And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With, 'Here is the fiddler of Dooney!'
And dance like a wave of the sea."
In a few final words we may try to estimate what all this amounts to in
the long battle between paganism and idealism. There is no question that
Fiona Macleod may be reasonably claimed by either side. Certainly it is
true of her work, that it is pure to the pure and dangerous to those who
take it wrongly. Meredith's great line was never truer than it is here,
"Enter these enchanted woods, ye who dare." The effect upon the mind,
and the tendency in the life, will depend upon what one brings to the
reading of it.
All this bringing back of the discarded gods has its glamour and its
risk. Such gods are excellent as curiosities, and may provide the
quaintest of studies in human nature. They give us priceless fragments
of partial and broken truth, and they exhibit cross-sections of the
evolution of thought in some of its most charming moments. Besides all
this, they are exceedingly valuable as providing us with that general
sense of religion, vague and illusive, which is deeper than all dogma.
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