by the Christian ethic. A chief, to hold his own, must still throw open doors of hospitality to his tribe, must dispense largesse to all-comers, must gather about his board the neighbours and dependents in riotous assemblies and festivals. But all this the Christian monk and priest looked upon with suspicion; they bade him fill his thoughts with a future Kingdom, rather than with the earthly one to which he had been born, and to keep his soul in humble readiness by prayers and fastings, by seclusion and self-sacrifice. The great disjointure is everywhere apparent; chiefs are seen flying from their plain duties to their clans in order to win a heavenly chiefdom, not of this world; kings retire into hermitages, and whole villages take on the aspect and system of life of the monastery. To escape a network of religious service so closely spread throughout the country was impossible; all that the half-convinced could do was to relieve his soul in legend and song and jest. Hence the large amount of this literature of protest, coming to us curiously side by side with poems breathing the very spirit of religious devotion, the work of peaceful recluse or retired monk.
For the movement had its other aspect. If the warrior or chief resigned much in becoming a Christian monk, there is no doubt that he gained as well. Contemporaneous religious poetry in the Middle Ages is elsewhere overshadowed by the cast of theologic thought. The "world" from which the saint must flee is no mere symbol, denoting the perils of evil courses; it is the actual visible earth, its hills and trees and flowers, and the beauty of its human inhabitants that are in themselves a danger and a snare. St. Bernard walking round the Lake of Geneva, unconscious of its presence and blind to its loveliness, is a fit symbol of the tendency of the religious mind in the Middle Ages. Sin and repentance, the fall and redemption, hell and heaven, occupied the religious man's every thought; beside such weighty themes the outward life became almost negligible. If he dared to turn his mind towards it at all, it was in order to extract from it some warning of peril, or some allegory of things divine. In essence, the "world" was nothing else than a peril to be renounced and if possible entirely abandoned.
But the Irish monk showed no such inclination, suffered no such terrors. His joy in nature grew with his loving association with her moods. He refused to mingle the idea of evil with what God had made so good. If he sought for symbols, he found only symbols of purity and holiness. The pool beside his hut, the rill that flowed across his green, became to his watchful eye the manifestation of a divine spirit washing away sin; if the birds sang sweetly above his door, they were the choristers of God; if the wild beasts gathered to their nightly tryst, were they not the congregation of intelligent beings whom God Himself would most desire? The friendly badgers or foxes of the wood that came forth, undismayed by the white or brown-robed figure who seemed to have taken up his lasting abode amongst them, became to his mind fellow-monks, authorised members of his strange community. Amongst his feathered and furred associates, he read his Psalms and Hours in peace; sang his periodic hymn to St. Hilary or St. Brigit, and performed his innumerable genuflexions and "cross-vigils." Here, from time to time, he poured forth in spontaneous song his joy in the life that he had elected as his own. When King Guaire of Connaught stands at the door of the hermitage in which his brother Marvan had taken refuge from the bustle of court life, and asks him why he had sacrificed so much, Marvan bursts forth into a poem in praise of his hermit life, and the King is fain to confess that the choice of the recluse was the wiser one; when St. Cellach of Killala is dragged into the forest by his comrades and threatened with death, not even the sight of the four murderers lying at his feet with swords ready drawn in their hands to slay him can prevent him from greeting the Dawn in a beautiful song.
The saint who, like St. Finan, lived shut up within his cell, in many cases lost his mental balance, and degenerated into a mere Fakir, winning heaven by the miseries of his self-imposed mortifications; but the monk who trusted himself to untrammelled intercourse with nature, preserved his underlying sanity. For whether or no the hundreds of daily genuflexions were performed, the patch of ground around the solitary's cell must be ploughed or sown or reaped; the apples must be gathered or the honeysuckles twined. The salmon or herring must be netted or angled for. Thus nature and its needs kept the hermit on the straight and simple paths of physical and mental healthfulness, however he might try to escape into a wilderness of his own imaginings.
The early poetry, we feel, is on the whole joyous; whether pagan or Christian in tone, it arises from a happy heart. The pagan is more robust, more vigorous; the Christian gentler and more reflective; but alike they are free from the mournful note of despair that throws a settled gloom over much of the later literature.
The Ossianic poems have quite a distinctive tone; in them we catch the abounding energy belonging to the days of the hunt of the wild native boar or stag, when all the country was one open hunting-ground, fit for men whose ideal was that of the sportsman and the warrior. Besides romantic tales, we have a whole body of poetry, loosely strung together under the covering name of Oisín, or Ossian, and usually ascribed to him or to Fionn mac Cumhall, his father and chief, dealing with the themes of war and of the chase. They are often in the nature of the protest of the fighting and hunting-man against the claims of religion. He is perpetually proclaiming that the sounds and sights of the forest and seashore are more dear to him than any others, and when he is called upon to give the first place to the duties of religion, placed before him, as it usually is, in its most enfeebling aspect, he raises the stout protest that the hunting-horn has greater attractions for him than the tinkling bell which calls to prayer.
"I have heard music sweeter far
Than hymns and psalms of clerics are;
The blackbird's pipe on Letterlea,
The Dord Finn's wailing melody.
"The thrush's song of Glenna-Scál,
The hound's deep bay at twilight's fall,
The barque's sharp grating on the shore,
Than cleric's chants delight me more."
There is the ring of the obstinate pagan about such verses; and many poems are wholly occupied by an unholy wrangling between the representative of the old order, Oisín, and the representative of the new, St. Patrick. The poems themselves probably date from a far later period than either.
More healthy are the true hunting songs. Many of these are in praise of the Isle of Arran, in the Clyde, a favourite resort during the sporting-season both for the Scottish and Irish huntsman. In the poem we have called "The Isle of Arran," from the "Colloquy of the Ancient Men," the charm of the Isle is well described. We have in it the same pure joy in natural scenery that we find in the poems of the religious hermits, but the tone is manlier and more emphatic.
Occasionally a fiercer note creeps into the hunter's mood. The chase of the boar and deer was not without its dangers. Winter, and the unfriendly clan hard by, or the lean prowling wolf at night, were real terrors to the small companies encamped on the open hill-side or in the forest. Though the warrior in peaceful times loved the chase of swine and stag, his hand had done and was always ready to do sterner work when opportunity offered. The poem "Chill Winter" has a note of almost savage exultation; the old fighter turns from his present perils and discomforts to remember the warrior onslaughts which had left the glen below him silent, and its once happy inhabitants cold in death; colder, as he gladly reflects, than even he himself feels on this chill winter's night. It is the voice of the ancient warrior, who thought no shame of slaying, but thanked God when he had knocked down his fellow. Whether he, in his turn, were the undermost man, or whether he escaped, he cared not at all.
Two difficulties face the modern reader in coming for the first time upon genuine Irish literature, whether poetry or prose. The first is the curious feeling that we are hung between two worlds, the seen and the unseen; that we are not quite among actualities, or rather that we do not know where the actual begins or where it ends. Even in dealing with history we may find ourselves suddenly wafted away into some illusory spirit-world with which the historian seems to deal with the same sober exactness as in detailing any fact of ordinary life.
