BOOKS.

BARDS OF THE GAEL AND GALL.*

Dn. SIGERSON is a very ingenious and painstaking man. Be has translated a large number of Gaelic poems into the original metres, and, as the essence of Irish poetic form seems to have resided in a highly complicated system of interwoven assonances, which he represents by rhymes, it is easy to judge of the difficulty of his task. Rhyme in Irish poetry merely concerns the vowels. The author of Seventy Years of Irish • Bards of the Gael and Gall Examples of the Poetic Literature of Erinn : Done into English after the Metres and Modes of the Gael. By George Sigerson, M.D.. so.. President of the National Literary Society of Ireland. London : T. Fisher 'Life tells a story of a. street musician, for whom his brother, J. S. Le Fanu, wrote a ballad. One stanza ended with the

lines :—

" So Paddy the hero he played them a jig,

He screwed up his pipes till they roared like a pig."

Paddy, the minstrel, was delighted with the poem, but took exception to the metaphor in this couplet. "So, your honour, I made bowld to change it, and I'll sing it this way : 'So Paddy the hero, he played them a jig,

He screwed up the pipes till they roared like a nymph.'

You see, your honour, the comparison's more dacent and the rhyme's just as good." So it is by the canons of Irish metre. Rhyme is perfect not only between similar vowels, but between the broad vowels, "a," "o," and "u," and the short ones, " i " and " e " (it must be remembered that in Irish vowels are really broad). The first stanza of the "Groves of Blarney" is in pure Irish rhyme :— " The Groves of Blarney

They look so charming Down by tho purling Of the babbling brooks, Planted with posies That spontaneous grow there All set in order By the sweet silent nooks."

But Dr. Sigerson, writing in English, has used consonantal

rhyme, single, double, and triple, to represent the original assonances. The result of such straining the vocabulary is in some measure to obscure the poetry. Tribute is, however, due to his ingenuity, which displays itself to most advantage in the rendering of " MacConglinn's Vision," a very curious poem of the twelfth century, which probably suggested passages in the "Land of Cokaigne." It describes a wonder- ful castle :—

" Dry beef was the door of it, Bran bread was the floor of it,

Wheycurds were the posts."

Ruddy warders rosily, Welcomed us right cosily To the fire and rest ; Seven coils of sausages Twined in twisted passages Round each brawny breast."

But the ordinary English reader, though he may be interested to get a notion of the earliest rhymed metre that was written in Europe, will be chiefly solicitous about the poetry. There is no question about it that Ireland had, long before any nation of Western Europe, a developed art of

verse ; or at all events that it had one, when all other litera- tures had been engulfed by the spreading of Roman influence, which never crossed the Irish Channel. All the rhetorical artifices were understood, recognised, and even classified by commentators. One poet of the sixth or seventh century experimented with Gaelic, as Spenser did with English, inventing new word-forms and resuscitating archaisms. In short, there was a literature, conscious of its own importance to the point of writing criticism. What was that literature worth P In the matter of literary form, it would appear to have been excellent. The musical effect of its assonances we cannot criticise ; but competent judges declare that no system of versi- fication is more agreeable to the ear. The remarkable thing is that the bards deliberately chose it in preference to consonantal rhyme which they also understood. Dr. Sigerson quotes

an elaborately rhymed stanza from the Thin Bo Cuaiigne, which he dates as early as the sixth century. If he be right, it would be difficult to resist his conclusion that rhyme was diffused through Europe by Irish monks, who in-

troduced it into Latin hymns of their own composition. The structure of poetry they also had fully mastered by a very early date. In " Cuchulainn's Lament for the Slaying of Ferdiad " a refrain is used with admirable skill. Of their style it is impossible to judge by any transla- tion, least of all by a translation so hampered as this one ; but it is not likely that skill in words would lag behind skill in the architecture of a poem. One thing is quite clear from Dr. Sigerson's translation, that the exuberance of diction which has been accounted characteristic of Irish poetry did not become marked till a late period,—perhaps not till the seventeenth century. Since then, though true and beautiful poetry has been written, it is almost all marred by this lack of restraint. " Mabel ni Kelly," a fine lyric by O'Carolan, the last of famous Irish bards (he died in 1738}, has half a dozen of the most hackneyed metaphors, but it has also one beantit ul phrase to describe a bright and lovely young woman, "Chord of music ringing after she has gone."

But there is a great gulf—not of time only—between O'Carolan's fluency and the stately reserve of Oisin's (or Ossian's) lament for Fiona and his heroes the Fianna :—

Long this night the clouds delay And long to me was yesternight; Long was the dreary day this day, Long, yesterday, the light.

Each day that comes to me is long : Not thus our wont to be of old, With never music, harp, nor song, Nor clang of battles bold."

There is neither wooing now, nor feats done, nor hunting, nor lore of the ancients, nor banquet, nor fighting ; dead and gone are the heroes. So in the last stanzas the poem's first line comes back, irregularly placed as a pathetic' burden :- "Long this night the clouds delay :

I raise their grave-cairns stone by stone,

For Fionn and Fianna passed away,

Ossian, left alone."

Ossian is the latest voice of the past, the protesting cry of a martial age against the Christian influence. Fiona is gone, he cries in another lyric, but the blackbird of Daricaon that Fionn brought with him overseas from Norway still sings, and its song recalls the deer's belling, the whirr of wings, the wind in the heather, the rustle among reeds, the cry of hounds, the eagles' barking; all the sounds that are unheard by the monk in his cloister :—

" The mountain, not the cell, they sought, Great Fionn and the Fianna fleet; Than tinkle of the bell, they thought The blackbird's song more sweet."

There is noble poetry in the lays of the Deirdre cycle, but their effect is lost without the complete story, which is finely dramatic, though we see no ground for Dr. Sigerson's view

that it was actually composed as a drama. Of the Christian poems, the most striking is certainly St. Patrick's rough chant, "The Warder's Cry." A touching interest attaches to two stanzas that survive, written in the margin of an ancient manuscript by the Irish monk, who was at his copy- ing in an Italian monastery when a blackbird chanced to sing, and awoke in the clerk an echo of song. There is a fine Teutonic-sounding ballad of Rued, an Irish prince, who was sailing to Norway, but found his ship's keel held by nine daughters of the sea. For a while he stayed with them and was wedded to one in her kingdom below the waves, but his errand bound him and he departed, promising, however, that he would see his bride on the homeward way. The pledge was broken, but when his ships neared Ireland, music followed them, a dirge of the mermaidens, and as Ruad touched the shore, the corpse of his own son was thrown up at his feet on the strand by the deserted mother. It is a tale which might tempt a modern poet of congenial imagination to reword it. But not all the poetry lies in the far-off ages. One of the most charming things in the book is a fairy lullaby, which belongs to the domain of folk-song, and may be either old or new. It is supposed to be sung by a woman who has been carried off by the fairies, and who, from her prison in the fairy-haunted rath, sees another woman washing clothes in the stream close by, and gives her directions how rescue may be accomplished. Bat, lest the fairies should overhear her, she can only speak by hasty snatches, in the pauses of a lullaby that she is singing to the fairy child in her arms. Here are the first two stanzas :— "0 woman washing by the river,

Hush-a-by, babe not mine, My woeful wail wilt pity never !

Hush-a-by, babe not mine. I year this day I was snatched for ever, Hush-a-by, babe not mine,

To the green hill fast when thorn trees shiver.

Hush-a-by, babe not mine. Shoheen, shoheen, shoheen, shoheen, Shohu-lo, shohn-lo,

Shoheen, shoheen, shoheen, shoheen, 'Tis not thou, my baby 0!

'Tis there the fairy court is holden, Hush-a-by, babe, not mine ; And there is new ale, there is olden,

Hush-a-by, babe, not mine.

And there are combs of honey golden, ilt■,11-a by, babe, not wine; And there lit. men in bonds enfolden, Bush-a-by, babe, not mine.

Shoheen, shoheen, &c."

That is an admirable piece of translation, and it is only justice to say that two paraphrases from the Gaelic, which conclude the book, show that Dr. Sigerson has a very con- siderable talent for verse. We wish that in his discussion of critical questions he would condescend to give references, and in making statements upon such controverted points as the authorship and date of ancient poems, would at least indicate his grounds for the conclusions which he adopts. Surely such an ascription as "The Dirge of Cael, by Crede, his Spouse," is hardly critical.