No More Learning

When a country has not begun to
care for literature, or has forgotten the taste for it, and most modern
countries seem to pass through this stage, these chimeras are hatched
in every basket. Certain generalisations are everywhere substituted
for life. Instead of individual men and women and living virtues
differing as one star differeth from another in glory, the public
imagination is full of personified averages, partisan fictions, rules
of life that would drill everybody into the one posture, habits that
are like the pinafores of charity-school children. The priest, trained
to keep his mind on the strength of his Church and the weakness of
his congregation, would have all mankind painted with a halo or with
horns. Literature is nothing to him, he has to remember that Seaghan
the Fool might take to drinking again if he knew of pleasant Falstaff,
and that Paudeen might run after Red Sarah again if some strange chance
put Plutarch's tale of Anthony or Shakespeare's play into his hands,
and he is in a hurry to shut out of the schools that Pandora's box,
_The Golden Treasury_. The newspaper he reads of a morning has not only
the haloes and horns of the vestry, but it has crowns and fools' caps
of its own. Life, which in its essence is always surprising, always
taking some new shape, always individualising, is nothing to it, it has
to move men in squads, to keep them in uniform, with their faces to
the right enemy, and enough hate in their hearts to make the muskets
go off. It may know its business well, but its business is building
and ours is shattering. We cannot linger very long in this great dim
temple where the wooden images sit all round upon thrones, and where
the worshippers kneel, not knowing whether they tremble because their
gods are dead or because they fear they may be alive. In the idol-house
every god, every demon, every virtue, every vice, has been given its
permanent form, its hundred hands, its elephant trunk, its monkey head.
The man of letters looks at those kneeling worshippers who have given
up life for a posture, whose nerves have dried up in the contemplation
of lifeless wood. He swings his silver hammer and the keepers of the
temple cry out, prophesying evil, but he must not mind their cries and
their prophecies, but break the wooden necks in two and throw down the
wooden bodies. Life will put living bodies in their place till new
image-brokers have set up their benches.

Whenever literature becomes powerful, the priest, whose forerunner
imagined St. Patrick driving his chariot-wheels over his own erring
sister, has to acknowledge, or to see others acknowledge, that there
is no evil that men and women may not be driven into by their virtues
all but as readily as by their vices, and the politician, that it is
not always clean hands that serve a country or foul hands that ruin
it.
He may even have to say at last, as an old man who had spent many
years in prison to serve a good cause said to me, 'There never was a
cause so evil that it has not been served by good men for what seemed
to them sufficient reasons. ' And if the priest or the politician should
say to the man of letters, 'Into how dangerous a state of mind are you
not bringing us? ' the man of letters can but answer, 'It is dangerous,
indeed,' and say, like my Seanchan, 'When did we promise safety? '

Thought takes the same form age after age, and the things that people
have said to me about this intellectual movement of ours have, I doubt
not, been said in every country to every writer who was a disturber of
the old life. When _The Countess Cathleen_ was produced, the very girls
in the shops complained to us that to describe an Irishwoman as selling
her soul to the devil was to slander the country. The silver hammer had
threatened, as it seems, one of those personifications of an average.
Someone said to me a couple of weeks ago, 'If you put on the stage any
play about marriage that does not point its moral clearly, you will
make it difficult for us to go on attacking the English theatre for its
immorality. ' Again, we were disordering the squads, the muskets might
not all point in the same direction.

Now that these opinions have found a leader and a voice in _The
Independent_, it is easy at anyrate to explain how much one differs
from them. I had spoken of the capricious power of the artist and
compared it to the capricious movements of a wild creature, and _The
Independent_, speaking quite logically from its point of view, tells
me that these movements were only interesting when 'under restraint. '
The writers of the Anglo-Irish movement, it says, 'will never consent
to serve except on terms that never could or should be conceded. ' I
had spoken of the production of foreign masterpieces, but it considers
that foreign masterpieces would be very dangerous. I had asked in
_Samhain_ for audiences sufficiently tolerant to enable the half-dozen
minds who are likely to be the dramatic imagination of Ireland for this
generation to put their own thought and their own characters into their
work. That is to say, I had asked for the amount of freedom which every
nation has given to its dramatic writers. But the newspaper hopes and
believes that no 'such tolerance will be extended to Mr. Yeats and his
friends.