Books: Imaginations and Reveries
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(A.E.) George William Russell >> Imaginations and Reveries
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O'Grady in his stories of the Red Branch rescued from the past what
was contemporary to the best in us today, and he was equal in his
gifts as a writer to the greatest of his bardic predecessors in
Ireland. His sentences are charged with a heroic energy, and,
when he is telling a great tale, their rise and fall is like the
flashing and falling of the bright sword of some great battle, or
like the onset and withdrawal of Atlantic surges. He can at need
be beautifully tender and quiet. Who that has read his tale of
the young Finn and the Seven Ancients will forget the weeping of
Finn over the kindness of the famine-stricken old men, and their
wonder at his weeping, and the self-forgetful pathos of their
meditation unconscious that it was their own sacrifice called
forth the tears of Finn. "Youth," they said, "has many sorrows
that cold age cannot comprehend."
There are critics repelled by the abounding energy in O'Grady's
sentences. It is easy to point to faults due to excess and
abundance, but how rare in literature is that heroic energy and
power. There is something arcane and elemental in it, a quality
that the most careful stylist cannot attain, however he uses the
file, however subtle he is. O'Grady has noticed this power in
the ancient bards and we find it in his own writing. It ran all
through the Bardic History, the Critical and Philosophical History,
and through the political books, The Tory Democracy and All Ireland.
There is this imaginative energy in the tale of Cuculain, in all
its episodes, the slaying of the hound, the capture of the Liath
Macha, the hunting of the enchanted deer, the capture of the Wild
swans, the fight at the ford, and the awakening of the Red Branch.
In the later tale of Red Hugh which, he calls The Flight of the
Eagle there is the same quality of power joined with a shining
simplicity in the narrative which rises into a poetic ecstasy in
that wonderful chapter where Red Hugh, escaping from the Pale,
rides through the Mountain Gates of Ulster and sees high above
him Sheve Gullion, a mountain of the Gods, the birth-place of
legend "more mythic than Avernus"; and O'Grady evokes for us and
his hero the legendary past and the great hill seems to be like
Mount Sinai, thronged with immortals, and it lives and speaks to
the fugitive boy, "the last great secular champion of the Gael,"
and inspires him for the fulfillment of his destiny. We might say
of Red Hugh, and indeed of all O'Grady's heroes, that they are the
spiritual progeny of Cuculain. From Red Hugh down to the boys who
have such enchanting adventures in Lost on Du Corrig and The Chain
of Gold they have all a natural and hardy purity of mind, a beautiful
simplicity of character, and one can imagine them all in an hour
of need, being faithful to any trust like the darling of the Red
Branch. These shining lads never grew up amid books. They are
as much children of nature as the Lucy of Wordsworth's poetry. It
might be said of them as the poet of the Kalevala sang of himself:
"Winds and waters my instructors."
These were O'Grady's own earliest companions, and no man can find
better comrades than earth, water, air and sun. I imagine O'Grady's
own youth was not so very different from the youth of Red Hugh
before his captivity; that he lived on the wild and rocky western
coast, that he rowed in coracles, explored the caves, spoke much
with hardy natural people, fishermen and workers on the land,
primitive folk, simple in speech but with that fundamental depth
men have who are much in nature in companionship with the elements,
the elder brothers of humanity. It must have been out of such a
boyhood and such intimacies with natural and unsophisticated people
that there came to him the understanding of the heroes of the Red
Branch. How pallid, beside the ruddy chivalry who pass, huge and
fleet and bright, through O'Grady's pages, appear Tennyson's
bloodless Knights of the Round Table, fabricated in the study to
be read in the drawing room, as anemic as Burne Jones' lifeless
men in armour. The heroes of ancient Irish legend reincarnated
in the mind of a man who could breathe into them the fire of life,
caught from sun and wind, their ancient deities, and send them
forth to the world to do greater deeds, to act through many men
and speak through many voices. What sorcery was in the Irish mind
that it has taken so many years to win but a little recognition
for this splendid spirit; and that others who came after him, who
diluted the pure fiery wine of romance he gave us with literary water,
should be as well known or more widely read. For my own, part I
can only point back to him and say whatever is Irish in me he kindled
to life, and I am humble when I read his epic tale, feeling how
much greater a thing it is for the soul of a writer to have been
the habitation of a demi-god than to have had the subtlest intellections.
We praise the man who rushes into a burning mansion and brings out
its greatest treasure. So ought we to praise this man who rescued
from the perishing Gaelic tradition its darling hero and restored
him to us, and I think now that Cuculain will not perish, and he
will be invisibly present at many a council of youth, and he will
be the daring which lifts the will beyond itself and fires it for
great causes, and he will be also the courtesy which shall overcome
the enemy that nothing else may overcome.
I am sure that Standish O'Grady would rather I should speak of his
work and its bearing on the spiritual life of Ireland, than about
himself, and, because I think so, in this reverie I have followed
no set plan but have let my thoughts run as they will. But I would
not have any to think that this man was only a writer, or that he
could have had the heroes of the past for spiritual companions,
without himself being inspired to fight dragons and wizardry. I
have sometimes regretted that contemporary politics drew O'Grady
away from the work he began so greatly. I have said to myself he
might have given us an Oscar, a Diarmuid or a Caolte, an equal
comrade to Cuculain, but he could not, being lit up by the spirit
of his hero, he merely the bard and not the fighter, and no man
in Ireland intervened in the affairs of his country with a superior
nobility of aim. He was the last champion of the Irish aristocracy,
and still more the voice of conscience for them, and he spoke to
them of their duty to the nation as one might imagine some fearless
prophet speaking to a council of degenerate princes. When the
aristocracy failed Ireland he bade them farewell, and wrote the
epitaph of their class in words whose scorn we almost forget
because of their sounding melody and beauty. He turned his mind
to the problems of democracy and more especially of those workers
who are trapped in the city, and he pointed out for them the way
of escape and how they might renew life in the green fields close
to Earth, their ancient mother and nurse. He used too exalted a
language for those to whom he spoke to understand, and it might
seem that all these vehement appeals had failed but that we know
that what is fine never really fails. When a man is in advance
of his age, a generation, unborn when he speaks, is born in due
time and finds in him its inspiration. O'Grady may have failed
in his appeal to the aristocracy of his own time but he may yet
create an aristocracy of character and intellect in Ireland. The
political and economic writings will remain to uplift and inspire
and to remind us that the man who wrote the stories of heroes had
a bravery of his own and a wisdom of his own. I owe so much to
Standish O'Grady that I would like to leave it on record that it
was he made me conscious and proud of my country, and recalled to
my mind, that might have wandered otherwise over too wide and
vague a field of thought, to think of the earth under my feet and
the children of our common mother. There hangs in the Municipal
Gallery of Dublin the portrait of a man with melancholy eyes, and
scrawled on the canvas is the subject of his bitter brooding: "'The
Lost Land." I hope that O'Grady will find before he goes back to
Tir na noge that Ireland has found again through him what seemed
lost for ever, the law of its own being, and its memories which go
back to the beginning of the world.
THE DRAMATIC TREATMENT OF LEGEND
"The Red Branch ought not to be staged. . . . That literature ought
not to be produced for popular consumption for the edification of
the crowd. . . . I say to you drop this thing at your, peril. . . .
You may succeed in degrading Irish ideals, and banishing the soul
of the land. . . . Leave the heroic cycles alone, and don't bring
them down to the crowd..." (Standish O'Grady in All Ireland Review).
Years ago, in the adventurous youth of his mind, Mr. O'Grady found
the Gaelic tradition like a neglected antique dun with the doors
barred, and there was little or no egress. Listening, he heard
from within the hum of an immense chivalry, and he opened the doors
and the wild riders went forth to work their will. Now he would
recall them. But it is in vain. The wild riders have gone forth,
and their labors in the human mind are only beginning. They will
do their deeds over again, and now they will act through many men
and speak through many voices. The spirit of Cuculain will stand
at many a lonely place in the heart, and he will win as of old
against multitudes. The children of Turann will start afresh
still eager to take up and renew their cyclic labors, and they
will gain, not for themselves, the Apples of the Tree of Life,
and the Spear of the Will, and the Fleece which is the immortal
body. All the heroes and demigods returning will have a wider
field than Erin for their deeds, and they will not grow weary
warning upon things that die but will be fighters in the spirit
against immortal powers, and, as before, the acts will be sometimes
noble and sometimes base. They cannot be stayed from their deeds,
for they are still in the strength of a youth which is ever renewing
itself. Not for all the wrong which may be done should they be
restrained. Mr. O'Grady would now have the tales kept from the
crowd to be the poetic luxury of a few. Yet would we, for all the
martyrs who perished in the fires of the Middle Ages, counsel the
placing of the Gospels on the list of books to be read only by a
few esoteric worshippers?
The literature which should be unpublished is that which holds the
secret of the magical powers. The legends of Ireland are not of
this kind. They have no special message to the aristocrat more
than to the man of the people. The men who made the literature
of Ireland were by no means nobly born, and it was the bards who
placed the heroes, each in his rank, and crowned them for after
ages, and gave them their famous names. They have placed on the
brow of others a crown which belonged to themselves, and all the
heroic literature of the world was made by the sacrifice of the
nameless kings of men who have given a sceptre to others they never
wielded while living, and who bestowed the powers, of beauty and
pity on women who perhaps had never uplifted a heart in their day,
and who now sway us from the grave with a grace only imagined in
the dreaming soul of the poet. Mr. O'Grady has been the bardic
champion of the ancient Irish aristocracy. He has thrown on them
the sunrise colors of his own brilliant spirit, and now would
restrain others from the use of their names lest a new kingship
should be established over them, and another law than that of his
own will, lest the poets of the democracy looking back on the
heroes of the past should overcome them with the ideas of a later
day, and the Atticottic nature find a loftier spirit in those who
felt the unendurable pride of the Fianna and rose against it. Well,
it is only natural he should try to protect the children of his
thought, but they need no later word from him. If writers of a
less noble mind than his deal with these things they will not rob
his heroes of a single power to uplift or inspire. In Greece,
after Eschylus and his stupendous deities, came Sophocles, who
restrained them with a calm wisdom, and Euripides, who made them
human, but still the mysterious Orphic deities remain and stir
us when reading the earlier page. Mr. O'Grady would not have the
Red Branch cycle cast in dramatic form or given to the people.
They are too great to be staged; and he quotes, mistaking the
gigantic for the heroic, a story of Cuculain reeling round Ireland
on his fairy steed the Liath Macha. This may be phantasy or
extravagance, but it is not heroism. Cuculain is often heroic,
but it is a quality of the soul and not of the body; it is shown
by his tears over Ferdiad, in his gentleness to women. A more
grandiose and heroic figure than Cuculain was seen on the Athenian
stage; and no one will say that the Titan Prometheus, chained on
the rock in his age-long suffering for men, is not a nobler figure
than Cuculain in any aspect in which he appears to us in the tales.
Divine traditions, the like of which were listened to with awe by
the Athenians, should not be too lofty for our Christian people,
whose morals Mr. O'Grady, here hardly candid, professes to be
anxious about. What is great in literature is a greatness springing
out of the human heart. Though we fall short today of the bodily
stature of the giants of the prime, the spirit still remains and
can express an equal greatness. I can well understand how a man
of our own day, by the enlargement of his spirit, and the passion
and sincerity of his speech, could express the greatness of the past.
The drama in its mystical beginning was the vehicle through which
divine ideas, which are beyond the sphere even of heroic life and
passion, were expressed; and if the later Irish writers fail of
such greatness, it is not for that reason that the soul of Ireland
will depart. I can hardly believe Mr. O'Grady to be serious when
he fears that many forbidden subjects will be themes for dramatic art,
that Maeve with her many husbands will walk the stage, and the lusts
of an earlier age be revived to please the lusts of today. The
danger of art is not in its subjects, but in the attitude of the
artist's mind. The nobler influences of art arise, not because
heroes are the theme, but because of noble treatment and the intuition
which perceives the inflexible working out of great moral laws.
The abysses of human nature may well be sounded if the plummet be
dropped by a spirit from the heights. The lust which leads on to
death may be a terrible thing to contemplate, but in the event
there is consolation; and the eye of faith can see even in the
very exultation of corruption how God the Regenerator is working
His will, leading man onward to his destiny of inevitable beauty.
Mr. O'Grady in his youth had the epic imagination, and I think few
people realize how great and heroic that inspiration was; but the
net that is spread for Leviathan will not capture all the creatures
of the deep, and neither epic nor romance will manifest fully the
power of the mythical ancestors of the modern Gael who now seek
incarnation anew in the minds of their children. Men too often
forget, in this age of printed books, that literature is, after all,
only an ineffectual record of speech. The literary man has gone
into strange byways through long contemplation of books, and he
writes with elaboration what could never be spoken, and he loses
that power of the bards on whom tongues of fire had descended, who
were masters of the magic of utterance, whose thoughts were not
meant to be silently absorbed from the lifeless page. For there
never can be, while man lives in a body, a greater means of
expression for him than the voice of man affords, and no instrument
of music will ever rival in power the flowing of the music of the
spheres through his lips. In all its tones, from the chanting of
the magi which compelled the elements, to those gentle voices which
guide the dying into peace, there is a power which will never be
stricken from tympan or harp, for in all speech there is life, and
with the greatest speech the deep tones of another Voice may mingle.
Has not the Lord spoken through His prophets? And man, when he has
returned to himself, and to the knowledge of himself, may find a
greater power in his voice than those which he has painfully harnessed
to perform his will, in steamship or railway. It is through drama
alone that the writer can summon, even if vicariously, so great a
power to his aid; and it is possible we yet may hear on the stage,
not merely the mimicry of human speech, but the old forgotten music
which was heard in the duns of great warriors to bow low their faces
in their hands. Dear O'Grady, if we do not succeed it is not for
you to blame us, for our aims are at least as high as your own.
1902
THE CHARACTER OF HEROIC LITERATURE
Lady Gregory, a fairy godmother, has given to Young Ireland the
gift of her Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which should be henceforward
the book of its dream. I do not doubt but there will be a great
change in the next generation, for the character of many children
will have grown to maturity brooding over the memories of heroes
who were themselves half children, half demigods. Though the hero
tales will have their greatest power over the young, no one mind
could measure their depth. They seem simple and primitive, yet
they draw us strangely aside from life, and the emotions they awaken
are not simple but complex. Here are twenty tales, and they are
so alike in imaginative character that they seem all to have poured
from one mind; and to these twenty we could add a hundred others,
all endlessly fertile in difference of incident, but all seeming
to own the same imaginative creator. It was so for many centuries,
and then the maker of the song seems to have grown weary, and
distinct voices not overladen with the tradition of the ages were
heard; and today every one wanders in a path of his own, finding
or losing the way, the truth, and the life of art in the free play
of his desires. There was something more to cause this later period
of diverse utterance than the interruption of other races and the
claims of the world upon us. Surely the ancient Egyptian met in
Memphis or Thebes as many strangers as we did, but he wept on through
many dynasties carving the same face of mystery and rarely altering
the peculiar forms which were his inheritance from the craftsmen
of a thousand years before. It was not the introduction of something
new, but the loss of something which finally vexed the calm of the
Sphinx and marred the Phidian beauty which in Greece was a long
dream for many generations. It was not because the Dane or Norman
came and dwelt among us that the signature of the Sidhe was withdrawn
from the Gaelic mind. I do not know how to express this loss
otherwise than by saying we appear to have fallen away from our
archetype. We find in all the early stories the presence of one
being who may be the genius of our land if that old idea of race
divinities be a true one. A strange similitude unites all the
characters. We infer an interior identity. The same spirit flashes
out in hostile clans, and then Cuculain kisses Ferdiad. They all
confidently appeal to; it in each other. Maeve flying after the
great battle can ask a gift from her conqueror and obtains it. Fand
and Emer dispute who shall make the last sacrifice of love and give
the beloved to a rival. The conflicts seem half in play or in dream,
and we do not know when an awakening of love will disarm the foes.
