A Recent Irish Literature I

That there is a recent Irish literature in the language of the foreigner is a matter which this paper accepts as a truism, for with all the talk of the impossibility of delineating Irish spirit and sentiment in English, we think that “Knocknagow” is a very fair portrait of Tipperary, or “Little Mary Cassidy” quite a realistic picture of a Galwayman’s love. But I do not ask you to consider any of the productions of the English-writing Irish poets or romanticists. I am about to ask your attention for quite a different style of writing – an Irish literature absolutely of our own time, produced in Ireland, written for Ireland, and exclusively in Irish. It is one of the features of the last few years that we have begun to acknowledge that all the possibilities of our people’s intellect, all the flights of their genius, all the power of their imaginations need not necessarily seek expression in English. We have all of us an idea of the past of Gaelic literature. Mangan, Walsh, Ferguson, Callanan, and others have familiarised us with the Gaelic writers of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. From the first day when English gained any sort of a hold in Ireland even the enemies of the Gael have admitted the rhythmic beauty of Irish poetry, and Spenser, narrow-minded as he certainly was, and good critic likewise, has paid a tribute to the originality and beauty of idea of the “rhymers” of his time. Swift, with all his indifference to the native population, was attracted to their literature, and even went so far as to translate one at least of the poems, the famous “Feast of O’Rourke,” into English. Henry Brooke, a man unjustly forgotten nowadays, went to the trouble of mastering the Irish language preparatory to writing a “History of Ireland,” which design, however, he never realised. To his daughter, Charlotte, we are indebted for the earliest attempt to give the world an idea, in a concise form, of the older literature of Ireland. Joseph Cooper Walker had preceded her by a few years, but both of them dealt in their work almost exclusively with the very earliest of extant Irish poetry, coming down only in an instance or two to modern days. Curran, as we know, was a born speaker of Gaelic, and most of the country members of Volunteer Days were also at least able to speak it. Flood was evidently impressed by its importance, as his gift to Trinity proves, and Grattan, as know, was favourable to it. The United Irishmen, so far as the rank and file went, were mostly Irish speakers, and the leaders in many cases, notably Russell and Drennan, took pains to acquire it. Lysaght wrote equally well in Irish and English, his “Kate of Garnavilla,” in Gaelic, being out of all comparison superior to the English version. Much of the inspiration of Moore’s earlier melodies was due to the existence of the Gaelic Society which met in Fishamble-Street, under the guidance of Theophilius O’Flanagan and William Halliday, and to the historical labours, oftentimes apocryphal, of Sylvester O’Halloran. The reader of the generally rubbishy magazines of the Irish capital of the half-century stretching from 1770 to 1820 will be struck by the quantity of translated matter from the Irish which finds a place in their pages. Worthless as the work generally is, it goes to prove how very general Irish was all over Ireland up to Emancipation days. Sometime about 1810 a country schoolmaster named William Farmer came to Dublin from Cavan and settled in Harold’s-Cross. There he came into contact with one Edward O’Reilly. A similarity of tastes led to closer friendship, and eventually they started a school for the teaching of Irish. At that time books printed in the Irish language were very scarce and very dear, more especially text books of the nature required for a primary class. Of grammars and dictionaries there was an especial dearth, and as the course of the lessons grew it became necessary to make vocabularies for the students. These accumulated until at length they became quite voluminous, and were gathered into folios by the scholars. They were the germ of a great work, and became in after years the famous Irish-English Dictionary of Edward O’Reilly, which, with a supplement by O’Donovan, is familiar to all students of Gaelic. This was not the only service these two humble men did for Ireland. Like all countrymen, the old airs and songs of their land had a charm for them, and in the intervals of their labours they amused each other singing or playing those old tunes, and writing them down for preservation. Unlike the glossary, they never blossomed into publicity, but as the Farmer-O’Reilly collection they have been drawn upon for many a fine old air by numerous collectors since. Of Farmer the subsequent life is not known. O’Reilly became secretary of the Hiberno-Celtic Society, edited for them several tracts, and compiled his Dictionary of Irish (Gaelic) Authors, which was published in 1820, a very incomplete volume, but still, as Dr. Hyde says, a wonderful compilation for one man working singlehanded. In 1817 one of the periodical famines which have marked the English occupation of Ireland took place. The terrible famine of ’47-’48 has eclipsed the memory of all others, but, as in our own time, lessons of actual starvation have never been wanting in Ireland. This famine of 1817 seems to have been of exceptional violence, whole districts were left devoid of the commonest food, and the proselytiser, ever seeing in these periods of distress the dispensing hand of Providence, charitably undertook to fill the mouth of the starving Papist, only asking in return that he should allow himself to become acquainted with the Protestant Bible. At that time no parish was short of good Gaelic readers. The hedge schoolmasters, whatever their other faults, never forgot the old tongue, and accordingly the Hibernian Bible Society looked for a fine harvest from the famine, reckoning that Faith, however firm, is not invariably proof against Hunger, particularly when a string of young children have got to be considered. Many were induced, owing to the painful state of affairs, to go amongst their neighbours and read to them the Irish Bible of Bedell, and in fact so many accepted the terms of the Bible-mongers that an order was issued by the Catholic clergy forbidding the further teaching of Irish lest the whole population might, by reason of their poverty, be thus drawn away from the faith of their forefathers. This short-sighted policy, more than anything else, save, of course, the national schools, has brought Gaelic to the position it occupied until lately. Most of the Bible-readers returned to their allegiance when the distress passed off, but a few still hung on to the skirts of the missionaries. Of these the most notable was Tadhg O’Connellan, a hedge schoolmaster, whose knowledge of Irish was certainly profound, and, who, with all the pedantry of his class, has still left some excellent little books, more especially an English-Irish dictionary, behind him. A reader of the “Introduction” of this little dictionary can form an idea of the grip which Irish had in Ireland then. Undoubtedly the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Irish did a world of damage to Gaelic, a damage which still has its effect tin Gaelic places, but the Catholic bishops, in preventing the reading and writing of the old tongue, actually played into the hands of the enemy, since they left their flocks open to the more wholesale demoralisation which has fallen on them by the flooding of their towns and villages with the gutter literature of England.

