e such
stories are an integral part of religion to simple men and women. I, upon
the other hand, being in the intemperance of my youth, denied, as publicly
as possible, merit to all but a few ballads translated from Gaelic
writers, or written out of a personal and generally tragic experience.

III

The greater number of those who joined my society had come under the seal
of Young Ireland at that age when we are all mere wax; the more ambitious
had gone daily to some public library to read the bound volumes of Thomas
Davis's old newspaper, and tried to see the world as Davis saw it. No
philosophic speculation, no economic question of the day, disturbed an
orthodoxy which, unlike that of religion had no philosophic history, and
the religious bigot was glad that it should be so. Some few of the younger
men were impatient, and it was these younger men, more numerous in the
London than in the Dublin Society, who gave me support; and we had been
joined by a few older men--some personal friends of my own or my
father--who had only historical interest in Thomas Davis and his school.
Young Ireland's prose had been as much occupied with Irish virtue, and
more with the invader's vices, than its poetry, and we were soon mired and
sunk into such problems as to whether Cromwell was altogether black, the
heads of the old Irish clans altogether white, the Danes mere robbers and
church burners (they tell me at Rosses Point that the Danes keep to this
day the maps of the Rosses fields they were driven out of in the 9th
century, and plot their return) and as to whether we were or were not once
the greatest orators in the world. All the past had been turned into a
melodrama with Ireland for blameless hero and poet, novelist and historian
had but one object, that we should hiss the villain, and only a minority
doubted that the greater the talent the greater the hiss. It was all the
harder to substitute for that melodrama a nobler form of art, because
there really had been, however different in their form, villain and
victim; yet fight that rancour I must, and if I had not made some head
against it in 1892 and 1893 it might have silenced in 1907 John Synge, the
greatest dramatic genius of Ireland. I am writing of disputes that
happened many years ago, that led in later years to much bitterness, and I
may exaggerate their immediate importance and violence, but I think I am
right in saying that disputes about the merits of Young Ireland so o