There, in Ireland, you get a strange mixture of elementary early peoples, walled off from the outer world by the four seas, and free to work out their own racial amalgam on their own lines.  They brought with them at the outset a great inheritance of Eastern mysticism.  Others lost it, but the Irish, all alone on their island, kept it alive and brooded on it, and rooted their whole spiritual side in it.  Their religion is full of it; their blood is full of it....  The Ireland of two thousand years ago is incarnated in her.  They are the merriest people and the saddest, the most turbulent and the most docile, the most talented and the most unproductive, the most practical and the most visionary, the most devout and the most pagan.  These impossible contradictions war ceaselessly in their blood.[30]

In our conversation what struck me most was the influence which politics had exercised even on his philosophic mind, notwithstanding a low estimate of our political leaders.  In one of a series of three notable articles upon the Irish Question, which appeared anonymously in the Fortnightly Review[31] in the winter of 1893-4, and of which he told me he was the writer, he had given a character sketch of what he called ‘The Rhetoricians.’  Their performances since the Union were summarised in the phrase ‘a century of unremitting gabble,’ and he regarded it as a sad commentary on Irish life that such brilliant talents so largely ran to waste in destructive criticism.

I naturally turned the conversation on to my own line of thought, and discussed the practical conclusions to which his studies had led him.  I tried to elicit from him exactly what he had in his mind when, in one of the articles to which I have referred, he advocated ’a reconstruction of Ireland on distinctive national lines.’  I hoped to find that his psychological study of my countrymen would enable him to throw some light upon the means by which play could be given at home to the latent capacities of the race.  I found that he was in entire accord with my view, that the chief difficulty in the way of constructive statesmanship was the defect in the Irish character about which I have said so much.  I was prepared for that conclusion, for I had already seen the lack of initiative admirably appreciated in the following illuminating sentence of his:—­’The Celt will help someone else to do the thing that other has in mind, and will help him with great zeal and devotion; but he will not start to do the thing he himself has thought of.’[32] But I was disappointed when he bade me his first and last good-bye that I had not convinced him that there was any way out of the Irish difficulty other than political changes, for which, at the same time, he appeared to think the people singularly unfitted.