ireUGHIERSIDE OF IRISH UFE BY GeotAfimuinham .1 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM »«rs."^.F.^. '^-orley Date Due )fiirf" ' 1' ^ac iAR3 ) 1948 J T APR ^' 948 IT ■APR 2 2 iy4yi> MAY 21 StP27l 1948^8 <&1 fi i !K»l \li • " CHAPTER TWO AS WE SEE OURSELVES : OLD IRELAND THE HISTORY OF IRELAND BROKE OFF abruptly and made a fresh start in the middle of the nineteenth century. The famine of 1846, '47, and '48 saw the end of one Ireland. The years which followed it have witnessed the painful struggling to the birth of another. The very type of our faces changed. We must, I suppose, believe the artists and caricaturists that the short- headed, snub-nosed, prognathous Irishman was common in the early part of the nineteenth century. He lingers on still in the English comic papers. From Ireland itself he has disappeared. The fact was pointed out to me by an old friend. " When I was young," he said, " Punch used to represent Irishmen as baboons in knee-breeches and swallow-tailed coats ; and the kind of face which Punch exag- gerated was to be seen in every fair and gather- ing of the people. I hardly ever see it now." I offer no explanation of the change, but the fact is plain. The type of Irish face which could be caricatured into the semblance of a baboon has vanished even more completely than the 25 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE picturesque dress which the Irish peasant used to wear. You may still see the swallow-tailed coat, chimney-pot hat, and tight knee-breeches on some old man at a wayside railway station. The face which used to be the prevailing type you see no more. And with the face has gone a certain kind of character. Lever's novels depict for us the old hard- drinking, hard-riding, hard-fighting, reckless Irishman. He had his day, but it is over now. The famine years killed him off. Those of his class who survived the famine were anachron- isms even in the twenty years from 1 8 50 to 1 8 70, No such people live in Ireland now. The town of Mallow is no longer famous for its " rakes." The very word has disappeared from common " Bearing, belling, dancing, drinking, Breaking windows, damning, sinking, Ever raking, never thinking, Live the Rakes of Mallow. Spending faster than it comes, Beating waiters, bailiffs, duns, Bacchus' true begotten sons, Live the Rakes of Mallow. Racking tenants, stewards teasing, Swiftly spending, slowly raising, Wishing to spend all their days in Raking as at Mallow." 26 OURSELVES : OLD IRELAND There is no such society in Ireland now, nor has been for half a century. Mallow depends for its fame to-day, not on its " rakes," but on the fact of its special connection with a very serious-minded politician, a gentleman whose worst enemies would hesitate to suggest that he was " Bacchus' true begotten son." But we have plenty of evidence that such a society really did exist in Ireland from the middle of the eighteenth century, perhaps earlier, up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Sir Jonah Barrington's Personal Studies and Sketches, a book far less known than it ought to be, abounds in true stories of the prototypes of ' ' The Rakes of Mallow. " A pair of hard-drink- ing squires went to sleep one night, after their potations, with their heads leaning against a wall which had recently been given a coat of mortar. During the night the mortar dried, and in the morning Messrs. Joe Kellyand Peter Alley were discovered by their friends fast anchored by their hair and scalps. A consulta- tion followed as to what had better be done in so painful a case. Mr. Peter Alley, growing impatient, released himself thus : "He asked 27 THE LIGHTERSIDE OF IRISH LIFE for two knives, which beingbrought,he whetted one against the other, and introducing the blades close to his skull, sawed away at cross corners till he was liberated, with the loss only of half his hair and a piece of his scalp, which he had sliced off in zeal and haste for his liberty. I never saw a fellow so extravagantly happy ■ Fur was scraped from the crown of a hat to stop the bleeding, and he was duly tied up with an old yNovna.Vi5praskeen (an apron). He was soon in a state of bodily convalescence. Our solicitude was now required solely for Joe, whose head was too deeply buried to be ex- humated with so much facility. At this moment Bob Casey, of Ballinakill, a very celebrated wigmaker, just dropped in to see what he could pick up honestly in the way of his profession or steal in the way of anything else ; and he immediately undertook to get Mr. Kelly out of the mortar by a very expert but tedious process, namely, clipping with his scissors, and then rooting out with an oyster knife. He thus fin- ally succeeded in less than an hour in setting Joe once more at liberty, at the price of his queue, which was totally lost, and of the exposure 28 OURSELVES : OLD' IRELAND of his raw and bleeding occiput. The opera- tion was, indeed, of a mongrel description — somewhat between a complete tonsure and an imperfect scalping, to both of which denomina- tions it certainly presented claims." Debt was, apparently, as common as whisky, and the weight of obligations which he could not hope to discharge was carried light-hearted- ly by the Irish gentleman. A certain Mr. Tom Flinter who lived in the neighbourhood of Timahoe enjoyed himself until his household was reduced to one faithful retainer, Dick Hennessy by name. This man seems to have had some feeling for common honesty, and it should be noted to his master's credit that Dick's good advice was not wholly wasted. Mr. Flinter came into some money unexpected- ly. He proposed to enjoy a " burst " at Tima- hoe fair. The conversation between him and Hennessy is thus related by a poet. Tom Flinter. " Dick," says he, Dick Hennessy. " What," says he. Tom Flinter. " Fetch me my hat," says he, " For I will go," says he, " To Timahoe," says he ; " I'll buy the fair," says he, " And all that's there," says he. 29 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE Dick Hennessy. " Arrah, pay what you owe," says he ; " And then you may go,'' says he, " To Timahoe," says he, " To buy the fair," says he, " And all that's there," says he. Tom Flinter. " Well, by this and by that," says he ; " Dick, hang up my hat" says he. But, though improvidence was common, a very " canny " appreciation of the value of possessions was not unknown. There was a certain Elizabeth Fitzgerald who, indeed, be- longed to rather an earlier period, being the great-aunt of Sir Jonah. It happened that she was besieged in her Castle by a large but ill- armed body of O'Cahills. Mistress Fitzgerald was well able to take care of her property, but her husband seems to have been a fool. He strayed from the safety of the Castle and was captured by the enemy. They sent a messenger to the lady, who conducted the prisoner to a place well within his wife's sight. "I'm a truce, lady," said the O'Cahill herald. " Look here " (showing the terrified squire), " we have your husband in hault — yees have yeer Castle stire enough. Now, we'll change, if you please: we'll render the squire and you'll render the keep ; 30 OURSELVES : OLD IRELAND and if yees won't do that same the squire will be throttled before your two eyes in half an hour." " Flag of truce ! " said the heroine with due dignity and without hesitation ; " mark the words of Elizabeth Fitzgerald of Moret Castle ; they may serve for your own wife upon some future occasion. Flag of truce! I won' i render my keep, and I'll tell you why — Elizabeth Fitzgerald may get another husband, but Eliza- beth Fitzgerald may never get another Castle ; so I '11 keep what I have ; and if you can't get off faster than your legs can readily carry you, my warders will try which is hardest, your skull or a stone bullet." The O'Cahills kept their word, and old Squire Stephen Fitzgerald in a short time was seen dangling and performing various evolutions in the air. It is easy to condemn the wild excesses of such a society. It is perhaps less easy to see its merits. But it had some merits. Its wild- ly bacchanalian songs had a certain literary flavour of their own. The men who wrote or sang them were hard drinkers no doubt, but THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE they were not ignorant boors. We drink less nowadays, which is clear gain. We look after our shillings and pence — so our savings bank statistics witness — but we are no longer capable of the fine abandon of the man who wrote " Bumper, Squire Jones." "Ye good fellows all. Who love to be told where good claret's in store. Attend to the call Of one who's ne'er frighted, But greatly delighted, With six bottles more : Be sure you don't pass The good hiuse Money-Glass, Which the jolly red god so peculiarly owns ; 'Twill well suit your humour, For pray what would you more Than mirth, with good claret, and bumpers. Squire Jones ? " Ye lovers who pine For lasses that oft prove as cruel as fair, Who whimper and whine For lilies and roses. With eyes, lips and noses, Or tip of an ear. Come hither, I'll show you How Phillis and Chloe No more shall occasion such sighs and such groans : For what mortal so stupid As not to quit Cupid, When called by good claret and bumpers. Squire Jones ?' 32 OURSELVES : OLD IRELAND So the song rants on for another six stanzas. The poets are appealed to — " Our jingling of glasses Your rhyming surpasses." Soldiers are invited to the revel. The clergy " so wise " have the right hand of bacchanalian fellowship extended to them. Even lawyers, the natural enemies of Squire Jones and his like, are exhorted to " Leave musty reports And forsake the king's courts, Where dullness and discord have set up their thrones." Doctors are apostrophised as " Ye physical tribe," and foxhunters, surely not in vain, are urged to " Hark away to the claret — a bumper, Squire Jones." In such a society it is scarcely to be wondered at that the father of Lever's most famous hero was obliged to leave Dublin in a hearse to escape the attention of his creditors ; or that a west of Ireland gentleman advertising for a tenant for his country house should have quoted as one of its chief attractions that there was not an attor- ney within twenty miles of it in any direction. Such a paradise for insolvent debtors can- 33 c THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE not, one would suppose, have remained long unlet. These were the gentry, the descendants of the Cromwellian Puritans, who ousted the old Jacobite aristocracy. But their spirit was the spirit of all classes. Micky Free was as con- vivial and as reckless as his master. There is a Dublin street ballad, " The Night before Larry was Stretched," which witnesses to just the same spirit in the very dregs of society. Larry was to be hanged in the morning. " Stretched" is a euphemism for the extreme vengeance of the law. His friends joined him the night be- fore in a final merry-making. " The boys they came crowding in fast, They drew all their stools round about him. Six glasses round his trap case were placed. He couldn't be well waked without 'em. When one of us asked could he die Without having duly repented ? Says Larry, ' That's all in my eye ; And first by the clergy invented, To get a fat bit for themselves.' " Larry was horribly blasphemous. Nobody is ever blasphemous now, which shows how much Ireland has improved since the days when the clergy drank with a cheery good-fellowship, and 34 OURSELVES : OLD IRELAND wore white chokers round their necks instead of collars as stiffly starched as their theology ! Such a society could not possibly survive. It is gone now, and no more than the tradition of its reckless joie de vivre remains. Squire Jones' descendants, if they drink at all, do it shamefacedly and timidly, being aware of the unpleasant effects of excessupon the liver. Our contemporary Larrys are very rarely hanged. They have a proper respect for their clergy nowadays, and the blamelessness of their lives goes to make good the boast of the politicians that Ireland is the most crimeless part of the United Kingdom. Those were the days of the famous faction fights, feuds often without any discoverable cause which resulted in pitched battles at fairs and markets. Tipperary was of all the Irish counties the richest in faction and produced the fiercest battles ; but they were common all over Ireland. Inglis, in his Irish Tour, gives an account of a scrimmage which he witnessed in western Galway between the Joyces and the Connemara boys. The combatants fought with sticks, the well-known Irish shillelaghs. The 35 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE traveller, who seems to have been a man of insatiable curiosity, attended a " Pattern " — a species of holiday festival — and was invited into a tent where poteen-drinking was in full swing. " By and by," he writes, " some boastful ex- pression of a Joyce appeared to give offence to several at the far end of the tent ; and some- thing loud and contentious was spoken of by two or three in a breath. The language, which, in compliment to me, had been English, sudden- ly changed to Irish. Two or three glasses of poteen were quickly gulped by most of theboys, and the innkeeper, who had accompanied me and who sat by me, whispered that there would soon be some fighting. I had seen abundance of fighting on a small scale in Ireland, but, I confess, I had been barbarous enough to wish I might see a regular faction fight; and now I was likely to be gratified. Taking the hint of the innkeeper, I shook hands with the ' boys ' nearest to me right and left ; and, taking ad- vantage of a sudden burst of voices, I stepped over my bench, and retiring from my tent, took up a safe position on some neighbouring rocks. 36 OURSELVES : OLD IRELAND " I had not long to wait ; out sallied the Joyces and a score of other ' boys ' from several tents at once, as if there had been some precon- certed signal ; and the flourishing of shillelaghs did not long precede the using of them. Any one, to see an Irish fight for the first time, would conclude that a score or two must inevitably be put hors de combat. The very flourish of a regu- lar shillelagh and the shout that accompanies it seem to be the immediate precursors of a fract- ured skull ; but the affair, though bad enough, is not so fatal as it appears to be : the shillelaghs, no doubt, do sometimes descend upon a head, which is forthwith a broken head ; but they oftener descend upon each other : and the fight soon becomes one of personal strength. The parties close and grapple ; and the most powerful man throws his adversary : fair play is but little attended to : two or three often attack a single man; nor is there cessation of blows even when a man is on the ground." Very little damage was done on this partic- ular occasion,- but elsewhere men were some- times killed, frequently seriously wounded. It was Thomas Drummond, Under-Secretary for 11 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE Ireland from 1835 till 1840, who first conceived the idea — surely an obvious one — of directing the police to put a stop to these combats. His order was somewhat strenuously objected to, not apparently by the rioters themselves, but, curiously enough, by the police officers. They thought it much better to keep the police out of the way, and represented to the reforming Under-Secretary that any interference would be likely to end in bloodshed. A suggestive side- light on the methods of the Irish government in those days ! But a respect for the sanctity of human life was perhaps not the only reason for the passive attitudeof thepolice. I cull from Sir George Cornewall Lewis' Irish Disturbances the following strange passage : " At one time the local authorities encour- aged faction fighting ; it seemed to them that the people must necessarily raise their hands against some one ; and they thought that fac- tions would serve the same purpose as the stone thrown by Cadmus among the earthborn war- riors of Thebes — that of turning the violence of the combatants themselves upon one another." Divide et empera is a wise political maxim, 38 OURSELVES : OLD IRELAND but surely never was it so cynically acted upon as by those local authorities. Sometimes the combatants had excellent reasons for their battles. There is a story told by Carleton in a hitherto unpublished novel, of a village whose inhabitants had a strong taste for historical drama. They agreed to act a play, and chose one called The Battle of Aughrim. In it the final and decisive battle between the Williamite and Jacobite forces in Ireland was represented in the style of a high old-fashioned tragedy. The village actors divided the parts among them on the most natural principles. The Protestants represented Ginckel and the Williamite officers. The Roman Catholics took St. Ruth, Sarsfield, and the men of the beaten side. Each actorwas then in a position to enter with spirit into his part. The inevitable result ensued. There was a riot. Every strong pas- sion, religious, racial, and political, was aroused, and the battle of Aughrim was in actual reality fought over again.- The result when cool reflec- tion came next day was unsatisfactory to both parties. But no one was inclined to give up the play. It was agreed that another performance 39 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE should take place, and that the Jacobite leaders should be taken by the Protestants while the Roman Catholics should shout the hated war- cries of their hereditary foes. I n this way, the enthusiasm of both sides being damped by the unfamiliar positions in which they found them- selves, it was hoped that a peaceful battle of Aughrim might be fought only on the stage. How the plan would have worked out we shall never know. On the evening of the perform- ance the floor of the barn which served as a theatre gave way, and both armies were precip- itated into the cow byre underneath. Over the battle of Aughrim passions were sure to surge strongly, but it seems that religious tolerance was sometimes practised in Ireland in those days. The rector of a western parish was threatened with a visit from his bishop on a cer- tain Sunday. He was plunged into despair at the prospect. What account he may have given beforehand of the condition of his parish we do not know, but in fact he had no more than about a dozen people attending his church. The rest of the inhabitants of the district were Roman Catholics, and the poor rector was greatly afraid 40 A QUIET WHIFF OURSELVES : OLD IRELAND that the bishop would be seriously angry. He told the trouble to the parish priest, with whom he appears to have been on excellent terms. The priest comforted him. " You leave the matter in my hands," he said, "and I'll see you all right." The appointed Sunday arrived. The priest's congregation assembled as usual, and considerably to their surprise were marched by their pastor to the Protestant Church. " Let every one of you behave yourselves," he said to them, "and, if you are in doubtwhat to do, keep your eye on me." The priest must have studied therubrics of the Book of Common Prayer care- fully. He sat in the front seat, and the behavi- our of the congregation, a very large one, was exemplary. The bishop afterwards congratu- lated the fortunate rector on the excellent con- dition of his parish. We are assured that religious bitterness is dying out in Ireland and will soon be a thing of the past ; but even the most optimistic, even a convinced English Liberal, will admit that we have some distance to go before we reach the breadth of charitable courtesy shown by that parish priest. 41 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE In the Life of Archbishop Trench — not the famous DubKn prelate, but one of the Protest- ant Archbishops of Tuam — there is an account given of the first meeting held in the west of I re- land town in support of the Society for the Pro- pagation of the Gospel. The Roman Catholic priestattendedthe meeting, and in the course of a friendly speech gave his reasons for not becom- ing a member of the great Anglican mission- ary society. We have all — one may say it either with gladness or regret — become too firmly con- vinced of the truth of what we believe to do that sort of thing now. The people then had amusements other than faction fights and inflammable plays. Hurl- ing matches were common. Athletic contests aroused popular interest and excitement. The gentry took part with their tenants in these games, just as the tenants had their share in the sport of foxhunting. Kickham, in his Knock- nagow, gives an account of a great contest in throwing the sled — a blacksmith's hammer — which took place between a Captain French and the village champion. The Captain, after an exciting struggle, was finally defeated, and took 42 OURSELVES : OLD IRELAND his beating, it is pleasant to note, in very good part. The dancing of jigs and reels was in those days a regular part of the education of every Irish boy and girl. During the winter months a dancing master made his rounds through a wide district. Various families in each locality subscribed to pay his fees. The boys and girls assembled every night in one house or another, each bringing a candle, so that the hostessfor the evening should be put to no expense in the pro- vision of illumination. The dancing master was also the musician, and to the sound of his fiddle the complicated steps of the dances were dili- gently practised. When summer came there were dances at the cross roads, and it was seen how each had profited by the lessons of the winter. But thoseold days aregone. Thefamine cut short that I rish life. A great sorrow quench- ed the merry-making. A new purposeful life, gathering strength for half a century, has re- placed the old careless recklessness with an earnest seriousness. Much that was bad has gone ; but, since it is by no means possible to bring back the past, even the severest moralist may be permitted a sigh of regret. Those re- 43 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE probate ancestors of ours drank hard, fought fre- quently, and outraged every canon of economic science. But after all they lived vigorously, and that is something to their credit. Their posses- sion of life force seems a superlative merit in these days when so many of us find it necessary to support the vital spark by consuming predigest- ed foods. The faction fights are over, but have we gained greatly ? The word survives among us and has given birth to a daughter, "faction- ist," a term as common now as the fights were then, and applied not to the muscular wielderot the blackthorn stick but to the misguided indi- vidual who in political matters ventures to think for himself. Our native dancing is being reviv- ed.but there is a certain artificiality about it now. Shall we get back the/ozie de vivre of the young men and maidens who tramped the roads on muddy nights, each with his candle in his hand? We are better men and women now, no doubt, but, no doubt also, we have lost something which all our earnestness will not give back to us. CHAPTER THREE AS WE SEE OURSELVES— THE NEW IRISHMAN CHAPTER THREE AS WE SEE OURSELVES : THE NEW IRISHMAN WHAT OF THE IRISHMAN OF TO-DAY? Our neighbours across the Channel insist that he is an eloquent sentimentalist, preserving, in spite of his sentimentality, a capacity for rol- licking on occasion. Our own writers, while steadily denying the sentimentality, admit the rollicking for the first half of the last century. But to-day nobody rollicks less than the Irish- man, and according to our own writers, no one is freer fromthose illusions which lieat the back of sentimentality. We may take Mr. George Bernard Shaw to witness. Larry Doyle, in fohiiBulPs Other Island, explains himself ; but since we are all a little slow at understanding Mr. Shaw, we have Larry explained for us in the best of all Mr. Shaw's prefaces, an essay addressed to politicians, but which surely de- serves to be classed with other such writings as an aid to critics. Doyle's contribution to the partnership in the play is, according to Mr. Shaw, "freedom from illusion, the power of fac- ing facts, the nervous industry, the sharpened wits, the sensitive pride of an imaginative man 47 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE who has fought his way up through social per- secution and poverty." This view of the Irish character is revolutionary. The cherished myth of the minor English novelists disappears at once. And Mr. Shaw is indubitably right. No- thing is more characteristic of the Irishman to-day than his freedom from illusion and his power of facing facts. Somey ears ago a well-disposed E nglish Chief Secretary paid a visit to an out-of-the-way part of the west coast of Ireland. A rumour went out among the inhabitants of the districtthat he had come among them with a cheque-book in his pocket and a readiness to spend large sums of money on works of public utility. The ru- mour was not wholly foolish. Amiable Chief Secretaries have often done this kind of thing. A leading man in the neighbourhood proposed to make this Chief Secretary's way easy to him by pointing out exactly what ought to be done. He went round his friends and asked them to join him in meeting the distinguished visitor with a view to persuading him to build a pier. One gentleman who was asked to join the depu- tation demurred. 