which irradiated them, and attracted the sympathetic attention of all the world. What the future held for a literature so circumstanced it would now be idle to speculate. History presents one illustrous instance of a sacred symbolism founded on the historical fact of expatriation and oppression. Would Irish literature thus have become symbolic and in a manner sacred? Such a development was certainly not uncongenial to the literary speculations of A. E. and Mr W. B. Yeats, who have more than once dwelt on the saying that it is the problem of literature to produce a sacred book. As it turned out, however, Mr Yeats and A. E. had not yet more than reached middle age when minatory murmurs began to be heard in that new Ireland which had begun to tread their generation down. The disturbances in the Abbey Theatre during the first performances of Synge's Playboy of the Western World were a warning of the arrival of a new generation which rejected symbolism, both in politics and poetry; and in the Easter week of 1916, a little band of poets, armed with guns, inaugurated that movement for the immediate realization of all ideals which has since been crowned with a success almost disconcerting to those who have inherited responsibility for it.
Irish literature, then, appears to have forfeited the enjoyment of those conditions in which it might have dreamed of producing a sacred book—unless, indeed, it has inadvertently produced one in Mr Joyce's Ulysses. The ironic mood in which that work is conceived might seem a little unholy, but for the matter of that, irony is now the very accent of prophecy. Mr Joyce's irony, however—unlike that of the humorous hot-gospellers Shaw and Chesterton—conveys no prophetic burthen: the coin of his wit has the same stamp on both sides. Even his master Rabelais ranks among the "pioneers of education," but Mr Joyce has achieved a work so purged of all philanthropic intention and so purely Mephistophelean, that one may almost say of it that it has every characteristic of a masterpiece except a raison d' être. Conflagration is the order of the day in Ireland; and perhaps Mr Joyce, after all, has some spiritual kinship with the late destroyer of our archives, Roderic O'Connor; for Ulysses is a bonfire, glorious while it lasts, of all the pious illusions of provincial and Catholic Ireland. . . . But I am by no means sure that it is the function of literature to produce a sacred book, or that any nation need envy the Hebrews those cir-
