Books: Imaginations and Reveries
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(A.E.) George William Russell >> Imaginations and Reveries
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17 Produced by Jake Jaqua
IMAGINATIONS AND REVERIES
--by AE [George William Russell]
PREFACE
The publishers of this book thought that a volume of articles and
tales written by me during the past twenty-five years would have
interest enough to justify publication, and asked me to make a
selection. I have not been able to make up a book with only one
theme. My temperament would only allow me to be happy when I was
working at art. My conscience would not let me have peace unless
I worked with other Irishmen at the reconstruction of Irish life.
Birth in Ireland gave me a bias towards Irish nationalism, while
the spirit which inhabits my body told me the politics of eternity
ought to be my only concern, and that all other races equally with
my own were children of the Great King. To aid in movements one
must be orthodox. My desire to help prompted agreement, while my
intellect was always heretical. I had written out of every mood,
and could not retain any mood for long. If I advocated a national
ideal I felt immediately I could make an equal plea for more
cosmopolitan and universal ideas. I have observed my intuitions
wherever they drew me, for I felt that the Light within us knows
better than any other the need and the way. So I have no book on
one theme, and the only unity which connects what is here written
is a common origin. The reader must try a balance between the
contraries which exist here as they exist in us all, as they
exist and are harmonized in that multitudinous meditation which
is the universe.--A.E.
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
To this edition four essays have been added. Two of these, "Thoughts
for a Convention" and "The New Nation," made some little stir when
they first appeared. Ireland since then has passed away from the
mood which made it possible to consider the reconciliations suggested,
and has set its heart on more fundamental changes, and these essays
have only interest as marking a moment of transition in national
life before it took a new road leading to another destiny.
CONTENTS
NATIONALITY OR COSMOPOLITANISM
STANDISH O'GRADY
THE DRAMATIC TREATMENT OF LEGEND
THE CHARACTER OF HEROIC LITERATURE
A POET OF SHADOWS
THE BOYHOOD OF A POET
THE POETRY OF JAMES STEPHENS
A NOTE ON SEUMAS O'SULLIVAN
ART AND LITERATURE
AN ARTIST OF GARLIC IRELAND
TWO IRISH ARTISTS
"ULSTER"
IDEALS OF THE NEW RURAL SOCIETY
THOUGHTS FOR A CONVENTION
THE NEW NATION
THE SPIRITUAL CONFLICT
ON AN IRISH HILL
RELIGION AND LOVE
THE RENEWAL OF YOUTH
THE HERO IN MAN
THE MEDITATION OF ANANDA
THE MIDNIGHT BLOSSOM
THE CHILDHOOD OF APOLLO
THE MASK OF APOLLO
The CAVE OF LILITH
THE STORY OF A STAR
THE DREAM OF ANGUS OGE
DEIRDRE
NATIONALITY OR COSMOPOLITANISM
As one of those who believe that the literature of a country is
for ever creating a new soul among its people, I do not like to
think that literature with us must follow an inexorable law of
sequence, and gain a spiritual character only after the bodily
passions have grown weary and exhausted themselves. In the essay
called The Autumn of the Body, Mr. Yeats seems to indicate such a
sequence. Yet, whether the art of any of the writers of the
decadence does really express spiritual things is open to doubt.
The mood in which their work is conceived, a distempered emotion,
through which no new joy quivers, 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 to absorb
their universal wisdom, and no longer confine ourselves to local
traditions. But nationality was never so strong in Ireland as at
the present time. It is beginning to be felt, less as a political
movement than as a spiritual force. It seems to be gathering itself
together, joining men who were hostile before, in a new intellectual
fellowship: and if all these could unite on fundamentals, it would
be possible in a generation to create a national Ideal in Ireland,
or rather to let that spirit incarnate fully which began among the
ancient peoples, which has haunted the hearts and whispered a dim
revelation of itself through the lips of the bards and peasant
story tellers.
Every Irishman forms some vague ideal of his country, born from
his reading of history, or from contemporary politics, or from
imaginative intuition; and this Ireland in the mind it is, not
the actual Ireland, which kindles his enthusiasm. For this he
works and makes sacrifices; but because it has never had any
philosophical definition or a supremely beautiful statement in
literature which gathered all aspirations about it, the ideal
remains vague. This passionate love cannot explain itself; it
cannot make another understand its devotion. To reveal Ireland
in clear and beautiful light, to create the Ireland in the heart,
is the province of a national literature. Other arts would add
to this ideal hereafter, and social life and politics must in the
end be in harmony. We are yet before our dawn, in a period
comparable to Egypt before the first of her solemn temples
constrained its people to an equal mystery, or to Greece before
the first perfect statue had fixed an ideal of beauty which mothers
dreamed of to mould their yet unborn children. We can see, however,
as the ideal of Ireland grows from mind to mind, it tends to assume
the character of a sacred land. The Dark Rosaleen of Mangan
expresses an almost religious adoration, and to a later writer it
seems to be nigher to the spiritual beauty than other lands:
And still the thoughts of Ireland brood
Upon her holy quietude.
