THE MEMORIES OF IRISHMEN.
MR. BALFOUR, in resisting the vote for a statue to Oliver Cromwell, may have had at the back of his mind some of the feeling of the old Tories that the Protector, however great, was still a successful rebel ; but we suspect the main impulse which governed him was sympathy for the Irishmen. He hopes one day to govern the United Kingdom, and he understands, as Mr. Morley and Sir William Harcourt do not understand, what the Irish temperament is like. He is a Scotchman blessed or cursed with a strong imagina- tion, and the two Ministers are Englishmen cursed or blessed with a nearly total want of it. To men of the latter type, the Irish temperament produces in Irish minds thoughts which are, in their judgment, simply foolishness. They do not comprehend even from the outside how a race can exist which does not reason, which cannot forgive, in which the foundation of thought is not calculation, but only memory. Yet there are such races, and the Irish do not stand alone. All the Celtic tribes are like that,—the Irishman, the Breton, the Welshman, the Highlander, alike indulging themselves in the pleasure produced by calling up images of the past, and permitting them to sway at once reverie and action. Indeed, it may be doubted if any race except the Teuton is quite free from the liability to become victims of memory, the Slav and the Semite, whether Jew or Arab, also indulging in the same way, and even the Southern European, though with less enjoyment and less complete surrender. They all, in a greater or less de- gree, forget time in recalling those who have injured or served them, and carry on revenge or gratitude from father to son through infinite generations. The Jews are perhaps the most persistent, they recalling a de- feated enemy, Haman, as if he had lived yesterday, and retaining, it is said, memories of enemies of Israel in the Middle Ages, of whom history records no trace ; but to other peoples beside them the past is very vivid. The Arabs are still governed by legends about men who perished two thousand years ago, and natives of India worship or detest heroes who, like Gautama, are lost in the twilight of time. The Sheeah Mahommedans go every year beside themselves with excitement as they recall the fate of the sons of Fatima, and Russian policy is still governed by the recollection of outrages received from Mussulmans coming from Samarcand or Constantinople. The specialty of the Celt is not his memory so much as the tendency of his memory to revel in the mournful, and therefore to breed vindictiveness rather than appreciation. He does indeed in the Highlands reverence certain families from which he once received leadership or other service ; but his natural tendency is to remember crimes and keep up feuds as if the causes which produced them were recurrent. The melancholy which is the very root of the Irishman's mental emotions makes him remember injury so vividly that it is in truth present, and to honour Cromwell, who crushed his race in what seemed to it an hour of
victory—that is, an hour of massacre committed with im- punity—is to him an unendurable insult. You might as well ask him to pardon the man who had murdered his mother, or had, with open contumely and violent scorn, belittled himself. He is unable to do it, even when, as often happens, he is personally a genial and pleasant man, and when he is not, he is dominated by a hate which attaches itself to the remotest descendant of his ancestors' detested foe. Irishmen do not hate this or that Englishman, but Englishmen, and will stand by English officers to the death in action while remaining vindictive enemies of the English name. Mr. Balfour understands that and pardons it, as a birth-mark, like black hair; while to Sir William Harcourt and Mr. Morley it seems a rather contemptible weak- ness, as of irascible and malignant children. It is not that, having its root rather, like all the enduring qualities, in a virtue, a perverted kind of constancy which, in another form, has kept Jew and Celt alive under tre- mendous persecutions, and enabled them to resist the pressure of much stronger or, at all events, much more suc- cessful races. The goodness of the Anglo-Saxon, on the other hand, which enables him to forget so completely, that he recalls Cromwell's tremendous vengeance and forgets the awful massacre that produced it, and which has already blotted out from his mental book the consummate and dastardly treachery of his Sepoy soldiery, is closely allied to his greatest mental defects. He forgets, in part from innate kindness, but also in part because he will not look back, or recall his own great history, but lives only in the present ; and in part because he is governed by self-interest. He can hardly understand a motive so silly and unfruitful as vindictiveness ; thinks it the most natural thing in the world for the Hapsburg to ally himself with the Hohenzollern, and smiles with scorn at the Frenchman who, asked to Kiel, rages with pain at the idea of being compelled to honour the family which conquered him a quarter-of-a-century ago. The Englishman, having provinces to recover, would recover them as he would recover a just due ; but the idea of being in a rage about them, or of quarrelling with his own interest because he had lost them, would never enter his head. When the Sepoy revolts and murders his women, he crushes him as savagely as the Celt would, with less of cruelty perhaps, but with an even more liberal pouring out of death, and then for- gets, not only the Sepoy's acts, but the Sepoy's character. He lives, in fact, in the present ; and as it is only from the present that you can get anything, he is of the two, the successful and the accumulative rival. Nothing is so wasteful of force as the passion of revenge, and the Anglo-Saxon, remembering nothing except during the moment of provocation, wastes no force. If an alliance with a Bonaparte pays him, he makes the affiance with a Bonaparte, and if the Irishman would but make peace, would forget in an hour the wrongs he has suf- fered, and inflicted, daring six hundred years. The Irishman, who is one of the keenest of mankind, knows that quite well, and trades on it, asking the Englishman to forget, and be his self-sacrificing friend, while himself retaining his old memory and his ancient hate. " You are good folk, you English, and we love you ; but may Cromwell, the typical Englishman, be accursed, now and for evermore."
It is, we think, rather futile to try to explain these pecu- liarities in either race. We can account for the serenity of the Englishman under insult by his innate pride, a pride built partly on the consciousness of limitless energy, partly on centuries of success, partly on a scorn for all who differ greatly or even perceptibly from himself. The Spaniard has a good deal of the same pride, and the Italian, and, almost alone among Asiatics, the Arab, and for precisely the same reasons. Bat the English forgetful- ness, a forgetf alness so complete that he alone among the nations has no traditions and no legendary poetry, remains to us inexplicable. He is not a shallow person, he is not one who does not record, he is delighted with victory, and he is not humiliated, as the Frenchman, for example, is, by defeat in battle ; and why, then, has he forgotten both Agincourt and Fontenoy P We do not believe that an ex- planation can be given, except that in ages of which we know nothing, a family of which that was the tempera- ment, found it help them in the struggle for supremacy, and multiplying and emigrating, carried their temperament with them to the settlement or conquest of great sections of the
world. All we know is that the descendants of that family have it, and that it helps them every day in business, and war, and thinking, as probably much nobler qualities would not. They concentrate themselves on the present, and there- fore the present yields to them, but why they do it we know no more than we know why the Chinaman remains now and always the least spiritual of human beings. Nor can we account for the Irishman's vindictiveness. He wants to get on, he pines for distinction, he is fretted to illness by the success of his great rival, especially in accumulation, yet he cannot suppress a passion which is in his way at all turns, which breaks his most valuable alliances, and which is hopelessly opposed to the teachings of a creed in which he nevertheless fervently believes. He has inherited the melancholy, which is its root, that is all we really know ; and there is nothing in that knowledge which satisfactorily explains his action. If the Irishman had suffered as the Englishman suffered at the hands of Nana Sahib, he would, a century hence, say of Mahrattas what the Jew poet said of the Babylonians,— "Happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou East served us ; blessed shall he be that taketh thy children and dasheth them against the stones." The Anglo-Saxon in 1995 will have forgotten that Nana Sahib ever existed, or that his forefathers once had reason to distrust the Mahratta nature. The Englishman is right by the laws of the Christian faith and by the experience of worldly wisdom ; but there is some- thing not to be despised in the other impulse too. It is wicked and also weak, but it tends to survival, as we see in the Jew, the Irishman, and the Breton. There is continuousness in their minds which, if they would but remember the benefactor as long as the spoiler, and hold services of thanksgiving for Ahasuerus as heartily as they hold services of commination for Haman, should in the end give them stores of thought- ful philosophy. The forgetfulness of the Englishman is one reason of his success, for he runs the race unburdened ; but we have a difficulty in believing that it can be a quality that strengthens the mind. One likes him for not cursing Azimoollah as Irishmen curse Cromwell ; but there is a sort of shallowness in it too.
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