When is a Literature National?
A Treasury of Irish Folklore.
by Padraic Colum.
Crown. 640 pp. $5.00.
I am not going to quarrel with Padraic Colum’s definition of folklore, although only two of the nine “Parts” into which his book is divided—“Ways and Traditions” and “Fireside Tales”—fit the usual definitions of the term. The rest is literature, though rarely belles-lettres.
Mr. Colum has cast his net wider than the collector of folklore proper. He clearly wishes to catch in it everything that the collective memory of the Irish nation would say if granted the power of speech. In his desire to be all-inclusive Padraic Colum has posed the problem which faces every student of Irish literature, especially an Irish anthologist who works for an English-speaking audience. In a pretentious moment one might call it “The Problem of the Continuity of a Discontinuous Tradition.” Every American writer not of Anglo-Saxon origin has to face this problem in some form; so does every Jewish writer, whatever his nationality, who is concerned with his character as a Jew. Put in Jewish terms, the problem takes somewhat this form: “How inclusive should we make the term ‘Jewish literature’? Should it refer only to Hebrew literature, ancient and modern? Should it include Yiddish literature? Should it include any work written by Jews, regardless of language? Should a separate category be set up for Israeli literature, and if so, must Israeli literature be in Hebrew only?”
On the basis of Irish experience, I assume that the above questions have been asked a million times. In my profound ignorance, I do not know what answers have been given, but I’m ready to bet they were endlessly conflicting, and that no one answer to any question has gained widespread acceptance. I suspect that the Irish problem somehow illuminates the parallel Jewish situation, if only to emphasize that it is not unique. But I leave the reader to make his own applications.
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The most striking and exclusive definition of Irish literature so far comes from Professor Daniel Corkery’s Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature: “. . . by Irish literature we mean the literature written in the Irish language and that alone . . . .” There is a breathtaking simplicity about this, as well as a touching integrity—for Corkery has thus put his own work outside the pale of Irish literature. He has also excluded nearly all of the writing by a number of the noblest, most gifted Irishmen who ever lived—all unimpeachably Gaelic by descent: John Scotus Erigena, 9th-century philosopher and Greek scholar, who may yet take over Berkeley’s place as the greatest Irish thinker; St. Columbanus, first of the great Irish missionaries to the Continent and founder of the monasteries of Luxeuil and Bob-bio; Sedullius, the great Latin poet; St. Adamnôn, biographer of St. Columcille (or Columba) of Iona; Muirchu Maccu Mactheni, first Latin biographer of St. Patrick; the anonymous author of that very popular medieval work, the Navigatio Brendani, which led many people to believe that America was discovered by an Irish saint; and the Irish monk named Marcus who wrote The Vision of Tundale, another very popular Latin work, which doubtless influenced Dante’s account of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. All of these, who wrote more or less exclusively in Latin, Professor Corkery, in his emphasis on a “national literature,” would be forced to exclude. Perhaps they on their side, as members of a universal church who wrote in an international language, would have scorned to contribute to a mere national literature in any case.
By Corkery standards nothing in Padraic Colum’s book is Irish except a few Gaelic phrases and one four-line toast. Part II, entitled “Heroes of Old,” does contain some translations from the Gaelic sagas, as well as four selections dealing with St. Patrick and St. Columcille. Here, I think, Mr. Colum’s editing falls down badly. To include only four selections from saints’ lives in such a book does a double injustice: in the first place, if we take folklore to include biography, topography, history, etc., a true representation of the saints’ share would allot them a hundred of the book’s three hundred selections rather than merely four; in the second place, anyone who has read the available literal translations of the Gaelic lives of the Irish saints will realize that these constitute one of the greatest sources of Irish folklore at present available. Perhaps Mr. Colum feared to offend his Catholic readers by treating the saints’ lives as folklore, though the Church itself preserves a healthy skepticism about these lives.
