Part 3 (1/2)
”I took pledges to my mother Not to give my story to any single man, If I would give it to any under the sun, It is to your bright body I would tell it.”
(”Complimenting him, like,” said James.) Then he recited the stanza which tells by implication how in the long duel Cuchulain was at last driven to use the irresistible stroke of Sgathach's teaching:--
”I lay my curse on my mother, That she put me under pledge; But if it were not for the feat of magic I had not been got for nothing.”
(It is a fine phrase surely, ”You had paid dear in blood before you mastered me.”)
Cuchulain answers groaning, with a wail for the lineage that is cut off:
”I lay my curse on your mother, For she destroyed a mult.i.tude of young ones; And because the treachery that was in her Left your smooth flesh reddened.”
Then comes, with the boy's dying word, the revelation of the most tragic moment in the fight.
”Cuchulain, beloved father, Is it not a wonder you did not know me When I cast my spear crooked and feebly Against your bush of blades.”
Where will you find a finer stroke of invention? The boy, tongue-tied by his pledge, knows his father and feels his defence failing against the terrible onset; he would not, if he could, be the victor, but he thinks of a way within the honour of his bond which may awaken knowledge of him; and he casts his javelin with a clumsiness not to be looked for in the champion ”that tied Conall.” It is useless, the battle madness is in Cuchulain, he thinks only of conquest, an end to the supple, quick parrying, and he throws the gaebulg, a spear of dragon's bones bristling with points (his ”bush of blades”), with the magic cast that there is no meeting. And now there is nothing left to him but the lamentation,
”Och, och! Great is my madness!
I lifting here my young lad!
My son's head in my one hand, His arms and his raiment on the other.
”I, the father that slew his son, May I never throw spear nor n.o.ble javelin; The hand that slew its son, May it win torture and sharp wounding.
”The grief for my son I put from me never, Till the flagstones of my side crumble, It is in me, and through my heart, Like a sharp blaze in the h.o.a.r hill gra.s.ses.
”If I and my heart's Connlaoch Were playing our kingly feats together, We could range from wave to sh.o.r.e Over the five provinces of Erin.”
The penultimate stanza, with its magnificent closing image and its truly aeschylean hyperbole, is not even suggested in Miss Brooke's version. It is, perhaps, the finest thing in the poem; but I hardly know any ballad finer as a piece of dramatic narrative; and the resonant verse, strongly rhymed (in the Gaelic a.s.sonances), and copiously stressed with alliteration, bears out the theme.
These, I trust, are critical opinions. But if the collector would have a special weakness for a vase which his own spade had unearthed, I may be prejudiced in favour of the poem, which I got in the sweat of my brow from very probably the one man living who knew it in that form.
Tellers of old Irish fairy tales about enchanted princes, magic c.o.c.ks and hens, and the like, are still numerous; but it is very rare to find a man who keeps living the old poetry which was made, perhaps, in the twelfth century. Yet while any survive the tradition is still there; the song still lives, for I did not spend my hours without feeling that this old man could respond to any emotion that the song-maker put into the sound and the meaning and the a.s.sociations of his words. There are still those to whom the Irish even of the twelfth century is no dead language.
Even if it were, no doubt the songs made in it might still be strong in life, as are to-day those of Homer and a hundred others. But in the case of these smaller literatures, once the tongue itself has ceased to be heard, dumbness and paralysis fall upon what might else be so full of vitality. And a song has more than its own life, it has power to quicken, to breed. If any one considers that legend of the son and father (found in many languages, yet in none, I think, more finely shaped), it is easy to see how from age to age it may revive itself in new forms, entering into other shapes, as Helen's figure adorns not her own story only, but the praise of a thousand women. Let it be understood that this legend is only one of a cycle, and that the song which I wrote down was only the barest fraction of James Kelly's repertory. Indeed, he was vexed that I should take it as a specimen, for he himself ”had more conceit in” the lays that tell of Finn and his companions, and I could have filled a volume, and maybe several volumes, from his recitations.
These songs may die, the language may die, the Irish race may be swallowed up in England and America. But it is my belief that the strong intellectual life which made of Ireland a home of the arts before the Normans came across channel may, like many another life in nature, spring after centuries of torpor into vigour and fertility again. That is the belief and hope of many of us; but nothing has rendered me so confident in it as to find this work of a strong and fine art not laid aside and neglected, but honoured and current to-day, and, though in a poor man's cottage, living with as full a life as when it was chanted at the feasts of princes.
IRISH EDUCATION AND IRISH CHARACTER.
Education in Ireland has been organised by the State in accordance with English ideas. Had English influence been able to bring about any large measure of conformity between the two countries, there would have been little or no need for a separate paper on moral training in Irish schools. But what conformity there is, is purely superficial; and although free development has been hindered, and Irish inst.i.tutions for teaching are less characteristic than they would have been if entirely left to themselves, still the moral influences which emerge wherever pupils and teachers are brought together reveal themselves in Ireland, and reveal themselves as Irish. The object of this paper, then, is to ill.u.s.trate, so far as possible, the nature and the symptoms of these distinctive influences.
First of all, it may be said broadly that no ordinary person in Ireland contemplates the possibility of teaching morality apart from religion; and by religion is meant emphatically this or that particular creed.
Almost every school maintained by the State is managed locally by a clergyman, who appoints the teacher, and public feeling is so strong on the matter that in any neighbourhood even a small group of families of any particular denomination is always provided with a separate school of its own. Of late, indeed, opinion has begun to agitate for a.s.sociating the laity with the clergy in the management of schools; but this does not indicate any desire to lessen the importance given to the part played by religion in education.
Further, so far as Catholic Ireland is concerned, an immense proportion of the teaching both in primary and secondary schools is done by members of religious orders, and in these, of course, there is no conception of separating moral influences from religious. There is, however, no evidence known to me that even in the few Protestant schools which are partly or wholly under lay control any duties, other than those of ordinary school work, are inculcated except as part of a Christian's religious obligations. This entire state of things is due to the fact that positive Christian belief, and the practice of religious observances, are everywhere in Ireland very general, and among the Catholic population almost universal. It is also hardly necessary to point out that in many respects the standard of Irish morality is so high that the example of Ireland may be quoted with confidence in support of the view which makes moral teaching necessarily a part of religion.
But from such broad generalities there is not much to be gathered, and I proceed to examine in some detail the existing inst.i.tutions--beginning at the top with higher education.
It follows from what has been said that, in the general opinion of Irishmen, there can be no positive moral influence where there is no religious teaching; and for that reason a university without a school of theology or arrangements for corporate wors.h.i.+p is, to Irishmen, a university deficient in moral safeguards. This accounts for the fact that Catholic opinion was much less opposed to the Protestant University of Dublin than to the more modern Queen's Colleges, which, designed by England to provide for her wants of Ireland, excluded religion entirely from their purview. This provision satisfied no one, except to some extent the Presbyterians, who accepted Queen's College, Belfast, with some alacrity, though in practice demanding that its head should always be a staunch professor of their own persuasion. But Catholics as a body refused to accept either the University of Dublin with its Protestant atmosphere or the ”G.o.dless” Queen's Colleges; and since Ireland is mainly a Catholic country, and the National University has not yet created a tradition, it is clear that not much can be gleaned on the subject of Irish ideas of moral training from Irish universities.