IRISH LITERATURE. The English occupation of Ire land raised its first literary monument in the Kildare Poems of the early 14th century whose interest is now mainly philo logical. Up to the middle years of the i6th century the use of English was limited to a few towns and to the confines of the Pale. It was not until the close of the next century that the conflicting policies of the two countries produced a special colonial spirit, whose spokesman was Molyneux, and a literature of corresponding character, Irish to the English, English to the Irish. This Janus-faced attitude of Anglo-Irish literature lasted almost into our own period, injuring its artistic integrity by its partisan spirit. In the 17th century the author of the Hiber niad proudly counts Swift, Denham, Parnell, Farquhar, Steele, Southerne, Roscommon, Boyle, Ussher and Berkeley amongst the Irish authors of his day. Only of the two greatest of these, Swift and Berkeley, may it be fairly said that their life in Ireland left a deep impress on their work. Ireland taught Swift his fierce hatred of injustice and that deep compassion for material suffer ing which Lecky observes. The same spectacle of Irish conditions added to Goldsmith's incomparable charm a sense of social values which lifts him above the urbane and artificial poets, and it gave to Burke the passion for justice which glows in his political philosophy. A strong Irish accent marked the thought as it marked the speech of both men. These men were born into the violent contrasts of the Irish i8th century where the most arti ficial inequalities of status and political control maintained a brilliant and corrupt society in the capital, firing the eloquence of Grattan and Curran and pointing Sheridan's wit.
Into this strife, too, was born Thomas Moore (1779-1852) whose Irish Melodies had in their day a European vogue and were acclaimed by the greatest of his con temporaries. His practice of writing to music necessarily be trayed him into a diffuse and cloying sweetness, and writing be fore the Wordsworthian reaction his language and imagery are often outmoded. But he remains a master of swift, light and musical verse as well as of witty political satire. His control of varied metres restored to the English lyric the freedom of 17th century verse. In this he was an innovator as well as in his introduction of certain Irish modes to English metre. With him for the first time there entered into Anglo-Irish poetry some faint breath of the Gaelic spirit which is the vital force of its later development. The cadences and imagery of Gaelic poetry give whatever is of value to the folk-verse of Callanan (1795-1829) and Walsh (1805-50), and the scholarly George Darley (1795-1846) dipped his pen in the same glittering honey dew. Its influence is supreme in the visionary James Clarence Mangan (1805-49), whose genius let and hampered, as has been said, by inborn physical and spiritual sensitiveness, reached in his best work the highest lyrical levels. Lionel Johnson, a kindred soul, ranks Mangan's "Dark Rosaleen" with the great lyrics of the world where the chivalry of a nation's faith is struck of a sudden into the immortality of music. His "Nameless One" has the troubled and vehement sincerity of Villon and Byron. At this time O'Curry, O'Donovan and Petric were laying the f ounda tions of Gaelic scholarship but with slight influence, Mangan excepted, upon the poets of their day.
The writers of The Nation newspaper, Duffy, D'Arcy McGee and the rest who followed the fruitful plough-share of Thomas Davis (1814-45) were pre-occupied with the Repeal and '48 movements and the work of politics. Literature was to them a tool and not an end in itself. Similarly, the new scholarship touched but did not greatly affect the impersonal and meditative Aubrey de Vere (1814-1902), Denis Florence M'Carthy, the translator of Calderon, or John Auster the translator of Faust. But as the fruits of their studies ripened, Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-86) found Irish themes to fit "the epic largeness of his conception" and he revealed to the younger poets the harvest about their feet.
The modern school traces its ancestry back in this way through Ferguson and Mangan to the Gaelic poets. The way to their ancient founts was pointed by the scholars already mentioned and by their successors, Whitley Stokes, Standish Hayes O'Grady, Kuno Meyer, Dr. Sigerson, Dr. Douglas Hyde and the editors of the Gaelic poets of the 17th and i8th centuries. Particular importance attaches to the publication of Hyde's Love Songs of Connacht and his edition of Raftery which notably influenced the new school in the direc tion of folk-simplicity, and to the works of Standish O'Grady, second of that name, who influenced it in the contrary direction by the glamour with which he invested the older heroic literature. The emergence of this group about 1900 was the literary evidence of a resurgent national spirit as race-conscious in literature as the Gaelic League in education, or Sinn Fein in politics. It had its origin in this race-consciousness stimulated by the study of the old heroic literature and of the folk poetry which still existed in Irish. It might have been a phenomenon of merely political or antiquarian interest if its chiefs were not primarily artists.
W. B. Yeats worked to a standard of well-nigh perfect artistry and the writings of George Russell (A.E.) were deepened and generalized with a profound consciousness of the divine origin and destiny of man. Yeats's interest in magic and A. E.'s pan theism remove their work still further from the kingdoms of this world. Yeats was always a very highly self-conscious artist. His early work broods in sorrowful ecstasy over visionary beauty; his later work is more austere in form, deliberately fashioned into abstract simplicity, very personal and often petulant. About these two writers and the Abbey theatre, the Gaelic League and Sinn Fein, were grouped in diverse relations the poets, novelists and dramatists of the so-called Irish literary revival. Ethna Carbery impersonated its spring-tide, Alice Milligan its clean-cut masculine purpose ; there were nature poets like Katharine Tynan and Francis Ledwidge; poets of the people like Padraic Colum, Joseph Campbell, Moira O'Neill; town poets like Seumas O'Sullivan who introduced a new and mordant note into his fastidious art; the newcomers, Austin Clarke, whose imagination is fitly exercised in epic subjects, F. R. Higgins, who seeks to develop the subtle Gaelic mode in clarity, and Oliver Gogarty, a writer of witty and lapidary verse. Reaction from cloudy abstraction and a transi
tion to prose marked the passing of youth and the coming of age of the movement. The appearance of James Stephens may be taken as the turning point, who passes indifferently from verse to prose, from slum idylls to the riotous invention of the Crock of Gold and The Demigods, and exhibits at each turn the same leaping fancy and the same wise and witty humanity.
