16. Daily Express. March 26. 1903.


The Soul of Ireland

"Poets and Dreamers: Studies and Translations from the Irish." By
Lady    Gregory. Hodges, Figgis, and Co., Dublin: John Murray,
London.

  Aristotle finds at the beginning of all speculation the feeling
of wonder, a feeling proper to childhood, and if speculation be
proper to the middle period of life it is natural that one should
look to the crowning period of life for the fruit of speculation,
wisdom itself. But nowadays people have greatly confused
childhood and middle life and old age; those who succeed in spite
of civilisation in reaching old age seem to have less and less
wisdom, and children who are usually put to some business as soon
as they can walk and talk, seem to have more and more "common
sense;" and, perhaps, in the future little boys with long beards
will stand aside and applaud, while old men in short trousers
play hand-ball against the side of a house.
  This may even happen in Ireland, if Lady Gregory has truly set
forth the old age of her country. In her new book she has left
legends and heroic youth far behind, and has explored in a land
almost fabulous in its sorrow and senility. Half of her book is
an account of old men and old women in the West of Ireland. These
old people are full of stories about giants and witches, and dogs
and black-handled knives, and they tell their stories one after
another at great length and with many repetitions (for they are
people of leisure) by the fire or in the yard of a workhouse. It
is difficult to judge well of their charms and herb-healing, for
that is the province of those who are learned in these matters
and can compare the customs of countries, and, indeed, it is well
not to know these magical-sciences, for if the wind changes while
you are cutting wild camomile you will lose your mind.
  But one can judge more easily of their stories. These stories
appeal to some feeling which is certainly not that feeling of
wonder which is the beginning of all speculation. The
story-tellers are old, and their imagination is not the
imagination of childhood. The story-teller preserves the strange
machinery of fairyland, but his mind is feeble and sleepy. He
begins one story and wanders from it into another story, and none
of the stories has any satisfying imaginative wholeness, none of
them is like Sir John Daw's poem that cried tink in the close.
Lady Gregory is conscious of this, for she often tries to lead
the speaker back to his story by questions, and when the story
has become hopelessly involved, she tries to establish some
wholeness by keeping only the less involved part; sometimes she
listens "half interested and half impatient." In fine, her book,
wherever it treats of the "folk," sets forth in the fulness of
its senility a class of mind which Mr. Yeats has set forth with
such delicate scepticism in his happiest book, "The Celtic
Twilight."
  Something of health and naturalness, however, enters with
Raftery, the poet. He had a terrible tongue, it seems and would
make a satirical poem for a very small offence. He could make
love-poems, too (though Lady Gregory finds a certain falseness in
the western love-poems), and repentant poems. Raftery though he
be the last of the great bardic procession, has much of the
bardic tradition about him. He took shelter one day from the rain
under a bush; at first the bush kept out the rain, and he made
verses praising it, but after a while it let the rain through,
and he made verses dispraising it.
  Lady Gregory translates some of his verses, and she also
translates some West Irish ballads and some poems by Dr. Douglas
Hyde. She completes her book with translations of four one-act
plays by Dr. Douglas Hyde, three of which have for their central
figure that legendary person, who is vagabond and poet, and even
saint at times, while the fourth play is called a "nativity"
play. The dwarf-drama (if one may use that term) is a form of art
which is improper and ineffectual, but it is easy to understand
why it finds favour with an age which has pictures that are
"nocturnes," and writers like Mallarme and the composer of
"Recapitulation." The dwarf-drama is accordingly to be judged as
an entertainment, and Dr. Douglas Hyde is certainly entertaining
in the "Twisting of the Rope," and Lady Gregory has succeeded
better with her verse-translations here than elsewhere, as these
four lines may show:

            I have heard the melodious harp
            On the streets of Cork playing to us;
            More melodious by far I thought your voice,
            More melodious by far your mouth than that.

  This book, like so many other books of our time, is in part
picturesque and in part an indirect or direct utterance of the
central belief of Ireland. Out of the material and spiritual
battle which has gone so hardly with her Ireland has emerged with
many memories of beliefs, and with one belief -- a belief in the
incurable ignobility of the forces that have overcome her -- and
Lady Gregory, whose old men and women seem to be almost their own
judges when they tell their wandering stories, might add to the
passage from Whitman which forms her dedication, Whitman's
ambiguous word for the vanquished -- "Battles are lost in the
spirit in which they are won."

                                                 -J. J.