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TO THE MEMORY
OF
WORDSWORTH.
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AUTHOR’S PREFACE
TO
“THE LEGENDS OF SAINT PATRICK.”
THE ancient records of Ireland abound in legends respecting the greatest
man and the greatest benefactor that ever trod her soil; and of these the
earlier are at once the more authentic and the nobler. Not a few have a
character of the sublime; many are pathetic; some have a profound meaning
under a strange disguise; but their predominant character is their
brightness and gladsomeness. A large tract of Irish history is dark: but
the time of Saint Patrick, and the three centuries which succeeded it,
were her time of joy. That chronicle is a song of gratitude and hope, as
befits the story of a nation’s conversion to Christianity, and in it the
bird and the brook blend their carols with those of angels and of men.
It was otherwise with the later legends connecting Ossian with Saint
Patrick. A poet once remarked, while studying the frescoes of Michael
Angelo in the Sistine Chapel, that the Sibyls are always sad, while the
Prophets alternated with them are joyous. In the legends of the
Patrician Cycle the chief-loving old Bard is ever mournful, for his face
is turned to the past glories of his country; while the Saint is always
bright, because his eyes are set on to the glory that has no end.
These legends are to be found chiefly in several very ancient lives of
Saint Patrick, the most valuable of which is the “Tripartite Life,”
ascribed by Colgan to the century after the Saint’s death, though it has
not escaped later interpolations. The work was long lost, but two copies
of it were re-discovered, one of which has been recently translated by
that eminent Irish scholar, Mr. Hennessy. Whether regarded from the
religious or the philosophic point of view, few things can be more
instructive than the picture which it delineates of human nature at a
period of critical transition, and the dawning of the Religion of Peace
upon a race barbaric, but far indeed from savage. That wild race
regarded it doubtless as a notable cruelty when the new Faith discouraged
an amusement so popular as battle; but in many respects they were in
sympathy with that Faith. It was one in which the nobler affections, as
well as the passions, retained an unblunted ardour; and where Nature is
strongest and least corrupted it most feels the need of something higher
than itself, its interpreter and its supplement. It prized the family
ties, like the Germans recorded by Tacitus; and it could not but have
been drawn to Christianity, which consecrated them. Its morals were
pure, and it had not lost that simplicity to which so much of spiritual
insight belongs. Admiration and wonder were among its chief habits; and
it would not have been repelled by Mysteries in what professed to belong
to the Infinite. Lawless as it was, it abounded also in loyalty,
generosity, and self-sacrifice; it was not, therefore, untouched by the
records of martyrs, examples of self-sacrifice, or the doctrine of a
great Sacrifice. It loved children and the poor; and Christianity made
the former the exemplars of faith, and the latter the eminent inheritors
of the Kingdom. On the other hand, all the vices of the race ranged
themselves against the new religion.
In the main the institutions and traditions of Ireland were favourable to
Christianity. She had preserved in a large measure the patriarchal
system of the East. Her clans were families, and her chiefs were
patriarchs who led their households to battle, and seized or recovered
the spoil. To such a people the Christian Church announced herself as a
great family—the family of man. Her genealogies went up to the first
parent, and her rule was parental rule. The kingdom of Christ was the
household of Christ; and its children in all lands formed the tribes of a
larger Israel. Its laws were living traditions; and for traditions the
Irish had ever retained the Eastern reverence.
In the Druids no formidable enemy was found; it was the Bards who wielded
the predominant social influence. As in Greece, where the sacerdotal
power was small, the Bards were the priests of the national Imagination,
and round them all moral influences had gathered themselves. They were
jealous of their rivals; but those rivals won them by degrees. Secknall
and Fiacc were Christian Bards, trained by St. Patrick, who is said to
have also brought a bard with him from Italy. The beautiful legend in
which the Saint loosened the tongue of the dumb child was an apt emblem
of Christianity imparting to the Irish race the highest use of its
natural faculties. The Christian clergy turned to account the Irish
traditions, as they had made use of the Pagan temples, purifying them
first. The Christian religion looked with a genuine kindness on whatever
was human, except so far as the stain was on it; and while it resisted to
the face what was unchristian in spirit, it also, in the Apostolic sense,
“made itself all things to all men.” As legislator, Saint Patrick waged
no needless war against the ancient laws of Ireland. He purified them,
and he amplified them, discarding only what was unfit for a nation made
Christian. Thus was produced the great “Book of the Law,” or “Senchus
Mohr,” compiled A.D. 439.
The Irish received the Gospel gladly. The great and the learned, in
other nations the last to believe, among them commonly set the example.
