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I have purposely abstained, throughout the greater part of this article, from arguing the question on anything like high ground. I have called the article The Common-sense of Home Rule,' and I have endeavoured to keep to the strict common-sense of the matter. My object has been to show that Home Rule describes an arrangement the most natural, the most practical, that could be devised for the management of an imperial system; that it is a principle which, if we were not bound by ancient prejudices and blinded by servile devotion to mere phrases, would assuredly commend itself to the common sense of all reasonable persons everywhere. If the relations of the three kingdoms had to be adjusted now for the first time under a free partnership, this is the arrangement which would suggest itself as a mere matter of business to every man capable of forming an opinion in the various parts of the Empire. No statesman now would think of suggesting as a beginning that all the local affairs of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, should be consigned to the care of a miscellaneous assembly already so overburdened with the common business of the Empire, that it is physically unable in any session to get through half its appointed work. An Englishman would naturally say: 'I know nothing about the Irish grand jury system or the Scotch hypothec; I don't suppose the Irish and Scotch members are likely to know much about English county boards. It would be absurd to thrust each other's domestic business in each other's way. If we do this, we shall never get on at all: the only sensible thing we can do is to leave to each country the work it understands and really cares about; and let us meet as a parliament in Westminster for the settlement of business that is strictly imperial, and concerns all parts of the three kingdoms alike.' This is the view that I have endeavoured to impress upon my readers. But I do not forget that there is a far higher view of the question. I hold in the highest reverence that undefined but most subtle and strong influence, the national sentiment, which has been the inspiration and the nurse of so much that is great, noble, and beautiful among all populations who have been allowed to give it expression in their political and social life. There is no influence I dread so much in modern legislation as that fatal desire to run the steam-roller of monotonous and uniform system over all the characteristic peculiarities of race and tradition and habit. If Lord Beaconsfield, when he talked of cosmopolitanism, had had in mind the kind of principle which finds a delight in effacing all national distinctions, and subduing all families and populations to one mournfully monotonous pattern, so that every part of the world should be as like as possible to every other part, I should have joined with all my heart in his denunciation. To insist that because England and Ireland are part of one empire they should necessarily be governed by one centralised system of uniform legislation seems to me about as absurd as to contend that the mountains of Killarney, and Connemara, and Donegal, ought to be removed somehow and the

ground made level in order to bring it into uniformity with the physical exterior of most of the English counties. There is something distinctly elevating and improving in the sentiment of nationality. An old friend of mine, who is now high in the service of the Crown in a far country, was reminding me lately in a letter of the days when we were young and of the sound national discussions, the healthy union of literature and of nationality,' that formed the staple of the talk of young men and boys in Ireland then. I own to the full feeling of his words. There was something fresh and pure in that strong breath of the national sentiment which began to reanimate the youth of Ireland at that time. It kept them from idle and purposeless reading, from sickliness of sentiment, from tendency to anything unwholesome or vulgar or debasing. Perhaps my friend would not have been nearly so useful or so distinguished a servant of the Crown if he had not been brought up in that healthy spirit of nationality which must have made him think, at every momentous crisis of his career, whether the part he was about to take was worthy of his country as well as of himself. I would then encourage the national sentiment. It makes men better and even more practical in the true sense than they would be without it. In so far as the demand for Home Rule is the expression of that sentiment, it is a demand that ought to have the respect of all Englishmen. But I have purposely abstained, throughout the greater part of this article, from taking that higher ground in my argument. I contend for Home Rule not merely because it would be the just admission of an honest and a legitimate desire on the part of a distinct population for the management of the business that is strictly domestic. I do not contend for it merely because it would really tend to reconcile England and Ireland, and make them, for the first time since the Union, friendly and willing copartners in one great imperial system. I now take the lower ground purposely, and put the question as one of common-sense. The machinery at present existing is utterly inadequate to the purposes it is meant to fulfil. The centralised system is a failure. It has collapsed. Some other system must be tried in its place. I point attention to the only system which appears to have simplicity, nature, and common-sense to recommend it-the system which would allow Ireland to manage for herself the business which the Imperial Parliament is not capable of managing properly, and the bare attempt to manage which by the Imperial Parliament only confuses and obstructs the proper business of the central Legislature. The sooner other parts of the Empire make the same demand for themselves that Ireland is making for herself, the better pleased shall I be; but for the present I am concerned about Ireland. I wish to show that Ireland's demand is the demand of common-sense; if that be so, I have no doubt that the example she sets will soon be followed.

VOL. VII.-No. 37.

FF

JUSTIN MCCARTHY.

SHAM ADMIRATION IN LITERATURE.

IN all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature. In the beginning, this is not altogether to be reprobated; it is the rude homage which Ignorance, conscious of its disgrace, offers to Learning; but after a while, Pretence becomes systematised, gathers strength from numbers and impunity, and rears its head in such a manner as to suggest it has some body and substance belonging to it. In England, literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education. When young gentlemen from ten to sixteen are set to study poetry (a subject for which not one in a hundred has the least taste or capability even when he reads it in his own language) in Greek and Latin authors, it is only a natural consequence that their views upon it should be slightly artificial. The youth who objected to the alphabet that it seemed hardly worth while to have gone through so much to have acquired so little, was exceptionally sagacious; the more ordinary lad conceives that what has cost him so much time and trouble, and entailed so many pains and penalties, must needs have something in it, though it has never met his eye. Hence arises our public opinion upon the ancient classics, which I am afraid is somewhat different from (what painters term) the private view. If you take the ordinary admirer of Æschylus, for example-not the scholar, but the man who has had what he believes to be a liberal education' -and appeal to his opinion upon some passage in a British dramatist, say Shakespeare, it is ten to one that he shows not only ignorance of the author (the odds are twenty to one about that), but utter inability to grasp the point in question; it is too deep for him, and especially too subtle. If you are cruel enough to press him, he will unconsciously betray the fact that he has never felt a line of poetry in his life. He honestly believes that the Seven against Thebes is one of the greatest. works that ever were written, just as a child believes the same of the Seven Champions of Christendom. A great wit once observed, when bored by the praises of a man who spoke six languages, that he had known a man to speak a dozen, and yet not say a word worth hearing in any one of them. The humour of the remark, as sometimes happens, has caused its wisdom to be underrated; for the fact is that,

in very many cases, all the intelligence of which a mind is capable is expended upon the mere acquisition of a foreign language. As to getting anything out of it in the way of ideas, and especially of poetical ones, that is almost never attained. There are, indeed, many who have a special facility for languages, but in their case (with a few exceptions) one may say without uncharity that the acquisition of ideas is not their object, though if they did acquire them they would probably be new ones. The majority of us, however, have much difficulty in surmounting the obstacle of an alien tongue; and when we have done so we are naturally inclined to overrate the advantages thus attained. Every one knows the poor creature who quotes French on all occasions with a certain stress on the accent, designed to arouse a doubt in his hearers as to whether he was not actually born in Paris. He, of course, is a low specimen of the class in question, but almost all of us derive a certain intellectual gratification from the mastery of another language, and as we gradually attain to it, whenever we find a meaning we are apt to mistake it for a beauty. Nay, I am convinced that many admire this or that (even) British poet from the fact that here and there his meaning has gleamed upon them with all the charm that accompanies unexpectedness.

Since classical learning is compulsory with us, this bastard admiration is much more often excited with respect to the Greek and Latin poets. Men may not only go through the whole curriculum of a university education, but take high honours in it, without the least intellectual advantage beyond the acquisition of a few quotations. This is not, of course (good heavens !), because the classics have nothing to teach us in the way of poetical ideas, but simply because to the ordinary mind the acquisition of a poetical idea is very difficult, and when conveyed in a foreign language is impossible. If the same student had given the same time-a monstrous thought, of course, but not impracticable-to the cultivation of Shakespeare and the old dramatists, or even to the more modern English poets and thinkers, he would certainly have got more out of them, though he would have missed the delicate suggestiveness of the Greek aorist and the exquisite subtleties of the particle de. Having acquired these last, however, and not for nothing, it is not surprising that he should esteem them very highly, and, being unable to popularise them at dinner parties and the like, he falls back upon praise of the classics generally.

Such are the circumstances which, more particularly in this country, have led to a wellnigh universal habit of literary lying-of a

Since the above was written, my attention has been called to the following remark of De Quincey: As must ever be the case with readers not sufficiently masters of a language to bring the true pretensions of a work to any test of feeling, they are for ever mistaking for some pleasure conferred by the writer, what is in fact the pleasure naturally attached to the sense of a difficulty overcome.'

pretence of admiration for certain works of which in reality we know very little, and for which, if we knew more, we should perhaps care less.

There are certain books which are standard, and as it were planted in the British soil, before which the great majority of us bow the knee and doff the cap with a reverence that, in its ignorance, reminds one of fetish worship, and, in its affectation, of the passion for High Art. The works without which, we are told at book auctions, 'no gentleman's library can be considered complete,' are especially the objects of this adoration. The Rambler, for example, is one of them. I was once shut up for a week of snowstorms in a mountain inn, with the Rambler and one other publication. The latter was a Shepherd's Guide, with illustrations of the way in which sheep are marked by their various owners for the purpose of identification: 'Cropped near ear, upper key bitted far, a pop on the head and another at the tail head, ritted, and with two red strokes down both shoulders,' &c. It was monotonous, but I confess that there were times when I felt it some comfort in having that picture-book to fall back upon, to alternate with the Rambler.

The essay, like port wine, I have noticed, requires age for its due appreciation. Leigh Hunt's Indicator comprises some admirable essays, but the general public have not a word to say for them; it may be urged that that is because they had not read the Indicator. But why then do they praise the Rambler and Montaigne? That comforting word, Mesopotamia,' which has been so often alluded to in religious matters, has many a parallel in profane literature.

A good deal of this mock worship is of course due to abject cowardice. A man who says he doesn't like the Rambler, runs, with some folks, the risk of being thought a fool; but he is sure to be thought that, for something or another, under any circumstances; and, at all events, why should he not content himself, when the Rambler is belauded, with holding his tongue and smiling acquiescence? It must be conceded that there are a few persons who really have read the Rambler, a work, of course, I am merely using as a type of its class. In their young days it was used as a school book, and thought necessary as a part of polite education; and as they have read little or nothing since, it is only reasonable that they should stick to their colours. Indeed, the French satirist's boast that he could predicate the views of any man with regard to both worlds, if he were only supplied with the simple data of his age and his income, is quite true in the general with regard to literary taste. Given the age of the ordinary individual—that is to say of the gentleman fond of books, but who has really no time for reading '—and it is easy enough to guess his literary idols. They are the gods of his youth, and, whether he has been 'suckled in a creed outworn' or not, he knows no other. These persons, however, rarely give their opinion about literary matters, except

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