48 THE NEW IRISHMAN " Where," he asked, " do you propose to put the pier ? " The leading man, the headof the deputation, named a spot. " But," said the objector, " a pier will be no kind of use there. No boats ever go near that place. They couldn't if they wanted to." " Nobody," said the other, "supposes for a moment that the pier will be any use, there or anywhere else. But if it's put where I want it, it will be well out of the way and do no harm to any one. That's as much as can be expected of any Government pier. What we want isn't really a pier, but a few hundred pounds spent in the locality." Thatman showedaremarkablefreedom from illusion, and a power of facing facts. An Eng- lishman, under similar circumstances, would have been equally anxious to secure the Gov- ernment money for his locality, but he would not have faced the facts with the Irishman's frankness. He would first have persuaded him- self by means of articles in the local papers and speeches made at public meetings that a pier in that particular spot would be most useful in the 49 o THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE development of sea fisheries. Then he would have allowed himself to believe that it would ultimately attract cargo steamers to its hospi- table stone sides, and so make for the increase of England's ever-swelling foreign trade. Fin- ally one of his artists would have painted a pic- ture of the future pier with the sea breaking on its face, and labelled his work, "An Outpost of Empire." Not till all that had been done would the Englishman ask the Chief Secretary to spend public money on the pier. The facts about the edifice would be the same whether an Englishman or an Irishman asked for it. It would not in either case be anything but an ornament to a desolate coast. The Irish recognise the facts, and stare them straight in the face without blinking. The English would have seen them only through a rosy mist of illusion, touched with Imperial sentimental- ism. Thus Mr. Shaw's analysis of the char- acter of the modern Irishman is justified by experience. There was also a Chief Secretary — another one — equally benevolent with an equal power of drawing on the public purse. He received 50 THE NEW IRISHMAN a deputation of gentlemen who wanted a rail- way run through the district they represented. They came armed with persuasive statistics, which went to show that their neighbourhood was a hive of nascent industrial life, wanting nothing but the Government's aid in laying down a few rails to turn it forthwith into a kind of Lancashire. Nothing could have been more conclusive than the statistics. But this Chief Secretary — itis asadthingtohave to say this of any Chief Secretary, but it is true about this par- ticular man — was of a sceptical temperament. He did not accept the statistics at their face value. H e recollected that a similar deputation hadwaitedon him some monthspreviously from the same neighbourhood. The matter under consideration at that time was the distribution of some funds granted for the relief of famine in the west of Ireland. That deputation had also brought statistics of an equally persuasive kindwhichprovedbeyondshadow of doubt that the people were totally without resources and would starve unless the Government fed them. The choice for the Government then, in fact, lay between providing money for food and giv- 51 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE ing money for coffins. With a fine appreci- ation of the value of picturesque description this deputation said that the farmers of the dis- trict owned nothing " but a few little sheep, so small that the eagles had not been able to find them among the heather." The suggestion was that the eagles had carried off and eaten the larger sheep, cows, horses, and other animals which they were able to find. The sceptical Chief Secretary turned up this former batch of statistics and read them out to the deputa- tion. " How," he asked, with a bland smile, " do you explain the discrepancies between these two sets of figures ? " Englishmen, under the circumstances, would have explained the discrepancies, and what is more to the point, would have believed their own explanations. They would have said, per- haps, and believed, that the timely aid granted by the Government on the occasion of the fam- ine, had actually effected an economic revolu- tion in the place, changed it from a hungry wilderness into a potential Manchester. They would have seen both sets of statistics through 52 THE NEW IRISHMAN a mist of illusion, and remained, morally, per- fectly honest men. The Irishman who led the deputation was intellectually honest, which is quite a different thing. He faced the facts and scorned illusion. " Those statistics," he said, pointing to the bundle which had been dragged from its pigeon- hole, " were compiled for an entirely different purpose." But it would be a mistake to suppose that our appreciation of naked fact and our contempt for the draperies in which decency would swathe its limbs render us incapable of appreciating fine language. No people in the world likes oratory more than we do. No people is more ready to cheer to the echo any noble sentiment which is expressed for us in really majestic words. We are not in the least taken in by the orators. We know that at the back of the noble sentiments there are certain hard practical considerations, and it is with these that we are concerned. The oratory itself we describe privately by an ex- pressive Irish word rdmdis ; which can perhaps scarcely be translated into English, but has an American equivalent in the phrase "talking 53 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE through his hat." Sometimes our contempt for the fine phrases, which all the time we thor- oughly enjoy, breaks out into actual parody. The walls of a south of Ireland town were de- corated a few years ago on the occasion of an election of District Councillors : " TO THE ELECTORS OF " Ladies and Gentlemen, — At the urgent request of several of the heaviest ratepayers and at the extra special desire of the working classes, I have great delight in coming up as a candidate for the office of Councillor and Chairman of our local Corporation, "Fellow- voters, I am, as you are fully aware, no stranger, my posterity belonging to one of the famous Irish families, and myself being a man of unassailable integrity, of clear intelli- gence, and of exhaustive will-power. I flatter myself that I would make a worthy represent- ative of the people. "Sincemyyouth I have always been a sturdy and consistent Home Ruler and a fearless ad- vocate of a Catholic University Bill. " I will do my utmost for our prehistoric town by inaugurating race meetings, regattas, and, 54 THE NEW IRISHMAN above all, coursing matches will ensure my fos- tering care, while at the same time I shall take care not to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. " These divisions (diversions ?) united with our national pastime, Gaelic matches and hurl- ing matches, will attract an immense influx of visitors to my truly loyal and scenic constitu- ency. " I am most assuredly a warm and courteous supporter of the Gaelic League, and would be only too happy to extend my patronage to home industries. " ' Every man his own landlord' is my motto. The ratepayers may confidently lay their suff- rages at my feet, and may make sure of my en- thusiastic co-operation in oppressing exorbitant and iniquitous taxation," The author of that election address was ap- parently suffering from an overdose of political oratory and had made too hearty a meal on the familiarcatchwords. His fondness forfactsand his dislike of illusions drove him into parody, but it is probably safe to say that the electors of the district took him quite as seriously as they 55 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE did any of the less obviously cynical candidates. They, almost certainly, believed his professions quite as much as they believed those of any one else. They cast their votes in the end for reasons wholly unconnected with the extension of patronage to home industries, or the influx of visitors to the " truly loyal and scenic con- stituency." I dwell upon this fact-seeing illusion-proof characteristic of the modern Irishman, empha- sised by Mr. Shaw, because mostof our cleverer writers, though they have not expressed them- selves so epigrammaticallyas he has, have been conscious of just these qualities in their country- men. The delight which we are supposed to take — which in fact we actually do take — in playing up to the Englishmen who visit us, is in reality a kind of very natural inversion of our contempt for illusion. We know quite well that the Englishman is our superior in many matters. He succeeds where we fail, grows rich while we remain poor, and although he is, as a rule, much stupider than we are, he continues to govern us in spite of our efforts to prevent him ; although we ought by rights to be governing him. But 56 HOME FROM THE FAIR— A FINANCIAL MUDDLE THE NEW IRISHMAN the Englishman cherishes his illusions, and especially his illusions about Ireland. When he lands on our shores he puts a temptation in our way which we should be more than human if we resisted. Our novelists delight in stories of our sympathetic treatment of Englishmen's ideas about Ireland. In Lever's time we were looked upon as a nation of barbarians who val- ued human life as little as the sportsman does the life of his grouse. Englishmen in those days went to and fro among us nervously. A certain timid traveller confessed to one of Lever's Irish country gentlemen that he had never seen a wake — the festivities connected with an Irish funeral. The Irishman, with the air of one anxi- ous to gratify an honoured guest, ordered his butler to go out and shoot one of his tenants, naming a man who had always been behind- hand with his rent. That story was told a long time ago. 1 1 could scarcely be told with any kind of verisimilitude now, for Englishmen no longer believe that we shoot each other with quite the old light-heart- edness. But illusions die hard. They still think that we are curiously callous about human life. 57 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE So, when Mr. Flurry Knox McCarthy, in Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., undertakes the education of Mr. Leigh Kelway, the earnest and thoroughly philanthropic secretary of Lord Waterbury, he allows him to listen to Slipper's account of the tragic death of young Driscoll at the Lisheen races. " ' The blood was druv out through his nose and ears,' continued Slipper, ' and you'd hear his bones cracking on the ground. You'd have pitied the poor boy, so you would.' " ' Good Heavens !' said Leigh Kelway, sit- ting up very straight in his chair. " ' Was he hurt. Slipper ? ' asked Flurry cas- ually. '"Hurt is it ! ' echoed Slipper, in highscorn. ' Killed on the spot.' He paused to relish the effect of this denouement on Leigh Kelway. ' Oh, divil so pleasant an afternoon ever you seen ; and indeed, Mr. Flurry, it's what we're all saying, it was a greatpity your honour wasn't there on account of the liking you had for Driscoll.' " Flurry listened, leaned back in his chair and began to laugh. 58 THE NEW IRISHMAN " ' It scarcely strikes one as a comic incident,' said Leigh Kelway very coldly. ' In fact it seems to me that the police ought ' " At that moment Driscoll himself appeared, vowing vengeance against Slipper. So our novelists, the earlier and the later, dwell on our fondness for making the most of the illusions of our English visitors. In real life such splendid opportunities seldom occur. But we do our best. Some time ago a very earnest Englishman, who described himself politically as a pronounced Home Ruler, made a tour of Ireland. He was passed from one cicerone to another and fell ultimately into the hands of an elderly parish priest. Havinglittle of startling interest to dis- play in his parish, this priest took the English- man into the national school. Somebody com- ing in, threatened to cut short the inspection of copybooks. ' ' What a tyrant that man is ! " said the priest. Then, as if struck by a brilliant idea, he turned to the scholars. ' ' Children," he said, ' ' can any of you tell me what is a tyrant ? " " Please, Father," said a little girl, " a tyrant is an English ruler." 59 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE The incident was splendidly stage-managed. The Englishman was filled with delight. He was a convinced Home Ruler, and this was ex- actly the kind of thing which he hoped to hear in Ireland. It came to him in the most con- vincing way at last, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. He boasted to chance acquaint- ances afterwards that, in that schopl he had touched " the real soul of Ireland." I am indebted to Mr. R. J. Mecredy of The Irish Cyclist for the following excellent illustra- tion of our polite desire to make everything as pleasant as possible for our English visi- tors. " A friend was camping for some weeks in the north-west corner of Donegal with the ex- press purpose of studying the peasantry whom he loved. He could talk to them in Irish ; he appreciated their folklore ; he could contribute his share, and he understood and sympathised with their troubles, their hardships, and their aspirations. He was one of them, not a stran- ger, and so they opened their hearts to him. An English lady on her first visit to Ireland was lodging in the district. She was simply enrap- 60 THE NEW IRISHMAN tured with Ireland and the Irish, and told my friend what alot she had learnt, especially about the fairies. She had met a delightful man who knew all about them, and had also seen them. He had given her some leaves from a fairy plant some thousand years old. My friend list- ened sympathetically, as an Irishman should, but with an inward smile. " Later they met at a dance in a farmhouse kitchen. About midnight my friend started to return to his camp, but as it was now raining, a local farmer offered to pilot him by a short cut over the bog. They had only gone a few yards when his guide stopped, and with a quizzical twinkle in hiseye remarked significantly : ' Thim English are divils on fairies,- sir.' 'What do you mean?' asked my friend. ' The lady inside, sir,' with a jerk of his thumb. ' Oh, I see,' re- plied my friend, ' you're the man who has been telling her all about the fairies.' ' And why not ? Sure she wanted to know, and I told her all I could, tho' sorra fairy or ghost ever I seen in my life.' " There is, however, a mystical and imagina- tive side to the character of the contemporary 6i THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE Irishman. He tends, especially while he is young, to write lyric poetry, and his verses are of very great merit. The poet's corner of ob- scure papers is a byword in England as the refuge of sentimental doggerel. In Ireland the reader comes across real poetry, strong, original, and melodious, in the most unexpected places. But even when he is writing poetry, the modern Irishman's affection for stark facts and his hatred of illusion beset him. The value — one hopes the permanent value — of the work of our younger Irish poets lies in their avoidance of the unreal and their determined efforts to get back to the primitive simple emo- tions. But fond as our writers are of lyric poetry, they are still fonder of the drama. It is by means of the stage that we are continually trying to express the ideas that are in us. So common has the habit of playwriting become, that an Irish author boasted recently that his chief dis- tinction lay in the fact that he was the only man in Ireland who had never written a play. He probably exaggerated his singularity. There must be others, small farmers, for instance, in 62 THE NEW IRISHMAN the Congested Districts, who have not written plays, but there must be very few. Our drama- tists, like our lyric poets, seem to be obsessed with a passion for facts. They will not look at lifethrough rose-coloured glasses. Their trage- dies are tragedies of naked realism. Their com- edies — and they produce comedies which spar- kle — are relentless exposures of our pettiness, our meanness, and our narrow outlook upon life. No literature known to me is less touched with sentimentalism than our Irish drama. What- ever else may be laid to the charge of our play- writers, it can never be said that they have been guilty of pandering to the popular taste by flat- teringthe Irish people. More than once storms of indignation have been aroused by represen- tations of I rish life which have been regarded as deliberate insults. Nowhere is the change from the old Ireland to the new more clearly seen than in the contrast between our orators and our dramatists. Speech making was the one great art of nineteenth-century Ireland. And our orators still cling to the old tradition, adorn- ing their productions with intoxicating pane- gyrics of all things Irish. The drama is the 63 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE Irish art of the twentieth century, and our dra- matists are so determined to rub salt into our wounds that they scarcely give us credit for having any whole part in us. CHAPTER FOUR THE IRISH CLERGY CHAP. FOUR THE IRISH CLERGY IN IRELAND THE CLERGY PLAY A MUCH more important part in the national life than they do in England or Scotland, and opinions differ a good deal about them. The feelings felt by the minstrel for Father OTlynn are commonenough still, and there is many an Irish priest who deserves the high praise givenin the song to the " PowerfuUest preacher, and Tinderest teacher, and Kindliest creature in ould Donegal." Such men deserve the place they have in the affection of thepeople, and arelikely to continue, for some time at all events, to be the leaders in the various attempts to better the lives of their parishioners. But there is also a strong current of anti-clerical feeling which in Ireland itself finds expression in half-subdued growls, and breaks out into unnecessarily vigorous anathe- mas among those who escape, temporarily, to England. There was an Irish clergyman who met a fellow-countrywoman of his in London. She talked frankly, as we all do, about Irish affairs, and at last expressed the conclusion of 67 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISHLIFE the whole matter thus : " We shall never do any real good in Ireland till every clergyman of every denomination is either hanged or shot." Then, having witnessed to the faith that was in her, she realised suddenly that her listener belonged to the condemned profession. She at once apologised, smiling, to his wife. He happened to be the kind of clergyman who has a wife. If he had been a celibate she would probably not have apologised at all. In England, so one gathers from the news- papers, a great many people are anxious to find out why other people do not go to church. The problem there is pressing and important. In Ireland it is as yet purely academic, because, for the most part, we do go to church pretty fre- quently. Perhaps we are really more religious than the English. Perhaps we are too poor to afford the Sunday amusements which have had such a demoralising effect upon our neighbours. Perhaps we are simply a little behind the times and will follow the example set us when the fashion of a non-religious Sunday comes to us across the Channel. Perhaps — itwould be very pleasant to think that this was true — our clergy 68 THE IRISH CLERGY give us something in the way of sermons worth going to church to listen to. Irish preachers havealwayshad a reputation for eloquence,and the list of pulpit orators to whom the English have delighted to listen contains the names of a considerable number of I rishmen. B ut the race of eloquent preachers is dying out. One no longer hears stories of congregations moved to floods of tears, or fine ladies casting their jew- elled bracelets into alms bags, driven by pas- sionate appeals beyond the limits set to their charity by the coin they brought to church with them. Such things used to happen. I do not hear of their happening now. Nor do enrap- tured damsels crowd round the pulpit steps in such numbers as to make the descent of the preacher almost impossible. They used to do so thirty years ago, and it is recorded of a very popular Irish preacher that he was once actu- ally besieged in his pulpit and obliged to add a clause to his sermon to the effect that he could not attempt to come down until every one of his admirers had not only withdrawn from the neighbourhood of the pulpit,but left the church. Those days, fortunately, are over ; but our clergy 69 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE still receive the admiration due to their efforts, and their sermons are highly attractive to the intelligent laity. The subject of sermons came up in the course of a conversation between a few friends who, as it happened, belonged to different Churches. They agreed to relate their most striking ex- periences of pulpit oratory. One of them told of a preacher, whose deliberately precise in- tonation he imitated carefully, who began his sermon thus : " This text, my beloved breth- ren, may be said to occupy an intermediate position between that which precedes and that which immediately follows it." The statement was, at all events, obviously true. It cannot be urged against that man that he forced his hear- ers into the credo quia impossibile frame of mind. They believed because the thing stated could not possibly be otherwise. The second story told was of a preacher of much greater virility and imaginative power. His subject was the unpleasant place to which bad people go after they die. He succeeded in representing it as a particularly horrible kind of menagerie. "When you're there," he said, " the lions will roar at 70 THE IRISH CLERGY yez, the serpents will hiss at yez, the owls will hoot at yez, and the hyenas will laugh yez to scorn." The next member of the company hesitated. He had nothing to offer at all equal to the laughing hyenas. It was only after being pressed that he told of a preacher who found himself called upon to deal with one of the deeper mysteries of the Christian faith. He was quite frank with his congregation. " This, brethren," he said, " is a matter which I have never been able to understand, or even to ex- plain." It would be interesting to know what opinion his people had of his understanding of the next subject which he did venture to ex- plain. The fourth story of the quartette was of one of those preachers who believe in the use of the simple forcible language of every day and distrust the moving power of words consecrated to pulpit use. H is subject was that final episode in Jezebel's life when she painted her face, tired her head, looked out of the window and taunted the victorious Jehu, " And would you believe it," said the preacher, after emphasising the ac- count of the queen's toilet, " when she did that the hussy was upwards of sixty years of age ! " 71 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE Another preacher, animated by a similar hankering after the unconventional, gave the following version of the final tragedy of the Baptist's life : "So the executioner swung his sword and swish went poor John's head." I knew another man with a reputation for speaking blunt truths in plain, in the very home- liest, language. He never indulged in high- flown rhetoric. Poetry, all that passes for poetry in the pulpit, was abhorrent to him. Yet once, in the very middle of one of the most absolute- ly straightforward and unadorned sermons I ever heard, this preacher broke into the most appallingly high-falutin simile. He said that man, the plain, common man in the pew, was like a soldier charging through the ranks of the enemy amid the blinding smoke and des- perate din of battle. He traced the course of the hero amid bullets, bayonet stabs, and sabre cuts, until he left him, still clinging to the tat- tered flag of his country, breathless before the feet of his beloved monarch. Only then did he become conscious of the bleeding wounds, the desperate gashes, the broken limbs of which during the excitement of the battle-charge he 72 A RARE EDITION THE IRISH CLERGY was wholly unaware. "So," said the preach- er, "is it with you and me " But I need not pursue the other branch of the simile. Its wor- king out is obvious. In the privacy of the ves- try afterwards another cleric reproached the preacher. "Why," he said, "did you spoil an excellent sermon with that ridiculous piece of bombast?" The reply was startling. "The fact is, that bit about the soldier on the battle- field was put in by my wife. What I wrote originally was: 'Whenaman is bathing and cuts his foot he doesn't notice it till he gets out of the water and begins to dry himself.'" Occasionally it is the congregation and not the preacher which says the funny thing. A cur- ate, young, nervous, but well-intentioned, was sent to address an assembly of peasants and dogs in the kitchen of a remote farmhouse. The room was about lo feet long and 8 broad. Neverthe- less, an ancient labourer, who was at the least deaf, complained afterwards that he couldn't ilear a word that was said. On the next occa- sion the curate took this man and set him on a chair in such a position that the entire address was spoken straight into his ear, there being a 73 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE distance of about a foot and a half between it and the speaker's mouth. "Well, Thomas," said the curate afterwards, "did you hear what I said to-night?" "I did, your reverence, but sure, what good was it to me ? What I do be wanting is to have the Gospel druv home hard into my soul." But it must not be supposed that the laugh is always on the side of the congregation. The clergy occasionally score, sometimes unconsci- ously, sometimes with malicious intent. There was a respected rector of a western parish who not long ago made his listeners supremely un- comfortable by begging them to remember that in a few years they would most surely " all be smouldering in their graves." He probably meant " mouldering." The word he accident- ally used suggested a very unpleasant future for a respectable and upright community. A very eminent ecclesiastic was once forced, very much against his will, to preach a sermon in aid of the fund for restoring an out-of-the-way church. He revenged himself on the unfortunate con- gregation, who had put pressure on him, when he had them helpless before him. "Your offer- 74 THE IRISH CLERGY ings to-day," he said, " are to be devoted to the fund for repairing and," looking slowly round him with an audible sniff, " if such a thing be poss- ible, the beautifyingof this church." Thepeople had been rather proud of their parish church beforehand ; the conceit went out of them after that. This same dignitary was much sought after as a preacher and held in some awe on ac- count of his mordant wit. On one occasion he unbent unexpectedly, rather to the embarrass- ment of his host. He was preaching a charity sermon in a church a long way from his home, and it was arranged that he should be enter- tained by the principal gentleman in the parish. This gentleman, though an excellent man, was unaccustomed to ecclesiastics, being himself an officer in the army. H e made, a little nervously, elaborate and conscientious preparations for his guest. H e turned his smoking-room in to a study for the time being, and collected all the books bearing on the subject of religion which he could find in the house. There were not many, and what there were were not up to date. Round the smoking-room table, when the eminent prea- cher arrived, were arranged Paley's Evidences, 75 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE Hervey's Meditations among the Tombs, a work called The Olive Leaf of Bethany, and two volumes of sermons by forgotten Puritan divines. They were dusty when their owner unearthed them from a lumber room, but he polished them up and felt that they made^a brave show when he laid them out. The great preacher, led to the " study " that he might rest a while after his journey, took these books up one by one and looked at them. 'He laid each volume down with a sniff. His host became more and more uncomfortable. " Are there," said the clergyman at last, " no other books of any kind in the house ? " His host, conscious of many novels; stored carefully out of sight, ad- mitted that there were other books. *' Then," said the clergyman, " bring me another, and let it be frothy, if possible, the frothiest of the frothy." I do not know what book was actually brought, perhaps The Visits of Elizabeth, which was just then at the height of its popularity : but most intimate and friendly relations were esta- blished at once between host and guest. Con- straint vanished, and the rest of the visit was actually merry. 