ANGL04KISH ESSAYS 
 
 JOHN EGLINTON 
 

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 THE LIBRARY OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
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 ENDOWED BY THE 
 
 mALECTIC AND PHILANTHROPIC 
 
 SOQETIES 
 
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 1918 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPEL HILL 
 
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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2013 
 
 http://archive.org/details/angloirishessaysOOmage 
 
Anglo-Irish Essays 
 
Anglo-Irish Essays 
 
 By 
 JOHN EGLINTON 
 
 ( ^.Ll-Ut. 
 
 1 
 
 NEW YORK 
 JOHN LANE COMPANY 
 
 MCMXVIII 
 
 , (^ t^ 
 
 lO 
 
Printed at 
 
 ctie CAiboc pness 
 
 89 Talbot vStteet 
 Dublin 
 
Contents 
 
 
 
 Page 
 
 Preface 
 
 3 
 
 The Island of Saints 
 
 8 
 
 A Neglected Monument of Irish Prose 
 
 21 
 
 The Grand Old Tongue 
 
 29 
 
 The Irish Mythological Cycle 
 
 34 
 
 The Philosophy of the Celtic Movement 
 
 41 
 
 The Best Irish Poem 
 
 47 
 
 St. Patrick on the Stage 
 
 57 
 
 Thomas Moore as Theologian 
 
 69 
 
 Irish Books 
 
 79 
 
 A Way of Understanding Nietzsche 
 
 90 
 
 Sincerity 
 
 101 
 
 Reafforestation 
 
 110 
 
 A Cause 
 
 119 
 
 529329 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The essays here reprinted, at the suggestion of some 
 friends, have been taken chiefly from various defunct 
 Irish magazines and newspapers and from a booklet 
 of which the remaining copies contributed their Httle 
 flame to the conflagrations in DubHn during the Easter 
 week of 1916.* The title refers as much to the writer's 
 point of view as to the subject-matter, and by it he 
 would suggest that the Anglo-Irishman has been left 
 a good deal out of account in recent years, any return 
 to his point of view, or indeed any mention of him, 
 seeming to strike a dissonant note in the melodious 
 concord of the Irish Literary Renascence. Perhaps, 
 however, '* Irish Ireland," deceived by that 
 acquiescent habit of mind which has characterized 
 the Anglo-Irishman since the Union, needs to be 
 reminded that he is still there. As he existed in 
 the days of Protestant Ascendancy he has no doubt 
 vanished. More than a hundred years, in which he 
 has assisted at the progress of democratic ideals in 
 Ireland, have taught him tolerance, have infected his 
 Protestant eudaemonism with a melancholy 
 scepticism, have mitigated his unsuspecting selfishness 
 and caused him many misgivings as he conned the 
 records of his past, and have bound him by new and 
 inextricable ties to the ancient population of this 
 island — in a word, have improved him out of all 
 
 * Thanks are due to The New Statesman for leave to reprint 
 from it one or two contributions. 
 B 
 
4 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 recognition as the descendant of the old rollicking 
 Irishman of the eighteenth century. A less invidious 
 name for the Anglo- Irishman would now perhaps be 
 the Modern Irishman, the Irishman, namely, who 
 accepts as a good European the connection with Great 
 Britain and yet feels himself to be far more distinct 
 from the Anglo-Saxon than he is from the Mere 
 Irishman. 
 
 It has always been the instinctive policy of English 
 government to ignore the existence of this race, which 
 it snubbed and over-ruled all through the seventeenth 
 and eighteenth centuries, and at which, far more than 
 at the Catholic Irish, it aimed the Act of Union. 
 During the nineteenth century this race almost 
 disappears from history : its sons are over all the 
 world and those who remain at home are silent, the 
 objects of misunderstanding and abuse. Yet never 
 for a moment does the Modern Irishman, while he 
 looks on with detachment at the sectarian animosities 
 of Limerick and Belfast, laughs at the Language 
 Movement (to which he generally subscribes), and 
 endeavours to enter into the romantic ideals of the 
 Sinn Feiners, cease to feel it to be a matter of 
 seif-gratulation that he is an Irishman. We first 
 notice the inconsistency in Dean Swift, who is usually 
 represented (like the Duke of Wellington) as having 
 been ashamed of his country, but who when in 
 England was probably fully sensible of the privilege of 
 spiritual emancipation conferred on him by his Anglo- 
 Irish nationality. This is a point on which we feel 
 ourselves, frankly, to be the superiors of all the world. 
 We have next to no intellectual prepossessions. This 
 open-mindedness makes us ideal cosmopolitans, and 
 
PREFACE 3 
 
 enables us beyond other races to live by our wits in 
 London and elsewhere. It serves us well in the posts 
 which we accept all over the British Empire, and adds 
 a useful and truly imperial tinge to the character ol 
 British rule throughout the colonies and dependencies. 
 Akin to this open-mindedness is the generosity with 
 which we have made a present to English literature 
 of our considerable achievements therein, never having 
 thought it worth while to keep a separate account of 
 our share in it ; just as we have made a present to the 
 Mere Irish of the stand which we made for our liberties 
 in the eighteenth century. We have, moreover, 
 augmented the potentialities of our intellectual life by 
 never pressing to a conclusion the Protestant and 
 Roman Catholic controversy, the Protestant and the 
 Catholic each holding in a perfectly friendly way that 
 the intellectual position of the other is impossible; 
 and we live amicably together, those of us who are 
 Catholics being as little capable of starting an 
 Inquisition as our Protestants of starting a Salvation 
 Army. 
 
 Undoubtedly, if our race were to rouse and realise 
 itself as a new and freshly compounded race the whole 
 situation in Ireland would be transformed. Intellectual 
 and political life would find their true centre, and a 
 great many things and persons now appearing at the 
 centre of Irish life would find their proper place at its 
 outskirts. To this race destiny entrusted the task ol 
 unifying and governing Ireland as clearly as to the 
 Anglo-Norman race it committed the task of unifying 
 and governing England: and towards the end of the 
 eighteenth century we seemed in a fair way to fulfil 
 our trust. But when the premature introduction of 
 
6 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 democratic ideas into Ireland at the time of the French 
 Revolution led to a completely artificial political 
 situation, in which the country's natural rulers had 
 to look on while England made what bargain she 
 could with the subject race, the Modern Irishman lost 
 interest to a great extent in his own country. That 
 almost culpable freedom from sentimental pre- 
 possession which has been noted as one of our chief 
 characteristics is strikingly apparent in the fact that 
 while the Mere Irishman still cherishes passionately 
 the names of such shadowy persons as Brian 
 Boroimhe, the Modern Irishman has almost forgotten 
 the achievements of his great-grandfathers in the 
 eighteenth century, of which Froude's History 
 contains so perverse a travesty. If we can imagine 
 the government of the United States of America, after 
 the achievement of independence, conniving under 
 the threat of invasion and insurrection at the 
 restoration of the old colonial government, and leaving 
 the tradition of Washington and Alexander Hamilton 
 in the air, we shall have an image on an extended 
 scale of what happened to the Modern Irish when, 
 after the Union, the memory of Grattan and the 
 Volunteers had become a dream. Their political 
 genius surely did not exhaust itself in the wonderful 
 group of orators in Grattan's Parliament, and if they 
 could have been left to themselves instead of being 
 bribed to accept the Union would surely have been 
 equal to the strange situation in which they would 
 have found themselves when the old Celtic nationality 
 woke up into the democratic era. They would have 
 made mistakes certainly, but in the end they would 
 have convinced the Mere Irish that, at any rate, they 
 
PREFACE 7 
 
 had to be lived with (as it is, the Sinn Fein doctrine 
 of the Mere Irish hardly allows our right to exist), and 
 there was always England to bring the whole 
 population together in a sense of their common 
 interest. 
 
 Frankly, one cannot feel surprised that England 
 took alarm at this prospect. Possibly she chose the 
 best way. It remains none the less true that a race 
 before which was opening the most exhilarating 
 prospects suddenly found itself deprived of its destiny 
 in this country. If any doubt occurred to Pitt and 
 Castlereagh that they would have a race on their 
 hands with its occupation gone, they probably said 
 to themselves that plenty of work would be found for 
 this race in helping England to govern the colonies; 
 and in fact, as already said, the political virtue of the 
 Anglo-Irish and Scotch-Irish since the Union has gone 
 into the management of the Empire. And if there 
 had been enough posts to go round, we might have 
 acquiesced in our disappearance from history. But 
 in the nature of the case a good many of us had to 
 remain at home, and it was hardly to be expected 
 that we should rest content in an attitude of mere 
 open-mindedness. Pitt, for instance, made one of the 
 bitterest enemies English rule in Ireland has ever had 
 by neglecting to answer an application for a colonial 
 appointment from a young member of our race of the 
 name of Wolfe Tone. Under these conditions we 
 often, in fact, become bad citizens. We ourselves 
 may be comfortable and satisfied as Castle officials, 
 judges, sinecurists, etc., but our sons and daughters 
 chafe at our provincial atmosphere, amaze us by their 
 petulant outbreaks, and set up as rebels. This is the 
 
8 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 phenomenon known from the earhest times of English 
 rule in Ireland, and exemplified in numerous families 
 throughout Ireland to-day, of the Anglo-Irish 
 becoming ** more Irish than the Irish themselves." 
 Wherever there has been any ferment of revolutionary 
 ideas, any threatening movement of hitherto inert 
 because leaderless masses, it will usually be found 
 that one of us has been mixing himself with action 
 lest he should wither by despair. During the early 
 part of the nineteenth century we looked on rather 
 frigidly while 0*Connell was persuading the Catholic 
 peasantry that they were just as respectable as the 
 Protestants, and was making them talk English and 
 dress like squireens ; but when in his old age he made 
 a speech in which he said that no political liberty was 
 worth a drop of human blood, it was more than our 
 young men could stand, and they began about that 
 time to take the Irish masses in hand themselves. 
 The cold and self-conscious Parnell was far less an 
 impersonation of the race-hatred of the Mere Irishman 
 towards England than of the pent-up wrath of the 
 Modern Irishman at not having a proper outlet in his 
 own country for his character and talents. 
 
 In the recent Insurrection, on the other hand, it 
 might seem that the passions and ideals of the Mere 
 Irishman were alone engaged, but that is hardly true. 
 For the ideals, at any rate, we must, I fear, accept 
 the larger share of the responsibility, though our great 
 quality of open-mindedness converted us into curious 
 but disinterested spectators when these ideals were 
 suddenly enacted in our midst. Our attitude through- 
 out the disturbances must, in fact, have seemed a little 
 ambiguous to anyone unacquainted with the inner 
 
PREFACE 9 
 
 history of the Irish Literary Movement. For the past 
 quarter of a century we have taken over from the 
 Mere Irishman all his terms and traditions, and have 
 been chanting the sorrows of Kathleen ni Houlahan 
 in strains ** more Irish " than anything in the ancient 
 language of the country. Theoretically, this literature 
 ought to be in that language, as we would, regretfully, 
 be the first to admit; just as the Agnostics and 
 Protestants who have chiefly produced this literature 
 ought in theory to be pious Catholics. The pretence 
 that the Modern Irishman is the Mere Irishman always 
 imparted something of a Delia Cruscan artificiality to 
 the literary movement which ended in bloodshed in 
 Easter Week. It would have far better become the 
 Modern Irishman to remember that if Ireland is still 
 unreconciled to the part which history and geography 
 have assigned to it, the fault is mainly his : and that 
 instead of adopting for literary purposes the religious 
 and race antipathies of the Mere Irish, and stultifying 
 his own past by accepting from them an obscurantist 
 mythology of which the chief figure is some hobgoblin 
 called England, it was for him to introduce new and 
 unassailable ideals of nationality, to sink the wells of 
 thought beneath the barren surface of tradition and 
 to bring Ireland into political and spiritual unity. 
 
 Happily there is in Ireland something older than 
 race distinctions, older than the Catholic Church, older 
 than archaeology, older even than the gods — Mothei 
 Nature herself, in whose presence the poet can forget 
 the squalid animosities of race and creed. The future 
 of Irish literature is mainly an affair between the poet 
 and this kindly mother, as she manifests herself to 
 the solitary thinker on the hills and plains of Ireland. 
 
ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 THE ISLAND OF SAINTS 
 
 :HAT *' East is East and West is West " — 
 in other words, that human nature in 
 the East and human nature in the West 
 are essentially different — is accepted 
 usually as a sufficient account of the fact 
 that what we call ** universal '* religions have as yet 
 appeared only in the East. The mere statement of 
 the fact has come to seem a kind of explanation of it. 
 The real explanation more probably is conveyed in the 
 saying of the Egyptian priest to Solon, in Plato's 
 Timaeus : ** O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always 
 children, and old man among you there is none." 
 ** How so?" asked Solon. ** You are all young," 
 said the priest, ** in your souls; for you have in them 
 no settled opinion confirmed through hearsay from of 
 old, and no knowledge hoary with time." The infant 
 nationalities of modern Europe were for many 
 centuries the pupils of a religion which came to them 
 with all the authority of that civilisation of which they 
 were the heirs, and it was their part, not all at once 
 to found a religion of their own, but to submit to 
 authority, and to content themselves with such answers 
 as were vouchsafed to their first questionings . The great 
 religions, which have something in them to which a 
 whole civilisation can look up, are the results of ages 
 
THE ISLAND OF SAINTS II 
 
 of silent thought, and of the independent contributions 
 of many schools. Give us a little time — at least a 
 few centuries longer — and in the mouth of a new 
 Buddha the conflicting tendencies of modern thought 
 will blend in fresh oracles, as the lore of Babylon, 
 Assyria, Persia, and Egypt were blended in Judaism, 
 or as Judaism was blended with the Greek spirit in 
 Christianity. The Christian Church, deputed by 
 ancient Rome to instruct the nations of the West, 
 made modern civilisation possible by the unity which 
 she imposed among these barbarous young Titans. 
 But with the first manifestations of the thinking faculty 
 in these nations, Christianity, as at first accepted, at 
 once began to be modified in all of them. True, 
 these nationalities soon found themselves ranged 
 against one another under the names *' Protestant '* 
 and '* Catholic," the Protestant nations openly 
 avowing their impious new departure in religious 
 matters, while the Catholic nations made a parade of 
 loyalty to their old teacher. But though without 
 doubt the Protestant nations found hemselves able, 
 or obliged, to tolerate a freedom of thought considered 
 disloyal in Catholic countries, we must not allow 
 ourselves to think that these theologico-political terms 
 represent any real division in that modern spirit which 
 had awakened in Catholic and Protestant nations 
 alike. As things have worked out, it has in fact come 
 to be a matter of doubt whether the modern spirit 
 gained so much by having in Protestant countries the 
 self-complacency and worldly indifference of the 
 average man professedly on its side. In France, for 
 instance, which till our own age has been called a 
 Catholic country, chiefly because it never chose to call 
 
12 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 itself Protestant, or to modify the forms of its popular 
 religion, the modern spirit has perhaps made things 
 easier for itself than in any Protestant country. The 
 terms have an historical and political, hardly an 
 essentially religious meaning; and in all countries the 
 real conflict is between intellectual hardihood and 
 pious Epicureanism, between genius and indifference, 
 knowledge and ignorance, initiative and irresolution. 
 Perhaps fifty, almost certainly a hundred years hence, 
 the terms Protestant and Catholic will be as obsolete 
 as V/hig and Tory are to-day. Except in Ireland, 
 and one or two other countries where religion and 
 politics insist on confusedly adopting one another's 
 terms, the question of personal belief has generally 
 come to be recognised as a very much deeper one 
 than whether we are ''Protestant" or "Catholic," 
 "Christian" or "infidel." Our real beliefs belong 
 to the subconscious part of our nature, and surprise, 
 and perhaps horrify, ourselves as much as they could 
 anyone else when they emerge occasionally. 
 
 Modern Ireland remains a " Catholic " country, 
 more strictly than France or even Spain, chiefly, we 
 must hold, because its religious consciousness in 
 modern times has never really been awakened. We 
 may even say that if Protestantism and Catholicism 
 do indeed represent two essentially different religious 
 tendencies, we are not yet able to say whether Ireland 
 is naturally Protestant or Catholic, for the alternatives 
 have never really been brought before it to choose 
 between. There is even some reason to think that a 
 country which produced Scotus Erigena and Virgil of 
 Salzburg; a country to which Christianity first came 
 in the form of the Pelagian heresy ; a country in which 
 
THE ISLAND OF SAINTS 13 
 
 the national church at the height of the religious 
 movement in the seventh century excited, by reason 
 of its independent spirit, the keen hostility of the 
 mother church at Rome, had a natural turn for what 
 comfortable people call haresy, but what we prefer 
 to call a disposition to take religious and intellectual 
 questions seriously. The Celtic Church — a church, 
 as Warren says, ** having its own litany, its own 
 translation of the Bible, its own mode of chanting, 
 its own monastic rule, its own cycle for the calculation 
 of Easter, and presenting both internal and external 
 evidence of a complete autonomy "—-was hardly, as 
 has been pretended, an early form of Protestantism, 
 but may at least be called a separate branch of the 
 Apostolic Church; and the Epistles of Saint Patrick, 
 if they have not a Lutheran flavour, have at least one 
 distinctly Pauline. There came very near to being, 
 as Ritchie says, another great branch of the Christian 
 Church, beside the Greek and the Roman, namely 
 the Celtic, which, had the fates proved propitious, 
 would in all likelihood have been the first to produce 
 its Luther, its Pascal or its Tolstoi, and so perhaps 
 have had its turn in the spiritual hegemony of 
 Christendom. 
 
 The true nature of that extraordinary period of 
 religious exaltation through which Ireland passed 
 between the fifth and the eighth centuries, and why it 
 vanished without leaving any germ of development 
 in the national character, will always remain some- 
 thing of a riddle. When we read of the solitaries who 
 dwelt in the laurae of the Thebaid and of Palestine 
 at the close of the antique ages, we are accustomed 
 to think of them as fugitives from a corrupt civilisation. 
 
14 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 But in Ireland, a country of primitive institutions and 
 manners, of nature-worship, and without even a word 
 to express the notion of sin, suddenly appears all that 
 passion for seclusion, for mortification and abnegation, 
 the flight from the world, the ingenuity in contriving 
 romantic forms of penance, and even something of the 
 delight of solitary communion with nature, which we 
 generally think of in connection with social decadence 
 or revolution. It is necessary to believe both that 
 Irish life included great extremes of good and evil, 
 and that there was a good deal in Druidism, or what 
 the poets called the ** old law of the men of Erin," 
 which prepared them for Christianity. The old Celtic 
 world, driven into narrow compass by the Roman 
 empire, had seen its most sacred places desecrated 
 with impunity, and was already filled with 
 premonitory influences of Apostolic Christianity when 
 the new faith made what we may call its state entry 
 into the country with Patrick and his missionary band. 
 The English had not yet landed at Thanet when the 
 early missionaries, inconvenienced so far as one can 
 learn mainly by some rough practical jokes of the old 
 Druidic party, were freely wending their way about 
 the country, distributing the Gospels and the books of 
 the law. Some explanation of the prodigious success 
 of the mission may doubtless be found in the character 
 of Patrick, whom we have only to contrast with that 
 dry ecclesiastic, Augustine of Canterbury, to see what 
 the advantage was of having a religious genius at the 
 head of an evangelical campaign. The author of the 
 ** Confession " (if not Patrick, then someone else of 
 the same name) — *' Saint Patrick," as he is styled, 
 though not we believe officially — '* Patrick, a sinner,** 
 
THE ISLAND OF SAINTS 13 
 
 as he preferred to call himself — was indeed the last 
 of the apostles, the spiritual brother of St. Paul, 
 though, as we shall see presently, with limitations 
 which remained the limitations of Celtic Christianity. 
 The bewilderment which he expresses at his own 
 success (*' I, a fool!") has all the naivete of a great 
 man unconscious of the magnetic power of a genuine 
 personality. But besides the advantage of Patrick's 
 personality, Christianity seems to have been able to 
 profit by an imbroglio arising out of the defection from 
 Druidism, about a century and a half previously, of 
 the great king Cormac, who is said finally to have 
 been slain by the Druids for having renounced their 
 teaching. The bards, we may believe, went mostly 
 with their king, and there was a consequent division 
 between bardism and Druidism which proved highly 
 serviceable to Patrick- Even in our own day, when 
 so many of our poets and novelists are agnostics, 
 theosophists, etc., we know that they have done a 
 good deal to undermine established religion, and in 
 the time of Patrick it is clear that with the bards on 
 his side half the battle was gained. We read that 
 on his arrival at the court of Laeghaire, the chief poet 
 of Erin rose up to do honour to him at his entrance. 
 In fact when Ireland became, as it presently did, an 
 ** Island of Saints," it would seem that the latter were 
 chiefly converted bards, in whose way of life it did 
 not perhaps at first make so very much difference to 
 become ** saints." The notion of acquiring super- 
 natural power by means of fasting and chastity, and 
 by a solitary life, was quite congenial and familiar to 
 Druidism, as were also the doctrines of the one God 
 and of immortality. The sacred and remote places of 
 
16 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 Druidism continued to be the sacred places of the 
 monks, who had supplemented the old magic with 
 the magic of baptism and the Psaltery. So close was 
 the connection of Christianity with bardism that it 
 seems to have been expected of a *' saint " (and quite 
 rightly) that he should also be ** a bit of a poet " ; and 
 all their canticles bear witness, less to any real under- 
 standing of Christianity, than to an acknowledgment 
 in it of a superior magic, as in the "Breastplates" 
 of Patrick and of Columba : 
 
 *' I adore not the voice of birds, 
 Nor a sneezing, nor a destiny, nor the earthly world. 
 Nor a son, nor chance, nor woman; 
 My Druid is Christ, the son of God, 
 Christ the son oj Mary, the great Abbot, 
 The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost/' 
 
 Indeed, we have only to look anywhere into the 
 Hymns or the Lives of the early saints to find support 
 for our theory that these saints were chiefly bards 
 cast loose from Druidism. That the bards were 
 numerous enough to make themselves a public 
 nuisance from time to time is well known; and the 
 close association of the early Church with the bards 
 appears in the account of the Convention of Drum- 
 ketta, more than a century after Patrick, when the 
 Church came to the rescue of the bardic order, 
 threatened with extinction by the High King. The 
 immense number of these saints excites our suspicion 
 almost as much as the number of bards raises one's 
 doubts as to the existence among them of any genuine 
 poet. Any rogue who had submitted his head to the 
 
THE ISLAND OF SAINTS 17 
 
 tonsure, who fasted, and who could repeat the Psalter, 
 was ipso jacto a saint, just as the standing of a bard 
 was determined by the number of tales he had by 
 heart. Those devotees who made their abode on the 
 top of the Skelligs or of Slieve Gullion; who got into 
 coracles and drifted out to sea without oars or rudder, 
 and sometimes threw away the loaves they had 
 brought with them ; or who tried in the name of Christ 
 to float stones on the lake, were many of them, we 
 may believe, the Quixotes of the old Druidic world, 
 which indeed lingered on for many centuries after 
 them. There is really nothing to choose between the 
 morale of the bard and of the saint, as he appears in 
 the legends, where he has parted with none of the 
 privileges of magical power and authority. Columba 
 himself has hardly more unction than Aitherne; and 
 even his respected biographer Adamnan, we are told, 
 retained a monk to tell his lies for him. The un- 
 regenerate character of the Irish saints struck Giraldus 
 Cambrensis, who wrote one of his chapters under the 
 heading, '* That the saints of this country appear to 
 have been of a vindictive temper." There is nothing 
 to indicate, what must of course have been to some 
 extent the case, that Christianity came to Erin as the 
 satisfaction of any speculative or spiritual need ; 
 nothing to compare, for example, with the speech of 
 the Northumbrian alderman at the council held to 
 consider the mission of Paulinus. The Aposolic 
 fervour and self-consciousness which Patrick brought 
 with him from Gaul were a good deal lost on the 
 volatile men of Erin, and indeed it is absurd to think 
 of him as converting the Irish in any sense in which 
 Wesley or D. L. Moody would have understood the 
 
18 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 word. He came to exorcise demons, to baptize, to 
 shave, not, as our patriotic poets and artists would 
 have us believe, to conduct a series of evangelistic 
 services. His impressive appearance and costume, 
 the melodious moaning of his chanting clerics and 
 bell-ringing on the silent plains, the magical clair- 
 voyance which enabled him to see demons perched on 
 the shoulders of kings, the impunity with which he 
 violated the sacred rites of the Druids, his dangerous 
 assiduity in prayer and fasting, and the formidable 
 sincerity of his curses, all bespoke a superior power 
 which confounded the magicians of ancient Erin, as 
 Moses confounded those of Egypt. His writings 
 express no elation at the realization of his youthful 
 dreams, and it must be confessed no great pleasure 
 in the society of his new converts, whom he would 
 gladly have left but that the '* voices " which he heard 
 had told him that he must not again return to his 
 friends. He had brought the ends of the earth within 
 the fold of the Church, yet the world continued, and 
 he ceased wearily to take account of the number of 
 persons whom he baptized so indiscriminately. He 
 had turned the bards into clerics, and in the Ireland 
 which he left behind him — in which the solemn note 
 of personal religion in the ** Confession " was not 
 taken up by any of his successors- — it was bardism 
 which took advantage of the use of the writing-tablets 
 which he had brought with him. The literature 
 
 which rose in this country out of the mission of Patrick 
 — unlike those literatures which rose in England and 
 Gaul out of the missions of Augustine and Martin of 
 Tours — is the expression of that primitive paganism 
 which Christianity came to cast out. 
 
