🧚 Opening, part 1 · page 2

It has been remarked that in the characters of Homer--so absolutely true are they to nature--the qualities which bear the same name are yet essentially different qualities; as, for example, courage as illustrated in Achilles and Ajax, in Diomed and in Hector.80 This mark of truthfulness strikes us at once in the Tain.81 The kingly valour of Fergus, thoughtful and serene, has nothing in common with the animal fearlessness of Lok Mac Favesh, or the blind patriotic fury of Ketherne, and but little with that of Ferdīa.82 In Cuchullain, courage is an inspiration descending from above upon a being essentially emotional, and though always brave, yet sensitive and capable of awe.83 We smile at the boundless admiration lavished on strength by all early races; nor shall we understand it aright while we suppose that it was, indeed, directed to mere physical qualities.84 This was not so.85 Body and soul were not then thus carefully discriminated; the heroic deed was attributed, not to the hand alone, but to the warrior himself, his heart and his brain; and not to the man only, but to some divine aid, his because deserved by him.86 Cuchullain is the chief example of heroism thus conceived.87 He is slender as a maid; but in the crisis of battle, when his spirit kindles, his stature becomes gigantic.88 This close connection between the material and the spiritual explains the rapidity with which the wounds of these legendary heroes heal.89 Should there ever come a time when the spiritual is the chief object of man’s reverence, the present adulation of mere intellect will be looked on as we regard the enthusiasm bestowed on martial might in days gone by.90

The imaginative literature of early races wears a rough exterior; but as we are told of a ‘latent heat,’ so there exists a latent thoughtfulness; and it is often found unexpectedly in the depths of a tale which on its surface reveals no disposition to deal with hard problems.91 The reader of the Tain will be reminded of this truth in proportion as he understands the relative position of the Irish kingdoms at the time it describes.92 Connaught was the most barbaric as well as the poorest of them all; while Ulster had even then reached that superiority in strength and wealth, and in civilisation both civil and military, which for so many centuries she retained.93 Her king was the subtlest and most powerful of the Irish kings; and her celebrated ‘Red Branch Knights’ were the most gallant order of Irish chivalry.94 The more astonishing, consequently, was the utter prostration, a defeat without a battle, into which she so suddenly fell.95 Without any apparent cause her strength changed to weakness, and her wisdom to folly.96 It was the rebuke of her pride.97 At the critical moment of her fortunes her great ones began to babble and talk nonsense.98 All that their country had been they forgot; and the near future they looked on through what the Tain calls ‘a mist of imbecility,’ and attributes to witchcraft.99 Equally striking is the change which takes place when the spell is reversed.100 The inferior nation can neither use nor retain the advantages accidentally and dishonestly gained, and defeat succeeds to triumph.101 I know of nothing else in poetry which resembles this.102 Possibly it might be easier to find a parallel in history.103

The Tain, a work which, while abounding in passion, distinctly includes an element of humour and irony, suffers nothing from a revulsion so strange.104 It ends with a great event, a battle and an overthrow; and if that catastrophe is but a ‘conclusion inconclusive,’ and no results remain behind, in this very circumstance lies a special significance of the work.105 To this issue the whole leads up, and the reader is not taken by surprise.106 Throughout the tale he finds the same strange mixture of ardent affections with causeless hatreds; of quick sympathies with injustice and ferocity; of high daring with a blundering the consequence not of incapacity, but of tortuous acuteness.107 Everywhere he finds the contrast between the emotional in excess and an all but complete absence of discipline, whether moral or mental.108 Such characteristics may last for centuries, but the end is ever the same--exertions that amaze, and abortive results.109 The only cause for surprise is that a moral so grave should have been unconsciously bequeathed by an ancient work, written to amuse, not instruct.110 The explanation is that a poem true to the time and to the characters it commemorates, teaches by necessity what they teach.111

The relation in which St. Kiaran stood to the Tain illustrates that of the Christian priesthood to the imaginative traditions of Ireland.112 The living bards and the clergy could not but be rivals, but it was often a friendly rivalship; and as regards the bards of past centuries, there was no room for jealousy.113 By degrees the clergy took an interest in the ancient tales, and became attached to what they befriended.114 Amid many extravagances they detected doubtless a significance which escapes the half-closed eye of a cynic shrewdness.115 Occasionally they added to old legends an interpolation which might have surprised those who had first sung them.116 Thus we read that Cuchullain, when going forth to his last battle, heard a choir of angels singing above that hill on which the cathedral of Armagh was destined one day to stand; that he was pleased by the anthem, and that his pleasure in it was accepted as a homage of good-will.117 Elsewhere he is represented as fleeting in his war-car, after death, above his beloved Emania.118 He sings,--119

I played on breaths Above the horses’ steam: There used to be broken before me Great battles on every side:120

yet he ends with a warning to the race of man, and announces the day of judgment.121

The teachers of those days doubtless believed that religion could afford to be indulgent towards minstrels who had been true to such lesser lights as they possessed.122 Paganism in those days was too little insidious to be dangerous.123 There is a paganism in literature much more formidable than theirs; but it had not then manifested itself.124 It belongs to that corrupted civilisation which uses against Christianity those intellectual and imaginative gifts, as well as that social and scientific progress, which it owes to Christianity alone.125 It belongs also to that merely conventional civilisation which has scanty dealings either with nature or with the supernatural.126 Nature, even in periods branded as ‘barbaric,’ has qualities that indicate a sympathy with the divine; for it has ardent affections, a simple refinement, singleness of aim, a marvellous self-sacrifice, and those unblunted sensibilities, both of love and reverence, without which the loftiest revealed truths cease to have a meaning.127 The heroic at its highest stretches forth its hands to the spiritual; and its very deficiencies are a confession that it needs to be supplemented by a something higher than itself.128 We must not confound the ‘savage’ state which has fallen beneath the dominion of blind sense, with the ‘barbaric’ which has not yet ascended into the clearer day, but which in its twilight has a gleam of coming morn.129 If Ireland, once converted to the faith, filled the world with her missions, there must have existed in her previously a thoughtfulness as well as a fearlessness each of which found its way at last into the nobler fields of enterprise.130 It is not unlikely that the apostle from Clonmacnoise and Iona often cheered his way over the Northumbrian moors or through the Teuton forest with a ballad about Cuchullain as well as with a Latin hymn of Sedulius.131