r gold can buy. They no longer love, for only life is
loved, and at last, a generation is like an hysterical woman who will
make unmeasured accusations and believe impossible things, because of
some logical deduction from a solitary thought which has turned a
portion of her mind to stone.

III

Even if what one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continual
apology, whatever the cause, makes the mind barren because it kills
intellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the
mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that
must come before all true thought and emotion. A zealous Irishman,
especially if he lives much out of Ireland, spends his time in a
never-ending argument about Oliver Cromwell, the Danes, the penal laws,
the rebellion of 1798, the famine, the Irish peasant, and ends by
substituting a traditional casuistry for a country; and if he be a
Catholic, yet another casuistry that has professors, schoolmasters,
letter-writing priests and the authors of manuals to make the meshes
fine, comes between him and English literature, substituting arguments
and hesitations for the excitement at the first reading of the great
poets which should be a sort of violent imaginative puberty. His
hesitations and arguments may have been right, the Catholic philosophy
may be more profound than Milton's morality, or Shelley's vehement
vision; but none the less do we lose life by losing that recklessness
Castiglione thought necessary even in good manners, and offend our Lady
Truth, who would never, had she desired an anxious courtship, have
digged a well to be her parlour.

I admired, though we were always quarrelling, J. F. Taylor, the orator,
who died just before the first controversy over these plays. It often
seemed to me that when he spoke Ireland herself had spoken, one got that
sense of surprise that comes when a man has said what is unforeseen
because it is far from the common thought, and yet obvious because when
it has been spoken, the gate of the mind seems suddenly to roll back and
reveal forgotten sights and let loose lost passions. I have never heard
him speak except in some Irish literary or political society, but there
at any rate, as in conversation, I found a man whose life was a
ceaseless reverie over the religious and political history of Ireland.
He saw himself pleading for his country before an invisible jury,
perhaps of the great dead, against traitors at ho