In some cases the Irish text has not
been printed, and I have had to work by comparing and piecing together
various translations. I have had to put a connecting sentence of my own
here and there, and I have fused different versions together, and
condensed many passages, and I have left out many, using the choice that
is a perpetual refusing, in trying to get some clear outline of the
doings of the heroes.
I have found it more natural to tell the stories in the manner of the
thatched houses, where I have heard so many legends of Finn and his
friends, and Oisin and Patrick, and the Ever-Living Ones, and the
Country of the Young, rather than in the manner of the slated houses,
where I have not heard them.
Four years ago, Dr Atkinson, a Professor of Trinity College, Dublin, in
his evidence before the Commission of Intermediate Education, said of
the old literature of Ireland:--"It has scarcely been touched by the
movements of the great literatures; it is the untrained popular feeling.
Therefore it is almost intolerably low in tone--I do not mean naughty,
but low; and every now and then, when the circumstance occasions it, it
goes down lower than low ... If I read the books in the Greek, the Latin
or the French course, in almost every one of them there is something
with an ideal ring about it--something that I can read with positive
pleasure--something that has what the child might take with him as a
[Greek: ktema eis dei]--a perpetual treasure; but if I read the Irish
books, I see nothing ideal in them, and my astonishment is that through
the whole range of Irish literature that I have read (and I have read
an enormous range of it), the smallness of the element of idealism is
most noticeable .
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