IRISH IMPRESSIONS
THE HISTORY OF
RUHLEBEN
BY JOSEPH POWELL (CAPTAIN OF THE CAMP)
AND FRANCIS GRIBBLE 10/6 _net_
TRUE LOVE
BY ALLAN MONKHOUSE 7/- _net_
THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN
BY FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG 7/- _net_
A GARDEN OF PEACE
BY F. LITTLEMORE 10/6 _net_
NEW WINE
BY AGNES AND EGERTON CASTLE 7/- _net_
MADELEINE
BY HOPE MIRRLEES 7/- _net_
COLLINS LONDON
IRISH IMPRESSIONS
_by_ G. K. CHESTERTON
[Illustration]
LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND
Copyright
First Impression, November, 1919
Second ” January, 1920
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. TWO STONES IN A SQUARE 1
II. THE ROOT OF REALITY 17
III. THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 45
IV. THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 67
V. THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 93
VI. THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 115
VII. THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 141
VIII. AN EXAMPLE AND A QUESTION 173
IX. BELFAST AND THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 207
CHAPTER I
TWO STONES IN A SQUARE
When I had for the first time crossed St George’s Channel, and for the
first time stepped out of a Dublin hotel on to St Stephen’s Green,
the first of all my impressions was that of a particular statue, or
rather portion of a statue. I left many traditional mysteries already
in my track, but they did not trouble me as did this random glimpse or
vision. I have never understood why the Channel is called St George’s
Channel; it would seem more natural to call it St Patrick’s Channel
since the great missionary did almost certainly cross that unquiet
sea and look up at those mysterious mountains. And though I should be
enchanted, in an abstract artistic sense, to imagine St George sailing
towards the sunset, flying the silver and scarlet colours of his
cross, I cannot in fact regard that journey as the most fortunate of
the adventures of that flag. Nor, for that matter, do I know why the
Green should be called St Stephen’s Green, nor why the parliamentary
enclosure at Westminster is also connected with the first of the
martyrs; unless it be because St Stephen was killed with stones. The
stones, piled together to make modern political buildings, might
perhaps be regarded as a cairn, or heap of missiles, marking the place
of the murder of a witness to the truth. And while it seems unlikely
that St Stephen was pelted with statues as well as stones, there are
undoubtedly statues that might well kill a Christian at sight. Among
these graven stones, from which the saints suffer, I should certainly
include some of those figures in frock coats standing opposite St
Stephen’s Westminster. There are many such statues in Dublin also; but
the one with which I am concerned was at first partially veiled from
me. And the veil was at least as symbolic as the vision.
I saw what seemed the crooked hind legs of a horse on a pedestal and
deduced an equestrian statue, in the somewhat bloated fashion of the
early eighteenth century equestrian statues. But the figure, from where
I stood, was wholly hidden in the tops of trees growing round it in a
ring; masking it with leafy curtains or draping it with leafy banners.
But they were green banners, that waved and glittered all about it in
the sunlight; and the face they hid was the face of an English king. Or
rather, to speak more correctly, a German king.
