Usheen" was the first poem written in English that had the real spirit of the middle-Irish poetry-passionate delight in the appearance of nature, in strength, and in beauty; vehement lamentation for the facts of decay and death. Other poems about Ireland's heroic period appeared in Mr. Yeats's early books-notably the superb Death of Cuchullain. But there were also poems of homely Irish life-poems about fishers, fiddlers, huntsmen, and priests. It was evident that a poet had now appeared who could give to Irish tradition and Irish life a new and subtle beauty.

The Significance of His Achievement.-Mr. Yeats, with his verse dramas and his lyrics, has to his credit a more varied body of poetic work than any of his contemporaries. He begins with verse that has a revolutionary directness of statement. In his early poems there are no inversions, no "poetic" constructions; his statements are as literal as if they were in prose. Then, still keeping to prose construction, his verse in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) becomes more elaborate in rhythm, more aloof in its suggestion. Writing for the stage, his verse becomes again direct, not with the directness of written words, but with the directness of actual speech. This directness of actual speech influences his later lyrics, making them more bare and direct than prose passages written emotionally. Mr. Yeats's poetic achievement has been twofold: he brought back the poetic drama to the theatre, writing in “The King's Threshold," in "On Baile's Strand," in "Deirdre," and in "The Green Helmet," the first dramatic verse since Jacobean days that was really related to human impulse and expression and was not a mere theatre decoration; he took the new Anglo-Irish poetry, with its tendency toward rhetoric and its gleams of racial imaginativeness, and he gave it an æsthetic form that was to be the greatest influence on the next generation of Irish writers. The volume of lyrics, The Wind Among the Reeds and the verse drama, "The Shadowy Waters" (1901) had an esoteric content and Mr. Yeats gained the reputation of being the poet of mysticism. But it is most likely that he wrote this eso

teric verse from an intellectual impulse which urged him to create as the French symbolists were creating. The Irish mind is not mystical but intellectual, and Mr. Yeats's esoteric poems show the Celtic interest in what is remote and cryptic.

"AE" (George W. Russell).-George W. Russell, whose work appears under the monogram "AE," is, in the most profound sense, a mystic. Like all mystics, he is content to express a single idea. In all his volumes of verse, in Homeward, in The Earth Breath, in The Divine Vision, he has put into pregnant verse his all-sufficing thought. Men are the strayed heaven-dwellers—the angels who "willed in silence their own doom," the gods who "forgo themselves to men.' Involved in matter, now they are creating a new empire for the spirit. He has been drawn to the study of Celtic remains; the old Irish mythology seems to him a fragment of the doctrine that was held by the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Indians. He alludes to the Irish divinities as if they were as well known as Zeus or Eros or Apollo. He is the mystical poet of our civilization, and nearly all of what the West has found in Rabindranath Tagore is in the poems which "AE" has been writing for the past twenty years. "AE" takes a large part in the public life of Ireland, and his prose, which is splendidly eloquent, pleads for and shows the way toward the creation of a new social order. He is also one of Ireland's few distinctive painters.

J. M. Synge. In the nineties the ascendancy of the national drama of Norway made a few Irish writers-Mr. W. B. Yeats, Mr. George Moore, Mr. Edward Martynthink of creating a national theatre for Ireland. They began by producing in Dublin for three successive seasons plays written by Irish writers but presented by English actors. This experiment closed unsuccessfully in 1901. Meanwhile the activities of the Gaelic League and other national societies had produced a company of Irish players. This company was now ready to further any experiments that Mr. Yeats, now the leader of the Irish dramatic movement, might make. A year afterward Mr. Yeats brought

into the company the writer who was to prove the remarkable dramatist of the movement-John M. Synge (18711909).

J. M. Synge wrote six plays for the Irish Theatre, five of which they produced-"The Shadow of the Glen," "Riders to the Sea," "The Well of the Saints," "The Playboy of the Western World," and "Deirdre of the Sorrows." Synge's genius was his ability to give his characters a place in nature, and constantly to draw poetry from this surrounding nature-in "Riders to the Sea" there is the tragical poetry of the actual sea; in "The Shadow of the Glen" there is the poetry of desolate bogs and open spaces; in "The Well of the Saints" there is the simple poetry of springtime; in "Deirdre of the Sorrows" there is the poetry of wood and glen. With this lyrical poetry there is intense dramatic poetry also the poetry that his characters themselves attain in their expression of resignation, exaltation, or disillusionment. His plays are masterpieces of construction, and it may certainly be said for "Riders to the Sea" that it is one of the best short tragedies that exists. His "Playboy of the Western World" is racial comedy in the sense that "Don Quixote" is racial comedy—it satirizes the Irish delight in romantic personality. Synge's is the most colored and musical dramatic dialogue that any dramatist has attained in English since the Elizabethans; taking the actual speech of the Irish peasantry, he has moulded it into a wonderful dramatic utterance.

AMERICAN LITERATURE

CHAPTER I

AMERICAN LITERATURE BEFORE 1800

I. INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT

The Lack of Primitive Beginnings.-As an expression of national life, American literature is different from any other in its lack of primitive beginnings. It does not, like the early English, progress as civilization progresses, gradually passing from the ruggedness of orally transmitted song to the intricacies of Elizabethan verse, the polished felicities of the early eighteenth century, and the studious and deliberate variety of the Victorian era. Nor does it take all the successive steps which lead up to, through, and out of feudalism. The effect of chivalry is not to be traced in its mediæval life, for it had no mediæval life. As a consequence, therefore, American literature does not in its beginnings directly feel the world-awakening influences of the Renaissance and the Reformation. These influences are, of course, traceable in American life, but it is only because their effects were brought over ready-made into America, just as certainly as clothes and tools and furniture and books. In the Colonial period one can study the process of transplanting a hardy flower from a sunny and protected place around the corner into the shade and the wind. Its roots are disturbed, but not at first wholly torn away from the original soil. Will the plant survive, blossom, and come to fruitage under the new conditions? Is it its previous self or something new? Or is it both, as the old stem drinks in new sap?

American Literature Defined.-It has been the practice of a number of historians of American letters to declare that nothing worthy of the name of literature was produced in the country before 1800. In order to differ intelligently with