Charles Johnston

“ Here in our visible life is a whisper and hint of our life invisible; of the secret that runs through and interprets so much of our history. For very much of our nation's life has been like the sadness of those autumn days,--a tale of torn leaves, of broken branches, of tears everywhere. Tragedy upon [pg 011] tragedy has filled our land with woe and sorrow, and, as men count success, we have failed of it, and received only misery and deprivation. He has never known the true Ireland who does not feel that woe. ”

“ Round the lakes of Erne there are wide expanses of peat, dug as fuel for centuries, and in many places as much as twelve feet deep, on a bed of clay, the waste of old glaciers. Though formed with incredible slowness, this whole mass of peat has grown since some of the great stone monuments were built; if we can tell the time thus taken for its growth we know at least the nearer limit of the time that divides us from their builders.
Like a tree, the peat has its time of growth and its time of rest. Spring covers it with green, winter sees it brown and dead. ”

“ And how excellent that history was, how full of humanity and the rich wine of life, the stories of Fergus and Concobar and Cuculain, of Find and Ossin and Gael, of Meave and Deirdré and Credé bear sufficient witness. The tide of Irish life to which they belong, and which brought them forth, flowed on without break to a time so recent that their whole tradition has come down to us, practically at first hand, from the heralds and bards themselves. Ireland is, therefore, our one doorway to the history of northern Europe through the long era of pagan times. ”

“ From morning to midday the [pg 029] shadows shrink, ever hiding from the sun; an army of wraiths, sprite-like able to grow gigantic or draw together into mere blots of darkness. When day declines, the shadows come forth again, joining ghostly hands from stone to stone, from circle to circle, under the sunset sky, and merging at last into the universal realm of night. Thus they weave their web, inexorable as tireless Time.
There are more than threescore of these circles at Carrowmore, under Knocknarea. Yet Carrowmore is only one among many memorials of dead years within our horizon. ”

“ To the Ireland that had seen the valor of Cuculain, that had watched the wars of Fergus,--to the Ireland that listened to the deeds of Find and the songs of Ossin,--came the Evangel of Galilee, the darkest yet brightest message ever brought to the children of earth. If we rightly read that Evangel, it brought the doom of the natural man, and his supersession by the man immortal; it brought the death of our personal perfecting and pride, and the rising from the dead of the common soul, whereby a man sees another self in his neighbor; sees all alike in the one Divine. ”

“ At Abbey-quarter, within the town-limits of Sligo itself, there is another great ring of boulders, the past and the present mingling together. On the northern coast, across the Bay of Sligo, where the headland of Streedagh juts forth into the sea, there is another giant necklace of gray blocks ranged upon the moor. Farther along the shore, where Bundoran marks the boundary of Donegal, a cromlech and a stone circle rise among the sand-banks. All have the same rugged and enduring massiveness, all are wrapped in the same mystery. ”

“ III. THE CROMLECH BUILDERS.
In every district of Ireland, therefore, there remain these tremendous and solemn survivors of a mighty past. The cromlechs, with their enormous masses upheld in the air, rising among the fertile fields or daisy-dotted pastures; the great circles of standing stones, starred everywhere, in the valleys or upon the uplands, along the rough sides of heather-covered hills. They have everywhere the same aspect of august mystery, the same brooding presence, like sentinels of another world. It is impossible not to feel their overshadowing majesty. ”

“ The cliffs gradually lessen, and their colors grow clearer, till they sink at last toward the sand-banks of Ballysadare, divided from us only by a channel of shallow sea.
The whole colored circle of sea and land, of moor and mountain, is full of the silence of intense and mighty power. The ocean is tremulous with the breath of life. The mountains, in their stately beauty, rise like immortals in the clear azure. The signs of our present works are dwarfed to insignificance. ”

“ Concobar the king, stern and masterful, crafty and secret in counsel though swift as an eagle to slay,--Concobar the king had watched Deirdré in her captivity, ever unseen of her, and his heart had been moved by the fair softness of her skin, the glow of her cheek, the brightness of her eyes and hair; so that the king had steadfastly determined in his mind that Deirdré should be his, in scorn of all prophecies and warnings; that her beauty should be for him alone. This the king had determined; and it was known to Naisi the son of Usnac. ”

“ Every tribe, every clan, is in turn victor and vanquished, raider and victim of raids. Everywhere are struggle and unrest, tales of captivity and slaughter.
We fall into vain lamenting over this red rapine and wrath, until we divine the genius and secret purpose of that wonderful epoch, so wholly different in inspiration from our own. The life of races, like the life of men, has its ordered stages, and none can [pg 263] ripen out of season. That was the epoch of dawning individual consciousness, when men were coming to a keen and vivid realization of themselves and their powers. ”

