They come
to announce a death, to fulfil some obligation, to revenge a wrong,
to pay their bills even--as did a fisherman's daughter the other
day--and then hasten to their rest.
to announce a death, to fulfil some obligation, to revenge a wrong,
to pay their bills even--as did a fisherman's daughter the other
day--and then hasten to their rest.
Yeats
It is better doubtless to believe much
unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial's sake truth and
unreason alike, for when we do this we have not even a rush candle
to guide our steps, not even a poor sowlth to dance before us on the
marsh, and must needs fumble our way into the great emptiness where
dwell the misshapen dhouls. And after all, can we come to so great evil
if we keep a little fire on our hearths and in our souls, and welcome
with open hand whatever of excellent come to warm itself, whether it
be man or phantom, and do not say too fiercely, even to the dhouls
themselves, 'Be ye gone'? When all is said and done, how do we not know
but that our own unreason may be better than another's truth? for it
has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the
wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey. Come into
the world again, wild bees, wild bees!
MORTAL HELP
ONE hears in the old poems of men taken away to help the gods in a
battle, and Cuchulain won the goddess Fand for a while, by helping her
married sister and her sister's husband to overthrow another nation of
the Land of Promise. I have been told, too, that the people of faery
cannot even play at hurley unless they have on either side some mortal,
whose body, or whatever has been put in its place, as the story-teller
would say, is asleep at home. Without mortal help they are shadowy and
cannot even strike the balls. One day I was walking over some marshy
land in Galway with a friend when we found an old, hard-featured man
digging a ditch. My friend had heard that this man had seen a wonderful
sight of some kind, and at last we got the story out of him. When he
was a boy he was working one day with about thirty men and women and
boys. They were beyond Tuam and not far from Knock-na-gur. Presently
they saw, all thirty of them, and at a distance of about half-a-mile,
some hundred and fifty of the people of faery. There were two of them,
he said, in dark clothes like people of our own time, who stood about
a hundred yards from one another, but the others wore clothes of all
colours, 'bracket' or chequered, and some with red waistcoats.
He could not see what they were doing, but all might have been
playing hurley, for 'they looked as if it was that. ' Sometimes they
would vanish, and then he would almost swear they came back out of
the bodies of the two men in dark clothes. These two men were of the
size of living men, but the others were small. He saw them for about
half-an-hour, and then the old man he and those about him were working
for took up a whip and said, 'Get on, get on, or we will have no work
done! ' I asked if he saw the faeries too. 'Oh, yes, but he did not want
work he was paying wages for to be neglected. ' He made everybody work
so hard that nobody saw what happened to the faeries.
1902.
A VISIONARY
A YOUNG man came to see me at my lodgings the other night, and began
to talk of the making of the earth and the heavens and much else. I
questioned him about his life and his doings. He had written many poems
and painted many mystical designs since we met last, but latterly
had neither written nor painted, for his whole heart was set upon
making his mind strong, vigorous, and calm, and the emotional life of
the artist was bad for him, he feared. He recited his poems readily,
however. He had them all in his memory. Some indeed had never been
written down. They, with their wild music as of winds blowing in the
reeds,[A] seemed to me the very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and of
Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen. Suddenly
it seemed to me that he was peering about him a little eagerly. 'Do you
see anything, X----? ' I said. 'A shining, winged woman, covered by her
long hair, is standing near the doorway,' he answered, or some such
words. 'Is it the influence of some living person who thinks of us,
and whose thoughts appear to us in that symbolic form? ' I said; for I
am well instructed in the ways of the visionaries and in the fashion
of their speech. 'No,' he replied; 'for if it were the thoughts of a
person who is alive I should feel the living influence in my living
body, and my heart would beat and my breath would fail. It is a spirit.
It is some one who is dead or who has never lived. '
I asked what he was doing, and found he was clerk in a large shop.
His pleasure, however, was to wander about upon the hills, talking
to half-mad and visionary peasants, or to persuade queer and
conscience-stricken persons to deliver up the keeping of their troubles
into his care. Another night, when I was with him in his own lodging,
more than one turned up to talk over their beliefs and disbeliefs, and
sun them as it were in the subtle light of his mind. Sometimes visions
come to him as he talks with them, and he is rumoured to have told
divers people true matters of their past days and distant friends, and
left them hushed with dread of their strange teacher, who seems scarce
more than a boy, and is so much more subtle than the oldest among them.
The poetry he recited me was full of his nature and his visions.
Sometimes it told of other lives he believes himself to have lived in
other centuries, sometimes of people he had talked to, revealing them
to their own minds. I told him I would write an article upon him and
it, and was told in turn that I might do so if I did not mention his
name, for he wished to be always 'unknown, obscure, impersonal. ' Next
day a bundle of his poems arrived, and with them a note in these words:
'Here are copies of verses you said you liked. I do not think I could
ever write or paint any more. I prepare myself for a cycle of other
activities in some other life. I will make rigid my roots and branches.
It is not now my turn to burst into leaves and flowers. '
The poems were all endeavours to capture some high, impalpable mood in
a net of obscure images. There were fine passages in all, but these
were often embedded in thoughts which have evidently a special value
to his mind, but are to other men the counters of an unknown coinage.
To them they seem merely so much brass or copper or tarnished silver
at the best. At other times the beauty of the thought was obscured by
careless writing as though he had suddenly doubted if writing was not a
foolish labour. He had frequently illustrated his verses with drawings,
in which an imperfect anatomy did not altogether hide extreme beauty of
feeling. The faeries in whom he believes have given him many subjects,
notably Thomas of Ercildoune sitting motionless in the twilight while
a young and beautiful creature leans softly out of the shadow and
whispers in his ear. He had delighted above all in strong effects of
colour: spirits who have upon their heads instead of hair the feathers
of peacocks; a phantom reaching from a swirl of flame towards a star;
a spirit passing with a globe of iridescent crystal--symbol of the
soul--half shut within his hand. But always under this largess of
colour lay some tender homily addressed to man's fragile hopes. This
spiritual eagerness draws to him all those who, like himself, seek
for illumination or else mourn for a joy that has gone. One of these
especially comes to mind. A winter or two ago he spent much of the
night walking up and down upon the mountain talking to an old peasant
who, dumb to most men, poured out his cares for him. Both were unhappy:
X---- because he had then first decided that art and poetry were not
for him, and the old peasant because his life was ebbing out with no
achievement remaining and no hope left him. Both how Celtic! how full
of striving after a something never to be completely expressed in word
or deed. The peasant was wandering in his mind with prolonged sorrow.
Once he burst out with 'God possesses the heavens--God possesses the
heavens--but He covets the world'; and once he lamented that his old
neighbours were gone, and that all had forgotten him: they used to draw
a chair to the fire for him in every cabin, and now they said, 'Who is
that old fellow there? ' 'The fret' [Irish for doom] 'is over me,' he
repeated, and then went on to talk once more of God and heaven. More
than once also he said, waving his arm towards the mountain, 'Only
myself knows what happened under the thorn-tree forty years ago'; and
as he said it the tears upon his face glistened in the moonlight.
This old man always rises before me when I think of X----. Both seek--one
in wandering sentences, the other in symbolic pictures and subtle
allegoric poetry--to express a something that lies beyond the range of
expression; and both, if X---- will forgive me, have within them the vast
and vague extravagance that lies at the bottom of the Celtic heart. The
peasant visionaries that are, the landlord duellists that were, and the
whole hurly-burly of legends--Cuchulain fighting the sea for two days
until the waves pass over him and he dies, Caolte storming the palace
of the gods, Oisin seeking in vain for three hundred years to appease
his insatiable heart with all the pleasures of faeryland, these two
mystics walking up and down upon the mountains uttering the central
dreams of their souls in no less dream-laden sentences, and this mind
that finds them so interesting--all are a portion of that great Celtic
phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered, nor any angel
revealed.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] I wrote this sentence long ago. This sadness now seems to me a part
of all peoples who preserve the moods of the ancient peoples of the
world. I am not so pre-occupied with the mystery of Race as I used to
be, but leave this sentence and other sentences like it unchanged. We
once believed them, and have, it may be, not grown wiser.
VILLAGE GHOSTS
IN the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our
minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities;
people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce.
Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge.
When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your
favourite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share
it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle
all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on
unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all
our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb
multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering
through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers
wrote across unexplored regions, 'Here are lions. ' Across the villages
of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us,
we can write but one line that is certain, 'Here are ghosts. '
My ghosts inhabit the village of H----, in Leinster. History has in no
manner been burdened by this ancient village, with its crooked lanes,
its old abbey churchyard full of long grass, its green background of
small fir-trees, and its quay, where lie a few tarry fishing-luggers.
In the annals of entomology it is well known. For a small bay lies
westward a little, where he who watches night after night may see a
certain rare moth fluttering along the edge of the tide, just at the
end of evening or the beginning of dawn. A hundred years ago it was
carried here from Italy by smugglers in a cargo of silks and laces.
If the moth-hunter would throw down his net, and go hunting for ghost
tales or tales of the faeries and such-like children of Lilith, he
would have need for far less patience.
To approach the village at night a timid man requires great strategy. A
man was once heard complaining, 'By the cross of Jesus! how shall I go?
If I pass by the hill of Dunboy old Captain Burney may look out on me.
If I go round by the water, and up by the steps, there is the headless
one and another on the quays, and a new one under the old churchyard
wall. If I go right round the other way, Mrs. Stewart is appearing at
Hillside Gate, and the devil himself is in the Hospital Lane. '
I never heard which spirit he braved, but feel sure it was not the one
in the Hospital Lane. In cholera times a shed had been there set up
to receive patients. When the need had gone by, it was pulled down,
but ever since the ground where it stood has broken out in ghosts and
demons and faeries. There is a farmer at H----, Paddy B---- by name--a man
of great strength, and a teetotaller. His wife and sister-in-law,
musing on his great strength, often wonder what he would do if he
drank. One night when passing through the Hospital Lane, he saw what he
supposed at first to be a tame rabbit; after a little he found that it
was a white cat. When he came near, the creature slowly began to swell
larger and larger, and as it grew he felt his own strength ebbing away,
as though it were sucked out of him. He turned and ran.
By the Hospital Lane goes the 'Faeries' Path. ' Every evening they
travel from the hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill. At the sea
end of their path stands a cottage. One night Mrs. Arbunathy, who lived
there, left her door open, as she was expecting her son. Her husband
was asleep by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him. After
he had been sitting there for a while, the woman said, 'In the name of
God, who are you? ' He got up and went out, saying, 'Never leave the
door open at this hour, or evil may come to you. ' She woke her husband
and told him. 'One of the good people has been with us,' said he.
Probably the man braved Mrs. Stewart at Hillside Gate. When she lived
she was the wife of the Protestant clergyman. 'Her ghost was never
known to harm any one,' say the village people; 'it is only doing a
penance upon the earth. ' Not far from Hillside Gate, where she haunted,
appeared for a short time a much more remarkable spirit. Its haunt was
the bogeen, a green lane leading from the western end of the village.
I quote its history at length: a typical village tragedy. In a cottage
at the village end of the bogeen lived a house-painter, Jim Montgomery,
and his wife. They had several children. He was a little dandy, and
came of a higher class than his neighbours. His wife was a very big
woman. Her husband, who had been expelled from the village choir for
drink, gave her a beating one day. Her sister heard of it, and came
and took down one of the window shutters--Montgomery was neat about
everything, and had shutters on the outside of every window--and beat
him with it, being big and strong like her sister. He threatened to
prosecute her; she answered that she would break every bone in his body
if he did. She never spoke to her sister again, because she had allowed
herself to be beaten by so small a man. Jim Montgomery grew worse and
worse: his wife soon began to have not enough to eat. She told no one,
for she was very proud. Often, too, she would have no fire on a cold
night. If any neighbours came in she would say she had let the fire out
because she was just going to bed. The people about often heard her
husband beating her, but she never told any one. She got very thin.
At last one Saturday there was no food in the house for herself and
the children. She could bear it no longer, and went to the priest and
asked him for some money. He gave her thirty shillings. Her husband
met her, and took the money, and beat her. On the following Monday
she got very ill, and sent for a Mrs. Kelly. Mrs. Kelly, as soon as
she saw her, said, 'My woman, you are dying,' and sent for the priest
and the doctor. She died in an hour. After her death, as Montgomery
neglected the children, the landlord had them taken to the workhouse.
A few nights after they had gone, Mrs. Kelly was going home through
the bogeen when the ghost of Mrs. Montgomery appeared and followed
her. It did not leave her until she reached her own house. She told
the priest, Father S----, a noted antiquarian, and could not get him to
believe her. A few nights afterwards Mrs. Kelly again met the spirit in
the same place. She was in too great terror to go the whole way, but
stopped at a neighbour's cottage midway, and asked them to let her in.
They answered they were going to bed. She cried out, 'In the name of
God let me in, or I will break open the door. ' They opened, and so she
escaped from the ghost. Next day she told the priest again. This time
he believed, and said it would follow her until she spoke to it.
She met the spirit a third time in the bogeen. She asked what kept it
from its rest. The spirit said that its children must be taken from
the workhouse, for none of its relations were ever there before, and
that three masses were to be said for the repose of its soul. 'If my
husband does not believe you,' she said, 'show him that,' and touched
Mrs. Kelly's wrist with three fingers. The places where they touched
swelled up and blackened. She then vanished. For a time Montgomery
would not believe that his wife had appeared: 'she would not show
herself to Mrs. Kelly,' he said--'she with respectable people to appear
to. ' He was convinced by the three marks, and the children were taken
from the workhouse. The priest said the masses, and the shade must have
been at rest, for it has not since appeared. Some time afterwards Jim
Montgomery died in the workhouse, having come to great poverty through
drink.
I know some who believe they have seen the headless ghost upon the
quay, and one who, when he passes the old cemetery wall at night, sees
a woman with white borders to her cap[B] creep out and follow him. The
apparition only leaves him at his own door. The villagers imagine that
she follows him to avenge some wrong. 'I will haunt you when I die' is
a favourite threat. His wife was once half-scared to death by what she
considers a demon in the shape of a dog.
These are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their
tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.
One night a Mrs. Nolan was watching by her dying child in Fluddy's
Lane. Suddenly there was a sound of knocking heard at the door. She
did not open, fearing it was some unhuman thing that knocked. The
knocking ceased. After a little the front-door and then the back-door
were burst open, and closed again. Her husband went to see what was
wrong. He found both doors bolted. The child died. The doors were
again opened and closed as before. Then Mrs. Nolan remembered that
she had forgotten to leave window or door open, as the custom is, for
the departure of the soul. These strange openings and closings and
knockings were warnings and reminders from the spirits who attend the
dying.
The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning creature. It
is put up with as long as possible. It brings good luck to those who
live with it. I remember two children who slept with their mother and
sisters and brothers in one small room. In the room was also a ghost.
They sold herrings in the Dublin streets, and did not mind the ghost
much, because they knew they would always sell their fish easily while
they slept in the 'ha'nted' room.
I have some acquaintance among the ghost-seers of western villages.
The Connaught tales are very different from those of Leinster. These
H---- spirits have a gloomy, matter-of-fact way with them.
They come
to announce a death, to fulfil some obligation, to revenge a wrong,
to pay their bills even--as did a fisherman's daughter the other
day--and then hasten to their rest. All things they do decently and in
order. It is demons, and not ghosts, that transform themselves into
white cats or black dogs. The people who tell the tales are poor,
serious-minded fishing people, who find in the doings of the ghosts
the fascination of fear. In the western tales is a whimsical grace,
a curious extravagance. The people who recount them live in the most
wild and beautiful scenery, under a sky ever loaded and fantastic with
flying clouds. They are farmers and labourers, who do a little fishing
now and then. They do not fear the spirits too much to feel an artistic
and humorous pleasure in their doings. The ghosts themselves share in
their quaint hilarity. In one western town, on whose deserted wharf the
grass grows, these spirits have so much vigour that, when a misbeliever
ventured to sleep in a haunted house, I have been told they flung him
through the window, and his bed after him. In the surrounding villages
the creatures use the most strange disguises. A dead old gentleman
robs the cabbages of his own garden in the shape of a large rabbit.
A wicked sea-captain stayed for years inside the plaster of a cottage
wall, in the shape of a snipe, making the most horrible noises. He was
only dislodged when the wall was broken down; then out of the solid
plaster the snipe rushed away whistling.
FOOTNOTE:
[B] I wonder why she had white borders to her cap. The old Mayo woman,
who has told me so many tales, has told me that her brother-in-law saw
'a woman with white borders to her cap going round the stacks in a
field, and soon after he got a hurt, and he died in six months. '
'DUST HATH CLOSED HELEN'S EYE. '
I
I HAVE been lately to a little group of houses, not many enough to be
called a village, in the barony of Kiltartan in County Galway, whose
name, Ballylee, is known through all the west of Ireland. There is the
old square castle, Ballylee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and a
cottage where their daughter and their son-in-law live, and a little
mill with an old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows upon
a little river and great stepping-stones. I went there two or three
times last year to talk to the miller about Biddy Early, a wise woman
that lived in Clare some years ago, and about her saying, 'There is a
cure for all evil between the two mill-wheels of Ballylee,' and to find
out from him or another whether she meant the moss between the running
waters or some other herb. I have been there this summer, and I shall
be there again before it is autumn, because Mary Hynes, a beautiful
woman whose name is still a wonder by turf fires, died there sixty
years ago; for our feet would linger where beauty has lived its life of
sorrow to make us understand that it is not of the world. An old man
brought me a little way from the mill and the castle, and down a long,
narrow boreen that was nearly lost in brambles and sloe bushes, and he
said, 'That is the little old foundation of the house, but the most of
it is taken for building walls, and the goats have ate those bushes
that are growing over it till they've got cranky, and they won't grow
any more. They say she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin was
like dribbled snow'--he meant driven snow, perhaps,--'and she had blushes
in her cheeks. She had five handsome brothers, but all are gone now! ' I
talked to him about a poem in Irish, Raftery, a famous poet, made about
her, and how it said, 'there is a strong cellar in Ballylee. ' He said
the strong cellar was the great hole where the river sank underground,
and he brought me to a deep pool, where an otter hurried away under a
grey boulder, and told me that many fish came up out of the dark water
at early morning 'to taste the fresh water coming down from the hills. '
I first heard of the poem from an old woman who lives about two miles
further up the river, and who remembers Raftery and Mary Hynes. She
says, 'I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never will
till I die,' and that he was nearly blind, and had 'no way of living
but to go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all the
neighbours would gather to hear. If you treated him well he'd praise
you, but if you did not, he'd fault you in Irish. He was the greatest
poet in Ireland, and he'd make a song about that bush if he chanced to
stand under it. There was a bush he stood under from the rain, and he
made verses praising it, and then when the water came through he made
verses dispraising it. ' She sang the poem to a friend and to myself
in Irish, and every word was audible and expressive, as the words in
a song were always, as I think, before music grew too proud to be the
garment of words, flowing and changing with the flowing and changing
of their energies. The poem is not as natural as the best Irish poetry
of the last century, for the thoughts are arranged in a too obviously
traditional form, so the old poor half-blind man who made it has to
speak as if he were a rich farmer offering the best of everything to
the woman he loves, but it has naive and tender phrases. The friend
that was with me has made some of the translation, but some of it has
been made by the country people themselves. I think it has more of the
simplicity of the Irish verses than one finds in most translations.
'Going to Mass by the will of God,
The day came wet and the wind rose;
I met Mary Hynes at the cross of Kiltartan,
And I fell in love with her then and there.
I spoke to her kind and mannerly,
As by report was her own way;
And she said, "Raftery, my mind is easy,
You may come to-day to Ballylee. "
When I heard her offer I did not linger,
When her talk went to my heart my heart rose.
We had only to go across the three fields,
We had daylight with us to Ballylee.
The table was laid with glasses and a quart measure,
She had fair hair, and she sitting beside me;
And she said, "Drink, Raftery, and a hundred welcomes,
There is a strong cellar in Ballylee. "
O star of light and O sun in harvest,
O amber hair, O my share of the world,
Will you come with me upon Sunday
Till we agree together before all the people?
I would not grudge you a song every Sunday evening,
Punch on the table, or wine if you would drink it,
But, O King of Glory, dry the roads before me,
Till I find the way to Ballylee.
There is sweet air on the side of the hill
When you are looking down upon Ballylee;
When you are walking in the valley picking nuts and blackberries,
There is music of the birds in it and music of the Sidhe.
What is the worth of greatness till you have the light
Of the flower of the branch that is by your side?
There is no god to deny it or to try and hide it,
She is the sun in the heavens who wounded my heart.
There was no part of Ireland I did not travel,
From the rivers to the tops of the mountains,
To the edge of Lough Greine whose mouth is hidden,
And I saw no beauty but was behind hers.
Her hair was shining, and her brows were shining too;
Her face was like herself, her mouth pleasant and sweet.
She is the pride, and I give her the branch,
She is the shining flower of Ballylee.
It is Mary Hynes, the calm and easy woman,
Has beauty in her mind and in her face.
If a hundred clerks were gathered together,
They could not write down a half of her ways. '
An old weaver, whose son is supposed to go away among the Sidhe (the
faeries) at night, says, 'Mary Hynes was the most beautiful thing
ever made. My mother used to tell me about her, for she'd be at every
hurling, and wherever she was she was dressed in white. As many as
eleven men asked her in marriage in one day, but she wouldn't have
any of them. There was a lot of men up beyond Kilbecanty one night
sitting together drinking, and talking of her, and one of them got
up and set out to go to Ballylee and see her; but Cloon Bog was open
then, and when he came to it he fell into the water, and they found
him dead there in the morning. She died of the fever that was before
the famine. ' Another old man says he was only a child when he saw
her, but he remembered that 'the strongest man that was among us, one
John Madden, got his death of the head of her, cold he got crossing
rivers in the night-time to get to Ballylee. ' This is perhaps the man
the other remembered, for tradition gives the one thing many shapes.
There is an old woman who remembers her, at Derrybrien among the Echtge
hills, a vast desolate place, which has changed little since the old
poem said, 'the stag upon the cold summit of Echtge hears the cry of
the wolves,' but still mindful of many poems and of the dignity of
ancient speech. She says, 'The sun and the moon never shone on anybody
so handsome, and her skin was so white that it looked blue, and she
had two little blushes on her cheeks. ' And an old wrinkled woman who
lives close by Ballylee, and has told me many tales of the Sidhe, says,
'I often saw Mary Hynes, she was handsome indeed. She had two bunches
of curls beside her cheeks, and they were the colour of silver. I saw
Mary Molloy that was drowned in the river beyond, and Mary Guthrie that
was in Ardrahan, but she took the sway of them both, a very comely
creature. I was at her wake too--she had seen too much of the world.
She was a kind creature. One day I was coming home through that field
beyond, and I was tired, and who should come out but the Poisin Glegeal
(the shining flower), and she gave me a glass of new milk. ' This old
woman meant no more than some beautiful bright colour by the colour of
silver, for though I knew an old man--he is dead now--who thought she
might know 'the cure for all the evils in the world,' that the Sidhe
knew, she has seen too little gold to know its colour. But a man by
the shore at Kinvara, who is too young to remember Mary Hynes, says,
'Everybody says there is no one at all to be seen now so handsome; it
is said she had beautiful hair, the colour of gold. She was poor, but
her clothes every day were the same as Sunday, she had such neatness.
And if she went to any kind of a meeting, they would all be killing one
another for a sight of her, and there was a great many in love with
her, but she died young. It is said that no one that has a song made
about them will ever live long. '
Those who are much admired are, it is held, taken by the Sidhe, who
can use ungoverned feeling for their own ends, so that a father, as an
old herb doctor told me once, may give his child into their hands, or
a husband his wife. The admired and desired are only safe if one says
'God bless them' when one's eyes are upon them. The old woman that sang
the song thinks, too, that Mary Hynes was 'taken,' as the phrase is,
'for they have taken many that are not handsome, and why would they
not take her? And people came from all parts to look at her, and, maybe
there were some that did not say "God bless her. "' An old man who lives
by the sea at Duras has as little doubt that she was taken, 'for there
are some living yet can remember her coming to the pattern[C] there
beyond, and she was said to be the handsomest girl in Ireland. ' She
died young because the gods loved her, for the Sidhe are the gods, and
it may be that the old saying, which we forget to understand literally,
meant her manner of death in old times. These poor countrymen and
countrywomen in their beliefs, and in their emotions, are many years
nearer to that old Greek world, that set beauty beside the fountain
of things, than are our men of learning. She 'had seen too much of
the world'; but these old men and women, when they tell of her, blame
another and not her, and though they can be hard, they grow gentle as
the old men of Troy grew gentle when Helen passed by on the walls.
The poet who helped her to so much fame has himself a great fame
throughout the west of Ireland. Some think that Raftery was half blind,
and say, 'I saw Raftery, a dark man, but he had sight enough to see
her,' or the like, but some think he was wholly blind, as he may have
been at the end of his life. Fable makes all things perfect in their
kind, and her blind people must never look on the world and the sun. I
asked a man I met one day, when I was looking for a pool _na mna Sidhe_
where women of faery have been seen, how Raftery could have admired
Mary Hynes so much if he had been altogether blind? He said, 'I think
Raftery was altogether blind, but those that are blind have a way of
seeing things, and have the power to know more, and to feel more,
and to do more, and to guess more than those that have their sight,
and a certain wit and a certain wisdom is given to them. ' Everybody,
indeed, will tell you that he was very wise, for was he not only blind
but a poet? The weaver whose words about Mary Hynes I have already
given, says, 'His poetry was the gift of the Almighty, for there are
three things that are the gift of the Almighty--poetry and dancing and
principles. That is why in the old times an ignorant man coming down
from the hillside would be better behaved and have better learning than
a man with education you'd meet now, for they got it from God'; and a
man at Coole says, 'When he put his finger to one part of his head,
everything would come to him as if it was written in a book'; and an
old pensioner at Kiltartan says, 'He was standing under a bush one
time, and he talked to it, and it answered him back in Irish. Some say
it was the bush that spoke, but it must have been an enchanted voice in
it, and it gave him the knowledge of all the things of the world. The
bush withered up afterwards, and it is to be seen on the roadside now
between this and Rahasine. ' There is a poem of his about a bush, which
I have never seen, and it may have come out of the cauldron of fable in
this shape.
A friend of mine met a man once who had been with him when he died,
but the people say that he died alone, and one Maurteen Gillane told
Dr. Hyde that all night long a light was seen streaming up to heaven
from the roof of the house where he lay, and 'that was the angels who
were with him'; and all night long there was a great light in the
hovel, 'and that was the angels who were waking him. They gave that
honour to him because he was so good a poet, and sang such religious
songs. ' It may be that in a few years Fable, who changes mortalities
to immortalities in her cauldron, will have changed Mary Hynes
and Raftery to perfect symbols of the sorrow of beauty and of the
magnificence and penury of dreams.
1900.
II
When I was in a northern town awhile ago I had a long talk with a man
who had lived in a neighbouring country district when he was a boy. He
told me that when a very beautiful girl was born in a family that had
not been noted for good looks, her beauty was thought to have come from
the Sidhe, and to bring misfortune with it. He went over the names of
several beautiful girls that he had known, and said that beauty had
never brought happiness to anybody. It was a thing, he said, to be
proud of and afraid of. I wish I had written out his words at the time,
for they were more picturesque than my memory of them.
1902.
FOOTNOTE:
[C] A 'pattern,' or 'patron,' is a festival in honour of a saint.
A KNIGHT OF THE SHEEP
AWAY to the north of Ben Bulben and Cope's mountain lives 'a strong
farmer,' a knight of the sheep they would have called him in the Gaelic
days. Proud of his descent from one of the most fighting clans of the
Middle Ages, he is a man of force alike in his words and in his deeds.
There is but one man that swears like him, and this man lives far away
upon the mountain. 'Father in heaven, what have I done to deserve
this? ' he says when he has lost his pipe; and no man but he who lives
on the mountain can rival his language on a fair day over a bargain. He
is passionate and abrupt in his movements, and when angry tosses his
white beard about with his left hand.
