At the enquiry which
preceded the granting of a patent to the Abbey Theatre I was asked if
_Cathleen ni Houlihan_ was not written to affect opinion.
preceded the granting of a patent to the Abbey Theatre I was asked if
_Cathleen ni Houlihan_ was not written to affect opinion.
Yeats
All fine
literature is the disinterested contemplation or expression of life,
but hardly any Irish writer can liberate his mind sufficiently from
questions of practical reform for this contemplation. Art for art's
sake, as he understands it, whether it be the art of the _Ode to a
Grecian Urn_ or of the imaginer of Falstaff, seems to him a neglect
of public duty. It is as though the telegraph-boys botanised among
the hedges with the undelivered envelopes in their pockets; one must
calculate the effect of one's words before one writes them, who they
are to excite and to what end. We all write if we follow the habit of
the country not for our own delight but for the improvement of our
neighbours, and this is not only true of such obviously propagandist
work as _The Spirit of the Nation_ or a Gaelic League play, but of
the work of writers who seemed to have escaped from every national
influence, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. George Moore, or even Mr. Oscar
Wilde. They never keep their head for very long out of the flood of
opinion. Mr. Bernard Shaw, the one brilliant writer of comedy in
England to-day, makes these comedies something less than life by never
forgetting that he is a reformer, and Mr. Wilde could hardly finish an
act of a play without denouncing the British public; and Mr. Moore--God
bless the hearers! --has not for ten years now been able to keep himself
from the praise or blame of the Church of his fathers. Goethe, whose
mind was more busy with philosophy than any modern poet, has said, 'The
poet needs all philosophy, but he must keep it out of his work. ' One
remembers Dante, and wishes that Goethe had left some commentary upon
that saying, some definition of philosophy perhaps, but one cannot
be less than certain that the poet, though it may be well for him to
have right opinions, above all if his country be at death's door, must
keep all opinion that he holds to merely because he thinks it right,
out of his poetry, if it is to be poetry at all.
At the enquiry which
preceded the granting of a patent to the Abbey Theatre I was asked if
_Cathleen ni Houlihan_ was not written to affect opinion. Certainly
it was not. I had a dream one night which gave me a story, and I
had certain emotions about this country, and I gave those emotions
expression for my own pleasure. If I had written to convince others I
would have asked myself, not 'Is that exactly what I think and feel? '
but 'How would that strike so-and-so? How will they think and feel when
they have read it? ' And all would be oratorical and insincere. We only
understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter
themselves through our minds, and we move others, not because we have
understood or thought about them at all, but because all life has the
same root. Coventry Patmore has said, 'The end of art is peace,' and
the following of art is little different from the following of religion
in the intense preoccupation that it demands. Somebody has said, 'God
asks nothing of the highest soul except attention'; and so necessary
is attention to mastery in any art, that there are moments when one
thinks that nothing else is necessary, and nothing else so difficult.
The religious life has created for itself monasteries and convents
where men and women may forget in prayer and contemplation everything
that seems necessary to the most useful and busy citizens of their
towns and villages, and one imagines that even in the monastery and
the convent there are passing things, the twitter of a sparrow in the
window, the memory of some old quarrel, things lighter than air, that
keep the soul from its joy. How many of those old religious sayings can
one not apply to the life of art? 'The Holy Spirit,' wrote S. Thomas a
Kempis, 'has liberated me from a multitude of opinions. ' When one sets
out to cast into some mould so much of life merely for life's sake,
one is tempted at every moment to twist it from its eternal shape to
help some friend or harm some enemy. Alas, all men, we in Ireland more
than others, are fighters, and it is a hard law that compels us to cast
away our swords when we enter the house of the Muses, as men cast them
away at the doors of the banqueting-hall at Tara.
literature is the disinterested contemplation or expression of life,
but hardly any Irish writer can liberate his mind sufficiently from
questions of practical reform for this contemplation. Art for art's
sake, as he understands it, whether it be the art of the _Ode to a
Grecian Urn_ or of the imaginer of Falstaff, seems to him a neglect
of public duty. It is as though the telegraph-boys botanised among
the hedges with the undelivered envelopes in their pockets; one must
calculate the effect of one's words before one writes them, who they
are to excite and to what end. We all write if we follow the habit of
the country not for our own delight but for the improvement of our
neighbours, and this is not only true of such obviously propagandist
work as _The Spirit of the Nation_ or a Gaelic League play, but of
the work of writers who seemed to have escaped from every national
influence, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. George Moore, or even Mr. Oscar
Wilde. They never keep their head for very long out of the flood of
opinion. Mr. Bernard Shaw, the one brilliant writer of comedy in
England to-day, makes these comedies something less than life by never
forgetting that he is a reformer, and Mr. Wilde could hardly finish an
act of a play without denouncing the British public; and Mr. Moore--God
bless the hearers! --has not for ten years now been able to keep himself
from the praise or blame of the Church of his fathers. Goethe, whose
mind was more busy with philosophy than any modern poet, has said, 'The
poet needs all philosophy, but he must keep it out of his work. ' One
remembers Dante, and wishes that Goethe had left some commentary upon
that saying, some definition of philosophy perhaps, but one cannot
be less than certain that the poet, though it may be well for him to
have right opinions, above all if his country be at death's door, must
keep all opinion that he holds to merely because he thinks it right,
out of his poetry, if it is to be poetry at all.
At the enquiry which
preceded the granting of a patent to the Abbey Theatre I was asked if
_Cathleen ni Houlihan_ was not written to affect opinion. Certainly
it was not. I had a dream one night which gave me a story, and I
had certain emotions about this country, and I gave those emotions
expression for my own pleasure. If I had written to convince others I
would have asked myself, not 'Is that exactly what I think and feel? '
but 'How would that strike so-and-so? How will they think and feel when
they have read it? ' And all would be oratorical and insincere. We only
understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter
themselves through our minds, and we move others, not because we have
understood or thought about them at all, but because all life has the
same root. Coventry Patmore has said, 'The end of art is peace,' and
the following of art is little different from the following of religion
in the intense preoccupation that it demands. Somebody has said, 'God
asks nothing of the highest soul except attention'; and so necessary
is attention to mastery in any art, that there are moments when one
thinks that nothing else is necessary, and nothing else so difficult.
The religious life has created for itself monasteries and convents
where men and women may forget in prayer and contemplation everything
that seems necessary to the most useful and busy citizens of their
towns and villages, and one imagines that even in the monastery and
the convent there are passing things, the twitter of a sparrow in the
window, the memory of some old quarrel, things lighter than air, that
keep the soul from its joy. How many of those old religious sayings can
one not apply to the life of art? 'The Holy Spirit,' wrote S. Thomas a
Kempis, 'has liberated me from a multitude of opinions. ' When one sets
out to cast into some mould so much of life merely for life's sake,
one is tempted at every moment to twist it from its eternal shape to
help some friend or harm some enemy. Alas, all men, we in Ireland more
than others, are fighters, and it is a hard law that compels us to cast
away our swords when we enter the house of the Muses, as men cast them
away at the doors of the banqueting-hall at Tara.
