dies, but
it is infinitely the pleasantest; there is no bitter tang in its hearty
humour. Even in _The Enthusiast_, a sketch which has some touch of
pessimism, there is little more than a good-humoured shrug of the
shoulders when the Enthusiast abandons his pretensions to make himself
heard against the banging of Orange drums. I find a very different note,
not merely in the work of Synge, of Boyle, Colum, Lennox Robinson, and
the rest of the Abbey dramatists, but even in the books of which Miss
Somerville was joint author. When Ireland is seen with the eyes, for
instance, of her Major Yeates, is not the whole attitude one of amused
and acquiescent resignation? Take the hunting out of it (with all the
humours of the hunt)--take the shooting and fishing--and what is left
but a life (to borrow a phrase from Mr. George Moore) "as melancholy as
bog-water and as ineffectual." Miss Somerville would probably decline
to imagine an Ireland with these unthinkable suppressions, but after
all, we cannot live by or for sport alone. What gave dignity and reality
to the life of yesterday was leadership in one class, and loyalty in the
other. Leadership resting on ownership is gone now, dead as the dodo;
what is left for the like (say) of Mr. Flurry Knox if he should begin to
take himself seriously? You can easily make a soldier of him; we have
all met him in trenches and observed his airy attitude in No Man's Land.
But soldiering has generally meant expatriation. For my part, I hope
some day to see this gentleman (or his like) play a useful part in some
battalion of Irish territorials--some home service offshoot of the
Connaught Rangers. But that is not enough. If those who, like Miss
Somerville, love Ireland's yesterday and desire to link it up with a
worthy to-morrow, there must be a wider understanding of Ireland, not in
the North only, but in that element of the South and West which stands
to-day in a sense morally expatriated. The Irish gentry who complain
that their tenants "deserted" them must learn where they themselves
failed their tenants. Leadership cannot depend merely on a power to
evict, and they would to-day repudiate the desire for a leadership so
grounded. But between free men where there is not comprehension there
can be no leadership.

I take first what is most difficult--the very heart of antagonism.
Everyone who desires to understand Ireland to-day should read Patrick
Pearse's posthumous book, called boldly _The St