I
felt I must fall into a trance if I did not struggle against it, and
that the influence which was causing this trance was out of harmony
with itself, in other words, evil.
felt I must fall into a trance if I did not struggle against it, and
that the influence which was causing this trance was out of harmony
with itself, in other words, evil.
Yeats
The old Mayo woman,
who has told me so many tales, has told me that her brother-in-law saw
'a woman with white borders to her cap going round the stacks in a
field, and soon after he got a hurt, and he died in six months. '
'DUST HATH CLOSED HELEN'S EYE. '
I
I HAVE been lately to a little group of houses, not many enough to be
called a village, in the barony of Kiltartan in County Galway, whose
name, Ballylee, is known through all the west of Ireland. There is the
old square castle, Ballylee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and a
cottage where their daughter and their son-in-law live, and a little
mill with an old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows upon
a little river and great stepping-stones. I went there two or three
times last year to talk to the miller about Biddy Early, a wise woman
that lived in Clare some years ago, and about her saying, 'There is a
cure for all evil between the two mill-wheels of Ballylee,' and to find
out from him or another whether she meant the moss between the running
waters or some other herb. I have been there this summer, and I shall
be there again before it is autumn, because Mary Hynes, a beautiful
woman whose name is still a wonder by turf fires, died there sixty
years ago; for our feet would linger where beauty has lived its life of
sorrow to make us understand that it is not of the world. An old man
brought me a little way from the mill and the castle, and down a long,
narrow boreen that was nearly lost in brambles and sloe bushes, and he
said, 'That is the little old foundation of the house, but the most of
it is taken for building walls, and the goats have ate those bushes
that are growing over it till they've got cranky, and they won't grow
any more. They say she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin was
like dribbled snow'--he meant driven snow, perhaps,--'and she had blushes
in her cheeks. She had five handsome brothers, but all are gone now! ' I
talked to him about a poem in Irish, Raftery, a famous poet, made about
her, and how it said, 'there is a strong cellar in Ballylee. ' He said
the strong cellar was the great hole where the river sank underground,
and he brought me to a deep pool, where an otter hurried away under a
grey boulder, and told me that many fish came up out of the dark water
at early morning 'to taste the fresh water coming down from the hills. '
I first heard of the poem from an old woman who lives about two miles
further up the river, and who remembers Raftery and Mary Hynes. She
says, 'I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never will
till I die,' and that he was nearly blind, and had 'no way of living
but to go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all the
neighbours would gather to hear. If you treated him well he'd praise
you, but if you did not, he'd fault you in Irish. He was the greatest
poet in Ireland, and he'd make a song about that bush if he chanced to
stand under it. There was a bush he stood under from the rain, and he
made verses praising it, and then when the water came through he made
verses dispraising it. ' She sang the poem to a friend and to myself
in Irish, and every word was audible and expressive, as the words in
a song were always, as I think, before music grew too proud to be the
garment of words, flowing and changing with the flowing and changing
of their energies. The poem is not as natural as the best Irish poetry
of the last century, for the thoughts are arranged in a too obviously
traditional form, so the old poor half-blind man who made it has to
speak as if he were a rich farmer offering the best of everything to
the woman he loves, but it has naive and tender phrases. The friend
that was with me has made some of the translation, but some of it has
been made by the country people themselves. I think it has more of the
simplicity of the Irish verses than one finds in most translations.
'Going to Mass by the will of God,
The day came wet and the wind rose;
I met Mary Hynes at the cross of Kiltartan,
And I fell in love with her then and there.
I spoke to her kind and mannerly,
As by report was her own way;
And she said, "Raftery, my mind is easy,
You may come to-day to Ballylee. "
When I heard her offer I did not linger,
When her talk went to my heart my heart rose.
We had only to go across the three fields,
We had daylight with us to Ballylee.
The table was laid with glasses and a quart measure,
She had fair hair, and she sitting beside me;
And she said, "Drink, Raftery, and a hundred welcomes,
There is a strong cellar in Ballylee. "
O star of light and O sun in harvest,
O amber hair, O my share of the world,
Will you come with me upon Sunday
Till we agree together before all the people?
I would not grudge you a song every Sunday evening,
Punch on the table, or wine if you would drink it,
But, O King of Glory, dry the roads before me,
Till I find the way to Ballylee.
There is sweet air on the side of the hill
When you are looking down upon Ballylee;
When you are walking in the valley picking nuts and blackberries,
There is music of the birds in it and music of the Sidhe.
What is the worth of greatness till you have the light
Of the flower of the branch that is by your side?
There is no god to deny it or to try and hide it,
She is the sun in the heavens who wounded my heart.
There was no part of Ireland I did not travel,
From the rivers to the tops of the mountains,
To the edge of Lough Greine whose mouth is hidden,
And I saw no beauty but was behind hers.
Her hair was shining, and her brows were shining too;
Her face was like herself, her mouth pleasant and sweet.
She is the pride, and I give her the branch,
She is the shining flower of Ballylee.
It is Mary Hynes, the calm and easy woman,
Has beauty in her mind and in her face.
If a hundred clerks were gathered together,
They could not write down a half of her ways. '
An old weaver, whose son is supposed to go away among the Sidhe (the
faeries) at night, says, 'Mary Hynes was the most beautiful thing
ever made. My mother used to tell me about her, for she'd be at every
hurling, and wherever she was she was dressed in white. As many as
eleven men asked her in marriage in one day, but she wouldn't have
any of them. There was a lot of men up beyond Kilbecanty one night
sitting together drinking, and talking of her, and one of them got
up and set out to go to Ballylee and see her; but Cloon Bog was open
then, and when he came to it he fell into the water, and they found
him dead there in the morning. She died of the fever that was before
the famine. ' Another old man says he was only a child when he saw
her, but he remembered that 'the strongest man that was among us, one
John Madden, got his death of the head of her, cold he got crossing
rivers in the night-time to get to Ballylee. ' This is perhaps the man
the other remembered, for tradition gives the one thing many shapes.
There is an old woman who remembers her, at Derrybrien among the Echtge
hills, a vast desolate place, which has changed little since the old
poem said, 'the stag upon the cold summit of Echtge hears the cry of
the wolves,' but still mindful of many poems and of the dignity of
ancient speech. She says, 'The sun and the moon never shone on anybody
so handsome, and her skin was so white that it looked blue, and she
had two little blushes on her cheeks. ' And an old wrinkled woman who
lives close by Ballylee, and has told me many tales of the Sidhe, says,
'I often saw Mary Hynes, she was handsome indeed. She had two bunches
of curls beside her cheeks, and they were the colour of silver. I saw
Mary Molloy that was drowned in the river beyond, and Mary Guthrie that
was in Ardrahan, but she took the sway of them both, a very comely
creature. I was at her wake too--she had seen too much of the world.
She was a kind creature. One day I was coming home through that field
beyond, and I was tired, and who should come out but the Poisin Glegeal
(the shining flower), and she gave me a glass of new milk. ' This old
woman meant no more than some beautiful bright colour by the colour of
silver, for though I knew an old man--he is dead now--who thought she
might know 'the cure for all the evils in the world,' that the Sidhe
knew, she has seen too little gold to know its colour. But a man by
the shore at Kinvara, who is too young to remember Mary Hynes, says,
'Everybody says there is no one at all to be seen now so handsome; it
is said she had beautiful hair, the colour of gold. She was poor, but
her clothes every day were the same as Sunday, she had such neatness.
And if she went to any kind of a meeting, they would all be killing one
another for a sight of her, and there was a great many in love with
her, but she died young. It is said that no one that has a song made
about them will ever live long. '
Those who are much admired are, it is held, taken by the Sidhe, who
can use ungoverned feeling for their own ends, so that a father, as an
old herb doctor told me once, may give his child into their hands, or
a husband his wife. The admired and desired are only safe if one says
'God bless them' when one's eyes are upon them. The old woman that sang
the song thinks, too, that Mary Hynes was 'taken,' as the phrase is,
'for they have taken many that are not handsome, and why would they
not take her? And people came from all parts to look at her, and, maybe
there were some that did not say "God bless her. "' An old man who lives
by the sea at Duras has as little doubt that she was taken, 'for there
are some living yet can remember her coming to the pattern[C] there
beyond, and she was said to be the handsomest girl in Ireland. ' She
died young because the gods loved her, for the Sidhe are the gods, and
it may be that the old saying, which we forget to understand literally,
meant her manner of death in old times. These poor countrymen and
countrywomen in their beliefs, and in their emotions, are many years
nearer to that old Greek world, that set beauty beside the fountain
of things, than are our men of learning. She 'had seen too much of
the world'; but these old men and women, when they tell of her, blame
another and not her, and though they can be hard, they grow gentle as
the old men of Troy grew gentle when Helen passed by on the walls.
The poet who helped her to so much fame has himself a great fame
throughout the west of Ireland. Some think that Raftery was half blind,
and say, 'I saw Raftery, a dark man, but he had sight enough to see
her,' or the like, but some think he was wholly blind, as he may have
been at the end of his life. Fable makes all things perfect in their
kind, and her blind people must never look on the world and the sun. I
asked a man I met one day, when I was looking for a pool _na mna Sidhe_
where women of faery have been seen, how Raftery could have admired
Mary Hynes so much if he had been altogether blind? He said, 'I think
Raftery was altogether blind, but those that are blind have a way of
seeing things, and have the power to know more, and to feel more,
and to do more, and to guess more than those that have their sight,
and a certain wit and a certain wisdom is given to them. ' Everybody,
indeed, will tell you that he was very wise, for was he not only blind
but a poet? The weaver whose words about Mary Hynes I have already
given, says, 'His poetry was the gift of the Almighty, for there are
three things that are the gift of the Almighty--poetry and dancing and
principles. That is why in the old times an ignorant man coming down
from the hillside would be better behaved and have better learning than
a man with education you'd meet now, for they got it from God'; and a
man at Coole says, 'When he put his finger to one part of his head,
everything would come to him as if it was written in a book'; and an
old pensioner at Kiltartan says, 'He was standing under a bush one
time, and he talked to it, and it answered him back in Irish. Some say
it was the bush that spoke, but it must have been an enchanted voice in
it, and it gave him the knowledge of all the things of the world. The
bush withered up afterwards, and it is to be seen on the roadside now
between this and Rahasine. ' There is a poem of his about a bush, which
I have never seen, and it may have come out of the cauldron of fable in
this shape.
A friend of mine met a man once who had been with him when he died,
but the people say that he died alone, and one Maurteen Gillane told
Dr. Hyde that all night long a light was seen streaming up to heaven
from the roof of the house where he lay, and 'that was the angels who
were with him'; and all night long there was a great light in the
hovel, 'and that was the angels who were waking him. They gave that
honour to him because he was so good a poet, and sang such religious
songs. ' It may be that in a few years Fable, who changes mortalities
to immortalities in her cauldron, will have changed Mary Hynes
and Raftery to perfect symbols of the sorrow of beauty and of the
magnificence and penury of dreams.
1900.
II
When I was in a northern town awhile ago I had a long talk with a man
who had lived in a neighbouring country district when he was a boy. He
told me that when a very beautiful girl was born in a family that had
not been noted for good looks, her beauty was thought to have come from
the Sidhe, and to bring misfortune with it. He went over the names of
several beautiful girls that he had known, and said that beauty had
never brought happiness to anybody. It was a thing, he said, to be
proud of and afraid of. I wish I had written out his words at the time,
for they were more picturesque than my memory of them.
1902.
FOOTNOTE:
[C] A 'pattern,' or 'patron,' is a festival in honour of a saint.
A KNIGHT OF THE SHEEP
AWAY to the north of Ben Bulben and Cope's mountain lives 'a strong
farmer,' a knight of the sheep they would have called him in the Gaelic
days. Proud of his descent from one of the most fighting clans of the
Middle Ages, he is a man of force alike in his words and in his deeds.
There is but one man that swears like him, and this man lives far away
upon the mountain. 'Father in heaven, what have I done to deserve
this? ' he says when he has lost his pipe; and no man but he who lives
on the mountain can rival his language on a fair day over a bargain. He
is passionate and abrupt in his movements, and when angry tosses his
white beard about with his left hand.
One day I was dining with him when the servant-maid announced a certain
Mr. O'Donnell. A sudden silence fell upon the old man and upon his two
daughters. At last the eldest daughter said somewhat severely to her
father, 'Go and ask him to come in and dine. ' The old man went out,
and then came in looking greatly relieved, and said, 'He says he will
not dine with us. ' 'Go out,' said the daughter, 'and ask him into the
back parlour, and give him some whiskey. ' Her father, who had just
finished his dinner, obeyed sullenly, and I heard the door of the back
parlour--a little room where the daughters sat and sewed during the
evening--shut to behind the men. The daughter then turned to me and
said, 'Mr. O'Donnell is the tax-gatherer, and last year he raised our
taxes, and my father was very angry, and when he came, brought him
into the dairy, and sent the dairy-woman away on a message, and then
swore at him a great deal. "I will teach you, sir," O'Donnell replied,
"that the law can protect its officers"; but my father reminded him
that he had no witness. At last my father got tired, and sorry too,
and said he would show him a short way home. When they were half-way
to the main road they came on a man of my father's who was ploughing,
and this somehow brought back remembrance of the wrong. He sent the man
away on a message, and began to swear at the tax-gatherer again. When
I heard of it I was disgusted that he should have made such a fuss
over a miserable creature like O'Donnell; and when I heard a few weeks
ago that O'Donnell's only son had died and left him heart-broken, I
resolved to make my father be kind to him next time he came. '
She then went out to see a neighbour, and I sauntered towards the back
parlour. When I came to the door I heard angry voices inside. The two
men were evidently getting on to the tax again, for I could hear them
bandying figures to and fro. I opened the door; at sight of my face
the farmer was reminded of his peaceful intentions, and asked me if I
knew where the whiskey was. I had seen him put it into the cupboard,
and was able therefore to find it and get it out, looking at the thin,
grief-struck face of the tax-gatherer. He was rather older than my
friend, and very much more feeble and worn, and of a very different
type. He was not like him, a robust, successful man, but rather one of
those whose feet find no resting-place upon the earth. I recognized one
of the children of reverie, and said, 'You are doubtless of the stock
of the old O'Donnells. I know well the hole in the river where their
treasure lies buried under the guard of a serpent with many heads. '
'Yes, sur,' he replied, 'I am the last of a line princes. '
We then fell to talking of many commonplace things, and my friend did
not once toss up his beard, but was very friendly. At last the gaunt
old tax-gatherer got up to go, and my friend said, 'I hope we will
have a glass together next year. ' 'No, no,' was the answer, 'I shall
be dead next year,' 'I too have lost sons,' said the other, in quite a
gentle voice. 'But your sons were not like my son. ' And then the two
men parted, with an angry flush and bitter hearts, and had I not cast
between them some common words or other, might not have parted, but
have fallen rather into an angry discussion of the value of their dead
sons. If I had not pity for all the children of reverie I should have
let them fight it out, and would now have many a wonderful oath to
record.
The knight of the sheep would have had the victory, for no soul that
wears this garment of blood and clay can surpass him. He was but once
beaten; and this is his tale of how it was. He and some farm hands were
playing at cards in a small cabin that stood against the end of a big
barn. A wicked woman had once lived in this cabin. Suddenly one of the
players threw down an ace and began to swear without any cause. His
swearing was so dreadful that the others stood up, and my friend said,
'All is not right here; there is a spirit in him. ' They ran to the door
that led into the barn to get away as quickly as possible. The wooden
bolt would not move, so the knight of the sheep took a saw which stood
against the wall near at hand, and sawed through the bolt, and at once
the door flew open with a bang, as though some one had been holding it,
and they fled through.
AN ENDURING HEART
ONE day a friend of mine was making a sketch of my Knight of the Sheep.
The old man's daughter was sitting by, and, when the conversation
drifted to love and love-making, she said, 'Oh, father, tell him
about your love affair. ' The old man took his pipe out of his mouth,
and said, 'Nobody ever marries the woman he loves,' and then, with
a chuckle, 'there were fifteen of them I liked better than the
woman I married,' and he repeated many women's names. He went on to
tell how when he was a lad he had worked for his grandfather, his
mother's father, and was called (my friend has forgotten why) by his
grandfather's name, which we will say was Doran. He had a great friend,
whom I shall call John Byrne; and one day he and his friend went to
Queenstown to await an emigrant ship, that was to take John Byrne
to America. When they were walking along the quay, they saw a girl
sitting on a seat, crying miserably, and two men standing up in front
of her quarrelling with one another. Doran said, 'I think I know what
is wrong. _That_ man will be her brother, and _that_ man will be her
lover, and the brother is sending her to America to get her away from
the lover. How she is crying! but I think I could console her myself. '
Presently the lover and brother went away, and Doran began to walk up
and down before her, saying, 'Mild weather, Miss,' or the like. She
answered him in a little while, and the three began to talk together.
The emigrant ship did not arrive for some days; and the three drove
about on outside cars very innocently and happily, seeing everything
that was to be seen. When at last the ship came, and Doran had to break
it to her that he was not going to America, she cried more after him
than after the first lover. Doran whispered to Byrne as he went aboard
ship, 'Now, Byrne, I don't grudge her to you, but don't marry young. '
When the story got to this, the farmer's daughter joined in mockingly
with, 'I suppose you said that for Byrne's good, father. ' But the
old man insisted that he _had_ said it for Byrne's good; and went
on to tell how, when he got a letter telling of Byrne's engagement
to the girl, he wrote him the same advice. Years passed by, and he
heard nothing; and though he was now married, he could not keep from
wondering what she was doing. At last he went to America to find out,
and though he asked many people for tidings, he could get none. More
years went by, and his wife was dead, and he well on in years, and a
rich farmer with not a few great matters on his hands. He found an
excuse in some vague business to go out to America again, and to begin
his search again. One day he fell into talk with an Irishman in a
railway carriage, and asked him, as his way was, about emigrants from
this place and that, and at last, 'Did you ever hear of the miller's
daughter from Innis Rath? ' and he named the woman he was looking for.
'Oh yes,' said the other, 'she is married to a friend of mine, John
MacEwing. She lives at such-and-such a street in Chicago. ' Doran went
to Chicago and knocked at her door. She opened the door herself, and
was 'not a bit changed. ' He gave her his real name, which he had taken
again after his grandfather's death, and the name of the man he had
met in the train. She did not recognize him, but asked him to stay to
dinner, saying that her husband would be glad to meet anybody who knew
that old friend of his. They talked of many things, but for all their
talk, I do not know why, and perhaps he did not know why, he never told
her who he was. At dinner he asked her about Byrne, and she put her
head down on the table and began to cry, and she cried so he was afraid
her husband might be angry. He was afraid to ask what had happened to
Byrne, and left soon after, never to see her again.
When the old man had finished the story, he said, 'Tell that to Mr.
Yeats, he will make a poem about it, perhaps. ' But the daughter said,
'Oh no, father. Nobody could make a poem about a woman like that. '
Alas! I have never made the poem, perhaps because my own heart which
has loved Helen and all the lovely and fickle women of the world, would
be too sore. There are things it is well not to ponder over too much,
things that bare words are the best suited for.
1902.
THE SORCERERS
IN Ireland we hear but little of the darker powers,[D] and come across
any who have seen them even more rarely, for the imagination of the
people dwells rather upon the fantastic and capricious, and fantasy
and caprice would lose the freedom which is their breath of life, were
they to unite them either with evil or with good. And yet the wise are
of opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his
rapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who store
their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit
hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and
melancholy multitude. They hold, too, that he who by long desire or
through accident of birth possesses the power of piercing into their
hidden abode can see them there, those who were once men or women
full of a terrible vehemence, and those who have never lived upon the
earth, moving slowly and with a subtler malice. The dark powers cling
about us, it is said, day and night, like bats upon an old tree; and
that we do not hear more of them is merely because the darker kinds of
magic have been but little practised. I have indeed come across very
few persons in Ireland who try to communicate with evil powers, and the
few I have met keep their purpose and practice wholly hidden from those
among whom they live. They are mainly small clerks and the like, and
meet for the purpose of their art in a room hung with black hangings.
They would not admit me into this room, but finding me not altogether
ignorant of the arcane science, showed gladly elsewhere what they would
do. 'Come to us,' said their leader, a clerk in a large flour-mill,
'and we will show you spirits who will talk to you face to face, and in
shapes as solid and heavy as our own. '
I had been talking of the power of communicating in states of trance
with the angelical and faery beings,--the children of the day and of the
twilight,--and he had been contending that we should only believe in
what we can see and feel when in our ordinary everyday state of mind.
'Yes,' I said, 'I will come to you,' or some such words; 'but I will
not permit myself to become entranced, and will therefore know whether
these shapes you talk of are any the more to be touched and felt by the
ordinary senses than are those I talk of. ' I was not denying the power
of other beings to take upon themselves a clothing of mortal substance,
but only that simple invocations, such as he spoke of, seemed unlikely
to do more than cast the mind into trance, and thereby bring it into
the presence of the powers of day, twilight, and darkness.
'But,' he said, 'we have seen them move the furniture hither and
thither, and they go at our bidding, and help or harm people who know
nothing of them. ' I am not giving the exact words, but as accurately as
I can the substance of our talk.
