This man is dead, Alan mac Alasdair; and it is well that you brought me
here to-day. That is a good thing, and for sure God has willed it."
"It is not a man that is dead. It is my soul that lies there. It is
dead. God called me to be His Prophet, and I hid in dreams. It is the
end." And with that, and death staring out of his eyes, he entered the
boat and sat down beside Ian.
"Let us go," he said, and that was all.
Slowly Ian oared the boat across the shadowy gulf of the cave, along the
narrow passage, and into the pale green gloom of the outer cavern,
wherein the sound of the sea made a forlorn requiem in his ears.
But the short November day was already passing to its end. All the sea
westward was aflame with gold and crimson light, and in the great dome
of the sky a wonderful radiance lifted above the paleness of the clouds,
whose pinnacled and bastioned heights towered in the south-west.
A faint wind blew eastwardly. Raising the sail, Ian made it fast and
then sat down beside Alan. But he, rising, moved along the boat to the
mast, and leaned there with his face against the setting sun.
Idly they drifted onward. Deep silence lay between them; deep silence
was all about them, save for the ceaseless, inarticulate murmur of the
sea, the splash of low waves against the rocks of Rona, and the sigh of
the surf at the base of the basalt precipices.
And this was their homeward sailing on that day of revelation: Alan,
with his back against the mast, and his lifeless face irradiated by the
light of the setting sun; Ian, steering, with his face in shadow.
_Love in Shadow has two sacred ministers, Oblivion and Faith, one to
heal, the other to renovate and upbuild._--F. M.
FOOTNOTE:
[13] This hymn was taken down in the Gaelic and translated by Mr.
Alexander Carmichael of South Uist.
FRAGMENTS FROM "GREEN FIRE"
THE BIRDS OF ANGUS OG
"_Then, in the violet forest all a-bourgeon, Eucharis, said to me:
It is Spring_."--ARTHUR RIMBAUD.
After the dim purple bloom of a suspended Spring, a green rhythm ran
from larch to thorn, from lime to sycamore: spread from meadow to
meadow, from copse to copse, from hedgerow to hedgerow. The blackthorn
had already snowed upon the nettle-garths. In the obvious nests, among
the bare boughs of ash and beech, the eggs of the blackbird were
blue-green as the sky that March had bequeathed to April. For days past,
when the breath of the Equinox had surged out of the west, the
missel-thrushes had bugled from the wind-swayed topmost branches of the
tallest elms. Everywhere the green rhythm ran.
In every leaf that had uncurled there was a delicate bloom, that which
is upon all things in the first hours of life. The spires of the grass
were washed in a green, dewy light. Out of the brown earth a myriad
living things thrust tiny green shafts, arrow-heads, bulbs, spheres,
clusters. Along the pregnant soil keener ears than ours would have heard
the stir of new life, the innumerous whisper of the bursting seed: and,
in the wind itself, shepherding the shadow-chased sunbeams, the voice of
that vernal gladness which has been man's clarion since Time began.
Day by day the wind-wings lifted a more multitudinous whisper from the
woodlands. The deep hyperborean note, from the invisible ocean of air,
was still audible: within the concourse of bare boughs which wrought
against it, that surging voice could not but have an echo of its wintry
roar. In the sun-havens, however, along the southerly copses, in daisied
garths of orchard-trees, amid the flowering currant and guelder and
lilac bushes, in quiet places where the hives were all a-murmur, the
wind already sang its lilt of Spring. From dawn till noon, from an hour
before sundown till the breaking foam along the wild-cherry flushed
fugitively because of the crimson glow out of the west, there was a
ceaseless chittering of birds. The starlings and the sparrows enjoyed
the commune of the homestead; the larks and fieldfares and green and
yellow linnets congregated in the meadows, where, too, the wild bee
already roved. Among the brown ridgy fallows there was a constant
flutter of black, white-gleaming, and silver-grey wings, where the
stalking rooks, the jerking peewits, and the wary, uncertain gulls from
the neighbouring sea feasted tirelessly from the teeming earth. Often,
too, the wind-hover, that harbinger of the season of the young broods,
quivered his curved wings in his arrested flight, while his lance-like
gaze penetrated the whins beneath which a new-born rabbit crawled, or
discerned in the tangle of a grassy tuft the brown watchful eyes of a
nesting quail.
In the remoter woodlands the three foresters of April could be heard;
the woodpecker tapping on the gnarled boles of the oaks, the wild dove
calling in low crooning monotones to his silent mate, the cuckoo tolling
his infrequent peals from skiey belfries built of sun and mist.
In the fields, where the thorns were green as rivulets of melted snow
and the grass had the bloom of emerald, and the leaves of docken,
clover, cinquefoil, sorrel, and a thousand plants and flowers, were
wave-green, the ewes lay, idly watching with their luminous amber eyes
the frisking and leaping of the close-curled, tuft-tailed, woolly-legged
lambs. In corners of the hedgerows, and in hollows in the rolling
meadows, the primrose, the celandine, the buttercup, the dandelion, and
the daffodil spilled little eddies of the sunflood which overbrimmed
them with light. All day long the rapture of the larks filled the blue
air with vanishing spirals of music, swift and passionate in the ascent,
repetitive and less piercing in the narrowing downward gyres. From every
whin the poignant monotonous note of the yellow hammer re-echoed. Each
pastoral hedge was alive with robins, chaffinches, and the dusky shadows
of the wild mice darting here and there among the greening boughs.
Whenever this green fire is come upon the earth, the swift contagion
spreads to the human heart. What the seedlings feel in the trees, what
the blood feels in the brown mould, what the sap feels in every creature
from the newt in the pool to the nesting bird, so feels the strange
remembering ichor that runs its red tides through human hearts and
brains. Spring has its subtler magic for us, because of the dim
mysteries of unremembering remembrance and of the vague radiances of
hope. Something in us sings an ascendant song, and we expect we know not
what: something in us sings a decrescent song, and we realise vaguely
the stirring of immemorial memories.
There is none who will admit that Spring is fairer elsewhere than in his
own land. But there are regions where the season is so hauntingly
beautiful that it would seem as though Angus Og knew them for his chosen
resting-places in his green journey.
Angus Og, Angus MacGreigne, Angus the Ever Youthful, the Son of the Sun,
a fair god he indeed, golden-haired and wonderful as Apollo Chrusokumos.
Some say that he is Love: some, that he is Spring: some, even, that in
him Thanatos, the Hellenic Celt that was his far-off kin, is
reincarnate. But why seek riddles in flowing water? It may well be that
Angus Og is Love, and Spring, and Death. The elemental gods are ever
triune: and in the human heart, in whose lost Eden an ancient tree of
knowledge grows, wherefrom the mind has not yet gathered more than a few
windfalls, it is surely sooth that Death and Love are oftentimes one and
the same, and that they love to come to us in the apparel of Spring.
Sure, indeed, Angus Og is a name above all sweet to lovers, for is he
not the god--the fair Youth of the Tuatha-de-Danann, the Ancient People,
with us still, though for ages seen of us no more--from the meeting of
whose lips are born white birds, which fly abroad and nest in lovers'
hearts till the moment come when, on the yearning lips of love, their
invisible wings shall become kisses again?
Then, too, there is the old legend that Angus goes to and fro upon the
world, a weaver of rainbows. He follows the Spring, or is its herald.
Often his rainbows are seen in the heavens: often in the rapt gaze of
love. We have all perceived them in the eyes of children, and some of us
have discerned them in the hearts of sorrowful women, and in the dim
brains of the old. Ah, for sure, if Angus Og be the lovely Weaver of
Hope, he is deathless comrade of the Spring, and we may well pray to him
to let his green fire move in our veins; whether he be but the Eternal
Youth of the World, or be also Love, whose soul is youth; or even though
he be likewise Death himself, Death to whom Love was wedded long, long
ago.
II
Alan was a poet, and to dream was his birthright.... He was ever
occupied by that wonderful past of his race which was to him a living
reality. It was perhaps because he so keenly perceived the romance of
the present--the romance of the general hour, of the individual
moment--that he turned so insatiably to the past with its deathless
charm, its haunting appeal.... His mind was as irresistibly drawn to the
Celtic world of the past as the swallow to the sun-way. In a word he was
not only a poet but a Celtic poet; and not only a Celtic poet but a
dreamer of the Celtic dream. Perhaps this was because of the double
strain in his veins. Doubtless, too, it was continuously enhanced by his
intimate knowledge of two of the Celtic languages, that of the Breton
and that of the Gael. It is language that is the surest stimulus to the
remembering nerves. We have a memory within memory as layers of skin
underlie the epidermis. With most of us this anterior remembrance
remains dormant throughout life: but to some are given swift ancestral
recollections. Alan was of these.
