of what is least observant and most sentimental in the Irish novelists. When I was a boy I spent many an afternoon with a village shoemaker who was a great reader. I asked him once what Irish novels he liked, and he told me there were none he could read, ‘They sentimentalised the people,’ he said angrily; and it was against Kickham that he complained most. ‘I want to see the people,’ he said, ‘shown up in their naked hideousness.’ That is the peasant mind as I know it, delight in strong sensations whether of beauty or of ugliness, in bare facts, and quite without sentimentality. The sentimental mind is the bourgeois mind, and it was this mind which came into Irish literature with Gerald Griffin and later on with Kickham. It is the mind of the town, and it is a delight to those only who have seen life, and above all country life, with unobservant eyes, and most of all to the Irish tourist, to the patriotic young Irishman who goes to the country for a month’s holiday with his head full of vague idealisms. It is not the art of Mr. Colum, born of the people, and when at his best looking at the town and not the country with strange eyes, nor the art of Mr. Synge spending weeks and months in remote places talking Irish to fishers and islanders. I remember meeting, about twenty years ago, a lad who had a little yacht at Kingstown. Somebody was talking of the sea paintings of a great painter, Hook, I think, and this made him very angry. No yachtsman believed in them or thought them at all like the sea, he said. Indeed, he was always hearing people praise pictures that were not a bit like the sea, and thereupon he named certain of the greatest painters of water—men who more than all others had spent their lives in observing the effects of light upon cloud and wave. I met him again the other day, well on in middle life, and though he is not even an Irishman, indignant with Mr. Synge’s and Mr. Boyle’s[I] peasants. He knew the people, he said, and neither he nor any other person that knew them could believe that they were properly represented in _The Well of the Saints_ or _The Building Fund_. Twenty years ago his imagination was under the influence of popular pictures, but to-day it was under the conventional idealisms which writers like Kickham and Griffin substitute for the ever-varied life of the cottages, and that conventional idealism that the contemporary English Theatre substitutes for all life whatsoever. I saw _Caste_, the earliest play of the modern school, a few days ago, and found there more obviously than I expected, for I am not much of a theatre-goer, the English half of the mischief. Two of the minor persons had a certain amount of superficial characterization, as if out of the halfpenny comic papers; but the central persons, the man and woman that created the dramatic excitement, such as it was, had not characters of any kind, being vague ideals, perfection as it is imagined by a common-place mind. The audience could give them its