A LITERARY HISTORY OF IRELAND.* Jr we are not greatly
mistaken, this is a book of very exceptional value and importance. We are quite certain that there exists no book in English which attempts what Dr. Hyde has accomplished,—namely, a clear account of the whole literature produced in Irish Gaelic and a reasonable estimate of its value. The study of Irish, like everything else in Ireland, has been mixed up with religious and political hatred. The tongue was, for political reasons, deliberately trampled out so far as possible ; and for political reasons it was sedulously cherished. It was the lan- guage of revolt, as well as the language of an outlawed Church ; English was the tongue of the Protestant and of the planter. The Irish nobles in Elizabeth's age more often knew Latin than English ; to teach their children English was to comply with the demands of a foreign master, to speak Irish was to defy him ; and the conquering nation took precisely the same view. Archbishop Ussher, a man by nature gentle, and by training a scholar, rebuked Bishop Bedell for com- piling in the Irish tongue books designed to convert the Irish to Protestantism.. It was, he said, a concession to Popery ; but he meant, in reality, that it was negotiating with rebellion. The same spirit to this day survives, as do so many hatreds in Ireland, with a persistency even greater among the despoilers than the despoiled ; its intensity would be far greater were it not that the founders of the Nation, newspaper, and the Young Ireland party generally, supplied modern Ireland with a popular literature in the English tongue. But for that fact there would be as much opposition to the foundation of a Chair of Celtic, or to the admission of Irish as a subject in Government examinations, as there is to the establishment of a Catholic University. Owing to this invasion of partisanship and racial animosity into the domains of literature, history, and scholarship, works written in the Gaelic tongue have been either extravagantly praised or ignorantly condemned ; and owing to the same cause the study of Irish history, Irish literature, and the Irish language, which ought emphatically to have been fostered in Trinity College, has received no help there. Admirable work has been done by men connected with that University : by the present Bishop of Limerick and by Dr. Todd, some time Librarian ; but their example has found no imitators, and the only en- dowment for the study of Celtic is, as Dr. Hyde points out, a Lecturership connected with the Divinity School, and founded for the express purpose of converting Irish Roman Catholics to the Protestant belief.
What we welcome, therefore, about Dr. Hyde's book is its attitude of detachment. He sets himself honestly to tell us why the study of Irish should be maintained, and what there is to be gained by a knowledge of the tongue which to him is native. And the ground upon which he puts his case is the value of Irish records as a contribution to history. He does not attempt to make us believe that the early literature of Ireland contains great masterpieces ; he plainly points out the difference between the clear-cut beauty of a passage in Homer * A Literary History of Ireland, from Earaest Times to the Present Day. By Douglas Hyde, LL.D., 31.11.1.A. (Au Craolbhin Aolbldan). Loudon : T. Fisher Unwin.Lidal and one of the Celtic " runs " with its sound and fury of agglomerated epithets. From reading his book, we are driven to the conclusion that the one great story which Ireland has produced is the story of Deirdre, certainly one of the finest in the world : fine passages and dramatic situations occur in the cycle which centres round Cuchulain, and in the Ossianic legends ; but there is probably nothing in early Irish litera- ture, except the Deirdre legend or saga, that the world cannot very well spare, as literature. But, as Dr. Hyde insists, we have in the Irish annals and romances the only surviving picture of a Celtic nation. He begins his book by a sketch of the part which Celts played in the history of Europe. Con- querors themselves, they were in their turn subjugated by the Romans everywhere except in Ireland. Britain was the western limit of Roman conquest. Consequently, from the second cen- tury onward, the Irish were a race apart ; they escaped the universal dominion. They were at that time, as the remains of pagan Ireland prove, far advanced in civilisa- tion; they had craftsmen in metal - work whose skill could hardly be surpassed ; and they had also theii poets and. writers. The respect for learning which still dis- tinguishes the Irish peasant was strong among them, and they maintained the traditions of antiquity. Christianity brought new knowledge, which was not suffered to die out, and between the seventh and tenth centuries Irelandwas almost the only place in Western Europe where Greek scholarship sur- vived. The history, therefore, which Irish literature preserves is not unimportant, though it is the history of a people secluded from the movement of events in Europe, but rather the more important on that account ; and the history cannot be dismissed as unauthentic. "Ascertainable authenticated Irish history," says Dr. Hyde, goes back to the days of St. Patrick,—that is to the fifth century. But Tighearnach, the annalist, who died in 1088, gave it as his opinion that the records of the Irish were uncertain prior to Cimbaeth, who built Emania,—that