Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/165

Rh To her own countrymen the work of Lady Gregory, valuable as it is, is not the revelation it is to us. Those of them that have not been brought up on the stories that she translates could read at least many of them in the "Old Celtic Romances" (1879) of Dr. P.W. Joyce, or in the versions of the Cuchulain and the Finn legends by Mr. Standish James O'Grady (1878 and 1880), books that somehow or other never came to be widely read in America. Mr. Yeats admits it was Mr. O'Grady that "started us all," that is, the writers who began the Renaissance in the late eighties. It may be, of course, that the added beauty and dignity the stories take on in the versions of Lady Gregory will inspire to nobler writing poets and dramatists and novelists that already owe much to Mr. O'Grady or Dr. Joyce or to the scholars they were sent back to by these popularizers. It is certain that the writers of the younger group, the group of those that are only now nearing distinction, owe much to Lady Gregory. After all is said, however, her work is to be judged not for its value to others, but as in itself an art product, of a class kindred to "The Wanderings of Oisin" of Mr. Yeats, although differing in form. I am not forgetting, of course, that she is following faithfully, or rather as faithfully as an artist may follow, the old legends. She has, she owns, clarified them, condensed them, left out contradictory episodes, woven now and then a Scotch version of an incident into a cycle arranged in one complete whole from many Irish versions. When Lady Gregory has owned this she has owned that she has added something more of her own than a "connecting