THE ISLAND OF SAINTS 19 
 
 It is interesting to remember these things at a time 
 when a kind of exreme unction is being administered 
 to the expiring language of this country, as *' piety's 
 own Celtic tongue"; whereas in truth Christianity 
 never learned to express itself in Irish. The *' Island 
 of Saints," or Celtic Ireland, is that country which 
 throughout its whole history has never produced a 
 saint, understanding by the word a religious genius. 
 What strikes an outsider in first approaching the Irish 
 language, with the patriotic intention of mastering it, 
 is that it suffers from the same want from which the 
 spirit of Irish nationality has suffered, namely, that it 
 has never undergone a spiritual discipline : it still 
 retains a rude flavour as of a language which has 
 never properly been to school. It did not happen to 
 the Irish language, as to the Anglo-Saxon, to lose and 
 find itself, to go under bondage, to hew wood and 
 draw water, and on a day to find itself stronger than 
 its taskmaster and to enter into all his possessions. 
 It is objected to the English language, on the other 
 hand, that it is "saturated with Protestantism" — 
 that " Teutonic development of Christianity " of which 
 there has never been what seemed at first promised, 
 a Celtic counterpart. The English language is 
 saturated, at any rate, like all successful languages, 
 with a spiritual quality, not derived exclusively or 
 perhaps even chiefly from Anglo-Saxon sources, and 
 certainly not from Protestantism, but from a long 
 discipline and development through which it has come 
 to be an element in which thought can breathe and 
 minds live and produce after their kind. True, the 
 history of the English language has given its thought 
 a trend which perhaps may with a little unfairness be 
 C 
 
20 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 styled, as Newman styled it, Protestant. But if the 
 English language be saturated with Protestantism, 
 with what is the Irish language saturated? Listen to 
 the last mutter ings of the '* Grand Old Tongue," and 
 you will hear it babbling of the fancies of its youth, 
 in the days before Patrick. It was only with the 
 introduction of the English language, and when 
 Ireland began to be affected indirectly by the 
 Reformation, that it became the pious nationality that 
 we know. 
 
 1905. 
 
A NEGLECTED MONUMENT OF IRISH PROSE 
 
 ^HE question, Why did Ireland reject the 
 Bible? is closely connected with another 
 question, Why did Ireland fail in 
 literature? not so much that Ireland's 
 final rejection of the Bible was the cause 
 of its failure in literature, as that both of these things 
 have come of a peculiarity of her spiritual history from 
 the earliest times — the complete separation in it of 
 things sacred and things profane. In all countries 
 literature begins to be national with a claim made on 
 behalf of the people to think for themselves. It was 
 so in England in the age of Chaucer, Langland, and 
 Wyclif. It was so in France a century earlier when 
 Jean de Meung, in his continuation of the Romance 
 oj the Rose, initiated the people, not without a good 
 deal of scandal, into a ** philosophy wholly 
 emancipated from theology." But literature in 
 Ireland never took the great questions of life and 
 destiny into its own hands. The people, in the person 
 of any great reformer or poet, never claimed the right 
 to think. No genius ever arose out of the gulf set 
 between things sacred and things profane. The 
 literatures of France and England grew up with the 
 freedom of thought, and finally became the national 
 organs for the expression of the mind of those nations ; 
 but Ireland, more and more in the course of its 
 
22 Anglo-Irish essays 
 
 history, has abandoned thought and speculation to a 
 rehgious order holding itself aloof, or at any rate 
 distinct, from the national life. Irish literature and 
 Irish religion have maintained two distinct and partly 
 hostile traditions; so that it has been the curious 
 destiny of Ireland, not only to have been the ** Island 
 of Saints,'* one of the chief refuges of Christianity in 
 the early Middle Ages, but to be the last home in 
 Europe of what we call Paganism, the country where 
 the kind of life portrayed in primitive literatures has 
 lasted longest. 
 
 The great national book of the Hebrews seemed at 
 one time likely enough to become in Ireland, what it 
 has been in so many countries, the begetter of an 
 original literature. Patrick and Finn Barr, it is told, 
 went about the country distributing the Gospels and 
 the Books of the Law. Ancient Irish literature, by 
 the very form of its annals and many of its narratives, 
 bears witness to the familiarity of those who wrote it 
 down with the Hebrew Scriptures. Ireland, at the 
 close of the seventh century, when Christianity lay 
 brooding here in a sort of halcyon calm and a gentler 
 temper fell upon its bards and heroes; that Ireland 
 into which the poem of Prince Aldfrid of Northumbria 
 gives us a glimpse, ** Inisfail the Fair" — that 
 inoffensive, pensive Ireland, where all things were 
 going well, on which Fate, without a particle of 
 provocation, suddenly let loose her yelling dogs of 
 destruction, her Danes and Saxons — if it could only 
 have continued ! Those, indeed, were Ireland's 
 palmy days, and let no ruthless historian destroy her 
 belief in them. It was long afterwards, in the twelfth 
 
MONUMENT OF IRISH PROSE 23 
 
 century, after her first sorrows had come upon her, 
 that Ireland, north and south, passed under the regular 
 authority of the Church of Rome. This silent and 
 gradual supplanting of the once glorious national 
 Church of Erin, whatever this country may have 
 gained through being thus brought within the 
 community of European nations, was yet the symbol 
 of an end which had come to much that was most 
 promising in our earlier history. The bond of union 
 between national and ecclesiastical life disappeared 
 with the nationality of the Church. In literature it 
 widened the breach between things sacred and 
 profane. Popular literature fell wholly into the hands 
 of the bardic order, an institution pertaining to the 
 childhood of nations, and which Ireland, in the 
 ordinary course of its development, was beginning to 
 outgrow. For it was not only Edward III. in his 
 Statute of Kilkenny (which, by the way, like the 
 Anglo-Norman invasion, was supported by ecclesias- 
 tical authority), or Edmund Spenser, in his ** View 
 of the State of Ireland,'* who pronounced this 
 standing army of poets to be the bane of the country 
 in several respects; but soon after the curtain rises on 
 the regular narrative of Irish history, we find the 
 authorities of Erin assembled to consider the best 
 method of dealing with what had become a public 
 nuisance. As Keating says : — ** The poets were a 
 great burden and it was difficult to control them. For 
 the Chief Poet's retinue numbered thirty, and there 
 were fifteen in the retinue of the poet who came next 
 to him; and about that time nearly a third of the 
 men of Ireland belonged to the poetic order, and they 
 quartered themselves from Samhain to Bealltaine on 
 
24 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 the men of Ireland."* The Ard-Righ of that time, 
 Aodh Mac Ainmire, wished to do away with this 
 outrageous institution, but at the suggestion of 
 Columcille, whose political influence was then great, 
 their numbers were reduced, and many of them were 
 turned into schoolmasters. King Aodh's proposal 
 was so energetic and drastic that one would like to 
 know more of an Irish statesman who seems to have 
 been as free from sentimentalism as Edward I. And 
 as it turned out, the settlement of Drum-Ketta was by 
 no means the end of the abuses of the bardic order. 
 Right down to the Penal times we hear of them chiefly 
 as bullies, braggarts, and scamps, and we may be 
 sure that whatever poetry the bardic class, as a class, 
 produced, was as paltry as some of their *' satires," 
 etc., which have come down to us. Their very 
 notion of a poet as the member of a kind of guild, or 
 bardic order, precluded the emergence of a great 
 poetic individuality much in the same sense and to the 
 same extent as a too rigidly-established priestly order 
 
 *The following passage in Gosson's School oj 
 Abuse, written in the spacious times of great Elizabeth 
 (1579), serves to show that other nations have been 
 slow in disestablishing their bardism : — ** We have 
 infinite poets, and pipers, and suche peevishe cattel 
 among us in Englande, that live by merrie begging, 
 mainteyned by almes, and privily encroach upon 
 everie man's purse. But if they that are in authoritie, 
 and have the sworde in their handes to cut off abuses, 
 shoulde call an accompt to see how many Chirons, 
 Terpandri, and Homers are heere, they might cast the 
 summe without pen or counters and sit downe with 
 Racha, to weepe for her children, because they were 
 not." 
 
MONUMENT OF IRISH PROSE 25 
 
 precludes the emergence of a new spiritual initiative. 
 The true poet, as we now see, is depressed and 
 silenced by the necessity to conform; and we may 
 conjecture that many a poetic soul in Erin remained 
 mute and inglorious, or what was worse, became loud 
 and turgid, through having to accept the traditions 
 of the bardic caste. The bards seem always to have 
 been afraid of being too serious. Any consideration 
 of the mysteries of existence, or any aim at inspiring 
 men with high and consolatory thoughts, they left to 
 the dull fellows who gave themselves up to the recital 
 of psalms and prayers. They gave Ireland for its 
 ideal the jolly fellow, subsequently incarnated in the 
 heroes of Lever and Lover. The only virtues which 
 they never wearied of praising, hospitality and 
 generosity, were those by whose superstitious exercise 
 they were themselves enabled to maintain their useless 
 existence. Sin e -An f^etit m^V' ptJ-Ait^ tnife e, A^tif mA 
 CA bi^eus irif An f^etiU biot) ! 
 
 The existence in Ireland of two large communities 
 of men, one religious, the other non-religious, and, 
 to a certain extent, anti-religious, was impossible 
 without a certain rivalry and hostility arising between 
 them. The clerics learned more and more to scorn 
 and hold aloof from the bards, whose idleness and 
 abuse of privileges they justly censured, while the 
 bards retaliated by contrasting the glories of an heroic 
 age with the times in which they were fallen. It is 
 surprising to some when they learn for the first time 
 that a section of Gaelic literature which seems most 
 ancient in its thought and spirit, those Ossianic ballads 
 in which pagan life is so forcibly contrasted with the 
 ascetic and devotional, should belong to more recent 
 
26 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 centuries. The hardihood of Oisin in dialogue with 
 Patrick surprises us to this day. In these poems the 
 bards went so far as they dared with a people whose 
 affections they held, while the Church retained the 
 people's veneration. Meanwhile, between the bards 
 and the priests, ** the hungry sheep looked up and 
 were not fed." When the Reformation came it was 
 needed in Ireland, at least as much as elsewhere; less, 
 indeed, on account of any great ecclesiastical abuses, 
 than because of the sad lethargy into which the mind 
 and spirit of the nation were fallen. Yet there seemed 
 no way of reaching the national consciousness; no 
 way, except one, and that was by translating the Bible 
 into the Irish language. 
 
 Small blame to the people of Ireland that they 
 did not accept the Reformation as it was offered to 
 them — that they refused to regard the gentleman or 
 lady on the throne of England as the Head of their 
 Church in preference to the remote and mysterious 
 Bishop of Rome. Yet as regards the welfare of the 
 language it might have been better if they could have 
 consented to do so. An early enthusiast for the Irish 
 language was Queen Elizabeth, who seems to have 
 advanced far enough in the study of it to encounter 
 difficulties which indisposed her to add to her royal 
 cares the considerable one of mastering the tongue. 
 It is true this inclination of Queen Elizabeth for the 
 Irish language was not altogether disinterested. 
 Having been excommunicated by the Pope, one of the 
 first acts of reprisal which had occurred to her was to 
 convert the Irish language into an engine against the 
 Papacy. She made a personal matter of it too, for it 
 was her own money which paid for the fount of type 
 
MONUMENT OF IRISH PROSE 27 
 
 which was almost the beginning of Irish printed 
 literature. In 1603, eight years before the English 
 authorised version, the New Testament appeared in 
 Irish, translated directly, with the aid of several 
 learned Irishmen, from the Greek. There can be 
 little question that if self-interests had not interfered, 
 the Bible in Irish, applied to the mind of the Irish 
 people at a critical moment, might have been a highly 
 important influence in its political and spiritueJ history, 
 and that the Irish language might have had the nucleus 
 of a serious modern literature, the lack of which has 
 caused it to be cast aside by successive generations of 
 Irishmen as they have emerged into the air of the 
 modern world. The experiment was defeated, perhaps 
 chiefly by the Irish Government, who dreaded the 
 publication of a book which they feared would create 
 a soul in the nationality which they sought to destroy ; 
 and, secondly, by the Catholic priesthood, who now 
 for the first time began to take an interest in 
 ** literature for the people," and who printed on the 
 Continent (partly, as some say, from Elizabeth's type, 
 which they had got hold of) the first of those books 
 of pietism which have been a questionable substitute 
 for the antique insight and compelling solemnity of 
 the Bible. Soon after, the dreadful incidents of the 
 Plantations and Rebellions fixed Protestant and 
 Catholic in enmity toward one another, and the cause 
 of Irish nationality came to be involved more and 
 more hopelessly in odium theologicum. The printing 
 of the Old Testament in 1685 was due mainly to the 
 philosopher, Robert Boyle; as is well known, the 
 translation had been begun under the care of the good 
 Bishop Bedell, and it, too, is a more or less direct 
 
28 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 translation from the original. But the country, under 
 the direction of its spiritual guides, would now have 
 none of it, and its circulation was left to the Society 
 for the Promotion of Christiem Knowledge, which 
 arose at the end of the century. There is something 
 perhaps a little pathetic in the naive assurance of 
 those monarchs, philosophers, and bishops who 
 interested themselves in the enterprise, that the 
 Hebrew Bible, translated into the tongue of the Gael, 
 would prove irresistible. Perhaps, after all, the solemn 
 note of Hebrew literature was out of tune with the 
 Gaelic temperament. Perhaps the only language in 
 which Ireland could possibly have read the Bible was 
 English. In any case, it is hardly on its literary merits 
 or by authority of its spiritual wisdom, that a book 
 recommends itself to the hearts of the people. Even 
 in Wales, where there was not the same political or 
 religious division between government and nationality 
 as in this country, the translation of the Bible had for 
 a long time very little effect in stopping the decay of 
 the language; and the Bible of Bishop Lloyd would 
 probably have had much the same destiny as Bishop 
 Bedell's, had not the institution of Sunday schools by 
 the Methodists obliged little boys and girls, no doubt 
 very reluctantly, to study it and learn it by heart. 
 Few Irishmen will admit that Ireland would have 
 been made a more interesting and agreeable country 
 by an evangelical movement which would have 
 introduced Bedell's Bible into every cottage; but it 
 was probably at the cost of her ancient language, as 
 well as of some other things, that Ireland kept her 
 religious tradition unbroken. 
 
 1905. 
 
THE GRAND OLD TONGUE 
 
 STATELY and venerable personage, 
 affectionately known among his admirers 
 as Ar dTeanga Fein, or Our Own 
 Tongue, has reappeared in our midst of 
 late years after a long and nearly mortal 
 illness, profiting by the increased amenity of Irish 
 public life. Few, indeed, will deny that a grace and 
 dignity are diffused by this ancient presence, whose 
 noble aspect is not belied by the strong current of 
 deep-sounding vocables which issue from his throat 
 in discourse, and few can refuse themselves the 
 pleasure of passing a word to him when they meet 
 him, for the sake of experiencing the inimitable gusto 
 and heartiness of his response, which has, indeed, 
 the *' very sound of courtesy." To us who are 
 condemned to tread the pavements of a large and 
 sophisticated town, his presence wafts an agreeable 
 pungency of peat-smoke, the airs of boglands under 
 the moon, the mists and eternal cadences of the 
 Atlantic. Notwithstanding the homely burr in his 
 accent, and a certain suggestion of a lack of book- 
 learning and culture conveyed by his manner of 
 slurring his syllables and running his words into one 
 another, the general impression of dignity made during 
 the slightest intercourse with him is such that no one 
 dreams of raising concerning him the question, 
 whether he is a gentleman. And, indeed, when we 
 reflect that his ancestry can be traced as far back as 
 
30 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 that of any of his compeers of Europe and Asia, the 
 question would seem sufficiently superfluous. That 
 he has seen better days is certain; there was even a 
 time when not only this island but its larger neighbour, 
 together with a large slice of the Continent, were his 
 own; and if he no longer hears around him the 
 language of courtiers, cultivated poets, and learned 
 ecclesiastics, there are not wanting those who assert 
 that in human dignity he loses nothing by comparison 
 with that rival who has supplanted him, to whom he 
 refers with majestic tolerance as Beurla. His caubeen 
 may have knocked itself out of shape against the 
 lintels of humble doorways, and his coat may be green 
 about his shoulders, yet he never wears a cringing 
 or shabby-genteel air. 
 
 There is, however, one baffling peculiarity about 
 this venerable personage, inconsistent, it is to be 
 feared, if not with his public notoriety, at least with 
 his reinstatement in what many of his admirers claim 
 for him as his birthright. With all his heartiness, for 
 the sincerity of which the deep note of his voice is a 
 sufficient guarantee, he does not permit that close 
 intimacy for which he provokes the desire; and 
 however numerous those may be who can boast a 
 bowing acquaintance with him, it is comparatively 
 rarely that one meets with any person who can be 
 said by common consent to know him well. 
 
 As one of those anxious to acquire something more 
 than the bowing acquaintance of which so many can 
 now boast with the Teanga, the present writer has 
 listened to his deep-chested utterance, endeavouring 
 after him to fetch up his g's from the back of his 
 throat and to smash his rs against his palate, in the 
 
THE GRAND OLD TONGUE 31 
 
 hope that finally the old man would dispense with 
 his role of elocution-master and narrate with the zest 
 born of perfect intimacy some of those inimitable 
 tales with which his memory is stored, tales to which, 
 it will be remembered, the great poet, Edmund 
 Spenser, listened not without appreciation. But the 
 barriers to the attainment of this perfect rapport seem 
 insuperable. The Teanga would seem to have lost 
 the flexibility of youth and to be the slave of old 
 usages, which, however interesting in themselves, 
 prevent his meeting his disciples half-way, as a master 
 should do who has the secret of communicating his 
 spirit. And, indeed, a knowledge of his history 
 disposes one to accept himi just as he is, and not to 
 expect from him now a departure from his conservative 
 instincts. While his European contemporaries have 
 lived and grown to what they are amid the stress of 
 epoch-making ideas and movements, have enjoyed 
 ceaseless intercourse with one another, been partners 
 in the same enterprises, and made common cause 
 against the foes of intellectual and spiritual liberty, 
 he fell, at the very dawn of what we call the miodern 
 movement, out of any share in the titanic struggle of 
 the new ideas, and living out his life in solitude and 
 far from towns, with all their iniquities and revolutions, 
 indulged his dreamy inclmations, sharing the kindly 
 life of simple peasants. And now, while his compeer 
 of Germany is valued for his philosophical discourse, 
 and that of France for his lucid critical insight, while 
 Beurla, forgetting the golden dreams of youth, is 
 concerned chiefly with practical questions of sociology 
 and government arising out of a vast empire — his talk 
 is of turf -cutting on the mountain-side, the kettle on 
 
32 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 the hob, the green boreen, or twilight try sting-places. 
 Has not this rugged but not ignoble kinsman of the 
 Aryan family of languages still a part to bear among 
 his lofty brethren? 
 
 "The cloud of mortal destiny. 
 Others will front it fearlessly. 
 But who, like him, will put it by ? '* 
 
 The best friend of the Teanga could not wish for him 
 a more beneficent mission than that of interpreting, by 
 means of his songs and tales, the life and thought of 
 human beings living in the bosom of elemental nature. 
 His presence with us, meanwhile, excites a special 
 and pathetic interest, inasmuch as several learned 
 doctors have pronounced that he cannot live much 
 longer, and that the energy which he now displays is 
 only a last exhibition of vitality, ere he sinks into the 
 final coma which precedes the easy death of the old. 
 His admirers, it is true, vociferously scout this verdict 
 and predict a glorious future for the Teanga, full of 
 all the inspirations and ardours of youth and fortune; 
 nay, they assert that Beurla will have sunk into 
 dishonour while a golden age is still opening out its 
 vistas before the rival whom he sought to exterminate. 
 It is very doubtful, however, whether those who 
 indulge these fancies are the best friends of the old 
 gentleman, whose infirmities and peculiarities are 
 more suited to a life of retirement and rusticity. Those 
 intellectually desperate men, who would hurry him 
 into an impossible position as champion of political 
 and religious parties, misconceive entirely the true 
 nature of his mission, and, as might be expected, such 
 persons are for the most part ignorant of the old man 
 personally. It is, at all events, permissible to hope 
 
THE GRAND OLD TONGUE 33 
 
 tKat under the care of the good friends whom he has 
 found in his decHne, he may Hve on now without 
 much losing ground for an indefinite number of years. 
 Heartily let us pray that he may do so ! For his 
 presence sheds an old-world distinction over the whole 
 island which was once his own, and to every hill and 
 stream of which he bestowed in the morning of his 
 youth a name. 
 
 1901. 
 
