A few months ago I was on the bare Hill of Allen, 'wide Almhuin of
Leinster,' where Finn and the Fianna are said to have had their house,
although there are no earthen mounds there like those that mark the
sites of old houses on so many hills. A hot sun beat down upon flowering
gorse and flowerless heather; and on every side except the east, where
there were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level horizon and
brown boglands with a few green places and here and there the glitter of
water. One could imagine that had it been twilight and not early
afternoon, and had there been vapours drifting and frothing where there
were now but shadows of clouds, it would have set stirring in one, as
few places even in Ireland can, a thought that is peculiar to Celtic
romance, as I think, a thought of a mystery coming not as with Gothic
nations out of the pressure of darkness, but out of great spaces and
windy light. The hill of Teamhair, or Tara, as it is now called, with
its green mounds and its partly-wooded sides, and its more gradual slope
set among fat grazing lands, with great trees in the hedgerows, had
brought before one imaginations, not of heroes who were in their youth
for hundreds of years, or of women who came to them in the likeness of
hunted fawns, but of kings that lived brief and politic lives, and of
the five white roads that carried their armies to the lesser kingdoms of
Ireland, or brought to the great fair that had given Teamhair its
sovereignty all that sought justice or pleasure or had goods to barter.
It is certain that we must not confuse these kings, as did the medieval
chroniclers, with those half-divine kings of Almhuin. The chroniclers,
perhaps because they loved tradition too well to cast out utterly much
that they dreaded as Christians, and perhaps because popular imagination
had begun the mixture, have mixed one with another ingeniously, making
Finn the head of a kind of Militia under Cormac MacArt, who is supposed
to have reigned at Teamhair in the second century, and making Grania,
who travels to enchanted houses under the cloak of AEngus, god of Love,
and keeps her troubling beauty longer than did Helen hers, Cormac's
daughter, and giving the stories of the Fianna, although the impossible
has thrust its proud finger into them all, a curious air of precise
history. It is only when we separate the stories from that medieval
pedantry, that we recognise one of the oldest worlds that man has
imagined, an older world certainly than we find in the stories of
Cuchulain, who lived, according to the chroniclers, about the time of
the birth of Christ. They are far better known, and we may be certain of
the antiquity of incidents that are known in one form or another to
every Gaelic-speaking countryman in Ireland or in the Highlands of
Scotland. Sometimes a labourer digging near to a cromlech, or Bed of
Diarmuid and Grania as it is called, will tell you a tradition that
seems older and more barbaric than any description of their adventures
or of themselves in written text or in story that has taken form in the
mouths of professed story-tellers. Finn and the Fianna found welcome
among the court poets later than did Cuchulain; and one finds memories
of Danish invasions and standing armies mixed with the imaginations of
hunters and solitary fighters among great woods. We never hear of
Cuchulain delighting in the hunt or in woodland things; and one imagines
that the story-teller would have thought it unworthy in so great a man,
who lived a well-ordered, elaborate life, and could delight in his
chariot and his chariot-driver and his barley-fed horses. If he is in
the woods before dawn we are not told that he cannot know the leaves of
the hazel from the leaves of the oak; and when Emer laments him no wild
creature comes into her thoughts but the cuckoo that cries over
cultivated fields. His story must have come out of a time when the wild
wood was giving way to pasture and tillage, and men had no longer a
reason to consider every cry of the birds or change of the night. Finn,
who was always in the woods, whose battles were but hours amid years of
hunting, delighted in the 'cackling of ducks from the Lake of the Three
Narrows; the scolding talk of the blackbird of Doire an Cairn; the
bellowing of the ox from the Valley of the Berries; the whistle of the
eagle from the Valley of Victories or from the rough branches of the
Ridge of the Stream; the grouse of the heather of Cruachan; the call of
the otter of Druim re Coir.' When sorrow comes upon the queens of the
stories, they have sympathy for the wild birds and beasts that are like
themselves: 'Credhe wife of Cael came with the others and went looking
through the bodies for her comely comrade, and crying as she went. And
as she was searching she saw a crane of the meadows and her two
nestlings, and the cunning beast the fox watching the nestlings; and
when the crane covered one of the birds to save it, he would make a rush
at the other bird, the way she had to stretch herself out over the
birds; and she would sooner have got her own death by the fox than the
nestlings to be killed by him. And Credhe was looking at that, and she
said: "It is no wonder I to have such love for my comely sweetheart, and
the bird in that distress about her nestlings."'
