No More Learning

Complain
of us if you will, but it will be useless, for before the curtain
falls a thousand ages, grown conscious in our sympathies, will have
cried _Absolvo te_. Blame if you will the codes, the philosophies, the
experiences of all past ages that have made us what we are, as the
soil under our feet has been made out of unknown vegetations: quarrel
with the acorns of Eden if you will, but what has that to do with us?
We understand the verdict and not the law; and yet there is some law,
some code, some judgment. If the poet's hand had slipped, if Antony
had railed at Cleopatra in the tower, if Coriolanus had abated that
high pride of his in the presence of death, we might have gone away
muttering the Ten Commandments. Yet may be we are wrong to speak of
judgment, for we have but contemplated life, and what more is there to
say when she that is all virtue, the gift and the giver, the fountain
whither all flows again, has given all herself? If the subject of drama
or any other art, were a man himself, an eddy of momentary breath, we
might desire the contemplation of perfect characters; but the subject
of all art is passion, the flame of life itself, and a passion can only
be contemplated when separated by itself, purified of all but itself,
and aroused into a perfect intensity by opposition with some other
passion, or it may be with the law, that is the expression of the whole
whether of Church or Nation or external nature. Had Coriolanus not been
a law-breaker neither he nor we had ever discovered, it may be, that
noble pride of his, and if we had not seen Cleopatra through the eyes
of so many lovers, would we have known that soul of hers to be all
flame, and wept at the quenching of it? If we were not certain of law
we would not feel the struggle, the drama, but the subject of art is
not law, which is a kind of death, but the praise of life, and it has
no commandments that are not positive.

But if literature does not draw its substance from history, or anything
about us in the world, what is a National literature? Our friends have
already told us, writers for the Theatre in Abbey Street, that we have
no right to the name, some because we do not write in Irish, and others
because we do not plead the National cause in our plays, as if we
were writers for the newspapers. I have not asked my fellow-workers
what they mean by the words National literature, but though I have
no great love for definitions, I would define it in some such way as
this: It is the work of writers, who are moulded by influences that
are moulding their country, and who write out of so deep a life that
they are accepted there in the end. It leaves a good deal unsettled--was
Rossetti an Englishman, or Swift an Irishman? --but it covers more kinds
of National literature than any other I can think of. If one says a
National literature must be in the language of the country, there are
many difficulties. Should it be written in the language that one's
country does speak or the language that it ought to speak?
Was Milton
an Englishman when he wrote in Latin or Italian, and had we no part in
Columbanus when he wrote in Latin the beautiful sermon comparing life
to a highway and to a smoke? And then there is Beckford, who is in
every history of English literature, and yet his one memorable book, a
story of Persia, was written in French.

Our theatre is of no great size, for though we know that if we write
well we shall find acceptance among our countrymen in the end, we would
think our emotions were on the surface if we found a ready welcome.
Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman are National writers of America,
although the one had his first true acceptance in France and the other
in England and Ireland. When I was a boy, six persons, who, alone out
of the whole world it may be, believed Walt Whitman a great writer,
sent him a message of admiration, and of those names four were English
and two Irish, my father's and Prof. Dowden's. It is only in our own
day that America has begun to prefer him to Lowell, who is not a poet
at all.

I mean by deep life that men must put into their writing the emotions
and experiences that have been most important to themselves. If they
say, 'I will write of Irish country people and make them charming and
picturesque like those dear peasants my great grandmother used to
put in the foreground of her water-colour paintings,' then they had
better be satisfied with the word 'provincial. ' If one condescends
to one's material, if it is only what a popular novelist would call
local colour, it is certain that one's real soul is somewhere else.
Mr. Synge, upon the other hand, who is able to express his own finest
emotions in those curious ironical plays of his, where, for all that,
by the illusion of admirable art, everyone seems to be thinking and
feeling as only countrymen could think and feel, is truly a National
writer, as Burns was when he wrote finely and as Burns was not when he
wrote _Highland Mary_ and _The Cotter's Saturday Night_.

A writer is not less National because he shows the influence of other
countries and of the great writers of the world. No nation, since the
beginning of history, has ever drawn all its life out of itself. Even
The Well of English Undefiled, the Father of English Poetry himself,
borrowed his metres, and much of his way of looking at the world, from
French writers, and it is possible that the influence of Italy was
more powerful among the Elizabethan poets than any literary influence
out of England herself. Many years ago, when I was contending with Sir
Charles Gavan Duffy over what seemed to me a too narrow definition
of Irish interests, Professor York Powell either said or wrote to me
that the creative power of England was always at its greatest when
her receptive power was greatest.