Dr. Corbett, Bishop of Oxford and Norwich, lamented long
ago the departure of the English fairies.
"In Queen Mary's time" he wrote—
"When Tom came home from labour,
Or Cis to milking rose,
Then merrily, merrily went their tabor,
And merrily went their toes."
But now, in the times of James, they had all gone, for "they
were of the old profession," and "their songs were Ave Maries." In
Ireland they are still extant, giving gifts to the kindly, and
plaguing the surly. "Have you ever seen a fairy or such like?" I
asked an old man in County Sligo. "Amn't I annoyed with them," was
the answer. "Do the fishermen along here know anything of the
mermaids?" I asked a woman of a village in County Dublin. "Indeed,
they don't like to see them at all," she answered, "for they always
bring bad weather." "Here is a man who believes in ghosts," said a
foreign sea-captain, pointing to a pilot of my acquaintance. "In
every house over there," said the pilot, pointing to his native
village of Rosses, "there are several." Certainly that now old and
much respected dogmatist, the Spirit of the Age, has in no manner
made his voice heard down there. In a little while, for he has
gotten a consumptive appearance of late, he will be covered over
decently in his grave, and another will grow, old and much
respected, in his place, and never be heard of down there, and
after him another and another and another. Indeed, it is a question
whether any of these personages will ever be heard of outside the
newspaper offices and lecture-rooms and drawing-rooms and eel-pie
houses of the cities, or if the Spirit of the Age is at any time
more than a froth. At any rate, whole troops of their like will not
change the Celt much. Giraldus Cambrensis found the people of the
western islands a trifle paganish. "How many gods are there?" asked
a priest, a little while ago, of a man from the Island of Innistor.
"There is one on Innistor; but this seems a big place," said the
man, and the priest held up his hands in horror, as Giraldus had,
just seven centuries before. Remember, I am not blaming the man; it
is very much better to believe in a number of gods than in none at
all, or to think there is only one, but that he is a little
sentimental and impracticable, and not constructed for the
nineteenth century. The Celt, and his cromlechs, and his
pillar-stones, these will not change much—indeed, it is doubtful if
anybody at all changes at any time. In spite of hosts of deniers,
and asserters, and wise-men, and professors, the majority still are
averse to sitting down to dine thirteen at table, or being helped
to salt, or walking under a ladder, or seeing a single magpie
flirting his chequered tail. There are, of course, children of
light who have set their faces against all this, though even a
newspaper man, if you entice him into a cemetery at midnight, will
believe in phantoms, for every one is a visionary, if you scratch
him deep enough. But the Celt is a visionary without
scratching.
Yet, be it noticed, if you are a stranger, you will not
readily get ghost and fairy legends, even in a western village. You
must go adroitly to work, and make friends with the children, and
the old men, with those who have not felt the pressure of mere
daylight existence, and those with whom it is growing less, and
will have altogether taken itself off one of these days. The old
women are most learned, but will not so readily be got to talk, for
the fairies are very secretive, and much resent being talked of;
and are there not many stories of old women who were nearly pinched
into their graves or numbed with fairy blasts?
At sea, when the nets are out and the pipes are lit, then
will some ancient hoarder of tales become loquacious, telling his
histories to the tune of the creaking of the boats. Holy-eve night,
too, is a great time, and in old days many tales were to be heard
at wakes. But the priests have set faces against
wakes.
In the Parochial Survey of Ireland it is recorded how the
story-tellers used to gather together of an evening, and if any had
a different version from the others, they would all recite theirs
and vote, and the man who had varied would have to abide by their
verdict. In this way stories have been handed down with such
accuracy, that the long tale of Dierdre was, in the earlier decades
of this century, told almost word for word, as in the very ancient
MSS. in the Royal Dublin Society. In one case only it varied, and
then the MS. was obviously wrong—a passage had been forgotten by
the copyist. But this accuracy is rather in the folk and bardic
tales than in the fairy legends, for these vary widely, being
usually adapted to some neighbouring village or local fairy-seeing
celebrity. Each county has usually some family, or personage,
supposed to have been favoured or plagued, especially by the
phantoms, as the Hackets of Castle Hacket, Galway, who had for
their ancestor a fairy, or John-o'-Daly of Lisadell, Sligo, who
wrote "Eilleen Aroon," the song the Scotch have stolen and called
"Robin Adair," and which Handel would sooner have written than all
his oratorios, [1]and the
"O'Donahue of Kerry." Round these men stories tended to group
themselves, sometimes deserting more ancient heroes for the
purpose. Round poets have they gathered especially, for poetry in
Ireland has always been mysteriously connected with
magic.
These folk-tales are full of simplicity and musical
occurrences, for they are the literature of a class for whom every
incident in the old rut of birth, love, pain, and death has cropped
up unchanged for centuries: who have steeped everything in the
heart: to whom everything is a symbol. They have the spade over
which man has leant from the beginning. The people of the cities
have the machine, which is prose and a
parvenu . They have few events. They
can turn over the incidents of a long life as they sit by the fire.
