No More Learning

There
was nothing of the magnificence or the pageantry she had expected.
The man came to a large hall and to a little chapel opening out of
it, where a ceremony was taking place. There were six girls dressed
in white, who took from the altar some yellow object--I thought it was
gold, for though, like my acquaintance, I was told not to see, I could
not help seeing. Somebody else thought that it was yellow flowers, and
I think the girls, though I cannot remember clearly, laid it between
the man's hands. He went out after a time, and as he passed through
the great hall one of us, I forget whom, noticed that he passed over
two gravestones. Then the vision became broken, but presently he stood
in a monk's habit among men-at-arms in the middle of a village reading
from a parchment. He was calling villagers about him, and presently
he and they and the men-at-arms took ship for some long voyage. The
vision became broken again, and when we could see clearly they had
come to what seemed the Holy Land. They had begun some kind of sacred
labour among palm-trees. The common men among them stood idle, but the
gentlemen carried large stones, bringing them from certain directions,
from the cardinal points I think, with a ceremonious formality. The
evoker of spirits said they must be making some kind of masonic house.
His mind, like the minds of so many students of these hidden things,
was always running on masonry and discovering it in strange places.

We broke the vision that we might have supper, breaking it with some
form of words which I forget. When supper had ended the seeress cried
out that while we had been eating they had been building, and they
had built not a masonic house but a great stone cross. And now they
had all gone away but the man who had been in chain armour and two
monks we had not noticed before. He was standing against the cross,
his feet upon two stone rests a little above the ground, and his arms
spread out. He seemed to stand there all day, but when night came he
went to a little cell, that was beside two other cells. I think they
were like the cells I have seen in the Aran Islands, but I cannot be
certain. Many days seemed to pass, and all day every day he stood upon
the cross, and we never saw anybody there but him and the two monks.
Many years seemed to pass, making the vision flutter like a drift of
leaves before our eyes, and he grew old and white-haired, and we saw
the two monks, old and white-haired, holding him upon the cross. I
asked the evoker of spirits why the man stood there, and before he had
time to answer I saw two people, a man and a woman, rising like a dream
within a dream, before the eyes of the man upon the cross. The evoker
of spirits saw them too, and said that one of them held up his arms and
they were without hands. I thought of the two grave-stones the man in
chain mail had passed over in the great hall when he came out of the
chapel, and asked the evoker of spirits if the knight was undergoing a
penance for violence, and while I was asking him, and he was saying
that it might be so but he did not know, the vision, having completed
its circle, vanished.

It had not, so far as I could see, the personal significance of the
other vision, but it was certainly strange and beautiful, though I
alone seemed to see its beauty. Who was it that made the story, if it
were but a story? I did not, and the seeress did not, and the evoker
of spirits did not and could not. It arose in three minds, for I
cannot remember my acquaintance taking any part, and it rose without
confusion, and without labour, except the labour of keeping the mind's
eye awake, and more swiftly than any pen could have written it out.
It may be, as Blake said of one of his poems, that the author was in
eternity. In coming years I was to see and hear of many such visions,
and though I was not to be convinced, though half convinced once or
twice, that they were old lives, in an ordinary sense of the word
life, I was to learn that they have almost always some quite definite
relation to dominant moods and moulding events in this life. They are,
perhaps, in most cases, though the vision I have but just described was
not, it seems, among the cases, symbolical histories of these moods and
events, or rather symbolical shadows of the impulses that have made
them, messages as it were out of the ancestral being of the questioner.

At the time these two visions meant little more to me, if I can
remember my feeling at the time, than a proof of the supremacy of
imagination, of the power of many minds to become one, overpowering one
another by spoken words and by unspoken thought till they have become a
single intense, unhesitating energy. One mind was doubtless the master,
I thought, but all the minds gave a little, creating or revealing for a
moment what I must call a supernatural artist.


IV

Some years afterwards I was staying with some friends in Paris. I had
got up before breakfast and gone out to buy a newspaper. I had noticed
the servant, a girl who had come from the country some years before,
laying the table for breakfast. As I had passed her I had been telling
myself one of those long foolish tales which one tells only to oneself.
If something had happened that had not happened, I would have hurt my
arm, I thought. I saw myself with my arm in a sling in the middle of
some childish adventures. I returned with the newspaper and met my host
and hostess in the door. The moment they saw me they cried out, 'Why,
the _bonne_ has just told us you had your arm in a sling. We thought
something must have happened to you last night, that you had been run
over maybe'--or some such words. I had been dining out at the other end
of Paris, and had come in after everybody had gone to bed. I had cast
my imagination so strongly upon the servant that she had seen it, and
with what had appeared to be more than the mind's eye.

One afternoon, about the same time, I was thinking very intently of
a certain fellow-student for whom I had a message, which I hesitated
about writing. In a couple of days I got a letter from a place some
hundreds of miles away where that student was. On the afternoon when
I had been thinking so intently I had suddenly appeared there amid a
crowd of people in a hotel and as seeming solid as if in the flesh. My
fellow-student had seen me, but no one else, and had asked me to come
again when the people had gone. I had vanished, but had come again
in the middle of the night and given the message. I myself had no
knowledge of casting an imagination upon one so far away.

I could tell of stranger images, of stranger enchantments, of
stranger imaginations, cast consciously or unconsciously over as
great distances by friends or by myself, were it not that the greater
energies of the mind seldom break forth but when the deeps are
loosened. They break forth amid events too private or too sacred for
public speech, or seem themselves, I know not why, to belong to hidden
things. I have written of these breakings forth, these loosenings of
the deep, with some care and some detail, but I shall keep my record
shut. After all, one can but bear witness less to convince him who
won't believe than to protect him who does, as Blake puts it, enduring
unbelief and misbelief and ridicule as best one may. I shall be content
to show that past times have believed as I do, by quoting Joseph
Glanvil's description of the Scholar Gipsy. Joseph Glanvil is dead, and
will not mind unbelief and misbelief and ridicule.

The Scholar Gipsy, too, is dead, unless indeed perfectly wise magicians
can live till it please them to die, and he is wandering somewhere,
even if one cannot see him, as Arnold imagined, 'at some lone ale-house
in the Berkshire moors, on the warm ingle-bench,' or 'crossing the
stripling Thames at Bablock Hithe,' 'trailing his fingers in the cool
stream,' or 'giving store of flowers--the frail-leaf'd white anemone,
dark bluebells drenched with dews of summer eves,' to the girls 'who
from the distant hamlets come to dance around the Fyfield elm in May,'
or 'sitting upon the river bank o'ergrown,' living on through time
'with a free onward impulse. ' This is Joseph Glanvil's story--

There was very lately a lad in the University of
Oxford, who being of very pregnant and ready parts and
yet wanting the encouragement of preferment, was by
his poverty forced to leave his studies there, and to
cast himself upon the wide world for a livelihood. Now
his necessities growing daily on him, and wanting the
help of friends to relieve him, he was at last forced
to join himself to a company of vagabond gipsies,
whom occasionally he met with, and to follow their
trade for a maintenance. . . . After he had been a pretty
while well exercised in the trade, there chanced to
ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been
of his acquaintance. The scholar had quickly spied
out these old friends among the gipsies, and their
amazement to see him among such society had well-nigh
discovered him; but by a sign he prevented them owning
him before that crew, and taking one of them aside
privately desired him with his friend to go to an inn,
not far distant, promising there to come to them. They
accordingly went thither and he follows: after their
first salutation his friends inquire how he came to
lead so odd a life as that was, and so joined himself
into such a beggarly company. The scholar gipsy having
given them an account of the necessity which drove
him to that kind of life, told them that the people
he went with were not such impostors as they were
taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of
learning among them and could do wonders by the power
of imagination, and that himself had learned much of
their art and improved it further than themselves
could. And to evince the truth of what he told them,
he said he'd remove into another room, leaving them to
discourse together; and upon his return tell them the
sense of what they had talked of; which accordingly
he performed, giving them a full account of what had
passed between them in his absence. The scholars
being amazed at so unexpected a discovery, earnestly
desired him to unriddle the mystery. In which he gave
them satisfaction by telling them that what he did
was by the power of imagination, his phantasy leading
theirs; and that himself had dictated to them the
discourse they had held together while he was from
them; that there were warrantable ways of heightening
the imagination to that pitch as to bend another's, and
that when he had compassed the whole secret, some parts
of which he was yet ignorant of, he intended to leave
their company and give the world an account of what he
had learned.

If all who have described events like this have not dreamed, we should
rewrite our histories, for all men, certainly all imaginative men,
must be for ever casting forth enchantments, glamours, illusions; and
all men, especially tranquil men who have no powerful egotistic life,
must be continually passing under their power. Our most elaborate
thoughts, elaborate purposes, precise emotions, are often, as I think,
not really ours, but have on a sudden come up, as it were, out of
hell or down out of heaven. The historian should remember, should he
not? angels and devils not less than kings and soldiers, and plotters
and thinkers. What matter if the angel or devil, as indeed certain
old writers believed, first wrapped itself with an organized shape in
some man's imagination? what matter 'if God himself only acts or is in
existing beings or men,' as Blake believed? we must none the less admit
that invisible beings, far wandering influences, shapes that may have
floated from a hermit of the wilderness, brood over council-chambers
and studies and battle-fields. We should never be certain that it was
not some woman treading in the wine-press who began that subtle change
in men's minds, that powerful movement of thought and imagination about
which so many Germans have written; or that the passion, because of
which so many countries were given to the sword, did not begin in the
mind of some shepherd boy, lighting up his eyes for a moment before it
ran upon its way.


V

We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more
visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully
than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive
meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated,
self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive. Our souls that
were once naked to the winds of heaven are now thickly clad, and have
learned to build a house and light a fire upon its hearth, and shut
to the doors and windows. The winds can, indeed, make us draw near
to the fire, or can even lift the carpet and whistle under the door,
but they could do worse out on the plains long ago. A certain learned
man, quoted by Mr. Lang in his _Making of Religion_, contends that the
memories of primitive man and his thoughts of distant places must have
had the intensity of hallucination, because there was nothing in his
mind to draw his attention away from them--an explanation that does not
seem to me complete--and Mr. Lang goes on to quote certain travellers to
prove that savages live always on the edges of vision. One Laplander
who wished to become a Christian, and thought visions but heathenish,
confessed to a traveller, to whom he had given a minute account of many
distant events, read doubtless in that traveller's mind, 'that he knew
not how to make use of his eyes, since things altogether distant were
present to them. ' I myself could find in one district in Galway but one
man who had not seen what I can but call spirits, and he was in his
dotage. 'There is no man mowing a meadow but sees them at one time or
another,' said a man in a different district.

If I can unintentionally cast a glamour, an enchantment, over persons
of our own time who have lived for years in great cities, there is
no reason to doubt that men could cast intentionally a far stronger
enchantment, a far stronger glamour, over the more sensitive people
of ancient times, or that men can still do so where the old order of
life remains unbroken. Why should not the Scholar Gipsy cast his spell
over his friends? Why should not St. Patrick, or he of whom the story
was first told, pass his enemies, he and all his clerics, as a herd
of deer? Why should not enchanters like him in the _Morte d'Arthur_
make troops of horse seem but grey stones? Why should not the Roman
soldiers, though they came of a civilization which was ceasing to be
sensitive to these things, have trembled for a moment before the
enchantments of the Druids of Mona? Why should not the Jesuit father,
or the Count Saint Germain, or whoever the tale was first told of, have
really seemed to leave the city in a coach and four by all the Twelve
Gates at once? Why should not Moses and the enchanters of Pharaoh have
made their staffs as the medicine men of many primitive peoples make
their pieces of old rope seem like devouring serpents? Why should not
that mediaeval enchanter have made summer and all its blossoms seem to
break forth in middle winter?

May we not learn some day to rewrite our histories, when they touch
upon these things too?

Men who are imaginative writers to-day may well have preferred to
influence the imagination of others more directly in past times.
Instead of learning their craft with paper and a pen they may have
sat for hours imagining themselves to be stocks and stones and beasts
of the wood, till the images were so vivid that the passers-by became
but a part of the imagination of the dreamer, and wept or laughed or
ran away as he would have them. Have not poetry and music arisen,
as it seems, out of the sounds the enchanters made to help their
imagination to enchant, to charm, to bind with a spell themselves and
the passers-by? These very words, a chief part of all praises of music
or poetry, still cry to us their origin. And just as the musician or
the poet enchants and charms and binds with a spell his own mind when
he would enchant the minds of others, so did the enchanter create or
reveal for himself as well as for others the supernatural artist or
genius, the seeming transitory mind made out of many minds, whose work
I saw, or thought I saw, in that suburban house. He kept the doors too,
as it seems, of those less transitory minds, the genius of the family,
the genius of the tribe, or it may be, when he was mighty-souled
enough, the genius of the world. Our history speaks of opinions and
discoveries, but in ancient times when, as I think, men had their eyes
ever upon those doors, history spoke of commandments and revelations.
They looked as carefully and as patiently towards Sinai and its
thunders as we look towards parliaments and laboratories. We are always
praising men in whom the individual life has come to perfection,
but they were always praising the one mind, their foundation of all
perfection.


