The origins of Celtic literature—Two streams—The Pagan—The Christian—Influence of the early Celtic Church as patron of letters—Originates a written literature—Attitude towards the ancient sagas—Medieval obscurantism—The Dialogues between Ossian and Patrick quoted and discussed—Their significance—Bishop Carsewell and the Reformation—The rival influences of Naturalism and the Church—Decline of Gaelic oral literature—The Nineteenth, a century of gleaning rather than of great creative work—Reasons—Present-day return to nature—Splendid services of individual Churchmen.
As we work our way back through history towards the origins of Celtic literature, we recognise two streams issuing from two very different sources. One has its rise in pre-Christian times, welling up from the pagan heart of the race from a remote antiquity. It is represented by the sagas and the poetry that is mingled with them. These sagas breathe the spirit of the Celtic people in the long past, and are the most characteristic of all their literary products. So old are they, that very few of them deal with events posterior to the eighth century, and those that do are the less meritorious.
In this respect it may be said that the Celts produced their best literature first. This literature was long in coming to the birth. It took centuries to evolve. But when it did appear it proved a new creation. The mind of a people lived in it, spoke through its tales. Generations of ancestors, lost and speechless in the slumber of the ages, found in it life and utterance.
So far as this stream has gained in volume through its course down the centuries, it has done so by expansion. Each succeeding age harks back to the past and draws from the original, imitating and transcribing, until now in the great books of sagas and modern literature thereon, we have a mighty river of Gaelic lore.
Yet nothing so original, nothing so characteristic in this line has ever been added to the early contribution. The Celtic genius seems to have found its fullest and most distinctive expression then, in the days before writing, and before Christianity was introduced, and ever since it has been drawing inspiration from its oldest creations.
Take away this stream, and the peculiar interest of Celtic literature is gone. How many centuries the sagas were in the making before they took final shape as we read them, can never be known. They passed from generation to generation by oral delivery, and it was only in the seventh or eighth century of our era that they ultimately found embodiment in writing. This much can be inferred, though we have no copies earlier than the end of the eleventh century and middle of the twelfth, those from which these latter drew their texts having perished long ago.
But as this stream flowed on from a past as remote and mysterious as the sources of the Nile were in the days of Herodotus, suddenly a new and independent one takes its rise. And this latter stream can be traced to its source in the fifth century of our era. It emanated not, as in the other case, from the pagan heart of the race in its more primitive phase, but in that heart overtaken and surprised by the new doctrines of Christianity.
This was really a new departure—a new beginning. The two streams had little in common. In essence and colour they seemed as if they belonged to two different worlds, which indeed was the case, in point of outlook and underlying thought.
As literature the old was better. It represented the real quintessence of the Celtic genius before it was diverted into new channels. And this is what makes critics like M. Darmesteter, while fully admitting the glorious significance of the new stream as a literary renaissance, yet consider it a decadence in contrast with the earlier.
For all this, the far-reaching significance of the new creation must not be lost sight of. It is probable that even then the ancient stream had reached its full flood, and but for the advent of the latter, which came with the new thought, it may have gradually subsided with the old order and never have found a way to posterity.
Historically, then, it is with the introduction of Christianity that Celtic literature first finds its embodiment, and when we consider the condition of continental Europe at the time, this early beginning in the writing of books is quite marvellous. It is to the Church, therefore, in the person of its missionary pioneers, that we owe the initial force that resulted in a written Gaelic literature.
In bringing Christianity to bear on the old pagan life and thought of the race, the missionaries effected a reanimation, which brought latent powers into action in a new direction. They furnished the people with fresh ideas, new material for thought, and an entirely changed outlook. The movement, indeed, might be described as the passage from Celtic naturalism to Christian spiritualism. And when we consider what the old paganism really was in many of its features, this emancipation cannot be regarded in any other light than that in which history uniformly regards it, as a salvation of the country, preparing the way for the realisation of all those grand possibilities that lay in the future.
With the coming of St. Patrick Ireland entered upon a new epoch, and with the advent of St. Columba the political and literary history of Scotland may be said to have begun. Every credit is due to the Church, therefore, as the importer and originator of a written literature, as well as of a true religion. To it we owe the remarkable arrival of letters which not only tapped a new fountain head, causing a new stream of literary composition to flow, but which also secured for us the preservation and continuance of the old to this day.
“Few forms of Christianity,” wrote Renan, “have offered an ideal of Christian perfection so pure as the Celtic Church of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries. Nowhere, perhaps, has God been better worshipped in spirit than in those great monastic communities of Hy or Iona, of Bangor, of Clonard, or of Lindisfarne.”
And it is this purity of motive and sincerity of purpose that led the early missionaries, in contrast to the obscurantists of later ages, to recognise the high value of literature and use it in the service of religion. In the primitive Celtic Church we find no conflict between the two, such as the sickly piety of some more modern periods has instituted and maintained. Learning and culture were then never regarded as enemies to religion. On the contrary, they were deemed not only helpful, but even indispensable to the progress of Christianity in the land. And they were encouraged as such. They were the most powerful agents for the removal of racial ignorance, superstition, and prejudice.
All honour, therefore, to the Church that first kindled the lamp of literature and the love of knowledge in these once dark islands.
The attitude of this early Celtic Church towards the original oral traditions and compositions of the people was perfectly consistent, and can be easily understood. It simply ignored them as far as that was possible, offering in their stead a substitute infinitely better fitted, as it thought, to elevate the life and character of these pagan peoples.
With a zeal that is entirely praiseworthy, it set itself to the multiplication of copies of the Psalter, of the Gospels, and other parts of Scripture. It is really marvellous, when we consider that these had to be patiently and laboriously and beautifully handwritten, how much was accomplished in this way by the early missionaries. St. Columba alone was credited with having written “three hundred gifted, lasting, illuminated, noble books,” all of them transcriptions of some portions of the Bible, no doubt.
It is this which accounts for the fact that almost all the existing literary monuments of the early Celtic Church are copies of the Gospels or of the Psalter, with or without Gaelic or Latin glosses.
Thus the “Domhnach Airgid,” the “Cathrach,” the Books of Durrow, Dimna, Kells, Molling, Armagh, Deer, the “Gospel of Maeielbrid Macdurnain,” the “Psalter of Southampton,” with correlative books like the “Irish Canons” and “Missal of Stowe,” in the British Islands, besides those on the Continent.
It is significant that the missionaries used the Latin versions of the Scriptures rather than Greek or Hebrew ones, with the reading and writing of which latter they seemed to have been less familiar. They did not attempt, so far as we know, to make a Gaelic translation of the original, but contented themselves, no doubt, with rendering from Latin into the Gaelic in course of their preachings and expositions.
One thing is evident, that these scholarly men had no aversion to textual criticism or any fear of it, like so many of their Highland and Irish successors to-day, for they freely indulged in it for their own and the popular benefit. Thus the Celtic Church of Scotland and Ireland had Jerome’s recension of the Vulgate almost as soon as it was issued, and, to judge from the youthful Columba and his master St. Finnian’s avidity for it, welcomed it with great enthusiasm. And more than that, the Celtic Church appears to have collated Jerome’s text with older native texts of their own, to make if possible even a better version, such as they might use in all their monasteries, and such as we find to this day in most of their great books of Gospel, as quoted above.
But in the same way that Knox unfortunately found it expedient to destroy many beautiful buildings, books, and customs of the Roman Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation, so the early Celtic Church in conflict with an ancient and debasing paganism felt it necessary, while tolerating many ancient customs and superstitions, to resist the leaven of heathenism in every shade and form, and thus even to ignore the compositions which breathed so freely its spirit and atmosphere.
There is a high probability that the best minds felt the hardship of having to turn their backs upon the most beautiful of these literary products of their race. For example, in the “Dialogue of the Sages,” found in the Book of Lismore, it is recorded that St. Patrick himself felt rather uneasy at the delight with which he listened to the stories of the ancient Feinn, and feared it might be wrong in him to enjoy or show his appreciation of those pagan narratives, yet when he consulted his guardian angels, they not only assured him that there was no harm in listening to the tales, but even counselled him to have them written down in the words of ollamhs, “for,” said they, “it will be a rejoicing to numbers and to the good people to the end of time to listen to these stories.”
