AND TRANSLATIONS 139

J. M. SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 146

THE TRAGIC THEATRE 196

JOHN SHAWE-TAYLOR 208

EDMUND SPENSER 213

THE CUTTING OF AN AGATE

THE CUTTING OF AN AGATE

THOUGHTS ON LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS

I

CUCHULAIN AND HIS CYCLE

The Church when it was most powerful taught learned and unlearned to
climb, as it were, to the great moral realities through hierarchies of
Cherubim and Seraphim, through clouds of Saints and Angels who had all
their precise duties and privileges. The story-tellers of Ireland,
perhaps of every primitive country, imagined as fine a fellowship, only
it was to the aesthetic realities they would have had us climb. They
created for learned and unlearned alike, a communion of heroes, a cloud
of stalwart witnesses; but because they were as much excited as a monk
over his prayers, they did not think sufficiently about the shape of
the poem and the story. We have to get a little weary or a little
distrustful of our subject, perhaps, before we can lie awake thinking
how to make the most of it. They were more anxious to describe energetic
characters, and to invent beautiful stories, than to express themselves
with perfect dramatic logic or in perfectly-ordered words. They shared
their characters and their stories, their very images, with one another,
and handed them down from generation to generation; for nobody, even
when he had added some new trait, or some new incident, thought of
claiming for himself what so obviously lived its own merry or mournful
life. The maker of images or worker in mosaic who first put Christ upon
a cross would have as soon claimed as his own a thought which was
perhaps put into his mind by Christ himself. The Irish poets had also,
it may be, what seemed a supernatural sanction, for a chief poet had to
understand not only innumerable kinds of poetry, but how to keep
himself for nine days in a trance. Surely they believed or half believed
in the historical reality of even their wildest imaginations. And so
soon as Christianity made their hearers desire a chronology that would
run side by side with that of the Bible, they delighted in arranging
their Kings and Queens, the shadows of forgotten mythologies, in long
lines that ascended