as never
cause so bad that it has not been defended by good men for what seemed
to them good reasons.' His friend had a burning and brooding imagination
that divided men not according to their achievement but by their degrees
of sincerity, and by their mastery over a straight and, to my thought,
too obvious logic that seemed to him essential to sincerity. Neither man
had an understanding of style or of literature in the right sense of the
word, though both were great readers, but because their imagination
could come to rest no place short of greatness, they hoped, John O'Leary
especially, for an Irish literature of the greatest kind. When Lionel
Johnson and Katharine Tynan (as she was then), and I, myself, began to
reform Irish poetry, we thought to keep unbroken the thread running up
to Grattan which John O'Leary had put into our hands, though it might be
our business to explore new paths of the labyrinth. We sought to make a
more subtle rhythm, a more organic form, than that of the older Irish
poets who wrote in English, but always to remember certain ardent ideas
and high attitudes of mind which were the nation itself, to our belief,
so far as a nation can be summarised in the intellect. If you had asked
an ancient Spartan what made Sparta Sparta, he would have answered, The
Laws of Lycurgus, and many Englishmen look back to Bunyan and to Milton
as we did to Grattan and to Mitchell. Lionel Johnson was able to take up
into his Art one portion of this tradition that I could not, for he had
a gift of speaking political thought in fine verse that I have always
lacked. I, on the other hand, was more preoccupied with Ireland (for he
had other interests), and took from Allingham and Walsh their passion
for country spiritism, and from Ferguson his pleasure in heroic legend,
and while seeing all in the light of European literature found my
symbols of expression in Ireland. One thought often possessed me very
strongly. New from the influence, mainly the personal influence, of
William Morris, I dreamed of enlarging Irish hate, till we had come to
hate with a passion of patriotism what Morris and Ruskin hated. Mitchell
had already all but poured some of that hate drawn from Carlyle, who had
it of an earlier and, as I think, cruder sort, into the blood of
Ireland, and were we not a poor nation with ancient courage, unblackened
fields and a barbarous gift of self-sacrifice? Ruskin and Morris had
spent themselves in vain because they