Lady Gregory, a fairy godmother, has given to Young Ireland the
gift of her Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which should be henceforward
the book of its dream. I do not doubt but there will be a great
change in the next generation, for the character of many children
will have grown to maturity brooding over the memories of heroes
who were themselves half children, half demigods. Though the hero
tales will have their greatest power over the young, no one mind
could measure their depth. They seem simple and primitive, yet
they draw us strangely aside from life, and the emotions they awaken
are not simple but complex. Here are twenty tales, and they are
so alike in imaginative character that they seem all to have poured
from one mind; and to these twenty we could add a hundred others,
all endlessly fertile in difference of incident, but all seeming
to own the same imaginative creator. It was so for many centuries,
and then the maker of the song seems to have grown weary, and
distinct voices not overladen with the tradition of the ages were
heard; and today every one wanders in a path of his own, finding
or losing the way, the truth, and the life of art in the free play
of his desires. There was something more to cause this later period
of diverse utterance than the interruption of other races and the
claims of the world upon us. Surely the ancient Egyptian met in
Memphis or Thebes as many strangers as we did, but he wept on through
many dynasties carving the same face of mystery and rarely altering
the peculiar forms which were his inheritance from the craftsmen
of a thousand years before. It was not the introduction of something
new, but the loss of something which finally vexed the calm of the
Sphinx and marred the Phidian beauty which in Greece was a long
dream for many generations. It was not because the Dane or Norman
came and dwelt among us that the signature of the Sidhe was withdrawn