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than the nation-state, but that, too, was a factor in some Irish nationalists.
An
uncle of mine, Seamus O'Neill, a rebel before 1916 and for a few years there–
after, once maintained to me that the Irish people suffered far more by the
loss of the Irish language than by their subjection to the British Empire.
As a cultural nationalist, Yeats set out to invigorate a sentiment close–
ly resembling Rousseau's "general
will."
He hoped to do this by invoking
a sense of the Irish people as they were expressed primordially in a legendary
history, the sagas and lore of a people before the coming of Christianity,
myths of "Oisin wandering, Cuchulain killing his son and fighting the sea,
Maeve and her children, Baile and Ailinn, Angus and his fellow-immortals."
I would, if I could, add to that majestic heraldry of the poets, that great
and complicated inheritance of images which written literature has
substituted for the greater and more complex inheritance of spoken
tradition, some new heraldic images, gathered from the lips of the
common people. Christianity and the old nature faith have lain down
side by side in the cottages, and I would proclaim that peace as loud–
ly as I can among the kingdoms of poetry, where there is no peace
that is not joyous, no battle that does not give life instead of death; I
may even try to persuade others, in more sober prose, that there can
be no language more worthy of poetry, and of the meditation of the
soul than that which has been made, or can be made, out of a subtle–
ty of desire, an emotion of sacrifice, a delight in order, that are perhaps
Christian, and myths and images that mirror the energies of woods
and streams, and of their wild creatures.
If myth is, as Marcel Etienne has described it, "an autonomous discourse
extracting from reality the elements over which it maintains sovereignty,"
it corresponds to a selected communal experience, as desire would have it,
free from the despotism of fact. The three major cycles-the mythologi–
cal cycle, the Red Branch cycle, and the cycle of the Fianna-gave Yeats
enough motifs for any of his purposes in poetry, fiction, and drama. He
could use those sagas to appeal to unity of race as a force prior to histori–
cal divisions. They allowed him to say, and to urge others to say: I am of
Ireland. Several years after the country was partitioned, Yeats maintained
that "Ireland, divided in religion and politics, is as much one race as any
modern country." But he did not maintain a strict distinction between
race and nation. The word "race" occurred to him when he scanned the
far horizon of myth and legend, and when he consulted the evidence
drawn from Celtic anthropology, folklore, and archaeology. In
"J.
M. Synge
and the Ireland of his Time" he claimed that Synge "sought for the race,