The missionaries appear to have been too earnest and consistent in their struggle with the gnarled roots of paganism to indulge their taste in writing what they could not help admiring as tales of great literary beauty, and very fascinating. And so for two or three centuries, though the cultivation of writing and bardic compositions went steadily on, none of the ancient pagan products found patrons sufficiently literary to commit them to MSS.
The new school followed a style and trend of its own, and in addition to endless transcribing, produced Latin prose works of its own, prominent among which may be mentioned St. Patrick’s Confession, and “Epistle to Coroticus,” Cummene’s and Adamnan’s Lives of St. Columba, Brendan’s Navigatio or Voyaging, each of which have had a wide vogue throughout the Middle Ages, and since.
Among its Gaelic contributions are many beautiful poems, some of ancient renown, on account of their theme or author, such as Dallan Forgaill’s Amra Choluimcille, St. Columba’s own numerous lyrics—that on Derry, on Cormac’s visit, his “Farewell to Ara,” all breathing love of nature and affection for home.
Then we have the verses of Cennfaelad, who died in 678; Aengus the Culdee’s “Feilire,” or Calendar, about 800; the poems in the Monastery of St. Paul, Carinthia; and the verses in the Codex Boernerianus; the “Saltair na Rann,” about the year 1000, a collection of 162 poems in early middle Irish.
Of hymns and prayers, both in Gaelic and Latin—compositions of the early Celtic Church—there is no lack. The most famous of the Latin ones are those of Sechnall (on St. Patrick) and of Columcille (“The Altus,” “In te Christo,” and “Noli Pater”); and of the Gaelic ones, St. Patrick’s “Deer’s Cry,” Colman’s and Fiacc’s hymns, “Ninine’s Prayer,” Ultan’s and Broccan’s hymns, both in praise of Brigit, “Adamnan’s Prayer,” and the hymns of Sanctain and Mael-isu.
When to these we add specimens of homiletic literature and “Cormac’s Glossary” (Cormac, King-Bishop of Cashel, 837–903), which is reckoned by far the oldest attempt at a comparative vernacular dictionary made in any language of modern Europe, and the same author’s “Saltair of Cashel,” we have a very fair representation of what the new literature initiated by the monks and missionaries contained.
It is mainly a religious literature, as contrasted with the purely pagan war-stories and romances of the heroes. This ethical movement for a time tended to supplant the natural spontaneous poetical output of the race, yet it could not crush out these older creations, which were independent of books and MSS., and as intense in feeling and true to nature as anything which the classical literatures contain.
And so in course of time there came a reaction. The votaries of naturalism so far triumphed in their zeal for the ancient sagas and romances, that they began to have them written down. Zimmer thinks that the earliest redaction of the “Táin Bó Chuailgné” dates from the seventh century. But it is difficult to ascertain when the sagas first found embodiment in ink. The interest in them appears to have been revived immediately before or at the time when the Norsemen arrived and were devastating the country. The devotion of the latter to the characteristic sagas of their own race and nation may have quickened the enthusiasm of the Gael for his own. And the new atmosphere which this rough pagan element introduced to the land, breaking for a time the influence and sway of the Church and of the men of learning in the monasteries, may have conduced further to bring into popular favour the old heroic war-poetry, nerving the heart of the people to withstand the onslaught of the invader in the spirit of the dead heroes.
Christianity suffered eclipse for a while, and with it the interests of learning and the religious literature, cultivated so assiduously in the monasteries.
By the time that the sagas had come to be written down, the old feeling which had prompted the early missionaries to ignore them was apparently giving way, since there were scribes within the Church eager to commit them to MS. This was a natural and inevitable reaction.
But monastic Christianity, ever on its guard against nature, was constantly seeking after the strange and paradoxical. For it, abstinence was worth more than enjoyment, happiness must be sought in its opposite. And so there sprung up afresh, this time a more blind and uncompromising orthodox antagonism to the early paganism and all its creations.
