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Title: Irish Impressions

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release Date: April 5, 2020 [EBook #61758]

Language: English

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IRISH IMPRESSIONS




  THE HISTORY OF
  RUHLEBEN
  BY JOSEPH POWELL (CAPTAIN OF THE CAMP)
  AND FRANCIS GRIBBLE               10/6 _net_

  TRUE LOVE
  BY ALLAN MONKHOUSE                 7/- _net_

  THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN
  BY FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG             7/- _net_

  A GARDEN OF PEACE
  BY F. LITTLEMORE                  10/6 _net_

  NEW WINE
  BY AGNES AND EGERTON CASTLE        7/- _net_

  MADELEINE
  BY HOPE MIRRLEES                   7/- _net_


  COLLINS      LONDON




  IRISH IMPRESSIONS

  _by_ G. K. CHESTERTON

  [Illustration]

  LONDON: 48 PALL MALL

  W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.

  GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND




Copyright

  First Impression, November, 1919
  Second    ”       January, 1920




CONTENTS


  CHAP.                                       PAGE

     I. TWO STONES IN A SQUARE                   1

    II. THE ROOT OF REALITY                     17

   III. THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD                 45

    IV. THE PARADOX OF LABOUR                   67

     V. THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND               93

    VI. THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND                 115

   VII. THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND                 141

  VIII. AN EXAMPLE AND A QUESTION              173

    IX. BELFAST AND THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM      207




CHAPTER I




TWO STONES IN A SQUARE


When I had for the first time crossed St George’s Channel, and for the
first time stepped out of a Dublin hotel on to St Stephen’s Green,
the first of all my impressions was that of a particular statue, or
rather portion of a statue. I left many traditional mysteries already
in my track, but they did not trouble me as did this random glimpse or
vision. I have never understood why the Channel is called St George’s
Channel; it would seem more natural to call it St Patrick’s Channel
since the great missionary did almost certainly cross that unquiet
sea and look up at those mysterious mountains. And though I should be
enchanted, in an abstract artistic sense, to imagine St George sailing
towards the sunset, flying the silver and scarlet colours of his
cross, I cannot in fact regard that journey as the most fortunate of
the adventures of that flag. Nor, for that matter, do I know why the
Green should be called St Stephen’s Green, nor why the parliamentary
enclosure at Westminster is also connected with the first of the
martyrs; unless it be because St Stephen was killed with stones. The
stones, piled together to make modern political buildings, might
perhaps be regarded as a cairn, or heap of missiles, marking the place
of the murder of a witness to the truth. And while it seems unlikely
that St Stephen was pelted with statues as well as stones, there are
undoubtedly statues that might well kill a Christian at sight. Among
these graven stones, from which the saints suffer, I should certainly
include some of those figures in frock coats standing opposite St
Stephen’s Westminster. There are many such statues in Dublin also; but
the one with which I am concerned was at first partially veiled from
me. And the veil was at least as symbolic as the vision.

I saw what seemed the crooked hind legs of a horse on a pedestal and
deduced an equestrian statue, in the somewhat bloated fashion of the
early eighteenth century equestrian statues. But the figure, from where
I stood, was wholly hidden in the tops of trees growing round it in a
ring; masking it with leafy curtains or draping it with leafy banners.
But they were green banners, that waved and glittered all about it in
the sunlight; and the face they hid was the face of an English king. Or
rather, to speak more correctly, a German king.

When laws can stay ... it was impossible that an old rhyme should not
run in my head, and words that appealed to the everlasting revolt
of the green things of the earth.... ‘And when the leaves in summer
time their colour dare not show.’ The rhyme seemed to reach me out of
remote times and find arresting fulfilment, like a prophecy; it was
impossible not to feel that I had seen an omen. I was conscious vaguely
of a vision of green garlands hung on gray stone; and the wreaths were
living and growing, and the stone was dead. Something in the simple
substances and elemental colours, in the white sunlight, and the sombre
and even secret image held the mind for a moment in the midst of all
the moving city, like a sign given in a dream. I was told that the
figure was that of one of the first Georges; but indeed I seemed to
know already that it was the White Horse of Hanover that had thus grown
gray with Irish weather or green with Irish foliage. I knew only too
well, already, that the George who had really crossed the Channel was
not the saint. This was one of those German princes whom the English
aristocracy used when it made the English domestic polity aristocratic
and the English foreign policy German. Those Englishmen who think the
Irish are pro-German, or those Irishmen who think the Irish ought to
be pro-German, would presumably expect the Dublin populace to have
hung the statue of this German deliverer with national flowers and
nationalist flags. For some reason, however, I found no traces of Irish
tributes round the pedestal of the Teutonic horsemen. I wondered how
many people in the last fifty years have ever cared about it, or even
been conscious of their own carelessness. I wonder how many have ever
troubled to look at it, or even troubled not to look at it. If it
fell down, I wonder whether anybody would put it up again. I do not
know; I only know that Irish gardeners, or some such Irish humorists,
had planted trees in a ring round that prancing equestrian figure;
trees that had, so to speak, sprung up and choked him, making him more
unrecognisable than a Jack-in-the-Green. Jack or George had vanished;
but the Green remained.

About a stone’s-throw from this calamity in stone there stood, at
the corner of a gorgeously coloured flower-walk, a bust evidently by
a modern sculptor, with modern symbolic ornament surmounted by the
fine falcon face of the poet Mangan, who dreamed and drank and died,
a thoughtless and thriftless outcast, in the darkest of the Dublin
streets around that place. This individual Irishman really was what we
were told that all Irishmen were, hopeless, heedless, irresponsible,
impossible, a tragedy of failure. And yet it seemed to be his head
that was lifted and not hidden; the gay flowers only showed up this
graven image as the green leaves shut out the other; everything around
him seemed bright and busy, and told rather of a new time. It was
clear that modern men did stop to look at _him_; indeed modern men had
stayed there long enough to make him a monument. It was almost certain
that if his monument fell down it really would be put up again. I
think it very likely there would be competition among advanced modern
artistic schools of admitted crankiness and unimpeachable lunacy;
that somebody would want to cut out a Cubist Mangan in a style less
of stone than of bricks; or to set up a Vorticist Mangan, like a
frozen whirlpool, to terrify the children playing in that flowery
lane. For when I afterwards went into the Dublin Art Club, or mixed
generally in the stimulating society of the intellectuals of the
Irish capital, I found a multitude of things which moved both my
admiration and amusement. Perhaps the best thing of all was that it
was the one society that I have seen where the intellectuals were
intellectual. But nothing pleased me more than the fact that even
Irish art was taken with a certain Irish pugnacity; as if there could
be street fights about æsthetics as there once were about theology.
I could almost imagine an appeal for pikes to settle a point about
art needlework, or a suggestion of dying on the barricades for a
difference about bookbinding. And I could still more easily imagine
a sort of ultra-civilised civil war round the half-restored bust of
poor Mangan. But it was in a yet plainer and more popular sense that
I felt that bust to be the sign of a new world, where the statue of
Royal George was only the ruin of an old one. And though I have since
seen many much more complex, and many decidedly contradictory things in
Ireland, the allegory of those two stone images in that public garden
has remained in my memory, and has not been reversed. The Glorious
Revolution, the great Protestant Deliverer, the Hanoverian Succession,
these things were the very pageant and apotheosis of success. The
Whig aristocrat was not merely victorious; it was as a victor that he
asked for victory. The thing was fully expressed in all the florid and
insolent statuary of the period, in all those tumid horsemen in Roman
uniform and rococo periwigs shown as prancing in perpetual motion down
shouting streets to their triumphs; only to-day the streets are empty
and silent, and the horse stands still. Of such a kind was the imperial
figure round which the ring of trees had risen, like great green fans
to soothe a sultan or great green curtains to guard him. But it was in
a sort of mockery that his pavilion was thus painted with the colour
of his conquered enemies. For the king was dead behind his curtains,
his voice will be heard no more, and no man will even wish to hear it,
while the world endures. The dynastic eighteenth century is dead if
anything is dead; and these idols at least are only stones. But only
a few yards away, the stone that the builders rejected is really the
head of a corner, standing at the corner of a new pathway, coloured and
crowded with children and with flowers.

That, I suspect, is the paradox of Ireland in the modern world.
Everything that was thought progressive as a prancing horse has come to
a standstill. Everything that was thought decadent as a dying drunkard
has risen from the dead. All that seemed to have reached a _cul de sac_
has turned the corner, and stands at the opening of a new road. All
that thought itself on a pedestal has found itself up a tree. And that
is why those two chance stones seem to me to stand like graven images
on either side of the gateway by which a man enters Ireland. And yet I
had not left the same small enclosure till I had seen one other sight
which was even more symbolic than the flowers near the foot of the
poet’s pedestal. A few yards beyond the Mangan bust was a model plot of
vegetables, like a kitchen garden with no kitchen or house attached
to it, planted out in a patchwork of potatoes, cabbages, and turnips,
to prove how much could be done with an acre. And I realised as in a
vision that all over the new Ireland that patch is repeated like a
pattern; and where there is a real kitchen garden there is also a real
kitchen; and it is not a communal kitchen. It is more typical even than
the poet and the flowers; for these flowers are also food, and this
poetry is also property; property which, when properly distributed,
is the poetry of the average man. It was only afterwards that I could
realise all the realities to which this accident corresponded; but even
this little public experiment, at the first glance, had something of
the meaning of a public monument. It was this which the earth itself
had reared against the monstrous image of the German monarch; and I
might have called this chapter Cabbages and Kings.

My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true
prophecies. In the little town in South Bucks, where I live, I
remember some talk of appropriate ceremonies in connection with the
work of sending vegetables to the Fleet. There was a suggestion that
some proceedings should end with ‘God Save the King,’ an amendment by
some one (of a more naval turn of mind) to substitute ‘Rule Britannia’;
and the opposition of one individual, claiming to be of Irish
extraction, who loudly refused to lend a voice to either. Whatever I
retain, in such rural scenes, of the frivolity of Fleet Street led
me to suggest that we could all join in singing ‘The Wearing of the
Greens.’ But I have since discovered that this remark, like other
typical utterances of the village idiot, was in truth inspired; and
was a revelation and a vision from across the sea, a vision of what
was really being done, not by the village idiots but by the village
wise men. For the whole miracle of modern Ireland might well be summed
up in the simple change from the word ‘green’ to the word ‘greens.’
Nor would it be true to say that the first is poetical and the second
practical. For a green tree is quite as poetical as a green flag; and
no one in touch with history doubts that the waving of the green flag
has been very useful to the growing of the green tree. But I shall
have to touch upon all such controversial topics later, for those
to whom such statements are still controversial. Here I would only
begin by recording a first impression as vividly coloured and patchy
as a modernist picture; a square of green things growing where they
are least expected; the new vision of Ireland. The discovery, for
most Englishmen, will be like touching the trees of a faded tapestry,
and finding the forest alive and full of birds. It will be as if, on
some dry urn or dreary column, figures which had already begun to
crumble magically began to move and dance. For culture as well as mere
caddishness assumed the decay of these Celtic or Catholic things; there
were artists sketching the ruins as well as trippers picnicking in
them; and it was not the only evidence that a final silence had fallen
on the harp of Tara, that it did not play ‘Tararaboomdeay.’ Englishmen
believed in Irish decay even when they were large-minded enough to
lament it. It might be said that those who were most penitent because
the thing was murdered, were most convinced that it was killed. The
meaning of these green and solid things before me is that it is not a
ghost that has risen from the grave. A flower, like a flag, might be
little more than a ghost; but a fruit has that sacramental solidity
which in all mythologies belongs not to a ghost, but to a god. This
sight of things sustaining, and a beauty that nourishes and does not
merely charm, was a premonition of practicality in the miracle of
modern Ireland. It is a miracle more marvellous than the resurrection
of the dead. It is the resurrection of the body.




CHAPTER II




THE ROOT OF REALITY


The only excuse of literature is to make things new; and the chief
misfortune of journalism is that it has to make them old. What is
hurried has to be hackneyed. Suppose a man has to write on a particular
subject, let us say America; if he has a day to do it in, it is
possible that, in the last afterglow of sunset, he may have discovered
at least one thing which he himself really thinks about America. It is
conceivable that somewhere under the evening star he may have a new
idea, even about the new world. If he has only half an hour in which to
write, he will just have time to consult an encyclopædia and vaguely
remember the latest leading articles. The encyclopædia will be only
about a decade out of date; the leading articles will be æons out of
date--having been written under similar conditions of modern rush. If
he has only a quarter of an hour in which to write about America, he
may be driven in mere delirium and madness to call her his Gigantic
Daughter in the West, to talk of the feasibility of Hands Across the
Sea, or even to call himself an Anglo-Saxon, when he might as well
call himself a Jute. But whatever debasing banality be the effect of
business scurry in criticism, it is but one example of a truth that can
be tested in twenty fields of experience. If a man must get to Brighton
as quickly as possible, he can get there quickest by travelling on
rigid rails on a recognised route. If he has time and money for
motoring, he will still use public roads; but he will be surprised to
find how many public roads look as new and quiet as private roads.
If he has time enough to walk, he may find for himself a string of
fresh footpaths, each one a fairy-tale. This law of the leisure needed
for the awakening of wonder applies, indeed, to things superficially
familiar as well as to things superficially fresh. The chief case for
old enclosures and boundaries is that they enclose a space in which
new things can always be found later, like live fish within the four
corners of a net. The chief charm of having a home that is secure is
having leisure to feel it as strange.

I have often done the little I could to correct the stale trick of
taking things for granted: all the more because it is not even taking
them for granted. It is taking them without gratitude; that is,
emphatically as not granted. Even one’s own front door, released by
one’s own latchkey, should not only open inward on things familiar,
but outward on things unknown. Even one’s own domestic fireside should
be wild as well as domesticated; for nothing could be wilder than
fire. But if this light of the higher ignorance should shine even on
familiar places, it should naturally shine most clearly on the roads of
a strange land. It would be well if a man could enter Ireland really
knowing that he knows nothing about Ireland; if possible, not even the
name of Ireland. The misfortune is that most men know the name too
well, and the thing too little. This book would probably be a better
book, as well as a better joke, if I were to call the island throughout
by some name like Atlantis, and only reveal on the last page that I
was referring to Ireland. Englishmen would see a situation of great
interest, objects with which they could feel considerable sympathy, and
opportunities of which they might take considerable advantage, if only
they would really look at the place plain and straight, as they would
at some entirely new island, with an entirely new name, discovered
by that seafaring adventure which is the real romance of England. In
short, the Englishman might do something with it, if he would only
treat it as an object in front of him, and not as a subject or story
left behind him. There will be occasion later to say all that should
be said of the need of studying the Irish story. But the Irish story
is one thing and what is called the Irish Question quite another; and
in a purely practical sense the best thing the stranger can do is to
forget the Irish Question and look at the Irish. If he looked at them
simply and steadily, as he would look at the natives of an entirely new
nation with a new name, he would become conscious of a very strange
but entirely solid fact. He would become conscious of it, as a man in
a fairy tale might become conscious that he had crossed the border of
fairyland, by such a trifle as a talking cow or a haystack walking
about on legs.

For the Irish Question has never been discussed in England. Men have
discussed Home Rule; but those who advocated it most warmly, and as
I think wisely, did not even know what the Irish meant by Home. Men
have talked about Unionism; but they have never even dared to propose
Union. A Unionist ought to mean a man who is not even conscious of the
boundary of the two countries; who can walk across the frontier of
fairyland, and not even notice the walking haystack. As a fact, the
Unionist always shoots at the haystack; though he never hits it. But
the limitation is not limited to Unionists; as I have already said,
the English Radicals have been quite as incapable of going to the root
of the matter. Half the case for Home Rule was that Ireland could not
be trusted to the English Home Rulers. They also, to recur to the
parable, have been unable to take the talking cow by the horns; for I
need hardly say that the talking cow is an Irish bull. What has been
the matter with their Irish politics was simply that they were English
politics. They discussed the Irish Question; but they never seriously
contemplated the Irish Answer. That is, the Liberal was content with
the negative truth, that the Irish should not be prevented from having
the sort of law they liked. But the Liberal seldom faced the positive
truth, about what sort of law they would like. He instinctively avoided
the very imagination of this; for the simple reason that the law the
Irish would like is as remote from what is called Liberal as from
what is called Unionist. Nor has the Liberal ever embraced it in his
broadest liberality, nor the Unionist ever absorbed it into his most
complete unification. It remains outside us altogether, a thing to be
stared at like a fairy cow; and by far the wisest English visitor is
he who will simply stare at it. Sooner or later he will see what it
means; which is simply this: that whether it be a case for coercion or
emancipation (and it might be used either way) the fact is that a free
Ireland would not only _not_ be what we call lawless, but might not
even be what we call free. So far from being an anarchy, it would be an
orderly and even conservative civilisation--like the Chinese. But it
would be a civilisation so fundamentally different from our own, that
our own Liberals would differ from it as much as our own Conservatives.
The fair question for an Englishman is whether that fundamental
difference would make division dangerous; it has already made union
impossible. Now in turning over these notes of so brief a visit,
suffering from all the stale scurry of my journalistic trade, I have
been in doubt between a chronological and a logical order of events.
But I have decided in favour of logic, of the high light that really
revealed the picture, and by which I firmly believe that everything
else should be seen. And if any one were to ask me what was the sight
that struck me most in Ireland, both as strange and as significant, I
should know what to reply. I saw it long after I had seen the Irish
cities, had felt something of the brilliant bitterness of Dublin and
the stagnant optimism of Belfast; but I put it first here because I
am certain that without it all the rest is meaningless; that it lies
behind all politics, enormous and silent, as the great hills lie beyond
Dublin.

I was moving in a hired motor down a road in the North-West, towards
the middle of that rainy autumn. I was not moving very fast; because
the progress was slowed down to a solemn procession by crowds of
families with their cattle and live stock going to the market beyond;
which things also are an allegory. But what struck my mind and stuck in
it was this; that all down one side of the road, as far as we went,
the harvest was gathered in neatly and safely; and all down the other
side of the road it was rotting in the rain. Now the side where it
was safe was a string of small plots worked by peasant proprietors,
as petty by our standards as a row of the cheapest villas. The land
on which all the harvest was wasted was the land of a large modern
estate. I asked why the landlord was later with his harvesting than
the peasants; and I was told rather vaguely that there had been
strikes and similar labour troubles. I did not go into the rights
of the matter; but the point here is that, whatever they were, the
moral is the same. You may curse the cruel Capitalist landlord or you
may rave at the ruffianly Bolshevist strikers; but you must admit
that between them they had produced a stoppage, which the peasant
proprietorship a few yards off did not produce. You might support
either where they conflicted, but you could not deny the sense in
which they had combined, and combined to prevent what a few rustics
across the road could combine to produce. For all that we in England
agree about and disagree about, all for which we fight and all from
which we differ, our darkness and our light, our heaven and hell, were
there on the left side of the road. On the right side of the road lay
something so different that we do not even differ from it. It may be
that Trusts are rising like towers of gold and iron, overshadowing the
earth and shutting out the sun; but they are only rising on the left
side of the road. It may be that Trade Unions are laying labyrinths
of international insurrection, cellars stored with the dynamite of a
merely destructive democracy; but all that international maze lies to
the left side of the road. Employment and unemployment are there; Marx
and the Manchester School are there. The left side of the road may even
go through amazing transformations of its own; its story may stride
across abysses of anarchy; but it will never step across the road.
The landlord’s estate may become a sort of Morris Utopia, organised
communally by Socialists, or more probably by Guild Socialists. It may
(as I fear is much more likely) pass through the stage of an employer’s
model village to the condition of an old pagan slave-estate. But the
peasants across the road would not only refuse the Servile State, but
would quite as resolutely refuse the Utopia. Europe may seem to be
torn from end to end by the blast of a Bolshevist trumpet, sundering
the bourgeois from the proletarian; but the peasant across the road is
neither a bourgeois nor a proletarian. England may seem to be rent by
an irreconcilable rivalry between Capital and Labour; but the peasant
across the road is both a capitalist and a labourer. He is several
other curious things; including the man who got his crops in first; who
was literally first in the field.

To an Englishman, especially a Londoner, this was like walking to
the corner of a London street and finding the policeman in rags,
with a patch on his trousers and a smudge on his face; but the
crossing-sweeper wearing a single eyeglass and a suit fresh from a
West End tailor. In fact, it was nearly as surprising as a walking
haystack or a talking cow. What was generally dingy, dilatory, and
down-at-heels was here comparatively tidy and timely; what was orderly
and organised was belated and abandoned. For it must be sharply
realised that the peasant proprietors succeeded here, not only because
they were really proprietors, but because they were only peasants.
It was _because_ they were on a small scale that they were a great
success. It was because they were too poor to have servants that
they grew rich in spite of strikers. It was, so far as it went, the
flattest possible contradiction to all that is said in England, both
by Collectivists and Capitalists, about the efficiency of the great
organisation. For in so far as it had failed, it had actually failed,
not only through being great, but through being organised. On the left
side of the road the big machine had stopped working, _because_ it was
a big machine. The small men were still working, because they were
not machines. Such were the strange relations of the two things, that
the stars in their courses fought against Capitalism; that the very
clouds rolling over that rocky valley warred for its pigmies against
its giants. The rain falls alike on the just and the unjust; yet here
it had not fallen alike on the rich and poor. It had fallen to the
destruction of the rich.

Now I do, as a point of personal opinion, believe that the right side
of the road was really the right side of the road. That is, I believe
it represented the right side of the question; that these little
pottering peasants had got hold of the true secret, which is missed
both by Capitalism and Collectivism. But I am not here urging my own
preferences on my own countrymen; and I am not concerned primarily to
point out that this is an argument against Capitalism and Collectivism.
What I do point out is that it is the fundamental argument against
Unionism. Perhaps it is, on that ultimate level, the only argument
against Unionism; which is probably why it is never used against
Unionists. I mean, of course, that it was never really used against
English Unionists by English Home Rulers, in the recriminations of that
Irish Question which was really an English Question. The essential
demanded of that question was merely that it should be an open
question; a thing rather like an open wound. Modern industrial society
is fond of problems, and therefore not at all fond of solutions. A
consideration of those who really have understood this fundamental fact
will be sufficient to show how confusing and useless are the mere party
labels in the matter. George Wyndham was a Unionist who was deposed
because he was a Home Ruler. Sir Horace Plunkett is a Unionist who is
trusted because he is a Home Ruler. By far the most revolutionary piece
of Nationalism that was ever really effected for Ireland was effected
by Wyndham, who was an English Tory squire. And by far the most brutal
and brainless piece of Unionism that was ever imposed on Ireland was
imposed in the name of the Radical theory of Free Trade, when the
Irish juries brought in verdicts of wilful murder against Lord John
Russell. I say this to show that my sense of a reality is quite apart
from the personal accident that I have myself always been a Radical
in English politics, as well as a Home Ruler in Irish politics. But I
say it even more in order to re-affirm that the English have first to
forget all their old formulæ and look at a new fact. It is not a new
fact; but it is new to them.

