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Yeats' FAIRY AND FOLK
TALES OF THE IRISH PEASANTRY
INTRODUCTION
Dr. Corbett, Bishop of Oxford and Norwich, lamented long
ago the departure of the English fairies. "In Queen Mary's time" he wrote--
"When Tom came home from labour,
Or Cis to milking rose,
Then merrily, merrily went their tabor,
And merrily went their toes."
But now in the times of James, they had all gone, for "they were of the old
profession", and "their songs were Ave Maries". In Ireland they are still
extant, giving gifts to the kindly, and plaguing the surly. "Have you ever seen
a fairy or such like?" I asked the old man in County Sligo. "Amn't I annoyed
with them," was the answer. "Do the fishermen along here know anything of the
mermaids?" I asked a woman of a village in County Dublin. 'Indeed, they don't
like to see them at all," she answered, "for they always bring bad weather."
"Here is a man who believes in ghosts," said a foreign sea-captain, pointing to
a pilot of my acquaintance. "In every house over there," said the pilot,
pointing to his native village of Rosses, "there are several." Certainly that
now old and much respected dogmatist, the Spirit of the Age, has in no
manner made his voice heard down there. In a little while, for he has gotten
a consumptive appearance of late, he will be covered over decently in his grave,
and another will grow, old and much respected, in his place, and never be heard
of down there, and after him another and another and another. Indeed, it is a
question whether any of these personages will ever be heard of outside the
newspaper offices and lecture-rooms and drawing-rooms and eel-pie houses of the
cities, or if the Spirit of the Age is at any time more than a froth. At any
rate, whole troops of their like will not change the Celt much. Giraldus
Cambrensis found the people of the western islands a trifle paganish. "How many
gods are there?" asked a priest, a little while ago, of a man from the Island of
Innistor. "There is one on Innistor; but this seems a big place," said the man,
and the priest held up his hands in horror, as Giraldus had, just seven
centuries before. Remember, I am not blaming the man; it is very much better to
believe in a number of gods than in none at all, or think there is only one, but
that he is a little sentimental and impracticable, and not constructed for the
nineteenth century. The Celt, and his cromlechs, and his pillar-stones, these
will not change much-indeed, it is doubtful if anybody at all changes at any
time. In spite of hosts of deniers, and asserters, and wise-men, and professors,
the majority still are averse to sitting down to dine thirteen at table, or
being helped to salt, or walking under a ladder, or seeing a single magpie
flirting his chequered tail. There are, of course, children of light who have
set their faces against all this, though even a newspaper man, if you entice him
into a cemetery at midnight, will believe in phantoms, for everyone is a
visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt is a visionary without
scratching.
Yet, be it noticed, if you are a stranger, you will not readily
get ghost and fairy legends, even in a western village. You must go adroitly
to work, and make friends with the children, and the old men, with those who
have not felt the pressure of mere daylight existence, and those with whom it is
growing less, and will have altogether taken itself off one of these days. The
old women are most learned, but will not so readily be got to talk, for the
fairies are very secretive, and much resent being talked of; and are there not
many stories of old women who were nearly pinched into their graves or numbed
with fairy blasts?
At sea, when the nets are out and the pipes are lit, then will some ancient
hoarder of tales become loquacious, telling his histories to the tune of the
creaking of the boats. Holy-eve night, too, is a great time, and in old days
many tales were to be heard at wakes. But the priest have set their faces
against wakes.
