The Shingle grinding along the sh.o.r.e, When they dragged his war-boats down to the sea; The dawn-wind whistling his spears among.
And the magic song of his ministrels three.
Whereby you may know, if you consider it rightly, what great strain of influence flows in from the Great Plain and the Land of Youth, that may yet help towards the salvation of Europe. When you turn your eyes on the diaphanous veil of the Mighty Mother, and see it sparkling and gleaming like that, it is but a step to seeing the motions of the Great Life behind; but a step to seeing
"Eternal Beauty wander on her way;"
--that Beauty which is the grand Theophany or manifestation of G.o.d. It would not be, it could not exist, but that the Spirit is here; but that the G.o.ds are here, and clearly visible; talk not of the Supreme Self, and shut your eyes meanwhile to the Beauty of the World which is the light that shines from It, and the sign of Its presence! And the consciousness of this Beauty is one which, since Ireland, thrilled from the Otherworld, arose and sang, has been forcing itself ever more and more through the minds, chiefly of poets, of a Europe exiled from truth. I cannot over-estimate the importance of this delight in and worship of Beauty in Nature, which the wise Chinese considered the path to the highest things in Art. Europe has inherited, mainly from the Greeks and the time the western world fell into ignorance, a preoccupation with human personality: in Art and Literature, I mean, as well as in life. We are individuals, and would peg out claims for ourselves even in the Inner World; and by reason of that the Inner World is mostly shut away from us;--for there, as the poem I quoted about the Great Plain says, "none talk of "mine" and "thine."" But down through the centuries of Christendom, after our catching it so near its source in magical Ireland, comes this other music: this listening, not for the voices of pa.s.sion, and indecision, and the self-conceit which is the greatest fool"s play of all, within our personal selves,--but for the meditations of the Omnipresent as they are communicated through the gleam on water, through the breath and delicacy of flowers, through the
"blackbird"s singing in Letterlee,"
--this tendency to "seek in the Impersonal" (Nature is impersonal) "for the Eternal Self."
So here, in these fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, I find the forces "going west," through Gaul, through Wales, through Ireland, to the Great Plain; there to recover themselves bathing in the magical Fountain of Youth which is so near to the island the Greeks called "Sacred Ierne of the Hibernians." It may be that the finest part of them has not come back yet; but will re-emerge, spiritual and saving, through this same gateway.
One would be ashamed of the Host of the G.o.ds, were they not doing strenuous battle in the unseen for the regeneration of this poor Ireland, that will yet mean so much to the world: and one would marvel at the h.e.l.lions, indeed one would, were they in their turn not moving heaven and earth, with their best battle-breaking champions in the fore-front, to maintain their strangle-hold on her tortured and beautiful soul.
XXVII. THE IRISH ILLUMINATION
We put 420 for a date to the Southern Renaissance in China, and 410 to the age that became Arthurian in Wales. The next thing in China is 527, and the coming of Bodhidharma; the next thing in Celtdom is 520, and the coming of Findian.
He was an Irishman, and had been studying in Wales; where, certainly, there was great activity in churchly circles in those days. Get a map of that country, and note all the place-names beginning with _Llan,_--and you will see. There are countless thousands of them. "Llan" means "the holy place of," and the rest of the name will be that of the saint who taught or preached there: of whom, I believe, only David appears in the Catholic calendar. They were most of them active in the fifth and sixth centuries.
Findian, according to the _Encyclopaedia Britannica,_ had come under the influence of three of the foremost of them: David, Gildas, and Catwg the Wise; who were perhaps great men, if we may judge by the results of their teaching, as Findian transmitted it to those that came after him. We have seen that Patrick opened no kind of golden age in Ireland, gave no impulse to civilization or letters. The church he founded had fallen on rather evil days since his death; and now Findian came to reform things in the light of what he had learned in Wales. He began by founding at Clonard a monastery on the Welsh plan. That was some twenty-two years before Geoffrey"s date for the pa.s.sing of Arthur. By the time Camlan had been fought, and the Crest-Wave had left Wales, Findian had made a channel through which it might flow into Ireland, and in the five-forties the Irish illumination began.
