Ireland, England, America, and Australia. They can make our undertaking
known to all who read, and can drop the same thought, as de Tocqueville
says, into a thousand minds at the same moment. They have helped us
hitherto, and they will help us for the future, I make no doubt, as far as
we deserve help, and we are entitled to expect no more.
It will be a pleasant task hereafter, I trust, to remember some of the
dismal predictions which our enterprise had to encounter at the outset.
The black prophets, who believe in no good till it is accomplished, warned
us that we labour in vain, that our population is yearly decreasing, and
is destined to merge in an imperial race, whose voice may be heard
uttering the word of command in the five great divisions of the world, and
that the men who remain are broken by quarrels as old as tradition, and
never likely to end. I would like to conclude with a word on each of these
objections. It is true we are united to a race who dominate huge tracts of
the globe, but I have visited four of the five great divisions in
question, and I can affirm that the word of command is not unfrequently
uttered with an Ulster burr, or an unequivocal Munster brogue. In every
great colony it has been spoken from the _dais_ of authority in the
accents we love. Nay, more, I met officers in the service of France and
Belgium, and some who had served in Austria, indistinguishable from
Frenchmen and Germans in their ordinary conversation, who, when they
strayed into English, became unmistakably Leinster-men or Munster-men, but
none of these Irishmen show the least disposition to merge themselves in
any other race. And the millions of our people in America, are they not
more Irish than the Irish at home? No, there is no danger that we shall
lose our nationality, or weary of labouring for it.
"The toil for Ireland once begun,
We never will give o'er,
Nor own a land on earth but one--
We're Paddies evermore."
It is too true that our population is still diminishing; generations must
perhaps pass before it regains the maximum it had reached fifty years ago;
but let not that disastrous fact discourage us overmuch. It is not by the
number, but by the intrinsic value of its men and women that a country
becomes powerful and memorable. The true admeasurement, as we may learn
from the inspiring story of small nations, is not geometrical but
metaphysical. Little Athens gave philosophy, literature, and art to
mankind; little Rome imposed her will on all the peoples of the known
world; in modern times little Portugal, with a population which sometimes
fell short of the population of Munster, undertook great enterprises, made
memorable discoveries of new territory, and established in Asia and Africa
settlements, which, after troubled centuries, still survive. The little
Netherlands, with no more men than Portugal, held its own against the
most powerful monarchy in Europe, and planted new Netherlands in distant
countries. Florence almost alone created and fostered the Renaissance
which after desolate ages
"--------blessed mankind
With arts anew, and civilised the world."
But these are the commonplaces of history, compared to the story of the
single city of Italy, which, with one arm, "held the golden East in fee,"
and with the other drove back the conquering Turk, bent on the destruction
of Christendom. Or, for an example, that not men but mind is the
conquering force, turn to the barren mountains of Switzerland, where free
institutions were first planted by a handful of husbandmen and hunters,
less than occupy one Irish county, and to-day a federated league of two
and twenty separate republics enjoy substantial prosperity and ideal
liberty, though they muster fewer men than still occupy the two sides of
the Boyne. No; trust me, you have men enough, if they be endowed with the
gifts and disciplined by the culture, which make the destiny of nations.
It would be vain to deny that national quarrels are the most intractable
of our troubles. The Celt is placable and generous in private
transactions, but for public conflicts he has an unsleeping memory. Some
of these quarrels are nearly as old as the Flood. The late Martin Haverty,
who wrote a meritorious history of Ireland, was once discovered by a
friend in a perturbed and angry mood, which he explained by the fact that
he had been reading a record of ill-usage his ancestors sustained from the
invaders. "The slaughter of the Milesians by Strongbow?" queried his
friend. "No," said the historian, "I speak of the slaughter inflicted by
the villanous Milesians on my ancestors the Tuatha De Danaans." No one can
tell with certainty the date of that transaction within a thousand years
or so, and it might perhaps be permitted to rest in peace. There is
another Irish historian and poet, who represents a race to which we have
not yet got altogether reconciled. Our friend, Dr. Sigerson, is as
unmitigated a Dane as the great soldier from whom his name is derived.