is, about 300 B.C. ; or, in other words, that as far back as that date they might with reason be trusted. This is the utterance, not of a barbarian, but of a professional scholar famous among a multitude of professional scholars, and in itself a proof of critical spirit, since the annals of Ireland ostensibly go back for an indefinite period. But the mythical and the historic, though professedly undistinguished, must have been in practice sharply separated ; since every man had a keen interest in the matter of his own pedigree and his neighbours, tribe land being the joint possession of those who could prove kinship with the chief. The mixture of myth in these records no more discredits them totally than does the element of the supernatural discredit the story of Brian's battle at Clontarf. Certain features of that narra- tive are as mythical as the intervention of the gods in Homer ; but by a very curious test its general fidelity was proved. A distinguished mathematician was set to calculate the times of the tide in Dublin Bay on April 23rd, 1014. The result arrived at exactly confirmed the account of the battle fought on the Strand, in which the day's fortunes turned on the position of the water. The fact is that hardly any people has taken such steps to have its doings recorded ; there was maintained throughout Ireland an immensely numerous order of bards, highly paid and highly privileged, who were prac- tically historiographers, carefully instructed in the business of genealogising and synchronising ; and it was the object of every bard to earn glory by catching his fellows in an error. The natural consequence is that the records are very numerous, though only a small portion of the MSS. available have been issued in print. There is enough, however, acces- sible to give a clear conception of the laws, dress, and habits of the people, and knowledge of this kind cannot be neglected by scholars. On the purely literary side there is not a great deal to be said for the study of Irish. They had no epic, no drama ; but they were rich in romance and fertile in lyric. The manner of prose narration which they evolved seems to have been one of the worst ever invented, but the verse is not so wordy ; and in metre they were great artists. Dr. Hyde is not so clear as Dr. Sigerson (in his Bards of the Gad and Gall) that rhyme is an Irish invention ; but certainly it was carried to a high perfec- tion there earlier than elsewhere, though it is not proven tc have existed in pre-Christian times. What is entirely new tr us is his explanation of the classical and the modern systems of Irish rhyming. The classical system employed consonantal rhyme as we do, but with the extension that certain kindred consonants might rhyme together ; "thus a word ending in t could rhyme with one ending in p or c, but with no other ;" thus, " rap " with "sat" or "mac," but not with " rag " or " mad." Rhymes of this sort were interlaced in the most intricate way, often_ two in a line ; and a special dialect of poetry and literature generally was maintained by strict tradi- tion. The aspiring bard received a long education in this dialect as well as in the formal prosody, and of this education Dr. Hyde gives an account. But as centuries went on the spoken speech and the written became widely separated, and in the seventeenth century came an entirely new departure. The regular schools were put down by the foreigners, and the peasants took to writing verse for themselves. Keating, an Irish-speaking priest of Norman descent, being prosecuted for preaching, went into hiding, and spent his life in composing works in the common dialect, with the result that his History of Ireland had a greater popularity than any written book had ever before enjoyed in the country. But what moves Dr. Hyde to special admiration is the free system of verse evolved by this new movement, a system which disregards consonantal rhyme altogether, and depends entirely on vowel assonance ; thus whole stanzas are composed in the vowel sounds of a and o, or of I and u, each vowel being dwelt upon in the utter- ance; and the lines depend not, as in the classical Irish metres, on syllabic length, but on the number of accents. The metres were invented apparently to imitate music„and, accord- ing to Dr. Hyde, can only be appreciated by those conversant with the language. That they are beautiful and harmonious we can readily believe from his reproduction of one or two in English ; but it seems to us a cloying beauty, and lacking in severity. On the lyrics themselves we cannot dwell for lack of space ; but to judge by his extracts, they are extremely interesting, though the utterances of half-educated peasants ; many of them, unhappily, are the cry of despair and hatred uttered by those dispossessed of lands and traditional liberty. We have not attempted to criticise Dr. Hyde's book in detail, but rather to indicate its general lines ; or we should have dwelt, for instance, upon the extreme charm and interest of the new opening to the Deirdre legend in a manuscript which he has discovered. There is only space to add that he has our sincerest sympathy in the efforts made by himself and his friends to keep alive the study of a language which is the key to such a treasure-house of knowledge. We agree with him also that Irish history should be no longer neglected in Irish schools.
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