.
My committee, and the majority of the Nationalist Irish Societies
throughout England were upon one side, and the Dublin committee and the
majority of the Nationalist Societies in Ireland upon the other, and
feeling ran high. Maud Gonne had the same friends that I had, and the
Dublin committee could not be made to understand that whatever money she
collected would go to the movement, and not to her friends and their
opponents. It seemed to me that if I accepted the Presidency of the '98
Commemoration Association of Great Britain, I might be able to prevent a
public quarrel, and so make a great central council possible; and a public
quarrel I did prevent, though with little gain perhaps to anybody, for at
least one active man assured me that I had taken the heart out of his
work, and no gain at all perhaps to the movement, for our central council
had commonly to send two organizers or to print two pamphlets, that both
parties might be represented when one pamphlet or one organizer had
served.

II

It was no business of mine, and that was precisely why I could not keep
out of it. Every enterprise that offered, allured just in so far as it was
not my business. I still think that in a species of man, wherein I count
myself, nothing so much matters as Unity of Being, but if I seek it as
Goethe sought, who was not of that species, I but combine in myself, and
perhaps as it now seems, looking backward, in others also, incompatibles.
Goethe, in whom objectivity and subjectivity were intermixed I hold, as
the dark is mixed with the light at the eighteenth Lunar Phase, could but
seek it as Wilhelm Meister seeks it intellectually, critically, and
through a multitude of deliberately chosen experiences; events and forms
of skill gathered as if for a collector's cabinet; whereas true Unity of
Being, where all the nature murmurs in response if but a single note be
touched, is found emotionally, instinctively, by the rejection of all
experience not of the right quality, and by the limitation of its
quantity. Of all this I knew nothing, for I saw the world by the light of
what my father had said, speaking about some Frenchman who frequented the
dissecting rooms to overcome his dread in the interest of that Unity. My
father had mocked, but had not explained why he had mocked, and I, for my
unhappiness had felt a shuddering fascination. Nor did I understand as yet
how little that Unity, however wisely sought, is possible without a Uni