A
labourer
told
us of what a friend of his had seen in a part of the woods that is
called Shanwalla, from some old village that was before the wood.
us of what a friend of his had seen in a part of the woods that is
called Shanwalla, from some old village that was before the wood.
Yeats
' Yet he was so
scornful of unchristian things for all their dancing and singing that
he thinks that 'you have only to bid them begone and they will go. It
was one night,' he says, 'after walking back from Kinvara and down by
the wood beyond I felt one coming beside me, and I could feel the horse
he was riding on and the way he lifted his legs, but they do not make
a sound like the hoofs of a horse. So I stopped and turned around and
said, very loud, "Be off! " and he went and never troubled me after. And
I knew a man who was dying, and one came on his bed, and he cried out
to it, "Get out of that, you unnatural animal! " and it left him. Fallen
angels they are, and after the fall God said, "Let there be Hell," and
there it was in a moment. ' An old woman who was sitting by the fire
joined in as he said this with 'God save us, it's a pity He said the
word, and there might have been no Hell the day,' but the seer did not
notice her words. He went on, 'And then he asked the devil what would
he take for the souls of all the people. And the devil said nothing
would satisfy him but the blood of a virgin's son, so he got that, and
then the gates of Hell were opened. ' He understood the story, it seems,
as if it were some riddling old folk tale.
'I have seen Hell myself. I had a sight of it one time in a vision. It
had a very high wall around it, all of metal, and an archway, and a
straight walk into it, just like what 'ud be leading into a gentleman's
orchard, but the edges were not trimmed with box, but with red-hot
metal. And inside the wall there were cross-walks, and I'm not sure
what there was to the right, but to the left there were five great
furnaces, and they full of souls kept there with great chains. So I
turned short and went away, and in turning I looked again at the wall,
and I could see no end to it.
'And another time I saw Purgatory. It seemed to be in a level place,
and no walls around it, but it all one bright blaze, and the souls
standing in it. And they suffer near as much as in Hell, only there are
no devils with them there, and they have the hope of Heaven.
'And I heard a call to me from there, "Help me to come out o' this! "
And when I looked it was a man I used to know in the army, an Irishman,
and from this county, and I believe him to be a descendant of King
O'Connor of Athenry.
'So I stretched out my hand first, but then I called out, "I'd be
burned in the flames before I could get within three yards of you. " So
then he said, "Well, help me with your prayers," and so I do.
'And Father Connellan says the same thing, to help the dead with your
prayers, and he's a very clever man to make a sermon, and has a great
deal of cures made with the Holy Water he brought back from Lourdes. '
1902.
FOOTNOTE:
[E] The religious society she had belonged to.
THE LAST GLEEMAN
MICHAEL MORAN was born about 1794 off Black Pitts, in the Liberties of
Dublin, in Faddle Alley. A fortnight after birth he went stone blind
from illness, and became thereby a blessing to his parents, who were
soon able to send him to rhyme and beg at street corners and at the
bridges over the Liffey. They may well have wished that their quiver
were full of such as he, for, free from the interruption of sight, his
mind became a perfect echoing chamber, where every movement of the
day and every change of public passion whispered itself into rhyme or
quaint saying. By the time he had grown to manhood he was the admitted
rector of all the ballad-mongers of the Liberties. Madden, the weaver,
Kearney, the blind fiddler from Wicklow, Martin from Meath, M'Bride
from heaven knows where, and that M'Grane, who in after days, when
the true Moran was no more, strutted in borrowed plumes, or rather
in borrowed rags, and gave out that there had never been any Moran
but himself, and many another, did homage before him, and held him
chief of all their tribe. Nor despite his blindness did he find any
difficulty in getting a wife, but rather was able to pick and choose,
for he was just that mixture of ragamuffin and of genius which is dear
to the heart of woman, who, perhaps because she is wholly conventional
herself, loves the unexpected, the crooked, the bewildering. Nor did
he lack, despite his rags, many excellent things, for it is remembered
that he ever loved caper sauce, going so far indeed in his honest
indignation at its absence upon one occasion as to fling a leg of
mutton at his wife. He was not, however, much to look at, with his
coarse frieze coat with its cape and scalloped edge, his old corduroy
trousers and great brogues, and his stout stick made fast to his wrist
by a thong of leather: and he would have been a woeful shock to the
gleeman MacConglinne, could that friend of kings have beheld him in
prophetic vision from the pillar stone at Cork. And yet though the
short cloak and the leather wallet were no more, he was a true gleeman,
being alike poet, jester, and newsman of the people. In the morning
when he had finished his breakfast, his wife or some neighbour would
read the newspaper to him, and read on and on until he interrupted
with, 'That'll do--I have me meditations'; and from these meditations
would come the day's store of jest and rhyme. He had the whole Middle
Ages under his frieze coat.
He had not, however, MacConglinne's hatred of the Church and clergy,
for when the fruit of his meditations did not ripen well, or when
the crowd called for something more solid, he would recite or sing a
metrical tale or ballad of saint or martyr or of Biblical adventure.
He would stand at a street corner, and when a crowd had gathered would
begin in some such fashion as follows (I copy the record of one who
knew him)--'Gather round me, boys, gather round me. Boys, am I standin'
in puddle? am I standin' in wet? ' Thereon several boys would cry, 'Ah,
no! yez not! yer in a nice dry place. Go on with _St. Mary_; go on
with _Moses_'--each calling for his favourite tale. Then Moran, with a
suspicious wriggle of his body and a clutch at his rags, would burst
out with 'All me buzzum friends are turned backbiters'; and after a
final 'If yez don't drop your coddin' and diversion I'll lave some
of yez a case,' by way of warning to the boys, begin his recitation,
or perhaps still delay, to ask, 'Is there a crowd round me now? Any
blackguard heretic around me? ' The best-known of his religious tales
was _St. Mary of Egypt_, a long poem of exceeding solemnity, condensed
from the much longer work of a certain Bishop Coyle. It told how a
fast woman of Egypt, Mary by name, followed pilgrims to Jerusalem for
no good purpose, and then turning penitent on finding herself withheld
from entering the Temple by supernatural interference, fled to the
desert and spent the remainder of her life in solitary penance. When
at last she was at the point of death, God sent Bishop Zozimus to hear
her confession, give her the last sacrament, and with the help of a
lion, whom He sent also, dig her grave. The poem has the intolerable
cadence of the eighteenth century, but was so popular and so often
called for that Moran was soon nicknamed Zozimus, and by that name is
he remembered. He had also a poem of his own called _Moses_, which went
a little nearer poetry without going very near. But he could ill brook
solemnity, and before long parodied his own verses in the following
ragamuffin fashion:
In Egypt's land, contagious to the Nile,
King Pharaoh's daughter went to bathe in style.
She tuk her dip, then walked unto the land,
To dry her royal pelt she ran along the strand.
A bulrush tripped her, whereupon she saw
A smiling babby in a wad o' straw.
She tuk it up, and said with accents mild,
''Tare-and-agers, girls, which av yez owns the child? '
His humorous rhymes were, however, more often quips and cranks at the
expense of his contemporaries. It was his delight, for instance, to
remind a certain shoemaker, noted alike for display of wealth and for
personal uncleanness, of his inconsiderable origin in a song of which
but the first stanza has come down to us:
At the dirty end of Dirty Lane,
Liv'd a dirty cobbler, Dick Maclane;
His wife was in the old king's reign
A stout brave orange-woman.
On Essex Bridge she strained her throat,
And six-a-penny was her note.
But Dickey wore a bran-new coat,
He got among the yeomen.
He was a bigot, like his clan,
And in the streets he wildly sang,
O Roly, toly, toly raid, with his old jade.
He had troubles of divers kinds, and numerous interlopers to face and
put down. Once an officious peeler arrested him as a vagabond, but was
triumphantly routed amid the laughter of the court, when Moran reminded
his worship of the precedent set by Homer, who was also, he declared,
a poet, and a blind man, and a beggarman. He had to face a more serious
difficulty as his fame grew. Various imitators started up upon all
sides. A certain actor, for instance, made as many guineas as Moran did
shillings by mimicking his sayings and his songs and his get-up upon
the stage. One night this actor was at supper with some friends, when
dispute arose as to whether his mimicry was overdone or not. It was
agreed to settle it by an appeal to the mob. A forty-shilling supper
at a famous coffee-house was to be the wager. The actor took up his
station at Essex Bridge, a great haunt of Moran's, and soon gathered a
small crowd. He had scarce got through 'In Egypt's land, contagious to
the Nile,' when Moran himself came up, followed by another crowd. The
crowds met in great excitement and laughter. 'Good Christians,' cried
the pretender, 'is it possible that any man would mock the poor dark
man like that? '
'Who's that? It's some imposhterer,' replied Moran.
'Begone, you wretch! it's you'ze the imposhterer. Don't you fear the
light of heaven being struck from your eyes for mocking the poor dark
man? '
'Saints and angels, is there no protection against this? You're a most
inhuman blaguard to try to deprive me of my honest bread this way,'
replied poor Moran.
'And you, you wretch, won't let me go on with the beautiful poem.
Christian people, in your charity, won't you beat this man away? he's
taking advantage of my darkness. '
The pretender, seeing that he was having the best of it, thanked the
people for their sympathy and protection, and went on with the poem,
Moran listening for a time in bewildered silence. After a while Moran
protested again with:
'Is it possible that none of yez can know me? Don't yez see it's
myself; and that's some one else? '
'Before I can proceed any further in this lovely story,' interrupted
the pretender, 'I call on yez to contribute your charitable donations
to help me to go on. '
'Have you no sowl to be saved, you mocker of heaven? ' cried Moran, put
completely beside himself by this last injury. 'Would you rob the poor
as well as desave the world? O, was ever such wickedness known? '
'I leave it to yourselves, my friends,' said the pretender, 'to give to
the real dark man, that you all know so well, and save me from that
schemer,' and with that he collected some pennies and half-pence. While
he was doing so, Moran started his _Mary of Egypt_, but the indignant
crowd seizing his stick were about to belabour him when they fell back
bewildered anew by his close resemblance to himself. The pretender now
called to them to 'just give him a grip of that villain, and he'd soon
let him know who the imposhterer was! ' They led him over to Moran,
but instead of closing with him he thrust a few shillings into his
hand, and turning to the crowd explained to them he was indeed but an
actor, and that he had just gained a wager, and so departed amid much
enthusiasm, to eat the supper he had won.
In April, 1846, word was sent to the priest that Michael Moran was
dying. He found him at 15 (now 141/2) Patrick Street, on a straw bed, in
a room full of ragged ballad-singers come to cheer his last moments.
After his death the ballad-singers, with many fiddles and the like,
came again and gave him a fine wake, each adding to the merriment
whatever he knew in the way of rann, tale, old saw, or quaint rhyme.