VI

I once saw a young Irish woman, fresh from a convent school, cast into
a profound trance, though not by a method known to any hypnotist. In
her waking state she thought the apple of Eve was the kind of apple
you can buy at the greengrocer's, but in her trance she saw the Tree
of Life with ever-sighing souls moving in its branches instead of sap,
and among its leaves all the fowls of the air, and on its highest bough
one white fowl bearing a crown. When I went home I took from the shelf
a translation of _The Book of Concealed Mystery_, an old Jewish book,
and cutting the pages came upon this passage, which I cannot think I
had ever read: 'The Tree, . . . is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
of Evil . . . in its branches the birds lodge and build their nests, the
souls and the angels have their place. '

I once saw a young Church of Ireland man, a bank clerk in the west of
Ireland, thrown in a like trance. I have no doubt that he, too, was
quite certain that the apple of Eve was a greengrocer's apple, and yet
he saw the tree and heard the souls sighing through its branches, and
saw apples with human faces, and laying his ear to an apple heard
a sound as of fighting hosts within. Presently he strayed from the
tree and came to the edge of Eden, and there he found himself not by
the wilderness he had learned of at the Sunday-school, but upon the
summit of a great mountain, of a mountain 'two miles high. ' The whole
summit, in contradiction to all that would have seemed probable to his
waking mind, was a great walled garden. Some years afterwards I found
a mediaeval diagram, which pictured Eden as a walled garden upon a high
mountain.

Where did these intricate symbols come from? Neither I nor the one
or two people present or the seers had ever seen, I am convinced,
the description in _The Book of Concealed Mystery_, or the mediaeval
diagram. Remember that the images appeared in a moment perfect in
all their complexity. If one can imagine that the seers or that I
myself or another had read of these images and forgotten it, that the
supernatural artist's knowledge of what was in our buried memories
accounted for these visions, there are numberless other visions to
account for. One cannot go on believing in improbable knowledge for
ever. For instance, I find in my diary that on December 27, 1897, a
seer to whom I had given a certain old Irish symbol, saw Brigit, the
goddess, holding out 'a glittering and wriggling serpent,' and yet I
feel certain that neither I nor he knew anything of her association
with the serpent until _Carmina Gadelica_ was published a few months
ago. And an old Irish woman who can neither read nor write has
described to me a woman dressed like Dian, with helmet, and short skirt
and sandals, and what seemed to be buskins. Why, too, among all the
countless stories of visions that I have gathered in Ireland, or that
a friend has gathered for me, are there none that mix the dress of
different periods? The seers when they are but speaking from tradition
will mix everything together, and speak of Finn mac Cool going to the
Assizes at Cork. Almost every one who has ever busied himself with such
matters has come, in trance or dream, upon some new and strange symbol
or event, which he has afterwards found in some work he had never read
or heard of. Examples like this are as yet too little classified, too
little analyzed, to convince the stranger, but some of them are proof
enough for those they have happened to, proof that there is a memory of
nature that reveals events and symbols of distant centuries. Mystics
of many countries and many centuries have spoken of this memory; and
the honest men and charlatans, who keep the magical traditions which
will some day be studied as a part of folk-lore, base most that is
of importance in their claims upon this memory. I have read of it in
Paracelsus and in some Indian book that describes the people of past
days as still living within it, 'Thinking the thought and doing the
deed. ' And I have found it in the prophetic books of William Blake, who
calls its images 'the bright sculptures of Los's Halls'; and says that
all events, 'all love stories,' renew themselves from those images. It
is perhaps well that so few believe in it, for if many did many would
go out of parliaments and universities and libraries and run into the
wilderness to so waste the body, and to so hush the unquiet mind that,
still living, they might pass the doors the dead pass daily; for who
among the wise would trouble himself with making laws or in writing
history or in weighing the earth if the things of eternity seemed ready
to hand?


VII

I find in my diary of magical events for 1899 that I awoke at 3 A. M.
out of a nightmare, and imagined one symbol to prevent its recurrence,
and imagined another, a simple geometrical form, which calls up dreams
of luxuriant vegetable life, that I might have pleasant dreams. I
imagined it faintly, being very sleepy, and went to sleep. I had
confused dreams which seemed to have no relation with the symbol. I
awoke about eight, having for the time forgotten both nightmare and
symbol. Presently I dozed off again and began half to dream and half
to see, as one does between sleep and waking, enormous flowers and
grapes. I awoke and recognized that what I had dreamed or seen was the
kind of thing appropriate to the symbol before I remembered having
used it. I find another record, though made some time after the event,
of having imagined over the head of a person, who was a little of a
seer, a combined symbol of elemental air and elemental water. This
person, who did not know what symbol I was using, saw a pigeon flying
with a lobster in his bill. I find that on December 13, 1898, I used a
certain star-shaped symbol with a seeress, getting her to look at it
intently before she began seeing. She saw a rough stone house, and in
the middle of the house the skull of a horse. I find that I had used
the same symbol a few days before with a seer, and that he had seen
a rough stone house, and in the middle of the house something under
a cloth marked with the Hammer of Thor. He had lifted the cloth and
discovered a skeleton of gold with teeth of diamonds, and eyes of some
unknown dim precious stones. I had made a note to this last vision,
pointing out that we had been using a Solar symbol a little earlier.
Solar symbols often call up visions of gold and precious stones. I
do not give these examples to prove my arguments, but to illustrate
them. I know that my examples will awaken in all who have not met the
like, or who are not on other grounds inclined towards my arguments,
a most natural incredulity. It was long before I myself would admit
an inherent power in symbols, for it long seemed to me that one could
account for everything by the power of one imagination over another,
telepathy as it is called with that separation of knowledge and life,
of word and emotion, which is the sterility of scientific speech.
The symbol seemed powerful, I thought, merely because we thought it
powerful, and we would do just as well without it. In those days I used
symbols made with some ingenuity instead of merely imagining them. I
used to give them to the person I was experimenting with, and tell him
to hold them to his forehead without looking at them; and sometimes I
made a mistake. I learned from these mistakes that if I did not myself
imagine the symbol, in which case he would have a mixed vision, it
was the symbol I gave by mistake that produced the vision. Then I met
with a seer who could say to me, 'I have a vision of a square pond,
but I can see your thought, and you expect me to see an oblong pond,'
or 'The symbol you are imagining has made me see a woman holding a
crystal, but it was a moonlight sea I should have seen. ' I discovered
that the symbol hardly ever failed to call up its typical scene, its
typical event, its typical person, but that I could practically never
call up, no matter how vividly I imagined it, the particular scene, the
particular event, the particular person I had in my own mind, and that
when I could, the two visions rose side by side.

