Art. V.-THE GAELIC REVIVAL IN LITERATURE. 2. A Literary History of Ireland. By Douglas Hyde, LL.D. London: Fisher Unwin, 1899. 3. Love Songs of Connacht. Collected, edited, and translated by Douglas Hyde. Dublin: Gill and Son, 1895. 4. Samhain. Edited for the Irish Literary Theatre by W. B. Yeats. Dublin: Sealy, 1901. 5. Poems. By W. B. Yeats. London: Fisher Unwin, 1901. 6. Homeward Songs by the Way and The Earth Breath. By A. E. London: John Lane. 7. Songs of the Glens of Antrim. By Moira O'Neill. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1900. 8. Hurrish and Grania. By Emily Lawless. Blackwood, 1886; Smith, Elder, 1892. 9. The Lost Pibroch and Gilian the Dreamer. By Neil Munro. Blackwood, 1896; Isbister, 1899. 10. The Sin-eater and The Washer of the Ford. By Fiona Macleod. Edinburgh: Geddes and Colleagues, 1895, 1896. And other works. THE stream of modern English literature is a big water; but ever since Macpherson produced his work-which, whether good or bad, genuine or spurious, affected the mind of Europe, colouring even Napoleon's bulletinsEnglish literature has shown a perceptibly Celtic tinge. The Celt has afforded a subject to many writers: Celtic imagination and Celtic thought have appeared as contributory forces in many books. Even Tennyson, English as Shakespeare, in his most popular poems worked on a Celtic basis; but it is fair to say that the Arthurian legends, as they left his hand, were made into something entirely British, in the modern acceptation of that word. There remains in it little enough that is distinctively Celtic, and no element that is distinctively Welsh. Nor, it may be said at once, has Wales, as Wales, contributed appreciably to English literature. Mr Meredith, by common consent head of those who write in English to-day, is Celt and Welshman, but he is the Celt become cosmopolitan. A Vol. 195.-No. 390. 2 G Celt may recognise the Celt in him; the Englishman may feel, and probably does feel, in his work an element that is bewildering and alien. But he has no place in the movement of which it is our business to write, for that movement is in its essence a vehement reaction against cosmopolitanism, a protest against the confounding of differences. And the most resolute form of that protest is to be found in the national life of Wales. For reasons not easily disentangled, the Celts in Wales have remained aloof, unchallenged and unchallenging. They have sufficed for themselves. Their men of genius have been content to work for the smaller and more responsive audience; and the result has justified them. In Scotland the Celtic speech and tradition are slowly perishing, and with them the people, their repositories. In Ireland ten years ago the same might have been asserted with even greater assurance. But in Wales the Celtic race and Celtic speech are to-day more prosperous, more strongly rooted in the soil than they were a century ago; and an hour spent over Mr Edmund Jones's translations from Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century will show why Wales has contributed little to English literature, and to the Celtic revival. The Welsh poets have produced their work for their own use, not for export; and it would seem that they have produced chiefly in lyrical verse, which is of all literary forms the most difficult to transfer into another tongue. In the most characteristic and popular form of modern creative work, prose fiction, the Welsh, we are told, have done little or nothing; and, with the exception of Mr Watts Dunton's 'Aylwin,' we cannot recall a book in which any considerable novelist has based his work on Welsh life. In Scotland and Ireland the case was very different. From the first years of the century in which the novel began to dominate all other forms of literature, novelists turned eagerly for subjects to the Scottish and Irish Gael. But in how different a spirit they regarded those two kindred peoples, may be readily seen by a comparison of Scott's work with those stories of Miss Edgeworth's to which he owed the suggestion for 'Waverley.' When Miss Edgeworth wrote, she had all about her an Ireland still Irish-speaking, but in which the old order and tradition were shattered; an Ireland lying as if in paralysis, vegetant rather than alive. She wrote of the Celtic Irish with that keen and not unkindly insight that a good mistress possesses into the virtues and foibles of her servants. Once or twice, as, for instance, in Ormond,' she endeavoured to portray some survival of the old Celtic nobility; and King Corny is perhaps as well represented as he could have been by one who knew nothing of the history, language, and literature of his race. Miss Edgeworth was probably as good a patriot as many of the men who opposed the Union, or in any other way defended the cause of Ireland against England; but the Ireland of which she thought and for which they laboured was a community with interests dating back at furthest to the plantation of Ulster. For all that gave significance and value to the history of the Irish Celt, for all his heritage from the past, she and they cared nothing. Miss Edgeworth was an Irishwoman, not a Celt; and Scott was a Scotsman, not a Celt; but what a difference between the two cases! The Scotland to which Scott belonged had a separate history, closing with the day when it gave a king to England. The Scots which his characters spoke, and which affected deeply his own style, was a dialect that had been used for literature as long as the kindred form across the Border; and a Scottish monarch had been among Chaucer's followers. The great nobles of Scotland were chiefs of the Highland