Life itself is more infinite, noble, and suggestive than thought. We soon come to the end of the ingenious allegory. It tells only one story but where there is a perfect image of life there is infinitude and mystery. We do not tire considering the long ancestry of expression in a face. It may lead us back through the ages; but we do tire of the art which imprisons itself within formulae, and says to the spectator: "In this way and in no other shall you regard what is before you." No man is profound enough to explain the nature of his own inspiration. Socrates says that the poet utters many things which are truer than he himself understands. The same thing applies to many a great artist, who, when he paints tree or field, or face, or form, finds that there comes on him a mysterious quickening of his nature, and he paints he knows not what. It is like and unlike what his eyes have seen. It may be the same field, but we feel there the presence of the spirit. It may be the same figure, but it is made transcendental, as when the Word had become flesh and dwelt among us. His inspiration is akin to that of the prophets of old, whose words rang but for an instant and were still, yet they created nations whose only boundaries were the silences where their speech had not been heard. His majestical figures are prophecies. His ecstatic landscapes bring us nigh to the beauty which was in Eden. His art is a divine adventure, in which he, like all of us who are traveling in so many ways, seeks, consciously or unconsciously, to regain the lost unity with nature and the knowledge of his own immortal being, and it is so you will best understand it.
AN ARTIST OF GAELIC IRELAND
The art of Hone and the elder Yeats, while in spirit filled with a sentiment which was the persistence of ancient moods into modern times, still has not the external characteristics of Gaeldom; but looking at the pictures of the younger Yeats it seemed to me that for the first time we had something which could be called altogether Gaelic. The incompleteness of the sketches suggests the term "folk" as expressing exactly the inspiration of this very genuine art. We have had abundance of Irish folk-lore, but we knew nothing of folk-art until the figures of Jack Yeats first romped into our imagination a few years ago. It was the folk-feeling lit up by genius and interpreted by love. It was not, and is now less than ever, the patronage bestowed by the intellectual artist on the evidently picturesque forms of a life below his own.
I suspect Jack Yeats thinks the life of the Sligo fisherman is as good a method of life as any, and that he could share it for a long time without being in the least desirous of a return to the comfortable life of convention. The name of Muglas Hyde suggests itself to me as a literary parallel. These sketches have all the prodigality of invention, the exuberance of gesture, and animation of "The Twisting of the Rope," and the poetry is of as high or higher an order. In the drawing called "Midsummer Eve" there is a mystery which is not merely the mystery of night and shadow. It is the mystery of the mingling of spirit with spirit which is suggested by the solitary figure with face upturned to the stars. We have all memories of such summer nights when into the charmed heart falls the enchantment we call ancient, though the days have no fellows, nor will ever have any, when the earth glows with the dusky hues of rich pottery, and the stars, far withdrawn into faery altitudes, dance with a gaiety which is more tremendous and solemn than any repose. The night of this picture is steeped in such a dream, and I know not whether it is communicated, or a feeling arising in myself; but there seems everywhere in it the breathing of life, subtle, exultant, penetrating. It is conceived in the mood of awe and prayer, which makes Millet's pictures as religious as any whichever hung over the altar, for surely the "Angelus" is one of the most spiritual of pictures, though the peasants bow their heads and worship in a temple not built with hands. I do not, of course, compare otherwise than in the mood the "Midsummer Eve" to such a masterpiece; but there is a kinship between the beauty revealed in great and in little things, and our thought turns from the stars to the flowers with no feeling of descent into an alien world. But this mood is rare in life as in art, and it is only occasionally that the younger Yeats becomes the interpreter of the spirituality of the peasant. He is more often the recorder of the extravagant energies of the race-course and the market-place, where he finds herded together all the grotesque humors of West Irish life.
We recognize his figures as distinctly Irish. Here the old rollicking Lever and Lover type of Irishmen reappear, hunting like the very devil, with faces set in the last ecstasy of rapid motion. There is an excess of energy in these furious riders which almost gives them a symbolic character. They seem to ride on some passionate business of the soul rather than for any transitory excitement of the body. And besides these wild horse-men there are quiet and lovely figures like "A Mother of the Rosses," holding her child to her breast in an opalescent twilight, through which the boat that carries her moves. There are always large and noble outlines, which suggest that if Jack Yeats had more grandiose ambitions he might have been the Millet of Irish rural life, but he is too much the symbolist, hating all but essentials, to elaborate his art.
