IRISH ANTIQUITIES.*

Jr is fortunate for students of Irish arekeology that for Christian art in any case a greater antiquity cannot be claimed than 1888 years, and that the probable date of the evangelisa- tion of Ireland reduces that period some 400 years. Miss Stokes, therefore, in this excellent manual need not "begin at the beginning," or grope in the twilight of the Celtic " heroic " period more than is necessary to her subject. Her handbook is an excellent recapitulation of the conclusions arrived at by those best acquainted with the curious and very interesting relics of Irish art ; for there is an undoubted and characteristic school of Irish art, and Miss Stokes does good and patriotic service in discriminating its merits. She gives a comprehensive account of the Irish antiquities known to exist in Europe ; but within the limits of an educational book we cannot expect to find wider issues discussed. It is, perhaps, so best, and Miss Stokes is wise in not travelling outside facts that can be verified. Within their range, however, there are abundant suggestions of outlying historic truths ; and this book creates a new interest in Tara brooches, sculptured crosses, round towers, and other curiosities, to which we had heard such incredible origins ascribed, that they had been relegated to the realms of faery, not to say imposture. It is, for instance, a help to us to remember, as Miss Stokes points out, that the incoherence, if we may use the expression, of Irish antiquities comes of the frequent invasions, the civil wars, and general hot-water which has jumbled together the relics of the past, and by checking the natural growths of progressive civilisation, has left them bare in all their strangeness. In the rest of Europe, archaic remains have been for the most part obliterated or supplemented, and each stage of art has prepared us for the next. In some respects this adds interest to the Irish relics, and tends to humble us when we examine the beauties of illuminated manuscripts and metal-work which have not been since sur- passed. Nowhere else can we so well study some aspects of the work of artists during the "dark ages."—for Irish pro- ducts are, after all, in close relation to other European handi- work of the same period. To trace its connection with Roman and Byzantine schools, to find even a probability that the round towers or " bell-houses " of Ireland were suggested by Charles the Bald to his Irish friends, as a Frankish mode of securing treasure from the Northern raiders, is far more interesting than to indulge in the wild dreams current not sixty years since of their Buddhist or Phcenician origin. We might as well ascribe Saturnian ancestry to our fellow-Cells; and it is satisfactory to be assured by so competent a scholar as Miss Stokes that the frequent and characteristic patterns of interlaced lines found in Irish ornamentation are neither Runic nor Punic, but Byzantine. The divergent spiral or trumpet design, which almost decides the best period, is found in British work of two centuries before and after Christ. It is in their use of designs which, as Humboldt says, are "rhythmical patterns of lines which characterise the ornamentation of many nations in a certain state of civilisation," that the Irish artists are com- mendable. We think that in two at least of the works described in this volume, Miss Stokes is fully justified when she says of them that they manifest "a style which accords

with the highest laws of the arts of design and such delicate and perfect execution, whatever the material in which

the art was treated, as must command respect for the conscien- tious artist by whom the work was carried out." The two- handed chalice of Ardagh, and the Tara brooch of which the century remains unknown, are astonishing specimens of metal- work. In their grace, their finish of refined ornament, which can hardly be appreciated without a moderately powerful lens, and by their beauty of form, these we think more wonderful than even the celebrated Book of %ells, which may be taken

• Early Christian Art in Tre/and. By Margaret Stokes. London: Chapman and Hall. 1837.

as the finest example of Irish illumination. If this or any other essay on the subject can teach modern workmen to rival

such productions, they will indeed be useful ; but when Miss Stokes hopes that if "studied in reverence they might sub- serve to a further development in the same lines," she forgets to reckon with the mania for cheapness, fatal to modern handi- crafts, and only less so than is the arrogant eclecticism which smothers invention at the birth. People who can buy, want to have everything at once at the lowest price. They find "Kells work" at shops and bazaars, in which the scribe's exquisite traceries are roughly copied in coarse work on anti- macassars, tea-cloths, and other incongruous articles. Let us hope that copies of the chalice of Ardagh be not made and vulgarised as have been the Irish brooches.