I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers
whether they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half
unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the
artist. At first I tried to distinguish between symbols and symbols,
between what I called inherent symbols and arbitrary symbols, but the
distinction has come to mean little or nothing. Whether their power
has arisen out of themselves, or whether it has an arbitrary origin,
matters little, for they act, as I believe, because the great memory
associates them with certain events and moods and persons. Whatever
the passions of man have gathered about, becomes a symbol in the great
memory, and in the hands of him who has the secret, it is a worker of
wonders, a caller-up of angels or of devils. The symbols are of all
kinds, for everything in heaven or earth has its association, momentous
or trivial, in the great memory, and one never knows what forgotten
events may have plunged it, like the toadstool and the ragweed, into
the great passions. Knowledgeable men and women in Ireland sometimes
distinguish between the simples that work cures by some medical
property in the herb, and those that do their work by magic. Such
magical simples as the husk of the flax, water out of the fork of an
elm-tree, do their work, as I think, by awaking in the depths of the
mind where it mingles with the great mind, and is enlarged by the great
memory, some curative energy, some hypnotic command. They are not what
we call faith cures, for they have been much used and successfully,
the traditions of all lands affirm, over children and over animals,
and to me they seem the only medicine that could have been committed
safely to ancient hands. To pluck the wrong leaf would have been to go
uncured, but, if one had eaten it, one might have been poisoned.


VIII

I have now described that belief in magic which has set me all but
unwilling among those lean and fierce minds who are at war with their
time, who cannot accept the days as they pass, simply and gladly; and
I look at what I have written with some alarm, for I have told more
of the ancient secret than many among my fellow-students think it
right to tell. I have come to believe so many strange things because
of experience, that I see little reason to doubt the truth of many
things that are beyond my experience; and it may be that there are
beings who watch over that ancient secret, as all tradition affirms,
and resent, and perhaps avenge, too fluent speech. They say in the
Aran Islands that if you speak overmuch of the things of Faery your
tongue becomes like a stone, and it seems to me, though doubtless
naturalistic reason would call it Auto-suggestion or the like, that I
have often felt my tongue become just so heavy and clumsy. More than
once, too, as I wrote this very essay I have become uneasy, and have
torn up some paragraph, not for any literary reason, but because some
incident or some symbol that would perhaps have meant nothing to the
reader, seemed, I know not why, to belong to hidden things. Yet I must
write or be of no account to any cause, good or evil; I must commit
what merchandise of wisdom I have to this ship of written speech, and
after all, I have many a time watched it put out to sea with not less
alarm when all the speech was rhyme. We who write, we who bear witness,
must often hear our hearts cry out against us, complaining because
of their hidden things, and I know not but he who speaks of wisdom
may not sometimes in the change that is coming upon the world, have
to fear the anger of the people of Faery, whose country is the heart
of the world--'The Land of the Living Heart. ' Who can keep always to
the little pathway between speech and silence, where one meets none
but discreet revelations? And surely, at whatever risk, we must cry
out that imagination is always seeking to remake the world according
to the impulses and the patterns in that great Mind, and that great
Memory? Can there be anything so important as to cry out that what we
call romance, poetry, intellectual beauty, is the only signal that the
supreme Enchanter, or some one in His councils, is speaking of what has
been, and shall be again, in the consummation of time?

1901.




THE HAPPIEST OF THE POETS.


I

ROSSETTI in one of his letters numbers his favourite colours in the
order of his favour, and throughout his work one feels that he loved
form and colour for themselves and apart from what they represent. One
feels sometimes that he desired a world of essences, of unmixed powers,
of impossible purities. It is as though the last judgment had already
begun in his mind and that the essences and powers, which the divine
hand had mixed into one another to make the loam of life, fell asunder
at his touch. If he painted a flame or a blue distance, he painted as
though he had seen the flame out of whose heart all flames had been
taken, or the blue of the abyss that was before all life; and if he
painted a woman's face he painted it in some moment of intensity when
the ecstasy of the lover and of the saint are alike, and desire becomes
wisdom without ceasing to be desire. He listens to the cry of the flesh
till it becomes proud and passes beyond the world where some immense
desire that the intellect cannot understand mixes with the desire of a
body's warmth and softness. His genius like Shelley's can hardly stir
but to the rejection of nature, whose delight is profusion, but never
intensity, and like Shelley's it follows the Star of the Magi, the
Morning and Evening Star, the mother of impossible hope, although it
follows through deep woods, where the star glimmers among dew-drenched
boughs and not through 'a windswept valley of the Apennine. ' Men like
him cannot be happy as we understand happiness, for to be happy one
must delight like nature in mere profusion, in mere abundance, in
making and doing things, and if one sets an image of the perfect before
one it must be the image that draws her perpetually, the image of a
perfect fulness of natural life, of an Earthly Paradise. One's emotion
must never break the bonds of life, one's hands must never labour to
loosen the silver cord, one's ears must never strain to catch the sound
of Michael's trumpet. That is to say, one must not be among those that
would have prayed in old times in some chapel of the Star, but among
those who would have prayed under the shadow of the Green Tree, and on
the wet stones of the Well, among the worshippers of natural abundance.


II

I do not think it was accident, so subtle are the threads that lead the
soul, that made William Morris, who seems to me to be the one perfectly
happy and fortunate poet of modern times, celebrate the Green Tree and
the goddess Habundia, and wells and enchanted waters in so many books.
In _The Well at the World's End_ green trees and enchanted waters are
shown to us, as they were understood by old writers, who thought that
the generation of all things was through water; for when the water that
gives a long and fortunate life and that can be found by none but such
a one as all women love is found at last, the Dry Tree, the image of
the ruined land, becomes green. To him indeed as to older writers Well
and Tree are all but images of the one thing, of an 'energy' that is
not the less 'eternal delight' because it is half of the body. He never
wrote, and could not have written, of a man or woman who was not of the
kin of Well or Tree. Long before he had named either he had made his
'Wanderers' follow a dream indeed, but a dream of natural happiness,
and all the people of all his poems and stories from the confused
beginning of his art in _The Hollow Land_ to its end in _The Sundering
Flood_, are full of the heavy sweetness of this dream. He wrote indeed
of nothing but of the quest of the Grail, but it was the Heathen Grail
that gave every man his chosen food, and not the Grail of Malory or
Wagner; and he came at last to praise, as other men have praised the
martyrs of religion or of passion, men with lucky eyes and men whom all
women love.

We know so little of man and of the world that we cannot be certain
that the same invisible hands, that gave him an imagination preoccupied
with good fortune, gave him also health and wealth, and the power to
create beautiful things without labour, that he might honour the Green
Tree. It pleases me to imagine the copper mine which brought, as Mr.
Mackail has told, so much unforeseen wealth and in so astonishing a
way, as no less miraculous than the three arrows in _The Sundering
Flood_. No mighty poet in his misery dead could have delighted enough
to make us delight in men 'who knew no vain desire of foolish fame,'
but who thought the dance upon 'the stubble field' and 'the battle
with the earth' better than 'the bitter war' 'where right and wrong
are mixed together. ' 'Oh the trees, the trees! ' he wrote in one of his
early letters, and it was his work to make us, who had been taught to
sympathize with the unhappy till we had grown morbid, to sympathize
with men and women who turned everything into happiness because they
had in them something of the abundance of the beechen boughs or of the
bursting wheat-ear. He alone, I think, has told the story of Alcestis
with perfect sympathy for Admetus, with so perfect a sympathy that he
cannot persuade himself that one so happy died at all; and he, unlike
all other poets, has delighted to tell us that the men after his own
heart, the men of his _News from Nowhere_, sorrowed but a little while
over unhappy love.
He cannot even think of nobility and happiness
apart, for all his people are like his men of Burg Dale who lived 'in
much plenty and ease of life, though not delicately or desiring things
out of measure. They wrought with their hands and wearied themselves;
and they rested from their toil and feasted and were merry; to-morrow
was not a burden to them, nor yesterday a thing which they would fain
forget; life shamed them not nor did death make them afraid. As for the
Dale wherein they dwelt, it was indeed most fair and lovely and they
deemed it the Blessing of the earth, and they trod the flowery grass
beside its rippled stream amidst the green tree-boughs proudly and
joyfully with goodly bodies and merry hearts. '


III

I think of his men as with broad brows and golden beards and mild eyes
and tranquil speech, and of his good women as like 'The Bride' in
whose face Rossetti saw and painted for once the abundance of earth
and not the half-hidden light of his star. They are not in love with
love for its own sake, with a love that is apart from the world or at
enmity with it, as Swinburne imagines Mary Stuart and as all men have
imagined Helen. They do not seek in love that ecstasy, which Shelley's
nightingale called death, that extremity of life in which life seems
to pass away like the Phoenix in flame of its own lighting, but rather
a gentle self-surrender that would lose more than half its sweetness
if it lost the savour of coming days. They are good house-wives; they
sit often at the embroidery frame, and they have wisdom in flocks and
herds and they are before all fruitful mothers. It seems at times as
if their love was less a passion for one man out of the world than
submission to the hazard of destiny, and the hope of motherhood and the
innocent desire of the body. They accept changes and chances of life
as gladly as they accept spring and summer and autumn and winter, and
because they have sat under the shadow of the Green Tree and drunk the
Waters of Abundance out of their hollow hands, the barren blossoms do
not seem to them the most beautiful. When Habundia takes the shape of
Birdalone she comes first as a young naked girl standing among great
trees, and then as an old carline, Birdalone in stately old age. And
when she praises Birdalone's naked body, and speaks of the desire it
shall awaken, praise and desire are innocent because they would not
break the links that chain the days to one another. The desire seems
not other than the desire of the bird for its mate in the heart of the
wood, and we listen to that joyous praise as though a bird watching its
plumage in still water had begun to sing in its joy, or as if we heard
hawk praising hawk in the middle air, and because it is the praise of
one made for all noble life and not for pleasure only, it seems, though
it is the praise of the body, that it is the noblest praise.

Birdalone has never seen her image but in 'a broad latten dish,' so the
wood woman must tell her of her body and praise it.

'Thus it is with thee; thou standest before me a tall and slim maiden,
somewhat thin as befitteth thy seventeen summers; where thy flesh
is bare of wont, as thy throat and thine arms and thy legs from the
middle down, it is tanned a beauteous colour, but otherwhere it is
even as fair a white, wholesome and clean as if the golden sunlight
which fulfilleth the promise of the earth were playing therein. . . .
Delicate and clean-made is the little trench that goeth from thy mouth
to thy lips, and sweet it is, and there is more might in it than sweet
words spoken. Thy lips they are of the finest fashion, yet rather thin
than full; and some would not have it so; but I would, whereas I see
therein a sign of thy valiancy and friendliness. Surely he who did thy
carven chin had a mind to a master work and did no less. Great was the
deftness of thine imaginer, and he would have all folk who see thee
wonder at thy deep thinking and thy carefulness and thy kindness. Ah,
maiden! is it so that thy thoughts are ever deep and solemn? Yet at
least I know it of thee that they be hale and true and sweet.

'My friend, when thou hast a mirror, some of all this thou shalt see,
but not all; and when thou hast a lover some deal wilt thou hear, but
not all. But now thy she-friend may tell it thee all, if she have eyes
to see it, as have I; whereas no man could say so much of thee before
the mere love should overtake him, and turn his speech into the folly
of love and the madness of desire. '

All his good women, whether it is Danae in her tower, or that woman in
_The Wood beyond the World_ who can make the withered flowers in her
girdle grow young again by the touch of her hand, are of the kin of the
wood woman. All his bad women too and his half-bad women are of her
kin. The evils their enchantments make are a disordered abundance like
that of weedy places and they are as cruel as wild creatures are cruel
and they have unbridled desires. One finds these evils in their typical
shape in that isle of the Wondrous Isles, where the wicked witch has
her pleasure-house and her prison, and in that 'isle of the old and the
young,' where until her enchantment is broken second childhood watches
over children who never grow old and who seem to the bystander who
knows their story 'like images' or like 'the rabbits on the grass. ' It
is as though Nature spoke through him at all times in the mood that is
upon her when she is opening the apple-blossom or reddening the apple
or thickening the shadow of the boughs, and that the men and women of
his verse and of his stories are all the ministers of her mood.


IV

When I was a child I often heard my elders talking of an old turreted
house where an old great-uncle of mine lived, and of its gardens and
its long pond where there was an island with tame eagles; and one day
somebody read me some verses and said they made him think of that old
house where he had been very happy. The verses ran in my head for years
and became to me the best description of happiness in the world, and
I am not certain that I know a better even now. They were those first
dozen verses of _Golden Wings_ that begin--

'Midways of a walled garden
In the happy poplar land
Did an ancient castle stand,
With an old knight for a warden.

Many scarlet bricks there were
In its walls, and old grey stone;
Over which red apples shone
At the right time of the year.

On the bricks the green moss grew,
Yellow lichen on the stone,
Over which red apples shone;
Little war that castle knew. '

When William Morris describes a house of any kind, and makes his
description poetical, it is always, I think, some house that he would
have liked to have lived in, and I remember him saying about the time
when he was writing of that great house of the Wolfings, 'I decorate
modern houses for people, but the house that would please me would be
some great room where one talked to one's friends in one corner and eat
in another and slept in another and worked in another. ' Indeed all he
writes seems to me like the make-believe of a child who is remaking the
world, not always in the same way, but always after his own heart; and
so unlike all other modern writers he makes his poetry out of unending
pictures of a happiness that is often what a child might imagine, and
always a happiness that sets mind and body at ease. Now it is a picture
of some great room full of merriment, now of the wine-press, now of
the golden threshing-floor, now of an old mill among apple-trees, now
of cool water after the heat of the sun, now of some well-sheltered,
well-tilled place among woods or mountains, where men and women live
happily, knowing of nothing that is too far off or too great for the
affections. He has but one story to tell us, how some man or woman lost
and found again the happiness that is always half of the body; and
even when they are wandering from it, leaves must fall over them, and
flowers make fragrances about them, and warm winds fan them, and birds
sing to them, for being of Habundia's kin they must not forget the
shadow of her Green Tree even for a moment, and the waters of her Well
must be always wet upon their sandals. His poetry often wearies us as
the unbroken green of July wearies us, for there is something in us,
some bitterness because of the Fall it may be, that takes a little from
the sweetness of Eve's apple after the first mouthful; but he who did
all things gladly and easily, who never knew the curse of labour, found
it always as sweet as it was in Eve's mouth. All kinds of associations
have gathered about the pleasant things of the world and half taken the
pleasure out of them for the greater number of men, but he saw them as
when they came from the Divine Hand. I often see him in my mind as I
saw him once at Hammersmith holding up a glass of claret towards the
light and saying, 'Why do people say it is prosaic to get inspiration
out of wine? Is it not the sunlight and the sap in the leaves? Are not
grapes made by the sunlight and the sap? '