On the night arranged I turned up about eight, and found the leader
sitting alone in almost total darkness in a small back room. He was
dressed in a black gown, like an inquisitor's dress in an old drawing,
that left nothing of him visible except his eyes, which peered out
through two small round holes. Upon the table in front of him was
a brass dish of burning herbs, a large bowl, a skull covered with
painted symbols, two crossed daggers, and certain implements shaped
like quern stones, which were used to control the elemental powers
in some fashion I did not discover. I also put on a black gown, and
remember that it did not fit perfectly, and that it interfered with my
movements considerably. The sorcerer then took a black cock out of a
basket, and cut its throat with one of the daggers, letting the blood
fall into the large bowl. He opened a book and began an invocation,
which was certainly not English, and had a deep guttural sound. Before
he had finished, another of the sorcerers, a man of about twenty-five,
came in, and having put on a black gown also, seated himself at my
left hand. I had the invoker directly in front of me, and soon began
to find his eyes, which glittered through the small holes in his
hood, affecting me in a curious way. I struggled hard against their
influence, and my head began to ache. The invocation continued, and
nothing happened for the first few minutes. Then the invoker got up
and extinguished the light in the hall, so that no glimmer might come
through the slit under the door. There was now no light except from the
herbs on the brass dish, and no sound except from the deep guttural
murmur of the invocation.
Presently the man at my left swayed himself about, and cried out, 'O
god! O god! ' I asked him what ailed him, but he did not know he had
spoken. A moment after he said he could see a great serpent moving
about the room, and became considerably excited. I saw nothing with any
definite shape, but thought that black clouds were forming about me.
I
felt I must fall into a trance if I did not struggle against it, and
that the influence which was causing this trance was out of harmony
with itself, in other words, evil. After a struggle I got rid of the
black clouds, and was able to observe with my ordinary senses again.
The two sorcerers now began to see black and white columns moving about
the room, and finally a man in a monk's habit, and they became greatly
puzzled because I did not see these things also, for to them they were
as solid as the table before them. The invoker appeared to be gradually
increasing in power, and I began to feel as if a tide of darkness
was pouring from him and concentrating itself about me; and now too
I noticed that the man on my left hand had passed into a death-like
trance. With a last great effort I drove off the black clouds; but
feeling them to be the only shapes I should see without passing into
a trance, and having no great love for them, I asked for lights, and
after the needful exorcism returned to the ordinary world.
I said to the more powerful of the two sorcerers--'What would happen
if one of your spirits had overpowered me? ' 'You would go out of this
room,' he answered, 'with his character added to your own. ' I asked
about the origin of his sorcery, but got little of importance, except
that he had learned it from his father. He would not tell me more, for
he had, it appeared, taken a vow of secrecy.
For some days I could not get over the feeling of having a number
of deformed and grotesque figures lingering about me. The Bright
Powers are always beautiful and desirable, and the Dim Powers are now
beautiful, now quaintly grotesque, but the Dark Powers express their
unbalanced natures in shapes of ugliness and horror.
FOOTNOTE:
[D] I know better now. We have the dark powers much more than I
thought, but not as much as the Scottish, and yet I think the
imagination of the people does dwell chiefly upon the fantastic and
capricious.
THE DEVIL
MY old Mayo woman told me one day that something very bad had come down
the road and gone into the house opposite, and though she would not say
what it was, I knew quite well. Another day she told me of two friends
of hers who had been made love to by one whom they believed to be the
devil. One of them was standing by the road-side when he came by on
horseback, and asked her to mount up behind him, and go riding. When
she would not he vanished. The other was out on the road late at night
waiting for her young man, when something came flapping and rolling
along the road up to her feet. It had the likeness of a newspaper, and
presently it flapped up into her face, and she knew by the size of
it that it was the _Irish Times_. All of a sudden it changed into a
young man, who asked her to go walking with him. She would not, and he
vanished.
I know of an old man too, on the slopes of Ben Bulben, who found the
devil ringing a bell under his bed, and he went off and stole the
chapel bell and rang him out. It may be that this, like the others, was
not the devil at all, but some poor wood spirit whose cloven feet had
got him into trouble.
HAPPY AND UNHAPPY THEOLOGIANS
I
A MAYO woman once said to me, 'I knew a servant girl who hung herself
for the love of God. She was lonely for the priest and her society,[E]
and hung herself to the banisters with a scarf. She was no sooner dead
than she became white as a lily, and if it had been murder or suicide
she would have become black as black. They gave her Christian burial,
and the priest said she was no sooner dead than she was with the Lord.
So nothing matters that you do for the love of God. ' I do not wonder
at the pleasure she has in telling this story, for she herself loves
all holy things with an ardour that brings them quickly to her lips.
She told me once that she never hears anything described in a sermon
that she does not afterwards see with her eyes. She has described to
me the gates of Purgatory as they showed themselves to her eyes, but
I remember nothing of the description except that she could not see
the souls in trouble but only the gates. Her mind continually dwells
on what is pleasant and beautiful. One day she asked me what month
and what flower were the most beautiful. When I answered that I did
not know, she said, 'The month of May, because of the Virgin, and the
lily of the valley, because it never sinned, but came pure out of the
rocks,' and then she asked, 'What is the cause of the three cold months
of winter? ' I did not know even that, and so she said, 'The sin of man
and the vengeance of God. ' Christ Himself was not only blessed, but
perfect in all manly proportions in her eyes, so much do beauty and
holiness go together in her thoughts. He alone of all men was exactly
six feet high, all others are a little more or a little less.
Her thoughts and her sights of the people of faery are pleasant and
beautiful too, and I have never heard her call them the Fallen Angels.
They are people like ourselves, only better-looking, and many and many
a time she has gone to the window to watch them drive their waggons
through the sky, waggon behind waggon in long line, or to the door to
hear them singing and dancing in the Forth. They sing chiefly, it
seems, a song called 'The Distant Waterfall,' and though they once
knocked her down she never thinks badly of them. She saw them most
easily when she was in service in King's County, and one morning a
little while ago she said to me, 'Last night I was waiting up for the
master and it was a quarter-past eleven. I heard a bang right down on
the table. "King's County all over," says I, and I laughed till I was
near dead. It was a warning I was staying too long. They wanted the
place to themselves. ' I told her once of somebody who saw a faery and
fainted, and she said, 'It could not have been a faery, but some bad
thing, nobody could faint at a faery. It was a demon. I was not afraid
when they near put me, and the bed under me, out through the roof. I
wasn't afraid either when you were at some work and I heard a thing
coming flop-flop up the stairs like an eel, and squealing. It went to
all the doors. It could not get in where I was. I would have sent it
through the universe like a flash of fire. There was a man in my place,
a tearing fellow, and he put one of them down. He went out to meet it
on the road, but he must have been told the words. But the faeries are
the best neighbours. If you do good to them they will do good to you,
but they don't like you to be on their path. ' Another time she said to
me, 'They are always good to the poor. '
II
There is, however, a man in a Galway village who can see nothing but
wickedness. Some think him very holy, and others think him a little
crazed, but some of his talk reminds one of those old Irish visions of
the Three Worlds, which are supposed to have give Dante the plan of
the _Divine Comedy_. But I could not imagine this man seeing Paradise.
