These are the gifts of the Irish home; among the poor, affection infinite as the sea, which, because of an idleness which is not their fault, has had full scope to grow into an intensity of longing that makes it sometimes hungry as the sea; among the better-off, ambition also and a free intellect; and in everybody an ancient philosophy of human nature which warms rather than chills human relations.
The English boy has an entirely different history. He enters some famous historical school, anxious, like his parents and all his aunts and cousins, that he be stamped and sealed with its approval. His desire is to be an Eton, Harrow, or Rugby boy, after which he will become an Oxford or Cambridge man, marked in his accent, clothes, and manner with the sign-manual of his university. For the Irish boy this is as impossible as it is repugnant. His home is stronger than his school and his college. In the great English schools the boys manage one another; a system of rules and of etiquette has democratically grown up which all must obey; this kind of docility is English and not Irish. Our boys cannot thus surrender themselves, for behind the Irish boy is the drama of a full home life. There is no such drama in English home life--it is prosperous, uneventful, and lies icily cold in the lap of law. The Irish home, in which so much happens, awaits its novelist; but, alas! English readers won’t read novels about Ireland, and Irish readers are too few to make their custom worth anybody’s attention. All we know is that the Irishman is, boy and man, a detached personality. He is often the gayest and most sociable of beings, and a true comrade, and he may be able to adapt himself to every situation, yet he remains apart; even with his friends he is inscrutable, he cannot be read. And this to my mind is right, for no one should be able to read another’s secret, except the mother who bore him, and sometimes a sweetheart. The ordinary well-to-do Englishman has no secrets, for you can read them all in his bank-book, in his Catechism, in the rules of his club and the laws of his country. He is an admirable citizen on whom you can calculate as on a railway time-table. The English mother when she parts from her boy at the school doors may sigh to think that she has lost her boy, yet be proud to think that he will return remodelled into the smart Eton or Harrow boy. The Irish mother has no such hopes and no such fears; her boy will come back what he was when he left her side, and though he go to India, and rule provinces, with many well-trained public-school Englishmen working under him, he will still remain the passionate Irish boy of her heart’s desire.