With us nothing has time to gather meaning, and too many things are
occurring for even a big heart to hold. It is said the most
eloquent people in the world are the Arabs, who have only the bare
earth of the desert and a sky swept bare by the sun. "Wisdom has
alighted upon three things," goes their proverb; "the hand of the
Chinese, the brain of the Frank, and the tongue of the Arab." This,
I take it, is the meaning of that simplicity sought for so much in
these days by all the poets, and not to be had at any
price.
The most notable and typical story-teller of my acquaintance
is one Paddy Flynn, a little, bright-eyed, old man, living in a
leaky one-roomed cottage of the village of B——, "The most
gentle— i.e. , fairy—place in
the whole of the County Sligo," he says, though others claim that
honour for Drumahair or for Drumcliff. A very pious old man, too!
You may have some time to inspect his strange figure and ragged
hair, if he happen to be in a devout humour, before he comes to the
doings of the gentry. A strange devotion! Old tales of Columkill,
and what he said to his mother. "How are you to-day, mother?"
"Worse!" "May you be worse to-morrow;" and on the next day, "How
are you to-day, mother?" "Worse!" "May you be worse to-morrow;" and
on the next, "How are you to-day, mother?" "Better, thank God."
"May you be better to-morrow." In which undutiful manner he will
tell you Columkill inculcated cheerfulness. Then most likely he
will wander off into his favourite theme—how the Judge smiles alike
in rewarding the good and condemning the lost to unceasing flames.
Very consoling does it appear to Paddy Flynn, this melancholy and
apocalyptic cheerfulness of the Judge. Nor seems his own
cheerfulness quite earthly—though a very palpable cheerfulness. The
first time I saw him he was cooking mushrooms for himself; the next
time he was asleep under a hedge, smiling in his sleep. Assuredly
some joy not quite of this steadfast earth lightens in those
eyes—swift as the eyes of a rabbit—among so many wrinkles, for
Paddy Flynn is very old. A melancholy there is in the midst of
their cheerfulness—a melancholy that is almost a portion of their
joy, the visionary melancholy of purely instinctive natures and of
all animals. In the triple solitude of age and eccentricity and
partial deafness he goes about much pestered by
children.
As to the reality of his fairy and spirit-seeing powers, not
all are agreed. One day we were talking of the Banshee. "I have
seen it," he said, "down there by the water 'batting' the river
with its hands." He it was who said the fairies annoyed
him.
Not that the Sceptic is entirely afar even from these western
villages. I found him one morning as he bound his corn in a merest
pocket-handkerchief of a field. Very different from Paddy
Flynn—Scepticism in every wrinkle of his face, and a travelled man,
too!—a foot-long Mohawk Indian tatooed on one of his arms to
evidence the matter. "They who travel," says a neighbouring priest,
shaking his head over him, and quoting Thomas Á'Kempis, "seldom
come home holy." I had mentioned ghosts to this Sceptic. "Ghosts,"
said he; "there are no such things at all, at all, but the gentry,
they stand to reason; for the devil, when he fell out of heaven,
took the weak-minded ones with him, and they were put into the
waste places. And that's what the gentry are. But they are getting
scarce now, because their time's over, ye see, and they're going
back. But ghosts, no! And I'll tell ye something more I don't
believe in—the fire of hell;" then, in a low voice, "that's only
invented to give the priests and the parsons something to do."
Thereupon this man, so full of enlightenment, returned to his
corn-binding.
The various collectors of Irish folk-lore have, from our
point of view, one great merit, and from the point of view of
others, one great fault. They have made their work literature
rather than science, and told us of the Irish peasantry rather than
of the primitive religion of mankind, or whatever else the
folk-lorists are on the gad after. To be considered scientists they
should have tabulated all their tales in forms like grocers'
bills—item the fairy king, item the queen. Instead of this they
have caught the very voice of the people, the very pulse of life,
each giving what was most noticed in his day. Croker and Lover,
full of the ideas of harum-scarum Irish gentility, saw everything
humorised. The impulse of the Irish literature of their time came
from a class that did not—mainly for political reasons—take the
populace seriously, and imagined the country as a humorist's
Arcadia; its passion, its gloom, its tragedy, they knew nothing of.
What they did was not wholly false; they merely magnified an
irresponsible type, found oftenest among boatmen, carmen, and
gentlemen's servants, into the type of a whole nation, and created
the stage Irishman. The writers of 'Forty-eight, and the famine
combined, burst their bubble. Their work had the dash as well as
the shallowness of an ascendant and idle class, and in Croker is
touched everywhere with beauty—a gentle Arcadian beauty. Carleton,
a peasant born, has in many of his stories—I have been only able to
give a few of the slightest—more especially in his ghost stories, a
much more serious way with him, for all his humour. Kennedy, an old
bookseller in Dublin, who seems to have had a something of genuine
belief in the fairies, came next in time. He has far less literary
faculty, but is wonderfully accurate, giving often the very words
the stories were told in. But the best book since Croker is Lady
Wilde's Ancient Legends . The
humour has all given way to pathos and tenderness. We have here the
innermost heart of the Celt in the moments he has grown to love
through years of persecution, when, cushioning himself about with
dreams, and hearing fairy-songs in the twilight, he ponders on the
soul and on the dead. Here is the Celt, only it is the Celt
dreaming.
