"  Well,  now  I  looked  at  the  work  of  modern  days,  and  what
did  I  see  ?  Not  badness,  not  clumsiness  ;  no  real  fault  you
could  point  to  ;  but  smallness. Apart  from  Russell  and  Yeates,
and  including  Synge,  no  one  in  Ireland  of  recent  years  has


254  THE  WASTED  ISLAND

produced  a  work  of  decent  size. Our  much-boasted  revival
has  produced  hardly  anything  but  short  plays,  short  stories,
and  a  bewildering  multitude  of  tiny  booklets  of  microscopic
verses. You'd  find  it  hard  to  point  to  a  flaw  in  any  of  them
(they  aren't  big  enough  to  make  big  mistakes),  but  the  small-
ness  and  mediocrity  of  the  stuff  is  appalling. That's  the
great  Renaissance  we  hear  so  much  about."

"  Yes,"  said  Stephen. "  That  may  be  all  quite  true,
but  where's  this  lie  you're  talking  about  ?  "

"  The  lie,"  said  O'Dwyer,  "  is  not  in  the  smallness  of  the
literature,  but  in  the  reason  for  it. I'm  coming  to  that
presently. But  there's  one  other  thing  I  want  you  to  notice,
and  that  is  that  half  of  the  poetry  turned  out  is  what  they  call
'  mystic,'  and  half  the  remainder  is  what  I  call  '  misty.'  As
for  the  second  kind,  you  know  the  sort  of  stuff  I  mean  :
poems  full  of  '  white  mist  on  the  brown  bog,'  and  that  kind  of
tosh. The  other's  harder  to  deal  with. You  see  it's  quite
unintelligible,  and  if  you  say  so  you're  told  you're  unfit  to
criticise. However,  after  a  careful  examination  into  a  num-
ber of  these  poems  I  came  to  this  conclusion  :  that  they  really
mean  nothing,  and  that  anyone  acquainted  with  the  laws
of  prosody  and  gifted  with  a  muddled  head  could  produce
them  automatically  by  self- hypnosis  induced  by  rime  and
alliteration. I  immediately  decided  to  try  the  experiment
on  myself,  and  produced  the  monstrosity  you  heard  to-
night. I  had  no  idea  in  my  head  when  I  sat  down. I
honestly  assure  you  of  that. I  wrote  down  the  first  line  that
came  into  my  head  and  the  rest  were  simply  fitted  in  to  suit
the  rime,  and  I  tacked  on  to  every  noun  the  first  alliterative
adjective  I  could  think  of. 