LAST night I went to a wide place on the Kiltartan road to listen to
some Irish songs. While I waited for the singers an old man sang about
that country beauty who died so many years ago, and spoke of a singer
he had known who sang so beautifully that no horse would pass him,
but must turn its head and cock its ears to listen. Presently a score
of men and boys and girls, with shawls over their heads, gathered
under the trees to listen. Somebody sang _Sa Muirnín Díles_, and then
somebody else _Jimmy Mo Mílestór_, mournful songs of separation, of
death, and of exile. Then some of the men stood up and began to dance,
while another lilted the measure they danced to, and then somebody
sang _Eiblín a Rúin_, that glad song of meeting which has always
moved me more than other songs, because the lover who made it sang it
to his sweetheart under the shadow of a mountain I looked at every
day through my childhood. The voices melted into the twilight, and
were mixed into the trees, and when I thought of the words they too
melted away, and were mixed with the generations of men. Now it was a
phrase, now it was an attitude of mind, an emotional form, that had
carried my memory to older verses, or even to forgotten mythologies.
I was carried so far that it was as though I came to one of the four
rivers, and followed it under the wall of Paradise to the roots of the
trees of knowledge and of life. There is no song or story handed down
among the cottages that has not words and thoughts to carry one as
far, for though one can know but a little of their ascent, one knows
that they ascend like mediæval genealogies through unbroken dignities
to the beginning of the world. Folk art is, indeed, the oldest of the
aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and
trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and
insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and
most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where
all great art is rooted. Wherever it is spoken by the fireside, or sung
by the roadside, or carved upon the lintel, appreciation of the arts
that a single mind gives unity and design to, spreads quickly when its
hour is come.
In a society that has cast out imaginative tradition, only a few
people—three or four thousand out of millions—favoured by their own
characters and by happy circumstance, and only then after much labour,
have understanding of imaginative things, and yet ‘the imagination
is the man himself.’ The churches in the Middle Age won all the arts
into their service because men understood that when imagination is
impoverished, a principal voice—some would say the only voice—for the
awakening of wise hope and durable faith, and understanding charity,
can speak but in broken words, if it does not fall silent. And so
it has always seemed to me that we, who would reawaken imaginative
tradition by making old songs live again, or by gathering old stories
into books, take part in the quarrel of Galilee. Those who are Irish
and would spread foreign ways, which, for all but a few, are ways of
spiritual poverty, take part also. Their part is with who those who
were of Jewry, and yet cried out, ‘If thou let this man go thou art not
Cæsar’s friend.’
1901.
_INTO THE TWILIGHT_
_Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight;
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
Thy mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight gray;
Though hope fall from thee or love decay
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill,
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of hollow wood and the hilly wood
And the changing moon work out their will.
And God stands winding his lonely horn;
And Time and the World are ever in flight,
And love is less kind than the gray twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn._