BELFAST AND THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM
Of that cloud of dream which seems to drift over so many Irish poems
and impressions, I felt very little in Ireland. There is a real meaning
in this suggestion of a mystic sleep, but it does not mean what most
of us imagine, and is not to be found where we expect it. On the
contrary, I think the most vivid impression the nation left on me, was
that it was almost unnaturally wide awake. I might almost say that
Ireland suffers from insomnia. This is not only literally true, of
those tremendous talks, the prolonged activities of rich and restless
intellects, that can burn up the nights from darkness to daybreak.
It is true on the doubtful as well as the delightful side, and the
temperament has something of the morbid vigilance and even of the
irritability of insomnia. Its lucidity is not only superhuman, but it
is sometimes in the true sense inhuman. Its intellectual clarity cannot
resist the temptation to intellectual cruelty. If I had to sum up in
a sentence the one fault really to be found with the Irish, I could
do it simply enough. I should say it saddened me that I liked them
all so much better than they liked each other. But it is our supreme
stupidity that this is always taken as meaning that Ireland is a sort
of Donnybrook Fair. It is really quite the reverse of a merely rowdy
and irresponsible quarrel. So far from fighting with shillelaghs, they
fight far too much with rapiers; their temptation is in the very nicety
and even delicacy of the thrust. Of course there are multitudes who
make no such deadly use of the national irony; but it is sufficiently
common for even these to suffer from it; and after a time I began to
understand a little that burden about bitterness of speech, which
recurs so often in the songs of Mr Yeats and other Irish poets.
Though hope fall from you and love decay
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.
But there is nothing dreamy about the bitterness; the worst part
of it is the fact that the criticisms always have a very lucid and
logical touch of truth. It is not for us to lecture the Irish about
forgiveness, who have given them so much to forgive. But if some one
who had not lost the right to preach to them, if St Patrick were to
return to preach, he would find that nothing had failed, through all
those ages of agony, of faith and honour and endurance; but I think he
might possibly say, what I have no right to say, a word about charity.
There is indeed one decisive sense in which the Irish are very
poetical; in that of giving a special and serious social recognition
to poetry. I have sometimes expressed the fancy that men in the Golden
Age might spontaneously talk in verse; and it is really true that half
the Irish talk is in verse. Quotation becomes recitation. But it is
much too rhythmic to resemble our own theatrical recitations. This is
one of my own strongest and most sympathetic memories, and one of my
most definable reasons for having felt extraordinarily happy in Dublin.
It was a paradise of poets, in which a man who may feel inclined to
mention a book or two of _Paradise Lost_, or illustrate his meaning
with the complete ballad of the _Ancient Mariner_, feels he will be
better understood than elsewhere. But the more this very national
quality is noted, the less it will be mistaken for anything merely
irresponsible, or even merely emotional. The shortest way of stating
the truth is to say that poetry plays the part of music. It is in
every sense of the phrase a social function. A poetical evening is as
natural as a musical evening, and being as natural it becomes what is
called artificial. As in some circles ‘Do you play?’ is rather ‘Don’t
you play?’ these Irish circles would be surprised because a man did
not recite rather than because he did. A hostile critic, especially an
Irish critic, might possibly say that the Irish are poetical because
they are not sufficiently musical. I can imagine Mr Bernard Shaw saying
something of the sort. But it might well be retorted that they are not
merely musical because they will not consent to be merely emotional. It
is far truer to say that they give a reasonable place to poetry, than
that they permit any particular poetic interference with reason. ‘But
I, whose virtues are the definitions of the analytical mind,’ says Mr
Yeats, and any one who has been in the atmosphere will know what he
means. In so far as such things stray from reason, they tend rather to
ritual than to riot. Poetry is in Ireland what humour is in America; it
is an institution. The Englishman, who is always for good and evil the
amateur, takes both in a more occasional and even accidental fashion.
It must always be remembered here that the ancient Irish civilisation
had a high order of poetry, which was not merely mystical, but rather
mathematical. Like Celtic ornament, Celtic verse tended too much to
geometrical patterns. If this was irrational, it was not by excess
of emotion. It might rather be described as irrational by excess of
reason. The antique hierarchy of minstrels, each grade with its own
complicated metre, suggests that there was something Chinese about
a thing so inhumanly civilised. Yet all this vanished etiquette is
somehow in the air in Ireland; and men and women move to it, as to the
steps of a lost dance.
