Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/257

 Reviews. 2 1 9

into Ulster should assume such heroic aspects in the telling is no more remarkable than that a rear-guard attack on an army on a high pass in the Pyrenees should come to represent the very tragedy of the Crusading spirit — a phase in the eternal conflict between good and evil.

But while it is difficult to concur with Miss Hull's " solarity," it is easier to sympathise with her indignation at the attacks upon Old Irish Literature in Dr. Atkinson's preface to the Yellow Book of Lecan. She is successful in her contention that what is left of the old tales is probably but a small proportion of what originally existed. And incontestably there is deep beauty, high dignity, and pure pathos to be discovered in the tales of the Red Branch and the poems of the Fenian cycle. But her idea that the old Irish tales are particularly free from grossness, the natural grossness that occurs in all folk-tales faithfully reported, is merely a mistake derived from the fact that editors have carefully expunged and translators glided over passages that were to their minds coarse or incompatible with " nice " modern ideas. The value of the older Irish tales is that they are faithfully recorded, and therefore they are full of natural barbarities and exaggerations and extravagancies of all kinds. There is often an unpruned exuberance about them that reminds one rather of the Hindoo epics than of the Ice- landic Sagas, which is a reason why the term Saga is to my mind incorrectly applied to Irish tales of the old type. It is useless to compare or contrast the ethical standpoint of the Cuchullin stories with the "poems of the Troubadours," which belong to a wholly different stage of civilisation, and are not particularly " licentious " if it comes to that, though there are certain gross and satirical pieces among them. Both are on a higher ethical level than much Latin and Greek literature, according to the usual standards.

There is no good gained by praising these Irish tales for quali- ties they do not possess ; they have many beauties of their own ; they have also their own patent defects, formlessness, lack of restraint, monstrous exaggeration, cS^c, but they not only always vividly express the true spirit of their time, they stir the very soul with pity and sympathy and pride, as they stirred the emotions of their first hearers. The absurdities of the Xanthos episode vanish as we read of Akhilleus' vengeful grief, and when Odusscus springs on the threshold with his mighty bow and from his full quiver