<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_i" id="Page_i">[i]</SPAN></span></p>
<div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/cover.jpg" width-obs="500" height-obs="660" alt="Cover image" /></div>
<p class="center larger">THE WILD IRISHMAN</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii">[ii]</SPAN></span></p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[iii]</SPAN></span></p>
<p class="titlepage larger">THE WILD<br/>
IRISHMAN</p>
<p class="titlepage"><span class="smaller">BY</span><br/>
T. W. H. CROSLAND</p>
<p class="center smaller"><i>Author of</i><br/>
“<cite>The Unspeakable Scot</cite>”</p>
<div class="figcenter titlepage" style="width: 100px;">
<ANTIMG src="images/imprimatur.jpg" width-obs="100" height-obs="120" alt="" /></div>
<p class="titlepage">NEW YORK<br/>
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY<br/>
1905</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[iv]</SPAN></span></p>
<p class="titlepage smaller"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1905, by</span><br/>
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY</p>
<p class="titlepage smaller"><i>Published October, 1905.</i></p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[v]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2>PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION</h2>
<p>The people of America may or may not
indulge kindly views of the Irish community;
but there cannot be the slightest question that
the Irish of Ireland have kindlier feelings
for America than ever they have had for
England. To the Irish of Ireland, in fact,
America has long stood in the relation of a
sort of promised land, and they have a habit
of turning their thoughts thitherward even
when small matters are concerned. There
is a tale of an elderly lady of Galway who,
on being informed by her medical attendant
that it was desirable that she should consult
a dental specialist, set forth incontinently for
New York to the total neglect of London.
She believed that of the two places, New<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[vi]</SPAN></span>
York was the friendlier. I am informed that,
broadly speaking, New York is policed by
Irish Americans and that the American Irishman
makes a rather useful subordinate
municipal official. Be this as it may, there
can be no doubt that very considerable numbers
of Irishmen contrive to do themselves
a great deal better in the United States than
they could ever have hoped to do in their
own native Erin. To those Americans and
American Irish who happen to be at all interested
in the present condition and prospects
of the green country, I venture to offer
the following pages for what they are worth.</p>
<p class="right">T. W. H. C.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
<table summary="Contents">
<tr>
<td class="tdr smaller">CHAPTER</td>
<td></td>
<td class="tdpg smaller">PAGE</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">I.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">Distressful</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_I">1</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">II.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">The Shillelagh</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_III">11</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">III.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">Blarney</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_III">19</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">IV.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">Whisky</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_IV">29</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">V.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">The Pathriot</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_V">36</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">VI.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">Orangemen</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_VI">42</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">VII.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">The Low Scotch</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_VII">50</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">VIII.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">Priestcraft</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_VIII">60</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">IX.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">Morals</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_IX">71</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">X.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">Pretty Women</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_X">91</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">XI.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">The London Irish</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XI">100</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">XII.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">Tom Moore</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XII">105</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">XIII.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">W. B. Yeats</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XIII">117</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">XIV.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">Wit and Humor</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XIV">130</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">XV.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">More Wit and Humor</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XV">141</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">XVI.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">Dirt</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XVI">151</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">XVII.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">The Tourist</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XVII">158</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">XVIII.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">Potatoes</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">169</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">XIX.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">Pigs</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XIX">179</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">XX.—</td>
<td><span class="smcap">Emigration</span></td>
<td class="tdpg"><SPAN href="#CHAPTER_XX">187</SPAN></td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</SPAN></span></p>
<h1>THE WILD IRISHMAN</h1>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I<br/> <span class="smaller">DISTRESSFUL</span></h2>
<p>The person who invented the Irish question
may or may not deserve well of his
species. In a sense, of course, there has been
an Irish question since the beginning of history.
But it is only within the last century
or so that we have begun to spell it with a
big Q. That big Q perhaps attained its
largest proportions during the eighties of the
last century, and associated, as it usually was,
with a capital G, which stood for Gladstone,
and a capital P, which stood for somebody
else, it certainly did yeoman service wherever
a use for letters could be found. At the time
of Mr. Gladstone’s Home Rule campaign<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</SPAN></span>
the existence of a highly insistent Irish question
could not be doubted. A good deal of
water has flowed under the bridges since then,
however, and at the present moment, and in
view of the present situation of Irish affairs,
one is tempted to wonder whether there now
exists, or whether there really has ever existed,
an Irish question with a big Q at all.
It is true that at the time of writing there is
an actual and undesirable famine raging in
Connemara. It is true that the population
of the country is on the decline, and that the
standard of comfort among the people will
not bear comparison with the standard of
comfort in any other country in the world,
unless it be in the poorer and bleaker regions
of Kamchatka; and it is true also that Irishmen
as a body continue to exercise themselves
both at street corners, and on all sorts of
platforms, in a habit of rhetoric, which many
years of shouting have made second nature
with them. For all that, the Irish question
as a portentous and vital matter appears to<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</SPAN></span>
be somewhat played out. One may safely
say that in Ireland, at any rate, it has been
reduced to an obscurity which allows of its
being now spelled with about the smallest
“q” in ordinary use among printers. In
England it has been allowed to disappear,
in favor of the Russo-Japanese War, Protection,
and Do We Believe? On the whole,
though it no doubt harrows the souls of the
horde of carpet-baggers which have come to
us out of Ireland, this condition of affairs is
exceedingly salutary for Ireland itself. Now
that the factions, and the tumult, and the turbulence,
and the wrangling have died down,
or at least been in large measure abated, the
facts about Ireland are for the first time in
history beginning, as it were, to swim into
our ken. We are beginning to perceive, for
example, that out of the quarrels and bloodshed
of the past hundred years Ireland has
emerged triumphant. It has been a case of
a bankrupt, downtrodden and dwindling people’s
fight against a rich and powerful dominant<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</SPAN></span>
people, and the weaker side has proved
clearly that in the long run God is on the
side of “justice.” To all intents and purposes
Ireland is at the present moment in
full possession of all that she herself has felt
it reasonable to demand. She has the franchise,
she has land laws which are almost
socialistic in the benefits they offer to the cultivators
of the soil, and she has local self-government.
More than all, she has herself
begun to recognize that the disposition of
England toward her is becoming year by year
less arrogant, less implacable, less contemptuous,
and less severe. It has been said that
Erin’s appeals for reasonable treatment at
the hands of England have had to be made
by violence of the most brutal and terrorizing
kind. She has stood before us with the
head of a landlord in one hand and the tail
of a cow in the other, and screamed till we
gave her what she wanted. And always in
a large measure we have succumbed. And
the singular part of it is that in no instance<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</SPAN></span>
have we had cause, nor do we appear likely to
have cause, to regret it. Of course, that crown
and summit of Irish blisses, Home Rule, has
not yet been vouchsafed to her. But this,
I believe, is due to the fact that Ireland herself
is still making up her mind whether she
really wants it. Half Ireland says, “Give us
Home Rule,” the other half says, “Please
don’t;” and the two parties seem to be getting
on very well together by agreeing to differ.
This is a true and natural settlement of
a problem which, as I believe, is purely artificial,
arising out of the exigencies of party
and the jealousies of rival demagogues,
rather than out of the desires of the people.
If Ireland in her heart of hearts desired
Home Rule, she would have it within
the next couple of years. She has the good
sense to know that, however fascinating the
theory of Home Rule may appear, the practise
of it for her would be difficult and irksome,
if not altogether disastrous. Both
sides are agreed that Home Rule for Ireland<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</SPAN></span>
means an immediate spell of civil war for
Ireland. The Irish Catholic will tell you
this, and the Irish Protestant is equally clear
about it. In view of the condition and nature
of the country, such a war were a calamity
to be staved off at pretty well any cost, even
if it were certain—and it is by no means certain—that
the subsequent benefits would be
appreciable and lasting. The politicians will
tell you that it is possible to have in Ireland
what is somewhat prettily called a “union
of hearts.” “The union of hearts which I
desire,” says one of them, “is a union of
Irishmen of all classes and of all creeds, from
the north to the south, from the east to the
west; landlords and tenants, Catholics and
Protestants, Orange and Green; and I look
to this union as the surest way of bringing
about the national regeneration of our country.”
Which is exceedingly beautiful, but
amounts to asking for the moon. Oil and
water cannot be made to mix, and in a country
where a couple of cardinals and a number<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</SPAN></span>
of bishops were lately stoned by a rabblement
of Protestants, the union of hearts may be
reckoned still a great way off. Holy Ireland—and
I think it is rather to her credit—will
never be brought to do what England and
Scotland have managed to do, namely to set
the political or material interest in front of
the religious or spiritual interest. Catholics
and Protestants in Ireland are Catholic and
Protestant from head to foot and right
through, and you will never induce them to
forget it. All the same it is not impossible,
with the exercise of a little charity and self-restraint,
for the lion to lie down with the
lamb politically, if not religiously, and this
is what is happening in Ireland. In other
words the Irish Catholics and Protestants
have tacitly agreed that they can live in more
or less amity under one government, providing
that government is neither an Irish Catholic
government nor an Irish Protestant government,
but an alien, impartial and practically
secular government.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>As we have said, the Irish question as a
portent and terror to England is disappearing,
if indeed it has not already disappeared.
For all that, the fact remains that Ireland
in the main is a distressful country. Thackeray’s
Snooks gives it as his opinion that “of
all the <i>wum</i> countwith that I ever wead of,
hang me if Ireland ithn’t the wummetht.”
“Wum,” gay and irrepressible epithet though
it may be, is really and deep down not the
epithet; whereas “distressful” is. There
are people in the world who are born to
misfortune, whose lives are touched with melancholy
from beginning to end, and who cannot
be brought to rejoice even by Act of Parliament.
Ireland’s woes may be said to be
largely temperamental and still more largely
“misfortunate.” Her very position in the
geographical scheme of things is strikingly
lonesome and unhappy. Practically she is the
last outpost of Europe, and a little one at
that. With sheer Atlantic on one side of her,
and sixty miles of sea between herself and<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</SPAN></span>
England, it is impossible for her to get rid
of a certain feeling of isolation which is not
good for the spirits. The soft rain that is always
over her may heighten the green of her
meadows, but it keeps her damp and watery
and preternaturally boggy. She has no harbors
of the kind that are essential to fishermen,
and though some of her ports may be
admirable, there is little in the country that
calls for the use of them. Thus physically
handicapped, Ireland has necessarily produced
a people who are in all respects a people
to themselves. The religious faculty in
them has been highly developed, the commercial
faculty might seem to have been left
out of their composition. By nature they are
a simple, cheerful, unambitious, warm-hearted
race, and they have suffered accordingly. Sir
Francis Drake, or some instrument of his,
planted the potato upon them. James I.
planted the Scotch on them. George III.
gave them a Lord Lieutenant and a Secretary.
The potato, the Scotch, and Dublin<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</SPAN></span>
Castle have been the three bitter curses which
have brought this people to the ghastliest
social and political passes. All three are ineradicable,
but they may be mitigated. This
is what Ireland wants.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II<br/> <span class="smaller">THE SHILLELAGH</span></h2>
<p>As the Yorkshireman is said to sport on
his escutcheon a flea, a fly, and a flitch of
bacon, so in the popular imagination an
Irishman of the real old sort is usually conceived
in association with a pig, a pipe, and
a shillelagh. Rightly considered, one supposes
that the shillelagh is a survival of the
pre-historic club. In any case, it is a weapon
of some character, chiefly notable for its
handiness in the matter of skull cracking,
and believed to be the pride and joy of every
Paddy worth his salt. The shillelagh has
undoubtedly earned for the Irish a reputation
for roguish and heroic delight in battle.
“Tread on the tail of my coat, now,” is
supposed to be forever on Irish lips, with
immediate results in the article of broken<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</SPAN></span>
heads. And when we English wish the use
of a metaphor for rows and scuffles, free
fights and so forth, we have a habit of
remarking that the affair amounted to “a
regular Donnybrook”—Donnybrook, of
course, being a sort of feast of shillelaghs
to which all Ireland was wont annually to
repair. Of the number of shillelaghs in
Ireland at the present moment the blue
books give no account. It seems to me
doubtful whether there are a thousand in
the whole country. One may travel through
Ireland for weeks on end, and come across
nothing of the sort. The only shillelagh
I had the pleasure of seeing in the course
of a recent, lengthy Irish journey was in
the hands of a very ill-clad youth who
looked more like a Lancashire cotton
operative out of work than a broth of a
boy. And the shillelagh in question was
of polished black wood without knots, and
the top of it had a nickel silver knob, like
a beau’s cane. The weapon, indeed, reminded<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</SPAN></span>
one of nothing so much as a Salmon
& Gluckstein, silver-headed, ebony walking-stick,
cut short. The owner proudly assured
me that it was his bit of a blackthorn, and
the finest for miles around. It seems more
than probable that the shillelagh-notion of
an Irishman had at one time something in it.
While Donnybrook Fair has been suppressed,
there can be no getting away from the fact
that there once was a Donnybrook, and a
pretty warm one to boot. Says the poet:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">“Who has e’er had the luck to see Donnybrook Fair?</div>
<div class="verse">An Irishman, all in his glory, is there,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">With his sprig of shillelagh and shamrock so green!</div>
<div class="verse">His clothes spic and span new, without e’er a speck,</div>
<div class="verse">A neat Barcelona tied round his neat neck;</div>
<div class="verse">He goes to a tent, and he spends half a crown,</div>
<div class="verse">He meets with a friend, and for love knocks him down</div>
<div class="verse indent2">With his sprig of shillelagh and shamrock so green!”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p>“And for love knocks him down” is quite
in the “rale ould” spirit. A spectator<SPAN name="FNanchor_1" id="FNanchor_1"></SPAN><SPAN href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</SPAN>
of the Donnybrook held on the 29th August<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</SPAN></span>
1828, described it as follows: “I rode out
again to-day for the first time, to see the
fair at Donnybrook, near Dublin, which is a
kind of popular festival. Nothing, indeed,
can be more national! The poverty, the
dirt, and the wild tumult were as great
as the glee and merriment with which the
cheapest pleasures were enjoyed. I saw
things eaten and drunk with delight, which
forced me to turn my head quickly away,
to remain master of my disgust. Heat and
dust, crowd and stench made it impossible
to stay long; but these do not annoy the
natives. There were many hundred tents,
all ragged, like the people, and adorned
with tawdry rags instead of flags; many
contented themselves with a cross on a
hoop; one had hoisted a dead and half-putrid
cat as a sign. The lowest sort of
rope-dancers and posture-makers exercised
their toilsome vocation on stages of planks,
and dressed in shabby finery, dancing and
grimacing in the dreadful heat till they<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</SPAN></span>
were completely exhausted. A third part
of the public lay, or rather rolled, about
drunk; others ate, screamed, shouted and
fought. The women rode about, sitting two
or three upon an ass, pushing their way
through the crowd, smoked with great delight,
and coquetted with their sweethearts.”
It is notable, however, that our eye-witness
continues: “My reverence for truth compels
me to add, that not the slightest
trace of English brutality was to be perceived;
they were more like French people,
though their gaiety was mingled with more
humor and more genuine good-nature; both
of which are national traits of the Irish, and
are always doubled by poteen.”</p>
<p>Not only is Donnybrook gone, but the
whole atmosphere which rendered Donnybrook
possible appears to have gone with
it. The knocking down of a friend for
love or out of sheer gaiety and volatility
of soul no longer ranks among the Irishman’s
accomplishments. If he fights at all,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</SPAN></span>
which is seldom, he fights now with clenched
teeth and a fierce hatred at his heart, and
usually it is about religion and has nothing
whatever to do with either fun or poteen.
In Dublin no more fighting goes on than
occurs in the average English city of the
same size. In Belfast the fighting is frequent,
but it is eminently Scotch, and therefore
not to be charged against Ireland. Out
of Ulster, there is scarcely any fighting at
all, poteen or no poteen. At the same time
in one city out of Ulster, which I will not
name, I was advised by the proprietor of
an hotel to prolong my stay because “we
are expecting riots on Monday.” Whether
the riots came off or not I do not know,
but I saw no accounts of them in the papers.</p>
<p>It is, of course, common knowledge that,
shillelaghs laid on one side, the Irishman
makes an admirable soldier. In point of
fact he is a much better soldier than the Scot,
though he has never had the credit for
it. The best English generals from Wellington<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</SPAN></span>
to Lord Roberts have been Irishmen,
which is paradox, not a “bull.” The Irish
never run away; in our late wars certain non-Irish
regiments, which were neither English
nor Welsh, did run away. It is significant
that Mr. Kipling’s soldiers—in <cite>Soldiers
Three</cite> for example—are Irish, Cockney, and
Yorkshire, and that the Irishman is set down
for the smartest man. I have seen it remarked,
and I believe it can be justified out
of the military histories, that while the Irish
and English regiments have usually done the
rough and tumble hand-to-hand fighting in
our most famous engagements, the gentlemen
with the bare knees have had the good
fortune to be sent in at the tail end of the
trouble, merely to execute a little ornamental
sweeping up. To the eye of officers and
women “nothing looks nicer” than kilts and
spats. To disarrange them were a pity;
therefore wherever possible we shall hold
them “in reserve.” On the parade ground
and in processions the same thing applies;<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</SPAN></span>
the plaudits of the crowd being invariably
forthcoming for the “bonnie bare-legged
laddies” newly enlisted, mayhap, out of
Glasgow and Dumfries, while “seasoned
Irish warriors” go past without a hand-clap.
But it is the kilts that do it. There may
be nothing in this, and anyway I do not suppose
that the Irish care twopence. But the
points for us to remember while we are on
this part of our subject are, that the shillelagh
is an effete weapon, that in Irish differences
the principle of “a word and a
blow” does not prevail, and that the Irish
soldier is very competent and very courageous.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<div class="footnote">
<p><SPAN name="Footnote_1" id="Footnote_1"></SPAN><SPAN href="#FNanchor_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></SPAN> Prince Pückler Muskau, quoted by Croker.</p>
</div>
</div>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III<br/> <span class="smaller">BLARNEY</span></h2>
<p>Blarney has come to mean a certain
adroitness and winningness of speech supposed
to be peculiar to the Irish. If an
Irishman open his mouth, the English and
Scotch insist on assuming that they are being
treated to blarney. The persons who affect
Messrs. Cook’s tours hang on to the words
of every Irishman they meet, particularly if
he be a jarvey, and wait lovingly and with
bated breath for the same phenomenon.
There are no snakes in Ireland, and, sad
to relate, there is very little blarney. Broadly
speaking, the people seem too poverty-stricken
and too apathetic for talk of any
kind, much less for that sprightly loquacity
and skilfulness of retort which we call blarney.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</SPAN></span>
The Irish jarvey, who is commonly
believed to be an adept in the art, is just
as much a disappointment as the London
cabby. Even in “the noble city of Dublin”
you find, as a rule, that you are being driven
by a dull, flea-bitten, porter-full person, who
has really not two words to say for himself.
That he is a daring and reckless driver I
am quite willing to admit; that he has a passion
for stout and whisky goes without saying;
but that he is a wit, or a humorist, or
a wheedling talker, or in any sense gifted
above ordinary hack-drivers, I deny. In the
smaller centers of population and in the
country districts he is even duller and more
flea-bitten and more taciturn. When he tries
to charge you treble fare, which is his usual
practise, he does it with a snap and gracelessly;
as a pointer-out of local monuments
he lacks both salt and information; he has
no gift for entertainment, and he drinks sullenly
and with a careful eye on the clock.
As for the Irish waiters, grooms, handy men,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</SPAN></span>
railway porters, and kindred creatures, of
whose powers of humorous persuasion and
repartee so much has been written, I have no
hesitation in pronouncing them to be a sad,
uncertain, curt, fiddle-faced company, with
scarcely a smile or the materials for a smile
among them. Their conversation is monosyllabic,
their manner barely civil, their apprehension
slow, and their habit slack and perfunctory.
And they are about as blarnified
as the Trafalgar Square lions. Of the peasantry
I can only say that cheerfulness,
whether of notion or word, is not nowadays
their strong point. They have a great way
of saying “your honor” to you if you are
a man, and “your ladyship’s honor” if you
are a woman; but after that the amount of
blarney to be got out of them is infinitesimal.
Grinding poverty, short-commons, a solitary
life on some dreary mountain-side, and a fine
view of the workhouse, do not tend to
sharpen the Irish tongue any more than they
sharpen the Irish wit. On the whole, therefore,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</SPAN></span>
I am inclined to think that nearly all
the blarney that should be in Ireland has for
some reason or other taken unto itself wings
and flown away. The people are no longer
racy of the soil. Even the gentry, who once
had the credit of being roguish and devil-may-care
to a fault, are become sad and somber
and flat of speech. The milk of human
kindness in the Irish blood appears, in short,
to have gone sour, and in place of the
old disposition to humor we have a tendency
to cynicism and vituperative remark. And
when an Irishman turns cynic or vituperator
he takes a wonderful deal of beating, as witness
the utterances in Parliament and elsewhere
of that choice body of gentlemen
known as the Irish Party, or the proceedings
of the Dublin Corporation, or the lucubrations
of the Irish press. A singular exhibition
of this particular Irish weakness has
quite lately been offered us by no less a person
than Mr. Samuel M. Hussey, who, I
believe, rather prides himself on having been<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</SPAN></span>
described as the best abused man in Ireland.
Of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Hussey writes as
follows:</p>
<p>“If Napoleon was the scourge of Europe,
Mr. Gladstone was the most malevolent
imp of mischief that ever ruined any one
country.… I heard him introduce the
motion [The Land Act of 1881] in the
House of Commons, and his speech was a
truly marvelous feat of oratory. He was interrupted
on all sides of the House, and in
a speech of nearly five hours in length never
once lost the thread of his discourse. As far
as I could judge, he never, even by accident,
let slip one word of truth.</p>
<p>“To do them justice, the Irish Members
gave such an exhibition of blackguardism as
has no parallel on earth, though it earned
but the mildest rebuke from their obsequious
ally, Mr. Gladstone.</p>
<p>“Mr. Gladstone considered that if you
gave a scoundrel a vote it made him into a
philanthropist, whereas events proved it<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</SPAN></span>
made him an eager accessory of murder, outrage,
and every other crime.”</p>
<p>It is only fair to Mr. Hussey to say that
he himself has received as good as he gives.
For example, an Irish demagogue once
treated him to the following:</p>
<p>“Sam Hussey is a vulture with a broken
beak, and he laid his voracious talons on the
conscience of the voters. (Boos.) The ugly
scowl of Sam Hussey came down upon them.
He wanted to try the influence of his dark
nature on the poor people. (Groans.)
Where was the legitimate influence of such a
man? Was it in the white terror he diffused?
Was it not the espionage, the network of
spies with which he surrounded his lands?
He denied that a man who managed property
had for that reason a shadow of a shade of
influence to justify him in asking a tenant
for his vote. What had they to thank him
for?”</p>
<p>A voice: “Rack rents.”</p>
<p>“They knew the man from his boyhood,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</SPAN></span>
from his <i>gossoonhood</i>. He knew him when
he began with a <i>collop</i> of sheep as his property
in the world. (Laughter.) Long before
he got God’s mark on him. It was not
the man’s fault but his misfortune that he
got no education. (Laughter.) He had in
that parish schoolmasters who could teach
him grammar for the next ten years. The
man was in fact a Uriah Heep among Kerry
landlords.” (Cheers.)</p>
<p>Here surely is blarney with a vengeance.
Among a people which was otherwise than
glib of expression such writing and such oratory
would be difficult to evolve. When
presumably cultivated men, for Mr. Hussey’s
assailant in this instance was a priest, allow
themselves to indulge in such childish objurgation,
what wonder is it that the commonalty
should be found to have lost their sense
of what is proper to decent speech and reasonable
argument. The demagogues of Ireland
have indubitably gone a great way toward
ruining the native taste and innate good<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</SPAN></span>
breeding of the Irish people. Like the ha’penny
papers of England they have made
their fortunes and their power by the degradation
of the masses. It is possible that the
poverty of the country left them absolutely
without other weapons wherewith to fight
the haughty national enemy, England; it is
certain that without these demagogues, and
without their raging and blistering words,
and the foul and brutal actions which frequently
followed them, landlordism in Ireland
would never have been scotched. As
it is, the landlord has been put in his place
and the chances of the natural heirs of the
soil have been greatly enhanced. No drastic
revolution of this kind can be brought about
without loss even to the winning side. And
in my opinion not the least of the losses of
the winning side in this matter has been the
transformation of blarney into flatness and
commination. Under the heel of the tyrant
the Irish people retained their faculty for
mirth and mirthful speech; the exhortations<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</SPAN></span>
of the demagogue and the agitator have
brought them freedom, opportunity and a
distinct abatement of spirits. As the world
goes, one is now compelled to reckon Ireland
in the same category that one reckons those
innocuous islets named Man and Wight.
There is more devil in the Isle of Dogs than
all Ireland is for the moment in a position
to show. It is not Ireland’s fault, and it is
not England’s fault; it is the horrible fault
of the nature of things. Whatever has happened
in the past has happened because nothing
better nor worse could in the nature of
things have happened. What will happen
in the future remains to be seen. It may
be peace and the rehabilitation of a kindly,
lively, and interesting people; it may be peace
and the dullest sorts of apathy and decay. In
any case it will be peace. The <cite>Times</cite>, which,
after the <cite>Saturday Review</cite>, is admittedly the
least consistent journal published on this footstool,
has frequently been reproved over the
mouth for remarking years ago that “In a<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</SPAN></span>
short time, a Catholic Celt will be as rare
on the banks of the Shannon as a red Indian
on the shores of Manhattan.” This in effect
was prophecy, though it is a hundred to
one that the <cite>Times</cite> did not know it. If
the resilient and recuperative powers of the
Irish people have not been destroyed there
is hope for the Irish people in Ireland. If
those powers have been destroyed there is
no hope for the Irish people in Ireland.
Blarney even of the vituperative order will
go entirely out, and the low Scotch will come
entirely in. I will do the low Scotch the
credit of saying, that if they had their way,
and no Irish Catholics to contend with, they
could make Ireland a highly successful business
proposition inside a quarter of a century.
Whether they will ever get the chance is
on the knees of the gods. For my own
part, and this is not blarney, I hope sincerely
that they never will.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV<br/> <span class="smaller">WHISKY</span></h2>
<p>The Universe as we know it abounds in
enigmas. And perhaps the most stupendous
enigma of all of them is called whisky. In
Scotland whisky is the universal ichor and
panacea. In Ireland a kind of whisky which
is unquestionably whisky, but not Scotch,
stands in the same friendly relation to the
people. In England we drink both kinds,
lying thus between the devil and the deep
sea. There cannot be the slightest doubt
that the baser sorts of whisky are Scotch, and
that the primal, more edifying and more inspiring
sorts—if we only knew it—are Irish.
He who drinks beer thinks beer. He who
drinks whisky thinks whisky. He who drinks
Scotch whisky becomes as the Scotch people,
who, as all men know, are a hectoring, swaggering,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</SPAN></span>
dull-witted, bandy-legged, plantigrade
folk. He who drinks Irish whisky becomes
as the Irish, who should be nimble, and neat,
and vivacious, and thriftless, and careless, and
lavish, and decent, and otherwise gracious.
The wise man, of course, will let both varieties
pass by him, excepting that he take them
in thimblefuls, and then only in the shape of
nightcaps. And lest the United Kingdom
Alliance misconstrue what I have now said,
let me here say roundly and flatly and out of
a good heart—A plague on both your whiskies!
The Scotch, it is true, is better to your
taste; but the Irish has the merit of being
better to your ethical or nobler parts. The
effect of Irish whisky upon Ireland is a matter
that might fittingly form the subject of
six or eight stout volumes, bound in calf and
prefaced by a life of Father Mathew. The
appealing and startling beauty of Irish whisky
as a potable spirit appears to lie in the fact
that it has never done Ireland any harm.
The number of whisky-sodden persons in<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</SPAN></span>
Scotland and the number of whisky-sodden
persons in Ireland stand in the ratio of ten
to one. In Scotland the red nose and the
pimply face abound. Outside that fearsome
area known as the Diamond, there is scarcely
a red nose or a pimply face in all Ireland.
All the best Scotch whisky is produced in legitimate
distilleries, and all the best Irish
whisky, with due respect, of course, to Dunville,
Jamieson et hoc genus, comes out of
little places which are unbeknownst to the
King’s officers of Excise. This, however, is
merely extraordinary, paradoxical, and inexplicable,
and has nothing whatever to do with
ethnology. But to return to the point: whisky
in Scotland is a religion, an institution, a
tradition, and a national reproach. Whisky
in Ireland, on the other hand, is an accomplishment,
an ornament, a mellowness, a kindness,
a simplicity, and a joy forever. The true
Irish people drink it wisely as the Gaul takes
his wine. When you see a number of drunken
persons in Ireland, you may safely assume<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</SPAN></span>
that they are Orangemen and of Scotch descent.
The Irish of Ireland do not get drunk;
which means that they neither roister in bars
nor soak alcoholically at home. According
to Mr. Hussey, Irish whisky is “vilely adulterated,”
both by the publican and “in some
of the factories.” In support of this statement
he tells the following story: “On one
occasion a Killorglin publican was in jail, and
his father asked for an interview because he
wanted the recipe for manufacturing the special
whisky for Puck Fair. It has been a constant
practise to prepare this blend, but the
whisky does not keep many days, as may be
gathered from the recipe, which the prisoner
without hesitation dictated to his parent: ‘A
gallon of fresh, fiery whisky, a pint of rum,
a pint of methylated spirit, two ounces of
corrosive sublimate, and three gallons of water.’”
Which is to suggest that the Irish have
no palates, and that like the gentleman who
ate fly-papers in mistake for oatcake, they are
poison-proof. Frankly, I should be disposed<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</SPAN></span>
to take Mr. Hussey’s recipe with great reserve.
It is amusing, doubtless, but a chemist
would shake his head over it. Practically,
the only undesirable drinking which goes on
in Ireland proper is done at wakes; but even
Mr. Hussey admits that wakes are on the
decline, and not by any means the occasions
for over-indulgence which they once were.
It is all very well to visit a country town and
single out half a dozen notorious drunkards
with the view of proving that the Irish people
are a drunken people. I say that the Irish
people in the lump are a sober people, though
they may not be teetotalers. I will go further
and admit that they have a wonderful
appreciation for the wine of the country, and
that at times some of them even get hearty.
But this is not to say that drink rages in Ireland
as it rages in Scotland, or, for that matter,
as it rages in the poorer quarters of our
English cities. And I believe further that,
taking the whisky of Ireland all round, it is
a much sounder and less sophisticated spirit<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</SPAN></span>
than the bulk of the whisky consumed in
Scotland and England. Mr. Hussey assures
us that the increase of lunacy in Ireland has
been pronounced by the Committee which sat
on the question in Dublin to be mainly due,
not only to excessive drinking, but to the assimilation
of adulterated spirits. With all
respect to the conclusions of this Committee,
I do not think that those conclusions
are borne out by the facts. Lunacy in Ireland
is the direct outcome of the almost
unthinkable poverty and squalor of the greater
part of the population. When you couple
with poverty, want of occupation, a solitary
life, and an enervating climate, not to mention
the melancholy brooding propensities of
the Irish peasant, it is no wonder that lunacy
claims many victims. To allege that because
a lunatic has been in the habit of consuming
a considerable quantity of poteen his lunacy
is necessarily due to poteen, seems to me to
be begging the question. If you could alleviate
the poverty and inaction to which the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</SPAN></span>
Irish peasant is condemned from the day of
his birth to the day of his death, you would
have gone a long way toward eliminating
lunacy from Ireland, and at the same time
I believe you would find that you had not
seriously reduced the consumption of whisky,
the fact being that the consumption per head
of the population is reasonable. In this, as
in many other respects, Ireland has been
grossly misrepresented, both by serious and
humorous writers. The humorous writers,
indeed, have been the graver offenders.
Many of them seem incapable of conceiving
the Irish character in any terms but those of
hilarious and flagrant alcoholism. It is a
profound mistake, and we shall be helped
materially in our endeavors to comprehend
and placate our unfortunate sister kingdom,
if we dismiss forthwith from our minds the
idea that she is utterly and perceptibly given
over to inordinate drinking.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V<br/> <span class="smaller">THE PATHRIOT</span></h2>
<p>Ireland has produced more patriots than
any other country under the sun. The names
of them are legion, and from Wolfe Tone
down to Dr. Tanner they have all been men
of reasonable parts. O’Connell, Emmet,
Butt, and Parnell shine out perhaps as the
greatest of them. The smaller fry do not
require enumeration. But if I mistake not,
while it is the fashion to flatter every Irishman
who has done anything at all for Ireland
with the general title of pathriot, it is
only within comparatively recent times that
the authentic pathriot has come into being.
The fact that in England people are unkind
enough to call him an agitator is of small consequence.
The pathriot is singularly and peculiarly
Irish. There is nothing like him in
England, and there never will be anything<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</SPAN></span>
like him; for he comes like water and like
wind he goes. He begins anywhere—he may
be a butcher, a publican, a schoolmaster or a
farmer—he attains a seat in the House of
Commons, and a certain prominence in the
press, and he ends nowhere. Irish editors
worship him for a season, then they wax critical
of him, then they forget him altogether.
Mr. Timothy Healy is a good type of the
pathriot at his best. He has accomplished
great things for Ireland, and achieved for
himself a reputation in Parliament for a sort
of savage brilliance. But there are not a
dozen men in England, Ireland, Scotland or
Wales to-day who care twopence where he is,
or could tell you what becomes of him when
Parliament is not sitting. He will end obscurely,
inasmuch as it is the fate of Irish
pathriots so to end. As the chief of the
pathriots of the less glorious type, who however
succeed in making the best of both countries,
we may instance Mr. T. P. O’Connor.
Mr. O’Connor is an Irishman and a Nationalist,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</SPAN></span>
but he has shaken the dust of Ireland
from his feet, and he sits for the Scotland
division of Liverpool, and has done himself
rather well as a promoter of heterogeneous
newspapers in London. With Mr. O’Connor,
however, we shall deal fully elsewhere.
Only for the sake of symmetry, do not let us
forget that he is a pathriot of the finest water.
The vital defect in the character of the Irish
pathriot, looking at him squarely, is that in
recent times at any rate he has never been a
statesman. A pathriot with the proper statesmanlike
qualities might, it is true, have been
altogether swamped by the frothy eloquence
and wild demands of the main body of pathriots.
But such a one, if the Irish could only
have managed to find him and keep him
going, whether in the House of Commons
or on English platforms, would in the long
run have made a vast difference to her interests.
It may be argued that Ireland did actually
find a statesman in Mr. Gladstone. On
the other hand it is abundantly evident that<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</SPAN></span>
however sincere and admirable Mr. Gladstone’s
proposals for the betterment of the
country may have been, they were not based
on anything like an exact, or for that matter
even a working, knowledge of its necessities
and requirements. As for Mr. Parnell, it is
no disrespect to him to say of him, in full
view of his amazing career, that he was not a
statesman even in a small way. His aloofness,
haughtiness and chilliness of temper
precluded him from a really effective part or
lot in the faction which he led, and ruled with
a rod of iron, and, for himself, he had not
sufficient spirits and imagination to carve out
an independent and statesmanlike policy.
Mr. Parnell made a great name and no little
dust in the world, yet the verdict of history
upon him will be that he was neither an
O’Connell nor an Isaac Butt, and that he
failed to go anything like so far as might
have been expected of him. For the rest of
the pathriots, the remnant, as it were, of the
National party, they do not matter, and they<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</SPAN></span>
know it. In the House of Commons they are
absolutely without other than adventitious
power. The English party system happened
to afford them certain mechanical advantages
of which they are never tired of boasting.
Their sarcasms and humors and occasional
displays of temper bring them from time to
time a passing notoriety. But taking them as
a body they are inept, irresponsible, feeble and
negligible; constituting, indeed, a standing
monument to the undesirable vagaries which
might be looked for in the event of their being
granted that much desired “little place of
their own” on College Green. In fine, the
Irish pathriot of our own times will not wash.
He means well by his country, and well
enough by himself, but he has no balance,
and is entirely blind to the falsehood of extremes.
It is curious to note how easily Ireland
is satisfied. In pretty well all matters
that concern her closely her standard of requirement
is barely middling. She knows
how to be grateful to the merest nonentities,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</SPAN></span>
and she can bestow reverence and undying
fame upon persons who are little removed
from mediocrity. The modern pathriot has
never risen above the foot-hills; yet for Ireland
he stands upon the pinnacle, and they
say Hosanna to him. It is a sign of the times,
however, that Erin is beginning to be alive
to the fact that in the main the pathriot is
just one of those persons with whom she can
very well afford to dispense. Vaulting ambition
hath rather overleaped itself in the matter
of these gentry, and their posturings and
screamings and clenchings of the fist are no
longer received with altogether unanimous
applause. That there is reason in all things
is a simple lesson which pathriots who are
not wholly careless of their future will do
well to learn. Their well-worn parrot-cries
of “tyranny,” “oppression,” “cowardice,”
“robbery,” “murder,” and so forth are become
just a trifle stale, flat, and unprofitable.
Irishmen are weary of shrieks; they desire
a trifle of sobriety and good sense.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI<br/> <span class="smaller">ORANGEMEN</span></h2>
<p>In matters Irish it is quite usual to talk
of aiming at the manifestly impossible. If
we could get rid of the priests, say some, Ireland
would be a happy country; but nobody
suggests how it is to be done, because everybody
knows full well that it cannot be done.
And nobody pretends to be quite sure that
benefits would result if it were done. For
myself, I believe that one of the most salutary
things that could be done for Ireland at
the present moment would be to get rid of
the Orangemen. Though they are, of course,
a much older organization, they occupy in
Ireland pretty much the same position as the
Passive Resisters occupy in this country. In
other words, while they proclaim themselves
to be the friends of liberty, they are in reality<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</SPAN></span>
nothing more nor less than the friends of intolerance
and tyranny.</p>
<div class="blockquote">
<p>“A Grand Orange demonstration will be
held in Donegal on Tuesday, 12th July 1898.
Who fears to speak of Derry, Aughrim, and
the Boyne? Papists, stand aside! We conquered
you before, and can do so again. Our
motto still is: Down with Home Rule, Hurrah
for King William, and to Hell with the
Pope!”</p>
</div>
<p>This is a sample Orange proclamation
quoted by Mr. M. J. F. M’Carthy in <cite>Five
Years in Ireland</cite>. Now seventy-five per cent.
of the population of Ireland are Roman
Catholics; what is more, they are Roman
Catholics of the devoutest and most devoted
type. Probably the Orangemen do not number
ten per cent. of the population; yet they
are allowed to insult the Head of the Roman
Church in the grossest manner, with absolute
impunity. If any secret society or other body
in Ireland were to post a notice in Donegal<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</SPAN></span>
to-morrow announcing a grand national demonstration,
and winding up with some such
ejaculatory remark as “To Hell with Mr.
Balfour,” there would be arrests and terms
of imprisonment and howls from every corner
of England. It goes without saying that
the Pope is not Mr. Balfour, and when His
Holiness is wished “to Hell” nobody is
really a penny the worse. But can it be
claimed for a moment that there is either
justice or reason in allowing such insults to
be placarded in the midst of a Catholic population?
Nobody above the level of a Scotch
Presbyterian would attempt to justify anything
of the kind. It may be that when the
Orange lodges were founded they had a use
and were necessary for the protection of the
Protestant religion against the wiles of Roman
Catholicism. At the present moment they
serve no purpose whatever that is not essentially
evil. In point of fact they are organized
centers for the encouragement of bibulous
sentiment and the open flaunting of the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</SPAN></span>
power of an ill-conditioned minority over a
decent and fairly tolerant majority. The
Protestant religion in Ireland must be in a
distinctly parlous condition if it requires any
such backing or any such “protection.” The
fact is that nothing of the sort is necessary,
or believed to be necessary, even by the more
bigoted Irish Protestants. That being so,
Orangeism would seem to be ripe for extirpation.
If the English Government were as
secular as it is commonly held to be, the Orange
lodges would have short shrift. It is
their supposed connection with religious liberty
which shields them from suppression.
Yet every Irishman, Protestant or Catholic,
knows well that the religious element in Orangeism
is little more than pure farce. The
entire Orange forces of Ireland could not
muster a couple of saints, lay or clerical, to
save their lives. At the present time the Orange
faction is literally powerless to do anything
but create disturbances which are, in
effect, street rows of the most vulgar and ill-considered<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</SPAN></span>
nature. The stoning of Cardinals
belongs properly to the same order of sport
as the baiting of Jews. Neither pastime
would be tolerated for a moment in England.</p>
<p>Why the Northern Irish should be indulged
passes comprehension. The majority in Ireland
is Green and Catholic as opposed to a
tiny minority of Orange and Protestant. The
majority has an admitted right to its way in
England—why not in Ireland? Much has
been said as to the “sinfulness” and “wickedness”
of Mr. Gladstone in disestablishing
the Irish Church. I am not sure that even
the Catholics are quite convinced that Mr.
Gladstone’s action was wise. But one thing
is certain, namely, that the disestablishment
of the Irish Church was eminently just, having
regard to the relative position of religious
parties in the country. The suppression of
the Orange lodges, or, at any rate, the penalization
of Orange demonstrations, ought to
have followed as a matter of course. There<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</SPAN></span>
will never be real peace nor content in Ireland
till Orangeism is deprived of its present
scandalous powers of annoyance, disturbance
and tyranny. Toleration on both sides, Catholic
and Protestant, is the only hope for a
“United Ireland,” or for an Ireland that is
to work out its own social and political salvation.
And you cannot have tolerance where
you have an organization of chartered reactionaries
who, in spite of their alleged religious
purpose, are little removed, whether in
temper or intention, from the common Hooligans
of London. The Irish Catholic Church,
which, after all, possesses some say over its
adherents, has, during late years, done all
that lies in its power to prevent collisions between
Catholics and Orangemen; it avoids as
far as is possible the occasions of such collision;
it is careful neither to provoke nor
challenge, and in practise it literally “turns
the other cheek.” The Irish Protestant
Church is equally anxious for peace and
equally assiduous in its efforts to secure it.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</SPAN></span>
Yet Orangeism flaunts itself at large and
without let or hindrance. It furnishes forth
“riots o’ Monday” at its own sweet will,
and hoots, and mobs, and waves crimson
handkerchiefs, and throws stones, and breaks
windows and heads to its heart’s content.
There is really nobody to say it nay. Authority
stands by and winks, for is it not the
great principle of Protestantism that is being
protected? And are not these same Orangemen
vigorous and violent anti-Home-Rulers?
Herein, indeed, you have the true inwardness
of the modern English attitude toward King
William’s men. The domestic quietude of
Ireland and the religious freedom of two-thirds
of her population cannot be of the
remotest consequence compared with the
maintenance of the Union. That Ireland no
longer seeks Home Rule does not matter.
Orangeism has severed the Unionists passing
well in the day that is just past. Let it reap
its reward in the shape of leave and license.
It deserves well of England; who shall raise<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</SPAN></span>
a finger against it? And, moreover, it is
Scotch, and the Scotch are the backbone of
Ireland, as of England—manners and morals
and all other decent things on one side. As
I indicated at the beginning of this chapter,
to attempt to rid Ireland of Orangemen were
to attempt the impossible. But to deprive
Orangeism of English approval and countenance
is possible. Break up the lodges, bring
to bear on the suppression of Orange demonstrations
and Orange disturbances one tithe
of the forces you brought to bear against
Irish nationalism, and you will have gone a
great way toward removing the last obstacles
to the peace and contentment of the Irish
people as a body.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII<br/> <span class="smaller">THE LOW SCOTCH</span></h2>
<p>I have no desire to offer in the present
pages a re-hash of a former work of mine,
which is said to have provoked the Scotch to
the point of laughter. But I do desire to
assert that, in my humble opinion, it is the
Scotch, or alien population of Ireland, which
has been at the root of Ireland’s principal
troubles throughout the past century. Ulster
may be a fine kingdom, the wealthiest, most
industrious, and the wisest and happiest in
the country, if you like. Yet it is Ulster that
bars the way in all matters that make for
the real good of Ireland. Every proper
Irishman knows this, and Ulstermen will be
at no pains to deny it. Rather are they
disposed to glory in it and to brag about
it. Ireland, they will tell you, is their<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</SPAN></span>
country. It is they who have made it, they
who have saved it, they who have enriched,
beautified and adorned it. They point to the
linen industry and to the shipbuilding industry;
they crack about Belfast and Portadown,
and about “eminent Ulstermen in every walk
of life.” There would be no Ireland at all
if it were not for themselves. They rule Ireland.
What Ireland wants she may have, if
it pleases Ulster. What Ireland does not
want she must have, if Ulster so much as
nod. That, at any rate, is the view of Ulster,
the view of the thrifty, douce Scotch bodies
whose fathers got gifts of other people’s
lands from James I. of England and VI. of
Scotland, and whose sons go up and down
and to and fro upon the earth, calling themselves
“Irishmen of Scotch descent.” There
are no Irishmen of Scotch descent. And
Ulstermen are not Irishmen unless their descent
be Irish. Failing this, they are simply
interlopers, or, at best, colonists and plantation
men, and they had best put the fact<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</SPAN></span>
in their pipes and smoke it. Nobody can
deny that it was a bad day for Ireland when
they came grabbing and grubbing to her
shores, just as it was a bad day for England
when she “took up” with them. They
got Ulster for nothing, and they have kept
it for “that same.” They have lived and
waxed fat on Irish plunder, and the whole
force of English legislation has been directed
toward maintaining them in their place, fostering
their projects, pampering and propitiating
them, and “protecting” them against
the wicked, degraded, unreasonable Irish
outside. Nor have they been content to confine
their greedy attention to their own
proper “kingdom,” which is not theirs.
Where the carcass is, there will the vulture
be; and where there is a soft job, or obvious
pickings, there you will find a Scotchman.
So that throughout Ireland, Scotchmen have
been scattered wherever the Government
could find a place for one. There is scarcely
an office, sub-office, or sub-deputy office worth<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</SPAN></span>
the having in all Ireland which has not been
made the perquisite of a Protestant Scotchman.
Even the Congested Districts Board
employs Scotch factors, and Thom’s Almanac
is little more than a catalogue of Scotch
patronymics. And the pride and insolence
and unfairness of them! From a booklet
called <cite>The Scot in Ulster</cite>, written by a Scotchman,
and published, if you please, by Blackwood’s
of Edinburgh, I take the following:
“Their English and Scotch origin seems to
me to give to the men of Ulster an unalienable
right to protest, as far as they are concerned,
against the policy of separation from
Great Britain to which the Irish, with the
genius for nicknames which they possess, at
present give the name of Home Rule.”
Could sophistry, craft, subtlety, disingenuousness,
or the Scotch genius for cunning misrepresentation
go further? To say that when the
Irish people have said Home Rule they meant
separation, is to promulgate a deliberate and
wily untruth. The Irish people proper invariably<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</SPAN></span>
mean what they say, no more and no
less. Home Rule never meant more nor
less to the Irish than “a parliament on college
green.” It was the Scotch, and the
Scotch alone, who set up the cry of “separation”
for a bugbear and a bogy wherewith
to frighten the timorous English ruler into
stubborn acquiescence in the Scotch view of
Irish affairs. Yet here we have a Scotchman
assuring us in cold print that Home Rule is
merely an Irish “nickname” for “separation.”
I note with considerable satisfaction,
however, that, as Scotchmen will, the author
of <cite>The Scot in Ulster</cite> proceeds religiously to
give away the whole Scotch-Irish question.
“For centuries,” says he, “the Scot had been
wont to wander forth over Europe in search
of <i>adventure</i>. [The italic is ours.] As a
rule, he turned his steps where fighting was
to be had, <i>and the pay for killing was reasonably
good</i>. [Again the italics are ours.]…
These Scots who have flocked from
Leith, or Crail, or Berwick to seek fortune,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</SPAN></span>
in peace or war, on the Continent of Europe
were mostly the young and adventurous, for
whom the old home life had become too narrow.
<i>They took with them little save their
own stout hearts and their national long
heads</i>. [These, too, are our italics.]…
The time arrived at last, however, when war
with England ceased, and internal strife became
less bloody, and Scotland began to be
too small for her rapidly growing population,
<i>for in those days food did not necessarily
come where there were mouths to consume it</i>.
[Italics—of our own—which famine-stricken
Ireland may fittingly ponder.] Then the
Scots, true to the race from which they sprung—for
‘Norman, and Saxon, and Dane are
we’ [think of it!]<SPAN name="FNanchor_2" id="FNanchor_2"></SPAN><SPAN href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</SPAN>—began to go forth, like
the northern hordes in days of yore, the
women and the children along with the
bread-winners, and crossed the seas, and settled
in new lands, and were ‘fruitful and<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</SPAN></span>
multiplied and replenished the earth,’ until
the globe is circled round with colonies which
are of our blood, and which love and cherish
the old ‘land of the mountain and the
flood.’” [Tut, tut!] And now mark us:
“It was in the beginning of the seventeenth
century that the first of these swarms crossed
the narrowest of the seas which surround
Scotland; it went out from the Ayrshire and
Galloway ports, and settled in the north of
Ireland. The numbers which went were
large. They left Scotland at a time when
she was deeply moved by the great Puritan
revival. They took with them their
Scottish character and their Scottish Calvinism.
[Clearly they had both hands full!]
They founded the Scottish colony in Ulster.
Thus it comes to pass ‘That the foundation
of Ulster society is Scottish. It is the solid
granite on which it rests.’ [Glory be!] The
history of this Scottish colony seems worth
telling, for it is a story of which any Scotsman
at home or abroad may be proud.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</SPAN></span>
[Where is my crimson handkerchief?] Its
early history is <i>quaint</i> and <i>interesting</i> [our
italics]; there is much <i>suffering</i> and <i>oppression</i>
in the story of the succeeding years [our italics];
but there are flashes of brightness to relieve
the gloom. <i>The men which this race of
Scotsmen has produced are worthy of the parent
stock; the contribution which this branch
of the Scottish nation has made to the progress
of civilization proves that it has not forgotten
the old ideals; the portion of Ireland
which these Scotsmen HOLD is so prosperous
and contented that it permits our statesmen
to forget that it is part of that most
‘distressful’ country.</i>” I venture to thank
Heaven and St. Patrick that the statements
we have last italicized and the word we have
put in capital letters embody the truth, the
whole truth and nothing but the truth. Examine
them, O sons of Erin, and take heed
that You are the people, and that the Scotch
are but the sons of Belial and Astoreth.
What has holy Ireland to do with these vapors,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</SPAN></span>
these swaggerings, these smitings of
righteous breasts? Who be the grubby,
grimy, gallowayan, grasping, governmental
hucksters that so by implication and innuendo
contemn You, the proper and legitimate
owners of Ulster? Ask of the winds, which
far around strew Scotchmen and the devil on
the fair places of the earth. You are innocent
to put up with it. You fought the landlords
and beat them hollow. “We conquered you
before, and can do so again!” Be done with
this Scotch obsession. Good can come out of
Ireland and Irishmen, as well as out of Ulster
and Scotchmen. Lo, that green island is
yours, not theirs. Seven-tenths of it are in
your hands to do with as you will. “There
is not, perhaps, another country on the face
of the globe where more good, solid work is
waiting to be done, where greater capacities
lie dormant, yet where trifling of all kinds so
abounds.” That is the verdict of an Irishman
and an Irish Catholic upon you. In
sober truth you groan, as England groans,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</SPAN></span>
under the Scotch superstition. Nobody can
be prosperous in Ireland save Scotchmen.
Nobody can manufacture but Scotchmen, nobody
can farm but Scotchmen. The view is
entirely false. Encourage it no longer; remember
who you are, and make an end of
trifling.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<div class="footnote">
<p><SPAN name="Footnote_2" id="Footnote_2"></SPAN><SPAN href="#FNanchor_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></SPAN> In point of fact the Scotch are neither Norman,
Saxon, Dane nor good red-herring, but sheer Scotch.</p>
</div>
</div>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII<br/> <span class="smaller">PRIESTCRAFT</span></h2>
<p>Are there too many priests in Ireland?
Yes. Is Dublin “black with them”? Yes.
Do they appear to be as frequent on the
country side as crows? Yes. Are they extorting
from the Irish people money which
is sorely needed for secular purposes? Yes.
Here you have four pertinent questions, which
invariably crop up whenever Ireland is discussed,
together with the average answers to
them. “It is the priests!” cry both well and
ill informed. According to the latest critic—who,
it seems, once occupied the somewhat
superfluous position of “literary editor of the
<cite>Daily Mail</cite>”—“one of the heaviest drags
upon the life of Ireland is the religious vocation.
The monasteries and nunneries prosper
and increase, choking and interfering with<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</SPAN></span>
the circulation of labor and of industry in the
country.” Also, “it is my profound conviction
that a large proportion of the present
misery of Ireland is not only bound up with,
but is actually a result of the country’s religion.”
Also, “the houses of the people are
so indecently poor and small; the houses of
the Church are so indecently rich and large.
Out of the dirt and decay they rise, proud
and ugly and substantial, as though to inform
the world that at least one thing is not dying
and despondent, but keeps its loins girded
and its lamps trimmed.” This, roughly, is
the indictment. Appended are some of the
figures upon which it is based. Mr. Michael
M’Carthy, himself a Catholic, says, “A cardinal,
3 archbishops, 25 bishops, 2 mitred
abbots, and 2,722 secular priests, together
with a host of regular priests of all the different
Orders, such as Jesuits, Franciscans,
Vincentians, Holy Ghost, Carmelites, Passionists,
Augustinians, Mary Immaculate,
Dominicans, Cistercians, Marists, Redemptorists<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</SPAN></span>
and so forth, all of whom flourish in
Ireland—such is the force which constitutes
the formidable clerical army of the Catholic
Church in Ireland, and its auxiliary forces
are the numerous Orders of nuns, Christian
brothers, lay brothers attached to the regular
Orders, and so forth; together with the great
body of Catholic National teachers, male and
female, who are under the control of the
priests, and teach catechism in the churches;
the parish priests, as managers of the parochial
National Schools, having the power of
dismissing the teachers.” “May it not be
said of this great organization,” adds Mr.
M’Carthy, “that ‘it is on a scale such as
few nations would be able and willing to
afford’?”</p>
<p>To dispose of the indictment first, we may
quote a little further from the author of it.
He writes: “So far as they are individually
concerned, they [the priests] are in many
cases the true friends of the people. They
help them in their affairs, settle their disputes,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</SPAN></span>
claim for them their rights, comfort them in
their sorrows, admonish, encourage, cherish
and watch over them. This is at the best.
At the worst they are hard and cruel, selfish
and unjust, over-eating and over-drinking—a
grotesque and monstrous company. But
these are the minority; and on the whole the
priests perform the duties of a dreary life as
well as could be expected of a narrow and
half-educated class of men.” Now, if this
means anything at all it means that the person
responsible for it believes that the Catholic
priesthood of Ireland is socially useful
and necessary. The minority of its members
are “hard and cruel, selfish and unjust,”
which is true of the minority in other priesthoods
besides the Irish. But the majority
“are the true friends of the people, helping
them in their affairs, settling their disputes,
claiming for them their rights, comforting
them in their sorrows, admonishing, encouraging,
cherishing and watching over them.”
How the majority manages to accomplish so<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</SPAN></span>
much, if it is composed of a “narrow and
half-educated class of men,” passes comprehension;
but we have the fact that it manages
it, which is satisfactory. Further, our friend
omits, in the plenitude of his deprecation, to
mention that the “religious vocation” in
Ireland is by no means the softest, easiest and
rosiest of vocations, amounting, indeed, to a
species of spiritual and physical servitude of
the severest kind; and that the religious
Orders, so far as they may be represented
in “monasteries and nunneries,” are self-supporting,
subsisting austerely on the labor
of their own hands, and devoting themselves
to the most arduous charitable and educational
work without fee or reward. And as
to “indecently rich” houses of the Church,
such an epithet as applied to the Catholic
churches of Ireland is quite preposterous.
There is no “indecently rich” Catholic
church in all Ireland. That there are Protestant
churches with incomes amounting to a
comfortable number of hundreds per annum<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</SPAN></span>
and not half a dozen souls in the way of a
<i lang="la">bona-fide</i> congregation may be granted; but
the Catholic church with as little as £100 a
year and no congregation does not exist.
Neither can it be maintained that the Irish
Catholic churches are “indecently rich” in
the matters of architecture or adornment—the
long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, gorgeous
windows, splendid altars and vessels,
or other elaborate fitments, being the exception
and not the rule. Indeed, our author
himself complains that “the ugliness of the
churches in Ireland is revolting to the healthy
sense,” and that the “decorations” which
“enshrine the mysteries of the Mass” are
“cheap” and “hideous,” so that on his own
showing “indecently rich” somehow fails to
fit in.</p>
<p>Now for the figures. The population of
Ireland at the last census was, roughly,
4,500,000, and the population of England
and Wales 32,500,000. In Ireland there
are 3 archbishops and 25 bishops, without<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</SPAN></span>
reckoning Episcopalians. In England and
Wales there are 2 archbishops, 33 bishops, 8
assistant bishops, and 27 bishops suffragan,
without reckoning 1 Roman Catholic archbishop
and 15 bishops, and the chiefs of the
Wesleyan Methodist, Methodist New Connexion,
Primitive Methodist, Baptist, Congregational,
Free Church, Salvation Army,
Church Army, Calvinistic, Unitarian, Catholic
Apostolic, and a host of other bodies. In
the matter of hierarchy, therefore, Ireland is
not exactly overburdened, even if it be admitted
that she should take her pattern from
England. Then, as against Ireland’s 2,722
secular priests, England boasts the amazing
total of 23,000 beneficed and unbeneficed
clergy, plus from 7,000 to 10,000 Nonconformist
ministers and 20,000 Salvation Army
“Officers.” So that, at a moderate computation,
while there is one priest or minister
of religion to every 500 of the population
in England, there is only one priest to every
800 of the population of Ireland. The<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</SPAN></span>
ratios indicated may not be exact, but they
are based on Whitaker and pretty near the
mark. Taken another way the position
amounts to this. In an English townlet of
from 3,000 to 4,000 population you will
find, as a rule, a couple of vicars, three or
four curates, a Wesleyan minister, a Baptist
minister, a Congregational minister, a Catholic
priest and a couple of Salvationists. In
an Irish townlet of the same size you have
possibly six Catholic priests and a solitary
Episcopalian. Dreadful, is it not? Being
mainly of one sort, as it were, the priests
of Ireland appear to be much thicker on the
ground than the clergy and ministers of England.
But it is nothing more nor less than
an optical illusion—one of those many illusions
upon which judgments about Ireland
are usually formed. As to places of worship,
it has been charged against the Irish Church
that she builds too much. “The traveler
walking or driving across the wastes of
that empty land,” says the author previously<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</SPAN></span>
quoted, “will nearly always find that the
first thing to break the monotony of the horizon
is a spire or tower; and when he arrives
at the desolate little huddle of cabins or cottages
that makes a town he will find, dominating
and shadowing it, the Catholic chapel.
Sometimes, indeed, the buildings are poor
and rough: but these are becoming fewer and
fewer, and are now gradually, even in the
poorest districts, being replaced by structures
strangely out of keeping with the ruinous
poverty around them. The last few years
have seen in Ireland a great activity in the
building of these chapels; the very slight increase
which has taken place in the standard
of living has made the movement possible.”
Assuming this to be a just statement of the
case, is it not equally true of our own England?
Has not the building of churches,
chapels and general places of worship proceeded
as merrily in the poorer districts of
the larger English towns during the past decade
as ever it did in Ireland? Where can<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</SPAN></span>
you turn in England without seeing a spire?
Where is the townlet, or suburb, or slum that
has not got its brand new red-brick Anglican
church, or its ruddy, stone-fronted Bethesda,
or its castellated, prison-like Salvation Barracks?
Furthermore, the English temples
are seldom half full. You have to provide
a sort of religious variety entertainment, with
services of song, magic-lantern sermons, brass
bands and the like to get the people in at all;
whereas the churches of Ireland are full to
overflowing, and the congregations do not
require the lure of a steady succession of
novelties, or, indeed, any departure from the
prescribed offices.</p>
<p>The fact is that the Irish Church and the
Irish priesthood have been cruelly and brutally
maligned by pretty well every sand-blind
writer and carpet-bagging politician who has
visited the country. We have blamed upon
the Church poverty and distress and ignorance
and squalor which are the direct outcome
of bad government and not of priestly<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</SPAN></span>
cupidity. We have said in effect to our Irish
brethren, “You are too indigent to have a
religion, or churches, or spiritual guidance.
Every penny you pay for these things is sheer
waste of money, particularly as it keeps our
rents down. And inasmuch as you are of one
Church and one mind—which is a thing unthinkable
in this free and enlightened England—you
are slaves and soulless.” But the
Church of Ireland goes on its way, and in
the words of Archbishop Croke, which by the
way Mr. M’Carthy, Irish Catholic, quotes
with a sneer, “[The Irish priesthood] holds
possession of the people’s hearts to a degree
unknown to any other priesthood in the
world.”</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX<br/> <span class="smaller">MORALS</span></h2>
<p>For all practical purposes, and in spite of
everything that can be brought against her,
Ireland may be justly described as a moral
country, even as Scotland is essentially an
immoral country and England a middling
one. It is true that we live in a time when
morality has ceased to matter and virtue is
become a reproach. The world has divided
itself into two camps—the one scientific,
the other artistic. Neither of them professes
the smallest concern with morals. We
have invented new and most blessedly euphonious
names for the old wickednesses. Robbery
is called competition; lying, smartness;
effrontery, pluck; cowardice, courtesy; avarice,
thrift; cunning, wisdom, and so forth.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</SPAN></span>
And when it pleases us we can e’en find
hard names for the Christian graces. The
faith of Ireland, for example, has been discovered
to be fanaticism, bigotry, paganism,
materialism, idolatry, and I know not what
besides; her charity is credited to her for
pusillanimity; her patience and long-suffering
for indolence and apathy. What wonder,
therefore, that the very chastity upon which
her national morals are based should at
length have been assailed. Hearken to the
inspired ex-literary editor of the <cite>Daily
Mail</cite>:</p>
<p>“The crowning achievement of the
Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, the thing
which is unparalleled elsewhere in the world,
is the complete and awful (<i>sic</i>) chastity of
the people. There is many a country district
where that incident which in England and
Scotland is regarded merely as a slight misfortune
is unknown and unimagined by the
people. I have seen a man, the father of a
grown-up family, blanch and hold up his<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</SPAN></span>
hands at the very name of it, as though even
to breath it were a blasphemy. And this,
in itself a good thing, has reached such a
point that it has become a dreadful evil. It
is no longer a virtue, it is a blight.”</p>
<p>And the dear young gentleman goes on to
assert that it is the chastity of the Irish
people which fills Irish lunatic asylums, and
exclaims dithyrambically: “There may be
no bastards in Ireland, but a hundred bastards
would, in Ireland’s peculiar circumstances,
be a more gracious and healthy sign
than one lunatic.” Here surely is wisdom of
the highest and most delightful type. We
have already seen that the increase of lunacy
in Ireland has been pronounced, by the committee
which sat on the question in Dublin,
to be mainly due to excessive drinking and
the assimilation of adulterated spirits. The
committee may not have been right; for my
own part I believe it was decidedly wrong.
But it delivered itself of no pronouncement
which warrants either the scientific or the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</SPAN></span>
ribald to associate Irish lunacy with chastity,
rather than with drink or other predispositions.
If chastity fills the lunatic asylums
how come the Irish priesthood to be at large,
or for that matter the women of the English
middle classes, and honest women all the
world over? And if bastardy be a preventative
of lunacy, how comes it that in Scotland
you have as many lunatics as you have in
Ireland, and about ten times as many bastards?
Can it be that of two evils Caledonia,
with her customary shrewdness, has
chosen both? The suggestion is as ridiculous
as it is abominable, and as scandalous as it is
malicious. Even in the sense which our
<cite>Daily Mail</cite> young person may be presumed
to have in mind, it is the direct opposite of
chastity that helps to people lunatic asylums,
and never chastity itself, “blight” or no
blight. I mention this wholly unprecedented
incursion into sophistry only by way of showing
what the astute censors of Ireland really
can do when they set themselves to the work;<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</SPAN></span>
and although I have no proof on the subject
I should like to wager that the author of it
is an Orangeman and of Scotch extraction.
It is no compliment to Ireland to say that,
in theory at any rate, her morals are entirely
sound. In other words, Ireland believes in
virtue and goodness, even though she may
not always succeed in living up to her tenet,
and though, for reasons which need not be
discussed, she may be possessed of primal
dispositions to the sorriest evil.</p>
<p>And it is the solemn and deplorable fact
that there does exist in the Irish blood a
tendency toward wickedness of the most
ghastly and inhuman character. A case in
point is afforded by the frightful doing to
death of Mrs. Bridget Cleary at Ballyvadlea
in 1895. The following account of this
tragedy is abridged from Mr. M’Carthy’s
<cite>Five Years in Ireland</cite>:</p>
<p>“Mrs. Cleary fell ill on Wednesday, the
13th of March, and sent for a doctor and
a priest. The priest saw her in the afternoon.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</SPAN></span>
She was in bed, and ‘she did not
converse with him except as a priest, and her
conversation was quite coherent and intelligible.’
The doctor also saw her, thought
her illness slight, prescribed for her and
left.… On the morning of Thursday
the 14th Father Ryan ‘was called
to see Mrs. Cleary again, but he told the
messenger that having administered the last
rites of the Church on the previous day
there was no need to see her again so
soon.’… William Simpson, a near
neighbor of the Clearys, living only 200
yards off, accompanied by his wife, left their
own house between nine and ten o’clock on
Thursday evening to visit Mrs. Cleary, having
heard she was ill. When they arrived
close to Cleary’s house they met Mrs.
Johanna Burke, accompanied by her little
daughter, Katie Burke, and inquired from
her how Mrs. Cleary was. Mrs. Burke, herself
a first cousin of Mrs. Cleary’s, said,
‘They are giving her herbs, got from Ganey,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</SPAN></span>
over the mountain, and nobody will be let
in for some time.’ These four people then
remained outside the house for some time,
waiting to be let in. Simpson heard cries
inside, and a voice shouting, ‘Take it, you
b⸺, you old faggot, or we will burn you!’
The shutters of the windows were closed and
the door locked. After some time the door
was opened and from within shouts were
heard: ‘Away she go! Away she go!’ As
Simpson afterward learned, the door had
been opened to permit the fairies to leave
the house, and the adjuration was addressed
to those ‘supernatural’ beings.</p>
<p>“In the confusion Simpson, his wife, Mrs.
Burke, and her little daughter, worked their
way into the house.… Simpson saw
four men—John Dunne, described as an old
man, Patrick Kennedy, James Kennedy, and
William Kennedy, all young men, ‘big black-haired
Tipperary peasants,’ brothers of Mrs.
Burke and first cousins of Mrs. Cleary,
‘holding Bridget Cleary down on the bed.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</SPAN></span>
She was on her back, and had a night-dress
on her. Her husband, Michael Cleary, was
standing by the bedside.’</p>
<p>“Cleary called for a liquid, and said,
‘Throw it on her.’ Mary Kennedy, an old
woman, mother of Mrs. Burke, and of all
the other Kennedys present, brought the
liquid. Michael Kennedy held the saucepan.
The liquid was dashed over Bridget Cleary
several times. Her father, Patrick Boland,
was present. William Ahearne, described as
a delicate youth of sixteen, was holding
a candle. Bridget Cleary was struggling,
vainly, alas! on the bed, crying out, ‘Leave
me alone.’ Simpson then saw her husband
give her some liquid with a spoon; she was
held down by force by the men for ten
minutes afterward, and one of the men kept
his hand on her mouth. The men at each side
of the bed kept her body swinging about the
whole time, and shouting, ‘Away with you!
Come back, Bridget Boland, in the name of<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</SPAN></span>
God!’ She screamed horribly. They cried
out, ‘Come home, Bridget Boland.’ From
these proceedings Simpson gathered that
‘they thought Bridget Cleary was a witch,’ or
had a witch in her, whom they ‘endeavored
to hunt out of the house by torturing her
body.’</p>
<p>“Some time afterward she was lifted out
of the bed by the men, or rather demons,
and <i>carried to the kitchen fire</i> by John Dunne,
Patrick, William, and James Kennedy.
Simpson saw red marks on her forehead, and
some one present said they had to ‘use
the red poker on her to make her take the
medicine.’ The four men named held poor
Bridget Cleary, in her night-dress, over the
fire; and Simpson ‘could see her body resting
on the bars of the grate where the fire
was burning.’ While this was being done,
we learn that the Rosary was said. Her
husband put her some questions at the fire.
He said if she did not answer her name<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</SPAN></span>
three times they would burn her. She, poor
thing, repeated her name three times after
her father and her husband!</p>
<p>“‘Are you Bridget Boland, wife of
Michael Cleary, in the name of God?’</p>
<p>“‘I am Bridget Boland, daughter of
Patrick Boland, in the name of God.’</p>
<p>“Simpson said they showed feverish anxiety
to get her answers before twelve o’clock.</p>
<p>“They were all speaking and saying, <i>Do
you think it is her that is there?</i> And the
answer would be ‘Yes,’ and they were all
delighted.</p>
<p>“After she had answered the questions
they put her back into bed, and ‘the women
put a clean chemise on her,’ which Johanna
Burke ‘aired for her.’ She was then asked
to identify each person in the room, and did
so successfully. The Kennedys left the
house at one o’clock ‘to attend the wake of
Cleary’s father,’ who was lying dead that
night at Killenaule! Dunne and Ahearne
left at two o’clock. It was six o’clock on<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</SPAN></span>
the morning of the 15th, ‘about daybreak,’
when the Simpsons and Johanna Burke left
the house after those hellish orgies. There
had been thirteen people present in Cleary’s
house on that night, yet no one outside the
circle of the perpetrators themselves seems
to have known, or cared, if they knew, of
the devilish goings-on in that laborer’s cottage.</p>
<p>“At one time during that horrible night
the poor victim said, ‘The police are at the
window. Let ye mind me now!’ But there
were no police there.</p>
<p>“We now come to the third day, Friday,
15th of March. Six o’clock on that morning
found Michael Cleary, the chief actor,
Patrick Boland and Mary Kennedy in the
house with the poor victim, when the two
Simpsons and the two Burkes were leaving.
Simpson says, ‘Cleary then went for the
priest, as he wanted to have Mass said in
the house to banish the evil spirits.’ This
brings us back again to the Rev. Father Ryan,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</SPAN></span>
who says, ‘At seven o’clock on Friday morning
I was next summoned. Michael Cleary
asked me to come to his house and celebrate
Mass: his wife <i>had had a very
bad night</i>.’… Father Ryan arrived
at the cottage at a quarter past eight, and
<i>said Mass</i> in that awful front room where
poor Bridget Cleary <i>was lying in bed</i>.…</p>
<p>“‘She seemed more nervous and excited
than on Wednesday,’ he says, and adds, ‘her
husband and father were present before
Mass began, but I could not say who was
there during its celebration.’ He had no
conversation with Michael Cleary ‘as to any
incident which had occurred,’ because he suspected
nothing. ‘When leaving,’ he said,
‘I asked Cleary was he giving his wife the
medicine the doctor ordered? Cleary answered
that he <i>had no faith in it</i>. I told him
that it should be administered. Cleary
replied that <i>people may have some remedy of
their own that could do more good than doctor’s
medicine</i>.’ Yet, Father Ryan left the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</SPAN></span>
house ‘suspecting nothing.’ ‘Had he any
suspicion of foul play or witchcraft,’ he says,
‘he should have at once <i>absolutely refused to
say Mass</i> in the house, and have <i>given information
to the police</i>.’…</p>
<p>“After Father Ryan had said his Mass
and left, Mrs. Cleary remained in bed.
Simpson saw her there at midday and never
saw her afterward. His excuse for his presence
and non-interference on Thursday night
is that ‘the door was locked, and he could
not get out.’ We find the names of still more
people mentioned as having visited her this
day. She seems, judging from the number
of visitors, to have been extremely popular.
Johanna Burke seems to have been in the
house the greater part of this day. At one
time she tells how Cleary came up to the
bedside and handed his wife a canister, and
said there was £20 in it. She, poor
creature, took it, tied it up, ‘and told her
husband to take care of it, that he would
not know the difference till he was without<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</SPAN></span>
it.’ She was ‘in her right mind, only frightened
at everything.’</p>
<p>“At length the night fell upon the scene;
and, at eight o’clock, Cleary, who seems to
have ordered all the other actors about as
if they were hypnotized, sent Johanna Burke
and her little daughter Katie for ‘Thomas
Smith and David Hogan.’ Smith says, ‘We
all went to Cleary’s, and found Michael
Cleary, Mary Kennedy, Johanna Meara, Pat
Leahy, and Pat Boland in the bedroom.’
The husband had a bottle in his hand, and
said to the poor bewildered wife, ‘Will you
take this now, as Tom Smith and David
Hogan are here? In the name of the Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost!’ Tom Smith, a man
who said ‘he had known her always since
she was born,’ then inquired what was in
the bottle, and Cleary told him it was holy
water. Poor Bridget Cleary said ‘Yes,’ and
she took it. She had to say, before taking
it, ‘In the name of the Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost,’ which she did. Smith and<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</SPAN></span>
Hogan then left the bedside and ‘went and
sat at the fire.’ Cleary told them that his
wife, ‘as she had company, was going to
get up.’ She actually left her bed, put on
‘a frock and shawl,’ and came to the kitchen
fire. The talk turned upon <i>bishogues</i>, or
witchcraft and charms. Smith remained there
till twelve o’clock, and then left the house,
leaving Michael Cleary (husband), Patrick
Boland (father), Mary Kennedy (aunt),
Patrick, James, and William Kennedy (cousins),
Johanna Burke, and her little daughter
Katie (also cousins), behind him in the house.
Thomas Smith never saw Bridget Cleary
after that. According to Johanna Burke,
they continued ‘talking about fairies,’ and
poor Bridget Cleary, sitting there by the fire
in her frock and shawl, wan and terrified,
had said to her husband, ‘Your mother used
to go with the fairies; that is why you think
I am going with them.’</p>
<p>“‘Did my mother tell you that?’ exclaimed
Cleary.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>“‘She did. That she gave two nights
with them,’ replied she.…</p>
<p>“Johanna Burke then says that she made
tea and ‘offered Bridget Cleary a cup.’ But
Cleary jumped up, and getting ‘three bits
of bread and jam,’ said she would ‘have
to eat them before she could take a sup.’
He asked her as he gave her each bit, ‘Are
you Bridget Cleary, wife of Michael Cleary,
in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost?’ The poor, desolate young woman
answered twice and swallowed two pieces.
We all know how difficult it is, when wasted
by suffering and excited by fear, to swallow
a bit of dry bread without a drop of liquid
to soften it. It, in fact, was the task set to
those in the olden days who had to undergo
the ‘ordeal by bread.’ How many of them,
we are told, failed to accomplish it! Poor
Bridget Cleary failed now at the third bit
presented to her by the demon who confronted
her. She could not answer the third
time.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>“He ‘forced her to eat the third bit.’
He threatened her, ‘If you won’t take it,
down you go!’ He flung her to the ground,
put his knee on her chest, and one hand on
her throat, forcing the bit of bread and jam
down her throat.</p>
<p>“‘Swallow it, swallow it. Is it down?
Is it down?’ he cried.</p>
<p>“The woman Burke says she said to him,
‘Mike, let her alone; don’t you see it is
Bridget that is in it?’ and explains, ‘He suspected
it was a fairy and not his wife.’</p>
<p>“Let Burke now tell how the hellish
murder was accomplished: ‘Michael Cleary
stripped his wife’s clothes off, except her
chemise, and got a lighted stick out of the
fire, and held it near her mouth. My mother
(Mary Kennedy), brothers (Patrick, James,
and William Kennedy), and myself <i>wanted
to leave</i>, but Cleary said he had the key
of the door, and the door would not be
opened till he got his wife back.’</p>
<p>“<i>They were crying in the room</i> and wanting<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</SPAN></span>
to get out. This crowd in the room crying,
while Cleary was killing their first cousin
in the kitchen!</p>
<p>“‘I saw Cleary throw lamp-oil on her.
When she was burning, she turned to me’
(imagine that face of woe!) ‘and called out,
“Oh, Han, Han!” I endeavored to get
out for the peelers. My brother William
went up into the other room and fell in a
weakness, and my mother threw Easter water
over him. <i>Bridget Cleary was all this time
burning on the hearth</i>, and the house was full
of smoke and smell. I had to go up to the
room, I could not stand it. Cleary then
came up into the room where we were and
took away a large sack bag. He said, “Hold
your tongue, Hannah, it is not Bridget I am
burning. You will soon see her go up into
the chimney.” My brothers, James and
William, said, “Burn her if you like, but
give us the key and let us get out.” While
she was burning, Cleary screamed out, “<i>She
is burned now. God knows I did not mean<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</SPAN></span>
to do it.</i>” When I looked down into the
other room again, <i>I saw the remains</i> of
Bridget Cleary lying on the floor on a sheet.
She was lying on <i>her face and her legs turned
upward</i>, as if they had contracted in burning.
She was dead and burned.’”</p>
<p>There is nothing which quite parallels the
foregoing in the whole history of crime. At
least a dozen persons, male and female, had
knowledge of what was going on in that
dreadful household over three days. Not
one of them had bowels of compassion, not
one of them lifted a little finger in the victim’s
behalf. The majority of them were
her blood relations, all of them were Catholics,
not one of them but could have informed
the priest, the doctor or the police of what
was taking place had he or she been so
minded. But the devilish poison raging in
the blood of the woman’s husband raged also
in their veins. They stood fascinated in the
presence of superstitions which they had<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</SPAN></span>
drawn in with their mother’s milk. They
believed in their hearts that Cleary and themselves
were righteously, if terribly, occupied.
They said the Rosary. And they did all
things in the name of the Father, the Son and
the Holy Ghost!</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X<br/> <span class="smaller">PRETTY WOMEN</span></h2>
<p>The women of England, not to say of
Scotland, have of late years lain under the
reproach that they are ceasing to be possessed
of the fatal gift of beauty. I am well aware
that there is not a reviewer exercising his calling
between Land’s End and John o’ Groats
who will not profess to foam at the mouth on
the strength of this statement. Yet the fact
remains that ugliness is rapidly becoming the
common heritage of English women and
Scotch women alike. There is an old superstition,
not, of course, tolerable to the minds
of the smart people of to-day, that wickedness,
or, not to put too fine a point upon it,
ugliness of temperament is calculated gradually
to induce ugliness of physique. Without
going into the question of the general<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</SPAN></span>
wickedness of Anglo-Saxon femininity, we
may put it down for a scientific fact that the
beauty of them is wearing away—let us hope
to the land of the leal. In those remarkably
æsthetic organs which sell fifty process-block
portraits per week for sixpence, we are treated
continually to what the editors take for
types of English beauty. You pay your sixpence
and you open your hot-pressed beauty-show.
On the first page—that is, of course,
after the advertisements—you have a speaking
presentment of something with elaborate
hair and an inexhaustible fund of torso which,
frankly, might pass very well for a sign to a
public-house called “The Bald-faced Stag.”
Beneath you read in capital letters “<span class="smcap">Miss</span> or
<span class="smcap">Mrs. So and So—The Famous Beauty</span>.”
No woman in England apparently is allowed
to know whether she be beautiful or not until
either Mr. Keble Howard Bell or Mr.
J. M. Bulloch has so labeled her; Bell and
Bulloch being, of course, the only possible
judges of feminine beauty England possesses.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</SPAN></span>
In the politest circles it is quite dangerous to
praise a woman’s good looks without reference
to the files of <cite>The Sketch</cite> and <cite>The Tatler</cite>.
A certain nobleman, however, is understood
to have earned something of a reputation
for himself as connoisseur by openly
avowing his contempt for both sheets, and
surreptitiously swotting up the picture pages
of the <cite>Daily Mirror</cite>. This, however, like
the <cite>Daily Mirror</cite>, is probably neither here
nor there. The solemn fact remains that the
beauty of England’s fairest daughters and
Scotland’s bonniest lasses alike, has become
a doubtful quantity. Any person who is
troubled with qualms on the subject need only
visit a Court, or the Opera, or Messrs. Peter
Robinson’s, or an A. B. C. shop, or a mothers’
meeting. Hard faces, bleary eyes, saw
teeth, humpy shoulders, and an undignified
gait, not to mention greasy complexions,
scanty hair, bony hands and knock knees, are
the rule and not the exception among English
womankind. We have scarcely a beauty<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</SPAN></span>
left, even at the Gaiety Theater. In fact,
leaving out the ravishing pictures of the illustrated
press, there are really only two beautiful
women in England, and both of these
are married to reviewers. Now, I say and
maintain that any male person, possessed of
an eye for the charms of what is commonly
called the opposite sex, will find that in Ireland
the decay of female beauty has not yet
commenced. Whether he be in Dublin or in
Cork, in Sligo or in Limerick, pretty women
take his vision—as the daffodils take the
winds of March—at every corner. In fine,
it may be said without exaggeration that if
Ireland possesses a characteristic which renders
her entirely different from the countries
to which, on the face of it, she displays a sort
of second hand, tumble-down resemblance, it
is the prettiness of her women. I take it for
granted that this trait has been commented
upon by other travelers; but I do not think
that it has heretofore been in any sense properly
impressed upon the public mind. It is<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</SPAN></span>
generally understood among artists that Irish
women have delicate hands and an eye with a
sparkle about it. Irish poets, in more or less
halting English verse, have done their best
to indicate that Irish women are, to say the
least of it, worth looking at. But I am not
aware that on the whole the literature about
Ireland insists, to anything like a reasonable
degree, on the beauty of Irish women. If the
present work were from the “exquisite” pen
of Mr. Arthur Symons, our failure adequately
to portray the beauty of Erin’s daughters
would, no doubt, be counterbalanced by the
insertion of a selection of half-tone portraits
of representative specimens. As it is we are
compelled to admit that words fail us, and
that, even if we cared to employ them, the
process-block makers would fail us also.</p>
<p>It may be said roughly, that the beauty
of an Irish woman, while quite tangible and
perfect to the vision, is an elusive matter
when one comes to cold type. The Anglo-Saxon
beauty can be hit off in words, quite<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</SPAN></span>
as handily as she can be hit off in paint. What
she amounts to as a rule is pink and white,
and yellow hair, or mouse-colored hair, and a
genteel pallidity. But in Ireland all this is
different, beauty of a witching and almost
eerie quality is a commonplace throughout
the country. An Irishman will speak to you
of “the red-haired woman,” or “that shlip
of a girl,” when he means pieces of loveliness
that Titian might have given his eye teeth
for a sight of. In France at the present moment
there is an artist who is understood to
be making a fortune by drawing pretty faces.
He could find more subjects for his pencil in
a day in Dublin than he could find in a month
in Paris. For this information I make no
charge. Even Mr. Gibson, who appears to
have invented a “girl” of his own, might do
very well out of the green country. Mr.
Gibson’s young lady is believed to typify the
fairest that the United States of America can
boast. At times, and when Mr. Gibson is at
his best, she is undoubtedly a young woman<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</SPAN></span>
of prepossessing appearance. That she is
also a truly American type may be taken for
granted. There are plenty of women in Ireland,
however, who come quite up to the
Gibson girl standard, and for that matter
beat it. In journeying through the country
I have been struck continually by the remarkable
facial resemblance which exists between
the Irish and the American people. In an
Irish railway train you see faces which at once
give you the impression that you are at the
Hotel Cecil. The high cheek bones and lank
shaven jaw of the full-blooded American are
here in great force, and it is only when their
possessors open their mouths that you can tell
the difference. Of course, the thing is accounted
for by the fact that a very considerable
proportion of the population of America
is Irish, and that for a hundred years Ireland
has been sending her best blood to those
states.</p>
<p>Besides being comely, the Irish women have
the advantage of what one may term an individual<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</SPAN></span>
beauty. In England you might rake
together twenty beautiful blondes and twenty
pretty brunettes, and discover that they were
merely blondes and brunettes and nothing
more. That is to say the blondes might readily
pass for sisters, and so might the brunettes,
both sorts lacking the ultimate gift of individuality.
Irish women are different—indeed,
you may safely say of them that they
are all pretty and all different. They never
repeat their beauty, there is nothing of the
white rabbit or puss, puss, puss about them,
and consequently they do not bore you. As
most things have a cause it seems possible
that there are reasons for the beauty of Irish
womanhood. For myself I should be disposed
to ascribe it to the circumstance that
the average Irish woman, be she rich or poor,
leads the life which a woman was intended
to lead by the order of things, namely, the
domestic life. Irish women are not without
the wit to know that they are beautiful; they
have an armory of feminine allurements, and<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</SPAN></span>
wit enough to handle them with skill, and
they cannot be considered insensible to the
fripperies which all women love. But they
do not make gaiety and ostentation the aim
and end of their existence, and they do not
shirk the plain duties of womanhood. In Ireland,
though the women of the poorer classes
have to work in the fields and undertake tasks
which by good rights should be done by men,
there is absolutely no third sex. The manly
woman, the emancipated woman, and the impertinent
flat-chested typewriter banger, which
so infest Great Britain, are unknown. Even
the Irish sportswoman—and, as everybody
knows, she is pretty numerous—retains her
womanliness in a way that is quite beyond
the horsey or doggy woman of the Shires.
So that in one respect at least Ireland may
be reckoned something of a paradise.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI<br/> <span class="smaller">THE LONDON IRISH</span></h2>
<p>The Irishman in London appears to lose
a great deal of his luster. If you wish to see
him at his best in this Metropolis you must
go to the Bar. If you wish to see him at
his worst you must go to the House of Commons.
And both best and worst are pretty
bad. The Irishmen at the Bar shall not be
named, but all the world knows that they
are a fairly ill-conditioned community—savage,
rude, reasonably illiterate, and not in the
least witty. Many of them model themselves
on the late Lord Russell and come off accordingly.
Others again are beefy and vulgar
and notorious bullies. The judicial bench
does not include an Irish judge. Possibly
this is fortunate. In London journalism the
Irish scarcely count. Mr. W. M. Thompson<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</SPAN></span>
edits a sheet called <cite>Reynolds’s Newspaper</cite> to
the complete satisfaction of Mr. Clement
Shorter, and Mr. T. P. O’Connor edits
<cite>T. P.’s Weekly</cite> and <cite>M. A. P.</cite>, both of them
journals with which London could well afford
to dispense. As for Irish reporters and sub-editors,
they are few and timid and well under
the heel of the Scotch, who are numerous
and rampant and unblushing. In the minor
professions, such as physic, publishing, and
stockbroking, the Irish do not figure at all
impressively. The truly great physicians of
London are mostly Scotch, so—thank Heaven!—are
the truly great publishers; while the
stockbrokers are commonly believed to belong
to the tribe of Manasseh. Of the politicians
a great deal more has been written
than the politicians are worth. Let us draw
a decent green veil over them. Few Englishmen
nowadays know which of them is alive
and which of them is dead; neither can one
tell off-hand whether they are for the Government
or agin it. I have heard rumors of<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</SPAN></span>
the existence in London of an Irish Literary
Society. Somewhere in Holborn there exists,
too, I am told, an Irish Club. So far as letters
are concerned, London is pretty well denuded
of Irishmen. Mr. George Moore no
longer abides with us. Mr. W. B. Yeats
has latterly preferred Dublin to the Euston
Road. Mr. George Bernard Shaw has become
an American playwright. If these gentlemen
are members of the Irish Literary Society
so much the better for the Irish Literary
Society. There is an Irish poetess resident
in Twickenham, but <cite>Who’s Who</cite> informs us
that her Celtic quality has not been stimulated
by a sojourn in her native land. The Irish
Club would seem to devote itself to “Smokers,”
“Socials,” and “Enjoyable Evenings.”
Its saturnalia are duly reported in <cite>Reynolds’s
Newspaper</cite>. Probably the most distinguished
Irishman in the Metropolis is Sir Thomas
Lipton, whose name is as prominently associated
with sport as it is with tea. Then
there are the Irish Guards, one of the finest<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</SPAN></span>
bodies of men in the King’s service, and Mr.
Dennis O’Sullivan, England’s only Irish
actor. It will thus be seen that the London
Irish do not shine effulgently. None of them
is at the top of things, as it were; none of
them has got very far above the middling.
The reason no doubt is that the Irish temperament
is coy. The Scotchman who comes
to London knows that he is an alien and an
interloper, and despised of his fellow-men,
but he blusters it out. The Irishman, on the
other hand, feels his position keenly and refuses
to be other than diffident. As a rule,
too, he is without commercial aptitude, and
not vastly taken with the blessed word thrift.
Besides which, Irishmen do not come to London
in droves, as do the Scotch. When they
emigrate, their natural tendency is toward
America. In any case it cannot be suggested
that the London Irish have at any time presumed
to be aggressive. Neither have they
made pretensions to superiority, or exhibited
a disposition to clannishness. That they do<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</SPAN></span>
not count is therefore probably their own
fault; for London, in a greater degree perhaps
than any other city in the world, is always
open to prostrate herself before the invader,
providing he be assertive and pushful
enough. Leaving out the more or less eminent,
and glancing for a moment at the common
rank of Irishmen in London, one is confronted
with two facts, and two facts only.
The first of them is that the London Irish
can muster in sufficient force to make a St.
Patrick’s Day concert or so financially successful,
and the second is that the morning
after, the metropolitan magistrates have invariably
to deal with a fairly noble batch of
Irish “drunks.” Practically this is all that
is known by the Cockney respecting his Irish
fellow-citizen, and I think that it is distinctly
unfortunate for Ireland, because it fosters a
false impression. The Scotch, who are wilier,
take great care not to get drunk on St. Andrew’s
Day.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII<br/> <span class="smaller">TOM MOORE</span></h2>
<p>In <cite>The Treasury of Irish Poetry in the
English Tongue</cite>, edited by Messrs. Stopford
A. Brooke and T. W. Rolliston, Thomas
Moore is represented by eleven pieces, to
wit, “The Song of Fionnuola,” “The Irish
Peasant to his Mistress,” “At the Mid
Hour of Night,” “When He who Adores
Thee,” “After the Battle,” “The Light of
Other Days,” “On Music,” “Echo,” “As
Slow our Ship,” “No, not more Welcome,”
and “My Birthday.” I do not suppose for
a moment that the editors intended to suggest
that this selection represents in any sense
the more popular of Moore’s writings from
the Irish point of view. Only two of the
lyrics, indeed, namely, “The Light of Other<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</SPAN></span>
Days” and “As Slow our Ship,” are really
well known among lovers of poetry, even in
Ireland. We assume, therefore, that the
remaining sets of verses have been inserted
because, in the opinion of Mr. Stopford A.
Brooke and his co-editor, they are the best
of Moore, <i lang="la">qua</i> poet in the English tongue.
We quote here at length “The Song of
Fionnuola”:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">“Silent, O Moyle, be the roar of thy water;</div>
<div class="verse indent1">Break not, ye breezes, your chain of repose,</div>
<div class="verse">While, murmuring mournfully, Lir’s lonely daughter</div>
<div class="verse indent1">Tells to the night-star her tale of woes.</div>
<div class="verse">When shall the swan, her death-note singing,</div>
<div class="verse indent1">Sleep, with wings in darkness furl’d?</div>
<div class="verse">When will heaven, its sweet bells ringing,</div>
<div class="verse indent1">Call my spirit from this stormy world?</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">Sadly, O Moyle, to thy winter-wave weeping,</div>
<div class="verse indent1">Fate bids me languish long ages away;</div>
<div class="verse">Yet still in her darkness doth Erin lie sleeping,</div>
<div class="verse indent1">Still doth the pure light its dawning delay.</div>
<div class="verse">When will that day-star, mildly springing,</div>
<div class="verse indent1">Warm our isle with peace and love?</div>
<div class="verse">When will heaven, its sweet bells ringing,</div>
<div class="verse indent1">Call my spirit to the fields above?”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>As the devil might inquire—Is this poetry?
I believe that I shall have with me the
sounder critics when I say that it is small
sentiment very carelessly set down. In sixteen
lines we have quite a number of different
measures, and Moore would seem to have
labored under the impression that he was
writing in one. In other words, the verses
halt. As to the sentiment, nobody can question
its utter banality. What a critic of
Mr. Stopford Brooke’s caliber can see in it,
Heaven alone knows. He might have got
better verses and better sentiment out of any
average breach of promise case. Nor are
the remaining pieces much above the standard
required by those eminent judges of poetry,
the gentlemen who write <i lang="fr">morceaux</i> for the
drawing-room. For myself I venture the
opinion that Moore lives on the strength of
“Rich and Rare were the Gems she Wore,”
“The Meeting of the Waters,” “The Harp
that once through Tara’s Halls,” “Believe
Me if all Those Endearing Young Charms,”<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</SPAN></span>
“The Minstrel Boy,” “The Last Rose of
Summer,” and the “Canadian Boat Song,”
most of which efforts have been set to music,
and are thereby materially aided to survival.
So that on the whole Thomas Moore may
not be reckoned as in any sense a purveyor
of the higher kinds of poetry. It is creditable,
however, to the Irish people that they
should have produced and put their emotional
and moral trust in a Moore, rather
than a Burns. But morals on one side,
Burns is immeasurably the greater poet, even
though at times he wrote drivel of the feeblest
sort. All the same it must be confessed
that the general consent which keeps Moore
at the head of the Irish poets is sufficiently
grounded. For weak vessel though he may
be, we do not find another Irish poet in the
English tongue who could properly be placed
above him. Right down to and including
William Allingham, the history of Irish
poetry in the English tongue has been the
history of happy-go-lucky mediocrity. Even<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</SPAN></span>
Mangan, who has latterly been credited with
a share of the authentic fire, exhibits a facility,
a slipshodness and an aptness to the banal
which savor of the librettist. From his most
considerable production we take the following
stanzas:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<p class="center">THE NAMELESS ONE</p>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">Roll forth, my song, like the rushing river</div>
<div class="verse indent1">That sweeps along to the mighty sea;</div>
<div class="verse">God will inspire me while I deliver</div>
<div class="verse indent6">My soul to thee!</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">Tell thou the world, when bones lie whitening</div>
<div class="verse indent1">Amid the last homes of youth and eld,</div>
<div class="verse">That there once was one whose veins ran lightning</div>
<div class="verse indent6">No eye beheld.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour,</div>
<div class="verse indent1">How shone for him, through his griefs and gloom,</div>
<div class="verse">No star of all heaven sends to light our</div>
<div class="verse indent6">Path to the tomb.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">Roll on, my song, and to after-ages</div>
<div class="verse indent1">Tell how, disdaining all earth can give,</div>
<div class="verse">He would have taught men from wisdom’s pages</div>
<div class="verse indent6">The way to live.</div>
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</SPAN></span></div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">And tell how trampled, derided, hated,</div>
<div class="verse indent1">And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong,</div>
<div class="verse">He fled for shelter to God, who mated</div>
<div class="verse indent6">His soul with song—</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">With song which alway, sublime or rapid,</div>
<div class="verse indent1">Flowed like a rill in the morning beam,</div>
<div class="verse">Perchance not deep, but intense and rapid—</div>
<div class="verse indent6">A mountain stream.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">Tell how the Nameless, condemned for years long</div>
<div class="verse indent1">To herd with demons from hell beneath,</div>
<div class="verse">Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long</div>
<div class="verse indent6">For even death.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">Go on to tell how, with genius wasted,</div>
<div class="verse indent1">Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love,</div>
<div class="verse">With spirit shipwrecked, and young hopes blasted,</div>
<div class="verse indent6">He still, still strove.</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p>There may be lyrical impulse here, but it
is of quite an ordinary quality. The much
vaunted line about “veins that ran lightning,”
could, I think, be paralleled out of
previous poets, and the first half of it is
clumsy and cacophonous. “Night-hour”
and “light our” might have stepped straight<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</SPAN></span>
out of the comic poets, and the same may be
said of “years long” and “tears, long,”
which J. K. Stephen would have chortled
over for a “metrical effect.” And when we
come to “still, still strove” we are among
the librettists with a vengeance. I have seen
James Clarence Mangan collocated with Poe.
If comparisons with America must be made,
we should range him alongside that bright
spirit, Ella Wheeler Wilcox.</p>
<p>For Sir Samuel Fergusson, he has been
highly praised by Mr. Swinburne, Aubrey de
Vere, and, of course, by Mr. W. B. Yeats.
Mr. Yeats pronounces him to be “the greatest
poet Ireland has produced, one who,
among the somewhat sybaritic singers of
his day was like some aged sea-king sitting
among the inland wheat and poppies—the
savor of the sea about him and its strength.”
Harken to the ancient sea-king:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">“Then dire was their disorder, as the wavering line at first</div>
<div class="verse">Swayed to and fro irresolute; then all disrupted, burst</div>
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</SPAN></span>
<div class="verse">Like waters from a broken dam effused upon the plain,</div>
<div class="verse">The shelter of Kilultagh’s woods and winding glens to gain.</div>
<div class="verse center">…</div>
<div class="verse">But keen-eyed Domnal, when he stood to view the rout, ere long</div>
<div class="verse">Spying that white, unmoving head amid the scattering throng,</div>
<div class="verse">Exclaimed: ‘Of all their broken host one only man I see</div>
<div class="verse">Not flying; and I therefore judge him impotent to be</div>
<div class="verse">Of use of limb. Go; take alive,’ he cried, ‘and hither fetch</div>
<div class="verse">The hoary-haired unmoving man.…’</div>
<div class="verse indent13">… A swift battalion went</div>
<div class="verse">And, breaking through the hindmost line, where Kellach sat hard by,</div>
<div class="verse">Took him alive; and, chair and man uphoisting shoulder high,</div>
<div class="verse">They bore him back, his hoary locks and red eyes gleaming far,</div>
<div class="verse">The grimmest standard yet displayed that day o’er all the war;</div>
<div class="verse">And grimly, where they set him down, he eyed the encircling ring</div>
<div class="verse">Of Bishops and of chafing Chiefs who stood about the King.</div>
<div class="verse">Then with his crosier’s nether end turned towards him, Bishop Erc</div>
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</SPAN></span>
<div class="verse">Said: ‘Wretch abhorred, to thee it is we owe this bloody work;</div>
<div class="verse">By whose malignant counsel moved, thy hapless nephew first,</div>
<div class="verse">Sought impious aid of foreigners; for which be thou accursed.’”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p>Surely this is rank butterwoman’s jogtrot to
market; the kind of thing perhaps that Mr.
J. Hickory Wood and Mr. Arthur Collins
might joyously and jointly produce for the
delight of the babies of England. But for
“the greatest poet Ireland has produced,” for
“the aged sea-king sitting among the inland
wheat and poppies” it is poor, poor stuff indeed.
Of course, I do not suggest that Sir
Samuel Fergusson—who really was a Scotchman,
and not a sea-king at all—could not do
better. The fact, however, that “the greatest
poet Ireland has produced” managed to
do so badly, and was capable even of worse,
speaks at any rate a small volume for Irish
poetry.</p>
<p>The sole remaining Irish poet worth troubling
about is Aubrey de Vere, and an examination<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</SPAN></span>
of his work shows that, while he
persistently exercised himself on Irish subjects,
and laid himself open to the charge of
Irish slackness and perfunctoriness, he could
write poetry of the kind which is entirely
classic in its derivation. But it is certain that
he cannot be considered to have belonged to
the far-famed Keltic movement, and that he
was miles behind Landor, even in the severe
classic vein.</p>
<p>I am afraid that, broadly speaking, Ireland
has not produced any poet of convincing
greatness at all. The “Treasury of Irish
Poetry” compared, say, with such a collection
of English poetry as Palgrave’s “Golden
Treasury” is a ghastly exhibition. Some of
the moderns set forward by the editors have,
it is true, accomplished work which is not
without a certain distinction; but the ancients,
Thomas Moore included, are not for the
reading of the discriminate. Indeed, Irish
poetry in the English tongue is on the whole,
like Ireland itself, a decidedly tumble-down<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</SPAN></span>
affair. In a sense the genius of the country
may be said to resemble the genius of Japan.
That is to say, while every Irishman may be
reckoned something of a poet in himself,
there are no Irish poets; just as while the
Japanese are all poets, none of them has managed
to evolve a respectable poem. This, I
cannot help thinking, is a pity for Ireland,
and more to be sorrowed over than her lack
of commercial aptitude, than her poverty,
and than her wrongs. There are those who
tell us that the true poetry of the Irish is
hidden away in the memories of the peasantry,
taking the shape of Gaelic folk-songs,
ballads, and so forth. No doubt much may
be said for this theory, particularly as there
is a Gaelic League which seems to be making
a good deal of impression upon certain sections
of the people. At the same time, it
seems remarkable that, if the poetry of the
Gael be so rich, and ornate, and satisfactory
as those who are able to read it would have
us believe, nobody takes the trouble to put it<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</SPAN></span>
before us in a form calculated to preserve it.
The Gaelic character is pretty enough, and
I have seen odd translations of Gaelic poetry
which promised rather well for the bulk. Yet
it seems more than doubtful if the “Druid
Singers,” as I suppose Mr. Yeats would call
them, ever had among their ranks a Homer,
or, for that matter, an Anacreon or a Theocritus.</p>
<p>And talking of the Gaelic League, I should
like to note for the entertainment of persons
of humor, that when I visited its establishment
in Dublin some months back I found
the upper portion of the window occupied by
a placard, which announced in large Roman
letters that a “well-known Leaguer” was
about to open a shop in Dublin—“Object to
push the sale of Irish provisions.” People
are human even in Ireland.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII<br/> <span class="smaller">W. B. YEATS</span></h2>
<p>It might reasonably be supposed that the
last drop in Ireland’s cup of bitterness was
Mr. William Butler Yeats. An emotional
and misfortunate people with the tyrant’s heel
on its neck, and poverty and disaster always
in attendance upon it, may be excused if it
does not altogether dance to the pipings of
a pretty fellow like Mr. Yeats. In point of
fact, however, Ireland fails to dance not because
of her sadness, but because Mr. Yeats’s
minstrelsy is to all intents and purposes
utterly alien to her. In England, or more
correctly speaking, in London, it is true,
there has been and possibly is now, a small
cult of what is commonly called the Keltic
Muse. And the head and front of it, of
course, is Mr. Yeats. He has found ardent,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</SPAN></span>
if undiscriminating, support among the Irish
reporters and reviewers on the daily papers;
he enjoys the patronage of Mr. Clement
Shorter, and he is received respectfully at the
Irish Literary Club. Further I am told that
there is a musically-minded elocutionist in
London who goes about chanting his numbers
to the three-stringed psaltery. That
Mr. Yeats is a poet of some parts nobody in
his senses will attempt to deny. That he is
a vast, or potent, or as he himself would no
doubt phrase it, a Druid poet, I am not
disposed to admit. The strength of him is
slight indeed; the thought of him prattles forever
round the trivial. He has a still small
voice with a wistfulness about it; and it is
on this wistfulness that he has builded up
his business. His contemporaries, the men
among whom, whether he likes it or no, he
will always have to range, are every one of
them stronger men than he. They are ruder
and more forceful, more gusty and less attenuated,
if only by fits and starts. They<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</SPAN></span>
do their best to try to belong to the great
British poetical tradition. They fail lamentably,
but their work bears marks of aspiration.
Mr. Yeats, on the other hand, has been
particular to pose on a little hill of his own.
He imagines that he has discovered a sort of
private tradition, the which he calls Keltic.
Out of Ireland he believes himself to have
captured Druid music, and this he has put
up for us in sundry lyrical pieces and sundry
plays. His lyrical pieces are admired in all
the drawing-rooms and all the sub-editors’
rooms, and his plays have been stamped with
the heartfelt approval of the Chief Secretary
for Ireland, and Mr. Max Beerbohm. The
general opinion of him may be summed up
in three words—How charmingly Keltic! It
is an old contention of mine that Mr. Yeats’s
qualities are not Keltic at all. I go further
and say that as a fact there are no Keltic
qualities which are not common in good English
poetry. The best Kelt we ever had was
Mr. Yeats’s own master, one William Blake,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</SPAN></span>
who was sheer Cockney. Mr. Yeats is just
Blake spun out, and overconscious.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">“The moon, like a flower</div>
<div class="verse">In heaven’s high bower,</div>
<div class="verse">With silent delight,</div>
<div class="verse">Sits and smiles on the night.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">“I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!</div>
<div class="verse">We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee;</div>
<div class="verse">And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky,</div>
<div class="verse">Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">“Sweet babe, in thy face</div>
<div class="verse">Soft desires I can trace,</div>
<div class="verse">Secret joys and secret smiles,</div>
<div class="verse">Little pretty infant wiles.</div>
<div class="verse center">…</div>
<div class="verse">As thy softest limbs I feel</div>
<div class="verse">Smiles as of the morning steal</div>
<div class="verse">O’er thy cheek, and o’er thy breast</div>
<div class="verse">Where thy little heart doth rest.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">“I told my love, I told my love,</div>
<div class="verse indent1">I told her all my heart,</div>
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</SPAN></span>
<div class="verse">Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears.</div>
<div class="verse indent1">Ah, she did depart!</div>
<div class="verse center">…</div>
<div class="verse">Soon after she was gone from me,</div>
<div class="verse indent1">A traveler came by,</div>
<div class="verse">Silently, invisibly:</div>
<div class="verse indent1">He took her with a sigh.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">“Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,</div>
<div class="verse indent1">The holy tree is growing there;</div>
<div class="verse">From joy the holy branches start,</div>
<div class="verse indent1">And all the trembling flowers they bear.</div>
<div class="verse">The changing colors of its fruit</div>
<div class="verse indent1">Have dowered the stars with merry light;</div>
<div class="verse">The surety of its hidden root</div>
<div class="verse indent1">Has planted quiet in the night.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p>Which is Blake, and which is Yeats? You
may put the name of either under any of
these stanzas, without being guilty of an unpardonable
critical lapse. Mr. Yeats took
Blake and imitated him as frankly, and it
may be, as unconsciously, as many less sophisticated
versifiers have imitated Tennyson, or
Mr. Swinburne, or Rossetti. It is creditable
to him that he should have had discernment
enough to perceive in Blake an exceptional<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</SPAN></span>
and individual content; but why having got
hold of that content, having saturated himself
with it, as it were, and having found the
exploitation of it easy and provocative of
praise, Mr. Yeats should turn round and call
it Keltic is something of a puzzle. Of course,
one has to remember that among a people
whose interests are material, rather than spiritual,
the poet who would get a hearing is
compelled to have resort to a certain amount
of adventitiousness and empyricism.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse">“We poets in our youth begin in gladness;</div>
<div class="verse">But thereof come in the end despondency and madness,”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p>saith Wordsworth. We poets in our youth
also begin in sincerity and with a single eye to
the glory of the Muses. But too frequently,
even while our youth is still with us, we begin
to think about the glory of ourselves, and
take steps accordingly. It is good for us, if
we have any gift at all, to organize and advertise
a school, with ourselves carefully elected
by ourselves to the position of archpriest.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</SPAN></span>
The critic who in an idle hour set down
“Cockney School,” has a great deal to answer
for. Somebody followed him hard with
the “Lake School.” And in due course we
had the “Fleshly School.” It is to be noted,
however, that these epithets were bestowed
by the critics upon the poets, and not by the
poets upon the poets themselves. I venture
to suggest that it has been slightly different
in the case of Mr. Yeats and his following.
