The Irish show their Aryan descent by the same characteristics as
the Fairy race, for they also love everything that is artistic—the
fascinations of life, beauty of form, music, poetry, song, splendour,
and noble pleasures. Their kings in ancient times were elected for
their personal beauty as much as for their chivalrous qualities. No
man with a blemish or a deformity was allowed to reign. Then, their
appreciation of intellect proved the value they set on the spiritual
and ideal above the material and the brutal. The poet ranked next
to the princes of the land. His person was sacred in battle; he was
endowed with an estate, so that his soul might be free from sordid
cares; and his robe of many colours, and the golden circlet on his brow
at the festivals, showed his claim and right to rank next to royalty,
and to sit at the right hand of the king. Poetry, learning, music,
oratory, heroism, and splendour of achievement—these were the true
objects of homage and admiration amongst the ancient Irish.
There was nothing brutal in their ideal of life; no hideous images or
revolting cruelties; and the beautiful and graceful Sidhe race, with
their plaintive music and soft melancholy, and aspirations for a lost
heaven, is the expression in a graceful and beautiful symbol of the
instinctive tendencies of the Irish nature to all that is most divine
in human intellect, and soft and tender in human emotion.
Ireland is a land of mists and mystic shadows; of cloud-wraiths
on the purple mountains; of weird silences in the lonely hills,
and fitful skies of deepest gloom alternating with gorgeous sunset
splendours. All this fantastic caprice of an ever-varying atmosphere
stirs the imagination, and makes the Irish people strangely sensitive
to spiritual influences. They see visions and dream dreams, and are
haunted at all times by an ever-present sense of the supernatural.
One can see by the form of the Irish head—a slender oval, prominent
at the brows and high in the region of veneration, so different
from the globular Teutonic head—that the people are enthusiasts,
religious, fanatical; with the instincts of poetry, music, oratory,
and superstition far stronger in them than the logical and reasoning
faculties. They are made for worshippers, poets, artists, musicians,
orators; to move the world by passion, not by logic. Scepticism will
never take root in Ireland; infidelity is impossible to the people. To
believe fanatically, trust implicitly, hope infinitely, and perhaps
to revenge implacably—these are the unchanging and ineradicable
characteristics of Irish nature, of Celtic nature, we may say; for it
has been the same throughout all history and all ages. And it is these
passionate qualities that make the Celt the great motive force of the
world, ever striving against limitations towards some vision of ideal
splendour; the restless centrifugal force of life, as opposed to the
centripetal, which is ever seeking a calm quiescent rest within its
appointed sphere.
The very tendency to superstition, so marked in Irish nature, arises
from an instinctive dislike to the narrow limitations of common sense.
It is characterized by a passionate yearning towards the vague, the
mystic, the invisible, and the boundless infinite of the realms of
imagination. Therefore the _Daine-Sidhe_, the people of the fairy
mansions, have an irresistible attraction for the Irish heart. Like
them, the Irish love youth, beauty, splendour, lavish generosity,
music and song, the feast and the dance. The mirth and the reckless
gaiety of the national temperament finds its true exponent in the mad
pranks of the _Phouka_ and the _Leprehaun_, the merry spirits that
haunt the dells and glens, and look out at the wayfarer from under the
dock-leaf with their glittering eyes. The inspiration that rises to
poetry under the influence of excitement is expressed by the belief in
the _Leanan-Sidhe_, who gives power to song; while the deep pathos of
Irish nature finds its fullest representation in the tender, plaintive,
spiritual music of the wail and lamentation of the _Ban-Sidhe_.