The Irish Celt is sociable, as may be known from his proverb, 'Strife is
better than loneliness,' and the Irish poets of the nineteenth century
have made songs abundantly when friends and rebels have been at hand to
applaud. The Irish poets of the eighteenth century found both at a
Limerick hostelry, above whose door was written a rhyming welcome in
Gaelic to all passing poets, whether their pockets were full or empty.
Its owner, himself a famous poet, entertained his fellows as long as his
money lasted, and then took to minding the hens and chickens of an old
peasant woman for a living, and ended his days in rags, but not, one
imagines, without content. Among his friends and guests had been
O'Sullivan the Red, O'Sullivan the Gaelic, O'Heffernan the blind, and
many another, and their songs had made the people, crushed by the
disasters of the Boyne and Aughrim, remember their ancient greatness.
The bardic order, with its perfect artifice and imperfect art, had gone
down in the wars of the seventeenth century, and poetry had found
shelter amid the turf-smoke of the cabins. The powers that history
commemorates are but the coarse effects of influences delicate and vague
as the beginning of twilight, and these influences were to be woven like
a web about the hearts of men by farm-labourers, pedlars,
potato-diggers, hedge-schoolmasters, and grinders at the quern, poor
wastrels who put the troubles of their native land, or their own happy
or unhappy loves, into songs of an extreme beauty. But in the midst of
this beauty was a flitting incoherence, a fitful dying out of the sense,
as though the passion had become too great for words, as must needs be
when life is the master and not the slave of the singer.
English-speaking Ireland had meanwhile no poetic voice, for Goldsmith
had chosen to celebrate English scenery and manners; and Swift was but
an Irishman by what Mr Balfour has called the visitation of God, and
much against his will; and Congreve by education and early association;
while Parnell, Denham, and Roscommon were poets but to their own time.
Nor did the coming with the new century of the fame of Moore set the
balance even, for all but all of his Irish melodies are artificial and
mechanical when separated from the music that gave them wings. Whatever
he had of high poetry is in 'The Light of other Days,' and in 'At the
Mid Hour of Night,' which express what Matthew Arnold has taught us to
call 'the Celtic melancholy,' with so much of delicate beauty in the
meaning and in the wavering or steady rhythm that one knows not where to
find their like in literature. His more artificial and mechanical verse,
because of the ancient music that makes it seem natural and vivid, and
because it has remembered so many beloved names and events and places,
has had the influence which might have belonged to these exquisite
verses had he written none but these. An honest style did not come into
English-speaking Ireland, until Callanan wrote three or four naive
translations from the Gaelic. 'Shule Aroon' and 'Kathleen O'More' had
indeed been written for a good while, but had no more influence than
Moore's best verses. Now, however, the lead of Callanan was followed by
a number of translators, and they in turn by the poets of 'Young
Ireland,' who mingled a little learned from the Gaelic ballad-writers
with a great deal learned from Scott, Macaulay, and Campbell, and turned
poetry once again into a principal means for spreading ideas of
nationality and patriotism. They were full of earnestness, but never
understood that though a poet may govern his life by his enthusiasms, he
must, when he sits down at his desk, but use them as the potter the
clay. Their thoughts were a little insincere, because they lived in the
half illusions of their admirable ideals; and their rhythms not seldom
mechanical, because their purpose was served when they had satisfied the
dull ears of the common man. They had no time to listen to the voice of
the insatiable artist, who stands erect, or lies asleep waiting until a
breath arouses him, in the heart of every craftsman. Life was their
master, as it had been the master of the poets who gathered in the
Limerick hostelry, though it conquered them not by unreasoned love for a
woman, or for native land, but by reasoned enthusiasm, and practical
energy. No man was more sincere, no man had a less mechanical mind than
Thomas Davis, and yet he is often a little insincere and mechanical in
his verse. When he sat down to write he had so great a desire to make
the peasantry courageous and powerful that he half believed them already
'the finest peasantry upon the earth,' and wrote not a few such verses
as
'Lead him to fight for native land,
His is no courage cold and wary;
The troops live not that could withstand
The headlong charge of Tipperary,'
and to-day we are paying the reckoning with much bombast. His little
book has many things of this kind, and yet we honour it for its public
spirit, and recognise its powerful influence with gratitude. He was in
the main an orator influencing men's acts, and not a poet shaping their
emotions, and the bulk of his influence has been good. He was, indeed, a
poet of much tenderness in the simple love-songs 'The Marriage,' 'A Plea
for Love,' and 'Mary Bhan Astor,' and, but for his ideal of a Fisherman,
