Ireland, I 921-1931

By W.

B. YEATs.

I.

IWALKED along the south side of the Dublin quays -11-„, a couple of years ago ; looked at the funnels of certain. Dublin steamers and found that something incredible had happened ; I had not shuddered with disgust though they were painted green on patriotic grounds.; that deep olive green seemed beautiful. I hurried to the Parnell -Monument and looked at the harp. Yes, that too was transfigured ; it was a most beautiful symbol ; it had ascended out of sentimentality, out of insincere rhetoric, out of mob emotion. When I reached home I took from the mantelpiece a bronze medal of myself and studied the little shamrock the American medalist had put after the date. But there there had been no transformation ; the disgust that will always keep me from printing that. portrait in any book of mine, or forgiving its creator, had increased, as though the ascent of the other symbols had left the shamrock the More alone with its' associations of drink and jocularity.

IL

What had happened to those other symbols ? What had gone down into my subconsciousness ? What had changed the foundations of my mind ? Five or six years ago an old Galway farmer told me that he supported the Government because it had given us the only peace Ireland had known in his lifetime. A month ago a Thomist philosopher who is an experienced politician said to me : " Nothing can bring Europe to its senses but an epoch of Bolshevism ; the people ask the impossible and the goVernments are afraid to govern." Our Government has not been afraid to govern, and that has changed the symbols, and not fOr my eyes only. We are on the edge of a general election and nobody in either party is con- fident, for it is hard to foretell anything about an election held under a scheme of proportional representation except that neither side will have more than a bare majority. If the Republicans come into power we shall have a few anxious months while they discover where they have asked the impossible, and then they in their turn will govern. An Irishman is wild in speech, the result of centuries of irresponsible opposition, but he casts it off in the grip of fact with a contempt beyond the reach of sober-speaking men.

The Government of the Free State has been proved legitimate by the only effective test : it has been per- mitted to- take life. The British Government, after the Rebellion of 1916, executed some sixteen or seventeen men and it was out of the country in five years. In the middle of our Civil War a Republican prisoner said to his fellow-prisoners : " We have won. I have news: they have executed their first man." They executed more than seventy and not a vote changed. These dead cannot share the glory of those earlier dead ; their names are not spoken aloud to-day except at those dwindling meetings assembled in O'Connell Street or at some prison gate by 'almost the sole surviving friend of my early manhood, protesting in sybilline old age, as once in youth and beauty, against what seems to her a tyranny.

III.

When I think of the legislation of those ten years I think first of the, roads which have brought lorry and 'bus,, the newspaper, and here and there books, to remote villages ; then of the electrical works at Ardnaerusha. ThoSe worki are successful ; the demand has exceeded the prophecy of the Minister. The Minister and his Board have quarrelled as to whether they should pay their way from the stark or ell cheap until the whole power of: to

Shannon is employed ; but of the works themselves there has been no criticism. They were the Government's first great practical success, a first object-lesson in politics. Planned by German engineers, they were attacked in the English Press, and still more vigorously by men and newspapers in Ireland, which the Irish public associated, often mistakenly, with-English interests. When the Government seized the Republican head- quarters they found letters from men all over Ireland resigning from Republican posts because such a project, carried against such opposition, proved our economic independence.

Nothing remains the same and there have been few mistakes. My six years in the Irish Senate taught me that no London Parliament could have found the time or the knowledge for that transformation. But I am less grateful to the Government for what it has done than because its mere existence delivered us from obses- sion. No sooner was it established, the civil war behind it, than the musician, the artist, the dramatist, the poet, the student, found—perhaps for the first time—that he could give his whole heart to his work. Theatre and concert audiences increased, the Royal Dublin Society built a new hall double the size of the old and doubled the number of performances ; and this vigorous life stayed unimpaired until the European economic crisis.

.

Freedom from obsession brought me a transformation akin to religious conversion. I had thought much of my fellow-workers—Synge, Lady Gregory, Lane—but had seen nothing in Protestant Ireland as a whole but its faults, had carried through my projects in face of its opposition or its indifference, had fed my imagination upon the legends of the Catholic villages or upon Irish mediaeval poetry ; but now may affection turned to my own people, to my own ancestors, to the books they had read. It seemed we had a part to play at last that might find us allies everywhere, for we alone had not to assume in public discussion of all great issues that we could find in St. Mark or St. Matthew a shorthand report of the words of Christ attested before a magistrate. We sought religious conviction by a more difficult research :

" How charming is divine philosophy Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute."

Now that Ireland was substituting traditions of govern- ment for the rhetoric of agitation our eighteenth century had regained its importance. An Irish Free State soldier. engaged in dangerous service for his Government, said to me that all the philosophy a man needed was in Berkeley. Stirred by those words I began to read The. Dialogues of Hylas and Philonus. From Berkeley I went to Swift, whose hold on Irish imagination is 'Comparable. to that of O'Connell. The Protestant representatives in Dail and Senate were worthy of this past ; two or three went in danger of their lives ; some had their houses burnt ; country gentlemen came front the blackened ruins of their houses to continue without melodrama or complaint some perhaps highly technical debate in the Senate. Month by month their prestige rose. When the censorship of books was proposed certain Protestant Bishops disassociated themselves from it, and had the Government persisted with the Bill in its first form and penalized opinion we might have had a declaration, perhaps from the Episcopacy as a whole, that private judgement implied access to the materials of judgement, Then; - just when we seemed a public necessity,. 'our Episcopacy lost its head. Without consulting its represent- atives in Bail or Senate, without a mandate from anybody, in the teeth of a refusal of support from Trinity College, terrified where none threatened, it appealed, not to the Irish people, but to the Colonial Conference, to keep the Irish Courts in subordination to the Privy Council, thereby seeming to declare that our ancestors made the independence of the legislature and the Courts the foundation of their politics, and of Ireland's from that day, because those Courts and that legislature protected not a nation but a class. When these blind old men turned their hacks upon Swift and Grattan, at a moment too when the past actions of the Colonial Conference itself had already decided the issue, they had forgotten, one hopes, or had never learnt, that their predecessors sat in the Irish House of Lords of 1719, when it sent the Irish Court of Exchequer to prison for accepting a decision of that Privy Council.

V.

If I were a young man I would start an agitation to show them their task in life. As a beginning I might gather together the descendants of those who had voted with Grattan against the Union that we might ask. the British Government to return his body ; it lies in West- minster Abbey under a flat plain stone since it was laid there, despite the protests of his followers, less to com- memorate his fame than to prevent a shrine and a pil- grimage. Then I would ask the Irish Government to line the streets with soldiers that we might with all befitting pomp open the pavement of St. Patrick's for one last burial.