Chapter 21

A conviction that the world was now but a bundle of fragments
possessed me without ceasing. I had tried this conviction on 'The
Rhymers,' thereby plunging into greater silence an already too
silent evening. 'Johnson,' I was accustomed to say, 'you are the
only man I know whose silence has beak & claw.' I had lectured on
it to some London Irish society, and I was to lecture upon it
later on in Dublin, but I never found but one interested man, an
official of the Primrose League, who was also an active member of
the Fenian Brotherhood. 'I am an extreme conservative apart from
Ireland,' I have heard him explain; and I have no doubt that
personal experience made him share the sight of any eye that saw
the world in fragments. I had been put into a rage by the
followers of Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage,
who not only asserted the unimportance of subject, whether in art
or literature, but the independence of the arts from one another.
Upon the other hand I delighted in every age where poet and artist
confined themselves gladly to some inherited subject matter known
to the whole people, for I thought that in man and race alike
there is something called 'unity of being,' using that term as
Dante used it when he compared beauty in the _Convito_ to a
perfectly proportioned human body. My father, from whom I had
learned the term, preferred a comparison to a musical instrument
so strong that if we touch a string all the strings murmur
faintly. There is not more desire, he had said, in lust than in
true love; but in true love desire awakens pity, hope, affection,
admiration, and, given appropriate circumstance, every emotion
possible to man. When I began, however, to apply this thought to
the State and to argue for a law-made balance among trades and
occupations, my father displayed at once the violent free-trader
and propagandist of liberty. I thought that the enemy of this
unity was abstraction, meaning by abstraction not the distinction
but the isolation of occupation, or class or faculty--

'Call down the hawk from the air
Let him be hooded, or caged,
Till the yellow eye has grown mild,
For larder and spit are bare,
The old cook enraged,
The scullion gone wild.'

I knew no mediaeval cathedral, and Westminster, being a part of
abhorred London, did not interest me; but I thought constantly of
Homer and Dante and the tombs of Mausolus and Artemisa, the great
figures of King and Queen and the lesser figures of Greek and
Amazon, Centaur and Greek. I thought that all art should be a
Centaur finding in the popular lore its back and its strong legs.
I got great pleasure too from remembering that Homer was sung, and
from that tale of Dante hearing a common man sing some