Ireland, Historic and Picturesque

by Charles Johnston

The story of Credé also shows the freedom and honor accorded to women, as does the queenship of Meave, with the record of her separate riches. The tragedies of Deirdré and Grania would never have been remembered, had not the freedom and high regard of women been universal. Such decorative skill as is shown in the metal-work and pottery that have come down to us must have borne fruit in every realm of social life, in embroideries, tapestries, well-designed and beautifully adorned homes. Music is everywhere spoken of in the old traditions, and the skill of the poets we can judge for ourselves.

In all that concerns the natural man, therefore, a very high perfection had been reached. A frame of life had grown habitual, which brought out the finest vigor and strength and beauty. Romantic love added its riches to valor, and dignity was given by the ever-present memory of the heroic past, merging on the horizon with the divine dawn of the world. Manhood and womanhood had come to perfect flower. The crown rested on the brow of the nation's life.

When the life of the natural man is perfected, the time comes to strike the note of the immortal, to open the door of our real and enduring destiny. Sensual success, the ideal of unregenerate man, was perfectly realized in Concobar and ten thousand like him. The destiny of triumphant individual life, the strong man victorious over nature and other men, was fulfilled. Individual prowess, individual accomplishment, could go no further.

Nor should we overlook the dark shadows of the picture. Glory is to the victor, but woe to the vanquished. The continual warfare between tribe and tribe, between chief and chief, which made every valley a home of warriors dominated by a rath-fortress, bore abundant fruits of evil. Death in battle need not be reckoned, or may be counted as pure gain; but the fate of the wounded, maimed and miserable, the destitution of women and children left behind, the worse fate of the captives, sold as they were into exile and slavery,--all these must be included in the total.

Nor are these material losses the worst. The great evil of the epoch of tribal war is its reaction on the human spirit. The continual struggle of ambition draws forth egotism, the desire to dominate for mere domination, the sense of separation and antagonism between man and man, tribe and tribe, province and province.

But our real human life begins only when these evil tendencies are abated; when we learn to watch the life of others as if it were our own,--as being indeed a part of our own life,--and in every act and motion of our minds do only that which shall be to the best advantage of both ourselves and our neighbor. For only thus, only by the incessant practice of this in imagination and act, can the door of our wider and more humane consciousness be opened.

Nor is this all. There are in us vast unexplored tracts of power and wisdom; tracts not properly belonging to our personal and material selves, but rather to the impersonal and universal consciousness which touches us from within, and which we call divine. Our personal fate is closed by death; but we have a larger destiny which death does not touch; a destiny enduring and immortal. The door to this larger destiny can only be opened after we have laid down the weapons of egotism; after we have become veritably humane. 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.