One day I was dining with him when the servant-maid announced a certain
Mr. O'Donnell. A sudden silence fell upon the old man and upon his two
daughters. At last the eldest daughter said somewhat severely to her
father, 'Go and ask him to come in and dine. ' The old man went out,
and then came in looking greatly relieved, and said, 'He says he will
not dine with us. ' 'Go out,' said the daughter, 'and ask him into the
back parlour, and give him some whiskey. ' Her father, who had just
finished his dinner, obeyed sullenly, and I heard the door of the back
parlour--a little room where the daughters sat and sewed during the
evening--shut to behind the men. The daughter then turned to me and
said, 'Mr. O'Donnell is the tax-gatherer, and last year he raised our
taxes, and my father was very angry, and when he came, brought him
into the dairy, and sent the dairy-woman away on a message, and then
swore at him a great deal. "I will teach you, sir," O'Donnell replied,
"that the law can protect its officers"; but my father reminded him
that he had no witness. At last my father got tired, and sorry too,
and said he would show him a short way home. When they were half-way
to the main road they came on a man of my father's who was ploughing,
and this somehow brought back remembrance of the wrong. He sent the man
away on a message, and began to swear at the tax-gatherer again. When
I heard of it I was disgusted that he should have made such a fuss
over a miserable creature like O'Donnell; and when I heard a few weeks
ago that O'Donnell's only son had died and left him heart-broken, I
resolved to make my father be kind to him next time he came. '
She then went out to see a neighbour, and I sauntered towards the back
parlour. When I came to the door I heard angry voices inside. The two
men were evidently getting on to the tax again, for I could hear them
bandying figures to and fro. I opened the door; at sight of my face
the farmer was reminded of his peaceful intentions, and asked me if I
knew where the whiskey was. I had seen him put it into the cupboard,
and was able therefore to find it and get it out, looking at the thin,
grief-struck face of the tax-gatherer. He was rather older than my
friend, and very much more feeble and worn, and of a very different
type. He was not like him, a robust, successful man, but rather one of
those whose feet find no resting-place upon the earth. I recognized one
of the children of reverie, and said, 'You are doubtless of the stock
of the old O'Donnells. I know well the hole in the river where their
treasure lies buried under the guard of a serpent with many heads. '
'Yes, sur,' he replied, 'I am the last of a line princes. '
We then fell to talking of many commonplace things, and my friend did
not once toss up his beard, but was very friendly. At last the gaunt
old tax-gatherer got up to go, and my friend said, 'I hope we will
have a glass together next year. ' 'No, no,' was the answer, 'I shall
be dead next year,' 'I too have lost sons,' said the other, in quite a
gentle voice. 'But your sons were not like my son. ' And then the two
men parted, with an angry flush and bitter hearts, and had I not cast
between them some common words or other, might not have parted, but
have fallen rather into an angry discussion of the value of their dead
sons. If I had not pity for all the children of reverie I should have
let them fight it out, and would now have many a wonderful oath to
record.
The knight of the sheep would have had the victory, for no soul that
wears this garment of blood and clay can surpass him. He was but once
beaten; and this is his tale of how it was. He and some farm hands were
playing at cards in a small cabin that stood against the end of a big
barn. A wicked woman had once lived in this cabin. Suddenly one of the
players threw down an ace and began to swear without any cause. His
swearing was so dreadful that the others stood up, and my friend said,
'All is not right here; there is a spirit in him. ' They ran to the door
that led into the barn to get away as quickly as possible. The wooden
bolt would not move, so the knight of the sheep took a saw which stood
against the wall near at hand, and sawed through the bolt, and at once
the door flew open with a bang, as though some one had been holding it,
and they fled through.
AN ENDURING HEART
ONE day a friend of mine was making a sketch of my Knight of the Sheep.
The old man's daughter was sitting by, and, when the conversation
drifted to love and love-making, she said, 'Oh, father, tell him
about your love affair. ' The old man took his pipe out of his mouth,
and said, 'Nobody ever marries the woman he loves,' and then, with
a chuckle, 'there were fifteen of them I liked better than the
woman I married,' and he repeated many women's names. He went on to
tell how when he was a lad he had worked for his grandfather, his
mother's father, and was called (my friend has forgotten why) by his
grandfather's name, which we will say was Doran. He had a great friend,
whom I shall call John Byrne; and one day he and his friend went to
Queenstown to await an emigrant ship, that was to take John Byrne
to America. When they were walking along the quay, they saw a girl
sitting on a seat, crying miserably, and two men standing up in front
of her quarrelling with one another. Doran said, 'I think I know what
is wrong. _That_ man will be her brother, and _that_ man will be her
lover, and the brother is sending her to America to get her away from
the lover. How she is crying! but I think I could console her myself. '
Presently the lover and brother went away, and Doran began to walk up
and down before her, saying, 'Mild weather, Miss,' or the like. She
answered him in a little while, and the three began to talk together.
The emigrant ship did not arrive for some days; and the three drove
about on outside cars very innocently and happily, seeing everything
that was to be seen. When at last the ship came, and Doran had to break
it to her that he was not going to America, she cried more after him
than after the first lover. Doran whispered to Byrne as he went aboard
ship, 'Now, Byrne, I don't grudge her to you, but don't marry young. '
When the story got to this, the farmer's daughter joined in mockingly
with, 'I suppose you said that for Byrne's good, father. ' But the
old man insisted that he _had_ said it for Byrne's good; and went
on to tell how, when he got a letter telling of Byrne's engagement
to the girl, he wrote him the same advice. Years passed by, and he
heard nothing; and though he was now married, he could not keep from
wondering what she was doing. At last he went to America to find out,
and though he asked many people for tidings, he could get none. More
years went by, and his wife was dead, and he well on in years, and a
rich farmer with not a few great matters on his hands. He found an
excuse in some vague business to go out to America again, and to begin
his search again. One day he fell into talk with an Irishman in a
railway carriage, and asked him, as his way was, about emigrants from
this place and that, and at last, 'Did you ever hear of the miller's
daughter from Innis Rath? ' and he named the woman he was looking for.
'Oh yes,' said the other, 'she is married to a friend of mine, John
MacEwing. She lives at such-and-such a street in Chicago. ' Doran went
to Chicago and knocked at her door. She opened the door herself, and
was 'not a bit changed. ' He gave her his real name, which he had taken
again after his grandfather's death, and the name of the man he had
met in the train. She did not recognize him, but asked him to stay to
dinner, saying that her husband would be glad to meet anybody who knew
that old friend of his. They talked of many things, but for all their
talk, I do not know why, and perhaps he did not know why, he never told
her who he was. At dinner he asked her about Byrne, and she put her
head down on the table and began to cry, and she cried so he was afraid
her husband might be angry. He was afraid to ask what had happened to
Byrne, and left soon after, never to see her again.
When the old man had finished the story, he said, 'Tell that to Mr.
Yeats, he will make a poem about it, perhaps. ' But the daughter said,
'Oh no, father. Nobody could make a poem about a woman like that. '
Alas! I have never made the poem, perhaps because my own heart which
has loved Helen and all the lovely and fickle women of the world, would
be too sore. There are things it is well not to ponder over too much,
things that bare words are the best suited for.
1902.
THE SORCERERS
IN Ireland we hear but little of the darker powers,[D] and come across
any who have seen them even more rarely, for the imagination of the
people dwells rather upon the fantastic and capricious, and fantasy
and caprice would lose the freedom which is their breath of life, were
they to unite them either with evil or with good. And yet the wise are
of opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his
rapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who store
their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit
hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and
melancholy multitude. They hold, too, that he who by long desire or
through accident of birth possesses the power of piercing into their
hidden abode can see them there, those who were once men or women
full of a terrible vehemence, and those who have never lived upon the
earth, moving slowly and with a subtler malice. The dark powers cling
about us, it is said, day and night, like bats upon an old tree; and
that we do not hear more of them is merely because the darker kinds of
magic have been but little practised. I have indeed come across very
few persons in Ireland who try to communicate with evil powers, and the
few I have met keep their purpose and practice wholly hidden from those
among whom they live. They are mainly small clerks and the like, and
meet for the purpose of their art in a room hung with black hangings.
They would not admit me into this room, but finding me not altogether
ignorant of the arcane science, showed gladly elsewhere what they would
do. 'Come to us,' said their leader, a clerk in a large flour-mill,
'and we will show you spirits who will talk to you face to face, and in
shapes as solid and heavy as our own. '
I had been talking of the power of communicating in states of trance
with the angelical and faery beings,--the children of the day and of the
twilight,--and he had been contending that we should only believe in
what we can see and feel when in our ordinary everyday state of mind.
'Yes,' I said, 'I will come to you,' or some such words; 'but I will
not permit myself to become entranced, and will therefore know whether
these shapes you talk of are any the more to be touched and felt by the
ordinary senses than are those I talk of. ' I was not denying the power
of other beings to take upon themselves a clothing of mortal substance,
but only that simple invocations, such as he spoke of, seemed unlikely
to do more than cast the mind into trance, and thereby bring it into
the presence of the powers of day, twilight, and darkness.
'But,' he said, 'we have seen them move the furniture hither and
thither, and they go at our bidding, and help or harm people who know
nothing of them. ' I am not giving the exact words, but as accurately as
I can the substance of our talk.
