Selected Works on Irish Literature and History
9781613102299
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
When the friends of the late Edmund Leamy were considering ways of honouring his memory they agreed that one way should be to republish this little book of Irish fairy tales. They knew that nothing would have been more grateful to himself, and that, in a manner, it would be an act of justice to his remarkable gifts. It would introduce a characteristic specimen of Leamy’s work to a race of readers who have appeared since it was written and who ought to be in a mood more appreciative of such literature than the mood which prevailed in that day. For the book has long been out of print. These “Irish Fairy Tales” were written, and printed on Irish paper, and published through an Irish publisher––Leamy would not bring out a book in any other way––before the Celtic renaissance had arrived. This is one of the facts which make them interesting. Perhaps, as some would tell us, seventeen years ago was a benighted time; at any rate we must admit it was rather dark from an Irish literary, or even “Irish Ireland,” point of view. It was before the Gaelic movement, and before we had such things as “intellectuals” and the “economic man,” or even the Irish Literary Theatre. Leamy’s gentle and loyal soul could have taken no influence from the asperity of some of the intervening ferment, “Parliamentarian” though he was. Had the impulse to write this volume come to him in this later period he would only have drawn from the time the nourishment which the atmosphere of sympathy always brings to the artist. But the impulse came to him before this period, in an atmosphere which held little that could nourish the sentiment so abundant among us to-day. O’Curry’s and Dr. Joyce’s books were almost the only sources of Gaelic inspiration open to a writer who was not a professed student. Douglas Hyde, though always at work, had not yet brought the fruits of his researches to light; Miss Eleanor Hull had not collected into a handy volume the materials of “The Cuchullin Saga”; Kuno Meyer we did not know; Standish O’Grady, though he had published his “Heroic Period,” had not yet begun popularising the bardic tales in such volumes as “Finn and his Companions.” No one was reading anything about Ireland but political matter. I think one may fairly claim some respect from this later day for a writer who seventeen years ago, of his own motion, with scarce a word of encouragement save from his wife and a friend or two––perhaps only one friend––turned to our Gaelic past and strove to give to Irish children something which would implant in them a love for the beauty and dignity of their country’s traditions. The modest author would never have claimed for these little tales the interest which I think they deserve. He wrote them for children, for he loved children, and one can detect the presence of the child listener at nearly every line. He was not thinking of a literary audience; the child at his knee was enough. This is why we hear (occasionally) a certain naïve accent which will not, perhaps, please the contemporary critic; but (as there are many who again find pleasure in early Victorian furniture) it may please others; I confess it pleases me. And the absence of literary self-consciousness is itself pleasant; indeed, much of the charm of these stories is the charm of their unpremeditated art. But, though he did not write for the critics, Leamy was in spite of himself a man of letters. He was so genuinely an artist that he could not do the thing ill. Any one of these stories will prove his capacity: the first, for instance, about that princess on the “bare, brown, lonely moor” who was “as sweet and as fresh as an opening rosebud, and her voice was as musical as the whisper of a stream in the woods in the hot days of summer.”