He had had his day, had said his prayers and made his confession, and
why should they not give him a hearty send-off? The funeral took place
the next day. A good party of his admirers and friends got into the
hearse with the coffin, for the day was wet and nasty. They had not
gone far when one of them burst out with 'It's cruel cowld, isn't it? '
'Garra',' replied another, 'we'll all be as stiff as the corpse when
we get to the berrin-ground. ' 'Bad cess to him,' said a third; 'I wish
he'd held out for another month until the weather got dacent. ' A man
named Carroll thereupon produced a half-pint of whiskey, and they all
drank to the soul of the departed. Unhappily, however, the hearse was
overweighted, and they had not reached the cemetery before the spring
broke, and the bottle with it.
Moran must have felt strange and out of place in that other kingdom he
was entering, perhaps while his friends were drinking in his honour.
Let us hope that some kindly middle region was found for him, where he
can call dishevelled angels about him with some new and more rhythmical
form of his old
Gather round me, boys, will yez
Gather round me?
And hear what I have to say
Before ould Salley brings me
My bread and jug of tay;
and fling outrageous quips and cranks at cherubim and seraphim. Perhaps
he may have found and gathered, ragamuffin though he be, the Lily of
High Truth, the Rose of Far-sought Beauty, for whose lack so many of
the writers of Ireland, whether famous or forgotten, have been futile
as the blown froth upon the shore.
REGINA, REGINA PIGMEORUM VENI
ONE night a middle-aged man, who had lived all his life far from the
noise of cab-wheels, a young girl, a relation of his, who was reported
to be enough of a seer to catch a glimpse of unaccountable lights
moving over the fields among the cattle, and myself, were walking along
a far western sandy shore. We talked of the Forgetful People as the
faery people are sometimes called, and came in the midst of our talk
to a notable haunt of theirs, a shallow cave amidst black rocks, with
its reflection under it in the wet sea sand. I asked the young girl if
she could see anything, for I had quite a number of things to ask the
Forgetful People. She stood still for a few minutes, and I saw that she
was passing into a kind of waking trance, in which the cold sea breeze
no longer troubled her, nor the dull boom of the sea distracted her
attention. I then called aloud the names of the great faeries, and
in a moment or two she said that she could hear music far inside the
rocks, and then a sound of confused talking, and of people stamping
their feet as if to applaud some unseen performer. Up to this my other
friend had been walking to and fro some yards off, but now he passed
close to us, and as he did so said suddenly that we were going to be
interrupted, for he heard the laughter of children somewhere beyond
the rocks. We were, however, quite alone. The spirits of the place
had begun to cast their influence over him also. In a moment he was
corroborated by the girl, who said that bursts of laughter had begun
to mingle with the music, the confused talking, and the noise of feet.
She next saw a bright light streaming out of the cave, which seemed to
have grown much deeper, and a quantity of little people,[F] in various
coloured dresses, red predominating, dancing to a tune which she did
not recognize.
I then bade her call out to the queen of the little people to come
and talk with us. There was, however, no answer to her command. I
therefore repeated the words aloud myself, and in a moment a very
beautiful tall woman came out of the cave. I too had by this time
fallen into a kind of trance, in which what we call the unreal had
begun to take upon itself a masterful reality, and was able to see
the faint gleam of golden ornaments, the shadowy blossom of dim hair.
I then bade the girl tell this tall queen to marshal her followers
according to their natural divisions, that we might see them. I found
as before that I had to repeat the command myself. The creatures then
came out of the cave, and drew themselves up, if I remember rightly,
in four bands. One of these bands carried quicken boughs in their
hands, and another had necklaces made apparently of serpents' scales,
but their dress I cannot remember, for I was quite absorbed in that
gleaming woman. I asked her to tell the seer whether these caves were
the greatest faery haunts in the neighbourhood. Her lips moved, but the
answer was inaudible. I bade the seer lay her hand upon the breast of
the queen, and after that she heard every word quite distinctly. No,
this was not the greatest faery haunt, for there was a greater one a
little further ahead. I then asked her whether it was true that she and
her people carried away mortals, and if so, whether they put another
soul in the place of the one they had taken. 'We change the bodies,'
was her answer. 'Are any of you ever born into mortal life? ' 'Yes. ' 'Do
I know any who were among your people before birth? ' 'You do. ' 'Who are
they? ' 'It would not be lawful for you to know. ' I then asked whether
she and her people were not 'dramatizations of our moods'? 'She does
not understand,' said my friend, 'but says that her people are much
like human beings, and do most of the things human beings do. ' I asked
her other questions, as to her nature, and her purpose in the universe,
but only seemed to puzzle her. At last she appeared to lose patience,
for she wrote this message for me upon the sands--the sands of vision,
not the grating sands under our feet--'Be careful, and do not seek to
know too much about us. ' Seeing that I had offended her, I thanked her
for what she had shown and told, and let her depart again into her
cave. In a little while the young girl awoke out of her trance, and
felt again the cold wind of the world, and began to shiver.
I tell these things as accurately as I can, and with no theories to
blur the history. Theories are poor things at the best, and the bulk of
mine have perished long ago. I love better than any theory the sound
of the Gate of Ivory, turning upon its hinges, and hold that he alone
who has passed the rose-strewn threshold can catch the far glimmer of
the Gate of Horn. It were perhaps well for us all if we would but raise
the cry Lilly the astrologer raised in Windsor Forest, 'Regina, Regina
Pigmeorum, Veni,' and remember with him, that God visiteth His children
in dreams. Tall, glimmering queen, come near, and let me see again the
shadowy blossom of thy dim hair.
FOOTNOTE:
[F] The people and faeries in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are,
sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet
high. The old Mayo woman I so often quote, thinks that it is something
in our eyes that makes them seem big or little.
'AND FAIR, FIERCE WOMEN'
ONE day a woman that I know came face to face with heroic beauty, that
highest beauty which Blake says changes least from youth to age, a
beauty which has been fading out of the arts, since that decadence we
call progress, set voluptuous beauty in its place. She was standing at
the window, looking over to Knocknarea where Queen Maive is thought to
be buried, when she saw, as she told me, 'the finest woman you ever saw
travelling right across from the mountain and straight to her. ' The
woman had a sword by her side, and a dagger lifted up in her hand, and
was dressed in white, with bare arms and feet. She looked 'very strong,
but not wicked,' that is, not cruel. The old woman had seen the Irish
giant, and 'though he was a fine man,' he was nothing to this woman,
'for he was round, and could not have stepped out so soldierly'; 'she
was like Mrs. ----' a stately lady of the neighbourhood, 'but she had
no stomach on her, and was slight and broad in the shoulders, and was
handsomer than any one you ever saw; she looked about thirty. ' The old
woman covered her eyes with her hands, and when she uncovered them
the apparition had vanished. The neighbours were 'wild with her,' she
told me, because she did not wait to find out if there was a message,
for they were sure it was Queen Maive, who often shows herself to
the pilots. I asked the old woman if she had seen others like Queen
Maive, and she said, 'Some of them have their hair down, but they
look quite different, like the sleepy-looking ladies one sees in the
papers. Those with their hair up are like this one. The others have
long white dresses, but those with their hair up have short dresses,
so that you can see their legs right up to the calf. ' After some
careful questioning I found that they wore what might very well be
a kind of buskin; she went on, 'They are fine and dashing looking,
like the men one sees riding their horses in twos and threes on the
slopes of the mountains with their swords swinging. ' She repeated
over and over, 'There is no such race living now, none so finely
proportioned,' or the like, and then said, 'The present Queen[G] is a
nice, pleasant-looking woman, but she is not like her. What makes me
think so little of the ladies is that I see none as they be,' meaning
as the spirits. 'When I think of her and of the ladies now, they are
like little children running about without knowing how to put their
clothes on right. Is it the ladies? Why, I would not call them women
at all. ' The other day a friend of mine questioned an old woman in a
Galway workhouse about Queen Maive, and was told that 'Queen Maive was
handsome, and overcame all her enemies with a hazel stick, for the
hazel is blessed, and the best weapon that can be got. You might walk
the world with it,' but she grew 'very disagreeable in the end--oh, very
disagreeable. Best not to be talking about it. Best leave it between
the book and the hearer. ' My friend thought the old woman had got some
scandal about Fergus son of Roy and Maive in her head.
And I myself met once with a young man in the Burren Hills who
remembered an old poet who made his poems in Irish and had met when he
was young, the young man said, one who called herself Maive, and said
she was a queen 'among them,' and asked him if he would have money or
pleasure. He said he would have pleasure, and she gave him her love for
a time, and then went from him, and ever after he was very mournful.
The young man had often heard him sing the poem of lamentation that he
made, but could only remember that it was 'very mournful,' and that he
called her 'beauty of all beauties. '
1902.
FOOTNOTE:
[G] Queen Victoria.
ENCHANTED WOODS
I
LAST summer, whenever I had finished my day's work, I used to go
wandering in certain roomy woods, and there I would often meet an old
countryman, and talk to him about his work and about the woods, and
once or twice a friend came with me to whom he would open his heart
more readily than to me. He had spent all his life lopping away the
witch elm and the hazel and the privet and the hornbeam from the paths,
and had thought much about the natural and supernatural creatures
of the wood. He has heard the hedgehog--'grainne oge,' he calls
him--'grunting like a Christian,' and is certain that he steals apples
by rolling about under an apple tree until there is an apple sticking
to every quill. He is certain too that the cats, of whom there are many
in the woods, have a language of their own--some kind of old Irish. He
says, 'Cats were serpents, and they were made into cats at the time of
some great change in the world. That is why they are hard to kill, and
why it is dangerous to meddle with them. If you annoy a cat it might
claw or bite you in a way that would put poison in you, and that would
be the serpent's tooth. ' Sometimes he thinks they change into wild
cats, and then a nail grows on the end of their tails; but these wild
cats are not the same as the marten cats, who have been always in the
woods. The foxes were once tame, as the cats are now, but they ran away
and became wild. He talks of all wild creatures except squirrels--whom
he hates--with what seems an affectionate interest, though at times his
eyes will twinkle with pleasure as he remembers how he made hedgehogs
unroll themselves when he was a boy, by putting a wisp of burning straw
under them.
I am not certain that he distinguishes between the natural and
supernatural very clearly. He told me the other day that foxes and cats
like, above all, to be in the 'forths' and lisses after nightfall; and
he will certainly pass from some story about a fox to a story about a
spirit with less change of voice than when he is going to speak about
a marten cat--a rare beast now-a-days. Many years ago he used to work
in the garden, and once they put him to sleep in a garden-house where
there was a loft full of apples, and all night he could hear people
rattling plates and knives and forks over his head in the loft. Once,
at any rate, he has seen an unearthly sight in the woods. He says, 'One
time I was out cutting timber over in Inchy, and about eight o'clock
one morning when I got there I saw a girl picking nuts, with her hair
hanging down over her shoulders, brown hair, and she had a good, clean
face, and she was tall and nothing on her head, and her dress no way
gaudy but simple, and when she felt me coming she gathered herself up
and was gone as if the earth had swallowed her up. And I followed her
and looked for her, but I never could see her again from that day to
this, never again. ' He used the word clean as we would use words like
fresh or comely.
