Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/293

 Folklore and History in Ireland. 283

unity. She never, in short, reahsed that in this world " no man hveth to himself," so that in the twentieth century she can still be torn and racked by a faction whose very name betrays incompetence to achieve in the ultimate — Sinn Fein — ourselves alone.

It is extraordinarily evident, once critical attention is drawn to the point, how that insidious " ourselves alone " pervades Irish history and permeates Irish thought. Ire- land has suffered terribly. But her sufferings are not pecuHar in the history of mankind. The horrors of the Elizabethan wars, the Ulster rebellion, the Cromwellian campaign, do not stand out as solitary instances of brutal doings. Their counterpart is to be found in other places. The sack of Drogheda was a small thing compared with the sack of Magdeburg. The massacres — be they of Irish by English, English by Irish, loyalists by rebels, or rebels by royalists, are not the only, or by any means the worst massacres the world has known. Ireland, with too much of the " inward-turning eye " talks, and what is worse thinks, as though they were. But Scotland passed through days as black, wars as destructive, legislation as crippling, as any Ireland has experienced — yet Scotland does not pose as a " most distressful country." It is evident that we must go deeper than surface matters to find a reason for this difference. Race does not explain it. Racially the two countries are very nearly akin. If Scotch settlers were brought to Ulster in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Irish invaders had settled in Scotland in the third. The folklore of the Highlands and Islands has more in common with Irish folklore than any other ; in fact, Joyce refers the student to it for knowledge of primitive Irish customs and beliefs. Am I wrong then in suggesting that the determining factor has been geographical control }

History is a longer and terribly complex matter to deal with. It is becoming more and more evident that the study of folklore and history are interdependent. If folk-