Years before I settled down to this book I was keenly aware of the need for it. At the same time I held back, fearing that I was not the man to write it, that I had neither the scholarship nor the leisure. In the wrestling of those two thoughts was a discomfort that in vain I tried to lay aside with a ‘but’ — ‘but no one else thinks it worth while to write it’ — that is, the book I had already in my mind’s eye.
Another thought tempted me. The whole movement for the revival of the Irish language, I felt, had been allowed to drift almost entirely under the guidance of grammarians. For the learning of such men, and their care for accuracy, I have the deepest respect. But (O blessed word!) there are too many of them about, I said; they have lost the sense of proportion; and because of this the conditions have become too meticulous, hard, and acrid for that wayward crop, literature, to throw out those promiscuous spurts of growth which are the very routine of youth. This book is a study of some of the Munster Gaelic poets of the eighteenth century. It is perhaps the first serious attempt made to understand them. It cannot be said, however, that those poets for some years past have been neglected; contrariwise they have been studied, almost entirely from the grammarian’s point of view, though, and not from any other, literary or even human. Not their works have been studied so much as their words; their prepositions and particles rather than their visions! — a hard fate to befall a set of men who not only were poets but lyric poets, whose lives moreover, whose whole period indeed, was a living agony. How they must thank me if, even in a blundering way, I throw open their songs to more kindly eyes!
Among the grammarians I do not, of course, include the historians of the literature — men like Professor Bergin, Professor O’Donoghue, Professor O’Rahilly, Professor Douglas Hyde, Father Dinneen, Mr Robin Flower and others whose words I quote so often in the following pages. To those I am well content to play the not unnecessary part of vulgarisateur.
All those as well as their students will, of course, find numerous errors after me, if they care to look. There are, however, errors and errors. Lord Morley held history to be an epic art — and the propulsive course of epics is not to be hindered by even shoals of errors. And if this opinion be not cover and shield enough for me and my faults I add to it that saying of Goethe’s: The best that history has to give us is the enthusiasm which it arouses.
Such errors as are to be found in this book will not prevent it from lighting up the period it deals with; — not only that, but subsequent periods of Irish history will, let us hope, be a little the clearer for it, even that very terrible phase from which we have not yet quite emerged. It will not, in any way, replace Lecky’s study of the same century; that book it will rather supplement, inasmuch as its province is that side of Irish life, the Gaelic side, which to him and his authorities was dark. He must have thought the Gaelic language a wayside patois, clearly not one of the permanent forces of the nation. In the preface to his History 0f England in the Eighteenth Century, of which book his chapters on Irish history, of course, form part, he explains that his aim was not to write a history year by year or to give a detailed account of battles or of the minor political incidents, but ‘to disengage from the great mass of facts those which relate to the permanent forces of the nation or which indicate some of the more enduring features of national life.’
From his own pages one would never feel that the soul of the Gael is one of the more enduring features of our national life. Yet this very fact becomes daily more evident, and all future historians will more and more have to wrestle with it. Far from disengaging for us the urge of that soul he would have us consider as complete an analysis of Irish life in which it is not referred to. The soul of a people is most intimately revealed, perhaps, in their literature; the Gaelic people in that period were possessed of much literature, were, moreover, constantly adding to it, for they had many poets; yet of this literature, of these poets, Lecky knew nothing.
He enlightens us on the attitude of those historians among whom he wished to stand: ‘What characterises these writers is that they try to look at history, not as a series of biographies, or accidents, or pictures, but as a great organic whole; that they consider the social and intellectual condition of the world at any given period a problem to be explained, the net result of innumerable influences which it is the business of the historian to trace.’
To the social condition of both the Gaelic people and the Ascendancy he gave close study; to the intellectual movements among the Ascendancy he gave the same earnest thought; but at similar movements among the Gael, also, just as surely, the net result of innumerable influences, he gave not even one single glance! The inference is that there were none, or that, being there, they were not matter for such historians as he. In his biography it is written: ‘Survivals of the old national life in a country always interested him particularly, and in Holland he had exceptional opportunities of seeing these.’ But the survivals of national life among the Gaels made no appeal to him. He wrote: ‘To destroy the prestige and position of Trinity College would be to drive the ablest Irishmen more and more to the English Universities, and thus more and more to denationalise the talent of Ireland.’ He had but little idea how denationalised his own mind was; he could describe himself quite seriously as the latest successor of the Four Masters!
