By Sundown Shores

________________________________________________
Title:     By Sundown Shores
Author: William Sharp [More Titles by Sharp]

"Cette âme qui se lamente
En cette plaine dormante
C'est la nôtre n'est-ce pas?
La mienne, dis, et la tienne,
Dont s'exhale l'humble antienne
Par ce tiède soir, tout, bas? "

By Sundown Shores

"'N hano ann Tad, ar Mab hac ar Spered-Zantel,
Homan' zo'r ganaouenn zavet en Breiz-Izel!
Zavet gant eur paour-kèz, en Ar-goat, en Ar-vor,
Kanet anez-hi, pewienn, hac ho pezo digor."

"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
This song of mine was raised in my Breton Fatherland,
In Argoat forest-clad, in Arvor of the grey wave:
Sing it, wayfarers, and all gates will open before you."

I do not know the name of the obscure minstrel who sang this song, as he passed from village to village, by the coasts, along the heath-lands of Brittany. But there are poets who have no name and no country, because they are named by the secret name of the longing of many minds, and mysteriously come from and pass to the Land of Heart's Desire, which is their own land. This wandering Breton minstrel is of that company. His sône is familiar. I have heard it where Connemara breaks in grey rock and sudden pastures to the sea: where only the wind and the heather people the solitudes of Argyll: where the silent Isles shelve to perpetual foam. He speaks for all his brotherhood of Armorica: he speaks also for the greater brotherhood of his race, the broken peoples who now stand upon the sundown shores, from wild Ushant to the cliffs of Achil, from St. Bride's Bay to solitary St. Kilda. He is not only the genius of Arvor, daughter of dreams, but the genius of a race whose farewell is in a tragic lighting of torches of beauty around its grave. For it is the soul of the Celt who wanders homeless to-day, with his pathetic burthen that his sône was made by ancestral woods, by the unchanging sea; dreaming the enchanted air will open all doors. Alas! few doors open: the wayfarer must not tarry. Memories and echoes he may leave, but he must turn his face. Grey dolmen and grey menhir already stand there, by the last shores, memorials of his destiny.

The ancient Gaels believed that in the western ocean there was an island called Hy Bràsil, where all that was beautiful and mysterious lived beyond the pillars of the rainbow. The legendary romances of the Celtic races may be described as the Hy Bràsil of literature.

In the Celtic commune there are many legendary tales which, but for the accident of names and local circumstances, are identical. The familiar Highland legend of the children who, bathing in a mountain loch, were carried off by a water-horse, has its counterpart in Connemara, in Merioneth, and in Finistère, though in the Welsh recital the children are the victims of a dragon, and in the Breton legend the monster is a boar. For that matter, this elemental tale has its roots in the east, and Macedonia and the Himalaya retain the memory of what Aryan wagoners told by the camp-fires during their centuries-long immigration into Europe. Whether, however, a tale be universal or strictly Celtic, generally it has a parallel in one or all of the racial dialects. True, there are legendary cycles which are local. The Arzur of Brittany is a mere echo in the Hebrides, and the name of Cuculain or the fame of the Red Branch has not reached the dunes of Armorica. Nevertheless, even in the mythopoeic tales there is a kindred character. Nomënoë may have been a Breton Fionn, though he had no Oìsin to wed his deeds to a deathless music; and Diarmid and Grainne have loved beneath the oaks of Broceliande or the beech-groves of Llanidris, as well as among the hills of Erin, or in the rocky fastnesses of Morven. It is characteristic, too, how Celtland has given to Celtland. Scotland gave Ireland St. Patrick; Ireland gave Scotland St. Columba; the chief bard of Armorica came from Wales; and Cornwall has the Arthurian fame which is the meed of Kymric Caledonia. To this day no man can say whether Oìsin, old and blind, wandered at the last to Drumadoon in Arran, or if indeed he followed out of Erin the sweet voice from Tirnan-Òg, and was seen or heard of by none, till three centuries later the bells of the clerics and the admonitions of Patrick made his days a burden not to be borne. Did not the greatest of Irish kings die in tributary lands by the banks of the Loire, and who has seen the moss of that lost grave in Broceliande where Merlin of the North lay down to a long sleep?

