IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE ERNEST A.BOYD IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE IRELAND'S ' LITERARY RENAISSANCE BY ERNEST A. BOYD AUTHOR OF "THE CONTEMPORARY IRISH DRAMA" NEW YORK JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXVI I ooo COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY JOHN LANE COMPANY ' Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A. TO M. E. B. FOREWORD The purpose of this book is to give an account of the literature produced in Ireland during the last thirty years, under the impulse of the Celtic Renaissance. The generation which succeeded the Anglicised Irish writers of the eighteenth century was the first conscious expression of national feeling since the passing of Gaelic as a literary medium. But, in spite of such fine personalities as William Carleton and Thomas Davis, the early nineteenth century was associated chiefly with "the stage Irishism" of Charles Lever, and the fierce political nationalism of the patriot poets of " The Nation." It was not until the Eighties that nation- alism made way for nationality, and a literature came into existence which bore the imprint of the latter. The rise of the Language Movement, and the return to Celtic sources, gave a colour and tradition to the new litera- ture unknown to the older exponents of Anglicisation or nationalism, and rendered it more akin to the Gaelic than the English genius. Consequently, it was no more related to the political than to the Anglicised liter- ature which had preceded it, for which reason no refer- ence has been made in this work to the later writers who have followed either school. Such names as Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw belong as certainly to the his- tory of English literature as Goldsmith and Sheridan, whereas the term Irish (or Anglo-Irish) can be most properly reserved for that literature which, although not 7 8 FOREWORD written in Gaelic, is none the less informed by the spirit of the race. Given this limitation of the subject, it will be evident that the estimates and judgments expressed in the course of this history are relative, and must always be referred to the fundamental condition upon which Anglo-Irish literature exists. As a rule, studies of Irish writers, whether articles or monographs, are written from an essentially English point of view. The subject is conceived, in other words, as part of English literature, and every effort is made to challenge attention by claiming for some Irish work a place amongst the masterpieces of the English genius. Sometimes these claims are allowed to pass, but more often they are re- sented by susceptible champions of England's literary supremacy. While we may understand the patriotic indignation of the latter, we cannot admit the theory that every word of praise bestowed upon Irish poetry is a tribute filched from Keats or Shelley. It is true that certain critics demand recognition for the subject of their enthusiasm upon terms which seem overgenerous to those most predisposed to sympathy, and thereby they render a great disservice to the literature of con- temporary Ireland. The fact is, the same misconcep- tion exists on both sides of the controversy. Irish criti- cism is not interested in such comparisons, being pri- marily concerned in establishing a ratio of national literary values for Irish literature. If comparisons between English and Irish poets are called for, they must be made upon some reasonable basis. It will not do to dismiss Yeats or A. E. by contrasting their achievement with that of the greatest writers in the English language. To us, in Ireland, Yeats may well FOREWORD 9 be the national counterpart of England's Shelley, and as such he claims our attention. In comparative lit- erature his rank may be different. We are satisfied that the poetry of the Revival is, to say the least, equal to that written in England during the same period. But needless to say such speculations, however interest- ing to the English historian, have no place in the present volume. The writers have been studied as part of our national literature, and have been estimated accordingly. Their work has been considered solely in so far as it reveals those artistic and racial qualities which consti- tute the raison d'etre of the Celtic Renaissance, and the terms of appreciation are strictly relative to the scope of Anglo-Irish literature. With few exceptions, the subjects of the following chapters have all placed me under obligations by the kind manner in which they responded to my inquiries concerning matters which absence from Ireland pre- vented me from verifying at first hand. For the same reason, I owe many thanks to my friend, Miss J. T ay- lour, of Dublin, who so patiently elucidated doubtful points of bibliographical interest, and to Mr. John Quinn, of New York, who generously gave me access to his rare collection of Irish books, at a time when no other sources of reference were at my disposal. E. A. B. September, 1916. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. PRECURSORS. James Clarence Mangan. Sir Samuel Ferguson 15 II. SOURCES. The Father of the Revival: Standish James O'Grady 26 III. SOURCES. The Translators: George Sigerson. Douglas Hyde 55 IV. THE TRANSITION. William Allingham. The Crystallisation of the New Spirit: The Irish Literary Societies 80 V. THE REVIVAL. POEMS AND BALLADS OF YOUNG IRELAND. John Todhunter, Katharine Ty- nan, T. W. Rolleston, William Larminie . 94 VI. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS. The Poems . . . 122 VII. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS. The Plays .... 145 WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS. The Prose Writings . 166 IX. THE REVIVAL OF POETRY. Lionel Johnson, Nora Hopper, Ethna Carbery and Others . . 188 X. THE DUBLIN MYSTICS. The Theosophical Move- ment. George W. Russell (A. E.). John Eglinton 212 XI. THE POETS OF THE YOUNGER GENERATION. NEW SONGS, edited by A. E. : Seumas O'Sullivan, Padraic Colum, James Stephens, Joseph Campbell, James H. Cousins, Thomas Macdonagh and Others 253 XII. THE DRAMATIC MOVEMENT. FIRST PHASE: The Irish Literary Theatre: Edward Martyn and George Moore 289 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XIII. THE DRAMATIC MOVEMENT. SECOND PHASE: The Origins of the Irish National Theatre: W. G. Fay's Irish National Dramatic Com- pany. The Initiators of Folk-Drama: J. M. Synge and Padraic Colum .... 309 XIV. THE DRAMATIC MOVEMENT. THIRD PHASE: Pop- ularity and Its Results: "Abbey" Plays and Playwrights. The Ulster Literary Theatre: Rutherford Mayne . . . -344 XV. FICTION AND NARRATIVE PROSE. The Weak Point of the Revival. Novelists: George Moore, Shan F. Bullock. Other Prose Writers: Lord Dunsany. James Stephens. Lady Gregory. Conclusion 374 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX 401 xn IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE CHAPTER I PRECURSORS JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN. SIR SAMUEL FERGUSON f" ""^HE nineteenth century saw the definite eclipse of the Irish language, and, conse- quently, the beginnings of a genuine Anglo- -*- Irish literature. At first England predom- inated, as in the work of Thomas Moore, whose songs familiarised the English people with Irish conditions, and constituted him our literary ambassador in England. These Irish melodies, which he clothed in the music of his country, are the first flutterings of the Irish spirit in English literature. Moore was followed by Jeremiah Joseph Callanan, who opened up the path along which Mangan was to follow and to out-distance him. Most of Callanan's work is of little value, being an imitation in form and manner of Byron, Scott and Moore. Fortunately, his knowl- edge of Irish gave him access to sources which saved him from the Anglicisation that renders so many of his predecessors and contemporaries negligible. The essentially Irish metre of the Outlaw of Loch Lene, and the passionate Dirge of 0' Sullivan Bear, are fine illustrations of Callanan's powers as translator. IS 16 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE The best of his original poems is probably Gogaune Barra, with its characteristically Gaelic rhymes, and its proud consciousness of Irish tradition. Three years after Callanan's death, in 1842, Sir Charles Gavan DufTy founded The Nation, a news- paper of great importance in the evolution of Anglo- Irish poetry. Primarily the organ of the Young Ireland Party, The Nation was born to awaken the spirit of Irish nationality. The essays of Thomas Davis and others were appeals for national unity, an attempt to revive a sense of history, of pride in the traditions of Ireland, in a people ignorant and en- slaved, and lost to all consciousness of the past achievement of their race. This propaganda of nationalism was greatly strengthened by Gavan Duffy's proposal to enlist the aid of the poets. Davis's Lament for the Death of Owen Roe O'Neill, probably his finest verse, was the first of the series of national songs and ballads which afterwards became famous as The Spirit of the Nation. A volume of poetry was poured into this channel from all quarters, obscure peasant girls, men well-known in the struggle for political freedom, succeeded one another in the pages of The Nation. All were in- spired by a like fervour of patriotism, while the sincerity of their emotion, and the vigour of its expression, earned for them the appreciation of such unlikely admirers as Lord Jeffrey and Macaulay. There can be little doubt of the influence of these poets upon their contemporaries. The idea of Irish nationality had become revitalised, and became a living thing to many distinguished Irishmen of the period, whose training and circumstances would ordinarily have directed their minds in another direction. Of these Sir Samuel Ferguson may be mentioned, as he was later to appear as the most PRECURSORS 17 remarkable poet of this century, and to share with Mangan the claim to be the immediate forerunner of the Literary Revival. The poets of The Nation, for all their intensity of patriotic feeling, followed the English rather than the Celtic tradition, their work has a political rather than a literary value, and bears little upon the de- velopment of modern Irish verse. The literature of the Revival is no longer concerned with the political revolt against England. It has lost the passionate cry of aggressive patriotism, the wail of despair, and has entered into possession of the vast field of Irish legend. Here, in the interpretation of the Celtic spirit, it has found a truer and more stead- fast expression of Irish nationality. The circum- stances propitious to such outbursts as characterised the patriot poets of the mid-nineteenth century have altered. Patriotic revolt is not a sufficient guar- antee of good poetry, and the Irish Muse has found a quieter and more lasting inspiration. With the exception of Mangan, none of The Nation poets have left work whose appeal is likely to endure. Mangan was something more than a patriot, he was a poet of genius, and his work has a value transcending that of the writers with whom he was accidentally asso- ciated. In him one can detect the presence of influ- ences which were absent from the work of his con- temporaries, and which make him the true father of the modern poets. Contact with the pure stream of Irish culture, Gaelic literature, so moulded the mind of the poet as to constitute his work the first utterance of Celtic Ireland in the English tongue. Patriot though he was, like Davis, McGee and the others, he required the stimulus of some ancient Gaelic song or legend to bring out the great power that was in him. Even the essentially patriotic and i8 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE familiar Dark Rosaleen owes its existence to Mangan's reading of Roisin Dubh, the work of an obscure Elizabethan bard. It was not, moreover, until he had produced two less felicitous versions that he attained the perfection of form in which it is now best known. The existence of these three versions, written at considerable intervals, indicates to what extent Mangan's imagination was haunted by this song. As he brooded over its passionate theme, becoming more deeply stirred by its beauty, his soul vibrated to the music of the Gaelic minstrel, until, carried away by his awakened inspiration, he gave his noble and almost perfect rendering. A comparison of these versions, verse by verse, reveals everywhere the same differences; the contrast between transla- tion and inspiration is in every line. As the poem departs more and more from the text, it comes nearer and nearer to the conception of the Gaelic poet, and becomes at the same time an original creation. In exchange for verbal fidelity Mangan offers such personal contribution as "your holy deli- cate white hands," nowhere to be discovered in the text. In short he treats his subject as the moderns have treated theirs. The latter, absorbing the leg- ends and stories of their country, have identified themselves with the spirit of Ireland's past, and renewed the tradition of Irish literature. Mangan, however, was not always so happily inspired by Gaelic themes, and in many instances his successor, Samuel Ferguson, has surpassed him, without possess- ing more than a tithe of his poetic genius. Fergu- son's profound knowledge of Irish often enables him to succeed, in a measure, where Mangan has failed. Owing to the absence of inspiration to compensate for the lack of scholarship, Mangan's The Fair Hills PRECURSORS 19 of Ireland is inferior to Ferguson's The Fair Hills of Eire, 0. Mangan has notes which Ferguson could never hope to reach, but his fire is spasmodic, and flickers in a manner utterly incompatible with the steady, if somewhat dead, level of Ferguson's work. His finest