In Mr. Yeats’s mind—perhaps without his
being wholly alive to it—something like the
following has taken place: “To be of any
account in this world a poet must have a
quality or cry of his own. There is a quality,
or poignancy of individualism, about Blake
which has not yet become obvious to the multitude.
I admire it, and I can imitate it, and
possibly improve upon it; therefore let me
adopt it for my own. And as I am an Irishman
I shall cause it to be known not as the
spirit of Blake, but as the Keltic quality.
Selah!” I do not suggest for a moment that<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</SPAN></span>
Mr. Yeats’s conduct in this matter has been
either wicked or unjustifiable. I do not even
suggest that Mr. Yeats has been quite aware
of what he was doing; but not to put too
fine a point upon it, I do say that he has been
“modern,” and that it is a thousand pities.
There is nothing in Ireland, and there never
has been anything in Ireland which will justify
the appropriation of Blake as a sort of
exclusive Irish product; and Mr. Yeats has
written nothing which he could not have
written just as well had he been a Cockney,
or a Hebrew, capable of appreciating the
spiritual and technical parts of Blake, and of
perceiving the beauty of certain scraps of
Irish history and folk-lore. As an Irish poet,
Mr. Yeats, in my opinion, fails completely.
It is as reasonable to call him an Irish poet
as it would be to call Milton a Hebrew poet
because he wrote “Paradise Lost,” or Mr.
Swinburne a Greek poet because he wrote
“Atalanta.” There is not an Irishman, <i lang="la">qua</i>
Irishman, who wants Mr. Yeats; any more<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</SPAN></span>
than there is an Irishman, <i lang="la">qua</i> Irishman, who
wants Mr. Yeats’s Irish Literary Theater.
Mr. Yeats’s poetry and Mr. Yeats’s Irish
Literary Theater are Blake’s poetry and
Blake’s Literary Theater. They belong to
the Euston Road, and not to Tara; they are
cultivated, wary, wistful, minor English, and
not Irish at all. You have to be English,
and a trifle subtle at that, to get on with
them. Blake’s laurels are very posthumous
and recent because the Englishmen of his
time were busy with Pope and Crabbe, and
had a sort of suspicion that Wordsworth was
a lunatic. Englishmen did not know even
Shakespeare in those days; at any rate not in
the way that we know him nowadays. To
the Pope-suckled Englishman of culture,
Shakespeare, if he was anything at all, was
a sort of robustious and flowery dramatist.
They played him in full-bottomed wigs and
small clothes. To-day the tendencies are all
the other way. Shakespeare we shall tell you
was no playwright, but a poet, and the biggest<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</SPAN></span>
of them. Our modern actors spoil him
for us, not by their cuts and modifications,
but by their raree-shows and mouthings.
Who of them can say for you to your soul’s
satisfaction:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent13">… “O here,</div>
<div class="verse">Will I set up my everlasting rest</div>
<div class="verse">And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars</div>
<div class="verse">From this world-weary flesh?”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p>Shakespeare is for all time and more and
more for the closet. Blake is a greater poet
than the critical are disposed to admit, even
in this age of tender enthusiasms. And Mr.
Yeats is a poet, not because he is Irish or
Keltic, but in so far and precisely as far as
he has had the good sense to take Blake for
his master. For Kelticism as it is understood
by its professors, Shakespeare abounds in it.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>1st Lady.</i> <span class="s12">Come, my gracious lord,</span></div>
<div class="verse indent4">Shall I be your playfellow?</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Mam.</i> <span class="s14">No, I’ll none of you.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>1st Lady.</i> <span class="s12">Why, my sweet lord?</span></div>
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</SPAN></span></div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Mam.</i> You’ll kiss me hard, and speak to me as if</div>
<div class="verse indent4">I were a baby still.—I love you better.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>2nd Lady.</i> And why so, my lord?</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Mam.</i> <span class="s14">Not for because</span></div>
<div class="verse indent4">Your brows are blacker; yet black brows, they say,</div>
<div class="verse indent4">Become some women best, so that there be not</div>
<div class="verse indent4">Too much hair there, but in a semi-circle</div>
<div class="verse indent4">Or half-moon made with a pen.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>2nd Lady.</i> <span class="s12">Who taught you this?</span></div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Mam.</i> I learnt it out of women’s faces.—Pray now</div>
<div class="verse indent4">What color are your eyebrows?</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>1st Lady.</i> <span class="s17">Blue, my lord.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Mam.</i> Nay, there’s a mock. I have seen a lady’s nose</div>
<div class="verse indent4">That has been blue, but not her eyebrows.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>2nd Lady.</i> <span class="s17">Hark ye;</span></div>
<div class="verse indent4">The queen your mother rounds apace; we shall</div>
<div class="verse indent4">Present our service to a fine new prince</div>
<div class="verse indent4">One of these days; and then you’d wanton with us,</div>
<div class="verse indent4">If we would have you.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>1st Lady.</i> <span class="s12">She is spread of late</span></div>
<div class="verse indent4">Into a goodly bulk. Good time encounter her!</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Her.</i> What wisdom stirs amongst you?—Come, sir, now</div>
<div class="verse indent4">I am for you again. Pray you, sit by us,</div>
<div class="verse indent4">And tell’s a tale.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Mam.</i> <span class="s12">Merry or sad shall’t be?</span></div>
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</SPAN></span></div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Her.</i> As merry as you will.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Mam.</i> <span class="s12">A sad tale’s best for winter:</span></div>
<div class="verse indent4">I have one of sprites and goblins.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Her.</i> <span class="s14">Let’s have that, good sir,</span></div>
<div class="verse indent4">Come on, sit down. Come on, and do your best,</div>
<div class="verse indent4">To fright me with your sprites, you’re powerful at it.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Mam.</i> There was a man—</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Her.</i> <span class="s12">Nay, come sit down; then on.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Mam.</i> Dwelt by a churchyard—I will tell it softly;</div>
<div class="verse indent4">Yond crickets shall not hear it.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse"><i>Her.</i> <span class="s17">Come on then,</span></div>
<div class="verse indent4">And give’t in mine ear.</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p>There is enough Keltic quality here, surely,
to satisfy both Mr. Yeats and Mr. Shorter.
In fine, this tiny episode out of <cite>A Winter’s
Tale</cite> is quite as good, and quite as Keltic,
as anything the Blake School, to give it its
honest title, has managed hitherto to produce.
What the average Irishman would think
about it is another story. It is a pity to take
from Ireland even a trifle over which she
might, not improperly, plume herself. But
Mr. Yeats in the figure of Irish poet reminds<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</SPAN></span>
us of nothing so much as a peacock butterfly
purchased in the chrysalis state out of France
by the careful entomologist, hidden in a
plant-pot at his parlor window, and slaughtered
and labeled British so soon as it has
had time to spread its wistful wings.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV<br/> <span class="smaller">WIT AND HUMOR</span></h2>
<p>It has been remarked by a certain hawker
of platitudes that humor is that which makes
a man laugh. There have been several definitions
of wit, one of them by Sydney Smith,
and all of them more or less wanting in completeness.
But in a general way nobody is
particularly keen on definitions, provided they
can get for their amusement and exhilaration
either humor or wit. During the past few
decades we have heard a vast deal of the advantages
which accrue from the possession of
what is called a sense of humor. This especial
sense or faculty for appreciating a joke
is nowadays cultivated, and consciously cultivated,
by all sorts and conditions of people.
The gravest and most reverend persons are
wont to enliven their conversation or their<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</SPAN></span>
discourse with quips, cranks, gibes, and other
sallies, ingeniously calculated to set the listener
in a roar. The House of Commons has
latterly appeared to be filled with gentlemen
who live to amuse each other; there are
judges who seem almost incapable of opening
their mouths without attempting the
hilarious, and even bishops and bankers must
have their little joke. The press also strains
after humorsomeness in every degree, and
when critics wish to be particularly severe
they write simply, “Mr. So-and-So has no
sense of humor.” And here, in effect, we
have what I conceive to be another distinct
injustice to Ireland. For Irish wit and humor
have passed into a tradition, and are
believed by good judges to be the very wittiest
and most humorous wit and humor the
gods are likely to vouchsafe to us. In the
course of years many fairly thick volumes
have been compiled out of the abundance of
humorous material Ireland has furnished
forth. To turn to such a volume, however,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</SPAN></span>
is in my opinion to experience a certain disappointment.
There are jokes, it is true, and
jokes innumerable; but somehow for the
modern laughter seeker there is a distinct flatness
about them. Furthermore, they are
nearly all “chestnuts,” a fact which renders
it pretty plain that the people of Ireland have
come to a full stop as it were, and ceased to
produce them. I subjoin a few examples
culled hap-hazard from a book published so
recently as last year:</p>
<p class="tb">A prisoner was trying to explain to a judge
and jury his innocence of a certain crime.
“It’s not meself,” he cried, “as’ll be afther
thrying to desave yer honors. I didn’t hit
the poor dead gintleman at all, at all. It was
him that sthruck the blow, and the exartion
killed him, and, what’s more, I wasn’t there
at the time.” “I perceive,” observed the
judge, “you are trying to prove an alibi.”
“An al-loi-boi!” exclaimed the prisoner, evidently
pleased at the big word being suggested<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</SPAN></span>
to strengthen his defense. “Yes,”
said the judge. “Can you tell me what is
a good alibi?” “Faith, yer honor,” replied
the prisoner, “and it’s a loi boi which the
prisoner gets off.”</p>
<p class="tb">“What passed between yourself and the
complainant?” inquired the magistrate in a
county court. “I think, sor,” replied the
worthy O’Brien, “a half-dozen bricks and a
lump of paving-stone.”</p>
<p class="tb">“I say, Paddy,” said a tourist to his car-driver,
“that is the worst-looking horse you
drive I ever saw. Why don’t you fatten him
up?” “Fat him up, is it?” queried the
Jehu, “faix, the poor baste can hardly carry
the little mate that’s on him now!”</p>
<p class="tb">“Have you had any experience with children?”
inquired a lady of a prospective nurse.
“Oh, yes, mum,” replied the woman, blandly.
“Oi used to be a child mesilf wanst.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>A jarvey, who was driving through the
streets of Dublin, met with an obstruction in
the shape of a man riding a donkey. “Now
then, you two!” he exclaimed.</p>
<p class="tb">An Irish member, named Dogherty, who
subsequently became Chief-Justice of Ireland,
asked Canning what he thought of his maiden
speech. “The only fault I can find with it,”
said Canning, “is that you called the Speaker
sir, too often.” “My dear fellow,” replied
Dogherty, “if you knew the mental state I
was in while speaking, you would not wonder
if I had called him ma’am.”</p>
<p class="tb">“Get on, man; get on!” said a traveler
to his car-driver. “Wake up your nag!”
“Shure, sor,” was the reply, “I haven’t the
heart to bate him.” “What’s the matter
with him?” inquired the traveler; “is he
sick?” “No, sor,” answered the jarvey,
“he’s not sick, but it’s unlucky he is, sor, unlucky!
You see, sor, every morning, before<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</SPAN></span>
I put him i’ the car, I tosses him whether he’ll
have a feed of oats or I’ll have a dhrink of
whisky, an’ the poor baste has lost five mornings
running!”</p>
<p class="tb">“Did you notice no suspicious character
about the neighborhood?” said a magistrate
to an inexperienced policeman. “Shure, yer
hanner,” replied the policeman, “I saw but
one man, an’ I asked him what he was doing
there at that time o’ night? Sez he, ‘I have
no business here just now, but I expect to
open a jewelry sthore in the vicinity later on.’
At that I sez, ‘I wish you success, sor.’”
“Yes,” said the magistrate, “and he did open
a jewelry store in the vicinity later on, and
stole seventeen watches.” “Begorra, yer
hanner,” answered the constable after a pause,
“the man may have been a thafe, but he was
no liar!”</p>
<p class="tb">“Bridget, I don’t think it is quite the
thing for you to entertain company in the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</SPAN></span>
kitchen.” “Don’t ye worry, mum. Shure,
an’ oi wouldn’t be afther deprivin’ ye o’ th’
parler.”</p>
<p class="tb">An old lady in Dublin, weighing about sixteen
stone, engaged a car-driver to convey
her to a North Wall steamer. Arrived there,
she handed the driver his legal fare—sixpence.
Gazing disconsolately at the coin in
his hand, and then at the fat old lady, he exclaimed
as he turned away—“I’ll lave ye
to the Almoighty, ma’am!”</p>
<p class="tb">“Prisoner,” demanded a magistrate of a
man charged with begging, “have you any
visible means of support?” “Yes, yer honor,”
replied the prisoner, and then turning
to his wife who was in court, he said, “Bridget,
stand up, so that the coort can see yez!”</p>
<p class="tb">Now it is plain that we have here a fairly
representative selection of the kind of wit
and humor that is supposed to come to us<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</SPAN></span>
out of Ireland. Some of it no doubt is reasonably
good, some of it is quite mild. Possibly
it is amusing, and calculated to tickle
old-fashioned people. Yet one has distinct
qualms about it when one considers it as a
means for provoking the laughter of the
twentieth-century person. The fact is that
humor has been made so much of a cult in
the modern mind that it has to be very humorous
indeed, not to say a trifle subtle, if
it is to raise a smile. And in considering the
examples quoted, we are faced with a further
difficulty. Are these anecdotes of unquestionable
Irish extraction? I am afraid not.
Their authenticity is impeachable. <i lang="la">Mutatis
mutandis</i>, they have been told of Cockneys
and Yorkshire men, and Somersetshire men,
and even of Scotchmen. Furthermore, there
is nothing in them that can be considered peculiarly
and exclusively Irish, or indicative of
the Irish temperament and character as it
exists to-day. Your modern Irishman, as I
have pointed out, is a dreary and melancholy<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</SPAN></span>
wight. Laughter and sprightliness have died
out of him, and whether in thought or word
he is about as dull and plantigrade as even
a sad man can well be. The eminent people
who stand for Ireland in this country are all
of them afflicted with a similar lack of cheerfulness.
Rouse them, and they can be as bitter
and vituperative and aboriginal as any
Scotchman of them all; but their ordinary
habit is sad, uncertain, and inept, and they do
not know how to laugh. Here and there one
of them at the Bar, or in the House of Commons,
or at a greasy journalistic banquet, does
his feeble best to keep up the Irish tradition
for smartness and wittiness of remark. But
the attempt is invariably a failure, because
at the back of it there is no real brain and
no real flow of spirits. One of the biggest
bullies at the Bar is a beefy Irishman who
esteems himself a great humorist. I have
heard him fire off twenty or thirty idiotic
jokes in the course of half an hour or so, and
always does he snigger at the beginning of<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</SPAN></span>
his precious gibe; always does he snigger in
the middle; always does he make pretense
of becoming apoplectic with chortle at the
end. The circumstance that people laugh at
him and not with him, does not appear to
occur to his small, if legal, mind. His dearest
friends call him “the sniggerer,” and it
is said that he is in the habit of retiring to
his chambers of afternoons for the purpose
of having a protracted fit of giggling.
Primed with four or five glasses of cheap
port, his capacity for low comedy becomes
so evident that one trembles lest some enterprising
theatrical manager should offer
him the Leno-Welch part in next year’s
“Little Goody Two-shoes.” Another “witty”
Irishman, who shall be nameless, came
to these shores with a fair array of good gifts
at his disposal. Knowing himself for an
Irishman, and having faith in the Irish tradition,
he forthwith set up in business as a
posturing clown and professional grinner
through horse-collars, with the result that<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</SPAN></span>
his genius is altogether obscured. Irishmen
of all degrees will do better if they endeavor
to remember that they have really no sense
of humor left. The only one of them who
has made anything like a satisfactory reputation
in London, Mr. W. B. Yeats to wit,
has helped himself to it by being as devoid
of humor as a bone-yard. Mr. Yeats has
never been known publicly to try his hand
at the very smallest joke. The sobriety of
the hearse is his, and much good sense also.
For the eminent Irish, as we know them
among us, are by nature neither witty nor
humorous; and those who try to be so, succeed
in being only fatuous and vulgar. Somebody
has said cuttingly that a Frenchman
consists of equal parts of tiger and monkey.
Of certain of the eminent Irish in London it
may be said that they are half jackal and half
performing dog; for they are at once hungry
and fantastic.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV<br/> <span class="smaller">MORE WIT AND HUMOR</span></h2>
<p>The real truth about Irish humor as a
thing to itself and apart is that it is based
either on ignorance or on a certain slowness
of mind. The Dublin car driver who on
being told by a constable that his name was
obliterated from his car replied, “Arrah, me
name’s not Oblitherated, it’s O’Grady,” no
doubt achieved what will pass among the
average for humor. All the same, he did
not know that he was saying anything good,
and his <i lang="fr">mot</i>, if <i lang="fr">mot</i> one may call it, was the
direct outcome of a profound ignorance of
the English language. The books of Irish
humor abound with instances of this form
of humorsomeness: “You are not opaque, are
you?” sarcastically asked one Irishman of
another who was standing in front of him<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</SPAN></span>
at the theater. “Indeed I’m not,” replied
the other, “it’s O’Brien that I am.” Clearly
one might manufacture this kind of humor
<i lang="la">ad infinitum</i>. The Chinese are said to consider
it a great joke if a man should fall down
and break his arm, and I have seen Englishmen
laughing at a man who has been
unfortunate enough to have his hat blown
off in a high wind. But the Irish do not
laugh at these things. Even the native bull,
of which they are so proud, fails to tickle
them. The Irishman says his bull solemnly
and unconsciously, and the Englishman does
the laughing. In essence the Irish bull is
really a blunder. Nuttall, with his usual
charming frankness, defines a bull as “a ludicrous
inconsistency, or blunder in speech.”
Children and Irishmen are always making
them: “If it please the coort,” quoth an
Irish attorney, “if I am wrong in this, I
have another pint which is equally conclusive.”
An Irish reporter, giving an account
of a burglary, remarked: “After a fruitless<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</SPAN></span>
search, all the money was recovered, except
one pair of boots!” A Dublin clerk on
being asked why he was a quarter of an
hour late at the office, made answer: “The
tram-car I came by was full, so I had to
walk.” “This is the seventh night you’ve
come home in the morning,” observed an
Irish lady to her spouse, “the next time you
go out, you’ll stay at home and open the
door for yourself.” The following advertisement
is said to have appeared in a Dublin
newspaper: “Whereas John Hall has
fraudulently taken away several articles of
wearing apparel, without my knowledge, this
is to inform him that if he does not forthwith
return the same his name shall be made public.”
An Irishman who accidentally came
across another Irishman who had failed to
meet him after a challenge addressed him in
these words: “Well, sir, I met you this
morning and you did not turn up; however
I am determined to meet you to-morrow
morning, whether you come or not.”<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</SPAN></span>
“Dhrunk!” said a man, speaking of his
neighbor, “he was that dhrunk that he made
ten halves of ivry word.” A man who was
employed as a hod-carrier was told that he
must always carry up fourteen bricks in his
hod. One morning the supply of bricks ran
short, and the man could find but thirteen
to put in his hod. In answer to a loud yell
from the street one of the masons on top
of the scaffolding called out: “What do you
want?” “T’row me down wan brick,”
bawled Pat, pointing to his hod, “to make
me number good.”</p>
<p>Of course, the great and abiding glory of
Ireland in the way of bull-makers was the
never-to-be-forgotten Sir Boyle Roche. This
worthy knight once charged a political opponent
with being “an enemy to both kingdoms
who wishes to diminish the brotherly
affection of the two sister countries.” He
also said that “a man differs from a bird
in not being able to be in two places at
once,” and that “the Irish people were living<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</SPAN></span>
from hand to mouth, like the birds of the
air.” A petition of the citizens of Belfast
in favor of Catholic emancipation he stigmatized
as “an airy fabric based upon a sandy
foundation,” and he expressed his willingness
“to give up, not only a part, but, if necessary,
even the whole of our constitution to preserve
the remainder.” In one of his most
famous speeches there occurs the appended
passage: “Mr. Speaker, if we once permitted
the villainous French Masons to meddle
with the buttresses and walls of our
ancient constitution, they would never stop,
nor stay, sir, until they brought the foundation
stones tumbling down about the ears
of the nation. If these Gallican villains
should invade us, ’tis on that table maybe
those honorable members might see their own
destinies lying in heaps atop of one another.
