A Recent Irish Literature II

This Recent Irish Literature of which I desire to speak is the growth of the last ten or fifteen years. Begun at a time when all attention was centred in latter-day politics, it has outlived the cold weather and contempt invariably awarded it by political leaders. It has grown mainly through the labours of a few men whom Ireland will one day delight to honour, and with the awakened spirit which is every day becoming more apparent, it will yet, with God’s good help, redeem the follies of the years gone by, and give Ireland a literature that no assimilating Saxon or enlightened foreigner can make or mistake for anything but what it is.

This literature I shall divide into two classes, original and collected, for I hold myself justified in treating as recent all the stories, songs, and poems hitherto speeding to forgetfulness with the passing generations, which have been collected and printed within our time. The prose is, of course, almost wholly folk-lore, and from the folklorist’s point invaluable, but of course considered as literature of quite a different value. One does not expect intricate plot or continued power in a folk-tale, but many of the plots, if we may so call them, of our Gaelic folk-tales are interesting, and occasionally most original. I would direct you to one of these tales translated, almost word by word, from the original, and I would ask your attention to as beautiful a bit of descriptive writing as I am acquainted with. It is taken from the longest story in Douglas Hyde’s First Book, “Leabhar Sgeulaigheachta.” The story is entitled, “Giolla na gCor nDubh,” or “The Black-Footed Fellow,” and retails his adventures in many lands. In this particular extract we get a picture of a peasant waiting for the approach of midnight and the consequent advent of the fairies. I think the picture a real gem of word painting: –

“Giolla went accordingly to the old rath when the night was fallen, and he stood with his elbow leaning on an old grey stone waiting until the midnight came. The moon rose up slowly, and it was like a ball of fire behind him, and there was a white mist rising from the meadows and the bottoms through the coolness of the night after the very great heat of the day. The night was as quiet as a lake when not a gust of wind is about to stir a wave upon it, and there wasn’t a sound to be heard but the humming of the chafers, as they flew by from time to time, or the sharp sudden cry of the wild geese going from lake to lake, half a mile up in the air over his head, or the shrill whistle of the feadog or the fillbin rising and descending, descending and rising, as is usual with them of a quiet night. There were thousands of bright stars shining above, and there was a little frost about that left the earth under the foot white and brittle. He stood there for an hour, for two hours, for three hours, and the frost grew in intensity, so much so that he heard the breaking of the short blades of grass under his feet as often as he stirred it. He was thinking in his own mind that the fairies would not come that night, and he had almost determined to return home when he heard a noise approaching, and he knew on the moment what it was. It grew and grew; at first it was like the breaking of the waves on a stony strand, then like the falling of a great waterfall, and at last like a heavy storm in the tops of the trees, then in one great whirling blast the fairy breeze swept into the rath towards him, and the fairy host were all around.”

This will give you an idea of what description in Irish is like. Of course one cannot apply to folk-lore the same criticism as to the literature evolved from centuries of practice and polish. One needs to be a great believer to take any of those tales literally, but one point stands out pre-eminently in them, their singular purity of tone and idea. I do not claim for them an immaculate freedom from taint. There is not lacking in some few of them traces of the lower senses and sentiments, but where these lapses occur they are faults of the individual of the tale, rather than of the tale itself. One does not reckon Shakespeare outside the pale because many of his characters are, to say the least, men and women of the world. So, also, in some of these folk-tales one comes across items and individuals somewhat free. One gets away from the hum and hurry of these later times in those old tales into a world full of the free life and fresh air of far-off days, green fields, high mountains, dark caverns, deep rivers, much magic, mystery, and exaggeration, but never a breath of the insidiousness which flavours so much of the later literature of the world. Coarseness to modern minds and plain speech one certainly does find, often just a trifle too plain for our highly-polished veneer of decency. We meet the primitive Irish peasant who sees nothing wrong in calling things by their proper names, because that fungus called civilisation has not rotted his heart or warped his imagination. To the book I have already referred to, the “Leabhar Sgeulaigheachta,” we are indebted for the tale called “Tadhg O’Cathain agus an Corpan” in Mr. Yeats’ “Fairy and Folk-Tales,” of which I have spoken above.

