No More Learning

It seems natural that so beautiful a prayer as that of
the old saint should have come out of a life so full of innocence and
peace. One could hardly have thought out the play in English, for those
phrases of a traditional simplicity and of a too deliberate prettiness
which become part of an old language would have arisen between the
mind and the story. One might even have made something as unreal as
the sentimental schoolmaster of the Scottish novelists, and how many
children, who are but literary images, would one not have had to hunt
out of one's mind before meeting with those little children? Even if
one could have thought it out in English one could not have written
it in English, unless perhaps in that dialect which Dr. Hyde had
already used in the prose narrative that flows about his _Love Songs of
Connaught_.

Dr. Hyde has written a little play about the birth of Christ which
has the same beauty and simplicity. These plays remind me of my first
reading of _The Love Songs of Connaught_. The prose parts of that book
were to me, as they were to many others, the coming of a new power
into literature. I find myself now, as I found myself then, grudging
to propaganda, to scholarship, to oratory, however necessary, a genius
which might in modern Irish or in that idiom of the English-speaking
country people discover a new region for the mind to wander in. In
Ireland, where we have so much to prove and to disprove, we are ready
to forget that the creation of an emotion of beauty is the only kind
of literature that justifies itself. Books of literary propaganda
and literary history are merely preparations for the creation or
understanding of such an emotion. It is necessary to put so much in
order, to clear away so much, to explain so much, that somebody may be
moved by a thought or an image that is inexplicable as a wild creature.

I cannot judge the language of his Irish poetry, but it is so rich in
poetical thought, when at its best, that it seems to me that if he
were to write more he might become to modern Irish what Mistral was to
modern Provencal. I wish, too, that he could put away from himself some
of the interruptions of that ceaseless propaganda, and find time for
the making of translations, loving and leisurely, like those in _Beside
the Fire_ and _The Love Songs of Connaught_.
He has begun to get a
little careless lately. Above all I would have him keep to that English
idiom of the Irish-thinking people of the west which he has begun to
use less often. It is the only good English spoken by any large number
of Irish people to-day, and one must found good literature on a living
speech. English men of letters found themselves upon the English Bible,
where religious thought gets its living speech. Blake, if I remember
rightly, copied it out twice, and I remember once finding a few
illuminated pages of a new decorated copy that he began in his old age.
Byron read it for the sake of style, though I think it did him little
good, and Ruskin founded himself in great part upon it. Indeed, one
finds everywhere signs of a book which is the chief influence in the
lives of English children. The translation used in Ireland has not the
same literary beauty, and if we are to find anything to take its place
we must find it in that idiom of the poor, which mingles so much of
the same vocabulary with turns of phrase that have come out of Gaelic.
Even Irish writers of considerable powers of thought seem to have no
better standard of English than a schoolmaster's ideal of correctness.
If their grammar is correct they will write in all the lightness of
their hearts about 'keeping in touch,' and 'object-lessons,' and
'shining examples,' and 'running in grooves,' and 'flagrant violations'
of various things. Yet, as Sainte-Beuve has said, there is nothing
immortal except style. One can write well in that country idiom without
much thought about one's words, the emotion will bring the right word
itself, for there everything is old and everything alive and nothing
common or threadbare. I recommend to the Intermediate Board--a body
that seems to benefit by advice--a better plan than any they know for
teaching children to write good English. Let every child in Ireland be
set to turn a leading article or a piece of what is called excellent
English, written perhaps by some distinguished member of the Board,
into the idiom of his own country side. He will find at once the
difference between dead and living words, between words that meant
something years ago, and words that have the only thing that gives
literary quality--personality, the breath of men's mouths. Zola, who is
sometimes an admirable critic, has said that some of the greatest pages
in French literature are not even right in their grammar, 'They are
great because they have personality.