For the many sins of omission and commission in this volume I must claim the reader's kind indulgence; nobody can be better aware of its shortcomings than I myself, and the only excuse that I can plead is that over so much of the ground I have had to be my own pioneer. I confidently hope, however, that in the renewed interest now being taken in our native civilisation and native literature some scholar far more fully equipped for his task than I, may soon render this volume superfluous by an ampler, juster, and more artistic treatment of what is really a subject of great national importance.
National or important, however, it does not appear to be considered in these islands, where outside of the University of Oxford--which has given noble assistance to the cause of Celtic studies--sympathisers are both few and far between. Indeed, I fancy that anybody who has applied himself to the subject of Celtic literature would have a good deal to tell about the condescending contempt with which his studies have been regarded by his fellows. "I shall not easily forget," said Dr. Petrie, addressing a meeting of the Royal Irish Academy upon that celebrated example of early Celtic workmanship the Tara Brooch, "that when in reference to the existence of a similar remain of ancient Irish art, I had first the honour to address myself to a meeting of this high institution, I had to encounter the incredulous astonishment of the illustrious Dr. Brinkley" [of Trinity College, President of the Academy] "which was implied in the following remark, 'Surely, sir, you do not mean to tell us that there exists the slightest evidence to prove that the Irish had any acquaintance with the arts of civilised life anterior to the arrival in Ireland of the English?' nor shall I forget that in the scepticism which this remark implied nearly all the members present very obviously participated." Exactly the same feeling which Dr. Petrie encountered was prevalent in my own _alma mater_ in the eighties, where one of our most justly popular lecturers said--in gross ignorance but perfect good faith--that the sooner the Irish recognised that before the arrival of Cromwell they were utter savages, the better it would be for everybody concerned! Indeed, it was only the other day that one of our ablest and best known professors protested publicly in the _Contemporary Review_ against the enormity of an Irish bishop signing so moderate, and I am sure so reasonable a document, as a petition asking to have Irish children who knew no English, taught through the medium of the language which they spoke. Last year, too, another most learned professor of Dublin University went out of his way to declare that "the mass of material preserved [in the Irish manuscripts] is out of all proportion to its value as 'literature,'" and to insist that "in the enormous mass of Irish MSS. preserved, there is absolutely nothing that in the faintest degree rivals the splendours of the vernacular literatures of the Middle Ages," that "their value as literature is but small," and that "for educational purposes save in this limited sense [of linguistic study] they are wholly unsuited," winding up with the extraordinary assertion that "there is no solid ground for supposing that the tales current at the time of our earliest MSS. were much more numerous than the tales of which fragments have come down to us." As to the civilisation of the early Irish upon which Petrie insisted, there is no longer room for the very shadow of a doubt; but whether the literature which they produced is so utterly valueless as this, and so utterly devoid of all interest as "literature," the reader of this volume must judge for himself. I should be glad also if he were to institute a comparison between "the splendours of the vernacular literatures" of Germany, England, Spain, and even Italy and France, prior to the year 1000, and that of the Irish, for I am very much mistaken if in their early development of rhyme, alone, in their masterly treatment of sound, and in their absolutely unique and marvellous system of verse-forms, the Irish will not be found to have created for themselves a place alone and apart in the history of European literatures.