The politics which became prose literature under Swift's pen remained literature in the hands of Wolfe Tone (Auto biography), Mitchel (Jail Journal) and Padraic Pearse, but the novel had a later start. Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849), the earliest of Anglo-Irish novelists, still remains a central figure amongst them. Equalling any of her successors in the vivacity of her dialogue and in the fidelity of her character studies she brought to bear on Irish life a criticism more serious and candid than any of the group after her. Samuel Lover (1797-1868) re deems with a touch of poetry his inclination to buffoonery. Charles Lever (1806-72) excels in the rollicking novel of adventure. He rarely touches serious issues but fills his pages with the "half-sirs" and "squireens" who swarmed in Ireland up to the date of the In cumbered Estates Act. He fashioned out of this class a pseudo national figure of the hard-drinking, devil-may-care Jrishman, and succeeded in impressing it on his foreign readers as the na tional type. The once popular Lady Morgan enjoyed a social and political vogue, and the singular figure of Maturin, whose influence Balzac admitted, will always hold the attention of literary his torians. Of more importance is the group which includes the Banim brothers (John, 1798-1842; Michael, 1796-1824), and the charming idyllist of peasant life, Charles Kickham (1826-82). With their knowledge of the people, but not without a sentimental and idealizing tendency, they penetrated the surface upon which Lever's school was content to play. With better models and tech nical equipment this period might have produced an Irish Tur geniev. Between the frivolous and the idealists stands the con siderable figure of Carleton (1794-1869), a twisted genius of un usual intensity, the opposite of Maria Edgeworth in all points, his blind power, grotesque humours and native, uncertain art con trasting with the security of her judgment and technique. Emily Lawless and Jane Barlow continue the study of the Irish peasant with the seriousness of their age, and contemporary with them the two writers who, under the names of Somerville and Ross, repro duce the laughing surface of Irish life in the true rhythm of Anglo-Irish speech—all three with a poet's sensitiveness to the changing beauty of the Irish landscape. The modern novelists, George Moore at their head, range themselves less consciously along the lines drawn by the religious and agrarian struggle of the 19th century. They are more pre-occupied with their art than with politics. The realism of the early Moore and of The Real Char lotte fortifies but does not displace the creative imagination of which James Stephens is the exemplar. Daniel Corkery's short stories and his single novel, The Threshold of Quiet, are studies of intense though quiet reality with which may be mentioned Colum's Castle Conquer. The premature death of Seumas O'Kelly was a great loss to Irish literature. His Weaver's Grave is the best modern Irish short story. Post-war conditions explain the brutal and immature talent of O'Flaherty whose short stories de serve recognition. There remains the unique personality of James Joyce, who passes the bounds of Anglo-Irish, if not indeed of English, literature.
The history of the Irish theatre be gins in the mid-17th century and the stage was firmly established in the i8th when Garrick and Mrs. Siddons were welcomed in the rivalry of genius with the native Spranger Barry and Peg Woffing ton. Congreve was contemporary in Dublin with Farquhar who made his first appearance as an actor in the famous Crow street theatre, and on them followed Goldsmith and Sheridan—the twin glories of the i8th century stage. Macklin, O'Keeffe, Gerald Grif fin and Dion Boucicault carry on the succession into the 19th cen tury when the supremacy of Dublin, and Ireland, in this field is resumed first with the brilliant and unhappy Oscar Wilde and in our day with Bernard Shaw and the Abbey dramatists. The movement which resulted in the foundation in 1904 of the Abbey theatre began in the meeting of the writers Russell and Yeats with the actors W. G. and Frank Fay. It was a fortunate junction of poets with actors who sought in simplicity for truth. The first plays were heroic and poetical. With the accession of Synge ( 1871-1909) the movement received its most powerful impulse. He founded no school; his tragic imagination was not hereditable and his gift of richly imaged speech could not safely be imitated. Lady Gregory contributed comic verse, inexhaustible invention and an instinct for cumulatively absurd dramatic situation. These, with Padraic Colum, were the foundation dramatists. Colum, with his social sense and grave beauty of speech, was the first begetter of the peasant drama; his best play Thomas Mus kerry was produced in the year of Synge's death and it is to his idiom rather than to Synge's that later dramatists returned. The new writers include T. C. Murray, Lennox Robinson, St. John Ervine and Lord Dunsany. Murray uniformly shows a strong sense of dramatic situation, the technique of an accomplished art ist and a faculty for significant and beautiful speech. Lennox Robinson is master of easy, graceful dramatic conversation while the highly personal talent of Lord Dunsany exhibits itself in unu sual invention and verbal felicities. Sean O'Casey's first play was staged in 1923. His advent is significant of the vitality of the movement and its change. The heroic play in verse or prose has given place to the drama of realism, and the townsman is chal lenging the peasant's monopoly of the stage. O'Casey has a con summate power of creating and energizing character, a speech that holds rich local savour without losing its natural rhythm, pity and humour that transcend the squalor of the slums. In these gifts and in his passion for truth, the fruit of enthusiasm and disillusion, lies his promise. (C. P. Cu.)