V.
Let us survey the Gaelic poets sympathetically but justly. Their work has been the subject of undiscriminating praise and ignorant depreciation. It must be understood that they did splendidly what they tried to do, but their ideas of the function of poetry are not those of the Anglicised Ireland of to-day.
One finds in them an exquisitely keen sense of beauty, but withal a strange lack of the sense of proportion. Their art ran to beautiful fantasy, to the elaborate and ornamental and intricate and occult. The chaste and simple elegance of Greek art had no appeal for them. Nature was not half beautiful enough for them, they must dress its nakedness in fantastic glittering garbs. The school of superficial critics who copy one another are wont to say (since the learned Celtologist, Matthew Arnold, started the cry) that "the love of nature is a peculiarly Gaelic quality!" I have never been able to see it. It seems to me the Gaelic poet is always trying to escape from Nature. He does not like her brutality. He is forever trying to build a I^and of Heart's Desire for himself.
Pagan, he framed a Tír na nÓg; Christian, he fastened his eyes on the glories of the other world and sang the hatefulness and dangers of the world and the flesh. He does not believe that "beauty is truth, truth beauty." He is always declaring (for centuries) that the world is but a mist, the pride and beauty of life a snare. He hates reality and the result is that Gaelic poetry tends to be artificial, exaggerated, fantastic. There is an abundance of fancy in it, but little imagination. The Gaelic mind is too subtle, too subjective to think in images!
Hence we see in Gaelic poetry a passion for beauty ruined by the lack of feeling for reality, for artistic truth.
