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the part of a leader among the peoples of Europe. Save
for this one historical achievement, she has stood outside
the main currents of development in the West, and has mingled little in European affairs. During the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries, and later, she played an illustrious part in the propagation of Christianity in Europe, and won for herself the undying title of the Island of Saints and Scholars. From the distant Age until recent times, she has been overwhelmed by invaders whom her rich lands attracted, and has had to endure the suppression of much that was most precious in her peculiar individuality. Now, when another Age of moral darkness has fallen upon mankind, she is coming at last to her own and has begun to give expression to her most noble gifts: and now, by the kind providence of God, another opportunity is offered her of doing again for mankind the high service she did once in centuries long gone by.
That service was intellectual and spiritual. It made Irish history during the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries a conspicuous part of religious European history. It won for her that title of the Island of Saints and Scholars, which remains to prove that Ireland was not always in that sad spiritual plight in which she seems to be to-day.
The chief features of that age of light are well known. From many parts of Europe students thronged into Ireland to sit at the feet of Irish Professors and Divines, and Irish teachers travelled over sea and land to bring the gift of heavenly and of earthly knowledge to yet unjlluminated regions of Britain and the Continent.
The three patron saints of Ireland, St. Patrick, St. Bridget and Columcille, founded schools at Armagh, Kildare and in Iona. Hundreds followed their example. Shrines of devotion and of
@NCE, AND ONLY ONCE, and for One only has Ireland taken
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learning were established in every part of the island. St. Finnian, travelling in Britain and seeing the ignorance of the people, planned their conversion, and returning to Ireland founded at Clonard that famous school whose students during his lifetime numbered three thousand. Moville, Bangor, Lismore, Cork, Ross, Glendalough, Innisfallen, were seats of noted colleges. Districts now looked on in Ireland as remote were then educational centres whose circumference might reach as far as France or Italy. The lonely island of Aran Mor, in the days of its great teacher, St. Enda, was the resort of all the best minds in Ireland. The school at Clonfett was planted by St. Brendan the Voyager, whose reputed travels, under the title of Navzgatio Brendani, were known throughout mediaeval Europe; it was the seat of St. Fursa (whose account of his Visions excited so wide an interest at one time that it has been held they offered suggestions even to the author of the Divine Comedy), and of the illustrious St. Cummian, some of whose writings are still extant, and who wins the admiration of the modern scholar by his intellectual humility and by the vastness of his learning. Clonmacnoise, now a desolate ruin in a lonely countryside, was founded by St. Kieran, and his cell soon became the centre of a veritable city of students. Iniscaltra became so famous for its school and monastery that an old record recounts how on one day there entered the mouth of the Shannon seven ships, full of students from foreign parts, bound for that little island on Lough Derg.
Aspirants, eager to gain and to bring back to their own darker homes the light of Western wisdom, came from all and sundry regions of Europe. Dagobert, a king of France, Aldfrid, king of Northumbria, St. Willibrord, a Saxon noble, afterwards Archbishop of Utrecht, Agilbert, 3 Frank, and afterwards Bishop of Paris, were among those educated at Irish schools. The Venerable Bede mentions that crowds of Anglo—Saxons went over to study in Ireland, where he reports they were kindly received and, without payment, were provided with books and with instruction. Aldhelm, abbot of Mahnesbury, records that, while Canterbury School was not over-full, the English swarmed like bees to the schools in Ireland. Visitors came too, it is said, from Gaul,
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Germany, Italy, and even from Egypt.
Nor was this intellectual traffic one—sided. Irish saints and scholars went out from their homeland diffusing their knowledge and leaving behind them in Europe traces which remain to this day. St. Columbanus and St. Gall, of the school at Bangor on Belfast Lough evangelised parts of Burgundy, Lombardy, and Switzerland. Dungal, from the same school, was a friend of Charlemagne and was the founder of the University of Padua. St. Aidan, of Galway, at the invitation of Oswald, King of Northumberland, went over to help in the conversion of the king’s subjects to Christianity, and founded the monastery of Lindisfarne. He was the first in the line of Bishops to take their title from Durham. His successor was Saint Finan of Tipperary, whose efforts (with those of two other Irishmen, Cedd and Diuma) carried the Gospel far down into Central England. Fergil, or Virgilius, became Archbishop of Salisbury. St. F ursa worked for six years as missionary in East Anglia, and then went over to France, where he earned a wide reputation for virtue and learning. St. Finbar of Connacht aided in the conversion of Mercia, and developed the monastery of Glastonbury. It is said that to—day 155 Irish saints are still venerated in Germany, 46 in France, 32 in Belgium, I 3 in Italy, 8 in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
Those who thus found in Ireland a fountain of knowledge at which they could slake their thirst were not unappreciative beneficiaries; sometimes an old record will give some quaint witness to the gratitude of eminent foreigners to the Irish schools which had taught them so well.
Thus there is still extant a letter from Alcuin, the most learned man at the court of King Charles of France, addressed in affectionate terms to “his blessed master and pious father” Colcu, or Colgan, chief Professor at Clonmacnoise. Not only did Alcuin send a letter, but he sent also 100 Shekels of silver (50 from himself and 50 from the king) to the brotherhood of Clonmacnoise as a gift, with a quantity of olive oil for the Irish Bishops.
For a time fate rang down the curtain upon this scene of intellectual activity and happiness. The Danes arrived, terrorising and destroying. Invasion followed invasion. But when in A.D. 1014
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Brian Boru utterly defeated the Danes at the battle of Clontarf and set the land free, missionary work was again resumed. This was the period when Irish influence in Germany was at its height.
A monk from Donegal founded a monastery of St. James at Regensburg in 1076. Soon a daughter house was opened at the same place, dedicated to St. Jacob. From this centre Irish influence spread in all directions. Twelve Irish monasteries were founded in Germany and in Austria, at Wurzburg, Numburg, Constanz, Vienna, Eichstadt, and other places. Irishmen coming directly from their native land travelled far and wide through Europe carrying the Gospel, and sometimes founding monasteries. Irishmen were chaplains of Conrad III and of Frederic Barbarossa. Under the latter monarch a monastery was foundedin what is now Bulgaria, and an Irishman appointed abbot. John, Bishop of Mecklenburg, preached to the Vandals between the Elbe and the Vistula. Pope Adrian IV studied under an Irish professor in the University of Paris. The fame of Irish saintliness and learning was established everywhere. Students still came, like their ancestors, to visit this island so celebrated for its intellectual and spiritual wealth.
But this revival burnt itself out, and no such flame has ever since been lit again. With the Normans there was introduced a condition of permanent warfare, which soon disintegrated Irish life. Suitable recruits were no longer sent out to the Continent, and the great Irish monasteries in Germany and elsewhere were either secularised, like that at Numburg, or turned over to local authorities, like those at Vienna or Wurzburg.
Such, in brief, were the Christian schools, such the signal achievement which won for Ireland that title which remains unforgotten as a call to aspiration, showing that once she has been, and yet may be again, an island of saints and scholars.
Long years of invasion and turmoil followed, but the settlers who came in this period to Ireland from overseas did not obliterate this temperamental mysticism of the native race. Indeed, in the era of Plantation it was noted that they soon took on the general characteristics of the people they had come to dwell among and became “more Irish than the Irish themselves.”
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Early in the eighteenth century, as if to prove that the flame of mystical genius, if overlaid, still burned in Ireland as strong as ever, there arose George Berkeley, Bishop of Coyne, whose spirit of self-sacrifice and missionary enthusiasm made him own brother of the ancient Irish saints. He foresaw the future greatness of America and in his verses On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America wrote the famous lines:
“Westward the course of empire takes its way. The first four acts already past A fifth shall close the drama with the dayTime’s noblest offspring in his last.”
He conceived the project of founding a college in the Bermudas by a charter from the crown for the Christian civilisation of America, and managed to get a vote of £20,000 from the English House of Commons for the purpose. In 1728, he sailed west and for three years—by way of preparation for Bermuda—lived and laboured in Rhode Island. As the promised grant was withdrawn he was obliged to return to Ireland, but not before he had planted in America the seeds of his idealistic philosophy. Westward therefore as well as eastward the missionary light of Irish Christianity has shone! Berkeley’s place in history, however, is due to his metaphysical insight. His famous and often misunderstood doctrine of the non—existence of matter means in reality that matter apart from its apprehension by mind——the mind of man or the mind of God—has no existence at all. In other words, he held, (it has been said) that the material universe can have no existence apart from its inclusion in a great spiritual order, which one may call the life of God. Since his day, illustrious critics have variously challenged, ridiculed, pondered over, commended, admitted the validity or exposed the fallacy of his arguments; but they have not ignored his philosophy. “It is a fact of history,” writes one authority, “that Berkeley has employed the modern philosophical world in a struggle, virtually about his new conception of the Universe, which has lasted for nearly two hundred years.” Primate Darcy, in a sermon on Berkeley in which he quoted from a number of contemporary philosophers, concluded “My purpose
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in referring to these works of to-day, the writings of men who occupy a foremost position in the world of thought in our time, is to show that the influence of Berkeley in philosophic thought at the present time is more potent and more creative than at any time in the past. Philosophy cannot get away from him.”
Berkeley died in 1753, a true successor of the saints and scholars of old and perhaps the only Irishman Who has earned an assured place in the main current of world thought.
Now once again—arnong the manifold activities of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries—Ireland has given conspicuous expression to this same spiritual gift in a new form. “A man is hidden behind his tongue,” says an Arabian proverb. A nation is hidden behind its literature. The writings of a people form a mirror in which the popular mind and heart are reflected. A poet is not a creator only, but a revealer; and he reveals, not only his own soul, but the soul of his people and of his age. The recent revival of letters in Ireland has been written about in many lands as an Irish Renaissance. And in the work of this Renaissance no human quality has found such general or such felicitous and ardent expression as that of spirituality.
In all ages nations have been proud of their poets. When they wish to display their greatness, it is to their poets they point—the English to Shakespeare, the Germans to Goethe, the Italians to Dante, just as long ago the Romans pointed to Vergil and the Greeks to Homer. A country’s poets give the highest expression of the national character. Set half-a-dozen poets of the Irish Revival beside a similar group of to-day’s poets from England, or the Colonies, or from America, and one of the traits which is seen at once to mark the Irish writers is the vividness and ardour of their religious feeling. This feeling is not, of course, absent from the contemporary poets of other lands: far from it. But it is not elsewhere so pervasive, so emphatic, as in Irish verse, nor has it the same quality of instinctive yearning and aspiration. No one can read the verse of Lionel Johnson, of Katharine Tynan-Hinkson, of Pearse, of Dora Sigerson, of Joseph Campbell in his earlier years, or of many another, without noting the devotional and often mystical quality of the author’s temperament. Indeed, the wealth
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of idealistic material is so great that it is some matter of surprise that no one has yet published an anthology of Irish verse of this special type. The two finest and most famous of Irish poets are, however, those in whose works this spirituality shines out with the greatest brilliance and power. It is to both Yeats and A.E. the one dominant thought, the one central theme. The hero of their verse is not man the mortal, but man the immortal, and their sadness ‘ is that of a spirit ill-content to dwell in a house of clay amid a world of illusions. Yeats has spoken of “the disembodied ecstasy” of A.E.’s verse, and no two words can better describe its special quality. “Be it thine,” writes A.E. of his own poetry, “be it thine to win Rare vistas of white light, Half-parted lips through which
~ the infinite murmurs its ancient story . . . until thy song’s elation Echoes the multitudinous meditation.” His verse is, in an extraordinary degree, aetherial, and its ideals of human life noble and august. He loves his country, but has no patience with those who are slaves of the embittering traditions of history. Of himself and those who think like him he says:
“We are less children of this clime Than of some nation yet unborn, Or empire in the womb of time. We hold the Ireland in the heart More than the land our eyes have seen, And love the goal for which we start More than the tale of what has been. We would no Irish sign efface, But yet our lips would gladlier hail The first—bom of the coming Race Than the last splendour of the Gael. No blazoned banner we unfold, One charge alone we give to youth, Against the sceptred myth to hold The golden heresy of truth.”
If only the voters of Ireland could reach up to this thought, how quickly might the ship of State sail out from among the rocks
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THE GENIUS OF IRELAND III
that now beset us, and seem likely to beset out children!
A.E. looks out upon a world full of unhappiness, and he sees human sorrow as springing always from men’s forgetfulness of their divine origin and of that high estate which once was theirs before they descended into this world of matter. “We dwindle down beneath the skies, and from ourselves we pass away.” They who forget they are from everlasting spiritual beings invoke misery. The remembrance of this truth brings an inward joy which lies “far beyond earth’s misery” and is the one road to real dominion and seIf-completion. Lesser goals of effort than this delude and disappoint. The whole universe, in its vastness and in its tiniest detail, is spirit-woven, and the Mighty Artist who reared “the changing halls of day and night” shows forth His delight likewise in the perfection of the wild flower of the field.
