By HORATIO S. KRANS, Ph.D.
In the closing decade of the nineteenth century and in the opening
years of the twentieth, no literary movement has awakened a livelier
interest than the Irish Literary Revival, a movement which, by its
singleness and solidarity of purpose, stood alone in a time of
confused literary aims and tendencies. Movements, like individuals,
have their ancestry, and that of the Irish Literary Revival is easily
traced. It descends from Callanan and Walsh, and from the writers of
'48. It is to this descent that the lines in William Butler Yeats's
"To Ireland in Coming Times" allude:
Know that I would accounted be
True brother of that company,
Who sang to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song.
With the passing of the mid-nineteenth-century writers, the old
movement waned, and in the field of Irish letters there was, in the
phrase of a famous bull, nothing stirring but stagnation. A witty
critic of the period, commenting upon this unhappy state of affairs,
declared that, though the love of learning in Ireland might still be,
as the saying went, indestructible, it was certainly imperceptible.
But after the fall of Parnell a new spirit was stirring. Politics no
longer absorbed the whole energy of the nation. Groups of men
inspired with a love of the arts sprang up here and there. In 1890
Yeats proved himself a real prophet when he wrote: "A true literary
consciousness--national to the centre--seems gradually to be forming
out of all this disguising and prettifying, this penumbra of
half-culture. We are preparing likely enough for a new Irish literary
movement--like that of '48--that will show itself in the first lull
in politics."
Responsive to the need of the young writers associated with Yeats,
the National Literary Society was founded in Dublin in 1892, and a
year later London Irishmen, among them men already distinguished in
letters, founded in the English metropolis the Irish Literary
Society. From the presses in Dublin, in London, and in New York as
well, books began to appear in rapid succession--slender volumes of
verse, novels, short stories, essays, plays, translations, and
remakings of Irish myths and legends, all inspired by, and closely
related to, the past or the present of Ireland, voicing an
essentially national spirit and presenting the noblest traits of
Irish life and character.
Not content with the organization of the two literary societies,
Yeats, with courage and relentless tenacity, cast about to realize
his long-cherished dream of a theatre that should embody the ideals
of the Revival. In Lady Gregory, and in Edward Martyn, an Irishman of
large means, who with both pen and purse lent a willing hand, he
found two ardent laborers for his vineyard. George Moore, who in the
event proved a fish out of water in Ireland, Yeats and Martyn
contrived to lure from his London lodgings and his cosmopolitan ways,
and to enlist in the theatrical enterprise. The practical knowledge
of the stage which this gifted _enfant terrible_ of literature
contributed was doubtless of great value in the early days of the
dramatic adventure, though Moore's free thoughts, frank speech, and
mordant irony brought an element of discord into Dublin literary
circles, which may well have left Yeats and his associates with a
feeling that they had paid too dear for a piper to whose tunes they
refused to dance. Be that as it may, in 1899 Yeats's dream was
measurably realized, and the Irish Literary Theatre established, to
be succeeded a little later by the Irish National Theatre Society.
Enough, however, of the dramatic aspect of the Revival, which
receives separate treatment elsewhere in these pages, as does also
the dramatic work of certain of the authors considered here.
From what has already been said, it should be plain that in the last
decade of the last century the ranks of the Irish Literary
Revivalists filled rapidly, and that the movement was really under
way. The renascent spirit took various forms. To one group of poets
the humor, pathos, and tragedy of peasant life deeply appealed, and
found expression in a poetry distinctively and unmistakably national,
from which a kind of pleasure could be drawn unlike anything else in
other literatures. In this group Alfred Perceval Graves and Moira
O'Neill cannot pass unmentioned. Who would ask anything racier in its
kind than the former's "Father O'Flynn"?
Of priests we can offer a charmin' variety,
Far renowned for larnin' and piety,
Still I'd advance you without impropriety,
Father O'Flynn as the flower of them all.
Here's a health to you, Father O'Flynn,
Slainte,[1] and slainte, and slainte agin.
Powerfullest preacher,
And tinderest teacher,
And kindliest creature in Old Donegal.
[Footnote 1: "Your health."]
Or was the homing instinct, the homesick longing for the old sod,
ever more truly rendered than in Moira O'Neill's song of the Irish
laborer in England?
Over here in England I'm helpin' wi' the hay,
An' I wish I was in Ireland the livelong day;
Weary on the English, an' sorra take the wheat!
Och! Corrymeela an' the blue sky over it.
D'ye mind me now, the song at night is mortial hard to raise,
The girls are heavy-goin' here, the boys are ill to plase;
When ones't I'm out this workin' hive, 'tis I'll be back again--
Aye, Corrymeela in the same soft rain.
Here, too, should be named Jane Barlow, whose poems and stories are
faithful imaginative transcripts of the face of nature and the hearts
of men as she knew them in Connemara. Finally there is William Butler
Yeats, who, on the whole, is the representative man of the Revival.
