T CHAPTER IX Anglo-Irish Literature HE early classical culture of Ireland, her literary technique in her native Gaelic and the equipment of solid learning that enabled her missionaries to evangelise much of western Europe, have always been a source of puzzled surprise to the modern historian. Only quite recently has the veil been lifted from this perplexing historical problem. For Zimmer has proved that the remarkable early Irish erudition was due to an exodus of Gaulish scholars into Ireland owing to the devastation of their country by the Huns, Vandals, Goths and Alans. They avoided England, which, at the time, was suffering from continental invasions; they sought Ireland because it was known, through the traders plying between the mouths of the Loire and Garonne and the south and east coasts of Ireland, to be not only a fertile and prosperous country but, also, to be already favourable to the Christian religion. Two circumstances conspired to establish the success of the influx of Gaulish scholars and divines with their precious manuscripts. For they reached Ireland with a learning that, as has been said, was still to the full extent the best tradition of scholarship in Latin Grammar, Oratory and Poetry, together with a certain knowledge of Greek-in fact the full classical lore of the 4th Century. They arrived, also, at a time when the Irish were most ready to receive them. For they found native schools of Irish oratory and poetry in which their Brehons or jurists and Filidh (Filé) or poets were being laboriously trained. To use Bede's expression, "it was not book-Latin but a living speech and a literature in the making that was now heard in many parts of Ireland." No wonder, then, that a fusion of Gaelic and classical literature began to take place. Thus, Irish bards fell into the metres of Latin hymns sung in the churches, and introduced final and internal rime, and a regularly recurring number of syllables, into their native poetry from the Latin; though Sigerson and others would have us believe that rime came into Latin from the Gaels or their kinsmen the Gauls, and that Cicero's famous O fortunatam natam me Consule Romam shows this Celtic influence on Latin poetry. Moreover, there was drawn into the Gaelic tongue a form of rhythmic prose to be found in very early Gaelic writings, notably the incantation of Amorgen, known as rosg, which still has its counterpart in the Welsh preachers' hwel or rhetorical cadence. So complete a removal, westward, of classical scholarship was thus made in the fourth century that, at the end of the fifth century, Sidonius Apollinaris declares that he knew of but one scholar at Trèves, Argogastis, who could speak and write pure Latin. But the lucky Irish, all this while, were enjoying the full gift of classical learning, and that at a time before scruples had arisen in the minds of professors of Christianity against the study of classics, owing to the pagan doctrines which pervaded them. They, therefore, gave themselves up whole-heartedly to it, and when, as missionaries and scholars, they carried back this classical learning to the continent at the end of the fifth century, they were amazed to find that they and their fellowcountrymen were almost its sole possessors. The interfusion of the Gaulish classical and Christian and the Gaelic schools of literature, thus early in Irish history, not only made for a singular forbearance towards such pagan themes as are to be found in The Colloquy of St. Patrick with Oisin (Ossian), but, also, gave to the religious poems of the Irish saints and the curiously free Gaelic translations from Vergil and other classical writings a picturesque individuality which makes them delightful reading. Gaelic poetry resolves itself roughly into fairy poetry or pagan supernatural poetry, early and later religious poetry, nature poetry, war poetry, love poetry and what may be termed official poetry, i.e. that of the bards as court poets, and as poets attached to the great chieftains whose exploits and nuptials they celebrated and whose dirges they sang; while, here and there, specimens of Irish satirical poetry are to be met throughout the three periods of ancient, middle and later Irish, into which leading scholars are agreed in dividing the works left to us in Irish Gaelic. The early war poetry does not call for special comment beyond this; as was to have been expected, it largely consists of laudations of chieftains of a fiercely barbaric kind, and abounds with picturesque descriptive phraseology. Thus, in Deirdre's Lament over the Sons of Usnagh, they are variously described as "three lions from the Hill of the Cave," "three dragons of Dun Monidh" and "three props of the battle-host of Coolney.' But, running through the savage and demonic incidents that characterise the early Irish epics, there is a vein of generosity of one heroic combatant towards another, the desire to fight fair and even to succour a failing enemy, strangely anticipatory of the spirit of medieval chivalry. Of official poetry, it may be said that its technique is extremely elaborate and, since it was necessary to put as much thought as possible into each self-contained quatrain, its condensations often make very hard sayings of these early ranns. A love of, or tendency towards, the supernatural permeates early and middle Irish poetry, as, indeed, it also pervades The History of Ireland by Geoffrey Keating, the Irish Herodotus, who wrote as late as 1634; and much of the fascination of Gaelic verse is due to the intrusion of the glamour of "the other world" into its pages. Love poetry, among the earliest of its kind in Europe, not only finds poignant expression in such an early Irish poem as What is Love?