The volume of his Collected Poems, first published in 1913, and many times reprinted, includes more than two hundred and thirty pieces, and runs to 369 pages. The treatment of a theme so vast and rich in so many brief lyrics leaves, perhaps, on the reader a sense of fragmentariness. More than twenty years ago a writer in an American paper, the Sewanee Review, spoke of A.E. as an “Irish Emerson.” It is a suggestive comparison; but Emerson was a dreamer and a thinker, while A.E., in his verse, appears rather as a dreamer and a singer. The view of life and of the universe which A.E. presents is taken from the Upanishads. The mythology which he employs is Celtic. Those readers, therefore, who are trained in the classical tradition of the West may find themselves here in a strange world. But the poet’s facility, the splendour of his language, the delicacy of his colour—sense, the occasional magic of his descriptive phrases, attract and charm; and no reader can be unmoved by the magnanimity and loftiness of the poet’s thought. Technically the work does not always show infallible clarity and finish. The poet seems a genius first, an artist in the second place. Yeats, on the other hand, is a genius in the second place, an artist first.
If Mr. Yeats has not in the same degree as A.E. an unquenched and unquenchable assurance of the truth and reality of his vision, nevertheless his work likewise depends for its individuality on a
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rare and ardent idealism. The dominant mood of his poetry, taken as a whole, is one of dream and reverie, of loneliness and longing. A belief in something better than the actual and a desire to reach and to enjoy it, form the main source of his inspiration. And though he has written in many moods, and ranged far in his choice of themes, yet it is when he makes adoration his motive that his touch is most sure, his eloquence most compelling. His idealism has many sides, and the ideal types which his heart or fancy present to him are now of one kind, now of another. Sometimes it is an image of ideal love on which he broods, sometimes an image of ideal joy, sometimes of ideal beauty. But the one of which he dreams more constantly than any other, the ideal of which he writes with a reiteration that never seems to slacken or grow weary is a perfection of beauty—a beauty still sensuous yet transcendently more fair than any that charms the senses of mankind on earth.
With the world of ethics his idealism has little concern. Save in one brilliant poem, he pays scant attention to perfection of character or to standards of conduct. He has shown in the Countess Cathleen what he can do in this field when he so wills. He has here taken an old legend which tells how once upon a time an Irish Princess, in order to save her people, gave up for them the most precious thing she possessed, her own soul. When she died, the Almighty pardoned her and received her into heaven because, if her deed was evil, her motive was divine. This story Mr. Yeats weaves into a dramatic poem, in which he does not bring out the conflict of the warring forces within the heroine’s breast before she makes her awful decision, but emphasises the moral beauty of her act and the religious significance of her ultimate forgiveness. The Lady Cathleen seems not so much a mere being of the earth as the spirit of a selfless love incarnate in a woman’s form. The whole poem is of so high and rate a loveliness that none of Mr. Yeats’s later work, brilliant though it be, seems quite to fulfil the promise given here.
Joy is set by the poet among his ideals, and yet it plays but a small part in his poetry. He writes with more affection of sorrow; and the lady of his dreams is nearly always sorrowful, and never
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joyous. He speaks of joy as one of the marks of the land of his heart’s desire, and in the Wanderings of Oz'sin he tells in a score of graceful lines the part joy plays in the universe. But even here, when he sings joy’s praise, he carries little conviction, because he sings always in a minor key. Nor does Yeats write of the love of man and woman with the enthusiasm that marks most poets, and which inspires them to their best verse. Only in one poem does he tell what is essentially a love story, or seek to express that inspiration which impels the soul to seek for happiness through a love union with its perfect mate. But here, in Shadowy Waters (which, though in form dramatic, is in its nature lyric and personal) the theme has done for Mr. Yeats what it has’done for almost every poet who has treated it—it has ennobled his style and enabled him to write some of his most exquisite and haunting poetry. Apart from this poem, Mr. Yeats’s attitude toward love is one of deprecation. As implied in many places and expressed in his Rose Of Battle, his view is that love brings contentment and repose which are inimical to the divine hunger of the poet. It is to the sad, the lonely, the insatiable, that Nature reveals her mysteries. The poet must abiure love and drive it from him to “hide its face amid a crowd of stars.”
