[An Irish Group]
The spirit of poetry is native to Ireland. It awakened there in the early dawn, and has hardly slumbered in two thousand years. Probably before the Christian era it had become vocal; and as long as twelve hundred years ago it had woven for the garment of its thought an intricate and subtle prosody. You would think it had grown old in so great a time. You would almost expect to find, in these latter days, a pale and mournful wraith of poetry in the green isle. You would look for the symbol of it in the figure of some poor old woman, like the legendary Kathleen ni Houlihan, who is supposed to incarnate the spirit of the country. But even while you are looking it will happen with you as it happened before the eyes of the lad in the play by Mr Yeats. The bent form will straighten and the old limbs become lithe and free, the eyes will sparkle and the cheeks flush and the head be proudly lifted. And when you are asked, "Did you see an old woman?" you will answer with the boy in the play:
I did not; but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen.
So it is with the later poetry of Ireland. One would not guess, in the more recent lyrics, that these singers are the heirs of a great antiquity. Their songs are as fresh as a blade of grass: they are as new as a spring morning, as young and sweet as field flowers in May. They partake of youth in their essence; and they would seem to proceed from that strain in the Irish nature which has always adored the young and beautiful, and which dreamed, many centuries ago, a pagan paradise of immortal youth which has never lost its glamour:
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.
Doubtless we owe this air of newness largely to the rebirth of literature in the Isle. When we say that poetry has never slumbered there, we get as near to the truth as is possible; it seems always to have been quick, eager and spontaneous, and never to have drowsed or faded. But there was a black age when it was smitten so hard by external misfortune that it nearly died. It was early in the nineteenth century when, as Dr Hyde tells, "The old literary life of Ireland may be said to come to a close amidst the horrors of famine, fever and emigration." All that Dr Hyde and Lady Gregory have done to build up the new literary life of their land cannot be fully realized yet. But out of their labours has surely sprung the movement which we call the Irish Literary Renaissance—a movement in which, disregarding cross currents, the detached observer would include the whole revival, whether popular or æsthetic. By fostering the Gaelic they have awakened in the people themselves a sense of the dignity of their own language and literature. By the translation of saga and romance, the patient gathering of folk-tale and fairy-lore, the search for and interpretation of old manuscripts, they have given to native poets a mass of material which is peculiarly suited to their genius. And since approximately the year 1890 they have seen their reward in the work of a band of brilliant writers. Romance is reborn in the novel; the poetry of the old saga blooms again in the lyric; and a healthy new development has given to Ireland what she never before possessed—a native drama.
Now it is true that the larger figures of the movement have receded a little; the one in whom the flame of genius burned most fiercely has passed into silence. And Synge being gone, there is no hand like his, cunning to modulate upon every string of the harp. There is no voice of so full a compass, booming out of tragic depths or shrilling satiric laughter or sweet with heroic romance; breathing essential poetry and yet rich with the comedy of life. It is a fact to make us grieve the more for that untimely end, but it is not a cause for despair. For there are many legatees of the genius of Synge. They are slighter figures—naturally so, at this stage of their career—but they belong, as he did, to the new birth of the nation's genius and they draw their inspiration directly from their own land.
Here we touch a constant feature of Irish poetry. Dr. Hyde tells that from the earliest times the bards were imbued with the spirit of nationality: that their themes were always of native gods and heroes, and that they were, in a sense, the guardians of national existence. The singers of a later day curiously resemble them in this. Sometimes it is a matter of outward likeness only, the new poets having drawn directly upon the stories which have been placed in their hands from the old saga. But much more often it is a rooted affinity—a thing of blood and nerve and mental fibre. Then, although the gods may bear another name and the heroes be of a newer breed and the national ideal may be enlarged, it is still with these things that the poets are preoccupied.
This has become to the scoffer a matter of jest, and to the grumbler a cause of complaint—that the Irish poet is obsessed by race. They say that they can guess beforehand what will be the mood, the manner and the subject of nine Irish poems out of ten. They are very clever people, so they probably could get somewhere near the mark. And they would naturally find themselves cramped in these narrow bounds. Religion and history and national ideals would give them no scope. But when they maintain that this is a radical defect, I am not at all convinced. I remember that many of the world's great books proceeded from an intense national self-consciousness; and I ask myself whether it may not be a law in the literary evolution of a people, as well as in their political development, that they proceed by way of a strong, free and proud spirit of nationality to something wider. The reply may be that that is a relatively early stage through which, in a normal literary progress, Ireland should have passed long since. True, but normal growth and advance have never been possible to her; and recalling the events of her history, it is something of a marvel that the literary genius should have survived at all.