Through Green Gasses: Andy Merrigan's Great Discovery and Other Irish Tales
9781465592170
418 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It was once my fortune to meet in a southern Irish town a little old man whose mind was a storehouse of strange legendary lore. He was thoroughly illiterate, but he had contrived to pick up in some way a peculiar collection of quasi-historical facts and fables. These he winnowed through his brain, rejecting the greater part of the corn and retaining all the chaff; and this mixture he would, like Æsop of old, retail solemnly to any chance customer. Dan—for such was his christian name—possessed an imagination of a peculiarly circumscribed character. His vision extended little further than his own tip-tilted nose, and around everything he wrapped a local, nay a personal, mantle. The kings, the princes, the chieftains of eld he clothed in his own shabby garments—even the saints (whom he reverenced) fared little better at his hands. All the characters introduced in his legendary yarns thought as Dan thought, acted as he would, in all probability, have acted, and spoke with his own delightful brogue. I may here observe, parenthetically, that the illiterate Irish story-teller possesses—so far as my experience goes—a vocabulary which is singularly simple and lucid. Most of the words he employs are either monosyllabic or dissyllabic. If the brogue were eliminated it would be found that he adopts a style which, so far as the choice of language is concerned, might be studied with advantage by those who (like myself) strive vainly after simplicity of diction. Of course no uneducated Irishman ever attempts to tread the mazes of “shall and will,” nor is he addicted to nominatives which agree with their verbs. He is, moreover, somewhat given to the mixing of tenses; and in the course of a lengthy narrative, he usually flies to the refuge of many of our modern novelists—the present tense. Dan’s style of narration had all the faults and the merits which I have endeavoured to point out, but Dan possessed one quality which atoned for most of his mixed tenses and for all his ill-mated nominatives and verbs—an extraordinary fund of humour. Of this possession he seemed, however, to live in blissful ignorance. He seldom smiled, and, in the general acceptation of the word, he never laughed. His laughing muscles were, possibly, situated in his shoulders, for when he told a good story, or when he heard one from a neighbour, his shoulders would shake and quiver with a motion prolonged and jelly-like. Chronology had no meaning and no terrors for Dan. To him the early Milesians, St. Patrick, Brian the Brave, Cromwell, and even “the great Bonypart” were, practically speaking, contemporaneous. In recounting any of the doughty deeds of the First Emperor he always kept before your mind’s eye a picture of that “ould anshent warrior” (possibly he confounded him with Hannibal) crossing the summits of the Alps on a milk-white charger. To Dan, Waterloo and St. Helena were purely mythical—at all events his “Bonypart” had never met with disaster nor ever endured exile. The only celebrity whom he condescended to view in a commonplace light was Garibaldi. He firmly believed the Italian patriot was a renegade Tipperaryman named Garret Baldwin, and often I have heard Dan express his unbounded contempt for the miserable Munsterman who had “gone and taken up arms agen his Holiness the Pope.” I have listened to many and many a romance as it fell from Dan’s lips, and it occurred to me that if I could speak with his voice, I might, in attempting to reproduce some of his yarns, be able to afford amusement to a larger audience than it was Dan’s province to cater for.
