THE ROOT OF REALITY
The only excuse of literature is to make things new; and the chief
misfortune of journalism is that it has to make them old. What is
hurried has to be hackneyed. Suppose a man has to write on a particular
subject, let us say America; if he has a day to do it in, it is
possible that, in the last afterglow of sunset, he may have discovered
at least one thing which he himself really thinks about America. It is
conceivable that somewhere under the evening star he may have a new
idea, even about the new world. If he has only half an hour in which to
write, he will just have time to consult an encyclopædia and vaguely
remember the latest leading articles. The encyclopædia will be only
about a decade out of date; the leading articles will be æons out of
date--having been written under similar conditions of modern rush. If
he has only a quarter of an hour in which to write about America, he
may be driven in mere delirium and madness to call her his Gigantic
Daughter in the West, to talk of the feasibility of Hands Across the
Sea, or even to call himself an Anglo-Saxon, when he might as well
call himself a Jute. But whatever debasing banality be the effect of
business scurry in criticism, it is but one example of a truth that can
be tested in twenty fields of experience. If a man must get to Brighton
as quickly as possible, he can get there quickest by travelling on
rigid rails on a recognised route. If he has time and money for
motoring, he will still use public roads; but he will be surprised to
find how many public roads look as new and quiet as private roads.
If he has time enough to walk, he may find for himself a string of
fresh footpaths, each one a fairy-tale. This law of the leisure needed
for the awakening of wonder applies, indeed, to things superficially
familiar as well as to things superficially fresh. The chief case for
old enclosures and boundaries is that they enclose a space in which
new things can always be found later, like live fish within the four
corners of a net. The chief charm of having a home that is secure is
having leisure to feel it as strange.
I have often done the little I could to correct the stale trick of
taking things for granted: all the more because it is not even taking
them for granted. It is taking them without gratitude; that is,
emphatically as not granted. Even one’s own front door, released by
one’s own latchkey, should not only open inward on things familiar,
but outward on things unknown. Even one’s own domestic fireside should
be wild as well as domesticated; for nothing could be wilder than
fire. But if this light of the higher ignorance should shine even on
familiar places, it should naturally shine most clearly on the roads of
a strange land. It would be well if a man could enter Ireland really
knowing that he knows nothing about Ireland; if possible, not even the
name of Ireland. The misfortune is that most men know the name too
well, and the thing too little. This book would probably be a better
book, as well as a better joke, if I were to call the island throughout
by some name like Atlantis, and only reveal on the last page that I
was referring to Ireland. Englishmen would see a situation of great
interest, objects with which they could feel considerable sympathy, and
opportunities of which they might take considerable advantage, if only
they would really look at the place plain and straight, as they would
at some entirely new island, with an entirely new name, discovered
by that seafaring adventure which is the real romance of England. In
short, the Englishman might do something with it, if he would only
treat it as an object in front of him, and not as a subject or story
left behind him. There will be occasion later to say all that should
be said of the need of studying the Irish story. But the Irish story
is one thing and what is called the Irish Question quite another; and
in a purely practical sense the best thing the stranger can do is to
forget the Irish Question and look at the Irish. If he looked at them
simply and steadily, as he would look at the natives of an entirely new
nation with a new name, he would become conscious of a very strange
but entirely solid fact. He would become conscious of it, as a man in
a fairy tale might become conscious that he had crossed the border of
fairyland, by such a trifle as a talking cow or a haystack walking
about on legs.
