ANIMA CELTICA
 
 ANIMA CELTICA 
 
 REGINALD L. HINE 
 
 LONDON 
 ELKIN MATHEWS, VIGO STREET 
 
 MCMXII
 
 TO 
 
 MRS. FRANK PYMAN 
 Bronntanas beag, mar chiiitiughadh ar thabhartas thar luach. 
 
 2057846
 
 APOLOGIA 
 
 J'ay seulement faict icy un amas de fleurs es- 
 trangeres, n'y ayant fourny du mien que le filet 
 a les joindre. 
 
 Feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes.
 
 ANIMA CELTICA 
 
 THE title of this little book was chosen rather for its 
 shortness and suggestiveness than for any other 
 merit it might have ; it should be excused from too 
 literal an acceptance. It would of course be sheer 
 arrogance to pretend, within the purview of an essay 
 such as this, to disclose the spirit of the Celtic 
 peoples. As they themselves said long ago of one 
 of their fairest queens, " If a hundred clerks were 
 gathered together they could not write down a half 
 of her ways," and, to use the still more extravagant 
 words of Oisin, " If all the sea were ink, and all the 
 feathers of the birds of the air were pens, all the 
 green earth paper, and all the sons and daughters of 
 Eve were writers, it would be impossible for them " 
 to tell even a tenth part of all the valour, virtues, 
 and sufferings of the Gael. Indeed the title is more 
 bold than to some readers it may seem. It compre- 
 hends nothing less than the social and literary history
 
 2 
 
 of Scandinavia, Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, some of 
 the Western Isles of Scotland, the Isle of Man, and 
 finally the hapless country of Ireland 
 
 " the lovely and the lonely Bride 
 Whom we have wedded but have never won." (1) 
 
 To compass the study of these several branches of 
 the Celtic stock in a work of this size would require 
 for its conception a mental recklessness that the 
 author does not possess, and, for the success of its 
 carrying out, more than the wisdom of angels. One 
 is bound in such a case to take a bold line and to set 
 apart one member of this great family to serve as a 
 type of the whole, and this may be done with more 
 reason because the Celtic race has, by the especial 
 aloofness and shyness of its spirit, lost in a less 
 measure than any other race by the separation of its 
 children. They have gone far apart and suffered 
 many different chances and changes in the vicissi- 
 tudes of things, but they have never wavered in the 
 love of their common mother, nor loosed themselves 
 from her influences ; and all that they have had to 
 endure through the devouring years has not been 
 able to dim the clear memory of their early home. 
 
 It is the Irish people we will prefer as this type. 
 It is their mind, their essential character, we will 
 attempt to fix (if one may fix a thing so elusive, so 
 intangible), that it may serve us as a mirror in which 
 to behold something of the delicate grace, the
 
 mystery, and the strangeness of beauty that lie 
 hidden from the common view in the soul of the 
 Celt the Anima Celtica. And we will write mainly 
 with the thought of the early days in our mind, for 
 the soul of a people may be traced best of all in its 
 beginning, when the impulse of life and expansion is 
 strong within, and before the influences of other 
 peoples have been able to change its course or mould 
 it to the general likeness of mankind. By prolonged 
 misfortune Ireland has been brought almost to the 
 verge of ruin, losing one after another those precious 
 gifts which once made her renowned through Europe. 
 It is not fair to judge an ancient race like this in the 
 cold light of modern history, or to point to a "rem- 
 nant under sorrow," as all that this people could 
 produce. Moreover it is too sadly evident, in these 
 latter days, that the commercial spirit has insinuated 
 itself into Ireland from the further west, and that 
 the people are forsaking their birthright to follow 
 after the doubtful gains of merchandise and political 
 intrigue. But this is not an inherited or even a 
 stable element in their nature, and it is only of such 
 that we propose to write. 
 
 Now the very last thing that one finds in dealing 
 with such a theme is what to set down at the be- 
 ginning. There is no beginning, nor any end, in the 
 maze and tangle of things Irish. And it may be that 
 the only wisdom is to plunge " in medias res," to 
 gather and bind together the stray scattered threads
 
 of truthhereand there,to cleanse them from our preju- 
 dice and clear them from our bewilderment of thought, 
 and finally to weave of them a likeness which will 
 be unmistakeable by the very force of its simplicity. 
 There is perhaps nothing so difficult as the delinea- 
 tion of character. Mr. Gladstone has well said that 
 " The shades of the rainbow are not so nice, and the 
 sands of the seashore are not such a multitude, as 
 are all the subtle, shifting, blinding forms of thought 
 and of circumstance that go to determine the 
 character of men and their acts," and if these words 
 are a little extravagant in measuring the solidity of 
 the Saxon mind, they do most truly represent the 
 fluid, quick, eager spirit of the Celtic race. In the 
 Irish people we meet with a character so complex 
 that it well nigh baffles our analysis. It may be said 
 of them that, when they think, it is with the firm, 
 commanding intellect of men ; when they suffer, it is 
 with the acute, sensitive nature of women ; when 
 they act, it is at random with the caprice and incon-' 
 sequence of children. Their emotions are changeful 
 as the wind, hovering always between a smile and a 
 sigh. They have minds as variable and versatile as 
 that of Brian Macnamee, bard to Henry O'Neill in the 
 15th century, of whom the Annals of Ulster say that 
 " he was illustrious for hospitality, and for that he 
 most bought of poetry and did most of border raids 
 that was in his time." (2) A man in his lifetime 
 plays many parts, but it is only the Celt who can do
 
 so without a seeming strangeness and without ring- 
 ing down the curtain between whiles. " The same 
 man who will to-day be dancing, sporting, drinking, 
 and shouting, will be soliloquising by himself to- 
 morrow, heavy, and sick, and sad, in his own little 
 hut, making a croon over departed hopes, lost life, 
 and the vanity of this world, and the coming of 
 death." (3) 
 
 Now it should be said here that even out of the 
 soul of this people (" wavering among intuition, 
 ignorances, half-truths, shadows of falsehood, now 
 audacious, now hesitating, blown hither and thither 
 by conflicting winds, a prey to the indefinite ") (4) 
 there do emerge for our study certain leading charac- 
 teristics, key-notes of themes which in their de- 
 velopment may reveal to us the truth and the 
 similitude of the Celtic mind.
 
 II 
 
 OF those leading characteristics the most outstand- 
 ing to the writer's view is the passion that the Irish 
 have always had for war and wandering, and the 
 wild hazardous ways of life. In the soft securities 
 of life they have found no abiding charm, nor have 
 they known by still waters to pass in quietness their 
 tranquil days. For them, rather, as Children of 
 Tempest, the full fury of the gale and the buffets of 
 the immeasurable sea. It may be said, with an Irish 
 twist of phrase, that these people are never at peace 
 except when they are at war. Their annals are one 
 unvaried record of bloodshed. Their history may 
 be told in that same terrible line with which Ver- 
 haeren sums up the story of the Egyptian Dynasties. 
 " Aubes de sang, soirs de flamme, nuits de de- 
 sastre." (5.) It has been said in explanation of this 
 that their pugnacity springs from two main causes, 
 the survival of primitive ways in this end of the 
 earth, and the strange peace that broods over the 
 hills. They have a saying still in the west, " It is 
 better to be quarrelsome than lonesome." This has
 
 been their maxim, and they have fought and become 
 riotous whenever the unnatural loneliness of their 
 land has been beyond their endurance. 
 
 Of their courage there has never been any ques- 
 tion. It is pleasant, after reading the many bitter 
 things said by Spenser in his " View of the state of 
 Ireland," to come upon his testimony to the valour 
 of the men he has hated so well. " They are very 
 valiante and hardye, for the most part great en- 
 clurours of cold, labour, hunger and all hardiness, 
 very active and stronge of hand, very swift of foote, 
 very vigilaunte and circumspect in theyr enter- 
 prises, very present in perrils, very great scorners of 
 
 death " and again " I have heard some 
 
 greate warriors say that in all the services which 
 they had seen abroad in forrayne countreys they 
 never saw a more comely horseman than the Irish- 
 man, nor that cometh on more bravely in his 
 charge." (6) 
 
 But we need not rely on Spenser's word alone for 
 the proof of these things. The fame of the Celtic 
 peoples for bravery had been won more than a 
 thousand years before his time. Greece, Rome, and 
 Central Europe had bowed the knee before the 
 power of their armies. And even in outlying coun- 
 tries like Ireland their children proved themselves 
 worthy of the parent stock, and maintained the old 
 traditions of daring and invincible courage in war. 
 They fought desperately, and with no care of life,
 
 8 
 
 because it was noble to die in battle and a shame upon 
 them to go back from any fight. " A man," said the 
 warrior Goll, " lives after this life but not after his 
 honour." And for them, before Patrick came, the 
 life after death was not in a gloomy underworld like 
 that of the Greeks, but feasting and making glad with 
 women, and with feats of arms in the shining palaces 
 of the Ever-Living Ones. And so they went out 
 recklessly to battle, and, if need be, to death ; yet 
 before rushing upon their foes they would not forget 
 to stoop down and kiss their ancient mother the 
 earth in farewell. It was a tribute of love to her on 
 whose bosom they might soon be resting, a last 
 thanksgiving to her who had given them days of joy 
 under the light of the sun, and made them swift and 
 strong for fight. To this impulsive bravery they 
 added a careful training in the science of war which 
 saved them from throwing their lives away. Indeed 
 they gave more praise to skill in arms than to actual 
 prowess of body. Those warriors were most esteemed' 
 who knew the craft of sword play, and the deft hand- 
 ling of shields in defence, and the felicitious casting 
 of the sling and the spear. They had a world fame 
 for these things, and in the pages of their annals they 
 loved to dwell upon this quality of cleverness and the 
 feats that were wrought by it in battle or in the 
 chase. Among the exploits of Cuchulain, when by 
 his own might he held Ulster against the hosts of 
 Connacht, were the three slings he made from a
 
 9 
 
 great distance to put terror into the heart of Queen 
 Maeve, of which the first killed her little dog 
 Baiscne, the second, the squirrel by her side, and 
 the third, the tame bird perching on her shoulder. 
 Then, too, there is the story of Naisi playing chess 
 with Deirdre in the House of the Red Branch, the 
 hour before his death, and the way he made a fair 
 throw with a man of the chessmen over his shoulder 
 and put out the eye of Conchobar's messenger 
 spying at them from the high window. And again 
 there are the tales told about Diarmuid and the men 
 he slew with his golden apple of magic, which would 
 hit anything he aimed at and return to his hand 
 again. In very truth these heroes of the Gael, with 
 their dexterity and fatal precision, are as wonderful 
 in their way as those seven hundred chosen warriors 
 of Gibeah, referred to in the book of Judges, who 
 could fight with left and right hand alike, and who 
 flung their sling stones with such aim that they 
 could hit even a hair and not miss by the stone's 
 going on either side. The lapse of time and the 
 kindling imaginations of the bards have thrown a 
 mythical greatness about these warriors of early 
 Ireland, and it is hard now to separate the truth 
 from the mass of fable in which it is enclosed, It 
 seems an unreal, almost supernatural world, in 
 which they lived and waged their wars. They them- 
 selves are only half-human, and will often be found 
 calling in the earth gods and the elements to their
 
 10 
 
 aid. " The thick of a wave, or the deep of the sea," 
 or a druid mist will come between them as they 
 fight, or perhaps one of the Gods will throw his 
 cloak of illusion about a chosen hero, as the Greek 
 Gods used to do, and carry him out of the battle. 
 And we read of one warrior who prevailed by reason 
 of his ugliness alone, which exceeded that of any 
 devil, and of another whom no one touched with a 
 spear because of his amazing beauty, " for all 
 thought he was a ministering angel." There is 
 something stupendous also in the battle frenzy or 
 rage which seizes upon them. Cuchulain used to 
 become distorted and swell to double his accustomed 
 size. Every limb quivered like a bulrush in a 
 running stream. The beats of his heart sounded 
 like the roaring of a lion as he rushed upon his 
 prey. A light blazed above his head, and " his hair 
 became tangled about as it had been the branches 
 of a red thorn-bush stuffed into the gap of a fence." 
 And when he fought his greatest fight, with Ferdia 
 at the ford, we are told that, while the two were 
 interlocked in close combat, the demons and goblins 
 and unearthly things of the glens screamed from 
 the edges of their swords, and the waters recoiled 
 in terror from them, so that they fought on dry land 
 in the midst of the river-bed.
 
 11 
 
 III 
 
 THERE are many legends one meets with in Irish 
 literature which throw a sidelight upon the genius 
 for war and the love of fighting that is inborn in 
 the race. Geraldus Cambrensis relates that when 
 they christened their sons they left the right arm 
 unbaptised, that it might be pagan and so the fitter 
 for battle. And the Roman geographer Solinus, 
 writing in the 3rd century after Christ, says that 
 Irish mothers were wont to present the first solid 
 food to their male infants on the point of the sword, 
 as it were to dedicate them to war from their 
 earliest days. 
 
 There is frequent mention, too, of the worship by 
 warriors of their war weapons, and the saying of 
 prayers and charms to them, " that they might have 
 the better success in bataille," and of the relating 
 by the swords themselves, when unsheathed, of the 
 deeds that had been wrought by them. Some of the 
 spears of the heroes of the Red Branch, and other 
 mythical champions, are described in the legends as 
 terrible and mysterious weapons. The spear of 
 Keltar of the Battles twisted and writhed in the 
 hand of the warrior who bore it, striving to make 
 for the victim whose blood was ready for spilling.
 