THE IRISH MYTHOLOGICAL CYCLE"* 
 
 
 IF the Irish race had succeeded poHtically, 
 the old wonder- world of myth and legend 
 might have been lost from memory more 
 completely than it has been. It is quite 
 possible — nay, judging by all analogies 
 it is almost certain — that the excitement of political 
 swccess, and the new forms of life and energy, and it 
 may be of belief, brought into existence by it, would 
 have been more unfavourable to the preservation of 
 ancient memories than were the Danish invasions or 
 the Anglo-Norman conquest. The two nations of 
 modern Europe which have had the most conspicuous 
 destinies, England and France, are those which have 
 most completely lost sight of primitive beliefs and 
 have no longer the material from which to recreate 
 them. England has to interrogate Iceland as to those 
 early divinities after whom it still names the days of 
 the week, and France is somewhat similarly indebted 
 to Ireland. So far, then, as the preservation of the 
 ancient traditions of the Irish Celt are concerned, it 
 would perhaps be hard to decide whether the Danish 
 and Anglo-Norman invasions did more damage by 
 vsrantonly destroying documents than service by 
 arresting the development of the nation on its own 
 lines : for whatever turn an independent Irish 
 
 * The Irish Mythological Cycle. By M. d'Arbois de Jubainville 
 Translated by Richard Irvine Best. Dublin : O'Donoghue and 
 Co., 1903. 
 
•• IRISH MYTHOLOGICAL CYCLE " 35 
 civilisation would have taken, we may feel pretty sure 
 that it would have passed through periods in which 
 primitive beliefs would have meant as little to it as 
 did the ** Lay of Beowulf " to England in the time of 
 Bunyan, or the Breton romances to France in the time 
 of Voltaire. History is the record of those 
 transformations by which, in working out its destiny, 
 a nation continually dies unto itself. Nations have not 
 histories nor men destinies, if they cannot now and 
 then sacrifice precedents to principles. And in fact 
 Ireland has never been a wholly unprogressive 
 country. For several centuries, indeed, no great 
 European movement has influenced ostensibly the 
 character of Irish nationality; but there was one such 
 movement in which Ireland shared to the full as much 
 as any European country, and that was the monastic 
 movement of the Christian Church at the close of 
 antiquity and the commencement of the Middle Ages. 
 It was Christianity, so freely received in ancient Erin 
 at a time when there was no external compulsion upon 
 it to receive what it did not like, which divided Ireland 
 for ever from its childhood. 
 
 What kind of beliefs were those displaced in Irelemd 
 by Christianity? For goi answer to this inquiry, the 
 ordinary Irish reader, until recent years, has had to 
 rely on those unsatisfactory chapters with which Irish 
 historians, since the eleventh century, have introduced 
 the story of their race. This spurious Cel to-Hebraic 
 mythology comes down to us from a time when 
 Ireland read the Bible with uncritical faith, and the 
 bardic historiographers scanned the Hebrew records 
 of the origin of the human race, assuredly with more 
 excuse than our modern ** Anglo-Israelites," but with 
 
 D 
 
36 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 results far more perplexing to those who would now 
 sift in these accounts the genuine from the fictitious. 
 It was in the eleventh century, according to M. 
 d'Arbois de Jubainville — the century in which the 
 ** Book of Invasions " was compiled — that a ** school 
 of mythology " arose, which set itself to adapt the 
 floating traditions of the Celt to the unimpeachable 
 authority of the Bible. The gods of the pagan Irish, 
 who still roamed at large in the imagination of the 
 people, were called in to give a last account of them- 
 selves to that race, in respect to which they had, 
 perhaps, taken their duties somewhat lightly, and 
 which had now adopted the essentially iconoclastic 
 religion of righteousness. The Irish gods were more 
 fortunate in the destiny meted out to them than were 
 their august kindred, the gods of Greece, when, in 
 the panic of which Milton has sung, they vacated 
 their shrines on the advent of the Christian era. 
 Instead of transforming their former gods into demons, 
 the Irish mythographers, following an appropriate text 
 in the sixth chapter of Genesis, agreed to regard them 
 as ** the mighty men which were of old, men of 
 renown." And henceforth, in the ancient history of 
 Ireland, it became hard to distinguish gods from men. 
 The Tuatha De Danann and the Fomorians seem not 
 less to take part in human fortunes than to direct them, 
 and the squabbles of divinities break in on the honest 
 wars of mankind. To distinguish the mythological 
 element in these old tales, and re-fashion from them 
 something like a system, was a task which awaited 
 the modem science of comparative mythology; and 
 though it is probably vain to expect anything more 
 certain than suggestive speculation as the result of 
 
•• IRISH MYTHOLOOICAL CYCLE '^ 37 
 
 such inquiries, M. d'Arbois, in the work now trans- 
 lated by Mr. R. 1. Best, no doubt indicates once for 
 all the most likely ways of getting at the truth. Mr. 
 Best, indeed, deserves the thanks of the Irish reading 
 PtJdHc for having made generally accessible a work 
 which helps so much toward setting our ancient 
 history on a true foundation. 
 
 The ordinary reader will caie less to hear from 
 M. d'Arbois how comparative mythology ** equates " 
 Tethra with Kronos, or Ith with Prometheus, than 
 to learn quite generally with what views of man and 
 nature the great race of ancient Celts looked forth on 
 the spectacle of life and destiny. What vital per- 
 ception of truth was theirs, or what were their errors? 
 First of all, the Celts appear to have been always a 
 Tace of implicit believers. There is no trace of such 
 ''philosophic doubt*' as appears in the ancient 
 writings of the Hebrews, the Greeks, or the Anglo- 
 Saxons. Where, as with the Hebrews, the belief in 
 another life, for example, arises as an explanation of 
 the injustices and imperfections of this, a fundamental 
 doubt as to the whole matter is evident, and the 
 reward of the righteous becomes an object of prayer 
 and hope. That is a philosophic faith, or a truth 
 conceived by inference. But what distinguished the 
 Celt was the vision — for it was nothing less — of 
 another world interpenetrating this, seen at times 
 with the bodily eyes and even journeyed unto with 
 the bodily feet. It might be said that such articles of 
 belief as the repayment of debts cifter death, or that 
 the dead warrior will use the weapons buried with 
 him, are but the crudities of savage minds; but this 
 belief in the present reality of another world has 
 
38 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 remained with the Celts up to times when no one 
 can say they were savages. Christianity did not come 
 in Ireland as an answer to men's doubts about the 
 soul or about immortality. *' I would treat them as 
 fools," says Valerius Maximus, in a passage quoted 
 by M. d'Arbois, ** if these wearers of breeches did 
 not hold the same beliefs in the immortality of the 
 soul as Pythagoras professed in his philosopher's 
 mantle." And with various other writers of the 
 Romsoi world Celtic beliefs are alluded to with more 
 respect than are those of the Jews. Christianity in 
 Ireland would hardly have found itself, in the 7th and 
 8th centuries, endowed with a missionary vocation, 
 had the Celt not been originally prepared by tempera- 
 ment and habit of mind to accept it. Yet it was not 
 as a rule of life, such as Christianity appears to us 
 now pre-eminently to be, that it was so completely 
 accepted in Ireland, but as an authentic account of 
 that other world, in which the Celt never doubted. 
 A religion, in the sense of an explanation of life, 
 the Celts did not require, for they had that explanation 
 already in a belief which was implicit with them. As 
 another writer on Celtic subjects, M. Le Brauz, says, 
 ** The future life, regarded as a sanction of the present 
 life, was not, in truth, a Celtic conception." 
 
 It is reasonable to look for some kinship between 
 the primitive beliefs of a people and the characteristics 
 revealed in its literature and history when it has 
 become one of those ministers of destiny called nations. 
 Perhaps M. d'Arbois is not too fanciful when he 
 Rnds in that pantheistic poem of Amairgen — assuredly 
 Dne of the most venerable remains of Celtic cmtiquity 
 — preserved in thp Book of Leinster, the germ of the 
 
*• IRISH MYTHOLOGICAL CYCLE '^ 39 
 
 philosophy of Scotus Erigena. In the same way some 
 have seen the germ of the dark self-questionings of 
 Hamlet in the speech of an Anglo-Saxon chief quoted 
 by Bede. When Paulinus brought Christianity to 
 Northumberland and King Edwin consulted his wise 
 men, one of them said : *' O king, the life of man 
 while on earth, compared to that which is unknown 
 to us, seems to me as when a sparrow flies swiftly 
 through the hall where thou art sitting with thy thanes 
 in the winter time, with the warm fire lighted on 
 the hearth, but the icy rain-storm without. The 
 sparrow entering at one door flies quickly out at the 
 other; while it is within it is untouched by the storm, 
 but after a little space of calm it flies away, and 
 passing out of the storm into the storm again, is lost 
 to thy sight. So the life of man is seen for a little 
 while, but what follows it, or what went before, we 
 know not. Therefore, if this new teaching shall bring 
 us anything more certain, it seems to deserve to be 
 followed.*' Nothing could better make us feel, by 
 force of contrast, one distinguishing peculiarity of the 
 Celtic mind, the absence from it of the questioning 
 spirit. When Scotus Erigena himself became a 
 reasoning philosopher he passed out of the ken of 
 the Celtic world. To this day it remains the charac- 
 teristic of those writers whom we call distinctively 
 Celtic, that they live by their imagination rather than 
 by their intellect. A^nd who shall say where vision 
 ends and where credulity begins? Perhaps the Celt 
 is right in regarding doubt as an intellectual limit 
 beyond which he dares not, or does not care to, tread. 
 It must be said, however, that the habit of subordi- 
 natinsr intellect to imagination has brought the Celt 
 
40 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 neither blessedness nor greatness. His visionary dis- 
 position is partial to that conservatism which has so 
 greatly helped his enemies. So long as the other 
 world lies within call and prospect, there will never 
 be any active instinct to redress the wrongs of this. 
 Had the Celt ever permitted himself to doubt, had he 
 called in the aid of reason, his history would have 
 been different. It is when the wild suspicion crosses 
 the brain of the citizen that after all the religions 
 have been deceiving him with their promises, and are 
 in a conspiracy with the whole mundane order to 
 repress him, that the mob turns to a tiger, and the 
 peasant looks across the field to the chateau, asking 
 himself why horses should fare better than he. 
 Happily in Ireland — where signs of change are not 
 wanting — there is as little prospect of revolutionary 
 horrors as anywhere, though what have hitherto been 
 accounted the permanent characteristics of the Celt 
 may become hard to recognise in new trans- 
 formations. 
 
 1903. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CELTIC 
 MOVEMENT* 
 
 ^OW many men carry into middle age, or 
 even very far into early manhood, a 
 concern for literature ? It is unfortunately 
 true that, while almost every man con- 
 tinues throughout life to require at odd 
 moments, or perhaps at regular intervals, ** some- 
 thing to read," an interest in literature, properly 
 so-called, is confined among those who have never 
 wholly abandoned the dream of doing something in 
 it themselves. An avowal, not necessarily quite 
 sincere or without sarcastic reference, of being '* com- 
 monplace,'* is very often the curt apology which a 
 man makes nowadays for not being what is called 
 ** literary." ** I am a plain man," he says — ^which is 
 only a somewhat deceitful way of claiming that he has 
 the mass of mankind with him, and that literature 
 if it is good for anything should not cease to interest 
 the mass of mankind. And in this he is, no doubt, 
 right : only the fault is not so entirely as he conceives 
 the incompetence of the poets. It is for history and 
 progress, doubtless, to bring about moments in which 
 the generality of men shall hearken to the dreams of 
 poets, and in which the poets shall hear through the 
 din of actual life the music of humanity. Between 
 
 * Idms of Good and Evil, By W. B. Yeata. London : A. H. 
 Bullen, 1903. 
 
42 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 such moments there is perhaps nothing for it but that 
 the poet shall dream his dreeon and the ordinary man 
 thresh out the concrete problems of civic life, with all 
 the ingenuity, integrity, and good sense he can apply 
 to them. 
 
 Mr. W. B. Yeats, whose career is cast in a period 
 in which there is no such rapprochement of poetry 
 and life, but rather — in spite of the protest of Mr. 
 Rudyard Kipling — an increasing divergence since the 
 days of Tennyson and Whitman, has just published 
 a book of essays in which, considering the influence 
 of its distinguished author, it is perhaps permissible 
 to look for an authoritative statement of the philosophy 
 of the ** Celtic movement.'* The breach between 
 poetry and modern life he holds to be absolute and 
 permanent. There are some anomalies in the book, 
 such, for example, as appreciative references to Walt 
 Whitman, yet the general argument is clear and con- 
 sistent. The reign of tradition, which had been dis- 
 turbed by the Renaissance, was overthrown by the 
 French Revolution, which was the inauguration of 
 the reign of reason. Now the awakening of reason 
 (this is Blake's and Mr. Yeats' dogma) brings with 
 it the obscuring of imagination, and the arts, being 
 the products of imagination wrought upon by the 
 " memory of mankind," cannot live under the reign 
 of reason, but only where the reason sleeps : for all 
 art is an emanation from the *' memory of mankind," 
 the ** dwelling-house of symbols," which moves men 
 through the imagination. Let the arts, then, proposes 
 Mr. Yeats, take refuge where tradition has never been 
 disturbed, among peasants 2md primitive people, who 
 live close to the "great memory," amid traditions 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF CELTIC MOVEMENT 43 
 
 which *' carry them back thousands of years.'* Leave 
 to the ** middle class " its Longfellow and its Mrs. 
 Hemans, its history, science, politics, philosophy, and 
 lodge among kindly and credulous country folk, who 
 see fairies and have not lost the use of charms and 
 simples, and in whose folklore we see the lineaments 
 of an eternal and ancestral art. Such in its naked pre- 
 sentment is Mr. Yeats' theory, in which one can see 
 certain similarities to that of Wordsworth and of 
 Tolstoi, the distinctive part here being the abandon- 
 ment of the ordinary man, so to say, to his fate, and 
 the contemptuous repudiation of all humanitarian 
 ideals. 
 
 Mr. Yeats has perhaps done as much as anyone 
 at the present time to bring home to us the significance 
 of folklore and primitive literature, before, it may be, 
 they pass away for ever; and in this respect he may 
 claim for his work in literature the commendation of 
 Mencius, who said, ** To gain the peasantry is the 
 way to become the son of heaven." The peasant with 
 his folklore represents the unreclaimed part of our 
 nature, which we call the superstitious, and which 
 though unreclaimed is not the less real. People ask 
 us do we believe in ghosts, a question to which only 
 that submerged and subconscious part of us, which 
 stirs in us as it will, can make answer. So it is with 
 the belief in fairies, the shrunken gods of ancient 
 Ireland, which still lingers amongst the Irish peasantry 
 — a vaporous and elusive belief, withdrawing from 
 the interrogation of the most friendly into denial or 
 deprecation of itself. These peasants are partly sub- 
 merged in a world of which we know little, nay, they 
 know little of it themselves. The ostensible part of 
 
44 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 their nature, the man who speaks to you at his door 
 or on the road, does not believe in fairies, but the 
 submerged and subconscious part of him does, so 
 that he is, perhaps, sufficiently sincere in the denial 
 of his faith for the cock to forbear to crow. Still we 
 must not close our eyes to that defect of the savage 
 mind, or the peasant mind when entirely unawakened 
 by thought — the lack of perspective — which makes his 
 folklore worthless to thought either as art or as testi- 
 incvriy. The supernatural effects in his tales are a 
 confusion of planes. He views the landscape and 
 the world of his imagination as it were on a flat 
 surface. The stars are hung up in the trees. He 
 cEinnot distinguish between the world of phenomena 
 and the world of ** bodiless essences " to which 
 thought admits us. 
 
 A race loses sight of primitive beliefs much as the 
 growing child discards its playthings and its dolls. 
 How exactly he grew out of them or what became of 
 them, the grown person cannot well rememiber; yet 
 that he did so somehow is no less certain than that 
 he can still recall and to some extent regret the power 
 once his to animate bodies stuffed with bran or tin 
 soldiers. Every tribe and every nation emerging out 
 of dim antiquity has lost or destroyed its dolls, and 
 with them a whole world of beliefs and legends, the 
 recollection of which continues for a long time to 
 afford a livelier impulse to the poet than the business 
 and politics of a mature civilisation. The wars of a 
 nation when it was an obscure tribe were, perhaps, 
 comparatively speaking, toy battles; yet though 
 modern warfare may afford wider scope for real 
 heroism, self -sacrifice and skill, the poetic imagination 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF CELTIC MOVEMENT 45 
 cannot invest its naked reality with the old atmosphere 
 of romance. In religious matters also the childhood 
 of nations and individuals believes in powers and 
 presences, in giants, fairies and hob-goblins, and not 
 in a law governing life and conduct; and the poet, 
 who represents in a nation far on into its full maturity, 
 its early beliefs and make-believe reality, shuns in 
 these days the paths of actuality, and seeks the twi- 
 light haunts of memory and shadows. And thus 
 poetry, though treated with indulgence and considera- 
 tion, falls in our own time into some contempt : the 
 poet insisting that these memories and shadows »»*-» 
 the only real, or at least the most real things, and the 
 ordinary man, when the poet is out of earshot,, 
 allowing his opinion on the matter to explode in noisy 
 and good-humoured merriment. The appearance of 
 a poet wholly on the side of the ordinary man — Mr. 
 Yeats' contemporary, Mr. Kipling — is notable at this 
 juncture. Yet there are realities hidden away in the 
 life of each man; and unless the poet can resolutely 
 fix on these, affirming to those who prefer the excite- 
 ments of the market-place to the dreams of the study » 
 a reality deeper than either, he must seem to the 
 practical man much as a child floating bulrushes on 
 the duck-pond to the mariner whose " beard in many 
 a tempest hath been shook." 
 
 Is it true, as Mr. Yeats says it is, that city life, 
 commerce, and ** middle class " vulgarity kill out the 
 visionary faculty, which men once had on the moun- 
 tain-side and the plain, or in the infant towns? On 
 the contrary, everything seems to show that it is in 
 culminating stages of civilisation that magical and 
 visionary practices, such as those described in this 
 
46 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 book, come uppermost. The poet returns to nature, 
 but the natural element of one possessed of abnormal 
 powers seems to be the welter of an abnormal civili- 
 sation. Among the stalwart farmers who made Rome 
 or the burgesses of early London, whom William 
 Morris loved to imagine on the wharves of an uncon- 
 taminated Thames, we hear little of seances, 
 hypnotism and the like; it is in imperial Rome, in 
 Nineveh and Babylon, in modern London and Paris, 
 in the vast urbaoi populations of India and China, 
 that we hear of such things, and if our towns increase 
 so as to suck up all that remains of peasant life it 
 may be expected that this product of city life may 
 increase proportionately. Indeed, one might say that 
 it is among the esprits homes of the ** middle class " 
 that it has its chief vogue. Tertullian acknowledges 
 that the growth of Christianity was greatly furthered 
 by the general interest taken in the spiritualistic 
 phenomena with which it was at first associated. In 
 England, the religion of the masses throughout the 
 large towns is more and more infected with these 
 practices; so wide of the mark is it to condemn city 
 life and the ** middle class " on these grounds. But, 
 indeed, in the tone adopted by Mr. Yeats towards the 
 ** middle class,*' which is simply the mass of man- 
 kind, we can gain some idea of how dangerous it 
 would be for mankind that any section of it should 
 achieve transcendental power or knowledge, and how 
 wise are those Powers who so obstinately withhold 
 their secrets from men until they have graduated in 
 faith, hope and charity. 1903. 
 
THE BEST IRISH POEM 
 
 ** As certain also of your own poets have saidV 
 
 \T the beginning of the nineteenth century 
 a name rose into prominence in England 
 which was a baleful star to poetry, a 
 name at which Eros paused in his 
 ranging and grew pale, recognising a 
 threatened end to that great period of his apotheosis 
 during which he had become the inseparable com- 
 panion of the nine muses and been held equally in 
 honour with them — the name of Malthus. The modern 
 study of literature has taught us to see every literary 
 movement in relation to the philosophical theories 
 £Uid social changes of the time, and we might almost 
 say that the first formulation of the Malthusian theory 
 — or the theory that population tends to increase 
 at a rate in excess of the means of subsistence — was 
 the signal for poetry to betake itself to the interpre- 
 tation of nature and of the individual life, and no 
 longer to be the mouthpiece of those warlike and 
 reproductive instincts which make for mighty nations. 
 For the poet is of all men most susceptible to any 
 changes in the intellectual climate of his age, and the 
 slightest cloud in the metaphysical or speculative sky 
 often causes a fatal rift in his lute. The poets were at 
 once up in arms against Malthus : Shelley, Coleridge, 
 Sou they, Byron, all protested against this cruel demon- 
 stration by a Church of England clergyman of the 
 
48 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 blindness of Cupid. ** I had rather be damned with 
 Plato," said Shelley, ** than go to heaven with 
 Malthus!" *' This abominable tenet," exclaimed 
 Coleridge, *' disgraceful to man as a Christian, a 
 philosopher, a statesman, or a citizen !" But that the 
 arguments of Mai thus had struck home, at least so far 
 as the poets were concerned, is clear from their subse- 
 quent fortunes. Already had come the epoch-making 
 defection of Wordsworth and the almost complete 
 change in the venue of poetry brought about by his 
 withdrawal from civic life to his native mountains; 
 and in the next generation we find the poets either 
 faithful to the magnificent prospectus of the new poetry 
 which he prefixed to The Excursion or else battling 
 pathetically with theological and sociological spectres, 
 and endeavouring to lay the hateful ghost of doubt. 
 It is only historic visionaries like William Morris or 
 l>elated jongleurs like Swinburne, who adhere obsti- 
 nately to the old themes, as though the sun of a new 
 era were not already well up in the sky. Generally 
 speaking, in spite of the reassurances of such writers 
 as Henry George, the poets have never quite got over 
 the depression caused by the '* theory " of Mai thus, 
 and it would seem as though the reproduction of one 
 generation by another were a process which must now 
 go forward unattended by the gratulatory chorus of 
 the poets : indeed it is hardly among those naturally 
 selected for the continuation of the species that they 
 find now-a-days either their chief audience or 
 inspiration. One and all, the poets turn with an 
 increasing aversion from the noisy and unlovely centres 
 of population to the calm and solitude of nature; 
 obeying an instinct perhaps not essentially different 
 
THE BEST IRISH POEM 49 
 
 from that which drove the Christian ancestors of the 
 modern world into the wilderness. 
 