Others too have seen spirits in the Enchanted Woods.
A labourer told
us of what a friend of his had seen in a part of the woods that is
called Shanwalla, from some old village that was before the wood. He
said, 'One evening I parted from Lawrence Mangan in the yard, and he
went away through the path in Shanwalla, an' bid me good-night. And
two hours after, there he was back again in the yard, an' bid me light
a candle that was in the stable. An' he told me that when he got into
Shanwalla, a little fellow about as high as his knee, but having a head
as big as a man's body, came beside him and led him out of the path an'
round about, and at last it brought him to the lime-kiln, and then it
vanished and left him. '
A woman told me of a sight that she and others had seen by a certain
deep pool in the river. She said, 'I came over the stile from the
chapel, and others along with me; and a great blast of wind came and
two trees were bent and broken and fell into the river, and the splash
of water out of it went up to the skies. And those that were with me
saw many figures, but myself I only saw one, sitting there by the bank
where the trees fell. Dark clothes he had on, and he was headless. '
A man told me that one day, when he was a boy, he and another boy went
to catch a horse in a certain field, full of boulders and bushes of
hazel and creeping juniper and rock-roses, that is where the lake side
is for a little clear of the woods. He said to the boy that was with
him, 'I bet a button that if I fling a pebble on to that bush it will
stay on it,' meaning that the bush was so matted the pebble would not
be able to go through it. So he took up 'a pebble of cow-dung, and as
soon as it hit the bush there came out of it the most beautiful music
that ever was heard. ' They ran away, and when they had gone about
two hundred yards they looked back and saw a woman dressed in white,
walking round and round the bush. 'First it had the form of a woman,
and then of a man, and it was going round the bush. '
II
I often entangle myself in arguments more complicated than even those
paths of Inchy as to what is the true nature of apparitions, but at
other times I say as Socrates said when they told him a learned opinion
about a nymph of the Ilissus, 'The common opinion is enough for me. ' I
believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom
we cannot see, and that some of these are ugly or grotesque, and some
wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have ever
seen, and that these are not far away when we are walking in pleasant
and quiet places. Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood
without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or
something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And
now I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice with
almost anxious footsteps, so deep a hold has this imagination upon me.
You too meet with a like imagination, doubtless, somewhere, wherever
your ruling stars will have it, Saturn driving you to the woods, or the
Moon, it may be, to the edges of the sea. I will not of a certainty
believe that there is nothing in the sunset, where our forefathers
imagined the dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but
some vague presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a
gateway out of the net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long
be beauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and
fatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport
than to look at the finest show that light and shadow ever made among
green leaves. I say to myself, when I am well out of that thicket of
argument, that they are surely there, the divine people, for only we
who have neither simplicity nor wisdom have denied them, and the simple
of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and even
spoken to them. They live out their passionate lives not far off, as
I think, and we shall be among them when we die if we but keep our
natures simple and passionate. May it not even be that death shall
unite us to all romance, and that some day we shall fight dragons among
blue hills, or come to that whereof all romance is but
'Foreshadowings mingled with the images
Of man's misdeeds in greater days than these,'
as the old men thought in _The Earthly Paradise_ when they were in good
spirits.
1902.
MIRACULOUS CREATURES
THERE are marten cats and badgers and foxes in the Enchanted Woods, but
there are of a certainty mightier creatures, and the lake hides what
neither net nor line can take. These creatures are of the race of the
white stag that flits in and out of the tales of Arthur, and of the
evil pig that slew Diarmuid where Ben Bulben mixes with the sea wind.
They are the wizard creatures of hope and fear, they are of them that
fly and of them that follow among the thickets that are about the Gates
of Death. A man I know remembers that his father was one night in the
wood of Inchy, 'where the lads of Gort used to be stealing rods. He was
sitting by the wall, and the dog beside him, and he heard something
come running from Owbawn Weir, and he could see nothing, but the sound
of its feet on the ground was like the sound of the feet of a deer. And
when it passed him, the dog got between him and the wall and scratched
at it there as if it was afraid, but still he could see nothing but
only hear the sound of hoofs. So when it was passed he turned and came
away home. ' 'Another time,' the man says, 'my father told me he was
in a boat out on the lake with two or three men from Gort, and one of
them had an eel-spear, and he thrust it into the water, and it hit
something, and the man fainted and they had to carry him out of the
boat to land, and when he came to himself he said that what he struck
was like a calf, but whatever it was, it was not fish! ' A friend of
mine is convinced that these terrible creatures, so common in lakes,
were set there in old times by subtle enchanters to watch over the
gates of wisdom. He thinks that if we sent our spirits down into the
water we would make them of one substance with strange moods of ecstasy
and power, and go out it may be to the conquest of the world. We would,
however, he believes, have first to outface and perhaps overthrow
strange images full of a more powerful life than if they were really
alive. It may be that we shall look at them without fear when we have
endured the last adventure, that is death.
1902.
ARISTOTLE OF THE BOOKS
THE friend who can get the woodcutter to talk more readily than he will
to anybody else went lately to see his old wife. She lives in a cottage
not far from the edge of the woods, and is as full of old talk as her
husband. This time she began to talk of Goban, the legendary mason, and
his wisdom, but said presently, 'Aristotle of the Books, too, was very
wise, and he had a great deal of experience, but did not the bees get
the better of him in the end? He wanted to know how they packed the
comb, and he wasted the better part of a fortnight watching them, and
he could not see them doing it. Then he made a hive with a glass cover
on it and put it over them, and he thought to see. But when he went and
put his eyes to the glass they had it all covered with wax so that it
was as black as the pot; and he was as blind as before. He said he was
never rightly kilt till then. They had him that time surely! '
1902.
THE SWINE OF THE GODS
A FEW years ago a friend of mine told me of something that happened
to him when he was a young man and out drilling with some Connaught
Fenians. They were but a car-full, and drove along a hill-side until
they came to a quiet place. They left the car and went further up the
hill with their rifles, and drilled for a while. As they were coming
down again they saw a very thin, long-legged pig of the old Irish sort,
and the pig began to follow them. One of them cried out as a joke that
it was a fairy pig, and they all began to run to keep up the joke. The
pig ran too, and presently, how nobody knew, this mock terror became
real terror, and they ran as for their lives. When they got to the
car they made the horse gallop as fast as possible, but the pig still
followed. Then one of them put up his rifle to fire, but when he looked
along the barrel he could see nothing. Presently they turned a corner
and came to a village. They told the people of the village what had
happened, and the people of the village took pitchforks and spades and
the like, and went along the road with them to drive the pig away. When
they turned the corner they could not find anything.
1902.
A VOICE
ONE day I was walking over a bit of marshy ground close to Inchy Wood
when I felt, all of a sudden, and only for a second, an emotion which
I said to myself was the root of Christian mysticism. There had swept
over me a sense of weakness, of dependence on a great personal Being
somewhere far off yet near at hand. No thought of mine had prepared
me for this emotion, for I had been pre-occupied with AEngus and Edain
and with Mannanan, son of the sea. That night I awoke lying upon my
back and hearing a voice speaking above me and saying, 'No human soul
is like any other human soul, and therefore the love of God for any
human soul is infinite, for no other soul can satisfy the same need
in God. ' A few nights after this I awoke to see the loveliest people
I have ever seen. A young man and a young girl dressed in olive-green
raiment, cut like old Greek raiment, were standing at my bedside.
I looked at the girl and noticed that her dress was gathered about
her neck into a kind of chain, or perhaps into some kind of stiff
embroidery which represented ivy-leaves. But what filled me with wonder
was the miraculous mildness of her face. There are no such faces now.
It was beautiful, as few faces are beautiful, but it had neither, one
would think, the light that is in desire or in hope or in fear or
in speculation. It was peaceful like the faces of animals, or like
mountain pools at evening, so peaceful that it was a little sad. I
thought for a moment that she might be the beloved of AEngus, but how
could that hunted, alluring, happy, immortal wretch have a face like
this? Doubtless she was from among the children of the Moon, but who
among them I shall never know.
1902.
KIDNAPPERS
A LITTLE north of the town of Sligo, on the southern side of Ben
Bulben, some hundreds of feet above the plain, is a small white
square in the limestone. No mortal has ever touched it with his hand;
no sheep or goat has ever browsed grass beside it. There is no more
inaccessible place upon the earth, and few more encircled by awe to
the deep considering. It is the door of faery-land. In the middle of
night it swings open, and the unearthly troop rushes out. All night the
gay rabble sweep to and fro across the land, invisible to all, unless
perhaps where, in some more than commonly 'gentle' place--Drumcliff
or Drum-a-hair--the night-capped heads of faery-doctors may be thrust
from their doors to see what mischief the 'gentry' are doing. To their
trained eyes and ears the fields are covered by red-hatted riders, and
the air is full of shrill voices--a sound like whistling, as an ancient
Scottish seer has recorded, and wholly different from the talk of the
angels, who 'speak much in the throat, like the Irish,' as Lilly, the
astrologer, has wisely said. If there be a new-born baby or new-wed
bride in the neighbourhood, the night-capped 'doctors' will peer with
more than common care, for the unearthly troop do not always return
empty-handed. Sometimes a new-wed bride or a new-born baby goes with
them into their mountains; the door swings to behind, and the new-born
or the new-wed moves henceforth in the bloodless land of Faery; happy
enough, but doomed to melt out at the last judgment like bright vapour,
for the soul cannot live without sorrow. Through this door of white
stone, and the other doors of that land where _geabbeadh tu an sonas
aer pighin_ ('you can buy joy for a penny'), have gone kings, queens,
and princes, but so greatly has the power of Faery dwindled, that there
are none but peasants in these sad chronicles of mine.
Somewhere about the beginning of last century appeared at the western
corner of Market Street, Sligo, where the butcher's shop now is, not
a palace, as in Keats's _Lamia_, but an apothecary's shop, ruled over
by a certain unaccountable Dr. Opendon. Where he came from, none ever
knew. There also was in Sligo, in those days, a woman, Ormsby by name,
whose husband had fallen mysteriously sick. The doctors could make
nothing of him. Nothing seemed wrong with him, yet weaker and weaker he
grew. Away went the wife to Dr. Opendon. She was shown into the shop
parlour. A black cat was sitting straight up before the fire. She had
just time to see that the side-board was covered with fruit, and to
say to herself, 'Fruit must be wholesome when the doctor has so much,'
before Dr. Opendon came in. He was dressed all in black, the same as
the cat, and his wife walked behind him dressed in black likewise.