clans, and they cherished the Gaelic in a sentimental affection along with the pipes and the tartans. Scott's ideal auditor, Lady Louisa Stuart or the chief of his own clan, did not need to be told how much poetry was held in the Highland tradition. If Scott was not a Celt, at least that farreaching sense of the past, that tenderness for lost causes, which are the Celt's, were Scott's also. And so the Celt, who came from Miss Edgeworth's pencil a droll, disorderly, affectionate, pathetic creature, was painted by Scott in the spirit of romantic tragedy; for the conception that obtains in life obtains also in literature. The Gael in Scotland was always and everywhere a decorative accessory, encouraged in his pride of race by leaders and representatives, who, if they lost the tongue, at least kept the tartan. In Ireland he was by turns the rebel and the serf, his tongue despised, his history ignored or contemned. And yet it is to Ireland that we must trace the revival of the distinctively Celtic spirit, of the Celtic mind, not as a theme, but as a contributory force. 6 For Scott himself, and still more those who imitated him, looked at the Celtic life from the outside. It is evident enough that, in Waverley,' Scott relied rather on the obviously romantic material afforded to his pen by the last struggle of the clans than on that intimate knowledge which he possessed of Lowland character. Admirable as are many strokes here and elsewhere in his delineation of the Highlander, Bailie Nicol Jarvie and the old Baron are creatures more fully created, more affluent in the sap of life, than all the Evans and Donalds, to say nothing of the Ferguses and Floras. Scott guesses at the Celts; he invents them to the best of his wonderful ability; the others spring up in his brain by some process of natural generation, fed from his own sources. All his sympathy, all his insight, do not prevent him from writing of the pure Celt as a foreigner, seen and known only in his collision with the familiar Lowland types, studied with a continual suggestion of contrast, and for the benefit of an alien audience. The importance of Irish literature in the history of the movement is that in Ireland Celtic subjects were first treated in English for a public presumed to be, at least, in racial and historic sympathy, a public of Celts. It was not so from the beginning. Moore, a genuine Celt, was the first to reproduce in English song something of the true Celtic poetry, the complex and varied structure of Celtic verse. The fact that he was the first, rather than the value of his achievement, accounts for the enthusiasm with which Irishmen accepted him as the national poet-a mistake that has led to misconception ever since. For Moore's productions were essentially light and shallow; compositions arranged for the temperature of London drawing-rooms; perhaps as good as things of their kind can be, but of a kind inevitably tainted with insincerity. Yet Celtic they were, and at a time when the distinctively Celtic spirit was at its lowest ebb. The recognised champions of Ireland, from Swift to Grattan, had been men divorced entirely from the Celtic tradition. O'Connell himself, the very voice of the Irish Celt, fluent in Irish as in English, wished that the language were extinct, and was strangely ignorant of all that lay in the past of his race. Men of genius who arose among the peasants, the Banims and Carleton, wrote with no sense of anything but the lamentable and inglorious present of their people. Carleton, indeed, as disreputable a personality as ever dishonoured a great gift, sold his religion for cash down, and began his literary career in the columns of a proselytising paper with caricatures of his own folk, till success enabled him to change to a more congenial partisanship. But in Carleton's pages and those of the Banims (men of less talent but infinitely more honourable record) there is preserved a picture of the Celtic Irish peasantry (or rather of the blended race that included in parts no little strain of Cromwellian blood) as vivid as need be wished for; but a picture, for all that, inadequate as literature. These men, in writing English, handled a tool of whose delicacies they knew nothing; they worked in a literary form strange to their inherited culture; and they wrote always with an eye on the wrong audience, the audience that needed explanations and justifications by the way. They were Celts; the Celt was their subject; but the reader whom they thought of was an English tourist; and this false attitude of mind threw their work, so to say, out of focus. Nevertheless, for a presentment of the Irish Celt as he was before the famine came, sweeping away in swathes the speakers of the old tongue, and convincing those who remained that 'God Almighty was turned Englishman,' Carleton and the Banims are the writers we must look to. Miss Edgeworth has had her successors, some of them notable, from Lever to the clever ladies whose infinitely diverting Recollections of an Irish R.M.' have increased the gaiety of nations. All this literature is thoroughly Irish, stamped with the character of the class from which its writers come-that of the landowners and professional men; and no characteristic of that class is more universal than a deep ignorance and indifference respecting the history of the country in which they reside-or do not reside. They, too, look back at a glorious past; but the date of that past is somewhere in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From Celtic history and Celtic tradition they are entirely divorced; and no wonder, since probably even the head of the O'Briens or |