Imaginations and Reveries | Page 4

influence on a country, cannot be denied. It was this idea led
Whitman to exploit himself as the typical American. He felt that what
he termed a "stock personality" was needed to elevate and harmonize
the incongruous human elements in the States. English literature has
always been more sympathetic with actual beings than with ideal types,
and cannot help us much. A man who loves Dickens, for example, may
grow to have a great tolerance for the grotesque characters which are
the outcome of the social order in England, but he will not be assisted
in the conception of a higher humanity: and this is true of very many
English writers who lack a fundamental philosophy, and are content to
take man as he seems to be for the moment, rather than as the pilgrim
of eternity-- as one who is flesh today but who may hereafter grow
divine, and who may shine at last like the stars of the morning,
triumphant among the sons of God.
Mr. Standish O'Grady, in his notable epic of Cuculain, was in our time
the first to treat the Celtic tradition worthily. He has contributed one
hero who awaits equal comrades, if indeed the tales of the Red Branch
do not absorb the thoughts of many imaginative writers, and Cuculain

remain the typical hero of the Gael, becoming to every boy who reads
the story a revelation of what his own spirit is.
I know John Eglinton, one of our most thoughtful writers, our first
cosmopolitan, thinks that "these ancient legends refuse to be taken out
of their old environment." But I believe that the tales which have been
preserved for a hundred generations in the heart of the people must
have had their power, because they had in them a core of eternal truth.
Truth is not a thing of today or tomorrow. Beauty, heroism, and
spirituality do not change like fashion, being the reflection of an
unchanging spirit. The face of faces which looks at us through so many
shifting shadows has never altered the form of its perfection since the
face of man, made after its image, first looked back on its original:
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride, Troy passed away in
one high funeral gleam, And Usna's children died.
These dreams, antiquities, traditions, once actual, living, and historical,
have passed from the world of sense into the world of memory and
thought: and time, it seems to me, has not taken away from their power,
nor made them more remote from sympathy, but has rather purified
them by removing them from earth to heaven: from things which the
eye can see and the ear can hear they have become what the heart
ponders over, and are so much nearer, more familiar, more suitable for
literary use than the day they were begotten. They have now the
character of symbol, and, as symbol, are more potent than history. They
have crept through veil after veil of the manifold nature of man; and
now each dream, heroism, or beauty has laid itself nigh the divine
power it represents, the suggestion of which made it first beloved: and
they are ready for the use of the spirit, a speech of which every word
has a significance beyond itself, and Deirdre is, like Helen, a symbol of
eternal beauty; and Cuculain represents as much as Prometheus the
heroic spirit, the redeemer in man.
In so far as these ancient traditions live in the memory of man, they are
contemporary to us as much as electrical science: for the images which
time brings now to our senses, before they can be used in literature,
have to enter into exactly the same world of human imagination as the
Celtic traditions live in. And their fitness for literary use is not there
determined by their freshness but by their power of suggestion. Modern
literature, where it is really literature and not book-making, grows more

subjective year after year, and the mind has a wider range over time
than the physical nature has. Many things live in it--empires which
have never crumbled, beauty which has never perished, love whose
fires have never waned: and, in this formidable competition for use in
the artist's mind, today stands only its chance with a thousand days. To
question the historical accuracy of the use of such memories is not a
matter which can be rightly raised. The question is--do they express
lofty things to the soul? If they do they have justified themselves.
I have written at some length on the two paths which lie before us, for
we have arrived at a parting of ways. One path leads, and has already
led many Irishmen, to obliterate all nationality from their work. The
other path winds upward to a