Chapter II: The Life of a Song (1)

There was a great contention some years ago fought out in a law court between the British Museum and the Royal Irish Academy, for the custody of certain treasure trove, gold vessels and ornaments disinterred on an Irish beach. The treasures went back, as was only right, to Ireland, where is a rich storehouse of such things, for the soil has been dug over in search for the material relics of ancient art. Yet little heed has been paid to treasures of far greater worth and interest, harder to sell, it is true, but easier to come by--the old songs and stories which linger in oral tradition or in old manuscripts handed down from peasant to peasant. Only within the last few years did the Irish suddenly awake to a consciousness that the authentic symbols, or, rather, the indisputable proofs of the national existence so dear to them, were slipping out of their hands. So far had the heritage perished, so ill had the tradition been maintained, that when they turned to revive their expiring language and literature, the first question asked was, "What is it you would revive? Was there ever a literature in Irish or merely a collection of ridiculous rhodomontade? Is there a language, or does there survive merely a debased jargon, employed by ignorant peasants among themselves, and chiefly useful, like a thieves' lingo, to baffle the police?"

These were the questions put, and not one in a thousand of Irish Nationalists could give an answer according to knowledge.

Now, matters are changed. The books that were available in print have been read; the work of poets extant only in manuscript has been printed and widely circulated; the language is studied with zeal, and not in Ireland only, but wherever Irishmen are gathered. Yet nothing has so strongly moved me to believe that we cherish the living rather than pay funeral honours to the dead, as certain hours spent with a peasant who could neither write nor read.

The life of a song--poets have said it again and again in immortal verse--is of all lives the most enduring. Kingdoms pass, buildings crumble, but the work which a man has fashioned "out of a mouthful of air" defies the centuries; it keeps its shape and its quivering substance. Strongest of all such lives are perhaps those where "the mouthful of air" is left by the singer mere air, and no more, unfixed on paper or parchment; when the song goes from mouth to mouth, altering its contours it may be, but unchanged in essence, though coloured by its immediate surroundings as a flower fits itself to each soil. Such was the song that I had the chance to write down, from lips to which it came through who knows how many generations.

The story which it tells is among the finest in that great repertory of legend which, since Ireland began to take count of her own possessions, has become familiar to the world. It is the theme of a play in the last book published by the chief of modern Irish poets, Mr. W. B. Yeats. But since he tells the story in a way of his own, and since it is none too well known even in those parts of Ireland where its hero's name is a proverb (_Comh laidir le Cuchulain_, Strong as Cuchulain), it may be well to set out the legend here.

Cuchulain, the Achilles of Irish epic, was famous from the day in boyhood when he got his name by killing, bare-handed, the smith's fierce watchdog that would have torn him. The ransom for the killing was laid on by the boy himself, and it was that he should watch Culann's house for a year and a day till a pup should be grown to take the place of the slain dog. So he came to be called Cu Chulain, Culann's Hound, and by that name he was known when, as a young champion, he set out for the Isle of Skye, where the warrior-witch Sgathach (from whom the island is called) taught the crowning feats of arms to all young heroes who could pass through the ordeals she laid upon them.

There was no trial that Cuchulain could not support, and the fame of him drew on a combat with another Amazonian warrior, Aoife, who, in the story that I heard, was Sgathach's daughter, though Lady Gregory in her fine book _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_ gives another version. But, at any rate, Cuchulain defeated Aoife, and she gave love to her conqueror--whose passion for the fierce queen was not strong enough to keep him from Ireland. When he made ready to go, the woman warrior told him that a child was to be born of their embraces, and she asked what should be done with it. "If it be a girl, keep it," said Cuchulain, "but if a boy, wait till his thumb can fill this ring"--and he gave her the circlet--"then send him to me." So he departed, leaving wrath behind him.

The child born was a son, and Aoife reared him and taught him all feats of arms that could be taught to a mortal, except one only, and of that feat only Cuchulain was master: "the way," said James Kelly, prefacing his ballad with such an explanation as I am now giving, "there would be none could kill him but his own father." And when the boy had learnt all and was the perfect warrior, Aoife sent him out to Ireland under a pledge to refuse his name to any that should ask it, well knowing how the wardens of the coast would stop him on the shore. It fell out as she purposed. The young Connlaoch defeated champion after champion till Cuchulain himself went down, and was recognised by his son. But the pledge tied Connlaoch's tongue, and only when he lay dying, slain by the magic throw which Aoife had withheld from his knowledge, could he reveal himself to his father, the great and childless hero, whose lament for his lost son is written in the song that I set out to secure, on a day of sun and rain, last summer, when great soft clouds drove full sail through the moist atmosphere, their shadows sweeping over brown moor and green valley, while far away towards the sea, mountain peaks rose purple and amethystine in the distance.

Twice before this I had been in the little cottage on Cark Mountain; first, when the chance rumour heard in a neighbouring cabin of a man with countless songs and stories sent me off to investigate; and for a second time, when I had come back with a slightly better knowledge of Gaelic and had taken down a few verses of the poem. These, sent to an Irish scholar, had sufficed to identify the ballad with one printed in Miss Brooke's _Reliques of Irish Poetry_, a characteristic production of the latter days of the eighteenth century, when Macpherson, with his adaptation of the Ossianic poems, and Bishop Percy, with his gathering of old English ballads, had set a fashion soon to culminate in Scott's great achievement.

They proved, however, not identity only but difference; and the ballad as I have it in full with its nineteen quatrains, is even less like the longer version given by O'Halloran to Miss Brooke, than the opening stanzas suggested. In them the variations were mainly textual, and when I read out O'Halloran's version to James Kelly, his son, a keen listener, declared a preference for the printed text. But the old man was of another mind. "It's the same song," he said, "sure enough, but there's things changed in it, and I know rightly about them. Some one was giving it the way it would be easier to understand, leaving out the old hard words. And I did that myself once or twice the last day you were here, and I was vexed after, when I would be thinking about it. And this day you will be to take down what I say, let you understand it or not; just word for word, the right way it should be spoken."

There you have in a glimpse the custodian of legend. The man was illiterate, technically, but he knew by instinct, as his ancestors had known before him, that he was the guardian of the life of a song; he recognised that it was a scripture which he had no right to mutilate or alter. He had to the full that respect for a work of literature which is the best indication of a scholar, and for him at least the line was unbroken from the Ireland of heroes and minstrels to the hour when he chanted over the poem that some bard in the remote ages had fashioned.

Little wonder, too, for his own way of life was close to that of the Middle Ages. Below in the valley, where the Swilly River debouches into its sea lough, was a prosperous little town with banks and railway; but to reach the bleak brown moor where James Kelly's house stood, you must climb by one of two roads, each so rough and steep that a bicycle cannot be ridden down them. Here, in a little screen of scrub alders, stands the cottage, where three generations of the family live together. His own home consisted simply of two rooms with no upper story, but it was trim and comfortable, the dresser well filled, and the big pot over the turf fire gave out a prosperous steam. The son, a grown man, waited from his turf-cutting to help in our discussion; the wife was abroad that day, and one daughter was just starting for market with a web of homespun cloth which they had dressed in the household. The spinning wheel stood in the corner; but another girl was busy near the fire with more modern work, hemming shirts with a machine for a Derry factory, and the bleached linen was the only thing in the house which had not taken on the brown tints of peat smoke.

James Kelly himself, as he sat by the fire declaiming at me, was all browns and greys, like the country outside his door; and his eyes were like brown streams running through that peaty mountain, with their movement and sparkle, and their dark depths. At other times easy, like that of all Irish peasants, his manner changed and grew rough and imperious when the business began. I must not interrupt with questions. I must write down, syllable for syllable, that the song might be got "the right way." It was by no means easy to carry out these directions, for the poem was written in an Irish not spoken to-day, as unlike as the Chaucerian English is to our common speech; and even to write down modern Irish by ear I was poorly qualified. Things were made harder, too, by the manner of recitation, as traditional as the words. He chanted, with a continuous vocalisation, and while he chanted, elbow and knee worked like a fiddler's or piper's marking the time. However, with persistence, I got the thing down, letting him first say a verse fully through, then writing line by line or as near as I could; then going back and asking questions in detail: the son coming to my rescue, when the old man lost patience (as he did once in every ten minutes) and interposing usefully in our discussions.

For there were endless discussions as to the meaning of words, and nothing could be more curious than to see the old man's endeavour to give in English not merely a bare rendering, but the colour of every phrase. It made me realise as nothing else could have done, how fine was his feeling for the shade of a word, and I cannot describe his dissatisfaction with the poor equivalents he could find. He was happy enough when the debate drifted into an exposition--always addressed to his son--of the uses of some rare word in the Irish, the manner of exposition being by citation of passages from other songs, or phrases that might occur in talk. I have listened to many a professor doing the same thing in Greek and Latin, but to none who had a finer instinct for the business. Kelly's vexation came when he had to "put English on" a word for me, and the obvious equivalent was not the right one. Sometimes I could help; sometimes he arrived by himself at what satisfied him, though once at least it was droll enough. We were at the lines where Connlaoch, dying, says to his father: "If I could give my secret to any under the sun, it is to your bright body I would tell it." The trouble was about the phrase "bright body," for the word "cneas" means literally "skin," but is used (just like [Greek: chros] in Homer) to signify "person." What James wanted to convey to me was that the word was not the common one for "body," and at last he smote his thigh. "Carkidge," he cried, "it's carkidge (carcase), 'It is to your clear carkidge I would tell it.'" A man with less instinct for literature would have said "body" at once, and never trouble more; but James knew at once too much and too little, and I give the instance to show how an Irishman unlettered in English may be deeply imbued with the true spirit of letters through a literature of his own.

