ar poets have not touched
her heart, her poetry when it comes will be distinguished and lonely."
O'Leary had once said to me, "neither Ireland nor England knows the good
from the bad in any art, but Ireland unlike England does not hate the good
when it is pointed out to her." I began to plot and scheme how one might
seal with the right image the soft wax before it began to harden. I had
noticed that Irish Catholics among whom had been born so many political
martyrs had not the good taste, the household courtesy and decency of the
Protestant Ireland I had known, and yet Protestant Ireland had begun to
think of nothing but getting on. I thought we might bring the halves
together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in
the memory, and yet had been freed from provincialism by an exacting
criticism, an European pose. It was because of this dream when we returned
to London that I made with pastels upon the ceiling of my study a map of
Sligo decorated like some old map with a ship and an elaborate compass and
wrote, a little against the grain, a couple of Sligo stories, one a vague
echo of "Grettir the Strong," which my father had read to me in childhood,
and finished with better heart my "Wanderings of Oisin," and began after
ridding my style of romantic colour "The Countess Cathleen." I saw that
our people did not read, but that they listened patiently (how many long
political speeches have they listened to?) and saw that there must be a
theatre, and if I could find the right musicians, words set to music. I
foresaw a great deal that we are doing now, though never the appetite of
our new middle-class for "realism," nor the greatness of the opposition,
nor the slowness of the victory. Davis had done so much in the four years
of his working life, I had thought all needful pamphleteering and
speech-making could be run through at the day's end, not knowing that
taste is so much more deeply rooted than opinion that even if one had
school and newspaper to help, one could scarcely stir it under two
generations. Then too, bred up in a studio where all things are discussed
and where I had even been told that indiscretion and energy are
inseparable, I knew nothing of the conservatism or of the suspicions of
piety. I had planned a drama like that of Greece, and romances that were,
it may be, half Hugo and half de la Motte Fouque, to bring into the town
the memories and visions of the country and to spread everywhere