The Dialogues between Ossian and Patrick are our witness. These, while professing to bring the spirit of paganism and of early Christianity together in the person of the last great representative of the one and the first of the other, were evidently the work of monkish scribes in the twelfth century or earlier, and they throw a significant sidelight on the situation. In reality they reflect the posture of affairs, not as it was in the early days when Christianity was first introduced, but as it existed later, when ecclesiastical doctrines had taken on their more lurid, medieval colour.
In form and setting the Dialogues are the nearest approach to a drama that the Gael has ever produced. And Miss Hull thinks that they were designed simply to popularise the ancient tales. But such a view seems to us to miss the whole aim and point of these compositions, which are clearly the undisguised result of a reaction,—nay, even revolt in the minds of thoughtful and patriotic men, monks or clerics or laymen, against the narrow and captious spirit that can see no good in any form of natural life and religion other than the contracted faith in which it was itself reared.
Evidently the Church had descended from the high level of faith and policy it had maintained in the days of St. Patrick and St. Columba, and measures which the latter had found necessary as temporary expedients till the need for them had vanished, smaller minds had elevated into principles; and even the simple tenets of Christianity they had distorted by casting them into an ecclesiastical mould, and opposing them to the most natural instincts and enthusiasms of the human heart.
The writers of the Dialogues, we can see, are thoroughly in earnest, and not sparing in their irony and banter of the grim theology which found no place for the natural virtues of the Celts, or for the story of the dreams and ideals of a thousand years. A mocking, derisive humour runs through these pieces, but the humour is all on one side. There can be no mistaking the sympathies of the writers, who themselves are intellectually emancipated from the narrow tenets and intolerant spirit that would consign the heroes without reflection and without scruple to endless pain.
In these Dialogues paganism at its best is brought face to face with ecclesiastical Christianity, and is made to appear more just, more humane, and desirable in every way.
To the spirit of these conversations, or to the form in which they are cast, no exception can reasonably be taken. In one respect only might students of history dissent, and that is, to the selection of St. Patrick as spokesman for the bigotry that is here pilloried.
Those who are familiar with the authentic records of his life and the spirit of his teaching will feel that an injustice is done the apostle of Ireland, by associating his name with such counterfeit sentiment. Had a typical medieval monk or cleric been selected as advocate of the repulsive theology represented here, the rôle would have been more true to life and historical fact. As it is, one feels that a noble character is traduced and put in a false setting. These Dialogues are profoundly interesting, not only because of the struggle between nature and dogma, between the cosmic process and the ethical, here brought into irreconcilable antagonism, but also because the two original and independent streams of Gaelic literature seem here to meet, and, like the rushing together of contrary tides or of two confluent currents, to mingle their waters together in a wild tumult of angry waves, which only subsides as each again gradually finds its own channel.
One of the most interesting of the Dialogues is that which is known as “Ossian’s Prayer,” and is about 150 lines in length. The bard begins by asking the saint if the Feinn of Erin are in heaven. When he is informed that his father, Gaul, and Oscar cannot be there, he not unnaturally retorts, “If Erin’s Feinn are not in heaven, why should I Christian be?” Thereupon the saint taunts him with irreverent fierceness of language, adding “What are all the Feinn of Erin to one hour with God alone?” But Ossian declares he would prefer to see one battle waged by the valiant Feinn than to see the Lord of Heaven and his cleric (Patrick) chanting sin.
The saint tries to impress him with God’s omniscience by telling him in effect that it would be impossible for the smallest midge to enter heaven without God’s knowledge. “How different from Finn,” exclaims the bard, “thousands might enter, partake of his cheer, and depart without notice.”
The argument throughout shows complete divergence in their thought.
“Finn is in hell in bonds,” says Patrick. “He is now in the house of pain and sorrow, because of the amusement he had with the hounds and for attending the (bardic) schools each day, and because he took no heed of God.” And to an interpolation of Ossian, “Misery attend thee, old man,” he continues, “who speakest words of madness; God is better for one hour than all the Fenians of Erin.”
