SEVENTH SERIES No. 3532 March 16, 1912 { FROM BEGINNING CONTENTS 1. Aspects of the "Religious" Question in Ireland. By Sydney FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW 643 II. Charity Up-to-Date. By the Rev. Canon Barnett. CONTEMPORARY REVIEW 655 660 III. Fortuna Chance. Chapter I. Mischance. By James Prior. (To IV. Bergson and the Mystics. By Evelyn Underhill. ENGLISH REVIEW 668 TIMES 675 V. The Novels of George Gissing. VI. The Toll of the Sea. By Dorothy MacKay. PALL MALL MAGAZINE 680 VII. The Soul of the Irish.. Καν. VIII. Analogies. II. The Exhaust. By Linesman. NATION 689 692 FOR SIX DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, THE LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage, to any part of the United States. To Canada the postage is 50 cents per annum. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office or express money order if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, express and money orders should be made payable to the order of THE LIVING AGE CO. Single Copies of THE LIVING AGE, 15 cents. THE MOTHER. She hath such quiet eyes, That feed on all earth's wonders! She will sit Here in the orchard and the bewilder ing beauty Of blossoming boughs lulls her as day grows late And level sunlight streameth through the tree-stems Lying as pale gold on the green fallows, and gilding the fleeces Of the slow-feeding sheep in the pastures. While in her there stirs A dream, a delight, a wonder her be ing knew not, Yet now remembers, wistfully, as a thing long lost, Sunken in dim, green, lucid sea-caves; And her desire goeth out from her, toward God, through the twilight; Lost, too, in the waters of his unfathomable silence, While slow tears fill her eyes. As a bird flies through the branches; And he reaches toward the soft, white, fluttering petals That light upon his face, and laughs; and she Stoops over him quickly with sudden, hot, passionate kisses, Smiling for all her tears. The Wind from the Hills beyond the World Was sweeter than I can tell, It carried the scent of the souls of flowers From the land where the Wee Folk dwell The souls of the blossoms, which died on earth, That bloom where Wee Folk dwell. I knew "they" must be near. The Wind from the Hills beyond the World Grew weary, and went to rest; The scent of the blossoms came down no more From the mountains dim in the west, And the feet of the Wee Folk danced away To the opal lands of the west. I dared to look upon the ground Chambers's Journal. ASPECTS OF THE "RELIGIOUS" QUESTION IN IRELAND. It is a commonplace of observation that there are two Irelands, and, as with most commonplaces, its significance is somewhat blunted by repetition. Not until one travels through the country, noting and cross-examining, does the phrase assume the meanings and proportions of a fact. There are, indeed, two Irelands (or twenty), divided from each other by barrier upon barrier. It is not alone that three-fourths of the people are Roman Catholics, while the remainder belong to one or other of the Protestant sects. It is not alone that among the Catholics the "Celtic" strain and qualities have curiously persisted, while the Protestants approach more nearly the Scotch and the English types. It is not alone that Catholic Ireland, speaking broadly, is poor and agricultural, and Protestant Ireland prosperous and industrial, or that the majority feel themselves to be the true natives of the soil, while the minority still retain something of the spirit of a superior colonizing caste, or that there should lie between them seven centuries of social, religious, and agrarian strife, or that on the masterquestion of Irish politics they should still irreconcilably differ. Not one of these elements of separation and contentiousness, taken by itself, would have sufficed to give the English visitor in Ireland his recurring consciousness of passing in and out between two worlds, almost between two civilizations, each unintelligible and repugnant to the other. What makes up the full sum of the uniqueness of Ireland is that the factors of antagonism and discord, by the diabolical chance of history, coincide with and reinforce instead of cancelling each other. Class distinctions in Ireland are not mitigated by political agreement; differences of creed are not assuaged by a harmony of economic interests; the cleavages of "racial" temperament are not, as in other countries they are, bridged over by a sense of national unity. On the contrary, all the bitternesses of caste and creed, of political antipathies and material contrasts, instead of losing half their viciousness in a multiplicity of cross-currents, are gathered and rigidly compressed in Ireland into two incongruous channels. Throughout the country you infer a man's religion from his social position, his social position from his religion, and his views on all Irish questions from both. The inference, to be sure, is not invariably correct. There is still left a remnant of the old Catholic nobility and gentry whose political sympathies have nothing in common with those of the great bulk of their co-religionists. In Dublin the "Castle" Catholic, the Catholic that is, who has identified himself with the English system of government and with the social circle that centres on the Viceregal Lodge, is a common enough type; nor is it by any means the case that Catholic landlords have had less trouble with their tenants, or have been less exposed to agrarian outrage than Protestants. The struggle for the land in Ireland has always evoked an intensity of feeling that has overriden the claims of religious and political communion, and the agitating Protestant tenant is, or used to be, as familiar in Ulster as the oppressive Catholic landlord in Kerry or Wexford. Nor is it here alone that the two Irelands cross and merge. There are several thousand Protestants in Ulster who are the staunchest and most determined of Home Rulers; Protestants form a considerable percentage of the Nationalist party at Westminster; and it is a remarkable and significant fact that, with the exception of O'Connell, nearly all the great leaders of Irish nationalism during the past century and a quarter have belonged to the Church of the minority. But in spite of an overlapping at this point and at that, the two Irelands remain not deliberately, still less defiantly, but instinctively separate. The social and religious cleavage runs sheer down to the foundations. It is buttressed and perpetuated by the policy of the Catholic Church, and the Protestants, for their part, show no real inclination to break it down. The members of the two faiths are educated almost altogether apart; they may mingle in after-life in business or politics