TH

PREFACE

HE title Literary Backgrounds of the Irish Free State applied to a book concerned chiefly with modern Anglo-Irish literature, requires explanation for those who have not followed closely the development of literary and political Ireland in the past decade. Although it is generally known that many of the leaders in the Irish Rebellion of 1916 were men of letters, comparatively few people realize how intimate has been the connection between Irish political thought and the literary revival. Standish O'Grady, Douglas Hyde, and William Butler Yeats are as truly founders of the Irish Free State as were Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins: O'Grady reinterpreted the glory and the dignity of early Gaelic Ireland; Hyde stayed the decay of Gaelic speech; and Yeats added to the national heritage a beauty partly compounded of ancient things. In thirty years Irish men and women have grown to understand the continuity of their tradition: that they are the inheritors of a highly developed tribal civilization untouched by Roman influences, revealed in a vernacular literature going back to prehistoric times and of a high stage of stylistic development. Behind the work of the creative writers, and even of the Gaelic League, lies the accomplishment of the scholars who have

edited, arranged, and explained the literature written in Gaelic from the ninth to the nineteenth century: this is the treasure-house of the national imagination, literary manner, and polity. Consciously or unconsciously, the Irish writers in Gaelic and in English who have built up the ideal of nationality expressed politically in the Free State have been influenced by their Gaelic literary heritage. Fully to understand the development of Ireland from 1889 to 1922 requires a knowledge of AngloIrish literature of the period; and to grasp the significance of this literature is to examine it in relation to the older Gaelic; Anglo-Irish literature, though written in English, thus is found Irish in imagination and in style.

The papers collected in this volume are an attempt at such a study, in which the late Thomas MacDonagh, with Literature in Ireland, was a distinguished pioneer. As a rule, books in English by Irish men and women have been considered almost entirely as contributions to English literature; in this book has been kept chiefly in mind their connection with the Gaelic tradition. To the present writer it is of great interest that the temper of Irish literature has altered little in a thousand years: Dunsany, though he invents a country of his own, preserves characteristics of Gaelic style; Ledwidge writes of landscape with the same intimacy as did the monks of remote centuries. If, as George Moore

has suggested, art has been blighted by modern civilization, there is high hope for Ireland, where the literary outlook is unchanged in essentials. Irish authors, moreover, may write in English and still remain thoroughly national.

The opening essays in Changing Ireland endeavor to give a general idea of the content and the salient features of Gaelic literature by way of necessary introduction to the critical papers that follow. The reviews of books dealing with Irish politics since 1916 are included, not only to show the Gaelic ideal operative in politics, but also to suggest volumes which may be useful in forming a just estimate of the turbulent course of Irish history and to indicate the more moderate opinions. Both parts, it is hoped, will give a true interpretation of the newly awakened and established Irish nationality in its continuity from the past and with its promise for the future.