To realise it we must not only go outside the British parties but
outside the British Empire, outside the very universe of the ordinary
Briton. The real question can be easily stated, for it is as simple
as it is large. What is going to happen to the peasantries of Europe,
or for that matter of the whole world? It would be far better, as I
have already suggested, if we could consider it as a new case of some
peasantry in Europe, or somewhere else in the world. It would be far
better if we ceased to talk of Ireland and Scotland, and began to
talk of Ireland and Serbia. Let us, for the sake of our own mental
composure, call this unfortunate people Slovenes. But let us realise
that these remote Slovenes are, by the testimony of every truthful
traveller, rooted in the habit of private property, and now ripening
into a considerable private prosperity. It will often be necessary to
remember that the Slovenes are Roman Catholics; and that, with that
impatient pugnacity which marks the Slovene temperament, they have
often employed violence, but always for the restoration of what they
regarded as a reasonable system of private property. Now in a hundred
determining districts, of which France is the most famous, this system
has prospered. It has its own faults as well as its own merits; but
it has prospered. What is going to happen to it? I will here confine
myself to saying with the most solid confidence what is not going to
happen to it. It is not going to be _really_ ruled by Socialists; and
it is not going to be really ruled by merchant princes, like those who
ruled Venice or like those who rule England.

It is not merely that England ought not to rule Ireland but that
England cannot. It is not merely that Englishmen cannot rule Irishmen,
but that merchants cannot rule peasants. It is not so much that we have
dealt benefits to England and blows to Ireland. It is that our benefits
for England would be blows to Ireland. And this we already began to
admit in practice, before we had even dimly begun to conceive it in
theory. We do not merely admit it in special laws against Ireland like
the Coercion Acts, or special laws in favour of Ireland like the Land
Acts; it is admitted even more by specially exempting Ireland than by
specially studying Ireland. In other words, whatever else the Unionists
want, they do not want to unite; they are not quite so mad as that. I
cannot myself conceive any purpose in having one parliament except to
pass one law; and one law for England and Ireland is simply something
that becomes more insanely impossible every day. If the two societies
were stationary, they would be sufficiently separate; but they are
both moving rapidly in opposite directions. England may be moving
towards a condition which some call Socialism and I call Slavery;
but whatever it is, Ireland is speeding farther and farther from it.
Whatever it is, the men who manage it will no more be able to manage a
European peasantry than the peasants in these mud cabins could manage
the Stock Exchange. All attempts, whether imperial or international, to
lump these peasants along with some large and shapeless thing called
Labour, are part of a cosmopolitan illusion which sees mankind as a
map. The world of the International is a pill, as round and as small.
It is true that all men want health; but it is certainly not true that
all men want the same medicine. Let us allow the cosmopolitan to survey
the world from China to Peru; but do not let us allow the chemist to
identify Chinese opium and Peruvian bark.

My parallel about the Slovenes was only a fancy; yet I can give a
real parallel from the Slavs which is a fact. It was a fact from
my own experience in Ireland; and it exactly illustrates the real
international sympathies of peasants. Their internationalism has
nothing to do with the International. I had not been in Ireland many
hours when several people mentioned to me with considerable excitement
some news from the Continent. They were not, strange as it may seem,
dancing with joy over the disaster of Caporetto, or glowing with
admiration of the Crown Prince. Few really rejoiced in English defeats;
and none really rejoiced in German victories. It was news about the
Bolshevists; but it was not the news of how nobly they had given votes
to the Russian women, nor of how savagely they had fired bullets into
the Russian princesses. It was the news of a check to the Bolshevists;
but it was not a glorification of Kerensky or Korniloff, or any of the
newspaper heroes who seem to have satisfied us all, so long as their
names began with K and nobody knew anything about them. In short, it
was nothing that could be found in all our myriad newspaper articles
on the subject. I would give an educated Englishman a hundred guesses
about what it was; but even if he knew it he would not know what it
meant.

It had appeared in the little paper about peasant produce so
successfully conducted by Mr George Russell, the admirable ‘A. E.,’ and
it was told me eagerly by the poet himself, by a learned and brilliant
Jesuit, and by several other people, as the great news from Europe.
It was simply the news that the Jewish Socialists of the Bolshevist
Government had been attempting to confiscate the peasants’ savings in
the co-operative banks; and had been forced to desist. And they spoke
of it as of a great battle won on the Danube or the Rhine. That is what
I mean when I say that these people are of a pattern and belong to a
system which cuts across all our own political divisions. They felt
themselves fighting the Socialist as fiercely as any Capitalist can
feel it. But they not only knew what they were fighting against, but
what they were fighting for; which is more than the Capitalist does. I
do not know how far modern Europe really shows a menace of Bolshevism,
or how far merely a panic of Capitalism. But I know that if any honest
resistance has to be offered to mere robbery, the resistance of Ireland
will be the most honest, and probably the most important. It may be
that international Israel will launch against us out of the East an
insane simplification of the unity of Man, as Islam once launched out
of the East an insane simplification of the unity of God. If it be so,
it is where property is well distributed that it will be well defended.
The post of honour will be with those who fight in very truth for their
own land. If ever there came such a drive of wild dervishes against us,
it would be the chariots and elephants of plutocracy that would roll in
confusion and rout; and the squares of the peasant infantry would stand.

Anyhow, the first fact to realise is that we are dealing with a
European peasantry; and it would be really better, as I say, to think
of it first as a Continental peasantry. There are numberless important
inferences from this fact; but there is one point, politically
topical and urgent, on which I may well touch here. It will be well
to understand about this peasantry something that we generally
misunderstand, even about a Continental peasantry. English tourists
in France or Italy commonly make the mistake of supposing that the
people cheat, because the people bargain, or attempt to bargain. When
a peasant asks tenpence for something that is worth fourpence, the
tourist misunderstands the whole problem. He commonly solves it by
calling the man a thief and paying the tenpence. There are ten thousand
errors in this, beginning with the primary error of an oligarchy, of
treating a man as a servant when he feels more like a small squire.
The peasant does not choose to receive insults; but he never expected
to receive tenpence. A man who understood him would simply suggest
twopence, in a calm and courteous manner; and the two would eventually
meet in the middle at a perfectly just price. There would not be what
we call a fixed price at the beginning, but there would be a very
firmly fixed price at the end: that is, the bargain once made would be
a sacredly sealed contract. The peasant, so far from cheating, has his
own horror of cheating; and certainly his own fury at being cheated.
Now in the political bargain with the English, the Irish simply think
they have been cheated. They think Home Rule was stolen from them
_after_ the contract was sealed; and it will be hard for any one to
contradict them. If ‘_le Roi le veult_’ is not a sacred seal on a
contract, what is? The sentiment is stronger because the contract was a
compromise. Home Rule was the fourpence and not the tenpence; and, in
perfect loyalty to the peasant’s code of honour, they have now reverted
to the tenpence. The Irish have now returned in a reaction of anger to
their most extreme demands; _not_ because we denied what they demanded,
but because we denied what we accepted. As I shall have occasion to
note, there are other and wilder elements in the quarrel; but the
first fact to remember is that the quarrel began with a bargain, that
it will probably have to end with another bargain; and that it will
be a bargain with peasants. On the whole, in spite of abominable
blunders and bad faith, I think there is still a chance of bargaining,
but we must see that there is no chance of cheating. We may haggle
like peasants, and remember that their first offer is not necessarily
their last. But we must be as honest as peasants; and that is a hard
saying for politicians. The great Parnell, a squire who had many of the
qualities of a peasant (qualities the English so wildly misunderstood
as to think them English, when they were really very Irish) converted
his people from a Fenianism fiercer than Sinn Fein to a Home Rule more
moderate than that which any sane statesmanship would now offer to
Ireland. But the peasants trusted Parnell, not because they thought he
was asking for it, but because they thought he could get it. Whatever
we decide to give to Ireland, we must give it; it is now worse than
useless to promise it. I will say here, once and for all, the hardest
thing that an Englishman has to say of his impressions of another great
European people; that over all those hills and valleys our word is
wind, and our bond is waste paper.

But, in any case, the peasantry remains: and the whole weight of the
matter is that it will remain. It is much more certain to remain than
any of the commercial or colonial systems that will have to bargain
with it. We may honestly think that the British Empire is both more
liberal and more lasting than the Austrian Empire, or other large
political combinations. But a combination like the Austrian Empire
could go to pieces, and ten such combinations could go to pieces,
before people like the Serbians ceased to desire to be peasants, and
to demand to be free peasants. And the British combination, precisely
because it is a combination and not a community, is in its nature more
lax and liable to real schism than this sort of community, which might
almost be called a communion. Any attack on it is like an attempt to
abolish grass; which is not only the symbol of it in the old national
song, but it is a very true symbol of it in any new philosophic
history; a symbol of its equality, its ubiquity, its multiplicity, and
its mighty power to return. To fight against grass is to fight against
God; we can only so mismanage our own city and our own citizenship that
the grass grows in our own streets. And even then it is our streets
that will be dead; and the grass will still be alive.




CHAPTER III




THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD


There was an old joke of my childhood, to the effect that men might
be grouped together with reference to their Christian names. I have
forgotten the cases then under consideration; but contemporary
examples would be sufficiently suggestive to-day. A ceremonial
brotherhood-in-arms between Father Bernard Vaughan and Mr Bernard Shaw
seems full of possibilities. I am faintly pleased with the fancy of Mr
Arnold Bennett endeavouring to extract the larger humanities of fiction
from the political differences of Mr Arnold White and Mr Arnold Lupton.
I should pass my own days in the exclusive society of Professor Gilbert
Murray and Sir Gilbert Parker; whom I can conceive as differing on
some points from each other, and on some points from me. Now there is
one odd thing to notice about this old joke; that it might have been
taken in a more serious spirit, though in a saner style, in a yet older
period. This fantasy of the Victorian Age might easily have been a
fact of the Middle Ages. There would have been nothing abnormal in the
moral atmosphere of mediævalism in some feast or pageant celebrating
the fellowship of men who had the same patron saint. It seems mad and
meaningless now, because the meaning of Christian names has been lost.
They have fallen into a kind of chaos and oblivion which is highly
typical of our time. I mean that there are still fashions in them,
but no longer reasons for them. For a fashion is a custom without a
cause. A fashion is a custom to which men cannot get accustomed; simply
because it is without a cause. That is why our industrial societies,
touching every topic from the cosmos to the coat-collars, are merely
swept by a succession of modes which are merely moods. They are customs
that fail to be customary. And so amid all our fashions in Christian
names, we have forgotten all that was meant by the custom of Christian
names. We have forgotten all the original facts about a Christian name;
but, above all, the fact that it was Christian.

Now if we note this process going on in the world of London or
Liverpool, we shall see that it has already gone even farther and
fared even worse. The surname also is losing its root and therefore
its reason. The surname has become as solitary as a nickname. For it
might be argued that the first name is meant to be an individual and
even isolated thing; but the last name is certainly meant, by all
logic and history, to link a man with his human origins, habits, or
habitation. Historically, it was a word taken from the town he lived
in or the trade guild to which he belonged; legally it is still the
word on which all questions of legitimacy, succession, and testamentary
arrangements turn. It is meant to be the corporate name; in that sense
it is meant to be the impersonal name, as the other is meant to be the
personal name. Yet in the modern mode of industrialism, it is more and
more taken in a manner at once lonely and light. Any corporate social
system built upon it would seem as much of a joke as the joke about
Christian names with which I began. If it would seem odd to require a
Thomas to make friends with any other Thomas, it would appear almost as
perplexing to insist that any Thompson must love any other Thompson. It
may be that Sir Edward Henry, late of the Police Force, does not wish
to be confined to the society of Mr Edward Clodd. But would Sir Edward
Henry necessarily seek the society of Mr O. Henry, entertaining as that
society would be? Sir John Barker, founder of the great Kensington
emporium, need not specially seek out and embrace Mr John Masefield;
but need he, any more swiftly, precipitate himself into the arms of Mr
Granville Barker? This vista of varieties would lead us far; but it
is enough to notice, nonsense apart, that the most ordinary English
surnames have become unique in their social significance; they stand
for the man rather than the race or the origins. Even when they are
most common they are not communal. What we call the family name is not
now primarily the name of the family. The family itself, as a corporate
conception, has already faded into the background, and is in danger of
fading from the background. In short, our Christian names are not the
only Christian things that we may lose.

Now the second solid fact which struck me in Ireland (after the success
of small property and the _failure_ of large organisation) was the fact
that the family was in a flatly contrary position. All I have said
above, in current language, about the whole trend of the modern world,
is directly opposite to the whole trend of the modern Irish world. Not
only is the Christian name a Christian name; but (what seems still more
paradoxical and even pantomimic) the family name is really a family
name. Touching the first of the two, it would be easy to trace out
some very interesting truths about it, if they did not divert us from
the main truth of this chapter; the second great truth about Ireland.
People contrasting the ‘education’ of the two countries, or seeking to
extend to the one the thing which is called education in the other,
might indeed do worse than study the simple problem of the meaning of
Christian names. It might dawn at last, even on educationists, that
there is a value in the content as well as the extent of culture; or
(in other words), that knowing nine hundred words is not always more
important than knowing what some of them mean. It is strictly and
soberly true that any peasant, in a mud cabin in County Clare, when he
names his child Michael, may really have a sense of the presence that
smote down Satan, the arms and plumage of the paladin of paradise. I
doubt whether it is so overwhelmingly probable that any clerk in any
villa on Clapham Common, when he names his son John, has a vision of
the holy eagle of the Apocalypse, or even of the mystical cup of the
disciple whom Jesus loved. In the face of that simple fact, I have
no doubt about which is the more educated man; and even a knowledge
of the _Daily Mail_ does not redress the balance. It is often said,
and possibly truly, that the peasant named Michael cannot write his
own name. But it is quite equally true that the clerk named John
cannot read his own name. He cannot read it because it is in a foreign
language, and he has never been made to realise what it stands for. He
does not know that John means John, as the other man does know that
Michael means Michael. In that rigidly realistic sense, the pupil of
industrial intellectualism does not even know his own name.

But this is a parenthesis; because the point here is that the man in
the street (as distinct from the man in the field) has been separated
not only from his private but from his more public description. He has
not only forgotten his name, but forgotten his address. In my own view,
he is like one of those unfortunate people who wake up with their minds
a blank, and therefore cannot find their way home. But whether or no
we take this view of the state of things in an industrial society like
the English, we must realise firmly that a totally opposite state of
things exists in an agricultural society like the Irish. We may put it,
if we like, in the form of an unfamiliar and even unfriendly fancy. We
may say that the house is greater than the man; that the house is an
amiable ogre that runs after and recaptures the man. But the fact is
there, familiar or unfamiliar, friendly or unfriendly; and the fact
is the family. The family pride is prodigious, though it generally
goes along with glowing masses of individual humility. And this family
sentiment does attach itself to the family name; so that the very
language in which men think is made up of family names. In this the
atmosphere is singularly unlike that of England though much more like
that of Scotland. Indeed, it will illustrate the impartial recognition
of this, apart from any partisan deductions, that it is equally
apparent in the place where Ireland and Scotland are supposed to meet.
It is equally apparent in Ulster, and even in the Protestant corner of
Ulster.

In all the Ulster propaganda I came across, I think the thing that
struck me most sharply was one phrase in one Unionist leading article.
It was something that might fairly be called Scottish; something
which was really even more Irish; but something which could not in
the wildest mood be called English, and therefore could not with any
rational meaning be called Unionist. Yet it was part of a passionately
sincere, and indeed truly human and historic outburst of the politics
of the north-east corner, against the politics of the rest of Ireland.
Most of us remember that Sir Edward Carson put into the Government a
legal friend of his named Campbell; it was at the beginning of the war,
and few of us thought anything of the matter except that it was stupid
to give posts to Carsonites at the most delicate crisis of the cause
in Ireland. Since then, as we also know, the same Campbell has shown
himself a sensible man, which I should translate as a practical Home
Ruler; but which is anyhow something more than what is generally meant
by a Carsonite. I entertain, myself, a profound suspicion that Carson
also would very much like to be something more than a Carsonite. But
however this may be, his legal friend of whom I speak made an excellent
speech, containing some concession to Irish popular sentiment. As might
have been expected, there were furious denunciations of him in the
press of the Orange party; but not more furious than might have been
found in the _Morning Post_ or any Tory paper. Nevertheless, there
was one phrase that I certainly never saw in the _Morning Post_ or
the _Saturday Review_; one phrase I should never expect to see in any
English paper, though I might very probably see it in a Scotch paper.
It was this sentence, that was read to me from the leading article of
a paper in Belfast: ‘There never was treason yet but a Campbell was
at the bottom of it.’ I give the extract as it was given to me; I
am quite conscious of a curious historical paradox about it. A curse
against Campbells would seem to be a Jacobite rather than a Williamite
tradition. It may suggest interesting complications of Scottish feuds
in Ireland; but it serves as one of a thousand cases of this fact about
the family.

Let anybody imagine an Englishman saying, about some business quarrel,
‘How like an Atkins!’ or ‘What could you expect of a Wilkinson?’ A
moment’s reflection will show that it would be even more impossible
touching public men in public quarrels. No English Liberal ever
connected the earlier exploits of the present Lord Birkenhead with
atavistic influences, or the totem of the wide and wandering tribe
of Smith. No English patriot traced back the family tree of any
English pacifist; or said there was never treason yet but a Pringle
was at the bottom of it. It is the indefinite article that is here
the definite distinction. It is the expression ‘a Campbell’ which
suddenly transforms the scene, and covers the robes of one lawyer
with the ten thousand tartans of a whole clan. Now that phrase is the
phrase that meets the traveller everywhere in Ireland. Perhaps the
next most arresting thing I remember, after the agrarian revolution,
was the way in which one poor Irishman happened to speak to me about
Sir Roger Casement. He did not praise him as a deliverer of Ireland;
he did not abuse him as a disgrace to Ireland; he did not say anything
of the twenty things one might expect him to say. He merely referred
to the rumour that Casement meant to become a Catholic just before his
execution, and expressed a sort of distant interest in it. He added:
‘He’s always been a Black Protestant. All the Casements are Black
Protestants.’ I confess that, at that moment of that morbid story,
there seemed to me to be something unearthly about the very idea of
there being other Casements. If ever a man seemed solitary, if ever a
man seemed unique to the point of being unnatural, it was that man on
the two or three occasions when I have seen his sombre handsome face
and his wild eye; a tall, dark figure walking already in the shadow of
a dreadful doom. I do not know if he was a Black Protestant; but he
was a black something, in the sad if not the bad sense of the symbol.
I fancy, in truth, he stood rather for the third of Browning’s famous
triad of rhyming monosyllables. A distinguished Nationalist Member,
who happened to have had a medical training, said to me, ‘I was quite
certain, when I first clapped eyes on him, the man was mad.’ Anyhow the
man was so unusual, that it would never have occurred to me or any of
my countrymen to talk as if there were a class or clan of such men. I
could almost have imagined he had been born without father or mother.
But for the Irish, his father and mother were really more important
than he was. There is said to be a historical mystery about whether
Parnell made a pun when he said that the name of Kettle was a household
word in Ireland. Few symbols could now be more contrary than the name
of Kettle and the name of Casement (save for the courage they had in
common); for the younger Kettle, who died so gloriously in France,
was a Nationalist as broad as the other was cramped, and as sane as
the other was crazy. But if the fancy of a punster, following his own
delightful vein of nonsense, should see something quaint in the image
of a hundred such Kettles singing as he sang by a hundred hearths, a
more bitter jester, reading that black and obscure story of the capture
on the coast, might utter a similar flippancy about other Casements,
opening on the foam of such very perilous seas, in a land so truly
forlorn. But even if we were not annoyed at the pun, we should be
surprised at the plural. And our surprise would be the measure of the
deepest difference between England and Ireland. To express it in the
same idle imagery, it would be the fact that even a casement is a part
of a house, as a kettle is a part of a household. Every word in Irish
is a household word.

The English would no more have thought of a plural for the word
Gladstone than for the word God. They would never have imagined
Disraeli compassed about with a great cloud of Disraelis; it would
have seemed to them altogether too apocalyptic an exaggeration of
being on the side of the angels. To this day in England, as I have
reason to know, it is regarded as a rabid and insane form of religious
persecution to suggest that a Jew very probably comes of a Jewish
family. In short, the modern English, while their rulers are willing
to give due consideration to Eugenics as a reasonable opportunity for
various forms of polygamy and infanticide, are drifting farther and
farther from the only consideration of Eugenics that could possibly be
fit for Christian men, the consideration of it as an accomplished fact.
I have spoken of infanticide; but indeed the ethic involved is rather
that of parricide and matricide. To my own taste, the present tendency
of social reform would seem to consist of destroying all traces of the
parents, in order to study the heredity of the children. But I do not
here ask the reader to accept my own tastes or even opinions about
these things; I only bear witness to an objective fact about a foreign
country. It can be summed up by saying that Parnell is the Parnell for
the English; but a Parnell for the Irish.

This is what I mean when I say that English Home Rulers do not know
what the Irish mean by home. And this is also what I mean when I say
that the society does not fit into any of our social classifications,
liberal or conservative. To many Radicals this sense of lineage will
appear rank reactionary aristocracy. And it is aristocratic, if we
mean by this a pride of pedigree; but it is not aristocratic in the
practical and political sense. Strange as it may sound, its practical
effect is democratic. It is not aristocratic in the sense of creating
an aristocracy. On the contrary, it is perhaps the one force that
permanently prevents the creation of an aristocracy, in the manner of
the English squirearchy. The reason of this apparent paradox can be put
plainly enough in one sentence. If you are _really_ concerned about
your relations, you have to be concerned about your poor relations.
You soon discover that a considerable number of your second cousins
exhibit a strong social tendency to be chimney-sweeps and tinkers.
You soon learn the lesson of human equality, if you try honestly and
consistently to learn any other lesson, even the lesson of heraldry
and genealogy. For good or evil, a real working aristocracy has to
forget about three-quarters of its aristocrats. It has to discard the
poor who have the genteel blood, and welcome the rich who can live
the genteel life. If a man is interesting because he is a McCarthy,
it is so far as he is interesting because he is a man; that is, he is
interesting whether he is a duke or a dustman. But if he is interesting
because he is Lord FitzArthur and lives at FitzArthur House, then he is
interesting when he has merely bought the house, or when he has merely
bought the title. To maintain a squirearchy it is necessary to admire
the new squire, and therefore to forget the old squire. The sense of
family is like a dog and follows the family; the sense of aristocracy
is like a cat and continues to haunt the house. I am not arguing
against aristocracy, if the English choose to preserve it in England; I
am only making clear the terms on which they hold it, and warning them
that a people with a strong family sense will not hold it on any terms.
Aristocracy, as it has flourished in England since the Reformation,
with not a little national glory and commercial success, is in its very
nature built up of broken and desecrated homes. It has to destroy a
hundred poor relations to keep up a family. It has to destroy a hundred
families to keep up a class.

But if this family spirit is incompatible with what we mean by
aristocracy, it is quite as incompatible with three-quarters of what
many men praise and preach as democracy. The whole trend of what
has been regarded as Liberal legislation in England, necessary or
unnecessary, defensible and indefensible, has for good or evil been
at the expense of the independence of the family, especially of the
poor family. From the first most reasonable restraints of the Factory
Acts to the last most maniacal antics of interference with other
people’s nursery games or Christmas dinners, the whole process has
turned sometimes on the pivot of the State, more often on the pivot
of the employer, but never on the pivot of the home. All this may be
an emancipation; I only point out that Ireland really asked for Home
Rule chiefly to be emancipated from this emancipation. But indeed the
English politicians, to do them justice, show their consciousness
of this by the increasing number of cases in which the other nation
is exempted. We may have harried this unhappy people with our
persecutions; but at least we spare them our reforms. We have smitten
them with plagues; but at least we dare not scourge them with our
remedies. The real case against the Union is not merely a case against
the Unionists; it is a far stronger case against the Universalists.
It is this strange and ironic truth; that a man stands up holding a
charter of charity and peace for all mankind; that he lays down a law
of enlightened justice for all the nations of the earth; that he claims
to behold man from the beginnings of his evolution equal, without
any difference between the most distant creeds and colours; that he
stands as the orator of the human race, whose statute only declares all
humanity to be human; and then slightly drops his voice and says, ‘This
Act shall not apply to Ireland.’




CHAPTER IV




THE PARADOX OF LABOUR


My first general and visual impression of the green island was that it
was not green but brown; that it was positively brown with khaki. This
is one of those experiences that cannot be confused with expectations;
the sort of small thing that is seen but not foreseen in the verbal
visions of books and newspapers. I knew, of course, that we had a
garrison in Dublin, but I had no notion that it was so obvious all over
Dublin. I had no notion that it had been considered necessary to occupy
the country in such force, or with so much parade of force. And the
first thought that flashed through my mind found words in the single
sentence: ‘How useful these men would have been in the breach at St
Quentin.’

For I went to Dublin towards the end of 1918, and not long after those
awful days which led up to the end of the war, and seemed more like
the end of the world. There hung still in the imagination, as above
a void of horror, that line that was the last chain of the world’s
chivalry; and the memory of the day when it seemed that our name and
our greatness and our glory went down before the annihilation from
the north. Ireland is hardly to blame if she has never known how
noble an England was in peril in that hour; or for what beyond any
empire we were troubled when, under a cloud of thick darkness, we
almost felt her ancient foundations move upon the floor of the sea.
But I, as an Englishman, at least knew it; and it was for England and
not for Ireland that I felt this first impatience and tragic irony.
I had always doubted the military policy that culminated in Irish
conscription, and merely on military grounds. If any policy of the
English could deserve to be called in the proverbial sense Irish,
I think it was this one. It was wasting troops in Ireland because
we wanted them in France. I had the same purely patriotic and even
pugnacious sense of annoyance, mingling with my sense of pathos, in
the sight of the devastation of the great Dublin street, which had
been bombarded by the British troops during the Easter Rebellion. I
was bitterly distressed that such a cannonade had ever been aimed at
the Irish; but even more distressed that it had not been aimed at the
Germans. The question of the necessity of the heavy attack, like the
question of the necessity of the large army of occupation, is of course
bound up with the history of the Easter Rebellion itself. That strange
and dramatic event, which came quite as unexpectedly to Nationalist
Ireland as to Unionist England, is no part of my own experiences, and
I will not dogmatise on so dark a problem. But I will say, in passing,
that I suspect a certain misunderstanding of its very nature to be
common on both sides. Everything seems to point to the paradox that
the rebels needed the less to be conquered, because they were actually
aiming at being conquered, rather than at being conquerors. In the
moral sense they were most certainly heroes, but I doubt if they
expected to be conquering heroes. They desired to be in the Greek and
literal sense martyrs; they wished not so much to win as to witness.
They thought that nothing but their dead bodies could really prove
that Ireland was not dead. How far this sublime and suicidal ideal was
really useful in reviving national enthusiasm it is for Irishmen to
judge; I should have said that the enthusiasm was there anyhow. But if
any such action is based on international hopes, as they affect England
or a great part of America, it seems to me founded on a fallacy about
the facts. I shall have occasion to note many English errors about
the Irish; and this seems to me a very notable Irish error about the
English. If we are often utterly mistaken about their mentality, they
were quite equally mistaken about our mistake. And curiously enough,
they failed through not knowing the one compliment that we had really
always paid them. Their act presupposed that Irish courage needed
proof; and it never did. I have heard all the most horrible nonsense
talked against Ireland before the war; and I never heard Englishmen
doubt Irish military valour. What they did doubt was Irish political
sanity. It will be seen at once that the Easter action could only
disprove the prejudice they hadn’t got, and actually confirmed the
prejudice they had got. The charge against the Irishman was not a lack
of boldness, but rather an excess of it. Men were right in thinking
him brave, and they could not be more right. But they were wrong in
thinking him mad, and they had an excellent opportunity to be more
wrong. Then, when the attempt to fight against England developed by
its own logic into a refusal to fight for England, men took away the
number they first thought of, and were irritated into denying what
they had originally never dreamed of doubting. In any case, this was,
I think, the temper in which the minority of the true Sinn Feiners
sought martyrdom. I for one will never sneer at such a motive; but it
would hardly have amounted to so great a movement but for another force
that happened to ally itself with them. It is for the sake of this
that I have here begun with the Easter tragedy itself; for with the
consideration of this we come to the paradox of Irish Labour.

Some of my remarks on the stability and even repose of a peasant
society may seem exaggerated in the light of a Labour agitation that
breaks out in Ireland as elsewhere. But I have particular and even
personal reasons for regarding that agitation as the exception that
proves the rule. It was the background of the peasant landscape that
made the Dublin strike the peculiar sort of drama that it was; and this
operated in two ways; first, by isolating the industrial capitalist as
something exceptional and almost fanatical; and second, by reinforcing
the proletariat with a vague tradition of property. My own sympathies
were all with Larkin and Connolly as against the late Mr Murphy; but
it is curious to note that even Mr Murphy was quite a different kind
of man from the Lord Something who is the head of a commercial combine
in England. He was much more like some morbid prince of the fifteenth
century, full of cold anger, not without perverted piety. But the
first few words I heard about him in Ireland were full of that vast,
vague fact which I have tried to put first among my impressions. I
have called it the family; but it covers many cognate things; youth
and old friendships, not to mention old quarrels. It might be more
fully defined as a realism about origins. The first things I heard
about Murphy were facts of his forgotten youth, or a youth that would
in England have been forgotten. They were tales about friends of his
simpler days, with whom he had set out to push some more or less
sentimental vendetta against somebody. Suppose whenever we talked of
Harrod’s Stores we heard first about the boyish day-dreams of Harrod.
Suppose the mention of Bradshaw’s Railway Guide brought up tales of
feud and first love in the early life of Mr Bradshaw, or even of Mrs
Bradshaw. That is the atmosphere, to be felt rather than described,
that a stranger in Ireland feels around him. English journalism and
gossip, dealing with English business men, are often precise about the
present and prophetic about the future, but seldom communicative about
the past; _et pour cause_. They will tell us where the capitalist is
going to, as to the House of Lords, or to Monte Carlo, or inferentially
to heaven; but they say as little as possible about where he comes
from. In Ireland a man carries the family mansion about with him like a
snail; and his father’s ghost follows him like his shadow. Everything
good and bad that could be said was said, not only about Murphy but
about Murphys. An anecdote of the old Irish Parliament describes an
orator as gracefully alluding to the presence of an opponent’s sister
in the Ladies’ Gallery, by praying that wrath overtake the whole
accursed generation ‘from the toothless old hag who is grinning in the
gallery to the white-livered poltroon who is shivering on the floor.’
The story is commonly told as suggesting the rather wild disunion of
Irish parties; but it is quite as important a suggestion of the union
of Irish families.

As a matter of fact, the great Dublin Strike, a conflagration of
which the embers were still glowing at the time of my visit, involved
another episode which illustrates once again this recurrent principle
of the reality of the family in Ireland. Some English Socialists, it
may be remembered, moved by an honourable pity for the poor families
starving during the strike, made a proposal for taking the children
away and feeding them properly in England. I should have thought the
more natural course would have been to give money or food to the
parents. But the philanthropists, being English and being Socialists,
probably had a trust in what is called organisation and a distrust
of what is called charity. It is supposed that charity makes a man
dependent; though in fact charity makes him independent, as compared
with the dreary dependence usually produced by organisation. Charity
gives property, and therefore liberty. There is manifestly much more
emancipation in giving a beggar a shilling to spend, than in sending
an official after him to spend it for him. The Socialists, however,
had placidly arranged for the deportation of all the poor children,
when they found themselves, to their astonishment, confronted with the
red-hot reality called the religion of Ireland. The priests and the
families of the faithful organised themselves for a furious agitation,
on the ground that the faith would be lost in foreign and heretical
homes. They were not satisfied with the assurance, which some of the
Socialists earnestly offered, that the faith would not be tampered
with; and, as a matter of clear thinking, I think they were quite
right. Those who offer such a reassurance have never thought about what
a religion is. They entertain the extraordinary idea that religion is
a topic. They think religion is a thing like radishes, which can be
avoided throughout a particular conversation with a particular person,
whom the mention of a radish may convulse with anger or agony. But a
religion is simply the world a man inhabits. In practice, a Socialist
living in Liverpool would not know when he was or was not tampering
with the religion of a child born in Louth. If I were given the
complete control of an infant Parsee (which is fortunately unlikely)
I should not have the remotest notion of when I was most vitally
reflecting on the Parsee system. But common sense, and a comprehension
of the meaning of a coherent philosophy, would lead me to suspect
that I was reflecting on it every other minute. But I mention the
matter here, not in order to enter into any of these disputes, but to
give yet another example of the way in which the essentially domestic
organisation of Ireland will always rise in rebellion against any
other organisation. There is something of a parable in the tales of
the old evictions, in which the whole family was besieged and resisted
together and the mothers emptied boiling kettles on the besiegers;
for any official who interferes with them will certainly get into hot
water. We cannot separate mothers and children in that strange land. We
can only return to some of our older historical methods and massacre
them together.

A small incident within my own short experience, however, illustrated
the main point involved here; the sense of a peasant base even of
the proletarian attack. And this was exemplified not in any check to
Labour, but rather in a success for Labour, in so far as the issue
of a friendly and informal debate may be classed with its more solid
successes. The business originally began with a sort of loose-jointed
literary lecture which I gave in the Dublin Theatre, in connection with
which I only mention two incidents in passing, because they both struck
me as peculiarly native and national. One concerned only the title
of my address, which was ‘Poetry and Property.’ An educated English
gentleman, who happened to speak to me before the meeting, said with
the air of one who foresees that such jokes will be the death of him,
‘Well, I have simply given up puzzling about what you can possibly
mean, by talking about poetry as something to do with property.’ He
probably regarded the combination of words as a mere alliterative
fantasy, like Peacocks and Paddington, or Polygamy and Potatoes; if
indeed he did not regard it as a mere combination of incompatible
contrasts, like Popery and Protestants, or Patriotism and Politicians.
On the same day an Irishman of similar social standing remarked quite
carelessly, ‘I’ve just seen your subject for to-morrow. I suppose the
Socialists will reply to you,’ or words to that effect. The two terms
told him at once, not about the lecture (which was literary if it was
anything), but about the whole philosophy underlying the lecture; the
whole of that philosophy which the lumbering elephant called by Mr Shaw
the Chesterbelloc laboriously toils to explain in England, under the
ponderous title of Distributivism. As Mr Hugh Law once said, equally
truly, about our pitting of patriotism against imperialism, ‘What is a
paradox in England is a commonplace in Ireland.’ My actual monologue,
however, dealt merely with the witness of poetry to a certain dignity
in man’s sense of private possessions, which is certainly not either
vulgar ostentation or vulgar greed. The French poet of the Pleiade
remembers the slates on his own roof almost as if he could count them.
And Mr W. B. Yeats, in the very wildest vision of a loneliness remote
and irresponsible, is careful to make it clear that he knows how many
bean-rows make nine. Of course there were people of all parties in the
theatre, wild Sinn Feiners and conventional Unionists, but they all
listened to my remarks as naturally as they might have all listened to
an equally incompetent lecture on Monkeys or on the Mountains of the
Moon. There was not a word of politics, least of all party politics,
in that particular speech; it was concerned with a tradition in art,
or at the most, in abstract ethics. But the one amusing thing which
makes me recall the whole incident was this; that when I had finished
a stalwart, hearty, heavy sort of legal gentleman, a well-known Irish
judge I understand, was kind enough to move a vote of thanks to me. And
what amused me about him was this: that while I (who am a Radical, in
sympathy with the revolutionary legend) had delivered a mild essay on
minor poets to a placid if bored audience, the judge, who was a pillar
of the Castle and a Conservative sworn to law and order, proceeded
with the utmost energy and joy to raise a riot. He taunted the Sinn
Feiners and dared them to come out; he trailed his coat if ever a
man trailed it in this world; he glorified England; not the Allies,
but England; splendid England, sublime England (all in the broadest
brogue), just, wise, and merciful England, and so on, flourishing what
was not even the flag of his own country, and a thing that had not
the remotest connection with the subject in hand, any more than the
Great Wall of China. I need not say that the theatre was soon in a
roar of protests and repartees; which I suppose was what he wanted.
He was a jolly old gentleman, and I liked him. But what interested me
about him was this; and it is of some importance in the understanding
of his nationality. That sort of man exists in England; I know and
like scores of him. Often he is a major; often a squire; sometimes a
judge; very occasionally a dean. Such a man talks the most ridiculous
reactionary nonsense in an apoplectic fashion over his own port wine;
and occasionally in a somewhat gasping manner at an avowedly political
meeting. But precisely what the English gentleman would not do, and the
Irish gentleman did do, would be to make a scene on a non-political
occasion; when all he had to do was to move a formal vote of thanks
to a total stranger, who was talking about Ithaca and Innisfree. An
English Conservative would be less likely to do it than an English
Radical. The same thing that makes him conventionally political would
make him conventionally non-political. He would hate to make too
serious a speech on too social an occasion, as he would hate to be in
morning-dress when every one else was in evening dress. And whatever
coat he wore he certainly would not trail it solely in order to make
a disturbance, as did that jolly Irish judge. He taught me that the
Irishman is never so Irish as when he is English. He was very like some
of the Sinn Feiners who shouted him down; and he would be pleased to
know that he helped me to understand them with a greater sympathy.

I have wandered from the subject in speaking of this trifle, thinking
it worth while to note the positive and provocative quality of all
Irish opinion; but it was my purpose only to mention this small
dispute as leading up to another. I had some further talk about poetry
and property with Mr Yeats at the Dublin Arts Club; and here again
I am tempted to irrelevant but for me interesting matters. For I am
conscious throughout of saying less than I could wish of a thousand
things, my omission of which is not altogether thoughtless, far less
thankless. There have been and will be better sketches than mine of
all that attractive society, the paradox of an intelligentsia that is
intelligent. I could write a great deal, not only about those I value
as my own friends, like Katherine Tynan or Stephen Gwynn, but about men
with whom my meeting was all too momentary; about the elvish energy
conveyed by Mr James Stephens; the social greatness of Dr Gogarty,
who was like a witty legend of the eighteenth century; of the unique
universalism of A. E., who has something of the presence of William
Morris, and a more transcendental type of the spiritual hospitality
of Walt Whitman. But I am not in this rough sketch trying to tell
Irishmen what they know already, but trying to tell Englishmen some of
the large and simple things that they do not always know. The large
matter concerned here is Labour; and I have only paused upon the other
points because they were the steps which accidentally led up to my
first meeting with this great force. And it was none the less a fact
in support of my argument because it was something of a joke against
myself.

On the occasion I have mentioned, a most exhilarating evening at the
Arts Club, Mr Yeats asked me to open a debate at the Abbey Theatre,
defending property on its more purely political side. My opponent was
one of the ablest of the leaders of Liberty Hall, the famous stronghold
of Labour politics in Dublin; Mr Johnson, an Englishman like myself,
but one deservedly popular with the proletarian Irish. He made a most
admirable speech, to which I mean no disparagement when I say that I
think his personal popularity had even more weight than his personal
eloquence. My own argument was confined to the particular value of
small property as a weapon of militant democracy, and was based on the
idea that the citizen resisting injustice could find no substitute for
private property; for every other impersonal power, however democratic
in theory, must be bureaucratic in form. I said, as a flippant figure
of speech, that committing property to any officials, even guild
officials, was like having to leave one’s legs in the cloakroom along
with one’s stick or umbrella. The point is that a man may want his legs
at any minute, to kick a man or to dance with a lady; and recovering
them may be postponed by any hitch, from the loss of the ticket to
the criminal flight of the official. So in a social crisis, such as a
strike, a man must be ready to act without officials who may hamper
or betray him; and I asked whether many more strikes would not have
been successful, if each striker had owned so much as a kitchen garden
to help him to live. My opponent replied that he had always been in
favour of such a reserve of proletarian property, but preferred it
to be communal rather than individual; which seems to me to leave my
argument where it was; for what is communal must be official, unless
it is to be chaotic. Two minor jokes, somewhat at my expense, remain
in my memory; I appear to have caused some amusement by cutting a
pencil with a very large Spanish knife, which I value (as it happens)
as the gift of an Irish priest who is a friend of mine, and which may
therefore also be regarded as a symbolic weapon, a sort of sword of the
spirit. Whether the audience thought I was about to amputate my own
legs in illustration of my own metaphor, or that I was going to cut Mr
Johnson’s throat in fury at finding no reply to his arguments, I do
not know. The other thing which struck me as funny was an excellent
retort by Mr Johnson himself, who had said something about the waste
of property on guns, and who interrupted my remark that there would
never be a good revolution without guns, by humorously calling out,
‘Treason.’ As I told him afterwards, few scenes would be more artistic
than that of an Englishman, sent over to recruit for the British
army, being collared and given up to justice (or injustice) by a
Pacifist from Liberty Hall. But all throughout the proceedings I was
conscious, as I say, of a very real popular feeling supporting the mere
personality of my opponent; as in the ovation he received before he
spoke at all, or the applause given to a number of his topical asides,
allusions which I could not always understand. After the meeting a
distinguished Southern Unionist, who happens to own land outside
Dublin, said to me, ‘Of course, Johnson has just had a huge success in
his work here. Liberty Hall has just done something that has really
never been done before in the whole Trade Union movement. He has really
managed to start a Trade Union for agricultural labourers. I know,
because I’ve had to meet their demands. You know how utterly impossible
it has always been really to found a union of agricultural labourers in
England.’ I did know it; and I also knew why it had been possible to
found one in Ireland. It had been possible for the very reason I had
been urging all the evening; that behind the Irish proletariat there
had been the tradition of an Irish peasantry. In their families, if
not in themselves, there had been some memory of the personal love of
the land. But it seemed to me an interesting irony that even my own
defeat was an example of my own doctrine; and that the truth on my
side was proved by the popularity of the other side. The agricultural
guild was due to a wind of freedom that came into that dark city from
very distant fields; and the truth that even these rolling stones of
homeless proletarianism had been so lately loosened from the very roots
of the mountains.

In Ireland even the industrialism is not industrial. That is what I
mean by saying that Irish Labour is the exception that proves the
rule. That is why it does not contradict my former generalisation that
our capitalist crisis is on the English side of the road. The Irish
agricultural labourers can become guildsmen because they would like to
become peasants. They think of rich and poor in the manner that is as
old as the world; the manner of Ahab and Naboth. It matters little in
a peasant society whether Ahab takes the vineyard privately as Ahab or
officially as King of Israel. It will matter as little in the long
run, even in the other kind of society, whether Naboth has a wage to
work in the vineyard, or a vote that is supposed in some way to affect
the vineyard. What he desires to have is the vineyard; and not in
apologetic cynicism or vulgar evasions that business is business, but
in thunder, as from a secret throne, comes the awful voice out of the
vineyard; the voice of this manner of man in every age and nation:
‘The Lord forbid that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto
thee.’




CHAPTER V




THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND


With no desire to decorate my travels with too tall a traveller’s tale,
I must record the fact that I found one point upon which all Irishmen
were agreed. It was the fact that, for some reason or other, there had
been a very hopeful beginning of Irish volunteering at the beginning
of the war; and that, for some reason or other, this had failed in
the course of the war. The reasons alleged differed widely with the
moods of men; some had regarded the beginnings with hope and some with
suspicion; some had lived to regard the failure with a bitter pleasure,
and some with a generous pain. The different factions gave different
explanations of why the thing had stopped; but they all agreed that
it had begun. The Sinn Feiner said that the people soon found they
had been lured into a Saxon trap, set for them by smooth subservient
Saxons like Mr Devlin and Mr Tim Healy. The Belfast citizen suggested
that the Popish priest had terrorised the peasants when they tried to
enlist, producing a thumbscrew from his pocket and a portable rack
from his handbag. The Parliamentary Nationalist blamed both Sinn Fein
and the persecution of Sinn Fein. The British Government officials, if
they did not exactly blame themselves, at least blamed each other. The
ordinary Southern Unionist (who played many parts of a more or less
sensible sort, including that of a Home Ruler) generally agreed with
the ordinary Nationalist that the Government’s recruiting methods had
been as bad as its cause was good. But it is manifest that multitudes
at the beginning of the war thought it really had a very good cause;
and, moreover, a very good chance.

