No More Learning

. . . No one in this great world is like me--a
poor old man dragging stones. The clouds are long above me this night.
I am the last man of the Fianna, the great Oisin, the son of Finn,
listening to the sound of bells. The clouds are long above me this
night. ' Matthew Arnold quotes the lamentation of Leyrach Hen as a type
of the Celtic melancholy, but I prefer to quote it as a type of the
primitive melancholy; 'O my crutch, is it not autumn when the fern is
red and the water flag yellow? Have I not hated that which I love? . . .
Behold, old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head and
my teeth, to my eyes which women loved. The four things I have all my
life most hated fall upon me together--coughing and old age, sickness
and sorrow. I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from
me, the couch of honour shall be no more mine; I am miserable, I am
bent on my crutch.
How evil was the lot allotted to Leyrach, the night
he was brought forth! Sorrows without end and no deliverance from his
burden. ' An Elizabethan writer describes extravagant sorrow by calling
it 'to weep Irish'; and Oisin and Leyrach Hen are, I think, a little
nearer even to us modern Irish than they are to most people. That is
why our poetry and much of our thought is melancholy. 'The same man,'
writes Dr. Hyde in the beautiful prose which he first writes in Gaelic,
'who will to-day be dancing, sporting, drinking, and shouting, will be
soliloquizing by himself to-morrow, heavy and sick and sad in his own
lonely little hut, making a croon over departed hopes, lost life, the
vanity of this world, and the coming of death. '


IV

Matthew Arnold asks how much of the Celt must one imagine in the ideal
man of genius. I prefer to say, how much of the ancient hunters and
fishers and of the ecstatic dancers among hills and woods must one
imagine in the ideal man of genius. Certainly a thirst for unbounded
emotion and a wild melancholy are troublesome things in the world,
and do not make its life more easy or orderly, but it may be the arts
are founded on the life beyond the world, and that they must cry in
the ears of our penury until the world has been consumed and become a
vision. Certainly, as Samuel Palmer wrote, 'Excess is the vivifying
spirit of the finest art, and we must always seek to make excess more
abundantly excessive. ' Matthew Arnold has said that if he were asked
'where English got its turn for melancholy and its turn for natural
magic,' he 'would answer with little doubt that it got much of its
melancholy from a Celtic source, with no doubt at all that from a
Celtic source is got nearly all its natural magic. '

I will put this differently and say that literature dwindles to a mere
chronicle of circumstance, or passionless phantasies, and passionless
meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and
beliefs of ancient times, and that of all the fountains of the passions
and beliefs of ancient times in Europe, the Sclavonic, the Finnish, the
Scandinavian, and the Celtic, the Celtic alone has been for centuries
close to the main river of European literature. It has again and again
brought 'the vivifying spirit' 'of excess' into the arts of Europe.
Ernest Renan has told how the visions of purgatory seen by pilgrims to
Lough Derg--once visions of the pagan under-world, as the boat made out
of a hollow tree that bore the pilgrim to the holy island were alone
enough to prove--gave European thought new symbols of a more abundant
penitence; and had so great an influence that he has written, 'It
cannot be doubted for a moment that to the number of poetical themes
Europe owes to the genius of the Celt is to be added the framework of
the divine comedy. '

A little later the legends of Arthur and his table, and of the Holy
Grail, once it seems the cauldron of an Irish god, changed the
literature of Europe, and it maybe changed, as it were, the very roots
of man's emotions by their influence on the spirit of chivalry and
on the spirit of romance; and later still Shakespeare found his Mab,
and probably his Puck, and one knows not how much else of his faery
kingdom, in Celtic legend; while at the beginning of our own day Sir
Walter Scott gave Highland legends and Highland excitability so great a
mastery over all romance that they seem romance itself.

In our own time Scandinavian tradition, because of the imagination
of Richard Wagner and of William Morris and of the earlier and, as I
think, greater Heinrich Ibsen, has created a new romance, and through
the imagination of Richard Wagner, become all but the most passionate
element in the arts of the modern world.