Are there any brighter colours to lighten the gloom of this picture? There appear to be a few. Best of all is the sincerity and honesty with which Mr. Cosgrave, deplorably served by some of his departments, is facing the situation. He, at least, with a task of extraordinary difficulty upon his hands, has shown no sign of hesitation or of despair for the future. He goes on battling, and he wins certain successes. More rebels are being daily captured than was the case last year. The dumping of arms is credibly reported to be on the increase. Some districts appear to be more or less pacified. Donegal, for example, is said to be quieter and more habitable than at any time in the past two years. And it argues some confidence in the country's future when men are to be found who will pay for pasture the prices at which some farms in Louth and Meath have recently changed hands. The banks have continued to do well, and it is evident there is plenty of money in the country. There has been no dislocation of trade that could not be restored within a few weeks-the greater part of it, indeed, within a few days-if once the National Army were to win a real mastery of the situation, such as has been achieved in Northern Ireland by Sir James Craig's new constabulary with the aid of British regiments, and the country were to settle down.

And here we come to the heart of the question. The young Bolsheviks and hooligans who form the bulk of the I.R.A.'s rank and file are not to be beaten by oratory nor persuasion, nor even by excellent enactments in Dail Eireann. Their leaders may have varied motives and ideals. Some are driven by wounded vanity, some by real devotion to a free republic, some by the pure philosophy of anarchy. But they fight chiefly for devilment and for loot. To make them stop fighting, they must be taught that it involves risk to themselves as well as the wretched population whom they terrorise. That lesson can be administered by the National Army, and by none else. It can never be administered unless the National Army acquires, and speedily, a new way of fighting, a new way of living, and a new way of thinking.

Now the men who compose that army are chiefly those who, with vastly greater advantages, carried on against the British Army and the R.I.C. a campaign similar to that now being waged against them by the irregulars. They have been proclaimed, especially by their own leaders, the salt of the earth, the men who beat the men whom the Germans could not beat. They are the victors of the war,' by which in the Free State is meant the civil strife of 1920 and 1921. Their charmed ears have taken in so much of this nonsense that they have come to believe in it, the more easily since not 2 per cent. of them have any idea what war really means. The idea of betterment is unheard of among them, for how

can glory-bedecked invincibles better themselves? Says one of their official bards, a most talented writer, Mr. Daniel Corkery: You strike in here, chant your wild songs, and go;

The chroniclers, with rushlights, stumble after :

And ah! to see them blot the sunrise glow

Of your bright deeds and dreams, your tears and laughter.2 That represents pretty well the atmosphere, the halo about their martial brows. The observer, however much a devotee of poetry he may be, is tempted to exclaim that if there were less chanting of wild songs and going, and a little more staying in soldierly silence, there would be more for the stumbling chroniclers, with their following rushlights, to discover among their present achievements. For they appear to have softened instead of stiffening. There are, for example, stories of drunkenness which contrast unfavourably with the evidence of every ex-officer of the Auxiliary Police that the old-time Shinner' was dangerous because his zeal kept him sober. Their discipline at best does not improve. But these are minor matters compared with the fact, which I have already noted, that their energy is often lacking and their loyalty sometimes suspect. They need a general stiffening and revivification, but there is no sign that their present commanders are capable of imparting it or that they themselves are prepared to suffer it.

That is the crux. There is no reason to suppose that the workmen, or at least the best of them, like Mr. Cosgrave, are not desirous of carrying out their tasks. With moderately good tools they are probably capable of it. But their main tool, the Army, is inefficient. Could it be improved, all might yet be well, even when the grievous losses, material, moral, and æsthetic, had been taken into account. Ireland was a rich country when the European war ended; not even the blows since dealt her by her own sons have ruined her. But the improvement must come speedily. Another year of anarchy such as the first three months of this have seen, and not only will the Free State Government be' down and out,' but the country will have sunk into a slough from which fifty years of labour would scarce suffice to extricate her.

CYRIL FALLS.

• Dedication to The Hounds of Banba, a book of short stories dealing with

the Rebellion, of considerable literary merit.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

EDGAR ALLAN POE is well-nigh forgotten in America to-day, for, although he has a secure place among the classics, he is relegated to the museum section and is regarded as a curio rather than a formative force. That he was a force, a formative force, in his day, and long after, is certain, and his countrymen would do well to cultivate a consciousness of his contribution to that literature of America which they are anxious to build, and which is in need both of co-ordination and of leadership. At the present timeas it appears to me-American writers neither know whence they came nor whither they are going.

Poe is the greatest lyrical poet that America has produced— if it can be said that America produced a poet who was born of English parents, who spent his childhood and part of his youth in Great Britain, and who owed his inspiration to English literature. In Poe's day there was not the same distinction between the life and thought of the two countries as exists to-day. The writers of the Boston school prided themselves upon maintaining their identity with British authors. Emerson was a worshipper of Carlyle, and Tennyson was the idol of the New England poets. As to Poe himself, he regarded Tennyson as the noblest poet that ever lived.' It is doubtful if any of these early American writers ever had the idea of producing what is called an American literature, except as a branch of English literature; indeed, it cannot be anything but that while Americans speak the English language.

