Some one has said that every great writer invents a new language.  Lady Gregory, whom it would be unfair to praise as a great writer, has at least qualified as one by inventing a new language out of her knowledge of Irish peasant speech.  This, perhaps, is her chief literary peril.  Having discovered the beautiful dialect of the Kiltartan peasantry, she was not content to leave it a peasant dialect—­as we find it in her best dramatic work, Seven Short Plays; but she set about transforming it into a tongue into which all literature and emotion might apparently be translated.  Thus, she gave us Moliere in Kiltartan—­a ridiculously successful piece of work—­and she gave us Finn and Cuchullain in modified Kiltartan, and this, too, was successful, sometimes very beautifully so.  Here, however, she had masterpieces to begin with.  In Irish Folk-History Plays, on the other hand, we find her embarking, not upon translation, but upon original heroic drama, in the Kiltartan language.  The result is unreality as unreal as if Meredith had made a farm-labourer talk like Diana of the Crossways.  Take, for instance, the first of the plays, Grania, which is founded on the story of the pursuit of Diarmuid and Grania by Finn MacCool, to whom Grania had been betrothed.  When Finn, disguised as a blind beggar, visits the lovers 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.