Imaginations and Reveries | Page 5

mountain-top of our own, which may be
in the future the Mecca to which many worshippers will turn. To
remain where we are as a people, indifferent to literature, to art, to
ideas, wasting the precious gift of public spirit we possess so
abundantly in the sordid political rivalries, without practical or ideal
ends, is to justify those who have chosen the other path, and followed
another star than ours. I do not wish any one to infer from this a
contempt for those who, for the last hundred years, have guided public
opinion in Ireland. If they failed in one respect, it was out of a
passionate sympathy for wrongs of which many are memories, thanks
to them, and to them is due the creation of a force which may be turned
in other directions, not without a memory of those pale sleepers to
whom we may turn in thought, placing--
A kiss of fire on the dim brow of failure, A crown upon her uncrowned
head.
1899

STANDISH O'GRADY
In this age we read so much that we lay too great a burden on the
imagination. It is unable to create images which are the spiritual
equivalent of the words on the printed page, and reading becomes for
too many an occupation of the eye rather than of the mind. How rarely,
out of the multitude of volumes a man reads in his lifetime, can he
remember where or when he read any particular book, or with any
vividness recall the mood it evoked in him. When I close my eyes, and
brood in memory over the books which most profoundly affected me, I

find none excited my imagination more than Standish O'Grady's epical
narrative of Cuculain. Whitman said of his Leaves of Grass:
"Camerado, this is no book. Who touches this touches a man," and
O'Grady might have boasted of his Bardic History of Ireland, written
with his whole being, that there was more than a man in it, there was
the soul of a people, its noblest and most exalted life symbolized in the
story of one heroic character.
With reference to Ireland, I was at the time I read like many others who
were bereaved of the history of their race. I was as a man who, through
some accident, had lost memory of his past, Who could recall no more
than a few months of new life, and could not say to what songs his
cradle had been rocked, what mother had nursed him, who were the
playmates of childhood, or by what woods and streams he had
wandered. When I read O'Grady I was as such a man who suddenly
feels ancient memories rushing at him, and knows he was born in a
royal house, that he had mixed with the mighty of heaven and earth and
had the very noblest for his companions. It was the memory of race
which rose up within me as I read, and I felt exalted as one who learns
he is among the children of kings. That is what O'Grady did for me and
for others who were my contemporaries, and I welcome the reprints, of
his tales in the hope that he will go on magically recreating for
generations yet unborn the ancestral life of their race in Ireland. For
many centuries the youth of Ireland as it grew up was made aware of
the life of bygone ages, and there were always some who remade
themselves in the heroic mould before they passed on. The sentiment
engendered by the Gaelic literature was an arcane presence, though
unconscious of itself, in those who for the past hundred years had
learned another speech. In O'Grady's writings the submerged river of
national culture rose up again, a shining torrent, and I realized as I
bathed in that stream, that the greatest spiritual evil one nation could
inflict on another was to cut off from it the story of the national soul.
For not all music can be played upon any instrument, and human nature
for most of us is like a harp on which can be rendered the music written
for the harp but nor that written for the violin. The harp strings quiver
for the harp-player alone, and he who can utter his passion through the
violin is silent before an unfamiliar instrument. That is why the Irish
have rarely been deeply stirred by English literature, though it is one of

the great literatures of the world. Our history was different and the
evolutionary product was a peculiarity of character, and the strings of
our being vibrate most in ecstasy when the music evokes ancestral
moods or embodies emotions akin to these. I am not going to argue the
comparative worth of the Gaelic and English tradition.