On the night arranged I turned up about eight, and found the leader
sitting alone in almost total darkness in a small back room. He was
dressed in a black gown, like an inquisitor's dress in an old drawing,
that left nothing of him visible except his eyes, which peered out
through two small round holes. Upon the table in front of him was
a brass dish of burning herbs, a large bowl, a skull covered with
painted symbols, two crossed daggers, and certain implements shaped
like quern stones, which were used to control the elemental powers
in some fashion I did not discover.
unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial's sake truth and
unreason alike, for when we do this we have not even a rush candle
to guide our steps, not even a poor sowlth to dance before us on the
marsh, and must needs fumble our way into the great emptiness where
dwell the misshapen dhouls. And after all, can we come to so great evil
if we keep a little fire on our hearths and in our souls, and welcome
with open hand whatever of excellent come to warm itself, whether it
be man or phantom, and do not say too fiercely, even to the dhouls
themselves, 'Be ye gone'? When all is said and done, how do we not know
but that our own unreason may be better than another's truth? for it
has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the
wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey. Come into
the world again, wild bees, wild bees!
MORTAL HELP
ONE hears in the old poems of men taken away to help the gods in a
battle, and Cuchulain won the goddess Fand for a while, by helping her
married sister and her sister's husband to overthrow another nation of
the Land of Promise. I have been told, too, that the people of faery
cannot even play at hurley unless they have on either side some mortal,
whose body, or whatever has been put in its place, as the story-teller
would say, is asleep at home. Without mortal help they are shadowy and
cannot even strike the balls. One day I was walking over some marshy
land in Galway with a friend when we found an old, hard-featured man
digging a ditch. My friend had heard that this man had seen a wonderful
sight of some kind, and at last we got the story out of him. When he
was a boy he was working one day with about thirty men and women and
boys. They were beyond Tuam and not far from Knock-na-gur. Presently
they saw, all thirty of them, and at a distance of about half-a-mile,
some hundred and fifty of the people of faery. There were two of them,
he said, in dark clothes like people of our own time, who stood about
a hundred yards from one another, but the others wore clothes of all
colours, 'bracket' or chequered, and some with red waistcoats.
He could not see what they were doing, but all might have been
playing hurley, for 'they looked as if it was that. ' Sometimes they
would vanish, and then he would almost swear they came back out of
the bodies of the two men in dark clothes. These two men were of the
size of living men, but the others were small. He saw them for about
half-an-hour, and then the old man he and those about him were working
for took up a whip and said, 'Get on, get on, or we will have no work
done! ' I asked if he saw the faeries too. 'Oh, yes, but he did not want
work he was paying wages for to be neglected. ' He made everybody work
so hard that nobody saw what happened to the faeries.
1902.
A VISIONARY
A YOUNG man came to see me at my lodgings the other night, and began
to talk of the making of the earth and the heavens and much else. I
questioned him about his life and his doings. He had written many poems
and painted many mystical designs since we met last, but latterly
had neither written nor painted, for his whole heart was set upon
making his mind strong, vigorous, and calm, and the emotional life of
the artist was bad for him, he feared. He recited his poems readily,
however. He had them all in his memory. Some indeed had never been
written down. They, with their wild music as of winds blowing in the
reeds,[A] seemed to me the very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and of
Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen. Suddenly
it seemed to me that he was peering about him a little eagerly. 'Do you
see anything, X----? ' I said. 'A shining, winged woman, covered by her
long hair, is standing near the doorway,' he answered, or some such
words. 'Is it the influence of some living person who thinks of us,
and whose thoughts appear to us in that symbolic form? ' I said; for I
am well instructed in the ways of the visionaries and in the fashion
of their speech. 'No,' he replied; 'for if it were the thoughts of a
person who is alive I should feel the living influence in my living
body, and my heart would beat and my breath would fail. It is a spirit.
It is some one who is dead or who has never lived. '
I asked what he was doing, and found he was clerk in a large shop.
His pleasure, however, was to wander about upon the hills, talking
to half-mad and visionary peasants, or to persuade queer and
conscience-stricken persons to deliver up the keeping of their troubles
into his care. Another night, when I was with him in his own lodging,
more than one turned up to talk over their beliefs and disbeliefs, and
sun them as it were in the subtle light of his mind. Sometimes visions
come to him as he talks with them, and he is rumoured to have told
divers people true matters of their past days and distant friends, and
left them hushed with dread of their strange teacher, who seems scarce
more than a boy, and is so much more subtle than the oldest among them.
The poetry he recited me was full of his nature and his visions.
Sometimes it told of other lives he believes himself to have lived in
other centuries, sometimes of people he had talked to, revealing them
to their own minds. I told him I would write an article upon him and
it, and was told in turn that I might do so if I did not mention his
name, for he wished to be always 'unknown, obscure, impersonal. ' Next
day a bundle of his poems arrived, and with them a note in these words:
'Here are copies of verses you said you liked. I do not think I could
ever write or paint any more. I prepare myself for a cycle of other
activities in some other life. I will make rigid my roots and branches.
It is not now my turn to burst into leaves and flowers. '
The poems were all endeavours to capture some high, impalpable mood in
a net of obscure images. There were fine passages in all, but these
were often embedded in thoughts which have evidently a special value
to his mind, but are to other men the counters of an unknown coinage.
To them they seem merely so much brass or copper or tarnished silver
at the best. At other times the beauty of the thought was obscured by
careless writing as though he had suddenly doubted if writing was not a
foolish labour. He had frequently illustrated his verses with drawings,
in which an imperfect anatomy did not altogether hide extreme beauty of
feeling. The faeries in whom he believes have given him many subjects,
notably Thomas of Ercildoune sitting motionless in the twilight while
a young and beautiful creature leans softly out of the shadow and
whispers in his ear. He had delighted above all in strong effects of
colour: spirits who have upon their heads instead of hair the feathers
of peacocks; a phantom reaching from a swirl of flame towards a star;
a spirit passing with a globe of iridescent crystal--symbol of the
soul--half shut within his hand. But always under this largess of
colour lay some tender homily addressed to man's fragile hopes. This
spiritual eagerness draws to him all those who, like himself, seek
for illumination or else mourn for a joy that has gone. One of these
especially comes to mind. A winter or two ago he spent much of the
night walking up and down upon the mountain talking to an old peasant
who, dumb to most men, poured out his cares for him. Both were unhappy:
X---- because he had then first decided that art and poetry were not
for him, and the old peasant because his life was ebbing out with no
achievement remaining and no hope left him. Both how Celtic! how full
of striving after a something never to be completely expressed in word
or deed. The peasant was wandering in his mind with prolonged sorrow.
Once he burst out with 'God possesses the heavens--God possesses the
heavens--but He covets the world'; and once he lamented that his old
neighbours were gone, and that all had forgotten him: they used to draw
a chair to the fire for him in every cabin, and now they said, 'Who is
that old fellow there? ' 'The fret' [Irish for doom] 'is over me,' he
repeated, and then went on to talk once more of God and heaven. More
than once also he said, waving his arm towards the mountain, 'Only
myself knows what happened under the thorn-tree forty years ago'; and
as he said it the tears upon his face glistened in the moonlight.
This old man always rises before me when I think of X----. Both seek--one
in wandering sentences, the other in symbolic pictures and subtle
allegoric poetry--to express a something that lies beyond the range of
expression; and both, if X---- will forgive me, have within them the vast
and vague extravagance that lies at the bottom of the Celtic heart. The
peasant visionaries that are, the landlord duellists that were, and the
whole hurly-burly of legends--Cuchulain fighting the sea for two days
until the waves pass over him and he dies, Caolte storming the palace
of the gods, Oisin seeking in vain for three hundred years to appease
his insatiable heart with all the pleasures of faeryland, these two
mystics walking up and down upon the mountains uttering the central
dreams of their souls in no less dream-laden sentences, and this mind
that finds them so interesting--all are a portion of that great Celtic
phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered, nor any angel
revealed.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] I wrote this sentence long ago. This sadness now seems to me a part
of all peoples who preserve the moods of the ancient peoples of the
world. I am not so pre-occupied with the mystery of Race as I used to
be, but leave this sentence and other sentences like it unchanged. We
once believed them, and have, it may be, not grown wiser.
VILLAGE GHOSTS
IN the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our
minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities;
people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce.
Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge.
When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your
favourite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share
it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle
all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on
unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all
our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb
multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering
through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers
wrote across unexplored regions, 'Here are lions. ' Across the villages
of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us,
we can write but one line that is certain, 'Here are ghosts. '
My ghosts inhabit the village of H----, in Leinster. History has in no
manner been burdened by this ancient village, with its crooked lanes,
its old abbey churchyard full of long grass, its green background of
small fir-trees, and its quay, where lie a few tarry fishing-luggers.
In the annals of entomology it is well known. For a small bay lies
westward a little, where he who watches night after night may see a
certain rare moth fluttering along the edge of the tide, just at the
end of evening or the beginning of dawn. A hundred years ago it was
carried here from Italy by smugglers in a cargo of silks and laces.
If the moth-hunter would throw down his net, and go hunting for ghost
tales or tales of the faeries and such-like children of Lilith, he
would have need for far less patience.
To approach the village at night a timid man requires great strategy. A
man was once heard complaining, 'By the cross of Jesus! how shall I go?
If I pass by the hill of Dunboy old Captain Burney may look out on me.
If I go round by the water, and up by the steps, there is the headless
one and another on the quays, and a new one under the old churchyard
wall. If I go right round the other way, Mrs. Stewart is appearing at
Hillside Gate, and the devil himself is in the Hospital Lane. '
I never heard which spirit he braved, but feel sure it was not the one
in the Hospital Lane. In cholera times a shed had been there set up
to receive patients. When the need had gone by, it was pulled down,
but ever since the ground where it stood has broken out in ghosts and
demons and faeries. There is a farmer at H----, Paddy B---- by name--a man
of great strength, and a teetotaller. His wife and sister-in-law,
musing on his great strength, often wonder what he would do if he
drank. One night when passing through the Hospital Lane, he saw what he
supposed at first to be a tame rabbit; after a little he found that it
was a white cat. When he came near, the creature slowly began to swell
larger and larger, and as it grew he felt his own strength ebbing away,
as though it were sucked out of him. He turned and ran.
By the Hospital Lane goes the 'Faeries' Path. ' Every evening they
travel from the hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill. At the sea
end of their path stands a cottage. One night Mrs. Arbunathy, who lived
there, left her door open, as she was expecting her son. Her husband
was asleep by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him. After
he had been sitting there for a while, the woman said, 'In the name of
God, who are you? ' He got up and went out, saying, 'Never leave the
door open at this hour, or evil may come to you. ' She woke her husband
and told him. 'One of the good people has been with us,' said he.
Probably the man braved Mrs. Stewart at Hillside Gate. When she lived
she was the wife of the Protestant clergyman. 'Her ghost was never
known to harm any one,' say the village people; 'it is only doing a
penance upon the earth. ' Not far from Hillside Gate, where she haunted,
appeared for a short time a much more remarkable spirit. Its haunt was
the bogeen, a green lane leading from the western end of the village.
I quote its history at length: a typical village tragedy. In a cottage
at the village end of the bogeen lived a house-painter, Jim Montgomery,
and his wife. They had several children. He was a little dandy, and
came of a higher class than his neighbours. His wife was a very big
woman. Her husband, who had been expelled from the village choir for
drink, gave her a beating one day. Her sister heard of it, and came
and took down one of the window shutters--Montgomery was neat about
everything, and had shutters on the outside of every window--and beat
him with it, being big and strong like her sister. He threatened to
prosecute her; she answered that she would break every bone in his body
if he did. She never spoke to her sister again, because she had allowed
herself to be beaten by so small a man. Jim Montgomery grew worse and
worse: his wife soon began to have not enough to eat. She told no one,
for she was very proud. Often, too, she would have no fire on a cold
night. If any neighbours came in she would say she had let the fire out
because she was just going to bed. The people about often heard her
husband beating her, but she never told any one. She got very thin.
At last one Saturday there was no food in the house for herself and
the children. She could bear it no longer, and went to the priest and
asked him for some money. He gave her thirty shillings. Her husband
met her, and took the money, and beat her. On the following Monday
she got very ill, and sent for a Mrs. Kelly. Mrs. Kelly, as soon as
she saw her, said, 'My woman, you are dying,' and sent for the priest
and the doctor. She died in an hour. After her death, as Montgomery
neglected the children, the landlord had them taken to the workhouse.
A few nights after they had gone, Mrs. Kelly was going home through
the bogeen when the ghost of Mrs. Montgomery appeared and followed
her. It did not leave her until she reached her own house. She told
the priest, Father S----, a noted antiquarian, and could not get him to
believe her. A few nights afterwards Mrs. Kelly again met the spirit in
the same place. She was in too great terror to go the whole way, but
stopped at a neighbour's cottage midway, and asked them to let her in.
They answered they were going to bed. She cried out, 'In the name of
God let me in, or I will break open the door. ' They opened, and so she
escaped from the ghost. Next day she told the priest again. This time
he believed, and said it would follow her until she spoke to it.
She met the spirit a third time in the bogeen. She asked what kept it
from its rest. The spirit said that its children must be taken from
the workhouse, for none of its relations were ever there before, and
that three masses were to be said for the repose of its soul. 'If my
husband does not believe you,' she said, 'show him that,' and touched
Mrs. Kelly's wrist with three fingers. The places where they touched
swelled up and blackened. She then vanished. For a time Montgomery
would not believe that his wife had appeared: 'she would not show
herself to Mrs. Kelly,' he said--'she with respectable people to appear
to. ' He was convinced by the three marks, and the children were taken
from the workhouse. The priest said the masses, and the shade must have
been at rest, for it has not since appeared. Some time afterwards Jim
Montgomery died in the workhouse, having come to great poverty through
drink.
I know some who believe they have seen the headless ghost upon the
quay, and one who, when he passes the old cemetery wall at night, sees
a woman with white borders to her cap[B] creep out and follow him. The
apparition only leaves him at his own door. The villagers imagine that
she follows him to avenge some wrong. 'I will haunt you when I die' is
a favourite threat. His wife was once half-scared to death by what she
considers a demon in the shape of a dog.
These are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their
tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.
One night a Mrs. Nolan was watching by her dying child in Fluddy's
Lane. Suddenly there was a sound of knocking heard at the door. She
did not open, fearing it was some unhuman thing that knocked. The
knocking ceased. After a little the front-door and then the back-door
were burst open, and closed again. Her husband went to see what was
wrong. He found both doors bolted. The child died. The doors were
again opened and closed as before. Then Mrs. Nolan remembered that
she had forgotten to leave window or door open, as the custom is, for
the departure of the soul. These strange openings and closings and
knockings were warnings and reminders from the spirits who attend the
dying.
The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning creature. It
is put up with as long as possible. It brings good luck to those who
live with it. I remember two children who slept with their mother and
sisters and brothers in one small room. In the room was also a ghost.
They sold herrings in the Dublin streets, and did not mind the ghost
much, because they knew they would always sell their fish easily while
they slept in the 'ha'nted' room.
I have some acquaintance among the ghost-seers of western villages.
The Connaught tales are very different from those of Leinster. These
H---- spirits have a gloomy, matter-of-fact way with them.
They come
to announce a death, to fulfil some obligation, to revenge a wrong,
to pay their bills even--as did a fisherman's daughter the other
day--and then hasten to their rest. All things they do decently and in
order. It is demons, and not ghosts, that transform themselves into
white cats or black dogs. The people who tell the tales are poor,
serious-minded fishing people, who find in the doings of the ghosts
the fascination of fear. In the western tales is a whimsical grace,
a curious extravagance. The people who recount them live in the most
wild and beautiful scenery, under a sky ever loaded and fantastic with
flying clouds. They are farmers and labourers, who do a little fishing
now and then. They do not fear the spirits too much to feel an artistic
and humorous pleasure in their doings. The ghosts themselves share in
their quaint hilarity. In one western town, on whose deserted wharf the
grass grows, these spirits have so much vigour that, when a misbeliever
ventured to sleep in a haunted house, I have been told they flung him
through the window, and his bed after him. In the surrounding villages
the creatures use the most strange disguises. A dead old gentleman
robs the cabbages of his own garden in the shape of a large rabbit.
A wicked sea-captain stayed for years inside the plaster of a cottage
wall, in the shape of a snipe, making the most horrible noises. He was
only dislodged when the wall was broken down; then out of the solid
plaster the snipe rushed away whistling.
FOOTNOTE:
[B] I wonder why she had white borders to her cap. The old Mayo woman,
who has told me so many tales, has told me that her brother-in-law saw
'a woman with white borders to her cap going round the stacks in a
field, and soon after he got a hurt, and he died in six months. '
'DUST HATH CLOSED HELEN'S EYE. '
I
I HAVE been lately to a little group of houses, not many enough to be
called a village, in the barony of Kiltartan in County Galway, whose
name, Ballylee, is known through all the west of Ireland. There is the
old square castle, Ballylee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and a
cottage where their daughter and their son-in-law live, and a little
mill with an old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows upon
a little river and great stepping-stones. I went there two or three
times last year to talk to the miller about Biddy Early, a wise woman
that lived in Clare some years ago, and about her saying, 'There is a
cure for all evil between the two mill-wheels of Ballylee,' and to find
out from him or another whether she meant the moss between the running
waters or some other herb. I have been there this summer, and I shall
be there again before it is autumn, because Mary Hynes, a beautiful
woman whose name is still a wonder by turf fires, died there sixty
years ago; for our feet would linger where beauty has lived its life of
sorrow to make us understand that it is not of the world. An old man
brought me a little way from the mill and the castle, and down a long,
narrow boreen that was nearly lost in brambles and sloe bushes, and he
said, 'That is the little old foundation of the house, but the most of
it is taken for building walls, and the goats have ate those bushes
that are growing over it till they've got cranky, and they won't grow
any more. They say she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin was
like dribbled snow'--he meant driven snow, perhaps,--'and she had blushes
in her cheeks. She had five handsome brothers, but all are gone now! ' I
talked to him about a poem in Irish, Raftery, a famous poet, made about
her, and how it said, 'there is a strong cellar in Ballylee. ' He said
the strong cellar was the great hole where the river sank underground,
and he brought me to a deep pool, where an otter hurried away under a
grey boulder, and told me that many fish came up out of the dark water
at early morning 'to taste the fresh water coming down from the hills. '
I first heard of the poem from an old woman who lives about two miles
further up the river, and who remembers Raftery and Mary Hynes. She
says, 'I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never will
till I die,' and that he was nearly blind, and had 'no way of living
but to go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all the
neighbours would gather to hear. If you treated him well he'd praise
you, but if you did not, he'd fault you in Irish. He was the greatest
poet in Ireland, and he'd make a song about that bush if he chanced to
stand under it. There was a bush he stood under from the rain, and he
made verses praising it, and then when the water came through he made
verses dispraising it. ' She sang the poem to a friend and to myself
in Irish, and every word was audible and expressive, as the words in
a song were always, as I think, before music grew too proud to be the
garment of words, flowing and changing with the flowing and changing
of their energies. The poem is not as natural as the best Irish poetry
of the last century, for the thoughts are arranged in a too obviously
traditional form, so the old poor half-blind man who made it has to
speak as if he were a rich farmer offering the best of everything to
the woman he loves, but it has naive and tender phrases. The friend
that was with me has made some of the translation, but some of it has
been made by the country people themselves. I think it has more of the
simplicity of the Irish verses than one finds in most translations.
