THE MATERIAL OF IRISH LITERATURE IN THE 1930'S

(or)

THE EMANCIPATION OF IRISH LETTERS. )

In theory the material of literature is everything. "The setting sun," says Keats, "will always put me to rights; and if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel." For the man of letters lives not by the book nor by opinion nor by fashion but by gusto. And if his gusto will carry him to Arabia, as it has in fact done, he may as well write about Arabia as about the Blasket Islands, as he has also done.

Here more than anywhere else one needs to remember that the writer is an amoral person half his days. He contains foul and fair, everything and nothing by turns, xan enjoys high and low, rich and poor, anlage as much as an Imogen. It is an admission of weakness when a man writer feels obliged to select and reject from his experience.

But this is essentially a country of selectivists. You cannot imagine any English critic being so absurd as to reject Conrad, say, from the history of English literature, or a French critic from French literature, because they did not always write in of England and France. Alternatively But a curse of exclusivism seems to hang over Ireland and I see that even the new Cambridge History of English Literature has put George Moore with the history of the English novel in its bibliography. That in itself is no small matter but there is some excuse for it, and in the case of many another writer it will always be difficult to say to which country goes the honour of miasfanax such men as the Banims, Le Fanu, Aubrey De Vere, Edward Dowden and the like. But it is very much more distracting when the work of writers undeniably Irish origin, interests, and loyalties, - men such as Tom Kettle or George Russell - is rejected by our Celtophiles, not for not being Irish but for being not sufficiently Irish, a charge unarguable because of its too-easy assumption of as to the premises.

2.

So I once heard of a man who wished to found a Society for the Emancipation of the Irish Intellect, and who was asked, "Whom will you have in your society for the Emancipation of the Irish Intellect? No doubt, to begin with, you will have George Russell?" Whereupon he glared angrily and said, "How can I have a man like George Russell in a Society for the Emancipation of the Irish Intellect? Why, the man is a - why, he isn't even a Protestant!"

Now, our friend of the Society for the Emancipation of the Irish Intellect is not as rare a bird as he may seem, nor as foolish as he sounds. He was merely voicing a feeling, common enough among intelligent people in present-day Ireland, Irishmen of to-day, that our people are not expressing themselves freely, either in literature or in life; to which is added, or rather in which is implied the feeling that these depths left unexpressed in Irish literature, can only be expressed *at* in a satisfying way after some awakening in the people themselves.

It is an attitude, like many such in Ireland, which dervies its appeal from its historicity. We have an extraordinary habit here of making discoveries fifty years after we should have made them, and then of continuing to act on them fifty years after we have stopped. For such a discovery as this is exactly the discovery we should have made around 1850 or 1875, and actually was made by some Irishmen, quicker-witted than the rest, around 1900. Mr W.B.Yeats was born in 1865; AE in 1867; John Millington Synge in 1871; Mr T.C.Murray in 1873; - his first play takes us on a decade after these others ; Mr Daniel Corkery in 1878; Padarei Padraic Colum in 1881, and so on.

But *it* is true that to make such a discovery is one thing and to act upon it another. And it is also true that a literature such as ours - or indeed the mere beginnings of a literature, for Anglo-Irish literature as it stands is nothing more, and it takes hundreds of years to establish a literature - progresses by a process of perpetual discovery, by an endless tidal movement of tradition rising to a full flood and ebbing into its decay until a revolt swings it forward once more to a new flood.

3

new flood. So that it is not only fitting but
well that a literature should often be examined
in its course, its tides often recharged,
lest it find itself axiingxenxia sinking on the
ebb when it thinks itself rising on the flow.
I have been struck, very much, in this connection
by the phrase of an American critic - which I
have here borrowed - that one of the duties of this
Academy should take on itself is this occasional
recharting of the tides of Irish life. Since we
have no criticism from outside to which an intelligen
writer can pay heed we must build up a criticism
for ourselves.
for the last twenty years or so

For unhappily, here in Ireland, these have got
growls of dissatisfaction are all we get, and
nobody could call them criticism, and
nobody but can distrust their frequency.
Nobody can but feel that they are dictated any
less by an interest in literature than by other
interests, such as politics, that have little
to do with literature. And one distrusts them, also,
because of their pretence to the spontaneity of
a national sentiment, when one knows that they
are in fact merely catchies
repeated from the papers and periodicals,
debating-societies and political clubs of the
bourgeois intelligentsia. And for another reason,
that makes one sympathise with them even while
one distrusts them, - one knows that they are,
inevitable in a country such as ours, inevitable and
as insecure and self-conscious in a new status
as a youth raised to sudden position and power.
unreliable as the

inevitable in a period such as ours, inevitable and
unreliable as the judgments of a youth raised
to sudden position and power, insecure and
self-conscious in his new status, over-critical
and dogmatic in the effort to sustain an alien range the
role. Patience, k instantlessness, forbearance
understanding are the last things one expects
from such a period as ours. It is a period in no way
helpful to Literature.

He is/

Thus, a characteristic criticism of the
type to which I refer, comes from Professor
Daniel Corkery in his book on *Synge and Anglo-Irish
Literature.* Here the charges are serious. Irish
literature has adopted literary fashions not
acclimatised to Ireland; it is scornful of the
judgments of the people; there is no native
criticism (Two charges which rather mark one

4

so far/

another out); Irish writers are not interested
in the life, political welfare, or cultural
establishments of their people; we do not
write for our own people but for England; we have
never fortold the future of our country; in brief sum,
we do not "face the facts of the Irish scene"
This series criticism, I must add, is the
only artificiaff effort/made to articulate the
frequent expression of dissatisfaction one otherwise
emphasizes from the point of view, rather than hears
from our readers.

"he sums up,"

I have said one distrusts such criticism
far mainly because it is not literary criticism but
political criticism, because it comes out of a
particular period and the particular circumstances
of that period, because it is not patient nor wise nor
understanding. Take, for example, the main point
of the professors attack, that Irish literature
does not face the facts of the Irish scene, does not
in other words express adequately the fullest
depths of the national character. "The three great
forces that work their will on the consciousness of
the people - Religion, the Land, Nationalism, -
have found little or no adequate expression in"
Anglo-Irish literature.

complaints?

There you have an example - indeed the only
articulate example available af - of this
dissatisfaction that one otherwise senses rather than
hears, or hears in conversation rather than sees
in print. And it is a characteristic example.
And it shows why fuxay, as I say, one distrusts these
this dissatisfaction, feeling it political rather
than literary, feeling it impatient and unwise.

unwisely

Religion," Land, Nationalism. One notes immediately
that the critic in this example has not gone to
the literature to see what it speaks of but to
pay politics to see what it might speak of.
Years before the, thirty years before Professor
Corkery made the opposite discovery, Professor
Stopford Brooke and T.W. Relleston edited an anthology
of Irish verse in which they found exactly those
three examples notes almost constantly expressed -
Religion, Land, Nationality, the Peasant.
That was a wise analysis for it was based on the f
facts of the literature itself. Professor Corkery
working on a theory of the ideal Ireland
and a theory of the far from ideal literature
not unnaturally contradicts it.

Now, as I have already observed in passing, this
critical attitude is of recent origin, and it is
applied to a literature which is also of
recent origin. And that is something which even the
critics themselves do not seem to realise. Yet you can't
do justice to any literature unless you make yourself
aware of your own relationship to that
literature. And the relationship here is that
this criticism is the criticism of the
revolutionary mind applied to a literature written
in a revolutionary atmosphere.

in other words/

Now, as I have observed in passing already, this critical attitude is of recent origin. And that is something which our critics do not realise, and Mr Corkery, for example, does not seem to realise it. You cannot really do justice to any literature unless you make yourself aware of that of your relationship in time to that literature. Modern Irish literature is, naturally, the mere beginnings of a literature but Irish criticism has not even made a beginning. You must ensure that this criticism is really the criticism of the revolutionary mind.