There were, however, several passages where I could get no clear account of the meaning, and in some I have since found by comparison with the text which O'Halloran provided for Miss Brooke that Kelly had got the words twisted. For instance, the first stanza opens simply:--

"There came to us a stout champion,
The hearty champion Connlaoch."

But of the next two lines I could get no clearer rendering than that "he just came in full through these people for diversion and for fun to himself." Then the ballad continues at once--for its method is terse and its transitions abrupt throughout--to give us the words of the men who meet Connlaoch on his landing:--

"Where have you been, O tender gallant,
Riding like a noble's son?
Methinks by the way of your coming,
You are wandering or astray."

And Connlaoch answers the taunt and the challenge implied:--

"My coming is over seas from the land
Of the High King of the World,
To prove my merry prowess
Athwart the high chiefs of Erin."

(It seemed to me characteristic that the stock epithet of valour should be "merry" or "laughing.") The ballad added no reply (though in Miss Brooke's version at this point there is a dialogue of warnings), but went on to tell in the shortest possible words how Conall Cearnach ("the Victorious") rode out from Emain Macha and met the challenger:--

"Out started Conall, not weak of hand,
To get news of the noble's son.
Bitter and hard was the way of it;
Conall was tied by Connlaoch."

"'Bring word from us to Hound's head,'
Said the King in fierce sullen tones,
To Dundalk sunny and bright,
To the Hound, Dog's jaw."

Then Cuchulain (thus described by versions of the nickname won when he broke the jaws of Culann's hound) made answer:--

"Hard for us is hearing of the captivity
Of the man whose plight is told;
And hard it is to try the venom of blades
With the warrior that bound Conall."

But the messenger pleads:--

"Do not think but to go to the rescue
Of the destroying keen dangerous warrior,
Of the hand that had no fear for any,
To loose him, and he fettered."

Then (as Miss Brooke in the majestic manner of the eighteenth century puts it):--

"Then with firm step and dauntless air,
Cucullin went and thus the foe addrest,
Let me, O valiant knight (he cried),
Thy courtesy request,
To me thy purpose and thy name confide."

And so on through a sonorous description of dialogue and fight till:--

"At length Cucullin's kindling soul arose,
Indignant shame recruited fury lends;
With fatal aim his glittering lance he throws,
And low on earth the dying youth extends."

Or, as I translate almost literally from James Kelly's version, which is considerably briefer than the text which Miss Brooke has so volubly expanded:--

"Out set the Hound of the keen, smooth blade
To see the work that Conall made,
Till he pierced with a bitter blow,
That hero youth his hardy foe."

That is all we are told of the fighting; the ballad passes straight to a terse dramatic dialogue, which Cuchulain opens:--

"Champion, tell your story,
For I see your wounds are heavy;
'Twill be short ere they raise your cairn,
So hide your testament no longer."

"That's what he said to the son," said James Kelly, finishing the verse, and beginning afresh,

"Let me fall on my face,
For methinks 'tis you are my father,
And for fear lest men of Eire should see
Me retreating from your fierce grapple."

"Then," said James, "the son spoke for to tell him the reason he couldn't spake at the first":--

"I took pledges to my mother
Not to give my story to any single man,
If I would give it to any under the sun,
It is to your bright body I would tell it."

("Complimenting him, like," said James.) Then he recited the stanza which tells by implication how in the long duel Cuchulain was at last driven to use the irresistible stroke of Sgathach's teaching:--

"I lay my curse on my mother,
That she put me under pledge;
But if it were not for the feat of magic
I had not been got for nothing."

(It is a fine phrase surely, "You had paid dear in blood before you mastered me.")

Cuchulain answers groaning, with a wail for the lineage that is cut off:

"I lay my curse on your mother,
For she destroyed a multitude of young ones;
And because the treachery that was in her
Left your smooth flesh reddened."

Then comes, with the boy's dying word, the revelation of the most tragic moment in the fight.

"Cuchulain, beloved father,
Is it not a wonder you did not know me
When I cast my spear crooked and feebly
Against your bush of blades."

Where will you find a finer stroke of invention? The boy, tongue-tied by his pledge, knows his father and feels his defence failing against the terrible onset; he would not, if he could, be the victor, but he thinks of a way within the honour of his bond which may awaken knowledge of him; and he casts his javelin with a clumsiness not to be looked for in the champion "that tied Conall." It is useless, the battle madness is in Cuchulain, he thinks only of conquest, an end to the supple, quick parrying, and he throws the gaebulg, a spear of dragon's bones bristling with points (his "bush of blades"), with the magic cast that there is no meeting. And now there is nothing left to him but the lamentation,

"Och, och! Great is my madness!
I lifting here my young lad!
My son's head in my one hand,
His arms and his raiment on the other.

"I, the father that slew his son,
May I never throw spear nor noble javelin;
The hand that slew its son,
May it win torture and sharp wounding.

