s his most conquering heroine, but he writes of the race as
one who has known the men and women of it entirely, or almost entirely, in
an English setting--a setting, in other words, which shows up their
strangeness and any surface eccentricities they may have, but does not
give us an ordinary human sense of them. Captain Con is vital, because
Meredith imagined him vitally, but when all is said and done, he is
largely a stage-Irishman, winking over his whiskey that has paid no
excise--a better-born relative of Captain Costigan.

Politically, _Celt and Saxon_ seems to be a plea for Home Rule--Home Rule,
with a view towards a "consolidation of the union." Its diagnosis of the
Irish difficulty is one which has long been popular with many intellectual
men on this side of the Irish Sea. Meredith sees, as the roots of the
trouble, misunderstanding, want of imagination, want of sympathy. It has
always seemed curious to me that intelligent men could persuade themselves
that Ireland was chiefly suffering from want of understanding and want of
sympathy on the part of England, when all the time her only ailment has
been want of liberty. To adapt the organ-grinder's motto,

Sympathy without relief
Is like mustard without beef.

As a matter of fact, Meredith realized this, and was a friend to many
Irish national movements from the Home Rule struggle down to the Gaelic
League, to the latter of which the Irish part of him sent a subscription a
year or two ago. He saw things from the point of view of an Imperial
Liberal idealist, however, not of a Nationalist. In the result, he did not
know the every-day and traditional setting of Irish life sufficiently well
to give us an Irish Nationalist central figure as winning and heroic, even
in his extravagances, as, say, the patriotic Englishman, Neville
Beauchamp.

At the same time, one must be thankful for a book so obviously the work of
a great abundant mind--a mind giving out its criticisms like flutters of
birds--a heroic intellect always in the service of an ideal liberty,
courage, and gracious manners--a characteristically island brain, that was
yet not insular.

XVII--OSCAR WILDE

Oscar Wilde is a writer whom one must see through in order to appreciate.
One must smash the idol in order to preserve the god. If Mr. Ransome's
estimate of Wilde in his clever and interesting and seriously-written book
is a little unsatisfactory, it is partly because he is not enough of an