In quoting to show the style of Lady Gregory I should quote description rather than narrative, as the description seems to me better as well as briefer. The three famous tales of Old Irish literature, "The Three Sorrows of Story-Telling," are "The Fate of the Children of Usnach," comparable, in the great wars it led to, to the rape of Helen; "The Fate of the Children of Lir," a story that has as its base the folk-tale that underlies "Lohengrin," but which takes us back farther into the past in its kinship to "Medea"; and "The Sons of Tuireann," which has been called the Irish Odyssey. Of these the first is incomparably the finest story, and Lady Gregory has told it nobly in "Cuchulain of Muirthemne," but it alone of all the stories in her three books of translations has enough of humanity in it to put it side by side with the story of Sigurd and Brunhilde or the story of Paris and Helen. When one remembers that Greek and Scandinavian literature may boast five stories each, at least, but little short of these their greatest stories, and that Irish literature has but "Diarmuid and Grania" to boast as in any way comparable to the story of Deirdre, it must be admitted that early Irish literature representing Ireland's heroic age is not so beautiful as the literature that represents the heroic ages of Scandinavia and Greece. "The Fate of the Children of Usnach" is rich in beautiful detail of incident and of description of nature; it preserves for us much of the inner life of old time; and it has dignity of proportion. It has not the fundamental weakness, as great art, of most of these old Irish stories, their characters' lack of interest because of their lack of body, their lack of personality, their running to type rather than moulding into individuals; yet the feats performed by Cuchulain are so wholly superhuman, most of them, that they often put their doer beyond our sympathy, and at their worst make him absurd.
If these stories were simply extravagant folk-fancy, such as the Jack the Giant Killer story, to delight children, we should not quarrel with this quality in them, but there is so much in them of dignity that we must take them seriously, as we take Homer. When their heroes are definitely gods we can accept almost any of their deeds, so we can delight in the earlier stories of "Gods and Fighting Men," the stories of the Tuatha de Danaan, Lugh and Angus, Midhir and Etain, Bran and Connla, as we cannot in those of Finn and Goll and Cuchulain and Conchubar, who, because of their historical setting and more definite characterization, have more of the appeal of humanity. We know Cuchulain, in Lady Gregory's pages, as a small dark man, constant in love in comparison with his fellows, faithful to his friends, loyal to his king; and we know Finn as a fair old man of ruddy countenance, a lover of women, somewhat pompous and somewhat quarrelsome; but neither hero is a clear-cut personality like Sigurd or Ajax. If either Cuchulain or Finn were surely a god we should accept his deeds as now we cannot accept them, and were either brought home to us as wholly human and divested of his supernatural powers, and given a personality, we should be far more moved by his fortunes.