in language. Our negotiations, which interested so much F. X. O'Brien and my two negotiators, a barrister and a doctor, bored him I thought, even more than they did me, to whom they were a novelty; but the Highland plan with its historical foundation and its vague possibilities excited him, and it seemed to me that what we said or did stirred him at other moments also to some similar remote thought and emotion. I think he returned my sympathy, for a little before his death he replied to some word of congratulation I sent him after the speech in which he resigned his seat in the House of Commons, with an account of some project of his for improving the quality of the Irish Representation there.
XLVII
I think that he shared with poet and philosopher the necessity of speaking the whole mind or remaining silent or ineffective, and he had been for years in a movement, where, to adapt certain words of a friend of mine, the heart upon the sleeve was as essential as the tongue in the cheek. The founders of the Irish Agrarian Movement had acted upon the doctrine, contradicted by religious history, that ignorant men will not work for an idea, or feel a political passion for its own sake, and that you must find a lever as it was called, some practical grievance, and I do not think that I am fantastic in believing that this faith in levers, universal among revolutionaries, is but a result of that mechanical philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, which has, as Coleridge said, turned the human mind into the quicksilver at the back of a mirror, though it still permitted a work of art to seem "a mirror dawdling along a road."
O'Leary had told me the story, not I think hitherto published. A prominent Irish American not long released from the prison where Fenianism had sent him, cabled to Parnell, "Take up Land Reform side by side with the National Question and we will support you. See Kickham." What had Parnell, a landowner and a haughty man, to do with the peasant or the peasant's grievance? And he was indeed so ignorant of both that he asked Kickham, novelist and Fenian leader, if he thought the people would take up a land agitation, and Kickham answered, "I am only afraid they would go to the Gates of Hell for it" and O'Leary's comment was "and so they have."
And so was founded an agitation where some men pretended to
