Imaginations and Reveries | Page 6

All that I can
say is that the traditions of our own country move us more than the
traditions of any other. Even if there was not essential greatness in
them we would love them for the same reasons which bring back so
many exiles to revisit the haunts of childhood. But there was essential
greatness in that neglected bardic literature which O'Grady was the first
to reveal in a noble manner. He had the spirit of an ancient epic poet.
He is a comrade of Homer, his birth delayed in time perhaps that he
might renew for a sophisticated people the elemental simplicity and
hardihood men had when the world was young and manhood was
prized more than any of its parts, more than thought or beauty or
feeling. He has created for us, or rediscovered, one figure which looms
in the imagination as a high comrade of Hector, Achilles, Ulysses,
Rama or Yudisthira, as great in spirit as any. Who could extol enough
his Cuculain, that incarnation of Gaelic chivalry, the fire and gentleness,
the beauty and heroic ardour or the imaginative splendor of the
episodes in his retelling of the ancient story. There are writers who
bewitch you by a magical use of words whose lines glitter like jewels,
whose effects are gained by an elaborate art and who deal with the
subtlest emotions. Others again are simple as an Egyptian image, and
yet are more impressive, and you remember them less for the sentence
than for a grandiose effect. They are not so much concerned with the
art of words as with the creation of great images informed with
magnificence of spirit. They are not lesser artists but greater, for there
is a greater art in the simplification of form in the statue of Memnon
than there is in the intricate detail of a bronze by Benvenuto Cellini.
Standish O'Grady had in his best moments that epic wholeness and
simplicity, and the figure of Cuculain amid his companions of the Red
Branch which he discovered and refashioned for us is, I think, the
greatest spiritual gift any Irishman for centuries has given to Ireland.
I know it will be said that this is a scientific age, the world is so full of
necessitous life that it is waste of time for young Ireland to brood upon
tales of legendary heroes, who fought with enchanters, who harnessed

wild fairy horses to magic chariots and who talked with the ancient
gods, and that it would be much better for youth to be scientific and
practical. Do not believe it, dear Irish boy, dear Irish girl, I know as
well as any the economic needs of our people. They must not be
overlooked, but keep still in your hearts some desires which might
enter Paradise. Keep in your souls some images of magnificence so that
hereafter the halls of heaven and the divine folk may not seem
altogether alien to the spirit. These legends have passed the test of
generations for century after century, and they were treasured and
passed on to those who followed, and that was because there was
something in them akin to the immortal spirit. Humanity cannot carry
with it through time the memory of all its deeds and imaginations, and
it burdens itself only in a new era with what was highest among the
imaginations of the ancestors. What is essentially noble is never out of
date. The figures carved by Pheidias for the Parthenon still shine by the
side of the greatest modern sculpture. There has been no evolution of
the human form to a greater beauty than the ancient Greek saw, and the
forms they carved are not strange to us, and if this is true of the
outward form it is true of the indwelling spirit. What is essentially
noble is contemporary with all that is splendid today, and until the mass
of men are equal in spirit the great figures of the past will affect us less
as memories than as prophecies of the Golden Age to which youth is
ever hurrying in its heart.
O'Grady in his stories of the Red Branch rescued from the past what
was contemporary to the best in us today, and he was equal in his gifts
as a writer to the greatest of his bardic predecessors in Ireland. His
sentences are charged with a heroic energy, and, when he is telling a
great tale, their rise and fall is like the flashing and falling of the bright
sword of some great battle, or like the onset and withdrawal of Atlantic
surges. He can at need be beautifully tender and quiet. Who that has
read his tale of the young Finn and the Seven Ancients will forget the
weeping of Finn over the kindness of