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AMONGST
all the elements that have mixed and worked together to quicken and
kindle the ancient British and Anglo-Saxon into the present English
race, nothing is more remarkable than the influence of the Norsemen.
They come into the world at a time when the old races are fast decaying,
for they have reached their dark ages. The storehouses of rude
strength are opened up in the North, and nature goes back to the primal
elements for a fresh vigour that shall vitalize the world. A new
race is wanted, who have had hardship for their teacher, and whose thews
and sinews have been developed to wrestle with difficulty,—a race that
shall conquer such rough facts as the Greeks have shunned, and become
the world's greatest workers; a race of builders as well as battlers,
who can plant as well as plunder, colonize as well as conquer, and
triumph where the Romans failed; a race that shall start up into
Protestant attitude in the presence of all oppression and wrong, and
live and breathe only under such national laws as give room for evolving
the noblest nature of the individual. It was from the cold and
stormy north that the Creator called forth the kindling energy of a
robuster race. These Norsemen came to infuse their Scandinavian
blood into our veins, tingling with electric fire, such as the fiercest
glow of the East can never match. They were the ocean-born
children of Liberty; and to this day, in whatever race the Norse
influence works, in whatever blood it quickens, that race will be found
true to the ancient mother, fighting for liberty still. The
Norsemen were born Protestants—haters of the Romish Church—hated it
almost as soon as they heard of it. They were known to us in our
boyhood as the 'Bloody Danes,' ever since they were so painted by the
Anglo-Saxon monks who saw their terrible warships hovering round the
shores, and their faces gleaming in the red light of burning
monasteries. This Norse power, then, after innumerable endeavours
to open the doors which were held and defended against it with desperate
tenacity, passed into the English race, with its indomitable pluck, its
enduring hardihood, and all its hunger for enterprise, lust of danger,
and longing for new fields of action. It did the same with
the Lowland Scotch. And we look upon this Norse Conquest as one of
the great wedding influences of the two peoples. It ranges us on the
same side of the world in politics and religion; it gives us the same
delight in the sea, and brotherhood in battling; gives us a mutual
feeling so strong that it fuses us into one. The Celtic race in
Ireland fought strenuously to resist the infusion of Norse influence,
and were more successful in their efforts to keep it, out. The
older brother, already and for long in possession of the land, and
priding himself on his direct lineage, looked with dark suspicion on
this younger, ruddy, blue-eyed, and fair-haired fellow, who had been to
sea, and who came with courage and daring to set his sea-king's throne
high over all the thrones or the earth. The Norsemen who came to
stir the plodding AngloSaxon, and make him lift up his brow in the
light of a new dawn, and quicken his footsteps in the onward march of
national life, was utterly rejected by the Celt; rejected with all his
might in battle, and by his strongest predilections of race. The
Norse spirit swam to the shores of Ireland, was continually driven to
sea again, but effected a landing in England and Scotland. There
was no such wide difference betwixt the Anglo-Saxons and the Irish
before the Norse blood got into the British race. The Anglo-Saxons
were over-ridden by the Romish Church, and the people were degenerating
in the stifling shadow that crept over them, in place of the pure light
that shone when Christ was born. These men asserted in their life
and looks their thoughts and deeds, that great principle which was
afterwards identified with the name of Luther. They maintained
the right of private judgment in religion, and the right of
representation in government; and whereas the Celtic affection is most
successfully appealed to in fighting for a person, the Norse ambition is
to fight for a principle. This illustration alone is sufficient to
show how far the Norse influence must have differentiated the
Anglo-Saxon in England from the Celtic race as found in Ireland.
We derive from the Norsemen many of those
characteristics which we now call 'so English.' Our love of the
sea; our aptitude for self-government; the large, clear sincerity of men
who have been accustomed to look stern realities full in the face; the
open-air freshness of look, flesh-and-blood warmth of grip; the
frankness and simplicity as of sailors; and a resolute earnestness of
being and doing,—were all traits of our Scandinavian ancestors.
There was a heartiness in the Norse nature, a breadth in the Norse
imagination, which out-distance anything we can find in the Celt.
In giving honour, let us also do justice. Our Irish friends have
so often done injustice to the inoffensive Anglo-Saxons, so much have
they nursed a mistaken feeling of hatred, that the term 'Saxon' has
become a sufficient mark for the wormwood bitterness of their blackest
blood. It is the Norsemen they mean. It was the Norsemen who
were their born enemies and natural antagonists. It was the Norsemen and
Anglo-Normans who so often attempted the conquest of Ireland. We
are not aware that history makes mention of more than one national raid
under an Anglo-Saxon king, and that is apocryphal. But the poor
'Saxon' has had to suffer in the Irish imagination for all that the
Norsemen and the Normans have done.
It was the Norsemen who first ravaged the shores of
Ireland in their many Viking expeditions. In the middle of the
ninth century, a king of Norway, proud and fierce, had made himself
master of half Ireland. From that time the spirit of the country
was kept continually insurgent against the Norsemen. And yet to this day
it is the name of the peaceable, home-loving Saxon that erects the
porcupine feeling at a thousand points.
The Irish race appears to us to lack many elements of
that new force which the Norsemen came to supply,—that tempering
influence and balancing power which sets an Englishman more firmly on
his feet, gives him a good grip of the bridle-hand over the horse-power
within him, and strength to keep the caloric of temperament shut up at
will in a granite calm. One would think that there was also a
defect in the Irish mind which incapacitates it for taking a real
possession of the present, and working out of the present a better
future. It puts the future first, when in the hopeful mood, and
whilst trying to climb up into its lofty and spreading shelter to make
its nest there, it will carelessly trample down all those lowly and
quiet undergrowths about its feet, those compensations of the present
which might fill the heart, with comforting thoughts, and life with some
sweet satisfaction and peace of possession. Or, if in the mournful mood,
it invariably turns to the past, when, according to the natural order of
things, it should be looking to a cheerier and brighter future. It
turns to some far past, and its poets sing of the bygone days, as though
they belonged to a race which has a splendid past, but a hopeless
future. Their true possessions appear to remain in a far-off land
that lies near the dawn, and is only visible in all its glory when
looked at across a sea of tears. They turn to the proud old
houses, and the great old times; their chiefs of long and lofty line,
and all the fields of victory they 'thrill to name, whose memories are
the stars that light long nights of shame.' And while the colours of
dawn bloom in the distance, and the glowing reflection flushes their
faces, the shadow of sorrow lengthens and darkens, as though all the
visionary splendour was only that of a setting sun going down for ever.
And the voice of the singer has a sound of tears, and is sad as a wind
that wails in a graveyard at night over the desolate dead. In the
midst of the bleakest and most shivering present, they will turn to warm
the chilled heart at the glory of their golden time, and find warmth and
solace in the pictures of their poetry.
While the Ireland of the present may be all dark, as
the wings of the famine-fiend overshadow it, and pestilence breathes in
the face of the people till they turn blue and ghastly, and the land is
a wilderness of graves, and only the last groan of breaking hearts, or
the wild cry of rebel men, startles the more horrible stillness of
despair,—they will fly to some realm of fancy, or region of
whisky-world, and find a land where they can walk entranced in the light
of a sun that shines on lustrous fields of harvest gold, and ruddy
fruits that come up out of the earth without planting, because the clime
is so balmy; and the princes have a loving, noble aspect, the people are
radiant with a happy look, plenty reigns, and content rejoices, because
the time is so blessed. Poor Mangan's vision of the past was
undoubtedly seen in whisky-world. But Irish poetry has more
authentic, if less amazing, reports of a splendid past. In 'Prince
Aldfrid's Itinerary through Ireland,' a poem still extant in the Irish
language, and attributed to Prince Aldfrid, afterwards king of the
Northumbrian Saxons, we have a glowing account of Ireland in the seventh
century. Unless we look upon the Prince merely as a 'finder,' in
the sense of the Mediævals, who called the poet by that name, it must
have been a wonderful time of day indeed for Ireland, and we cannot
marvel that it should yet dazzle the native imagination. He tells
us that he 'travelled its fruitful provinces round,' and he found plenty
of gold and silver, food in abundance, apparel in plenty. He found
God's people rich in pity.
