oks on alien subjects, which have been
worn away like pebbles on the shore, would do the same, they, too, might
find themselves. Even the landscape-painter, who paints a place that he
loves, and that no other man has painted, soon discovers that no style
learned in the studios is wholly fitted to his purpose. And I cannot but
believe that if our painters of Highland cattle and moss-covered barns
were to care enough for their country to care for what makes it different
from other countries, they would discover, when struggling, it may be, to
paint the exact grey of the bare Burren Hills, and of a sudden it may be,
a new style, their very selves. And I admit, though in this I am moved by
some touch of fanaticism, that even when I see an old subject written of
or painted in a new way, I am yet jealous for Cuchulain, and for Baile,
and Aillinn, and for those grey mountains that still are lacking their
celebration. I sometimes reproach myself because I cannot admire Mr.
Hughes' beautiful, piteous _Orpheus and Eurydice_ with an unquestioning
mind. I say with my lips, 'The Spirit made it, for it is beautiful, and
the Spirit bloweth where it listeth,' but I say in my heart, 'Aengus and
Etain would have served his turn;' but one cannot, perhaps, love or
believe at all if one does not love or believe a little too much.

And I do not think with unbroken pleasure of our scholars who write about
German writers or about periods of Greek history. I always remember that
they could give us a number of little books which would tell, each book
for some one country, or some one parish, the verses, or the stories, or
the events that would make every lake or mountain a man can see from his
own door an excitement in his imagination. I would have some of them leave
that work of theirs which will never lack hands, and begin to dig in
Ireland, the garden of the future, understanding that here in Ireland the
spirit of man may be about to wed the soil of the world.

Art and scholarship like these I have described would give Ireland more
than they received from her, for they would make love of the unseen more
unshakable, more ready to plunge deep into the abyss, and they would make
love of country more fruitful in the mind, more a part of daily life. One
would know an Irishman into whose life they had come--and in a few
generations they would come into the life of all, rich and poor--by
something that set him apart among men. He himself would unders