She gave him a guinea, and got a little bottle in return. Her husband
recovered that time. Meanwhile the black doctor cured many people; but
one day a rich patient died, and cat, wife, and doctor all vanished
the night after. In a year the man Ormsby fell sick once more. Now
he was a good-looking man, and his wife felt sure the 'gentry' were
coveting him. She went and called on the 'faery-doctor' at Cairnsfoot.
As soon as he had heard her tale, he went behind the back door and
began muttering, muttering, muttering--making spells. Her husband got
well this time also. But after a while he sickened again, the fatal
third time, and away went she once more to Cairnsfoot, and out went the
faery-doctor behind his back door and began muttering, but soon he came
in and told her it was no use--her husband would die; and sure enough
the man died, and ever after when she spoke of him Mrs. Ormsby shook
her head saying she knew well where he was, and it wasn't in heaven or
hell or purgatory either. She probably believed that a log of wood was
left behind in his place, but so bewitched that it seemed the dead body
of her husband.
She is dead now herself, but many still living remember her. She was,
I believe, for a time a servant or else a kind of pensioner of some
relations of my own.
Sometimes those who are carried off are allowed after many years--seven
usually--a final glimpse of their friends. Many years ago a woman
vanished suddenly from a Sligo garden where she was walking with her
husband. When her son, who was then a baby, had grown up he received
word in some way, not handed down, that his mother was glamoured by
faeries, and imprisoned for the time in a house in Glasgow and longing
to see him. Glasgow in those days of sailing-ships seemed to the
peasant mind almost over the edge of the known world, yet he, being
a dutiful son, started away. For a long time he walked the streets of
Glasgow; at last down in a cellar he saw his mother working. She was
happy, she said, and had the best of good eating, and would he not eat?
and therewith laid all kinds of food on the table; but he, knowing well
that she was trying to cast on him the glamour by giving him faery
food, that she might keep him with her, refused, and came home to his
people in Sligo.
Some five miles southward of Sligo is a gloomy and tree-bordered pond,
a great gathering-place of water-fowl, called, because of its form, the
Heart Lake. It is haunted by stranger things than heron, snipe, or wild
duck. Out of this lake, as from the white square stone in Ben Bulben,
issues an unearthly troop. Once men began to drain it; suddenly one of
them raised a cry that he saw his house in flames. They turned round,
and every man there saw his own cottage burning. They hurried home
to find it was but faery glamour. To this hour on the border of the
lake is shown a half-dug trench--the signet of their impiety. A little
way from this lake I heard a beautiful and mournful history of faery
kidnapping. I heard it from a little old woman in a white cap, who
sings to herself in Gaelic, and moves from one foot to the other as
though she remembered the dancing of her youth.
A young man going at nightfall to the house of his just married bride,
met in the way a jolly company, and with them his bride. They were
faeries, and had stolen her as a wife for the chief of their band.
To him they seemed only a company of merry mortals. His bride, when
she saw her old love, bade him welcome, but was most fearful lest he
should eat the faery food, and so be glamoured out of the earth into
that bloodless dim nation, wherefore she set him down to play cards
with three of the cavalcade; and he played on, realizing nothing until
he saw the chief of the band carrying his bride away in his arms.
Immediately he started up, and knew that they were faeries; for slowly
all that jolly company melted into shadow and night. He hurried to
the house of his beloved. As he drew near came to him the cry of the
keeners. She had died some time before he came. Some noteless Gaelic
poet had made this into a forgotten ballad, some odd verses of which my
white-capped friend remembered and sang for me.
Sometimes one hears of stolen people acting as good genii to the
living, as in this tale, heard also close by the haunted pond, of John
Kirwan of Castle Hacket. The Kirwans[H] are a family much rumoured of
in peasant stories, and believed to be the descendants of a man and a
spirit. They have ever been famous for beauty, and I have read that the
mother of the present Lord Cloncurry was of their tribe.
John Kirwan was a great horse-racing man, and once landed in Liverpool
with a fine horse, going racing somewhere in middle England. That
evening, as he walked by the docks, a slip of a boy came up and asked
where he was stabling his horse. In such and such a place, he answered.
'Don't put him there,' said the slip of a boy; 'that stable will be
burnt to-night. ' He took his horse elsewhere, and sure enough the
stable was burnt down. Next day the boy came and asked as reward to
ride as his jockey in the coming race, and then was gone. The race-time
came round. At the last moment the boy ran forward and mounted, saying,
'If I strike him with the whip in my left hand I will lose, but if in
my right hand bet all you are worth. ' 'For,' said Paddy Flynn, who told
me the tale, 'the left arm is good for nothing. I might go on making
the sign of the cross with it, and all that, come Christmas, and a
banshee, or such like, would no more mind than if it was that broom. '
Well, the slip of a boy struck the horse with his right hand, and John
Kirwan cleared the field out. When the race was over, 'What can I do
for you now? ' said he. 'Nothing but this,' said the boy: 'my mother
has a cottage on your land--they stole me from the cradle. Be good to
her, John Kirwan, and wherever your horses go I will watch that no
ill follows them; but you will never see me more. ' With that he made
himself air, and vanished.
Sometimes animals are carried off--apparently drowned animals more than
others. In Claremorris, Galway, Paddy Flynn told me, lived a poor widow
with one cow and its calf. The cow fell into the river, and was washed
away. There was a man thereabouts who went to a red-haired woman--for
such are supposed to be wise in these things--and she told him to take
the calf down to the edge of the river, and hide himself and watch.
He did as she had told him, and as evening came on the calf began
to low, and after a while the cow came along the edge of the river
and commenced suckling it. Then, as he had been told, he caught the
cow's tail. Away they went at a great pace, across hedges and ditches,
till they came to a royalty (a name for the little circular ditches,
commonly called raths or forts, that Ireland is covered with since
Pagan times). Therein he saw walking or sitting all the people who had
died out of his village in his time. A woman was sitting on the edge
with a child on her knees, and she called out to him to mind what the
red-haired woman had told him, and he remembered she had said, 'Bleed
the cow. ' So he stuck his knife into the cow and drew blood. That broke
the spell, and he was able to turn her homeward. 'Do not forget the
spancel,' said the woman with the child on her knees; 'take the inside
one. ' There were three spancels on a bush; he took one, and the cow was
driven safely home to the widow.
There is hardly a valley or mountain-side where folk cannot tell you of
some one pillaged from amongst them. Two or three miles from the Heart
Lake lives an old woman who was stolen away in her youth. After seven
years she was brought home again for some reason or other, but she had
no toes left. She had danced them off. Many near the white stone door
in Ben Bulben have been stolen away.
It is far easier to be sensible in cities than in many country places
I could tell you of. When one walks on those grey roads at evening by
the scented elder-bushes of the white cottages, watching the faint
mountains gathering the clouds upon their heads, one all too readily
discovers, beyond the thin cobweb veil of the senses, those creatures,
the goblins, hurrying from the white square stone door to the north, or
from the Heart Lake in the south.
FOOTNOTE:
[H] I have since heard that it was not the Kirwans, but their
predecessors at Castle Hacket, the Hackets themselves, I think, who
were descended from a man and a spirit, and were notable for beauty.
I imagine that the mother of Lord Cloncurry was descended from the
Hackets. It may well be that all through these stories the name of
Kirwan has taken the place of the older name. Legend mixes everything
together in her cauldron.
THE UNTIRING ONES
IT is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed
emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and
something in our sweetheart that we dislike. It is this entanglement
of moods which makes us old, and puckers our brows and deepens the
furrows about our eyes. If we could love and hate with as good heart
as the faeries do, we might grow to be long-lived like them. But until
that day their untiring joys and sorrows must ever be one-half of their
fascination. Love with them never grows weary, nor can the circles of
the stars tire out their dancing feet. The Donegal peasants remember
this when they bend over the spade, or sit full of the heaviness of the
fields beside the griddle at nightfall, and they tell stories about it
that it may not be forgotten. A short while ago, they say, two faeries,
little creatures, one like a young man, one like a young woman, came
to a farmer's house, and spent the night sweeping the hearth and
setting all tidy. The next night they came again, and while the farmer
was away, brought all the furniture up-stairs into one room, and having
arranged it round the walls, for the greater grandeur it seems, they
began to dance. They danced on and on, and days and days went by, and
all the country-side came to look at them, but still their feet never
tired. The farmer did not dare to live at home the while; and after
three months he made up his mind to stand it no more, and went and told
them that the priest was coming. The little creatures when they heard
this went back to their own country, and there their joy shall last as
long as the points of the rushes are brown, the people say, and that is
until God shall burn up the world with a kiss.
But it is not merely faeries who know untiring days, for there have
been men and women who, falling under their enchantment, have attained,
perhaps by the right of their God-given spirits, an even more than
faery abundance of life and feeling. It seems that when mortals have
gone amid those poor happy leaves of the Imperishable Rose of Beauty,
blown hither and thither by the winds that awakened the stars, the dim
kingdom has acknowledged their birthright, perhaps a little sadly, and
given them of its best. Such a mortal was born long ago at a village in
the south of Ireland. She lay asleep in a cradle, and her mother sat
by rocking her, when a woman of the Sidhe (the faeries) came in, and
said that the child was chosen to be the bride of the prince of the
dim kingdom, but that as it would never do for his wife to grow old
and die while he was still in the first ardour of his love, she would
be gifted with a faery life. The mother was to take the glowing log
out of the fire and bury it in the garden, and her child would live
as long as it remained unconsumed. The mother buried the log, and the
child grew up, became a beauty, and married the prince of the faeries,
who came to her at nightfall. After seven hundred years the prince
died, and another prince ruled in his stead and married the beautiful
peasant girl in his turn; and after another seven hundred years he died
also, and another prince and another husband came in his stead, and
so on until she had had seven husbands. At last one day the priest of
the parish called upon her, and told her that she was a scandal to the
whole neighbourhood with her seven husbands and her long life. She was
very sorry, she said, but she was not to blame, and then she told him
about the log, and he went straight out and dug until he found it, and
then they burned it, and she died, and was buried like a Christian, and
everybody was pleased. Such a mortal too was Clooth-na-bare,[I] who
went all over the world seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery
life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and lake
to hill, and setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted,
until at last she found the deepest water in the world in little Lough
Ia, on the top of the Birds' Mountain at Sligo.
The two little creatures may well dance on, and the woman of the log
and Clooth-na-bare sleep in peace, for they have known untrammelled
hate and unmixed love, and have never wearied themselves with 'yes'
and 'no,' or entangled their feet with the sorry net of 'maybe' and
'perhaps. ' The great winds came and took them up into themselves.
