more clearly out of the common? A movement first of poetry, then of sentimentality, and land-hunger, had struggled with, and as the nation passed into the second period of all revolutions, had given way before a movement of abstraction and hatred; and now after twenty years of the second period though abstraction and hatred have won their victory, there is as yet no clear sign of a third, a tertium quid and a reasonable frame of mind. Seeing that only the individual soul can attain to its spiritual opposite, a nation in tumult must needs pass to and fro between mechanical opposites, but one hopes always that those opposites may acquire sex and engender. At moments when I have thought of the results of political subjection upon Ireland I have remembered a story told me by Oscar Wilde who professed to have found it in a book of magic: "If you carve a Cerberus upon an emerald" he said "and put it in the oil of a lamp and carry it into a room where your enemy is, two heads will come upon his shoulders and devour one another."
Instead of sharing our traditional sentimental rhetoric with every man who had found a practical grievance, whether we cared a button for the grievance or not, most of us were prosecuting heretics. Nationality was like religion, few could be saved, and meditation had but one theme—the perfect nation and its perfect service. "Public opinion" said an anonymous postcard sent to a friend of mine "will compel you to learn Irish" and it certainly did compel many persons of settled habits to change tailor and cloth. I believed myself dressed according to public opinion, until a letter of apology from my tailor informed me that "It took such a long time getting Connemara cloth" as it had to come "all the way from Scotland."
The Ireland of men's affections must be, as it were, self-moving, self-creating, though as yet but few added, avoiding a conclusion that seemed hopeless, altogether separate from England politically. Men for the moment were less concerned with the final achievement than with independence during the struggle for it of English parties and influence. We had no longer any leaders, abstractions were in their place; and our conventions where O'Leary presided interrupting discussion without the least consideration for rules of procedure when the moment came for his cup of coffee, were dominated by little groups, the Gaelic propagandists, though still very few, being the most impassioned, which had the intensity and narrowness of theological sects.