In writing of Jack Yeats mention must be made of his black and white work, which at its best has a primitive intensity. The lines have a kind of Gothic quality, reminding one of the rude glooms, the lights and lines of some half-barbarian cathedral. They are very expressive and never undecided. The artist always knows what he is going to do. There is no doubt he has a clear image before him when he takes up pen or brush. A strong will is always directing the strong lines, forcing them to repeat an image present to the inner eye. In his early days Jack Yeats loafed about the quays at Sligo, and we may be sure he was at all the races, and paid his penny to go into the side-shows, and see the freaks, the Fat Woman and the Skeleton Man. It was probably at this period of his life he was captured by pirates of the Spanish Main. My remembrance of Irish county towns at that time is that no literature flourished except the Penny Dreadful and the local press. I may be doing Jack Yeats an injustice when hailing him at the beginning of a fascinating career I yet suspect a long background of Penny Dreadfuls behind it. How else could he have drawn his pirates? They are the only pirates in art who manifest the true pride, glory, beauty, and terror of their calling as the romantic heart of childhood conceives of it. The pirate has been lifted up to a strange kind of poetry in some of Jack Yeats' pictures. I remember one called "Walking the Plank." The solemn theatrical face, lifted up to the blue sky in a last farewell to the wild world and its lawless freedom, haunted me for days. There was also a pen-and-ink drawing I wish I could reproduce here. A young buccaneer, splendid in evil bravery, leaned across a bar where a strange, beastly, little, old, withered, rat-like figure was drawing the drink. The little figure was like a devil with the soul all concentrated into malice, and the whole picture affected one with terror like a descent into some ferocious human hell.
In all these figures, pirates or peasants, there is an ever present suggestion of poetry; it is in the skies, or in the distance, or in the colors; and these people who laugh in the fairs will have after hours as solemn as the quiet star-gazer in the "Midsummer Eve." This poetry is evident in the oddest ways, and escapes analysis, so elusive and so original is it, as in the "Street of Shows." Nothing at first thought seems more hopelessly remote from poetry than the country circus, with its lurid posters of the Giant Schoolgirl, the Petrified Man, and the Mermaid, all in strong sunlight; but the heart carries with it its own mood, and this flaring scene has undergone some indefinite transformation by the alchemy of genius, and it assumes the character of a fairy tale or Arabian Nights Entertainment imagined in the fantastic dreams of childhood. The sleepy doorkeeper is a goblin or gnome. Perhaps the charm of it all is that it is so evidently illusion, for when the heart is strong in its own surety it can look out on the world, and smile on things which would be unendurable if felt to be permanent, knowing they are only dreams.
Many of these sketches have a largeness, almost a nobility, of conception, which is, I think, a gift from father to son. "After the Harvest's Saved" is something elemental. The "Post-car" suggests the horses of the sun, or the stage coach in De Quincey's extraordinary dream, when the opium had finally rioted in his brain, and transformed his stage-coach into a chariot carrying news of some everlasting victory. Blake has said "exuberance is genius," and there is an excess of energy or passion, or a dilation of the forms, or a peace deeper than mere quietude in the figures of Mr. Yeats' pictures, which gives them that symbolic character which genius always impresses on its works.
The coloring grows better every year; it is more varied and purer. It is sometimes sombre, as in the tragic and dramatic "Simon the Cyrenian," and sometimes rich and flowerlike, but always charged with sentiment, and there is a curious fitness in it even when it is evidently unreal. These blues and purples and pale greens—what crowd ever seemed clad in such twilight colors? And yet we accept it as natural, for this opalescence is always in the mist-laden air of the West; it enters into the soul today as it did into the soul of the ancient Gael, who called it Ildathach—the many-colored land; it becomes part of the atmosphere of the mind; and I think Mr. Yeats means here to express, by one of the inventions of genius, that this dim radiant coloring of his figures is the fitting symbol of the fairyland which is in their hearts. I have not felt so envious of any artist's gift for a long time; not envy of his power of expression, but of his way of seeing things. We are all seeking today for some glimpse of the fairyland our fathers knew; but all the fairylands, the Silver Cloud World, the Tirnanoge, the Land of Heart's Desire, rose like dreams out of the human soul, and in tracking them there Mr. Yeats has been more fortunate than us all, for he has come to the truth, perhaps hardly conscious of it himself.
TWO IRISH ARTISTS
It is unjust to an artist to write on the spur of the moment of his work—of the just seen picture which pleases or displeases. For what instantly delights the eye may never win its way into the heart, and what repels at first may steal later on into the understanding, and find its interpretation in a deeper mood. The final test of a picture, or of any work of art, is its power of enduring charm. There are many circles in the Paradise of Beautiful Memories, and half unconsciously, but with a justice, we at last place each in its hierarchy, remote or near to the centre of our being; and I propose here rather to speak of the impression left in my memory after seeing the work of Yeats and Hone for many years, than to describe in detail the pictures—some new, some familiar—which by a happy thought have been gathered together for exhibition. To tell an artist that you remember his pictures with love after many years is the highest praise you can give him; and to distinguish the impression produced from others is a pleasure I am glad to be here allowed.
An artist like Mr. Yeats, whose main work has been in portraiture, must often find himself before sitters with whom he has little sympathy, and we all expect to find portraits which do not interest us, because the interpreter has been at fault, and has failed in his vision. With the born craftsman, who always gives us beautiful brushwork, we do not expect these inequalities, but with Mr. Yeats technical power is not the most prominent characteristic. He broods or dreams over his sitters, and his meditation always tends to the discovery of some spiritual or intellectual life in them, or some hidden charm in the nature, or something to love; and if he finds what he seeks, we are sure, not always of a complete picture, but of a poetic illumination, a revelation of character, a secret sweetness for which we forgive the weakness or indecision manifest here and there, and which are relics of the hours before the final surety was attained.