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'I also found in Armagh, the splendid,
Meekness, wisdom, and prudence blended.' |
What a different version Irish
representatives give now-a-days!
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'I found the good lay monks and brothers
Ever beseeching help for others,
And in their keeping the holy word
Pure as it came from Jesus the Lord.
I found in Munster unfettered of any,
Kings and queens, and poets a-many.' |
This will,
perhaps, account for the numbers that claim royal descent, still
'unfettered of any' misgivings in making their claim, or scruples in
putting it forward.
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'I found strict morals in age and youth,
I found historians recording truth.' |
Can testimony to
national veracity go further, or say more? The writer could not
have known what force that statement would acquire for us. But, as
though he had a fear lest he might not be believed in after times, he
tells us that he did find all these things 'I have written sooth.'
Another bard gives us a pleasant picture of Ireland
in the past. How much of its light-heartedness, happy health, and
generous nationality, comes from the heart of its translator, Mr
Ferguson, and how much may be found in the original Irish, we know not;
but it is as richly stored with delightfulness as a breast full of milk
for a babe, gracious and satisfying as Spencer's description of
'Charity:'—
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'A plenteous place is Ireland for hospitable cheer,
Where the wholesome fruit is bursting from the yellow barley
ear;
There is honey in the trees where her misty vales expand,
And her forest paths in summer are by falling waters fanned;
There is dew at high noontide there, and springs in the yellow
sand,
On the fair hills of holy Ireland.
'Large and profitable are the stacks upon the ground;
The butter and the cream do wond'rously abound;
The cresses on the water and the sorrels are at hand,
And the cuckoo's calling daily his note of music bland,
And the bold thrush sings so bravely his song i' the forests
grand,
On the fair hills of holy Ireland.' |
In all this
turning back to the past, we are continually reminded of a race that has
seen better days. There is a total want of the fine old Norse
spirit of self-reliance, and of making the best possible of the present.
On the contrary, among the Irish bards we find a wild wailing set up
continually for the expected Deliverer who is to come and restore this
golden time. Ireland is sleeping, and her people are dreaming,
with all things in a general state of pause, awaiting for the coming-to
of Cathaleen Ni Houlahan. Or Ireland is cowering underground,
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'Neath the sod lying low,
Expecting King James with the crown on his brow.' |
Ireland is
mostly represented allegorically. The poet often wanders abroad in
the purple of dawn, the gold of evening, or green of the day, and he
sees in splendid vision a maiden wondrously fair, meek as a vestal, yet
grand as a queen. Her eyes are as the stars of heaven, her teeth
are smiling pearls, her gold tresses are ringleted and reaching to the
knee; but never mortal kissed the lily hand, never did mortal brow rest
on the beautiful bosom. This is Ireland, as she sits, perhaps, on
the sea-shore, looking wistfully with her wide blue eyes to see if her
Deliverer is coming over the sea to free her where she is bound, like
another Andromeda, mourning melodiously.
One of these bards sings:—
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'We love the antique and the olden,
We gladly glance
back to the golden
And valourful times of our sages and heroes,
But those shall
no more be beholden.' |
His conclusion is, indeed, a
settler, and startingly literal:—
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'The armies of Britain wield ample
Resources to vanquish and
trample;
Charles Stuart's o'erthrow, should be venture o'er hither,
Will be dreadful beyond
all example.' |
One of the most
familiar of Irish legends relates that a troop of O'Neill's horse lies
in magic sleep in a cave under a hill. There they only wait to have the
spell broken by courage, in order that they may rise to help their
country, and overthrow her oppressors. The legend tells us how one
man wandered into the cave, and saw the men lying beside their horses,
bridle in one hand, and broadsword in the other. One of the
troopers raised his head, and asked, 'Is the time come?' The man
was too frightened to reply; and so the soldier, receiving no answer,
fell once more into the charmed slumber.
Nearly twenty years ago, there arose in Ireland a
band of young men, passionate lovers of their country, and jealous
guardians of her proudest traditions. They conceived the idea of
awakening this deliverer, who should stretch forth his hand and take the
sword they would forge ready for his clutch. They would breathe a new
breath of life into Ireland. 'Ireland for the Irish' was the motto on
their banner. Around this banner thronged eager spirits, burning
high with hope and ardour, who set about fighting the battle of
nationality by press and pen, picture and speech, with all the fervour
of those three hundred Spartans who sold their lives so dearly in the
red pass of Thermopylæ. Among them was the usual mixture of human
dross, but there was also immortal metal. They strove to put a new soul
into the great body of the people through the opening eyes, the
listening ears, or, if need were, the tingling finger-tips that clasped
the sword-hilt, and in every way inspire them to lift up the bended
brow, and walk erect, straight through some gate of glory into their new
kingdom of liberty and light. Some hearts were broken, some lives
were wasted, many waves of strength dashed on the wrong shore, failed
and fall back worn out and weary. For one thing, they sought what
is known in Scotland as the 'Good Man's Croft,' or the 'Devil's Acre.'
This is that portion of a farm or estate which will never repay the cost
of cultivation. Yet it appears to be satanically endowed with power to
tempt the unlucky victim into a wilful determination of conquering its
stubbornness, until he wastes his time, money, strength, life, and will
spend all the profit yielded by the rest of the land in this mad
endeavour to overcome natural sterility. 'Repeal of the Union' was
the 'Good Alan's Croft' or 'Devil's Acre' of these young, enthusiastic,
and wilful Irishmen.
Thomas Davis was the great man of the Young
Ireland party. His name is one not often heard in England.
It finds no record in Scotland, to judge by the new 'Encyclopædia
Britannica,' in which no mention of him can be found. Even Ireland
does not yet know what a true lover and faithful son she lost in him.
Ten years ago a complete edition of the works of Thomas Davis was
proposed by Mr Duffy, a, publisher, of whom his country should be proud;
but it was never called for, and has not been issued. Yet the name of
Thomas Davis is one never to be forgotten when ballad poetry is spoken
of, no matter in what country. And it is a name for Ireland to
cherish in her heart of hearts. Countries as well as writers often
do not know when they have produced their best. We hold that
Ireland, the nation of many sorrows, suffered one of her greatest
bereavements when she lost him. The reader may recollect, in a
note of Lord Jeffrey to Mrs Empson, to be found in Lord Cockburn's Life
of Jeffrey, that the critic says he has just read,
'A very interesting little volume of "Irish Ballad
Poetry," published by that poor Duffy of the Nation, who died so
prematurely the other day. There are some most pathetic and many
spirited pieces, and all, with scarcely an exception, so entirely
national. Do get the book and read it. I am most struck with
"Soggarth Aroon," and a long, racy, authentic sounding dirge for the
Tyrconnel Princes. But you had better begin with the "Irish
Emigrant" and the "Girl of Loch Dan," which will break you in more
gently to the wilder and more impassioned parts.'
The 'poor Duff y of the Nation' should have
been written Thomas Davis. Davis was pre-eminent amongst his
fellows for his large-heartedness, his capacity for work, his
loveableness, his chivalry, invincible as that of the knights of old.
He was one of those gallant spirits that start in the race of life with
the proudest hopes and aspirations, eager to do, daring to suffer, and
mighty to overcome, a martyr and hero in one, but who never accomplish a
third of the work that was in them; and so, when we hear the report of
friends, who stood about them in a pleasant glow and hush of
expectation, and who speak to us of them after they are gone, the report
appears extravagant. But, high over a heart as warm as the
youngest and most passionate patriot, a heart like a 'holy well,'
running over with waters of life, Thomas Davis bore the clear head of a
calm statesman. He was no mere hot-brained fighting man; no mere
madcap and feather-triumph patriot. He was as kingly in council as
fervid in song. We may differ with him, as we do, about the
supposed benefit of a repeal of the Union—for one reason, that we have
lived to see more than he saw. But, right or wrong in object, he
set about using the right means. His advice was, to cease wailing
and begin working. Any one can destroy; let us see if we cannot
create. Study the nation's history, and train up men who
shall be worthy of wearing what we are toiling to win. Look no
longer to France or Spain for hope and succour, or to any Utopia
whatever for the deliverer, but trust to your own heads, hearts, and
hands. Educate, that you may be free. Give the little ones
in schools the best available knowledge of literature, art, and science.
Everything must be Irish—everything done for Ireland by the Irish.
He would have the dull made thoughtful, the thoughtful made studious,
the studious wise, and the wise crowned with power. He would have
every parish penetrated and permeated with a knowledge of what Ireland
had been, was, and might yet become. He would have the people
turned on the land in small proprietorships; the bogs drained, and set
on fire in the shape of fuel; railways on the land, mills on the
streams, and fisheries on the sea. He was as eloquent. on the nature of
soils as of races, on duties as on rights, on national commerce as on
national song.
Among other schemes, he planned the publication of
one hundred shilling books, to be printed in Duffy's Library for
Ireland, and to consist of history, biographies, etc., the materials for
which were to be sought in the State Paper Office, London, the MSS.
Trin. Col. Library, and the valuable papers still preserved in Irish
convents at Rome, Salamanca, and other places. To infuse a larger
spirit of nationality into the people, it was proposed to commence the
Nation newspaper, and the projectors determined to make use of
popular poetry as an agent. There being none at hand suited to
their purpose, they had to set about making their own poetry for
themselves. This was the origin of most of that beautiful rebel
verse, now known as the 'Spirit of the Nation.'
Such was the patriotic heat of the time glowing at
the heart of each and all, acting and reacting on one another, that men
stood for the moment transfigured in the brightness of faculties new
found. Brains formed for solid work, and stiffened into shapes
that should be able to wrestle with figure and fact, became fluent at a
touch, and poetry flowed from them in vital streams. To refer to
one example: we believe that the following poem was the first and last
attempt at verse-making on the part of the writer, but it is the most
perfect gem of all the Young Ireland verse—an epitome of Irish history—a
picture of Ireland the exile—a poem that is anonymous so long as its
author lives, but a poem that will make known his name for ever after:—
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'THE MEMORY OF THE DEAD.
Who fears to speak of Ninety-Eight?
Who blushes at the name?
When cowards mock the Patriot's fate,
Who hangs his head for shame?
He's all a knave, or half a slave,
Who slights his country thus;
But a true man, like you, man,
Will fill your glass with us.
We drink the memory of the brave,
The faithful and the few;
Some lie far off beyond the wave,
Some sleep in Ireland too.
All—all are gone—but still lives on
The fame of those who died;
All true men, like you, men,
Remember them with pride.
Some on the shores of distant lands
Their weary hearts have laid,
And by the stranger's heedless hands
Their lonely graves were made.
But tho' their clay be far away
Beyond the Atlantic foam,
In true men, like you, men,
Their spirit's still at home.
The dust of some is Irish earth,
Among their own they rest;
And the same land that gave them birth
Has caught them to her breast.
And we will pray that from their clay
Full many a race may start
Of true men, like you, men,
To act as brave a part.
They rose in dark and evil days,
To right their native land;
They kindled here a living blaze
That nothing shall withstand.
Alas! that Might can vanquish Right—
They fell and passed away;
But true men, like you, men,
Are plenty here to-day.
Then, here's their memory—may it be
For us a guiding light,
To cheer our strife for liberty,
And teach us to unite!
Through good and ill, be Ireland's still,
Tho' sad as theirs your fate;
And true men be you, men,
Like those of Ninety-Eight.' |
One
marvels whether that shaft hit the mark by accident, like the boy's in
the Persian legend. The king's archers were a11 shooting at the
ring, and not one could send the shaft through. A boy, sitting on
a house-top near, tried with his bow, and by accident the arrow went
through the ring. Wonderful marksman! cried the soldiers; come
down and do that again. But the boy was wise, and would not risk
his fame. Is this ungracious, Mr Nameless? Well, you who can
write so, ought to have written more!
Up to the time of starting the Nation
newspaper, in conjunction with Mr Duffy, Thomas Davis is said to have
never written poetry. He tried, and produced a ballad, full of
Irish pathos, on the death of Owen Roe O'Neill. All of a sudden it
seemed that a national lyrist had, aloe-like, burst into full bloom.
There was a genuine lyrical leap of the soul into song in Thomas Davis
ballads; more so than could have been anticipated from one who was a
late beginner, and who began to write verse from external necessity to
teach, rather than from internal necessity to sing. He sang at the
call of his country, rather than at the voice of his own soul. It
was Pegasus in historical harness, helping to draw the people along a
heavy road, full of ruts and furrows, rather than proudly bearing a poet
up the steeps of Parnassus. But it matters little whence the
incentive comes, so that it quickens a fruitful nature. Possibly,
if Davis had lived, the politician might have killed out the poet; but
he had only written verse for three years, when the chords of his Irish
harp were stilled by the dull hand of Death. He died also when
only a few volumes of the projected Library of Ireland had been printed.
He died of fever, in September 1845, most probably from over-work,—died
at his post, and with his armour on, but without getting a glimpse of
the better times that have dawned for Ireland. But Thomas Davis
did not live or die in vain. The movement into which he flung his
life as an impulse, did not end in a cabbage-garden. After the
chief was gone, the soldiers fought, rashly, wildly, and ended
lamentably. But the spirit of inquiry that Davis woke has not died
out. His own spirit is with Ireland still. His words—when speaking
of Ireland's wants—still work on, and the men who remember them.
'It is not a gambling fortune made at Imperial play that
Ireland w ants. It is the pious and stern cultivation of her
faculties and her virtues, the acquisition of faithful and exact habits,
and the self-respect that rewards a dutiful and sincere life. To
get her peasants into snug homesteads, with well-tilled fields and
placid hearths—to develop the ingenuity of her artists, and the docile
industry of her artizans—to make for her own instruction a literature
wherein our climate, history, and passion shall breathe—to gain
conscious strength and integrity, and the high post of holy freedom;—
these are Ireland's wants.'
We quote a few lines from a poem on the death of
Thomas Davis, written by Samuel Ferguson to a music peculiarly national.
The poem is not to be met with in the usual collections of Irish
poetry:—
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'And, alas! to think but now and thou art lying,
Dear Davis, dead at thy mother's knee;
And I, no mother near, on my own sick-bed,
That face on earth shall never see!
I may lie and try to feel that I am not dreaming—
I may lie and try to say, "Thy will be done!"
But a hundred such as I will never comfort Erin
For the loss of the noble son.
But my trust is strong in God, who made us brothers,
That He will not suffer those right hands,
Which thou hast joined in holier rites than wedlock,
To draw opposing brands.
Oh! many a tuneful tongue that thou mad'st vocal
Would lie cold and silent then;
And songless long once more should often-widowed
Erin
Mourn the loss of her brave young men.
Oh, brave young men! my love, my pride, my promise,
'Tis on you my hopes are set,
In manliness, in kindliness, in justice,
To make Erin a nation yet:
Self-respecting, self-relying, self-advancing,
In union, or in severance, free and strong.
And if God grant this, then, under God, to Thomas Davis
Let the greater praise belong.' |
The life of Thomas
Davis has not been written. His correspondence was to have been
given to the world by Owen Maddyn, if he had lived. Alas!
how many grand promises made to Ireland have depended on such an 'if!'
We have not many facts of the biographic kind, and we do not feel very
generous about giving what we have to those encyclopædists who ought to
have collected them for us. Thomas Davis was born at Mallow,
Ireland, in the year 1814. He graduated at Trinity College,
Dublin, in 1835; was called to the Irish bar in 1838, made his first
essay in political writing in 1840, helped to start the Nation
in 1842, died in 1845, and numbered 30 or 31 years on his coffin lid.
