only dreams. He loves the sun-drowned shadows. They are invisible thus,
but they are there, in the sunlight itself. Sure, they may be heard: as,
an hour ago, when on my way hither by the Stairway of the Kings--for so
sometimes they call here the ancient stones of the mouldered princes of
long ago--I heard a mother moaning because of the son that had had to go
over-sea and leave her in her old age; and heard also a child sobbing,
because of the sorrow of childhood--that sorrow so unfathomable, so
incommunicable. And yet not a stone's-throw from where I lie, half
hidden beneath an overhanging rock, is the Pool of Healing. To this
small, black-brown tarn, pilgrims of every generation, for hundreds of
years, have come. Solitary, these; not only because the pilgrim to the
Fount of Eternal Youth must fare hither alone, and at dawn, so as to
touch the healing water the moment the first sunray quickens it--but
solitary, also, because those who go in quest of this Fount of Youth are
the dreamers and the Children of Dream, and these are not many, and few
come now to this lonely place. Yet, an Isle of Dream Iona is, indeed.
Here the last sun-worshippers bowed before the Rising of God; here
Columba and his hymning priests laboured and brooded; and here Oran or
his kin dreamed beneath the monkish cowl that pagan dream of his. Here,
too, the eyes of Fionn and Oisin, and of many another of the heroic men
and women of the Fianna, may have lingered; here the Pict and the Celt
bowed beneath the yoke of the Norse pirate, who, too, left his dreams,
or rather his strangely beautiful soul-rainbows, as a heritage to the
stricken; here, for century after century, the Gael has lived, suffered,
joyed, dreamed his impossible, beautiful dream; as here, now, he still
lives, still suffers patiently, still dreams, and through all and over
all, broods upon the incalculable mysteries. He is an elemental, among
the elemental forces. He knows the voices of wind and sea: and it is
because the Fount of Youth upon Dun-I of Iona is not the only wellspring
of peace, that the Gael can front destiny as he does, and can endure.
Who knows where its tributaries are? They may be in your heart, or in
mine, and in a myriad others.
I would that the birds of Angus Og might, for once, be changed, not, as
fabled, into the kisses of love, but into doves of peace, that they
might fly into the green world, and nest there in many hearts, in many
minds, crooning their incommunicable song of joy and hope.
A doomed and passing race. I have been taken to task for these words.
But they are true, in the deep reality where they obtain. Yes, but true
only in one sense, however vital that is. The Breton's eyes are slowly
turning from the enchanted West, and slowly his ears are forgetting the
whisper of the wind around menhir and dolmen. The Manxman has ever been
the mere yeoman of the Celtic chivalry; but even his rude dialect
perishes year by year. In Wales, a great tradition survives; in Ireland,
a supreme tradition fades through sunset-hued horizons; in Celtic
Scotland, a passionate regret, a despairing love and longing, narrows
yearly before a dull and incredibly selfish alienism. The Celt has at
last reached his horizon. There is no shore beyond. He knows it. This
has been the burden of his song since Malvina led the blind Oisin to his
grave by the sea: "Even the Children of Light must go down into
darkness." But this apparition of a passing race is no more than the
fulfilment of a glorious resurrection before our very eyes. For the
genius of the Celtic race stands out now with averted torch, and the
light of it is a glory before the eyes, and the flame of it is blown
into the hearts of the stronger people. The Celt fades, but his spirit
rises in the heart and the mind of the Anglo-Celtic peoples, with whom
are the destinies of generations to come.
I stop, and look seaward from this hillslope of Dun-I. Yes, even in this
Isle of Joy, as it seems in this dazzle of golden light and splashing
wave, there is the like mortal gloom and immortal mystery which moved
the minds of the old seers and bards. Yonder, where that thin spray
quivers against the thyme-set cliff, is the Spouting Cave, where to this
day the Mar-Tarbh, dread creature of the sea, swims at the full of the
tide. Beyond, out of sight behind these craggy steeps, is
Port-na-Churaich, where, a thousand years ago, Columba landed in his
coracle. Here, eastward, is the landing-place, for the dead of old,
brought hence out of Christendom for sacred burial in the Isle of the
Saints. All the story of the Gael is here. Iona is the microcosm of the
Gaelic world.
Last night, about the hour of the sun's going, I lay upon the heights
near the Cave, overlooking the Machar--the sandy, rock-frontiered plain
of duneland on the west side of Iona, exposed to the Atlantic. There was
neither bird nor beast, no living thing to see, save one solitary human
creature. The man toiled at kelp-burning. I watched the smoke till it
merged into the sea-mist that came creeping swiftly out of the north,
and down from Dun-I eastward. At last nothing was visible. The mist
shrouded everything. I could hear the dull, rhythmic beat of the waves.
That was all. No sound, nothing visible.
It was, or seemed, a long while before a rapid thud-thud trampled the
heavy air. Then I heard the rush, the stamping and neighing, of some
young mares, pasturing there, as they raced to and fro, bewildered or
perchance in play. A glimpse I caught of three, with flying manes and
tails; the others were blurred shadows only. A swirl, and the mist
disclosed them; a swirl, and the mist enfolded them again. Then, silence
once more.
Abruptly, though not for a long time thereafter, the mist rose and
drifted seaward.
All was as before. The kelp-burner still stood, straking the smouldering
seaweed. Above him a column ascended, bluely spiral, dusked with shadow.
The kelp-burner: who was he but the Gael of the Isles? Who but the Gael
in his old-world sorrow? The mist falls and the mist rises. He is there
all the same, behind it, part of it; and the column of smoke is the
incense out of his longing heart that desires Heaven and Earth, and is
dowered only with poverty and pain, hunger and weariness, a little isle
of the seas, a great hope, and the love of love.
But ... to the island-story once more!
Some day, surely, the historian of Iona will appear.
How many "history-books" there are like dead leaves. The simile is a
travesty. There is no little russet leaf of the forest that could not
carry more real, more intimate knowledge. There is no leaf that could
not reveal mystery of form, mystery of colour, wonder of structure,
secret of growth, the law of harmony; that could not testify to birth,
and change, and decay, and death; and what history tells us more?--that
could not, to the inward ear, bring the sound of the south wind making a
greenness in the woods of Spring, the west wind calling his brown and
red flocks to the fold.
What a book it will be! It will reveal to us the secret of what Oisin
sang, what Merlin knew, what Columba dreamed, what Adamnan hoped: what
this little "lamp of Christ" was to pagan Europe; what incense of
testimony it flung upon the winds; what saints and heroes went out of
it; how the dust of kings and princes were brought there to mingle with
its sands; how the noble and the ignoble came to it across long seas and
perilous countries. It will tell, too, how the Danes ravaged the isles
of the west, and left not only their seed for the strengthening of an
older race, but imageries and words, words and imageries so alive to-day
that the listener in the mind may hear the cries of the viking above
the voice of the Gael and the more ancient tongue of the Pict. It will
tell, too, how the nettle came to shed her snow above kings' heads, and
the thistle to wave where bishops' mitres stood; how a simple people out
of the hills and moors, remembering ancient wisdom or blindly cherishing
forgotten symbols, sought here the fount of youth; and how, slowly, a
long sleep fell upon the island, and only the grasses shaken in the
wind, and the wind itself, and the broken shadows of dreams in the minds
of the old, held the secret of Iona. And, at the last--with what lift,
with what joy--it will tell how once more the doves of hope and peace
have passed over its white sands, this little holy land! This little
holy land! Ah, white doves, come again! A thousand thousand wait.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] A more polished later version, though attributed to Columba, runs:--
"An I mo chridhe, I mo ghraidh
An aite guth mhanach bidh geum ba;
Ach mu'n tig an saoghal gu crich,
Bithidh I mar a bha."