 The ** population question '* meant a different thing 
 to that poet of County Clare who in 1780 wrote what 
 has been called *' the most tasteful composition in 
 modern Irish," The Midnight Court ( Cuirt an 
 Mheadhoin Oidhche). The Munster poets of the 
 eighteenth century, in whose idealism there is none of 
 the pessimistic alienation from the joy of life of the 
 later English poets, produced a literature which has 
 not yet found its critical interpreter; an office which, 
 we may wonder, is not taken over by someone like 
 Mr. Stephen Gwynn or Mr. T. W. RoUeston, whose 
 knowledge of Gaelic enables them to enjoy in the 
 original poetry for which such high claims are made 
 as that of Owen Roe O'SuUivan, Egan O'Rahilly, etc. 
 We need not wonder that the penal times produced 
 poets whose main themes were wine, women and 
 joviality, any more than we need wonder that Cal- 
 vinistic Scotland produced Burns. Perhaps, indeed, 
 the dear Irishman is never so unconvincing as when 
 he talks, as he is so fond of doing, of the horrible events 
 of the penal times, as if they were entirely undeserved, 
 or as if, from his own point of view, they did not prove 
 a blessing in disguise. But for the penal regulations, 
 Ireland would doubtless have been, at the time of 
 O'Connell, as much an English-speaking country as 
 Scotland. The modern Gaelic movement is in direct 
 descent from the battle of the Boyne, which threw the 
 Celtic world back on itself, and arrested that disin- 
 tegration of the old language which was already far 
 advanced. The penal regulations were a very mild 
 form of that discipline to which every race which has 
 
50 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 ever done anything in the world has been at some time 
 subjected, and the lack of which till then in Ireland is 
 probably the cause of its having missed hitherto both 
 that political and literary destiny for which the Irish- 
 man, both physically and mentally, is so well fitted. 
 As it was, that period proved, so far as matters could at 
 so late a date be mended, his salvation. With nothing 
 to do but to keep quiet, Gaelic Ireland at length 
 achieved in its own despite something like unity. The 
 population steadily increased, and whereas at the 
 beginning of the seventeenth century there were only 
 about half a million Gaelic speakers in Ireland, by the 
 end of the eighteenth century a big nation had come 
 into existence, which has been the main problem of 
 the British Empire ever since. As regards literature, 
 this period was, by all accounts, the golden age of 
 Irish poetry. Not only did many of the mediaeval tales 
 and poems then receive their final shape, but a sudden 
 expansion of form and metre brought into the poems 
 of the Celts the passion and genius of their melodies. 
 During the ** Augustan age " of English literature 
 poems were written in Ireland which have far more 
 in common with later developments of English poetry 
 — with poems, for example, like Shelley's When the 
 Lamp is Shattered or George Meredith's Love in the 
 Valley — than anything produced by the '* wits " of 
 the London coffee-houses. These poets, however, 
 were only strong in the expression of the primordial 
 instincts. When he " begins to think," the Celtic 
 poet is not so much, as Goethe said of Byron, *' a 
 child," as a nasty bigot. The stock-in-trade images 
 of unregenerate Irish nationalism are all of his 
 creation : Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the Soggarth Aroon» 
 
THE BEST IRISH POEM 51 
 
 the Saxon tyrant, the jolly good fellow. Ironical, 
 sensual, gregarious, and too clever by half, the Irish 
 poet enables one to understand how tough a problem 
 was presented in the Irish temperament to evangelists 
 like Ignatius Loyola and Wesley, who both entertained 
 the vain ambition of repeating in Ireland the legendary 
 success of Patrick. 
 
 Yet that there is no natural limitation in the Irish 
 mind which disqualifies it for ** dealing boldly with 
 substantial things," or for free speculation, is 
 sufficiently proved in the poem already mentioned, 
 The Midnight Court of Brian Merriman, now 
 published and translated in the Zeitschrijt jiir 
 Celtische Philologie by L. C. Stern. The steady 
 increase in the population had already begun to over- 
 flow in that stream of emigration to America and to 
 the large towns in Ireland and Great Britain, which, 
 with another cause mentioned in the poem, deprived 
 the country of its best and most enterprising young 
 men. What remedy for this evil? is the question 
 discussed by Merriman. The form is the mediaeval 
 Aisling, or vision. The poem opens with a fine 
 description of daybreak on a summer morning in the 
 county Clare. 
 
 ' My heart rejoiced as I looked on Loch Greine, 
 The fields, the soil, and the width of the skies, 
 The mountains lying serene and lovely. 
 One over the other uplifting their tops. 
 Dried up though it be, the heart rejoices. 
 Spent and nerveless and filled with pains; 
 The embittered hungerer, owning nothing, 
 Looks forth for a little while over the woods /" 
 £ 
 
52 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 Wandering on until exhausted the poet lies down 
 and falls asleep. A woman of giant form appears to 
 him in a dream and upbraids him with his sloth. 
 Does he not see how the people are hurrying to the 
 Court, no court of robbers who have ** sworn on the 
 Bible the destruction of the poor," but a court of the 
 queen and high dignitaries of the fairies who befriend 
 Munster, and who are met to hear the complaints of 
 ** the poor, the good, and of women.'* There is a 
 want of men in Erin. The high spirit of the old race 
 has gone over the seas, and the young men are doing 
 nothing to replace it. Without further parley the 
 poet, as helpless as Chaucer in the claws of the eagle 
 in the House oj Fame, is seized and borne over the 
 valleys to the court at Feakle. 
 
 He there finds a company assembled in a stately 
 room lighted with torches (it is midnight in his dream), 
 and standing at a table^ with tear-stained face and 
 excited gesture, a maiden is laying before Aoibhell, 
 the Queen, the sad case of the women of Erin, who 
 through neither choice nor fault of their own have to 
 live ** like black nuns." It is only the old, not young 
 and proper men, who will marry. She enumerates 
 her own charms, and describes without reserve her 
 frustrated efforts to secure a mate, urging that some 
 compulsion be brought to bear on the young men. In 
 answer to this an old man rises and pours forth vindic- 
 tive abuse of the women of Erin, which he illustrates 
 by an account of his own mesalliance. The young 
 men of Erin, he contends, only show their prudence 
 in refusing to marry; and he makes a grumbling 
 allusion to the high fee (three guineas and a crown, as 
 the German editor reminds us) which the poor maK> 
 
THE BEST IRISH POEM 53 
 
 had then to pay the Church for the privilege. But if 
 it be true, as he admits, that the '* race of men is 
 degenerating on the soil of green and delightful Erin," 
 there is an ** easy way of peopling it once again with 
 heroes," without the *' useless and meaningless " help 
 of the priest. Abolish marriage. Let noble blood 
 combine with peasant vigour to produce a worthier 
 race. Proclaim through the land freedom to young 
 and old. Such a law will breed again wit and sinew 
 in the Gael, and the men of the land will have '* chest, 
 back, and fists like Goll." 
 
 The reply of the first speaker to this is serious and 
 crushing : 
 " God willed that the mother should not be jorsak^n. 
 
 In women s behooj have the prophets ruled!*' 
 She defends the delinquent in the old man's case in 
 language which drops out of the decorous pages of the 
 German review, but is led on by his proposal to 
 contrast such dotards as he with the fine young men 
 who are lost to the country in the Church. *' My 
 heart is filled with grief, and in perplexity I wonder 
 at one thing, what has exempted the clergy from the 
 bond of marriage? For languishing maidens it is a 
 sad sight, their muscular build and comeliness, jovial 
 countenance, and sparkling smile. . . . They live in 
 luxury at table, with comfort and money for drink and 
 pleasure; they have beds of down and nourishing 
 meats, with cakes and comfits and wine and jesting; 
 they are trusty and able and young and sociable, and 
 as we all know, made of flesh and blood like our- 
 selves !" 
 
 ** I say nothing," she goes on, "of the awkward 
 chatterbox, the gouty grumbler, the disconsolate 
 
54 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 booby, no, my business is with the simple and stout 
 fellows who snore and do no work. I think certainly 
 that many might still take orders, and I allow them ! 
 We must not, in justice, hang the whole company, 
 condemning all to the rope, nor would I sink the ship 
 for the sake of one man. Many of them, indeed, are 
 no good, and many are unregulated and not to be 
 trusted, niggardly, unsympathetic, without virtue, 
 rough and cold, hateful to women ! But the most of 
 them are better, filled with love and of a noble nature. 
 By their help we often attain a thing of value, a jewel, 
 a cask, or grain. Their virtues are extolled, I know 
 it, and many a clever and proper deed of theirs. 
 Often, too, in the country have I heard a whisper 
 running round that the gentlemen have their love- 
 affairs." 
 
 ** A sorrow on the land it is, and a wrong to women, 
 this senseless obligation of the clergy. A bitter grief 
 it is for Ireland, wTiat we have lost by this aimless law. 
 Wise Queen ! I lay before you my complaint — the 
 law which binds the priests ! My little confidence is 
 shaken, I am as one who sees not — enlighten me, and 
 tell me, for you know it, the speech of the prophet, 
 the royal apostle's living word ! Where is the rule 
 ordained by the Creator, of the killing of the flesh in 
 the priestly tonsure? Saint Paul said not, as I think, 
 to shun marriage, but rather lust; to leave your 
 kindred, however high you be, and life-long to cleave 
 to the wife. But it were a vain thing for one such as 
 I to expound to you the sense of the law." 
 
 Finally, the queen pronounces judgment. She 
 finds a true bill against the men of Erin, and hence- 
 forth whoever of them is twenty-one and unmarried 
 
THE BEST IRISH POEM 55 
 
 is to be handed over to be whipped. As regards the 
 remedy proposed by the plaintiff, she says: ** Speak 
 it softly and tell it not above a whisper, your hand 
 over your mouth, for talk is risky : just at present you 
 need not disturb those charming gentlemen — it is 
 coming to marriage with them, you will see it yet 1 
 The day will arrive of the great dispensation, the Pope 
 himself will put his hand to it. He will find that this 
 community is hurtful to the land, and soon you will 
 have free for the marriage-bond those fine fellows 
 who take your fancy!** The poet now finds himself 
 to his discomfiture the object of general attention. He 
 is hailed forward to the table by his conductor, and 
 convicted of being thirty and unmarried. In a clever 
 and amusing passage he gets in an account of himself, 
 his personal appearance and habits, his popularity 
 with the gentry (Merriman had acted as tutor in 
 several houses), his musical gifts — it is plain that he 
 deserves no mercy. They decide to make a terrible 
 example of him, and sentence him to be flayed alive ! 
 The date of this important decision is being called out 
 in the court when the poet — awakes. 
 
 It would be unbecoming in us to add anything to 
 the judicious words of Aoibhell in summing up this 
 delicate case. The vexed question or a celibate 
 clergy, is it not discussed exhaustively in the pages of 
 Lea and of Lecky? The poet who delivered himself 
 of this powerful piece of social criticism was himself 
 little of a reformer, and his poem, which continued to 
 be treasured in the memory of Gaelic speakers till well 
 toward the end of the nineteenth century, does not 
 appear to have caused any particular scandal. Would 
 this have been so had he written his poem in English ? 
 
56 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 If not, the inference is that EngUsh was even then 
 the accepted language of the people, for the lauiguage 
 in which ideas have play and influence is surely the 
 language of its thought and literature. Or was it that 
 freedom of thought and speculation was natural to 
 the Irish in their Gaelic speech, but that in presence 
 of the hated English they maintained an appearance 
 of rigid and conventional orthodoxy ? Merriman lived 
 on till 1805, in which year his death is recorded in a 
 Limerick newspaper : ** On Saturday morning, after 
 a few hours' illness, in Old Clare Street, Mr. Brian 
 Merriman, Teacher of Mathematics, etc." 
 
 1905. 
 
ST. PATRICK ON THE STAGE 
 
 IF St. Patrick were only a saint, there would 
 be little more to say about him. When 
 virtue has reached the degree of saint- 
 ship, or even of extreme heroism, it 
 passes necessarily beyond the ken of 
 modern imagination, which has not as yet evolved its 
 own ideals of moral perfection; so that it is not by 
 the saints, or by such spotless heroes as Perceval and 
 Bayard, that our minds are dominated nowadays, but 
 by the more or less equivocal characters of such beings 
 as Hamlet, Don Quixote, Faust, or Don Juan. Not 
 only indeed can we no longer portray saints, but when 
 we undertake to portray devils and malefactors, we 
 find ourselves making heroes of them. We all know 
 the effect produced by Milton's rendering of the myth 
 in Genesis. Having learned to know Satan, we 
 conceived a certain liking for him ; we saw his position, 
 and how inevitable it was that a personality like his, 
 fretting itself out among the supple-kneed seraphim, 
 would come sooner or later into collision with a deity 
 so jealous of individuality as Jehovah. Satan fell, 
 and, at least according to Milton, everything that was 
 the least interesting in heaven fell with him; and the 
 practical moral of Milton's whole experiment is that 
 we moderns are as yet far from being qualified to 
 treat sympathetically of celestial matters, and that 
 until we can state Jehovah's side of the case with a 
 little more sympathetic insight than Milton shows. 
 
58 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 and a little more sincerity of aspiration for the colour- 
 less round of a heavenly day, we would do well not to 
 enter into rivalry as to these things with the 
 conceptions of past civilizations, which gave them- 
 selves up to spiritual contemplation as we to mundane 
 energy and desire. If Patrick, then, were only a saint, 
 we should not think much about him nowadays : long 
 ere this he would have faded into the inane with St. 
 Andrew, St. George, and St. David. Patrick, how- 
 ever, has a literary vitality quite peculiar to himself 
 among patron saints; and his figure, so far from 
 shrinking to insignificance under the application of 
 the higher criticism, stands out all the more impres- 
 sively and honourably when his story is told as it 
 probably happened — as, for instance, Aubrey De 
 Vere in some of his idylls has told it. His fame as a 
 man still keeps alive the marvellous history which 
 made him the theme of Marie de France in the twelfth 
 century, and of the Trouveres, and in the seventeenth 
 century of Calderon. Calderon's drama is without 
 doubt Patrick's most distinguished appearance in 
 literature. In this play, however, Calderon has placed 
 the saint under a dramatic disadvantage by introducing 
 as his spiritual proteg6 a reprobate of the finest 
 Castilian quality, Luis Enius, whose psychological 
 experience so fascinated Shelley. No saint, indeed, 
 could compete on the Spanish stage with an imper- 
 sonation so congenial to it as the ** Irish soldier " who, 
 having enjoyed every form of wickedness, insists at 
 the last moment on enjoying heaven as well. 
 
 During the highest development of the Spanish 
 drama, it was still possible for a saint to appear 
 without loss of dignity on the stage, as he had done in 
 
ST. PATRICK ON THE STAGE 59 
 
 the old miracle-plays ; for the Spanish drama, like the 
 Greek, but unlike the English, had not cut itself adrift 
 from its religious origins, and so remained a far more 
 truly national institution than the English drama ever 
 tecame after the Reformation. Indeed, it is hard to 
 say what might have become of the English drama 
 when, owing to the Reformation, it had forfeited a 
 permanent source of romantic interest in the 
 mystical and miraculous, but for the accident, as it 
 were, that the '* higher education," lately inaugurated 
 at the universities, had already begun to yield its 
 unfailing crop from year to year of youths whom it 
 has incapacitated for gaining a livelihood in the usual 
 ways, and that among these were certain intellectual 
 adventurers who were driven by want of pence to take 
 the crude popular theatre out of the hands of interlude- 
 makers and doggerel comedians, as in our own times 
 their descendants have taken journalism out of the 
 hands of reporters and publishers' hacks. In the 
 London taverns they hatched the project of a 
 Renaissance drama, and ranged all countries and all 
 histories for subjects. Whatever their drama lacked, 
 there was no lack of variety. Yet the new Renais- 
 sance drama never had the support of the people as 
 the drama had in Spain. For one cultivated English- 
 man who took a patriotic interest in the new blank- 
 verse play, there were probably at least a dozen who 
 did not give two thoughts to the stage, and were far 
 more ready to discuss the latest innovations in doctrine 
 from Geneva and Holland. On the other hand, 
 scholarly courtiers like Raleigh were delighted with 
 the academic element in the new drama, and 
 encouraged its free expression. It was not, however. 
 
60 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 these ** university wits," but their prodigiously 
 assimilative and business-like young colleague from 
 Warv^ickshire, who turned the court favour to full 
 account, and created a drama which gained as much 
 as it lost in permanent value by its estrangement from 
 popular interests. Wonder is still expressed that 
 Shakspeare's contemporaries failed to recognize in him 
 what he was; yet surely no further exj^lanation is 
 needed than that among all his creations there is not 
 one which indicates the slightest sympathy in their 
 author with those political and religious aspirations 
 into which more and more with each succeeding year 
 of his life the intellect and energies of his nation were 
 passing. Outside the romantic world which he created 
 for himself, no very serious drama was possible on a 
 stage devoted chiefly, more and more, to the amuse- 
 ment of the anti-Puritan party. As James's reign 
 crept on, and the favour of the people became more 
 and more worth having, and that of the court less, his 
 successors became discouraged; and even before his 
 death we find Beaumont regretting the days when they 
 sallied from the Mermaid Tavern as from a citadel. 
 No dramatists could have taken their art more 
 seriously than Jonson, Massinger, or Shirley, who 
 seem to have written less for an audience than with 
 a view to the ultimate publication of their collected 
 works; but no amount of artistic seriousness could 
 make a drama serious which was estranged from the 
 religious culture of the nation, and ordinary people 
 began to find the churches much more interesting than 
 the theatres. 
 
 In 1635, when the theatres were closed for a time 
 owing to the plague, James Shirley came over to 
 
ST. PATRICK ON THE STAGE 6t 
 
 Dublin in order to help his friend Ogilby, Wentworfh's 
 Master of the Revels, in starting the new theatre in 
 Werburgh Street, the first theatre founded outside 
 London. Shirley's visit to Dublin has puzzled hia 
 biographers, who have tried to explain it by suggest- 
 ing that the Chief Justice, Sir George Shirley, was his 
 relative. But it is not hard to conceive what must 
 have interested this Catholic poet in the new theatre 
 at such a moment. Dublin was then, indeed, a 
 Protestant town chiefly; but it had that necessity of a 
 theatre in those days, a court anxious to encourage 
 one, while in the background was a population in 
 which, whatever its indifference and ignorance, there 
 was no such sullen antipathy to ** stage-plays " as 
 was paralysing the English theatre. Instead of a 
 nation filled with hostility or indifference to the stage, 
 there was here a nation in which the drama might 
 have a distinct part to play, both in conciliating and in 
 educating the people. To Wentworth, bent on 
 making his court as imposing a representative of 
 royalty as possible, the project of establishing a 
 theatre under the patronage of the Castle must have 
 been so acceptable that we may perhaps assume that 
 he authorized Ogilby's invitation to the experienced 
 London manager. Perhaps, however, ** Black 
 Tom's " favour may have been in part accountable 
 for the slightness of the interest shown in the 
 enterprise by the Dublin public. For hardly anyone 
 came; and, in the prologues which Shirley wrote for 
 plays by Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and for several which 
 he contributed himself, he seems to take the empty 
 houses as a mournful sort of joke : 
 
62 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 ''I'll tell you what a poet says; two year 
 He has lived in Dublin, yet he k^ows not where 
 To find the city .... 
 When he did live in England, he heard say 
 That here were men loved wit and a good play; 
 Thai here were gentlemen and lords; a jew 
 Were bold to say there were some ladies too; 
 This he believed, and though they are not jound 
 Above, who k^ows what may be underground?'* 
 
 He remained about two years in Dublin, and before 
 leaving made a special effort to ** find out the humoui 
 of its taste " with a somewhat remarkable play, 5^ 
 Patrick for Ireland, with which he seems to have 
 succeeded better. 
 
 The theme is the conversion of Ireland to 
 Christianity; and the play is interesting, both as 
 proving to the ** Irish Irelanders '* of our own day how 
 completely even then the Anglo-Irish nationality had 
 identified itself with the country, and also because, in- 
 order to interest an Irish audience, the author found 
 it needful to introduce that religious element whose 
 exclusion from the Elizabethan drama was, as already 
 «aid, its fatal limitation. For a special development 
 of drama in Dublin there had been the necessary 
 historical preparation. Besides the miracle-plays 
 
 which from an early period had been popular, the 
 trade-guilds had accustomed the public to dramatic 
 entertainments. ** An ancient custom," says Walter 
 Harris, ** prevailed for a long time in the city of 
 Dublin, always against the great festivals of the year 
 to invite the Lord Deputy, the nobility, and other 
 persons of quality and rank to an entertainment in 
 
ST. PATRICK ON THE STAGE 63 
 
 which they first diverted them with stage-plays, and 
 then regaled them with a splendid banquet.'* These 
 stage-plays were chiefly pageants; and in them, as 
 might be expected, we hear nothing of St. Patrick : 
 it was rather his equivocal rival St. George who 
 triumphed, on what was afterwards known as College 
 Green, in the presence of both Irish and English lords. 
 That St. George should not at least occasionally have 
 given place to St. Patrick is the more to be regretted 
 when we think of the real part which he was even 
 then playing in native Irish literature, in those 
 dialogues with Oism, which might so naturally have 
 been the starting-point of a school of Irish drama. 
 But except at the Castle, and perhaps at King's Inns, 
 Dublin had seen nothing before Shirley's visit of what 
 the * mediaeval drama had grown into ; and it is 
 interesting to find that the first play which seems to 
 have interested an Irish audience had in it something 
 of the character of a miracle-play. 
 
 After all this, some account of the play may be 
 expected; but the story hardly bears telling. If 
 Shirley could have maintained the style and spirit of 
 the first act, in which the alarm of the Druids is 
 represented, and the approach of St. Patrick with his 
 guardian angel, 
 
 " a pale man coming jrom the sea. 
 
 Attended by a tribe oj reverend men," 
 
 the play would have had a unique character among^ 
 the productions of the later Elizabethan drama; and 
 we must believe that this is the kind of play which 
 the author would have liked to write. But hia 
 
64 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 audience in Werburgh Street was as disinclined to 
 listen to an elevated play on an Irish subject as an 
 ** Irish Ireland " audience in Abbey Street now is to 
 listen to a burlesque. The moral depravity of the 
 mere Irish, their absurd notions of poetry, and the 
 infamies of their original religion had to be exhibited 
 for the delectation of the Anglo-Irish; and only at the 
 close of the play, where Patrick drives out the serpents, 
 does it recover the tone with which it opens. Most 
 of it is taken up with the intrigue of the prince 
 Corybreus, who, in order to win Milcho's daughter 
 Emeria, disguises himself as the god whom she 
 specially adores, and is at last stabbed to death by 
 her on his detection. Here, as always, Shirley misses 
 his dramatic opportunity; for if Emeria, otherwise an 
 interesting creation, could have been made to raise 
 her hand against a god, she would have become a 
 symbol — almost Greek — of the revolt of a pure human 
 nature against obscene superstition. To a Catholic 
 poet, however, this would in any case, perhaps, hardly 
 occur; and we must admire the tact with which 
 Shirley, writing for a bigoted Protestant audience, 
 manipulates his main subject of the conversion of 
 Ireland, not, as Calderon does, making it an occasion 
 for the glorification of his Church. To have taken 
 Patrick more seriously than Shirley has done, to have 
 told his early story in detail like Calderon, to have 
 armed him with a wonder-working crucifix, or eve^^ 
 to have alluded to his crowning miracle of opening 
 that door into Purgatory and Paradise which had a 
 few years previously been destroyed by order of the 
 English Government, would have been to rufHe the 
 :serene conviction of Irish Protestants that Patrick was 
 
ST. PATRICK ON THE STAGE 65 
 
 a kind of advance-guard of their ascendancy. Still 
 he permits himself some appeals to a more enlightened 
 patriotism which must have existed among his 
 audience, as where the saint foretells the coming glory 
 of Ireland : — 
 
 '^^ This nation 
 Shall in a jair succession thrive, and grow 
 Up the world's academy, and disperse, 
 As the rich stream oj human and divine 
 Knowledge, clear streams to water foreign l^ingdoms; 
 Which shall be proud to owe what they possess 
 In learning to this great, all-nursing Ireland." 
 
 Finally, with the expulsion of the serpents — a subject 
 dear to the Anglo-Irish — he leaves his audience in 
 great good-humour. ''St. Patrick jor Ireland is a 
 failure; but it is the failure of a man of genius,** says 
 Mr. Gosse. A miracle-play written for a Protestant 
 audience in the seventeenth century could not, indeed, 
 be anything but a failure; and its chief interest now 
 perhaps is that it enables us, far better than a good 
 many of the acknowledged ** sources ** for the period, 
 to realize how the Anglo-Irish felt towards theii 
 country on the eve of the Rebellion. 
 