Doubtless the poet’s failure to write at length of joy and love and moral perfection is not so much due to his loving these less, but to his loving another ideal even more. The ideal which he prizes most highly is that of beauty. He chants the praise of beauty in his lyrics, his narratives, his plays. He chanted it when he was a boy, and he chants it now he is a man. So active is his imagination when enkindled by the desire for beauty, that the poet seems able to look at his ideal now from this angle, now from that, to see it in a hundred different forms, and to sing it in a hundred different ways. And if he writes of this theme late and early, he writes of it also with an emotion which, though it may seldom be impassioned or rapturous, is always sincere and earnest and profound.
The great function of poetry is to him the expression of beauty. He sees the poets as “labouring all their days to build a perfect beauty in rhyme.” Nor could they well choose a worthier theme,
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since it is the love of beauty that has impelled men to the heights of epic achievement (as in old Hellas and ancient Ireland). Moreover, beauty was, indeed, the cause of creation, since God made the world that He might provide the Angel of Beauty with a place where she might wander at will. In one poem Mr. Yeats claims that an aesthetic difference is an ethical one, and that ugliness is unrighteous. “The wrong of unshapely things,” he cries, “is a wrong too great to be told.” So monotheistic is he in his worship that when he turns to indite a poem in honour of Erin he fears he may be guilty of unfaithfulness, and, therefore, saves himself by propounding the belief that beauty is the tutelary Goddess of Erin, and still loves that land as her peculiar haven and home on earth. In what might seem intended as love poems MI. Yeats writes not so much of love as of beauty. He praises his beloved beca'use she reminds him of the loveliness that has long faded from the world; he tells her that when she sighs, he hears White Beauty sighing too, and that she seems to him an incamation of that Angel of Beauty to whom his heart is given. He does not seem self—forgetful, like the true lover, but conscious of himself and of his dreams; so that, for instance, when he tells his beloved that he spreads before her feet his dreams as cloths for her to walk upon, he is careful to ask that she tread lightly.
This sensuous beauty, which Yeats so devoutly adores, he often personifies as a woman or goddess of whom he is the humble devotee and priest. But at other times he thinks rather of some ideal age or place where there is nothing, neither form nor colour, nor odour, nor sound, that is not beautiful. Frequently he speaks of bygone ages as possessed of a loveliness which, like Astraea, has long since fled from earth. In one or two brief lyrics some favourite spot in Ireland like the Lake Isle of Innisfree is painted as the ideal place of his dreams. But in his larger works the dwelling—place and home of beauty is some imaginary land beyond the known borders of the world—in The Wanderings of Oisz'n it is the Isle of the Blessed; in The Land of Heart’s Desire it is the realms of Faery; in Where There is Nothing it is the heaven of the mystic’s faith.
It has been Mr. Yeats’s custom to place this halcyon home of
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Beauty in strong and striking contrast to the actual life of man on earth. The workaday world he shows as a hard and sordid place, whose darkness he uses as a foil to set ofi? the glory of the land of his dreams. This opposition is, to him, not a mere artistic device, but a profound fact of Nature, and it provides him With the subject of some of his best poetry. Indeed, the poems which have appealed to his readers as most sincere, and which are the most general favourites, are precisely those in which this opposition is the crux and central theme.
In these points Mr. Yeats’s method—if without injustice to his art one may point for a moment to the foundations and the ground—plan on which he has built—is to place the hero (or heroine) in the midst, with Earth on one side and Elysium on the other, and then have him decide which of the two he will choose. The making of the choice, the struggle to escape from earth, and the final attainment of Elysium provide the plot. The hero’s weariness of earth, his longing for Paradise, and his delight on reaching his haven, supply the emotion of the piece. Names, dates, places may vary, but this plan varies not. Oisin, Maire Bruin, Forgael, Paul Rutledge—mythic warrior, peasant girl, pirate, and nineteenth—century country gentleman—all stand in similar dilemmas, all make a similar election, and all reach similar goals. There is, however, one play which, though it belongs to this class, yet stands by itself as apart from its fellows. This is Cathleen Ny Hauli/zan. For in this piece the hero does not seek the personal enjoyment of any delectable Paradise, but refuses the good things of earth that he may the better do his duty and fight in his country’s cause.