With this double key Alan unlocked many doors. In his brain ran ever
that Ossianic tide which has borne so many marvellous argosies through
the troubled waters of the modern mind. Old ballad of his nature isles,
with their haunting Gaelic rhythm of idioms, their frequent reminiscence
of Norse viking and the Danish summer-sailor were often in his ears. He
had lived with his hero Cuchullin from the days when the boy shewed his
royal blood at Emain-Macha till that sad hour when his madness came upon
him and he died. He had fared forth with many a Lifting of the Sunbeam,
and had followed Oisin step by step on that last melancholy journey when
Malvina led the blind old man along the lonely shores of Arran. He had
watched the _crann-tara_ flare from glen to glen, and at the bidding of
that fiery cross he had seen the whirling of the swords, the dusky
flight of arrow-rain, and from the isles, the leaping forth of the war
_birlinns_ to meet the Viking galleys. How often, too, he had followed
trial of Niall of the nine Hostages and had seen the Irish Charlemagne
ride victor through Saxon London, or across the Norman plains or with
onward sword direct his army against the white walls of the Alps!... It
was all this marvellous life of old which wrought upon Alan's life as by
a spell. Often he recalled the words of a Gaelic _Sean_ he had heard
Yann croon in his soft monotonous voice,--words which made a light
shoreward eddy of the present and were solemn with the deep-sea sound of
the past, that is with us even as we speak....
Truly his soul must have lived a thousand years ago. In him, at least,
the old Celtic brain was reborn with a vivid intensity which none
guessed, for Alan himself only vaguely surmised the extent and depth of
this obsession. In heart and brain that old world lived anew. Himself a
poet, all that was fair and tragically beautiful was for ever undergoing
in his mind a marvellous transformation--a magical resurrection rather,
wherein what was remote and bygone, and crowned with oblivious dust,
became alive again with intense and beautiful life....
Deep passion instinctively moves towards the shadow rather than towards
the golden noons of light. Passion hears what love at most dreams of;
passion sees what love mayhap dimly discerns in a glass darkly. A
million of our fellows are "in love" at any or every moment: and for
these the shadowy way is intolerable. But for the few, in whom love is,
the eyes are circumspect against the dark hour which comes when heart
and brain and blood are aflame with the paramount ecstasy of love....
Oh, flame that burns where fires of home are lit! and oh, flame that
burns in the heart to whom life has not said, Awake! and oh, flame that
smoulders from death to life, and from life to death, in the dumb lives
of those to whom the primrose way is closed! Everywhere the burning of
the burning, the flame of the flame, pain and the shadow of pain, joy
and the rapt breath of joy, flame of the flame that, burning, destroyeth
not, till the flame is no more!...
It is said of an ancient poet of the Druid days that he had the power to
see the lines of the living, and these as though they were phantoms,
separate from the body. Was there not a young king of Albainn who, in a
perilous hour, discovered the secret of old time, and knew how a life
may be hidden away from the body so that none may know of it, save the
wind that whispers all things, and the tides of day and night that bear
all things upon their dark flood?...
The fragrance of the forest intoxicated him. Spring was come indeed. The
wild storm had ruined nothing, for at its fiercest it had swept
overhead. Everywhere the green fire of Spring would be litten anew. A
green flame would pass from meadow to hedgerow, from hedgerow to the
tangled thickets of bramble and dog-rose, from the underwoods to the
inmost forest glades.
Everywhere song would be to the birds, everywhere young life would
pulse, everywhere the rhythm of a new rapture would run rejoicing. The
Miracle of Spring would be accomplished in the sight of all men, of all
birds and beasts, of all green life. Each, in its kind would have a
swifter throb in the red blood of the vivid sap....