Thus, whether we consider the sense in which the Irish are really
quarrelsome, or the sense in which they are really poetical, we find
that both lead us back to a condition of clarity which seems the very
reverse of a mere dream. In both cases Ireland is critical, and even
self-critical. The bitterness I have ventured to lament is not Irish
bitterness against the English; that I should assume as not only
inevitable, but substantially justifiable. It is Irish bitterness
against the Irish; the remarks of one honest Nationalist about another
honest Nationalist. Similarly, while they are fond of poetry, they
are not always fond of poets, and there is plenty of satire in their
conversation on the subject. I have said that half the talk may consist
of poetry; I might almost say that the other half may consist of
parody. All these things amount to an excess of vigilance and realism;
the mass of the people watch and pray, but even those who never pray
never cease to watch. If they idealise sleep, it is as the sleepless
do; it might almost be said that they can only dream of dreaming. If
a dream haunts them, it is rather as something that escapes them; and
indeed some of their finest poetry is rather about seeking fairyland
than about finding it. Granted all this, I may say that there was
one place in Ireland where I did seem to find it, and not merely to
seek it. There was one spot where I seemed to see the dream itself in
possession, as one might see from afar a cloud resting on a single
hill. There a dream, at once a desire and a delusion, brooded above a
whole city. That place was Belfast.
The description could be justified even literally and in detail. A man
told me in north-east Ulster that he had heard a mother warning her
children away from some pond, or similar place of danger, by saying,
‘Don’t you go there; there are wee popes there.’ A country where
that could be said is like Elfland as compared to England. If not
exactly a land of fairies, it is at least a land of goblins. There is
something charming in the fancy of a pool full of these peculiar elves,
like so many efts, each with his tiny triple crown or crossed keys
complete. That is the difference between this manufacturing district
and an English manufacturing district, like that of Manchester. There
are numbers of sturdy Nonconformists in Manchester, and doubtless
they direct some of their educational warnings against the system
represented by the Archbishop of Canterbury. But nobody in Manchester,
however Nonconformist, tells even a child that a puddle is a sort
of breeding place for Archbishops of Canterbury, little goblins in
gaiters and aprons. It may be said that it is a very stagnant pool
that breeds that sort of efts. But whatever view we take of it, it
remains true, to begin with, that the paradox could be proved merely
from superficial things like superstitions. Protestant Ulster reeks of
superstition; it is the strong smell that really comes like a blast out
of Belfast, as distinct from Birmingham or Brixton. But to me there is
always something human and almost humanising about superstition; and
I really think that such lingering legends about the Pope, as a being
as distant and dehumanised as the King of the Cannibal Islands, have
served as a sort of negative folk-lore. And the same may be said, in so
far as it is true that the commercial province has retained a theology
as well as a mythology. Wherever men are still theological there is
still some chance of their being logical. And in this the Calvinist
Ulsterman may be more of a Catholic Irishman than is commonly realised,
especially by himself.
Attacks and apologies abound about the matter of Belfast bigotry;
but bigotry is by no means the worst thing in Belfast. I rather think
it is the best. Nor is it the strongest example of what I mean, when
I say that Belfast does really live in a dream. The other and more
remarkable fault of the society has indeed a religious root; for nearly
everything in history has a religious root, and especially nearly
everything in Irish history. Of that theoretical origin in theology
I may say something in a moment; it will be enough to say here that
what has produced the more prominent and practical evil is ultimately
the theology itself, but not the habit of being theological. It is the
creed, but not the faith. In so far as the Ulster Protestant really has
a faith, he is really a fine fellow; though perhaps not quite so fine
a fellow as he thinks himself. And that is the chasm; and can be most
shortly stated as I have often stated it in such debates: by saying
that the Protestant generally says, ‘I am a good Protestant,’ while the
Catholic always says, ‘I am a bad Catholic.’
When I say that Belfast is dominated by a dream, I mean it in the
strict psychological sense; that something inside the mind is stronger
than everything outside it. Nonsense is not only stronger than sense,
but stronger than the senses. The idea in a man’s head can eclipse the
eyes in his head. Very worthy and kindly merchants told me there was
no poverty in Belfast. They did not say there was less poverty than
was commonly alleged, or less poverty than there had been, or less
than there was in similar places elsewhere. They said there was none.
As a remark about the Earthly Paradise or the New Jerusalem, it would
be arresting. As a remark about the streets, through which they and
I had both passed a few moments before, it was simply a triumph of
the sheer madness of the imagination of man. These eminent citizens
of Belfast received me in the kindest and most courteous fashion, and
I would not willingly say anything in criticism of them beyond what
is necessary for the practical needs of their country and mine. But
indeed I think the greatest criticism on them, is that they would not
understand what the criticism means. I will therefore clothe it in a
parable, which is none the worse for having also been a real incident.
