Gods and Fighting Men, Lady I. A Gregory [best e books to read TXT] 📗
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- Author: Lady I. A Gregory
Book online «Gods and Fighting Men, Lady I. A Gregory [best e books to read TXT] 📗». Author Lady I. A Gregory
I
A few months ago I was on the bare Hill of Allen, "wide Almhuin of
Leinster," where Finn and the Fianna lived, according to the stories,
although there are no earthen mounds there like those that mark the
sites of old buildings on so many hills. A hot sun beat down upon
flowering gorse and flowerless heather; and on every side except the
east, where there were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level
horizon and brown boglands with a few green places and here and there
the glitter of water. One could imagine that had it been twilight and
not early afternoon, and had there been vapours drifting and frothing
where there were now but shadows of clouds, it would have set stirring
in one, as few places even in Ireland can, a thought that is peculiar to
Celtic romance, as I think, a thought of a mystery coming not as with
Gothic nations out of the pressure of darkness, but out of great spaces
and windy light. The hill of Teamhair, or Tara, as it is now called,
with its green mounds and its partly wooded sides, and its more gradual
slope set among fat grazing lands, with great trees in the hedgerows,
had brought before one imaginations, not of heroes who were in their
youth for hundreds of years, or of women who came to them in the
likeness of hunted fawns, but of kings that lived brief and politic
lives, and of the five white roads that carried their armies to the
lesser kingdoms of Ireland, or brought to the great fair that had given
Teamhair its sovereignty, all that sought justice or pleasure or had
goods to barter.
II
It is certain that we must not confuse these kings, as did the mediaeval
chroniclers, with those half-divine kings of Almhuin. The chroniclers,
perhaps because they loved tradition too well to cast out utterly much
that they dreaded as Christians, and perhaps because popular imagination
had begun the mixture, have mixed one with another ingeniously, making
Finn the head of a kind of Militia under Cormac MacArt, who is supposed
to have reigned at Teamhair in the second century, and making Grania,
who travels to enchanted houses under the cloak of Angus, god of Love,
and keeps her troubling beauty longer than did Helen hers, Cormac's
daughter, and giving the stories of the Fianna, although the impossible
has thrust its proud finger into them all, a curious air of precise
history. It is only when one separates the stories from that mediaeval
pedantry, as in this book, that one recognises one of the oldest worlds
that man has imagined, an older world certainly than one finds in the
stories of Cuchulain, who lived, according to the chroniclers, about the
time of the birth of Christ. They are far better known, and one may be
certain of the antiquity of incidents that are known in one form or
another to every Gaelic-speaking countryman in Ireland or in the
Highlands of Scotland. Sometimes a labourer digging near to a cromlech,
or Bed of Diarmuid and Crania as it is called, will tell one a tradition
that seems older and more barbaric than any description of their
adventures or of themselves in written text or story that has taken form
in the mouths of professed story-tellers. Finn and the Fianna found
welcome among the court poets later than did Cuchulain; and one finds
memories of Danish invasions and standing armies mixed with the
imaginations of hunters and solitary fighters among great woods. One
never hears of Cuchulain delighting in the hunt or in woodland things;
and one imagines that the story-teller would have thought it unworthy in
so great a man, who lived a well-ordered, elaborate life, and had his
chariot and his chariot-driver and his barley-fed horses to delight in.
If he is in the woods before dawn one is not told that he cannot know
the leaves of the hazel from the leaves of the oak; and when Emer
laments him no wild creature comes into her thoughts but the cuckoo that
cries over cultivated fields. His story must have come out of a time
when the wild wood was giving way to pasture and tillage, and men had no
longer a reason to consider every cry of the birds or change of the
night. Finn, who was always in the woods, whose battles were but hours
amid years of hunting, delighted in the "cackling of ducks from the Lake
of the Three Narrows; the scolding talk of the blackbird of Doire an
Cairn; the bellowing of the ox from the Valley of the Berries; the
whistle of the eagle from the Valley of Victories or from the rough
branches of the Ridge of the Stream; the grouse of the heather of
Cruachan; the call of the otter of Druim re Coir." When sorrow comes
upon the queens of the stories, they have sympathy for the wild birds
and beasts that are like themselves: "Credhe wife of Cael came with the
others and went looking through the bodies for her comely comrade, and
crying as she went. And as she was searching she saw a crane of the
meadows and her two nestlings, and the cunning beast the fox watching
the nestlings; and when the crane covered one of the birds to save it,
he would make a rush at the other bird, the way she had to stretch
herself out over the birds; and she would sooner have got her own death
by the fox than the nestlings to be killed by him. And Credhe was
looking at that, and she said: 'It is no wonder I to have such love for
my comely sweetheart, and the bird in that distress about her
nestlings.'"
