IRISH SONGS.* IT is impossible to enter into the spirit

of Irish song without entering into the life of the Irish people. Strangely enough, Matthew Arnold, in spite of his own somewhat restrained lyre, has sympathised most thoroughly with the harmony and the emotion of Celtic music and verse, and has left a noble testimony to the value of the Celtic element in English literature. Speaking of the Celtic nature in his Study of Celtic Literature, he says :—" An organisation quick to feel impressions, and feeling them very strongly, a lively per- sonality, therefore keenly sensitive to joy and to sorrow ; this is the main point. If the downs of life too much out- number the ups, this temperament, just because it is so quickly and nearly conscious of all impressions, may no doubt be seen shy and wounded; it may be seen in wistful regret, it may be seen in passionate, penetrating melancholy; but its essence is to aspire ardently after life, light, and emotion, to be expansive, adventurous, and gay." And again, "Alt that emotion can do in music the Celt has done ; the very soul of emotion breathes in the Scotch and Irish airs." It is this passionate emotion of love or hatred, of sorrow or rejoicing, that finds its best outlet in song, rising as it does in complex natures, natures of swift moods and of great contradictions easily misunderstood and easily alienated by colder, self-restrainted Teutonic races.

Mr. Alfred Percival Graves has edited a very good collec- tion of Irish songs, combining both words and music, in a small, handy volume of the "New Irish Library." In his introduction, Mr. Graves starts with a reference to the initial difficulty in making such a collection,—namely, the disappearance in ordinary life of the tongue in which some of the best songs were written. "The task of editing this volume," he says, "has been no easy one, for many of our best lyrics remain unmatched or ill-matched to music, and some of our finest airs are still without worthy words. Then our choice folk-songs in the Gaelic tongue are incompre- hensible to the general reader, and a difficulty has been experienced in obtaining good translations or adaptations from them in the measures to which the originals were sung." Dr. Douglas Hyde, in his Story of Gaelic Literature, claims for Ireland that she possesses "one of the finest, most perfect, and best-preserved of the great Aryan languages," and he points out that any attempts to translate the various styles of Irish poetry must be inadequate, "because it is likely that there never was a language whose literature so largely de- pended upon the sound of the vocables as Irish." This profusion of rhyme-sound is entirely characteristic of early Irish literature, but the peculiar laws of alliterative rhyme, rhythm, and assonance by which it was governed, make trans- lation almost impossible, and the chief beauties of the originals are necessarily left out. Matthew Arnold says that " Rhyme,— the most striking characteristic of our modern poetry as dis- tinguished from that of the ancients, and a main source, to our poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call its romantic element,—rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, comes into our poetry from the Celts." The songs in this little volume show the many-sidedness of the Irish character, and reflect its sad and joyous moods, its intense love of country and hatred of foreign yoke. This yearning for the old country, this passionate love of nature, is no new trait in the Irish character. When Columkille saw a

• The Irish Song-Book. Edited by Alfred Percival Grarei. Lendon : Fisher

heron fly across the water from the south and take shelter on his rocky island of Iona, he sent one of his monks to feed and cherish the bird, "because," he said, weeping, " it has come from the land I shall never see on earth again." There is a poem written by Columkille full of passionate regret at leaving Ireland, translated by Dr. Hyde, with an attempt to preserve the swing of the original metre, that might have been written by an Irishman of the present day :—

" How happy the son is of Dima ; no sorrow For him is designed,

He is having, this hour, round his own Kill in Durrow The wish of his mind.

The sound of the wind in the elms, like the strings of A harp being played, The note of the blackbird that claps with the wings of Delight in the glade.

With him in Ros-Grencha the cattle are lowing At earliest dawn, On the brink of the summer the pigeons are cooing And doves in the lawn.

Three things am I leaving behind me, the very Most dear that I know, Tir-Ludach I'm leaving, and Durrow and Derry, Alas, I must go!

Yet my visit and feasting with Comgall have eased me At Cainneach's right. hand,

And all but thy government Erin has pleased me, Thou waterfall land."

Mr. Graves anticipates that he will be roundly attacked for his treatment of " Shule Agra ; " he has adapted, and in a way conventionalised, both words and tune, and we confess that true lovers of the old song will resent the alterations. The

present writer cannot lay claim to a knowledge of Irish, but has been told by Gaelic scholars that the lines translated by the editor,—

" Only death can ease my woe

Since the lad of my heart from me did go,"

have no adequate reference to the original meaning, and also that "lad of my heart" is a very un-Irish phrase. Why Mr.

