We begin to live when we have conceived life as a tragedy.
XX
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.
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