mbering that no two men are alike, and
that there is no 'excellent beauty without strangeness.' In this matter he
must be without humility. He may, indeed, doubt the reality of his vision
if men do not quarrel with him as they did with the Apostles, for there is
only one perfection and only one search for perfection, and it sometimes
has the form of the religious life and sometimes of the artistic life; and
I do not think these lives differ in their wages, for 'The end of art is
peace,' and out of the one as out of the other comes the cry: _Sero te
amavi, Pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova! Sero te amavi!_

The Catholic Church is not the less the Church of the people because the
Mass is spoken in Latin, and art is not less the art of the people
because it does not always speak in the language they are used to. I once
heard my friend Mr. Ellis say, speaking at a celebration in honour of a
writer whose fame had not come till long after his death, 'It is not the
business of a poet to make himself understood, but it is the business of
the people to understand him. That they are at last compelled to do so is
the proof of his authority.' And certainly if you take from art its
martyrdom, you will take from it its glory. It might still reflect the
passing modes of mankind, but it would cease to reflect the face of God.

If our craftsmen were to choose their subjects under what we may call, if
we understand faith to mean that belief in a spiritual life which is not
confined to one Church, the persuasion of their faith and their country,
they would soon discover that although their choice seemed arbitrary at
first, it had obeyed what was deepest in them. I could not now write of
any other country but Ireland, for my style has been shaped by the
subjects I have worked on, but there was a time when my imagination seemed
unwilling, when I found myself writing of some Irish event in words that
would have better fitted some Italian or Eastern event, for my style had
been shaped in that general stream of European literature which has come
from so many watersheds, and it was slowly, very slowly, that I made a new
style. It was years before I could rid myself of Shelley's Italian light,
but now I think my style is myself. I might have found more of Ireland if
I had written in Irish, but I have found a little, and I have found all
myself. I am persuaded that if the Irishmen who are painting conventional
pictures or writing conventional bo