CHANGING IRELAND
By KATE O'BRIEN
IRELAND, to the confusion of many who have sought to understand, befriend or bully her, keeps on with a trick she has of being exceptional, even when undergoing experiences resembling those of other nations. It is therefore, perhaps, characteristic of her that, though with- in the last two decades she has suffered in common with the rest of Europe a considerable measure of social change, that change should in her case derive from a cause peculiarly her own and unrelated to those which brought about or are bringing about an altered system of social life elsewhere.
The aristocratic conception of life—I use the adjective in a loose, everyday sense—has departed from Europe,. driven off in each country by that country's particular method of class warfare. It has departed from Ireland, too, but only at the bidding of nationalism, only because, as exploited under her skies, it was a foreigner's way of life, a stranger's. Had Ireland's aristocracy been Irish and Catholic, had the Big House fortressed an indigenous tradition, it might indeed in• this century be suffering with all traditions ; but the fact that, such as it was, is now a memory, leaves us no room for surmising about a hypothetical Irish revolution against an Irish aris- tocracy. It cuts no ice to venture a guess that there would have been no Irish revolution—or at least that it would not have come yet,—but it may be worth observing that Ireland, with immense differences, has also vast resemblances to Spain, and that country, slow to hear the alarums of our time, is finding now that she is not, after all, so sweepingly eager to be quit of the past as she thought she was. It is possible that Ireland would have been still less eager.
But, " if ifs and ans . . ." The aristocracy which we housed for nine centuries is gone—save for a few embit- tered or long-sufferingly affectionate remnants of it who, for one reason or another, linger on in a dwindled, emptied world where, dodging ghosts and memories, they are for the most part glad to be on friendly terms with the new regime. The Colonel's lady, all her acknowledged sisters scattered, is willing to explore her kinship with Judy O'Grady. But Judy is a flighty lass. . . .
What is this new regime ? . At present no more than a boiling in a pot, a simmering something which, by its varied smells, we take to consist of more than one, maybe more than two or three ingredients. But it is too soon in the cooking for us to guess what our ultimate fare is to be. A bouillabaisse, an olla podrida, or simply an Irish stew ?
To the latter dish, three elements are necessary— mutton, potatoes and onions. These, with stock to cover them, which we may take to mean- the Irish character, and pepper and salt. to liven them, the still intractable republicans, stand perhaps with no roles especially assigned, for the Church, the Government and that large, lively and mainly articulate and self-assertive bourgeois class which is roughly represented by Mr. Cosgrave's opposition and the doomed Senate. How long will this dish be in cooking ? When, tasting it, shall we know the official flavour of Irish social life ?
De Valera stands - for a bare, stripped, sober way of living, and leaves no effort unmade to impose it. The simplicity of his personal life is exemplary. His worst enemies must admit his cold indifference to the sweets of office, his scorn for the soft and bright tempta- tions of high place, and politically he seeks to lead his people ever further and further away from what is called progress, and into a life that shall be cleared of inessentials, and pastoral, detached and spiritual in its ideal. That I take to be the dream of any man who insists on imposing economic nationalism upon a country such as Ireland. The logical end is a simplification which thoroughly pursued must mean. isolation for its practitioners.
But it is only a dream, a dream with too much harshness and denial in it, too much non-conformity, ever to appeal for long either to the Irish or the Catholic imagination. It cannot be permanently fitted to national character, which from time out of mind has excelled, not in isolation, but in the stream of full life. Whatever we have done that the world remembers we have done as preachers, missioners, soldiers, actors, moralists, writers, gangsters, policemen, lovers or Tammany men. In other words, we need a sounding- board, and a big one, on which to develop our most characteristic powers. At either extreme end of the scale; as mystics, philosophers, mathematicians, musicians, or as mere clods, unquestioning hewers of wood and drawers of water, we have not shown any special aptitude.
We are an extrovert nation and cannot finally be turned inside out. We are also intensely individualistic, however, and have an egotism and personal awareness that in the simplest of us can express itself over and over again in embarrassing and foolish ways. This means that no more than national isolation can com- munism or the doctrines of mass consciousness be thrust upon us. For good or ill, we remain what we have always been, Catholics and individuals, and those two constants, though they may have very much to experience, and to be confused by, through the spoil-sport fanaticism to which at present, in curious panic, the Eternal Church is lending itself in Ireland—almost as if She were a Baptist sect—and through political upheavals which we will have always -with us, may manage, • with luck and if the world remains intact for long enough for it to matter, to accomplish a tolerably civilized society. A society mainly urban in its stimulus, in contrast to the departed one which spread from isolated great houses. It will be urban because we talk well and mock well—need the street and restaurant for these practices and if, traditionally and truly, we like the racecourse and the hunting field, we like their accidents of sociability at least as much as their essentials.
At present this social life, beginning to assert itself, is a bit hysterical and self-conscious. The spirit of censorship that would repress it and wrongly call it foreign is very formidable, but so unnatural to Ireland that it really cannot be regarded as a permanent danger, though always, one ventures to guess, there will remain —a different thing—the categorical imperative of the Church, which will certainly control, let us hope in the traditional and not in the new-fangled manner, the country's intellectual life. No bad thing maybe—if one looks about the modern world with impartial eyes, and hears the despairing cries of its undisciplined intelligentsia. And it is because of a conviction that the Church will, above all other forces, shape and decide Ireland's social life in the next century that one must omit the sophis- ticated bayleaf of intellectualism from the simmering stewpot, for whatever amount of that kind of thing is considered necessary will have to be subject to the Church, and of its own essence. In any case, so far as one knows, there has never been a, bayleaf in a properly cooked Irish stew.
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