Irish Books And Irish People Part 5

When he came home, "even the youngest child of the house could see how great had been the blow. It was not the political defeat, severe as that was, it was the personal wound, and it was incurable."

Looking back through all those years, the "gentle lady" can see nothing in that episode but a case of priestly intimidation. "One need not blame the sheep who pa.s.sed in a frightened huddle from one fold to another."

Yet friends of mine in Galway look back on it in a very different spirit; they remember the Nolan-Trench election and Captain Nolan's victory as a triumph of the poor, a first instalment of freedom; it brought with it an exultation very different from the mere outburst of hatred that these pages suggest. What is more, having been privileged to sit in the most widely representative a.s.sembly of Irishmen that modern Ireland has known, I can testify that to-day peer and peasant, clergy and laymen, those who opposed it, and those others who fought for it, alike admit that the change which such a victory fore-shadowed was necessary and was beneficent. But it was a revolution. Ireland of yesterday was Ireland before the revolution. The Ireland that Miss Somerville and Martin Ross have lived in as grown women has been a country in the throes of a revolution, long drawn-out, with varying phases, yet still incomplete. Those who judge Ireland should remember this. In time of revolution, life is difficult, ancient loyalties clash with new yet living principles, sympathy and justice even are unsure guides. No country could have been kept for forty years in such a ferment as Ireland has known without profound demoralisation. We may well envy those who lived more easily and quietly in the Ireland of yesterday, and held with an unquestioning spirit to the state of things in which they were born.

Such were the folk of whom Miss Somerville writes with "that indomitable family pride that is an a.s.set of immense value in the history of a country." They "took all things in their stride without introspection or hesitation. Their unflinching conscientiousness, their violent church-going (I speak of the sisters), were accompanied by a whole-souled love of a spree and a wonderful gift for a row." I can corroborate her details, especially the last. All those that I recall had some talent for feuds; at least, in every family there would be one warrior, male or female; and all had the complete contempt, not so much for convention as for those who were affected in their lives (or costumes) by any standard that was not home-made. But in all humility I must admit that the real heroines of this book--Mrs. Somerville and Mrs.

Martin--outs.h.i.+ne anything that my memory can produce. When Martin Ross and her mother went back to West Galway and re-established themselves at their old home, a letter from her to Miss Somerville describes one incident:--

I wish you had seen Paddy Griffy, a very active little old man, and a beloved of mine, when he came down on Sunday night to welcome me.

After the usual hand-kissings on the steps, he put his hands over his head and stood in the doorway, I suppose invoking his saint. He then rushed into the hall.

"Dance, Paddy," screamed Nurse Bennett (my foster-mother, now our maid-of-all-work).

And he did dance, and awfully well, too, to his own singing. Mamma, who was attired in a flowing pink dressing-gown and a black hat trimmed with lilac, became suddenly emulous, and with her spade under her arm joined in the jig. This lasted for about a minute, and was a never-to-be-forgotten sight. They skipped round the hall, they changed sides, they swept up to each other and back again and finished with the deepest curtseys.

My own mother would gladly have done the same on a like occasion, but she lacked Mrs. Martin's talent for the jig. Mrs. Somerville is sketched with a free and humorous hand. I quote only one detail, but it shows the real Irishwoman, more deeply in touch with Ireland's traditional life than any Gaelic League could bring her. Question arose how to find a suitable offering for 'an old servant of forty years' standing, whose fancies were few and her needs none.' "Give her a nice shroud," said Mrs. Somerville, "there's nothing in the world she'd like so well as that."

Shakespeare could not have outdone that intuition, and only one of the larger breed would have been unconventional enough to suggest what the younger generation, hampered by other feelings than those of West Carbery, "were too feeble to accept."

These two traits belong to the harmonious and thoroughly Irish grouping in which such ladies as Mrs. Martin and Mrs. Somerville were central figures of the whole countryside. That grouping exists no longer, and this book has to describe the discord which interrupted that harmony.

Martin Ross's elder brother, Robert Martin (famous in his day as the writer and singer of _Ballyhooly_, and a score of other topical songs), left his work as a London journalist to help in fighting the first campaign which brought the word "boycott" into usage.

It was at this work (his sister writes), that Robert knew for the first time what it was to have every man's hand against him, to meet the stare of hatred, the jeer and the sidelong curse; to face endless drives on outside cars with his revolver in his hand; to plan the uphill tussle with boycotted crops and cattle for which a market could scarcely be found; to know the imminence of death, when by accidentally choosing one of two roads he evaded the man with a gun who had gone out to wait for him.

Robert Martin faced, in a word, the earliest and ugliest phases of that Irish revolution, which was the Nemesis of the all too easy and too pleasant ways of yesterday in Ireland. Later, after his death, Martin Ross herself had to gain some experience of the same trouble. When she went back with her mother to re-establish the family home from which they had been fifteen years absent, there was a hostile element in the parish, and gracious hospitality was ungraciously met. An attempt was made to keep children from a children's party which she had organised.

The move was half-hearted and her energy defeated it, but that the attempt should be made was such "a facer" as she had never before known.

Like many another ugly thing in Ireland, it originated in that cowardly fear of public opinion which is to be found on the seamy side of all revolutions; and it did not stand against her "gallant fight to restore the old ways, the old friends.h.i.+ps."

The old ways, in so far as they meant the old friends.h.i.+ps, she might hope to restore, although the friends.h.i.+p would, half consciously, take on a new accent; personality would count for more in it, position for less. But the old relation which authorised a kind-hearted landlord to feel that his tenants had "deserted him" because they voted against his wish in an election--that is gone for ever; and gone, at all events, for the present, is the local leaders.h.i.+p of the gentry.

I question whether it is realised that in parting from that leaders.h.i.+p Ireland lost what was in a sense Home Rule. In the "yesterday" of which I write Ireland was governed in all its parochial and most intimate affairs by a cla.s.s or a caste; but that governing cla.s.s was Irish--Irish with a limitation, no doubt, yet still indisputably Irish. When that rule perished, when that cla.s.s lost its local ascendancy, government became the b.a.s.t.a.r.d compromise that we have known, with power inharmoniously divided between officialdom and agitators. The law was framed and administered by officials, often English or Scotch, possessing no authority except what the law conferred on them. Authority lay very largely with popular leaders; but leaders.h.i.+p and authority alike were purely personal, depending on a man's own qualities and the support which they evoked. No man was born to it as of right, and such authority is far more precarious than the established power of a governing cla.s.s. This is a weakness in all democratically-governed countries, but where there is self-government, the individual, in entering upon office, acquires the support and the prestige of a long-established machinery of power. He ceases to be merely the individual when he becomes part of the Government. For the Irish leaders this reinforcement to the personal authority has never existed; they have been at a terrible disadvantage as compared with all other democratic politicians; and consequently the power exercised by them has always, except perhaps at Parnell's zenith, been far less than was the combined authority of the gentry before the landlord rule was broken.

Those who shared in that authority acted, and could afford to act, with unquestioning confidence; they were surer of themselves, than is any popular leader or any official in Ireland of to-day. It seldom occurred to them to ask whether their conduct in any juncture might meet with approval; being a law to other people, they were naturally a law to themselves, and an Irish law. Their power was excessive, and demoralised them by its lack of limitation; yet many of the qualities which it bred, made them an element of great value in the country. These qualities are by no means extinct in their kindred, nor is the tradition of their right to leaders.h.i.+p forgotten.

Of one thing Miss Somerville and those for whom she speaks (she is a real spokeswoman) may be well a.s.sured. Whatever be the surface mood of the moment, whatever the pa.s.sing effect of war's hectic atmosphere, nothing is more deeply realised throughout Ireland than the need to restore the old ways, the old friends.h.i.+ps--the need to bring back the gentry to their old uses in Ireland, and to so much of leaders.h.i.+p as should be theirs by right of fitness. When the history of the Irish Convention comes to be fully recorded, it will be seen that a great desire was universally felt, cordially uttered, in that a.s.sembly, to bridge over the gulf which divides us from yesterday in Ireland, and to recover for the future much of what was admirable, valuable and lovable in a past that is not unkindly remembered. Indeed, it is plain that Miss Somerville has felt the influences that were abroad on the winds, when she wrote of her comrade:--

Her love of Ireland, combined with her distrust of some of those newer influences in Irish affairs to which her letters refer, made her dread any weakening of the links that bind the United Kingdom into one; but I believe that if she were here now, and saw the changes that the past eighteen months have brought to Ireland, she would be quick to welcome the hope that Irish politics are lifting at last out of the controversial rut of centuries, and that although it has been said of East and West that "never the two shall meet," North and South will yet prove that in Ireland it is always the impossible that happens.

North and South--that is a more difficult gulf to bridge, for the one I have been speaking of is only a breach to repair. But industrial Protestant Ulster and the rest of Ireland have never really been one.

