INTRODUCTION.
THE TROOPING FAIRIES.
THE SOLITARY FAIRIES.
GHOSTS.
WITCHES, FAIRY DOCTORS.
T'YEER-NA-N-OGE.
SAINTS, PRIESTS.
THE DEVIL.
GIANTS.
KINGS, QUEENS, PRINCESSES,EARLS, ROBBERS.
NOTES.
INTRODUCTION.
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.)
