Imaginations and Reveries | Page 7

are critics repelled by the abounding energy in O'Grady's sentences. It is easy to point to faults due to excess and abundance, but how rare in literature is that heroic energy and power. There is something arcane and elemental in it, a quality that the most careful stylist cannot attain, however he uses the file, however subtle he is. O'Grady has noticed this power in the ancient bards and we find it in his own writing. It ran all through the Bardic History, the Critical and Philosophical History, and through the political books, The Tory Democracy and All Ireland. There is this imaginative energy in the tale of Cuculain, in all its episodes, the slaying of the hound, the capture of the Liath Macha, the hunting of the enchanted deer, the capture of the Wild swans, the fight at the ford, and the awakening of the Red Branch. In the later tale of Red Hugh which, he calls The Flight of the Eagle there is the same quality of power joined with a shining simplicity in the narrative which rises into a poetic ecstasy in that wonderful chapter where Red Hugh, escaping from the Pale, rides through the Mountain Gates of Ulster and sees high above him Sheve Gullion, a mountain of the Gods, the birth-place of legend "more mythic than Avernus"; and O'Grady evokes for us and his hero the legendary past and the great hill seems to be like Mount Sinai, thronged with immortals, and it lives and speaks to the fugitive boy, "the last great secular champion of the Gael," and inspires him for the fulfillment of his destiny. We might say of Red Hugh, and indeed of all O'Grady's heroes, that they are the spiritual progeny of Cuculain. From Red Hugh down to the boys who have such enchanting adventures in Lost on Du Corrig and The Chain of Gold they have all a natural and hardy purity of mind, a beautiful simplicity of character, and one can imagine them all in an hour of need, being faithful to any trust like the darling of the Red Branch. These shining lads never grew up amid books. They are as much children of nature as the Lucy of Wordsworth's poetry. It might be said of them as the poet of the Kalevala sang of himself: "Winds and waters my instructors."
These were O'Grady's own earliest companions, and no man can find better comrades than earth, water, air and sun. I imagine O'Grady's own youth was not so very different from the youth of Red Hugh before his captivity; that he lived on the wild and rocky western coast, that he rowed in coracles, explored the caves, spoke much with hardy natural people, fishermen and workers on the land, primitive folk, simple in speech but with that fundamental depth men have who are much in nature in companionship with the elements, the elder brothers of humanity. It must have been out of such a boyhood and such intimacies with natural and unsophisticated people that there came to him the understanding of the heroes of the Red Branch. How pallid, beside the ruddy chivalry who pass, huge and fleet and bright, through O'Grady's pages, appear Tennyson's bloodless Knights of the Round Table, fabricated in the study to be read in the drawing room, as anemic as Burne Jones' lifeless men in armour. The heroes of ancient Irish legend reincarnated in the mind of a man who could breathe into them the fire of life, caught from sun and wind, their ancient deities, and send them forth to the world to do greater deeds, to act through many men and speak through many voices. What sorcery was in the Irish mind that it has taken so many years to win but a little recognition for this splendid spirit; and that others who came after him, who diluted the pure fiery wine of romance he gave us with literary water, should be as well known or more widely read. For my own, part I can only point back to him and say whatever is Irish in me he kindled to life, and I am humble when I read his epic tale, feeling how much greater a thing it is for the soul of a writer to have been the habitation of a demi-god than to have had the subtlest intellections.
We praise the man who rushes into a burning mansion and brings out its greatest treasure. So ought we to praise this man who rescued from the perishing Gaelic tradition its darling hero and restored him to us, and I think now that Cuculain will not perish, and he will be invisibly present at many a council of youth, and he will be the daring which lifts the will beyond itself and fires