The Story of Ireland Part 20

And afterwards? What follows? What is its future destined to be? Will it vanish away, will it pa.s.s into new phases, or will some form of it eventually receive the sanction of the nation? These are Sphinx questions, which one may be excused from endeavouring to answer, seeing that the strongest and most far-reaching heads are at this moment intent upon them--not, so far as can be seen, with any strikingly successful result. The Future is a deep mine, and we have not yet struck even a spade into it.

In every controversy, no matter how fierce the waves, how thick the air with contending a.s.sertions, there is almost always, however, some fact, or some few facts, which seem to rise like rocks out of the turmoil, and obstinately refuse to be washed or whittled away. The chief of these, in this case, is the geographical position, or rather juxtaposition, of the two islands. Set before a stranger to the whole Irish problem--if so favoured an individual exists upon the habitable globe--a map of the British islands, and ask him whether it seems to him inevitable that they should remain for ever united, and we can scarcely doubt that his reply would be in the affirmative. This being so, we have at least it will be said one fact, one sea-rock high above the reach of waves or spray. But Irishmen have been declared by a great and certainly not an unfavourable critic--Mr. Matthew Arnold--to be "eternal rebels against the despotism of fact." If this is so--and who upon the Irish side of the channel can wholly and absolutely deny the a.s.sertion?--then our one poor standing-point is plucked from under our feet, and we are all abroad upon the waves again. Will Home Rule or would Home Rule, it has been asked, recognize this fact as one of the immutable ones, or would it sooner or later incline to think that with a little determination, a little manipulation, the so-called fact would politely cease to be a fact at all? It is difficult to say, and until an answer is definitely received it does not perhaps argue any specially sloth-like clinging to the known in preference to the unknown to admit that there is for ordinary minds some slight craning at the fence, some not altogether unnatural alarm as to the ground that is to be found on the other side of it. "Well, how do you feel about Home Rule now that it seems to be really coming?" some one inquired last spring, of an humble but life-long Nationalist. "'Deed, sir, to tell the truth, I feel as if I'd been calling for the moon all me life and was told it was coming down this evening into me back garden!" was the answer. It is not until a great change is actually on top of us, till the gulf yawns big and black under our very eyes, that we fully realize what it means or what it may come to mean. The old state of things, we then begin to say to ourselves, was really very inconvenient, very trying to all our tempers and patience, but at least we know the worst of it. Of the untravelled future we know nothing. It fronts us, with hands folded, smiling blankly. It may be a great deal better than we expect, but, on the other hand, it may be worse, and in ways, too, which as yet we hardly foresee.

Whatever else Home Rule may, would, could, or should be, one thing friends and foes alike may agree to admit, and that is that it will mark an entirely new departure--a departure so new that no ill.u.s.tration drawn from the last century, or from any other historical period, is of much avail in enabling us to picture it to ourselves. It will be no resumption, no mere continuation of anything that has gone before, but a perfectly fresh beginning. A beginning, it may be asked, of what?

LIX.

CONCLUSION.

"Concluded not completed," is the verdict of Carlyle upon one of his earlier studies, and "concluded not completed," conscience is certainly apt to mutter at the close of so necessarily inadequate a summary as this. Much of this inadequacy, it may fairly be confessed, is individual, yet a certain amount is also inherent in the very nature of the task itself. In no respect does this inadequacy press with a more penitential weight than in the case of those heroes whose names spring up at intervals along our pages, but which are hardly named before the grim necessities of the case force us onwards, and the hero and his doings are left behind.

