Synge and the Ireland of his Time: III
By William Butler Yeats
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III
Even if what one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continual
apology, whatever the cause, makes the mind barren because it kills
intellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the
mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that
must come before all true thought and emotion. A zealous Irishman,
especially if he lives much out of Ireland, spends his time in a
never-ending argument about Oliver Cromwell, the Danes, the penal laws,
the rebellion of 1798, the famine, the Irish peasant, and ends by
substituting a traditional casuistry for a country; and if he be a
Catholic, yet another casuistry that has professors, schoolmasters,
letter-writing priests, and the authors of manuals to make the meshes
fine, comes between him and English literature, substituting arguments
and hesitations for the excitement at the first reading of the great
poets which should be a sort of violent imaginative puberty. His
hesitations and arguments may have been right, the Catholic philosophy
may be more profound than Milton's morality, or Shelley's vehement vision; but none the less do we lose life by losing that recklessness Castiglione thought necessary even in good manners, and offend our Lady
Truth, who would never, had she desired an anxious courtship, have digged
a well to be her parlour.
I admired though we were always quarrelling on some matter, J.F. Taylor,
the orator, who died just before the first controversy over these plays.
It often seemed to me that when he spoke Ireland herself had spoken, one
got that sense of surprise that comes when a man has said what is
unforeseen because it is far from the common thought, and yet obvious
because when it has been spoken, the gate of the mind seems suddenly to
roll back and reveal forgotten sights and let loose lost passions. I have
never heard him speak except in some Irish literary or political society,
but there at any rate, as in conversation, I found a man whose life was a
ceaseless reverie over the religious and political history of Ireland. He
saw himself pleading for his country before an invisible jury, perhaps of
the great dead, against traitors at home and enemies abroad, and a sort
of frenzy in his voice and the moral elevation of his thoughts gave him
for the moment style and music. One asked oneself again and again, 'Why
is not this man an artist, a man of genius, a creator of some kind?' The other day under the influence of memory, I read through his one book, a
life of Owen Roe O'Neill, and found there no sentence detachable from its
context because of wisdom or beauty. Everything was argued from a
premise; and wisdom, and style, whether in life or letters come from the
presence of what is self-evident, from that which requires but statement,
from what Blake called 'naked beauty displayed.' The sense of what was unforeseen and obvious, the rolling backward of the gates had gone with
the living voice, with the nobility of will that made one understand what
he saw and felt in what was now but argument and logic. I found myself in the presence of a mind like some noisy and powerful machine, of thought that was no part of wisdom but the apologetic of a moment, a woven thing, no intricacy of leaf and twig, of words with no more of salt and of savour than those of a Jesuit professor of literature, or of any other
who does not know that there is no lasting writing which does not define
the quality, or carry the substance of some pleasure. How can one, if
one's mind be full of abstractions and images created not for their own
sake but for the sake of party, even if there were still the need, find
words that delight the ear, make pictures to the mind's eye, discover
thoughts that tighten the muscles, or quiver and tingle in the flesh, and
stand like St. Michael with the trumpet that calls the body to
resurrection?
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