icy, and I planned a premature impossible peace between those two devouring heads because I was sedentary and thoughtful, but Maud Gonne was not sedentary and I noticed that before some great event she did not think, but became exceedingly superstitious. Are not such as she aware, at moments of great crisis, of some power beyond their own minds; or are they like some good portrait painters of my father's generation and only think when the model is under their eye? Once upon the eve of some demonstration, I found her with many caged larks and finches which she was about to set free for the luck's sake.
I abandoned my plans on discovering that our young men, not yet educated by Mr Birrell's university, would certainly shout down everyone they disagreed with, and that their finance was so extravagant that we must content ourselves with a foundation-stone and an iron rail to protect it, for there could never be a statue; while she carried out every plan she made.
Her power over crowds was at its height, and some portion of the power came because she could still, even when pushing some abstract principle to what seemed to me an absurdity, keep her own mind free, and so when man and woman did her bidding they did it not only because she was beautiful, but because that beauty suggested joy and freedom. There was some element in her beauty also that moved minds full of old Gaelic stories and poems, for she looked as though she lived in an ancient civilization where all superiorities whether of mind or of body were a part of public ceremonial, were in some way the crowd's creation, as the Pope's entering the Vatican is the crowd's creation. Her beauty backed by her great stature could instantly affect an assembly, and not as often with our stage beauties because obvious and florid, for it was incredibly distinguished, and if her face like the face of some Greek statue showed little thought—as must be that it might seem that assembly's very self, fused, unified, and solitary—her whole body seemed a master-work of long labouring thought, as though a Scopas had measured and calculated, consorted with Egyptian sages, and mathematicians out of Babylon, that he might outface even Artemesia's sepulchral image with a living norm.
But in that ancient civilization abstract thought scarce existed, while she but rose partially and for a moment out of raging abstraction; and for that reason, as I have known another woman so, she hated her own beauty, not its effect upon others, but its image in the
