The Glories of Gaelic
Blácam, Aodh de
August 28, i929 THE COMMONWEAL 4r9 some as an anti-Catholic victory. We find America's good offices being used to promote a settlement be- tween the government and Church in Mexico. Such...
...Even the lesser poems in which are woven the names of our native hills, our heroes and our kindred, come poignantly to our bosoms, and as we read the finer sagas of our land we seem to inhabit the spiritual dwelling-places of our race...
...The same phenomenon has been repeated in our own days, when Canon Peter O'Leary led our contemporary writers in a fresh resort to the speech of the people as the source of literary renaissance...
...Jean Marie Latour, bishop of Santa F6, appeared to me as Michel Alfred Barrat, bishop of Tell6...
...I HAVE MET THE ARCHBISHOP By J. DESBRIERE IRWIN HAT sympathetic character of Willa Cather's charming book, Bishop Jean Marie Latour, is still alive: I have met him on the Amazon...
...But for Ireland, the works of art which that period has bequeathed to us would be lifeless and soulless...
...Here, too, is the thought of a virile nation that has carried a mediaeval mentality into the present age...
...many verses will carry the mind into the high regions of imagination...
...On the contrary, the whole Modern period is the direct descendant and heir of the Middle and the Old...
...For him, English culture is a recent growth of continental origin...
...From Celtic prose romance sprang the Arthurian tradition that runs through English poetry and even German opera...
...What, then, does the corpus of Irish letters comprise...
...3- A great volume of narrative, lyrical and elegiac poetry...
...From the same source sprang the romances of chivalry and, thence, the greatest masterpiece of secular prose, Don Quixote...
...We shall see that at all times the poet held a place of privilege in Ireland: bishop, king and ~ird-ollamh, or chief poet, had equal dignity...
...Minor spasms of economic nationalism are to be expected and are occurring...
...When we rule out what is repetitious and what is dull, a classic residue remains that would fill, perhaps, from five hundred to a thousand printed volumes...
...Gaelic poetry, as we have remarked, is peculiar in its high elaboration...
...It is bordered on the northwest by Colombia, on the southwest by Peru, and is the largest of the eight prelatures of the state of Amazonas...
...Anglo-American naval conversations may get tangled up with the current domestic politics of continental nations...
...we shall seek rather to understand what was in his mind as he went from castle to castle, or in his dark tent turned his elaborate verses...
...The old and later sagas, apart from their historical content, are as bold and as satisfying as those of the Northmen, as rich in color as the tales of Greece...
...he is equally struck by the persistence of the heroic air in the latest tales and poems...
...High wages in Europe may provoke outbursts on the part of European manufacturers as bitter as those which heralded our own employers' reaction to Ford's first announcement of a minimum wage scale at Detroit...
...It extends along both banks of the Solim~os, and includes the territories of the rios Jurua, Japura and Purus and their million tributaries...
...The image or record of the Irish past thus arrayed possesses worth and fascination for the learned world...
...Tell6, the big town and the bishop's see, has 1,2oo souls...
...Scholars of the first rank in Europe have lavished upon it enthusiasm that shames its neglectful heirs...
...Down the centuries in Ireland the story-loving instinct worked on the events of history...
...masses of proverbial matter, epigrams and anonymous songs...
...5- Native law tracts and mediaeval works on philosophy, medicine and science...
...At a very early date he had developed a technique of story-telling that offers as good a model as can be found anywhere in fiction...
...From the practical point of view, it is far more to the interest of America and Europe to co6perate economically than it is to their interest to distrust or boycott each other...
...Old Irish has a considerable vocabulary, inflections, infixed pronouns, and a neuter gender, now obsolete...
...These waterways are indeed the only means of transportation...
...Even relatively modern history was romanticized...
...Middle Irish leaves traces on literature down to the sixteenth century...
...The same can be said to be true of most of the other great modern nations...
...He dresses in a plain black or white cassock, often without the purple braid or sash...
...Only the corroding work of time upon language obliges him to surrender to specialists his older literary possessions...
...It is usual to distinguish three chief periods in the August 28, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 421 growth of the Irish language and literature...
...I left Para on a broad river boat, that old-fashioned mode of traveling which retains all the romance and charm of a country as wild and immense as the Amazon...
...The prelature apostolic of Teff6--for in mission countries a bishopric is called a prelature--contains 172,5oo acres and is entirely covered by mato--the Brazilian jungle--and rivers...
...but he looks back in his literature to remote times and almost to racial origins, without interruption of vision...
...He said to me with his quiet, sweet smile: "But...
...the others are scattered along the banks of the rios, the rivulets and the lagunas...
...but Modern Irish, dropping the ancient pronunciation and syntax, and adopting the later vocabulary, appears as early as the fourteenth...
...For better or worse, the Celt made his own use of his own material and ignored the literary evolution of other lands...
