d
in no spiritual paradise. Art in the decadence in our time might be
symbolized as a crimson figure undergoing a dark crucifixion: the hosts
of light are overcoming it, and it is dying filled with anguish and
despair at a beauty it cannot attain. All these strange emotions have a
profound psychological interest. I do not think because a spiritual
flaw can be urged against a certain phase of life that it should remain
unexpressed. The psychic maladies which attack all races when their
civilization grows old must needs be understood to be dealt with: and
they cannot be understood without being revealed in literature or art.
But in Ireland we are not yet sick with this sickness. As psychology
it concerns only the curious. Our intellectual life is in suspense. The
national spirit seems to be making a last effort to assert itself
in literature and to overcome cosmopolitan influences and the art
of writers who express a purely personal feeling. It is true that
nationality may express itself in many ways: it may not be at all
evident in the subject matter, but it may be very evident in the
sentiment. But a literature loosely held together by some emotional
characteristics common to the writers, however great it may be, does not
fulfill the purpose of a literature or art created by a number of men
who have a common aim in building up an overwhelming ideal--who create,
in a sense, a soul for their country, and who have a common pride in the
achievement of all. The world has not seen this since the great antique
civilizations of Egypt and Greece passed away. We cannot imagine an
Egyptian artist daring enough to set aside the majestic attainment of
many centuries. An Egyptian boy as he grew up must have been overawed by
the national tradition, and have felt that it was not to be set aside:
it was beyond his individual rivalry. The soul of Egypt incarnated in
him, and, using its immemorial language and its mysterious lines, the
efforts of the least workman who decorated a tomb seem to have been
directed by the same hand that carved the Sphinx. This adherence to a
traditional form is true of Greece, though to a less extent. Some
little Tanagra terra-cottas might have been fashioned by Phidias, and
in literature Ulysses and Agamemnon were not the heroes of one epic, but
appeared endlessly in epic and drama. Since the Greek civilization no
European nation has had an intellectual literature which was genuinely
national. In the present