"The practical ones have all emigrated," a Dublin novelist told us, "and the dreamers are left. The heads of the older ones are filled with poetry and legends; they see nothing as it is, but always through some iridescent-tinted medium. Their waking moments, when not tormented by hunger, are spent in heaven, and they all live in a dream, whether it be of the next world or of a revolution. Effort is to them useless, submission to everybody and everything the only safe course; in a word, fatalism expresses their attitude to life."
Much of this submission to the inevitable is a product of past poverty, misfortune, and famine, and the rest is undoubtedly a trace of the same spirit that we find in the lives and writings of the saints, and which is an integral part of the mystery and the traditions of Romanism. We who live in the bright (and sometimes staring) sunlight of common-sense can hardly hope to penetrate the dim, mysterious world of the Catholic peasant, with his unworldliness and sense of failure.
Dr. Douglas Hyde, an Irish scholar and staunch Protestant, says: "A pious race is the Gaelic race. The Irish Gael is pious by nature.
There is not an Irishman in a hundred in whom is the making of an unbeliever. The spirit, and the things of the spirit, affect him more powerfully than the body, and the things of the body . . . What is invisible for other people is visible for him. . . He feels invisible powers before him, and by his side, and at his back, throughout the day and throughout the night . . . His mind on the subject may be summed up in the two sayings: that of the early Church, 'Let ancient things prevail,' and that of St. Augustine, 'Credo quia impossibile.' Nature did not form him to be an unbeliever; unbelief is alien to his mind and contrary to his feelings."
Here, only a few miles away, is the Slemish mountain where St.
Patrick, then a captive of the rich cattle-owner Milcho, herded his sheep and swine. Here, when his flocks were sleeping, he poured out his prayers, a Christian voice in Pagan darkness. It was the memory of that darkness, you remember, that brought him back, years after, to convert Milcho. Here, too, they say, lies the great bard Ossian; for they love to think that Finn's son Oisin,++ the hero poet, survived to the time of St. Patrick, three hundred years after the other 'Fianna' had vanished from the earth,--the three centuries being passed in Tir-nan-og, the Land of Youth, where the great Oisin married the king's daughter, Niam of the Golden Hair. 'Ossian after the Fianna' is a phrase which has become the synonym of all survivors' sorrow. Blinded by tears, broken by age, the hero bard when he returns to earth has no fellowship but with grief, and thus he sings:--'No hero now where heroes hurled,---Long this night the clouds delay---No man like me, in all the world, Alone with grief, and grey.
Long this night the clouds delay---I raise their grave carn, stone on stone, For Finn and Fianna passed away---I, Ossian left alone.'
++Pronounced Isheen' in Munster, Osh'in in Ulster.
In more senses than one Irish folk-lore is Irish history. At least the traditions that have been handed down from one generation to another contain not only the sometimes authentic record of events, but a revelation of the Milesian temperament, with its mirth and its melancholy, its exuberant fancy and its passion. So in these weird tales there is plenty of history, and plenty of poetry, to one who will listen to it; but the high and tragic story of Ireland has been cherished mainly in the sorrowful traditions of a defeated race, and the legends have not yet been wrought into undying verse. Erin's songs of battle could only recount weary successions of Flodden Fields, with never a Bannockburn and its nimbus of victory; for, as Ossian says of his countrymen, "they went forth to the war, but they always fell"; but somewhere in the green isle is an unborn poet who will put all this mystery, beauty, passion, romance, and sadness, these tragic memories, these beliefs, these visions of unfulfilled desire, into verse that will glow on the page and live for ever.
Somewhere is a mother who has kept all these things in her heart, and who will bear a son to write them. Meantime, who shall say that they have not been imbedded in the language, as flower petals might be in amber?--that language which, as an English scholar says, "has been blossoming there unseen, like a hidden garland of roses; and whenever the wind has blown from the west, English poetry has felt the vague perfume of it."