ty
of Culture in class or people that is no longer possible at all.

"The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart."

III

I went hither and thither speaking at meetings in England and Scotland and
occasionally at tumultuous Dublin conventions, and endured some of the
worst months of my life. I had felt years before that I had made a great
achievement when the man who trained my uncle's horses invited me to share
his Xmas dinner, which we roasted in front of his harness room fire; and
now I took an almost equal pride in an evening spent with some small
organizer into whose spitoon I secretly poured my third glass of whiskey.
I constantly hoped for some gain in self-possession, in rapidity of
decision, in capacity for disguise, and am at this moment, I dare say, no
different for it all, having but burgeoned and withered like a tree.

When Maud Gonne returned she became our directing mind both in England and
in Ireland, and it was mainly at her bidding that our movement become a
protest against the dissensions, the lack of dignity, of the Parnellite
and Anti-Parnellite parties, who had fought one another for seven or eight
years, till busy men passed them by, as they did those performing cats
that in my childhood I used to see, pretending to spit at one another on a
table, outside Charing Cross station. Both parliamentary parties seeing
that all young Ireland, and a good part of old, were in the movement,
tried to join us, the Anti-Parnellite without abandoning its separate
identity. They were admitted I think, but upon what terms I do not
remember. I and two or three others had to meet Michael Davitt, and a
member of parliament called F. X. O'Brien to talk out the question of
separate identity, and I remember nothing of what passed but the manner
and image of Michael Davitt. He seemed hardly more unfitted for such
negotiation, perhaps even for any possible present politics, than I
myself, and I watched him with sympathy. One knows by the way a man sits
in his chair if he have emotional intensity, and Davitt's suggested to me
a writer, a painter, an artist of some kind, rather than a man of action.
Then, too, F. X. O'Brien did not care whether he used a good or a bad
argument, whether he seemed a fool or a clever man, so that he carried his
point, but if he used a bad argument Davitt would bring our thought back
to it tho