'Going to Mass by the will of God,
The day came wet and the wind rose;
I met Mary Hynes at the cross of Kiltartan,
And I fell in love with her then and there.
I spoke to her kind and mannerly,
As by report was her own way;
And she said, "Raftery, my mind is easy,
You may come to-day to Ballylee. "
When I heard her offer I did not linger,
When her talk went to my heart my heart rose.
We had only to go across the three fields,
We had daylight with us to Ballylee.
The table was laid with glasses and a quart measure,
She had fair hair, and she sitting beside me;
And she said, "Drink, Raftery, and a hundred welcomes,
There is a strong cellar in Ballylee. "
O star of light and O sun in harvest,
O amber hair, O my share of the world,
Will you come with me upon Sunday
Till we agree together before all the people?
I would not grudge you a song every Sunday evening,
Punch on the table, or wine if you would drink it,
But, O King of Glory, dry the roads before me,
Till I find the way to Ballylee.
There is sweet air on the side of the hill
When you are looking down upon Ballylee;
When you are walking in the valley picking nuts and blackberries,
There is music of the birds in it and music of the Sidhe.
What is the worth of greatness till you have the light
Of the flower of the branch that is by your side?
There is no god to deny it or to try and hide it,
She is the sun in the heavens who wounded my heart.
There was no part of Ireland I did not travel,
From the rivers to the tops of the mountains,
To the edge of Lough Greine whose mouth is hidden,
And I saw no beauty but was behind hers.
Her hair was shining, and her brows were shining too;
Her face was like herself, her mouth pleasant and sweet.
She is the pride, and I give her the branch,
She is the shining flower of Ballylee.
It is Mary Hynes, the calm and easy woman,
Has beauty in her mind and in her face.
If a hundred clerks were gathered together,
They could not write down a half of her ways. '
An old weaver, whose son is supposed to go away among the Sidhe (the
faeries) at night, says, 'Mary Hynes was the most beautiful thing
ever made. My mother used to tell me about her, for she'd be at every
hurling, and wherever she was she was dressed in white. As many as
eleven men asked her in marriage in one day, but she wouldn't have
any of them. There was a lot of men up beyond Kilbecanty one night
sitting together drinking, and talking of her, and one of them got
up and set out to go to Ballylee and see her; but Cloon Bog was open
then, and when he came to it he fell into the water, and they found
him dead there in the morning. She died of the fever that was before
the famine. ' Another old man says he was only a child when he saw
her, but he remembered that 'the strongest man that was among us, one
John Madden, got his death of the head of her, cold he got crossing
rivers in the night-time to get to Ballylee. ' This is perhaps the man
the other remembered, for tradition gives the one thing many shapes.
There is an old woman who remembers her, at Derrybrien among the Echtge
hills, a vast desolate place, which has changed little since the old
poem said, 'the stag upon the cold summit of Echtge hears the cry of
the wolves,' but still mindful of many poems and of the dignity of
ancient speech. She says, 'The sun and the moon never shone on anybody
so handsome, and her skin was so white that it looked blue, and she
had two little blushes on her cheeks. ' And an old wrinkled woman who
lives close by Ballylee, and has told me many tales of the Sidhe, says,
'I often saw Mary Hynes, she was handsome indeed. She had two bunches
of curls beside her cheeks, and they were the colour of silver. I saw
Mary Molloy that was drowned in the river beyond, and Mary Guthrie that
was in Ardrahan, but she took the sway of them both, a very comely
creature. I was at her wake too--she had seen too much of the world.
She was a kind creature. One day I was coming home through that field
beyond, and I was tired, and who should come out but the Poisin Glegeal
(the shining flower), and she gave me a glass of new milk. ' This old
woman meant no more than some beautiful bright colour by the colour of
silver, for though I knew an old man--he is dead now--who thought she
might know 'the cure for all the evils in the world,' that the Sidhe
knew, she has seen too little gold to know its colour. But a man by
the shore at Kinvara, who is too young to remember Mary Hynes, says,
'Everybody says there is no one at all to be seen now so handsome; it
is said she had beautiful hair, the colour of gold. She was poor, but
her clothes every day were the same as Sunday, she had such neatness.
And if she went to any kind of a meeting, they would all be killing one
another for a sight of her, and there was a great many in love with
her, but she died young. It is said that no one that has a song made
about them will ever live long. '
Those who are much admired are, it is held, taken by the Sidhe, who
can use ungoverned feeling for their own ends, so that a father, as an
old herb doctor told me once, may give his child into their hands, or
a husband his wife. The admired and desired are only safe if one says
'God bless them' when one's eyes are upon them. The old woman that sang
the song thinks, too, that Mary Hynes was 'taken,' as the phrase is,
'for they have taken many that are not handsome, and why would they
not take her? And people came from all parts to look at her, and, maybe
there were some that did not say "God bless her. "' An old man who lives
by the sea at Duras has as little doubt that she was taken, 'for there
are some living yet can remember her coming to the pattern[C] there
beyond, and she was said to be the handsomest girl in Ireland. ' She
died young because the gods loved her, for the Sidhe are the gods, and
it may be that the old saying, which we forget to understand literally,
meant her manner of death in old times. These poor countrymen and
countrywomen in their beliefs, and in their emotions, are many years
nearer to that old Greek world, that set beauty beside the fountain
of things, than are our men of learning. She 'had seen too much of
the world'; but these old men and women, when they tell of her, blame
another and not her, and though they can be hard, they grow gentle as
the old men of Troy grew gentle when Helen passed by on the walls.
The poet who helped her to so much fame has himself a great fame
throughout the west of Ireland. Some think that Raftery was half blind,
and say, 'I saw Raftery, a dark man, but he had sight enough to see
her,' or the like, but some think he was wholly blind, as he may have
been at the end of his life. Fable makes all things perfect in their
kind, and her blind people must never look on the world and the sun. I
asked a man I met one day, when I was looking for a pool _na mna Sidhe_
where women of faery have been seen, how Raftery could have admired
Mary Hynes so much if he had been altogether blind? He said, 'I think
Raftery was altogether blind, but those that are blind have a way of
seeing things, and have the power to know more, and to feel more,
and to do more, and to guess more than those that have their sight,
and a certain wit and a certain wisdom is given to them. ' Everybody,
indeed, will tell you that he was very wise, for was he not only blind
but a poet? The weaver whose words about Mary Hynes I have already
given, says, 'His poetry was the gift of the Almighty, for there are
three things that are the gift of the Almighty--poetry and dancing and
principles. That is why in the old times an ignorant man coming down
from the hillside would be better behaved and have better learning than
a man with education you'd meet now, for they got it from God'; and a
man at Coole says, 'When he put his finger to one part of his head,
everything would come to him as if it was written in a book'; and an
old pensioner at Kiltartan says, 'He was standing under a bush one
time, and he talked to it, and it answered him back in Irish. Some say
it was the bush that spoke, but it must have been an enchanted voice in
it, and it gave him the knowledge of all the things of the world. The
bush withered up afterwards, and it is to be seen on the roadside now
between this and Rahasine. ' There is a poem of his about a bush, which
I have never seen, and it may have come out of the cauldron of fable in
this shape.
A friend of mine met a man once who had been with him when he died,
but the people say that he died alone, and one Maurteen Gillane told
Dr. Hyde that all night long a light was seen streaming up to heaven
from the roof of the house where he lay, and 'that was the angels who
were with him'; and all night long there was a great light in the
hovel, 'and that was the angels who were waking him. They gave that
honour to him because he was so good a poet, and sang such religious
songs. ' It may be that in a few years Fable, who changes mortalities
to immortalities in her cauldron, will have changed Mary Hynes
and Raftery to perfect symbols of the sorrow of beauty and of the
magnificence and penury of dreams.
1900.
II
When I was in a northern town awhile ago I had a long talk with a man
who had lived in a neighbouring country district when he was a boy. He
told me that when a very beautiful girl was born in a family that had
not been noted for good looks, her beauty was thought to have come from
the Sidhe, and to bring misfortune with it. He went over the names of
several beautiful girls that he had known, and said that beauty had
never brought happiness to anybody. It was a thing, he said, to be
proud of and afraid of. I wish I had written out his words at the time,
for they were more picturesque than my memory of them.
1902.
FOOTNOTE:
[C] A 'pattern,' or 'patron,' is a festival in honour of a saint.
A KNIGHT OF THE SHEEP
AWAY to the north of Ben Bulben and Cope's mountain lives 'a strong
farmer,' a knight of the sheep they would have called him in the Gaelic
days. Proud of his descent from one of the most fighting clans of the
Middle Ages, he is a man of force alike in his words and in his deeds.
There is but one man that swears like him, and this man lives far away
upon the mountain. 'Father in heaven, what have I done to deserve
this? ' he says when he has lost his pipe; and no man but he who lives
on the mountain can rival his language on a fair day over a bargain. He
is passionate and abrupt in his movements, and when angry tosses his
white beard about with his left hand.