With the natural disposition of the race an appropriate culture had
concurred. It was one which at least did not fail to develop the
imagination, the affections, and a great part of the moral being, and
which thus indirectly prepared ardent natures, and not less the heroic
than the tender, to seek their rest in spiritual things, rather than in
material or conventional. That culture, without removing the barbaric,
had blended it with the refined. It had created among the people an
appreciation of the beautiful, the pathetic, and the pure. The early
Irish chronicles, as well as songs, show how strong among them that
sentiment had ever been. The Borromean Tribute, for so many ages the
source of relentless wars, had been imposed in vengeance for an insult
offered to a woman; and a discourtesy shown to a poet had overthrown an
ancient dynasty. The education of an Ollambh occupied twelve years; and
in the third century, the time of Oiseen and Fionn, the military rules of
the Feinè included provisions which the chivalry of later ages might have
been proud of. It was a wild, but not wholly an ungentle time. An
unprovoked affront was regarded as a grave moral offence; and severe
punishments were ordained, not only for detraction, but for a word,
though uttered in jest, which brought a blush on the cheek of a listener.
Yet an injury a hundred years old could meet no forgiveness, and the life
of man was war! It was not that laws were wanting; a code, minute in its
justice, had proportioned a penalty to every offence, and specified the
_Eric_ which was to wipe out the bloodstain in case the injured party
renounced his claim to right his own wrong. It was not that hearts were
hard—there was at least as much pity for others as for self. It was that
anger was implacable, and that where fear was unknown, the war field was
what among us the hunting field is.
The rapid growth of learning as well as piety in the three centuries
succeeding the conversion of Ireland, prove that the country had not been
till then without a preparation for the gift. It had been the special
skill of Saint Patrick to build the good which was lacked upon that which
existed. Even the material arts of Ireland he had pressed into the
service of the Faith; and Irish craftsmen had assisted him, not only in
the building of his churches, but in casting his church bells, and in the
adornment of his chalices, crosiers, and ecclesiastical vestments. Once
elevated by Christianity, Ireland’s early civilisation was a memorable
thing. It sheltered a high virtue at home, and evangelised a great part
of Northern Europe; and amidst many confusions it held its own till the
true time of barbarism had set in—those two disastrous centuries when the
Danish invasions trod down the sanctuaries, dispersed the libraries, and
laid waste the colleges to which distant kings had sent their sons.
Perhaps nothing human had so large an influence in the conversion of the
Irish as the personal character of her Apostle. Where others, as
Palladius, had failed, he succeeded. By nature, by grace, and by
providential training, he had been specially fitted for his task. We can
still see plainly even the finer traits of that character, while the land
of his birth is a matter of dispute, and of his early history we know
little, except that he was of noble birth, that he was carried to Ireland
by pirates at the age of sixteen, and that after five years of bondage he
escaped thence, to return A.D. 432, when about forty-five years old;
belonging thus to that great age of the Church which was made illustrious
by the most eminent of its Fathers, and tasked by the most critical of
its trials. In him a great character had been built on the foundations
of a devout childhood, and of a youth ennobled by adversity. Everywhere
we trace the might and the sweetness which belonged to it, the versatile
mind yet the simple heart, the varying tact yet the fixed resolve, the
large design taking counsel for all, yet the minute solicitude for each,
the fiery zeal yet the genial temper, the skill in using means yet the
reliance on God alone, the readiness in action with the willingness to
wait, the habitual self-possession yet the outbursts of an inspiration
which raised him above himself, the abiding consciousness of authority—an
authority in him, but not of him—and yet the ever-present humility.
Above all, there burned in him that boundless love, which seems the main
constituent of the Apostolic character. It was love for God; but it was
love for man also, an impassioned love, and a parental compassion. It
was not for the spiritual weal alone of man that he thirsted. Wrong and
injustice to the poor he resented as an injury to God. His vehement love
for the poor is illustrated by his “Epistle to Coroticus,” reproaching
him with his cruelty, as well as by his denunciations of slavery, which
piracy had introduced into parts of Ireland. No wonder that such a
character should have exercised a talismanic power over the ardent and
sensitive race among whom he laboured, a race “easy to be drawn, but
impossible to be driven,” and drawn more by sympathy than even by
benefits. That character can only be understood by one who studies, and
in a right spirit, that account of his life which he bequeathed to us
shortly before its close—the “Confession of Saint Patrick.” The last
poem in this series embodies its most characteristic portions, including
the visions which it records.
The “Tripartite Life” thus ends:—“After these great miracles, therefore,
after resuscitating the dead, after healing lepers, and the blind, and
the deaf, and the lame, and all diseases; after ordaining bishops, and
priests, and deacons, and people of all orders in the Church; after
teaching the men of Erin, and after baptising them; after founding
churches and monasteries; after destroying idols and images and Druidical
arts, the hour of death of Saint Patrick approached. He received the
body of Christ from the Bishop Tassach, according to the counsel of the
Angel Victor. He resigned his spirit afterwards to Heaven, in the one
hundred and twentieth year of his age. His body is still here in the
earth, with honour and reverence. Though great his honour here, greater
honour will be to him in the Day of Judgment, when judgment will be given
on the fruit of his teaching, as of every great Apostle, in the union of
the Apostles and Disciples of Jesus; in the union of the Nine Orders of
Angels, which cannot be surpassed; in the union of the Divinity and
Humanity of the Son of God; in the union, which is higher than all
unions, of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”