V

In one of his little socialistic pamphlets he tells us how he sat
under an elm-tree and watched the starlings and thought of an old
horse and an old labourer that had passed him by, and of the men and
women he had seen in towns; and he wondered how all these had come to
be as they were. He saw that the starlings were beautiful and merry
and that men and the old horse they had subdued to their service were
ugly and miserable, and yet the starlings, he thought, were of one
kind whether there or in the south of England, and the ugly men and
women were of one kind with those whose nobility and beauty had moved
the ancient sculptors and poets to imagine the gods and the heroes
after the images of men. Then he began, he tells us, to meditate how
this great difference might be ended and a new life, which would
permit men to have beauty in common among them as the starlings have,
be built on the wrecks of the old life. In other words, his mind was
illuminated from within and lifted into prophecy in the full right
sense of the word, and he saw the natural things he was alone gifted
to see in their perfect form; and having that faith which is alone
worth having, for it includes all others, a sure knowledge established
in the constitution of his mind that perfect things are final things,
he announced that all he had seen would come to pass. I do not think
he troubled to understand books of economics, and Mr. Mackail says,
I think, that they vexed him and wearied him. He found it enough to
hold up, as it were, life as it is to-day beside his visions, and to
show how faded its colours were and how sapless it was. And if we had
not enough artistic feeling, enough feeling for the perfect that is,
to admit the authority of the vision; or enough faith to understand
that all that is imperfect passes away, he would not, as I think, have
argued with us in a serious spirit. Though I think that he never used
the kinds of words I use in writing of him, though I think he would
even have disliked a word like faith with its theological associations,
I am certain that he understood thoroughly, as all artists understand
a little, that the important things, the things we must believe in or
perish, are beyond argument. We can no more reason about them than
can the pigeon, come but lately from the egg, about the hawk whose
shadow makes it cower among the grass. His vision is true because it
is poetical, because we are a little happier when we are looking at
it; and he knew as Shelley knew by an act of faith that the economists
should take their measurements not from life as it is, but from the
vision of the world made perfect that is buried under all minds. The
early Christians were of the kin of the Wilderness and of the Dry Tree,
and they saw an unearthly Paradise, but he was of the kin of the Well
and of the Green Tree and he saw an Earthly Paradise.

He obeyed his vision when he tried to make first his own house, for he
was in this matter also like a child playing with the world, and then
houses of other people, places where one could live happily; and he
obeyed it when he wrote ? The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of
William Butler Yeats, Vol. 7 (of 8), by William Butler Yeats

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Title: The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 7 (of 8)
The Secret Rose. Rosa Alchemica. The Tables of the Law.
The Adoration of the Magi. John Sherman and Dhoya

Author: William Butler Yeats

Release Date: August 5, 2015 [EBook #49614]

Language: English

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THE COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

[Illustration: _Emery Walker, Ph. sc. _

_From a drawing by J. B. Yeats_]




THE SECRET ROSE. ROSA ALCHEMICA.
THE TABLES OF THE LAW. THE
ADORATION OF THE MAGI. JOHN
SHERMAN AND DHOYA :: BEING THE
SEVENTH VOLUME OF THE COLLECTED
WORKS IN VERSE & PROSE
OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS :: IMPRINTED
AT THE SHAKESPEARE
HEAD PRESS STRATFORD-ON-AVON
MCMVIII




CONTENTS


PAGE
THE SECRET ROSE:
DEDICATION 3
TO THE SECRET ROSE 5
THE CRUCIFIXION OF THE OUTCAST 7
OUT OF THE ROSE 20
THE WISDOM OF THE KING 31
THE HEART OF THE SPRING 42
THE CURSE OF THE FIRES AND OF THE SHADOWS 51
THE OLD MEN OF THE TWILIGHT 61
WHERE THERE IS NOTHING, THERE IS GOD 69
OF COSTELLO THE PROUD, OF OONA THE DAUGHTER OF
DERMOTT AND OF THE BITTER TONGUE 78

ROSA ALCHEMICA 103

THE TABLES OF THE LAW 141

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 165


EARLY STORIES.

JOHN SHERMAN 183

DHOYA 283




THE SECRET ROSE




As for living, our servants will do that for
us. --_Villiers de L'Isle Adam. _

Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the
withered wrinkles made in her face by old age,
wept, and wondered why she had twice been carried
away. --_Leonardo da Vinci. _




_My Dear A. E. --I dedicate this book to you because, whether you think
it well or ill written, you will sympathize with the sorrows and the
ecstasies of its personages, perhaps even more than I do myself.
Although I wrote these stories at different times and in different
manners, and without any definite plan, they have but one subject,
the war of spiritual with natural order; and how can I dedicate such
a book to anyone but to you, the one poet of modern Ireland who has
moulded a spiritual ecstasy into verse? My friends in Ireland sometimes
ask me when I am going to write a really national poem or romance,
and by a national poem or romance I understand them to mean a poem or
romance founded upon some famous moment of Irish history, and built
up out of the thoughts and feelings which move the greater number of
patriotic Irishmen. I on the other hand believe that poetry and romance
cannot be made by the most conscientious study of famous moments and
of the thoughts and feelings of others, but only by looking into that
little, infinite, faltering, eternal flame that we call ourselves. If
a writer wishes to interest a certain people among whom he has grown
up, or fancies he has a duty towards them, he may choose for the
symbols of his art their legends, their history, their beliefs, their
opinions, because he has a right to choose among things less than
himself, but he cannot choose among the substances of art. So far,
however, as this book is visionary it is Irish; for Ireland, which is
still predominantly Celtic, has preserved with some less excellent
things a gift of vision, which has died out among more hurried and
more successful nations: no shining candelabra have prevented us from
looking into the darkness, and when one looks into the darkness there
is always something there. _

