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THEY say the Celt is passing away,

For he represents yesterday, and its ideals: legendry, ritual, the heroic and indignant joy of life, belong to him; and he can establish no manner of connection with modern science and the subjugating of the material universe; with the spirit of to-day and to-morrow. Of all Celtic countries, Ireland has the richest background; with so varied and exciting a past, it may well be that she has difficulty in concentrating herself on the new, and hangs to her own consistencies in a world of compromise. Every one save herself has forgotten what she was, and how her precedents, rather than any outer consideration, must still govern her, and keep her antagonist and unreconciled. It is not to be modified, this pauper's pride of blood. She says to the powers, in charming futile bravado, what a Howard once said to a Spencer: "My ancestors were plotting treason, while yours were keeping sheep!" The word warms her heart like wine. "Le moyen Âge Énorme et dÉlicat," in Verlaine's beautiful colors, seems a phrase made for Irish mediÆvalism. It was the watershed of European knowledge and moral culture: the watershed truly, which, sending streams down and out and far away, can never call them back. It gave Scotland her "naked knee" and her kingly line; it gave England its Christian creed; it gave modern France and Spain the noble enrichment of its banished and stainless gentry, its Jacobite Wild Geese. It has been in America, from the Revolution on, an influence incalculable. It won the perfect understanding sympathy of De Beaumont, Renan and Matthew Arnold: men of antipodal judgments. It has an intangible throne in every mind which loves scholarship, and imaginings more beautiful than any folk-lore in the world. "See you this skull?" Lucan makes Mercury say to Menippus, in the shades: "this is Helen." Great is the gulf between happy Innisfail, sovereign and wise, with her own laws, language, sports, and dress, and this wrecked Ireland we know: a country of untended flax-fields, unworked marble-quarries, silent mills on river-banks, little collapsing baronies whose landlords are absent and cold, and a capital whose lordly houses are given over, since the Union, to neglect and decay.

Yet of her glory there are glorious witnesses. Her rough and winding historic roads are open all along. The country is full of ruins and traditions and snatches of strange song, to "tease us out of thought." A gander off on a holiday, with his white spouse and their pretty brood, lifts his paternal hiss at the passer-by from a Druid's altar; and where young lambs lie, in a windy spring, to lee of their mothers, is a magnificent doorway, Lombardic, Romanesque, or Hiberno-Saxon, arch in arch, with its broken inscription, an Orate for immemorial kings. At well-sides are yet seen ablutions and prayers, and May-Day offerings of corn and wool, even as they were "before the advent of the Desii into the County Waterford." By a waterfall, plunging under cleanest ivy and long grass, is a cross with circled centre and intricate Byzantine ornament, displaying David with his harp, or Peter with his keys, set up by a monastic hand twelve hundred years ago. Forty feet away, is something dearer to the archÆologist: a kitchen of the primeval hunters, its wall and hearth and calcined lime-stones bedded among laughing bluebells. A brook's freshet, any March, may bring ashore a strange staff or necklace; a rock is overturned under a yew-tree, and discloses horns and knives elder than Clontarf. But yesterday, in a Carlow garden adjoining the ruins of a Butler fortress, put up at the time when Richard the Lionheart was looking with tears of envy over the walls of Jerusalem, closed urns were found in vaults, each with its shining dust: a tenantry long anterior to Christianity, and conscious perhaps, of Christian goings-on overhead, when The MacMorrough Kavanagh was pressed to dine with the Warden of the Black Castle, and slain among his followers at the pouring of the wine. There can be no other country so fatal to the antiquarian: for zest and labor are superfluous, and a long course of incomparable luck must drive him, for very satiety, from the field.

