The Church when it was most powerful taught learned and unlearned to
climb, as it were, to the great moral realities through hierarchies of
Cherubim and Seraphim, through clouds of Saints and Angels who had all
their precise duties and privileges. The story-tellers of Ireland,
perhaps of every primitive country, imagined as fine a fellowship, only
it was to the aesthetic realities they would have had us climb. They
created for learned and unlearned alike, a communion of heroes, a cloud
of stalwart witnesses; but because they were as much excited as a monk
over his prayers, they did not think sufficiently about the shape of
the poem and the story. We have to get a little weary or a little
distrustful of our subject, perhaps, before we can lie awake thinking
how to make the most of it. They were more anxious to describe energetic
characters, and to invent beautiful stories, than to express themselves
with perfect dramatic logic or in perfectly-ordered words. They shared
their characters and their stories, their very images, with one another,
and handed them down from generation to generation; for nobody, even
when he had added some new trait, or some new incident, thought of
claiming for himself what so obviously lived its own merry or mournful
life. The maker of images or worker in mosaic who first put Christ upon
a cross would have as soon claimed as his own a thought which was
perhaps put into his mind by Christ himself. The Irish poets had also,
it may be, what seemed a supernatural sanction, for a chief poet had to
understand not only innumerable kinds of poetry, but how to keep
himself for nine days in a trance. Surely they believed or half believed
in the historical reality of even their wildest imaginations. And so
soon as Christianity made their hearers desire a chronology that would
run side by side with that of the Bible, they delighted in arranging
their Kings and Queens, the shadows of forgotten mythologies, in long
lines that ascended to Adam and his Garden. Those who listened to them
must have felt as if the living were like rabbits digging their burrows
under walls that had been built by Gods and Giants, or like swallows
building their nests in the stone mouths of immense images, carved by
nobody knows who. It is no wonder that one sometimes hears about men who
saw in a vision ivy-leaves that were greater than shields, and
blackbirds whose thighs were like the thighs of oxen. The fruit of all
those stories, unless indeed the finest activities of the mind are but a
pastime, is the quick intelligence, the abundant imagination, the
courtly manners of the Irish country-people.
William Morris came to Dublin when I was a boy, and I had some talk with
him about these old stories. He had intended to lecture upon them, but
'the ladies and gentlemen'--he put a communistic fervour of hatred into
the phrase--knew nothing about them. He spoke of the Irish account of
the battle of Clontarf and of the Norse account, and said, that one saw
the Norse and Irish tempers in the two accounts. The Norseman was
interested in the way things are done, but the Irishman turned aside,
evidently well pleased to be out of so dull a business, to describe
beautiful supernatural events. He was thinking, I suppose, of the young
man who came from Aoibhill of the Grey Rock, giving up immortal love and
youth, that he might fight and die by Murrough's side. He said that the
Norseman had the dramatic temper, and the Irishman had the lyrical. I
think I should have said with Professor Ker, epical and romantic rather
than dramatic and lyrical, but his words, which have so great an
authority, mark the distinction very well, and not only between Irish
and Norse, but between Irish and other un-Celtic literatures. The Irish
story-teller could not interest himself with an unbroken interest in the
way men like himself burned a house, or won wives no more wonderful than
themselves. His mind constantly escaped out of daily circumstance, as a
bough that has been held down by a weak hand suddenly straightens itself
out. His imagination was always running to Tir-nan-og, to the Land of
Promise, which is as near to the country-people of to-day as it was to
Cuchulain and his companions. His belief in its nearness, cherished in
its turn the lyrical temper, which is always athirst for an emotion, a
beauty which cannot be found in its perfection upon earth, or only for a
moment. His imagination, which had not been able to believe in
Cuchulain's greatness, until it had brought the Great Queen, the
red-eyebrowed goddess, to woo him upon the battlefield, could not be
satisfied with a friendship less romantic and lyrical than that of
Cuchulain and Ferdiad, who kissed one another after the day's fighting,
or with a love less romantic and lyrical than that of Baile and Aillinn,
who died at the report of one another's deaths, and married in
Tir-nan-og. His art, too, is often at its greatest when it is most
extravagant, for he only feels himself among solid things, among things
with fixed laws and satisfying purposes, when he has reshaped the world
according to his heart's desire. He understands as well as Blake that
the ruins of time build mansions in eternity, and he never allows
anything, that we can see and handle, to remain long unchanged. The
characters must remain the same, but the strength of Fergus may change
so greatly, that he, who a moment before was merely a strong man among
many, becomes the master of Three Blows that would destroy an army, did
they not cut off the heads of three little hills instead, and his sword,
which a fool had been able to steal out of its sheath, has of a sudden
the likeness of a rainbow. A wandering lyric moon must knead and kindle
perpetually that moving world of cloaks made out of the fleeces of
Mananan; of armed men who change themselves into sea-birds; of
goddesses who become crows; of trees that bear fruit and flower at the
same time. The great emotions of love, terror and friendship must alone
remain untroubled by the moon in that world which is still the world of
the Irish country-people, who do not open their eyes very wide at the
most miraculous change, at the most sudden enchantment. Its events, and
things, and people are wild, and are like unbroken horses, that are so
much more beautiful than horses that have learned to run between shafts.
