Douglas Hyde (1860-1949), known also as An Craoibhín Aoibhinn
(the Sweet Little Branch or Pleasant Little Branch), was an
important scholar of the Irish language who played a major
part in the Irish Cultural Revival.
His popular Love Songs of Connacht (1893) published
Irish poems that he had collected in the West, with verse and
prose translations into English. Haines misses Stephen's talk
in the library because he has gone to buy a copy of Hyde's
book. To add injury to insult, the novel marks Stephen's
failure (so far) to distinguish himself as a poet by having
him shape sounds—"mouth to her mouth's kiss"—that
clearly derive from one of Hyde's lyrics.
In Scylla and Charybdis Mr. Best announces that "Haines is gone." The Englishman
had expressed interest in
hearing Stephen's talk on Shakespeare, but Best's mentions of
Irish mythology and poetry have sent him off in a different
direction: "He's quite enthusiastic, don't you know,
about Hyde's Lovesongs of Connacht. I
couldn't bring him in to hear the discussion. He's gone to
Gill's to buy it." John Eglinton comments
sardonically on this quest for Irish authenticity: "The
peatsmoke is going to his head." But George Russell voices the
ambitions of the Revival: "— People do not know
how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of
Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions
in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a
peasant's heart on the hillside." In Wandering Rocks
we encounter Haines sitting at the DBC with "his
newbought book."
The repetitive motif at the heart of Stephen's poetic
manipulations of sound in Proteus—"mouth to
her mouth's kiss. . . . Mouth to her kiss. No. Must
be two of em. Glue em well. Mouth to her mouth's
kiss. / His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air:
mouth to her womb. Oomb, allwombing tomb"—comes from
the last stanza of "My Grief on the Sea," a poem in Hyde's Love
Songs:
And my love came behind me—
He came from the South;
His breast to my bosom,
His mouth to my mouth.
Stephen has ambitions to transform the simple verses into
something grandiose and gothic—"He comes, pale vampire, through storm his
eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her
mouth's kiss"—but he has not yet achieved
even that dubious transformation of a minor lyric.
Cyclops has fun with the kind of literary recovery
projects that Hyde undertook, paying serious scholarly
attention to the canine verse of Garryowen: "Our
greatest living phonetic expert (wild horses shall not drag
it from us!) has left no stone unturned in his
efforts to delucidate and compare the verse recited and has
found it bears a striking resemblance (the italics
are ours) to the ranns of ancient Celtic bards. We
are not speaking so much of those delightful lovesongs with
which the writer who conceals his identity under the
graceful pseudonym of the Little Sweet Branch has
familiarised the bookloving world but rather (as a
contributor D. O. C. points out in an interesting
communication published by an evening contemporary) of the
harsher and more personal note which is found in the satirical
effusions of the famous Raftery and of Donal MacConsidine to
say nothing of a more modern lyrist at present very much in
the public eye."
Hyde grew up in the west, in Sligo and Roscommon, and learned
Irish from the quarter of the population who still spoke it in
the countryside in those counties. Passionately dedicated to
preventing the extinction of the native language and culture,
he contributed to Yeats’s Fairy
and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888),
published his own Besides the Fire: A Collection of Irish
Gaelic Folk Stories in 1890, and, after the Love
Songs in 1893, also published Religious Songs of
Connacht in 1906, as well as scholarly works like
The Story of Early Gaelic Literature (1895) and the Literary
History of Ireland (1899). He collaborated with Yeats
and others in the work of the Literary Theatre, which became
the Abbey Theatre, and he exerted immense cultural influence
through the Gaelic League until that group was infiltrated by
Sinn Féin and became an
essentially political organization. In 1938 he became the
first President of the new Irish republic.
Scylla and Charybdis reproduces nearly verbatim one
of Hyde's quatrains:
Bound thee forth my Booklet quick.
To greet the Polished Public.
Writ—I ween't was not my Wish—
In lean unLovely English.
The six-stanza poem that begins with these lines concludes
Hyde's The Story of Early Gaelic Literature. That
Stephen knows part of it by heart (characteristically, he
makes the Public "callous") suggests that he has some
considerable regard for Hyde's writings.
