THE PRIEST’S SOUL.
In former days there were great schools in Ireland where every sort of learning was taught to the people, and even the poorest had more knowledge at that time than many a gentleman has now. But as to the priests, their learning was above all, so that the fame of Ireland went over the whole world, and many kings from foreign lands used to send their sons all the way to Ireland to be brought up in the Irish schools.
Now, at this time there was a little boy learning at one of them who was a wonder to every one for his cleverness. His parents were only labouring people, and of course very poor; but young as he was, and poor as he was, no king’s or lord’s son could come up to him in learning. Even the masters were put to shame; for when they were trying to teach him he would tell them something they had never heard of before, and show them their ignorance. One of his great triumphs was in argument, and he would go on till he proved to you that black was white, and then when you gave in, for no one could beat him in talk, he would turn round and show you that white was black, or may be that there was no colour at all in the world. When he grew up his poor father and mother were so proud of him that they resolved to make him a priest, which they did at last, though they nearly starved themselves to get the money. Well, such another learned man was not in Ireland, and he was as great in argument as ever, so that no one could stand before him. Even the Bishops tried to talk to him, but he showed them at once they knew nothing at all.
Now, there were no schoolmasters in those times, but it was the priests taught the people; and as this man was the cleverest in Ireland all the foreign kings sent their sons to him as long as he had house-room to give them. So he grew very proud, and began to forget how low he had been, and, worst of all, even to forget God, who had made him what he was. And the pride of arguing got hold of him, so that from one thing to another he went on to prove that there was no Purgatory, and then no Hell, and then no Heaven, and then no God; and at last that men had no souls, but were no more than a dog or a cow, and when they died there was an end of them. ‘Who ever saw a soul?’ he would say. ‘If you can show me one, I will believe.’ No one could make any answer to this; and at last they all came to believe that as there was no other world, every one might do what they liked in this, the priest setting the example, for he took a beautiful young girl to wife. But as no priest or bishop in the whole land could be got to marry them, he was obliged to read the service over for himself. It was a great scandal, yet no one dared to say a word, for all the kings’ sons were on his side, and would have slaughtered any one who tried to prevent his wicked goings-on. Poor boys! they all believed in him, and thought every word he said was the truth. In this way his notions began to spread about, and the whole world was going to the bad, when one night an angel came down from Heaven, and told the priest he had but twenty-four hours to live. He began to tremble, and asked for a little more time.
But the angel was stiff, and told him that could not be.
‘What do you want time for, you sinner?’ he asked.
‘Oh, sir, have pity on my poor soul!’ urged the priest.
‘Oh, ho! You have a soul, then?’ said the angel. ‘Pray how did you find that out?’
‘It has been fluttering in me ever since you appeared,’ answered the priest. ‘What a fool I was not to think of it before!’
‘A fool, indeed,’ said the angel. ‘What good was all your learning, when it could not tell you that you had a soul?’
‘Ah, my lord,’ said the priest, ‘if I am to die, tell me how soon I may be in heaven.’
‘Never,’ replied the angel. ‘You denied there was a Heaven.’
‘Then, my lord, may I go to Purgatory?’
‘You denied Purgatory also; you must go straight to Hell,’ said the angel.
‘But, my lord, I denied Hell also,’ answered the priest, ‘so you can’t send me there either.’
The angel was a little puzzled.
‘Well,’ said he, ‘I’ll tell you what I can do for you. You may either live now on earth for a hundred years enjoying every pleasure, and then be cast into Hell for ever; or you may die in twenty-four hours in the most horrible torments, and pass through Purgatory, there to remain till the Day of Judgment, if only you can find some one person that believes, and through his belief mercy will be vouchsafed to you and your soul will be saved.’
The priest did not take five minutes to make up his mind.
‘I will have death in the twenty-four hours,’ he said, ‘so that my soul may be saved at last.’
On this the angel gave him directions as to what he was to do, and left him.
Then, immediately, the priest entered the large room where all his scholars and the kings’ sons were seated, and called out to them—
‘Now, tell me the truth, and let none fear to contradict me. Tell me what is your belief. Have men souls?’