76 THE IRISH CLERGY There is a proverb which says that hawks do not pluck out hawks' eyes ; but it is not re- garded by the Irish clergy. Their wit is as keenly barbed for their professional brethren as it is for the laity. Perhaps the severest thing ever said by one clergyman about another was said about a bishop who had just died. A num- ber of his clergy happened to meet, and very naturally fell to discussing the merits and faults of the prelate they had lost. One of them, a man who had his own reasons for disliking the bishop, told a story of a dream he had. " I was walking along the road," he said, "near the place where they buried the bishop. Whom should I see coming along to meet me but the old man himself. He had his robes on him and hispastoralstaff inhis hand, and helooked very much as he did when he was alive. No sooner did he come up to me than he stretched out his staff and touched me on the hand with it. Would you believe me, gentlemen, I was burnt to the bone, for the staff was red hot." The region to which the bishop had departed may be inferred. The General Synod of the Church of Ireland 77 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE meets once a year in Dublin. Being a deliber- ative assembly in which every member is en- titled to make a speech if he likes, its sittings might be of almost any length, though as a matter of fact they seldom last more than four days. An anxious clergyman, who had left his parishioners shepherdless while he attended the Synod, asked an eminent prelate how long he thought the sitting would last. " I do not know," was the reply, " but I am told that geese generallysit for four weeks." Even more cruel was a proposal made by one of the mem- bers of the Synod. The building in which the assembly meets is a very handsome one, con- taining a central hall, a number of committee rooms, a luncheon room and other offices. It was suggested that appropriate texts of Scrip- ture should be placed over the doors of the various rooms. That this was never done was probably due to the prompt suggestion by a member of the Synod of a verse appropriate for the luncheon room. He took it from the book of the Psalms : " Here the wild asses quench their thirst." The same clergyman was once sitting in the Synod Hall, immediately under- 78 THE IRISH CLERGY neath the strangers' gallery. A lady, who had come with the intention of sitting out a long de- bate, and had taken precautions against ex- haustion, dropped her bottle of smelling salts from the front of the gallery. It narrowly mis- sed hitting the clergyman underneath, falling just at his feet. He looked up with a smile, and once more quoted a psalm with singular apt- ness : " Let not your precious balms break my head." But his best joke was made under cir- cumstances which for most of us make j esting a total impossibility. He had crossed from Holy- head to Kingstown on a very stormy night, and suffered for hours in the usual unpleasant way. An ecclesiastically-minded Englishman who happened to be in the steamer, took it into his head, for some reason, that the obviously sea- sick clergyman was a bishop. As the steamer approached the pier at Kingstown, he asked politely, " Is this your see, my Lord?" "No," replied the clergyman, glancing at the waves which had caused him so much misery ; " if it were, I should keep it in better order." Another clergyman, this time an adherent of the Roman Communion, is credited with a 79 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE more delicately pointed joke on the same pain- ful subject. He was in charge at the time of a sea-board parish, and it happened that an Eng- lish Chief Secretary landed there one day from a small steamer in which he had been making a tour of the coast, H e andhis attendant officials had encountered bad weather, and when they came ashore looked as if they were recovering from severe illness. The Chief Secretary com- plained to the priest : " They tell me," he said, " that your Church has unlimited power in the west of Ireland. I wish you'd arrange to have the sea calm for us to-morrow." The priest shook his head. He could not command the waves. The Chief Secretary persisted, " But if the Church has all the powersheprofesses — " " The Church's power," said the priest, " extends as far as high-water mark. Beyond that it's 'Rule, Britannia! Britannia rules the waves.'" The Chief Secretary represented the might of the world's greatest maritime power, but the colour of his cheeks gave the lie to any boast he might have been inclined to make about rul- ing the waves. A provincial town was treated a little while So THE IRISH CLERGY ago to a curiously conclusive example of the power of the Church, this time of the Protestant Church. The rector, who was a very musical man and most energetic in his efforts to pro- vide high-class entertainments for the town, got together a choir capable of singing Spohr's "Last Judgment." Theperformance was large- ly advertised. The posters ran thus : THE LAST JUDGMENT By Spohr Will be performed in, etc. etc. At the last moment an important soloist got a sore throat, and no substitute could be found to take the part. The unfortunate rector was obliged very hurriedly to get slips printed with the word "Postponed." The bill-stickers went round the town and pasted these over the mid- dle of the original posters. A Roman Catholic townsman twitted a Protestant friend with the extraordinary appearance the posters then bore. " Have you seen," he said, " what your rector has stuck up all over the town, ' The Last Judgment Postponed'.?" " Well," said the Protestant in reply, "that's more than your 8l F THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE clergy could do anyhow." We are accused, not without some show of justice, of taking our re- ligious differences very seriously in Ireland, but an incident of this kind resolves the odiumtheo- logicum in the surest of ways. Thehabit of smokingwas frowned upon by the severer Irish clergy long after it became popu- lar among their brethren in England. The ex- ample of Archbishop Whately, who is said to have been fond of tobacco, ought to have done something towards establishing a more liberal view. But it came too early. Even laymen were dubious about the propriety of smoking in his days. The prejudice has now almost died away, but until quite lately a smoker felt it wise to conceal his weakness when staying in old- fashioned country rectories. One young cleric found himself the guest for a week of an elderly dignitary of most venerable appearance and strictly professional manner. The young man earnestly desired a pipe before he went to bed at night, but was ashamed to say so. He hypo- critically asserted that he always slept better if he went for a short walk in the air before turning in. During this walk he puffed as fast 82 THE IRISH CLERGY and as hard as he could at his pipe. All went well until the last night of his stay was reached. The rain fell in torrents and a severe gale raged round the house. The hospitable old Canon besought his guest not to go out in such weather. The young man, fingering his pipe in his pocket, insisted. But he did not feel it necessary to go far. He stopped under the nearest tree, and, at the expense of about half a box of matches, lit his pipe. Cowering under his umbrella with his back to the wmd, he had just begun to enjoy his smoke when he heard himself hailed by his host from the door- step of the house. " Do you mean to say," said the old man, " that you've gone out of doors every night to smoke, and that your walk was only an excuse ? " The young man, caught hopelessly, confessed that this was so, " My goodness," said his host, " what a pity ! I've gone down to the kitchen every night after you went to bed and blown my smoke up the chimney for fear of shocking you." That last night at least both these worthy men smoked comfortably in large armchairs before the fire in the Canon's study. 83 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE The wave of temperance reform which has swept over Ireland during the last few years has produced a good deal of hardship among the more easygoing clergy of all Churches. It is told of one man that he found a bold way of rendering periods of total abstinence endur- able. Under the influence of a fervid mission- ary he and all his parishioners signed a pledge. They kept it faithfully until a day arrived when the clergyman felt that the limit of human endurance had been reached. Christmas was close at hand. He is credited with having ab- solved the parish, himself included, from the pledge for a period of one week, stating plainly that the promise would be binding again On New Year's Eve. It is not only, perhaps not chiefly, the clergy who feel the burden of our new temperance morality. The humble layman is sometimes quite pathetic in his desire for a little indul- gence. There was a young man of somewhat intemperate habits who, acting on the advice of his parents, made up his mind to marry and settle down. A young woman was found who was willing to take him for better or for worse. 84 THE IRISH CLERGY His clergyman, seizing what seemed to be a great opportunity, urged the young man to take the temperance pledge. " I will, your re- verence," said the young man. " I know well it would be better for me if I had it. I'll take it, and what's more I'll keep it." The clergyman, anxious to strike while the iron was hot, pro- duced a pen and ink and the necessary form. The young man unaccountably held back. The clergyman pressed him. " To-morrow," he said, " is your wedding-day. Now is the time to sign the pledge." " Sure you mustn't be hard on me, your reverence ; it'll be time enough if I sign it the day after to-morrow." Explanations fol- lowed. It appeared that a half-barrel of porter had been ordered for the wedding-feast. The clergyman was human. He realised the awful position of a bridegroom who could not drink porter athis own wedding. The pledge-signing took place on the first day of the honeymoon. There are many stories about the dogmatic differences between the two Churches and the rivalry between their clergy. On one occasion it happened that, owing to there being a crowd in the only available hotel, two clergymen, 85 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE members of different Churches, were obliged to sleep in the same bedroom. Each, before get- ting into bed, knelt down to say his prayers. Each determined, for the honour of his Church, that his prayers should not be shorter than those of his rival. Each eyed the other from time to time and continued kneeling. In the morning they were found by the boots of the hotel who came to call them, each kneeling at his own bedside, and both sound asleep. This is not a story which is ever told by the clergy, but it is very popular among laymen. A very witty priest was once asked by a Pro- testant for his candid unofficial opinion on the subject of Purgatory. " It's my belief," he replied, " that you might go farther and fare worse." Another priest settled the contro- versy between the two Churches in a short and easy fashion. Taking a Bible he opened at the first and longest of St. Paul's epistles. " Tell me now," he said, " who did the Apostle write that to ? " " The Romans," said his opponent. " That's enough," said the priest. " You show me the epistle he ever wrote to the Protestants, and I'll give in to you." ► 86 THE IRISH CLERGY The old-fashioned parish clerk was not strict- ly speaking a clergyman, but he was in his own estimation, and I think in that of the law, an ecclesiastical person. In Ireland he had no small opinion of his own importance. There was one who presided over the rector and con- gregation of a parish in the north of Ireland. It was well understood that he, and he alone, uttered those parts of the service which are al- lotted by the Church to the congregation. It would have been regarded as no more outrag- eous to repeat the Absolution aloud with the priest, than to join the clerk in the responses, of which he had taken entire possession. But there once came to the house of one of the par- ishioners an English visitor, who did not un- derstand the local "use." On Sunday morning he began to repeat the responses in an audi- ble voice. The clerk stood it for some time, but finally rebuked the audacious stranger. In the middle of the Litany, he stood up and said sol- emnly, " Sir, either you or me must quit." Another self-opinionated clerk made up his mind that the proper way to pronounce the name of thesea monster mentioned in the Psalms was 87 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE Leviathan, with a short i and a strong accent on the penultimate syllable. In his church the psalms were not sung, but read verse about by the clergyman and his clerk. The rector, who was something of a precisian in matters of de- tail, was greatly annoyed by this pronuncia- tion. He reasoned with the clerk, but the clerk refused to be convinced. He went on saying Leviathan whenever the psalm for the day gave him the chance. At last the rector was driven to a desperate expedient. He took a note of the day of the month on which Levi- athan appeared in the clerk's verse of the Psalms, and whenever Sunday fell on that day he altered the date, putting the calendar either forward or back a day. H is exercise of author- ity was not equal to that of the clergyman who postponed the " Last Judgment," but it was certainly an unwarrantable interference with affairs which lie beyond the province of eccle- siastics. I close this chapter with two stories, neither of which has any discoverable moral, though both help to illustrate the respect of the Irish people for their clergy, and the feeling they en- 88 IX, M X t- THE IRISH CLERGY tertain for the religion which the clergy teach. Some time ago a regrettable but quite tempor- ary outbreak of anger against a generally re- spected clergyman ended in the throwing of stones at his windows by some ill-affected per- sons. The people of a neighbouring parish pre- sented him with an address of condolence, cal- culated to bring home to his proper parishioners a sense of their degraded wickedness. 1 1 ended with the wish that he might long live to adorn " that high office in the Church to which it has been Almighty God's most pleasing duty to ap- point you." This conception of the Deity as a suave returning officer is a valuable addition to the garnered anthropomorphisms of popular mythology. The other story belongs to an eloquent mis- sion preacher. He told it to a congregation which may have been sleepy at the beginning of his sermon but must certainly have wakened up when he came to this anecdote. There were two old women in one parish who were greatly given to quarrelling, and when they fell out with each other they used terribly bad language. It happened that one of them went to confession 89' THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE one day. As she was leaving the church, hav- ing received absolution, she met her enemy, who was going in. On the very steps of the sacred edifice a quarrel began. The woman who was entering the church poured out the usual stream of sacrilegious and blasphemous abuse. The other listened to her in silence for some time, and then, no longer able to endure the triumph of her adversary, said bitterly, " It's easy seeing, Biddy Malone, that you know I'm in a state of grace this minute and can't answer you. But, glory be to God, I won't be so for long ! " CHAPTER FIVE THE IRISH OFFICIAL CHAP. FIVE THE IRISH OFFICIAL IRELAND IS A PARADISE FOR THE OFFI- cial. There may be other paradises for him in the world, but I doubt of the existence of any so completely satisfying as Ireland. In Germany he is said to have great power over the public, but then in Germany he himself is a man under authority. Above the mightiest German offi- cials is the Emperor. In England he is very well paid, but hitherto in England he has been forced to comport himself occasionally as the servant, not the master, of the public. I n I reland the high official is under no authority, and he has reduced the public to a condition of absol- ute submissiveness. He draws a salary which is very large compared to the earnings of priv- ate individuals, and he occupies of right the highest possible position in society. Subordin- ate officials are of course not quite so well paid and they have to submit more or less to their superiors, but towards the general public their attitude is that of stern but on the whole ben- evolent despots. They know that they are al- ways in the right, and having power to enforce their will they do it with a clear conscience. So 93 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE Ireland is the country to which worthy officials hope to go when they die. Under these circumstances it is natural that we should all wish to be officials. Whatever the original position of an Irishman may be, there is always some official post for him to look for- ward to. If he is influential, powerful, or un- usually skilful, he aspires to be the head of one of our great Government departments. I f he is lowly and has no backing in high places, he may have to content himself with the secretaryship of an Old Age Pensions sub-committee. I n any case, what he has got to do is to make himself agreeable to the people who have the giving of the particular job he wants. In England there is a certain cloak of decency thrown over the making of official appointments. Many posi- tions are filled by means of competitive exam- inations. The theory of these is of course ab- surd. The fact that a man shows unusual skill in outwitting an examiner in the matter of French grammar is no guarantee whatever that he is particularly well qualified to collect income tax. But the English people have persuaded them- selves that an examination is a test of ability. 94 THE IRISH OFFICIAL That is one of the illusions to which they cling. We,who have no illusions, have never gone in for competitive examinations. Our appointments, like kissing, go by favour. We do indeed in- sist that the candidates for certain minor and comparatively ill-paid posts must be qualified. For instance, a girl who wants to earn ;^8o a year by teaching people to cook must first sat- isfy a superior official that she herself can cook. After she has done that her chances of obtain- ing employment and earning her ;^8o a year depend upon the amount of influence she can bring to bear on the members of some com- mittee. A dispensary doctor, who may be paid anything from ;^ioo to ;^i6o a year, must be qualified, that is to say, he must have some kind of medical degree. If he has that, he is much more likely to be appointed to a district because his father was evicted in the days of the Land League, or because his uncle is an influential Orangeman, than on account of any special apti- tude he may possess for snaring microbes. Re- ligion too, though the fact is strenuously denied, has a good deal to do with the appointment of doctors. In our private lives we are very toler- 95 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE ant of the religious professions of our medical advisers. An unbending Protestant will often allow a Roman Catholic doctor to set his broken leg. A Roman Catholic has no real objection to paying a Protestant for advising him to take a pill. But when it comes to appointing the doctor who is to dose the very poor we are much more careful. Then we see to it that the man who gets our votes is a man of unblemished or- thodoxy. An Irish member of Parliament once startled a sleepy House of Commons at about two o'clock in the morning by making the fol- lowing statement : " I have known seven dispen- sary doctors, all of them men appointed upon religious grounds, and all of them died of delir- ium tremens. " His experience was unfortunate. Nothing like loo per cent, of our dispensary doctors suffer from that particular disease, but what he said goes to show the advantage of considering a man's religion before you give him ;^ioo a year for doctoring the poor. For the higher official positions no qualifica- tions of any kind are required. We insist that a laundress shall pass an examination in wash- ing collars before we turn her loose with ;^8o 96 THE IRISH OFFICIAL a year to teach other people to wash collars. We do not ask a Local Government Board In- spector to convince any one that he can inspect anything. We give him his ;^5oo to jC7oo a year if we feel reasonably sure that he is not actually blind. The result of this system of makingappointments is a little surprising. The public has the greatest respect for the high offi- cials who have given no evidence ofbeingquali- fied for their posts. It adopts an attitude of critical but kindly forbearance towards the in- ferior officials whohave demonstrated to some- body that they understand their business. A very nice and thoroughly competent younglady was sent some time ago to a parish that she might instruct the inhabitants in the art of making butter. An energetic clergyman — there is always an energetic clergyman on these occasions — went round the district and extracted from the wives and daughters of the farmers promises that they would attend the classes. They did so, and their opinions of the instructress were summed up afterwards by one of their number : " She's a very nice young girl, so she is ; and I wouldn't say but with a little 97 G THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE practice she might be able to make good enough butter ; but sure them ones is too fond of talk- ing. An official with a higher salary, though with- out anything like the certificates held by that young lady, would have been looked up to and not patronised. An Englishman of afreeboot- ing and buccaneering type was a little while ago shut up for a short time in an Irish jail. He had succeeded in swindling the keeper of a public-house out of a small sum of money ; which shows that he was a man of great fin- ancial ability, for an Irish publican is a particu- larly difficult man to rob. He was visited, of course, by the prison chaplain, and proved to be so entertaining a companion that the clergyman spent a good deal of time with him. About his career in his own native land he said very little, but he spoke quite freely about his time in Ire- land. He had wandered somehow into a rural district somewhere in the south. Being in funds at the time he put up comfortably at the local inn. His host made up his mind that he must be an important official in the employment of the Land Commission. The Englishman, who 98 THE IRISH OFFICIAL probably had reasons of his own for pretending to be something other than he actually was, accepted the character assigned to him. He walked about all day looking at fields, and oc- casionally poked loose clay with the end of his stick. This is not what Land Commissioners actually do, but it was the Englishman's con- ception of their duties. The inhabitants of the district accepted him at the innkeeper's valua- tion. They all wanted to buy their farms and to buy them as ch eaply as possible. The advent of an important official among them seemed to offer an opportunity. One after another the farmers called to see him, paid for his drinks and even offered him small sums of actual cash, hoping thereby to secure his goodwill. The local landlord, who was quite as anxious to sell his estate as the tenants were to buy it, invited thesupposedCommissionertodinner and treat- ed him really well. Unfortunately — and this shows the disadvantage of not having a good general education — the man gave himself away through not understanding the intricate pro- cedure of Irish land purchase. He said or did something which showed clearly that he was 99 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE not a real official. He had to leave the neigh- bourhood at once, and almost immediately af- terwards got into the trouble which ended in prison. He was most anxious, during the leisure which the law secured him, to learn as much as possible, from the prison chaplain, about the way in which Irish estates are bought and sold. He proposed, so he said frankly, to go " back to the land " as soon as he was set at liberty. Of this man's subsequent career I am unfortunately quite ignorant. But the story, as I have told it, has its value as an instance of the great respect and kindness with which high officials are treated in Ireland. The same chaplain had another experience, which, though it only very indirectly illustrates the subject of this chapter, may be included here to show that there is a human side to the sternest of Irish officials and that even prison warders have an appreciation of humorous sit- uations. There was a prisoner called Finnegan whose offence against the law was nothing worse than begging. Why this particular man should have been singled out to be punished for an offence which hundreds of people commit lOO THE IRISH OFFICIAL with impunity every day all over Ireland, it is impossible to say. The law, like every thingelse on this side of the Irish Sea, is erratic in its action. Not only are some people punished for what other people do without punishment, but the same man is often imprisoned and praised for the same action. The ministers of the law " deliver over to executors pale " some one for making a speech which the makers of the law are citing with high approbation in the House of Commons. Thus it happens that our respect for law in this country is like the reverence of the savage for his idol. We know it to be pow- erful, but we feel it to be capricious. We can- not calculate with any confidence on what its next action will be. We alternately propitiate and defy it, accepting its decisions, whatever they be, with a cheerful kind of fatalism. So the beggar submitted to his term of imprison- ment with a good grace. Other beggars were no doubt prospering while he was held captive, but no feeling of injustice preyed on him. He was cheerful and obedient. He endeared him- self during his short stay to the chaplain and the warders. When he got out early on a Tues- THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE day morning he called on the chaplain and asked for the modest sum of a shilling. He said he wanted it in order to be able to make a fresh start in life. The chaplain gave it to him, but because he happenedatthe moment to be shav- ing, did not add any good advice to the gift. That evening the chaplain called at the prison on business. He was greeted at the gate by a grinning warder. " Your reverence," said the man, " your friend Finnegan is in again. He turned up here paralytic drunk an hour ago." The chaplain did not at first see anything fun- ny in this lapse. Afterwards the reason of the warder's amusement dawned upon him. " He was singing at the top of his voice," said the warder, "when they were conducting him in, and it was a hymn he had, ' Hold the fort, for I am coming.' " After all, the religious influ- ences brought to bear on prisoners are not en- tirely wasted. The most curious point of this man's story is that when he returned to the prison in the evening he had one and tenpence in his pocket. He must have spent at least two shillings in becoming " paralytic drunk." The chaplain had only given him a shilling, so THE IRISH OFFICIAL he was evidently a beggar of considerable ability. It must not, however, be supposed that Irish officials lead indolent and easy lives. The exact opposite is the case. No body of men in the world works harder. No one is more consci- entious about giving full value for the salaries earned. Even the minor clerks in Government offices are filled with a zeal for toil and a hatred of idleness. These men are paid to write let- ters,and they write enormous numbers of them. Nothing pleases them better than the discovery of a subject to write about. A clerk in the Edu- cation Office, for instance, will pore over the re- turns sent in by school managers until he finds one case in which the area of the school floor has not been stated in square feet. He knows in his heart that the schoolroom has neither ex- panded nor shrunk during the period of twelve months covered by the return. He has, for per- haps twenty years or even longer, made annu- ally a careful note of the fact that that particular schoolroom had an area of 400 square feet. But he is anxious above all things to earn his sal- ary honestly. He writes a courteous letter to 103 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE the forgetful manager asking him for the infor- mation that he does not want. The manager, who is not paid by any one to write letters, does not answer. The clerk is still more pleased. Being an honourable man he feels that he is now giving the taxpayer value for his money. He writes another letter. The manager, with a slight feelingof irritation, drops itinto the waste- paper basket. The clerk, with a happy smile, writes a third, then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, per- haps, if nothing happens to divert his energies into another channel, a twentieth letter about the area of that schoolroom floor. The public, represented in this case by the school man- ager, is often harassed and vexed by this ex- treme activity of the officials. The attitude is quite unreasonable. If you pay a man for writ- ing letters you ought to be pleased to discover that he writes as many as he possibly can. Other officials wear themselves out prema- turely by travelling. They go from end to end of the country in railway trains, and it has been estimated that it is impossible to walk the length of any station platform in Ireland without run- ning into two or three men out at the expense 104 THE IRISH OFFICIAL of the Government for the purpose of inspecting something. This ceaseless wayfaring is very- hard indeed on the inspectors. TravelHng by Irish railways is a trying business at the best. The station-masters, guards, ticket-collectors, and porters are themselves officials, though not yet in the pay of the Government. They there- fore treat the public as if the public existed for the purpose of providing them with occupation. They areas a rule kind-hearted and they do not go out of their way to annoy travellers unneces- sarily. They simply take an official view of life. I n E ngland, where the shareholders of the railway companies want to earn money, and on the Continental state railways, where the offi- cials can be made amenable to public authority by means of agitation, a train is supposed to be a convenience to travellers. In Ireland a train is a train, a self-existing, self-sufficing entity, the travellers being an unimportant by-product of the system. In England, if there be good reason to suppose that there will be an unusu- ally large number of passengers on any partic- ular day, Whit-Monday for instance, additional coaches are added to the train, so that there is THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE room for passengers. In Ireland, even when the experience of years has proved that on cer- tain days there is sure to be double the usual number of passengers, the train remains ex- actly its normal length. The view taken by the officials of the railway company is that if a large number of people in response to the offer of a cheap excursion, or for the purpose of attending Punchestown Races, insists on travelling by the same train, some of them must suffer the incon- venienceofbeing left behind at junctions. The Irish public iswell accustomed to this treatment aiid does not resent it. 1 1 is merely another in- stance of the way in which all officials assert their rights. But some time ago an English- man, unused to Irish railways, found himself travelling in an overcrowded train. In due time he arrived at a junction, at which he was told to change into another train. It was ex- actly the same length as the train he had left and had already its full complement of passen- gers. The consequence of trying to get an- other trainful of passengers into it was, of course, extreme congestion. The Englishman found that he had no hope of getting a seat. He held 1 06 THE IRISH OFFICIAL a first-class ticket, but that did not help him, for all classes, first, second, and third, were equally full. He approached the guard and then the staiion-master and demanded that an extra coach should be attached to the train. This seemed to him a reasonable demand. To the officials it seemed an unheard-of kind of in- solence. They snubbed the passenger sharply. Being an Englishman, he asserted himself, quoted legal decisions and generally threatened to make a disagreeable fuss if he were left be- hind. In the course of his speech the officials discovered that he was an Englishman, and therefore not to be treated as their own subjects are. They immediately turned several Irish people out of the carriage in which they had settled themselves and made room for the turbu- lent Saxon. It was only a third-class carriage, for in Ireland it is not safe to interfere seriously with first-class passengers. They may turn out to be officials of a superior kind. But Irish railway officials, if approached with proper humility, are always ready to be helpful, and frequently go out of their way to impart really useful information. A traveller once 107 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE found himself stranded at an out-of-the-way junction at ten o'clock at night. 