The faculty of abstracting from the land their eyes beheld another
Ireland through which they wandered in dream, has always been a
characteristic of the Celtic poets. This inner Ireland which the
visionary eye saw was the Tirnanoge, the Country of Immortal Youth,
for they peopled it only with the young and beautiful. It was
the Land of the Living Heart, a tender name which showed that it
had become dearer than the heart of woman, and overtopped all
other dreams as the last hope of the spirit, the bosom where it
would rest after it had passed from the fading shelter of the world.
And sure a strange and beautiful land this Ireland is, with a
mystic beauty which closes the eyes of the body as in sleep, and
opens the eyes of the spirit as in dreams and never a poet has
lain on our hillsides but gentle, stately figures, with hearts
shining like the sun, move through his dreams, over radiant grasses,
in an enchanted world of their own: and it has become alive through
every haunted rath and wood and mountain and lake, so that we can
hardly think of it otherwise than as the shadow of the thought of God.
The last Irish poet who has appeared shows the spiritual qualities
of the first, when he writes of the gray rivers in their "enraptured"
wanderings, and when he sees in the jeweled bow which arches
the heavens--
The Lord's seven spirits that shine through the rain
This mystical view of nature, peculiar to but one English poet,
Wordsworth is a national characteristic; and much in the creation
of the Ireland in the mind is already done, and only needs retelling
by the new writers. More important, however, for the literature
we are imagining as an offset to the cosmopolitan ideal would be
the creation of heroic figures, types, whether legendary or taken
from history, and enlarged to epic proportions by our writers, who
would use them in common, as Cuculain, Fionn, Ossian, and Oscar
were used by the generations of poets who have left us the bardic
history of Ireland, wherein one would write of the battle fury of
a hero, and another of a moment when his fire would turn to
gentleness, and another of his love for some beauty of his time,
and yet another tell how the rivalry of a spiritual beauty made
him tire of love; and so from iteration and persistent dwelling
on a few heroes, their imaginative images found echoes in life,
and other heroes arose, continuing their tradition of chivalry.
That such types are of the highest importance, and have the most
ennobling 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 mountain-top of our own,
which may be in the future the Mecca to which many worshippers will
turn. To remain where we are as a people, indifferent to literature,
to art, to ideas, wasting the precious gift of public spirit we
possess so abundantly in the sordid political rivalries, without
practical or ideal ends, is to justify those who have chosen the
other path, and followed another star than ours. I do not wish
any one to infer from this a contempt for those who, for the last
hundred years, have guided public opinion in Ireland. If they
failed in one respect, it was out of a passionate sympathy for
wrongs of which many are memories, thanks to them, and to them
is due the creation of a force which may be turned in other
directions, not without a memory of those pale sleepers to whom
we may turn in thought, placing--
A kiss of fire on the dim brow of failure,
A crown upon her uncrowned head.
1899
STANDISH O'GRADY
In this age we read so much that we lay too great a burden on the
imagination. It is unable to create images which are the spiritual
equivalent of the words on the printed page, and reading becomes
for too many an occupation of the eye rather than of the mind. How
rarely, out of the multitude of volumes a man reads in his lifetime,
can he remember where or when he read any particular book, or with
any vividness recall the mood it evoked in him. When I close my
eyes, and brood in memory over the books which most profoundly
affected me, I find none excited my imagination more than Standish
O'Grady's epical narrative of Cuculain. Whitman said of his Leaves
of Grass: "Camerado, this is no book. Who touches this touches
a man," and O'Grady might have boasted of his Bardic History of
Ireland, written with his whole being, that there was more than a
man in it, there was the soul of a people, its noblest and most
exalted life symbolized in the story of one heroic character.