"The grief for my son I put from me never,
Till the flagstones of my side crumble,
It is in me, and through my heart,
Like a sharp blaze in the hoar hill grasses.

"If I and my heart's Connlaoch
Were playing our kingly feats together,
We could range from wave to shore
Over the five provinces of Erin."

The penultimate stanza, with its magnificent closing image and its truly AEschylean hyperbole, is not even suggested in Miss Brooke's version. It is, perhaps, the finest thing in the poem; but I hardly know any ballad finer as a piece of dramatic narrative; and the resonant verse, strongly rhymed (in the Gaelic assonances), and copiously stressed with alliteration, bears out the theme.

These, I trust, are critical opinions. But if the collector would have a special weakness for a vase which his own spade had unearthed, I may be prejudiced in favour of the poem, which I got in the sweat of my brow from very probably the one man living who knew it in that form.

Tellers of old Irish fairy tales about enchanted princes, magic cocks and hens, and the like, are still numerous; but it is very rare to find a man who keeps living the old poetry which was made, perhaps, in the twelfth century. Yet while any survive the tradition is still there; the song still lives, for I did not spend my hours without feeling that this old man could respond to any emotion that the song-maker put into the sound and the meaning and the associations of his words. There are still those to whom the Irish even of the twelfth century is no dead language. Even if it were, no doubt the songs made in it might still be strong in life, as are to-day those of Homer and a hundred others. But in the case of these smaller literatures, once the tongue itself has ceased to be heard, dumbness and paralysis fall upon what might else be so full of vitality. And a song has more than its own life, it has power to quicken, to breed. If any one considers that legend of the son and father (found in many languages, yet in none, I think, more finely shaped), it is easy to see how from age to age it may revive itself in new forms, entering into other shapes, as Helen's figure adorns not her own story only, but the praise of a thousand women. Let it be understood that this legend is only one of a cycle, and that the song which I wrote down was only the barest fraction of James Kelly's repertory. Indeed, he was vexed that I should take it as a specimen, for he himself "had more conceit in" the lays that tell of Finn and his companions, and I could have filled a volume, and maybe several volumes, from his recitations.

These songs may die, the language may die, the Irish race may be swallowed up in England and America. But it is my belief that the strong intellectual life which made of Ireland a home of the arts before the Normans came across channel may, like many another life in nature, spring after centuries of torpor into vigour and fertility again. That is the belief and hope of many of us; but nothing has rendered me so confident in it as to find this work of a strong and fine art not laid aside and neglected, but honoured and current to-day, and, though in a poor man's cottage, living with as full a life as when it was chanted at the feasts of princes.

IRISH EDUCATION AND IRISH CHARACTER.

Education in Ireland has been organised by the State in accordance with English ideas. Had English influence been able to bring about any large measure of conformity between the two countries, there would have been little or no need for a separate paper on moral training in Irish schools. But what conformity there is, is purely superficial; and although free development has been hindered, and Irish institutions for teaching are less characteristic than they would have been if entirely left to themselves, still the moral influences which emerge wherever pupils and teachers are brought together reveal themselves in Ireland, and reveal themselves as Irish. The object of this paper, then, is to illustrate, so far as possible, the nature and the symptoms of these distinctive influences.

First of all, it may be said broadly that no ordinary person in Ireland contemplates the possibility of teaching morality apart from religion; and by religion is meant emphatically this or that particular creed. Almost every school maintained by the State is managed locally by a clergyman, who appoints the teacher, and public feeling is so strong on the matter that in any neighbourhood even a small group of families of any particular denomination is always provided with a separate school of its own. Of late, indeed, opinion has begun to agitate for associating the laity with the clergy in the management of schools; but this does not indicate any desire to lessen the importance given to the part played by religion in education.

Further, so far as Catholic Ireland is concerned, an immense proportion of the teaching both in primary and secondary schools is done by members of religious orders, and in these, of course, there is no conception of separating moral influences from religious. There is, however, no evidence known to me that even in the few Protestant schools which are partly or wholly under lay control any duties, other than those of ordinary school work, are inculcated except as part of a Christian's religious obligations. This entire state of things is due to the fact that positive Christian belief, and the practice of religious observances, are everywhere in Ireland very general, and among the Catholic population almost universal. It is also hardly necessary to point out that in many respects the standard of Irish morality is so high that the example of Ireland may be quoted with confidence in support of the view which makes moral teaching necessarily a part of religion.

But from such broad generalities there is not much to be gathered, and I proceed to examine in some detail the existing institutions--beginning at the top with higher education.