One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that
howls at something a man's eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive
lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious of many
things that we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly,
more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away. Although the
gods come to Cuchulain, and although he is the son of one of the
greatest of them, their country and his are far apart, and they come to
him as god to mortal; but Finn is their equal. He is continually in
their houses; he meets with Bodb Dearg, and AEngus, and Mananan, now as
friend with friend, now as with an enemy he overcomes in battle; and
when he has need of their help his messenger can say: 'There is not a
king's son or a prince, or a leader of the Fianna of Ireland, without
having a wife or a mother or a foster-mother or a sweetheart of the
Tuatha de Danaan.' When the Fianna are broken up at last, after hundreds
of years of hunting, it is doubtful that he dies at all, and certain
that he comes again in some other shape, and Oisin, his son, is made
king over a divine country. The birds and beasts that cross his path in
the woods have been fighting-men or great enchanters or fair women, and
in a moment can take some beautiful or terrible shape. We think of him
and of his people as great-bodied men with large movements, that seem,
as it were, flowing out of some deep below the shallow stream of
personal impulse, men that have broad brows and quiet eyes full of
confidence in a good luck that proves every day afresh that they are a
portion of the strength of things. They are hardly so much individual
men as portions of universal nature, like the clouds that shape
themselves and reshape themselves momentarily, or like a bird between
two boughs, or like the gods that have given the apples and the nuts;
and yet this but brings them the nearer to us, for we can remake them in
our image when we will, and the woods are the more beautiful for the
thought. Do we not always fancy hunters to be something like this, and
is not that why we think them poetical when we meet them of a sudden, as
in these lines in _Pauline_?
'An old hunter
Talking with gods; or a high-crested chief
Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos.'
One must not expect in these stories the epic lineaments, the many
incidents woven into one great event of, let us say, the story of the
War for the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, or that of the last gathering at
Muirthemne. Even _Diarmuid and Grania_, which is a long story, has
nothing of the clear outlines of _Deirdre_, and is indeed but a
succession of detached episodes. The men who imagined the Fianna had the
imagination of children, and as soon as they had invented one wonder,
heaped another on top of it. Children--or, at any rate, it is so I
remember my own childhood--do not understand large design, and they
delight in little shut-in places where they can play at houses more than
in great expanses where a country-side takes, as it were, the impression
of a thought. The wild creatures and the green things are more to them
than to us, for they creep towards our light by little holes and
crevices. When they imagine a country for themselves it is always a
country where you can wander without aim, and where you can never know
from one place what another will be like, or know from the one day's
adventure what may meet you with to-morrow's sun.
Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions they
will put away for one reason or another before they grow into ordinary
men and women. Mankind as a whole had a like dream once; everybody and
nobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient story-tellers are
there to make us remember what mankind would have been like, had not
fear and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped up its heels.
The Fianna and their like are themselves so full of power, and they are
set in a world so fluctuating and dreamlike, that nothing can hold them
from being all that the heart desires.
I have read in a fabulous book that Adam had but to imagine a bird and
it was born into life, and that he created all things out of himself by
nothing more important than an unflagging fancy; and heroes who can make
a ship out of a shaving have but little less of the divine prerogatives.
