Cailte had been one of the most renowned of Finn's companions; he had come now from the Great Plain to save his old master. You will note that remark of the latter's when Cailte let the fact escape him that he, Mongan, had been Finn: "Hush! it is wrong for the to reveal a secret." That was the feeling of the Christian redactors. Reincarnation was not a thing for baptized lips to speak about.
But we are anticipating things: the coming of Patrick did not bring about the great literary revival which sent all these stories down to us. Patrick Christianized Ireland: converted the kings and established the church; and left the bulk of the people pagan-hearted and pagan-visioned still,—as, glory be to God, they have been ever since. I mean by that that under all vicissitudes the Irish have never quite lost sight of the Inner Life at the heart of things, as most of the rest of us have. Time and men and circumstance, sorrow and ignorance and falsity, have conspired to destroy the race; but there is a vision there, however thwarted and hedged in,—and the people do not perish: their woods and mountains are still full of a gay or mournful, a wailing or a singing, but always a beautiful, life. Patrick was a great man; but he never could drive out the Danaan Gods, who had gone into the hills when the Milesians came. He drove out the serpents, they say; and a serpent was a name for a Druid Adept: Taliesin says, in one of his poems, 'Wyf dryw, wyf sarff,' 'I am a druid, I am a serpent'; and we know from H.P. Blavatsky how universal this symbol was, with the meaning of an Initiate of the Secret Wisdom. So perhaps Patrick did evict his Betters from that land of evictions; it may be so;—but not the God-life in the mountains. But I judge from the clean and easy sweep he made of things that Druidism was at a low pass in Ireland when he came. It had survived there five centuries since its vital center and link with the Lodge had been destroyed at Bibracte by Caesar; and, I suppose, thus cut off, and faced with no opposition to keep it pure and alert, might well, and would naturally have declined. Its central light no longer burning, political supremacy itself would have hastened its decay; fostering arrogance for spirituality, and worldliness for true Wisdom. How then about the theory that some life and light remained or was revivable in it in Britain? Why claim that for Britain, which one would incline to deny to Ireland and Gaul?— Well; we know that Druidism did survive in Gaul a long time after the Romans had proscribed it. But Gaul became very thoroughly Romanized. The Romans and their civilization were everywhere; the Celtic language quite died out; (Breton was brought in by emigrants from Britain;)—and where the Celtic language had died, unlikely that Celtic thought would survive. But in Britain, as we have seen, while the Romans and their proscription were near enough to provide a salutary opposition and constant peril, there were many places in which the survivors of Suetonius' massacre in Mona might have taken refuge. I take it that in Ireland it suffered through lack of opposition; in Gaul, it died of too effective opposition; but in Britain there were midway conditions that may well have allowed it to live on.
Beyond Christianizing the country, it does not appear that Patrick did much for it. It is not clear that Ireland made any progress in material civilization then,—or for that matter, at any time since. We should know by this time that these things are a matter of law. Patrick found her essentially in pralaya, essentially under the influence of centrifugalism; and you cannot turn the ebbing tide, and make it flow before its time. There was a queer mixture of intensive culture and ruthless barbarism: an extreme passion on the one hand for poetry and the things of the spirit,—and on the other, such savagery as continual warfare always brings in its train. The literary class was so strong that in the little kingdom of Tir Conall in Donegal alone the value of ten thousand dollars of the revenue was set aside yearly for its support and purposes;—whereby one would imagine that for all things else they could but have had a nickel or so left. This is culture with a vengeance. There was, besides, wonderful skill in arts and crafts, intricate designing in jewelry-work;—and all this is not to be called by another name than the relics of a high civilization. But there was no political unity; or only a loose bond under the high kings at Tara, who had forever to be fighting to maintain their authority. There was racial, but not national consciousness.
But where in Europe was there national consciousness? We should remember that it only began to exist, or to reincarnate from times beyond the horizon of history, in the thirteenth century A.D. There would be a deal less sneering at Ireland were only these facts known. England was perhaps the first country in which it became effective: the wars of the first and third Edwards called it into being there. Joan lit the fires of it in France; she mainly;—in the fourteen-twenties and thirties. Spain had to wait for Ferdinand and Isabel; Sweden for Gustavus Vasa; Holland for William the Silent; Italy for Victor Emmanuel; Germany for Bismarck. Wales was advancing towards it, in an imperfect sort of way, rather earlier than England; but the Edwardian conquest put the whole idea into abeyance for centuries. So too Ireland: she was half-conquered by the Normans, broken, racked, ruined and crucified, a century before the idea of Nationhood had come into existence, and while centrifugalism was still the one force in Europe. It is thus quite beside the point to say that she was never a nation, even in the days of her native rule. Of course she was not. Nor was England, in those times; nor any other. In every part of the continent the centrifugal forces were running riot; though in some there were strong fighting kings to hold things together. This by way of hurling one more spear at the old cruel doctrine of race inferiorities and superiorities: at Unbrotherliness and all its wicked works and ways. I was the European pralaya; when your duty to your neighbor was everywhere and always to fight him, to get in the first blow; to kill him before he killed you, and thank God for his mericies. So Ireland was not exceptional in that way. Where she was exceptional, bless her sweet heart, lay, as we shall see, in the fact that while all the rest were sunk in ignorance and foulest barbarism, and mentall utterly barren,—she alone had the grace to combine her Kilkenny Cattery with an exquisite and wonderful illumination of culture. While she tore herself to pieces with one hand, with the other she was holding up the torch of learning,—and a very real learning too, —to benighted Europe; and then (bedad!) she found another hand again, to be holding the pen with it, and to produce a literature to make the white angels of God as green as her own holy hills with envy! That was Ireland!