One day I was dining with him when the servant-maid announced a certain
Mr. O'Donnell. A sudden silence fell upon the old man and upon his two
daughters. At last the eldest daughter said somewhat severely to her
father, 'Go and ask him to come in and dine. ' The old man went out,
and then came in looking greatly relieved, and said, 'He says he will
not dine with us. ' 'Go out,' said the daughter, 'and ask him into the
back parlour, and give him some whiskey. ' Her father, who had just
finished his dinner, obeyed sullenly, and I heard the door of the back
parlour--a little room where the daughters sat and sewed during the
evening--shut to behind the men. The daughter then turned to me and
said, 'Mr. O'Donnell is the tax-gatherer, and last year he raised our
taxes, and my father was very angry, and when he came, brought him
into the dairy, and sent the dairy-woman away on a message, and then
swore at him a great deal. "I will teach you, sir," O'Donnell replied,
"that the law can protect its officers"; but my father reminded him
that he had no witness. At last my father got tired, and sorry too,
and said he would show him a short way home. When they were half-way
to the main road they came on a man of my father's who was ploughing,
and this somehow brought back remembrance of the wrong. He sent the man
away on a message, and began to swear at the tax-gatherer again. When
I heard of it I was disgusted that he should have made such a fuss
over a miserable creature like O'Donnell; and when I heard a few weeks
ago that O'Donnell's only son had died and left him heart-broken, I
resolved to make my father be kind to him next time he came. '
She then went out to see a neighbour, and I sauntered towards the back
parlour. When I came to the door I heard angry voices inside. The two
men were evidently getting on to the tax again, for I could hear them
bandying figures to and fro. I opened the door; at sight of my face
the farmer was reminded of his peaceful intentions, and asked me if I
knew where the whiskey was. I had seen him put it into the cupboard,
and was able therefore to find it and get it out, looking at the thin,
grief-struck face of the tax-gatherer. He was rather older than my
friend, and very much more feeble and worn, and of a very different
type. He was not like him, a robust, successful man, but rather one of
those whose feet find no resting-place upon the earth. I recognized one
of the children of reverie, and said, 'You are doubtless of the stock
of the old O'Donnells. I know well the hole in the river where their
treasure lies buried under the guard of a serpent with many heads. '
'Yes, sur,' he replied, 'I am the last of a line princes. '
We then fell to talking of many commonplace things, and my friend did
not once toss up his beard, but was very friendly. At last the gaunt
old tax-gatherer got up to go, and my friend said, 'I hope we will
have a glass together next year. ' 'No, no,' was the answer, 'I shall
be dead next year,' 'I too have lost sons,' said the other, in quite a
gentle voice. 'But your sons were not like my son. ' And then the two
men parted, with an angry flush and bitter hearts, and had I not cast
between them some common words or other, might not have parted, but
have fallen rather into an angry discussion of the value of their dead
sons. If I had not pity for all the children of reverie I should have
let them fight it out, and would now have many a wonderful oath to
record.
The knight of the sheep would have had the victory, for no soul that
wears this garment of blood and clay can surpass him. He was but once
beaten; and this is his tale of how it was. He and some farm hands were
playing at cards in a small cabin that stood against the end of a big
barn. A wicked woman had once lived in this cabin. Suddenly one of the
players threw down an ace and began to swear without any cause. His
swearing was so dreadful that the others stood up, and my friend said,
'All is not right here; there is a spirit in him. ' They ran to the door
that led into the barn to get away as quickly as possible. The wooden
bolt would not move, so the knight of the sheep took a saw which stood
against the wall near at hand, and sawed through the bolt, and at once
the door flew open with a bang, as though some one had been holding it,
and they fled through.
AN ENDURING HEART
ONE day a friend of mine was making a sketch of my Knight of the Sheep.
The old man's daughter was sitting by, and, when the conversation
drifted to love and love-making, she said, 'Oh, father, tell him
about your love affair. ' The old man took his pipe out of his mouth,
and said, 'Nobody ever marries the woman he loves,' and then, with
a chuckle, 'there were fifteen of them I liked better than the
woman I married,' and he repeated many women's names. He went on to
tell how when he was a lad he had worked for his grandfather, his
mother's father, and was called (my friend has forgotten why) by his
grandfather's name, which we will say was Doran. He had a great friend,
whom I shall call John Byrne; and one day he and his friend went to
Queenstown to await an emigrant ship, that was to take John Byrne
to America. When they were walking along the quay, they saw a girl
sitting on a seat, crying miserably, and two men standing up in front
of her quarrelling with one another. Doran said, 'I think I know what
is wrong. _That_ man will be her brother, and _that_ man will be her
lover, and the brother is sending her to America to get her away from
the lover. How she is crying! but I think I could console her myself. '
Presently the lover and brother went away, and Doran began to walk up
and down before her, saying, 'Mild weather, Miss,' or the like. She
answered him in a little while, and the three began to talk together.
The emigrant ship did not arrive for some days; and the three drove
about on outside cars very innocently and happily, seeing everything
that was to be seen. When at last the ship came, and Doran had to break
it to her that he was not going to America, she cried more after him
than after the first lover. Doran whispered to Byrne as he went aboard
ship, 'Now, Byrne, I don't grudge her to you, but don't marry young. '
When the story got to this, the farmer's daughter joined in mockingly
with, 'I suppose you said that for Byrne's good, father. ' But the
old man insisted that he _had_ said it for Byrne's good; and went
on to tell how, when he got a letter telling of Byrne's engagement
to the girl, he wrote him the same advice. Years passed by, and he
heard nothing; and though he was now married, he could not keep from
wondering what she was doing. At last he went to America to find out,
and though he asked many people for tidings, he could get none. More
years went by, and his wife was dead, and he well on in years, and a
rich farmer with not a few great matters on his hands. He found an
excuse in some vague business to go out to America again, and to begin
his search again. One day he fell into talk with an Irishman in a
railway carriage, and asked him, as his way was, about emigrants from
this place and that, and at last, 'Did you ever hear of the miller's
daughter from Innis Rath? ' and he named the woman he was looking for.
'Oh yes,' said the other, 'she is married to a friend of mine, John
MacEwing. She lives at such-and-such a street in Chicago. ' Doran went
to Chicago and knocked at her door. She opened the door herself, and
was 'not a bit changed. ' He gave her his real name, which he had taken
again after his grandfather's death, and the name of the man he had
met in the train. She did not recognize him, but asked him to stay to
dinner, saying that her husband would be glad to meet anybody who knew
that old friend of his. They talked of many things, but for all their
talk, I do not know why, and perhaps he did not know why, he never told
her who he was. At dinner he asked her about Byrne, and she put her
head down on the table and began to cry, and she cried so he was afraid
her husband might be angry. He was afraid to ask what had happened to
Byrne, and left soon after, never to see her again.
When the old man had finished the story, he said, 'Tell that to Mr.
Yeats, he will make a poem about it, perhaps. ' But the daughter said,
'Oh no, father. Nobody could make a poem about a woman like that. '
Alas! I have never made the poem, perhaps because my own heart which
has loved Helen and all the lovely and fickle women of the world, would
be too sore. There are things it is well not to ponder over too much,
things that bare words are the best suited for.
1902.
THE SORCERERS
IN Ireland we hear but little of the darker powers,[D] and come across
any who have seen them even more rarely, for the imagination of the
people dwells rather upon the fantastic and capricious, and fantasy
and caprice would lose the freedom which is their breath of life, were
they to unite them either with evil or with good. And yet the wise are
of opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his
rapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who store
their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit
hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and
melancholy multitude. They hold, too, that he who by long desire or
through accident of birth possesses the power of piercing into their
hidden abode can see them there, those who were once men or women
full of a terrible vehemence, and those who have never lived upon the
earth, moving slowly and with a subtler malice. The dark powers cling
about us, it is said, day and night, like bats upon an old tree; and
that we do not hear more of them is merely because the darker kinds of
magic have been but little practised. I have indeed come across very
few persons in Ireland who try to communicate with evil powers, and the
few I have met keep their purpose and practice wholly hidden from those
among whom they live. They are mainly small clerks and the like, and
meet for the purpose of their art in a room hung with black hangings.
They would not admit me into this room, but finding me not altogether
ignorant of the arcane science, showed gladly elsewhere what they would
do. 'Come to us,' said their leader, a clerk in a large flour-mill,
'and we will show you spirits who will talk to you face to face, and in
shapes as solid and heavy as our own. '
I had been talking of the power of communicating in states of trance
with the angelical and faery beings,--the children of the day and of the
twilight,--and he had been contending that we should only believe in
what we can see and feel when in our ordinary everyday state of mind.
'Yes,' I said, 'I will come to you,' or some such words; 'but I will
not permit myself to become entranced, and will therefore know whether
these shapes you talk of are any the more to be touched and felt by the
ordinary senses than are those I talk of. ' I was not denying the power
of other beings to take upon themselves a clothing of mortal substance,
but only that simple invocations, such as he spoke of, seemed unlikely
to do more than cast the mind into trance, and thereby bring it into
the presence of the powers of day, twilight, and darkness.
'But,' he said, 'we have seen them move the furniture hither and
thither, and they go at our bidding, and help or harm people who know
nothing of them. ' I am not giving the exact words, but as accurately as
I can the substance of our talk.
On the night arranged I turned up about eight, and found the leader
sitting alone in almost total darkness in a small back room. He was
dressed in a black gown, like an inquisitor's dress in an old drawing,
that left nothing of him visible except his eyes, which peered out
through two small round holes. Upon the table in front of him was
a brass dish of burning herbs, a large bowl, a skull covered with
painted symbols, two crossed daggers, and certain implements shaped
like quern stones, which were used to control the elemental powers
in some fashion I did not discover.
