ck or Columbkil, Oisin or Fion, in
Prometheus' stead; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patric or Ben Bulben?
Have not all races had their first unity from a polytheism, that marries
them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the
uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories
current among the educated classes, rediscovering for the work's sake what
I have called "the applied arts of literature," the association of
literature, that is, with music, speech, and dance; and at last, it might
be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and
poet, craftsman and day-labourer would accept a common design? Perhaps
even these images, once created and associated with river and mountain,
might move of themselves and with some powerful, even turbulent life, like
those painted horses that trampled the rice fields of Japan.

XXIV

I used to tell the few friends to whom I could speak these secret thoughts
that I would make the attempt in Ireland but fail, for our civilization,
its elements multiplying by division like certain low forms of life, was
all-powerful; but in reality I had the wildest hopes. To-day I add to that
first conviction, to that first desire for unity, this other conviction,
long a mere opinion vaguely or intermittently apprehended: Nations, races,
and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images,
symbolical or evocative of the state of mind, which is of all states of
mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation;
because only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without
despair, rouses the will to full intensity.

A powerful class by terror, rhetoric, and organized sentimentality, may
drive their people to war but the day draws near when they cannot keep
them there; and how shall they face the pure nations of the East when the
day comes to do it with but equal arms? I had seen Ireland in my own time
turn from the bragging rhetoric and gregarious humour of O'Connell's
generation and school, and offer herself to the solitary and proud Parnell
as to her anti-self, buskin following hard on sock, and I had begun to
hope, or to half hope, that we might be the first in Europe to seek unity
as deliberately as it had been sought by theologian, poet, sculptor,
architect, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Doubtless we must
seek it differently, no longer considering it convenient to epitom