the

Irish prose literature has hardly yet as much as begun. In what has been accomplished we may observe two main divisions, however - divisions which must necessarily be completely altered by the light subsequent developments threw on what we are doing. Our critics treat what has been accomplished as if it were finished when it is completed and axen and divisible. Most of them, indeed, form their opinions either on the basis of prejudices formed by very early series - the levers and levers - means or end caused, more often, by the very latest series, from 1910 or, and apply their opinions haphazardly to the entire literature as it at present stands. Hopeless confusion results.

We must divide prose literature into pre and post-1916. To begin with we have work from such writers as Canon Sheehan, Katherine Tynan, Edith Somerville, George Moore, Gerald O'Donovan, Seumas O'Kelly, James Joyce, James Stephens, Daniel Corkery. These might be further divided, if you so wish, though it is not essential, into writers (very few of these named) who wrote before the actual Irish Literary Revival had got under way. Canon Sheehan for example, is not in the same literary atmosphere as George Moore - he was a peripheral writer who received no help from his contemporaries. Indeed, at the beginning he had none. After these writers come a different generation, at any rate, a different atmosphere surrounds them. There is Einar O'Duffy, Con O'Leary, Brianley MacNamara, Liam O'Flaherty, Austin Clarke, Peadar O'Donnell, Frank O'Connor, and Mr L.A.G. Strong, and others. And no criticism should fail to distinguish between these two main divisions.

Kate O'Brien,

let me give one example of the absurd mistakes-

O. Leary,

No! I take it is patent that this modern
dissatisfaction is reused by such men as
the work of such writers, as O'Casey, O'Flaherty,
MaoNanara, O'Donnell, Clarke, O'Duffy, Frank
O'Connor, and myself who have touched the
national consciousness on the raw.
And now, the sins of these few writers
are visited on the head of Anglo-Irish
literature. It is time that was made clear,
and time our critics realised what they are
doing.

In a word, they are approaching not merely a section
of a literature with from a nationalistic or
political standpoint but all literature. Take again
Mr Corkery's Religion, Land Nationalism.
(And I should like to say that I harp on Mr
Corkery's criticism only because it is the only
articulate example available of a dissatisfaction
one otherwise sense rather than hears, and
feels axin' that airx though it is occasionally
expressed in revws, and maxxiamak in odd
references is, usually ill- mannered, in
our non-literary journals. One notices at once in
about this Land, Religion, Nationalism, that the critic
has not gone to the literature to see what it does
speak of. He goes rather to politics and
sociology to see what it might speak of.
When Brooke and Rellesten found these notes in
Irish literature, it was an intelligent and wise
criticism because the examples were there to
illustrate what was meant. But to say that a mass
I have made clear of poetry or prose, does not hard
sufficiency on the land is not intelligible because no examples
are offered as to what is meant. Used in this
way Land Religion Nationalism become merely
social phenomena - causes which might produce
interesting effects on the Irish character,
polyseconomically significant effects about which
any novelist would clearly like to hear more
and in detail.

Mr. Corkery's
statement

As I have made clear of poetry or prose, does not hard
sufficiency on the land is not intelligible because no examples
are offered as to what is meant. Used in this
way Land Religion Nationalism become merely
social phenomena - causes which might produce
interesting effects on the Irish character,
polyseconomically significant effects about which
any novelist would clearly like to hear more
and in detail.

XX. The Englishman, the Irishman, the American, the reality, and the machine.

But the truth of this matter is that the modern Irish reader, from whose mind things nationalistic and political are inseparable, and who will not be content until he gets what he would call a full and sincere interpretation of Irish life, is and Criticises everything that reads Irish book he reads in accordance with that desire. And he is simply asking whether is not entitled to ask any literature to supply what he wants to satisfy his desire. Judged according to that standard what would British readers think of Mr. Shaw, Americans of Mencken? What chance would Moliere get in the Ireland of the day? And one can feel that Falstaff - at any rate the Falstaff of the second part of "Henry IV" - would get as short a shrift as Joxer. While as for Pope, Defoe, Dryden, or a novel like Wuthering Heights...