 Shirley had meant to write a second play about St. 
 Patrick; but, unless he had some share in another 
 play which had a great success, Landgartha, by Henry 
 Burnell, produced on the following St. Patrick*s Day, 
 and founded on a serpent-story in Saxo Grammaticus, 
 he does not seem to have done anything towards 
 carrying out his purpose, for by that time he was back 
 again in London. Soon after, the Dublin theatre was 
 closed owing to the Rebellion. It is perhaps allow- 
 
66 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 able to speculate on what the Irish campaign of this 
 last of the ** Elizabethans " might have led to had 
 he been given a chance of following it up. 
 Apparently, in order to interest Irish people in the 
 drama, he had found it necessary to make some appeal 
 to national feeling. We can hardly suppose that he 
 had any notion of the richness of Celtic legend, or 
 that he had any other feeling than that of the ordinary 
 Englishman's contempt for the ** mere Irishman.'* 
 But it is no stretch of probability to suppose that, 
 having been successful with a Patrick play, he might 
 have gone on to Strongbow, and that a definite school 
 of Irish drama might thus have been started, which, 
 although it might have had to wait till the foundation 
 of the Abbey Theatre, sooner or later would have 
 recurred to that one neglected vein of Irish literature 
 and legend awaiting dramatic development, the 
 dialogues of Oisin and Patrick. To have originated 
 the conception underlying these dialogues is the chief 
 claim, one is tempted to think, of Irish literature to be 
 taken seriously. Nietzsche is anticipated in the scorn 
 of Oism for the ideals of Christianity. The idea is 
 here supplied, in the light of which not only the gods 
 and heroes of ancient Ireland, but the primitive ideals 
 of all the western nations, could have been brought 
 into dramatic contrast with the ideal of moral 
 renunciation communicated to European civilization 
 from the East. A war of ideals might in time have 
 conferred on a Celtic drama the glory of a work 
 embodying that ideal which is destined to be 
 victorious. 
 
 Shirley remains a distinguished figure, although his 
 verses are halting enough, as may have been noticed 
 
ST. PATRICK ON THE STAGE 67 
 
 in our quotations — each verse, as it were, seeming 
 desirous of shouldering off responsibiHty for being a 
 blank verse upon its neighbour. Yet he is still of the 
 great company of the Elizabethans, and wisdom and 
 beauty still blossom under his pen. He is more, 
 indeed, of a poet than a dramatist; nor can we think 
 of him in any age or place as the initiator of a 
 movement so bold as the emancipation of the English 
 stage from the limitation imposed on it by the 
 Shakspearians, who made it the satellite of a court, 
 and estranged it from the religious culture of the 
 people. To please his aristocratic audience, 
 Shakspeare had for the most part been content to 
 make game of the people, and bring them on the 
 stage in a pall-mall of clowns and yokels. And all 
 the while these clowns and yokels, small tradespeople 
 and country farmers, were slowly acquiring the con- 
 viction that they, and not the court, were the real 
 nation. Shakspeare, apparently, little suspected that 
 one of his tinkers, Christopher Sly or Snout, had it in 
 him to write The Pilgrim's Progress, A new genera- 
 tion was soon to arise whose ignorance of Shakspeare 
 is the mark no less of the limitations of Puritanism 
 than of his own art. Every speculation as to the 
 private life of Shakspeare seems fanciful; yet the 
 suggestion of Professor Barrett Wendell that, in the 
 three last silent years of his life, he had *' felt a 
 check," has a strong fascination. In 1642, when the 
 Long Parliament closed the theatres, Shirley was 
 maintaining quite creditably the tradition of a drama 
 which had no relation to the serious life of the people. 
 ** Whereas the distressed state of Ireland, steeped in 
 her own blood, and the distracted state of England, 
 F 
 
68 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 threatened with a cloud of blood by a civil war, call 
 for all possible means to appease and avert the wrath 
 of God '* — so began the proclamation. James Shirley 
 went back to his former life as a schoolmaster; and, 
 to judge by his preface to the first folio of Beaumont 
 and Fletcher, and by his famous lines, ** The glories 
 of our blood and state,*' said to have been written on 
 the occasion of Charles's death, he remained firm in 
 his literary admirations and in his loyalty. At the 
 Restoration his plays were revived without success; 
 and he found himself regarded as an old fogey by 
 Dryden and his circle. In 1666, an old man of 
 seventy, he died, together with his wife, from exposure 
 in the streets during the Fire of London. 
 
 1907.' 
 
THOMAS MOORE AS THEOLOGIAN 
 
 i E lose our taste for theology almost as easily 
 as our feeling for poetry, and from much 
 the same causes. Our poetry fails to 
 interest us after youth, not merely 
 because it suffers from rivalry with the 
 practical affairs of life : for the most part it is not as 
 yet, properly speaking, a literature for men; it 
 expresses emotional states merely, clings to the 
 illusions of youth and does not attend man to the 
 market-place, or even to meditative solitude, as his 
 counsellor and consoler. In youth, when life is still 
 before us, and presumably all the delightful and 
 passionate experiences of which our modern poetry is 
 the expression, this expression has an immense 
 attraction for us, and for a brief period we run through 
 the entire gamut of this proxy experience; presently, 
 however, when we begin to suspect that life is not 
 going to be quite what we fancied — that, in fact, it is 
 likely to go to a rather thin and reedy tune strummed 
 on the one or two inherited aptitudes (or inaptitudes) 
 that we may have — we soon learn to leave poetry to 
 cranks and pedagogues, and to look askance at those 
 dreamers who continue in middle age to murmur to 
 themselves Keats' odes or Shelley's melodious 
 rhapsodies. Whenever literature has been really 
 great, its aim has been the comparatively simple one 
 of combining amusement with edification, and it is 
 owing to their excessive dread of trenching on what 
 
70 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 has been regarded, since the days of the Apostles, as 
 the peculiar province of the clergyman, that our poets 
 have so little to offer us once we are grown at all 
 scarred and disillusioned. If there has ever been a 
 great poet who was not also a good deal a theologian, 
 we should like to hear his name. It is certainly only 
 such poets who add something to that still scanty 
 ** literature abounding in subjects of meditation" to 
 which Schlegel looked forward, and which, as some 
 have fancied, will one day give Western culture its 
 ** sacred book." But no, the day of sacred books is 
 over ! It is the end of poetry now, and of the arts 
 generally, not to write the Upanishads or to build the 
 Parthenons of the future, but to awaken in man new 
 faculties of thought and vision. It is for our poets to 
 restore those private interests without which life is 
 scarcely decent; and only when they have taken over 
 that whole region hitherto abandoned to clergymen 
 will our poetry begin to speak with the Oriental 
 largeness and authority. 
 
 These remarks may seem out of key with the 
 associations raised by the name of Thomas Moore, 
 but they are suggested by the interest in theological 
 matters which distinguished him in common with poets 
 much greater than himself. This taste of his is the 
 more noteworthy when we consider him as the 
 principal founder of Anglo-Irish literature, a literature 
 in which a genial vein of theological originality has 
 been perhaps the chief deficiency. When we speak 
 of Moore as a theologian, however, we must make a 
 distinction. The need of a metaphysical background 
 for his world, a sense of the mystery of things, was 
 no part of his poetic constitution. His well-known 
 
THOMAS MOORE AS THEOLOGIAN 71 
 lines, *' This world is but a fleeting show," hardily 
 seem charged with any characteristic emotion; and 
 when, in the presence of Mont Blanc, he was moved 
 to record his conviction that '* there is a God," he 
 forgot, as Hazlitt said, that " the poet himself, standing 
 at the foot of it, however diminutive in appearance, 
 was a much greater proof of his own argument than a 
 huge, shapeless lump of ice." Of Moore's complete 
 indifference to theology, in the more general sense of 
 the word, we may judge by the fact that in his Lalla 
 Rool^h we have the product of a study of much the 
 same authorities as Goethe used for his Westostlicher 
 Divan, When we call him a theologian, then, we use 
 the word in the sense which it usually bears among 
 his fellow-countrymen, and as signifying one who is 
 versed in the ** Protestant and Roman Catholic 
 controversy." Theology, in this restricted sense, was 
 Moore's life-long hobby ; and in his Travels oj an Irish 
 Gentleman in search oj a Religion he made a contribu- 
 tion to it of some importance. Certain discoveries 
 which he had made in the course of a long experience 
 in the drawing-rooms of the English aristocracy had 
 thrown something of a new light on the faith of his 
 childhood. 
 
 " Tom dearly loves a lord," said his friend Byron; 
 and he himself always declared that the best society 
 was only to be found among titled people. On certain 
 occasions, when he found himself in the company of 
 the great and aggrieved poets of his time, whom he 
 overshadowed in the popular esteem, it was noticed 
 that he ** seemed sensible of his inferiority," but with 
 lords and ladies he mingled freely on his own terms. 
 Indeed he was, in a sense, a lord himself; for this little 
 
72 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 man was understood to be the owner of a large poetic 
 estate, to wit, Ireland, a country which has never, 
 perhaps, been without a kind of romantic attraction 
 for the imagination of Englishmen. This poetic 
 lordship of Ireland was held by Moore without question 
 for nearly fifty years, and now that he is in his grave 
 for more than that time it is doubtful whether any 
 successor to him has appeared with title deeds equal 
 to his, either in the opinion of the British public or of 
 the Irish people. Across the Shannon and north of 
 the Boyne, there is now a new, vaguely interpreted 
 Ireland, with lakes of uncertain locality like Innisfree; 
 but within the ancient borders of the Pale and as far 
 south as Killarney the human associations, without 
 which a limited company would hardly risk planting 
 an hotel even in the most beautiful region, have been 
 provided mainly by Thomas Moore. No doubt the 
 Irish Muse had ranged Erin for some high-souled yet 
 careless-minded young peasant, such as her 
 Caledonian sister had found a few years earlier follow- 
 ing the plough ; but apparently her search had been in 
 vain when she hastened after the Aungier Street 
 grocer *s son, and touched his trembling ears as he sate 
 before the pianoforte in England. In Moore's case 
 this is no mere pedantic Miltonic metaphor; it was 
 through his ears that he received that national afflatus 
 which his contemporaries promptly recognised as his 
 distinguishing merit. He had listened so lovingly to 
 the old folk tunes of his country that presently, when 
 they came dancing through his brain, words leaped up 
 in answering rhythms, not noble or magical words, 
 for the most part the decorous diction of the eighteenth 
 century, which even when unaccustomed to metrical 
 
THOMAS MOORE AS THEOLOGIAN 73 
 motion moves in his songs not without an old-world 
 conventional grace. As Mr. Stephen Gwynn says, 
 ** Moore was really importing into English poetry 
 some of the characteristics of a literature which he did 
 not know." He was the principal medium through 
 which the melodious soul of Ireland passed over into 
 the English language. As he came to recognise his 
 own position as the national poet of Ireleuid, he began 
 to take a new interest in his intellectual estate. He 
 remembered his early days in Trinity College, and the 
 absurd feeling of intellectual intimidation once imposed 
 on him by the Protestgoit Ascendancy. Irish 
 Protestants had been slow to acknowledge him as the 
 national poet, and it was only when they heard of him 
 as moving in the highest social circles, and as the 
 chosen intimate of the colossal Byron, and saw him 
 when he came over here making familiarly for the 
 Viceregal Lodge, that they ceased to annoy him by 
 calling him ** Tom " and not ** Mr.** Moore. And 
 now — especially in the light of the new ideas coming 
 into vogue among Moore's aristocratic friends — what 
 a small affair seemed Irish evangelical Protestantism 1 
 What a mean little relic of provincialism the 
 Protestant Ascendancy ! What was Protestantism 
 anyway? The question was already beginning to 
 agitate the cultured seclusion of Oxford. 
 
 We can understand, then, and partly sympathise 
 with Moore in the feelings which prompted him to 
 publish, in 1833, his Travels oj an Irish Gentleman, 
 a work in which his contemporaries found it hard to 
 recognise the hand of the ** Irish Anacreon.*' He 
 knew how distasteful to Irish Protestantism was that 
 development of the Romantic Movement in theology 
 
74 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 which was to culminate by turning the most 
 piciaresque figure in the religious life of England 
 during the nineteenth century into a cardinal. In an 
 English drawing-room he could pour forth his devotion 
 to the Catholic Church unabashed, as in his beautiful 
 song, *' Through grief and through danger thy smile 
 has cheer'd my way *' ; whereas in Dublin his audience 
 would have been nearly as much affronted by it as the 
 ladies in Tannhduser were by the praise of Venusberg. 
 To represent the altered situation of the once haughty 
 church of Primate Boulter, now with a rather ghastly 
 semblance of disinterestedness setting up soup-kitchens 
 and Bible-depots among the suddenly enfranchised 
 helots on whom it still depended for tithes, he devised 
 the symbolism of an elderly maiden lady who has set 
 her heart on becoming the mistress of Ballymudragget 
 Rectory, with its income of £2,000 per annum, and to 
 that end on the conversion of the author, a lively young 
 Catholic student of Trinity College — such a youth as 
 Moore remembered himself as being when he was at 
 college with Robert Emmet. The author tells how 
 nearly he was seduced by the prospect offered to him ; 
 and indeed a man with the domestic instincts of Moore 
 might well be so, for however extravagant was his 
 notion of their income, the Protestant rectories are 
 still perhaps the most pleasing-looking domestic 
 objects that one sees in the remoter parts of Ireland — 
 peaceful homesteads coeval with their embowering 
 trees, contrasting with the more recent edifices of the 
 priests, which, with their densely-planted shrubberies 
 and thickly-gravelled walks, are after all transparently 
 bachelors' establishments, destitute of that instinct for 
 nestling into nature in nature's way which 
 
THOMAS MOORE AS THEOLOGIAN 75 
 distinguishes the Protestant rectory. A sensitive 
 scruple, however, withholds the hero; as the rector of 
 Ballymudragget he would no longer have the proud 
 feeling of belonging to a church to which it was 
 against his worldly interest to belong. Properly 
 speaking, indeed can a church truly be called a church 
 when it has lost this feeling? '* The church " should 
 surely be in some kind of opposition to ** the world " ; 
 and Moore, accustomed to belong to a true and per- 
 secuted church, felt quite genuinely that he would 
 hardly recognise himself as belonging to a church at 
 all when it brought so large a share of that peace 
 which the world can give. The English Government, 
 at last thoroughly understanding the situation, had 
 been setting itself to make the antithesis of ** church " 
 and ** world " null and void in Ireland, and to enable 
 the Catholic clergy to live in all the comfort of Bally- 
 mudragget Rectory; and at the time Moore wrote his 
 book had just sent over one of its strongest churchmen, 
 Whately, who, with the ingenuous view of weakening 
 the authority of the Catholic Church, recommended its 
 establishment. A little earlier ** Catholic Emancipa- 
 tion " had been granted, and it is the news of the 
 passing of this Act which moves the hero, as he sits 
 in his rooms in Trinity College, to utter his famous 
 exclamation, ** Thank God, I can now become a 
 Protestant !" 
 
 The author sets out on his theological ** travels " 
 confident that in the teaching of the primitive Christian 
 Church he will find Protestantism in all its purity, but 
 to his not very well-feigned surprise finds that this 
 teaching, so far from resembling the religion of the 
 Rector of Ballymudragget, is point for point identical 
 
76 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 with that of the poor despised Irish priest. — Many 
 have been led, like the present writer, to look into 
 Moore's book by its attractive title and by the name 
 of its author, and been disappointed to find that it is 
 only a somewhat lively contribution to a now happily 
 almost extinct controversy. What the disputants in 
 this controversy seem never to have perceived was 
 that Protestantism and Catholicism are necessary to 
 one another; that the one without the other is as 
 inconceivable as Liberalism or Conservatism without 
 its rival. Moore's rather unpleasant book was 
 excessively resented by Irish Churchmen, who, like 
 Whately, believed that time and education were all 
 that was required to turn Ireland into a Protestant 
 country ; and within a few months of its appearance it 
 had been answered by more than one book as big as 
 his. Moore wisely said nothing more ; he was satisfied 
 to have got in his word. They might prove his 
 ignorant, and even occasionally dishonest, use of 
 quotations from the Fathers; they might assert with 
 some truth that his book proved nothing but the 
 incapacity of such a mind as his to recognize the 
 object of his search when found : he had shown, at all 
 events, that an ** Irish Gentleman " (a term emphasized 
 on his title-page), who had taken as much pains as can 
 reasonably be expected from a layman to inform 
 himself as to the points of controversy, had yet no 
 mind to turn Protestant. When a man of letters, like 
 Moore or Kingsley, intervenes in a controversy beyond 
 his powers he is generally guided by a ray of real 
 perception. Irish education has advanced considerably 
 since Whately's day, but Ireland shows no sign of 
 becoming Protestant; and the Catholic Church is no 
 
THOMAS MOORE AS THEOLOGIAN 77 
 
 longer afraid of it. Certainly neither Protestantism 
 nor Catholicism is going to keep the modern spirit out 
 of Ireland; but when it succeeds in expressing itself, 
 as it is now striving to do, it will probably take its 
 character from the Catholic mind rather than from the 
 Protestant; for a real difference is perceptible in the 
 cast of mind of those who look back on the beliefs of 
 bygone generations from one or the other standpoint. 
 Ignatius Loyola and Calvin are not more radically 
 distinct from one another than are Voltaire and 
 Rousseau, Renaui and Emerson, Comte and Herbert 
 Spencer, Anatole France and Bernard Shaw. 
 
 Moore pleased very few people with his book. 
 Catholics were offended by its Anacreontic renderings 
 from the Fathers, and religious Protestants derived 
 from it the perhaps correct opinion that the author 
 was essentially an ** infidel." A tendency to make 
 light of man's distinguishing faculty of reason is no 
 doubt a horrible and even diabolical one, and it was 
 this tendency in Moore's book which chiefly shocked a 
 genuine religious genius, the Irish-Spaniard Blanco 
 White, then residing in the household of Archbishop 
 Whately. White belonged to a Catholic family which 
 had been driven abroad by the penal laws; and the 
 history of his religious development, from strict 
 Catholicism to a kind of Christian rationalism, is 
 almost an epitome of the historical development of 
 Christianity. The book with which, in a few weeks, 
 he answered Moore, Second Travels oj an Irish 
 Gentleman, contains a more agreeable story than 
 Moore's, and presents an array of arguments with a 
 force only possible to one whose whole heart lay in 
 the^e matters. The further progress of his theological 
 
78 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 opinions presently became a subject of concern to the 
 archiepiscopal household, and he withdrew to 
 Liverpool, where he died after a few miserable years — 
 a religious outcast. His Rationalist a Kempis has 
 recently been reprinted; but he is now remembered 
 chiefly as the author of a sonnet pronounced by 
 Coleridge the most grandly conceived in the English 
 language, which, as a genuine example of that still 
 scanty theological poetry to which we have alluded, 
 we shall conclude by quoting : — ^ 
 
 *^ Mysterious Night! When our first parent kpew 
 Thee jrom report divine, and heard thy name. 
 Did he not tremble jor this lovely jrame, 
 This glorious canopy of light and blue ? 
 Yet, 'neath a curtain oj translucent dew. 
 Bathed in the rays oj the great setting flame, 
 Hesperus with the host oj heaven came. 
 And lol Creation widened in mans view. 
 Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed 
 Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find. 
 Whilst flow'r and leaj and insect lay revealed. 
 That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind! 
 Why do we then shun Death with anxious strije ? 
 Ij Light can thus deceive, wherejore not Lije ?'* 
 
 1911. 
 
IRISH BOOKS 
 
 ^HERE is something so incurably wrong 
 with the world that it is hardly possible 
 to rectify one wrong in it without 
 introducing another. The moment we 
 begin to attend to the affairs of others, 
 with the notion that our own are fully looked after, 
 that moment we begin to act on an assumption of 
 omniscience which will be punished, either in our own 
 experience or in that of others. Thus England, m 
 suppressing the native wars in India, the burning of 
 widows, etc., has raised even greater embarrassments 
 for itself in over-population and famine ; and somewhat 
 similarly our modern libraries, in their determination 
 that posterity shall miss no line of what we have been 
 pleased to write during the past hundred years or so, 
 have already almost hopelessly depreciated the value 
 of the written word and rendered it, one would think, 
 a nearly impossible task for posterity to fix on those 
 books which deserve immortality. We may even 
 doubt whether in the world of books some struggle for 
 existence is not the best security for the survival of 
 the fittest, and whether books of the giant order are 
 likely to appear under conditions so entirely favourable 
 to book-production as the present. It is characteristic 
 of nearly all such books that they have been produced 
 by a kind of accident, the authors being anxious 
 perhaps to beguile the hours of exile or imprisonment, 
 or like Milton to prove a thesis, or like Shakspeare to 
 
80 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 make a fortune — to avenge themselves, to confess 
 themselves, and so forth. Authors who have been 
 most resolute to produce literary masterpieces have, 
 as a rule, produced the least satisfactory ones. 
 Humanity is endlessly curious about itself, and is not 
 to be put off in its quest of some authentic revelation 
 of itself by the most imposing array of vocables, as 
 the Landors and Swinburnes appear at times to have 
 supposed. The real book is an embodiment of some 
 profound human experience; and thus the scholar, 
 who passes his time in conning the records of other 
 ages — for happily it is the real books which hitherto 
 have tended to survive — is not so unsocial as he may 
 seem to be, for he is really conversing with the souls 
 of peoples, or with mankind itself, in a more direct 
 and satisfactory manner than is possible in the most 
 unconventional assemblies, where it is hard for the 
 most part to see mankind for the men. 
 
