A Recent Irish Literature V

I have thus endeavoured to give you an idea of a literature which has grown up around us, almost without the knowledge of the majority of us. About 1891 a few enthusiasts conceived the idea of again attempting the work begun and left unfinished by Young Ireland. Around them they gathered what has become a yearly increasing circle. Some few books of value have been the result, but the greater result was one not looked for by the renaissants. The idea of making an Irish literature in English stirred some few to the thought of an Irish literature in Irish, to continue the chain which links us with a history whose beginning is lost in the depths of time. The great gap embracing the Penal Days and all the years between them and ours was, as far as the world was aware, a vast blank in Irish literature. These collections with which I have dealt cover part of the chasm, further labours will completely bridge it, and where the traditional lays and stories end, the continuance is taken up by the men to-day endeavouring to produce still a literature for Ireland. There are many people professing an interest in the Irish language who tell you they would learn it if there were anything to be read in it at the end of their labour. To such as these I trust this little effort of mine may be some proof that their doubts are, to say the least, not on the best foundations. There are others who sneer at the poverty of Gaelic literature – to such I would quote the words of Dr. Hyde:

“If anyone is still found,” he writes, to repeat Macaulay’s hackneyed taunt about our race never having produced a great poem, let him ask himself if it is likely that a country where, for one hundred years after Aughrim and the Boyne, teachers, who for long before that had been in great danger, were systematically knocked on the head or sent to a jail for teaching; where children were seen learning their letters with chalk on their father’s tombstones, other means being denied them; where the possession of a manuscript might lead to the owner’s death or imprisonment, so that many valuable books were buried in the ground or hidden to rot in the walls; whether such a country were a soil on which an epic or anything else could flourish. How in the face of all this the men of the eighteenth century preserved in manuscript so much of the Ossianic poetry as they did, and even rewrote or redacted portions of it, as Michael Comyn is said to have done to ‘Ossian in the Land of the Young,’ is to me nothing short of amazing.”

I shall not stop to discuss the suitability of Irish for all the purposes of fiction. Until a few years ago an erroneous idea existed that Irish was an impossible tongue for the teaching of science. That error has been dispelled. It would be outside our province to suggest what might be utilised by future Gaelic writers for material – their own tastes more than anything else will suggest subjects. There exists in manuscript historical tales sufficient to fill, according to O’Curry, 4,000 pages of the size of the “Annals of the Four Masters.” Of tales about Finn, Ossian, and the Fenians, material exists sufficient to fill 3,000 pages, and in addition there exists a number of imaginative stories, neither historical nor Fenian, computed at around 5,000 pages, not to speak of the romances of the last three centuries. All these certainly point to a mine of wealth that, rewritten to suit the changes of the language, would place ours on a level with the literature of any language. Something of this nature has been done by the publication by David Comyn of “MacGniomhantha Finn,” and, within the last few days, of Mr. T. O’Neill Russell’s “Boromha Laighean.” Your own minds will conjure up for you what these old tales and stories might become treated by some Gaelic Scott or Victor Hugo. The everyday life of Ireland can, at least, furnish the same material to the Irish writer as to him who endeavours to paint our people properly in English. Of the nature of these old and locked-up treasures an idea may be gleaned from the “Silva Gaedilica” of S. Hayes O’Grady, or from the various extracts in Dr. Hyde’s splendid little book, “The Story of Early Gaelic Literature,” to which I am indebted for much of the basis of these papers, and in his great work, “The Literary History of Ireland.”

It is rather labouring the question to point out how much we should gain by a general adoption of Gaelic. Firstly, we should emancipate ourselves from the servitude and soullessness which an entire dependence on a foreign literature entails. However national one may remain, the presence of a shoal of magazine literature in our midst must have an effect. We can only counteract it by producing something ourselves; and a magazine in Gaelic, with modern themes and studies of the everyday life of Ireland, in Irish, would be the greatest barrier we could possibly raise against the tide of threepenny monthlies which threatens to turn the tastes of our youth into insipid and colourless channels, with no higher ideals than the study of criminals’ skulls or the relative size of the British Empire and some particular journal’s circulation. Besides, a Gaelic market at home would provide a field for our writers, who are forced away, to become the drudges of the Saxon, to write against their convictions, and sink, in the struggle for bread, the abilities that, directed in some proper channels, might produce a masterpiece. By the adoption of Gaelic we will gradually wean ourselves from fashions and habits that have grown on us unknowingly, we will become what we claim to be, and strengthen to an almost incalculable extent our claim to individual nationhood.