Besides these are two writers of importance, who have
published, so far, nothing in book shape—Miss Letitia Maclintock
and Mr. Douglas Hyde. Miss Maclintock writes accurately and
beautifully the half Scotch dialect of Ulster; and Mr. Douglas Hyde
is now preparing a volume of folk tales in Gaelic, having taken
them down, for the most part, word for word among the Gaelic
speakers of Roscommon and Galway. He is, perhaps, most to be
trusted of all. He knows the people thoroughly. Others see a phase
of Irish life; he understands all its elements. His work is neither
humorous nor mournful; it is simply life. I hope he may put some of
his gatherings into ballads, for he is the last of our
ballad-writers of the school of Walsh and Callanan—men whose work
seems fragrant with turf smoke. And this brings to mind the
chap-books. They are to be found brown with turf smoke on cottage
shelves, and are, or were, sold on every hand by the pedlars, but
cannot be found in any library of this city of the Sassanach. "The
Royal Fairy Tales," "The Hibernian Tales," and "The Legends of the
Fairies" are the fairy literature of the people.
Several specimens of our fairy poetry are given. It is more
like the fairy poetry of Scotland than of England. The personages
of English fairy literature are merely, in most cases, mortals
beautifully masquerading. Nobody ever believed in such fairies.
They are romantic bubbles from Provence. Nobody ever laid new milk
on their doorstep for them.
As to my own part in this book, I have tried to make it
representative, as far as so few pages would allow, of every kind
of Irish folk-faith. The reader will perhaps wonder that in all my
notes I have not rationalised a single hobgoblin. I seek for
shelter to the words of Socrates.
[2]
" Phædrus. I should like
to know, Socrates, whether the place is not somewhere here at which
Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia from the banks of the
Ilissus?
" Socrates. That is the
tradition.
" Phædrus. And is this the
exact spot? The little stream is delightfully clear and bright; I
can fancy that there might be maidens playing near.
" Socrates. I believe the
spot is not exactly here, but about a quarter-of-a-mile lower down,
where you cross to the temple of Artemis, and I think that there is
some sort of an altar of Boreas at the place.
" Phædrus. I do not
recollect; but I beseech you to tell me, Socrates, do you believe
this tale?
" Socrates. The wise are
doubtful, and I should not be singular if, like them, I also
doubted. I might have a rational explanation that Orithyia was
playing with Pharmacia, when a northern gust carried her over the
neighbouring rocks; and this being the manner of her death, she was
said to have been carried away by Boreas. There is a discrepancy,
however, about the locality. According to another version of the
story, she was taken from the Areopagus, and not from this place.
Now I quite acknowledge that these allegories are very nice, but he
is not to be envied who has to invent them; much labour and
ingenuity will be required of him; and when he has once begun, he
must go on and rehabilitate centaurs and chimeras dire. Gorgons and
winged steeds flow in apace, and numberless other inconceivable and
portentous monsters. And if he is sceptical about them, and would
fain reduce them one after another to the rules of probability,
this sort of crude philosophy will take up all his time. Now, I
have certainly not time for such inquiries. Shall I tell you why? I
must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be
curious about that which is not my business, while I am still in
ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous. And, therefore, I
say farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For,
as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself.
Am I, indeed, a wonder more complicated and swollen with passion
than the serpent Typho, or a creature of gentler and simpler sort,
to whom nature has given a diviner and lowlier
destiny?"
I have to thank Messrs Macmillan, and the editors of
Belgravia , All the
Year Round , and Monthly
Packet , for leave to quote from Patrick
Kennedy's Legendary Fictions of the Irish
Celts , and Miss Maclintock's articles
respectively; Lady Wilde, for leave to give what I would from
her Ancient Legends of Ireland
(Ward & Downey); and Mr. Douglas Hyde, for his three
unpublished stories, and for valuable and valued assistance in
several ways; and also Mr. Allingham, and other copyright holders,
for their poems. Mr. Allingham's poems are from
Irish Songs and Poems (Reeves and
Turner); Fergusson's, from Sealey, Bryers, & Walker's shilling
reprint; my own and Miss O'Leary's from Ballads
and Poems of Young Ireland , 1888, a little
anthology published by Gill & Sons, Dublin.
W. B. YEATS.
Footnotes
[1] He lived some time in Dublin, and heard it
then.
[2] Phædrus. Jowett's
translation. (Clarendon Press.)