 Something of the old-fashioned coyness in putting 
 one's name on a title-page lingered on even in Scott, 
 but in general it may be said that, with the great 
 psychological change which came over the world at 
 the end of the eighteenth century, literature assumed 
 a new and corporate dignity in the various nations, 
 and it was generally felt that every country with 
 separate frontiers, just as it ought to have a senate- 
 house and an army, ought also to have its array of 
 poets. Indeed, could the retreat of the Muses have 
 been discovered, there has hardly been a European 
 statesman since that period who would not have 
 regarded it as his most adroit public action to place 
 one of his country's mountains at their disposal. 
 Accordingly in Ireland, during the early decades of 
 
IRISH BOOKS 81 
 
 the nineteenth century, we had quite a number of 
 writers — many of them encouraged in their laudable 
 ambition by government pensions — who set them- 
 sqlves, in the phrase of the time, to be the ** Irish 
 Walter Scott," the ** Irish Burns," the *' Irish 
 Beranger," and so forth. So far as Scott was 
 concerned they were well entitled to adopt his method, 
 for it had been from an Irish writer. Miss Edgeworth, 
 that the Wizard of the North, at least he said so 
 himself, had filched his fire. Neither Gerald Griffin, 
 however, nor the Banims, dexterous and inventive 
 though they were, ever quite succeeded in reproducing 
 his magical blend of romance and reality, nor in 
 diverting the attention of the vast reading public of 
 the new era from Scotland to Ireland. It may be 
 doubted whether Scott was an entirely fortunate 
 influence at this period ; whether, but for his dazzling 
 vogue, some Irish writer might not have stumbled on 
 the secret of Turgenev, and so made the literary 
 fortune of his country. The incomparable Scottish 
 advocate, who delighted to show visitors round his 
 Highlands, and whose tales and poems form a sort of 
 guide-book for that public and that posterity which 
 he could not conduct personally, was a little too much 
 of the showman to make an entirely profitable model 
 for these ambitious and self-respecting writers. As 
 usual, when a man of distinctive genius did arrive he 
 was a little disconcerting; he appeared (of all places !) 
 in a quarter, at the mere mention of which any Irish- 
 man with the least pretension to true culture and 
 liberality will shrug his shoulders — in the pages of a 
 proselytizing magazine ! Carleton was the man sent by 
 God in response to the general clamour for an Irish 
 
82 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 Walter Scott. As Shakespeare came out of the heart 
 of England, so Carleton came from Tyrone, the locality 
 in which the three elements of modern Irish nationality 
 were most naturally blended; and as he declares 
 himself in his proud and bitter Autobiography, ** there 
 never was any man of letters who had an opportunity 
 of knowing and describing the manners of the Irish 
 people so thoroughly as I." His Catholic country- 
 men, however, have never been the chief admirers of 
 this apostate; indeed, it was not till Davis had got 
 hold of him — when unfortunately it was too late — that 
 he set himself to write with deliberately patriotic 
 intentions. A man, like Burns, of immense natural 
 ability, who felt himself the equal of anyone, he wrote 
 of the life which he knew, and Catholic Ireland had 
 in the author of the Traits and Stories a literary 
 interpreter such as it has never had before or since. 
 Ireland's anger burned in him duly, but, unfortunately, 
 in him it was directed impartially against foreign 
 oppression and the religious perversity of his 
 countrymen, which, in their united effects, had so 
 heavily handicapped him in the struggle for life. 
 Unlucky Carleton ! Catholic Ireland would have 
 applauded for ever the man who would have done 
 for her history and for her heroes what Scott had done 
 for those of his country; and it is conceivable that 
 Carleton, who plumed himself a good deal on his 
 rather remarkable physical resemblance to Sir Walter, 
 might, with a little more adroitness than he displayed 
 through life, have rejoiced with dogs and horses in an 
 Irish Abbotsford. But his early experiences had 
 hardly prepared him for representing Ireland's history 
 and antiquities (about which he cared nothing) under 
 
IRISH BOOKS 83 
 
 that veil of romantic illusion through which they are 
 still viewed by many of her sons; and nations have 
 no Abbotsfords for writers who do not flatter their 
 vanity. Late in life he declared his intention to write 
 his autobiography, into which, wrote he, ** I will pour 
 all the pent-up venom which has been so long cor- 
 roding my heart at the ingratitude and neglect which 
 I have experienced from my country." He only 
 began to write it, however, a few months before his 
 death, when suffering under one of the most formidable 
 of mortal diseases, and it was with no intention of 
 emulating Rousseau, but of providing his daughters 
 with a little money, that he produced what is, perhaps, 
 the most interesting of all Irish books. But for the 
 enterprise of Mr. D. J. O'Donoghue, who published 
 it in 1896 as the first volume of his Lije oj Carleton, 
 it might never have appeared at all. In the part 
 which he completed he tells the story of his life up to 
 that point at which his experiences as an author began, 
 and there is none of the venom in this part which he 
 proposed to pour into it; on the contrary, there is 
 beauty, and the glamour with which an old man's 
 memory invests his youth. The temperament 
 revealed in these pages is certainly a hard one. It is 
 the temperament of the Irish peasant, the so-called 
 Celtic temperament, which is really no doubt the 
 temper amient of the peasant everywhere, and which is 
 only transformed and softened, perhaps, by some kind 
 of religious movement. In no other book does the 
 Irish peasant attain self-expression as he does in this, 
 and nowhere is there an equally sympathetic presenta- 
 tion of that great peasant world of which O'Connell 
 was the champion, on the eve of its *' Anglicization/* 
 G 
 
84 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 1 he mutual jealousy and suspicion of the Protestant 
 and Catholic branches of the Christian Church in 
 Ireland were now threatening to spoil not only 
 Ireland's dreams of obtaining political independence, 
 but even her innocent and laudable desire to have a 
 literature; and just as the ** Wild Geese" of the 
 seventeenth century had taken service in Continental 
 armies, so now the young men of talent of provin- 
 cialized Ireland, the "Wild Geese" of Protestant 
 Ascendancy, took service more and more in the ranks 
 of London journalism or in far-off British Colonies. 
 And meanwhile the new population brought into 
 political existence by O'Connell, and rapidly throwing 
 over its ancient language, was beginning to call for 
 something to read. It was at this time that Thomas 
 Davis came forward, a ngime which in some respects 
 is above every other Irish name. Davis appears to 
 have impressed everyone who worked with him as 
 the greatest man of his generation in Ireland : what 
 Lessing was to Germany (to compare small things 
 with great) he gave promise, during his wonderful 
 three years of activity, of being to this country. 
 Consciously a pioneer, in him as in no other lay the 
 possibility of reconciling the discordant elements of 
 Irish nationality, for his sense of the boundless 
 opportunity offered to a new European community in 
 a spacious island of its own was not stronger than his 
 feeling for his country's heroic past. In particular he 
 found a use for the ancient Gaelic language as a sort 
 of palladium of nationality ; and though we may admit 
 now that he lost his head a little on this subject there 
 was some excuse for him at a time when some millions 
 of Irishmen were still talking a language unknown to 
 
IRISH BOOKS 85 
 
 the others. He himself had too many irons in the 
 fire to do much more than dash off hurried prose 
 articles and verses as they were wanted, but he was 
 the cause of writing in other men, and in the Nation — 
 the one literary enterprise which has excited general 
 enthusiasm in Ireland — his was the prevailing 
 ** spirit." In one respect alone was Davis scarcely 
 satisfactory. Whoever woos Ireland must be provided 
 with some answer to that artless question which she 
 may suddenly spring on him, as Margareta did on 
 Faust : ** Do you believe in God?" It is the distinction 
 of Davis that there was something about him which 
 raised the question of his religious credentials, nor 
 was he the man to shirk the question had it been 
 fairly asked him or to put it lightly by. But what 
 could the leader of Young Ireland do when his already 
 favoured rival, the mighty champion of Old Ireland, 
 breathed into her ear his private knowledge that the 
 young men of the Nation were little better thar* 
 ^* infidels "? Mr. Rolleston, who has written well of 
 Davis, attributes his failure, or as he prefers to say, 
 the "interruption of his influence," to the Famine; 
 but is it not plain that Davis, with his noble passion 
 for national culture and independent thought, 
 belonged to a tradition which Ireland, with its many 
 rankling memories, with its indifference to the national 
 ideals of the end of the eighteenth century, and later 
 w^ith its impossible claims for the Gaelic language, 
 was preparing to repudiate? His proposal to unite 
 Ireland by means of a national culture which should 
 ignore the " religious question " was a little like 
 proposing to act Hamlet without the Prince. In the 
 actual drama of Irish history at that time the 
 
86 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 ** religious question " had its full part assigned to it. 
 ** There's no offence, my lord," we may figure Young 
 Ireland as, somewhat feebly, assuring the moody 
 master of the situation, and the latter as replying, 
 ** Yes, by Saint Patrick, but there is, and much offence 
 too!" No sooner had the protagonist in the Irish 
 drama begun to take action than Young Ireland with 
 all its ideals collapsed; and as regards literature very 
 little came of that union of the finest spirits which 
 Ireland has seen — nothing that can be called a book. 
 There is perhaps one exception which rather strikingly 
 illustrates our thesis of the incidental nature of literary 
 masterpieces, John Mitchel's Jail Journal, 
 
 What ought now to have happened was an Irish 
 Aufklarung — an Irish Emerson, and, if not a Trans- 
 cendental movement, a movement at any rate which 
 should transcend the paltry quarrel of Protestant and 
 Catholic, which so far has prevented Ireland from 
 realising either its political or literary ideals. What 
 a difference it would have made had some clergyman 
 or parish priest transformed an Irish country town 
 or village — Westport or Doneraile — into an Irish 
 Concord ! A thinker who would have unsealed the 
 fountains of thought and claimed the full privileges 
 of a human being on the soil of Ireland would have 
 brought it far further toward the realisation of its 
 spiritual and political unity than ever did Parnell. 
 But Ireland's hour was not yet come, and just as, 
 after Davis, politics became once more estranged 
 from those interests which ensure the support of the 
 wise, so literature estranged itself from those common 
 interests which make it genuinely national. There 
 was, first, the well-meaning Ferguson, sometimes^ 
 
IRISH BOOKS 87 
 
 really exalted in his personal poems and adaptations 
 from the Irish (particularly the noble Conary)^ but 
 whose more ambitious labours smell a little too much 
 of the Record Office. There was also the attenuated 
 Wordsworthianism of Aubrey De Vere. Lastly 
 there has been the considerable literary movement 
 initiated chiefly by Mr. Standish O'Grady, styled 
 variously the '* Irish Literary Revival,'* the ** Celtic 
 Renascence,'* &c., in which the chief factor has 
 undoubtedly been the peculiar genius of Mr. W. B. 
 Yeats. The meeting in modern Ireland of the modern 
 with the ancient spirit is an important event, not 
 only in the literary but in the spiritual history of Ire- 
 land, and perhaps the full significance of the work 
 of Mr. Yeats and /E will only be apparent eventually. 
 Mr. Yeats in particular understands the ancient Celtic 
 spirit as Ronsard understood Graeco-Roman antiquity, 
 and is imbued with it in much the same way ; and 
 just as it was only when the modern world had 
 learned to understand the ancient classics that it began 
 to strike out in every direction on lines of its own, so 
 perhaps the spirit of Ireland, through its self-recovery 
 in this last poet of the line of Senchan Torpeist, is 
 being made ready for new beginnings. 
 
 Meanwhile if we ask whether the voluminous 
 literary activity of the last twenty years has brought 
 forth a Book, we shall have difficulty on fixing on any 
 one work which Ireland seems likely to take to its 
 affections permanently. If a masterpiece should still 
 come of this literary movement we need not be 
 surprised if it appears by a kind of accident and in 
 some unexpected quarter, and we have a fancy that 
 appearances in modern Ireland point to a writer of 
 
88 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 the type of Cervantes rather than to an ideahsing 
 poet or romance writer. A hero as loveable as the 
 great Knight of the Rueful Countenance might be 
 conceived, who in some back street of Dubhn had 
 addled his brains with brooding over Ireland's wrongs, 
 and that extensive but not always quite sincere 
 literature which expresses the resentment of her sons 
 towards the stranger. His library would be described, 
 the books which had ** addled the poor gentleman's 
 brain " : Mitchel's History oj Ireland would be there, 
 and Cobbett's History oj the Rejormation, and Mrs. 
 J. R. Green's Making oj Ireland and Its Undoing. 
 We can conceive him issuing forth, fresh-hearted as 
 a child at the age of fifty, with glib and saffron- 
 coloured kilt, to realise and incidentally to expose 
 the ideals of present-day Ireland. What scenes might 
 not be devised at village inns arising out of his refusal 
 to parley with landlords in any but his own few words 
 of Gaelic speech; what blanketings, in which our 
 sympathies would be wholly with the rebel against 
 
 the despotism of fact ! His Dulcinea would be 
 
 who but Kathleen ni Houlihan herself, who really is 
 no more like what she is taken for than the maiden of 
 Toboso, but who, in the addled masculine brain of 
 the Irish idealist, is a sort of wraith materialising itself 
 on the eve of chimerical insurrections — an old woman 
 (God save the mark!), not a friendly and buxom 
 wench, whose partiality for strapping young 
 foreigners, whether Danish, Saxon or Scotch, has 
 had a great deal to do in bringing about the present, 
 by no means desperate, situation of modern Ireland. 
 And such a book as we fancy need not really insult 
 or injure the cause of Irish nationality any more than 
 
IRISH BOOKS 89 
 
 Cervantes laughed real chivalry away. Ireland 
 remains, a country inhabited by a new, freshly- 
 compounded, English-speaking race of men, equal 
 to any race in physique, intelligence and opportunity; 
 a country in which Euiything may happen once her 
 sons agree to cast out delusions and to realise their 
 common humanity together. A mixture of races, 
 wrote Davis, is *' as much needed as the mixture of 
 Protestants and Catholics." And he addeds ** If a 
 union of all Irish-born men ever be accomplished, 
 Ireland will have the greatest gind most varied 
 material for an illustrious nationality, and for a 
 tolerant and flexible character in literature, manners, 
 religion and life, of any nation on earth." 
 
 1911. 
 
 This was of course a sorry account of the *' Irish 
 Literary Renascence"; the collected poems of Mr. 
 Yeats, /E, and others, Synge's plays, etc., will 
 doubtless be called "books" by generations of Irish 
 readers. Mr. James Stephens' lively and delectable 
 vein had in 1911 only begun to flow, and Mr. James 
 Joyce had not yet published his highly instructive 
 studies in the life of those young men who have chiefly 
 to be reckoned with nowadays in arranging or fore- 
 casting the future of Ireland. The anticipation in the 
 final paragraph might seem to have had a partial 
 fulfilm.ent in Mr. George Moore's Hail^nd Farewell. 
 
 1917. 
 
A WAY OF UNDERSTANDING NIETZSCHE 
 
 The tension of the soul in misfortune, which communicates to it its 
 energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiver^ss 
 and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting and exploiting 
 misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice 
 or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul — has it not been bestowed 
 through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering ? In 
 man creature and creator are united ; in man there is not only 
 matter, shred, excess, clay, mire, folly, chaos ; but there is also the 
 creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divinity of the 
 spectator, and the seventh day ! " — Beyond Good and Evil. 
 
 |LTHOUGH Nietzsche may fairly be 
 described as a dangerous author, there 
 is the same kind of natural safeguard 
 against the corruption of his readers as 
 that which preserves the schoolboy from 
 corruption by the more highly-coloured passages in the 
 works of Horace and Ovid which are placed freely in 
 his hands, and may excite the misgivings of parents. 
 The wit required to understand what Nietzsche really 
 means is as little compatible with intellectual gulli- 
 bility as an aptitude for Latin usually is with the 
 depraved tendencies of the naughty boy. The school- 
 master, at all events, is unlikely to complain if he 
 find in these tendencies unexpected allies ; and in like 
 manner divine philosophy may gain unexpected 
 
WAY OF UNDERSTANDING NIETZSCHE 91 
 
 adherents if the average, or more than averagely, 
 sensual man be led on by the popularity of Nietzsche's 
 lively phrases about Christianity and morals to make 
 acquaintance with a very rigorous intellectual regimen, 
 and to realize the consequences of the proved falsity 
 of many notions of conventional morality and 
 established religion. Indeed he should be warned 
 that if these have chastized him with whips, Nietzsche 
 will chastize him with scorpions. When he has 
 parted with every article of transcendental belief, and 
 sacrificed all those arriere-pensees of faith and morals 
 which are so little in evidence in ordinary conversa- 
 tion, and yet are such determining motives of ordinary 
 conduct, he will find himself in the presence of a 
 caustic and relentless mentor who will require of him 
 — at the point where he is ready perhaps to creep 
 into some monastery — a capacity for ** gaiety " in 
 self-abnegation and self-annihilation. He will find, 
 indeed, that several of the gravest responsibilities 
 of that God whom he has repudiated have devolved 
 upon himself, and will be called upon, in a world 
 bankrupt in ideals, to create new moral values and 
 new Gods. 
 
 We must ireassure ourselves a little in face of 
 Nietzsche's disquieting denials of ** God, freedom, 
 immortality," and all those inspiring ideas, our secret 
 misgivings about which are revealed whenever a 
 single thinker is bold enough to deny them, and seems 
 to precipitate all the stars of thought from the sky. 
 The denial of ** God " and of the ideal is from time 
 to time necessary, because to attain to any real 
 perception in such matters it is necessary to live 
 creatively and to find out these things for oneself. 
 
92 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 God as an objective fact does not appear to exist. 
 Such is the reciprocal connection between the 
 individual and the causal energy of the universe that 
 we must create the objects of our belief : the whole 
 force of our nature must go into the achievement. 
 The ordinary citizen does not like the doctrine of God 
 to be challenged : he likes to think of God being there, 
 as he likes to think of a limitless supply of coal in the 
 bowels of Great Britain. It is on the sense of moral 
 cowardice in regard to those beliefs to which we may 
 have recourse in grief or in weakness, but which for 
 the most part hardly bear examination, that Nietzsche 
 relies when he comes with his dogmatic denial of 
 those beliefs. A dogmatist, however, is what no man 
 has a right to be : and Nietzsche, who is as fierce a 
 dogmatist as Tertullian, has of all persons least right 
 to complain if we remind ourselves of the physiological 
 conditions of his shrill assurance. Most men require 
 the stimulus of happiness for production of any kind, 
 but Nietzsche, like Leopardi, was one of those who 
 only rise to the height of their powers under the 
 stimulus of pain and privation. He is one of those 
 invalids who cannot breathe in the lower valleys of 
 thought, and can only get the full of their lungs when 
 hurricanes are blov/ing. The more outrageous the 
 statement to be made the better he is pleased, and 
 the more himself he is. The bleaker and colder the 
 intellectual landscape the more impetuous becomes 
 his verve. We may be sure that if he rejects with so 
 much scorn *' God, freedom, and immortality,*' it is 
 because it has cost him something to do so. 
 
 His starting point is the philosophy of Schopen- 
 hauer, a volume of which fell in his wa^ while he was 
 
WAY OF UNDERSTANDING NIETZCHE 93 
 
 a professor at Basle, and at once completely filled his 
 mind. Of philology, his study till then, he had said 
 in his inaugural lecture that it is ** neither a Muse nor 
 a Grace, but a messenger of the Gods; and as the 
 Muses formerly descended among the afflicted and 
 suffering Boeotians, this messenger comes to-day into 
 a world filled with gloomy and baneful shapes, filled 
 with profound and incurable sufferings, and consoles 
 us by evoking the beautiful and luminous forms of a 
 marvellous, an azure, a distant, a fortunate country !" 
 Pessimism is the most restful of all creeds to a mind 
 harassed by the disorder and vulgarity of modern life, 
 and it is out of pessimism that all the religions have 
 originated. For pessimism is the affirmation of the 
 ideal, and restores to the mind what actuality refuses. 
 To condemn existence as a whole is to exempt from 
 all risk of change and contamination by experience 
 those forms of truth and beauty which the mind creates 
 or of which it can entertain the supposition. Pessi- 
 mism, as a creed, is the last subterfuge by which the 
 human mind, instead of succumbing to the ills of liie 
 by suicide, madness or recklessness, escapes from the 
 galling pressure of fatality. It is true that the 
 pessimist must then affirm, like Schopenhauer, that 
 all the consolations of life are purely negative, and 
 that in turning to art, or religion, or philosophy, or 
 science, he is only exercising the hard- won faculty of 
 escaping, by means of an *' objective interest in 
 things,** from real experience. But man, as Goethe 
 said, *' never knows how anthropomorphic he is.** 
 He can never secure his conception of nirvana, of 
 heaven, of God, of beauty, or of holiness from some 
 admixture of the hopes and sympathies which he may 
 
94 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 have dreamed of renouncing. The pessimistic 
 idealist is likely enough to return from his contempla- 
 tions with some ** gospel " or philosophy addressed 
 to his fellowmen, in which lurk perhaps all the old 
 seeds of infatuation. In the pessimist's affirmation of 
 the ideal, Nietzsche mockingly detects the last 
 resource of hypocritical weakness. He resolves, 
 then, at the point where all the hopes and illusions of 
 chagrined egoism find themselves foiled, to declare 
 himself optimist — a lover of fate, or a '* yea-saying 
 man." He denies ** the ideal." More courageous 
 and more honest than Schopenhauer, he returns from 
 the dread region of ultimate self-questioning with no 
 deceptive doctrine of resignation, or altruism, or con- 
 templation — seed-grounds of hypocrisy and illusion — 
 but with the frank and ** gay " denial of God, 
 freedom, immortality, and, at the same time, with the 
 equally frank and gay avowal of the will-to-live, the 
 desire of power, strength, and activity. But has he 
 reckoned with the narrow limits of that power in 
 which he has learned to exult, the limitations of 
 experience, from which pessimism has found in art, 
 contemplation, resignation, the only permitted outlets? 
 He returns, at all events, with this augmentation and 
 ratification of the sentiment of power, that it disowns 
 all ** idealistic " restrictions. He has acquired a 
 caustic perception of the figmentitious nature of those 
 conceptions which it suits alike the interest of the 
 strong and the poltroonery of the weak to regard as 
 moral distinctions, transcendental or divine, inherent 
 in human nature. Nietzsche stands or falls with his 
 assertion that moral distinctions are not superhuman 
 or superimposed (transcendental) checks and ingre- 
 
WAY OF UNDERSTANDING NIETZCHE 9S 
 dients of human conduct, but the creation, subject to 
 continual transformation from the same source, of 
 humanity itself. The spectacle of ** the moral law " 
 awakens in him, not as it did in Ksuit, such a feelingr 
 as the spectacle of the stars awakens, of eternal and 
 supernormal elements present in every-day experience, 
 yet a certain judicious respect as the monument of 
 earlier ages in which man acted in his true role as a 
 "'creator of values." In the sense that *' language is 
 fossil poetry " : or in the sense that philology, 
 according to the passage already quoted, evokes the 
 forms of a more fortunate past ; so the morality which 
 men accept as ** slaves " points back to the creative 
 power of *' masters " who imposed it (as Nietzsche 
 conceives, for their own ends). 
 
 In the family, for instance, parents will impose a 
 slave-morality : ** You mustn*t do that !" Impatience, 
 expediency, not to speak of a lack of metaphysical 
 acumen, will dictate this hasty method of tabooing 
 certain actions as in themselves ** bad.** And it is so 
 that conventional morality and religion treat the 
 parents themselves. Indeed it is only by a flash of 
 intuition, with some elements of ** wickedness,'* that 
 in later life we occasionally transcend the moral 
 casuistry of the Sunday School. Take, for example, 
 public charity. The poor would fare far better at our 
 hands were it not for that moral philosophy which 
 at once puts up our backs by inculcating the practice 
 as a duty. We refuse charity in the streets because 
 we do not like the smack of self-satisfaction consequent 
 on the performance of an action which is reputed to 
 be virtuous. But if it were simply understood that 
 we can do what we like with our own money we 
 
96 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 should relieve many a poor applicant simply out of 
 a sense of freedom, or according to that maxim of 
 ** noble " as contrasted with *' slave *' morality, which 
 Nietzsche might have said had lost its way among the 
 early Christians, ** It is more blessed to give than to 
 receive." Or take the habit of telling lies. It is a 
 matter of expediency to whip little boys out of such a 
 habit, and to impute it as an offence in the mentally 
 undeveloped ; yet who can doubt that a punctiliousness 
 about telling the truth is mainly an affair of personal 
 pride, and strongest where it is purely voluntary. 
 But the "noble," who are voluntarily truthful among 
 themselves, will enjorce the practice on their vassals. 
 The "power," then, which Nietzsche cares about is 
 the power to preside at the origin of those conceptions 
 ^which direct and control men. We have to bear this 
 in mind in order to account for an apparent incon- 
 sistency in the writings of Nietzsche, who, while 
 praising power wherever he sees it exercised in 
 liistory purely from the love of it, is clearly always on 
 the side of those who confront the might of the world 
 with the might of the idea, and for whom some 
 limitation of circumstance or character has been a 
 "school of genius." When he praises deliberately 
 " bad " men, such as the mythical Machiavelli or 
 Caesar Borgia, he is praising men who dealt with the 
 crowd in the spirit of " masters," though only after 
 its own moral values; he is praising them at the 
 expense of merely " good " men, with whom some 
 sense of " acquiring merit " by their actions is 
 inseparable from the habit of regarding actions as in 
 themselves good or evil. 
 
 But what becomes of those '* laws which in the 
 
WAY OF UNDERSTANDING NIETZCHE 97 
 highest empyrean had their birth," of which Sophocles 
 sang even in that Greek world which philology evoked 
 for Nietzsche? How was it, indeed, that the Greeks 
 and Romans, whose '* immoralism " Nietzsche is 
 never tired of praising, were far less afraid than we 
 are of the suspicion of having the tongue in the cheek 
 when they talked of virtue said morality, and used 
 these words far more freely than we do? They 
 believed in good and evil just as much as we do, but 
 in calling a man good or bad they regarded the whole 
 ensemble of his character and circumstances more 
 liberally, if not quite as fastidiously as we. Plutarch's 
 heroes do not in general perform particularly '* good " 
 actions, yet his biographies leave the impression of 
 goodness or badness, or rather of moral strength or 
 weakness. In regard to morals, Nietzsche is (by 
 continual effort) one of the ancients : and though his 
 attitude towards the struggle of the ordinary man with 
 his ** temptations " can hardly be described as 
 sympathetic; though in fact he holds his sides in 
 unholy merriment at the spectacle of men living 
 deliberately against their inclinations; he is probably 
 as whole-hearted as any moralist in his belief that the 
 devil is an ass. ** I do not deny," he says, — ** as 
 need hardly be said if it be allowed that I am in my 
 senses — that it is needful to avoid and combat many 
 actions which are called immoral ; just as it is needful 
 to perform and to encourage many which are called 
 moral ; but I think it is needful to do both the one and 
 the other for different reasons from those till now 
 acknowledged. It is needful that we should change 
 owf^way oj seeing in order to arrive, perhaps very late, 
 at changing our way oj jeeling," Nietzsche himself 
 
98 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 seems to see with the ancients and to feel with the 
 modern puritans like Emerson, Thoreau, Carlyle, who 
 have arrived at a ** way of feeling '* in these matters 
 most nearly akin to that of the ancients (** teachers 
 best," as Milton calls them, '* of moral prudence "), 
 and who have regarded man, as the ancients regarded 
 him, rather as having a will to exert than as having 
 a soul to save. In this way the ancients maintained 
 their supremacy as moralists even after the appearance 
 of Christianity, with its consoling but, as it seemed to 
 the ancients, ** immoral " beliefs. Nietzsche, as is 
 well known, denounced Christianity as a perversion 
 by which, owing to a combination of circumstances, 
 ** slave morality " was enabled to triumph over the 
 ** morality of masters." This antipathy to Christianity 
 into which he has thought himself helps one, at all 
 events, to understand the attitude of serious thinkers 
 in the ancient world who detected in the ** forgiveness 
 of sins " and the annihilation of the will, a lax 
 morality. And later, when Europe was filled with 
 renunciants and ascetics, paganism was still able to 
 unfold before the eyes of men the most shining 
 examples, not indeed of holiness, but of manhood 
 (virtue). Throughout the middle ages and under the 
 regime of ecclesiasticism, virtue, in the old sense of 
 manhood, was almost discredited in favour of the 
 ideal of renunciation; until the Renaissance, with the 
 not specially antique accompaniment of libertinism, 
 brought back the ancient ideal of a humanity *'for 
 perfect action fonned under laws divine." The 
 morality of Shakspeare's plays, or of Browning's 
 poem *' The Statute and the Bust," of Goethe, or of 
 Carlyle's " Friedrich," is none the less positive and 
 
WAY OF UNDERSTANDING NIETZCHE 99 
 
 real for not lending itself to inculcation from the pulpit. 
 
 To the doctrine of the Superman — that ** far-off 
 divine event" to which, according to Nietzsche, 
 humanity moves — a consideration of the ** morality of 
 slaves and masters " naturally leads on; but his con- 
 ception of the Superman, moulded chiefly by hatred 
 of Christianity and the obsession of his mind by 
 Darwinism, is undoubtedly a little crazy. There is a 
 kind of assumption that those great me^i who act as 
 ''bridges" to the Superman exist at the expense of 
 the rest of mankind. But the existence of great men, 
 like the discovery of nature's secrets, brings nothing 
 but gain to all men. A great man, a spiritually great 
 man, is he who adds a new power and significance to 
 life. It is otherwise, to some extent, with the Caesars 
 and Napoleons, those idols of the average man, who, 
 like the wrath of Achilles, *' bring a thousand woes 
 to men, and send quickly to Hades mciny strong souls 
 of heroes, thus accomplishing the will of Zeus "; and 
 Nietzsche, with his insane denial of idealism and 
 devotion to " physiology," came to acknowledge 
 greatness only in such men. Undoubtedly all 
 civilizations culminate in a period during which a 
 privileged few appear to subsist at the expense of the 
 rest of mankind. Refinement, wealth, beauty, 
 learning, leisure, amusement, all these things are 
 necessary for art; but we must not therefore conclude 
 that civilization exists for the sake of the few. As 
 the blossom is only an incident in the development of 
 the plant, so the efflorescence of art and culture is 
 only a part of the life-history of a race. Behind this 
 efflorescence, and eventually displacing it, new ideas 
 and tendencies are germinating. How is it that the 
 
 H 
 
100 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 spiritual development of humanity appears to obey 
 laws so contrary to those which govern its physical 
 evolution, that it is as a rule among the ** despised 
 and rejected " that the princes and potentates of 
 thought arise ? Clearly because it is on the unsuccess- 
 ful candidates for natural selection that the problem of 
 existence bears with its whole weight. So little com- 
 petent is a merely physical theory like that of Darwin 
 to explain life, that its chief service is so to marshal 
 facts as immediately to demonstrate the existence of 
 forces which it leaves out of account, and to send us 
 back perhaps to some metaphysical theory like that 
 of Hegel, which teaches that every positive generates 
 the negation of itself. 
 
 1904. 
 
SINCERITY 
 
 EWARE of that man,'* said Diderot of 
 Rousseau; ** he believes every word he 
 says ! ' ' We are reminded by such a 
 saying that sincerity, or the habit of 
 throwing the vital powers into our words 
 and actions, so far from being merely the attribute of 
 good and undesigning men, is an engine of influence 
 and innovation within the compass of the few. There 
 are indeed certain men — Rousseau was one of them, 
 and there is no doubt a Rousseau in every man of 
 genius — who are born into the world to apply to our 
 arts and institutions the test of genuine feeling. *'I am 
 not like any man whom I have ever seen,** said 
 Rousseau; ** I venture to think I am not like any man 
 that ever existed." But he was mistaken. In all the 
 foibles described by him so lovingly in his ** Con- 
 fessions," thousands of readers in every generation 
 since have confessed themselves vicariously. What 
 was so exceptional in Rousseau was the complete 
 absence in him of that power to adapt himself to his 
 environment, a power which almost everyone 
 possesses, and which parents are perhaps right in 
 choosing to encourage in their children rather than 
 genius ; and on the other hand the strength in him of 
 that power whose rarity nature seems to atone for by 
 the enormous attraction and compulsive force with 
 which she occasionally endows it. From time to time 
 a moment befalls when the martyrs of sincerity are 
 
102 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 transformed into the founders of new eras, and the 
 ** creators," to adopt Nietzsche's language, of the 
 ** new values." But for Rousseau, if we may accept 
 the testimony of Napoleon, there would have been no 
 French Revolution; and two centuries earlier, a man 
 who had at first seemed likely to end as one more 
 obscure victim of a sincerity sis helpless as that of 
 Rousseau, Martin Luther, apparently by a mere acci- 
 dent, suddenly found on his side the suffrages of men,^ 
 and himself the honoured father of the coming world. 
 
 It is a common fallacy, bequeathed to us perhaps 
 from pre-Lutheran times, that people are by preference 
 and intention insincere, and that the strong man will 
 wear a mask, whereas the truth probably is that in- 
 sincerity is almost invariably a sign of weakness. If 
 it were in our power to be sincere we should no more 
 think of being insincere than a pleader would bewilder 
 his audience with subtleties when facts were at his 
 disposal. The power of genius is essentially the same 
 as the disconcerting quality of sincerity when brought 
 face to face with false pretensions. The rest of us are 
 constantly peeling off new wrappages which conceal 
 us from ourselves, eoid finding that yesterday we acted 
 a part; but the genius is he who has arrived at the 
 basis of his nature and whose morrow belies not his 
 yesterday. Genius is that fire which kindles only the 
 altars of sincerity. To be sincere is what every man, 
 from the poet to the Archbishop of Canterbury, finds 
 his account in being. In literature it is style, the power 
 of leaning one's whole weight on the pen. If ever we 
 poor pagans, adrift in what Myers called the "inter- 
 space between faiths decayed and faiths re-risen,'* 
 shall devise for ourselves some consoling ritual, it 
 
SINCERITY 103 
 
 ought to be one which should recall us, were it only 
 one day in the week, to spiritual nakedness and self- 
 realization. Meanwhile, to have confided oneself 
 even to paper brings relief and peace, as only those 
 actions do which have the sanction of heart, soul and 
 intellect. If we could believe that a certain number 
 of those actions in trade, politics and social life, which 
 make up the world's doings for a day, were done with 
 the whole-heartedness with which, in a lonely country 
 road, one makes an entry in one's note-book, we might 
 believe in the '* progress of civilisation," and that the 
 world was going excellently well; but it is only those 
 who have no plans and no schemes, and perhaps even 
 not too much brains, who can afford to act and speak 
 only from conviction. Verily we need a brood of fakirs 
 and eremites, with souls uncompromisingly exclusive 
 of the otiose and insincere; poets whose poverty in 
 mere opinion perhaps excludes them from society, but 
 whose rare thoughts have the beauty and finality of 
 wayside flowers. 
 
 Most people have at one time or another had the 
 dream of how good a thing it would be to say and do 
 nothing except with sincerity; to say ** Thank you'* 
 and *' Good morning " only when you mean it, to 
 laugh only when amused, to listen only when in- 
 terested, etc. So resolute an attempt, however, to 
 simplify life, very soon breaks down. To begin with, 
 we ourselves have a dozen different sincerities, a 
 sincerity of ill-humour, of jollity, of cynicism, of mis- 
 understanding, to mention some of the less worthy 
 kind; and are we to inflict our moods on our neigh- 
 bours? Besides, it is only with the sincere that sin- 
 cerity is possible ; and as the greater number of those 
 
104 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 with whom the day's doings bring us into contact have 
 not attained sincerity, we must trim our course as we 
 may among conflicting moods. If it is rare that we 
 are sincere even with ourselves, it is rarer still for two 
 persons to be simultaneously and mutually sincere. 
 Sincerity is attained for the most part in solitude, but 
 even there it is to be feared the necessity of incon- 
 stancy and variety pursues us. If we felt the force of 
 those intuitions which visit us so absolutely as to feel 
 them always, we should hardly get through life. We 
 cannot afford to be too sincere. Who has not felt, for 
 example, at certain times that existence itself is some- 
 thing to feel ashamed of, and perhaps even said 
 heartily with Sophocles, '* Not to have been born is 
 past utterance the best." Yet to feel this to the 
 exclusion of the ideals of stoicism, of epicureanism, of 
 scepticism, of religion, which in their different ways 
 enable us to live, was impossible not only for 
 Sophocles, who was most likely, like Shakespeare and 
 Goethe, a man of a cheerful and hopeful disposition, 
 but for human nature. The excuse, if one is needed, 
 for this inconstancy to our deepest intuitions is that we 
 are something in ourselves, independently of all the 
 truths we visit as a bee the flower. In reply to that 
 naive inquiry, *' What do you believe?" one can only 
 say. This and that ! I can no more tell what I believe 
 than I can tell what the universe believes. The chief 
 event of each day should be a fresh discovery of what 
 one believes, and every mood has its own creed. 
 People sometimes talk as though a creed, capable of 
 weekly recitation, were an essential part of the equip- 
 ment of life, but really it is surprising how well one can 
 get along without a creed. As the Indian scripture 
 
SINCERITY 105 
 
 says, ** Drinking of the pleasant beverage called the 
 perception of truth, one becomes free from excitement 
 and sin." 
 
 It is contended that science and religion are not 
 necessarily opposed, yet it is hardly to be denied that 
 Scio has ascended the throne of Credo, who sits as a 
 kind of dowager-empress, wearing the insignia of 
 former greatness, and even insisting on precedence, 
 yet yielding all her real authority to her successor. 
 What we ** believe '* has not the value of what we 
 know; what we have heard from another we say we 
 believe, but what we have found out for ourselves we 
 know. For a long time humanity, having quite in- 
 sufficient notions of the phenomena of external and of 
 human nature, of the stars and the earth and the cause 
 of thunder, formed the habit of distinguishing 
 between the truth of faith and the truth of knowledge. 
 It must, however, be admitted that the notion of faith 
 as a special organ of the humsm mind is not one 
 which bears examination now. The disappearance 
 of faith simply means that the mind is now called 
 upon to verify things for itself, and to bring them 
 within the range of knowledge. In regard to a 
 difficult and involved subject, for example, like the 
 origins of Christianity, in which certainty is so difficult 
 to arrive at, but in which the well-disposed are not to 
 be satisfied with the mere criticism of commonsense 
 or with denial, a kind of tacit or provisional assent is 
 adopted by minds unable or too indolent to enter on 
 a general examination of the evidence bequeathed to 
 us; hat it is quite certain that those who do not 
 c^ttempt such research are at the mercy of those who 
 arrive at their own conclusions in doing so. As we 
 
106 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 study an age like the fourth century, and gradually 
 gain clear ideas of its various tendencies, conviction 
 inevitably rises in the mind as to the nature of historic 
 Christianity and the claims made for it. Such a study 
 may lead to very different conclusions in different 
 minds — that is a question of temperament or the will 
 to believe — but certainty, whether in affirmation or 
 denial, is only to be gained by resolute inquiry. 
 
 The New Testament is generally allowed to exhibit 
 a great advance on the Old in respect of the suppres- 
 sion of that hatred of one's enemies so candidly 
 avowed by David in his Psalms. But to love one's 
 enemies is a different thing from making friends with 
 everybody, a thing impossible. There are persons 
 unfortunately to whom our true relationship is one of 
 enmity. We can persuade ourselves that we love our 
 enemy, or rather, out of consideration for ourselves, 
 we refrain from breaking through that thin medium 
 of general good will in which we confound our enemy 
 with our friends, until destiny, in some malign hour, 
 throws us into some situation in which we rub 
 shoulders with him all day long, and we discover that 
 the laws of incompatibility of temperament are not to 
 be eluded by any counsel of perfection. To love each 
 man is doubtless the goal to aim at, but until love, 
 hatred ! To pray for the discomfiture of our enemies 
 indicates a frame of mind far more likely to succeed 
 in bringing about an ultimate rapprochement than to 
 acquiesce in the continuance of a mutual toleration in 
 which our attitude towards mankind at large, 
 generally egoistic, is not particularised into a personal 
 relationship. Perhaps when our enemy is discomfited 
 
SINCERITY 107 
 
 and punished as we believe he deserves, we shall find 
 him tractable and accessible, a man whom one can 
 love. What each man really is, is disguised from us 
 in most cases by circumstances which preclude a 
 genuine contact with, him at any point, and to upset 
 these false relations and substitute true ones, the lever 
 of hatred may be meanwhile necessary. On the 
 whole, next to love, this hatred is the highest com- 
 pliment which we can pay to our neighbour, and the 
 most promising of a happy eventuation. A lover 
 will not hear of any sentiment between love and 
 hatred from his mistress, and we see that mortal 
 enemies, when brought face to face in a duel, are 
 willing to die to give each other ''satisfaction." In 
 the pure ether of the inmost consciousness, the region 
 in which the Gospels call upon us to live, where 
 identity is perceived, we may love our neighbour 
 truly as ourselves ; to meet him at all in that region is 
 to love him as ourselves. But to love the man whose 
 true personality we cannot reach because of the 
 circumstances which make him our obstacle, it is 
 needful to break down those barriers first. 
 
 A certain confusion of thought seems to vitiate 
 those schemes for the abolition of war, etc., which 
 seem to suggest that nations should be governed in 
 their conduct towards one another by principles 
 derived from what the Quakers called the '* inner 
 hght." Nations, however, have a sincerity of their 
 own in their dealings with one another which states- 
 men understand. They live, as the jurists of the 
 seventeenth century taught, in a " state of nature " 
 rather than as individuals composing a society, and 
 
108 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 we delegate to governments the duty of maintaining 
 our safety auid securing our interests after a code 
 which we might otherwise have to practise 
 individually, but which we have discarded as 
 members of society. Neither Laotze nor Socrates nor 
 Jesus interfered with this code, or denied the 
 necessary authority of the State, which on condition of 
 our readiness to sacrifice our lives for it when it is 
 assailed, takes upon its own shoulders the disgraceful 
 struggle for existence. They limited themselves to 
 the demonstration that the true interests of men in 
 every State are identical. The use of terms and of 
 ideals, which have reference originally to the relation 
 of man to his neighbour, have an air of unreality and 
 cant when applied, as they are nowadays by some of 
 our publicists, to the relation of these Titanic beings 
 towEurds one another, whose normal relations of formal 
 courtesy and watchful neutrality represent a great 
 refinement in the conditions of the struggle for 
 existence, insomuch that we scarcely realise at times 
 that the struggle still goes on, or why the nations 
 should not live together according to the maxims of 
 the Sermon on the Mount. Yet to talk of love 
 between nations is merely a capitulation to the news- 
 papers. So long as their part is simply to look 
 after our interests there may be honourable and 
 prudent dealings in their mutual rivalries, but not 
 love, which begins with renunciation; and were the 
 nations empowered to practise this they might vanish, 
 their task accomplished. A sincere and regretful 
 admission that civilisation is but a refinement of the 
 struggle for life, and that the cause of sociaJ well- 
 
SINCERITY 109 
 
 being is distinct from the fact of personal salvation, 
 and even perhaps the private and inevitable foe of the 
 latter, might if it were general be the most effective 
 deterrent from war, inasmuch as mankind would then 
 be less likely to be led by specious phrases into 
 unforseen calamities. 
 
 1904 
 
REAFFORESTATION. 
 
 ** Here are trees — let tis think the matter outV — Buddha. 
 
 JF the vegetable world, as man of the animal 
 world, the tree is the perfect type and 
 development : and hence it is that when 
 man is thoroughly at peace with himself, 
 prosperous and flourishing, there is 
 nothing that we compare him with so instinctively as 
 a tree. *' He shall be like a tree planted by the 
 rivers of water, that bringeth forth its fruit in its 
 season, whose leaf also shall not wither; and whatso- 
 ever he doeth shall prosper." "Man is indeed 
 described by a tree in the Word,*' says Swedenborg, 
 ** and his wisdom from love by a garden; nothing else 
 is signified by the Garden of Eden." In the tree the 
 passive ideal of existence is realised, the vegetative 
 ideal; and though the limitations of that ideal were 
 destined to be demonstrated when the notion of an 
 axe flew to the brain of the latest uncouth-looking 
 mammal, there were entire ages during which the 
 true type of attainment was still the tree, and not in 
 any of the apparently aimless activities of those 
 animals who crashed or climbed or slunk through the 
 forest, or lodged in its branches. Providence, how- 
 ever, had some other end in view, as it appeared, 
 with this planet than the realisation upon its surface of 
 the vegetative ideal : 201 end which has been perhaps 
 
REAFFORESTATION 1 1 1 
 
 too boldly defined by the Swedish seer as the 
 ''production of a heaven from the human race."^ 
 However that may be, it is in man — ** earth's thought- 
 ful lord,*' as Wordsworth sings him; "for perfect 
 action formed under laws divine," as Whitman 
 proclaims him — that the purpose of creation, so far 
 as we have knowledge, appears to be concentrated. 
 He has even begun to dream of himself as the medium 
 through which the creative purpose of the universe 
 shall manifest itself further; and only a little while 
 ago a professor of philology in Germany threw up his 
 chair and retired into the Alps in order to proclaim 
 to the world his doctrine of the Supermian, according 
 to which man himself assumes within certain limits 
 the role of creator. Nietzsche, however, was a mere 
 poet, and more anthropomorphic than any of the 
 Hebrews whom he vituperated. As if, after barely a 
 million years of existence, and a few hundreds of 
 more or less uninterrupted and conscious social 
 development, it were yet time to begin to think of the 
 next stage of evolution ! The Superman was perhaps 
 really nothing more (or less) than a personification of 
 the State, an entity which has been created not so 
 much by us as in spite of ourselves by our necessities, 
 and has only in our own time begun to acquire self- 
 consciousness and self -direction. It is true that 
 Nietzsche vituperated the State as the ** coldest of cold 
 monsters " ; but it is only in the State that the ** great 
 man mankind " attains to some of those superhuman 
 attributes with which Nietzsche endowed his 
 Superman, and the Statesman who best interprets the 
 collective will of mankind is perhaps the nearest thing 
 to him that it is permissible to hope for. 
 
112 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 The State is, in fact, a cosmic agent, in so far as it 
 is its part to restore the balance of nature where that 
 hats been upset by the reckless behaviour of man in 
 the past : to determine, for example, what portions of 
 the earth's surface it can now afford to set apart for 
 the ancient races of the trees. Yet in looking to the 
 State, £ts to a new Providence, for the solution of all 
 our problems, we are perhaps only giving time for 
 causal energies to mature which lie altogether outside 
 the range of state-interference. What is known as 
 the problem of rural life, for instance — at which the 
 State has recently begun to tinker — awaits for its 
 solution nothing more or less than a new way of 
 looking at things, a new idea, which may arise Heaven 
 knows how, and may change the face of society at 
 any time. For a long time to come we may expect 
 that society will fall into two main parties or divisions, 
 l>oth looking to the State for their sanction, one acting 
 in its name to secure revolutionary adaptations of 
 society to the pressure of its difficulties, the other 
 regsurding its own cause as nothing less than that of 
 the maintenance of civilisation, and succeeding 
 periodically in arresting the precipitation towards 
 anarchy. And nature — human nature — will find in 
 neither of these parties, nor in both together, the 
 plasticity and spontaneity required for the moulding 
 of the future of msui; it \vill rather find these in a 
 third class which will meanwhile have arisen, con- 
 sisting in the first case of those who have fallen away 
 irom social effort and public ambition, the ** intellec- 
 tuals " as we call them at present, the ** incom- 
 petents," and the increasing number of those who 
 are appealed to by the ideal of self-culture. 
 
