IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES.* WE all, especially just now,
talk much about Ireland, but few perhaps with any real insight. It is cut off from us not only by the sea, but also by one of those deep divisions which Nature,
in her mysterious workings, seems often to set between race and race. Between Celt and Saxon there is a difference of temperament which the outward uniformity of modern life may often disguise but can rarely destroy, and sober English- men, hearing of some Irish outburst, may sometimes be tempted to repeat the famous words, "0 foolish Celts, who bath bewitched you ? " while to misunderstandings which arise from diversity of temper are often added those which have their birth in ignorance. Except for a period of some two or three centuries, how many of us know anything of Irish history ? Students, no doubt, will recall how, in the seventh century, at a time when England was almost bar- baric, Irish scholars helped to keep the lamp of learning and religion alight both in their own country and throughout Europe, but to most Englishmen Irish literature and folk- song is a sealed book, and men such as J. C. Mangan, Bunting, Petrie, or Ferguson, who in the last century gave their lives largely to its study—and of whom Mr. Graves here offers us vivid and admirable pictures—are on this side of the Channel hardly more than names. And the value of this book, apart from its literary charm, consists, we think, in the clear vistas which its sixteen brief essays open out, as it were, into a new, an almost unexplored, but assuredly a very notable and interesting world. We hear much nowadays about the Troad, and hosts of tourists have explored the hill of Hissarlik, but what recollections will be roused by "the ruins of the Seven Churches of Clonmacnoise "? And yet no one can read the noble passage (pp. 215-217) in which Petrie describes them as they stand to-day, "amid loneliness and silence," the memorials "of the arts and literature, the piety and humanity . . . of a people who, in a dark age, marched among the foremost on the road to life and civilization," without feeling that here, almost at our doors, is something which may well touch the heart, the imagination, and the
understanding hardly less than "the topless towers of Ilium" itself. Nor certainly, whatever the gap between Greek and Gaelic, did Ireland ever lack either Homeric chieftains or Homeric bards. Nowhere, perhaps, did that minstrelsy which lies at the back of the Iliad exert a longer or more lasting influence than in our sister-isle. It goes back demonstrably for almost fifteen centuries, while its legendary source is lost
in the mists of antiquity ; and if the Greeks had their Achilles, not less had the Irish their "Con of the Hundred Battles"— Mangan emended to "bottles"—and their deities not unworthy of the old Olympians :—
" Good are they at man-slaying feats, Melodious over meats and ale ;
Of woven verse they weave the spell. At chess-craft they excel the Gael."
Indeed the informing spirit of Greek epic seems to live again in these Irish folk-Bongs, many of which Mr. Graves has reproduced—often with the aid of Professor Kuno Meyer's prose versions—with his well-known mastery of rhyme and verse. In the "Tryst after Death" (150-154), for example,
• Irish Literary and Musical Studies. By Alfred Pereeval Graves. London: Elkin Mathews. [Gs. net.]
bow Homeric is the joy of combat that rings out in lines like these:— "Twelve warriors in the battle brunt
Front to front against me stood:
Yet now of all the twelve are left But corses cleft and bathed in blood."
Later on, too, there follows a description of "the draught- board" of the Connacht hero which may be set even beside that of the Shield of Achilles, while throughout the whole ballad there is that strong sense of "the preter-
natural" which is one of the distinguishing marks of primitive poetry. And yet this Irish poetry, however old, is by no means a wholly dead thing, a mere antiquarian curiosity. Until recently, at least, these ancient songs were part of the national inheritance and of the national life. It was still possible in 1792 to attend a "Harpers' Festival" in Belfast and hear Denis Hernpson play "the very old, the aboriginal music of the country" with such excel- lence as to justify "the praises of the old Irish harp in Cambrensis and Fuller," or Arthur O'Neill, in whom "was realized all that the genius of latter poets and romance writers has feigned of the wandering minstrel," while it was in Irish cabins, "beside a blazing turf-fire," amid surroundings " it would have required a Rembrandt to paint," that Petrie and others made their collections of songs and melodies. Indeed, as you read these essays, full though they are of legend and romance, the feeling that they arouse is yet one less of fiction than of reality. You feel that the spirit which breathes in Irish poetry and Irish story is a spirit which still quickens and inspires, and that somehow in these pages you are brought into touch with that most elusive but most living of realities which has been called "The Soul of a People," and a book which can in any way do that may be recommended not only to students, but also, and even more warmly, to statesmen.
It only remains to add that Mr. Graves's volume much needs a careful bibliography. It deals in a number of loosely con- nected essays with subjects that are little known, but on which much is to be learned in various works to which he frequently refers incidentally. As it is, he whets his readers' appetite without telling them exactly where they can get a full meal.
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