Here, perhaps, sir, the murderous crew would
break in and cut us to pieces, and throw our
bleeding heads upon that table to stare us
in the face.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>“Is your father alive yet?” inquired one
O’Brien of one M’Gorry. “No,” replied
M’Gorry solemnly, “not yet!” A beggar
called at a house and said: “For the love
of hiven, ma’am, give me a crust of bread,
for I’m so thirsty I don’t know where I’ll
sleep to-night.” All of which is very funny
and as who should say, very quaint. But is
it humor? It provokes a smile certainly, yet
it points to simplicity, rather than subtilty,
in the Irish character. Indeed, the absolute
truth about the bull is that it is the child
of a plentiful lack of wit. A nice derangement
of epitaphs, an opening of one’s mouth
and a putting of one’s foot in it, may provoke
mirth in other people, but it does not
prove one to be either witty or merry. It
is satisfactory to know that, according to
the latest observations, the fine art of bull-making
is going out of fashion among Irishmen.
The Irish were the inventors of the
bull, they brought it to its greatest perfection,
they made it redound to their credit<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</SPAN></span>
as a witty nation; and one cannot deny their
right to cease from its manufacture if they
see fit. In the House of Commons a bull
is nowadays seldom perpetrated, whether
consciously or unconsciously, at any rate by
the Irish Party. Irish Members of Parliament
have grown too wary to be caught bulling.
They walk delicately in English-cut
frock-coats; they rather pride themselves on
their ability to keep down the brogue, and
at the bare mention of the word “bull,”
they are prone to shiver.</p>
<p>There is one feature of Irish wit and humor
which is worthy of admiration and imitation.
It is a negative feature truly, but an
excellent one. Irishmen do not seem capable
of that last infirmary of the doting mind—the
pun. To play effectively upon words is,
of course, an art in itself, and kept within
bounds it is an amusing art; but the man who
drops out of art into sheer mechanism, which
is what has happened to the average punster,
cannot be considered worthy of the respect<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</SPAN></span>
of his fellows. The Irish, as I have said,
do not appear to have descended to these
depths. They may be a worn-out, a weary,
a dull-witted, an exhausted, and a brooding
and melancholy people, but they are not punsters.
Herein they have a distinct advantage
over the English, among whom the pun appears
to obtain wider and wider currency.
It is a lamentable fact that there are judges
on the English Bench who never let slip an
opportunity for punning. It makes juries
and the gallery guffaw, and it gets a judge the
reputation of being a wit and the possessor
of those minor literary graces which are supposed
to be included in the judicial prerogative.
Judges are commonly understood to
be irremovable, but I think that after their
third pun retirement should be the only
course for them. The man who makes a
pun insults the intellect of his auditors and
commits a gross outrage upon the language.
Let all punsters, whether in high or low
places, take heed that they are vulgar and<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</SPAN></span>
vicious persons, and neither witty nor wise.
A thousand honest bulls are less to be deprecated
than the weeniest pun that was ever let
loose.</p>
<p>Before leaving this part of our subject it
is perhaps desirable that we should remember
that two of the very wittiest men of our
own time have come to us from Ireland.
One of them was the late Mr. Oscar Wilde
and the other is Mr. George Bernard Shaw.
Of Oscar Wilde, excepting that in his prime
he was a wit of the first water, I shall say
nothing. Mr. George Bernard Shaw, however,
is another story. As a reformer and a
serious writer I make small account of him.
On the other hand, as a wit, he is a portent.
He has been an unconscionable time coming
into his own, but in America, at any rate,
people are beginning, by childlike, dim degrees,
to perceive that he has brilliance. If
he had published the substance of his printed
work in any other form but that of plays,
he might have been a recognized and prosperous<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</SPAN></span>
humorist long ago. The people who
supply the wit and humor of the day may
be set down, without injustice, for a sorry
and indifferent company. Burnand, Payne,
Emanuel, Jerome, Lucas, Sims, Hickory
Wood, and Barrie—these are some of the
names of them. And what do they stand
for? Parts of <cite>Punch</cite>, <cite>Eliza</cite>, <cite>Three Men
in a Boat</cite>, <cite>The Inside Completuar Britanniaware</cite>
(O blood and knives!), <cite>Mustard and
Cress</cite>, or, The Fat Man’s Sabbath Morning,
<cite>The White Cat</cite>, or, Cooper’s Entire, <cite>Peter
Pan</cite>, or, The Old Man’s Crèche. Heaven
save us and keep us from wishing that this
squad of awkward witlings had never been
born! Mr. George Bernard Shaw in his
sole person, and Irishman though he be, is
worth a wilderness of them. Some day we
shall find it out, and in that good hour Ireland
will be able to boast that one of her
sons was nearly as great, nearly as humorous,
and nearly as popular as, say, Mr. Mark
Twain.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI<br/> <span class="smaller">DIRT</span></h2>
<p>I suppose that next to the Scotch, the Irish
are out and out the dirtiest people on the
earth. But whereas Scotch dirt is a crude
and gross affair, Irish dirt has still a pathetic
and almost tender grace about it. “Dear,
dirty Dublin” sigh the emotional in such
matters—though you never catch anybody
shedding a tear for remembrance of dear,
filthy Glasgow. Dublin is indubitably a dirty
city, just as Ireland is a dirty country, and
for Irishmen, at any rate, the Government
is a dirty Government. And it is not because
Dublin or Ireland is dirty of necessity, or in
the way that the Black Country or the East
End of London are dirty. Not a bit of it:
Dublin and Ireland are dirty simply and solely
because the Dublin and Irish people steadfastly<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</SPAN></span>
refuse to keep them clean. To all intents
and purposes the Irish people have lost,
if indeed they ever possessed, that gift of
punctilious domesticity, which insists first and
last and always on cleanliness. In Dublin
you will come upon more dirty hotels and
more dirty houses than in pretty well any
other city of its size in Europe. True, the
dirt has the merit of not being too obvious,
and falling short of the scandalous; but it is
still there, and you cannot get away from it.
Properly looked into, it recommends itself to
you as the dirt of a happy-go-lucky, neglectful,
behind-hand and poverty-stricken people,
rather than of a people who are flagrantly
given over to dirt for its own sake. It is the
dirt of the slattern who is forever dusting
things with her apron, rather than of the
stout idleback for whom dust and grime and
sloppiness have no terrors, and no reproach.
It is a dirt which is the direct consequence of
bad seasons, the decay of trade, monetary
stringency, and public and private listlessness<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</SPAN></span>
and apathy. It is the kind of dirt which one
associates with the boarding-houses of elderly
ladies who have seen “better days.” Ireland’s
better days have been few and far between,
and they would seem to be all past.
Hence, no doubt, the dustiness and dinginess
and shabby gentility of her parlors. In an
Irish hotel dirt and its common concomitant,
tumbledownness, are ever before you. The
floors clamor to be swept, the furniture would
give a day of its life for a polishing, the wall
papers are faded and fly-blown, there are
cobwebs in the top corners and dust in the
bottom corners, the windows are rickety and
perfunctorily cleaned, the carpets infirm and
old, the linen worn and yellow with age, the
crockery cracked and chipped, the cutlery dull
and greasy, and the general air of the place
shabby and forlorn. I do not say that there
are no cleanly and spick-and-span hotels in
Dublin; for there is at least one such establishment.
But, in the main, what one may
term the semi-clean, semi-dirty, used-to-be<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</SPAN></span>
kind of hotel prevails. Even the waiters,
though their hair be greased and their faces
shine by virtue of vigorous applications of
soap, wear frayed and threadbare swallow-tails
and a sort of perennial yesterday’s shirt-front.
And what is true of the hotels is true
of the houses. There is a district between
Sackville Street and the ⸺ Railway Station
which contains a very large number of
the somberest, most forbidding, and dirtiest-looking
domiciles it has ever been my lot to
come across. Formerly these houses were the
homes of the easy and the well-to-do; now
they are let off in tenements to the poorest
of the poor. Black and grinding poverty
peeps out of the cracked and paper-patched
windows of them; groups of grubby, bare-legged,
blue-cold children huddle round their
decrepit doors, or scamper up and down the
filthy pavements in front of them. The
places may be sanitary enough within the
meaning of the Acts, but that they are filthy
and foul, to a nauseating degree, no person<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</SPAN></span>
can doubt. Such rookeries would be clean
swept away by the authorities in any English
city. In Dublin nobody seems to trouble
about them, or to be in the smallest sense
disturbed by them. They are a part and parcel
of dear, dirty Dublin, and haply Dublin
would not be Dublin without them.</p>
<p>In the other Irish cities and towns the same
tendency to squalor and grime and filth is
painfully noticeable. Even in a center like
Portadown, which, be it noted, is Protestant
and to a great extent new, the same undesirable
traits assail you pretty well wherever you
go. In a city set on a hill, without a factory
to its name, I found a blackness and a grime
which reminded me of nothing so much as
Gravesend or Stockport. The hotel in that
same city was as crazy as it was chilly and
comfortless—poky rooms and dark little passages,
meager and dubious furnishings, and
dirt, dirt, dirt, from basement to attic. Yet
the place seemed populous with cleaner
wenches, floor-scrubbers, and clout-women.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</SPAN></span>
There was a boy in a green apron, who appeared
to do nothing all day but dust the
banisters, and the waiters were eternally flicking
the dust off things with their napkins.
And such waiters: wall-eyed, heated, fumbling,
grumpy, and incompetent. They insisted
on getting in one another’s way, and
they had a gift of dilatoriness that amounted
to genius. In this place, let me set down a
small fact about the Irish waiter which may,
perhaps, save future travelers in Ireland some
trouble. If you ask an English waiter for a
time-table he will bring it to you, and leave
you to your own devices. If you ask an Irish
waiter, he will say “Time-table, yes, sir.
Where will you be afther goin’, sir?” You
are taken unawares, and quite foolishly tell
him the name of the next town on your itinerary.
Forthwith he informs you that there
is a very good hotel there “be the name of
the Jukes Head,” and that the next train
“convanient” goes at “wan-thirty.” Is it
a quick train? “Oh, yes.” Will he see that<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</SPAN></span>
your baggage Is taken to the station in time
to catch it? Certainly he will. You keep
your mind easy and turn up at the station at
“wan-thirty.” There is a train at one-thirty,
it is true, but, unluckily for you, it does not
go within a hundred miles of your place of
destination. The train you ought to have
caught went at ten-thirty, and there is not
another one till late at night, while, if it be
Saturday, you must wait till Monday morning,
because there are practically no Sunday
trains in Ireland. Do not imagine for a moment
that your Irish waiter has misinformed
you with malice aforethought, or out of a
desire to lengthen your sojourn in his employer’s
hotel; because this is not the case.
He is merely an Irishman, and therefore a
born blunderer; and he does his best to blunder
every time.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_XVII">CHAPTER XVII<br/> <span class="smaller">THE TOURIST</span></h2>
<p>The tourist is the curse of Ireland, as he
is the curse of most places. When one comes
to consider the enormous number of grievances
the Irish and their political figure-heads
have managed to rake up, one wonders that
the tourist should hitherto have escaped.
That he constitutes a grievance, and a grievance
which affects seriously the main body
of the Irish people, can not be doubted. It
is quite obvious, to begin with, that the tourist
in Ireland is usually of the hated Sassenach
race. Irishmen do not tour in their own
country as Englishmen do, or as Scotchmen
have been known to do. They have too little
money for indulgences of that kind, and if
money be plentiful they prefer to visit England
or America. The Englishman, however,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</SPAN></span>
insists on taking a holiday in Ireland
sometime in his life, even though it be only
on his honeymoon. So that in the more
suitable months the country bristles with tourists,
and the great majority of them are English.
Secondly, the tourist, being English, is
always more or less hilarious, supercilious and
aggressive, and these are qualities of which
the Irish of all people least like a display, at
any rate from an Englishman. Time out
of mind the English tourist has been the
covert <i lang="fr">bête noire</i> of the Continental peoples
on account of these very traits. An Englishman
on the Continent, especially if he be
a middle-class Englishman, or a very wealthy
Englishman, has a knack of divesting himself
utterly of the thin veneer of social decency
which he manages to maintain at home.
Somehow the air of the Continent exhilarates
him to all sorts of posturing and ridiculousness.
The vulgarian, the Philistine and the
snob in him become greatly emphasized. He
can shout aloud, and be rude to everybody,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</SPAN></span>
because he believes that nobody understands
what he is pleased to call his lingo. Besides
which the Englishman on the Continent always
believes in his private bosom that he
is a philanthropist, a sort of circular-touring
benevolence, as it were. “Who is it,” he
inquires grandiloquently, “that keeps these
pore foreigners going? Why, the English,
and the English alone. It is we who bring
millions of pounds to their starved, tax-burdened
countries. It is we who populate their
rapacious hotels and make their seasons for
them, and drop our idiot moneys at their
gambling tables, and pay francs at the entrances
to their art galleries, and climb their
rotten mountains, and steam, to soft Lydian
airs, up their rivers, and bathe in their lukewarm
seas, and tip them and patronize them,
and joke with them, and generally afford
them opportunities for existence.” This attitude
has been noted and laughed at by the
cynical, time out of mind; but it can not be
eradicated from the Englishman’s fairly<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</SPAN></span>
comprehensive stock of idiosyncrasies, and it
remains to this day typical of the breed. To
Ireland the English tourist proceeds focused
for pretty well the same view of things. Of
course, he is disposed to look upon your Irishman
as being rather more of a man and a
brother than is the low foreigner. Further,
he invariably believes that by a judicious expenditure
on “drinks,” coupled with an easy,
slap-you-on-the-back but still superior manner,
he can extract from the Irishmen with
whom he comes in contact the whole secret
of the Irish Question. In other words, he
makes a point of going to Ireland with his
eyes open; so that when he returns he may
remark huskily in his club—“Sir, I have
visited Ireland, and I know the Irish people
through and through. Waiter, a large
Scotch, please!” Thus is the altruism of
the tourist in Ireland tempered with a taste
for inquiry and politics. I suppose that in
no country in the world is the tourist allowed
so much of his fling as in this same<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</SPAN></span>
green Erin. For example, in Ireland he
takes care to call every man “Pat,” and
every woman “Kathleen mavourneen.” If
he called a Frenchman “Froggy,” or a German
“Johnny Deutscher” he would stand a
good chance of getting his nose pulled. But
in Ireland a bold peasantry has learned to
smile and smile and touch the hat, and take
the coppers, and provide the political information
for which his honor is gasping without
so much as turning a hair. It is not really
in the Irish blood to take these traveling
mountebanks, with their loud suits and louder
manners and louder money, seriously or even
indifferently. On the other hand, your true
Irish resent in their hearts the entire business.
It is their poverty and not their wills which
consent; though singularly enough, as I have
already said, you will seldom find an Irishman
indulging himself in growls about it.
And it is this very poverty which might reasonably
give rise to the Irishman’s third
grievance against the tourist. For an Englishman<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</SPAN></span>
traveling in Ireland is always a sort
of perambulating incitement to envy, because
of his apparent wealth. He may be
only a clerk out for a fortnight’s “rest and
change” on money squeezed out of the
meagerest kind of salary; yet to the penniless
Irishman he seems literally to be made of
wealth. And Pat—let us call him Pat, so
that the tourists of this world may know
whom we mean—is not without certain reasoning
powers of his own, poverty-stricken
though he may be. It seems to me only
human that he should reason about the English
tourist in a way which brings him little
comfort and throws considerable discredit on
England. He perceives that compared with
himself the Englishman is not altogether a
person of genius or an angel of light. His
ignorance is appalling, even to an Irishman;
his manners are none of the choicest; his
capacity for eating and drinking borders on
the marvelous. “Pat” notes these things
and wonders. He wonders why there should<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</SPAN></span>
be such tremendous gulfs between loving subjects
of the King. He wonders where people
who travel on cheap tickets get all their
money; he wonders how they manage to pay
fifty pounds a rod for certain fishing;
or fifty pounds a gun for certain shooting;
he wonders why they cackle so about priestcraft,
and Home Rule, and the development
of industry; he wonders whether they have
really been elected by heaven to be a dominant
people; he wonders why he himself
should have been given over to their governance;
and with all his wondering he is not
consoled. There is probably nobody to tell
him that for irremediable reasons the Irish
are never likely to become a happy and prosperous
nation. There is nobody to tell him
that this dazzling Englishman is so much
gross material, with no tradition of spirituality
at the back of him. There is nobody to
tell him that it is the British habit to think
first and foremost of its own welfare and
comfort, and that it pities rather than admires<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</SPAN></span>
those countries or persons who have
been foredoomed to contribute to them.
Therefore he goes on wondering without
consolation, and within him there is discontent
and bitterness, despite his outward subservience.
There has been very tall talk in
sundry well-meaning circles as to the advantages
which are to accrue to Ireland from
the development of her trade in tourists. No
doubt it is extremely heterodox to say so, but
for myself, I incline to the opinion that the
tourist business on its present lines is a snare
and a delusion and a demoralization. It
takes money into the country certainly, but
it takes other things which are not by any
means so desirable. Moreover, that very
money helps materially to cloud and confuse
important issues. The real condition of
Ireland, as it is known to Irish officialdom,
and as it should be known to Englishmen, is
glossed over and hidden away as a direct result
of the eleemosynary tendencies of the
English tourist. A people of the temper and<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</SPAN></span>
parts of the Irish people should be in a
position to live out of Irish land and Irish industry,
and not be in any serious sense dependent
upon the fitful generosity of sight-seers
and problem-solvers. Ireland has had
far too much <i lang="fr">largesse</i>, both private and public.
The English tourist distributes his shillings;
the English Government distributes
its loans and other financial bolsterings-up.
What is wanted is a fair field and no favor
for Irish labor. It will take many generations
of tourists to provide for Ireland any
such good gift. I do not believe that the
Government loans can provide either. A
newer and little less rapacious and less unintelligent
race of landlords might achieve it.
The bland, benevolent money-dropping Englishman,
who out of his generosity or his
scheme of politics desires to assist the Irish
people, should buy a place in Ireland and do
his best to live there. The country is full
of properties which would be cheap at treble
the prices that are now being asked for them.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</SPAN></span>
There is plenty of land and there is plenty
of labor. The Land Laws, it is true, seem
on the face of them ridiculous, that is to
say, if you happen to be a landlord whose
eye is forever on the rent-roll and the automatic
improvement of properties at other
people’s expense. But if, on the other hand,
you are a comfortable, high Tory, patriarchal
landlord, with bowels, and a proper appreciation
of sport, and a proper interest in agriculture
and the breeding of cattle, Ireland
need have no terrors for you. There is a
notion abroad that the Irish farmer has deep-rooted
prejudices against landlords of whatever
degree. We are told that he is a
confirmed shirker of the prime duty of rent-paying,
and that he will let a holding go to
rack and ruin for the sole purpose of cheapening
its value, so that he may himself buy
it in for the merest song. The demand
throughout the country, we are told, is for
farmer and peasant proprietorship, and the
legislature has formulated wonderful machinery<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</SPAN></span>
in the interest of such proprietorship. My
own view is that of two evils the Irish cultivators
have in this matter chosen the lesser.
On the one hand they had rack rents, absentee
landlords and agents who, if they had bodies
to be shot, appear to have had very small
souls to be saved. On the other hand, they
have been offered schemes of purchase that
sound very well but do not work out quite
so well in practise. Still a bad scheme of purchase
is better than bad landlords and worse
agents. An intelligent and reasonable landlord
of bucolic tastes, who will look as
sharply after his agent or factor as he will
look after his tenants on rent-day, could in
my opinion do quite as well in Ireland as
he can do in England. In a sentence, Ireland
wants settling, not touring.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_XVIII">CHAPTER XVIII<br/> <span class="smaller">POTATOES</span></h2>
<p>A gentleman who is universally applauded
as a handler of the pencil and a
smart after-dinner speaker lately remarked
that if he were compelled to give up one of
two things, to wit, tobacco or Christianity,
he would give up Christianity. Then, with
a slack-minded man’s weakness, he went on
to explain that a Christianity which prohibited
tobacco would not be Christianity at all.
“When all things were made,” we are told,
“nothing was made better than tobacco.”
Without being an anti-tobacconist, without
being a non-smoker, without, indeed, being
other than “a great blower of the cloud,”
it is quite reasonable for one to doubt
whether on the whole tobacco is the blessing
that modern men hold it to be. There<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</SPAN></span>
is no evidence to show that men’s intellects
have improved since the introduction
of smoking. It seems probable that the high-water
mark of British brains had been reached
somewhat prior to the time in which James I.
had occasion to adorn polite letters with his
notorious “Counterblast.” Shakespeare did
not smoke. Mitcham shag was nothing to
Ben Jonson, nor navy plug to Milton. It is
our Barries, and our J. K. Jeromes, and our
F. C. Goulds who electrify the country with
their pipes in their mouths. Now, the person
who is commonly credited with having introduced
the art and practise of tobacco smoking
into England is Sir Walter Raleigh. There
is a legend that when that gentleman’s servant
first saw him smoking, he rushed out
for a bucket of water, in the belief that his
master was on fire. By a strange coincidence,
it is this same Sir Walter Raleigh who is commonly
credited with having introduced the
potato into Ireland. Could Sir Walter Raleigh’s
servant have perceived what black and<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</SPAN></span>
fearsome troubles the potatoes in his master’s
pockets or other receptacle would one day call
down upon the Irish people, it is conceivable
that he might have rushed out for something
even more drastic than a bucket of water.
