It must be evident to all who read this collection of plays, stories and
poems in the spirit which their author would have wished for, that it
would be utterly wrong to preface them with remarks applying merely to
their literary qualities.
For they are something more than literature. On the pages as we read
they seem to grow into flesh and blood and spirit. They are a record of
the emotions of a life which was devoured by one idea, the native beauty
of Ireland, its manners, its speech, its people, its history. And we see
how that idea was coupled in the mind with a poignant sense of the
danger that threatened the vitality of all those things. The writer saw
the thought of the Gall spreading like a destructive growth through the
body of Irish nationality. He felt that an imported politeness mocked at
the Gaelic ways; he knew that the Irish language had been extinguished
in the greater part of Ireland by the sense of shame working on poverty,
and that many of the people of the Irish-speaking fringe were also
growing ashamed of the priceless treasure they possessed; he saw that
the lessons of Irish history, which the leaders of the past had taught
by their labours and often sealed with their blood, were being ignored
in the modern political game.
Earnestness of purpose had always marked him. He threw his heart and
soul and strength into the Gaelic movement; he learned the language so
thoroughly as to be able to use it with ease as his medium of literary
expression, to recapture the old forms of poetry and story-telling, and
to infuse into them the modernity of his own modes of thought. He fought
the battles of Irish with a vigour that we all remember. He founded a
school--against what difficulties!--where education was Irish, and aimed
at the free development of personality in the Irish way. All that was
hard and earnest work, but its earnestness was nothing to the terrible
seriousness that grew upon him when he came to realize the maladies of
the political movement that was supposed to aim at Irish nationhood. The
Volunteers, at whose foundation he had assisted, were at first
negotiated with and then divided by the constitutional Party; the
original founders, who determined to adhere to their principles, were
left high and dry without any constitutional support. The conviction
gained on him that only blood could vivify what tameness and corruption
had weakened, and that he and his comrades were destined to go down the
same dark road by which so many brave and illustrious Irishmen had gone
before them.
It is in the light of this progress of thought that we must read his
writings. We find the fresh notes of tenderness and sweetness in the
early stories, IOSAGAN, THE PRIEST, BARBARA, and EOINEEN OF THE BIRDS.
The psychology of children, their sorrows and joys, are the theme. The
older people are merely foils to the children; we learn nothing of their
inner story, except in the case of Old Matthias--and even here we have
merely an account of a return to the innocence of second childhood.
Iosagan coming to play with the little ones on the green, while the old
folks are at Sunday Mass, Paraig wearing a surplice and saying _Dominus
Vobiscum_, and _Orate Fratres_, in anticipation of the priestly office,
Brideen holding converse grave and gay with her doll, Eoineen watching
with joy the return of the swallows in spring, and broken-hearted at
their departure in late autumn, all pass before our eyes as dwellers in
a _Tír-ná-n-óg_ in _Iar-Connacht_, where the waves sing a careless song,
and the sun shines only on innocent faces. But in THE MOTHER and other
stories we are on different ground, and are told of “the heavy and the
weary weight” that lies on the hearts of the Western poor. We see the
tragic pride of Gaelic culture that impels old Brigid of the Songs to
walk across Ireland to sing at the Oireachtas in Dublin, only to die of
hunger and exhaustion at the end, the listless face of the old tramp,
who tells how through the Dearg-Daol he had lost his luck, his farm and
his family, and had become “a walking man, and the roads of Connacht
before him, from that day to this”; and even more significant is the
story of the death in prison of Coilin, with its undercurrent of hatred
for the foreign laws. The manner of narration in these stories is brief
and severe; there is scarcely a phrase too many, and even purists would
be hard set to detect an alien note. The most perfect instance seems to
me to be the story of the DEARG-DAOL.
Of the little collection of poems, _Suantraighe agus Goltraidhe_ (Songs
of Sleep and Sorrow), Mr. MacDonagh rightly said: “One need not ask if
it be worth while having books of such poetry. The production of this is
already a success for the new literature.” The old forms, with their
full-sounding assonances and alliterations are beautifully wrought, and
the modern thoughts, the latter-day enthusiasms and dejections, when
they come, never strike us as intruders. To illustrate their beauty,
quotation in English would not serve my purpose; I will quote from the
Irish original a single verse from the poem, _A Chinn Aluinn_:
_A ghlóir ionmhuin dob’íseal aoibhinn,
An fíor gó gcualas trém’ shuanaibh thú?
Nó an fíor an t-eólas atá dom’bheo-ghoin?
Mo bhrón, sa tuamba níl fuaim ná guth!_
Quite suddenly, in the second last of the collection, the image of
Ireland stands out, bowed beneath the weight of the ages, the mother of
Cuchulainn the valiant, but also of shameful children who betrayed her,
lonely and imperious. And the last poem is an exquisite farewell to the
beauty that is seen and heard and felt, before gathering the pack and
going the stern way whither the service of Ireland pointed.
