Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: George Townshend, Genius of Ireland and Other Essays, Dublin and Cork, Ireland: Talbot Press Limited, 1930, bahai-library.com.
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The Genius of Ireland
and Other Essays
By
George Townshend
M.A. (Oxon)

The Talbot Press Limited
Dublin & Cork
First published 1930

Printed in Ireland
At The Talbot Press
Dublin
Preface
Two of the following essays, and part of another, appeared
anonymously in the pages of the Church of Ireland Gazette a
couple of years ago and are republished here by arrangement
with the Editor at that time. The rest of the material is new.
George Townshend.
Ahascragh,
Co. Galway.

Contents
Irish humour.. ................................................................................ .. 9
The Genius of Ireland.. ................................................................... .. 24
A kinship in genius: The English poet-prophets.. ........................... .. 52
The language of the Commonwealth.. ............................................. .. 76
The beauty of Ireland.. ................................................................... .. 93

The Genius of Ireland

Irish humour
Men say that Irish humour is vanishing, that the leaven of
jocularity and wit which once so graciously gave lightness to
our social life is out of fashion and out of use, and that clever
quips and lightning repartee are now seldom heard on the
platform or at the bar. The English have lamented that their
Parliament has grown dull since the Irish left, but no Irishman
has claimed that what Westminster lost was gained by the
Dail.1 We are now—so men assert—no better masters of the
ludicrous than are our neighbours, and there are no more jokes
and jests to be heard in Ireland than there are in any other
land.
If this be true, what a strange turn has revolution taken, and
in what an unexpected hour has our humour gone from us!
Here have we got, for the first time in history, Ireland for
the Irish; here are we “ourselves alone” at last; here are we a
free nation, living in a Free State—and the first thing we do is
to lose the most renowned and distinguishing of all our
national

1 Dail Eireann (“Assembly of Ireland”) is the lower house and
principal chamber of the Oireachtas, which also includes the
president of Ireland and a senate called Seanad Eireann.
10 The Genius of Ireland
excellent test of its civilisation. If, therefore, this ancient,
winning, and most honourable gift is now in truth leaving our
shores, our moralists and Ministers of State should take notice,
and by some further measures of protection and stimulation,
prevent its total disappearance.
Sydney Smith1 once said that any man could make himself a
humourist by working at it for four hours a day. How valuable
is the hint to us in our emergency! Our nationality might gain
more from a revival of Irish humour than from a revival of the
Irish language. How much more pleasant and popular, and
how much less costly it would be to give in our State schools
lessons in humour instead of lessons in Irish. After all, when
our boys and girls shall have learned at last to use the Irish
tongue, their only gain will be that they can talk to one another
in a language that no other national can understand. But if
they regain their fore-fathers’ genial humour they will be able
to speak a language that will unite them to all other human
beings, and will make them welcome everywhere.
Humour has long been taken, in foreign lands, to be the
especial distinction of the Irishman. Famous observers like
Thackeray and Meredith2 have indeed given of the Irish quite a
different account, But (whether we always like it or not) it is
spontaneous humour that is known abroad as the outstanding
trait of the Irish character.
No one who knew and loved the pre-war Ireland will be
altogether surprised that this reputation of

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) was an English writer and Anglican
clergyman.
2 William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) was an English novelist
and illustrator. George Meredith (1828–1909), was an English
novelist and critic.
Irish humour 11
possessions. Our statesmen are busy bolting our doors and
putting up our shutters, trying to establish, in a little hermit
island, a nationality so clean-cut and self-centred that all will
cry out in admiration, “Here is the real Ireland at last!” and
meantime we are letting slip from our midst that one precious
thing which has always been looked on as the delightful hallmark of the genuine Irishman.
And how precious a thing it, was! For surely if humour be
not an actual virtue, it is one of the chief among the graces and
the charms of life, and its demise demands a tear. What
difficulties does it ease, what restraints does it remove, what
springs of fellow-feeling does it open. How potent a weapon is
it in the hands of one who seeks to persuade rather than to
convince. How many a verdict has it determined, and how
often has it proved more effective than reason or rhetoric. If it
can lighten labour it can not less enrich leisure. In the lesser
concerns of home and office, and also in such august
assemblages as Synod or Senate, its appearance may be as
magical as it is welcome. Carlyle1 will have it that laughter is
much more than a mere gift or grace: it is a token of virtue.
“No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed,” he
protests, “can be altogether irreclaimably bad.” Carlyle was a
Scotchman, too, and therefore not over prone to exaggerate the
value of a laugh. Meredith held that “the flourishing of the
comic idea and of comedy” in a country was an

1 Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian and
philosopher.
12 The Genius of Ireland
ours should be what it is. For one thing, people all the world
over like humour, even if they have not very much of it
themselves. They are prompt to notice it, and they remember
it a long time—especially when it is (like our Irish humour) of a
genial and kindly type. Nor is there much doubt that among
Irishmen the sense of humour lies nearer the surface than it
does among people of other countries. The atmosphere is
charged with humour. Not only are jests and drolleries current
coin in our social activities, but it has been remarked that in
Ireland things will often fall out in some incongruous or
amusing way that never would occur among a more grave or
cautious people.
Is there any nation except the Irish who can claim that they
have a definite brand of joke especially named after them?
Whether the Irish Bull is in reality any more Irish than, say,
that dish called Irish stew, is certainly debatable. Some who
have gone into the question have, like Sir Boyle Roche,1 boldly
answered in the affirmative, “No.” It has been told of Professor
Wilkie,2 a Scotchman, that he said to a boy whom he met, “I was
sorry to hear there was fever in your family last spring. Was it
you or your brother that died of it?” “It was me,” said the boy.
The late Sir James Percy, in his delightful Bulls and Blunders, 3
quotes a number of specimens from abroad. He tells of a Hindu
baker in Bombay, with a business largely British, who
advertised himself as “a first-class English loafer”; of a
Dutchman pointing out “there’s a windmill that works by

Sir Boyle Roche, (1736–1807) was an Irish politician.
2 William Wilkie (1721–1772) was a Scottish Church of Scotland
minister and Professor of Natural Philosophy.
3 Sir James Campbell Percy (1869–?) was an Irish journalist. Bulls
and Blunders was published in 1915.
Irish humour 13
water”; of a Welsh sailor boasting that in his country “the tops
of many of the houses were copper-bottomed with sheet lead”;
of an Englishman (who surely must have had an Irish
grandmother!) complaining that “his physician drenched him
so with drugs during his illness that he was sick for a long time
after he got well.”
But whether bulls are, by right, Irish or not, possession is
nine parts of the law. The bull is now Irish property. So it will
remain as long as it lives; and a long life to it!
People who like to be very precise have had a difficulty in
defining the bull in such a way that it would not be confused in
the show yard with other humorous blunders. But definitions
matter little; all recognise a bull at sight. The word is used
broadly, inclusively. When one looks over familiar specimens
of the genus, one sees that they are of two kinds. In the first—
perhaps the purer breed—the sense is plain and evident
enough, and the confusion is confined to the language. When a
sailor says “all hands went ashore to stretch their legs”, or a
Dublin Recorder that “the only people who pay attention to
motor horns are the dogs”, or an orator “this will be the
brightest feather in my crown”, there is no ambiguity about his
meaning. But there is another kind of bull, in which the
confusion is in the sense, rather than in the words, or in both
sense and words. An Irishman who rued a too early marriage
confided to a friend, “Ah, if I had my time to come again I would
never marry
14 The Genius of Ireland
so young, if I lived to be as old as Methuselah.” A certain
baronet, learning that his married sister had given birth to
twins, sent at once, in excited interest, to know if he were an
uncle or aunt or both. Sir Boyle Roche (a pity that a gentleman
so highly respected should be remembered only for his
blunders!) once complained, when the shoemaker brought
home the boots made for his gouty feet, “You have bungled
these boots. I told you to make one larger than the other, and
instead of that you have made one smaller than the other—the
very opposite.” In cases such as these the tangle is a little more
than verbal.
But though bulls may differ slightly among themselves in
such details, they all are alike in being by nature accidental.
They are uttered wholly, or almost wholly, in innocence. Nor in
this do they stand alone among Irish jokes. The humour of
many of our most popular stories is unconscious. Illustrations
are so numerous and so familiar, one can hardly quote any
without an apology. Take any of the best-known members of
that large family of jokes that turn on the rival religions of our
country. Sir John Ross,1 in his memoirs, calls to mind a good
example (said to have occurred in the Provost’s kitchen in Dr
Salmon’s time). A Roman Catholic cook, religiously keeping a
fast-day, watched her Protestant kitchen-maid enjoying a
succulent and savoury beefsteak. “Well,” she said, “if you’re
not going to hell for that, I’m getting a queer sell.”2 We have all
heard of the young

Sir John Ross (1777–1856) was a British naval officer and explorer.
2 “A queer sell” is an old‑fashioned English idiom meaning “a
strange deception”, “an unexpected trick”, or “a puzzling
disappointment”. “If you can eat meat on a fast‑day and not be
punished, then I’ve been fooled.”
Irish humour 15
essayist’s “There are no wild beasts left in Ireland except in the
theological gardens”; of the fish-wife, assailed on her way from
Mass, by her old adversary, retorting, “It’s aisy seen you know
I’m in a state of grace now, and can’t answer you back; but,
glory be to God, I shan’t be so for long, and then I’ll be showing
you what I can do with my tongue.”
Of course, unconscious humour is to be found in all
countries. Mr Morley, in his Life of Gladstone,1 tells how much
that statesman was amused by the story of the Bostonian who,
having read Shakespeare for the first time, observed gravely:
“I call that a very clever book. I don’t suppose there are twenty
men in Boston to-day who could have written that book.” But
it is a question whether people who thus blunder into jokes do
so always by accident. Doubtless the majority of these jokes, or
very many of them, are made in all innocence. But—at least in
Ireland—some of them are realised well enough by the
speaker, or are, at any rate, half-conscious. The best of humour
is said by Meredith to lie in the ability to detect the ridicule of
those you love without loving them less. An Irishman so dearly
prizes a little fun that he would rather have a joke at his own
expense than none at all. Perhaps there is, too, a subtler reason
for this prevalence of unconscious humour in our country. It
ought often to be described, not as unconscious, but as
subconscious. There is in the Irish temperament—north and
south—an inborn proneness to jocularity which has heavily
charged the mental atmosphere

1 John Morley (1838–1923), was a British Liberal statesman, writer
and newspaper editor. The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 vols,
1903.
16 The Genius of Ireland
we have created about ourselves, and which is the more
precious and the more prominent because it is offset by that
other mood of Celtic melancholy. The traveller who lands at
Cobh or Dun Laoghaire feels almost at once what he certainly
does not feel when he disembarks at Holyhead or Calais or New
York. He becomes quickly aware of the genial good-humour of
the Irish people, and of that light-hearted drollery which they
let prevail in so much of their life. The real distinction of Irish
humour is to be found less in its character than its
superabundance. It is not found chiefly in this class nor chiefly
in this locality, but belongs to all the people in all sections.
American humour is associated with Mark Twain and
Artemus Ward; English with Lamb and Sydney Smith; French
with Moliere, and so forth. But Irish humour is as much that of
the jarvey and the gossoon, 1 of the judge and the cleric, as it is
of Richard Brinsley Sheridan2 or the world-enlivening George
Bernard Shaw, and it cares nothing for boundaries, but is
current coin from the centre to the sea. Here is the probable
reason why—as some have remarked—so many ludicrous
things happen in Ireland. Quite as many happen in other
countries; but people see some other side, the practical, or
financial, or inconvenient, or humiliating side, and so miss the
fun. When, as happened to a Mr D—some years ago, near
Limerick, an Irishman fishing for pike with a frog as bait
somehow gets the fish-hook through the grisly part of

1 Coachman (jarvey) and a lad (gossoon).
2 Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan (1751–1816) was an Anglo-Irish
playwright, writer and Whig politician.
Irish humour 17
his nose and has to walk four miles with a frog hanging from
his face (covered as far as possible by a handkerchief) before
he reaches a blacksmith and gets the hook cut through, his
sense of humour takes the edge off his trouble, and for years
after he enjoys telling the story against himself. Another
man—Alan Breck, for instance—might feel merely mortified,
and keep mum about his misadventure. Here, too, is one
reason why drollery and low comedy are regarded as a feature
of our humour. This is but natural when the humour is not the
distilled product of literary minds, but springs direct from the
off-hand daily conversation of educated and uneducated alike.
Whatever one may say of the stories of bulls and
unconscious humour in Ireland, no one will believe they come
of any lack of native intelligence and wit. Clever thrusts,
lightning parries, unanswerable repartees are heard every
day—or used to be heard—in all grades and ranks of society.
High comedy—that is, comedy that awakes thoughtful
laughter—may be the monopoly of the highbrow. But genuine
wit is as much public property as the bull. The distinction
between wit and humour is an old problem. When Carlyle said
wit was an affair of the head, humour of the heart, he put
shortly what many others have said at greater length. Mr H. W.
Fowler1 (who being both a wit and a humourist ought to
know), carries out the analysis more thoroughly when he says
that the province of humour is human nature—that of wit,
words and ideas; the method of

1 Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933) was an English schoolmaster,
lexicographer and commentator on the usage of the English
language.
18 The Genius of Ireland
humour is observation—that of wit, surprise; and that humour
appeals to sympathy, wit to intelligence. So let it be. We have
had in the past, if we have not still in the present, a galaxy of
wits: Swift, O’Connell, Curran, Archbishop Whately, Father
Healy, Percy French, and countless others have wellremembered mots1 to their credit.
Jokes have much in common all the world over, and in all
ages. The difference between various nations in their wit and
humour is not so wide as it is often made out to be. For
instance: A man returning to his home-city after a long
absence met an old acquaintance, and enquired about a mutual
friend. “Oh, he’s married.” “What, married!” cried the
traveller; “he whom I lately left alive and walking about!” The
story has quite a modern ring in it; and few would guess it was
more than twenty centuries old, and came out of an ancient
Greek play. But the humour of a nation (rather more than its
wit) does certainly reflect much of the social conditions and the
history of a people as well as some dominant traits in its
character. The financial shrewdness of the Scotch will appear
in any collection of Scotch humorous stories. A rather boastful
exaggeration, again, is a mark of American humour, and
appears in those stories which Europe thinks typically
American. The farmer of Georgia boasts that his melons grow
so fast they wear themselves out running along the ground, his
pigs’ tails curl so tight they lift the hindquarters off the ground,
and so on. The

1 Bon mot (a witty remark).
Irish humour 19
American patriot protests his country is bounded on the north
by the aurora borealis, on the south by the procession of the
equinoxes, on the east by the rising sun and on the west by the
Day of Judgement. It is told of someone seated on the piazza of
the Grand Hotel in Naples and looking at Vesuvius, which was
in eruption at the time, that he said to some Americans who
were in the party, “That’s one big thing you can’t show in
America.” To which one of them replied, “No, sir; but we have a
cataract in America that could put out that thing in two
minutes.”
The quotation of characteristic jokes may show what
national humour is like in other countries, but it will not do so
in the case of Ireland. Humour here has long been more
prevalent and more popular than in other lands. In the regime
of our social life it is not so much a favourite dish as a favourite
flavour. We delight to season our conversation and, at times,
our business and our politics, with it. The wit of Athens was its
Attic salt.1 Humour is our Irish salt, or rather, our Irish honey.
It sweetens and attracts. It does not show itself always, nor
chiefly, in flashes. Rather it is, in common life, like the cheering
glow of the fireside. With a steady flame it warms and
brightens. It is a temper or aptitude which plays in social life
as an undercurrent, continually felt, but seldom breaking the
surface, seldom showing itself in a mot which could be taken
away and shewn as an example of drollery or wit, Often when
it is most precious and

1 Attic refers to Athens—specifically to the refined, elegant culture
of ancient Attica, the region surrounding the city. Hence, the
sharp, dry, graceful wit associated with classical Athenians. In
older English, salt could mean “wit” or “piquancy”. Writers from
the Renaissance through the 19th century used the phrase to
praise humour that was intelligent and lightly ironic rather than
heavy or vulgar.
20 The Genius of Ireland
most charming it is so closely bound up with the occasion that
prompted it, with details of time or place or person, that its life
is its spontaneity and the delight of it is incommunicable.
But to think over one’s experience of Irish humour is to see
in it at least two traits which are more or less distinctive; one,
good enough; the other, better still. The first is its
extravagance—an extravagance often overwhelming and
irresistible, but yet an extravagance. It will revel in the
ludicrous, even in the most rank and abandoned absurdity. We
all know the story (told as true by Mr Lefanu) of the Irish
coachman as he drove the English lady up Knockacuppall Hill,
between Mallow and Killarney. A small boy, clad in only one
garment (an old corduroy jacket), ran after the coach as it
slowly went up the hill, asking for pennies. “Isn’t it very sad,”
said the lady, “to see that poor little fellow with nothing on him
but that wretched jacket?” “Ma’am,” said the coachman, that
boy could have clothes enough if he chose.” “And why hasn’t
he?” she asked. “Well, now, ma’am, that boy is so wonderful
ticklesome that he could never stand to let the tailor take his
measure for a pair of trousers.”
Sometimes a piece of sheer farce provokes at the time the
more boisterous laughter because, perhaps, one is laughing,
not only at the joke, but at the joker, for thinking of such a joke,
and oneself for laughing at it.
The other trait is of a higher order. Irish humour
Irish humour 21
is, when true to type, not grim nor caustic, but genial and goodhumoured. If it slips into irony or satire, it does so infrequently,
and it still remains not unkindly.
Indeed, humour at its best, in all lands, seems to have this
quality. Those whom the nations like and honour as their
greatest humorists have been lovers of their kind, lovers of
what is sweet and beautiful in life. Was it not so with
Shakespeare, with Lamb, with Dickens, with Sterne, and
Goldsmith? Not only in typical Irish humour but in the most
valued humour of other countries, the springs of laughter rise
close beside those of sympathy and pathos.
Humour, indeed, is part of the mental equipment of the
normal man, and no character is rounded without it. In a
world full of error and of charlatans it is an aid and a weapon
to the lover of truth. We do not think of Milton as a hilarious
person, yet he has it that “the vein of laughing hath, of times, a
strange and sinewy force in teaching and confuting.”
The ancient Greeks believed that the gods enjoyed a jest as
well as, or better than, mortals, and would take in good part a
joke played upon themselves. The disciples of St. Francis
became known as joculatores Domini.1 Time out of mind
humour combined with shrewdness and moral sense has been
turned against the foibles and follies of mankind. Even in the
Christian pulpit it has been used with vigour and effect. It is
told of Whitefield2 that, when preaching one hot summer’s day
on the difficulty of entering the narrow gate, he saw the people

1 The Lord’s jesters.
2 George Whitefield (1714–1770) was the famous Anglican evangelist
of the Great Awakening.
22 The Genius of Ireland
were growing inattentive. He paused, and tried to catch a gnat
that was buzzing about his face. “You think it quite easy,” he
went on, “to enter by the strait gate and secure salvation. Just
as easy as for me to seize this gnat” (snatching again and again
at the insect). Then, after a pause, he opened his hand and said
solemnly, “But I have missed it!”
Mr Ward Beecher,1 one of the most impressive and brilliant
of American preachers, was a wit and a humourist, and made a
powerful use of his gifts in the pulpit. Mr Spurgeon,2 during
those thirty years when twice every Sunday he held a great
audience enthralled, did likewise. “I wonder,” said an old and
respected minister to him, “that you allow yourself such
freedom, and discredit your sacred calling by making so many
jokes in the pulpit.” “You would not wonder at all,” answered
Spurgeon, “if you knew how many I keep to myself.” Spurgeon
was full of humour, but in his preaching he used his gift with
tact and discretion. Thus—as in the case of Beecher—it
increased immensely his power to persuade and to expose, to
win and to subdue.
Humour, in fact, is one of the elements that make up a
balanced and complete mentality. It is not only a diverting
quality giving private pleasure in solitude and general pleasure
in company, but it can be turned to serious purposes by the
teacher or crusader. It is strange that it has been used in times
of transition so often on the conservative, not on the
progressive side. From the days of

1 Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) was an American
Congregationalist clergyman, social reformer, and speaker, known
for his support of the abolition of slavery, his emphasis on God’s
love, and his 1875 adultery trial.
2 Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892) was an English Particular
Baptist preacher.
Irish humour 23
Aristophanes and Juvenal to—shall we say those of Dean Inge,
it has been used to expose the follies of the present by contrast
with a simpler and a saner past. But it need not be so, nor has
it always been. Humour may be used now, as sometimes in the
past, on the side of advance and construction. To take the most
illustrious example possible—in that duel between good and
evil which the New Testament records, one will find a grave
and clear-eyed humour on the side of truth, hut none at all in
the minds of the Pharisees and Scribes. Please goodness the
momentary decay of humour in Ireland and other countries
will soon end, and the forces of construction and
enlightenment will add this weapon to their armoury. When in
Ireland we learn once more to laugh together, we may learn to
live together. A touch of humour may make us once more akin,
and throughout the natural boundaries of our island home we
may share alike the enjoyment of our common gifts and our
common country.
The Genius of Ireland
Once, and only once, and for One only has Ireland taken 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.
Overwhelmed a thousand years ago by invaders whom her
rich lands attracted, she has had to endure from that time to
the present the suppression of her peculiar and precious
individuality. Only once, and then for a brief time, did fate
accord her an opportunity of using her talents in the service of
mankind.
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

The Genius of Ireland 25
over sea and land to bring the gift of heavenly and of earthly
knowledge to yet unilluminated regions of Britain and the
Continent.
The three patron saints of Ireland, St. Patrick, St. Bridget,
and Columcille,1 founded schools at Armagh, Kildare, and in
Iona. Hundreds followed their example. Shrines of devotion
and of 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 Clonfert was planted
by St. Brendan the Voyager, whose reputed travels, under the
title of “Navigatio 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.

1 Columba or Colmcille (CE 521–597) was an Irish abbot and
missionary evangelist credited with spreading Christianity in what
is today Scotland.
26 The Genius of Ireland
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, a 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 Malmesbury,
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, 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
The Genius of Ireland 27
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
Salsbury. St. Fursa 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, 13 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
28 The Genius of Ireland
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.
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 and a challenge to effort,
showing that once she has been, and yet may be again, an
island of saints and scholars.
Then fate rang down the curtain upon this scene of
intellectual activity and happiness. The Danes arrived.
Invasion followed invasion. The brief, though brilliant day of
Ireland’s glory was followed by a night of a thousand years.
She had used well the one opportunity given to her of
expressing her individuality, and had nobly served the greatest
of causes. But now the opportunity was at an end.
It was not wholly by accident, nor is it without profound
significance, that Ireland’s one constructive achievement in
international history should have been not political nor
economic, not in the sphere of commerce nor of
administration, but should have been distinctively religious.
Perhaps also it is due to causes deeper than historical
circumstance that the religion which she thus practised and
taught had a clearly-marked character of its own, and, laying
little emphasis on the
The Genius of Ireland 29
ecclesiastical and institutional aspects of religion, was, in type,
strongly devotional and intellectual. For the Irish temperament
was—and is—markedly spiritual. Had there not been latent in
those Irish tribesmen mental potencies of a rare order, the
Message which St. Patrick brought could never have kindled so
quickly so great a fire, nor could a religious achievement so
brilliant ever have been accomplished nor undertaken. To-day,
as then, the Irish character—taken at its truest and best—is of
a mystical cast. This special gift is not confined to any one class
or to any one school of thought. Sometimes it is developed;
more often it is not. But the sympathetic observer may,
without search, see it as a tendency, an inclination, a dormant
power, on every side, even among the most poor, the most
obscure, the most remote.
That ancient gift of spiritual intuition is with us still, though
there would be little wonder if it had vanished. For what is
there remaining to us from those old days—what but the hills
and the winds and the ruins of sculptured stone? It is not only
that social conditions have been wholly transformed, that the
monasteries were burned by the Danes and the scholars’ books
buried in the bogs, but that men of other stocks have settled in
the land and mingled their blood with the blood of the older
immigrants. The Irish men and women of the time of Brigit
and Columba may be our forefathers in religion, but they are
only partly so in blood. A fire that burns more steadily, if it
does
30 The Genius of Ireland
not flash so far, had been kindled in the island; and from over
many seas came strangers who have made Ireland their home
and, bringing non-Celtic gifts and traits, have created the more
balanced character of that composite being, the modern
Irishman.
But the old spirituality has not been dissipated. It has been
set too deep in the nature of the people to be weakened by the
chances of time or the infusion of fresh blood into the native
stock. In the era of the Plantations men noted that settlers
from England and Scotland soon took on the characteristics of
the older inhabitants, and became as the saying was, even
“more Irish than the Irish.” Be it the influence of climate or not,
it is certain that the island possesses some power of moulding
its inhabitants to a determined type, and that at least one of the
traits of the older Irish—and that the noblest—remains to this
day.
The world at large is ignorant of the true character of the
Irish. Its acquaintance with the people has been casual. It has
seen only what is superficial and obvious, and has noted only
the qualities that show in social intercourse. It has formed a
judgment on a few scraps of information and has let a fleeting
impression be crystallised into a final verdict.
It allows to the Irishmen and Irishwomen quickness of
mind and gaiety of spirit. In its romances, it likes to give to its
heroines a dash of Irish blood. It regards humour and drollery
as the peculiar
The Genius of Ireland 31
national characteristic, and it has fixed into its imagination as a
type to set beside John Bull and Uncle Sam the figure of the
stage Irishman.
Few will wonder that for long ages the Irish have not been
known at their best, nor seen as they truly are. It has been
always difficult for one nation to secure from others a fair
judgment. Nations look at their own virtues and at others’
failings. They seem quite content not to be just to one another.
They try to see what they would like to see; and in order that
they may the better magnify themselves, they make little of the
worth of others. Even when there is a desire to be really
judicial, it is not easy to be so. One has to judge from one’s own
standpoint, and cannot tell what might come into view from
another angle. One has to judge from what one knows, and one
seldom knows accurately much about foreign peoples.
Circumstances, too, may, for a time, distort or hide important
traits, and bring into prominence matters which, in fact, are
trifling.
Few nations have been so hampered by circumstance as the
Irish for the last thousand years: few so misrepresented by
circumstance as the Irish for the last hundred years. For ages
past fate has denied them adequate means of self-expression.
What chances they have had they have made good use of, and
the same high gifts which shone so brightly in the days of
Columcille did not wholly cease to cast their light till the
thirteenth century. After the Battle of Clontarf, the spirituality
of the
32 The Genius of Ireland
Irish again leapt into flame. This was the period when Irish
activity 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, Nurnberg, Konstanz, 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
founded in 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 the flame has never
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
The Genius of Ireland 33
that at Nurnberg, or turned over to local authorities, like those
at Vienna or Wurzburg.
The nineteenth century had come before the Irish character
began to find again an opportunity of asserting itself. Even
then, the conditions, at first, were unfortunate. Irish
intelligence had been given no opening for constructive effort
in learning, or art, or statesmanship, or any such activity, and
found its scope chiefly in the wiles and ingenuities of
opposition. It spent itself in evading or outwitting the powers
that were. Thus it became warped by misuse. A wrong
impression of the Irish character, and of the quality of Irish
intelligence, was given to the outside world. For a long time it
was not recognised that the Irish really possessed that ample
and positive mental power which they had shown long ago and
which, of late years, they have begun to show again.
The Irish gift of humour and drollery has, in a similar way,
been perverted. It was used by the weaker against the
stronger to cajole, to wheedle, to placate. “Better be laughed at
than be trampled on,” thought the poor man, facing his rich
master. Hence arose the type of the stage Irishman, which,
being original and amusing, was found convenient by novelist
and playwright, and became stereotyped. Even to-day it is, in
parts of the world, taken to represent a truly national figure. In
America, for instance, the part of the buffoon in every anecdote
is given to “Pat”, save only in the Southern States. The Irish
34 The Genius of Ireland
traveller is relieved when he crosses the Mason-Dixon Line and
finds that the part of the clown in story is there given, not to
the Irishman, but to the negro.
But these false impressions are rapidly disappearing. Irish
intelligence, wit, and humour are not now fettered, as of old,
but have full scope to work and a fair field in which to show
themselves. And if, in an age so materialistic as this,
spirituality finds few avenues of self-expression, and is shut in
by convention and by dead habits of thought, nevertheless,
there is, perhaps, no country outside the Orient where the
observer will find such evidence of latent spiritual capacity as
in this ancient island.
Nor is any close or detailed examination needed in order to
discover how strong is this quality among the Irish people today. “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. For the past fifty years or so we have had in Ireland
a brilliant revival of letters, which 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
The Genius of Ireland 35
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-adozen poets of the Irish Revival beside a similar group of today’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 of idealistic material is so great that it is some
matter for 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.1 the
one dominant thought, the one central theme. The hero of
their verse is not man the mortal, but man the immortal,

1 William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist,
writer and literary critic who was one of the foremost figures of
20th-century literature. George William Russell (1867–1935), who
wrote with the pseudonym Æ (often written AE or A.E.), was an
Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, painter and Irish nationalist. He
was also a writer on mysticism, and a central figure in the group of
devotees of theosophy which met in Dublin for many years.
36 The Genius of Ireland
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-born 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
The Genius of Ireland 37
sail out from among the rocks 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 self-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
38 The Genius of Ireland
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 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
The Genius of Ireland 39
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 rare a
loveliness that none of Mr Yeats’s later work, brilliant though it
be, seems quite to fulfil the promise given here.
40 The Genius of Ireland
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 joyous. He speaks of joy as one of the marks of the
land of his heart’s desire, and in the Wanderings of Oisin 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 abjure love and drive it from him to
“hide its face amid a crowd of stars.”
The Genius of Ireland 41
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, 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
42 The Genius of Ireland
be told.” So monotheistic is he in this 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 Mr Yeats
writes not so much of love as of beauty. He praises his beloved
because 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
incarnation 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 Innisfree1 is painted as the ideal place of his
dreams.

