thought out, there is so big a literature of ideas in existence, that I
think we could recover from a very considerable amount of smashing. I’m
pro-smash. We have to smash. What holds us back are fixed ideas. Take
Profit. We’re used to Profit. Most business is done for profit still.
But why should the world tolerate profit at all? It doesn’t stimulate
enterprise; it only stimulates knavery. And Capital, Financial Capital
is just blackmail by gold—gold rent. We think the state itself even
can’t start a business going or employ people without first borrowing
money. Why should it borrow money? Why not, for state purposes, create
it? Yes. No money would be any good if it hadn’t the state guarantee.
Gold standard, fixed money fund, legitimate profits and so on; that’s
the sort of fixed idea that gets in the way nowadays. It won’t get out
of the way just for reason’s sake. The employers keep on with these old
fixed ideas, naturally, because so it is they have been made, but the
workpeople believe in them less and less. There must be a smash of some
sort—just to shake ideas loose....”
Oswald surveyed his ward. So this was the young man’s theory. Not a bad
theory. Fixed Ideas!
“There’s something to be said for this notion of Fixed Ideas,” he said.
“Yes. But isn’t this ’I’m a Rebel’ business, isn’t that itself a Fixed
Idea?”
“Oh certainly!” said Peter cheerfully. “We poor human beings are always
letting our ideas coagulate. That’s where the whole business seems to me
so hopeless....”
§ 8
In the ’eighties and ’nineties every question had been positive and
objective. “People,” you said, “think so and so. _Is it right?_” That
seemed to cover the grounds for discussion in those days. One believed
in a superior universal reason to which all decisions must ultimately
bow. The new generation was beginning where its predecessors left off,
with what had been open questions decided and carried beyond discussion.
It was at home now on what had once been battlefields of opinion. The
new generation was reading William James and Bergson and Freud and
becoming more and more psychological. “People,” it said, “think so and
so. Why do they do so?”
So when at last Oswald carried off Peter to Dublin—which he did not do
at Easter as he had planned but at Whitsuntide for a mere long
week-end—to see at close hand this perplexing Irish Question that seemed
drifting steadily and uncontrollably towards bloodshed, he found that
while he was asking “who is in the right and who is in the wrong here?
Who is most to blame and who should have the upper hand?” Peter was
asking with a terrible impartiality, “Why are _all_ these people talking
nonsense?” and “Why have they got their minds and affairs into this
dangerous mess?” Sir Horace Plunkett, Peter had a certain toleration
for; but it was evident he suspected A.E. Peter did not talk very much,
but he listened with a bright scepticism to brilliant displays of good
talk—he had never heard such good anecdotal talk before—and betrayed
rather than expressed his conviction that Nationalism, Larkinism, Sinn
Feinism, Ulsterism and Unionism were all insults to the human
intelligence, material for the alienist rather than serious
propositions.
It wasn’t that he felt himself to be in possession of any conclusive
solution, or that he obtruded his disbelief with any sense of
superiority. In spite of his extreme youth he did not for a moment
assume the attitude of a superior person. Life was evidently troubling
him profoundly, and he was realizing that there was no apparent answer
to many of his perplexities. But he was at least trying hard to get an
answer. What shocked him in the world of Dublin was its manifest
disinclination to get any answer to anything. They jeered at people who
sought solutions. They liked the fun of disorder; it gave more scope for
their irrepressible passion for character study. He began to recognize
one particular phrase as the keynote of Dublin’s animation: “Hev ye
hurrd the letest?”
On the Sunday afternoon of their stay in Dublin, Powys motored them
through the city by way of Donnybrook and so on round the bay to Howth
to see the view from Howth Head. Powys drove with a stray guest beside
him. Behind, Peter imparted impressions to Oswald.
“I don’t like these high walls,” he said. “I’ve never seen such a lot of
high walls.... It’s just as if they all shut themselves in from one
another.”
“Fixed Ideas, Peter?”
“They _are_ rather like Fixed Ideas. I suppose high walls are fun to
climb over and throw things over. But—it’s uncivilized.”
“Everybody,” grumbled Peter, “is given to fixed ideas, but the Irish
have ’em for choice. All this rot about Ireland a Nation and about the
Harp, which isn’t properly their symbol, and the dear old Green Flag
which isn’t properly their colour!... They can’t believe in that stuff
nowadays.... But _can_ they? In our big world? And about being a Black
Protestant and pretending Catholics are poison, or the other way round.