 12 
 
 And other spears were regularly seized with a rage 
 for massacre, and often the bronze head grew red- 
 hot, so that it had to be kept near a cauldron of cold 
 water, into which it was plunged whenever it blazed 
 up with the murder fit. (7) 
 
 It was believed, too, that the shields of kings and 
 great commanders, when their bearers were hard 
 pressed in battle, gave forth a loud melancholy moan, 
 which was heard all over Ireland, and taken up and 
 continued by the shields of other heroes, and further 
 prolonged by the roaring of the Three Waves of 
 Erin in sympathy. And in the same way the Lia 
 Fail, or stone of destiny, would roar under the feet 
 of every king who was fated to be supreme in Ireland. 
 Even when " death's ungentle buffet " came upon 
 these warriors in life's last battle, their hands re- 
 fused to fall apart into forgetfulness, nor did any 
 sleep come upon their swords. There is clear 
 evidence, from the opening of the royal tombs, to 
 prove that the bodies of kings and chieftains were 
 often buried in standing position, arrayed in full 
 armour, with their faces turned towards the terri- 
 tories of their enemies. 
 
 It was no doubt this passion for war and love of 
 personal glory which led the Irish people astray. 
 They fought too valiantly to fight well. To suffer 
 leadership, or go shoulder to shoulder with other 
 fighting men, were things their proud natures would 
 not endure. They demanded the open battle, and
 
 13 
 
 freedom to win with their own right hands a name 
 that should go down in the songs of the bards to the 
 last end of the world. Had they been men of less 
 individual prowess, they might have banded them- 
 selves together, and shewn a firm front and closed 
 ranks in time of invasion. These centuries of pitiful 
 decay might have been centuries of construction. 
 Ireland might have consolidated itself into one great 
 nation, equal to that of its enemy across the sea. 
 But these are vain regrets. These " might have 
 beens " only add to the bitterness of the truth. The 
 tale itself is a far different one, and the tale has been 
 told. The moral of Irish History is simply this, that 
 the jealousy of warriors, and the constant struggle of 
 separate tribes for supremacy, is death to the cause 
 of unity, that a nation divided against itself can 
 never stand. 
 
 There was a time when this people saw for itself 
 the folly of each man amongst them fighting for his 
 own hand. It does not seem to be known by whose 
 thought it was, but somewhere between the reigns 
 of Conn of the Hundred Battles, High King of 
 Ireland in 123 A.D., and that of his grandson Cormac 
 MacArt, the renowned company of the Fianna were 
 founded for the good order and defence of Ireland. 
 They were not merely an idle pleasure-loving troop 
 of hunters, as some have imagined; theirs was a 
 brave attempt to quell the turmoil of their beloved 
 country, and to protect her against the marauding
 
 14 
 
 invasions of the strangers from oversea. They were 
 continually making the circuit of Ireland, and wher- 
 ever they passed there was peace. When Fionn 
 MacCumhal came to be their captain, their star rose 
 to its height. Under his leadership they were 
 invincible. They would follow him anywhere, know- 
 ing well that, with him, they were sure at least of 
 some honourable way to death. In that they were 
 not mistaken, for it is said that only four of them 
 died like ordinary men, peacefully, in their beds. It 
 is good and stirring to the heart to read in the Irish 
 books the story of all their might, the fame that they 
 won in battle, and the staunch fellowship which was 
 between them to the end. Who would not have gone 
 down gladly to the edge of death with such a hero- 
 chief as Fionn, " of the large and liberal soul of 
 bounty : exceeding all his countrymen in the prowess 
 and accomplishments of a warrior, King of mild 
 majesty and numerous bards ? The ever open house 
 of kindness was his heart; the seat of undaunted 
 courage. Great was the chief of the mighty Fianna. 
 Fionn of the perfect soul, the consummate wisdom, 
 whose knowledge penetrated events and pierced 
 through the veil of futurity. Fionn of the splendid 
 and ever-during glories. Bright were his blue- 
 rolling eyes, and his hair like flowing gold. Lovely 
 were the charms of his unaltering beauty, and his 
 cheeks like the glowing rose." (8) It was no ordinary 
 man Fionn would welcome into the ranks of the
 
 15 
 
 Fianna. They must be warriors of true heart, and 
 strong in the arm, and keepers of their word : he 
 would not have a man whose weapon quivered in his 
 hand. He required beforehand that a candidate for 
 admission should take the oath of his country " by the 
 sun, and the wind, and the moon," to give obedience 
 to his command, to offer violence to no woman, to 
 take a wife for her virtue and beauty, without thought 
 of any fortune she might have, and to give service 
 to the poor. And the following are some further 
 qualifications that a candidate must have. 
 
 That he (the candidate) would not refuse to fight 
 with nine men of any other nation who should 
 challenge or set upon him. 
 
 That he should be well acquainted with the twelve 
 books of poetry, and be able to compose verses. 
 
 That, when he ran through a wood in chase, his 
 hair should continue bound up if it fell down he 
 could not be received. 
 
 That he must be so swift and light of foot as not 
 to break a rotten stick by standing on it. 
 
 That he must be able to leap over a tree as high 
 as his forehead and to stoop under a tree that was 
 lower than his knees. 
 
 That he should be able, without stopping, or 
 lessening his speed, to draw a thorn out of his foot. 
 
 We are at liberty to believe or disbelieve these 
 hero-feats according as we please, but it should be 
 said that Keating himself, the historian of the Fianna,
 
 16 
 
 has no shadow of doubt that what he wrote was the 
 truth. He goes on gravely to say that, " So long as 
 these terms of admission were exactly insisted upon, 
 the militia of Ireland were an invincible defence to 
 their country, and a terror to rebels at home and 
 enemies abroad." 
 
 It was a grievous day for Ireland when the flower 
 of the Fianna perished in the field of Gabhra, and 
 there was never a greater battle fought in Ireland 
 than that one. Wonderful deeds were done on both 
 sides, and the slaughter was such that only old men 
 and boys, it is said, were left in Erin after the fight. 
 It was Osgur who led the Fianna that day, like a 
 wild sea horse on the tides of war. He cut a path 
 for himself three times through the ranks of the foe, 
 and slew five score of the sons of the Gael, and five 
 score fighting men from the country of Snow, and 
 seven score of the men of Green Swords, that never 
 went a step backward, and four hundred from the 
 country of the Lion, and five score of the sons of 
 kings, and the High King himself before he, too, fell, 
 " slain by the spear of the seven spells." The car- 
 nage was so terrible that it mighte well seem as if the 
 ruin of the world were at hand. Even Osgur, whose 
 heart was " like a twisted thorn with a sheath of 
 steel upon it," could not refrain from tears, and 
 Fionn, coming to the aid of his band of heroes when 
 it was too late, turned his face away and cried also. 
 And he made this lament over Osgur, as he lay dying :
 
 17 
 
 " Child of my child, calf of my calf, white and 
 slender, it is a pity the way you are. And my heart 
 is starting like a deer and I am weak after you and 
 after the Fianna of Ireland. Misfortune has followed 
 us, and farewell now to battles and to a great name, 
 and farewell to taking tributes ; for every good thing 
 I ever had is gone from me now." As for Fionn 
 himself, it is said that, when his time came, he died 
 performing his hero leap. Yet there are some who 
 say that Fionn and his companions never saw death, 
 but lie spell-bound in an enchanted cave, and that 
 the day will come when the battle-horn of Fionn 
 shall be sounded three times, and at the sound of it 
 the Fianna will rise up, as strong and fair as ever, 
 to redeem their land from tyranny and wrong.
 
 IV 
 
 ANOTHER leading theme which calls for develop- 
 ment in any study of the Celtic Mind is that of its 
 melancholy. 
 
 It is the melancholy of men who have a passion 
 for intellectual and visible beauty, who have grown 
 weary with the travail of ideas, and the long, vain 
 pursuit after the white hounds of immortality. 
 
 It is the melancholy of dreamers and visionaries, 
 and of men like Mohammed's successor whom God 
 has loved, but not suffered to attain to anything. 
 
 It is the melancholy of those who have " loved the 
 future like a mistress, and the future has mixed her 
 breath with their breath, and shaken her hair about 
 them, and hidden them from the understanding of 
 their times." (9) 
 
 It is the melancholy of an utter despair, of men 
 who have failed in the world, who have had to learn 
 always the same long lesson of submission to an 
 overmastering fate. 
 
 The remembrance and the understanding of this 
 spirit of melancholy is vital to the knowledge of the
 
 19 
 
 Irish nature, and indeed of that of the whole of the 
 Celtic family. It is one of the things the most 
 deeply grained into their character, and provides the 
 surest explanation of that shyness and aloofness to 
 which we have already referred, and which divides 
 them so singularly from the other races of Europe. 
 It appears everywhere throughout the whole range 
 of their life, and tinges all of it with an atmosphere 
 of gloom. 
 
 In the realm of War, though, like the race from 
 which they sprang, they " dared beyond their strength 
 and hazarded beyond their judgment, and in ex- 
 tremities were of an excellent hope " (10), it has 
 nevertheless to be said of them by Oisin, " They went 
 forth to the battle but they always fell." And in the 
 ways of the world and the affairs of men they have 
 not been more fortunate. There has never been in 
 the civilised world a race of men with so little o f 
 the commercial instinct, or business judgment and 
 balance. For these matters, which they would agree 
 with the clerics in calling " ignominia seculi," and 
 with Hamlet in thinking "the trivial game of life," 
 they have been hopelessly unfitted by the framing 
 and moulding of their mind. The spirit of Fionn of 
 the generous hands is still strong upon his des- 
 cendants. They, too, will give away " gold as if it 
 were the leaves of the woodland, and silver as if it 
 were the foam of the sea." 
 
 Ernest Renan, whose writings are perhaps the
 
 20 
 
 truest expression in modern literature of the Celtic 
 mind, has told us in that intimate revelation of him- 
 self in which his memory is enshrined (11), that he 
 has always possessed the sentiment of the infinite 
 and the eternal in life, and from that view and out- 
 look has smiled upon the things that are temporal. 
 And he, when he comes to speak of his brother Celts, 
 and of the way in which they have steadily gone 
 down in the world, says of them, " Never, since the 
 beginning of Time, has any people hurried to ruin 
 more impetuously, more imaginatively, more lightly." 
 Their fluid, unstable temperament has carried them 
 downwards as in a flood. " They have lived in a 
 world where anything might flow and change and 
 become any other thing, and among great gods whose 
 passions are in the flaming sunsets and in the thunder 
 and the thunder shower." (12) Our strait limits of 
 life, and our thoughts of weight and measure, are 
 things which have passed their understanding. Their 
 treasures and their hearts are hidden in the king* 
 doms of faery, where we cannot go, and, as one of 
 their poets says, they " would not, for the kingdom 
 of the whole world, give up even one night of the 
 nights of the Sidhe."
 
 21 
 
 V 
 
 AND again, in the kingdom of Love, the strain of 
 melancholy intrudes, and there are for these men 
 and women more sighs than smiles, more woes than 
 benedictions. Let us set down here two verses from 
 the Irish, put into English by Dr. Douglas Hyde, to 
 illustrate what we have just written : 
 
 " Woe who once has seen her please 
 And then sees her not each hour : 
 Woe for him her love-mesh traps ; 
 Woe for him who snaps its power. 
 
 Woe for him who sees her not : 
 Woe his lot who does, I wis ! 
 Woe for him is not beside her ; 
 Woe besides for him who is." 
 
 If the literature of a people may be taken as a 
 fair presentment of their outlook on life, and their 
 experience of it, then love is indeed for the Irish, 
 
 " a thwart sea wind full of rain and foam " (13) 
 and 
 
 " The love of all under the light of the sun 
 Is but brief longing, and deceiving hope 
 And bodily tenderness." (14) 
 
 As I have read through their song books and found 
 in their love lyrics all the sadness and lament of 
 elegies, there has surged into my mind again and
 
 22 
 
 again that refrain from the French, which has in it 
 all the inconsolable sorrow of the " abbreviation of 
 time and the failure of hope " and the frailty of 
 human affection, 
 
 " Plaisir d'amour ne dure qu'un moment : 
 Chagrin d'amour dure toute la vie." 
 
 The coming of love, which should be the perfecting 
 and consummation of a life, and the supreme happi- 
 ness of it, seems to bring to the Irish no consolation 
 or gladness, but rather to intensify for them the 
 bitterness of " earth's old and weary cry." " It is," 
 as Ailell said to Etain the Fair, for whose forbidden 
 love he was wasting away to death, "It is love given 
 to an echo, the spending of grief on a wave, a lonely 
 fight with a shadow ; that is what my love and my 
 desire have been to me." " When," as is certainly 
 the case with the children of Erin, " a soul gives 
 itself absolutely to love, all the barriers of the world 
 are burnt away and all its wisdom and subtlety are, 
 as incense poured on a flame." (15) It is this ruin 
 waiting for them hand in hand with love, and also 
 the strain of seeking in mortal images the likeness 
 of what is perhaps immortal, that throws a heaviness 
 into their hearts when they should be most free from 
 care, that makes it impossible for them ever to 
 know what it is to " throw the pearl of their soul 
 into a cup of wine or go down the primrose path of 
 life to the sound of flutes." (16)
 
 23 
 
 Later, in this essay, we shall trace the foot prints 
 of melancholy in the paths of Irish literature too. 
 Its stamp is everywhere in those " Celtic myths and 
 legends, where the loveliness of the world is shewn 
 through a mist of tears, and the life of a man is no 
 more than the life of a flower." (17) 
 
 One might indeed go further and affirm that it 
 was their bitterness of soul sorrow which gave the 
 chief impulse to their song, and drove them to that 
 deep communion with Madonna Natura which is 
 reflected in all their literary work. It has been with 
 them as it was with the other nations before their 
 time. Out of the ruins of a memorable past there 
 has sprung the creative flower of beauty : fate has 
 given them gifts of fairer kind than those she took 
 away. The glory of its youth has passed too soon 
 from Ireland: the people once so strong have gone 
 down early to their grave. Yet their spirit lingers 
 like an everlasting enchantment about the hills and 
 valleys of their beloved country : and the glory that 
 they lost is but added to the loveliness of earth. 
 Nor is this beauty lavished in vain. There are poets 
 left in Erin, whose eyes can pierce the mysteries of 
 earth, whose delicate hands have skill to fix the fiery 
 steeds of vision to the golden chariot of faultless 
 words. By them, the pain and suffering of long ago 
 is distilled into the pure essence of beauty, and the 
 dirge of a fallen nation is wrought worthily out of 
 that nobler poetry which is born of sorrow.
 
