Читать книгу Some Impressions of My Elders - St. John G. Ervine - Страница 11

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Sometimes I say to myself that "A. E." has lived too long and too exclusively in Ireland. He is not free from the mush of sentimentality with which Irishmen regard themselves, this everlasting self-congratulation that Irishmen are not as Englishmen, this smug preoccupation with their own virtues and bland disregard of their vices, this eternal denial that they have any demerits. If the Irish people are to recover the dignity and the stature of the gods, they must display god-like qualities or prove that they possess them. It is not sufficient to assert that they possess these qualities, at the same time denying them by nagging continually at their neighbours. I have wished at times that "A. E." could be removed from the atmosphere of adulation which envelopes him in Dublin, and sent, without letters of introduction, on a tour round the world. He has probably travelled less than any other educated man in Ireland. He passes from his home in Rathmines, a suburb of Dublin, to the office of the Irish Homestead in Merrion Square, from one centre of adulation to another, with occasional visits to the home of James Stephens, where he meets the same people that visit him on Sunday nights, or to the Hermetic Society, where he meets them again. He is too fine a spirit to be seriously affected by the paltry gabble of the third-rate minds he encounters on most occasions in Dublin, and perhaps it hardly matters that he seldom leaves Dublin and hardly ever leaves Ireland; but even so rare a man as "A. E." must suffer contraction within the narrow limits of Dublin. He has resources that few men possess: a quiet mind, a vivid faith and the love and respect of very dissimilar people. He can turn from the consideration of agricultural prices in the Irish Homestead to the esoteric alphabet with which he speaks to the Gods, or he can go off to the mountains of Donegal and make pictures. When painting no longer delights him, he can spend his nights and days in making poems. He is extravagantly generous to young writers, giving greater praise to them sometimes than they deserve, giving less of criticism than is necessary. There are minor poets in Dublin, authors of thin books of thin verse, who have persuaded themselves, because of "A. E's." praise, that they are more meritable than they are. There are people in Dublin who seem to believe that Ireland has produced a greater literature than England and will denounce you as a traitor to your country if you protest that she cannot show poets of the stature of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Browning and Tennyson, with the exception of Mr. Yeats. I am the sort of patriot who would like to see his country raise herself to the level of other countries, but I am not the sort of patriot who will pretend that she is on the level of England and France and Germany when, in fact, she is far below it. "A. E." is not entirely free from blame for this. He could have given Ireland a sense of proportion, had he cared to do so.