Yet if in this large group of poems Mr. Yeats changes neither
the theme nor the essentials of his plot, he does considerably
change his point of view and his treatment of the story. When he
was young he looked at the matter from one angle, and wrote
The Wanderings Of Oz'sin; when he was a little less young, his
point of view was changed, and he wrote The Land of Heart’s
Desire; when he reached middle age he saw it all in yet another
way, and wrote Where There is Nothing. In his youth his
fancy broke its leash, and he revelled in the delights of his dream
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Elysium. His hero of this period, Oisin, escapes forthright from earth and rides with a fairy bride to the Isle of the Blessed, and the poet fills almost the whole of his poem with emaptured descriptions of that wonderful world. But with growing experience Mr. Yeats’s- perspective changed, and the thought of earth became obtrusive. Maire Bruin, the main figure in The Land of Heart’s Desire, did not find so quick or easy an escape to the place of her dreams as did Oisin. It is only When Earth has grown at last unbearable that she calls for the fairies, whom she has loved so long, to take her out of “this dull world.” Even then her decision has to be fought out in a hard and bitter struggle, for earth has its ties, and she cannot win her fairy land till she has broken the bonds of faith and home. Paul Rutledge has a yet more arduous experience than Maire. Less fortunate than she, he does not know where that which he desires is to be found. No fairychild, no princess from the Happy Isles, comes to his need. He must go out and search for his ideal himself. He does so in a fashion which is, at least, uncompromising, and becomes by turn tinker, monk, and self—appointed friar. But his goal remains unknown till, at the very last, as he drops dying beneath the stones of the mob, he cries “I go to the sacred heart of flame,” and finds his soul’s desire through martyrdom. So hardly did Paul Rutledge attain what Oisin was given as a gift; and so little is the reader told of that Paradise which in the earlier poem 3 thousand glowing lines were hardly sufficient to describe.
Mr. Yeats himself is acutely conscious of this change. He sees no more the heavens opened, nor does he tell burning tales of dream-guided adventurers forsaking all to seek the mystic home of Beauty. He cannot write now in that high, happy strain. His songs no more thrill with faith and hope. He doubts. “Is this my dream, or the truth P” he asks. Once he wrote a poem—TZe - Rose of the World—to protest against the false dream that “Beauty passes like a dream.” Now he records the wisdom of the old men: “I heard the old, old men say, ‘All that’s beautiful drifts away like the waters.’ ” He feels the loss and laments the change. “I am worn out with dreams,” he cries; and again, “Now my
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heart is sore. All’s changed”—“My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone”—and “The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished; I have nothing but the embittered sun; Banished heroic mother moon and vanished, And now that I have come to fifty years I must endure the timid sun.”
He tries to think, however, that if the fading of his early vision be sad, yet it has its gains. Perhaps he was wrong then and is right now.
“Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; Now I may wither into the truth.”
“The truth!” What, then is this truth which has come when joy is gone? One reads The Green Helmet, and comes on the following lines, and wonders whether they really can be written by the same pen as that which charmed all hearts not long ago With a story of that Land of Heart’s Desire where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood”:
“How shall I know That in the blinding light beyond the grave We’ll find so good a thing as we have lost? The hourly kindness, the day’s common speech, The habitual content of each with each, When neither soul nor body has been crossed.”
Heaven, it seems, is closed. Only the earth remains. But when the poet took this for the burden of his song, his power and his rapture left him. He is still the craftsman, but he cannot move men’s spirits. Like his heroic Oisin, so soon as he slips from his faery—steed and touches the common earth, his strength turns to water and the years master him. “0, who could have foretold that the heart grows old!” he cries. He has no tidings now. What is an Irish poet who has lost his idealism ? He is as a saint without the knowledge of heaven, as a scholar without the knowledge of the earth.
But Mr. Yeats has not spoken his last word. Progress moves not in a straight line, but in a spiral. Wordsworth’s Child, who at
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first saw all things apparelled in celestial light, and later, as he grew to man’s estate, lost the happiness of this intuitive vision, found in later years the same high Wisdom restored and deepened through thought and contemplation. So may it be With this poet Whom God has gifted and man has justly honoured. Before he lays down his pen he will, of a surety, see once again the gates of pearl cast wide, and, in fuller, stronger tones than ever before, will sing in his old age the glories of the Land of the Ever—Young.
