Irish Books and Irish People   By: Stephen Lucius Gwynn (1864-1950)

By

STEPHEN GWYNN.

DUBLIN The Talbot Press Ltd. 89 Talbot Street

LONDON T. Fisher Unwin Ltd. 1 Adelphi Terrace

CONTENTS

Page INTRODUCTION 1

NOVELS OF IRISH LIFE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 7

A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR 23

LITERATURE AMONG THE ILLITERATES:

I. THE SHANACHY 44

II. THE LIFE OF A SONG 51

IRISH EDUCATION AND IRISH CHARACTER 65

THE IRISH GENTRY 83

YESTERDAY IN IRELAND 97

INTRODUCTION.

My publisher must take at least some of the responsibility for reviving these essays. All bear the marks of the period at which they were written; and some of them deal with the beginnings of movements which have since grown to much greater strength, and in growing have developed new characteristics at the expense of what was originally more prominent. Other pages, again, take no account of facts which to day must be present to the mind of every Irish reader, and so are, perhaps significantly, out of date. Nobody for instance, could now complain that Irish humour is lacking in seriousness. Synge disposed of that criticism and, indeed, the Abbey Theatre in its tone as a whole may be accused of neglecting Ireland's gift for simple fun. Yet Lady Gregory made the most of it in her "Spreading the News," and Mr. Yeats in his "Pot of Broth." How beautifully W. G. Fay interpreted an Irish laughter which had no bitterness in it.

But the strong intellectual movement which has swept over Ireland has been both embittering and embittered. These last five and twenty years have been the most formative in the country's history of any since Ireland became the composite nation that she now is, or, perhaps, has yet to become. At the back of it all lies the great social change involved in the transfer of ownership from the landlord to the cultivators of the soil a change which has literally disenserfed three fourths of Ireland's people. Yet the relations are obscure, indefinite, and intangible, which unite that material result to the outcome of two forces, allied but distinct, which have operated solely on men's minds and spirits. These are, of course, the Gaelic revival and the whole literary movement which has had its most concrete expression in the Irish theatre, and its most potent inspiration in the personality of Mr. Yeats.

Of these two forces, one can show by far the more tangible effects, for the Gaelic League has issued in action. Setting out to revive and save the Irish language as a living speech, the instrument of a nation's intercourse, it has failed of its purpose; but it has revived and rendered potent the principle of separation. Nationalist, it will have nothing to do with a nationality that is not as plainly marked off from other nationalities as a red lamp from a green lamp; and the essential symbol of separate nationality is for orthodox Gaelic Leaguers a separate language. America, said an able exponent of this doctrine the other day in a public debate, will never and never can be a nation till its language is no longer recognisable as English till its English differs as much from the language of England as German differs from Dutch. An inevitable corollary to this view is the necessity for complete political separation from Great Britain if only to provide the machinery for this complete differentiation by daily speech.