No More Learning

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. '

The habit of writing for the stage, even when it is not country people
who are the speakers, and of considering what good dialogue is, will
help to increase our feeling for style. Let us get back in everything
to the spoken word, even though we have to speak our lyrics to the
Psaltery or the Harp, for, as A. E. says, we have begun to forget that
literature is but recorded speech, and even when we write with care we
have begun 'to write with elaboration what could never be spoken. ' But
when we go back to speech let us see that it is either the idiom of
those who have rejected, or of those who have never learned, the base
idioms of the newspapers.

Mr. Martyn argued in _The United Irishman_ some months ago that
our actors should try to train themselves for the modern drama of
society. The acting of plays of heroic life or plays like _Cathleen ni
Houlihan_, with its speech of the country people, did not seem to him
a preparation. It is not; but that is as it should be. Our movement
is a return to the people, like the Russian movement of the early
seventies, and the drama of society would but magnify a condition of
life which the countryman and the artisan could but copy to their
hurt. The play that is to give them a quite natural pleasure should
either tell them of their own life, or of that life of poetry where
every man can see his own image, because there alone does human nature
escape from arbitrary conditions. Plays about drawing-rooms are written
for the middle classes of great cities, for the classes who live in
drawing-rooms, but if you would uplift the man of the roads you must
write about the roads, or about the people of romance, or about great
historical people.