III

Men who lived in a world where anything might flow and change, and become

any other thing; and among great gods whose passions were in the flaming

sunset, and in the thunder and the thunder-shower, had not our thoughts of

weight and measure. They worshipped nature and the abundance of nature,

and had always, as it seems, for a supreme ritual that tumultuous dance

among the hills or in the depths of the woods, where unearthly ecstasy

fell upon the dancers, until they seemed the gods or the godlike beasts,

and felt their souls overtopping the moon; and, as some think, imagined

for the first time in the world the blessed country of the gods and of the

happy dead. They had imaginative passions because they did not live within

our own strait limits, and were nearer to ancient chaos, every man's

desire, and had immortal models about them. The hare that ran by among the

dew might have sat upon his haunches when the first man was made, and the

poor bunch of rushes under their feet might have been a goddess laughing

among the stars; and with but a little magic, a little waving of the

hands, a little murmuring of the lips, they too could become a hare or a

bunch of rushes, and know immortal love and immortal hatred.

All folk literature, and all literature that keeps the folk tradition,

delights in unbounded and immortal things. The _Kalevala_ delights in the

seven hundred years that Luonaton wanders in the depths of the sea with

Wäinämöinen in her womb, and the Mahomedan king in the Song of Roland,

pondering upon the greatness of Charlemagne, repeats over and over, 'He is

three hundred years old, when will he weary of war?' Cuchulain in the

Irish folk tale had the passion of victory, and he overcame all men, and

died warring upon the waves, because they alone had the strength to

overcome him. The lover in the Irish folk song bids his beloved come with

him into the woods, and see the salmon leap in the rivers, and hear the

cuckoo sing, because death will never find them in the heart of the woods.

Oisin, new come from his three hundred years of faeryland, and of the love

that is in faeryland, bids St. Patrick cease his prayers a while and

listen to the blackbird, because it is the blackbird of Darrycarn that

Finn brought from Norway, three hundred years before, and set its nest

upon the oak-tree with his own hands. Surely if one goes far enough into

the woods, one will find there all that one is seeking? Who knows how many

centuries the birds of the woods have been singing?

All folk literature has indeed a passion whose like is not in modern

literature and music and art, except where it has come by some straight

or crooked way out of ancient times. Love was held to be a fatal sickness

in ancient Ireland, and there is a love-poem in _The Songs of Connacht_

that is like a death cry: 'My love, O she is my love, the woman who is

most for destroying me, dearer is she for making me ill than the woman who

would be for making me well. She is my treasure, O she is my treasure, the

woman of the grey eyes ... a woman who would not lay a hand under my

head.... She is my love, O she is my love, the woman who left no strength

in me; a woman who would not breathe a sigh after me, a woman who would

not raise a stone at my tomb.... She is my secret love, O she is my secret

love. A woman who tells me nothing,... a woman who does not remember me

to be out.... She is my choice, O she is my choice, the woman who would

not look back at me, the woman who would not make peace with me.... She is

my desire, O she is my desire: a woman dearest to me under the sun, a

woman who would not pay me heed, if I were to sit by her side. It is she

ruined my heart and left a sigh for ever in me.' There is another song

that ends, 'The Erne shall be in strong flood, the hills shall be torn

down, and the sea shall have red waves, and blood shall be spilled, and

every mountain valley and every moor shall be on high, before you shall

perish, my little black rose.' Nor do the old Irish weigh and measure

their hatred. The nurse of O'Sullivan Bere in the folk song prays that the

bed of his betrayer may be the red hearth-stone of hell for ever. And an

Elizabethan Irish poet cries: 'Three things are waiting for my death. The

devil, who is waiting for my soul and cares nothing for my body or my

wealth; the worms, who are waiting for my body but care nothing for my

soul or my wealth; my children, who are waiting for my wealth and care

nothing for my body or my soul. O Christ, hang all three in the one

noose.' Such love and hatred seek no mortal thing but their own infinity,

and such love and hatred soon become love and hatred of the idea. The

lover who loves so passionately can soon sing to his beloved like the

lover in the poem by 'A. E.,' 'A vast desire awakes and grows into

forgetfulness of thee.'

