Irish essys, and others

Preface

The Essays which malce the chief part of this volume have all appeared during the last year or two in well-known periodicals. The Prefaces which follow at the end were published in 1853 and 1854 as prefaces to my Poems, and have not been reprinted since. Some of the readers of my poetry have expressed a wish for their reappearance, and with that^sh I here comply. Exactly as they stand, I should, not have written them now ; but perhaps they are none the worse on that account.

The three essays regarding Ireland which commence the present volume, and which give it its title, were received with no great favour when they appeared, and will probably be received with no great favour now. Practice politicians and men of the world are apt rather to resent the incursion of a man of letters into the field of politics ; he is, in truth, not on his own ground there,

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and is in peculiar danger of talking at random. No one feels this more than I do. Nevertheless I have set in the front of this volume the essays on Irish affairs. If I am asked why, I should be disposed to answer that I am curious to know -how they will look ten years hence, if anyone happens then to turn to them.

English people keep asking themselves what we ought to do about Ireland. The great contention of these essays is, that in order to attach Ireland to us solidly, English people have not only to do something different rom what they have done hitherto, they have also to be something different from what they have been hitherto. As a whole, as a community, they have to acquire a larger and sweeter temper, a larger and more lucid mind. And this is indeed no light task, yet it is the capital task now appointed to us, and our safety depends on our accomplishing it : to be something different, much more, even, than to do somethmg different.

I have enquired how far the Irish Land Act seemed likely, to a fair and dispassionate observer, to attach Ireland to us, to prove healing. It was easy to see reasons for thinking beforehand that it would not prove healing.

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Now that it is in operation, it is easy to see reasons for thinking so still. At the present moment one especial aspect of the matter can hardly fail to catch any clearsighted man's attention. No one can deny that the Act seems likely to have a very large and far-reaching effect. But neither can it be denied, on the other hand, that leading Ministers declared their belief, which of course was entirely sincere, that the number of extortionate landlords in Ireland was inconsiderable, and that the general reduction of rents in Ireland would be inconsiderable. But it turns out that probably the general reduction of rents in Ireland, through the operation of the Land Courts fixing a judicial rent, will, on the contrary, be very considerable. Most certainly the inference of the people of Ireland will be that the number of extortionate landlords, also, was in fact very considerable. But this was just the contention of the people of Ireland. The Government, however, did not admit its truth, and instituted the Land Courts without expecting that they would bring about any radical and universal change. If, therefore, they do bring about such a'change, what, even though the Irish tenants profit by it, will be their gratitude to the Government ? They

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will say that the English Government has done them a service without intending it, and without understanding and acknowledging the justice of their case. But so strong was the justice of their case, they will say, that it victoriously established itself as soon as the English Government, not dreaming of any such result, gave them a tribunal for determining a fair rent.

It seems to me impossible not to see this, if one does not either shut one's eyes or turn them another way. We shall have brought about a radical change, we shall have established by law a divided ownership full of critical consequences, we shall have disturbed the ac cepted and ordinary constitutive characters of property, — ^nd we shall get little or no gratitude for it ; we shall be said to have done it without intending it. Our measure is not likely, therefore, of itself to avail to win the affections of the Irish people to us and to heal their estrangement. Yet to make a radical change, without doing this, opens no good prospect for the future. To break down the landlords in Ireland, as we have already broken down the Protestant Church there, is merely to complete the destruction of the modus vivendi hitherto

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existing for society in that country j a most imperfect modus Vivendi indeed, but the only one practically attained there up to this time as a substitute for anarchy. Simply to leave to the Irish people the free and entire disposal of their own affairs is recommended by some counsellors as the one safe solution of the Irish difficulty. But the safety of this solution depends upon the state and dispositions of the people to whom we apply it. May not a people be in such a state that Shakespeare's words hold true of it —

. . . Your affections are A sick man's appetite, who desires most that Which would increase his evil ?

And may it not be affirmed, that if ever those words seemed true of any people, they seem true of the Irish at this hour?

To heal the estrangement between Ireland and England is what is needed above all things, and I cannot say that the Land Act appears to me to have in itself the elements for healing it. Nor can I see the use of pretending to find them in it if they are not really there.

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Nothing, indeed, could be more absurd than for irre^ sponsible people to press seriously their fancy solutions, though they may properly enough throw them out, on a suitable occasion, for purposes of discussion and illustration. Nothing, moreover, is further from my thoughts, in what is here said, than to find fault with the responsible Government, which has to provide not a fancy solution for difficulties, but a solution which may be put in practice. I know that it was as impossible to go on governing Ireland by means of the landlords as by means of the Protestant Church. I am ready to admit that the Government, the power and purchase at their disposal being what it is, could not well but have had recourse to some such measure as the Land Act. I think, even, as I have said in the following pages, that the Land Act of the Government, with what it does and what it gives the power of doing, is probably quite capable of satisfpng the Irish people as a Land Act, if a certain other indispensable condition is complied with. But this condition the Land Act will not of itself realise. The indispensable condition is, that England and English civilisation shall become more attractive ; or, as I began by saying, that we should not only do to Ireland something different

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from what we have done hitherto, but should also be something different. On this need of a changed and more attractive power in English civilisation almost all the essays in the present volume, and not alone those dealing directly with Ireland, will be found to insist. '

The barren logomachies of Plato's Thetstetus are relieved by half a dozen immortal pag^s, and among them are those in which is described the helplessness of the philosopher in the ways of the world, the helplessness of the man of the world in a spiritual crisis. The philosopher Thales in the ditch had been an easy and a frequent subject for merriment ; it was reserved for Plato to amuse himselt with the practical politician and man of the world in a spiritual crisis. Mr. Jowett is uncommonly happy in his translation of Plato's account of the man of the world, at such a crisis, ' drawn into the upper air,' having to ' get himself out of his commonplaces to the consideration of government and of human happiness and misery in general, — what they are, and how a man is to attain the one and avoid the other.' ' Then, indeed,' says Plato, 'when that narrow, vain, little practical mind is called to account about all this, he gives the philosopher his revenge. For dizzied by the height at which he is

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hanging, whence he looks into space which is a strange experience to him, he being dismayed and lost and stammering out broken words is laughed at, not by Thracian handmaidens such as laughed at Thales, or by any other uneducated persons, for they have no eye for the situation, but by every man who has been brought up as a true freeman.'

Our practical politicians and men of the world, carried up by the course of time and change into a new air, and still ruefully trying there to gasp out their formulas, such as 'Freedom of contract/ or 'The Liberal party has emphatically condemned religious endowment,' or ' Our traditional, existing, social arrangements,' could not be better hit off. The man of the world, with his utter astonishment that the Irish tenants should stop the hunting, when the hunting ' caused the noble master of the hounds to spend among them ten thousand a year ! ' the man of the world, with his mournful and incessant cries of ' Revolution ! ' Yes, we are in a revolution ; ' a revolution,' as the late Duke of Wellington said, ' by due course of law.' And one of the features of it is, that the Irish tenants prefer to stop the hunting of those whom they regard as a set of aliens encamped amongst

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them for sporting purposes, who ha-ve in the past treated them and spoken to them as if they were slaves, and who are disposed, many of them, to treat them and speak to them as if they were slaves still, — the , Irish people had rather stop this hunting, than profit by an expenditure upon it to the tune of ten thousand a year. The man of the world has had and has one formula for attaching neighbours and tenants to us, and one only, — expenditure. And now he is 'drawn into upper air,' and has to hear such new and strange formulas as this, for example, of the most charming of French moralists : — Four gagner rhumaniti, il faut lid plaire ; pour lui plaire, il faut Hre aimable. Or, if the man of the world can stand Holy Writ, let him hear the Psalmist : — ' Mansueti possidebunt tertam, the gentle shall possess the earth.'

Indeed we are at the end of a period, and always at the end of a period the word goes forth : ' Now is the judgment of this world.' The ' traditional, existing, social arrangements,' which satisfied before, satisfy no longer ; the conventions and phrases, which onc^ passed without question, are challenged. That saying of the saints comes to be fulfilled : Peribit Mum quod non est ex Deo ortum.

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Each people has its own periods of national life, with their own characters. The period which is now ending for England is that which began, when, after the sensuous tumult of the Renascence, Catholicism being discredited and gone, our serious nation desired, as had been foretold, 'to see one of the days of the Son of Man and did not see it' ; but men said to them, See Jure, or See there, and they went after the blind guides and followed the false direction ; and the actual civilisation of England and of America is the result. A civilisation with many virtues ! but without lucidity of mind, and without largeness of temper. And now we English, at any rate, have to acquire them, and to learn the necessity for us 'to live,' as Emerson says, 'from a greater depth of being.' The sages and the saints alike have always preached this necessity; the so-called practical people and men of the world have always derided it. In the present collapse of their wisdom, we ought to find it less hard to rate their stock ideas and stock phrases, their claptrap and their catchwords, at their proper value, and , to cast in our lot boldly with the sages and with die saints. Sine ut mortui sepeliant moriuos suos, sed tu vade adnuntia tegiium Dei.