I do not know what Mr. Yeats' philosophy of life is, but in his work he has been over-mastered by the spirit of his race, and he belongs to those who from the earliest dawn of Ireland have sought for the Heart's Desire, and who have refined away the world, until only fragments remained to them. They have not accepted life as it is, and Mr. Yeats could not paint like Reynolds or Romney the beauty of every day in its best attire. He is like the Irish poets who have rarely left a complete description of women, but who speak of some transitory motion or fragile charm—"a thin palm like foam of the sea," "a white body," or in such vague phrases, until it seems a spirit is praised and not flesh and blood. I remember the faces of women and children in his pictures where everything is blurred or obscured, save faces which have a nameless charm. They look at you with long-remembered glances out of the brooding hour of twilight, out of reverie and dream. It is the hidden heart which looks out, and we love these women and children for this, for surely the heart's desire is its own secret.
His portraits of men have kindred qualities, and the magnificent picture of John O'Leary shows him at his best. It is itself a symbol of the movement of which O'Leary was the last great representative. The stately patriarchal head of the old chief is the head of the idealist, so sure of his own truth that he must act, and, if needs be, become the martyr for his ideal. But the delicate hands are not the hands of an empire-breaker. This portrait will probably find its last resting-place in the National Gallery, where, with a curious irony, the Government places the portraits of the dead rebels who gave its statesmen many an anxious day and many a nightmare; and so it will go on, perhaps, until the contemplation of these pictures inspires some boy with an equal or better head and a stronger hand, and then—.
But to return to Mr. Yeats. Some earlier pictures show him attempting to paint directly the ideal world of romance and poetry; yet interesting as these are, they do not convey the same impression of mystery as the pictures of today. Indeed, the light seen behind or through a veil is always more suggestive than the unveiled light. It may be that the spirit is a formless breath which pervades form, and it is better revealed as a light in the eyes, as a brooding expression, than by the choice of ancient days and other-world subjects, where the shapes can be molded to ideal forms by the artist's will. However it is, it is certain that Millet, the realist, is more spiritual than Moreau or Burne-Jones for all their archaic design; and Mr. Yeats, who, as his King Goll shows, might have been a great romantic painter, has probably chosen wisely, and has painted more memorable pictures than if he had gone back to the fairyland of Celtic mythology.
To turn from Yeats to Hone is to turn from the lighted hearth to the wilderness. Humanity is very far away, or is huddled up under immense skies, where it seems of less importance than the rocks. The earth on which men have lived, where the work of their hand is evident, with all the sentiment of the presence of man, with smoke arising from numberless homes, is foreign to Mr. Hone. The monsters of the primeval world might sprawl on the rocks, for all the evidence of lapse of time since their day, in many of his pictures. He, too, has refined away his world until only fragments of the earth remain to him where he can dream in; and these are waste places, where the salt of the sea is in the wind, and the skies are gray and vapor-laden, or the loneliness of dim twilights are over level sands. Whatever else he paints is devoid of its proper interest, for he seems to impose on the cattle in the fields and on the habitable places a sentiment alien to their nature. He has a mind with but one impressive mood, and his spirit is never kindled, save in the society where none intrude; but in his own domain he is a master, and is always sure of himself and his effect. There is no tentative, undecisive brushwork, such as we often see in the subtle search for the unrevealed, which makes or mars Mr. Yeats' work. He is at home in his peculiar world, while the other is always seeking for it.
"A Sunset on Malahide Sands" shows a greater intensity than is usual even in Mr. Hone's work. There is something thrilling in this twilight trembling over the deserted world. Philosophies may prove very well in the lecture-room, says Whitman, and not prove at all under the sky and stars. Pictures likewise may seem beautiful in a gallery, yet look thin and unreal where, with a turn of the head, one could look out at the pictures created hour after hour by the Master of the Beautiful; but there is some magic in this vision made up of elemental light, darkness, and loneliness, and we feel awed as if we knew the Spirit was hidden in His works. But primitive as this peculiar world is, and remote from humanity, it is just here we find a human revelation; for is not all art a symbol of the creative mind, and if we were wise enough we would understand that in art the light on every cloud, and the clear spaces above the cloud, and the shadows of the earth beneath are made out of the lights, infinitudes, and shadows of the soul, and are selected from nature because of some correspondence, unconscious or half felt. But these things belong more to the psychology of the artist mind than to the appreciation of its work. I have said enough, I hope, to attract to the work of these artists, in a mood of true understanding, those who would like to believe in the existence in Ireland of a genuine art. For ignored and uncared for as art is, we have some names to be proud of, and of these Mr. Yeats and Mr. Hone are foremost.
"ULSTER"
AN OPEN LETTER TO MR. RUDYARD KIPLING
I Speak to you, brother, because you have spoken to me, or rather you have spoken for me. I am a native of Ulster. So far back as I can trace the faith of my forefathers they held the faith for whose free observance you are afraid.
I call you brother, for so far as I am known beyond the circle of my personal friends it is as a poet. We are not a numerous tribe, but the world has held us in honor, because on the whole in poetry is found the highest and sincerest utterance of man's spirit. In this manner of speaking if a man is not sincere his speech betrayeth him, for all true poetry was written on the Mount of Transfiguration, and there is revelation in it and the mingling of heaven and earth. I am jealous of the honor of poetry, and I am jealous of the good name of my country, and I am impelled by both emotions to speak to you.
You have blood of our race in you, and you may, perhaps, have some knowledge of Irish sentiment. You have offended against one of our noblest literary traditions in the manner in which you have published your thoughts. You begin by quoting Scripture. You preface your verses on Ulster by words from the mysterious oracles of humanity as if you had been inflamed and inspired by the prophet of God; and you go on to sing of faith in peril and patriotism betrayed and the danger of death and oppression by those who do murder by night, which things, if one truly feels, he speaks of without consideration of commerce or what it shall profit him to speak. But you, brother, have withheld your fears for your country and mine until they could yield you a profit in two continents. After all this high speech about the Lord and the hour of national darkness it shocks me to find this following your verses: "Copyrighted in the United States of America by Rudyard Kipling." You are not in want. You are the most successful man of letters of your time, and yet you are not above making profit out of the perils of your country. You ape the lordly speech of the prophets, and you conclude by warning everybody not to reprint your words at their peril. In Ireland every poet we honor has dedicated his genius to his country without gain, and has given without stint, without any niggardly withholding of his gift when his nation was dark and evil days. Not one of our writers, when deeply moved about Ireland, has tried to sell the gift of the spirit. You, brother, hurt me when you declare your principles, and declare a dividend to yourself out of your patriotism openly and at the same time.
I would not reason with you, but that I know there is something truly great and noble in you, and there have been hours when the immortal in you secured your immortality in literature, when you ceased to see life with that hard cinematograph eye of yours, and saw with the eyes of the spirit, and power and tenderness and insight were mixed in magical tales. But you were far from the innermost when you wrote of my countrymen us you did.
I have lived all my life in Ireland, holding a different faith from that held by the majority. I know Ireland as few Irishmen know it, county by county, for I traveled all over Ireland for years, and, Ulster man as I am, and proud of the Ulster people, I resent the crowning of Ulster with all the virtues and the dismissal of other Irishmen as thieves and robbers. I resent the cruelty with which you, a stranger, speak of the lovable and kindly people I know.
You are not even accurate in your history when you speak of Ulster's traditions and the blood our forefathers spilt. Over a century ago Ulster was the strong and fast place of rebellion, and it was in Ulster that the Volunteers stood beside their cannon and wrung the gift of political freedom for the Irish Parliament. You are blundering in your blame. You speak of Irish greed in I know not what connection, unless you speak of the war waged over the land; and yet you ought to know that both parties in England have by Act after Act confessed the absolute justice and rightness of that agitation, Unionist no less than Liberal, and both boast of their share in answering the Irish appeal. They are both proud today of what they did. They made inquiry into wrong and redressed it. But you, it seems, can only feel sore and angry that intolerable conditions imposed by your laws were not borne in patience and silence. For what party do you speak? What political ideal inspires you? When an Irishman has a grievance you smite him. How differently would you have written of Runnymede and the valiant men who rebelled when oppressed. You would have made heroes out of them. Have you no soul left, after admiring the rebels in your own history, to sympathize with other rebels suffering deeper wrongs? Can you not see deeper into the motives for rebellion than the hireling reporter who is sent to make up a case for the paper of a party? The best men in Ulster, the best Unionists in Ireland will not be grateful to you for libeling their countrymen in your verse. For, let the truth be known, the mass of Irish Unionists are much more in love with Ireland than with England. They think Irish Nationalists are mistaken, and they fight with them and use hard words, and all the time they believe Irishmen of any party are better in the sight of God than Englishmen. They think Ireland is the best country in the world to live in, and they hate to hear Irish people spoken of as murderers and greedy scoundrels. Murderers! Why, there is more murder done in any four English shires in a year than in the whole of the four provinces of Ireland! Greedy! The nation never accepted a bribe, or took it as an equivalent or payment for an ideal, and what bribe would not have been offered to Ireland if it had been willing to forswear its traditions.
I am a person whose whole being goes into a blaze at the thought of oppression of faith, and yet I think my Catholic countrymen more tolerant than those who hold the faith I was born in. I am a heretic judged by their standards, a heretic who has written and made public his heresies, and I have never suffered in friendship or found my heresies an obstacle in life. I set my knowledge, the knowledge of a lifetime, against your ignorance, and I say you have used your genius to do Ireland and its people a wrong. You have intervened in a quarrel of which you do not know the merits like any brawling bully, who passes, and only takes sides to use his strength. If there was a high court of poetry, and those in power jealous of the noble name of poet, and that none should use it save those who were truly Knights of the Holy Ghost, they would hack the golden spurs from your heels and turn you out of the Court. You had the ear of the world and you poisoned it with prejudice and ignorance. You had the power of song, and you have always used it on behalf of the strong against the weak. You have smitten with all your might at creatures who are frail on earth but mighty in the heavens, at generosity, at truth, at justice, and heaven has withheld vision and power and beauty from you, for this your verse is but a shallow newspaper article made to rhyme. Truly ought the golden spurs to be hacked from your heels and you be thrust out of the Court.
IDEALS OF THE NEW RURAL SOCIETY
For a country where political agitations follow each other as rapidly as plagues in an Eastern city, it is curious how little constructive thought we can show on the ideals of a rural civilization. But economic peace ought surely to have its victories to show as well as political war. I would a thousand times rather dwell on what men and women working together may do than on what may result from majorities at Westminster. The beauty of great civilizations has been built up far more by the people working together than by any corporate action of the State. In these socialistic days we grow pessimistic about our own efforts and optimistic about the working of the legislature. I think we do right to expect great things from the State, but we ought to expect still greater things from ourselves. We ought to know full well that, if the State did twice as much as it does, we shall never rise out of mediocrity among the nations unless we have unlimited faith in the power of our personal efforts to raise and transform Ireland, and unless we translate the faith into works. The State can give a man an economic holding, but only the man himself can make it into Earthly Paradise, and it is a dull business, unworthy of a being made in the image of God, to grind away at work without some noble end to be served, some glowing ideal to be attained.
Ireland is a horribly melancholy and cynical country. Our literary men and poets, who ought to give us courage, have taken to writing about the Irish as people who "went forth to battle, but always fell," sentimentalizing over incompetence instead of invigorating us and liberating us and directing our energies. We have developed a new and clever school of Irish dramatists who say they are holding up the mirror to Irish peasant nature, but they reflect nothing but decadence. They delight in the broken lights of insanity, the ruffian who beats his wife, the weakling who is unfortunate in love and who goes and drinks himself to death, while the little decaying country towns are seized on with avidity and exhibited on the stage in every kind of decay and human futility and meanness. Well, it is good to be chastened in spirit, but it is a thousand times better to be invigorated in spirit. To be positive is always better than to be negative. These writers understand and sympathize with Ireland more through their lower nature than their higher nature. Judging by the things people write in Ireland, and by what they go to see performed on the stage, it is more pleasing to them to see enacted characters they know are meaner than themselves than to see characters which they know are nobler than themselves.
All this is helping on our national pessimism and self-mistrust. It helps to fix these features permanently in our national character, which were excusable enough as temporary moods after defeat. The younger generation should hear nothing about failures. It should not be hypnotized into self-contempt. Our energies in Ireland are sapped by a cynical self-mistrust which is spread everywhere through society. It is natural enough that the elder generation, who were promised so many millenniums, but who actually saw four million people deducted from the population, should be cynical. But it is not right they should give only to the younger generation the heritage of their disappointments without any heritage of hope. From early childhood parents and friends are hypnotizing the child into beliefs and unbeliefs, and too often they are exiling all nobility out of life, all confidence, all trust, all hope; they are insinuating a mean self-seeking, a self-mistrust, a vulgar spirit which laughs at every high ideal, until at last the hypnotized child is blinded to the presence of any beauty or nobility in life. No country can ever hope to rise beyond a vulgar mediocrity where there is not unbounded confidence in what its humanity can do. The self-confident American will make a great civilization yet, because he believes with all his heart and soul in the future of his country and in the powers of the American people. What Whitman called their "barbaric yawp" may yet turn into the lordliest speech and thought, but without self-confidence a race will go no whither. If Irish people do not believe they can equal or surpass the stature of any humanity which has been upon the globe, then they had better all emigrate and become servants to some superior race, and leave Ireland to new settlers who may come here with the same high hopes as the Pilgrim Fathers had when they went to America.
We must go on imagining better than the best we know. Even in their ruins now, Greece and Italy seem noble and beautiful with broken pillars and temples made in their day of glory. But before ever there was a white marble temple shining on a hill it shone with a more brilliant beauty in the mind of some artist who designed it. Do many people know how that marvelous Greek civilization spread along the shores of the Mediterranean? Little nations owning hardly more land than would make up an Irish barony sent out colony after colony. The seed of beautiful life they sowed grew and blossomed out into great cities and half-divine civilizations. Italy had a later blossoming of beauty in the Middle Ages, and travelers today go into little Italian towns and find them filled with masterpieces of painting and architecture and sculpture, witnesses of a time when nations no larger than an Irish county rolled their thoughts up to Heaven and miked their imagination with the angels. Can we be contented in Ireland with the mean streets of our country towns and the sordid heaps of our villages dominated in their economics by the vendors of alcohol, and inspired as to their ideals by the vendors of political animosities?
