Читать книгу Some Impressions of My Elders - St. John G. Ervine - Страница 4

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In all the books on Ireland, considered nationally, socially and economically, that have been written in the past twenty years, two men inevitably are mentioned: Sir Horace Plunkett and "A. E.," whose lawful name is George William Russell. Men of affairs in most parts of the world have heard of them, and I imagine that very few of the people who go to Ireland with any serious purpose fail to visit them. I saw Sir Horace Plunkett receive an ovation from a large audience in New York which could only have been given to him by people who had some knowledge and appreciation of his work for his country; and I was impressed by the fact that many Americans asked me to tell them something of "A. E." And yet, though the wide world is not ignorant of their worth, it is very likely that they are less generally known in Ireland than some paltry politician with a gift for street corner rhetoric. Once, in Dublin, I praised Sir Horace Plunkett to a man from the county of Cavan, who interrupted me to say that no one in his village had ever heard of Sir Horace. He seemed to imagine that the ignorance of his neighbours proved a demerit in the founder of the co-operative movement in Ireland. Your villagers, said I, may never have heard of Sir Horace Plunkett and are probably very familiar with the names of Mr. Charles Chaplin and Miss Mary Pickford, but does that prove that Mr. Chaplin is a greater man than Sir Horace? I am not indifferent to the merits of Mr. Chaplin—I would go a long way to see him in the movies—but I hope I shall never succumb to this modern shoddy democracy which will not believe that a man possesses quality unless his name is printed frequently in the newspapers and is familiarly known to the rabble. It may be that Paudeen, unfit to do more than "fumble in a greasy till," as Mr. Yeats wrote in his bitter poem, "September, 1913," knows little or nothing of Sir Horace Plunkett whose life labours have brought so much of comfort and prosperity to him—but who cares what Paudeen knows? Let him grub in the soil, as God made him to grub, while men of mind and quality look after his affairs. It is sufficient for the knowledgeable minority that they know of Sir Horace and realize the value of the great work he has done for his country. A false optimism bids us to believe that "we needs must love the highest when we see it," but a sense of reality convinces us that the highest has to fight harder for recognition than the lowest, and that the way to the throne of heaven passes through Golgotha, the place of a skull.