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PARTISAN REVIEW
humane." Ireland had no future of its own, but it could help to improve
an English society dismally philistine when left to its proclivities.
England, in turn, should do everything to attach Ireland to itself. On
Ireland's part, there must be no thought of severance.
Arnold's advice met a poor reception. Within two years, the Fenian
Rising, despite its being a botched enterprise in every other respect, at least
made it clear that the Union of Ireland and England that had come into
legal being on January 1,1801, was still in dispute. Sixteen years after lec–
turing on the study of Celtic literature, Arnold reported with dismay in an
essay called "The Incompatibles" that England had "completely failed to
attach Ireland." Worse still: "We find ourselves the object of a glowing,
fierce, unexplained hatred on the part of the Irish people." But there must
still be no thought of Home Rule or separation. In the spirit of Edmund
Burke, Arnold urged that Ireland should be brought "to acquiesce in the
English connection by good and just treatment." Specifically: Ireland
would be appeased not by better Land Bills but by "the equitable treat–
ment of Catholicism" in regard to schools and universities; and by the
development of a society in England that Irish people would find in every
respect worth joining.
It
may be said: well, Arnold is merely a particular manifestation of prej–
udice and vivacity. He is not a representative figure in the English relation
to Ireland. True, but he was not alone in maintaining that the Irish were a
race, not a nation. George Moore said much the same, especially in
A
Drama
<if
Muslin
and
Parnell and His Island.
Ireland was "a primitive coun–
try and barbarous people." The western Celt, as Moore described
him,
was
"a creature quick to dream, and powerless to execute; in external aspects
and in moral history the same tale is told-great things attempted, noth–
ing done." Ireland was interesting so long as you were not invited to take
it seriously. In
Hail and Farewell
Moore made fun of Yeats for his dismissal
of the social class-the middle class-to which Yeats himself belonged on
both sides of his family. In
Autobiographies
Yeats paid him back for this
affront and many other indelicacies. Moore's face, he reported, was carved
out of a turnip, his body was "insinuating, upflowing, circulative, curvicu–
lar, pop-eyed." He was so ill-mannered that "he wrote a long preface to
prove that he had a mistress in Mayfair." In
Hail and Farewell
Moore, who
knew no Irish, laughed at Douglas Hyde for speaking it-"a torrent of
dark, muddied stuff flowed from him, much like the porter which used to
come up from Carnacun to be drunk by the peasants on midsummer
nights when a bonfire was lighted"-and he gave a farcical account of a
pilgrimage he made with George Russell to Slievegullion in honor of
Cuchulain and Finn. Moore's irony always preceded the need of it. But the
main difference between Moore and Arnold on the question of the Irish