When laws can stay ... it was impossible that an old rhyme should not
run in my head, and words that appealed to the everlasting revolt
of the green things of the earth.... ‘And when the leaves in summer
time their colour dare not show.’ The rhyme seemed to reach me out of
remote times and find arresting fulfilment, like a prophecy; it was
impossible not to feel that I had seen an omen. I was conscious vaguely
of a vision of green garlands hung on gray stone; and the wreaths were
living and growing, and the stone was dead. Something in the simple
substances and elemental colours, in the white sunlight, and the sombre
and even secret image held the mind for a moment in the midst of all
the moving city, like a sign given in a dream. I was told that the
figure was that of one of the first Georges; but indeed I seemed to
know already that it was the White Horse of Hanover that had thus grown
gray with Irish weather or green with Irish foliage. I knew only too
well, already, that the George who had really crossed the Channel was
not the saint. This was one of those German princes whom the English
aristocracy used when it made the English domestic polity aristocratic
and the English foreign policy German. Those Englishmen who think the
Irish are pro-German, or those Irishmen who think the Irish ought to
be pro-German, would presumably expect the Dublin populace to have
hung the statue of this German deliverer with national flowers and
nationalist flags. For some reason, however, I found no traces of Irish
tributes round the pedestal of the Teutonic horsemen. I wondered how
many people in the last fifty years have ever cared about it, or even
been conscious of their own carelessness. I wonder how many have ever
troubled to look at it, or even troubled not to look at it. If it
fell down, I wonder whether anybody would put it up again. I do not
know; I only know that Irish gardeners, or some such Irish humorists,
had planted trees in a ring round that prancing equestrian figure;
trees that had, so to speak, sprung up and choked him, making him more
unrecognisable than a Jack-in-the-Green. Jack or George had vanished;
but the Green remained.
About a stone’s-throw from this calamity in stone there stood, at
the corner of a gorgeously coloured flower-walk, a bust evidently by
a modern sculptor, with modern symbolic ornament surmounted by the
fine falcon face of the poet Mangan, who dreamed and drank and died,
a thoughtless and thriftless outcast, in the darkest of the Dublin
streets around that place. This individual Irishman really was what we
were told that all Irishmen were, hopeless, heedless, irresponsible,
impossible, a tragedy of failure. And yet it seemed to be his head
that was lifted and not hidden; the gay flowers only showed up this
graven image as the green leaves shut out the other; everything around
him seemed bright and busy, and told rather of a new time. It was
clear that modern men did stop to look at _him_; indeed modern men had
stayed there long enough to make him a monument. It was almost certain
that if his monument fell down it really would be put up again. I
think it very likely there would be competition among advanced modern
artistic schools of admitted crankiness and unimpeachable lunacy;
that somebody would want to cut out a Cubist Mangan in a style less
of stone than of bricks; or to set up a Vorticist Mangan, like a
frozen whirlpool, to terrify the children playing in that flowery
lane. For when I afterwards went into the Dublin Art Club, or mixed
generally in the stimulating society of the intellectuals of the
Irish capital, I found a multitude of things which moved both my
admiration and amusement. Perhaps the best thing of all was that it
was the one society that I have seen where the intellectuals were
intellectual. But nothing pleased me more than the fact that even
Irish art was taken with a certain Irish pugnacity; as if there could
be street fights about æsthetics as there once were about theology.
I could almost imagine an appeal for pikes to settle a point about
art needlework, or a suggestion of dying on the barricades for a
difference about bookbinding. And I could still more easily imagine
a sort of ultra-civilised civil war round the half-restored bust of
poor Mangan. But it was in a yet plainer and more popular sense that
I felt that bust to be the sign of a new world, where the statue of
Royal George was only the ruin of an old one. And though I have since
seen many much more complex, and many decidedly contradictory things in
Ireland, the allegory of those two stone images in that public garden
has remained in my memory, and has not been reversed. The Glorious
Revolution, the great Protestant Deliverer, the Hanoverian Succession,
these things were the very pageant and apotheosis of success. The
Whig aristocrat was not merely victorious; it was as a victor that he
asked for victory. The thing was fully expressed in all the florid and
insolent statuary of the period, in all those tumid horsemen in Roman
uniform and rococo periwigs shown as prancing in perpetual motion down
shouting streets to their triumphs; only to-day the streets are empty
and silent, and the horse stands still. Of such a kind was the imperial
figure round which the ring of trees had risen, like great green fans
to soothe a sultan or great green curtains to guard him. But it was in
a sort of mockery that his pavilion was thus painted with the colour
of his conquered enemies. For the king was dead behind his curtains,
his voice will be heard no more, and no man will even wish to hear it,
while the world endures. The dynastic eighteenth century is dead if
anything is dead; and these idols at least are only stones. But only
a few yards away, the stone that the builders rejected is really the
head of a corner, standing at the corner of a new pathway, coloured and
crowded with children and with flowers.
