draw a great audience in any country town, had been the
lecturer. The scheme was very nearly self-supporting, and six or seven
bundles of books, chosen after much disputation by John O'Leary, J. F.
Taylor, and myself, had been despatched to some six or seven branches.
"The country will support this work" Taylor had said somewhere on some
public platform, "because we are the most inflammable people on God's
earth," his harsh voice giving almost a quality of style to Carlylian
commonplace; but we are also a very jealous people. The half-a-dozen young
men, if a little jealous of me, were still more jealous of those country
branches which were getting so much notice, and where there was so much of
that peasant mind their schoolmasters had taught them to despise. One must
be English or Irish, they would have said. I returned to find a great box
of books appropriated for some Dublin purpose and the whole scheme
abandoned. I know that it was a bitter moment because I remember with
gratitude words spoken not to my ear, but for my ear, by a young man who
had lately joined our Society, Mr. Stephen McKenna, now well-known amongst
scholars for his distinguished translations of Plotinus, and I seem to
remember that I lost through anger what gift of persuasion I may possess,
and that I was all the more helpless because I felt that even the best of
us disagreed about everything at heart. I began to feel that I needed a
hostess more than a society, but that I was not to find for years to
come. I tried to persuade Maud Gonne to be that hostess, but her social
life was in Paris, and she had already formed a new ambition, the turning
of French public opinion against England. Without intellectual freedom
there can be no agreement, and in Nationalist Dublin there was not--indeed
there still is not--any society where a man is heard by the right ears,
but never overheard by the wrong, and where he speaks his whole mind
gaily, and is not the cautious husband of a part; where phantasy can play
before matured into conviction; where life can shine and ring, and lack
utility. Mere life lacking the protection of wealth or rank, or some
beauty's privilege of caprice cannot choose its company, taking up and
dropping men merely because it likes, or dislikes, their manners and their
looks, and in its stead opinion crushes and rends, and all is hatred and
bitterness: wheel biting upon wheel, a roar of steel or iron tackle, a
mill of argument grinding all t