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russian Models for Irish Litterateurs1 When a modern literature began to be created in Irish there were practically only two sources to which the writers went for models.These were english literature and the old Irish literature. english literature was on all counts a disastrous model. It was disastrous when the writers went to the english of the elizabethans, as some did when they set about writing drama. It was no less disastrous when they went to Sir Walter Scott,2 as others did when they set out to write historical novels. Few went to the english moderns – perhaps some instinct saved them. There are perhaps no two countries in europe which present two such different schemes of life to the artist as do Ireland and england.The problems of sex are the stock-in-trade of modern english novelists. If the artist is to grow in his own soil and to flower as the nation flowers, it is evident these problems are not for the Irish writer.They are not the sources of passionate endeavour in Ireland. So much for english models. as for the Irish models, it is I think to be accepted that even yet as much has not been done with them as might. The unfortunate thing is, however, that we have little or no prose models from the more recent centuries in Irish. The prose models go too far back to be of immediate service. Verse models there are in plenty – and it is of these I am thinking when I say that they have not at all been used to the extent they might. a few writers went to the French dramatists; surely not wisely: to the courtly life of France in the seventeenth century is surely a far cry from modern Ireland. russian literature on the other hand uses for its own end a scheme of life which has much in common with Irish life; and at the same time it is a modern literature. It practically did not exist before the nineteenth century. These earlier russian litterateurs – pushkin,3 Lermontov,4 Gogol5 – when they looked from their own eyes out on russia found in the first place the cultures of other peoples and languages seated in the high places. Looking more intimately at life they found a horde of officials, a bureaucracy; and behind all this a peasant nation. and the one great central fact in that peasant nation was its religion; religion coloured every strand of the web of its life.They also found revolutionaries. I need not point out the closeness of the parallel, it is so obvious. But it is to be insisted on that these writers did not look out on this life as from alien eyes: they were above all things russians. religion in the russian peasant often intensifies into fanaticism; and we find the same thing happening in these writers, both in their books and their lives. politics in the russian revolutionary often seems to die away into a sullen despair; and so too with russian writers. need it be said also that one finds examples among the 19 minor writers of people developing the smugness of the official both in their lives and writings – a thing not undreamt of in Ireland. I mention this identity of the russian writer with his people as a sort of hint of my fear that the same thing is not being done in Ireland. Is there not a touch too much of the schoolmaster in our Irish writers? not in all, but in too many. Is there not a certain want of frankness, a fear of being real? Is there not a touch too much of the idyllic? Because of this desire of ours to turn out a side of things which is perfectly blameless (as if the trick cannot be seen through at a glance!) we are not getting up the power or putting forth any of these studies of life which would do more in the end to forward everything Irish than political movements. What would one not give for a passionately real study of Irish life before the famine! or for a study – not idyllic – of life in the Land League days? or for a story which – again predicating passionate reality – would have, say, egan o’rahilly6 or eoghan ruadh7 or pierce Fitzgerald8 or Cathal Buidhe9 for its central figure, grouping up the life of their extraordinary days about them! These are yet...

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