ust as tears help to an assuaging of grief, so in a sense
laughter makes an end of mirth. Give a feeling its instinctive vent, and
you will soon be done with it, like the child who laughs and cries
within five minutes; check it, and it spreads inward, gaining in
intellectual quality as it loses in physical expression. The moral is,
that if you wish to be really humorous you must not be too funny; and
the capital defect of most Irish humour is that its aim is too
simple--it does not look beyond raising a laugh.

There are brilliant exceptions in the century that lies between Sheridan
and Mr. Bernard Shaw, between Maria Edgeworth and Miss Barlow. But
serious art or serious thought in Ireland has always revealed itself to
the English sooner or later as a species of sedition, and the Irish have
with culpable folly allowed themselves to accept for characteristic
excellences what were really the damning defects of their work--an easy
fluency of wit, a careless spontaneity of laughter. They have taken
Moore for a great poet, and Handy Andy for a humorist to be proud of.
Yet an Irishman who wishes to speak dispassionately must find humour of
a very different kind from that of _Handy Andy_ or _Harry Lorrequer_
either, to commend without reserve, as a thing that may be put forward
to rank with what is best in other literatures.

Taking Sheridan and Miss Edgeworth as marking the point of departure, it
becomes obvious that one is an end, the other at a beginning. Sheridan
belongs body and soul to the eighteenth century; Miss Edgeworth, though
her name sounds oddly in that context, is part and parcel of the
romantic movement. The "postscript which ought to have been a preface"
to _Waverley_ declared, though after Scott's magnificent fashion, a real
indebtedness. Sheridan's humour, essentially metropolitan, had found no
use for local colour; Miss Edgeworth before Scott proved the artistic
value that could be extracted from the characteristics of a special
breed of people under special circumstances in a special place. Mr.
Yeats, who, like all poets, is a most suggestive and a most misleading
critic, has declared that modern Irish literature begins with Carleton.
That is only true if we are determined to look in Irish literature for
qualities that can be called Celtic--if we insist that the outlook on
the world shall be the Catholic's or the peasant's. Miss Edgeworth had
not a trace of the Celt--as I conceive that rather indefinite
e