Critical works on individual authors are innumerable. STEVENSON. Home Book of Verse. Henry Holt and Company. The Book of Georgian Verse. Brentano's. Oxford Treasury of English Literature (3 vols.). Oxford University Press. MANLY. English Prose and Poetry (Ginn and Company). Similar volumes published by The Macmillan Company; Scott, Foresman and Company; and others. STEDMAN. Victorian Anthology. Houghton Mifflin Company.. Athenæum Press Series contains valuable volumes, with critical notes, of selections from Keats, Shelley, De Quincey, Landor, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Carlyle. Ginn and Company. Everyman's Library contains many nineteenth-century classics (send to E. P. Dutton & Company for list). Other useful series: Bohn (Harcourt, Brace and Company); Temple Classics (E. P. Dutton & Company); Golden Treasury (The Macmillan Company). School classics: Standard English Classics (Ginn and Company). Similar series on other publishers' lists. The publishers of standard editions of the works of the authors named in this chapter can be readily located. Suggested Topics Romanticism and Classicism- -a comparison. The lyrics of Keats and Shelley. A study of Wordsworth's ode on "Intimations of Immortality." Wordsworth's attitude toward nature. Scott's typical themes and his historical method. The personality of Charles Lamb, as shown in his essays. The Victorians and ourselves-contrasts. Macaulay's prose style. A study of Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus." Ruskin's attitude toward economic questions, as shown in "The Crown of Wild Olive." The choicest lyrics of Tennyson. Tennyson's use of the "Morte d'Arthur." Browning's philosophy of life. A study of Browning's "Men and Women." Dickens's humor, as displayed in "Pickwick Papers." A character study of Becky Sharp. The personality of Robert Louis Stevenson. Striking passages from Meredith. An analysis of Hardy's "Return of the Native." Recent English poets. A study of a recent English novel. CHAPTER XIV IRISH LITERATURE TRADITION AND EARLY HISTORY Pre-Christian Ireland. The Irish are a Celtic people. The evidence seems to point to a twofold Celtic migration from the Continent to the British Isles, first by the Gaelic and later by the Britannic branch. The latter displaced the Gaels and crowded them into Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. So far as actual events are concerned, we have practically nothing that is authentic until close upon the Christianization of the island. There are traditions of shadowy ancestral races and conflicts-of the monstrous Firbolgs and the fierce Fomorians, overcome by the half supernatural race of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who are said to have come from Greece; of the four Milesian princes from Spain, who overcame the Tuatha and established the high kingship in Ireland; of the long line of kings that followed; of King Conchobhar1 and the hero Cuchulain,2 and of King Cormac mac Art and the two chieftains Finn and Ossian. With Cormac we begin to see the dawn of authentic history. He is supposed to have reigned about the middle of the third century of the Christian Era. The pagan pantheon of Ireland seems to have consisted of a number of divinities corresponding in a rough way to some of the gods of Greece. By the time of Cormac these were apparently reduced to a single great being, symbolized by the sun, and to the numerous and varied forms of the sidhe, or fairy folk. The Druids acted as priests, prophets, teachers, and poets. The social system was apparently a crude sort of communism. The people were divided into tribes and families, owning allegiance to their local kings and in a loose way to the high king. They lived in houses of wood 2 Cu-hü'lǎn. 1 Cön'o-här, or Conor. 3 She. or wattles, indulged in cattle raids, were judged by their Brehons and their system of Brehon law, and accorded a high measure of honor to their women. They had a written language, and were not without a certain skill in the arts, as their metal work and the great palace at Tara bear witness. Poetry was cultivated by the bardic schools, and it may be that the so-called "Song of Amergin," a sixteen-line fragment beginning, "I am the wind that breathes upon the sea," has come down to us from the pre-Christian period. Some of the institutions of the pagan era, such as the Brehon law and the bardic schools of poetry, together with much of the pagan temperament and reaction to experience, survived far into Christian times. The missionaries. The literature of Ireland in the early period is bound up intimately with the work of the missionaries and great religious teachers. Saint Patrick is said to have seen Ireland first when taken there in his boyhood as a captive from Britain. He was sent from Rome in later years to carry out his long-cherished ambition of Christianizing the Irish people. The dates traditionally assigned to his labors in Ireland are 432-492. He seems to have gone about with a considerable following of helpers preaching the gospel and founding churches and schools, and to have been everywhere gladly received. He established the famous school at Armagh. Under his successors, particularly Saint Columcille, Ireland was by the end of the sixth century almost wholly Christianized, and was dotted with schools and colleges like that at Armagh, in which religious and secular learning was cultivated. To these centers of learning came students from all parts of Europe, and from them missionaries and scholars went forth to England and the Continent as far as Switzerland and Galicia. And it was in these schools that the priceless manuscripts of early Irish literature were collected, copied, and preserved. Poems and other writings have been attributed to Saint Patrick and Saint Columcille, and it is possible that a few fragments actually composed by them may have survived, such as "The Deer's Cry," a short devotional poem assigned to Saint Patrick, and the "Farewell to Ireland," said to have been written by Saint Columcille. The Irish language. The Irish language is a branch of the Celtic -the Goidelic, or Gaelic, branch. The earliest manuscripts and inscriptions exhibit two forms, the Roman and the Ogham. Ogham seems to have been employed only for inscriptions on stone or metal and to have made use of a runelike alphabet based phonetically on the Roman. The Irish script used in manuscripts is a remarkably beautiful modification of the Roman alphabet. The period of the language known as Old Irish extends to the end of the tenth century. It appears almost wholly in notations on various continental manuscripts; there are also a very few poetic fragments, certain copies of the Gospels, and one or two other specimens. Some of these ancient manuscripts, particularly those of the Gospels, are typical of the highly developed art of illumination, so characteristic of the Irish copyists. Middle Irish extends from the eleventh to the seven A PORTION OF THE GENEALOGY OF JESUS CHRIST From the "Book of Kells" teenth century, and Modern Irish from the seventeenth century to the present. The Irish genius. So far as the nature and peculiar qualities of the Irish people are concerned, they may be fairly well summed up in the statement that the Irish are of Celtic stock. This means that they are builders of poems rather than of empires. Fundamentally their instinct is for beauty and romance and not for prosperity. They are generous to the point of improvidence; and a people of whom this is true cannot be cold or heartless. The entirely lovable Goldsmith is typical of his countrymen. The fondness of the Irish people for nature is probably deeper and more consistent than that of any other people in the world. There is no moment in their literature in which this sentiment is not warm and sincere. Moreover, in no other people is the feeling for the supernatural so intense. This is also a part of their Gaelic heritage. There is a strange mingling of the old paganism and the new Christianity in much of their best literature and in many of their everyday beliefs and customs. They have refused to turn the old gods out of doors. They keep them in that charming world of the fairies,—the "good people,"-who constitute so vital a link between the visible and the invisible universe. Elves, banshees, leprechauns, haunted raths and streams and caves and shores, are everywhere in Ireland, today as in the distant past. "We exchange civilities with the world beyond," says Yeats. And again he speaks, in his analysis of the Irish spirit, of "the ancient worship of nature, and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all beautiful places being haunted," which a real reverence for nature brings with it. This is true of the whole course of Irish endeavor and experience. In the ancient records we find: "One day the young poet Nede fared forth till he stood on the margin of the sea, for the poets believed the brink of the water to be the place of poetic inspiration. He heard a sound in the wave, even a chant of wailing and sadness, and he marveled thereat."1 And writing but yesterday by comparison, Synge truly enough makes Ireland the "playboy of the western world," representing it as clinging obstinately to romance in the face of much ridicule and at the sacrifice of much advancement in practical and worldly things. THE SAGA-ROMANCE CYCLES Date. The real greatness of early Irish literature lies in the splendid mass of heroic and legendary tales known as saga-romance, dealing with the events and characters of the pre-Christian age. It 1" Book of Leinster." |