This latter statement may be challenged, and probably requires qualification; but it raises an interesting question. The very fact that Poe is neglected in America may be cited by some as proof that a new and indigenous literature has sprung up in the United States. Poe was so essentially English that the average American scarcely recognises him, and present-day American writers have no kinship with him in either prose or poetry. The members of the new school of vers librists have so far removed themselves from the Poe tradition as to abandon all his ideals and principles of poetry.

The declension of his fame may have been due in part to the

Puritan prejudices of New England, which he ceaselessly attacked ; but Walt Whitman was not of the Boston school, and he was less of a Puritan than Poe, yet his fame is secure. It might be contended from this that Whitman is more typically American than Poe, and that with Whitman began an indigenous American literature. It must be admitted that Whitman mirrored the expansive and intensive life of the United States in his poetry, that its very conglomerateness and outspokenness were distinctively American, yet Whitman, as a thinker and a dreamer, was, after all, merely a transplanted Englishman. The writers of England were the first to recognise and understand him, and it is doubtful if he is as much appreciated in America to-day as he is in Europe generally.

Whitman was a poetical revolutionist, and the immediate cause of his revolt was Poe. This is true not only in regard to verse form, but also to thought and feeling. Poe was the meticulous metrist—subjective, introspective and sedentary. Whitman was a rugged, wide-eyed man of the open road, who shouted rather than sang his message.

The free verse movement in the United States may be regarded as a revulsion from the fastidiously wrought lyricism of Poe's poetry. The warmest admirers of Poe must admit that there followed in his wake a glut of highly artificial verse which abounded in rhymes and repetitions, odd rhythms and alliterations. Newspapers and magazines were flooded with Poesque poetry until the revolt came. Whitman little realised into what emotional chaos and intellectual anarchy he was leading his countrymen. By way of contrast I will quote a verse from Poe's Eulalie and one from an American vers librist :

I dwelt alone

In a world of moan,

And my soul was a stagnant tide,

Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride-
Till the yellow-haired young Eulalie became my smiling bride.

That from Poe, and this from James Oppenheim:

In a dream, gentlemen

For it would have been treasonable to think this by myself—
I saw our venerable Statue of Liberty suddenly bowled over,
Sprawling in the bay . .

...

I was startled, I can assure you,

And glad to wake up and find it only a dream.

One could well imagine Poe having such a dream, but his telling of it would have been very dissimilar!

Poe is one of the most enigmatical personalities in modern literature. He was an enigma even to himself. He has always been looked upon as an uncanny poet, lurking in the shadows of

life, prying into the dark secrets of death; an associate of phantoms, a passionately importunate suitor of ethereal Beauty.

Although Poe was essentially English, he was at the same time peculiarly American. He had a double consciousness. For ever haunted with the memories of the Old World, he was faced with the problem of adapting his soul to the New. Had he remained in England he would probably have been just as contemplative and mystical, but his muse would have been quieter and less urgent. It is this urgency and breathless eagerness in Poe's work that is most characteristically American. He was an intellectual adventurer, a geological prospector in the spiritual world, exploring the secrets of the past for the purpose of creating a greater and happier future-not a Utopia, but an ethereal paradise of love and beauty.

Despairing for the most part, and haunted by The Raven's croak of Nevermore,' Poe was constitutionally incapable of scepticism. Mysticism and sentiment were the breath of his poetical life. He held tenaciously to a belief in the existence of a spiritual world. Angels and ghouls were commonplaces with him, and he liked to think of' Angels whispering to one another.' What American poet to-day dare hint that he believed in the existence of such ethereal beings?-they have gone the way of the fairies. Strangely enough, Poe foresaw this, for in a sonnet written in his youth he thus addresses' Science':

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car ?
And driven the Hamandryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

Hast thou not torn Naiad from her flood,
The elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

Science has indeed robbed us of our myths, shattered the old world of fancy, dissipated many of our religious conceptions. But it is the office and the duty of our poets to build a new world of fancy, for there are some things that science has not touched, and even its discoveries have made the mystery of the universe and human life deeper than ever. Fairies and angels stood for something that is just as real to the soul to-day as it was to our grandfathers and grandmothers.

We are witnessing to-day an odd reaction among even men of science. Sir Oliver Lodge is a sort of scientific Poe, who sees the spirits of the dead every time he peers into the darkness; but Sir Oliver would organise the spirit world and rob it of its uncertainty and mystery. He is a cold and dispassionate wooer of angel presences, who says 'Don't get scared of the ghoststhey won't touch you!'

It is not science that kills the fairies; it is the scientific