To which the bard retorts, “O Patrick, who makest me that impertinent answer, thy crozier would be in atoms were Oscar present. Were my son Oscar and God hand in hand on Knock-na-veen, if I saw my son down, it is then I would say that God was a strong man.
“How could it be that God and his clerics could be better men than Finn, the chief king of the Fenians, the generous one, who was without blemish? All the qualities that you and your clerics say are according to the rule of the King of the Stars, Finn’s Fenians had them all, and they must be now stoutly seated in God’s heaven. Were there a place above or below better than heaven, ’tis there Finn would go and all the Fenians he had.”
Baffled in his attempt to initiate the pagan into his new doctrines, and curious to hear, Patrick relents and calls for a tale. The following is an example of the usual metre of the original mellifluous Gaelic:—
And warming to the task, the bard recites the glorious character and deeds of the vanished heroes. “The Fenians never used to tell untruth. There never sat cleric in church, though melodiously ye may think they chant psalms, more true to his word than the Fenians, the men who shrank never from fierce conflicts.” And then when he adds, “I never heard that any feat was performed by the King of the saints, or that He reddened his hand,” the exasperated and dogmatic Patrick stops him short with the assertion, “Let us cease disputing on both sides, thou withered old man, who art devoid of sense; understand that God dwells in heaven of the orders, and Finn and his hosts are all in pain.” Ossian, pathetically, “Great then would be the shame for God not to release Finn from the shackles of pain; for if God himself were in bonds, my chief would fight on his behalf. Finn never suffered in his day any one to be in pain or difficulty without redeeming him by silver or gold, or by battle and fight, until he was victorious.
“It is a good claim I have against your God, I to be among these clerics as I am, without food, without clothing or music, without bestowing gold on bards, without battling, without hunting, etc.” The idea of his well-meaning instructors was to starve the bard into submission, in the intolerant spirit of the Inquisition of later times, or of boycotting in more modern days.
Elsewhere the bewildered Ossian laments as follows:—
“Alas, O Patrick, I did think that God would not be angered thereat; I think long, and it is a great woe to me, not to speak of the way of Finn of the Deeds.” To which Patrick: “Speak not of Finn nor of the Fenians, for the Son of God will be angry with thee for it. He would never let thee into his court, and He would not send thee the bread of each day.”
“I will, O Patrick, do his will. Of Finn or of the Fenians I will not talk, for fear of bringing anger upon them, O cleric, if it is God’s wont to be angry.”
Mingled with these arguments are passages which quiver with the Gaelic enthusiastic love of nature. In Finn’s Pastimes, for example, we have a lyric of extraordinary beauty. After a couple of verses addressed to his opponent, ending, “Can his doom be in hell, in the house of cold?” Ossian goes on to tell of his father’s delight in nature. The passage is held to be in the very best style, rhyme, rhythm, and assonance, all combined with a most rich vocabulary of words expressive of sounds, nearly impossible to translate into English. But we quote from Dr. Sigerson’s beautiful rendering of the original:—
These Dialogues are quoted at some length, because they bring into clear outline permanent tendencies—the rival influences of naturalism and the Church—Celtic literature struggling to be free, and the Church seeking to saturate it with its own sentiment, and use it solely for its own propaganda. That is the history down to this day. Nature, love, and war on the one side, and religious themes on the other. The one timid of the other, and each on its guard against the undue ascendency of its rival.
Thus it is assumed that James Macpherson ignored these ancient compositions, namely, the Dialogues, as modern and counterfeit, because of the intrusion of the ecclesiastical element into the purely pagan domain. Into none of his own so-called translations did he admit any flavour of Christianity, regarding that only as the genuine and original Ossianic residuum which breathed the spirit of pre-Christian times.
