Irish movement and our people had long sympathized with the Irish. The question that interested me most was how and to what extent the Irish character expresses itself in Irishmen who no longer speak the Irish language. English writers often allude, in their portrayals of character, to the peculiarities of Celtic race and blood. Can a people live if its language is dead? The Irish writer, George Moore, once stated this problem very trenchantly as regards himself and the Irish—and it stuck in my mind.
Lectures and public meetings I attended pretty regularly, among others those at which Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw spoke. I had, of course, long read Shaw’s writings; but I got to know him as politician and pacifist propagandist. The level of these meetings and of the discussions that followed them was very high. Opponents listened calmly to arguments and sought calmly to refute them. In similar meetings I came across G. K. Chesterton and his brother, the anti-Semite, and I had a look even at Horatio Bottomley, the proprietor of “John Bull,” a nationalist brawler and super-patriot. This gentleman had been involved in ugly financial affairs before the war, and similar affairs were afterwards to get him a seat in prison in exchange for his seat in Parliament. During the war he was the self-constituted mouthpiece of the John Bulls—undoubtedly a man of talent, a typical exploiter of patriotic feeling—and he actually contrived to get an invitation to visit the British Commander-in-Chief at Headquarters. As Dr. Johnson knew, “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
If I add that I went to numbers of churches (the ritualistic movement had long interested me), that I heard sermons and watched the piety of the people in its relation to the war, I shall have given a sufficient account of my doings in London.
Meanwhile our propaganda was going well. The Press Bureau and the shop window in Piccadilly Circus had their effect. We searched the history of Anglo-Czech relations and turned it to account. Those relations began with the marriage of Anne of Bohemia to Richard II in 1882. We emphasized Wyclif’s relationship to Hus and to our Reformation, and the interest taken by Comenius in English education; and we drew attention to the English and American disciples of the Moravian Brothers and of Hollar.[1] Nor did we forget the
- ↑ Wenceslas Hollar, a Czech artist who came to England in 1637 as a refugee from Hapsburg persecution after the Battle of the White Mountain, and left engravings of great value.
