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Page 8
Oxford, the home of so many other lost causes, apparently aspires to be
also the home of the lost cause of mendacity. The forcible-feeble malice
of Mr Fletcher calls for no serious discussion; submit it to any
continental scholar, to any honest British scholar, and he will ask
contemptuously, though perhaps with a little stab of pain, how the name
of Oxford comes to be associated with such wicked absurdities. Every
other reference to Ireland is marked by the same scientific composure
and balanced judgment. And this document, inspired by race hatred, and
apparently designed to propagate race hatred, is offered to the youth of
these countries as an aid towards the consolidation of the Empire. It is
a case not merely of the poisoning of a well, but of the poisoning of a
great river at its source. The force of cowardice can no farther go. So
long as it goes thus far, so long as the Froudes find Fletchers to echo
them, Irishmen will inevitably "brood over the past." We do not share
the cult of ancestor-worship, but we hold the belief that the Irish
nation, like any other, is an organism endowed with a life in some sort
continuous and repetitive of its origins. To us it does matter something
whether our forerunners were turbulent savages, destitute of all
culture, or whether they were valiant, immature men labouring through
the twilight of their age towards that dawn which does not yet flush our
own horizon. But we are far from wishing that dead centuries should be
summoned back to wake old bitterness that ought also to be dead. Hand
history over to the scholars, if you will; let it be marshalled as a
multitudinous and coloured pageant, to incite imaginations and inspire
literature. Such is our desire, but when we read the clotted nonsense of
persons like Mr Fletcher we can only repeat: _Que messieurs les
assassins commencent_!
For the purpose of this inquiry it is inevitable that some brief account
should be rendered of the past relations between England and Ireland.
The reader need not shrink back in alarm; it is not proposed to lead him
by the reluctant nose through the whole maze and morass of Irish
history. The past is of value to political realists only in that residue
of it which survives, namely, the wisdom which it ought to have taught
us. Englishmen are invited to consider the history of Ireland solely
from that point of view. They are prayed to purge themselves altogether
of pity, indignation, and remorse; these are emotions far too beneficent
to waste on things outside the ambit of our own immediate life. If they
are wise they will come to Irish history as to a school, and they will
learn one lesson that runs through it like the refrain of a ballad. A
very simple lesson it is, just this: Ireland cannot be put down. Ireland
always has her way in the end. If the opposite view is widely held the
explanation lies on the surface. Two causes have co-operated to produce
the illusion. Everybody agrees that Great Britain has acted in a most
blackguardly fashion towards Ireland; everybody assumes that
blackguardism always succeeds in this world, therefore Ireland is a
failure. The only flaw in this syllogism is that it is in direct
conflict with every known fact. For the rest we have to thank or blame
the sentimentalism of Mr Matthew Arnold. His proud but futile Celts who
"went down to battle but always fell" have been mistaken for the Irish
of actual history. The truth is, of course, that the phrase is in the
grand manner of symbolism. When Ecclesiastes laments that the eye is not
filled with seeing nor the ear with hearing we do not argue him deaf
and blind; we take his words as a proclamation of that famine and fierce
appetite of the spirit which has created all the higher religions.
Ireland agrees with Ecclesiastes. Perceiving that there is in matter no
integral and permanent reality she cannot be content with material
victories; her poets are subtle in what a French writer styles the
innuendoes by which the soul makes its enormous claims. The formula of
her aspiration has been admirably rendered by the late Mrs Nora Chesson:
"He follows after shadows when all your chase is done;
He follows after shadows, the King of Ireland's son."
Were I to read the poem, of which these lines are the motif, to certain
genial Englishmen of my acquaintance they would observe that the
gentleman in question was a "queer cove, staying up late at night and
catching cold, and that no doubt there was a woman in the case." But
these are considerations a little remote from the daily dust of
politics. In the sense in which every life is a failure, and the best
life the worst failure, Ireland is a failure. But in every other sense,
in all that touches the fathomable business of daylight, she has been a
conspicuous success.
A certain type of fanaticism is naive enough to regard the intercourse
of England with Ireland as that of a superior with an inferior race.
This is the sanction invoked to legitimise every adventure in invasion
and colonisation. M. Jules Hormand, who has attempted, in his recent
book, "Domination et Colonisation," to formulate a theory of the whole
subject, touches bed-rock when he writes:
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