In a few years the Four Masters were to write the history of that time,
and they were to record the goodness or the badness of Irishman and
Englishman with entire impartiality. They had seen friends and relatives
persecuted, but they would write of that man's poisoning and this man's
charities and of the fall of great houses, and hardly with any other
emotion than a thought of the pitiableness of all life. Friend and enemy
would be for them a part of the spectacle of the world. They remembered
indeed those Anglo-French invaders who conquered for the sake of their
own strong hand, and when they had conquered became a part of the life
about them, singing its songs, when they grew weary of their own Iseult
and Guinevere. The Four Masters had not come to understand, as I think,
despite famines and exterminations, that new invaders were among them,
who fought for an alien State, for an alien religion. Such ideas were
difficult to them, for they belonged to the old individual, poetical
life, and spoke a language even, in which it was all but impossible to
think an abstract thought. They understood Spain, doubtless, which
persecuted in the interests of religion, but I doubt if anybody in
Ireland could have understood as yet that the Anglo-Saxon nation was
beginning to persecute in the service of ideas it believed to be the
foundation of the State. I doubt if anybody in Ireland saw that with
certainty, till the Great Demagogue had come and turned the old house of
the noble into 'the house of the Poor, the lonely house, the accursed
house of Cromwell.' He came, another Cairbry Cat Head, with that great
rabble, who had overthrown the pageantry of Church and Court, but who
turned towards him faces full of the sadness and docility of their long
servitude, and the old individual, poetical life went down, as it seems,
for ever. He had studied Spenser's book and approved of it, as we know,
finding, doubtless, his own head there, for Spenser, a king of the old
race, carried a mirror which showed kings yet to come though but kings
of the mob. Those Bohemian poets of the theatres were wiser, for the
States that touched them nearly were the States where Helen and Dido had
sorrowed, and so their mirrors showed none but beautiful heroical heads.
They wandered in the places that pale passion loves, and were happy, as
one thinks, and troubled little about those marching and
hoarse-throated thoughts that the State has in its pay. They knew that
those marchers, with the dust of so many roads upon them, are very
robust and have great and well-paid generals to write expedient
despatches in sound prose; and they could hear mother earth singing
among her cornfields:
'Weep not, my wanton! smile upon my knee;
When thou art old there's grief enough for thee.'