Irish Nationality Part 7

In the whole of Irish history no time brought such calamity to Ireland as the Victorian age. "I leave Ireland," said one, "like a corpse on the dissecting table." "The Celts are gone," said Englishmen, seeing the endless and disastrous emigration. "The Irish are gone, and gone with a vengeance." That such people should carry their interminable discontent to some far place seemed to end the trouble. "Now for the first time these six hundred years," said _The Times_, "England has Ireland at her mercy, and can deal with her as she pleases." But from this death Ireland rose again. Thirty years after O'Connell Parnell took up his work. He used the whole force of the Land League founded by Davitt to relieve distress and fight for the tenants' rights; but he used the land agitation to strengthen the National movement. He made his meaning clear. What did it matter, he said, who had possession of a few acres, if there was no National spirit to save the country; he would never have taken off his coat for anything less than to make a nation. In his fight he held the people as no other man had done, not even O'Connell. The conflict was steeped in pa.s.sion. In 1881 the government asked for an act giving them power to arrest without trial all Irishmen suspected of illegal projects--a power beyond all coercion hitherto. O'Connell had opposed a coercion act in 1833 for nineteen nights; Parnell in 1881 fought for thirty-two nights.

Parliament had become the keeper of Irish tyrannies, not of her liberties, and its conventional forms were less dear to Irishmen than the freedom of which it should be the guardian. He was suspended, with thirty-four Irish members, and 303 votes against 46 carried a bill by which over a thousand Irishmen were imprisoned at the mere will of the Castle, among them Parnell himself. The pa.s.sion of rage reached its extreme height with the publication in _The Times_ (1888) of a facsimile letter from Parnell, to prove his consent to a paid system of murder and outrage. A special commission found it to be a forgery.

With the rejection of Gladstone's Home Rule bills in 1886 and 1893, and with the death of Parnell (1891), Irish nationalists were thrown into different camps as to the means to pursue, but they never faltered in the main purpose. That remains as firm as in the times of O'Connell, Thomas Davis, John O'Leary, and Parnell, and rises once more to-day as the fixed unchanging demand, while the whole Irish people, laying aside agitations and controversies, stand waiting to hear the end.

The national movement had another side, the bringing back of the people to the land. The English parliament took up the question under pressure of violent agitation in Ireland. By a series of Acts the people were a.s.sured of fair rents and security from eviction. Verdicts of judicial bodies tended to prove that peasants were paying 60 per cent. above the actual value of the land. But the great Act of 1903--a work inspired by an Irishman's intellect and heart--brought the final solution, enabling the great ma.s.s of the tenants to buy their land by instalments. Thus the land war of seven hundred years, the war of kings and parliaments and planters, was brought to a dramatic close, and the soil of Ireland begins again to belong to her people.

There was yet another stirring of the national idea. In its darkest days the country had remained true to the old Irish spirit of learning, that fountain of the nation's life. In O'Connell's time the "poor scholar" who took his journey to "the Munster schools" was sent out with offerings laid on the parish altars by Protestants and Catholics alike; as he trudged with his bag of books and the fees for the master sewn in the cuff of his coat, he was welcomed in every farm, and given of the best in the famishing hovels: "The Lord prosper him, and every one that has the heart set upon the learning." Bards and harpers and dancers wandered among the cottages. A famous bard Raftery, playing at a dance heard one ask, "Who is the musician?" and the blind fiddler answered him:

"I am Raftery the poet, Full of hope and love, With eyes that have no light, With gentleness that has no misery.

Going west upon my pilgrimage, Guided by the light of my heart, Feeble and tired, To the end of my road.

Behold me now, With my face to a wall, A-playing music To empty pockets."

Unknown scribes still copied piously the national records. A Louth schoolmaster could tell all the stars and constellations of heaven under the old Irish forms and names. A vision is given to us through a government Ordnance Survey of the fire of zeal, the hunger of knowledge, among the tillers and the tenants. In 1817 a dying farmer in Kilkenny repeated several times to his sons his descent back to the wars of 1641 and behind that to a king of Munster in 210 A.D.--directing the eldest never to forget it. This son took his brother, John O'Donovan, (1809-1861) to study in Dublin; in Kilkenny farmhouses he learned the old language and history of his race. At the same time another Irish boy, Eugene O'Curry (1796-1862), of the same old Munster stock, working on his father's farm in great poverty, learned from him much knowledge of Irish literature and music. The Ordnance Survey, the first peripatetic university Ireland had seen since the wanderings of her ancient scholars, gave to O'Donovan and O'Curry their opportunity, where they could meet learned men, and use their hereditary knowledge. A ma.s.s of material was laid up by their help. Pa.s.sionate interest was shown by the people in the memorials of their ancient life--giants' rings, cairns, and mighty graves, the twenty-nine thousand mounds or moats that have been counted, the raths of their saints and scholars--each with its story living on the lips of the people till the great famine and the death or emigration of the people broke that long tradition of the race. The cry arose that the survey was pandering to the national spirit. It was suddenly closed (1837), the men dismissed, no materials published, the doc.u.ments locked up in government offices. But for O'Donovan and O'Curry what prodigies of work remained. Once more the death of hope seemed to call out the pieties of the Irish scholar for his race, the fury of his intellectual zeal, the pa.s.sion of his inheritance of learning. In the blackest days perhaps of all Irish history O'Donovan took up Michael O'Clery's work of two hundred years before, the Annals of the Four Masters, added to his ma.n.u.script the ma.s.s of his own learning, and gave to his people this priceless record of their country (1856).

Among a number of works that cannot be counted here, he made a Dictionary which recalls the old pride of Irishmen in their language.

O'Curry brought from his humble training an incredible industry, great stores of ancient lore, and an amazing and delicate skill as a scribe. All modern historians have dug in the mine of these men's work. They open to Anglo-Irish scholars such as Dr. Reeves and Dr.

Todd, a new world of Irish history. Sir Samuel Ferguson began in 1833 to give to readers of English the stories of Ireland. George Petrie collected Irish music through all the west, over a thousand airs, and worked at Irish inscriptions and crosses and round towers. Lord Dunraven studied architecture, and is said to have visited every barony in Ireland and nearly every island on the coast.

These men were nearly all Protestants; they were all patriots. Potent Irish influences could have stirred a resident gentry and resident parliament with a just pride in the great memorials of an Ireland not dead but still living in the people's heart. The failure of the hope was not the least of the evils of the Union. The drift of landlords to London had broken a national sympathy between them and the people, which had been steadily growing through the eighteenth century. Their sons no longer learned Irish, nor heard the songs and stories of the past. The brief tale of the ordnance survey has given us a measure of the intelligence that had been wasted or destroyed by neglect in Ireland. Archbishop Whately proposed to use the new national schools so as to make this destruction systematic, and to put an end to national traditions. The child who knew only Irish was given a teacher who knew nothing but English; his history book mentioned Ireland _twice_ only--a place conquered by Henry II., and made into an English province by the Union. The quotation "This is my own, my native land,"

was struck out of the reading-book as pernicious, and the Irish boy was taught to thank G.o.d for being "a happy English child." A Connacht peasant lately summed up the story: "I suppose the Famine and the National Schools took the heart out of the people." In fact famine and emigration made the first great break in the Irish tradition that had been the dignity and consolation of the peasantry; the schools completed the ruin. In these, under English influence, the map of Ireland has been rolled up, and silence has fallen on her heroes.

Even out of this deep there came a revival. Whitley Stokes published his first Irish work the year after O'Curry's death; and has been followed by a succession of laborious students. Through a School of Irish Learning Dublin is becoming a national centre of true Irish scholarship, and may hope to be the leader of the world in this great branch of study. The popular Irish movement manifested itself in the Gaelic League, whose branches now cover all Ireland, and which has been the greatest educator of the people since the time of Thomas Davis. Voluntary colleges have sprung up in every province, where earnest students learn the language, history, and music of their country; and on a fine day teacher and scholars gathered in the open air under a hedge recall the ancient Irish schools where brehon or chronicler led his pupils under a tree. A new spirit of self-respect, intelligence, and public duty has followed the work of the Gaelic League; it has united Catholic and Protestant, landlord and peasant.

And through all creeds and cla.s.ses a desire has quickened men to serve their country in its social and industrial life; and by Agricultural Societies, and Industrial Development Societies, to awaken again her trade and manufactures.

The story is unfinished. Once again we stand at the close of another experiment of England in the government of Ireland. Each of them has been founded on the idea of English interests; each has lasted about a hundred years--"Tudor conquest," Plantations, an English parliament, a Union parliament. All alike have ended in a disordered finance and a flight of the people from the land.

Grattan foretold the failure of the Union and its cause. "As Ireland,"

he said, "is necessary to Great Britain, so is complete and perfect liberty necessary to Ireland, and both islands must be drawn much closer to a free const.i.tution, that they may be drawn closer to one another." In England we have seen the advance to that freer const.i.tution. The democracy has entered into larger liberties, and has brought new ideals. The growth of that popular life has been greatly advanced by the faith of Ireland. Ever since Irish members helped to carry the Reform Acts they have been on the side of liberty, humanity, peace, and justice. They have been the most steadfast believers in const.i.tutional law against privilege, and its most unswerving defenders. At Westminster they have always stood for human rights, as n.o.bler even than rights of property. What Chatham foresaw has come true: the Irish in the English parliament have been powerful missionaries of democracy. A freedom-loving Ireland has been conquering her conquerors in the best sense.

The changes of the last century have deeply affected men's minds. The broadening liberties of England as a free country, the democratic movements that have brought new cla.s.ses into government, the wider experience of imperial methods, the growing influence of men of good-will, have tended to change her outlook to Ireland. In the last generation she has been forced to think more gravely of Irish problems. She has pledged her credit to close the land question and create a peasant proprietary. With any knowledge of Irish history the religious alarm, the last cry of prejudice, must inevitably disappear.

The old notion of Ireland as the "property" of England, and of its exploitation for the advantage of England, is falling into the past.

A mighty spirit of freedom too has pa.s.sed over the great Colonies and Dominions. They since their beginning have given shelter to outlawed Irishmen flying from despair at home. They have won their own pride of freedom, and have all formally proclaimed their judgment that Ireland should be allowed the right to shape her own government. The United States, who owe so much to Irishmen in their battle for independence, and in the labours of their rising prosperity, have supported the cause of Ireland for the last hundred years; ever since the first important meeting in New York to express American sympathy with Ireland was held in 1825, when President Jackson, of Irish origin, a Protestant, is said to have promised the first thousand dollars to the Irish emanc.i.p.ation fund.

In Ireland itself we see a people that has now been given some first opportunities of self-dependence and discipline under the new conditions of land ownership and of county government. We see too the breaking up of the old solid Unionist phalanx, the dying down of ancient fears, the decaying of old habits of dependence on military help from England, and a promise of revival of the large statesmanship that adorned the days of Kildare and of Grattan. It is singular to reflect that on the side of foreign domination, through seven hundred years of invasion and occupation, not a single man, Norman or English, warrior or statesman, has stood out as a hero to leave his name, even in England, on the lips or in the hearts of men. The people who were defending their homes and liberties had their heroes, men of every creed and of every blood, Gaelic, Norman, English, Anglican, Catholic, and Presbyterian. Against the stormy back-ground of those prodigious conflicts, those immeasurable sorrows, those thousand sites consecrated by great deeds, lofty figures emerge whom the people have exalted with the poetry of their souls, and crowned with love and grat.i.tude--the first martyr for Ireland of "the foreigners" Earl Thomas of Desmond, the soul of another Desmond wailing in the Atlantic winds, Kildare riding from his tomb on the horse with the silver shoes, Bishop Bedell, Owen Roe and Hugh O'Neill, Red Hugh O'Donnell, Sarsfield, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmett, O'Connell, Davis, Parnell--men of peace and men of war, but all lovers of a free nation.

In memory of the long, the hospitable roll of their patriots, in memory of their long fidelities, in memory of their national faith, and of their story of honour and of suffering, the people of Ireland once more claim a government of their own in their native land, that shall bind together the whole nation of all that live on Irish soil, and create for all a common obligation and a common prosperity. An Irish nation of a double race will not fear to look back on Irish history. The tradition of that soil, so steeped in human pa.s.sion, in joy and sorrow, still rises from the earth. It lives in the hearts of men who see in Ireland a ground made sacred by the rare intensity of human life over every inch of it, one of the richest possessions that has ever been bequeathed by the people of any land whatever to the successors and inheritors of their name. The tradition of national life created by the Irish has ever been a link of fellowship between cla.s.ses, races, and religions. The natural union approaches of the Irish Nation--the union of all her children that are born under the breadth of her skies, fed by the fatness of her fields, and nourished by the civilisation of her dead.

SOME IRISH WRITERS ON IRISH HISTORY

JOYCE, P.W.--Social History of Ancient Ireland. 2 vols. 1903.

This book gives a general survey of the old Irish civilisation, pagan and Christian, apart from political history.

FERGUSON, SIR SAMUEL.--Hibernian Nights' Entertainments. 1906.

These small volumes of stories are interesting as the effort of Sir S. Ferguson to give to the youth of his time an impression of the heroic character of their history.

GREEN, A.S.--The Making of Ireland and its Undoing (1200-1600).

1909. An attempt is here made to bring together evidence, some of it unused before, of the activity of commerce and manufactures, and of learning, that prevailed in mediaeval Ireland, until the destruction of the Tudor wars.

MITCh.e.l.l, JOHN.--Life and Times of Aodh O'Neill. 1868. A small book which gives a vivid picture of a great Irish hero, and of the later Elizabethan wars.

TAYLOR, J.F.--Owen Roe O'Neill. 1904. This small book is the best account of a very great Irishman; and gives the causes of the Irish insurrection in 1641, and the war to 1650.

DAVIS, THOMAS.--The Patriot Parliament of 1689. 1893. A brief but important study of this Parliament. It ill.u.s.trates the Irish spirit of tolerance in 1689, 1843, and 1893.

BAGWELL, RICHARD.--Ireland under the Tudors and the Stuarts. 5 vols. 1885, 1910. A detailed account is given of the English policy from 1509 to 1660, from the point of view of the English settlement, among a people regarded as inferior, devoid of organisation or civilisation.

MURRAY, A.E.--Commercial Relations between England and Ireland.

1903. A useful study is made here of the economic condition of Ireland from 1641, under the legislation of the English Parliament, the Irish Parliament, and the Union Parliament.

LECKY, W.E.H.--History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century. 5 vols. 1892. The study of the independent Parliament in Ireland is the most original work of this historian, and a contribution of the utmost importance to Irish history. Mr. Lecky did not make any special study of the Catholic peasantry.

Two Centuries of Irish History (1691-1870). Introduction by JAMES BRYCE. 1907. These essays, mostly by Irishmen, give in a convenient form the outlines of the history of the time. There is a brief account of O'Connell.

O'BRIEN, R. BARRY.--Life of Charles Stewart Parnell. 1898. 2 vols.

This gives the best account of the struggle for Home Rule and the land agitation in the last half of the nineteenth century.

D'ALTON, E.A.--History of Ireland (1903-1910). 3 vols. This is the latest complete history of Ireland.