(other than the guzzle's flash of it), might soften him; something
sweeter than the slow animal well-meaningness his placable brethren point
his attention to. It is not seen, and though he can understand the
perils of a severance, he prefers to rub the rawness of his wound and be
ready to pitch his cap in the air for it, out of sheer bloodloathing of
a connection that offers him nothing to admire, nothing to hug to his
heart. Both below and above the blind mass of discontent in his island,
the repressed sentiment of admiration-or passion of fealty and thirst to
give himself to a visible brighter--is an element of the division:
meditative young Patrick O'Donnell early in his reflections had noted
that:--and it is partly a result of our daily habit of tossing the straw
to the monetary world and doting on ourselves in the mirror, until our
habitual doings are viewed in a bemused complacency by us, and the scum-
surface of the country is flashed about as its vital being. A man of
forethought using the Press to spur Parliament to fitly represent the
people, and writing on his daily topics with strenuous original vigour,
even though, like Rockney, he sets the teeth of the Celt gnashing at him,
goes a step nearer to the bourne of pacification than Press and
Parliament reflecting the popular opinion that law must be passed to
temper Ireland's eruptiveness; for that man can be admired, and the Celt,
in combating him, will like an able and gallant enemy better than a
grudgingly just, lumbersome, dull, politic friend. The material points
in a division are always the stronger, but the sentimental are here very
strong. Pass the laws; they may put an extinguisher on the Irish
Vesuvian; yet to be loved you must be a little perceptibly admirable.
You may be so self-satisfied as to dispense with an ideal: your yoke-
fellow is not; it is his particular form of strength to require one for
his proper blooming, and he does bloom beautifully in the rays he courts.
Ah then, seek to be loved, and banish Bull. Believe in a future and
banish that gross obscuration of you. Decline to let that old-yeoman-
turned alderman stand any longer for the national man. Speaking to the
brain of the country, one is sure of the power of a resolute sign from it
to dismiss the brainless. Banish him your revels and your debatings,
prohibit him your Christmas, lend no ear either to his panics or his
testiness, especially none to his rages; do not report him at all,
and he will soon subside into his domestic, varied by pothouse, privacy.
The brain should lead, if there be a brain. Once free of him, you will
know that for half a century you have appeared bottom upward to mankind.
And you have wondered at the absence of love for you under so astounding
a presentation. Even in a Bull, beneficent as he can dream of being,
when his notions are in a similar state of inversion, should be sheepish
in hope for love.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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