Imaginations and Reveries | Page 3

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