George Russell, also known by his pen name AE, was a significant contributor to the nationalist cultural revival and at the centre of the artists and thinkers behind the nationalist movement. This piece from Studies in 1923 shows the horror he felt at the destruction wrought by the civil war. In it he accuses ‘the champions of physical force’ of having ‘poisoned the soul of Ireland’. ‘All that was exquisite and lovable is dying,’ he adds: ‘They have squandered a spirit created by poets, scholars and patriots of a different order’. Although at the time of the Rising he had been in support of it, AE had not joined in the combat, on account of his pacifism. Writing in 1923, he looks back to the violent insurrection with disdain.
A. E., “Lessons of Revolution”, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 12, No. 45 (Mar., 1923), 1-6. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30093149
Lessons of Revolution
I have found few people in Ireland deeply concerned about the ethics of civil war or revolution. The majority accept the principle that it is lawful to use physical force in support of high ideals. Their questioning is about the justice of the cause; and, if that be admitted, they seem to think the right to use physical force to secure its triumph follows in logical and unquestionable sequence. I will not discuss the morality of civil war or revolution. I remember a man, tired of ideal ethics, who cried out at a meeting many years ago: “Let us hear no more of the good man or the bad man. Let us speak of the wise man and the foolish man.” I am like that man. I desire to question the wisdom of a policy rather than discuss the original rightness of a cause.
A policy is wise if, in operation, it secures the triumph of the ideal. It is unwise if, in destroying opposition, it does not at the same time establish in the hearts of men the lovable and desirable life for which the struggle was begun. I think few disinterested thinkers dispute the moral justice of the ideals of the Russian revolutionaries who desired to bring about such a control and use of the natural resources of their country that none would be poor or hungry or neglected. Was the policy adopted wise as the ideal was right? Did it succeed? Could it have succeeded even if there was no blockade or foreign intervention? Lenin and Bukarin have learned wisdom. They confess to great errors. Where lay the unwisdom?
Bukarin says it lay in this, that they provoked a revolution without the technical competence to realise their ideal. On the plane of physical force they won. On the intellectual plane they were defeated. Bukarin admits that, to save the economic situation, they had to restore the control of industry to the enemies of the revolution. Intellect, science, administrative ability could not be improvised, being evolutionary products. The revolutionaries now fall back on evolution and declare their hope lies in education. They begin again in the neglected sphere of culture.
The Irish revolution, which began in Easter Week, has also triumphed solely in externals. Our spiritual, cultural, and intellectual life has not changed for the better. If anything, it has retrograded. Nothing beautiful in the mind has found freer development. In so far as anything is done efficiently, it is done by administrators, educationists, officials and guiders of industry, who maintain, so far as permitted by circumstances, the habits engendered before the war for independence. The Anglicization of the Irish mind remains unaffected. The Gaelic movement was the one movement in Ireland with a truly national character. It began its work in the soul, not on the body. It inspired a few heroes to fight; but the transfer of energy to the plane of physical conflict weakened it ; and now, when there is theoretical possibility of a Gaelic state, there are not Gaels in numbers and intellect competent to take control. The mass of people in the country continue to think as they did before the revolution.
If the Republicans succeeded in establishing a republic, the country would be as Anglicized as ever, because the Republic, no more than the Free State, could improvise culture, experience, intellect or administrative ability. It is practically certain that after a period of muddle,—for their leaders have even less administrative experience than the Free State politicals, they would be forced like the Russians to fall back on the technical competents of the old order to prevent chaos. The Gaelic state cannot be established unless there are Gaels in multitude to administer it. The momentum of the old order carries us along in Ireland hardly deflected a hair’s breadth from the old cultural lines. It would carry us along despite the legal establishment of a Republic,—a purely external thing, just as that human momentum ignored the legal establishment of a Free State.
Inevitably also, after a victory brought about by the wreckage of the economic life of the people, the preoccupation of all with the work of material reconstruction would thrust all spiritual and cultural ideals out of sight. It would give people a sense of nausea to have them discussed. The moods by which high spiritual, political or cultural ideals are appreciated are engendered in times of peace. The Free State came into being with popular feeling stagnant. Why was this? Seven years of sensation had dulled the heart and made it insensitive. If a Republic were proclaimed in Ireland next year or the year after, would there be any more exultation? I think not. Another year or two of civil conflict and the heart would have been unhappy so long that it would have become fixed in sadness. The citizens would gaze with the same apathetic dulness on Republican deputies going to Dail meetings that they now display when deputies attend the Free State assembly.
Photo: National Gallery of Ireland, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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