Irish literature

“ The love for literature of a traditional type, in song, in poem, in saga, was, I think, more nearly universal in Ireland than in any country of western Europe, and hence that which appears to me to be of most value in ancient Irish literature is not that whose authorship is known, but rather the mass of traditional matter which seems to have grown up almost spontaneously, and slowly shaped itself into the literary possession of an entire nation. ”

“ Irishmen are often taunted with the fact that their history is yet unwritten, but that the Irish, as a nation, have been careless of their past is refuted by the facts which I have mentioned. A people who alone in Europe preserved, not in dry chronicles alone, but illuminated and adorned with all that fancy could suggest in ballad, and tale, and rude epic, the history of the mound-raising period, are not justly liable to this taunt. Until very modern times, history was the one absorbing pursuit of the Irish secular intellect, the delight of the noble, and the solace of the vile. ”

“ Ireland has contributed to our literature her peculiar strain of humour and of romance, tinged with the melancholy of her historic ill-fortune. The graver tone and gentler view she will never lose, for they belong to a people who will always have behind them the memory of the centuries of that undeserved suffering which opens the eyes of men to the nature of the human tragedy. But the distinctive Irish quality may henceforward be shot with a brighter thread catching the light from her assured future as a nation. ”

“ Irish poetry and Irish stories were made to be spoken or sung, while English literature, alone of great literatures, because the newest of them all, has all but completely shaped itself in the printing-press. In Ireland to-day the old world that sang and listened is, it may be for the last time in Europe, face to face with the world that reads and writes, and their antagonism is always present under some name or other in Irish imagination and intellect. ”

“ Modern Irish literature is treated with a brevity and an injustice which are nothing short of contemptible; and what little there is concerning the new Irish renaissance is scattered here and there in the articles on English literature! ”

“ When Irish literature, in Miltonic language, "reassembles its afflicted powers," it will find a good many gaps in its ranks: not so much that our poets, in any considerable number, have been executed, assassinated, or banished, as that a fell disillusionment has seized upon many Irishmen with respect to the realization of long-cherished ideals, and in particular the ideal of a Gaelic-speaking Ireland. ”

“ A general air of distinction may be claimed for Irish literature, so consciously maintained that when any of its writers, however fresh and vigorous, shows signs of popularity on railway book-stalls, he begins to lose caste and ceases to be spoken of in that inner circle from which proceeds his true reward of recognition. ”

“ It is the outcome of a desire and a want which have been long felt that the Irish people should know accurately and intimately everything connected with the past history of their country, with its literature, its music, its antiquities, and its art. The same idea which is now taking visible shape, presented itself to the minds of the leaders of the Young Ireland movement fifty years ago, when a series of little books was published which have since been the companions, the inspiration, and the delight of two generations of Irishmen at home and abroad. ”

“ It is not, [13] believe me, that I would not give anything to see Irish literature and Irish drama taking a good place, as it ought to do, and several of the authors you name I admire extremely. It is only from the practical and paying point of view that I feel it to be rather rash. Plays cost more, I take it, to produce than novels, and one would feel rather rash if one brought out a novel at one’s own risk. ”

“ The bias and ignorance of English historians and of many professed students of Irish history, who continue to write without a first-hand knowledge of its sources, have also reacted unfavourably upon the study of Irish literature. Slowly, however, the fact is becoming recognised in ever wider circles that the vernacular literature of ancient Ireland is the most primitive and original among the literatures of Western Europe, and that in its origins and development it affords a most fascinating study. ”

“ What it may do in the future, if Irish again becomes a tongue of literature in lofty poetry, lies on the knees of the gods. I wish it well, but such a development seems now too late. The Irish genius, if it is to speak in drama, in narrative poetry or in an epic, must speak, if it is to influence or to charm the world beyond the Irish shore, in a world-language like English, and of international as well as of Irish humanity. ”

“ There can be no mention of the five hundred years of Irishmen’s fame in Europe as classical scholars, philosophers, saints, merchants, or travellers. The centuries of Ireland’s history as a free and independent country are blotted out, and he may catch no glimpse of his people save in the various phases of their material subjugation. During his entire course he can turn [47] no wandering eye on an Ireland that had any art, literature, or industry of its own—a place where anything may have happened on its own account, or where any interest may lie detached from an English book of chronology. ”

“ The exact extent of the direct influence of Irish literature upon the development of other nations is hard to trace, chiefly because the influence of Ireland upon the Continent was at its height at the time when none of the languages of modern Europe except Welsh and Anglo-Saxon had reached a stage at which they might be used for literary purposes, and a Continental literature on which the Irish one might have influence simply did not exist. ”

“ With a memory running back over six decades of reading, I confidently affirm that there are scattered in magazines and annuals, in luckless books neglected in the hurry of our political march, in publications the very names of which are forgotten by the present generation, Irish stories of surpassing interest, fit to win and fascinate young Irish readers, which would not degrade or debase them, but make them better men and better Irishmen. ”

“ There is no dry-as-dust. The extracts comprise mythology, legend, folklore, poems, songs, street-ballads, essays, oratory, history, science, memoirs, fiction, travel, drama, wit, and humour. The vast majority are chosen as being specially expressive of Irish nationality. Choice is made both from the Gaelic and the Anglo-Irish literatures, but the ancient Gaelic literature is given solely in translation. ”

