the Gaelic poet rejoiced iu preaching that the world was "but a mist," that all was vanity and emptiness in this life.[1]
The devotion to the Catholic Church became more passionately intense under the Penal Laws. One loves that for which one sacrifies oneself. The poets taught people that the sufferings of the Gaels were a punishment for their sins. They bade them trust in God and all would yet be well. Prayer and patience were the great remedies against every evil.
The joyous animalism of human nature would find vent. Hot-blooded youth broke out into that class of blackguardism which we accommodatingly term "wildness." This was regarded as a natural weakness of youth, to be paid for with later repentance. The poets took a kind of pride in the guise of penitence, in recounting the sins of their youth. Those sins are always the same—wine and women. They repent with tears in their eyes, but they wish everybody to understand what terrible fellows they were. In fact, the ascetic ideal, the contempt for the world and the flesh made nature mean to them sin and "wildness." It is important to grasp this point, for it helps one to understand how different was Brian's attitude. He was blind to much that the others saw, but one idea is clearly discernible in his work: that the too rigid suppression of human nature tends to produce vice and immorality.
- ↑ Much that I have said about Gaelic art and literature is equally true of mediaeval art and literature in general. This is another way of saying that the Renaissance hardly reached the Gaeldom. Just as our so-called "beautiful Celtic letters" were really Roman letters, the current script of early Christian monks adapted to Irish, so a great deal of our "Gaelicism" is simply a survival of mediævalism.