For the Irish Question has never been discussed in England. Men have
discussed Home Rule; but those who advocated it most warmly, and as
I think wisely, did not even know what the Irish meant by Home. Men
have talked about Unionism; but they have never even dared to propose
Union. A Unionist ought to mean a man who is not even conscious of the
boundary of the two countries; who can walk across the frontier of
fairyland, and not even notice the walking haystack. As a fact, the
Unionist always shoots at the haystack; though he never hits it. But
the limitation is not limited to Unionists; as I have already said,
the English Radicals have been quite as incapable of going to the root
of the matter. Half the case for Home Rule was that Ireland could not
be trusted to the English Home Rulers. They also, to recur to the
parable, have been unable to take the talking cow by the horns; for I
need hardly say that the talking cow is an Irish bull. What has been
the matter with their Irish politics was simply that they were English
politics. They discussed the Irish Question; but they never seriously
contemplated the Irish Answer. That is, the Liberal was content with
the negative truth, that the Irish should not be prevented from having
the sort of law they liked. But the Liberal seldom faced the positive
truth, about what sort of law they would like. He instinctively avoided
the very imagination of this; for the simple reason that the law the
Irish would like is as remote from what is called Liberal as from
what is called Unionist. Nor has the Liberal ever embraced it in his
broadest liberality, nor the Unionist ever absorbed it into his most
complete unification. It remains outside us altogether, a thing to be
stared at like a fairy cow; and by far the wisest English visitor is
he who will simply stare at it. Sooner or later he will see what it
means; which is simply this: that whether it be a case for coercion or
emancipation (and it might be used either way) the fact is that a free
Ireland would not only _not_ be what we call lawless, but might not
even be what we call free. So far from being an anarchy, it would be an
orderly and even conservative civilisation--like the Chinese. But it
would be a civilisation so fundamentally different from our own, that
our own Liberals would differ from it as much as our own Conservatives.
The fair question for an Englishman is whether that fundamental
difference would make division dangerous; it has already made union
impossible. Now in turning over these notes of so brief a visit,
suffering from all the stale scurry of my journalistic trade, I have
been in doubt between a chronological and a logical order of events.
But I have decided in favour of logic, of the high light that really
revealed the picture, and by which I firmly believe that everything
else should be seen. And if any one were to ask me what was the sight
that struck me most in Ireland, both as strange and as significant, I
should know what to reply. I saw it long after I had seen the Irish
cities, had felt something of the brilliant bitterness of Dublin and
the stagnant optimism of Belfast; but I put it first here because I
am certain that without it all the rest is meaningless; that it lies
behind all politics, enormous and silent, as the great hills lie beyond
Dublin.
I was moving in a hired motor down a road in the North-West, towards
the middle of that rainy autumn. I was not moving very fast; because
the progress was slowed down to a solemn procession by crowds of
families with their cattle and live stock going to the market beyond;
which things also are an allegory. But what struck my mind and stuck in
it was this; that all down one side of the road, as far as we went,
the harvest was gathered in neatly and safely; and all down the other
side of the road it was rotting in the rain. Now the side where it
was safe was a string of small plots worked by peasant proprietors,
as petty by our standards as a row of the cheapest villas. The land
on which all the harvest was wasted was the land of a large modern
estate. I asked why the landlord was later with his harvesting than
the peasants; and I was told rather vaguely that there had been
strikes and similar labour troubles. I did not go into the rights
of the matter; but the point here is that, whatever they were, the
moral is the same. You may curse the cruel Capitalist landlord or you
may rave at the ruffianly Bolshevist strikers; but you must admit
that between them they had produced a stoppage, which the peasant
proprietorship a few yards off did not produce. You might support
either where they conflicted, but you could not deny the sense in
which they had combined, and combined to prevent what a few rustics
across the road could combine to produce. For all that we in England
agree about and disagree about, all for which we fight and all from
which we differ, our darkness and our light, our heaven and hell, were
there on the left side of the road. On the right side of the road lay
something so different that we do not even differ from it. It may be
that Trusts are rising like towers of gold and iron, overshadowing the
earth and shutting out the sun; but they are only rising on the left
side of the road. It may be that Trade Unions are laying labyrinths
of international insurrection, cellars stored with the dynamite of a
merely destructive democracy; but all that international maze lies to
the left side of the road. Employment and unemployment are there; Marx
and the Manchester School are there. The left side of the road may even
go through amazing transformations of its own; its story may stride
across abysses of anarchy; but it will never step across the road.
The landlord’s estate may become a sort of Morris Utopia, organised
communally by Socialists, or more probably by Guild Socialists. It may
(as I fear is much more likely) pass through the stage of an employer’s
model village to the condition of an old pagan slave-estate. But the
peasants across the road would not only refuse the Servile State, but
would quite as resolutely refuse the Utopia. Europe may seem to be
torn from end to end by the blast of a Bolshevist trumpet, sundering
the bourgeois from the proletarian; but the peasant across the road is
neither a bourgeois nor a proletarian. England may seem to be rent by
an irreconcilable rivalry between Capital and Labour; but the peasant
across the road is both a capitalist and a labourer. He is several
other curious things; including the man who got his crops in first; who
was literally first in the field.
To an Englishman, especially a Londoner, this was like walking to
the corner of a London street and finding the policeman in rags,
with a patch on his trousers and a smudge on his face; but the
crossing-sweeper wearing a single eyeglass and a suit fresh from a
West End tailor. In fact, it was nearly as surprising as a walking
haystack or a talking cow. What was generally dingy, dilatory, and
down-at-heels was here comparatively tidy and timely; what was orderly
and organised was belated and abandoned. For it must be sharply
realised that the peasant proprietors succeeded here, not only because
they were really proprietors, but because they were only peasants.
It was _because_ they were on a small scale that they were a great
success. It was because they were too poor to have servants that
they grew rich in spite of strikers. It was, so far as it went, the
flattest possible contradiction to all that is said in England, both
by Collectivists and Capitalists, about the efficiency of the great
organisation. For in so far as it had failed, it had actually failed,
not only through being great, but through being organised. On the left
side of the road the big machine had stopped working, _because_ it was
a big machine. The small men were still working, because they were
not machines. Such were the strange relations of the two things, that
the stars in their courses fought against Capitalism; that the very
clouds rolling over that rocky valley warred for its pigmies against
its giants. The rain falls alike on the just and the unjust; yet here
it had not fallen alike on the rich and poor. It had fallen to the
destruction of the rich.
Now I do, as a point of personal opinion, believe that the right side
of the road was really the right side of the road. That is, I believe
it represented the right side of the question; that these little
pottering peasants had got hold of the true secret, which is missed
both by Capitalism and Collectivism. But I am not here urging my own
preferences on my own countrymen; and I am not concerned primarily to
point out that this is an argument against Capitalism and Collectivism.
What I do point out is that it is the fundamental argument against
Unionism. Perhaps it is, on that ultimate level, the only argument
against Unionism; which is probably why it is never used against
Unionists. I mean, of course, that it was never really used against
English Unionists by English Home Rulers, in the recriminations of that
Irish Question which was really an English Question. The essential
demanded of that question was merely that it should be an open
question; a thing rather like an open wound. Modern industrial society
is fond of problems, and therefore not at all fond of solutions. A
consideration of those who really have understood this fundamental fact
will be sufficient to show how confusing and useless are the mere party
labels in the matter. George Wyndham was a Unionist who was deposed
because he was a Home Ruler. Sir Horace Plunkett is a Unionist who is
trusted because he is a Home Ruler. By far the most revolutionary piece
of Nationalism that was ever really effected for Ireland was effected
by Wyndham, who was an English Tory squire. And by far the most brutal
and brainless piece of Unionism that was ever imposed on Ireland was
imposed in the name of the Radical theory of Free Trade, when the
Irish juries brought in verdicts of wilful murder against Lord John
Russell. I say this to show that my sense of a reality is quite apart
from the personal accident that I have myself always been a Radical
in English politics, as well as a Home Ruler in Irish politics. But I
say it even more in order to re-affirm that the English have first to
forget all their old formulæ and look at a new fact. It is not a new
fact; but it is new to them.
To realise it we must not only go outside the British parties but
outside the British Empire, outside the very universe of the ordinary
Briton. The real question can be easily stated, for it is as simple
as it is large. What is going to happen to the peasantries of Europe,
or for that matter of the whole world? It would be far better, as I
have already suggested, if we could consider it as a new case of some
peasantry in Europe, or somewhere else in the world. It would be far
better if we ceased to talk of Ireland and Scotland, and began to
talk of Ireland and Serbia. Let us, for the sake of our own mental
composure, call this unfortunate people Slovenes. But let us realise
that these remote Slovenes are, by the testimony of every truthful
traveller, rooted in the habit of private property, and now ripening
into a considerable private prosperity. It will often be necessary to
remember that the Slovenes are Roman Catholics; and that, with that
impatient pugnacity which marks the Slovene temperament, they have
often employed violence, but always for the restoration of what they
regarded as a reasonable system of private property. Now in a hundred
determining districts, of which France is the most famous, this system
has prospered. It has its own faults as well as its own merits; but
it has prospered. What is going to happen to it? I will here confine
myself to saying with the most solid confidence what is not going to
happen to it. It is not going to be _really_ ruled by Socialists; and
it is not going to be really ruled by merchant princes, like those who
ruled Venice or like those who rule England.
