Men who lived in a world where anything might flow and change, and
become any other thing; and among great gods whose passions were in
the flaming sunset, and in the thunder and the thunder-shower, had
not our thoughts of weight and measure. They worshipped nature and
the abundance of nature, and had always, as it seems, for a supreme
ritual that tumultuous dance among the hills or in the depths of the
woods, where unearthly ecstasy fell upon the dancers, until they seemed
the gods or the godlike beasts, and felt their souls overtopping the
moon; and, as some think, imagined for the first time in the world the
blessed country of the gods and of the happy dead. They had imaginative
passions because they did not live within our own strait limits, and
were nearer to ancient chaos, every man’s desire, and had immortal
models about them. The hare that ran by among the dew might have sat
upon his haunches when the first man was made, and the poor bunch of
rushes under their feet might have been a goddess laughing among the
stars; and with but a little magic, a little waving of the hands, a
little murmuring of the lips, they too could become a hare or a bunch
of rushes, and know immortal love and immortal hatred.
All folk literature, and all literature that keeps the folk tradition,
delights in unbounded and immortal things. The _Kalevala_ delights in
the seven hundred years that Luonaton wanders in the depths of the
sea with Wäinämöinen in her womb, and the Mahomedan king in the Song
of Roland, pondering upon the greatness of Charlemagne, repeats over
and over, ‘He is three hundred years old, when will he weary of war?’
Cuchulain in the Irish folk tale had the passion of victory, and he
overcame all men, and died warring upon the waves, because they alone
had the strength to overcome him. The lover in the Irish folk song bids
his beloved come with him into the woods, and see the salmon leap in
the rivers, and hear the cuckoo sing, because death will never find
them in the heart of the woods. Oisin, new come from his three hundred
years of faeryland, and of the love that is in faeryland, bids Saint
Patrick cease his prayers a while and listen to the blackbird, because
it is the blackbird of Darrycarn that Finn brought from Norway, three
hundred years before, and set its nest upon the oak-tree with his own
hands. Surely if one goes far enough into the woods, one will find
there all that one is seeking? Who knows how many centuries the birds
of the woods have been singing?
All folk literature has indeed a passion whose like is not in modern
literature and music and art, except where it has come by some straight
or crooked way out of ancient times. Love was held to be a fatal
sickness in ancient Ireland, and there is a love-poem in _The Songs of
Connacht_ that is like a death cry: ‘My love, O she is my love, the
woman who is most for destroying me, dearer is she for making me ill
than the woman who would be for making me well. She is my treasure, O
she is my treasure, the woman of the grey eyes ... a woman who would
not lay a hand under my head.... She is my love, O she is my love, the
woman who left no strength in me; a woman who would not breathe a sigh
after me, a woman who would not raise a stone at my tomb.... She is my
secret love, O she is my secret love. A woman who tells me nothing, ...
a woman who does not remember me to be out.... She is my choice, O she
is my choice, the woman who would not look back at me, the woman who
would not make peace with me.... She is my desire, O she is my desire:
a woman dearest to me under the sun, a woman who would not pay me heed,
if I were to sit by her side. It is she ruined my heart and left a sigh
for ever in me.’ There is another song that ends, ‘The Erne shall be
in strong flood, the hills shall be torn down, and the sea shall have
red waves, and blood shall be spilled, and every mountain valley and
every moor shall be on high, before you shall perish, my little black
rose.’ Nor do the old Irish weigh and measure their hatred. The nurse
of O’Sullivan Bere in the folk song prays that the bed of his betrayer
may be the red hearth-stone of hell for ever. And an Elizabethan Irish
poet cries: ‘Three things are waiting for my death. The devil, who is
waiting for my soul and cares nothing for my body or my wealth; the
worms, who are waiting for my body but care nothing for my soul or my
wealth; my children, who are waiting for my wealth and care nothing for
my body or my soul. O Christ, hang all three in the one noose.’ Such
love and hatred seek no mortal thing but their own infinity, and such
love and hatred soon become love and hatred of the idea. The lover who
loves so passionately can soon sing to his beloved like the lover in
the poem by ‘A.E.,’ ‘A vast desire awakes and grows into forgetfulness
of thee.’
When an early Irish poet calls the Irishman famous for much loving,
and a proverb, a friend has heard in the Highlands of Scotland, talks
of the lovelessness of the Irishman, they may say but the same thing,
for if your passion is but great enough it leads you to a country where
there are many cloisters. The hater who hates with too good a heart
soon comes also to hate the idea only; and from this idealism in love
and hatred comes, as I think, a certain power of saying and forgetting
things, especially a power of saying and forgetting things in politics,
which others do not say and forget. The ancient farmers and herdsmen
were full of love and hatred, and made their friends gods, and their
enemies the enemies of gods, and those who keep their tradition are
not less mythological. From this ‘mistaking dreams,’ which are perhaps
essences, for ‘realities’ which are perhaps accidents, from this
‘passionate, turbulent reaction against the despotism of fact,’ comes,
it may be, that melancholy which made all ancient peoples delight in
tales that end in death and parting, as modern peoples delight in
tales that end in marriage bells; and made all ancient peoples, who
like the old Irish had a nature more lyrical than dramatic, delight
in wild and beautiful lamentations. Life was so weighed down by the
emptiness of the great forests and by the mystery of all things, and by
the greatness of its own desires, and, as I think, by the loneliness
of much beauty; and seemed so little and so fragile and so brief,
that nothing could be more sweet in the memory than a tale that ended
in death and parting, and than a wild and beautiful lamentation. Men
did not mourn merely because their beloved was married to another, or
because learning was bitter in the mouth, for such mourning believes
that life might be happy were it different, and is therefore the less
mourning; but because they had been born and must die with their great
thirst unslaked. And so it is that all the august sorrowful persons
of literature, Cassandra and Helen and Deirdre, and Lear and Tristan,
have come out of legends and are indeed but the images of the primitive
imagination mirrored in the little looking-glass of the modern and
classic imagination. This is that ‘melancholy a man knows when he is
face to face’ with nature, and thinks ‘he hears her communing with him
about’ the mournfulness of being born and of dying; and how can it do
otherwise than call into his mind ‘its exiles, its flights across the
seas,’ that it may stir the ever-smouldering ashes? No Gaelic poetry is
so popular in Gaelic-speaking places as the lamentations of Oisin, old
and miserable, remembering the companions and the loves of his youth,
and his three hundred years in faeryland, and his faery love: all
dreams withering in the winds of time lament in his lamentations: ‘The
clouds are long above me this night; last night was a long night to me;
although I find this day long, yesterday was still longer. Every day
that comes to me is long.... No one in this great world is like me—a
poor old man dragging stones. The clouds are long above me this night.
I am the last man of the Fianna, the great Oisin, the son of Finn,
listening to the sound of bells. The clouds are long above me this
night.’ Matthew Arnold quotes the lamentation of Leyrach Hen as a type
of the Celtic melancholy, but I prefer to quote it as a type of the
primitive melancholy; ‘O my crutch, is it not autumn when the fern is
red and the water flag yellow? Have I not hated that which I love?...
Behold, old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head and
my teeth, to my eyes which women loved. The four things I have all my
life most hated fall upon me together—coughing and old age, sickness
and sorrow. I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from
me, the couch of honour shall be no more mine; I am miserable, I am
bent on my crutch. How evil was the lot allotted to Leyrach, the night
he was brought forth! Sorrows without end and no deliverance from his
burden.’ An Elizabethan writer describes extravagant sorrow by calling
it ‘to weep Irish’; and Oisin and Leyrach Hen are, I think, a little
nearer even to us modern Irish than they are to most people. That is
why our poetry and much of our thought is melancholy. ‘The same man,’
writes Dr. Hyde in the beautiful prose which he first writes in Gaelic,
‘who will to-day be dancing, sporting, drinking, and shouting, will be
soliloquizing by himself to-morrow, heavy and sick and sad in his own
lonely little hut, making a croon over departed hopes, lost life, the
vanity of this world, and the coming of death.’