INTRODUCTION

It must be evident to all who read this collection of plays, stories and poems in the spirit which their author would have wished for, that it would be utterly wrong to preface them with remarks applying merely to their literary qualities.

For they are something more than literature. On the pages as we read they seem to grow into flesh and blood and spirit. They are a record of the emotions of a life which was devoured by one idea, the native beauty of Ireland, its manners, its speech, its people, its history. And we see how that idea was coupled in the mind with a poignant sense of the danger that threatened the vitality of all those things. The writer saw the thought of the Gall spreading like a destructive growth through the body of Irish nationality. He felt that an imported politeness mocked at the Gaelic ways; he knew that the Irish language had been extinguished in the greater part of Ireland by the sense of shame working on poverty, xand that many of the people of the Irish-speaking fringe were also growing ashamed of the priceless treasure they possessed; he saw that the lessons of Irish history, which the leaders of the past had taught by their labours and often sealed with their blood, were being ignored in the modern political game.

Earnestness of purpose had always marked him. He threw his heart and soul and strength into the Gaelic movement; he learned the language so thoroughly as to be able to use it with ease as his medium of literary expression, to recapture the old forms of poetry and story-telling, and to infuse into them the modernity of his own modes of thought. He fought the battles of Irish with a vigour that we all remember. He founded a school—against what difficulties!—where education was Irish, and aimed at the free development of personality in the Irish way. All that was hard and earnest work, but its earnestness was nothing to the terrible seriousness that grew upon him when he came to realize the maladies of the political movement that was supposed to aim at Irish nationhood. The Volunteers, xiat whose foundation he had assisted, were at first negotiated with and then divided by the constitutional Party; the original founders, who determined to adhere to their principles, were left high and dry without any constitutional support. The conviction gained on him that only blood could vivify what tameness and corruption had weakened, and that he and his comrades were destined to go down the same dark road by which so many brave and illustrious Irishmen had gone before them.

It is in the light of this progress of thought that we must read his writings. We find the fresh notes of tenderness and sweetness in the early stories, Iosagan, The Priest, Barbara, and Eoineen of the Birds. The psychology of children, their sorrows and joys, are the theme. The older people are merely foils to the children; we learn nothing of their inner story, except in the case of Old Matthias—and even here we have merely an account of a return to the innocence of second childhood. Iosagan coming to play with the little ones on the green, while the old folks are at Sunday Mass, Paraig wearing a surplice and saying xiiDominus Vobiscum, and Orate Fratres, in anticipation of the priestly office, Brideen holding converse grave and gay with her doll, Eoineen watching with joy the return of the swallows in spring, and broken-hearted at their departure in late autumn, all pass before our eyes as dwellers in a Tír-ná-n-óg in Iar-Connacht, where the waves sing a careless song, and the sun shines only on innocent faces. But in The Mother and other stories we are on different ground, and are told of “the heavy and the weary weight” that lies on the hearts of the Western poor. We see the tragic pride of Gaelic culture that impels old Brigid of the Songs to walk across Ireland to sing at the Oireachtas in Dublin, only to die of hunger and exhaustion at the end, the listless face of the old tramp, who tells how through the Dearg-Daol he had lost his luck, his farm and his family, and had become “a walking man, and the roads of Connacht before him, from that day to this”; and even more significant is the story of the death in prison of Coilin, with its undercurrent of hatred for the foreign laws. The manner of narration in these stories is brief xiiiand severe; there is scarcely a phrase too many, and even purists would be hard set to detect an alien note. The most perfect instance seems to me to be the story of the Dearg-Daol.

Of the little collection of poems, Suantraighe agus Goltraidhe (Songs of Sleep and Sorrow), Mr. MacDonagh rightly said: “One need not ask if it be worth while having books of such poetry. The production of this is already a success for the new literature.” The old forms, with their full-sounding assonances and alliterations are beautifully wrought, and the modern thoughts, the latter-day enthusiasms and dejections, when they come, never strike us as intruders. To illustrate their beauty, quotation in English would not serve my purpose; I will quote from the Irish original a single verse from the poem, A Chinn Aluinn:

A ghlóir ionmhuin dob’íseal aoibhinn,

An fíor gó gcualas trém’ shuanaibh thú?

Nó an fíor an t-eólas atá dom’bheo-ghoin?

Mo bhrón, sa tuamba níl fuaim ná guth!

Quite suddenly, in the second last of the xivcollection, the image of Ireland stands out, bowed beneath the weight of the ages, the mother of Cuchulainn the valiant, but also of shameful children who betrayed her, lonely and imperious. And the last poem is an exquisite farewell to the beauty that is seen and heard and felt, before gathering the pack and going the stern way whither the service of Ireland pointed.