(In effect: _In Iona that is my heart's desire, Iona that is my love,
the lowing of cows shall yet replace the voices of monks: but before the
end is come Iona shall again be as it was._)
[3] In a beautiful old Scoto-Gaelic ballad, the "Bas Fhraoich," occurs
the line, _Thuit i air an traigh na neul_, "she fell on the shore as a
mist," though here finely used for a swoon only.
[4] An allusion to the Hebridean proverb, _Ma dh' itheas tu cridh an
eoin, bidh do chridhe air chrith ri d' bheo_ ("If you eat the bird's
heart, your heart will palpitate for ever.")
[5] The Irish pipes are called "Piob-theannaich" to distinguish them
from the "Piob" or "Piob-Mhor" of the Highlands.
[6] _The Dominion of Dreams_, 1st Ed.
[7] See Notes, p. 429.
BY SUNDOWN SHORES
"_Cette ame qui se lamente
En cette plaine dormante
C'est la notre n'est-ce pas?
La mienne, dis, et la tienne,
Dont s'exhale l'humble antienne
Par ce tiede soir, tout, bas?_"
By Sundown Shores
"_'N hano ann Tad, ar Mab hac ar Spered-Zantel,
Homan' zo'r ganaouenn zavet en Breiz-Izel!
Zavet gant eur paour-kez, en Ar-goat, en Ar-vor,
Kanet anez-hi, pewienn, hac ho pezo digor._"
"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
This song of mine was raised in my Breton Fatherland,
In Argoat forest-clad, in Arvor of the grey wave:
Sing it, wayfarers, and all gates will open before you."
I do not know the name of the obscure minstrel who sang this song, as he
passed from village to village, by the coasts, along the heath-lands of
Brittany. But there are poets who have no name and no country, because
they are named by the secret name of the longing of many minds, and
mysteriously come from and pass to the Land of Heart's Desire, which is
their own land. This wandering Breton minstrel is of that company. His
sone is familiar. I have heard it where Connemara breaks in grey rock
and sudden pastures to the sea: where only the wind and the heather
people the solitudes of Argyll: where the silent Isles shelve to
perpetual foam. He speaks for all his brotherhood of Armorica: he speaks
also for the greater brotherhood of his race, the broken peoples who now
stand upon the sundown shores, from wild Ushant to the cliffs of Achil,
from St. Bride's Bay to solitary St. Kilda. He is not only the genius of
Arvor, daughter of dreams, but the genius of a race whose farewell is in
a tragic lighting of torches of beauty around its grave. For it is the
soul of the Celt who wanders homeless to-day, with his pathetic burthen
that his _sone_ was made by ancestral woods, by the unchanging sea;
dreaming the enchanted air will open all doors. Alas! few doors open:
the wayfarer must not tarry. Memories and echoes he may leave, but he
must turn his face. Grey dolmen and grey menhir already stand there, by
the last shores, memorials of his destiny.
The ancient Gaels believed that in the western ocean there was an island
called Hy Brasil, where all that was beautiful and mysterious lived
beyond the pillars of the rainbow. The legendary romances of the Celtic
races may be described as the Hy Brasil of literature.
In the Celtic commune there are many legendary tales which, but for the
accident of names and local circumstances, are identical. The familiar
Highland legend of the children who, bathing in a mountain loch, were
carried off by a water-horse, has its counterpart in Connemara, in
Merioneth, and in Finistere, though in the Welsh recital the children
are the victims of a dragon, and in the Breton legend the monster is a
boar. For that matter, this elemental tale has its roots in the east,
and Macedonia and the Himalaya retain the memory of what Aryan wagoners
told by the camp-fires during their centuries-long immigration into
Europe. Whether, however, a tale be universal or strictly Celtic,
generally it has a parallel in one or all of the racial dialects. True,
there are legendary cycles which are local. The Arzur of Brittany is a
mere echo in the Hebrides, and the name of Cuculain or the fame of the
Red Branch has not reached the dunes of Armorica. Nevertheless, even in
the mythopoeic tales there is a kindred character. Nomenoe may have been
a Breton Fionn, though he had no Oisin to wed his deeds to a deathless
music; and Diarmid and Grainne have loved beneath the oaks of
Broceliande or the beech-groves of Llanidris, as well as among the hills
of Erin, or in the rocky fastnesses of Morven. It is characteristic,
too, how Celtland has given to Celtland. Scotland gave Ireland St.
