enlarge-imageOFF TO AMERICA.OFF TO AMERICA.
OFF TO AMERICA.
I have said that the Irish are not domestic. They are gregarious, but not domestic. The Irishman depends a deal on the neighbours; he has no suchway of enclosing himself within a little fortified place of home against all the ills of the world as has the Englishman. Irish mothers, like Irish nurses, are often tenderly, exquisitely soft and warm; but the young ones will fly out of the nest for all that. Perhaps the art of making the home pleasant is not an Irish art. Perhaps it is the gregariousness, general and not particular—at least, general in the sense of embracing the parish and not the family. To the young Irish and a good many of their elders the home is dull. They go off to America, leaving the old people to loneliness, because there is no amusement. They do not make their own interests, as the slower, less vivacious nations do. The rainy Irish climate seems made for a people who would find their pleasures indoors. But the Irish will be out and about, telling good stories and hearing them. They are an artistic people, with great traditions; yet books or music or conversation will not keep them at home. If they cannot have the neighbours in, they will go out to the neighbours.
They are very religious, and accept the invisible world with a thoroughness and simplicity of belief which they would say themselves is their most precious inheritance. The Celt is no materialist. He does not love success or riches; most of those whomhe holds in esteem have been neither successful nor rich. Money is not the passport to his affections. He ought never to go away, and, alas! he goes away in thousands! Contact with the selfish, money-getting materialism has power to destroy the spiritual qualities of the Celt, once he is outside Ireland. When he comes back—a prosperous Irish-American—he is no longer the Celt we loved. And he does come back: that is one of his contradictions. The home he has left behind because of its dulness, the arid patch of mountain-land, the graves of his people, call him back again at the moment when one would have said every bond with them was loosened.
He is full of sentiment, yet he makes mercenary marriages. The Irish match-making customs are well known. In the South and West of Ireland the prospective bride is bargained over with no more sentiment than if she were a heifer. She may be “turned down” for an iron pot or a feather-bed which her mother will not give up to supplement the dowry. Satin cheeks and speedwell eyes and a head of silk like the raven’s plume will not count against a bullock extra with a yellow spinster of greater fortune, or is not supposed to count; for sometimes Cupid steps in, although the match-making customs are usually accepted as unquestioningly as a similarinstitution is by the French. And even in such unpromising soil flowers of love and tenderness will spring up. Under my hand I have a letter from an Irish peasant which I think affords a beautiful refutation of the idea that sentiment and match-making cannot go together. Here is a passage from it:
“For the last few weeks I was anxiously engaged at match-making, as matters were going from bad to worse; having no housekeeper, household jobs and cares prevented me from attending to outside work. Well, at last my match is made. The marriage is to take place next Thursday. The ‘young girl’ is twenty-two years, and I thank God that I am perfectly satisfied with my life-companion-to-be. There were many other matches introduced to me—far more satisfactory from the financial point of view, some having £20, some £30, and one £40 more fortune than my intended wife has, with whom I am getting but £90, while I must ‘by will’ give £120 to my brother, leaving a deficit of £30; but, somehow, I could not satisfy my mind with the other ‘good girls’ if they had over £200—nay, at all. And the poet’s words were true when he said something like ‘pity is akin to love’; pity I felt first for my intended wife, with her simple, yet wise, unaffected ways, not used to world’s ways and wiles,‘an unspoiled child of Nature,’ never flirted, never went to dances, with the bloom of her maidenhood fresh and pure, and fair and bright. When but a last £5 was between myself and her peoplerefortune, her very words to me were: ‘Wisha, God help me! if I’m worth anything, I ought to be worth that £5.’ That expression of hers stung me to the quick, so openly, frankly, and innocently uttered, and ‘I’m getting other accounts, but would not marry anyone but you.’ Well, the end was in that one night, sitting beside her in her father’s house, the feeling of pity changed to a warmer feeling, thank God; for if it didn’t, I would rather live and die single than marry against my will. ‘’Tisn’t riches makes happiness.’ I’ve read somewhere that when want comes in at the door, love flies out of the window; but I don’t believe it—I don’t believe it. And my brother is kind; he will be giving me time to pay the balance, £30, by degrees.”
The Irish are notoriously brave, yet they have a fear of public opinion unknown to an Englishman. Underneath their charmingly gay and open manner there is a self-consciousness, a self-mistrust. For all their keen sense of humour, they cannot bear laughter directed at themselves. They dread to be made absurd more than anything else in this world.They are responsive and sympathetic, yet too witty not to be somewhat malicious; and they are warm and generous, yet not always so reliably kind as a duller, slower people. They are irritable, so they are less tolerant of children and animals, although they make excellent nurses, as I have said. They have no tolerance at all for slowness and stupidity, very little for ugliness or want of charm. They adore beauty, though it doesn’t count for much in their most intimate relations; and it is not, therefore, the paradise of plain women.
I have not touched on a hundredth part of their contradictoriness, which makes the Irish so eternally unexpected and interesting. They can be, as they say themselves, “contrairy” when they choose—and they often choose. Yet, when all is said and done, they are the pleasantest people in the world. Nor is their pleasantness insincere. They are pleasant because they feel pleasant; and an Irish man or woman will pay you an amazing, fresh, audacious compliment which an Englishman might feel, but would rather die than say.
Did I say that the Celt was gay and melancholy? He is exquisitely gay and most profoundly melancholy. He is in touch with the other world, and yet desperately afraid of it, or of the passage to it,being a creature of fine nerves and apprehension; whence he will joke about death to cover up his real repugnance, and yet hold the key to heaven as securely as though it were the other side of the wall, with a lonesome passage to be traversed. It is the lonesomeness of death which makes it terrible to the gregarious Irishman, although he knows that the other side of the wall the kinsmen and friends and neighbours await him, friendly and loving as of old.
IFyou go down from Dublin by the wonderful coast-line or through the beautiful country inland which runs by the base of the mountains, you will come upon beautiful scenery, and find a population not at all characteristically Irish. The beauty of Wicklow, its wonderful woods, its deep glens, its placid waters, its glorious mountains, is only less than the beauty of Killarney, which is an earthly paradise. But in Wicklow, in Wexford, in Waterford, the people’s blood is mixed. Sometimes it is Celt upon Celt, the Welsh Celt upon the Irish. There are charming people in Wicklow and Wexford and Waterford, butto those counties belongs also what I call the cynical Irishman—the Irishman without charm of manner, the “independent” Irishman, who will not take off his hat to rank or age or sex; yet he is Irish enough in the core of him. And Wicklow and Wexford, with Kildare and part of Meath, were the scenes of the Rebellion in 1798. Perhaps the memory of those days helps to make the Irishman of the south-east corner of Ireland what he is, and that is often something very unlike the gracious Irishman of the South and West. He has his resentments. I have heard an Irishman say: “A Wexford man will never look at a Tipperary man, because Tipperary didn’t rise in the Rebellion.” The Rebellion, which was hatched in the North by Ulster Presbyterians, broke out, after all, in Wexford, and on a religious, and a Catholic, cause of quarrel. There could have been nothing farther from the thoughts of the leaders of the united Irishmen than to make a religious war, but that was what the Rebellion of 1798 turned out to be—a religious war; a war between Catholic and Protestant, precipitated not by English intriguers, say those who know well, but by outrageous insults to the Catholic altars, led in many cases by priests on the rebel side, foredoomed to failure in spite of the desperate courage of the peasantry who for a timeswept all before them. One always thinks of Wexford and the Rebellion simultaneously. It was a time of cynical contrasts. Think of the poor peasants, maddened by outrages to their altars, led by their priests, carrying on the Rebellion planned by Protestants of the North—by leaders deeply imbued with the French revolutionary spirit, which was certainly not Christian! Think of the Western peasants, when Humbert and his men landed at Killala, hailing those good comrades of the Revolution as fellow-Catholics, coming to meet them decked out in religious emblems! One of the strangest and most cynical of these contrasts was the fact that while the peasant army fought desperately at New Ross, where they all but carried the day, on the other side of the Barrow River men were ploughing peacefully in their fields, because it was Wexford that was up and not their county. I suppose it is the clan system which differentiates Irishmen by their counties and their towns. Dublin is heterogeneous, perhaps. It has, at all events, few distinguishing characteristics, whereas Cork and Waterford men are as widely apart almost as though they were of different nationalities; and both are agreed in despising Dublin, although Dublin has made history in the last hundred years—national history—more than either.
enlarge-imageA WICKLOW GLEN.A WICKLOW GLEN.
A WICKLOW GLEN.
The men who were the first begetters of the Rebellion, and the men who saved Ireland for the English Crown, were alike men of Anglo-Irish blood. The Rebellion was put down by the Irish yeomanry, as English statesmen had to acknowledge, however little they liked the methods of their allies. The yeomanry did not make war with rose-water, any more than they precipitated the Rebellion by gentle methods. It is a bloody and brutal chapter of Irish history, and the memories of it accounted for the religious animosities which I remember in my youth, which are fading out as the memories of the Rebellion are fading. The year 1798 has ceased to be a landmark in Irish life. When I was a child, there yet lived people who could tell at first hand or second hand of the terrible happenings of those days. People used to say, fixing an age: “He was born the year of the Rebellion.” Now all that has passed away. Even in those times it was becoming more customary to date events by the year of the Big Wind, 1839. Now, with the establishment of parish registers—which did not come in in Ireland till the sixties—and the spread of newspapers and cheap knowledge generally, such landmarks are no longer required; and the Big Wind of 1903 has wiped out the memory of its predecessor.
In the mountains of Wicklow the insurgents of those days found their refuges and their fastnesses and their graves. I remember having seen somewhere near Roundwood, in the Wicklow Mountains, in the midst of a ploughed field a long strip of greenest grass covering the grave of many rebels. The plough had gone round it ever since then, but not a sod of it had been turned up; it had remained inviolate.
A great deal of Irish history gathers round the Rebellion—theRebellion, the Irish yet call it, as though there had never been any other. The men who made it were literary men, in a more vital sense than the men of ‘48, who were also literary. Two books of that day stand out pre-eminently—Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s “Life and Letters,” edited by Thomas Moore, and the Journal of Theobald Wolfe Tone. Lord Edward had an exquisite style. His letters are the frank revelation of a beautiful and gallant and innocent mind and heart. Without deliberation, without knowledge, his family letters achieved the highest art. They are immortal, imperishable things.
Then Tone’s Journal is as remarkable a human document. Tone swaggers through these pages better than any hero of romance. Life, after all, isthe greatest artist, and one does not say, “Here is a true Dumas hero! Here is a true Stevenson hero!” For Life is better than her children.
Nearly all the United Irish leaders left memoirs or journals behind them. There was, perhaps, something of the self-consciousness of the French Revolution in this keeping a journal in the face of battle. Anyhow, we are grateful to Holt, to Teeling, to Cloney, for keeping alive for us those days and those men.
In Lady Sarah Napier’s letters you also get most vivid glimpses of the Rebellion—as, indeed, you do in the letters of the whole Leinster family. Mary Ledbetter, that gentle Quakeress, of Ballitore, has told her experiences of the Rebellion in Kildare; there is Bishop Stock’s Narrative of the French landing at Killala and those days in which he entertained willy-nilly the French leaders and found them the most considerate of guests. In fact, there is a whole library of Rebellion literature.
I ask pardon for treating Wicklow and Wexford as though they were the theatre of ‘98, and nothing more; but, indeed, in the story of Wexford the Rebellion stands up like White Mountain and Mount Leinster, and one finds little else to say.
BETWEENDublin and Newry there is not much to see or to remember except that Cromwell sacked Drogheda with a thoroughness, and that at Dundalk Edward Bruce, the brother of Robert, was crowned King of Ireland. The Mourne Mountains and Carlingford Lough bring us back to characteristic Ireland. Beyond them one enters the manufacturing districts—that north-east corner of Ireland which no Celt looks upon as Ireland at all. In speech, in character, in looks, the people become Scotch and not Irish. One has crossed the border and Celtic Ireland is left behind.
In the north-east corner of Ulster they are all busy money-making and money-getting. The North of Ireland has admirable qualities—thrift, energy, industry, ambition, capacity. In other parts of Ireland you find these qualities here and there; they are mainly, but not altogether, the qualities of the Anglo-Irish—that is, in so far as they are a business asset. The Celt has no real capacity for money-making,though at the wrong end of the virtue of thrift—that dreariest of the virtues—he may accumulate it. He will put an enormous deal of energy into something that does not pay him in hard cash. Honorary positions are greedily sought after by the Irish everywhere. They will run any number of societies for nothing, will do the business of Leagues, of the Poor Law, of the County Councils. The energy shown by the Celt in doing the public business would enrich him if applied to his own. He has a large capacity for public business, and an extraordinary readiness to do it, which is, I suppose, the reason why he does the public business of America, while non-Irish Americans sit by and grumble at his way of doing it.
In Ireland and in America he does hard manual labour, but somehow the genius of finance is not his. His hard work is on the land in one form or another. Now and again he may build up quite a considerable fortune in petty shop-keeping—the big traders are nearly all Anglo-Irish—but when he does, his sons become professional men and the business ceases to be. One can hardly imagine in Celtic Ireland what occurs every day in English business life, where the son of a successful business man may be a public-school man, a University man, and have had all the advantagesof wealth, and yet succeed his father in the business. And his son succeeds him, and so on. This, in Celtic Ireland, would, I fear, be taken as indicative of a pettifogging spirit. The Anglo-Irishman, on the contrary, succeeds to the business his father has made, even though he be a University man; and the Grafton Street shops are often run by men who are graduates and honourmen of the University, and yet do not disdain to be seen in their shops.
There is nothing Irish about North-East Ulster except the country itself, which does not materially alter its character, because it is studded with factories. From the streets of Belfast you see the Cave Hill, as from easy-going Dublin you see the Dublin Mountains. Perhaps there is something of exuberance caught from the Celt in the paraphernalia and ceremonial of the Orange Society. Who can say how much of poetry it may not mean, that crowded hour of glorious life which comes about mid-July, when men who have worked side by side in amity all the rest of the year suddenly become bitter enemies, when the wearing of an Orange sash and the sight of an Orange lily stir a fever in the blood?
Apart from such occasions, they are given in Belfast to minding their own business, and minding itvery well. The Belfast man is very shrewd, but he has a great simplicity withal. He has none of the uppish notions of the Celt, and though he makes money he does not make it to display it. He is blunt and brusque in his speech and manner, and so not unlike his Lancashire brother. He lives simply. In public matters he has the priceless advantage, in Ireland, of knowing what he wants; and he usually gets it, unless his demands be too outrageous. He is a hard man of business, but in his human relationships he is kind and sincere. I have known exiles of Dublin who went to Belfast in tears, and for the first months or years of their residence were always sighing after Dublin. When, however, they came to know the man of the North—he takes a good deal of knowing—nothing would induce them to return to Dublin.
Like his Scottish progenitors, he stands by the Bible. There is as much Bible-reading in the fine red-brick mansions of Belfast as there is in Scotland. He does not produce literature. The more artistic parts of Ireland look down on him as one to whom “boetry and bainting” are as unacceptable as they were to the Second George. But he encourages solid learning, and he endows seats of learning as generously as does the American millionaire, who inthis respect offers an example to his English brother. The Belfast man has the Scottish love of education. He has many of the homespun Scottish virtues, and much less than the Scottish love of money.
At the very gates of Belfast you find the Irish country. The Glens of Antrim are as Irish as Limerick or Clare. They are very beautiful, and not much exploited. There is also the Giant’s Causeway to see. The legend of its construction is that Finn, the Irish giant, invited a Scotch giant over to fight him, and generously provided the Causeway for him to cross by; but he played a nasty trick on him, for he pretended to the Scottish giant when he came that he was his own little boy. “If you are the little son, what must your father be?” the Scottish giant is reported to have said before taking to his heels.
I do not believe the story. I believe that the Scottish giant came and stayed. You see his children all over North-East Ulster.
There are women-poets whom one associates with the North—Moira O’Neill of the Glens, and Alice Milligan, a daughter of Belfast. They are both
“Kindly Irish of the IrishNeither Saxon nor Italian,”
“Kindly Irish of the IrishNeither Saxon nor Italian,”
“Kindly Irish of the IrishNeither Saxon nor Italian,”
nor Scottish.
enlarge-imageTHE RIVER LEE.THE RIVER LEE.
THE RIVER LEE.
THEREis something of rich and racy association about the very name of Cork—something that suggests joviality, wit, a warm southern temperament. Corkmen only out of all Ireland hold together. The rest of Ireland may be fissiparous, disunited. Corkmen cleave closer than Scotsmen to one another, and to be a Corkman is to another Corkman a cloak that covers a multitude of sins. A Corkman in Dublin will have friends in all sorts of unlikely places. What matter though a man be in a humble rank of life—a cabman, a policeman, a postman, even a scavenger! So he be a Corkman, he has an appeal to the heart of his brother Corkman. It is a Freemasonry. There is nothing else like it in Ireland, nor anywhere else, so far as I know; for the Scotsman coming into England may draw other Scotsmen to follow him, but in the Scotch sticking together there is less real affection than there is in the case of the Corkman. To be able to exchange memories of the Mardyke, of the River Lee, of Shandon andSunday’s Well, is to make Corkmen brothers all the world over. Cork looks on itself as the real capital of Ireland, and has always its eye on a day when Dublin will be dispossessed.
It has a most excellent situation on the River Lee, and is surrounded by all manner of natural beauties. There is plenty of business stirring, and there is a good deal of opulence in Cork, where, Corkmen being men of taste, they display it in their houses, their way of living and on the persons of their beautiful women, with the irresistible Cork brogue to crown all their other charms. Cork is nothing if not artistic. She has produced artists of all descriptions—poets, painters, great newspaper men (was not Delane of theTimesa Corkman?), musicians, sculptors, orators, preachers. The words roll off the Cork tongue sweet as honey. There is something extraordinarily rich, gay and alluring about Cork and Cork people. They were always audacious. They set up Perkin Warbeck as a Pretender to the English Crown, clad him in silks and velvets, and demanded his acknowledgment at the hands of the Lord Deputy. I do not know that as a city Cork took a great part in any of the many Irish rebellions. It would make a city of diplomatists because of its honeyed tongue. Queen Elizabeth, they say,was the first one to talk of Blarney, which is a Cork commodity. There was a certain McCarthy, Lord of Blarney, who would not come in and submit to the Queen’s forces, though week by week he promised to come and kept the Queen’s anger off by cozening words. “It is all Blarney,” the Queen came to say of fair words that meant nothing; but that is a derivation I somewhat suspect. I do not know what Cork was doing in the Desmond Rebellion, of the results of which Spenser has left us so harrowing a description. She was perhaps enjoying herself after the fashion of that day. Spenser married a Cork-woman, and has enshrined her in the “Epithalamion,” the most beautiful love-poem in the English language. Cork has its links with the Golden Age of England, for Raleigh was at Youghal, and Spenser at Kilcolman close by; and in Raleigh’s house at Youghal they show you the oriel in which Spenser sat and read the “Faërie Queene” to his host, the Shepherd of the Ocean. Youghal and all that part of the country round about Cork is steeped in traditions and memories. St. Mary’s Collegiate Church at Youghal might be in an English town, and there are malls and promenades in those parts, with high, crumbling houses, which suggest the English civilization of the Middle Ages and not the Irish civilizationbefore the Norman Conquest. The Normans were great church-builders, but of their churches, as in the case of the old Abbey of St. Francis at Youghal, there remain now only ruins—a naked gable standing up amid a wilderness of graves, buried in coarse grasses, which, when I was there, had a greater decency towards the dead than had the living. For it is strange that the Irish, who love the dead, have little piety towards their graves.
From Youghal Sir Walter Raleigh sailed away to Virginia on his last disastrous voyage. Spenser had gone back to London earlier than that, heart-broken by the loss of his little son, who was burnt to death in a fire at Kilcolman Castle. Raleigh and Spenser had received grants of the lands of the attainted Desmonds. Very little profit either had of them, and Raleigh’s lands passed to the Earl of Cork, commonly called “the Great,” whose flaring chapel destroys the quiet of St. Mary’s dim aisles and chancel. Never was there so worldly a monument as this of Robert Boyle, his mother, his two wives, and his nine children, all in hideously painted and decorated Italian marble. The fierce eyes of the great Earl are something to remember with dismay.
I recall the evidence the great Earl adduced to prove that Sir Walter did really hand him over his Irishestates on the eve of that journey to Virginia—for a small consideration of money and plenishing for the expedition. “If you do not take the lands, some Scot will have them,” said, or is reported to have said, Sir Walter, which reminds us that Jamie had succeeded Elizabeth, and was already transplanting his Scots—Jamie, who was to keep so brilliant a bird as Sir Walter in so squalid a cage as a prison till he made up his mind to send him to the block. Youghal is haunted by Sir Walter and Spenser. My memories of the place in a windy autumn are brightened by sudden gleams, as of splendid attire and golden olive faces with the Elizabethan ruff and the Elizabethan pointed beard.
The Blackwater, which runs through Youghal, dropping into the sea at that point, had at Rhincrew Point its House of Knights Templars. From Youghal they also sailed away in search of El Dorado, but a heavenly one. May they have found it!
And also there is Templemichael, of the Earls of Desmond, the southern branch of the Fitzgeralds, which Cromwell battered down for “dire insolence.” There is a story of a Desmond lord who was buried across the water at Ardmore, the holy place of St. Declan, where there is a pilgrimage and a patronage to this day. But holy as Ardmore was and is, EarlGerald could not sleep there. He wanted to be back at Templemichael, where his young wife lay in her lonely grave. So that night after night there came a terrible cry, “Garault Arointha! Garault Arointha!”—that is to say: “Give Gerald a ferry!” So at last some of his faithful followers rowed over by night, took up the body of Earl Gerald, and carried it back to Templemichael and to the dead Countess’s side. And after that Earl Gerald slept in peace.
My memory of Youghal in that far-away windy autumn is compounded of three or four things. There was purple wistaria hanging in great masses over the walls of the college which was the foundation of one of the Desmonds. There was provision there for so many singing men—twenty, was it?—who were to sing in St. Mary’s choir. The great Earl of Cork had a great maw, one that never suffered from indigestion. The revenues of St. Mary’s College went the same way as Sir Walter’s slice of the Desmond lands. Then, again, in a little shop-window of the town, there was a glorious show of fruit—great scarlet-skinned tomatoes, gorgeous plums and pears and apples, which reminded one that Raleigh had planted orchards at Affane, on the Blackwater. As a rule, fruit is sadly to seek in a small Irish town, although Cork produces some ofthe finest fruit I have ever seen. Then, again, there was a room in Raleigh’s house, Myrtle Grove, unlit save for the flicker of firelight, the darkness all about us, and an old voice bidding us to notice the earthy smell, which was supposed to enter the room from a subterranean passage that led to St. Mary’s.
Again, I have another widely different memory. It is of a fine, tall, beautifully-complexioned girl standing behind the counter of a draper’s shop, her shining red-golden head showing against a background of little plaid shawls and kerchiefs, while she lamented in her wailing southern brogue the fact that no one could hope to get married in Youghal, unless one had £300 to buy an old “widda-man”; and they were all the men that were going.
I like to get back from Youghal and its ghosts, and Rosanna, who never thought of rebelling against the marriage customs of her forbears, to cheerful Cork of the living and not the dead, with her tramcars, her jingles—the curious covered car which takes the place of the outside car in other Irish towns—her citizens laughing and button-holing each other with a greater gaiety than the Dubliners; her excellent shops, her beautiful girls promenading Patrick Street, her club-houses, her churches, her Queen’s College, and all the rest of it, down to herriver with its busy steamers. Cork’s citizens live outside her gates, at Monkstown, at Blackrock, at Glenbrook; and the busy steamers carry them to and fro by the loveliest of waterways. “Are the steamers punctual?” I asked a Cork friend. “Is it punctual?” repeated he. “They’re the most punctual things in Ireland, for they always get in before their time.”
Father Mathew is one of Cork’s memories; Father Prout is another; Dr. Maginn is another. But the list of Cork’s worthies is a long one, and I shall not enter upon it here.
enlarge-imageRALEIGH’S HOUSE, MYRTLE GROVE.RALEIGH’S HOUSE, MYRTLE GROVE.
RALEIGH’S HOUSE, MYRTLE GROVE.
Cork has the most enervating climate for one who comes to it from more northern latitudes. It is always soft and warm, and often wet. “Good heavens!” said John Mitchel, when he came back from twenty years or so of Australia, gliding in by Spike Island in that same silver mist of rain in which he had gone out, “isn’t that shower over yet?” The flowers are wonderful in Cork, as well as the fruit. I have seen the suburban gardens of Corkmen a luxuriance of vivid, closely packed, overflowing blossom. Myrtles and fuchsias grow in the open air. There are hedges of fuchsias at Killarney. There are hydrangeas also; but the same is true of Dublin and its precincts. No one coming in from outside has energy to do anythingin Cork. But the Corkman lacks nothing of energy, nothing of the joy of life. He is a keen business man, and there is plenty of industrial enterprise. He is interested in the affairs of the world at large and of Cork in particular. He has his enthusiasms. He is a tremendous politician, and does not mind being on the losing side so long as it is the right one. He is a sportsman and a bit of a gambler; he makes love and is a good friend. The place is full of wit and gaiety and humour. His standard of living when he has money, or ought to have it, is an unusually high one for Ireland. Some of those successful merchants live, I am told, like merchant princes. He is lavish and generous, and fond of display—altogether a rich, abundant, highly-coloured character. He lives in an atmosphere of incessant wit and humour. Hardly a man in Cork but has his nickname. “There goes Billy Boulevard,” you hear, and you are told that the gentleman so designated desired to embellish Patrick Street with trees. But it was in Dublin that they called one who had made his money in pneumatic tyres, and was exalted above his humbler neighbours, “Lord Tyre and Side-on.”
GALWAYis so synonymous with racy Irish life that a peep at Ireland must be incomplete unless it includes a peep at Galway. It is full of the strangest monuments of the past. It was once a town of the Irishry, in the O’Flaherty country. But with the Norman Conquest there came in that group of Anglo-Norman families known as the Tribes, who in course of time went the way of all their compeers, becoming more Irish than the Irish. “Lord!” said Edmund Spenser, “how quickly doth that country alter men’s natures!” The Tribes were, and are—for happily there are still the Tribes of Galway—thirteen, viz.: Athy, Blake, Bodkin, Browne, D’Arcy, Font, French, Joyce, Kirwan, Lynch, Martin, Morris, and Skerrett. These Tribes became responsible in time for so much of the wild and picturesque life of the Irish gentry of the eighteenth century—the duelling, the drinking, the racing, the gambling, the general devil-may-care life—that Galway looms more largely, perhaps, than any town in the social history of Ireland.Galway drew up a code for duellists known as the Galway Code; and in the irresponsible life of the eighteenth century, such as you find in Miss Edgeworth’s “Castle Rackrent” and in Lever’s novels, the life which the Encumbered Estates Act put a period to, the names of the Tribes figure oftener than more Celtic names. For the picturesque wildness of Irish life was the wildness of the settlers rather than the wildness of the native Irish.
However, in the great days of Galway’s trade with Spain and other continental ports, traces of which are scattered all over the old ruined city, which is as much Spanish as it is Irish, the Tribes were just merchant princes, not anticipating the time when,more Hibernico, they should fling trade to the winds and become the maddest crew of dare-devils known in the social life of any country. And here I find, in the record of the duelling and drinking days, traces and indications of the English descent of the roysterers. For certainly there was a lack of humour in the actors, though none for the spectator; there was a solemnity—not always a drunken solemnity—in the way their pranks were performed that was not Celtic; for the Celt has a terrible sense of the ridiculous. Doubtless it was from his Anglo-Irish betters that the Celt derived the habit of “trailing his coat” through a fair when he was spoiling for a fight, though, to do him justice, he practised it only when he was drunk. The Anglo-Irish duellists inaugurated the custom. When on no pretext could they find a friend or neighbour to kill or be killed by, they went out and “trailed the coat,” like the gentleman who rode on a tailless horse, with his face to the crupper, and, seeing an unwary stranger smile, immediately challenged him, and rode home in huge delight to look to his pistols. They were extremely solemn over their pranks. One wonders how often the Celtic servants had a smile behind their hand at such strange goings-on of their masters, which would not have been possible to the self-conscious Celt.
Over one of the gates of Galway was the pious legend, “From the ferocious O’Flaherties, good Lord deliver us!” I have heard of other inscriptions referring to other Irish septs over the remaining gates of the town, but those I think are apocryphal. The fact remains that the Tribes, having seized the town of the Irish after their rapacious Norman manner, were obliged to wall it against the O’Flaherties, and doubtless often slept ill at night because of the wild Irish battering at their gates, as did their brothers of the English pale up in Dublin.
Galway would at that time have been well worth sacking. A traveller of the early seventeenth century reports: “The merchants of Galway are rich and great adventurers at sea: their commonalitie is composed of the descendants of the ancient English families of the towne: and rairlie admit of any new English among them, and never of any of the Irish; they keep good hospitalitie and are kind to strangers, and in their manner of entertainment and in fashioninge and apparellynge themselves and their wives do most preserve the ancient manners and state of annie towne that ever I saw.”
They had their enactments against the Irish, including the MacWilliam Burkes, who had gone over to the Irish, bag and baggage:
“That none of the towne buy cattle out of the country but only of true men.
“That no man of the towne shall sell galley, bote or barque to an Irishman.
“That no person shall give or sell to the Irish any munition as hand-povins, calivres, poulter, leade, nor salt-peter, nor yet large bowes, cross-bowes, cross-bowe strings, nor yearne to make the same, nor any kind of weapon on payn to forfayt the same and an hundred shyllinges.
“If anie man being an Irishman to brag and boste upon the towne, to forfayt 12 pence.
“That no man of this towne shall ostle or receive into their house at Christmasse or Easter nor no feast elles, anny of the Burkes MacWilliams, the Kellies, nor no septs elles, without the licence of the Maior and Council on payn to forfayt £5. That neither O’ ne Mac shall strutt or swagger through the streets of Galway.”
You still find traces of the commerce of the Tribes with Spain, not only in the old Spanish buildings of the town, but in the black Spanish eyes and hair of the people. I remember to have been struck in Donegal by a dignity, a loftiness of bearing, as well as by a height and stateliness of the peasant people that made one murmur “Spanish” to one’s own ear.
One of the sights of Galway is the ruins of the house from the window of which James Lynch Fitz Stephen, a Chief Magistrate of Galway in 1493, hanged his only son for murder with his own hand, lest the townspeople should rescue him. The house is called The Cross Bones nowadays, and is situated most appropriately in Dead-Man’s Lane. There remains but an old wall, with a couple of doorways having the pointed Spanish arches and some ornatewindow-spaces above. There is a tablet on the wall, bearing a skull and cross-bones, with the inscription:
“Remember Deathe,Vaniti of vanitis, all is but vaniti.”
“Remember Deathe,Vaniti of vanitis, all is but vaniti.”
“Remember Deathe,Vaniti of vanitis, all is but vaniti.”
Some people believe that this Lynch is the “onlie begetter” of Lynch Law. This, however, I do not believe, and I think it more likely to have been derived from a Lynch of the mining-camps in Southern California, who was the first to promulgate and put in practice the wild justice of execution without judge or jury. Anyhow, I cannot see that the example of James Lynch FitzStephen was an admirable one, and I do not believe the legend that he died heart-broken as a result of his own stern sense of justice.
The palmy days of the Tribes were over with the Reformation, for they did not cease to be Catholics, and so were in no great favour with the predominant partner. Galway also stood for the King against the Parliament, was besieged and taken by the Parliamentary soldiers under Ludlow, who stabled his horses, according to report, in St. Nicholas’s Cathedral. After that Galway’s great prosperity as a trading centre passed away, and the Tribes scattered among the ferocious O’Flaherties and others of their sort and became country gentlemen, with anoble contempt for trade. The situation of Galway, on its magnificent Bay, still cries out for commerce. The spectacle of Galway as a port of call for American steamers has dangled before the eyes of the Galwegians for a long time without being realized, although they made preparations for it long ago, by building a hotel that would house aMauretania-load of travellers.
Only the other day I listened to a Galway Tribesman conversing with someone who had lived in Galway, and who asked after the old places and persons. “What’s become of So-and-so?” “He’s just the same as ever; not a bit of change in him. He comes home every night strapped to the outside car to keep him from falling off.” “And what’s become of So-and-so?” “Oh, he’s done very well for himself. His father says, ‘Mac’s all right; he’s got the run of a kitchen in Yorkshire,’ meaning that he married an English heiress.”
This conversation made me feel that to some extent Galway stands where it did.
enlarge-imageGLENCOLUMBKILLE HEAD. PAGE 70.GLENCOLUMBKILLE HEAD.PAGE 70.
GLENCOLUMBKILLE HEAD.PAGE 70.
The Claddagh fishing village by Galway is something not to be missed. It keeps itself to itself, with a reserve Celtic or Spanish or anything else you like, but not English. It used to be ruled by its own King, who was just a fisherman like his subjects,and was not exalted in his manner of living by his royal state. He was chosen for his governing powers and his mental and moral qualities, and his subjects were ruled by him with a despotism that was never anything but fatherly. They intermarried, too, among themselves—I do not know if this usage survives—and their ring of betrothal, handed on from one generation to another, has a design of two hands holding up a heart. At the Claddagh they still have the Blessing of the Sea, but they will not make a show of it, and even the Galway people are kept in ignorance of the time when the ceremony takes place.
ITonce fell to my lot to make a hasty scamper through Donegal from end to end; that is to say, as far as possible, I made the circuit of the county, beginning with Ballyshannon, following the coast-line, with divergences, from Donegal to Gweedore, going round by Bloody Foreland, by Falcarragh and Dunfanaghy, and ending up by way of Letterkenny atBallyshannon again. I took ten or twelve days to do it—perhaps a fortnight—staying each night at an inn. To Gweedore I devoted the best portion of a week. Now, in that scamper I had a very characteristic peep at Ireland. I missed, indeed, the wild gaiety of the South. Donegal people are somewhat sorrowful. But I found plenty of types and racy life nevertheless.
It is a good many years ago now; and travelling in Donegal has been simplified since then by the light railways with which the names of Mr. Arthur Balfour and Mr. Gerald Balfour are gratefully associated. When I was there I drove through the country, only taking the train from Letterkenny to Ballyshannon on my return journey; and it was an excellent, though somewhat expensive, way of seeing the country. However, the hospitality was so wonderful that one only slept and breakfasted in one’s hotel. For the rest, the kind priests were only too eager to give hospitality to myself and my companion.
At Ballyshannon we stayed a night in one of those enormous old hotels with a maze of winding passages, which suggest to one in the dead waste and middle of the night that in case of a fire one never could get out. The next day we came upon the first of the priests, who carried us off to see everythingthat could be seen of Ballyshannon, including a visit to Abbey Assaroe, which we knew already in William Allingham’s poetry. To the grief of these kind friends of ours, we insisted on going off the same afternoon to Donegal town, to which we were driven by “Wullie”—the first “Wullie”—a red-haired, taciturn youth, who suspected us of laughing at him and was closer than an oyster. Your English man or woman is the truly expansive person. When you want to get at anything from an Irishman you’ve got to sit down and wait for the charmed moment when his suspicion of you is put to sleep. Dr. Douglas Hyde got his Religious Songs and Love Songs of Connacht by sitting over the turf fire in a cabin, taking a “shaugh” of the pipe and offering a fill of it, passing round a flask of poteen, perhaps. It might be hours, and it might be days, and it might be weeks before you broke down the barrier of reserve, well worth the breaking-down if you have “worlds enough and time.” You can’t travel twenty miles in an English third-class carriage before you have the intimate confidence of your fellow-passengers. You are told which relative died of cancer, with harrowing details, which is in a madhouse, and which in gaol; for the plain English people are the most unreserved in the world, whilethe Irish are the most reticent. And if you win a flow of talk from the Irish peasants, be sure they are talking round what they have to tell by way of leading you away from it; for an Irishman uses language to conceal his thoughts.
We hadn’t “worlds enough and time” for “Wullie.” His lips were tight-locked from Ballyshannon to Donegal.
The next day we saw what was to be seen of the Castle, under the guidance of the parish priest, whom we met walking in the Diamond. We introduced ourselves to him. He was a delightful, humorous, stately, kindly old man, and he looked at us when he met us with an eye that asked: “Who are you and what is your business in Donegal?” It is a way the priests have in the remote parts of Ireland, where they are everything to their flocks. Being reassured, he gave his day to our entertainment, taking us to see some of his parishioners when he had shown us all the town contained of interest.
Killybegs I remember as a beautiful bay, big enough to take in the whole English fleet. The next day we went on to Kilcar, where we found our third priest, who lived in a delightfully clean little cabin with a clay floor. His housekeeper was barefooted, but he had dainty table appointments. I rememberthat he had very good china, and he explained that his mother had given it to him. He was the son of rather wealthy people. We had a meal of fish, with a little fruit to follow; and while we ate it a messenger was out prospecting for the loan of an outside car for the priest. Sure enough, by the time we had finished the meal the car was at the door, and our host carried us off to see the Caves of Muckross, some six miles away. Incidentally, we saw Bunglass, that magnificent cliff-face where Slieve League drops into the sea. I remember a visit we paid to a cottage where a father sat at the loom weaving, the mother was carding wool, and a black-haired daughter was sprigging muslin by the little narrow square window. A scarlet geranium in the window seemed to be in her night-black hair, and her tears flowed when our little priest spoke to her. He told us that her lover had married a richer girl and gone to America. I can remember quite well walking up a mountain road where the friendly little lambs came and trotted a bit of the way with us, and the voice of the young priest as he told us of the innocence of the people—“not a sin in it from year’s end to year’s end,” for they were too poor to drink—and how his ambition was to get away to the East End of London, where there was something to do for a born fighter.
A night at the excellent hotel at Carrick and the next day we were at Glencolumkille, that wild and lonely glen between the mountains and the sea, with the majestic Glen Head standing out into the Atlantic. In the Glen are twelve crosses of stone, where pilgrims make the stations in honour of St. Columba or Columkille, the Dove of the Churches. Above Lough Gartan, on Eithne’s Bed, he was born, and any who lie there shall not have the pangs of home-sickness; wherefore many emigrants stretch themselves upon that rocky couch before they cross “the Green Fields to America.” The Glen is full of the noise and thunder of the waves, and Slieve League lies superbly up in the sky, reminding one of Browning—