FOOTNOTE:
[I] Doubtless Clooth-na-bare should be Cailleac Bare, which would
mean the old Woman Bare.
scornful of unchristian things for all their dancing and singing that
he thinks that 'you have only to bid them begone and they will go. It
was one night,' he says, 'after walking back from Kinvara and down by
the wood beyond I felt one coming beside me, and I could feel the horse
he was riding on and the way he lifted his legs, but they do not make
a sound like the hoofs of a horse. So I stopped and turned around and
said, very loud, "Be off! " and he went and never troubled me after. And
I knew a man who was dying, and one came on his bed, and he cried out
to it, "Get out of that, you unnatural animal! " and it left him. Fallen
angels they are, and after the fall God said, "Let there be Hell," and
there it was in a moment. ' An old woman who was sitting by the fire
joined in as he said this with 'God save us, it's a pity He said the
word, and there might have been no Hell the day,' but the seer did not
notice her words. He went on, 'And then he asked the devil what would
he take for the souls of all the people. And the devil said nothing
would satisfy him but the blood of a virgin's son, so he got that, and
then the gates of Hell were opened. ' He understood the story, it seems,
as if it were some riddling old folk tale.
'I have seen Hell myself. I had a sight of it one time in a vision. It
had a very high wall around it, all of metal, and an archway, and a
straight walk into it, just like what 'ud be leading into a gentleman's
orchard, but the edges were not trimmed with box, but with red-hot
metal. And inside the wall there were cross-walks, and I'm not sure
what there was to the right, but to the left there were five great
furnaces, and they full of souls kept there with great chains. So I
turned short and went away, and in turning I looked again at the wall,
and I could see no end to it.
'And another time I saw Purgatory. It seemed to be in a level place,
and no walls around it, but it all one bright blaze, and the souls
standing in it. And they suffer near as much as in Hell, only there are
no devils with them there, and they have the hope of Heaven.
'And I heard a call to me from there, "Help me to come out o' this! "
And when I looked it was a man I used to know in the army, an Irishman,
and from this county, and I believe him to be a descendant of King
O'Connor of Athenry.
'So I stretched out my hand first, but then I called out, "I'd be
burned in the flames before I could get within three yards of you. " So
then he said, "Well, help me with your prayers," and so I do.
'And Father Connellan says the same thing, to help the dead with your
prayers, and he's a very clever man to make a sermon, and has a great
deal of cures made with the Holy Water he brought back from Lourdes. '
1902.
FOOTNOTE:
[E] The religious society she had belonged to.
THE LAST GLEEMAN
MICHAEL MORAN was born about 1794 off Black Pitts, in the Liberties of
Dublin, in Faddle Alley. A fortnight after birth he went stone blind
from illness, and became thereby a blessing to his parents, who were
soon able to send him to rhyme and beg at street corners and at the
bridges over the Liffey. They may well have wished that their quiver
were full of such as he, for, free from the interruption of sight, his
mind became a perfect echoing chamber, where every movement of the
day and every change of public passion whispered itself into rhyme or
quaint saying. By the time he had grown to manhood he was the admitted
rector of all the ballad-mongers of the Liberties. Madden, the weaver,
Kearney, the blind fiddler from Wicklow, Martin from Meath, M'Bride
from heaven knows where, and that M'Grane, who in after days, when
the true Moran was no more, strutted in borrowed plumes, or rather
in borrowed rags, and gave out that there had never been any Moran
but himself, and many another, did homage before him, and held him
chief of all their tribe. Nor despite his blindness did he find any
difficulty in getting a wife, but rather was able to pick and choose,
for he was just that mixture of ragamuffin and of genius which is dear
to the heart of woman, who, perhaps because she is wholly conventional
herself, loves the unexpected, the crooked, the bewildering. Nor did
he lack, despite his rags, many excellent things, for it is remembered
that he ever loved caper sauce, going so far indeed in his honest
indignation at its absence upon one occasion as to fling a leg of
mutton at his wife. He was not, however, much to look at, with his
coarse frieze coat with its cape and scalloped edge, his old corduroy
trousers and great brogues, and his stout stick made fast to his wrist
by a thong of leather: and he would have been a woeful shock to the
gleeman MacConglinne, could that friend of kings have beheld him in
prophetic vision from the pillar stone at Cork. And yet though the
short cloak and the leather wallet were no more, he was a true gleeman,
being alike poet, jester, and newsman of the people. In the morning
when he had finished his breakfast, his wife or some neighbour would
read the newspaper to him, and read on and on until he interrupted
with, 'That'll do--I have me meditations'; and from these meditations
would come the day's store of jest and rhyme. He had the whole Middle
Ages under his frieze coat.
He had not, however, MacConglinne's hatred of the Church and clergy,
for when the fruit of his meditations did not ripen well, or when
the crowd called for something more solid, he would recite or sing a
metrical tale or ballad of saint or martyr or of Biblical adventure.
He would stand at a street corner, and when a crowd had gathered would
begin in some such fashion as follows (I copy the record of one who
knew him)--'Gather round me, boys, gather round me. Boys, am I standin'
in puddle? am I standin' in wet? ' Thereon several boys would cry, 'Ah,
no! yez not! yer in a nice dry place. Go on with _St. Mary_; go on
with _Moses_'--each calling for his favourite tale. Then Moran, with a
suspicious wriggle of his body and a clutch at his rags, would burst
out with 'All me buzzum friends are turned backbiters'; and after a
final 'If yez don't drop your coddin' and diversion I'll lave some
of yez a case,' by way of warning to the boys, begin his recitation,
or perhaps still delay, to ask, 'Is there a crowd round me now? Any
blackguard heretic around me? ' The best-known of his religious tales
was _St. Mary of Egypt_, a long poem of exceeding solemnity, condensed
from the much longer work of a certain Bishop Coyle. It told how a
fast woman of Egypt, Mary by name, followed pilgrims to Jerusalem for
no good purpose, and then turning penitent on finding herself withheld
from entering the Temple by supernatural interference, fled to the
desert and spent the remainder of her life in solitary penance. When
at last she was at the point of death, God sent Bishop Zozimus to hear
her confession, give her the last sacrament, and with the help of a
lion, whom He sent also, dig her grave. The poem has the intolerable
cadence of the eighteenth century, but was so popular and so often
called for that Moran was soon nicknamed Zozimus, and by that name is
he remembered. He had also a poem of his own called _Moses_, which went
a little nearer poetry without going very near. But he could ill brook
solemnity, and before long parodied his own verses in the following
ragamuffin fashion:
In Egypt's land, contagious to the Nile,
King Pharaoh's daughter went to bathe in style.
She tuk her dip, then walked unto the land,
To dry her royal pelt she ran along the strand.
A bulrush tripped her, whereupon she saw
A smiling babby in a wad o' straw.
She tuk it up, and said with accents mild,
''Tare-and-agers, girls, which av yez owns the child? '
His humorous rhymes were, however, more often quips and cranks at the
expense of his contemporaries. It was his delight, for instance, to
remind a certain shoemaker, noted alike for display of wealth and for
personal uncleanness, of his inconsiderable origin in a song of which
but the first stanza has come down to us:
At the dirty end of Dirty Lane,
Liv'd a dirty cobbler, Dick Maclane;
His wife was in the old king's reign
A stout brave orange-woman.
On Essex Bridge she strained her throat,
And six-a-penny was her note.
But Dickey wore a bran-new coat,
He got among the yeomen.
He was a bigot, like his clan,
And in the streets he wildly sang,
O Roly, toly, toly raid, with his old jade.
He had troubles of divers kinds, and numerous interlopers to face and
put down. Once an officious peeler arrested him as a vagabond, but was
triumphantly routed amid the laughter of the court, when Moran reminded
his worship of the precedent set by Homer, who was also, he declared,
a poet, and a blind man, and a beggarman. He had to face a more serious
difficulty as his fame grew. Various imitators started up upon all
sides. A certain actor, for instance, made as many guineas as Moran did
shillings by mimicking his sayings and his songs and his get-up upon
the stage. One night this actor was at supper with some friends, when
dispute arose as to whether his mimicry was overdone or not. It was
agreed to settle it by an appeal to the mob. A forty-shilling supper
at a famous coffee-house was to be the wager. The actor took up his
station at Essex Bridge, a great haunt of Moran's, and soon gathered a
small crowd. He had scarce got through 'In Egypt's land, contagious to
the Nile,' when Moran himself came up, followed by another crowd. The
crowds met in great excitement and laughter. 'Good Christians,' cried
the pretender, 'is it possible that any man would mock the poor dark
man like that? '
'Who's that? It's some imposhterer,' replied Moran.
'Begone, you wretch! it's you'ze the imposhterer. Don't you fear the
light of heaven being struck from your eyes for mocking the poor dark
man? '
'Saints and angels, is there no protection against this? You're a most
inhuman blaguard to try to deprive me of my honest bread this way,'
replied poor Moran.
'And you, you wretch, won't let me go on with the beautiful poem.
Christian people, in your charity, won't you beat this man away? he's
taking advantage of my darkness. '
The pretender, seeing that he was having the best of it, thanked the
people for their sympathy and protection, and went on with the poem,
Moran listening for a time in bewildered silence. After a while Moran
protested again with:
'Is it possible that none of yez can know me? Don't yez see it's
myself; and that's some one else? '
'Before I can proceed any further in this lovely story,' interrupted
the pretender, 'I call on yez to contribute your charitable donations
to help me to go on. '
'Have you no sowl to be saved, you mocker of heaven? ' cried Moran, put
completely beside himself by this last injury. 'Would you rob the poor
as well as desave the world? O, was ever such wickedness known? '
'I leave it to yourselves, my friends,' said the pretender, 'to give to
the real dark man, that you all know so well, and save me from that
schemer,' and with that he collected some pennies and half-pence. While
he was doing so, Moran started his _Mary of Egypt_, but the indignant
crowd seizing his stick were about to belabour him when they fell back
bewildered anew by his close resemblance to himself. The pretender now
called to them to 'just give him a grip of that villain, and he'd soon
let him know who the imposhterer was! ' They led him over to Moran,
but instead of closing with him he thrust a few shillings into his
hand, and turning to the crowd explained to them he was indeed but an
actor, and that he had just gained a wager, and so departed amid much
enthusiasm, to eat the supper he had won.
In April, 1846, word was sent to the priest that Michael Moran was
dying. He found him at 15 (now 141/2) Patrick Street, on a straw bed, in
a room full of ragged ballad-singers come to cheer his last moments.
After his death the ballad-singers, with many fiddles and the like,
came again and gave him a fine wake, each adding to the merriment
whatever he knew in the way of rann, tale, old saw, or quaint rhyme.