achievement is Dark Rosaleen. Noisy and sincere patriotism were then, and have since been, the frequent inspiration of Irish poetry, but that wonderful paraphrase has a beauty and a poignant intensity which have never been equalled. The squalid shiftlessness of Mangan's own life made him the responsive interpreter of Ireland's sorrowful history of former splendour contrasted with an ever-present misery. Here he could lose himself in the hopes, laments and memories of the Gael, and satisfy the vague longings of his idealism. Weak and purposeless himself, he had not that joy of living which alone can create eternal beauty. It was only when he caught the fervour of some old Irish poet that he became truly inspired. Even then, he could not say yea to life. As in his original work, so in his poems of Gaelic origin, his themes are of sorrow, despair and death. His verse is filled with tears, and seems, as it were, the caoine of an entire race. Apart from Gaelic sources Mangan is as commonplace as Moore. His work is often shallow and arid, filled with rhetoric which not even his unusual command of rhyme and rhythm, his skilful versification, can conceal. He was devoid of the self-control which enables the great artist to select and fashion his material at will. His genuine culture and love of literature constituted him a somewhat unique figure in his time. In him the authentic voice of Celtic Ireland was heard for the first time in Anglo-Irish poetry, and he indicated 20 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE the way of escape from the dominance of England, which his successors have followed. Unlike Mangan, Ferguson was a distinguished Gaelic scholar. His studies in archaeological re- search gave him direct access to the treasures of Ire- land's ancient history and literature, which were only imperfectly revealed to Mangan in the literal translations from the Gaelic, furnished by his learned friends O'Daly and O'Curry. With the intuition of genius, Mangan was able to sense the spirit that lay behind these transcriptions. Ferguson infused his verse with that spirit as the reward of years of an- tiquarian labours. His work was not confined to literature, but covered the whole field of Irish culture, history, architecture, law, music and antiquities. The public recognition of his services to Irish scholar- ship was his appointment as Deputy Keeper of the Records, and subsequently his election as President of the Royal Irish Academy. He set himself to lay the foundations of a national literature worthy of Ireland, realising that something more substantial than the aggressive patriotism of The Nation must provide the subject matter of Irish art. While a young man Ferguson attracted attention as a poet in the pages of Blackwood's Magazine, and between the ages of twenty and thirty he contributed to the Dublin University Review the series of historic tales afterwards published as The Hibernian Nights' Entertainments. These were his first attempts to put the old legends and stories into circulation. In 1867 he published his first volume of verse, Lays of the Western Gael, which was followed in 1872 by the more ambitious epic, Congal. A volume of collected Poems appeared in 1880, and attached directly to the first book of Lays, by its treatment of further incidents in the Red Branch legendary cycle. These PRECURSORS 21 two works gave a strong impulse to the return to Irish legend which is so distinctive a feature of the Revival. This rendering in English verse of the Conorian cycle of the Red Branch history is the foundation of a new literature. Here, for the first time in Anglo-Irish poetry, is outlined the tragic history of the House of Usnach, of the loves of Naisi and Deirdre, the Helen and Paris of Ireland's an- tiquity, and the mighty deeds of Cuchulain, who dominates Irish bardic history, as Achilles dominated the Greek epic. The older, Conorian, legend has always found more favour than the later Ossianic. The love story of Deirdre, for example, has never ceased, since Fer- guson, to engage the attention of the poets. As early as 1876 the Deirdre of R. D. Joyce awakened popular response, and since 1880, the date of Fer- guson's version, the subject has been treated by Douglas Hyde, John Todhunter, T. W. Rolleston, A.E., J. M. Synge, W. B. Yeats, and others of lesser importance. On the other hand, the corresponding tale of Diarmuid and Grania from the later legend has attracted comparatively few, none of whom has been quite successful. Ferguson, in his Lays, has treated the pathetic incident of the death of Diarmuid and his last meeting with Finn. Katharine Tynan, in her second volume of verse, Shamrocks, gave a sympathetic rendering of the story, but it still awaits a worthy interpretation. The dramatists have simi- larly failed in their treatment. Neither the Diar- muid and Grania due to the strange collaboration of George Moore and W. B. Yeats, nor the recent Grania of Lady Gregory, can be compared with the dramas which have had Deirdre for their subject. The latter, it is true, offers material of a naturally more dramatic quality. The story falls of its own 22 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE accord into the five acts of classical tragedy, and, involving as it does the destiny of the entire House of Usnach, it is not surprising that it should transcend the more circumscribed interest of the Diarmuid and Grania episode. The Fate of the Sons of Usnach seems from the earliest times to have been sung by the bards, for whom the tragedy had the same fas- cination it has exercised upon the modern poets. Indeed, as Dr. Sigerson has pointed out, there is reason to suppose that Deirdre was the first tragedy, outside of the classic languages, in the literature of Europe. It was natural that Ferguson, with his ambition to found a national literature, should think of writing an Irish epic. In Lays of the Western Gael he had already adapted to English verse portions of the great Gaelic epic, the Tain-Bo-Cuaigne, but these episodes were never welded together, and made no pretence of fufilling the need of Anglo-Irish literature for a work of epical dimensions. For this purpose something more was demanded of the poet than that he should be a translator or adapter. It was necessary to take the material supplied by the trans- scripts of the ancient tales of the bards, to divest it of many of the extravagancies which conceal the true grandeur and poetry of the bardic songs, and to remould it into one of those beautiful, homogeneous narratives with which we identify the great epic poems of literature. In the bardic romance known as The Battle of Moyra, Ferguson believed he had found a subject susceptible of such treatment, and for some years he strove to embody it in a poem of epic quality. The result of his labours was the pub- lication in 1872 of Congal. This, however, was but the partial fulfilment of his original purpose. As he confessed in his preface, the "inherent repugnancies" PRECURSORS 23 of the subject proved "too obstinate for reconcile- ment." Instead of following the plan of the original story, he was obliged to recast the material, and_to concentrate his attention upon Congal, the principal personage in the Gaelic text, while retaining the Battle of Moyra as the culminating incident. The theme seems, indeed, peculiarly adapted to epic treatment, possessing, as it does, breadth of sig- nificance and unity and continuity of action. The struggle between the forces of Congal and Domnal transcend the interest of simple warfare, and the battle at Moyra marks the last stand of bardic and pagan Ireland against the forces of Christianity and clericalism. In spite of having abandoned his first project, Ferguson succeeded in imparting to Congal some of the qualities which his original conception would naturally have possessed. He peoples his narrative of the expedition of Prince Congal against Domnal, king of Erin, with the terrible, gigantic figures of Celtic mythology. Mananan mac Lir, the great sea-god of Irish antiquity, strides through these pages with giant steps, while the ghastly Washer of the Ford, most horrible of banshees, is evoked with the vividness of reality. Ferguson's work is valuable as representing a defi- nite stage in the development of Anglo-Irish litera- ture. It must be judged by its relative rather than by its absolute merits. As we have seen, he was more than a poet, he was an antiquarian whose man- ifold activities, though all directed towards the reconstruction of the Gaelic past, could not but in- terfere with his efforts in the field of pure literature. He did not bring to poetry that concentration of purpose and jealous care for perfection of finish, which are necessary to the creation of great verse. The most effective passages in Congal are marred by 24 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE metrical weaknesses, the clashing of consonants and awkward caesurae, all indicating a certain roughness of composition also visible in the shorter poems. Frequently, on the other hand, there is a vigour and freshness which enable Ferguson to achieve his effects, in spite of poor craftmanship. It is neces- sary to remember the difficulties with which he had to contend. We are now so familiar with the material that we forget how strange it was in Ferguson's time. To the natural difficulties of all pioneer work must be added the problem of finding euphonious equiva- lents for the old Gaelic names and of grappling in English with the redundant fluency of the old lan- guage. In his notes to Congal Ferguson refers to these "word-cataracts," where such orgies of descrip- tive epithet abound as the following: The deep-clear-watered, foamy crested, terribly-resounding, Lofty leaping, prone-descending, ocean-calf-abounding, Fishy fruitful, salmon-teeming, many-coloured, sunny beaming, Heady-eddied, horrid thund'ring, ocean-prodigy-engend'ring, Billow-raging, battle waging, merman-haunted, poet-vaunted, Royal, patrimonial, old torrent of Eas-Roe. That he should have risen so successfully to the exigencies of his task must weigh with us in esti- mating the defects and qualities of Ferguson's verse. If we miss the more delicate verbal effects to which many of his successors have attained, we find in him a grasp of subject, a simple grandeur, with frequent passages of genuine inspiration, which compensate the absence of a more perfect technique. At times, especially in his longer works, we are more sensible of the hand of the scholar than of the poet. It was fortunate that, sometimes, at least, scholarship and poetry were combined. The disappearance of Gaelic PRECURSORS 25 from the mainstream of Irish life was so complete that it seemed condemned to exist obscurely in the libraries of the learned societies. Once having lapsed into the domain of scholarship, the annals and achievement of Gaelic Ireland could only be restored through the intervention of a scholar, but a scholar who would reach the ear of the unlearned. The work of restoration demanded the co-opera- tion of learning and imagination, and in Ferguson a man was found who combined the necessary quali- fications. He was able to see the past with the eyes of a scholar and to interpret it with the mind of a poet. It was thus his privilege to possess the key that unlocked the gates through which the stream of modern Irish literature was to pass. He set free the Celtic spirit, imprisoned in the shell of an almost extinct language, and obscured by the dust of political turmoil. It is significant that Ferguson obtained immediate recognition from Aubrey de Vere, Wil- liam Allingham, and such of his contemporaries as were to prepare the way of the new poetic revival. The year of his death, 1886, saw the publication of Mosada, the first book of W. B. Yeats, who has since been so completely identified with the Celtic spirit in Irish literature. As indicating the relation of Ferguson to the young generation, and, consequently, his influence upon the Literary Revival, Yeats's criticism of that date may be quoted: "The author of these poems is the greatest poet Ireland has pro- duced, because the most central and the most Celtic. Whatever the future may bring forth in the way of a truly great and national literature . . . will find its morning in these three volumes of one who was made by the purifying flame of national sentiment, the one man of his time who wrote heroic poetry." CHAPTER II SOURCES THE FATHER OF THE REVIVAL: STANDISH JAMES O'GRADY MANGAN and Ferguson may be rightly regarded as the precursors of the Lit- erary Revival, for their work contains more in common with that of their successors than with that of the poets who preceded them, under the leadership of Thomas Davis. Patriotic as was The Nation group, it cannot in the proper sense of the word be described as national. Davis and his followers expressed too narrow a phase of Irish life to merit so comprehensive a term. Mangan and Ferguson, on the other hand, were the interpreters of a wider and purer nationalism, exist- ing independent of political sentiment. They lifted national poetry out of the noisy clamour of politics, and thereby effected that dissociation of ideas which was most essential to the existence of national lit- erature, and which remains the characteristic of all the best work of the modern Irish poets. The substi- tution of a sense of nationality for aggressive nation- alism is the factor in the poetry of Mangan and Ferguson which distinguishes them from all their predecessors, and brings them nearer to our own time than to theirs. While thus introducing a new element into Irish 26 SOURCES 27 literature, they lacked, nevertheless, the qualifica- tion which we shall find in those who were the true initiators of the Revival. Something more powerful than intermittent flashes of Mangan's wayward genius, something more ardent than the conscious scholarship of Ferguson, was needed to produce the extraordinary awakening known as the Irish Literary Revival. The occasion demanded a writer who, combining the imaginative intensity of the former, with the scholarly attainments of the latter, would illumine the entire field of Ireland's antiquity with the vivifying flame of romance and poetry. It so happened that, about the year 1872, a young student of Dublin University was obliged to spend a wet day indoors at a country house where he was visiting. While exploring the bookshelves he came upon the three volumes of O'Halloran's History of Ireland, where he made the discovery that his country had a great past an interesting, but awkward fact, which had been well hidden from him, in accordance with the current precepts of Irish Protestant education. His interest and excitement kindled, this youth re- turned to Dublin and plunged into the records of his newly discovered country, preserved in the Royal Irish Academy. A few years later he introduced himself to the public as Standish O'Grady, a name which has ever since been familiar by its constant association with every form of literary, political and economic activity, that called for noble enthusiasm and lofty idealism. To this accidental contact with O'Halloran we owe a most remarkable renascence of Irish literature. The publication in 1878 of O'Grady' s History of Ireland: Heroic Period, marked the advent of a new spirit,, and this work, with its concluding volume in 1880, must be regarded as the starting-point of the Literary Revival. 