Lastly, as we read these stories, even in a modern dress, an impression of great ancientry is made upon us, so much so that some scholars have tried to turn Finn into a mythical hero—but if he be as old as that implies, of how great an age must be the clearly mythic tales which gather round the Tuatha de Danaan? However this may be, the impression of ancientry is deep and agreeable. All myths in any nation are, of course, of a high antiquity, but as they treat of the beginning of things, they mingle an impression of youth with one of age. This is very pleasant to the imagination, and especially so if the myths, as in Ireland, have some poetic beauty or strangeness, as in the myth I have referred to—of the deep spring of clear water and the nine hazels of wisdom that encompass it. This mingling of the beauty of youth and the honour of ancientry runs through all the Irish tales. Youth and the love of it, of its beauty and strength, adorn and vitalize their grey antiquity. But where, in their narrative, the hero's youth is over and the sword weak in his hand, and the passion less in his and his sweetheart's blood, life is represented as scarcely worth the living. The famed men and women die young—the sons of Turenn, Cuchulain, Conall, Dermot, Emer, Deirdre, Naisi, Oscar. Oisín has three hundred years of youth in that far land in the invention of which the Irish embodied their admiration of love and youth. His old age, when sudden feebleness overwhelms him, is made by the bardic clan as miserable, as desolate as his youth was joyous. Again, Finn lives to be an old man, but the immortal was in him, and either he has been born again in several re-incarnations (for the Irish held from time to time the doctrine of the transmigration of souls), or he sleeps, like Barbarossa, in a secret cavern, with all his men around him, and beside him the mighty horn of the Fianna, which, when the day of fate and freedom comes, will awaken with three loud blasts the heroes and send them forth to victory. Old as she is, Ireland does not grow old, for she has never reached her maturity. Her full existence is before her, not behind her. And when she reaches it her ancientry and all its tales will be dearer to her than they have been in the past. They will be an inspiring national asset. In them and in their strange admixture of different and successive periods of customs, thoughts and emotions (caused by the continuous editing and re-editing of them, first in oral recitation and then at the hands of scribes), Ireland will see the record of her history, not the history of external facts, but of her soul as it grew into consciousness of personality; as it established in itself love of law, of moral right, of religion, of chivalry, of courtesy in war and daily life; as it rejoiced, and above all, as it suffered and was constant, in suffering and oppression, to its national ideals.
It seems as if, once at least, this aspect of the tales of Ireland was seen by men of old, for there is a story which tells that heaven itself desired their remembrance, and that we should be diverted and inspired by them. In itself it is a record of the gentleness of Irish Christianity to Irish heathendom, and of its love of the heroic past. For one day when Patrick and his clerks were singing the Mass at the Rath of the Red Ridge, where Finn was wont to be, he saw Keelta, a chief of the Fianna, draw near with his companions, and Keelta's huge hounds were with him. They were men so tall and great that fear fell on the clerks, but Patrick met with and asked their chieftain's name. "I am Keelta," he answered, "son of Ronan of the Fianna." "Was it not a good lord you were with," said Patrick, "Finn, son of Cumhal?" And Keelta said, "If the brown leaves falling in the wood were gold, if the waves of the sea were silver, Finn would have given them all away." "What was it kept you through your lifetime?" said Patrick. "Truth that was in our hearts, and strength in our hands, and fulfilment in our tongues," said Keelta. Then Patrick gave them food and drink and good treatment, and talked with them. And in the morning the two angels who guarded him came to him, and he asked them if it were any harm before God, King of heaven and earth, that he should listen to the stories of the Fianna. And the angels answered, "Holy Clerk, these old fighting men do not remember more than a third of their tales by reason of the forgetfulness of age, but whatever they tell write it down on the boards of the poets and in the words of the poets, for it will be a diversion to the companies and the high people of the latter times to listen to them."[[8]] So spoke the angels, and Patrick did as he bade them, and the stories are in the world to this day.
STOPFORD A. BROOKE
ST PATRICK'S DAY, 1910
COIS NA TEINEADH
(By the Fireside.)
Where glows the Irish hearth with peat
There lives a subtle spell— The faint blue smoke, the gentle heat,
The moorland odours, tell
Of long roads running through a red
Untamed unfurrowed land, With curlews keening overhead,
And streams on either hand;