THE CUCHULLIN SAGA.* WHATEVER may be thought of the merits
of Celtic literature or the virtues of the Celtic races, there can be no doubt as to the influence, the somewhat mysterious and unaccountable influence, which both have exercised on the outside world. It is by no means always an influence of attraction. To many persons the Celt appears to move in an atmosphere of romance, —a certain interest of sentiment clings to all that is related to him. But to others the influence is decidedly one of repulsion. In the United States, as Mr. Wyckoff has observed during his experiences as a working man, the Irishman is classed with the negro and kept at a distance by the American worker, although the Irish who appear in Mr. Wyckoff'sbooksalmost always do so in a favourable light, showing themselves rather more social, more humane, more truly civilised than their fellows of the same class. In the North of England, too, we believe that English artisans will not work at the same bench as Irishmen, but the latter have to be set apart with gangers of their own. This seems to be the general feeling of the uneducated man of Anglo-Saxon race. With the classes higher in the social scale (where whatever is strange awakens intellectual curiosity rather than aversion) the romantic interest begins to come in, and is sometimes carried to a length of sentimental devotion which the Celt, a born histrion, knows how to receive with appropriate gravity. But whether we regard the Celt through a deforming or an idealising medium, the question of what lies behind it, what is the vraie viriti about the Celtic spirit and the Celtic genius, is one of fascinating interest. And it is one which can be best studied where we meet the products of that spirit and genius in their purest form, unalloyed by foreign influences, as we find them in the ancient imaginative litera- ture of Ireland, where alone a pure Celtic civilisation developed itself to a high degree, finding expression in literature, art, and political institutions. The materials for this study lie buried in a vast collection of MSS., which, in the absence of any special provision for their investigation—for Dublin University, strange to say, has no Chair of Celtic—constitute what may still be called an unexplored world of literature. Yet travellers have visited it, and brought us back some record of their dis- coveries. Since the monumental work of those giants of Celtic scholarship, O'Curry and O'Donovan, not only has much been done through learned periodicals like the Irische Texte of Whitley Stokes and Windisch, the Revue Celtique, and the publications of the Ossianic Society and the Royal Irish Academy, but in works more accessible to the general p such as O'Grady's Silva Gadelica—an immense storehouse of Gaelic legend and poetry—Meyer's and Nutt's Voyage of Bran, and Sigerson's Bards of the Gael and Gall, to set before us the creative work of the Celtic imagination, not as the modern litttfrateur shapes and transforms it, but as it actually sprang up on Irish soil, as yet untouched by the influences of the classical models. Of these works, Miss Hull's Cuchullin Saga is the latest, and it is certainly one of the most notable. Fourteen tales, translated (with some abridgments) by various scholars of eminence, are here collected, illustrating the career of the ideal hero of the Celtic race,—the Achilles, as he may be called, of Irish epic romance. It is curious to note, by the way, how the fundamental features of the Greek epic are reproduced in the Irish, to serve as the motives for a tale of glory, of crime, of retribution, and of heroic valour overshadowed by the pathos of an early death, deliberately chosen as the price of everlasting fame. As Cuchullin may stand for Achilles, so may Conchobar, King of Ulster, for Menelaus and Agamemnon in one. Deirdre is a nobler Helen, as Naisi is a nobler Paris. Maeve, however, the beautiful and haughty warrior-Queen, has no parallel in the tale of Troy divine, nor has the marvellous episode of the fight of Cuchullin at the ford of Ath Fherdia (Ardee), where he has to meet Ferdia, his Patroclus, in a battle to the death. Full as it is of Celtic fantasy, barbaric extrava- gance if you will, we doubt if the whole range of primitive or epic literature can show anything more poignantly beautiful • The OttehttilAn Sam. By Eleanor Hull. London : Datd Nutt. [7s. oda. 9.s the " Tain Bo Cuailgne," or " Cattle Spoil of Quelgny," admirably rendered by Mr. S. H. O'Grady in this volume.
But if we leave aside incidents and characters, and compare the art of the Celt with the art of the Greek, what a world of diffelence at once appears ! Miss Hull is, we believe, strictly acurate when she writes that the Cuchullin Saga, though it hoe apparently always existed in a number of isolated tales, exceeds the other Gaelic cycles in the fulness and orderliness of its conception." But to say positively, as she does, that it presents itself in a shape which can be called " singularly complete and homogeneous," is to say more than her own book at all warrants. If there is one thing more remarkable than the power and beauty shown in some of these tales, it is the incoherence common to nearly all of them. So usual a feature is this in all ancient Celtic literature, that it cannot be set down, as many have wished to set it, to the mutilations of ignorant copyists and the bungling of stupid redactors. Matthew Arnold has described the Welsh Habinogion as a "treasure-house of mysterious ruins " ; the mediaeval story- teller, he thinks, was " pillaging an antiquity of which he did not possess the secret," building with fragments of an archi- tecture "greater, cunninger, more majestical " than his own. And these are the words that at once occur to the reader as he takes up for the first time the Voyage of Bran, or the Cuchullin Saga, or attempts to penetrate the dim recesses of Silva Gadelica,—works of the contents of which Matthew Arnold had no con- ception when his lectures on Celtic literature were delivered. But is it really so or is it the fact that the Celt was naturally deficient in the faculty of composition,-that although his chisel could give life and significance to every stone it touched, he was unable to combine them into a noble build- ing ? We are inclined to think that a larger survey of Celtic literature than was possible in Matthew Arnold's day would have convinced him that the essentially phantasmagoric character of Celtic literature was due, not to any lapse in the continuity of literary history, but to a real lacuna in the Celtic mind. The same lack of coherence is found not alone in matters of a more or less external kind, such as the construction of a story, not merely in the love of fantastic exaggerations- always the irresistible temptation of the Celtic sagaman-it betrays itself also in a feeble grasp of the moral unity of characters and transactions. Conor, the betrayer of the Children of Usna, is glorified as much as Fergus, their pro- tector and avenger. Cuchullin, the mirror of chivalry and honour, frequently breaks his betrothal vow to Emer, and even boasts of his triumphs as the seducer of the wives and daughters of Erin. Emer herself, the type of noble wifehood, refuses to listen to the wooing of Cuchullin until he has gone forth like a Malay savage and slain his hundreds, not in a patriotic war, but as a mere display, at once puerile and san- guinary, of his personal prowess. Facts such as the attribution to Cuchullin of no less than three different fathers, two human and one divine, his descent from either of the human fathers being totally irreconcilable with the cardinal incident of his career, are small matters compared with the moral incongruities which deface these romances. And yet-for it seems impos- sible to make with safety any general proposition about any- thing Irish-this volume supplies in the "Thin Bo Cuailgne " one example of a very noble, and, on the whole, well-ordered and well-controlled, epic narrative. From the vivacious and humorous opening, the conversation between Ailill, King of Connaught, and Maeve, his wife, which gives rise to the action, this fine tale moves forward with deepening power and passion till it culminates in the great scene of Cuchullin's combat at the Ford ; thence winding gradually to its striking conclusion in the death of the Brown Bull, a strange, half-mythical crea- ture, for the possession of which the great war was waged. Of all the relics of ancient Irish literature which have yet been published, there is certainly none so architectural in composition and so full of imaginative greatness as the " Tain." It is not surprising to learn that it was by far the most popular of the old romances, and was regarded with an almost religious veneration. When the true version was lost, it is recorded in legend that St. Columba and four other saints of Ireland met together in fasting and prayer till the bard and warrior, Fergus mac Roy, rose from his grave and recited it to them,-a story which, by the way, well illustrates the care and affection bestowed by Irish Christian ecclesiastics on the pagan literature of their country. The very copy of the " Tain " in the Book of Leinster, on which Mr. O'Grady relies for much of the rendering given in this volume, was written by the hand of a twelfth-century Bishop of Kildare. And this love and veneration were well deserved. The ancient poet has given us in the figure of Cuchullin, as he appears in this tale, a picture of an heroic per- sonality which it would be hard to match for impressiveness in the saga literature of any people. Whether he be a solar myth, as Miss Hull thinks, or a glorified human being, or a pure creation of the poetic imagination, he certainly gives the reader the impression of a fierce intensity of life, which is curiously heightened by the strange touches which picture him as a "little, black-browed man" whose appearance gives no indication of his superhuman strength and vigour. He is but seventeen years old when he meets the champions of Maeve on the march into Ulster, and has on one occasion to blacken his chin to simulate a beard before they will condescend to fight him. But when his battle-fury seizes him he undergoes a strange distortion ; he dilates into a huge and appalling figure, a cloud of fire hovers over his head, and a " magic mist of gloom resembling the smoky pall that drapes a regal dwelling what time a king at night-fall of a winter's day draws near to it," while the " boctInachs and baninachs and geniti glindi and demons of the air" scream from the rim of his shield and the shaft of his spear. The metaphors of terror and fury which the old Irish bard had at command are truly startling in their vividness ; yet he has as many tales to tell of his hero's gentleness and modesty as of his deeds of blood : " I was a child with children," Cuchullin declares, in the strange legend in which he is summoned from the dead by St. Patrick, "I was a man with men, as well as a sword-red hero after the slaying of hosts." At the beginning of the Foray of Maeve he meets in the forest a foeman's charioteer, who asks his help in trimming a chariot-pole to chase "that famous deer, Cuchullin." Cuchullin trims the pole for him hand- somely, and when the charioteer discovers who he is, and cries out in affright that he is "surely now but a dead man," Cuchullin bids him go in peace, for he wars not "with drivers nor messengers nor the unweaponed." His death comes in the end from his courtesy, for in going to his last fight he takes food of witchcraft from the hand of an old hag by the wayside, fearing if he refuses the unsightly fare to seem disdainful of her poverty. A very curious and characteristic story tells how when returning home from his first deeds of arms on the marches of Ulster, his chariot hung round with the heads of foemen, he was so drunk with blood- fury that the Lords of Emania feared he would fall upon his own friends. To avert this, the women of the Court strip off all their garments and go out to meet him, standing naked in his path. The young hero is abashed at the sight, and bows his head on the rail of his chariot, whereupon he is seized and bound, and soused in cold water, which at first flies off in steam, bursting the vat that contained it, until his natural form and temper are re: tored to him.
To Englishmen, in whom the strain of Celtic ancestry counts for so much, as well, of course, as to Irishmen, in whom it counts for so much more, this early Celtic literature deserves to be better known. And we trust that the work of enlightenment, so well begun in Miss Hull's and other recent volumes, will go steadily forward.
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