28 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE That a great stream of poetry should have its fountain-head in a work of prose, and a prose history, moreover, may be sufficiently unusual to explain the prevailing ignorance of the authentic origin of the poetic renascence in Ireland. It is a commonplace of literary evolution that prose should issue from poetry, and that the latter should be concerned in its beginnings with historical themes. The reversal of the process in the present instance was all the more calculated to escape the notice of criticism, inasmuch as the existence of the preceding generations of Irish poets indicated them as the obvious source from which to trace their successors. To do so, however, is to assume that the Literary Revival is merely a continuation of the Anglicised Irish literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whereas it is, in reality, the creation of a national literature in the English language. But the growth of this literature has necessarily been a departure from the normal process of evolution. Ireland already pos- sessed the literary forms perfected and handed down both by English and Gaelic writers, so that it was not a question of evolving the framework of literature, but of renewing the substance which was to be poured into the existing moulds. In the circum- stances, therefore, we need no longer be surprised that two volumes of historical prose should prove the starting point of a rich vein of poetry. It was not the form but the matter and spirit of literature that were changed, in order that Ireland might be adequately expressed in the language which had supplanted her own tongue. We have seen that neither Mangan nor Ferguson was sufficiently equipped for such a task, still less their predecessors. What the older poets were unable to achieve in verse was accom- plished by the prose of Standish O'Grady. This SOURCES 29 poet, disguised in the mantle of an historian, in- fused the new spirit which was to revitalise Irish literature. Nothing further from the ordinary conception of historical writing can be imagined than these two volumes relating the history of Ireland's heroic age. That they should differ from the manner of Keatinge, O' Curry, and other orthodox historians, was neces- sary and inevitable, if we view them in the light of their ultimate destiny, for how otherwise could a young and comparatively unknown barrister achieve such extraordinary results in a field already laboured by recognised authorities? But it did not require the confirmation of subsequent events to emphasise the fact that with Standish O'Grady a new method of treating Irish history was inaugurated. In his Preface the author himself clearly indicated his own attitude towards history, and the faults of his prede- cessors which he proposed to remedy. Nowhere more than in Ireland had the historian of antiquity been content to accumulate names and dates, and to tabulate events, solely with a view to presenting as exhaustive a mass of antiquarian research as possible. The ignorance of Irish laws, customs and traditions, resulting from the desuetude into which the language had fallen, explains to some extent the character of Irish history. So many facts had become obscured, so much literature was threatened with oblivion by the spread of Anglicisation, that the work of translation and excavation seemed at once the most imperative and the most important. But, as Standish O'Grady pointed out, a generation of workers had laboured patiently at this task, the bardic writings had been largely translated, the remains of ancient Ireland had been investigated, and a large quantity of material now lay within easy 30 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE reach of the true historian. At the same time, a precedent had unfortunately been created, with the result, as he says, that "the province of archaeology has so extended its frontiers as to have swallowed up the dominion of pure history altogether." The antiquarians have unearthed "mounds of ore," to be smelted and converted into current coin of the realm, but they stand "in their gaunt uselessness," awaiting literary exploitation. It was O'Grady who came with the fire of imagina- tion which transmuted this ore into gold. Leaving aside all the preoccupations of archaeology, the in- quiries and investigations, the balancing of state- ments and probabilities, he undertakes "the recon- struction by imaginative processes of the life led by our ancestors in this country." Taking the material furnished by the antiquarians, he remoulds and absorbs it, reducing to its artistic elements the entire history of the heroic period as revealed in bardic literature. To Standish O'Grady these great figures of an age of heroes are something more than the vague and remote shadows that strive to live in the pages of the Publications of the Gaelic and Ossianic Societies. He so immerses himself in the past that he identifies himself with his heroes and heroines, they cease to be legendary and become for him living men like himself, moving about the same country, treading the same earth his ances- tors, as they are the ancestors of every Irishman. As he ponders over the bardic tales he catches their note of epic grandeur, and the spaciousness of dic- tion which characterised the bards of old is reflected in his own style. Thus he describes heroic Ireland as he sees it in the dazzling light of the bardic imagination: SOURCES 31 "But all around, in surging, tumultuous motion, come and go the gorgeous, unearthly beings that long ago emanated from bardic minds, a most weird and mocking world. Faces rush out of-the darkness, and as swiftly retreat again. Heroes expand into giants and dwindle into goblins, or fling aside the heroic form and gam- bol as buffoons; gorgeous palaces are blown asunder like smoke wreaths; kings with wands of silver and ard-roth of gold, move with all their state from century to century; puissant heroes, whose fame reverberates through battles, are shifted from place to place . . . buried monarchs reappear. . . . The explorer visits an enchanted land where he is mocked and deluded. Everything is blown loose from its fastenings. All that should be most stable is whirled round and borne away like foam or dead leaves in a storm." As befits a work destined to be the source of a liter- ature, O'Grady's History has a certain primitive energy, a naive amplitude such as we expect in epic narrative. Not content with the vast uncharted territory before him, in which the annals of the bards are but stepping stones " set at long distances in some quaking Cimmerian waste," he must begin with the Pleistocene epoch, and briefly trace the transforma- tions which preceded the inhabitation of Ireland by the human species! One feels that he is attracted to these periods by the immensity of the events which they cover and by the gigantic creatures to which they gave birth. We see him linger with the delight of Homeric simplicity over mastodon and megatherium, pleiseosauros and trogatherium, the size of these monsters fills him with the same satis- faction as he experiences when describing Ireland, sinking beneath the slowly descending glaciers that covered Europe, or submerged by the waters of the ocean, "as with a vast millennial suspiration, the earth's bosom fell." But these chapters are merely the preliminary exercises of a mind enamoured of greatness, whether material or spiritual. They 32 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE hardly bear more relation to scientific accuracy, than the geology and geography of the Iliad. The historian soon reaches the borders of the vast dominion, where the legendary and the historical mingle in a shadowy confusion, which he has under- taken to survey. Here he pauses for a moment, arrested by the thought of separating the facts of history from the visions of the bards, but his scruples vanish as he recollects the beauties of the legend and their significance in the life of a people. "They are that kind of history a nation desires to possess. They betray the ambition and ideals of the people, and, in that respect, have a value beyond the tale of actual events and duly recorded deeds." In his eyes "Achilles and Troy appear somehow more real than Histiceus and Miletus; Cuculain and Emain Macha than Brian Boromh and Kincorah." Standish O'Grady sees the gods and demigods, the heroes and kings of Irish history, with the eyes of an epic imagination. He is not concerned with deciding the exact point at which the legends merge into history, but embraces the whole epoch, assimi- lating all that is best and most lordly in the bardic compositions with the knowledge gleaned from all manner of sources, contemporary documents and recent commentaries. The result is an astonishingly vigorous narrative, which rolls along with a mighty sweep, carrying the reader into the very midst of the great life of the heroic period. The past lives again in these pages, lit up by the brilliance of a mind stored with a wealth of romantic vision. The first volume of the History begins, properly speaking, with the foundation of Emain Macha, and relates mainly to the incidents of the Cattle Spoil of Coolney, or Tain Bo-Cuailgne. Incidentally the story of Deirdre is told, and the whole work is inter- SOURCES 33 woven with numerous myths and charming snatches of Celtic folk-lore. Valuable as they are in creating atmosphere and in renewing tradition, they do not constitute the greatest merit of the book. Its real distinction lies in the wonderful series of graphic pictures which the author has drawn of the great spoil. This, the chief of the epic romances of Irish literature, is conceived in truly epical spirit. The protagonists, Maeve, Fergus, Ferdia, on the one side, Conchobar, Laeg and, above all Cuculain, on the other these stand out in fine relief. We move between the camps of the contending hosts, we attend their councils of war, we hear their cries of joy and grief, we sit amid their feasts. As he nar- rates the events of this struggle between Maeve and the Red Branch, Standish O'Grady attains to some- thing of the style of the Greek historians. His manner of rendering the speeches of the chieftains and warriors reminds us, sometimes of the sim- plicity so penetrating and effective of Herodotus, sometimes of the terse word-painting of Thucydides. When he leaves the main course of events to evoke some picture of contemporary manners, the feasting of the heroes, the domestic employments of the women, the games of the children, the contests of the youths, he achieves, at his best, the naivete and simple grandeur of Homer. He has the truly Celtic love of the sonorous phrase, but his style bears traces of his classical scholarship. The finest qualities of the historian are revealed by his treatment of the story of Cuculain. Step by step this heroic and lordly nature is unfolded before us with the skill and sympathy which come of deep understanding coupled wfth a power of vision and expression. We feel that there is a har- mony between the author and his subject to which 34 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE we owe this great and spirited re-creation. We see the child, his eager mind filled with the stories of his country's heroes, meditate his escape to the martial life of Emain Macha. A charming picture he presents, this child of ten years old, as he eludes his mothers anxious vigilance and sets out for Emain, armed with his wooden shield and little sword of lath. In his first trial of strength with his contemporaries we are made to feel the promise of his future exploits, the incident is all the more real, too, because of the natural way in which it is de- scribed as arising out of a quarrel between a group of Ultonian boys, playing at hurling, and the intrud- ing stranger. Similarly, the legend of the naming of Cuculain, so remote and colourless in Ferguson's poem, is impressed upon the reader by an equal freshness and vivacity of narrative. In the glow of his enthusiasm and imagination, Cuculain lives as he could never have lived in the cold precision of Ferguson's Lays. With what skill he evokes Cuculain's life at Emain, his military training under Fergus, his ever-increasing prowess at arms, and finally his knighthood, preparatory to his entry upon the great stage which he was to dominate the battlefields of heroic Ireland. Cuculain submits all the proofs of strength and military science exacted by his judges, and at last receives the chariot which is to be his aid and witness in the mighty deeds which he subsequently performed on behalf of Ultonia. "Like a hawk swooping along the face of a cliff when the wind is high, or like the rush of the March wind over the smooth plain, or like the fleetness of the stag roused from his lair by the hounds, and covering his first field, was the rush of those steeds when they had broken through the restraint of the charioteer as though they galloped over fiery flags, so that the earth shook and trembled with the velocity of their motion, and all the time the great car SOURCES 35 brayed and shrieked as the wheels of solid and glittering bronze went round, for there were demons that had their abode in that car." We enter now upon the most significant and illus- trious phase of Cuculain's career. With the breath- less interest of romance the History carries us along from one scene to another in the dramatic struggle of Maeve against the Ultonians. The long series of single combats in which the champions of Maeve, in their turn, stand against Cuculain, the sole guardian of his clan, alternate with the plots and schemes of the Queen to remove by some trick this youth who bars the path of her march northward. Admiration is divided between the vigorous intensity with which these great duels are described and the telling effect of the descriptions of Maeve's relations with her soldiers and advisers. In the former, with all the attendant circumstances of supernatural phenomena, demons and gods who participate only to heighten the fierceness and terror of the struggle, the gigantic figures of the combatants are as near to us and as real as though they were men of to-day. In the latter, we learn to know Maeve, not merely as the warrior-queen and rival of Conchobar, but as a woman, spiteful, unscrupulous and headstrong, and of a temper so quick that when her counsellor Fergus remonstrated at her imprudence, she hurled a spear at him. "But ere she could seize another," we are told, "he ran to her, and seized her with his strong hands and forced her back into her throne, and held her still, and she spat at him." In their strength and weakness these semi-legendary figures are wonderfully near to common humanity as they move across the pages of Standish O'Grady's history. The finest chapters are those of the latter portion of the book in which we find Cuculain forsaken, but 36 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE unconquerable, as he holds the ford against his adversaries. Day after day he struggles with a new champion, and emerges a victor from the encounter, but in his lonely mountain hiding-place his mind is torn with grief and wonder at the con- tinued absence of his kinsmen. The arrival of his father serves to settle his doubts, for now he learns of the spell that has been cast upon the Red Branch, so that they are unconscious of the peril of Cuculain and of his valour on their behalf. The pathos of this scene, the old man powerless to assist his son, the latter's tender care for his father in spite of exhaustion and danger, these are the traits which help us to realise the nobility of Cuculain. With consummate insight Standish O'Grady contrives to give the necessary light and shade to the portrayal of this heroic being. While bringing into promi- nence the terrible strength, the extraordinary skill and endurance of Cuculain, he never fails to illus- trate his contrasting qualities of gentleness and kindness which excite the love and admiration of his enemies. Thus we see Cuculain conquer Maeve herself, in a moment of truce, by the loveliness of his disposition, we hear his touching conversation with Fergus who, forgetting his office of Councillor and General to Maeve, steals off at night to the mountains to comfort his former pupil, whom he is debarred from assisting by the rules of warfare. Especially beautiful is the account of the final en- counter which closes the first volume. Using the most unscrupulous means Maeve persuades Ferdia to engage with Cuculain, his old friend and comrade at arms. When Cuculain sees this new adversary, he is overcome by emotion, the fierce warrior that is in him is subdued for a moment by the voice of memory and friendship. The combatants appeal to SOURCES 37 one another in the name of their affection, each entreating the other to surrender, that he may be spared the pain of inflicting death to one beloved. Skilfully the dialogue passes from affectionate en- treaty to sterner remonstrance, then to reproaches and upbraidings, taunt follows taunt, until the irreparable words are spoken and the two mighty champions are engaged. "Then drew Fardia his mighty sword that made a flaming cres- cent as it flashed most bright and terrible, and rushed headlong upon Cuculain, and they met in the midst of the ford. But straightway there arose a spray and a mist from the trampling of the heroes, and through the mist their forms moved hugely, like two giants of the Fomoroh contending in a storm. But the war- demons too, contended around them fighting, the Bocanah and Bananahs, the wild people of the glens and the demon of the air, and the fiercer and more blood-thirsty of the Tuatha de Danan. . . . But the warriors of Maeve turned pale, and the war-steeds brake loose and flew through the plain with the war-cars, and the women and camp-followers brake forth and fled, and the upper water of the divine stream gathered together for fear, and reared itself aloft like a steed that has seen a spectre, with jags of torn water and tossing foam." Fierce and bloody the horrible struggle continues, accompanied by the dreadful shouts of.the people of Ferdia, only restrained from aiding their chief by the forcible intervention of Fergus. At last Cucu- lain is victorious, his friend lies torn and mutilated at his feet, dead like all the other champions who tried to force the gates of the north. But soon the war-demons pass out of him, and he joins the enemy in lamenting the dead. The narrative concludes: "He took off the cath-barr from the head of Fardia, and un- wound his yellow hair, tress after bright tress, most beautiful, shedding many tears, and he opened the battle-dress and took out the queen's brooch that for which his friend had come to slay him and he cursed the lifeless metal, and cast it from him into the air, southwards over the host, and men saw it no more." 3 8 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE Then Cuculain strides to his resting-place in the mountains where Laeg comes to his assistance. The book closes upon the scene of the hero resting under the care of his faithful friend who in a vision had seen his plight, and roused the spellbound men of the Red Branch from their unnatural inertia. In a magnificent closing chapter we see Cuculain vis- ited by the gods throughout Erin, the Sidh from the bright land of Tir-na-noge, the Tuatha de Danaan, all come to pay homage to, and comfort, the brave warrior who was able to converse with them, "being noble of heart like themselves." II The second part of the History of Ireland did not appear until 1880. Meanwhile, in 1879, appeared the interesting essay on Early Bardic Literature, which provided an instructive exegesis on the entire History, and was subsequently reprinted as an Introduction to the concluding volume. Here Stand- ish O'Grady makes an eloquent plea on behalf of the bardic remains of Ireland, pointing out their value as historical documents, and vindicating them against the neglect of the English-speaking literary world. Ancient Irish literature "with its hundred epics" is relegated to the care of pure scholarship, whereas its great antiquity should give it a peculiar interest to all Aryan nations. The Nibelungen- lied, a modern production beside some of the bardic tales, secures attention, even MacPherson's Ossian is familar to the literary classes, as O'Grady indig- nantly observes, but the wonderful epic cycles of Ireland are unknown or ignored. In thus asserting the claims of bardic literature, he is obviously pro- claiming the intention of his own work and, as we SOURCES 39 know, his appeal was not in vain, so far as his own countrymen are concerned. Circumstances have since rendered most of his arguments inapplicable_to present conditions, but without under-estimating labours of recent writers in the same field, we cannot but recognise in Standish O'Grady the pioneer. By an unusual combination of scholarly precept with literary practice he succeeded in dispersing the clouds of prejudice and ignorance that obscured a glittering source of inspiration from the eyes of the poets. Valuable as this essay is as the preliminary mani- festo of the Literary Revival, and as a succinct state- ment of the main facts relating to the ancient liter- ature of Ireland, it derives an incidental interest as a sort of apologia for the author's conception of history as revealed in his first book. This latter, it goes without saying, possessed none of the charms of the usual, and the critics, with one or two exceptions, accorded it the traditional reception extended to innovators. In the course of a remarkably appre- ciative criticism, The Spectator, it is true, displayed unique foresight and sympathy by enquiring why the Irish poets have left unwrought "this rich mine of the virgin poetry of their country." "Why does not some one arise among them," the reviewer asks, "aspiring to do for these legends what Tennyson has done for the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table?" This solitary instance of a genuine insight into the author's purpose was nevertheless not sufficient to allay the fears awakened in him by the hostile refer- ences to his naive geology, his fantastic geography and the general incoherence of his want of historical method. It is evidently with such faultfinders in his mind that he emphasises the difficulties of the 40 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE historian who has to deal with the bardic material; the impossibility of distinguishing between truth and fiction as evidenced by the presence or absence of the marvellous, the enormous mass of literature to be considered, and the necessity for considering every document. Thus he is led to declare that the only effective method of treating this heroic literature in connection with the history of Ireland would be to print it exactly as it is without excision or condensation, adopting the order determined by the bards themselves. Such a task, however, is beyond the power of any single individual, and must be performed under the supervision of the Royal Irish Academy. Having thus suggested the ideal history, he rapidly dismisses as out of the question the familiar method of tabulating names and dates, and falls back upon his own plan, on the ground of its being justified by the circumstances explained. Admitting that his mode of writing history is open to "many obvious objections," he once again formu- lates his intention, this time in words curiously prophetic of his ultimate success : "I desire to make this heroic period once again a portion of the imagination of the country, and its chief characters as familiar in the minds of our people as they once were. ... If I can awake an interest in the career of even a single ancient Irish king, I shall establish a train of thoughts, which will advance easily from thence to the state of society in which he lived, and the kings and heroes who surrounded, preceded or followed him. Attention and interest once fully aroused, concerning even one feature of this landscape of ancient history, could be easily widened and extended in its scope. " In spite of this confession of faith, when the con- cluding volume of the History appeared in 1880, it was prefaced by a chronological sketch of the entire period covered by the two volumes. This was SOURCES 41 clearly a concession to the demand for definite out- lines and precise facts. Without it, the author feared his History might be referred "to a different order of romantic composition than that to which it really belongs." While admitting that this sketch is not without its utility, most readers will wish that it had been an appendix, rather than that it should interrupt the narrative which is here continued to the death of Cuculain. The insertion of both the introductory essay on bardic literature and this preface, between the points at which the story breaks off in the first volume and begins in the second, constitutes a blunder in form which might easily have been avoided. Nevertheless these defects do not seriously detract from the merits of this final portion of the History, in which the Cuculain epic reaches its apogee, losing none of its sublime grandeur and weird terror in the process of reconstruction. When the narrative is resumed the hero is still lying weak and in the care of Laeg after the last great duel with Ferdia. While he thus remains in the background the history is concerned with Maeve and her followers. A succes- sion of striking pictures explains the course of events in the camp of the Queen, who has invaded and plundered Ultonia during the temporary cessation of Cuculain's activities, while incidentally enabling the reader to obtain a vivid insight into the life and cus- toms of the heroic age. The great feast at which Maeve and her courtiers celebrate their invasion of Ultonia, the songs of the bard, as he entertains the warriors with the incidents of the Tain from earliest days of the Red Branch down to the events in which his hearers had just participated, the visions and portents that strike fear into the hearts of the revel- lers, the prophecies of the Druid Cailitin, and finally, 42 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE the hurried preparations to meet the host of Concobar approaching to intercept the retreat of the invaders these are the preliminary graphic touches filling in the foreground of the canvas upon which the artist is to evoke the apotheosis of heroic Ireland. The ensuing battle of Gaura is related with that spirit and extraordinary power of visualisation which have endowed the work of Standish O'Grady with such a special significance in the revival of Irish lit- erature. We see the great plain filled with mighty hosts of the Four Provinces of Erin and the men of the Red Branch; the shouts of the warriors, the rattle of the chariots, are the roar of this sea of giant humanity. The chieftains move before us with their men, and each is made to stand out by some deft touch which heightens the relief, so that, im- mense as the picture is, it is not blurred or con- fused, but is a clear visualisation. In contrast to the swaying, struggling masses on the plain, we are shown Cuculain asleep in his tent, his strength visibly returning as he slumbers and dreams, unconscious of the peril of the Red Branch. In his sleep comes a vision, the god Lu appears summoning him to the battle, and promising him divine aid to overcome the supernatural forces he will have to encounter. Cucu- lain arises, goes into the field and surpasses in strength, valour, magnanimity all that men had imagined. Surrounded by tutelary gods and demons of slaughter, he sweeps the armies of Maeve before him; his form is now seen in the mist of panic and terror, gigantic, invulnerable, invincible. Cuculain here enters upon the greatest and last phase of his career where, with- out ceasing to be human, he has taken on the attri- butes of divinity. "Out of his countenance there went as it were lightnings, showers of deadly stars rained forth from the dark western clouds above his SOURCES 43 head, and there was a sound as of thunder round him, and cries not of his own coming from unseen mouths, and dreadful faces came and went upon the wind, and visages not seen in Erin for a thousand years were present around the hero that day." Thus he is shown to us as he goes forth to battle against the Four Provinces, and so he appears throughout many fine pages of the History. In the end, however, the forces of his divine pro- tectors are unable to withstand the powers of evil, he loses his magic attributes and is vanquished in the final downfall of the Ultonians. In describing the last hosting of the Four Provinces against Cu- culain O'Grady loses none of his effective power. The concluding chapters relating the distress of Cuculain as he fights against the demons and in- visible hosts of darkness, the hero's farewell to his wife Emer, his desperate struggles when, shorn of his glory, he goes to war "like one who has devoted himself to death," and finally his death from the spear which passed first through his body before piercing that of Laeg these chapters sustain the lofty note which characterises the whole History. There is the same evidence of imagination and sympathy in the picture of Cuculain as he leaves his wife, with his little son clinging to him and asking when he will return, as in this tragic scene when the hero falls mortally wounded: "Thereat the sun darkened, and the earth trembled, and a wail of agony from immortal mouths shrilled across the land and a pale panic smote the host of Maeve when, with a crash, fell that pillar of heroism, and that flame of the warlike valour of Erin was extinguished." The book closes upon the mighty figure as he stands on an eminence, sword in hand and with the rays of the setting sun upon his helmet, for he has bound himself to a pillar that he may die neither 44 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE sitting or lying, as was prophesied. From a dis- tance it seems to the host of Maeve that he is im- mortal, so that even in the agony of death he strikes terror into the hearts of his enemies. in As we have seen, Standish O'Grady's method of writing history drew upon him the adverse criticism of those who held to the orthodox conception of historiography, so much so, in fact, that in his second volume he felt called upon to make certain conces- sions to such critics and to enter a defence of his own style. Not content with this, he published in 1 88 1 the first volume of a Critical and Philosophical His- tory, which was by way of redeeming his former errors, and offering to the public a more conventional study of the same period traversed by his earlier work. This History, however, was never completed, and now serves only to bear witness to the soundness of the instinct which prompted the author to abandon himself in the first instance to the visualisation of a naturally epic imagination. Perhaps it may be profitably regarded as a commentary or appendix to the Bardic History. O'Grady strives earnestly to conform to the traditional manner, quoting dates, citing authorities, and explaining legends, but be- neath the array of facts is felt the throb of romance and of poetry. At times this restraint is relaxed and the bardic note is heard again. Sometimes he interpolates passages from the earlier history, and even elaborates them, as in the famous dialogue between Ossian and St. Patrick, sometimes he sim- ply follows the bent of his mind, forgetting the critics he would placate, and once more the material of heroic Ireland glows with the life breathed into SOURCES 45 it by the epic spirit. The following description of Cuculain on the field of battle might well be mistaken for a passage from the Bardic History: "Fear and Panic go out before him; from his eyes glare vivid lightnings; the lips shrink away from his mouth, and between his crashing teeth a voice like near thunder bellows. . . . Black clouds gather round him pouring forth showers of deadly stars, the blood starts from his hair which lashes the wind with gory whips, and all the demons that exult in carnage and in blood roar around him, while like the sound of a mighty drum his heart beats." The imaginative element is too strong to be long held in check, and in the pages of this volume it fre- quently preponderates at the expense of the critical and philosophical intentions of the author. Un- fortunately such passages derive an inevitable in- congruity from their juxtaposition with matter of a purely prosaic and historic nature, and seem curi- ously out of place in a work of this kind. It is easy, therefore, to understand why the second volume was never published. The first remains, odd and incon- clusive, to emphasise the essentially epical and poetic quality of Standish O'Grady's genius and to illustrate his inability to break the mould of his mind. Unable or unwilling to adopt the conventional historical methods, O'Grady was forced to find some other medium by which to give expression to his peculiar talent for historic reconstruction. Given the preponderance of the romantic and imaginative in his work, it was clear that the most obvious path must lead him to the novel. Henceforward we shall find him employing his activities, almost exclusively in the field of romance. It is true that he did not altogether forsake pure history, but his editorship of Pacata Hibernia in 1897 does not call for considera- tion in a study of the Literary Revival in Ireland. 46 ' IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE Similarly, his political writings, The Crisis in Ireland (1882), Toryism and the Tory Democracy (1889) and All Ireland (1898) need only be mentioned in pass- ing. They all possess unusual qualities and have more claim to be considered as literature than might be anticipated from their original scope and purpose. Toryism and the Tory Democracy, in particular, is an interesting instance of the application of O'Grady's method to history somewhat less remote than that of heroic Ireland, to the period preceding and cover- ing the first years of the union of the English and Irish Parliaments. Most remarkable is the section Ireland and the Hour, in which, continuing The Crisis in Ireland, the author addresses the Irish land- owners. This eloquent indictment of a worthless aristocracy, lost to all sense of its duties, clinging fearfully to the protection of England, and devoid of those intellectual and spiritual qualities which alone could justify its privileges or excuse its inso- lence this indictment is one of the finest pieces of political writing in Irish literature. The pen that wrote the Bardic History is easily recognisable, whether it be in the passages that so remorselessly sum up the continued years of incompetence and neglect, or those in which the glories of the great Irish aristocracies of the past are evoked in forcible contrast. It is surely the mark of genius that a work written for the moment should endure by its intrinsic worth. Like the pamphlets of Swift, O'Grady's Tory Democracy possesses those qualities of style and emotion which enable such writings to retain their interest when their object has long since been accomplished, or has ceased to engage public attention. The landed aristocracy is no longer a factor in Irish life, other economic problems have taken the place of that which exercised the scorn, SOURCES 47 the eloquence and the intelligence of Standish O'Grady. As indicating how his influence has transcended the occasion of its immediate exercise, it is significant that, in indicating the class which has replaced the landowners in the economic struggle, the poet, A. E., has been inspired to renew the eloquent tradition of Ireland and the Hour. The series of historical romances which followed the publication of the histories fall into two groups, the one dealing with heroic age, the other with the Elizabethan Ireland. Contrary to what might be expected, it was not from the bardic material that O'Grady's first novel was fashioned, fresh as this material must have been in his mind. Perhaps, indeed, the comprehensive studies he had already given of heroic Ireland, induced him to break new ground by turning to the Elizabethan period, and to come forward as a novelist in 1889 with Red Hugh's Captivity. In describing this work as a novel, advantage has been taken of the proverbial amorphousness of the genre. Red Hugh's Captivity hesitates between the history and the novel, and might almost indifferently be attributed to either, particularly in view of the author's conception of history. From the Introduction it is evident that O'Grady intends to do for Irish history in the six- teenth century what he had previously done for the heroic period. Now, however, instead of the bardic literature, contemporary State papers and subse- quent histories provide him with a vast field in which his restless imagination and inventive genius are given free play. In selecting the Elizabethan era Standish O'Grady found himself in the presence of conditions somewhat analogous to those that gave birth to his Bardic History. The work of the various historians, excel- 48 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE lent as it was from the technical standpoint, could never hope to bring the period vividly home to the minds of the vast general public. The Annals of the Four Masters, O'Clery's Bardic Life of Hugh Roe, or the more recent works of Froude and others, were no more likely to reach the uninitiated than the writ- ings of the ancient bards or the studies of Keatinge and O'Curry. If the fruit of their researches and labours was to become part of the national inheri- tance, it was essential that some one should appear with sufficient energy, enthusiasm and literary ability to remould this material and throw it into common circulation. As O'Grady had lighted up the obscure region of Irish legend and mythology with the flashes of a brilliant imagination, so he undertook to illumine the gloomy waste of six- teenth-century Irish history. This century is one of vital interest to Irishmen, for it witnessed the struggle of Gaelic Ireland against her assimilation by England, resulting in the incor- poration of the Irish with the English-speaking race. The age was crowded with remarkable personalities, the Irish chiefs and petty kings whose resistance to England constituted the last stand of the old Gaelic and feudal order against English civilisation. Natu- rally, however, the more general histories of the time could not do justice to these figures, and the events in which they were concerned, so, as a rule, they were hastily sketched in as very minor detail in a large picture. While recognising this as inevitable in the circumstances, Standish O'Grady determined to devote a series of smaller pictures to filling in pre- cisely this detail, so important to Irishmen, and so neglected in the comprehensive studies of the pro- fessional historians. Shane O'Neill, Feagh mac- Hugh O'Byrne, Red Hugh O'Donnell all the great SOURCES 49 chieftains are rescued from what he describes so aptly as "the sombre immortality of the bookshelf." They and their followers are presented in the setting of their own stirring times, a background filled with patiently elaborated sketches of feudal life and customs. In Red Hugh's Captivity, as has been suggested, O'Grady does not seem quite sure of his style, which oscillates between pure history and romance. The narrative is too frequently obscured or interrupted by the clumsy interposition of historical data, as though the author were overburdened with the re- sults of his researches in the archives. Conscious, apparently, of the ineffectiveness of his attempt, he returned in 1897 to the same story of Red Hugh's escape from Dublin Castle, and in The Flight of the Eagle gave to Irish literature