going. The chronicler's fable of this
century becomes the accredited historical fact of the next. Give it what
billiard-players call "legs" enough and it will mature into a tradition,
a proverb, a spontaneous instinct. There is a whole department of
research concerned with the growth of myths, stage by stage, from a
little nebulous blotch into a peopled world of illusion. The strange
evolution there set forth finds an exact parallel in the development of
English opinion on Ireland. And, indeed, the more you study "the Irish
Question," as it is envisaged by the ruling mind of Great Britain, the
more conscious are you of moving in the realm not of reason but of
mythology.

All this will seem obvious even to the point of weariness. But it is of
interest as furnishing a clue to the English attitude towards Irish
history; I should rather say attitudes, for there are two. The first is
that of the Man of Feeling. His mode of procedure recalls inevitably an
exquisite story which is to be found somewhere in Rousseau. During
country walks, Jean Jacques tells us, his father would suddenly say: "My
son, we will speak of your dear, dead mother." And Jean Jacques was
expected to reply: "Wait, then, a moment, my dear father. I will first
search for my handkerchief, for I perceive that we are going to weep."
In precisely such a mood of deliberate melancholy does the
sentimentalist address himself to the Confiscations and the Penal Laws.
He is ready to praise without stint any Irish leader who happens to be
sufficiently dead. He is ready to confess that all his own British
forerunners were abominable blackguards. He admits, not only with
candour but even with a certain enthusiastic remorse, that England
oppressed Ireland in every phase of their relations. Then comes the
conclusion. So terrible have been the sins of his fathers that he feels
bound to make restitution. And in order to make restitution, to be kind
and helpful and remedial, he must retain the management of Irish affairs
in his benevolent hands. In order to expiate the crimes of the past he
must repeat the basal blunder that was the cause and source of them. For
this kind of sympathy we have only to say, in a somewhat vulgar phrase,
that we have no use whatever. The Englishman who "sympathises" with
Ireland is lost.

But the more general attitude differs widely from this. Confronting us
with a bluff and not unkindly demeanour, worthy of the nation that
invented cold baths