We must say a word or two as to the kind of inst.i.tution he founded. There were several of them in Wales,--to be called colleges, or even universities, as rightly as monasteries:--one at Bangor in the north; two or three in Glamorgan; one at Saint Davids. Students flocked to them by the thousands; there was strict discipline, the ascetic life,--and also serious study, religious and secular. It was all beautifully simple: each student lived in his own hut,
"of clay and wattles made,"
--or, where stone might be plentiful, as it is in most parts of Wales, of stone. Like a military camp, the whole place would be surrounded with fosse and vallum. They grew their own corn and vegetables, milked their own cows, fished in the streams, and supported themselves. The sky roofed their lecture-halls; of which the walls, if there were any, were the trees and the mountains. But these places were real centers of learning, the best there were in Europe in those days; and you needed not to be a monk to attend them.
In Wales the strain of the Saxon wars kept them from their full fruition. Celtic warfare was governed by a certain code: thus, you, went to war only at such and such a time of the year; invaded your neighbor"s territory only through such and such a stretch of his frontier; and no one need trouble to guard more than the recognized doorway of his realm. Above all, you never took an army through church lands. So through all the wars the Britons might be waging among themselves to keep their hands in, the monastery-colleges remained islands of peace, on friendly terms with all the combatants. But Wales, with no natural frontier, lay very open to invaders who knew no respect for religion or learning. Twelve hundred of the student-monks of Bangor, for example, were slaughtered in 613 by the Saxon Ethelfrith;--whereafter the rest fled to Bardsey Island in Cardigan Bay, and the great college at Bangor ceased to be.
Augustine of Canterbury, sent by the Pope to convert the English, had summoned the Welsh bishops to a conference, and ordered them to come under his sway and conform to Rome. They hardly knew why, but disliked the idea. Outwardly, their divergence from Catholicism was altogether trivial: they had their own way of shaving their heads for the tonsure, and their own times for celebrating Easter,--though truly, these are the kind of things over which you fight religious wars. However, it was not these details that worried them so much; but an uneasy sense they derived, perhaps, from the tone of Augustine"s summons. The story runs that they took counsel among themselves, and agreed that if he were a man sent from G.o.d, they would find him humble-minded and mannered; whereof the sign should be, that he would rise to greet them when they entered. But Augustine had other ideas; and as the amba.s.sador of the Vicar of Christ, rose to greet no man. So still, not quite knowing why, they would have no dealings with him; and went their ways after refusing to a.s.similate their Church of the Circled Cross to his of the Cross Uncircled;--whereupon he, to teach them a sound lesson, impelled the Saxon kings to war. Fair play to him, he was dead before that war brought about the ma.s.sacre of the monks of Bangor,--who had marched to Chester to pray for the Briton arms.
But when Findian went back to Ireland he found no such difficulties in his way. Not till two hundred and seventy-five years later was that island disturbed by foreign invaders; and whatever domestic Kilkenny Cattery might be going forward, the colleges were respected. His school at Clonard quickly grew* till its students numbered three thousand; and in the forties, he sent out twelve of the chief of them to found other such schools throughout the island. Then the great age began; and for the next couple of thirteen-decade periods Ireland was a really brilliant center of light and learning. Not by any means merely, or even chiefly, in theology; there was a wonderful quickening of mental energies, a real illumination. The age became, as we have seen, a sort of literary clearing-house for the whole Irish past. If the surviving known Gaelic ma.n.u.scripts were printed, they would fill nearly fifty thousand quarto volumes, with matter that mostly comes from before the year 800,--and which is still not only interesting, but fascinating.
------ * _Encyclopaedia Britannica,_ article "Ireland"; whence all re Findian and the colleges.
