Gaelic Literature

The Literature of the Highlands. By Nigel MacNeill. Edited by T. MacMaster Campbell. (Eneas Mackay, Stirling. 7s. 6d.) THE almost simultaneous publication in Ireland and Scotland of two remarkable books dealing with Gaelic Literature is one of those happy coincidences which sometimes occur in literary production. The more important and altogether more vital work of Mr. de Blficam is a general survey of the Gaelic State and Gaelic polity, gathered into a consecutive whole in a series of brilliant essays.

This is the first attempt—and a successful one as far as it goes—at reconstituting from age to age the historic as well as the literary background of the great treasures of Irish litera- ture. Mac Liag and Cuan O'Lochain were poets, but they were more. They were living, virile sharers in the moving drama of the history of their day. To understand, for instance, the beautiful lines on Kincora known chiefly to English speakers through Mangan's translation :-

" Oh, where, Kincora, is Brian the great ?

And where is the beauty that once was thine ?

we must perforce know all about the dismantling of Brian Boroimhe's great fortress at the head of the weir and the relations between the Court poet and his over-lord.

As we read we thrill to the thought of Geoffrey Keating, the greatest of Irish literary men, writing at Bordeaux his home- sick message in the form of a beautiful and well-ordered poem in correct bardic metre to send home to the island of his love. " My blessing with you, 0 writing," he says, " to the pleasant island of Ealga." Here in a flash we have a picture of the exile—prototype of all Irish exiles for the past three hundred years.

This is no dead catalogue of literary work. The pages glow and burn with the fire of an imaginative soul. Here is light enough and to spare for the dark corners of literary history. The empty spaces are peopled with dead-and-gone Gaels of many generations. The bare bones of literature take on the flesh and blood of living men and women instinct with the feelings of their time. Picture after picture rises before us until the very beauty of the language begins to cloy, as it were, like a mother's over-fondling of a baby she loves intensely.

There is nothing new in this latest contribution to Irish literary history. No startling theories.; no research into new material ; no scientific delving into abstruse forms. The subject-matter is well known to all serious students of Irish literature. O'Curry, O'Donovan, Dottin, MacNeill, Hyde, and the other pioneers and research workers are laid under tribute throughout. And yet it is all new, for the standpoint is frankly that of the uprisen Gael.

This book goes back three centuries to recapture the native outlook ; it is a rehandling of the vast material in the treasure house of Irish literature, particularly of the modern period.

So full of life are these pages, that we see in vivid vision Mac Aingil wandering on foot in Spain and France and Italy, or sitting down to write his account of the Irish philosopher, Duns Scotus, or O'Rahilly on his death-bed hurling defiance at the fate that involved his country in ruin :—

" I'll cry not for help ere I'm laid in the slender coffin."

The appreciation of the Red-Branch literature as " an aris- tocratic literature of an aristocratic age where glory was the warrior's only goal " takes on shape in glowing words :-

" As in Homer the lives of heroes are poured forth ungrudgingly for an immaterial end, and death seems but the sinking of the brief wave back into the common tide. A terrific animal energy runs through the whole."

Or, again, we meet such a pregnant phrase as :— " At all times Ireland's most fruitful contact with the larger world has been found through the Church, and the oppression of the Church always has cramped her culture."

This reference to the influence of the Church leads us on to what is one of the most serious omissions of the book: that is, a study of the earlier schools which were largely centred round the monasteries. At one period the monasteries were almost the only centres of cultured and literary life in the island, and it was in the later Middle Ages

that the best of the lay Bardic schools flourished. It is, of course; with the later phases of literary development Mr. de Blacam chiefly deals, professing, in fact—and in this he differs from most Irish literary workers—a preference for the later Fenian cycle of literature preserved not alone in literary form but as folk-tales amongst the people. Deirdre the beautiful, the tragic, he likes best in the more sentimental dressing of the late mediaeval version. The stark outline of the earlier and more virile saga does not appeal to him in the same way as the more subtle and more subjective rendering of an age that gave elegant form to the crude things of life. And yet a Deirdre forced brutally after the death of Naoise to live on with his murderers, and finally in despair at the accumulation of insults dashing out her brains against a rock is truer to the primitive age in which she lived than the graceful heroine of the later version who sank in romantic fashion on the grave of her lover to be buried with him, having first unburdened herself of a poetic tribute.

What de Blacam calls truthfully the Ossianic wistfulness he attributes to higher sensitiveness. " The Virgilian tears," he says, " are found in all literature that sees this transient world pass with a contemplative eye. These things will pass."

" Ind raith tar cis caich ar nair Ocus hid rig foilit i n-uir."

"The rath survives the Kings who lie in their bed of clay." (sic.)