Unity there has not to be re-established, but created. Martin Ross went to the North only once "at the tremendous moment of the signing of the Ulster Covenant," and she was profoundly impressed by what she saw. She wrote about it publicly and she wrote also privately (in a letter which I had the honour to receive) a pa.s.sage well worth quoting:--

I did not know the North at all. What surprised me about the place was the feeling of cleverness and go, and also the people struck me as being hearty. If only the South would go up North and see what they are doing there, and how they are doing it, and ask them to show them how, it would make a good deal of difference. And then the North should come South and see what nice people we are, and how we do that.

When that reciprocal pilgrimage was accomplished by the Convention, her antic.i.p.ations were more than justified. But how clever she was! In a flash, she, coming there a stranger, hits on the word which describes Ulster and differentiates it from the rest of Ireland. "Hearty," that is what they are; it is the good side of their self-content. No people that is in revolution can be hearty--least of all when revolution has dragged on through more than a generation. Distrust of your comrades--distrust of your leaders--self-distrust--these are the characteristic vices of revolution (look at Russia), and they sow a bitter seed. Protestant Ulster has never known revolution; for it yesterday and to-day have been happily, naturally, continuous. Political change it has known, normal and beneficent; land purchase came to Ulster as a by-product of what the rest of Ireland endured in torment, and agony, and self-mutilation.

Clever the Northerns are, but their cleverness issues prosperously in action; they carry on in a solidly-established order; they have not needed to break down before they could begin to build. That is why their heartiness stood out when they were a.s.sembled, as I have seen them in a common council of Irishmen, which was also, thank heaven, a companions.h.i.+p. But the world at large can see it exhibited in another way. Contrast the work of the Ulster Players with that of the Abbey Theatre. _The Drone_ is perhaps not the best of new Irish comedies, but it is infinitely the pleasantest; there is no bitter tang in its hearty humour. Even in _The Enthusiast_, a sketch which has some touch of pessimism, there is little more than a good-humoured shrug of the shoulders when the Enthusiast abandons his pretensions to make himself heard against the banging of Orange drums. I find a very different note, not merely in the work of Synge, of Boyle, Colum, Lennox Robinson, and the rest of the Abbey dramatists, but even in the books of which Miss Somerville was joint author. When Ireland is seen with the eyes, for instance, of her Major Yeates, is not the whole att.i.tude one of amused and acquiescent resignation? Take the hunting out of it (with all the humours of the hunt)--take the shooting and fis.h.i.+ng--and what is left but a life (to borrow a phrase from Mr. George Moore) "as melancholy as bog-water and as ineffectual." Miss Somerville would probably decline to imagine an Ireland with these unthinkable suppressions, but after all, we cannot live by or for sport alone. What gave dignity and reality to the life of yesterday was leaders.h.i.+p in one cla.s.s, and loyalty in the other. Leaders.h.i.+p resting on owners.h.i.+p is gone now, dead as the dodo; what is left for the like (say) of Mr. Flurry Knox if he should begin to take himself seriously? You can easily make a soldier of him; we have all met him in trenches and observed his airy att.i.tude in No Man's Land.

But soldiering has generally meant expatriation. For my part, I hope some day to see this gentleman (or his like) play a useful part in some battalion of Irish territorials--some home service offshoot of the Connaught Rangers. But that is not enough. If those who, like Miss Somerville, love Ireland's yesterday and desire to link it up with a worthy to-morrow, there must be a wider understanding of Ireland, not in the North only, but in that element of the South and West which stands to-day in a sense morally expatriated. The Irish gentry who complain that their tenants "deserted" them must learn where they themselves failed their tenants. Leaders.h.i.+p cannot depend merely on a power to evict, and they would to-day repudiate the desire for a leaders.h.i.+p so grounded. But between free men where there is not comprehension there can be no leaders.h.i.+p.

I take first what is most difficult--the very heart of antagonism.

