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ANCIENT LEGENDS OF IRELAND.

BY LADY WILDE.

HE Pall Mall Gazette, some little time ago, described its contemporary, The Tablet, as a window through which Englishmen could look, with much advantage to themselves, on to the world of Catholic Europe. This statement, no doubt, is perfectly true as far as it goes, though it might be urged that The Tablet is not quite the best guide for one who seeks to examine the Catholic Church in an enlightened way; and that, in these days of ours, a purely clerical paper gives only a warped, a one-sided view of the great world of Europe. If these qualifications are allowed me, then I would cordially agree, with The Pall Mall Gazette, in thinking that The Tablet is wholesome and profitable reading for the average Englishman, who too seldom looks through any window which gives him a satisfactory view of the world beyond the English Channel and the Irish Sea.

But in these delightful volumes, Lady Wilde has given her fellow-countrymen, if she will allow us so to describe ourselves, a window through which we can look quite out of our prosaic life, into a world of fancy and romance. It is a world with all the youthful freshness and charm of the earliest ages of historical man. These ancient legends of Ireland might be described as :

Charm'd magic casements opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Lady Wilde takes her readers into fairy land; not into the unreal fairy land of nursery tales, but into a veritable world in which human people live, and move, and have their being, and surround themselves with exquisite fancies of the unseen universe beyond the narrow limits of mortal ken.

M. Renan, in his Poésie des Races Celtiques, speaks of those gifted races imagining that la nature entière est enchantée et féconde; and in these legends we find how true this is. Nothing, perhaps, can reveal a nation more truly than its imaginations about the unseen; and if this be so, it is a most profitable occupation for us to look through Lady Wilde's charm'd magic casements at the Irish, as these legends of theirs display them to us. They will do us far more good, and

tell us a great deal more about

Ireland, than the articles in the Tory

Papers, or than the chilling speeches of the Unionists.

In these legends we are taken back to the earliest traditions which have been handed down in the human family, and we find them as they exist among the people who, of all the western nations, are the most unchanged. There is one quality in these ancient myths which cannot fail to strike an observant reader, and that is their profound melancholy, their yearning pathos. We often hear it asserted that pathos and melancholy are the wicked acquirements of our own century; indeed, in a recent book of curious art-criticisms, which had a title still more curious, it was stated of one of the greatest of living English artists, "that the underlying sadness of his work has no parallel in that of ancient times." I suppose the second that in the sentence refers to sadness, and the writer means to tell us that this sadness is less known to ancient art than it is to our own. There were many verdicts in the book to which I could hardly assent, many comparisons which seemed, to me, to illustrate the difference

Germanic nature; but

between the refined Celtic spirit and the gross there was hardly a statement from which I dissented more completely than this one about pathos. I thought of Virgil's lacrima rerum ; the sense of tears in mortal things, as it has been finely rendered by a living poet, whom the author of Sententiæ Artis mangles and misquotes. And then, in these ancient legends of the Irish race, I find the sense of tears in mortal things as evident in the oldest traditions which we possess: traditions so ancient that, in comparison with their age, the writings of Virgil are modern. With this brief preface, and this mild protest, I turn to Lady Wilde's volumes.

I propose to deal with three kinds of stories: stories of fairies, stories about poets, and stories about animals. The stories of fairies tell us most about the Irish nature; for instance, Lady Wilde insists, more than once, upon the connection between fairy melodies and Irish music. "It is remarkable," she says, "that the Irish national airsplaintive, beautiful, and unutterably pathetic-should so perfectly express the spirit of the Céol-Sidhe (the fairy music), as it haunts the fancy of the people and mingles with all their traditions of the spirit world. Wild and capricious as the fairy nature, these delicate harmonies, with their mystic, mournful rhythm, seem to touch the deepest chords of feeling, or to fill the sunshine with laughter, according to the mood of the players; but, above all things, Irish music is the utterance of a Divine sorrow; not stormy or passionate, but like that of an exiled spirit, yearning and wistful, vague and unresting; ever seeking the unattainable, ever shadowed, as it were, with memories of some lost good, or some dim forebodings of a coming fate-emotions that seem to find their truest expression in the sweet, sad, lingering wail of the pathetic minor in a genuine Irish air." Emotions, too, which find their utterance in Shelley; of whom

L

this paragraph might be a criticism. And again, "On May Eve the fairy music is heard on all the hills, and many beautiful tunes have been caught up in this way by the people and the native musicians.”

"

Besides the connection between the Irish airs and the fairy music, we find a close affinity between the Irish people and the fairies themselves. "The fairies," says Lady Wilde once more, "with their free, joyous temperament and love of beauty and luxury, hold in great contempt the minor virtues of thrift and economy. And, above all things, abhor the close, hard, niggardly nature that spends grudgingly and never gives freely. Indeed, they seem to hold it as their peculiar mission to punish such people." Earth, lake, and hill are peopled by these fantastic, beautiful gods of earth ; the wilful, capricious child spirits of the world." "The children of the Sidhe and a mortal mother are always clever and beautiful, and specially excel in music and dancing. They are, however, passionate and wilful, and have strange, moody fits, when they desire solitude above all things, and seem to hold converse with unseen spiritual beings." This last definition, which might almost serve for a description of the poetic nature, leads us on to what Lady Wilde tells us about the poets in Celtic antiquity. "Poets have a knowledge of mysteries above all other men." "The spirit of life was supposed to be the inspirer of poet and singer;" and "music and poetry are fairy gifts, and the possessors of them show kinship to the spirit race-therefore they are watched over by the spirit of life, which is prophecy and inspiration; and by the spirit of doom, which is the revealer of the secrets of death." So highly were poets esteemed by this spiritual race that "the Poet ranked next to the Princes of the land," he could dress in more gorgeous clothing than any people who were not royal, and he wore a mantle of birds'

plumage. The power of the poets, too, was mysterious and awful; they were lords over the secrets of life, through "the power of the Word." We read of a chief who was killed by satires, and another poet said, "I will satirize the mice in a poem, and forthwith he chanted so bitter a satire against them that ten mice fell dead at once in his presence." This poet was so delightfully particular that he refused to accept food from a boy, because his grandfather was chipnailed; and from a beautiful maiden, because her grandmother had once "pointed out the way with her hand to some travelling lepers; after that, said the Poet, How could I touch thy food?" It is no wonder that the unfortunate Prince, whose emissaries were scorned in this way, "prayed to God to be delivered from the learned men and women, a vexatious class." We are told of a very wise Seer who "never could be made to learn the English tongue, though he says it might be used with great effect to curse one's enemies ;" and who that reads Reviews and literary squabbles can deny the profound insight of the prophet!

unseen.

The Irish have invested the animal world with the same air of mystery and spirituality which they attribute to Nature, to the "The peasants believe that the domestic animals know all about us, especially the dog and the cat. They listen to everything that is said; they watch the expression of the face, and can even read the thoughts. The Irish say it is not safe to ask a question of a dog, for he might answer, and should he do so the questioner will surely die." The cat is regarded as singularly intelligent, but as slightly uncanny, too; a usual form of blessing is, "God save all here except the cat." Black cats "are endowed with reason, can understand conversation, and are quite able to talk if they considered it advisable and judicious to join in the conversation." If If your

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