When an early Irish poet calls the Irishman famous for much loving, and a

proverb, a friend has heard in the Highlands of Scotland, talks of the

lovelessness of the Irishman, they may say but the same thing, for if your

passion is but great enough it leads you to a country where there are many

cloisters. The hater who hates with too good a heart soon comes also to

hate the idea only; and from this idealism in love and hatred comes, as I

think, a certain power of saying and forgetting things, especially a power

of saying and forgetting things in politics, which others do not say and

forget. The ancient farmers and herdsmen were full of love and hatred,

and made their friends gods, and their enemies the enemies of gods, and

those who keep their tradition are not less mythological. From this

'mistaking dreams,' which are perhaps essences, for 'realities' which are

perhaps accidents, from this 'passionate, turbulent reaction against the

despotism of fact,' comes, it may be, that melancholy which made all

ancient peoples delight in tales that end in death and parting, as modern

peoples delight in tales that end in marriage bells; and made all ancient

peoples, who like the old Irish had a nature more lyrical than dramatic,

delight in wild and beautiful lamentations. Life was so weighed down by

the emptiness of the great forests and by the mystery of all things, and

by the greatness of its own desires, and, as I think, by the loneliness of

much beauty; and seemed so little and so fragile and so brief, that

nothing could be more sweet in the memory than a tale that ended in death

and parting, and than a wild and beautiful lamentation. Men did not mourn

merely because their beloved was married to another, or because learning

was bitter in the mouth, for such mourning believes that life might be

happy were it different, and is therefore the less mourning; but because

they had been born and must die with their great thirst unslaked. And so

it is that all the august sorrowful persons of literature, Cassandra and

Helen and Deirdre, and Lear and Tristan, have come out of legends and are

indeed but the images of the primitive imagination mirrored in the little

looking-glass of the modern and classic imagination. This is that

'melancholy a man knows when he is face to face' with nature, and thinks

'he hears her communing with him about' the mournfulness of being born and

of dying; and how can it do otherwise than call into his mind 'its exiles,

its flights across the seas,' that it may stir the ever-smouldering ashes?

No Gaelic poetry is so popular in Gaelic-speaking places as the

lamentations of Oisin, old and miserable, remembering the companions and

the loves of his youth, and his three hundred years in faeryland, and his

faery love: all dreams withering in the winds of time lament in his

lamentations: 'The clouds are long above me this night; last night was a

long night to me; although I find this day long, yesterday was still

longer. Every day that comes to me is long.... No one in this great world

is like me--a poor old man dragging stones. The clouds are long above me

this night. I am the last man of the Fianna, the great Oisin, the son of

Finn, listening to the sound of bells. The clouds are long above me this

night.' Matthew Arnold quotes the lamentation of Leyrach Hen as a type of

the Celtic melancholy, but I prefer to quote it as a type of the primitive

melancholy; 'O my crutch, is it not autumn when the fern is red and the

water flag yellow? Have I not hated that which I love?... Behold, old age,

which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head and my teeth, to my

eyes which women loved. The four things I have all my life most hated fall

upon me together--coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow. I am old, I

am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from me, the couch of honour

shall be no more mine; I am miserable, I am bent on my crutch. How evil

was the lot allotted to Leyrach, the night he was brought forth! Sorrows

without end and no deliverance from his burden.' An Elizabethan writer

describes extravagant sorrow by calling it 'to weep Irish'; and Oisin and

Leyrach Hen are, I think, a little nearer even to us modern Irish than

they are to most people. That is why our poetry and much of our thought is

melancholy. 'The same man,' writes Dr. Hyde in the beautiful prose which

he first writes in Gaelic, 'who will to-day be dancing, sporting,

drinking, and shouting, will be soliloquizing by himself to-morrow, heavy

and sick and sad in his own lonely little hut, making a croon over

departed hopes, lost life, the vanity of this world, and the coming of

death.'