Things to keep in mind:
The secret of Celtic magic.
Since the time when Macpherson exploited Celtic sources to provide a public eager for Romantic material with what they wanted, it has been the fashion to think of the Celtic mind as something mysterious, magical, filled with dark broodings over a mighty past; and the Irish, Welsh, and the rest as a people who by right of birth alone were in some strange way in direct contact with a mystical supernatural twilight world which they would rarely reveal to the outsider. The so-called “Celtic Revival” of the end of the last century did much to foster this preposterous idea. A group of writers, approaching the Celtic literatures (about which they usually knew very little, since most of them could not read the languages at all) with a variety of the above prejudice conditioned by the pre-Raphælite and Æsthetic movements and their own individual turns of mind, were responsible for the still widely held belief that they are full of mournful, languishing, mysterious melancholy, of the dim “Celtic Twilight” (Yeats’s term), or else of an intolerable whimsicality and sentimentality. (Compare the opinion of Whitley Stokes quoted in his obituary in 1909 in the Celtic Review, VI, 72, that Irish literature is “strong, manly, purposeful, sharply defined in outline, frankly realistic, and pitiless in logic.”)
—posted 6300 days ago
