sorrow is voiced in musical prayers, tears, curses and prophecies. They comfort themselves with prophetic visions of a fairy woman announcing the coming of a foreign fleet to make all right again. In revolt against their environment their hopes were based on a restoration of the past. In those dreadful Penal Days they were not strong enough to find out new paths, and the journey through life of most of these musical singers was stumbling, confused, aimless.
Brian, on the other hand, impresses one as a coherent personality, full of calm strength. A work of such nice balance and proportions as the "Cúirt," an art so impersonal, so natural, so broadly human, could never have sprung from a weak, hysterical being. His sense of proportion and sense of humour were too perfect to allow him to make a chaotic blunder of his life. His love of nature, his frank animalism, his healthy sanity; withal his entire absence of a sense of the spiritual[1] kept him from the extremes to which the poetic nature is prone to run. Although he broke away from all conventions in his poetry, although he cared little for what all around him reverenced profoundly, he did not trail his coat as gage of battle before any of the forces that controlled his world. The cunning impersonality of his poem, the skill with which his most daring shots were put into the mouths of opposing characters seems to have been successful in his lifetime; for he taught a school in peace and won the admiration of contemporaries for the cleverness of his art, while perhaps they hardly appreciated the full force of his satire.
- ↑ It might be objected that the "Cúirt" is, after all, a vision of a fairy court. But this very fact only emphasises Brian's sense of reality. The "dream" has a solidarity and humanity which is most un-dreamlike. The human characters are presented with extraordinary vividness, fairies are just ordinary human beings, and the vision never gets away from the solid earth.