1 1 was necessary to spend the night in the place, and he had never been there before. He asked a porter if there were an hotel in which he could get a room. " There's two hotels," said the porter, "and it's likely that there's plenty of rooms in either of them," The traveller asked which of the two was the better. ' ' There's some," said the porter, " that prefer the Railway Hotel, and there's some that prefer the Imperial, but whichever of the two you go to you'll find yourself lying awake the most of the night wishing you'd gone to the other." Only an official in a secure and independent position could afford to give that kind of totally unbiased information to a chance stranger. Another instance of official courtesy came recently under the notice of a friend of mine. It was his melancholy duty to attend the coffin of a distant relative which was being conveyed to the family burying-place by rail. A mortuary van was attached to the train, but happened, when the train drew up, to be at the end of the platform a long way from the place where the 1 08 THE IRISH OFFICIAL coffin was laid. The station-master immediately sent a porter to the engine-driver : " Will you tell him," he said, " to pull her up a bit ; but let him not loose the whistle on us." Nothing could have shown greater consideration for the overstrung nerves of the mourners than this determination to restrain by main force the engine's whistle. Another mourner was not so fortunate in his treatment by the railway company. He was found by a friend standing disconsolately on the platform of a well-known west of Ireland junction. "What brings you here?" said his friend, glancingatthe mourner's silk hat and black coat. " I was meaning to attend a funeral," said the other, " but the corpse has missed the connec- tion." There is an operation spoken of by Irish rail- way officials as "checking the train." The word has really a technical meaning, and is ap- plied to a leisurely survey of the tickets held by the passengers ; but the mere outsider is in- clined to understand it in its more ordinary sense. A train which appears likely to be in time log THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE anywhere is immediately "checked, "especially if it is supposed to make a connection with an- other train. The ascendancy of the official class in Ire- land has created a belief, very well founded, that anything can be done by influence. The usual way of bringing influence to bear is by means of a letter written to an official by some person supposed to be of local importance. I was some time ago asked by a mother, who appeared to be in great distress, to write a letter to the governor of a jail in which her son was incarcerated. It was her opinion that a letter from me would at once effect his release. I pointed out that this was not so ; that once legal- ly condemned the young man would have to stay where he was until his sentence expired ; that no one except the Lord- Lieutenant could get him out. The poor mother was unconvinced. She thought that I was making excuses so as to avoid the trouble of writing a letter. The matter, she said, was a simple one for me. The result would be of the utmost importance for her. ■ Feeling that no particular harm could come of the experiment, I finally wrote the letter, ad- IIO THE IRISH OFFICIAL dressed and posted it to the governor of the jail, his very name being unknown to me. I offer no explanation of the end of the story. I have never been able to satisfy myself about what happened. But a week later the mother returned to thank me, with tears in her eyes, for what I had done. Her son had been mysteri- ously restored to her. CHAPTER SIX THE GOVERNMENT CHAP. SIX THE GOVERNMENT THERE IS A TRADITION THAT AN Irishman was once asked whether he was a Lib- eral or a Conservative, and replied, "I don't know, but I'm against the Government any- way." This answer may possibly have been given once, a long time ago, when the story was first told. In those days the Government, whether Liberal or Conservative, was against Irishmen. Naturally we were against it. But now governments are of a different mind. Like the mothers of spoiled children they alter- nately bully and pet us. Therefore our attitude towards them has changed. We regard them with tolerant contempt. An English tourist, anxious to plumb the depths of our ignorance of our own archaeology, once pointed out a round tower to the car-driver who was conducting him round Glendalough and asked who built it. " There's nobody knows that," said the car- driver, " but seeing that it isn't of any manner of use and must have cost a deal of money, I'm thinking it must have been the Government built it." "5 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE The story gives a very good example of the opinion the latter-day Irishman holds of his rulers. H is attitude is scarcely made any plainer by the penetrating remark of a famous Irish wit, that the Irish problem was the necessary consequence of a stupid people trying to govern a clever one. It was the same gentleman, deal- ing with the same subject, who produced a par- ticularly neat apologue. Discussing the efforts of recent governments to ameliorate the condi- tion of the Irish people, he quoted a bill which he once received from a farrier : " To curing your honour's mule, until it died, los. od." We may hope that the end in our case will be happier. In the meanwhile the curing process goes merrily on. Ireland is supposed to be governed by the Parliament that sits at Westminster, the pre- dominant party in that assembly sending over to Dublin an ornamental representative called a Lord- Lieutenant and a very hard-working gentleman known as a Chief Sectretary. The theory is that this Chief Secretary manages I re- land and reports his proceedings to Parliament, being more or less responsible if anything goes ii6 THE GOVERNMENT wrong. In reality Ireland is governed by the English Treasury officials, the various under- secretaries and their assistants in Dublin Castle, and the heads of a number of more or less inde- pendent Irish Boards. A recent writer compar- ed these Boards to the forty thieves who appear in one of the best-known stories in The Arab- ian Nights. He was too hard on them. Our forty Boards — there are, I believe, actually rather less than forty — rob nobody except the general taxpayer, who is fair game. The per- manent officials in Dublin Castle are employed in baffling any Chief Secretary who wants to do anything and in supplying him with answers to the questions which Irish members ask at Westminster. The Treasury occupies itself in provingto the satisfaction of the English people that immense sums of other people's money are lavished on Ireland, and that we, as a nation, are dependent for our existence upon charitable doles. In Ireland we believe that the money spent on our country is our own, and that a great deal of it is spent very foolishly. However, whether .it is ours or somebody else's, there is no doubt that a great deal of 117 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE money has recently been spent in I reland. Our Old Age Pensions have absorbed several mil- lions, and it is generally supposed that in the scramble which followed the passing of that ex- cellent Act we somehow got more than our share. We were credited with having deliber- ately gone about to swindle the innocent Treas- ury. They make us out cleverer than we really are who suppose that we succeeded. No one could swindle the Treasury who has not had long practicejn the art of paying income tax, and in Ireland, for obvious reasons, very little Income tax is payable. But many stories were told which went to show how we succeeded in doing this impossible thing. A middle-aged man, who had perhaps reached the age of fifty, was supposed to be in receipt of an old-age pension. Asked how he managed to secure it, he replied — "Sure I knew the day that the pensions officer was coming round to look at me, and I had a real old alibi down from the mountains ready waiting for him in my bed." All such stories are apocryphal. We tried to overstate our ages occasionally. E very body, ii8 THE GOVERNMENT English, Scottish, or Irish, did who had a ghost of a chance of being believed. But we also oc- casionally understated them, which I feel sure that no one on the other side of the Channel ever did. There was an old man who, in send- ing in his claim for the pension, asserted that he was seventy years of age. After a prolonged search in the papers of the 1841 census it was found that he was eighty. The pension officer, who was indignant at the amount of extra trouble he had been put to through the mistake, upbraided the old man. " You must have known," he said, "that you were a good bit over seventy. Why didn't you say so ? You'd have got the pension just the same." " Your honour," said the old man, "I'll not be telling you any lies about it. I had my mind made up to get married as soon as ever I got the pension ; but there isn't a girl in the parish would look at me if it got out on me that I was eighty." It was not the Treasury that that old man tried to defraud. The fact is that the Old Age Pensions Act 119 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE was to a large extent unworkable in Ireland for two reasons. Very few of us knew how old we were, and we had no means of finding out be- cause we had no compulsory registration of births until 1864. And very few of us knew what our incomes were. The Board of Inland Revenue, which had charge of the working of the Act, was faced at the very outset with a difficulty of getting proof of anybody's age. It might have collected some very unreliable evidence from the 1841 census returns; but that would have been a troublesome task, and the Board naturally shrank from it. Some one with a genius for blundering, hit upon the idea of asking the clergymen of the various churches to certify the ages of their parishioners. The clergy, of course, had no better means of know- ing whether a man was sixty-nine or seventy than anybody else had. They naturally leaned to the side of charity. If the Government was foolish enough to suppose that the Irish clergy were going to make themselves unpopular for the sake of saving a few shillings of public money the Government deserved to suffer. I n the end the system of asking for clerical certifi- 120 A KILDARE COLLEEN THE GOVERNMENT cates was abandoned, very much to the relief of the clergy. Then we fell back, failing the census returns, on the most curious evidences of age. A woman over whose case a local committee had long hesitated finally enabled them to make up their minds by setting them the following little sum : " Gentlemen," she said, " I was the mother of thirteen children and the youngest of them was a girl. That girl has fourteen children of her own now and the youngest of them is walking. Now, am I seventy or am I not ? " There was, of course, the possibility of several sets of twins in both families. Apart from such accidents the proof of age was convincing. The old lady got her pension. Another applicant very nearly lost her pen- sion through having been vain when she was young. The register of her marriage was found, and it was there stated, apparently on her own authority, that she was twenty-five years of age in 1 870. This seemed decisive. She could not possibly have been born in 1839. But she seemed dissatisfied, and continued to assert that she was seventy years of age. Pressed to 121 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE explain the marriage certificate, she at last con- fessed that, her husband being eight years younger than herself, she had, to save her self- respect, understated her age by ten years. In her case some evidence of the truth of this last statement was forthcoming, but she very nearly became a standing example of the truth of the lines in King Lear : " The gods are just and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to scourge us." Her daughter, who had heard the whole subject thrashed out, was immensely impressed by her mother's narrow escape. " If I 'm ever married, " she said, "I'll give out that I'm ten years older than I am, no matter what age himself may be." There was another woman who offered a very interesting piece of evidence that she was seventy years of age. " When I was a slip of a girl," she said, " I was took into the big house to wait on Lady Mary, and one of the things I had to do was to carry up a can of hot water in the morning and pour it into a kind of big tin dish the way her ladyship could wash her- self all over. I mind it well, for I'd never seen the like before, nor nobody else had in them THE GOVERNMENT days. There was one morning, after her lady- ship had gone down to breakfast, that I thought I'd try what the feel of it might be like. Believe you me, gentlemen, I wasn't the better of it for a long time after. But they tell me that baths, as they call them, is common now." There was, one supposes, a time at which the doctrine of baths had not yet found adherents amongst the women of the upper classes. A careful student of our social customs might fix the date at which they began to " wash them- selves all over." If so, on the assumption that the applicant became a lady's-maid at about sixteen, her age could be fixed with tolerable certainty. The problem was unfortunately beyond the sub-committee which considered her case. Other evidence had to be sought. But the question of our ages was nothing to the problem of determining what our incomes were. To the framers of the Bill, men familiar with the conditions of life in industrial England, the matter seemed simple enough. A man is either in receipt of ten shillings of weekly wage or he is not. There is no room for argument or doubt. But the small farmer in the west of 123 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE Ireland is in a totally different position. No- body pays him any wages. He lives on a little patch of land, plants and digs his own potatoes, owns a cow, which gives him milk during certain months of the year, sells an oc- casional " young beast " and from the proceeds of its sale pays his rent and rates. Consci- entious sub-committees used to spend hours trying to make up the family budgets of these farmers. Conversations like this were followed by muddled well-meaning men with pencils and pieces of paper before them. Chairman of Committee — Now, Tom, how much land have you ? Applicant for Pension — There's no use telling a lie about it. I've seven acres ; but the two of them is cut- away bog, and what use are they ? Chairman — And what rent do you pay ? Applicant — I pay ;^4, 3s. 6d. and rates along with that. Them same rates is terrible high. (The committee murmurs sympathetically. It is the general opinion that rates are terrible high.) Chairman — Have you a cow ? Applicant — You might call her a cow. Member of Committee (sympathetic with applicant, who is a friend of his) — If you saw her, you'd hardly say she was a cow, she's that old. Chairman — You get milk from her ? Applicant — If I didn't I wouldn't keep her. 124 THE GOVERNMENT Member of Committee — You would not, Tom. Why would you ? Chairman — How much milk do you get ? Applicant — No more than what's used in the house. Chairman — Milk is twopence a quart. Shall we say your cow is worth £\o a year to you ? Applicant — You will not say that. Don't I tell you I get no more from her than what's used in the house ? I haven't sold a drop of milk this twenty years. Chairman — You get the value of the milk all the same. What hens have you ? Applicant — I have four black Minorcas out of a setting of eggs I got from the Congested Districts Board, and the most of them was rotten. And I've ten old hens and a cock, and three of them runner ducks. Chairman — They lay eggs, I suppose ? Applicant — They might lay an odd one now and again. Chairman — Shall we say that you get an average of a dozen eggs in the week for six months in the year? Come now, that's putting it low. Applicant — You may say it if you like. Chairman — Take eightpence a dozen as the price of eggs Applicant — The hens I has doesn't lay except when eggs is cheap. Eightpence a dozen is too high, and any- way herself (his wife) doesn't sell the eggs. Chairman — It's all the same whether you sell them or eat them. Applicant — I do not eat them. How would a poor man like me be eating eggs ? Chairman — If you don't eat them and don't sell them, what do you do with them ? 125 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE Applicant — Herself does be taking them in to the shops. Chairman — ^Then she sells them ? Applicant — She does not. The devil a penny she ever gets for them, only a pound of tea at an odd time, and at the latter end she has to pay for the most of that. Chairman (baffled by the egg problem) — What potatoes do you set ? Applicant — Maybe two roods. But I get no more out of that than what is used in the house and the small ones that goes to feed the pig. Chairman (hopefully) — You have a pig? Applicant — I had a pig, but he died on me. Chairman — ^The pig was a loss, then ? Applicant — You may say that. I gave fifteen shillings for him after I had sold the young heifer. Chairman — How much did you get for the young heifer ? Applicant — I got £^i, and I ought to have got more. She was worth £,^0. Chairman — Have you any children in America ? Applicant — I have a son, but he's married. Chairman — Does he send you home any money ? Applicant — He does not. Don't I tell you he's married ? Member of Committee — What happened to your daugh- ter Sarah? Applicant — She's in America. Chairman — Does she send you home any money? Applicant — She might, an odd time. Chairman — How much did she send you last Christmas ? Applicant — £2. But what use was that ? Didn't it go on paying what was owing in the shops ? 126 THE GOVERNMENT The committee winds in and out of the in- tricacies of the applicant's financial affairs for another twenty minutes. Desperate efforts are made to estimate the value of the turf he cuts from the bog, the price he paid for artificial manures, the market cost of the hay which the animal " that you might call a cow " has eaten. A long time is spent over the position of the applicant's son who lives with him. Ought the wages which as a matter of fact are not paid to him, but which certainly ought to be paid for his services as farm labourer, to be put down on the credit side of the applicant's balance-sheet ? The fact that one of the black Minorca hens hatched out ten chickens last year emerges suddenly. The committee calculates the price of chickens and deducts the cost of the Indian meal which has to be bought to feed them. Their labours prove vain ; for just as they have added 3s. 4d. to the applicant's yearly income it turns out that all the chickens died in infancy of a disease called the pip. In the end, after everybody has tried different ways of dealing with fractions of a penny in addition and sub- traction, the amazing conclusion is reached that 127 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE the applicant has been living all his life on ;^io a year or so less than nothing. This is obvi- ously absurd, and the applicant is further pressed for some explanation. He has none to give except that he owes a good deal of money in the shops. If he really owes all that his own statements make out that he must owe^he Irish shopkeepers are a long-suffering race of phil- anthropists. He is, at all events, clearly en- titled to an old-age pension. As a rule the applicants, if muddled, are honest, but now and then one appears before a committee who is anxious to minimise an in- come which really exceeds the statutory los. a week. One of these, a woman, tried to convince a sceptical committee by prefacing each of her statements with a kind of oath : "In the name of Almighty God, gentlemen, what I'm telling you now is the truth. If I was put on my oath this minute, I couldn't say other than what I'm saying." The committee which was con- sidering her case bore with her for a long time. Then a member who usually sat silent in a corner by himself, broke out against her sud- denly. 