No More Learning

Coventry Patmore has said, 'The end of art is peace,' and
the following of art is little different from the following of religion
in the intense preoccupation that it demands. Somebody has said, 'God
asks nothing of the highest soul except attention'; and so necessary
is attention to mastery in any art, that there are moments when one
thinks that nothing else is necessary, and nothing else so difficult.
The religious life has created for itself monasteries and convents
where men and women may forget in prayer and contemplation everything
that seems necessary to the most useful and busy citizens of their
towns and villages, and one imagines that even in the monastery and
the convent there are passing things, the twitter of a sparrow in the
window, the memory of some old quarrel, things lighter than air, that
keep the soul from its joy. How many of those old religious sayings can
one not apply to the life of art? 'The Holy Spirit,' wrote S. Thomas a
Kempis, 'has liberated me from a multitude of opinions. ' When one sets
out to cast into some mould so much of life merely for life's sake,
one is tempted at every moment to twist it from its eternal shape to
help some friend or harm some enemy. Alas, all men, we in Ireland more
than others, are fighters, and it is a hard law that compels us to cast
away our swords when we enter the house of the Muses, as men cast them
away at the doors of the banqueting-hall at Tara. A weekly paper in
reviewing last year's _Samhain_, convinced itself, or at any rate its
readers--for that is the heart of the business in propaganda--that I only
began to say these things a few months ago under I know not what alien
influence; and yet I seem to have been saying them all my life. I took
up an anthology of Irish verse that I edited some ten years ago, and I
found them there, and I think they were a chief part of an old fight
over the policy of the _New Irish Library_. Till they are accepted by
writers and readers in this country it will never have a literature, it
will never escape from the election rhyme and the pamphlet. So long as
I have any control over the National Theatre Society it will be carried
on in this spirit, call it art for art's sake if you will; and no plays
will be produced at it which were written, not for the sake of a good
story or fine verses or some revelation of character, but to please
those friends of ours who are ever urging us to attack the priests or
the English, or wanting us to put our imagination into handcuffs that
we may be sure of never seeming to do one or the other.

I have had very little to say this year in _Samhain_, and I have said
it badly. When I wrote _Ideas of Good and Evil_ and _Celtic Twilight_,
I wrote everything very slowly and a great many times over. A few
years ago, however, my eyesight got so bad that I had to dictate the
first drafts of everything, and then rewrite these drafts several
times.
I did the last _Samhain_ this way, dictating all the thoughts
in a few days, and rewriting them in two or three weeks; but this
time I am letting the first draft remain with all its carelessness of
phrase and rhythm. I am busy with a practical project which needs the
saying of many things from time to time, and it is better to say them
carelessly and harshly than to take time from my poetry. One casts
something away every year, and I shall, I think, have to cast away the
hope of ever having a prose style that amounts to anything. After all,
dictation gives one a certain vitality as of vehement speech.


1906

LITERATURE AND THE LIVING VOICE. [J]

I

One Sunday, in summer, a few years ago, I went to the little village
of Killeenan, that is not many miles from Galway, to do honour to the
memory of Raftery, a Gaelic poet who died a little before the famine.
A headstone had been put over his grave in the half-ruined churchyard,
and a priest had come to bless it, and many country people to listen to
his poems. After the shawled and frieze-coated people had knelt down
and prayed for the repose of his soul, they gathered about a little
wooden platform that had been put up in a field. I do not remember
whether Raftery's poem about himself was one of those they listened
to, but certainly it was in the thoughts of many, and it was the
image reflected in that poem that had drawn some of them from distant
villages.

I am Raftery the poet,
Full of hope and love;
With eyes without light;
With gentleness without misery.

Going west on my journey
With the light of my heart;
Weak and tired
To the end of my road.

I am now
And my back to a wall,
Playing music
To empty pockets.

Some few there remembered him, and one old man came out among the
reciters to tell of the burying, where he himself, a young boy at the
time, had carried a candle.

The verses of other Gaelic poets were sung or recited too, and,
although certainly not often fine poetry, they had its spirit, its
_naivete_--that is to say, its way of looking at the world as if it were
but an hour old--its seriousness even in laughter, its personal rhythm.

A few days after I was in the town of Galway, and saw there, as I had
often seen in other country towns, some young men marching down the
middle of a street singing an already outworn London music-hall song,
that filled the memory, long after they had gone by, with a rhythm as
pronounced and as impersonal as the noise of a machine. 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.