1 Lake Isle of Innisfree is an uninhabited island within Lough Gill, in
Ireland, near which Yeats spent his summers as a child.
The Genius of Ireland 43
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 Oisin 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
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 off 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
44 The Genius of Ireland
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 Houlihan.
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 Oisin; 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-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 enraptured descriptions of that wonderful world. But
with growing experience Mr Yeats’s perspective changed, and
the thought of
The Genius of Ireland 45
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 fairy-child, 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 selfappointed 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 a 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
46 The Genius of Ireland
strain. His songs no more thrill with faith and hope. He doubts.
“Is this my dream, or the truth?” he asks. Once he wrote a
poem—The 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 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
The Genius of Ireland 47
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. “O, 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 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
48 The Genius of Ireland
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 Englishspeaking 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.
The Genius of Ireland 49
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 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?
The Irish have long desired a place among the peoples of
the world and an opportunity for national self-expression.
That opportunity now has come. It has come, indeed, in almost
extravagant measure. This present age is one in which the idea
of independence and self-determination has been carried to its
furthest limits, and all men and all nations seem bent on
nothing so much as on asserting their own individuality. Our
country is small and poor, nor is it likely ever to become rich.
But nations far greater than we shall ever be—greater than the
Empires of Rome or Babylon—have been as small and as poor
as ourselves. The
50 The Genius of Ireland
Roman poet long ago proudly voiced his country’s renunciation
of the pursuit of Beauty and of Truth, of the arts and the
sciences, and proclaimed that the imperial glory of the Caesars
lay in the military conquest of the world. The larger nations of
to-day may—if they will—pursue some such ambition. For the
humble and the weak, such as ourselves, another path invites.
If this little land of ours is to play, indeed, a useful part among
mankind, it will not be in the field of commerce, nor in the arts
of administering vast areas or complex commonwealths.
Rather it may be—if anywhere—in the realm of the mind and
the spirit. No service to mankind can be higher than that which
may be rendered by religious intuition and the faculty of vision;
and now there lies before the Irish such an opportunity of
using these gifts as has not appeared for a millennium. If they
fail, the blame can no longer be laid on hostile conditions nor
on other people. If they succeed, they will prove themselves
not unworthy heirs of a great tradition. That which has been
done in Ireland during the last ten years will not permit anyone
to sentimentalize the Irish character. The name of honour
which Ireland once won is used often now in mockery of our
present state. But a high and rare capacity for spiritual
attainment is assuredly ours. It has but to be used. Our poets
have led the way; they have sounded the reveille. Now it is for
others to walk by the path of the Spirit into heavenly
The Genius of Ireland 51
places, and continually to see and declare a fuller and fuller
vision of God and His truth.
To consider that this great gift of spiritual sensibility
belongs in a marked degree to the Irish: to look back on a
distant past and see how the religious genius of the people
made this lovely island once the shrine of Western Europe: to
realise that still there burns deep in the dumb heart of the
people that ancient fire : to hear 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 a breaking day, or to hear the tidings already
breathed from on high, and that she may do for mankind now
such service as her saints and scholars did for Europe long ago.
A kinship in genius:
The English poet-prophets
Truth makes us all akin. The idealism and impassioned
faith which inspired long ago our scholars and our saints and
which echoes to-day in our noblest contemporary verse is not
the mark of Irish letters alone. It rings in the poet-prophets of
yesterday in England. And though their soaring and majestic
song has little of its kind to herald it in England and still less to
carry on its message at the present hour, yet its inspiration is
the same as that which animates the best genius of Ireland; and
in range, richness, and profundity it goes beyond that which
our poets have yet given to the world.
More than a century ago a great Poet-Prophet (himself of
Irish stock) uplifted in England a strange new Song of Victory
and Triumph, and foretold the approach of an age when
hypocrisy and tyranny would be dethroned and when man
would recognise at last the hidden truth about himself and the
worlds in which he lives and would enjoy the rights of a lawabiding Citizen of the Universe.
Blake1 with clear eyes saw the oppression which filled the
earth, and watched the helpless struggle

1 William Blake (1757–1827) was an English poet, painter and
printmaker.
A kinship in genius: The English poet-prophets 53
of the weak, the poor, the enslaved against those who were able
by force to hold them in subjection. He not only felt with
extraordinary intensity the pitifulness of their condition, but he
recognised it as a fearful spiritual wrong, a blasphemous
defiance of God’s will: this cruelty was a lie against God. And,
looking beyond man’s manifold iniquity, he saw approaching
the certain vengeance of an outraged deity; he foretold the
deliverance of the world from misrule and the final acceptance
by mankind of the eternal principle of brotherhood and unity.
To the declaration of this theme he dedicated his gifts, as an
artist and a poet, insisting always that what he uttered was
“not fable but vision”, and that he spoke by inspiration.
His mantle fell on other poets, who like him called men’s
hearts away from deism and doubt and chanted the praise of
the Universal Spirit—Unborn, Undying, Over-ruling all and
Ordaining all. They knew Its joy and Its beauty, and they saw
Its power animating the natural world and directing the slow
processes of human history. Its will was desecrated by man’s
crimes; Its beneficent purpose postponed by his obtuseness.
But they were conscious of Its transcendent might, beheld the
certainty of Its triumph and witnessed in the world about them
the stirring of a stupendous soul-force that would bring justice
to the earth and establish among men obedience to Truth and
God.
Blake was the most complete visionary of all this group of
prophet-poets; his insight was the most
54 The Genius of Ireland
piercing, his outlook the most wide. He had his own reading of
human life and of the nature of man, built up his ideas into a
complex but single picture of Reality, and did his best to devise
a galaxy of forms and figures through which he could express
thoughts so unwonted and aetherial.
Though he kept in close touch with the social and political
life about him, yet he was too far in advance of his age, and too
far above it, to find contemporary appreciation. Gross
materialism shut him in on every side. His point of view was
totally incomprehensible to all except a very few; and as men
made their ignorance the standard by which he was to be
judged, they regarded his originality not as a sign of his
Truthfulness (which it was) but as a proof of his madness.
The strangeness of his thoughts was emphasised by the
strangeness of his style and literary method. He made himself
in youth a master of the traditional manner of writing English
poetry. He wrote verses such as those which open the Fourth
Book of the Golden Treasury, beginning:
“Whether on Ida’s shady brow,
Or in the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the sun, that now
From ancient melody have ceased ….
Then he discarded this manner for one of his own devising.
Henceforth he abandoned the use of Greek mythology which
was familiar to the reading public and created a cryptic
mythology of his own.
A kinship in genius: The English poet-prophets 55
Even to-day much of his work remains difficult and obscure.
Among his contemporaries, to whom his attitude of mind was
much less congenial than it has become to us, the originality of
his manner, added to the originality of his matter, served only
to secure the total condemnation of his verse from every point
of view.
Blake as a great mystic saw the eternal happiness of heaven
beating its wings against the misery of a recusant world which
declined to listen or to heed. Within his own heart this
happiness found a lodging, and, looking about him, he saw, in
spite of appearances, the same happiness latent and expectant
in all things. He would address even the humblest form of
animal life and cry:
“Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy!
Arise and drink your bliss, for everything that lives is
holy!”
He was the first to discover childhood and to set it in its due
place of honour and regard. He wrote of children not only with
exquisite tenderness and sympathy, but with a dramatic power
which makes his verse seem not the utterance of a kindly
observer but of childhood itself.
He rediscovered nature and showed forth in all his work a
love of all country things—of light and cloud and valley, even of
the worm, the “image of weakness”, and of the clod of clay,
which in The Book of Thel thus addresses the Human Soul:
56 The Genius of Ireland
“Thou seest me, the meanest thing, and so I am indeed
My bosom of itself is cold and of itself is dark;
But He that loves the lowly pours His oil upon my head,
And kisses me and binds His nuptial bands around my
breast,
And says: ‘Thou mother of my children, I have loved
thee,
And I have given thee a crown that none can take away.”
Blake pleaded passionately for man’s better understanding
of the lesser children of a common Creator. We all know now
his lines:
“A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage …
A dog starved at his master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A horse misused upon the road
Calls to Heaven for human blood.
A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.
Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.”
With pity—and with anger—he looked out upon a social
order saturated with iniquity and cruelty, and he sang some of
the most poignant songs of sympathy with the oppressed that
our literature has to show. With what a searching eye does he
see, with what relentless lucidity does he expose the arts of the
modern tyrant! Here is the advice given in Vala by the archtyrant Urizen:
A kinship in genius: The English poet-prophets 57
“Listen to the words of wisdom.
Compel the poor to live upon a crust of bread by soft
mild arts:
So shall you govern over all. Let Moral Duty tune your
tongue
But be your hearts harder than the nether millstone …
When his children sicken, let them die; there are enough
Born, even too many, and our earth will soon be overrun
Without these arts. If you would make the Poor live
with temper,
With pomp give every crust of bread you give; with
gracious cunning
Magnify small gifts; reduce the man to want a gift, and
then give with pomp ...”
Gentle-spirited as he was, Blake all through his life was
“ever a fighter”, and he gave no quarter to the enemies of
justice or of truth. Against false science and wrong-headed
philosophy, against ecclesiastical hypocrisy and political
tyranny he waged relentless war; and long before Shelley
wrote or Byron was born, he sang hymns of deliverance,
paeans of liberty. He never doubted how the battle would end,
nor questioned the certainty of the triumph of the principle of
brotherhood. He saw in clear vision the awakening of mankind
and the sublimation of the social order. He deliberately bent
all his powers to aid in that tremendous struggle which must
precede the final victory of the Powers of Good on earth.
His real interest, however, lay not so much in
58 The Genius of Ireland
outward as in inward things. The oppression which he saw
about him, the struggle of the weak and poor for liberty, had
their counterpart and their source in the soul of man. They
were indeed the shadow cast on the outer world by conditions
existing within the mind. To Blake, history begins—within.
The real stage on which the action of his poems takes place is
the human soul. He was not only nor chiefly a poet of Nature
(as were his successors, Wordsworth and Shelley) but
primarily a poet of man; and not of man only, but likewise of
divinity. He believed that poetry is the power of transmitting
heavenly communications, and that it can never be
comprehended by the “corporeal understanding” but only by
sympathetic intuition. The beginning of all the world’s troubles
lies in the heart, and their ending is to be found in the same
place. Blake was not a revolutionary. He did not counsel the
use of force nor think that through it wrongs could be
permanently righted. The basis of the tyranny which he saw
wherever he turned—in England, in France, in America—was
psychological; and the remedy must likewise be psychological.
He struck at the root of the tree. The essential truth which ran
through all his utterances and thoughts was a principle which
all accepted and no one put to use—that man is spirit and that
mankind is one spirit in many bodies. Blake was an ardent
Christian, and though he had no patience with a literal
interpretation of the Bible, he strongly held that the Scripture
contained the spiri-
A kinship in genius: The English poet-prophets 59
tual history of man, and was an inspired Guide to the
knowledge of the eternal truth. God, he believed, was to be
found and to be loved in every man. Indeed, not the human
race alone but all existence was in its last reality one, and was
animated throughout by love. The object of every man’s mortal
life was to attain the purpose of creation: namely, the soul’s
communion with God. Since the Fall (which of course he took
as an allegory) man was shut up in the prison of his five senses.
Hell was to Blake not a place but a condition of being, a state of
self-centredness and enslavement to “corporeal desires”.
Reason of itself was too weak to free man from this
confinement. The principle by which man perceives what is
beyond the realm of sense was the power of God unto salvation.
Faith arouses intuition or spiritual insight, and by this power
man bursts the bounds of his hell and escapes for ever from the
limitations of corporeal blindness.
Men therefore in their true nature were to Blake free and
happy. They had lost their way and strayed into misery. But
they would assuredly find the right path again and win back on
this earth an elysian condition which in the eternal world they
once had had and which it was not God’s will they should ever
have lost.
Blake was the Elijah, the earliest of a succession of prophets
whose splendour illumines with unaccustomed light the first
half of the nineteenth century. His vision was broader than
that of those
60 The Genius of Ireland
who followed him, his flight was more sustained. Though the
world-darkness which surrounded him was even denser than
that which surrounded them, yet his genius dwelt in a glory
which they saw only in glimpses. But they too had their vision,
their message, their heaven-born power; and they produced on
the mind of their time an influence far greater than his.
Wordsworth1 and Shelley2 saw man as spirit and all
existence as a unified whole. They proclaimed the inalienable
dignity of manhood and the right of all men to liberty. And
though they took from his hand the Torch of spiritual light,
they were more closely akin to each other than to him in this,
that they looked rather through Nature to find God than
through man.
When Wordsworth observed with minute care the objects
through the countryside and pondered them in loving
remembrance, the details of the scene became to him avenues
through which he looked into an immaterial realm. His senses
were what Blake said our senses ought to be—“means of
spiritual apprehension”. With their aid his intuitions unveiled
to him a sphere of beauty lapped in a light that never was on
sea or land. He felt the presence in the sky, the ocean, the air,
of a moving spirit which permeated all life, all existence, all
objects of thought. The splendour of that imperial realm is, he
proclaimed, the true home of man. Out of it he descends into
this world, and into it he returns. Birth into mortality is but a
sleep and

1 William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was an English Romantic poet
who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic
Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical
Ballads (1798).
2 Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was an English writer who is
considered one of the major English Romantic poets.
A kinship in genius: The English poet-prophets 61
a forgetting. In childhood we still recall something of this dear
beauty and ante-natal delight. The shadows of earth-life gather
about the soul, separating it from knowledge, till with growing
years reflection re-awakes the vision of childhood; and the
earnest contemplation of Nature, even of the simplest bloom or
flower, brings thoughts that lie too deep for tears, enables the
soul to see again the domes of the hidden Palace of God, and to
hear the waters beating forever on the eternal shores.
Shelley, too, was a poet of mysticism, and took for his
subject Nature rather than man. Intensely spiritual, he looked
“not with but through his eye” on an open vision of incorporeal
Beauty which transcended all that is of earth but was yet in a
degree manifest in Nature. To him, everywhere save within the
dark confines of man’s life on earth, there shone the stainless
radiance of Eternity. In that everlasting glory dwelt the great
Realities of existence—Beauty, and Love, and Joy. The
splendour of Truth, however, was hidden from men as they
made their weary pilgrimage through this world from birth to
death. The poet’s function is to lift the veil and let the true light
shine here in the darkness. The poet is a revealer. He is a
prophet less of God as Law than of God as Beauty and as Love.
To Shelley life was sad because of its limitations and its
deprivations. He did not see nor think deeply enough to find
for it—as Blake did—a special and limited purpose in the farstretching scheme of things. He spoke of birth
62 The Genius of Ireland
into this world as an “eclipsing curse”. Its delight was
“Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright.”
Living man might escape from its sorrow in his dreams, but
from these he must “wake to weep”, and his counsel to one
whose heart was filled with high imaginings was
“Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek.”
But if he thus sang dirges over earth-life and cried out that
our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought, he
did not proclaim that man in his true identity was sad. Earthlife was a little thing, man a great thing. Few have believed
more nobly or chanted more enthusiastically the essential
dignity of manhood. Man did not belong to this earth-life nor
was he bounded by it. It was merely an incident which Shelley
did not explain. Man was the heir of infinity, born of “that Light
whose smile kindled the universe”; and his destiny, when he
attained the consummation of his manhood, was to become a
portion of that loveliness which the poet revealed.
Even here below there awaited man a far greater happiness
than he yet had found. Life must, he believed, be sad in
comparison with the Bliss to be conferred hereafter; but it
need not be so sad as it had been made. Shelley was not
content to be a visionary. Like both Blake and Wordsworth, he
A kinship in genius: The English poet-prophets 63
was intensely interested in the social and political movements
of his time. Wordsworth in his youth had strong republican
sympathies. His visits to France intensified these, and he took
the warmest interest in the progress of the Revolution. So
extreme was he that he became a disciple of the radical
doctrines of William Godwin, parts of whose subversive work
Political Justice he paraphrased in The Prelude. When his
extravagant hopes of the Revolution were dashed, he was
struck with consternation, and the reaction caused such a
change of views that he incurred, as we all know, the censure of
Browning. But he never disowned these ideal hopes which he
had too confidently connected with the activities of Danton and
Robespierre. Shelley’s political convictions were of sterner
stuff. He was, and always remained, a fierce opponent of
militarism, priest craft, sex-inequality, and all the forms of
domination with which he saw the world filled. He believed in
the certain betterment of mankind and never ceased to
champion it. He foresaw the coming of a new heaven and a
new earth and was assured that his vision would in fact and
deed be realised on earth at no distant date.
Browning 1 likewise proclaimed the Universe as a spiritual
thing, existing for the purposes of the soul. God is
“one everlasting bliss
From whom all being emanates, all power
Proceeds; in whom is life for evermore.”

1 Robert Browning (1812–1889) was an English poet and playwright
whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian
poets.
64 The Genius of Ireland
He was one with Wordsworth and Shelley in seeing God’s
presence in Nature, but he went beyond them in seeing God
revealed yet more fully and more clearly in man.
“Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark
Soars up and up, shivering for very joy;
Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing gulls
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe
Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plain—and God renews
His ancient rapture. Thus He dwells in all,
From life’s minute beginnings, up at last
To man—the consummation of this scheme
Of being, the completion of this sphere Of life …”
He kept always in the closest touch with human life and
with the thought of his time. His work throughout is
permeated with the idea of development and progress and
with the attendant moral questions of success and failure. His
sympathies were liberal and democratic. In the third book of
Sordello, he tells how he had pledged his art to serve the cause
of the people; the race was to be his Muse, and he was to tune
his art not to please the taste of the few so much as to serve the
needs of the many. The political creed expressed long
afterwards in Why I am a Liberal, in 1885, only four years
before his death, is the same as that of this early poem. He
stood all through his life for the principle of social liberty and
of social opportunity. Every man should have the chance to
“live, love,
A kinship in genius: The English poet-prophets 65
and labour freely”, and was entitled to favourable conditions
under which he could pursue the purpose that God traced for
his body and his soul.
Browning expresses a belief in the general development of
the human race through the ages. In Cleon he traces the
intellectual development from beast to man; in Sordello (Bk. V),
he sketches the historical and social development from the
time of Charlemagne to that of the hero of the poem. But he is
more especially concerned with the progress of the individual
human soul, and in his poems on single men and women or on
national life he delights in taking some moment of crisis when
the issue is whether the movement shall be forward or (as it
may be) backward. He is the poet of the human will and holds
that the central business of man’s life comes from his power to
choose. God has His scheme laid out for the human race, and
every individual has a special ideal born of his own nature. But
progress towards the ideal needs choice and effort. The human
will should be exercised in making the decision and in then
vigorously carrying it out, and even should failure be the result,
the will should never falter nor faith be lost. Browning went so
far as to hold (what Huxley also maintained) that there is more
hope for a man who chooses the wrong path and walks in it
than for the faint heart who stagnates through refusal to move
in any direction whatever.
Browning thought much and wrote much about the
problem of evil. He has left not a few unlovely
66 The Genius of Ireland
pictures of human depravity, and the Guido of The Ring and the
Book is probably the most mean and miserable villain that
appears in any great English poem. But though he thus made
himself so familiar with forms of wickedness, he retained
always his firm and radiant belief in the overwhelming power
of Goodness—he “never doubted clouds would break, never
dreamed though right were worsted wrong would triumph.”
He loves to show that the idea of human progress and growth
implies shortcomings and involves effort. A stationary
happiness would be no happiness at all; and completeness on
earth would leave nothing to hope for and would be merely
death. Effort gives life its delight, and where the world laments
that there is no rose without a thorn, Browning is glad that “a
thorn comes to the aid of and completes the rose.” He is not
disheartened when he looks at his own life and sees the gap
between the actual and his ideal:
“What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me.”
The man who caught up with his ideals, who morally and
spiritually had nothing more to do, would suffer, to Browning’s
mind, the most lamentable kind of ennui and boredom. His
optimism is, in the last resort, based on his philosophy of life; it
is the logical result of a firmly held view of the universe. His
intuition gave him the same experience as that which the magic
of music gave to
A kinship in genius: The English poet-prophets 67
Abt Vogler: it imparted to him a direct, irresistible, rapturous
sense of the activity of an Almighty Spirit. He believed always
in the over-ruling intelligence and power of God, Whose name
was love and Who had His seat in every human heart.
Wherever love was, however distorted and meagre it might be,
there lay a hope of the coming of God, and love comes to every
heart, even—in the shock of mortal fear—to such a one as
Guido. This Divine love, so passionate is its warmth, must melt
and overcome all; it will “fill infinitude wholly nor leave up or
down one spot for the creature to stand in.” And the progress
made here on earth will not end here. “No work begun shall
ever pause for death.” There lie ahead “other heights in other
lives” and
“man is hurled
From change to change unceasingly,
His soul’s wings never furled.”
Social betterment and the regeneration of the race would be
the inevitable outcome of that soul-progress which Browning
saw proceeding in the human heart. But he remained always
the analyst and poet of the individual. His concern was with
the soul: “Little else,” he said, “is worth study; and by soul he
meant the soul of a single man or woman, not the soul of a
nation or of a race or of humanity. Broad changes in the world
at large would of necessity follow from the individual changes
which he so clearly outlined. But he chose to deal little with
these larger consequences
68 The Genius of Ireland
and much with the finer and more subtle inward causes.
Tennyson1 did contrariwise. He was interested in outer
rather than in inner things; in history and science more than in
philosophy and psychology. Though he was like Browning in
his faith and his optimism, he was strikingly unlike him in his
manner, his temperament, and in the range and province of his
thought. He had no sympathy with anything in politics that
was revolutionary or radical. And as he was without the
crusading moral vigour of Browning, so was he without the
searching contemplativeness of Wordsworth or the firewinged enthusiasm of Shelley.
Yet in his own way this precedent-loving and highly
nationalistic English gentleman was one of the prophets—and
the last of them. He too saw the Invisible. He apprehended “a
presence, a motion and a Spirit” which overruled all things. He
had his own original angle of vision, and added a new profound
thought to those which his poet-brothers had acclaimed. His
gaze was turned not so much on the heart of nature, nor on the
heart of man, as on the history of the human race. Here it was
that he saw evidence of the Divine power, indications of the
Divine purpose. The course of world-events, to him, clearly
followed a definite Design, was directed by an Over-will, was
bent towards a fixed consummation. Shelley had seen this in
glimpses, and sung of it in snatches. But Tennyson’s mind was
held by it, and in his poems

1 Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) was an English poet.
A kinship in genius: The English poet-prophets 69
he gives it a central place. Shelley saw the regeneration of
society as an event assured indeed, but sudden and miraculous.
Tennyson saw it as the final result of a long and ordered
process. It is an idea to him so precious, so beautiful, so vital,
that it is never far from his mind, and claims a position of
honour in his poetry. It is, in truth, his special and most
valuable contribution to that group of thoughts which we call
idealism. It stands out in one poem after another: in The Day
Dream, The Two Voices, The Golden Year, The Passing of Arthur,
The Poet’s Song, Locksley Hall.
“Not in vain the distance beckons.
Forward, forward let us range;
Let the great world spin for ever
Down the ringing grooves of change.”
And—
“For we are Ancients of the earth,
And in the morning of the times.”
Or—
“This fine old world of ours is but a child
Yet in the go-cart. Patience! Give it time
To learn its limbs. There is a Hand that guides.”
Merlin summarises history in four zones of symbolic
sculpture—in the lowest, beasts are slaying men; in the second,
men are slaying beasts,
“And on the third are warriors, perfect men,
And on the fourth are men with growing wings.”
70 The Genius of Ireland
This evolution takes shape in a world-state,
“When the war-drum throbs no longer and the battleflags are furled
In the Parliament of man, the federation of the world.”
And as he had used this idea to close The Princess on a note
of hope, so again, at the conclusion of In Memoriam, he resorts
to it again to seal the greatest of his poems with the mark of
final comfort and assurance.
“… The man that with me trod
This planet was a noble type
Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God,
That God which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far off divine event
To which the whole creation moves.”
With Tennyson this line of English prophets closed. They
had done their work. They had scattered the doubt and the
deism of the eighteenth century. They had exposed the guile,
the hypocrisy, the oppression which had poisoned the political
and social life of the western nations. They had proclaimed the
dignity of man and given a new and truer ideal of manhood.
They had seen the Universe as spirit-woven and humanity as
the orphaned Child of the Almighty Over-Soul from whose
Home was not always to be exiled. One and all they acclaimed
love as the clue to Truth, the
A kinship in genius: The English poet-prophets 71
answer to all mysteries, the creative and sustaining principle of
life, the essence of the nature of God and the trysting place
where the spirit of man can meet the Father-Spirit. They bade
men look not to the past but to the future. They foretold the
regeneration of mankind, the near approach of that
Blessedness promised from of old by the Spokesmen of Destiny.
They saw drawing near to a negligent and unbelieving world an
Era of Justice and Freedom, of Unity and constructive Peace.
Tennyson died, and since his time there has been no open
vision. The heavens are shut up. Instead of making peace men
made a universal war. Nation rose against nation, class against
class, children against their parents, wives against their
husbands and husbands against their wives. Society was
resolved into its constituent atoms and whatever discipline or
order had existed was swallowed up in a raging chaos. Hope
fell away, and a sense of impotence bred despair. The young
took refuge in dissipation, and the old imitated, as best they
might, the young. Instead of the progress and development the
Prophets foresaw, Time has brought us decadence.
So dark are the portents of the time that the hearts of many
thoughtful men fail them for fear. They are tempted to despair
of the future, even of human nature. Satire and destructive
criticism have become the vogue. But no seer ever despairs.
Blake never doubted his inspiration. Shelley dealt with “forms
more real than living
72 The Genius of Ireland
man.” To them the realities of this world—water and clay and
hunger and thirst and life and death—were realities of
impermanence, but the realities of the realm of vision were not
subject to dissolution nor decay. They wrote with the
assurance of clear sight and certain knowledge. That which
they saw, that which they sang, that which filled their souls
with joy and empowered them to thrill the hearts of all who
“had ears to hear”, was the ancient and everlasting truth. The
veritable victory of Him whose smile kindled the Universe, the
beating of the sword into a ploughshare, the transmutation of
men into sons of God, the appearance of a new heaven and a
new earth, make up an Event which prophets have upheld in
more ages than Blake’s. But in the present age it is on the eve
of accomplishment. The prophet now sees it in greater fullness
and shows it forth in greater detail. The spirit which moves
him is the same spirit, the vision is the same vision, the rapture
which fills him is the same rapture, but now the destined
transformation takes shape and outline. The changes that are
involved, and the method by which these changes are to be
effected and maintained, these now are left no longer indefinite
or obscure. The unification of the peoples, the establishment of
a world-order and of a central Parliament, the substitution of
social justice for force, and the attainment of this universal
metamorphosis not by an arbitrary decree but as the climax of
an age-long process of race-education and race-development:
all this, set
A kinship in genius: The English poet-prophets 73
forth of old in ecstatic images by the seers of distant times, is
now proclaimed with a new precision and exactitude.
Blake and Shelley sang in the depths of a Stygian darkness.
What they said seemed too absurd to be considered. But
already—indeed long since—it has begun to happen. East and
West have met. The world has become a single country, a
single city. The League of Nations has been established. A
universal language has been constructed. Universal peace is
now the goal of international statesmen. The old hypocrisies
have been exposed. The old oppressions discredited. With a
determination never known before, universal justice is
demanded by all men. Everywhere there is abroad a sense that
the troubles of our time are the throes of a great New Birth—
that we live in a stage of transition: a great era has definitely
passed away and a New Age is in process of creation.
Great reforms take time. Things which are to endure come
into being not in a moment but by slow degrees. Reformers
need not only vision and energy but also patience.
Perseverance was proclaimed at the beginning of our Era as a
distinguishing mark of the Master and His followers. Before
profound changes can be consummated, large numbers of
people must be trained to discard the traditions and prejudices
of the past and to accept new ways of thought, new ideals of
conduct and of administration. Men of affairs have to
74 The Genius of Ireland
devise means and methods, and men of action to carry them
into effect. The question of the day is not whether the
evolution so long foretold and now so far advanced is to
continue to its destined climax. It is one of less or greater
delay. How long will mankind (or its leaders) resist the higher
impulses which stir in their hearts and hang back from the
tasks which progress demands of them? Blake saw that before
liberty and happiness could be attained by mankind there must
be a fierce and bitter warfare, a battle to the death. He sang the
battle-song of the Peace of God. His triumphant summons to
victory has found its echo to-day in our Irish poetry—“Men yet
shall hear The archangels rolling Satan’s empty skull Over the
mountain tops”—and is still the song of all who love their kind
and believe in God and in His prophets.
“And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountain green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was
Jerusalem budded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
A kinship in genius: The English poet-prophets 75
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.”
The language of the Commonwealth
Among the conspicuous achievements and possessions of
the English people there is one which is commonly given less
than its due of recognition and praise. We hear much of the
British Empire, the British Constitution, British Jurisprudence,
and the like; but we hear little of the creation of that
marvellous instrument of expression, the English language.
Not many of those who use it give a thought to the
unprecedented variety of the work which it is called upon to
do, or of the outstanding position which it has gained for itself
among the languages of mankind. Fewer still pause to consider
the copiousness of its vocabulary and the flexibility of its
forms, or to remember the busy ages of enrichment and
refinement that have gone to its making.
A modern language, if it is to meet the increasing
requirements of this complex life of ours, must be a highly
elastic and expansive thing. There is no language which has
been put to so severe a test as English, nor is there any which
has stood up to its work more stoutly or more successfully.
The broad and evident facts of English literature—or, to be
more exact, of the many literatures

