Imaginations and Reveries | Page 9

of Cuculain will stand at many a lonely place in the heart, and he
will win as of old against multitudes. The children of Turann will start
afresh still eager to take up and renew their cyclic labors, and they will
gain, not for themselves, the Apples of the Tree of Life, and the Spear
of the Will, and the Fleece which is the immortal body. All the heroes
and demigods returning will have a wider field than Erin for their deeds,
and they will not grow weary warning upon things that die but will be
fighters in the spirit against immortal powers, and, as before, the acts
will be sometimes noble and sometimes base. They cannot be stayed
from their deeds, for they are still in the strength of a youth which is
ever renewing itself. Not for all the wrong which may be done should
they be restrained. Mr. O'Grady would now have the tales kept from the
crowd to be the poetic luxury of a few. Yet would we, for all the
martyrs who perished in the fires of the Middle Ages, counsel the
placing of the Gospels on the list of books to be read only by a few
esoteric worshippers?
The literature which should be unpublished is that which holds the
secret of the magical powers. The legends of Ireland are not of this kind.
They have no special message to the aristocrat more than to the man of
the people. The men who made the literature of Ireland were by no
means nobly born, and it was the bards who placed the heroes, each in
his rank, and crowned them for after ages, and gave them their famous
names. They have placed on the brow of others a crown which
belonged to themselves, and all the heroic literature of the world was

made by the sacrifice of the nameless kings of men who have given a
sceptre to others they never wielded while living, and who bestowed
the powers, of beauty and pity on women who perhaps had never
uplifted a heart in their day, and who now sway us from the grave with
a grace only imagined in the dreaming soul of the poet. Mr. O'Grady
has been the bardic champion of the ancient Irish aristocracy. He has
thrown on them the sunrise colors of his own brilliant spirit, and now
would restrain others from the use of their names lest a new kingship
should be established over them, and another law than that of his own
will, lest the poets of the democracy looking back on the heroes of the
past should overcome them with the ideas of a later day, and the
Atticottic nature find a loftier spirit in those who felt the unendurable
pride of the Fianna and rose against it. Well, it is only natural he should
try to protect the children of his thought, but they need no later word
from him. If writers of a less noble mind than his deal with these things
they will not rob his heroes of a single power to uplift or inspire. In
Greece, after Eschylus and his stupendous deities, came Sophocles,
who restrained them with a calm wisdom, and Euripides, who made
them human, but still the mysterious Orphic deities remain and stir us
when reading the earlier page. Mr. O'Grady would not have the Red
Branch cycle cast in dramatic form or given to the people. They are too
great to be staged; and he quotes, mistaking the gigantic for the heroic,
a story of Cuculain reeling round Ireland on his fairy steed the Liath
Macha. This may be phantasy or extravagance, but it is not heroism.
Cuculain is often heroic, but it is a quality of the soul and not of the
body; it is shown by his tears over Ferdiad, in his gentleness to women.
A more grandiose and heroic figure than Cuculain was seen on the
Athenian stage; and no one will say that the Titan Prometheus, chained
on the rock in his age-long suffering for men, is not a nobler figure than
Cuculain in any aspect in which he appears to us in the tales. Divine
traditions, the like of which were listened to with awe by the Athenians,
should not be too lofty for our Christian people, whose morals Mr.
O'Grady, here hardly candid, professes to be anxious about. What is
great in literature is a greatness springing out of the human heart.
Though we fall short today of the bodily stature of the giants of the
prime, the spirit still remains and can express an equal greatness. I can
well understand how a man of our own day, by the enlargement of his

spirit, and the passion and sincerity of his speech, could express the