 24 
 
 VI 
 
 AT the beginning of this section we defined the 
 Celtic Melancholy to be the melancholy of an utter 
 despair, of men who had failed in the world, who 
 had had to learn always the same long lesson of 
 submission to an overmastering fate. This cannot 
 be better illustrated than by the history of Ireland 
 itself as a nation by the record of its varying for- 
 tunes, or, shall we not rather say, the unvarying 
 record of its ill-fortune. There is no profit in dwell- 
 ing continually on the misrule of the English in 
 Ireland, or the long tragedy of this country's down- 
 fall. But one cannot easily be silent, remembering 
 the overthrow, by the Norman invasions, of the fair 
 and mature civilisation that was in Ireland from the 
 7th to the 12th centuries, and the extinguishment, at 
 a later time, of the afterglow of the Renaissance in 
 Ireland, by the tyrannies and oppression of the 
 Tudors. 
 
 This country, as Thomas Davis reminded his 
 brother Irishmen, " is no sandbank thrown up by 
 some recent caprice of earth. It is an ancient land, 
 honoured in the archives of civilisation, traceable 
 into antiquity by its piety, its valour, and its suffer- 
 ings. Every great European race^has sent its
 
 25 
 
 stream to the river of Irish mind. Long wars, vast 
 organisations, subtle codes, beacon crimes, leading 
 virtues, and self-mighty men were here." And it 
 was this people, proud offspring of so noble a line- 
 age, that the English, by a fatal policy, attempted to 
 drive into submission by outrage, and massacre, and 
 murder. 
 
 There are some almost unbelievable things in the 
 state papers of the 16th century, and in the 
 chronicles of that same period, which throw a keen 
 light upon the understanding that the English had 
 of the Irish of those days. They refer to them as a 
 " people ready to go headlong to the Devil, if 
 England seek not speedy remedy to prevent the 
 same." They call upon God "with the beams of 
 His grace to clarify the eyes of that rude people, 
 that at length they may see their miserable estate." 
 They record that it was from very boyhood that 
 Henry VIII., in his "royal appetite," had determined 
 to reduce the realm of Ireland " to knowledge of 
 God and obedience of Us," and by conquest to cure 
 " all the disease and infirmity of all this land, and 
 bring the wild Irish into civilisation, and introduce 
 for the first time tranquility and restfulness, wealth 
 and prosperity, to a savage people." Erasmus takes 
 it upon himself to place the Irish in learning and 
 manner of life upon a level with the Turks and 
 Saracens, and expresses the wish that the Epistles 
 of St. Paul may be translated if only for the sake of
 
 26 
 
 their enlightenment. And even the saintly Hooker 
 can say no better thing of this race than the follow- 
 ing : " This wicked, effrenated, barbarous, and un- 
 faithful nation who, as Cambrensis writeth of them, 
 they are a wicked and perverse generation, constant 
 always in that they be always inconstant, faithful in 
 that they be always unfaithful, and trusting in that 
 they be always treacherous and untrusty. . . . They 
 do nothing but imagine mischief, and have no delight 
 in any good thing. God is not known in their land, 
 neither is His name rightly called upon among 
 them." 
 
 It seems to give an absolute pain to these old 
 writers to have to speak anything praiseworthy of 
 these wild Irish. When they are forced in spite of 
 themselves to write without blame, they add fre- 
 quently for the comfort of their souls some such 
 qualification as this, from the same Cambrensis 
 whom we have already quoted : " No man can be so 
 inveterately attached to vice, as not to break its 
 chains occasionally and perform some virtuous 
 action." 
 
 The English of the age of Shakespeare, applying 
 the words of their master to the consideration of 
 " the meere Irish," agreed that the ills that these 
 men did, invariably lived after them, while the good 
 (which by the way they denied them to possess) was 
 oft interred with their bones. And that was surely 
 a pity. For, by a curious irony, it seems that in
 
 27 
 
 their bones rested the sole virtue of this abandoned 
 race, and that only when they were dead could any 
 good be made of them. It is written, in some of the 
 early herbals, that the human skull, being made into 
 fine powder, is an effectual remedy against many 
 diseases of the body, and one of them goes on to say, 
 " the scull of a man ought to be of such an one 
 which dieth a violent death (as war or criminal exe- 
 cution) and never buried. Therefore those of Ireland 
 are here best esteemed, being very clean and white 
 and often covered over with moss." Could there be 
 any truer or more terrible picture of the state of Ire- 
 land at that time than this old simpler's unsuspecting 
 phrase ? It is darker even than the pages of Edmund 
 Spenser, and recalls to the mind those woe-begotten 
 days chronicled in the annals of Ulster when " great 
 storms of war and pestilence " were sweeping over 
 Ireland, and men lay in thousands where they fell. 
 
 It is into such hands that Ireland has fallen these 
 many years, and it is no wonder, amidst these mis- 
 understandings and prejudices, that they have learned 
 to better the lesson of their masters, and give back 
 in larger measure, hate for hate, and violence for 
 violence, until their land has become a byword for 
 reproach in English history. And it is no wonder 
 that James Clarence Mangan, one of the chief among 
 the Irish poets, looking back over the centuries of 
 gradual annihilation of his beloved country, and 
 despairing of all earthly succour, should have ad-
 
 28 
 
 dressed his verse to that God, who above all is the 
 God of the oppressed and the downtrodden : 
 
 " And Thou, O Mighty Lord, whose ways 
 Are far above our feeble minds 
 
 To understand 
 
 Sustain us in these doleful days 
 And render light the chain that binds 
 Our fallen land. 
 
 Look down upon our dreary state 
 And through the ages that may still 
 
 Roll sadly on, 
 
 Watch Thou o'er hapless Erin's fate, 
 And shield at least from darker ill 
 
 The blood of Conn." 
 
 And now in these latter days, when the heart of 
 the English people is touched by the long sufferings 
 and despair of the Irish, now that they are willing 
 at last to restore to them their liberty, and give into 
 their hands the rule of their ancient land, it is 
 perhaps too late. It is one of those biting pieces 
 of irony of which the tide of human affairs is full. 
 They would offer home rule to a people who have 
 gone over the seas : they would give back to Ireland 
 a desert where once her gardens blossomed as the 
 rose. 
 
 Such has been the fate of the Irish in their wars, 
 and their loves, in their worldly affairs, and in their 
 national life. Misunderstanding and misunderstood, 
 they have wrestled only half-heartedly with the 
 world, and have been always worsted. And so, tired
 
 29 
 
 of it all, and with the wistfulness of exiles upon 
 their faces, exiles in a world where for them there is 
 no abiding place, they have turned aside and strayed 
 down " new thoroughfares in sad humanity." And 
 there, untroubled and hidden from the strife of men, 
 they dream their dreams and behold their visions, 
 and satisfy that thirst that is in them for the things 
 of the spirit. They have wished to dream, and they 
 do not care where their dreams may lead them. The 
 things of the earth are become as a shadow for them, 
 and the true realities of life are only in 
 
 " the dreams, the ever living 
 Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world 
 And then smooth out with ivory hands, and sigh." (18)
 
 VII 
 
 IT is pleasant to have come to our third theme 
 for development, namely the humour of the Irish 
 people : and profitable also as a balance to the fore- 
 going section, and lest one should believe that the 
 melancholy of the Celtic mind has made of the 
 Irish a people "sullen in the sweet air," or 
 
 " Thinkers of crooked thoughts upon life in the sere 
 And on that which consigns men to night after shewing the 
 day to them." (19) 
 
 Their many sorrows have never prevailed to take 
 from them that gaiety and buoyancy of mind which 
 is as distinctive an element in their character as the 
 melancholy which we have just studied. Even the 
 stark and terrible terseness of their histories is 
 lightened at intervals with flashes of grim humour, 
 and it is this more than anything else which draws 
 one on to read them until the last page is turned. By 
 a strange mischance, or rather by a just compensa- 
 tion, the saddest people seem always to be dowered 
 with the readiest wit. With the Irish it is most 
 certainly so. They have had to feed themselves on
 
 31 
 
 the blessed bread of gaiety because otherwise they 
 would have starved, and no doubt it is the despair 
 of their actual lives which gives such a keen edge 
 to the fictions of their minds. In this way the spirit 
 of humour has become an intimate and inseparable 
 part of their nature. It is not something apart and 
 striven after laboriously like that of the Saxon mind. 
 It is their atmosphere, the very air they breathe, 
 something intangible yet vital. It is about the only 
 inheritance which those who oppressed them were 
 not able to take away. 
 
 Of all the races of the world the Irish seem the 
 best fitted to catch the gayest, happiest attitude of 
 things. Their wit has a lightness and a wisdom in 
 it which even the French may not surpass : the 
 world is full of the laughter that springs from their 
 " happy unhappy answers." This twist of light- 
 heartedness has been in their nature from the very 
 beginning and has never failed of its irresistible 
 charm. King Conari's jesters, so it is written in 
 one of the old books of Ireland, were fellows of 
 such inimitable wit that no man could refrain 
 from laughing at them, even though the dead body 
 of his father or mother lay stretched out before 
 him. (20) 
 
 Sometimes the humour is due to that over-quick- 
 ness of the Irish mind which is impatient of words 
 and too hurried to be scrupulous about their mean- 
 ing. It is this, for example, that accounts for the
 
 32 
 
 mixed metaphors of the counsel for the plaintiff in 
 an action brought for alleged malversation of three 
 bullocks, who said, " Gentlemen of the Jury, it will 
 be for you to say whether the defendant shall be 
 allowed to come into the court with unblushing 
 footsteps, with the cloak of hypocrisy in his mouth, 
 and draw three bullocks out of my client's pockets 
 with impunity." It accounts, too, for the words of an 
 Irish member of the House of Commons, who, in 
 speaking on a bill which proposed to extend the 
 franchise in Ireland, said, " You should refrain from 
 throwing open the flood gates of Democracy lest 
 you pave the way for a general conflagration." 
 
 But in general the humour of the Irish is more 
 natural, being bred of that happy unlikely turn of 
 phrase which is their especial sign of recognition in 
 the highways of the world. And though their point 
 of view seems to us a little strange and ludicrous, it 
 is to them direct and clear. They see things 
 differently from ourselves, and perhaps more surely, 
 for it is in their nature to follow that " new and 
 remoter way of thinking" which Sir William 
 Davenant took to be the soul of wit. What could 
 be happier than to say of a lady of stiff, cold, formal 
 manner, " She has all the characteristics of a poker 
 except its occasional warmth," or more oddly true 
 than to describe a man of kindly feeling and sym- 
 pathies as " a man whose heart would be touched by 
 the bleatin' of a bruised worm " ?
 
 33 
 
 The Irish have too much regard for the truth to 
 be dragging her out on every paltry occasion, and 
 they have been careful to avoid the blunting of their 
 wit with that scrupulosity and exactness which they 
 associate with the " dull creeping Saxons." But in 
 spite of this their humour seems rarely un- 
 reasonable : they keep always within distant hail 
 of the probabilities of things. 
 
 There is something just, as well as winning, in 
 the words of the old Irish woman who said of her 
 umbrella that " it was a wonderful convenient con- 
 thrivance for hinderin' a body from gettin' drownded 
 on a wet Sunday goin' to Mass," and who cast her 
 scorn upon banks and banking by saying, "Troth 
 and bedad I'd be long sorry to go pay away me bit 
 of money into e'er an ould concern of a bank and have 
 nothin' to show for it at the heel of the hunt except 
 a scrawm on a scrap of paper." 
 
 Their lightning rapidity of thought is well shown 
 by the old story of the man who was asked whether 
 it was a son or a daughter that his sister had 
 got. " The curse of the crows on me," he said, 
 " but I don't know whether I'm an uncle or an aunt." 
 And their wonderful familiarity with the Almighty 
 appears very well in the words used by an old 
 woman in reference to someone who had done her 
 an injury. "I'll lave him to God," said she, "an' 
 He'll play the divil with him." 
 
 But this side of Irish life is so well known that
 
 34 
 
 there is no need to be labouring it with stories which 
 are more or less of common knowledge. There is 
 more charm in that indirect and delicate humour 
 which one meets with here and there in the reading 
 of Irish history and literature, and at the worst this 
 will be less familiar than what has been already 
 quoted. 
 
 VIII 
 
 THERE is a childlike simplicity and outspokenness 
 in the tale of Irish affairs, for the Irish have ever 
 been of this way of mind, and innocent of the sub- 
 tleties that other races have grown up to possess. 
 There never was such a confiding people created since 
 the world began. The impossible has always pleased 
 their fancy, and whatever to other men would seem 
 too remote and difficult for belief is welcomed to 
 their hearts with the conviction of truth. To their 
 childlike credulity, as an English reviewer (21) has 
 well observed, the Round Towers of Ireland are not 
 ecclesiastical buildings, dating from about the 10th 
 century, according to the consent of the learned, but 
 pagan monuments of immense antiquity, connected 
 with the worship of Baal, and quite peculiar to
 
 35 
 
 Ireland. In a similar spirit, inspired of the faeries, 
 enthusiasts were digging in the hill of Tara only a 
 few years ago in the sure and certain hope of un- 
 earthing the Ark of the Covenant. Lough Dan has 
 been gravely identified by them with the lost tribe 
 of that name, and it is considered so unworthy of a 
 true Irishman to admit any inferior strain between 
 himself and the Chosen People, that Irish pedigrees 
 are assiduously traced back to Noah or to Magog the 
 son of Japhet. 
 
 One of the most delightful works for reading in 
 the whole range of Irish literature is the dialogue 
 between Oisin and St. Patrick, with a view to the 
 former's conversion to the Christian faith. And 
 this shews, perhaps better than any other, the pure 
 fount of Irish humour, springing from no artificial 
 source, but direct from the deep wells of childhood, 
 with its artlessness and simple grace. 
 
 In the early stanzas of this, the old bard will not 
 hear a single word from Patrick of "the solemn 
 psalms." His mind is preoccupied with memories 
 of the time before he went to the Country of the 
 Young : his anger is against the Christ, and against 
 the host of his white-handed saints who have over- 
 come the princely host of the Fianna. " Were 
 Fionn alive and the Fianna comely and warlike, 
 with their hounds running propitiously, they would 
 seem to me more majestic than those who dwell in 
 heaven I would rather be in Fionn's court,
 
 36 
 
 barkening to the voices of hounds every morning, 
 and meditating on hard fought battles, than in the 
 
 court of Jesus Christ, that is certain One 
 
 day only, in company with clergy of the bells, is 
 longer to me than if I were to be in hell of torments 
 as long as God shall be in heaven." 
 
 Then he turns upon St. Patrick and the priests and 
 derides them with a fine scorn for the way they have 
 " to be ever beating their breasts and each evening 
 kneeling under gloom," weak fasting men without 
 liberality, having no dinners or banquets like the 
 banquets of the Fianna. Cruagan the brave would 
 consume at one meal what they would make last 
 through the year : " were he alive he would not like 
 Rome's clergy." If Ciarnan his friend, dreadful in 
 plunder, were there, it is not any food they would be 
 getting for themselves at all, " it would not be 
 pleasant to thy clergy were he alive." Better to the 
 ears of Oisin the cry of battle's remembrance from 
 Fionn's Dord than the shrill, doleful prayers of 
 coward priests. Better to go down into the thick of 
 battle and perish there by fair sway of swords than 
 to be spending long, weary lives in cells, muttering 
 over the white books from Rome. 
 
 It is more than clever the way St. Patrick handles 
 the rebellious spirit of the old blind man, once Oisin 
 the mighty chief of the Fianna, now only a singer of 
 things gone in the wind. He gives him full rein to 
 work off his raging anger, and to make a lamentation
 
 37 
 
 for the mighty heroes of his youth. He leads him 
 on to sing their praise, and to tell the story of their 
 deeds. The Fianna live again for a while under the 
 magic song of the bard, and the battle of the Hill 
 of Slaughter is fought afresh. Osgur, the mighty 
 champion of perfect training, goes out once more 
 against Tailc of Severe Hands, slayer of a thousand 
 men, and it is five days and five nights without food, 
 without drink, without slumber, before the head of 
 Tailc is levelled with the dust. Then follows the 
 combat with Meargach of the Green Blade, and this 
 time more than ten days of incessant fighting elapse 
 before he and his two sons are " deficient of their 
 heads." And lastly, when the noise of battle is 
 hushed, between the silent ranks of the opposing 
 hosts, comes Aile the queen, the wife and mother 
 of the slain, of whom Oisin says, that neither 
 Patrick nor his God had ever seen a woman of 
 equal beauty to hers, or with such a glory of golden 
 hair. And she makes over the fallen, her "three 
 champions of light, her three great lions," a lament 
 so tender and so pitifully sad, that even the warriors 
 of the two armies hang their heads, and tears 
 come rushing in to blind their eyes. With these 
 " unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago," Oisin 
 spends his frail store of strength, and then the Saint 
 takes the word, and has his will upon the weakness 
 of the old blind man. He tells him it is foolish to 
 be turning his thoughts away from God, and to be
 
 38 
 
 dwelling always upon the days of his youth, for 
 green nettles grow where the palace of Fionn once 
 stood, and he and his warlike bands are enclosed in 
 the hell of torments and burdened and subjected for 
 ever. And he shews Oisin a vision of hell so terrible, 
 with demons and iron flails, and sparks flying out of 
 the ribs of the damned, that the aged bard shrinks 
 with terror, and asks Patrick for the grace of baptism, 
 lest he, too, should go to the same place. There- 
 upon, the real charm and humour of the dialogue 
 begins. There never was such an innocent disciple 
 of the faith in the whole history of Christendom, 
 nor one at the same time more careful about the 
 benefits to be received from Holy Church. " Patrick 
 tell me (if it is thou, hast the most correct infor- 
 mation), will my hound and my dog be allowed to go 
 with me to the mansion of the King of grace. I 
 would know if He is a generous man in his house, 
 and if He will let the legions of the Fianna come 
 under shelter of His holy heaven. If your God is 
 generous in miracles, He will have pity on me, 
 sightless : if once I get inside the door I will suddenly 
 request Him to heal me. I will receive knowledge 
 of God if He is hurriedly liberal in the distribution 
 of food : if He has abundance of bread I will 
 remain in His company for ever : Tell unto thy God 
 that there was no knowledge with Fionn or with the 
 Fianna of His existence in their own time: and 
 that, if they had known it, His pleasure would have
 
 seemed courteous in their eyes." When St. Patrick 
 has answered or evaded these searching inquiries, 
 he proceeds to instruct his novice in the elements 
 of the faith, but they do not get very far ; the old 
 pagan is quite unteachable. For, when St. Patrick 
 tells him that sin and death came into the world 
 because Eve pulled an apple which God told her not 
 to touch, he makes this delicious comment. " If, 
 when I and Diarmuid lived in Tuab-herard, we had 
 known that God was in want of apples, we would 
 have sent to Him, in heaven, seven horses and one 
 mule laden with apples." Their minds and souls 
 were whole seas and centuries apart : and then, too, 
 Oisin will keep on praying God to relieve the Fianna 
 from the house of pains, though he is told that " it 
 is like throwing stones at the sun or the moon to 
 pray for souls that are in hell." This is a breach 
 between them to the end, but Oisin will not desist. 
 He has read the book of Holy Scripture and believes 
 that nothing is impossible for God to do. At the 
 worst "he can just leave them where they are, and 
 yet give them delightful coolness." And the legend 
 finishes by shewing that he had his reward, for a 
 messenger came from God to say that the Fianna, 
 although not removed from the place where they had 
 been so long, had got relief from their pains. After 
 this, Oisin becomes a great penitent, and, till the 
 time of death, " he every day wetted three sheets 
 with his tears." (22)
 
 40 
 
 This vein of delicate humour is sustained through- 
 out the dialogue to a degree that is unusual in Irish 
 literature. In general, the work of the bards is very 
 uneven: one has sometimes to turn over a large 
 mass of rough ore before coming across a single, 
 sparkling gem of wit. But these gems are precious 
 when one lights upon them at last, for their lustre 
 is of that rare quality which never grows dim with 
 use. It may be entertaining to follow our present 
 theme still further by setting out a few of these 
 waifs and strays of wit that the writer has chanced 
 upon, here and there, in the byeways of old books. 
 
 IX 
 
 ONE of the charges against the Great Earl of 
 Kildare, brought to England for trial in the reign of 
 King Henry VIII., related that he had sacreligiously 
 burned the cathedral church of Cashel, to which he 
 replied that it was true enough but that he would 
 not have done so, only he thought the Archbishop 
 was in it. And the rest of his replies were framed 
 in similar style, and gave such pleasure to the bluff 
 King Hal, that he pardoned him all his crimes on the
 
 41 
 
 spot. It is refreshing indeed to turn aside from the 
 delicate diplomacy of English affairs to the sim- 
 plicity of such things among the Irish. It is written 
 somewhere that Conn O'Neill claimed tribute from 
 O'Donnell, and wrote to him in Irish in the following 
 terms : " O'Donnell, send me my rent or if you 
 
 don't " to which O'Donnell promptly wrote in 
 
 reply : " O'Neill, I owe you no rent, and if I did " 
 
 whereupon O'Neill flew to arms, and the war 
 began. 
 
 It is natural enough in the literature of the Land 
 of Saints that there should be a multitude of legends 
 touching the disciples of Christ and their adversary, 
 the Devil. The subject is one so entertaining, that 
 it may be wise to restrict ourselves, at the outset, to 
 three of these. The first is a charming story out of 
 the life of St. Columb. We are told that, at the 
 time when the Saint was surreptitiously copying 
 St. Finnen's Book of Psalms at Drumfinn, Finnen 
 sent a messenger to spy out what he was doing. 
 But St< Columb's pet crane, happening to be with 
 him, walked over to the door and neatly picked out 
 the man's eye through the keyhole. As to the 
 Devil, Angus the Culdee tells us that he once paid a 
 visit in disguise to St. Moiling, who soon discovered 
 who he was, and recommended him to go on his 
 knees and pray. " Oh ! " said he, " I am not able to 
 kneel, for my knees are at the back of my legs." (23) 
 From the devil it is but a little way to the thought
 
 42 
 
 of hell, and indeed Irish books are filled with all 
 manner of fantastic speculation about this place. 
 Satan was a familiar theme for the imagination of 
 the curious. They seem to have studied him from 
 the life, and whatever they write of him has a sense 
 of ease and assurance about it. The punishment of 
 hell, in the Irish mind, has often some relation to 
 the crime and sometimes the very instruments of 
 wrongdoing followed the wretch to hell, and were 
 there turned to his own torture. The sons of 
 O'Corri saw a man digging in a garden, on one of 
 the islands of hell, while both spade and handle were 
 red hot, which punishment he was doomed to, be- 
 cause when on earth he worked every Sunday, 
 digging in his garden. (24) 
 
 To search for humour in the laws of a people 
 would seem to be the most profitless undertaking 
 that a man could conceive. There is a deadness and 
 uniformity about the legal mind which blasts, at the 
 outset, all hope of wit : to the cheerful man the 
 general body of jurisprudence is "weary, flat, stale,
 
 43 
 
 and unprofitable." Fortunately there is very little 
 of this in the Brehon laws of the Irish : and one 
 may find in their pages many curious things, and 
 always quaintly expressed. This is no doubt due in 
 a measure to the happy accident of their birth. 
 For, whereas in other codes the framers have most 
 often been the judges of the land, and (shall one say 
 it ? ) " learned without sense and venerably dull," the 
 Irish were careful to choose differently for the 
 making of theirs. Three kings, and three saints, and 
 three sages of poetry, of literature, and of language, 
 sat together in council soon after the coming of 
 St. Patrick, and, with the general consent of the 
 common people, wrote down the traditional laws of 
 Ireland : they are called in the words of the legend 
 the " nine props of the Senchus Mor." A further 
 safeguard from the conventional dulness of the law 
 lay in the custom, prevalent among the Irish from 
 early days, to entrust the care of justice to the poets, 
 and this no doubt was done for the reason that 
 poets, alone, could put the lex non scripta into the 
 rhythm of verse for the easier memory of the people 
 at large. The light touch of their fancy is still 
 traceable in the laws and legal formula?, as, for 
 instance, the swearing of oaths by the elements, and 
 " the dew, the crops, and the countenances of men," 
 and the limitation of property, " while the sea sur- 
 rounds Erin," or " so long as the sun and wind 
 remain." We should smile nowadays at the very
 
 44 
 
 thought of committing the charge of national affairs 
 to such aery, irresponsible persons as poets : but in 
 Ireland the policy worked well, and the common 
 people were content, at any rate for a while. Then, 
 somehow, their imagination took a more soaring 
 flight, clean out of the sphere of time, and space, and 
 reason, and their speech got lost in archaic forms 
 and an elaborate and intricate style. It is recorded 
 in the chronicles of the reign of Conchobar 
 MacNessa, who lived and died about the time of 
 Christ, that once, when there was a public contest 
 on a point of law between two of the poet-judges, 
 neither the King, nor his chiefs, nor anyone else 
 could understand a word they said, " so great was 
 their high, noble, beautiful obscurity," whereupon 
 the King was filled with indignation at this insult to 
 his intelligence, and took away the privilege of judi- 
 cature from the poets for ever and made special 
 judges in their stead. 
 