The extraordinary story of how that chance was lost may find mention
on a later page. I will begin by touching on the first incident that
befell me personally in connection with the same enterprise. I went to
Ireland at the request of Irish friends who were working warmly for
the Allied cause, and who conceived (I fear in far too flattering a
spirit) that I might at least be useful as an Englishman who had always
sympathised as warmly with the Irish cause. I am under no illusions
that I should ever be efficient at such work in any case; and under
the circumstances I had no great hopes of doing much, where men like
Sir Horace Plunkett and Captain Stephen Gwynne, far more competent,
more self-sacrificing, and more well-informed than I, could already
do comparatively little. It was too late. A hundredth part of the
brilliant constancy and tragic labours of these men might easily, at
the beginning of the war, have given us a great Irish army. I need not
explain the motives that made me do the little I could do; they were
the same that at that moment made millions of better men do masses of
better work. Physical accident prevented my being useful in France,
and a sort of psychological accident seemed to suggest that I might
possibly be useful in Ireland; but I did not see myself as a very
serious figure in either field. Nothing could be serious in such a case
except perhaps a conviction; and at least my conviction about the great
war has never wavered by a hair. _Delenda est_--and it is typical of
the power of Berlin that one must break off for want of a Latin name
for it. Being an Englishman, I hoped primarily to help England; but
not being a congenital idiot, I did not primarily ask an Irishman to
help England. There was obviously something much more reasonable to
ask him to do. I hope I should in any case have done my best for my
own country. But the cause was more than any country; in a sense it
was too good for any country. The Allies were more right than they
realised. Nay, they hardly had a right to be so right as they were.
The modern Babylon of capitalistic States was hardly worthy to go on
such a crusade against the heathen; as perhaps decadent Byzantium was
hardly worthy to defend the Cross against the Crescent. But we are glad
that it did defend the Cross against the Crescent. Nobody is sorry
that Sobieski relieved Vienna; nobody wishes that Alfred had not won
in Wessex. The cause that conquered is the only cause that survived.
We see now that its enemy was not a cause but a chaos; and that is
what history will say of the strange and recent boiling up of barbaric
imperialism, a whirlpool whose hollow centre was Berlin. This is where
the extreme Irish were really wrong; perhaps really wrong for the first
time, I entirely sympathise with their being in revolt against the
British Government. I am in revolt in most ways against the British
Government myself. But politics are a fugitive thing in the face of
history. Does anybody want to be fixed for ever on the wrong side at
the Battle of Marathon, through a quarrel with some Archon whose very
name is forgotten? Does anybody want to be remembered as a friend of
Attila, through a breach of friendship with Aëtius? In any case, it
was with a profound conviction that if Prussia won Europe must perish,
and that if Europe perished England and Ireland must perish together,
that I went to Dublin in those dark days of the last year of the war;
and it so happened that the first occasion when I was called upon for
any expression of opinion was at a very pleasant luncheon party given
to the representatives of the British Dominions, who were then on an
official tour in the country inspecting its conditions. What I said is
of no importance except as leading up to later events; but it may be
noted that though I was speaking perhaps indirectly to Irishmen, I was
speaking directly, if not to Englishmen, at least to men in the more
English tradition of the majority of the Colonies. I was speaking, if
not to Unionists, at least largely to Imperialists.

Now I have forgotten, I am happy to say, the particular speech that
I made, but I can repeat the upshot of it here, not only as part of
the argument, but as part of the story. The line I took generally in
Ireland was an appeal to the Irish principle, yet the reverse of a mere
approval of the Irish action, or inaction. It postulated that while the
English had missed a great opportunity of justifying themselves to the
Irish, the Irish had also missed a similar opportunity of justifying
themselves to the English. But it specially emphasised this; that what
had been lost was not primarily a justification against England, but
a joke against England. I pointed out that an Irishman missing a joke
against an Englishman was a tragedy, like a lost battle. And there was
one thing, and one thing only, which had stopped the Irishman from
laughing and saved the Englishman from being laughable. The one and
only thing that rescued England from ridicule was Sinn Fein. Or, at any
rate, that element in Sinn Fein which was pro-German, or refused to be
anti-German. Nothing imaginable under the stars _except_ a pro-German
Irishman could at that moment have saved the face of a (very recently)
pro-German Englishman.

The reason for this is obvious enough. England in 1914 encountered
or discovered a colossal crime of Prussianised Germany. But England
could not discover the German crime without discovering the English
blunder. The blunder was, of course, a perfectly plain historical fact;
that England made Prussia. England was the historic, highly civilised
western state, with Roman foundations and chivalric memories; Prussia
was originally a petty and boorish principality used by England and
Austria in the long struggle against the greatness of France. Now in
that long struggle Ireland had always been on the side of France.
She had only to go on being on the side of France, and the Latin
tradition generally, to behold her own truth triumph over her own
enemies. In a word, it was not a question of whether Ireland should
become anti-German, but merely of whether she should _continue_ to be
anti-German. It was a question of whether she should suddenly become
pro-German, at the moment when most other pro-Germans were discovering
that she had been justified all along. But England, at the beginning
of her last and most lamentable quarrel with Ireland, was by no means
in so strong a controversial position. England was right; but she
could only prove she was right by proving she was wrong. In one sense,
and with all respect to her right action in the matter, she had to be
ridiculous in order to be right.

But the joke against the English was even more obvious and topical.
And as mine was only meant for a light speech after a friendly lunch,
I took the joke in its lightest and most fanciful form, and touched
chiefly on the fantastic theory of the Teuton as the master of the
Celt. For the supreme joke was this: that the Englishman has not only
boasted of being an Englishman; he has actually boasted of being a
German. As the modern mind began to doubt the superiority of Calvinism
to Catholicism, all English books, papers, and speeches were filled
more and more with a Teutonism which substituted a racial for a
religious superiority. It was felt to be a more modern and even a more
progressive principle of distinction, to insist on ethnology rather
than theology; for ethnology was supposed to be a science. Unionism
was simply founded on Teutonism. Hence the ordinary honest patriotic
Unionist was in a highly humorous fix when he had suddenly to begin
denouncing Teutonism as mere terrorism. If all superiority belonged
to the Teuton, the supreme superiority must clearly belong to the
most Teutonic Teuton. If I claim the right to kick Mr Bernard Shaw on
the specific ground that I am fatter than he is, it is obvious that I
look rather a fool if I am suddenly kicked by somebody who is fatter
still. When the earth shakes under the advancing form of one coming
against me out of the east who is fatter than I (for I called upon
the Irish imagination to embrace so monstrous a vision), it is clear
that whatever my relations to the rest of the world, in my relations
to Mr Bernard Shaw I am rather at a disadvantage. Mr Shaw, at any
rate, is rather in a position to make game of me; of which it is not
inconceivable that he might avail himself. I might have accumulated a
vast mass of learned sophistries and journalistic catchwords, which
had always seemed to me to justify the connection between waxing fat
and kicking. I might have proved from history that the leaders had
always been fat men, like William the Conqueror, St Thomas Aquinas,
and Charles Fox. I might have proved from physiology that fatness is
a proof of the power of organic assimilation and digestion; or from
comparative zoology that the elephant is the wisest of the beasts.
In short, I might be able to adduce many arguments in favour of my
position. Only, unfortunately, they would now all become arguments
against my position. Everything I had ever urged against my old enemy
could be urged much more forcibly against me by my new enemy. And
my position touching the great adipose theory would be exactly like
England’s position touching the equally sensible Teutonic theory. If
Teutonism was creative culture, then on our own showing the German was
better than the Englishman. If Teutonism was barbarism, then on our own
showing the Englishman was more barbaric than the Irishman. The real
answer, of course, is that we were not Teutons but only the dupes of
Teutonism; but some were so wholly duped that they would do anything
rather than own themselves dupes. These unfortunates, while they are
already ashamed of being Teutons, are still proud of not being Celts.

There is only one thing that could save my dignity in such an
undignified fix as I have fancied here. It is that Mr Bernard Shaw
himself should come to my rescue. It is that Mr Bernard Shaw himself
should declare in favour of the corpulent conqueror from the east;
that _he_ should take seriously all the fads and fallacies of that
fat-headed superman. That, and that alone, would ensure all my own
fads and fallacies being not only forgotten but forgiven. There is
present to my imagination, I regret to say, a wild possibility that
this is what Mr Bernard Shaw might really do. Anyhow, this is what a
certain number of his countrymen really did. It will be apparent, I
think, from these pages that I do not believe in the stage Irishman. I
am under no delusion that the Irishman is soft-headed and sentimental,
or even illogical and inconsequent. Nine times out of ten the Irishman
is not only more clear-headed, but even more cool-headed than the
Englishman. But I think it is true, as Mr Max Beerbohm once suggested
to me in connection with Mr Shaw himself, that there is a residual
perversity in the Irishman, which comes after and not before the
analysis of a question. There is at the last moment a cold impatience
in the intellect, an irony which returns on itself and rends itself;
the subtlety of a suicide. However this may be, some of the lean men,
instead of making a fool of the fat man, did begin almost to make a
hero of the fatter man; to admire his vast curves as almost cosmic
lines of development. I have seen Irish-American pamphlets which
took quite seriously (or, I prefer to think, pretended to take quite
seriously) the ridiculous romance about the Teutonic tribes having
revived and refreshed civilisation after the fall of the Roman Empire.
They revived civilisation very much as they restored Louvain or
reconstructed the _Lusitania_. It was a romance which the English for
a short time adopted as a convenience, but from which the Irish have
continually suffered as from a curse. It was a suicidal perversity that
they themselves, in their turn, should perpetuate their permanent curse
as a temporary convenience. That was the worst error of the Irish, or
of some of the best of the Irish. That is why the Easter Rising was
really a black and insane blunder. It was not because it involved the
Irish in a military defeat; it was because it lost the Irish a great
controversial victory. The rebel deliberately let the tyrant out of a
trap; out of the grinning jaws of the gigantic trap of a joke.

Many of the most extreme Nationalists knew this well; it was what
Kettle probably meant when he suggested an Anglo-Irish history called
‘The Two Fools’; and of course I do not mean that I said all this in my
very casual and rambling speech. But it was based on this idea, that
men had missed the joke against England, and that now unfortunately the
joke was rather against Ireland. It was Ireland that was now missing
a great historical opportunity for lack of humour and imagination, as
England had missed it a moment before. If the Irish would laugh at
the English and help the English, they would win all along the line.
In the real history of the German problem, they would inherit all the
advantages of having been right from the first. It was now not so much
a question of Ireland consenting to follow England’s lead as of England
being obliged to follow Ireland’s lead. These are the principles which
I thought, and still think, the only possible principles to form
the basis of a recruiting appeal in Ireland. But on the particular
occasion in question I naturally took the matter much more lightly,
hoping that the two jokes might, as it were, cancel out and leave the
two countries quits and in a better humour. And I devoted nearly all
my remarks to testifying that the English had really, in the mass,
shed the cruder Teutonism that had excused the cruelties of the past.
I said that Englishmen were anything but proud of the past government
of Ireland; that the mass of men of all parties were far more modest
and humane in their view of Ireland than most Irishmen seem to suppose.
And I ended with words which I only quote here from memory, because
they happen to be the text of the curious incident which followed:
‘This is no place for us to boast. We stand here in the valley of our
humiliation, where the flag we love has done very little that was
not evil, and where its victories have been far more disastrous than
defeats.’ And I concluded with some general expression of the hope
(which I still entertain) that two lands so much loved, by those who
know them best, are not meant to hate each other for ever.

A day or two afterwards a distinguished historian who is a professor
at Trinity College, Mr Alison Phillips, wrote an indignant letter
to the _Irish Times_. He announced that he was not in the valley of
humiliation, and warmly contradicted the report that he was, as he
expressed it, ‘sitting in sackcloth and ashes.’ He remarked, if I
remember right, that I was middle-class, which is profoundly true;
and he generally resented my suggestions as a shameful attack upon my
fellow Englishmen. This both amused and puzzled me; for of course I had
not been attacking Englishmen, but defending them; I had merely been
assuring the Irish that the English were not so black, or so red, as
they were painted in the vision of ‘England’s cruel red.’ I had not
said there what I have said here, about the anomaly and absurdity of
England in Ireland; I had only said that Ireland had suffered rather
from the Teutonic theory than the English temper; and that the English
temper, experienced at close quarters, was really quite ready for a
reconciliation with Ireland. Nor indeed did Mr Alison Phillips really
complain especially of my denouncing the English, but rather of my
way of defending them. He did not so much mind being charged with the
vice of arrogance. What he could not bear was being charged with the
virtue of humility. What worried him was not so much the supposition
of our doing wrong, as that anybody should conceive it possible that
we were sorry for doing wrong. After all, he probably reasoned, it may
not be easy for an eminent historical scholar actually to deny that
certain tortures have taken place, or certain perjuries been proved;
but there is really no reason why he should admit that the memory of
using torture or perjury has so morbid an effect on the mind. Therefore
he naturally desired to correct any impression that might arise, to the
effect that he had been seen in the valley of humiliation, like a man
called Christian.

But there was one fancy that lingered in the mind over and above the
fun of the thing; and threw a sort of random ray of conjecture upon
all that long international misunderstanding which it is so hard to
understand. Was it possible, I thought, that this had happened before,
and that I was caught in the treadmill of recurrence? It may be that
whenever, throughout the centuries, a roughly representative and fairly
good-humoured Englishman has spoken to the Irish as thousands of such
Englishmen feel about them, some other Englishman on the spot has
hastened to explain that the English are not going in for sackcloth
and ashes, but only for phylacteries and the blowing of their own
trumpets before them. Perhaps whenever one Englishman said that the
English were not so black as they were painted in the past, another
Englishman always rushed forward to prove that the English were not
so white as they were painted on the present occasion. And after all
it was only Englishman against Englishman, one word against another;
and there were many superiorities on the side which refused to believe
in English sympathy or self-criticism. And very few of the Irish, I
fear, understood the simple fact of the matter, or the real spiritual
excuses of the party thus praising spiritual pride. Few understood
that I represented large numbers of amiable Englishmen in England,
while Mr Phillips necessarily represented a small number of naturally
irritable Englishmen in Ireland. Few, I fancy, sympathised with him so
much as I do; for I know very well that he was not merely feeling as an
Englishman, but as an exile.




CHAPTER VI




THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND


I met one hearty Unionist, not to say Coercionist in Ireland, in such a
manner as to talk to him at some length; one quite genial and genuine
Irish gentleman, who was solidly on the side of the system of British
government in Ireland. This gentleman had been shot through the body by
the British troops in their efforts to suppress the Easter Rebellion.
The matter just missed being tragic; but since it did, I cannot help
feeling it as slightly comic. He assured me with great earnestness that
the rebels had been guilty of the most calculated cruelties, and that
they must have done their bloody deeds in the coldest blood. But since
he is himself a solid and (I am happy to say) a living demonstration
that the firing even on his own side must have been rather wild, I am
inclined to give the benefit of the doubt also to the less elaborately
educated marksmen. When disciplined troops destroy people so much at
random, it would seem unreasonable to deny that rioters may possibly
have been riotous. I hardly think he was, or even professed to be, a
person of judicial impartiality; and it is entirely to his honour that
he was, on principle, so much more indignant with the rioters who did
not shoot him than with the other rioters who did. But I venture to
introduce him here not so much as an individual as an allegory. The
incident seems to me to set forth, in a pointed, lucid, and picturesque
form, exactly what the British military government really succeeded
in doing in Ireland. It succeeded in half-killing its friends, and
affording an intelligent but somewhat inhumane amusement to all its
enemies. The fire-eater held his fire-arm in so contorted a posture as
to give the wondering spectator a simple impression of suicide.

Let it be understood that I speak here, not of tyranny thwarting
Irish desires, but solely of our own stupidity in thwarting our own
desires. I shall discuss elsewhere the alleged presence or absence of
practical oppression in Ireland; here I am only continuing from the
last chapter my experiences of the recruiting campaign. I am concerned
now, as I was concerned then, with the simple business matter of
getting a big levy of soldiers from Ireland. I think it was Sir Francis
Vane, one of the few really valuable public servants in the matter
(I need not say he was dismissed for having been proved right) who
said that the mere sight of some representative Belgian priests and
nuns might have produced something like a crusade. The matter seems
to have been mostly left to elderly English landlords; and it would
be cruel to record their adventures. It will be enough that I heard,
on excellent testimony, that these unhappy gentlemen had displayed
throughout Ireland a poster consisting only of the Union Jack and the
appeal, ‘Is not this your flag? Come and fight for it!’ It faintly
recalls something we all learnt in the Latin grammar about questions
that expect the answer no. These remarkable recruiting-sergeants did
not realise, I suppose, what an extraordinary thing this was, not
merely in Irish opinion, but generally in international opinion. Over
a great part of the globe, it would sound like a story that the Turks
had placarded Armenia with the Crescent of Islam, and asked all the
Christians who were not yet massacred whether they did not love the
flag. I really do not believe that the Turks would be so stupid as to
do it. Of course it may be said that such an impression or association
is mere slander and sedition, that there is no reason to be tender
to such treasonable emotions at all, that men ought to do their duty
to that flag whatever is put upon that poster; in short, that it is
the duty of an Irishman to be a patriotic Englishman, or whatever
it is that he is expected to be. But this view, however logical and
clear, can only be used logically and clearly as an argument for
conscription. It is simply muddle-headed to apply it to any appeal
for volunteers anywhere, in Ireland or England. The whole object of a
recruiting poster, or any poster, is to be attractive; it is picked out
in words or colours to be picturesquely and pointedly attractive. If
it lowers you to make an attractive offer, do not make it; but do not
deliberately make it, and deliberately make it repulsive. If a certain
medicine is so mortally necessary and so mortally nasty, that it must
be forced on everybody by the policeman, call the policeman. But do not
call an advertisement agent to push it like a patent medicine, solely
by means of ‘publicity’ and ‘suggestion,’ and then confine him strictly
to telling the public how nasty it is.

But the British blunder in Ireland was a much deeper and more
destructive thing. It can be summed up in one sentence; that whether or
no we were as black as we were painted, we actually painted ourselves
much blacker than we were. Bad as we were, we managed to look much
worse than we were. In a horrible unconsciousness we re-enacted history
through sheer ignorance of history. We were foolish enough to dress
up, and to play up, to the part of a villain in a very old tragedy. We
clothed ourselves almost carelessly in fire and sword; and if the fire
had been literally stage-fire or the sword a wooden sword, the merely
artistic blunder would have been quite as bad. For instance, I soon
came on the traces of a quarrel about some silly veto in the schools,
against Irish children wearing green rosettes. Anybody with a streak of
historical imagination would have avoided a quarrel in that particular
case about that particular colour. It is touching the talisman, it is
naming the name, it is striking the note of another relation in which
we were in the wrong, to the confusion of a new relation in which we
were in the right. Anybody of common sense, considering any other case,
can see the almost magic force of these material coincidences. If the
English armies in France in 1914 considered themselves justified
for some reason in executing some Frenchwoman, they would perhaps be
indiscreet if they killed her (however logically) tied to a stake in
the market-place of Rouen. If the people of Paris rose in the most
righteous revolt against the most corrupt conspiracy of some group of
the wealthy French Protestants, I should strongly advise them not to
fix the date for the vigil of St Bartholomew, or to go to work with
white scarfs tied round their arms. Many of us hope to see a Jewish
commonwealth reconstituted in Palestine; and we could easily imagine
some quarrel in which the government of Jerusalem was impelled to
punish some Greek or Latin pilgrim or monk. The Jews might even be
right in the quarrel and the Christian wrong. But it may be hinted that
the Jews would be ill-advised if they actually crowned him with thorns,
and killed him on a hill just outside Jerusalem. Now we must know by
this time, or the sooner we know it the better, that the whole mind
of that European society which we have helped to save, and in which
we have henceforth a part right of control, regards the Anglo-Irish
story as one of those black and white stories in a history book. It
sees the tragedy of Ireland as simply and clearly as the tragedy of
Christ or Joan of Arc. There may have been more to be said on the
coercive side than the culture of the Continent understands. So there
was a great deal more than is usually admitted to be said on the side
of the patriotic democracy which condemned Socrates; and a very great
deal to be said on the side of the imperial aristocracy which would
have crushed Washington. But these disputes will not take Socrates
from his niche among the pagan saints, or Washington from his pedestal
among the republican heroes. After a certain testing time substantial
justice is always done to the men who stood in some unmistakable manner
for liberty and light against contemporary caprice and fashionable
force and brutality. In this intellectual sense, in the only competent
intellectual courts, there is already justice to Ireland. In the wide
daylight of this world-wide fact we or our representatives must get
into a quarrel with children, of all people, and about the colour
green, of all things in the world. It is an exact working model of
the mistake I mean. It is the more brutal because it is not strictly
cruel; and yet instantly revives the memories of cruelty. There need be
nothing wrong with it in the abstract, or in a less tragic atmosphere
where the symbols were not talismans. A schoolmaster in the prosperous
and enlightened town of Eatanswill might not unpardonably protest
against the school-children parading in class the Buff and Blue favours
of Mr Fizkin and Mr Slumkey. But who but a madman would not see that to
say that word, or make that sign, in Ireland, was like giving a signal
for keening and the lament over lost justice that is lifted in the
burden of the noblest of national songs; that to point to that rag of
that colour was to bring back all the responsibilities and realities
of that reign of terror when we were, quite literally, hanging men
and women too for wearing of the green? We were not literally hanging
these children. As a matter of mere utility, we should have been more
sensible if we had been.

But the same fact took an even more fantastic form. We not only dressed
up as our ancestors, but we actually dressed up as our enemies. I need
hardly state my own conviction that the Pacifist trick of lumping the
abuses of one side along with the abominations of the other was a
shallow pedantry come of sheer ignorance of the history of Europe and
the barbarians. It was quite false that the English evil was exactly
the same as the German. It was quite false; but the English in Ireland
laboured long and devotedly to prove it was quite true. They were not
content with borrowing old uniforms from the Hessians of 1798; they
borrowed the newest and neatest uniforms from the Prussians of 1914. I
will give only one story that I was told, out of many, to show what I
mean. There was a sort of village musical festival at a place called
Cullen in County Cork, at which there were naturally national songs
and very possibly national speeches. That there was a sort of social
atmosphere, which its critics would call Sinn Fein, is exceedingly
likely; for that now exists all over Ireland, and especially that
part of Ireland. If we wish to prevent it being expressed at all, we
must not only forbid all public meetings but all private meetings,
and even the meeting of husband and wife in their own house. Still
there might have been a case, on coercionist lines, for forbidding
this public meeting. There might be a case, on coercionist lines,
for imprisoning all the people who attended it; or a still clearer
case, on those lines, for imprisoning all the people in Ireland. But
the coercionist authorities did not merely forbid the meeting, which
would mean something. They did not arrest the people at the meeting,
which would mean something. They did not blow the whole meeting to
hell with big guns, which would also mean something. What they did
apparently was this. They caused a military aeroplane to jerk itself
backwards and forwards in a staggering fashion just over the heads of
the people, making as much noise as possible to drown the music, and
dropping flare rockets and fire in various somewhat dangerous forms in
the neighbourhood of any men, women, and children who happened to be
listening to the music. The reader will note with what exquisite art,
and fine fastidious selection, the strategist has here contrived to
look as Prussian as possible without securing any of the advantages of
Prussianism. I do not know exactly how much danger there was, but there
must have been some. Perhaps about as much as there generally has been
when boys have been flogged for playing the fool with fireworks. But
by laboriously climbing hundreds of feet into the air, in an enormous
military machine, these ingenuous people managed to make themselves a
meteor in heaven and a spectacle to all the earth; the English raining
fire on women and children just as the Germans did. I repeat that they
did not actually destroy children, though they did endanger them; for
playing with fireworks is always playing with fire. And I repeat that,
as a mere matter of business, it would have been more sensible if they
had destroyed children. That would at least have had the human meaning
that has run through a hundred massacres: ‘wolf-cubs who would grow
into wolves.’ It might at least have the execrable excuse of decreasing
the number of rebels. What they did would quite certainly increase it.