_W. B. YEATS. _


_TO THE SECRET ROSE_

_Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose,
Enfold me in my hour of hours; where those
Who sought thee at the Holy Sepulchre,
Or in the wine-vat, dwell beyond the stir
And tumult of defeated dreams; and deep
Among pale eyelids heavy with the sleep
Men have named beauty. Your great leaves enfold
The ancient beards, the helms of ruby and gold
Of the crowned Magi; and the king whose eyes
Saw the Pierced Hands and Rood of Elder rise
In druid vapour and make the torches dim;
Till vain frenzy awoke and he died; and him
Who met Fand walking among flaming dew,
By a grey shore where the wind never blew,
And lost the world and Emir for a kiss;
And him who drove the gods out of their liss
And till a hundred morns had flowered red
Feasted, and wept the barrows of his dead;
And the proud dreaming king who flung the crown
And sorrow away, and calling bard and clown
Dwelt among wine-stained wanderers in deep woods;
And him who sold tillage and house and goods,
And sought through lands and islands numberless years
Until he found with laughter and with tears
A woman of so shining loveliness
That men threshed corn at midnight by a tress,
A little stolen tress. I too await
The hour of thy great wind of love and hate.
When shall the stars be blown about the sky,
Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?
Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,
Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose? _


THE CRUCIFIXION OF THE OUTCAST

A MAN, with thin brown hair and a pale face, half ran, half walked,
along the road that wound from the south to the town of Sligo. Many
called him Cumhal, the son of Cormac, and many called him the Swift,
Wild Horse; and he was a gleeman, and he wore a short parti-coloured
doublet, and had pointed shoes, and a bulging wallet. Also he was of
the blood of the Ernaans, and his birth-place was the Field of Gold;
but his eating and sleeping places were the four provinces of Eri, and
his abiding place was not upon the ridge of the earth. His eyes strayed
from the Abbey tower of the White Friars and the town battlements to
a row of crosses which stood out against the sky upon a hill a little
to the eastward of the town, and he clenched his fist, and shook it at
the crosses. He knew they were not empty, for the birds were fluttering
about them; and he thought how, as like as not, just such another
vagabond as himself was hanged on one of them; and he muttered: 'If it
were hanging or bowstringing, or stoning or beheading, it would be bad
enough. But to have the birds pecking your eyes and the wolves eating
your feet! I would that the red wind of the Druids had withered in
his cradle the soldier of Dathi, who brought the tree of death out of
barbarous lands, or that the lightning, when it smote Dathi at the foot
of the mountain, had smitten him also, or that his grave had been dug
by the green-haired and green-toothed merrows deep at the roots of the
deep sea. '

While he spoke, he shivered from head to foot, and the sweat came
out upon his face, and he knew not why, for he had looked upon many
crosses. He passed over two hills and under the battlemented gate, and
then round by a left-hand way to the door of the Abbey. It was studded
with great nails, and when he knocked at it, he roused the lay brother
who was the porter, and of him he asked a place in the guest-house.
Then the lay brother took a glowing turf on a shovel, and led the way
to a big and naked outhouse strewn with very dirty rushes; and lighted
a rush-candle fixed between two of the stones of the wall, and set
the glowing turf upon the hearth and gave him two unlighted sods and
a wisp of straw, and showed him a blanket hanging from a nail, and a
shelf with a loaf of bread and a jug of water, and a tub in a far
corner. Then the lay brother left him and went back to his place by
the door. And Cumhal the son of Cormac began to blow upon the glowing
turf that he might light the two sods and the wisp of straw; but the
sods and the straw would not light, for they were damp. So he took off
his pointed shoes, and drew the tub out of the corner with the thought
of washing the dust of the highway from his feet; but the water was so
dirty that he could not see the bottom. He was very hungry, for he had
not eaten all that day; so he did not waste much anger upon the tub,
but took up the black loaf, and bit into it, and then spat out the
bite, for the bread was hard and mouldy. Still he did not give way to
his anger, for he had not drunken these many hours; having a hope of
heath beer or wine at his day's end, he had left the brooks untasted,
to make his supper the more delightful. Now he put the jug to his lips,
but he flung it from him straightway, for the water was bitter and
ill-smelling. Then he gave the jug a kick, so that it broke against
the opposite wall, and he took down the blanket to wrap it about him
for the night. But no sooner did he touch it than it was alive with
skipping fleas. At this, beside himself with anger, he rushed to the
door of the guest-house, but the lay brother, being well accustomed to
such outcries, had locked it on the outside; so he emptied the tub and
began to beat the door with it, till the lay brother came to the door
and asked what ailed him, and why he woke him out of sleep. 'What ails
me! ' shouted Cumhal, 'are not the sods as wet as the sands of the Three
Rosses? and are not the fleas in the blanket as many as the waves of
the sea and as lively? and is not the bread as hard as the heart of a
lay brother who has forgotten God? and is not the water in the jug as
bitter and as ill-smelling as his soul? and is not the foot-water the
colour that shall be upon him when he has been charred in the Undying
Fires? ' The lay brother saw that the lock was fast, and went back to
his niche, for he was too sleepy to talk with comfort. And Cumhal went
on beating at the door, and presently he heard the lay brother's foot
once more, and cried out at him, 'O cowardly and tyrannous race of
friars, persecutors of the bard and the gleeman, haters of life and
joy! O race that does not draw the sword and tell the truth! O race
that melts the bones of the people with cowardice and with deceit! '

'Gleeman,' said the lay brother, 'I also make rhymes; I make many
while I sit in my niche by the door, and I sorrow to hear the bards
railing upon the friars. Brother, I would sleep, and therefore I make
known to you that it is the head of the monastery, our gracious abbot,
who orders all things concerning the lodging of travellers. '

'You may sleep,' said Cumhal, 'I will sing a bard's curse on the
abbot. ' And he set the tub upside down under the window, and stood
upon it, and began to sing in a very loud voice. The singing awoke the
abbot, so that he sat up in bed and blew a silver whistle until the lay
brother came to him. 'I cannot get a wink of sleep with that noise,'
said the abbot. 'What is happening? '

'It is a gleeman,' said the lay brother, 'who complains of the sods,
of the bread, of the water in the jug, of the foot-water, and of the
blanket. And now he is singing a bard's curse upon you, O brother
abbot, and upon your father and your mother, and your grandfather and
your grandmother, and upon all your relations. '

'Is he cursing in rhyme? '

'He is cursing in rhyme, and with two assonances in every line of his
curse. '

The abbot pulled his night-cap off and crumpled it in his hands, and
the circular brown patch of hair in the middle of his bald head looked
like an island in the midst of a pond, for in Connaught they had not
yet abandoned the ancient tonsure for the style then coming into use.
'If we do not somewhat,' he said, 'he will teach his curses to the
children in the street, and the girls spinning at the doors, and to the
robbers upon Ben Bulben. '

'Shall I go, then,' said the other, 'and give him dry sods, a fresh
loaf, clean water in a jug, clean foot-water, and a new blanket, and
make him swear by the blessed Saint Benignus, and by the sun and moon,
that no bond be lacking, not to tell his rhymes to the children in the
street, and the girls spinning at the doors, and the robbers upon Ben
Bulben? '

'Neither our blessed Patron nor the sun and moon would avail at all,'
said the abbot; 'for to-morrow or the next day the mood to curse
would come upon him, or a pride in those rhymes would move him, and
he would teach his lines to the children, and the girls, and the
robbers. Or else he would tell another of his craft how he fared in the
guest-house, and he in his turn would begin to curse, and my name would
wither. For learn there is no steadfastness of purpose upon the roads,
but only under roofs, and between four walls. Therefore I bid you go
and awaken Brother Kevin, Brother Dove, Brother Little Wolf, Brother
Bald Patrick, Brother Bald Brandon, Brother James and Brother Peter.
And they shall take the man, and bind him with ropes, and dip him in
the river that he may cease to sing. And in the morning, lest this but
make him curse the louder, we will crucify him. '

'The crosses are all full,' said the lay brother.

