any Celtic conception of the honourable and the loveable;
so that the Celt anxious to admire is rebutted, and
the hatred of a Celt, quick as he is to catch at images,
has a figure of hugeous animalism supplied to his
malign contempt. Rockney’s historic England,
and the living heroic England to slip from that dull
hide in a time of trial, whether of war or social
suffering, he cannot see, nor a people hardening to
Spartan lineaments in the fire, iron men to meet disaster,
worshippers of a discerned God of Laws, and just men
too, thinking to do justice; he has Bull on the eye,
the alternately braggart and poltroon, sweating in
labour that he may gorge the fruits, graceless to a
scoffer. And this is the creature to whose tail
he is tied! Hereditary hatred is approved by
critical disgust. Some spirited brilliancy, some
persistent generosity (other than the guzzle’s
flash of it), might soften him; something sweeter
than the slow animal well-meaningness his placable
brethren point his attention to. It is not seen,
and though he can understand the perils of a severance,
he prefers to rub the rawness of his wound and be
ready to pitch his cap in the air for it, out of sheer
bloodloathing of a connection that offers him nothing
to admire, nothing to hug to his heart. Both
below and above the blind mass of discontent in his
island, the repressed sentiment of admiration-or passion
of fealty and thirst to give himself to a visible
brighter—is an element of the division:
meditative young Patrick O’Donnell early in his
reflections had noted that:—and it is partly
a result of our daily habit of tossing the straw to
the monetary world and doting on ourselves in the mirror,
until our habitual doings are viewed in a bemused
complacency by us, and the scum-surface of the country
is flashed about as its vital being. A man of
forethought using the Press to spur Parliament to fitly
represent the people, and writing on his daily topics
with strenuous original vigour, even though, like
Rockney, he sets the teeth of the Celt gnashing at
him, goes a step nearer to the bourne of pacification
than Press and Parliament reflecting the popular opinion
that law must be passed to temper Ireland’s
eruptiveness; for that man can be admired, and the
Celt, in combating him, will like an able and gallant
enemy better than a grudgingly just, lumbersome, dull,
politic friend. The material points in a division
are always the stronger, but the sentimental are here
very strong. Pass the laws; they may put an
extinguisher on the Irish Vesuvian; yet to be loved
you must be a little perceptibly admirable. You
may be so self-satisfied as to dispense with an ideal:
your yoke-fellow is not; it is his particular form
of strength to require one for his proper blooming,
and he does bloom beautifully in the rays he courts.