Part 17

The story of the “Feast of Bricriu of the Bitter Tongue” is one of the most interesting of the tales of the Cuchulain cycle. In all this cycle of tales, Bricriu appears as the cunning, malevolent mischief-maker, dreaded for his biting satire and his power of setting by the ears the boastful, truculent, reckless, and marvellously short-tempered heroes among whom he lived. He has points of resemblance to Thersites, to Sir Kay, of the Arthurian romances, and to Conan, of the Ossianic cycle of Celtic sagas. This story is based upon the custom of the “champion’s portion,” which at a feast was allotted to the bravest man. It was a custom which lasted far down into historic times, and was recognized in the Brehon laws, where a heavy fine was imposed upon any person who stole it from the one to whom it belonged. The story in its present form, like all of these stories, is doubtless somewhat changed from the story as it was originally recited among the pre-Christian Celts of Ireland, but it still commemorates customs of the most primitive kind, many of them akin to those of all the races of Aryan tongue in their earlier days. The queens cause their maids to heat water for the warriors’ baths when they return from war, and similarly made ready to greet their guests, as did the Homeric heroines. The feasts were Homeric feasts. The heroes boasted and sulked and fought as did the Greeks before Troy. At their feasts, when the pork and beef, the wheaten cakes and honey, had been eaten, and the beer, and sometimes the wine of Gaul, had been drunk in huge quantities, the heroes, vainglorious and quarrelsome, were always apt to fight. Thus in the three houses which together made up the palace of the high king at Emain Macha, it was necessary that the arms of the heroes should all be kept in one place, so that they could not attack one another at the feasts. These three houses of the palace were the Royal House, in which the high king himself had his bronzed and jewelled room; the Speckled House, where the swords, the shields, and the spears of the heroes were kept; and the House of the Red Branch, where not only the weapons, but the heads of the beaten enemies were stored; and it was in connection with this last grewsome house that the heroes in the train of the High King Conchubar took their name of the “Heroes of the Red Branch.”

When Bricriu gave his feast, he prepared for it by building a spacious house even handsomer than the House of the Red Branch; and it is described in great detail, as fashioned after “Tara’s Mead Hall,” and of great strength and magnificence; and it was stocked with quilts and blankets and beds and pillows, as well as with abundance of meat and drink. Then he invited the high king and all the nobles of Ulster to come to the feast. An amusing touch in the saga is the frank consternation of the heroes who were thus asked. They felt themselves helpless before the wiles of Bricriu, and at first refused outright to go, because they were sure that he would contrive to set them to fighting with one another; and they went at all only after they had taken hostages from Bricriu and had arranged that he should himself leave the feast-hall as soon as the feast was spread. But their precautions were in vain, and Bricriu had no trouble in bringing about a furious dispute among the three leading chiefs, Loigaire the Triumphant, Conall the Victorious, and Cuchulain. He promised to each the champion’s portion, on condition that each should claim it. Nor did he rest here, but produced what the saga calls “the war of words of the women of Ulster,” by persuading the three wives of the three heroes that each should tread first into the banquet-hall. Each of the ladies, in whose minds he thus raised visions of social precedence, had walked away from the palace with half a hundred women in her train, when they all three met. The saga describes how they started to return to the hall together, walking evenly, gracefully, and easily at first, and then with quicker steps, until, when they got near the house, they raised their robes “to the round of the leg” and ran at full speed. When they got to the hall the doors were shut, and, as they stood outside, each wife chanted her own perfections, but, above all, the valor and ferocious prowess of her husband, scolding one another as did Brunhild and Krimhild in the quarrel that led to Siegfried’s death at the hands of Hagen. Each husband, as in duty bound, helped his wife into the hall, and the bickering which had already taken place about the champion’s portion was renewed. At last it was settled that the three rivals should drive in their chariots to the home of Ailill and Meave, who should adjudge between them; and the judgment given, after testing their prowess in many ways, and especially in encounters with demons and goblins, was finally in favor of Cuchulain.

One of the striking parts of the tale is that in which the three champions, following one another, arrive at the palace of Meave. The daughter of Meave goes to the sun-parlor over the high porch of the hold, and from there she is told by the queen to describe in turn each chariot and the color of the horses and how the hero looks and how the chariot courses. The girl obeys, and describes in detail each chariot as it comes up, and the queen in each case recognizes the champion from the description and speaks words of savage praise of each in turn. Loigaire, a fair man, driving two fiery dapple-grays, in a wickerwork chariot with silver-mounted yoke, is chanted by the queen as:

“A fury of war, a fire of judgment, A flame of vengeance; in mien a hero, In face a champion, in heart a dragon; The long knife of proud victories which will hew us to pieces, The all-noble, red-handed Loigaire.”

Conall is described as driving a roan and a bay, in a chariot with two bright wheels of bronze, he himself fair, in face white and red, his mantle blue and crimson, and Meave describes him as:

“A wolf among cattle; battle on battle, Exploit on exploit, head upon head he heaps”;

and says that if he is excited to rage he will cut up her people

“As a trout on red sandstone is cut.”

Then Cuchulain is described, driving at a gallop a dapple-gray and a dark-gray, in a chariot with iron wheels and a bright silver pole. The hero himself is a dark, melancholy man, the comeliest of the men of Erin, in a crimson tunic, with gold-hilted sword, a blood-red spear, and over his shoulders a crimson shield rimmed with silver and gold. Meave, on hearing the description, chants the hero as:

“An ocean in fury, a whale that rageth, a fragment of flame and fire; A bear majestic, a grandly moving billow, A beast in maddening ire: In the crash of glorious battle through the hostile foe he leaps, His shout the fury of doom; A terrible bear, he is death to the herd of cattle, Feat upon feat, head upon head he heaps: Laud ye the hearty one, he who is victor fully.”

Bricriu lost his life as a sequel of the great raid for the Dun Bull of Cooley. This was undertaken by Queen Meave as the result of the “bolster conversation,” the curtain quarrel, between her and Ailill as to which of the two, husband or wife, had the more treasure. To settle the dispute, they compared their respective treasures, beginning with their wooden and iron vessels, going on with their rings and bracelets and brooches and fine clothes, and ending with their flocks of sheep, and herds of swine, horses, and cattle. The tally was even for both sides until they came to the cattle, when it appeared that Ailill had a huge, white-horned bull with which there was nothing of Meave’s to compare. The chagrined queen learned from a herald that in Cooley there was a dun or brown bull which, it was asserted, was even larger and more formidable.

Meave announces that by fair means or foul the dun bull shall be hers, and she raises her hosts. A great war ensues, in which Cuchulain distinguishes himself above all others. All the heroes gather to the fight, and a special canto is devoted to the fate of a very old man, Iliach, a chief of Ulster, who resolves to attack the foe and avenge Ulster’s honor on them. “Whether, then, I fall or come out of it, is all one,” he said. The saga tells how his withered and wasted old horses, which fed on the shore by his little fort, were harnessed to the ancient chariot, which had long lost its cushions. Into it he got, mother-naked, with his sword and his pair of blunt, rusty spears, and great throwing-stones heaped at his feet; and thus he attacked the hosts of Meave and fought till his death. In the Cuchulain sagas the heroes frequently fight with stones; and the practice obtained until much later days, for in Olaf’s death-battle with the ships of Hakon his men were cleared from the decks of the Long Serpent by dexterously hurled stones as well as by spears.

Partly by cunning, Meave gets the dun bull upon which she had set her heart. Then comes in a thoroughly Erse touch. It appears that the two bulls have lived many lives in different forms, and always in hostility to each other, since the days when their souls were the souls of two swineherds, who quarrelled and fought to the death. Now the two great bulls renew their ancient fight. Bricriu is forced out to witness it, and is trampled to death by the beasts. At last the white-homed bull is slain, and the dun, raging and destroying, goes back to his home, where he too dies. And this, says the saga, in ending, is the tale of the Dun Bull of Cooley and the Driving of the Cattle-Herd by Meave and Ailill, and their war with Ulster.

The Erse tales have suffered from many causes. Taken as a mass, they did not develop as the sagas and the epics of certain other nations developed; but they possess extraordinary variety and beauty, and in their mysticism, their devotion to and appreciation of natural beauty, their exaltation of the glorious courage of men and of the charm and devotion of women, in all the touches that tell of a long-vanished life, they possess a curious attraction of their own. They deserve the research which can be given only by the lifelong effort of trained scholars; they should be studied for their poetry, as countless scholars have studied those early literatures; moreover, they should be studied as Victor Bérard has studied the “Odyssey,” for reasons apart from their poetical worth; and finally they deserve to be translated and adapted so as to become a familiar household part of that literature which all the English-speaking peoples possess in common.

AN ART EXHIBITION

AN ART EXHIBITION

The recent “International Exhibition of Modern Art” in New York was really noteworthy. Messrs. Davies, Kuhn, Gregg, and their fellow members of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors did a work of very real value in securing such an exhibition of the works of both foreign and native painters and sculptors. Primarily their purpose was to give the public a chance to see what has recently been going on abroad. No similar collection of the works of European “moderns” has ever been exhibited in this country. The exhibitors were quite right as to the need of showing to our people in this manner the art forces which of late have been at work in Europe, forces which can not be ignored.

This does not mean that I in the least accept the view that these men take of the European extremists whose pictures were here exhibited. It is true, as the champions of these extremists say, that there can be no life without change, no development without change, and that to be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life. It is no less true, however, that change may mean death and not life, and retrogression instead of development. Probably we err in treating most of these pictures seriously. It is likely that many of them represent in the painters the astute appreciation of the power to make folly lucrative which the late P. T. Barnum showed with his faked mermaid. There are thousands of people who will pay small sums to look at a faked mermaid; and now and then one of this kind with enough money will buy a Cubist picture, or a picture of a misshapen nude woman, repellent from every standpoint.

In some ways it is the work of the American painters and sculptors which is of most interest in this collection, and a glance at this work must convince any one of the real good that is coming out of the new movements, fantastic though many of the developments of these new movements are. There was one note entirely absent from the exhibition, and that was the note of the commonplace. There was not a touch of simpering, self-satisfied conventionality anywhere in the exhibition. Any sculptor or painter who had in him something to express and the power of expressing it found the field open to him. He did not have to be afraid because his work was not along ordinary lines. There was no stunting or dwarfing, no requirement that a man whose gift lay in new directions should measure up or down to stereotyped and fossilized standards.

For all of this there can be only hearty praise. But this does not in the least mean that the extremists whose paintings and pictures were represented are entitled to any praise, save, perhaps, that they have helped to break fetters. Probably in any reform movement, any progressive movement, in any field of life, the penalty for avoiding the commonplace is a liability to extravagance. It is vitally necessary to move forward and to shake off the dead hand, often the fossilized dead hand, of the reactionaries; and yet we have to face the fact that there is apt to be a lunatic fringe among the votaries of any forward movement. In this recent art exhibition the lunatic fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and the Futurists, or Near-Impressionists. I am not entirely certain which of the two latter terms should be used in connection with some of the various pictures and representations of plastic art--and, frankly, it is not of the least consequence. The Cubists are entitled to the serious attention of all who find enjoyment in the colored puzzle-pictures of the Sunday newspapers. Of course there is no reason for choosing the cube as a symbol, except that it is probably less fitted than any other mathematical expression for any but the most formal decorative art. There is no reason why people should not call themselves Cubists, or Octagonists, or Parallelopipedonists, or Knights of the Isosceles Triangle, or Brothers of the Cosine, if they so desire; as expressing anything serious and permanent, one term is as fatuous as another. Take the picture which for some reason is called “A Naked Man Going Down Stairs.” There is in my bathroom a really good Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of the Cubist theory, is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. Now, if, for some inscrutable reason, it suited somebody to call this rug a picture of, say, “A Well-Dressed Man Going Up a Ladder,” the name would fit the facts just about as well as in the case of the Cubist picture of the “Naked Man Going Down Stairs.” From the standpoint of terminology each name would have whatever merit inheres in a rather cheap straining after effect; and from the standpoint of decorative value, of sincerity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is infinitely ahead of the picture.

As for many of the human figures in the pictures of the Futurists, they show that the school would be better entitled to the name of the “Past-ists.” I was interested to find that a man of scientific attainments who had likewise looked at the pictures had been struck, as I was, by their resemblance to the later work of the palæolithic artists of the French and Spanish caves. There are interesting samples of the strivings for the representation of the human form among artists of many different countries and times, all in the same stage of palæolithic culture, to be found in a recent number of the “Revue d’Ethnographie.” The palæolithic artist was able to portray the bison, the mammoth, the reindeer, and the horse with spirit and success, while he still stumbled painfully in the effort to portray man. This stumbling effort in his case represented progress, and he was entitled to great credit for it. Forty thousand years later, when entered into artificially and deliberately, it represents only a smirking pose of retrogression, and is not praiseworthy. So with much of the sculpture. A family group of precisely the merit that inheres in a structure made of the wooden blocks in a nursery is not entitled to be reproduced in marble. Admirers speak of the kneeling female figure by Lehmbruck--I use “female” advisedly, for although obviously mammalian it is not especially human--as “full of lyric grace,” as “tremendously sincere,” and “of a jewel-like preciousness.” I am not competent to say whether these words themselves represent sincerity or merely a conventional jargon; it is just as easy to be conventional about the fantastic as about the commonplace. In any event one might as well speak of the “lyric grace” of a praying mantis, which adopts much the same attitude; and why a deformed pelvis should be called “sincere,” or a tibia of giraffe-like length “precious,” seems to a reasonably sane view of the pictures of Matisse a question of pathological rather than artistic significance. This figure and the absurd portrait head of some young lady have the merit that inheres in extravagant caricature. It is a merit, but it is not a high merit. It entitles these pieces to stand in sculpture where nonsense rhymes stand in literature and the sketches of Aubrey Beardsley in pictorial art. These modern sculptured caricatures in no way approach the gargoyles of Gothic cathedrals, probably because the modern artists are too self-conscious and make themselves ridiculous by pretentiousness. The makers of the gargoyles knew very well that the gargoyles did not represent what was most important in the Gothic cathedrals. They stood for just a little point of grotesque reaction against, and relief from, the tremendous elemental vastness and grandeur of the Houses of God. They were imps, sinister and comic, grim and yet futile, and they fitted admirably into the framework of the theology that found its expression in the towering and wonderful piles which they ornamented.

Very little of the work of the extremists among the European “moderns” seems to be good in and for itself; nevertheless it has certainly helped any number of American artists to do work that is original and serious; and this not only in painting but in sculpture. I wish the exhibition had contained some of the work of the late Marcius Symonds; very few people knew or cared for it while he lived; but not since Turner has there been another man on whose canvas glowed so much of that unearthly “light that never was on land or sea.” But the exhibition contained so much of extraordinary merit that it is ungrateful even to mention an omission. To name the pictures one would like to possess--and the bronzes and tanagras and plasters--would mean to make a catalogue of indefinite length. One of the most striking pictures was the “Terminal Yards”--the seeing eye was there, and the cunning hand. I should like to mention all the pictures of the president of the association, Arthur B. Davies. As first-class decorative work of an entirely new type, the very unexpected pictures of Sheriff Bob Chandler have a merit all their own. The “Arizona Desert,” the “Canadian Night,” the group of girls on the roof of a New York tenement-house, the studies in the Bronx Zoo, the “Heracles,” the studies for the Utah monument, the little group called “Gossip,” which has something of the quality of the famous fifteenth idyl of Theocritus, the “Pelf,” with its grim suggestiveness--these and a hundred others are worthy of study, each of them; I am naming at random those which at the moment I happen to recall. I am not speaking of the acknowledged masters, of Whistler, Puvis de Chavannes, Monet; nor of John’s children; nor of Cézanne’s old woman with a rosary; nor of Redon’s marvellous color-pieces--a worthy critic should speak of these. All I am trying to do is to point out why a layman is grateful to those who arranged this exhibition.

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

The illustration near the front of the book is the publisher’s logo.

Page 219: “understanded” was printed that way.

Page 287: “knight errants” was printed that way.