formed conditions: the life of the "gentry," represented by a series of conscientious novelists from Miss Edgeworth to Miss Somerville. In certain districts of the West of England, in France, Italy, Germany, are gathered little groups of Anglo-Irish émigrés, most of them longing to come back, and already indeed beginning to do so. They are attracted back to Ireland, partly by patriotism, partly by a belief prevalent amongst them that Ireland is socially a conservative community.
We await a portent—the transformation of Irish literature. In 1913 Mr Yeats wrote a poem with the burden "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone," in which he was generally understood to take leave of Irish nationalism; but in 1916 Romantic Ireland had reasserted itself with a vengeance, and Mr Yeats published a kind of palinode with the refrain, "A terrible beauty is born!" Mr Yeats has not taken anything like A. E.'s share in bringing into being the Free State, but he has done what he could for it—and that is a good deal—by coming over to live in it and by serving in the Senate; and the other day he made a speech in which he urged the need of building up, in place of the old idealism, the "idealism of labour and of thought." Can we conceive Mr Yeats, like an Irish d'Annunzio, casting away his dreamer's cloak and chanting the songs of labour? Does a loftier destiny await Ireland than to be the dreamer amongst the nations? The intense Italian temperament, which reduces social and spiritual problems to clear alternatives, is certainly not ours. There is a dimness and indistinctness of outline in all our prospects, and we have perhaps secured the form of nationality before we have made quite sure of the reality.
