It is, however, on more general grounds that I have, albeit as an outside observer, watched with some anxiety and much gratification the progress of the Gaelic Revival.  In the historical evolution of the Irish mind we find certain qualities atrophied, so to speak, by disuse; and to this cause I attribute the past failures of the race in practical life at home.  I have shown how politics, religion, and our systems of education have all, in their respective influences upon the people, missed to a large extent, the effect upon character which they should have made it their paramount duty to produce.  Nevertheless, whenever the intellect of the people is appealed to by those who know its past, a recuperative power is manifested which shows that its vitality has not been irredeemably impaired.  It is because I believe that, on the whole, a right appeal has been made by the Gaelic League that I have borne testimony to its patriotic endeavours.

The question of the Gaelic Revival seems to be really a form of the eternal question of the interdependence of the practical and the ideal in Ireland.  Their true relation to each other is one of the hardest lessons the student of our problems has to learn.  I recall an incident in the course of my own studies which I will here recount, as it appears to me to furnish an admirable illustration of this difficulty as it presented itself to a very interesting mind.  During the years covering the rise and fall of Parnell, when interest in the Irish Question was at its zenith, the newspapers of the United States kept in London a corps of very able correspondents, who watched and reported to their transatlantic readers every move in the Home Rule campaign.  An American public, by no means limited to the American-Irish, devoured every morsel of this intelligence with an avidity which could not have been surpassed if the United States had been engaged in a war with Great Britain.  Among these correspondents perhaps the most brilliant was the late Harold Frederic.  Not many months before he died I received a letter from him, in which he said that, although we were unknown to each other, he thought, from some public utterances of mine, that we must have many views in common.  He had often intended to get an introduction to me, and now suggested that we should ‘waive things and meet.’  We met and spent an evening together, which left some deep impressions on my mind.  He told me that the Irish Question possessed for him a fascination for which he could give no rational explanation.  He had absolutely no tie of blood or material interest with Ireland, and his friendship for it had brought him the only quarrels in which he had ever been engaged.

What chiefly interested me in Harold Frederic’s philosophy of the Irish Question was that he had arrived at a diagnosis of the Irish mind not substantially different from my own.  Since that evening I have come across a passage in one of his novels, which clothes in delightful language his view of the chaotic psychology of the Celt: