possibly be more unfit for Home Rule than the Englishmen in question are for Union.

any.

But this conclusion, however logically drawn, will of course not recommend itself to any one with Conservative sympathies; and persuasion must take a more concrete form if it can take And the best way to begin seems to be by asking Englishmen, in all seriousness, whether there are any faults in the Irish character which do not exist in their own in varying degrees. Quaintly enough, many of them point to the quarrelsomeness of Irish politicians among themselves as a proof of their unfitness for self-rule, when it is actually only the quarrelsomeness of English politicians that has kept the existing Irish party on the stretch up to the point of developing disastrous strife within its own ranks. Had not the English Liberal party earlier split up, as the Parnellite party did later, Home Rule would have been carried ere now, and the Parnellite party first split on a rock that would have shivered any English party whatever. It is true that the Conservative party has, in general, less internal strife than the Liberal, the reason being, not any wisdom or self-restraint among its members, but the fact that they are united mainly in order to prevent any Liberal legislation; whereas Liberals, having among them a great variety of plans, tend to divide on these.1 But no English Conservative leader of modern times could have held his party together any better than did Mr Parnell, if he had personally figured in similar circumstances.

We shall deal later with the historical aspects of the comparison between the two races, so called; but it may be profitable at the outset to press it a little further as regards our own generation. When anti-Irish Englishmen are not speaking of Irish quarrelsomeness, they are heard to call Irishmen unstable and untruthful. The latter charge seems peculiarly supererogatory, when we remember that at any moment the leaders of parties in England are confidently believed to be untruthful by myriads of the opposite side. Hundreds of thousands of Englishmen have habitually regarded Mr Gladstone as a prevaricator. Hundreds of thousands more have rather more confidently taken the same view of his antagonists, Lords Beaconsfield and Salisbury. Mr Chamberlain cannot possibly be more convinced of the untrustworthiness of the Irish members with whom he used to plot, than multitudes of his own countrymen are convinced of his.

1 Now that we have a Coalition Ministry, with a variety of plans for activity, the principle of discord at once comes into fresh play in the coalition ranks.

It seems, therefore, quite idle to discuss the question of Irish truthfulness. It can hardly matter, for purposes of practical politics. I would only note in passing, first, that Englishmen in the mass are pronounced perfidious by large numbers of Frenchmen, Germans, and Russians; secondly, that so early as the fourteenth century, Petrarch, when assigning the qualities of the nations in the entertaining way in which those things were done then as now, pronounced "craftiness" to be the special English characteristic; and, thirdly, that an accomplished and thoughtful Englishman who lived a great deal in France, the late Mr P. G. Hamerton, seemed to be somewhat of Petrarch's opinion. This is what he says1 on the subject of comparative lying, French and English.

"I notice . . . a difference in kind and quality between French and English lying. The French are daring enough, but they are not really clever in the art. They have much audacity, but little skill. They will say what is not true with wonderful decision, and they will stick to it afterwards; but the English surpass them infinitely in craft and guile. The typical French lie is a simple, shameless invention; the typical English lie is not merely half a truth; it is entangled with halfa-dozen truths, or semblances of truth, so that it becomes most difficult to separate them. . .

After this, surely, the question of comparative truthfulness had better be dropped among us. The scientific fact seems to be that we all-all nations, that is-lie more or less, some in haste, some otherwise.

It

But the question of temperamental instability is worth discussing seriously. "Hysteria" used to be charged against Irishmen in the lump by some Englishmen, before "Ulsteria" became so epidemic: the phrase "the blind hysterics of the Celt" is one of the late Lord Tennyson's contributions to sociology. happened that he was in his own politics, as in his philosophy of life, one of the most hysterical men of genius of his time; some of his leading competitors in that character being men of his own political way of thinking, as Mr Carlyle and Dr Tyndall. But it is not necessary to rest here on a mere tu quoque: for it can be demonstrated that almost all the well-known English men of letters who in recent times have taken it upon them to expose the instability of the Irish character are themselves, to the medical

1 French and English, 1889, p. 186.

2 Compare The Two Voices and In Memoriam, in which the final problems of philosophy are disposed of in terms of mere hysteria.

and to the critical eye, visibly hysterical. Kingsley, who was one of the first prophets of the "Teutonic forefather" gospel in England; who made even sentimental patriots wince by his oracle, "the hosts of our (Teutonic) forefathers were the hosts of God"; and who aspersed the character of the Irish in mass, was, I suppose, the most flagrantly hysterical type in all modern literature. He seemed incapable of writing a page save in a tumult of hysteria; so that even the charm and the sincerity of his character cannot save much of his writing from being nauseous; and the constant affectation of strength cannot disguise the real weakness. And he has many congeners, of his own and other ethical schools. Take, after Mr Carlyle and Dr Tyndall, such distinguished writers as Mr Froude, Mr Goldwin Smith, Mr Swinburne, and Mr Kipling. Mr Froude and Mr Smith are dealt with separately in another part of this volume, for such readers as may demand rigorous demonstration; but I fancy that any really cool-headed and critical reader will admit at once that they are emphatically hysterical types, incapable of consistency, vacillating, blusterous, gustily sentimental, childishly self-contradictory, in a word, weakly emotional where for just judgment or wise counsel there is needed a high degree of sanity and coherence. As for Mr Kipling, his way of dealing with Irish matters, where meant to be funny, is lamentable, and where meant to be serious is very funny. This writer unconsciously typifies, with a success worthy of his own genius for type-drawing (to which I have pleasure in bearing here an impartial testimony), the extreme simplicity of the mental processes of his party. Whatsoever race happens at any moment to be the object of Mr Kipling's patriotic distrust is conceived of by him as consisting in mass of cads and cowards. Thus in one story he triumphantly presents an excessively caddish Russian officer as a type of everything Russian: there is no admission of possible exceptions. Natives of India in the mass, barring the specially warlike tribes, are commonly presented by him as cowards; but when in the tale a hysterical native prince, in the fulness of his loyalty to Her Majesty, goes as far as even after-banquet decorum will permit in the way of insulting the solitary Russian officer, Mr Kipling gleefully presents him as a hero who will be of value on the English side in what Mr Lang eloquently calls "that dreadful battle drawing nigh, to thunder through the Afghan passes sheer." So with Mr Kipling's treatment of the Irish problem. So long as Irishmen are content to fight for "the Queen, God bless her," Mr Kipling joyously recognises their merits. Mul

vaney is his favourite soldier. But inasmuch as most Irishmen choose to work for Home Rule, and some of them commit brutal outrages, Mr Kipling sees, with the eye of genius, that the tendency to certain specific forms of outrage is hereditary in the stock; and so he constructs for us the pleasing tale of the Thibetan offspring of a disaffected Irish soldier who spontaneously take to cutting off cows' tails by night to avenge themselves in a quarrel. If only there had been any strong movement for Home Rule in the Scotch Highlands, with some of the crimes which follow on intense agrarain discontent, we should doubtless have had from Mr Kipling a similar tale concerning the Scottish Celt, as an offset to the study of "The Drums of the Fore and Aft," where the Celts are perhaps a little too favourably contrasted with the unlucky regiment of raw English. Mr Kipling can adjust his muse to most exigencies. When the late Mr Parnell, in his overbalanced contempt for English opinion, was reckless enough to meet a piece of cross-examination on an old speech with the remark that on a particular occasion he had perhaps "sought to deceive the House," Mr Kipling rose to heights of moral indignation where the Nonconformist conscience itself could scarcely breathe, and delivered a withering sermon in verse on the subject. One is disposed to meet it by asking Mr Kipling whether Mr Parnell was not as much entitled to latitude of exposition as he? Is all the deceit to be on the English side? Might it not suggest itself to a man with some sense of humour, and some eye for courage, that Mr Parnell did but show himself a stronger man than the unavowed prevaricators on the other side of the dispute? Is Mr Parnell's method so peculiar, in comparison with Lord Salisbury's direction to Lord Lytton to "make a pretext," in his dealings with Afghanistan; or with the systematic prevarication of the Foreign Office in Parliament on such a matter as the invasion of the Soudan?

The spectacle of Mr Kipling's political and ethnological propaganda leads us to a conclusion which it is often profitable to keep in mind that a great deal of harm can be done in the world by irrational men of genius. For there is such a thing as irrational genius, as there is such a thing as witty stupidity; and both forces play a great part in most political strifes. In the case of Mr Swinburne, therefore, we may let the ascription of genius pass without qualification, leaving his verse in the mass to those who think it great poetry, only pointing out that of the several qualities which can fitly secure for the political opinions of a poet or anyone else a title to respect, Mr Swinburne's

poetry exhibits at most one-that of enthusiasm. Of wisdom or weight of character, of measure, of decent self-restraint, of gravity of reflection on disturbing themes, no English poet has ever given less sign. Furious abuse of Frenchmen in the mass, after loud laudation of Frenchmen in the mass; unworthy abuse of Walt Whitman after fervent acclamation of Walt Whitman; these are among the later illustrations Mr Swinburne has given us of his stability and his sense. If Irishmen lack strength, and self-control, and constancy, they are hardly to be convicted of it by the author of " Songs before Sunrise."

For many readers, it must be quite unnecessary to press these unpleasant points. Men with any turn for discrimination must have noted how little of solidity or strength enters into most literary proclamations of the greatness of English character; how much of windy weakness there is in the English rhetoricians who ascribe to weakness of character the misfortunes of the Irish people. Even on the Unionist side, the championship of Mr Froude and Mr Swinburne must cause some misgivings. And as regards the interference of poets in political disputes generally, the recent exhibitions of the Poet Laureate have done something to bring home to the public mind the fact that though a poet may happen to be inspired by a good cause, he is no better a judge of causes than anybody else; and that the opinion of the Poet Laureate on political problems has no more special weight than that of the President of the Royal Academy, or the head of the Academy of Music. But if we are to judge the frame of mind of the English majority by the general run of the literature of Unionism, we cannot escape the conviction that these outcries of primitive passion and prejudice find a ready echo and applause among a multitude similarly disposed, and thus tend to fix and worsen a state of mind which, being often entered into with youthful haste or in momentary exasperation, might otherwise yield to criticism and reflection. So the spirit of racial malice persists: indeed, the very nature of the dispute tends to foster it. It is almost inevitable that there should still be attacks by Irishmen on English character in the lump; and such attacks would produce rejoinders in the lump, even if there were not still the English disposition to make the aggression. Matters which, to a considerate eye, are in nowise proofs of deficiency in Irish character, are often founded on as justifying English disrespect. The composition of the Irish Nationalist party or parties, for instance, is often pointed to as proving a low level of qualification for political life in Ireland. Now, so far are the