Page:Yeats Responsibilities 1916.djvu/202

186 but a few lines, not so many certainly as the objection of various persons to supply Sir Hugh Lane with 'a monument at the city's expense,' and as the gallery was supported by Mr. James Larkin, the chief Labour leader, and important slum workers, I assume that the purpose of the opposition was not exclusively charitable.

These controversies, political, literary, and artistic, have showed that neither religion nor politics can of itself create minds with enough receptivity to become wise, or just and generous enough to make a nation. Other cities have been as stupid&mdash;Samuel Butler laughs at shocked Montreal for hiding the Discobolus in a cellar&mdash;but Dublin is the capital of a nation, and an ancient race has nowhere else to look for an education. Goethe in Wilhelm Meister describes a saintly and naturally gracious woman, who getting into a quarrel over some trumpery detail of religious observance, grows&mdash;she and all her little religious community&mdash;angry and vindictive. In Ireland I am constantly reminded of that fable of the futility of all discipline that is not of the whole being. Religious Ireland&mdash;and the pious Protestants of my childhood were signal examples&mdash;thinks of divine things as a round of duties separated from life and not as an