And here I leave out of account altogether the extreme Celophilic critic like Mr. Corkery in whose mind Irish life is idealised according to a literary convention, idealised, romanticised, and even at times sentimentalised. To such a critic Mr. Joyce's Leopold Bloom must be a hard but to erack, - Mr. Leopold Bloom frying the entrails of fellow for his wife's breakfast while she sags the wires of the spring bed with her great heavy body. Not Irish, would such a critic say? To which one replies wearily, Perhaps so and perhaps not, but great literature it is Irish literature. And really beyond that you cannot go. You may blame literature for being poor, for being weak, for being from Literature; but in the first case, you are a bad writer, and in the second, a bad politician, and in either case, a traitor to your calling.

I think, none the less, that for the sake of literature we must be patient and courageous with these critics. I think we should try to understand their point of view. Grass as it is, something may be learned from them.

They are, as I have said, the generation of the rebellion, a generation that took sides instinctively against that last previous Rebellion, the Anglo-Irish revival. Why they did so is a very interesting matter but not to be pursued here. They lived their lives most vital years at a peak of excitement, and they fell after that into a pit of disillusion, and at all times they could see and think only - if you like, we could see and think only of politics and the nation. As a result, they saw Irish life and Irish character either without flaw or blemish or utterly ignoble. There was another generation before them that suffered the same heat and cold - that generation who saw

Parnell magnificent at his height and Ireland
disembodied at his fall. Joyce, though not of that
generation, drank in the spirit of the time and there
is something of its disillusion in almost everything
he has written. But it was not, I imagine, anything
like the enthusiasm and disillusion of our day.

To this generation of the revolution I make so bold as
to say life was scarcely revealed at all. Caught
between two extremes, they had little opportunity
to see life fully and to see it whole. They had
remembrances experiences that might have been revealing
if we were not a people who became lost in excitement
and have small faculty for luxuriating in the memory of
its effects, if we were not a people in whom there is
very little power of detachment and almost no
power of abstraction. As a result, I think always of this
generation of the revolution as a precession of blinded
men stumbling down the wherry of the Styx, and
I can never recall Lamb's vision of the Brig o'dread
without thinking of Ireland since 1916. I think of it
in these terms because I believe that a man is not fully
a man until he is fully conscious.

To a writer it is an appalling waste
of fortune to see such moments of excitement go
unused. Mr Edward Garnett once told me how he was
recounting to Conrad an experience he had in
the days when he lived in Whitechapel; a man
lodging above him had killed a prostitute and
then halfhanged himself. Conrad on hearing
the story went into a sudden fury. "Marxxyuxzxx
mzxztxrmexxx "How is it," he stormed, "that such
experiences never happen to me?"

Not that such experiences as we have had in Ireland
all too frequently of recent years are in themselves
of any value. Without the great moments of life,
moments of love or fear or hate or overwhelming pity,
one cannot but is true, arrive at the
moment of revelation; but it is afterwards
in the moments of tranquil restoration that
"with an eye made quiet by the power of
harmful, and the deep power of joy,
we see into the life of things."
Then comes the essence of life, that residuum of
passion which, where there is a literary gift,
a gift of words and of writing, produces what
I call literature, the literature of wisdom.

What I am driving at is that we Irish have a small
power of abstraction, and that for most of
us, therefore, it is not so much the real
experience that teaches as its residuum in books
or a poem or a play of some other man. They are
for us the interpreters. And we should therefore
be very grateful to those early discoverers —
and it does not matter for the moment how
partial the discovery — who although have revealed
to their fellow-countrymen something of the
essential truth of the life about them.