When told there was no poverty in Belfast, I had remarked mildly that
the people must have a singular taste in dress. I was gravely assured
that they had indeed a most singular taste in dress. I was left with
the general impression that wearing shirts or trousers decorated with
large holes at irregular intervals was a pardonable form of foppery
or fashionable extravagance. And it will always be a deep indwelling
delight, in the memories of my life, that just as these city fathers
and I came out on to the steps of the hotel, there appeared before us
one of the raggedest of the ragged little boys I had seen, asking for a
penny. I gave him a penny, whereon this group of merchants was suddenly
transfigured into a sort of mob, vociferating, ‘Against the law!
Against the law!’ and bundled him away. I hope it is not unamiable
to be so much entertained by that vision of a mob of magistrates, so
earnestly shooing away a solitary child like a cat. Anyhow, they knew
not what they did; and, what is worse, knew not that they knew not. And
they would not understand, if I told them, what legend might have been
made about that child, in the Christian ages of the world.
The point is here that the evil in the delusion does not consist in
bigotry, but in vanity. It is not that such a Belfast man thinks he
is right; for any honest man has a right to think he is right. It is
that he does think he is good, not to say great; and no honest man can
reach that comfortable conviction without a course of intellectual
dishonesty. What cuts this spirit off from Christian common sense is
the fact that the delusion, like most insane delusions, is merely
egotistical. It is simply the pleasure of thinking extravagantly
well of oneself, and unlimited indulgence in that pleasure is far
more weakening than any indulgence in drink or dissipation. But so
completely does it construct an unreal cosmos round the ego, that the
criticism of the world cannot be felt even for worldly purposes. I
could give many examples of this element in Belfast, as compared even
with Birmingham or Manchester. The Lord Mayor of Manchester may not
happen to know much about pictures, but he knows men who know about
them. But the Belfast authorities will exhibit a maniacally bad picture
as a masterpiece, merely because it glorifies Belfast. No man dare put
up such a picture in Manchester, within a stone’s-throw of Mr Charles
Rowley. I care comparatively little about the case of æsthetics;
but the case is even clearer in ethics. So wholly are these people
sundered from more Christian traditions that their very boasts lower
them; and they abase themselves when they mean to exalt themselves.
It never occurs to them that their strange inside standards do not
always impress outsiders. A great employer introduced me to several of
his very intelligent employees, and I can readily bear witness to the
sincerity of the great Belfast delusion even among many of the poorer
men of Belfast. But the sincere efforts of them and their master, to
convince me that a union with the Catholic majority under Home Rule was
intolerable to them, all went to one tune, which recurred with a kind
of chorus, ‘We won’t have the likes of them making laws for the likes
of us.’ It never seemed to cross their minds that this is not a high
example of any human morality; that judged by pagan _verecundia_ or
Christian humility or modern democratic brotherhood, it is simply the
remark of a snob. The man in question is quite innocent of all this;
he has no notion of modesty, or even of mock modesty. He is not only
superior, but he thinks it a superiority to claim superiority.
It is here that we cannot avoid theology, because we cannot avoid
theory. For the point is that even in theory the one religious
atmosphere now differs from the other. That the difference had
historically a religious root is really unquestionable; but anyhow it
is very deeply rooted. The essence of Calvinism was certainty about
salvation; the essence of Catholicism is uncertainty about salvation.
The modern and materialised form of that certainty is superiority;
the belief of a man in a fixed moral aristocracy of men like himself.
But the truth concerned here is that, by this time at any rate, the
superiority has become a doctrine as well as an indulgence. I doubt if
this extreme school of Protestants believe in Christian humility even
as an ideal. I doubt whether the more honest of them would even profess
to believe in it. This can be clearly seen by comparing it with other
Christian virtues, of which this decayed Calvinism offers at least
a version, even to those who think it a perversion. Puritanism is a
version of purity; if we think it a parody of purity. Philanthropy is a
version of charity; if we think it a parody of charity. But in all this
commercial Protestantism there is no version of humility; there is not
even a parody of humility. Humility is not an ideal. Humility is not
even a hypocrisy. There is no institution, no commandment, no common
form of words, no popular pattern or traditional tale, to tell anybody
in any fashion that there is any such thing as a peril of spiritual
pride. In short, there is here a school of thought and sentiment that
does definitely regard self-satisfaction as a strength, as against the
strong Christian tradition in the rest of the country that does as
definitely regard it as a weakness. That is the real moral issue in
the modern struggle in Ireland, nor is it confined to Ireland. England
has been deeply infected with this pharisaical weakness, but as I have
said, England takes things vaguely where Ireland takes them vividly.
