It cropped up, the fanciful flow of rhetoric, the turn of humorous paradox of phrase or thought, in every class of society. One heard it at a gathering of authors in Dublin, from the country priest or the waitress at a village inn in Connemara or from the professor of medicine at Trinity College. I heard men, deeply versed in the tragic history of Ireland and concerned for its future, speculate on this very thing. "It's a joy to you, a visitor," they said, "but it's been one of the curses of Ireland. More than anywhere in the world the mind runs away in Ireland. It is seduced by images and caught up by the stream of words."
I was at fist disappointed at the town of Galway. The women look very picturesque with their shawls wound round their heads, but the shops are dirty and sullen-looking and the houses are. most of them, grimy tenements, In a squalid side street I came upon a little shop with a captivating array of Irish lace and embroidery framed in a forlorn dirty Behind the counter was a half-kindly, belligerent looking middle-aged woman.
"How's business?" I could not help asking when I had made my purchase. The woman of the shop looked at me almost angrily. "And how's business, you're asking? How's business!" she repeated, almost contemptuously. "How would it be?" she said. "Terrible: And it's bee terrible," she added, lening- over' the ¢o and shaking an expository forefinger at me, "it'é been terrible ever since the blackguards brought us our freedom."
"But," I said, "I thought the Irish wanted their freedom?" "Did they now?" she said. "Listen to that! Wanted their freedom, did they?" And wasn't it a great country here in the West of Ireland, full of English toffs and lords and swells, spending their money like gentlemen and helping all the country round about with their hunting and fishing and their great houses and the hordes of servants they had. "And what did those blackguards do now? They burned down their houses. And don't you think," she said, looking at me intently, "they'd be moving away?" She did not wait for assent. "Well, they did"
It was a long way from Sunion on an Aegean headland to Connemara; bu? here. on an Irish headland above the sea, one could imagine a Greek temple beckoning mariners from the West as the one at Sunion beckoned those from the East. This was a race of poets, surely, bred on intensities. The air of this island made the tragedy of this people. It nourished their passions as the rain bred their melancholies, and the mists clouded their minds with historic bitterness.
Perhaps by the time these lines appear, the Gestapo may be in O'Connell Street. I do not think. they will be able to erase the colour on St. Siephen's Green or the music of Irish speech or the free flights of their imagination. Not England of the Church or famine have been able to do that.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.