News is brought to the King that Etain is found, and he goes to the remote and lonely place that his messengers have told him of. He comes upon her unaware—
There by the sea, Etain his destined bride
Sat unabashed, unwitting of the sight
Of him who gazed upon her gleaming side,
Fair as the snowfall of a single night;
Her arms like foam upon the flowing tide;
Her curd-white limbs in all their beauty bare,
Straight as the rule of Dagda's carpenter.
There is, too, in this poetry of Mr Cousins, a very tender feeling for Nature. Perhaps it does not quite accord with the spirit of the wild time out of which the stories came; but that opens up a larger question into which we are not bound to enter. For if we are going to quarrel with the treatment of epic material in any but the vigorous, 'primitive' manner, we shall make ourselves the poorer by rejecting much beautiful poetry. We may even find ourselves robbed of Virgilian sweetness. But most of us will be wise enough to take good things wherever we find them; and may, therefore, rejoice in stanzas like these, which describe the stirring of wild creatures at dawn:
Somewhere the snipe now taps his tiny drum;
The moth goes fluttering upward from the heath;
And where no lightest foot unmarked may come,
The rabbit, tiptoe, plies his shiny teeth
On luscious herbage; and with strident hum
The yellow bees, blustering from flower to flower,
Scatter from dew-filled cups a sparkling shower.
The meadowsweet shakes out its feathery mass;
And rumorous winds, that stir the silent eaves,
Bearing abroad faint perfumes as they pass,
Thrill with some wondrous tale the fluttering leaves,
And whisper secretly along the grass
Where gossamers, for day's triumphal march,
Hang out from blade to blade their diamond arch.
There is, however, a very different manner in which these early legends are being treated by some of the Irish poets. One may call it 'Celtic,' in the hope of conveying some impression of it in a single word. But if you would get nearer than that, you may take one or two fragments from Mr Yeats' The Celtic Twilight—such as "the voice of Celtic sadness and of Celtic longing for infinite things ... the vast and vague extravagance that lies at the bottom of the Celtic heart." And to phrases like that, which adumbrate the spirit of the work, you must add a style which is allusive, mystic, and symbolical: in fact, a mode of expression rather like Mr Yeats' own early poetry. But the crux of the matter lies there. For the production of really good work of this kind demands just the equipment which Mr Yeats happens to possess: the right temperament and the right degree (a high one) of poetic craftsmanship. It is a rare combination—unique, of course, in so far as the element of individuality enters. And attempts which have been made to gain the same effects with a different natural endowment have failed in proportion as temperament was unsuited or 'the capacity for taking pains' was less. Hence 'Celtic' poetry, in the specific sense, has fallen into some disfavour. Yet when mood and material and craft 'have met and kissed each other,' it is clear that authentic beauty is created; and that of a kind which cannot be made in any other way. Thus we might choose, from the romantic work of Miss Eva Gore Booth, passages where all the desirable qualities seem to meet. There is, for instance, the poem which prefaces her Triumph of Maeve, from which I take the last two stanzas. Here is finely caught that unrest of soul which we have been taught to believe essentially Celtic; though it probably haunts every imaginative mind, of whatever race.
There is no rest for the soul that has seen the wild eyes of Maeve;
No rest for the heart once caught in the net of her yellow hair—
No quiet for the fallen wind, no peace for the broken wave;
Rising and falling, falling and rising with soft sounds everywhere,
There is no rest for the soul that has seen the wild eyes of Maeve.
I have seen Maeve of the Battles wandering over the hill
And I know that the deed that is in my heart is her deed;
And my soul is blown about by the wild winds of her will,
For always the living must follow whither the dead would lead—
I have seen Maeve of the Battles wandering over the hill.
From the same romance we may select a speech by Fionavar, Queen Maeve's beautiful young daughter. The sense of the supernatural enters here, for the occasion is Samhain, the pagan All Souls' Eve. It is a night when gods and fairies are abroad, and Fionavar has seen things strange and awesome:
As I came down the valley after dark,
The little golden dagger at my breast
Flashed into fire lit by a sudden spark;
I saw the lights flame on the haunted hill,
My soul was blown about by a strange wind.
Though the green fir trees rose up stark and still
Against the sky, yet in my haunted mind
They bent and swayed before a magic storm:
A wave of darkness thundered through the sky,
And drowned the world....
In Nera's Song, again, as in the whole romance, we find the element of dreams which is supposed to be an indubitable sign of the Celtic temperament. Nera, who is the Queen's bard, has just returned after an absence of one whole year in the Land of Faëry; and though it is autumn, his arms are full of primroses, the fairies' magical flower: