saw the sons of Usna headless, and Illann the Fair headless too, but
Buimne the Ruthless Red with his head upon his shoulders, smiling a grim
smile--when she saw over Naois, her beloved, a cloud of blood--or that,
alas, too bitter-true a foreseeing, when in the Craebh Derg, the House
of the Red Branch, she cried to her lover and his two brothers that
death was at the door and "grievous to me is the deed O darling
friends--and till the world's end Emain will not be better for a single
night than it is to-night." Or, again, of that pathetic, simultaneous
death-vision of Baile the Sweet-Spoken and Aillinn, he in the north, she
in the south, so that each out of a grief unbearable straightway died,
as told in one of the oldest as well as loveliest of ancient Gaelic
tales, the _Scel Baili Binnberlaig_.
There is something strangely beautiful in most of these "second-sight"
stories of Columba. The faculty itself is so apt to the spiritual law
that one wonders why it is so set apart in doubt. It would, I think, be
far stranger if there were no such faculty.
That I believe, it were needless to say, were it not that these words
may be read by many to whom this quickened inward vision is a
superstition, or a fantastic glorification of insight. I believe; not
only because there is nothing too strange for the soul, whose vision
surely I will not deny, while I accept what is lesser, the mind's
prescience, and, what is least, the testimony of the eyes. That I have
cause to believe is perhaps too personal a statement, and is of little
account; but in that interior wisdom, which is no longer the flicker of
one little green leaf but the light and sound of a forest, of which the
leaf is a part, I know that to be true, which I should as soon doubt as
that the tide returns or that the sap rises or that dawn is a ceaseless
flashing light beneath the circuit of the stars. Spiritual logic demands
it.
It would ill become me to do otherwise. I would as little, however, deny
that this inward vision is sometimes imperfect and untrustworthy, as I
would assert that it is infallible. There is no common face of good or
evil; and in like fashion the aspect of this so-called mystery is
variable as the lives of those in whom it dwells. With some it is a
prescience, more akin to instinct than to reason, and obtains only among
the lesser possibilities, as when one beholds another where in the body
none is; or a scene not possible, there, in that place; or a face, a
meeting of shadows, a disclosure of hazard or accident, a coming into
view of happenings not yet fulfilled. With some it is simply a larger
sight, more wide, more deep; not habitual, because there is none of us
who is not subject to the law of the body; and sudden, because all tense
vision is a passion of the moment. It is as the lightning, whose
sustenance is sure for all that it has a second's life. With a few it is
a more constant companion, a dweller by the morning thought, by the
noon reverie, by the evening dream. It lies upon the pillow for some:
to some it as though the wind disclosed pathways of the air; a swaying
branch, a dazzle on the wave, the quick recognition in unfamiliar eyes,
is, for others, sufficient signal. Not that these accidents of the
manner need concern us much. We have the faculty, or we do not have it.
Nor must we forget that it can be the portion of the ignoble as well as
of those whose souls are clear. When it is in truth a spiritual vision,
then we are in company of what is the essential life, that which we call
divine.
It was this that Columba had, this serene perspicuity. That it was a
conscious possession we know from his own words, for he gave this answer
to one who marvelled: "Heaven has granted to some to see on occasion in
their mind, clearly and surely, the whole of earth and sea and sky."
It is not unlikely that in the seventy years which elapsed between
Colum's death and the writing of that lovely classic of the Church,
Adamnan's _Vita St. Columbae_, some stories grew around the saint's
memory which were rather the tribute of childlike reverence and love
than the actual experiences of the holy man himself. What then? A field
in May is not the less a daughter of Spring, because the
cowslip-wreaths found there may have been brought from little wayward
garths by children who wove them lovingly as they came.
Many of these strange records are mere coincidences; others reveal so
happy a surety in the simple faith of the teller that we need only
smile, and with no more resentment than at a child who runs to say he
has found stars in a wayside pool. Others are rather the keen insight of
a ceaseless observation than the seeing of an inward sense. But, and
perhaps oftener, they are not inherently incredible. I do not think our
forebears did ill to give haven to these little ones of faith, rather
than to despise, or to drive them away.
