Coming to the substance of the book—­the glance from many sides at the Irish and English temperaments—­we find Meredith extremely penetrating in his criticism of John Bullishness, but something of a foreigner in his study of the Irish character.  The son of an Irishwoman, he chose an Irishwoman as 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 iconoclast.  He has not realized with sufficient clearness that, while Wilde belonged to the first rank as a wit, he was scarcely better than second-rate as anything else.  Consequently, it is not Wilde the beau of literature who dominates his book.  Rather, it is Wilde the egoistic,—­aesthetic philosopher, and Wilde the imaginative artist.