I would not mind people fighting in a passion to get rid of all that barred some lordly scheme of life, but quarrels over political bones from which there is little or nothing wholesome to be picked only disgust. People tell me that the countryside must always be stupid and backward, and I get angry, as if it were said that only townspeople had immortal souls, and it was only in the city that the flame of divinity breathed into the first men had any unobscured glow. The countryside in Ireland could blossom into as much beauty as the hillsides in mediaeval Italy if we could but get rid of our self-mistrust. We have all that any race ever had to inspire them, the heavens overhead, the earth underneath, and the breath of life in our nostrils. I would like to exile the man who would set limits to what we can do, who would take the crown and sceptre from the human will and say, marking out some petty enterprise as the limit—"Thus far can we go and no farther, and here shall our life be stayed." Therefore I hate to hear of stagnant societies who think because they have made butter well that they have crowned their parochial generation with a halo of glory, and can rest content with the fame of it all, listening to the whirr of the steam separators and pouching in peace of mind the extra penny a gallon for their milk. And I dislike the little groups who meet a couple of times a year and call themselves co-operators because they have got their fertilizers more cheaply, and have done nothing else. Why, the village gombeen man has done more than that! He has at least brought most of the necessaries of life there by his activities; and I say if we co-operators do not aim at doing more than the Irish Scribes and Pharisees we shall have little to be proud of. A poet, interpreting the words of Christ to His followers, who had scorned the followers of the old order, made Him say:
I say unto you, see that your souls live
A deeper life than theirs.
The co-operative movement is delivering over the shaping of the rural life of Ireland, and the building up of its rural civilization, into the hands of Irish farmers. The old order of things has left Ireland unlovely. But if we do not passionately strive to build it better, better for the men, for the women, for the children, of what worth are we? We continually come across the phrase "the dull Saxon" in our Irish papers, it crops up in the speeches of our public orators, but it was an English poet who said:
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
And it was the last great, poet England has produced, who had so much hope for humanity in his country that in his latest song he could mix earth with heaven, and say that to human eyes:
Hung betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
Shall we think more meanly of the future of Ireland than these "dull Saxons" think of the future of their island? Shall we be content with humble crumbs fallen from the table of life, and sit like beggars waiting only for what the commonwealth can do for us, leaving all high hopes and aims to our rulers, whether they be English or Irish? Every people get the kind of Government they deserve. A nation can exhibit no greater political wisdom in the mass than it generates in its units. It is the pregnant idealism of the multitude which gives power to the makers of great nations, otherwise the prophets of civilization are helpless as preachers in the desert and solitary places. So I have always preached self-help above all other kinds of help, knowing that if we strove passionately after this righteousness all other kinds of help would be at our service. So, too, I would brush aside the officious interferer in co-operative affairs, who would offer on behalf of the State to do for us what we should, and could, do far better ourselves. We can build up a rural civilization in Ireland, shaping it to our hearts' desires, warming it with life, but our rulers and officials can never be warmer than a stepfather, and have no "large, divine, and comfortable words" for us; they tinker at the body when it is the soul which requires to be healed and made whole. The soul of Ireland has to be kindled, and it can be kindled only by the thought of great deeds and not by the hope of petty parsimonies or petty gains.
Now, great deeds are never done vicariously. They are done directly and personally. No country has grown to greatness mainly by the acts of some great ruler, but by the aggregate activities of all its people. Therefore, every Irish community should make its own ideals and should work for them. As great work can be done in a parish as in the legislative assemblies with a nation at gaze. Do people say: "It is easier to work well with a nation at gaze?" I answer that true greatness becomes the North Pole of humanity, and when it appears all the needles of Being point to it. You of the young generation, who have not yet lost the generous ardour of youth, believe it is as possible to do great work and make noble sacrifices, and to roll the acceptable smoke of offering to Heaven by your work in an Irish parish, as in any city in the world. Like the Greek architects—who saw in their dreams hills crowned with white marble pillared palaces and images of beauty, until these rose up in actuality—so should you, not forgetting national ideals, still most of all set before yourselves the ideal of your own neighborhood. How can you speak of working for all Ireland, which you have not seen, if you do not labor and dream for the Ireland before your eyes, which you see as you look out of your own door in the morning, and on which you walk up and down through the day?
"What dream shall we dream or what labor shall we undertake?" you may ask, and it is right that those who exhort should be asked in what manner and how precisely they would have the listener act or think. I answer: the first thing to do is to create and realize the feeling for the community, and break up the evil and petty isolation of man from man. This can be done by every kind of co-operative effort where combined action is better than individual action. The parish cannot take care of the child as well as the parents, but you will find in most of the labors of life combined action is more fruitful than individual action. Some of you have found this out in many branches of agriculture, of which your dairying, agricultural, credit, poultry, and flax societies are witness. Some of you have combined to manufacture; some to buy in common, some to sell in common. Some of you have the common ownership of thousands of pounds' worth of expensive machinery. Some of you have carried the idea of co-operation for economic ends farther, and have used the power which combination gives you to erect village halls and to have libraries of books, the windows through which the life and wonder and power of humanity can be seen. Some of you have light-heartedly, in the growing sympathy of unity, revived the dances and songs and sports which are the right relaxation of labor. Some Irishwomen here and there have heard beyond the four walls in which so much of their lives are spent the music of a new day, and have started out to help and inspire the men and be good comrades to them; and calling themselves United Irish-women, they have joined, as men have joined, to help their sisters who are in economic servitude, or who suffer from the ignorance and indifference to their special needs in life which pervade the administration of local government. We cannot build up a rural civilization in Ireland without the aid of Irish women. It will help life little if we have methods of the twentieth century in the fields, and those of the fifth century in the home. A great writer said: "Woman is the last thing man will civilize." If a woman had written on that subject she would have said: "Woman is the last thing a man thinks about when he is building up his empires." It is true that the consciousness of woman has been always centered too close to the dark and obscure roots of the Tree of Life, while men have branched out more to the sun an wind, and today the starved soul of womanhood is crying out over the world for an intellectual life and for more chance of earning a living. If Ireland will not listen to this cry, its daughters will go on slipping silently away to other countries, as they have been doing—all the best of them, all the bravest, all those most mentally alive, all those who would have made the best wives and the best mothers—and they will leave at home the timid, the stupid and the dull to help in the deterioration of the race and to breed sons as sluggish as themselves. In the New World women have taken an important part in the work of the National Grange, the greatest agency in bettering the economic and social conditions of the agricultural population in the States. In Ireland the women must be welcomed into the work of building up a rural civilization, and be aided by men in the promotion of those industries with which women have been immemorially associated. We should not want to see women separated from the activities and ideals and inspirations of men. We should want to see them working together and in harmony. If the women carry on their work in connection with the associations by which men earn their living they will have a greater certainty of permanence. I have seen too many little industries and little associations of women workers spring up and perish in Ireland, which depended on the efforts of some one person who had not drunk of the elixir of immortal youth, and could not always continue the work she started; and I have come to the conclusion that the women's organizations must be connected with the men's organizations, must use their premises, village halls, and rooms for women's meetings. I do not believe women's work can be promoted so well in any other way. Men and women have been companions in the world from the dawn of time. I do not know where they are journeying to, but I believe they will never get to the Delectable City if they journey apart from each other, and do not share each other's burdens.
Working so, we create the conditions in which the spirit of the community grows strong. We create the true communal idea, which the Socialists miss in their dream of a vast amalgamation of whole nationalities in one great commercial undertaking. The true idea of the clan or commune or tribe is to have in it as many people as will give it strength and importance, and so few people that a personal tie may be established between them. Humanity has always grouped itself instinctively in this way. It did so in the ancient clans and rural communes, and it does so in the parishes and co-operative associations. If they were larger they would lose the sense of unity. If they were smaller they would be too feeble for effectual work, and could not take over the affairs of their district. A rural commune or co-operative community ought to have, to a large extent, the character of a nation. It should manufacture for its members all things which it profitably can manufacture for them, employing its own workmen, carpenters, bootmakers, makers and menders of farming equipment, saddlery, harness, etc. It should aim at feeding its members and their families cheaply and well, as far as possible, out of the meat and grain produced in the district. It should have a mill to grind their grain, a creamery to manufacture their butter; or where certain enterprises like a bacon factory are too great for it, it should unite with other co-operative communities to furnish out such an enterprise. It should sell for the members their produce, and buy for them their requirements, and hold for them labor-saving machinery. It should put aside a certain portion of its profits every year for the creation of halls, libraries, places for recreation and games, and it should pursue this plan steadily with the purpose of giving its members every social and educational advantage which the civilization of their time affords. It should have its councils or village parliaments, where improvements and new ventures could be discussed. Such a community would soon generate a passionate devotion to its own ideals and interests among the members, who would feel how their fortunes rose with the fortunes of the associations of which they were all members. It would kindle and quicken the intellect of every person in the community. It would create the atmosphere in which national genius would emerge and find opportunities for its activity. The clan ought to be the antechamber of the nation and the training ground for its statesmen. What opportunity leadership in the councils of such a rural community would give to the best minds! The man of social genius at present finds an unorganized community, and he does not know how to affect his fellow-citizens. A man might easily despair of affecting the destinies of a nation of forty million people, but yet start with eagerness to build up a kingdom of the size of Sligo, and shape it nearer to the heart's desire. The organization of the rural population of Ireland in co-operative associations will provide the instrument ready to the hand of the social reformer.
Some associations will be more dowered with ability than others, but one will learn from another, and a vast network of living, progressive organizations will cover rural Ireland, democratic in constitution and governed by the aristocracy of intellect and character.
Such associations would have great economic advantages in that they would be self-reliant and self-contained, and would be less subject to fluctuation in their prosperity brought about by national disasters and commercial crises than the present unorganized rural communities are. They would have all their business under local control; and, aiming at feeding, clothing, and manufacturing locally from local resources as far as possible, the slumps in foreign trade, the shortage in supplies, the dislocations of commerce would affect them but little. They would make the community wealthier. Every step towards this organization already taken in Ireland has brought with it increased prosperity, and the towns benefit by increased purchasing power on the part of these rural associations. New arts and industries would spring up under the aegis of the local associations. Here we should find the weaving of rugs, there the manufacture of toys, elsewhere the women would be engaged in embroidery or lace-making, and, perhaps, everywhere we might get a revival of the old local industry of weaving homespuns. We are dreaming of nothing impossible, nothing which has not been done somewhere already, nothing which we could not do here in Ireland. True, it cannot be done all at once, but if we get the idea clearly in our minds of the building up of a rural civilization in Ireland, we can labor at it with the grand persistence of medieval burghers in their little towns, where one generation laid down the foundations of a great cathedral, and saw only in hope and faith the gorgeous glooms over altar and sanctuary, and the blaze and flame of stained glass, where apostles, prophets, and angelic presences were pictured in fire: and the next generation raised high the walls, and only the third generation saw the realization of what their grandsires had dreamed. We in Ireland should not live only from day to day, for the day only, like the beasts in the field, but should think of where all this long cavalcade of the Gael is tending, and how and in what manner their tents will be pitched in the evening of their generation. A national purpose is the most unconquerable and victorious of all things on earth. It can raise up Babylons from the sands of the desert, and make imperial civilizations spring from out a score of huts, and after it has wrought its will it can leave monuments that seem as everlasting a portion of nature as the rocks. The Pyramids and the Sphinx in the sands of Egypt have seemed to humanity for centuries as much a portion of nature as Erigal, or Benbulben, or Slieve Gullion have seemed a portion of nature to our eyes in Ireland.
We must have some purpose or plan in building up an Irish civilization. No artist takes up his paints and brushes and begins to work on his canvas without a clear idea burning in his brain of what he has to do, else were his work all smudges. Does anyone think that out of all these little cabins and farmhouses dotting the green of Ireland there will come harmonious effort to a common end without organization and set purpose? The idea and plan of a great rural civilization must shine like a burning lamp in the imagination of the youth of Ireland, or we shall only be at cross-purposes and end in little fatuities. We are very fond in Ireland of talking of Ireland a nation. The word "nation" has a kind of satisfying sound, but I am afraid it is an empty word with no rich significance to most who use it. The word "laboratory" has as fine a sound, but only the practical scientist has a true conception of what may take place there, what roar of strange forces, what mingling of subtle elements, what mystery and magnificence in atomic life. The word without the idea is like the purse without the coin, the skull without the soul, or any other sham or empty deceit. Nations are not built up by the repetition of words, but by the organizing of intellectual forces. If any of my readers would like to know what kind of thought goes to the building up of a great nation, let him read the life of Alexander Hamilton by Oliver. To that extraordinary man the United States owe their constitution, almost their existence. To him, far more than to Washington, the idea, plan, shape of all that marvelous dominion owes its origin and character. He seemed to hold in his brain, while America was yet a group of half-barbaric settlements, the idea of what it might become. He laid down the plans, the constitution, the foreign policy, the trade policy, the relation of State to State, and it is only within the last few years almost, that America has realized that she had in Hamilton a supreme political and social intelligence, the true fountain-head of what she has since become.
We have not half a continent to deal with, but size matters nothing. The Russian Empire, which covers half Europe, and stretches over the Ural Mountains to the Pacific, would weigh light as a feather in the balance if we compare its services to humanity with those of the little State of Attica, which was no larger than Tipperary. Every State which has come to command the admiration of the world has had clearly conceived ideals which it realized before it went the way which all empires, even the greatest, must go; becoming finally a legend, a fable, or a symbol. We have to lay down the foundations of a new social order in Ireland, and, if the possibilities of it are realized, our thousand years of sorrow and darkness may be followed by as long a cycle of happy effort and ever-growing prosperity. We shall want all these plans whether we are ruled from Westminster or College Green. Without an imaginative conception of what kind of civilization we wish to create, the best government from either quarter will never avail to lift us beyond national mediocrity. I write for those who have joined the ranks of the co-operators without perhaps realizing all that the movement meant, or all that it tended to. Because we hold in our hearts and keep holy there the vision of a great future, I have fought passionately for the entire freedom of our movement from external control, lest the meddling of politicians or official persons without any inspiration should deflect, for some petty purpose or official gratification, the strength of that current which was flowing and gathering strength unto the realization of great ideals. Every country has its proportion of little souls which could find ample room on a threepenny bit, and be majestically housed in a thimble, who follow out some little minute practice in an ecstasy of self-satisfaction, seeking some little job which is the El Dorado of their desires as if there were naught else, as if humanity were not going from the Great Deep to the Great Deep of Deity, with wind and water, fire and earth, stars and sun, lordly companions for it on its path to a divine destiny. We have our share of these in Ireland in high and low places, but I do not write for them. This essay is for those who are working at laying deep the foundations of a new social order, to hearten them with some thought of what their labor may bring to Ireland. I welcome to this work the United Irishwomen. As one of their poetesses has said in a beautiful song, the services of women to Ireland in the past have been the services of mourners to the stricken. But for today and tomorrow we need hope and courage and gaiety, and I repeat for them the last passionate words of her verse: