Chapter VII: Part 7

This is true, although it does not contain by any means the whole truth; moreover, the parallelism with the scientific movement of the present day undoubtedly in part obtains. Yet the saying which Dr. Dwight quotes with approval from Herbert Spencer applies to what he himself attempts; to destroy the case of one’s opponents and to justify one’s own case are two very different things. At present we are in greater danger of suffering in things spiritual from a wrong-headed scientific materialism than from religious bigotry and intolerance; just as at present we are threatened rather by what is vicious among the ideas that triumphed in the Revolution than we are from what is vicious in the ideas that it overthrew. But this is merely because victorious evil necessarily contains more menace than defeated evil; and it will not do to forget the other side, nor to let our protest against the evil of the present drive us into championship of the evil of the past. The excesses of the French Revolution were not only hideous in themselves, but were fraught with a menace to civilization which has lasted until our time and which has found its most vicious expression in the Paris Commune of 1871 and its would-be imitators here and in other lands. Nevertheless, there was hope for mankind in the French Revolution, and there was none in the system against which it was a protest, a system which had reached its highest development in Spain. Better the terrible flame of the French Revolution than the worse than Stygian hopelessness of the tyranny--physical, intellectual, spiritual--which brooded over the Spain of that day. So it is with the modern scientific movement. There is very much in it to regret; there is much that is misdirected and wrong; and Dr. Dwight is quite right in the protest he makes against Haeckel and to a less extent against Weismann, and against the intolerant arrogance and fanatical dogmatism which the scientists of their school display to as great an extent as ever did any of the ecclesiastics against whom they profess to be in revolt. The experience of our sister republic of France has shown us that not only scientists but politicians, professing to be radical in their liberalism, may in actual fact show a bigoted intolerance of the most extreme kind in their attacks on religion; and bigotry and intolerance are at least as objectionable when anti-religious as when nominally religious. But in his entirely proper protest against these men and their like Dr. Dwight is less than just to Darwin and to many another seeker after truth, and he fails to recognize the obligation under which he and those like him have been put by the fearless pioneers of the new movement. The debt of mankind to the modern scientific movement is incalculable; the evil that has accompanied it has been real; but the good has much outweighed the evil. It is only the triumph of the movement led by the men against whom Dr. Dwight protests that has rendered it possible for books such as Dr. Dwight’s to be published with the approval--as in his case--of the orthodox thought of the church to which the writer belongs.

The most significant feature of his book is the advance it marks in the distance which orthodoxy has travelled. He grudgingly admits the doctrine of evolution, although--quite rightly, and in true scientific spirit, by the way--he insists most strongly upon the fact that we are as yet groping in the dark as we essay to explain its causes or show its significance; and he is again quite right in holding up as an example to the dogmatists of modern science what Roger Bacon said in the thirteenth century: “The first essential for advancement in knowledge is for men to be willing to say, ‘We do not know.’” He, of course, treats of the solar system, the law of gravitation, and the like as every other educated man now treats of them. Now, all of this represents a great advance. A half-century ago no recognized authorities of any church would have treated an evolutionist as an orthodox man. A century ago Dr. Dwight would not have been permitted to print his book as orthodox if it had even contained the statement that the earth goes round the sun. In the days of Leonardo da Vinci popular opinion sustained the church authorities in their refusal to allow that extraordinary man to dissect dead bodies, and the use of antitoxin would unquestionably have been considered a very dangerous heresy from all standpoints. In their generations Copernicus and Galileo were held to be dangerous opponents of orthodoxy, just as Darwin was held to be when he brought out his “Origin of Species,” just as Mendel’s work would have been held if Darwin’s far greater work had not distracted attention from him. The discovery of the circulation of the blood was at the time thought by many worthy people to be in contradiction of what was taught in Holy Writ; and the men who first felt their way toward the discovery of the law of gravitation made as many blunders and opened themselves to assault on as many points as was the case with those who first felt their way to the establishment of the doctrine of evolution. The Dr. Dwights of to-day can write with the freedom they do only because of the triumph of the ideas of those scientific innovators of the past whom the Dr. Dwights of their day emphatically condemned.

But when Dr. Dwight attacks the loose generalizations, absurd dogmatism, and ludicrous assumption of omniscient wisdom of not a few of the so-called leaders of modern science, he is not only right but renders a real service. The claims of certain so-called scientific men as to “science overthrowing religion” are as baseless as the fears of certain sincerely religious men on the same subject. The establishment of the doctrine of evolution in our time offers no more justification for upsetting religious beliefs than the discovery of the facts concerning the solar system a few centuries ago. Any faith sufficiently robust to stand the--surely very slight--strain of admitting that the world is not flat and does move round the sun need have no apprehensions on the score of evolution, and the materialistic scientists who gleefully hail the discovery of the principle of evolution as establishing their dreary creed might with just as much propriety rest it upon the discovery of the principle of gravitation. Science and religion, and the relations between them, are affected by one only as they are affected by the other. Genuine harm has been done by the crass materialism of men like Haeckel, a materialism which, in its unscientific assumptions and in its utter insufficiency to explain all the phenomena it professes to explain, has been exposed in masterly fashion by such really great thinkers--such masters not only of philosophy but of material science--as William James, Émile Boutroux, and Henri Bergson. It is worth while to quote the remarks of Alfred Russel Wallace, the veteran evolutionist: “With Professor Haeckel’s dislike of the dogmas of theologians and their claims as to the absolute knowledge of the nature and attributes of the inscrutable mind that is the power within and behind and around nature many of us have the greatest sympathy; but we have none with his unfounded dogmatism of combined negation and omniscience, and more especially when this assumption of superior knowledge seems to be put forward to conceal his real ignorance of the nature of life itself.” Dr. Dwight is emphatically right when he denies that science (using the word, as he does, as meaning merely the science of material things) has taught “a new and sufficient gospel,” or that, to use his own words, there is any truth “in the boast of infidel science that she and she alone has all that is worth having.” He could go even further than he does in refuting the queer optimism of those evolutionists who insist that evolution in the human race necessarily means progress; for every true evolutionist must admit the possibility of retrogression no less than of progress, and exactly as species of animals have sunk after having risen, so in the history of mankind it has again and again happened that races of men, and whole civilizations, have sunk after having risen. In so far as Dr. Dwight’s view of religion is that it is the gospel of duty and of human service, his view is emphatically right; and surely when the doctrine of the gospel of works is taken to mean the gospel of service to mankind, and not merely the performance of a barren ceremonial, it must command the respect, and I hope the adherence, of all devout men of every creed, and even of those who adhere to no creed of recognized orthodoxy.

In the same way I heartily sympathize with his condemnation of the men who stridently proclaim that “science has disposed of religion,” and with his condemnation of the scientific men who would try to teach the community that there is no real meaning to the words “right” and “wrong,” and who therefore deny free-will and accountability. Even as sound a thinker as Mr. Bernard, whose book is rightly, as he calls it, “an essay in constructive biology,” who in his theory of group development has opened a new biological and even sociological field of capital importance, who explicitly recognizes the psychical accompaniment of physical force as something distinct from it, and whose final chapter on the integration of the human aggregate shows that he has a far nobler view of life than any mere materialist can have, yet falls into the great mistake of denying freedom of the will, merely because he with his finite material intelligence can not understand it. Dr. Dwight is right in his attitude toward the scientific men who thus assume that there is no freedom of the will because on a material basis it is not explicable. Whenever any so-called scientific men develop, as an abstract proposition, a theory in accordance with which it would be quite impossible to conduct the affairs of mankind for so much as twenty-four hours, the wise attitude of really scientific men would be to reject that theory, instead of following the example of the, I fear not wholly imaginary, scientist who, when told that the facts did not fit in with his theory, answered: “So much the worse for the facts.” M. Bergson, in his “Creative Evolution,” has brought out with convincing clearness the great truth that the human brain, so able to deal with purely material things, and with sciences, such as geometry, in which thought is concerned only with unorganized matter, works under necessarily narrow limitations--limitations in reality very, very narrow, and never to be made really broad by mere intellect--when it comes to grasping any part of the great principle of life. Reason can deal effectively only with certain categories. True wisdom must necessarily refuse to allow reason to assume a sway outside of its limitations; and where experience plainly proves that the intellect has reasoned wrongly, then it is the part of wisdom to accept the teachings of experience, and bid reason be humble--just as under like conditions it would bid theology be humble. A certain school of Greek philosophers was able to prove logically that there was not, and could not be, any such thing as motion, and that, even if there were, it was quite impossible logically for a pursuing creature ever to overtake a fleeing creature which was going at inferior speed; but all that was really accomplished by this teaching was to prove the need of much greater intellectual humility on the part of those who believed that they were capable of thinking out an explanation for everything. Mr. Bernard ought not to have been caught in such a dilemma, because of the very fact that he does not cast in his lot with the crass materialists; for he admits that there are many things we do not know, that there is much which our intelligence--necessarily functioning in material fashion--can not understand. It is just as idle for a man to try to explain everything in the moral and spiritual world by that which he is able to apprehend of the material world as it would be for a polyp to try to explain the higher emotions of mankind in terms of polyp materialism. Not only would it be quite impossible to conduct even the lowest form of civil society without practical acknowledgment of free-will and accountability--an acknowledgment always made in practice by every single individual of those who deny it in theory--but even in their writings the very men who deny free-will and accountability inevitably and continually use language which has no meaning except on the supposition that both of them exist. Mr. Bernard, for instance, on the same page on which he denies freedom of the will, makes an impatient plea for just laws, and explains that by “just laws” he means laws that are in accordance with the highest conceptions of human relationships; he complains that the legal idea of justice is invariably far behind that of our psychic perceptions; and elsewhere, as on page 457, he speaks of the “duties” of man and of his “moral perceptions,” and on page 473 he asks for perfection of the community, so that “social life worked out by the highest wisdom of mankind will at once rise to a newer and higher physical and psychic level.” All of this is meaningless if there are no such things as freedom of the will and accountability; and its goes to show that even a profound and original thinker, if he has dwelt too long in the realms where the pure materialist is king, needs to pay heed to M. Bergson’s pregnant saying that “pure reasoning needs to be supervised by common sense, which is an altogether different thing.” A part, and an essential part, of the same truth is expressed by Mr. Taylor when he paraphrases Saint Augustine in insisting that “the truths of love are as valid as the truths of reason.”

Dr. Dwight and the many men whose habits of thought are similar to his perform a real service when they keep people from being led astray by the mischievous dogmas of those who would give to each passing and evanescent phase of materialistic scientific thought a dogmatic value; and our full acknowledgment of this service does not in the least hinder us from also realizing and acknowledging that the advance in scientific discovery, which has been and will be of such priceless worth to mankind, can not be made by men of this type, but only by the bolder, more self-reliant spirits, by men whose unfettered freedom of soul and intellect yields complete fealty only to the great cause of truth, and will not be hindered by any outside control in the search to attain it. A brake is often a useful and sometimes an indispensable piece of equipment of a wagon; but it is never as important as the wheels. As the University of Wisconsin declared when Dr. Richard T. Ely was tried for economic heresy: “In all lines of investigation the investigator must be absolutely free to follow the paths of truth wherever they may lead.”

It is always a difficult thing to state a position which has two sides with such clearness as to bring it home to the hearers. In the world of politics it is easy to appeal to the unreasoning reactionary, and no less easy to appeal to the unreasoning advocate of change, but difficult to get people to show for the cause of sanity and progress combined the zeal so easily aroused against sanity by one set of extremists and against progress by another set of extremists. So in the world of the intellect it is easy to take the position of the hard materialists who rail against religion, and easy also to take the position of those whose zeal for orthodoxy makes them distrust all action by men of independent mind in the search for scientific truth; but it is not so easy to make it understood that we both acknowledge our inestimable debt to the great masters of science, and yet are keenly alive to their errors and decline to surrender our judgment to theirs when they go wrong. It is imperative to realize how very grave their errors are, and how foolish we should be to abandon our adherence to the old ideals of duty toward God and man without better security than the more radical among the new prophets can offer us. The very blindest of those new scientific prophets are those whose complacency is greatest in their belief that the material key is that which unlocks all the mysteries of the universe, and that the finite mind of man can, not merely understand, but pass supercilious judgment upon, these mysteries. Mr. Wallace stands in honorable contrast to the men of this stamp. No one has criticised with greater incisiveness what he properly calls “the vague, incomprehensible, and offensive assertions of the biologists of the school of Haeckel.” He shows his scientific superiority to these men by his entire realization of the limitations of the human intelligence, by his realization of the folly of thinking that we have explained what we are simply unable to understand when we use such terms as “infinity of time” and “infinity of space” to cover our ignorance; and he stands not far away from the school of MM. Boutroux and Bergson, and, old man though he is, comes near the attitude of the more serious among the younger present-day scientific investigators--of the stamp of Professor Osborn, of the American Museum of Natural History--in his readiness to acknowledge that the materialistic and mechanical explanations of the causes of evolution have broken down, and that science itself furnishes an overwhelming argument for “creative power, directive mind, and ultimate purpose” in the process of evolution.

The law of evolution is as unconditionally accepted by every serious man of science to-day as is the law of gravitation; and it is no more and no less foolish to regard one than the other as antagonistic to religion. To reject either on Biblical grounds stands on a par with insisting, on the same grounds, that geological science must reconcile itself--and astronomy as well--to a universe only six thousand years old. The type of theologian who takes such a position occupies much the same intellectual level with the strutting materialists of the Haeckel type. To all men of this kind I most cordially commend a capital book, “Evolution and Dogma,” by the Rev. J. A. Zahm, one-time professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana.

The great distinguishing feature of the centuries immediately past has been the extraordinary growth in man’s knowledge of, and power to understand and command, his own physical nature and his physical surroundings in the universe. It is this growth which so sharply distinguishes modern civilization, the civilization which we may roughly date as beginning about the time of Columbus’s voyage, from all preceding civilizations; and it has not only immeasurably increased man’s power over nature, but, when rightly understood, has also measurably added to his inner dignity and worth, and to his power and command over things spiritual no less than material. This conquest could have been achieved only by men who dared to follow wherever their longing for the truth led them, and who were masters of their own consciences, and as little servile to the past as to the present. But no such movement for the uplifting of mankind ever has taken place, or ever will or can take place, without being fraught also with great dangers to mankind. Our hope lies in progress, for if we try to remain stationary we shall surely go backward; and yet as soon as we leave the ground on which we stand in order to advance there is always danger that we shall plunge into some abyss.

