over the water
and she lay there motionless, knowing that, had she moved, he would have
drowned himself and her. Perhaps unmotived self-immolation, were that
possible, or else at mere suggestion of storm and night, were as great
evidence as such a man could give of power over self, and so of the
expression of the self.

XII

When I look back upon my Irish propaganda of those years I can see little
but its bitterness. I never met with, or but met to quarrel with, my
father's old family acquaintance; or with acquaintance I myself might have
found, and kept, among the prosperous educated class, who had all the
great appointments at University or Castle; and this I did by deliberate
calculation. If I must attack so much that seemed sacred to Irish
nationalist opinion, I must, I knew, see to it that no man suspect me of
doing it to flatter Unionist opinion. Whenever I got the support of some
man who belonged by birth and education to University or Castle, I would
say, "Now you must be baptized of the gutter." I chose Royal visits
especially for demonstrations of disloyalty, rolling up with my own hands
the red carpet spread by some elderly Nationalist, softened or weakened by
time, to welcome Viceroyalty; and threatening, if the London Society drank
to the King's health, that my friends and I would demonstrate against it
by turning our glasses upside down; and was presently to discover that one
can grow impassioned and fanatical about opinions, which one has chosen
as one might choose a side upon the football field; and I thought many a
time of the pleasant Dublin houses that would never ask me to dine; and
the still pleasanter houses with trout-streams near at hand, that would
never ask me upon a visit. I became absurdly sensitive, glancing about me
in certain public places, the private view of our Academy, or the like, to
discover imagined enemies; and even now, after twenty or thirty years, I
feel at times that I have not recovered my natural manner. Yet it was in
those pleasant houses, among the young men and the young girls, that we
were to make our converts. When we loathe ourselves or our world, if that
loathing but turn to intellect, we see self or world and its anti-self as
in one vision; when loathing remains but loathing, world or self consumes
itself away, and we turn to its mechanical opposite. Popular Nationalism
and Unionism so changed into one another, being each but the other's
headache. The Nationalist a