When I was last in Dublin I proposed a final burial of national feuds,
ancient and modern, and, as a last victim might be required to consecrate
the transaction, I suggested, that we might execute this last Dane on the
field of Clontarf, where, by some unaccountable mischance, his ancestor
escaped the conquering sword of Bryan. The Doctor offered no objection to
so reasonable a proposal, but suggested that the tramway from Nelson's
Pillar to Clontarf should run quarter-hour trains on the day of execution,
as he wanted a large audience to tell them what they certainly did not
know, that there was a strong Danish contingent in Bryan's Irish army, and
that the Danes, so far from being exterminated at Clontarf, maintained
themselves in Ireland for many generations afterwards, and still
constitute a solid element in our population. Some clement person
suggested that as the sons and daughters of Siger are among the most
gifted patriots in the country just now, it might be discreet to forgive
them offences nearly ten centuries old, but he was pronounced out of
order. I am rejoiced to say a compromise was arrived at in the end, by
which, if the learned doctor will undertake to translate some of the most
characteristic of the Scandanavian sagas for the new Irish Library, and
make us better acquainted generally with the Norse literature, so far as
it relates to Ireland, his punishment may be postponed, and perhaps
altogether remitted. There is another nation with whom our quarrels are
more recent, more bitter, and more prolonged, but it would be genuine
wisdom to make peace with them also if they will let us. The memory of
wrongs which are perpetuated and renewed cannot be forgotten; but, while
no man knows better than I do how just are our complaints and how terrible
the memories they evoke, I affirm that the best Irishmen are prepared
_toto corde_ to forget and forgive the past, if its policy and practices
are never to reappear. The Rules of this Society forbid me to speak of
later quarrels, whether international or internecine; but surely no people
ever were more emphatically exhorted by the circumstances in which they
stand, to close their ranks and end their feuds. Our efforts in this
Society will, I trust, contribute to promote that end.
I have spoken only of the revival of literature for the people, for
happily there has never been altogether wanting a literature for the
studious and thoughtful, maintained by the spontaneous zeal of a few
gifted men and women. It slept at times, but only for an interval.
O'Conor and Curry, Miss Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, Banim and Griffin, have
had successors down to our own day when we are still at times delighted
with glowing historic or legendary stories, or charming idylls of the
people, bright and natural as a bunch of shamrocks with the dew of Munster
fresh upon them. One secluded scholar has spent his manhood collecting our
national records with a care and zeal which in any other country would
compel the recognition and reward of the State; a group of scholars not
connected, I think, except by the _camaraderie_ of a kindred pursuit, have
created a great revival in Gaelic literature; and the Irish press has not
for a generation devoted so much thought to native literature and art,
national customs and manners, as it does just now. There are still local
periodicals full of the enthusiasm of old for our national antiquities,
and it is pleasant to know that they are often sustained by men who differ
from the majority in race, creed, and political opinions. I rarely see
without a strong sentiment of affection and sympathy a little sixpenny
magazine conducted for twenty years by the zeal of one solitary priest
who watches like a father over whatever concerns the Irish intellect. It
is good, therefore, to know that we are not sailing against wind and tide.
The spirit of the era, the state of men's minds as well as the manifest
need of such an enterprise are favourable to our experiment, and I trust
it shall not fail by any indolence or apathy of those who have taken the
responsibility of initiating it.
If I were to express in one phrase the aim of this Society, and of kindred
societies, and of the literary revival of which I have been speaking, it
is to begin another deliberate attempt to make of our Celtic people all
they are fit to become--to increase knowledge among them, and lay its
foundations deep and sure; to strengthen their convictions and enlarge
their horizon; and to tend the flame of national pride, which, with
sincerity of purpose and fervour of soul, constitute the motive power of
great enterprises. Intellectual experiments have not in our own day been
unfruitful of results. Early in this century the philosopher Arago
organised a literary propaganda in Paris, before which Louis Philippe in
the end vanished like a spectre. Dr. Newman and a few of his friends in
Oxford attacked the Puritanism of the English Church with results with
which we are all familiar. One or two Westminster reviewers, and two or
three Manchester manufacturers, reversed the commercial policy of England
in less than a dozen years. Do not be deterred by the manifest
difficulties of the task. The task is difficult but noble, for it is
better to have the teaching of a people than the governing of them. Nor
shall such labour lack its fitting reward, for toil and sacrifice in a
generous cause are among the keenest enjoyments given to man.
_IRISH LITERATURE:_ ITS ORIGIN, ENVIRONMENT, AND INFLUENCE.
BY GEORGE SIGERSON, M.D., M.Ch., &c.,
FELLOW OF THE ROYAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND.
CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE SOCIETIES OF ANTHROPOLOGY,
CLINIC, AND PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF PARIS, &c., &c.
IRISH LITERATURE: ITS ORIGIN, ENVIRONMENT, & INFLUENCE.[2]
Two worlds commemorate that great adventure of Columbus, who, four
centuries ago, after tragic effort, sailed forth from Huelva, and at last
found the fringe of a new continent. He opened its gates to the kingdoms
of Europe, but that vast region had been ages before discovered by the
ships of the daring sea-kings who gave it the name of "Great Ireland"--a
prophetic name.
These men we know; Brendan and Cabot, too, we know; but who shall tell of
him who first, setting his prow against the western sunlight, drove into
the dark mists of the Unknown, and discovered Ireland? Forgotten are his
name and race, forgotten his struggles, who must have been his own king,
counsellor, and guard, in an adventure greater by far, in comparison, than
that of the Genoese. But these things we can tell of the primeval
colonists of our land. When the great migrations of mankind streamed over
Europe, in many branching currents, those were not the least valorous who
went first and farthest. When the Northern Ocean and the Atlantic billows
set bounds to their travel, those must have been amongst the bravest of
heart, the most skilled of hand, and the most aspiring of mind, who
shaped, stored, equipped, and manned the boats that were launched upon
these strange seas to confront all terrors. And it may be a comfort to
know, in view of prevalent hypotheses, that the stock of the Anthropoids
never went through evolutions in this country. Whatever may have happened
elsewhere, the beings who first leaped upon our shores must have been
among the foremost in the developed attributes of manhood.
These isles were to the ancients what America has been to modern Europe,
and more. The apparent course of the sun seemed an invitation, and
ever-flying hope showed, in the splendour of its setting, the glories of
the Hesperides. When Pytheas of Massilia saw the Teutons in the region of
the Elbe, he rejected the view that they had migrated, in favour of the
theory that they were autochthonoi, or products of the place, for it was
inconceivable that so dreary a territory could attract rational beings. It
was otherwise as regards Ireland. The rumour of its fairness seems to have
reached Homer; to this verdant isle of Ogygia Ulysses came, and here
Calypso welcomed and wailed him.
The land must have appeared very beautiful to those first comers who had
traversed the desolate wastes and shaggy forests of the continent, but its
aspect was not altogether that of to-day. Green pastures there were, where
the wild deer browsed, and a wonderful profusion of flowers, and mountain
moors that seemed mantled in purple and gold. But there were also the
mysteries of dark forests of sombre yew, balsamic pine, and immemorial
oak, where lurked the fierce wild bull, lean wolf, and other foes of life,
now like them extinct. We dwell above their remains, for the Book of
Nature is a palimpsest where the record of a new life is written over the
dead letter of the old.
Men coming to a new home bring with them a stock of ideas, some ancestral,
some acquired on the way. They obtain others from the suggestions of their
surroundings after arrival. In the excitement of change, in the presence
of novel phenomena and new experience, the eye is made keen, the senses
are quickened, and the brain is stimulated to the utmost. The rapid
climatic variations of their insular abode must have affected those
accustomed to more constant continental atmospheres. 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, to whom fair
objects of heaven and earth gave joy, and whose exalted imagination saw
mystery in new phenomena. These (common things to us) contradicted their
experience, and the unknown causes were identified with unseen beings.
What wonder if sudden gusts unaccountable, light twirling eddies, mists
marching through ravines and gorges, should mask the invisible powers! Man
was face to face with nature, vibrating with every change, affected by
every influence. His weapons had a secret life within, and the shield of
the champion sounded when one of the Three Waves of Erin rose roaring in
foam.
The aspect of the living waters was ever present, in the surging seas, the
full rivers in all the plains, the liquid voice of streams in every glen,
and the silent, mystical lakes among the mountains. Sometimes the waters
were troubled, and they saw therein the struggles of gigantic
serpents--ancestral memories of extinct animals, or reminiscences of
experience in other regions. Sometimes the waters sank, or, suddenly
rushing up, overwhelmed the abodes of men, owing, they fancied, to some
pledge broken to the invisible deities. These strange phenomena, which
have given cause for so many weird legends, I have correlated with those
that precede or accompany earthquake action. It has seemed to me probable
that there were, of old, beyond our western coasts, islands, which, owing
to the same seismical cause, have sunk beneath the ocean level. The memory
of their existence, and the fact of their absence, might well give rise
to those strange and beautiful traditions of the Lands of Youth, of Life,
of Virtues--their mystical appearance and disappearance--which for ages
inspired the imagination of the poets. When successive waves of invaders
had flowed over the land, the earliest--driven into the woods, mountains,
and remote isles--assumed mythical proportions in the minds of the later
comers, and, in the haze of knowledge, the land and all its far islands
became peopled with a population of phantoms.
That is the cloud-background of our history, the despair of arid
annalists, which contains the Nibelungen treasure of our ancient
literature. We do not look there for precise date, but for the
lightning-flash of ideas in the darkness of the dawn. It was the Heroic
Age of Ireland, when, as in Greece and Rome, all was gigantic, Titanic, or
divine. On the mountain peaks of time man saw his own image in the midst
of clouds, like the spectres of the Brocken, exaggerated, majestic and
terrible. In such conditions the towers of Ilion rose, Hector and Achilles
fought, and Olympus helped the fray. Hence the Epic which has thrilled the
world, and which, long ages later, broke the chains of the Turk, and made
Greece a nation. That Epic stands alone, nor should we desire to have
ideas cast in the same mould. Such desire is the defect of stereotyped
thought, which does not understand that to have something diverse and
original is to possess a treasure. Our ancient literature must be judged
by itself, on its intrinsic merits as the articulate expression of
independent humanity. If a standard is required, let it be compared with
the non-classic literatures of the western world, and it will be found to
rise tall and fair above them, like an Alpine peak which has caught the
morning light whilst darkness reigns below.
