the
history and legends of mediaeval Ireland and to fill Ireland once more
with sacred places. I even planned out, and in some detail, (for those
mysterious lights and voices were never long forgotten,) another
Samothrace, a new Eleusis. I believed, so great was my faith, or so
deceptive the precedent of Young Ireland, that I should find men of genius
everywhere. I had not the conviction, as it may seem, that a people can be
compelled to write what one pleases, for that could but end in rhetoric or
in some educational movement but believed I had divined the soul of the
people and had set my shoes upon a road that would be crowded presently.

XXX

Someone at the Young Ireland Society gave me a newspaper that I might read
some article or letter. I began idly reading verses describing the shore
of Ireland as seen by a returning, dying emigrant. My eyes filled with
tears and yet I knew the verses were badly written--vague, abstract words
such as one finds in a newspaper. I looked at the end and saw the name of
some political exile who had died but a few days after his return to
Ireland. They had moved me because they contained the actual thoughts of a
man at a passionate moment of life, and when I met my father I was full of
the discovery. We should write out our own thoughts in as nearly as
possible the language we thought them in, as though in a letter to an
intimate friend. We should not disguise them in any way; for our lives
give them force as the lives of people in plays give force to their words.
Personal utterance, which had almost ceased in English literature, could
be as fine an escape from rhetoric and abstraction as drama itself. My
father was indignant, almost violent, and would hear of nothing but drama.
"Personal utterance was only egotism." I knew it was not, but as yet did
not know how to explain the difference. I tried from that on to write out
of my emotions exactly as they came to me in life, not changing them to
make them more beautiful, and to rid my syntax of all inversions and my
vocabulary of literary words, and that made it hard to write at all. It
meant rejecting the words or the constructions that had been used over and
over because they flow most easily into rhyme and measure. Then, too, how
hard it was to be sincere, not to make the emotion more beautiful and more
violent or the circumstance more romantic. "If I can be sincere and make
my language natural, and without becoming discursive, li