The men of Belfast offer that city as something supreme, unique and
unrivalled; and they are very nearly right. There is nothing exactly
like it in the industrialism of this country; but for all that, the
fight against its religion of arrogance has been fought out elsewhere
and on a larger field. There is another centre and citadel from which
this theory, of strength in a self-hypnotised superiority, has
despised Christendom. There has been a rival city to Belfast; and its
name was Berlin.
Historians of all religions and no religion may yet come to regard
it as an historical fact, I fancy, that the Protestant Reformation
of the sixteenth century (at least in the form it actually took) was
a barbaric breakdown, like that Prussianism which was the ultimate
product of that Protestantism. But however this may be, historians
will always be interested to note that it produced certain curious and
characteristic things, which are worth studying whether we like or
dislike them. And one of its features, I fancy, has been this; that it
has had the power of producing certain institutions which progressed
very rapidly to great wealth and power; which the world regarded at a
certain moment as invincible; and which the world, at the next moment,
suddenly discovered to be intolerable. It was so with the whole of
that Calvinist theology, of which Belfast is now left as the lonely
missionary. It was so, even in our own time, with the whole of that
industrial capitalism of which Belfast is now the besieged and almost
deserted outpost. And it was so with Berlin as it was with Belfast;
and a subtle Prussian might almost complain of a kind of treachery, in
the abruptness with which the world woke up and found it wanting; in
the suddenness of the reaction that struck it impotent, so soon after
it had been counted on omnipotent. These things seem to hold all the
future, and in one flash they are things of the past.
Belfast is an antiquated novelty. Such a thing is still being excused
for seeming _parvenu_ when it is discovered to be _passé_. For
instance, it is only by coming in touch with some of the controversies
surrounding the Convention, that an Englishman could realise how much
the mentality of the Belfast leader is not so much that of a remote
seventeenth century Whig, as that of a recent nineteenth century
Radical. His conventionality seemed to be that of a Victorian rather
than a Williamite, and to be less limited by the Orange Brotherhood
than by the Cobden Club. This is a fact most successfully painted and
pasted over by the big brushes of our own Party System, which has the
art of hiding so many glaring facts. This Unionist Party in Ireland
is very largely concerned to resist the main reform advocated by
the Unionist Party in England. A political humorist, who understood
the Cobden tradition of Belfast and the Chamberlain tradition of
Birmingham, could have a huge amount of fun appealing from one to the
other; congratulating Belfast on the bold Protectionist doctrines
prevalent in Ireland; adjuring Mr Bonar Law and the Tariff Reformers
never to forget the fight made by Belfast for the sacred principles
of Free Trade. But the fact that the Belfast school is merely the
Manchester school is only one aspect of this general truth about the
abrupt collapse into antiquity: a sudden superannuation. The whole
march of that Manchester industrialism is not only halted but turned;
the whole position is outflanked by new forces coming from new
directions; the wealth of the peasantries blocks the road in front
of it; the general strike has risen menacing its rear. That strange
cloud of self-protecting vanity may still permit Belfast to believe in
Belfast, but Britain does not really believe in Belfast. Philosophical
forces far wider and deeper than politics have undermined the
conception of progressive Protestantism in Ireland. I should say myself
that mere English ascendancy in that island became intellectually
impossible on the day when Shaftesbury introduced the first Factory
Act, and on the day when Newman published the first pages of the
_Apologia_. Both men were certainly Tories and probably Unionists.
Neither were connected with the subject or with each other; the one
hated the Pope and the other the Liberator. But industrialism was never
again self-evidently superior after the first event, or Protestantism
self-evidently superior after the second. And it needed a towering and
self-evident superiority to excuse the English rule in Ireland. It is
only on the ground of unquestionably doing good that men can do so much
evil as that.
Some Orangemen before the war indulged in a fine rhetorical comparison
between William of Prussia and William of Orange, and openly suggested
that the new Protestant Deliverer from the north would come from
North Germany. I was assured by my more moderate hosts in Belfast
that such Orangemen could not be regarded as representative or even
responsible. On that I cannot pronounce. The Orangemen may not have
been representative; they may not have been responsible; but I am quite
sure they were right. I am quite sure those poor fanatics were far
nearer the nerve of historical truth than professional politicians like
Sir Edward Carson or industrial capitalists like Sir George Clark. If
ever there was a natural alliance in the world, it would have been the
alliance between Belfast and Berlin. The fanatics may be fools, but
they have here the light by which the foolish things can confound the
wise. It is the brightest spot in Belfast, bigotry, for if the light
in its body be darkness, it is still brighter than the darkness. By
the vision that goes everywhere with the virility and greatness of
religion, these men had indeed pierced to the Protestant secret and the
meaning of four hundred years. Their Protestantism is Prussianism, not
as a term of abuse, but as a term of abstract and impartial ethical
science. Belfast and Berlin are on the same side in the deepest of all
the spiritual issues involved in the war. And that is the simple issue
of whether pride is a sin, and therefore a weakness. Modern mentality,
or great masses of it, has seriously advanced the view that it is a
weakness to disarm criticism by self-criticism, and a strength to
disdain criticism through self-confidence. That is the thesis for which
Berlin gave battle to the older civilisation in Europe; and that for
which Belfast gave battle to the older civilisation in Ireland. It may
be, as I suggested that such Protestant pride is the old Calvinism,
with its fixed election of the few. It may be that the Protestantism
is merely Paganism, with its brutish gods and giants lingering in
corners of the more savage north. It may be that the Calvinism was
itself a recurrence of the Paganism. But in any case, I am sure that
this superiority, which can master men like a nightmare, can also
vanish like a nightmare. And I strongly suspect that in this matter
also, as in the matter of property as viewed by a peasantry, the
older civilisation will prove to be the real civilisation, and that
a healthier society will return to regarding pride as a pestilence,
as the Socialists have already returned to regarding avarice as a
pestilence. The old tradition of Christendom was that the highest
form of faith was a doubt. It was the doubt of a man about his soul.
It was admirably expressed to me by Mr Yeats, who is no champion of
Catholic orthodoxy, in stating his preference for mediæval Catholicism
as compared with modern humanitarianism: ‘Men were thinking then
about their own sins, and now they are always thinking about other
peoples.’ And even by the Protestant test of progress, pride is seen
to be arrested by a premature paralysis. Progress is superiority to
oneself, and it is stopped dead by superiority to others. The case
is even clearer by the test of poetry, which is much more solid and
permanent than progress. The Superman may have been a sort of poem, but
he could never be any sort of poet. The more we attempt to analyse that
strange element of wonder, which is the soul of all the arts, the more
we shall see that it must depend on some subordination of the self to
a glory existing beyond it, and even in spite of it. Man always feels
as a creature when he acts as a creator. When he carves a cathedral,
it is to make a monster that can swallow him. But the Nietzschean
nightmare of swallowing the world is only a sort of yawning. When the
evolutionary anarch has broken all links and laws and is at last free
to speak, he finds he has nothing to say. So German songs under the
imperial eagle fell silent like songbirds under a hawk; and it is
but rarely, and here and there, that a Belfast merchant liberates his
soul in a lyric. He has to get Mr Kipling to write a Belfast poem, in
a style technically attuned to the Belfast pictures. There is the true
Tara of the silent harp, and the throne and habitation of the dream;
and it is there that the Celtic pessimists should weep in silence
for the end of song. Blowing one’s own trumpet has not proved a good
musical education.
In logic a wise man will always put the cart before the horse. That
is to say, he will always put the end before the means; when he is
considering the question as a whole. He does not construct a cart in
order to exercise a horse. He employs a horse to draw a cart, and
whatever is in the cart. In all modern reasoning there is a tendency
to make the mere political beast of burden more important than the
chariot of man it is meant to draw. This has led to a dismissal of all
such spiritual questions in favour of what are called social questions;
and this to a too facile treatment of things like the religious
question in Belfast. There is a religious question; and it will not
have an irreligious answer. It will not be met by the limitation of
Christian faith, but rather by the extension of Christian charity. But
if a man says that there is no difference between a Protestant and a
Catholic, and that both can act in an identical fashion everywhere but
in a church or chapel, he is madly driving the cart-horse when he has
forgotten the cart. A religion is not the church a man goes to but the
cosmos he lives in; and if any sceptic forgets it, the maddest fanatic
beating an Orange drum about the Battle of the Boyne is a better
philosopher than he.
Many uneducated and some educated people in Belfast quite sincerely
believe that Roman priests are fiends, only waiting to rekindle the
fires of the Inquisition. For two simple reasons, however, I declined
to take this fact as evidence of anything except their sincerity.