Venerable Ireland has failed, as the world reckons failure. She cannot take prettily to her rÔle of subjugated province. Abominably misruled, without a senate, without commerce, she has fallen back into the sullen interior life, into the deep night of reverie. From that brooding dark she has let leap no modern flame supremely great. For the great artist is not Irish, as yet, though with warm exaggerations, uncritical enthusiasms, affectionate encouragements, her own exalt her own. As Goldsmith accused Dr. Johnson of doing, she lets her little fishes talk like whales. And this, of course, tends to no good: it only blunts the ideals of the populace, lowers the mark of achievement, and makes it difficult indeed for the true prince to be recognized in the hubbub of mistaken acclaim. The constituency of Aneurin and Ossian lacks a single sovereign poet: a lack apparent enough to all but itself. Verse, from of old, is pervasive as dew or showers: but nowhere is it in process of crystallization. The persecution of age-long ignorance, imposed upon a most intellectual people, is a miasmatic cloud not yet altogether withdrawn. Only in the best is Ireland perfect: in heroes and in saints. In life, if not in art, we can sometimes do away with economy, restraint, equipoise. We can hardly judge the epic figures of antiquity: but from Columba to "J.K.L.," from Hugh O'Neill and Sarsfield to Emmet and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, runs an endearing family likeness: scorn, pity, sweetness, disinterestedness, honor, power, brave ill luck, in them all. Most of these are rebels; their names are under the baffling shadow of exile and the scaffold, and, alas, count for naught save in their mother's memory.

"Where be thy gods, O Israel?" The gibe comes with ill grace from the English. England has, by the world's corroboration, her divine sons, whose names are in benediction. But she has also a Sahara spectacle of the most stolid, empty folk in the universe: the sapless, rootless, flowerless millions who pay, as it were, for Shakespeare and Shelley, for Turner and Purcell, for Newton and Darwin. Easy, is it not, for the superlative quality to form and act, in fullest power here and there, in a nation where no smallest grain of it is ever wasted on the common mortal? But Ireland reeks with genius impartially distributed. It is infectious; every one suffers from it, in its various stages and manifestations. "The superior race" makes the superior individual impossible. There is no situation open to him; he is notoriously superfluous: a coal brought to Newcastle. It is his lot to awake contradiction, and to be made to feel that he has no nominating committee behind him. He may be a great man in theory: but where every other man is demonstrably quite as great as he, he may be excused if he fails to move mountains. Eccentricity is in your Irishman's blood; and organization he hates and fears, perhaps through a dim consciousness that in organizations mental activities must be left to the leaders. If Celticism, with its insuperable charm, has never led the world in trade or war, can never so lead it, the cause is only that the units, which can hardly be said to compose it, use their brains with unhallowed persistence. The most dashing spirited troops in Europe, the Irish are natural critics even of authority. Their successes are everywhere spasmodic: they juggle with success, they do not woo it to wife. In a career dramatically checkered, it happens that their onset wins Fontenoy, and that their advice forfeits Culloden.

It has been well said that the cultured classes are everywhere much the same, and that the true range of observation lies among the lowly and the poor. Now, no peasantry in the world furnishes such marked examples as does the Irish, of original speculation, accessibility to ideas. Threadbare old farmers and peddlers keep you in amused astonishment, and in an attitude of impious doubt towards the ascendancy of the trained thinker. You fall, nay, you run into cordial agreement with the suggestion of Tom Jones to the Ensign, "that it is as possible for a man to know something without having been at school, as it is to have been at school and to know nothing!" To handle the inscrutable Celt on his own acres is to learn, or at least to apprehend, the secret of a live resistance, incredibly prolonged, to a power almost wearied out with maintaining mastery. The sense of equity, the sense of humor itself, in the humblest and silentest Irishman, is armor enough against fate. He, the law-breaker, has compensations which the law-makers wot not of, in his own ethic subtleties. His soul swells big with dreams. In his native village, he is rated sympathetically by the dream's size and duration, rather than, as in grosser communities, by the deed. The man is a trafficker in visions; he becomes a cryptic mystery to his wife. She admires him for his madness, and has heard of fairy influences: "satis est, it suffices," as old Burton oracularly says. Ah, well, the poor devil is with Fergus in his woodland car, when the rent comes due, and the crops are rotting in the rain! He has no turn for temporalities, no ambition to rise; yet in a pictorial sense, by the grace of God, or the witchcraft of the soil, he walks unique and illustrious. It is a memorable sight, this monstrous average and aggregate of whim. Nowhere the lonely planetary effulgence: everywhere the jovial defiant twinkle of little stars! According to Emerson's sweet prediction,—

"As half-gods go,
The gods arrive."