The Open Secret of Ireland | Page 8

supplement it by the
further discovery that their masters had invaded Anywhere in order to
please the Pope, and introduce true religion. This second role completes
the dedication of the invaders on the altar of mendacity. It was Leo XIII.
himself who, with that charming humour of his, deprecated the attitude
of certain a priori historians who, said he, if they were writing the
Gospel story would, in their anxiety to please the Pope, probably
suppress the denial of Peter.
These things which might have happened anywhere did, in fact, happen
in Ireland. Out of the footprints of the invaders there sprang up a legion
of fictionists, professional cooks of history. Beginning with Giraldus
Cambrensis they ought to have ended, but, as we shall see, did not end
with Froude. The significance of these mercenaries of literature can
hardly be exaggerated; it is not too much to say that they found Ireland
a nation, and left her a question. It is not at all that they put on record

the thing that was not as regards the events of their own period. That
might be and has been amended by the labours of impartial scholarship.
The real crime of the fabulists lies in this, that their tainted testimony
constituted for honest Englishmen the only information about Ireland
easily obtainable. The average Englishman (that is to say, the forty
millions of him who do not read learned books of any kind) comes to
the consideration of contemporary Ireland with a vision distorted
almost beyond hope of cure. The treasured lies of seven hundred years
are in his heart to-day. For time runs against the cause of truth as well
as with it. Once create a Frankenstein of race hatred, and he will gather
strength in going. The chronicler's fable of this century becomes the
accredited historical fact of the next. Give it what billiard-players call
"legs" enough and it will mature into a tradition, a proverb, a
spontaneous instinct. There is a whole department of research
concerned with the growth of myths, stage by stage, from a little
nebulous blotch into a peopled world of illusion. The strange evolution
there set forth finds an exact parallel in the development of English
opinion on Ireland. And, indeed, the more you study "the Irish
Question," as it is envisaged by the ruling mind of Great Britain, the
more conscious are you of moving in the realm not of reason but of
mythology.
All this will seem obvious even to the point of weariness. But it is of
interest as furnishing a clue to the English attitude towards Irish history;
I should rather say attitudes, for there are two. The first is that of the
Man of Feeling. His mode of procedure recalls inevitably an exquisite
story which is to be found somewhere in Rousseau. During country
walks, Jean Jacques tells us, his father would suddenly say: "My son,
we will speak of your dear, dead mother." And Jean Jacques was
expected to reply: "Wait, then, a moment, my dear father. I will first
search for my handkerchief, for I perceive that we are going to weep."
In precisely such a mood of deliberate melancholy does the
sentimentalist address himself to the Confiscations and the Penal Laws.
He is ready to praise without stint any Irish leader who happens to be
sufficiently dead. He is ready to confess that all his own British
forerunners were abominable blackguards. He admits, not only with
candour but even with a certain enthusiastic remorse, that England

oppressed Ireland in every phase of their relations. Then comes the
conclusion. So terrible have been the sins of his fathers that he feels
bound to make restitution. And in order to make restitution, to be kind
and helpful and remedial, he must retain the management of Irish
affairs in his benevolent hands. In order to expiate the crimes of the
past he must repeat the basal blunder that was the cause and source of
them. For this kind of sympathy we have only to say, in a somewhat
vulgar phrase, that we have no use whatever. The Englishman who
"sympathises" with Ireland is lost.
But the more general attitude differs widely from this. Confronting us
with a bluff and not unkindly demeanour, worthy of the nation that
invented cold baths as a tonic against all spiritual anguish, the practical,
modern Englishman speaks out his mind in straight-flung words and
few. "You fellows," he says, "brood too much over the past. After all,
this is the twentieth century, not the twelfth. What does it matter
whether my ancestors murdered yours or not? Both would be dead now
in any event. What does it matter whether yours were the saints and
men of letters and mine the savages, or whether the boot was on the