She was his Magic. The light of their love was upon everything. Deeply
as he loved beauty he had learned to love it far more keenly and
understandingly because of her. He saw now through the accidental and
everywhere discerned the Eternal Beauty, the echoes of whose wandering
are in every heart and brain though few discern the white vision or hear
the haunting voice.... Thus it was she had for him this immutable
attraction which a few women have for a few men; an appeal, a charm,
that atmosphere of romance, that _air_ of ideal beauty, wherein lies the
secret of all passionate art.
The world without wonder, the world without mystery! That indeed is the
rainbow without colours, the sunrise without living gold, the noon void
of light....
In deep love there is no height nor depth between two hearts, no height
nor depth nor length nor breadth. There is simply love. What if both at
times were wrought too deeply by this beautiful dream? What if the inner
life triumphed now and then, and each forgot the deepest instinct of
life that here the body is overlord, and the soul but a divine consort?
There are three races of man. There is the myriad race which loses all
through (not bestiality, for the brute world is clean and sane)
perverted animalism; and there is the myriad race which denounces
humanity, and pins all its faith and joy to a life the very conditions
of whose existence are incompatible with the law to which we are
subject--the sole law, the law of nature.
Then there is that small untoward clan, which knows the divine call of
the spirit through the brain, and the secret whisper of the soul in the
heart, and for ever perceives the veils of mystery and the rainbows of
hope upon our human horizons, which hears and sees, and yet turns
wisely, meanwhile, to the life of the green earth, of which we are part,
to the common kindred of living things with which we are at one--is
content, in a word, to live because of the dream that makes living so
mysteriously sweet and poignant; and to dream because of the commanding
immediacy of life....
What are dreams but the dust of wayfaring thoughts? Or whence are they,
and what air is upon their shadowy wings? Do they come out of the
twilight of man's mind: are they ghosts of exiles from vanished palaces
of the brain: or are they heralds with proclamations of hidden tidings
for the soul that dreams?
III
THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD
"_The Souls of the Living are the Beauty of the World._"--BACON.
For out of his thoughts about Annaik and Ynys arose a fuller, a deeper
conception of womanhood. How well he remembered a legend that Ynys had
once told him: a legend of a fair spirit which goes to and fro upon the
world, the Weaver of Tears. He loves the pathways of sorrow. His voice
is low and sweet, with a sound like the bubbling of waters in that fount
whence the rainbows rise. His eyes are in quiet places, and in the dumb
pain of animals as in the agony of the human brain: but most he is
found, oftenest are the dewy traces of his feet, in the heart of woman.
Tears, tears: they are not the saltest tears which are on the lids of
those who weep. Fierce tears there are, hot founts of pain in the mind
of many a man, that are never shed, but slowly crystallise in furrows on
brow and face, and in deep weariness in the eyes: fierce tears,
unquenchable, in the heart of many a woman, whose brave eyes look
fearlessly at life, whose dauntless courage goes forth daily to die but
never to be vanquished.
In truth the Weaver of Tears abides in the heart of woman. O Mother of
Pity, of Love, of deep Compassion: with thee it is to yearn for ever for
the ideal human, to bring the spiritual love into fashion with human
desire, endlessly to strive, endlessly to fail, always to hope in spite
of disillusion, to love unswervingly against all baffling and
misunderstanding, and even forgetfulness! O Woman, whose eyes are always
stretched out to her erring children, whose heart is big enough to cover
all the little children in the world, and suffer with their sufferings,
and joy with their joys: Woman, whose other divine names are Strength
and Patience, who is no girl, no virgin, because she has drunk too
deeply of the fount of Life to be very young or very joyful. Upon her
lips is the shadowy kiss of death: in her eyes is the shadow of birth.
She is the veiled interpreter of the two mysteries. Yet what joyousness
like hers, when she wills: because of her unwavering hope, her
inexhaustible fount of love?
So it was that just as Alan had long recognised as a deep truth, how the
spiritual nature of man has been revealed to humanity in many divine
incarnations, so he had come to believe that the spiritual nature of
woman has been revealed in the many Marys, sisters of the Beloved, who
have had the keys of the soul and the heart in their unconscious
keeping. In this exquisite truth he knew a fresh and vivid hope.... A
Woman-Saviour, who would come near to all of us, because in her heart
would be the blind tears of the child, the bitter tears of the man, and
the patient tears of the woman: who would be the Compassionate One, with
no end or aim but compassion--with no doctrine to teach, no way to show,
but only deep, wonderful, beautiful, inalienable, unquenchable
compassion.