An artless Member of Parliament, whose name I forget, attempted an
apology for this half-witted performance. He interposed in the Unionist
interests, when the Nationalists were asking questions about the
matter, and said with much heat, ‘May I ask whether honest and loyal
subjects have anything to fear from British aeroplanes?’ I have often
wondered what he meant. It seems possible that he was in the mood of
that mediæval fanatic who cried, ‘God will know his own’; and that he
himself would fling any sort of flaming bolts about anywhere, believing
that they would always be miraculously directed towards the heads
harbouring, at that moment, the most incorrect political opinions.
Or perhaps he meant that loyal subjects are so superbly loyal that
they do not mind being accidentally burnt alive, so long as they are
assured that the fire was dropped on them by Government officials out
of a Government apparatus. But my purpose here is not to fathom such a
mystery, but merely to fix the dominant fact of the whole situation;
that the Government copied the theatricality of Potsdam even more
than the tyranny of Potsdam. In that incident the English laboriously
reproduced all the artificial accessories of the most notorious crimes
of Germany; the flying men, the flame, the selection of a mixed crowd,
the selection of a popular festival. They had every part of it, except
the point of it. It was as if the whole British army in Ireland had
dressed up in spiked helmets and spectacles, merely that they might
_look_ like Prussians. It was even more as if a man had walked across
Ireland on three gigantic stilts, taller than the trees and visible
from the most distant village, solely that he might look like one of
those unhuman monsters from Mars, striding about on their iron tripods
in the great nightmare of Mr Wells. Such was our educational efficiency
that, before the end, multitudes of simple Irish people really had
about the English invasion the same particular psychological reaction
that multitudes of simple English people had about the German invasion.
I mean that it seemed to come not only from outside the nation, but
from outside the world. It was unearthly in the strict sense in which a
comet is unearthly. It was the more appallingly alien for coming close;
it was the more outlandish the farther it went inland. These Christian
peasants have seen coming westward out of England what we saw coming
westward out of Germany. They saw science in arms; which turns the very
heavens into hells.

I have purposely put these fragmentary and secondary impressions
before any general survey of Anglo-Irish policy in the war. I do
so, first because I think a record of the real things, that seemed
to bulk biggest to any real observer at any real moment, is often
more useful than the setting forth of theories he may have made up
before he saw any realities at all. But I do it in the second place
because the more general summaries of our statesmanship, or lack of
statesmanship, are so much more likely to be found elsewhere. But if
we wish to comprehend the queer cross-purposes, it will be well to
keep always in mind a historical fact I have mentioned already; the
reality of the old Franco-Irish Entente. It lingers alive in Ireland,
and especially the most Irish parts of Ireland. In the fiercely Fenian
city of Cork, walking round the Young Ireland monument that seems to
give revolt the majesty of an institution, a man told me that German
bands had been hooted and pelted in those streets out of an indignant
memory of 1870. And an eminent scholar in the same town, referring to
the events of the same ‘terrible year,’ said to me: ‘In 1870 Ireland
sympathised with France and England with Germany; and, as usual,
Ireland was right!’ But if they were right when we were wrong, they
only began to be wrong when we were right. A sort of play or parable
might be written to show that this apparent paradox is a very genuine
piece of human psychology. Suppose there are two partners named John
and James; that James has always been urging the establishment of a
branch of the business in Paris. Long ago John quarrelled with this
furiously as a foreign fad; but he has since forgotten all about it;
for the letters from James bored him so much that he has not opened
any of them for years. One fine day John, finding himself in Paris,
conceives the original idea of a Paris branch; but he is conscious in a
confused way of having quarrelled with his partner, and vaguely feels
that his partner would be an obstacle to anything. John remembers that
James was always cantankerous, and forgets that he was cantankerous
in favour of this project, and not against it. John therefore sends
James a telegram, of a brevity amounting to brutality, simply telling
him to come in with no nonsense about it; and when he has no instant
reply, sends a solicitor’s letter to be followed by a writ. How James
will take it depends very much on James. How he will hail this happy
confirmation of his own early opinions will depend on whether James is
an unusually patient and charitable person. And James is not. He is
unfortunately the very man, of all men in the world, to drop his own
original agreement and everything else into the black abyss of disdain,
which now divides him from the man who has the impudence to agree with
him. He is the very man to say he will have nothing to do with his own
original notion, because it is now the belated notion of a fool. Such
a character could easily be analysed in any good novel. Such conduct
would readily be believed in any good play. It could not be believed
when it happened in real life. And it did happen in real life; the
Paris project was the sense of the safety of Paris as the pivot of
human history; the abrupt telegram was the recruiting campaign, and the
writ was conscription.

As to what Irish conscription was, or rather would have been, I cannot
understand any visitor in Ireland having the faintest doubt, unless (as
is often the case) his tour was so carefully planned as to permit him
to visit everything in Ireland except the Irish. Irish conscription
was a piece of rank raving madness, which was fortunately stopped,
with other bad things, by the blow of Foch at the second battle of the
Marne. It could not possibly produce at the last moment allies on whom
we could depend; and it would have lost us the whole sympathy of the
allies on whom we at that moment depended. I do not mean that American
soldiers would have mutinied; though Irish soldiers might have done so;
I mean something much worse. I mean that the whole mood of America
would have altered; and there would have been some kind of compromise
with German tyranny, in sheer disgust at a long exhibition of English
tyranny. Things would have happened in Ireland, week after week, and
month after month, such as the modern imagination has not seen except
where Prussia has established hell. We should have butchered women
and children; they would have _made us_ butcher them. We should have
killed priests, and probably the best priests. It could not be better
stated than in the words of an Irishman, as he stood with me in a high
terraced garden outside Dublin, looking towards that unhappy city, who
shook his head and said sadly, ‘They will shoot the wrong bishop.’

Of the meaning of this huge furnace of defiance I shall write when I
write of the national idea itself. I am concerned here not for their
nation but for mine; and especially for its peril from Prussia and
its help from America. And it is simply a question of considering
what these real things are really like. Remember that the American
Republic is practically founded on the fact, or fancy, that England is
a tyrant. Remember that it was being ceaselessly swept with new waves
of immigrant Irishry telling tales (too many of them true, though not
all) of the particular cases in which England had been a tyrant. It
would be hard to find a parallel to explain to Englishmen the effect
of awakening traditions so truly American by a prolonged display of
England as the tyrant in Ireland. A faint approximation might be found
if we imagined the survivors of Victorian England, steeped in the
tradition of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, watching the American troops march
through London. Suppose they noted that the negro troops alone had
to march in chains, with a white man in a broad-brimmed hat walking
beside them and flourishing a whip. Scenes far worse than that would
have followed Irish conscription; but the only purpose of this chapter
is to show that scenes quite as stupid marked every stage of Irish
recruitment. For it certainly would not have reassured the traditional
sympathisers with Uncle Tom to be told that the chains were only a part
of the uniform, or that the niggers moved not at the touch of the whip,
but only at the crack of it.

Such was our practical policy; and the single and sufficient comment
on it can be found in a horrible whisper which can scarcely now be
stilled. It is said, with a dreadful plausibility, that the Unionists
were deliberately trying to prevent a large Irish recruitment, which
would certainly have meant reconciliation and reform. In plain words,
it is said that they were willing to be traitors to England, if they
could only still be tyrants to Ireland. Only too many facts can be made
to fit in with this; but for me it is still too hideous to be easily
believed. But whatever our motives in doing it, there is simply no
doubt whatever about what we did, in this matter of the Pro-Germans
in Ireland. We did not crush the Pro-Germans; we did not convert
them, or coerce them, or educate them or exterminate them or massacre
them. We manufactured them; we turned them out patiently, steadily,
and systematically as if from a factory; we made them exactly as we
made munitions. It needed no little social science to produce, in any
kind of Irishman, any kind of sympathy with Prussia; but we were equal
to the task. What concerns me here, however, is that we were busy at
the same work among the Irish-Americans, and ultimately among all the
Americans. And that would have meant, as I have already noted, the
thing that I always feared; the dilution of the policy of the Allies.
Anything that looked like a prolonged Prussianism in Ireland would
have meant a compromise; that is, a perpetuated Prussianism in Europe.
I know that some who agree with me in other matters disagree with me
in this; but I should indeed be ashamed if, having to say so often
where I think my country was wrong, I did not say as plainly where I
think she was right. The notion of a compromise was founded on the
coincidence of recent national wars, which were only about the terms
of peace, not about the type of civilisation. But there do recur, at
longer historic intervals, universal wars of religion, not concerned
with what one nation shall do, but with what all nations shall be. They
recommence until they are finished, in things like the fall of Carthage
or the rout of Attila. It is quite true that history is for the most
part a plain road, which the tribes of men must travel side by side,
bargaining at the same markets or worshipping at the same shrines,
fighting and making friends again; and wisely making friends quickly.
But we need only see the road stretch but a little farther, from a hill
but a little higher, to see that sooner or later the road comes always
to another place, where stands a winged image of victory; and the ways
divide.




CHAPTER VII




THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND


There is one phrase which certain Irishmen sometimes use in
conversation, which indicates the real mistake that they sometimes
make in controversy. When the more bitter sort of Irishman is at last
convinced of the existence of the less bitter sort of Englishman,
who does realise that he ought not to rule a Christian people by
alternations of broken heads and broken promises, the Irishman has
sometimes a way of saying, ‘I am sure you must have Irish blood in your
veins.’ Several people told me so when I denounced Irish conscription,
a thing ruinous to the whole cause of the Alliance. Some told me so
even when I recalled the vile story of ’98; a thing damned by the
whole opinion of the world. I assured them in vain that I did not need
to have Irish blood in my veins, in order to object to having Irish
blood on my hands. So far as I know, I have not one single drop of
Irish blood in my veins. I have some Scottish blood; and some which,
judging merely by a name in the family, must once have been French
blood. But the determining part of it is purely English, and I believe
East Anglian, at the flattest and farthest extreme from the Celtic
fringe. But I am here concerned, not with whether it is true, but with
why they should want to prove it is true. One would think they would
want to prove precisely the opposite. Even if they were exaggerative
and unscrupulous, they should surely seek to show that an Englishman
was forced to condemn England, rather than that an Irishman was
inclined to support Ireland. As it is, they are labouring to destroy
the impartiality and even the independence of their own witness. It
does not support, but rather surrender Irish rights, to say that only
the Irish can see that there are Irish wrongs. It is confessing that
Ireland is a Celtic dream and delusion, a cloud of sunset mistaken for
an island. It is admitting that such a nation is only a notion, and a
nonsensical notion; but in reality it is this notion about Irish blood
that is nonsensical. Ireland is not an illusion; and her wrongs are
not the subjective fancies of the Irish. Irishmen did not dream that
they were evicted out of house and home by the ruthless application
of a land law no man now dares to defend. It was not a nightmare that
dragged them from their beds; nor were they sleepwalkers when they
wandered as far as America. Skeffington did not have a delusion that
he was being shot for keeping the peace; the shooting was objective,
as the Prussian professors would say; as objective as the Prussian
militarists could desire. The delusions were admittedly peculiar to
the British official whom the British Government selected to direct
operations on so important an occasion. I could understand it if the
Imperialists took refuge in the Celtic cloud, conceived Colthurst
as full of a mystic frenzy like the chieftain who fought with the
sea, pleaded that Piggott was a poet whose pen ran away with him, or
that Sergeant Sheridan romanced like a real stage Irishman. I could
understand it if they declared that it was merely in the elvish ecstasy
described by Mr Yeats that Sir Edward Carson, that famous First Lord of
the Admiralty, rode on the top of the dishevelled wave; and Mr Walter
Long, that great Agricultural Minister, danced upon the mountains like
a flame. It is far more absurd to suggest that no man can see the green
flag unless he has some green in his eye. In truth this association
between an Irish sympathy and an Irish ancestry is just as insulting
as the old jibe of Buckingham, about an Irish interest or an Irish
understanding.

It may seem fanciful to say of the Irish nationalists that they are
sometimes too Irish to be national. Yet this is really the case in
those who would turn nationality from a sanctity to a secret. That
is, they are turning it from something which every one else ought to
respect, to something which no one else can understand. Nationalism is
a nobler thing even than patriotism; for nationalism appeals to a law
of nations; it implies that a nation is a normal thing, and therefore
one of a number of normal things. It is impossible to have a nation
without Christendom; as it is impossible to have a citizen without a
city. Now normally speaking this is better understood in Ireland than
in England; but the Irish have an opposite exaggeration and error, and
tend in some cases to the cult of real insularity. In this sense it is
true to say that the error is indicated in the very name of Sinn Fein.
But I think it is even more encouraged, in a cloudier and therefore
more perilous fashion, by much that is otherwise valuable in the cult
of the Celts and the study of the old Irish language. It is a great
mistake for a man to defend himself as a Celt when he might defend
himself as an Irishman. For the former defence will turn on some tricky
question of temperament, while the latter will turn on the central
pivot of morals. Celticism, by itself, might lead to all the racial
extravagances which have lately led more barbaric races a dance. Celts
also might come to claim, not that their nation is a normal thing, but
that their race is a unique thing. Celts also might end by arguing
not for an equality founded on the respect for boundaries, but for an
aristocracy founded on the ramification of blood. Celts also might come
to pitting the prehistoric against the historic, the heathen against
the Christian, and in that sense the barbaric against the civilised.
In that sense I confess I do not care about Celts; they are too like
Teutons.

Now of course every one knows that there is practically no such danger
of Celtic Imperialism. Mr Lloyd George will not attempt to annex
Brittany as a natural part of Britain. No Tories, however antiquated,
will extend their empire in the name of the True Blue of the Ancient
Britons. Nor is there the least likelihood that the Irish will overrun
Scotland on the plea of an Irish origin for the old name of the
Scots; or that they will set up an Irish capital at Stratford-on-Avon
merely because _avon_ is the Celtic word for water. That is the sort
of thing that Teutonic ethnologists do; but Celts are not quite so
stupid as that, even when they are ethnologists. It may be suggested
that this is because even prehistoric Celts seem to have been rather
more civilised than historic Teutons. And indeed I have seen ornaments
and utensils in the admirable Dublin museum, suggestive of a society
of immense antiquity, and much more advanced in the arts of life
than the Prussians were, only a few centuries ago. For instance,
there was something that looked like a sort of safety razor. I doubt
if the godlike Goths had much use for a razor; or if they had, if
it was altogether safe. Nor am I so dull as not to be stirred to an
imaginative sympathy with the instinct of modern Irish poetry to
praise this primordial and mysterious order, even as a sort of pagan
paradise; and that not as regarding a legend as a sort of lie, but a
tradition as a sort of truth. It is but another hint of a suggestion,
huge yet hidden, that civilisation is older than barbarism; and that
the farther we go back into pagan origins, the nearer we come to the
great Christian origin of the Fall. But whatever credit or sympathy
be due to the cult of Celtic origins in its proper place, it is none
of these things that really prevents Celticism from being a barbarous
imperialism like Teutonism. The thing that prevents imperialism is
nationalism. It was exactly because Germany was not a nation that it
desired more and more to be an empire. For a patriot is a sort of
lover, and a lover is a sort of artist; and the artist will always love
a shape too much to wish it to grow shapeless, even in order to grow
large. A group of Teutonic tribes will not care how many other tribes
they destroy or absorb; and Celtic tribes when they were heathen may
have acted, for all I know, in the same way. But the civilised Irish
nation, a part and product of Christendom, has certainly no desire to
be entangled with other tribes, or to have its outlines blurred with
great blots like Liverpool and Glasgow, as well as Belfast. In that
sense it is far too self-conscious to be selfish. Its individuality
may, as I shall suggest, make it too insular; it will not make it too
imperial. This is a merit in nationalism too little noted; that even
what is called its narrowness is not merely a barrier to invasion, but
a barrier to expansion. Therefore, with all respect to the prehistoric
Celts, I feel more at home with the good if sometimes mad Christian
gentlemen of the Young Ireland movement, or even the Easter Rebellion.
I should feel more safe with Meagher of the Sword than with the
primitive Celt of the safety razor. The microscopic meanness of the
Mid-Victorian English writers, when they wrote about Irish patriots,
could see nothing but a very small joke in modern rebels thinking
themselves worthy to take the titles of antique kings. But the only
doubt I should have, if I had any, is whether the heathen kings were
worthy of the Christian rebels. I am much more sure of the heroism of
the modern Fenians than of the ancient ones.

Of the artistic side of the cult of the Celts I do not especially speak
here. And indeed its importance, especially to the Irish, may easily be
exaggerated. Mr W. B. Yeats long ago dissociated himself from a merely
racial theory of Irish poetry; and Mr W. B. Yeats thinks as hard as
he talks. I often entirely disagree with him; but I disagree far more
with the people who find him a poetical opiate, where I always find
him a logical stimulant. For the rest, Celticism in some aspects is
largely a conspiracy for leading the Englishman a dance, if it be a
fairy dance. I suspect that many names and announcements are printed
in Gaelic, not because Irishmen can read them, but because Englishmen
can’t. The other great modern mystic in Dublin, entertained us first by
telling an English lady present that she would never resist the Celtic
atmosphere, struggle how she might, but would soon be wandering in the
mountain mists with a fillet round her head; which fate had apparently
overtaken the son or nephew of an Anglican bishop who had strayed into
those parts. The English lady, whom I happen to know rather well, made
the characteristic announcement that she would go to Paris when she
felt it coming on. But it seemed to me that such drastic action was
hardly necessary, and that there was comparatively little cause for
alarm; seeing that the mountain mists certainly had not had that effect
on the people who happen to live in the mountains. I knew that the
poet knew, even better than I did, that Irish peasants do not wander
about in fillets, or indeed wander about at all, having plenty of much
better work to do. And since the Celtic atmosphere had no perceptible
effect on the Celts, I felt no alarm about its effect on the Saxons.
But the only thing involved, by way of an effect on the Saxons, was a
practical joke on the Saxons; which may, however, have lasted longer in
the case of the bishop’s son than it did in mine. Anyhow, I continued
to move about (like Atalanta in Calydon) with unchapleted hair, with
unfilleted cheek; and found a sufficient number of Irish people in the
same condition to prevent me from feeling shy. In a word, all that sort
of thing is simply the poet’s humour, especially his good humour, which
is of a golden and godlike sort. And a man would be very much misled by
the practical joke if he does not realise that the joker is a practical
man. On the desk in front of him as he spoke were business papers of
reports and statistics, much more concerned with fillets of veal than
fillets of vision. That is the essential fact about all this side of
such men in Ireland. We may think the Celtic ghost a turnip ghost; but
we can only doubt the reality of the ghost; there is no doubt of the
reality of the turnip.

But if the Celtic pose be a piece of the Celtic ornament, the spirit
that produced it does also produce some more serious tendencies to the
segregation of Ireland, one might almost say the secretion of Ireland.
In this sense it is true that there is too much separatism in Ireland.
I do not speak of separation from England, which, as I have said,
happened long ago in the only serious sense, and is a condition to
be assumed, not a conclusion to be avoided. Nor do I mean separation
from some federation of free states including England; for that is a
conclusion that could still be avoided with a little common sense and
common honesty in our own politics. I mean separation from Europe,
from the common Christian civilisation by whose law the nations live.
I would be understood as speaking here of exceptions rather than the
rule; for the rule is rather the other way. The Catholic religion, the
most fundamental fact in Ireland, is itself a permanent communication
with the Continent. So, as I have said, is the free peasantry which is
so often the economic expression of the same faith. Mr James Stephens,
himself a spiritually detached man of genius, told me with great
humour a story which is also at least a symbol. A Catholic priest,
after a convivial conversation and plenty of good wine, said to him
confidentially: “You ought to be a Catholic. You can be saved without
being a Catholic; but you can’t be Irish without being a Catholic.”

Nevertheless, the exceptions are large enough to be dangers; and
twice lately, I think, they have brought Ireland into danger. This
is the age of minorities; of groups that rule rather than represent.
And the two largest parties in Ireland, though more representative
than most parties in England, were too much affected, I fancy, by the
modern fashion, expressed in the world of fads by being Celtic rather
than Catholic. They were just a little too insular to accept the old
unconscious wave of Christendom; the Crusade. But the case was more
extraordinary than that. They were even too insular to appreciate,
not so much their own international needs, as their own international
importance. It may seem a strange paradox to say that both nationalist
parties underrated Ireland as a nation. It may seem a more startling
paradox to say that in this the most nationalist was the least
national. Yet I think I can explain, however roughly, what I mean by
saying that this is so.

It is primarily Sinn Fein, or the extreme national party, which thus
relatively failed to realise that Ireland is a nation. At least it
failed in nationalism exactly so far as it failed to intervene in the
war of the nations against Prussian imperialism. For its argument
involved, unconsciously, the proposition that Ireland is not a nation;
that Ireland is a tribe or a settlement, or a chance sprinkling of
aborigines. If the Irish were savages oppressed by the British Empire,
they might well be indifferent to the fate of the British Empire; but
as they were civilised men, they could not be indifferent to the fate
of civilisation. The Kaffirs might conceivably be better off if the
whole system of white colonisation, Boer and British, broke down and
disappeared altogether. The Irish might sympathise with the Kaffirs,
but they would not like to be classed with the Kaffirs. Hottentots
might have a sort of Hottentot happiness if the last European city had
fallen in ruins, or the last European had died in torments. But the
Irish would never be Hottentots, even if they were pro-Hottentots.
In other words, if the Irish were what Cromwell thought they were,
they might well confine their attention to Hell and Connaught, and
have no sympathy to spare for France. But if the Irish are what Wolfe
Tone thought they were, they must be interested in France, as he was
interested in France. In short, if the Irish are barbarians, they need
not trouble about other barbarians sacking the cities of the world;
but if they are citizens, they must trouble about the cities that
are sacked. This is the deep and real reason why their alienation
from the Allied cause was a disaster for their own national cause. It
was not because it gave fools a chance of complaining that they were
anti-English, it was because it gave much cleverer people the chance
of complaining that they were anti-European. I entirely agree that
the alienation was chiefly the fault of the English Government; I even
agree that it required an abnormal imaginative magnanimity for an
Irishman to do his duty to Ireland, in spite of being so insolently
told to do it. But it is none the less true that Ireland to-day would
be ten thousand miles nearer her deliverance if the Irishman could have
made that effort; if he had realised that the thing ought to be done,
not because such rulers wanted it, but rather although they wanted it.

But the much more curious fact is this. There were any number of
Irishmen, and those among the most Irish, who did realise this; who
realised it with so sublime a sincerity as to fight for their own
enemies against the world’s enemies, and consent at once to be insulted
by the English and killed by the Germans. The Redmonds and the old
Nationalist party, if they have indeed failed, have the right to be
reckoned among the most heroic of all the heroic failures of Ireland.
If theirs is a lost cause, it is wholly worthy of a land where lost
causes are never lost. But the old guard of Redmond did also in its
time, I fancy, fall into the same particular and curious error, but
in a more subtle way and on a seemingly remote subject. They also,
whose motives like those of the Sinn Feiners were entirely noble, did
in one sense fail to be national, in the sense of appreciating the
international importance of a nation. In their case it was a matter
of English and not European politics; and as their case was much more
complicated, I speak with much less confidence about it. But I think
there was a highly determining time in politics when certain Irishmen
got on to the wrong side in English politics, as other Irishmen
afterwards got on to the wrong side in European politics. And by the
wrong side, in both cases, I not only mean the side that was not
consistent with the truth, but the side that was not really congenial
to the Irish. A man may act against the body, even the main body, of
his nation; but if he acts against the soul of his nation, even to save
it, he and his nation suffer.