 Another feature of the Brehon laws is their 
 intimate concern with every side of life. There 
 are rules and regulations to meet every possible 
 contingency ; and indeed their range is so com- 
 prehensive, and their attention to detail so minute, 
 that one may gather, from reading them, the 
 closest idea of Irish social and civic life. Thus, 
 for example, to choose at random, there are 
 penalties prescribed for personal injuries caused by 
 Brooches, whose points project beyond the shoulder,
 
 45 
 
 and compensation for the sting of bees. It is or- 
 dained that the domestic cat shall be pardoned for 
 eating the food in the kitchen, if this is lying negli- 
 gently about, but punished if the food be taken from 
 the security of a vessel or other kitchen utensil. 
 Care is taken to regulate the quantity of ale allowed 
 at a dinner to laymen and clerics respectively, six 
 pints to a layman, and three to a cleric. It is added 
 that the latter were so restricted in order that they 
 " may not be drunk, and that their canonical hours 
 may not in consequence be set astray on them." If 
 a middle-sized pig be caught trespassing his owner 
 shall pay to the party aggrieved half a sack of good 
 corn. If a doctor fail to make his patient well he 
 shall not be entitled to any fee, nor shall an artificer 
 be paid for his work unless, on its completion, he 
 gives his personal blessing to it in the presence of 
 his master. A fine of two cows is inflicted for a 
 " lump " blow, that is a blow which bruises but 
 draws no blood, and the same penalty applies for 
 shaving a man against his will. And if a priest so 
 far forget himself as to curse his servant, he shall 
 have administered to him 100 blows on the bare 
 hand, and bread and water for a day and a night. 
 There are many laws also dealing with fosterage, or 
 the giving and taking of children for nurture, and 
 rules for their upbringing according to their position 
 in the seven grades of society. The distinctions of 
 class are truly instructive. The sons of the lower
 
 46 
 
 orders were taught the herding and care of cattle, 
 and all manner of beasts, kiln-drying, the combing of 
 wool, and wood-cutting ; and the daughters must 
 learn the use of the quern, the sieve, and the knead- 
 ing-trough. Those of higher rank, if sons, were 
 brought up to swim and to shoot, to play chess and 
 perform upon the instruments of music, while the 
 daughters were employed in needle work, cutting 
 out, and embroidery. " And a king's son shall have 
 horses in times of races." Another more amusing 
 discrimination of class is afforded by the rule which 
 says that stirabout, or porridge as we call it, shall 
 be given to all, but the flavouring which goes into it 
 shall vary : salt butter for the inferior grades, fresh 
 butter for the sons of chiefs, and honey for the sons 
 of kings. 
 
 With regard to the sanction of these laws there 
 are not many direct provisions. There was no need of 
 compulsion, for the reverence of traditional law was 
 a stronger trait than any other in the character of 
 the Irish. The purity of justice has always been 
 a matter of national pride. They say in one of their 
 celebrated Triads, " Three glories of a gathering : 
 a judge without perturbation, a decision without 
 reviling, terms agreed upon without fraud." To 
 disturb a public assembly was a crime most venial 
 to them, a crime beyond the atonement of a fine, 
 requiring the capital penalty of death. One peculiar 
 method of enforcing the Brehon laws was the
 
 47 
 
 practice of "fasting," whereby a man, being injured, 
 would wait patiently outside the door of the offending 
 person without food for a prescribed period, and 
 if thereupon the offender refused to cede to the 
 fasting, he was to pay double the thing for which he 
 was fasted upon. There are some quaint stories 
 told of this practice in Irish literature. It is said 
 that Amergin MacAuley fasted on the old sage 
 Fintan till he forced him to relate the ancient 
 history of Ireland. Conall Derg O'Corra and his 
 wife, having failed to obtain children from God, 
 turned to the Devil and fasted on him to give them 
 children, and obtained their request. (25) Nay, a 
 legend relates that a certain man, thinking himself 
 hardly used by providence, grumbled and fasted 
 against God for relief, and the tale goes on to say 
 that God was angry but nevertheless dealt mercifully 
 with him. (26) > 
 
 There was, however, an alternative for the offender. 
 He might " give a pledge to fasting " and have the 
 case tried, and thereupon the province of the Brehon 
 or judge began. Now it must not be thought from 
 the foregoing levity that justice was left to the will 
 of chance or the momentary caprice of the judges. 
 The Brehons were, by rank and training, men of 
 integrity and wisdom. Their only thought was to 
 do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before 
 the God of Truth. They held the scales evenly 
 between the old law of retaliation, as varied by time-
 
 48 
 
 honoured precedents, and that law of forgiveness 
 which the blessed St. Patrick had taught them out 
 of the Gospels. All was done without haste, decently, 
 and in solemn form. We are told of one of their 
 number that " he was not wont to make his decree 
 until he had pondered upon it in his breast the night 
 before." It has been said of them, disparagingly, 
 that when they were at their wits' end for a decision, 
 before the coming of the Faith, they consulted the 
 Druids, and came at the truth by the help of their 
 sorceries and spells. However that may be, there 
 certainly was one instrument of supernatural aid 
 which the Brehons frequently used. In England of 
 old time, it was often said that the administration 
 of equity varied according to the measure of the 
 Chancellor's foot. In Ireland, it seems to have 
 varied according to the pressure of the magic collar 
 of Moran, of which, legend relates that, when placed 
 about the neck of a judge, it would contract and go 
 near to choke him if he was about to deliver a 
 false judgment, and relax, and leave him free to 
 speak, if he pronounced what was true and of right 
 accustomed. It was equally efficient when placed 
 about the neck of a witness inclined to perjury. 
 There is no wonder then, with such a beneficent and 
 complete code of law, and such worthy judges, and 
 such heavenly interposition in time of error, that, 
 in the golden age of Ireland, the nation was united 
 as one family, and that peace and prosperity reigned
 
 49 
 
 within its borders. It is such a period of rest and 
 content that the Triad reflects, which says, " Three 
 slender things that best support the world : the 
 slender stream of milk into the pail, the slender 
 blade of green corn upon the ground, the slender 
 thread over the hand of a skilled woman." It is 
 this more than anything else which led to the 
 jealousy and covetousness of the strangers from 
 over sea, this which drew on the raids of the Danes, 
 and invasions of the Normans, to destroy the homes 
 and break the hearts of the Irish people for ever. 
 
 The work of destruction has been fully accom- 
 plished now. There is nothing left of that fair 
 civilisation save the mouldering records which hold 
 its memory. For the remnant of this people there 
 is no inheritance at all. It is a hard struggle for 
 them to earn even their daily bread. The only 
 things left them to cherish are dreams of a glory 
 that is clean passed away, and a grim hope, in spite 
 of everything, of a possible revenge. 
 
 It is perhaps fitting, with this last thought in our 
 minds, and at this time when Ireland and its affairs 
 are playing so large and vital a part in our political 
 life, that we should close our selection from literary 
 and historical sources with the following prophecy 
 from the Book of Howth, a vellum folio of the 16th 
 century, written in thirteen different hands. 
 
 " long life and oft fighting shall be for 
 
 the land, and the land shall be harried and stained
 
 50 
 
 with great slaughter of men, but the English shall 
 have the mastery a little before doomsday, and that 
 land shall be from sea to sea i-castelled and fully 
 won, but the Englishmen shall be after that well 
 feeble in the land and disdained."
 
 XI 
 
 THERE is one theme above all which should have 
 place of honour in any study of the Celtic Mind, and 
 that is the passion with which it holds by its in- 
 heritance of learning. The word " passion " is used 
 advisedly, for the men of this race are no " half 
 believers of their casual creeds," no languid diners 
 without appetite at the banquet of life. They give 
 themselves absolutely to life as they have come to 
 know it, and their days are full, and their minds and 
 souls are on fire with the things that are eager 
 and intense and passionate. " And it is," as Fiona 
 Macleod said, "this eagerness and thirst, a thirst 
 above all for the things of the spirit, which makes 
 them turn so often from the near securities and 
 prosperities, and indeed all beside, setting their 
 hearts aflame with vain, because illimitable, desires. 
 For them, the wisdom before which knowledge is 
 a frosty breath the beauty that is beyond the 
 beautiful." (27) They have always had this nervous 
 desire to get apart from actual life : and the desire 
 has been quickened by the sad course of their 
 national history. In spite of all they have suffered, 
 the Irish have never been mere cowards of fate or
 
 52 
 
 dumb beholders of calamity. Bereft of earthly 
 treasure, they sought elsewhere that " calmer state- 
 lier wealth of wisdom " which neither force nor fate 
 can take away. Tired of the deceit of a people 
 who promised them peace, " whereas the sword 
 reacheth unto the soul," they took shelter in the un- 
 failing peace of God the Father. In the midst of 
 derelection these men were perhaps too ready to 
 forsake all things that they might follow remote 
 ways of thought, or plunge into the sea of God. 
 They were constantly longing, as in the hermit's 
 song, rendered by Dr. Kuno Meyer, " for a hidden 
 little hut in the wilderness that it may be my dwell- 
 ing, a clear pool to wash away sins through the Holy 
 Spirit, quite near, a beautiful wood around it on 
 every side, a few shining candles above the pure 
 
 white scriptures And I to be sitting awhile 
 
 praying to God there and in every place." And if 
 this sacred quiet could not be theirs, if, as often 
 chanced, they were driven to wear out their lives 
 in ceaseless wandering, there were still those other 
 candles, the three candles that illumine every dark- 
 ness, truth, nature, knowledge. These were enough 
 to light them to the end of their difficult way till 
 their own lives flickered with the last, quick, breath 
 of life, till they were forced to own with Sadi that 
 
 " Like a taper one must melt in pursuit of learning, 
 Since without learning one cannot know God." 
 
 Such has been the devotion of the Irish in the
 
 53 
 
 following after learning and piety, that they have 
 won for their land, without dispute, the title of 
 " Insula sanctorum et doctorum." The regard that 
 these people have always had for spiritual things 
 has come to form the bed rock of their national 
 character, and it is this, more than anything else, 
 that gives the clue to the meaning of their life. The 
 faiths of the world, whether they be Pagan or 
 Christian, have been chief among the nurseries of 
 genius, and if in the Irish and their literature there 
 is a charm which may not be found elsewhere, it is 
 due, as we believe, to their unwavering fidelity in 
 the love and worship of the Ever Living Ones, and in 
 the quest of the things that are eternal and pass not 
 away. Their earliest Gods, with the exception per- 
 haps of Mannanan Mac Lir, God of the Sea, and the 
 Dagda, with his cauldron of magic and his harp of 
 death, and Morrigu, Goddess of Destruction, had in 
 them a spirit of beauty and gentleness, contrasting 
 strangely with the savage nature of the early gods 
 of other races, and it is perhaps their pervading 
 influence that has had most force in the framing of 
 the Irish mind. 
 
 Their ocean God was Mannanan Mac Lir, 
 
 Whose angry lips 
 In their white foam full often would inter 
 
 Whole fleets of ships. 
 Crom was their day god, and their thunderer, 
 
 Made morning and eclipse : 
 Bride was their queen of song, and unto her 
 
 They pray'd with fire-touched lips. (28)
 
 54 
 
 And Dana, the mother of the Gods, stands out most 
 clear and merciful of all in the well-known lines of a 
 living poet : 
 
 " I am the heartbreak over fallen things, 
 The sudden gentleness that stays the blow, 
 And I am in the kiss that foemen give 
 Pausing in battle, and in the tears that fall 
 Over the vanquished foe, and in the highest 
 Among the Danaan Gods, I am the last 
 Council of mercy in their hearts where they 
 Mete justice from a thousand starry thrones." (29) 
 
 Inspired by beneficent Gods such as these, the 
 Irish have always been driven on by a great desire 
 to attain that " vision of the rainbow-aureoled face 
 of her whom men name Beauty," and along the 
 ways of wisdom and culture, and with the love in 
 their hearts of Bride, their queen of song, and her 
 praise on their fire-touched lips, they have sought 
 out the expression of Beauty incarnate in her mani- 
 fold forms. Their quest has surely been easier and 
 more pleasant to them through the wonderful gifts- 
 that they have in their language. Here, there is a 
 wealth of phrase, and a store of colour and music, 
 which many a poet of an alien country has envied. 
 This is 
 
 " The speech that wakes the soul in withered faces 
 And wakes remembrance of great things gone by." (30) 
 
 And in this beautiful, unmixed, Aryan language 
 which, with the exception of Greek, has left the
 
 55 
 
 longest, most luminous, and most consecutive 
 literary track behind it of the vernacular tongues 
 of Europe in this, when kindled with the fire of 
 poetry, there is a spell and a solace, of which it has 
 been well said : 
 
 " It charmed away the merchant from his guile, 
 And turned the farmer's memory from his cattle, 
 And hushed in sleep the roaring ranks of battle : 
 For all who heard it dreamed a little while." 
 
 XII 
 
 So great was the fame of Irish scholarship at the 
 height of its civilisation, that the landsbecame, as it 
 were, the seminary for the training of the greater 
 part of the intellect of Europe. And, to pluck the 
 matured fruit from the tree of knowledge in the Irish 
 schools, there came from all parts men who thought 
 even lightly of the danger of the seas and of the 
 mastery of a language, which, in its difficulty, is sur- 
 passed, perhaps, by no other civilised tongue. 
 Indeed, to those who have bent their will to the 
 learning of Irish, the following passage out of Holin- 
 shed will scarcely seem very remarkable. " A gentle-
 
 56 
 
 man of mine acquaintance reported that he did see 
 a woman in Rome which was possessed of a babbling 
 spirit that could have chatted any language save the 
 Irish, and that it was so difficult as the very devil 
 was gravelled thereat. A gentleman, that stood by, 
 answered that he took the speech to be so sacred and 
 holy that no damned fiend had the power to speak 
 it. Nay, by God's mercy, man (quoth the other), I 
 stand in doubt (I tell you), whether the Apostles in 
 their copious mart of languages at Jerusalem could 
 have spoken Irish if they were opposed, whereat 
 the company heartily laughed." 
 