The truth is, we seem to have in it the relics and wreckage of the literary output of a whole foregone manvantara, or perhaps several. For in the vast ma.s.s of epics and romances that comes down, one distinguishes three main cycles: the _Mythological,_ the _Red Branch,_ and the _Fenian._ The first deals with the Five Races that invaded or colonized Ireland: Partholanians, Nemedians, Firbolgs, G.o.ds, and Irish;--in all of it I suspect the faint memories and _membra disjecta_ of old, old manvantaras: indeed, the summing up of the history of created man. You will have noted that the number of the races, as in Theosophic teaching, is five. M. de Jubainville points out that the creation of the world, or its gradual a.s.sumption of its present form, goes on _pari pa.s.su_ with the evolution of its humanities, and under their eyes; thus, when Partholan, the first invader, arrived, there were but three lakes in Ireland, and nine rivers, and one plain. This, too, is an echo of the secret doctrine; and incidentally indicates how tremendously far back that first invasion was thought to have been.
The Partholanians came into Ireland from the Great Plain, the "Land of the Living," as the Irish called it, which is also the Land of the Dead:--in other words, they came _into_ this world, and not from another part of it. Their peculiarity was that they were "no wiser the one than the other "; an allusion to the mindlessness of the early humanities before the Manasaputra incarnated in the mid-Third Root Race. Again, before their coming, there was a people in Ireland called the Fomorians: they came up from the sea, were gigantic and deformed; some of them with but one foot or one arm, some with the heads of horses or goats. That will remind you of the "water-men, terrible and bad"
in the Stanzas of Dzyan: the first attempts of the Earth or unaided Nature to create men. But when the Partholanians fought with and defeated these Fomoroh, they were said to have "freed Ireland from a foreign foe"; this though the Fomorians were there first, and though the Partholanians were "invaders," and utterly ceased to be after a time, so that no drop of their blood runs in Irish veins. Why, then, does Ireland identify itself with the one race, and discard the other as "foreign foes"?-- Because the Partholanians represent the first human race, but the Fomoroh or "Water-men" were unhuman, and a kind of _lusus naturae._ "Fomoroh," by the way, may very well be translated "Water-men"; _fo_ I take to be the Greek _upo,_ "under," and "mor" is the "sea." Now the Battle of Mag Itha, between Partholan and the Fomorians, is a very late invention; not devised, I think, until the eleventh century. And of course there was no war or contact between the First Race and the Water-men, who had been destroyed long before. This is a good example of what came down in Pagan Ireland, and how the Christian redactors treated it. They had heard of the existence of the Fomoroh before the coming of Partholan, and thought it wise to provide the latter with a war against them. Later, as we shall see, the Fomoroh stood for the over-sea people westward,--the Atlantean giant-sorcerers.
The second race of invaders, the Nemedians, were also given a war with the Fomorians,--in the story of the seige of Conan"s Tower.
But this story is told by Nennius as applying to the Milesians, the Fifth Race Irish, and not to the Second Race Nemedians; and probably relates to events in comparatively historical tiems,-- say a million years ago, or between that and the submersion of Poseidonis about nine thousand B.C. One would imagine that Ireland, from its position, must have been a main battle-ground between the men of the Fifth and the Atlanteans, between the White and the Black Magicians. Mr. Judge"s _Bryan Kinnavan_ stories indicate that it was a grand stronghold of the former.
The Nemedians were akin to the Partholanians: the Second Race to the First,--both mindless: they came after their predecessors had all died out; and in their turn died or departed to the last man. So we find in _The Secret Doctrine_ that the first two humanities pa.s.sed utterly and left no trace. If I go into all this a little fully, it is because it ill.u.s.trates so well the system of _blinds_ under which the Inner Teaching was hidden, and at the same time revealed, by the Initiate of every land. These Celtic things seem never to have come under the eye of Mme.