The language of the Commonwealth 77
written all in the speech of England—are enough to show this
resourcefulness and virility. Indeed, they set it off in high relief.
What might one not say in praise of the adaptability of a
language when one finds that it meets the needs, not only of
law, commerce, and science, but also that in its higher moods it
suits alike the pedestrian prose of Defoe and Swift on the one
hand, and the mystical verse of Blake and Shelley on the other;
that in the paragraphs of Pater1 it can pace with imperturbable
slowness, or at the call of a Swinburne can race at headlong
speed in torrential lyrics; that in the hands of a Tennyson or a
Charles Lamb it has the lightness and delicacy of a fairy or an
elf, and now can roll with sonorous rhythm in the learned
pages of Milton or of Gibbon? Yet this is not the whole of the
various achievements of the English language. Throughout the
nations of the British Commonwealth English is the vernacular.
Each of the great white colonies has its own outlook, but all are
able to find full self-expression in the tongue of their motherland. The romantic history of Scotland and its people—its
clans and princes, its highlanders and gipsies, its lawyers,
shepherds, ministers, and the rest—has been immortalised in
English; and in, the person of Burns the Scotch have given to
letters the most truly loved of all the poets who have used the
English tongue. The Irish have accomplished a yet more
remarkable feat. They have shown (through the works of men
like Burke, Goldsmith, Moore, Yeats, and Russell) how a
language shared

1 Walter Horatio Pater (1839–1894) was an English essayist, art and
literary critic, and fiction writer.
78 The Genius of Ireland
with England and the colonies can be tuned to express a
temperament original, distinctive, and in many ways dissimilar.
Further yet from the centre stand those recent writers of
Indian blood—such as Rabindranath Tagore—whose subtle,
exquisite and imaginative work represents a culture unlike any
found in the Occident.
No language of the present or the past, neither Latin in the
Middle Ages, nor Greek at the beginning of our era, nor any
lingua franca of any known age, ever ranged so far as this
tongue, the use of which extends throughout an Empire on
which the sun never sets.
But the use of English is not confined to the British
Commonwealth. It has been inherited by the United States, and
is the adopted language of all the diverse nationalities that
make up the cosmopolitan population of that country. When
the London paradox-maker, on his arrival in New York, said: “I
find we have everything in common with the Americans,
except, of course, language,” he hit the obverse of the truth
fairly in the centre. Americans learn the classic use of the
language from England. They accept as the standard of taste
and correctness the forms preferred in England. Yet American
literature is no mere variation of an old tune. It has developed
a native quality and a national distinction, and in the three
fields of form, of substance, and of spirit, it has made a definite
contribution of its own to the common stock of English
literature. In form, it has elaborated the short story, the
The language of the Commonwealth 79
cult of which began with Edgar Allan Poe and Hawthorne, and
has been passed on through many typical and popular writers
to O. Henry1 and to others of our time. In substance, it has
added to the great characters of world-fiction a new and
strikingly romantic figure in the Red Indian of the Leatherstocking Tales. James Fenimore Cooper’s five romances—The
Pioneers, The Prairie, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder
and The Deerslayer—unite in giving an idealised portrait of
Chingachgook, the Red Man, as well as of the backwoodsman,
Hawkeye. The account of the daily life of Indian huntsmen and
the vivid descriptions of wood, lake, and prairie form a unique
and memorable picture of human conditions and natural
scenes which have long since passed away, and the portrait of
Chingachgook has made a deeper impression on the popular
imagination of Europe than any other feature of American
fiction.
Yet the most vital and valuable distinction of the literature
of the States lies in that spirit of idealism which, with so strong
and constant a power, shines in the pages of those writers
whom America honours as typical exponents of her genius.
The work—in prose or verse—of Emerson, Whitman,
Longfellow, Lanier, Whittier, and Hawthorne runs through
many moods; but if there be one noble trait which in each and
all stands out more boldly it is this idealistic attitude of mind.
The note which is heard in Emerson’s2 exalted love poem
beginning “Give all for love” and closing with the lines:

1 William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), better known by his pen name
O. Henry, was an American writer known primarily for his short
stories, though he also wrote poetry and non-fiction.
2 Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), who went by his middle name
Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister,
abolitionist.
80 The Genius of Ireland
“Though thou loved her as, thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive;
Heartily know, when half-gods go
The gods arrive”:
the note which is heard again in Whitman’s Pioneers:1
“All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied
world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize,
World of labour and the march,
Pioneers, O Pioneers!”
—which is heard in the more familiar lines of Excelsior, or of
the Battle Hymn of the Republic:2
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the
Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of
wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fatal lightning of His terrible swift
sword:
His truth is marching on.”
This is the distinctive note of the great American writers.
On this theme of practical idealism they have made their
highest contribution to English literature, and for this as well
as for their national uses they have made the language of the
English serve their purpose.
Here, then, are seven of the nations which have severally
signed as States Members of the League, with America in
addition to make the eighth—

Walter Whitman Jr. (1819–1892) was an American poet, essayist,
and journalist.
2 Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) was an American author and poet,
known for writing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as new lyrics
to the song “John Brown’s Body”.
The language of the Commonwealth 81
people of distant climes and different character, representing
more than one religion and one race and, indeed, united into
one whole by little else than this sole bond of a common
speech—all using for literary purposes the English language
and combining to make “English literature” the most
cosmopolitan of literary creations.
But the labours of the English language are by no means
finished when it has served the imaginative purposes of such
diverse lands. A hundred other needs, those, for example, of
the forum and the home, of the laboratory and the market, of
engineers and inventors and the heterogeneous army of all
manner of specialists, have also to be met. No such tax was
ever laid upon human speech in ancient times.
The great modern languages have only been able to meet
the exactions of a new environment by refining their
machinery and increasing their resources. They have enlarged
their vocabularies. They have invented new grammatical
forms. They have sought simplicity and accuracy of expression
by every means which intelligence can suggest. In all this
progress English has proved one of the most enterprising of
languages, and many scholars regard it to-day as being the
most advanced and efficient of European languages. No other
known tongue has in it so many words: the Oxford English
Dictionary—apart from any supplement—catalogues four
hundred thousand. In order to give the meaning, source, and
history of these, 178 miles of
82 The Genius of Ireland
type and half a million quotations are needed. The work fills
ten imperial quarto volumes, and cost its promoters more than
thirty-five thousand pounds. The story of these words is itself
a compendium of the development of the English people, and is
as picturesque as any historical romance. Here in this vast
vocabulary are represented remote lands and savage tribes,
strange and long-disused pursuits, events small and great,
national or personal, stretching continuously back across
millenniums to a date before the first forbears of the Anglo-
Saxon race entered the continent of Europe.
The study of its words—or even of a single word like, say,
‘ginger’, or ‘silk’, or ‘almanac’—will start an enquirer upon an
exploration as fascinating as that of an excavator who digs up a
buried city from which our civilisation sprang.
‘Calico’, for example, is taken from the name ‘Calicut’;
‘banana’ and ‘negro’ are African words; ‘bamboo’, ‘gong’,
‘cockatoo’ come from Malay; ‘chocolate’, ‘cocoa’, ‘tomato’, are
Mexican; ‘hurricane’, ‘hammock’, ‘maize’, ‘savannah’, are
Caribbean; ‘dervish’ is Persian; ‘magazine’, ‘coffee’, and ‘harem’,
Arabian. From Peru has travelled the word ‘guano’; from the
island of Haiti, ‘canoe’, ‘tobacco’, and ‘potato’. The Red Indians
have given us ‘hickory’, ‘tomahawk’, ‘moccasin’, and ‘opossum’.
Such words as these have been brought to us in modern times
by sailors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Other
words came to us overland from the East, like ‘alcohol’, ‘amber,’
The language of the Commonwealth 83
‘alkali’, ‘camphor’, ‘cipher’, ‘algebra’, from Arabia. The Greeks
borrowed ‘pearl’ and ‘sapphire’ from the Orient; the Orient
borrowed from the Greek ‘alchemy’ and ‘alembic’; and each
passed its borrowing on to us. The Crusades were the means of
bringing to the West scores of Eastern words—‘cotton’ and
‘sugar’ and ‘azure’ and ‘saffron’ and ‘damask’ (from Damascus)
and ‘lute’ and ‘mattress’ and so on. ‘Assassin’ meant originally
‘eaters of hashish’, and was applied by the Crusaders to Moslem
murderers who were sent out to kill the Christian leaders and
who used to intoxicate themselves with hashish before they
started on their errand. Far back in ages antedating the
Crusades the word ‘silk’ was brought from China, ‘ginger’ from
the Sanskrit, ‘pepper’ and ‘orange’ and the names ‘India’ and
‘Saracen’ from remote sources in the East.
Most of the events of English history have left their mark
upon the language. ‘Cannibal’ and ‘canoe’ were brought back
by Christopher Columbus; ‘tattoo’ and ‘kangaroo’ by Captain
Cook. The Reformation introduced ‘sincere’, ‘evangelical’,
‘Protestant’, ‘dunce’, ‘faction’, ‘precise’, ‘Puritan’, and gave new
meanings to ‘religion’, ‘godly’, and ‘piety’. To the Renaissance
we owe ‘Arcadian’, ‘enthusiasm’, ‘Hesperian’, ‘Elysian’ and
many other words drawn direct from the classics.
Those words which form the core and heart of the language
date back far beyond any known events of history. They go
back to a time before
84 The Genius of Ireland
the ancestors of the Germans and English and Dutch and
Scandinavians had separated and while they still spoke a
common language: back yet further to a still more distant age
when all the European peoples (Celts and Latins, Slays,
Teutons, and Greeks) lived together; back ultimately to a period
out-dating Babel, when the Hindus and Persians and the
peoples who now inhabit Europe shared a single primitive
language, and a single civilisation.
Those distant ancestors whom we have in common with so
many now sundered peoples, lived somewhat as the patriarchs
of the Old Testament lived, and had words to cover all they
knew of nature and human life: such words as ‘night’ and
‘star’, ‘dew’ and ‘snow’, ‘wind’ and ‘thunder’, ‘father’ and
‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ and ‘sister’, ‘hound’ and ‘ox’, and
‘wheel’ and ‘axle’, and ‘door’ and ‘thatch’. These primeval
words, and a few dozen more of the same simplicity, have come
down through all the unrecorded changes of time to this
present day and hour. They form still part of the common
vocabulary of many nations of the East and the West. And their
presence in the vernacular of peoples now divided bears
witness to the closeness of a kinship which for long lay
neglected and forgotten.
This continual expansion of our vocabulary has often
roused misgivings in the minds of scholars and of purists. It
has not always been so managed—especially in recent years—
as to be an unmixed
The language of the Commonwealth 85
advantage. Samuel Johnson once remarked that if we did not
stop borrowing Gallicisms, English would soon become a
dialect of French. We have continued to borrow even to this
day; but English remains English and retains its distinctive
force and directness. The influence of America, rather than
France, is at present under suspicion; yet the working day
vernacular will not be the poorer if we take to ourselves such
expressions as ‘fix up’, ‘back number’, ‘standpoint’, or ‘anyway’.
And it is, surely, no disservice to have preserved the good word
‘fall’ in the place of ‘autumn’, or to have brought into use such
words as ‘antagonise’ in the sense of ‘rouse the hostility of’, and
‘placate’.
Ireland (without exciting alarm or comment) has
produced—as some of Yeats’ and Lady Gregory’s writing will
prove—a distinct species of prose with an idiom of its own, and
has contributed more original words than any other colony or
than the United States. Most of these words are unimportant:
‘hubbub’, ‘bother’, ‘blarney’, ‘shamrock’, ‘boycott’, for instance.
But there is one of real interest and significance: ‘cross’. The
native word in England for cross was ‘rood’, which we
remember in Shakespeare’s “no, by the rood”, and in “roodbeam”. But the Irish Christians formed ‘cross’ from the Latin
crux, and, in their missionary work throughout Northern
England, introduced it into the northern dialects, from which,
in time, it made its way into literary use.
Errors in word-formation have, too, called forth

