of the "Cúirt" that one would gladly offer it as a model for the young poet or artist.
Notice next the impersonality of Brian's art. The greatest art is always impersonal. It is hardly possible to tie Brian down to any definite expression of opinion except the one thought that the remedy for grief and suffering is to bathe oneself in the beauty of nature. He describes a "vision," of tremendous solidarity, what a Teuton would call imagination, but he never obtrudes his personality between the reader and his visionary beings. It is rather in the attitude of mind discerned that one reads the man than in any deliberate self-revelation.
VII.
Nowhere has the soul of Christianity taken deeper root than in the Gaelic nature. It found nowhere a soil more congenial. In Italy Paganism was wrapped up with the "joy of life" and died hard. The art of Fra Angelico and Giorgone, the works of Dante and Boccaccio flourished side by side. Paganism has survived beside Christianity to the days of D'Annunzio and Fogazzaro, the sensualist and the Christian. But in Ireland our Pagan religion itself revelled in the weird, in supernatural terrors. The Greek myths deified the forces of nature, the Gaelic myths escaped from nature and created artificial beauties and artificial terrors.
The Catholic Christian idea of life took firm root in the soil of Gaeldom. It reduced to order and discipline, it endowed with a meaning and a beauty the vague uncomprehended yearnings of the Gaelic soul. Escaping from the perversity of life and the brutality of nature, the Gaels fixed their eyes on the glory of another world. The flesh was an enemv to be mortified. Asceticism became an ideal and
