dauntless triumphant affirmation. Her poems of the Christ-child have something of the exaltation of Christina Rossetti; for to her mind the road to victory lies through the gate of Humility. Here is a typical illus

tration:

THE HEART'S LOW DOOR

O Earth, I will have none of thee.
Alien to me the lonely plain,
And the rough passion of the sea
Storms my unheeding heart in vain.

The petulance of rain and wind,

The haughty mountains' superb scorn, Are but slight things I've flung behind, Old garments that I have out-worn.

Bare of the grudging grass, and bare
Of the tall forest's careless shade,
Deserter from thee, Earth, I dare
Seo all thy phantom brightness fade.

And, darkening to the sun, I go

To enter by the heart's low door, And find where Love's red embers glow A home, who ne'er had home before.

Thomas MacDonagh (1878-1916) was, like so many of the young Irish writers of the twentieth century, both scholar and poet. In 1916 he published a prose critical work, Literature in Ireland, in which his two passions, love of art and love of country, are clearly displayed. His books of original verse include The Golden Joy, 1906; Songs of Myself, 1910, and others. He was a worshipper of Beauty, his devotion being even more religious than æsthetic. The poems addressed to Beauty-of which there are comparatively many -exhibit the familiar yet melancholy disparity between the vision in the poet's soul and the printed image of it. This disparity is not owing to faulty technique, for his management of metrical effects shows ease and grace; it is simply the lack of sufficient poetic vitality. Although his ambition as an artist appears to

have been to write great odes and hymns to Beauty, his simple poems of Irish life are full of charm. The Wishes to My Son has a poignant tenderness. One can hardly read it without tears. And the love of a wife for "her man" is truly revealed in the last two stanzas of John-John.

The neighbours' shame of me began
When first I brought you in;

To wed and keep a tinker man

They thought a kind of sin; But now this three year since you're gone 'Tis pity me they do,

And that I'd rather have, John-John,
Than that they'd pity you.
Pity for me and you, John-John,
I could not bear.

Oh, you're my husband right enough,
But what's the good of that?
You know you never were the stuff
To be the cottage cat,

To watch the fire and hear me lock
The door and put out Shep-
But there now, it is six o'clock
And time for you to step.
God bless and keep you far, John-John!
And that's my prayer.

Joseph Campbell, most of whose work has been published under the Irish name Seosamh Maccathmhaoil, writes both regular and free verse. He is close to the soil, and speaks the thoughts of the peasants, articu lating their pleasures, their pains, and their superstitions. No deadness of conventionality dulls the edge of his art he is an original man. His fancy is bold, and he makes no attempt to repress it. Perhaps his most striking poem is I am the Gilly of Christ-strange that its reverence has been mistaken for sacrilege! And in the little song, Go, Ploughman, Plough one tastes the joy of muscle, the revelation of the upturned earth, and the promise of beauty in fruition.

Go, ploughman, plough
The mearing lands,

The meadow lands:

The mountain lands:

All life is bare Beneath your share,

All love is in your lusty hands.

Up, horses, now!

And straight and true

Let every broken furrow run:
The strength you sweat
Shall blossom yet

In golden glory to the sun.

In 1917 Mr. Campbell published a beautiful volume, signed with his English name, embellished with his own drawings-one for each poemcalled Earth of Cualann. Ĉualann is the old name for the County of Wicklow, but it includes also a stretch to the northwest, reaching close to Dublin. Mr. Campbell's description of it in it in his preface makes a musical overture to the verses that follow. "Wild and unspoilt, a country of cairncrowned hills and dark, watered valleys, it bears even to this day something of the freshness of the heroic dawn."

The work of Seumas O'Sullivan, born in 1878, has often been likened to that of W. B. Yeats, but I can see little similarity either in spirit or in manner. The younger poet has the secret of melody and his verses show a high degree of technical excellence; but in these respects he no more resembles his famous countryman than many another master. His best poems are collected in a volume published in 1912, and the most interesting of these give pictures of various city streets, Mercer Street (three), Nelson Street, Cuffe Street, and so on. In other words, the most original part of this poet's production is founded on reality. This does not mean that he lacks imagination; for it is only by imagination that a writer can portray and interpret familiar scenes. The more widely and easily their veracity can be

verified by readers, the greater is the challenge to the art of the poet.

We may properly add to our list the names of two Irish poets who are Americans. Maurice Francis Egan, full of years and honours, a scholar and statesman, giving notable service to America as our Minister to Denmark, has written poetry marked by tenderness of feeling and delicacy of art. His little book, Songs and Sonnets, published in 1892, exhibits the range of his work as well as anything that he has written. It is founded on a deep and pure religious faith. . . . Norreys Jephson O'Conor is a young Irish-American, a graduate of Harvard, and has already published three volumes of verse, Celtic Memories, which appeared in England in 1913, Beside the Blackwater, 1915, and Songs of the Celtic Past, 1917. American by birth and residence, of Irish parentage, he draws his inspiration almost wholly from Celtic lore and Celtic scenes. He is a natural singer, whose art is steadily increasing in authority.

...

It will be seen from our review of the chief figures among contemporary Irish poets that the jolly, jigging Irishman of stage his tory is quite conspicuous by his absence. He still gives his song and dance, and those who prefer musical-comedy to orchestral compositions can find him in the numerous anthologies of Anglo-Irish verse; but the tone of modern Irish poetry is spiritual rather than hearty.

Whatever may be thought of the appropriateness of the term "Advance of English Poetry" for my sur vey of the modern field as a whole, there is no doubt that it applies fittingly to Ireland. The last twentyfive years have seen an awakening of poetic activity in that island unlike anything known there before; and Dublin has become one of the lit

IT HAS frequently been pointed out that the ability to laugh is the only function that distinguishes mankind from all the lower animals. Furthermore, a man's degree of evolution may be measured by the sort of things at which he laughs most heartily. There are many different grades of refinement in the sense of humour,- -so many that to codify them all would require the attention of a profound philosopher. I have never read the celebrated essay of M. Henri Bergson on the subject of laughter, and cannot tell-in consequencewhether or not he has covered the field: but this point, at least, is per tinent, that it is possible to paraphrase an ancient proverb by saying, "Tell me what you laugh at, and I will tell you what you are." If any evidence were needed to confute the utterly unreasonable statement that "all men are created equal," it would be necessary merely to point out that all men do not laugh at the same order of ideas. The Germans laughed when the Lusitania went down; and by this laughter they distinguished themselves from the preponderent proportion of mankind.

It is easy enough to laugh at physical eventualities. When a man's feet slip from under him and he falls "with a dull, sickening thud" on the fattest and least vulnerable part of his anatomy, no human observer of the incident can easily suppress a loud guffaw. The appeal of such material is perpetuated in the theatre by the proverbial slap-stick [which the greatest of all comic dramatists did not forbear to use in such farces as Les Fourberies de Scapin], and is kept alive forever by an endless race of amply-cushioned actresses like Marie Dressler.

A slightly higher degree of evolution is demanded before a man can learn to laugh at mental accidents. The French-in their reasoned catalogue of criticism-have registered a clear distinction between the mot de situation and the mot de caractère. To the common mind, it is obviously funny for anyone to fall downstairs; but a greater degree of culture is required to realise the fact that some people may be funnier still if they merely walk downstairs and never fall at all. Of a certain small but very pompous citizen, some happyminded commentator once remarked that he always seemed to strut while sitting down; and this phrase may be accepted as an illustration of what the French intend by a "quip of character."

But it is still comparatively easy to laugh at someone else; and civilisation may be said to begin at the point when a man becomes capable of laughing also at himself. It is easy to be humourous; it is harder to sustain a sense of humour. It is easy to make fun, at the expense of the other fellow: it is harder to take fun, at the expense of oneself. Some of our greatest humourists have-by common account-been deficient in the receptive sense of humour. I never knew Mark Twain,-although I met him half a dozen times and talked with him as a very young apprentice would naturally talk with an admitted master; but many of his friends have told me that this monu. mental humourist was incapable of seeing and accepting a joke against himself.

A slightly higher rung upon the ladder is attained when men begin to laugh at words, and at the jugglery of words, instead of laughing merely

at situations or at people. Words are symbols of ideas; and only a civilised person can see the fun in an idea. When Oscar Wilde permitted one of his puppets to say, “I can resist anything except temptation," he carried laughter into the higher realm of the philosophical abstract.

A still higher realm is reached when the ideas that are laughed at are the very ideas that are held most seriously by the man that leads the laughing. This is the realm of satire, -which must consequently be regarded as the most loftily developed mood of humour. The satirist laughs not only at himself but also at those very thoughts which he regards as the light and leading of his life. A humourist can make a joke; a man endowed with the more subtle sense of humour can see and take a joke against himself; but a satirist can see and make a joke against his very God. Many things in life are holy; but to the satirist the gift of laughter is more sacred than any of the others.

The satirical mood may be illustrated easily by reference to Lord Byron's immense and teeming poem called Don Juan. Time after time, in the course of this composition, the poet winged his way aloft on a wind of lyric inspiration, only to pause suddenly and laugh tremendously at the very incentive that had excited him to eloquence. When I was in my teens, I used to hate this poem, because of Byron's habit of laughing in his loftiest moments and blaspheming [as it seemed to me] against the dictates of his genius; but, in recent years, I have begun to appreciate [and almost to admire] his nimbleness of mind in presenting an august idea from antithetic points of view. Any man can see a subject from one side: but the mark of culture comes when a man is able to see a subject from several sides at once.

The satiric mood demands an extraordinary alertness of intelligence,

not only on the part of the humourist, but also on the part of his audience. Mr. Chesterton, for instance, whose essential mood is one of deep religious reverence, has a disconcerting habit of laughing his way into the very presence of his God; and this habit is bewildering to minds that are less cultivated than his own.

As a test of the different degrees of humour, the reader may be recommended to enter any barber's shop and say, with due solemnity, "I desire a diminution of the linear dimension of my capillary appendages.". An uncivilised barber will be offended, and may even cause the philosophical experimentor to be ejected from his chaste establishment [for there is nothing more offensive to the common mind than the sort of humour that it cannot understand]; but a civilised barber will say, "Oh hell!,-you mean a haircut!," and will proceed, with laughter, to suit his action to your words.

Satire which may be defined as an irresponsible and happy-hearted toying with ideas can flourish only in those ages which acknowledge an obeisance to the high ideal of culture. Satire can be conceived and written only by gentlemen-like the Roman Horace, the French Boileau, the English Dryden, or the American Henry James. A man must be distinguished before he can afford to laugh in public against the very things he holds most holy. Also, he must feel assured of the existence of an agile-minded audience to appreciate the perilous gymnastics of his mind.

Our American theatre has long been regarded as an ugly duckling; but a certain sign of promise has been registered by its recent incursion into the unprecedented realm of satire. If our native playwrights can afford to be satirical, a time has come at last when our American theatre may be accepted as a grown. up institution.