elves or others, and it is these thoughts,
tested by passion, that we call convictions. Among subjective men (in all
those, that is, who must spin a web out of their own bowels) the victory
is an intellectual daily recreation of all that exterior fate snatches
away, and so that fate's antithesis; while what I have called "the Mask"
is an emotional antithesis to all that comes out of their internal nature.
We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.

XXII

A conviction that the world was now but a bundle of fragments possessed me
without ceasing. I had tried this conviction on the Rhymers, thereby
plunging into greater silence an already too silent evening. "Johnson," I
was accustomed to say, "you are the only man I know whose silence has beak
and claw." I had lectured on it to some London Irish society, and I was to
lecture upon it later on in Dublin, but I never found but one interested
man, an official of the Primrose League, who was also an active member of
the Fenian Brotherhood. "I am an extreme conservative apart from Ireland,"
I have heard him explain; and I have no doubt that personal experience
made him share the sight of any eye that saw the world in fragments. I had
been put into a rage by the followers of Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran,
and Bastien-Lepage, who not only asserted the unimportance of subject
whether in art or literature, but the independence of the arts from one
another. Upon the other hand, I delighted in every age where poet and
artist confined themselves gladly to some inherited subject matter known
to the whole people, for I thought that in man and race alike there is
something called "Unity of Being," using that term as Dante used it when
he compared beauty in the _Convito_ to a perfectly proportioned human
body. My father, from whom I had learned the term, preferred a comparison
to a musical instrument so strung that if we touch a string all the
strings murmur faintly. There is not more desire, he had said, in lust
than in true love, but in true love desire awakens pity, hope, affection,
admiration, and, given appropriate circumstance, every emotion possible to
man. When I began, however, to apply this thought to the state and to
argue for a law-made balance among trades and occupations my father
displayed at once the violent free trader and propagandist of liberty. I
thought that the enemy of this unity was abstraction, meaning by
abstraction not the distinction but the is