A BOOK OF THE MOMENT
GAELIC POETRY UNDER THE PENAL LAWS Lxcxv said that to write the history of Catholic Ireland under the Penal Laws a man must draw upon the annals of France, Austria and Spain ; and it is true that during the eighteenth century all the best Ggelie • blood sought a career overseas, leaving at home a mass of people gradually being driven down to serfdom, not even peasants in the proper sense, for they had no secure tenure of the land. Yet Lecky knew' about this underlying stratum of people, the part of Ireland in direct contact with the soil, only what he could read in English. Now comes along another Irish writer, not merely able to read Gaelic, but imbued with the spirit of a culture that has its roots very far back, long centuries before English was a language ; and he is able to show us that in the darkest hours mess agitabat molem, an intellectual life quickened the muddy lump. The moral of Mr. Corkery's book is that Gaelic Ireland in the eighteenth century had a future, because it retained conscious connexion with its past. Two earlier volumes by him, collections of short stories and sketches, throw much light on the Ireland of our day. Whoever wants to understand the struggle of 1919-21 ought to read The Hounds of Banba and learn how it looked to Sinn Fein. But this new work of literary study, though it has nothing authoritative or final about it, illuminates Irish history in its continuity. Mr. Corkery has in rare measure the gift of sympathetic interpretation, which excludes rancour, and other forms of narrowness. He can put things in their right place ; his vision is at no point limited to Ireland. But the case that he makes, to my mind successfully, is that Irish literature has to be judged by its own standards, and not by those which the Renaissance imposed. The point of special interest about Irish poetry is that it was a public institution with a social character ; it was essentially the product of schools. And he shows us the pathetic attempt of Gaelic Ireland, when it had become one obscure mass of peasantry, to preserve this institution—an instinctive effort to perpetuate what was most characteristic in the life of the race.
For, so long as there remained one unit of the loose knit fabric of States which made up Gaelic Ireland, poets were maintained at the public cost. Mr. W. F. Butler in his book on the Irish Confiscations quotes the letter of some. English statesman marking down 2,000 acres which the Maguires of Fermanagh set apart for the upkeep of their poets and chroniclers, " persons that merit no respect but rather dis- countenance from the State." After the Ulster Plantation the last trace of Gaelic rulers was gone, but Mr. Corkery brings out very well that for more than a century the Big House with its hospitality to some extent made good what bad been the tribal provision. The schools, however, did not and could not last so long as that, and the schools were the essence of the bardic tradition. Naturally, when poetry was a paying trade, men tried to keep it in the family ; apprenticeship was rarely granted outside the family pale, and the craft imposed its own technical rules, most difficult of observance. Since they were accredited official poets, it lay with them to admit or reject ; and both in diction and versification there was evolved an elaborate pedantry. But there was also definitely imposed the idea of style. Nothing in the world could be less like folk-song than the poetry of Gaelic Ireland in the sixteenth- century. In the seventeenth, when the bard was no longer unofficial, buttressed up by many con- servatisms, but depended upon individual patrons, he must please or starve ; and Mr. Corkery qUotes poems to show how grudgingly these experts consented to write what—so at least they said—nobody could fail to understand. Neither did they think that the bounty of their patrons was adequate to their deserts and their needs ; but they still had possible patrons to look to when Egan O'Rahillywas born, in the reign of Charles II. He saw the final overthrow of Catholic Ireland, and lived on far into the penal days ; but he wrote to the end as an
aristocrat for aristocrats—survivor of an order which took rank with the nobles, writing the praise and the deeds of great princes and great families ; and flinging his heart into passionate revilings and passionate lamentation of the changed Ireland.
O'Rahilly was perhaps the last of those who might be called professional poets : he had been trained in some survival of a bardic school, and was immensely erudite in genealogy ; and he looked to live by patrons. The typical poets of the penal days grew up when poverty was the native portion of Catholic Gaeldom and every man of them had his trade. Most were schoolmasters, clever boys who had got Greek and Latin and English in a hedge-school, and set up on their own. But others were farmers—one or two even gentlemen farmers—and one at least was a publican, " Merry John O'Toomey " of County Limerick, who hung up a signboard with a hearty quatrain on it, to say that any wandering bard would be welcome, even though he lacked pence. The public-house, it may be added, "went broke." But few of the poets ever had anything to lose. They were peasants, as a class ; vagabonds often, about as virtuous as Villon. Yet the art which they practised was not a peasant art : it was academic. The schools were dead, the race of poet-professors was extinct ; but the instinct for the school survived, and they invented the Court of Poetry. At the summons of the leading poet of a district they would assemble, in the Big House, if one were hospitable, in the chief poet's barn (they called him the Sheriff) if it were good enough, or, failing these, in the tavern ; and there by rush lights, in the turf smoke, they would listen to the verses which this man or that, perhaps a passing visitor, had composed. In several places the Court had its register, a volume in which approved pieces were inscribed. There was no question of print. All this literature has been preserved, only in manuscript or by memory ; not a few pieces have come down only by word of mouth, transcribed in these last years from the dictation of some mountainy man who could neither read nor write. Yet there were masses of it. Of all the poets the most typical is the most popular—Owen Roe O'Sullivan, born about 1750 near Killarney, who set up a high school at eighteen and before he was twenty was ejected from it for trouble about a girl. Then he turned " spalpeen," or wandering spade labourer.