'Then we must make another cross. If we do not make an end of him
another will, for who can eat and sleep in peace while men like him
are going about the world? Ill should we stand before blessed Saint
Benignus, and sour would be his face when he comes to judge us at
the Last Day, were we to spare an enemy of his when we had him under
our thumb! Brother, the bards and the gleemen are an evil race, ever
cursing and ever stirring up the people, and immoral and immoderate in
all things, and heathen in their hearts, always longing after the Son
of Lir, and Aengus, and Bridget, and the Dagda, and Dana the Mother,
and all the false gods of the old days; always making poems in praise
of those kings and queens of the demons, Finvaragh, whose home is
under Cruachmaa, and Red Aodh of Cnocna-Sidhe, and Cleena of the Wave,
and Aoibhell of the Grey Rock, and him they call Donn of the Vats of
the Sea; and railing against God and Christ and the blessed Saints. '
While he was speaking he crossed himself, and when he had finished he
drew the nightcap over his ears, to shut out the noise, and closed his
eyes, and composed himself to sleep.

The lay brother found Brother Kevin, Brother Dove, Brother Little Wolf,
Brother Bald Patrick, Brother Bald Brandon, Brother James and Brother
Peter sitting up in bed, and he made them get up. Then they bound
Cumhal, and they dragged him to the river, and they dipped him in it at
the place which was afterwards called Buckley's Ford.

'Gleeman,' said the lay brother, as they led him back to the
guest-house, 'why do you ever use the wit which God has given you to
make blasphemous and immoral tales and verses? For such is the way of
your craft. I have, indeed, many such tales and verses well nigh by
rote, and so I know that I speak true! And why do you praise with rhyme
those demons, Finvaragh, Red Aodh, Cleena, Aoibhell and Donn? I, too,
am a man of great wit and learning, but I ever glorify our gracious
abbot, and Benignus our Patron, and the princes of the province.
My soul is decent and orderly, but yours is like the wind among the
salley gardens. I said what I could for you, being also a man of many
thoughts, but who could help such a one as you? '

'Friend,' answered the gleeman, 'my soul is indeed like the wind, and
it blows me to and fro, and up and down, and puts many things into my
mind and out of my mind, and therefore am I called the Swift, Wild
Horse. ' And he spoke no more that night, for his teeth were chattering
with the cold.

The abbot and the friars came to him in the morning, and bade him get
ready to be crucified, and led him out of the guest-house. And while he
still stood upon the step a flock of great grass-barnacles passed high
above him with clanking cries. He lifted his arms to them and said, 'O
great grass-barnacles, tarry a little, and mayhap my soul will travel
with you to the waste places of the shore and to the ungovernable sea! '
At the gate a crowd of beggars gathered about them, being come there
to beg from any traveller or pilgrim who might have spent the night in
the guest-house. The abbot and the friars led the gleeman to a place
in the woods at some distance, where many straight young trees were
growing, and they made him cut one down and fashion it to the right
length, while the beggars stood round them in a ring, talking and
gesticulating. The abbot then bade him cut off another and shorter
piece of wood, and nail it upon the first. So there was his cross for
him; and they put it upon his shoulder, for his crucifixion was to be
on the top of the hill where the others were. A half-mile on the way he
asked them to stop and see him juggle for them; for he knew, he said,
all the tricks of Aengus the Subtle-hearted. The old friars were for
pressing on, but the young friars would see him: so he did many wonders
for them, even to the drawing of live frogs out of his ears. But after
a while they turned on him, and said his tricks were dull and a shade
unholy, and set the cross on his shoulders again. Another half-mile
on the way, and he asked them to stop and hear him jest for them, for
he knew, he said, all the jests of Conan the Bald, upon whose back a
sheep's wool grew. And the young friars, when they had heard his merry
tales, again bade him take up his cross, for it ill became them to
listen to such follies. Another half-mile on the way, he asked them to
stop and hear him sing the story of White-breasted Deirdre, and how
she endured many sorrows, and how the sons of Usna died to serve her.
And the young friars were mad to hear him, but when he had ended they
grew angry, and beat him for waking forgotten longings in their hearts.
So they set the cross upon his back, and hurried him to the hill.

When he was come to the top, they took the cross from him, and began to
dig a hole to stand it in, while the beggars gathered round, and talked
among themselves. 'I ask a favour before I die,' says Cumhal.

'We will grant you no more delays,' says the abbot.

'I ask no more delays, for I have drawn the sword, and told the truth,
and lived my vision, and am content. '

'Would you, then, confess? '

'By sun and moon, not I; I ask but to be let eat the food I carry in my
wallet. I carry food in my wallet whenever I go upon a journey, but I
do not taste of it unless I am well-nigh starved. I have not eaten now
these two days. '

'You may eat, then,' says the abbot, and he turned to help the friars
dig the hole.

The gleeman took a loaf and some strips of cold fried bacon out of his
wallet and laid them upon the ground. 'I will give a tithe to the
poor,' says he, and he cut a tenth part from the loaf and the bacon.
'Who among you is the poorest? ' And thereupon was a great clamour, for
the beggars began the history of their sorrows and their poverty, and
their yellow faces swayed like Gara Lough when the floods have filled
it with water from the bogs.

He listened for a little, and, says he, 'I am myself the poorest,
for I have travelled the bare road, and by the edges of the sea; and
the tattered doublet of particoloured cloth upon my back and the
torn pointed shoes upon my feet have ever irked me, because of the
towered city full of noble raiment which was in my heart. And I have
been the more alone upon the roads and by the sea because I heard in
my heart the rustling of the rose-bordered dress of her who is more
subtle than Aengus, the Subtle-hearted, and more full of the beauty of
laughter than Conan the Bald, and more full of the wisdom of tears than
White-breasted Deirdre, and more lovely than a bursting dawn to them
that are lost in the darkness. Therefore, I award the tithe to myself;
but yet, because I am done with all things, I give it unto you. '

So he flung the bread and the strips of bacon among the beggars,
and they fought with many cries until the last scrap was eaten. But
meanwhile the friars nailed the gleeman to his cross, and set it
upright in the hole, and shovelled the earth in at the foot, and
trampled it level and hard. So then they went away, but the beggars
stared on, sitting round the cross.