r the moon thirsts
to escape out of bounds, to lose itself in some unbounded tidal stream,
that the songs of the folk are mournful, and that the story of the
Fianna, whenever the queens lament for their lovers, reminds us of songs
that are still sung in country-places? Their grief, even when it is to
be brief like Grania's, goes up into the waste places of the sky. But in
supreme art, or in supreme life there is the influence of the sun too,
and the sun brings with it, as old writers tell us, not merely
discipline but joy; for its discipline is not of the kind the multitudes
impose upon us by their weight and pressure, but the expression of the
individual soul, turning itself into a pure fire and imposing its own
pattern, its own music, upon the heaviness and the dumbness that is in
others and in itself. When we have drunk the cold cup of the moon's
intoxication, we thirst for something beyond ourselves, and the mind
flows outward to a natural immensity; but if we have drunk from the hot
cup of the sun, our own fulness awakens, we desire little, for wherever
one goes one's heart goes too; and if any ask what music is the
sweetest, we can but answer, as Finn answered, 'What happens.' And yet
the songs and stories that have come from either influence are a part,
neither less than the other, of the pleasure that is the bride-bed of
poetry.

Gaelic-speaking Ireland, because its art has been made, not by the
artist choosing his material from wherever he has a mind to, but by
adding a little to something which it has taken generations to invent,
has always had a popular literature. We cannot say how much that
literature has done for the vigour of the race, for who can count the
hands its praise of kings and high-hearted queens made hot upon the
sword-hilt, or the amorous eyes it made lustful for strength and beauty?
We remember indeed that when the farming people and the labourers of the
towns made their last attempt to cast out England by force of arms they
named themselves after the companions of Finn. Even when Gaelic has gone
and the poetry with it, something of the habit of mind remains in ways
of speech and thought and 'come-all-ye's' and poetical sayings; nor is
it only among the poor that the old thought has been for strength or
weakness. Surely these old stories, whether of Finn or Cuchulain, helped
to sing the old Irish and the old Norman-Irish aristocracy to their end.
They heard their hereditary poets and story-te