Irish heroes, for one reason or another, have come off, it must be owned, but poorly before the bar of history. Either their deeds having been told by those in whose eyes they found a meagre kindness, or else by others who, with the best intentions possible, have so inflated the hero's bulk, so pared away his merely human frailties, that little reality remains, and his bare name is as much as even a well-informed reader pretends to be acquainted with. Comparing them with what are certainly their nearest parallels--the heroes and semi-heroes of Scotch history--the contrast strikes one in an instant, yet there is no reason in the nature of things that this should be. Putting aside those whose names have got somewhat obscured by the mists of the past, and putting aside those nearer to us who stand upon what is still regarded as debateable ground, there are no lack of Irish names which should be as familiar to the ear as those of any Bruce or Douglas of them all. The names of Tyrone, of James Fitzmaurice, of Owen Roe O'Neill, and of Sarsfield, to take only a few and almost at random, are all those of gallant men, struggling against dire odds, in causes which, whether they happen to fit in with our particular sympathies or not, were to them objects of the purest, most genuine enthusiasm. Yet which of these, with the doubtful exception of the last, can be said to have yet received anything like a fair meed of appreciation? To live again in the memory of those who come after them may not be--let us sincerely hope that it is not--essential to the happiness of those who are gone, but it is at least a tribute which the living ought to be called upon to pay, and to pay moreover ungrudgingly as they hope to have it paid to them in their turn.

Glancing with this thought in our minds along that lengthened chronicle here so hastily overrun, many names and many strangely-chequered destinies rise up one by one before us; come as it were to judgment, to where we, sitting in state as "Prince Posterity," survey the varied field, and judge them as in our wisdom we think fit, a.s.signing to this one praise, to that one blame, to another a judicious admixture of praise and blame combined. Not, however, it is to be hoped, forgetting that our place in the same panorama waits for another audience, and that the turn of this generation has still to come.

AUTHORITIES.

Ad.a.m.nan, "Life of St. Columba" (_trans_.).

Arnold (Matthew), "On the Study of Celtic Literature."

Bagwell, "Ireland under the Tudors."

Barrington (Sir Jonah), "Personal Recollections," "Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation."

Brewer, "Introduction to the Carew Calendar of State Papers."

Bright (Rt. Hon. J.), "Speeches."

Burke (Edmund), "Tracts on the Popery Laws," "Speeches and Letters."

Carlyle, "Letters and Speeches of Cromwell."

Carew, "Pacata Hibernia."

Cloncurry, "Life and Times of Lord Cloncurry."

Clogy, "Life and Times of Bishop Bedell."

Cornwallis Correspondence.

Croker (Rt. Hon. W.), "Irish, Past and Present."

Davis (Thomas), "Literary and Historical Essays."

Davies (Sir John), "A Discoverie of the True Causes why Ireland was never Subdued."

Dennis, "Industrial Ireland."

Domenach (Abbe), "Larerte Erinn."

Dymock (John), "A Treatise on Ireland."

Duffy (Sir Charles Gavin), "Four Years of Irish History."

Ess.e.x, "Lives and Letters of the Devereux, Earls of."

Froude (J.A.), "History of England," "The English in Ireland."

Giraldus Cambrensis, "Conquest of Ireland," Edited by J. Dimock, Master of the Rolls Series, 1867; "Topography of Ireland," Edited by J. Dimock, Master of the Rolls Series, 1867.

Green, "History of the English People."

Grattan, "Life and Speeches of Rt. Hon. Henry Grattan."

Halliday, "Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin."

Hennessy (Sir Pope), "Sir Walter Raleigh in Ireland."

Hardiman, "History of Galway."

Howth (Book of), from O'Flaherty's "Iar Connaught."

Joyce, "Celtic Romances."

Kildare (Marquis of), "The Earls of Kildare."

Lodge, "Desiderata Curiosa Hibernica."

Lecky, "History of England in the Eighteenth Century,"

and "Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland."

Leland, "History of Ireland."

Maine (Sir H.), "Early History of Inst.i.tutions,"

"Village Communities, East and West."

Max Muller's Lectures.

M'Gee (T. Darcy), "History of Ireland."

McGeoghegan, "History of Ireland."

Mitch.e.l.l (John), "History of Ireland."

Montalembert, "Monks of the West."

Murphy (Rev. Denis), "Cromwell in Ireland."

Madden, "History of Irish Periodical Literature."

McCarthy (Justin), "History of Our Own Times."