Contents

PAGl''

The Incompatibles . . . . • . . . . i An Unregarded Irish Grievance 82

JSCCE, CONVERTIMVR AD GeNTES .... IO9

I

The Irish Land Bill has not yet, at the moment when I write this, made its appearance. No one is very eager, I suppose, to read more about the Irish Land Bill while we do not yet know what the Bill will be. Besides, and above all, no one under any circumstances, perhaps, can much care to read what an insignificant person, and one who has no special connexion with Ireland, may have to say about the grave and sad affairs of that country.

But even the most insignificant Englishman, and the least connected with Ireland and things Irish, has a deep concern, surely, in. the present temper and action of the Irish people towards England, and must be impelled to seek for the real explanation of them. We find ourselves, — though conscious, as we assure one another, of nothing but goodwill to all the world, — we find ourselves the object of a glowing, fierce, unexplained hatred on the part of the Irish people. ' The Liberal Ministry resolved,'

B

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said pne of our leading Liberal statesmen a few years ago, when the Irish Church Establishment was abolished, ' the Liberal Ministry resolved to knit the hearts of the empire into one harmonious concord, and knitted they were accordingly.' Knitted indeed ! The Irish people send members to our Parliament, whose great, recommendation with their constituencies is, says Miss Charlotte O'Brien, that they are wolves ready to fly at the throat of England ; and more and more of these wolves, we are told, are likely to be sent over to, us. These wolves ravin and destroy in the most savage and mortifying way ; they obstruct our business, lacerate our good name, deface our dignity, make our cherished fashions of government impossible and ridiculous. And then come eloquent rhetoricians, startling us with the prediction that Ireland will have either to be governed in future despotically, or to be given up. Even more alarming are certain grave and serious observers, who will not leave us even the cold comfort of the rhetorician's alternative, but declare that Ireland is irresistibly drifting to a separation from us, and to an unhappy separation ; — a separation which will bring confusion and misery to Ireland, danger to us.

For my part, I am entirely indisposed to believe the eloquent rhetoricians who tell us that Ireland must either

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be governed for the future as a Crown colony or must be given up. I am also entirely indisposed to believe the despondent observers who tell us that Ireland is fatally and irresistibly drifting to a separation, and a miserable separation, from England. I no more believe the eloquent rhetoricians than I should believe them if they prophesied to me that Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall would have either to be governed as Crown colonies for the future, or to be given up. I no more believe the despondent observers than I should believe them if they assured me that Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall were fatally and irresistibly drifting to a miserable separation from England. No doubt Ireland presents many and great difficulties, and England has many and great faults and shortcomings. But after all the English people, with ' its ancient and inbred piety, integrity, good nature, and good humour,' has considerable merits, and has done considerable things in the world. In presence of such terrifying predictions and assurances as those which I have been just quoting, it becomes right and necessary to say so. I refuse to believe that such a people is unequal to the task of blending Ireland with itself in the same way that Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall are blended with us, if it sets about the task seriously.

True, there are difficulties. One of the greatest is to

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be found in our English habit of adopting a conventional account of things, satisfying our own minds with it, and then imagining that it will satisfy other people's minds also, and may really be relied on. Goethe, that sagest of critics, and moreover a great lover and admirer of England, noted this fault in us. 'It is good in the English,' says he, 'that they are always for being practical in their dealings with things ; aber sie sind Pedanien, — but they are pedants.' The pedant is he who is governed by phrases and does not get to the reality of things. Elsewhere Goethe attributes this want of insight in the English, their acceptante of phrase and convention, and their trust in these, — their pedantry in short, — to the habits of our public life, and to the reign amongst us of party spirit and party formulas. Burke supplies a remarkable confirmation'of this account of the matter, when he complains of Parliament as being a place where it is 'the business of a Minister still further to contract the narrowness of men's ideas, to confirm inveterate prejudices, to inflame vulgar passions, and to abet all sorts of popular absurdities.' The true explanation of any matter is therefore seldom come at by us, but we rest in that account of things which it suits our class, our party, our leaders, to adopt and to render current. We adopt a version of things because we choose, not because it really represents them ; and we expect it to hold good because we wish that it may.

