Irish Books And Irish People Part 2

They had been put into English, I told him. "Oh, ay, they would be, in a sort of a way," said James, with a fine scorn. Soon we broke new ground, for James had by heart not only the Fenian or Ossianic cycle, but also the older Sagas of Cuchulain. He confused the cycles, it is true, taking the Red Branch heroes for contemporaries of the Fianna, which is much as if one should make Heracles meet Odysseus or Achilles in battle; but he had these earlier legends by heart, a rare acquirement among the Shanachies of to-day.

Here then was a type of the Irish illiterate. A man somewhere between fifty and sixty, at a guess; of middle height, spare and well-knit, high-nosed, fine-featured, keen-eyed; standing there on his own ground, courteous and even respectful, yet consciously a scholar; one who had travelled too--had worked in England and Scotland, and could tell me that the Highland Gaelic was far nearer to the language of the old days than the Irish of to-day; finally, one who could recite without apparent effort long narrative poems in a dead literary dialect. When I find an English workman who can stand up and repeat the works of Chaucer by heart, then and not till then I shall see an equivalent for James Kelly.

And yet it would be a different thing entirely. Chaucer has never survived in oral tradition. But in the West of Donegal, whence James Kelly's father emigrated to where I found his son, every old person had this literature in mind, and my friend was no exception. It is among the younger generation, who have been taught in the National Schools (surely the most ironic of all t.i.tles), that the language and the history of the nation are dying out. Yet that is changing. For instance, James Kelly's son reads and writes Irish, and on another day helped me to note down some of his father's lore.

For it was late when I came first to the house, and though the Shanachie pressed me (not knowing even my name) to stay the night, I had to depart for that day, after I had heard him recite in the traditional chant some staves of an Ossianic lay, and sing to the traditional air Carolan's famous lyric, "The Lord of Mayo." We drank a gla.s.s of whisky from my flask, a cup of tea that his wife made; and as we went into the house he asked a favour in a whisper. It was that I should eat plenty of his good woman's b.u.t.ter. He escorted me a good way over the hill, for, said he, when I had come that far to see him, it was the least that he should put me a piece on my road, and he exhorted me to come again for "a good crack together." And if I deferred visiting him for another year that was largely because I did not like to face again this illiterate without acquiring a little more knowledge.

What came of my second visit must be written in another paper. But here, let it be understood this is no exceptional case. In every three or four parishes along the Western seaboard and for twenty miles inland, from Donegal to Kerry, there is the like of James Kelly to be found. It may be that in another fifty years not one of these Shanachies will linger; education will have made a clean sweep of illiteracy. And yet again, it may be that by that time, not only in the Western baronies but through the length and breadth of Ireland, both song and story and legend will be living again on the lips and in the hearts of the people. _Go leigidh Dia sin._

LITERATURE AMONG THE ILLITERATES

II

THE LIFE OF A SONG

There was a great contention some years ago fought out in a law court between the British Museum and the Royal Irish Academy, for the custody of certain treasure trove, gold vessels and ornaments disinterred on an Irish beach. The treasures went back, as was only right, to Ireland, where is a rich storehouse of such things, for the soil has been dug over in search for the material relics of ancient art. Yet little heed has been paid to treasures of far greater worth and interest, harder to sell, it is true, but easier to come by--the old songs and stories which linger in oral tradition or in old ma.n.u.scripts handed down from peasant to peasant. Only within the last few years did the Irish suddenly awake to a consciousness that the authentic symbols, or, rather, the indisputable proofs of the national existence so dear to them, were slipping out of their hands. So far had the heritage perished, so ill had the tradition been maintained, that when they turned to revive their expiring language and literature, the first question asked was, "What is it you would revive? Was there ever a literature in Irish or merely a collection of ridiculous rhodomontade? Is there a language, or does there survive merely a debased jargon, employed by ignorant peasants among themselves, and chiefly useful, like a thieves' lingo, to baffle the police?"

These were the questions put, and not one in a thousand of Irish Nationalists could give an answer according to knowledge.

Now, matters are changed. The books that were available in print have been read; the work of poets extant only in ma.n.u.script has been printed and widely circulated; the language is studied with zeal, and not in Ireland only, but wherever Irishmen are gathered. Yet nothing has so strongly moved me to believe that we cherish the living rather than pay funeral honours to the dead, as certain hours spent with a peasant who could neither write nor read.

The life of a song--poets have said it again and again in immortal verse--is of all lives the most enduring. Kingdoms pa.s.s, buildings crumble, but the work which a man has fashioned "out of a mouthful of air" defies the centuries; it keeps its shape and its quivering substance. Strongest of all such lives are perhaps those where "the mouthful of air" is left by the singer mere air, and no more, unfixed on paper or parchment; when the song goes from mouth to mouth, altering its contours it may be, but unchanged in essence, though coloured by its immediate surroundings as a flower fits itself to each soil. Such was the song that I had the chance to write down, from lips to which it came through who knows how many generations.

The story which it tells is among the finest in that great repertory of legend which, since Ireland began to take count of her own possessions, has become familiar to the world. It is the theme of a play in the last book published by the chief of modern Irish poets, Mr. W. B. Yeats. But since he tells the story in a way of his own, and since it is none too well known even in those parts of Ireland where its hero's name is a proverb (_Comh laidir le Cuchulain_, Strong as Cuchulain), it may be well to set out the legend here.

Cuchulain, the Achilles of Irish epic, was famous from the day in boyhood when he got his name by killing, bare-handed, the smith's fierce watchdog that would have torn him. The ransom for the killing was laid on by the boy himself, and it was that he should watch Culann's house for a year and a day till a pup should be grown to take the place of the slain dog. So he came to be called Cu Chulain, Culann's Hound, and by that name he was known when, as a young champion, he set out for the Isle of Skye, where the warrior-witch Sgathach (from whom the island is called) taught the crowning feats of arms to all young heroes who could pa.s.s through the ordeals she laid upon them.

There was no trial that Cuchulain could not support, and the fame of him drew on a combat with another Amazonian warrior, Aoife, who, in the story that I heard, was Sgathach's daughter, though Lady Gregory in her fine book _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_ gives another version. But, at any rate, Cuchulain defeated Aoife, and she gave love to her conqueror--whose pa.s.sion for the fierce queen was not strong enough to keep him from Ireland. When he made ready to go, the woman warrior told him that a child was to be born of their embraces, and she asked what should be done with it. "If it be a girl, keep it," said Cuchulain, "but if a boy, wait till his thumb can fill this ring"--and he gave her the circlet--"then send him to me." So he departed, leaving wrath behind him.

The child born was a son, and Aoife reared him and taught him all feats of arms that could be taught to a mortal, except one only, and of that feat only Cuchulain was master: "the way," said James Kelly, prefacing his ballad with such an explanation as I am now giving, "there would be none could kill him but his own father." And when the boy had learnt all and was the perfect warrior, Aoife sent him out to Ireland under a pledge to refuse his name to any that should ask it, well knowing how the wardens of the coast would stop him on the sh.o.r.e. It fell out as she purposed. The young Connlaoch defeated champion after champion till Cuchulain himself went down, and was recognised by his son. But the pledge tied Connlaoch's tongue, and only when he lay dying, slain by the magic throw which Aoife had withheld from his knowledge, could he reveal himself to his father, the great and childless hero, whose lament for his lost son is written in the song that I set out to secure, on a day of sun and rain, last summer, when great soft clouds drove full sail through the moist atmosphere, their shadows sweeping over brown moor and green valley, while far away towards the sea, mountain peaks rose purple and amethystine in the distance.

Twice before this I had been in the little cottage on Cark Mountain; first, when the chance rumour heard in a neighbouring cabin of a man with countless songs and stories sent me off to investigate; and for a second time, when I had come back with a slightly better knowledge of Gaelic and had taken down a few verses of the poem. These, sent to an Irish scholar, had sufficed to identify the ballad with one printed in Miss Brooke's _Reliques of Irish Poetry_, a characteristic production of the latter days of the eighteenth century, when Macpherson, with his adaptation of the Ossianic poems, and Bishop Percy, with his gathering of old English ballads, had set a fashion soon to culminate in Scott's great achievement.

They proved, however, not ident.i.ty only but difference; and the ballad as I have it in full with its nineteen quatrains, is even less like the longer version given by O'Halloran to Miss Brooke, than the opening stanzas suggested. In them the variations were mainly textual, and when I read out O'Halloran's version to James Kelly, his son, a keen listener, declared a preference for the printed text. But the old man was of another mind. "It's the same song," he said, "sure enough, but there's things changed in it, and I know rightly about them. Some one was giving it the way it would be easier to understand, leaving out the old hard words. And I did that myself once or twice the last day you were here, and I was vexed after, when I would be thinking about it. And this day you will be to take down what I say, let you understand it or not; just word for word, the right way it should be spoken."

There you have in a glimpse the custodian of legend. The man was illiterate, technically, but he knew by instinct, as his ancestors had known before him, that he was the guardian of the life of a song; he recognised that it was a scripture which he had no right to mutilate or alter. He had to the full that respect for a work of literature which is the best indication of a scholar, and for him at least the line was unbroken from the Ireland of heroes and minstrels to the hour when he chanted over the poem that some bard in the remote ages had fashioned.

Little wonder, too, for his own way of life was close to that of the Middle Ages. Below in the valley, where the Sw.i.l.l.y River debouches into its sea lough, was a prosperous little town with banks and railway; but to reach the bleak brown moor where James Kelly's house stood, you must climb by one of two roads, each so rough and steep that a bicycle cannot be ridden down them. Here, in a little screen of scrub alders, stands the cottage, where three generations of the family live together. His own home consisted simply of two rooms with no upper story, but it was trim and comfortable, the dresser well filled, and the big pot over the turf fire gave out a prosperous steam. The son, a grown man, waited from his turf-cutting to help in our discussion; the wife was abroad that day, and one daughter was just starting for market with a web of homespun cloth which they had dressed in the household. The spinning wheel stood in the corner; but another girl was busy near the fire with more modern work, hemming shirts with a machine for a Derry factory, and the bleached linen was the only thing in the house which had not taken on the brown tints of peat smoke.

James Kelly himself, as he sat by the fire declaiming at me, was all browns and greys, like the country outside his door; and his eyes were like brown streams running through that peaty mountain, with their movement and sparkle, and their dark depths. At other times easy, like that of all Irish peasants, his manner changed and grew rough and imperious when the business began. I must not interrupt with questions.

I must write down, syllable for syllable, that the song might be got "the right way." It was by no means easy to carry out these directions, for the poem was written in an Irish not spoken to-day, as unlike as the Chaucerian English is to our common speech; and even to write down modern Irish by ear I was poorly qualified. Things were made harder, too, by the manner of recitation, as traditional as the words. He chanted, with a continuous vocalisation, and while he chanted, elbow and knee worked like a fiddler's or piper's marking the time. However, with persistence, I got the thing down, letting him first say a verse fully through, then writing line by line or as near as I could; then going back and asking questions in detail: the son coming to my rescue, when the old man lost patience (as he did once in every ten minutes) and interposing usefully in our discussions.

