Dr. Corbett, Bishop of Oxford and Norwich, lamented long ago the
departure of the English fairies. "In Queen Mary's time" he wrote--
"When Tom came home from labour,
Or Cis to milking rose,
Then merrily, merrily went their tabor,
And merrily went their toes."
But now, in the times of James, they had all gone, for "they were of the
old profession," and "their songs were Ave Maries." In Ireland they are
still extant, giving gifts to the kindly, and plaguing the surly. "Have
you ever seen a fairy or such like?" I asked an old man in County Sligo.
"Amn't I annoyed with them," was the answer. "Do the fishermen along
here know anything of the mermaids?" I asked a woman of a village in
County Dublin. "Indeed, they don't like to see them at all," she
answered, "for they always bring bad weather." "Here is a man who
believes in ghosts," said a foreign sea-captain, pointing to a pilot of
my acquaintance. "In every house over there," said the pilot, pointing
to his native village of Rosses, "there are several." Certainly that now
old and much respected dogmatist, the Spirit of the Age, has in no
manner made his voice heard down there. In a little while, for he has
gotten a consumptive appearance of late, he will be covered over
decently in his grave, and another will grow, old and much respected, in
his place, and never be heard of down there, and after him another and
another and another. Indeed, it is a question whether any of these
personages will ever be heard of outside the newspaper offices and
lecture-rooms and drawing-rooms and eel-pie houses of the cities, or if
the Spirit of the Age is at any time more than a froth. At any rate,
whole troops of their like will not change the Celt much. Giraldus
Cambrensis found the people of the western islands a trifle paganish.
"How many gods are there?" asked a priest, a little while ago, of a man
from the Island of Innistor. "There is one on Innistor; but this seems a
big place," said the man, and the priest held up his hands in horror, as
Giraldus had, just seven centuries before. Remember, I am not blaming
the man; it is very much better to believe in a number of gods than in
none at all, or to think there is only one, but that he is a little
sentimental and impracticable, and not constructed for the nineteenth
century. The Celt, and his cromlechs, and his pillar-stones, these will
not change much--indeed, it is doubtful if anybody at all changes at any
time. In spite of hosts of deniers, and asserters, and wise-men, and
professors, the majority still are averse to sitting down to dine
thirteen at table, or being helped to salt, or walking under a ladder,
or seeing a single magpie flirting his chequered tail. There are, of
course, children of light who have set their faces against all this,
though even a newspaper man, if you entice him into a cemetery at
midnight, will believe in phantoms, for every one is a visionary, if you
scratch him deep enough. But the Celt is a visionary without scratching.
Yet, be it noticed, if you are a stranger, you will not readily get
ghost and fairy legends, even in a western village. You must go adroitly
to work, and make friends with the children, and the old men, with those
who have not felt the pressure of mere daylight existence, and those
with whom it is growing less, and will have altogether taken itself off
one of these days. The old women are most learned, but will not so
readily be got to talk, for the fairies are very secretive, and much
resent being talked of; and are there not many stories of old women who
were nearly pinched into their graves or numbed with fairy blasts?
At sea, when the nets are out and the pipes are lit, then will some
ancient hoarder of tales become loquacious, telling his histories to
the tune of the creaking of the boats. Holy-eve night, too, is a great
time, and in old days many tales were to be heard at wakes. But the
priests have set faces against wakes.
In the Parochial Survey of Ireland it is recorded how the
story-tellers used to gather together of an evening, and if any had a
different version from the others, they would all recite theirs and
vote, and the man who had varied would have to abide by their verdict.
In this way stories have been handed down with such accuracy, that the
long tale of Dierdre was, in the earlier decades of this century, told
almost word for word, as in the very ancient MSS. in the Royal Dublin
Society. In one case only it varied, and then the MS. was obviously
wrong--a passage had been forgotten by the copyist. But this accuracy
is rather in the folk and bardic tales than in the fairy legends, for
these vary widely, being usually adapted to some neighbouring village
or local fairy-seeing celebrity. Each county has usually some family,
or personage, supposed to have been favoured or plagued, especially by
the phantoms, as the Hackets of Castle Hacket, Galway, who had for
their ancestor a fairy, or John-o'-Daly of Lisadell, Sligo, who wrote
"Eilleen Aroon," the song the Scotch have stolen and called "Robin
Adair," and which Handel would sooner have written than all his
oratorios,[1] and the "O'Donahue of Kerry." Round these men stories
tended to group themselves, sometimes deserting more ancient heroes
for the purpose. Round poets have they gathered especially, for poetry
in Ireland has always been mysteriously connected with magic.
