A Land of Uncrowned Kings
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By J. M. HONE Tira title, unorowned king, by which Parnell was known, can be carried far back into Irish history, even to those High Kings of Tara of whom Professor Curtis writes briefly at the beginning of his book, and who were not kings in the anointed European sense but patriarchal chiefs. After a few centuries of the mediaeval attempt to centralise Ireland under a Dublin govern- ment, the uncrowned king again reappears and is found about the year 1500 in the great Earl of Kildare. Henceforth, as a result of the Tudor mishandling of religion in Ireland, we have a nation of people in permanent opposition throwing up one king after another,: Hugh if Owen Roc O'Neill, Sarsfield, Swift, Daniel O'Connell, Parnell. Although he is a Nationalist in tendencies Mr. Curtis shows sorrow, not pleasure, in driving home the truth that the English Crown, or (in later centuries) the English Crown through Parliament, has failed to find a place in the national affections, and has finally had to leave Ireland to the uncrowned heroes. It is implicit in his pages that the kingdom of Ireland as existing in the Crown of England might have been a great fact and the common pride of all Irishmen ; but the explanation of the failure is abundant. The breach with the Crown is ascribed to the sixteenth-century religious policy of the Crown, the alienation, that is, of the "old English" population which was inclined to be royalist, but was driven over to the native Irish among whom has always existed a kind of racial nationalism not easy to reconcile with the English association.
Professor Curtiss strong suit as a scholar is Irish Mediaeva- lism, 1100-1500, as his earlier book Mediaeval Ireland shows. It is a very difficult history, for perhaps no other country manifests for so long a period so great a lack of the unity, or the narrative line, that historians like to bring into relief. Yet George Moore used to say that the episode of the Bruces was the most wonderful history in the world ; and Mr. Curtis has now given a most readable account of the ever-dwindling English Pale, the almost independent rule of numerous Gaelic chiefs and lords becoming Gaelic, the strange anomaly of an English King claiming to rule a large island which he visits thrice in the course of three centuries. Mr. Curtis always writes with skill, but it is evidently a pleasure to him to reach the Tudor period, when an exciting continuous story begins. Though he is not a Roman Catholic, Mr. Curtis is unable to accept the belief, clung to the more fondly by its spokesmen as congregations grow smaller, in the Celtic lineage of the Reformed Church in Ireland. He cannot find that St. Patrick was anything but a typical Latin Christian of his time who would have referred to the Pope in all matters of faith and discipline. And as regards the Reformation, he cannot doubt that the existing Church of Ireland--to whose moral and intellectual achievement he does not fail to pay tribute—was anything but an extension to Ireland of the Church of England by State authority and without popular support.
The pages on the eighteenth century are full of interest. Mr. Curtis writes with respect of the "Protestant nation : rise and fall " ; but his readers do not lose sight of the fact that this nation, in spite of all it did for Ireland, was from first to last an upper-class oligarchy based on a particular creed and not even representing the whole of it. Too much, however, has been _made of this fact by the modern Gaelic theorists whose vague " philosophy " of history now iqfluences even legislation in the Free State, and who regard the " ascendancy" period as a detached episode in Irish history without connex- ion with what went before or with what came after. Mr. Curtis, is horrified that the Patriot Parliament of Grattan should. never have qndertaken any measures of social legisla- tion,; hitt, thongb himself a democrat of Gaelic sympathies
A History of Ireland.. Hy Ectmtmd Curtis: (Methuen: 12s. 6d.)
he shows dearly in the earlier part of an honest book that, so far from being a Chestertonian land of " distributivist equality, Ireland in her Gaelic past ranged from the most proud and privileged of aristocratic freemen down to serfs. betaghs, who were on a far lower level of servitude than even the English villein.
• In his treatment of the post-Union period it seems to me that Professor Curtis is too lenient towards Daniel O'Connell, who led the Irish masses into new ways of English speaking, into party politics with the Catholic sentiment dominant, and of leadership by political organisers and parish priests : with him begin the ambiguities of " Catholic democracy." his unscrupulous demagogy drove the loyal upper and middle-class Catholics out of public life, and made impossible the orderly evolution in Irish society of which the later eighteenth century gave promise, when liberalism in religion had penetrated for a moment into the higher strata of Irish life, Catholic as well as Protestant. After the Union the noble Grattan, in the English House of Commons, and the Roman Catholic Bishops were prepared to accept the principle of a Government veto on episcopal appoint- ments made by the Pope, and Rome, too, declared for the
veto : if with disastrous effect on the moral and intellectual future of a most gifted race, succeeded in out- witting Grattan, the representative of high-minded Irish Protestantism, Lord Fingall and the cultivated Catholic peers, and the Pope, all together. Too great a readiness to believe in the cruelty of Irish landlordism has prevented Professor Curtis from fully realising the misfortune which Ireland suffered when the whig, aristocratic and rationalist eighteenth century disappeared without leaving a trace, or in other words by the failure of Liberalism in Ireland to pass, as in other countries, by a natural transition out of its feudal phase. I feel, therefore, that any inadequacy there may be in this history of Ireland is in the three last chapters ; but in these the task of selection and compression Must have been most difficult. Taken as a whole the pro- portions of the book are admirable ; but eleven pages 8.Cellt to be scarcely sufficient for the conclusion : " From Parnell to the Treaty, 1891-1922," and the causes and consequences of the Secession of the six counties of Ulster do not receive the attention which their importance deserves. In the light of Partition it is perhaps an .exaggeration to say that "the powers of (National) freedom conveyed by the Irish Treaty •.• . would certainly have contented a whole suc- cession of leaders from Hugh O'Neill to Parnell."
Since, Lecky, however, no Irish historian has appeared at all comparable with Mr. Curtis in range of knowledge, thoughtfulness and generosity of spirit. And Mr. Curtis has the adVantage over Lecky in that he has made himself aCquainted with the language which even only a hundred years ago was the, language of a large part of a people who, as we arc reminded by the first sentences of this book, have the oldest traditions of any race in Europe north and west of the Alps. He has tested for himself the merits of a language which in the later middle ages almost displaced French and English as the general language of Ireland, and in the eight- eenth and early nineteenth centuries showed its recuperative powers by becoming the language of millions of people. One may, or may not, share the regret that the Irish people lost their affection for the language after the Great Famine ; but it cannot be questioned that a knowledge of the Irish mind as expressed in Gaelic literature is an indispensable qualification for an understanding of the remarkable race -
consciousness of the Celt which is here shown in its develop- ment through the ages.
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