Naturally, the men who have taken the lead in these extraordinary material discoveries have often tended to think that there is nothing to discover or to believe in except what is material. Much of the growth in our understanding of nature has been due to men whose high abilities were nevertheless rigidly limited in certain directions. Our knowledge of solar systems so inconceivably remote that the remoteness is itself unreal to our senses; our knowledge of animate and inanimate forces working on a scale so infinitesimal and yet so powerful as to be almost impossible for our imaginations to grasp; our knowledge of the eons through which life has existed on this planet; the extraordinary advances in knowledge denoted by the establishment of such doctrines as those of gravitation and of evolution; in short, the whole enormous incredible advance in knowledge of the physical universe and of man’s physical place in that universe, has been due to the labor of students whose special tastes and abilities lay in the direction of dealing with what is purely material. Their astounding success, and the far-reaching, indeed the stupendous, importance of their achievements, have naturally tended to make those among them who possess genuine but narrow ability, whose minds are keen but not broad, assume an attitude of hard, arrogant, boastful, self-sufficient materialism: a mental attitude which glorifies and exalts its own grievous shortcomings and its inability to perceive anything outside the realm of the body. This attitude is as profoundly repellent as that of the civil and ecclesiastical reactionaries, the foes of all progress, against whom these men profess to be in revolt; and, moreover, it is an attitude which is itself as profoundly unscientific as any of the anti-scientific attitudes which it condemns. The universal truth can never be even imperfectly understood or apprehended unless we have the widest possible knowledge of our physical surroundings, and unless we fearlessly endeavor to find out just what the facts and the teachings of these physical surroundings are; but neither will it ever be understood if the physical and material explanations of life are accepted as all-sufficient. By none is this more clearly recognized than by the most acute and far-sighted of the investigators into physical conditions. Says Mr. Bernard: “There are psychic elements wholly different in kind from the physical elements ... [they] constitute, in a way impossible to define, a new character, quality, element--or shall we at once boldly borrow a term from mathematics and call it a new ‘dimension’ of our environment, hitherto three-dimensional? These various mental conditions lead us to believe that at any moment, while being driven through this three-dimensional environment, we may also be plunged into a psychic condition which hangs like an atmosphere over our particular physical surroundings.”

Not only every truly religious, but every truly scientific, man must turn with relief from the narrowness of a shut-in materialism to the profound and lofty thought contained in the writings of William James, of his biographer, M. Émile Boutroux, and of another philosopher of the same school, M. Bergson. M. Boutroux’s study of William James gives in brief form--and with a charm of style and expression possible only for those who work with that delicate instrument of precision, French prose--the views which men of this stamp hold; and be it remembered that, like James, they are thoroughly scientific men, steeped in the teachings of material science, who acknowledge no outside limitation upon them in their search for truth. They have a far keener understanding of the world of matter than has been attained by the purely materialistic scientists, just because, in addition, they also understand that outside of the purely physical lies the psychic, and that the realm of religion stands outside even of the purely psychic. M. Boutroux’s book on “Science and Religion” has been translated into English--and we owe a real debt of gratitude to Messrs. Nield and Mitchell for their excellent translations of MM. Boutroux and Bergson. There is much talk of the conflict between science and religion. The inherent absurdity of such talk has never been better expressed than by M. Boutroux when he says that such opposition “is the result of our defining both science and religion in an artificial manner by, on the one hand, identifying science with physical science, and, on the other hand, assuming that religion consists in the dogmas which merely symbolize it.” M. Boutroux’s book, like M. Bergson’s “Creative Evolution,” must be read in its entirety; mere extracts and condensations can not show the profound philosophical acumen with which these men go to the heart of things, and prove that science itself, if correctly understood, renders absurd the harsh and futile dogmatism of many of those who pride themselves upon being, above all things, scientific. For, as these writers point out, the work of the scientist is conditioned upon the existence of the free determination of a spirit which, dominating the scientific spirit, believes also in an æsthetic and moral ideal. They see the material, the physical body, in its relation to other physical bodies; and back of and beyond the physical they see life itself, consciousness, which is to be conceived of as something always dynamic and never static, as a “stream of consciousness,” a “becoming.”

As M. Boutroux finely says, religion gives to the individual his value and treats him as an end in himself, no less than treating him from the standpoint of his duties to other individuals. This philosophy is founded on a wide and sympathetic understanding of the facts of the material world, a frank acceptance of evolution and of all else that modern science has ever taught; and so those who profess it are in a position of impregnable strength when they point out that all this in no shape or way interferes with religion and with Christianity, because, as they hold, evolution in religion has merely tended to disengage it from its own gross and material wrapping, and to leave unfettered the spirit which is its essence. To them Christianity, the greatest of the religious creations which humanity has seen, rests upon what Christ himself teaches; for, as M. Boutroux phrases it, the performance of duty is faith in action, faith in its highest expression, for duty gives no other reason, and need give no other reason, for its existence than “its own incorruptible disinterestedness.” The idea thus expressed is at bottom based on the same truth to which expression is given by Mr. Taylor when he says: “The love of God means not despising but honoring self; and for Christians on earth the true love of God must show itself in doing earth’s duties and living out earth’s full life, and not in abandoning all for dreams, though the dreams be of heaven.” To men such as William James and these two French philosophers physical science, if properly studied, shows conclusively its own limitations, shows conclusively that beyond the material world lies a vast series of phenomena which all material knowledge is powerless to explain, so that science itself teaches that outside of materialism lie the forces of a wholly different world, a world ordered by religion--religion which, says M. Boutroux, must, if loyal to itself, work according to its own nature as a spiritual activity, striving to transform men from within and not from without, by persuasion, by example, by love, by prayer, by the communion of souls, not by restraint or policy; and such a religion has nothing to fear from the progress of science, for the spirit to which it is loyal is the faith in duty, the search for what is for the universal good and for the universal love, the secret springs of all high and beneficent activity.

It is striking to see how these two gifted Frenchmen, by their own road, reach substantially the same conclusion which, by a wholly different method, and indeed in treating religion from a wholly different standpoint, is also reached by the president of Bowdoin College. Mr. Hyde’s short volume combines in high degree a lofty nobility of ethical concept with the most practical and straightforward common-sense treatment of the ways in which this concept should be realized in practice. Each of us must prescribe for himself in these matters, and one man’s need will not be wholly met by what does meet another’s; personally, this book of President Hyde’s gives me something that no other book does, and means to me very, very much.

We must all strive to keep as our most precious heritage the liberty each to worship his God as to him seems best, and, as part of this liberty, freely either to exercise it or to surrender it, in a greater or less degree, each according to his own beliefs and convictions, without infringing on the beliefs and convictions of others. But the professors of the varying creeds, the men who rely upon authority, and those who in different measures profess the theory of individual liberty, can and must work together, with mutual respect and with self-respect, for certain principles which lie deep at the base of every healthy social system. As Bishop Brent says: “The only setting for any one part of the truth is all the rest of the truth. The only relationship big enough for any one man is all the rest of mankind.” Abbot Charles, of Saint Leo Abbey, in Florida, has recently put the case for friendly agreement among good men of varying views, when he summed up a notably fine address in defence--as he truly says, _friendly_ defence--of his own church by enunciating the plea for “true peace founded on justice,” worked out in accordance with what he properly calls one of the “dearest blessings that heaven can give, the spirit that springs from religious liberty.” However widely many earnest and high-minded men of science and many earnest and high-minded men of religious convictions may from one side or the other disagree with the teachings of the earnest and high-minded students of philosophy whom I have quoted, yet surely we can all be in agreement with the fundamentals on which their philosophy is based. Surely we must all recognize the search for truth as an imperative duty; and we ought all of us likewise to recognize that this search for truth should be carried on, not only fearlessly, but also with reverence, with humility of spirit, and with full recognition of our own limitations both of the mind and the soul. We must stand equally against tyranny and against irreverence in all things of the spirit, with the firm conviction that we can all work together for a higher social and individual life if only, whatever form of creed we profess, we make the doing of duty and the love of our fellow men two of the prime articles in our universal faith. To those who deny the ethical obligation implied in such a faith we who acknowledge the obligation are aliens; and we are brothers to all those who do acknowledge it, whatever their creed or system of philosophy.

THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS

THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS

Next to developing original writers in its own time, the most fortunate thing, from the literary standpoint, which can befall any people is to have revealed to it some new treasure-house of literature. This treasure-house may be stored with the writings of another people in the present, or else with the writings of a buried past. But a few generations ago, in that innocent age when Blackstone could speak of the “Goths, Huns, Franks, and Vandals”--incongruous gathering--as “Celtic” tribes, the long-vanished literatures of the ancestors of the present European nations, the epics, the sagas, the stories in verse or prose, were hardly known to, or regarded by, their educated and cultivated descendants. Gradually, and chiefly in the nineteenth century, these forgotten literatures, or fragments of them, were one by one recovered. They are various in merit and interest, in antiquity and extent--“Beowulf,” the Norse sagas, the “Kalevala,” the “Nibelungenlied,” the “Song of Roland,” the Arthurian cycle of romances. In some there is but one great poem; in some all the poems or stories are of one type; in others, as in the case of the Norse sagas, a wide range of history, myth, and personal biography is covered. In our own day there has at last come about a popular revival of interest in the wealth of poems and tales to be found in the ancient Celtic, and especially in the ancient Erse, manuscripts--the whole forming a body of prose and poetry of great and well-nigh unique interest from every standpoint, which in some respects can be matched only by the Norse sagas, and which has some striking beauties the like of which are not to be found even in these Norse sagas.

For many decades German, French, Irish, and English students have worked over the ancient Celtic texts, and recently many of the more striking and more beautiful stories have been reproduced or paraphrased in popular form by writers like Lady Gregory and Miss Hull, Lady Gregory showing in her prose something of the charm which her countrywoman Emily Lawless shows in her poems “With the Wild Geese.” It is greatly to be regretted that America should have done so little either in the way of original study and research in connection with the early Celtic literature, or in the way of popularizing and familiarizing that literature, and it is much to be desired that, wherever possible, chairs of Celtic should be established in our leading universities. Moreover, in addition to the scholar’s work which is especially designed for students, there must ultimately be done the additional work which puts the results of the scholarship at the disposal of the average layman. This has largely been done for the Norse sagas. William Morris has translated the “Heimskringla” into language which, while not exactly English, can nevertheless be understood without difficulty--which is more than can be said for his translation of “Beowulf”--and which has a real, though affectedly archaic, beauty. Dasent has translated the “Younger Edda,” the “Njala Saga,” and the “Saga of Gisli the Outlaw.” It is pleasant for Americans to feel that it was Longfellow who, in his “Saga of King Olaf,” rendered one of the most striking of the old Norse tales into a great poem.

It is difficult to speak with anything like exactness of the relative ages of these primitive literatures. Doubtless in each case the earliest manuscripts that have come down to us are themselves based upon far earlier ones which have been destroyed, and doubtless, when they were first written down, the tales had themselves been recited, and during the course of countless recitations had been changed and added to and built upon, for a period of centuries. Sometimes, as in the “Song of Roland,” we know at least in bare outline the historical incident which for some reason impressed the popular imagination until around it there grew up a great epic, of which the facts have been twisted completely out of shape. In other instances, as in the “Nibelungenlied,” a tale, adaptable in its outlines to many different peoples, was adapted to the geography of a particular people, and to what that people at least thought was history; thus the Rhine becomes the great river of the “Nibelungenlied,” and in the second part of the epic the revenge of Krimhild becomes connected with dim memories of Attila’s vast and evanescent empire. The “Song of Roland” and the “Nibelungenlied” were much later than the earliest English, Norse, and Irish poems. Very roughly, it may perhaps be said that, in the earliest forms at which we can guess, the Irish sagas were produced, or at least were in healthy life, at about the time when “Beowulf” was a live saga, and two or three centuries or thereabouts before the early Norse sagas took a shape which we would recognize as virtually akin to that they now have.

These Celtic sagas are conveniently, though somewhat artificially, arranged in cycles. In some ways the most interesting of these is the Cuchulain cycle, although until very recently it was far less known than the Ossianic cycle--the cycle which tells of the deeds of Finn and the Fianna. The poems which tell of the mighty feats of Cuchulain, and of the heroes whose life-threads were interwoven with his, date back to a purely pagan Ireland--an Ireland cut off from all connection with the splendid and slowly dying civilization of Rome, an Ireland in which still obtained ancient customs that had elsewhere vanished even from the memory of man.

Thus the heroes of the Cuchulain sagas still fought in chariots driven each by a charioteer who was also the stanch friend and retainer of the hero. Now, at one time war chariots had held the first place in the armies of all the powerful empires in the lands adjoining the Mediterranean and stretching eastward beyond the Tigris. Strange African tribes had used them north and south of the Atlas Mountains. When the mighty, conquering kings of Egypt made their forays into Syria, and there encountered the Hittite hosts, the decisive feature in each battle was the shock between the hundreds of chariots arrayed on each side. The tyranny of Sisera rested on his nine hundred chariots of iron. The Homeric heroes were “tamers of horses,” which were not ridden in battle, but driven in the war chariots. That mysterious people, the Etruscans, of whose race and speech we know nothing, originally fought in chariots. But in the period of Greek and Roman splendor the war chariot had already passed away. It had seemingly never been characteristic of the wild Teuton tribes; but among the western Celts it lingered long. Cæsar encountered it among the hostile tribes when he made his famous raid into Britain; and in Ireland it lasted later still.

The customs of the heroes and people of the Erin of Cuchulain’s time were as archaic as the chariots in which they rode to battle. The sagas contain a wealth of material for the historian. They show us a land where the men were herdsmen, tillers of the soil, hunters, bards, seers, but, above all, warriors. Erin was a world to herself. Her people at times encountered the peoples of Britain or of Continental Europe, whether in trade or in piracy; but her chief interest, her overwhelming interest, lay in what went on within her own borders. There was a high king of shadowy power, whose sway was vaguely recognized as extending over the island, but whose practical supremacy was challenged on every hand by whatever king or under-king felt the fierce whim seize him. There were chiefs and serfs; there were halls and fortresses; there were huge herds of horses and cattle and sheep and swine. The kings and queens, the great lords and their wives, the chiefs and the famous fighting men, wore garments crimson and blue and green and saffron, plain or checkered, and plaid and striped. They had rings and clasps and torques of gold and silver, urns and mugs and troughs and vessels of iron and silver. They played chess by the fires in their great halls, and they feasted and drank and quarrelled within them, and the women had sun-parlors of their own.

Among the most striking of the tales are those of the “Fate of the Sons of Usnach,” telling of Deirdrè’s life and love and her lamentation for her slain lover; of the “Wooing of Emer” by Cuchulain; of the “Feast of Bricriu”; and of the famous Cattle-Spoil of Cooley, the most famous romance of ancient Ireland, the story of the great raid for the Dun Bull of Cooley. But there are many others of almost equal interest; such as the story of MacDatho’s pig, with its Gargantuan carouse of the quarrelsome champions; and the tale of the siege of Howth.

In these tales, which in so many points are necessarily like the similar tales that have come down from the immemorial past of the peoples of kindred race, there are also striking peculiarities that hedge them apart. The tales are found in many versions, which for the most part have been enlarged by pedantic scribes of aftertime, who often made them prolix and tedious, and added grotesque and fantastic exaggerations of their own to the barbaric exaggerations already in them, doing much what Saxo Grammaticus did for the Scandinavian tales. They might have been woven into some great epic, or at least have taken far more definite and connected shape, if the history of Ireland had developed along lines similar to those of the other nations of west Europe. But her history was broken by terrible national tragedies and calamities. To the scourge of the vikings succeeded the Anglo-Norman conquest, with all its ruinous effects on the growth of the national life. The early poems of the Erse bards could not develop as those other early lays developed which afterward became the romances of Arthur and Roland and Siegfried. They remain primitive, as “Beowulf” is primitive, as, in less measure, “Gisli the Outlaw” is primitive.

The heroes are much like those of the early folk of kindred stock everywhere. They are huge, splendid barbarians, sometimes yellow-haired, sometimes black- or brown-haired, and their chief title to glory is found in their feats of bodily prowess. Among the feats often enumerated or referred to are the ability to leap like a salmon, to run like a stag, to hurl great rocks incredible distances, to toss the wheel, and, like the Norse berserkers, when possessed with the fury of battle, to grow demoniac with fearsome rage. This last feat was especially valued, and was recognized as the “heroes’ fury.” As with most primitive peoples, the power to shout loudly was much prized, and had a distinct place of respect, under the title of “mad roar,” in any list of a given hero’s exhibitions of strength or agility; just as Stentor’s voice was regarded by his comrades as a valuable military asset. So, when the slaughter begins in Etzel’s hall, the writer of the Nibelung lay dwells with admiration on the vast strength of Diederick, as shown by the way in which his voice rang like a bison horn, resounding within and without the walls. Many of the feats chronicled of the early Erse heroes are now wholly unintelligible to us; we can not even be sure what they were, still less why they should have been admired.

Among the heroes stood the men of wisdom, as wisdom was in the early world, a vulpine wisdom of craft and cunning and treachery and double-dealing. Druids, warlocks, sorcerers, magicians, witches appear, now as friends, now as unfriends, of the men of might. Fiercely the heroes fought and wide they wandered; yet their fights and their wanderings were not very different from those that we read about in many other primitive tales. There is the usual incredible variety of incidents and character, and, together with the variety, an endless repetition. But these Erse tales differ markedly from the early Norse and Teutonic stories in more than one particular. A vein of the supernatural and a vein of the romantic run through them and relieve their grimness and harshness in a way very different from anything to be found in the Teutonic. Of course the supernatural element often takes as grim a form in early Irish as in early Norse or German; the Goddess with red eyebrows who on stricken fields wooed the Erse heroes from life did not differ essentially from the Valkyrie; and there were land and water demons in Ireland as terrible as those against which Beowulf warred. But, in addition, there is in the Irish tales an unearthliness free from all that is monstrous and horrible; and their unearthly creatures could become in aftertime the fairies of the moonlight and the greenwood, so different from the trolls and gnomes and misshapen giants bequeathed to later generations by the Norse mythology.

Still more striking is the difference between the women in the Irish sagas and those, for instance, of the Norse sagas. Their heirs of the spirit are the Arthurian heroines, and the heroines of the romances of the Middle Ages. In the “Song of Roland”--rather curiously, considering that it is the first great piece of French literature--woman plays absolutely no part at all; there is not a female figure which is more than a name, or which can be placed beside Roland and Oliver, Archbishop Turpin and the traitor Ganelon, and Charlemagne, the mighty emperor of the “barbe fleurie.” The heroines of the early Norse and German stories are splendid and terrible, fit to be the mothers of a mighty race, as stern and relentless as their lovers and husbands. But it would be hard indeed to find among them a heroine who would appeal to our modern ideas as does Emer, the beloved of Cuchulain, or Dierdrè, the sweetheart of the fated son of Usnach. Emer and Deirdrè have the charm, the power of inspiring and returning romantic love, that belonged to the ladies whose lords were the knights of the Round Table, though of course this does not mean that they lacked some very archaic tastes and attributes.

