In the ages which lie far back of our recorded history many battles between gods and demons took place as told by the Celtic Homers. The hosts of light, a divine race known as the Tuatha de Danann, made war upon the Fomors for possession of Eire. At the last great battle of Moytura came victory for the gods. One of our later singers, Larminie, who has retold the story, has it that the demoniac nature was never really subdued. The bright Danann and the dark Fomor no longer war in mystic worlds, but twine more subtly together in the human generations who came after, and now the battle is renewed in the souls of men. Indeed it seems that the fierce Fomor spirit is more rampant, makes itself more evident to the eyes of men, than the gentle, peaceful race who inherit the spirit bequeathed by the gods. It is our misfortune that the Fomorian Celt, who makes most noise, represents us before the world. He looms up variously as a drunken Paddy, a rowdy politician, a moonlighter, or a rackrenting landlord. There is a tradition current about the last which confirms my theory. It is that when the rebel angels were cast out of Paradise the good God put some of them into waste places, and some became landlords. So I am moving here on safe ground.
But, however it may be, of that other Eire behind the veil the world knows little. It is guessed only by some among ourselves. We may say one-half of Ireland is unsuspected by the other half: it is so shy of revealing itself. The tourist will never unmask it: nor will the folklorist who goes about his work in the scientific spirit of a member of the Royal Dublin Society. It is on his own telling that, bent on discovery, he panted his way up certain hills until he met a native. Our folklorist surveyed him through spectacles and went at once to business.
"Are there any myths connected with these hills, any ancient traditions, my good man?"
"Sor!"
"I mean are there any folk tales current?"
"No, sor, I never heard tell of any."
Our folklorist went his way down the mountain side convinced that legend and faery were things of the past. Yet these very mountains have been to some what Mount Meru was to the Indian ascetic. They have seen the bright race of the Sidhe at midnight glow like a sunrise on the dark brow in rainbow-colored hosts. They have heard the earthly silences broken by heart-capturing music. Where these mountains are and who it was that saw is of no moment. If I named the hills they would be desecrated by the curious bent equally on picnic and faeries. If I named the visionaries some people would be sure to get up a committee to investigate. It is the dark age. To the curious I would say that faery-land is the soul of earth and it lies as much about you in America as here, and friendship with your bright kinsmen in the unseen there is the surest way to friendship with them here when you pay us a visit. That the faery traditions have by no means passed away I am aware.
I was driving from the ancient city of Drogheda to New Grange, once the most famous magical and holy place in Ireland. My carman after a little became communicative. He told me that many people still left little bowls of milk for the good people: a friend of his had seen them in their red jackets playing hurley: a woman near by had heard the fairy chimes ringing clear over the deserted Druidic mound at Dowth. Then he grew apprehensive that he was telling too much and sounded me as to my own beliefs. My faeries were different from his. I believed in the bright immortals: he in the little elemental creatures who drape themselves with the pictures of the past, and misbehave in their heroic guise. But I sunk my differences and most positively affirmed my faith, adding a few tales to his own. "Sor," he said at last, in an awestruck tone, "Is it thrue they can take you away among themselves?" Still thinking of my bright immortals I expressed my downright conviction that such was the case. May the belief flourish! An old sergeant of the constabulary told me many tales. He had seen a water-spirit invoked: "Man," he said, "It do put one in a sweat to see them." He knew the spell but would not tell it. I might "do some one a hurt with it." A strain of the magical runs in the blood of the Celt and its manifestation is almost always picturesque and poetical. He has an eye to effect. Down in Kerry, a friend tells me, there lived a faery doctor whom he knew. This man was much pestered, as bigger magicians have been, by people who wanted to see something. One in particular was most persistent and the doctor gave way. He brought his neophyte into a lonely place where there was a faery rath. It was night: a wind colder than earthly began blowing: the magician suddenly flung his arms round his trembling companion, who had a vision of indescribable creatures fleeting past. Ever after, he had the second sight.
Stories like these could be endlessly multiplied. What it is these peasant seers really perceive we cannot say. They have only a simple language and a few words for all. A child wanders over the hillside while the silver blushes fade from the soft blue cheek of evening. The night drops with dew about him. The awe of the nameless also descends. And, as he stands entranced, the children of twilight begin to move softly beside him, wearing the masks of ancient queens with sweeping draperies of purple, gold and green: or stately warriors appear: or white-robed druids at their mystic rites. He relates, after, that the good people were about. But perhaps, child as he is, his eyes have looked upon some mighty mystery's reenactment, some unveiling of the secrets of life and of death. It is a land full of enchantment.
That much of what is gathered by the folklorists misrepresents the actual vision, seems probable. The band of singers and writers in modern Ireland who directly relate their own dreams grow more mystic day by day. Another nature whispers busily in their brains. It has held its breath too long and now the faery soul of things exhales everywhere. I find a rhymer in "United Ireland" inspired because of the new light in his country :—
"Once more the thrilling song, the magic art,
Fill with delight."
The week before I was carried into wonderland by another poet who describes a Sunset City, a flame-built dun of the gods high over Slieve Cullen. He was perhaps unaware of the ancient tradition which declares that below this mountain Creidene, the Smith of the Tuatha de Dananu, worked. What was his toil? Another of these Smiths, Culain, the foster father of the hero Cuculain, had his forge in the recesses of Sleive Fuad. A third had his smithy at Loch Len, now Killarney, where he worked "surrounded by a rainbow and fiery dews." Were not these Smiths the same as the mighty Kabiri, most mysterious of deities, fire-gods from whose bright furnaces shot the glow, the sparks which enkindled nations? In ancient Eire their homes lay below the roots of the mountains. Will they, awakening from their cyclic reverie, renew their labors as of old? Last year, to one who, lying on the mound at Ros-na-ree, dreamed in the sunlight, there came an awakening presence, a figure of opalescent radiance who bent over crying, "Can you not see me? Can you not hear me? I come from the Land of Immortal Youth!" This world of Tir-ua-nogue, the heaven of the ancient Celt, lay all about them. It lies about us still. Ah, dear land, where the divine ever glimmers brotherly upon us, where the heavens droop nearer in tenderness, and the stones of the field seem more at league with us; what bountiful gifts of wisdom, beauty, and peace dost thou not hold for the world in thy teeming, expanding bosom, O, Eire! There is no death in the silence of thy immovable hills, for in their star-hearts abide in composed calm the guardians of the paths through which men must go seeking for the immortal waters. Yes, they live, these hills.
A little while ago a quite ordinary man, a careless, drinking, unthinking sort of fellow, strayed upon one of them in holiday time and awoke out of a lazy dream on the hillside crying that the "mountain was alive!" The unseen archers had pierced his heart with one of their fiery arrows. I record his testimony with delight and add thereto a vagrant tribute:—
A friendly mountain I know:
As I lie on the green slope there,
It sets my heart in a glow
And closes the door on care.A thought I try to frame:
I was with you long ago:
My soul from your heart-light came:
Mountain, is that not so?Take me again, dear hills:
Open the door to me
Where the magic murmur fills
The halls I do not see,Thy halls and caverns deep,
Where sometimes I may dare
Down the twilight stairs of sleep
To meet the kingly there.Sometimes with flaming wings
I rise unto a throne,
And watch how the great star swings
Along the sapphire zone.It has wings of its own for flight;
Diamond its pinions strong,
Glories of opal and white,
I watch the whole night long.Until I needs must lay
My royal robes aside,
And toil in a world of grey,
Grey shadows by my side,And when I ponder it o'er
Grey memories only bide:
But their fading lips tell more
Than all the world beside.
There is no country in the world whose ancient religion was more inseparably connected with the holy places, mountains, and rivers of the land than Ireland, unless perhaps it be America. We may say it was shaped by the gods. They have left their traces in the streams and lakes which sprung forth at their command. A deity presided over each: their magical tides were fraught with healing powers for they were mixed with elemental fire at their secret sources. We read of strange transformations taking place, of demigods who become rivers or are identified with mountains. After the battle of Gabra, where the Finian chivalry were overthrown, Caolte, one of the most mystic and supernatural of the warriors, stormed the hill of Assaroe and dwelt therein expelling a horde of elemental beings. He appears in after years and was supposed to have become one of the divine race of the Tuatha. He came to Mongan, a prince of Ulster three centuries later, and hailed him as an old companion: "You were with me—with Finn." Do not these strange transformations hint at some vast and grandiose beliefs about the destiny of the human soul? It may become a guardian of men, of a divine being, enthroning itself at one of those places where from the star-soul of earth the light breaks through into our shadowy sphere. Whenever I grow ambitious I think of Caolte at Assaroe, and long for a mountain of my own with plenty of fire to scatter about.
It may be because the land is so full of memorials of an extraordinary past, or it may be that behind the veil these things still endure, but everything seems possible here. I would feel no surprise if I saw the fiery eyes of the cyclops wandering over the mountains. There is always a sense expectant of some unveiling about to take place, a feeling, as one wanders at evening down the lanes scented by the honeysuckle, that beings are looking in upon us out of the true home of man. While we pace on, isolated in our sad and proud musings, they seem to be saying of us, "Soon they will awaken. Soon they will come again to us"; and we pause and look around smitten through by some ancient sweetness, some memory of a life-dawn pure before passion and sin began. The feeling is no less prophetic than reminiscent, and this may account for the unquenchable hope in the future of Ireland which has survived centuries of turbulence, oppression and pain, and which exists in the general heart.
In sleep and dream, in the internal life, a light from that future is thrown upon the spirit which is cheered by it, though unable to phrase to itself the meaning of its own gladness. Perhaps these visions, to which the Celt is so liable, refer as much to the future as to the bygone, and mysteries even more beautiful than the past are yet to be unfolded. I think it is so. There are some to whom a sudden sun-lustre from Tir-na-nogue revealed a hill on the western shore overlooking the Atlantic. There was a temple with many stately figures: below at the sea's edge jetted twin fountains of the golden fire of life, and far off over a glassy calm of water rose the holy city, the Hy-Brazil, in the white sunlight of an inner day.