First, because the stories, when reduced to their rudiment of truth,
generally resolved themselves into the riddle of poor Roman Catholics
giving money to their own religion, and seemed to deplore not so much
a dependence on priests as an independence of employers. And second,
for a reason drawn from my own experience, as well as common knowledge,
concerning the Protestant gentry in the south of Ireland. The southern
Unionists spoke quite without this special horror of Catholic priests
or peasants. They grumbled at them or laughed at them as a man grumbles
or laughs at his neighbours; but obviously they no more dreamed that
the priest would burn them than that he would eat them. If the priests
were as black as the black Protestants painted them, they would be at
their worst where they are with the majority, and would be known at
their worst by the minority. It was clear that Belfast held the more
bigoted tradition, not because it knew more of priests, but because
it knew less of them; not because it was on the spot, but because the
spot was barred. An even more general delusion was the idea that all
the southern Irish dreamed and did no work. I pointed out that this
also was inconsistent with concrete experience; since all over the
world a man who makes a small farm pay has to work very hard indeed.
In historic fact, the old notion that the Irish peasant did no work,
but only dreamed, had a simple explanation. It merely meant that he did
no work for a capitalist’s profit, but dreamed of some day doing work
for his own profit. But there may also have been this distorted truth
in the tradition; that a free peasant, while he extends his own work,
creates his own holidays. He is not idle all day, but he may be idle
at any time of the day; he does not dream whenever he feels inclined,
but he does dream whenever he chooses. A famous Belfast manufacturer,
a man of capacity, but one who shook his head over the unaccountable
prevalence of priests, assured me that he had seen peasants in the
south doing nothing, at all sorts of odd times; and this is doubtless
the difference between the farm and the factory. The same gentleman
showed me over the colossal shipping of the great harbour, with all
machinery and transport leading up to it. No man of any imagination
would be insensible to such titanic experiments of his race; or deny
the dark poetry of those furnaces fit for Vulcan or those hammers
worthy of Thor. But as I stood on the dock I said to my guide: ‘Have
you ever asked what all this is for?’ He was an intelligent man, an
exile from metaphysical Scotland, and he knew what I meant. ‘I don’t
know,’ he said, ‘perhaps we are only insects building a coral reef.
I don’t know what is the good of the coral reef.’ ‘Perhaps,’ I said,
‘that is what the peasant dreams about, and why he listens to the
priest.’
For there seems to be a fashionable fallacy, to the effect that
religious equality is something to be done and done with, that we may
go on to the real matter of political equality. In philosophy it is
the flat contrary that is true. Political equality is something to be
done and done with, that we may go on to the much more real matter
of religion. At the Abbey Theatre I saw a forcible play by Mr St John
Irvine, called _The Mixed Marriage_, which I should remember if it were
only for the beautiful acting of Miss Maire O’Neill. But the play moved
me very much as a play; yet I felt that the presence of this fallacy
falsified it in some measure. The dramatist seemed to resent a schism
merely because it interfered with a strike. But the only object of
striking is liberty; and the only object of liberty is life: a thing
wholly spiritual. It is economic liberty that should be dismissed as
these people dismiss theology. We only get it to forget it. It is right
that men should have houses, right that they should have land, right
that they should have laws to protect the land; but all these things
are only machinery to make leisure for the labouring soul. The house is
only a stage set up by stage carpenters for the acting of what Mr J. B.
Yeats has called ‘the drama of the home.’ All the most dramatic things
happen at home, from being born to being dead. What a man thinks
about these things is his life; and to substitute for them a bustle of
electioneering and legislation is to wander about among screens and
pulleys on the wrong side of pasteboard scenery, and never to act the
play. And that play is always a miracle play; and the name of its hero
is Everyman.
When I came back from the desolate splendour of the Donegal sea and
shore, and saw again the square garden and the statue outside the
Dublin hotel, I did not know I was returning to something that might
well be called more desolate. For it was when I entered the hotel that
I first found that it was full of the awful tragedy of the _Leinster_.
I had often seen death in a home, but never death decimating a vast
hostelry; and there was something strangely shocking about the empty
seats of men and women with whom I had talked so idly a few days
before. It was almost as if there was more tragedy in the cutting short
of such trivial talk than in the sundering of life-long ties. But there
was all the dignity as well as the tragedy of man; and I was glad,
before I left Ireland, to have seen the nobler side of the Anglo-Irish
garrison, and to have known men of my own blood, however mistaken, so
enduring the end of things. With the bad news from the sea came better
news from the war; the Teutonic hordes were yielding everywhere, at
the signal of the last advance; and with all the emotions of an exile,
however temporary, I knew that my own land was secure. Somehow, the bad
and good news together turned my mind more and more towards England;
and all the inner humour and insular geniality which even the Irish
may some day be allowed to understand. As I went homewards on the next
boat that started from the Irish port, and the Wicklow hills receded
in a rainy and broken sunlight, it was with all the simplest of those
ancient appetites with which a man should come back to his own country.