For in truth there is the divine eternal feminine counterpart to the
divine eternal male, and both are needed to explain the mystery of the
dual spirit within us--the mystery of the two in one, so infinitely
stranger and more wonderful than that triune life which the blind
teachers of the blind have made a rock of stumbling and offence out of a
truth clear and obvious as noon.
We speak of Mother Nature, but we do not discern the living truth behind
our words. How few of us have the vision of this great brooding Mother,
whose garment is the earth and sea, whose head is pillowed among the
stars: she, who, with death and sleep as her familiar shapes, soothes
and rests all the weariness of the world, from the waning leaf to the
beating pulse, from the brief span of a human heart to the furrowing of
granite brows by the uninterrupted sun, the hounds of rain and wind, and
the untrammelled airs of heaven.
Not cruel, relentless, impotently anarchic, chaotically potent, this
Mater Genetrix. We see her thus, who are flying threads in the loom she
weaves. But she is patient, abiding, certain, inviolate, and silent
ever. It is only when we come to this vision of her whom we call Isis,
or Hera, or Orchil, or one of a hundred other names, our unknown
Earth-Mother, that men and women will know each other aright, and go
hand in hand along the road of life without striving to crush, to
subdue, to usurp, to retaliate, to separate.
Ah, fair vision of humanity to come: man and woman side by side, sweet,
serene, true, simple, natural, fulfilling earth's and heaven's behests,
unashamed, unsophisticated, unaffected, each to each and for each,
children of one mother, inheritors of a like destiny, and, at the last,
artificers of an equal fate.
Pondering thus, Alan rose, and looked out, into the night. In that
great stillness, wherein the moonlight lay like the visible fragrance of
the earth, he gazed long and intently. How shadow, now, were those lives
that had so lately palpitated in this very place: how strange their
silence, their incommunicable knowledge, their fathomless peace!
Was it all lost ... the long endurance of pain, the pangs of sorrow? If
so, what was the lesson of life? Surely to live with sweet serenity and
gladness, content against the inevitable hour. There is solace of a kind
in the idea of a common end, of that terrible processional march of life
wherein the myriad is momentary, and the immeasurable is but a passing
shadow. But, alas, it is only solace of a kind: for what heart that has
beat to the pulse of love can relinquish the sweet dream of life, and
what coronal can philosophy put upon the brows of youth in place of
eternity.
No, no: of this he felt sure. In the Beauty of the World lies the
ultimate redemption of our mortality. When we shall become at one with
nature in a sense profounder even than the poetic imaginings of most of
us, we shall understand what now we fail to discern. The arrogance of
those who would have the stars as candles for our night, and the
universe as a pleasance for our thought, will be as impossible as their
blind fatuity who say we are of dust, briefly vitalised, that shall be
dust again, with no fragrance saved from the rude bankruptcy of life, no
beauty raised up against the sun to bloom anew.
It is no idle dream, this: no idle dream that we are a perishing clan
among the sons of God, because of this slow waning of our joy, of our
passionate delight, in the Beauty of the World. We have been unable to
look out upon the shining of our star, for the vision overcomes us; and
we have used veils which we call "scenery," "picturesqueness," and the
like--poor, barren words that are so voiceless and remote before the
rustle of leaves and the lap of water, before the ancient music of the
wind, and all the sovran eloquence of the tides of light. But a day may
come--nay, shall surely come--when indeed the poor and the humble shall
inherit the earth: they who have not made a league with temporal evils
and out of whose heart shall arise the deep longing, that shall become
universal, of the renewal of youth.
... Often, too, alone in his observatory, where he was wont to spend
much of his time, Alan knew that strange nostalgia of the mind for
impossible things. Then, wrought for a while from his vision of green
life, and flamed by another green fire than that born of the earth, he
dreamed his dream. With him, the peopled solitude of night was a
concourse of confirming voices. He did not dread the silence of the
stars, the cold remoteness of the stellar fire.