On the roads with his fellows : and so it went on for years. Now and again he would set up a school ; but always there would be trouble of one sort or other. At one big house he was employed as a labourer ; some one wanted a letter written and the red-headed ploughboy volunteered : the letter went off in four versions—Greek, Latin, English and Irish. He was promoted then to tutor in the household, and there was more trouble—bad trouble, seemingly, for the safest way out was to enlist. He took to the sea and was in Rodney's fleet that defeated Grasse : wrote an English poem in praise of Rodney that brought him to the Admiral's cabin. There he was asked what he wanted, and he said, " My discharge," and was told he would not get it. But he slithered somehow into the army, and out of the army by creating footsores on himself, and so back to schoolmastering in Kerry, where he died of a drinking bout after fever at the age of thirty-six. Even to-day his exploits and his fame are a legend throughout Munster.
They were not all quite so disreputable. Pierce Fitzgerald, one of the most notable, was a man of substance, so respectable that he changed his religion to save his property for his children : we have his poems apologizing. But a couple of others—Red Donough Macnamara and Andy Magrath, " the Jolly Pedlar," also became Protestants, for a while anyhow, to get the price of a drink. Macnamara, who had been put out of a school, even denounced to the magistrate the man who succeeded him in that illegal and contraband occupation. Yet this choice blackguard wrote (in Hamburg of all places, for he was a seaman also) the most beautiful of all eighteenth century Gaelic lyrics, " The Fair Hills of Ireland."
I cannot pretend even to understand their poetry for the most part, still less to judge it. But Mr. Corkery is mani- festly keenly appreciative of literature in many kinds, and he derives delight from these verses. The rest of us may remember that long education is needed to enter into a literary tradition which is alien to our own. Anybody can enjoy Homer—but Pindar ? For that matter, anybody can enjoy French prose, but how many Englishmen really feel as a Frenchman does about much of what by French standards is the best French poetry ? In any case, the abstract value of this literature to the literary critic is not the question : my point is that from 1700 to 1800 there was in the province of Munster (where Gaelic culture survived strongest) a continuous production of elaborate verse having- on it all the marks of a school. The typical form was the Aisling or Vision, a theme that recurred, like the Crucifixion, in Italian painting. There was the description of Erin, the beautiful damsel, poverty-stricken, ragged and oppressed, and the picture of the promised deliverer—a Prince from over the water. Jacobite poetry, but how unlike the Scots Mr. Corkery knows that well. The " intimacy, the warmth of feeling, the directness of expression," are far from the Irish poems. " Bonny Prince Charlie " was a living man for Scotland : to Ireland the Stuarts were " far away people." But, as Mr. Corkery says :—
" On the other hand, Ireland is in all the aisling poems ; the only lines in them that strike fire are those of her sorrows—her princes dead, her strongholds broken, her lands in the possession of churls, her children scattered across the seas."
We shall not understand rightly the Ireland whose filth and misery Swift described, Berkeley pitied, Young surveyed, and Maria Edgeworth made living and comical, until we realize that pride survived under all that squalor :—
" 'Tis not the poverty I detest Nor being down for ever, But the insult which follows That no leeches can cure."
So the wastrel sailor of Rodney's fleet put it in a verse. The Ireland that was down then has in our days struggled to its feet—for good or ill. This book is one of the things that teach us to envisage rightly what has so often been regarded as a prolonged jacquerie or rising of the serfs against their masters. The Hidden Ireland was an Ireland that did not regard itself as naturally or historically servile : its poets probably did more than any other class to preserve its sense of right to freedom ; and it is only justice that Ireland of to-day, with full opportunities to justify its pride of race, should recognize her debt to these obscure torch-bearers.
In the meanwhile, our debt to Mr. Corkery demands that one should say how much curious and interesting social history, in his pictures of the herdic schools, and how much acute literary criticism, especially concerning the effects of the Renaissance on European literature and art, has been passed by without the least mention, in this review of a really notable and valuable book, which is also most likeable.
STEPHEN GWYNN.
Previous page