Everyone who desires to understand Ireland to-day should read Patrick Pea.r.s.e's posthumous book, called boldly _The Story of a Success_.[1] It is the spiritual history of Pea.r.s.e's career as a schoolmaster, edited and completed by his pupil, Desmond Ryan; and it is a book by which no one can be justly offended--a book instinct with n.o.bility, chivalry and high courtesy, free from all touch of bitterness; a book, too, shot through and slashed with that tragic irony which the Greeks knew to be the finest thrill in literature--the word spoken, to which the foreknown event gives an echo of double meaning. Pea.r.s.e was concerned with Ireland's yesterday; he desired to bring the present and the future into organic rotation with the past. But his yesterday was not Miss Somerville's nor mine. The son of an English mechanic and a Galway woman, he was brought up in Connemara after the landlord power had ceased to exist. Ireland's past for him and Irish tradition were seen through the medium of an imagination in touch only with the peasant life, but inspired by books and literature, written and spoken. His yesterday was of no definite past, for he had been born in a revolution when the immediate past was obliterated. In his vision a thousand years were no more than the watch of some spellbound chivalry, waiting for the voice that should say, "It is the time." Cuchulain and Robert Emmet were his inspirations, but the champion of the legendary Red Branch cycle and the young revolutionary of Napoleon's days were near to him one as the other, in equally accessible communion. Going back easily to the heroic legends, on which, though blurred in their outline, his boyhood had been fostered by tellers of long-transmitted tales at a Connemara hearthside, he found the essential beauty and significance where more learned though less cultured readers have been bewildered by what seemed to them wild extravagances of barbarism. What he gathered from them did not lie inert, but quickened in him and in others, for he was the revolutionary as schoolmaster--the most drastic revolutionary of all. In the school review which was the first vehicle for these writings of his, he hoped to found "the rallying point for the thought and aspirations of all those who would bring back again in Ireland that Heroic Age which reserved its highest honour for the hero who had the most childlike heart, for the king who had the largest pity, and for the poet who visioned the truest image of beauty." All his theory of education was based on the old Irish inst.i.tution of fosterage, which was no mere physical tie of the breast; the child sent to be fostered was sent to be bred and trained, and it was a tie stronger than that of its blood or of the breast. _Irish Memories_ shows incidentally how great a part this fosterage played in the Ross of yesterday--that family with its mult.i.tude of children was bound to the countryside by all the "Nursies."

But the Martin household, and all similar households were, in a less literal sense, fostered by the peasantry at large. The truest part of education should be to know your own country (a principle much neglected in Ireland), and which of us all, who had the good fortune to be brought up in touch with Irish peasant life, does not realise our debt? We received a devotion, an affection, for which no adequate return could be made--it is the nature of fosterage that the fosterer should give more than can ever be requited; but we gained also our real knowledge, in so far as we ever had it, of the countryside, the traditional wisdom, the inherited way of life. There was more to be got if we had the wit to a.s.similate it. Almost all of modern Irish literature that has lasting value is evoked from elements floating in peasant memory, in the peasant mind, and in the coloured peasant speech of an Ireland which keeps unbroken descent from a long line of yesterdays. Mr. Yeats is only the chief of those who draw from this source. Miss Somerville herself and her cousin must have known well that the real worth of their work lies in their instinct for the poetry which, more specially in Gaelic-speaking regions, sits in rags by roadside and chimney corner.

Irish poetry is not only the tragic voice of the keene; Gaelic had its comic muse as well, a robust virago, of the breed which produced Aristophanes and Rabelais--and Slipper with his gift for epic narrative is a camp-follower of that regiment.

[Footnote 1: "The Story of a Success." By P. H. Pea.r.s.e. Being a Record of St. Erda's College, September, 1908, to Easter, 1916. Edited by Desmond Ryan, B.A. Maunsel & Co.]

Yet in Miss Somerville's appreciation there is often--not always--a sense of the incongruity as well as of the beauty in peasant speech. The woman crying for alms of bread who described her place of habitation, "I do be like a wild goose over on the side of Drominidy Wood," moves to laughter as well as to pity with the dignity of her phrase. Ireland so felt is Ireland perceived from the outside--seen as a picturesque ruin.

You cannot so see Pea.r.s.e; he is too strong for even compa.s.sionate laughter. What he embodies is the central strength of Irish nationalism--its disregard of the immediate event.

Wise men have told me that I ought never to set my foot on a path unless I can see clearly whither it will lead me. But that philosophy would condemn most of us to stand still till we rot.

Surely one can do no more than a.s.sure one's self that each step one takes is right; and as to the rightness of a step one is fortunately answerable only to one's conscience and not to the wise men of the counting house. The street will pa.s.s judgment on our enterprises according as they have "succeeded" or "failed." But if one can feel that one has striven faithfully to do a right thing, does not one stand ultimately justified, no matter what the issue of one's attempt, no matter what the sentence of the street?

