anners and of culture that it is of small moment should
they please themselves with some tavern humour; but we must needs
cling to 'our foolish Irish pride' and form an etiquette, if we would
not have our people crunch their chicken bones with too convenient
teeth, and make our intellect architectural that we may not see them
turn domestic and effusive nor nag at one another in narrow streets.

III

Some of the writers of our school have intended, so far as any
creative art can have deliberate intention, to make this change, a
change having more meaning and implications than a few sentences can
define. When I was first moved by Lord Dunsany's work I thought that
he would more help this change if he could bring his imagination into
the old Irish legendary world instead of those magic lands of his with
their vague Eastern air; but even as I urged him I knew that he could
not, without losing his rich beauty of careless suggestion, and the
persons and images that for ancestry have all those romantic ideas
that are somewhere in the background of all our minds. He could not
have made Slieve-na-Mon nor Slieve Fua incredible and phantastic
enough, because that prolonged study of a past age, necessary before
he could separate them from modern association, would have changed
the spontaneity of his mood to something learned, premeditated, and
scientific.

When we approach subtle elaborate emotions we can but give our minds
up to play or become as superstitious as an old woman, for we cannot
hope to understand. It is one of my superstitions that we became
entangled in a dream some twenty years ago; but I do not know whether
this dream was born in Ireland from the beliefs of the country men and
women, or whether we but gave ourselves up to a foreign habit as our
spirited Georgian fathers did to gambling, sometimes lying, as their
history has it, on the roadside naked, but for the heap of straw they
had pulled over them, till they could wager a lock of hair or the
paring of a nail against what might set them up in clothes again.
Whether it came from Slieve-na-Mon or Mount Abora, AE. found it with
his gods and I in my 'Land of Heart's Desire,' which no longer
pleases me much. And then it seemed far enough till Mr. Edward Martyn
discovered his ragged Peg Inerney, who for all that was a queen in
faery; but soon John Synge was to see all the world as a withered and
witless place in comparison with the dazzle of that dream; and now