-an expression as definite in its description of the sufferings of a lover as can be found even in Shakespeare's Sonnets-but the love lyrics interspersed among Irish prose romances are generally uttered by famous women whose adventures are there described with a passionate purity and tender, delicate feeling rarely met with in the heroines of the Arthurian cycles. One other characteristic distinguishes old Gaelic poetry from that of contemporary European writers-that love of nature described by Matthew Arnold as natural magic and, according to him, specially characteristic of early and medieval Irish and Welsh poetry. This feature of Gaelic poetry is not only to be noticed in the open air Fenian Sagas, but, even in an early hymn to the Virgin, we find her described as: Branch of Jesse's Tree, whose blossoms Scent the heavenly hazel wood! and Star of knowledge, rare and noble, Indeed, the love of nature suffuses all Irish Gaelic poetry. The bard of early days felt it even among the icy rigours of winter, while the cheerful companionship with nature of the Irish monk or anchorite is in marked contrast with the fakirlike indifference to her influences of a St. Simeon Stylites or the voluntary withdrawal from them of the enclosed Orders of later days. Enough has been said here to suggest that there is much in Irish Gaelic literature, which, if well translated into English verse or prose, might have a stimulative effect upon English letters. Stopford Brooke set himself to prove this by an instructive essay entitled The Need and Use of getting Irish Literature into the English Tongue, written three and twenty years ago, in which he showed that there is a vast body of that literature untranslated or inadequately translated, and that very much of it, in good hands, might be so rendered as to prove a substantial gain to English literature. There has been a considerable response to his appeal, and it is not a little remarkable that, more than a hundred years ago, an early scion of the same literary stock, Charlotte Brooke, daughter of Henry Brooke, the dramatist, had conceived the same view of the importance of recruiting English literature from Irish Gaelic sources, and put it into practice by her own volume of translations from Irish poetry. Unfortunately, however, the artificial, not to say affected, English verse of her day was about the worst vehicle for the reproduction of the best Gaelic poetry, and the contributors to Hardiman's Irish Minstrelsy, which followed her volume, and even later writers in the nineteenth century, were found wanting as effective translators from the Irish. But a new impulse to, and pleasure in, the study of Gaelic poetry was contributed by the vivid versions in kindred English forms of the great Irish prose epics, and of the lyric passages with which they are studded, as well as of the poems of the earlier and later bards wrought by such writers as Edward Walsh and Sir Samuel Ferguson, Mangan and Callanan, Whitley Stokes and Standish Hayes O'Grady, and the editors of the Ossianic society's publications. A band of contemporary authors, some of whom had already translated many poems, have further answered to the call. This became more easy, owing to the impetus given to the study of Irish by the foundation of the Gaelic league. The Irish Text society was started, and more than a dozen volumes of important English translations from Irish classics have been issued by it. Many translations have been the work of Irishwomen, while further translations of Irish lyric poetry, Irish heroic tales and myths and Irish dramatic poetry have been made. It is only during the last twenty-five years that the language of this poetry has been carefully studied, and later scholars have had the advantage over their predecessors in being able to introduce with great effect reminiscences of the characteristic epithets and imagery which formed a large part of the stock-in-trade of the medieval bard. We have indicated that the interesting individual character of early Irish literature makes it worth while getting that literature more fully represented in the English language through translation, adaptation and the use of Irish themes in original English writings. It may be desirable to point out here that, when Irish literature had a wider recognition in Britain and on the continent than it now commands, it thus found its way into European and Welsh and, therefrom, into English literature. The Anglo-Norman conquerors of Ireland, no doubt, clung to their French prose and verse romances, and the native Irish chieftains were as conservative of their native hero tales and poems. Yet, as E. C. Quiggin well puts it, few serious scholars will be prepared to deny that the Island contributed in considerable measure to the common literary stock of VOL. XIV-22 |