That, I suspect, is the paradox of Ireland in the modern world.
Everything that was thought progressive as a prancing horse has come to
a standstill. Everything that was thought decadent as a dying drunkard
has risen from the dead. All that seemed to have reached a _cul de sac_
has turned the corner, and stands at the opening of a new road. All
that thought itself on a pedestal has found itself up a tree. And that
is why those two chance stones seem to me to stand like graven images
on either side of the gateway by which a man enters Ireland. And yet I
had not left the same small enclosure till I had seen one other sight
which was even more symbolic than the flowers near the foot of the
poet’s pedestal. A few yards beyond the Mangan bust was a model plot of
vegetables, like a kitchen garden with no kitchen or house attached
to it, planted out in a patchwork of potatoes, cabbages, and turnips,
to prove how much could be done with an acre. And I realised as in a
vision that all over the new Ireland that patch is repeated like a
pattern; and where there is a real kitchen garden there is also a real
kitchen; and it is not a communal kitchen. It is more typical even than
the poet and the flowers; for these flowers are also food, and this
poetry is also property; property which, when properly distributed,
is the poetry of the average man. It was only afterwards that I could
realise all the realities to which this accident corresponded; but even
this little public experiment, at the first glance, had something of
the meaning of a public monument. It was this which the earth itself
had reared against the monstrous image of the German monarch; and I
might have called this chapter Cabbages and Kings.
My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true
prophecies. In the little town in South Bucks, where I live, I
remember some talk of appropriate ceremonies in connection with the
work of sending vegetables to the Fleet. There was a suggestion that
some proceedings should end with ‘God Save the King,’ an amendment by
some one (of a more naval turn of mind) to substitute ‘Rule Britannia’;
and the opposition of one individual, claiming to be of Irish
extraction, who loudly refused to lend a voice to either. Whatever I
retain, in such rural scenes, of the frivolity of Fleet Street led
me to suggest that we could all join in singing ‘The Wearing of the
Greens.’ But I have since discovered that this remark, like other
typical utterances of the village idiot, was in truth inspired; and
was a revelation and a vision from across the sea, a vision of what
was really being done, not by the village idiots but by the village
wise men. For the whole miracle of modern Ireland might well be summed
up in the simple change from the word ‘green’ to the word ‘greens.’
Nor would it be true to say that the first is poetical and the second
practical. For a green tree is quite as poetical as a green flag; and
no one in touch with history doubts that the waving of the green flag
has been very useful to the growing of the green tree. But I shall
have to touch upon all such controversial topics later, for those
to whom such statements are still controversial. Here I would only
begin by recording a first impression as vividly coloured and patchy
as a modernist picture; a square of green things growing where they
are least expected; the new vision of Ireland. The discovery, for
most Englishmen, will be like touching the trees of a faded tapestry,
and finding the forest alive and full of birds. It will be as if, on
some dry urn or dreary column, figures which had already begun to
crumble magically began to move and dance. For culture as well as mere
caddishness assumed the decay of these Celtic or Catholic things; there
were artists sketching the ruins as well as trippers picnicking in
them; and it was not the only evidence that a final silence had fallen
on the harp of Tara, that it did not play ‘Tararaboomdeay.’ Englishmen
believed in Irish decay even when they were large-minded enough to
lament it. It might be said that those who were most penitent because
the thing was murdered, were most convinced that it was killed. The
meaning of these green and solid things before me is that it is not a
ghost that has risen from the grave. A flower, like a flag, might be
little more than a ghost; but a fruit has that sacramental solidity
which in all mythologies belongs not to a ghost, but to a god. This
sight of things sustaining, and a beauty that nourishes and does not
merely charm, was a premonition of practicality in the miracle of
modern Ireland. It is a miracle more marvellous than the resurrection
of the dead. It is the resurrection of the body.