n in the world, he has
often written really in order to hurt; not because he hated any
particular men (he is hardly hot and animal enough for that), but
because he really hated certain ideas even unto slaying. He provokes; he
will not let people alone. One might even say that he bullies, only
that this would be unfair, because he always wishes the other man to hit
back. At least he always challenges, like a true Green Islander. An even
stronger instance of this national trait can be found in another eminent
Irishman, Oscar Wilde. His philosophy (which was vile) was a philosophy
of ease, of acceptance, and luxurious illusion; yet, being Irish, he
could not help putting it in pugnacious and propagandist epigrams. He
preached his softness with hard decision; he praised pleasure in the
words most calculated to give pain. This armed insolence, which was the
noblest thing about him, was also the Irish thing; he challenged all
comers. It is a good instance of how right popular tradition is even
when it is most wrong, that the English have perceived and preserved
this essential trait of Ireland in a proverbial phrase. It _is_ true
that the Irishman says, "Who will tread on the tail of my coat?"

But there is a second cause which creates the English fallacy that the
Irish are weak and emotional. This again springs from the very fact that
the Irish are lucid and logical. For being logical they strictly
separate poetry from prose; and as in prose they are strictly prosaic,
so in poetry they are purely poetical. In this, as in one or two other
things, they resemble the French, who make their gardens beautiful
because they are gardens, but their fields ugly because they are only
fields. An Irishman may like romance, but he will say, to use a frequent
Shavian phrase, that it is "only romance." A great part of the English
energy in fiction arises from the very fact that their fiction half
deceives them. If Rudyard Kipling, for instance, had written his short
stories in France, they would have been praised as cool, clever little
works of art, rather cruel, and very nervous and feminine; Kipling's
short stories would have been appreciated like Maupassant's short
stories. In England they were not appreciated but believed. They were
taken seriously by a startled nation as a true picture of the empire and
the universe. The English people made haste to abandon England in favour
of Mr. Kipling and his imaginary colonies; they made haste to ab