The plays, THE SINGER, THE KING, THE MASTER, and the last poems, THE
REBEL, THE FOOL, THE MOTHER, are those of a man in whom meditation on
coming struggle, agony and death have become one with life and art. They
are weighted with the concept of a nation inheriting an original sin of
slavery, for whose salvation the death of one man is a necessity. “One
man can free a nation as one Man redeemed the world,” says MacDara in
THE SINGER. “I will take no pike, I will go into the battle with bare
hands, I will stand up before the Gall as Christ hung naked before men
on the tree!” And the mother says: “My son, MacDara, is the Singer that
has quickened the dead years and all the quiet dust.” And the sharp
anguish of doubt is there too, the ever-recurring thought of the apathy
of the nation, and the vision of those “that cursed me in their hearts
for having brought death into their houses,” of “the wise, sad faces of
the dead, and the keening of women.” But the doubt comes from outside,
it is not born within the soul, and the stern resolution and _saeva
indignatio_ conquer it and persist. The mother is evoked in whose
calendar of saints the martyrs will be inscribed, who will ponder at
night in her heart in religious quiet on “the little names that were
familiar once round her dead hearth.” And through all, as if nature
would have her revenge for the over-strain, breaks in a flash the love
of the old-sought, fugitive beauty of things, the
“Little rabbits in a field at evening
Lit by a slanting sun,
Or some green hill where shadows drifted by,
Some quiet hill where mountainy man hath sown
And soon would reap; near to the gate of Heaven;
Or children with bare feet upon the sands
Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets
Of little towns in Connacht.”
Taken in the order I have indicated, the work of Padraic Pearse seems to
me to constitute a mystical book of the love of Ireland. In _Iosagán_ we
have the tender and satisfied love of the fervent novice, delighting in
the old-world, yet ever youthful charm of the Gaelic race, untroubled by
the clouded day of maturity. We find in _An Mátair_, and in some of the
poems and plays the way of purgation by doubt and suffering. In the last
plays and poems we reach unity and illumination, the glow of the soul in
the fire of martyrdom. And all these states of love are interwoven, as
they should be, in the separate stages, though a different one may have
predominance in each. I believe the generations of Irishmen yet to be
born into the national faith will come to the reading of this book as to
a kind of _Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum_, a journey to the realization of
Ireland, past, present and to come, a learning of all the love and
enthusiasm and resolve which that realization implies:
“Live in these conquering leaves; live all the same;
And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame.
Live here, great heart; and love, and die, and kill;
And bleed and wound; and yield and conquer still.”
Those who look in these pages for a vision of Pagan Ireland, with its
pre-Christian gods and heroes, will be disappointed. The old divinities
and figures of the sagas are there, and the remnants of the old worship
in the minds of the people are delineated, but everything is
overshadowed by the Christian concept, and the religion that is found
here centres in Christ and Mary. The effect of fifteen centuries of
Christianity is not ignored or despised. The ideas of sacrifice and
atonement, of the blood of martyrs that makes fruitful the seed of the
faith, are to be found all through these writings; nay, they have here
even more than their religious significance, and become vitalizing
factors in the struggle for Irish nationality. The doubts and weaknesses
which are described are not those of people who are inclined to return
to the former beliefs, but of men whose souls are grown faint on account
of the lethargy which they see around them. For years they have preached
and laboured and sung; but the masses remain unmoved. What wonder if
they feel unable to repeat with conviction: “Think you not that I can
ask the Father, and He will give me presently twelve legions of angels?”
No, the Ireland about which Pearse writes is not the land of the early
heroes, but of people deeply imbued with the Christian idea and will.
And yet we feel that the ancient and mediæval and modern Gaelic currents
meet in him. By his life and death he has become one with Cuchulainn and
Fionn and Oisin, with the early teachers, terrible or gentle, of
Christianity, with Hugh of Dungannon and Owen Roe and all the chieftains
who fought against the growing power of the Sassenach, with Wolfe Tone
and the United Irishmen, with Rossa, O’Leary, and the Fenians. He will
appeal to the imagination of times to come more than any of the rebels
of the last hundred and thirty years, because in him all the tendencies
of Irish thought, culture and nationality were more fully developed. His
name and deeds will be taught by mothers to their children long before
the time when they will be learned in school histories. To older people
he will be a watchword in the national fight, a symbol of the unbroken
continuity and permanence of the Gaelic tradition. And they will think
of him forever in different ways, as a poet who sang the songs of his
country, as a soldier who died for it, as a martyr who bore witness with
his blood to the truth of his faith, as a hero, a second Cuchulainn, who
battled with a divine frenzy to stem the waves of the invading tide.