Ireland and the Arts by W.B. Yeats

The arts have failed; fewer people are interested in them every / generation. The mere business of living, of making money, of amusing / oneself, occupies people more and more, and makes them less and less / capable of the difficult art of appreciation. When they buy a picture it / generally shows a long-current idea, or some conventional form that can be / admired in that lax mood one admires a fine carriage in or fine horses in; / and when they buy a book it is so much in the manner of the picture that / it is forgotten, when its moment is over, as a glass of wine is forgotten. / We who care deeply about the arts find ourselves the priesthood of an / almost forgotten faith, and we must, I think, if we would win the people / again, take upon ourselves the method and the fervour of a priesthood. We / must be half humble and half proud. We see the perfect more than others, / it may be, but we must find the passions among the people. We must / baptize as well as preach.

The makers of religions have established their ceremonies, their form of / art, upon fear of death, on the hope of the father in his child, upon the / love of man and woman. They have even gathered into their ceremonies the / ceremonies of more ancient faiths, for fear a grain of the dust turned / into crystal in some past fire, a passion that had mingled with the / religious idea, might perish if the ancient ceremony perished. They have / renamed wells and images and given new meanings to ceremonies of spring / and midsummer and harvest. In very early days the arts were so possessed / by this method that they were almost inseparable from religion, going side / by side with it into all life. But, to-day, they have grown, as I think, / too proud, too anxious to live alone with the perfect, and so one sees / them, as I think, like charioteers standing by deserted chariots and / holding broken reins in their hands, or seeking to go upon their way drawn / by the one passion which alone remains to them out of the passions of the / world. We should not blame them, but rather a mysterious tendency in / things which will have its end some day. In England, men like William / Morris, seeing about them passions so long separated from the perfect that / it seemed as if they could not be changed until society had been changed, / tried to unite the arts once more to life by uniting them to use. They / advised painters to paint fewer pictures upon canvas, and to burn more of / them on plates; and they tried to persuade sculptors that a candlestick / might be as beautiful as a statue. But here in Ireland, when the arts have / grown humble, they will find two passions ready to their hands, love of / the Unseen Life and love of country.