one of its most spirited and beautifully written romances. Here the skele- ton of history is concealed by a vesture of fine prose, the spoils of the Record Office no longer obtrude themselves, but are discreetly added for reference in an appendix, and the whole episode is welded into a harmonious narrative. The episode of Red Hugh's capture and flight is the most famous and significant of the dramas enacted in Elizabethan Ireland, mark- ing, as it did, the beginning of the Nine Years' War which proved to be the greatest obstacle to the estab- lishment of English rule, and might have changed the destiny of the Irish people. The Flight of the Eagle is a fascinating picture of the social and politi- cal life of the time, and is probably the only work at all worthy of the picturesque and daring young rebel whose story is related. Its many beautiful passages entitle it to rank with the Bardic History. The magnified apostrophe of Lough Liath towards the end, when the young hero's successful flight has So IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE brought him safe to his mountain home, is justly celebrated. This lonely lake, high upon the moun- tain-top of Slieve Gullion, is identified with the greatest periods of Gaelic history, with the druidic mysteries of earliest antiquity, with Finn, Cuculain and all the heroic mythological figures of Irish legend. In an eloquent rhapsody O'Grady evokes the great deeds and personages grouped around this cradle and keystone of Celtic Ireland, and closes his narrative with the picture of Red Hugh O'Donnell at the foot of this historic mountain, the last cham- pion of the old ideals with which Lough Liath is inseparably and so intimately connected. If The Flight of the Eagle represents such an ad- vance upon Red Hugh's Captivity, and is the finest work O'Grady has done outside of the heroic period, it is doubtless because the years intervening between the two had seen the publication of almost all his work in the field of historic romance. The charm- ing volume of Elizabethan stories, The Bog of Stars, in 1893 enabled him to add to his saga of Red Hugh by the addition of incidents in the life of the hero and his associates, not directly part of the events with which the two main narratives are concerned. At the same time he extended the scope of his his- toric reconstructions by the elaboration of various important phases of the struggle against the Tudor dynasty. The appearance of Ulrick the Ready in 1896 marked the last stage of his advance in the art of narration. The manner in which he handles his historical material has lost all the clumsiness of his first effort at long narrative, the odour of the archives no longer hangs about his pages, and the ease and fluency of the story indicates a complete mastery of detail. Indeed he is now threatened with the dangers of this facility and succumbs to SOURCES 51 the extent of writing In the Wake of King James. Here he reveals all the faults of a certain type of popular pseudo-historical novel, in which an~ his- torical setting is exploited as a pretext for the telling of some banal tale of love and adventure. Fortu- nately, instead of continuing in this direction O'Grady bethought himself of his first work, and returned to the half-accomplished task of Red Hugh's Captivity with the fortunate results already described. In considering the group of stories based upon bardic literature little can be added to what has been said of the history of the heroic period. With the exception of Finn and His Companions (1892), a sim- ple retelling of some of, the principal incidents of the Ossianic cycle addressed to children, the remain- ing works are adaptations from the histories. The Coming of Cuculain was published in 1894, and con- sisted almost entirely of a literal transcription of the earlier chapter relating to the childhood and youth of Cuculain, in the first volume of the History of Ireland. At that date, as we have seen, O'Grady was practising his skill as a novelist, and this book may be regarded as an exercise, for he has taken his earlier material and elaborated and rearranged it to form a continuous narrative. Some years later, in 1901, he remodelled similarly the concluding chapters of the same volume, and In the Gates of the North presented the story of Cuculain's manhood, concluding with the hero's splendid defence of Ulster, single-handed, against the champions of Maeve. These accounts of Cuculain thus pre- sented in the form of historic romance lose nothing in the process, and are, therefore, significant as indi- cating the essentially imaginative, romantic quality of O'Grady's mind. In this form, moreover, they 52 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE must have reached a public not likely to be attracted to a work ostensibly of pure history, and conse- quently they have helped materially to attain the chief end their author had in view: to rehabilitate the bardic literature of Ireland and to place the Irish people in possession of their lost national heritage. It is, however, as an historian that Standish O'Grady exercised the greatest influence upon the Literary Revival. With a fine sense of what was needed to give nerve and backbone to Irish literature he turned in succession to the two epochs in the his- tory of Ireland when the national spirit was most strongly and truly defined; the heroic age, when the Celtic soul had reached its plenitude, the Eliza- bethan age, when the last sunset glow of the old ideals flared up to show the final rally and dispersion of Gaelic civilisation. His History of Ireland offends against most of the accepted canons of historical writing, his novels are marred by faults of construc- tion at which the most commonplace "circulationist" would smile, but all these faults are redeemed by the inner quality which they derive from burning ideal- ism and epic grandeur of the mind that conceived these works. The Bardic History, in particular, was a veritable revelation. Here at last was heard the authentic voice of pagan and heroic Ireland; in the story of Cuculain, modern Irish literature had at length found its epic. How pale is Ferguson's Congal beside this glowing prose, where poetry springs from the very power and beauty of the imagination as it conceives the life and struggles of the divine being. With his proud affirmations of belief in the ancient deities, and his wonderful evo- cation of the past, Standish O'Grady revealed to his countrymen the splendour of their own idealism, SOURCES 53 and restored to them their truly national tradition. All eyes were now turned towards the shining land of heroic story and legend, the footsteps of all were directed upon the path which led back to the sources of Irish nationality. There is not an important writer of the Revival but has acknowledged his debt to Standish O'Grady, more particularly the generation just springing up when his best work appeared. A. E., whose mind and work are perhaps most akin to his, shows con- tinual traces of O'Grady's influence, and has re- peatedly testified to the importance of the Bardic History; Todhunter's Three Bardic Tales are the direct result of the contact thus afforded with Irish legend, while W. B. Yeats has directly and indirectly admitted his obligation to the same source. It was further given to O'Grady to foster the growth of Irish literature both as a publisher and an editor. He founded in 1900, and conducted for some six years, The All Ireland Review, which was, at the time, the only journal in Ireland devoted to letters. This periodical became in due course a real centre of culture and ideas, and was the soil from which some of the best fruits of the Literary Revival sprang. It was not the least of his achievements that, as a publisher, O'Grady was responsible for the appear- ance of a volume of essays unique in the history of the Revival, Pebbles from a Brook, the best work of John Eglinton, that subtle essayist who alone up- holds the traditions of this genre in contemporary Irish literature. Historian, dramatist, novelist, edi- tor, publisher, poet and even economist, Standish O'Grady was, above all, and always, an idealist, and in every phase of his activities he has never failed to champion the great ideals which first at- tracted him to the noblest period in the story of his 54 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE race. As a personality he has exerted a profound influence upon the literary generation whose ardour he had already kindled by his re-creation of heroic Ireland. As he was the first to reveal a truly noble tradition, it was fitting that he should create, and for a time watch over, the medium through which so much was expressed that was the direct outcome of his own teaching and example, and that he should finally become sponsor for some of the children of his own literary offspring. It is with a peculiar sense of appropriateness, therefore, that we may salute in Standish James O'Grady the father of the Literary Revival in Ireland. CHAPTER III SOURCES THE TRANSLATORS: GEORGE SIGERSON. DOUGLAS HYDE WHILE Standish O'Grady revealed the wonders of Irish bardic literature, and sent the poets to the heroic age for the themes of a new song more truly expres- sive of the national spirit, it was left to others to explore fields hardly less rich in unexploited treasures of the Celtic imagination. The Literary Revival has been characterised, not only by the resuscitation of the great historical figures and events of Irish an- tiquity, but also by the restoration to letters of the beautiful songs and stories of folk-lore, which were being rapidly obliterated by the increasing Anglicisa- tion of the countryside. The work of the transla- tors and folklorists who collected, transcribed and translated these folk tales and songs, in which the old Celtic traditions still lived, was an important element in the forces that went to the formation of modern Anglo-Irish literature. It is true, how- ever, that this work did not give so direct an impulse to the literary renascence as that of Standish James O'Grady, and belongs more properly to the history of the Gaelic movement, which has done so much to preserve the Irish language, literature and customs. Nevertheless, certain of these writers have exercised a greater influence upon Anglo-Irish letters than 55 56 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE others, an influence beyond that which might be expected from mere translation, and cannot, there- fore, be omitted from a consideration of the Literary Revival. Moreover, as the language movement was coincident with the Revival, and has undoubtedly strengthened it, the interaction of the two may best be studied in those writers who belonged to both, while primarily concerned with the restoration of Gaelic. In the field of translation George Sigerson may be said to occupy a position somewhat similar to that of Standish O'Grady in the history of Anglo-Irish lit- erature proper, and to share the honours with him as doyen of the Revival. Born in 1839, he is not only O'Grady's senior in years, but as a poet he had become known some twenty years before the Bardic History was published. As far back as 1855 he was a contributor to The Harp, and much of his early verse appeared in Davis' paper, The Nation, during the last phase of its existence. Under the pseu- donym "Erionnach," Sigerson was familiar to read- ers of Irish periodicals, but excellent as is much of his original verse, it has never been collected, and is only accessible in the various anthologies, of which there is rather an unfortunate profusion in Ireland. Apart from his activities on behalf of the National Literary Society, which we shall notice later, his influence has been strongest as a translator of the old Gaelic poets, and it is upon his achievement in this direction that his claim to distinction must rest. Sigerson's first permanent contribution to litera- ture was the publication, in 1860, of the second part of the Poets and Poetry of Munster, the first series of which had been contributed by Mangan, and was published posthumously in 1850. Thus, by an inter- esting coincidence, George Sigerson serves as a living SOURCES 57 link between the precursors of the Revival and its initiators, joining up the age of Mangan and Fer- guson with that of the new literature whose seed was germinating in their work. The Poets and Poetry of Munster, which contained the text of about fifty very beautiful Irish poems, with those metrical translations which were to become the special study of the author, was the first effective contribution to the Gaelic movement. It marks the beginning of the Celtic Revival which subsequently made such headway under the leadership of Douglas Hyde. Indeed, the later vigour to which the language movement attained would certainly have been re- tarded, if not rendered absolutely impossible, had it not been for the work of Sigerson and of John O'Daly, the editor of both series of Munster Poets. For many years these two fought alone against the indifference of the public towards Gaelic literature, the repository of Irish nationality. The justification of their faith, and the measure of their success, were demonstrated by the very dif- ferent conditions in which Sigerson presented his second work dealing with the poets and poetry of ancient Ireland. When Bards of the Gael and Gall appeared, in 1897, it was not the offering of an enthusiastic young student to an apathetic public, but the contribution of a ripe scholar to a subject for which an appreciative audience had in the mean- time developed. The National Literary Society in Dublin and the Irish Literary Society in London had come into being, and it was as President of the former that Sigerson was able to dedicate the volume to Gavan Duffy, the President of the sister