districts, and, if it did nothing else, at least it would have sent us
to school in pleasant places among the most lovable preceptors. It was a
blessed change from London to a valley among hills that look over the
Atlantic, with its brown stream tearing down among boulders, and its
heathy banks, where the keen fragrance of bog-myrtle rose as you brushed
through in the morning on your way to the head of a pool. Here was
indeed a desirable academy, and my preceptor matched it. A big,
loose-jointed old man, rough, brownish-gray all over, clothes, hair, and
face; his cheeks were half-hidden by the traditional close-cropped
whisker, and the rest was an ill-shorn stubble. Traditional, too, was
the small, deep-set, blue eye, the large, kindly mouth, uttering English
with a soft brogue, which, as is always the case among those whose real
tongue is Irish, had no trace of vulgarity. Indeed, it would have been
strange that vulgarity of any sort should show in one who had perfect
manners, and the instinct of a scholar, for this preceptor was not even
technically illiterate. He could read and write English, and Irish, too,
which is by no means so common; and I have not often seen a man happier
than he was over Douglas Hyde's collection of Connacht love-songs, which
I had fortunately brought with me. But his main interest was in
history--that history which had been rigorously excluded from his school
training, the history of Ireland. I would go on ahead to fish a pool,
and leave him poring over Hyde's book; but when he picked me up,
conversation went on where it broke off--somewhere among the fortunes of
Desmonds and Burkes, O'Neills and O'Donnells. And when one had hooked a
large sea-trout, on a singularly bad day, in a place where no sea-trout
was expected, it was a little disappointing to find that Charlie's only
remark, as he swept the net under my capture, was: "The Clancartys was
great men too. Is there any of them living?" The scholar in him had
completely got the better of the sportsman.
Beyond his historic lore (which was really considerable, and by no means
inaccurate) he had many songs by heart, some of them made by Carolan,
some by nameless poets, written in the Irish which is spoken to-day. I
wrote down a couple of Charlie's lyrics which had evidently a local
origin; but what I sought was one of the Shanachies who carried in his
memory the classic literature of Ireland, the epics or ballads of an
older day. Charlie was familiar, of course, with the matter of this
"Ossianic" literature, as we all are, for example, with the story of
Ulysses. He knew how Oisin dared to go with a fairy woman to her own
land; how he returned in defiance of her warning; how he found himself
lonely and broken in a changed land; and how, in the end, he gave in to
the teaching of St. Patrick ("Sure how would he stand up against it?"
said Charlie), and was converted to Christ. But all the mass of rhymed
verse which relates the dialogues between Oisin and Patrick, the tales
of Finn and his heroes which Oisin told to the Saint, the fierce answers
with which the old warrior met the Gospel arguments--all this was only
vaguely familiar to him. I was looking for a man who had it by heart.
The search for the repositories of this knowledge leads sometimes into
strange contrasts. One friend of mine lay stretched for long hours on
top of a roof of sticks and peat-scraws which was propped against the
wall of a ruined cabin, while within the evicted tenant, still clinging
to his home as life clings to the shattered body, lay bedridden on a
lair of rushes, and chanted the deeds of heroes; his voice issuing
through the vent in the roof, at once window and chimney, from the
kennel in which was neither room nor light for a man to sit and record
the verses. My own chance was luckier and happier. It came on a day when
a party of us had set out in quest of a remote mountain lough. Our way
led along the river, and as we drove up to where the valley contracted,
and the tillage land decreased in extent and fertility, the type of the
people changed. They were Celts and Catholics, evident to the least
practised eye. A little further still from civilisation we reached the
fringe that was Gaelic not merely in blood; the kindly woman whose
cottage warmed and sheltered us when we returned half-foundered from
plunging through bogs was an Irish speaker. She had no songs herself,
but if I wanted them her neighbour, James Kelly, was the best of
company, and would keep me listening the length of a night.
I pushed my bicycle through a drizzle of misty rain up the road over
mountainous moor, before I saw his cottage standing trim and white under
its thatch in a screen of trees, and as I was nearing it, the boy with
me showed me James down in a hollow, filling a barrow with turf. He
stopped work as I came down, and called off his dog, looking at me
curiously enough, for, indeed, strangers were a rarity in that spot,
clean off the tourist track, and away from any thoroughfare. One's
presence had to be explained out of hand, and I told him exactly why I
had come. He looked surprised and perhaps a little pleased, that his
learning should draw students. But he made no pretence of ignorance; the
only question was, how he could help me. Did I want songs of the modern
kind, or the older songs of Finn Mac-Cool? If it was the latter, it
seemed I was not well able to manage the common talk, and these songs
were written in "very hard Irish, full of ould strong words."
I should like to send the literary Irishmen of my acquaintance one by
one to converse with James Kelly as a salutary discipline. He was
perfectly courteous, but through his courtesy there pierced a kind of
toleration that carried home to one's mind a profound conviction of
ignorance. People talk about the servility of the Irish peasant. Here
was a man who professed his inability to read or write, but stood
perfectly secure in his sense of superior education. His respect for me
grew evidently when he found me familiar with the details of more
stories than he expected. I was raised to the level of a hopeful pupil.
They had been put into English, I told him. "Oh, ay, they would be, in a
sort of a way," said James, with a fine scorn. Soon we broke new ground,
for James had by heart not only the Fenian or Ossianic cycle, but also
the older Sagas of Cuchulain. He confused the cycles, it is true, taking
the Red Branch heroes for contemporaries of the Fianna, which is much as
if one should make Heracles meet Odysseus or Achilles in battle; but he
had these earlier legends by heart, a rare acquirement among the
Shanachies of to-day.
Here then was a type of the Irish illiterate. A man somewhere between
fifty and sixty, at a guess; of middle height, spare and well-knit,
high-nosed, fine-featured, keen-eyed; standing there on his own ground,
courteous and even respectful, yet consciously a scholar; one who had
travelled too--had worked in England and Scotland, and could tell me
that the Highland Gaelic was far nearer to the language of the old days
than the Irish of to-day; finally, one who could recite without apparent
effort long narrative poems in a dead literary dialect. When I find an
English workman who can stand up and repeat the works of Chaucer by
heart, then and not till then I shall see an equivalent for James Kelly.
And yet it would be a different thing entirely. Chaucer has never
survived in oral tradition. But in the West of Donegal, whence James
Kelly's father emigrated to where I found his son, every old person had
this literature in mind, and my friend was no exception. It is among the
younger generation, who have been taught in the National Schools (surely
the most ironic of all titles), that the language and the history of the
nation are dying out. Yet that is changing. For instance, James Kelly's
son reads and writes Irish, and on another day helped me to note down
some of his father's lore.
For it was late when I came first to the house, and though the Shanachie
pressed me (not knowing even my name) to stay the night, I had to depart
for that day, after I had heard him recite in the traditional chant some
staves of an Ossianic lay, and sing to the traditional air Carolan's
famous lyric, "The Lord of Mayo." We drank a glass of whisky from my
flask, a cup of tea that his wife made; and as we went into the house he
asked a favour in a whisper. It was that I should eat plenty of his good
woman's butter. He escorted me a good way over the hill, for, said he,
when I had come that far to see him, it was the least that he should put
me a piece on my road, and he exhorted me to come again for "a good
crack together." And if I deferred visiting him for another year that
was largely because I did not like to face again this illiterate without
acquiring a little more knowledge.
What came of my second visit must be written in another paper. But here,
let it be understood this is no exceptional case. In every three or four
parishes along the Western seaboard and for twenty miles inland, from
Donegal to Kerry, there is the like of James Kelly to be found. It may
be that in another fifty years not one of these Shanachies will linger;
education will have made a clean sweep of illiteracy. And yet again, it
may be that by that time, not only in the Western baronies but through
the length and breadth of Ireland, both song and story and legend will
be living again on the lips and in the hearts of the people. _Go leigidh
Dia sin._
LITERATURE AMONG THE ILLITERATES
II
THE LIFE OF A SONG
There was a great contention some years ago fought out in a law court
between the British Museum and the Royal Irish Academy, for the custody
of certain treasure trove, gold vessels and ornaments disinterred on an
Irish beach. The treasures went back, as was only right, to Ireland,
where is a rich storehouse of such things, for the soil has been dug
over in search for the material relics of ancient art. Yet little heed
has been paid to treasures of far greater worth and interest, harder to
sell, it is true, but easier to come by--the old songs and stories which
linger in oral tradition or in old manuscripts handed down from peasant
to peasant. Only within the last few years did the Irish suddenly awake
to a consciousness that the authentic symbols, or, rather, the
indisputable proofs of the national existence so dear to them, were
slipping out of their hands. So far had the heritage perished, so ill
had the tradition been maintained, that when they turned to revive their
expiring language and literature, the first question asked was, "What is
it you would revive? Was there ever a literature in Irish or merely a
collection of ridiculous rhodomontade? Is there a language, or does
there survive merely a debased jargon, employed by ignorant peasants
among themselves, and chiefly useful, like a thieves' lingo, to baffle
the police?"