1 Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) was an English writer who made
lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist,
literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and lexicographer.
86 The Genius of Ireland
protests from those jealous for the purity of our English
speech. Macaulay objected to ‘constituency’ and to ‘influential’;
Coleridge and Carlyle to ‘talented’. ‘Cab’, ‘mob’, and ‘van’ were
once looked on as vulgar and slangy. A generation or so ago
loud protests were made against ‘reliable’ on the ground that it
should be ‘reli-on-able’, and against ‘telegram’, which ought to
be ‘tele-grapheme’. ‘Bus’ is not always looked on yet as
legitimate, and lately we have had crusades against
‘automobile’ and ‘scientist’. But usage rules and over-rules in
these matters, and the efforts of scholars to maintain the purity
and correctness of the language have availed little.
The additions made during the last century, and especially
during the last generation, have not been such as to rejoice the
heart of the poet or to lend themselves to the use of the stylist.
They have contributed nothing to the aesthetic quality of the
language, and have, in fact, rendered it less euphonious than
the “English undefiled” of an earlier day.
The number of these additions is enormous. Webster’s
original Dictionary, published in 1828, contained less than
eighty thousand words. The Oxford Dictionary has more than
five times as many, and since it began publication, in 1881,
hundreds, and even thousands of words have been added.
Some idea of this growth may be gathered from a statement
made by the Editor of the Supplement to the Dictionary:
The language of the Commonwealth 87
“It might be supposed that for the letter ‘A’ there was
little to add beyond aeroplane’ and ‘appendicitis’, and
perhaps ‘automobile’ and ‘aviation’; and the thirty pages
(already in type) of additions under the first letter of the
alphabet will, I think, surprise any who are not in the
habit of observing the almost daily accretions to the
English vocabulary. ‘A’ begins with ‘aasvogel’, which is
supported by references to Rider Haggard and Rudyard
Kipling, and ends with ‘azygospore’, botanical term now,
it is true, rarely used, but which must be recorded for
completeness’ sake.1 These are the alphabetical termini
of a multitude of common colloquialisms, of
technicalities that have become public currency, of the
labels of discoveries and inventions, of the names of
exotic plants and garments, of religious, political, and
social movements, of terms of sport and of the new
psychology and so on. There are, for instance: to put or
get it across, auto-suggestion, autopiano, auto-erotism,
autogiro, accent in art, to go all out, apperception, the
all-red line, Agapemone, apache, adenoids, aspidistra,
acrobatic, alpha rays, drug addict, air-bath, airworthy,
adurol, Ashkenazim, Anglicist, Anglophobiac, angels on
horseback, the spiritistic apport, and accelerometer.
And some words or meanings must be marked obsolete
even in this supplement of modernisms; as, for example,
the older sense of ‘aerodrome’, now expressed by
‘aeroplane’, and the original sense of ‘aeroplane’, which
was plane or wing; and ‘animatograph’, one

1 For the sake of completeness.
88 The Genius of Ireland
of the early names of the cinema, is as dead as Queen
Anne.”
The words quoted here may be taken as typical of the
accretions which to-day are growing about our English tongue.
Nobody could say they were pleasing to the ear or to the eye.
They are not suited for literary or aesthetic purposes but are
blankly utilitarian. They illustrate the undoubted fact (now
recognised more generally than ever before) that the
development of a language through the influence of
circumstance has its drawbacks and its dangers. The result
may be at times to mutilate and to debase rather than to
improve. If the intelligentsia could exercise more control than
in the past they might in a degree prevent deterioration and
increase effectiveness. Recent study of the processes of
thought and of speech has indeed suggested that science may
do more for a language than our forefathers knew or than
conservative scholars to-day are ready to admit. An organised
effort is actually on foot to create a new world-language and to
do more thoroughly by the cooperation of many minds what
was done in Esperanto by that genius Dr Zamenhof.1 If, it is
argued, the direction of scientific methods to a definite purpose
has accomplished so much in other realms, may it not do
likewise in the matter of language? May not knowledge and
constructive thought accomplish in this field something more
than chance and the hazards of national growth have ever yet
done? May not experts build a means of

1 L. L. Zamenhof (1859–1917) was the creator of Esperanto, the most
widely used constructed international auxiliary language.
The language of the Commonwealth 89
communication more simple, economical, and possibly more
beautiful than any of our inherited forms of speech? We have
learned that the general structure of the Indo-European
languages is superior to that of the Mongolian, and we are apt
to assume that no better design than this is within man’s reach.
But the structure of some of the Red Indian languages is now
reported as fundamentally different from both the Mongolian
and the Aryan type, and as being in some respects more
economical than either. Scholars may yet succeed in combining
these types or perhaps in devising a new type better than them
all. What happened with numerals in Europe many centuries
ago may now happen again—but this time with words. The
ancient Romans could not do long division and thought of it
much as we now think of the unpictureable ultimates of
contemporary physics and mathematics. It seemed to them
abstruse and intrinsically difficult. But when from the East the
Arabians brought to Europe the system of figures known to this
day by their name, it was discovered that the crux of the
problem lay not in the sum itself but in the inadequacy of the
tools for doing it. The calculation itself proved to be so easy
that school-children could master it. If the analogy hold good,
science may yet cap the evolution of human speech by creating
a synthetic language which will enable future generations,
relieved of the handicap of defective tools of thought, to pursue
90 The Genius of Ireland
with ease ideas and mental processes that seem to us to-day
most difficult.
But the growth of a language is one of those things which
have never yet been in the hands of the intelligentsia nor of the
few, which are not planned nor guided by any forethought, and
which draw to themselves little immediate notice or
observation. The appearance of a great classic like the
Authorised Version, or the Works of Shakespeare, will help to
stabilise the vocabulary: to this day there is a working
convention among poets that a word used by Shakespeare is
legitimate, not out of date. The power of an outstanding
author, like Shelley, may introduce and popularise a new word.
But language has no Lycurgus and no Napoleon. It is the
creation of the people. It develops; but nobody can quite tell
how. It increases its range and its efficiency, not by the
conscious direction of one man or of the many, but in
obedience to some active and controlling instinct.
When a development has taken shape, it then becomes an
object for the expert to scrutinise and judge; and, looking back,
one may clearly discover the means by which that
development was brought into being. All modern languages
are moving along the same path. They are, by degrees,
abandoning the baldness and complexity which mark primitive
speech for an ever greater fullness and simplicity. French,
German, Italian, Spanish and all the greater languages have
travelled far along this path, but none has travelled so far as
English. All modern
The language of the Commonwealth 91
languages, for example, are learning to express meaning by the
easy method of word-order rather than by that of changing the
form of words. But English has carried this further than any
other. We know how convenient it is to use a noun as an
adjective, as in ‘war expenditure’, ‘waste-paper basket’, ‘Covent-
Garden Market’, or ‘Covent-Garden Market salesman’; or to put
the sign of the possessive after a whole phrase, like ‘the King of
the Cannibal Islands’ ‘appetite’. But these are liberties which
only users of the English language can take. Grammatical
gender is a barbarous and irrational convention which
attributes sex to sexless objects and often the wrong gender to
living objects. It is still retained by all the other well-known
languages of Europe, and has been abandoned by English
alone. To a greater extent than any other nation we have
discarded many grammatical forms, have given up inflexions of
nouns and verbs, using (instead of cases and tenses)
prepositions and auxiliaries.
This modern recourse to prepositions may, of course, be
overdone. The Society for Pure English is on the watch against
the misuse of this, as against the misuse of other innovations.
Some time ago they published the following dialogue as a
warning:—
“Child: I want to be read to.
Nurse: What book do you want to be read to out of?
92 The Genius of Ireland
Child: Robinson Crusoe.
(Nurse goes out and returns with The Swiss Family
Robinson).
Child: What did you bring me that book to be read to
out of from for?”
An excellent reductio ad absurdum.1 But the device
caricatured is, nevertheless, one of the most ingenious and
effective improvements in our language. More and more we
succeed in expressing each separate thought by a separate
word, and so lead other nations in achieving that exactness of
language which is the product of a high civilisation.
Thus, in its progressiveness and adaptability, in its range,
its richness, and the perfection of its mechanism, English
stands second to none among the most highly developed of
modern languages.
Its unsurpassed, and perhaps unequalled, efficiency is the
result of ages of constant enrichment and refinement. Its lifehistory leads back through the great national and international
movements of modern and mediaeval times to a date beyond
the beginnings of Western civilisation. And though its
romantic story and its present power are too little recognised,
it stands clearly out pre-eminent and alone as being both the
most ancient heritage of the British people and also one of
their most consummate modern achievements.

1 Reductio ad absurdum (“reduction to the absurd”) is a mode of
argumentation that seeks to establish a contention by deriving an
absurdity from its denial, thus arguing that a thesis must be
accepted because its rejection would be untenable. It is a style of
reasoning that has been employed throughout the history of
mathematics and philosophy from classical antiquity onwards.
The beauty of Ireland
In such summer days as these1 a citizen is tempted to seek
freedom from the confinement of the streets, to leave their
noise and smoke, their fever and their fret and, in the fragrant
open spaces of the country, to enjoy again for a time those
natural blessings of which an ever-increasing proportion of
mankind have elected to deprive themselves. Here, amid rural
scenes, he is moved to those childlike but profound reflections
which from time immemorial nature has prompted in the heart
of man. He wonders at the strange and deathless power which,
though unseen itself, takes form in so prodigal a profusion of
beauty, finding a mirror in the least as in the greatest, in the
wild flower as in the mountain, and spreading like shapes of
loveliness over plains and seas and continents that lie out of
view the world around! He wonders at the charm of nature
which, though as ancient as the first man himself, still holds in
full measure its primeval freshness, and pours upon all for ever
its eternal magic and eternal youth. With relief he yields up his
heart to this all-involving and inviolate peace which summons
into

1 This Essay was published serially in summer time.
94 The Genius of Ireland
fellowship with itself everyone who contemplates a natural
scene, and reveals to his vision the serene omnipotence of an
ever-reigning law, an ever-moving life.
As he watches and reflects, another and less happy thought
invades his mind. How alien, how unworthy of an earth so
lovely and so majestic are the cities which man, with such
pride, has been building for himself! How dark, unwholesome,
and how pitiful seem these elaborate and labyrinthine prisons
in which man has chosen to manacle his spirit! As modernity
grows more intense, more sophisticated, the cities that men
rear grow further and further from all that is exquisite,
glorious, and uplifting in Nature. Has not city-building man
misused an opportunity? Cannot a city be a city without being
what these modern cities have become? Are these cities really
fit to be called cities—are they not tragic caricatures,
prodigious monuments of misapplied ingenuity and skill? In
order to be a centre of human activity, must a city have these
crowded and raging streets, these rattling tunnels, these dizzy
piles of masonry that shut out so much light and air and often
outsoar both the steeple and the stork? When a man goes back
into the city, must he leave utterly behind him this sweetness
and this peace, forget it, deny it, and pass into another and an
alien sphere sealed against all communion with Nature and her
eternities?
What fairer, happier, worthier cities might not man create
in this resourceful age, if only he were
The beauty of Ireland 95
not content to accept as wholly true the adage that God made
the country and manmade the town. The city has its own
peculiar genius, and the country has its own; but, though the
two are different, and in contrast, they are not in reality
(whatever man may have made of them) repugnant to each
other, nor in any degree alien. On the contrary, they are
complementary. For completeness the positive charge of
electricity needs the negative, the man needs the woman, the
West needs the East; and the city, likewise, needs its older
brother, the country. Both are necessary for the full well-being
of the human race. Both spring from God. He made one and
ordained the other. He presented man with the country as a
gift, and taught him how to create the city.
Of course, the two can be set in opposition and in direct
antagonism to each other. Men can make of a city what they
please, using the opportunity divinely, indifferently, or
infernally. The same book that pictures the ideal
consummation of human attainment under the symbol of a
heavenly city, likens hell also to a city in the gates of which
Satan and his chiefs take counsel and from which they lead
forth their legions in vain campaigns against the soldiers of the
Most High God. How valiantly has man gone to work to make
the city, in its appearance, its character, and in its influence on
the soul and spirit, as unlike the country as may be!
In those cities which are most typically and
96 The Genius of Ireland
boastfully modern this unlikeness and opposition is seen at its
extreme. The cleavage between city and country grows deeper;
the gulf grows wider. Man grows more and more sophisticated.
He moves further and further from Nature. And the ultramodern cities he likes to build reflect his attitude of mind. In
Ireland, we are comparatively fortunate. We do not here see
the modern city to disadvantage. Most of our large towns are
exceptionally well situated. They have the sea on one side, and
on the other mountains, loughs, and woods. What position
could be better than that of our capital, and how admirably it is
provided with parks and open spaces. We have no town yet
that could be called excessive in size. We have no town of
which we need say what a parish clergyman in England sadly
said some time ago: “For a poor man, the quickest road out of
Manchester is through the public house.” From the heart of our
largest city, a man, by tram or bicycle, may, with a little effort,
soon reach green fields or sandy shore.
But look at the chief centres of population in larger
countries. How long will one spend, even with the help of train
or motor-car, in getting out of, say, London or New York, or
Chicago? Extensive as are such modern cities, how
inconveniently and dangerously overcrowded are they, one
and all. Movement in them grows more difficult and more
slow, and yet their streets, as an English judge remarked the
other day, are “only for the quick
The beauty of Ireland 97
and the dead”. In the houses people are packed almost as
closely as on the streets. London is the financial centre of the
world and the focus of all the material sources of a vast Empire.
Yet in London there are six hundred and thirty thousand
persons living in slums where the poverty and squalor are
extreme. In these slums vermin share with human beings
many of the dwellings, and Mr Galsworthy has told the story of
how, in a certain tenement, hungry rats ate off the foot of a
living baby.1 The supply of light and air is, in a modern town,
inadequate; virtually no individual receives the proper
amount—not even among the well-to-do, let alone the poor. To
reduce the available supply yet further, there is added the
smoke-nuisance. Measurements have shown (the figures are
almost incredible) that in the English metropolis two hundred
and fifty tons of soot fall every year on every square mile. Yet
the atmosphere of London is comparatively clear. The deposit
in other centres is far greater—three, four, five hundred tons to
the square mile, and in one city of the midlands, Burslem, six
hundred tons. If, under such conditions, pulmonary complaints
are common, who will be surprised!
In spite of such disadvantages (which tend to increase
rather than to abate) people pour in larger and larger flocks
into the cities. The countryside is denuded of its most
energetic and ambitious children. From the rural parts of
Ireland young men and maidens drift away, some