“ We are the more disposed to trust the fidelity of the picture, since the foundations of the Tara banquet-hall are to be clearly traced to this day--an oblong earthwork over seven hundred feet long by ninety wide, with the twelve doors still distinctly marked; as for the brooches and torques of gold, some we have surpass in magnificence anything here described, and their artistic beauty is eloquent of the refinement of spirit that conceived and the skill that fashioned them. Spear-heads, too, are of beautiful bronze-gold, with tracings round the socket of great excellence and charm. ”

“ Owen Roe O'Neill, last great son of a heroic race, splendidly upheld their high tradition and ideal. No nobler figure, and few more gifted captains, can be found in the annals of those warlike centuries. The valor of Cuculain, the wisdom of Concobar, the chivalry of Fergus--all were his, and with them a gentle and tolerant spirit in all things concerning religion, very admirable in an age when so many men, in other things not lacking in elements of nobility, were full of bitter animosity, and zealous to persecute all those who differed from them concerning things shrouded in mystery. ”

“ The tide of life, thus forced inward, gained a firm possession of the invisible world, with the eternal realities indwelling there. Thus fixed and founded in the real, that tide turned once again, flowing outwards and sweeping before it all the barriers in its way. The population of Ireland is diminishing in numbers; but the race to which they belong increases steadily: a race of clean life, of unimpaired vital power, unspoiled by wealth or luxury, the most virile force in the New World. ”

“ But not less complete is the contrast between the ancient hamlet, thus hidden for security amid the waters, and the great cromlech, looming black against the sky on the hill's summit, exposed to the wildness of the winds, utterly unguarded, yet resting there in lonely serenity.
A little farther south, Lough Gur lies like a white mirror among the rolling pasture-lands of Limerick, set amongst low hills. On the lake's shore is another metropolis of the dead, worthy to compare with Carrowmore on the Sligo headland. ”

“ For the winds are rough, and the roads are foul, and the streams and the rivers are in flood, and the hands of the warriors are busy making forts and strongholds among strangers. So wait till the summer days come upon us, till every grassy sod is a pillow, till our horses are full of spirit and our colts are strong, till our men are whole of their wounds and hurts, till the nights are short to watch and to ward and to guard in the land of enemies and in the territories of strangers. Spring is not the time for an invasion. ”

“ Our land, which had stood so high in the ranks of valor and romance, now rose not less eminent for piety and fervid zeal, sending forth messengers and ministers of the glad news to the heathen lands of northern and central Europe, and planting refuges of religion within their savage bounds. Beauty came forth in stone and missal, answering to the beauty of life it was inspired by; and here, if anywhere upon earth through a score of centuries, was realized the ideal of that prayer for the kingdom, as in heaven, so on earth. ”

“ Their works still live all around us in Ireland, spread evenly through the four provinces, a world of the vanished past enduring among us into the present; and, so mightily did these old builders work, and with such large simplicity, that what they built will surely outlast every handiwork of our own day, and endure through numberless to-morrows, bridging the morning and evening twilight of our race. ”

“ There must be a death to militant self-assertion, a new birth to wide and universal purposes, before this larger life can be understood and known.
With all the valor and rich life of the days of Cuculain and Ossin, the destructive instinct of antagonism was very deeply rooted in all hearts; it did endless harm to the larger interests of the land, and laid Ireland open to attack from without. Because the genius of the race was strong and highly developed, the harm went all the deeper; even now, after centuries, it is not wholly gone. ”

“ During this stormy time, which only carried forward the long progress of fighting since the days of the prime, a famous school of learning and religion had been founded at Moville by Finian, "the tutor of the saints of Ireland." The home of his church and school is a very beautiful one, with sombre mountains behind rising from oak-woods into shaggy masses of heather, the blue waters of Lough Foyle in front, and across the mouth of the lough the silver sands and furrowed chalk hills of Antrim, blending into green plains. ”

“ Close under us lies Carrowmore, with its labyrinth of cromlechs and stone circles, a very city of dead years. There is something awe-inspiring in the mere massiveness of these piled and ordered stones, the visible boundaries of invisible thoughts; that awe is deepened by the feeling of the tremendous power [pg 028] lavished in bringing them here, setting them up in their ordered groups, and piling the crowns of the cromlechs on other only less gigantic stones; awe gives place to overwhelming mystery when we can find no kinship to our own thoughts and aims in their stately grouping. ”

“ For the tale of our life is mainly tragedy. And we may outline now the manner in which that tale will be told. We shall have, first, a long, dim dawn,--mysterious peoples of the hidden past coming together to our land from the outlying darkness. A first period, which has left abundant and imperishable traces everywhere among our hills and valleys, writing a large history in massive stone, yet a history which, even now, is dim as the dawn it belongs to. ”