They have no speculative thoughts to wander through eternity and waste
heroic blood; but how could that be otherwise? for it is at all times
the proud angels who sit thinking upon the hill-side and not the people
of Eden. One morning we meet them hunting a stag that is 'as joyful as
the leaves of a tree in summertime'; and whatever they do, whether they
listen to the harp or follow an enchanter over-sea, they do for the sake
of joy, their joy in one another, or their joy in pride and movement;
and even their battles are fought more because of their delight in a
good fighter than because of any gain that is in victory. They live
always as if they were playing a game; and so far as they have any
deliberate purpose at all, it is that they may become great gentlemen
and be worthy of the songs of the poets. It has been said, and I think
the Japanese were the first to say it, that the four essential virtues
are to be generous among the weak, and truthful among one's friends, and
brave among one's enemies, and courteous at all times; and if we
understand by courtesy not merely the gentleness the story-tellers have
celebrated, but a delight in courtly things, in beautiful clothing and
in beautiful verse, one understands that it was no formal succession of
trials that bound the Fianna to one another. Only the Table Round, that
is indeed, as it seems, a rivulet from the same well-head, is bound in a
like fellowship, and there the four heroic virtues are troubled by the
abstract virtues of the cloister. Every now and then some noble knight
builds a cell upon the hill-side, or leaves kind women and joyful
knights to seek the vision of the Grail in lonely adventures. But when
Oisin or some kingly forerunner--Bran, son of Febal, or the like--rides
or sails in an enchanted ship to some divine country, he but looks for a
more delighted companionship, or to be in love with faces that will
never fade. No thought of any life greater than that of love, and the
companionship of those that have drawn their swords upon the darkness of
the world, ever troubles their delight in one another as it troubles
Iseult amid her love, or Arthur amid his battles. It is an ailment of
our speculation that thought, when it is not the planning of something,
or the doing of something, or some memory of a plain circumstance,
separates us from one another because it makes us always more unlike,
and because no thought passes through another's ear unchanged.
Companionship can only be perfect when it is founded on things, for
things are always the same under the hand, and at last one comes to hear
with envy the voices of boys lighting a lantern to ensnare moths, or of
the maids chattering in the kitchen about the fox that carried off a
turkey before breakfast. Lady Gregory's book of tales is full of
fellowship untroubled like theirs, and made noble by a courtesy that has
gone perhaps out of the world. I do not know in literature better
friends and lovers. When one of the Fianna finds Osgar dying the proud
death of a young man, and asks is it well with him, he is answered, 'I
am as you would have me be.' The very heroism of the Fianna is indeed
but their pride and joy in one another, their good fellowship. Goll, old
and savage, and letting himself die of hunger in a cave because he is
angry and sorry, can speak lovely words to the wife whose help he
refuses. 'It is best as it is,' he said, 'and I never took the advice of
a woman east or west, and I never will take it. And oh, sweet-voiced
queen,' he said, 'what ails you to be fretting after me? And remember
now your silver and your gold, and your silks ... and do not be crying
tears after me, queen with the white hands,' he said, 'but remember your
constant lover Aodh, son of the best woman of the world, that came from
Spain asking for you, and that I fought on Corcar-an-Dearg; and go to
him now,' he said, 'for it is bad when a woman is without a good man.'