Blavatsky at all; or how she might have drawn on them! I think that nowhere else in the mythologies are the Five Root-Races, the four past and the one existent, mentioned so clearly as here in Ireland. For historic reasons at which we have glanced,--the Roman occupation, which was hardly over before the Saxon invasions began,--Wales has preserved infinitely less of the records of ancient Celtic civilization than Ireland has; and yet Professor Kund Meyer told me,--and surely no living man is better qualified to make suct a statement,--that the whole of the forgotten Celtic mythology might yet be recovered from old MSS.
hidden away in Welsh private libraries that have never been examined. How much more then may be hoped for from Ireland!
The third invasion was by a threefold people: the Fir Domnan, or Men of the G.o.ddess Domna; the Fir Bolg, or Men of the Sacks; and the Galioin. From these races there were still people in Connacht in the seventeenth century who claimed their decent.
Generally all three are called by the one name of Firbolgs. They were "avaricious, mean, uncouth, musicless, and inhospitable."
Then came the Tuatha De Danaan, "G.o.ds and false G.o.ds," as Tuan MacCarell told St. Finnen, "from whom everyone knows the Irish men of learning are descended. It is likely they came into Ireland from heaven, hence their knowledge and the excellence of their teaching." Thus Tuan, who has just been made to allude to them as "G.o.ds and _false G.o.ds._" This Tuan, I should mention, originally came into Ireland with Partholan; and, that history might be preserved, kept on reincarnating there, and remembering all his past lives. These Danaans conquered, and then ruled over, the Firbolgs: it is a glyph of the Third or Lemurian Race, of which the first three (and a half) sub-races were mindless--the Fir Domnan, Fir Bolg and Galioin; then the Lords of Mind incarnated and reigned over them, the Tuatha De Danaan, wafted down from heaven in a druid cloud. So far we have a pretty exact symbolic rendering of the Theosophic teaching.
The Danaans conquered the Firbolgs, it is said, at the Battle of Moytura. Now there were two Battles of Moytura, of which this was the first; it alludes to the incarnation of the Manasaputra, and with it the clear symbolic telling of human history comes to an end. So much, being very remote, was allowed to come down without other disguise than that which the symbols afforded. But at this point, which is the beginning of the mind-endowed humanity we know, a mere eighteen million years ago, further blinds became necessary. History, an esoteric science, had still more to be camouflaged, lest memories should seize upon indications too readily, and find out too much. Why this should be, it is not the time to argue; enough to say that the wisdom of antiquity decreed it.
There has always been some doubt as to the Second Battle of Moytura. Because of a certain air with which it is invested, scholars think now, for the most part, that it was a later invention. But I do not think so: I think that air comes from the extra layer of symbolism that is laid over it; from the second coating of camouflage; from the fact that the few years between the two battles represent several million years,--about which the mythological history is silent, running them all together, like street-lights you see a long way off. What happened was this:
In the first battle Nuada, king of the Danaans, lost his hand; and, because a king must be blemishless, lost his kinghood too.
It went to Bres son of Elatha; whose mother was Danaan, but whose unknown father was of the Fomoroh. Note the change: the first battle was with the Firbolgs, the mindless humanity of the early third Race; now we are to deal with Fomorians, who have come to symbolize the Black Magicians of Atlantis: the second half of the Lemurian, and nearly the whole of the Atlantean period, have elapse.--In person, Bres was handsome like the Danaans; in character he was Fomorian altogether. This is the sum of the history of later Lemuria and of Atlantis; Moytura, and Nuada"s loss of his hand and kinghood there, symbolize the incarnation of the Manasaputra,--descent of Spirit into matter,-- and therewith, in time, their forgetting their own divinity. I should say that it is Bres himself, rather than the Fomorians as a whole, who stands symbol just now for the Atlantean sorcerers.
