CHAPTER XXXIV SUDDEN ARREST OF IRISH DEVELOPMENT

The semi-usurpation of Brian Boru, which broke through the old prescriptional usage (according to which the High-kings of Ireland had, for the preceding five hundred years, been elected only from amongst the northern or southern Ui Neill, that is, from the descendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages), produced no evil effects, but much good so long as Brian himself lived; yet his action was destined to have the worst possible influence upon the future of Ireland, an evil influence comparable only to that caused by the desertion of Tara four centuries and a half before. The High-kingship being thus thrown open, as it were, to any Irish chief sufficiently powerful to wrest it from the others, became an object of constant dispute and warfare, the O'Neills kings of Ulster, the O'Conors of Connacht, the O'Briens of Munster, and the princes of Leinster, all contended for it, so that from the death of Malachy, Brian Boru's successor, there was scarcely a single High-king who was not, as the Irish annalists call it, "a king with opposition."[1] Hence despite the immediate[Pg 453] revival of art and literature which followed the defeat of the Northmen, the country was in many ways politically weakened, the inherent defects of the clan system accentuated, and the land, already much exhausted by the Danish wars,[2] was left open to the invasion of the Normans.

It was in May, 1169, that the first force of these new invaders landed, and, aided by the incompetence of a particularly feeble High-king, they had so thoroughly established themselves in Ireland by the close of the century, that they succeeded in putting an end to the Irish High-kingship, under which Ireland had subsisted for over a thousand years. Then began that permanent war—very different, indeed, from what the Irish tribes waged among themselves—which, almost from its very commencement, thoroughly arrested Irish development, and disintegrated Irish life.

It is not too much to say that for three centuries after the Norman Conquest Ireland produced nothing in art, literature, or scholarship, even faintly comparable to what she had achieved before. With the Normans came collapse;

"Red ruin and the breaking up of laws,"

and all the horrors of chronic and remorseless warfare.

We must now examine the history of Irish art, as displayed in metal-work, buildings, and illuminated manuscripts.

That peculiar class of design which Irish artists developed so successfully in "the countless hosts of the illuminated books of the men of Erin," is not really of Irish origin at[Pg 454] all. It is not even Celtic. The late researches of M. Solomon Reinach and others into the genuine remains of the Celts of Gaul and the Continent have discovered in their ornamentation scarcely a trace at all of the so-called Irish patterns. They are in truth not Irish, but Eastern. They seem to have started from Byzantium, spread over Dalmatia and North Italy, and finally found their way into Ireland. The early forms of pre-Christian Irish art show no trace whatsoever of those peculiar interlaced patterns and convoluted figures which are usually associated with the name of Celtic design. The engraved patterns on the tumulus of New Grange, dating from probably about 800[3] years before the Christian era, and the similar scribings upon sepulchral chambers at Louchcrew, Telltown, and other places, do not show a particle of interlaced work, but consist for the most part of circles with rays, arrangements of concentric circles, patterns of double and triple spirals, and lozenges. Indeed, it is the spiral, in countless forms and applications, which seems to have been really indigenous to the earliest inhabitants of Ireland, and with it the interlaced and convoluted figures of non-Irish post-Christian art became blended, gradually driving it out. These in their turn perished, degraded and abased by admixture with Gothic forms introduced by the Normans, whose invasion soon put an end to the development of all art in Ireland save that of architecture.

The so-called Celtic design of Ireland, with its interlaced bands, its convolutions, its knots, its triquetras, is really a survival of what once, starting from the East, spread over a large portion of western and northern Europe, but which soon died out there overwhelmed by Gothic and other influences; whilst in Ireland, where it was applied with far truer artistic feeling and far finer elaboration than elsewhere, it has been preserved in countless works of stone,[Pg 455] bronze, and parchment. A scrutiny of early Scandinavian art and of the architectural styles of Italy known as the Latino-Barbaro and Italo-Bizantino, with portions of the art of other countries, have revealed traces of the so-called Celtic designs in places and under circumstances which prove that they cannot be—as used to be generally supposed—the work of exiled Irishmen. Nevertheless, there is a certain individuality in the working out of these designs when brought to perfection by Irish hands, which sufficiently distinguishes Irish art from that of other countries. For in Ireland the interlaced decoration was grafted on to the more archaic and pre-Christian style.

    "The peculiar spirals found on these bronzes of that [pre-Christian] time," says Miss Stokes,[4] "the trumpet pattern, the even more archaic single-line spirals, zigzags, lozenges, circles, dots, are all woven in with interlaced designs, with marvellous skill and sense of beauty and charm of varied surface, added to which is an unsurpassed feeling for colour where the style admits of colour, as in enamels and illumination. Besides all this, the interlacings, taken by themselves, gradually undergo a change in character under the hand of an Irish artist. They become more inextricable, more involved, more infinitely varied in their twistings and knottings, and more exquisitely precise and delicate in execution than they are ever seen to be on continental work, so far as my experience goes."

The original pre-Christian art of the Irish Celts, that known to Cuchulain and Conor mac Nessa and the heroes of the Red Branch, survives only upon a few bronzes and upon the stones of a few sepulchral mounds. The tracings upon the sepulchral mounds are rude—though we find in some instances evidences of designs deliberately worked out to cover a given surface—and they mostly consist of recognisable symbols of Sun and Fire worship. The bronze sword-sheaths of Lisnacroghera, which are magnificent specimens of early Irish art, are a development of these patterns, but bear no trace of that interlaced work which was introduced with Christianity. There are several other bronze ornaments, evidently pre-Christian,[Pg 456] which exhibit the same kind of designs, notably what appear to be two horns of a radiated crown exquisitely decorated by spiral lines in relief, and which, said Mr. Kemble, "for beauty of design and execution may challenge comparison with any specimen of cast bronze-work that it has ever been my fortune to see." Miss Stokes, however, has shown that these pieces were not cast, but repoussé, and consequently, she writes—

    "If not the finest pieces of casting ever seen, yet as specimens of design and workmanship they are perhaps unsurpassed. The surface is here overspread with no vague lawlessness, but the ornament is treated with fine reserve, and the design carried out with the precision and delicacy of a master's touch. The ornament on the cone flows round and upwards in lines gradual and harmonious as the curves in ocean surf, meeting and parting only to meet again in lovelier forms of flowing motion. In the centre of the circular plate below—just at the point or hollow whence all these lines flow round and upwards, at the very heart, as it might seem, of the whole work—a crimson drop of clear enamel may be seen."

These beautiful fragments are almost certainly pre-Christian, and may even have been worn by Conairé the Great or Conor mac Nessa. They represent a variety of design which stands midway between the stone engravings and the art of the early Christians. It is a remarkable fact, amply proven and universally acknowledged, that the bronze-work of the pre-Christian Irish was never surpassed by their post-Christian metal-work. Indeed, while the pagan Irish are proved to have attained great skill in the art of design, in working of metals, and especially in the art of enamelling by various processes, the specimens of the earliest Christian metal-work, such as St. Patrick's bell, are exceedingly rude and barbarous—possibly because the skilled pagan workmen did not turn their hands to such business, and the Christian converts had themselves to do the best they could.

Many of the monks, however, appear to have given themselves up to metal-work, and reached a very high pitch of[Pg 457] excellence in it, as may be seen at a glance by the inspection of such master works as the two-handed Ardagh chalice, the cross of Cong, and numerous shrines, cúmhdachs [coodachs], or book-cases, and croziers. The ornamental designs upon the later Christian metal-work reached their highest perfection in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the work of this period exhibits about forty different varieties of design, in which animal forms are only sparingly used, and in which there is no trace of foliate pattern. Indeed, these are not found in Irish metal-work before the period of decadence in the thirteenth century. Although the best specimens of Christian art in metal-work belong to the tenth and eleventh centuries, we are not to assume from this that the metal-work of the earlier Christian artists did not keep pace with the work of the early Christian scribes, who produced such magnificent specimens of penmanship and colour in the seventh and eighth centuries. They may have done so, but no relics of their work are left. According to Dr. Petrie, few, if any, of the more distinguished churches of Ireland were destitute of beautiful metal-work in the shape of costly shrines at the coming of the Norseman, as the frequent allusions in the Irish annals show; but scarcely one of these escaped their destructive raids, and hence the finest surviving specimens are of a much later date than the finest surviving manuscripts,[5] which were only destroyed whenever met with, but were not, like the costly metal-work, an object of eager and unremitting pursuit.

In sculpture the Irish never produced anything finer than their tall, shapely, richly but not over-richly ornamented[Pg 458] Celtic crosses. The Ogam-inscribed stones, of which over a couple of hundred remain, are perfectly plain and undecorative. Some of the later inscribed tombstones (of which some two hundred and fifty remain), contain, it is true, fine chisel-work, but the numerous high Celtic crosses, covered many of them with elaborate sculpture in relief, with undercutting, and ornamented with the divergent and interlaced spiral pattern, show the finest artistic instinct. Most of these beautiful works of art are later than the year 900, but hardly one is posterior to the Norman invasion, which soon put a stop to such artistic luxuries.

The Irish were not a nation of builders. Most of the early Irish houses, even at Tara, were, as we have seen, of wood. The ordinary dwelling-house was either a cylindrical hut of wicker-work with a cup-shaped roof, plastered with clay and thatched with reeds, or else a quadrilateral house built of logs or of clay. The so-called city of Royal Tara was, in fact, a vast enclosure, containing quite a number of different raths, and houses inside the raths. The buildings seem to have been constructed of the timbers of lofty trees planted side by side, probably carved into fantastic shapes upon the outside, while the inside walls were closely interwoven with slender rods, over which a putty or plaster of loam was smoothly spread, which, when even and dry, was painted in bright colours, chiefly red, yellow, and blue. The roofs were formed of smooth joists and cross-beams, and probably thatched with rods and rushes, much in the same manner as the houses of the peasantry to-day. The floors appear to have been of earth, carefully hardened and beaten down, and then covered with a coat of some kind of hard and shiny mortar. No doubt some very fine barbaric effects were realised in these buildings, some of which, as is evidenced by the description of Cormac's Teach Midhchuarta, must have been immense. There were as many as seven dúns, or raths, round Tara, each containing within it many houses, and each surrounded by a mound, or vallum, planted with a stockade[Pg 459] like a Maori pah.[6] The finest house of all, painted in the gayest colours, planted in the sunniest spot, and provided overhead with a balcony, was reserved for the ladies of the place, and was called the grianán [greeanawn], or sunny house.

Stone, however, was used in places, at a very early date, long before the first century, as may be seen from the stone forts of western and south-western Ireland, huge structures of which one of the best known is Dún-Angus, in the Isle of Arran, but there was no knowledge of mortar. Masonry was also used occasionally by the early monks in constructing their little clocháns, or beehive cells, and their oratories, with rounded roofs, built without a vestige of an arch, the whole surrounded by an uncemented stone wall, or cashel.

The Irish do not seem to have done much in stone-work until the Danish invasions forced them to construct the round towers in which to take shelter when the enemy was upon them, saving thus their jewels, books, and shrines. The Danes, who made rapid marches across the country, could not burn these towers nor throw them down, nor could they spend the time necessary to reduce them by famine, lest the country should be roused behind them, and their retreat to their ships cut off. The idea and form of the round tower the Irish almost certainly derived from the East. In Lord Dunraven's "Notes on Irish Architecture" the path of these buildings from Ravenna across Europe and into Ireland is distinctly shown; but while only about a score of examples survive in the rest of Europe, Ireland alone possesses a hundred and eighteen of these curious structures. There are three well-marked styles of towers. The doors and windows of the earlier ones are primitive and horizontal, but in the later ones the rude entablature of the earlier towers has given way[Pg 460] to the decorated Romanesque arch, and the beauty and number of the arched windows is greatly increased.

The transition from the horizontal to the round-arched style is shown in the Church of Iniscaltra, erected two years after the battle of Clontarf, and many years before the true Romanesque appeared in England. From that time till the coming of the Normans, Irish ecclesiastical architecture—the only kind practised, for the Irish did not live in or build castles—progressed enormously, and several fine specimens belonging to the twelfth century still survive.

    "The remains," writes Miss Stokes, "of a great number of monuments belonging to the period between the fifth and twelfth centuries of the Christian era, have survived untouched by the hand either of the restorer or of the destroyer, and in them, when arranged in consecutive series, we can trace the development from an early and rude beginning to a very beautiful result, and watch the dovetailing, as it were, of one style into another, till an Irish form of Romanesque architecture grew into perfection. The form of the Irish Church points to an original type which has almost disappeared elsewhere—that of the Shrine or Ark, not of the Basilica."

The Norman invasion, however, put a complete stop to the natural development of Irish Romanesque, and changed the building of churches into that of castles, in which the Irish only copied, so far as they built at all, the pattern of the invader.

The art, however, in which the Irish earliest excelled, and in which they have really no rivals in Europe, was in that of writing and illuminating manuscripts. The most recent authority on the subject, Johan Adolf Brunn in his "Inquiry into the Art of Illuminated MSS. of the Middle Ages," acknowledges that the fame of the Celtic school, "dating from the darker centuries of the Middle Ages, excels that of any of its rivals." Westwood, the great British authority, declares that were it not for Irishmen these islands would contain no primitive works of art worth mentioning, and asserts that the Book of Kells is "unquestionably the most[Pg 461] elaborately executed manuscript of so early a date, now in existence." Even Giraldus Cambrensis, who came in with the early Normans, was struck dumb with admiration of the exquisite book shown him at Kildare, which of all the miracles with which Kildare was credited was to him the greatest. Here, he writes, "you may see the visage of majesty divinely impressed, on one side the mystic forms of the evangelists having now six, now four, now two wings, on one side the eagle, on another the calf, on one side the face of a man, on the other of a lion, and an almost infinite quantity of other figures.... A careless glance at the whole," he goes on to say, "reveals no particular excellence, but if, looking closer at it, the spectator examined the work in detail he would see how extraordinarily subtle and delicate were the knots and lines, how bright and fresh the colours remained, how interlaced and bound together was the whole, so that we would feel inclined to believe that it could hardly be a human composition but the works of angels. In fact," writes Cambrensis, "the oftener and closer I inspect it,[7] the more certain I am to be struck with something new, with something ever more and more wonderful." Indeed, the story ran, that such figures and such colouring were due to no mere mortal invention, but that an[Pg 462] angel had appeared to the scribe in his sleep and taught him how to make these wondrous drawings, "and thus," adds Cambrensis, "through the revelation of the angel, the prayer of Brigit, and the imitation of the scribe, that book was written."

Now Giraldus Cambrensis, as Johan Adolf Brunn observes, "knew to perfection the master-achievements of the non-Celtic schools of art of contemporary date," and "although referring to a particular work of especial merit," says Brunn, "the testimony of this medi?val writer may well be placed at the head of an inquiry into the art in general of the Celtic illuminated manuscripts, emphasising as it does the salient characteristics of the style followed by this distinguished school of illumination, its minute and delicate drawing, its brilliancy of colouring, and, above all, that amazing amount of devoted and patient labour, which underlies its intricate composition, and creates the despair of any one who tries to copy them."

Between six and seven centuries later Westwood expresses himself in terms not unlike those of Cambrensis, of the now scanty remains of ancient Irish illumination—

    "Especially deserving of notice," he writes, "is the extreme delicacy and wonderful precision, united with an extraordinary minuteness of detail with which many of these ancient manuscripts were ornamented. I have examined with a magnifying glass the pages of the Gospel of Lindisfarne, and the Book of Kells, for hours together, without ever detecting a false line or an irregular interlacement; and when it is considered that many of these details consist of spiral lines, and are so minute as to be impossible to have been executed without a pair of compasses, it really seems a problem not only with what eyes but also with what instruments they could have been executed.... I counted in a small space, measuring scarcely three quarters of an inch by less than half an inch in width, in the Book of Armagh, not fewer than one hundred and fifty-eight interlacements of a slender ribbon pattern formed in white lines edged with black ones upon a black ground."[8]

The Book of Armagh, as we have seen, was written in 807, or perhaps, as the "Four Masters" antedate at this period, in 812,[Pg 463] while the Book of Kells is ascribed, according to the best judges, to the close of the seventh century.

The seventh and eight centuries, before the island was disturbed by the Danes, were the most flourishing period of the Irish illuminator and scribe. But their schools continued to turn out very fine work as late as the twelfth century, and Gilbert, in his "Facsimiles of the National Manuscripts of Ireland," states that there are perhaps no finer specimens of minute old writing extant than those in the margins and interlineations of a copy of the Gospels written by Maelbrigte Ua Maelruanaigh [Mulroony], in Armagh, in 1138, that is, seventeen years after that city had for the last time been burnt and plundered by the Danes.

