IRISH HISTORY AND IRISH CHARACTER.*

A SENSIBLE and impartial treatise on Ireland is a rarity in literary history, commanding attention if only on that ground. But Mr. Goldwin Smith is a writer of no ordinary ability, and he is no super- ficial thinker. His impartiality and good sense are not the result of a cold philosophical cynicism which looks down upon the excesses of all parties alike, because it is unable to enter into or appreciate their underlying and explanatory impulses; but the well-balanced judg- ment of one who, through the force of an enlightened and sympa- thizing discrimination, has penetrated beneath the surface of tem- porary prejudices to their deeper and more permanent springs. A few words from such a man on such a subject are a real want and a great boon. The fate of Ireland must new, if ever, be decided in a favourable or unfavourable sense. The conditions under which former efforts towards her pacification and prosperity havebeen engaged in are now, by the course of events, much simplified and reduced in number. The old principle of ascendancy is now virtually abandoned on all sides ; and even the last relic of its former existence— the Protestant Established Church—is palliated and apologized for on the ground of collateral and incidental benefits, instead of being insisted upon as an integral part of an essential duty. Agrarianism has, we may hope, received its death-blow in the combined operation of a great famine, emigration, and the transfer of the proprietorship of the land from nominal to actual owners through the instrumentality of the Encumbered Estates Act. A tolerable sweep has thus been made of the evils which lay at the bottom of the Catholic and Celtic disaffec- tion and the consequent misery of Ireland. We have now to deal almost entirely with the accidental consequences of the long operation of these sources of disorganization in the poverty and the intellectual and moral distortion which they have left behind as their fatal legacy. Some time must yet elapse before the relations of landlord and tenant settle down into an harmonious and just equilibrium, and Time only can eradicate the seeds so long and so thickly sown of religious dis- cord, and effectually destroy the insects which have been generated and fed by the foulness of the social atmosphere. The Orangeman has been disarmed, if not entirely tamed ; the Ultramontane dis- unionist feels the ground slipping from under his feet, and .eagerly clutches at the most discreditable and self-discrediting engines for keeping alive popular passion. His power, too, is passing rapidly away, and the politico-religious crisis in the seat of St. Peter's tem- Poral authority will itself probably solve the last and most difficult of all the problems over which English and Irish patriots have puzzled themselves during so many centuries, as to the divided allegiance of the subject to his king and to his spiritual head. Now, then, is the very time to review the past history of Ireland in a candid and sym- pathizing spirit, and to consign definitely to the impartial domain of antiquarian historians the feuds and animosities of former centuries.

We cannot better introduce this sensible and temperate manual of Mr. Goldwin Smith's, than by his own summary of the results and substance of his judicial inquiry :

" If the view taken of Irish history in this brief sketch be correct, the original source of the calamities of Ireland was the partial character of the Norman con- • Irish History and Irish Character. By Goldwin Smith. Oxford and London: J. H. and Jas. Parker. quest, which caused the conquerors, instead of becoming an upper class, to remain a mere hostile settlement, or pale. This was an accident of history, for which the descendants of the two races are as little responsible as they are for the accidents of geology. The next great source of mischief was the disruption of Christendom at the period of the Reformation, and the terrible religious wars which ensued upon that disruption, and into which both nations, in common with the other nations of Europe, were drawn. Then Ireland became a victim to the attempt of Louis XIV., which was in part a sequel of the religions wan, to destroy the liberty of England through his vassals the House of Sttutrt. Finally, the French Revolution breaking out into anarchy, massacre, and atheism at the moment when the Government of England under Pitt had just entered on the path of reform and toleration, not only arrested political progress in this as in other cases, but involved Ireland in another civil war. Many of the actors in than miserable events merited personal infamy which no reference to general causes can reverse. The governors of Ireland, who treated the natives with inhumanity while they were humanely treated by contemporary go- vernors, such as Sir John Perrot; the vile adventurers, who plied the trade of cootiscation under the Stuarts; the members of Parliament and prelates who were active in framing the Penal Code; the Irish gentlemen and yeomanry who tortured and butchered in 1798 cannot be saved by any philosophy of history from everlasting shame. But if the question is between the Irish and the English people, there is no part of all this which may not be numbered with the general calamities of Europe during the last two centuries, and with the rest of those calamities buried in oblivion. The theory of an exterminating policy, carried on by one people against the other, is historically untenable. It is also morally absurd. Individual men may be cold-blooded and systematic murderers, bat a nation of cold-blooded and systematic murderers is a thing which human nature has not yet produced. A man who should allow himself to entertain such a notion would have a very distempered imagination, and a man who should allow himself to be guided by it in action would certainly find that he had acted like a fool. Still more does justice require that allowance should be made on historical grounds for the failings of the Irish people. If they are wanting in industry, in regard for the rights of property, in reverence for the law, history furnishes a full explanation of their defects without supposing in them any in- herent depravity, or even any inherent weakness. The progress of the Irish people was arrested at an almost primitive stage, and a series of calamities follow- ing close upon each other has prevented it from ever fairly resuming its coarse."

