to suggest a round tower with
a wolf-dog at its foot, and who would have felt it inappropriate to
publish an Irish book, that had not harp and shamrock and green cover, so
completely did their minds move amid Young Ireland images and metaphors,
and I thought with alarm of the coming of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy; while
here and there I noticed that smooth, smiling face that we discover for
the first time in certain pictures by Velasquez; all that hungry,
mediaeval speculation vanished, that had worn the faces of El Greco and in
its place a self-complacent certainty that all had been arranged, provided
for, set out in clear type, in manual of devotion or of doctrine. These,
however, were no true disciples of Young Ireland, for Young Ireland had
sought a nation unified by political doctrine, a subservient art and
letters aiding and abetting. The movement of thought, which had in the
'fifties and 'fourties at Paris and London and Boston, filled literature,
and especially poetical literature with curiosities about science, about
history about politics, with moral purpose and educational
fervour--abstractions all--had created a new instrument for Irish
politics, a method of writing that took its poetical style from Campbell,
Scott, Macauley, and Beranger, with certain elements from Gaelic, and its
prose style--in John Mitchell, the only Young Ireland prose writer who had
a style at all--from Carlyle. To recommend this method of writing as
literature without much reservation and discrimination I contended was to
be deceived or to practice deception. If one examined some country
love-song, one discovered that it was not written by a man in love, but by
a patriot who wanted to prove that we did indeed possess, in the words of
Daniel O'Connell, "the finest peasantry upon earth." Yet one well-known
anthology was introduced by the assertion that such love-poetry was
superior to "affected and artificial" English love-songs like "Drink to me
only with thine eyes"--"affected and artificial," the very words used by
English Victorians who wrote for the newspapers to discourage capricious,
personal writing. However, the greater number even of those who thought
our famous anthology, _The Spirit of the Nation_, except for three or four
songs, but good election rhyme, looked upon it much as certain enlightened
believers look upon the story of Adam and Eve and the apple, or that of
Jonah and the whale, which they do not question publicly, becaus