There are critics repelled by the abounding energy in O'Grady's
sentences. It is easy to point to faults due to excess and
abundance, but how rare in literature is that heroic energy and
power. There is something arcane and elemental in it, a quality
that the most careful stylist cannot attain, however he uses the
file, however subtle he is. O'Grady has noticed this power in
the ancient bards and we find it in his own writing. It ran all
through the Bardic History, the Critical and Philosophical History,
and through the political books, The Tory Democracy and All Ireland.
There is this imaginative energy in the tale of Cuculain, in all
its episodes, the slaying of the hound, the capture of the Liath
Macha, the hunting of the enchanted deer, the capture of the Wild
swans, the fight at the ford, and the awakening of the Red Branch.
In the later tale of Red Hugh which, he calls The Flight of the
Eagle there is the same quality of power joined with a shining
simplicity in the narrative which rises into a poetic ecstasy in
that wonderful chapter where Red Hugh, escaping from the Pale,
rides through the Mountain Gates of Ulster and sees high above
him Sheve Gullion, a mountain of the Gods, the birth-place of
legend "more mythic than Avernus"; and O'Grady evokes for us and
his hero the legendary past and the great hill seems to be like
Mount Sinai, thronged with immortals, and it lives and speaks to
the fugitive boy, "the last great secular champion of the Gael,"
and inspires him for the fulfillment of his destiny. We might say
of Red Hugh, and indeed of all O'Grady's heroes, that they are the
spiritual progeny of Cuculain. From Red Hugh down to the boys who
have such enchanting adventures in Lost on Du Corrig and The Chain
of Gold they have all a natural and hardy purity of mind, a beautiful
simplicity of character, and one can imagine them all in an hour