Gods and Fighting Men, Lady I. A Gregory [best e books to read TXT] 📗

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joyful knights to seek the vision of the Grail in lonely adventures. But

when Oisin or some kingly forerunner--Bran, son of Febal, or the

like--rides or sails in an enchanted ship to some divine country, he but

looks for a more delighted companionship, or to be in love with faces

that will never fade. No thought of any life greater than that of love,

and the companionship of those that have drawn their swords upon the

darkness of the world, ever troubles their delight in one another as it

troubles Iseult amid her love, or Arthur amid his battles. It is one of

the ailments of our speculation that thought, when it is not the

planning of something, or the doing of something or some memory of a

plain circumstance separates us from one another because it makes us

always more unlike, and because no thought passes through another's ear

unchanged. Companionship can only be perfect when it is founded on

things, for things are always the same under the hand, and at last one

comes to hear with envy of the voices of boys lighting a lantern to

ensnare moths, or of the maids chattering in the kitchen about the fox

that carried off a turkey before breakfast. This book is full of

fellowship untroubled like theirs, and made noble by a courtesy that has

gone perhaps out of the world. I do not know in literature better

friends and lovers. When one of the Fianna finds Osgar dying the proud

death of a young man, and asks is it well with him, he is answered, "I

am as you would have me be." The very heroism of the Fianna is indeed

but their pride and joy in one another, their good fellowship. Goll, old

and savage, and letting himself die of hunger in a cave because he is

angry and sorry, can speak lovely words to the wife whose help he

refuses. "'It is best as it is,' he said, 'and I never took the advice

of a woman east or west, and I never will take it. And oh, sweet-voiced

queen,' he said, 'what ails you to be fretting after me? and remember

now your silver and your gold, and your silks ... and do not be crying

tears after me, queen with the white hands,' he said, 'but remember your

constant lover Aodh, son of the best woman of the world, that came from

Spain asking for you, and that I fought on Corcar-an-Dearg; and go to

him now,' he said, 'for it is bad when a woman is without a good man.'"

 

 

VI

 

They have no asceticism, but they are more visionary than any ascetic,

and their invisible life is but the life about them made more perfect

and more lasting, and the invisible people are their own images in the

water. Their gods may have been much besides this, for we know them from

fragments of mythology picked out with trouble from a fantastic history

running backward to Adam and Eve, and many things that may have seemed

wicked to the monks who imagined that history, may have been altered or

left out; but this they must have been essentially, for the old stories

are confirmed by apparitions among the country-people to-day. The Men of

Dea fought against the mis-shapen Fomor, as Finn fights against the

Cat-Heads and the Dog-Heads; and when they are overcome at last by men,

they make themselves houses in the hearts of hills that are like the

houses of men. When they call men to their houses and to their country

Under-Wave they promise them all that they have upon earth, only in

greater abundance. The god Midhir sings to Queen Etain in one of the

most beautiful of the stories: "The young never grow old; the fields and

the flowers are as pleasant to be looking at as the blackbird's eggs;

warm streams of mead and wine flow through that country; there is no

care or no sorrow on any person; we see others, but we ourselves are not

seen." These gods are indeed more wise and beautiful than men; but men,

when they are great men, are stronger than they are, for men are, as it

were, the foaming tide-line of their sea. One remembers the Druid who

answered, when some one asked him who made the world, "The Druids made

it." All was indeed but one life flowing everywhere, and taking one

quality here, another there. It sometimes seems to one as if there is a

kind of day and night of religion, and that a period when the influences

are those that shape the world is followed by a period when the greater

power is in influences that would lure the soul out of the world, out of

the body. When Oisin is speaking with S. Patrick of the friends and the

life he has outlived, he can but cry out constantly against a religion

that has no meaning for him. He laments, and the country-people have

remembered his words for centuries: "I will cry my fill, but not for

God, but because Finn and the Fianna are not living."

 

 

VII

 

Old writers had an admirable symbolism that attributed certain energies

to the influence of the sun, and certain others to the lunar influence.

To lunar influence belong all thoughts and emotions that were created by

the community, by the common people, by nobody knows who, and to the sun

all that came from the high disciplined or individual kingly mind. I

myself imagine a marriage of the sun and moon in the arts I take most

pleasure in; and now bride and bridegroom but exchange, as it were, full

cups of gold and silver, and now they are one in a mystical embrace.