I can best explain what I mean by reaffirming the reality which an
English visitor really found in Irish politics, towards the end of
the war. It may seem odd to say that the most hopeful fact I found,
for Anglo-Irish relations, was the fury with which the Irish were all
accusing the English of perjury and treason. Yet this was my solid
and sincere impression; the happiest omen was the hatred aroused by
the disappointment over Home Rule. For men are not furious unless
they are disappointed of something they really want; and men are not
disappointed except about something they were really ready to accept.
If Ireland had been entirely in favour of entire separation, the loss
of Home Rule would not be felt as a loss, but if anything as an escape.
But it is felt bitterly and savagely as a loss; to that at least I can
testify with entire certainty. I may or may not be right in the belief
I build on it; but I believe it would still be felt as a gain; that
Dominion Home Rule would in the long run satisfy Ireland. But it would
satisfy her if it were given to her, not if it were promised to her.
As it is, the Irish regard our Government simply as a liar who has
broken his word; I cannot express how big and black that simple idea
bulks in the landscape and blocks up the road. And without professing
to regard it as quite so simple, I regard it as substantially true.
It is, upon any argument, an astounding thing the King, Lords, and
Commons of a great nation should record on its statute-book that a law
exists, and then illegally reverse it in answer to the pressure of
private persons. It is, and must be, for the people benefited by the
law, an act of treason. The Irish were not wrong in thinking it an act
of treason, even in the sense of treachery and trickery. Where they
were wrong, I regret to say, was in talking of it as if it were the
one supreme solitary example of such trickery; when the whole of our
politics were full of such tricks. In short, the loss of justice for
Ireland was simply a part of the loss of justice in England; the loss
of all moral authority in government, the loss of the popularity of
Parliament, the secret plutocracy which makes it easy to take a bribe
or break a pledge, the corruption that can pass unpopular laws or
promote discredited men. The law-giver cannot enforce his law because,
whether or no the law be popular, the law-giver is wholly unpopular,
and is perpetually passing wholly unpopular laws. Intrigue has been
substituted for government; and the public man cannot appeal to the
public because all the most important part of his policy is conducted
in private. The modern politician conducts his public life in private.
He sometimes condescends to make up for it by affecting to conduct his
private life in public. He will put his baby or his birthday book into
the illustrated papers; it is his dealings with the colossal millions
of the cosmopolitan millionaires that he puts in his pocket or his
private safe. We are allowed to know all about his dogs and cats; but
not about those larger and more dangerous animals, his bulls and bears.

Now there was a moment when England had an opportunity of breaking
down this parliamentary evil, as Europe afterwards had an opportunity
(which it fortunately took) of breaking down the Prussian evil. The
corruption was common to both parties; but the chance of exposing
it happened to occur under the rule of a Home Rule party; which the
Nationalists supported solely for the sake of Home Rule. In the
Marconi Case they consented to whitewash the tricks of Jew jobbers
whom they must have despised, just as some of the Sinn Feiners
afterwards consented to whitewash the wickedness of Prussian bullies
whom they also must have despised. In both cases the motive was wholly
disinterested and even idealistic. It was the practicality that was
unpractical. I was one of a small group which protested against the
hushing up of the Marconi affair, but we always did justice to the
patriotic intentions of the Irish who allowed it. But we based our
criticism of their strategy on the principle of _falsus in uno, falsus
in omnibus_. The man who will cheat you about one thing will cheat you
about another. The men who will lie to you about Marconi, will lie to
you about Home Rule. The political conventions that allow of dealing
in Marconis at one price for the party, and another price for oneself,
are conventions that also allow of telling one story to Mr John Redmond
and another to Sir Edward Carson. The man who will imply one state of
things when talking at large in Parliament, and another state of things
when put into a witness-box in court, is the same sort of man who will
promise an Irish settlement in the hope that it may fail; and then
withdraw it for fear it should succeed. Among the many muddle-headed
modern attempts to coerce the Christian poor to the Moslem dogma about
wine and beer, one was concerned with abuse by loafers or tipplers
of the privilege of the Sunday traveller. It was suggested that the
travellers’ claims were in every sense travellers’ tales. It was
therefore proposed that the limit of three miles should be extended
to six; as if it were any harder for a liar to say he had walked six
miles than three. The politicians might be as ready to promise to walk
the six miles to an Irish Republic as the three miles to an Irish
Parliament. But Sinn Fein is mistaken in supposing that any change of
theoretic claim meets the problem of corruption. Those who would break
their word to Redmond would certainly break it to De Valera. We urged
all these things on the Nationalists whose national cause we supported;
we asked them to follow their larger popular instincts, break down a
corrupt oligarchy, and let a real popular parliament in England give a
real popular parliament to Ireland. With entirely honourable motives,
they adhered to the narrower conception of their national duty. They
sacrificed everything for Home Rule, even their own profoundly national
emotion of contempt. For the sake of Home Rule, or the solemn promise
of Home Rule, they kept such men in power; and for their reward they
found that such men were still in power; and Home Rule was gone.

What I mean about the Nationalist Party, and what may be called its
prophetic shadow of the Sinn Fein mistake, may well be symbolised in
one of the noblest figures of that party or any party. An Irish poet,
talking to me about the pointed diction of the Irish peasant, said he
had recently rejoiced in the society of a drunken Kerry farmer, whose
conversation was a litany of questions about everything in heaven and
earth, each ending with a sort of chorus of ‘Will ye tell me that now?’
And at the end of all he said abruptly, ‘Did ye know Tom Kettle?’ and
on my friend the poet assenting, the farmer said, as if in triumph,
‘And why are so many people alive that ought to be dead, and so many
people dead that ought to be alive? Will ye tell me that now?’ That is
not unworthy of an old heroic poem, and therefore not unworthy of the
hero and poet of whom it was spoken. ‘Patroclus died, who was a better
man than you.’ Thomas Michael Kettle was perhaps the greatest example
of that greatness of spirit which was so ill rewarded on both sides of
the channel and of the quarrel, which marked Redmond’s brother and so
many of Redmond’s followers. He was a wit, a scholar, an orator, a man
ambitious in all the arts of peace; and he fell fighting the barbarians
because he was too good a European to use the barbarians against
England, as England a hundred years before had used the barbarians
against Ireland. There is nothing to be said of such things except what
the drunken farmer said, unless it be a verse from a familiar ballad
on a very remote topic, which happens to express my own most immediate
feelings about politics and reconstruction after the decimation of the
great war.

  The many men so beautiful
  And they all dead did lie:
  And a thousand thousand slimy things
  Lived on, and so did I.

It is not a reflection that adds any inordinate self-satisfaction to
the fact of one’s own survival.

In turning over a collection of Kettle’s extraordinary varied and
vigorous writings, which contain some of the most pointed and piercing
criticisms of materialism, of modern capitalism and mental and moral
anarchism generally, I came on a very interesting criticism of myself
and my friends in our Marconi agitation; a suggestion, on a note of
genial cynicism, that we were asking for an impossible political
purity; a suggestion which, knowing it to be patriotic, I will venture
to call pathetic. I will not now return on such disagreements with a
man with whom I so universally agree; but it will not be unfair to find
here an exact illustration of what I mean by saying that the national
leaders, so far from merely failing as wild Irishmen, only failed
when they were not instinctive enough, that is, not Irish enough.
Kettle was a patriot whose impulse was practical, and whose policy
was impolitic. Here also the Nationalist underrated the importance of
the intervention of his own nationality. Kettle left a fine and even
terrible poem, asking if his sacrifices were in vain, and whether he
and his people were again being betrayed. I think nobody can deny
that he was betrayed; but it was not by the English soldiers with whom
he marched to war, but by those very English politicians with whom he
sacrificed so much to remain at peace. No man will ever dare to say
his death in battle was in vain, not only because in the highest sense
it could never be, but because even in the lowest sense it was not.
He hated the icy insolence of Prussia; and that ice is broken, and
already as weak as water. As Carlyle said of a far lesser thing, that
at least will never through unending ages insult the face of the sun
any more. The point is here that if any part of his fine work was in
vain, it was certainly not the reckless romantic part; it was precisely
the plodding parliamentary part. None can say that the weary marching
and counter-marching in France was a thing thrown away; not only in
the sense which consecrates all footprints along such a _via crucis_,
or highway of the army of martyrs; but also in the perfectly practical
sense, that the army was going somewhere, and that it got there. But
it might possibly be said that the weary marching and counter-marching
at Westminster, in and out of a division lobby, belonged to what the
French call the _salle des pas perdus_. If anything was practical it
was the visionary adventure; if anything was unpractical it was the
practical compromise. He and his friends were betrayed by the men whose
corruptions they had contemptuously condoned, far more than by the men
whose bigotries they had indignantly denounced. There darkened about
them treason and disappointment, and he that was the happiest died in
battle; and one who knew and loved him spoke to me for a million others
in saying: ‘And now we will not give you a dead dog until you keep your
word.’




CHAPTER VIII




AN EXAMPLE AND A QUESTION


We all had occasion to rejoice at the return of Sherlock Holmes when
he was supposed to be dead; and I presume we may soon rejoice in his
return even when he is really dead. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his
widespread new campaign in favour of Spiritualism, ought at least to
delight us with the comedy of Holmes as a control and Watson as a
medium. But I have for the moment a use for the great detective not
concerned with the psychical side of the question. Of that I will only
say, in passing, that in this as in many other cases, I find myself in
agreement with an authority about where the line is drawn between good
and bad, but have the misfortune to think his good bad, and his bad
good. Sir Arthur explains that he would lift Spiritualism to a graver
and more elevated plane of idealism; and that he quite agrees with his
critics that the mere tricks with tables and chairs are grotesque and
vulgar. I think this quite true if turned upside down, like the table.
I do not mind the grotesque and vulgar part of Spiritualism; what I
object to is the grave and elevating part. After all, a miracle is a
miracle and means something; it means that Materialism is nonsense. But
it is not true that a message is always a message; and it sometimes
only means that Spiritualism is also nonsense. If the table at which
I am now writing takes to itself wings and flies out of the window,
perhaps carrying me along with it, the incident will arouse in me a
real intelligent interest, verging on surprise. But if the pen with
which I am writing begins to scrawl, all by itself, the sort of things
I have seen in spirit writing; if it begins to say that all things are
aspects of universal purity and peace, and so on, why, then I shall
not only be annoyed, but also bored. If a great man like the late Sir
William Crookes says a table went walking upstairs, I am impressed by
the news; but not by news from nowhere to the effect that all men are
perpetually walking upstairs, up a spiritual staircase, which seems to
be as mechanical and labour-saving as a moving staircase at Charing
Cross. Moreover, even a benevolent spirit might conceivably throw the
furniture about merely for fun; whereas I doubt if anything but a devil
from hell would say that all things are aspects of purity and peace.

But I am here taking from the Spiritualistic articles a text that has
nothing to do with Spiritualism. In a recent contribution to _Nash’s
Magazine_, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle remarks very truly that the modern
world is weary and wicked and in need of a religion; and he gives
examples of its more typical and terrible corruptions. It is perhaps
natural that he should revert to the case of the Congo, and talk of it
in the torrid fashion which recalls the days when Morel and Casement
had some credit in English politics. We have since had an opportunity
of judging the real attitude of a man like Morel in the plainest case
of black and white injustice that the world has ever seen. It was at
once a replica and a reversal of the position expressed in the Pious
Editor’s Creed, and might roughly be rendered in similar language.

  I do believe in Freedom’s cause
  Ez fur away ez tropics are;
  But Belgians caught in Prussia’s claws
  To me less tempting topics are.
  It’s wal agin a foreign king
  To rouse the chapel’s rigours;
  But Liberty’s a kind of thing
  We only owe to niggers.

He had of course a lurid denunciation of the late King Leopold, of
which I will only say that, uttered by a Belgian about the Belgian
king in his own land and lifetime, it would be highly courageous and
largely correct; but that the parallel test is how much truth was told
by British journalists about British kings in their own land and
lifetime; and that until we can pass that test, such denunciations do
us very little good. But what interests me in the matter at the moment
is this. Sir Arthur feels it right to say something about British
corruptions, and passes from the Congo to Putumayo, touching a little
more lightly; for even the most honest Britons have an unconscious
trick of touching more lightly on the case of British capitalists. He
says that our capitalists were not guilty of direct cruelty, but of an
attitude careless and even callous. But what strikes me is that Sir
Arthur, with his taste for such protests and inquiries, need not have
wandered quite so far from his own home as the forests of South America.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is an Irishman; and in his own country, within
my own memory, there occurred a staggering and almost incredible crime,
or series of crimes, which were worthier than anything in the world of
the attention of Sherlock Holmes in fiction, or Conan Doyle in reality.
It always will be a tribute to the author of _Sherlock Holmes_ that
he did, about the same time, do such good work in reality. He made an
admirable plea for Adolf Beck and Oscar Slater; he was also connected,
I remember, with the reversal of a miscarriage of justice in a case
of cattle-mutilation. And all this, while altogether to his credit,
makes it seem all the more strange that his talents could not be used
for, and in, his own home and native country, in a mystery that had
the dimensions of a monstrosity, and which did involve, if I remember
right, a question of cattle-maiming. Anyhow, it was concerned with
moonlighters and the charges made against them, such as the common one
of cutting off the tails of cows. I can imagine Sherlock Holmes on such
a quest, keen-eyed and relentless, finding the cloven hoof of some
sinister and suspected cow. I can imagine Dr Watson, like the cow’s
tail, always behind. I can imagine Sherlock Holmes remarking, in a
light allusive fashion, that he himself had written a little monograph
on the subject of cows’ tails; with diagrams and tables solving the
great traditional problem of how many cows’ tails would reach the moon;
a subject of extraordinary interest to moonlighters. And I can still
more easily imagine him saying afterwards, having resumed the pipe and
dressing-gown of Baker Street, ‘A remarkable little problem, Watson.
In some of its features it was perhaps more singular than any you
have been good enough to report. I do not think that even the Tooting
Trouser-Stretching Mystery, or the singular little affair of the Radium
Toothpick, offered more strange and sensational developments.’ For
if the celebrated pair had really tracked out the Irish crime I have
in mind, they would have found a story which, considered merely as a
detective story, is by far the most dramatic and dreadful of modern
times. Like nearly all such sensational stories, it traced the crime
to somebody far higher in station and responsibility than any of those
suspected. Like many of the most sensational of them, it actually
traced the crime to the detective who was investigating it. For if
they had really crawled about with a magnifying glass, studying the
supposed footprints of the peasants incriminated, they would have
found they were made by the boots of the policeman. And the boots of a
policeman, one feels, are things that even Watson might recognise.

I have told the astounding story of Sergeant Sheridan before; and I
shall often tell it again. Hardly any English people know it; and I
shall go on telling it in the hope that all English people may know
it some day. It ought to be first in every collection of _causes
célèbres_, in every book about criminals, in every book of historical
mysteries; and on its merits it would be. It is not in any of them.
It is not there because there is a motive, in all modern British
plutocracy, against finding the big British miscarriages of justice
where they are really to be found; and that is a great deal nearer
than Putumayo. It is a place far more appropriate to the exploits of
the family of the Doyles. It is called Ireland; and in that place a
powerful British official named Sheridan had been highly successful
in the imperial service by convicting a series of poor Irishmen of
agrarian crimes. It was afterwards discovered that the British official
had carefully committed every one of the crimes himself; and then, with
equal foresight, perjured himself to imprison innocent men. Any one who
does not know the story will naturally ask what punishment was held
adequate for such a Neronian monster; I will tell him. He was bowed out
of the country like a distinguished stranger, his expenses politely
paid, as if he had been delivering a series of instructive lectures;
and he is now probably smoking a cigar in an American hotel, and much
more comfortable than any poor policeman who has done his duty. I defy
anybody to deny him a place in our literature about great criminals.
Charles Peace escaped many times before conviction; Sheridan escaped
altogether after conviction. Jack the Ripper was safe because he was
undiscovered; Sheridan was discovered and was still safe. But I only
repeat the matter here for two reasons. First, we may call our rule in
Ireland what we like; we may call it the union when there is no union;
we may call it Protestant ascendancy when we are no longer Protestants;
or Teutonic lordship when we could only be ashamed of being Teutons.
But this is what it _is_, and everything else is waste of words. And
second, because an Irish investigator of cattle-maiming, so oblivious
of the Irish cow, is in some danger of figuring as an Irish bull.

Anyhow, that is the real and remarkable story of Sergeant Sheridan, and
I put it first because it is the most practical test of the practical
question of whether Ireland is misgoverned. It is strictly a fair
test; for it is a test by the minimum and an argument _a fortiori_.
A British official in Ireland can run a career of crime, punishing
innocent people for his own felonies, and when he is found out, he
is found to be above the law. This may seem like putting things at
the worst, but it is really putting them at the best. This story was
not told us on the word of a wild Irish Fenian, or even a responsible
Irish Nationalist. It was told, word for word as I have told it, by
the Unionist Minister in charge of the matter and reporting it, with
regret and shame, to Parliament. He was not one of the worst Irish
Secretaries, who might be responsible for the worst _régime_; on the
contrary, he was by far the best. If even he could only partially
restrain or reveal such things, there can be no deduction in common
sense except that in the ordinary way such things go on gaily in the
dark, with nobody to reveal and nobody to restrain them. It was not
something done in those dark days of torture and terrorism, which
happened in Ireland a hundred years ago, and which Englishmen talk
of as having happened a million years ago. It was something that
happened quite recently, in my own mature manhood, about the time
that the better things like the Land Acts were already before the
world. I remember writing to the _Westminster Gazette_ to emphasise
it when it occurred; but it seems to have passed out of memory in an
almost half-witted fashion. But that peep-hole into hell has afforded
me ever since a horrible amusement, when I hear the Irish softly
rebuked for remembering old unhappy far-off things and wrongs done in
the Dark Ages. Thus I was especially amused to find the Rev. R. J.
Campbell saying that ‘Ireland has been petted and coddled more than
any other part of the British Isles’; because Mr Campbell was chiefly
famous for a comfortable creed himself, for saying that evil is only
‘a shadow where light should be’; and there is no doubt here of his
throwing a very black shadow where light is very much required. I
will conceive the policeman at the corner of the street in which Mr
Campbell resides as in the habit of killing a crossing-sweeper every
now and then for his private entertainment, burgling the houses of Mr
Campbell’s neighbours, cutting off the tails of their carriage horses,
and otherwise disporting himself by moonlight like a fairy. It is his
custom to visit the consequences of each of these crimes upon the Rev.
R. J. Campbell, whom he arrests at intervals, successfully convicts by
perjury, and proceeds to coddle in penal servitude. But I have another
reason for mentioning Mr Campbell, a gentleman whom I heartily respect
in many other aspects; and the reason is connected with his name, as it
occurs in another connection on another page. It shows how in anything,
but especially in anything coming from Ireland, the old facts of
family and faith outweigh a million modern philosophies. The words in
_Who’s Who_--‘Ulster Protestant of Scottish ancestry’--give the really
Irish and the really honourable reason for Mr Campbell’s extraordinary
remark. A man may preach for years, with radiant universalism, that
many waters cannot quench love; but Boyne Water can. Mr Campbell
appears very promptly with what Kettle called ‘a bucketful of Boyne, to
put the sunrise out.’ I will not take the opportunity of saying, like
the Ulsterman, that there never was treason yet but a Campbell was at
the bottom of it. But I will say that there never was Modernism yet but
a Calvinist was at the bottom of it. The old theology is much livelier
than the New Theology.

Many other such true tales could be told; but what we need here is a
sort of test. This tale is a test; because it is the best that could be
said, about the best that could be done, by the best Englishman ruling
Ireland, in face of the English system established there; and it is
the best, or at any rate the most, that we can know about that system.
Another truth which might also serve as a test, is this; to note among
the responsible English not only their testimony against each other,
but their testimony against themselves. I mean the consideration of
how very rapidly we realise that our own conduct in Ireland has been
infamous, not in the remote past, but in the very recent past. I have
lived just long enough to see the wheel come full circle inside one
generation; when I was a schoolboy, the sort of Kensington middle
class to which I belong was nearly solidly resisting, not only the
first Home Rule Bill, but any suggestion that the Land League had a
leg to stand on, or that the landlords need do anything but get their
rents or kick out their tenants. The whole Unionist Press, which was
three-quarters of the Press, simply supported Clanricarde, and charged
any one who did not do so with supporting the Clan-na-Gael. Mr Balfour
was simply admired for enforcing the system, which it is his real
apologia to have tried to end, or at least to have allowed Wyndham to
end. I am not yet far gone in senile decay; but already I have lived to
hear my countrymen talk about their own blind policy in the time of the
Land League, exactly as they talked before of their blind policy in the
time of the Limerick Treaty. The shadow on our past, shifts forward as
we advance into the future; and always seems to end just behind us. I
was told in my youth that the age-long misgovernment of Ireland lasted
down to about 1870; it is now agreed among all intelligent people that
it lasted at least down to about 1890. A little common sense, after
a hint like the Sheridan case, will lead one to suspect the simple
explanation that it is going on still.

Now I heard scores of such stories as the Sheridan story in Ireland,
many of which I mention elsewhere; but I do not mention them here
because they cannot be publicly tested; and that for a very simple
reason. We must accept all the advantages and disadvantages of a
rule of absolute and iron militarism. We cannot impose silence and
then sift stories; we cannot forbid argument and then ask for proof;
we cannot destroy rights and then discover wrongs. I say this quite
impartially in the matter of militarism itself. I am far from certain
that soldiers are worse rulers than lawyers and merchants; and I am
quite certain that a nation has a right to give abnormal power to its
soldiers in time of war. I only say that a soldier, if he is a sensible
soldier, will know what he is doing and therefore what he cannot do;
that he cannot gag a man and then cross-examine him, any more than
he can blow out his brains and then convince his intelligence. There
may be; humanly speaking, there must be, a mass of injustices in the
militaristic government of Ireland. The militarism itself may be the
least of them; but it must involve the concealment of all the rest.

It has been remarked above that establishing militarism is a thing
which a nation had a right to do, and (what is not at all the same
thing) which it may be right in doing. But with that very phrase ‘a
nation,’ we collide of course with the whole real question; the alleged
abstract wrong about which the Irish talk much more than about their
concrete wrongs. I have put first the matters mentioned above, because
I wish to make clear, as a matter of common sense, the impression of
any reasonable outsider that they certainly have concrete wrongs.
But even those who doubt it, and say that the Irish have no concrete
grievance but only a sentiment of Nationalism, fall into a final and
very serious error about the nature of the thing called Nationalism,
and even the meaning of the word ‘concrete.’ For the truth is that, in
dealing with a nation, the grievance which is most abstract of all is
also the one which is most concrete of all.

