Everywhere he went he was an alien and suspected.  Do what he would, he fell between two countries and two courses.  Ireland had cast him out and England would none of him.  He hated Catholicism and Protestantism alike, and Protestants and Catholics alike disowned him.  To every Church and every sect he was a free thinker, destitute of all religion.  Yet few men were more religious.  His enemies called him a turner and a twister; yet on any one of his lines no man ever steered a straighter course.

A capacity for turning and twisting might have saved him.  It would at any rate have made him more intelligible.  As it was, he presented to two countries the disconcerting spectacle of a many-sided object moving with violence in a dead straight line.  He moved so fast that to a stationary on-looker he was gone before one angle of him had been apprehended.  It was for other people to turn and twist if any one of them was to get a complete all-round view of the amazing man.

But taken all round he passed for a man of hard wit and suspicious brilliance.

And he belonged to no generation.  In nineteen-thirteen he was not yet forty, too old to count among the young men, and yet too young for men of his own age.  So that in all Ireland and all England you could not have found a lonelier man.

The same queer doom pursued him in the most private and sacred relations of his life.  To all intents and purposes he was married to Vera Harrison and yet he was not married.  He was neither bound nor free.

All this had made him sorrowful and bitter.

And to add to his sorrowfulness and bitterness he had something of the Celt’s spiritual abhorrence of the flesh; and though he loved Vera, after his manner, there were moments when Vera’s capacity for everlasting passion left him tired and bored and cold.

All his life his passions had been at the service of ideas.  All his life he had looked for some great experience, some great satisfaction and consummation; and he had not found it.

In nineteen-thirteen, with half his life behind him, the opportunist was still waiting for his supreme opportunity.

Meanwhile his enemies said of him that he snatched.

But he did not snatch.  The eyes of his idealism were fixed too steadily on a visionary future.  He merely tried, with a bored and weary gesture, to waylay the passing moment while he waited.  He had put his political failure behind him and said, “I will be judged as an artist or not at all.”  They judged him accordingly and their judgment was wrong.