He was a sincere Protestant, but beloved in both camps. He was not
married. His intellect was solid, as his life was brief and
brilliant. His poems are collected in a little shilling hook.
His essays are the merest sparks struck out of the grindstone of hard
daily toil; but there is in them a touch of the true Promethean
fire—ample proof that here was a good and a great man. We give but
one specimen of his poetry; but it is a model of ballad verse: in its
way, it is perfect as one of Campbell's battle-ballads, although written
with the more numerous detail as of our pre-Raphælite painters, whereas
Campbell used the brush more after the manner of the old masters.
It is the 'Battle of Fontenoy,' where, as the old Scottish song says,
the French for 'ance won the day.' It was the day of the
famous English column, whose rolling fire, the French courtier wrote,
was 'really infernal,' and the English officers laid their canes across
the muskets to make the men fire low; and so fatal was their fire, that
the one English volley on the hill-top cost the desperate Irish brigade
one-fourth of their officers and one-third of their men. George
II., on hearing bow the Irish fought, is said to have uttered that
imprecation on the penal code: 'Cursed be the laws which deprive me of
such subjects.'
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'Thrice at the huts of Fontenoy, the English column failed,
And twice the lines of St Antoine the Dutch in vain assailed;
For town and slope were filled with fort and flanking battery,
And well they swept the English ranks and Dutch auxiliary,
As vainly, thro' De Barri's wood, the British soldiers burst,
The French artillery drove them back, diminished and dispersed.
The bloody Duke of Cumberland beheld with anxious eye,
And ordered up his last reserve, his latest chance to try.
On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, how fast his generals ride!
And mustering come his chosen troops, like clouds at eventide.
Six thousand English veterans in stately column tread,
Their cannon blaze in front and flank, Lord Hay is at their head;
Steady they step adown the slope—steady they climb the hill;
Steady they load—steady they fire, moving right onward still,
Betwixt the wood and Fontenoy, as thro' a furnace blast,
Thro' rampart, trench, and palisade, and bullets showering fast;
And on the open plain above they rose, and kept their course,
With ready fire and grim resolve that mocked at hostile force,
Past Fontenoy, past Fontenoy, while thinner grew their ranks,
They break, as broke the Zuyder Zee thro' Holland's ocean banks.
More idly than the summer flies, French tirailleurs rush round;
As stubble to the lava tide, French squadrons strew the ground;
Bomb-shell, and grape, and round-shot tore; still on they marched
and fired—
Fast from each volley grenadier and voltigeur retired.
"Push on my household cavalry!" King Louis madly cried:
To death they rush, but, rude the shock—not unavenged they died.
On thro' the camp the column trod—King Louis turns his rein:
"Not yet, my liege," Saxe interposed, "the Irish troops
remain:"
And Fontenoy, famed Fontenoy, had been a Waterloo,
Were not those exiles ready then, fresh, vehement, and true.
"Lord Clare," he says, "you have your wish, there are your Saxon
foes!"
The Marshal almost smiles to see, so furiously he goes.
How fierce the look those exiles wear, who're won't to be so gay!
The treasured wrongs of fifty years are in their hearts to-day—
The treaty broken ere the ink wherewith 'twas writ could dry,
Their plundered homes, their ruined shrines, their women's part-
ing cry;
Their priesthood hunted down like wolves, their country over
thrown,—
Each looks as if revenge for all were staked on him alone.
On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, nor ever yet elsewhere,
Rushed on to fight a nobler band than these proud exiles were.
O'Brien's voice is hoarse with joy, as, halting, he commands—
"Fix bayonets "—charge!—like mountain-storm, rush on those
fiery bands!
Thin is the English column now, and faint their volleys grow,
Yet, mustering all the strength they have, they make a gallant show,
They dress their ranks upon the hill to face that battle wind—
Their bayonets the breakers' foam, like rocks the men behind.
One volley crashes from their line, when, thro' the surging smoke,
With empty guns clutched in their hands, the headlong Irish broke.
On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, hark to that fierce huzza!"
Revenge! remember Limerick! dash down the Sassenagh!"
Like lions leaping at a fold, when mad with hunger's pang,
Right up against the English line the Irish exiles sprang:
Bright was their steel, 'tis bloody now, their guns are filled with
gore;
Thro' shattered ranks, and severed files, and trampled flags they
tore.
The English strove with desperate strength, paused, rallied, stag
gered, fled—
The green hill-side is matted close with dying and with dead;
Across the plain and far away passed on that hideous wrack,
While Cavalier and Fantassin dash in upon their track.
On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, like eagles in the sun,
With bloody plumes the Irish stand—the field is fought and won.' |
This poetry of the
Nation school could not be of the highest kind; poetry written for
political purposes never can be: the highest can only be struck from the
eternal strings of the human heart. Nor did it come as the natural
crown that blossoms out of great national action, for life must be lived
before a literature can be written. The spoken word may incite to
action. The minstrel Tallifer may help to win a battle of
Hastings, but the greatest actions must be accomplished before the
greatest song will be sung. Only out of a strong and healthy
national life can a national literature spring; only out of the lion of
this strength cometh the full sweetness of poetry. Still, they did
some true things in poetry; and one of the very best things done by
these young men was the very memorable one of breaking up that huge and
foolish swindle, the 'Repeal Association. Poor O'Connell was their
bitter enemy, for he felt they had shortened his days in the land, and
found that they were too much for him.
We have now to speak of other Irish poets not
necessarily connected with the
Nation school. These do not properly come under the title
of our article, but may be embraced in the same view, as belonging to
the last twenty or thirty years of Irish poetry. The name and fame
of Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson were made before the rise of the
'Young Ireland' school. The father and founder of an earlier and
more purely literary school of Irish writers was Dr Petrie. In
1832, four very remarkable young men might be found working in his study
in Dublin, and, under his instruction and inspiration, working, we
believe, on the 'Ordnance Survey Memoir of Ireland' (a great work nipped
in the bud, for fear of exciting too strong a feeling of nationality).
These were, O'Donovan, Curry, O'Keefe, and Mangan. Petrie was at
this time editing the
Dublin Penny Journal, the first two volumes of which contain
writings of great elegance, and include some of Mangan's best earlier
translations. At the same time, or probably a little earlier, the
Rev. George Fox (now the Principal of an English College in Demerara)
had gathered about him a little band of devoted young disciples in
Belfast, and amongst these were Hogan, M'Clean, and Samuel Ferguson.
These young men owed much to their teachers, to whom they looked up with
love and gratitude. It was Dr Petrie who corrected, by the
influence of a refinement of mind and sentiment acting insidiously, the
early faults of Mangan's style. The chief fault which Petrie
corrected for the time was poor Mangan's affectation of a
gamin-like jauntiness and knowingness. He also conquered
his repugnance to Irish material. For Mangan had to work on
literal translations from the original language, and could with
difficulty be brought to melt into music the bald, disjointed English
which Curry and his other companions put before him.
James Clarence Mangan was born in Dublin in 1803, of
poor parents. His father is said to have been of a restless
disposition, and unfortunate in business. His boyhood was most
probably spent in the streets, where the precocious child would be an
industrious sweeper-up of peculiar information respecting the world in
general, and that of poverty in particular. Before he was fifteen,
he obtained a situation in a scrivener's office, which he kept for seven
years, and was then a solicitor's clerk for three years. Those who
knew him in after years speak of his mother, sister, and brother as
still living; and these must for long have partly lived on Mangan's
scanty earnings. He himself has written of his early days in the
lawyer's office:—
'I was obliged to work seven years of the ten from
five in the morning, winter and summer, to eleven at night; and during
the three remaining years, nothing but a special providence could have
saved me from suicide. The misery of my own mind; my natural
tendency to loneliness, poetry, and self-analysis; the disgusting
obscenities and horrible blasphemies of those associated with me; the
persecutions I was obliged to endure, and which I never avenged but by
acts of kindness; the close air of the room, and the perpetual smoke of
the chimney,—all these destroyed my constitution. No!
