Imaginations and Reveries | Page 2

seems too often to tell
rather of exhausted vitality than of the ecstasy of a new life. However
much, too, their art refines itself, choosing, ever rarer and more
exquisite forms of expression, underneath it all an intuition seems to

disclose only the old wolfish lust, hiding itself beneath the golden
fleece of the spirit. It is not the spirit breaking through corruption, but
the life of the senses longing to shine with the light which makes
saintly things beautiful: and it would put on the jeweled raiment of
seraphim, retaining still a heart of clay smitten through and through
with the unappeasable desire of the flesh: so Rossetti's women, who
have around them all the circumstance of poetry and romantic beauty,
seem through their sucked-in lips to express a thirst which could be
allayed in no spiritual paradise. Art in the decadence in our time might
be symbolized as a crimson figure undergoing a dark crucifixion: the
hosts of light are overcoming it, and it is dying filled with anguish and
despair at a beauty it cannot attain. All these strange emotions have a
profound psychological interest. I do not think because a spiritual flaw
can be urged against a certain phase of life that it should remain
unexpressed. The psychic maladies which attack all races when their
civilization grows old must needs be understood to be dealt with: and
they cannot be understood without being revealed in literature or art.
But in Ireland we are not yet sick with this sickness. As psychology it
concerns only the curious. Our intellectual life is in suspense. The
national spirit seems to be making a last effort to assert itself in
literature and to overcome cosmopolitan influences and the art of
writers who express a purely personal feeling. It is true that nationality
may express itself in many ways: it may not be at all evident in the
subject matter, but it may be very evident in the sentiment. But a
literature loosely held together by some emotional characteristics
common to the writers, however great it may be, does not fulfill the
purpose of a literature or art created by a number of men who have a
common aim in building up an overwhelming ideal--who create, in a
sense, a soul for their country, and who have a common pride in the
achievement of all. The world has not seen this since the great antique
civilizations of Egypt and Greece passed away. We cannot imagine an
Egyptian artist daring enough to set aside the majestic attainment of
many centuries. An Egyptian boy as he grew up must have been
overawed by the national tradition, and have felt that it was not to be
set aside: it was beyond his individual rivalry. The soul of Egypt
incarnated in him, and, using its immemorial language and its
mysterious lines, the efforts of the least workman who decorated a

tomb seem to have been directed by the same hand that carved the
Sphinx. This adherence to a traditional form is true of Greece, though
to a less extent. Some little Tanagra terra-cottas might have been
fashioned by Phidias, and in literature Ulysses and Agamemnon were
not the heroes of one epic, but appeared endlessly in epic and drama.
Since the Greek civilization no European nation has had an intellectual
literature which was genuinely national. In the present century, leaving
aside a few things in outward circumstance, there is little to distinguish
the work of the best English writers or artists from that of their
Continental contemporaries. Milliais, Leighton, Rossetti, Turner--how
different from each other, and yet they might have painted the same
pictures as born Frenchmen, and it would not have excited any great
surprise as a marked divergence from French art. The cosmopolitan
spirit, whether for good or for evil, is hastily obliterating all distinctions.
What is distinctly national in these countries is less valuable than the
immense wealth of universal ideas; and the writers who use this wealth
appeal to no narrow circle: the foremost writers, the Tolstois and Ibsens,
are conscious of addressing a European audience.
If nationality is to justify itself in the face of all this, it must be because
the country which preserves its individuality does so with the profound
conviction that its peculiar ideal is nobler than that which the
cosmopolitan spirit suggests--that this ideal is so precious to it that its
loss would be as the loss of the soul, and that it could not be realized
without an aloofness from, if not an actual indifference to, the ideals
which are spreading so rapidly over Europe. Is it possible for any
nationality to make such a defense of its isolation? If not, let us read
Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoi, men so much greater than any we can show,
try