nging
his Gaelic words without knowing whose words they sang. It is so in India,
where peasants sing the words of the great poet of Bengal without knowing
whose words they sing, and it must often be so where the old imaginative
folk life is undisturbed, and it is so amongst schoolboys who hand their
story books to one another without looking at the title page to read the
author's name. Here and there, however, the peasants had not lost the
habit of Gaelic criticism, picked up, perhaps, from the poets who took
refuge among them after the ruin of the great Catholic families, from men
like that O'Rahilly, who cries in a translation from the Gaelic that is
itself a masterpiece of concentrated passion--

"The periwinkle and the tough dog-fish
Towards evening time have got into my dish."

An old rascal was kept in food and whiskey for a fortnight by some
Connaught village under the belief that he was Craoibhin Aoibhin, "the
pleasant little branch," as Doctor Hyde signed himself in the newspapers
where the villagers had found his songs. The impostor's thirst only
strengthened belief in his genius, for the Gaelic song-writers have had
the infirmities of Robert Burns, "It is not the drink but the company,"
one of the last has sung. Since that first meeting Doctor Hyde and I had
corresponded, and he had sent me in manuscript the best tale in my _Faery
and Folk Tales_, and I think I had something to do with the London
publication of his _Beside the Fire_, a book written in the beautiful
English of Connaught, which is Gaelic in idiom and Tudor in vocabulary,
and indeed, the first book to use it in the expression of emotion and
romance, for Carleton and his school had turned it into farce. Henley had
praised him, and York Powell had said, "If he goes on as he has begun, he
will be the greatest folk-loreist who has ever lived"; and I know no first
book of verse of our time that is at once so romantic and so concrete as
his Gaelic _Abhla de'n Craoibh_; but in a few years Dublin was to laugh
him, or rail him, out of his genius. He had no critical capacity, having
indeed for certain years the uncritical folk-genius, as no educated Irish
or Englishman has ever had it, writing out of an imitative sympathy like
that of a child catching a tune and leaving it to chance to call the tune;
and the failure of our first attempt to create a modern Irish literature
permitted the ruin of that genius. He was to create a great popular
movement, f