He is especially angry with the people of faery, and describes the
faun-like feet that are so common among them, who are indeed children
of Pan, to prove them children of Satan. He will not grant that 'they
carry away women, though there are many that say so,' but he is certain
that they are 'as thick as the sands of the sea about us, and they
tempt poor mortals. '
He says, 'There is a priest I know of was looking along the ground like
as if he was hunting for something, and a voice said to him, "If you
want to see them you'll see enough of them," and his eyes were opened
and he saw the ground thick with them. Singing they do be sometimes,
and dancing, but all the time they have cloven feet. ' 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?
who has told me so many tales, has told me that her brother-in-law saw
'a woman with white borders to her cap going round the stacks in a
field, and soon after he got a hurt, and he died in six months. '
'DUST HATH CLOSED HELEN'S EYE. '
I
I HAVE been lately to a little group of houses, not many enough to be
called a village, in the barony of Kiltartan in County Galway, whose
name, Ballylee, is known through all the west of Ireland. There is the
old square castle, Ballylee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and a
cottage where their daughter and their son-in-law live, and a little
mill with an old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows upon
a little river and great stepping-stones. I went there two or three
times last year to talk to the miller about Biddy Early, a wise woman
that lived in Clare some years ago, and about her saying, 'There is a
cure for all evil between the two mill-wheels of Ballylee,' and to find
out from him or another whether she meant the moss between the running
waters or some other herb. I have been there this summer, and I shall
be there again before it is autumn, because Mary Hynes, a beautiful
woman whose name is still a wonder by turf fires, died there sixty
years ago; for our feet would linger where beauty has lived its life of
sorrow to make us understand that it is not of the world. An old man
brought me a little way from the mill and the castle, and down a long,
narrow boreen that was nearly lost in brambles and sloe bushes, and he
said, 'That is the little old foundation of the house, but the most of
it is taken for building walls, and the goats have ate those bushes
that are growing over it till they've got cranky, and they won't grow
any more. They say she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin was
like dribbled snow'--he meant driven snow, perhaps,--'and she had blushes
in her cheeks. She had five handsome brothers, but all are gone now! ' I
talked to him about a poem in Irish, Raftery, a famous poet, made about
her, and how it said, 'there is a strong cellar in Ballylee. ' He said
the strong cellar was the great hole where the river sank underground,
and he brought me to a deep pool, where an otter hurried away under a
grey boulder, and told me that many fish came up out of the dark water
at early morning 'to taste the fresh water coming down from the hills. '
I first heard of the poem from an old woman who lives about two miles
further up the river, and who remembers Raftery and Mary Hynes. She
says, 'I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never will
till I die,' and that he was nearly blind, and had 'no way of living
but to go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all the
neighbours would gather to hear. If you treated him well he'd praise
you, but if you did not, he'd fault you in Irish. He was the greatest
poet in Ireland, and he'd make a song about that bush if he chanced to
stand under it. There was a bush he stood under from the rain, and he
made verses praising it, and then when the water came through he made
verses dispraising it. ' She sang the poem to a friend and to myself
in Irish, and every word was audible and expressive, as the words in
a song were always, as I think, before music grew too proud to be the
garment of words, flowing and changing with the flowing and changing
of their energies. The poem is not as natural as the best Irish poetry
of the last century, for the thoughts are arranged in a too obviously
traditional form, so the old poor half-blind man who made it has to
speak as if he were a rich farmer offering the best of everything to
the woman he loves, but it has naive and tender phrases. The friend
that was with me has made some of the translation, but some of it has
been made by the country people themselves. I think it has more of the
simplicity of the Irish verses than one finds in most translations.
'Going to Mass by the will of God,
The day came wet and the wind rose;
I met Mary Hynes at the cross of Kiltartan,
And I fell in love with her then and there.
I spoke to her kind and mannerly,
As by report was her own way;
And she said, "Raftery, my mind is easy,
You may come to-day to Ballylee. "
When I heard her offer I did not linger,
When her talk went to my heart my heart rose.
We had only to go across the three fields,
We had daylight with us to Ballylee.
The table was laid with glasses and a quart measure,
She had fair hair, and she sitting beside me;
And she said, "Drink, Raftery, and a hundred welcomes,
There is a strong cellar in Ballylee. "
O star of light and O sun in harvest,
O amber hair, O my share of the world,
Will you come with me upon Sunday
Till we agree together before all the people?
I would not grudge you a song every Sunday evening,
Punch on the table, or wine if you would drink it,
But, O King of Glory, dry the roads before me,
Till I find the way to Ballylee.
There is sweet air on the side of the hill
When you are looking down upon Ballylee;
When you are walking in the valley picking nuts and blackberries,
There is music of the birds in it and music of the Sidhe.
What is the worth of greatness till you have the light
Of the flower of the branch that is by your side?
There is no god to deny it or to try and hide it,
She is the sun in the heavens who wounded my heart.
There was no part of Ireland I did not travel,
From the rivers to the tops of the mountains,
To the edge of Lough Greine whose mouth is hidden,
And I saw no beauty but was behind hers.
Her hair was shining, and her brows were shining too;
Her face was like herself, her mouth pleasant and sweet.
She is the pride, and I give her the branch,
She is the shining flower of Ballylee.
It is Mary Hynes, the calm and easy woman,
Has beauty in her mind and in her face.
If a hundred clerks were gathered together,
They could not write down a half of her ways. '
An old weaver, whose son is supposed to go away among the Sidhe (the
faeries) at night, says, 'Mary Hynes was the most beautiful thing
ever made. My mother used to tell me about her, for she'd be at every
hurling, and wherever she was she was dressed in white. As many as
eleven men asked her in marriage in one day, but she wouldn't have
any of them. There was a lot of men up beyond Kilbecanty one night
sitting together drinking, and talking of her, and one of them got
up and set out to go to Ballylee and see her; but Cloon Bog was open
then, and when he came to it he fell into the water, and they found
him dead there in the morning. She died of the fever that was before
the famine. ' Another old man says he was only a child when he saw
her, but he remembered that 'the strongest man that was among us, one
John Madden, got his death of the head of her, cold he got crossing
rivers in the night-time to get to Ballylee. ' This is perhaps the man
the other remembered, for tradition gives the one thing many shapes.
There is an old woman who remembers her, at Derrybrien among the Echtge
hills, a vast desolate place, which has changed little since the old
poem said, 'the stag upon the cold summit of Echtge hears the cry of
the wolves,' but still mindful of many poems and of the dignity of
ancient speech. She says, 'The sun and the moon never shone on anybody
so handsome, and her skin was so white that it looked blue, and she
had two little blushes on her cheeks. ' And an old wrinkled woman who
lives close by Ballylee, and has told me many tales of the Sidhe, says,
'I often saw Mary Hynes, she was handsome indeed. She had two bunches
of curls beside her cheeks, and they were the colour of silver. I saw
Mary Molloy that was drowned in the river beyond, and Mary Guthrie that
was in Ardrahan, but she took the sway of them both, a very comely
creature. I was at her wake too--she had seen too much of the world.
She was a kind creature. One day I was coming home through that field
beyond, and I was tired, and who should come out but the Poisin Glegeal
(the shining flower), and she gave me a glass of new milk. ' This old
woman meant no more than some beautiful bright colour by the colour of
silver, for though I knew an old man--he is dead now--who thought she
might know 'the cure for all the evils in the world,' that the Sidhe
knew, she has seen too little gold to know its colour. But a man by
the shore at Kinvara, who is too young to remember Mary Hynes, says,
'Everybody says there is no one at all to be seen now so handsome; it
is said she had beautiful hair, the colour of gold. She was poor, but
her clothes every day were the same as Sunday, she had such neatness.
