Lady Gregory has just given me her beautiful _Poets and Dreamers_, and it
has brought to mind a day two or three years ago when I stood on the side
of Slieve Echtge, looking out over Galway. The Burren Hills were to my
left, and though I forget whether I could see the cairn over Bald Conan of
the Fianna, I could certainly see many places there that are in poems and
stories. In front of me, over many miles of level Galway plains, I saw a
low blue hill flooded with evening light. I asked a countryman who was
with me what hill that was, and he told me it was Cruachmaa of the Sidhe.
I had often heard of Cruachmaa of the Sidhe even as far north as Sligo,
for the country people have told me a great many stories of the great host
of the Sidhe who live there, still fighting and holding festivals.
I asked the old countryman about it, and he told me of strange women who
had come from it, and who would come into a house having the appearance of
countrywomen, but would know all that had happened in that house; and how
they would always pay back with increase, though not by their own hands,
whatever was given to them. And he had heard, too, of people who had been
carried away into the hill, and how one man went to look for his wife
there, and dug into the hill and all but got his wife again, but at the
very moment she was coming out to him, the pick he was digging with struck
her upon the head and killed her. I asked him if he had himself seen any
of its enchantments, and he said, 'Sometimes when I look over to the hill,
I see a mist lying on the top of it, that goes away after a while.'
A great part of the poems and stories in Lady Gregory's book were made or
gathered between Burren and Cruachmaa. It was here that Raftery, the
wandering country poet of ninety years ago, praised and blamed, chanting
fine verses, and playing badly on his fiddle. It is here the ballads of
meeting and parting have been sung, and some whose lamentations for defeat
are still remembered may have passed through this plain flying from the
battle of Aughrim.
'I will go up on the mountain alone; and I will come hither from it again.
It is there I saw the camp of the Gael, the poor troop thinned, not
keeping with one another; Och Ochone!' And here, if one can believe many
devout people whose stories are in the book, Christ has walked upon the
roads, bringing the needy to some warm fireside, and sending one of His
Saints to anoint the dying.
I do not think these country imaginations have changed much for centuries,
for they are still busy with those two themes of the ancient Irish poets,
the sternness of battle and the sadness of parting and death. The emotion
that in other countries has made many love songs has here been given, in
a long wooing, to danger, that ghostly bride. It is not a difference in
the substance of things that the lamentations that were sung after battles
are now sung for men who have died upon the gallows.
The emotion has become not less, but more noble, by the change, for the
man who goes to his death with the thought--
'It is with the people I was,
It is not with the law I was,'
has behind him generations of poetry and poetical life.
The poets of to-day speak with the voice of the unknown priest who wrote,
some two hundred years ago, that _Sorrowful Lament for Ireland_, Lady
Gregory has put into passionate and rhythmical prose--
'I do not know of anything under the sky
That is friendly or favourable to the Gael,
But only the sea that our need brings us to,
Or the wind that blows to the harbour
The ship that is bearing us away from Ireland;
And there is reason that these are reconciled with us,
For we increase the sea with our tears,
And the wandering wind with our sighs.'
There is still in truth upon these great level plains a people, a
community bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and poems
which have grown out of its own life, and by a past of great passions
which can still waken the heart to imaginative action. One could still, if
one had the genius, and had been born to Irish, write for these people
plays and poems like those of Greece. Does not the greatest poetry always
require a people to listen to it? England or any other country which takes
its tune from the great cities and gets its taste from schools and not
from old custom, may have a mob, but it cannot have a people. In England
there are a few groups of men and women who have good taste, whether in
cookery or in books; and the great multitudes but copy them or their
copiers. The poet must always prefer the community where the perfected
minds express the people, to a community that is vainly seeking to copy
the perfected minds. To have even perfectly the thoughts that can be
weighed, the knowledge that can be got from books, the precision that can
be learned at school, to belong to any aristocracy, is to be a little pool
that will soon dry up. A people alone are a great river; and that is why I
am persuaded that where a people has died, a nation is about to die.
1903.