There is a subtle connexion between the Firbolgs and Fomoroh: the former are the men, the latter the G.o.ds, of the same race; the Firbolgs stood originally for the mindless men of the early third, men evolving up out of the lower kingdoms towards the point of becoming human and mind-endowed; the Fomorians were the G.o.ds or so to say Spiritual Powers of those lower worlds; the forces in opposition to upward evolution. So we see Bres of that dual lineage: with magic from his Danaan mother, and blackness from his Fomorian father: the Atlanteans, inheriting mind from the Manasaputra, but turning their divine inheritance to the uses of chaos and night.
As his reign represents the whole Atlantean period, we might expect it to have begun well enough, and worsened as it went.
This was so; had he shown his colors from the first, it is not to be thought that the Danaans would have tolerated him at all.
But it came to be, as time went on, that he oppressed Ireland abominably; and at last they rose and drove him out. Nuada, whose missing hand had been replaced with one of silver, was restored in the kingship; henceforth he is called Nuada of the Silver Hand. Here we have the return or redescent of the Divine Dynasties who came to lead the men of the early Fifth Race against the Atlantean giants. I shall beg leave now to tell you the story of the Second Battle of Moytura.
Perhaps it was in Ireland that the White Adepts of the Fifth made their first stand against the Atlanteans? Perhaps thence it first got its epithet, _Sacred_ Ierne?--Bres, driven out by the G.o.ds, took refuge with his father the Fomorian king beyond the western sea; who gave him an army with which to reconquer his lost dominions. Now we come to the figure who represents the Fifth Race. There are in Europe perhaps a dozen cities named after Lugh Lamfada, the Irish (indeed Celtic) Sun-G.o.d: Lyons, the most important of them, was Lug-dunum, the _dun_ or fortress of Lugh. Lugh was a kind of counterpart to Bres; he was the son of Cian, a Danaan, and a daughter of the Fomorian champion Balor of the Mighty Blows, or of the Evil Eye. The story of his birth is like that of Perseus, son of Zeus and Danae. Danae"s son, you remember, was fated to kill his grandfather Acrisius; so Acrisius shut Danae in an inaccessable tower, that no son might be born to her. The antiquity of the whole legend is suggested by this nearness of the Greek and Irish versions;--even to the similarity of the names of Dana and Danae: though Dana was not the mother of Lugh, but of the whole race of the G.o.ds: _Tuatha De Danaan_ means, the "Race of the G.o.ds the Children of Dana."
So you see it comes from the beginnings of the Fifth Race, a million years ago; but how much better the history of that time is preserved in the Irish than in the Greek version! As if the Irish took it direct from history and symbolism, and the Greeks from the Irish. And why not? since in the nature of things Ireland must have been so much nearer the scene of action.
Lugh grew up among his mother"s people, but remembered his divine descent on his father"s side; and when it came to the War of the Fomoroh against Ireland, was for fighting for his father"s people. So he set out for Tara, where Nuada and the G.o.ds were preparing to meet the invasion; and whoever beheld him as he came, it seemed to them as if they had seen the sun rising on a bright day in summer.--"Open thou the portal!" said he; but the knife was in the meat and the mead in the horn, and no man might enter but a craftsman bearing his craft. "Oh then, I am a craftsman," said Lugh; "I am a good carpenter." There was an excellent carpenter in Tara already, and none other needed.-"It is a smith I am," said Lugh. But they had a smith there who was professor of the three new designs in smithcraft, and none else would be desired. Then he was a champion; but they had Ogma son of Ethlenn for champion, and would not ask a better. Then he was a harper; and a poet; and an antiquary; and a necromancer; and an artificer; and a cup-bearer. But they were well supplied with men of all those crafts, and there was no place for him.-- "Then go and ask the king," said Lugh, "if he will not be needing a man who is excellent in all those crafts at once"; and that way he got admission.
After that he was drawing up the smiths and carpenters, and inquiring into their abilities, and giving them their tasks in preparation for the battle. There was Goibniu, the smith of the Danaans.--"Though the men of Ireland should be fighting for seven years," said Goibniu, "for every spear that falls off its handle, and for every sword that breaks, I will put a new weapon in its place; and no erring or missing cast shall be thrown with a spear of my making; and no flesh it may enter shall ever taste the sweets of life after;--and this is more than Dub the smith of the Fomorians can do." And there was Creidne the Brazier: he would not do less well than Goibniu the Smith would; and there was Luchtine the Carpenter: evil on his beard if he did less than Creidne;--and so with the long list of them.
