Page images
PDF
EPUB

self. He died with but three crowded years of work to his credit. The Famine came and struck down all the national energies. It was left to our own days for men to take up Davis's work, and his essays are the program of the Irish-Ireland movement to-day.

Though Davis was greatest as a national teacher, Clarence Mangan was greatest as a literary artist. He differed from Davis, too, in being immersed in Gaelic style; his poetry is full of Gaelic imagery and music. He is to Irish what Chapman is to Homer. His Gaelicism renders him strange and difficult to English critics; otherwise he would be recognised as one of the greatest poets using English in his days. He was capable of magnificent symbolism as in this lament for the Irish princes:

Theirs were not souls wherein dull Time
Could domicile decay, or house Decrepitude,

and of unforgettable passionate imagery, as in Dark Rosaleen, Meehal Dhu MacGiolla Keerin and Cathleen-ny-Houlihan.

Sir Samuel Ferguson must be mentioned with Mangan because, though his style was less racily Gaelic, and derived more from classical study, he aided in presenting Gaelic tradition through English verse. He was more scholarly and more artistic than the political writers of the Nation, but his patriotism was less from the heart. His poem describing The Burial of King Cormac-telling how the Boyne water carried away the corpse of the King who wished not to be buried with his pagan sires-gives us both the atmosphere of the Boyne country and a true picture of the splendid and barbaric pre-patrician age. His Lays of the Western Gael bring up a vivid pageant of the Red Branch figures.

The reader who possesses Mitchel's Jail Journal (the second gospel of Irish nationality), the Spirit of the Nation (an anthology of the Nation poets), the Essays of Davis, and the poems of Mangan and Ferguson, has a fairly complete collection of Anglo-Irish literature of this group.

We have thus far made no allusion to fiction, for the reason that it is in poetry and the essay that Ireland found some degree of national expression, while fiction is a more external or impressionist matter. Maria Edgeworth's name is a great one in English literature, and her brilliant tales of 18th century Ascendancy life in Ireland deserve attention, though they cannot be described as an expression of the nation. Carleton's tales contain a rich gallery of pictures of the people's life in the early 19th century, but their anti-Irish bias renders them displeasing to modern readers.

Love and Lever wrote rollicking tales which are similarly disapproved of because they distorted Irish life to please the prejudices of a contemptuous English market. The judicious reader, of course, can peruse these works with interest and profit, but they are intrinsically unnational. Kickham's Knocknagow is the one outstanding Irish novel of the age that is national, inoffensive and historic.

CHAPTER LXXVIII

SINN FEIN

THE world is witnessing in Ireland an extraordinary national renaissance, which expresses itself in literature, art, industry, social idealism, religious fervour and personal self-sacrifice. Deprived of the means of learning, impoverished and ground down, the Irish people for 200 years have not known culture or freedom, and their history for that period is gloomy reading.

The country in these long years lay fallow, but the soil was good. In the closing years of the 19th century the untilled field was ploughed up and sown in by the Gaelic League. From this educational movement which began in 1893 the whole revival of IrishIreland may be dated.1

Recovering some measure of strength at last after the exhaustion of the famine years, but disheartened and confused by the collapse of the Parnell movement, Ireland welcomed the Gaelic League

1 At the very beginning of the Gaelic League movement a Gaelic song, sung from the gallery of a Dublin theatre by William Rooney and some fellow enthusiasts (the first of its kind ever heard in such place) had thrilling effect upon many of the hearers-especially upon Ethna Carbery who commemorated the event in her poem:

A GAELIC SONG

A murmurous tangle of voices,
Laughter to left and right,
We waited the curtain's rising,

In a glare of electric light;

When down through the din came, slowly,

Softly, then clear and strong,

The mournful minor cadence

Of a sweet oid Gaelic song.

Like the trill of a lark new-risen,
It trembled upon the air,

And wondering eyes were lifted
To seek for the singer there;

Some dreamed of the thrush at noontide,
Some fancied a linnet's wail,

While the notes went sobbing, sighing,

O'er the heartstrings of the Gael.