Except in the translator's sphere, his writings have given him a
place in almost all the activities of this movement. As a lyric poet,
he has expressed the moods of peasant and patriot, of mystic,
symbolist, and quietist, and it is safe to say that in lyric poetry
no one of his generation writing in English is his superior. We
cannot resist the pleasure of quoting here from his "Innisfree",
which won the praise of Robert Louis Stevenson, and which, if not the
high mark of Yeats's achievement, is still a flawless thing in its
way:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnets' wings.
In this place, and for convenience sake, it may be permitted to speak
of aspects of Yeats's work other than that by virtue of which he is
to be classed with the group we have just considered. In his
narrative poem, "The Wanderings of Usheen", as well as in his plays
and lyrics, he is of the best of those--among them we may mention by
the way Dr. John Todhunter, Nora Hopper (Mrs. W.H. Chesson), and
William Larminie--who have revealed to our day the strange beauty of
the ancient creations of the Gaelic imagination. In prose he has
written short stories, a novelette, _John Sherman and Dhoya_, and
essays that reveal a subtle critical insight, and a style of
beautiful finish and grace, suggestive of the style of Shelley's
_Defence of Poetry_. Yeats's plays constitute a considerable and an
important part of his work, but these must be reserved for treatment
elsewhere in this book. In prefaces to anthologies of prose and verse
of his editing, in the pages of reviews, and elsewhere, he appears as
the chief apologist of the aims of the Literary Revival, and in
particular of the methods of the dramatists of the Revival. Whatever
he has touched he has lifted into the realm of poetry, and this is in
large measure true of his prose, which proceeds from the poet's point
of view and breathes the poetic spirit. A man of rare versatility, a
finished artist with a scrupulous artistic conscience, he has done
work of high and sustained quality, and is certain to exert a good
and lasting influence upon the literature of his country.
In a literary movement in the "Isle of Saints", we look naturally for
religious poetry, and we do not look in vain. This poetry, chiefly
Catholic, has a quality of its own as distinctive as that of the
writers of the group we have just left. Now it voices a naïve,
devoted simplicity of Christian faith; now it attains to a high and
keen spirituality; now it is mystic and pagan. Among the religious
poets, Lionel Johnson easily stands first--perhaps the Irish poet of
firmest fibre and most resonant voice of his generation. A note of
high courage and of spiritual triumph rings through his verse, even
from the shadow of the wings of the dark angel that gives a title to
one of the saddest of his poems. Often he strikes a note of genuine
religious ecstasy and exaltation rarely heard in English, as in "Te
Martyrum Candidatus":
Ah, see the fair chivalry come, the companions of Christ!
White Horsemen, who ride on white horses, the Knights of God!
They, for their Lord and their Lover who sacrificed
All, save the pleasure of treading where He first trod.
These through the darkness of death, the dominion of night,
Swept, and they woke in white places at morning tide:
They saw with their eyes, and sang for joy of the sight,
They saw with their eyes the Eyes of the Crucified.
Among the men of the Revival, no personality is stronger or more
attractive than that of G.W. Russell--"Æ", as he is always
called--who may be regarded as the hero of George Moore's _Hail and
Farewell_, and who alone in that gallery of wonderful pen-portraits
looks forth with complete amiability. He is a pantheist, a mystic,
and a visionary, with what would seem a literal and living faith in
many gods, though strongly prepossessed in favor of the ancient
divinities of the Gael, now long since in exile. Impressive and
striking by a certain spiritual integrity, so to say, "Æ" unites
gifts and faculties seldom combined. He is a poet of rare subtlety, a
painter in whose genius so good a judge as George Moore believed, and
a most practical man of affairs, who, as assistant to Sir Horace
Plunkett, held up the latter's hands in his labors on behalf of
co-operative dairies and the like. His poems have their roots in a
pantheism which half reveals the secrets of an indwelling spirit,
speaking alike "from the dumb brown lips of earth" and from the
passions of the heart of man.
Of novelists, both men and women, the Irish Revival can, in the words
of "Father O'Flynn", offer a charming variety, and among their novels
and short stories are some books of high quality and not a few in a
high degree interesting and entertaining. To Standish O'Grady we turn
for tales, with a kind of bardic afflatus about them, of the hero age
of legendary Ireland--tales which drew attention to the romantic
Celtic past of myth and saga, and must have been an inspiration to
more than one writer of the younger generation. In contrast to the
broad epic sweep and remote romantic backgrounds of O'Grady, are the
stories of Jane Barlow, whose _genre_ pictures of peasant life in the
west of Ireland, like her poems mentioned above, show how
sympathetically she understands the ways of thinking, feeling, and
acting of her humble compatriots. A like minute and faithful
knowledge is evident in the work of two story-tellers of the north,
Seumas MacManus and Shan Bullock. The former's outlook is humorous
and pathetic. He tells fairy and folk tales well, and is a past
master of the dialect and idiom that combine to give his old-wives'
yarns an honest smack of the soil. Let him who doubts it read
_Through the Turf Smoke_ or _Donegal Fairy Stories_. If Shan Bullock
walks the same fields as Seumas MacManus, he does so with a different
air and with a more definite purpose. Sometimes he turns to the
squireens, small farmers, or small country gentry, and lays bare the
hardness and narrowness that are a part of their life. Or, again, in
pictures whose sadness and gloom are lightened, to be sure, with
humor or warmed with love, he studies the necessitous life of the
poor. _The Squireen, The Barrys_, and _Irish Pastorals_ are some of
his representative books.