By such teaching he commended to his scholars, and to Ireland, the spirit which he desired to see expressed in "that laughing gesture of a young man that is going into battle or climbing to a gibbet." Strange country, that has the gibbet always before the eyes and almost before the aspiration of its idealists! It was so yesterday--in all the yesterdays--and yet the reason is plain. All the aspirations of such idealists have been regarded as criminal by the cla.s.s for which Miss Somerville and her cousin speak--criminal and menacing to those who, holding the power, arrogated to themselves a monopoly of loyalty. They have always conceived of Pea.r.s.e and his like as thirsting for their blood. Miss Edgeworth, in a letter printed for the first time in _Irish Memories_, writes:--"I fear our throats will be cut by order of O'Connell and Co. very soon." We know enough to-day about O'Connell to realise how far this estimate lay from the truth of things; yet Miss Somerville herself talks about "Parnell and his wolf-pack." Justin McCarthy, John Redmond, Willie Redmond--these were some of the wolves who presumably wanted to tear Miss Somerville's kindred to pieces. That is where the change must come; there must be among the gentry some generous understanding of Nationalist leaders before the grave has closed over them. Anyone can see what is bad in Sinn Fein, but no one can fight that evil effectively, no one can convert to better uses the ill-guided force which Sinn Fein represents, until he understands what is best in it. Sinn Fein has largely replaced a movement which, in its later phases, dwelt perhaps too much on the material advantages which it offered as the reward of support. Sinn Fein's strength has lain not in what it has offered, but in what it has asked; it has asked for devotion, and Pea.r.s.e certainly both gave that and received it. Such was his teaching, and I do not know a better saying for the Irish gentry to ponder over than the last sentence in these essays of his: "The highest thing anyone can do is to serve."

That temper was perhaps lacking in the Ireland of yesterday which Miss Somerville so lovingly describes. To command loyalty as a right, to reward it by generosity, by indulgence--this made part of the ideal of leaders.h.i.+p; but scarcely to be laborious either in rendering or exacting capable work.

The old way of life was good for children, as Martin Ross describes it in her sketch of her brother's upbringing.

Everything in those early days of his was large and vigorous; tall trees to climb, great winds across the lake to wrestle with, strenuous and capable talk upstairs and downstairs, in front of furnaces of turf and logs, long drives and the big Galway welcome at the end of them.

But for the grown men, it lacked one thing: effort. Pleasant it was; lots of everything, lots of hunting, lots of game on the moors and bogs, lots of fish in lake and river, lots of beef and mutton on the farm, lots of logs and turf, lots of s.p.a.ce--above all, lots of time, and always the spirit for a spree that made everyone "prefer good fun to a punctual dinner." There was only one deficiency: that way of life was apt to be short of cash. It was, in short, a life that could not pay its way. The "big Galway welcome" is just as big with a sounder economic system, that rests solidly on men's own work. Anyone who knows Western Ireland can tell you that the quality of work is better on the land where men are their own masters than it was in the old days. Yet even there we are not out of the old vicious circle of under-pay and under-work; and in the industrial life we are fully entangled in it. But here also the revolutionary as schoolmaster has appeared. To my thinking the most momentous apparition in Ireland of our times is that of Mr.

Ford, who is paying American wage rates for labour in Cork, and calculating, not to get value for his money at once, but to teach labour to be worth it. According to his gospel, as it was expounded to me, you will not get efficiency by offering to pay the wages of efficiency when labour becomes efficient: you must first provide the conditions of efficiency and then teach, just as in the army your first care is to get a recruit fit and your second to make him thorough in his ground work.

That is the practical recognition of what yesterday in Ireland failed to recognise.

Nor does this ideal of strenuous and capable work exclude either the strenuous and capable talk of Martin Ross's Galway household or anything else that was excellent in the old way. Certainly the most laborious and the most prosperous peasant household that I have ever known (and for many months I was part of it) was the most thoroughly and traditionally Irish, except that it was removed by one generation from Gaelic speech.

But the whole cast of mind was Gaelic, remote as the poles from that "newer Ireland" which is in revolt against all tradition of authority--and, if they only knew it, against all Irish tradition. Miss Somerville thinks, as a page in her book shows, that the newer Ireland has lost the endearing courtesy which is imposed by the genius of the Gaelic tongue, and is for that matter to be found in every line of Pea.r.s.e's essays. We can educate back to that without any detriment; we can be as efficient and as courteous as the j.a.panese. Another thing is gone. Ireland of yesterday, even in its poverty, was a merry country; to-day, even in its prosperity, it is full of bitter, mirthless rancour and hate. It will be a great thing if we can help to preserve for Ireland the exquisite benediction which a beggar woman in Skibbereen laid upon Martin Ross: "Sure, ye're always laughing! That ye may laugh in the sight of the glory of Heaven."

1918.