STANDISH O'GRADY. (1846 6 · STANDISH O'GRADY was born in 1846 at Castletown, Berehaven, and was educated at Tipperary and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he took his degree in 1868. He was called to the bar and practiced law for a time, but later devoted himself to literature. He is owner and editor of the All-Ireland Review, a literary weekly published in Ireland. His History of Ireland: Mythical Period' appeared in 1878; Toryism and the Tory Democracy' (London, 1886); 'The Crisis in Ireland' (Dublin, 1882); History of Ireland, Heroic Period' (2 volumes, Dublin, 1878-1880); perhaps his greatest work, now long out of print, a book which W. B. Yeats has stated "started us all; it started others too. Burne-Jones said to somebody, I forget who now, that it made an epoch in his life; and I remember hearing William Morris praise it also"'Philosophical and Critical History of Ireland,' Volume I., all published (London, 1881); Cuculain,' a prose epic (London, 1882) 'Finn and his Companions' (London, 1892); Ulrick the Ready (London, 1896); Red Hugh's Captivity' (London, 1889); 'The Bog of Stars' (London and Dublin, 1895); 'The Story of Ireland' (London, 1894); Loss of Du Corrig' (London, 1894); Early Bardic Literature of Ireland' (Dublin, 1882); The Chain of Gold' (London, 1895); Pacata Hibernia,' by Thomas Stafford, edited by O'Grady, 2 volumes (London, 1896); 'In the Wake of King James' (London, 1897); The Coming of Cuculain' (London, 1894); All Ireland,' a volume of essays on Irish economic questions (Dublin, 1898); 'The Flight of the Eagle' (London, 1897) and 'In the Gates of the North' (Dublin, 1902). 6 6 Mr. O'Grady has been the lonely pioneer of many ideas in Ireland. The causes he has advocated have become successful, but he is never found among the rejoicing victors. He is always afar in some new field, advocating some unpopular cause, while he leaves to others the shouts of the crowd. His 'Bardic History of Ireland,' published when he was a young man, revealed to younger Irishmen for the first time with real dignity and literary power the great heroic world of the ancient Gael; and since that time one distinguished writer after another has gone into the same world and has popularized it, but none of them have quite the same morning wonder and freshness in their work as the pioneer. Mr. O'Grady has been in many things the seer in Irish politics, and the union of class and class which seems possible now was urged by him with extraordinary eloquence at a time when to shoot on the one side, and to hang on the other, seemed almost the only possible policies of action. At present while everybody is urging on the creation of peasant proprietors, he is advocating some bewilder172 2737 ing economic heresies which assuredly will take many years to become orthodox: but even in this later work, which many of his friends regret because it has withdrawn him too much from literature into journalism, there are sudden illuminations springing, like Ruskin's, from a perception of the eternal laws of human nature, which can never be for very long neglected by society without a bitter awakening and disappointment in the end. Whilst these incursions into politics and economics, expressed in too hasty journalism, have lessened to some extent the quality of his work in pure literature, he will undoubtedly in any future history of the literature of Ireland occupy a notable place. For in spite of the lack of wide recognition, he has done work which is unequaled by that of any other Irish writer for its mingling of heroic fire and gentleness with a generosity of spirit which is much more evident in the bardic stories than in Irish life to-day. The 'Bardic History of Ireland,' and especially that portion of it which was published as 'The Epic of Cuculain,' will never be superseded by more learned renderings of the epical traditions clustering around the exploits of the Red Branch. We have yet much to learn of the past, and there is an ample field for the poet, dramatist, and historian; but because nature never gifts two writers with the same qualities, it is vain to hope that any later writer will recreate for us the Champion of the Red Branch as O'Grady has done, or make the warrior seem almost a divine type, or remove from battle the lust of blood, as he has, until these conflicts of warriors seem not a warring upon flesh and blood, but the everlasting battle where the Clan Cailitan are the dark powers and Cuculain the spirit of redeeming light. We feel in the unendurable pathos of the story as O'Grady tells it, that Cuculain was in a dark age to the Celt what a greater spirit has been to humanity. He was the incarnation of their ideal, and if we analyze the lavish tenderness of the old bards to their hero, a tenderness which O'Grady has perfectly retained, it will be found at its root to have a purely spiritual quality akin to that we feel to Him who took the burden of the sins of the world upon Him, and came without the scepter and crown of divinity to a people who dwelt in darkness and who knew Him not. It is this symbolism, which is, I think, the product of an unconsciously spiritual imagination, and not the result of a conscious art, that makes O'Grady apart from and above the English writers who have written of the legendary past. They are too much concerned with the adventures of the body, but with O'Grady every action of his hero, even when advancing to the battle, seems to be an adventure of the soul, and we are stirred as if we followed some noble conquest of darkness rather than the triumphs of man Tennyson indeed has made his Arthur a symbol, but has done it so consciously that we wish for an actual person to speak, and the too evident allegory a little wearies us. O'Grady's Cuculain, more nobly conceived, and in a more epical spirit, as I think, is always a distinct human being, a demigod perhaps, but with a distinct personality, and with something too which, while never offending us with modernity, seems to show that the new over man. religion, which overturned the pagan world, has through O'Grady thrown back a reflected light on the greatest hero of pre-Christian days. O'Grady's finest achievement has been to rescue for us the great pagan virtues and to bring them with a living force into modern Ireland. For these tales of the far past are not to be forgotten. They have been preserved for a hundred generations in the heart of the people because they had in them a core of eternal truth. Truth is not a thing of to-day or to-morrow. Beauty, heroism, and spirituality do not change like fashion, being the reflection of an unchanging spirit. The face of faces which looks at us through so many shifting shadows has never altered the form of its perfection since the face of man, made after its image, first looked back on its original : "For these red lips with all their mournful pride, These dreams, antiquities, traditions, once actual, living, and historical, have passed from the world of sense into the world of the soul in O'Grady's rendering of them, and time has taken away nothing from their power, nor made them more remote from sympathy, but has rather purified them by removing them from earth to heaven; from things which the eye can see and the ear can hear, they have become what the heart ponders over; and we have in O'Grady's tales of Cuculain the spiritual and heroic residue, the primitive grossness left out, the strength retained. O'Grady is the direct representative to-day of the bards who delighted in the heroic life, while in W. B. Yeats is incarnated the spirit of those who sought for beauty and followed Niam across the mystic waters to the World of Immortal Youth. The latter writer with a greater art has not the epical spirit which informs O'Grady's best work, or the incomparable fire and energy which makes the sounding sentences of the epic of Cuculain rear themselves like giants from the page. Through this energy of conception O'Grady is frequently led into hasty writing and exaggerated metaphors, but, at its best, his style is beautiful in its simplicity. One of the best examples of this simplicity and directness is the episode of the Seven Ancients told in that charming little book 'Finn and his Companions.' No one who has ever read this can forget the story with its wonderful close, the noble tears of Finn, and the noble unconscious wonder of the old men. "Youth, they thought, hath many sorrows which old age cannot comprehend." While it is by his renderings of the ancient stories that O'Grady will be rightly remembered, his books dealing with the Elizabethan period of Irish history should not be overlooked. The period hardly lends itself so well to his somewhat giantesque imagination as the older tales, but in one book, 'The Flight of the Eagle,' he has written the history of the captivity of Red Hugh with a singular intensity. His narrative, following history closely, is always vivid and is illuminated, like everything he writes, with flashes of poetic |