Like all the other arts of civilised life, that of the illuminator and decorative scribe was brought to a standstill by the Norman warriors, nor do the Irish appear after this period to have produced a single page worth the reproduction of the artistic pal?ographer. The reason of this, no doubt, was that the Irish artist in former days could—no matter how septs fell out or warring tribes harried one another—count upon the sympathy of his fellow countrymen even when they were hostile. Under the new conditions caused by the Norman settlements in each of the four provinces, he could count on nothing, not even on his own life. All confidence was shaken, all peace of mind was gone, the very name of so-called government produced a universal terror, and Ireland became, to use a graphic expression of the Four Masters, a "trembling sod." "No words," writes Mrs. Sophie Bryant, with perfect truth, "could describe that arrest of development so eloquently or so lucidly as the facts of Irish art-history." "Since then" [i.e., since the Norman invasion], writes Miss Stokes, one of the highest living authorities upon this subject, "the native character of Ireland has best found expression in her music. No work of purely Celtic art, whether in illumination of the sacred writings,[Pg 464] or in gold, or bronze, or stone, was wrought by Irish hands after that century and as we shall now see this decay of Irish art is reflected in the falling off" of Irish literature, which continued languishing until the great revival which took place about the year 1600.
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[1] After Malachy reigned Donough O'Brien, son of Brian Boru; after him Diarmuid of Leinster, of the race of Cáthaoir Mór; after him two other O'Briens, then an O'Lochlainn king of Ulster, then O'Conor of Connacht, then another O'Lochlainn, and then another O'Conor, King Roderick, in whose time the Normans landed.

[2] Although the backbone of the Danish power was broken at Clontarf, desultory warfare with them did not cease for long after. Even so late as 1021 they were able to penetrate into the city of Armagh for the seventeenth time during two hundred years, and burnt the whole city to the ground, with its churches and books. Within two years of the battle of Clontarf they burned Glendalough and Clonard.

[3] This is the minimum date assigned them by Mr. George Coffey in his admirable monograph upon the subject.

[4] "Six Months in the Apennines," Introductory Letter.

[5] The earliest surviving book-shrine, that of Molaise's Gospels, was made between the year 1001 and 1025; the earliest dated crozier is 967; the earliest bell-shrine may be assigned to 954. The Cross of Cong dates from about 1123. That the earlier Christian craftsmen must have made good work, if only it had survived, may be inferred from the fine silver chalice of Kremsmünster, in Lower Austria, dating from between the years 757 and 781.

[6] This was the case with most of those earthen circumvallations, called in different parts of Ireland raths and lisses, and in Hibernian English forts or forths. The houses were inside the embankment, which was in most cases protected by a wall of stakes planted round its summit.

[7] The whole passage is worth transcribing in the original. "Inter numerosa Kildari? miracula nihil mihi miraculosius occurrit quam liber ille mirandus, tempore Virginis [he means St. Brigit] ut aiunt, angelo dictante, consumptus. Hic Majestatis vultum videas divinitus impressum, hinc mysticas Evangelistarum formas, nunc senas, nunc quaternas, nunc binas alas habentes: hinc aquilam, inde vitulum, hinc hominis faciem, inde leonis, aliasque figuras fere infinitas. Quas si superficialiter et usuali more minus acute conspexeris, litura potius videbitur quam ligatura, nec ullam prorsus attendes subtilitatem. Sin autem ad perspicacius intuendum oculorum aciem invitaveris, et longe penitius ad artis arcana et transpenetraveris, tam delicatas et subtiles tam arctas et artitas, tam nodosas et vinculatim colligatas, tam que recentibus adhuc coloribus illustratas, notare poteris intricaturas, ut veré h?c omnia potius angelica quam humana diligentia jam asseveraveris esse composita. H?c equidem quanto frequentius et diligentius intueor semper quasi novis obstupeo semper magis ac magis admiranda conspicio." Master of the Rolls series, vol. v., p. 123.

[8] "The Miniatures and Ornaments of Anglo-Saxon and Irish MSS."