most forces men to
battle with each other for the means of existence? I know well that no
political mechanics, nothing which is an economic device only, will of
themselves be able to affect the transfiguration of society and bring
it under the dominion of the spirit. For that, a far higher quality of
thought and action than is here indicated is necessary. The economist
can provide the daily bread, but that bread of the coming day which
Christ wished his followers to aspire to must come otherwise. That
should be the labor of the poets, artists, musicians, and of the heroic
and aristocratic characters who provide by their life an image to
which life can be modeled. Therefore I beseech audience not only of the
churches, but of the poets, writers, and thinkers of Ireland for their
aid in this labor. They alone can create in wide commonalty the ideals
which can dominate society. It is the work of the artist to create for
us images of desirable life, to manifest to us the ideal humanity, and
to prefigure that vaster entity which I have called the national being.
I said in an earlier page that part of the failure of Ireland must be
laid to the poets who had dropped out of the divine procession and sang
a solitary song; to the writers who had turned from contemplating
the great to the portrayal of the little in human nature. I know how
difficult it is to constrain the spirit, and how futile it is to ask
artists or poets to create what they are not inspired to create. But
we can ask all men--artists, poets, litterateurs, and scientists--to be
citizens, and if they realize imaginatively the spiritual conception of
the State, we may assume that this imaginative realization of the
State will influence the labors of the mind, and what is done will,
consciously or unconsciously, have reference to that collective being
which must dominate society more and more, which will dominate it as a
tyranny if we fail in our labors, or liberate and make more majestical
the spirit of man if we imagine rightly. All greatness is brought
about by a conspiracy of the imagination and the will. Our literature
certainly manifests beauty, but not greatness or majesty, for majesty
only arises where there is an orchestration of humanity by some mighty
conductor; and as a people we shall never manifest the highest qualities
in literature or life until we are under the dominion of one, at least,
of the great fundamental ideas which have been the inspiration of