These were the questions put, and not one in a thousand of Irish
Nationalists could give an answer according to knowledge.
Now, matters are changed. The books that were available in print have
been read; the work of poets extant only in manuscript has been printed
and widely circulated; the language is studied with zeal, and not in
Ireland only, but wherever Irishmen are gathered. Yet nothing has so
strongly moved me to believe that we cherish the living rather than pay
funeral honours to the dead, as certain hours spent with a peasant who
could neither write nor read.
The life of a song--poets have said it again and again in immortal
verse--is of all lives the most enduring. Kingdoms pass, buildings
crumble, but the work which a man has fashioned "out of a mouthful of
air" defies the centuries; it keeps its shape and its quivering
substance. Strongest of all such lives are perhaps those where "the
mouthful of air" is left by the singer mere air, and no more, unfixed on
paper or parchment; when the song goes from mouth to mouth, altering its
contours it may be, but unchanged in essence, though coloured by its
immediate surroundings as a flower fits itself to each soil. Such was
the song that I had the chance to write down, from lips to which it came
through who knows how many generations.
The story which it tells is among the finest in that great repertory of
legend which, since Ireland began to take count of her own possessions,
has become familiar to the world. It is the theme of a play in the last
book published by the chief of modern Irish poets, Mr. W. B. Yeats. But
since he tells the story in a way of his own, and since it is none too
well known even in those parts of Ireland where its hero's name is a
proverb (_Comh laidir le Cuchulain_, Strong as Cuchulain), it may be
well to set out the legend here.
Cuchulain, the Achilles of Irish epic, was famous from the day in
boyhood when he got his name by killing, bare-handed, the smith's fierce
watchdog that would have torn him. The ransom for the killing was laid
on by the boy himself, and it was that he should watch Culann's house
for a year and a day till a pup should be grown to take the place of the
slain dog. So he came to be called Cu Chulain, Culann's Hound, and by
that name he was known when, as a young champion, he set out for the
Isle of Skye, where the warrior-witch Sgathach (from whom the island is
called) taught the crowning feats of arms to all young heroes who could
pass through the ordeals she laid upon them.
There was no trial that Cuchulain could not support, and the fame of him
drew on a combat with another Amazonian warrior, Aoife, who, in the
story that I heard, was Sgathach's daughter, though Lady Gregory in her
fine book _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_ gives another version. But, at any
rate, Cuchulain defeated Aoife, and she gave love to her
conqueror--whose passion for the fierce queen was not strong enough to
keep him from Ireland. When he made ready to go, the woman warrior told
him that a child was to be born of their embraces, and she asked what
should be done with it. "If it be a girl, keep it," said Cuchulain,
"but if a boy, wait till his thumb can fill this ring"--and he gave her
the circlet--"then send him to me." So he departed, leaving wrath behind
him.
The child born was a son, and Aoife reared him and taught him all feats
of arms that could be taught to a mortal, except one only, and of that
feat only Cuchulain was master: "the way," said James Kelly, prefacing
his ballad with such an explanation as I am now giving, "there would be
none could kill him but his own father." And when the boy had learnt all
and was the perfect warrior, Aoife sent him out to Ireland under a
pledge to refuse his name to any that should ask it, well knowing how
the wardens of the coast would stop him on the shore. It fell out as she
purposed. The young Connlaoch defeated champion after champion till
Cuchulain himself went down, and was recognised by his son. But the
pledge tied Connlaoch's tongue, and only when he lay dying, slain by the
magic throw which Aoife had withheld from his knowledge, could he reveal
himself to his father, the great and childless hero, whose lament for
his lost son is written in the song that I set out to secure, on a day
of sun and rain, last summer, when great soft clouds drove full sail
through the moist atmosphere, their shadows sweeping over brown moor and
green valley, while far away towards the sea, mountain peaks rose purple
and amethystine in the distance.