A good service to the study of Irish literature is rendered by. calling attention emphatically to the stories which form a running relief to the standard works, the parodies of Fenian and other tales, and by the scholarly appreciation of the rela- tions between the teacher and the students at the Bardic schools and in the various Centres of learning—those of the father or the head of a clan and a family all working for a common end. The idea of the bards as the journalists of their day is elaborated to good effect, whilst one of the aptest deductions from the history of the High-Kingship is con- centrated in the phrase :-

" Had it (the High-Kingship) reached maturity of authority a national resistance might have rebuffed the invaders, but a national defeat might have subjected the whole land."

Curiously enough the Bardic metres get fuller treatment than the more modern accented metres, which arc not fully or satisfactorily dealt with. These modern forms will, we hope, be dealt with in a later edition, for this is a book which should run through many editions because of its sheer beauty of form, its sympathetic insight, and its modern outlook. Is it the personal note of the saddened Irishman we get in :-

" At last, however, the golden comradeship is tarnished and the day of the Mena wanes."

is it the impatience of the quick mind that speaks in

" Keating put down marvels never foreseeing the uprise of a scientific generation too dull to distinguish between jest and earnest "

No writer at the present stage of the Irish Revival can rightly appraise the authors of past generations whose work has until recently lain in manuscript or is still unpublished. There can be no sense of proportion, no fixing of places in literature until everything is published and until much more scholarly work has been done on the existing texts. Mr. de Blacam is inclined to get his vision blurred by the wrong end of the telescope when a favourite author lilts a ballad whose tune catches his ear or his fancy. But it were ungracious to emphasize minor weaknesses or the defects of a rare quality when, as in this delightful book informed with the vision without which a nation perishes, we get a new note ; a fresh and vigorous quality scarce known until now in Irish literary appreciation. -Irish Literature Surveyed is a book that will send students direct to the fountain-head of Irish literature, full 'of enthusiasm and fresh energy, and this is just what is wanting at the present stage of the Renaissance.

We turn now to a book dealing with the same subject from the point of view of the Gaelic colonists in Scotland, though the author would scorn to acknowledge the Gaels of Scotland as colonists from Ireland. Indeed, we find him betrayed into the following statement of origins :—

" Great Britain was peopled in the North and in the South

simultaneously from the Continent and Ireland was similarly peopled from the North and South of Britain."

He goes on, however, to say notwithstanding all this :- " The Gaels of Ireland and of Scotland were the same people having the same language and music and all the elements of civil- ization about them were common to both."

This was written, we must remember, in 1892, as this volume is a reprint of the first edition with an introduction and a valuable final chapter by the editor. Many of the theories here put forward have long since been discarded, for in no field of literary or historic criticism has better or more radical work been done during the past fifty years than in that of Gaelic literature and language. The work of Irish, Scottish, and above all Continental scholars has cleared the ground for present-day workers so completely that one could wish the earlier chapters of this interesting book were either suppressed or rewritten. Leaving aside such chapters as repeat the exploded theories of the nineteenth century, and also those which deal with mediaeval Irish literature—the background of both the Irish and the Scottish Gael—we come on a great mass of valuable matter, the fruit of much delving into the work of the later Scottish writers.

Dr. MacNeill as well as Mr. de Blicam leans towards the Fenian cycle, and some of his best work deals with the Ossianic poems. As is natural, MacPherson's "Ossian " looms large and intriguing.

Mac Mhaighistir Alasdair, the great Mac Donald poet,

boldest of all the Scottish bards, is reviewed fully and with insight. Blackie's translation of The Birlinn gives us as an incitement to the rowers over the water :- "Wound the huge swell on the ocean meadow Rolling and deep.

With your sharp narrow blades white and slender Strike its big breast."

Duncan Ban Mac an tsaoir, the humble poet from

Glenorchy, was a contrast to the more learned Mae Mhaighistir, yet there is not much to choose between his

Ben Dorain and the work of his great contemporary :— " My delight was rise morning With the early skies

All aglow."

—or his charming love-song to his wife, " Mb.iri bhanag." The romantic figure of Mary MacLeod of Harris composing

her laudatory lays and her Nature poems well-nigh four hundred years' ago in the Hebrides reminds us that Sappho

also once sang among southern islands.

The book of Clanronald and the collection known as The Book of the Dean of Lismore, as well as the Mac Vurrich bardic descent from the famous Murray Albanach O'Daly, who divided his life between the two countries, all link up Ireland and Scotland, and just when the links between the two countries had weakened, the Jacobite enthusiasm common to the two peoples brought them to such a literary under-

standing as may be fostered by the ballad poetry of a race, though by that time differences of religion and political

outlook were too strong to allow of any close union between these two peoples, so alike in origin and culture. Referring to this common literature, Dr. Macneill says :— " In examining the older manuscripts and assigning them a nationality the student of Celtic literature must bear in mind that the language spoken in the Highlands of Scotland and in Ireland in early times was exactly the same and that the dialectic differences existing just now have been mostly developed since the period of the Reformation. The literature that the two peoples possessed till then was also to a great extent common property."

The last chapter, by the editor, is a delightful review of the activities of the chief language workers of Scotland for the past quarter of a century. So unbiased and generous is the Doctor's appreciation that we hope for more from his pen.

A. O'F.