The poems of Mr. Yeats, with those of A.E., have made the name of Ireland honourably known through the English—speaking world, particularly among the educated and most influential classes. They have, in a dark and doubting age, upheld with power and persuasiveness, the cause of idealism and of spirituality. They have had the effect, throughout the Empire and in America, of connecting this cause with the revival of letters in Ireland. It has been felt that the special qualities of these poems are not merely personal, but are typical of the genius of the Irish people.
Here lies the national significance of these two great poets’ work. Their achievement is not the singular and unaccountable outburst of an extraordinary talent; it is not unrelated to its environment, a flaming bush in a wilderness. On the contrary, Mr. Yeats and A.E. are children of their country. Their greatest and most splendid quality is one Which they inherit from Ireland. Their power of vision is an Irish gift. It marked the Irish long ago, and it marks them now. What is singular in their attainment is not that they possess the seer’s temperament, but that to it they add a rare faculty of poetical expression. It is not their privilege to sing of themes unknown or strange to the Irish people, but rather to give utterance to aspirations Which many among the Irish felt, yet none but themselves can put in music or in words. Indeed, what these two men have achieved might well be impossible had they not had the spirit of the people with them. For they have done something which, in the realm of letters, is - comparable with the work of an ancient Irish missionary in the realm of religion. In an age when the Philistines have captured the Ark of Beauty, When most poets sing of earthliness and shadows and despair, here are two Irishmen singing, in strains of
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rapture and desire, tidings of joy and light and loveliness. “Men yet shall hear The Archangels rolling Satan’s empty skull Over the mountain tops” is continually the burden of their song. And where else in the wide world to-day will this be found as the characteristic and dominant note of a nation’s contemporary verse?
Perhaps the victory of the Archangels over Satan which Yeats foretold was nearer than he knew. Perhaps had he learned where to turn his ear, he might have found yet fairer songs to sing in his later years than he had found in his brilliant youth.
Our poets saw in vision the eternal light of heaven shining afar and caught a glimmer of its radiance down on this earth amidst the uncomprehending gloom of human life. They expressed their vision in forms and images gathered from the love of the ancient East or from the myths and faery legends of their own land. They did not sing of the Marriage of Heaven and Earth, of the Sun God scattering for ever the Spirit of Darkness, nor—as Shelley did—attempt in a hundred impassioned lyrics to raise the chant of all createq things hymning in adoration the glory of a regenerated Universe.
Their imaginations ranged far and wide for thoughts and images through Celtic or mediaeval or oriental myths and legendary lore; they did not seek their inspiration from the one central source from which Columba and his fellow saints and scholars derived their knowledge and their strength.
Now has come, now has spread far and wide through the globe a fuller, richer, happier Message; the Message promised by Christ long ago and now at length after well-nigh two millenniums brought by him and given in tones that are heard only by spiritual ears (as He used to say when He taught “He that hath ears to hear let him hear”). A poet—prophet of the East, a hero—saint of the ancient land of Iran, Bahá’u’lláh, has brought, as God’s Messenger, Tidings of a New Heaven and a New Earth. Tidings that Light’s Arrows have pierced the heart of Darkness, that the battle which the Patron Saints of Ireland fought of Truth against Error, Knowledge against, Ignorance, Love against Hate, has
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been won for us, and that Victory will descend when men stretch out their eager hands to gather it. Blinded with self—desire, men and nations drain the bitter dregs of disillusion and cannot see what spectral hand holds to their lips the cup of death—cannot see the underlying cause of the world’s want and woe is spiritual poverty.
What nation will be the first to behold the vision of truth, the first to declare it? Might not their great tradition call the Irish to this task?
To consider in how marked a degree this precious gift of spirituality has been theirs in the past: to look back at their history and see how the religious genius of the people has over centuries made Ireland a lamp of Faith in a darkened world, directing its light both East and West, to realise that still there burns deep in the heart of the people that ancient fire: to heat to-day in our midst the voice of poets beginning to raise again the strain so long unheard, and chant in the ears of a forgetful world the praise of eternal beauty and eternal truth: thus to watch, to listen, and to reflect is to be filled with hope that Ireland may not be slow to catch the vision of the New Day, of the coming of the Kingdom of God, and that she may do for mankind now such service as she did for the world long ago in the hour of its darkness and its need.
