rtan English" to fall back upon to give that foreign flavor that
we intuitively feel the need of in a translation. There may be a slight
loss of dignity through its use, but there is a great gain in folk
atmosphere.

In quoting to show the style of Lady Gregory I should quote description
rather than narrative, as the description seems to me better as well as
briefer. The three famous tales of Old Irish literature, "The Three
Sorrows of Story-Telling," are "The Fate of the Children of Usnach,"
comparable, in the great wars it led to, to the rape of Helen; "The Fate
of the Children of Lir," a story that has as its base the folk-tale that
underlies "Lohengrin," but which takes us back farther into the past in
its kinship to "Medea"; and "The Sons of Tuireann," which has been
called the Irish Odyssey. Of these the first is incomparably the finest
story, and Lady Gregory has told it nobly in "Cuchulain of Muirthemne,"
but it alone of all the stories in her three books of translations has
enough of humanity in it to put it side by side with the story of Sigurd
and Brunhilde or the story of Paris and Helen. When one remembers that
Greek and Scandinavian literature may boast five stories each, at least,
but little short of these their greatest stories, and that Irish
literature has but "Diarmuid and Grania" to boast as in any way
comparable to the story of Deirdre, it must be admitted that early Irish
literature representing Ireland's heroic age is not so beautiful as the
literature that represents the heroic ages of Scandinavia and Greece.
"The Fate of the Children of Usnach" is rich in beautiful detail of
incident and of description of nature; it preserves for us much of the
inner life of old time; and it has dignity of proportion. It has not the
fundamental weakness, as great art, of most of these old Irish stories,
their characters' lack of interest because of their lack of body, their
lack of personality, their running to type rather than moulding into
individuals; yet the feats performed by Cuchulain are so wholly
superhuman, most of them, that they often put their doer beyond our
sympathy, and at their worst make him absurd.

If these stories were simply extravagant folk-fancy, such as the Jack
the Giant Killer story, to delight children, we should not quarrel with
this quality in them, but there is so much in them of dignity that we
must take them seriously, as we take Homer. When their heroes are
definitely gods we ca