The potato, undoubtedly, is an elegant fruit.
All men know that with beef, mutton, and
flesh meats in general, it is everything that
could be desired. As a staple article of food,
however, it cannot be considered otherwise
than as a flagrant and wicked mistake. In
Ireland the potato has become a staple article
of food. Whole generations of Irishmen
have battened upon it—in good times, with
the addendum of a little buttermilk or a scrap
of bacon, in bad times with the addendum of
a pinch of salt. And as the times in Ireland
have been immemorially bad times, the pinch
of salt has been most frequently to the fore.
In plain words, the Irish people are a potato-fed
people. In theory the potato might well
have been specially created by Providence to
fit in with the Irish temperament. The Irish<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</SPAN></span>
temperament has distinct tendencies in the direction
of indolence; the potato, heaven be
thanked, is a tuber which does not demand
too great a skill or too great an amount of
labor in cultivation. You cut it up, dump it
into the ground, and it grows of itself. Also
it is a prolific plant, and will make more dead
weight to the rood than almost anything else
that grows—the which, of course, saves digging.
A peasant with a potato-patch is believed
to be wholly beyond the reach of
hunger, and his standard of emolument may
conveniently be adjusted for him accordingly.
He himself is aware that it is out of his potato-patch
that he and his family have got to
subsist, and that all the rest is luxury of the
most bloated order. Philosophers can invariably
dispense with luxury, and the Irishman
is a philosopher. He can afford to sit and
watch his potatoes growing, as content as any
king. For not only shall that green plant
yield unto him and the “childer” the staff
of life, but it shall also furnish for him the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</SPAN></span>
wherewithal for the innocent manufacture of
potheen, which is life itself. It is a singular
fact, though a fact big with meaning, that
while the Irishman has been a potato-grower
from Raleigh’s time, he has not succeeded in
attracting to himself any special reputation
as a cultivator in this department. Nobody
sets up the Irish potato for a peculiar delicacy.
Jersey, Cheshire, Lancashire, and parts
of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire have secured
for themselves all the glory and honor and
profit which is to be got out of potato-growing.
It is said, however, that the Irish can
cook a potato against anybody in the world;
but this is doubtful, inasmuch as the Dublin
potato—and for that matter the Cork or Kilkenny
or Newry potato—is neither better nor
worse cooked than the common tuber of Cockaigne.
This, however, is by the way. The
hard fact is that all over Ireland you are
brought face to face with a poverty and a
desolation which are the palpable outcome of
too great a reliance upon a doubtful staple.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</SPAN></span>
The very physique of the people bears abundant
witness to the circumstance that a diet
of pure potato is not good for one. It induces
a ricketiness of build, a lankness and a
want of tone; not to mention a confirmed
hungriness of look. Quite half the people
of Ireland might pass for persons who had
lately been emulating the fasting man, or had
just been let loose from a severe term of
penal servitude. It is intolerable that it
should be so, but there is no getting away
from it. The Irish people are physiologically
underfed. They may eat to repletion, but
as even an Irish potato consists mainly of
starch and water, precious little corporeal
good is to be got out of it. When the body
is starved, the mind dwindles and languishes.
A potato-fed man can no more be witty or
wise or energetic than a man fed on draff and
husks. That is why the Irish have almost entirely
lost the spirits and the volatility and
the graces for which they were formerly renowned.
If you are to make good use of an<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</SPAN></span>
Irishman, as of any other man, you must ply
him with nutriment. The potato is not nutriment
in anything like a complete sense. Even
that exceedingly popular work, <cite>The Encyclopædia
Britannica</cite>, has no feeling for the potato
where the Irish are concerned. Under
the head of “Ireland” I find, among others,
the following sentences: “Introduced by
Raleigh in 1610, the cultivation of this dangerous
tuber developed with extraordinary
rapidity.” “When Petty wrote, early in
Charles II.’s reign, this demoralizing esculent
was already the national food.” “When
the ‘precarious exotic’ failed, an awful famine
was the result.” <cite>The Encyclopædia Britannica</cite>
also obliges us with the appended information:
“The labor of one man could
plant potatoes enough to feed forty.…
Potatoes cannot be kept very long, but there
was no attempt to keep them at all; they were
left in the ground, and dug as required. A
frost which penetrated deep caused the famine
of 1739. Even with the modern system<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</SPAN></span>
of storing in pits, the potato does not last
through the summer, and the ‘meal months’—June,
July and August—always brought
great hardship.… Between 1831 and
1842, there were six seasons of dearth, approaching
in some places to famine.…
In 1845 the population had swelled to 8,295,061,
the greater part of whom depended on
the potato only.” The greater part of the
population of Ireland proper—that is to say
of Ireland with Northern Diamond left out—depends
upon the potato to this day. It is
a state of affairs which cannot be too severely
deprecated; it is a state of affairs which ought
in no circumstances to be allowed to continue;
it is a state of affairs which convinces one
only too clearly that Ireland has for centuries
been governed either by rogues or by blockheads.
Yet the potato, like the tourist, does
not appear hitherto to have been written down
for an Irish grievance or injustice. True,
<cite>The Encyclopædia Britannica</cite> condemns it as
we have seen; but it does so rather by innuendo<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</SPAN></span>
than of set purpose. I am not aware
that the restriction of potato growing has
ever figured as a plank in the platform of
the Irish Party. Indeed, to suggest it, would
have looked like infamy in the face of the
condition of the people. But until the Irish
are taught that the potato is not the first and
last thing God made, they will remain open
to the disasters and the disabilities which too
great a dependence upon it have invariably
brought about. It is lamentable to note the
limitations of the Irish mind as to what is
possible in the matter of food. With sixpence,
your indigenous, starving Irishman
will purchase inevitably a dish of potatoes
and as much whisky as can be screwed out
of the money when the potatoes have been
paid for. The beer and bread and cheese,
or bread and bacon of the English rustic may
be reckoned a Lucullian feast in comparison,
and they are at least three times more nourishing
to the body, if not to the brain. And
the worst of it is, that your proper potato-fed<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</SPAN></span>
Irishman cannot forego his hereditary appetite
for the “esculent” aliment of his country
any more than a Scotchman can forego
oatmeal and offal. In the midst of plenty an
Irishman of the Irish will make for potatoes
as surely as the needle makes for the north.
He prefers them. To take an instance, Mr.
George Bernard Shaw believes himself to be
a vegetarian by free-will and out of altruism.
In point of fact, vegetarianism is easy and
possible for him, because he is an Irishman,
and consequently comes of an ingrained, potato-feeding
stock, however remote. His wit
and other parts, if any, are to be accounted
for by the circumstance that he has the good
sense to supplement his potato-flour with pea-meal,
coco-butter, and other garnishes. A
few thousand tons of lentils, with pepper and
salt to taste, would do Ireland more good
than a new Land Act. She has had enough
potato and enough Land Acts to last her for
the next hundred years.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_XIX">CHAPTER XIX<br/> <span class="smaller">PIGS</span></h2>
<p>In Ireland the pig has long been understood
to pay the rent. Hence, no doubt, it
comes to pass that Irish rents are not always
paid up. That an animal such as the pig,
a grunting, groveling wallower in sloughs,
should be so popular a favorite among the
Irish does not speak too well for them. In
England the favorite and most bepraised domestic
beast is the dog. The keeping of a
pup of some sort is a mark of true English
blood. Dogs in Ireland do not appear to be
so popular. The fact is, of course, that the
pig has been thrust down the Irish throat
by greedy, grasping landlordism. Their worships,
the factors and agents, perceiving that
good man Patrick was hard put to it for
the means of subsistence when he had satisfied<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</SPAN></span>
their rapacious demands, informed him
blithely that a pig would make an admirable
domestic pet and addendum to the potato-patch,
and, unlike a common dog, could,
when you have petted him to a certain sleekness,
be killed and eaten, or salted and sold.
So that the wild Irishman has taken to pig-keeping
with a zest which is without parallel
among other races; whereas for dogs he has
little or no room. The English collier, who
on being met in a lane with a couple of fine
terriers, was asked by a thrifty land-holder
if he, the collier, might not have shown
greater wisdom had he spent his money on
pigs rather than on terriers, replied: “Perhaps
so, but a man would look a damned fool
going ratting wi’ two pigs.” One supposes
that in Ireland if the people ever do go ratting,
they do it with these same porkers.</p>
<p>Quite apart from questions of sport, however,
the pig is certainly not the sweetest
of quadrupeds, and to have him with you
continually in the house, like William had<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</SPAN></span>
Dora, must be something of a trial, rent or
no rent. It is notable, as indicating the difference
between the treatment meted out to
the English and to the Irish, that when a
certain woman of Epping, or some such
neighborhood, took to the keeping of pigs
on the Irish principle, she was swooped down
upon by the authorities who have charge of
the public sanitation, and compelled to part
with her pet. In Ireland you can maintain
familiarly in your kitchen as many pigs as
you like, and nobody will interfere with you.
Possibly the relationship between the Irishman
and his pig might be considered reasonable
if one were by any means certain that
when the pig has discharged his duties as
a household pet and come squalling to the
knife, he were really meat for the Irishman
and his family. I am afraid, however, that
in too many instances the people are so frightfully
poor that the bulk and best parts of
the family pig’s carcass pass out of Ireland
on to the breakfast tables of the bloated<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</SPAN></span>
English, under the name and guise of Irish
provisions. On the whole, one inclines to
the view that even as, in the long run, the
Irish would be the happier and the better fed
without the potato, they might with advantage
dispense also with the pig. It sounds
like rank heresy, but I commend this suggestion
to all thoughtful legislators. The pig
requires neither care nor attention in the
matter of his bringing up; he is a feeder
on refuse and garbage; he would just as soon
sleep on your domestic hearth as in the
snuggest sty that was ever built, and, generally
speaking, he may be considered a
very proper beast for association with an indolent
man. With the potatoes shooting up
merrily forninst your cabin door, and the
pig fattening himself gruntingly and without
assistance from yourself, you may well recline
in honeyed ease and never really trouble
to do a day’s work. And it follows that in
the course of time you fall irrevocably into
the potato-and-pig habit, and acquiesce in the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</SPAN></span>
potato-and-pig standard of living, comfort,
and culture. You vegetate like the tuber, and
you grunt and snore and thrive on nothing,
like the porker. It suits the landlords and
the legislators and the philosophers, and it
fits in entirely with that taint of indolence
which always lurks in the Irish blood. The
farming of one pig, not to mention the keeping
of pigs in cabins, should be prohibited by
Act of Parliament. There would naturally
be great howls from the Irish people, for
nobody is loved with a greater love, or
treated with a greater amount of respect in
Ireland, than the single pig. But he is a
blight and a mistake, and a failure both
economically and socially. The Irish of
America, it is true, have made large fortunes
out of him. There are cities in America
that have been built entirely on pig, and the
American pork-packing interest appears to
keep quite half the country going. But how
have these things been accomplished? Certainly
not by the breeding and rearing of<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</SPAN></span>
single pigs in people’s houses. No, the
American Irish have gone in for pig-keeping
on wholesale and colossal lines. They have
turned the gentleman that pays the rent out
of the house into fields and pens, they have
made a business of the feeding and fattening
of him, and they have erected mammoth
factories wherein he may be slaughtered and
salted down by the thousand. Ireland might
with indisputable advantage take a leaf out
of the bulky lard-stained book of Chicago.
Irish bacon will always command quite as
good a price as the best American that was
ever exported. The English market for it
is practically inexhaustible, but apparently
nobody but the Americans has enterprise or
courage enough to exploit that market. In
America the pigs for the packing trade are
understood to be fed on apples and pea-flour,
and I have seen it suggested that because they
are amply supplied with these staples, the
American pig-feeders will always have the
advantage of possible competitors. There<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</SPAN></span>
are neither apples nor pea-flour in Ireland;
but there is the potato, and if ever an article
of food was designed for a special sort of
beast, the potato was designed for the pig.
The Irish should endeavor to remember that
if the potato have any virtue at all, it was
intended for the feeding of pigs, and not
of human beings. The English farmer does
not, when the dinner hour draws nigh, lead
forth his wife and children to his hay-chamber
for nutriment, and the Irishman should
have just as small a gustatory regard for his
store of potatoes. It is pig-feed, my dear
Patrick, pig-feed, and not victuals at all. If
the English peasantry were to take to a diet
of chopped hay and husks to-morrow, the
English landlords would not lift a little finger
to prevent them, and within a twelvemonth
they would adjust matters by putting up rents
all round. So long as you, the low wild Irish,
choose to be content with the same diet as
your household pet, so long may you remain
content, and so long will the landlords look<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</SPAN></span>
to it that you get no other food. I do not
believe for a moment that Ireland is going
to be regenerated on political, measure-making
Parliamentary lines. Her regeneration
will have to come out of herself. So
much of it as has already been accomplished
has come wholly out of herself, and not out
of legislation at all. The rest will follow if
the Irish people have a mind to deal as
straightly with themselves in the future as
they have dealt with themselves in the past.
And I should say that at all costs the potato-and-pig
habit, as it now exists in Ireland,
should be broken, and got rid of, and utterly
wiped out.</p>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 id="CHAPTER_XX">CHAPTER XX<br/> <span class="smaller">EMIGRATION</span></h2>
<p>When Ireland desires to sup the sweeter
drops out of the cup of sorrow, she has a
way of babbling about exiles from Erin, and
that kind of thing. That her population has
been greatly reduced by emigration cannot be
denied; neither can one get away from the
fact that the true-blooded Irishman has a peculiar
affection for the soil on which he was
born, and that the pains of expatriation have
for him a special and almost intolerable
poignancy. But excepting as it bears upon
the peace of mind of individuals, on the
breaking-up of homes, and the wrenching of
family ties, I do not think that the emigration
which it is the fashion so to deplore has
been at all a bad thing for Ireland. It is
clear that if the country is incapable of supporting<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</SPAN></span>
adequately the mass of the people
now resident in it, the persons who have left
it for fresh woods and pastures new are on
the whole to be congratulated. If it be contended
that it is shameful that a man should
be compelled to leave his native country because
that country does not offer sufficient
scope for his energies, and fails to provide
for him the means of rational human subsistence,
I should say that Ireland is by no means
singular in such failure. The Scotch emigrate,
and boast about it. “Scotland is a
stony country,” they say, “there are plenty
of mouths and little wherewith to fill them;
lo, we will go forth into the undiscovered
places of the world, and seek food and fortune
where they are most likely to be found.”
The Irish, on the other hand, weep and wail,
and keen about it. “We are leaving the ould
counthry, ochone, wirra, wirra, and wirras-thrue!
I’ll sit at the top of Vinegar Hill,
and there I’ll weep till I’ve wept my fill, and
every tear would turn a mill; for, bedad, it’s<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</SPAN></span>
acrost the say I’ll be afther goin’, and, glory
knows, when I’ll be afther comin’ back again.
Good-by, Terence, and Bryan, and Pathrick,
and Judy, and Kathleen, and all the rest of
yez. It’s me that’s got to leave yez, and may
all the leading fiends assail the dhirthy Government!”
And so on and so forth. Tears
and howls are the Irish emigrant’s stock-in-trade.
I do not deny that this is wrong, but
it seems possible that a great deal too much
capital has been made out of it, both by the
poets and by the politicians. Excepting at
the immediate hour of embarkation, the Irish
emigrant makes a very good emigrant indeed.
If his emigration takes him only so far as
England, he becomes at once an industrious,
and not infrequently a fairly prosperous, member
of the community. If his emigration
takes him to America the same thing happens
to him, and he has been known to blossom
out into millionairedom. Why weep for him,
why recite touching poetry about him, and
why call the Government names on his behoof?<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</SPAN></span>
It is the people who are left at home
who should be cried over, and recited over,
and whose condition should provoke the obsecration
of the Government. Of course, the
real truth about the Irish emigrant is that
when he gets into a new country, he is compelled
to fall into line with a scheme of existence
which is far in advance of anything
which has been considered possible in his own
country. The great stumbling-blocks of his
life, namely, the potato patch and the pig,
pass forthwith out of his purview. In England
he must live like a civilized being, in a
house erected and maintained on lines which
conform to the requirements of County Councils
and sanitary authorities; very naturally,
too, he drops into the English view as to diet,
clothing, recreations, and the like, and to secure
these things he is compelled to work,
maybe twelve, or it may be fourteen hours
a day. If the work be hard, it is more or
less regular, and the pay is sure, and, from
the Irish standpoint, princely. In America,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</SPAN></span>
with anything like luck, the Irish emigrant
finds himself even more favorably conditioned,
and if he possesses an ounce of sense—and
he usually does—there are chances for
him which lead to prosperity.</p>
<p>At home, in Ireland, the Irishman of the
poorer class, and even of the middle class, is
absolutely without opportunity. He must
take things as they are, and if he ever thinks
about such matters at all, resign himself to
the mean, and uninspiring facts. There is
nothing in Ireland that a man who wishes
to get along in life may do; the fact being
that the country is exhausted, and devoid of
the elements which are necessary to activity.
And it seems more than likely that this state
of affairs will continue for many years to
come. Capital that is not backed up by arrant
greed has become extremely rare of late.
There is little hope for Ireland in the modern
sense, unless she be exploited, and for some
reason or other, exploitation is nowadays attempted
only by persons without bowels, who,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</SPAN></span>
with all their exploiting, succeed only in enriching
themselves, and degrading the persons
who toil for them. I have said before
that Ireland’s true regeneration must come
from within. When she took to emigration
she began practically this work. For years
it has been the only way for her; it will go
on just as long as it is necessary and good
for her. Meanwhile the people at home must
be roused from their apathy. If the gentlemen
who periodically stump the country with
a miscellaneous selection of political and religious
shibboleths would direct some of their
energy and oratory to the social and intimate
life of the Irish people, they might yet accomplish
for Ireland a work that would be of
real benefit to her. There is far too much
complacency, even in the ranks of Ireland’s
best wishers. It is taken for granted that
the main body of the people of Ireland are
peasants; everybody speaks of them as peasants,
and everybody talks of them as peasants.
When Goldsmith wrote about “a bold peasantry,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</SPAN></span>
their country’s pride,” he did not mean
peasantry in the same way that the glib writers
and talkers of our own day mean it. The
word “peasant,” like many another good
word, has had its ups and downs, and for the
last half-century, if not for a longer period,
“peasant,” as applied to an Irishman, has
amounted really to a condemnation and an
excuse. “Ah, my dear sir,” cry the wise,
“you do not know the Irish peasant!” If
one is to believe all that one hears, the Irish
peasant is a sort of inferior, inhuman creation.
Anything is good enough for him, and,
like the dog in the adage, the less you give
him and the more you kick him, the better
he will like you. One never hears the slackest
politician of them all talking or writing
about “the English peasant.” It is “the
sturdy men of Kent,” “the hardy men of
Yorkshire,” and “comrades,” and “fellow-workers,”
all the time. These men eat bacon
and cheese, and as much beef as they can lay
tooth upon; also they drink beer in and out<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</SPAN></span>
of season and by the bucketful; also their
children are reasonably well-fed and reasonably
well-clad. There’s not the smallest boy
in England but travels in his shoes. Hence
the English peasantry retain those qualities
of boldness and masterfulness and independence,
without which a peasantry cannot thrive.
And nobody dare call them “peasants,” nor
offer them the treatment which peasants are
commonly supposed to delight in. The Irish
need to be taught that they are a race of men,
and not merely dreamers, and martyrs, and
kickable persons. And the first thing for a
proper man to do is to make sure that himself
and his family live like human beings
and compass the food and shelter and decencies
which are nowadays considered necessary
to human beings. The Irish politicians have
helped Ireland to something in the nature of
reasonable government; they might now conveniently
lay themselves out to help her into
something that resembles reasonable living.
At the forthcoming General Election, we are<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</SPAN></span>
told, great political and party play is to be
made with that ancient and bedraggled question,
Home Rule. The friends of Ireland,
and the friends of England, fancy that they
see in it something which is going to be very
good for Ireland. In point of fact it is a
matter of which next to nothing would have
been heard, had not Mr. Balfour stood in
sore need of a red herring to drag across the
idiot noses of the electorate. From Mr. Balfour’s
point of view, no doubt, the resurrection
of the Home Rule bogy is a singularly
adroit move. It will confuse the fiscal tariff-mongers;
it will placate the dunder-headed
Liberal party, and it will tickle the Irish to
death. But any man who believes for one
moment that it will be of the smallest benefit
to Ireland is just a fool. England made up
her mind long ago that Home Rule for Ireland
was a sheer impossibility; and what is
more to the point, Ireland proper, and in the
mass, is of the same opinion. If she desires
to take advantage of the opportunities which<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</SPAN></span>
a General Election is bound to provide for
her, she will let Home Rule severely alone,
and base her demands on less political, but
considerably more urgent and vital things.</p>
<p class="titlepage">THE END</p>
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