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 WestminsterGazette 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.
GLASGOW: WM. COLLINS SONS AND CO. LTD.
‘Books published by the firm of Collins are
invariably good to look at and good to read.’
Man of Kent in the British Weekly
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