Of course, a tale such as “The Fate of the Children of Lir”—probably the story known above all others among the children of Western Scotland and Ireland—is sad with another sadness, that of prolonged and unmerited suffering. But to the Gaelic mind, at least, this is redeemed by the sense of heroic endurance, of the deep unselfish devotion of a lovely womanly type such as is represented by Fionula, and perhaps, above all, by the music and beauty which were the sweet doom of Fionula and her brothers.
But to me not one of them is sad, save with beauty. For through all I hear the sound of Peterkin’s laughter. Sometimes it was aroused by an episode; sometimes it leapt like a hound along the trail of vagrant thoughts; sometimes it came and went as an eddying wind, none knowing whence or whither.
This laughter of Peterkin has become for me one of the sweet wonderful voices of nature—the four winds of Childhood: Wonder, Delight, Longing, and Laughter. Ah, children, children, to one and all I wish the golden fortune of Peterkin.
V
When Peterkin was still a child he was familiar with tales of the old world which now-a-days we keep from children, because they are not old enough to understand. That, I fear, is more because we ourselves do not understand, or are out of sympathy. Is a child more likely to be hurt, or to be nobly attuned to the chant-royal of life, by acquaintance with stories of vivid and beautiful human love such as that of Nathos and Darthool, or Dermid and Grainne? Surely, what is beautiful is not a thing to be feared; and though, alas! so many of us do now indeed dread beauty and feel toward it a strange baffled aversion, there are others who know it to be the profoundest and most exquisite mystery in life.
To Peterkin at any rate there was never anything but what was stirring and heroic and full of charm and beauty in these old tales: and through all his days their atmosphere was in his mind, so that he made life fairer for himself and others.
Few stories delighted him more than the wild folk-lore tales which he heard from the shepherds and fishermen, or than those which he was told on Iona. It was to that island he was taken when he was still a child, at a time when the shadow of death darkened his young life. But there, staying with Ian Mor and with Eilidh, his wife, he lived the happiest months of his early years, and came closer to the beauty of the past and to the beauty of the present than ever before or after.
It was on Iona that he first heard the “Three Sorrows of Story-Telling,” though that of Nathos and Darthool—or of “The Sons of Usna,” as it is generally called—was rather overheard by him as Ian related it to Eilidh, than told to him direct.
Throughout the first months of his stay in Iona, Peterkin was told something daily by Ian Mor, so that, child as he was, he became familiar with strange names and peoples of the past, as well as with all the wonders of the living world. True, there was thus in his mind a jumble of the past and the present, and Columba was more real to him than McCailin Mor himself, and Finn and Cuchulain, Ossian and Oscar and Dermid as vivid and actual as any fisherman of Iona.
When he was old enough to follow aright, Ian Mor told him, anew and in his own way, the three famous tales which follow.