rse which owed its
position to its moral or political worth, roused a resentment which even
I find it hard to imagine to-day, and our verse was attacked in return,
and not for anything peculiar to ourselves, but for all that it had in
common with the accepted poetry of the world, and most of all for its
lack of rhetoric, its refusal to preach a doctrine or to consider the
seeming necessities of a cause. Now, after so many years, I can see how
natural, how poetical, even, an opposition was, that shows what large
numbers could not call up certain high feelings without accustomed
verses, or believe we had not wronged the feeling when we did but attack
the verses. I have just read in a newspaper that Sir Charles Gavan Duffy
recited upon his death bed his favourite poem, one of the worst of the
patriotic poems of Young Ireland, and it has brought all this to mind,
for the opposition to our School claimed him as its leader. When I was
at Siena, I noticed that the Byzantine style persisted in faces of
Madonnas for several generations after it had given way to a more
natural style, in the less loved faces of saints and martyrs. Passion
had grown accustomed to those sloping and narrow eyes, which are almost
Japanese, and to those gaunt cheeks, and would have thought it sacrilege
to change. We would not, it is likely, have found listeners if John
O'Leary, the irreproachable patriot, had not supported us. It was as
clear to him that a writer must not write badly, or ignore the examples
of the great masters in the fancied or real service of a cause, as it
was that he must not lie for it or grow hysterical. I believed in those
days that a new intellectual life would begin, like that of Young
Ireland, but more profound and personal, and that could we but get a few
plain principles accepted, new poets and writers of prose would make an
immortal music. I think I was more blind than Johnson, though I judge
this from his poems rather than anything I remember of his talk, for he
never talked ideas, but, as was common with his generation in Oxford,
facts and immediate impressions from life. With others this renunciation
was but a pose, a superficial reaction from the disordered abundance of
the middle century, but with him it was the radical life. He was in all
a traditionalist, gathering out of the past phrases, moods, attitudes,
and disliking ideas less for their uncertainty than because they made
the mind itself changing and restless. He