Publisher's Synopsis
When Mrs. Green's Irish Nationality was published, a writer in a Dublin paper began his review of it with the words: "By God, this is a book!" That sentence suggests, a little violently, the Irish opinion of Mrs. Green's place as a historian. No lover of the cold (or, if you like the word better, the inanimate) facts of history ever broke out into an exclamation like that in book review. It was obviously written by one who regarded Mrs. Green, not as a bloodless chronicler of events but as the champion and vindicator of a nation.If anyone doubts that Ireland needed a champion in the historical even more than in the political sphere, he will do well to read Mrs. Green's own short essay, "The Way of History in Ireland." It is an exposure, at once impassioned and wittily contemptuous, of the way in which the historians, instead of setting themselves to open up new fields of knowledge in Irish history, have successively contented themselves with muddying the pedigree of the Irish people. "History does not repeat itself," said either Wilde or Mr. Max Beerbohm; "historians repeat each other." And the witticism is seriously true of most of the Irish history that has been written. One after another, the historians have leaped through the gap of tradition, like a rout of sheep, and pastured on the old fables that represent the seven-hundred-years duel between England and Ireland as a duel between civilization, on the one hand, and barbarism on the other. This was scarcely questioned in collegiate circles. One accepted it as one accepted the superiority of Abraham Lincoln to Sitting Bull, of Queen Victoria to the Queen of the Baganda. To contend that the quarrel between England and Ireland, so far from being a quarrel between civilization and barbarism, was a quarrel between one civilization and another, would have been regarded as a paradox of which only an irresponsible Irishman would be capable. More than that, it would have been to challenge the whole world of political and social ideas in which the historians of Ireland had hitherto lived and moved and had their being. It would even have been to question the ethics of Imperialism. For Irish history has been written for the most part, not in the service of truth but in the service of Empire.