“ These are patronized, in the main, by poor people of literary taste, who can not afford satisfactory libraries of their own. There is now a revival of Irish literature in Great Britain as well as in Ireland itself. Many English and Scotch firms have taken to printing Irish prose and poetry in the English tongue, so that Irish authors are no longer confined, as they were, with a few exceptions, of old, to an insular constituency. Irish literary work of merit, when not strongly patriotic, sells readily in Great Britain to-day. ”

“ There is not in any ancient or mediæval literature anything to excel it in general interest. It is an historic gem that has been forgotten or overlooked for centuries. The indifference which the educated classes of the Irish people have heretofore shown about the ancient literature of their country was one of the most shocking, sickening symptoms of national degradation ever shown by any civilised people. ”

“ It is this poetic literature which constitutes the stumbling-block, as it constitutes also the glory, of early Irish history, for it cannot be rejected and it cannot be retained. It cannot be rejected, because it contains historical matter which is consonant with and illuminates the dry lists of the chronologist, and it cannot be retained, for popular poetry is not history; and the task of distinguishing In such literature the fact from the fiction—where there is certainly fact and certainly fiction—is one of the most difficult to which the intellect can apply itself. ”

“ On the other hand, Irish qualities of temperament and mind bear such fair fruit in literature and art as might be imagined springing from the Gallic stem but for the Roman graft. [148]
No trustworthy story can be put together from the myth, tradition, and conscious fiction which record the unprogressive [Pg 128] turbulence of pre-Christian Ireland. But the Irish character and capacities are clearly mirrored in this enormous Gaelic literature. Truculence and vanity pervade it, and a passion for hyperbole. A weak sense of fact and a lack of steady rational purpose are also conspicuous. ”

“ It seems much more probable that the Irish authors deliberately chose a method of making their work at once literary and suited to please a popular audience; they told their stories in plain prose, adding to them verse, possibly chanted by the reciters of the stories, so that while the prose told the story in simple language, the emotions of pity, martial ardour, and the like were awakened by the verse. They did not use the epic form, although their knowledge of classical literature must have made them familiar with it; the Irish epic form is Romance. ”

“ An almost universal acquaintance with a traditional literature was a leading trait amongst the Irish down to the last century, when every barony and almost every townland still possessed its poet and reciter, and song, recitation, music, and oratory were the recognised amusements of nearly the whole population. ”

“ We have already pointed out that as early as the Old Irish period nameless Irish poets were singing the praises of nature in a strain which sounds to our ears peculiarly modern. At the present time it is difficult to say how much of what is really poetic in Irish literature has come down Nature poetry. to us. Our MSS. preserve whole reams of the learned productions of the filid which were so much prized in medieval Ireland, but it is, generally speaking, quite an accident if any of the delightful little lyrics entered in the margins or on blank spaces in the MSS. have remained. ”

“ Every people has at first its ideals, simple, sincere, and great, mingled with myths that stimulate the [Pg 71] imagination. Every young generation has similar wants, and will seek to satisfy them, if not here, then elsewhere, in a literature that debases the germing ideals, dwarfs the mind, and soils the imagination.
With roots deep struck in the soil, the literature of the Irish Gael and commingled races grew vigorously from its own stock and threw out luxuriant branches and fair blooms. ”

“ Once they began to be written down, a great body of romantic and historical written literature rapidly accumulated, consisting chiefly of prose tales. They are contained in our old manuscripts, from the Book of the Dun Cow downwards.
The chief use of popular tales all the world over was—and is—to amuse. The storyteller recited the narrative for his audience, who listened because it gave them pleasure. But in Ireland [Pg 75] the native stories were turned to another important use:—they were made to help in educating the people in the manner explained farther on. ”

“ In what I have to say of the work of the Irish poets, I am thinking of it solely as a part of English literature. I have in mind no political bias whatever, though I confess I have small admiration for extremists. During the last forty years Irishmen have written mainly in the English language, which assures to what is good in their compositions an influence bounded only by the dimensions of the earth. Great creative writers are such an immense and continuous blessing to the world that the locality of their birth pales in comparison with the glory of it, a glory in which we all profit. ”

“ Other nations exhibit these qualities in their literature, and Ireland herself is rich in writers who have furnished food for mirth. But her special pre-eminence resides in the possession of what, to adapt a famous phrase, may be called an anima naturaliter jocosa. Irish wit and Irish humor are a national inheritance. They are inherent in the race as a whole, independent of education or culture or comfort. The best Irish sayings are the sayings of the people ”

“ The literary aspect of the ancient literature of Ireland has not indeed been altogether neglected. It has been used to furnish themes on which modern poems can be written; ancient authority has been found in it for what is essentially modern thought: modern English and Irish poets have claimed the old Irish romances as inspirers, but the romances themselves have been left to the scholars and the antiquarians. ”

“ One secluded scholar has spent his manhood collecting our national records with a care and zeal which in any other country would compel the recognition and reward of the State; a group of scholars not connected, I think, except by the camaraderie of a kindred pursuit, have created a great revival in Gaelic literature; and the Irish press has not for a generation devoted so much thought to native literature and art, national customs and manners, as it does just now. ”

“ Then again, as to history, all the world knows that since the Flood the Irish have never done any thing else than make love, illicit whiskey, and beat each other. What nonsense, then, to talk about the ancient cultivation of the land, of its high rank in literature, and its excellence in art. A stone bishop, with a nose like a negro, and a crosier like a garden-rake, are the only evidences of our ancestors' taste in sculpture; and some doggrel verses in Irish, explaining how King Phelim O'Toole cheated a brother monarch out of his smallclothes, are about the extent of our historic treasures. ”