# Genius of Ireland and Other Essays

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> 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
> The beauty of Ireland                    113
> 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.
> The beauty of Ireland                   115
> “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
> The beauty of Ireland                   117
> 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;
> 120                   The Genius of Ireland
> 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.
>
> — *Genius of Ireland and Other Essays (Used by permission of the curator)*