It is not merely that England ought not to rule Ireland but that
England cannot. It is not merely that Englishmen cannot rule Irishmen,
but that merchants cannot rule peasants. It is not so much that we have
dealt benefits to England and blows to Ireland. It is that our benefits
for England would be blows to Ireland. And this we already began to
admit in practice, before we had even dimly begun to conceive it in
theory. We do not merely admit it in special laws against Ireland like
the Coercion Acts, or special laws in favour of Ireland like the Land
Acts; it is admitted even more by specially exempting Ireland than by
specially studying Ireland. In other words, whatever else the Unionists
want, they do not want to unite; they are not quite so mad as that. I
cannot myself conceive any purpose in having one parliament except to
pass one law; and one law for England and Ireland is simply something
that becomes more insanely impossible every day. If the two societies
were stationary, they would be sufficiently separate; but they are
both moving rapidly in opposite directions. England may be moving
towards a condition which some call Socialism and I call Slavery;
but whatever it is, Ireland is speeding farther and farther from it.
Whatever it is, the men who manage it will no more be able to manage a
European peasantry than the peasants in these mud cabins could manage
the Stock Exchange. All attempts, whether imperial or international, to
lump these peasants along with some large and shapeless thing called
Labour, are part of a cosmopolitan illusion which sees mankind as a
map. The world of the International is a pill, as round and as small.
It is true that all men want health; but it is certainly not true that
all men want the same medicine. Let us allow the cosmopolitan to survey
the world from China to Peru; but do not let us allow the chemist to
identify Chinese opium and Peruvian bark.
My parallel about the Slovenes was only a fancy; yet I can give a
real parallel from the Slavs which is a fact. It was a fact from
my own experience in Ireland; and it exactly illustrates the real
international sympathies of peasants. Their internationalism has
nothing to do with the International. I had not been in Ireland many
hours when several people mentioned to me with considerable excitement
some news from the Continent. They were not, strange as it may seem,
dancing with joy over the disaster of Caporetto, or glowing with
admiration of the Crown Prince. Few really rejoiced in English defeats;
and none really rejoiced in German victories. It was news about the
Bolshevists; but it was not the news of how nobly they had given votes
to the Russian women, nor of how savagely they had fired bullets into
the Russian princesses. It was the news of a check to the Bolshevists;
but it was not a glorification of Kerensky or Korniloff, or any of the
newspaper heroes who seem to have satisfied us all, so long as their
names began with K and nobody knew anything about them. In short, it
was nothing that could be found in all our myriad newspaper articles
on the subject. I would give an educated Englishman a hundred guesses
about what it was; but even if he knew it he would not know what it
meant.
It had appeared in the little paper about peasant produce so
successfully conducted by Mr George Russell, the admirable ‘A. E.,’ and
it was told me eagerly by the poet himself, by a learned and brilliant
Jesuit, and by several other people, as the great news from Europe.
It was simply the news that the Jewish Socialists of the Bolshevist
Government had been attempting to confiscate the peasants’ savings in
the co-operative banks; and had been forced to desist. And they spoke
of it as of a great battle won on the Danube or the Rhine. That is what
I mean when I say that these people are of a pattern and belong to a
system which cuts across all our own political divisions. They felt
themselves fighting the Socialist as fiercely as any Capitalist can
feel it. But they not only knew what they were fighting against, but
what they were fighting for; which is more than the Capitalist does. I
do not know how far modern Europe really shows a menace of Bolshevism,
or how far merely a panic of Capitalism. But I know that if any honest
resistance has to be offered to mere robbery, the resistance of Ireland
will be the most honest, and probably the most important. It may be
that international Israel will launch against us out of the East an
insane simplification of the unity of Man, as Islam once launched out
of the East an insane simplification of the unity of God. If it be so,
it is where property is well distributed that it will be well defended.
