But while Mr. Froude"s book has no practical relation to modern Irish politics, and does not offer any solution of the present question, it has a certain historical value. It is a vivid picture of Ireland in the latter half of the eighteenth century, a picture often false in its lights and exaggerated in its shadows, but a picture none the less. Mr.
Froude admits the martyrdom of Ireland but regrets that the martyrdom was not more completely carried out. His ground of complaint against the Executioner is not his trade but his bungling. It is the bluntness not the cruelty of the sword that he objects to. Resolute government, that shallow shibboleth of those who do not understand how complex a thing the art of government is, is his posthumous panacea for past evils. His hero, Colonel Goring, has the words Law and Order ever on his lips, meaning by the one the enforcement of unjust legislation, and implying by the other the suppression of every fine national aspiration. That the government should enforce iniquity and the governed submit to it, seems to Mr. Froude, as it certainly is to many others, the true ideal of political science. Like most penmen he overrates the power of the sword.
Where England has had to struggle she has been wise. Where physical strength has been on her side, as in Ireland, she has been made unwieldy by that strength. Her own strong hands have blinded her. She has had force but no direction.
There is, of course, a story in Mr. Froude"s novel. It is not simply a political disquisition. The interest of the tale, such as it is, centres round two men, Colonel Goring and Morty Sullivan, the Cromwellian and the Celt. These men are enemies by race and creed and feeling. The first represents Mr. Froude"s cure for Ireland. He is a resolute "Englishman, with strong Nonconformist tendencies," who plants an industrial colony on the coast of Kerry, and has deep-rooted objections to that illicit trade with France which in the last century was the sole method by which the Irish people were enabled to pay their rents to their absentee landlords.
Colonel Goring bitterly regrets that the Penal Laws against the Catholics are not rigorously carried out. He is a "_Police_ at any price" man.
"And this," said Goring scornfully, "is what you call governing Ireland, hanging up your law like a scarecrow in the garden till every sparrow has learnt to make a jest of it. Your Popery Acts! Well, you borrowed them from France. The French Catholics did not choose to keep the Hugonots among them, and recalled the Edict of Nantes. As they treated the Hugonots, so you said to all the world that you would treat the Papists. You borrowed from the French the very language of your Statute, but they are not afraid to stand by their law, and you are afraid to stand by yours. You let the people laugh at it, and in teaching them to despise one law, you teach them to despise all laws--G.o.d"s and man"s alike. I cannot say how it will end; but I can tell you this, that you are training up a race with the education which you are giving them that will astonish mankind by and bye."
Mr. Froude"s resume of the history of Ireland is not without power though it is far from being really accurate. "The Irish," he tells us, "had disowned the facts of life, and the facts of life had proved the strongest." The English, unable to tolerate anarchy so near their sh.o.r.es, "consulted the Pope. The Pope gave them leave to interfere, and the Pope had the best of the bargain. For the English brought him in, and the Irish . . . kept him there." England"s first settlers were Norman n.o.bles. They became more Irish than the Irish, and England found herself in this difficulty: "To abandon Ireland would be discreditable, to rule it as a province would be contrary to English traditions." She then "tried to rule by dividing," and failed. The Pope was too strong for her. At last she made her great political discovery. What Ireland wanted was evidently an entirely new population "of the same race and the same religion as her own." The new policy was partly carried out:
Elizabeth first and then James and then Cromwell replanted the Island, introducing English, Scots, Hugonots, Flemings, Dutch, tens of thousands of families of vigorous and earnest Protestants, who brought their industries along with them. Twice the Irish . . . tried . . .
to drive out this new element . . . They failed. . . . [But] England . . . had no sooner accomplished her long task than she set herself to work to spoil it again. She destroyed the industries of her colonists by her trade laws. She set the Bishops to rob them of their religion.
. . . [As for the gentry,] The purpose for which they had been introduced into Ireland was unfulfilled. They were but alien intruders, who did nothing, who were allowed to do nothing. The time would come when an exasperated population would demand that the land should be given back to them, and England would then, perhaps, throw the gentry to the wolves, in the hope of a momentary peace. But her own turn would follow. She would be face to face with the old problem, either to make a new conquest or to retire with disgrace.