These folk-tales are full of simplicity and musical occurrences, for
they are the literature of a class for whom every incident in the old
rut of birth, love, pain, and death has cropped up unchanged for
centuries: who have steeped everything in the heart: to whom
everything is a symbol. They have the spade over which man has leant
from the beginning. The people of the cities have the machine, which
is prose and a _parvenu_. They have few events. They can turn over the
incidents of a long life as they sit by the fire. With us nothing has
time to gather meaning, and too many things are occurring for even a
big heart to hold. It is said the most eloquent people in the world
are the Arabs, who have only the bare earth of the desert and a sky
swept bare by the sun. "Wisdom has alighted upon three things," goes
their proverb; "the hand of the Chinese, the brain of the Frank, and
the tongue of the Arab." This, I take it, is the meaning of that
simplicity sought for so much in these days by all the poets, and not
to be had at any price.
The most notable and typical story-teller of my acquaintance is one
Paddy Flynn, a little, bright-eyed, old man, living in a leaky
one-roomed cottage of the village of B----, "The most gentle--_i.e._,
fairy--place in the whole of the County Sligo," he says, though
others claim that honour for Drumahair or for Drumcliff. A very pious
old man, too! You may have some time to inspect his strange figure and
ragged hair, if he happen to be in a devout humour, before he comes to
the doings of the gentry. A strange devotion! Old tales of Columkill,
and what he said to his mother. "How are you to-day, mother?" "Worse!"
"May you be worse to-morrow;" and on the next day, "How are you
to-day, mother?" "Worse!" "May you be worse to-morrow;" and on the
next, "How are you to-day, mother?" "Better, thank God." "May you be
better to-morrow." In which undutiful manner he will tell you
Columkill inculcated cheerfulness. Then most likely he will wander off
into his favourite theme--how the Judge smiles alike in rewarding the
good and condemning the lost to unceasing flames. Very consoling does
it appear to Paddy Flynn, this melancholy and apocalyptic cheerfulness
of the Judge. Nor seems his own cheerfulness quite earthly--though a
very palpable cheerfulness. The first time I saw him he was cooking
mushrooms for himself; the next time he was asleep under a hedge,
smiling in his sleep. Assuredly some joy not quite of this steadfast
earth lightens in those eyes--swift as the eyes of a rabbit--among so
many wrinkles, for Paddy Flynn is very old. A melancholy there is in
the midst of their cheerfulness--a melancholy that is almost a portion
of their joy, the visionary melancholy of purely instinctive natures
and of all animals. In the triple solitude of age and eccentricity and
partial deafness he goes about much pestered by children.
As to the reality of his fairy and spirit-seeing powers, not all are
agreed. One day we were talking of the Banshee. "I have seen it," he
said, "down there by the water 'batting' the river with its hands."
He it was who said the fairies annoyed him.
Not that the Sceptic is entirely afar even from these western
villages. I found him one morning as he bound his corn in a merest
pocket-handkerchief of a field. Very different from Paddy
Flynn--Scepticism in every wrinkle of his face, and a travelled man,
too!--a foot-long Mohawk Indian tatooed on one of his arms to evidence
the matter. "They who travel," says a neighbouring priest, shaking his
head over him, and quoting Thomas Á'Kempis, "seldom come home holy." I
had mentioned ghosts to this Sceptic. "Ghosts," said he; "there are no
such things at all, at all, but the gentry, they stand to reason; for
the devil, when he fell out of heaven, took the weak-minded ones with
him, and they were put into the waste places. And that's what the
gentry are. But they are getting scarce now, because their time's
over, ye see, and they're going back. But ghosts, no! And I'll tell ye
something more I don't believe in--the fire of hell;" then, in a low
voice, "that's only invented to give the priests and the parsons
something to do." Thereupon this man, so full of enlightenment,
returned to his corn-binding.
The various collectors of Irish folk-lore have, from our point of
view, one great merit, and from the point of view of others, one great
fault. They have made their work literature rather than science, and
told us of the Irish peasantry rather than of the primitive religion
of mankind, or whatever else the folk-lorists are on the gad after. To
be considered scientists they should have tabulated all their tales in
forms like grocers' bills--item the fairy king, item the queen.
Instead of this they have caught the very voice of the people, the
very pulse of life, each giving what was most noticed in his day.
Croker and Lover, full of the ideas of harum-scarum Irish gentility,
saw everything humorised. The impulse of the Irish literature of their
time came from a class that did not--mainly for political
reasons--take the populace seriously, and imagined the country as a
humorist's Arcadia; its passion, its gloom, its tragedy, they knew
nothing of. What they did was not wholly false; they merely magnified
an irresponsible type, found oftenest among boatmen, carmen, and
gentlemen's servants, into the type of a whole nation, and created the
stage Irishman. The writers of 'Forty-eight, and the famine combined,
burst their bubble. Their work had the dash as well as the shallowness
of an ascendant and idle class, and in Croker is touched everywhere
with beauty--a gentle Arcadian beauty. Carleton, a peasant born, has
in many of his stories--I have been only able to give a few of the
slightest--more especially in his ghost stories, a much more serious
way with him, for all his humour. Kennedy, an old bookseller in
Dublin, who seems to have had a something of genuine belief in the
fairies, came next in time. He has far less literary faculty, but is
wonderfully accurate, giving often the very words the stories were
told in. But the best book since Croker is Lady Wilde's _Ancient
Legends_. The humour has all given way to pathos and tenderness. We
have here the innermost heart of the Celt in the moments he has grown
to love through years of persecution, when, cushioning himself about
with dreams, and hearing fairy-songs in the twilight, he ponders on
the soul and on the dead. Here is the Celt, only it is the Celt
dreaming.
Besides these are two writers of importance, who have published, so
far, nothing in book shape--Miss Letitia Maclintock and Mr. Douglas
Hyde. Miss Maclintock writes accurately and beautifully the half
Scotch dialect of Ulster; and Mr. Douglas Hyde is now preparing a
volume of folk tales in Gaelic, having taken them down, for the most
part, word for word among the Gaelic speakers of Roscommon and Galway.
He is, perhaps, most to be trusted of all. He knows the people
thoroughly. Others see a phase of Irish life; he understands all its
elements. His work is neither humorous nor mournful; it is simply
life. I hope he may put some of his gatherings into ballads, for he is
the last of our ballad-writers of the school of Walsh and
Callanan--men whose work seems fragrant with turf smoke. And this
brings to mind the chap-books. They are to be found brown with turf
smoke on cottage shelves, and are, or were, sold on every hand by the
pedlars, but cannot be found in any library of this city of the
Sassanach. "The Royal Fairy Tales," "The Hibernian Tales," and "The
Legends of the Fairies" are the fairy literature of the people.
Several specimens of our fairy poetry are given. It is more like the
fairy poetry of Scotland than of England. The personages of English
fairy literature are merely, in most cases, mortals beautifully
masquerading. Nobody ever believed in such fairies. They are romantic
bubbles from Provence. Nobody ever laid new milk on their doorstep for
them.
As to my own part in this book, I have tried to make it
representative, as far as so few pages would allow, of every kind of
Irish folk-faith. The reader will perhaps wonder that in all my notes
I have not rationalised a single hobgoblin. I seek for shelter to the
words of Socrates.[2]
"_Phædrus._ I should like to know, Socrates, whether the place is not
somewhere here at which Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia
from the banks of the Ilissus?
"_Socrates._ That is the tradition.
"_Phædrus._ And is this the exact spot? The little stream is
delightfully clear and bright; I can fancy that there might be maidens
playing near.
"_Socrates._ I believe the spot is not exactly here, but about a
quarter-of-a-mile lower down, where you cross to the temple of
Artemis, and I think that there is some sort of an altar of Boreas at
the place.
"_Phædrus._ I do not recollect; but I beseech you to tell me,
Socrates, do you believe this tale?
"_Socrates._ The wise are doubtful, and I should not be singular if,
like them, I also doubted. I might have a rational explanation that
Orithyia was playing with Pharmacia, when a northern gust carried her
over the neighbouring rocks; and this being the manner of her death,
she was said to have been carried away by Boreas. There is a
discrepancy, however, about the locality. According to another version
of the story, she was taken from the Areopagus, and not from this
place. Now I quite acknowledge that these allegories are very nice,
but he is not to be envied who has to invent them; much labour and
ingenuity will be required of him; and when he has once begun, he must
go on and rehabilitate centaurs and chimeras dire. Gorgons and winged
steeds flow in apace, and numberless other inconceivable and
portentous monsters. And if he is sceptical about them, and would fain
reduce them one after another to the rules of probability, this sort
of crude philosophy will take up all his time. Now, I have certainly
not time for such inquiries. Shall I tell you why? I must first know
myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that
which is not my business, while I am still in ignorance of my own
self, would be ridiculous. And, therefore, I say farewell to all this;
the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to
know not about this, but about myself. Am I, indeed, a wonder more
complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a
creature of gentler and simpler sort, to whom nature has given a
diviner and lowlier destiny?"
* * * * *
I have to thank Messrs Macmillan, and the editors of _Belgravia_, _All
the Year Round_, and _Monthly Packet_, for leave to quote from Patrick
Kennedy's _Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts_, and Miss
Maclintock's articles respectively; Lady Wilde, for leave to give what
I would from her _Ancient Legends of Ireland_ (Ward & Downey); and Mr.
Douglas Hyde, for his three unpublished stories, and for valuable and
valued assistance in several ways; and also Mr. Allingham, and other
copyright holders, for their poems. Mr. Allingham's poems are from
_Irish Songs and Poems_ (Reeves and Turner); Fergusson's, from Sealey,
Bryers, & Walker's shilling reprint; my own and Miss O'Leary's from
_Ballads and Poems of Young Ireland_, 1888, a little anthology
published by Gill & Sons, Dublin.