1 John Galsworthy (1867–1933) was a novelist and a social reformer.
This “story” does not occur in his works and is a later hearsay in
Victorian/Edwardian “slum horror” literature.
98 The Genius of Ireland
going East, and some going West; but whether it be to Glasgow
or to Philadelphia, their goal is always a large city.
The movement of these young folk is typical of the modern
attitude of mind. The ultra-modern man has his back to the
country, his face to the city. He magnifies the city and regards
it as the focus of all that he covets as most desirable. The
country, to him, stands lower in the scale of evolution. He even
regards it as a brake upon the advancement of mankind.
“Human progress in historical time,” writes a scientist, “has
been the progress of cities dragging a reluctant countryside in
their wake.”
A civilisation which ignores the life and outlook of the
country and reflects distinctively the traits and conditions of
the town must needs be partial and one-sided; and when the
towns are so far from satisfactory as ours, the impoverishment
of civilisation is the greater and the more marked. The true
civilisation towards which by the grace of Heaven we are
moving will not be based on this manufactured antagonism,
but on a natural alliance. It will recognise that for the spirit,
the mind and the body of man the country has its uses as well
as the city. It will not desire to exalt one at the expense of the
other, but letting each develop towards perfection in its own
way, will draw its own character from the wealth of both.
This consummation, though it may now be hidden from our
eyes, surely is an obvious ideal.
The beauty of Ireland 99
some day—perhaps not a distant day—it will be accomplished.
This magnification of all that is urban and belittlement of all
that is rural cannot continue much longer. The disadvantages
of the modern city tend to increase, and are found less and less
tolerable. The modern city-builder has overreached himself.
The by-products and the direct products of an ever-intensified
congestion grow more numerous and more difficult to cope
with. When one sees a city stretching north, south, east, and
west further than the eye can reach, towering far into the
polluted air, and delving deep into the over-loaded earth; when
one reads of subsidence of ancient structures, of bursting
mains that pour forth floods of water or of flaming gas, one
wonders whether it was man only that made such a town, and
whether the devil too had not a hand in the work.
Meantime the advantages of country life grow, year by year,
greater. Deprivations are removed. Comforts, pleasures,
refinements increase. Thanks to the inventor and the engineer,
the village, the farm, the country house are no longer isolated.
Loneliness and monotony have been dispelled. Locomotion
has become swift and cheap. Culture is decentralised.
Whatever civilisation has to offer is now more evenly
distributed throughout the length and breadth of the land than
at any past time in history. The newspaper, the motor, and the
radio have revolutionised country life, and, while
100 The Genius of Ireland
taking away little, have added new wealth to its old wealth.
However artificial man may become, and however far selfglorification may lead him from the natural blessings which are
his birth right, the blunt and simple facts of life will, sooner or
later, assert themselves. How diverse, rich, and indispensable
to happiness are the gifts and graces of the countryside! The
whole of man’s being, material and spiritual, draws sustenance
from it. Man, as we have heard, is a parasite on the cow.
Civilisation is built upon the farm. The millennium is not only
to break the sword, but to beat it into a ploughshare. Science
may develop synthetic food, and mankind elect to feast on
tabloids; but there will be no getting away from the human
need of fruit and grains and stock. The farmer is the most
necessary of citizens, and will remain so. We would do ill
without bankers and lawyers, musicians and poets; but that
these may exist, we must first have someone to sow and to
reap, to herd and to shear.
The country is the foster-mother of the city, and in the
countryside many of the chief sources of man’s normal and
rightful happiness are still to be sought. Here man takes his fill
of pure light and clean air and natural exercise. Here he has for
his neighbours animals and green growing things, enjoys the
fragrance of field and garden, and the sound of streams and
rustling leaves, and can look out over open spaces that rest his
eyes and soothe his mind. To be deprived of these simple
blessings—as those con-
The beauty of Ireland 101
fined in dungeons are—has always been considered a signal
misfortune. Yet in the modern great city this deprivation is a
condition from which many escape but little, and from which
multitudes of the poor never escape at all.
Man’s love for the country has not been acquired like his
love for the city, but is immemorial and inborn. He has looked
upon the country through the ages as his natural home, his
refuge and his temple. Here more than elsewhere he has found
solace, content and inspiration. Why should I give my Sabine
farm in exchange for wealth and its cares? asked a great poet
long ago; and he ascribed his distinction in Aeolian song to the
peace and beauty of “the streams that flow by fruitful Tivoli
and the close foliage of the groves.” How many who were
poets, and who were not poets, have, since the time of Horace,
felt and repeated the same sentiment, and how many great
works in verse, and other arts as well, have owed their being to
the same love for Nature.
For Nature is man’s treasure-house and playground. More
than that, she is not only kind, but kin to him. She is a sistercreature made like him, out of the self-same dust, and subject
to like laws. Her wealth is boundless, and she withholds
nothing from him. Rich in all manner of delights, she has
pleasures for all his senses. Her storehouse of odours is
boundless, and all its wealth is bestowed prodigally in endless
variety. She hangs on every side about him meadowsweet or
honey-
102 The Genius of Ireland
suckle, over his head lilac and lime-blossom, at his feet violet,
primrose, mignonette. Every degree of odour is hers to be
lavished away, from the strong scent of syringa,1 almost too
powerful to endure indoors, to the faint perfume of clover and
wild thyme. Now she distils her odours from a single bush or a
single bloom, now pours them forth from tracts of gorse or
fields of new-mown hay in rivers that flood the air with
sweetness. And when at night many flowers close and sleep,
she has her flowers of the dark that cast out upon the still air
the perfume they withheld during the day.
For the eye Nature has delights as many and as various. To
walk anywhere among the trees is to have spread before one in
endless profusion a feast of shape and of colour. Some of the
leaves are as broad as a man’s hand, others almost as fine as a
lady’s needle. All are green, but sometimes the green (as in the
early beech) verges on yellow, and sometimes on purple, as in
the pine; and even the surface of the leaves is never in two
trees quite the same, but shows every kind of gradation, from
the deepest grain to the utmost smoothness, from dullness to
the brilliance of a mirror shining in the sun. Some leaves are
hung so numerous and so close that (as on the chestnut) they
seem to hide the boughs almost altogether; others seem now to
hide, now to reveal, or like the birch-leaves, by their airiness
and their contrasting hues, set off the long lines of the tree on
which they grow. And when the wind passes through them
they break

1 Syringa is a genus of 12 currently recognized species of flowering
woody plants in the olive family, or Oleaceae, called lilacs.
The beauty of Ireland 103
—now here, now there, now all at once—into a tumultuous
dance which, though to the last degree unruly and capricious, is
always rhythmical and always a dance of joy.
The sound of the wind, in breeze or in a storm, has its own
power to lull or to exhilarate, and joins with those other
innumerable sounds of sea or stream or flying thing to give
variety and completeness to the beauty of the world. The bees
that hum among the heather, the lark in the high air, the
mountain torrent or the great waves that thunder on the cliffs,
all have their message to the human heart as well as to the ear.
Our greatest Nature poet attributed to Nature’s music an
exquisite and special influence—an influence even greater than
that of her other forms of beauty—when he told how Nature
took Lucy to be her own child and ordained that—
“The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willow bend;
Nor shall she fail to see,
Even in the motions of the storm,
Grace that shall mould the maiden’s form
By silent sympathy.”
He closed with the final and highest gift of Nature to the
child—
“The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.”1

1 Verse nos 4 & 5 [no. 5 has been corrected] of William
Wordsworth’s poem “Three years She Grew”.
104 The Genius of Ireland
When Nature lays by all her instruments of music, and
when all her choir animate and inanimate are hushed, then
does the pause, the cessation of sound, seem to uplift the soul,
and the stillness of the open sea, the silence of the starry sky
breathe upon man the sense of infinitude and peace.
Nor is there in the simple love for Nature and in the study of
her ways any disillusion or satiety. Here familiarity increases
delight and understanding. The wonders of the natural world
are inexhaustible. If Nature were not a growing, ever-changing
thing, but stationary, like a painted ship upon a painted ocean,
even then the art of man could no more imitate the exquisite
detail and delicacy of her minute workmanship than it can rival
the vastness of the heavens which she stretches above his
head. But Nature is always moving, never at rest, and none
appreciates this so well as he who accepts her invitation to
observe and study the life of her and her children.
The lowly world of bird and insect, of tree and flower, is
never eventless, never unable to repay attention. Every
season, every month, there is something special to be seen and
noted, and every day is a link in that moving chain of growth
and decay. The return of the migrants—chiff-chaff, corncrake,
cuckoo; the springing of snowdrop, crocus, daffodil; the first
unfolding of the leaves; the flowering of lilac and gorse, of
hawthorn and chestnut; or the ripening of the wild grasses in
The beauty of Ireland 105
later summer—these are part of that gorgeous procession
which the Nature-lover knows so well and watches with a
delight that is always fresh and always satisfying. To the
pleasures of realisation he is able to add those of memory. He
is on the look-out for something—a bird, a song, a blossom—
which he expects to appear, and recalls from the past some
scene or date to give a contrast or a likeness to the present.
Those who live habitually with Nature, who work with her
and become her partners in the production of grain or fruit or
flowers, are able to draw near to her and to attain an intimacy
and sense of kinship which is specially their own. Not only for
the appetites and the nerves of her fellow-labourers, but even
for their minds, she has simple gifts to bestow. The very
handling of clay, the digging in the raw earth, is soothing,
magnetic. Country people who earn their living in the fields
and from babyhood to age, like their fathers before them, have
a practical knowledge of the ways of bird and beast and the
things that grow on the farm or in the forest; these people are
able to speak of natural objects with a directness and a force
that more sophisticated beings lose. Wordsworth felt this, and
for this reason deliberately chose the peasant-class for the
themes of his poetry. In Burns,1 or occasionally in a rural poet
of Ireland like Padraic Colum,2 or Campbell3 in his younger
days, something of this simple and realistic talk

1 Robert Burns (1759–1796) was a Scottish poet and lyricist.
2 Padraic Colum (1881–1972) was an Irish poet, novelist, dramatist,
biographer, playwright, children’s author and collector of folklore.
3 Joseph Campbell (1879–1944) was an Irish poet and lyricist.
106 The Genius of Ireland
passes over into the printed page. But as a rule and almost
entirely it belongs to the son of the soil.
This love of man for Nature (so rich is she in beauty) is
infinitely various, and responds to a thousand differing
charms—some evident, some subtle, some purely sensuous,
some in part ideal. So many are her aspects that a single
human mind could hardly appreciate them all; nor, if it did,
would it delight in them all equally. The pleasure that men
take in scenery reflects one’s mood of temperament, or (it may
be) the taste and character not only of oneself, but of one’s
Nation, or one’s Age. Some like best luxuriant growth and a
quantity of exquisite detail; others prefer wide empty spaces;
others wild mountains and rocky shores. Some must needs
have a lake, a fountain, or a stream to make a scene quite
satisfying to them—perhaps Wordsworth was such a one, and
certainly Theocritus; some (like Spenser) must have birds to
sing, or floating clouds. But such preferences are not merely
capricious and personal. Sensitiveness to the beauty of the
country is—like Nature herself—a living, growing thing. It
may be encouraged, strengthened, refined; it can, too, be
numbed or stunted. The history of our Western literature
shows, during the last two or three thousand years, a slowly
changing and deepening appreciation of Nature’s manifold and
inexhaustible attractions.
Mr Mackail, in the preface to his Anthology,1 says that it was
in the third century before Christ that the