 All the fair promise of a great future for Irish 
 learning and literary eminence was wrecked by the 
 destruction and cruelties of the Danish and Norman 
 invasions. The schools were broken up, an infinite 
 number of priceless manuscripts were burnt, and the 
 Irish " sons of learning," as these wise men modestly 
 called themselves, were sent into exile over the sea. 
 There, in poverty, friendless, and bereft of their old 
 sources of knowledge, they dragged out wretchedly 
 the length of their days, consumed with a hopeless 
 longing to return to their Alma Mater, and build up 
 again her desolate habitations. One catches a 
 glimpse of them now and again, chiefly in those per- 
 sonal notes which it was their custom to put in the 
 margin of their manuscripts. Here is one of the 
 poor brother FergalO'Gara,of the Augustinian Order, 
 who was spending the residue of his days in making
 
 57 
 
 a great collection of poems on themes in Irish His- 
 tory. He says, " Of each one that shall read this 
 book, and observe aught that in the same is wrongly 
 written or omitted, I crave pardon that they will not 
 wrongly blame me, seeing that I had not any to teach 
 me these things," and later he adds, " here I break 
 off until morning, and I in gloom and grief, and 
 during my life's length, unless only that I may have 
 one look at Ireland." 
 
 Some, more fortunate than their brethren, were 
 allowed to enter into the University of Oxford, and, 
 though it was not many years before this license was 
 recalled, and they were sent wandering again, they 
 left behind them a record of which even their own 
 country might be proud. The quaint notices of the 
 lives of some of these men in Holinshed, and in 
 Ware's Writers, are too interesting to pass over. 
 
 Of David de la Hyde, Fellow of Merton in 1549, it 
 is certified that he was " An exquisite and profound 
 clerk, very well seen in the Latin and Greek 
 tongues, expert in the mathematical, a proper anti- 
 quary, and an exact divine, whereby I gather that 
 his pen has not been lazy, but is daily breeding of 
 such learned books as shall be available to his pos- 
 terity." (31) Then, too, there is Nicholas Quemer- 
 ford, who took his degree after spending four years 
 in Oxford, " pecking and hewing at logic and philo- 
 sophy." And Elias Sheth, born at Kilkenny, who 
 wrote " divers sonnets, and was a gentleman of pass-
 
 58 
 
 ing good wit a pleasant conceited companion, full 
 of mirth without gall," and finally one " Nicholas 
 Eustace, a student of divinity, who, notwithstanding 
 he was born to a fair living, yet did wholly 
 sequester himself from the world." 
 
 With those few of the " sons of learning " who 
 stayed on in Ireland among the ruins of their former 
 glory, life must have gone very hardly, if one may 
 judge from the notes in the margin of their manu- 
 scripts. " I am tired," writes the transcriber of a 
 Great Digest of the Brehon Law, " I am tired, I 
 being this day without food, and I crave help of 
 God." " My writing equipment is bad," complains 
 another, " a soft, spiky pen, foxy, thick ink, vellum 
 stony and green, and (into the bargain) grief." 
 Another is angry at the disordering of his papers : 
 " My curse and God's curse into the bargain I be- 
 stow on the women that have muddled up together 
 all that I possessed in the way of ink, of colour, and 
 of books." Another looks sadly upon his manuscript, 
 and notes in the margin, "This writing of mine is not 
 worth bragging about if it were so I would." And 
 here, lastly, is the prayer of one who hears, as he 
 writes, the tumult of battle, and has the fear of 
 sudden death in his soul. "The conflict rages in 
 every district of Medhbs provinces, and I implore the 
 king of both the hither and the yonside world to shield 
 self and comrades, with me, from all harm, both here 
 and hereafter." (32)
 
 59 
 
 XIII 
 
 THIS is perhaps the place to say how extraordinary 
 (considering the unpeace of this people and the 
 incessant turmoil and upset of their country) is the 
 amount of their literary production. After all the 
 burning and destruction, after these many centuries 
 of the printing and publishing of books, after the 
 unwearied industry in translation of Irish scholars 
 during the last fifty years, there is, it is estimated, 
 still enough inedited manuscript material in Old 
 Irish to fill 1,500 volumes in thick folio. 
 
 The winning of knowledge seems never to have 
 brought weariness to the Irish people. They have 
 kept unabated their feverish desire for books and 
 the making of books. It was not in their way to 
 complain of the price of a manuscript, though, as was 
 the case with a book in the library of the Great Earl 
 of Kildare, it should cost them as much as twenty 
 cows. Nor was it their way to murmur at any long 
 travel or fatigue of body spent in search of knowledge, 
 though, as is recorded in the case of St. Columb, 
 the journey should extend to 200 miles. But it is, 
 perhaps, unfortunate to have fallen upon this instance 
 of St. Columb's long journey, for one has to confess 
 that there was murmuring, and more than murmur- 
 ing, at the end thereof. The legend runs, that this
 
 60 
 
 saint came down these many miles from lona to 
 study the Irish Annals of a brother saint, who was 
 so little saintly, that he would not receive St. Columb 
 to the place of his manuscripts and parchments. 
 Thereupon St. Columb (how one loves the trait of 
 righteous anger in his character!) rained down curses 
 for a whole hour, and implored the Almighty to make 
 all the books of this false saint of no service to him 
 or to his successors. "And these manly curses," 
 says the legend, " were heard afar off in heaven, and 
 the good Lord sent an Angel, who altered all the 
 books of this selfish saint into a language which 
 none of the sons of men have ever been able to 
 understand." 
 
 There have been no books anywhere in the world 
 so beloved of their owners as the books of Ireland, 
 beloved not with the love we give to inanimate things 
 that are beautiful, but with the almost human affec- 
 tion we yield to things that are lovely, and have 
 about them the signs of life and immortality. It is, as 
 one remembers this, that one finds a genuine pathos 
 in the legend which says, that on the death of 
 Longharad of Sleeve Margy, a most eminent scholar 
 of the 6th century, " the whole of the book satchels 
 of Ireland fell down from their racks on that 
 night." (33)
 
 61 
 
 XIV 
 
 BUT we must turn away from these things now to 
 give some account of the old Irish bards, perhaps 
 the most perfect flower of their civilisation, men of 
 whom it is said that "their lips won battles," who as 
 successors to the Druids, and to their mysteries, 
 enjoyed the veneration and power that their wisdom 
 had won, men who knew how to make the past live 
 again, 
 
 " to recall the blind, 
 
 Forewandered years and round their temples bind 
 Fresh coronals of lovelier memories." (34) 
 
 And men, again, whose calm far-seeing eyes looked 
 down the vista of the centuries to come, of whom 
 it might be said, as it was said of Cathvah the 
 Druid, 
 
 " his voice was like a sea's 
 For mystery and awe, and like the brooding sea 
 Blue were his druid eyes, and sad with things to come." (35) 
 
 The record of the national life of Ireland is dark 
 enough, but it had been far darker without the sweet 
 influences of these men. It is true enough that 
 they were inclined to sit in the seat of the scornful, 
 and were given to the making of fierce satires and 
 the firing of smouldering passions, but more often 
 still they were engaged in the making of peace.
 
 62 
 
 Again and again we read of the intervention of 
 bards who, shaking the chain of silence between the 
 quarrelling chiefs, succeeded in calming the strife ; 
 and the fragment from the romance from Fionn 
 Mac Cumhal that follows is only one of very many 
 evidences of the worthy part played by these men 
 in Irish affairs. 
 
 " . It was then that the prophesying poet 
 
 of the pointed words, that guerdon-full good man 
 of song, Fergus of the Fair Lips, rose up, and all 
 the Fenian men of science along with him, and they 
 sang their hymns and good poems and their perfect 
 lays to those heroes to silence and to soften them. 
 It was then they ceased from their slaughtering 
 and maiming on hearing the music of the poets, 
 and they let their weapons fall to earth, and the poets 
 took up their weapons, and they went between them 
 and grasped them with the grasp of reconciliation." 
 
 One must not approach the work of these men 
 with too vehement a desire for the truth. After all, 
 it was their metier to put a thread of poetry round 
 the bare chronicle of wasted time, to give unto the 
 world beauty for its ashes. Who shall blame them 
 that they have woven too many threads of this kind 
 or used colours too strong and deep for our weak 
 eyes to bear ? The thought of colour indeed is the 
 one which always leaps to the mind as one thinks of 
 these splendid singers of long ago " in rhythmic 
 cadence dressing life's discordant tale," For,
 
 63 
 
 springing as they did from the noble families of 
 Ireland, and being, by virtue of their office, held 
 equal in rank with the King himself, they were 
 allowed the use of all the six colours in their robes 
 as a sign of honour. 
 
 And, throughout their work also, one may see how 
 lavish they were in ornament and decorated phrase, 
 how they loved too well to cast their thought and 
 fancy into words of many hue and make them 
 radiant with excess of light and rich with trappings 
 grand and gay. 
 
 Here is a word picture made by one of them, 
 giving the likeness of Queen Maeve of Connact: "A 
 beautiful, pale, long-faced woman with flowing, 
 golden hair; upon her a crimson cloak fastened 
 with a brooch of gold, over her breast a straight 
 ridged spear blazing red in her hand." And here, 
 again, is an account of the army she marshalled for 
 the invasion of Ulster : " The first corps had on 
 them black heads of hair, and green mantles held 
 with silver brooches, and, next to their skins, shirts 
 of gold thread having round patterns of gold. The 
 second corps were clad in grey mantles and pure 
 white shirts, and helmets of gold were upon their 
 heads, hiding their hair. The third corps had flow- 
 ing yellow hair, with sheen of gold, all cast loose, 
 fine-wrought, crimson mantles, with cunning devices 
 of ornaments enwrapped therein, and at their breast 
 they had golden, jewelled brooches; and silken
 
 64 
 
 shirts, fine textured, touched the middle of their 
 insteps." 
 
 Another bard sings of the glories of the palace of 
 Emania, with its three times fifty rooms, and the 
 walls made of the red yew. The King's room was 
 in the front of the house, and was large enough for 
 thirty warriors. It was ornamented with silver, and 
 bronze, and carbuncles, and precious stones, so that 
 day and night were equally light therein. A gong of 
 silver hung behind the king, suspended from the 
 roof-tree, and, when he struck it with his silver wand 
 with the three golden apples tied to it, all the men 
 of Ulster were silent. And not far away was the 
 tower of Deirdre of the Sorrows, whence she looked 
 out with desire upon the youth Naisi, the son of 
 Uisneach, his skin white as the driven snow, his 
 hair black as the raven's wing, and on his cheeks a 
 blooming red, deep as the blood of the calf. 
 
 XV 
 
 APART from this use of colour, there is much 
 graciousness in the songs and writings of the bards. 
 They delighted in whatsoever things were fair and 
 venerable. Just as Augustine in his youth, so they,
 
 65 
 
 too, loved to dwell in their work upon such things as 
 the comeliness of the body, the fair harmony of 
 time, the brightness of the light, sweet melodies of 
 every kind, perfumes of flowers, and the delectable- 
 ness of lovely limbs. And yet, with all this, there is 
 mixed a strange grotesqueness and mystery which 
 comes, it may be, as an heritage from those far off 
 times when the Gods fought with each other upon 
 the earth, and worked terrible signs and wonders 
 among the children of men. 
 
 The early tales are shrouded in druid mists, 
 clouds of darkness, and showers of fire and blood, 
 like those the Firbolgs cast over the men of Dea, 
 the way they could not see or speak with one 
 another through the length of three days. And 
 they seem the more terrible and unreal because they 
 come to pass in a world of enchantment, where 
 things change and interchange with startling 
 rapidity, so that a man might appear one time in 
 his own natural shape, and the next as a salmon of 
 knowledge, shining in the sea, and after that, perhaps, 
 as the God " who spreads light in the gathering on 
 the hills." We read of Midir the Proud, of the 
 Yellow Hair, and Etain, daughter of Etar, King 
 of the Riders of the Sidhe, escaping together from 
 the rage of Eochaid in the form of two swans, high 
 up, linked by a chain of gold, and we are told how 
 wonder fell on the Milesians, seeing Eriu, the wife 
 of Mac Greine, Son of the Sun, one moment a wide-
 
 eyed most beautiful queen, and, in another, a sharp- 
 beaked gray-white crow. And through all these 
 bewildering scenes of transformation, one seems to 
 hear the magic harps of the Sidhe, playing that 
 music which may bring men swiftly to their death, 
 or cast over them the spell of deep sleep, or make 
 them suddenly forget the faces of women they have 
 madly loved. 
 
 In this dim atmosphere everything is portentous. 
 Those who come and go loom vast and confusedly 
 before us. They are not of our petty size nor 
 subject to our weakness. They perform prodigious 
 feats carelessly, as if with one hand, and what to us 
 would be an Odyssey they accomplish at one stride. 
 One man will go out to the fight alone, and slay so 
 many, that they will never be known till " we number 
 the stars of the sky, or flakes of snow, or the dew on 
 the grass, or the horses of the Son of Lir in a stormy 
 sea." Another will prefer to feast, and eat a whole 
 ox and two score cakes of bread, and then go lightly 
 to the hunting of deer. Another will stay quietly in 
 his dun, and say words that will make the very 
 clouds to tremble, or frame curses so fearful as to 
 quench the candles at the further end of his banquet 
 hall. 
 
 Notwithstanding all this extravagance of thought 
 and high-sounding phrase, they were honest men, 
 these bards. They loved to play with the jewelled 
 words, and cast a veil of mythical greatness about
 
 67 
 
 the heroes of their songs. It was not desirable, in 
 their minds, to forego their wonderful inheritance of 
 fancy for a mess of facts. They preferred the ways 
 of romance to the dull routine of the truth : they are 
 honest because they will declare it. Some of them 
 are well nigh as candid as that critical scribe of the 
 Book of Leinster, who writes of the exploits in the 
 Tain, " I who have transcribed this history do not 
 myself put faith in all things therein. Some are the 
 tricks of the devil, some the figments of poets, some 
 things are like the truth and some are not, and some 
 things are only for the amusement of fools." 
 