society, and to Douglas Hyde, the President,^ of the Gaelic League. This dedication is, so to speak, a synthesis of the various activities of literary Ireland since the 58 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE publication of the second series of Poets and Poetry of Munster. It is a sign-post whereon are inscribed the names which point out the two directions taken by the national current in literature. On the one hand are evoked the struggles of those who strove to restore the language and letters of the Gael, and on the other, the crystallisation of the efforts to create a national literature in English by the absorp- tion and remoulding of the Gaelic material. Bards of the Gael and Gall was addressed to both the Gaelic and the Anglo-Irish sections by the dual nature of its appeal. To the one it offered the inter- est of its extraordinarily faithful, and metrically skilful, renderings of the original texts; to the other it presented an imposing anthology of Irish poetic literature, enhanced by a scholarly history of Gaelic verse and a vindication of the greatness of Celtic culture. Dispensing with the original texts, which had become more accessible since the days when he translated the Munster poets, Sigerson was able to bring together eight times as many poems as in his first collection. These range from earliest lays of the Milesian invaders to folk-songs of the eight- eenth century, and extend over a period of some two thousand years. All the great epochs of Irish history are represented, the age of Cuculain, the age of Finn, the age of Ossian, the dawn of Christianity and the Gaelic-Norse period, the whole constituting an almost unparalleled poetic lineage, which could not but strengthen the growing sense of Irish na- tionality in literature. With such an ancestry, the poets were emboldened to proclaim themselves as voicing something more than a mere province of England. The material of Gaelic literature and history had been released by the magic touch of O'Grady; Sigerson, Hyde and others were kindling SOURCES 59 the torch of Gaelic civilisation, and had drawn to the service of the Irish language many of the younger writers. A literature was in the process of for=- mation, which attached itself directly to the original stem of national culture. This new branch, though its outer covering was of a different texture from the parent tree, derived its sap from the same roots. The spirit was Celtic, if the form was English. Even the form, however, has inevitably taken on some- thing of the colour of its environment. Thus, while in Ireland some critics have questioned the possibility of an Irish literature in the English language, in England the contrary criticism has been raised. So successfully have Irish writers adopted English to the expression of national characteristics, so deeply have they marked it with the Gaelic imprint, that they have been accused of deforming the English language. Such critics will find nothing to reassure them in Bards of the Gael and Gall. At a first glance they might, perhaps, be misled into believing that the book contained nothing dangerous to the integrity of English. They will not find any words, phrases or turns of speech of an emphatically Gaelic complex- ion, none of these flamboyant, exotic passages with which Synge, particularly, startled the unaccustomed ear. Nevertheless Sigerson is, in their sense, a more serious source of danger than most of his successors. His metrical translations are, in fact, a unique in- stance of the adaptation of a foreign language to the needs of the user. It is not very difficult for an Irish poet to catch the spirit of a Gaelic text; so far we have seen that it was done to a varying extent both by Ferguson and Mangan. Sigerson, however, succeeds in achieving the far more difficult feat of rendering the music of the original, in addition to its 60 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE spirit. The popular heptasyllabic measure of Gaelic poetry is essentially alien to the nature of English, which falls more readily into line of eight syllables. With few exceptions Sigerson's versions successfully reproduce this measure, whenever the text so re- quires. The perfection and diversity of the Gaelic verse forms precluded their illustration in every case, but the volume contains many examples of this elaborate verse structure, with its internal rhymes and alliterations, its consonant and assonant rhymes. This complicated technique is abundantly displayed in the course of translation, and testifies to the age and development of Gaelic culture. In this connection reference must be made to the Introduction, which displays Sigerson's mastery of his subject and his wide scholarship, and, being in the form of a commentary, adds so much to the value and interest of his work. He discusses, for example, the claim of Irish literature to have created a system of versification absolutely different from that of Greece and Rome, and is able to illustrate his thesis by the first poem of the anthology, the extremely ancient incantation of the Druid-poet Amergin. The translation brings out exactly the rhyme of the text, which demonstrates the existence of rhyming verse in Ireland at a time when such forms were, so far as we know, undreamt of in other countries. Then follows the Triumph Song of Amergin, which appears to be an early instance of blank-verse, whose invention must also be ascribed to the Gaelic genius. The poems representing the Cuculain period deal entirely with those incidents and stories whose beauty and significance had been revealed by the sympathetic imagination of Standish O'Grady. Deirdre's Lament for the Sons of Usnach, the relations of Cuculain and Ferdial, and other features of the SOURCES 61 Red Branch History had become part of the mate- rial of a new generation of poets, since the publication of the Bardic History. It is interesting, therefore, to study in Sigerson's versions the technique of the contemporary poetry relating to this subject. O'Grady had given the content and the spirit of bardic literature, it remained for Sigerson to analyse its form, and reproduce its structural characteristics. In Cuculain's Lament for Ferdial for example, we see how the bards employed the burthen, a form which only came into English verse at a late date. Simi- larly with many other metrical inventions generally believed to be of comparatively recent origin. These admirable translations reproduce the numer- ous metrical characteristics of Gaelic literature, whose diversity indicates how highly developed was the art of versification in ancient Ireland. Bards of the Gael and Gall, while emphasising the technical achievement of Irish poetry, does not sacrifice the poetic substance to the metric shadow. When the bards had obtained such command over the instruments of their craft, they were necessarily tempted at times to indulge in soulless exercises in technique, the metrical gymnastics which we asso- ciate with the poetry of the Precieux and the fash- ionable ruelles of seventeenth-century Paris. Some of the effects cited by Sigerson remind us of the pointes and concetti beloved of the Hotel Rambouillet, but as a rule he concerns himself only with such forms as were destined to be permanent factors in the development of European poetry. At the same time he traces the growth of those traits which have since been identified so completely with Celtic verse. From Amergin's Chant to the present day, the same feeling for nature, with its underlying sug- gestion of pantheistic sympathy, is noticeable, and 62 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE this unity of sentiment is rightly emphasised and illustrated in the comprehensive sweep of Sigerson's anthology. Interesting, too, is the manner in which he ex- plains the origin of the melancholy that pervades Irish poetry, and has so long been accepted as its dominant characteristic. In the dirges of Oisin lamenting the death of the Fianna we hear for the first time the note of "Celtic sadness" of which so much has been written. Oisin, the last of the great pagans, mourns the departure of his companions, and the disappearance of all they stood for, in the rising influence of Christianity. The dialogues of Oisin and Patrick remain as the expression of the eternal conflict between the heroic and the Christian ideal. If the mournful note was first heard in the lamentation of paganism when displaced by asceti- cism, it is to the same cause that we must ascribe the prevalence of a certain tone of sadness in more recent times. The most distinguished of the modern Irish poets have all been on the side of Oisin, they have made the same protest, and their work is tinged by regret for the joylessness of an age unfit to be compared with the great age of which the bards sang. They have been transported by the force of imagination and sympathy to this heroic world peopled with the noble figures and lordly ideals of Celtic civilisation. Filled with the beauties of this dream-world, once a reality, their minds dwell in sadness upon the altered destiny of the race, whom they ceaselessly exhort to return to the path which will lead, as of old, to the unfolding of the perfect flower of national and spiritual greatness. From the fifth to the ninth century Ireland was the guardian of European civilisation, fostering the arts, and sending teachers to all parts of the Conti- SOURCES 63 nent. Sigerson's work in Bards of the Gael and Gall possesses, therefore, an interest extending far be- yond his immediate hearers. Those who have studied European literatures may learn through his exact versions from the Gaelic the precise nature of the debt of other nations to Irish culture. He shows how the verse forms of Gaelic filtered through to the Continent, as a result of their introduction into the Latin hymns and the Carmen Paschale of Sedulius, the first great Christian epic. The early saints whose hymns, for all their Latin, betrayed the Gaelic influence in the vowel end-rhymes, and sys- tematic alliteration, were the disseminators of a new literary tradition, a system of versification entirely independent of Greek and Roman influences. While many of the Gaelic verse-forms proved immediately adaptable to the exigencies of the Latin language, and in due course to its derivatives, others have always remained the peculiar possession of the tongue in which they were originally conceived. Few poets in English have habitually exercised all the forms that Sigerson has used in the illustration of his text. The diversity of these, however, shows how far an Irish writer can succeed in expressing native forms in a foreign language. At the same time, they afford an explanation of the metrical characteristics and peculiarities of all Anglo-Irish poetry. The love of recurrent and interwoven vowel sounds, and the assonances of the modern poets, are simply the survival in the English-speaking Irishman of the verse traditions of his race. In Bards of the Gael and Gall, George Sigerson has com- bined an anthology wkich, while substantiating the claim of Ancient Ireland to be the "Mother of Lit- eratures," vindicates, above all, the right of her own sons to turn to her for their literary education. 64 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE Other nations have at one time regarded Ireland as their teacher, and preserve in their literature some of the fruits of her instruction. All the more, there- fore, may we expect to find the Irish nation cherish- ing her teaching, imitating her models, and striving to produce a literature -in harmony with the great traditions she created. DOUGLAS HYDE It will be the duty of the historian of the Gaelic Movement in Ireland to render justice to the achieve- ment of Douglas Hyde, whose life has been devoted to the restoration of the .Gaelic language and liter- ature. In a study of the Literary Revival, con- cerning itself solely with Anglo-Irish literature, there can be no question of even attempting to give ade- quate consideration to his work. In a sense, Hyde represents a tendency opposed in principle, if not in fact, to the creation of a national literature in the English language. In a famous lecture delivered to the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin, shortly after its foundation, he pleaded for "the necessity of de-Anglicising Ireland," and his con- stant purpose has been to effect the object which he defined on that occasion. He has been the organiser of a vast propaganda on behalf of all that is Irish, music, literature, games and customs of every kind. He was careful in 1892 to explain that work of de- Anglicisation was not "a protest against imitating what is best in the English people," but was "to show the folly of neglecting what is Irish, and hastening to adopt, pell-mell, and indiscriminately, everything that is English, simply because it is English." Since then, however, his more enthusi- astic disciples have swept away these limits, and SOURCES 65 have championed everything that is Irish, simply because it is Irish. Consequently, they incline to view with suspicion the growth of Anglo-Irish litera- ture, on the ground that it is written in an alien language, and has, in some cases, been primarily addressed to the British, rather than the Irish public. Language, it is argued, is the sign and symbol of nationality, and there can be no literature expressive of Irish nationality which is not composed in the Irish language. Whether Hyde himself is entirely in agreement with this application of his teaching, it is impossible to say. If we may accept the statements of com- petent critics, his best work, plays, poems, and fairy tales, has been in Gaelic, while such of it as has been conceived in English is devoted to the history and vindication of the claims of Gaelic literature. Ex- ception