No More Learning

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.

FOOTNOTE:

[Footnote B: This essay was first published in the _United Irishman_. ]




THE GALWAY PLAINS


LADY GREGORY has just given me her beautiful _Poets and Dreamers_, and
it has brought to mind a day two or three years ago when I stood on the
side of Slieve Echtge, looking out over Galway. The Burren Hills were
to my left, and though I forget whether I could see the cairn over Bald
Conan of the Fianna, I could certainly see many places there that are
in poems and stories. In front of me, over many miles of level Galway
plains, I saw a low blue hill flooded with evening light. I asked a
countryman who was with me what hill that was, and he told me it was
Cruachmaa of the Sidhe. I had often heard of Cruachmaa of the Sidhe
even as far north as Sligo, for the country people have told me a great
many stories of the great host of the Sidhe who live there, still
fighting and holding festivals.

I asked the old countryman about it, and he told me of strange women
who had come from it, and who would come into a house having the
appearance of countrywomen, but would know all that happened in that
house; and how they would always pay back with increase, though not by
their own hands, whatever was given to them. And he had heard, too, of
people who had been carried away into the hill, and how one man went to
look for his wife there, and dug into the hill and all but got his wife
again, but at the very moment she was coming out to him, the pick he
was digging with struck her upon the head and killed her.