The sources of this superstition are easily
traced. The English have created the noblest literature in the world,
and are candidly ashamed of the fact. In their view anybody who succeeds
in words must necessarily fail in business. The Irishman on the contrary
luxuriates, like the artist that he is, in that _splendor verborum_
celebrated by Dante. If a speech has to be made he thinks that it should
be well made, and refuses altogether to accept hums and haws as a token
of genius. He expects an orator not merely to expound facts, but to
stimulate the vital forces of his audience. These contrary conceptions
of the relation of art to life have, throughout the Home Rule campaign,
clashed in the English mind much to our disadvantage. And there has been
another agent of confusion, more widely human in character. Every idea
strongly held and, on the other side, strongly challenged, kindles
spontaneously into passion, and every great cause has its poetry as well
as its dialetics. Men, forced to concentrate all their thought on one
reform, come to see it edged with strange, mystical colours.
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