Only there clung to me, not to be denied, one sentiment about Ireland,
one sentiment that I could not transfer to England; which called me
like an elfland of so many happy figures, from Puck to Pickwick. As I
looked at those rainy hills I knew at least that I was looking, perhaps
for the last time, on something rooted in the Christian faith. There at
least the Christian ideal was something more than an ideal; it was in a
special sense real. It was so real that it appeared even in statistics.
It was so self-evident as to be seen even by sociologists. It was a
land where our religion had made even its vision visible. It had made
even its unpopular virtues popular. It must be, in the times to come,
a final testing-place, of whether a people that will take that name
seriously, and even solidly, is fated to suffer or to succeed.
As the long line of the mountain coast unfolded before me I had an
optical illusion; it may be that many have had it before. As new
lengths of coast and lines of heights were unfolded, I had the fancy
that the whole land was not receding but advancing, like something
spreading out its arms to the world. A chance shred of sunshine
rested, like a riven banner, on the hill which I believe is called in
Irish the Mountain of the Golden Spears; and I could have imagined
that the spears and the banner were coming on. And in that flash I
remembered that the men of this island had once gone forth, not with
the torches of conquerors or destroyers, but as missionaries in the
very midnight of the Dark Ages; like a multitude of moving candles,
that were the light of the world.
GLASGOW: WM. COLLINS SONS AND CO. LTD.
‘_Books published by the firm of Collins are invariably good to look at
and good to read._’
MAN OF KENT in the _British Weekly_
SOME RECENT NOVELS
_from_
MESSRS COLLINS’ LIST
THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN
By FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG
‘One of the most vital stories ever written.’--_Illustrated London
News._
‘Being written by his supple yet precise and sensitive pen, _The
Young Physician_ is naturally lifted far above the average story in
expression.’--_Morning Post._
‘Giving its author’s best, and placing him high indeed on the æsthetic
plateau.’--_Daily Chronicle._
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._
(_Second Impression._)
_Read also by the same Author_
MARCHING ON TANGA
_A New Edition with Six Coloured Plates._
‘It is hard to recall a book about the war at once so imaginative and
so real.’--_Westminster Gazette._
_Small 4to. 10s. 6d. net._
POEMS: 1916-1918
Handsomely Printed on Fine Paper
_Large Crown 8vo. 5s. net._
CAPTAIN SWING: A PLAY
By FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG AND W. EDWARD STIRLING
_Large Crown 8vo. 2s. net._
Cousin Philip
MRS HUMPHRY WARD
Author of _The War and Elizabeth_, _Missing_, etc.
_Cousin Philip_ is chiefly a study of the change which the war has
brought about, on the modern girl and the relations of men and women.
Helena, an orphan girl of great beauty and some wealth, has consented,
to please her dying mother, to spend two years, from her 19th to her
21st birthday under the care of her guardian, Lord Buntingford, rather
than go at once, as she herself wishes, to a University, in preparation
for an independent life. She is headstrong, wilful, and clever; as keen
intellectually as she is fond of dancing and flirting. Mrs Humphry
Ward shows all her well-known skill in the handling of the subsequent
situation, that skill which has made her books models of the novel
writer’s art. Lord Buntingford’s modern yet chivalrous character, with
his poetic personality, make him a charming figure. The _dénouement_ is
unexpected.
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._
RECENTLY PUBLISHED BY THE SAME AUTHOR
A WRITER’S RECOLLECTIONS
_Demy 8vo. 12s. 6d. net._
(_Third Impression_)
The Young Physician
FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG
Author of _Marching on Tanga_, etc.
_The Young Physician_ is the history of the formative years of a boy
who, after leaving one of our public schools, decides more from force
of circumstances than from inclination to enter the medical profession.
Side-light is thrown upon our educational system in the first part
of the book, which is devoted to home and school life; while in the
second, the impressions and experiences which went to the moulding of
his character are presented side by side with a picture of student life
at the Midland Hospital where he pursues his medical curriculum. The
success of such a book lies no less in its truth to life than in its
ability to entertain the reader, both of which conditions are fulfilled
in Major Brett Young’s new novel where, once again, the author breaks
entirely new ground.
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._
(_Second Impression_)
NEW WINE
By AGNES AND EGERTON CASTLE
‘Mr and Mrs Egerton Castle are old hands at the game, and can be relied
on to tell a good story and tell it well.’--_Daily Chronicle._
‘Not only very readable but worth pondering over.’--_British Weekly._
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._
(_Second Impression._)
THE PLAIN GIRL’S TALE
By H. H. BASHFORD
_The Plain Girl’s Tale_, by H. H. Bashford, is the longest novel
that the author of _The Corner of Harley Street_ has yet written,
and the first that he has produced since the publication of _Pity
the Poor Blind_, six years ago. Though dealing with the adventures
and development of a girl of the artisan class in various spheres of
contemporary life, it stands apart from the war and is in no sense
merely topical. In the delineation of the central character, through
whose eyes most of the action of the novel is seen, the author has
endeavoured to expand the ethical theme that was the basis of his
previous novel.