defying a foreign soldiery, would have been as good in 'The Boatman of
Kinsale'; and once or twice when he touched upon some historic sorrow he
forgot his hopes for the future and his lessons for the present, and
made moving verse. His contemporary, Clarence Mangan, kept out of public
life and its half illusions by a passion for books, and for drink and
opium, made an imaginative and powerful style. He translated from the
German, and imitated Oriental poetry, but little that he did on any but
Irish subjects is permanently interesting. He is usually classed with
the Young Ireland poets, because he contributed to their periodicals and
shared their political views; but his style was formed before their
movement began, and he found it the more easy for this reason perhaps to
give sincere expression to the mood which he had chosen, the only
sincerity literature knows of; and with happiness and cultivation might
have displaced Moore. But as it was, whenever he had no fine ancient
song to inspire him, he fell into rhetoric which was only lifted out of
commonplace by an arid intensity. In his 'Irish National Hymn,' 'Soul
and Country,' and the like, we look into a mind full of parched sands
where the sweet dews have never fallen. A miserable man may think well
and express himself with great vehemence, but he cannot make beautiful
things, for Aphrodite never rises from any but a tide of joy. Mangan
knew nothing of the happiness of the outer man, and it was only when
prolonging the tragic exultation of some dead bard, that he knew the
unearthly happiness which clouds the outer man with sorrow, and is the
fountain of impassioned art. Like those who had gone before him, he was
the slave of life, for he had nothing of the self-knowledge, the power
of selection, the harmony of mind, which enables the poet to be its
master, and to mould the world to a trumpet for his lips. But O'Hussey's
Ode over his outcast chief must live for generations because of the
passion that moves through its powerful images and its mournful,
wayward, and fierce rhythms.
'Though he were even a wolf ranging the round green woods,
Though he were even a pleasant salmon in the unchainable sea,
Though he were a wild mountain eagle, he could scarce bear, he,
This sharp, sore sleet, these howling floods.'
Edward Walsh, a village schoolmaster, who hovered, like Mangan, on the
edge of the Young Ireland movement, did many beautiful translations from
the Gaelic; and Michael Doheny, while out 'on his keeping' in the
mountains after the collapse at Ballingarry, made one of the most moving
of ballads; but in the main the poets who gathered about Thomas Davis,
and whose work has come down to us in 'The Spirit of the Nation,' were
of practical and political, not of literary importance.
Meanwhile Samuel Ferguson, William Allingham, and Mr Aubrey de Vere were
working apart from politics, Ferguson selecting his subjects from the
traditions of the Bardic age, and Allingham from those of his native
Ballyshannon, and Mr Aubrey de Vere wavering between English, Irish, and
Catholic tradition. They were wiser than Young Ireland in the choice of
their models, for, while drawing not less from purely Irish sources,
they turned to the great poets of the world, Mr de Vere owing something
of his gravity to Wordsworth, Ferguson much of his simplicity to Homer,
while Allingham had trained an ear, too delicate to catch the tune of
but a single master, upon the lyric poetry of many lands. Allingham was
the best artist, but Ferguson had the more ample imagination, the more
epic aim. He had not the subtlety of feeling, the variety of cadence of
a great lyric poet, but he has touched, here and there, an epic vastness
and naivete, as in the description in 'Congal' of the mire-stiffened
mantle of the giant spectre Mananan macLir, striking against his calves
with as loud a noise as the mainsail of a ship makes, 'when with the
coil of all its ropes it beats the sounding mast.' He is frequently
dull, for he often lacked the 'minutely appropriate words' necessary to
embody those fine changes of feeling which enthral the attention; but
his sense of weight and size, of action and tumult, has set him apart
and solitary, an epic figure in a lyric age. Allingham, whose pleasant
destiny has made him the poet of his native town, and put 'The Winding
Banks of Erne' into the mouths of the ballad-singers of Ballyshannon,
is, on the other hand, a master of 'minutely appropriate words,' and can
wring from the luxurious sadness of the lover, from the austere sadness
of old age, the last golden drop of beauty; but amid action and tumult
he can but fold his hands. He is the poet of the melancholy peasantry of
the West, and, as years go on, and voluminous histories and copious
romances drop under the horizon, will take his place among those minor
immortals who have put their souls into little songs to humble the
proud. The poetry of Mr Aubrey de Vere has less architecture than the
poetry of Ferguson and Allingham, and more meditation. Indeed, his few
but ever memorable successes are enchanted islands in grey seas of
stately impersonal reverie and description, which drift by and leave no
definite recollection. One needs, perhaps, to perfectly enjoy him, a
Dominican habit, a cloister, and a breviary.
