appreciated as of much
significance at its beginning. Writing in 1892, Miss Jane Barlow was not
hopeful for the immediate future of English literature in Ireland;--it
seemed to her "difficult to point out any quarter of the horizon as a
probable source of rising light." Yet Mr. Yeats had published his
"Wanderings of Oisin" three years before; Mr. Russell had already
gathered about him a group of eager young writers; and Dr. Hyde was
organizing the Gaelic League, to give back to Ireland her language and
civilization, and translating from the Gaelic "The Love Songs of
Connacht" (1894) into an English of so new and masterful a rhythm, that
it was to dominate the style of many of the writers of the movement, as
the burden of the verse was to confirm them in the feelings and
attitudes of mind, centuries old and of to-day, that are basic to the
Irish Gael. Even in 1894, when Mrs. Katherine Tynan Hinkson wrote the
article that for the first time brought before America so many of the
younger English poets, all that she said of the Renaissance was, "A very
large proportion of the Bodley Head poets are Celts,--Irish, Welsh,
Cornish." She had scarcely so spoken when there appeared the little
volume, "The Revival of Irish Literature," whose chapters, reprinted
addresses delivered before she had spoken by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy and
Dr. George Sigerson and; Dr. Douglas Hyde, turned the attention of the
younger men to literature, the fall of Parnell and the ensuing decline
of political agitation having given them a chance to think of something
else than politics. In 1895 all the English-speaking world that heeds
letters was talking of the Celtic Renaissance, so quickly did news of it
find its way to men, when it was once more than whispered of abroad. It
was as frequently referred to then as "The Irish Renaissance," because
Ireland contributed most to it and because it was in Ireland that it
acquired its most definite purpose. This purpose was to retell in
English the old Irish legends and the still current Irish folk-songs,
and to catch and preserve the moods of Irish men and women of to-day,
especially those moods which came to them out of their brooding over
Ireland, its history, its landscape, the temper of its people. It would
be absurd, of course, to regard all of the writing of the movement as a
result of a definite literary propaganda, but the very fact that we
instinctively speak of the Celtic Renaissance as a movement rather