Not only is patriotism a part of practical politics, but it is
more practical than any politics. To neglect it, and ask only for
grievances, is like counting the clouds and forgetting the climate.
To neglect it, and think only of laws, is like seeing the landmarks
and never seeing the landscape. It will be found that the denial of
nationality is much more of a daily nuisance than the denial of votes
or the denial of juries. Nationality is the most practical thing,
because so many things are national without being political, or without
being legal. A man in a conquered country feels it when he goes to
market or even goes to church, which may be more often than he goes
to law; and the harvest is more general than the General Election.
Altering the flag on the roof is like altering the sun in the sky; the
very chimney-pots and lamp-posts look different. Nay, after a certain
interval of occupation they are different. As a man would know he was
in a land of strangers before he knew it was a land of savages, so he
knows a rule is alien long before he knows it is oppressive. It is not
necessary for it to add injury to insult.

For instance, when I first walked about Dublin, I was disposed to
smile at the names of the streets being inscribed in Irish as well as
English. I will not here discuss the question of what is called the
Irish language, the only arguable case against which is that it is not
the Irish language. But at any rate it is not the English language,
and I have come to appreciate more imaginatively the importance of
that fact. It may be used rather as a weapon than a tool; but it is a
national weapon if it is not a national tool. I see the significance
of having something which the eye commonly encounters, as it does a
chimney-pot or a lamp-post; but which is like a chimney reared above
an Irish hearth or a lamp to light an Irish road. I see the point
of having a solid object in the street to remind an Irishman that
he is in Ireland, as a red pillar-box reminds an Englishman that he
is in England. But there must be a thousand things as practical as
pillar-boxes which remind an Irishman that, if he is in his country, it
is not yet a free country; everything connected with the principal seat
of government reminds him of it perpetually. It may not be easy for an
Englishman to imagine how many of such daily details there are. But
there is, after all, one very simple effort of the fancy, which would
fix the fact for him for ever. He has only to imagine that the Germans
have conquered London.

A brilliant writer who has earned the name of a Pacifist, and even
a Pro-German, once propounded to me his highly personal and even
perverse type of internationalism by saying, as a sort of unanswerable
challenge, ‘Wouldn’t you rather be ruled by Goethe than by Walter
Long?’ I replied that words could not express the wild love and loyalty
I should feel for Mr Walter Long, if the only alternative were Goethe.
I could not have put my own national case in a clearer or more compact
form. I might occasionally feel inclined to kill Mr Long; but under
the approaching shadow of Goethe, I should feel more inclined to kill
myself. That is the deathly element in denationalisation; that it
poisons life itself, the most real of all realities. But perhaps the
best way of putting the point conversationally is to say that Goethe
would certainly put up a monument to Shakespeare. I would sooner die
than walk past it every day of my life. And in the other case of the
street inscriptions, it is well to remember that these things, which
we also walk past every day, are exactly the sort of things that
always have, in a nameless fashion, the national note. If the Germans
conquered London, they would not need to massacre me or even enslave me
in order to annoy me; it would be quite enough that their notices were
in a German style, if not in a German language. Suppose I looked up
in an English railway carriage and saw these words written in English
exactly as I have seen them in a German railway carriage written in
German: ‘The out-leaning of the body from the window of the carriage is
because of the therewith bound up life’s danger strictly prohibited.’
It is not rude. It would certainly be impossible to complain that it is
curt. I should not be annoyed by its brutality and brevity; but on the
contrary by its elaborateness and even its laxity. But if it does not
exactly shine in lucidity, it gives a reason; which after all is a very
reasonable thing to do. By every cosmopolitan test, it is more polite
than the sentence I have read in my childhood: ‘Wait until the train
stops.’ This is curt; this might be called rude; but it never annoyed
me in the least. The nearest I can get to defining my sentiment is to
say that I can sympathise with the Englishman who wrote the English
notice. Having a rude thing to write, he wrote it as quickly as he
could, and went home to his tea; or preferably to his beer. But what is
too much for me, an overpowering vision, is the thought of that German
calmly sitting down to compose that sentence like a sort of essay. It
is the thought of him serenely waving away the one important word till
the very end of the sentence, like the Day of Judgment to the end of
the world. It is perhaps the mere thought that he did not break down in
the middle of it, but endured to the end; or that he could afterwards
calmly review it, and see that sentence go marching by, like the whole
German army. In short, I do not object to it because it is dictatorial
or despotic or bureaucratic or anything of the kind, but simply because
it is German. Because it is German I do not object to it in Germany.
Because it is German I should violently revolt against it in England.
I do not revolt against the command to wait until the train stops,
not because it is less rude, but because it is the kind of rudeness
I can understand. The official may be treating me casually, but at
least he is not treating himself seriously. And so, in return, I can
treat him and his notice not seriously but casually. I can neglect
to wait until the train stops, and fall down on the platform, as I
did on the platform of Wolverhampton, to the permanent damage of that
fine structure. I can, by a stroke of satiric genius, truly national
and traditional, the dexterous elimination of a single letter, alter
the maxim to ‘Wait until the rain stops.’ It is a jest as profoundly
English as the weather to which it refers. Nobody would be tempted to
take such a liberty with the German sentence; not only because he would
be instantly imprisoned in a fortress, but because he would not know at
which end to begin.

Now this is the truth which is expressed, though perhaps very
imperfectly, in things like the Gaelic lettering on streets in Dublin.
It will be wholesome for us who are English to realise that there
is almost certainly an English way of putting things, even the most
harmless things, which appears to an Irishman quite as ungainly,
unnatural, and ludicrous as that German sentence appears to me. As the
famous Frenchman did not know when he was talking prose, the official
Englishman does not know when he is talking English. He unconsciously
assumes that he is talking Esperanto. Imperialism is not an insanity of
patriotism; it is merely an illusion of cosmopolitanism.

For the national note of the Irish language is not peculiar to what
used to be called the Erse language. The whole nation used the tongue
common to both nations with a difference far beyond a dialect. It
is not a difference of accent, but a difference of style; which
is generally a difference of soul. The emphasis, the elision, the
short cuts and sharp endings of speech, show a variety which may be
almost unnoticeable but is none the less untranslatable. It may be
only a little more weight on a word, or an inversion allowable in
English but abounding in Irish; but we can no more copy it than copy
the compactness of the French _on_ or the Latin ablative absolute.
The commonest case of what I mean, for instance, is the locution
that lingers in my mind with an agreeable phrase from one of Mr
Yeats’s stories: ‘Whom I shall yet see upon the hob of hell, and
them screeching.’ It is an idiom that gives the effect of a pointed
postscript, a parting kick or sting in the tail of the sentence, which
is unfathomably national. It is noteworthy and even curious that
quite a crowd of Irishmen, who quoted to me with just admiration the
noble ending of _Kathleen-na-Hulahan_, where the newcomer is asked
if he has seen the old woman who is the tragic type of Ireland going
out, quoted his answer in that form, ‘I did not. But I saw a young
woman, and she walking like a queen.’ I say it is curious, because I
have since been told that in the actual book (which I cannot lay my
hand on at the moment) a more classic English idiom is used. It would
generally be most unwise to alter the diction of such a master of style
as Mr Yeats: though indeed it is possible that he altered it himself,
as he has sometimes done, and not always, I think, for the better.
But whether this form came from himself or from his countrymen, it
was very redolent of his country. And there was something inspiring
in thus seeing, as it were before one’s eyes, literature becoming
legend. But a hundred other examples could be given, even from my own
short experience, of such fine turns of language, nor are the finest
necessarily to be found in literature. It is perfectly true, though
prigs may overwork and snobs underrate the truth, that in a country
like this the peasants can talk like poets. When I was on the wild
coast of Donegal, an old unhappy woman who had starved through the
famines and the evictions, was telling a lady the tales of those times,
and she mentioned quite naturally one that might have come straight
out of times so mystical that we should call them mythical, that some
travellers had met a poor wandering woman with a baby in those great
gray rocky wastes, and asked her who she was. And she answered, ‘I am
the Mother of God, and this is Himself, and He is the boy you will all
be wanting at the last.’

There is more in that story than can be put into any book, even on a
matter in which its meaning plays so deep a part, and it seems almost
profane to analyse it however sympathetically. But if any one wishes
to know what I mean by the untranslatable truth which makes a language
national, it will be worth while to look at the mere diction of that
speech, and note how its whole effect turns on certain phrases and
customs which happen to be peculiar to the nation. It is well known
that in Ireland the husband or head of the house is always called
‘himself’; nor is it peculiar to the peasantry, but adopted, if
partly in jest, by the gentry. A distinguished Dublin publicist, a
landlord and leader among the more national aristocracy, always called
me ‘himself’ when he was talking to my wife. It will be noted how a
sort of shadow of that common meaning mingles with the more shining
significance of its position in a sentence where it is also strictly
logical, in the sense of theological. All literary style, especially
national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual
sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable; because it is
possible to render the meaning, but not the double meaning. There is
even a faint differentiation in the half-humorous possibilities of the
word ‘boy’; another wholly national nuance. Say instead, ‘And He is
the child,’ and it is something perhaps stiffer, and certainly quite
different. Take away, ‘This is Himself’ and simply substitute ‘This
is He,’ and it is a piece of pedantry ten thousand miles from the
original. But above all it has lost its note of something national,
because it has lost its note of something domestic. All roads in
Ireland, of fact or folk-lore, of theology or grammar, lead us back
to that door and hearth of the household, that fortress of the family
which is the key-fortress of the whole strategy of the island. The
Irish Catholics, like other Christians, admit a mystery in the Holy
Trinity, but they may almost be said to admit an experience in the
Holy Family. Their historical experience, alas, has made it seem to
them not unnatural that the Holy Family should be a homeless family.
They also have found that there was no room for them at the inn, or
anywhere but in the jail; they also have dragged their new-born babes
out of their cradles, and trailed in despair along the road to Egypt,
or at least along the road to exile. They also have heard, in the dark
and the distance behind them, the noise of the horsemen of Herod.

Now it is this sensation of stemming a stream, of ten thousand things
all pouring one way, labels, titles, monuments, metaphors, modes of
address, assumptions in controversy, that make an Englishman in Ireland
know that he is in a strange land. Nor is he merely bewildered, as
among a medley of strange things. On the contrary, if he has any sense,
he soon finds them unified and simplified to a single impression, as
if he were talking to a strange person. He cannot define it, because
nobody can define a person, and nobody can define a nation. He can
only see it, smell it, hear it, handle it, bump into it, fall over it,
kill it, be killed for it, or be damned for doing it wrong. He must be
content with these mere hints of its existence; but he cannot define
it, because it is like a person, and no book of logic will undertake to
define Aunt Jane or Uncle William. We can only say, with more or less
mournful conviction, that if Aunt Jane is not a person, there is no
such thing as a person. And I say with equal conviction that if Ireland
is not a nation, there is no such thing as a nation. France is not a
nation, England is not a nation; there is no such thing as patriotism
on this planet. Any Englishman, of any party, with any proposal, may
well clear his mind of cant about that preliminary question. If we
free Ireland, we must free it to be a nation; if we go on repressing
Ireland, we are repressing a nation; if we are right to repress
Ireland, we are right to repress a nation. After that we may consider
what can be done, according to our opinions about the respect due to
patriotism, the reality of cosmopolitan and imperial alternatives,
and so on. I will debate with the man who does not want mankind
divided into nations at all; I can imagine a case for the man who
wants specially to restrain one particular nation, as I would restrain
anti-national Prussia. But I will not argue with a man about whether
Ireland is a nation, or about the yet more awful question of whether
it is an island. I know there is a sceptical philosophy which suggests
that all ultimate ideas are only penultimate ideas, and therefore
perhaps that all islands are really peninsulas. But I will claim to
know what I mean by an island and what I mean by an individual; and
when I think suddenly of my experience in the island in question, the
impression is a single one; the voices mingle in a human voice which I
should know if I heard it again, calling in the distance; the crowds
dwindle into a single figure whom I have seen long ago upon a strange
hill-side, and she walking like a queen.




CHAPTER IX




BELFAST AND THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM


Of that cloud of dream which seems to drift over so many Irish poems
and impressions, I felt very little in Ireland. There is a real meaning
in this suggestion of a mystic sleep, but it does not mean what most
of us imagine, and is not to be found where we expect it. On the
contrary, I think the most vivid impression the nation left on me, was
that it was almost unnaturally wide awake. I might almost say that
Ireland suffers from insomnia. This is not only literally true, of
those tremendous talks, the prolonged activities of rich and restless
intellects, that can burn up the nights from darkness to daybreak.
It is true on the doubtful as well as the delightful side, and the
temperament has something of the morbid vigilance and even of the
irritability of insomnia. Its lucidity is not only superhuman, but it
is sometimes in the true sense inhuman. Its intellectual clarity cannot
resist the temptation to intellectual cruelty. If I had to sum up in
a sentence the one fault really to be found with the Irish, I could
do it simply enough. I should say it saddened me that I liked them
all so much better than they liked each other. But it is our supreme
stupidity that this is always taken as meaning that Ireland is a sort
of Donnybrook Fair. It is really quite the reverse of a merely rowdy
and irresponsible quarrel. So far from fighting with shillelaghs, they
fight far too much with rapiers; their temptation is in the very nicety
and even delicacy of the thrust. Of course there are multitudes who
make no such deadly use of the national irony; but it is sufficiently
common for even these to suffer from it; and after a time I began to
understand a little that burden about bitterness of speech, which
recurs so often in the songs of Mr Yeats and other Irish poets.

  Though hope fall from you and love decay
  Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

But there is nothing dreamy about the bitterness; the worst part
of it is the fact that the criticisms always have a very lucid and
logical touch of truth. It is not for us to lecture the Irish about
forgiveness, who have given them so much to forgive. But if some one
who had not lost the right to preach to them, if St Patrick were to
return to preach, he would find that nothing had failed, through all
those ages of agony, of faith and honour and endurance; but I think he
might possibly say, what I have no right to say, a word about charity.

There is indeed one decisive sense in which the Irish are very
poetical; in that of giving a special and serious social recognition
to poetry. I have sometimes expressed the fancy that men in the Golden
Age might spontaneously talk in verse; and it is really true that half
the Irish talk is in verse. Quotation becomes recitation. But it is
much too rhythmic to resemble our own theatrical recitations. This is
one of my own strongest and most sympathetic memories, and one of my
most definable reasons for having felt extraordinarily happy in Dublin.
It was a paradise of poets, in which a man who may feel inclined to
mention a book or two of _Paradise Lost_, or illustrate his meaning
with the complete ballad of the _Ancient Mariner_, feels he will be
better understood than elsewhere. But the more this very national
quality is noted, the less it will be mistaken for anything merely
irresponsible, or even merely emotional. The shortest way of stating
the truth is to say that poetry plays the part of music. It is in
every sense of the phrase a social function. A poetical evening is as
natural as a musical evening, and being as natural it becomes what is
called artificial. As in some circles ‘Do you play?’ is rather ‘Don’t
you play?’ these Irish circles would be surprised because a man did
not recite rather than because he did. A hostile critic, especially an
Irish critic, might possibly say that the Irish are poetical because
they are not sufficiently musical. I can imagine Mr Bernard Shaw saying
something of the sort. But it might well be retorted that they are not
merely musical because they will not consent to be merely emotional. It
is far truer to say that they give a reasonable place to poetry, than
that they permit any particular poetic interference with reason. ‘But
I, whose virtues are the definitions of the analytical mind,’ says Mr
Yeats, and any one who has been in the atmosphere will know what he
means. In so far as such things stray from reason, they tend rather to
ritual than to riot. Poetry is in Ireland what humour is in America; it
is an institution. The Englishman, who is always for good and evil the
amateur, takes both in a more occasional and even accidental fashion.
It must always be remembered here that the ancient Irish civilisation
had a high order of poetry, which was not merely mystical, but rather
mathematical. Like Celtic ornament, Celtic verse tended too much to
geometrical patterns. If this was irrational, it was not by excess
of emotion. It might rather be described as irrational by excess of
reason. The antique hierarchy of minstrels, each grade with its own
complicated metre, suggests that there was something Chinese about
a thing so inhumanly civilised. Yet all this vanished etiquette is
somehow in the air in Ireland; and men and women move to it, as to the
steps of a lost dance.

Thus, whether we consider the sense in which the Irish are really
quarrelsome, or the sense in which they are really poetical, we find
that both lead us back to a condition of clarity which seems the very
reverse of a mere dream. In both cases Ireland is critical, and even
self-critical. The bitterness I have ventured to lament is not Irish
bitterness against the English; that I should assume as not only
inevitable, but substantially justifiable. It is Irish bitterness
against the Irish; the remarks of one honest Nationalist about another
honest Nationalist. Similarly, while they are fond of poetry, they
are not always fond of poets, and there is plenty of satire in their
conversation on the subject. I have said that half the talk may consist
of poetry; I might almost say that the other half may consist of
parody. All these things amount to an excess of vigilance and realism;
the mass of the people watch and pray, but even those who never pray
never cease to watch. If they idealise sleep, it is as the sleepless
do; it might almost be said that they can only dream of dreaming. If
a dream haunts them, it is rather as something that escapes them; and
indeed some of their finest poetry is rather about seeking fairyland
than about finding it. Granted all this, I may say that there was
one place in Ireland where I did seem to find it, and not merely to
seek it. There was one spot where I seemed to see the dream itself in
possession, as one might see from afar a cloud resting on a single
hill. There a dream, at once a desire and a delusion, brooded above a
whole city. That place was Belfast.

The description could be justified even literally and in detail. A man
told me in north-east Ulster that he had heard a mother warning her
children away from some pond, or similar place of danger, by saying,
‘Don’t you go there; there are wee popes there.’ A country where
that could be said is like Elfland as compared to England. If not
exactly a land of fairies, it is at least a land of goblins. There is
something charming in the fancy of a pool full of these peculiar elves,
like so many efts, each with his tiny triple crown or crossed keys
complete. That is the difference between this manufacturing district
and an English manufacturing district, like that of Manchester. There
are numbers of sturdy Nonconformists in Manchester, and doubtless
they direct some of their educational warnings against the system
represented by the Archbishop of Canterbury. But nobody in Manchester,
however Nonconformist, tells even a child that a puddle is a sort
of breeding place for Archbishops of Canterbury, little goblins in
gaiters and aprons. It may be said that it is a very stagnant pool
that breeds that sort of efts. But whatever view we take of it, it
remains true, to begin with, that the paradox could be proved merely
from superficial things like superstitions. Protestant Ulster reeks of
superstition; it is the strong smell that really comes like a blast out
of Belfast, as distinct from Birmingham or Brixton. But to me there is
always something human and almost humanising about superstition; and
I really think that such lingering legends about the Pope, as a being
as distant and dehumanised as the King of the Cannibal Islands, have
served as a sort of negative folk-lore. And the same may be said, in so
far as it is true that the commercial province has retained a theology
as well as a mythology. Wherever men are still theological there is
still some chance of their being logical. And in this the Calvinist
Ulsterman may be more of a Catholic Irishman than is commonly realised,
especially by himself.

Attacks and apologies abound about the matter of Belfast bigotry;
but bigotry is by no means the worst thing in Belfast. I rather think
it is the best. Nor is it the strongest example of what I mean, when
I say that Belfast does really live in a dream. The other and more
remarkable fault of the society has indeed a religious root; for nearly
everything in history has a religious root, and especially nearly
everything in Irish history. Of that theoretical origin in theology
I may say something in a moment; it will be enough to say here that
what has produced the more prominent and practical evil is ultimately
the theology itself, but not the habit of being theological. It is the
creed, but not the faith. In so far as the Ulster Protestant really has
a faith, he is really a fine fellow; though perhaps not quite so fine
a fellow as he thinks himself. And that is the chasm; and can be most
shortly stated as I have often stated it in such debates: by saying
that the Protestant generally says, ‘I am a good Protestant,’ while the
Catholic always says, ‘I am a bad Catholic.’

When I say that Belfast is dominated by a dream, I mean it in the
strict psychological sense; that something inside the mind is stronger
than everything outside it. Nonsense is not only stronger than sense,
but stronger than the senses. The idea in a man’s head can eclipse the
eyes in his head. Very worthy and kindly merchants told me there was
no poverty in Belfast. They did not say there was less poverty than
was commonly alleged, or less poverty than there had been, or less
than there was in similar places elsewhere. They said there was none.
As a remark about the Earthly Paradise or the New Jerusalem, it would
be arresting. As a remark about the streets, through which they and
I had both passed a few moments before, it was simply a triumph of
the sheer madness of the imagination of man. These eminent citizens
of Belfast received me in the kindest and most courteous fashion, and
I would not willingly say anything in criticism of them beyond what
is necessary for the practical needs of their country and mine. But
indeed I think the greatest criticism on them, is that they would not
understand what the criticism means. I will therefore clothe it in a
parable, which is none the worse for having also been a real incident.
When told there was no poverty in Belfast, I had remarked mildly that
the people must have a singular taste in dress. I was gravely assured
that they had indeed a most singular taste in dress. I was left with
the general impression that wearing shirts or trousers decorated with
large holes at irregular intervals was a pardonable form of foppery
or fashionable extravagance. And it will always be a deep indwelling
delight, in the memories of my life, that just as these city fathers
and I came out on to the steps of the hotel, there appeared before us
one of the raggedest of the ragged little boys I had seen, asking for a
penny. I gave him a penny, whereon this group of merchants was suddenly
transfigured into a sort of mob, vociferating, ‘Against the law!
Against the law!’ and bundled him away. I hope it is not unamiable
to be so much entertained by that vision of a mob of magistrates, so
earnestly shooing away a solitary child like a cat. Anyhow, they knew
not what they did; and, what is worse, knew not that they knew not. And
they would not understand, if I told them, what legend might have been
made about that child, in the Christian ages of the world.

