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Page 7
All this will seem obvious even to the point of weariness. But it is of
interest as furnishing a clue to the English attitude towards Irish
history; I should rather say attitudes, for there are two. The first is
that of the Man of Feeling. His mode of procedure recalls inevitably an
exquisite story which is to be found somewhere in Rousseau. During
country walks, Jean Jacques tells us, his father would suddenly say: "My
son, we will speak of your dear, dead mother." And Jean Jacques was
expected to reply: "Wait, then, a moment, my dear father. I will first
search for my handkerchief, for I perceive that we are going to weep."
In precisely such a mood of deliberate melancholy does the
sentimentalist address himself to the Confiscations and the Penal Laws.
He is ready to praise without stint any Irish leader who happens to be
sufficiently dead. He is ready to confess that all his own British
forerunners were abominable blackguards. He admits, not only with
candour but even with a certain enthusiastic remorse, that England
oppressed Ireland in every phase of their relations. Then comes the
conclusion. So terrible have been the sins of his fathers that he feels
bound to make restitution. And in order to make restitution, to be kind
and helpful and remedial, he must retain the management of Irish affairs
in his benevolent hands. In order to expiate the crimes of the past he
must repeat the basal blunder that was the cause and source of them. For
this kind of sympathy we have only to say, in a somewhat vulgar phrase,
that we have no use whatever. The Englishman who "sympathises" with
Ireland is lost.
But the more general attitude differs widely from this. Confronting us
with a bluff and not unkindly demeanour, worthy of the nation that
invented cold baths as a tonic against all spiritual anguish, the
practical, modern Englishman speaks out his mind in straight-flung words
and few. "You fellows," he says, "brood too much over the past. After
all, this is the twentieth century, not the twelfth. What does it matter
whether my ancestors murdered yours or not? Both would be dead now in
any event. What does it matter whether yours were the saints and men of
letters and mine the savages, or whether the boot was on the other leg?
That's all over and done with. Imitate me. Let bygones be bygones."
Now this is, in some respects, the authentic voice of health.
Undoubtedly the most characteristic thing about the past is that it is
not present, and to lavish on it too tragic and intense a devotion is to
love death more than life. And yet our bluff Englishman can learn in two
words how it comes about that his invitation represents a demand for the
impossible. In the first place, the bygones have not gone by. Our
complaint is made not against the crimes of his fathers, who are dead,
but against the crimes of himself and his fellows, who are alive. We
denounce not the repealed Penal Laws but the unrepealed Act of Union. If
we recall to the memory of England the systematic baseness of the
former, it is in order to remind her that she once thought them right,
and now confesses that they were cruelly wrong. We Irish are realists,
and we hold the problems of the present as of more account than any
agonies or tyrannies of the past. But our realism has the human touch in
it, and that constitutes the second impossibility in the invitation
tendered us. _Que messieurs les assassins commencent!_ The anti-Irish
legend is not dead nor even sleeping, nor are the resources of calumny
yet exhausted. An instance is immediately at hand. I have, at this
moment, on my desk a volume lately issued--"The School History of
England." It is published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford; Mr Rudyard
Kipling contributes twenty-three pieces of verse, and a Mr C. R. L.
Fletcher, whose qualifications are not stated, appears to be responsible
for the prose. The book has been praised in most of the papers, and it
will no doubt go far. This is the picture of the coming to Ireland of
the Cymro-Frankish adventurers which its pages will imprint on the minds
of the youth of England:
"One event of his reign (Henry II.'s) must not be forgotten, his
visit to Ireland in 1171-2. St Patrick, you may have heard, had
banished the snakes from that island, but he had not succeeded in
banishing the murderers and thieves who were worse than many
snakes. In spite of some few settlements of Danish pirates and
traders on the eastern coast, Ireland had remained purely Celtic
and purely a pasture country. All wealth was reckoned in cows; Rome
had never set foot there, so there was a king for every day in the
week, and the sole amusement of such persons was to drive off each
other's cows and to kill all who resisted. In Henry II.'s time this
had been going on for at least seven hundred years, and during the
seven hundred that have followed much the same thing would have
been going on, if the English Government had not occasionally
interfered."
The English whom Henry II. left behind him soon became "as wild and
barbarous as the Irishmen themselves."
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