And if she went to any kind of a meeting, they would all be killing one
another for a sight of her, and there was a great many in love with
her, but she died young. It is said that no one that has a song made
about them will ever live long. '
Those who are much admired are, it is held, taken by the Sidhe, who
can use ungoverned feeling for their own ends, so that a father, as an
old herb doctor told me once, may give his child into their hands, or
a husband his wife. The admired and desired are only safe if one says
'God bless them' when one's eyes are upon them. The old woman that sang
the song thinks, too, that Mary Hynes was 'taken,' as the phrase is,
'for they have taken many that are not handsome, and why would they
not take her? And people came from all parts to look at her, and, maybe
there were some that did not say "God bless her. "' An old man who lives
by the sea at Duras has as little doubt that she was taken, 'for there
are some living yet can remember her coming to the pattern[C] there
beyond, and she was said to be the handsomest girl in Ireland. ' She
died young because the gods loved her, for the Sidhe are the gods, and
it may be that the old saying, which we forget to understand literally,
meant her manner of death in old times. These poor countrymen and
countrywomen in their beliefs, and in their emotions, are many years
nearer to that old Greek world, that set beauty beside the fountain
of things, than are our men of learning. She 'had seen too much of
the world'; but these old men and women, when they tell of her, blame
another and not her, and though they can be hard, they grow gentle as
the old men of Troy grew gentle when Helen passed by on the walls.
The poet who helped her to so much fame has himself a great fame
throughout the west of Ireland. Some think that Raftery was half blind,
and say, 'I saw Raftery, a dark man, but he had sight enough to see
her,' or the like, but some think he was wholly blind, as he may have
been at the end of his life. Fable makes all things perfect in their
kind, and her blind people must never look on the world and the sun. I
asked a man I met one day, when I was looking for a pool _na mna Sidhe_
where women of faery have been seen, how Raftery could have admired
Mary Hynes so much if he had been altogether blind? He said, 'I think
Raftery was altogether blind, but those that are blind have a way of
seeing things, and have the power to know more, and to feel more,
and to do more, and to guess more than those that have their sight,
and a certain wit and a certain wisdom is given to them. ' Everybody,
indeed, will tell you that he was very wise, for was he not only blind
but a poet? The weaver whose words about Mary Hynes I have already
given, says, 'His poetry was the gift of the Almighty, for there are
three things that are the gift of the Almighty--poetry and dancing and
principles. That is why in the old times an ignorant man coming down
from the hillside would be better behaved and have better learning than
a man with education you'd meet now, for they got it from God'; and a
man at Coole says, 'When he put his finger to one part of his head,
everything would come to him as if it was written in a book'; and an
old pensioner at Kiltartan says, 'He was standing under a bush one
time, and he talked to it, and it answered him back in Irish. Some say
it was the bush that spoke, but it must have been an enchanted voice in
it, and it gave him the knowledge of all the things of the world. The
bush withered up afterwards, and it is to be seen on the roadside now
between this and Rahasine. ' There is a poem of his about a bush, which
I have never seen, and it may have come out of the cauldron of fable in
this shape.
A friend of mine met a man once who had been with him when he died,
but the people say that he died alone, and one Maurteen Gillane told
Dr. Hyde that all night long a light was seen streaming up to heaven
from the roof of the house where he lay, and 'that was the angels who
were with him'; and all night long there was a great light in the
hovel, 'and that was the angels who were waking him. They gave that
honour to him because he was so good a poet, and sang such religious
songs. ' It may be that in a few years Fable, who changes mortalities
to immortalities in her cauldron, will have changed Mary Hynes
and Raftery to perfect symbols of the sorrow of beauty and of the
magnificence and penury of dreams.
1900.
II
When I was in a northern town awhile ago I had a long talk with a man
who had lived in a neighbouring country district when he was a boy. He
told me that when a very beautiful girl was born in a family that had
not been noted for good looks, her beauty was thought to have come from
the Sidhe, and to bring misfortune with it. He went over the names of
several beautiful girls that he had known, and said that beauty had
never brought happiness to anybody. It was a thing, he said, to be
proud of and afraid of. I wish I had written out his words at the time,
for they were more picturesque than my memory of them.
1902.
FOOTNOTE:
[C] A 'pattern,' or 'patron,' is a festival in honour of a saint.
A KNIGHT OF THE SHEEP
AWAY to the north of Ben Bulben and Cope's mountain lives 'a strong
farmer,' a knight of the sheep they would have called him in the Gaelic
days. Proud of his descent from one of the most fighting clans of the
Middle Ages, he is a man of force alike in his words and in his deeds.
There is but one man that swears like him, and this man lives far away
upon the mountain. 'Father in heaven, what have I done to deserve
this? ' he says when he has lost his pipe; and no man but he who lives
on the mountain can rival his language on a fair day over a bargain. He
is passionate and abrupt in his movements, and when angry tosses his
white beard about with his left hand.
One day I was dining with him when the servant-maid announced a certain
Mr. O'Donnell. A sudden silence fell upon the old man and upon his two
daughters. At last the eldest daughter said somewhat severely to her
father, 'Go and ask him to come in and dine. ' The old man went out,
and then came in looking greatly relieved, and said, 'He says he will
not dine with us. ' 'Go out,' said the daughter, 'and ask him into the
back parlour, and give him some whiskey. ' Her father, who had just
finished his dinner, obeyed sullenly, and I heard the door of the back
parlour--a little room where the daughters sat and sewed during the
evening--shut to behind the men. The daughter then turned to me and
said, 'Mr. O'Donnell is the tax-gatherer, and last year he raised our
taxes, and my father was very angry, and when he came, brought him
into the dairy, and sent the dairy-woman away on a message, and then
swore at him a great deal. "I will teach you, sir," O'Donnell replied,
"that the law can protect its officers"; but my father reminded him
that he had no witness. At last my father got tired, and sorry too,
and said he would show him a short way home. When they were half-way
to the main road they came on a man of my father's who was ploughing,
and this somehow brought back remembrance of the wrong. He sent the man
away on a message, and began to swear at the tax-gatherer again. When
I heard of it I was disgusted that he should have made such a fuss
over a miserable creature like O'Donnell; and when I heard a few weeks
ago that O'Donnell's only son had died and left him heart-broken, I
resolved to make my father be kind to him next time he came. '
She then went out to see a neighbour, and I sauntered towards the back
parlour. When I came to the door I heard angry voices inside. The two
men were evidently getting on to the tax again, for I could hear them
bandying figures to and fro. I opened the door; at sight of my face
the farmer was reminded of his peaceful intentions, and asked me if I
knew where the whiskey was. I had seen him put it into the cupboard,
and was able therefore to find it and get it out, looking at the thin,
grief-struck face of the tax-gatherer. He was rather older than my
friend, and very much more feeble and worn, and of a very different
type. He was not like him, a robust, successful man, but rather one of
those whose feet find no resting-place upon the earth. I recognized one
of the children of reverie, and said, 'You are doubtless of the stock
of the old O'Donnells. I know well the hole in the river where their
treasure lies buried under the guard of a serpent with many heads. '
'Yes, sur,' he replied, 'I am the last of a line princes. '
We then fell to talking of many commonplace things, and my friend did
not once toss up his beard, but was very friendly. At last the gaunt
old tax-gatherer got up to go, and my friend said, 'I hope we will
have a glass together next year. ' 'No, no,' was the answer, 'I shall
be dead next year,' 'I too have lost sons,' said the other, in quite a
gentle voice. 'But your sons were not like my son. ' And then the two
men parted, with an angry flush and bitter hearts, and had I not cast
between them some common words or other, might not have parted, but
have fallen rather into an angry discussion of the value of their dead
sons. If I had not pity for all the children of reverie I should have
let them fight it out, and would now have many a wonderful oath to
record.