Patrick; Ireland gave Scotland St. Columba; the chief bard of Armorica
came from Wales; and Cornwall has the Arthurian fame which is the meed
of Kymric Caledonia. To this day no man can say whether Oisin, old and
blind, wandered at the last to Drumadoon in Arran, or if indeed he
followed out of Erin the sweet voice from Tirnan-Og, and was seen or
heard of by none, till three centuries later the bells of the clerics
and the admonitions of Patrick made his days a burden not to be borne.
Did not the greatest of Irish kings die in tributary lands by the banks
of the Loire, and who has seen the moss of that lost grave in
Broceliande where Merlin of the North lay down to a long sleep?
Even where there seems no probability of a common origin, there is often
a striking similarity in the matter and the manner of folk-tales,
particularly those which narrate the strange experiences of the saints.
Thus, for example, in one of the most beautiful of the legendary stories
given in _The Shadow of Arvor_[8] there is an account of how Gradlon,
"the honoured chief of Kerne, the monarch who built Ys, and on whose
brow were united the crowns of Armorica," having voluntarily become a
wandering beggar, arrived at last in the heart of an ancient forest:
"towering moss-clad pillars bearing a heavy roof of foliage, full of the
mystery of a cathedral aisle by night." Here the king vowed to build a
great temple, but before he could fulfil his vow he died. Gwennole the
monk had missed Gradlon, and had followed him to the forest, to find him
there on the morrow, lying on a bed of moss which the fallen leaves had
flecked with gold. Near him crouched a human figure. This was Primel the
anchorite. Note how the king speaks to the Christian monk Gwennole
concerning this ancient hermit. "Have mercy on this poor old man beside
me: the length of three men's lives has been his, and he has known the
deeps of sorrow. The sorrows which have come upon me are nothing to his;
for while I have wept over the fate of my royal city, and while for Ahez
my heart has been broken, this man has lost his gods. There is no sorrow
that is so great a sorrow. He is a Druid lamenting a dead faith. Show
him tenderness." Therewith Gradlon dies. Over the dead king "Gwennole
murmured a Latin chant; the druid in a tremulous voice intoned a
refrain in an unknown tongue; and Gradlon, ruler of the sea, slept in
that glade watched over by the priest of Christ and by the last
surviving servant of Teutates.... There, amid the majestic solitudes of
the forest, the two religions of the ancient race joined hands and were
at one before the mystery of death." Later, the druid bids Gwennole
build a Christian sanctuary on the spot where "the belated ministrant of
a fallen faith" died beside Gradlon Maur, the Great King. One strange
touch of bitterness occurs. "But," exclaims Gwennole, "if the sanctuary
be reared here, we shall invade thy last refuge." "As for me ...!"
replies the old man; then, after a silence he adds, with a gesture of
infinite weariness, "it is my gods who should protect me. Let them save
me if they can." The dying druid turns away to seek his long rest under
the sacred oaks: "Gwennole, his heart full of a tender love and pity
which he could not understand, moved slowly towards the sea." A fitting
close to a book full of interest, charm, and spiritual beauty.
In the third book of St. Adamnan's _Life of St. Columba_, there is an
episode entitled "Of a manifestation of angels meeting the soul of one
Emchath." Columba, "making his way beyond the Ridge of Britain
(Drum-Alban), near the lake of the river Nisa (Loch Ness), being
suddenly inspired by the Holy Spirit, says to the brethren who are
journeying with him at that time: 'Let us make haste to meet the holy
angels who, that they may carry away the soul of a certain heathen man,
who is keeping the moral law of nature even to extreme old age, have
been sent out from the highest regions of heaven, and are waiting until
we come thither, that we may baptize him in time before he dies.'
