No More Learning

' And the makers of the Sagas made the squirrel run up and
down the sacred ash-tree carrying words of hatred from the eagle to the
worm, and from the worm to the eagle; although they had less of the old
way than the makers of the _Kalevala_, for they lived in a more crowded
and complicated world, and were learning the abstract meditation which
lures men from visible beauty, and were unlearning, it may be, the
impassioned meditation which brings men beyond the edge of trance and
makes trees, and beasts, and dead things talk with human voices.

The old Irish and the old Welsh, though they had less of the old way
than the makers of the _Kalevala_, had more of it than the makers of
the Sagas, and it is this that distinguishes the examples Matthew
Arnold quotes of their 'natural magic,' of their sense of 'the
mystery' more than of 'the beauty' of nature. When Matthew Arnold wrote
it was not easy to know as much as we know now of folk song and folk
belief, and I do not think he understood that our 'natural magic' is
but the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of nature
and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all beautiful
places being haunted, which it brought into men's minds. The ancient
religion is in that passage of the _Mabinogion_ about the making of
'Flower Aspect. ' Gwydion and Math made her 'by charms and illusions'
'out of flowers. ' 'They took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms
of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadowsweet, and produced from
them a maiden the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw; and
they baptized her, and called her Flower Aspect'; and one finds it in
the not less beautiful passage about the burning Tree, that has half
its beauty from calling up a fancy of leaves so living and beautiful,
they can be of no less living and beautiful a thing than flame: 'They
saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one half of which was in
flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in
full leaf. ' And one finds it very certainly in the quotations he makes
from English poets to prove a Celtic influence in English poetry; in
Keats's 'magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery
lands forlorn'; in his 'moving waters at their priest-like task of
pure ablution round earth's human shore'; in Shakespeare's 'floor of
heaven,' 'inlaid with patens of bright gold'; and in his Dido standing
'on the wild sea banks,' 'a willow in her hand,' and waving it in the
ritual of the old worship of nature and the spirits of nature, to wave
'her love to come again to Carthage. ' And his other examples have the
delight and wonder of devout worshippers among the haunts of their
divinities. Is there not such delight and wonder in the description of
Olwen in the _Mabinogion_: 'More yellow was her hair than the flower
of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave,
and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the
wood-anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountains. ' And is there
not such delight and wonder in--

'Meet we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or on the beached margent of the sea'?

If men had never dreamed that fair women could be made out of flowers,
or rise up out of meadow fountains and paved fountains, neither passage
could have been written. Certainly the descriptions of nature made in
what Matthew Arnold calls 'the faithful way,' or in what he calls 'the
Greek way,' would have lost nothing if all the meadow fountains or
paved fountains were meadow fountains and paved fountains and nothing
more. When Keats wrote, in the Greek way, which adds lightness and
brightness to nature--

'What little town by river or sea-shore
Or mountain built with quiet citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn';

when Shakespeare wrote in the Greek way--

'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows';

when Virgil wrote in the Greek way--

'Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,'

and

'Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens
Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi';

they looked at nature without ecstasy, but with the affection a man
feels for the garden where he has walked daily and thought pleasant
thoughts. They looked at nature in the modern way, the way of people
who are poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a
nature which has faded to be but friendly and pleasant, the way of
people who have forgotten the ancient religion.


III

Men who lived in a world where anything might flow and change, and
become any other thing; and among great gods whose passions were in
the flaming sunset, and in the thunder and the thunder-shower, had
not our thoughts of weight and measure.
They worshipped nature and
the abundance of nature, and had always, as it seems, for a supreme
ritual that tumultuous dance among the hills or in the depths of the
woods, where unearthly ecstasy fell upon the dancers, until they seemed
the gods or the godlike beasts, and felt their souls overtopping the
moon; and, as some think, imagined for the first time in the world the
blessed country of the gods and of the happy dead. They had imaginative
passions because they did not live within our own strait limits, and
were nearer to ancient chaos, every man's desire, and had immortal
models about them. The hare that ran by among the dew might have sat
upon his haunches when the first man was made, and the poor bunch of
rushes under their feet might have been a goddess laughing among the
stars; and with but a little magic, a little waving of the hands, a
little murmuring of the lips, they too could become a hare or a bunch
of rushes, and know immortal love and immortal hatred.

All folk literature, and all literature that keeps the folk tradition,
delights in unbounded and immortal things. The _Kalevala_ delights in
the seven hundred years that Luonaton wanders in the depths of the
sea with Wainamoinen in her womb, and the Mahomedan king in the Song
of Roland, pondering upon the greatness of Charlemagne, repeats over
and over, 'He is three hundred years old, when will he weary of war? '
Cuchulain in the Irish folk tale had the passion of victory, and he
overcame all men, and died warring upon the waves, because they alone
had the strength to overcome him. The lover in the Irish folk song bids
his beloved come with him into the woods, and see the salmon leap in
the rivers, and hear the cuckoo sing, because death will never find
them in the heart of the woods. Oisin, new come from his three hundred
years of faeryland, and of the love that is in faeryland, bids Saint
Patrick cease his prayers a while and listen to the blackbird, because
it is the blackbird of Darrycarn that Finn brought from Norway, three
hundred years before, and set its nest upon the oak-tree with his own
hands. Surely if one goes far enough into the woods, one will find
there all that one is seeking? Who knows how many centuries the birds
of the woods have been singing?

All folk literature has indeed a passion whose like is not in modern
literature and music and art, except where it has come by some straight
or crooked way out of ancient times. Love was held to be a fatal
sickness in ancient Ireland, and there is a love-poem in _The Songs of
Connacht_ that is like a death cry: 'My love, O she is my love, the
woman who is most for destroying me, dearer is she for making me ill
than the woman who would be for making me well. She is my treasure, O
she is my treasure, the woman of the grey eyes . . . a woman who would
not lay a hand under my head.