One thinks of actual life, when one reads those Norse stories, which had
shadows of their decadence, so necessary were the proportions of actual
life to their efforts, when a dying man remembered his heroism enough to
look down at his wound and say, 'Those broad spears are coming into
fashion'; but the Irish stories make us understand why some Greek writer
called myths the activities of the daemons. The great virtues, the great
joys, the great privations, come in the myths, and, as it were, take
mankind between their naked arms, and without putting off their
divinity. Poets have chosen their themes more often from stories that
are all, or half, mythological, than from history or stories that give
one the sensation of history, understanding, as I think, that the
imagination which remembers the proportions of life is but a long
wooing, and that it has to forget them before it becomes the torch and
the marriage-bed.
One finds, as one expects, in the work of men who were not troubled
about any probabilities or necessities but those of emotion itself, an
immense variety of incident and character and of ways of expressing
emotion. Cuchulain fights man after man during the quest of the Brown
Bull, and not one of those fights is like another, and not one is
lacking in emotion or strangeness; and when one thinks imagination can
do no more, the story of the Two Bulls, emblematic of all contests,
suddenly lifts romance into prophecy. The characters too have a
distinctness we do not find among the people of the _Mabinogion_,
perhaps not even among the people of the _Morte D'Arthur_. We know we
shall be long forgetting Cuchulain, whose life is vehement and full of
pleasure, as though he always remembered that it was to be soon over; or
the dreamy Fergus who betrays the sons of Usnach for a feast, without
ceasing to be noble; or Conal who is fierce and friendly and
trustworthy, but has not the sap of divinity that makes Cuchulain
mysterious to men, and beloved of women. Women indeed, with their
lamentations for lovers and husbands and sons, and for fallen rooftrees
and lost wealth, give the stories their most beautiful sentences; and,
after Cuchulain, one thinks most of certain great queens--of angry,
amorous Maeve, with her long, pale face; of Findabair, her daughter, who
dies of shame and of pity; of Deirdre, who might be some mild modern
housewife but for her prophetic wisdom. If one does not set Deirdre's
lamentations among the greatest lyric poems of the world, I think one
may be certain that the wine-press of the poets has been trodden for one
in vain; and yet I think it may be proud Emer, Cuchulain's fitting
wife, who will linger longest in the memory. What a pure flame burns in
her always, whether she is the newly-married wife fighting for
precedence, fierce as some beautiful bird, or the confident housewife,
who would awaken her husband from his magic sleep with mocking words; or
the great queen who would get him out of the tightening net of his doom,
by sending him into the Valley of the Deaf, with Niamh, his mistress,
because he will be more obedient to her; or the woman whom sorrow has
set with Helen and Iseult and Brunnhilda, and Deirdre, to share their
immortality in the rosary of the poets.
"And oh! my love!" she said, "we were often in one another's company,
and it was happy for us; for if the world had been searched from the
rising of the sun to sunset, the like would never have been found in one
place, of the Black Sainglain and the Grey of Macha, and Laeg the
chariot-driver, and myself and Cuchulain."
'And after that Emer bade Conal to make a wide, very deep grave for
Cuchulain; and she laid herself down beside her gentle comrade, and she
put her mouth to his mouth, and she said: "Love of my life, my friend,
my sweetheart, my one choice of the men of the earth, many is the woman,
wed or unwed, envied me until to-day; and now I will not stay living
after you."'
To us Irish, these personages should be very moving, very important, for
they lived in the places where we ride and go marketing, and sometimes
they have met one another on the hills that cast their shadows upon our
doors at evening. If we will but tell these stories to our children the
Land will begin again to be a Holy Land, as it was before men gave their
hearts to Greece and Rome and Judea. When I was a child I had only to
climb the hill behind the house to see long, blue, ragged hills flowing
along the southern horizon. What beauty was lost to me, what depth of
emotion is still perhaps lacking in me, because nobody told me, not even
the merchant captains who knew everything, that Cruachan of the
Enchantments lay behind those long, blue, ragged hills!