They have no asceticism, but they are more visionary than any ascetic,
and their invisible life is but the life about them made more perfect
and more lasting, and the invisible people are their own images in the
water. Their gods may have been much besides this, for we know them from
fragments of mythology picked out with trouble from a fantastic history
running backward to Adam and Eve, and many things that may have seemed
wicked to the monks who imagined that history, may have been altered or
left out; but this they must have been essentially, for the old stories
are confirmed by apparitions among the country-people to-day. The Men of
Dea fought against the mis-shapen Fomor, as Finn fights against the
Cat-Heads and the Dog-Heads; and when they are overcome at last by men,
they make themselves houses in the hearts of hills that are like the
houses of men. When they call men to their houses and to their Country
Under-Wave they promise them all that they have upon earth, only in
greater abundance. The god Midhir sings to Queen Etain in one of the
most beautiful of the stories: 'The young never grow old; the fields and
the flowers are as pleasant to be looking at as the blackbird's eggs;
warm streams of mead and wine flow through that country; there is no
care or no sorrow on any person; we see others, but we ourselves are not
seen.' These gods are indeed more wise and beautiful than men; but men,
when they are great men, are stronger than they are, for men are, as it
were, the foaming tide-line of their sea. One remembers the Druid who
answered, when someone asked him who made the world, 'The Druids made
it.' All was indeed but one life flowing everywhere, and taking one
quality here, another there. It sometimes seems as if there is a kind of
day and night of religion, and that a period when the influences are
those that shape the world is followed by a period when the greater
power is in influences that would lure the soul out of the world, out of
the body. When Oisin is speaking with St. Patrick of the friends and the
life he has outlived, he can but cry out constantly against a religion
that has no meaning for him. He laments, and the country-people have
remembered his words for centuries: 'I will cry my fill, but not for
God, but because Finn and the Fianna are not living.'
Old writers had an admirable symbolism that attributed certain energies
to the influence of the sun, and certain others to the lunar influence.
To lunar influence belong all thoughts and emotions that were created by
the community, by the common people, by nobody knows who, and to the sun
all that came from the high disciplined or individual kingly mind. I
myself imagine a marriage of the sun and moon in the arts I take most
pleasure in; and now bride and bridegroom but exchange, as it were, full
cups of gold and silver, and now they are one in a mystical embrace.
From the moon come the folk-songs imagined by reapers and spinners out
of the common impulse of their labour, and made not by putting words
together, but by mixing verses and phrases, and the folk-tales made by
the capricious mixing of incidents known to everybody in new ways, as
one deals out cards, never getting the same hand twice over. When one
hears some fine story, one never knows whether it has not been hazard
that put the last touch of adventure. Such poetry, as it seems to me,
desires an infinity of wonder or emotion, for where there is no
individual mind there is no measurer-out, no marker-in of limits. The
poor fisher has no possession of the world and no responsibility for it;
and if he dreams of a love-gift better than the brown shawl that seems
too common for poetry, why should he not dream of a glove made from the
skin of a bird, or shoes made from the skin of a herring, or a coat made
from the glittering garment of the salmon? Was it not AEschylus who said
he but served up fragments from the banquet of Homer?--but Homer
himself found the great banquet of an earthen floor and under a broken
roof. We do not know who at the foundation of the world made the banquet
for the first time, or who put the pack of cards into rough hands; but
we do know that, unless those that have made many inventions are about
to change the nature of poetry, we may have to go where Homer went if we
are to sing a new song. Is it because all that is under the moon thirsts
to escape out of bounds, to lose itself in some unbounded tidal stream,
that the songs of the folk are mournful, and that the story of the
Fianna, whenever the queens lament for their lovers, reminds us of songs
that are still sung in country-places? Their grief, even when it is to
be brief like Grania's, goes up into the waste places of the sky. But in
supreme art, or in supreme life there is the influence of the sun too,
and the sun brings with it, as old writers tell us, not merely
discipline but joy; for its discipline is not of the kind the multitudes
impose upon us by their weight and pressure, but the expression of the
individual soul, turning itself into a pure fire and imposing its own
pattern, its own music, upon the heaviness and the dumbness that is in
others and in itself. When we have drunk the cold cup of the moon's
intoxication, we thirst for something beyond ourselves, and the mind
flows outward to a natural immensity; but if we have drunk from the hot
cup of the sun, our own fulness awakens, we desire little, for wherever
one goes one's heart goes too; and if any ask what music is the
sweetest, we can but answer, as Finn answered, 'What happens.' And yet
the songs and stories that have come from either influence are a part,
neither less than the other, of the pleasure that is the bride-bed of
poetry.