It follows from what has been said that, in the general opinion of Irishmen, there can be no positive moral influence where there is no religious teaching; and for that reason a university without a school of theology or arrangements for corporate worship is, to Irishmen, a university deficient in moral safeguards. This accounts for the fact that Catholic opinion was much less opposed to the Protestant University of Dublin than to the more modern Queen's Colleges, which, designed by England to provide for her wants of Ireland, excluded religion entirely from their purview. This provision satisfied no one, except to some extent the Presbyterians, who accepted Queen's College, Belfast, with some alacrity, though in practice demanding that its head should always be a staunch professor of their own persuasion. But Catholics as a body refused to accept either the University of Dublin with its Protestant atmosphere or the "godless" Queen's Colleges; and since Ireland is mainly a Catholic country, and the National University has not yet created a tradition, it is clear that not much can be gleaned on the subject of Irish ideas of moral training from Irish universities.

Yet Trinity College is well worth study, for in it we have a free growth, typifying both in its virtues and in its defects the ruling Protestant class, landed and professional. Here, unquestionably, the chief moral influence is that of the Church, felt, as at Oxford, directly through the chapel services and sermons, and indirectly through the presence of a large body of theological students. The second of these influences is specially strong in Dublin, because these students have an organisation of their own in the University Theological Society, and also because the work of the Divinity School at Dublin comprises much that is done in England by the training colleges. I should therefore be inclined to put the positive influence of dogmatic religion higher at Dublin than at Oxford.

On the other hand, the vaguer humanitarian enthusiasms which are more or less allied to Socialism, and with which the High Church party willingly allies itself, have, I think, much less hold in Trinity than at the English universities; though the movement which sends so many brilliant young Englishmen into work (temporary or permanent) in the East End of London has its parallel in the recently organised Social Service Society, which attempts something for the reclamation of Dublin slums. Again, in regard to more definitely political aspirations, Irish Protestants are somewhat unfortunately situated. Trinity as a whole has no sympathy with the ideals that appeal to Ireland as a nation, and it always seems to lack first-hand touch with the best English thought, whether Liberal or Tory. This isolation from the main movement of Irish thought and feeling on the one hand, and on the other, this enforced separation from the current of English life, keep the place a little old-fashioned; and to generate enthusiasm, ideals and feelings need a certain freshness. If it be held (as I should hold) that a university's main moral function is to produce enthusiasts rather than merely decent citizens, in this respect, I think, Trinity fails.

In regard to the less direct influences, a good deal may be noted. The general trend of life in Trinity is towards frugality, just as at Oxford it is towards extravagance. Consequently, money is less of an advantage, poverty less of a drawback than at the English universities; the standard of living is more uniform; and in the society of which the university is typical, and which it influences, respect for wealth as wealth is noticeably rare. Again, the idea of education is more disciplinary than in England. Irishmen go to college, not to acquire culture by contact, but to learn certain definite things; and the university, in its anxiety to find out if the task is being learnt, multiplies examinations. The same idea pervades all Irish education--the old-fashioned demand for a positive result in knowledge; and if it leads to an excessive value set upon these tests, it also goes far to discourage idleness.

In another matter Trinity College is typical of Irish ideas generally. Games are simply taken as games, not as a main business of life in which success may even have a marketable value. Everybody recognizes their physical use, and more than that, their use as a means of bringing men together. But nobody in Ireland, save here and there a stray apostle of English notions, talks of the moral lessons to be acquired by fielding out or by patient batting. Compulsory games at school are practically unknown; nobody plays unless he wants to; so that the duffer does not experience the questionable moral advantage of physical discomfort and frequent humiliation, and the naturally painstaking or excellent athlete gets no more than his fair chance of exercising his gifts. And these are less likely to have an undue importance in their possessor's eyes, because they will not of themselves lead him to a position of great distinction in an Irish university.

Unfortunately, Trinity College is the only place in Ireland--unless perhaps a saving clause should be made for Queen's College, Belfast--which offers what is meant by a university life. The National University, whether in Dublin, Cork or Galway, brings young men together only in classes and in one or two debating societies. Yet even so, I question whether, in some ways, life does not beat stronger in it than in Trinity; whether the moral influences proper to a university, the enthusiasm, the contagion of generous ideas, are not here more strongly felt. The reason for this view must be given.

Trinity has never been the University of Ireland. It is ceasing to be the University of Protestant Ireland, for Protestants, who can afford to do so, send their sons increasingly to Oxford or Cambridge, and Trinity, which has not known how to create a true and special function for itself, is becoming merely a cheap substitute for these English institutions. And the reason for this is a moral reason which goes to the root of many questions connected with Irish education. Should Irish schools and colleges seek to educate citizens for the Empire, or citizens for Ireland? During the last half century, while the Imperialist idea has been developing in England, Trinity has thrown all its moral weight into support of that idea. But the Imperialist idea in England is very different from the same idea as viewed in Canada or New Zealand or Australia; and universities in these countries address themselves particularly to local needs. In the section of Ireland which Trinity represents, local patriotism is held to conflict with Imperial patriotism, and one has to observe that Trinity's Imperialism is forwarding tendencies which are leaving her drained. Nationalists may respect the sincerity of convictions so pressed in defiance of a local interest; but a university, whose main emotional appeal is directed towards evoking primarily an enthusiasm for England, cannot be of much use to Nationalist Ireland. Catholics may (and do) respect the thoroughness of the religious teaching, and the strong grip which Protestantism keeps on the university; but a university which inculcates morals through a Protestant religion is not precisely suitable to Catholics. Yet Catholics and Nationalists alike infinitely prefer a university or a college or a school with strong Protestant beliefs, or strong Imperialist patriotism, to an institution with neither beliefs nor patriotism at all. The colourless and merely scholastic ideals of the Queen's Colleges, and the huge examining machinery known as the Royal University, typified in their total lack of moral influences all that was worst in the educational system under which Ireland labours.

