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really think that the crude is good art? or that Mr. Liam o’Flaherty’s efforts at curdling the blood, as in The Informer,3 are anything else than the cheapest form of melodrama? His present book, The Tent, has stories in it that hitch on to The Informer, that from which the book takes its name, for instance, or ‘Civil war,’or ‘The terrorist,’ or ‘The Sensualist,’ and one or two others. They are really the weakest things in the book. when they do not in their crude accumulating of shock shell make us smile they simply leave us cold. If the mind returns to them at all, it is simply to think how easily they might be bettered. But these after all are only a small part of the book. His studies in animal life are always interesting, and the objectively-written end of ‘The wounded Cormorant’ is one of the few pages which really infect the mind with its own feeling.There are then his stories of priests and their ways – perhaps the crudest of all. an artist must respond to his material; and wilfully to see only the externals of the Irish priest is simply misdirection of energy. only in one story, the simplest of all, do we experience the reverberations that arise in the spirit when life, the inner, is reached. It is the story ‘Mother and Son.’ a mother is in great anxiety, her wildish son not having returned from school at anything like the usual time. at last he does come, and the mother instead of thrashing him, as she had intended, simply cuddles him, and thrusts the task of punishing him on to the father, who is not at home.That intention the boy dissolves in his mother by telling her of a big black horse that he has seen in the sky.we feel that the mother and son are indeed flesh of the same flesh; and we feel the little soul groping for a way in life, his mother’s way – all softness, and his father’s way, his father who has told him that he must never be afraid. The little story is tenderly and beautifully told; and the author of it has the root of the matter in him. He will presently give over trying to freeze the blood with whirling adjectives – the very wrongest way; he will learn that an artist who doesn’t respect the material he deals in, who doesn’t almost shrink from it, for it is Life itself, mysterious and majestical – is just a bungler and no more. * * * The Literature of Collapse1 one wonders if the Literature of Collapse – such as has been in the making among us ever since the treaty was signed,2 exhibit everywhere the same characteristics. It would be an interesting thing for some calm and wise Part Two. Representing Ireland 109 Irishman to examine for us the literature that has grown up in Germany since 1918. Doubtless he should have to make some allowance for the difference that must always exist, even in periods of collapse, between the expression of the mind of a free people and that of the mind of a people not free; but this distinction made, one wishes to know if Germany is having its p.S. o’Hegartys,3 its Sean o’Caseys4 and the others. after the fever of midsummer, the cloudless august harvestings, how one welcomes those calm Corot-like days of october!5 one sinks into the mood of them and rests; and as Thoreau tells us of himself that after a long day of quiet idleness, even of suspension of thought, he often felt he had made growth somehow, was renewed, was different,6 so in the long slow twilight of an october day one may at last begin to lift a head, to feel that back of all things, or under the earth somewhere were stirrings towards a future burgeoning; and then the welcoming of the future, and the feeling of quiet preparation for it in all things – that becomes the secret of living. But there are people who will not be still even how stilly the atmosphere is: where does Lamb remark that the sound of a saw on a warm summer day harrows one?7 Sawing is a thing that must be done; but those frenetic people who will saw when we all would give ourselves to the healing powers of quietness and...

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