...Parties which gather on the Irish moors for hunting, shooting and fishing, and render a great horse show the chief function of the Irish social year, maintain a tradition which, I,ooo years ago, created in the hunting tales and poems of the Fiana the world's first large sporting literature...
...August 28, i929 THE COMMONWEAL 4r9 some as an anti-Catholic victory...
...We pass over that archaic dialect traceable in the Ogham inscriptions, and find the beginnings of our surviving literature in texts that come down from the eighth and ninth centuries...
...These are written in what we call Old Irish: a form of the language only intelligible today to the erudite...
...These tales, or uirsc6alta, were subdivided into many classes...
...Poetry and romance, however, besides being the most easily accessible, are also the most characteristic phases of our literature...
...In sport, the Gaelic habit still lives among us...
...It is otherwise with the Gael...
...Both, I am sure, had Monsenhor Barrat's kind, almost youthful, smile, his straightforward blue eyes, his white hair, his aristocratic countenance, his utter simplicity--for he aever wears his gold chain or cross except in the performance of religious duties, and even his episcopal amethyst ring he keeps in his pocket, taking it out only when he believes it necessary...
...Each has too large a stake, industrial, commercial and financial, in the other's prosperity to permit minor disagreements to destroy the general good...
...it would be dangerous if they were to do so, for it would indicate an unhealthy state of subservience or fear...
...An eminent English literary critic contends that there is little of any consequence in English literature which came in earlier than the Conquest...
...4. Lives of the Irish saints...
...As the Danish overthrow brought in literary Middle Irish, so the resurgence of the nation against the Anglo-Normans brought in literary Modern Irish...
...Pope Plus XI talked to Irish pilgrims of their "lingua gloriosa...
...In this form an abundant literature survives...
...Surviving Gaelic literature amounts in volume to many times that of classical Rome...
...American stockholders are being deprived of voting rights in certain British companies...
...Such an enumeration is not exhaustive...
...6. Gaelic renderings, generally very free, of classical and mediaeval literature...
...Last year he spent ten months visiting just one of his six parishes...
...The same life, the same mode of thought, appear in the eighteenth century as in the eighth...
...He will find Irish literature as intensely Catholic as the Spanish, and as intensely racial as that of Israel...
...War may come in the far East, despite all efforts to avert it...
...We may classify it mainly in seven groups: I. Native annals, histories, clan records and topographies...
...A rough test of verse is that it echoes in the memory...
...Gaelic literature intellectually is a literature of rest, not of change: of intensive cultivation, not of experiment...
...The modern novel and the old uirsc6al satisfy precisely the same taste...
...We approach this literature, then, with open-minded curiosity...
...While we take note of these linguistic periods, we must avoid the notion that any break in literary tradition is implied...
...Every student is struck by the modern note of the oldest Gaelic writings, as in the worldly wisdom of King Cormac's Instructions, or the monk's droll poem to his cat...
...for early Modern yielded place to late Modern Irish in days when, with the overthrow of the Gaelic schools, academic diction was abandoned, and the speech of the people adopted as the literary language...
...This all-pe~vading faith, too, we shall find as one of the marks of Gaelic literature...
...This is a transitional form of the language...
...The classical literature of the Gael contains almost nothing in drama, autobiography, modern science, travel, art, criticism and recent history...
...The rest of the population is made up of small Indian tribes, usually of from thirty to fifty members, who wander from place to place amid the mato...
...It is well to note that Celtic prose romance has been an important factor in European literary history...
...The result of their co6peration will be neither the enslavement of Europe nor the subordination of America that the political mathematicians profess to fear, but the multiplication of each other's resources in the mysterious and fruitful manner symbolized by the letter "x...
...To these groups must be added the considerable new literature which has sprung up since the beginning of the recovery of the language in 1893...
...We find America's good offices being used to promote a settlement between the government and Church in Mexico...
...We have uirsc6alta which are built on episodes that are supposed to have taken place in the sixth century B. C., and on subsequent events down to the Battle of Clontarf...
...Always we shall see the past in the present and the present in the past...
...on my left was a Brazilian general, on my right a colonel and across from me was a tall, white-haired priest...
...To enjoy any literature, the student must be ready to find interest in the life which it depicts...
...Her priests retain that homely ease which was their conquering gift when her missions 420 THE COMMONWEAL August 28, I929 flowed over the known world...
...As it is, however, the prospects are that the old world and the new, whatever their political relationship, will continue on the best of economic terms...
...homilies, and translations of foreign works of Catholic devotion...
...Punitive tariffs on certain types of American goods, quotas on American motion pictures and reprisals on American trade may temporarily obscure the essential harmony of world economics...
...The graduate of the bardic schools was required to master hundreds of classical tales...
...Proper to an open-air life is an intellectual simplicity...
