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Page 4
"The chief of his services may perhaps be stated thus, that he
discovered (for the modern English) the purely intellectual
importance of humility. He had none of that hot humility which is
the fascination of saints and good men. But he had a cold humility
which he had discovered to be a mere essential of the
intelligence."
Such a humility, purely hygienic in character, is for Englishmen the
beginning of wisdom on the Irish Question. It is the needle's eye by
which alone they can enter a city otherwise forbidden to them. Let there
be no misunderstanding. The attitude of mind commended to them is not
without its agreeable features. Closely scrutinised, it is seen to be a
sort of inverted vanity. The student begins by studying himself, an
exercise in self-appraisal which need not by any means involve
self-depreciation. What sort of a mind, then, is the English mind?
If there is anything in regard to which the love of friends corroborates
the malice of enemies it is in ascribing to the English an
individualism, hard-shelled beyond all human parallel. The Englishman's
country is an impregnable island, his house is a castle, his temperament
is a suit of armour. The function common to all three is to keep things
out, and most admirably has he used them to that end. At first, indeed,
he let everybody in; he had a perfect passion for being conquered, and
Romans, Teutons, Danes, and Normans in succession plucked and ate the
apple of England. But with the coming of age of that national
consciousness, the bonds of which have never been snapped, the English
entered on their lucky and courageous career of keeping things out. They
possess in London the only European capital that has never in the modern
period been captured by an invader. They withstood the intellectual
grandeur of Roman Law, and developed their own medley of customs into
the most eccentric and most equitable system in the world. They kept out
the Council of Trent, and the Spanish Armada. They kept out the French
Revolution, and Napoleon. They kept out for a long time the Kantian
philosophy, Romanticism, Pessimism, Higher Criticism, German music,
French painting, and one knows not how many other of the intellectual
experiments that made life worth living, or not worth living, to
nineteenth-century Europe. Their insularity, spiritual as well as
geographical, has whetted the edge of a thousand flouts and gibes.
"Those stupid French!" exclaims the sailor, as reported by De Morgan:
"Why do they go on calling a cabbage a _shoe_ when they must know that
it is a _cabbage?_" This was in general the attitude of what Mr Newbolt
has styled the "Island Race" when on its travels. Everybody has laughed
at the comedy of it, but no one has sufficiently applauded its success.
The English tourist declined to be at the trouble of speaking any
foreign tongue whatsoever; instantly every hotel and restaurant on the
Continent was forced to learn English. He refused to read their books; a
Leipsic firm at once started to publish his own, and sold him his
six-shilling Clapham novels in Lucerne for two francs. He dismissed
with indignation the idea of breakfasting on a roll, and bacon and eggs
were added unto him. In short, by a straightforward policy of studying
nobody else, he compelled everybody else to study him.
Now it is idle to deny this performance the applause which it plainly
deserves. The self-evolution of England, as it may perhaps be called, in
its economic, political, and literary life, offers an admirable model of
concentration and energy. Even where it is a case of obtuseness to other
civilisations, at least as high but of a different type, the verdict
cannot be wholly unfavourable. The Kingdom of Earth is to the
thick-skinned, and bad manners have a distinct vital value. A man, too
sensitive to the rights and the charms of others, is in grave danger of
futility. Either he will become a dilettante, which is the French way,
or he will take to drink and mystical nihilism, a career very popular in
Russian fiction. Bad manners have indeed a distinct ethical value. We
all experience moods in which we politely assent to the thing that is
not, because of the fatigue of fighting for the thing that is. A
temperament such as has been delineated is therefore, as human types go,
an excellent type. But it has its peculiar perils. To ignore the point
of view of those in whose country you eat, drink, sleep, and sight-see
may breed only minor discords, and after all you will pay for your
manners in your bill. But to ignore the point of view of those whose
country you govern may let loose a red torrent of tragedy. Such a temper
of mind may, at the first touch of resistance, transform your stolid,
laudable, laughable Englishman into the beastliest of tyrants. It may
drive him into a delirium of cruelty and injustice. It may sweep away,
in one ruin of war, wealth, culture, and the whole fabric of
civilisation. It may darken counsel, and corrupt thought. In fact, it
may give you something very like the history of the English in Ireland.
