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.