In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

tradition fearful always for its own safety, and the other coming out of an ireland of fight and conquest is a wide tradition that like the ireland of the middle ages spreads its arms to the ideas of every country in the world. * * * The emancipation of irish Writers1 [. . .] 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!’2 Now, our friend of the Society for the emancipation of the irish intellect is not so rare a bird as he may seem, nor so foolish as he sounds. He was merely voicing a feeling, common enough among intelligent irishmen of today , 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 in a satisfying way after some awakening in the people themselves. it is an attitude, like many such in ireland, which derives 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 [should] 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; Æ, in 1867; John Millington Synge, in 1871; Mr. t.C. Murray, in 1873 [. . .]; Mr. daniel Corkery, in 1878; 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; 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 its triumph and ebbing to its decay until a revolt swings it forward once more to a new flood. So that it is not only fitting but well that a literature should often be examined in its course, its tides often recharted, lest it find itself sinking on the ebb when it thinks itself rising on the flow. Part Four. Contemporary Reception 225 unhappily, here in ireland for the last twenty years or so, these growls of dissatisfaction are all we have got, and nobody could call them criticism, and nobody can but distrust their frequency. Nobody can but feel that they are dictated 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 pretense to the spontaneity of a national sentiment, when one knows that they are in fact merely catchwords repeated from the papers and periodicals, debating societies and political clubs of the bourgeois intelligentsia. and one fears them for another reason, that makes one sympathise with them even while one distrusts them – one knows that they are inevitable in a period such as ours, inevitable and unreliable as the judgements of a youth raised to sudden position and power. He is insecure and self-conscious in his new status, overcritical and dogmatic in the effort to sustain the rôle. patience, forbearance, understanding are the last things one expects from such a period. it is a period in no way helpful to literature. 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 varied: irish literature has adopted literary fashions not acclimatised to ireland; it is scornful of the judgements of the people, and there is no native criticism (two charges which rather mark one 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...

Share