But in Irish history there remains, demanding treatment, that other
immense mass of literature of an imaginative nature, illuminating
with anecdote and tale the events and personages mentioned simply
and without comment by the chronicler. It is this poetic literature
which constitutes the stumbling-block, as it constitutes also the
glory, of early Irish history, for it cannot be rejected and it
cannot be retained. It cannot be rejected, because it contains
historical matter which is consonant with and illuminates the dry
lists of the chronologist, and it cannot be retained, for popular
poetry is not history; and the task of distinguishing In such
literature the fact from the fiction--where there is certainly fact
and certainly fiction--is one of the most difficult to which the
intellect can apply itself. That this difficulty has not been
hitherto surmounted by Irish writers is no just reproach. For the
last century, intellects of the highest attainments, trained and
educated to the last degree, have been vainly endeavouring to solve
a similar question in the far less copious and less varied heroic
literature of Greece. Yet the labours of Wolfe, Grote, Mahaffy,
Geddes, and Gladstone, have not been sufficient to set at rest the
small question, whether it was one man or two or many who composed
the Iliad and Odyssey, while the reality of the achievements of
Achilles and even his existence might be denied or asserted by a
scholar without general reproach.
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