Political disquisitions of this kind, and prophecies after the event, are found all through Mr. Froude"s book, and on almost every second page we come across aphorisms on the Irish character, on the teachings of Irish history and on the nature of England"s mode of government. Some of them represent Mr. Froude"s own views, others are entirely dramatic and introduced for the purpose of characterisation. We append some specimens. As epigrams they are not very felicitous, but they are interesting from some points of view.
Irish Society grew up in happy recklessness. Insecurity added zest to enjoyment.
We Irish must either laugh or cry, and if we went in for crying, we should all hang ourselves.
Too close a union with the Irish had produced degeneracy both of character and creed in all the settlements of English.
We age quickly in Ireland with the whiskey and the broken heads.
The Irish leaders cannot fight. They can make the country ungovernable, and keep an English army occupied in watching them.
No nation can ever achieve a liberty that will not be a curse to them, except by arms in the field.
[The Irish] are taught from their cradles that English rule is the cause of all their miseries. They were as ill off under their own chiefs; but they would bear from their natural leaders what they will not bear from us, and if we have not made their lot more wretched we have not made it any better.
"Patriotism? Yes! Patriotism of the Hibernian order. The country has been badly treated, and is poor and miserable. This is the patriot"s stock in trade. Does he want it mended? Not he. His own occupation would be gone."
Irish corruption is the twin-brother of Irish eloquence.
England will not let us break the heads of our scoundrels; she will not break them herself; we are a free country, and must take the consequences.
The functions of the Anglo-Irish Government were to do what ought not to be done, and to leave undone what ought to be done.
The Irish race have always been noisy, useless and ineffectual. They have produced nothing, they have done nothing, which it is possible to admire. What they are, that they have always been, and the only hope for them is that their ridiculous Irish nationality should be buried and forgotten.
The Irish are the best actors in the world.
Order is an exotic in Ireland. It has been imported from England, but it will not grow. It suits neither soil, nor climate. If the English wanted order in Ireland, they should have left none of us alive.
When ruling powers are unjust, nature rea.s.serts her rights.
Even anarchy has its advantages.
Nature keeps an accurate account. . . . The longer a bill is left unpaid, the heavier the acc.u.mulation of interest.
You cannot live in Ireland without breaking laws on one side or another. Pecca fort.i.ter, therefore, as . . . Luther said.
The animal spirits of the Irish remained when all else was gone, and if there was no purpose in their lives, they could at least enjoy themselves.
The Irish peasants can make the country hot for the Protestant gentleman, but that is all they are fit for.
As we said before, if Mr. Froude intended his book to help the Tory Government to solve the Irish question he has entirely missed his aim.
The Ireland of which he writes has disappeared. As a record, however, of the incapacity of a Teutonic to rule a Celtic people against their own wish, his book is not without value. It is dull, but dull books are very popular at present; and as people have grown a little tired of talking about Robert Elsmere, they will probably take to discussing The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. There are some who will welcome with delight the idea of solving the Irish question by doing away with the Irish people. There are others who will remember that Ireland has extended her boundaries, and that we have now to reckon with her not merely in the Old World but in the New.
The Two Chiefs of Dunboy: or An Irish Romance of the Last Century. By J.
A. Froude. (Longmans, Green and Co.)
SOME LITERARY NOTES--V
(Woman"s World, May 1889.)
Miss Caroline Fitz Gerald"s volume of poems, Venetia Victrix, is dedicated to Mr. Robert Browning, and in the poem that gives its t.i.tle to the book it is not difficult to see traces of Mr. Browning"s influence.
Venetia Victrix is a powerful psychological study of a man"s soul, a vivid presentation of a terrible, fiery-coloured moment in a marred and incomplete life. It is sometimes complex and intricate in expression, but then the subject itself is intricate and complex. Plastic simplicity of outline may render for us the visible aspect of life; it is different when we come to deal with those secrets which self-consciousness alone contains, and which self-consciousness itself can but half reveal. Action takes place in the sunlight, but the soul works in the dark.
There is something curiously interesting in the marked tendency of modern poetry to become obscure. Many critics, writing with their eyes fixed on the masterpieces of past literature, have ascribed this tendency to wilfulness and to affectation. Its origin is rather to be found in the complexity of the new problems, and in the fact that self-consciousness is not yet adequate to explain the contents of the Ego. In Mr.
Browning"s poems, as in life itself which has suggested, or rather necessitated, the new method, thought seems to proceed not on logical lines, but on lines of pa.s.sion. The unity of the individual is being expressed through its inconsistencies and its contradictions. In a strange twilight man is seeking for himself, and when he has found his own image, he cannot understand it. Objective forms of art, such as sculpture and the drama, sufficed one for the perfect presentation of life; they can no longer so suffice.
The central motive of Miss Caroline Fitz Gerald"s psychological poem is the study of a man who to do a n.o.ble action wrecks his own soul, sells it to evil, and to the spirit of evil. Many martyrs have for a great cause sacrificed their physical life; the sacrifice of the spiritual life has a more poignant and a more tragic note. The story is supposed to be told by a French doctor, sitting at his window in Paris one evening:
How far off Venice seems to-night! How dim The still-remembered sunsets, with the rim Of gold round the stone haloes, where they stand, Those carven saints, and look towards the land, Right Westward, perched on high, with palm in hand, Completing the peaked church-front. Oh how clear And dark against the evening splendour! Steer Between the graveyard island and the quay, Where North-winds dash the spray on Venice;--see The rosy light behind dark dome and tower, Or gaunt smoke-laden chimney;--mark the power Of Nature"s gentleness, in rise or fall Of interlinked beauty, to recall Earth"s majesty in desecration"s place, Lending yon grimy pile that dream-like face Of evening beauty;--note yon rugged cloud, Red-rimmed and heavy, drooping like a shroud Over Murano in the dying day.
I see it now as then--so far away!
The face of a boy in the street catches his eye. He seems to see in it some likeness to a dead friend. He begins to think, and at last remembers a hospital ward in Venice:
"Twas an April day, The year Napoleon"s troops took Venice--say The twenty-fifth of April. All alone Walking the ward, I heard a sick man moan, In tones so piteous, as his heart would break: "Lost, lost, and lost again--for Venice" sake!"
I turned. There lay a man no longer young, Wasted with fever. I had marked, none hung About his bed, as friends, with tenderness, And, when the priest went by, he spared to bless, Glancing perplexed--perhaps mere sullenness.
I stopped and questioned: "What is lost, my friend?"
"My soul is lost, and now draws near the end.
My soul is surely lost. Send me no priest!
They sing and solemnise the marriage feast Of man"s salvation in the house of love, And I in h.e.l.l, and G.o.d in Heaven above, And Venice safe and fair on earth between-- No love of mine--mere service--for my Queen."
He was a seaman, and the tale he tells the doctor before he dies is strange and not a little terrible. Wild rage against a foster-brother who had bitterly wronged him, and who was one of the ten rulers over Venice, drives him to make a mad oath that on the day when he does anything for his country"s good he will give his soul to Satan. That night he sails for Dalmatia, and as he is keeping the watch, he sees a phantom boat with seven fiends sailing to Venice:
I heard the fiends" shrill cry: "For Venice" good!
Rival thine ancient foe in grat.i.tude, Then come and make thy home with us in h.e.l.l!"
I knew it must be so. I knew the spell Of Satan on my soul. I felt the power Granted by G.o.d to serve Him one last hour, Then fall for ever as the curse had wrought.
I climbed aloft. My brain had grown one thought, One hope, one purpose. And I heard the hiss Of raging disappointment, loth to miss Its prey--I heard the lapping of the flame, That through the blanched figures went and came, Darting in frenzy to the devils" yell.
I set that cross on high, and cried: "To h.e.l.l My soul for ever, and my deed to G.o.d!
Once Venice guarded safe, let this vile clod Drift where fate will."