No More Learning

II

The more a poet rids his verses of heterogeneous knowledge and
irrelevant analysis, and purifies his mind with elaborate art, the
more does the little ritual of his verse resemble the great ritual of
Nature, and become mysterious and inscrutable. He becomes, as all the
great mystics have believed, a vessel of the creative power of God; and
whether he be a great poet or a small poet, we can praise the poems,
which but seem to be his, with the extremity of praise that we give
this great ritual which is but copied from the same eternal model.
There is poetry that is like the white light of noon, and poetry that
has the heaviness of woods, and poetry that has the golden light of
dawn or of sunset; and I find in the poetry of Mr. Bridges in the
plays, but still more in the lyrics, the pale colours, the delicate
silence, the low murmurs of cloudy country days, when the plough is in
the earth, and the clouds darkening towards sunset; and had I the great
gift of praising, I would praise it as I would praise these things.

1896.




IRELAND AND THE ARTS


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 Judaea, 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.