For myself I know shall always be grateful to
Mr. Lennox Robinson for his fine play "The
Patriot." I saw it during one of those
priceless visits the Abbey Theatre used to pay
to Cork, and should I think pay all the
country, for this good reason, rather than to
America. I do not remember of the play now, more
than a scene in an upper room over a pub in
a country town. There was a lane girl
and her mother, the hard-fisted woman of the
house who managed the pub. There was a table in the
centre of the room and with a red cloth on it and

three men sitting by it, mubling about how they
should tell, and who should tell, the returned
Fenian, that the people were not quite so
keen, as interested, shall we say, in
Fenianism as when the old man went to prison
for his beliefs ten or fifteen years before.

It is still an excellent play, though dated
somewhat by the Revolution, but then it was full
of cogency, relevant in every way to
contemporary life. It was to me and doubtless
to every one of my audience, some other such
play or book has had the same effect on first
hearing it, a complete revelation. I know I
left the theatre realising for the first time that
the people in the streets and lanes of Cork were
not merely so much furniture of a city, city,
not merely Citizen Number One and
Citizen Number Two, but flesh and blood in whose
lives there might be, too, the same fun and
drama, the same passion and tragedy, as there was
in that back room over the pub in Mr. Robinson's
play, and to their height and to my height and
to the height of the life of the town of Cork
a cubit was added that night.

Such a play as that merely touched on
the news of the what people like Mr. A. C. Bradley
would call (the cosmic drama of life. It
dealt with the local tragedy, so to speak. We have
Other plays and books which can
awaken by their attitude to the same life
wider and deeper questionings in which the whole
tragedy of human living is involved.
To such a document as Mr. Robinson's play
a dramatist like Synge or O'Casey put their
signature and turned it into a judgment.
And what did the Irish public do to these
plays of judgment? That is what we do from
To these interpreters, these revealers? They
howled them from the stage. And why? Because
the integrity of the artist was greater than their
the integrity of the public; because the artist
faced the facts of the Irish scene and the
public was too cowardly to do the same.
Because, in short, the artist was more interested in
the nation.
And yet we are told that we too easily scorn the
judgment of the people.

And if that must drive the nationalist off minded
to his last position. A literature need not, in its
writers, be interested in the nation, if may say,
but at least it will reflect unconsciously the
national character. Just as an ancient Catholic
might say, & literature need not be preoccupied with
Catholic dogma but it cannot help, if it be
truly the literature of a Catholic people, but
reflecting the character of Christianity. And even here
I must demur. I know Pope was a Catholic, and
Baudelaire was a Catholic, and Rony de Gourment was a
Catholic, and Gibbon was far a periodical a Catholic,
and I know that to examine the works of these men to
see whether or not they do reflect the
quality of Christianity would be, not merely a
good delicate task, but in the end an irrelevant one. For,
what follows
you might even come to the conclusion that there was
something wrong with their Catholicity in every case,
just as our nationalist critics here come to the
conclusion that there is something wrong with the
nationality of Anglo-Irish literature - and still
the literary value would remain unimpressed. Or you might
come to the conclusion that there was something wrong
with Christianity that it did not, unconsciously,
affect these writers, and still their literary value
would remain. And one must demur, too, at such
an approach, even thus modified, since it is
impossible to undertake to say what exactly
is the national character which one would
hope to see reflected in Irish literature; and as I
have shown, Mr. Corkery's effort, for example,
to speak of it in terms of social causes, like
Land, does not even touch the edge of the
subject of the national character. It is clearly the
wise thing to look after beauty and let truth look after
heresies.
I should certainly not like to
be on that windmill.

beauties

But this is where we come to the heart of a far more important
matter. I have said, cautiously, that the
artist faced certain sides of Irish life which
the public declined to face. And here again we
must be careful to distinguish our periods.
For in the case of Synge and the 'Playboy,"
the public was concerned not to some extent at any rate,
with a moral question as well as the matter of the
fullness of the interpretation before the world
of the Irish character; whereas in the case of
O'Casey almost nothing mattered but the supposed
vilification of the nation. So here in Dublin,
protests were made against the depicting of
Volunteers drinking in a pub in the 'Plough and the
Stars,' and people objected to the National flag
being seen in a pub, and people argued hotly whether
it did not save the situation that the Volunteers
called only for a small port; and in Chicago
at a dinner given to the Irish Players in, I think,
1928, a speaker protested hotly that no Irishman
was ever seen in such a fancy dress as
that of the National Forester - which he evidently
had never seen before - and that the speech
off-stage, actually based on a speech of Pearse, was
a numerous speech such as no Irishman would have
spoken. And there was a feeling among our
thinner skinned intelligentsia about this play - and the
same feeling applies to all those who are most of the
literature of the same period - that the
interpretation of Irish life was unsympathetic.
(Chigoriz / en bas)

I have said that nobody can ask a writer to
interpret Irish life sympathetically if the writer
does not want to. But I think it is very clear now
that we of the post-1916 period are unsympathetic, as a rule,
there can be no denying that the question we must ask
ourselves is whether that lack of sympathy with
"certain facts of Irish life" has impaired our sympathy for any
artistic integrity. Has our lack of sympathy with
certain aspects of Irish life produced a
lack of sympathy with humanity? That we must
face.

In the first volume of his
I wonder if any of my audience remember Warton's
Essay on the Genius and Writings of Alexander Pope.
In the first volume, it was published in 1756, he
began a discussion on the merits of Pope which
lasted for nearly a hundred years, to the time when
Macaulay wrote the little hunchbacked satirist to pieces.

Warton divided poems into four classes, and asked where among these Pope would finally be placed. First, he took poems of the Imagination - Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Then he took poems of moral and panegyrical taste, and there he placed Dryden, Cowley, Waller, Prior, Garth, and Gay. Thirdly, he took poems of wit and taste, and here - how many would agree with him to-day? - he placed Butler, Donne, and Swift. Lastly, he took the versifiers, such as Breome and Buckingham. His second volume, in which he placed Pope's maxims answered his own question about Pope's position in this ladder of fame, came just twenty-six years later, in 1782. And as a matter of curiosity I may say that he put Pope between the first and the second quires...below Milton, but just above Dryden.

It was a curious exercise and I was reminded of it in the present connection by the words of Warton's expressed himself judgment in which he was willing to put the finer artist above the greater genius, Dryden, and yet asked with doubt how much of the sublime and poetic there is in Pope - those two chief nerves of all genuine poetry.

 states the problem for Pope, you see, in these lines: - as no doubt, to a certain extent, they are inseparable, as any man's peronality and his genius are inseparable, though often, indeed, anagenetic to one another. We have our English writers who display in relation to contemporary Irish life something of the disgust of Pope for contemporary London life. But he also states the problem for contemporary Irish literature, because whatever lacks there are in Pope some from something of the same lack of sympathy which is so patent in us. We may feel that his character of Lord Hervey, the Sperus of the 'Satires,' was deserved; we may feel that even his character of Addison, the Gate of the 'Satires' was not undeserved, but we cannot deny that had he shown as much sympathy as Dryden even showed to his victims we would think him a far greater poet than he was and have none of Warton's doubts about putting him among the greatest of the great. As it is, we know he holds his position only by the absolute perfection of his artistry. And artistry which, to put it mildly, any Irish writer of our day will find himself hampered to equal.

And admittedly, the professed satirist must take sides, at least to the degree Dryden takes sides. Whereas the novelist or the dramatist who takes sides must do so under no compulsion of technical necessity and does so, axiomatic in fact, at great risk. It is a byword in literary appreciation of the greatness of Balzaer, better still, Shakespeare, that they hold the balance of life so evenly between their characters, good and bad, that it is impossible to define their own attitude to their people. They are the greatest who seem to compass all life and, balance all life, and yet leave us questioning of life at the end. They have detachment without loss of emotion; passion without loss of justice; judgment, without loss of sympathy.