REAFFORESTATION 1 1 3 
 
 contemplation, and even asceticism. It is amongst 
 these that a new idea might conceivably arise which 
 might even lead ultimately to a new form of civilisa- 
 tion. It is hard to say, for example, what influence 
 the appearance of an English-speaking Tolstoi might 
 not have in peopling the derelict country with small 
 holdings, inhabited no longer by peasantry — a class 
 w^hich the whole modem system of things is tending 
 to abolish — but by those to whom the prizes of civil 
 life no longer presents an overpowering attraction, 
 and to whom, on the other hand, nature calls. It is 
 an idea for which we wait. Without an idea man 
 is frivolous, anarchic, dissatisfied, despicable. With 
 an idea, the long-hoarded initiatives of his nature are 
 liberated, he strains forward to new consummations, 
 he ** did not know that he contained so much virtue." 
 ** They reckon ill who leave Me out,** says Brahma 
 in Emerson's poem : and the saying may be applied 
 to the ** anticipations " of sociologists like Mr. H. G. 
 Wells, which leave out of account the possible effects 
 on the whole structure of society of the renewal in 
 mankind of a disposition for spiritual adventure : a 
 change which would make any prizes which society 
 has to offer to the better sort of individuals as nothing 
 compared with such rewards as Buddha offered in 
 Emancipation, or Jesus Christ in the Kingdom of 
 Heaven. He must be very dogmatic or unimaginative 
 who would affirm that man will never weary of the 
 whole system of things which reigns at present : of 
 respectability and security, of eight hours of work and 
 cards in the evening, of shops, professions, motors 
 and newspapers, of household-life and the sacrifice of 
 his natural love of liberty to the requirements of town- 
 
1 1 4 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 loving woman, of churches and theatres. We never 
 know how near we are to the end of any phase of 
 our experience, smd often when its seeming stabiUty 
 begins to pall upon us, it is a sign that things are 
 about to take a new turn. Man, aifter all, is still man, 
 the same being who flung himself into the wars of 
 religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
 who departed on the Crusades, who peopled the 
 deserts of Egypt and the East, the forests of Germany 
 and the isles, with hermits; and there is no reason,, 
 should the idea of doing so enter into his head, that 
 he should not try some new experiment. There is 
 nothing of which we should be less disposed to say 
 that it cannot happen, than that such an idea should 
 not at some unexpected moment occur to him. Man- 
 kind, in fact, is always acting impulsively on an idea 
 of some sort. About a century ago, for instance, it 
 took to scooping out the coal-measures, the formation 
 of which occupied nature for millions of years, and 
 already it has almost come within sight of their 
 exhaustion — and all for what? Chiefly because the 
 idea of Speed had taken possession of it, the apparently 
 unassailable ideal of expediting work and locomotion 
 indefinitely. A man does not particularly enjoy 
 ripping through mountains in an express-train or 
 tearing along tarred roads in a motor, but it is an idea, 
 and one of which he may weary any day. The 
 imbroglio of labour and capital, and the first symptoms 
 of a disconcerting but not really irrational ** revolt of 
 woman," are perhaps, at the moment of writing, the 
 outstanding results of his devotion to this idea. 
 Probably when he changes it for some other, the trees, 
 which during his obsession by this idea have been 
 
REAFFORESTATION 1 1 5 
 
 threatened with extermination, may steal down upon 
 the plains again, to his advantage in every way. 
 What if the ideal of Leisure were to succeed that of 
 Speed ? If we rightly apprehend Hegel's theory of an 
 inherent logic in historic development, we might 
 almost use his authority in predicting that it will. Of 
 course we must expect that the generality of men will 
 overdo this ideal, just as they have overdone it in 
 India and the East, and just as they have overdone 
 Speed in Europe and America : but its adoption might 
 be attended with one advantage, which can scarcely 
 be said to have attended devotion to Speed : the 
 highest type of human being might be brought out 
 once again as in certain epochs of the past, the sage, 
 the man like unto a tree planted by the rivers of water. 
 The outlook therefore, we consider, is not without 
 hope; nor are we discouraged in contemplating the 
 growing numbers of young men who have been sent 
 to the universities in order to become lawyers, doctors, 
 clergymen, engineers, etc., and have lost their 
 vocation by the way, inbibing perhaps, to the despair 
 of their parents and guardians, irrelevant notions of 
 self -culture from Goethe, the itch of authorship from 
 Emerson and Carlyle, vagabond propensities from 
 Whitman or Stevenson, insubordination from 
 Nietzsche or Shaw, Christianity from Tolstoi, indeter- 
 minate literary aestheticism from W. B. Yeats, etc., 
 all according to their various temperaments. It can- 
 not be said that our universities are directly responsible 
 for this result, whether good or bad, of their training : 
 on the contrary, mundane success of one kind or 
 another is their ideal, and when by some chance one 
 of these young ne'er-do-wells, matriculating in the 
 I 
 
116 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 vast university of life, attains eventually to honours, 
 the old time-serving alma mater will consider it her 
 special privilege to bind his laurels about his brows. 
 The most flagrant instance of this is perhaps the case 
 of poor Goldsmith, whose monument now ** welcomes 
 the coming, speeds the parting guest," Trmity College 
 claiming to have ** produced" him. But in what 
 sense did Trinity College produce Goldwnith? Did 
 she discover beneath his pock-marked exterior the 
 graK:eful and enfranchised spirit whose mission it was 
 to instruct the great British public in the art of 
 expression for more than a generation? Did he feel 
 in his wanderings through this world of care that her 
 eye was upon him, or did her Macte Virtu te sound 
 gratefulh' in his ears when he gained his first 
 successes? No, the ideal of Trinity College is, of 
 necessity, the successful professional man, not the 
 poet, not the thinker; and it would be a mistake to 
 infer from the situation of Foley's fine monument that 
 a beautiful maternal relationship exists between these 
 old seats of learning and mundanity, and their 
 prodigal sons. A little rage at the recollection of 
 Smiglesius and Burgersdicius (fifty years before 
 Goldsmith, Jonathan Swift had been ** esteemed a 
 blockhead " for his inability to read these authors, 
 ** they were so stupid "), and some memories of 
 cruelty and snobbery which rankled in him throughout 
 his life, were all that Golds. nith carried away with 
 him when he passed through the gateway of Trinity 
 for the last time. Yet we are far from suggesting that 
 it is not the main function of a university to turn out 
 as many good citizens as it can, or that she should 
 maintain any other than a resolutely and even sternly 
 
REAFFORESTATION 1 1 7 
 
 mundane attitude toward her young idealists : 
 Newman, who came over here in the middle of last 
 century (thinking, like others of his countrymen, that 
 Ireland was a country where ideas grew wild !) had 
 regretfully to acknowledge that this was so, and to 
 abandon his project of starting a university with God 
 for its central idea. And still less should we fail to 
 acknowledge that universities may now and then 
 retain among their teachers one as different as possible 
 from Theaker Wilder. 
 
 Have we wandered from the subject of Reafforesta- 
 tion? Not perhaps so very far. We are in quest of 
 the tree-like man, whom our civilisation has hitherto 
 failed to produce, nor does it appear that the seed of 
 him is sown in those ** sacred nurseries of blooming 
 youth," our universities. According to the old 
 Indian custom, the time of thought, reflection, 
 discipline, cultivation of the higher powers, education, 
 in fact, in the true sense of the term, came at the end 
 of life, when a man had fulfilled his part as a house- 
 holder, and presumably had lost a too distracting 
 appetite for the pleasures of life. With us, on the 
 contrary, the time of education is placed at the outset 
 of life, at that period in which a man is probably 
 least amenable to real instruction, the period at which 
 almost any man looking back upon himself will 
 acknowledge himself to have been a young puppy. 
 At the time when the Indian was about to enter upon 
 the more serious and interesting part of his life, and 
 teheld — as a man travelling to the sea may behold 
 from afar the distant port from which he is to embark 
 — the forest hermitage in which he was to make ready 
 for a new incarnation, our citizen, bothered orobably 
 
1 1 8 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 by a clamorous brood of sons and daughters, is 
 beginning to wonder whether it is worth his while to 
 give them an education which meant so little to 
 himself : looking cheerlessly round on the waste places 
 of his spirit, of no economic account in the present 
 system of things. It is these waste spaces of the 
 human mind that its reafForesters, our poets and 
 thinkers, must learn how to utilize. 
 
 1912. 
 
A CAUSE 
 
 JHEN, during the Renascence and the 
 Reformation, it began to be more and 
 more impossible, or at all events more 
 and more unnecessary, for a man in 
 whom stirred the progressive spirit of the 
 race to remain within the Church, the scholar, the 
 political theorist, the philosopher, the poet, and even 
 the saint, coming forth into the world, soon set up 
 standards of excellence and perfection superior to 
 those currently acknowledged within the fold. 
 Protestantism was essentially an abolition of the 
 antithesis between the Church and the World, and 
 whatever we hear nowadays of the failure of 
 Protestantism and of the evils which it has brought in 
 its train, it is quite certain that it has effectually and 
 irremediably done its work, and that the world since 
 Luther's time has become a very different place. The 
 Catholic Church, which until the Reformation had 
 enshrined and appropriated the ideals of humanity, 
 had now to look on, while in each of the nationalities 
 of modern Europe a growing band of idealists began 
 that criticism of institutions and that promulgation of 
 new ideals, which have set up as their goal the 
 realization of the City of God, not in an invisible 
 communion of saints but in the body politic of each 
 nation. The aspirations of the individual soul, which 
 had formerly burned themselves away in prayer and 
 contemplation, now gave birth to lyrical prophecies 
 
120 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 of the perfectibility of human society, and the concep- 
 tion of heaven itself began to pale before the concep- 
 tion of an ideal republic. What would Thomas a 
 Kempis have thought of the world revealed to us in 
 George Fox's Journals, the England of Milton and 
 Harrington and Gerard Winstanley ? What would he 
 have thought of the adoption by the world of some of 
 the very watchwords of the Kingdom of Heaven? of 
 the attempt to remove from the world those evils 
 which were blessings in so far as they drove the 
 bleeding human spirit to the bosom of God? How, 
 looking further into the future, would he have heard 
 the assertion of Mazzini that true religion comes from 
 the world, in its new transformation '* the people *'r 
 or the still more valiant assertion of Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw that men can only be made virtuous by Acts of 
 Parliament? But even if we pay Protestantism the 
 compliment of saying, as we do, that it represented 
 the progressive force of humanity, we should be 
 claiming too much for it if we said that it carried its 
 forces in good order into the modern world. The 
 word Reformation, which we apply loosely to the 
 exodus from the old chruch of many of her more 
 honest and earnest spirits, is really more appropriate 
 to what we call the Catholic Reaction which resulted 
 from it, and a somewhat similar reaction began among 
 the idealists themselves at the time of the French 
 Revolution when a certain proportion of them 
 recoiled from the reckless propaganda of Rousseau. 
 The celebrated Anglo-Irishman, Edmund Burke, was 
 the leader in this reaction : for whom it may be claimed 
 that he destroyed the general taste for ideal republics 
 by substituting an almost mystical conception of 
 
A CAUSE 121 
 
 society and of the state, from which even the most 
 factious revolutionary could hardly with decency 
 withhold his homage. The state, he proclaimed, *' is 
 a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; 
 a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As 
 the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in 
 many generations, it becomes a partnership not only 
 between those who are living, but between those who 
 are living, those who are dead, and those who are to 
 be born. Each contract of each particular state is 
 but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal 
 society, linking the lower with the higher natures, 
 connecting the visible and invisible world, according 
 to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath 
 which holds all physical and all moral natures, each 
 in their appointed place," etc. Many of the poets 
 in these countries, who had shown symptoms of 
 defection from the parent state, went over whole- 
 heartedly to this champion of natural law in society, 
 just as on the continent a good many of them returned 
 to the fold of the Catholic Church. Words v/orth in 
 particular, who had begun his career as a revolu- 
 tionary, became one of Burke's most illustrious and 
 not least influential disciples, not so much by 
 advocating his political doctrines directly as by hi 
 sacred zeal in adopting a strictly Burkian conception 
 of his vocation as a poet. Returning out of the 
 uproar of the French Revolution to his native hills, 
 he had found as he revisited his childish haunts, on 
 the one hand, that the '* rights of man " no longer 
 kindled in his breast the old exultations and indigna- 
 tions, and, on the other, that he had entered without 
 knowing it a new and hardly discovered poetic region, 
 
122 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 watered with the springs of intuition, and where the 
 
 universal soul stretched away like a vast inland sea. 
 
 Yes, the Catholic Church was right, not indeed in 
 thinking that the world must inevitably jeturn to her, 
 or that it would be good for the world that it should 
 do so, but that the idealists who went forth from her 
 would suffer an inevitable disillusionment and 
 deterioration in substituting for the ideal of a church 
 the ideal of human solidarity and progress. They 
 have indeed accomplished great things : liberated 
 thought in human affairs and set the world moving, it 
 may be toward some far-off divine event ; brought the 
 whole thought of the world to bear on the affairs of 
 the world. It is probable that never was a time when 
 the world, taking into account its vast problems of 
 population and supply, eind the magnitude of its 
 schemes, was more equitably governed, and that never 
 was so close an inquisition made into whatever savours 
 of oppression and cruelty. Abuses which a few 
 hundred years ago attracted no attention are now 
 blazoned and paraded to catch the universal indigna- 
 tion. People who lived under no particular sense of 
 wrong are now sought out and convinced that they 
 are trampled upon. But have our idealists who have 
 brought all this about not lost hold of some of those 
 fiery convictions which they carried with them out 
 of the mother church when they first began to set up 
 theocracies and republics? Have they maintained in 
 its purity any transcendental principle or belief of 
 which they can say to one another *' In hoc signo 
 vinces"? Have they established any ideal superior 
 to that of the common man? Have they produced 
 any writing with eoiything like the solace and certitude 
 
A CAUSE 123 
 
 of Thomas a Kempis's Imitation ? Have they found 
 out anything, or even agreed upon anything ? Perhaps 
 one of the most really melancholy of all the modern 
 poets, though he was also one of the most beautiful, 
 was the poet whose ideals were entirely mundane and 
 who believed in the perfectibility of society— William 
 Morris; and who of the moderns, at all events in the 
 Anglo-Saxon world, have achieved in their person- 
 alities an independent world of transcendental 
 affirmation, if not Blake and Walt Whitman, of whom 
 one was crazy and the other a poet who could not 
 sing, while both were as little disposed to interfere 
 in the conduct of the world as Socrates or Jesus. 
 
 Nevertheless, when all is said, we are citizens, 
 concerned in the reign of justice and the remedy of 
 abuses : answerable even, to the small extent of our 
 personal relations, for establishing on the side of the 
 globe a mankind which will enable it to look the 
 other stars in their faces. Is the cause of the Ideal 
 then social rather than personal, as Mazzini dreamed 
 and as our own intellectuals are coming more and 
 more to believe? Religions hitherto have been in the 
 nature of consolations and compensations for the 
 defects of life, and the most comprehensive in its scope 
 of all religions, Buddhism, begins with the postulate 
 that life is sorrow. It is, in fact, a matter of common 
 experience that, as we are constituted individually, 
 the lower we pitch our hopes the better for our 
 happiness. Life is full of surprises and satisfactions 
 when we postulate it as something from which to 
 escape; indeed,- some such principle is the whole 
 rationale of art and religion as hitherto understood. 
 But such an attitude towards social life seems hardly 
 
1 24 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 now to befit us as citizens : even though we may have 
 no great faith in an ideal republic or in the perfectibility 
 of the race, we should be pusillanimous if we did not 
 look forward to the renovation of a system of things 
 which still makes life a physical misery for at least a 
 large minority. Does the recognition that life is 
 sorrow, with which all religion has hitherto begun » 
 not then apply to the general life of humanity? Or 
 would the religious standpoint itself be altered if its 
 social setting were transformed? On the answer ta 
 this question depends the answer to the question 
 whether the religious ideas with which mankind has 
 been indoctrinated, chiefly through Buddhism and 
 Christianity, have now been worked out and have 
 begun to be displaced by the germs of a new spiritual 
 principle. Rightly or wrongly, we have admitted the 
 ideals of progress and politics into our conception of 
 religion. ** The individual," said Mazzini, ** is no 
 longer the aim of human endeavour. The individual 
 will appear in new sacredness when, by the promulga- 
 tion of the social law, the rights and duties of 
 individual existence are made to harmonize with that 
 law.'* The drawing together of thoughtful and 
 scrupulous men, which formerly produced a church, 
 now produces ideals of the purification of politics and 
 international relations, of national and social integrity. 
 From a perfectly well-ordered world, from which all 
 discontent has been eliminated, in which machinery 
 has taken over all menial tasks, while the individual,, 
 certain of seventy or eighty years of interesting life^ 
 has learned to think in terms of human and not merely 
 individual destiny, will man continue to turn from 
 the external to the inward world, or find any meaning 
 
A CAUSE 12S 
 
 in such language as that of Thomas a Kempis : ** Truly 
 it is misery to live upon earth. The more a man 
 desires to be spiritual, the more bitter does this present 
 life become to him, because he understands better,, 
 and sees more clearly the weakness of corrupt human 
 nature. For to eat and drink, to watch and sleep, to 
 rest and work, and to be subject to all the necessities 
 of nature, is truly a great misery and affliction to a 
 devout man, who would gladly be released." 
 
 Whatever changes are in store for humanity, one 
 thing is certain, that so far it has never shown itself 
 at its best when it has been most prosperous; or 
 rather, it is out of the very fulness of life that arises 
 the sense of its imperfection. As we are constituted, 
 no sooner are we happy than we begin to hate our- 
 selves. Elizabethan England, had it only known, was 
 happy, but that very love of life which empurples the 
 page of the Shakspearean drama fostered a thousand 
 germs of restless activity which was soon to involve 
 the destiny of England in unimagined cares and 
 responsibilities; and in our own age, throughout the 
 states of the world, when mankind seemed in a fair 
 way to the achievement of social well-being, a vague 
 dissatisfaction arose, threatening the dissolution of 
 society, and forcing the governments into suspicion of 
 one another and finally into conflict. In the life of the 
 individual no less than in society there is left a little 
 bit of chaos in regard to which man plays the part of 
 creator, and it is not so much to remedy the imperfec- 
 tion of life as out of its essential nature that arise all 
 the vital causes and all the types of human heroism. 
 ** Unless above himself he can erect himself, how 
 poor a thing is man ! ' ' The highest manifestation of 
 
126 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 the value of life is the self-sacrifice of the hero, who 
 actually proves in his life and if needful by his death 
 that human nature is competent to achieve certainty, 
 in the realization of which all the consolations of 
 ordinary experience fall away as of little account. 
 To the fact of the heroic experience all religion, all 
 morality, all poetry attaches itself, and is enabled to 
 look once again on nature as in the morning of the 
 world. Tradition is by its means recovered, and the 
 human story is seen to hang on consistent threads, so 
 fine as to be imperceptible yet so strong as to carry 
 suspended on them the entire mass of historical 
 achievement. Through every heroism the poet in 
 man receives a new access of creative instinct, the 
 believer a new confirmation of vision, all men 
 according to their deeds and dispositions a silent 
 rebuke or encouragement; and the human faculties, 
 which scatter like hounds where the trail is false, are 
 recalled as by the horn of the huntsman. To achieve 
 this certitude in thought and action is the dream to 
 which every youth is bom. 
 
 The interference of religious idealists in the affairs 
 of the world reached its climax, at all events in 
 England, at the time of the Puritan Revolution, and 
 that revolution, even at the height of its success, 
 proved to be a dreadful exposure of theocracy as a 
 principle of government in a modern State. Cromwell, 
 the Lord's Anointed, having deeply dissatisfied true 
 believers by his adoption of a purely mundane 
 toleration, sat uneasily on his throne, haunted at night 
 by terrors; and his secretary Milton, even in the act 
 of inditing his master's messages, was abandoning his 
 plan of the historic glorification of his country and 
 
A CAUSE 127 
 
 beginning to dream of Paradise as something 
 irretrievably lost. As a consequence of this disillu- 
 sionment, a vaguely defined community of lately 
 militant idealists, the forefathers of our own Intellec- 
 tuals — Swift at the close of the seventeenth century 
 reckoned them in the Tale oj a Tub at about 10,000 — 
 found themselves with their occupation gone, without 
 a cause or a belief, and falling into all kinds of 
 contentions among themselves : in a position, in fact, 
 not without some analogy to what we might imagine 
 would have been the position of the Chosen People if 
 Moses had failed to get them across the Red Sea and 
 they had all been transported back to Egypt. They 
 would in that case have been put to their old task of 
 manufacturing bricks without straw, and would have 
 suffered hardships severer than any with which the 
 sufferings of Grub Street could be compared ; but after 
 a while their talents and their solidarity would have 
 told, and in time they would have risen as they had 
 done before to an influential position in the public 
 affairs of Egypt. And so it was with the idealists of 
 England after their downfall at the Restoration and 
 the discomfiture of their attempt under such men as 
 Cromwell and Milton to build with brick and stone the 
 City of God. Little by little, with new and delightful 
 forms of literary composition, they made themselves 
 acceptable and indispensable, and as time went on 
 they dared once again to criticize institutions in the 
 light of their own ideals. The result was — in France 
 the great Revolution; and in England, where the 
 germs of that Revolution were hatched, their establish- 
 ment in an authoritative position, mainly through the 
 Press. The tendency of our Intellectuals has of late 
 
128 ANGLO-IRISH ESSAYS 
 
 been to offer advice to the ordinary citizen in every 
 province of civic activity, and they have ceased 
 altogether to be distinguished by any special fervour 
 of belief in ** God, freedom, immortality." One 
 suspects, however, that the ordinary citizen can look 
 after his own affairs surprisingly well. It is not for 
 guidance in mundane matter's that the man of affairs 
 looks to the man of thought — to whom in general he 
 is infinitely well disposed — but for something which 
 he feels that he has not got himself and that the 
 thinker ought to be able to give him. 
 
 What then is the true and final relation of idealists 
 to the parent community? Much depends on our 
 notion of progress, and whether we regard social 
 stability as the desideratum in a state, or believe in 
 the realization of the ideal in society. In the East, 
 v^here until it began to be disturbed by the West, 
 spiritual progress only was cared about, the true 
 believer is the recipient of alms, which the ordinary 
 householder acquires merit in bestowing. In our own 
 society his place has been taken by corporate bodies 
 which we call churches, and if our idealists had 
 concentrated their energies on the things of the spirit 
 they might perhaps even now, instead of scribbling 
 out their souls for the newspapers, be occupying many 
 of those delicious country parsonages which evoked 
 one of Wordsworth's beautiful sonnets. As it is, 
 they have done little or nothing to deserve the grateful 
 support of society in consideration of any transcen- 
 dental doctrines of which they might have been the 
 repositories. The economic relation of the children 
 of light to the world has indeed been conceived quite 
 definitely by the religions : the elect should be the 
 
A CAUSE 129 
 
 poor, the objects of true charity and the recipients of 
 alms. Granted that our civiUzation will abolish 
 pauperism, and that the human race by perfecting 
 mechanism will secure at once plenty and leisure, 
 there will still remain the distinction between the rich 
 and the poor, only the poor will be so voluntarily. A 
 certain number of men will always refuse this world's 
 riches. Accepting, therefore, as natural the general 
 division of men into rich and poor, a perfect state of 
 society would be that in which the rich would give 
 Avillingly to the poor, and in doing so would be 
 assisting a cause and an ideal in which they them- 
 selves believed. In the present spiritual anarchy we 
 know not what rascality we may be supporting when 
 ^we give alms : we may be giving to publicans (in the 
 modern sense) and sinners; but if we gave to a 
 Buddhist Bhikku or a Franciscan brother, to Walt 
 Whitman or William Blake, we should know where 
 OUT money went, and that we were laying up for 
 ourselves treasures in heaven. The Irish beggar who 
 bursts into a torrent of intercession for us on receipt 
 of our copper has a true notion of economic charity 
 and perhaps even believes in the soundness of our 
 investment, at all events gives us encouraging assur- 
 ance that our money is not lost. Assuming that a 
 life of poverty is the best, that in nakedness of worldly 
 ^oods a man is brought nearest to spiritual reality, 
 then if we cannot live the ideal ourselves it is well 
 that we should enable it to be lived.