or the professions, but for all social purposes they retain a mutually exclusive aloofness; there is little bigotry, except in Derry and Belfast, but on the other hand there is little intimacy. As a general rule, Protestants and Catholics in Ireland do not intervisit or hold any genuine intercourse together. In the social clubs you will hardly find one member of the old faith to every score or fifty of the new; and that is not because sectarian intolerance penetrates further in Ireland than elsewhere, or even because the profession of the one creed or the other carries with it historical implications and significances of wider import than in any other land, but because the two sects are for the most part restricted to different social levels. Throughout Ireland the upper classes are all but exclusively Protestants. Their old political ascendancy has been torn from them, but their social and industrial supremacy remains. You soon come to take it for granted, when passing from one village to another, that the "big house" of the neighborhood is owned by a Protestant. You soon learn to be surprised, on making the circuit of the towns, if you find a single one of the principal industries in Catholic hands. The small tradesman, the retail shopkeeper, may be a Catholic; the publican is pretty sure to be one, but the large manufacturer, the bank manager, the railway director, the brewer, the merchant, the shipbuilder, ninetynine times out of a hundred, is a Protestant. And whether in town or country, the Protestants form inevitably an aloof and self-contained coterie of their own, feeling themselves in character, education, culture, and enterprise the members both of a superior class and a superior civilization. The upper classes among them, the landlords and the gentry, distinguished beyond any other body of men by the numbers of their titles, whose origin the tactful visitor will refrain from inquiring into, hardly regard themselves as Irish at all. Their eyes are turned Englandwards, they speak of "the people," even when with the utmost kindliness, much as an Indian civil servant might speak of the natives around him; they carry with them the consciousness of an eternal separateness; they have chosen, in short-the oddest and most perverse choice ever made by or forced upon any aristocracy-to be English instead of Irish, and "Imperialists" instead of Nationalists. Their relations with those about and below them, while frequently marked with a great outward friendliness and sympathy and much charitable zeal, lack altogether those amenities, that basis of mutual attachment, that placid revolution round the feudal centre, which have been the strength of the English squirearchy. Throughout rural Ireland the sense of common interests between class and class seems almost to have perished and will not, so far as one can see, stand any chance of being re-established until the completion of land purchase leaves the gentry free to play the normal, useful, and beneficent rôle of a real aristocracy among a leader-loving people. And even, or perhaps I ought to say especially, among the great manufacturers of the North, all of whom, without, so far as I know, a single exception, are Protestants, one finds the same aggressive aloofness. Trade as a rule is a potent antiseptic to mitigate the poison of political and sectarian feuds; but fate has so willed it that the magnificent industries of Londonderry and Belfast should find in Ireland their workshop but not their market. Their business is almost altogether an exporting one, and this unquestionably has been a factor of considerable moment in preventing a true understanding between North and South, and in keeping the two classes, "races" and creeds apart. One comes at last to accept it as almost normal that Protestants and Catholics, when they meet at all in Ireland, should do so in one or other of the innumerable relations of employer and employed. Mr. Stephen Gwynn, who has justly emphasized this peculiar rule of Irish life, has noted also that sport, and especially such sport as has to do with horseflesh, is an exception to it. What the Irishman does not know about horses is hidden even from the Afghan and the New Englander, and in the buying, selling, training, racing, and hunting of horses there is probably more unforced mingling of the classes and creeds than in all other connections put together. The fact which dwarfs all other facts about Ireland is that she is Catholic. She is far more Catholic than is implied in the bare statement that threefourths of her people belong to the ancient communion. She is Catholic with an intensity unequalled-unapproached, indeed-by any other English-speaking people, and unsurpassed by any people anywhere. An inquirer into Irish affairs will find in this phenomenon the most delicate and baffling of all the problems that beset him. He observes at once that in Ireland the priesthood has attained to a predominance in the secular sphere of everyday life such as is scarcely rivalled even in Spain or Lower Quebec. He will endeavor, therefore, to discover how this power is used and to what extent the priests, by their training and their ideals, are fitted to wield it. He will seek to assess the influence of Catholicism upon the national character, and even to determine what type of Catholicism it is that flourishes in Ireland-whether it is the American type or the French, or more nearly approaches that which obtains in Mexico. Recognizing that among a profoundly religious people no power can be greater than that of religion, he will inevitably ask from the Church a full account of her stewardship. It will be his business to ascertain, if possible, in what way she fulfils her mission of instructing and elevating the people; what part, if any, she plays in their political affairs; how far her teachings or her policy equip them with the character that is essential to material or any other success; what effect the establishment she maintains produces upon the economic vitality of the masses, and the degree in which she encourages temperance, thinking, virility, joyousness. are not easy tasks for anyone, and for an Englishman they are peculiarly difficult. An Englishman has to burrow his way through whole mountains of prejudice and misconception before he can win to an even moderately unhampered view of the character, work, and influence of the Irish priesthood. In England itself he has hardly a single chance of learning the truth. Somewhere in the back of the average Englishman's mind is a confused idea that practically all Irish priests are little above the level of illiteracy. He is told that the education they receive at Maynooth is of the most cramping clearThese |