In the novel as in poetry the ladies have worked side by side with
their literary brethren. Miss Hermione Templeton, in her _Darby
O'Gill_, and elsewhere, has written pleasantly and gracefully of the
fairies. In a very different vein are the novels of the
collaborators, Miss Somerville and "Martin Ross" (Miss Violet
Martin), over which English and American readers have laughed as
heartily as their own fellow countrymen. _The Experiences of an Irish
R.M._remains, perhaps, their best book. The work of these ladies, be
it said by the way, is in the line of descent from that group of
older Irish novelists who wrote in the spirit of the devil-may-care
gentry, the novelists from Maxwell to Lover and Lever, who were ever
questing "divilment and divarshion," and who in their moods of
boisterous fun forgot the real Irishman, and presented in his place a
caricature--him of the Celtic screech and the exhilarating whack of
the shillelagh, the famous stage Irishman who has made occasional
appearances in English literature from the time of Shakespeare's
_Henry V._, on through the works of Fielding and the plays of
Sheridan, to the present moment of writing.
Of a very different stripe from the work of the collaborating ladies
just mentioned are the novels of the recently deceased Canon
Sheehan--notable among them _Luke Delmege_ and _My New
Curate_--rambling, diffuse, and a trifle provincial from the artistic
standpoint, but interesting as studies of manners, and for the
pictures they afford of the priesthood of modern Ireland in the
pleasantest light. If the stories of Miss Somerville and "Martin
Ross" are related to the comic stories of the old novelists of the
gentry, those of Canon Sheehan must be associated with the work of
the older novelists who wrote more or less in the spirit of the
peasantry, that is, with Gerald Griffin, the Banim brothers, and
William Carleton, less famous than he deserves to be by his _Traits
and Stories_ and a long line of novels and tales.
No survey of Irish novelists, however brief, can afford to forget the
Rev. James Owen Hannay ("George A. Birmingham"), canon of St.
Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, whose work is as distinctively
Protestant in its point of view as Father Sheehan's is Catholic. His
more substantial novels are a careful transcript of the actualities
of Irish life today, and in them one meets, incognito but easily
recognizable, many Irishmen now prominent in literature or politics
in Ireland. Of his numerous books may be mentioned _The Seething Pot,
Hyacinth_, and _Northern Iron_.
Finally there is George Moore, whose enlistment in the Revival was
responsible for the novel _The Lake_ and the short stories of _The
Unfilled Field_, and for a largely autobiographic and entirely
indiscreet trilogy entitled _Hail and Farewell_, the separate volumes
appearing as _Ave, Salve, Vale_, and the last of them as late as
1914. George Moore's anti-Catholic bias is strong, but his is the pen
of an accomplished artist. He has the story-teller's beguiling gift,
and he bristles with ideas which his books cleverly embody and to
which the dramatic moments of his novels give point and relief.
Not the least important work of the Irish Literary Revival has been
done by translators, who have put into English the old Gaelic
romances and the folklore still current among the little remnant of
Irish-speaking country folk. Dr. Douglas Hyde is in the forefront of
this group. He it was who organized the Gaelic League, a band of
enthusiasts zealous for the revival of the Irish language both as a
spoken tongue and as the medium for a national literature, and eager,
also, to breed up a race of Celtic scholars. The lyrics in his _Love
Songs of Connacht_ are full of grace, tenderness, and fire, and
indicate the kind of gems which he and his fellow laborers have added
to the treasury of poetry in English. But it is Lady Gregory,
especially in her _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_ and _Gods and Fighting
Men_, who more than any other has found a way to stir the blood of
readers of to-day by the romantic hero tales of Ireland. From the
racy idiom of the dwellers on or about her own estate in Galway, she
happily framed a style that gave her narratives freshness, novelty,
and a flavor of the soil. Upon the work of scholars she drew heavily
in making her own renderings, but she has justified all borrowings by
breathing into her books the breath and the warmth of life, and her
adaptation to epic purposes of the dialect of those who still retain
the expiring habit of thinking in Gaelic was a real literary
achievement. She has, indeed, in sins of commission and of omission,
taken liberties with the old legends, but this may render them not
less, and perhaps more, delightful to the general reader, however
just complaints may be from the standpoint of the scholar.
Even so brief a sketch as this may suffice to bring home to those not
already aware of it a realization of the delights to be drawn from
the creations of a living literary movement, which is perhaps the
most notable of its generation, and which has gathered together a
remarkable group of poets, novelists, and dramatists, who, as men and
women, are a most interesting company--a fact to which even George
Moore's _Hail and Farewell_, with its quick eye for defects and
foibles and its ironic wit, bears abundant testimony.