It is a strange thing to say that Edmund Spenser, who so deprecates their “rebellious” love of liberty, might well have envied the position and influence of the Irish poets. At the Queen’s Court in England he had learned “what hell it is in suing long to bide,” to “eat the heart in despair,” and all the miseries of dilatory patronage:
“To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone.”
In Ireland he saw a different state of things. The poets might almost be described as the patrons, for theirs it was to distribute praise or dispraise in poems, “the which,” says Spenser, “are held in so high regard and estimation amongst them that none dare displease them, for feare to runne into reproach through their offence, and be made infamous in the mouths of all men.”
Their compositions were sung at all feasts and meetings by other persons, and these also, to his surprise, “receive great rewards and reputation.” Certain it is, though strange, that Edmund Spenser, had he been least bard in the pettiest principality of Ireland, instead of being the first poet of the monarch of Great Britain, would not have died of hunger. Neglected and starving in Westminster, may he not have regretted his political efforts to destroy the one national organism which above all others had ever generously encouraged the representatives of literature?[17]
It is a study full of interest to watch the development of the culture of the Anglo-Irish Pale, and the continuance of that of the Irish nation. In Latin, their men of learning had long a common language, but the vernacular was not neglected. In 1600 the literary organisation was still strong, and its strength was shown in the great Bardic Contention. Thirty-two years later an assemblage of historians, antiquaries, and monks was held to collect and collate materials for the great Annals of the Kingdom. Four years the Four Masters laboured at the work, safe by the far shore of Donegall, and fortunate it was, for soon after there was no safety in the “Athens of the West”—the “University of Europe”—for those of its faithful offspring who loved learning and letters. Teacher and pupil were banned. In the midst of morasses, forests, or mountain-glens, they still studied, their bards still sang, and their minstrels played, often with outposted sentinels on the watch.
What wonder if sadness shadowed the land? But disaster may have some compensating gifts to noble natures. The true laurel when crushed yields all its inner fragrance. Deprived of their princes and deposed from their estate, the bards ceased to be learned in the classic forms of literary technic; but they became poets of the people. The sincere voice of their hearts spoke in their song, which is brimful of passionate feeling and glowing with fair ideals. If in other times they had too often confined their efforts to the eulogy of particular princes, now it was otherwise. At the hearths of the people they sang the songs of a Nation.
Perhaps now the first idea of modern nationhood was conceived. Now, at all events, pathos became a character of Irish literature, distinguishing it deeply from that counterfeit of late grotesque, the authors of which resemble those mutilators of men who carved the mockery of laughter upon the face of grief.
What a subject for a painter would be that meeting between the blind and hoary bard Carolan, and the young, bright-eyed child Oliver Goldsmith! The venerable aspect of the ancient Celtic poet he never forgot. “His songs,” he says, “in general may be compared to those of Pindar; they have frequently the same flight of imagination.” He had composed a concerto “with such spirit and elegance that it may be compared (for we have it still) with the finest compositions of Italy.” This reminds us of the time when an enemy, Giraldus Cambrensis, declared that the skill of the Irish in music “was incomparably superior to that of any other nation.”
The meeting of Carolan and Goldsmith may fitly typify the meeting of the literatures of the old nation and of the Pale—one venerable by age and glorified by genius, the other young, buoyant, and destined, like it, to be the guardian and the honour of our common country.
Irish literature is of many blends, not the product of one race but of several. It resembles the great oriel of some ancient cathedral, an illumination of many beautiful colours, some of which can never be reproduced, for the art is lost. We possess an unique treasure in that ancient literature which grew up from a cultured people, self-centred, independent of Roman discipline. Were it not for this we should look at the Northern world through Southern eyes, and, taking our view-point from the Capitol, see nothing beyond the light of the empire, but wild woods and wastes made horrid by Cimmerian darkness, and shifting hordes of quarrelsome barbarians. Yet these were the ancestors of most of the modern European peoples, and those who so depicted them were their coercive and uncomprehending foes. Our deliverance from this thraldom of an enemy’s judgment abides in the monuments of the ancient Irish.