It was on the first day of November the battle began; and when the sun went to his setting, the weapons of the Fomorians were all bent and notched, but those of the G.o.ds were like new. And new they were: new and new after every blow struck or cast thrown. For with three strokes of his hammer Goibniu would be fashioning a spear-head, and after the third stroke there could be no bettering it. With three chippings of his knife, Luchtine had cut a handle for it; and at the third chipping there would be no fault to find with the handle either by G.o.ds or men. And as quickly as they made the spear-heads and the shafts, Creidne the Brazier had the rivets made to rivet them; and if there were bettering those rivets, it would not be by any known workmanship.
When Goibniu had made a spear-head, he took it in his tongs, and hurled it at the lintel of the door so that it stuck fast there, the socket outward. When Luchtine had made a spear-haft, he hurled it out at the spear-head in the lintel; and it was good hurling, not to be complained of: the end of the haft stuck in the socket, and stuck firm. And as fast as those two men did those two things, Creidne had his rivets ready, and threw them at the spear-head; and so excellent his throwing, and the nicety of his aim, no rivet would do less than enter the holes in the socket, and drive on into the wood of the shaft;--and that way there was no cast of a spear by the G.o.ds at the h.e.l.lions, but there was a new spear in the smithy ready to replace it. Then the Fomoroh sent a spy into the camp of the G.o.ds, who achieved killing Goibniu with one of the latter"s own spears; and by reason of that it was going ill with the G.o.ds the next day in the battle. And it was going worse with them because of Balor of the Mighty Blows, and he taking the field at last for the Fomorians,--
"Balor as old as a forest, his mighty head helpless sunk, And an army of men holding open his weary and death-dealing eye,"
--for wherever his glances fell, there death came. They fell on Nuada of the Silver Hand, and he died,--albeit it is well known that he was alive, and worshiped in Britain in Roman times, for a temple to him has been found near the River Severn.--Then came Lugh to avenge Nuada, and a bolt from his sling tore like the dawn ray, like the meteor of heaven, over Moytura plain, and took the evil eye of Balor in the midst, and drove it into his head; and then the Fomorians were routed. And this, in truth, like Camlan and Kurukshetra, is the battle that is forever being fought: Balor comes death-dealing still; and still the sling of Lugh Lamfada is driving its meteor shafts through heaven and defeating him.
As for the defeat of the G.o.ds by the Milesians, and their retirement into the mountains,--that too is actual history told under a thinnish veil of symbolism: the Fifth Race having been started, the Sons of Wisdom, its first G.o.ds and Adept Kings, who had sown the seeds of all bright things that were to be in its future civilizations, withdrew into the Unseen.
All this and much more,--the whole Mythological Cycle,-- represents what came over into Irish literature from ancient manvantaric periods, and the compression of the records of millions of years. A century seems a very long time while it is pa.s.sing; but at two or three millenniums ago, no longer than a few autumns and winters; and at a million years" distance, the doings and changes, the empires and dynasties of a hundred centuries, look to the eyes of racial memory like the contents of a single spring. So it is the history and wisdom of remote multiplied ages that come down to us in these tales.
But with the Heroic Cycle we seem to be entering a near manvantara.
