No More Learning

I
would have some of them leave that work of theirs which will never
lack hands, and begin to dig in Ireland, the garden of the future,
understanding that here in Ireland the spirit of man may be about to
wed the soil of the world.

Art and scholarship like these I have described would give Ireland
more than they received from her, for they would make love of the
unseen more unshakable, more ready to plunge deep into the abyss, and
they would make love of country more fruitful in the mind, more a part
of daily life. One would know an Irishman into whose life they had
come--and in a few generations they would come into the life of all,
rich and poor--by something that set him apart among men. He himself
would understand that more was expected of him than of others because
he had greater possessions. The Irish race would have become a chosen
race, one of the pillars that uphold the world.

1901.

FOOTNOTE:

[Footnote B: This essay was first published in the _United Irishman_. ]




THE GALWAY PLAINS


LADY GREGORY has just given me her beautiful _Poets and Dreamers_, and
it has brought to mind a day two or three years ago when I stood on the
side of Slieve Echtge, looking out over Galway. The Burren Hills were
to my left, and though I forget whether I could see the cairn over Bald
Conan of the Fianna, I could certainly see many places there that are
in poems and stories. In front of me, over many miles of level Galway
plains, I saw a low blue hill flooded with evening light. I asked a
countryman who was with me what hill that was, and he told me it was
Cruachmaa of the Sidhe. I had often heard of Cruachmaa of the Sidhe
even as far north as Sligo, for the country people have told me a great
many stories of the great host of the Sidhe who live there, still
fighting and holding festivals.

I asked the old countryman about it, and he told me of strange women
who had come from it, and who would come into a house having the
appearance of countrywomen, but would know all that happened in that
house; and how they would always pay back with increase, though not by
their own hands, whatever was given to them. And he had heard, too, of
people who had been carried away into the hill, and how one man went to
look for his wife there, and dug into the hill and all but got his wife
again, but at the very moment she was coming out to him, the pick he
was digging with struck her upon the head and killed her. I asked him
if he had himself seen any of its enchantments, and he said, 'Sometimes
when I look over to the hill, I see a mist lying on the top of it, that
goes away after a while.
'

A great part of the poems and stories in Lady Gregory's book were made
or gathered between Burren and Cruachmaa. It was here that Raftery,
the wandering country poet of ninety years ago, praised and blamed,
chanting fine verses, and playing badly on his fiddle. It is here
the ballads of meeting and parting have been sung, and some whose
lamentations for defeat are still remembered may have passed through
this plain flying from the battle of Aughrim.

'I will go up on the mountain alone; and I will come hither from it
again. It is there I saw the camp of the Gael, the poor troop thinned,
not keeping with one another; Och Ochone! ' And here, if one can believe
many devout people whose stories are in the book, Christ has walked
upon the roads, bringing the needy to some warm fire-side, and sending
one of His Saints to anoint the dying.

I do not think these country imaginations have changed much for
centuries, for they are still busy with those two themes of the ancient
Irish poets, the sternness of battle and the sadness of parting and
death. The emotion that in other countries has made many love songs has
here been given, in a long wooing, to danger, that ghostly bride. It is
not a difference in the substance of things that the lamentations that
were sung after battles are now sung for men who have died upon the
gallows.

The emotion has become not less, but more noble, by the change, for the
man who goes to death with the thought--

'It is with the people I was,
It is not with the law I was,'

has behind him generations of poetry and poetical life.

The poets of to-day speak with the voice of the unknown priest who
wrote, some two hundred years ago, that _Sorrowful Lament for Ireland_,
Lady Gregory has put into passionate and rhythmical prose--

'I do not know of anything under the sky
That is friendly or favourable to the Gael,
But only the sea that our need brings us to,
Or the wind that blows to the harbour
The ship that is bearing us away from Ireland;
And there is reason that these are reconciled with us,
For we increase the sea with our tears,
And the wandering wind with our sighs. '

There is still in truth upon these great level plains a people, a
community bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and
poems which have grown out of its own life, and by a past of great
passions which can still waken the heart to imaginative action. One
could still, if one had the genius, and had been born to Irish, write
for these people plays and poems like those of Greece. Does not the
greatest poetry always require a people to listen to it? England or
any other country which takes its tune from the great cities and gets
its taste from schools and not from old custom, may have a mob, but it
cannot have a people. In England there are a few groups of men and
women who have good taste, whether in cookery or in books; and the
great multitudes but copy them or their copiers.