Thereafter the aged saint made as much haste as he could to go in
advance of his companions, until he came to the district which is named
Airchartdan (Glen Urquhart)." There he found "the holy heathen man,"
Emchath by name.
Here, then, is an instance of a Celtic priest in Armorica and of a
Celtic priest in Scotland acting identically towards an upright heathen.
A large book would be necessary to relate the correspondence between the
folk-tales, the traditional romances, and the Christian legends of the
four great branches of the Celtic race.
On the seventh day, when God rested, says a poet of the Gael, He dreamed
of the lands and nations he had made, and out of that dreaming were
born Ireland and Brittany. Truly, within Christian days, there were more
saints, there were more lamps of the spirit lit in that grey peninsula,
in that green land, in the little sand-cinctured isle Iona, than
anywhere betwixt the Syrian deserts and the meads of Glastonbury. It
takes nothing from, it adds much to these lands where spiritual ecstasy
has longest dreamed, that the old gods have not perished but merge into
the brotherhood of Christ's company; that the old faiths, and the
ancient spirit, and the pagan soul were not given to the wave for foam,
to the pastures for idle sand. Ireland and Brittany! Behind the
sorrowful songs of longing and regret, behind the faint chime of bells
which some day linger as an echo in the towers of Ys where she lies
under the wave, are the cries of the tympan and the forgotten music of
druidic harps. What song the oaks knew in Broceliande, what song
Taliesin heard, what chant Merlin the Wild raised among dim woods in
Caledon: these may be lost to us for ever, or live only through our
songs and dreams as shadows live in the hollows of the sunrain: but
Broceliande and Gethsemane are in symbol akin, Taliesin is but another
name of him who ate the wild honey and listened to the wind, and
Merlin, with the nuts of wisdom in his hand, stands hearkening to the
same deep murmur of the eternal life which was heard upon the Mount of
Olives.
It has occurred to me often of late, from what I have seen, and read,
and heard from others, that the Celtic mythopoeic faculty is still
concerning itself largely with an interweaving of Pagan and Christian
thought, of Pagan and Christian symbol, of the old Pagan tales of a day
and of mortal beauty with the Christian symbolic legends that are of no
day and are of immortal beauty.
A fisherman told me the story of Diarmid and Grainne, in the guise of a
legend of the Virgin Mary and her Gaelic husband. Three years ago, in
Appin, an old woman, Jessie Stewart, told me that when Christ was
crucified He came back to us as Oisin of the Songs. From a ferryman on
Loch Linnhe, near the falls of Lora, a friend heard a confused story of
Oisin (confused because the narrator at one moment spoke of Oisin, and
at another of "Goll"), how on the day that Christ was crucified Oisin
slew his own son, and knew madness, crying that he was but a shadow, and
his son a shadow, and that what he had done was but the shadow of what
was being done in that hour "to the black sorrow of time and the
universe (_domhain_)." In this connection, Celtic students will recall
the story of Concobar mac Nessa, the High King of Ulster: how on that
day he rose suddenly and fled into the woods and hewed down the branches
of trees, crying that he slew the multitudes of those who at that moment
were doing to death the innocent son of a king.
Out of this confusion may arise a new interpretation of certain great
symbolic persons and incidents in the old mythology. As this legendary
lore is being swiftly forgotten, it is well that it should be saved to
new meanings and new beauty, by that mythopoeic faculty which, in the
Celtic imagination, is as a wing continually uplifting fallen dreams to
the imaging wind of the Spirit.
FOOTNOTE:
[8] _Vide_ Notes, p. 431.
THE WIND, SILENCE, AND LOVE
I know one who, asked by a friend desiring more intimate knowledge as to
what influences above all other influences had shaped her inward life,
answered at once, with that sudden vision of insight which reveals more
than the vision of thought, "The Wind, Silence, and Love."
The answer was characteristic, for, with her who made it, the influences
that shape have always seemed more significant than the things that are
shapen. None can know for another the mysteries of spiritual
companionship. What is an abstraction to one is a reality to another:
what to one has the proved familiar face, to another is illusion.
I can well understand the one of whom I write. With most of us the
shaping influences are the common sweet influences of motherhood and
fatherhood, the airs of home, the place and manner of childhood. But
these are not for all, and may be adverse, and in some degree absent.
Even when a child is fortunate in love and home, it may be spiritually
alien from these: it may dimly discern love rather as a mystery dwelling
in sunlight and moonlight, or in the light that lies on quiet meadows,
woods, quiet shores: may find a more intimate sound of home in the wind
whispering in the grass, or when a sighing travels through the
wilderness of leaves, or when an unseen wave moans in the pine.
When we consider, could any influences be deeper than these three
elemental powers, for ever young, yet older than age, beautiful
immortalities that whisper continually against our mortal ear. The Wind,
Silence, and Love: yes, I think of them as good comrades, nobly
ministrant, priests of the hidden way.
To go into solitary places, or among trees which await dusk and storm,
or by a dark shore; to be a nerve there, to listen to, inwardly to hear,
to be at one with, to be as grass filled with, as reeds shaken by, as a
wave lifted before, the wind: this is to know what cannot otherwise be
known; to hear the intimate, dread voice; to listen to what long, long
ago went away, and to what now is going and coming, coming and going,
and to what august airs of sorrow and beauty prevail in that dim empire
of shadow where the falling leaf rests unfallen, where Sound, of all
else forgotten and forgetting, lives in the pale hyacinth, the
moon-white pansy, the cloudy amaranth that gathers dew.
And, in the wood; by the grey stone on the hill; where the heron waits;
where the plover wails: on the pillow; in the room filled with
flame-warmed twilight; is there any comrade that is as Silence is? Can
she not whisper the white secrecies which words discolour? Can she not
say, when we would forget, forget; when we would remember, remember? Is
it not she also who says, Come unto me all ye who are weary and heavy
laden, and I will give you rest? Is it not she who has a lute into which
all loveliness of sound has passed, so that when she breathes upon it
life is audible? Is it not she who will close many doors, and shut away
cries and tumults, and will lead you to a green garden and a fountain in
it, and say, "This is your heart, and that is your soul; listen."
That third one, is he a Spirit, alone, uncompanioned? I think sometimes
that these three are one, and that Silence is his inward voice and the
Wind the sound of his unwearying feet. Does he not come in wind, whether
his footfall be on the wild rose, or on the bitter wave, or in the
tempest shaken with noises and rains that are cries and tears, sighs
and prayers and tears?
He has many ways, many hopes, many faces. He bends above those who meet
in twilight, above the cradle, above dwellers by the hearth, above the
sorrowful, above the joyous children of the sun, above the grave. Must
he not be divine, who is worshipped of all men? Does not the wild-dove
take the rainbow upon its breast because of him, and the salmon leave
the sea for inland pools, and the creeping thing become winged and
radiant?
The Wind, Silence, and Love: if one cannot learn of these, is there any
comradeship that can tell us more, that can more comfort us, that can so
inhabit with living light what is waste and barren?
And, in the hidden hour, one will stoop, and kiss us on the brow, when
our sudden stillness will, for others, already be memory. And another
will be as an open road, with morning breaking. And the third will meet
us, with a light of joy in his eyes; but we shall not see him at first
because of the sunblaze, or hear his words because in that summer air
the birds will be multitude.
Meanwhile they are near and intimate. Their life uplifts us. We cannot
forget wholly, nor cease to dream, nor be left unhoping, nor be without
rest, nor go darkly without torches and songs, if these accompany us; or
we them, for they go one way.
BARABAL
A MEMORY
I have spoken in "Iona" and elsewhere of the old Highland woman who was
my nurse. She was not really old, but to me seemed so, and I have always
so thought of her. She was one of the most beautiful and benignant
natures I have known.