I have not found it possible to revise this book as completely as I
should have wished. I have corrected a bad mistake of a copyist, and
added a few pages of new verses towards the end, and softened some
phrases in the introduction which seemed a little petulant in form, and
written in a few more to describe writers who have appeared during the
last four years, and that is about all. I compiled it towards the end of
a long indignant argument, carried on in the committee rooms of our
literary societies, and in certain newspapers between a few writers of
our new movement, who judged Irish literature by literary standards, and
a number of people, a few of whom were writers, who judged it by its
patriotism and by its political effect; and I hope my opinions may have
value as part of an argument which may awaken again. The Young Ireland
writers wrote to give the peasantry a literature in English in place of
the literature they were losing with Gaelic, and these methods, which
have shaped the literary thought of Ireland to our time, could not be
the same as the methods of a movement which, so far as it is more than
an instinctive expression of certain moods of the soul, endeavours to
create a reading class among the more leisured classes, which will
preoccupy itself with Ireland and the needs of Ireland. The peasants in
eastern counties have their Young Ireland poetry, which is always good
teaching and sometimes good poetry, and the peasants of the western
counties have beautiful poems and stories in Gaelic, while our more
leisured classes read little about any country, and nothing about
Ireland. We cannot move these classes from an apathy, come from their
separation from the land they live in, by writing about politics or
about Gaelic, but we may move them by becoming men of letters and
expressing primary emotions and truths in ways appropriate to this
country. One carries on the traditions of Thomas Davis, towards whom our
eyes must always turn, not less than the traditions of good literature,
which are the morality of the man of letters, when one is content, like
A.E. with fewer readers that one may follow a more hidden beauty; or
when one endeavours, as I have endeavoured in this book, to separate
what has literary value from what has only a patriotic and political
value, no matter how sacred it has become to us.
The reader who would begin a serious study of modern Irish literature
should do so with Mr Stopford Brooke's and Mr Rolleston's exhaustive
anthology.
W.B.Y.
_August 15, 1899_