Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill ON IRISH LITERATURE Ireland's best case is to be found in her literature; and if she were to be represented, as the aggrieved one, in the congress of English speaking countries, I would have her represented by a book. I do not mean a book on the ' Irish question ' that would be enough to disrupt any conference! I mean a group of lyrics by Yeats, or selections from the prose of George Russell or Standish O'Grady, or best of all by far, a play by Synge and the less politics and Celtic twilight in it the better. There are a thousand things, economic, commercial, religious, geographical, prejudicial, irritable, and disreputable that count for Ireland, but only one which has breathing, human interest for an Australian or an American and that is not the body, but the soul of Ireland. He will not admit it perhaps, or be conscious of it, for we do not talk of souls in America (and I suppose Australia) except on Sundays and in sermons. He might be shocked to be told that even the easy Irish humor that made a background for him in boyhood has something to do with soul. It has; and it is just one among many Irish forms of escape, escape from the rather tiresomeefficiencies; escape from a cut and dried economic and respectable view of the universe; escape from ugliness of the body into beauty of the mind. I do not mean an escape to Angus and Dana and the other Celtic gods who seem to be local celebrities after all, a bit overwritten in a publicity campaign to put them beside the old favorites of classic English literature (a form of Bolshevikism this, an attack by the Irish proletariat upon the vested interests of the Greek and Latin deities). They have their place, but it is the persistent and successful escape of the Irish mind into sorrow and joy and reverence and lov...
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