Vol. 2 No. 1 - Modernist Magazines Project

9 1916-1941 : TRADITION AND CREATION
litter and the snipe's crooked flight over the bog. The
people took the coins—though not, be it remembered,
without a good deal of persiflage and criticism—but the
novels and plays and poems were a bit too much for them.
There was nothing unusual about that. In England
W, & H. Smith refused to stock Tess of the D'Urberuilles.
In France they prosecuted Flaubert. Boston banned
Mencken. All now honour Hardy, Flaubert, and
Mencken. Cabinet Ministers attended the funerals of
JE y and Higgins. That simply means that the old pieties
survive inside the new * realism.'
We remember what Yeats said of Synge. * When a
country produces a man of genius he is never what it
wants : he is always unlike its idea of itself. Scotland
believed itself religious, moral, and gloomy, and its national
poet came not to speak of these things but to speak of
lust and drink and drunken gaiety. Ireland, since the
Young Irelanders, has given itself up to apologetics.
Every impression of life or impulse of imagination has been
examined to see if it helped or hurt the glory of Ireland
or the political claim of Ireland. A sincere impression of
life became at last impossible, all was apologetics. There
was no longer an impartial imagination, delighting in
whatever is naturally exciting. Synge was the rushing
up of the buried fire, an explosion of all that had been
denied or refused, a furious impartiality, an indifferent,
turbulent sorrow. Like Burns, his work was to say all
that the people did not want to have said . . . '
People are always wanting things not to be said. They
cleave to the old symbols all the time. When new men
make new symbols in spite of them, the people then cleave
to these new symbols and will have no more innovation.
Our traditionalists attacked The Playboy just as our traditionalists
attacked The Plough and the Stars, and the later
ones probably scorn the former ones. How many people
know this fine thing that was said about that :—
' Ireland in our day as in the past has excommunicated