The knight of the sheep would have had the victory, for no soul that
wears this garment of blood and clay can surpass him. He was but once
beaten; and this is his tale of how it was. He and some farm hands were
playing at cards in a small cabin that stood against the end of a big
barn. A wicked woman had once lived in this cabin. Suddenly one of the
players threw down an ace and began to swear without any cause. His
swearing was so dreadful that the others stood up, and my friend said,
'All is not right here; there is a spirit in him. ' They ran to the door
that led into the barn to get away as quickly as possible. The wooden
bolt would not move, so the knight of the sheep took a saw which stood
against the wall near at hand, and sawed through the bolt, and at once
the door flew open with a bang, as though some one had been holding it,
and they fled through.
AN ENDURING HEART
ONE day a friend of mine was making a sketch of my Knight of the Sheep.
The old man's daughter was sitting by, and, when the conversation
drifted to love and love-making, she said, 'Oh, father, tell him
about your love affair. ' The old man took his pipe out of his mouth,
and said, 'Nobody ever marries the woman he loves,' and then, with
a chuckle, 'there were fifteen of them I liked better than the
woman I married,' and he repeated many women's names. He went on to
tell how when he was a lad he had worked for his grandfather, his
mother's father, and was called (my friend has forgotten why) by his
grandfather's name, which we will say was Doran. He had a great friend,
whom I shall call John Byrne; and one day he and his friend went to
Queenstown to await an emigrant ship, that was to take John Byrne
to America. When they were walking along the quay, they saw a girl
sitting on a seat, crying miserably, and two men standing up in front
of her quarrelling with one another. Doran said, 'I think I know what
is wrong. _That_ man will be her brother, and _that_ man will be her
lover, and the brother is sending her to America to get her away from
the lover. How she is crying! but I think I could console her myself. '
Presently the lover and brother went away, and Doran began to walk up
and down before her, saying, 'Mild weather, Miss,' or the like. She
answered him in a little while, and the three began to talk together.
The emigrant ship did not arrive for some days; and the three drove
about on outside cars very innocently and happily, seeing everything
that was to be seen. When at last the ship came, and Doran had to break
it to her that he was not going to America, she cried more after him
than after the first lover. Doran whispered to Byrne as he went aboard
ship, 'Now, Byrne, I don't grudge her to you, but don't marry young. '
When the story got to this, the farmer's daughter joined in mockingly
with, 'I suppose you said that for Byrne's good, father. ' But the
old man insisted that he _had_ said it for Byrne's good; and went
on to tell how, when he got a letter telling of Byrne's engagement
to the girl, he wrote him the same advice. Years passed by, and he
heard nothing; and though he was now married, he could not keep from
wondering what she was doing. At last he went to America to find out,
and though he asked many people for tidings, he could get none. More
years went by, and his wife was dead, and he well on in years, and a
rich farmer with not a few great matters on his hands. He found an
excuse in some vague business to go out to America again, and to begin
his search again. One day he fell into talk with an Irishman in a
railway carriage, and asked him, as his way was, about emigrants from
this place and that, and at last, 'Did you ever hear of the miller's
daughter from Innis Rath? ' and he named the woman he was looking for.
'Oh yes,' said the other, 'she is married to a friend of mine, John
MacEwing. She lives at such-and-such a street in Chicago. ' Doran went
to Chicago and knocked at her door. She opened the door herself, and
was 'not a bit changed. ' He gave her his real name, which he had taken
again after his grandfather's death, and the name of the man he had
met in the train. She did not recognize him, but asked him to stay to
dinner, saying that her husband would be glad to meet anybody who knew
that old friend of his. They talked of many things, but for all their
talk, I do not know why, and perhaps he did not know why, he never told
her who he was. At dinner he asked her about Byrne, and she put her
head down on the table and began to cry, and she cried so he was afraid
her husband might be angry. He was afraid to ask what had happened to
Byrne, and left soon after, never to see her again.
When the old man had finished the story, he said, 'Tell that to Mr.
Yeats, he will make a poem about it, perhaps. ' But the daughter said,
'Oh no, father. Nobody could make a poem about a woman like that. '
Alas! I have never made the poem, perhaps because my own heart which
has loved Helen and all the lovely and fickle women of the world, would
be too sore. There are things it is well not to ponder over too much,
things that bare words are the best suited for.
1902.
THE SORCERERS
IN Ireland we hear but little of the darker powers,[D] and come across
any who have seen them even more rarely, for the imagination of the
people dwells rather upon the fantastic and capricious, and fantasy
and caprice would lose the freedom which is their breath of life, were
they to unite them either with evil or with good. And yet the wise are
of opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his
rapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who store
their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit
hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and
melancholy multitude. They hold, too, that he who by long desire or
through accident of birth possesses the power of piercing into their
hidden abode can see them there, those who were once men or women
full of a terrible vehemence, and those who have never lived upon the
earth, moving slowly and with a subtler malice. The dark powers cling
about us, it is said, day and night, like bats upon an old tree; and
that we do not hear more of them is merely because the darker kinds of
magic have been but little practised. I have indeed come across very
few persons in Ireland who try to communicate with evil powers, and the
few I have met keep their purpose and practice wholly hidden from those
among whom they live. They are mainly small clerks and the like, and
meet for the purpose of their art in a room hung with black hangings.
They would not admit me into this room, but finding me not altogether
ignorant of the arcane science, showed gladly elsewhere what they would
do. 'Come to us,' said their leader, a clerk in a large flour-mill,
'and we will show you spirits who will talk to you face to face, and in
shapes as solid and heavy as our own. '
I had been talking of the power of communicating in states of trance
with the angelical and faery beings,--the children of the day and of the
twilight,--and he had been contending that we should only believe in
what we can see and feel when in our ordinary everyday state of mind.
'Yes,' I said, 'I will come to you,' or some such words; 'but I will
not permit myself to become entranced, and will therefore know whether
these shapes you talk of are any the more to be touched and felt by the
ordinary senses than are those I talk of. ' I was not denying the power
of other beings to take upon themselves a clothing of mortal substance,
but only that simple invocations, such as he spoke of, seemed unlikely
to do more than cast the mind into trance, and thereby bring it into
the presence of the powers of day, twilight, and darkness.
'But,' he said, 'we have seen them move the furniture hither and
thither, and they go at our bidding, and help or harm people who know
nothing of them. ' I am not giving the exact words, but as accurately as
I can the substance of our talk.