In the Parochial Survey of Ireland it is recorded how the story-tellers used
to gather together of an evening, and if any had a different version from the
others, they would all recite theirs and vote, and the man who had varied would
have to abide by their verdict. In this way stories have been handed down with
such accuracy, that the long tale of Dierdre was, in the earlier decades of this
century, told almost word for word, as in the very ancient MSS. in the Royal
Dublin Society. In one case only it varied, and then the MS. was obviously
wrong--a passage had been forgotten by the copyist. But this accuracy is rather
in the folk and bardic tales than in the fairy legends, for these vary widely,
being usually adapted to some neighbouring village or local fairy-seeing
celebrity. Each county has usually some family, or personage, supposed to have
been favoured or plagued, especially by the phantoms, as the Hackets of Castle
Hacket, Galway, who had for their ancestor a fairy, or John-o'-Daly of
Lisadell, Sligo, who wrote "Eilleen Aroon", the song the
Scots have stolen and called "Robin Adair", and which Handel would sooner have
written than all his oratorios,1 and the "O'Donahue of Kerry". Round these men stories tended
to group themselves, sometimes deserting more ancient heroes for the purpose.
Round poets have they gathered especially, for poetry in Ireland has always been
mysteriously connected with magic.
These folk tales are full of simplicity and musical occurrences, for they are
the literature of a class for whom every incident in the old rut of birth, love,
pain, and death has cropped up unchanged for centuries: who have steeped
everything in the heart: to whom everything is a symbol. They have the spade
over which man has leant from the beginning. The people of the cities have the
machine, which is prose and a parvenu. They have few events. They can
turn over the incidents of a long life as they sit by the fire. With us nothing
has time to gather meaning, and too many things are occurring for even a big
heart to hold. It is said the most eloquent people in the world are the Arabs,
who have only the bare earth of the desert and a sky swept bare by the sun.
"Wisdom has alighted upon three things," goes their proverb; "the hand of the
Chinese, the brain of the Frank, and the tongue of the Arab." This, I take it,
is the meaning of that simplicity sought for so much in these days by all the
poets, and not to be had at any price.
The most notable and typical story-teller of my acquaintance is one Paddy
Flynn, a little, bright-eyed, old man, living in a leaky one-roomed cottage of
the village of B------, "The most gentle--i.e., fairy-place in the
whole of the County Sligo," he says, though others claim that honour for Drumahair
or for Drumcliff. A very pious old man, too! You may have some time to inspect
his strange figure and ragged hair, if he happen to be in a devout humour,
before he comes to the doings of the gentry. A strange devotion! Old tales of
Columkill, and what he said to his mother. "How are you today, mother?" "Worse!"
"May you be worse tomorrow"; and on the next day, "How are you today, mother?"
"Worse!" "May you be worse tomorrow"; and on the next, "How are you today,
mother?" "Better, thank God." "May you be better tomorrow." In which undutiful
manner he will tell you Columkill inculcated cheerfulness. Then most likely he
will wander off into his favourite theme--how the judge smiles alike in
rewarding the good and condemning the lost to unceasing flames. Very consoling
does it appear to Paddy Flynn, this melancholy and apocalyptic cheerfulness of
the Judge. Nor seems his own cheerfulness quite earthly--though a very palpable
cheerfulness. The first time I saw him he was cooking mushrooms for himself; the
next time he was asleep under a hedge, smiling in his sleep. Assuredly some joy
not quite of this steadfast earth lightens in those eyes--swift as the eyes of a
rabbit--among so many wrinkles, for Paddy Flynn is very old. A melancholy there
is in the midst of their cheerfulness--a melancholy that is almost a portion of
their joy, the visionary melancholy of purely instinctive natures and of all
animals. In the triple solitude of age and eccentricity and partial deafness he
goes about much pestered by children.
As to the reality of his fairy and spirit-seeing powers, not all are agreed.
One day we were talking of the Banshee. "I have seen it", he said, "down there
by the water 'batting' the river with its hands". He it was who said the fairies
annoyed him.
Not that the Sceptic is entirely afar even from these western villages. I
found him one morning as he bound his corn in a merest pocket-handkerchief of a
field. Very different from Paddy Flynn--Scepticism in every wrinkle of his face,
and a travelled man, too!--a foot-long Mohawk Indian tattooed on one of his arms
to evidence the matter. "They who travel," says a neighbouring priest, shaking
his head over him, and quoting Thomas Ã
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