From the moon come the folk-songs imagined by reapers and spinners out

of the common impulse of their labour, and made not by putting words

together, but by mixing verses and phrases, and the folk-tales made by

the capricious mixing of incidents known to everybody in new ways, as

one deals out cards, never getting the same hand twice over. When one

hears some fine story, one never knows whether it has not been hazard

that put the last touch of adventure. Such poetry, as it seems to me,

desires an infinity of wonder or emotion, for where there is no

individual mind there is no measurer-out, no marker-in of limits. The

poor fisher has no possession of the world and no responsibility for it;

and if he dreams of a love-gift better than the brown shawl that seems

too common for poetry, why should he not dream of a glove made from the

skin of a bird, or shoes made from the skin of a fish, or a coat made

from the glittering garment of the salmon? Was it not Aeschylus who said

he but served up fragments from the banquet of Homer?--but Homer himself

found the great banquet on an earthen floor and under a broken roof. We

do not know who at the foundation of the world made the banquet for the

first time, or who put the pack of cards into rough hands; but we do

know that, unless those that have made many inventions are about to

change the nature of poetry, we may have to go where Homer went if we

are to sing a new song. Is it because all that is under the moon thirsts

to escape out of bounds, to lose itself in some unbounded tidal stream,

that the songs of the folk are mournful, and that the story of the

Fianna, whenever the queens lament for their lovers, reminds us of songs

that are still sung in country-places? Their grief, even when it is to

be brief like Grania's, goes up into the waste places of the sky. But

in supreme art or in supreme life there is the influence of the sun too,

and the sun brings with it, as old writers tell us, not merely

discipline but joy; for its discipline is not of the kind the multitudes

impose upon us by their weight and pressure, but the expression of the

individual soul turning itself into a pure fire and imposing its own

pattern, its own music, upon the heaviness and the dumbness that is in

others and in itself. When we have drunk the cold cup of the moon's

intoxication, we thirst for something beyond ourselves, and the mind

flows outward to a natural immensity; but if we have drunk from the hot

cup of the sun, our own fullness awakens, we desire little, for wherever

one goes one's heart goes too; and if any ask what music is the

sweetest, we can but answer, as Finn answered, "what happens." And yet

the songs and stories that have come from either influence are a part,

neither less than the other, of the pleasure that is the bride-bed of

poetry.

 

 

VIII

 

Gaelic-speaking Ireland, because its art has been made, not by the

artist choosing his material from wherever he has a mind to, but by

adding a little to something which it has taken generations to invent,

has always had a popular literature. One cannot say how much that

literature has done for the vigour of the race, for one cannot count the

hands its praise of kings and high-hearted queens made hot upon the

sword-hilt, or the amorous eyes it made lustful for strength and beauty.

One remembers indeed that when the farming people and the labourers of

the towns made their last attempt to cast out England by force of arms

they named themselves after the companions of Finn. Even when Gaelic has

gone, and the poetry with it, something of the habit of mind remains in

ways of speech and thought and "come-all-ye"s and poetical saying; nor

is it only among the poor that the old thought has been for strength or

weakness. Surely these old stories, whether of Finn or Cuchulain, helped

to sing the old Irish and the old Norman-Irish aristocracy to their end.

They heard their hereditary poets and story-tellers, and they took to

horse and died fighting against Elizabeth or against Cromwell; and when

an English-speaking aristocracy had their place, it listened to no

poetry indeed, but it felt about it in the popular mind an exacting and

ancient tribunal, and began a play that had for spectators men and women

that loved the high wasteful virtues. I do not think that their own

mixed blood or the habit of their time need take all, or nearly all,

credit or discredit for the impulse that made our modern gentlemen fight

duels over pocket-handkerchiefs, and set out to play ball against the

gates of Jerusalem for a wager, and scatter money before the public eye;

and at last, after an epoch of such eloquence the world has hardly seen

its like, lose their public spirit and their high heart and grow

querulous and selfish as men do who have played life out not heartily

but with noise and tumult. Had they understood the people and the game a

little better, they might have created an aristocracy in an age that has

lost the meaning of the word. When one reads of the Fianna, or of

Cuchulain, or of some great hero, one remembers that the fine life is

always a part played finely before fine spectators. There also one

notices the hot cup and the cold cup of intoxication; and when the fine

spectators have ended, surely the fine players grow weary, and

aristocratic life is ended. When O'Connell covered with a dark glove the

hand that had killed a man in the duelling field, he played his part;

and when Alexander stayed his army marching to the conquest of the world

that he might contemplate the beauty of a plane-tree, he played his

part. When Osgar complained as he lay dying, of the keening of the women

and the old fighting men, he too played his part; "No man ever knew any

heart in me," he said, "but a heart of twisted horn, and it covered with

iron; but the howling of the dogs beside me," he said, "and the keening

of the old fighting men and the crying of the women one after another,

those are the things that are vexing me." If we would create a great

community--and what other game is so worth the labour?--we must recreate

the old foundations of life, not as they existed in that splendid

misunderstanding of the eighteenth century, but as they must always

exist when the finest minds and Ned the beggar and Seaghan the fool

think about the same thing, although they may not think the same thought

about it.

 

 

IX

 

When I asked the little boy who had shown me the pathway up the Hill of

Allen if he knew stories of Finn and Oisin, he said he did not, but that

he