“ The central is the greatest; two hundred thousand tons of stone heaped up, within a circular wall of stone, itself surrounded by a great outer circle of standing stones, thirty in number, like gray sentinels guarding the shrine. In the very heart of the pyramid, hushed in perpetual stillness and peace, is the inmost sanctuary, a chamber formed like a cross, domed with a lofty roof, and adorned with mysterious tracings on the rocks. ”

“ It happens very rarely, under those mysterious laws which rule the life of all humanity, the laws which work their majestic will through the ages, using as their ministers the ambitions and passions of men--it happens rarely that a race keeps its unbroken life through thirty centuries, transformed time after time by new spiritual forces, yet in genius remaining ever the same. It may be doubted whether even once before throughout all history a race thus long-lived has altogether escaped the taint of corruption and degeneration. ”

“ Throughout this vast territory there must have been a common people, a common purpose and inspiration, a common striving towards the hidden world; there must have been long ages of order, of power, of peace, during which men's hearts could conceive and their hands execute memorials so vast, so evidently meant to endure to a far distant future, so clearly destined to ideal ends. There must have been a great spiritual purpose, a living belief in the invisible world, and a large practical power over natural forces, before these huge monuments could be erected. ”

“ Eocaid, Erc's son, their chieftain, called the lesser chiefs around him, and Sreng made full report of what he had seen and heard. The Firbolgs, pressed on by their fate, decided to refuse all terms with the De Danaans, but to give them battle, and drive them from the island. So they made ready, each man seeing to the straps of his shield, the burnishing of his thick sword and heavy spear. Eyes gleamed out beneath lowering brows all about the dwellings of Tara, and hot words were muttered of the coming fight. The dark faces of the Firbolgs were full of wrath. ”

“ This rich creative power thus breaking forth in lovely handiwork is only the outward sign of a full inner life, kindled by the fire of aspiration, and glowing with the warm ardor of devotion. Bective Abbey dates from about 1150. We are told that the king of Meath who founded it for the Cistercian order "endowed it with two hundred and forty-five acres of land, a fishing-weir and a mill." From this meager outline we can almost restore the picture of the life, altogether idyllic and full of quiet delight, that the old Friars lived among the meadows of the Boyne. ”

“ As the gloom rises up out of the earth, bands of dark red gather on the horizon, seaming the clear bronze of the sky, that passes upward into olive-color, merging in dark blue overhead. The sun swings down behind the hills, and purple darkness comes down out of the sky; the red fades from the tree-stems, the cloud-colors die away; the whole world glimmers with the fading whiteness of twilight. ”

“ After the lessons of fighting come the lessons [pg 217] of work. For these lessons of work, for the direct touch with the everlasting Will gained in all honest work, our own age is to be valued, far more than for the visible and material fruits which that work produces.
In like manner the old epoch of war is to be esteemed for the lessons it taught of high valor, sacrifice, heroic daring. And to what admirable ends these same qualities may tend we can see in a life like that of Colum Kill, "head of the piety of the most part of Ireland and Scotland after Patrick." ”

“ Beside the stream, a tributary of the Blackwater, a huge red cromlech rises over the greenness of the meadows like a belated mammoth in its uncouth might. To the southwest, under the red hills that guard Killarney on the south, the Sullane River flows towards the Lee. On its bank is another cromlech of red sandstone blocks, twin-brother to the Glanworth pile. Beyond it the road passes towards the sunset through mountain-shadowed glens, coming out at last where Kenmare River opens into a splendid fiord towards the Atlantic Ocean. ”

“ Never before, we may confidently say, has a single people emerged [pg 384] from such varied vicissitudes, stronger at the end in genius, in spiritual and moral power, than at the beginning, richer in vital force, clearer in understanding, in every way more mature and humane.
For this is the real fruit of so much evil valiantly endured: a deep love of freedom, a hatred of oppression, a knowledge that the wish to dominate is a fruitful source of wrong. The new age now dawning before us carries many promises of good for all humanity; not less, it has its dangers, grave and full of menace ”

“ Everywhere within that wide world of hill and plain, and hardly less ancient than the hills themselves, are strewn memorials of another world that has vanished, sole survivors of a long-hidden past. A wordless history is written there, in giant circles of stone and cromlechs of piled blocks, so old that in a land of most venerable tradition their very legend has vanished away. ”

“ Every bitterness that the heart of man can conceive, that the heart of man can inflict, that the heart of man can endure, was poured into our cup, and we drained it to the dregs. Of that saddest yet most potent time we shall record enough to show not only what befell through our age of darkness, but also, so far as may be, what miraculous intent underlay it, what promise the darkness covered, of our future light; what golden rays of dawn were hidden in our gloom. ”