He had had his day, had said his prayers and made his confession, and
why should they not give him a hearty send-off? The funeral took place
the next day. A good party of his admirers and friends got into the
hearse with the coffin, for the day was wet and nasty. They had not
gone far when one of them burst out with 'It's cruel cowld, isn't it? '
'Garra',' replied another, 'we'll all be as stiff as the corpse when
we get to the berrin-ground. ' 'Bad cess to him,' said a third; 'I wish
he'd held out for another month until the weather got dacent. ' A man
named Carroll thereupon produced a half-pint of whiskey, and they all
drank to the soul of the departed. Unhappily, however, the hearse was
overweighted, and they had not reached the cemetery before the spring
broke, and the bottle with it.
Moran must have felt strange and out of place in that other kingdom he
was entering, perhaps while his friends were drinking in his honour.
Let us hope that some kindly middle region was found for him, where he
can call dishevelled angels about him with some new and more rhythmical
form of his old
Gather round me, boys, will yez
Gather round me?
And hear what I have to say
Before ould Salley brings me
My bread and jug of tay;
and fling outrageous quips and cranks at cherubim and seraphim. Perhaps
he may have found and gathered, ragamuffin though he be, the Lily of
High Truth, the Rose of Far-sought Beauty, for whose lack so many of
the writers of Ireland, whether famous or forgotten, have been futile
as the blown froth upon the shore.
REGINA, REGINA PIGMEORUM VENI
ONE night a middle-aged man, who had lived all his life far from the
noise of cab-wheels, a young girl, a relation of his, who was reported
to be enough of a seer to catch a glimpse of unaccountable lights
moving over the fields among the cattle, and myself, were walking along
a far western sandy shore. We talked of the Forgetful People as the
faery people are sometimes called, and came in the midst of our talk
to a notable haunt of theirs, a shallow cave amidst black rocks, with
its reflection under it in the wet sea sand. I asked the young girl if
she could see anything, for I had quite a number of things to ask the
Forgetful People. She stood still for a few minutes, and I saw that she
was passing into a kind of waking trance, in which the cold sea breeze
no longer troubled her, nor the dull boom of the sea distracted her
attention. I then called aloud the names of the great faeries, and
in a moment or two she said that she could hear music far inside the
rocks, and then a sound of confused talking, and of people stamping
their feet as if to applaud some unseen performer. Up to this my other
friend had been walking to and fro some yards off, but now he passed
close to us, and as he did so said suddenly that we were going to be
interrupted, for he heard the laughter of children somewhere beyond
the rocks. We were, however, quite alone. The spirits of the place
had begun to cast their influence over him also. In a moment he was
corroborated by the girl, who said that bursts of laughter had begun
to mingle with the music, the confused talking, and the noise of feet.
She next saw a bright light streaming out of the cave, which seemed to
have grown much deeper, and a quantity of little people,[F] in various
coloured dresses, red predominating, dancing to a tune which she did
not recognize.
I then bade her call out to the queen of the little people to come
and talk with us. There was, however, no answer to her command. I
therefore repeated the words aloud myself, and in a moment a very
beautiful tall woman came out of the cave. I too had by this time
fallen into a kind of trance, in which what we call the unreal had
begun to take upon itself a masterful reality, and was able to see
the faint gleam of golden ornaments, the shadowy blossom of dim hair.
I then bade the girl tell this tall queen to marshal her followers
according to their natural divisions, that we might see them. I found
as before that I had to repeat the command myself. The creatures then
came out of the cave, and drew themselves up, if I remember rightly,
in four bands. One of these bands carried quicken boughs in their
hands, and another had necklaces made apparently of serpents' scales,
but their dress I cannot remember, for I was quite absorbed in that
gleaming woman. I asked her to tell the seer whether these caves were
the greatest faery haunts in the neighbourhood. Her lips moved, but the
answer was inaudible. I bade the seer lay her hand upon the breast of
the queen, and after that she heard every word quite distinctly. No,
this was not the greatest faery haunt, for there was a greater one a
little further ahead. I then asked her whether it was true that she and
her people carried away mortals, and if so, whether they put another
soul in the place of the one they had taken. 'We change the bodies,'
was her answer. 'Are any of you ever born into mortal life? ' 'Yes. ' 'Do
I know any who were among your people before birth? ' 'You do. ' 'Who are
they? ' 'It would not be lawful for you to know. ' I then asked whether
she and her people were not 'dramatizations of our moods'? 'She does
not understand,' said my friend, 'but says that her people are much
like human beings, and do most of the things human beings do. ' I asked
her other questions, as to her nature, and her purpose in the universe,
but only seemed to puzzle her. At last she appeared to lose patience,
for she wrote this message for me upon the sands--the sands of vision,
not the grating sands under our feet--'Be careful, and do not seek to
know too much about us. ' Seeing that I had offended her, I thanked her
for what she had shown and told, and let her depart again into her
cave. In a little while the young girl awoke out of her trance, and
felt again the cold wind of the world, and began to shiver.
I tell these things as accurately as I can, and with no theories to
blur the history. Theories are poor things at the best, and the bulk of
mine have perished long ago. I love better than any theory the sound
of the Gate of Ivory, turning upon its hinges, and hold that he alone
who has passed the rose-strewn threshold can catch the far glimmer of
the Gate of Horn. It were perhaps well for us all if we would but raise
the cry Lilly the astrologer raised in Windsor Forest, 'Regina, Regina
Pigmeorum, Veni,' and remember with him, that God visiteth His children
in dreams. Tall, glimmering queen, come near, and let me see again the
shadowy blossom of thy dim hair.
FOOTNOTE:
[F] The people and faeries in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are,
sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet
high. The old Mayo woman I so often quote, thinks that it is something
in our eyes that makes them seem big or little.
'AND FAIR, FIERCE WOMEN'
ONE day a woman that I know came face to face with heroic beauty, that
highest beauty which Blake says changes least from youth to age, a
beauty which has been fading out of the arts, since that decadence we
call progress, set voluptuous beauty in its place. She was standing at
the window, looking over to Knocknarea where Queen Maive is thought to
be buried, when she saw, as she told me, 'the finest woman you ever saw
travelling right across from the mountain and straight to her. ' The
woman had a sword by her side, and a dagger lifted up in her hand, and
was dressed in white, with bare arms and feet. She looked 'very strong,
but not wicked,' that is, not cruel. The old woman had seen the Irish
giant, and 'though he was a fine man,' he was nothing to this woman,
'for he was round, and could not have stepped out so soldierly'; 'she
was like Mrs. ----' a stately lady of the neighbourhood, 'but she had
no stomach on her, and was slight and broad in the shoulders, and was
handsomer than any one you ever saw; she looked about thirty. ' The old
woman covered her eyes with her hands, and when she uncovered them
the apparition had vanished. The neighbours were 'wild with her,' she
told me, because she did not wait to find out if there was a message,
for they were sure it was Queen Maive, who often shows herself to
the pilots. I asked the old woman if she had seen others like Queen
Maive, and she said, 'Some of them have their hair down, but they
look quite different, like the sleepy-looking ladies one sees in the
papers. Those with their hair up are like this one. The others have
long white dresses, but those with their hair up have short dresses,
so that you can see their legs right up to the calf. ' After some
careful questioning I found that they wore what might very well be
a kind of buskin; she went on, 'They are fine and dashing looking,
like the men one sees riding their horses in twos and threes on the
slopes of the mountains with their swords swinging. ' She repeated
over and over, 'There is no such race living now, none so finely
proportioned,' or the like, and then said, 'The present Queen[G] is a
nice, pleasant-looking woman, but she is not like her. What makes me
think so little of the ladies is that I see none as they be,' meaning
as the spirits. 'When I think of her and of the ladies now, they are
like little children running about without knowing how to put their
clothes on right. Is it the ladies? Why, I would not call them women
at all. ' The other day a friend of mine questioned an old woman in a
Galway workhouse about Queen Maive, and was told that 'Queen Maive was
handsome, and overcame all her enemies with a hazel stick, for the
hazel is blessed, and the best weapon that can be got. You might walk
the world with it,' but she grew 'very disagreeable in the end--oh, very
disagreeable. Best not to be talking about it. Best leave it between
the book and the hearer. ' My friend thought the old woman had got some
scandal about Fergus son of Roy and Maive in her head.
And I myself met once with a young man in the Burren Hills who
remembered an old poet who made his poems in Irish and had met when he
was young, the young man said, one who called herself Maive, and said
she was a queen 'among them,' and asked him if he would have money or
pleasure. He said he would have pleasure, and she gave him her love for
a time, and then went from him, and ever after he was very mournful.
The young man had often heard him sing the poem of lamentation that he
made, but could only remember that it was 'very mournful,' and that he
called her 'beauty of all beauties. '
1902.
FOOTNOTE:
[G] Queen Victoria.
ENCHANTED WOODS
I
LAST summer, whenever I had finished my day's work, I used to go
wandering in certain roomy woods, and there I would often meet an old
countryman, and talk to him about his work and about the woods, and
once or twice a friend came with me to whom he would open his heart
more readily than to me. He had spent all his life lopping away the
witch elm and the hazel and the privet and the hornbeam from the paths,
and had thought much about the natural and supernatural creatures
of the wood. He has heard the hedgehog--'grainne oge,' he calls
him--'grunting like a Christian,' and is certain that he steals apples
by rolling about under an apple tree until there is an apple sticking
to every quill. He is certain too that the cats, of whom there are many
in the woods, have a language of their own--some kind of old Irish. He
says, 'Cats were serpents, and they were made into cats at the time of
some great change in the world. That is why they are hard to kill, and
why it is dangerous to meddle with them. If you annoy a cat it might
claw or bite you in a way that would put poison in you, and that would
be the serpent's tooth. ' Sometimes he thinks they change into wild
cats, and then a nail grows on the end of their tails; but these wild
cats are not the same as the marten cats, who have been always in the
woods. The foxes were once tame, as the cats are now, but they ran away
and became wild. He talks of all wild creatures except squirrels--whom
he hates--with what seems an affectionate interest, though at times his
eyes will twinkle with pleasure as he remembers how he made hedgehogs
unroll themselves when he was a boy, by putting a wisp of burning straw
under them.
I am not certain that he distinguishes between the natural and
supernatural very clearly. He told me the other day that foxes and cats
like, above all, to be in the 'forths' and lisses after nightfall; and
he will certainly pass from some story about a fox to a story about a
spirit with less change of voice than when he is going to speak about
a marten cat--a rare beast now-a-days. Many years ago he used to work
in the garden, and once they put him to sleep in a garden-house where
there was a loft full of apples, and all night he could hear people
rattling plates and knives and forks over his head in the loft. Once,
at any rate, he has seen an unearthly sight in the woods. He says, 'One
time I was out cutting timber over in Inchy, and about eight o'clock
one morning when I got there I saw a girl picking nuts, with her hair
hanging down over her shoulders, brown hair, and she had a good, clean
face, and she was tall and nothing on her head, and her dress no way
gaudy but simple, and when she felt me coming she gathered herself up
and was gone as if the earth had swallowed her up. And I followed her
and looked for her, but I never could see her again from that day to
this, never again. ' He used the word clean as we would use words like
fresh or comely.
