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so much more intense than the unrealised half-beliefs of the merely bookish. The peasant, equally with everyone else, stands at the conflux of two eternities; but who else realises it as he does? But the gift of insight is necessary to see this other worldliness colouring his every thought whether he rises up or lies down or goes about his fields.The very writers who are up in arms if poet or dramatist make a peasant mean or murderous or cowardly are often those who paint the peasant as if his beliefs were as superficial as those of the characters in magazine stories. It will be found that whatever of value in literature of this genre we have been given of late years has been the work of men of vision. ‘Impassioned contemplation’ was pater’s phrase with regard to wordsworth’s genius5 – impassioned contemplation! – there’s the magic word. * * * review: The Tent and Other Stories by Liam o’Flaherty1 The poet sang Deeper their voice grows, and nobler their bearing, whose youth in the fires of anguish hath died – 2 and we agree with him. But even long after youth is over, those self-same fires may rekindle themselves: like temptation, they cease only when the heart ceases. and always, in age as in youth, one emerges from their chastening ordeal with some deepened tone in the voice and some added stateliness in the pose. we have recovered a sense of values tenderer than those that use and wont had taught us unconsciously to live by. In our quickened sensibility we shrink from flashiness, from loudness, from the barbaric joy of giving pain. we have put off the old Man. Can it be possible that in the nation it is all different? That when the nation has had its spiritual conflict, brother thinking it right to shed the blood of brother, father that of son, son that of father – the nation, when the crisis is over, emerges cross-quartered, piebald, half-swaggering, halfdancing , loud-voiced, wanton, yet, strangest effect of all, full of the muckrake wisdom of the world! Strange phantom! Its cry is that there must be no more nonsense, no more inhibitions – except perhaps courage, steadfastness, charitableness and gentility. Part Two. Representing Ireland 107 During the seven years from 1916 to 1923 the Irish nation went through a spiritual crisis so intense that only quite a small number of its individuals was not called upon to share in it.The intensity was to be measured not so much by the sacrifices made as by the spirit in which they were made.The death-words of boys, as well as the testimonies of brave enemies who saw them die, are on record. But who that lived through those years needs to be reminded of that spiritual crisis, its intensity, its high-mindedness? It was such a crisis as in an individual could not do otherwise than induce that nobler bearing and that richer voice which the wise poet noted and set down. Yet in the nation has been induced only that strange fantastic crossquartered , piebald, worldly-wise-man attitude we have spoken of before. and one repeats the query: why should the nation differ so much from the individual? the people from the person? If one should doubt that this is true portraiture of the national being as the fires and buffetings of revolution have fashioned it, we can but say, take up and read. take up the novels, the plays, the polemical writings, the reminiscences that have been written in Ireland within the last three or four years when one, at last, got a chance of writing the real truth of things, and then say if the portraiture is true or false, is against the burden of these books or in agreement with it.These novels have been sent all over the world, the plays have been staged in alien capitals, the polemical writings reviewed and commended as the last word in frankness, in depth of feeling, in heroic truthfulness. These are the famous books. other books may have been written, published, and thrust aside, or may have been written and never published at all, not being according to market-place requirements; but who is courageous enough to suggest that these shy and hesitating voices may be the true voice, the true record, of the new Ireland that has indeed emerged from all the pother? why, to suggest as much is to...

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