What are Protestants and Catholics now?... Old dead squabbles.... Dead
as Druids.... Keeping up all that bickering stuff, when a child of eight
ought to know nowadays that the Christian God started out to be a
universal, charitable God.... If Christ came to Dublin the Catholics and
Protestants would have a free fight to settle which was to crucify
Him....”
“It’s the way with them,” said Oswald. “We’ve got to respect Irish
opinion.”
“It doesn’t respect itself. Everywhere else in the world, wherever we
have been, there’s been at least something like the germ of an idea of a
new life. But here! When you get over here you realize for the first
time that England is after all a living country trying to get on to
something—compared with this merry-go-round.... It’s exactly like a
merry-go-round churning away. It’s the atmosphere of a country fair. An
Irishman hasn’t any idea of a future at all, so far as I can see—except
that perhaps his grandchildren will tell stories of what a fine fellow
he was....”
The automobile halted for a moment at cross roads, and the finger-post
was in Erse characters.
“Look at _that!_” said Peter with genuine exasperation. “And hardly a
Dubliner knows fifty words of the language! It’s foolery. If we were
Irish I suppose we should smother London with black-letter. We should go
on pretending that we, too, were still Catholics and Protestants. The
pseudo-Protestants would hang Smithfield with black on account of the
martyrs, and the pseudo-Catholics would come and throw the meat about on
Fridays. Chesterton and Belloc would love it anyhow.”...
Oswald was not sure of the extent of Peter’s audience. “The
susceptibilities of a proud people, Peter,” he whispered, with his eye
on the back of their host.
“Bother their susceptibilities. Much they care for _our_
susceptibilities. The worst insult you can offer a grown-up man is to
humour him,” said Peter. “What’s the good of pretending to be
sympathetic with all this Wearing of the Green. It’s like our White Rose
League. Let ’em do it by all means if they want to, but don’t let’s
pretend we think it romantic and beautiful and all the rest of it. It’s
just posing and dressing up, and it’s a nuisance, Nobby. All Dublin is
posing and dressing up and playing at rebellion, and so is all Ulster.
The Volunteers of the eighteenth century all over again. It’s like
historical charades. And they’ve pointed loaded guns at each other. Only
idiots point loaded guns. Why can’t we English get out of it all, and
leave them to pose and dress up and then tell anecdotes and anecdotes
and anecdotes about it until they are sick of it? If ever they are sick
of it. Let them have their Civil War if they want it; let them keep on
with Civil Wars for ever; what has it got to do with us?”
“You’re a Home Ruler then,” said Oswald.
“I don’t see that we English do any good here at all. What are we here
for anyhow? The Castle’s just another Fixed Idea, something we haven’t
the mental vigour to clear away. Nobody does any good here. We’re not
giving them new ideas, we’re not unifying them, we’re not letting
Ireland out into the world—which is what she wants—we’re not doing
anything but just holding on.”
“What’s that?” said Powys suddenly over his shoulder.
“Peter’s declaring for Home Rule,” said Oswald.
“After his glimpse of the slums of Dublin?”
“It’s out of malice. He wants to leave Irishmen to Irishmen.”
“Ulster says _No_!” said Powys. “Tell him to talk to Ulster,” and
resumed a conversation he had interrupted with the man beside him.
At the corner where Nassau Street runs into Grafton Street they were
held up for some lengthy minutes by a long procession that was trailing
past Trinity College and down Grafton Street. It had several bands, and
in the forefront of it went National Volunteers in green uniforms,
obviously for the most part old soldiers; they were followed by men with
green badges, and then a straggle of Larkinites and various Friendly
Societies with their bands and banners, and then by a long dribble of
children and then some workgirls, and then a miscellany of people who
had apparently fallen in as the procession passed because they had
nothing else to do. As a procession it was tedious rather than
impressive. The warm afternoon—it was the last day in May—had taken the
good feeling out of the walkers. Few talked, still fewer smiled. The
common expression was a long-visaged discontent, a gloomy hostile stare
at the cars and police cordon, an aimless disagreeableness. They were
all being very stern and resolute about they did not quite know what.
