No More Learning

In the shop
windows there were, I knew, the signs of a life very unlike that I had
seen at Killeenan; halfpenny comic papers and story papers, sixpenny
reprints of popular novels, and, with the exception of a dusty Dumas or
Scott strayed thither, one knew not how, and one or two little books of
Irish ballads, nothing that one calls literature, nothing that would
interest the few thousands who alone out of many millions have what
we call culture. A few miles had divided the sixteenth century, with
its equality of culture, of good taste, from the twentieth, where if a
man has fine taste he has either been born to leisure and opportunity
or has in him an energy that is genius. One saw the difference in the
clothes of the people of the town and of the village, for, as the
Emerald tablet says, outward and inner things answer to one another.
The village men wore their bawneens, their white flannel jackets; they
had clothes that had a little memory of clothes that had once been
adapted to their calling by centuries of continual slight changes. They
were sometimes well dressed, for they suggested nothing but themselves
and wore little that had suited another better. But in the town nobody
was well dressed; for in modern life, only a few people--some few
thousands--set the fashion, and set it to please themselves and to fit
their lives, and as for the rest they must go shabby--the ploughman in
clothes cut for a life of leisure, but made of shoddy, and the tramp
in the ploughman's cast-off clothes, and the scarecrow in the tramp's
battered coat and broken hat.

II

All that love the arts or love dignity in life have at one time or
another noticed these things, and some have wondered why the world has
for some three or four centuries sacrificed so much, and with what
seems a growing recklessness, to create an intellectual aristocracy,
a leisured class--to set apart, and above all others, a number of men
and women who are not very well pleased with one another or the world
they have to live in. It is some comparison, like this that I have
made, which has been the origin, as I think, of most attempts to revive
some old language in which the general business of the world is no
longer transacted. The Provencal movement, the Welsh, the Czech, have
all, I think, been attempting, when we examine them to the heart, to
restore what is called a more picturesque way of life, that is to say,
a way of life in which the common man has some share in imaginative
art. That this is the decisive element in the attempt to revive and to
preserve the Irish language I am very certain. A language enthusiast
does not put it that way to himself; he says, rather, 'If I can make
the people talk Irish again they will be the less English'; but if you
talk to him till you have hunted the words into their burrow you will
find that the word 'Ireland' means to him a form of life delightful to
his imagination, and that the word 'England' suggests to him a cold,
joyless, irreligious and ugly life. The life of the villages, with
its songs, its dances and its pious greetings, its conversations full
of vivid images shaped hardly more by life itself than by innumerable
forgotten poets, all that life of good nature and improvisation grows
more noble as he meditates upon it, for it mingles with the middle ages
until he no longer can see it as it is but as it was, when it ran, as
it were, into a point of fire in the courtliness of kings' houses. He
hardly knows whether what stirred him yesterday was that old fiddler,
playing an almost-forgotten music on a fiddle mended with twine, or a
sudden thought of some king that was of the blood of that old man, some
O'Loughlin or O'Byrne, listening amid his soldiers, he and they at
the one table, they too, lucky, bright-eyed, while the minstrel sang
of angry Cuchulain, or of him men called 'Golden salmon of the sea,
clean hawk of the air. ' It will not please him, however, if you tell
him that he is fighting the modern world, which he calls 'England,' as
Mistral and his fellows called it Paris, and that he will need more
than language if he is to make the monster turn up its white belly.
And yet the difference between what the word England means and all
that the word Gaelic suggests is greater than any that could have been
before the imagination of Mistral.
Ireland, her imagination at its noon
before the birth of Chaucer, has created the most beautiful literature
of a whole people that has been anywhere since Greece and Rome, while
English literature, the greatest of all literatures but that of Greece,
is yet the literature of a few. Nothing of it but a handful of ballads
about Robin Hood has come from the folk or belongs to them rightly, for
the good English writers, with a few exceptions that seem accidental,
have written for a small cultivated class; and is not this the reason?
Irish poetry and Irish stories were made to be spoken or sung, while
English literature, alone of great literatures, because the newest of
them all, has all but completely shaped itself in the printing-press.
In Ireland to-day the old world that sang and listened is, it may be
for the last time in Europe, face to face with the world that reads and
writes, and their antagonism is always present under some name or other
in Irish imagination and intellect. I myself cannot be convinced that
the printing-press will be always victor, for change is inconceivably
swift, and when it begins--well, as the proverb has it, everything comes
in at the hole. The world soon tires of its toys, and our exaggerated
love of print and paper seems to me to come out of passing conditions
and to be no more a part of the final constitution of things than the
craving of a woman in child-bed for green apples. When one takes a book
into the corner, one surrenders so much life for one's knowledge, so
much, I mean, of that normal activity that gives one life and strength,
one lays away one's own handiwork and turns from one's friend, and
if the book is good one is at some pains to press all the little
wanderings and tumults of the mind into silence and quiet. If the
reader be poor, if he has worked all day at the plough or the desk,
he will hardly have strength enough for any but a meretricious book;
nor is it only when the book is on the knees that one's life must be
given for it. For a good and sincere book needs the preparation of the
peculiar studies and reveries that prepare for good taste, and make it
easier for the mind to find pleasure in a new landscape; and all these
reveries and studies have need of so much time and thought that it is
almost certain a man cannot be a successful doctor, or engineer, or
Cabinet Minister, and have a culture good enough to escape the mockery
of the ragged art student who comes of an evening sometimes to borrow
a half-sovereign. The old culture came to a man at his work; it was
not at the expense of life, but an exaltation of life itself; it came
in at the eyes as some civic ceremony sailed along the streets, or as
one arrayed oneself before the looking-glass, or it came in at the ears
in a song as one bent over the plough or the anvil, or at that great
table where rich and poor sat down together and heard the minstrel
bidding them pass around the wine-cup and say a prayer for Gawain dead.
Certainly it came without a price; it did not take one from one's
friends and one's handiwork; but it was like a good woman who gives all
for love and is never jealous and is ready to do all the talking when
we are tired.

How the old is to come again, how the other side of the penny is to
come up, how the spit is to turn the other side of the meat to the
fire, I do not know, but that the time will come I am certain; when one
kind of desire has been satisfied for a long time it becomes sleepy,
and other kinds, long quiet, after making a noise begin to order life.
Of the many things, desires or powers or instruments, that are to
change the world, the artist is fitted to understand but two or three,
and the less he troubles himself about the complexity that is outside
his craft, the more will he find it all within his craft, and the more
dexterous will his hand and his thought become. I am trying to see
nothing in the world but the arts, and nothing in this change--which one
cannot prove but only foretell--but the share my own art will have in it.

III

One thing is entirely certain. Wherever the old imaginative life
lingers it must be stirred into life, and kept alive, and in Ireland
this is the work, it may be, of the Gaelic movement.