‘Master,’ they answered, ‘once we believed that men had souls; but, thanks to your teaching, we believe so no longer. There is no Hell, and no Heaven, and no God. This is our belief, for it is thus you taught us.’
Then the priest grew pale with fear, and cried out: ‘Listen! I taught you a lie. There is a God, and man has an immortal soul. I believe now all I denied before.’
But the shouts of laughter that rose up drowned the priest’s voice, for they thought he was only trying them for argument.
‘Prove it, master,’ they cried, ‘prove it! Who has ever seen God? Who has ever seen the soul?’
And the room was stirred with their laughter.
The priest stood up to answer them, but no word could he utter; all his eloquence, all his powers of argument, had gone from him, and he could do nothing but wring his hands and cry out—
‘There is a God! there is a God! Lord, have mercy on my soul!’
And they all began to mock him, and repeat his own words that he had taught them—
‘Show him to us; show us your God.’
And he fled from them groaning with agony, for he saw that none believed, and how then could his soul be saved?
But he thought next of his wife.
‘She will believe,’ he said to himself. ‘Women never give up God.’
And he went to her; but she told him that she believed only what he taught her, and that a good wife should believe in her husband first, and before and above all things in heaven or earth.
Then despair came on him, and he rushed from the house and began to ask every one he met if they believed. But the same answer came from one and all: ‘We believe only what you have taught us,’ for his doctrines had spread far and wide through the county.
Then he grew half mad with fear, for the hours were passing. And he flung himself down on the ground in a lonesome spot, and wept and groaned in terror, for the time was coming fast when he must die.
Just then a little child came by.
‘God save you kindly,’ said the child to him.
The priest started up.
‘Child, do you believe in God?’ he asked.
‘I have come from a far country to learn about Him,’ said the child. ‘Will your honour direct me to the best school that they have in these parts?’
‘The best school and the best teacher is close by,’ said the priest, and he named himself.
‘Oh, not to that man,’ answered the child, ‘for I am told he denies God and Heaven and Hell, and even that man has a soul, because we can’t see it; but I would soon put him down.’
The priest looked at him earnestly. ‘How?’ he inquired.
‘Why,’ said the child, ‘I would ask him if he believed he had life to show me his life.’
‘But he could not do that, my child,’ said the priest. ‘Life cannot be seen; we have it, but it is invisible.’
‘Then, if we have life, though we cannot see it, we may also have a soul, though it is invisible,’ answered the child.
When the priest heard him speak these words he fell down on his knees before him, weeping for joy, for now he knew his soul was safe; he had met at last one that believed. And he told the child his whole story: all his wickedness, and pride, and blasphemy against the great God; and how the angel had come to him and told him of the only way in which he could be saved, through the faith and prayers of some one that believed.
‘Now, then,’ he said to the child, ‘take this penknife and strike it into my breast, and go on stabbing the flesh until you see the paleness of death on my face. Then watch—for a living thing will soar up from my body as I die, and you will then know that my soul has ascended to the presence of God. And when you see this thing, make haste and run to my school and call on all my scholars to come and see that the soul of their master has left the body, and that all he taught them was a lie, for that there is a God who punishes sin, and a Heaven and a Hell, and that man has an immortal soul, destined for eternal happiness or misery.’
‘I will pray,’ said the child, ‘to have courage to do this work.’
And he kneeled down and prayed. Then when he rose up he took the penknife and struck it into the priest’s heart, and struck and struck again till all the flesh was lacerated; but still the priest lived, though the agony was horrible, for he could not die until the twenty-four hours had expired. At last the agony seemed to cease, and the stillness of death settled on his face. Then the child, who was watching, saw a beautiful living creature, with four snow-white wings, mount from the dead man’s body into the air and go fluttering round his head.
So he ran to bring the scholars; and when they saw it they all knew it was the soul of their master, and they watched with wonder and awe until it passed from sight into the clouds.
And this was the first butterfly that was ever seen in Ireland; and now all men know that the butterflies are the souls of the dead waiting for the moment when they may enter Purgatory, and so pass through torture to purification and peace.