Old and Modern Irish are not as comparable as Ancient and Modern Hebrew, Old Irish being at least as different from Modern Irish as Anglo-Saxon is from modern English. But Latin literature by Irishmen may properly be considered to correspond to Jewish writing in Greek, Arabic, and, of course, Latin. We may also reasonably equate Irish dialect literature—Synge’s work, for example—with Yiddish literature. The use of Gaelic words and idioms in this literature is not unlike the presence of Hebrew and English words in Yiddish. If we add language, then, to the criterion of subject, the writings of Anglo-Irishmen like Berkeley and Swift in standard English will be part not of Irish but of English literature, except where there is direct reference to Irish life—Swift’s Drapier Letters, Berkeley’s The Querist. Mr. Colum’s anthology plausibly could exclude anything by Berkeley, Burke, or Swift that had nothing to do with Ireland, but to include nothing at all by any of them is to do grave injustice to the Irish genius. But perhaps their work would have stood out too much above the surrounding undistinguished writing. Oliver Goldsmith is represented by almost the only thing he ever wrote with a purely Irish reference—his account of Turlough O’Carolan, last of the Irish bards.
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The Irish 19th-century imitators of Sir Walter Scott provide a source of genuine folklore (non-copyright) which Mr. Colum has used liberally. He includes Charles J. Kickham’s Knocknagow, or the Homes of Tipperary, a novel which has been a perennial best-seller in Ireland for about a century. According to Mr. Colum’s index, there are seven items by bold Kickham; the only other individuals supplying seven or more items are Douglas Hyde and Padraic Colum himself, though twenty-four items in all, by a variety of authors, are taken from the files of The Gael, a New York periodical, for the beginning of the present century. Like so many anthologists Mr. Colum seems to have been guided by such irrelevant but compelling factors as availability.
Occasionally, his stamp of “Irish” seems merely whimsical. He numbers among his contributors the German scholar Kuno Meyer and the English scholar Robin Flower, not to mention a lady named Luba Kaftannikoff. We have also the literature of the Irish Diaspora in the New World; there are two excerpts from Finley Peter Dunne (“Mr. Dooley”), accounts of Commodore John Barry, the “Fighting 69th,” Ambrose O’Higgins of Chile, and three stories about John L. Sullivan.
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Actually one can offer a comparatively straightforward definition of “Irish literature”: literary work by anyone of Irish birth, descent, or upbringing who continues to regard himself as primarily Irish. Practically, one may find it necessary to insist on a combination of these criteria. In principle, however, I am against any definition of “Irish” or of “Irishman” which will exclude a Yeats or a De Valera, a Solomons or a Mercier. A witty Gael who writes as “Thersites” in the Dublin Irish Times once remarked: “. . . we ought to drop the idea that calling a writer ‘Irish’ is necessarily awarding him a kind of medal.” At the same time, one must avoid classing as “Irish” something which simply happens to be at hand. I am prepared to accept as Irish, for instance, the remarkable Middle English “Kildare Poems” and certain works in Norman-French written in Ireland.
No country—Ireland least of all, after centuries of destructive civil war—is so rich in culture that she can afford to throw away any part of her heritage. Padraic Colum, who played an important part in the Irish renaissance at the beginning of the century, knows this truth better than anyone, since it was the basic premise of that revival; at the time, it was Ireland’s Gaelic past that had to be made available. Today another aspect of Ireland’s heritage, the Anglo-Irish one, is in danger of being jettisoned. If Mr. Colum had misgivings that his Treasury might suffer from all-inclusiveness, he must quickly have suppressed them with the reflection that culture, in the anthropological sense, is all-inclusive too. A people’s prayers and its ways of cooking potatoes—Mr. Colum includes examples of both—have an equal right to be regarded as cultural manifestations, though not as equally important ones. So have its modes of expression, whatever language happens to be used, or whoever is expressing them. I suggest that Irishmen, like Jews, would do well to think twice before repudiating any cultural legacy.
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