In 1896, Patrick Pearse joined Douglas Hyde’s Gaelic League, which had as its principal aim ‘the necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland’ – the title of an address Hyde delivered in 1892. Pearse believed passionately that the Irish school system was designed to create good and obedient English citizens, and that the key to arresting this erasure of Irish identity was to revive the Irish language and to promote the native literary and cultural heritage. It was with this in mind that he set up St Enda’s School – Scoil Éanna – in 1908. In 1913, he wrote an essay for Studies, which was only in its second year, in which he argued that the world would have been better served had it revived Irish rather than Greek and Latin literature at the Renaissance.
Patrick Pearse, ‘Some Aspects of Irish Literature’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 2, No. 5 (Mar., 1913), 810-822. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25700923
Some Aspects of Irish Literature
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When I said in the beginning that had Irish literature been rediscovered four centuries ago instead of Greek and Latin literature, modern letters might have received a nobler, because a more humane, inspiration than they did actually receive, what I meant to suggest was this: that the Irish chivalry and the Irish spirituality which would then have commenced to percolate the literatures of Europe was a finer thing than the spirit of the old classic literatures, more heroic, more gentle, more delicate and mystical. And it is remarkable that the most chivalrous inspiration in modern literature does in fact come from a Celtic source: that King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have meant more to modern men than the heroes who warred at Troy or than Charlemagne and his Paladins. But how much richer might European literature have been had the story of Cuchulainn become a European possession! For the story of Cuchulainn I take to be the finest epic stuff in the world: as we have it, it is not the most finely-finished epic, but it is, I repeat, the finest epic stuff. I mean not merely that Conor and Fergus and Conall and Cuchulainn are nobler figures, humaner figures, than Agammemnon and Hector and Ulysses and Achilles; not merely that Macha and Meadhbh and Deirdre and Emer are more gracious figures, more appealing figures, than Hecuba and Helen; I mean also that the story itself is greater than any Greek story, the tragedy as pitiful as any Greek tragedy, yet at the same time more joyous, more exultant. The theme is as great as Milton’s in “Paradise Lost”: Milton’s theme is a fall, but the Irish theme is a redemption. For the story of Cuchulainn symbolises the redemption of man by a sinless God. The curse of primal sin lies upon a people; new and personal sin brings doom to their doors; they are powerless to save themselves; a youth, free from the curse, akin with them through his mother but through his father divine, redeems them by his valour; and his own death comes from it. I do not mean that the Táin is a conscious allegory: but there is the story in its essence, and it is like a retelling (or is it a fore-telling ?) of the story of Calvary. Whether you agree with me or not, you will agree as to the greatness of the theme, stated thus in its essentials; and you will no longer, I hope, think of the Táin as the tale of an ancient Cattle Drive. In that glorious Anthology “The Bards of the Gael and Gall” Dr. Sigerson long ago pointed out that the story of Deirdre fell naturally into the five acts of a great tragic drama. Since then four dramatic poets, three in English and one in Irish, have given us tragedies on the Deirdre story. But the whole Ulster epic falls just as naturally into a great trilogy of tragedies, with a prologue and an epilogue. The Prologue tells of the primal sin and the Curse of Macha; the three great tragedies are, in order, Deirdre, the Táin, and the Death of Cuchulainn; the Epilogue is the Death of Conor. Each of the great tragedies is complete in itself, yet through the whole cycle unrolls in inevitable sequence the doom of Ulster.
It may be said of the Homeric gods that they are too nearly akin to men, but of the Irish heroes that they have in them always something of the divine. The unseen powers have always been very close to Irish-speaking men. I have known old people who lived in familiar converse with the unseen; who knew as it were by sight and by the sound of their voices Christ and Mary and many familiar saints. Now that intimacy with spiritual things is very characteristic of Irish literature. One finds it in the mystical hymns of the Middle Ages; one finds it in the folk-tales of the Western countrysides; one finds it in many exquisite folk-songs. As Mr. Colum has pointed out, Christ and Mary have been incorporated into the Gaelic clan; and Irish peasant women can keen Christ dead with as real a grief as they keen their own dead. I have many times seen women sob as they repeated or listened to “The Keening of Mary.” The strange intimacy that connects certain places in Ireland with the scenes of Christ’s birth and life and death, and links certain Irish saints and heroes with the joy of the Nativity and the tragedy of the Passion – this is the true Irish mysticism, the mysticism which recognises no real dividing line between the seen and the unseen, and to which the imagined experience is often more vivid than the real experience. A people so gifted must bring in their turn a very precious gift to literature; for is it not the function of literature by making known the real and imagined experiences of gifted souls to reveal to common men all the hidden splendours of the world and to make vocal its silent music?
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