had found no passion to harness to
their thought, but here was unwasted passion and precedents in the
popular memory for every needed thought and action. Perhaps, too, it
would be possible to find in that new philosophy of spiritism coming to
a seeming climax in the work of Fredrick Myers, and in the
investigations of uncounted obscure persons, what could change the
country spiritism into a reasoned belief that would put its might into
all the rest. A new belief seemed coming that could be so simple and
demonstrable and above all so mixed into the common scenery of the
world, that it would set the whole man on fire and liberate him from a
thousand obediences and complexities. We were to forge in Ireland a new
sword on our old traditional anvil for that great battle that must in
the end re-establish the old, confident, joyous world. All the while I
worked with this idea, founding societies that became quickly or slowly
everything I despised. One part of me looked on, mischievous and
mocking, and the other part spoke words which were more and more unreal,
as the attitude of mind became more and more strained and difficult.
Madame Maud Gonne could still draw great crowds out of the slums by her
beauty and sincerity, and speak to them of 'Mother Ireland with the
crown of stars about her head.' But gradually the political movement
she was associated with, finding it hard to build up any fine lasting
thing, became content to attack little persons and little things. All
movements are held together more by what they hate than by what they
love, for love separates and individualises and quiets, but the nobler
movements, the only movements on which literature can found itself, hate
great and lasting things. All who have any old traditions have something
of aristocracy, but we had opposing us from the first, though not
strongly from the first, a type of mind which had been without influence
in the generation of Grattan, and almost without it in that of Davis,
and which has made a new nation out of Ireland, that was once old and
full of memories.

I remember, when I was twenty years old, arguing, on my way home from a
Young Ireland Society, that Ireland, with its hieratic Church, its
readiness to accept leadership in intellectual things,--and John O'Leary
spoke much of this readiness,[3]--its Latin hatred of middle paths and
uncompleted arguments, could never create a democratic poet of the type
of Burns, although it had tried to