I am wrong; it was not even all these that destroyed me. In
seeking to escape from this misery, I had laid the foundation of that
evil habit which has proved my ruin.'
He must have wrought at weaving the web of his
wonderful knowledge, assiduously and secretly as any old spider, hid up
in the dark of those early years. It is said that he loved some
cold and careless coquette, and that a good deal of his life's lustre
was run off in tears, which only served to make her triumph more
brilliant. But all this was suffered in his own shy, sensitive,
uncomplaining way. One who knew him, speaks of there being a gap
in his life here; 'an obscure gulf, which no eye has fathomed, into
which he entered a bright-haired youth, and emerged a withered and
stricken man.'
By the aid of Drs Petrie and Todd, Mangan obtained
employment in the great University Library. The book-worm feasted
richly, and then burst into wings of rare splendour. A strange
figure he must have been, with the white halo of bleached hair round his
head, the dark halo round his eyes—eyes of weird blue, as of one who
could see spirits; a lighted corpse-like face, with that faint lavender
shadow which they wear who eat opium, and dream its dreams. A
strange figure, and yet not startling: a child would not have feared to
pull the old brown carmelite coat, climb the offered knee, and kiss the
face where queer humour and quaint pathos mingled with an expression
such as Cruikshank alone could have figured; and over all was the
affecting touch of a weak will in the mildness of his look, that pained
you like the crack in the laugh of age.
One of the most pathetic things in all the mortal
life of our Saviour, is His weeping over the doomed city of Jerusalem.
There it lies, full of all uncleanness. It has persecuted the
saints, slain the prophets, and stoned the martyrs. It spurns the
Saviour, and hurries on to meet its day of doom and desolation.
Yet, looking on it, the heart yearns over it, the eyes grow tearful;
there comes a wave of feeling that would wash out all its sins in
forgiveness, followed by the heart-aching, lip-quivering tenderness of
the words, 'O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! how often would I have
gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens
under her wings, and
ye would not.' There are spirits over whom we yearn in
like manner, as far as our nature can follow the feeling of the Divine
Master. We long to embrace them and shelter them from the coming doom,
and in our utter helplessness we cannot.
Even so did good and true friends yearn over poor
Mangan in his later days, and tried to save him, and he would not.
There was no bravado, no loud recklessness in his fall. It seemed
to be rather from sheer want of will. When set on his legs, there
was no power to stand, and down he went, till the image of God was
almost wholly battered out of the poor human face. When sinking
lower and lower beyond the reach of help, friends still clung to him as
near as they could get. His kindest friend, the Rev. C. P. Meehan,
was with him to the end, trying to smooth the sad pillow where he lay.
With last words, Mangan requested that one of the Catholic penitential
hymns might be read; and when it was ended, his spirit had Passed.
He died on the 20th of June 1849, in the Meath Hospital, Dublin.
Mangan has been compared to Poe. There was some
likeness at first sight, but this lay more in the outer facts of his
life, and in external characteristics. If we can get at the inmost
spirit of the man, we find the likeness only negative. In weakness
of will, in carrying out a good resolution, he was powerless as Poe.
But then he had none of the fierce defiant determination to be bad, and
thrust the very worst into the faces of lookers-on, calling aloud to
those who would have pityingly passed by the sad sight. He never
gloried in his gutter as Poe did, or played the madman on purpose to
mock humanity and delight the devil. He had not the same ghoulish
fondness for digging with lean fingers, and tearing up the secrets of
the grave, nor the same morbid lust for creating a creeping horror in
the blood of his readers. Poe showed a malice prepense
against himself, and went the way to perdition with a wicked wilfulness.
Poor Mangan slipped down the back way with a shy weakness. Poe
seemed to enjoy making your heart ache for him, but Mangan would not
have willingly cost you a tear for all his misery. Poe was
possessed and torn by seven devils of self, whereas it was one cause of
Mangan's sad fate, when all had gone wrong, that he had not a thought
about himself. As his best friend says of him briefly and
pathetically, Mangan 'had no vice but the one.' Both died
in public hospitals in the same year, and within ten weeks of each
other.
Another likeness between these two poets opens up a
curious subject for speculation on psychical phenomena.
Shakespeare speaks of method in madness: we think there must be strange
music in it too—music that is often unfathomably subtle, or recklessly
splendid. We have seen the insane listening to it, trying to catch
it, dancing to it, and breaking off in mournful failure. Think of
the music of Coleridge, of Poe, of Mangan! We cannot help
associating it with the opiate and the stimulant. Coleridge's is
the healthiest of the three—he can work the real miracle. Poe's is
the most. unhealthy, and in him we can detect the conjurer. There
is strange music in Mangan, with a sudden breaking in at times of the
spirit-world. Now it is a playful prank of Ariel in the air; now
the tiny tinkling music of fairies, their notes formed from water
dropping; now a sudden cry as of a lost soul, warbled instead of wailed,
or a horrible laugh thrills through; now some harbinger of death is
going overhead in a cold blood-curdling air; now there hurries up a
swarm of wild ululant discords, like a chorus of evil spirits hovering
round a doomed suicide, as he sits at midnight with white face by a dark
water, urging the despairing soul over the last ledge of hope,
down—down—down!
The real Clarence Mangan is only to be found in his
poems, although here it is difficult at times to know when you have him.
It is as though the soul of the man had gone out of him into his books
when in Trinity College Library, and the souls of fourand-twenty poets
dead and gone, all of different nations, had made use of him. He
was master of a prodigious number of languages, but his translations
were sometimes translations only in name. It is said, that, on
being questioned by a friend respecting the genuineness of an ode from
the great Persian lyrist, he admitted that it was only 'half his.'
In some alleged autobiographical memoranda which he left behind him, he
is stated to have confessed that he frequently fathered on other writers
the offspring of his own brain. And he told a friend of ours, that
in German translations he often attributed poems to the poet 'Selber,'
meaning himself. Here is a specimen from the Persian:—
|
'Thus writeth Meer Djafrit—
"I hate thee, Djaun Bool,
Worse than Màrid or Afrit,
Or corpse-eating ghool.
I hate thee like sin,
For thy mop-head of hair,
Snub nose, and bald chin,
And thy turkey-cock air.
Thou vile Ferindjee!
That thou shouldst disturb an
Old Moslim like me,
With my Khizzilbash turban!
Old fogy like me,
With my Khizzilbash turban.
"I spit on thy clothing,
That garb for baboons!
I eye with deep loathing
Thy tight pantaloons!
I curse the cravat
That encircles thy throat,
And thy cooking-pot hat,
And thy swallow-tailed coat!
Go, hide thy thick sconce
In some hovel suburban,
Or else don at once
The red Moosleman turban;
Thou dog, don at once
The grand Khizzilbash turban."' |
He published a
series of poems in the Dublin University Magazine, between
September 1837 and January 1846, under the title of 'Literæ Orientales.'
These were mostly original poems, disguised by various so-called
Persian, Turkish, and other Oriental names, phrases, and choruses; but
the mystification is thrown off at times almost derisively, as if in
contempt of any one who could be deceived. In running through
these, we have noted here and there an illustrative and characteristic
stanza of poems that have never yet been collected. In the number
for September 1837, is a fine poem, full of music, in eleven stanzas,
called 'The Time of the Roses.' Here is one:—
|
'See the young lilies, their scymitar-petals
Glancing like silver mid earthlier metals,
Dews of the brightest in life-giving showers,
Fall all the night on these luminous flowers.
Each of them sparkles afar like a gem,
Wouldst thou be happy and smiling like them?
Oh, follow all
counsel that Pleasure proposes—
It dies, it
flies, the Time of the Roses.' |
The second number, March 1838,
contains, besides other pieces, a fine lyric 'To Mihri,' of which this
is the first stanza:—
|
'My starlight, my moonlight, my midnight, my moonlight,
Unveil not, unveil not, or millions must pine:
Ah, didst thou lay bare
Those dark tresses of thine,
Even Night would seem bright
To the hue of thy hair, which is black as
despair.
My starlight, my moonlight, my midnight, my moonlight,
Unveil not, unveil not, or millions must pine.' |
In the third number, September 1838,
'The Hundred-leafed Rose' is another of Mangan's curiously versified
poems, the one rhyme being kept up all through:—
|
'O give her the gardens of Peristan,
Where only the musk-wind
blows,
And where she need fear nor storm nor man,
The Hundred-leafed Rose.
For the Summer's hand of love and light,
In the luminous flowers it strews
Earth's valleys withal, drops none so bright
As the Hundred-leafed Rose.' |
There are several good poems in the
fourth number, April 1840; one that flows on very sweetly into its
mournful echo—
|
'All things vanish after brief careering,
Down one gulf life's myriad barks are steering.
Headlong mortal! hast thou ears for hearing?
Pause! believe! the Night, thy Night, is nearing!
Night is nearing.' |
Mangan wrote another series in the
same magazine, entitled 'Lays from many Lands,' containing translations
(so-called) from Irish, Welsh, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Swiss,
Servian, Romaic, Persian, Russian, Danish, Icelandic, and other
languages. It is as difficult to tell what Mangan did not know, as
to identify what he did. The editor of his poems, however, is
wrong in placing the 'Mariner's Bride' in the 'Apocrypha,' it being an
exquisite and faithful rendering of one of Camoens' Spanish Songs (for
he wrote in Spanish as well as Portuguese), beginning, 'Irme quiero,
Madre, a aquella galera.' In his translations proper—his German
Anthology, for example—Mangan does not abide by the literal text.
But he frequently does what Coleridge did for Schiller. When his
mind kindles and emits a further flash, he gives it, and it is often the
finest in the poem. An instance of this occurs in his translation
of Freiligrath's 'Spectre-Caravan,' where he strikes out the magnificent
thought—
|
'Never quail before the shadows?
You are children of the sun!' |
He concludes Rueckert's 'Ride round
the Parapet' with an amplification of the humour into rich grotesque:—
|
'And wrinkled Eld crept on, and still her lot was maidenhood;
And woe! her end was tragic: she was changed, at length, by
magic,
To an ugly wooden image they maintain;
She, the Lady Eleanora,
She, the Lady Eleanora von Alleyne.
And now, before the gate, in sight of all, transmogrified;
Stands Lady Eleanora von Alleyne,
Before her castle gate, in sight of all transmogrified;
And he that wont salute her must be fined in foaming pewter,
If a boor; but if a burgher, in champagne,
For the Lady Eleanora,
Wooden Lady Eleanora von Alleyne. |
The genius of
Mangan was often remarkably happy in the continuation and climax of an
author's thought. Readers who first read some of these German
poems in Mangan's rendering, will find the original faint in colour and
languid in music by comparison. In many of his poems from the
Irish he has recreated them successfully as Tennyson has reproduced the
beautiful mythology of Arthur, and the poetry of his 'Round Table.'
'Dark Rosaleen' is an instance in kind. The passionate emphasis of
the music would of itself have made a new poem. We quote four of
its stanzas:—
|
'Over hills and thro' dales
Have I roamed for your sake;
All yesterday I sailed with sails
On river and on lake.
The Erne, . . , at its highest flood,
I dashed across unseen,
For there was lightning in my blood,
My Dark Rosaleen?
My own Rosaleen!
Oh! there was lightning in my blood,
Red lightning lightened thro' my blood,
My Dark Rosaleen.
Woe and pain, pain and woe,
Are my lot night and noon,
To see your bright face clouded so,
Like to the mournful moon.
But yet . . , will I rear your throne
Again in golden sheen;
'Tis you shall reign, shall reign alone,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen! etc.
I could scale the blue air,
I could plough the high hills,
Oh, I could kneel all night in prayer
To heal your many ills!
And one . . . beamy smile from you
Would float like light between
My toils and me, my own, my true,
My Dark Rosaleen, etc.
Oh! the Erne shall run red
With redundance of blood;
The earth shall rock beneath our tread,
And flames wrap hill and wood;
And gun-peal, and slogan-cry,
Wake many a glen serene,
Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
The judgment hour must first be nigh,
Ere you can fade, ere you can die,
My Dark Rosaleen!' |
Mangan had the true temperament of
the Celt; exaggerated in his case by his own misfortune, just as it has
been in his people by ages of national misfortune. He had the key
of the Celtic heart. He was the natural born of a race whose
sorrows and joys seem to have a keener birth-pang of pain and of
pleasure; a sharper cry and a lighter laugh. He had their
tenderness, tremulous to tears—the fire of their warful mood—the music
that thrills to the marrow—the sudden, sharp, short intensity of feeling
that goes to the heart with a fire-flash and fills the eyes with
tears—the frolicking and rollicking, the pathos and humour that brighten
a storm-gloom with sunburst. We find the natural antithesis to his
earlier Oriental gaieties, the other extreme of a nature lacking balance
and perfecting power, in some of his later pieces, which have a
dreariness of desolation, a dark hopelessness that is absolutely
frightful. In his version of 'O'Hussey's Ode to the Maguire,' he
has painted a picture of tragic woe made splendid by lightning, to match
that of poor old mad Lear appealing to the pitiless heavens with his
bare white head and broken heart. But it is in reference to
himself, and his blighted life, that he reaches the blackness of
darkness. How terrible is this from a ballad called the 'Nameless
One:'—
|
'Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour,
How shone for him, through his griefs and
gloom,
No star of all heaven sends to light our
Path to the tomb.
Go on to tell bow, with genius wasted,
Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love,
With spirit shipwrecked, and young hopes blasted,
He still, still strove.
And he fell far thro' that pit abysmal,
The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns,
And pawned his soul for the devil's dismal
Stock of returns.
Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble,
Deep in your bosoms! there let him dwell!
He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble,
Here, and in hell.' |
In another piece, called the
'Saw-Mill,' he heard the saw and the 'song of the tree that the saw
sawed through,' and this was the burden,—
|
'"In a few days more, most Lonely One!
Shall I, as a narrow ark, veil
Thine eyes from the glare of the world and sun
'Mong the urns in yonder dark vale,
In the cold and dim
Recesses of yonder dark vale.
"For this grieve not! thou know'st what thanks
The Weary-souled and the Meek owe
To death!" I awoke, and heard four planks
Fall down with a saddening echo.
I heard four planks
Fall all down with a hollow echo.' |
Another piece concludes still more
mournfully, from the touch of ghastly humour in it. The poor
dreamer sits at midnight amidst the ashes of wasted life:—
|
Tick-tick, Tick-tick, tick-tick!—not a sound save Time's,
And the wind-gust as it drives the rain—
Tortured torturer of reluctant rhymes,
Go to bed, and rest thine aching brain!
Sleep!—no more the dupe of hopes and schemes,
Soon thou sleepest where the thistles blow:
Curious anticlimax to thy dreams
Twenty golden years ago!' |
Alas, what a change from the glow and
grace, and musical sweetness of his carols in the Dawn! He
sleeps now where the thistles blow, and no stone marks his nameless
grave. Drop a kindly tear, gentle reader, for the sad fate
of poor Clarence Mangan.
The questions of Race and Religion, the continual
beating of each other black and blue for the sake of Orange and Green,
or indeed on any other colourable pretext, must put many an Irishman
into a similar state of perplexity to that of the poor English peasant,
who had lived to see all his old associations uprooted, and the firm
ground on which he had fixed himself take life and move off into unknown
seas; the few thoughts he had were all entangled in the revolving wheels
of change, and his last words were these: 'What wi' faith and what wi'
works, and what wi' the engines a-buzzin and a-fuzzin, and what wi' one
thing and what wi' another, I'm clean astonied and fairly bet.' We
fancy that it was Mr Ferguson, writing some lines to Clarence Mangan in
the
Dublin University Magazine, May 1847, who gave goodhumoured
expression to something of this feeling of perplexity in regard to the
numerous points of divergence with which Ireland bristles all over:—
|
'I sometimes doubt if I have Irish blood in me,
So often in these mazes do I lose my clue,
Mixing Danes with Milesians, and the clear-faced Saxon
With the hairy-dirty children of Boru.
