There is one idealism always present and alive in the Irish peasant-heart, war with England. The soil is volcanic with it, so that if you scratch the surface it is ready to blaze forth. When my brother-in-law and I were out shooting, we met an old man, and looking into an empty barn, my brother-in-law asked how many men it would accommodate as sleeping quarters? He gave us a sharp look and said, 'When you bring yer men, we will find a better place than that for them.' I think this anecdote would please Sir Walter Scott and be a mere foolishness to George Bernard Shaw and his teacher Sam Butler. I am now writing of the Island that used to be, when poverty, conversation, and idleness kept company with each other around the turf fire in the winter, or on the hillside in summer, an ancient spirituality was always present there and a kind of humour, sometimes gentle like Goldsmith's and often, especially in the cities, iconoclastic like Swift's, or like Tim Healy's when he was first in Parliament. The soul of Ireland was partly pagan and that was good for lovers and for sensuous poetry; partly Catholic and Christian and that was good for the sorrowful and for lovers also; and partly patriotic and that was good for the courageous, whether young or old. My niece writes to me of the 'appalling commonness of the Australian mind.' The Irish peasant mind is not common, is indeed so interesting that the peasants in the west of Ireland can enjoy themselves in solitude, poetized, if I may use such a word, by their religion, by their folk lore, and by their national history, and by living under a changeable sky which, from north to south and from west to east is a perpetual decoration like the scenery in some vast theatre. Synge, spiritually the most fastidious man I ever knew and the proudest, who turned away from modern French literature, told me that he preferred their society to the comforts of the best hotel. They are so happy in themselves and in each other's conversation that they are conservative, as conservative as the people behind the barriers of privilege. It is, the people with 'common minds' who quarrel with themselves and with life, and are a homeless people and seek for change, for experiment and for progress. It is the unhappy people who make the world go round. Yet these happy people might also help progress if the impossible should take place and we could teach them the technique of the arts. Perhaps they might not think it worth the trouble? Yet it is among people of this sort, whose imagination is vivid and whose will has been broken by dreams & visions, that the arts have always flourished. And remember if these peasants have not the will power which has made the dull people of Belfast such an edifying success, all the same they have their own intensity, and I myself and there are more like me, would rather listen to a Mayo man whistling a tune, or telling a fairy tale or ghost story,