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"Mary Queen of Heaven,
Protector of the Unborn,
Pray for Us." |
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Book Review: Irish Impressions
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Irish
Impressions
by G.K. Chesterton
Norfolk, VA: IHS Press, 2002
149 pages (including endnotes and suggestions for further reading)
$12.95
Reviewed by Sean P. Dailey
(Click
the image to order this book from our store)
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| In
order to understand what over the years has come to be called the “Irish
Question,” the first thing you have to do, G.K. Chesterton says, is rid
yourself of all the baggage having to do with the issue: “It would be
well if a man could enter Ireland really knowing that he knows nothing
about Ireland; if possible, not even the name of Ireland. The misfortune
is that most men know the name too well, and the thing too little.” |
| The
trouble is, so many passions revolve around the issue of Ireland vs. England
that forgetting the baggage isn’t always easy to do. But not for Chesterton.
In 1918, he and a companion, Sir Horace Plunkett, went to Ireland with
a seemingly impossible task — recruiting Irishmen to help the English
fight the Germans in World War I. One of the fruits of that visit was
Irish Impressions, first published in 1919 and now reissued by
IHS Press in a handsome paperback edition. |
In
Irish Impressions, Chesterton brings to this problem all the wit
and insight he brought to everything else he wrote about, and he wrote
about just about everything.
At the beginning of World War I, and even up to midway through, recruiting
Irish to fight for the British wouldn’t have been too hard a task. Many
supported the English effort, and indeed early on many enlisted in the
British army. But midway through the war a strange thing happened — the
1916 Easter Uprising in Dublin, which was quashed by British troops after
a few days’ bloody fighting. The defeated rebels were initially reviled
by their countrymen, who still hoped for Home Rule once the war was over.
But the heavy-handedness of the British in dealing with the rebels was
so brutal that within a year, the rebels were considered Irish heroes. |
| This is the situation
Chesterton stepped into when he came looking for volunteers in 1918. In
insightful essays, he points out mistakes made by both the British and
Irish in the battle for Irish independence, either through Home Rule or
other means. But as always, his criticisms are made in order to correct
a problem, not to find fault: “If the Irish would laugh at the English
and help the English, they would win all along the line,” he writes. “In
the real history of the German problem, (the Irish) would inherit all
the advantages of having been right from the first. It was not now so
much a question of Ireland consenting to follow England’s lead as of England
being obliged to follow Ireland’s lead. These are the principles which
I thought, and still think, the only possible principles to form the basis
of a recruiting appeal in Ireland.” |
| The Irish may
not have had any great love for the British, but most saw the Germans,
especially the Protestant Prussianism that ruled Germany, as by far the
greater threat. Indeed, though many English assumed, despite evidence
to the contrary, that the Irish generally would favor a German victory
out of mere spite, Chesterton shows that, despite a few misguided exceptions,
this was simply not true. In fact, the greatest support for Berlin came
not from Irish Catholics, but from Irish Protestants, especially Ulster
Protestants. |
| “If ever there
was a natural alliance in the world, it would have been the alliance between
Belfast and Berlin,” Chesterton writes. “Belfast and Berlin are on the
same side in the deepest of all the spiritual issues involved in the war.
And that is the simple issue of whether pride is a sin, and therefore
a weakness.” |
| Chesterton wrote
this book about three years before he himself became a Catholic. But his
writing here overflows with the keen understanding and love for the Catholic
religion that characterized his writing throughout his career. He understands
that religion may be the most obvious thing that makes the Irish a separate
people from the English, but it is far from being the only thing. The
roles of hearth and home in Irish life, the supreme importance of the
family, to say nothing of the Irish affinity for poetry, make them as
distinct from the English as could be. “In Ireland, a man carries the
family mansion about with him like a snail; and his father’s ghost follows
him like a shadow,” he wrote. |
| And anyway, even
if the conflict comes down to religion, it is not just a matter of one
religion having a Pope as its supreme head, and the other having the English
monarch as its supreme head. A religion is more than merely where you
worship; it’s much more than whether a man carries an image of our Lady
in his pocket or a picture of the Queen: |
| If a man says
that there is no difference between a Protestant and a Catholic,
and that both can act in an identical fashion everywhere but
in a church or chapel, he is madly driving the cart horse when
he has forgotten the cart. A religion is not the church a man
goes to but the cosmos he lives in; and if any sceptic forgets
it, the maddest fanatic beating an Orange drum about the Battle
of the Boyne is a better philosopher than he. |
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| Fortunately for
both the Irish and the English, Chesterton is a better philosopher than
fanatical Orangemen beating their drums, and you will be a better philosopher,
and will have a much better understanding of the tangled web of Anglo-Irish
religion and politics, after having read this book. IHS Press, the small
publishing house dedicated to spreading Catholic social teaching by bringing
back out-of-print books such as this, is to be commended for making Irish
Impressions once again available. |
| Sean
P. Dailey is editor-in-chief of Gilbert
Magazine, a literary journal devoted to the thought
and writings of English Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton.
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