The post of honour will be with those who fight in very truth for their
own land. If ever there came such a drive of wild dervishes against us,
it would be the chariots and elephants of plutocracy that would roll in
confusion and rout; and the squares of the peasant infantry would stand.
Anyhow, the first fact to realise is that we are dealing with a
European peasantry; and it would be really better, as I say, to think
of it first as a Continental peasantry. There are numberless important
inferences from this fact; but there is one point, politically
topical and urgent, on which I may well touch here. It will be well
to understand about this peasantry something that we generally
misunderstand, even about a Continental peasantry. English tourists
in France or Italy commonly make the mistake of supposing that the
people cheat, because the people bargain, or attempt to bargain. When
a peasant asks tenpence for something that is worth fourpence, the
tourist misunderstands the whole problem. He commonly solves it by
calling the man a thief and paying the tenpence. There are ten thousand
errors in this, beginning with the primary error of an oligarchy, of
treating a man as a servant when he feels more like a small squire.
The peasant does not choose to receive insults; but he never expected
to receive tenpence. A man who understood him would simply suggest
twopence, in a calm and courteous manner; and the two would eventually
meet in the middle at a perfectly just price. There would not be what
we call a fixed price at the beginning, but there would be a very
firmly fixed price at the end: that is, the bargain once made would be
a sacredly sealed contract. The peasant, so far from cheating, has his
own horror of cheating; and certainly his own fury at being cheated.
Now in the political bargain with the English, the Irish simply think
they have been cheated. They think Home Rule was stolen from them
_after_ the contract was sealed; and it will be hard for any one to
contradict them. If ‘_le Roi le veult_’ is not a sacred seal on a
contract, what is? The sentiment is stronger because the contract was a
compromise. Home Rule was the fourpence and not the tenpence; and, in
perfect loyalty to the peasant’s code of honour, they have now reverted
to the tenpence. The Irish have now returned in a reaction of anger to
their most extreme demands; _not_ because we denied what they demanded,
but because we denied what we accepted. As I shall have occasion to
note, there are other and wilder elements in the quarrel; but the
first fact to remember is that the quarrel began with a bargain, that
it will probably have to end with another bargain; and that it will
be a bargain with peasants. On the whole, in spite of abominable
blunders and bad faith, I think there is still a chance of bargaining,
but we must see that there is no chance of cheating. We may haggle
like peasants, and remember that their first offer is not necessarily
their last. But we must be as honest as peasants; and that is a hard
saying for politicians. The great Parnell, a squire who had many of the
qualities of a peasant (qualities the English so wildly misunderstood
as to think them English, when they were really very Irish) converted
his people from a Fenianism fiercer than Sinn Fein to a Home Rule more
moderate than that which any sane statesmanship would now offer to
Ireland. But the peasants trusted Parnell, not because they thought he
was asking for it, but because they thought he could get it. Whatever
we decide to give to Ireland, we must give it; it is now worse than
useless to promise it. I will say here, once and for all, the hardest
thing that an Englishman has to say of his impressions of another great
European people; that over all those hills and valleys our word is
wind, and our bond is waste paper.
But, in any case, the peasantry remains: and the whole weight of the
matter is that it will remain. It is much more certain to remain than
any of the commercial or colonial systems that will have to bargain
with it. We may honestly think that the British Empire is both more
liberal and more lasting than the Austrian Empire, or other large
political combinations. But a combination like the Austrian Empire
could go to pieces, and ten such combinations could go to pieces,
before people like the Serbians ceased to desire to be peasants, and
to demand to be free peasants. And the British combination, precisely
because it is a combination and not a community, is in its nature more
lax and liable to real schism than this sort of community, which might
almost be called a communion. Any attack on it is like an attempt to
abolish grass; which is not only the symbol of it in the old national
song, but it is a very true symbol of it in any new philosophic
history; a symbol of its equality, its ubiquity, its multiplicity, and
its mighty power to return. To fight against grass is to fight against
God; we can only so mismanage our own city and our own citizenship that
the grass grows in our own streets. And even then it is our streets
that will be dead; and the grass will still be alive.