because of his interest in the Celtic Renaissance, but Wales has
little writing outside of his to point to as a result of the awakening.
In Scotland, William Sharp, whose "Lyra Celtica" (1896) was a prominent
agent in bringing the Renaissance before the world, was transformed into
another writer by it. His work as "Fiona Macleod," both prose and verse,
was very different from his earlier work in prose and verse. Mr. Neil
Munro, too, was affected by the Renaissance, and in the tales of "The
Lost Pibroch" (1896) and in the novels of "John Splendid" (1898) and
"Gillian the Dreamer" (1899) and "The Children of Tempest" (1903) he
reveals an intimacy with Highland life such as informs the writing of no
other novelist of our day. Of recent years Mr. Munro has wandered
farther afield than his native Argyll, and, I feel, to the lessening of
the beauty of his writing. In the Isle of Man, T.E. Brown had been
striving for years to put into his stories in verse the fast-decaying
Celtic life of his country, but even with his example and with all that
has been done since the Renaissance began, in the preservation of Manx
folk-lore and in the recording of vanishing Manx customs, no writer of
Brown's power has been developed, or in fact any writer of powers equal
to those of the best men of the younger generation in the other Celtic
lands. It is with the Celtic Renaissance as it appears in Ireland, then,
that I have to deal chiefly in this book, as it is only in Ireland, of
the countries that retain a Celtic culture, that the movement is the
dominating influence in writing in English; and it is with the drama
only that I have now to deal, though when a playwright is a poet or a
story-teller, too, I have written of his attainment in verse and tale
also. Had I been writing five years ago, I should have said that it was
in poetry that the Celtic Renaissance had attained most nobly, but since
then the drama has had more recruits of power than has poetry, and it is
a question as to which of the two is greater as art. There is no doubt,
however, but that the drama has made a stronger and wider appeal,
whatever its excellence, than has the verse, and it is therefore of
greater significance for its time than is the poetry, whatever the
ultimate appraisement will be. Of the men I have written of here, Mr.
Yeats and Mr. Russell are to me poets before they are dramatists, and
Lionel Johnson, whose only direct connection with the dramatic movement
w