128 THE GOVERNMENT " Woman," he said, "will you leave the name of Almighty God alone for one minute and speak the truth ! " He might have quoted Shakespeare with effect. " Methinks the lady doth protest too much," would have accurately expressed the feeling of the committee. The whole business becomes exceedingly complicated when we reach cases in which the farm, originally held by the applicant, has been assigned to a son. These assignments are com- monly made on the occasion of the son's mar- riage, and are, as a rule, perfectly bonafideXxaxis- actions. The father reserves for himself certain rights, the use of a room or two rooms in the house, sufficient grass to feed a cow, perhaps two cows, and his own food and clothes. The Old Age Pensions Committee hasto determine first whether the assignment was bona fide and not made with the objectof obtaining a pension, then, a much more difficult matter, what the house-room, food, clothes, and grass are worth when translated into terms of shillings perweek. Sometimes there is no legal assignment, noth- ing but a verbal agreement, quite satisfactory 129 I THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE to the parties concerned, but very difficult to deal with when it has to be brought within the four corners of an Act of Parliament. Thus we struggle with the well-meant efforts of benevolent Governments, trying, I think quite heroically, to do what is right under cir- cumstances which would baffle far abler men than we are. It is no longer possible to discover the name of the first official Englishman who hit upon the idea of building piers as a remedy for the ills of Ireland. There ought to be a statue erected to him, whoever he was. No idea in modern poli- tics has been so fruitful in results. Some parts of the coast of Ireland are actually jagged with small stone piers, built at various times by vari- ous Boards, which stick out from the land like the teeth of a comb. There are some which can- not be reached from the shore, many which even daring mariners shrink from approaching from the sea, and a few which cannot be reached either from sea or shore, but which may turn out in the end to be useful as alighting places for aeroplanes. There is a considerable demand for these piers, and the inhabitants of the local- 130 THE GOVERNMENT ity will sometimes take a great deal of trouble to secure one. A petition was forwarded some time ago to one of our pier-building Boards, representing the urgent need of a structure of the kind in a certain bay. An inspector was sent down to investigate the case. He drove twenty miles from the nearest railway station on a brilliant summer day, and arrived at last at the top of the hill from which he could look down on the bay he was to inspect. Nothing could have been more beautiful than the scene before him. A broad stretch of water lay glistening in the sunshine, a picturesque village clustered under the shelter of a grey cliff. The sand, on which the waves broke gently, was absolutely golden, A boat, manned by four men, lay, her oars poised above the water, a few yards from the shore. The inspector gazed, fascinated, as his car descended the hill. Suddenly, with a wild cry, the four men in the boat sprang to their feet, flung their oars from them, plunged waist deep into the water and, with some difficulty, upset their boat. At the same moment women rushed, dishevelled from the cottages, and fell, shriek- 131 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE ing, on their knees on the shore. The boatmen waded in, dragging their boat with them. The chief man of the village met the amazed inspec- tor as he got off his car. " You see for yourself now, your honour," he said, " the need of a pier in this place, when them kind of disasters occurs before your own eyes." Another idea which has had an extraordinary fascination for the minds of our rulers is that Ireland is to be saved by means of seed pota- toes. Some time ago a scheme for a large dis- tribution of seed potatoes, in a district supposed to be very poverty stricken, was devised. On the principle that far-off cows have long horns, these particular potatoes were fetched from Scotland in a steamer. With a belief in the value of its own work which is deeply pathetic, the Board, which was managing the potatoes, arranged that the steamer should land them at one of the piers which it had itself built some time before. The captain of the steamer when the time came found that he could not get any- where near the pier on account of the enormous number of rocks which guarded the approach 132 THE GOVERNMENT to it and the extreme shallowness of the water. It appeared that he would have to ferry his potatoes on shore by boatloads. This, however, did not matter much, because, as things turned out, he was not called upon to land many of them. It happened that the Board was suffer- ing at the time from an attack of political ec- onomy. It decided that as many of the inhab- itants as could afford it should buy and pay for the potatoes, and that none should be given away until every possible shilling had been ab- stracted from the pockets of the people. When no one was left who could be expected to buy even at the cheapest rate, then the rest of the people should be given their potatoes free. Nothing could have been more economically sound than the scheme. The inhabitants of the district, who heard all about it before the pot- atoes arrived, greatly admired the wisdom of the Board. They quite admitted that every one who could afford to pay for the potatoes should do so, but each man, after careful consideration, decided that he himself could not afford to buy, and made up his mind to wait till the free dis- tribution began. The result was that the first 133 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISHLIFE boatload of potatoes, the only boatload ever landed, lay day after day untouched in the gal- vanised iron shed erected for their accommo- dation. The captain of the steamer, unable to approach the pier, lay at anchor a mile from the shore, and clamoured to be allowed to land the rest of his cargo. He maintained that his ship was in danger, lying shelterless off a sing- ularly inhospitable coast. Still no buyers ap- peared. In the end, the potatoes in the hold of the steameT began to go bad, and the whole cargo, many hundred pounds' worth, had to be shovelled into the Atlantic. The inhabitants of the district, curiously enough, when one con- siders their original destitution, survived the loss. The proprietor of a western American music hall is said to have had a large notice put up in front of the piano, which ran thus : " Please do not shoot the musician. He is doing his best." Something of the same sort ought to be posted in every market-place in Ireland. We cannot, indeed, shoot our Government, but we are sometimes tempted to doubt whether they are doing their best. In reality they are, 134 THE GOVERNMENT but there are moments when it is difficult to believe this. A strongly worded assurance, printed in big type, and so placed as to catch the eye, would help us to feel charitably to- wards our rulers. After all, in spite of every effort to improve us, we really have of late years prospered a little, and there is, according to the best judges, every sign that we are likely to continue prospering. DROWNING THE SHAMROCK. CHAPTER SEVEN THE IRISH PEASANT SEVEN : THE IRISH PEASANT THE SOUL OF THE PEASANT IS AL- ways an enigma to the man who has suffered the misfortune of a town education, or who be- longs to one of the classes of the community which earn their living otherwise than straight from the earth itself. A great gulf is fixed, a spiritual gulfwell-nighuncrossable, between the mind of the one who has been taught to look for knowledge in books and newspapers, and the mind of the other who learns from the fields, from the waters, the trees, and the living things which move among them. This is the case everywhere, and nothing is more pathetic than the efforts which our literary men make from time to time to get back to the simple, primitive emotions which make the peasant what he is. But of all peasants the Irish is, I suppose, the most elusive. Very few, even of his own kith and kin, have understood him. He has rarely succeeded in expressing himself. He is content for the most part to stand dumb while the world heaps upon him foolish blame or equally foolish praise. It used to be the fashion in England to repre- 139 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE sent the Irish peasant as a monster of iniquity. He was a cowardly, bloodthirsty villain who shot innocent men from behind hedges, tortured helpless women, and mutilated cattle. The wheel has come full circle since those days, and a kind of cult of the Irish peasant — now spoken of as a Celt or Gael — has invaded the literary world. The man who was once a murderer by inclination is now a kind of half pagan, half Christian saint, the one witness left in a mat- erialised world to the undying truth of age- worn mysticisms. Some one described the neo- Catholicism of the end of the nineteenth century as a creed which asserted that there is no God, and Mary is his mother. The new admirers of the Irish peasant father on him a still more ridi- culous faith. He is supposed to believe in a thousand gods of earth, air, wind, water, and that Mary is the mother of them all. I make no claim to understand the Irish peasant, and I have no intention of trying to explain him ; but beyond the fact that he is, in his own way, a man of religious faith, I see little truth in most of the rather morbid writing which has been poured out upon him of late. 140 THE IRISH PEASANT The religion of the Irish peasant is too solemn asubjecttobe discussed here. If anyone wants to grasp the spirit of it, he should turn to Dr. Hyde's Religious Songs ofConnacht. There he will find in the original Irish language and trans- lated into curiously effective English the stories which the people made and told for themselves, the hymns they used to sing, the prayers they still say, the charms they use, even some of the curses with which they invoke misfortune upon their enemies. Some of these stories, told for the most part in verse, are very beautiful, and remind the student curiously of those which the Coptic Christians told about their saints. Many of them display an acutely critical spirit which is by no means inclined to spare the short- comings of the Church. Covetousness is a sin which has often been laid to the charge of the Christian clergy. In this little story the Irish peasant expresses his feelings on the subject : " There was a priest in the chapel one day, and there came in a young, fine-looking, well- combed man and stood at the door. ' You sleek lad yonder,' says the priest, 'come here till I see have you your Christian Doctrine. Tell me 141 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE how many deadly sins there are in it.' ' Six,' says he. ' Musha, there were seven in it last year,' says the priest. ' There were,' said he, ' but no w we leave covetousness to the Church. '" (Religious Songs of Connacht, by Douglas Hyde, vol. i. p. 169). To the same effect is the following rhyth- mical proverb : " Four clergy who are not covetous, Four Frenchmen who are not yellow, Four shoemakerg who are not liars — Those are a dozen who are not in the country." (From the same.) On the other hand, we find in the same col- lection much plainly sincere praise of the clergy, whom the people have learned to love and re- spect. What could be more touchingly simple than this little verse addressed by a blind poet to his priest ? " When you lifted up your voice to plead Christ's cause, You made sinners pause, you looked through us. You seemed in Kilcornin that Sunday morning Like an angel of God sent to us." Or this, which may be set against the charge of coveteousness : " It is Father William is the generous messenger, Who would teach us sense and give advice. 142 THE IRISH PEASANT He would distribute the world, if he had it, as broadly and generously As the sun gives its light in the harvest." (From the same, p, 155.) Occasionally these ranns touch the high mysteries of the Christian faith with a kind of reverential playfulness, very characteristic of the peasant mind. We feel that we are in direct touch with the spirit of St. Patrick himself when we read lines like these : " Three folds in my garment, yet only one garment I bear. Three joints in a finger, yet only one finger is there. Three leaves in a shamrock, yet only one shamrock I wear, Frost, ice, and snow, these three are nothing but water, Three persons in God, yet only one God is there." (From the same, vol. ii. p. 397.) More solemn in tone is this descant on the old theme of the inevitable end of all things. 1 1 is the Irish peasant's version of the universal Respice Finem : " The first of a ship — wood sheeting. The first of a kiln — stone heaping, The first of a feast — good greeting. The first of good health — sound sleeping. The end of a ship — deep drowning. The end of a kiln — red burning. The end of a feast — black frowning. The end of good health — white mourning." (From the same, p. 404.) 143 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE It is worth while, for the sake of giving some idea of the stark terseness of the original, to quote Dr. Hyde's literal translation of the verses. It runs thus : " The beginning of a ship — a board. The beginning of a lime-kiln — stones. The beginning of a banquet — a welcome. The beginning of health — sleep. The end of a ship — drowning. The end of a kiln — burning. The end of a banquet — reviling. The end of health — a groan." It cannot be said of peasants who made such verses as these — and many of them are of quite modern date — that they are deficient in literary instinct. Still less that they have failed to apprehend something of the meaning of the religion they profess. I am tempted to quote more and to write more on this most fascin- ating subject, but I am conscious of my own inability to treat it properly. I prefer to turn from it to those more superficial characteristics of the people which require no specially sym- pathetic chronicling. B esides his religious poems, the I rish peasant has many rhymed or proverbial toasts, used by 144 THE IRISH PEASANT those who pledge each other. Here is one of them, characterised by a certain generous good fellowship : " Silk for you, and wool for me, but enough of drink to the both of us." Another gives us a conception of complete felicity. I have ventured to render it into rude English rhyme : " Here's wishing good health and long life to you. And the choice of the girls for a wife to you, And your land without penny of rent to you. If these three blessings are sent to you, Then there'll be peace and content to you." " To thousands of men," says Euripides, ' ' come thousands of different hopes. " One might do worse than adopt this Irish version of the summum bonum. I suspect that the following toast belongs by origin to the gentry rather than the peasantry, but the hatred of the inhospitable house is less common to-day than it used to be among what are called " the upper classes." There is, who- ever created it, a fine, reckless selfishness about the sentiment : " May the devil fly away with the roof of the house where you and I aren't welcome." 145 ' ^ THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE The spirit of a people is very often plainly ex- pressed in its proverbs. I recognise the results of old centuries of dealing with " the Saxon invader " in the following piece of crystallised wisdom : " Beware of the horns of a bull, of the heels of a horse, of the smile of an Englishman." Only a people familiar with the conditions of life on Irish farms could have expressed the value of self-help in this proverb : " The owner of a cow should be at the tail of her himself." When a cow falls into a bog hole the way to get her out is by pulling at her tail. It is obvi- ouslythe owner of the animal who should under- take this important part of the work. His neighbours have no doubt gathered to his help and are prepared to do their best, but it is the man himself who should take his place at the tail. So with all the business of life. The prin- cipal part of it should be done by the person most interested, and no one should depend much on outside help. The same conviction finds expression in an- other farmyard proverb : 146 THE IRISH PEASANT "It's a poor hen that cannot scratch for it- self." The English have a proverb which warns against the dangers of procrastination : "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day." But this is a bad proverb ; for any one who acted on it consistently would be led into all sorts of hasty and ill-considered action, would get into trouble by doing foolish things which he would not have done if he had reversed the teaching of the proverb and taken a night for considera- tion before acting. The Irish proverb, drawn again from the farmer's experience, teaches the wisdom of acting promptly much better : " Time enough lost the ducks." Young ducks are the prey of foxes, rats, and other vermin. They ought to be safely housed at sundown. There is a kind of optimistic, almost cheer- ful fatalism in this curious saying : " What is there that seems worse to a man than his death, and yet he does not know, but it may be the height of his good luck." The people who made that proverb were well fitted to survive evil days. They would take 147 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE the worst that could come to them with a certain resigned hopefulness which would carry them on till the sun shone again. There is, on the other hand, a cynical distrust of life and what life brings in this proverb : "Thirst is the end of drinking, and sorrow is the end of love." The mother-in-law joke is, next to the drunk man joke, the most popular of that small store of really humorous things by which generation after generation is moved to laughter. I do not profess to know who made it first, but it is to be found in one of its very best forms as far back as the time of Plutarch. He makes it in one of his essays, rather apologetically, I think, as if he knew it to be venerable even then. There must, one supposes, be something essentially comic in this relationship which comes into exist- ence after marriage. Otherwisethe joke would not retain its unfading freshness. But curious- ly enough, all the humorists who have played their variations on the original theme, from Plutarch down, have dealt with the mother of the wife as she affects the interloping husband. The Irish alone, so far as I know, have realised 148 THE IRISH PEASANT that the wife has serious difficulties with the husband's mother. They made not a joke, but a proverb on the subject : " A daughter-in-law and a mother-in-law," they say, "are like a cat and a mouse facing each other." This apprehenson of the extreme difficulty of the situation does something to explain the postponement of marriage which is becoming a serious matter in rural I reland. I n the old days the Irish peasants married young. A small bit was cut off the parental farm and the new fam- ily started in a cottage of their own, a home eas- ily and cheaply built. It is now no longer pos- sible to subdivide farms in the old reckless way. When a farmer's son marries he must bring his bride home to his father's house. He has no- where else to take her to, and no means of sup- porting her except the produce of the farm which will one day be his, and on which, in the meanwhile, he works as an unpaid labourer. But bringing the bride home means creating that cat and mouse situation against which the accumulated wisdom embodied in the pro- verb has warned him. The original mistress 149 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE of the house dislikes having "a strange woman brought in on top of her in her own home." The young wife dreads the prospect of intim- ate life with an old woman whom she suspects of being "crabbed." The result is that mar- riage is postponed until the old woman either dies or becomes so infirm that the services of a housekeeper are urgently required. From the point of view of the woman's fam- ily there is an equally good reason for postpon- ing marriage. The man she is to marry, though he will some day be the owner of a valuable property, is, while his father lives, simply a farm labourer without a farm labourer's wages. It is in the power of the father to disinherit him and leave the farm to some one else. Such a thing might very well happen as a result of a series of quarrels between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. No prudent father will allow his daughter to accept so very precarious a posi- tion. Nor will he hand over his daughter's dowry, an important matter in Irish marriages, unless he can make sure of a settlement in re- turn. He demands, very properly, that some assignment of the farm, or part of it, shall be 150 THE IRISH PEASANT made to the sonbefore the marriage takes place. But the young man's father dislikes making over his land even to his own son as long as he has health and strength to work it himself. From this point of view, too, we see the necessity for the postponement of marriage. In rural Ireland a very large percentage of marriages are arranged by parents or other friends. " Love matches," as they are called, take place, but are comparatively rare, and are looked upon with distrust. " It's seldom ever they turn out well," the people say, and they quote specific instances in support of their be- lief. On the other hand, the arranged marriages turn out very well indeed. Conjugal infidelity is almost unknown in rural Ireland. Magis- trates are scarcely ever troubled with cases of wife-beating. The woman is generally treated with respect, and is regarded, not as an inferior or a permanently settled household servant, but as a partner, with an equal interest in the pro- sperity of the farm. She has an authority over her grown-up sons and daughters at least equal to, often greater than, that of the father. Her marriage may lack that glow of romance which 151 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE glorifies the awakening of passion. It makes up for the loss afterwards by the position in the home which is secured for her. The success of our marriages and the very small number of our wrecked homes has been traced to various causes. The Roman Catholic conception of marriage as a sacrament may have something to do with it, but fails to account for the equally successful marriages of Protestant peasants. The supposition of a sort of genius for domes- ticity natural to the Irish people seems unsatis- factory when we are dealing with a race of mixed blood. The probabilityisthatasmostofourpeo- ple marry without romance, so they marry with- out illusion. The woman accepts wifehood and motherhood as a man accepts his profession, knowing that life is not a rose garden. The man accepts his wife without supposing that he is going to be mated with an angel. Some- what less is expected in the marriage of arrange- ment than in the marriage of passion, and there- fore, in the great majority of cases, somewhat more is obtained. I nto the marriage of passion the man and woman rush with blind eyes, to recover sight afterwards, and with sight, too 152 OBTTING READY FOR THE FAIR THE IRISH PEASANT often, disillusion. Into the marriage of arrange- ment they go with eyes very widely opened, and are therefore all the better able to close them afterwards when closing is necessary for domes- tic peace. Courtship is no essential preliminary to mar- riage in rural Ireland. Very often the bride and bridegroom scarcely know each other be- forehand. Occasionally they meet for the first time before the altar. What happens in the " making" of a marriage is commonly this. A man is found to want a wife. Perhaps his mother has died or become infirm. Perhaps his sister has left him. At all events he has no housekeeper. A wife is required to take up the necessary work. His father, his uncle, or some disinterested friend makes inquiries and hears of a suitable girl possessed of a fortune such as a man in hispositionmay fairly expect. The Irish- man in this matter of fortunes for his daughters is, like the Frenchman, a very good father. H e may be desperately poor. He may be very heavily in debt ; but he will succeed somehow in laying by a few pounds for each of his daughters. The self-denial practised is often very great, 153 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISHLIFE actually marvellous. Any one familiar with Irish country life must again and again have wondered how the fifty pounds which the girl brings to her husband's home was ever made or ever kept. But in the performance of this duty an Irish father very rarely fails. If he has little money to offer he will eke out the dowry with gifts of animals, a heifer perhaps or a cow, from the scanty stock of his own farm. It is not to be wondered at that a father should be cautious about parting with a dowry for which he has toiled so hard and which he has kept so painfully. A long negotiation takes place be- tween him and his wife on the one side and the father or friend of the bridegroom on the other. The discussion is conducted in the private par- lour of some public-house, and is carried over sometimes from one day to another. An offer is made by way of dowry to the girl, and a quid pro ^?foasasettlementisdemanded. Alongprocess of bargaining ensues. Ten pounds are offered, five pounds more are asked. An additional heifer is demanded, and the request met with the offer of a pig. The whole business strikes the outsider, accustomed to other ways of marry- 154 THE IRISH PEASANT ing, as a degraded sale of human beings. To the people actually engaged in it no such idea oc- curs. Each side is really endeavouring to make the best possible arrangement for the future of a household and family. Neither of the people chiefly concerned is present during these preliminary negotiations. The girl is perhaps in a friend's house. The man is, presumably nervously, wanderingabout the streets with a companion. Once theimport- ant matter of the dowry is settled the girl Is sent for. Then the man enters, and they are solemnly asked whetherthey are content to take each other as husband and wife. It is perhaps the first time they have spoken to each other. It is only occasionally that there has been any kind of friendship between them before. But they are generally both content to abide by the wisdom of their elders. The engagement is made. Nowand thenan objection is made by one or other of the two, and when made it is respected. An Irish girl is very seldom, an Irish man still seldomer, forced into a marriage which he has definitely objected to. The important inter- 155 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE view takes place in the presence of parents and guardians and is something more than a mere formality. A young man summoned from his wandering through the streets was accompanied by his companion to the very door of the room where his intended bride was waiting for him. His friend, a man of some experience, whisper- ed a last word of advice. " See her walk," he said. " See her walk before you say you'll have her. It was only last week that they very nearly had me married to a girl. If it hadn't been that they differed after about the price of a cow, I'd have been married to her. They had her set out on a chair facing me, as nice a looking girl as you'd wish to see. It wasn't till the week after, when the marriage was off, that I found out that she'd only one leg on her." The spirit of the veterinary surgeon was strong in another young man, who refused to ratify an engagement until he was assured by some responsible person that there was no truth in a rumour he had heard to the effect that the prospective bride had a varicose vein in one of her legs. 156 THE IRISH PEASANT It is not to be wondered at under the circum- stances that the girl sometimes finds a difficulty at first in adjusting herself to her new relation- ship with her husband. It is the custom in Ireland for the bridegroom to give his bride a ceremonial kiss immediately after the service. This is generally done in church, and is really part of the service. One young man put off the kiss till he went into the vestry-room to sign the register. The kiss he gave then was something rather more than ceremonial. His bride, to whom he was almost a stranger, very foolishly resisted. The bridegroom turned to the clergy- man with a broad grin : " She oughtn't to be so shy now, your rever- ence, ought she ? " The marriage service accomplishes a good deal, but it is perhaps too much to expect that it should at once do away with the instinctive alarm of a young woman at the prospect of being warmly kissed by a man to whom she has not spoken half a dozen times in her life. When the religious service is over the bride, the bridegroom, and theirfriends go for a drive together. There is sometimes quite a proces- 157 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE sion of cars on these occasions, and it used to be the custom for the bridegroom's friends to drag the car of the happy couple along the last half-mile or so of the road leading to the new home. The wedding feast is a regular feature of amarriage, and often ends withadancewhich lasts the greater part of the night. As many of the neighbours and friends as the house will hold are invited to the feast ; and on these occasions, as indeed at most other times, the utmost good feeling prevails between Protest- ants and Roman Catholics. I remember hearing of a remarkable instance of courtesy between the members of the two Churches at the weddingfeast. Cold ham, cold mutton, and other pleasant things were spread out on the table. Everybody was hungry after the long drive, and, by eight o'clock at night, quite ready to eat. The hosts and most of the guests were Protestants, but there were a few Roman Catholics present. The day was Friday, and though the Protestants haj^ no more objection to eating ham on that day than any other, they knew that their Roman Catholic friends could not conscientiously join them. 158 THE IRISH PEASANT The whole party sat looking at the feast, grow- ing no doubt hungrier and hungrier, till the clock struck midnight. Then Friday was over, and every one could eat what he liked with a good conscience. There is a story of an Egyp- tian hermit who once, out of consideration for a guest, broke his rule of fasting until sundown and ate a hearty meal at midday in order to keep his chance visitor in countenance. It was an act of gracious courtesy, but outdone, I think, by the delicacy of feeling which kept those hungry wedding guests from their meal until midnight. The wedding feast is often visited by young men masked and disguised with swathes of straw tied over their clothes. They are called " straw boys." Their behaviour is very divert- ing to the guests. They crack jokes, sing songs, dance, and finally drink thebride's health with great heartiness. It is a point of honour to treat the " straw boys " with open-handed hospitality, and the final glasses of porter are handed to them by the bride herself. It is considered most unlucky for a bride to