This is the noon-period of Irish literature, the Shakespeare-Milton time; where the other was the dawn or Chaucer period. Or the Mythological Cycle is the Vedic, and the Heroic, the Epic, period, to take an Indian a.n.a.logy; and this fits it better, because the Irish, like the Indian, dawn-period is immensely ancient and of immense duration. But when you come to the Heroic time, with the stories of the high king Conary Mor, and of the Red Branch Warriors, with for _piece de resistance_ the epic _Tann Bo Cuailgne,_ you seem (as you do in the _Mahabharata_) to be standing upon actual memories, as much historical as symbolic. Here all the figures, though t.i.tanic, are at least half human, with a definite character a.s.signed to all of importance. They revel in huge dramatic action; move in an heroic mistless sunlight. You can take part in the daily life of the Red Branch champions as you can in that of the Greeks before Troy; they seem real and clear-cut; you can almost remember Deirdre"s beauty and the sorrow of the doom of the Children of Usna; you have a shrewd notion what Cuculain looked like, and what Conall Carnach; you are familiar with the fire trailed from the chariot wheels, the sods kicked up by the horses" hoofs; you believe in them all, as you do in Odysseus and Ajax, in Bhishma and Arjuna, in Hamlet and Falstaff;--as I for my part never found it possible to believe in Malory"s and Tennyson"s well-groomed gentlemen of the Table Round.
And then, after long lapse, came another age, and the Cycle of the Fenians. It too is full of excellent tales, but all less t.i.tanic and clearly-defined: almost, you might say, standing to the Red Branch as Wordsworth and Keats to Shakespeare and Milton.
The atmosphere is on the whole dimmer, the figures are weaker; there is not the same dynamic urge of creation. You come away with an impression of the beauty of the forest through which the Fenians wandered and camped, and less with an impression of the personalities of the Fenians themselves. There is abundant Natural Magic, but not the old Grand Manner; and you would not recognise Finn or Oisin or Oscar, if you ment them, so easily as you would Cuculain or Fergus MacRoy or Naisi. Civilization appears to have declined far between the two ages, to have become much less settled,--as it naturally would, with all that fighting going on. I take it that all the stories of both cycles relate to ages of the breakup of civilization: peaceful and civilized times leave less impress on the racial memory. The Fenians are distinctly further from such civilized times, however, than are the Red Branch: they are a nomad company, but the Red Branch had their capital at Emain Macha by Armagh in Ulster. But what mystery, what sparkling magic environs them! Mr. Rollerstone cites this as an example: Once three beautiful unknown youths joined Finn"s company; but stipulated that they should camp apart, and be left alone during the nights. After awhile it fell out what was the reason for this: one of them died between every dusk and dawn, and the other two had to be watching him. That is all that is said; but it is enough to keep your imagination at work a long while.
--And then, the manvantara dies away in a dolphin glory of mystical colors in the many tales of wondrous voyages and islands in the Atlantic: such as the Voyage of Maelduin, of which Tennyson"s version gives you some taste of the brightness, but none at all of the delicacy and mysterious beauty and grace.
Except the cla.s.sical, this is the oldest written literature in Europe; and I doubt there is any other that gives us such a wide peep-hole into lost antiquity. Yes; perhaps it is the best lens extant, west of India. It is a lens, of course, that distorts: the long past is shown through a temperament,--made into poetry and romance; not left bare scientific history. But perhaps poetry and romance are after all the truest and final form of history. Perhaps, in looking at recent ages, we are balked of seeing their true underlying form by the dust of events and the clamor of details; for eyes anointed they might resolve themselves into Moyturas and Camlans endlessly fought; into magical weapons magically forged; into Cuculains battling eternally at the Watcher"s Ford, he alone withstanding the great host of this world"s invaders, while all his companions are under a druid sleep. . . . It is the most splendid scene or incident in the _Tann Bo Cuailgne;_ and I cannot think of it, but it calls up before my mind"s eye another picture: that of a little office in New York, and a desk, and rows of empty seats; and another Irishman, lecturing to those empty seats . . . . but to all humanity, really . . . . from the ranks of which his companions should come to him presently; he would hold back the hosts of darkness alone, waiting for their coming. And I cannot think of this latter picture but it seems to me as if:
Cuculain rode from out the ages" prime, The hero time, s.p.a.cious and girt with gold, For he had heard this earth was stained with crime.