All this and much more,—the whole Mythological Cycle,— represents what came over into Irish literature from ancient manvantaric periods, and the compression of the records of millions of years. A century seems a very long time while it is passing; but at two or three millenniums ago, no longer than a few autumns and winters; and at a million years' distance, the doings and changes, the empires and dynasties of a hundred centuries, look to the eyes of racial memory like the contents of a single spring. So it is the history and wisdom of remote multiplied ages that come down to us in these tales.
But with the Heroic Cycle we seem to be entering a near manvantara. This is the noon-period of Irish literature, the Shakespeare-Milton time; where the other was the dawn or Chaucer period. Or the Mythological Cycle is the Vedic, and the Heroic, the Epic, period, to take an Indian analogy; and this fits it better, because the Irish, like the Indian, dawn-period is immensely ancient and of immense duration. But when you come to the Heroic time, with the stories of the high king Conary Mor, and of the Red Branch Warriors, with for piece de resistance the epic Tann Bo Cuailgne, you seem (as you do in the Mahabharata) to be standing upon actual memories, as much historical as symbolic. Here all the figures, though titanic, are at least half human, with a definite character assigned to all of importance. They revel in huge dramatic action; move in an heroic mistless sunlight. You can take part in the daily life of the Red Branch champions as you can in that of the Greeks before Troy; they seem real and clear-cut; you can almost remember Deirdre's beauty and the sorrow of the doom of the Children of Usna; you have a shrewd notion what Cuculain looked like, and what Conall Carnach; you are familiar with the fire trailed from the chariot wheels, the sods kicked up by the horses' hoofs; you believe in them all, as you do in Odysseus and Ajax, in Bhishma and Arjuna, in Hamlet and Falstaff;—as I for my part never found it possible to believe in Malory's and Tennyson's well-groomed gentlemen of the Table Round.
And then, after long lapse, came another age, and the Cycle of the Fenians. It too is full of excellent tales, but all less titanic and clearly-defined: almost, you might say, standing to the Red Branch as Wordsworth and Keats to Shakespeare and Milton. The atmosphere is on the whole dimmer, the figures are weaker; there is not the same dynamic urge of creation. You come away with an impression of the beauty of the forest through which the Fenians wandered and camped, and less with an impression of the personalities of the Fenians themselves. There is abundant Natural Magic, but not the old Grand Manner; and you would not recognise Finn or Oisin or Oscar, if you ment them, so easily as you would Cuculain or Fergus MacRoy or Naisi. Civilization appears to have declined far between the two ages, to have become much less settled,—as it naturally would, with all that fighting going on. I take it that all the stories of both cycles relate to ages of the breakup of civilization: peaceful and civilized times leave less impress on the racial memory. The Fenians are distinctly further from such civilized times, however, than are the Red Branch: they are a nomad company, but the Red Branch had their capital at Emain Macha by Armagh in Ulster. But what mystery, what sparkling magic environs them! Mr. Rollerstone cites this as an example: Once three beautiful unknown youths joined Finn's company; but stipulated that they should camp apart, and be left alone during the nights. After awhile it fell out what was the reason for this: one of them died between every dusk and dawn, and the other two had to be watching him. That is all that is said; but it is enough to keep your imagination at work a long while.
—And then, the manvantara dies away in a dolphin glory of mystical colors in the many tales of wondrous voyages and islands in the Atlantic: such as the Voyage of Maelduin, of which Tennyson's version gives you some taste of the brightness, but none at all of the delicacy and mysterious beauty and grace.
Except the classical, this is the oldest written literature in Europe; and I doubt there is any other that gives us such a wide peep-hole into lost antiquity. Yes; perhaps it is the best lens extant, west of India. It is a lens, of course, that distorts: the long past is shown through a temperament,—made into poetry and romance; not left bare scientific history. But perhaps poetry and romance are after all the truest and final form of history. Perhaps, in looking at recent ages, we are balked of seeing their true underlying form by the dust of events and the clamor of details; for eyes anointed they might resolve themselves into Moyturas and Camlans endlessly fought; into magical weapons magically forged; into Cuculains battling eternally at the Watcher's Ford, he alone withstanding the great host of this world's invaders, while all his companions are under a druid sleep. . . . It is the most splendid scene or incident in the Tann Bo Cuailgne; and I cannot think of it, but it calls up before my mind's eye another picture: that of a little office in New York, and a desk, and rows of empty seats; and another Irishman, lecturing to those empty seats . . . . but to all humanity, really . . . . from the ranks of which his companions should come to him presently; he would hold back the hosts of darkness alone, waiting for their coming. And I cannot think of this latter picture but it seems to me as if:
Cuculain rode from out the ages' prime,
The hero time, spacious and girt with gold,
For he had heard this earth was stained with crime.
With loud hoof-thunder, clangor, ring and rhyme,
With chariot-wheels flame-trailing where they rolled,
Cuculain rode from out the ages' prime.
I saw his eyes, how darkening, how sublime,
With what impatient pity and power ensouled;
(For he had heard this earth was stained with crime!)
Song on his lips—I heard the chant and chime.
The stars themselves danced to in days of old:—
Cuculain rode from out the ages' prime.
Love sped him on to out-speed the steeds of Time:
No bliss for him, and this world left a-cold,
Which, he had heard, was stained with grief and crime.