But he lived in the days before textual criticism. We cannot credit the Church as a whole with disinterested love of literature and its encouragement. But in every age there have been men within its fold who were passionately devoting themselves to authorship on their own account, and to the preservation of books and MSS., and literary lore of the past. Every monastery in the Middle Ages was thus more or less a place in which reading and writing were cultivated, and some were active centres of literary work. So that indirectly, and especially in troublous times, we owe to the Church the splendid heritage of a Gaelic literature continuous from the days of St. Patrick and St Columba to our own. Down to very recent times, in fact, the men connected with religious institutions have been the real custodiers, if not always themselves the authors, of Gaelic productions. Thus it was Maelmuiri in Clonmacnois that enriched posterity with the wonderful Leabhar Na h’Uidhre, while his contemporary did for the hymns in the Liber Hymnorum what he so bravely and intelligently did for the sagas. From their time the fatuous hostility to the sagas had evidently broken down. Perhaps the Dialogues between Ossian and Patrick had been as effective in their own way in pouring ridicule and contempt upon the opposing faction as the poems of Burns in withering the hyper-orthodox tyranny of later times. At any rate, from the monasteries of Ireland in these Middle Ages came the great books of sagas and romance, such as the Books of Leinster, Ballymote, Lecain, Lismore, etc.; and in Scotland in the corresponding period we have the Glenmasan MS. of the thirteenth century; MS. XL. of the fourteenth; and, besides others, the great Book of the Dean of Lismore, which covers the period down almost to the Reformation in Scotland.
But with the Reformation the old spirit of mistaken evangelical zeal against the ancient heroic literature seems to have revived in an aggressive form, for we find no less a man than Bishop Carswell, the most representative Churchman in the Highlands of that age, inveighing against the popularity of the sagas. In the epistle to the reader, which he prefixed to Knox’s Liturgy, the first book printed in Gaelic, he says:—
And great is the blindness and sinful darkness and ignorance and perverseness of those who teach and write and compose in Gaelic, that with the view of obtaining for themselves the vain rewards of this world, they are more desirous, and more accustomed to preserve the vain, extravagant, false, and worldly histories concerning the Tuath de Dananns and Milesians, Fionn, the son of Cumhail, and his heroes the Feinn, and many others, which I shall not here mention, nor attempt to examine, than they are to write, and to teach, and to compose the sincere words of God and the perfect way of truth. For the world loves falsehood more than the truth, and as a proof of it, worldly sinful men will pay for falsehood, and will not listen to the truth though they have it for nothing.
A great portion of the darkness and ignorance of such persons arises, too, from the aforesaid truths not being taught in good books, understood by all who speak the general language or habitual Gaelic tongue.
This was a volte-face from the sympathetic attitude of the Dean of Lismore, and no doubt included him in its sweeping indictment. Yet we may take it as representing the attitude of the leaders of the Reformation towards the literature as well as the beliefs and cults tolerated by the Latin Church. For a time the great evangelical movement, which had spread from Germany over England and Scotland, had little effect in the Highlands. The people remained widely indifferent to religious influences of every kind, except such lingering influence as the Roman Catholic Church continued to exert upon them; but when at length they came once more under the influence of evangelical preachers, like Robert Bruce and others, the precedent set by Carsewell and the reformers seems to have been less or more uniformly followed; and with every revival of clerical authority there appeared an unmistakable tendency towards a revival of clerical intolerance, painfully detrimental to wholesome literature, as well as to music, athletic sports, and amusements of every kind.
Consequently since the Reformation Gaelic oral literature has been gradually disappearing, until, in the words of Mr. Alexander Carmichael, “it is now becoming meagre in quantity, inferior in quality, and greatly isolated.”
In his own collection, which represents the latest gleaning in this field of Gaelic lore, we see the influence of the Church and the old pagan traditions strangely intermingled. The very title, “Hymns and Incantations,” suggests the double influence, the two streams which have been running parallel, approaching each other, mingling and separating all through Celtic literature.
However much the Church may have gained the ascendency over rival influences, it has never been able to stifle the heroic poetry of the race. At periods when the latter seemed most to have gone under, and disappeared beneath the ban of religion, it came to life again with amazing vitality, as, for example, in the days of Maelmuiri and after, when the ecclesiastical seemed to have conquered the pagan; and again in the days of Macpherson, when the Reformation appeared to have made a clean sweep of the heroic saga in the land, leaving neither name nor memorial. And the MSS. had so completely disappeared that they were not known to exist.