I have small faith in Punic etymologies,
I sometimes fancy Petrie and St Patrick are the same:
I doubt that Betham knows all the tongues of Babel,
Or that William Smith O'Brien is a Hebrew name.
I don't care a button for "Young Ireland" or "Old Ireland,"
But as between the two I rather like Old Dan;
And I wish the Nation would let the agitation
Die out a humbug as it first began.' |
Be this as it may,
Mr Ferguson has won a success of a peculiar kind in his happy way of
writing Anglo-Irish character, phraseology, and imagery. The
greatest of living Irish poets, and one of the finest lyrists that ever
lived, he has made it possible to unite the Irish heart and English
tongue: his own heart being large enough, his love catholic enough, to
appreciate England without lessening his feeling for Ireland.
Mr Ferguson has been reviled by the more violent of
the
Nation school, because he was not national enough in their way.
But Ireland has no living poet more truly national, nor one of whom she
has more reason to be proud. His early efforts were directed to
the formation of a sound literary taste. His mind, like that of
Davis, is richly objective, strong and eager to take that grasp of
outward things which has often saved poetry from decay; often broke up
new ground in which to plant the immortal flower. His ballads are
simple, sensuous, and passionate; poems to quote and get by heart, but
not inviting to any critical disquisition. We would far rather
have written his 'Forging of
the Anchor,' than many a long and magniloquent blank verse poem that
might employ a whole academy of critics without ever being licked into
living shape. Here is the brave opening burst!
|
'Come see the Dolphin's Anchor forged—'tis at a white-heat now:
The bellows ceased, the flames decreased—though on the forge's
brow
The little flames still fitfully play through the sable mound,
And fitfully you still may see the grim smiths ranking round,
All clad in leathern panoply, their broad hands only bare,—
Some rest upon their sledges here, some work the windlass there.
The windlass strains the tackle-chains, the black mound heaves
below,
And red and deep a hundred veins burst out at every throe:
It rises, roars, rends all outright. O, Vulcan, what a
glow!
'Tis blinding White! 'tis blasting bright! the high sun
shines not so!
The high sun sees not on the earth such fiery fearful show;
The roof-ribs swarth, the candent-hearth, the ruddy lurid row
Of smiths that stand, an ardent band, like men before the foe,
As, quivering through his fleece of flame, the sailing monster, slow
Sinks on the anvil—all about the faces fiery grow.
"Hurrah!" they shout, "leap out—leap out;" bang, bang the
sledges go:
Hurrah! the jetted lightnings are hissing high and low—
A hailing fount of fire is struck at every squashing blow,
The leathern mail rebounds the hail, the rattling cinders strew
The ground around: at every bound the sweltering fountains flow,
And thick and loud the swinking crowd at every stroke pant "ho!"
Leap out, leap out, my masters; leap out and lay on load!
Let's forge a goodly anchor—a bower thick and broad;
For a heart of oak is hanging on every blow I bode,
And I see the good ship riding all in a perilous road—
The low reef roaring on her lee—the roll of ocean poured
From stem to stern, sea after sea: the mainmast by the board;
The bulwarks down, the rudder gone, the boats stove at the chains!
But courage still, brave mariners, the bower yet remains,
And not an inch he deigns to flinch, save when ye pitch sky-high;
Then moves his head as though he said, "Fear nothing—here
am I."' |
Mr Ferguson has
more of the Norse spirit in him than any other Irish poet. The
absence of the sea-feeling in Irish poetry is remarkable. This
must be a matter of race, because other conditions are the same as in
England, the sea embracing all round. The sea has never been a
national sentiment with the Irish as it is with us. This makes the
'Boatman's Hymn,' one of Mr Ferguson's translations from the Irish, all
the more noticeable. Somehow the soul of an old Norse sagaman has
got embodiment here! It is full of the salt and sparkle, the
motion and burst of the bounding wave. The expression, however, in
the last stanza betrays the warm Celtic fancy. A Norseman would
have taken it a little more coolly. The appeal to the rock, and
its answer, are also exceedingly characteristic. Wavemotion rocks
you to wave-music on that 'tide-top, the tide-top:'
|
'BOATMAN'S HYMN.
Bark that bears me through foam and squall,
You in the storm are my castle wall;
Though the sea should redden from bottom to top,
From tiller to mast she takes no drop.
On the tide-top, the
tide-top,
Wherry aroon, my land and
store!
On the tide-top, the
tide-top,
She is the boat can sail
go-leor.
She dresses herself, and goes gliding on,
Like a dame in her robes of Indian lawn;
For God has blessed her gunnel and wale,
And, oh, if you saw her stretch out to the gale,
On the tide-top, the
tide-top!'
Whillan, ahoy! old heart of stone,
Stooping so black o'er the beach alone,
Answer me well. On the bursting brine
Saw you ever a bark like mine?
On the tide-top, the
tide-top!
Says Whillan, since first I was made of stone,
I have looked abroad o'er the beach alone—
But till to-day on the bursting brine,
Saw I never a bark like thine!
On the tide-top, the
tide-top.
'God of the air!' the seamen shout
When they see us tossing the brine about:
'Give us the shelter of strand or rock,
Or through and through us she goes with a shock!'
On the tide-top, the
tide-top, etc. |
We look to see the
seed sown by Mr Ferguson yet bear fruit in Irish poetry, and an
extension take place in the direction in which he was going, when, to
our great regret, he paused by the way. The Young Irelanders have
discovered that the feat of the rams' horns before Jericho is not to be
repeated, and that verse of the declamatory kind is useless without
listeners, and not of much avail even with them. Ireland has set
to work in a heartier, healthier way than heretofore, and will lift up a
cheerier, nobler song at her labour, no longer satisfied with having
been—determined now to be.
William Allingham is another of the Anglo-Irish
poets, whose poems deserve greater fame than they have yet won. Some
half-dozen of his ballads have never been surpassed. They have the pulse
of the Irish heart, the idiom of its speech, the colour of the country.
The worst of Mr Allingham is, that he has given up to an over-refined
poetic English culture what was meant for the people of his own land.
In his great admiration of Tennyson, he seems to prefer serving in
England to reigning in Ireland. There has always been a lack of
heroic fibre in his poetry; but in his range he has the real touch of
hearts, and is often exquisitely natural, and thoroughly national.
A little more reliance on the gifts of birth, and a little less on
English acquirements will make a greater poet of him yet. Nothing
can be more delightful in its naïveté, earnest gallantry, and
homely pathos, than his 'Mary Donnelly:'—
|
'Oh, lovely Mary Donnelly, it's you I love the best!
If fifty girls were round you, I'd hardly see the rest.
Be what it may the time of day, the place be where it will,
Sweet looks of Mary Donnelly, they bloom before me still.
Her nose is straight and handsome, her eyebrows lifted up;
Her chin is very neat and pert, and smooth like a china cup,
Her hair's the brag of Ireland, so weighty and so fine:
It's rolling down upon her neck, and gathered in a twine.
The dance o' last Whit-Monday night exceeded all before,
No pretty girl for miles about was missing from the floor;
But Mary kept the belt of love, and O but she was gay!
She danced a jig, she sung a song, that took my heart away.
When she stood up for dancing, her steps were so complete,
The music nearly killed itself to listen to her feet;
The fiddler moaned his blindness, he heard her so much praised,
But bless'd himself he wasn't deaf when once her voice she raised.
And evermore I'm whistling or lilting what you sung;
Your smile is always in my heart, your name beside my tongue;
But you've as many sweethearts as you'd count on both your
hands,
And for myself there's not a thumb or little finger stands.