With reference to Ireland, I was at the time I read like many others
who were bereaved of the history of their race. I was as a man who,
through some accident, had lost memory of his past, Who could recall
no more than a few months of new life, and could not say to what
songs his cradle had been rocked, what mother had nursed him, who
were the playmates of childhood, or by what woods and streams he
had wandered. When I read O'Grady I was as such a man who suddenly
feels ancient memories rushing at him, and knows he was born in a
royal house, that he had mixed with the mighty of heaven and earth
and had the very noblest for his companions. It was the memory
of race which rose up within me as I read, and I felt exalted as
one who learns he is among the children of kings. That is what
O'Grady did for me and for others who were my contemporaries, and
I welcome the reprints, of his tales in the hope that he will go
on magically recreating for generations yet unborn the ancestral
life of their race in Ireland. For many centuries the youth of
Ireland as it grew up was made aware of the life of bygone ages,
and there were always some who remade themselves in the heroic mould
before they passed on. The sentiment engendered by the Gaelic
literature was an arcane presence, though unconscious of itself,
in those who for the past hundred years had learned another speech.
In O'Grady's writings the submerged river of national culture rose
up again, a shining torrent, and I realized as I bathed in that
stream, that the greatest spiritual evil one nation could inflict
on another was to cut off from it the story of the national soul.
For not all music can be played upon any instrument, and human
nature for most of us is like a harp on which can be rendered the
music written for the harp but nor that written for the violin.
The harp strings quiver for the harp-player alone, and he who can
utter his passion through the violin is silent before an unfamiliar
instrument. That is why the Irish have rarely been deeply stirred
by English literature, though it is one of the great literatures
of the world. Our history was different and the evolutionary
product was a peculiarity of character, and the strings of our
being vibrate most in ecstasy when the music evokes ancestral moods
or embodies emotions akin to these. I am not going to argue the
comparative worth of the Gaelic and English tradition. All that
I can say is that the traditions of our own country move us more
than the traditions of any other. Even if there was not essential
greatness in them we would love them for the same reasons which
bring back so many exiles to revisit the haunts of childhood. But
there was essential greatness in that neglected bardic literature
which O'Grady was the first to reveal in a noble manner. He had
the spirit of an ancient epic poet. He is a comrade of Homer,
his birth delayed in time perhaps that he might renew for a
sophisticated people the elemental simplicity and hardihood men
had when the world was young and manhood was prized more than any
of its parts, more than thought or beauty or feeling. He has
created for us, or rediscovered, one figure which looms in the
imagination as a high comrade of Hector, Achilles, Ulysses, Rama
or Yudisthira, as great in spirit as any. Who could extol enough
his Cuculain, that incarnation of Gaelic chivalry, the fire and
gentleness, the beauty and heroic ardour or the imaginative splendor
of the episodes in his retelling of the ancient story. There are
writers who bewitch you by a magical use of words whose lines
glitter like jewels, whose effects are gained by an elaborate art
and who deal with the subtlest emotions. Others again are simple
as an Egyptian image, and yet are more impressive, and you remember
them less for the sentence than for a grandiose effect. They are
not so much concerned with the art of words as with the creation
of great images informed with magnificence of spirit. They are
not lesser artists but greater, for there is a greater art in the
simplification of form in the statue of Memnon than there is in
the intricate detail of a bronze by Benvenuto Cellini. Standish
O'Grady had in his best moments that epic wholeness and simplicity,
and the figure of Cuculain amid his companions of the Red Branch
which he discovered and refashioned for us is, I think, the greatest
spiritual gift any Irishman for centuries has given to Ireland.
I know it will be said that this is a scientific age, the world
is so full of necessitous life that it is waste of time for young
Ireland to brood upon tales of legendary heroes, who fought with
enchanters, who harnessed wild fairy horses to magic chariots and
who talked with the ancient gods, and that it would be much better
for youth to be scientific and practical. Do not believe it, dear
Irish boy, dear Irish girl, I know as well as any the economic
needs of our people. They must not be overlooked, but keep still
in your hearts some desires which might enter Paradise. Keep in
your souls some images of magnificence so that hereafter the halls
of heaven and the divine folk may not seem altogether alien to
the spirit. These legends have passed the test of generations
for century after century, and they were treasured and passed on
to those who followed, and that was because there was something
in them akin to the immortal spirit. Humanity cannot carry with
it through time the memory of all its deeds and imaginations, and
it burdens itself only in a new era with what was highest among
the imaginations of the ancestors. What is essentially noble is
never out of date. The figures carved by Pheidias for the Parthenon
still shine by the side of the greatest modern sculpture. There
has been no evolution of the human form to a greater beauty than
the ancient Greek saw, and the forms they carved are not strange
to us, and if this is true of the outward form it is true of the
indwelling spirit. What is essentially noble is contemporary with
all that is splendid today, and until the mass of men are equal
in spirit the great figures of the past will affect us less as
memories than as prophecies of the Golden Age to which youth is
ever hurrying in its heart.
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