Nevertheless, his book is a noble work, packed with knowledge. What it lacks, however, was the very life of the building. If his account of Ireland were the whole truth, the subsequent history of Ireland must have been very different from what it actually has been. That subsequent history is a rough story of a national ideal grimly pursued; it is perhaps the best illustration in the world’s history of how strong and indeed terrible a force nationalism comes slowly to be when tempered in the fires of adversity and smithied in the forge of persecution. Mr Stopford Brooke some years ago took the mass of poetry written by Irishmen in the English tongue. He searched it for its distinctive elements. In the end he marked out three — Nationality, Religion, and ‘what England calls Rebellion.’1
Nationality, Religion, Rebellion! Now, if this be the finding of a competent critic with regard to that poetry, practically all of which was written in the nineteenth century, what would we say of a historian of that century who had never given a thought to that mass of literature or its writers? If his work gave one to understand that none such existed, that consequently the desire that would crave such utterance either did not exist, or else, so weakly as not to find expression for itself — surely it would not be too severe a condemnation of such a work to say that whatever of good it held in it, the life of the building was not in it? Now, one goes only a little way into the Irish poetry of the eighteenth century when one comes on the same three notes, the same, yet how vastly different! How much deeper, louder, stronger, fiercer!
Lecky, however, telling his tale of that century, omits all reference to this body of literature, almost all of which may be spoken of as explicitly or implicitly historical.
It is when his shortcomings are known that his book becomes of great value; for one turns to it then for what it contains, — for information on the material conditions of the country or for the story of the Dublin Parliament, that noisy side-show, so bizarre in its lineaments and s0 tragi-comic in its fate, to which he gave such attention. His account of the life of the country as a whole needs many supplementary books, not one. Some indeed have already appeared; and this book aims at being simply one other.
Lecky’s attitude towards Irish would not matter if similar views did not still exist in the country. It would be well for all outsiders who would understand Ireland and its tragic history, or indeed any phase of it, always to keep before them the fact that the Ascendancy mind is not the same thing as the English mind.2 The English mind we can fairly come upon in the literature of the English people; but how astray would he be who would make himself an image of the English, as we in Ireland have known them, from the study of that literature! As well think to find in it the English of India! The first article in an Ascendancy’s creed is, and has always been, that the natives are a lesser breed, and that anything that is theirs (except their land and their gold!) is therefore of little value. If they have had a language and literature, it cannot have been a civilised language, cannot have been anything but a patois used by the hillmen among themselves; and as for their literature, the less said about it the better. In the course of time the natives become tainted with these doctrines; and cry approval when the untruths of the Ascendancy are echoed from some distant place, as if at last a fair judgment has been pronounced, not recollecting that the Ascendancy have had for hundreds of years possession of the ear of the world and have not failed to fill it with such opinions as were opportune. What pains one is to come upon an Irishman who cannot speak either of the Irish language or Irish literature or Gaelic history except in some such terms as the Ascendancy in Ireland have taught him. In his case the Ascendancy have succeeded; they have created in him the slave-mind. They have won his thoughts and affections from his native country. ‘We dare say,’ wrote Sir Samuel Ferguson, ‘we dare say, had it been the policy of any party in ancient Greece to win the thoughts and affections of the Greeks from their own country, so as to make them a safer provincial dependency of some earlier civilised neighbouring nation — Syria, say, or Egypt — this sort of argument or expostulation would have been very often employed by them: Where is the use of tracing back the barbarous traditions of the House of Atreus? … Why waste your time on idle enumerations of the pedigrees of Inachus? … Turn your thoughts to Egypt … The glorious actions of Sesostris are something indeed worthy of the study of men of enlightenment. The sources of the Nile, and the causes of its overflow, you may investigate with profit and delight … indulge no more the idle dreams of being Greeks — North-west Egyptians, methinks, would sound more proper.’
Even today, here in Ireland, we are aware of thousands who must have been seduced by some such accents; the prejudice against the language is insensate; yet a nationality that has been toughened in whole centuries of foul fortune will not easily give up that tongue in which alone the desires of its heart have been uttered in their truest, deepest, and most beautiful forms. That this is so cannot be gainsaid. Why then seek any other argument for keeping it alive?
