Gods and Fighting Men by Lady I. A Gregory (novels in english TXT) 📖
- Author: Lady I. A Gregory
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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
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