Gaelic-speaking Ireland, because its art has been made, not by the
artist choosing his material from wherever he has a mind to, but by
adding a little to something which it has taken generations to invent,
has always had a popular literature. We cannot say how much that
literature has done for the vigour of the race, for who can count the
hands its praise of kings and high-hearted queens made hot upon the
sword-hilt, or the amorous eyes it made lustful for strength and beauty?
We remember indeed that when the farming people and the labourers of the
towns made their last attempt to cast out England by force of arms they
named themselves after the companions of Finn. Even when Gaelic has gone
and the poetry with it, something of the habit of mind remains in ways
of speech and thought and 'come-all-ye's' and poetical sayings; nor is
it only among the poor that the old thought has been for strength or
weakness. Surely these old stories, whether of Finn or Cuchulain, helped
to sing the old Irish and the old Norman-Irish aristocracy to their end.
They heard their hereditary poets and story-tellers, and they took to
horse and died fighting against Elizabeth or against Cromwell; and when
an English-speaking aristocracy had their place, it listened to no
poetry indeed, but it felt about it in the popular mind an exacting and
ancient tribunal, and began a play that had for spectators men and
women that loved the high wasteful virtues. I do not think that their
own mixed blood or the habit of their time need take all, or nearly all,
credit or discredit for the impulse that made those gentlemen of the
eighteenth century fight duels over pocket-handkerchiefs, and set out to
play ball against the gates of Jerusalem for a wager, and scatter money
before the public eye; and at last, after an epoch of such eloquence the
world has hardly seen its like, lose their public spirit and their high
heart, and grow querulous and selfish, as men do who have played life
out not heartily but with noise and tumult. Had they known the people
and the game a little better, they might have created an aristocracy in
an age that has lost the understanding of the word. When one reads of
the Fianna, or of Cuchulain, or of any of their like, one remembers that
the fine life is always a part played finely before fine spectators.
There also one notices the hot cup and the cold cup of intoxication; and
when the fine spectators have ended, surely the fine players grow
weary, and aristocratic life is ended. When O'Connell covered with a
dark glove the hand that had killed a man in the duelling-field, he
played his part; and when Alexander stayed his army marching to the
conquest of the world that he might contemplate the beauty of a
plane-tree, he played his part. When Osgar complained as he lay dying of
the keening of the women and the old fighting-men, he too played his
part; 'No man ever knew any heart in me,' he said, 'but a heart of
twisted horn, and it covered with iron; but the howling of the dogs
beside me,' he said, 'and the keening of the old fighting-men and the
crying of the women one after another, those are the things that are
vexing me.' If we would create a great community--and what other game is
so worth the labour?--we must re-create the old foundations of life, not
as they existed in that splendid misunderstanding of the eighteenth
century, but as they must always exist when the finest minds and Ned the
beggar and Seaghan the fool think about the same thing, although they
may not think the same thought about it.
When I asked the little boy who had shown me the pathway up the Hill of
Allen if he knew stories of Finn and Oisin, he said he did not, but that
he had often heard his grandfather telling them to his mother in Irish.
He did not know Irish, but he was learning it at school, and all the
little boys he knew were learning it. In a little while he will know
enough stories of Finn and Oisin to tell them to his children some day.
It is the owners of the land whose children might never have known what
would give them so much happiness. But now they can read Lady Gregory's
book to their children, and it will make Slieve-na-man, Allen, and
Benbulben, the great mountain that showed itself before me every day
through all my childhood and was yet unpeopled, and half the
country-sides of south and west, as populous with memories as her
Cuchulain of Muirthemne will have made Dundealgan and Emain Macha and
Muirthemne; and after a while somebody may even take them to some
famous place and say, 'This land where your fathers lived proudly and
finely should be dear and dear and again dear;' and perhaps when many
names have grown musical to their ears, a more imaginative love will
have taught them a better service.