Irish History and the Irish Question

by Goldwin Smith

IRISH HISTORY AND THE IRISH QUESTION

I

Of all histories the history of Ireland is the saddest. For nearly seven centuries it was a course of strife between races, bloodshed, massacre, misgovernment, civil war, oppression, and misery. Hardly even now have the troubles of Ireland come to a close, either for herself or for her partner. Unrest still reigns in her and, embodied in her Parliamentary delegation, harasses the Parliament and distracts the councils of Great Britain.

The theatre of this tragedy is a large island lying beside one nearly three times larger, which cuts it off from the continent of Europe, while on the other side it fronts the wide ocean. The climate is for the most part too wet for wheat. The pasture is very rich. Ireland seems by nature to be a grazing country, and a country of large farms; tillage and small farms have been enforced by the redundance of rural population consequent on the destruction of urban industries. In coal and minerals Ireland is poor, while the sister island abounds in them, and in its swarming factories and mines furnishes a first-rate market for the produce of Irish pastures; so that the two islands are commercial supplements of each other. The progress of pastoral countries, political and general, as they have little city life, is slow. With beauty Ireland is well endowed. The interior is flat, with large peat bogs and brimming rivers. But the coast is mountainous and romantic. The western coast especially, where the Atlantic rolls into deep inlets, has a pensive charm which, when troubles end and settled peace reigns, may attract the villa as they do the wanderer now. In early times the island was densely clothed with woods, which, with the broad and bridgeless rivers, operated like the mountain barriers of the Scottish Highlands in perpetuating the division of clans, with their patriarchal system, their rivalries, and their feuds, thus precluding the growth of a nation. In Ireland there was no natural centre of dominion. Interest of every kind seems to enjoin the union of the islands. But in the age of conquest the weaker island was pretty sure to be marked as a prey of the stronger, while the difficulties of access, the Channel, broad in the days of primitive navigation, and the Welsh mountains, combined with the internal barriers of forest and river and with the naturally wild habits of the people, portended that the conquest would be difficult and that the agony would be long. Such was the mould of Destiny.

The people of Ireland when history opens were Celts, kinsmen of the primitive races of Gaul and Britain, remnants of which are left in Wales and in the Highlands of Scotland. Their language was of that family, while cognate words connect it with the general Aryan stock. There are traces of a succession of immigrations. Too much, no doubt, has been made of the influence of race. Yet the Teuton is a Teuton and the Celt is a Celt. The Celt in his native state has everywhere shown himself lively, social, communicative, impulsive, prone to laughter and to tears, wanting, compared with the Teuton, in depth of character, in steadiness and perseverance. He is inclined rather to personal rule or leadership than to a constitutional polity. His poet is not Shakespeare or Milton, but Tom Moore, a light minstrel of laughter and tears. His political leader is O’Connell, a Boanerges of passionate declamation. In war he is impetuous, as was the Gaul who charged at Allia and the Highlander who charged at Killiecrankie and Prestonpans. His taste as well as his manual skill in decoration is shown by the brilliant collection of gold ornaments in the Celtic Museum at Dublin, as well as in stone carvings and such a paragon of illuminated missals as the Book of Kells. But it is greater than his aptitude for high art, that art which treats the human form, in which he has not shone. His religious tendency, the outcome of his general character, is either to Catholicism with its fervid faith, its mysteries, and its ceremonial, as in Ireland; or to the enthusiastic forms of Protestantism, as in the Highlands and in Wales. Anglicanism, a sober cult with a balanced creed, suits him not. It was a cruel decree of destiny that the larger island from which the conqueror would come was peopled by the Teuton, so that to the usual evils of conquest was added that of a difference of character inherent in race.

The primitive organization of the Irish Celts was tribal, the underlying idea being kinship, real or reputed. The ruler with paternal authority was the chief of the tribe. To avert strife his tanist, or successor, was elected in his lifetime. In a community of reputed kinsmen there could be no aristocracy of birth; but there seems to have been a plutocracy, whose riches in that pastoral country consisted of cattle, which formed the measure of wealth and command of which made poorer clansmen their retainers. Under these were the freemen of the tribe. Under the freemen again were the unfree, wanderers or captives taken in war or slaves from the English slave-market. The unfree appear to have been the only tillers of the soil. Thus tillage was marked with a bar sinister from its birth. The tribal law was a mystical and largely fanciful craft or tradition in the keeping of the Brehons, or judges, a hereditary order who, though revered as arbiters, were without power of enforcing their judgments. Like primitive law in general, it lacked the idea of public wrong. It treated crime as a private injury, to be compounded by fine. The land was the common property of the tribe, to which it nominally reverted on the demise of the holder, though it may be assumed that the chiefs at all events had practically land of their own and that the tendency in this, as in other cases, was to private ownership.

What the religion was is not certainly known. Probably it was the same as that of the Celts of Great Britain and Gaul, Druidism, wild, orgiastic, and perhaps sanguinary. But there seem to be no remains clearly Druidic in Ireland.

Life was pastoral, roving, probably bellicose. It appears that women required to be restrained from taking part in war. The characteristic garb of the tribesman was a loose saffron mantle, which served as his dress by day, his coverlet by night. His favourite weapons, often used, were an axe and a dart. He drew, it seems, a bow weak compared with the long-bow of England. The gentler side of his character was shown in his passionate love of the harp and the reverence in which he held the harper, and which was extended to the bard, whose rude lays saluted the intellectual dawn and whom we find in later times feared as an author of lampoons. Among his favourite amusements was chess.

Knowledge of the peculiar system of the Irish, political and legal, is of more consequence because the opposite system, that of constitutional government and feudal ownership, having presented itself to him as that of alien masters and oppressors, tribal peculiarities and sentiments lingered long. The idea of tribal ownership perhaps was a few generations ago still faintly present in agrarian agitation. Nor has the general character of the tribesman long been, if it yet is, extinct. Tribal feuds were until lately represented in the strange faction fights of the Caravats and Shanavests, the Two-Year-Olds and Three-Year-Olds, the annual fight of factions for a legendary stone, and the encounters between bodies of the peasantry at Irish fairs. Perhaps another feature of character traceable to tribalism may be the gregarious habit of Irishmen contrasted with the Englishman’s isolation and love of his private home.