think, all legends but
theirs in wild beauty, and in our land, as in theirs, there is no river or
mountain that is not associated in the memory with some event or legend;
while political reasons have made love of country, as I think, even
greater among us than among them. I would have our writers and craftsmen
of many kinds master this history and these legends, and fix upon their
memory the appearance of mountains and rivers and make it all visible
again in their arts, so that Irishmen, even though they had gone thousands
of miles away, would still be in their own country. Whether they chose for
the subject the carrying off of the Brown Bull, or the coming of Patrick,
or the political struggle of later times, the other world comes so much
into it all that their love of it would move in their hands also, and as
much, it may be, as in the hands of the Greek craftsmen. In other words, I
would have Ireland recreate the ancient arts, the arts as they were
understood in Judaea, in India, in Scandinavia, in Greece and Rome, in
every ancient land; as they were understood when they moved a whole people
and not a few people who have grown up in a leisured class and made this
understanding their business.

I think that my reader[2] will have agreed with most that I have said up
till now, for we all hope for arts like these. I think indeed I first
learned to hope for them myself in Young Ireland Societies, or in reading
the essays of Davis. An Englishman, with his belief in progress, with his
instinctive preference for the cosmopolitan literature of the last
century, may think arts like these parochial, but they are the arts we
have begun the making of.

I will not, however, have all my readers with me when I say that no
writer, no artist, even though he choose Brian Boroihme or S. Patrick for
his subject, should try to make his work popular. Once he has chosen a
subject he must think of nothing but giving it such an expression as will
please himself. As Walt Whitman has written--

'The oration is to the orator, the acting is to the actor and actress,
not to the audience:
And no man understands any greatness or goodness but his own or the
indication of his own.'

He must make his work a part of his own journey towards beauty and truth.
He must picture saint or hero, or hillside, as he sees them, not as he is
expected to see them, and he must comfort himself, when others cry out
against what he has seen, by reme