We cannot pretend to follow our author through his nervous and condensed exposition of the philosophy of Irish history. We must con- fine ourselves to a few of its more striking points. Ireland, he observes, lies too close to a larger island to have a chance of independence, and is too large an island in itself to be easily subjugated or kept in sub- ection. These facts determine the general character of its history.. It is naturally avast grazing-ground; the Atlantic clouds which ferti- lize its land and clothe it with perpetual verdure are hostile to harvest operations. "Its natural way to commercial prosperity seems to be to supply with the produce of its grazing and dairy farms the popu- lation of England." The flax and linen manufactures of the country are likely to form an important social element in its history, and the coal-fields, when capital has been applied to their proper development, may open out another channel of national industry and education. Her water communications are even superabundant, but the price which she pays for this affluence of natural wealth is to be found in her " bogs of Allen." England and Ireland are naturally intended, in race as well as in soil, to be the supplements of one another. " What the Saxon wants in liveliness, grace, and warmth, the Kelt can supply ; what the Kelt lacks in firmness, judgment, perseverance, and the more solid elements of character, the Saxon can afford." The primitive form of Irish society was the sept or clan, and this lies at the root of almost all its national merits and defects. But Ireland was arrested in the very stage of transition from this patriarchal period to one in which the ascendancy of one clan would evolve the ascendancy of one principality, and a central, and thence a single monarchy. There never was any sovereign of Ireland in the proper sense of the term; the rule of O'Connor and Brian Boroun was scarcely the supremacy_ over less powerful princes implied in the pre-eminence of the West-Saxon Egbert and his immediate suo-- cessors. But the idea of a single and personal ruler is ingrained in the Celtic race. The French do not love imperialism more than the Irish cling to the personal devotion implied in the chief of the sept or of the country. The Teutonic love of law, and tendency to consultative assemblies, is alien to the enthusiastic and confiding- character of the Irish genius. At the same time the communistic tendencies of sept-law, the fact that the sept-land belonged to the sept in common, and not to the individual clansman, perpe- trated the rankling feeling of dispossession far beyond the period over which the influence of an ordinary confiscation of land would have extended. English lawyers and statesmen did not understand this, and necessarily fostered and aggravated the feeling of wrong by the alien methods which they pursued even in their most legal enact- ments. The irregular system of inheritance, in which legitimacy seemed entirely subordinated to other considerations, could not fail to shock the ecclesiastical lawyers of the Anglo-Norman dynasties. The law of " tanistry" and the claims of fosterage, superior practically to those of blood, could not fail to irritate both the logic and the morality of a race so little tolerant of alien customs as the conquerors. of Ireland. The native Church of Ireland, strange as it may now appear, seems to have been singularly independent, and even antago- nistic, in respect to the Chair of St. Peter. One great and avowed motive in the grant of Ireland by Pope Adrianto ourHenryPlantagenet was the establishment of the supremacy of the Church of 'tome in that island. The rude freedom of the Irish Church shocked both the moral and eccle- siastical feelings of the Norman clergy. It tolerated the most un- Christian usages, neglected Christian rites and ordinances, and carried the sept system into the Church in a manner similar, indeed, to that in which feudalism had affected the episcopate of other countries, but in a form more antagonistic to the civilization of that age. The philosophy of the early period of Irish history is, after all, resolvable very much into the national characteristics of individual and discon- tinuous greatness. The nation, as a whole, was far from partici- pating in the special and spasmodic displays of genius which shed

about it a somewnat fictitious greatness in the eyes of the rest of

turbulent and wild descendants of the undispossessed princes of the not suffer to be mooted directly in respect to itself."

rest of the country. Instead of the Pale civilizing the rest of Ireland, it became demoralized itself, and the " more than Irish" AN IMPROVER ON JOB.*

an accidental consequence, in a horrible massacre.

Mr. Goldwin Smith does justice, for the first time, to the real posi- "Life" is introduced with " hasty toilet, half awake," standing tion and conduct of Cromwell in Irish affairs. He is quite too clear- beneath "the new-lighted. heaven," and giving his " orison unto the sighted to accept either the malignant calumnies of the enemies of dawn." Life begins this prayer by the statement that there is much the great Protector, or the scarcely less injurious vindication of his suffering in the world :

professed friends. Oliver himself does not glory in, but apologizes "For there's a moan—a deep and doleful wail—

for, and evidently is unable to vindicate to his own conscience, the Cries from the heart of our humanity slaughter of the garrison of Drogheda. His own defence, for once, Aloud, unheard, to God : is uncertain and self-contradictory, and in the fact that it is so lies ' 'Tis not, but 'twould be happy.'" the real vindication of the natural humanity and far-sightedness of The complaint is continued at considerable length, stating that : his character. The rule of the Protector, once established, was most " Truth rises up and stabs the swindled world, beneficial as far as the stage at which public feeling had arrived would And death drags off all players from life's prize." allow it to be ; and Mr. Goldwin Smith speaks with truth of the 'Life,' though so lately up, then falls into a dream, in which he miracles of administrative talent which his short sway exhibits. turns to read the "history of ages," when Time places his withered

The Restoration threw back the country into the hands of unprin- hand upon his shoulder and makes a still bitterer complaint than that cipled and selfish intriguers. The succeeding reign involved it fatally of Life. He has lost, he says, so many children; none will stay with in the fortunes of the Stuarts and the Church of Rome. Religious him. Time becomes hysterical, and subsides, when, " suddenly, a fanaticism proved too strong for the masculine good sense of William mightier spirit rose, with an ebon crown and sable robes, two diamonds of Orange to contend against, and the penal enactments against the in his diadem, and the evening star on his brow." This majestic Catholics, hideous in themselves, and only palliated by wider cousi- spirit takes Life with him up to a high place and shows him derations of policy and circumstance, lasted, in name at least, down "fathomless perdition," with all damnation's shrieking "horrors to the reign of George III. But before that time toleration, though in grbinned." There they see a good deal of very uncomfortable fury, a form very akin to indifference, had stepped in to mitigate and nullify " vialed volcanoes" amongst other things, which is, we suppose, the their operation. It was now that the truth of Mr. Goldwin Smith's more lucid form in this author's mind of the "bottles of heaven" in leading proposition was exemplified—that the root of the turbulence Job ; and "perdition's ever yelling cry ;" and madmen, "with eyes and disaffection in Ireland is agrarian and not religious in its cha- burst in their faces" and " boiling brains." And, after a long gaze, ratter. Questions affecting the land preceded, and were only inten- the dark spirit at his side explains that all these have cursed God to sified by, differences in religious creed. The great Catholic land- his very face. "Their doom is eye for eye and tooth for tooth." holders still in possession of their estates supported the government ; Then Life awakes for the second time and prays that it might be a ,the Cromwellian intruders lost their religious peculiarities, merged dream:

in the common form of landlordism, and degenerated as fast as any So far we have not got apparently any very clear substitute for Celtic proprietor could possibly have done. the revelation of Job. In the second part there is a dialogue be-