I think it almost inevitable that the integrity of the modern Irish writer should be impaired. Attacked on every side by political prejudice, national enthusiasm, pietistic evangelism, he has to fight tooth and nail for his vision of life. He has to preserve a constant effort of will to retain that consistency between belief and creative action which may be said to define integrity.

And if in the stress of that fight he loses something of the wholeness of vision at which he aims, I think the last person who should enquire him is the deluded man he is trying to save.

For to correct the balance of life is the writer's way of achieving wholeness in a balance of truth. And the writer worth his salt fixing could live in such an atmosphere of self-delusion and self-esteem as this atmosphere of modern Ireland without desiring to correct the balance of truth in art his art.

So, if indeed the integrity of the Irish artist today is not the integrity of the greatest art the reason is not, as our critics may think, because many the artist will not listen to them, but because he does listen to them. And is added on by them. And either retires into the delusion of fantasy and romance or retaliates with the bludgeon of realism.

Irish literature, as I feel it, has always been seeking escapes from the shattering of its ideals. In bitter satire our drama has worked itself out to a condition of inane farce. Time was when a play like The Eloquent Dempsey was a healthy aesthetic to Irish life; but the hundred and one Dempseys that have

followed have reduced to the patient to a
state bordering on coma. We ran from the gauges
murder of our ideals into the gardens of fantasy
until the master of fantastical beauty decided that
it was time for decent men to walk naked. We have
since the revolution turned in fury on life
reality itself until one could imagine benefit
rising in horror at this image of life
and flying to a nummery from both literature and
fact.

that the integrity of the Irish artist is impaired,
another reason for it. I suggest, is

If this be truly so, then because we
have been too caught up by the emotion of the
web. The rabblesomeness of the rabblesomeness of the
web. The rabblesomeness of the web. It is
another day of the rabblement. What has the
web to do with us that we should weep for them?
Yet into our books they come, so many types of
the life that harasses us. Our work is with
life,Maxx struggling outward to freedom in the
individual soul. Our comradeship is with the
brothers man and woman whom we love, not been
made by bitter words and sharp words, but not been
 grown like a fungus in the mind.

and there we wrote our
spirit on them as one
in the blood of a
man's race.

maddened by

Our art, which cannot keep politics and
literature separate, must live in a world
atmosphere of irreality.

power of

There one sees the need in modern literature in
Ireland for a far greater detachment than has been
necessary before, the detachment from politics, a detachment from
controversy, even a detachment from the
judgments of the people. That very
thing which we are charged with, doing, we
do not do sufficiently. If I had any way I should
send every Irish writer out of Ireland for at least
ten years confident that he would do his best
work for Ireland in the事业 of exiles.

of this
generation

One may be the work that would please even our patriots.

"A vagrant and ubiquitous race," it was said.

Sheehan who said it, "that is, their country when they
die in it and yearn for it when they are absent."

In exile, if we could only avoid sentimentality, we might
infuse into our work something of that warmth and
geniality, that equality, that humor, and love
which get frozen and killed in the partisan atmosphere
of home. We might even, above all, add to our
literature the one thing in which it is not rich -
namely, a quality of wider intellectual
curiosity. With the exception of the poetry
of A.M., Irish literature has been romantic,
realist, satirical, fantastical, but never
intellectual, and it is a remarkable proof of the

outstanding

illustration of the intellectual detachment of A.E.
that he must be singled out in this way.
But in prose, at any rate, the rest of us are

clearly too entangled in local problems to
universalise our interests to towards the
greater problems that lie outside Ireland.
Even technical problems such as the

are expressing writers and painters and
sculptors have appealed only to
all Irish writers, to Mr Joyce.

