No More Learning

'Squeeze, hair,' said the old woman; 'I can't, I'm in the fire,' said
the second hair. Then the hound put his teeth in her, and Bill brought
her down, and she cried for mercy. 'Give me my life,' she said, 'and
I'll tell you where you'll get your brother again, and his hound and
horse. ' 'Where's that? ' said Bill. 'Do you see that rod over the fire? '
said she; 'take it down and go outside the door where you'll see three
green stones, and strike them with the rod, for they are your brother,
and his horse and hound, and they'll come to life again. ' 'I will, but
I'll make a green stone of you first,' said Bill, and he cut off her
head with his sword.

Then he went out and struck the stones, and sure enough there were
Jack, and his horse and hound, alive and well. And they began striking
other stones around, and men came from them, that had been turned to
stones, hundreds and thousands of them.

Then they set out for home, but on the way they had some dispute or
some argument together, for Jack was not well pleased to hear he had
spent the night with his wife, and Bill got angry, and he struck Jack
with the rod, and turned him to a green stone. And he went home, but
the princess saw he had something on his mind, and he said then, 'I
have killed my brother. ' And he went back then and brought him to
life, and they lived happy ever after, and they had children by the
basketful, and threw them out by the shovelful. I was passing one time
myself, and they called me in and gave me a cup of tea.

1902.
BY THE ROADSIDE


LAST night I went to a wide place on the Kiltartan road to listen to
some Irish songs. While I waited for the singers an old man sang about
that country beauty who died so many years ago, and spoke of a singer
he had known who sang so beautifully that no horse would pass him,
but must turn its head and cock its ears to listen. Presently a score
of men and boys and girls, with shawls over their heads, gathered
under the trees to listen. Somebody sang _Sa Muirnin Diles_, and then
somebody else _Jimmy Mo Milestor_, mournful songs of separation, of
death, and of exile. Then some of the men stood up and began to dance,
while another lilted the measure they danced to, and then somebody
sang _Eiblin a Ruin_, that glad song of meeting which has always
moved me more than other songs, because the lover who made it sang it
to his sweetheart under the shadow of a mountain I looked at every
day through my childhood. The voices melted into the twilight, and
were mixed into the trees, and when I thought of the words they too
melted away, and were mixed with the generations of men. Now it was a
phrase, now it was an attitude of mind, an emotional form, that had
carried my memory to older verses, or even to forgotten mythologies.
I was carried so far that it was as though I came to one of the four
rivers, and followed it under the wall of Paradise to the roots of the
trees of knowledge and of life. There is no song or story handed down
among the cottages that has not words and thoughts to carry one as
far, for though one can know but a little of their ascent, one knows
that they ascend like mediaeval genealogies through unbroken dignities
to the beginning of the world. Folk art is, indeed, the oldest of the
aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and
trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and
insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and
most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where
all great art is rooted. Wherever it is spoken by the fireside, or sung
by the roadside, or carved upon the lintel, appreciation of the arts
that a single mind gives unity and design to, spreads quickly when its
hour is come.

In a society that has cast out imaginative tradition, only a few
people--three or four thousand out of millions--favoured by their own
characters and by happy circumstance, and only then after much labour,
have understanding of imaginative things, and yet 'the imagination
is the man himself. ' The churches in the Middle Age won all the arts
into their service because men understood that when imagination is
impoverished, a principal voice--some would say the only voice--for the
awakening of wise hope and durable faith, and understanding charity,
can speak but in broken words, if it does not fall silent. And so
it has always seemed to me that we, who would reawaken imaginative
tradition by making old songs live again, or by gathering old stories
into books, take part in the quarrel of Galilee. Those who are Irish
and would spread foreign ways, which, for all but a few, are ways of
spiritual poverty, take part also. Their part is with who those who
were of Jewry, and yet cried out, 'If thou let this man go thou art not
Caesar's friend.