Now it is not denied that most Englishmen believe the English mind to be
incapable of such excesses. This, they say, is the Russian in Warsaw,
the Austrian in Budapest, the Belgian in the Congo, the blind fool-fury
of the Seine. But it is not the English way. Nor is it suggested that
this illusion is sheer and mere hypocrisy. It is simply an hallucination
of jingoism. Take a trivial instance in point. We have all read in the
newspapers derisive accounts of disorderly scenes in the French Chamber
or the Austrian Reichstag; we all know the complacent sigh with which
England is wont on such occasions to thank God that she is not as one
of those. Does anybody think that this attitude will be at all modified
by recent occurrences at Westminster? By no means. Lord Hugh Cecil, his
gibbering and gesticulating quite forgotten, will be assuring the House
next year that the Irish are so deficient in self-restraint as to be
unfit for Home Rule. Mr Smith will be deploring that intolerant temper
which always impels a Nationalist to shout down, and not to argue down
an opponent. Mr Walter Long will be vindicating the cause of law and
order in one sentence, and inciting "Ulster" to bloodshed in the next.
This is not hypocrisy, it is genius. It is also, by the way, the genesis
of the Irish Question. If anyone is disposed to underrate the mad
passions of which race hatred can slip the leash, let him recall the
crucial examples which we have had in our own time. We have in our own
time seen Great Britain inflamed by two frenzies--against France, and
against the Boer Republics. In the history of public opinion there are
no two chapters more discreditable. In the days of Fashoda the Frenchman
was a degenerate _tigre-singe,_ the sworn enemy of religion and soap. He
had contributed nothing to civilisation except a loathsome science of
sensuality, and the taint of decay was in his bones. In the days of
Spion Kop the Boer was an unlaundered savage, fit only to be a target
for pig-stickers. His ignorance seemed the most appalling thing in the
world until one remembered his hypocrisy and his cowardice. The
newspaper which led the campaign of denigration against France has come
to another view. Its proprietor now divides his time between signing
�10,000 cheques for triumphant French aviators, and delivering speeches
in which their nation is hailed as the pioneer of all great ideas. As
regards the Boers, the same reversal of the verdict of ten years ago has
taken place. The crowd which in 1900 asked only for a sour appletree on
which to hang General Botha, adopts him in 1911 as the idol of the
Coronation. At this progress towards sanity we must all rejoice. But
most of all we have to ask that these two sinister pageants of race
hatred shall not be suffered to dissolve without leaving some wrack of
wisdom behind. Writers on psychology have made many studies of what they
call the collective illusion. This strange malady, which consists in all
the world seeing something which in fact does not exist, wrought more
potently on the mind of England than did reason and justice in the Home
Rule controversies of 1886 and 1893. What has occurred may recur. And
since we are to speak here with all the candour of private conversation
I confess that I cannot devise or imagine any specific against such a
recurrence except an exercise in humility of the kind suggested by Mr
Chesterton. My own argument in that direction is perhaps compromised by
the fact that I am an Irishman. Let us therefore fall back on other
testimony. Out of the cloud of witnesses let us choose two or three, and
in the first place M. Alfred Fouill�e. M. Fouill�e is a Platonist--the
last Platonist in Europe--and consequently an amiable man. He is
universally regarded as the leader of philosophy in France, a position
not in the least shaken by Bergson's brief authority. In a charming and
lucid study of the "Psychology of the Peoples of Europe" Fouill�e has
many pages that might serve for an introduction to the Irish Question.
The point of interest in his analysis is this: he exhibits Irish history
as a tragedy of character, a tragedy which flows with sad, inevitable
logic from a certain weakness which he notes, not in the Irish, but in
the English character.
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