But the schools of Ireland were quite deserted after that time, for people said, What is the use of going so far to learn when the wisest man in all Ireland did not know if he had a soul till he was near losing it; and was only saved at last through the simple belief of a little child?
The Hour-Glass was first played in The Molesworth Hall, Dublin, with the following cast:—Wise Man, Mr. T. Dudley Digges; His Wife, Miss M. T. Quinn; The Fool, Mr. F. J. Fay; Pupils, P. J. Kelly, P. Columb, C. Caufield.
We always play it in front of an olive-green curtain, and dress the Wise Man and his Pupils in various shades of purple. Because in all these decorative schemes one needs, as I think, a third colour subordinate to the other two, we have partly dressed the Fool in red-brown, which is repeated in the furniture. There is some green in his dress and in that of the Wife of the Wise Man who is dressed mainly in purple.
One sometimes has need of more lines of the little song, and I have put into English rhyme three of the many verses of a Gaelic ballad:
I was going the road one day
(O the brown and the yellow beer!)
And I met with a man that was no right man
(O my dear, my dear).
‘Give me your wife,’ said he,
(O the brown and the yellow beer!)
‘Till the sun goes down and an hour of the clock’
(O my dear, my dear).
‘Good-bye, good-bye, my husband,’
(O the brown and the yellow beer!)
‘For a year and a day by the clock of the sun’
(O my dear, my dear).
APPENDIX II
CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN.
My dear Lady Gregory,—
When I was a boy I used to wander about at Rosses Point and Ballisodare listening to old songs and stories. I wrote down what I heard and made poems out of the stories or put them into the little chapters of the first edition of The Celtic Twilight, and that is how I began to write in the Irish way.
Then I went to London to make my living, and though I spent a part of every year in Ireland and tried to keep the old life in my memory by reading every country tale I could find in books or old newspapers, I began to forget the true countenance of country life. The old tales were still alive for me indeed, but with a new, strange, half-unreal life, as if in a wizard’s glass, until at last, when I had finished The Secret Rose, and was half-way through The Wind Among the Reeds, a wise woman in her trance told me that my inspiration was from the moon, and that I should always live close to water, for my work was getting too full of those little jewelled thoughts that come from the sun and have no nation. I had no need to turn to my books of astrology to know that the common people are under the moon, or to Porphyry to remember the image-making power of the waters. Nor did I doubt the entire truth of what she said to me, for my head was full of fables that I had no longer the knowledge and emotion to write. Then you brought me with you to see your friends in the cottages, and to talk to old wise men on Slieve Echtge, and we gathered together, or you gathered for me, a great number of stories and traditional beliefs. You taught me to understand again, and much more perfectly than before, the true countenance of country life.
One night I had a dream almost as distinct as a vision, of a cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an old woman in a long cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Cathleen ni Houlihan for whom so many songs have been sung and about whom so many stories have been told and for whose sake so many have gone to their death. I thought if I could write this out as a little play I could make others see my dream as I had seen it, but I could not get down out of that high window of dramatic verse, and in spite of all you had done for me I had not the country speech. One has to live among the people, like you, of whom an old man said in my hearing, ‘She has been a serving-maid among us,’ before one can think the thoughts of the people and speak with their tongue. We turned my dream into the little play, Cathleen ni Houlihan, and when we gave it to the little theatre in Dublin and found that the working-people liked it, you helped me to put my other dramatic fables into speech. Some of these have already been acted, but some may not be acted for a long time, but all seem to me, though they were but a part of a summer’s work, to have more of that countenance of country life than anything I have done since I was a boy.
W. B. Yeats.
Feb., 1903.
This play was first played on April 2, 1902, in St. Teresa’s Hall, Dublin, with the following cast:—Cathleen, Miss Maude Gonne; Delia Cahel, Miss Maire nic Sheublagh; Bridget Gillan, Miss M. T. Quinn; Patrick Gillan, Mr. C. Caufield; Michael Gillan, Mr. T. Dudley Digges; Peter Gillan, Mr. W. G. Fay.
Miss Maude Gonne played very finely, and her great height made Cathleen seem a divine being fallen into our mortal infirmity. Since then the part has been twice played in America by women who insisted on keeping their young faces, and one of these when she came to the door dropped her cloak, as I have been told, and showed a white satin dress embroidered with shamrocks. Upon another,—or was it the same occasion?—the player of Bridget wore a very becoming dress of the time of Louis the Fourteenth. The most beautiful woman of her time, when she played my Cathleen, ‘made up’ centuries old, and never should the part be played but with a like sincerity. This was the first play of our Irish School of folk-drama, and in it that way of quiet movement and careful speech which has given our players some little fame first showed itself, arising partly out of deliberate opinion and partly out of the ignorance of the players. Does art owe most to ignorance or to knowledge? Certainly it comes to its deathbed full of knowledge. I cannot imagine this play, or any folk-play of our school, acted by players with no knowledge of the peasant, and of the awkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the plough, or too lacking in humility to copy these things without convention or caricature.
The lines beginning ‘Do not make a great keening’ and ‘They shall be remembered for ever’ are said or sung to an air heard by one of the players in a dream. This music is with the other music at the end of the third volume.
APPENDIX III
THE GOLDEN HELMET.
The Golden Helmet was produced at the Abbey Theatre on March 19, 1908, with the following cast:—Cuchulain, J. M. Kerrigan; Conal, Arthur Sinclair; Leagerie, Fred. O’ Donovan; Laeg, Sydney Morgan; Emer, Sara Allgood; Conal’s Wife, Maire O’Neill; Leagerie’s Wife, Eileen O’ Doherty; Red Man, Ambrose Power; Horseboys, Scullions, and Black Men, S. Hamilton, T. J. Fox, U. Wright, D. Robertson, T. O’Neill, I. A. O’Rourke, P. Kearney.
In performance we left the black hands to the imagination, and probably when there is so much noise and movement on the stage they would always fail to produce any effect. Our stage is too small to try the experiment, for they would be hidden by the figures of the players. We staged the play with a very pronounced colour-scheme, and I have noticed that the more obviously decorative is the scene and costuming of any play, the more it is lifted out of time and place, and the nearer to faeryland do we carry it. One gets also much more effect out of concerted movements—above all, if there are many players—when all the clothes are the same colour. No breadth of treatment gives monotony when there is movement and change of lighting. It concentrates attention on every new effect and makes every change of outline or of light and shadow surprising and delightful. Because of this one can use contrasts of colour, between clothes and background, or in the background itself, the complementary colours for instance, which would be too obvious to keep the attention in a painting. One wishes to make the movement of the action as important as possible, and the simplicity which gives depth of colour does this, just as, for precisely similar reasons, the lack of colour in a statue fixes the attention upon the form.
The play is founded upon an old Irish story, The Feast of Bricriu, given in Cuchulain of Muirthemne, and is meant as an introduction to On Baile’s Strand.
APPENDIX IV
DATES AND PLACES OF THE FIRST PERFORMANCE OF NEW PLAYS PRODUCED BY THE NATIONAL THEATRE SOCIETY AND ITS PREDECESSORS:—
In addition to these plays, many of which are constantly revived, translations of foreign masterpieces are given occasionally.
It was not until the opening of the Abbey Theatre that Lady Gregory, Mr. J. M. Synge, and Mr. W. B. Yeats became entirely responsible for the selection of plays, though they had been mainly so from 1903.
Corrigenda.—P. 120, l. 5, for ‘severe’ read ‘serious’; p. 143, l. 4, for ‘prepared’ read ‘performed’; p. 176, l. 29, for ‘their own day’ read ‘our own day.’
Printed by A. H. Bullen, at The Shakespeare Head Press,
Stratford-on-Avon.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
Page 22, “aoor” changed to “door” (through the kitchen door)
Page 177, “monotous” changed to “monotonous” (monotonous to an ear)
Page 202, “A’Kempis” changed to “à Kempis” (wrote S. Thomas à Kempis)