Imaginations and Reveries | Page 7

the famine-stricken old men, and
their wonder at his weeping, and the self-forgetful pathos of their
meditation unconscious that it was their own sacrifice called forth the
tears of Finn. "Youth," they said, "has many sorrows that cold age
cannot comprehend."
There 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