It is certain that intellectual cultivation existed in Ireland long before
the coming of St. Patrick. We have the laws at the revision of which he
assisted, and I assert that, speaking biologically, such laws could not
emanate from any race whose brains had not been subject to the quickening
influences of education for many generations. Granting even that
Christianity came before his day, there are yet abounding proofs that our
ancient literature arose in pre-Christian days, so closely do its antique
characters cling to it. Unquestionably no nation ever so revered its men
of learning. They rewarded that reverence by giving immortal life to its
heroes, and by winning for that people the respect of modern scholarship.
I wish I could say of modern Ireland. But our people, generally, drink no
more at the high head-fountains of their island-thought. This is one of
the greatest losses which can befall a nation, for it loses thus its
birthright, that central core of ideas round which new ideas would develop
naturally, grow and flourish, as they never can on alien soil. There is a
tone of sincerity in the ancient narratives which cannot exist in imported
thought, and we are apt to lose inspiring examples of manful striving,
loyal comradeship, truthful lives, chivalric courtesy, and great-minded
heroism. It is true that so we escape some crude conceptions and
improbable wonders. But, as in the physical order, each man seems to pass
through various phases of racial development, so the individual in youth
has tastes similar to those manifested by the race in its youth. Every
people has at first its ideals, simple, sincere, and great, mingled with
myths that stimulate the imagination. Every young generation has similar
wants, and will seek to satisfy them, if not here, then elsewhere, in a
literature that debases the germing ideals, dwarfs the mind, and soils the
imagination.
With roots deep struck in the soil, the literature of the Irish Gael and
commingled races grew vigorously from its own stock and threw out
luxuriant branches and fair blooms. From the first, it exhibited
characters peculiarly its own. But these were not what are considered
Irish, in latter days: and here let me say that I am taken with dismay
when I find some of my patriotic young friends deciding what is and what
is not the Irish style in prose and the Irish note in poetry. We all know
what is meant. But it is scarcely too much to say that you may search
through all the Gaelic literature of the nation, and find many styles, but
not this. If it ever existed, it existed outside of our classic
literature, in a rustic or plebeian dialect. It must be counted, but to
make it exclusive would be to impose fatal fetters on literary expression.
As in other countries, there were not one but many styles, differing with
the subject, the writer, and the age. At one period, we shall find works
characterised by curt, clear and ringing sentences; at another the phrase
moves embarrassed by its own luxuriance.
Still more remote from the popular notion, and far more emphatic, are the
characteristics of Irish Gaelic versification of which there were many
kinds. I shall give a summary of the rules which govern the formation of
one species only, the _Dan direach_, or Direct Metre, of which, however,
there are several varieties:
1. The lines must have a certain number of syllables.
2. There must be four lines in each quatrain of two couplets. The sense
may be complete in the couplet, but must be complete in the quatrain.
3. Concord must be observed; _i.e._, two words (not being prepositions or
particles) in each line must begin with a vowel or with the same
consonant. If these alliterated words be the last two, the concord is
perfect, if not, it is an improper concord. The third and last lines must
have perfect concord.
4. Correspondence must be observed. The bards grouped the consonants into
five classes, according to the characters of the sound. Perfect
correspondence demanded that the end words in two lines should agree in
possessing letters of the same class. [This may sometimes result in what
we call rhyme.] If only the vowels rhyme, whilst the consonants are
disregarded, then this is termed imperfect concordance.
5. Termination required the final word of each couplet to be one syllable
longer than the final word in the preceding line.
6. Union is another essential. Similar to correspondence, in some
respects, the same vowels need not be repeated--it suffices that they
belong to the same class; the final word of one line chimes with a central
word in the next.
There are other rules besides, but these are surely enough to prove that
classic Irish verse was an extremely elaborate affair. It would be
impossible to adapt the English language to verse so intricate. Its
existence betrayed a highly refined development of the organs of speech
and of hearing, which latter is what we should expect from the musical
taste and skill of the race. From such rules, we can readily understand
that the bardic corporation was competent to carry this refinement of
technic, and to develop an intricacy of meaning to such a degree, that
the outer world required an explanation. Some of the poems of Seancan
Torpeist, in the seventh century, were quite as unintelligible as the most
obscure of Browning's, but, unlike Browning, he was always able to
translate them to a puzzled prince. Poets seemed to have a natural
tendency in the direction of over-elaboration; they had been judges until
they developed technicalities and an artificial law language, so that
neither suitors nor audience could understand them. Then the princes
interposed, adding laymen to the court. With their poetic tongue there was
no interference, until it had been unduly exercised in oppressing the
chiefs.