The English boy has an entirely different history. He enters some famous historical school, anxious, like his parents and all his aunts and cousins, that he be stamped and sealed with its approval. His desire is to be an Eton, Harrow, or Rugby boy, after which he will become an Oxford or Cambridge man, marked in his accent, clothes, and manner with the sign-manual of his university. For the Irish boy this is as impossible as it is repugnant. His home is stronger than his school and his college. In the great English schools the boys manage one another; a system of rules and of etiquette has democratically grown up which all must obey; this kind of docility is English and not Irish. Our boys cannot thus surrender themselves, for behind the Irish boy is the drama of a full home life. There is no such drama in English home life—it is prosperous, uneventful, and lies icily cold in the lap of law. The Irish home, in which so much happens, awaits its novelist; but, alas! English readers won’t read novels about Ireland, and Irish readers are too few to make their custom worth anybody’s attention. All we know is that the Irishman is, boy and man, a detached personality. He is often the gayest and most sociable of beings, and a true comrade, and he may be able to adapt himself to every situation, yet he remains apart; even with his friends he is inscrutable, he cannot be read. And this to my mind is right, for no one should be able to read another’s secret, except the mother who bore him, and sometimes a sweetheart. The ordinary well-to-do Englishman has no secrets, for you can read them all in his bank-book, in his Catechism, in the rules of his club and the laws of his country. He is an admirable citizen on whom you can calculate as on a railway time-table. The English mother when she parts from her boy at the school doors may sigh to think that she has lost her boy, yet be proud to think that he will return remodelled into the smart Eton or Harrow boy. The Irish mother has no such hopes and no such fears; her boy will come back what he was when he left her side, and though he go to India, and rule provinces, with many well-trained public-school Englishmen working under him, he will still remain the passionate Irish boy of her heart’s desire.
The great factor in the Irish education is not the school, but the Irish home, unique in its combination of small means, intellect, and ambition with conversation. Without this conversation the home would not be Irish. From every manor-house and cabin ascends the incense of pleasant talk; it is that in which we most excel. With us all journeys end in talkers’ meeting; “we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks,” said Oscar Wilde. When any Irish reform is proposed—and they are innumerable—I always ask, how will it affect our conversation? France has her art and literature, England her House of Lords, and America her vast initiative; we have our conversation. We watch impatiently for the meals, because we are hungry and thirsty for conversation; not for argument’s sake or to improve ourselves, but because we spontaneously like one another. We like human voices and faces and the smiles and gestures and all the little drama of household colloquy, varying every moment from serious to gay, with skill, with finesse; we like human nature for its own sake, and we like it vocal—that is why we talk; we even like our enemies, on the Irish principle that it is “better to be quarrelling than to be lonesome.” Arthur Symons, staying in a pilot’s cottage on the west of Ireland, said to my daughter: “I don’t believe these people ever go to bed.” No, they have so much to say to one another.
“England,” said Bernard Shaw, “cannot do without its Irish and Scots to-day because it cannot do without at least a little sanity.” Both these nations are conversational.
The home must play its part vigorously if the race is to be saved for affection and happiness, and if we would bring back the conditions from which spring art and poetry.
[WHY THE ENGLISHMAN IS HAPPY]
An Irishman’s Notes on the Saxon Temperament
N the long quest for self-knowledge and self-fulfilment there are two types of men and two methods. There are some who would have the individual man care only for himself morning, noon, and night, for his spirit, his mind, his body, his temporal and eternal welfare. There are others who would say he should forget himself and lose himself in great ideas, great causes, great enthusiasms, in passionate love or humanitarianism, or even in the anger of battle. Of these two methods the second is found in France while the first is the Englishman’s creed.