Two Irishmen

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIX, Issue 41, 19 October 1922, Page 9

Two Irishmen

The death of Arthur Griffith is a tragedy of the type in which sympathy makes us silent, as we stand silent before such a bereavement .in our own private life (says the New Witness). Strictly speaking in such cases there is nothing to bo said, but only something to be done and that is as much as possible of what the great dead have been driven to leave undone. In spite of the turmoil amid which he perished, it is true in some sense that God has not often given a man so clear a work for the salvation of his country; and -we wish to God there were any work so clear for the salvation of our own. And indeed the comparison is in this case clinched by a coincidence. Within a week of the time when this great Irishman died in Ireland, another Irishman died in England. His fame was much bigger and much less great. It is no time to dwell on our past differences with Lord Northdice, nor indeed for other reasons are we disposed to do so. For some time past he had been chiefly a champion of better things, of the cause of Ireland and of France; and there is much good that can truly be said of him even in his crudest period. He set a good example long ago of the comparatively decent payment of the proletariat of Fleet Street; and there are many to tell stories of his kindness to individuals in sickness or distress. But we confess at the moment to being chiefly haunted by a comparison, and by a recurring doubt in connection with it. For we are much more troubled about the condition of England than about the condition of Ireland. A reasonable recognition of the qualities of the dead man will take no notice, of course, of the meaningless comparison between Northcliffe and Napoleon. It is exactly one of those unlucky things that tend to make us a. laughing-stock for foreign nations. * Nothing would please a rather bitter Frenchman or Italian better than the suggestion that the office of Answers was the nearest wo had ever got to the bridge of Areola. In truth, the comparison is grossly unpatriotic and unjust to our own traditions. The poorest soldier who serves the guns under fire, the most ordinary officer of artillery in a provincial town, with a scientific interest in his trade, is immeasurably more like Napoleon than this master of rumors and random speculations. Napoleon was above 'all things a man dealing with realities. Northcliffe was above all things a man dealing with unrealities. He undoubtedly displayed great powers of organisation in his own job; but his job was rather advertisement than achievement. It was natural he should be complimented upon the talents he showed; but this was about the worst compliment that could be paid him; for he had .neither the vices nor the* virtues of militarism. Nevertheless there was one respect in which he was really like Napoleon. And that is that the lament over him tends to be one universal chorus of Vanitas Vanitatuxn. Of no human career can one so truly say, in the words of a greater Irishman, “'What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!” He was exhibited to the four corners of the world as a monument of success; and he was in truth in a special and singular manner a monument of failure. It was not even the failure of which we ' speak in connection with the frustration of some clear aim and consistent purpose. It was not merely failure but also futility. Men like Koskiusco or Wolfe Tone may be said in a sense to fail; but their failures are not futilities. They are like the strong beginnings of some straight Roman road, which breaks down at the end of a mile, but still points straight at the city of its desire. It can be afterwards repaired and continued, as the Polish and the Irish roads have been repaired and continued. But the road of the late Lord Northcliffe’s political career was not only a rambling but a bewildering path, twisting about to suit all sorts of whims, thrown out of its course by all sorts of miscalculations, doubling upon itself, and eventually leading nowhere. He left behind him not a road but a labyrinth without a centre. The more we think of his energy, of his genius for management, of his generous sympathies in so many personal relations, the more we must feel this burden of futility and finality. The greater we think his powers, the greater we must count their wastage and dissipation. This sense of the vanity of earthly things may indeed in some sense link

the tragedies of Napoleon and Northcliffe. But there was one other link also, and that of a worthier sort. It is really true to say that both men had before they died some returning touch of tenderness for things older and better than themselves. Napoleon remembered that he had been baptised a Catholic. Harmsworth remembered that he had been born an Irishman. Harmsworth. remembered but there were Irishmen like Wolfe Tone and Griffith who never forgot. And the essential matter for us in England to realise, even if it be a salutary shock to our self-satisfaction, is that it is now the world of. Irish idealism that has become positive and practical, and the -world of English commerce and compromise that has become negative and inconclusive. Of the two men who have just died, the Irishman in Ireland has done a consistent and constructive work, while the Irishman in England has left not so much work as waste. His politics were a web of Penelope. He passed the great part of his political life trying to undo what he had himself done. By his own clamor he forced Lord Kitchener into the seat of authority, and then immediately started the same clamor to force him out again. He devoted himself to proving that Mr. George was our only choice for a Prime Minister, and then devoted himself with even greater passion to proving that his own choice had been wrong. Now the inference from all this is not really at the expense of Lord Northcliffe; it is at the expense of ourselves. It is England that has to learn the lesson; and we know only too well that it is a hard lesson to learn. In plain words, if Alfred Harmsworth had remained with Arthur Griffith in Dublin, he might have been put to some practical work. As may have been the case with Griffith, his countrymen might have worked him to death but they would have worked him. It was we who wasted him. " When old Lord Salisbury spoke the last splendid word for the old classical aristocracy of England, and called the Daily Mail a paper written by office-boys for officeboys, he clearly enunciated a* truth; but it may not be so obvious that he also uttered a defence or at least an apology. There are -worse people than office-boys; and this sort of editor had some of the sincere sentiments of an office-boy. The view of life insinuated by Harmsworth was not invented by Harmsworth. It was invented by us. The Kitchener he clamored for was never the real Kitchener; but the Kitchener of a girl’s novelette. The Lloyd George he boomed was never the real Lloyd George; but the Lloyd George of a political bun-fight. He believed in all the modern moonshine about magnetism and will-power, and push and go, and pep and hustle; the sort of moonshine that is merely limelight, turned as easily on one man as another. But it -was not that particular office-boy from Dublin who invented that limelight and moonshine. It -was the condition of commercial • England at the end of the nineteenth century. It was • we ourselves. In short, modern England has reached a state of mental chaos, compared with which the state of Ireland, with its merely material chaos, is a pattern of logic and . lucid order. Arthur Griffith pursued a definite and positive policy without reference to what we were saying about him; from the first day when our newspapers were calling him a murderer down to this last day when our newspapers are calling him a martyr. Other Irishmen have other policies; such as those of Sir Henry Wilson or do Valera, and they also pursued their policies, and the result is a conflict of wills. It is a conflict beyond expression, tragic and miserable; but it is no more meaningless than the Great -War or the Crusades or the French Revolution. There is everything there that can rend the heart, but nothing to insult the intellect of man. It is no new thing in the world that men should have different faiths and fight about them. But what have our politicians and papers to fight about? What have they even to fuss about? , Not a single one of them has any principle at stake that anyone could state, as one could state the Orange dogma of men like Wilson or the doctrinal difference between men like Collins and men like de Valera. Whatever faults the Irish have, at present to correct, the faults we have to correct at present are the faults of futility. It may be that not once or twice in our rough island story the pfith of duty was the way to glory; but for once at least it is certain that, the path

of reason is the way to duty. The duty definitely in front of us is exactly expressed in a much misunderstood phrase; it is the duty of making up our minds. Most people who talk about making up their minds simply mean neglecting their minds, and following their wishes or their whims. To make up the mind it is necessary to use the mind* and at least to have a mind to use. We are not here insisting that all Englishmen should make up their minds to be supporters of the New Witness, though we wish they, would. Let them make up their minds to be Bolshevists, or to be Die-Hards, or to be anything, but let them do it with their minds, with a consciousness of their first principles and a thorough thinking out of their results. With that practice the modern Englishman "may yet become practical. Without it he may make or lose millions, see his portrait in any number of papers, be called in at any number of Cabinet crises, be a personality, be a power —vanitas vanitatum — thistledown wandering on the wind.