The lights grew blurred, and a vision
Fell upon all who heard-

The purple of moorland heather

By a wonderful wind was stirred;

as a new and hopeful means of exerting her national energies. The League spread like fire. With its pageants, its countryside "feiseanna" or festivals, its Gaelic song and music, rich with memories, its lectures on the forgotten glories of the Gael, it roused the whole mind of the country. Thainig anam in Eirinn-a soul came into Ireland. The popular imagination recovered a vision of historic Ireland, that traditional nation whose heroes were not the orators of College Green but the O'Neills and the Fianna and the chivalry of the Red Branch. Twenty-five years ago, the multitude were stark ignorant of the names of Conall Cearnach, Luke Wadding, Céitinn, Raftery: to-day the traditional lore is at least as familiar as the English lore which had threatened utterly to usurp it. To-day, too, Gaelic education has its numerous summer colleges and diocesan colleges; it has assumed something like its proper national position in all the better seminaries, and no scholar can enter the National University without a knowledge of the Irish tongue.

The centre of gravity in national life changed from the anglicised towns to the rural population, sturdy, unspoilt, patriotic, virile, the offspring and living representatives of the traditional Gael. Hence Irish politics began forthwith to reflect the mind of the real Irish race.

Green rings of rushes went swaying,

Gaunt boughs of Winter made moan;
One saw the glory of Life go by,
And one saw Death alone.

A river twined through its shallows,
Cool waves crept up on a strand,

Or fierce, like a mighty army,

Swept wide on a conquered land;

The Dead left cairn and barrow,

And passed in noble train,

With sheltering shield, and slender spear-
Ere the curtain rose again.

The four great seas of Eire

Heaved under fierce ships of war,

The God of Battles befriended,

We saw the Star! the Star!

We nerved us for deeds of daring,
For Right we stood against Wrong;

We heard the prayer of our mothers,
In that sweet old Gaelic song.

It was the soul of Eire

Awaking in speech she knew,

When the clans held the glens and the mountains,

And the hearts of her chiefs were true:

She hath stirred at last in her sleeping,

She is folding her dreams away,

The hour of her destiny neareth-
And it may be to-day--day!

We now see Ireland, in the new century new-awakened to selfconsciousness, a stout rural nation, filled with new pride in its past, and feeling after means to achieve a worthy future. Throughout the country, a band of enthusiasts toils at an intellectual movement -studies a difficult and educative language, reads history and all manner of books on national construction, and acts as a ferment to the whole people.

Extraordinary little newspapers and magazines, written voluntarily by enthusiasts, began to appear. The most important was the United Irishman,' edited by Mr. Arthur Griffith (the Hamlet of the whole story) and contributed to by scores of brilliant writers of verse, drama, tale, essay and research-work. This weekly, voluntary, paper, published work that has since taken rank among the immortal things of Irish literature. Parallel to this journalistic movement, a dramatic movement, led by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, was proceeding in the Abbey Theatre.

This intellectual ferment called for a political expression. You could not have all young Ireland brimful with enthusiasm for the glories of the Gael, primed with ambition to see again on Irish soil a hale and lovely polity like that of old, eager to use hand and brain in patriot work, and yet rest content to mark time behind a (Parliamentary) political movement that seemed to have lost momentum, and which certainly gave no promise that it was seeking an Ireland such as was now envisioned.

In 1905 Mr. Griffith and his friends put before the nation a new political movement. In Dublin on Nov. 28, 1905, a National Council3 was called into being for the purpose of organising the nation with a view to withdrawing the representatives sitting at Westminster and setting up a provisional Irish Parliament made up of these members and representatives of public bodies. This de facto Parliament would call upon the people to co-operate with it voluntarily in the administration of Ireland. In a newly-founded weekly, Sinn Fein (succeeding the United Irishman), Mr. Griffith proceeded to show how the nation could thus conduct its own affairs even while the national parliament was denied recognition by outside powers.

Thus, through the Harbour Boards, difficulties could be imposed in the "dumping" of foreign goods, which would amount to

2 Preceded by the Shan Van Vocht, which, edited by Ethna Carbery and Alice Milligan, first awaked the new national enthusiasm, and did splendid pioneer work.

3 For sake of historical record it may be stated that those who first met and formed this National Council were: Arthur Griffith, Maud Gonne MacBride, Alderman Tom Kelly, Henry Dixon, Seumas MacManus, and Edward Martyn.

« PreviousContinue »