II
But there are artists abroad whose chief glory seems to be to deny that
they have convictions--that is, convictions about the passionate things
of life that rouse and move their generation. Now that they should not
be special pleaders is an obvious duty, but unless they have a
passionate feeling for the vital things that move men, heart and soul,
they cannot interpret the heart and soul of passionate men, and their
work must be for ever cold. When literature is not passionate it does
not touch the spirit to lift and spread its wings and soar to finer air.
That is the great want about all the clever books now being turned
out--they often give us excitement; they never give us ecstasy. Then
there is an obvious feeling of something lacking which men try to make
up with art; and they produce work faultless in form and fastidious in
phrase, but still it lacks the touch of fire that would lift it from
common things to greatness.
III
If we are to apply art to great work we must distinguish art from
artifice. We find the two well contrasted in Synge's "Riders to the Sea"
and his "Playboy." The first was written straight from the heart. We
feel Synge must have followed those people carrying the dead body, and
touched to the quick by the _caoine_, passed the touch on to us, for in
the lyric swell of the close we get the true emotion. Here alone is he
in the line of greatness.
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