The great factor in the Irish education is not the school, but the Irish home, unique in its combination of small means, intellect, and ambition with conversation. Without this conversation the home would not be Irish. From every manor-house and cabin ascends the incense of pleasant talk; it is that in which we most excel. With us all journeys end in talkers’ meeting; “we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks,” said Oscar Wilde. When any Irish reform is proposed--and they are innumerable--I always ask, how will it affect our conversation? France has her art and literature, England her House of Lords, and America her vast initiative; we have our conversation. We watch impatiently for the meals, because we are hungry and thirsty for conversation; not for argument’s sake or to improve ourselves, but because we spontaneously like one another. We like human voices and faces and the smiles and gestures and all the little drama of household colloquy, varying every moment from serious to gay, with skill, with finesse; we like human nature for its own sake, and we like it vocal--that is why we talk; we even like our enemies, on the Irish principle that it is “better to be quarrelling than to be lonesome.” Arthur Symons, staying in a pilot’s cottage on the west of Ireland, said to my daughter: “I don’t believe these people ever go to bed.” No, they have so much to say to one another.
“England,” said Bernard Shaw, “cannot do without its Irish and Scots to-day because it cannot do without at least a little sanity.” Both these nations are conversational.
The home must play its part vigorously if the race is to be saved for affection and happiness, and if we would bring back the conditions from which spring art and poetry.
AN IRISHMAN’S NOTES ON THE SAXON TEMPERAMENT
In the long quest for self-knowledge and self-fulfilment there are two types of men and two methods. There are some who would have the individual man care only for himself morning, noon, and night, for his spirit, his mind, his body, his temporal and eternal welfare. There are others who would say he should forget himself and lose himself in great ideas, great causes, great enthusiasms, in passionate love or humanitarianism, or even in the anger of battle. Of these two methods the second is found in France while the first is the Englishman’s creed.