Miss Stokes puts the illuminated manuscripts above the metal-work of Ireland ; but we must remember how many manuscripts, and how few specimens of metal-work have been spared by the successive spoilers. It is quite possible that more may turn up. The chalice of Ardagh was found by a boy digging potatoes ; the Tara brooch was picked up by a child near the sea-shore as lately as 1850. We can but hurriedly touch the intricate beauties of the chalice, which is of the best. period of Irish Christian art. In it are used gold, silver, bronze, brass, and lead. Gold repouss6 plaques, and the finest filigree, in which forty distinct patterns are employed, beautify with admirable reserve of ornament the classically

proportioned bowl, the stem and foot. Both the cloisonné and champlev4 enamels which enrich the chalice have interesting peculiarities of workmanship. To historians of the Church it has

special value as a "unique example of the two-handed chalices used in the earliest Christian times," the only one at least that has been found in the United Kingdom. It is engraved with the names of the Apostles, differently placed to the order now used in the Roman missal. Of the Tara brooch we can only observe that in its marvellous ornamentation no fewer than seventy-six varieties of Irish design are used, corresponding to those found in the best specimens of illumination.

Who has not heard of the Book of Kells? What amateur of illumination is not familiar with the charm of its interlaced

patterns? There is nothing new to be said in its praise. Miss Stokes assigns to it the early date of the seventh century, and it may be said to be the grammar of Irish ornament. It is, indeed, so beautiful that we almost doubt whether, within two centuries of the austere evangelisation of Ireland, such a return could have been made towards the lovely ingenuity of pre-Christian ornament. No doubt Roman and Byzantine

influences pursued the ascetic fugitives from pagan luxury and humanism ; but from the bell of Patrick to the Book of Kells is a "far cry." The primitive Christian life of which we

gain glimpses in this volume, suggests that the prevailing horror of the world and the flesh which drove earnest souls to the hardest of lives in the roughest of places, can alone account for the ugliness and bald simplicity of the earlier Christian relics in Ireland. The doctrine of man's moral deformity and vileness, accentuated by the decay of the Roman civilisation, the habitual spiritual excitement and mystic enthusiasm which despised and even feared the fascinations of every form of beauty, go far to account for the clumsy ugliness of the relic called St. Patrick's bell." It is at once the most authentic and the oldest specimen of Irish Christian metal-work, and it possesses an unbroken history through fourteen hundred years. Since the eleventh century it has been encased in a shrine that is highly ornamental, but the bell itself might have been made by the roughest of village blacksmiths. Yet in the Petrie Museum are examples of Irish pre-Christian bronze-work, supposed to have formed parts of a radiated crown "which," says Mr. Kemble, "for beauty of design and execution, may challenge comparison with any specimen of cast-bronze work that it has ever been my fortune to see." This is one of the curious anomalies that meet us in Irish antiquities. We can but see here, as elsewhere, that mathetics are closely allied to ethics.

It is said that no martyrdoms followed the conversion of Ireland, but nowhere was the ascetic enthusiasm more marked. The first preaching of the Gospel there coincided with the full tide of that feeling which, as Sir F. Leighton has lately said, loathed the body and its beauty as the vehicle of all tempta- tion, and yearned for a life in which the flesh should be shaken off." More than in other countries of Europe, certain points of Christian faith seem to have been emphasised in Ireland, and notwithstanding the ridicule that has been roused by the idea, we think that climate has much to do with Irish peculiarities. Who can say how much its sunlessness deepened the fierce fervours of the innumerable monks, or how much the wild winds and rains of the Western coast quickened their nerves to spiritual ecstasy and scorn of material beauty ? Mr. Ruskin remarks that the roots of leaf ornament in Christian architecture are the Greek acanthus and the Egyptian lotus; "yet," writes Miss Stokes, "no trace of the

acanthus has ever been found as the basis of any Celtic foliate pattern. Something similar to the lotus does occur in the Book of Kells, but never the acanthus. The vine and the trefoil are rather the roots of all Irish leaf ornament, and both these plants have borne a meaning in Christian symbolism."