enter her mother's house until she has been 159 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE married for a full month. This belief is pre- valent even among well-educated people, who will sometimes put themselves to great incon- venience rather than run the risk of bringing ill-luck to their married life. Among Gaelic-speaking people a married woman does not lose her maiden name. She remains " Una, daughter of So-and-so," but adds to her designation that she is "wife of such a one." Even where the Gaelic language has completely passed out of use a woman is known after marriage by her maiden name, and desc- ribes herself by it. "My name," an old woman once said to me, "is Mary O'Brien, but my hus- band's name is McNulty." She had been mar- ried for over forty years, but had not, even then, so merged her individuality in her husband's as to adopt his name. This is one of the things which ought to attract to Ireland ardent femin- ists anxious to secure proper respect for their sex. Nowhere else, I suppose, have women been accorded such complete equality with men as among the I rish peasants. B ut the I rishman while he recognises his wife as an equal and a partner, insists on retaining his own self-re- i6o THE IRISH PEASANT spect. He will not wheel perambulators, or carry sticky babies in his arms in public places. Englishmen — I judge by my experience of the northern manufacturing towns on Saturday nights — will do both these things withoutshow- ing any signs of discomfort. Women, even fem- inists, cannot have it both ways. If they want equality and independence they can marry I rish- men, but then they will have to drag their own babies about or else leave them at home. Or they can marry Englishmen, lose their maiden names, become the property of their husbands, who will speak about " my woman," and enjoy by way of compensation the pleasure of doing theirmarketingwhile a long-suffering man toils after them laden with babies. The Irish peasant has a long memory, but a curiously capricious one. Certain events in his past history have left a store of tales behind them. Nothing is easier than to gather stories of the famine time or the "Great wind" of 1837. On the other hand, O'Connell's agita- tions have left few memories behind them ; and the landing of the French at Killala, an event which ought surely to have impressed itself on 161 L THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE the Mayo people, is only very vaguely recol- lected. Very ancient legends, too, of saints and pagan heroes have survived and are told gener- ation after generation, the stories being con- nected with impossible localities in a most be- wildering way. CHAPTER EIGHT THE BROGUE CHAPTER EIGHT THE BROGUE THE LAW OF COPYRIGHT OUGHT TO BE amended in such a way as to secure to Irishmen the sole right of reproducing their own speech in print. As things are at present, E nglishmen in- sist on trying to write down what they suppose we say. The result is a pain to us and a disgrace to them. The question of the phonetic spelling of any dialect is a difficult one. I have never been able to understand why, if phonetic spelling is used at all in reporting dialogue, it should not be used impartially for all speakers. The I rish- man is held up to ridicule for saying "a cup of tay." Nobody dreams of printing the English- man's way of saying the phrase as"acupoftee." Yet that, phonetically spelt, iswhatthe English- man actually does say. The Irishman's way of pronouncing " wh" is, for some obscure reason, represented by "hw" in print. " Hwat did you say?" But the Englishman, who gets out of the difficulty by dropping the h altogether, is not penalised by having his question printed as "Wat did you say?" If we are to have phonetic spell- ing at all in our novels, we ought surely to have it for every kind of speaker. It is grossly unfair 165 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE that Lord So-and-so, who certainly does notpro- nounce English as it is spelt, should be treated as if he did, while Tom Geraghty from beyond the bog in Lisnacreen should have his remarks rendered unintelligible by being represented in print as a conglomeration of vowelless conson- ants with apostrophes hanging on to them in odd places, and a superabundance of h's strew- ed about among them. It is true that most of the greatest masters of the art of writing dialogue have adopted the sys- tem of phonetic spelling in order to produce the illusion that the speaker is an uneducated or pro- vincial person. But it is also true that many writers, men of inferior genius, adopt absurd spellings as a means of disguising the fact that they do not really know the dialect they are at- tempting to write. Nothing is commoner, for instance, than to see the word "sure" spelt "shure" when the speaker happens to be an Ir- ishman. Yet this is an absolutely senseless thing to do. Nobody, Irish, English, or Scottish, says the word without putting an h after the s. The writer who spells the word "sure" when an Eng- lishman says it and "shure" when the speaker is i66 THE BROGUE an Irishman, simply proclaims his inability to convince his readers that the character really is Irish without resorting to a ridiculous conven- tion. The Irish pronunciation of some of the words most commonly pilloried is in reality not provincial or vulgar, but simply an older, one might say a more classical, pronunciation than that used by modern English speakers. ' ' Tay " is the way eighteenth-century Englishmen pro- nounced the word "tea." Pope rhymed it with "obey," and Pope was very particular about his rhymes : "And here great Anna, whom three realms obey. Doth sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea.'' Ignorance of this fact betrays English writers into many mistakes in their phonetic reproduc- tions of I rish speech. The I rishman says ' ' say " instead of sea ; and any one, arguing from ana- logy instead of knowing the facts, might easily represent an Irishman as saying a "bay" when hemeansa "bee." Butno Irishmansays "bay" for "bee." He does say "swate" for "sweet" just as the lowland Scots did, perhaps do: " His lady hath taken another mate So we make our dinner sweet." 167 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISHLIFE But he does not say "fate" for "feet," though I have met more than one English writer who thinks he does. The fact is, that nearly all the Irish preferences to "ai" to the double e sound, in words like "eat," "severe,"and "deceive,"are not vulgarisms, but survivals. The same sound has survived among E nglish speakers in ' 'great," wh ich when they were altering ' ' tea, " " eat, "and the others they might just as well have changed into "greet." This particular difference in the rendering of a vowel sound gives rise to oc- casional confusion. Lever has a story of an army officer who prided himself on his correct use of out-of-the-way words. Being shocked at the very dirty appearance of a new recruit, he or- dered an Irish sergeant to take him down to the river and "lave himthere." The sergeant obeyed his order literally as he understood it, and left the man in the river. Fortunately he could swim. A traveller, anxious about his letters, asked the waiter of an Irish hotel what mails there were in the place. "Three, your honour," replied the man, " breakfast, dinner, and tea." But the pronunciations are not by any means the most interesting characteristics of Irish i68 SLANTHE THE BROGUE speech. Many of its peculiar turns are the re- sult of thinking in one language and speaking in another. The fact that Gaelic and not Eng- lish was at one time the mother tongue of three- fourths of the I rish people, has left marks on the idiom of E nglish-speaking I rishmen which even the National Board of Education has hitherto failed to erase. "My cow died on me," says an Irish farmer, relating a serious misfortune. He does not mean, as a puzzled and sympathetic English friend of mine once supposed, that the animal had succeeded in lying down on its un- fortunate owner just before it expired. He is simply translating a Gaelic idiom into English. The " on " represents the Gaelic preposition "air" which conveys an idea of harm or detri- ment when it is compounded with the personal pronoun. A mother returning from a walk asks one of her servants where the baby is. "He'satBridgie, ma'am," is the answer she receives. I do not know what this would mean to any one familiar only with English as spoken in England. Per- haps that the baby, a particularly fractious and objectionable child, was at that moment tormen- 169 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE ting Bridgie in some way. In reality it is a translation of a Gaelic idiom and means simply that Bridgie has the baby. An Englishman who had settled in Ireland once related to me a conversation which he had with an Irish servant. " Mary," he said, " will you please light the fire in my study ? " " I'm just after lighting it," she replied. " Then do it at once," he said. " Don't I tell you, sir," she said, " that I'm just after doing it .■* " To him that use of the word " after" con- veyed the idea that she was in pursuit of the thing, hurrying desperately, as it were, to over- take the lighting of the study fire, a duty which had up to that moment succeeded in escaping from her grasp, but which she soon hoped to get up to and deal with. What she wanted to convey to her master was that she had just lit the fire ; that the act of lighting it lay in the past for her ; that she, so to speak, stood behind the moment when she lit it, as the afternoon, in point of time, stands behind or after the noon. That word "afternoon" marks another pe- 170 THE BROGUE cuHarity of Irish speech directly traceable to Gaelic influence. We never say " Good after- noon." We say " Good morning " or perhaps " Good day." It is only the Englishman who says "Good afternoon"; and you can recognise him, however he may try to disguise himself, by this greeting. I n Gaelic there is no word for afternoon. The day divides itself into morning and evening. The Irishman, even if he knows no Gaelic, cannot, without a definite effort, wish any one " Good afternoon." The phrase gives him a curious sense of uneasy disgust. " He's a bad head to me," or " a good head to me," is another of these translations. A woman will say it of her husband, meaning in the one case that he drinks more than he ought, or in the other case that he is unusually sober. There is an odd euphemism for a tendency to drunkenness, which maybe quoted here, though it is not, so far as I know, a translation from the Gaelic. " He does be a bit foolish at times," has but one meaning in the mouth of an Irish- man. Foolishness is always drunkenness. The apparently redundant " does be " is another translation. The Irish verb has a tense, the 171 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE consuetudinal present, which the English verb lacks. It signifies habitual action, "I do be sowing potatoes in the field beyond," means, " I sow them there regularly year after year." The Irishman feels the want of this tense, a very useful one, when he speaks English, and has to take a way of his own to express his meaning. " Himself," " herself," " myself" are used by the Irishman in a way which is strange to the English. " Himself" in the mouth of a woman, used as the subject of a sentence, generally means her husband. " H imself does be in town every day." Similarly " herself " in the mouth of a man means his wife. " Myself" is used as it never is by Englishmen. " It's myself would be glad to earn the money," is an em- phatic way of saying, "I would be glad," These are all translations of Gaelic idiom. The com- mon way of ending a letter in Gaelic is " Ismise dochara," or " Is mise le meas mor " — literally, " It's myself your friend," or " It's myself with great respect " — and then the signature, " I t's equal to me whether you do or not," meaning, " I do not care," " It does not matter to me," 172 THE BROGUE is another translation in common use. I re- member meeting a lady who had been brought up in the highlands of Scotlandand came tolive in the west of Ireland. She told me that the speech of the people sounded curiously familiar to her, and that many of the phrases and idioms used in Connacht were those used at her own home. This, though surprising at first, is really quite natural. The Scottish Highlander and the west of Ireland man when they speak Eng- lish are both translating from the Gaelic into a language partially learned. A good many Gaelic words and phrases sur- vive untranslated in the English of west of Ire- land people. A child is addressed as "agra," or in the case of a boy " avic." The words are pure Gaelic, and mean "my dear" and " my son." " Sleuthering " is a word in common use — I think I have occasionally heard it even in England, It means getting the better of some one, over-persuading him by soft speeches. Itisreallyan anglicised Gaelic word. To "but- ter " is used in very much the same sense. A well-known Irish barrister was famous for his success in dealing with juries. He obtained 173 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE verdictsin favour of his clients in what appeared to be the most hopeless cases. Asked for the secret of his influence with the twelve honest men in the jury box, he explained it thus : " First I butter them up and then I sleuther them down." " He's flahooly,"aladyonce said tome about her son, and knew exactly what she meant by the word although neither she nor any of her immediate ancestors had spoken Gaelic. Her word was a corruption of the Gaelic for " prince- ly "; and what she wanted to convey, and did con- vey better than she could in any single English word, was that her son had very grand ideas, and was by no means inclined to keep ordinary ex- penditure within the bounds of his income. " There I was," said a woman to me once, " sitting socar and easy." She believed that " socar " was an English word, and assured me that she knew no Gaelic. But "socar" must havebeenaninheritancefromaGaelic-speaking mother. It is the Gaelic for " quiet." A woman threatening a child with dire punishment for some particularly annoying iniquity said, " When I catch you I'll give you thaw m6 saustha." 174 THE BROGUE She probably thought the phrase was English. She would at all events have found it hard to get an English phrase which would have ex- pressed her meaning so effectively. What the child understood was that the whipping he had to look forward to was one which it would be a solid satisfaction to his mother to inflict. The Irish speaker of English ought to be given credit for enriching the language of his adoption. Some of his words and phrases fill long-felt wants. Of a girl with a pretty face and an attractive manner it is said, " She puts the comether on the men." The meaning is that she puts a kind of charm on them which draws themtoher. Thewordis a compound of "come hither," and is used as a substantive. " Show," used in the sense of "give me for a moment," is a word which is exceedingly useful, but which once got me into trouble. I was an Irish boy making the acquaintance of my companions in an English school. Wanting to point a pencil, I said to the boy next me, "Show me your knife, please." He gaped at me at first and then, wondering, I suppose, at my curious request, showed me his knife. I explained myself, but 175 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE for a long time afterwards the joke was kept up against me. Things I particularly wanted were " shown " and then put away again. Yet the word is a useful word. It means much less than "give" and somewhat less than "lend," which may be understood of a prolonged loan. " Smithereen " is another excellent word which is, I believe, creeping into English. I have heard it used by Englishmen in conversation, and Dr Joyce in his interesting book on Eng- lish as we speak it in Ireland, says that an English M. P. recently used it in a public speech. It means the kind of little bits that are lying about after a bad smash. The jug which a child drops on a stone floor is in "smithereens" after- wards. A bicycle which got mixed up with the wheels of a railway engine was described as being in " smithereens." " Galore " is another of these words. Most Englishmen understand it, and as soon as they realise its value will, no doubt, begin to use it. " Gazebo " is a word which is certainly wanted in English. It means a tall, gawky, awkward person, generally lean. " A great gazebo of a man " calls up a very dis- tinct picture to an Irishman. It canalso be ap- 176 THE BROGUE plied to buildings and statues. Considering the nature of a great deal of their provincial and some of their London architecture, I often won- der how the English get on as well as they do without "gazebo." The Gaelic diminutive termination " een " is frequently tacked on to English words, and is very useful in giving a sense of half-pitying affection. " The rain " said a woman, describ- ing her destitute condition, " does be pouring down through the roof of my houseen." I do not think that "little house" would have con- veyed half her meaning. The cottage of which she spoke was not only small, it was dear to her, held a real place in her affections. She expressed all that when she called it a " hous- een." "Will youlook at the fingereens of him ? " said a woman who was engaged in an orgy of baby worship, and wished to call particular attention to the creature's hands. " Girleen " is common in speaking affectionately of a little girl. " Mikeen," " Paudeen," and " Noreen " are examples of the addition of the termination to Christian names. In one or two cases the termination carries with it a sense of contempt. 177 M THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE " Maneen " is a boy who apes the manners of a man. " Seonfn," pronounced " Shoneen," is that most detestable of creatures, the Irishman who is ashamed of his country and pretends to be English. He is a " little ' Shaun,' " a little, inferior kind of John Bull. Among the Irish words in use in Ireland which may be said to have naturalised itself in English is " gossoon." Curiously enough this is not a Gaelic word at all. It is simply a form of the French "gar9on," which has somehow passed into Irish speech. The true Irish word is "gossure," which isused instead of "gossoon" in Mayo and Gal way. 1 1 is derived from ' ' gos, " a branch, and " ur," " young," and means liter- ally " a young shoot." It appears to be quite unknown in English, and has been a source of some trouble to me. I have used it from time to time in novels, placing it in the mouth of west of Ireland people. Printers and proof correctors invariably change it into "gossoon," and I have some difficulty in persuading theip that I really meant what I wrote. Some of the phrases in common use in Ire- land are very picturesque. I once heard a very 178 THE BROGUE crafty and tricky girl described as one who " would build a nest in your ear." The com- parison of the young lady to a bird which could put moss and small sticks in your ear without your noticing it, was a high conipliment to her skill. ' ' To walk up my sleeve " is another strik- ing phrase with very much the same meaning. A lady who was particularly good at intricate steps of the Irish jig once gave an exhibition of her skill in public. She was watched, critic- ally, by two old countrymen who professed to know all there is to be known about jig danc- ing. Their commendation of her performance was, in the end, whole-hearted. " Faith," said one of them, "but that one mixes her legs well." I am not sure that his companion improved on the expression when he added, " I never seen a girl that handled her feet better." I like the expression "cock him up," which is in every- day use in Ireland. A lady was inquiring for one of her under gardeners ^yho had been suffering severely from toothache. She asked whether he hsid been to the dentist. " Dentist, is it ? " said the head gardener. " What call had he for a dentist ? Cock the likes of them fellows 179 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE up with a dentist ! " He meant that a man in the position of an under gardener had no right to such luxuries as the dentist's forceps. To say that a man looks as if " butter wouldn't melt in his mouth," is to give him credit for look- ing like the curates who appear in the pages of Punch. But appearances are desperately deceitful. Such an one frequently turns out tobea"boyo," or "abitof alad,"oneof whose daring wickedness every one speaks with kindly indulgence. There is a delightful tendency to picturesque exaggeration in Irish speech which often redeems a conversation from the dead level of the commonplace. " Would you know him again if you saw him ?" " Know him ? I'd know his skin in a tanyard." Can the power of recognition be put to a severer test ? " There isn't a two-year-old in the country I'd be seen dead with at a pig fair," says Flurry Knox McCarthy ; and he could scarcely have describ- ed the degradation of the County Cork horses more eloquently. "You may scrape Ireland with a fine-tooth comb, but you'll not find him," said the same gentleman on another occasion. An English angler inquired from his gillie i8o THE BROGUE whether there were many fish in a certain river. " If you were to boil the water you'd take out of it," said the man, " you'd be getting the taste of salmon on your tea." CHAPTER NINE OLD CUSTOMS AND SUPERSTITIONS THE ANGKLUS BKLL CHAPTER NINE OLD CUSTOMS AND SUPERSTITIONS RED-HAIRED WOMEN ARE IN THE height of the fashion in England now, if we may trust the novelists. Nearly every heroine has hair which is either frankly red or, if the author has scruples about that, of the shade described as " red-gold." In the country parts of Ireland we are not so advanced, and still retain a pre- judice against women with hair of that particular colour. We do not like meeting a red-haired woman when we are setting out to do any im- portant work. She is a sign of bad luck before us ; and if we are wise we turn back and put off the work, whatever it is, until the next day. This is inconvenient, especially for the women. A friend of mine, who lives in a very remote part of Ireland, was walking one morning along a road which led to the little harbour where the fishermen kept their boats. Her own hair was of a quite harmless shade of brown ; but shehad as a companion a girl whose locks even a fashion- able novelist would have hesitated to describe as auburn. Her head was actually brilliant. My friend was amazed to find herself suddenly 185 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE caught by the arm and dragged into the ditch at the side of the road. There she and her com- panion crouched for some minutes until the fishermen had got safelypast them. "If thiey'd seen me," said the girl in explanation, " they'd have had to turn back again. They couldn't have gone out fishing to-day. They'd havehad no luck if they did." That girl must have led a trying kind of life. It cannot be pleasant to have to dodge your fellow-creatures during the early hours of everyday. But a girl of anygood feeling would, of course, submit to any amount of inconvenience rather than paralyse the in- dustry ofallherneighbours. And, afterall, there is nothing worse than inconvenience. A girl is not ostracised or in any way despised br ill- treated because her hair is red. She stands just asgood a chanceof getting marriedas her dark- haired sisters. I suppose that the familiarity of married life in some way breaks the force of the evil spell. Otherwise I do not see how a man with a red-haired wife would ever succeed in doing anything. It would be immensely dif- ficult to avoid seeing her some time in the morning before the day's work began. 1 86 OLD CUSTOMS & SUPERSTITIONS It is not lucky for a stranger to enter a house in which churning is going on unless he puts his hand to the dash and takes some part in the work. He need not do much, but he must at least give one plunge of the dash, otherwise the butter will not come. I have never got a satis- factory explanation of this belief, but I imagine that it is connected in some way with the influ- ence of fairies over milk. The whole business of butter-making is a mysterious one. Scien- tific people pretend that they understand it, and explain the curious facts that butter some- times comes readilyandsometimeswillnot come atall, by saying that there are differences intem- perature and such things. This kind of scep- tical materialism is merely silly. You cannot chase away fairies by threatening them with a thermometer. Themosthighlyinstructeddairy- maid findsherself, in spite of all herprecautions, baffled by the inexplicable behaviour of churns. Fairies, who still play some part in Irish life, are generally spoken of as " the people." A kindly Englishman was entertained at tea shortlyafter he arrived in this country by a farmer's wife, a well-educated woman and sufficiently rational- 187 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE istic to be one of the Protestant minority. She apologised for offering her guest jam instead of butter. " I have no butter," she said, "for the people took it from me last week." The Eng- lishman, indignant at such robbery, suggested, as an Englishman would, that she should com- plain to the police. The woman laughed at him. "The police ! " she said. "What use would the police be when it was the people that took it ? " The absurdity of setting the members of the Royal Irish Constabulary to arrest a fairy justi- fied her mirth. There is a picture in the Dublin Municipal Art Gallery in which Mr. W. B, Yeats is represented in the act of introducing Mr. George Moore to the Queen of the Fairies. It is a most amusing picture ; but a companion to it in which a sergeant of police appeared put- ting handcuffs on a butter-stealing fairy would, I think, be more amusing still. But the fairy of the churn is, alas! disappear- ing. H e cannot get on in the modern creamery. The whirling separator annoys him, I suppose. Sir Horace Plunkett, who is responsible for the existence of most of our creameries, has been accused of many things. The system of butter- i88 OLD CUSTOMS & SUPERSTITIONS making which he advocates is supposed to re- sult in the starvation of calves, the extreme delicacy of children, and a general decay in the health of rural Ireland. It is curious that no one has yet thought of attacking him for driv- ing the fairies into exile. This charge, unlike the others, could be sustained, and any jury would give a verdict against him if a case were brought into court. Sir Horace Plunkett tells a story about a man who objected to the found- ing of a creamery in his neighbourhood because he doubted whether the butter made in it would be made on sound Nationalist principles. I imagine that this man had really more to say for himself than he succeeded in expressing. I n the back of his mind there was, very likely, a feeling that the application of modern machin- ery to an ancient art would destroy the mysteri- ous romance of it. He foresaw a materialised fairy-less Ireland. In Ireland we have a very proper respect for the season of Lent, and very rarely indeed does any one get married during its forty days. After Lentis over rural Ireland is too busy for marry- ing. The turf has to be saved then, and from 189 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE that on until the harvest is gathered in, work of every kind is pressing. Marriages tend to be crowded into the weeks between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday. The period is called in the west of Ireland " Seraft " ; a corruption, we are told, of " shrift," and so related to Shrove Tuesday. Thus it happens that any one who is unmarried at the beginning of Lent is likely to remain unmarried for a year. Dr. Joyce, in /his English as we speak it in Ireland, tells us of a curious custom which prevailed in Mun- ster on the First Sunday in Lent. " Those young men who should have been married but were not, were marked with a heavy streak of chalk on the back of their Sunday coat, by boys whocarried bitsof chalkin theirpockets for that purpose and lay in wait for bachelors. The marking was done while the congregation were assembling for Mass; and the young fellow ran for his life, always laughing, and often singing theconcluding words of some suitable doggerel, such as ' And you are not married though Lent hascpme.' That particular Sunday was known as ' Chalk Sunday.' " Another similar custom is also Related by Dr. Joyce : igo OLD CUSTOMS & SUPERSTITIONS " On the Great Skellig rock in the Atlantic, off the coast of Kerry, are the ruins of a monas- tery, to which people at one time went on pil- grimage — and a difficult pilgrimage it was. The tradition is still kept up in some places, though in an odd form, in connection with the custom that marriages are not solemnised in Lent, i.e. after Shrove Tuesday. It is well with- in my memory that — in the south of Ireland — young persons who should have been married before Ash Wednesday, but were not, were supposed to set out on pilgrimage to Skellig on Shrove Tuesday night ; but it was all a make-believe. Yet I remember witnessing oc- casionally some play in mock imitation of the pilgrimage. Itwas usual for alocal bard tocom- posewhat was called a 'Skellig List,' — a jocose rhyming catalogue of the unmarried men and women of the neighbourhood who went on the sorrowful journey, — which was circulated on Shrove Tuesday and for sometimeafter. Some of those were witty and amusing; but occasion- ally they were scurrilous and offensive doggerel. They were generally too long for singing ; but I remember one — a good one too — which— 191 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE when I was very young — I heard sung to a spirited air. It is represented here by a single verse, the only one I remember. " As young Rory and Moreen were talking, How Shrove Tuesday was just drawing near ; For the tenth time he asked her to marry ; But says she-; — 'Time enough till next year.' ' Then ochone I'm going to Skellig : O Moreen, what will I do ? 