I pass to a brief examination of the boarding schools, institutions which have never flourished in Ireland. Nearly all Protestants and many Catholics, if they can afford it, send their sons to England to be taught. The ideals of the English Public School have reacted so strongly upon Irish Protestant schools that nothing need be said of these--not one of which has ever, within living memory, had a continuous prosperity. The important Catholic schools are managed by the great teaching orders, especially by the Jesuits, and managed at astonishingly low cost. They give everywhere more than value for the fees which they receive. No unendowed institution could compete with them; and it practically comes to this, that the regular clergy subsidise education with their own unpaid labour and even with their own funds, in order to maintain their influence over the faith and morals of their country. Whether it might be more to the advantage of Irish parents to pay more and get something different, is another question; but those of us who least like the exclusive delegation of these important functions to the priesthood, cannot but admire the thoroughness and consistency with which the Catholic priesthood's idea is carried out. It would be hard to overstate the moral effect of that vast organised system of self-sacrifice and self-suppression.

Three or four points may be noted in relation to these schools. One is, that in all classrooms and playgrounds, a master is always present. Comparing this with the system in vogue at many English schools, under which a boy out of school hours is always forced to live in public by rules which compel him either to be playing some game or looking on while others play, I prefer the system of frank supervision, as leaving more individual freedom and choice of pursuits, and as making serious bullying impossible. Generally, the idea that it is good for a boy to be knocked about without stint is foreign to Irish ideas. A pleasant and characteristic feature of Jesuit schools is the habit of telling off some boy to act as companion and cicerone to a newcomer for his first week or fortnight; and the ridiculous English fashion which prescribes that the smallest fag should be described as a "man" is unknown. Christian names, not surnames, are used generally. The unpopularity of boarding schools in Ireland is due to the great value set upon home life; and an Irish boarding school is far less distinct from home life than an English one.

English eyes would be surprised and a good deal shocked by the presence of a billiard table in every playroom; yet it may fairly be argued that it is wise to limit the number of things that have the fascination of the forbidden. A more serious criticism would address itself to the permitted slovenliness. Untidiness amounts to a national vice in Ireland, and, though one may overstate its gravity, the secondary schools could and should do much more to remedy this national defect than they are at present doing. At one first-class Irish establishment--admirably equipped with buildings, playground, and all other appliances--boots used to go unblacked from one end of the month to the other. The boys who come here come largely from the well-to-do farming class, in whose homes, in many ways so pleasant and worthy of respect, there is often a lamentable lack of that charm which comes of notable housewifery. The young men who return from this school will be less apt than they should be to value good housewifery in their wives and mothers.

But of all sinners in this regard the State is the chief offender. Under the Code of the National Board of Education a national schoolmaster or mistress is bound to teach cleanliness and decency by precept and example. He or she is paid an average wage (without allowances) of thirty shillings or one pound a week according to sex; and out of that an appearance befitting superior station has to be maintained--for in Ireland the schoolmaster has always a position of some dignity. For the school the State provides four bare walls, a roof, not always weatherproof, and a few desks. Firing is not provided. Decoration is subject to inspection, and any picture which can be held to have a religious or remotely political bearing is a gross offence against the Code. It follows, in practice, that bare walls are kept bare, though not clean; and let it be remembered that Catholicism, if left to itself, in education always trusts greatly to the appeal to the eye. In every Catholic school uncontrolled by the State the emblems of religion are everywhere present. National schools under State control, even in places where there is not a Protestant child within twenty miles, are rigorously forbidden the use of any such embellishment. On the other hand, Protestant schools which would gladly, and, as I think, most laudably, furnish themselves with pictures recalling such memories as the shutting of the Derry gates, come under the same tyranny of compromise. Taste and culture are the expression of an individuality, and individuality is forbidden to Irish teachers in State employ. The State puts a schoolmaster into a schoolhouse, without adequate payment for himself, without adequate provision either for building or the upkeep of building; it bids him to keep it clean, but pays no servant to wash or sweep; and, while enjoining the absence of dirt, it checks and hampers that desire to decorate, which is the positive side of order and taste. The result is, broadly, slatternly schools.

There could hardly be a better moral influence in Ireland than tastefully and brightly decorated schools, cleanly kept. But to secure this the State must provide money, and must give individual freedom. Instead of that, it adapts its institution to the lowest standard of living; and the raggedest child out of the dirtiest cottage will probably be in full keeping with his environment when he takes his place in class.