III
One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that
howls at something a man's eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive
lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious of many
things that we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly,
more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away. Although the
gods come to Cuchulain, and although he is the son of one of the
greatest of them, their country and his are far apart, and they come to
him as god to mortal; but Finn is their equal. He is continually in
their houses; he meets with Bodb Dearg, and Angus, and Manannan, now as
friend with friend, now as with an enemy he overcomes in battle; and
when he has need of their help his messenger can say: "There is not a
king's son or a prince, or a leader of the Fianna of Ireland, without
having a wife or a mother or a foster-mother or a sweetheart of the
Tuatha de Danaan." When the Fianna are broken up at last, after hundreds
of years of hunting, it is doubtful that he dies at all, and certain
that he comes again in some other shape, and Oisin, his son, is made
king over a divine country. The birds and beasts that cross his path in
the woods have been fighting men or great enchanters or fair women, and
in a moment can take some beautiful or terrible shape. One thinks of him
and of his people as great-bodied men with large movements, that seem,
as it were, flowing out of some deep below the narrow stream of personal
impulse, men that have broad brows and quiet eyes full of confidence in
a good luck that proves every day afresh that they are a portion of the
strength of things. They are hardly so much individual men as portions
of universal nature, like the clouds that shape themselves and re-shape
themselves momentarily, or like a bird between two boughs, or like the
gods that have given the apples and the nuts; and yet this but brings
them the nearer to us, for we can remake them in our image when we will,
and the woods are the more beautiful for the thought. Do we not always
fancy hunters to be something like this, and is not that why we think
them poetical when we meet them of a sudden, as in these lines in
"Pauline":
"An old hunter
Talking with gods; or a nigh-crested chief
Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos"
IV
One must not expect in these stories the epic lineaments, the many
incidents, woven into one great event of, let us say, the story of the
War for the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, or that of the last gathering at
Muirthemne. Even Diarmuid and Grania, which is a long story, has nothing
of the clear outlines of Deirdre, and is indeed but a succession of
detached episodes. The men who imagined the Fianna had the imagination
of children, and as soon as they had invented one wonder, heaped another
on top of it. Children--or, at any rate, it is so I remember my own
childhood--do not understand large design, and they delight in little
shut-in places where they can play at houses more than in great expanses
where a country-side takes, as it were, the impression of a thought. The
wild creatures and the green things are more to them than to us, for
they creep towards our light by little holes and crevices. When they
imagine a country for themselves, it is always a country where one can
wander without aim, and where one can never know from one place what
another will be like, or know from the one day's adventure what may meet
one with to-morrow's sun. I have wished to become a child again that I
might find this book, that not only tells one of such a country, but is
fuller than any other book that tells of heroic life, of the childhood
that is in all folk-lore, dearer to me than all the books of the western
world.
Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions
they will put away for one reason or another before they grow into
ordinary men and women. Mankind as a whole had a like dream once;
everybody and nobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient
story-tellers are there to make us remember what mankind would have been
like, had not fear and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped
up its heels. The Fianna and their like are themselves so full of power,
and they are set in a world so fluctuating and dream-like, that nothing
can hold them from being all that the heart desires.
I have read in a fabulous book that Adam had but to imagine a bird, and
it was born into life, and that he created all things out of himself by
nothing more important than an unflagging fancy; and heroes who can make
a ship out of a shaving have but little less of the divine prerogatives.
They have no speculative thoughts to wander through eternity and waste
heroic blood; but how could that be otherwise, for it is at all times
the proud angels who sit thinking upon the hill-side and not the people
of Eden. One morning we meet them hunting a stag that is "as joyful as
the leaves of a tree in summer-time"; and whatever they do, whether they
listen to the harp or follow an enchanter over-sea, they do for the sake
of joy, their joy in one another, or their joy in pride and movement;
and even their battles are fought more because of their delight in a
good fighter than because of any gain that is in victory. They live
always as if they were playing a game; and so far as they have any
deliberate purpose at all, it is that they may become great gentlemen
and be worthy of the songs of poets. It has been said, and I think the
Japanese were the first to say it, that the four essential virtues are
to be generous among the weak, and truthful among one's friends, and
brave among one's enemies, and courteous at all times; and if we
understand by courtesy not merely the gentleness the story-tellers have
celebrated, but a delight in courtly things, in beautiful clothing and
in beautiful verse, one understands that it was no formal succession of
trials that bound the Fianna to one another. Only the Table Round, that
is indeed, as it seems, a rivulet from the same river, is bound in a
like fellowship, and there the four heroic virtues are troubled by the
abstract virtues of the cloister. Every now and then some noble knight
builds himself a cell upon the hill-side, or leaves kind women
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