Twice before this I had been in the little cottage on Cark Mountain;
first, when the chance rumour heard in a neighbouring cabin of a man
with countless songs and stories sent me off to investigate; and for a
second time, when I had come back with a slightly better knowledge of
Gaelic and had taken down a few verses of the poem. These, sent to an
Irish scholar, had sufficed to identify the ballad with one printed in
Miss Brooke's _Reliques of Irish Poetry_, a characteristic production of
the latter days of the eighteenth century, when Macpherson, with his
adaptation of the Ossianic poems, and Bishop Percy, with his gathering
of old English ballads, had set a fashion soon to culminate in Scott's
great achievement.
They proved, however, not identity only but difference; and the ballad
as I have it in full with its nineteen quatrains, is even less like the
longer version given by O'Halloran to Miss Brooke, than the opening
stanzas suggested. In them the variations were mainly textual, and when
I read out O'Halloran's version to James Kelly, his son, a keen
listener, declared a preference for the printed text. But the old man
was of another mind. "It's the same song," he said, "sure enough, but
there's things changed in it, and I know rightly about them. Some one
was giving it the way it would be easier to understand, leaving out the
old hard words. And I did that myself once or twice the last day you
were here, and I was vexed after, when I would be thinking about it. And
this day you will be to take down what I say, let you understand it or
not; just word for word, the right way it should be spoken."
There you have in a glimpse the custodian of legend. The man was
illiterate, technically, but he knew by instinct, as his ancestors had
known before him, that he was the guardian of the life of a song; he
recognised that it was a scripture which he had no right to mutilate or
alter. He had to the full that respect for a work of literature which is
the best indication of a scholar, and for him at least the line was
unbroken from the Ireland of heroes and minstrels to the hour when he
chanted over the poem that some bard in the remote ages had fashioned.
Little wonder, too, for his own way of life was close to that of the
Middle Ages. Below in the valley, where the Swilly River debouches into
its sea lough, was a prosperous little town with banks and railway; but
to reach the bleak brown moor where James Kelly's house stood, you must
climb by one of two roads, each so rough and steep that a bicycle cannot
be ridden down them. Here, in a little screen of scrub alders, stands
the cottage, where three generations of the family live together. His
own home consisted simply of two rooms with no upper story, but it was
trim and comfortable, the dresser well filled, and the big pot over the
turf fire gave out a prosperous steam. The son, a grown man, waited from
his turf-cutting to help in our discussion; the wife was abroad that
day, and one daughter was just starting for market with a web of
homespun cloth which they had dressed in the household. The spinning
wheel stood in the corner; but another girl was busy near the fire with
more modern work, hemming shirts with a machine for a Derry factory, and
the bleached linen was the only thing in the house which had not taken
on the brown tints of peat smoke.
James Kelly himself, as he sat by the fire declaiming at me, was all
browns and greys, like the country outside his door; and his eyes were
like brown streams running through that peaty mountain, with their
movement and sparkle, and their dark depths. At other times easy, like
that of all Irish peasants, his manner changed and grew rough and
imperious when the business began. I must not interrupt with questions.
I must write down, syllable for syllable, that the song might be got
"the right way." It was by no means easy to carry out these directions,
for the poem was written in an Irish not spoken to-day, as unlike as the
Chaucerian English is to our common speech; and even to write down
modern Irish by ear I was poorly qualified. Things were made harder,
too, by the manner of recitation, as traditional as the words. He
chanted, with a continuous vocalisation, and while he chanted, elbow and
knee worked like a fiddler's or piper's marking the time. However, with
persistence, I got the thing down, letting him first say a verse fully
through, then writing line by line or as near as I could; then going
back and asking questions in detail: the son coming to my rescue, when
the old man lost patience (as he did once in every ten minutes) and
interposing usefully in our discussions.
For there were endless discussions as to the meaning of words, and
nothing could be more curious than to see the old man's endeavour to
give in English not merely a bare rendering, but the colour of every
phrase. It made me realise as nothing else could have done, how fine was
his feeling for the shade of a word, and I cannot describe his
dissatisfaction with the poor equivalents he could find. He was happy
enough when the debate drifted into an exposition--always addressed to
his son--of the uses of some rare word in the Irish, the manner of
exposition being by citation of passages from other songs, or phrases
that might occur in talk. I have listened to many a professor doing the
same thing in Greek and Latin, but to none who had a finer instinct for
the business. Kelly's vexation came when he had to "put English on" a
word for me, and the obvious equivalent was not the right one. Sometimes
I could help; sometimes he arrived by himself at what satisfied him,
though once at least it was droll enough. We were at the lines where
Connlaoch, dying, says to his father: "If I could give my secret to any
under the sun, it is to your bright body I would tell it." The trouble
was about the phrase "bright body," for the word "cneas" means literally
"skin," but is used (just like [Greek: chros] in Homer) to signify
"person." What James wanted to convey to me was that the word was not
the common one for "body," and at last he smote his thigh. "Carkidge,"
he cried, "it's carkidge (carcase), 'It is to your clear carkidge I
would tell it.'" A man with less instinct for literature would have said
"body" at once, and never trouble more; but James knew at once too much
and too little, and I give the instance to show how an Irishman
unlettered in English may be deeply imbued with the true spirit of
letters through a literature of his own.
There were, however, several passages where I could get no clear account
of the meaning, and in some I have since found by comparison with the
text which O'Halloran provided for Miss Brooke that Kelly had got the
words twisted. For instance, the first stanza opens simply:--
"There came to us a stout champion,
The hearty champion Connlaoch."
But of the next two lines I could get no clearer rendering than that "he
just came in full through these people for diversion and for fun to
himself." Then the ballad continues at once--for its method is terse and
its transitions abrupt throughout--to give us the words of the men who
meet Connlaoch on his landing:--
"Where have you been, O tender gallant,
Riding like a noble's son?
Methinks by the way of your coming,
You are wandering or astray."
And Connlaoch answers the taunt and the challenge implied:--
"My coming is over seas from the land
Of the High King of the World,
To prove my merry prowess
Athwart the high chiefs of Erin."
(It seemed to me characteristic that the stock epithet of valour should
be "merry" or "laughing.") The ballad added no reply (though in Miss
Brooke's version at this point there is a dialogue of warnings), but
went on to tell in the shortest possible words how Conall Cearnach ("the
Victorious") rode out from Emain Macha and met the challenger:--
"Out started Conall, not weak of hand,
To get news of the noble's son.
Bitter and hard was the way of it;
Conall was tied by Connlaoch."
"'Bring word from us to Hound's head,'
Said the King in fierce sullen tones,
To Dundalk sunny and bright,
To the Hound, Dog's jaw."
Then Cuchulain (thus described by versions of the nickname won when he
broke the jaws of Culann's hound) made answer:--
"Hard for us is hearing of the captivity
Of the man whose plight is told;
And hard it is to try the venom of blades
With the warrior that bound Conall."
But the messenger pleads:--
"Do not think but to go to the rescue
Of the destroying keen dangerous warrior,
Of the hand that had no fear for any,
To loose him, and he fettered."
Then (as Miss Brooke in the majestic manner of the eighteenth century
puts it):--
"Then with firm step and dauntless air,
Cucullin went and thus the foe addrest,
Let me, O valiant knight (he cried),
Thy courtesy request,
To me thy purpose and thy name confide."
And so on through a sonorous description of dialogue and fight till:--
"At length Cucullin's kindling soul arose,
Indignant shame recruited fury lends;
With fatal aim his glittering lance he throws,
And low on earth the dying youth extends."
Or, as I translate almost literally from James Kelly's version, which is
considerably briefer than the text which Miss Brooke has so volubly
expanded:--
"Out set the Hound of the keen, smooth blade
To see the work that Conall made,
Till he pierced with a bitter blow,
That hero youth his hardy foe."
That is all we are told of the fighting; the ballad passes straight to a
terse dramatic dialogue, which Cuchulain opens:--
"Champion, tell your story,
For I see your wounds are heavy;
'Twill be short ere they raise your cairn,
So hide your testament no longer."
"That's what he said to the son," said James Kelly, finishing the verse,
and beginning afresh,