On the night arranged I turned up about eight, and found the leader
sitting alone in almost total darkness in a small back room. He was
dressed in a black gown, like an inquisitor's dress in an old drawing,
that left nothing of him visible except his eyes, which peered out
through two small round holes. Upon the table in front of him was
a brass dish of burning herbs, a large bowl, a skull covered with
painted symbols, two crossed daggers, and certain implements shaped
like quern stones, which were used to control the elemental powers
in some fashion I did not discover. I also put on a black gown, and
remember that it did not fit perfectly, and that it interfered with my
movements considerably. The sorcerer then took a black cock out of a
basket, and cut its throat with one of the daggers, letting the blood
fall into the large bowl. He opened a book and began an invocation,
which was certainly not English, and had a deep guttural sound. Before
he had finished, another of the sorcerers, a man of about twenty-five,
came in, and having put on a black gown also, seated himself at my
left hand. I had the invoker directly in front of me, and soon began
to find his eyes, which glittered through the small holes in his
hood, affecting me in a curious way. I struggled hard against their
influence, and my head began to ache. The invocation continued, and
nothing happened for the first few minutes. Then the invoker got up
and extinguished the light in the hall, so that no glimmer might come
through the slit under the door. There was now no light except from the
herbs on the brass dish, and no sound except from the deep guttural
murmur of the invocation.
Presently the man at my left swayed himself about, and cried out, 'O
god! O god! ' I asked him what ailed him, but he did not know he had
spoken. A moment after he said he could see a great serpent moving
about the room, and became considerably excited. I saw nothing with any
definite shape, but thought that black clouds were forming about me.
I
felt I must fall into a trance if I did not struggle against it, and
that the influence which was causing this trance was out of harmony
with itself, in other words, evil. After a struggle I got rid of the
black clouds, and was able to observe with my ordinary senses again.
The two sorcerers now began to see black and white columns moving about
the room, and finally a man in a monk's habit, and they became greatly
puzzled because I did not see these things also, for to them they were
as solid as the table before them. The invoker appeared to be gradually
increasing in power, and I began to feel as if a tide of darkness
was pouring from him and concentrating itself about me; and now too
I noticed that the man on my left hand had passed into a death-like
trance. With a last great effort I drove off the black clouds; but
feeling them to be the only shapes I should see without passing into
a trance, and having no great love for them, I asked for lights, and
after the needful exorcism returned to the ordinary world.
I said to the more powerful of the two sorcerers--'What would happen
if one of your spirits had overpowered me? ' 'You would go out of this
room,' he answered, 'with his character added to your own. ' I asked
about the origin of his sorcery, but got little of importance, except
that he had learned it from his father. He would not tell me more, for
he had, it appeared, taken a vow of secrecy.
For some days I could not get over the feeling of having a number
of deformed and grotesque figures lingering about me. The Bright
Powers are always beautiful and desirable, and the Dim Powers are now
beautiful, now quaintly grotesque, but the Dark Powers express their
unbalanced natures in shapes of ugliness and horror.
FOOTNOTE:
[D] I know better now. We have the dark powers much more than I
thought, but not as much as the Scottish, and yet I think the
imagination of the people does dwell chiefly upon the fantastic and
capricious.
THE DEVIL
MY old Mayo woman told me one day that something very bad had come down
the road and gone into the house opposite, and though she would not say
what it was, I knew quite well. Another day she told me of two friends
of hers who had been made love to by one whom they believed to be the
devil. One of them was standing by the road-side when he came by on
horseback, and asked her to mount up behind him, and go riding. When
she would not he vanished. The other was out on the road late at night
waiting for her young man, when something came flapping and rolling
along the road up to her feet. It had the likeness of a newspaper, and
presently it flapped up into her face, and she knew by the size of
it that it was the _Irish Times_. All of a sudden it changed into a
young man, who asked her to go walking with him. She would not, and he
vanished.
I know of an old man too, on the slopes of Ben Bulben, who found the
devil ringing a bell under his bed, and he went off and stole the
chapel bell and rang him out. It may be that this, like the others, was
not the devil at all, but some poor wood spirit whose cloven feet had
got him into trouble.
HAPPY AND UNHAPPY THEOLOGIANS
I
A MAYO woman once said to me, 'I knew a servant girl who hung herself
for the love of God. She was lonely for the priest and her society,[E]
and hung herself to the banisters with a scarf. She was no sooner dead
than she became white as a lily, and if it had been murder or suicide
she would have become black as black. They gave her Christian burial,
and the priest said she was no sooner dead than she was with the Lord.
So nothing matters that you do for the love of God. ' I do not wonder
at the pleasure she has in telling this story, for she herself loves
all holy things with an ardour that brings them quickly to her lips.
She told me once that she never hears anything described in a sermon
that she does not afterwards see with her eyes. She has described to
me the gates of Purgatory as they showed themselves to her eyes, but
I remember nothing of the description except that she could not see
the souls in trouble but only the gates. Her mind continually dwells
on what is pleasant and beautiful. One day she asked me what month
and what flower were the most beautiful. When I answered that I did
not know, she said, 'The month of May, because of the Virgin, and the
lily of the valley, because it never sinned, but came pure out of the
rocks,' and then she asked, 'What is the cause of the three cold months
of winter? ' I did not know even that, and so she said, 'The sin of man
and the vengeance of God. ' Christ Himself was not only blessed, but
perfect in all manly proportions in her eyes, so much do beauty and
holiness go together in her thoughts. He alone of all men was exactly
six feet high, all others are a little more or a little less.
Her thoughts and her sights of the people of faery are pleasant and
beautiful too, and I have never heard her call them the Fallen Angels.
They are people like ourselves, only better-looking, and many and many
a time she has gone to the window to watch them drive their waggons
through the sky, waggon behind waggon in long line, or to the door to
hear them singing and dancing in the Forth. They sing chiefly, it
seems, a song called 'The Distant Waterfall,' and though they once
knocked her down she never thinks badly of them. She saw them most
easily when she was in service in King's County, and one morning a
little while ago she said to me, 'Last night I was waiting up for the
master and it was a quarter-past eleven. I heard a bang right down on
the table. "King's County all over," says I, and I laughed till I was
near dead. It was a warning I was staying too long. They wanted the
place to themselves. ' I told her once of somebody who saw a faery and
fainted, and she said, 'It could not have been a faery, but some bad
thing, nobody could faint at a faery. It was a demon. I was not afraid
when they near put me, and the bed under me, out through the roof. I
wasn't afraid either when you were at some work and I heard a thing
coming flop-flop up the stairs like an eel, and squealing. It went to
all the doors. It could not get in where I was. I would have sent it
through the universe like a flash of fire. There was a man in my place,
a tearing fellow, and he put one of them down. He went out to meet it
on the road, but he must have been told the words. But the faeries are
the best neighbours. If you do good to them they will do good to you,
but they don't like you to be on their path. ' Another time she said to
me, 'They are always good to the poor. '
II
There is, however, a man in a Galway village who can see nothing but
wickedness. Some think him very holy, and others think him a little
crazed, but some of his talk reminds one of those old Irish visions of
the Three Worlds, which are supposed to have give Dante the plan of
the _Divine Comedy_. But I could not imagine this man seeing Paradise.
He is especially angry with the people of faery, and describes the
faun-like feet that are so common among them, who are indeed children
of Pan, to prove them children of Satan. He will not grant that 'they
carry away women, though there are many that say so,' but he is certain
that they are 'as thick as the sands of the sea about us, and they
tempt poor mortals. '
He says, 'There is a priest I know of was looking along the ground like
as if he was hunting for something, and a voice said to him, "If you
want to see them you'll see enough of them," and his eyes were opened
and he saw the ground thick with them. Singing they do be sometimes,
and dancing, but all the time they have cloven feet. ' 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?