They meant to show that Dublin could be as stern and resolute as
Belfast. Between the parts of the procession were lengthy gaps. It was a
sunshiny, dusty afternoon, and the legs of the processionists were dusty
to the knees, their brows moist, and their lips dry. There was an
unhurried air about them of going nowhere in particular. It was evident
that many of their banners were heavy. “What’s it all about?” asked
Oswald.
“Lord knows,” said Powys impatiently. “It’s just a demonstration.”
“Is that all? Why don’t we cut across now and get on?”
“There’s more coming. Don’t you hear another band?”
“But the police could hold it up for a minute and let all these tramcars
and automobiles across.”
“There’d be a fight,” said Powys. “They daren’t.”...
“And I suppose this sort of thing is going on in the north too?” asked
Oswald after a pause.
“Oh! everywhere,” said Powys. “Orange or Green. But they’ve got more
guns up north.”
“These people don’t really want Ireland a Nation and all the rest of
it,” said Peter.
“_Oh?_” said Powys, staring at him.
“Well, look at them,” said Peter. “You can see by their faces. They’re
just bored to death. I suppose most people _are_ bored to death in
Ireland. There’s nothing doing. England just holds them up, I suppose.
And it’s an island—rather off the main line. There’s nothing to get
people’s minds off these endless, dreary old quarrels. It’s all they
have. But they’re bored by it....”
“And that’s why we talk nothing but anecdotes, Peter, eh?” Powys
grinned.
“Well, you _do_ talk a lot of anecdote,” said Peter, who hadn’t realized
the sharpness of his host’s hearing.
“Oh! we do. I don’t complain of your seeing it. It isn’t your discovery.
Have you read or heard the truest words that were ever said of
Ireland—by that man Shaw? In _John Bull’s Other Island_.... That
laughing scene about the pig. ’Nowhere else could such a scene cause a
burst of happiness among the people.’ That’s the very guts of things
here; eh?”
“It’s his best play,” said Oswald, avoiding too complete an assent.
“It gets there,” Powys admitted, “anyhow. The way all them fools come
into the shanty and snigger.”...
The last dregs of the procession passed reluctantly out of the way. It
faded down Grafton Street into a dust cloud and a confusion of band
noises. The policemen prepared to release the congested traffic. Peter
leaned out to count the number of trams and automobiles that had been
held up. He was still counting when the automobile turned the corner.
They shook Dublin off and spun cheerfully through the sunshine along the
coast road to Howth. It was a sparkling bright afternoon, and the road
was cheerful with the prim happiness of many couples of Irish lovers.
But that afternoon peace was the mask worn by one particular day. If the
near future could have cast a phantom they would have seen along this
road a few weeks ahead of them the gun-runners of Howth marching to the
first foolish bloodshed in Dublin streets....
They saw Howth Castle, made up now by Lutyens to look as it ought to
have looked and never had looked in the past. The friend Powys had
brought wanted to talk to some of the castle people, and while these two
stayed behind Oswald and Peter went on, between high hedges of clipped
beech and up a steep, winding path amidst great bushes of rhododendron
in full flower to the grey rock and heather of the crest. They stood in
the midst of one of the most beautiful views in the world. Northward
they looked over Ireland’s Eye at Lambay and the blue Mourne mountains
far away; eastward was the lush green of Meath, southward was the long
beach of the bay sweeping round by Dublin to Dalkey, backed by more blue
mountains that ran out eastward to the Sugar Loaf. Below their feet the
pale castle clustered amidst its rich greenery, and to the east, the
level blue sea sustained one single sunlit sail. It was rare that the
sense of beauty flooded Peter, as so often it flooded Joan, but this
time he was transported.
“But this is altogether beautiful,” he said, like one who is taken by
surprise.
And then as if to himself: “How beautiful life might be! How splendid
life might be!”
Oswald was standing on a ledge below Peter, and with his back to him. He
waited through a little interval to see if Peter would say any more.
Then he pricked him with “only it isn’t.”
“No,” said Peter, with the sunlight gone out of his voice. “It isn’t.”
He went on talking after a moment’s reflection.
“It’s as if we were hypnotized and couldn’t get away from mean things,
beastly suspicions, and stale quarrels. I suppose we are still half
apes. I suppose our brains set too easily and rapidly. I suppose it’s
easy to quarrel yet and still hard to understand. We take to jealousy
and bitterness as ducklings take to water. Think of that stale, dusty
procession away there!”
Oswald’s old dream vision of the dark forest came back to his mind. “Is
there no way out, Peter?” he said.
“If some great idea would take hold of the world!” said Peter....
“There have been some great ideas,” said Oswald....
“If it would take hold of one’s life,” Peter finished his thought....
“There has been Christianity,” said Oswald.
“Christianity!” Peter pointed at the distant mist that was Dublin. “Sour
Protestants,” he said, “and dirty priests setting simple people by the
ears.”
“But that isn’t true Christianity.”
“There isn’t true Christianity,” said Peter compactly....
“Well, there’s love of country then,” said Oswald.
“That Dublin corporation is the most patriotic and nationalist in the
world. Fierce about it. And it’s got complete control there. It’s green
in grain. No English need apply.... From the point of view of
administration that town is a muck heap—for patriotic crowings. Look at
their dirty, ill-paved streets. Look at their filthy slums! See how they
let their blessed nation’s children fester and die!”
“There are bigger ideas than patriotism. There are ideas of empire, the
Pax Britannica.”
“Carson smuggling guns.”
“Well, is there nothing? Do _you_ know of nothing?”
Oswald turned on his ward for the reply.
“There’s a sort of idea, I suppose.”
“But what idea?”
“There’s an idea in our minds.”
“But what is it, Peter?”
“Call it Civilization,” Peter tried.
“I believe,” he went on, weighing his words carefully, “as you believe
really, in the Republic of Mankind, in universal work for a common
end—for freedom, welfare, and beauty. Haven’t you taught me that?”
“_Have_ I taught you that?”
“It seems to me to be the commonsense aim for all humanity. You’re awake
to it. You’ve awakened me to it and I believe in it. But most of this
world is still deep in its old Fixed Ideas, walking in its sleep. And it
won’t wake up. It won’t wake up.... What can we _do_? We’ve got to a
sort of idea, it’s true. But here are these Irish, for example,
naturally wittier and quicker than you or I, hypnotized by Orange and
Green, by Protestant and Catholic, by all these stale things—drifting
towards murder. It’s murder is coming here. You can smell the bloodshed
coming on the air—and we can’t do a thing to prevent it. Not a thing.
The silliest bloodshed it will be. The silliest bloodshed the world has
ever seen. We can’t do a thing to wake them up....
“We’re _in_ it,” said Peter in conclusion. “We can’t even save
ourselves.”
“I’ve been wanting to get at your political ideas for a long time,” said
Oswald. “You really think, Peter, there might be a big world
civilization, a world republic, did you call it?—without a single slum
hidden in it anywhere, with the whole of mankind busy and happy, the
races living in peace, each according to its aptitudes, a world going
on—going on steady and swift to still better things.”
“How can one believe anything else? Don’t you?”
“But how do we get there, Peter?”
“Oh, how do we get there?” echoed Peter. “How do we get there?”
He danced a couple of steps with vexation.
“I don’t _know_, Nobby,” he cried. “I don’t know. I can’t find the way.
I’m making a mess of my life. I’m not getting on with my work. You
_know_ I’m not.... Either we’re mad or this world is. Here’s all these
people in Ireland letting a solemn humbug of a second-rate lawyer with a
heavy chin and a lumpish mind muddle them into a civil war—and _that’s_
reality! That’s life! The solemn League and Covenant—copied out of old
history books! That’s being serious! And over there in England, across
the sea, muddle and muck and nonsense indescribable. Oh! and we’re _in_
it!”
“But aren’t there big movements afoot, Peter, social reform, the labour
movement, the emancipation of women, big changes like that?”
“Only big discontents.”
“But doesn’t discontent make the change?”
“It’s just boredom that’s got them. It isn’t any disposition to _make_.
Labour is bored, women are bored, all Ireland is bored. I suppose Russia
is bored and Germany is getting bored. She is boring all the world with
her soldiering. How bored they must be in India too—by us! The day bores
its way round the earth now—like a mole. Out of sight of the stars. But
boring people doesn’t mean making a new world. It just means boring on
to decay. It just means one sort of foolish old fixed idea rubbing and
sawing against another, until something breaks down.... Oh! I want to
get out of all this. I don’t _like_ this world of ours. I want to get
into a world awake. I’m young and I’m greedy. I’ve only got one life to
live, Nobby.... I want to spend it where something is being made. Made
for good and all. Where clever men can do something more than sit
overlong at meals and tell spiteful funny stories. Where there’s
something better to do than play about with one’s brain and viscera!...”