Graves sometimes conventionalises his Irish spelling, and sometimes writes it correctly, is a question that only an expert in the matter can answer. The old airs played originally on the harp or the soft Irish chanter or bagpipes, are generally melancholy and subdued, though the whole character of the tunes varies according to the method of playing them. The air " Callino Casturame," is a survival of a song old enough to have been quoted by Shakespeare, though there seems a doubt as to whether the tune, notwith- standing its name (a corruption of "colleen oge asthore "), is really Irish in character. "The Memory of the Dead" and "O'Donnell Aboo " are grand old songs not often included in collections ; like "The White Cockade" and "The Wearing of the Green," they must have stirred many a heart in a nation that has always given her best sons to the profession of fighting. That beautiful air, "The Snowy-breasted Pearl," was, we believe, first written down by Sir Stephen de Vere from the playing of a harper in Limerick, and he also wrote some verses to it ; those in the present volume are translated by Dr. Petrie. Mr. Graves has not adopted James Clarence Mangan's beautiful translation of "The ROisin Dubh," or "Little Black Rose." The original ballad was written in the time of Elizabeth, and is supposed to be an allegorical address from Red Hugh O'Donnell, chieftain of Tyrconnel, to Ireland as his love and mistress. The verses by Thomas Furlong fit the air, but they are tame beside Mr. Mangan's version, which gives the fire and extravagant glow, the passion and intensity, of the Irish lilt, though an alien tongue expresses but feebly the colour and beauty of the original. We have only room to quote a few lines, omitting the repetitions :—

"0 my dark Rosaleen

Do not sigh, do not weep ! The priests are on the ocean green, They march along the deep.

There's wine from the royal Pope, Upon the ocean green; And Spanish ale shall give you hope, Shall give you health and help, and hope, My dark Rosaleen!

All day long in unrest To and fro, do I move, The very soul within my breast Is wasted for you, love ! The heart in my bosom faints To think of you, my Queen, My life of life, my saint of saints, My dark Rosaleen !

Ovor lows, over sands, Will I fly for your weal ; Your holy delicate white hands Shall girdle me with steel.

At home in your emerald bowers,

Fr,,m morning's dawn till e'en,

You'll pray for me, my flower of flowers, My dark Rosaleen !

I could scale the blue air.

I could plough the high hills, Oh, I could kneel all night in prayer To heal your many ills ; And one beauty smile from you Would float like light between My toils and me, my own, my true, My dark Rosaleen !"

We are a little puzzled over Mr. Graves's "Arranmore Boat-Song," the opening couplet,— " With swelling sail, away ! away !

Our bark goes bounding o'er the bay !"

nas a hackneyed, unreal sound with nothing Irish about it, and the Arran he addresses must surely be Scotch ; it cannot

be the island of Aran, in Galway Bay, as the description of the " glitt'ring realm of grain" is singularly unfitted to that desolate rocky shore. Mr. Graves has also written new words to the air of "The Girl I left behind me" (apparently this was an English military march of about the middle of the eighteenth century); another air of the same description "The Buff Coat has no fellow," though, as Mr. Chappell points out, purely English in character, has been claimed by Irish and Scotch alike, and Moore appropriated it under the name of "My husband's a journey to Portugal gone." The interchange of tunes has always gone on between the sister- islands ; not only has "Eileen Aroon " been taken by the Scotch, but the very name of Robin Adair must also have been borrowed from the celebrated Irish chieftain of that name, whose famous harp with thirty-seven strings is still to be seen at Hollybrooke in County Wicklow; or Mr. Graves thinks it may have been a later Robin Adair of Holly Park, near Bray, a Member of the Irish Parliament in the last century. When we come to the rousing tune of "The Pro- testant Boys," we find that Mr. Graves does not mention the origin of the air. If we go back as far as the revolution of 1688, we shall see what Burnet says about the famous song then known as " Lilliburlero." "A foolish ballad was made at that time, treating the Papists, and chiefly the Irish, in a very ridiculous manner, which had a burden said to be Irish words. Lero, lero, lilliburlero,' that made an impression on the [King's] army, that cannot be imagined by those that saw it not. The whole army, and at last the people, both in city and country, were singing it perpetually. And perhaps never had so slight a thing so great an effect." This song helped to drive away the Stuarts as much as the famous song of "The King shall enjoy his own again" had helped to bring them back. The modern tune is slightly altered from the old ranting "Lilliburlero," but it is substantially the same ; the song printed by Mr. Graves is dated "about 1800," and is therefore much later than the old "Protestant boys, good tidings I bring," which was sung to this tune in the eighteenth century.

It would be impossible to conclude without any mention of the brighter side of the Irish character. The sun that breaks through the clouds and lights up the "waterfall country," the lights and shadows that chase each other over the hills and plains, and are reflected in the broad rivers and loughs of Ireland, are typical of her impressionable sons and daughters. Lever's and Lover's humorous ballads are too well known to need more than a passing mention, and are, of course, to be found in this little volume, and the editor him- self has written some capital verses embodying the famous tale of the Kilkenny cats to the air of "Better let them alone." Mr. A. P. Graves's modest hope that his small collec-

tion of songs and airs from the great storehouse of Irish minstrelsy may set people searching that storehouse for them-

selves, will surely be realised, for the very reason that he quotes from a criticism by Dr. Hubert Parry, that "Irish folk-music is probably the most human, most varied, most poetical in the world, and is particularly rich in tunes which imply considerable sympathetic sensitiveness."