients, while innumerable
considerations of external probability or social utility or of what is
becoming in so meritorious a person as ourselves, destroy the seeming
irresponsible creative power that is life itself?