Others too have seen spirits in the Enchanted Woods.
A labourer told
us of what a friend of his had seen in a part of the woods that is
called Shanwalla, from some old village that was before the wood. He
said, 'One evening I parted from Lawrence Mangan in the yard, and he
went away through the path in Shanwalla, an' bid me good-night. And
two hours after, there he was back again in the yard, an' bid me light
a candle that was in the stable. An' he told me that when he got into
Shanwalla, a little fellow about as high as his knee, but having a head
as big as a man's body, came beside him and led him out of the path an'
round about, and at last it brought him to the lime-kiln, and then it
vanished and left him. '
A woman told me of a sight that she and others had seen by a certain
deep pool in the river. She said, 'I came over the stile from the
chapel, and others along with me; and a great blast of wind came and
two trees were bent and broken and fell into the river, and the splash
of water out of it went up to the skies. And those that were with me
saw many figures, but myself I only saw one, sitting there by the bank
where the trees fell. Dark clothes he had on, and he was headless. '
A man told me that one day, when he was a boy, he and another boy went
to catch a horse in a certain field, full of boulders and bushes of
hazel and creeping juniper and rock-roses, that is where the lake side
is for a little clear of the woods. He said to the boy that was with
him, 'I bet a button that if I fling a pebble on to that bush it will
stay on it,' meaning that the bush was so matted the pebble would not
be able to go through it. So he took up 'a pebble of cow-dung, and as
soon as it hit the bush there came out of it the most beautiful music
that ever was heard. ' They ran away, and when they had gone about
two hundred yards they looked back and saw a woman dressed in white,
walking round and round the bush. 'First it had the form of a woman,
and then of a man, and it was going round the bush. '
II
I often entangle myself in arguments more complicated than even those
paths of Inchy as to what is the true nature of apparitions, but at
other times I say as Socrates said when they told him a learned opinion
about a nymph of the Ilissus, 'The common opinion is enough for me. ' I
believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom
we cannot see, and that some of these are ugly or grotesque, and some
wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have ever
seen, and that these are not far away when we are walking in pleasant
and quiet places. Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood
without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or
something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And
now I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice with
almost anxious footsteps, so deep a hold has this imagination upon me.
You too meet with a like imagination, doubtless, somewhere, wherever
your ruling stars will have it, Saturn driving you to the woods, or the
Moon, it may be, to the edges of the sea. I will not of a certainty
believe that there is nothing in the sunset, where our forefathers
imagined the dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but
some vague presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a
gateway out of the net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long
be beauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and
fatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport
than to look at the finest show that light and shadow ever made among
green leaves. I say to myself, when I am well out of that thicket of
argument, that they are surely there, the divine people, for only we
who have neither simplicity nor wisdom have denied them, and the simple
of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and even
spoken to them. They live out their passionate lives not far off, as
I think, and we shall be among them when we die if we but keep our
natures simple and passionate. May it not even be that death shall
unite us to all romance, and that some day we shall fight dragons among
blue hills, or come to that whereof all romance is but
'Foreshadowings mingled with the images
Of man's misdeeds in greater days than these,'
as the old men thought in _The Earthly Paradise_ when they were in good
spirits.
1902.
MIRACULOUS CREATURES
THERE are marten cats and badgers and foxes in the Enchanted Woods, but
there are of a certainty mightier creatures, and the lake hides what
neither net nor line can take. These creatures are of the race of the
white stag that flits in and out of the tales of Arthur, and of the
evil pig that slew Diarmuid where Ben Bulben mixes with the sea wind.
They are the wizard creatures of hope and fear, they are of them that
fly and of them that follow among the thickets that are about the Gates
of Death. A man I know remembers that his father was one night in the
wood of Inchy, 'where the lads of Gort used to be stealing rods. He was
sitting by the wall, and the dog beside him, and he heard something
come running from Owbawn Weir, and he could see nothing, but the sound
of its feet on the ground was like the sound of the feet of a deer. And
when it passed him, the dog got between him and the wall and scratched
at it there as if it was afraid, but still he could see nothing but
only hear the sound of hoofs. So when it was passed he turned and came
away home. ' 'Another time,' the man says, 'my father told me he was
in a boat out on the lake with two or three men from Gort, and one of
them had an eel-spear, and he thrust it into the water, and it hit
something, and the man fainted and they had to carry him out of the
boat to land, and when he came to himself he said that what he struck
was like a calf, but whatever it was, it was not fish! ' A friend of
mine is convinced that these terrible creatures, so common in lakes,
were set there in old times by subtle enchanters to watch over the
gates of wisdom. He thinks that if we sent our spirits down into the
water we would make them of one substance with strange moods of ecstasy
and power, and go out it may be to the conquest of the world. We would,
however, he believes, have first to outface and perhaps overthrow
strange images full of a more powerful life than if they were really
alive. It may be that we shall look at them without fear when we have
endured the last adventure, that is death.
1902.
ARISTOTLE OF THE BOOKS
THE friend who can get the woodcutter to talk more readily than he will
to anybody else went lately to see his old wife. She lives in a cottage
not far from the edge of the woods, and is as full of old talk as her
husband. This time she began to talk of Goban, the legendary mason, and
his wisdom, but said presently, 'Aristotle of the Books, too, was very
wise, and he had a great deal of experience, but did not the bees get
the better of him in the end? He wanted to know how they packed the
comb, and he wasted the better part of a fortnight watching them, and
he could not see them doing it. Then he made a hive with a glass cover
on it and put it over them, and he thought to see. But when he went and
put his eyes to the glass they had it all covered with wax so that it
was as black as the pot; and he was as blind as before. He said he was
never rightly kilt till then. They had him that time surely! '
1902.
THE SWINE OF THE GODS
A FEW years ago a friend of mine told me of something that happened
to him when he was a young man and out drilling with some Connaught
Fenians. They were but a car-full, and drove along a hill-side until
they came to a quiet place. They left the car and went further up the
hill with their rifles, and drilled for a while. As they were coming
down again they saw a very thin, long-legged pig of the old Irish sort,
and the pig began to follow them. One of them cried out as a joke that
it was a fairy pig, and they all began to run to keep up the joke. The
pig ran too, and presently, how nobody knew, this mock terror became
real terror, and they ran as for their lives. When they got to the
car they made the horse gallop as fast as possible, but the pig still
followed. Then one of them put up his rifle to fire, but when he looked
along the barrel he could see nothing. Presently they turned a corner
and came to a village. They told the people of the village what had
happened, and the people of the village took pitchforks and spades and
the like, and went along the road with them to drive the pig away. When
they turned the corner they could not find anything.
1902.
A VOICE
ONE day I was walking over a bit of marshy ground close to Inchy Wood
when I felt, all of a sudden, and only for a second, an emotion which
I said to myself was the root of Christian mysticism. There had swept
over me a sense of weakness, of dependence on a great personal Being
somewhere far off yet near at hand. No thought of mine had prepared
me for this emotion, for I had been pre-occupied with AEngus and Edain
and with Mannanan, son of the sea. That night I awoke lying upon my
back and hearing a voice speaking above me and saying, 'No human soul
is like any other human soul, and therefore the love of God for any
human soul is infinite, for no other soul can satisfy the same need
in God. ' A few nights after this I awoke to see the loveliest people
I have ever seen. A young man and a young girl dressed in olive-green
raiment, cut like old Greek raiment, were standing at my bedside.
I looked at the girl and noticed that her dress was gathered about
her neck into a kind of chain, or perhaps into some kind of stiff
embroidery which represented ivy-leaves. But what filled me with wonder
was the miraculous mildness of her face. There are no such faces now.
It was beautiful, as few faces are beautiful, but it had neither, one
would think, the light that is in desire or in hope or in fear or
in speculation. It was peaceful like the faces of animals, or like
mountain pools at evening, so peaceful that it was a little sad. I
thought for a moment that she might be the beloved of AEngus, but how
could that hunted, alluring, happy, immortal wretch have a face like
this? Doubtless she was from among the children of the Moon, but who
among them I shall never know.
1902.
KIDNAPPERS
A LITTLE north of the town of Sligo, on the southern side of Ben
Bulben, some hundreds of feet above the plain, is a small white
square in the limestone. No mortal has ever touched it with his hand;
no sheep or goat has ever browsed grass beside it. There is no more
inaccessible place upon the earth, and few more encircled by awe to
the deep considering. It is the door of faery-land. In the middle of
night it swings open, and the unearthly troop rushes out. All night the
gay rabble sweep to and fro across the land, invisible to all, unless
perhaps where, in some more than commonly 'gentle' place--Drumcliff
or Drum-a-hair--the night-capped heads of faery-doctors may be thrust
from their doors to see what mischief the 'gentry' are doing. To their
trained eyes and ears the fields are covered by red-hatted riders, and
the air is full of shrill voices--a sound like whistling, as an ancient
Scottish seer has recorded, and wholly different from the talk of the
angels, who 'speak much in the throat, like the Irish,' as Lilly, the
astrologer, has wisely said. If there be a new-born baby or new-wed
bride in the neighbourhood, the night-capped 'doctors' will peer with
more than common care, for the unearthly troop do not always return
empty-handed. Sometimes a new-wed bride or a new-born baby goes with
them into their mountains; the door swings to behind, and the new-born
or the new-wed moves henceforth in the bloodless land of Faery; happy
enough, but doomed to melt out at the last judgment like bright vapour,
for the soul cannot live without sorrow. Through this door of white
stone, and the other doors of that land where _geabbeadh tu an sonas
aer pighin_ ('you can buy joy for a penny'), have gone kings, queens,
and princes, but so greatly has the power of Faery dwindled, that there
are none but peasants in these sad chronicles of mine.
Somewhere about the beginning of last century appeared at the western
corner of Market Street, Sligo, where the butcher's shop now is, not
a palace, as in Keats's _Lamia_, but an apothecary's shop, ruled over
by a certain unaccountable Dr. Opendon. Where he came from, none ever
knew. There also was in Sligo, in those days, a woman, Ormsby by name,
whose husband had fallen mysteriously sick. The doctors could make
nothing of him. Nothing seemed wrong with him, yet weaker and weaker he
grew. Away went the wife to Dr. Opendon. She was shown into the shop
parlour. A black cat was sitting straight up before the fire. She had
just time to see that the side-board was covered with fruit, and to
say to herself, 'Fruit must be wholesome when the doctor has so much,'
before Dr. Opendon came in. He was dressed all in black, the same as
the cat, and his wife walked behind him dressed in black likewise.
