THE LAUGHTER OF PETERKIN.*
THERE seems no particular reason why this latest and most excellent piece of work of Miss Macleod's should be published under a title which is so little indicative of its real nature. Peterkin is a child who wakes in the night, plays with moonbeams, and is fetched back to bed very properly by a faithful attendant, who tells him Celtic fairy stories and legends, all which read naturally enough till we are told that Peterkin is "not
merely a little child, a boy, a youth but a type of the wonder-child, and so a brother to all children, to poets and dreamers In certain stories he found pre-eminently the haunting charm and sad, exquisite beauty" peculiar to the Celtic genius. "And that is why, therefore," Miss Macleod sells us, "I have chosen to make this book essentially [why 'essentially ' ?] a re-telling of the beautiful old tales of the 'Three Sorrows,' so familiar once to our Gaelic ancestors, Ind still the most popular of all the tales of the Gael."
There is something rather unreal and confusing about this introductory mechanism. The reader really needs no testi- monial to the excellence of these tales, least of all from an imaginary "wonder-child." He is quite ready to take Miss Macleod's word for it. In fact the conversational interludes are the least happy passages in the book ; and the "laughter of Peterkin," as interjected at some length into "The Four Swans" (on p. 65), and once into "The Sons of Turenn," strikes us as a trifle self-conscious. In fact the four striking Celtic myths so effectively presented in this volume —weird fairy legends and tragedies of old-world moonlit splendour, family feuds of Pelopidean horror (even in their popularised form)—are little suggestive of the happy laughter of childhood. We do not say but that children of a certain kind would appreciate a great part of them. But it will be a relief to the average reader that the child-narrative element practically disappears from the book before the last and longest story.
In this we are glad to be left by ourselves, in a world remoter from our own than any dreamland, to the con- templation of the star-like beauty of the doomed maiden Darthool or Deirdrk whose hair, like that of Wordsworth's ideal maid, was of the "web of dusk," of the dread saying that "sinks into her mind as moonlight into dark water," of • The Laughter of Peterkin : a Re felting of Old Tales from the Wonder World. By Fiona Macleod. London: A. Constable and Co.
the three heroic sons of Usna and their fearful end, and all the witchery of antique and sanguinary melodrama, the scenery of which shifts easily across the "waste of seas" in a mist of medimval gloom, from Erin to "Alba," from Ulster to Argyll. We can recall no word-picture more purely fascinating than that of the radiant beauty of Darthula, the Irish Helen, and the love of Nathos, otherwise known as Naoise; and this romance, which is of the first literary importance, most deservedly occupies more than a third of Miss Macleod's volume.
The material of "The Four Swans " is more familiar, though with character and melancholy enough of its own. Most dreadful of all is the tale of the "Fate of Three Sons of Turenn," who, because that they slew the noble Kian (and that not in fair fight—Kian had complicated matters by changing himself to a wild boar) were doomed to pay the greatest "Erie" ever exacted for any slain man. The ubiquitous and eternal fancy for impossible " quests " here crops up in a form rich and variegated enough to satisfy any boy-reader. This is emphasised by the tragi-comic irony of Lu Ildanna, the son and avenger of Kian. The historic penalty, as at first demanded by him, had the air of quite a simple list of articles not so very difficult to procure,—a skin, a dog, a roasting-spit, a spear, and so forth. But when it came to details, "I do not think ye will find it over easy," he said. For the skin was the Skin of Healing treasured by the King of Greece in the Far East, the skin that cures all wousils and turns water to wine. "I do not think ye will come easily by that skin." What "human boy" could resist a delightful shudder at this ? And the spear was the dreadful Spear of Aradvar, whose point thirsted so for blood it had to be kept in a cauldron of water. (If this is not a magnificent piece of savagery, what is ?) And the seven swine were the immortal herd kept by Asol of the Golden Pillars ; and the hound was no other than the great and terrible Talinnish, before whom all beasts fell in helpless fear ; and the spit was that actually used for roasting their food by the Seawomen in the caves beneath the distant isle of Fiancarya-
" I do not think," said Lu Ildauna—whose words clearly express the general feeling of the assembly at Tara—" that ye will find it easy to obtain that thing." Even if they did that was not all. Never before was such an "Eric" demanded for any slain man. The three guilty brethren had also bound themselves to "shout three shouts upon a hill." "A hundred shouts" they had lightly offered "upon a hundred hills," so easy they counted the feat. But when it appeared that the shouts were to be shouted on the Hill of Mekween the sons of Turenn felt—well, much what the modern reader will feel under the spell of this weird romance. He can figure to him- self the scornful Lu Ildauna throwing himself back on his golden chair with a final taunt, "I do not think ye will find it easy to pass the sons of Mekween nor to shout three shouts upon that hill." The thing, in fact, was undreamable. Not only were Mekween and his sons, who occupied the land, nothing better than armed wild beasts, but they were absolutely under geas not to allow a single shout to be shouted on that particular hill ! This story has certainly all the "haunting charm" and "sad sweetness" noted by Peterkin. For "sad sweetness" one might perhaps read "fatalist gloom." For at the last, when the three heroes have performed their Herculean task and paid every item of the wondrous "Eric," when worn out and wounded almost to death, they beg their triumphant enemy for the use of the "Healing Skin," then we are told " Lu smiled a bitter, evil smile." And the heroes must needs die the death. We cannot regard Lu Mauna as an amiable person, but he was not merely revengeful. He feared that if the sons of Tare= lived there might be feuds thereafter in fair Erin,—and what nineteenth-century critic shall say that he was wrong ? The moral of the legend is terribly irreproachable. The brothers should not have killed Klan, who, by the way, was more difficult to bury than the victim of Eugene Aram. The atmosphere of all these romances is heavy and lurid with fate, the "ineluctable" Aschylean Miss Macleod has appended to her delightful volume an appendix of concise and useful notes. The English of her text is pure and strikingly free from the archaic fantasies that infest this kind of literature, and though the illustrations are perhaps slight, the book is brightly and pleasantly got up. "Intention," on p. 281, is a rather obvious misprint fox "mention "
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