VIII.
The eighteenth century was notoriously an era of artificiality when the sentiment of nature seemed to have gone out of European literature. In the last twenty years of the century, however, came a reaction, which went to the opposite extreme, glorifying savage life, yearning for the primitive, treating law and civilisation as enemies of the human race. In 1762 Rousseau brought men back to "the origin of human institutions" and, amid much nonsense, voiced the consciousness of the malady of human civilisation. In Germany Goethe threw men's minds back to the robber chiefs of old days in "Götz von Berlichingen," and Schiller glorified the revolt against human law in "Die Räuber." The French Revolution, the English Romantic revival were other instances of the same tendency.
The Gaelic poets were mediaeval and reactionary, as we have shown. Brian alone seems to have been in contact with the world movement.
In the "Cuirt" the old man and the young women argue on different sides of the case, but both resemble one another in this point—that they appeal to nature, not to laws and usages and traditions. Contrast Brian in this with all the other Gaelic poets! When the latter wish to argue any case they appeal to tradition, precedent, written laws. The only citing of precedent in the "Cuirt" is a vague generalisation at the end of the third chapter.
The "love of nature" is often restricted to the meaning of "the love of natural scenery." This is of course absurd. Brian has the sentiment of nature in its broadest sense. You may ransack all the Gaelic poetry from the Siege of Limerick to the death of Eoghan Ruadh without finding a single other piece of genuine poetry picturing the beauty of natural scenery