But, 'it is not your fond desire or mine,' says Burke again, ' that can alter the nature of things ; by contending against whi6h, what have we got, or shall ever get, but defeat and shame ? ' These words of Burke should be laid to heart by us. We shall solve at last, I hope and beUe ve, the difficulty which the state of Ireland presents to us. But we shall never solve it without first understanding it ; and we shall never understand it while we pedantically accept whatever accounts of it happen to pass current with our class, or party, or leaders, and to be recommended by our fond desire and theirs. We must see the matter as it really stands; we must cease to ignore, and to try to set aside, the nature of things ; ' by contending against which, what have we got, or shall ever get^but defeat and shame ? '

Pedantry and conventionality, therefore, are dangerous when we are in difficulties ; and our habits of class and party action, and our ways of public discussion, tend to encourage pedantry and conventionality in us. Now there are insignificant people, detached from classes and parties and their great movements, people unclassed and unconsidered, but who yet are lovers of their country, and lovers of the humane life and of civilisation, and

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therefore grievously distressed at the condition in which they see Ireland and Irish sentiment at the present time, and appalled at the prophecies they hear of the turn which things in Ireland must certainly take. Such persons, — ^who after all, perhaps, are not so very few in number,— may well desire to talk the case over one to another in their own quiet and simple way, without pedantry and conventionality, admitting unchallenged none of the phrases with which classes and parties are apt to settle matters, resolving to look things full in the face and let them, stand for what they really are ; in order that they may ascertain whether there is any chance of comfort in store, or whether things are really as black and hopeless as we are told. Let us perish in the light, at any rate (if perish we must), and not in a cloud of pedantry ; let us look fairly into that incompatibility, alleged to be incurable, between us and the Irish nation.

Even to talk of the people inhabiting an island quite near to us, and which we have governed ever since the twelfth century, as a distinct nation from ourselves, ought to seem strange and absurd to us ; — as strange and absurd as to talk of the people inhabiting Brittany as a distinct nation from the French. However, we know but too

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well that the Irish consider themselves a distinct nation from us, and that some of their leaders, upon this ground, claim for them a parliament, and even an army and navy and a diplomacy, separate and distinct from ours. And this, again, ought to seem as strange and absurd as for Scotland or Wales or Cornwall to claim a parliament, an army and navy, and a diplomacy, distinct from ours ; or as for Brittany or Provence to claim a parliament, an army and navy, and a diplomacy, distinct from those of France. However, it is a fact that for Ireland such claims are made, while for Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, and Provence, they are not. That is because Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall are really blended in national feeling with us, and Brittany and Provence with the rest of France. And it is well that people should come to understand and feel that it is quite incumbent on a nation to have its parts blended together in a common national feeling; and that there is insecurity, Ihere is reason for mortification and humiliation, if they are not. At last this much, at least, has been borne in upon the mind of the general public in England, which for a long while troubled itself not at all about the matter, — that it is a ground of insecurity to us, and a cause of mortification and humiliation, that we have so completely failed to attach Ireland. I remember, when I was visiting schools in Alsace twenty years ago, I noticed a number of points in which questions of language and religion seemed to me likely to raise irritation gainst the French government, and to call forth in the people of Alsace the sense of their separate nationality. Yet all such irritating points were smoothed down by the power of a common national feeling with France ; and we all know how deeply German and Protestant Alsace regretted, and still regrets, the loss of her connexion with France Celtic and Catholic. Undoubtedly this does great honour to French civilisation and to its attractive forces. We, on the other hand, Germanic and Protestant England, we have utterly failed to attach Celtic and Catholic Ireland, although our language prevails there, and although we have no great counter-nationality on the borders of Ireland to compete with us for the possession of her affections, as the French had Germany on the borders of Alsace.

England holds Ireland, say the Irish, by means of conquest and confiscation. But almost all countries have undergone conquest and confiscation ; and almost aU property, if we go back far enough, has its source in these violent proceedings. After such proceedings, however, people go about their daily business, gradually things settle down, there is well-being and tolerable justice, prescription arises, and nobody talks about conquest and confiscation any

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more. The Prankish conquest of France, the Norman conquest of England, came in this way, with time, to be no longer talked of, to be no longer even thought of.