must be made of the three original poems published in 1895, together with some verse transla- tions, under the title The Three Sorrows of Story- telling. The first of these, Deirdre, was a prize poem, which obtained the Vice-Chancellor's prize in Dub- lin University, and possesses all the merits and de- fects peculiar to that order of composition. The same may be said of the other two stories, The Children of Lir, and The Fate of the Children of Tuireann, which were written about the same time. Perhaps the most significant feature of Deirdre is that a poem upon an essentially Irish theme should have been presented and found favour in a University which, at that time, was definitely hostile to de-Anglicised Ireland and, in the person of two of its most distinguished professors, had publicly expressed its contempt for the ancient literature of the country. In the same year, how- ever, Hyde published his Story of Gaelic Literature, 66 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE an admirable sketch, which was elaborated and ulti- mately appeared in 1899 as The Literary History of Ireland. This is Hyde's most important original work in English. For the first time a connected and adequate survey had been made of literary evolution of Gaelic Ireland. Hitherto Gaelic litera- ture had only secured a few incidental pages or chapters in the works of such Irish antiquarians as O'Curry, for the necessarily rough and imperfect catalogues of Bishop Nicholson in the early part of the eighteenth century, and of Edward O'Reilly at the beginning of the nineteenth, can hardly be described as histories in the proper sense of the term. Hyde's book was the first of its kind and, apart from its value to the student of Gaelic literature, was a fine piece of propaganda. With such a demon- stration of the diversity and importance of the old literature, it was no longer possible to dismiss the claims of the Language Movement. Hyde answered, once and for all, the objection of his more educated opponents that the Irish language did not repay study because it had no literature. The Literary History of Ireland placed within the reach of the general public the facts which had previously been vaguely admitted, or denied from hearsay. After its publication very little was heard about the "bar- barians" who were supposed to have constituted Gaelic Ireland, and whose literature was alleged to be disgusting or negligible. Against the specific claim of many of Hyde's adherents, that Anglo-Irish literature is a con- tradiction in terms, we may' set the fact that their leader was one of the early vice-presidents of the National Literary Society, which he worked so hard, with many others, to found, and that neither this Society nor the Irish Literary Society in London, SOURCES 67 was created solely with a view to fostering Gaelic literature. At the same time, it must be admitted, the principle of the Language Movement certainly seems to authorise the conclusions which enthusiasts have drawn from it. If language be accepted as the criterion of nationality, then the Literary Revival is condemned as un-national, and Anglo-Irish litera- ture becomes simply a phase of English literature. This view represents the point at which two extremes of criticism meet. The English critics who refuse to admit the claim of Anglo-Irish literature to speak for a distinct and separate tradition from that of England, and the Irish critics who are so possessed by a sense of nationality that they cannot allow their English-speaking countrymen to come forward as representing the national spirit. On both sides there is an over-emphasis of the importance of the English language, as if that were the determining factor. But those who persist in regarding literary Ireland as a province of England are no less mis- taken than those who believe that Ireland loses her identity once she accepts the English language. The striking difference between the Anglo-Irish literature of the Revival, and the Anglicised Irish literature which has always existed outside it, is sufficient proof that both views are mistaken. Ire- land has produced writers whose work reveals noth- ing of their country but a certain note of pro- vinciality; they have been simply imitators of Eng- land. She has also given to English literature writers like Burke and Swift who have been lost to Ireland, who have been no more hers than have any of the great names in the literary history of England. In neither case is there any justification for the gen- eralisations of the two classes of critics already mentioned. 68 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE So long as Irish legends and stories, traditions and customs are cherished, so long will the feeling of nationality endure. It was precisely the desire to rescue and preserve these things which gave birth to the Revival. It is, therefore, absurd to pretend that the new literature, which has done so much in this direction, is not national. It is, however, equally true that the Gaelic Movement, which has coincided to a great extent with the Revival, has played a very important part in the development of Anglo-Irish literature. Many of the younger poets have been drawn into the Language Movement, while those who have not directly participated, have been indirectly influenced by it. The general im- pulse towards Irish sources has been greatly strength- ened by the propaganda of Douglas Hyde and the Gaelic League, of which he is President. So long as the League exists we may be sure that no effort will be wanting to protect all that is most truly Irish in the life of the country. Whether it can do more than postpone for a while the ultimate disap- pearance of the Gaelic language is a question which we are not now called upon to discuss. For many reasons it is to be hoped that the energy and optimism of Hyde will be justified. The endurance of Gaelic constitutes, as it were, a reserve of literary vitality, where our writers may renew themselves, by imbibing afresh from the very sources of the national spirit and tradition. The obliteration of all Gaelic traces would probably weaken the forces of Anglo-Irish literature and leave it open to the process of Anglicisation. Where there is no national spirit capable of moulding the liter- ature of the country in its own image, no tradition springing up from the roots of the nation, resistance is impossible. The race whose language is used SOURCES 69 inevitably dominates. It is highly probable that the general public is quite uncertain which of its favourite novelists and poets are English ~and which are American, the difference is not always obvious. In this respect Ireland is in a position somewhat similar to that of Belgium. If some French critics prefer to consider Brussels as the centre of a pro- vincial literature, others have recognised the literary nationality of Belgium. They see in the work of a Verhaeren the presence of elements entirely different from those that characterise French poetry. The spirit of Belgian literature expresses a tradition far removed from that of France. The presence of Walloon and Flemish are sufficient to guarantee the immunity of Belgian traditions, and to safeguard the nationality of those who write and speak French. Like Gaelic in Ireland, they exercise an influence upon Franco-Belgian literature which cannot be overlooked. Yet Belgium also has her champions of nationality, who fear that the French language is incompatible with the national spirit. In both countries the obvious solution of the difficulty is the recognition that they are bi-lingual. There is no necessary conflict between Gaelic and Anglo-Irish literature, they are complementary, not antagonistic. Whatever reproaches the more ardent Gaels have made against those Irish writers whose medium is English, the latter have never retaliated. They admit to the full all the claims of the older language, and they have constantly acknowledged their obli- gations to Gaelic literature. They only plead for the right of co-existence. In addition to the material derived from the old Gaelic literature, the Revival has found in the folk- lore and folk-songs of the peasantry a valuable 70 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE deposit of literary ore which was in danger of being lost owing to the disappearance of Gaelic. This vast unwritten literature was cherished solely by the Irish-speaking country folk, and the diminution of the latter threatened it with oblivion. It was natural that Douglas Hyde, having set himself to restore the Gaelic language, should have been keenly sensible of the value of these songs and stories, which contained, as it were, the sparks of the tradition which he was endeavouring to fan into flame. He began at an early date to collect Gaelic folk-lore, and rapidly established a reputation as the foremost authority in this branch of Irish literature. As a folklorist he has exercised a very special influ- ence upon the Literary Revival. Like his first vol- ume of folktales, Leabhar Sgeuluigheachta, published in 1889, most of his work has been written in Gaelic, for the force of personal example has been conspicu- ous in his propaganda on behalf of the Language Movement. In order, however, to reach those less proficient than himself, he adopted in many cases the plan of giving parallel versions, Irish on the one side and the English translation on the other. Beside the Fire, the Love Songs of Connacht and the Religious Songs of Connacht were published in this fashion, and it is these three works which must directly affect the development of Anglo-Irish litera- ture. This is not the place to consider Hyde's achievement in Gaelic, but his translations in the three volumes referred to have a significance which must command attention in any study of the Lit- erary Revival. Prior to 1890 various efforts had been made to preserve something of Irish folk-lore, but it was not until the appearance in that year of Beside the Fire, that any serious contribution in the English Ian- SOURCES 71 guage was made to the subject. As far back as 1825, Crofton Croker had published Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, a work whose literary charm has been widely recognised, but whose scientific value is as slight as that of the collections of Kennedy, Lady Wilde and Curtin, which suc- ceeded it. In none of these is it possible to discover the sources from which the stories have been col- lected, nor can one be certain how far the originals have been followed, and to what extent the ground- work has been elaborated by the authors. The folk-tales suffered in many ways by this treatment. Their origins were lost, and they became dissociated from the soil from which they sprang by the fact that interest inevitably shifted from the stories themselves to the manner and style of their narra- tion. As Hyde pointed out, it was essential that folk-lore should not be divorced from its original expression in language. It is easy, therefore, to understand why his first Book of Folk Stories (Leabhar Sgeuluigheachtd) should have appeared in Irish, for it is in the old language that the folk-tales and songs are remembered. Except in those districts where Eng- lish displaced Irish at such an early date that edu- cation and reading had not time to thrust themselves between the people and their spoken literature, the Gaelic stories did not pass into the new language. Consequently the rapidly declining population of native Irish speakers constituted the source of Hyde's researches. In Beside the Fire he gives, in addition to trans- lations of portions of Leabhar Sgeuluigheachta, a number of Connacht folk-tales, in the original Irish of the narrators, with a parallel version in English. In this way Hyde initiated a new method of collect- ing and preserving Gaelic folk-lore. His stories are 72 IRELAND'S LITERARY RENAISSANCE not at all modified by him, but are transcribed as he heard them, the circumstances under which each tale was obtained being included in an appendix. The same treatment was adopted by William Lar- minie, whose West Irish Folk-Tales and Romances was published in 1893, and did for the coast of Connacht and Donegal what Hyde had done for the inland portion of the first-mentioned province. Larminie did not always give the Irish text, but in the cases where he did so, his work had the addi- tional value to students of Gaelic, of reproducing phonetically the dialect of the speaker. The desire for accuracy which prompted Hyde to reproduce the original language of the Gaelic folk- tales, and the consequent method of giving parallel translations, are factors of greater significance than might at first sight be imagined. This constant juxtaposition of Irish and English has profoundly affected the form of modern Anglo-Irish literature. Instead of the haphazard, and usually quite false, idioms and accent which at one time were the con- vention in all reproductions of English as spoken in Ireland, the Literary Revival has given us the true form of Anglo-Irish, so that our literature represents perfectly the old Gaelic spirit in its modern garb. This great change has been brought about by two complementary influences. The restoration of the Irish language has reaffirmed the hold of Gaelic upon the mind of the people, and emphasised the modifications of English as moulded by the Irish idiom. At the same time the scientific care with which Hyde and the translators have sought to render exactly the Anglo-Irish equivalents of their texts has tended to fix more effectively and more precisely the language of an English-speaking, but essentially Gaelic race. Beside the Fire, so far as it is SOURCES 73 written in English, is a careful study of that language as it is used under the limitations and modifications imposed by the older tongue. In the preface Hy