all over the world

The framework of the artist's ideals is
clearly one which, because he is for ever seeking for
universality, must be wider far than the
framework of the ideals of the patriot.
And even it must be expected that the two sets of
ideals will sometimes clash - as the humanitarianism
of two men like Barbusso or almost all
any of the war writers, except even the humanitarianism
of Sean O'Casey, clashes with the patriotism of
the militarist. Is that not patent in every period of
literature, and does it not, in fact, give us the
endless variety of art? Is not that why
every restrictive movement of criticism begins -
such as the Humanist movement of today,
led by Mr. Irving Babbitt and Mr. Paul Elmer More, which
is perpetually railing at the Romantic
movement in literature, at Keats or at Mr. Musset,
for reasons that are connected with
morals rather than with art? Is it not clear that
the ideals of the artist fly him far above
the ideals of the artist - an ideal

all temporary and even local conditions? This
becomes clear in the judgments of the great
writers on their subjects - and the conceptions of
the great writers as to what is tragic.
It is not a moral weakness that brings disaster

or Othello? on fear, or on fear, but a weakness of
character, as vanity, or jealousy, or too great
love.

Time was, I admit, when art was the handmaid
of religion, and here we must face the great
dividing fact that has created modern life
and modern art. The Renaissance and the
Reformation, the rise of humanism - the older
humanism and the homecentric attitude to life are
which lie at the basis of all modern art.
Date and the Greeks saw the tragedy of
life through the eyes of religion.

["Thebekev's fixien framework afxideais\nmakes it clear that the artist's known norm\nis", "be we, each of us,\nfashion an ideal\nnorm for\nourselves.", "that", "Thekev states the position well. The norm of life\nwe do not know: And though I am sure there are\nhundreds of people in Ireland who would be prepared to\ntell me what the norm of life is I should refuse to\nlisten to them, simply because there would be\nhundreds of people in England who would also\nbe prepared to define the norm for me and their norm\nwould be entirely different, and as many more norms\nas there are nations. And do you think that even your\nhundred Irishmen would agree? Did you ever know two\nIrishmen to agree, let alone a hundred? You may follow\nthat line of thought as far as you like,\ndown whatever channel you like, to subjective\nand objective truth, to classical and Romantic, even\nto a study of human truth as comparative religions.", "the writer is", "But I am not prepared to follow 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ignoring morals, politics, time, the social order, place, human people. In that surge and flight of the creative spirit the mind of the artist sears out of itself its all the bonds that have trammelled, held it Commonly, blindly/ in - fraxmative sears, from the wrist of convention, the world confabulating itself in utter freedom. Meddling ambition The Musing hawk as Bacon says, it flies without fear. Compare Charlotte Brontë, who rarely spares with Emily Brontë, and you will see what I mean. Or we must with the bodies kiss express our love; but it is the love that is real and not the flesh, to paraphrase Emma John Donne,

Here in Ireland where our people are more interested in the bodily resemblance than in the flight that ignores it, more interested in the flesh than the spirit of Kitarature interested in the marriage of the flesh than the marriage of the soul, literature must definitely set its face if anything, against the norm of local and temporal norm, human society. And that is why I, for one, dread the influence of the naturalistic novel on Irish literature, and regret that the two master novelists of Irish literature, Moore and Joyce, should in the main have followed it. Nor is this to escape from the realities of normal Irish life but to use them and transmute them. So used and so transmuted nobody shall say that the transmutation into fantasy, or romance, is an escape. It will rather be a using of the natural qualities of our Irish matures to give significance and loveliness to all the workings of the flesh, intelligibility to a vision.

And as to moulds, the weary romanticism of the nineteenth century, of Turgeon and La抱ert and Gautier have little in common with us, and they have already had too great an influence on us. We are at the beginnings of a literature and we must establish moulds, traditions of our own. And if one asks what pattern they may follow, I think they will naturally follow the pattern of the idealised racial mind, which brings me for the last time to the material of our literature, which is Irish life.

In Irish life I see two great qualities and two great vices. I see Cowardice and Cruelty, and Mysterium and Passion, Art and Urbanity, and a little Spirituality.