...My bishop is still working, struggling over his problems in a region 1,5oo miles up the Amazon, which is called there the Solim~os...
...Nor is it immune from qualification...
...The League of Nations and the Kellogg pact might conceivably find themselves in opposition...
...Despite the disadvantage of translation, episodes, read with that quiet receptivity necessary to the reading of classics, will stir admiration...
...not why they chose not to follow foreign example...
...both had built a diocese out of a wilderness...
...Our tourists may again arouse the resentment of the "toured...
...Nothing is sure in the realm of politics, and still less is anything sure in the realm of economics...
...the outbursts may be even more bitter, since they will be able to borrow the habiliments of patriotism...
...He had ballads indeed, but often what other races turned into epic, or tragedy, or comic drama, he turned into prose narrative...
...I sat at the captain's table...
...many romances will excite wistful desires...
...It is, moreover, the image of civilization half heroic, half pastoral, that continues down to the present day...
...In effect, the Gael found a way of life long ago, and a religious faith, that satisfied him then and forever, and seemed to offer all that a man can wring from the world...
...The final revolution, however, has implied no greater changes than have occurred in the writing of English since the days of Milton...
...His literature, therefore, contrasts in a remarkable way with that of such a country as England, where the writings of every generation mirror some philosophic change...
...THE GLORIES OF GAELIC By AODH DE BLACAM F THE literature written in Gaelic during fourteen centuries, much has been lost...
...In the older portion is found a window into the early Iron Age, wherein European civilization was founded...
...We shall see that the overthrow of the Gaelic order at the beginning of the seventeenth century also was reflected in philology...
...The cabins opened onto the deck, and in the centre a place had been cleared of partitions and there the long dining tables were set...
...All this many foreign students have found in Irish literature...
...But if politics is the science of the possible, economics is the science of the practicable...
...and he must approach it on its own terms...
...7. An abundant folklore...
...It would be idle to expect the two continents to agree on every point...
...The stories of the Red Branch cycle, and in a lesser degree, those of the Fenian cycle, are epical in all save form...
...Should the Young plan be revised in the future, the question of war debts will again bob up...
...I had taken him for a Brazilian--his Portuguese was indeed perfect, but I was almost sure he could speak French, as most educated Brazilians do...
...Only after a while did I notice that his straight black cassock was lined with a narrow purple braidm and I knew that he was a bishop...
...Whether he be right or wrong in this, it is obvious that England has been nationally articulate in literature only since the renaissance...
...Yet, while foreign scholars of classic taste find much in it, the Irishman finds more...
...Still in the little chapels of the Irish glens, sparsely ornate, worship has the intimacy of the home at Nazareth...
...Scott's Red-gauntlet and Buchan's Midwinter, introducing Prince Charlie and Dr...
...Miss Cather's bishop did his work some eighty years ago, and died...
...A rough test of prose is that it bears rereading and is quotable...
...With the social changes attendant on the overthrow of the Danes, Middle Irish arises...
...2. A vast mass of heroic and romantic tales, beginning with the mythological and heroic sagas, and developing down the centuries toward the form of the modern romantic novel and short story...
...Irish poetry is full of allusions that can be understood only by those who are familiar with the sagas, just as a poem by Horace can be understood only by those who know their classical mythology...
...After dinner I introduced myself to Monsenhor Barrat...
...Ireland shows to us their living makers, and tells us something of what they did and how they thought...
...Again, the romantic novel of Scotland, which has borne so large a progeny in the books of Scott, Stevenson, Munro, Crockett, Buchan and others, is the direct heir of Gaelic romance...
...We shall not complain that the court poet wrote no epic...
...R. A. S. Macalister writes: Nowhere else but in Ireland do we find a literature that comes down to us right out of the heart of the La T~ne period...
...In the combination of vigor and simplicity we shall trace, perhaps, the charm by which Ireland has enchanged men from the days of Northumbrian Aldfrid to those of the American tourist, absorbing Norsemen and Normans and generations of English soldiers and settlers...
...Ireland still is little troubled by the perplexities of the study...
...This vast area is populated by i2o,ooo people...
...This includes some admirable fiction, some biography, essays, literary criticism and translation...
...It takes my bishop six years to visit his entire prelature...
...One of the most remarkable traits of Gaelic literature is that it deals, so to speak, with a continuous historic present...
...We shall seek to understand why our forbears wrote thus and thus...
...Closely connected with the poetic art was that of the prose romance...
...Johnson in imaginary adventures, are admirable examples of uirsc6alta...
...that never has accepted industrialism and the city, and that must live on if the Gael himself is not to disappear...
...Both were Auvergnats, both were missionaries...
...Some were romantic in the popular sense of that word ; some were humorous, and some were tragic...
...Finally, we must repeat that the romances were intimately connected with the poetry...
...Always Gaelic literature belongs to the open air...
Vol. 10 • August 1929 • No. 17