Even where there seems no probability of a common origin, there is often a striking similarity in the matter and the manner of folk-tales, particularly those which narrate the strange experiences of the saints. Thus, for example, in one of the most beautiful of the legendary stories given in The Shadow of Arvor there is an account of how Gradlon, "the honoured chief of Kerne, the monarch who built Ys, and on whose brow were united the crowns of Armorica," having voluntarily become a wandering beggar, arrived at last in the heart of an ancient forest: "towering moss-clad pillars bearing a heavy roof of foliage, full of the mystery of a cathedral aisle by night." Here the king vowed to build a great temple, but before he could fulfil his vow he died. Gwennole the monk had missed Gradlon, and had followed him to the forest, to find him there on the morrow, lying on a bed of moss which the fallen leaves had flecked with gold. Near him crouched a human figure. This was Primel the anchorite. Note how the king speaks to the Christian monk Gwennole concerning this ancient hermit. "Have mercy on this poor old man beside me: the length of three men's lives has been his, and he has known the deeps of sorrow. The sorrows which have come upon me are nothing to his; for while I have wept over the fate of my royal city, and while for Ahez my heart has been broken, this man has lost his gods. There is no sorrow that is so great a sorrow. He is a Druid lamenting a dead faith. Show him tenderness." Therewith Gradlon dies. Over the dead king "Gwennole murmured a Latin chant; the druid in a tremulous voice intoned a refrain in an unknown tongue; and Gradlon, ruler of the sea, slept in that glade watched over by the priest of Christ and by the last surviving servant of Teutates.... There, amid the majestic solitudes of the forest, the two religions of the ancient race joined hands and were at one before the mystery of death." Later, the druid bids Gwennole build a Christian sanctuary on the spot where "the belated ministrant of a fallen faith" died beside Gradlon Maur, the Great King. One strange touch of bitterness occurs. "But," exclaims Gwennole, "if the sanctuary be reared here, we shall invade thy last refuge." "As for me ...!" replies the old man; then, after a silence he adds, with a gesture of infinite weariness, "it is my gods who should protect me. Let them save me if they can." The dying druid turns away to seek his long rest under the sacred oaks: "Gwennole, his heart full of a tender love and pity which he could not understand, moved slowly towards the sea." A fitting close to a book full of interest, charm, and spiritual beauty.

In the third book of St. Adamnan's Life of St. Columba, there is an episode entitled "Of a manifestation of angels meeting the soul of one Emchath." Columba, "making his way beyond the Ridge of Britain (Drum-Alban), near the lake of the river Nisa (Loch Ness), being suddenly inspired by the Holy Spirit, says to the brethren who are journeying with him at that time: 'Let us make haste to meet the holy angels who, that they may carry away the soul of a certain heathen man, who is keeping the moral law of nature even to extreme old age, have been sent out from the highest regions of heaven, and are waiting until we come thither, that we may baptize him in time before he dies.' Thereafter the aged saint made as much haste as he could to go in advance of his companions, until he came to the district which is named Airchartdan (Glen Urquhart)." There he found "the holy heathen man," Emchath by name.

Here, then, is an instance of a Celtic priest in Armorica and of a Celtic priest in Scotland acting identically towards an upright heathen. A large book would be necessary to relate the correspondence between the folk-tales, the traditional romances, and the Christian legends of the four great branches of the Celtic race.

On the seventh day, when God rested, says a poet of the Gael, He dreamed of the lands and nations he had made, and out of that dreaming were born Ireland and Brittany. Truly, within Christian days, there were more saints, there were more lamps of the spirit lit in that grey peninsula, in that green land, in the little sand-cinctured isle Iona, than anywhere betwixt the Syrian deserts and the meads of Glastonbury. It takes nothing from, it adds much to these lands where spiritual ecstasy has longest dreamed, that the old gods have not perished but merge into the brotherhood of Christ's company; that the old faiths, and the ancient spirit, and the pagan soul were not given to the wave for foam, to the pastures for idle sand. Ireland and Brittany! Behind the sorrowful songs of longing and regret, behind the faint chime of bells which some day linger as an echo in the towers of Ys where she lies under the wave, are the cries of the tympan and the forgotten music of druidic harps. What song the oaks knew in Broceliande, what song Taliesin heard, what chant Merlin the Wild raised among dim woods in Caledon: these may be lost to us for ever, or live only through our songs and dreams as shadows live in the hollows of the sunrain: but Broceliande and Gethsemane are in symbol akin, Taliesin is but another name of him who ate the wild honey and listened to the wind, and Merlin, with the nuts of wisdom in his hand, stands hearkening to the same deep murmur of the eternal life which was heard upon the Mount of Olives.

It has occurred to me often of late, from what I have seen, and read, and heard from others, that the Celtic mythopoëic faculty is still concerning itself largely with an interweaving of Pagan and Christian thought, of Pagan and Christian symbol, of the old Pagan tales of a day and of mortal beauty with the Christian symbolic legends that are of no day and are of immortal beauty.

A fisherman told me the story of Diarmid and Grainne, in the guise of a legend of the Virgin Mary and her Gaelic husband. Three years ago, in Appin, an old woman, Jessie Stewart, told me that when Christ was crucified He came back to us as Oìsin of the Songs. From a ferryman on Loch Linnhe, near the falls of Lora, a friend heard a confused story of Oìsin (confused because the narrator at one moment spoke of Oìsin, and at another of "Goll"), how on the day that Christ was crucified Oìsin slew his own son, and knew madness, crying that he was but a shadow, and his son a shadow, and that what he had done was but the shadow of what was being done in that hour "to the black sorrow of time and the universe (domhain)." In this connection, Celtic students will recall the story of Concobar mac Nessa, the High King of Ulster: how on that day he rose suddenly and fled into the woods and hewed down the branches of trees, crying that he slew the multitudes of those who at that moment were doing to death the innocent son of a king.

Out of this confusion may arise a new interpretation of certain great symbolic persons and incidents in the old mythology. As this legendary lore is being swiftly forgotten, it is well that it should be saved to new meanings and new beauty, by that mythopoëic faculty which, in the Celtic imagination, is as a wing continually uplifting fallen dreams to the imaging wind of the Spirit.

[The end]
William Sharp's essay: By Sundown Shores

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN