The Washer of the Ford: Legendary moralities and barbaric tales. Sharp William

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      “… from the looms of Life are spun,

       Warp of shadow and woof of sun—”

      and if, too, I long to express anew something of that wonderful historic romance in which we of our race and country are so rich, I am not likely to forget those earlier dreams which are no whit less realities—realities of the present seen through an inverted glass—which have been, and are, so full of inspiration and of a strange and terrible beauty.

      But one to whom life appeals by a myriad avenues, all alluring and full of wonder and mystery, cannot always abide where the heart longs most to be. It is well to remember that there are shadowy waters even in the cities, and that the Fount of Youth is discoverable in the dreariest towns as well as in Hy Bràsil: a truth apt to be forgotten by those of us who dwell with ever-wondering delight in that land of lost romance which had its own day, as this epoch of a still stranger, if a less obvious, romance has its own passing hour.

The titular piece—with its strange name that will not be unfamiliar to you who know our ancient Celtic literature, or may bear in mind the striking use made of it and its vague cognate legend, by Ferguson, in his Irish epic, Congal—gives the keynote not only of this book but of what has for hundreds of years, and to some extent still is, the characteristic of the purely Celtic mind in the Highlands and the Isles. This characteristic is a strange complexity of paganism and Christianity, or rather an apparent complexity arising from the grafting of Christianity upon paganism. Columba, St. Patrick, St. Ronan, Kentigern, all these militant Christian saints were merely transformed pagans. Even in the famous dialogue between St. Patrick and Oisìn, which is the folk-telling of the passing of the old before the new, the thrill of a pagan sympathy on the part of the uncompromising saint is unmistakable. To this day, there are Christian rites and superstitions which are merely a gloss upon a surviving antique paganism. I have known an old woman, in no wise different from her neighbours, who on the day of Beltane sacrificed a hen: though for her propitiatory rite she had no warrant save that of vague traditionary lore, the lore of the teinntean, of the hearth-side—where, in truth, are best to be heard the last echoes of the dim mythologic faith of our ancestors. What is the familiar “clachan,” now meaning a hamlet with a kirk, but an echo of the Stones, the circles of the druids or of a more ancient worship still, that perhaps of the mysterious Anait, whose sole record is a clach on a lonely moor, of which from time immemorial the people have spoken as the “Teampull na’n Anait”? A relative of mine saw, in South Uist, less than twenty-five years ago, what may have been the last sun-sacrifice in Scotland, when an old Gael secretly and furtively slew a lamb on the summit of a conical grassy knoll at sunrise. Those who have the Gaelic have their ears filled with rumours of a day that is gone. When an evicted crofter laments, O mo chreach, mo chreach![1] or some poor soul on a bed of pain cries, O mo chradshlat,[2] he who knows the past recognises in the one the mournful refrain of the time when the sea-pirates or the hill-robbers pillaged and devasted quiet homesteads, and, in the other, not the moan of suffering only, but the cry of torment from the victim racked on the cradhshlat, a bitter ignominious torture used by the ancient Gaels. When, in good fellowship, one man says to another, Tha, a laochain (yes, my dear fellow), he recalls Fionn and the chivalry of eld, for laochan is merely a contraction for laoch-Fhinn, meaning a companion in war, a hero, literally Fionn’s right-hand man in battle. To this day, women, accompanying a marching regiment, are sometimes heard to say in the Gaelic, “We are going with the dear souls to the wars”—literally an echo of the Ossianic Siubhlaidh sinn le’n anam do’n araich, “We shall accompany their souls to the battle-field.” A thousand instances could be adduced. The language is a herring-net, through which the unchanging sea filtrates, even though the net be clogged with the fish of the hour. Nor is it the pagan atmosphere only that survives: often we breathe the air of that early day when the mind of man was attuned to a beautiful piety that was wrought into nature itself. Of the several words for the dawn, there is a beautiful one, Uinneagachadh. We have it in the phrase ’nuair a bha an latha ag uinneagachadh, “when the day began to dawn.” Now this word is simply an extension of Uinneag, a window: and the application of the image dates far back to the days of St. Columba, when some devout and poetic soul spoke of the uinneagan Neimh, the windows of Heaven.

[1] Oh, alas, alas! (Literally, Oh, my undoing, or Oh, my utter ruin.)

[2] Alas my torment!

      Sometimes, among the innumerable “legendary moralities” which exist fragmentarily in the West Highlands and in the Isles, there is a coherent narrative basis—as, for example, in the Irish and Highland folk-lore about St. Bride, or Bridget, “Muime Chriosd.” Sometimes there is simply a phrase survived out of antiquity. I doubt if any now living, either in the Hebrides or in Ireland, has heard any legend of the “Washer of the Ford.” The name survives, with its atmosphere of a remote past, its dim ancestral memory of a shadowy figure of awe haunting a shadowy stream in a shadowy land. Samuel Ferguson, in Congal, has done little more than limn an obscure shadow of that shadow: yet it haunts the imagination. In the passage of paganism, these old myths were too deep-rooted in the Celtic mind to vanish at the bidding of the Cross: thus came about that strange grafting of the symbolic imagery of the devout Culdee, of the visionary Mariolater, upon the surviving Druidic and prehistoric imagination. In a word, the Washer of the Ford might well have appeared, to a single generation, now as a terrible and sombre pagan goddess of death, now as a symbolic figure in the new faith, foreshadowing spiritual salvation and the mystery of resurrection.

      If in a composition such as “The Annir-Choille,” there is the expression of revolt—not ancient only, nor of the hour, but eternal, for the revolt is of the sovereign nature within us whereon all else is an accidental superstructure—against the Christian ethic of renunciation, with an echo of our deep primeval longing for earth-kinship with every life in nature: if here there is the breath of a day that may not come again, there is little or nothing of the past, save what is merely accidental, in “The Fisher of Men” or “The Last Supper.” I like to think that these eachdaireachd Spioradail, these spiritual chronicles, might as well, in substance, have been told a thousand years ago or be written a thousand years hence. That Fisher still haunts the invisible shadowy stream of human tears: those mystic Spinners still ply their triple shuttles, and the Fair Weaver of Hope, now as of yore and for ever, sends his rainbows adrift across the hearts and through the minds of men. What does it matter, again, that the Three Marvels of Hy are set against the background of the Iona of St. Columba? St. Francis blessed the birds of Assisi, and San Antonio had a heart as tender for all winged and gentle creatures: and there are innumerable quiet gardens of peace in the world even now where the kindred of San Antonio and St. Francis and St. Columba are kith to our fellow-beings, knowing them akin one and all to the seals whom St. Molios blessed at the end of his days, and in his new humbleness hailed as likewise of the company of the Sons of God.

      But of this I am sure. If there is spiritual truth in the vision of the Blind Harper who saw the Washer of the Ford, or in that of Molios who hailed the seals as brethren, or in that of Colum who blessed the birds and the fish of the sea and even the vagrant flies of the air, and saw the Moon-Child, and in that seeing learned the last mystery of the life of the soul, if in these, as in the “Fisher of Men” and “The Last Supper,” I have given faint utterance to the heart-knowledge we all have, I would not have you or any think that the pagan way is therefore to me as the way of darkness. The lost monk who loved the Annir-Choille was doubtless not the less able to see the Uinneagan Neimh because he was under ban of Colum and all his kin: and there are those of us who would rather be with Cathal of the Woods, and be drunken with green fire, than gain the paradise of the holy Molios who banned him, if in that gain were involved the forfeiture of the sunny green world, the joy of life, and the earth-sweet ancient СКАЧАТЬ