Meanwhile vast tracts of history have been set aside as apparently not worth exploring. Where, for example, shall we find a serious account, with the guidance of modern scholarship, of the hundred and fifty years between the battle of Clontarf and the landing of the Norman barons. The people were no longer in the tribal state. The change to a kind of feudalism had come. What was the form of that feudalism? How did it differ from the system that had grown out of other conditions elsewhere? There is not so much as a chapter in any book, or a pamphlet, occupied with the land system of the earlier middle ages, what changes the Norman settlement brought, or what forms of social life did actually exist. The campaign of Edward Bruce is usually said to be a central turning point in Irish history, but who will guide us to any adequate study of it? There are no monographs on Desmonds, O’Neills, O’Donnells, Fitzgeralds, Butlers, Clanrickards, and so on. No annals of the provinces or kingdoms have been compiled, nor chronologies. The work of the two great Earls of Kildare is one of the most critical periods of Irish history: it still awaits a historian. Who has examined the history of the schools and education? Who has worked out the industrial development? How can we learn what were the negotiations by which Henry viii. carried the claim to be King of Ireland? Here are fields too long deserted waiting for workers. Here are a few of the immense voids, into which our writers fling, like bundles of dried straw, their vain words – “savage,” “primeval,” “lawless,” “brutish,” and the rest. In the history of Ireland nothing has been completed. That which is unknown disturbs, and may overturn the vulgar conclusions from the fragments known. We are for ever walking through a country unmapped. To be sure it is full of sign-posts put up at hazard – “To English Civilisation.” Where every road is marked to lead to the same inn, why should travellers discuss, debate, and ask questions? What reason can there be to loiter by the way? The English fingerpost is always there.
Some day perhaps the Irish race in this island will no longer seem to lie beyond the need, and below the honour, of the historical method. Ireland will have a history like other nations. It is possible to conceive that out of its peoples, English or Irish, there may arise some great thinker or poet who will set before us the two civilizations that have met here; in other words, the efforts by which two highly endowed races endeavoured to solve the problem that has perplexed every people that has ever yet appeared in this world – how to shape a community where men may live in safety, freedom, and happiness. The Celts had waged the fight for their civilization to the walls of Rome itself. They had left the valleys of the Danube and the Rhine and the plains of Gaul red with their blood. Now, on the outermost border of the world their last conflict awaited them. Within the mountain rim of Ireland, with silent Nature to keep the lists, two peoples met to fight out the last issues on that fatal soil. Here, imprisoned by the Ocean, the antagonists stood for centuries to their battle: every passion exalted, the splendours of courage, the majesty of despair, all skill of surprises, all glory of chivalry, triumph and sorrow, Christian pieties, and the surging up amid the upheaval of human nature of the mysterious superstitions of elemental man, and of his ferocities. What affections of race lay behind such a struggle? What was its meaning? What of beauty, of happiness, or of virtue did each civilization in fact offer to man? What was gained, what was lost? Here would have been a history of fire and flame, a new outlook on the fate of commonwealths, a theme worthy of an English or an Irish patriot.
In the long task of giving its true balance to the history of Ireland, by the discovery of all the facts, and the adjudging of their place, controversy will be lively. Every Irishman for certain will be ready for a battle of wits. But let us keep our intelligence perfectly clear on one point. We shall hear a great deal of “impartiality” and a “judicial mind.” Here we must make no mistake. Impartiality of intellect need not mean insensibility of heart. Let us suppose that the intellect should have no pre-possession at all, not even in favour of English civilization, nor of the idol of the market-place, “the Wealth of Nations” – its delicate balance should drop now on this side, now on that, without a shadow of prejudice or a hint of obstinacy, abhorrent of convention, with never a predilection. But impartiality of the heart – that is another matter. Who will pretend to comprehend human life who has no great affection of the soul? The generous heart knows no balancing hesitation between the man who deserts his country and the man who defends it; he alone can interpret the hero in whose soul some answering passion flames; and I suppose that the understanding of a commonwealth will best come to him who is most responsive to a variety of human emotions. I think we could do with a change of partialities in Ireland – fewer orthodox predilections of the head, if it might be so, and some illumination from the heart.
A new examination of Irish history is indeed of the utmost importance to our people. The leading reviews, text-books, and histories in England with one accord have presented Ireland to the English people under the “savage” aspect, and their statements have been too frequently accepted. Hear the common opinion as Tennyson put it: “Kelts are all made furious fools… They live in a horrible island, and have no history of their own worth the least notice. Could not anyone blow up that horrible island with dynamite and carry it off in pieces – a long way off?” The same gloomy picture is still spread before England. Mr. Fletcher, a Fellow of All Souls, records that “it was quite common to bleed a cow for a refreshing drink of blood,” and that “there were no exports save the said cow-skins,” though with these the Irish apparently managed to buy “red seas of claret.” Shane O’Neill was killed “by his own people whom he was plundering!” Degradation was universal, as we learn from a sentence absolutely amazing in its colossal and unscrupulous ignorance – “though his name had once been FitzNigel or de Burgh, it gradually became O’Neill or O’Bourke!” Mr. Rudyard Kipling joins Mr. Fletcher in declaring that Irish history “was all broken heads and stolen cows, as it had been for a thousand years,” and that Irishmen had no interest or care for their religion till they discovered a use for it as a warcry against England. Accounts of Ireland equally contrary to fact and common sense serve in political controversy. English politicians assert on platforms that Irishmen of themselves had never any national life or duty at all, that the first gleam of true patriotism was taught them by England since the Union, that Ireland had no conception of a Parliament till England gave it to her people, when the boon was so misused and misunderstood by an incompetent race (the English in Ireland, be it remembered) that in the higher interests of man it had to be withdrawn. As for the desire of self-government, “some people said it was a matter of historical sentiment. The humour of it was that there never was a real Irish kingdom at all. The Parliament which it was sought to restore to Ireland was given to it by England. The historical sentiment and loyalty which Mr. John Redmond was talking was the greatest humbug that was ever preached.” There are others who argue, Dr. Mahaffy among them, that practically there is not any more a Celtic race in Ireland, but one so mixed in blood that it no longer, if it ever did, contains the materials of a nation. The Celtic people, to their honour, have never denied a national brotherhood to Danes, Normans, English, or Palatines, who loyally entered into the Irish commonwealth. But as to political theories of the vanishing of the race, we have only to examine them by known facts, and turn to the Report of the Registrar-General in 1909 for proof that in the mingling of peoples the Celtic is still the predominant element over all the rest; and if this proof is conclusive, even in the register of merely Irish names, how enormous would be its increased weight if we could reckon in Celtic families the change from Irish names which has gone on ceaselessly since the thirteenth century, and is still constantly occurring at this moment – a change which, however lamentable, cannot alter the blood and the inheritance.
Irishmen are often warned to waste no time in looking back at the past. But if England draws the moral from her interpretation of history, we must learn our lesson too – only it must be a lesson more