She gave him a guinea, and got a little bottle in return. Her husband
recovered that time. Meanwhile the black doctor cured many people; but
one day a rich patient died, and cat, wife, and doctor all vanished
the night after. In a year the man Ormsby fell sick once more. Now
he was a good-looking man, and his wife felt sure the 'gentry' were
coveting him. She went and called on the 'faery-doctor' at Cairnsfoot.
As soon as he had heard her tale, he went behind the back door and
began muttering, muttering, muttering--making spells. Her husband got
well this time also. But after a while he sickened again, the fatal
third time, and away went she once more to Cairnsfoot, and out went the
faery-doctor behind his back door and began muttering, but soon he came
in and told her it was no use--her husband would die; and sure enough
the man died, and ever after when she spoke of him Mrs. Ormsby shook
her head saying she knew well where he was, and it wasn't in heaven or
hell or purgatory either. She probably believed that a log of wood was
left behind in his place, but so bewitched that it seemed the dead body
of her husband.
She is dead now herself, but many still living remember her. She was,
I believe, for a time a servant or else a kind of pensioner of some
relations of my own.
Sometimes those who are carried off are allowed after many years--seven
usually--a final glimpse of their friends. Many years ago a woman
vanished suddenly from a Sligo garden where she was walking with her
husband. When her son, who was then a baby, had grown up he received
word in some way, not handed down, that his mother was glamoured by
faeries, and imprisoned for the time in a house in Glasgow and longing
to see him. Glasgow in those days of sailing-ships seemed to the
peasant mind almost over the edge of the known world, yet he, being
a dutiful son, started away. For a long time he walked the streets of
Glasgow; at last down in a cellar he saw his mother working. She was
happy, she said, and had the best of good eating, and would he not eat?
and therewith laid all kinds of food on the table; but he, knowing well
that she was trying to cast on him the glamour by giving him faery
food, that she might keep him with her, refused, and came home to his
people in Sligo.
Some five miles southward of Sligo is a gloomy and tree-bordered pond,
a great gathering-place of water-fowl, called, because of its form, the
Heart Lake. It is haunted by stranger things than heron, snipe, or wild
duck. Out of this lake, as from the white square stone in Ben Bulben,
issues an unearthly troop. Once men began to drain it; suddenly one of
them raised a cry that he saw his house in flames. They turned round,
and every man there saw his own cottage burning. They hurried home
to find it was but faery glamour. To this hour on the border of the
lake is shown a half-dug trench--the signet of their impiety. A little
way from this lake I heard a beautiful and mournful history of faery
kidnapping. I heard it from a little old woman in a white cap, who
sings to herself in Gaelic, and moves from one foot to the other as
though she remembered the dancing of her youth.
A young man going at nightfall to the house of his just married bride,
met in the way a jolly company, and with them his bride. They were
faeries, and had stolen her as a wife for the chief of their band.
To him they seemed only a company of merry mortals. His bride, when
she saw her old love, bade him welcome, but was most fearful lest he
should eat the faery food, and so be glamoured out of the earth into
that bloodless dim nation, wherefore she set him down to play cards
with three of the cavalcade; and he played on, realizing nothing until
he saw the chief of the band carrying his bride away in his arms.
Immediately he started up, and knew that they were faeries; for slowly
all that jolly company melted into shadow and night. He hurried to
the house of his beloved. As he drew near came to him the cry of the
keeners. She had died some time before he came. Some noteless Gaelic
poet had made this into a forgotten ballad, some odd verses of which my
white-capped friend remembered and sang for me.
Sometimes one hears of stolen people acting as good genii to the
living, as in this tale, heard also close by the haunted pond, of John
Kirwan of Castle Hacket. The Kirwans[H] are a family much rumoured of
in peasant stories, and believed to be the descendants of a man and a
spirit. They have ever been famous for beauty, and I have read that the
mother of the present Lord Cloncurry was of their tribe.
John Kirwan was a great horse-racing man, and once landed in Liverpool
with a fine horse, going racing somewhere in middle England. That
evening, as he walked by the docks, a slip of a boy came up and asked
where he was stabling his horse. In such and such a place, he answered.
'Don't put him there,' said the slip of a boy; 'that stable will be
burnt to-night. ' He took his horse elsewhere, and sure enough the
stable was burnt down. Next day the boy came and asked as reward to
ride as his jockey in the coming race, and then was gone. The race-time
came round. At the last moment the boy ran forward and mounted, saying,
'If I strike him with the whip in my left hand I will lose, but if in
my right hand bet all you are worth. ' 'For,' said Paddy Flynn, who told
me the tale, 'the left arm is good for nothing. I might go on making
the sign of the cross with it, and all that, come Christmas, and a
banshee, or such like, would no more mind than if it was that broom. '
Well, the slip of a boy struck the horse with his right hand, and John
Kirwan cleared the field out. When the race was over, 'What can I do
for you now? ' said he. 'Nothing but this,' said the boy: 'my mother
has a cottage on your land--they stole me from the cradle. Be good to
her, John Kirwan, and wherever your horses go I will watch that no
ill follows them; but you will never see me more. ' With that he made
himself air, and vanished.
Sometimes animals are carried off--apparently drowned animals more than
others. In Claremorris, Galway, Paddy Flynn told me, lived a poor widow
with one cow and its calf. The cow fell into the river, and was washed
away. There was a man thereabouts who went to a red-haired woman--for
such are supposed to be wise in these things--and she told him to take
the calf down to the edge of the river, and hide himself and watch.
He did as she had told him, and as evening came on the calf began
to low, and after a while the cow came along the edge of the river
and commenced suckling it. Then, as he had been told, he caught the
cow's tail. Away they went at a great pace, across hedges and ditches,
till they came to a royalty (a name for the little circular ditches,
commonly called raths or forts, that Ireland is covered with since
Pagan times). Therein he saw walking or sitting all the people who had
died out of his village in his time. A woman was sitting on the edge
with a child on her knees, and she called out to him to mind what the
red-haired woman had told him, and he remembered she had said, 'Bleed
the cow. ' So he stuck his knife into the cow and drew blood. That broke
the spell, and he was able to turn her homeward. 'Do not forget the
spancel,' said the woman with the child on her knees; 'take the inside
one. ' There were three spancels on a bush; he took one, and the cow was
driven safely home to the widow.
There is hardly a valley or mountain-side where folk cannot tell you of
some one pillaged from amongst them. Two or three miles from the Heart
Lake lives an old woman who was stolen away in her youth. After seven
years she was brought home again for some reason or other, but she had
no toes left. She had danced them off. Many near the white stone door
in Ben Bulben have been stolen away.
It is far easier to be sensible in cities than in many country places
I could tell you of. When one walks on those grey roads at evening by
the scented elder-bushes of the white cottages, watching the faint
mountains gathering the clouds upon their heads, one all too readily
discovers, beyond the thin cobweb veil of the senses, those creatures,
the goblins, hurrying from the white square stone door to the north, or
from the Heart Lake in the south.
FOOTNOTE:
[H] I have since heard that it was not the Kirwans, but their
predecessors at Castle Hacket, the Hackets themselves, I think, who
were descended from a man and a spirit, and were notable for beauty.
I imagine that the mother of Lord Cloncurry was descended from the
Hackets. It may well be that all through these stories the name of
Kirwan has taken the place of the older name. Legend mixes everything
together in her cauldron.
THE UNTIRING ONES
IT is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed
emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and
something in our sweetheart that we dislike. It is this entanglement
of moods which makes us old, and puckers our brows and deepens the
furrows about our eyes. If we could love and hate with as good heart
as the faeries do, we might grow to be long-lived like them. But until
that day their untiring joys and sorrows must ever be one-half of their
fascination. Love with them never grows weary, nor can the circles of
the stars tire out their dancing feet. The Donegal peasants remember
this when they bend over the spade, or sit full of the heaviness of the
fields beside the griddle at nightfall, and they tell stories about it
that it may not be forgotten. A short while ago, they say, two faeries,
little creatures, one like a young man, one like a young woman, came
to a farmer's house, and spent the night sweeping the hearth and
setting all tidy. The next night they came again, and while the farmer
was away, brought all the furniture up-stairs into one room, and having
arranged it round the walls, for the greater grandeur it seems, they
began to dance. They danced on and on, and days and days went by, and
all the country-side came to look at them, but still their feet never
tired. The farmer did not dare to live at home the while; and after
three months he made up his mind to stand it no more, and went and told
them that the priest was coming. The little creatures when they heard
this went back to their own country, and there their joy shall last as
long as the points of the rushes are brown, the people say, and that is
until God shall burn up the world with a kiss.
But it is not merely faeries who know untiring days, for there have
been men and women who, falling under their enchantment, have attained,
perhaps by the right of their God-given spirits, an even more than
faery abundance of life and feeling. It seems that when mortals have
gone amid those poor happy leaves of the Imperishable Rose of Beauty,
blown hither and thither by the winds that awakened the stars, the dim
kingdom has acknowledged their birthright, perhaps a little sadly, and
given them of its best. Such a mortal was born long ago at a village in
the south of Ireland. She lay asleep in a cradle, and her mother sat
by rocking her, when a woman of the Sidhe (the faeries) came in, and
said that the child was chosen to be the bride of the prince of the
dim kingdom, but that as it would never do for his wife to grow old
and die while he was still in the first ardour of his love, she would
be gifted with a faery life. The mother was to take the glowing log
out of the fire and bury it in the garden, and her child would live
as long as it remained unconsumed. The mother buried the log, and the
child grew up, became a beauty, and married the prince of the faeries,
who came to her at nightfall. After seven hundred years the prince
died, and another prince ruled in his stead and married the beautiful
peasant girl in his turn; and after another seven hundred years he died
also, and another prince and another husband came in his stead, and
so on until she had had seven husbands. At last one day the priest of
the parish called upon her, and told her that she was a scandal to the
whole neighbourhood with her seven husbands and her long life. She was
very sorry, she said, but she was not to blame, and then she told him
about the log, and he went straight out and dug until he found it, and
then they burned it, and she died, and was buried like a Christian, and
everybody was pleased. Such a mortal too was Clooth-na-bare,[I] who
went all over the world seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery
life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and lake
to hill, and setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted,
until at last she found the deepest water in the world in little Lough
Ia, on the top of the Birds' Mountain at Sligo.
The two little creatures may well dance on, and the woman of the log
and Clooth-na-bare sleep in peace, for they have known untrammelled
hate and unmixed love, and have never wearied themselves with 'yes'
and 'no,' or entangled their feet with the sorry net of 'maybe' and
'perhaps. ' The great winds came and took them up into themselves.
FOOTNOTE:
[I] Doubtless Clooth-na-bare should be Cailleac Bare, which would
mean the old Woman Bare.