These three poets published much of their best work before and during
the Fenian movement, which, like 'Young Ireland,' had its poets, though
but a small number. Charles Kickham, one of the 'triumvirate' that
controlled it in Ireland; John Casey, a clerk in a flour-mill; and Ellen
O'Leary, the sister of Mr John O'Leary, were at times very excellent.
Their verse lacks, curiously enough, the oratorical vehemence of Young
Ireland, and is plaintive and idyllic. The agrarian movement that
followed produced but little poetry, and of that little all is forgotten
but a vehement poem by Fanny Parnell, and a couple of songs by Mr T.D.
Sullivan, who is a good song-writer, though not, as the writer has read
on an election placard, 'one of the greatest poets who ever moved the
heart of man.' But while Nationalist verse has ceased to be a portion of
the propaganda of a party, it has been written, and is being written,
under the influence of the Nationalist newspapers and of Young Ireland
societies and the like. With an exacting conscience, and better models
than Thomas Moore and the Young Irelanders, such beautiful enthusiasm
could not fail to make some beautiful verses. But, as things are, the
rhythms are mechanical, and the metaphors conventional; and inspiration
is too often worshipped as a Familiar who labours while you sleep, or
forget, or do many worthy things which are not spiritual things. For
the most part, the Irishman of our times loves so deeply those arts
which build up a gallant personality, rapid writing, ready talking,
effective speaking to crowds, that he has no thought for the arts which
consume the personality in solitude. He loves the mortal arts which have
given him a lure to take the hearts of men, and shrinks from the
immortal, which could but divide him from his fellows. And in this
century, he who does not strive to be a perfect craftsman achieves
nothing. The poor peasant of the eighteenth century could make fine
ballads by abandoning himself to the joy or sorrow of the moment, as the
reeds abandon themselves to the wind which sighs through them, because
he had about him a world where all was old enough to be steeped in
emotion. But we cannot take to ourselves, by merely thrusting out our
hands, all we need of pomp and symbol, and if we have not the desire of
artistic perfection for an ark, the deluge of incoherence, vulgarity,
and triviality will pass over our heads. If we had no other symbols but
the tumult of the sea, the rusted gold of the thatch, the redness of the
quicken-berry, and had never known the rhetoric of the platform and of
the newspaper, we could do without laborious selection and rejection;
but, even then, though we might do much that would be delightful, that
would inspire coming times, it would not have the manner of the greatest
poetry.
Here and there, the Nationalist newspapers and the Young Ireland
societies have trained a writer who, though busy with the old models,
has some imaginative energy; while Mr Lionel Johnson, Mrs Hinkson, Miss
Nora Hopper, and A.E., the successors of Allingham and Ferguson and Mr
de Vere, are more anxious to influence and understand Irish thought than
any of their predecessors who did not take the substance of their poetry
from politics. They are distinguished too by their deliberate art, and
with their preoccupation with spiritual passions and memories. Mr Lionel
Johnson and Mrs Hinkson are both Catholic and devout, but Mr Lionel
Johnson's poetry is lofty and austere, and, like Mr de Vere's, never
long forgets the greatness of his Church and the interior life whose
expression it is, while Mrs Hinkson is happiest when she embodies
emotions, that have the innocence of childhood, in symbols and metaphors
from the green world about her. She has no reverie nor speculation, but
a devout tenderness like that of S. Francis for weak instinctive things,
old gardeners, old fishermen, birds among the leaves, birds tossed upon
the waters. Miss Hopper belongs to that school of writers which embodies
passions, that are not the less spiritual because no Church has put them
into prayers, in stories and symbols from old Celtic poetry and
mythology. The poetry of A.E., at its best, finds its symbols and its
stories in the soul itself, and has a more disembodied ecstasy than any
poetry of our time. He is the chief poet of the school of Irish mystics,
which has shaped Mr Charles Weekes, who published recently, but withdrew
immediately, a curious and subtle book, and Mr John Eglinton, who is
best known for the orchestral harmonies of his 'Two Essays on the
Remnant,' and certain younger writers who have heard the words, 'If ye
know these things, happy are ye if ye do them,' and thought the labours
that bring the mystic vision more important than the labours of any
craft.
Except some few Catholic and mystical poets and Prof. Dowden in one or
two poems, no Irishman living in Ireland has sung excellently of any but
a theme from Irish experience, Irish history, or Irish tradition.
Trinity College, which desires to be English, has been the mother of
many verse-writers and of few poets; and this can only be because she
has set herself against the national genius, and taught her children to
imitate alien styles and choose out alien themes, for it is not possible
to believe that the educated Irishman alone is prosaic and uninventive.
Her few poets have been awakened by the influence of the farm-labourers,
potato-diggers, pedlars, and hedge-schoolmasters of the eighteenth
century, and their imitators in this, and not by a scholastic life,
which, for reasons easy for all to understand and for many to forgive,
has refused the ideals of Ireland, while those of England are but
far-off murmurs. An enemy to all enthusiasms, because all enthusiasms
seemed her enemies, she has taught her children to look neither to the
world about them, nor into their own souls where some dangerous fire
might slumber.
To remember that in Ireland the professional and landed classes have
been through the mould of Trinity College or of English Universities,
and are ignorant of the very names of the best writers in this book, is
to know how strong a wind blows from the ancient legends of Ireland, how
vigorous an impulse to create is in her heart to-day. Deserted by the
classes from among whom have come the bulk of the world's intellect, she
struggles on, gradually ridding herself of incoherence and triviality,
and slowly building up a literature in English which, whether important
or unimportant, grows always more unlike others; nor does it seem as if
she would long lack a living literature in Gaelic, for the movement for
the preservation of Gaelic, which has been so much more successful than
anybody foresaw, has already its poets. Dr Hyde, who can only be
represented here by some of his beautiful translations, has written
Gaelic poems which pass from mouth to mouth in the west of Ireland. The
country people have themselves fitted them to ancient airs, and many
that can neither read nor write, sing them in Donegal and Connemara and
Galway. I have, indeed, but little doubt that Ireland, communing with
herself in Gaelic more and more, but speaking to foreign countries in
English, will lead many that are sick with theories and with trivial
emotion, to some sweet well-waters of primeval poetry.
W.B.Y.
The editor thanks Mr Aubrey de Vere, Mr T.W. Rolleston, Dr J. Todhunter,
Mr Alfred Perceval Graves, Dr Douglas Hyde, Mr Lionel Johnson, A.E., Mr
Charles Weekes, Mr John Eglinton, Mrs Hinkson, Miss Dora Sigerson (Mrs
Clement Shortes), and Miss Nora Hopper for permission to quote from
their poems, Lady Ferguson and Mrs Allingham for leave to give poems by
Sir Samuel Ferguson and William Allingham, and Messrs Chatto & Windus
for permission to include a song of Arthur O'Shaughnessy's. Two writers
are excluded whom he would gladly have included--Casey, because the
copyright holders have refused permission, and Mr George Armstrong,
because his 'Songs of Wicklow,' when interesting, are too long for this
book.