The psychology of Irishmen, from the time we know any- thing of it to our own O'Briens and O'Connors, is most interesting, and the study of their ancient art helps us to understand the country which never belonged to the Roman Empire or tasted of its laws, and which has perhaps for its most notable characteristic a fragmentary Christianity of the Dark Ages, untempered by any authoritative direction from the Roman Church. Reverence and awe, amounting often to superstition, came readily to the lovers of Oisin's poetry, and Patrick was heard with enthusiasm. The same intensity of awe has preserved for us some of the curious relics figured in these pages. The anchorites who lived in the beehive cells of Skellig Michael, or on the mountain-tops of the mainland, may well have amazed even the doughty Fenian Militia. In later times, when beauty was once more endurable to these Baptists of the West, the rude bells of the earlier saints, their sacred books, and the simple staves which were their wands of episcopal office, were given splendid cases. Families and clans were proud to devote themselves to their guardianship, and some of the more precious relics were carried to battle as was the Ark of the Israelites. Some of the satchels in which it was customary to carry books, still attest what was once a common practice, and Miss Stokes mentions as an interesting fact, that "all the books in the Abyssinian

monastery of Sourians, on the Natron Lakes in Egypt, were recently found by an English traveller in a condition singularly resembling that of the Book of Armagh."

In her chapters on architecture, Miss Stokes is perforce driven to say something of Dolmens and Duns, of tumuli and treasure-caves, which existed before the Christian missionaries built their oratories and cells, often within the shelter of some rath or fort the lord of which had been converted. Roman characters are found beside Ogham in bilingual inscriptions, and when the earlier ardours of the Christian scribes suffered them to use ornament, we find the trumpet and other dis- tinctively Celtic patterns turned to good use in beautifying the symbols of their faith. In Ireland still exist types and emblems which have been overgrown elsewhere. The little churches, some fourteen feet by nine in length and breadth, and twelve in height, were in the traditional shape of the Ark ; there were no basilicas to be consecrated. If pagan ideas were allowed to influence the Christian artists, they were Celtic rather than Roman. The beds of the dead" were marked out by pillar-stones, only distinguished from their heathen prototypes by the cross figured on them. Inscriptions are in the vernacular, and not, as generally on the Continent, in Latin. It is, however, in her convincing account of the round towers or bell-houses of Ireland that the author leaves the clearest expression of her knowledge and good sense. Since Petrie's book there has been no reasonable question of their ecclesiastical purpose. Miss Stokes, following Lord Dunraven and other later critics, narrows the dates of their more or less finished architecture to periods when the Irish had breathing- spaces between the Danish invasions of the ninth to the eleventh centuries, and the latest, which show features of decorated romanesque style, she ascribes to the thirteenth. The watch- towers and refuges of the first period were developing into campaniles of the Italian type. The disproportion of their height to the little churches by which they stood is well explained :—

"Till the invasion of the Northmen, the Irish ecclesiastic possessed his soul in comparative peace, and the wall that encircled the groups of cells and oratories that formed the monastery was deemed security enough for him, as was that of the Laura; but in the year 800 all was changed ; the attempted colonisation of Ireland by a pagan invader, resolved to extirpate

the Christianity that he found there, and to establish the national heathenism of his own country, compelled the monks to protect their little churches and cells by means of the lofty tower. Its great height, its isolated position, and small doorway about 14 ft. from the ground, made it fit to resist the attacks of an enemy chiefly armed with bows and arrows."

As a signal-tower its value is obvious :— "The churches of Ireland being but the size of an ordinary cottage of the present day, never could have supported the weight of a tower of 100 ft. in height, and would always seem out of pro- portion to it ; but when a watch-tower and keep for the monastery became necessary, when war and rapine called forth the symbol of pride and power in Irish Christian architecture, the lofty strong- hold bearing its cross on high was erected in the cemetery, and opposite the door of the church."

We cannot do more than mention the forty-five high crosses, thirty-two of which are richly ornamented, which belong to what we may call the middle period of early Irish art, when

the clerics invented a national cross by uniting the Roman and Greek forms. These noble erections are sculptured according to figures common to the Christian art of the time ; and they express the hieratic cycle of symbolism into which the faith was condensed, and much of which is now inexplicable. As for the two hunclred Ogham stones, whether or not they bear traces of Patrick's peaceful conquest, we will not venture on their consideration. We have said enough to suggest how well an.anged and in every way excellent is this manual, which should, indeed, teach its readers a great deal more than to imitate or even reproduce the beauty of Irish design. It throws light on that dim and troubled past of the people of Ireland, which is unlike the past of other European nations, though in no nay mysterious. It shows the chaotic mixture in her relics, of the dark, the middle, and the present ages, which is not without parallel in the jumble of her laws, her politics, and her aspirations.

We regret that even by copies it has been found impossible to give a better idea of ancient Irish art in the Exhibition at Olympia. There seems no organised and patriotic effort in this direction, though in the case of curios exhibited by Mr.

Day are some interesting archaic objects.