No More Learning

No nation, since the
beginning of history, has ever drawn all its life out of itself. Even
The Well of English Undefiled, the Father of English Poetry himself,
borrowed his metres, and much of his way of looking at the world, from
French writers, and it is possible that the influence of Italy was
more powerful among the Elizabethan poets than any literary influence
out of England herself. Many years ago, when I was contending with Sir
Charles Gavan Duffy over what seemed to me a too narrow definition
of Irish interests, Professor York Powell either said or wrote to me
that the creative power of England was always at its greatest when
her receptive power was greatest. If Ireland is about to produce a
literature that is important to her, it must be the result of the
influences that flow in upon the mind of an educated Irishman to-day,
and, in a greater degree, of what came into the world with himself.
Gaelic can hardly fail to do a portion of the work, but one cannot say
whether it may not be some French or German writer who will do most to
make him an articulate man. If he really achieve the miracle, if he
really make all that he has seen and felt and known a portion of his
own intense nature, if he put it all into the fire of his energy, he
need not fear being a stranger among his own people in the end. There
never have been men more unlike an Englishman's idea of himself than
Keats and Shelley, while Campbell, whose emotion came out of a shallow
well, was very like that idea. We call certain minds creative because
they are among the moulders of their nation and are not made upon its
mould, and they resemble one another in this only--they have never been
fore-known or fulfilled an expectation.

It is sometimes necessary to follow in practical matters some
definition which one knows to have but a passing use. We, for instance,
have always confined ourselves to plays upon Irish subjects, as if
no others could be National literature. Our theatre inherits this
limitation from previous movements, which found it necessary and
fruitful. Goldsmith and Sheridan and Burke had become so much a part
of English life, were so greatly moulded by the movements that were
moulding England, that, despite certain Irish elements that clung
about them, we could not think of them as more important to us than
any English writer of equal rank. Men told us that we should keep our
hold of them, as it were, for they were a part of our glory; but we
did not consider our glory very important. We had no desire to turn
braggarts, and we did suspect the motives of our advisers. Perhaps they
had reasons, which were not altogether literary, for thinking it might
be well if Irishmen of letters, in our day also, would turn their faces
to England.
But what moved me always the most, and I had something to
do with forcing this limitation upon our organisations, is that a new
language of expression would help to awaken a new attitude in writers
themselves, and that if our organisations were satisfied to interpret
a writer to his own countrymen merely because he was of Irish birth,
the organisations would become a kind of trade union for the helping
of Irishmen to catch the ear of London publishers and managers, and
for upholding writers who had been beaten by abler Englishmen. Let a
man turn his face to us, accepting the commercial disadvantages that
would bring upon him, and talk of what is near to our hearts, Irish
Kings and Irish Legends and Irish Countrymen, and we would find it a
joy to interpret him. Our one philosophical critic, Mr. John Eglinton,
thinks we were very arbitrary, and yet I would not have us enlarge our
practice. England and France, almost alone among nations, have great
works of literature which have taken their subjects from foreign lands,
and even in France and England this is more true in appearance than
reality. Shakespeare observed his Roman crowds in London, and saw,
one doubts not, somewhere in his own Stratford, the old man that gave
Cleopatra the asp. Somebody I have been reading lately finds the Court
of Louis the Fourteenth in Phedre and Andromaque. Even in France and
England almost the whole prose fiction professes to describe the life
of the country, often of the districts where its writers have lived,
for, unlike a poem, a novel requires so much minute observation of the
surface of life that a novelist who cares for the illusion of reality
will keep to familiar things. A writer will indeed take what is most
creative out of himself, not from observation, but experience, yet he
must master a definite language, a definite symbolism of incident and
scene. Flaubert explains the comparative failure of his Salammbo by
saying 'one cannot frequent her. ' He could create her soul, as it were,
but he could not tell with certainty how it would express itself before
Carthage fell to ruins. In the small nations which have to struggle
for their National life, one finds that almost every creator, whether
poet or novelist, sets all his stories in his own country. I do not
recollect that Bjornson ever wrote of any land but Norway, and Ibsen,
though he lived in exile for many years, driven out by his countrymen,
as he believed, carried the little seaboard towns of Norway everywhere
in his imagination. So far as one can be certain of anything, one
may be certain that Ireland with her long National struggle, her old
literature, her unbounded folk-imagination, will, in so far as her
literature is National at all, be more like Norway than England or
France.

If Literature is but praise of life, if our writers are not to plead
the National Cause, nor insist upon the Ten Commandments, nor upon the
glory of their country, what part remains for it, in the common life
of the country? It will influence the life of the country immeasurably
more, though seemingly less, than have our propagandist poems and
stories.