In spite of the bloodshed the heroes seem like children who fight
steadily through a mock battle, but the night will see these children
at peace, and they will dream with arms around each other in the
same cot. No literature ever had a more beautiful heart of childhood
in it. The bards could hate no one consistently. If they took
away the heroic chivalry from Conchobar in one tale they restored
it to him in another. They have the confident trust--and expectation
of goodness that children have, who may have suffered punishment,
but who come later on and smile on the chastiser. It is this quality
which gives the tales their extraordinary charm. I know no other
literature which has it to the same degree. I do not like to
speculate on the absence of this spirit in our later literature,
which was written under other influences. It cannot be because
there was a less spiritual life in the apostles than in the bards.
We cannot compare Cuculain, the most complete ideal of Gaelic
chivalry, with that supreme figure whose coming to the world was
the effacement of whole pantheons of divinities, and yet it is
true that since the thoughts of men were turned from the old ideals
our literature has been filled with a less noble life. I think a
due may be found in the withdrawal of thought from nature, the
great mother who, is the giver of all life, and without whose life
ideals become inoperative and listless dwellers in the heart. The
eyes of the ancient Gael were fixed in wonder on the rocks and hills,
and the waste places of the earth were piled with phantasmal palaces
where the Sidhe sat on their thrones. Everywhere there was life,
and as they saw so they felt. To conceive of nature in any way,
as beautiful and living, as friendly or hostile, is to receive from
her in like measure out of her fullness. With whatever face we
approach the mirror a similar face approaches ours. "Let him
approach it, saying, 'This is the Mighty,' he becomes mighty," says
an ancient scripture, teaching us that as our aspiration is so will
be our inspiration and power. Out of this comradeship with earth
there came a commingling of natures, and we do not know when we
read who are the Sidhe and who are human. The great energies are
all in the heroes. They bound to themselves, like the Talkend,
the strength of the fire, the brightness of the sun, and the
swiftness of the wind. They seem truly the earth-born. The waves
respond to their deeds; the elemental creatures respond and there
are clashing echoes and allies innumerable, and armies in the air
continuing their battles illimitably beyond: a proud race, who
felt with bursting heart the heavens were watching them, who defied
their gods and exiled them to have free play for their own deeds.
A very different humanity indeed from those who have come to walk
the earth with humility, who are afraid of heaven and its rulers,
and whose dread is the greatest of all sins, for in it is a denial
of their own divinity. Surely the sight heroes is more welcome
to the King, in whose heaven are sworded seraphim, than the bowed
knees and the spirits who make themselves as worms in His sight.
In the symbolic expression of our spiritual life the eagle has
become a dove brooding peace. Oh, that it might rebecome the eagle
and take to the upper airs!
A generosity and greatness of spirit are in the heroes of the Red
Branch, and out of their strength grows a bloom of beauty never
fully revealed until Lady Gregory compiled these tales. As we
read our eyes are dazzled by strange graces of color flowing over the
pages: everywhere there is mystery and magnificence. Procession's
pass by in Druid ritual, kings and queens, and harpers who look like
kings. When the wind passes over them and stirs their garments a
sweetness comes over the teller of the tale, who felt that delight
in draperies blown over shapely forms which is the inspiration of
the Winged Victory and many Greek marbles. The bards will not have
the hands of those proud people touch anything which is not beautiful.
"It was a beautiful chessboard they had, all of white bronze, and
the chessmen of gold and silver, and a candlestick of precious stones
lighting it." The wasting of time has spared us a few things to
show that this rare and intricate metal work was not a myth, and
we are forced by an inexorable logic to accept as mainly true the
narration of the pride, the beauty, the generosity, and the large
lovable character of the ancient heroes. We may come to realize
that, losing their Druid vision of a more shining world mingling
with this, we have lost the vision of that life into the likeness
of which it is the true labor of the spirit to transform this life.
For the Tirnanoge is that Garden where, in the mind of the Lord,
the flowers and trees blossomed before they grew in the fields,
where man lived in the Golden Age before the outer darkness of the
earth was built and he was outcast from Paradise. There is no true
art or literature which has not some image of the Golden Life lurking
within it, and through the archaic rudeness of these legends the
light shines as sunlight through the hoary branches of ancient oaks.
Lady Gregory has done her work, as compiler with a judgment which
could hardly be too much praised, and she has translated the stories
into an idiom which is a reflection of the original Gaelic and is
full of charm. We are indebted to her for this labor as much as
to any of those who sang to sweeten Ireland's wrong.
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