 Whatever be the faults and failings of these 
 bards, their songs remain to this day as the fairest 
 relic of the ancient glory of Ireland. And more 
 than that. They linger still in the hearts of the 
 common people. They are a joy and a solace to 
 them, even in these latter days of dereliction, when 
 the glory is departed, and the age of heroes is over. 
 It is when a nation has fallen on evil days that it 
 clings the most closely to the memory of its former 
 greatness: and with these people it is especially 
 true. Is it too fanciful to say that, as the evening 
 of Time begins to close round them, they warm 
 themselves with the thought of the beacon fires of 
 the past, and are heartened by the song of the bards 
 to go on further into the night, to endure hardness 
 until the end ? (36)
 
 XVI 
 
 But it is time to loose ourselves from the spell of 
 these bards, and proceed on our way, for it is well we 
 should tarry some while with their successors, the 
 sweet singers of our own time, who catch for us the 
 fugitive airs, the exquisite fleeting cadences, the 
 haunting indefinable music, of an earlier day, and so 
 follow faithfully in the long tradition of Irish song. 
 
 We have already observed the strange blend of 
 light-heartedness and despair that has gone to the 
 making of Irish Verse, and we have found that the 
 prevailing note is one of deep melancholy, the 
 dominant characteristic is one of gloom, of unavailing 
 regret, of mournful longing, a lament for what can- 
 not be again. " And for all the blithe songs and 
 happy abandon of so many Irish singers, the Irish' 
 themselves have given us the most poignant, the 
 most hauntingly sad lyric cries in all modern 
 literature. (37) 
 
 Let us look more closely at this poetry, and find 
 out by analysis something of its composition, the 
 secret of its charm, and the causes of its weakness. 
 
 The very first thing that strikes one is the great 
 lack, in this verse, of the stuff of which life is made. 
 There are here no full-blooded men, active, and full
 
 of energy, conquering the world, and living out their 
 hasty lives in great cities, amid the roar and rattle of 
 machinery they have known to invent. There is 
 none of the glare of the sun at noonday, and but 
 little said of the strife and stress in the work-a-day 
 world. No : the wells where the Irish bards find 
 their refreshing, and their inspiration, are very far 
 away from our hard world, in a twilight land of 
 faery and mystery, where the wicked cease from 
 troubling, and the weary are at rest. It is here that 
 these dreamers go among their dreams. It is beside 
 these still waters that they bring to harbour their 
 wills, so often adrift on the sea of desire, here that 
 they satisfy, at last, their great thirst for eternity. 
 
 " Hunters of Shadows they themselves are 
 Shades," (38) and the poetry that they make is but 
 the weaving of dreams upon a loom that is fashioned 
 out of a weeping mist, and out of the sorrow that 
 is in the wind, and the ancient sadness that is in the 
 sea. For this dream poetry they have been much 
 blamed, and there is no doubt that its detachment, 
 and its dwelling overmuch on a narrow range of 
 emotions, are chief among the limitations of Irish 
 verse. It is full of the unsweetened fruit and frail 
 flowers that grow on the northerly summits of 
 Parnassus, and lit only by the blood-red light of the 
 sun-setting. Perhaps it would have been better it 
 should have known something, at least, of the southern 
 slopes, and the gladness of the sun at noonday, the
 
 70 
 
 full ripeness of fruit, and the fragrance of 
 flowers. 
 
 But this aspect of life has been denied the Irish 
 People, and it is hard to see why their verse should 
 be blamed, because of a limitation it has not been 
 in their power to avoid. If poetry be the sincere 
 effluence of life, the Celtic peoples could not have 
 written otherwise than they have done. From a 
 race, which in the words of one of its children, is but 
 " Flotsam and waif in Time's eternal sea," (39) it is 
 uncritical to demand that width of experience, and 
 that ardour and joy in living, which can only spring 
 from men whose fates have been spun more 
 fortunately. 
 
 XVII 
 
 Another leading element in Irish poetry, one that 
 it has in larger measure than the poetry of other 
 nations, is that supreme pathos which is born of the 
 eternal procession of men and things, and of the 
 contrast between the frailty of the children of men, 
 and the abiding strength of the Gods whose years 
 endure through all generations. The whole range
 
 71 
 
 of Irish literature has been touched with this spirit 
 of impermanence. In the colloquy between Caoilte 
 and St. Patrick, a maiden of wonderful beauty 
 approaches them as they talk together, with the 
 light, graceful step of youth. " It is Flower- Lustre," 
 cries Caoilte, " my love of long ago." Patrick looks 
 wonderingly from one to the other, from Caoilte, 
 a withered ancient trembling on the verge of death, 
 to the girl, tall and fair as a lily by his side, and 
 then asks how this may be. " She," says the old 
 man, with a bitter sigh, " is of the tuatha de'danann, 
 who are unfading, and whose duration is perennial. 
 I am of the sons of Milesius, that are perishable, and 
 fade away." 
 
 Walter Raleigh, in his fine study of Shakespeare, 
 speaking of the Sonnets, has said, " The tragedy of 
 which they speak is the topic and inspiration of 
 all poetry; it is the triumph of Time, marching 
 relentlessly over the ruins of human ambitions and 
 human desires. It may be read in all nature and 
 in all art ; there are hints of it in the movement of 
 the dial hand, in the withering of flowers, in the 
 wrinkles on a beautiful face ; it comes home with the 
 harvests of autumn, and darkens hope in the eclipse 
 of the sun and moon ; the yellowing papers of the 
 poet, and the crumbling pyramids of the builder, tell 
 of it ; it speaks in the waves that break upon the 
 shore, and in the histories that commemorate bygone 
 civilisations."
 
 72 
 
 It is this tragedy in life that is the occasion and 
 the fibre of Irish Verse. It is from the ruins of 
 their old civilisation, and from the wreckage of 
 their dreams, that the Irish have fashioned into 
 beauty those elegies which haunt the mind with 
 their melancholy grace. 
 
 " Solomon ! where is thy throne ? It is gone in the wind. 
 Babylon ! where is thy might? It is gone in the wind. 
 All that the genius of man hath achieved or designed 
 Waits but its hour to be dealt with as dust by the wind." (40) 
 
 Yet another element in Irish Poetry is the very 
 large concern it has with love and all the strange 
 ways of love. It is the chief theme of their verse, 
 as it is of their life, and in fixing the relation of 
 their mind with that of other nations in the world's 
 history, they have not overlooked this. The old 
 lines run : 
 
 " For acuteness and valour the Greeks, 
 For excessive pride the Romans, 
 For dulness the creeping Saxons, 
 For beauty and amorousness the Gaidhils." 
 
 " For beauty and amorousness the Gaidhils." It is 
 the blend of these two which goes to form the 
 body of Irish verse, and the beauty is that immortal, 
 spiritual beauty which is beyond the beauty of earth, 
 and the love is that which is clothed with all the 
 romance and melancholy of the Celtic mind. Their 
 art is not of that austere kind which requires that 
 " beauty itself shall come in sober apparel, joy only 
 walking temperately, sorrow without the disfigure-
 
 73 
 
 ment of tears." (41) Their lives are lived out 
 
 naturally. They brook no control or restraint, and 
 are not careful to curb their passions or their emo- 
 tions. And that is why there is such freedom in their 
 verse, and such richness of colour and expression. 
 
 What other people could frame words like their 
 words, to image the beauty of women, or yield them 
 an equal measure of praise ? Who, but one of their 
 poets, could have written such a precious thing as 
 this description of Etain the Fair. " Now Eochaid 
 Feidlech, High King of Ireland, was going one time 
 over the fair green of Bri Leith, and he saw, at the 
 side of a well, a woman with a bright comb of gold 
 and silver, and, she washing in a silver basin, having 
 four golden birds on it, and little bright purple stones 
 set in the rim of the basin. A beautiful purple cloak 
 she had, and silver fringes to it, and a gold brooch ; 
 and she had on her a dress of green silk, with a long 
 hood, embroidered in red gold, and wonderful clasps 
 of gold and silver on her breasts and on her shoulder. 
 The sunlight was falling on her, so that the gold and 
 the green silk were shining out. Two plaits of hair she 
 had, four locks in each plait, and a bead at the point 
 of every lock, and the colour of her hair was like 
 yellow flags in summer, or like red gold after it is 
 rubbed. There she was, letting down her hair to 
 wash it, and her arms out through the sleeve holes 
 of her shift. Her soft hands were as white as the 
 snow of a single night, and her eyes as blue as any
 
 74 
 
 blue flower, and her lips as red as the berries of the 
 rowan-tree, and her body as white as the foam of a 
 wave. The bright light of the moon was in her face, 
 the highness of pride in her eybrows, a dimple of 
 delight in each of her cheeks, the light of wooing in 
 her eyes, and when she walked, she had a step that 
 that was steady and even, like the walk of a 
 queen." (42) 
 
 We have already seen that when the Irish would 
 sing of love, it is the fever of love and its sorrow 
 which comes to their mind, and touches with a plain- 
 tive note the strings of their lyre. The love that for 
 some is a quickening flame becomes for them a de- 
 vouring fire, and in its passionate heat they are con- 
 sumed. It is by the shipwreck of their lives they 
 learn that Aphrodite is at once the fairest of the 
 deities and the most cruel, and that when she is most 
 gracious to men it is time for them to die. It may 
 be well here to give some illustration of this, and how 
 could one choose anything more beautiful, or more 
 representative, than the following lyric of Mr. W. B. 
 Yeats : 
 
 11 The quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves, 
 The full round moon and the star laden sky, 
 And the loud song of the ever-singing leaves, 
 Has hid away earth's old and weary cry. 
 
 And then you came with those red mournful lips, 
 And with you came the whole of the world's tears, 
 And all the sorrows of her labouring ships, 
 And all the trouble of her myriad years.
 
 75 
 
 And now the sparrows warring in the eaves, 
 The curd-pale moon, the white stars in the sky, 
 And the loud chaunting of the unquiet leaves, 
 Are shaken with earth's old and weary cry." 
 
 XVIII 
 
 THE last element we can set apart for consideration 
 in Irish poetry is that, which, perhaps of all, gives to 
 it the greatest part of its charm. And this is its 
 affinity with the natural world, nay more, its perfect 
 understanding and expression of the hidden mysteries 
 and inarticulate voices of Nature. The Celtic Peoples 
 have never grown ashamed or forgetful of the Divine 
 Mother from whom they sprang, and to whom, in due 
 season, they return. True Children of Earth, their 
 souls are filled with the softness of dawns and the 
 splendourof sun-risings, and the glory of sun-settings. 
 They have known, as no others have known, the 
 peace that broods along the lonely hills, and the 
 tenderness that is in the sacred aisles of primeval 
 woods, where, as one of their poets says : 
 
 " the ancient mother lingers 
 To dip her hands in the diamond dew 
 And lave thy ache with cloud cool fingers 
 Till sorrow die from you." (48)
 
 76 
 
 The sea itself flows in their veins : they are 
 clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the 
 stars. (44) They have laid their hearts against the 
 mother heart of Nature, and let them beat in unison 
 with hers; their songs seem to be but the setting 
 down of that inner beauty and wisdom which she 
 has revealed to these children of hers, who have 
 loved her with a love so deep and so enduring. 
 
 The divinity of earth, the sighing of the wind, 
 the surge of the unresting sea, these are chief 
 among the abiding elements of Irish poetry. And 
 the love of the Irish for these is so strong, as to 
 make them often look back wistfully to the time 
 when, in the early freshness of the world, they 
 prayed their prayers alone to the Nature Gods, and 
 framed their litanies only for the beauty of this earth. 
 
 " Who," they sing, with a note of regret in their 
 voices : 
 
 " Who is that goddess to whom men should pray, 
 But her from whom their hearts have turned away ? 
 Out of whose virgin being they were born, 
 Whose mother nature they have named in scorn, 
 Calling its holy substance common clay. 
 
 Yet from this so despised earth was made 
 
 The milky whiteness of those queens, who swayed 
 
 Their generations with a light caress, 
 
 And from some image of whose loveliness 
 
 The heart built up high heaven when it prayed." (45) 
 
 The Irish love of the sea and the wind is free from 
 the gloom and terror that these cast into the souls of
 
 77 
 
 their brothers away in Brittany. To the latter, the 
 wind is that which tells of the cruelties of the Gods, 
 the hapless fate of humankind, the ceaseless pursuit 
 of illusions ceaselessly renewed, and, if they speak of 
 it at all in their verse, it is with words full of vague- 
 ness, and mystery, and uneasiness : " Ann avel a zeu 
 deus a bell. Den na oar piou e ann avel." " The 
 wind comes from very far away. We do not know 
 who is the wind." And the sea, too, is the implacable 
 enemy of the Bretons, and the fear of it is ever in 
 their souls, throwing its deep shadow athwart their 
 happier hours. It is an 
 
 " Ocean incarnadined with countless crime, 
 Green with drowned hopes and wrecks of joyous prime ; 
 Salt with the myriad tears of human woes, 
 Tossed with the surge and tumult of earth's throes." (46) 
 
 The Irish have overcome this feeling of terror in 
 face of the vast elemental forces of Nature, and, 
 though they know more keenly than other men the 
 melancholy that comes to those that look long upon the 
 beauty of the world, they know, too, at times, the old 
 joy of earth, and the reckless laughter of the wind, 
 and the gladness of the sea. 
 
