tation, found very
moving by English sympathisers, of the tear and the smile in Erin's eye.
They may even have had more sincerity than their sort elsewhere, but they
had inherited a cause that men had died for, and they themselves had gone
to jail for it, and had so worn their hereditary martyrdom that they had
seemed for a time no common men, and now must pay the penalty. "I have
just told Mahaffy," Wilde had said to me, "that it is a party of men of
genius," and now John O'Leary, Taylor, and many obscure sincere men had
pulled them down; and yet, should what followed, judged by an eye that
thinks most of the individual soul, be counted as more clearly out of the
common? A movement first of poetry, then of sentimentality, and land
hunger, had struggled with, and as the nation passed into the second
period of all revolutions, had given way before a movement of abstraction
and hatred; and after some twenty years of the second period, though
abstraction and hatred have won their victory, there is no clear sign, of
a third, a _tertium quid_, and a reasonable frame of mind.

Seeing that only the individual soul can attain to its spiritual opposite,
a nation in tumult must needs pass to and fro between mechanical
opposites, but one hopes always that those opposites may acquire sex and
engender. At moments when I have thought of the results of political
subjection upon Ireland I have remembered a story told me by Oscar Wilde
who professed to have found it in a book of magic, "if you carve a
Cerberus upon an emerald," he said, "and put it in the oil of a lamp and
carry it into a room where your enemy is, two heads will come upon his
shoulders and devour one another."

Instead of sharing our traditional sentimental rhetoric with every man who
had found a practical grievance, whether one care a button for the
grievance or not, most of us were prosecuting heretics. Nationality was
like religion, few could be saved, and meditation had but one theme--the
perfect nation and its perfect service. "Public opinion," said an
anonymous postcard sent to a friend of mine, "will compel you to learn
Irish," and it certainly did compel many persons of settled habits to
change tailor and cloth. I believed myself dressed according to public
opinion, until a letter of apology from my tailor informed me that "It
takes such a long time getting Connemara cloth as it has to come all the
way from Scotland."

The Ireland of men's affections must be,