off into a passionate dream] But your wits can't thicken in that
soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty
rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and
magenta heather. You've no such colors in the sky, no such lure
in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh, the
dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heartscalding, never
satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! [Savagely] No
debauchery that ever coarsened and brutalized an Englishman can
take the worth and usefulness out of him like that dreaming. An
Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him,
never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality
nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer
at them that do, and [bitterly, at Broadbent] be "agreeable to
strangers," like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets.
[Gabbling at Broadbent across the table] It's all dreaming, all
imagination. He can't be religious. The inspired Churchman that
teaches him the sanctity of life and the importance of conduct is
sent away empty; while the poor village priest that gives him a
miracle or a sentimental story of a saint, has cathedrals built
for him out of the pennies of the poor. He can't be intelligently
political, he dreams of what the Shan Van Vocht said in ninety-
eight. If you want to interest him in Ireland you've got to call
the unfortunate island Kathleen ni Hoolihan and pretend she's a
little old woman. It saves thinking. It saves working. It saves
everything except imagination, imagination, imagination; and
imagination's such a torture that you can't bear it without
whisky. [With fierce shivering self-contempt] At last you get
that you can bear nothing real at all: you'd rather starve than
cook a meal; you'd rather go shabby and dirty than set your mind
to take care of your clothes and wash yourself; you nag and