To revive Irish, cry the Progressives — Progressives! — is to stay the wheels, to put the hands of the clock back. They are filled with a vision of whirring wheels, glistening belts, flying argosies, — a mechanical world, its speed ever accelerating, its output ever increasing! One can indeed imagine a multiplicity of languages as making for confusion among barbarian peoples; but if we, with all those mechanical aids to boot, cannot carry on smoothly under such conditions as did not ever in the world’s history entirely prevent commerce and traffic — surely all our pains to invent have been in vain? After all, all that aptness in mechanism means control of force; it is all in the economy of nature; it is natural. What is not natural is that ‘progress’ should spell ‘uniformity.’ If those whose very dreams have become mechanical still see any use for the arts, it can only be that they pay lip-service to old saws. How anyone who cares for literature can bear to see a language, any language, die is a thought beyond us. Even an old outworn language digged out of the earth — who can measure its latent power or forecast its influences? Fragments of stone have been picked out of the ground by field labourers: they have so shaken, so disturbed, so inspired, so coerced the whole art-mind of Europe ever since, that one sometimes regrets that ever they were awakened from their dreams!
But it is comforting to know that even during the very period that those ‘Progressives’ look upon as having been ruled by their own modern and efficient ideas, several dead and half-dead languages have been quietly recovering their powers of speech! Perhaps this, too, is in the economy of nature; is not without purpose.
Reading those re-discovered poets day after day, I was more and more struck with the extent to which the modes of Mediaeval literature survived in them. At first I felt merely curious; but somehow becoming aware that the whole trend of modern literature was towards those self-same long discarded modes, I grew to think that here was such a justification for reviving the language as overshadowed all others.
In this place it is not feasible, even if one were able, to take such a wide or penetrating view of modern literature as would show whether or not Renaissance moulds are being flung aside as no longer of use. One must be satisfied to sketch out roughly certain lines of thought which give us to feel a great struggle going on in modern literature between the dying spirit of the Renaissance and the re-discovered spirit of Nationality. It is not to-day nor yesterday that this fight began. What is every Romantic movement, every Sturm und Drang movement, but a skirmish in it? Does not every such movement begin by an increased consciousness that the breadth, movement, colour of life, the romance of it, cannot be poured into classical moulds? (Of course, the moulds are not really Classical at all; they are only Classical at second-hand; they are Renaissance.) It is the surface-movement, the surface-flush of life that at first seems to protest against the inflexibility, the too-regulated shapeliness, the too-restricted colouring that those Renaissance modes insist upon, for all their size and grandeur. Then the pageantry of the past, where surface-movement, surface-colour, are less mixed with other elements, joins in the protest and clamours for expression. But it does not matter to the argument which of the two comes first; the thing to insist upon is that every Romantic movement is a national effort to discover for present needs forms other than the Classical forms.
It has to be insisted upon that Renaissance standards are not Greek standards. Greek standards in their own time and place were standards arrived at by the Greek nation; they were national standards. Caught up at second-hand into the art-mind of Europe — thus becoming international, their effect was naturally to whiten the youthfully tender national cultures of Europe. That is, the standards of a dead nation killed in other nations those aptitudes through which they themselves had become memorable. Since the Renaissance there have been, strictly speaking, no self-contained national cultures in Europe. The antithesis of Renaissance art in this regard is national art. To some it must seem as if the Renaissance has justified itself in thus introducing a common strain into the art-consciousness of all European countries. That common strain was certainly brilliant, shapely, worldly-wise, strong, if not indeed gigantic, over-abounding in energy, in life! Yet all the time there was a latent weakness in it, a strain, a sham strength, an uneasy energy, a death in life. It always protested too much. Dissembling always, it was never simple-hearted enough to speak plainly, and so, intensely. It therefore dazzles us rather than moves us. If it has justified itself, then should we swap Rheims cathedral for St Peter’s and Rouen for St Paul’s! ‘One would, however, swap Dante for Shakespeare?’ — Yes, but what did Shakespeare’s native woodnotes wild know of the Unities? Happy England! — so naïvely ignorant of the Renaissance at the close of the sixteenth century. Unhappy France! — where even before Shakespeare was born they had ceased to develop their native Christian literary modes, had indeed begun to fling them aside for those of Euripides and Seneca. The edifice they built up in after years upon these borrowed alien modes is both noble and vast, perhaps even great, but it is not either a Rheims or a Rouen: its appeal to the spirit has less in it both of magic and depth. The Renaissance may have justified itself, but not, we feel, either on the plane of genuine Christian art or genuine pagan art. It is not as intense or as tender as the one, nor so calm, majestic and wise as the other.3
A Romantic movement is not usually thought of as a violent effort to re-discover the secret power that lay behind Greek art; yet in essence that is what every Romantic movement has been. The personal note, the overweening subjectivity, that marks such movements is a protest against the externality of Renaissance moulds. The local colour, the religious motif, the patriotic motif, these are an adventure in rough life rather than in the pale meadows of death. That is, every Romantic movement is right in its intention: it seeks to grow out of living feeling, out of the here and now, even when it finds its themes in the past, just as Greek art, which also looked for themes in its people’s past, grew up out of the living feeling of its own time and place. The Renaissance would hold by a dead age and a dead land.
There is perhaps no tongue in Europe that has not had its Romantic movement, or movements. If we are destined to see no more, it is simply that the Old Man of the Sea has been flung from our backs, that the Renaissance is dead.
The Renaissance, artificial from the start, rootless, had sometime to die. Dead, what could succeed it except a return to national standards? Whether or not we feel that every literature in Europe is doing this may be a question of knowledge. But it is not necessary to take them in turn and observe their courses. Let us rather ask ourselves: What language in Europe since the French Revolution — which outburst, for all its Classicism, really meant the overthrow of the Renaissance — has done the greatest work in literature? The answer is the Russian. That literature, born too late to share deeply in the wares of the Renaissance, is at once the most national and the most significant of all modern literatures. A memorable and comforting fact — pointing out the way of light and freedom.
Note again, the influence that other late comers in the field of world-literatures, such as Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, are having on the world of letters. It is the literatures of these countries that are really the pathfinders of to-day. Note again, how impossible it would have been for America to make any progress in literature if Whitman had not arisen to slay the New Englanders. Still further observe the huge extent to which dialect is entering into the stuff of modern literature in almost all countries. Imagine what Racine would say to Eugene O’Neill! Dialect is the language of the common people; in literature it denotes an almost overweening attempt to express the here and now, that, in its principle is anti-Renaissance.
If one confined his attention to English, it would be interesting to show how truly modern is A. E. Housman’s Shropshire Lad, how old-fashioned Francis Thompson: Housman, the Saxon, the Nationalist; Thompson, the Latinist, the child of the Renaissance. Again, an interesting contrast could be made between Hardy, the delineator of a rural parish, and Shaw, whose country is the world, though, of course, Shaw is anything but pure Renaissance. He is not old-fashioned through and through.
But indeed in a hundred different ways it could be shown that in every live country, literature is creeping back to the national hearth, as if it would there find a mother tongue in which to express its judgment on such human souls as most deeply move its affections.
If another line of argument be necessary, one could institute an interesting comparison between the art which Renaissance standards have most tongue-tied and that which fortunately has never known them — Sculpture and Music. What a difference! It is almost the difference between Life and Death. The value of this argument is that it sufficiently answers those to whom Europe without the Renaissance is unthinkable. One certainly does not hold that Music has not been influenced, and deeply influenced, by the Renaissance spirit, but the question all through is not one so much of ‘spirit’ as ‘mode’: in music we have, happily, clear evidence that modern Europe could invent art-forms when put to it — all out of its own head! If only it could have done so in Sculpture! Music is really the one triumph of modern Europe in art.
This aspect of the value of Irish poetry — how it brings the mind right into the stream of modern literature, as far at least as expression is concerned — struck me more and more while reading these forgotten poets, although, of course, the tradition in which they lived failing more and more, they are the least Gaelic of Gaelic poets. Indeed it seems to me that nearly all modern poets in English are trying, never, however, with the same triumphant success, to write lyrics in the manner of Keating’s ‘A Bhean Lán de Stuaim.’ When they succeed in doing so the Old Man of the Renaissance will have been flung from the shoulders of our civilisation.
In these following pages only one aspect of the Hidden Ireland is delineated: the literary side. To fill out the vision of that land, so dark, so scorned, yet so secretly romantic to those who know it, one would need to have as well a full account of the Irish adventurers of that century, of such men as Morty Óg O’Sullivan and Art O’Leary — to take two of many figures so different, so very different both from ‘Barry Lyndon’ — the ‘Irishman’ of fiction and Barrington’s ‘Irishmen’ of history.
One also needs an adequate account of the wandering priests and friars moving hither and thither between this country and the Continent, suffering so deeply, striving so gallantly to keep the institutional side of the Church from utterly fading away. Finally, with a comprehensive study of the folk-poetry — the most precious heritage of all produced by the Gaels in that century — as well as of the folk-music then composed, we should feel that we had fairly explored the riches of that starving people. Until those other avenues are also opened up one cannot have any deep idea of their hidden lives.
I desire to thank Mr John O’Toole, Mr Séumas Ó hAodha, M.A., and Br Senan, of the Capuchin Order, for help and advice. My thanks are also due to Professor Bergin for permission to use some of his translations of bardic poems.