An important addition to then existing Gaelic books was the publication, in 1834, of James Hardiman’s “Irish Minstrelsy.” This, like Miss Brooke’s “Reliques of Ancient Irish Poetry,” dealt principally with old Gaelic; but a valuable addition was a number of songs by O’Carolan, Seaghan O’Neachtain, and Seaghan MacDomhnaill Clarach. The compiler was exceedingly unfortunate in his versifiers. Save Thomas Furlong, none of them – John Dalton, Henry Grattan Curran, and Edward Lawson – can be said to have been remarkably gifted with poetic genius. This will become especially evident on comparison with renderings of the same poems by Ferguson, and we may trace a good deal of the critical opinion of English writers on Gaelic poetry to their acceptance of these versions as spirited or faithful. In the Dublin and Irish Penny Journals the first beginnings of O’Donovan were made, and there, in Mangan, Irish Gaelic poetry first found a man who, feeling the spirit of the old land, gave to the English dress of his renderings something of the figure, majesty and beauty of the originals. In the Citizen, under the editorial care of Torrens McCullagh and W. Eliot Hudson, Gaelic was not forgotten; and the Nation, under Davis, as we all know, lost no opportunity of advancing its claims. Two volumes of Edward Walsh, “The Popular Poetry of Ireland” and “The Jacobite Reliques,” were amongst the most important additions made during the Forties, are, perhaps, the most faithful of all early renderings, and in some few cases the best English versions in existence. The two volumes of John O’Daly dealing with the “Poets and Poetry of Munster,” the first versified by Mangan, the second by Dr. Sigerson, are worthy of all praise, but the translations too often look forced, and consequently are unpleasing. The labours of men like Dr. Reeves, Henthorn Todd, Petrie, O’Donovan, and, above all, O’Curry, need no remark from me. Their work was generally confined to an Irish literature as yet an unknown land to most of our scholars, an Irish literature which we shall refer to later on. Of Dr. MacHale’s renderings of Moore and Homer I need say little either, save that while some few of his melodies have become popular, the vast majority of then never can – firstly, because they are rather stiff, and, secondly, because they are too closely an imitation of the form of the original, and, lastly and principally, because they are in a style of versification almost entirely foreign to Irish literature and unusual to Gaelic ears. The vowel sounds get little or no scope in them, and an Irish ear reveres the full swing of those letters, even in English. The continuity of Gaelic is preserved by the illustrious name of John O’Mahony, whose whole-souled sympathy with the tongue of his race inspired the name which defines the movement of ’67 for ever in history. John O’Mahony, to my mind, fulfils all the essentials of an Irish National leader. To a thorough desire for entire Irish independence he united an enthusiastic reverence for the past of his nation, and added to his genius as an organiser the culture and knowledge of a scholar. Proud of his nation, his greatest pride was that he spoke her language, and was able to leave for those less fortunate the best translation ever made of Keating’s marvellous “History.” The Nation and the Irishman did their part by the language, and the Shamrock in its earlier days did likewise, but it was reserved for our generation to begin the completion of the work which proselytiser, Catholic bishop and national school had each, after a different fashion, formed and fostered. From the proselytiser, with alien sympathies, from the national schools, with thinly-masked ideas of the same type, we could expect little interest in Irish; but from those to whom a whole century of ignorance, emigration, and absence of civil rights had been suffered we were entitled to look for help. We did not get it, and to its absence year by year, aided undoubtedly to an enormous extent by the horrors of ’48, we may attribute all the waning which has marked the latter half of the century. Some little semblance of interest in the tongue of the Gael marked all the generations before ours; but we, with our backs turned to everything native, with our eyes perpetually on the Parliament of the foreigner, dazzled by the prospect of a “Union of Hearts,” forgot everything but the hour, and were gradually drifting, drifting into mere automata, till the crash came, and in the rending of the veil we saw at last what was before us, and paused.

I have endeavoured to trace the continuity of interest in matters Gaelic, from the siege of Limerick to our times, amongst the English-speaking part of our population. Through all that period of two hundred years the Gaelic tongue has never ceased to produce, at least, poets; but until recently they have mostly sung unnoticed. John O’Cullane, the author of the “Lament for Timoleague,” is, possibly, the latest Gaelic writer of whom one will find any account in books; but of such men as Raftery, or Barrett, or MacSweeney, one must depend for information on the traditions preserved in their native regions. They all existed within the present century, but little of their work has yet found its way into print, although Dr. Hyde considers Raftery the greatest of all modern Gaelic poets. I would point out that while we have had many translations from Irish into English during the century the amount of original or translated work in Irish has been comparatively small, and only in these immediate days of noticeable importance or voluminousness. Outside of Father O’Sullivan’s translation of “The Imitation of Christ,” and O’Fianachty’s Irish rendering of Maria Edgeworth, the amount of modern Irish prose had been very scant until within the last few years, and the poetry, though most abundant, was still not particularly in evidence either. Like its various predecessors, the Ossianic Society had concerned itself only with the past, the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, in its initial stages, made some attempt to get in touch with Irish-speaking Ireland, but the internal broils that ensued stayed the work. The Gaelic Union did rather better, for besides providing text books, it initiated the Gaelic Journal, which undoubtedly laid the foundation of the literature, to which I invite your attention.