Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

46 STANDISH O'GRADY
of Hellas in the centuries that preceded the age of
Homer, and of which all monuments have been swept
away.
Again, we must remember that the intellectual
influence exercised by Ireland over the north-west of
Europe, during the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries,
is distinctly, though indirectly, traceable to the bards.
It is not in the nature of things that a savage and
untutored race should suddenly burst upon the world
and assume the spiritual control of peoples who had
been for centuries in contact with Roman influence.
When the Christian missionaries landed in Ireland,
they found a people whose intellectual, moral, and
imaginative powers had been for many generations
stimulated and aroused by their ntive bards. But
for them the Ireland of those centuries would have
been impossible.
But perhaps the most valuable work achieved for
Ireland by those ancient shapers of legend and heroic
tale, is like all that is best done in the world, incapable
of being definitely grasped and clearly exhibited. Their
best work is probably hidden in the blood and brain
of the race to this day. Those antique singing men,
with their imagined gods and superhuman heroes,
breathed into the land and people the gallantry and
chivalrousness, the prevailing ideality, the love of action and
freedom, the audacity and elevation of thought, which,
underneath all rudeness and grotesquerie, characterizes
those remnants of their imaginings, and which we would
believe no intervening centuries have been powerful