 The wind that blows through them " the melan- 
 choly forgotten things of long ago," is the same wind 
 that they hear with 
 
 "slender fingers 
 
 Harping strange things among the tossing reeds, 
 A lordlier music than the old blind singers 
 Made of Cuchulain and his mighty deeds, 
 And heroes this faint time no longer heeds." (47)
 
 78 
 
 And that, again, is the same wind which, with its 
 exultant sweep, cures them of all their heartbreak 
 and nerves, and braces them to front the future with 
 untroubled souls. And the sea that is 
 
 " terrible with the unrevealed 
 Burden of dim lamentful prophecies," 
 
 is that which yields to them its sacred consolation, 
 and that again, which as a harper, " lays hold of the 
 shore as a lyre," rejoicing their hearts with its per- 
 fect music. " Oceanward," they sing, " Oceanward, 
 the sea-horses sweep magnificently, champing and 
 whirling white foam about their green flanks, and 
 tossing on high their manes of sunlit rainbow-gold, 
 dazzling white and multitudinous, far as sight can 
 reach. O champing horses of my soul, toss on high 
 your sunlit manes, your manes of rainbow-gold, 
 dazzling white and multitudinous, for I, too, rejoice, 
 rejoice." (48) 
 
 XIX 
 
 It is because of their absorbing love for Nature 
 that the Irish have kept about them the old earth- 
 magic and steeped their hearts in its spell. For 
 phem the god Pan is not dead ; the natural world is
 
 79 
 
 peopled with the children of the Sidhe, the hidden, 
 wondrous folk that never die, and there come steal- 
 ing upon their ears ceaselessly, far unknown cries, 
 and whispering voices, and the faint sound of phantom 
 battle-horns, and those wild, remote, uncertain bells, 
 that ring out their fatal beauty, and lonely sorrow, 
 from Falias. and Finias, and Gorias, and Murias, the 
 four buried cities of the Irish seas. 
 
 " Once," as Mr. Yeats says, " every people in the 
 world believed that trees were divine, and could 
 take a human or grotesque shape, and dance among 
 the shadows ; and that deer, and ravens and foxes, 
 and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools, almost 
 all things under the sun and moon, and the sun 
 and moon, were not less divine and changeable. 
 They saw in the rainbow the still bent bow of a 
 god thrown down in his negligence; they heard, in 
 the thunder, the sound of his beaten water jar, or 
 the tumult of his chariot wheels ; and when a sudden 
 flight of wild duck, or of crows, passed over their 
 heads, they thought they were gazing at the dead 
 hastening to their rest; while they dreamed of so 
 great a mystery in little things, that they believed 
 the waving of a hand, or of a sacred bough, enough 
 to trouble far-off hearts, or hood the moon with 
 darkness." 
 
 It is this primitive spirit that the Irish have 
 preserved, with so little loss, from the clutch of the 
 devouring years. Other races have stopped their
 
 80 
 
 ears to the whispering of the faery folk, and grown 
 old, and closed the doors of their souls upon what- 
 soever is fair and lovely. But the Irish and, be it 
 remembered, as their abiding praise have held fast, 
 through the long horror and humiliation of their 
 history, to the unaltering agelessness which is the 
 secret of their charm. They are a race of children 
 children of Aengus the Beautiful and the Ever 
 Young and they have all the simplicity, and wonder, 
 and surprise that goes with youth, and with youth 
 alone. It is because of this that they can over- 
 hear the voices of " The Twilight People," as they 
 call them, and interpret the song of the birds, and 
 fathom the secret of the forest ways. And it is 
 this childlikeness, strangely blent with all the in- 
 herited sorrow of their lives, which makes it possible 
 for them to frame such perfect verses as those with 
 which we will close our study of the literature of 
 the Irish : 
 
 " It is a whisper among the hazel bushes ; 
 It is a long, low, whispering voice that fills 
 With a sad music the bending and swaying rushes ; 
 It is a heart beat deep in the quiet hills. 
 
 Twilight people, why will you still be crying, 
 Crying and calling to me out of the trees? 
 For under the quiet grass the wise are lying, 
 And all the strong ones are gone over the seas. 
 
 And I am old, and in my heart at your calling 
 
 Only the old dead dreams a-fluttering go ; 
 
 As the wind, the forest wind, in its falling 
 
 Sets the withered leaves fluttering to and fro." (49)
 
 81 
 
 XX 
 
 IT is time to be making an end, or the writer will be 
 accused of playing " the sleepy tune " of the harpers 
 of the Sidhe, the which, if a man hear, though he 
 try his utmost to keep awake, and though he be in 
 the midst of battle, or following the chase, or read- 
 ing in a book, yet shall he straightway be overcome 
 with the irresistible desire for sleep. If he has not 
 already done so, the writer is sorely inclined to cast 
 over his readers this same spell of sleep, for then, 
 without injury or blame, he might indulge his teem- 
 ing fancy, and swell this little treatise into a mighty 
 volume, worthy, at any rate in size, to find place 
 with " Erin's host of books." One is loth to be 
 drawn away from the study of a people like the 
 Irish, for further knowledge of their nature brings 
 with it a deeper love. And therein is the danger. 
 For love has never acknowledged the laws of time 
 and space, and literary affections, in particular, are 
 apt to loose sight of the endurance of mortal readers 
 or the stern rules of art. 
 
 It would have been pleasant to write of the folk 
 songs, in which one may hear the very heart of the 
 Irish people beating; and the folk tunes, whose
 
 82 
 
 simple melodies fall upon one's soul like memories 
 from another world. One would have liked, also, to 
 tell of the three orders of the Irish Saints, of which 
 the first glowed like the sun in the fervour of their 
 charity, the second cast a pale radiance like the 
 moon, and the third shone with the faint glimmering 
 of the Aurora, which three Orders the blessed 
 Patrick foreknew, enlightened by heavenly wisdom, 
 when in prophetic vision he saw at first all Ireland 
 ablaze, and afterwards only the mountains on fire, 
 and at last only lamps lit in the valleys. 
 
 But, above all, it had been the desire of the writer 
 to make pass before his readers something more 
 than the shadows of those illustrious children of 
 Erin, whose names are as everlasting lights in the 
 long corridor of the temple of fame. There had 
 been no better way of coming to an end than to 
 have made a Masque of the Undying Dead those 
 
 "wanderers o'er Eternity 
 Whose bark drives on and anchored ne'er shall be," 
 
 no sweeter recessional than to have hymned their 
 praise, as one unfolded in gradual beauty the pageant 
 of their lives. 
 
 We should have seen the Tuatha De Danaan pass 
 by us in all the splendour of their strength, among 
 them Manannan MacLir, clad in his invulnerable 
 mail, his jewelled helmet flashing in the sun, robed 
 in his cloak of magic, woven from the fleeces of the
 
 83 
 
 flocks of Paradise, and girt with his sword " Reta- 
 liator," which never failed to slay. Goibniu, the 
 forger of weapons, and brewer of the ale of immor- 
 tality. Morrigu, Queen of Battle, Niamh of the 
 Golden Tresses, Queen of the land of Youth, and 
 Lugh of the Long Hands, with his face shining with 
 the glory of the sun. And in their train would have 
 swept by the proud conquering Milesians, with Amer- 
 gin of the White Knees at their head, weaving his 
 Druid incantations, and singing his perfect lays. 
 And, after them again, the Champions of the Red 
 Branch, with Conchobar MacNessa for their chief, 
 and with him Bricriu of the Bitter Tongue, and 
 Conall the Victorious, and the three sons of Uisneach, 
 Naisi, and Ainnle, and Ardan, pillars of the headlong 
 bursting battle, and, by their side, Deirdre, the Queen 
 of Loveliness, crowned with the white flame of wis- 
 dom, and the red flame of beauty. And a little apart 
 from these, resplendent in his chariot, with the hero- 
 light about his head, Cuchulain the flower of Irish 
 Chivalry, the supreme glory of Irish Romance. 
 
 " Like a swift hound for strength, and graceful slenderness 
 In the first flower of his youth ; the colours of his face 
 Fresh as the dawning day, and in his clear blue eyes 
 The glad undaunted light of life's unsullied morn." (50) 
 
 These again, would have passed on their way, and 
 given place to the Fianna, and we should have 
 looked upon Fionn, the breaker of hosts, and king of 
 the glittering blades of war ; and Osgur of dire
 
 84 
 
 deeds ; and Diarmuid of the dusky curling hair, the 
 lover and beloved of women ; and Caoilte, swiftest 
 footed of men ; and Conan, of Boisterous Speech ; 
 and Goll Mac Morna, the raging lion, the torch of 
 onset, and the great of soul. And last of all, follow- 
 ing very slowly and far behind, the sad, pathetic 
 figure of Oisin, wrenching great sorrowful cries out 
 of his harp for the loss of Niamh of the Golden 
 Hair, and for the land of Youth where he may no 
 more return, and for the departed glory of the 
 Fianna. 
 
 It is, with Oisin, the bard : 
 
 " Whose ancient song 
 Over the clamour of all change is heard, 
 Sweet-voiced and strong." (51) 
 
 It is with him the pageant should end. It is his 
 voice, and the harping of his harp, these alone, that 
 should be with us at the last : his sublime elegies 
 that should linger in our hearts after that we have r 
 taken our leave of this doomed and passing race. 
 
 A doomed and passing race ! Yes, but not 
 wholly so. The Celt has at last reached his horizon. 
 There is no shore beyond. He knows it. This has 
 been the burden of his song since Malvina led the 
 blind singer to his grave by the sea. " Even the 
 Children of Light must go down in the darkness." 
 But this apparition of a passing race is no more 
 than the fulfilment of a glorious resurrection before
 
 85 
 
 our very eyes. For the genius of the Celtic Race 
 stands out now with averted torch, and the light of 
 it is a glory before the eyes, and the flame of it is 
 blown into the hearts of the mightier, conquering 
 people. The Celt falls, but his spirit rises in the 
 heart and the brain of the Anglo-Celtic peoples 
 with whom are the destinies of the generations to 
 come." (52)
 
 REFERENCES TO QUOTATIONS. 
 
 1 William Watson. Coronation Ode, 1901. 
 
 2 Annals of Ulster, III., p. 281. 
 
 3 Dr. Douglas Hyde. 
 
 4 Arthur Symons of Gerard de Nerval. 
 
 5 In " Le Multiple Splendeur." 
 
 6 Edmund Spenser, " A View of the state of Ireland," 116 
 
 and seq. 
 
 7 Whitely Stokes Da Derga, 301. 
 
 8 From the Rhapsody of Oisin. Translated by Miss Brooke. 
 
 9 W. B. Yeats of William Blake in Ideas of Good and Evil. 
 
 10 Speech of Pericles upon the Athenian dead. From 
 
 Thucydides. 
 
 11 Souvenirs de 1'enfance et de jeunesse. 
 
 12 W. B. Yeats. Celtic Element in Literature. 
 
 13 Swinburne. Atalanta in Calydon. 
 
 14 W. B. Yeats. 
 
 15 Arthur Symons. The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 
 
 p. 157. 
 
 16 Oscar Wilde. De Profundis. 
 
 17 Oscar Wilde. De Profundis. 
 
 18 W. B. Yeats. The Shadowy Waters. 
 
 19 Thomas Hardy. Times Laughing-stocks. 
 
 20 O'Curry. Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, 
 
 150. Vol. III.
 
 88 
 
 21 In an article in the Times Literary Supplement, 1911. 
 
 22 The Translation of these extracts from the Dialogue are 
 
 taken from the " Poems of Oisin," by John Hawkins 
 Simpson, 1857. 
 
 23 Feilire of Angus the Culdee, 154. 
 
 24 Joyce. Old Celtic Romances, 419. 
 
 25 Revue Celtique, XIV., 29. 
 
 26 Stokes' Lives of the Saints, IX. 
 
 27 Fiona Macleod, in The Divine Adventure, lona, etc. 
 
 28 Thomas D'Arcy McGee. The Celts. 
 
 29 A. E. (George Russell), in the Divine Vision. 
 
 30 Lionel Johnson. Poems. 
 
 31 This versatile scholar may very likely be an ancestor of 
 
 Dr. Douglas Hyde, the famous man of letters of our 
 own day. I am informed by the latter that his family 
 were the De La Hydes before the time of Elizabeth. 
 
 32 I have transcribed these several marginal notes from 
 
 Alice Stopford Green's book, "The Making and 
 Undoing of Ireland." 
 
 33 Feilire of Angus the Culdee, 141. 
 
 34 Margaret L. Wood's " Twilight." 
 
 35 John Todhunter, " The Fate of the Sons of Usna." 
 
 36 The translations from the old Irish used in this section of 
 
 the bards are chiefly from Lady Gregory's book, 
 "Gods and Fighting Men." 
 
 37 Introduction to " Lyra Celtica," by William Sharp. 
 
 38 R. Henghist Home. "Orion," 
 
 39 P. A. Sheehan. 
 
 40 James Clarence Mangan. " Gone in the Wind." 
 
 41 Arthur Symons. Of Robert Bridges. 
 
 42 The translation is by Lady Gregory, and appears in her 
 
 " Gods and Fighting Men." 
 
 43 A. E. (George Russell). Homeward Songs by the Way. 
 
 44 Varied from a passage in Thomas Traherne's "Centuries 
 
 pf Meditations."
 
 89 
 
 45 A. E. (George Russell). The Virgin Mother. By Still 
 
 Waters. 
 
 46 Mary Cowden Clarke. 
 
 47 Dermot O' Byrne. Seafoam and Firelight. In Carna. 
 
 48 Fiona Macleod. The Silence of Amor. Evoe. 
 
 49 Seumas O' Sullivan. 
 
 50 John Todhunter. " The Fate of the Sons of Usna." 
 
 51 Thomas D'Arcy McGee. The Celts. 
 
 52 Fiona Macleod.
 
 W H. DARGAN, LTD., SMITHFIELD, B.C.