The same tyranny of compromise sterilises the whole teaching on the moral side. Nothing must be taught anywhere which could offend any susceptibility--except in the hour licensed for the teaching of denominational religion. There must be no appeal to Irish patriotism, whether it be of Protestant or Catholic. Irish history may not be taught as a subject, and, until lately, anything bearing on it, however remotely, was tabooed. The poem _Breathes there a man with soul so dead_ was struck out of a lesson book, lest it should encourage sedition. To-day certain accepted books on Irish history may be used as readers; the Irish language may be taught, and is taught; and gradually with these changes new moral influences are coming in. Irish children are being encouraged to remember their nationality. Yet, meanwhile, the teacher, who is to instruct them in the duties of a good citizen, is debarred from taking any part in local politics, from serving on any local council. He is forbidden, in fact, to be himself a good citizen; forbidden to be anything more than the colourless instrument of a system of compromise and countercheck. Nothing is more certain than this, that to get a good teacher you need a man's whole personality; you must enlist all his beliefs and his feelings in the exercise of that moral function of education which can never be fulfilled by a mere machine for imparting the rudiments. Man everywhere, but especially in Ireland, is, as Aristotle said, a political animal. The State in Ireland, when organising education, tries as far as possible to eliminate the man and produce the pedagogue.

Take, for contrast with all this, the purely native institution, now unhappily extinct, of the old "classical academies" kept in the country parts of Munster by private laymen. In the eighteenth century, and on into the nineteenth, these men kept alive the tradition of Irish popular poetry, sometimes with a real gift. For good or for bad they were persons of character and of talent, and the last of them is alive, though he keeps school no longer. He taught boys who had learnt the rudiments at the ordinary national school, and who wished to carry on their studies with a view either to the priesthood or to medicine. He was paid only by the fees of his scholars, who were either the sons of farmers about him, or of men living at a distance, who sent their children to be part of the family in some farm where they had kinship or acquaintance. Thus existence for these scholars was divided between the home life of a farm and the hours of school. There was, however, a small element of what in Ireland were called "poor scholars"--boys from the less prosperous North and West, who came (sometimes walking the whole journey) to get learning gratis. To them teaching was never refused, and their board was provided by the farmers, who "would be snatching them from one and other," since they assisted the other children in preparing tasks.

Now, in the school which my friend has described to me, there was no formal teaching of anything but the prescribed subjects. But literature would be lying about--Haverty's _History of Ireland_, and the Nationalist papers of the day--and the teacher was there always ready to expound and answer questions. Himself a fighting politician (a member of the Fenian organisation, whose name is still sacred throughout Ireland), he was careful never to draw in or compromise his pupils; but to teach them the story of their country and discuss it with them was part of his natural occupation. He taught Irish also, the tongue readiest to him, for he held that Irishmen should know their own language; but the essential business of his school was teaching the simple old-fashioned curriculum, Latin, mathematics, and some Greek. Yet because he was a man who loved and valued knowledge for its own sake, and loved and valued literature, it is probable that he gave a more real training to the mind than is achieved by the most modern system of hand and eye culture and the rest of it. He taught neither religion nor morals, but his teaching assumed throughout, what his example showed, that a man should be true and thorough in what he professed to believe, and should be ready at all times to make sacrifices for principle. Such a school had the only moral influence which in Ireland has ever counted for much--the influence of a strong personality, acting in alliance with the influences of a fully realised religion and of an ordered family life.

I sketch a more concrete picture that always rises in my mind with a ray of hope, when I think of education in Ireland. Out of doors, winter twilight falling on a wild landscape within hearing of the Atlantic surf; the man of the house coming out to talk to me, a handsome Irishman of the old school, frieze-clad, with the traditional side whiskers, the humorous eye and mouth. We talked for a while in the cold, then "_Gabh i leith isteach_," he said, "for I hear you have the Irish." As I paused in the door to phrase the Gaelic salutation, more devout and courteous than would come to my lips in any other tongue, I was astonished at the company gathered in the long low room. Chairs were set by the wide hearth of course, and from one of them the woman of the house rose to greet me; a settle ran along the side wall, and its length was filled with men and women blotted against the dusk background. But the centre of the picture was a narrow deal table set in the middle of the room, with candles on it, and benches on each side, and on the benches fully ten children busy with books and copies. "Are these your burden?" I asked in the quaint Irish phrase. "A share of them," the man answered; and then I understood that some belonged to other neighbours, and that it was a mutual arrangement for friendliness and help. None of the children budged; there they were, drilled and disciplined at their work, in the middle of the room, while their elders sat and chatted quietly. I have never seen elsewhere anything which so filled my conception of what a home should be, as that farmhouse in Corcabascinn--so full of order and good governance, yet so free of constraint, so full of welcome, yet so lacking in expense or display. For, understand, we who were strangers were brought (much against my will) into the state-room or parlour beyond the party wall, and drink was pressed upon us hospitably. But the neighbours who had come there (and came daily, I fancy) came neither to eat nor drink (unless maybe tea might be brewing) but simply to sit and smoke and talk, and watch that their children got their lessons properly. And at the end, perhaps before they parted, perhaps when the family was alone, the rosary would be said by the turf fire, that made, winter or summer, the centre of all that pleasant existence.

It is a pity to think of how poorly the National school, to which those children would go with their tasks in the morning, seconds the help which this home life gives it. Easily could the school--which takes whatever real light it has from the home, just as it depends for warmth on the few turf which scholars bring daily along with their books--reflect sound and fruitful ideas on to the home through the children. It could teach the children and the parents, not only the political, but the economic history of their own country; it could teach them what has been done in Ireland, what has succeeded, what has failed, and why; it could teach them, who are already proud of being Irish, to have new reasons for their pride; it could teach them, who are already willing to do their best for Ireland, into what channels the driving force of that willingness may be poured.

Outside of definite religion, the only fruitful source of educational ideas connected with the moral order that I see in Ireland is the Gaelic League. This organisation, founded to save from extinction, and to revive into new prosperity the national language of Ireland, based itself entirely upon a moral appeal. It appealed to Irishmen as they were proud of their race, to save the most distinctive symbol of their nationality; and the appeal met with an extraordinary promptness of response. But to stimulate and promote the movement, it was found necessary to widen the propaganda. Irishmen were urged to learn Irish, and to speak Irish because of pride in their country; the same organisation soon began to teach that an Irishman who set an example of drunkenness, or gave an occasion of it, not only sinned against himself, but against his country. Vulgar and indecent literature was denounced as un-Irish; Irish dances were advocated, not only for their admirable grace and their historic interest, but also because it was held that dances like the waltz, departed from the austere standard of Irish morality. Irish men and women were taught to buy goods of Irish manufacture by the people who taught them to learn the language, on the ground that if the Irish nation continued to ebb away out of Ireland, nationality and language must perish together.

Thus through the medium of a propaganda which at first sight would seem merely literary and archaeological, many practical issues of life were related to a purely educational purpose. There is no doubt that the Gaelic League, now a widespread and solidly established organisation, spending on the whole, perhaps, L30,000 or L40,000 a year on its enterprise, has done as much to promote temperance, and to further Irish industries, as it has accomplished in its peculiar task of reviving the old tongue. Primarily a teaching institution--for each of the League's eight hundred branches exists to hold classes for Irish study--it has linked with the linguistic teaching a moral idea. The reaction has been mutual, for there is more intelligent thought on the methods of linguistic teaching in the Gaelic League than one would easily find in all the schools and universities of Ireland. The appeal to pride of race has quickened intelligence no less than enthusiasm.

It is a very remarkable fact, that the great teaching order of the Christian Brothers has taken up the teaching of Irish and generally the Gaelic League's whole propaganda more thoroughly than any other organisation in Ireland; very remarkable, for their practical success is so conspicuous that Protestant clergymen have repeatedly from the pulpit appealed for extra support to Protestant schools whose pupils, as one preacher said in my hearing, were being ousted in all competition for employment by the lads from the Christian Brothers' schools. Whatever the post was, the preacher said, this body of lay Catholics seemed always to have a candidate specially prepared for it. One of the greatest institutions in charge of that order is the industrial school at Artane, near Dublin, where eight hundred boys are being prepared for different trades. Every single one of those boys is now being taught Irish; that is to say, a linguistic training with a special appeal to the learner's patriotism has been superimposed on the ordinary rudiments. It is a great experiment made by enthusiasts who are also teachers with an intensely practical bent.

It is too early even to forecast the effect which is likely to be produced upon Irish education generally by the new university colleges set up under Mr. Birrell's Act. Yet this may be said. Irish education needs reform from the top downwards, not from the bottom upwards. It has lacked idealism, and these universities in which Ireland, whether of the north or the south, will be free to express its own character, can and should set up ideals which will govern every school in the country. Trinity College has been free to follow its own bent, and its eyes to-day are, in scriptural phrase, "on the ends of the earth." Primary education, secondary studies, as governed by the machinery controlled through the Board of Intermediate Education, and university teaching as directed and rewarded through the Royal University, have all in the last resort been inspired by Englishmen who thought it very desirable that Irish boys and girls should learn to read and write and cipher, and that young men and young women should equip themselves for clerkships in the civil service, but who never for one instant realised that the end of education is divergence not conformity--to elicit, whether from the race or from the individual, a full and characteristic development. In twenty years perhaps a paper of interest may be written to show the positive results of education upon Irish character. At present the most noticeable facts are negative, and may be summed up by affirming a total lack of correspondence between the system employed and the needs and qualities of the Irish people.

1907.

THE IRISH GENTRY.