rest—find those consequences unendurable. The minds that have it grow always more abundant, more imaginative, more full of fantasy even, as its object approaches, and to deny that play of mind is to make belief itself impossible.
VII
I have worked with Mr. Lennox Robinson for years, and there are times when I see him daily and I know that his mind plays constantly about the most profound problems; and that especially of late his Art, under the mask of our brisk Dublin comedy, has shown itself akin to that of writers who have created a vision of life Turtullian would have accepted. I think of Strindberg in his Spook Sonata, in his Father, in his books of autobiography, as mad and as profound as King Lear; of James Joyce in his Ulysses, lying 'upon his right and left side' like Ezekiel and eating 'dung' that he may raise 'other men to a perception to the infinite'; of John Synge, lost to the 'dazzling dark' of his Well of the Saints and of the last act of his Deirdre. I cannot deny my sympathy to these austere minds though I am of that school of lyric poets that has raised the cry of Ruysbroeck though in vain: 'I must rejoice, I must rejoice with ceasing, even if the world shudder at my joy'.
VIII
The intellect of Ireland is irreligious. I doubt if one could select from any Irish writer of the last hundred and fifty years until the present generation, a solitary sentence that might be included in a reputable anthology of religious thought. Ireland has produced but two men of religious genius: Johannes Scotus Erigena, who lived a long time ago, and Bishop Berkeley, who kept his Plato by his Bible, and Ireland has forgotten both; and its moral system being founded upon habit, not intellectual conviction, has shown of late that it cannot resist the onset of modern
