not been able to believe in
Cuchulain's greatness, until it had brought the Great Queen, the
red-eyebrowed goddess, to woo him upon the battlefield, could not be
satisfied with a friendship less romantic and lyrical than that of
Cuchulain and Ferdiad, who kissed one another after the day's fighting,
or with a love less romantic and lyrical than that of Baile and Aillinn,
who died at the report of one another's deaths, and married in
Tir-nan-og. His art, too, is often at its greatest when it is most
extravagant, for he only feels himself among solid things, among things
with fixed laws and satisfying purposes, when he has reshaped the world
according to his heart's desire. He understands as well as Blake that
the ruins of time build mansions in eternity, and he never allows
anything, that we can see and handle, to remain long unchanged. The
characters must remain the same, but the strength of Fergus may change
so greatly, that he, who a moment before was merely a strong man among
many, becomes the master of Three Blows that would destroy an army, did
they not cut off the heads of three little hills instead, and his sword,
which a fool had been able to steal out of its sheath, has of a sudden
the likeness of a rainbow. A wandering lyric moon must knead and kindle
perpetually that moving world of cloaks made out of the fleeces of
Mananan; of armed men who change themselves into sea-birds; of
goddesses who become crows; of trees that bear fruit and flower at the
same time. The great emotions of love, terror and friendship must alone
remain untroubled by the moon in that world which is still the world of
the Irish country-people, who do not open their eyes very wide at the
most miraculous change, at the most sudden enchantment. Its events, and
things, and people are wild, and are like unbroken horses, that are so
much more beautiful than horses that have learned to run between shafts.
One thinks of actual life, when one reads those Norse stories, which had
shadows of their decadence, so necessary were the proportions of actual
life to their efforts, when a dying man remembered his heroism enough to
look down at his wound and say, 'Those broad spears are coming into
fashion'; but the Irish stories make us understand why some Greek writer
called myths the activities of the daemons. The great virtues, the great
joys, the great privations, come in the myths, and, as it were, take
mankind between their naked arms, and without putti