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She is almost unique in that she is the only writer of any importance whose Catholicism has found literary expression. Reference has previously been made to the famous discussion of Oisin and St. Patrick, the clash of Paganism and Christianity, and to the fact that the Irish poets have almost unanimously declared themselves on the side of the former. It is certainly remarkable how completely the better Catholic writers have effaced their religion from their work. That is not to say they have deliberately suppressed their beliefs, or that the others have openly declared their hostility to the Catholic Church. The fact is simply that one class has been frankly pagan, and, as a rule, mystic, while the other has in no way been inspired or influenced by the teaching to which it assents. It is significant, for example, that so precious an anthology of Catholic folk-poetry as The Religious Songs of [108] Connacht should have been compiled by a Protestant. One would naturally expect that a task of this kind would have appealed to one of the Catholic poets, whose identity of belief and sympathy would specially qualify him to act as an interpreter. But apart from the most minor poets, Katharine Tynan alone reflects that attitude of Catholic Ireland in her verse. Outside of Ireland, Catholicism has been an aesthetic influence. Continental critics have come to regard the Catholic Church as a fosterer of the arts, and many ingenious conclusions have been drawn from the contrast between the artistic imaginativeness of the Latin and Catholic races, and the joyless materialism and ugliness of the Teutonic and Protestant countries. France, especially, has afforded interesting instances of the intimate artistic relations between the Catholic Church and literature. The French Protestant has invariably a certain heaviness, a lack of suppleness and vivacity which distinguish his writing from that of the majority who are untouched by the Lutheran heresy.
 Ireland presents a problem for the champions of neo-Catholicism, for there they will find little to support their enthusiasm for the older Church, as a refuge from the democratic mediocrity, and intolerant freedom, of the most Protestant sections of Protestantism. It is impossible to conceive of a Huysmans or a Verlaine being converted to Irish Catholicism. The “grands convertis” had a conception of religion entirely remote from the philosophy of Catholic Ireland, whose artistically barren soil could never produce a Chartres Cathedral, while its inhabitants would view with horror such a “convert” as the author of La Cathedrale. Irish ecclesiastical architecture is, as a rule, as unrelievedly [109] dull as that which we associate with the extremer forms of Protestantism.
 The externals of Irish life immediately demonstrate how slight is the artistic influence of Catholicism in Ireland. Irish Catholics have none of the easy tolerance and freedom of religious majorities elsewhere, but have the narrowness and hardness of a small sect. All the repressive measures of puritanism are heartily enforced, in emulation of the efforts of the Protestant minority. In short, the Protestantism of the Irish Catholic is such as to deprive the Church of precisely those elements which are favourable to literary and intellectual development, and have rallied so many artists to her support. Nor have those peculiar qualities of genuine Protestantism been substituted, to which the Northern races owe their most characteristic virtues. As a result, the Catholic Irishman does not find in his religion the spiritual emotion and the aesthetic stimulant necessary to the creation of a work of art. Consequently, his inspiration has been drawn from sources independent of his religious beliefs.
 The foregoing may seem to preclude the possibility of there being even one truly Catholic poet, and to be completely disproved by the existence of such an anthology as The Religious Songs of Connacht. The contradiction is, however, more apparent than real; the old antagonism of bard and saint, of which the historians have written, still lingers obscurely in Ireland, and it has been seriously contended that the Catholic Church is an exotic. Nevertheless the people, and more particularly the peasantry, have associated the bardic divinities and heroes with the saints and wonders of Christianity. Sacred and profane legends have become so identical a part of the belief of the rural population that the one has infused [110] the other with a certain breath of poetry. In the large cities a dehberate effort has been made to find a spiritual background for Irish life, and, as we shall see in a later chapter, with most interesting results. In the country towns, unfortunately, this has not been the case, and the spiritual death that hangs over them is obviously due in part to this failure of Catholicism to become properly assimilated. In the remoter Irish-speaking districts, however, what was conscious in the cities has been instinctive, and a certain folk-poetry has grown up. The presence of the Gaelic language guaranteed the survival of the bardic tradition, and the heroic figures of antiquity naturally amalgamated with those of sacred history. Where the Celtic flame had not been extinguished poetry was possible. The ancient tongue had the associations lacking in the speech of the provincial towns, and only recovered by the concerted move of a few more cultivated groups in the cities. The latter, being more deliberate, were naturally more radical in their return to the origins of nationality and of national literature, and quickly dissociated the fundamental traits of the Celtic spirit from the extraneous agglomerations of Catholicism. Hence on the one hand. The Religious Songs of Connacht, and on the other, the poetry of A.E., W. B. Yeats and the writers associated with them.
 Katharine Tynan, though also associated, to some extent, with the group of poets last mentioned, remained uninfluenced by the revolt which led them to the very sources of Celtic spirituality. She remained undisturbed in her acceptation of the simple teaching of the Catholic Church, and it is just in so far as she approximates to the attitude of the country people that she is a Catholic poet. One does not find her expressing the profounder aspects of Catholicism, [111] the exaltation and rapture of belief, for these belong to a more emotional and intellectual religion than that of the Irish Catholic. In Ireland the folk-lore conception of Catholicism is the most prevalent, as they know who have essayed to raise the theological level to that of France or italy. Modernism is a problem which we have not yet faced. In the realm of folk-lore, at all events, is witnessed a certain reconciliation of the antagonistic bardic and Christian elements. Katharine Tynan’s verse, therefore, voices that naive faith, that complete surrender to the simpler emotions of wonder and pity, which characterise the religious experiences of the plain man.