1 John William Mackail (1859–1945) was a Scottish academic of
Oxford University and reformer of the British education system.
Select Epigrams From The Greek Anthology (1890).
The beauty of Ireland 107
charm of the country was for the first time fully realised. Many
years before this, Aeschylus had put into a single unmatched
phrase all the beauty of the quiet sea shining in the sunlight,
and had painted in language of befitting power the titanic
world of rocks and Alpine heights, of storms and lightning and
echoing thunder. Sophocles had sung of woods so thick the
sun-rays could not enter, and of green coverts where the trilling
nightingale hid among the dark-brown ivy. Aristophanes, with
an accuracy which Ruskin noted, had described the clouds as
seen on the hillside “ coming softly through the hollows and the
thickets, trailing aslant in multitudes.” But passages such as
these were rare, and were introduced, not for the sake of
Nature’s own loveliness, but in reference—through some
sympathy or contrast—to human emotion or to a dramatic
situation. It was not till a later day that men grew really
conscious, as we moderns are, of the charm of the country.
Writing of the third and second century BCE, Mr Mackail says:
“In revulsion from the immense accumulation of material
wealth in this period, a certain refined simplicity was then the
ideal of the best minds, as it was afterwards in the early
Roman. Empire, as it is in our own day …. The life of gardens
became a passion, and hardly less so the life of the opener air,
of the hill, and meadow, of the shepherd or hunter, the farmer
and the fisherman. Sick of cities, the imagination turned to an
Arcadia that henceforth was to fill all poetry with the music of
108 The Genius of Ireland
its names.” This fresh original delight in the countryside has
entered directly into our modern literature through the idylls
of Theocritus, which deeply influenced the art of the pastoral
poets of the Renaissance and of Tennyson. He loved to paint a
landscape seen under the noonday heat as his shepherds
reclined in the shade of oak tree or of pine where the firneedles strewed the ground or where the ferns made a “couch
more soft than sleep”. Or he would paint the beginnings of the
hillside where the olive-gardens end and the short grass of the
heights alternates with thorns and aromatic plants, and
runnels flow from the fountains of the Nereids, or wells fringed
with maidenhair bubble from the rocks.
The Roman’s love for the country has not, perhaps, so much
of sheer aesthetic delight in her loveliness as had the Greek’s.
But it has a distinctive quality in its homeliness—in its
devotion to the country as man’s most fitting and most
charming dwelling-place. A great Latin critic said of his
countrymen that their taste in Nature was prevailingly for
“pleasantness”. The aspect of Nature which finds best
expression in their poetry is the soft sweet freshness of Italy,
with its fruitful orchards and its cosy farms. Horace wrote of
Vergil that it was the country-loving Muses which granted him
tenderness and grace. Often, said Tennyson of him, all the
charm of all the Muses flowers in a lonely word. And to the
same purpose Professor W. Y. Sellar1 has written: “By a

1 William Young Sellar (1825–1890) was a Scottish classical scholar
and Professor of Humanity at the University of Edinburgh.
The beauty of Ireland 109
few simple words Vergil calls up before our minds the genial
luxuriance of spring, the freshness of early morning, the rest of
all living things in the burning heat of noon, the stillness of
evening, the gentle imperceptible motions of Nature in the
shooting up of the young alder tree, and the gradual colouring
of the grapes on the sunny hillsides.” Vergil’s Georgics is,
indeed, one of the most delightful poems in any language. But
only the consummate art and the intimate nature-knowledge of
the poet made it so. It is a practical and didactic work—a
veritable Farmer’s Guide.
The contrast between the Greek and the Roman author in
his attitude towards Nature is one of emphasis rather than of
kind, yet a difference is discernible and marked. The Greek
wrote sparingly but enthusiastically of the beauty and the
sweetness of the country. To this sensuous delight the Roman
added a completer knowledge and a more domestic affection.
Here, at the beginning of our Western culture, the Roman and
the Greek mark out for us the two paths by which man
approaches Nature. The two paths intertwine, and lead
towards the same goal, but they remain distinct (the aesthetic
and the practical—the emotional and the intellectual), and
along these two paths literature and the men who made it have
travelled ever since.
The first man was a gardener, and his first acquaintance
with country life was gained in a garden. Since that time, his
descendants, East and
110 The Genius of Ireland
West, have delighted in a garden, and have bestowed increasing
care upon its design and its culture. Never in the past was the
taste for gardening so widely diffused, nor shared by so many
people in all lands as it is to-day. Yet never were such
multitudes denied the opportunity of indulging their desire. In
great cities, space is so valuable that it must be either flagged
or roofed over, and he who would domesticate the distant
country must be content with a window-box or a flower-pot—
or, perhaps, a piece of wet flannel sown with mustard and
cress. But for those happy and grateful country-dwellers on
whom fortune has bestowed the space, the light, the air, and
the other means for making and tending a garden, what endless
play is here for physical, emotional, and mental energy! Some
have leave and liberty to plan and to lay out as they desire the
space available, using to the best advantage the special shape
and contour of the ground, and choosing the trees, bushes,
hedges that suit best the soil or aspect of the place. All have if
not these larger opportunities yet still the perennial delight of
selecting, year by year, amongst a thousand flowers, the flowers
of their own particular choice, and of varying as they will the
harmony and the contrast of those colours which lavish Nature
puts at their disposal. The care, the labour, and the devotion
expended on such tasks increases the enjoyment and the
reward, super-adding a moral to an aesthetic pleasure.
The beauty of Ireland 111
As in a garden, so at large in the countryside, knowledge
opens up new avenues of satisfaction, and effort keeps one’s
enjoyment fresh. What we cannot learn of Nature’s ways by
experience or observation we can now learn readily at secondhand from specialists. Never before were so many or such
readable and charming books written on birds, beasts, fishes,
flowers, trees, and all the animate and inanimate objects that
throng the external world about us. Never did mankind
display so real a sympathy or so wide and exact an
understanding of all lower forms of life as is displayed in our
time.
One reads these books, and finds that wherever one turns
in this wonderland of the external world there are new regions
to explore, new forms of life, new ways of growth, activity and
decay, that capture our interest and arouse our sympathy.
Everywhere about us our humble fellow-creatures move and
have their being, unimaginably diverse in their habits and
appearance, yet subject to much the same physical laws as
ourselves, and sufficiently akin to us to arouse our sympathy
and, at times, our affection. How blank, dull, narrow, and
obtuse are man’s indifference and callousness towards his
lesser brothers! How egotistic and barbaric his not infrequent
antipathy and unkindness! To peruse Selborne or Walden, or
the writings of Hudson, Burroughs, or even the more coldly
scientific works of Darwin, is to pass from chamber to chamber
in a vast palace of knowledge more richly
112 The Genius of Ireland
furnished, more full of attraction to the mind and to the
emotions than the fabled miracles of any genie. Wherever we
look we find life—life—life; and if we follow the lead of Fabre,
Maeterlinck, or others like them, we learn that not only the
lovelier objects, such as butterflies and flowers, but those too
which have no outward charm at all but even the reverse, have,
in their measure, a real appeal to the interest and the care of
man.
We all have something of St. Francis’ love for birds—his
“flowers of the air”. We can understand readily that the study
of bird-life should have attracted many, and that charming
books on this subject are numerous. It is easy too to desire a
closer acquaintance with stars, trees, and the like. It is not at
all so easy, on the other hand, nor so usual, to desire to make
friends of creeping, crawling things of the insect tribe, from
which our flesh seems to shrink. Yet a naturalist like Fabre will
teach us our mistake, will quicken our sympathy with spiders,
weevils, glow-worms, beetles, and all manner of insects, and
thus will amazingly widen the field of our interest, of our
pleasure and, if we give him his way, even of our affection and
our love.
The delight of man in natural beauty reached its zenith in
the nineteenth century, and such became its power at that time
that it not only brought back to men all and more than all their
old and partly forgotten love of Nature, but it also discovered
for them vistas of unguessed beauty and opened
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up avenues to new and deeper enjoyment. Wordsworth had, as
Coleridge said of him, to create the taste by which he could fitly
be judged. He and Shelley educated the English public to see
again in Nature all that Shakespeare and Horace and Aeschylus
had seen, and to discover in her something also which from
them was in great part or wholly concealed. Shelley said it was
the function of a poet, not merely to extol (as Horace might
have done) the sensuous beauty of the world, but rather to
reveal a beauty which to him was plain but from others was
hidden. Since his and Words-worth’s time men have been able
to find in the contemplation of Nature a pleasure yet more
precious and elevated than that which the poets of ancient
Greece conveyed. Endowed by the spirit of the age with a
higher sensitiveness, they have been able to discern in Nature
something which does not meet the eye or the ear, and behind
the veil of a corruptible loveliness, to catch the movement of a
spiritual glory which does not fade nor change.
Such a view of Nature (carried from the East) may possibly
lie behind the superstitious belief in Dryads, Fauns, and Sprites
of stream and tree. Certainly this deeper consciousness was
possessed by the seer-poet Vergil. But for us it has its literary
origin in the verse of Palestine rather than in that of Greece and
Rome. The Hebrew never looked on Nature as self-subsisting.
He always
114 The Genius of Ireland
thought of her as in relation to an overruling spiritual power.
The thunder and the whirlwind, drought and flood, plague
and famine, and all natural phenomena are the result of the
immediate action of Him—
“Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of His
hand,
And meted out Heaven with the span,
And comprehended the dust in a measure, And weighed
the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance;
It is He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth,
And the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers;
That stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and
spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.”—Isaiah
40:12–22.
The argument of the Book of Job is based on the majesty of
the laws by which God rules His universe, and the wonders of
creation are there expressed with a splendour which has never
been surpassed.
Wordsworth and Shelley—like Blake before them—
regarded Nature with a like reverence. She spoke to them of
spiritual life, and led their thoughts to a world of a higher
reality than this. But they did not sing of her merely as
subordinate to an over-ruling Creator. They thought of her
rather as animated by some Presence which imparted to them
a breath of its own being, of its own consciousness.
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“I have felt,” says Wordsworth,
“A Presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
Anti the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”—Tintern Abbey.
And again—
“The Being that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom He loves.”
He felt that the objects in the landscape enjoyed the air they
breathed—
“The moon doth, with delight,
Look round her when the heavens are bare.”
Nature thus could give solace and companionship to men—
could even impart a power of vision clearer than that attained
through erudition.
“One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.”
Shelley likewise felt that this natural realm about us was
the embodiment of an unseen Spirit of Joy, and that the
countless forms and forces of Nature
116 The Genius of Ireland
were like strings of a great world-harp on which the
Archangels played songs of triumph and hymeneal chants more
exquisite far than any they could draw from the sad heart of
man. Indeed, it seemed to him as though all the elements and
parts of this material world—the earth, the air, the cloud, the
bird, the flower—were moving mirrors on which the eternal
principle of Beauty cast its rays, and that their very life was
instinct with an exuberant and imperishable joy.
Nor is this attitude towards Nature merely a fancy or an
overwrought personification. It is rather the result of his
spiritual and exquisitely vivid sense of the unity of all
existence. Behind, and through, and within all this changing
world of the senses, he saw One changeless and eternal Being,
“whose smile kindled the universe”, and whose joy reached
down to the lowliest of its creatures.
When one observes that Nature has this power of
awakening in the heart of a spiritually-minded man the
deepest religious emotion, when she can stir at times thoughts
too deep for tears, or, opening the vision of eternal love, can
touch the soul to ecstasy, one understands how Nature and the
countryside were so loved by the seers and poets of the Bible,
by the Precursor and by the Builder of our Christian faith.
Abraham, with all his wealth, left the city and went forth to
wander among the hills of Palestine, and the plains of Egypt.
Moses was born on the reedy banks of the Nile, carried out the
chief part of his life-work in
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the wilderness, and was buried in the lonely recesses of the
mountains. David, the sweet singer of Israel, was a shepherd,
and loved to tell of the splendours of Nature and the
beneficence of the Creator Who made it for man’s sake. In the
desert, far from man, the Baptist received the training which
made him the herald of a new spiritual order, the forerunner of
the Messiah. Jesus Himself was country born and country bred.
His teaching breathes of the open air, the open road, of ripening
corn, of mountain and of sea. His images are taken from the
occupation of the fanner, the vine-dresser, the fisherman, from
the sunset or the veering wind, from the beauty of the wild
flower or the happiness of the birds. Those who were able to
understand His meaning, or to appreciate the Truth while it
walked among them, were not the men of the forum nor the
dwellers in a great city. The boasted civilisation and culture of
the day ignored Him. Only the toilers of the land and of the sea,
the shepherd and the tiller of the soil, the village-girl and the
busy cottage-wife, only these accepted His message and
believed in Him. Among that chosen band of twelve who have
to-day an unique honour among mankind are many drawn
from the rude life of the countryside, and not one drawn from
the metropolis. The city knew Him not. Sophisticated, selfcomplacent, blind, it scorned Him, persecuted Him, arraigned
Him, condemned Him, and at last crucified Him.
118 The Genius of Ireland
Is it not a fact of history that the teaching of Christ was -
first given and first accepted in the country, and that ever since
the country has been beloved of seers, of poets, and of all
spiritual minds, and has been more especially the place for
religious meditation and attainment? It would not be difficult
to argue that the exaltation of the city at the expense of the
country has involved the sacrifice of what is simple and the
enthronement of what is superficial, that to the country belong
intuition and receptiveness of mind, and that in it inspiration
has been born and the loftiest genius quickened.
How easily might one maintain that the country has been
the dawning place of vision and spiritual knowledge, that in the
countryside those constructive movements which mould and
re-mould civilisation, and that (in fact) in the higher forms of
progress the country has been dragging a reluctant city in its
wake!
But such a conclusion would be unprofitable. Town and
country are not in reality struggling together for mastery; they
are not in competition. In Ireland the discord (so strident in
other lands) has not yet become acute; and if we take warning
in time it may never become so. It may even be our destiny to
show how true a concord may be wrought between them! For
their existing alienation is artificial, and their supposed rivalry
a mere illusion. The adage that God made the one and
The beauty of Ireland 119
man the other is the most deceitful of truisms. For their
manifest and everlasting differences are ordained for the
enrichment of human life. Their potential harmony is fixed in
the nature of things. Indeed, it has been realised already on a
small scale. Who has not seen many a farmhouse or village,
nestling among the trees or on the flank of mountain, that
added a pleasant touch of contrast and completeness, and gave
a sense of home and happy human activity to a natural scene?
Will not man someday conceive, and the co-operation of many
arts and crafts carry out a like harmony on a far larger scale—a
scale as large as that of a metropolis? Such an ideal has already
glimmered into the minds of men, but the master thought
which alone will ensure its realisation lies in the Bible yet
unused. Those allegories of the heavenly state which open and
which close the Book show that the Archetypal City is as
beautiful as Eden. A town, as well as a garden, may be a
Paradise. Both are made to be a dwelling-place for man, and
both in equal measure are fit to receive the glory of the divine
presence. But in these allegories there lies another truth which
has its meaning for art as much as for religion. The Author and
Designer of Eden and the New Jerusalem alike is God. And
when at length civilisation produces an authentic and veritable
city—a city worthy of the name—not only will it prove to be an
harmonic of the country, in complete accord with the
surrounding landscape;
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but they who design and build it will have gone to school to the
Original and Supreme Architect and will have learned how to
turn the principles of His consummate workmanship to the
everyday uses of mankind.

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