No More Learning

Every argument carries us backwards to some religious conception, and
in the end the creative energy of men depends upon their believing that
they have, within themselves, something immortal and imperishable,
and that all else is but as an image in a looking-glass. So long as
that belief is not a formal thing, a man will create out of a joyful
energy, seeking little for any external test of an impulse that may be
sacred, and looking for no foundation outside life itself. If Ireland
could escape from those phantoms of hers she might create, as did the
old writers; for she has a faith that is as theirs, and keeps alive
in the Gaelic traditions--and this has always seemed to me the chief
intellectual value of Gaelic--a portion of the old imaginative life.
When Dr. Hyde or Father Peter O'Leary is the writer, one's imagination
goes straight to the century of Cervantes, and, having gone so far,
one thinks at every moment that they will discover his energy. It is
precisely because of this reason that one is indignant with those who
would substitute for the ideas of the folk-life the rhetoric of the
newspapers, who would muddy what had begun to seem a fountain of life
with the feet of the mob. Is it impossible to revive Irish and yet to
leave the finer intellects a sufficient mastery over the more gross, to
prevent it from becoming, it may be, the language of a Nation, and yet
losing all that has made it worthy of a revival, all that has made it a
new energy in the mind?

Before the modern movement, and while it was but new, the ordinary
man, whether he could read and write or not, was ready to welcome
great literature. When Ariosto found himself among the brigands, they
repeated to him his own verses, and the audience in the Elizabethan
Theatres must have been all but as clever as an Athenian audience. But
to-day we come to understand great literature by a long preparation, or
by some accident of nature, for we only begin to understand life when
our minds have been purified of temporary interests by study.

But if literature has no external test, how are we to know that it is
indeed literature? The only test that nature gives, to show when we
obey her, is that she gives us happiness, and when we are no longer
obedient she brings us to pain sooner or later. Is it not the same
with the artist? The sign that she makes to him is that happiness we
call delight in beauty. He can only convey this in its highest form
after he has purified his mind with the great writers of the world; but
their example can never be more than a preparation.
If his art does
not seem, when it comes, to be the creation of a new personality, in
a few years it will not seem to be alive at all. If he is a dramatist
his characters must have a like newness. If they could have existed
before his days, or have been imagined before his day, we may be
certain that the spirit of life is not in them in its fulness. This
is because art, in its highest moments, is not a deliberate creation,
but the creation of intense feeling, of pure life; and every feeling
is the child of all past ages and would be different if even a moment
had been left out. Indeed, is it not that delight in beauty, which
tells the artist that he has imagined what may never die, itself but a
delight in the permanent yet ever-changing form of life, in her very
limbs and lineaments? When life has given it, has she given anything
but herself? Has she any other reward, even for the saints? If one
flies to the wilderness, is not that clear light that falls about the
soul when all irrelevant things have been taken away, but life that has
been about one always, enjoyed in all its fulness at length? It is as
though she had put her arms about one, crying: 'My beloved, you have
given up everything for me. ' If a man spend all his days in good works
till there is no emotion in his heart that is not full of virtue, is
not the reward he prays for eternal life? The artist, too, has prayers
and a cloister, and if he do not turn away from temporary things, from
the zeal of the reformer and the passion of revolution, that zealous
mistress will give him but a scornful glance.

What attracts one to drama is that it is, in the most obvious way, what
all the arts are upon a last analysis. A farce and a tragedy are alike
in this that they are a moment of intense life. An action is taken out
of all other actions; it is reduced to its simple form, or at anyrate
to as simple a form as it can be brought to without our losing the
sense of its place in the world. The characters that are involved in
it are freed from everything that is not a part of that action; and
whether it is, as in the less important kinds of drama, a mere bodily
activity, a hair-breadth escape or the like, or as it is in the more
important kinds, an activity of the souls of the characters, it is
an energy, an eddy of life purified from everything but itself. The
dramatist must picture life in action, with an unpreoccupied mind, as
the musician pictures her in sound and the sculptor in form.