The Open Secret of Ireland | Page 9

other leg? That's all over and done with. Imitate me. Let bygones be
bygones."
Now this is, in some respects, the authentic voice of health.
Undoubtedly the most characteristic thing about the past is that it is not
present, and to lavish on it too tragic and intense a devotion is to love
death more than life. And yet our bluff Englishman can learn in two
words how it comes about that his invitation represents a demand for
the impossible. In the first place, the bygones have not gone by. Our
complaint is made not against the crimes of his fathers, who are dead,
but against the crimes of himself and his fellows, who are alive. We
denounce not the repealed Penal Laws but the unrepealed Act of Union.
If we recall to the memory of England the systematic baseness of the
former, it is in order to remind her that she once thought them right,
and now confesses that they were cruelly wrong. We Irish are realists,
and we hold the problems of the present as of more account than any
agonies or tyrannies of the past. But our realism has the human touch in
it, and that constitutes the second impossibility in the invitation

tendered us. _Que messieurs les assassins commencent!_ The anti-Irish
legend is not dead nor even sleeping, nor are the resources of calumny
yet exhausted. An instance is immediately at hand. I have, at this
moment, on my desk a volume lately issued--"The School History of
England." It is published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford; Mr Rudyard
Kipling contributes twenty-three pieces of verse, and a Mr C. R. L.
Fletcher, whose qualifications are not stated, appears to be responsible
for the prose. The book has been praised in most of the papers, and it
will no doubt go far. This is the picture of the coming to Ireland of the
Cymro-Frankish adventurers which its pages will imprint on the minds
of the youth of England:
"One event of his reign (Henry II.'s) must not be forgotten, his visit to
Ireland in 1171-2. St Patrick, you may have heard, had banished the
snakes from that island, but he had not succeeded in banishing the
murderers and thieves who were worse than many snakes. In spite of
some few settlements of Danish pirates and traders on the eastern coast,
Ireland had remained purely Celtic and purely a pasture country. All
wealth was reckoned in cows; Rome had never set foot there, so there
was a king for every day in the week, and the sole amusement of such
persons was to drive off each other's cows and to kill all who resisted.
In Henry II.'s time this had been going on for at least seven hundred
years, and during the seven hundred that have followed much the same
thing would have been going on, if the English Government had not
occasionally interfered."
The English whom Henry II. left behind him soon became "as wild and
barbarous as the Irishmen themselves."
Oxford, the home of so many other lost causes, apparently aspires to be
also the home of the lost cause of mendacity. The forcible-feeble
malice of Mr Fletcher calls for no serious discussion; submit it to any
continental scholar, to any honest British scholar, and he will ask
contemptuously, though perhaps with a little stab of pain, how the
name of Oxford comes to be associated with such wicked absurdities.
Every other reference to Ireland is marked by the same scientific
composure and balanced judgment. And this document, inspired by

race hatred, and apparently designed to propagate race hatred, is
offered to the youth of these countries as an aid towards the
consolidation of the Empire. It is a case not merely of the poisoning of
a well, but of the poisoning of a great river at its source. The force of
cowardice can no farther go. So long as it goes thus far, so long as the
Froudes find Fletchers to echo them, Irishmen will inevitably "brood
over the past." We do not share the cult of ancestor-worship, but we
hold the belief that the Irish nation, like any other, is an organism
endowed with a life in some sort continuous and repetitive of its origins.
To us it does matter something whether our forerunners were turbulent
savages, destitute of all culture, or whether they were valiant, immature
men labouring through the twilight of their age towards that dawn
which does not yet flush our own horizon. But we are far from wishing
that dead centuries should be summoned back to wake old bitterness
that ought also to be dead. Hand history over to the scholars, if you will;
let it be marshalled as a multitudinous and coloured pageant, to incite
imaginations and inspire literature. Such is our