in
their tent, Grania, who does not recognize him, bids him give Finn this
message from her:--

Give heed to what I say now. If you have one eye is blind, let it
be turned to the place where we are, and that he might ask news of.
And if you have one seeing eye, cast it upon me, and tell Finn you
saw a woman no way sad or afraid, but as airy and high-minded as a
mountain-filly would be challenging the winds of March!

I flatly refuse to take the high-minded mountain filly seriously as a
tragic heroine, and I confess I hold Finn equally suspect, disguised as
a beggar though he is, when he speaks of himself to Grania as a hard
man--"as hard as a barren step-mother's slap, or a highway gander's
gob." After all, in heroic literature, we must have the illusion of the
heroic. If we can get the peasant statement of the heroic, that is
excellent; its sincerity brings its illusion. But a mere imitation of
the peasant statement of the heroic, such as Lady Gregory seems to aim
at giving us in these sentences, is as pinchbeck and unreal as
Macpherson's _Ossian_. It reaches a grotesque absurdity when at the
close of Act II Finn comes back to the door of the tent and, in order to
stir up Diarmuid's jealousy, says:--

It is what they were saying a while ago, the King of Foreign is
grunting and sighing, grunting and sighing, around and about the
big red sally tree beside the stream!

To write like that is to use not a style but a jargon.

If you want a standard of reality with which to compare these passages
of Abbey-Theatre rhetoric, you have only to turn to Lady Gregory's own
notes at the end of _Irish Folk-History Plays_, where she records a
number of peasant utterances on Irish history. Here, and not in the
plays--in the tragic plays, at any rate--is the real "folk-history" of
her book to be found. One may take, as an example, the note on
_Kincora_, where some one tells of the Battle of Clontarf, in which
Brian Boru defeated the Danes:--

Clontarf was on the head of a game of chess. The generals of the
Danes were beaten at it, and they were vexed. It was Broder, that
the Brodericks are descended from, that put a dagger through
Brian's heart, and he attending to his prayers. What the Danes left
in Ireland were hens and weasels. And when the cock crows in the
morning the country people will always say: "It is for Denmark they
are crowing; crowing they ar