that, not merely where is inherited the heroic wealth of hall and bower.'

In 1922, for the first time, the French Government of this Republic took official part in the public honour paid to St. Jeanne d'Arc. But the great procession of that day, last summer, was that of the young men of the more educated classes; as this procession of theirs has been for years past, the chief matter of interest, at each recurring 8th of May. With this difference, that, even four or five years ago, the young university men and others in Paris had to fight government soldiers and police, and to risk imprisonment and even death, for their effort to pay tribute to French tradition of honour, fidelity, reverence, chivalry, decency, of even (as they hold), religion-notwithstanding that these young men of l'Action Française frankly confess, that, albeit they see, that France, to be herself, and to honour herself, must recognize her Catholicity, yet they themselves are sometimes far from being Catholic believers. And their powerful leader, M. Maurras, who is moving a side of France against the republicanism which there implies Socialism, is himself not a Catholic, except in that French national sense of a political' Catholic.' And herein is another great possible rift in the lute, and a preparation for new discord, and crashing sound. For, surely, this Catholicism' of the forward youth, this nationalism, this militarism-to that it runs-has real beliefs against it, and other ideals, and enthusiasms, and hope, and readiness for self-sacrifice, in the Socialist ideals of worldpeace and a real league of nations, founded, the socialistic, too, think, on a moral ground. All these tendencies, one way or other, are the matter for European thought, life, strife, or resolution of difficulties, in the generation of present-day university youth. Nothing in such tendencies can be indifferent to mind, heart, or soul, of any nation. They may make, or they may mar, Irish life too. One could not but hark back to Ireland from Germany, when one read in German papers, of how some Berlin actors were giving, last autumn, an

' erotic comedy' in Rhineland erotic

Düsseldorf. The young men of Düsseldorf made the following protest against the dirty play: 'We protested; and to show that there are young men who have some notion of the seriousness of the times, we saw no way but to disturb the acting. The future belongs to us, the young. We shall have to bear the ruin made by older men, who said they stood as our examples; and we are going to show a solid front against all this smut. In honesty, in good will, and in decency, we mean to work and write.' Bravo! exclaimed a leading Munich paper; after quoting the young men's protest, and noting their riotous action.

At the 1922 great congress gathering in Munich-before cardinals and bishops and lord mayors and prime ministers and professors-students spoke, men, and women. They spoke well; with surer utterance, it must be said, with clearer articulation, even with more flow, than we have been accustomed to, in English speech in Ireland. The other day, here, I read a long article by an elocution professor in Dublin, himself a Gaelic League Irish Irelander, deploring that in schools for Irish youth, there is no real training in speech, only a few moments daily for tongueuse, at all, and a tumbling and a mumbling; with, he added-was he right ?-a consequent lack of confidence, a loss to self-respect, a disbelief in the work one has in hand, a sense that half-measures will do, a damp on enthusiasm for good causes, a feeling of failure, perhaps of being a failure. All these bad things, wrote Professor Edmund Burke-clarum et venerabile nomen hibernicum-are an inheritance upon the Irish; which inheritance he appeals to lovers of Ireland to help him to lift off from shiftless youth, and to give them manners, virtue, freedom, power. Certainly, knowledge of how not only French youth speak in public, but even German, will show us a better way. And these young German men and women that I heard spoke with no shrinking from idealism, with the full con fidence of their wisest elders, that the foe to the body o the nation as well as to its soul, is that materialism, blind to its own results, dull in the clinging corruption it, canno

resist, with all its selfishness, cruelty, resentment, hate, lust, and frivolity.

In moving fashion, those young people called on us, to help them in their efforts against filth and cinemas-one must say, they coupled the two. And their power of work is great. Eighty per cent. or even ninety per cent. of German students are working now every bit of vacation time, from shops to mines; to earn wherewith to study. And that, by the way, is not all well, for higher studies there, and hence in all the world. True, all through the long vacation, there were some of the students that knew foreign languages told off to be guides and friends to visiting students who would wish to live more in the country's life in Germany than does the mere tourist. Still, as in the summer courses offered at French universities, the foreigner who knows little French and less German has, comparatively, but a profitless time of it. Yet, to repeat, it is well for us in far-off Ireland to cut into even the surface of continental life.

Why, as Matthew Arnold asked even Englishmen, should you worship that strong idol Macaulay,' with no vision in him, rather than a gentle humanist like his contemporary the French Joubert? Or read only about Cowper and his Calvinism and pleasantries, and not the letters of the larger Catholic world of even the half-unknown Eugénie de Guérin, and her nobility and charm? For Matthew Arnold, culture was knowing the best that is thought and written in the world. One names him here, because he reminded his Englishmen that they could not afford, from any point of view, to remain as ignorant as they had been, of foreign languages. We are simply at sea, Newman, back in his England, was writing, about the same time, in the nineteenth-century sixties-concerning what is going on beyond our four seas. The English may muddle through, as they say, in their great heaving through the world. But, in

The great apostle of the Philistines, for Matthew Arnold; to whom Philistinism means: ' on the side of beauty and taste, vulgarity; on the side of morality and feeling, coarseness; on the side of mind and spirit, unintelligence.'

theology, in art, in music-must one say, to-day, even in literature ?—how provincial they are. And we, in Ireland, seeing with their eyes, hearing with their ears, are condemned to be the ineffectual and neglected province of a province. Speaking Irish will not be the whole cure for that. Nay, it is not to cut out English, but to manage to add to it, that is our need. Is there a greater literature than the English? People tell me, it is materialistic. Is 'Hamlet' so? Is 'Lear'? Is Milton? Perhaps so, in a sense, as compared with Dante? But is Dryden always more materialistic than Molière? He is less simply noble heroic than Corneille. But if Byron is more materialistic than Schiller, is Wordsworth? Is Shelley? Tennyson, than the far greater Goethe? Even the Londoner, Browning, at the heart of him? Anyway, if Gibbon would not give up, for untold wealth, his invincible love of reading, certainly a lover of English literature finds reason for a growing faithfulness to his love, the better it is known.' Why, even an Irish martyr might say: 'I die, loving that England.' Nevertheless, that is not the question; as has been said above. What we are, that we are. Neither by fancyings can we make ourselves other than that. And yet, other than that, other than what we have been, we have an instinct that we, in Ireland, must be, if we are to be, at all. We must know more of the wider world, and the better. An enormous advantage, a Lecky thinks, the Catholic clergy have, in being part of a cosmopolitan organization. There is much in that which may be an inspiration and a fount of wisdom. That advantage lies in Ireland. We like other nations, must be ourselves. Not in dog-like hos tility to others, any more than when St. Bede's English scholars came among the Irish and got books and learning for nothing, and lodging and food. From vicious in humanity our very littleness, if nothing else, may pre serve us, as has been suggested, through common sense

1 'To argue about the abstract superiority of cultures would be to ent upon a futile controversy, like an argument between ants and bees over the civilizations; as if those who had the worst of the argument could chang their species.'-The Interpreters, by A, p. 59.

through sense of humour. But we have had an abnormal past, of many a long day, and we are uneasy; as restless as all but a saint would be on a gridiron. There is no denying that we must get off this English fire somehow, or be burnt up, and be Irish no more. And that will not be. To put it another way, we quote Emerson, who said, for his provincial younger United States, so boastful, so much ashamed of themselves: At all costs, he said, we must extract the tapeworm of Europe from the body of America. He meant, Americans must look at home; they must learn and know, for America first, for themselves as Americans; since

He is the best cosmopolite

Who loves his native country best.

So an English poet teaches. And another :

The main mystery, that I am I,

With power on mine own self and on the world.

But, to repeat, and sum up; the Irish, given their history, and the history of their neighbour, given their place in the planet, given their nature as now it is, and their circumstances, will never be like the squirrel that is free of the forest trees, but only like the squirrel that is set in the whirling cage and getting nowhere, if made run by only English machine drivers, and lulled by only English airs, sung not without their meaning, by, and for the singers, but with be-madding effect on the Irish victims, bewitched, bewildered, deaf to all else but the voice of the charmer, who is also the scorner. And is the scorner, then, the one to be blamed? James Fintan Lalor paid his Irish tribute to him: O for a year of the bull-dog soul of England!'

Anyway-with whatever mingled strength and weakness-Ireland must now bear in mind T. Kettle's words: My only counsel to Ireland is, that to become deeply Irish she must become European.'

W. F. P. STOCKLEY.