felt that there
was something not wholly himself in much of "The Untilled Field" and in
much of "The Lake," that the minds of Mr. Yeats and Mr. Russell had in a
way dominated his mind, and that not even the hardly tolerated Mr.
Martyn had been without influence upon him.

Such a realization is not the professed motive for the return of Mr.
Moore to England, but I have no doubt at all that it is somewhere in the
back of his mind, where he would like it to be hidden and forgot. At any
rate, by the time of his return to England, Mr. Moore had come to see
clearly that the Celtic episode of his maturity was closed.

It is not, I think, particularly difficult for one who understands the
old-fashioned camp-meeting "getting of religion" to understand this
"Celtic episode." Mr. Moore got Celtomania; a sort of "spiritual
consumption," he calls his possession in one place, as a certain other
type of sinner "got religion" in the old shouting days. That is, Mr.
Moore wrought himself up partly in the spirit of the Playboy, and was
wrought up to some degree willy-nilly until he could write his speech of
February, 1900, on "Literature and the Irish Language," and, finally, a
little later, could return happily to the country that until then he
could endure only now and again.

But as a matter of fact the motive that led Mr. Moore back to Ireland
matters not at all to literature. What beauty of writing that return led
to matters a great deal. Had he not returned to Ireland, we should not
have had a good deal that adds to the joy we win from satiric laughter,
we should not have had "Hail and Farewell"; had he not returned we
should not have had a book that adds to the treasure of beautiful
feeling and beautiful writing there is in English literature, a treasure
that there is no chance of ever having too large; we should not have had
"The Lake," which is Ireland, West Ireland, Catholic Ireland, a land
under gray skies that the priests its masters would, too many of them,
make a land of gray lives.

CHAPTER V

MR. GEORGE W. RUSSELL ("A.E.")

Synge is the one instinctive dramatist of the earlier group of writers
of the Celtic Renaissance, the one to whom drama was the inevitable
medium for the expression of the best that was in him. Yet even Synge
came to write plays only through an external stimulus, the urging of Mr.
Yeats on their meeting in Paris. It was fortunate for the Irish drama,
this meeting, and fortunate for Synge