stories as he pleased in order to give pleasure to
the modern world. It made it lawful because he could reply to those
who objected that what he produced was not the real thing--"The real
thing exists; you will find it, when you wish to see it, accurately
and closely translated by critical and competent scholars. I refer you
to the originals in the notes to this book. I have found the materials
of my stories in these originals; and it is quite lawful for me, now
that they have been reverently preserved, to use them as I please for
the purpose of giving pleasure to the modern world--to make out of
them fresh imaginative work, as the medieval writers did out of the
original stories of Arthur and his men." This is the defence any
re-caster of the ancient tales might make of the _lawfulness_ of his
work, and it is a just defence; having, above all, this use--that it
leaves the imagination of the modern artist free, yet within
recognized and ruling limits, to play in and around his subject.

One of those limits is the preservation, in any remodelling of the
tales, of the Celtic atmosphere. To tell the Irish stories in the
manner of Homer or Apuleius, in the manner of the Norse sagas, or in
the manner of Malory, would be to lose their very nature, their soul,
their nationality. We should no longer understand the men and women
who fought and loved in Ireland, and whose characters were moulded by
Irish surroundings, customs, thoughts, and passions. We should not see
or feel the landscape of Ireland or its skies, the streams, the woods,
the animals and birds, the mountain solitudes, as we feel and see
them in the original tales. We should not hear, as we hear in their
first form, the stormy seas between Scotland and Antrim, or the great
waves which roar on the western isles, and beat on cliffs which still
belong to another world than ours. The genius of Ireland would desert
our work.

And it would be a vast pity to lose the Irish atmosphere in the
telling of the Irish tales, because it is unique; not only distinct
from that of the stories of other races, but from that of the other
branches of the Celtic race. It differs from the atmosphere of the
stories of Wales, of Brittany, of the Highlands and islands of
Scotland. It is more purely Celtic, less mixed than any of them. A
hundred touches in feeling, in ways of thought, in sensitiveness to
beauty, in war and voyaging, and in ideals of life, separate it from
that of the other