Folklorists we have always had with us – Croker and Lover, Carleton and Kennedy, Lady Wilde, and in these days McNally and Yeats, but they have confined their work to English. Little attempt was made to gather the great treasure of Gaelic lore until the starting of the Gaelic Journal, when the work was begun by Mr. R. J. O’Mulrenin in his fine tale, “The Fellow Who Shook with Fear.” This was in the first volume, and since then the field has been occupied by many diligent workers, of whom, beyond all question An Craoibhin Aoibhinn (Dr. Douglas Hyde), is by far the greatest worker. He represents Connacht in the work, and represents her ably. Poor Patrick O’Leary was just starting to do for Munster what the Craoibhin did for the West when death struck him down. His book, “Sgeulaigheacht Cuige Mumhan,” though written in a dialect peculiar to South-West Cork, is so well annotated in classic Gaelic that one has little difficulty in following the trend of each tale. The stories are, of course, all Munster tales, and “Paidin O’Dalaigh” in particular will repay any trouble one unaccustomed to the dialect may meet in its reading. It is a pity that the author’s religious observance of every little peculiarity of dialect has made him stick rigidly to the accents of his own neighbourhood, for the fact may prevent the book from becoming as popular as it might in districts where the language has, perhaps, not preserved all the copiousness claimed for Beara and Bantry. Let us not be taken as suggesting any wide variety of Irish dialects, but one can readily understand how little the language of Dorset would appeal to one accustomed to the English of any other part of Britain. For Ulster the principal workers have been Mr. Joseph H. Lloyd, who has garnered in Armagh, Monaghan, Meath, and Donegal, and Messrs. John C. Ward and Peter Toner McGinley, whose work has lain principally in Donegal. No collected volume of any of their work has yet appeared, but to the pages of the Gaelic Journal many folk tales, songs, &c, have been contributed. Ulster Irish, as a rule, differs very little from that of Connacht, and consequently the student finds it no difficulty to glide through the many excellent tales which have been furnished to us from the firesides of the North. Many of them, of course, are family relatives, if not exactly the same as those one finds in the various books of the Craoibhin, but some little change in incident makes them different. In fact, the reader of Irish folk-lore, as told by the writers in English, will find most of his old acquaintances turning up in those salvages from the wreck of what must have been a great freight, before the waves of fortune shattered the barque that bore it.

The ”Leabhar Sgeulaigheachta” represents but a portion of Dr. Hyde’s labours to preserve the literature of the people from eternal night. His “Cois na Teineadh,” or “Beside the Fire,” and more recently, “An Sgeulaidhe Gaodhaolach,” contains stories even worthier of attention than his previous efforts. Such tales as “Liam O’Ruanaigh,” “The Tailor and the Three Beasts,” “The Eagle of the Golden Feathers,” “The Ghost of the Tree,” or “The Priest and the Bishop,” though they may not appeal to the fastidiousness founded on decadence, ought at least to win favour from those who see in the Brothers Grimm or Hans Andersen subjects for admiration. But even the Craoibhin has not exhausted this fireside literature. Away in the hills of Connemara lives, to quote his own words, “Domhnall MacMhiohil, mhic Dhomhnaill O’Fotharta, do chlannaibh Bhaoiscne, oide scoile ‘san gCaladh in Iar gConnactha,” or “Donal O’Foharty, of the clanna Baoiscne, school teacher in Calow in West Connaught.” Donal is an old man now, but all his life has been spent beneath the sky and amid the Twelve Pins which through all the ages have mirrored themselves in that land of lakes. There still the Gaelic rings melodious in fair and harvest fields; there on the Sundays and holidays the congregations yet yield up their hearts in the fashion of their fathers; there the foreign song or the music of the Gall has not yet pierced, and the audiences round the winter hearths still shudder at the tales of the phooka, marvel at the might of the giants, revel in the splendours of the slaugh sidhe, and, possibly, hope some day to catch a leprechaun. Amongst them Domhnall O’Foharty has moved, and filled his soul with their songs and stories, noted their beliefs, and made a little book of all that delighted them. Even though his neighbourhood has preserved much of its olden characteristics, he notes a change.

“How different,” he says, “the world from what it was long ago, when we would be satisfied with simple fun among the neighbours when they gathered together when the night drew night. There they amused each other, and the youngsters heard the tales of the olden days. It’s many a night I’ve spent in such a fashion myself, and I like to go back in my own mind and think of the people who used to gather and of the talk and the tales that circled round us then. To-day the people are gone, and the old customs they followed are fast going after them, but here I will set down a little of what is left.”

This little is his book, “Siamsa an Gheimridh,” or “Amusements of the Winter,” which was given to the Irish public in 1892. It includes folk-tales, folk-songs, riddles, charms, and proverbs. Of the songs I shall speak later, the stories are in some cases replicas of ones with which we are familiar, such as “An Bheirt Dhearbhrathar,” or the “Two Brothers,” which is our friend, “Little Fairly,” of Samuel Lover, and “Owney and Owney na Peek,” of Griffin. Others, however, like that entitled, “Deirdre” (not the famous classic), are quite distinct tales. Of course the majority of them are concerned with the daoine maithe, or good people, and as an example I would direct you to “Diarmuid Sugach an chaoi ar cuir se ar na Daoinibh Maithe,” or “Merry Dermot, and the way He Played with the Good People.” These stories will be translated and published in our columns later on. Other fine stories, but much longer, are “Leaduidhe na Luaithe,” or “The Lazy Fellow,” and “The Leprechaun.”

These tales some may say are too simple to go before the world as a nation’s literature, but as I hope to show later on, they possess all the essentials of a literature – love of Nature, a high ideal of manliness, a noble ideal of women, and a thorough appreciation of the beautiful in sound and vision. If these are not underlying fundamentals of literature in its highest sense, I know not on what it should be built. One will never find brute force triumphing, or vice victorious in those tales, and though real life does not always give the goal to the right, the underlying belief in truth and justice, evident from all these tales, argues a temperament capable of the highest flights of romance or poetry.