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
MADELEINE
By HOPE MIRRLEES (_Second Impression._)
‘Marked by very considerable distinction.’--_Westminster Gazette._
‘A first novel that deserves the warmest applause.’--_Morning Post._
‘It is well worth while to read this difficult and interesting
novel.’--_Times Literary Supplement._
‘It will be interesting to see if, with a supposed intellectual revival
going on, _Madeleine_ becomes “a good seller.”’--_Evening Standard._
‘A remarkable piece of erudition.’--_Truth._
‘A remarkable first novel.’--_Manchester Guardian._
‘Really promising.’--_Outlook._
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._
TRUE LOVE
By ALLAN MONKHOUSE
Author of _Men and Ghosts_, etc.
‘A thoughtful and provocative work, full of energy.’--_Daily Chronicle._
‘The observation is notably close and vivid, the character drawing
subtle and true. Mr Monkhouse has put enough sheer cleverness into this
book to vivify half a dozen novels.’--_Sunday Times._
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._
FULL CIRCLE
By MARY AGNES HAMILTON
Author of ‘_Dead Yesterday_,’ etc.
Placed first in Scotland and later in London, and timed more than
a dozen years before the war, this story follows the intertwined
fortunes of a brother and sister, members of a singularly happy,
artistically-sensitive, and romantically-minded family, into whose
tranquillity there crashes a queer, brilliantly gifted realist. Contact
with him indeed colours, whether they will or no, the lives of all
the people who meet him, even after his mysterious disappearance; and
especially that of the girl whom, judged by ordinary standards, he
treats so ill. Happiness has a hundred faces, and that which she learns
to see will set readers questioning.
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._
THE HUMAN CIRCUS
By J. MILLS WHITHAM
Author of ‘_Fruit of Earth_.’
In his new novel, Mr Mills Whitham, while developing his realistic
art, leaves sombre tragedy for picaresque comedy. The tale carries the
girl Zillah through early years in a North Devon hamlet, adventures
on Exmoor, the roads, and at the West Country Fairs, excitements in
London, and leaves her back again at the hamlet, ripe in her own
wisdom. Peasants, show-folk, gipsies, nimble vagabonds, philosophers
and fools, make their bow and enliven the Circus.
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._
SIR LIMPIDUS
By MARMADUKE PICKTHALL
Author of ‘_Oriental Encounters_,’ etc.
A Novel of the plenteous days before the war. The author has essayed
the high imaginative task of investing the established order with the
mantle of romance. It is not the mantle of Don Quixote nor of Tartarin
de Tarascon: but it is the best and gayest cloak of humour which
the author could devise consistently with the sentiments of awe and
reverence with which he naturally approached the subject.
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._
THE QUIETNESS OF DICK
By R. E. VERNÈDE
Author of ‘_Letters to His Wife_.’
‘Has all the high spirits and gaiety which characterised his
writings.’--_Times._
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._
THE CARAVAN-MAN
By ERNEST GOODWIN
‘A happy, charming story, introducing us to a lot of happy
people.’--_Sheffield Daily Telegraph._
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._
THE SHINING ROAD
By GEO. AGNEW CHAMBERLAIN
‘A first-rate adventure tale.’--_Westminster Gazette._
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._
OVER AND ABOVE
By J. E. GURDON
‘The goodness of the book is based on certain rare and attractive
features. Not only by airmen, but also by the laity, _Over and Above_
will be read with more than ordinary interest.’--_Times._
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
COCKTAILS
By LIEUT. C. PATRICK THOMPSON
‘This is a collection of very fine stories. No other book has given us
the atmosphere of adventure and, what is more, of mystery peculiar to
air-fighting.’--_New Witness._
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
UNDER THE PERISCOPE
By LIEUT. MARK BENNETT, R.N.R.
‘Bright with entertaining touches and humour.’--_Scotsman._
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._
THE PROBLEM CLUB
By BARRY PAIN
‘Excellent fooling.’--_The Times._
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._
(_Second Impression._)
LOVE LANE
By J. C. SNAITH
Author of _Mary Plantagenet_, etc.
‘It is a splendid, manly, simple story.’--_New Witness._
_Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net._
(_Third Impression._)
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.