youthful audience of some methods which, though
elementary, have been observed by critics admittedly
not puerile.

The paper Tribute to Ireland, a 'review', hints at a
debt of enjoyment and instruction which it must suffice
for the while that I acknowledge. Our professional
critics take the conventions of their trade with such a
depressing solemnity that they dismiss as negligible the
beautiful art of gay writing in which our literature has
constantly excelled. It were a chastening discipline for
reviewers who week by week hail any turgid German
novel as a masterpiece, to set them down to a page of
The Irish R.M. or any of its successors, and invite them
to better a sentence, to suggest the slightest improve-
ment on the artistry. And this provokes a wider surmise
--What would be the future loss not only to us but to
all Europe if an Irish Republic, having its way, were
to compel all its authors to sing and write in Gaelic?
With Burke, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Blake, Synge, Æ,
Yeats in our minds--to omit a score--we may faintly
guess our own literature lacking the delicate cadence,
the 'sweet wild twist' of the Irish idiom. But that
Europe at large and at this time of day is likely (on any
translated evidence at least) to be charmed by much in
a separatist language imposed by a 'government' seems
to me a delusion and a dream. Great literatures are
not grown in that way.

ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH

Jesus College, Cambridge

Trafalgar Day, 1934

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