No More Learning

They have renamed wells and images and given new meanings to
ceremonies of spring and midsummer and harvest. In very early days the
arts were so possessed by this method that they were almost inseparable
from religion, going side by side with it into all life. But, to-day,
they have grown, as I think, too proud, too anxious to live alone
with the perfect, and so one sees them, as I think, like charioteers
standing by deserted chariots and holding broken reins in their hands,
or seeking to go upon their way drawn by the one passion which alone
remains to them out of the passions of the world. We should not blame
them, but rather a mysterious tendency in things which will have its
end some day. In England, men like William Morris, seeing about them
passions so long separated from the perfect that it seemed as if they
could not be changed until society had been changed, tried to unite the
arts once more to life by uniting them to use. They advised painters to
paint fewer pictures upon canvas, and to burn more of them on plates;
and they tried to persuade sculptors that a candlestick might be as
beautiful as a statue. But here in Ireland, when the arts have grown
humble, they will find two passions ready to their hands, love of
the Unseen Life and love of country. I would have a devout writer or
painter often content himself with subjects taken from his religious
beliefs; and if his religious beliefs are those of the majority, he
may at last move hearts in every cottage. While even if his religious
beliefs are those of some minority, he will have a better welcome
than if he wrote of the rape of Persephone, or painted the burning
of Shelley's body. He will have founded his work on a passion which
will bring him to many besides those who have been trained to care
for beautiful things by a special education. If he is a painter or a
sculptor he will find churches awaiting his hand everywhere, and if he
follows the masters of his craft our other passion will come into his
work also, for he will show his Holy Family winding among hills like
those of Ireland, and his Bearer of the Cross among faces copied from
the faces of his own town. Our art teachers should urge their pupils
into this work, for I can remember, when I was myself a Dublin art
student, how I used to despond, when eagerness burned low, as it always
must now and then, at seeing no market at all.

But I would rather speak to those who, while moved in other things
than the arts by love of country, are beginning to write, as I was
some sixteen years ago, without any decided impulse to one thing more
than another, and especially to those who are convinced, as I was
convinced, that art is tribeless, nationless, a blossom gathered in No
Man's Land. The Greeks, the only perfect artists of the world, looked
within their own borders, and we, like them, have a history fuller than
any modern history of imaginative events; and legends which surpass,
as I think, all legends but theirs in wild beauty, and in our land,
as in theirs, there is no river or mountain that is not associated in
the memory with some event or legend; while political reasons have
made love of country, as I think, even greater among us than among
them. I would have our writers and craftsmen of many kinds master this
history and these legends, and fix upon their memory the appearance
of mountains and rivers and make it all visible again in their arts,
so that Irishmen, even though they had gone thousands of miles away,
would still be in their own country.
Whether they chose for the subject
the carrying off of the Brown Bull, or the coming of Patrick, or the
political struggle of later times, the other world comes so much into
it all that their love of it would move in their hands also, and as
much, it may be, as in the hands of the Greek craftsmen. In other
words, I would have Ireland recreate the ancient arts, the arts as they
were understood in Judaea, in India, in Scandinavia, in Greece and Rome,
in every ancient land; as they were understood when they moved a whole
people and not a few people who have grown up in a leisured class and
made this understanding their business.

I think that my reader[B] will have agreed with most that I have said
up till now, for we all hope for arts like these. I think indeed I
first learned to hope for them myself in Young Ireland Societies,
or in reading the essays of Davis. An Englishman, with his belief
in progress, with his instinctive preference for the cosmopolitan
literature of the last century, may think arts like these parochial,
but they are the arts we have begun the making of.

I will not, however, have all my readers with me when I say that no
writer, no artist, even though he choose Brian Boroihme or Saint
Patrick for his subject, should try to make his work popular. Once he
has chosen a subject he must think of nothing but giving it such an
expression as will please himself. As Walt Whitman has written--

'The oration is to the orator, the acting is to the
actor and actress, not to the audience:
And no man understands any greatness or goodness,
but his own or the indication of his own. '

He must make his work a part of his own journey towards beauty and
truth. He must picture saint or hero, or hillside, as he sees them, not
as he is expected to see them, and he must comfort himself, when others
cry out against what he has seen, by remembering that no two men are
alike, and that there is no 'excellent beauty without strangeness. '
In this matter he must be without humility. He may, indeed, doubt the
reality of his vision if men do not quarrel with him as they did with
the Apostles, for there is only one perfection and only one search for
perfection, and it sometimes has the form of the religious life and
sometimes of the artistic life; and I do not think these lives differ
in their wages, for 'The end of art is peace,' and out of the one as
out of the other comes the cry: _Sero te amavi, Pulchritudo tam antiqua
et tam nova! Sero te amavi! _

The Catholic Church is not the less the Church of the people because
the Mass is spoken in Latin, and art is not less the art of the people
because it does not always speak in the language they are used to.
I once heard my friend Mr. Ellis say, speaking at a celebration in
honour of a writer whose fame had not come till long after his death,
'It is not the business of a poet to make himself understood, but it
is the business of the people to understand him.