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I do not wish to be taken as quarrelling with the principle of censorship. But in practice it requires men of more than ordinary intelligence, whose values are ones that are generally recognised and whose judgements are to a great extent predictable. The judgements of the present Censorship Board are far from predictable. As Mr. MacManus says, they sometimes appear to add eccentricity to arbitrariness.4 One effect of that, which has not been commonly realised, is that it makes it impossible for any Irish publisher to publish the works of those writers whom Mr. MacManus refers to as ‘The Left Wing Group.’5 The banning of even one book, such as Seán O’Faoláin’s Bird Alone,6 would be quite sufficient to bankrupt a small publisher, and it seems to me a most mischievous thing to make it impossible for the Irish writer to publish at home. Already he has been too much tempted by the English market, but this perpetuates that old bad state of things which compelled him to publish abroad because there was no market at home. Now the market at home is coming, but he will have to go abroad because no one will dare to publish his work here. I throw my hat at the question of nomenclature. To enquire whether a book is ‘Irish’or ‘Anglo-Irish’or ‘Colonial’or whether we find ‘reflected in it the face of the people of the land,’7 or whether it is the sort of book ‘Irish people will take to their hearts,’8 to ask if it is ‘representative’ – all this without considering whether it has any merit as a book seems to me the same sort of folly as enquiring the proportion of Irish books read by a man who hasn’t enough to read. ‘Irish’ or ‘English’ are handy words for people who have to classify books; it may add an additional flavour to be told that a good book is typically ‘Spanish,’ but ‘Irish’ and the rest of them have absolutely no critical significance. Having in my youth made the mistake of damning all the writers I disliked as ‘Anglo-Irish’and convincing myself that then and there I had disposed of them forever, I now abjure the hateful error, and beg the other contributors to this symposium not to repeat it. * * * Synge1 I Since the plays of John Synge were first produced in our Theatre we have seen a revolution. In those days Synge was the wicked man, the foreigner, the atheist, the traducer of the Irish people. Now, thanks to the work of Part Four. Contemporary Reception 215 professor Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, he has been accepted as almost an irish writer. if he did traduce the irish people it was unconsciously. as a protestant, he couldn’t know better! professor Corkery’s thesis is that there is no such thing as what he calls ‘anglo-irish’ literature. in Synge and one or two others there is an approximation to it; that is all. ‘The three great forces’, he says, ‘which, working for long in the irish national being, have made it so different from the english national being are: (1) The religious Consciousness of the people; (2) irish Nationalism; and (3) The Land.’2 He then goes on to say that the mentality of a crowd of 30,000 he had seen at a hurling match in Thurles ‘was chiefly the result of the interplay of these three forces’ – apparently unaware that the mentality of any crowd or any man is chiefly the result of things far less subtle, and forgetting that later he will say that ‘if irish life differs from english life . . . that difference is due to a quality of intenseness in irish mind, there racially or else induced by whole centuries of suffering . . . .’3 But it is on the first ground that he dismisses the poetry of yeats.‘it is not possible’, he says, ‘to imagine it as the foundation of a school of poetry in which these three great forces, religion, Nationalism, The Land, will find intense yet chastened expression.’4 and in so far as Synge remained a protestant and alien to nationalist, Catholic ideas, he too failed as a writer. one thing stands out from this judgement; the fact that Corkery considers literature a purely representative thing. for him the artist’s justification is as a parliamentary deputy of literature. What three...

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