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.
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