 Her delight in St. Francis is typical of her general manner. She never touches the speculative depths of such Catholics as Pascal, the doubts and ecstasies of the great believers are not hers. She sees nature with the eyes of devout reverence, and in her tender descriptions of all the small creatures of God, her love for the old or the helpless, she excels in conveying a sense of child-like admiration for and confidence in the works of an Almighty Power. Her Rhymed Life of St. Patrick accurately reproduces the popular view of the saint, widely different as that is from the facts. The little book of six miracle plays published in 1895 is another of her best-known works devoted entirely to religious subjects. Here, however, there is a rather too careful simplicity, giving an air of artificiality not usual, for spontaneity is a noticeable feature of her devotional outpourings. But it must be said that here also she has failed to exercise any restraint. Her numerous contributions to magazines of piety are rarely suitable for republication. The devotional side of Katharine Tynan’s work is quite adequately represented by a selection [112] from her religious verse, such as that which has recently appeared under the title, The Flower of Peace.
 Interesting though she may be as the only important Catholic poet in Ireland, Katharine Tynan will hardly rank with the best writers of the Literary Revival. For the reasons we have seen, Irish Catholicism is necessarily a shallow vein of inspiration, and even at best, it has not created, and cannot create, great poetry. In the special circumstances just described, it has inspired folk-poetry that has many beauties, but the power of The Religious Songs of Connacht loses by transposition. There is more of the poetic essence in Douglas Hyde’s collection than in Katharine Tynan’s many volumes. Nevertheless, she has written more verse than any of her contemporaries, with the possible exception of W. B. Yeats, and this, notwithstanding the incredible list of fiction with which she has endowed the circulating libraries. In Yeats’s case the volume of writing is distributed over a wide range of subject and has been constantly revised. When Katharine Tynan, with a fraction of the poetic material, has spread it over so many pages. It is not surprising her work should be thin. Irish Poems, published in 1913, contains a selection from the best of her more recent poetry. If we are to judge her by this volume, we must forget all the inferior verse, all the book-making, which is doubtless inevitable, so long as commercialism is the master instead of the servant of art. This is all the more easy, as she has here collected a sufficient number of beautiful poems to ensure her remembrance by all who care for the unassuming songs of a poet whose voice has so often sung the fragrance of the country, and the charm of natural beauty.

A further point of dissimilarity between Johnson and the Irish poets with whom he was associated is the strongly marked note of Catholicism which characterises so many of his poems. Whether he joined the Catholic Church in the hope of thereby accentuating his newly-found Irish nationality, or whether he wished to be in the literary fashion of France, as were so many of the English “decadents” of the Eighteen Nineties, we cannot tell. It is possible he may have been prompted by mixed motives, in which literary, social, and even spiritual, considerations [192] played a part. Be that as it may, Johnson’s enthusiasm for Ireland may be described as that of a convert. His intellect was stirred before his heart, otherwise it could be difficult to account for what must have seemed an apostasy. Not by emotion, but by argument, can the de-nationalised Irishman be restored to his country, for the former would appeal precisely to those instincts which he lacks. It need not surprise us, therefore, if Johnson’s poems, arising out of a thought, possess qualities not commonly found in the verse of his contemporaries, which are inspired by an emotion. A further point of dissimilarity between Johnson and the Irish poets with whom he was associated is the strongly marked note of Catholicism which characterises so many of his poems. Whether he joined the Catholic Church in the hope of thereby accentuating his newly-found Irish nationality, or whether he wished to be in the literary fashion of France, as were so many of the English “decadents” of the Eighteen Nineties, we cannot tell. It is possible he may have been prompted by mixed motives, in which literary, social, and even spiritual, considerations [192] played a part. Be that as it may, Johnson’s Catholicism constitutes him the only poet of the Revival, apart from Katharine Tynan, whose religion has coloured his work. But here, again, his English education and training produced effects which distinguish him from the Irish Catholic. English Catholicism is, by comparison with that of Ireland, intellectual. If, by chance, an Irish poet gives expression to Catholicism, it is either in the instinctive, wild, half-Pagan fashion of the Religious Songs of Connacht, or after the simple, tenderly devout manner of Katharine Tynan. Compare the latter’s charming poem, St. Francis to the Birds, with Johnson’s A Descant upon the Litany of Loretto or Our Lady of the May. The lofty austerity of Johnson is very different from the humble reverence of the author of Sheep and Lambs. There is no introspection in her work, but just a natural movement of devotion before the creatures of God. Her verse is as typical of Irish as Johnson’s is of English Catholicism. The intellectual fibre, the stern asceticism of the latter’s religious poetry, is quite unknown to the few Irish poets of any importance who have written out of a like inspiration.

The Island of Saints and A Neglected Monument of Irish Prose are characteristic examples of the application of an ironical and detached curiosity to popular subjects, which has become so marked in the later John Eglinton. These two essays are related, in so far as both are an examination of certain religious phenomena in Ireland. In the first the author advances the theory that Irish Catholicism is an exotic, wholly out of sympathy with the natural aspirations of the Irish race. The hostility of bard and saint in Gaelic literature, the divorce of Catholicism and literature in subsequent times, and the peculiarly Protestant atmosphere of Catholic Ireland, with its Sabbatarianism and inartistic puritanism - these are the facts which, at all events, give the necessary background of reality to the slightly paradoxical contention. In the second essay, the ramifications of the problem are touched upon when the essayist explains the relation of cause and effect in the literary non-existence of the Irish Bible. Here are exhibited, in the light of a theory clearly postulated, some of the anomalies of our intellectual life, with its strange silence where certain fundamental ideas are concerned. John Eglinton has elsewhere enlarged upon the hopefulness of a recrudescence of religious bigotry.  Until our system is cleared of the stifled [251] germs of seventeenth-century theological controversies, we shall never begin to discuss real problems with becoming frankness. The history of the Irish Bible becomes a symbol of the divorce between things sacred and profane, which gives a certain unreality to our public discussions.