we have here the Tree of Life and that of the knowledge of
Good and Evil which is rooted in our interests, and if we have forgotten
their differing virtues it is surely because we have taken delight in a
confusion of crossing branches. Tragic art, passionate art, the drowner
of dykes, the confounder of understanding, moves us by setting us to
reverie, by alluring us almost to the intensity of trance. The persons
upon the stage, let us say, greaten till they are humanity itself. We
feel our minds expand convulsively or spread out slowly like some
moon-brightened image-crowded sea. That which is before our eyes
perpetually vanishes and returns again in the midst of the excitement it
creates, and the more enthralling it is, the more do we forget it.

August, 1910.

JOHN SHAWE-TAYLOR

There is a portrait of John Shawe-Taylor by a celebrated painter in the
Dublin Municipal Gallery, but painted in the midst of a movement of the
arts that exalts characteristics above the more typical qualities, it
does not show us that beautiful and gracious nature. There is an
exaggeration of the hollows of the cheeks and of the form of the bones
which empties the face of the balance and delicacy of its lines. He was
a very handsome man, as women who have imagination and tradition
understand those words, and had he not been so, mind and character had
been different. There are certain men, certain famous commanders of
antiquity, for instance, of whose good looks the historian always
speaks, and whose good looks are the image of their faculty; and these
men copying hawk or leopard have an energy of swift decision, a power of
sudden action, as if their whole body were their brain.

A few years ago he was returning from America, and the liner reached
Queenstown in a storm so great that the tender that came out to it for
passengers returned with only one man. It was John Shawe-Taylor, who had
leaped as it was swept away from the ship.

The achievement that has made his name historic and changed the history
of Ireland came from the same faculty of calculation and daring, from
that instant decision of the hawk, between the movement of whose wings
and the perception of whose eye no time passes capable of division. A
proposal for a Land Conference had been made, and cleverer men than he
were but talking the life out of it. Every argument for and against had
been debated over and over, and it was plain that nothing but argument
would come