have verily rolled from soul to soul, dying out only as the language it was built from approaches extinction. How far is the same true of the literature of “culture,” even in these days of compulsory education?
“Not that Irish literature gave no expression to purely contemplative and indoor thought. We have examples enough to show that this was not so. To one such instance the learned Italian Celticist Ascoli alludes in a passage of great beauty and pathos in the preface to an extremely dry philological work. He is writing of the poor Irish monk, who, toiling in his cell in a foreign land at the transcription of some Latin manuscript, stops to listen to the notes of a blackbird from a distant thicket, then, turning from his labour, composes in his native Gaelic a touching and beautiful ode to the bird, and inscribes the verses on the margin of his page. The song, written a thousand years ago, has lain in oblivion till in our day it was unearthed by the research of the philologist. There is a fine instance of Irish contemplative poetry in the Leabhar Breac, where a monk dwells on the weaknesses and wanderings to which even the monastic heart is prone. In another poem in the same MS. the poet commiserates a blackbird, whose nest has been robbed by cowboys:—
“Sorrowfully cries this blackbird;
The evil he has met I know;
Whosoever has robbed his house,
For his brood it was plundered.
The evil he has met now,
It is not long since I have met it;
Well I understand thy voice, O blackbird,
After the plunder of thy dwelling.
It has burned thy heart, O blackbird!
What this wilful person has done;
Thy nest without bird, without egg,
A story that is small trouble to the cowboy.
They used to come for thy clear notes,
Thy young brood, from beyond!
Not a bird now comes out of thy house
Over the edge of thy shapely nest.
The herd-boys of the kine have killed
All thy children in one day;
The same grief have I and thou;
My children they live no more.
O, Thou who hast formed the universe,
Hard we deem Thy partiality;
The friends that are by our side,
Their wives live yet, and their children.”
Wit in the classic sense, the power of bringing more or less distant ideas into pleasing relation or contrast, is, as might be expected, a constant note of Irish literature. Hardly any other literature shows such a daring use of unexpected metaphor. “Blaze of a splendid sun,” Aengus Céile Dé calls St. Patrick. Aengus himself is styled in turn the “flame over Bregia (the plain of Meath)” and the “sun of the west of the world.” “To tell to you, men of Ireland, the miracles of Patrick,” says an ancient prose writer, “would be to bring water to a lake!” “My love,” sings a hopeless lover, “is the love of an echo.” In the Battle of Rosnaree, an officer in retreat leaps into the Boyne, “and a wave laughed over him and he was drowned without life.”
“Love of Nature has been from the earliest times to which our knowledge reaches a peculiar note of our national literature, especially of its poetry. The appreciation of Nature is by no means absent from Greek and Roman authors. It is prominent in the mediæval literature of Europe. It is, perhaps, what most endears Chaucer to us, and it gives softness and sweetness to the heart-searching thoughtful pages of Shahespeare. But these, for the most part, confine their love of Nature to her amenities. To the Irish poet, all Nature, nimate and inanimate, is dear. He loves alike her beauties, her splendours, her terrors. One of the most striking passages in Irish literature is a very ancient rosc or rhapsody which represents Amergin, the legendary first poet of the Gaedhil in Ireland, as identifying his own person with all the forms and forces of Nature. The spirit survives down to the Gaelic poetry of our own age. In the person of an exile, Donnchadh Mac Conmara sings—
“Dearer than this land is the wildness of each mountain
Of the bright hills of Eire!”
Before the sixteenth century there is hardly any trace of effort to cultivate a prose style, no greater effort indeed than we might have met with in the traditional tales that the peasants have been telling during the nights of the past winter round their firesides in Tyrconnell, in Connemara, or in Corcaguiny. It is not, for this, to be thought that the older prose was rough, unpleasant, or devoid of graces. Uneducated Irishmen commonly display in speaking English an abundance of vocabulary, a variety, freedom and power of expression, of which Englishmen in the same station are quite incapable. But in speaking their own language, the Irish show a range of speech, a diversity of usage, a play of rhetoric, a power and delicacy of diction, certainty not excelled even by the educated classes in speaking English. As we go farther back in time we find the Irish language ever more copious in vocabulary, more nicely organised, and more apt for the expression of finer shades of thought. The literary class in old times consisted of men trained, after the fashion of the time, in the study of their own tongue. We can thus realize how, without effort and without pride in the form of their work, Irish writers could produce a prose literature not wanting in beauty and in power, of which the graces were of nature rather than of art.
“The greatest and the best part of Gaelic prose is narrative. The narrative faculty in the Gaelic mind is even more highly developed than the rhetorical faculty. The excellence of Irish writers in this direction may be ascribed to the conjunction of a strong and ready imaginative power with the habit of objective treatment already mentioned. No doubt our epic tales frequently show the power of narrative exercised in a fashion much too exuberant for our modern taste. Irish literature addressed itself, as we have seen, to open-air audiences, and open-air audiences cannot well be addressed in drawing-room tones. One notable feature of Irish tales is the ease and versatility with which the narrator launches into his theme. The interest in an Irish tale seldom lags for an instant, unless it be in those curious metrical interpolation which repeat in verse what has already been told in prose. In general, the narrative moves forward directly and rapidly to its conclusion. In later times writers became stylists, and the change was for the worse, the style becoming intolerably turgid with heaped-up epithets and long-drawn-out descriptions. Contemporary folklore has preserved the ancient manner with the most of its peculiarities.
“Poetry was the great object of literary cultivation in ancient Ireland. In Ireland, it can hardly be doubted, that golden link between language and music, the rhyming stanza, originated. In Ireland it attained its highest perfection of form. So perfect, indeed, was the form that it has been questioned whether the restrictions it imposed could have admitted of the writing of good poetry. It is to be borne in mind that, when it pleased them, the Irish poets cast aside the restraint of the artificial rules of the