The Crest-Wave rolled in to her; the spiritual forces descended far enough to create a cultural illumination, but not far enough to create political stability. We have seen before that they touch the artistic creative planes, in their descent, before they reach the more material planes. So her position is perfectly comprehensible. The old European manvantara was dying; elsewhere it was dead. Its forces, when they passed away through Ireland, were nearly exhausted; in no condition whatever to penetrate to the material plane and make political greatnesses and strengths. But they found in her very soil and atmosphere a spiritual something which enabled them to produce a splendor of literary creation that perhaps had had no parallel in Europe since Periclean days: Yes, surely Ireland was much more creative than Augustan Rome.
Have any of you heard of literary savages? Of wild men of the woods, your true prognathous primitives, that in a bare couple of generations, and upon no contact with civilized races, rose from their native pithecanthropism to be the wonderful beacon of the West or East? You have not, and cannot imagine it; nor could it ever be. A great literary habit is only acquired in long ages of settled civilization; and there were long ages of settled civilization behind Ireland;—and when, about thirteen decades after Patrick's coming, she flamed up into cultural creation, she was but returning to what was proper to her soul; in the midst of her dissolution, she was but groping after an olden self. That olden self, very likely, she had even by that time more than half forgotten; and we now can only see it refracted, as it were, through the lens of those first Christian centuries, and with the eyes of those Christian monks and bards. How would they have seen them?—There was that spirit of euhemerization: of making ancient things conform to new Christian ideas. They had the Kilkenny Catterwauling in their ears daily; would they have allowed to any Pagan times a quieter less dissonant music? Could they have imagined it, indeed?—I doubt. Kilkennyism would have appeared to them the natural state of things. Were you to look back into Paganism for your Christian millennium, to come not till Christ came again? Were you to search there for peace on earth and mercy mild?—there in the long past, when all the near past was war?—Besides, there was that ancientest of Mariners, Noah, but a few thousand years back; and you had to make things fit.
So I find nothing in it conclusive, if the legends tell of no conditions different from those Patrick found: Kilkenny Cattery in politics, intensive culture in the things of the spirit; and I see no difficulty in the co-existence of the two. The cultured habit had grown in forgotten civilized ages; the Cattery was the result of national or racial pralaya; of the break-up of the old civilization, and the cyclic necessary night-time between it and the birth of another. Let us remember that during the Thirty Years War, in mid-manvantara, Europeans sunk into cannibalism; let us remember the lessons of our own day, which show what a very few years of war, so it be intense enough, can do toward reducing civilized to the levels of savage consciousness. So when we find Ireland, in this fourth century, always fighting,— and the women as well as the men; and when we find a tribe in Scotland, the Attacotti, with a reputation for cannibalism;—we need not for a moment imagine that things had always been like that. It is not that man is naturally a savage, and may from the heights of civilization quickly relapse into savagery; it is that he is a dual being, with the higher part of his nature usually in abeyance, and its place taken, when it is taken at all, by the conventions of law and order; and so the things that are only thought, or perhaps secretly practised, in times of civilization, as soon as war has broken down the conventions, find their full expression in action,—and others along with them. So Patrick found Ireland, what she has been mostly since, a grand Kilkenny Cattery; but with the literary habit of an older and better day surviving, and nearly ready to be awakened into transcendent splendor. The echoes of the Danaan music were ringing in her still; and are now, heaven knows;—and how would they not be, when what to our eyes are the hills of her green with fern, to eyes anointed, and to the vision of the spirit, are the palaces of the Danaan Sidhe, and the topless towers of Fairyland?
I shall come to my history next week; meanwhile here for you is the Song of Finn in Praise of May, a part of it, as Mr. Rollertone translates it, to give a taste of the literary habit of Pre-christian Ireland:
May day! delightful day!
Bright colors play the vales along;
Now wakes at morning's slender ray,
Wild and gay, the blackbird's song.
Now comes the bird of dusty hue,
The loud cuckoo, the summer lover;
Broad-branching trees are thick with leaves;
The bitter evil time is over.