§ 9
In the days when Peter was born the Anglican system held the Empire with
apparently invincible feelings of security and self-approval; it
possessed the land, the church, the army, the foreign office, the court.
Such people as Arthur and Dolly were of no more account than a stray
foreign gipsy by the wayside. When Peter came of age the Anglican system
still held on to army, foreign office, court, land, and church, but now
it was haunted by a sense of an impalpable yet gigantic antagonism that
might at any time materialize against it. It had an instinctive
perception of the near possibility of a new world in which its base
prides could have no adequate satisfaction, in which its authority would
be flouted, its poor learning despised, and its precedents disregarded.
The curious student of the history of England in the decade before the
Great War will find the clue to what must otherwise seem a hopeless
tangle in the steady, disingenuous, mischievous antagonism of the old
Anglican system to every kind of change that might bring nearer the
dreaded processes of modernization. Education, and particularly
university, reform was blocked, the most necessary social legislation
fought against with incoherent passion, the lightest, most reasonable
taxation of land or inheritance resisted.
Wherever the old system could find allies it snatched at them and sought
to incorporate them with itself. It had long since taken over the New
Imperialism with its tariff schemes and its spirit of financial
adventure. It had sneered aloof when the new democracy of the elementary
schools sought to read and think; it had let any casual adventurer to
supply that reading; but now the creator of _Answers_ and _Comic Cuts_
ruled the _Times_ and sat in the House of Lords. It was a little
doubtful still whether he was of the new order or the old, whether he
was not himself an instalment of revolution, whether the Tories had
bought him or whether he had bought them, but at any rate he did for a
time seem to be serving the ends of reaction.
To two sources of strength the Anglicans clung with desperate
resolution, India and Ulster. From India the mass of English people were
shut and barred off as completely as any foreigners could have been.
India was the preserve of the “ruling class.” To India the good
Anglican, smitten by doubts, chilled by some disrespectful comment or
distressed by some item of progress achieved, could turn, leaving all
thoughts of new and unpleasant things behind him; there in what he loved
to believe was the “unchanging East” he could recover that sense of
walking freely and authoritatively upon an abundance of inferior people
which was so necessary to his nature, and which was being so seriously
impaired at home. The institution of caste realized his secret ideals.
From India he and his womankind could return refreshed, to the struggle
with Liberalism and all the powers of democratic irreverence in England.
And Ulster was a still more precious stronghold for this narrow culture.
From the fastness of Ulster they could provoke the restless temperament
of the Irish to a thousand petty exasperations of the English, and for
Ulster, “loyal Ulster,” they could appeal to the generous partisanship
of the English against their native liberalism. More and more did it
become evident that Ulster was the keystone of the whole Anglican
ascendancy; to that they owed their grip upon British politics, upon
army, navy, and education; they traded—nay! they existed—upon the open
Irish sore. With Ireland healed and contented England would be lost to
them. England would democratize, would Americanize. The Anglicans would
vanish out of British life as completely as the kindred Tories vanished
out of America at the close of the eighteenth century. And when at last,
after years of confused bickering, a Home Rule Bill became law, and
peace between the two nations in Ireland seemed possible, the Anglicans
stepped at once from legal obstruction to open treason and revolt. The
arming of Ulster to resist the decision of Parliament was incited from
Great Britain, it was supported enthusiastically by the whole of the
Unionist party in Great Britain, its headquarters were in the west end
of London, and the refusal of General Gough to carry out the
precautionary occupation of Ulster was hailed with wild joy in every
Tory home. It was not a genuine popular movement, it was an artificial
movement for which the landowning church people of Ireland and England
were chiefly responsible. It was assisted by tremendous exertions on the
part of the London yellow press. When Sir Edward Carson went about
Ulster in that warm June of 1914, reviewing armed men, promising “more
Mausers,” and pouring out inflammatory speeches, he was manifestly
preparing bloodshed. The old Tory system had reached a point where it
had to kill men or go.
And it did not mean to go; it meant to kill. It meant to murder men.
If youth and the new ideas were to go on with the world, the price was
blood.