For there were endless discussions as to the meaning of words, and nothing could be more curious than to see the old man's endeavour to give in English not merely a bare rendering, but the colour of every phrase. It made me realise as nothing else could have done, how fine was his feeling for the shade of a word, and I cannot describe his dissatisfaction with the poor equivalents he could find. He was happy enough when the debate drifted into an exposition--always addressed to his son--of the uses of some rare word in the Irish, the manner of exposition being by citation of pa.s.sages from other songs, or phrases that might occur in talk. I have listened to many a professor doing the same thing in Greek and Latin, but to none who had a finer instinct for the business. Kelly's vexation came when he had to "put English on" a word for me, and the obvious equivalent was not the right one. Sometimes I could help; sometimes he arrived by himself at what satisfied him, though once at least it was droll enough. We were at the lines where Connlaoch, dying, says to his father: "If I could give my secret to any under the sun, it is to your bright body I would tell it." The trouble was about the phrase "bright body," for the word "cneas" means literally "skin," but is used (just like [Greek: chros] in Homer) to signify "person." What James wanted to convey to me was that the word was not the common one for "body," and at last he smote his thigh. "Carkidge,"

he cried, "it's carkidge (carcase), 'It is to your clear carkidge I would tell it.'" A man with less instinct for literature would have said "body" at once, and never trouble more; but James knew at once too much and too little, and I give the instance to show how an Irishman unlettered in English may be deeply imbued with the true spirit of letters through a literature of his own.

There were, however, several pa.s.sages where I could get no clear account of the meaning, and in some I have since found by comparison with the text which O'Halloran provided for Miss Brooke that Kelly had got the words twisted. For instance, the first stanza opens simply:--

"There came to us a stout champion, The hearty champion Connlaoch."

But of the next two lines I could get no clearer rendering than that "he just came in full through these people for diversion and for fun to himself." Then the ballad continues at once--for its method is terse and its transitions abrupt throughout--to give us the words of the men who meet Connlaoch on his landing:--

"Where have you been, O tender gallant, Riding like a n.o.ble's son?

Methinks by the way of your coming, You are wandering or astray."

And Connlaoch answers the taunt and the challenge implied:--

"My coming is over seas from the land Of the High King of the World, To prove my merry prowess Athwart the high chiefs of Erin."

(It seemed to me characteristic that the stock epithet of valour should be "merry" or "laughing.") The ballad added no reply (though in Miss Brooke's version at this point there is a dialogue of warnings), but went on to tell in the shortest possible words how Conall Cearnach ("the Victorious") rode out from Emain Macha and met the challenger:--

"Out started Conall, not weak of hand, To get news of the n.o.ble's son.

Bitter and hard was the way of it; Conall was tied by Connlaoch."

"'Bring word from us to Hound's head,'

Said the King in fierce sullen tones, To Dundalk sunny and bright, To the Hound, Dog's jaw."

Then Cuchulain (thus described by versions of the nickname won when he broke the jaws of Culann's hound) made answer:--

"Hard for us is hearing of the captivity Of the man whose plight is told; And hard it is to try the venom of blades With the warrior that bound Conall."

But the messenger pleads:--

"Do not think but to go to the rescue Of the destroying keen dangerous warrior, Of the hand that had no fear for any, To loose him, and he fettered."

Then (as Miss Brooke in the majestic manner of the eighteenth century puts it):--

"Then with firm step and dauntless air, Cucullin went and thus the foe addrest, Let me, O valiant knight (he cried), Thy courtesy request, To me thy purpose and thy name confide."

And so on through a sonorous description of dialogue and fight till:--

"At length Cucullin's kindling soul arose, Indignant shame recruited fury lends; With fatal aim his glittering lance he throws, And low on earth the dying youth extends."

Or, as I translate almost literally from James Kelly's version, which is considerably briefer than the text which Miss Brooke has so volubly expanded:--

"Out set the Hound of the keen, smooth blade To see the work that Conall made, Till he pierced with a bitter blow, That hero youth his hardy foe."

That is all we are told of the fighting; the ballad pa.s.ses straight to a terse dramatic dialogue, which Cuchulain opens:--

"Champion, tell your story, For I see your wounds are heavy; 'Twill be short ere they raise your cairn, So hide your testament no longer."

"That's what he said to the son," said James Kelly, finishing the verse, and beginning afresh,

"Let me fall on my face, For methinks 'tis you are my father, And for fear lest men of Eire should see Me retreating from your fierce grapple."

"Then," said James, "the son spoke for to tell him the reason he couldn't spake at the first":--