Oh, you're the flower o' womankind in country or in town;
The higher I exalt you, the lower I'm cast down.
If some great lord should come this way, and see your beauty
bright,
And you to be his lady, I'd own it was but right.
Oh, lovely Mary Donnelly, your beauty's my distress;
It's far too beauteous to be mine, but I'll never wish it less.
The proudest place would fit your face, and I am poor and low;
But blessings be about you, dear, wherever you may go.' |
On recurring to
the list of books that head our article, we find that our space will not
permit us to do any justice to the deep feeling and stately verse of
M'Ghee; the descriptive power and southern richness of Mr Irwin's
poetry; the dash and sparkle of Dr Waller; the cleverness, especially in
French translation, of the younger Dr Drennan; or the vigour of a bard
of the
Nation, Mr Sullivan.
Amongst the collections of Irish ballad poetry, Mr
Duffy's little volume is the best, so far as it goes. Mr Hayes'
collection is more complete and ample, but it needs a careful weeding of
a great deal of rubbish, and some ballads remain to be added. Mr
Mitchell's American edition of Mangan's Poems is disappointing to us,
when compared with what it might have been. But, with all its
shortcomings, it is one of the richest and most enjoyable books of lyric
poetry in the English language.
Mr Lover proves himself to have been both naturally
and artificially unfitted to edit the
Lyrics of Ireland. He is unable to reach any depth of real
Irish feeling, and is full of paltry shallow prejudices against those
who were amongst the far truer lovers of Ireland. Thomas Davis,
when living and writing in his sincere and hearty way, had told the
young verse writers to get at the original melodies of Ireland, for
Moore's version of them was corrupt, and this was even more true of
Lover's tunes. Now, this was a fact patent, even notorious, and
very mildly stated. Thirteen years after Thomas Davis was laid in
his early grave, Mr Lover gets his first great chance of wreaking
revenge for the slight. He does it in the meanest spirit. He
quotes Thomas Davis falsely; he perverts his meaning, and retorts on the
dead man by calling him the 'Bed-maker of the Young Ireland College of
Criticism.' We would laugh if we could, but it is too pitiable.
Further, Mr Lover excludes Thomas Davis' best ballads from the
Lyrics of Ireland. Many of the finest Irish ballads are
missing, and these mainly belong to the poetry of Young Ireland.
We do not find a single piece of William Allingham's; and, in his great
ignorance of his subject, the editor has ascribed the following lyric to
Clarence Mangan, and extolled it as possessing that poet's rarest
qualities:—
|
'SUMMER LONGINGS.
Ah! my heart is weary waiting,
Waiting for the May—
Waiting for the pleasant rambles,
Where the fragrant hawthorn brambles,
With the woodbine alternating,
Scent
the dewy way.
Ah! my heart is weary waiting,
Waiting for the May.
Ah! my heart is sick with longing,
Longing for the May—
Longing to escape from study,
To the fair young face and ruddy,
And the thousand charms belonging
To
the summer day:
Ah! my heart is sick with longing,
Longing for the May.
Ah! my heart is sore with sighing,
Sighing for the May—
Sighing for their sure returning,
When the summer beams are burning,
Hopes and flowers that dead or dying
All
the winter lay:
Ah! my heart is sore with sighing,
Sighing for the May.
Ah! my heart is pained with throbbing,
Throbbing for the May—
Throbbing for the seaside billows,
Or the water-wooing willows,
Where in laughing and in sobbing,
Glides the stream away:
Ah! my heart, my heart is throbbing,
Throbbing for the May.
Waiting, sad, dejected, weary,
Waiting for the May—
Spring goes by with wasted warnings,
Moonlight evenings, sunbright mornings:
Summer comes, yet, dark and dreary,
Life
still ebbs away:
Man is ever weary, weary,
Waiting for the May!' |
A lovely lyric, and one that will
make the reader wish to know more about the author of it; but it is not
Mangan's. It has a sweetness of breath that comes from a sounder
health than his. It was written by D. Florence MacCarthy, a young
Irish poet, whose acquaintance is well worth making, for his genuine
musical faculty and lyrical aptitude. Mr Lover has filled up the
place of better men with lyrics of his own; but they are not the real
thing, only imitations of the true emerald cut in green glass. No
amount of them will compensate for the omission of those which he has
left out, any more than the gain of a hundred Samuel Lovers could repay
Ireland for the loss of one Thomas Davis.
We do not feel much more affection for the
nationality of Mr Lover, than he himself feels for the 'Young
Irelanders.' It is not much in advance of the old 'Teddy my
Jewel,' and 'Paddy my Joy' style of representation. We like an
Irishman to be an Irishman, a Scotchman to be a Scotchman; but an Irish
Cockney, or a Scotchman turned London snob, is to us a mortal
abomination. Be a hot-hearted Repealer, or a hot-headed 'Scottish
Rights ' man, if you please; but don't think to win the favour of a true
Englishman by caricaturing your own country for sport in song, or
abusing the land you have left in renegade leading articles. We
respect patriotism, even if in the wrong; we do not respect flunkeyism,
even if it tries to serve in the right. Mr Lover cannot sound the
depths of the Irish nature; cannot touch it to the quick. Neither
can Lady Dufferin. The 'Irish Emigrant' is an affecting,
sentimental ballad, but very far from the real thing. Let the
reader compare it with the poetry of John Keegan, to see the difference.
We know nothing of this author, except that he was a poor man, born and
bred amongst the people, that he wrote for his bread, did not need it
long, and died in 1849. But the reader, if he have any skill in
feeling the Irish pulse, will find the Irish heart beating in some of
Keegan's ballads, with an intense tenderness and warmth of nearness to
be found in few. In Lady Dufferin's 'Terence's Farewell,' there is
an elaborate Irish blunder about England being 'a beautiful city,' but
it fails to make the poem genuine. Further, Thomas Davis was quite
right in stating that Thomas Moore was 'often deficient in vehemence,
did not speak the sterner passions, spoiled some of his finest songs by
pretty images, and was too refined and subtle in dialect.' Moore
was an exquisite lyrist, and wrote many melodious songs, but they might
all have been written by an Englishman. He does not bring out of
the Irish harp that piercing pathos which can work so weirdly in Celtic
blood. He has none of those 'gushes of feeling that smite the
heart like the cry of a woman.' Hit poetry does not weep the
bitter tears that fall within, hot and hissing on the heart, nor reach
the utter gloriousness of Irish joy. There are flashes of
tenderness in Irish poetry almost equal to the pathos of Scottish
ballads. When the flash lightens from the fancy, it is often a splendid
extravagance, as when a lover, praising the sweetness of his mistress'
voice, asserts that the cattle listening to it 'milked over two-thirds
more than was their wont,'—which is rather strained; but when it
comes through the feeling, and gets simple expression, the endearment
is often ineffable.
|
'Ellen Bawn, O Ellen Bawn, you darling, darling dear you,
Sit awhile beside me here, I'll die unless I'm near you.' |
That is Irish.
|
'No aid, bright beloved, can reach me, save God above,
For a blood-lake is formed of the light of my eyes with love.' |
That too is Irish. So are the following:
|
Who in the winter's night,
When the cold blast did bite,
Came to my cabin door,
And, on my earthen flure,
Knelt by me sick and poor,
Soggarth Aroon? |
|
'Her lips are like roses, her mouth much the same,
Like a dish of ripe strawberries smothered in crame.'
'The music nearly, killed itself to listen to her feet.'
'But O'Kelly still remains to defy and to toil,
He has memories that hell won't permit him to forget.'
'Tho' it break my heart to hear say again the bitter words.' |
All these are Irish. Many more
instances as apt we might quote, and yet fail to catch the subtle spirit
of nationality, which is as evasive as it is felicitous. We cannot
help thinking that very happy things have yet to be done for Irish
poetry, in worship of that muse unknown to the Greeks, the muse of the
household: the divinities of home, weans, and wife, ought yet to make
their noblest appeal to its power of passionate endearment.
GERALD MASSEY. |
