me and enemies abroad,
and a sort of frenzy in his voice and the moral elevation of his
thoughts gave him for the moment style and music. One asked oneself
again and again, 'Why is not this man an artist, a man of genius, a
creator of some kind?' The other day under the influence of memory, I
read through his one book, a life of Owen Roe O'Neill, and found there
no sentence detachable from its context because of wisdom or beauty.
Everything was argued from a premise; and wisdom and style, whether in
life or letters, come from the presence of what is self-evident, from
that which requires but statement, from what Blake called 'naked beauty
displayed.' The sense of what was unforeseen and obvious, the rolling
backward of the gates, had gone with the living voice, with the nobility
of will that made one understand what he saw and felt in what was now
but argument and logic. I found myself in the presence of a mind like
some noisy and powerful machine, of thought that was no part of wisdom
but the apologetic of a moment, a woven thing, no intricacy of leaf and
twig, of words with no more of salt and of savour than those of a Jesuit
professor of literature, or of any other who does not know that there is
no lasting writing which does not define the quality, or carry the
substance of some pleasure. How can one, if one's mind be full of
abstractions and images created not for their own sake but for the sake
of party, even if there were still the need, make pictures for the
mind's eye and sounds that delight the ear, or discover thoughts that
tighten the muscles, or quiver and tingle in the flesh, and so stand
like St. Michael with the trumpet that calls the body to resurrection?

IV

Young Ireland had taught a study of our history with the glory of
Ireland for event, and this for lack, when less than Taylor studied, of
comparison with that of other countries wrecked the historical instinct.
An old man with an academic appointment, who was a leader in the attack
upon Synge sees in the eleventh century romance of Deirdre a retelling
of the first five-act tragedy outside the classic languages, and this
tragedy from his description of it was certainly written on the
Elizabethan model; while an allusion to a copper boat, a marvel of magic
like Cinderella's slipper, persuades him that the ancient Irish had
forestalled the modern dockyards in the making of metal ships. The man
who doubted, let us say, our fabulous ancient kings ru