terature is a greatness springing out of the human
heart. Though we fall short today of the bodily stature of the giants of
the prime, the spirit still remains and can express an equal greatness.
I can well understand how a man of our own day, by the enlargement of
his spirit, and the passion and sincerity of his speech, could express
the greatness of the past. The drama in its mystical beginning was the
vehicle through which divine ideas, which are beyond the sphere even of
heroic life and passion, were expressed; and if the later Irish writers
fail of such greatness, it is not for that reason that the soul of
Ireland will depart. I can hardly believe Mr. O'Grady to be serious when
he fears that many forbidden subjects will be themes for dramatic art,
that Maeve with her many husbands will walk the stage, and the lusts of
an earlier age be revived to please the lusts of today. The danger of
art is not in its subjects, but in the attitude of the artist's mind.
The nobler influences of art arise, not because heroes are the theme,
but because of noble treatment and the intuition which perceives the
inflexible working out of great moral laws.

The abysses of human nature may well be sounded if the plummet be
dropped by a spirit from the heights. The lust which leads on to death
may be a terrible thing to contemplate, but in the event there is
consolation; and the eye of faith can see even in the very exultation
of corruption how God the Regenerator is working His will, leading man
onward to his destiny of inevitable beauty. Mr. O'Grady in his youth
had the epic imagination, and I think few people realize how great and
heroic that inspiration was; but the net that is spread for Leviathan
will not capture all the creatures of the deep, and neither epic nor
romance will manifest fully the power of the mythical ancestors of
the modern Gael who now seek incarnation anew in the minds of their
children. Men too often forget, in this age of printed books, that
literature is, after all, only an ineffectual record of speech. The
literary man has gone into strange byways through long contemplation of
books, and he writes with elaboration what could never be spoken, and he
loses that power of the bards on whom tongues of fire had descended, who
were masters of the magic of utterance, whose thoughts were not meant
to be silently absorbed from the lifeless page. For there never can be,
while man lives in a body, a greater means of expres