The Open Secret of Ireland | Page 6

has
occurred may recur. And since we are to speak here with all the
candour of private conversation I confess that I cannot devise or
imagine any specific against such a recurrence except an exercise in
humility of the kind suggested by Mr Chesterton. My own argument in
that direction is perhaps compromised by the fact that I am an Irishman.
Let us therefore fall back on other testimony. Out of the cloud of
witnesses let us choose two or three, and in the first place M. Alfred
Fouillée. M. Fouillée is a Platonist--the last Platonist in Europe--and
consequently an amiable man. He is universally regarded as the leader
of philosophy in France, a position not in the least shaken by Bergson's
brief authority. In a charming and lucid study of the "Psychology of the
Peoples of Europe" Fouillée has many pages that might serve for an
introduction to the Irish Question. The point of interest in his analysis
is this: he exhibits Irish history as a tragedy of character, a tragedy
which flows with sad, inevitable logic from a certain weakness which
he notes, not in the Irish, but in the English character.
"'In the eyes of the English,' says Taine who had studied them so
minutely, 'there is but one reasonable civilisation, namely their own.
Every other way of living is that of inferior beings, every other religion
is extravagant.' So that, one might add, the Englishman is doubly
personal, first as an individual and again as a member of the most
highly individualised of nations. The moment the national interest is
involved all dissensions cease, there is on the scene but one single man,
one single Englishman, who shrinks from no expedient that may
advance his ends. Morality for him reduces itself to one precept:
Safeguard at any cost the interest of England."

Like all foreigners he takes Ireland as the one conspicuous and flaming
failure of England. In that instance she has muddled, as usual, but she
has not muddled through.
"The Anglo-Saxons, those great colonisers of far-off lands, have in
their own United Kingdom succeeded only in inflicting a long
martyrdom on Ireland. The insular situation of England had for pendant
the insular situation of Ireland; the two islands lie there face to face.
The English and the Irish, although intellectually very much alike, have
preserved different characters. And this difference cannot be due
essentially to the racial element, for nearly half Ireland is Germanic. It
is due to traditions and customs developed by English oppression."
Having summarised the main lines of British policy in Ireland, he
concludes:
"It is not easy to detect here any sign of the 'superiority of the
Anglo-Saxons.'"
With Fouillée we may associate Emile Boutmy. In his "Political
Psychology of the English" he declares that the haughty, taciturn,
solitary, unassimilative temperament of England, so admirable from the
point of view of self-development, shows its worst side and comes to a
malign florescence in the history of Ireland. It explains why
"the relations of Ireland with England have been, for so many centuries,
those of a captive with his jailer, those of a victim with his torturer."
I pass over De Beaumont, Von Raumer, Perraud, Paul-Dubois, Filon,
Bonn. The considerations already adduced ought to be enough to lead
the English reader to certain conclusions which are fundamental. For
the sake of clearness they may be repeated in all their nudity:
England has failed in Ireland.
Her failure has been due to defects of her own character, and
limitations of her outlook. The same defects which corrupted her policy
in the past distort her vision in the present.

Therefore, if she is to understand and to solve the Irish Question, she
must begin by breaking the hard shell of her individualism, and trying
to think herself into the skin, the soul, and the ideals of the Irish nation.
Now the English reader is after all human. If he has endured so far the
outrage on his most sacred prejudices perpetrated in this chapter he
must at this moment be hot with resentment. He must feel as if,
proposing to his imagination Pear de Melba, he had in truth swallowed
sand. Let me end with a more comfortable word. We have seen that
Irish history is what the dramatists call an internal tragedy, the secular
disclosure and slow working-out of certain flaws in the English
character. I am not to be understood as ascribing horns to England and
a halo to Ireland. We Irish are not only imperfect but even modest; for
every beam that we detect in another eye we are willing to confess a
mote in our own. The English on the other hand have been not
monsters or demons, but men unstrung.
"In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be, passions