Then came the American revolution, bringing in its train the tween " Life" and " Mentor." Mentor's solution of the problem " Irish Volunteers" of '82, the repeal of Poyningg 's g law, and the in- of human misery is, that we should do our duty plainly, and not ask dependent Irish Parliament.In this the Protestants had a slight but too much. This does not satisfy Life, who says :

decided majority ; but the history of that body, which has been re- ferred back to as an epoch of national glory and revived greatness, is A great unanswered cry. My being claims really, as our author points out, one little deserving of commendation The knowledge of a high truth still unknown,

or self-gratulation. It was emphatically the reign of selfish and de- And will not be at rest.—Why? why? oh why— graded corruption. All that was genuine in it was the passionate For all life's gains, this jeopardy of soul?-

fanaticism of individual feelings. Throughout, when a moderating What prize proportioned to the unchasen risk,

hand was interposed between the tyrant and his victim, it was from To say Holds b wanced Justice o'er our periled heads,

England, and not from Ireland, that it proceeded. In England, the The mighty searchings of the afflicted heart old intolerant feeling towards Irish, as Catholics, had much abated, Grope comfortless at God." and it was not until the French revolution of '89 that any change took He then becomes a great deal more obscure than the obscurest place in this respect. Then came in both countries, first the dread of portions of Job : republicanism, and then—after the failure of the United Irishmen, "Man at best

and when the Catholic peasantry began to move, or were goaded by misery or design into rebellion—the in religious frenzy. The horrors And needing nature never centred round

of the last Irish rebellion are known in a general wayto most persons. A present joy, and said—' This is complete.' "

Our author has, perhaps, dwelt too strongly in proportion on the What needs nature, and what is complete ?—the drift appearing to atrocities of the Protestant gentry and yeomanry, though he admits be that his full heart is not complete, and the grammar having nothing in general terms those of the insurgents. No doubt education and to say on the matter at all. As the object was lucidity, we submit superior comfort make the comparison an unequal one in the two this is not very happy, and the number of such passages as this is ex- cases, so far as palliation is concerned;. but whatever may have been eeedingly large. }or instance, in the next page the following uni31- the provocations to rebellion, it should not be forgotten that the re- telligible query is put : tributive vengeance, against which Mr. Goldwin Smith justly inveighs, " In myself I'm nothing—

succeeded acts of horrible cruelty against the relatives of those who Worm and dust—sin-crowned with condemnation: thns indulged their detestable revenge, and partook even more of per- sonal than of religious rancour. The " Union," in its gradual effects, Base it the Christian, as the heathens challenge?"

is discussed with much sag real by oar author, who makes consider-

able use of Lord Cornwallis's despatches, as illustrative of the al state of Irish parties under the old, so called, independent Parliament. part comes to an end ; and, in the third, Mentor again offers a very

perfect notice of this interesting and suggestive little work : • God and Man. London: Would= and Wright "IC may perhaps be added that the lateness of the union between England and

Ireland, though caused by, and connected with, all that is most deplorable, is not

Christian Europe. , in itself altogether to be deplored. Early consolidation and perfect unity are, in The Norman conquest, or as Mr. Goldwin Smith ought more de- one point of view, sources of great strength to a nation, as we see in the case of cidedly to have styled it, the conquest by the amalgamated race of France. But in another, and perhaps a more important point of view, a nation Normans and Saxons, was, unfortunately, in the first case the work may derive advantage from the independent action of different elements in its composition down to a later period of its history. Wholesome checks are thus of individuals, and not conducted as a whole and to completion under

imposed upon tendencies which otherwise would become too exclusively domi- the auspices of the English sovereigns. The sept feeling of attach- mint, and give a one-sided character to civilization, and questions are kept in ment to a chief was thus left to gather itself around the traditions of some measure open which would otherwise be prematurely closed. ' By virtue the past ; and the non-residence of the English kings, after their of her long unsettlement and her special claims to consideration,' Ireland ' is af- fording a clear field for the discussion of political, ecclesiastical, and social qua- assumption of the title of lords of Ireland, left the fate of the country tic= which the English nation, satisfied with an early and limited progress, will virtually in the hands of the selfish aristocracy of the Pale, and the "