Emer, the daughter of Forgall the Wily, who was wooed by Cuchulain, had the “six gifts of a girl”--beauty, and a soft voice, and sweet speech, and wisdom, and needlework, and chastity. In their wooing the hero and heroine spoke to one another in riddles, those delights of the childhood of peoples. She set him journeys to go and feats to perform, which he did in the manner of later knight errants. After long courting and many hardships, he took Emer to wife, and she was true to him and loved him and gloried in him and watched over him until the day he went out to meet his death. All this was in a spirit which we would find natural in a heroine of modern or of mediæval times--a spirit which it would be hard to match either among the civilizations of antiquity, or in early barbarisms other than the Erse.

So it was with Deirdrè, the beautiful girl who forsook her betrothed, the Over-King of Ulster, for the love of Naisi, and fled with him and his two brothers across the waters to Scotland. At last they returned to Ireland, and there Deirdrè’s lover and his two brothers were slain by the treachery of the king whose guests they were. Many versions of the Songs of Deirdrè have come down to us, of her farewell to Alba and her lament over her slain lover; for during centuries this tragedy of Deirdrè, together with the tragical fate of the Children of Lir and the tragical fate of the Children of Tuirenn, were known as the “Three Sorrowful Tales of Erin.” None has better retained its vitality down to the present day. Even to us, reading the songs in an alien age and tongue, they are very beautiful. Deirdrè sings wistfully of her Scottish abiding-place, with its pleasant, cuckoo-haunted groves, and its cliffs, and the white sand on the beaches. She tells of her lover’s single infidelity, when he came enamoured of the daughter of a Scottish lord, and Deirdrè, broken-hearted, put off to sea in a boat, indifferent whether she should live or die; whereupon the two brothers of her lover swam after her and brought her back, to find him very repentant and swearing a threefold oath that never again would he prove false to her until he should go to the hosts of the dead. She dwells constantly on the unfailing tenderness of the three heroes; for her lover’s two brothers cared for her as he did:

“Much hardship would I take,
Along with the three heroes;
I would endure without house, without fire,
It is not I that would be gloomy.

“Their three shields and their spears
Were often a bed for me.
Put their three hard swords
Over the grave, O young man!”

For the most part, in her songs, Deirdrè dwells on the glories and beauties of the three warriors, the three dragons, the three champions of the Red Branch, the three that used to break every onrush, the three hawks, the three darlings of the women of Erin, the three heroes who were not good at homage. She sings of their splendor in the foray, of their nobleness as they returned to their home, to bring fagots for the fire, to bear in an ox or a boar for the table; sweet though the pipes and flutes and horns were in the house of the king, sweeter yet was it to hearken to the songs sung by the sons of Usnach, for “like the sound of the wave was the voice of Naisi.”

There were other Irish heroines of a more common barbarian type. Such was the famous warrior-queen, Meave, tall and beautiful, with her white face and yellow hair, terrible in her battle chariot when she drove at full speed into the press of fighting men, and “fought over the ears of the horses.” Her virtues were those of a warlike barbarian king, and she claimed the like large liberty in morals. Her husband was Ailill, the Connaught king, and, as Meave carefully explained to him in what the old Erse bards called a “bolster conversation,” their marriage was literally a partnership wherein she demanded from her husband an exact equality of treatment according to her own views and on her own terms; the three essential qualities upon which she insisted being that he should be brave, generous, and completely devoid of jealousy!

Fair-haired Queen Meave was a myth, a goddess, and her memory changed and dwindled until at last she reappeared as Queen Mab of fairyland. But among the ancient Celts her likeness was the likeness of many a historic warrior queen. The descriptions given of her by the first writers or compilers of the famous romances of the foray for the Dun Bull of Cooley almost exactly match the descriptions given by the Latin historian of the British Queen Boadicea, tall and terrible-faced, her long, yellow hair flowing to her hips, spear in hand, golden collar on neck, her brightly colored mantle fastened across her breast with a brooch.

Not only were some of Meave’s deeds of a rather startling kind, but even Emer and Deirdrè at times showed traits that to a modern reader may seem out of place, in view of what has been said of them above. But we must remember the surroundings, and think of what even the real women of history were, throughout European lands, until a far later period. In the “Heimskringla” we read of Queen Sigrid, the wisest of women, who grew tired of the small kings who came to ask her hand, a request which she did not regard them as warranted to make either by position or extent of dominion. So one day when two kings had thus come to woo her, she lodged them in a separate wooden house, with all their company, and feasted them until they were all very drunk, and fell asleep; then in the middle of the night she had her men fall on them with fire and sword, burn those who stayed within the hall and slay those who broke out. The incident is mentioned in the saga without the slightest condemnation; on the contrary, it evidently placed the queen on a higher social level than before, for, in concluding the account, the saga mentions that Sigrid said “that she would weary these small kings of coming from other lands to woo her; so she was called Sigrid Haughty thereafter.” Now, Sigrid was an historical character who lived many hundred years after the time of Emer and Deirdrè and Meave, and the simplicity with which her deed was chronicled at the time, and regarded afterward, should reconcile us to some of the feats recorded of those shadowy Erse predecessors of hers, who were separated from her by an interval of time as great as that which separates her from us.