The point is here that the evil in the delusion does not consist in
bigotry, but in vanity. It is not that such a Belfast man thinks he
is right; for any honest man has a right to think he is right. It is
that he does think he is good, not to say great; and no honest man can
reach that comfortable conviction without a course of intellectual
dishonesty. What cuts this spirit off from Christian common sense is
the fact that the delusion, like most insane delusions, is merely
egotistical. It is simply the pleasure of thinking extravagantly
well of oneself, and unlimited indulgence in that pleasure is far
more weakening than any indulgence in drink or dissipation. But so
completely does it construct an unreal cosmos round the ego, that the
criticism of the world cannot be felt even for worldly purposes. I
could give many examples of this element in Belfast, as compared even
with Birmingham or Manchester. The Lord Mayor of Manchester may not
happen to know much about pictures, but he knows men who know about
them. But the Belfast authorities will exhibit a maniacally bad picture
as a masterpiece, merely because it glorifies Belfast. No man dare put
up such a picture in Manchester, within a stone’s-throw of Mr Charles
Rowley. I care comparatively little about the case of æsthetics;
but the case is even clearer in ethics. So wholly are these people
sundered from more Christian traditions that their very boasts lower
them; and they abase themselves when they mean to exalt themselves.
It never occurs to them that their strange inside standards do not
always impress outsiders. A great employer introduced me to several of
his very intelligent employees, and I can readily bear witness to the
sincerity of the great Belfast delusion even among many of the poorer
men of Belfast. But the sincere efforts of them and their master, to
convince me that a union with the Catholic majority under Home Rule was
intolerable to them, all went to one tune, which recurred with a kind
of chorus, ‘We won’t have the likes of them making laws for the likes
of us.’ It never seemed to cross their minds that this is not a high
example of any human morality; that judged by pagan _verecundia_ or
Christian humility or modern democratic brotherhood, it is simply the
remark of a snob. The man in question is quite innocent of all this;
he has no notion of modesty, or even of mock modesty. He is not only
superior, but he thinks it a superiority to claim superiority.

It is here that we cannot avoid theology, because we cannot avoid
theory. For the point is that even in theory the one religious
atmosphere now differs from the other. That the difference had
historically a religious root is really unquestionable; but anyhow it
is very deeply rooted. The essence of Calvinism was certainty about
salvation; the essence of Catholicism is uncertainty about salvation.
The modern and materialised form of that certainty is superiority;
the belief of a man in a fixed moral aristocracy of men like himself.
But the truth concerned here is that, by this time at any rate, the
superiority has become a doctrine as well as an indulgence. I doubt if
this extreme school of Protestants believe in Christian humility even
as an ideal. I doubt whether the more honest of them would even profess
to believe in it. This can be clearly seen by comparing it with other
Christian virtues, of which this decayed Calvinism offers at least
a version, even to those who think it a perversion. Puritanism is a
version of purity; if we think it a parody of purity. Philanthropy is a
version of charity; if we think it a parody of charity. But in all this
commercial Protestantism there is no version of humility; there is not
even a parody of humility. Humility is not an ideal. Humility is not
even a hypocrisy. There is no institution, no commandment, no common
form of words, no popular pattern or traditional tale, to tell anybody
in any fashion that there is any such thing as a peril of spiritual
pride. In short, there is here a school of thought and sentiment that
does definitely regard self-satisfaction as a strength, as against the
strong Christian tradition in the rest of the country that does as
definitely regard it as a weakness. That is the real moral issue in
the modern struggle in Ireland, nor is it confined to Ireland. England
has been deeply infected with this pharisaical weakness, but as I have
said, England takes things vaguely where Ireland takes them vividly.
The men of Belfast offer that city as something supreme, unique and
unrivalled; and they are very nearly right. There is nothing exactly
like it in the industrialism of this country; but for all that, the
fight against its religion of arrogance has been fought out elsewhere
and on a larger field. There is another centre and citadel from which
this theory, of strength in a self-hypnotised superiority, has
despised Christendom. There has been a rival city to Belfast; and its
name was Berlin.

Historians of all religions and no religion may yet come to regard
it as an historical fact, I fancy, that the Protestant Reformation
of the sixteenth century (at least in the form it actually took) was
a barbaric breakdown, like that Prussianism which was the ultimate
product of that Protestantism. But however this may be, historians
will always be interested to note that it produced certain curious and
characteristic things, which are worth studying whether we like or
dislike them. And one of its features, I fancy, has been this; that it
has had the power of producing certain institutions which progressed
very rapidly to great wealth and power; which the world regarded at a
certain moment as invincible; and which the world, at the next moment,
suddenly discovered to be intolerable. It was so with the whole of
that Calvinist theology, of which Belfast is now left as the lonely
missionary. It was so, even in our own time, with the whole of that
industrial capitalism of which Belfast is now the besieged and almost
deserted outpost. And it was so with Berlin as it was with Belfast;
and a subtle Prussian might almost complain of a kind of treachery, in
the abruptness with which the world woke up and found it wanting; in
the suddenness of the reaction that struck it impotent, so soon after
it had been counted on omnipotent. These things seem to hold all the
future, and in one flash they are things of the past.

Belfast is an antiquated novelty. Such a thing is still being excused
for seeming _parvenu_ when it is discovered to be _passé_. For
instance, it is only by coming in touch with some of the controversies
surrounding the Convention, that an Englishman could realise how much
the mentality of the Belfast leader is not so much that of a remote
seventeenth century Whig, as that of a recent nineteenth century
Radical. His conventionality seemed to be that of a Victorian rather
than a Williamite, and to be less limited by the Orange Brotherhood
than by the Cobden Club. This is a fact most successfully painted and
pasted over by the big brushes of our own Party System, which has the
art of hiding so many glaring facts. This Unionist Party in Ireland
is very largely concerned to resist the main reform advocated by
the Unionist Party in England. A political humorist, who understood
the Cobden tradition of Belfast and the Chamberlain tradition of
Birmingham, could have a huge amount of fun appealing from one to the
other; congratulating Belfast on the bold Protectionist doctrines
prevalent in Ireland; adjuring Mr Bonar Law and the Tariff Reformers
never to forget the fight made by Belfast for the sacred principles
of Free Trade. But the fact that the Belfast school is merely the
Manchester school is only one aspect of this general truth about the
abrupt collapse into antiquity: a sudden superannuation. The whole
march of that Manchester industrialism is not only halted but turned;
the whole position is outflanked by new forces coming from new
directions; the wealth of the peasantries blocks the road in front
of it; the general strike has risen menacing its rear. That strange
cloud of self-protecting vanity may still permit Belfast to believe in
Belfast, but Britain does not really believe in Belfast. Philosophical
forces far wider and deeper than politics have undermined the
conception of progressive Protestantism in Ireland. I should say myself
that mere English ascendancy in that island became intellectually
impossible on the day when Shaftesbury introduced the first Factory
Act, and on the day when Newman published the first pages of the
_Apologia_. Both men were certainly Tories and probably Unionists.
Neither were connected with the subject or with each other; the one
hated the Pope and the other the Liberator. But industrialism was never
again self-evidently superior after the first event, or Protestantism
self-evidently superior after the second. And it needed a towering and
self-evident superiority to excuse the English rule in Ireland. It is
only on the ground of unquestionably doing good that men can do so much
evil as that.

Some Orangemen before the war indulged in a fine rhetorical comparison
between William of Prussia and William of Orange, and openly suggested
that the new Protestant Deliverer from the north would come from
North Germany. I was assured by my more moderate hosts in Belfast
that such Orangemen could not be regarded as representative or even
responsible. On that I cannot pronounce. The Orangemen may not have
been representative; they may not have been responsible; but I am quite
sure they were right. I am quite sure those poor fanatics were far
nearer the nerve of historical truth than professional politicians like
Sir Edward Carson or industrial capitalists like Sir George Clark. If
ever there was a natural alliance in the world, it would have been the
alliance between Belfast and Berlin. The fanatics may be fools, but
they have here the light by which the foolish things can confound the
wise. It is the brightest spot in Belfast, bigotry, for if the light
in its body be darkness, it is still brighter than the darkness. By
the vision that goes everywhere with the virility and greatness of
religion, these men had indeed pierced to the Protestant secret and the
meaning of four hundred years. Their Protestantism is Prussianism, not
as a term of abuse, but as a term of abstract and impartial ethical
science. Belfast and Berlin are on the same side in the deepest of all
the spiritual issues involved in the war. And that is the simple issue
of whether pride is a sin, and therefore a weakness. Modern mentality,
or great masses of it, has seriously advanced the view that it is a
weakness to disarm criticism by self-criticism, and a strength to
disdain criticism through self-confidence. That is the thesis for which
Berlin gave battle to the older civilisation in Europe; and that for
which Belfast gave battle to the older civilisation in Ireland. It may
be, as I suggested that such Protestant pride is the old Calvinism,
with its fixed election of the few. It may be that the Protestantism
is merely Paganism, with its brutish gods and giants lingering in
corners of the more savage north. It may be that the Calvinism was
itself a recurrence of the Paganism. But in any case, I am sure that
this superiority, which can master men like a nightmare, can also
vanish like a nightmare. And I strongly suspect that in this matter
also, as in the matter of property as viewed by a peasantry, the
older civilisation will prove to be the real civilisation, and that
a healthier society will return to regarding pride as a pestilence,
as the Socialists have already returned to regarding avarice as a
pestilence. The old tradition of Christendom was that the highest
form of faith was a doubt. It was the doubt of a man about his soul.
It was admirably expressed to me by Mr Yeats, who is no champion of
Catholic orthodoxy, in stating his preference for mediæval Catholicism
as compared with modern humanitarianism: ‘Men were thinking then
about their own sins, and now they are always thinking about other
peoples.’ And even by the Protestant test of progress, pride is seen
to be arrested by a premature paralysis. Progress is superiority to
oneself, and it is stopped dead by superiority to others. The case
is even clearer by the test of poetry, which is much more solid and
permanent than progress. The Superman may have been a sort of poem, but
he could never be any sort of poet. The more we attempt to analyse that
strange element of wonder, which is the soul of all the arts, the more
we shall see that it must depend on some subordination of the self to
a glory existing beyond it, and even in spite of it. Man always feels
as a creature when he acts as a creator. When he carves a cathedral,
it is to make a monster that can swallow him. But the Nietzschean
nightmare of swallowing the world is only a sort of yawning. When the
evolutionary anarch has broken all links and laws and is at last free
to speak, he finds he has nothing to say. So German songs under the
imperial eagle fell silent like songbirds under a hawk; and it is
but rarely, and here and there, that a Belfast merchant liberates his
soul in a lyric. He has to get Mr Kipling to write a Belfast poem, in
a style technically attuned to the Belfast pictures. There is the true
Tara of the silent harp, and the throne and habitation of the dream;
and it is there that the Celtic pessimists should weep in silence
for the end of song. Blowing one’s own trumpet has not proved a good
musical education.

In logic a wise man will always put the cart before the horse. That
is to say, he will always put the end before the means; when he is
considering the question as a whole. He does not construct a cart in
order to exercise a horse. He employs a horse to draw a cart, and
whatever is in the cart. In all modern reasoning there is a tendency
to make the mere political beast of burden more important than the
chariot of man it is meant to draw. This has led to a dismissal of all
such spiritual questions in favour of what are called social questions;
and this to a too facile treatment of things like the religious
question in Belfast. There is a religious question; and it will not
have an irreligious answer. It will not be met by the limitation of
Christian faith, but rather by the extension of Christian charity. But
if a man says that there is no difference between a Protestant and a
Catholic, and that both can act in an identical fashion everywhere but
in a church or chapel, he is madly driving the cart-horse when he has
forgotten the cart. A religion is not the church a man goes to but the
cosmos he lives in; and if any sceptic forgets it, the maddest fanatic
beating an Orange drum about the Battle of the Boyne is a better
philosopher than he.

Many uneducated and some educated people in Belfast quite sincerely
believe that Roman priests are fiends, only waiting to rekindle the
fires of the Inquisition. For two simple reasons, however, I declined
to take this fact as evidence of anything except their sincerity.
First, because the stories, when reduced to their rudiment of truth,
generally resolved themselves into the riddle of poor Roman Catholics
giving money to their own religion, and seemed to deplore not so much
a dependence on priests as an independence of employers. And second,
for a reason drawn from my own experience, as well as common knowledge,
concerning the Protestant gentry in the south of Ireland. The southern
Unionists spoke quite without this special horror of Catholic priests
or peasants. They grumbled at them or laughed at them as a man grumbles
or laughs at his neighbours; but obviously they no more dreamed that
the priest would burn them than that he would eat them. If the priests
were as black as the black Protestants painted them, they would be at
their worst where they are with the majority, and would be known at
their worst by the minority. It was clear that Belfast held the more
bigoted tradition, not because it knew more of priests, but because
it knew less of them; not because it was on the spot, but because the
spot was barred. An even more general delusion was the idea that all
the southern Irish dreamed and did no work. I pointed out that this
also was inconsistent with concrete experience; since all over the
world a man who makes a small farm pay has to work very hard indeed.
In historic fact, the old notion that the Irish peasant did no work,
but only dreamed, had a simple explanation. It merely meant that he did
no work for a capitalist’s profit, but dreamed of some day doing work
for his own profit. But there may also have been this distorted truth
in the tradition; that a free peasant, while he extends his own work,
creates his own holidays. He is not idle all day, but he may be idle
at any time of the day; he does not dream whenever he feels inclined,
but he does dream whenever he chooses. A famous Belfast manufacturer,
a man of capacity, but one who shook his head over the unaccountable
prevalence of priests, assured me that he had seen peasants in the
south doing nothing, at all sorts of odd times; and this is doubtless
the difference between the farm and the factory. The same gentleman
showed me over the colossal shipping of the great harbour, with all
machinery and transport leading up to it. No man of any imagination
would be insensible to such titanic experiments of his race; or deny
the dark poetry of those furnaces fit for Vulcan or those hammers
worthy of Thor. But as I stood on the dock I said to my guide: ‘Have
you ever asked what all this is for?’ He was an intelligent man, an
exile from metaphysical Scotland, and he knew what I meant. ‘I don’t
know,’ he said, ‘perhaps we are only insects building a coral reef.
I don’t know what is the good of the coral reef.’ ‘Perhaps,’ I said,
‘that is what the peasant dreams about, and why he listens to the
priest.’

For there seems to be a fashionable fallacy, to the effect that
religious equality is something to be done and done with, that we may
go on to the real matter of political equality. In philosophy it is
the flat contrary that is true. Political equality is something to be
done and done with, that we may go on to the much more real matter
of religion. At the Abbey Theatre I saw a forcible play by Mr St John
Irvine, called _The Mixed Marriage_, which I should remember if it were
only for the beautiful acting of Miss Maire O’Neill. But the play moved
me very much as a play; yet I felt that the presence of this fallacy
falsified it in some measure. The dramatist seemed to resent a schism
merely because it interfered with a strike. But the only object of
striking is liberty; and the only object of liberty is life: a thing
wholly spiritual. It is economic liberty that should be dismissed as
these people dismiss theology. We only get it to forget it. It is right
that men should have houses, right that they should have land, right
that they should have laws to protect the land; but all these things
are only machinery to make leisure for the labouring soul. The house is
only a stage set up by stage carpenters for the acting of what Mr J. B.
Yeats has called ‘the drama of the home.’ All the most dramatic things
happen at home, from being born to being dead. What a man thinks
about these things is his life; and to substitute for them a bustle of
electioneering and legislation is to wander about among screens and
pulleys on the wrong side of pasteboard scenery, and never to act the
play. And that play is always a miracle play; and the name of its hero
is Everyman.

When I came back from the desolate splendour of the Donegal sea and
shore, and saw again the square garden and the statue outside the
Dublin hotel, I did not know I was returning to something that might
well be called more desolate. For it was when I entered the hotel that
I first found that it was full of the awful tragedy of the _Leinster_.
I had often seen death in a home, but never death decimating a vast
hostelry; and there was something strangely shocking about the empty
seats of men and women with whom I had talked so idly a few days
before. It was almost as if there was more tragedy in the cutting short
of such trivial talk than in the sundering of life-long ties. But there
was all the dignity as well as the tragedy of man; and I was glad,
before I left Ireland, to have seen the nobler side of the Anglo-Irish
garrison, and to have known men of my own blood, however mistaken, so
enduring the end of things. With the bad news from the sea came better
news from the war; the Teutonic hordes were yielding everywhere, at
the signal of the last advance; and with all the emotions of an exile,
however temporary, I knew that my own land was secure. Somehow, the bad
and good news together turned my mind more and more towards England;
and all the inner humour and insular geniality which even the Irish
may some day be allowed to understand. As I went homewards on the next
boat that started from the Irish port, and the Wicklow hills receded
in a rainy and broken sunlight, it was with all the simplest of those
ancient appetites with which a man should come back to his own country.
Only there clung to me, not to be denied, one sentiment about Ireland,
one sentiment that I could not transfer to England; which called me
like an elfland of so many happy figures, from Puck to Pickwick. As I
looked at those rainy hills I knew at least that I was looking, perhaps
for the last time, on something rooted in the Christian faith. There at
least the Christian ideal was something more than an ideal; it was in a
special sense real. It was so real that it appeared even in statistics.
It was so self-evident as to be seen even by sociologists. It was a
land where our religion had made even its vision visible. It had made
even its unpopular virtues popular. It must be, in the times to come,
a final testing-place, of whether a people that will take that name
seriously, and even solidly, is fated to suffer or to succeed.

As the long line of the mountain coast unfolded before me I had an
optical illusion; it may be that many have had it before. As new
lengths of coast and lines of heights were unfolded, I had the fancy
that the whole land was not receding but advancing, like something
spreading out its arms to the world. A chance shred of sunshine
rested, like a riven banner, on the hill which I believe is called in
Irish the Mountain of the Golden Spears; and I could have imagined
that the spears and the banner were coming on. And in that flash I
remembered that the men of this island had once gone forth, not with
the torches of conquerors or destroyers, but as missionaries in the
very midnight of the Dark Ages; like a multitude of moving candles,
that were the light of the world.


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RECENTLY PUBLISHED BY THE SAME AUTHOR

A WRITER’S RECOLLECTIONS

_Demy 8vo. 12s. 6d. net._

(_Third Impression_)


The Young Physician

FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG

Author of _Marching on Tanga_, etc.

_The Young Physician_ is the history of the formative years of a boy
who, after leaving one of our public schools, decides more from force
of circumstances than from inclination to enter the medical profession.
Side-light is thrown upon our educational system in the first part
of the book, which is devoted to home and school life; while in the
second, the impressions and experiences which went to the moulding of
his character are presented side by side with a picture of student life
at the Midland Hospital where he pursues his medical curriculum. The
success of such a book lies no less in its truth to life than in its
ability to entertain the reader, both of which conditions are fulfilled
in Major Brett Young’s new novel where, once again, the author breaks
entirely new ground.

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._

(_Second Impression_)


NEW WINE

By AGNES AND EGERTON CASTLE

‘Mr and Mrs Egerton Castle are old hands at the game, and can be relied
on to tell a good story and tell it well.’--_Daily Chronicle._

‘Not only very readable but worth pondering over.’--_British Weekly._

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._

(_Second Impression._)


THE PLAIN GIRL’S TALE

By H. H. BASHFORD

_The Plain Girl’s Tale_, by H. H. Bashford, is the longest novel
that the author of _The Corner of Harley Street_ has yet written,
and the first that he has produced since the publication of _Pity
the Poor Blind_, six years ago. Though dealing with the adventures
and development of a girl of the artisan class in various spheres of
contemporary life, it stands apart from the war and is in no sense
merely topical. In the delineation of the central character, through
whose eyes most of the action of the novel is seen, the author has
endeavoured to expand the ethical theme that was the basis of his
previous novel.

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._


MADELEINE

By HOPE MIRRLEES      (_Second Impression._)

‘Marked by very considerable distinction.’--_Westminster Gazette._

‘A first novel that deserves the warmest applause.’--_Morning Post._

‘It is well worth while to read this difficult and interesting
novel.’--_Times Literary Supplement._

‘It will be interesting to see if, with a supposed intellectual revival
going on, _Madeleine_ becomes “a good seller.”’--_Evening Standard._

‘A remarkable piece of erudition.’--_Truth._

‘A remarkable first novel.’--_Manchester Guardian._

‘Really promising.’--_Outlook._

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._


TRUE LOVE

By ALLAN MONKHOUSE

Author of _Men and Ghosts_, etc.

‘A thoughtful and provocative work, full of energy.’--_Daily Chronicle._

‘The observation is notably close and vivid, the character drawing
subtle and true. Mr Monkhouse has put enough sheer cleverness into this
book to vivify half a dozen novels.’--_Sunday Times._

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._


FULL CIRCLE

By MARY AGNES HAMILTON

Author of ‘_Dead Yesterday_,’ etc.

Placed first in Scotland and later in London, and timed more than
a dozen years before the war, this story follows the intertwined
fortunes of a brother and sister, members of a singularly happy,
artistically-sensitive, and romantically-minded family, into whose
tranquillity there crashes a queer, brilliantly gifted realist. Contact
with him indeed colours, whether they will or no, the lives of all
the people who meet him, even after his mysterious disappearance; and
especially that of the girl whom, judged by ordinary standards, he
treats so ill. Happiness has a hundred faces, and that which she learns
to see will set readers questioning.

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._


THE HUMAN CIRCUS

By J. MILLS WHITHAM

Author of ‘_Fruit of Earth_.’

In his new novel, Mr Mills Whitham, while developing his realistic
art, leaves sombre tragedy for picaresque comedy. The tale carries the
girl Zillah through early years in a North Devon hamlet, adventures
on Exmoor, the roads, and at the West Country Fairs, excitements in
London, and leaves her back again at the hamlet, ripe in her own
wisdom. Peasants, show-folk, gipsies, nimble vagabonds, philosophers
and fools, make their bow and enliven the Circus.

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._


SIR LIMPIDUS

By MARMADUKE PICKTHALL

Author of ‘_Oriental Encounters_,’ etc.

A Novel of the plenteous days before the war. The author has essayed
the high imaginative task of investing the established order with the
mantle of romance. It is not the mantle of Don Quixote nor of Tartarin
de Tarascon: but it is the best and gayest cloak of humour which
the author could devise consistently with the sentiments of awe and
reverence with which he naturally approached the subject.

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._


THE QUIETNESS OF DICK

By R. E. VERNÈDE

Author of ‘_Letters to His Wife_.’

‘Has all the high spirits and gaiety which characterised his
writings.’--_Times._

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._


THE CARAVAN-MAN

By ERNEST GOODWIN

‘A happy, charming story, introducing us to a lot of happy
people.’--_Sheffield Daily Telegraph._

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._


THE SHINING ROAD

By GEO. AGNEW CHAMBERLAIN

‘A first-rate adventure tale.’--_Westminster Gazette._

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._


OVER AND ABOVE

By J. E. GURDON

‘The goodness of the book is based on certain rare and attractive
features. Not only by airmen, but also by the laity, _Over and Above_
will be read with more than ordinary interest.’--_Times._

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._


COCKTAILS

By LIEUT. C. PATRICK THOMPSON

‘This is a collection of very fine stories. No other book has given us
the atmosphere of adventure and, what is more, of mystery peculiar to
air-fighting.’--_New Witness._

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._


UNDER THE PERISCOPE

By LIEUT. MARK BENNETT, R.N.R.

‘Bright with entertaining touches and humour.’--_Scotsman._

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._


THE PROBLEM CLUB

By BARRY PAIN

‘Excellent fooling.’--_The Times._

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._

(_Second Impression._)


LOVE LANE

By J. C. SNAITH

Author of _Mary Plantagenet_, etc.

‘It is a splendid, manly, simple story.’--_New Witness._

_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._

(_Third Impression._)




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.





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