The plays, The Singer, The King, The Master, and the last poems, The Rebel, The Fool, The Mother, are those of a man in whom meditation on coming struggle, agony and death have become one with life and art. They are weighted with the concept of a nation inheriting an original sin of slavery, for whose salvation the death of one man is a necessity. “One man can free a nation as one Man redeemed the world,” says MacDara in The Singer. “I will take no pike, I will go into the battle with bare hands, I will stand up before the Gall as Christ hung naked before men on the tree!” And the mother says: “My son, MacDara, is the Singer that has quickened the dead years and all the quiet dust.” And the xvsharp anguish of doubt is there too, the ever-recurring thought of the apathy of the nation, and the vision of those “that cursed me in their hearts for having brought death into their houses,” of “the wise, sad faces of the dead, and the keening of women.” But the doubt comes from outside, it is not born within the soul, and the stern resolution and saeva indignatio conquer it and persist. The mother is evoked in whose calendar of saints the martyrs will be inscribed, who will ponder at night in her heart in religious quiet on “the little names that were familiar once round her dead hearth.” And through all, as if nature would have her revenge for the over-strain, breaks in a flash the love of the old-sought, fugitive beauty of things, the

“Little rabbits in a field at evening

Lit by a slanting sun,

Or some green hill where shadows drifted by,

Some quiet hill where mountainy man hath sown

And soon would reap; near to the gate of Heaven;

Or children with bare feet upon the sands

xvi Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets

Of little towns in Connacht.”

Taken in the order I have indicated, the work of Padraic Pearse seems to me to constitute a mystical book of the love of Ireland. In Iosagán we have the tender and satisfied love of the fervent novice, delighting in the old-world, yet ever youthful charm of the Gaelic race, untroubled by the clouded day of maturity. We find in An Mátair, and in some of the poems and plays the way of purgation by doubt and suffering. In the last plays and poems we reach unity and illumination, the glow of the soul in the fire of martyrdom. And all these states of love are interwoven, as they should be, in the separate stages, though a different one may have predominance in each. I believe the generations of Irishmen yet to be born into the national faith will come to the reading of this book as to a kind of Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum, a journey to the realization of Ireland, past, present and to come, a learning of all the love and enthusiasm and resolve which that realization implies:

xvii“Live in these conquering leaves; live all the same;

And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame.

Live here, great heart; and love, and die, and kill;

And bleed and wound; and yield and conquer still.”

Those who look in these pages for a vision of Pagan Ireland, with its pre-Christian gods and heroes, will be disappointed. The old divinities and figures of the sagas are there, and the remnants of the old worship in the minds of the people are delineated, but everything is overshadowed by the Christian concept, and the religion that is found here centres in Christ and Mary. The effect of fifteen centuries of Christianity is not ignored or despised. The ideas of sacrifice and atonement, of the blood of martyrs that makes fruitful the seed of the faith, are to be found all through these writings; nay, they have here even more than their religious significance, and become vitalizing factors in the struggle for Irish nationality. The doubts xviiiand weaknesses which are described are not those of people who are inclined to return to the former beliefs, but of men whose souls are grown faint on account of the lethargy which they see around them. For years they have preached and laboured and sung; but the masses remain unmoved. What wonder if they feel unable to repeat with conviction: “Think you not that I can ask the Father, and He will give me presently twelve legions of angels?”

No, the Ireland about which Pearse writes is not the land of the early heroes, but of people deeply imbued with the Christian idea and will. And yet we feel that the ancient and mediæval and modern Gaelic currents meet in him. By his life and death he has become one with Cuchulainn and Fionn and Oisin, with the early teachers, terrible or gentle, of Christianity, with Hugh of Dungannon and Owen Roe and all the chieftains who fought against the growing power of the Sassenach, with Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen, with Rossa, O’Leary, and the Fenians. He will appeal to the imagination of times to come more than any of the rebels of the last xixhundred and thirty years, because in him all the tendencies of Irish thought, culture and nationality were more fully developed. His name and deeds will be taught by mothers to their children long before the time when they will be learned in school histories. To older people he will be a watchword in the national fight, a symbol of the unbroken continuity and permanence of the Gaelic tradition. And they will think of him forever in different ways, as a poet who sang the songs of his country, as a soldier who died for it, as a martyr who bore witness with his blood to the truth of his faith, as a hero, a second Cuchulainn, who battled with a divine frenzy to stem the waves of the invading tide.

P. BROWNE.

Maynooth, 21st May, 1917.

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