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 ............