A SOCIAL HISTORY OF ANtAbiNT IRELAND.* FIFTY, and even thirty,
years ago the social and artistic life of pre-Norman Ireland was as unknown to the generality of educated Englishmen—and Irishmen too—as the manners and customs of the Guanchos or the early history of the native American peoples. In the one case a certain national aloofness and incuriousness, in the other a tendency, not yet quite extinct, to keep the eyes fixed on London and to depre- cate any passionate interest in Irish historical or antiquarian research, as savouring unduly of Nationalism or whatever " ism " was in worst odour at the time, was responsible for this ignorance or neglect. The fruits of the great work begun by Zeuss, and continued by a self-sacrificing band of Irish, British, and Continental scholars, were long untested by the literary world. For years Matthew Arnold's appeal on behalf of the study of Celtic literature remained unanswered, and Sir Samuel Ferguson, the greatest Irish poet of the last fifty years, was known to an extremely limited public, and has not yet been awarded all the honour due to the pioneer, with Mangan, of the Irish literary revival.
To-day all is changed. A new school of poets, of novelists —perhaps of dramatists—is growing up across the Irish Sea, and claims, and, we hope, will claim, more interest and atten- tion each year from British authors and critics. It is the boast of some of the best known of our Irish poets that they reveal to the modern world the spirit of the true Celtic Ireland preserved in the fragments of her ancient literature, and not so closely veiled by modernity as to escape sympa- thetic observers of the Western peasant. Some of Tennyson's admirers claim that he interpreted the " Mabinogion " to the English-speaking world, and the claim of the new Irish poets (perrroos componere magno to be interpreters of the old Gaelic literature must compel the attention of the most ultrae
Saxon of critics. - .
But is this interpretation, this revelation, complete ? Does Mr. W. B. Yeats, for example, reproduce as perfectly as a modern can the ethos of early Irish life and of the art and literature that were born of it ? To find an answer we must leave the air to the poets, and dig with the antiquarian or • A Seoiot History of Ancient Ireland. By P. W. Joyce, LL.D. 9 ve1e. London: Longnions end co. Lais.j
transcribe and translate with the student and the philologist, whose achievements, never adequately recognised, are in danger of being reckoned too mundane by the devotees of
the crepuscular school. This inquiry adds a new interest to Dr. P. W. Joyce's Social History of Ancient Ireland, the work of an author whose knowledge of Irish antiquities and folk- lore is universally recognised, and whose fairness and modera-
tion have never been impugned. For the antiquarian it must long remain a most valuable work of reference ; for the student of early Irish institutions, as for the reader who wishes to form a general idea of the progress attained by the Celts of the island and of the character of their civilisa- tion, it will be almost a necessity. There are blemishes, as is inevitable in a work of such compass ; the illustrations are of very varying merit ; there are defects in arrangement,—e.g., we find a section devoted to Irish poetry and prosody included in chap. 30, which deals with "Various Social Customs," and not in chap. 12 on the "Irish Language and Literature," which is surely
its rightful place ; and the modern belief in "master animals" —e.g., a "master otter," and " kings " of the cats like Trusan ' or Luchtigern '—is not traced to its source in totemism or animal worship. But these are, after all, minor blemishes ; Dr. Joyce is under no illusions as to a primitive golden age,
nor does he attempt to minimise the cruelties of slavery or the evil plight of the " Fuidhir," or serf class, in early times ; but he points out with perfect justice that learning was more general and more reverenced in Ireland in the seventh and eighth centuries than in any other country of Western Europe, while the internal warfare was probably no worse in Ireland than under the Saxon Heptarchy. The Scandinavian invasions arrested the growing civilisation of the country, the fatal victory of Clontarf destroyed the hopes of the house of Brian Boru. The Norman adventurers made confusion worse confounded, and the interference of the English Kings and the weakness of their deputies made a stable government im- possible. Dr. Joyce treats Spenser the partisan with a proper severity : while recognising the turbulence and want of cohesion of the Irish people, he is careful to point out the harm done by a needless, and often stupid, interference with the institutions which had been evolved during centuries of tribal life, and his remarks on three of the main principles of the Brehon Law have a painful interest in the light of fairly " Every free man had a right to a portion of land to enable him to subsist, the deprival of which constituted a grievous injustice : if a free tenant failed to pay his rent or subsidy, it was recovered like any other debt—never by process of eviction : the duty of inflicting punishment for wrong devolved by right on the injured person where all means of obtaining redress from the culprit failed."
Customs that have grown up slowly among a people during more than a thousand years take long to eradicate. They subsist as living "forces for generations after their formal abolition; and the unconscious, instinctive, hereditary memory of these three principles will go far to explain the tendency to personal acts of vengeance witnessed in Ireland down to recent times in cases of eviction from houses and lands." As might be expected, the chapters devoted to the Brehon Law are ex- cellent, and give the impression that under Kings who could enforce it the legal system suited the genius of the people, though, like all primitive codes, it was unjust in its treatment of those who, through misfortune or birth, did not enjoy the status of the freeman. But if we compare the condition of Ireland in the eighth century with the records of Elizabethan times, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the civilisation of the country had declined absolutely, and still more relatively, during the five hundred years of turbulence, misrule, and war that followed the invasion of Richard de Clare. The followers of the Earl of Desmond and the heads of the great O'Neill family were well acquainted with the use of the musket and of
defensive armour; their chiefs were often educated and cultured men, who encouraged learning and founded lay and religious schools ; the bards, amid much extravagance of panegyric and undue devotion to a formidable list of metric rules, produced lyrics of rare power and beauty; but the mass of the people
had reverted to the barbarism of the pre-Christian epoch; the class of " non-free " tenants and serfs had enormously in- creased; and the jealousy of all control and supervision mani- fested by warlike feudal chiefs, with the increase of a lawless class of retainers, made it impossible for the rulers of Ireland,
mass of the people that security of life, property, and land tenure without which progress was a delusive dream. It is the fashion to-day in some quarters to regard peace and its blessings as dangerous gifts of Providence ; the anarchy of mediaeval Ireland, and the torments of the Thirty Years' War in Germany, are surely sufficient evidence of the perils of an over-strenuous national life.
What strikes us very forcibly, after reading through Dr. Joyce's two most interesting volumes, and comparing the im- pression that they give us with the best translations of early Irish literature, and with the work of the best known writers of the modern mystical school, is the entire failure of the latter to portray those aspects of the complex Celtic character which we may group, for want of better names, under the headings of " sociability " and "combativeness." We admit. that a reaction from the full-blooded exuberance of Charles O'Malley and Harry Lorrequer was necessary and in- evitable; but, in our opinion, many of the new writers have gone dangerously far in the opposite direction, and are as one-sided in their portraiture of the Irish Celt as ever Charles Lever or Samuel Lover was. Indubitably we find much mysticism of an imaginative order in early Celtic literature, whether Irish or Welsh—the land and the history of these peoples account for this—but we also find abundant proofs of that delight in a free, active life realised to the full amid festivity and conflict, and of that sensuous admiration of beauty of form, of sound, and of colour, of that spirit, in short, which might once have been labelled "Hellenic," but which differs notably from the spirit of Greece in its lack of restraint and precision. It is unfortunate, for many reasons, that a fashion should have been set of describing the Celtic character in the terms of an elegant and languid mysticism. By so doing many of our best authors leave its more human side to the mercy of Irish writers of inferior calibre, or of Englishmen, romanticists seeking for virgin soil, humomists gathering thistle fodder for a certain public, or converted realists repenting in sackcloth and trousers, of all men the most incapable of describing the Celtic combativeness and sociability without exaggeration.
To Englishmen, and to some even of the Anglo-Irish, it is extremely difficult to describe the Celt. Take the authors who have made the attempt. Tennyson's Maeldune is an exaggeration of Irish combativeness, a welter of "confusion and fury and fighting," while his "Idylls of the King" are consciously Anglo-Norman, little, if at all, coloured by the " Mabinogion." Mr. Kipling's Mulvaney, perhaps through exposure to Eastern suns, deviates considerably from the national type. Tbackeray confined himself as far as possible to triveurs and Ladventurers on whose pattern is modelled the soldier of fortune in Stevenson's Master of Ballantrae. The Teutonic, and even the Latin, characters are more com- prehensible to English authors, and when these endeavour to get into touch with the Celt their very sympathy and eager- ness to comprehend often lead them into parlous exaggera- tions of salient characteristics. Hibernicis ipsis Hiberniores, these luckless men, after plunging into the Irish literary movement, and discovering a Celtic strain in their ancestry. proceed to drape themselves, if realists, in the coarsest Irish frieze, and if mystics, in garments of the mistiest Celtic glamour. There occurs to us the case of an Englishman who. became so enamoured of Bedouin life that he finally found it absolutely necessary to take the road from the Cairo Station. to Shepheard's Hotel on the back of a magnificent dromedary ! But seriously, it is time to turn from the mystic to the more human aides of the Gaol: the men of the ancient epics could dream, but they could love and fight on occasion, and could look on Nature without an ever-boding sense of the presence of unseen powers. When Mr. Yeats takes their dreams, colours them with the fancies of Blake, adds a part of the philosophy of Maeterlinck, and proclaims the resultant to be the spirit of the Ossianic poems, we feel inclined to protest. "It is very beautiful and dim, but it is not Oisin."
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