THE REVIVAL OF IRISH LITERATURE.* AN effort to restore Irish
literature of the past, and to encourage that of the present and future, deserves warm sympathy from all wbo desire the "thread of poetry" to be woven into our workaday life. That the recently founded Irish Literary Society should be presided over by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy is in itself a pledge of patriotic aim in a region that is happily not political, and of the higher cultivation of language, at a time when language is becoming telegrammatic and disordered. The two addresses delivered by him to the Society in 1892 and 1893 are excellent texts for comment on Irish literature, and he represents to this day the "Young Ireland" enthusiasts of 1848, who unsheathed their somewhat archaic swords and sang their battle-songs with true Gaelic pomp of words and rhythm. Not Mr. Matthew Arnold himself could feel a
• addresses by Sir Charles Garen Dole, K.C.M.G., Dr. George Sigerson, and Dr. Douglas Hyde. London : Fisher Unwin. 1894.
higher respect than we do for the literary genius of the Irish race. We take even a larger view of Gaelic influ- ence on language than does Sir C. G. Daffy. We are encouraged to do so as regards Scandinavian literature by Dr. Sigerson, who writes of Ireland with all the enthu-
siasm of a domesticated Viking. and by Dr. Douglas Hyde, who, however anxious to de-Anglicise " West Britain" (hated name!), can hardly claim Milesian descent. Sir C. G.
Daffy is exceptionally eloquent, but whether he echoes the " Spirit of the Nation," or sketches Irish virtues with a free brush, we are already familiar with the like estimate of Ireland, which, as we all know, is first gem of the sea, inhabited by the finest peasantry in the world. All the charm of brilliant intellectual suggestion is his,—the "silvery column" of his prose reflects in Gaelic style the light in a thousand sparkles, though it may not always quench our thirst for exact knowledge. He is essentially Irish, " always ready to react against the despotism of fact," which we take to be high praise, and meant for such, when the saying is quoted by Mr. Arnold. We do not sympathise so well when the English official speaks in Irish tones of the need of literature that will improve Irish farming, and impress John Bullism on the bright-eyed Irish children. We read Sir C. G. Duffy, as we do most Irish litera- ture of the Gaelic type, with pleasure, but we " get no forrarder " in the deeper reasons for wishing better know- ledge of the vast stores of Celtic thought and imagination which have been preserved in Ireland by extraordinary accident, considering the history of the island. Let us not too seriously dwell on the legends of its early civilisation, of which, however, we do not doubt the main tradition, attested as it is by objects that we still possess. The minds that dealt with those facts, the lovely embroideries of language worked upon them are chiefly important, and while they are buried in submerged forests, lost in over- growths of sphagnum moss, the inheritance of an imagina- tive literature is in itself not only the expression of former enthusiasms, but an immortal incitement to reach higher levels of thought and life. Even in the journalism of the day, Irish phrases, which have become common property of the nation, are a very real gain to the "creeping Saxons." We cannot enter into the proclivities of the Celtic races, except to remind ourselves that they are of our own Indo-European family, and only differentiated from Teutons by the pressure of historic circumstances. Dr. Sigerson, true to his Norse blood, remarks that men who reached the furthest limits of the known world, and even sought the Beyond, were probably men of courage and adventure. They came to a land which seems to have had natural beauties then of which it has been largely shorn since its dense forests have been cut down and replaced by bog. Given the original Celtic temperament we can imagine that-
" The rapid climatic variations of their insular abode must have affected those accustomed to more constant continental atmos. pheres. The earliest remnants of our literature reveal a people who were—or as I think, who had become in these conditions— very sensitive to the things of nature."
And Dr. Sigerson "correlates " many weird legends with phenomena that accompany earthquake action and that lived in the tradition of St. Brendan, and later, in the plans of Cabot, if not of an earlier discovery of America by sea-rovers from the north-east.
In the older writings of Ireland are to be found very vary- ing shades of the same typical style. The earliest is the best. It has an ingenuous free sincerity that is "racy of the soil," as are not the later productions of a people whose axes of feeling have been deflected. Pride that was excessive has become embittered mortification. Beauty that had been a joy changed to an intense melancholy, relieved when its strain was too great, by the jigs and grins assumed for the first time in the century of penal laws. Antique examples of manful striving, courtesy and great-minded heroism such as those sung by Oisin were distinctly home-grown. Patting aside the evidences contained in poetry, the Brehon laws and traditional customs, even in pre-Christian times, suggest a high standard of honourable life. Meantime, whatever the Irish ethic, what- ever their Gaelic characteristics, the senses of the Irish family were exercised to extreme keenness by their nomad and pastoral habits. In all ancient folk-lore, there are traces of preternatural gifts in seeing and hearing, and the Irish lived among the very springs of folk-lore to a later date than their Romanised cousins: The wandering and contentious
clans of Erin, fighting within the small arena of Ireland, did not settle down to agricultural and home life, but pastured their herds where they could. Their habits obliged extreme activity of muscle and acuteness of sense. It is possible that the life and sounds of the well wooded and watered Nature may have helped to quicken their perception of its harmonies, and the more so that they were imputed to supernatural powers. Hearing was of the first importance in their "cattle spoils." surprises, and nightly laagers during their expeditions. It follows that ears so sensitive, and the love of excitement incident to their adventurous life, recognised, as no others did, even the Cymry of Wales, the finer and multi- farious values of sound. Every chief had his Sennachie, or professional poet ; and Dr. Sigerson reminds us that in ancient Ireland " the poets might almost be described as the patrons, for theirs it was to distribute praise or dispraise in poems, the which,' says Spenser, are held in so high regard and estimation among them, that none dare displease them, for feare to run into reproach through their offence, and be made infamous in the mouths of all men." Dr. Sigerson says, in a note, " that in the petty princedom of Tyrconnell, now Donegal county, the real estate allocated to maintenance of the literati amounted to £2,000 yearly, present currency." The Irish bards, at their best and pre-Christian period, were prophets of the ideal, and makers of Gaelic standards differing from ours, but with a grandeur of their own. Miss Lawless, in her Essex, describes a bard's recital and its effect on the listeners, even in the sixteenth century, when Lord Essex himself, Shakespeare's friend, did not remain unmoved. For centuries the Sennachies had practised a rapid rhythmic speech, with every art of rhetoric that long experience had taught them. It seems certain that they and their Irish pupils, who as Christians overran the schools of Europe, were the creators of assonant and rhymed verse. They had felt and learned the rhythms of nature, and discovered the pleasure which they gave to the human sense when ordered in certain numbers. Trained to long-breathed effort, they arranged the pauses of human speech, and the rise and fall of its emo- tion in accord with the deep-lying recognition of vibration which gives pain or pleasure to sensitive ears. The versifica- tion of the western Gael was extremely complex, and its correctness was imperative, as it is still in France, though in a far less degree. Dr. Sigerson gives examples of refined concords and alliteration which prove singular subtlety in the ears that enjoyed them. The fine sense of hearing among the Irish was parallel to the refined vision evidenced in the intri- cate delicacy, for instance, of the initial letters of the Book of Kells. The science of their verse was pushed to a nicety that even Tennyson has not conceived. Necessarily the values of phrases in producing varied emotions were studied ; the taste of the hearers improved ; and even when the subjects of the chanted epics might be cruel or revolting, they were clothed in the best words that long experience had sifted from the vocabulary. For centuries before letters were known to the vulgar, the professional bards had improvised in vivid and sonorous language for their chiefs and clansmen. It was their calling to rouse or allay passion in the valiant heroes of the tribe. How to lead it to victory, and to control it by their satire in times of recoil and craft, was no unimportant science, given the Gaelic senses and the Gaelic temper. Style, there- fore, the subtle and ready use of words, was a weapon in the chief's bands as powerful as any Maxim gun. The weapon became rusty and inefficient as the race abandoned its ancient life ; adjectives were multiplied as disasters befell the fighting nomads ; and the later Gaelic poems are monuments, for the most part, of exaggeration. They are seldom, if ever, defaced by trivial or vulgar words or phrases. Fortunately for our English literature, the long resistance of the Irish clans kept the Gaelic poetry alive, though gradually weakened,—alive, as it is not in any other part of Europe.
The essay by Dr. Douglas Hyde advises a change in the drift of our thoughts about Ireland, which is interesting, though altogether impracticable. He wishes to "de-Anglicise" Ireland ; he forgets that, as yeast works in dough, some Irish qualities are leavening the nations with which they come in contact for the general advance of humanity, while they are dangerously explosive when bottled up in the little island which, for the present, cannot help being " West Britain." All who desire the higher life of Europe, as preached in litera- ture, should soothe the Irish Literary Society by the fullest recognition of the uses of Irish prose and poetry. It is idle to turn back currents of Gaelic influence on sources that are lost in the twilight, it may be, of the gods ; in this nineteenth century it proves a valuable element, but to produce the noblest literature, it lacks stability ; and for human uses, even of ideal circumstance, is too " defiant of the despotism of fact,"—the point from which it wings its vehement flight is not solid ground ; and something more than even the best arrangement of words is necessary for great superstructures of thought. What would be left if Ireland were "de-Angli- cised "—what would be lost if the element of Gaelic splendour were abstracted from English literature ? Irish thought, in its energy and pomp, is crippled, and strangely metamor- phosed, in English phrases ; but the hereditary keenness of the Irish ear is still ready to feel the music of prose or rhyme ; the essential spirituality which is ready to defy fact, keeps us alive in the flat marshes of sensible life. When Europe was most Addisonian and Encyclophliste, a flame was kindled in its ashes by Macpherson's " Ossian." There is, in all our modern poetry, more of the Irish bard than of Addison or the French philosophy of the eighteenth century. English sobriety catches fire from Irish enthusiasm, though it remains unconscious that Chateaubriand and Byron, even such differing poets as Keats and Victor Hugo, had thrown off, in Gaelic fashion, " the despotism of fact."
In vain we look for Irish voices in the great revival of imagination. Yet even in the Johnsonian autocracy Gold- smith had learned sweet Gaelic notes, perhaps from Carolan, the Irish bard, whom in his boyhood he had seen. Mr. M. Arnold has told us how much Shakespeare owed to Gaelic ideals, and Spenser's Una was of Irish parentage. It is idle to maintain, however, that Gaelic fancies, or even Gaelic style, could have immortalised those imaginings without English reasonableness and grasp of life's real facts. Yet to the old Sennachies of Ire- land we probably owe the rhetoric of Burke, the sweet. ness and biting satire of Moore, who could so deftly translate Anacreon and invent the " Twopenny Post-Bag." Having no space in which to note the works of Lover and Carleton, or of a dozen hybrid writers born of Irish degradation during the penal laws, we arrive at the true Gaelic revival of 1848, and the most modern journalism has clear tokens of a Gaelic strain in lofty leaders and " own correspondents," not less good at fighting than at describing battles. There is, in their fine language, always abundant, a remarkable absence of slang and of vulgarity in all its ramifications, and a felicitous choice of words that are seldom ignoble in sound or in association, however weak the arguments they embody. Here and there Irish writers tend to overshoot our English wits, which do not see all round a thought, and we laugh at Irish bulls because they flash alternative ideas round a central one.
Irish oratory, even though it is sometimes translated Gaelic into English of the Latin type, requires no bush, but we earth- treading English not " defiant of facts " by no means wish some Irish ideas the success their purple robes bespeak. Macpherson hung those robes on his inadequate human figures, and ail Europe wondered at the majesty of their folds even when awry. 0 Irish Literary Society ! be patient that they are nobly borne by men and women of whatever Indo-European race, by Aubrey de Vere as by Florence MacCarthy, by Charlotte Brontë as by' Emily Lawless, who give to the English-speaking races a literature in which Gaelic qualities reappear at their brightest. In the name of Europe we pro- test against Protection in the transmission of poetic thought.
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