I have already spoken of Columba as another St. Francis, because of his
tenderness for creatures. I recall now the lovely legend (for I do not
think Colum himself attributed "second-sight" to an animal) which tells
how the old white pony which daily brought the milk from the cow-shed to
the monastery came and put its head in the lap of the aged and feeble
abbot, thus mutely to bid farewell. Let Adamnan tell it: "This creature
then coming up to the saint, and knowing that his master would soon
depart from him, and that he would see his face no more, began to utter
plaintive moans, and, as if a man, to shed tears in abundance into the
saint's lap, and so to weep, frothing greatly. Which when the attendant
saw, he began to drive away that weeping mourner. But the saint forbade
him, saying, 'Let him alone? As he loves me so, let him alone, that into
this my bosom he may pour out the tears of his most bitter lamentation.
Behold, thou, a man, that hast a soul, yet in no way hast knowledge of
my end save what I have myself shown thee; but to this brute animal the
Master Himself hath revealed that his master is about to go away from
him.' And so saying, he blessed his sorrowing servant the horse."
If there be any to whom the aged Colum comforting the grief of his old
white pony is a matter of disdain or derision, I would not have his soul
in exchange for the dumb sorrow of that creature. One would fare further
with that sorrow, though soulless, than with the soul that could not
understand that sorrow.
If one were to quote from Adamnan's three Books of the Prophecies,
Miracles, and Visions of Columba, there would be another book. Amid much
that is childlike, and a little that is childish, what store of
spiritual beauty and living symbol in these three books--the Book of
Prophetic Revelations, the Book of Miracles of Power, the Book of
Angelic Visitations. But there, as elsewhere, one must bear in
remembrance that, in spiritual sight, there is symbolic vision as well
as actual vision. When Colum saw his friend Columbanus (who, unknown to
any on Iona, had set out in his frail coracle from the Isle of Rathlin)
tossed in the surges of Corryvrechan; or when, nigh Glen Urquhart, he
hurried forward to minister to an old dying Pict "who had lived well by
the light of nature," and whose house, condition, and end had been
suddenly revealed to him: then we have actual vision. When Aithne, his
mother, dreamed that an angel showed her a garment of so surpassing a
loveliness that it was as though woven of flowers and rainbows, and then
threw it on high, till its folds expanded and covered every mountain-top
from the brows of Connaught to the feet of the Danish sea, and so
revealed to her what manner of son she bore within her womb; or when, in
the hour of Colum's death, the aged son of Tailchan beheld the whole
expanse of air flooded with the blaze of angels' wings, which trembled
with their songs: then we have symbolic vision. And sometimes we have
that which partakes of each, as when (as Adamnan tells us in his third
book) Colum saw angels standing upon the rocks on the opposite side of
the Sound which divides Iona from the Ross of Mull, calling to his soul
to cross to them, yet, as they assembled and beckoned, mysteriously and
suddenly restrained, for his hour was not come.
And in all actual vision there is gradation; from what is so common,
premonition, to what is not common, prescience, and to what is rare,
revelation. Thus when the labourers on Iona looked up from the fields
and saw the aged abbot whom they so loved, borne in a wagon to give them
benediction at seed-sowing, many among them knew that they would not see
Colum again, and Colum knew it, and so shared that premonition. And
when, many years before, he and the abbot Comgell, returning from a
futile conference of the kings Aedh and Aidan, rested by a spring,
concerning which Colum said that the day would come when it would be
filled with human blood, "because my people, the Hy-Neill, and the
Pictish folk, thy relations according to the flesh, will wage war by
this fortress of Cethirn close by," Comgell learned, through Colum's
foreknowledge, of what did in truth come to pass. Again, when Colum
bade a brother go three days thence to the sea-shore on the west side of
Iona, and lie in readiness to help "a certain guest, a crane to wit,
beaten by the winds during long and circuitous and aerial flights, which
will arrive after the ninth hour of the day, very weary and sore
distressed," and bade him to lift it and tend it lovingly for three days
and three nights till it should have strength to return to "its former
sweet home," and to do this out of love and courtesy because "it comes
from our fatherland"--and when all happens and is done as the saint
foretold and commanded, then we have revelation, the vision that is
absolute, the knowledge that is the atmosphere of the inevitable. It
would take a book indeed to tell all the stories of Columba's visionary
and prophetic powers. That I write at this length concerning him,
indeed, is because he is himself Iona. Columba is Christian Iona, as
much as Iona is Icolmkill. I have often wondered (because of a passage
in Adamnan) if the island be not indeed named after him, the Dove: for
as Adamnan says incidentally, the name Columba is identical with the
Hebrew name Jonah, also signifying a Dove, and by the Hebrews pronounced
Iona.
It is enough now to recall that this man, so often erring but so human
always, in whose life we see the soul of Iona as in a glass, is become
the archetype of his race, as Iona is the microcosm of the Gaelic world.
That he came into this life heralded by dreams and visions, that from
his youth onward to old age he knew every mystery of dream and vision,
and that before and after his death his soul was revealed to others
through dreams and visions, is but an added hieratic grace: yet we do
well to recall often how these dreams before and these visions after
were angelical, and nobly beautiful: how there was left of him, and to
his little company, and to us for remembrance, that last signal vision
of a blaze of angelic wings, more intolerable than the sun at noon, the
tempestuous multitude trembling with the storm of song.
Columba and Oran ... these are the two great names in Iona. Love and
Faith have made one immortal; the other lives also, clothed in legend. I
am afraid there is not much definite basis for the popular Iona legend
of Oran. It is now the wont of guides and others to speak of the Reilig
Odhrain, Oran's burial-place, as that of Columba's friend (and victim),
but it seems likelier that the Oran who lies here is he who is spoken
of in the _Annals of the Four Masters_ as having died in the year 548,
that is fifteen years before Colum came to the island. This, however,
might well be a mistake: what is more convincing is that Adamnan never
mentions the episode, nor even the name of Oran, nor is there mention of
him in that book of Colum's intimate friend and successor, Baithene,
which Adamnan practically incorporated. On the other hand, the Oran
legend is certainly very old. The best modern rendering we have of it is
that of Mr. Whitley Stokes in his _Three Middle-Irish Homilies_, and
readers of Dr. Skene's valuable _Celtic Scotland_ recollect the
translation there redacted. The episode occurs first in an ancient Irish
life of St. Columba. The legend, which has crystallised into a popular
saying, "Uir, uir, air suil Odhrain! mu'n labhair e tuille
comhraidh"--"Earth, earth on Oran's eyes, lest he further blab"--avers
that three days after the monk Oran or Odran was entombed alive (some
say in the earth, some in a cavity), Colum opened the grave, to look
once more on the face of the dead brother, when to the amazed fear of
the monks and the bitter anger of the abbot himself, Oran opened his
eyes and exclaimed, "There is no such great wonder in death, nor is Hell
what it has been described." (Ifrinn, or Ifurin--the word used--is the
Gaelic Hell, the Land of Eternal Cold.) At this, Colum straightway cried
the now famous Gaelic words, and then covered up poor Oran again lest he
should blab further of that uncertain world whither he was supposed to
have gone. In the version given by Mr. Whitley Stokes there is no
mention of Odran's grave having been uncovered after his entombment. But
what is strangely suggestive is that both in the oral legend and in that
early monkish chronicle alluded to, Columba is represented as either
suggesting or accepting immolation of a living victim as a sacrifice to
consecrate the church he intended to build.
One story is that he received a divine intimation to the effect that a
monk of his company must be buried alive, and that Odran offered
himself. In the earliest known rendering "Colum Cille said to his
people: 'It is well for us that our roots should go underground here';
and he said to them, 'It is permitted to you that some one of you go
under the earth of this island to consecrate it.' Odran rose up readily,
and thus he said: 'If thou wouldst accept me,' he said, 'I am ready for
that.' ... Odran then went to heaven. Colum Cille then founded the
Church of Hii."
It would be a dark stain on Columba if this legend were true. But apart
from the fact that Adamnan does not speak of it or of Oran, the
probabilities are against its truth. On the other hand, it is, perhaps,
quite as improbable that there was no basis for the legend. I imagine
the likelier basis to be that a druid suffered death in this fashion
under that earlier Odran of whom there is mention in the _Annals of the
Four Masters_: possibly, that Odran himself was the martyr, and the
Ard-Druid the person who had "the divine intimation." Again, before it
be attributed to Columba, one would have to find if there is record of
such an act having been performed among the Irish of that day. We have
no record of it. It is not improbable that the whole legend is a
symbolical survival, an ancient teaching of some elementary mystery
through some real or apparent sacrificial rite.
Among the people of Iona to-day there is a very confused idea about St.
Oran. To some he is a saint: to others an evil-doer: some think he was a
martyr, some that he was punished for a lapse from virtue. Some swear by
his grave, as though it were almost as sacred as the Black Stone of
Iona: to others, perhaps most, his is now but an idle name.
By the Black Stone of Iona! One may hear that in Icolmkill or anywhere
in the west. It used to be the most binding oath in the Highlands, and
even now is held as an indisputable warrant of truth. In Iona itself,
strangely enough, one would be much more likely to hear a statement
affirmed "by St. Martin's Cross." On this stone--the old Druidic Stone
of Destiny, sacred among the Gael before Christ was born--Columba
crowned Aidan King of Argyll. Later, the stone was taken to
Dunstaffnage, where the Lords of the Isles were made princes: thence to
Scone, where the last of the Celtic Kings of Scotland was crowned on it.
It now lies in Westminster Abbey, a part of the Coronation Chair, and
since Edward I. every British monarch has been crowned upon it. If ever
the Stone of Destiny be moved again, that writing on the wall will be
the signature of a falling dynasty; but perhaps, like Iona in the island
saying, this can be left to the Gaelic equivalent of Nevermas, "gus am
bi MacCailein na' righ," "till Argyll be a king."
In my childhood I well recall meeting in Iona an old man who had come
from the glens of Antrim, to me memorable because he was the last
Gaelic minstrel of the old kind I have seen. "It was a poor land,
Antrim," he said, "with no Gaelic, a bitter lot o' protestantry, an'
little music."
I remember, too, his adding in effect:
"It is in the west you should be if you want music, an' men and women
without coldness or the hard mouth. In Donegal an' Mayo an' all down
Connemara-way to the cliffs of Moher you'll hear the wind an' the voices
o' the Shee with never a man to curse the one or the other." I asked him
why he had come to Iona. It was to see the isle of Colum, he said, "St.
Bridget's brother, God bless the pair av' thim." He was on his way to
Oban, thence to go to a far place in the Athole country, where his
daughter had married a factor who had returned to his own land from the
Irish west, and was the more dear to the old man because his only living
blood-kin, and because she had called her little girl by the name of the
old harper's long-lost love, "my love an' my wife."
The last harper, though he had not his harp with him. He had come from
Drogheda in a cattle-boat to Islay (whence he had sailed in a
fishing-smack to Iona), and his friend the mate had promised to leave
the harp and his other belongings at Oban in safe keeping. He had with
him, however, a small instrument that he called his little clar. It was
something between a guitar and a cithern, suggestive of a primitive
violin, and he played on it sometimes with his fingers, sometimes with a
short bit of wood like a child's tipcat; and, he said, could make good
music with a hazel-wand or "the dry straight rod of a quicken when
that's to be had." He said this quaint instrument had come down to him
through fifty-one generations: literally, "eleven and twice twenty
_sheanairean_ (grandfathers, or elders or forebears)," of whom he could
at any moment give the pedigree of _ceithir deug air 'fhichead_, "four
and ten upon twenty"--that is, to translate the Gaelic method of
enumeration, "thirty-four."
This was at the house of a minister then lodging in the island, and it
was he who hosted the old harper. He told me, later, that he had no
doubt this was the old-world cruit, the Welsh _crwth_ of to-day, and the
once colloquial Lowland "crowther," akin to the Roman _canora cythara_,
the "forebear" of the modern Spanish guitar. To this day, I may add,
Highlanders (at least in the west) call the guitar the
_Cruit-Spanteach_. There seems to have been four kinds of "harp" in the
old days: the clar or clarsach, the kairneen (ceirnine), the
kreemtheencrooth (cream-thine-cruit), and the cionar cruit. The clarsach
was the harp proper; that is, the small Celtic harp. The ceirnine was
the smaller hand-harp. The "creamthine cruit" had six strings, and was
probably used chiefly at festivals, possibly for a strong sonance to
accentuate chants; while the cionar cruit had ten strings, and was
played either by a bow or with a wooden or other instrument. It must
have been a cionar-cruit, ancient or a rude later-day imitation, that
the old harper had.
Poor old man, I fear he never played on his harp again; for I learned
later that he had found his Athole haven broken up, and his daughter and
her husband about to emigrate to Canada, so that he went with them, and
died on the way--perhaps as much from the mountain-longing and
home-sickness as from any more tangible ill.
I have a double memento of him that I value. In Islay he had bought or
been given a little book of Gaelic songs (the Scoto-Gaelic must have
puzzled him sorely, poor old _eirionnach_), and this he left behind him,
and my minister friend gave it to me, with much of the above noted down
on its end-pages. The little book had been printed early in the century,
and was called _Ceilleirean Binn nan Creagan Aosda_, literally
"Melodious Little Warblings from the Aged Rocks"; and it has always been
dear to me because of one lovely phrase in it about birds, where the
unknown Gaelic singer calls them "clann bheag' nam preas," the small
clan of the bushes, equivalent in English to "the children of the
bushes." This occurs in a lovely verse--
"Mu'n cuairt do bhruachaibh ard mo glinn,
Biodh luba gheuga 's orra blath,
's clann bheag' nam preas a' tabhairst seinn
Do chreagaibh aosd oran graidh."
("Along the lofty sides of my glen let there be bending boughs clad in
blossom, and the children of the bushes making the aged rocks re-echo
their songs of love")--truly a characteristic Gaelic wish,
characteristically expressed.
And though this that I am about to say did not happen on Iona, I may
tell it here, for it was there and from an islander I heard it, an old
man herding among the troubled rocky pastures of Sguir Mor and Cnoc na
Fhiona, in the south of that western part called Sliav Starr--one
translation of which might be Wuthering Heights, for the word can be
rendered wind-blustery or wind-noisy; though I fancy that _starr_ is, on
Iona, commonly taken to mean a strong coarse grass. (Fhiona here I take
to be not the genitive of a name, nor that of "wine," but a mis-spelling
of _fionna_, grain.)
When he was a boy he was in the island of Barra, he said, and he had a
foster-brother called Iain Macneil. Iain was born with music in his
mind, for though he was ever a poor creature as a man, having as a child
eaten of the bird's heart, he could hear a power o' wonder in the
wind.[4] He had never come to any good in a worldly sense, my old
herdsman Micheil said; but it was not from want of cleverness only, but
because "he had enough with his music." "Poor man, he failed in
everything he did but that--and, sure, that was not against him, for _is
ann air an traghadh a rugadh e_--wasn't he born when the tide was
ebbing?" Besides, there was a mystery. Iain's father was said to be an
Iona man, but that was only a politeness and a play upon words ("_The
Holy Isle of the Western Sea_" could mean either Iona or the mystic
Hy-Brasil, or Tir-na-thonn of the underworld); for he had no mortal
father, but a man of the Smiling Distant People was his father. Iain's
mother had loved her Leannan-shee, her fairy sweetheart, but that love
is too strong for a woman to bear, and she died. Before Iain was born
she lay under a bush of whitethorn, and her Leannan appeared to her. "I
can't give you life," he said, "unless you'll come away with me." But
she would not; for she wished the child to have Christian baptism.
"Well, good-bye," he said, "but you are a weak love. A woman should care
more for her lover than her child. But I'll do this: I'll give the child
the dew, an' he won't die, an' we'll take him away when we want him. An'
for a gift to him, you can have either beauty or music." "I don't want
the dew," she said, "for I'd rather he lay below the grass beside me
when his time comes: an' as for beauty, it's been my sorrow. But because
I love the songs you have sung to me an' wooed me with, an' made me
forget to hide my soul from you--an' it fallen as helpless as a broken
wave on damp sand--let the child have the _binn-beul_ an' the _lamh
clarsaireachd_ (the melodious mouth an' the harping hand)."
And truly enough Iain Macneil "went away." He went back to his own
people. It must have been a grief to him not to lie under the grass
beside his mother, but it was not for his helping. For days before he
mysteriously disappeared he went about making a _ciucharan_ like a
November wind, a singular plaintive moaning. When asked by his
foster-brother Micheil why he was not content, he answered only "_Far am
bi mo ghaol, bidh mo thathaich_" (Where my Love is, there must my
returning be). He had for days, said Micheil, the mournful crying in the
ear that is so often a presage of death or sorrow; and himself had said
once "Tha 'n eabh a' m' chenais"--the cry is in my ear. When he went
away, that going was the way of the snow.
It is no wonder that legends of Finn and Oisein, of Oscur and Gaul and
Diarmid, of Cuchullin, and many of the old stories of the Gaelic
chivalry survive in the isles. There, more than in Ireland, Gaelic has
survived as the living speech, and though now in the Inner Hebrides it
is dying before "an a' Beurla," the English tongue, and still more
before the degraded "Bheurla leathan" or Glasgow-English of the lowland
west, the old vernacular still holds an ancient treasure.