But this change is not to be wrought in a day or a year, nor in a lifetime possibly, and what shall we do in the meantime? As I observed in the beginning of this series, I think “Knocknagow” an exact and faithful transcript of Irish life, and I will go so far as to say that some of Frank Fahy’s poems could be written by no one but an Irishman. Are we to kill off the people capable of producing work like this? Are we to discourage an attempt to give the English-speaking portion of our race something representative of themselves? Let us say what we will, no man’s ideal of Irish nationhood will be lowered by reading Davis or Mitchel. No man will be the less an Irishman because the lines of Mangan and Williams and Casey and O’Donnell surge through his memory. No man can be false to Ireland if he follows their teaching. They have not, perhaps, given us distinctly national literature, but they have given us a Nationalist one, and the horizon of a free Ireland was before their eyes as they wrote. Let us look around to-day and weigh the position of affairs – two millions at least of our population can never hope to be able to appreciate a Gaelic literature. Are we going to deprive them of a substitute, even though a bad one, in English? If we do, their children will not be even as Irish as themselves. For a generation or two yet we must have Irish writers in English, just as till we are independent we shall have to use English in our daily life. It is a narrow view, considering the circumstances, to say that all effort must be concentrated in purely Gaelic channels. It means that men who otherwise might do good, men with sympathies wholly Irish, are to be shut off from all participation in the uprise of the nation because fortune did not favour them with a Gaelic mother, and consequently cannot reach above mediocrity in the language of their own land. Mr. John MacNeill, writing in the New Ireland Review in 1894, altogether discounts the idea of an Anglo-Irish literature, and looks down on “third-rate efforts in English,” but to my mind we provide something for those who, through no fault of theirs, are unable to grasp the beauties of Gaelic literature. I shall not here discuss the existence of such an Anglo-Irish school, but it will be manifest from the few extracts I have given that anything ambitioning the title of “Irish style” in English must be simple and direct. No mystification, no introspective or metaphysical ramblings can pass current for Celtic style or spirit. The Celt to-day is as great a believer as ever. He, no doubt, has lost much of the simplicity, most of the superstition, and a great measure of the optimism of old times, but, in the main, he is the same individual who has been contesting the supremacy of this island for centuries. This is true of the Irishman who has come within the influence of English ideas; it is a million times truer of the men beyond the Shannon and the Galtees, the clansmen of Erris and Innisowen. For them, looking westward over the tumbling waves of the Atlantic, Hy Brasil still comes up upon the sunset, for them still the raths and duns are musicful, the banshee wails and the phooka sweeps through the lonely, leafy valleys. For them still the Sluagh Sidhe come in eddying circles up the dusty roads in the summertime, and fairy hands still shake the reeds beside the rivers. Amongst these people and in their thoughts is the real heart of Ireland, the Ireland untouched by time, still fresh and verdant. The key to the heart is the Irish language. It will open to the writer all the manifold charms that have won the commendation even of bitter enemies. Something of its glow and glamour can be represented in English, but only by men whose knowledge has been won by personal contact with them. Through no translation can that soul or spirit be infused. I do not seek to claim as an end an Anglo-Irish literature. I only point it out as one of the roads, and the surest road that can be travelled by those long disassociated from Gaelic thought and treasure. Its presence and popularity can in no wise injure the fair demesne to which it leads. It will induce many to know more of the real material, where the study incidental to the knowledge might at first deter them. I have endeavoured by Anglo-Irish means to give you some idea of the value of this literature. You may take it that, charming as some of those things have been even in English, the best of them conveys but a very slight idea of the melodiousness and merit of the original. It should be the glory of our time that we have seen the spring of a new Irish literature, let it be our boast also we have done all that we might to secure for it a full and abundant harvest.

WM. ROONEY.

(AN CRIOCH.)