The seizure of Strasburg by France is an event belonging to modern history. It was a violent and scandalous act. But it has long ago ceased to stir resentment in a single Alsatian bosom. On the other hand, the English conquest of Ireland took place little more than a century after the Norman conquest of England. But in Ireland it did not happen that people went about their daily business, that their condition improved, that things settled down, that the country became peaceful and prosperous, and that gradually all remembrance of conquest and confiscation died out. On the contrary, the conquest had again and again to be renewed ; the sense of prescription, the true security of all property, never arose. The angry memory of conquest and confiscation, the ardour for revolt against them, have continued, therefore, to irritate and inflame men's minds. They irritate and inflame them still ; the present relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland offer only too much proof of it.

But this is only saying ftver again that England has

failed ta attach Ireland. We must ask, then, what it is

which makes things, after a conquest, settle peaceably

-down, what makes a sense of prescription arise, what makes property secure and blends the conquered people into one nation with the conquerors. Certainly we must put, as one of the first and chief causes, general well-being. Never mind how misery arises, whether by the fault of the conquered or by the fault of the conqueror, its very existence prevents the solid settlement of things, ]jrevents the dying out of desires for revolt and change. Now, let us consult the testimonies from Elizabeth's reign, when the middle age had ended and the modem age had begun, down to the present time. First we have this picture of Irish misery by the poet Spenser : —

Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them ; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves ; they did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could find them, yea, and one another soon after, insomuch as the very carcases they spared not to scrape out of their graves ; and if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrocks there, they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue these withal ; that in short space there were none almost left.

Then, a hundred and forty years later, we have another picture of Irish misery, a picture drawn by the terrible hand of Swift He describes ' the miserable dress and diet and dwelling of the people, the general desolation in most parts of the kingdom.' He says : —

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Some persons of a desponding spirit are in great concern about the aged, diseased, or maimed poor ; but I am not in the least pain upon the matter, because it is very well known that they are every day dying and rotting by cold and famine, and filth and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected.

And again : —

I confess myself to be touched with a very sensible pleasure when I hear of a mortality in any country parish or village, where the vnretches are forced to pay, for a filthy cabin and two ridges of potatoes, treble the worth ; brought up to steal or beg, for want of work ; to whom death would be the best thing to be wished for, on account both of themselves and the public.

Next and finally, after the lapse of a hundred and fifty years more, coming down to our own day, we have this sentence, strong and short, from Colonel Gordon : —

The state of our fellow-countrymen in the south-west of Ireland is worse than that of any people in the world, — let alone Europe. *

I say, where there is this misery going on for centuries after a conquest, acquiescence in the conquest cannot take place ; a sense of permanent settlement and of the possessors' prescriptive title to their property cannot spring up, the conquered cannot blend themselves into one nation with their conquerors.

English opinion, indeed, attributes Irish misery to the faults of the Irish themselves, to their insubordination, to their idleness and improvidence, and to their Popish religion. But however the misery arises, -there cannot, as I have already said, be fusion, there cannot be forgetfulness of past violences and confiscations, while the misery lasts. Still, if the misery is due to the faults of the Irish, it is in curing faults on their side that we have to seek the remedy, not in curing faults of our ovra.

Undoubtedly the native Irish have the faults which we commonly attribute to them. Undoubtedly those Anglo-Irish, who lead them, too often superadd to the passionate unreason of the natives our own domestic hardness and narrow doggedness, and the whole makes a very unpleasant mixture. Undoubtedly it is not agreeable to have people offering to fly like wolves at your throat, — these people knowing, at the same , time, that you will not put out your full strength against them, and covering you on that account with all the more menace and contumely. England must often enough be disposed to answer such assailants gruffly, to vow that she will silence them once for all, and to ejaculate, as Caesar did when he threatened to silence the tribune Metellus : ' And when I say this, young man, to say it is more trouble to me than to do it' Were there ever people, indeed, who so aggravated their own difficulties as the Irish people, so increased the labour and sorrow of him who toils to find a remedy for their ills ? 'Always ready to react against the despotism -of fact,' — so their best friend ' among their French kinsmen describes them. ' Poor brainsick creatures ! ' — a sterner critic * among these kinsmen says, — ' poor brainsick creatures, distraught with misery and incurable ignorance ! by inflaming themselves against the English connexion, by refusing to blend their blood, their habits, their hopes, with those of the leading country, they are preparing fot themselves a more miserable future than that of any other people ii^ Europe.' It seems as if this poor Celtic people were bent on making what one of its own poets has said of its heroes hold good for ever: ' They went forth to the war,, but they always fell.'