But forth they came to testify once more to the hidden and precarious genius of the Celtic people, which produced such diverse characters as Fergus and Ossian, Patrick and Columcille.
While the nineteenth century has been exceptionally brilliant in the department of English literature, the same cannot be said of Gaelic literature. In the former great works of creative genius have appeared, which have added immense lustre to the language in which they were conceived. In the latter the output by comparison has been very poor and meagre, no lengthy sustained production of any originality having seen the light either in prose or poetry. It would seem as if the genius of the Gaelic language had found more congenial expression in English, for not a few of those who have enriched the younger literature, from Sir Walter Scott onwards to William Black and Robert Buchanan, have derived their inspiration, and sometimes their themes, from Celtic sources. Of native compositions we have nothing to show beyond elegies, songs, and lyrics, some of them of great beauty, and as spontaneous and true to nature as the beating of men’s hearts. But no epic, no heroic poetry, no drama, no great prose work worthy to be classed with the masterpieces of English literature, or even with the minor works, has appeared within the last century. Instead of being a century of creative work, as in English, it has rather been a century of gleaning. All the best works in Gaelic are collections—gleanings from the past.
It would be difficult to assign the real reason for the barrenness of production in recent times. Many causes seem to combine. The derelict condition of the Highland and Irish populations in the beginning of last century may have had something to do with it; the decline and limited use of the language; the invasion of English and English literature, of Lowland people and Lowland ways.
Gleaners and native lovers of Celtic literature generally ascribe a large share of the decadence to the influence and attitude of the Church in its local testimony. During the greater part of last century, especially in the Highlands, that influence has been such that, had the Dialogues been produced any time within that period, they would have hit the mark quite as surely as in the age in which they were written, if we conceived St Patrick as orthodox cleric and Ossian as the native genius of the Celtic people.
But times have changed. The lights and shadows on the canvas have again shifted. Our modern habits of thought are different. Like Ossian, men look askance on morbid teaching, and have no great enthusiasm for unnatural asceticism. The prevailing theory of life, impatient of ethical dualism, objects to the identification of nature with evil quite as much as the bard did. If nature is not evil, it asks, where, then, is the necessity or the benefit of a renunciation which is incompatible with the conditions under which men have to exist? And so, concurrent with the decadence of ecclesiastical ideas and ecclesiastical authority, there is a return to nature; and in many quarters a fresh interest is being taken in the language, literature, and lore of the Gael. And new writers have arisen who breathe the spirit of the race, and voice its longings, yearnings, strivings, free from theological bias.
Their medium is no longer the Gaelic, but the English, into which they have carried many quaint idioms, sentiments, and expressions. Indeed it is doubtful if ever the Gaelic will again adapt itself to any great literary work, since the gifted have adopted English as the more comprehensive vehicle.
Yet now, looking dispassionately over the vicissitudes of Gaelic literature from the time it was first cradled in the rough bosom of the race, and nurtured by Christianity, we cannot forget the splendid services rendered by monks and Churchmen in the early days and during the Middle Ages down to the Reformation. Adverse periods of obscurantism there have been, blighting enough and painfully retrograde. But for ages the Church figured as the patron of letters, and even in later times there have been enthusiastic literary workers within its pale. In Scotland men like Sage, Macnicol, Smith, Maccallum, Drs. Norman Macleod, Macdonald, Clerk, Maclauchlan, Cameron, Dowden, Henderson, and Macneill; in Ireland Drs. Reeves, Todd, Wright, Stokes, and many others.
And taking the influence of the Church at its best, we may surely apply to it, in its relation to literature, the remark of Dean Church in a wider connection: “History teaches us this, that in tracing back the course of human improvement, we come in one case after another upon Christianity as the source from which improvement derived its principle and its motive. We find no other source adequate to account for the new spring of amendment, and without it no other source of good could have been relied on.”
So here Christianity, through its medium, the Church, besides saving the soul of a departing oral literature, has been the fruitful spring and inspiration of much that is beautiful, pure, and enduring in our Gaelic heritage.