'Tis the woeful road to travel ; And how lonesome I'll be without you ! ' " In ]\layo the first Thursday in Lent, the day after Ash Wednesday, is spoken of as " Pus Thursday." " Pus " is the Gaelic word for a lip, and is used by the English-speaking people in such phrases as "she has a pus on her," mean- ing that her face has a discontented, disappointed expression, such as is produced by pouting the lips. On the first Thursday in Lentagoodmany young men and young women go about with a "pus" on them. It is quite natural that they should, for if they remain single on that day they are likely to remain single for another twelve- month. Hence the suggestive name of " Pus Thursday." The custom of lighting bonfires on St. John's Eve, Midsummer Day, is still prevalent in the ig2 OLD CUSTOMS & SUPERSTITIONS west of I reland, and shows no signs of dying out. It is of immense antiquity, and comes to us from pagan ancestors who celebrated the day of the sun's greatest strength by acts of fire worship. Christianity, in its conquest of paganism, took over a great many customs connected with the worship of the old gods and incorporated them into the Church's system by giving them a new significance. The bonfiresof St. John's Evees- caped this process of naturalisation and remain to-day without any religious meaning. For a week or two beforehand the boys of every street in a west of Ireland town go round soliciting subscriptions for their own particular fire. There is keen rivalry between the different streets,but the collectors of money are never grasping. A very small sum satisfies them, and the fact of having paid a subscription to one street is gen- erally accepted as an excuse for not giving to another. It would be a great comfort if all col- lectors for public works would act as moderately. The money collected is spent on cartloads of turf, tar barrels, paraffin oil, and other inflam- mable materials. These are built into piles at thestreet corners, and when the evening comes 193 N THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE are lit. The town, on a fine summer evening, presents a most striking and picturesque appear- ance. I have heard of very unpopular people being burnt in effigy on these occasions, but such expression of feeling is very rare. As a rule, the whole performance is purely good-natured. Hallow Eve is another festival which is faith- fully observed in most parts of I reland. Like the bonfires on St. John's Eve, it is of pagan origin, being the old Irish Samhain feast ; but it has to some extent been christianised by its connection with All Saints' Day. There are a great many cur- ious sports in connection with this festival, which differ in different parts of the country, and special kinds of food are eaten. " Sowans " is a kind of gruel used on H allow Eve in the northof I reland. The name is really the old Samhain, which is pro- nounced as so wan is spelt Barmbrackisakindof cake which is eaten on many festal occasions, but is specially con nected with H allow Eve. Itsname has been a subject of much discussion, but seems to be derived from the Irish words "borreen," a cake, and ' ' breac, " which means spotted. The reason of the name is plain enough. "Barm- brack" is an ordinary yeast bread enriched with 194 OLD CUSTOMS & SUPERSTITIONS currants and raisins, which give it a spotted ap- pearance. ' ' Caulcan non, " a word which is spelt in a great many different ways, is another Hal- low E ve dish. I ts derivation is obscure, but the thing itself is sufficiently well known. It con- sists of mashed potatoes with which cabbage, chopped up fine, is mixed. A lump of butter is put into the middle of the dish. St. Stephen's Day, known in England as Box- ing Day, brings the "Wren boys" to our doors. The wren was regarded in old Irish literature as a treacherous bird, and there is a legend which blames it for the betrayal of Ireland to her Eng- lish conquerors. Some such idea may lie at the back of the determined persecution this bird suffers at the hands of Irish boys; but I doubt whether any of them have any idea why they carry dead wrens about on St. Stephen's Day. Thereare agreat many "Wren boys." Indeed, in a west of Ireland town almost every boy is a " Wren boy. " The supply of birds is always in- sufficient, and most of those who come asking for pennies on the day after Christmas carry nothing more than boxes gaily decorated with coloured paper. They chant a peculiar doggerel 195 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE when they come for their pennies, and most of them know only two lines of it, which run thus : " The wren, the wren, the king of all birds. On Stephen's Day was caught in a furze." A very beautiful custom survives in the west of Ireland in the use of Christmas candles. These are long thick candles, sometimes weigh- ing a pound. One is lit in every country house on Christmas Eve and left burning all night. The door of the house is also left open. The idea, a truly pious one, is that there should be light and a welcome in every house that night for the Son of Man, should He return to earth. His faithful people are unwilling that He should be lodged a second time in the stable of an inn. The thought in the people's minds has been beautifully expressed in a little poem published some time ago on a Christmas card by Miss Susan Mitchell : " Day closes in the cabin dim, They light the Christmas candle tall For Him who is the light of all ; They deck the little crib for Him Whose cradle is earth's swinging ball ! " A somewhat similar custom, but unconnected with Christianity, consists in leaving a saucer 196 OLD CUSTOMS & SUPERSTITIONS of cream ready for the fairies on Hallow Eve. " The people " are supposed to be abroad in great numbers that night, and the voluntary offeringof cream averts their displeasure. Irish children are warned not to eat blackberries after the istof November, because the fairies in their wanderings on Hallow Eve put some kind of blight on the fruit which renders it unwhole- some. A whole book might be written about the theories of disease and the cure of it, held by Irish country people. Nowadays, when the pur- suit of health is one of our most popular pas- times, those who are really enthusiastic in the matter might, with advantage to themselves, pay a visit to some out-of-the-way part of Ire- land. The cures we shouldrecommend tothem would be no more unpleasant, very much more original, and quite as efficacious as those of many fashionable physicians. Some of our older people display an extraordinary amount of medical skill. There was an old woman whom I knew very well at one time who knew whether a patient was going to die or not by the feel of his ears. She was never able to explain how 197 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE the ears guided her, but she was generally right. I remember in particular one occasion on which the doctor left a house after declaring that the patient could not possibly live till morning. My old friend felt the poor man's ears and then assured us all that there was not the slightest fear of his dying. His wife was greatly cheered. I, I am ashamed to say, believed the doctor. The man got better. The same old woman was very knowing in all matters relating to child- birth, and professed to be able to tell a long time beforehand whether the expected baby would be a boy or a girl. Somes cures, firmly believed in, are of the most fanciful kind. Whooping-cough is one of the plagues of childhood. In Ireland it is call- ed "chin cough," a curious corruption of kink cough, i.e. a cough which brings on a kind of con- fused and painful fit. A person is said to be in " kinks " of laughter as well as kinks of cough- ing. Before chin cough, orthodox medical sci- ence simply quails. When I was a boy, a child with this disease used to be taken to the local gasworks and made to breathe the air with a flavour of tar in it. I do not think the treat- igS OLD CUSTOMS & SUPERSTITIONS ment did any one any good, and it seems to have been abandoned by most doctors. They now suggest a plentiful supply of fresh air, which, I suppose, cannot do much harm, but which does not seem a sufficiently drastic treatment to the I rish mother, whose children usually get as much fresh air as any one can possibly want. She has a treatment of her own. I f you want to cure a child of chin cough you go out and walk along the road with it until you meet a man riding a white horse. Him you accost civilly, and ask him what he recommends for the child. He may say anything ; but whatever he says you do, and your child will get rapidly well. A sty on the eyecanbecured by laying seven thorns plucked from a gooseberry bush on the affected spot. I have not tried this cure my- self ; but I have known cases in which stys which looked threatening, disappeared after being treated with gooseberry thorns, Fear-gurtha is a disease of a most deadly character which may be common elsewhere, but has not, I think, been classified and explained except in the west of Ireland. It is a kind of faintness, sometimes fatal, which comes on 199 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE people who take long walks over mountains. The name means hunger-grass, and it is sup- posed thatakindof grass grows in small patches on mountain-sides possessed of this peculiar quality. Any one walking over it is seized with faintness like that produced by starvation. I have heard the name pronounced " fargurths," which would mean not hunger-grass, but hun- gry-man. The people who have this version of the word explain it by attributing the faint- ness to a malevolent demon, a kind of malign fairy who attacks people upon mountains. The belief in the curative value of a hair of the dog that bit you is still held quite literally in some parts of Ireland. A gentleman who lived in a small western town was some time ago given a present of a well-bred and some- what valuable terrier, and arrangements were made for sending the animal to him by train. It arrived, and he wrote a letter full of warm thanks to the donor, which, in the fullness of his heart, he went out and posted at once. He was sorry afterwards that he had acted so hastily. On his return from the post office he was greeted with the news that the dog had bitten a small 200 THE LUCK. PENNY OLD CUSTOMS & SUPERSTITIONS boy in the leg. Almost immediately afterwards a letter arrived from the orginal owner in which it was admitted that the dog, otherwise a very desirable animal, had one fault. "It can't bear the sight of bare-legged boys, and always bites them. That's the reason I had to get rid of him. I've paid £^ in compensation during the last month. " The new owner feltacutely uncomfort- able. West of Ireland towns in summer time are full of bare-legged boys. I f the terrier's little peculiarity cost ^s ^ month in Belfast, his former home, where bare-legged boys are com- paratively rare, the bill was likely to be very much larger i n Connacht. I n due time the father of the bitten boy turned up. He stated his case with some force, and showed that his son had suffered very severely. Thenhehesitated. The owner of the dog waited anxiously to hear the amount claimed, feeling that he could not well dispute it, whatever it was. " Your honour," said the father, " it's hardly ever I could bring myself to ask it, seeing that you're a gentleman I've always had a liking for, and one that I'd be unwilling to annoy in any way, but — " There he stopped again, evidently overwhelmed by the 201 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE magnitude of the request he intended to make. The owner of the dog became acutely uncom- fortable, anticipating that an enormous sum was going to be asked of him. " But if it isn't asking too much," said the father, " I'd be glad if you'd give me a hair out of the dog's tail." The relief was immense. " Take the hair," said the owner. " Take all the hairs there are. Take the tail itself if you like>" " Sure that'd be too much altogether," said the father. " All I want is a hair to lay on the bite in the young lad's leg the way no harm would come of it." " Look here," said the owner, " I set no particular value on that dog, and his licence is paid for the year. Suppose you take him home with you and keep him altogether. Then if you want another hair any time you won't have to come up here to ask for it." The father of the boy went home leading the terrier with him. In the end, I believe, the animal had to be drowned ; but that was, in all probability, not till after all the hairs in his tail had been plucked out. CHAPTER TEN THE "YANK" CHAPTER TEN THE "YANK" THE LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION IS unquestionably a powerful instrument in Ire- land, generally for evil, always for trouble and annoyance to the recipient. A leading captain of industry, who employed a great many men, once told me that when considering the char- acters of applicants for posts in his gift he always began by putting all letters of recommendation from clergymen into the waste-paper basket without reading them. That saved him some time, but he must still have had to wade through an enormous amount of MSS., for laymen as well as clergymen write those letters. Society being what it is in Ireland, we all have to write uproarious commendations of our neighbours whenever a post of any sort falls vacant. We try not to, but it is very seldom indeed that we escape. A clergyman, who was afflicted with a troublesome conscience, was once asked to write a letter to a very eminent man, the head of a great Government department. He did not want to write the letter, because the appli- cant was obviously unsuited for the post he sought. But he did not want to refuse, because 205 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE the applicant was what we call " a decent poor man that nobody had a word to say against." He bethought himself of a way of getting out of the difficulty. The eminent head of the De- partment had just sailed for America, where he proposed to spend a couple of months. ' ' There's no use my writing the letter," said the clergy- man, "because that gentleman isn't in Ireland." " Is it America ? " said the applicant. " It is," said the clergyman," so you see a letter would be no good." " Well now," said the applicant, "isn't it true enough what they're always saying, that emigration is the curse of this country? If so be he'd been at home, I'd have been cer- tain of the job with your honour's letter in my pocket. But, sure, when the like of him has to go there's little good in the rest of us stopping in this country." The sentiment is pretty gen- eral in Ireland. Politicians round off their speeches with it. Poets give it eloquent ex- pression in verses about the beauty of the Irish hills. Reformers devise schemes for keeping the people at home. But the lure of America isstrong. The emigration agent still flourishes. Our boys and girls still go ; although we are 206 THE "YANK" all in practical agreement with the fact that emigration is the curse of the country. The way is unfortunately made easy enough for most of us. There are a great many Irish people in America already, and they are always willing to help their relations in the old country to go out and j oin them. Sarah goes and some- how gets a situation in New York, earning what sound like fabulous wages. So we learn from her first letter home. The next letter brings a photograph of Sarah, strangely transformed from the girl we knew. She has a large feathery hat on her head. She has a fur boa round her neck. Her dress is of a grandeur past imagin- ing. On her wrist is a bracelet which looks as if it might be gold. The old people sigh and wonder ; but the imagination of little Molly is fired. " I sn't it better to be wearing grand hats and fine frocks than to be slobbering barefoot across a muddy yard with a tub of boiled tur- nips for the pigs ? " The old people sigh and wonder, but Molly is sure. The next few letters from Sarah contain hints of a possible future for Molly if only Molly were in America. Then comes the fatal letter which contains a ticket 207 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISHLIFE for New York, paid for and ready for Molly to use. There are tears, excited preparations, the final heart-breaking farewell at the railway station when the emigrant train steams out. Then Molly is gone from us, and we go home to elaborate once more the old theme that emi- gration is the curse of the country. Sometimes, however, even the gift of a ticket to New York does not make the way quite plain for the intending emigrant. There was an old farmer in Co. Galway who was bitterly opposed to letting his last son go. He was a hard old man, who had toiled on a patch of land, lived closely, and saved. He had the reputation of being rich, stingy with his money, and exceed- ingly shrewd. His reasons for objecting to parting with his son were far more economic than sentimental. He thoroughly understood the value of an unpaid labourer on his farm. When the ticket for America arrived the young man wanted to go. The father refused to give him a single penny to buy an outfit. No shop in the neighbouring town would give the young man credit for as much as a pair of boots ; nor would the shopkeepers take his word for it that 208 THE "YANK" the father would ultimately pay the bill. They knew the old man, and felt sure that he would not pay for anything except what he ordered him- self. The boy was, as his brothers in America would have said, " up against a tough proposi- tion." The period for which the ticket was available was passing rapidly. He had to get his clothes at once or forfeit his opportunity. After long consideration he wrote the following letter to the principal shopkeeper in the town. " Give my son Tom a suit of clothes, a pair of boots, and three shirts." To this he signed his father's name. Then by way of postscript he added, " But give him no more ; for if you do, I won't pay for it, not if it was only to the value of an old sack." With this document in his hand the young man walked into the shop on the morning of the day on which he intended to start for America. The shopkeeper inspected the order, sceptically at first. The postscript, when he came to it, convinced him. It was so exactly the sort of thing the old man would have been likely to write that he accepted it as gen- uine. Tom, with his very meagre outfit, went joyfully to America. The shopkeeper later on 2og o THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE felt a new force in the saying that emigration is the curse of this country ; for the old man refused to pay the bill and repudiated the writ- ten order. He made good his assertion that the document was a forgery in the simplest way. He could not possibly have written it, because he could not write. But for all the cursedness of emigration, we owe some gratitude to our sons and daughters in America. They finance our politics for us, which is a very important matter. We should be — itishardto say exactly where, but certainly not in our present position, if we had no one to go and make speeches on our behalf at West- minster. They also — and this is a still more important matter — to a very considerable ex- tent finance our homes. Nothing is more beau- tiful, nothing more wonderful, than the gener- osity of the American Irish to their friends at home. Christmas after Christmas brings into the poorest houses in Ireland a shower of postal orders representing money which must have been hard to win, desperately hard to save, which no one without the motive power of great love could endure to part with. 210 THE "YANK" Curiously enough, considering all they do for us, weare notfondof the Irish Americans. They come home to us from time to time, sometimes tosettle down in the old country, sometimes for brief visits. We do not, as a rule, much like them either as settlers or visitors. I f they come home for good and all, they put up the price of land, bidding up small holdings which happen to be for sale to quite ridiculous prices. Then they build houses which are out of keeping with our humble dwellings. Their ways of life are a continual reproach to our easy-going habits. We call them " Yanks " or " returned Yanks,!! and feel that we should get on better without them. If they come as visitors their conversa- tion annoys us. They tell us of splendid kinds of life of which we have no experience. Electric light is a commonplace thing with them. They speak with familiar contempt of telephones. They impress on us that we ought to "hustle round a bit," a thing we detest doing, and tell us that a year in America would " speed us up. We know it would, but we have not yet accepted speed as one of the ideals of life. Their clothes even are an annoyance to us. They walk our 211 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE streets like Solomon in all his glory, and by the look of them even at a distance we are able to say with confidence, " Them ones is Yanks." This is all the more galling because we very well remember the Tom, who is now so lordly, cutting turf behind in the bog ; and Mary Ellen, whose dresses are as if they came out of fash- ion books, we knew when her red petticoat very scantily covered a pair of mottled pur- ple legs. These are the little faults of the " Yanks." They are no more for the most part than defects of manner, unfortunate but in no way interfer- ing with the warmness of their hearts. I have heard graver charges brought against them. 1 1 is said sometimes that they corrupt our inno- cence, and bringwith them intoour Edenadan- gerous fruit of the tree of knowledge. My ex- perience of them is different. They appear to me almost scrupulously anxious to conform to our very high standard of behaviour in matters of religion. Men who have gone neither to church nor Mass for years in the United States, attend either one or the other in the most ex- emplary way when they get back to Ireland. 212 THE "YANK" I have heard it quoted as a fault that the re- turned " Yanks " use bad language, spreading the use of strange oaths in holy Ireland. But this is surely hypercriticism. Even those who have never crossed the Atlantic swear occa- sionally, especially when irritated. A new oath, unless it be one of quite unimaginable malignity, cannot add much to the wickedness of those already in common use. On the other hand, the returned " Yanks," if one gets over their little peculiarities of manner, are pleasant, simple people. I remember travel- ling once with two very grand young ladies. Their splendour was such that but for the fact that we were in a third-class carriage, I should have expected to see their luggage taken charge of by a smart maid. At the station, the ter- minus of a line of railway which meanders to- wards the western seacoast, these impressive fellow-travellers of mine were met by an old man, very poor apparently, dressed in a shabby suit of home-made grey tweed. The two girls rippled and beamed with joy at the sight of him, and before the train had quite stopped were out of the carriage, hugging and kissing the old 213 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE man. Two days afterwards I was wandering round the outskirts of a very poverty-stricken village which clung to the side of a stony hill. I came upon the old man whom I had seen at the railway station. His English was not good. My Gaelic was scanty. But we succeed- ed in understanding each other, and he told me with pride and joy how his two daughters had come home from America for the summer, and had brought twenty pounds with them, which they had handed over to him and their mother. I asked where the girls were, and what they were doing. He pointed to a field beyond that in which we stood. I crossed the stone wall which enclosed it and came on the two ' ' Yanks. " They were dressed then in crimson flannel pet- ticoats, loose bodices, and had handkerchiefs tied over their heads. They were barefooted, and were working vigorously with hay rakes. When I asked them what they were doing, they replied in Gaelic, so completely and whole- heartedly had they gone back — there are peo- ple who would say relapsed — into the old life. There was a boy who left an Irish village for America when he was about fifteen years of age. 214 THE "YANK" He was a good boy, and he got on well. Ten years passed, and he found himself in receipt of a salary which justified him in marrying. He chose a native-born American, and by way of a honeymoon took her to Ireland to see his old home. He remembered every field and every lane. He remembered every face. The fields, the lanes, and the houses were almost unchang- ed. The faces were different. Ten years had altered the schoolfellows whom he looked for- ward to seeing. It was a shock to him to find grown men instead of those whom he had al- ways thought of as boys. In the bottom of his box he had a little present for each of his old friends. He distributed them very shamefaced- ly in the end. The things which he had brought were suitable to the boys he recollected, scarce- ly so suitable to the men he found. But, what- ever our faults may be, we have good manners. The gifts were received with serious thanks, and it was not till this "Yank" and his bride had returned to America that the incident was allowed to be treated as a joke. That young man returned to America gladly when his holiday was over. He loved his old 215 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE home, but he was strong and vigorous. He could not have been happy without the con- stant stimulus of his new life. It is sometimes otherwise. A woman, who had been unusu- ally successful in the New World, came back again some years ago to I reland. She has stayed there ever since, preferring a life of bare sim- plicity to the luxury which she enjoyed abroad. She admitted that she missed in her old home much that had come to be almost necessary to her comfort. " I say nothing against America," she said. " Why should I ? for I did well when I was in it. I don't deny but it's a fine life, but there's things which you earn too hard. It's better to have a minute or two now and then to yourself, and time to be sitting down even if it's with your feet in the turf ashes, than to be going from morning till night. I'd rather have a little peace than all the money I might earn out there. Sure, money's not everything." It is quite possible that this woman, out of the full- ness of her experience, had learned the true philosophy of life. But peace, though rural Ireland if anywhere in the world ought to be rich in it, is not always 216 g H Z O THE "YANK" attained by the " Yank " even here. A friend of mine, a clergyman, was told one evening that there was a woman at the door of his house who wanted to speak to him. He expected to find a beggar, and his first impulse when he saw the woman was to give her a small coin. She was verypoorly dressed, and had a baby in her arms wrapped in a corner of her own shawl. I nstead of clamouring for money she asked my friend to christen the baby for her. The request, coming from a total stranger at nine o'clock at night, was a strange one. The woman's story was stranger still. She had started from a place nearly forty miles distant to tramp to the near- est seaport town, intending to follow her hus- band by steamer to Glasgow. On the way her child was born, and she wished to have it baptiz- ed before venturing fartheron her journey. The baby, save for the mother's shawl, which she could ill spare, was absolutely naked. My friend called his wife. Clothes for mother and babe were found, and the baptism took place. The mother was very grateful, and insisted that she would next day work off part of the debt which she felt that she owed. She was set to scrub 217 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE a floor, which was the only thing she seemed fitted to do. She did it, and then she asked to be allowed to make a cake. Somewhat doubt- fully my friend's wife supplied her with the materials she required. The result was sur- prising. A cake of the most beautiful kind, a very masterpiece of the confectioner's art, was produced. The woman then offered to cook a dinner. It turned out a most sumptuous re- past. Further questions drew from the woman the rest of her story. She had gone to New York as a girl and obtained a situation as kit- chen-maid in a pastry cook's shop. She had risen to be the head cook of the establishment. She was earning very good wages, but the life was too hard for her. Like the other woman, who had mastered life's philosophy, she wanted peace and quietness. She came back to Ire- land and married. The result for her was not peace, but that long tramp along lonely roads and the baby which my kind friend baptized. CHAPTER ELEVEN THE IRISH SERVANT ELEVEN : THE IRISH SERVANT IRISH NOVELISTS ARE NOT TO BE COM- pared to the Scottish or English. We have no writer who is the equal of R. L. Stevenson ; we have certainly none who is to be mentioned along with Sir Walter Seott, He indeed, as befitted so great a man, was more than generous in his appreciation of the talent of his Irish con- temporary, Maria Edgeworth. But the gener- ations which came after have given an unmis- takable decision. Scott is read by thousands to whom Maria Edgeworth is no more than a name. Yet in one single respect the Irish writers hold their own, do more than hold their own. The Irish servant, as the novelist repre- sents him, is inferior to none. Not even Andrew Fairservice and Mistress Alison Wilson, not Sam Weller or Morgan ' ' Pendennis " are better than Thady Quirk in Castle Rackrent, Handy Andy, Micky Free, and, to quote the creation of living writers, Mrs. Cadogan. It would be interesting — but this is not the place for it — to elaborate a comparison between Andrew Fair- service and Thady Quirk; to set Handy Andy against Sam Weller, caricatures, both of them; 221 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE or to trace to their racial origin the contrasts between Major Pendennis' invaluable Morgan and the soldier servant of Charles O'Malley. There is nothing I should enjoy more than working out the kinship of spirit in Mistress Wilson and Mrs. Cadogan, I love them both. But my business here is not literary criticism, however fascinating the paths to which it lures. The servant problem is a serious one. The dilet- tante amateur of letters has no business with it. Domestic service is a great profession, but it has only of late become so, and even now it is only the rich who can secure highly-trained, delicate-handed, skilful men and women to minister to their wants. They and — since the tipping system is in full force — theirfriends can afford to pay for, and therefore can enjoy, that supreme, luxurious comfort which really good servants supply. But with every gain its cor- responding loss. The very rich miss the de- lightsomeness which comes of very familiar intercourse with servants whose native char- acters have not been smoothed away by a long course of professional training. Every highly specialised profession destroys individuality in THE IRISH SERVANT its victims. The clergyman who has been a clergyman of any church for twenty years has his calling written unmistakably upon his face. He cannot escape from his clericalism. I knew one once who, ordered abroad by his doctor and strictly forbidden to do any work, tried to avoid any risk of being asked to preach by dress- ing in lay clothes. He bought a light brown suit, a sporting sort of hat, and a bright red tie. Confident in his disguise he went to church in Geneva. An official, some sort of church- warden I suppose, met him at the door, eyed him suspiciously, and, after a moment's hesita- tion, asked him to collect the alms of the con- gregation. His red tie did not save him. The eye of a total stranger detected at once the fact that he had some close connection with the Church. The law has a similar effect upon those who devote themselves to it. I once went to a Turkish bath in company with a friend, who challenged me to name the profession of a gentleman who lay on a couch in the hottest room of all. He had on at the moment even less than one usually wears in a Turkish bath ; but I had no difficulty at all. One glance at his 223 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE face was sufficient. I declared him to be a judge. We made inquiries afterwards from the energetic man who shampooed us. I was very nearly right. The stranger was a K.C. of eminence. Nor do doctors escape this merging of the individual in a professional type. There was one who went on an excursion by steamer and the day was rough. Most of his fellow- excursionists were prostrated utterly before the steamer was an hour at sea. The doctor himself was very far from comfortable. Nothing was farther from his wishes than to be called upon to practise his art. Yet he was called. A pas- senger, singling him out of a crowd of a hun- dred or so, walked up to him and said : "Ex- cuse my troubling you, doctor, but can you sug- gest anything to help my wife? I'm afraid that the violence of her sickness — " and so on thro- ugh a catalogue of symptoms. Yet there was no stethoscope bulging in that doctor's breast pocket, and the sea-breezes must have blown away any smell of iodoform which clung to him. There are, of course, clergymen, lawyers, and doctors whose personality is too strong to be destroyed by their profession. So there are, 224 THE IRISH SERVANT here and there, butlers and ladies' maids who retain their individuality. But in the higher ranks of any profession these strong people are extremely rare. As a rule, we get character, personal, eccentric character, only among those who are either too young to have been complete- ly formed, or amongthose who are, professional- ly speaking, failures. It is inthe poorer middle- class families that we find the servants whom it is a delight to know, in the remote parish the parson who can completely unbend, in the half- deserted classrooms of third-rate schools the pedagogues who still continue to be men. It is perhaps more frequently in Ireland than else- where that we come upon the unprofessional members of the professional classes. A lady, still young as a housekeeper, though she had a baby of which she was very proud, once gave a tea-party. Her guests assembled, and everything necessary at such a feast was prepared. The wedding-present silver gleam- ed with high polish, and the conversation was of the politest kind. Suddenly — the house was very small — a loud, clear voice was heard up- lifted in song : 225 p THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE " O Jane, I say, you're telling lies — I do not like to say so. But what you've just observed to me Is more than I can swallow." The tune was that of " Barbara Allen." The absence of rhyme was scarcely noticeable. Jane was the cook and general servant in the estab- lishment. The singer was the newly acquired nurse for the baby. There had been a discus- sion of some sort in the kitchen. That nurse was very musical. She sang the baby to sleep every night to the tune of " The Happy Land," and beat time on the child's back with such heartiness that the thuds of her blows could be heard all over the house. Curiously enough the child liked it, and for years afterwards would not go to sleep until some one had hit him hard between the shoulders for half an hour. That nurse turned out to be what is, I believe, techni- cally called a "treasure." She was dismissed occasionally in deep disgrace. She left now and then of her own accord. She did nearly every- thing that a good servant ought not to do, and did none of her proper duties except when occasion offered save the life of the child, but I met her sixteen years after the tea-party at 226 THE IRISH SERVANT which I had first heard of her, in the house of her old mistress singing another baby to sleep. Now though she has several babies of her own she is eager in her assertion that the first one she ever "cared," the boy she beat furiously on the back, was the best, finest, and ablest that was ever born. She never could have been a good servant. She was too Irish to be pro- fessionalised. She was something better. She became, and still is, a valued personal friend of her employers. I am told that real friendship between serv- ants and their employers is a thing of the past in England. In Ireland it is still common, and where it fails to exist the fault must surely lie with the mistress, not the maid. In a household of which I am an occasional inmate there are periodic times of extreme discomfort owing to the loss of the bunch of keys on which all happi- ness depends. These keys disappear of their own accord, deliberately moving themselves out of the drawers into which they have been carefully shut, and, having attained liberty, con- ceal themselves in themostinconceivable places. The whole domestic staff then searches for them 227 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE with frenzy, pretending to be seriously pertur- bed but inwardly calm, because the thing hap- pens so often that it no longer causes serious alarm. Once, however, the keys were lost only three days after the arrival of a new housemaid. They were worse lost than usual, and it took two days to find them. The new maid was very seriously alarmed, and it was she who found them in the end concealed under the cushion in the baby's perambulator. Next day she asked for a payment in advance of wages — due to her. The sum demanded was only one shilling, and the mistress, moved by curiosity, asked what the shilling was wanted for. The girl told her frankly that during the days of extreme anxiety, while the keys were still missing, she had vowed a shilling to St. Anthony (a saint particularly trusted in such matters) if he would help her to find the keys. St. Anthony had risen to the occasion, and she very properly wished to give him his promised reward. In the case of a girl like that, one capable of a real sacrifice in her employer's interests, it must certainly have been the fault of the mistress and not the servant if there was no real friendship. It is pleasant to 228 THE IRISH SERVANT relate that in this particular case a very intimate relationship was established. Years afterwards the maid determined to get married, and chose a particularly undesirable man. So close was the friendship between them that the mistress ventured to remonstrate with her. The girl took all that was said in very good part, and admitted that she was not likely to be happy with a man who got violently drunk whenever he had any money. She insisted, however, on marrying him, and explained her feeling thus : "Sure it (marriage) is before me anyway, and I may as well make up my mind to it now as later." An Irish servant is of all people in the world the most anxious to please, and, when possible, to do exactly as she is told even when the com- mands laid on her are entirely unreasonable. A young housekeeper once undertook to train a cook. In the course of time it happened that there were whiting for dinner. She explained carefully the proper way of cooking whiting, and, with a view to achieving elegance as well as comfort, added that these particular fish are sent up to table with their tails in their mouths. 229 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE (The tail of the whiting is, in fact, put into its eye, not its mouth ; but this housekeeper was very young.) The fish appeared on the dinner table, not seductively curled after the pleasant habit of whiting, but lying rigidly straight on the dish. Each of them, however, had its tail cut off and neatly inserted into its mouth. The inexperienced cook had most conscientiously obeyed what must have struck her as a merely vexatious order. In order to get full value out of this desire to please, it is necessary to know how to treat Irish servants. In England a household runs most smoothly when it runs in a rut, that is to say, when every one has exactly the same work to do at exactly the same hour every day, and no one is asked to do anything outside of a fixed routine. In Ireland this kind of mono- tony is fatal to domestic peace, A house worked by I rish servants must have no routine. There must be infinite variety. The proper way to manage a household in Ireland is by means of series of crises, the more violent the better. If you try to get your breakfast regularly at half- past eight in the morning you will not get itfrom 230 THE IRISH SERVANT Irish servants. It will be late, or half-cooked, or stone cold on three mornings out of four. But if you announce, late at night, that you want breakfast next morning at five o'clock you will get it, hot and good, at exactly the hour you name. If you are further able to say that you expect four or five friends to join you at the meal, you will get, without the smallest diffi- culty, a most sumptuous repast, with nice hot bread and every other luxury. If the kitchen chimney goes on fire half an hour before din- ner and soot falls down in large quantities, an English cook gives in and you get no dinner. To an Irish cook an event of that kind is sim- ply a stimulus. She cooks far better under those circumstances than she does when the kitchen chimney absorbs the smoke peacefully. The Irish servant invariably rises to occasions. I was once stopping in a house owned by an Irish lady and run by Irish servants. I was wakened at two o'clock in the morning by a fellow-guest, who told me that water was pour- ing down through the ceiling of his bedroom. I bestirred myself at once, though I am not con- stitutionally fitted for crises of this kind. I 231 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE found that the kitchen floor — the kitchen in this case was at the very top of the house — was ankle deep in water. I shall not soon for- get the cheerful heroism of the servants on that occasion. Being Irish, they positively revelled in the scene which followed. At that ghastly hour in the morning we paddled about, scooped grimy water up in tins, soaked towels with it and wrung them furiously into baths. We salved valuable evening dresses from wardrobes which the flood threatened. We climbed staggering step ladders and spread sheets of brown paper under persistent cascades. Not only did every- body's temper remain gay, but the next morn- ing breakfast was ready at the usual hour and, except for the extreme cleanness of the kitchen floor, there was scarcely a trace of the disaster. It is by the skilful use of crises of this kind that Irish households are best managed. Englishwomen, accustomed to dull English methods, find it difficult at first to deal with Irish servants. In the end, if they are intelli- gent they do come to understand. There was one, a most estimable lady, who suffered a great deal during the early years of her life in Ireland. 232 THE IRISH SERVANT She could not get the work of her house done however hard she tried. At last she hit upon a plan. " I find," she said, " that everything goes right if you give each servant another's work to do. I now ask the cook to take the baby out in the perambulator, while the house- maid weeds the strawberry bed. The nurse lays the table for luncheon, and the gardener does the cooking. In this way everything is done well and punctually." There is an old saying that the E nglish when they become I rish get to be more Irish than the Irish themselves. It was so with this lady. She carried her me- thod to extremes. A friend having accepted an invitation to afternoon tea in her house, was shown into the drawing-room, in which the cook was ironing the baby's clothes in front of the fire. This was a wholly unnecessary extension of the principle. The unconventional friendliness of a middle- class Irish household is really based on the idea that the servant occupies to some extent the position of a child or humble relative, and that the master accepts all a parent's rights and re- sponsibilities. A girl, an applicant for the posi- 333 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE tion of kitchen-maid, was led to the house of her future employer by her father. After the mistress had been duly interviewed and many details settled, the father asked to be allowed to speak to the master of the house. He ex- pressed himself thus : " Molly's a good girl and has been brought up respectable, and I wouldn't like now that she's away from myself that she'd be getting into bad ways, neglecting her re- ligious duties or walking out at night." The master said that Molly should have every op- portunity of being religious, within the bounds of moderation, and that he himself strongly disapproved of walking out at night. "If you catch her at it," said the father, " or if you find she's backward about her religion, take the stick to her. It's what I always did myself, and it's the best. Them ones," he added, pointing to his daughter, who was listening to the con- versation, " wouldn't care what you might be saying to them. But the stick puts the fear of God into them mighty soon." The delegation of parental authority could hardly go further. A court of law would perhaps scarcely allow it to go so far. Certainly no modern master of 234 THE IRISH SERVANT a household, however sorely tempted, would venture on such a primitive mode of maintain- ing the religious spirit in a kitchen-maid. Another parent, this time a mother, commit- ted her daughter to the same household with somewhat less confidence. "It might be good for the girl," she said, "or it might not, but any- way she'll get enough to eat, and what have I at home for her only the daylight." It is pleasant to think that the change of diet agreed with the girl. She became very becomingly plump when she got other food than that which her home afforded. An I rish employer is always scrupulously par- ticular about the religious privileges of his ser- vants. Households are often seriously disor- ganised in order that the domestic staff shall have an opportunity of attending "church. Mass or meeting," on Sundays or Holy days. Some- times the consequences of this carefulness are curious. A gentleman who was living for a time in a western corner of Munster took a country lad into his house and trained him as a valet. The young man became very expert in his duties and after awhile was taken to London. He was 235 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE full of independence and self-reliance, and dis- liked being treated as if he did not know how to take care of himself in the strange city. On Sunday morning he said he was going to Mass as usual. His master wanted to give him di- rections for finding the nearest Roman Catholic church, but the young man said he needed no help and could find his way himself. Asked how he meant to do so, he replied that he would step outside into the street and then "follow the crowd." The plan would have worked well in his native town ; but London crowds are not like those of the west of Ireland. They go many different ways on Sunday mornings. A lady, a north of I reland woman, was on very friendly and confidential terms with her maid. On Sunday evenings the two used to discuss the sermons they had heard and other points of interest in the service. It happened once that a missionary came to preach in the little country church which they attended. He was an emi- nent missionary, and had been made a Doctor of Divinity by an appreciative university. He wore the handsome red cloth hood pertaining to that particular degree. H e preached a very ex- 236 THE IRISH SERVANT cellent sermon, andboth mistress and maid were delighted with it. "But, Mrs. H , dear,"said the maid, "why did he wear thon red thing on his back?" The mistress began to explain the nature of university degrees, but the maid in- terruptedher. " I daresay now," shesaid, "that he means no harm by it, and just does it to at- tract the heathen." But the days of this paternal and filial relation- ship between masters and servants are passing away even in Ireland. On the one hand, there is a tendency to regard the servants in a house- hold as mere hirelings. On the other hand, do- mestic service is becoming more and more pro- fessionalised, and is, moreover, beginning to be looked on as a degrading kind of servitude. No doubt this is quite right. The spirit of man is a noble thing, and ought to assert itself against any employment which carries with it the idea of inferiority to any other human being. But it is a pity that the new feeling for independence sometimes asserts itself in dubious ways. An applicant for the post of sewing-maid answered an advertisement with along letter in which she explained carefully that she thought the situation 237 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE rather beneath her, but was prepared to accept it because she was "compelledby unexpected fam- ily misfortune to try to earn an honest living." She went into no particulars about the way she had got her living before the unexpected mis- fortune, thus laying herself open to a suspicion which was, no doubt, quite unjust. CHAPTER TWELVE WIT AND HUMOUR TWELVE : WIT AND HUMOUR THE IRISH ARE. CREDITED WITH A RE- markable nimbleness in seeing jokes and, curi- ously enough, with a singular dullness in making them. There isastory told— thetelleris,of course himself an I rishman— of a joke madein the House of Commons, quite unexpectedly, in the middle of a particularly dull debate. The Irish members roared with laughter at once. A few minutes later the English members smiled and then gig- gled. An hour afterwards the S cottish members were discovered chuckling quietly in corners of the lobbies and the reading-room. They ap- preciated the joke when they saw it, but they had to think it over for some time first. The story represents fairly enough the popular estimate of the nimbleness of the three peoples in seeing jokes. On the other hand, the Irish are supposed to be exceptionally dull in making jokes. In the popular judgment they are people to laugh at, not to laugh with. Their humour takes the form of bulls, which though amusing to listen to are supposed to be an evidence of hopeless mental confusion in those who make them. But the genuine Irish bull may, I think, more justly be 241 Q THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE regarded as an example of abnormal, perhaps morbid, mental quickness. An Irish member of Parliament was recently held up to scorn by the English newspapers for a bull which he perpetrated in the course of what must have been an eloquent speech. H e descri- bed the extreme desolation of a certain tract of land by saying that there was no living creature on it except the seagulls which flew over it. That was a bull of the purest Irish breed. Butconsider the mental process by which the speaker arrived at it. He had before his mind a picture of a de- serted farm. As he spoke he realised very vivid- ly the scene he wanted to describe. The seagulls, flying landwards from some approaching storm, heightened thegeneral sense of desolation. He had not time to round off his sentence about the absence of men and beasts, before the birds seized on his imagination. What he was in reality guilty of was not extraordinary dullness, but a piece of impressionistword-paintingtoofinely conceived for his audience. And this is the nature of all genuine Irish bulls. Sir Jonah Barringtonexpresseshimself to this effect while discussing the bulls of Sir Boyle 242 WIT AND HUMOUR Roche, the most famous maker of this kind of blunder. "His bulls were rather logical perversions, and had some strong point in most of them. The English people consider a bull as nothing more than a vulgar, nonsensical expression ; but the Irish blunders arefrequentlyhumoroushyp- erboles or oxymorons, and present very often the most energetic mode of expressing the speaker's meaning." No one, certainly, will be inclined to deny the quality of energy to the speeches of Sir Boyle Roche. On one occasion he was denounc- ing the French Revolution in the I rish House of Commons. His speech is reported by Barring- ton. "Mr. Speaker," said he, "if we once per- mitted the villainous French Masons to meddle with the buttresses and walls of our ancient con- titution, they would never stop nor stay, sir, till they brought the foundation-stones tumbling down about the ears of the nation. There, Mr. Speaker, if these Galilean villains should invade us, sir, 'tis on that very table, maybe, these hon- ourable members might see their own destinies lying in heaps on top of one another. Here, perhaps, sir, the murderous marshal-law-men, 243 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE Marseillois, would break in, cut us to mince meat, and throw our bleeding heads upon that table, to stare us in the face." Perhaps even Robespierre would not have proceeded to such extremes with the Irish aristocracy ; but it can- not be denied that Sir Boyle Roche displayed an imaginative nimbleness in describing the hor- rors he anticipated. It was in the course of another speech in the parliament house that this baronet was guilty of his most famous bull. The original saying is well known, though its author is not always given credit for it, but the explanation which he offered afterwards for his mistake will probably be new to many readers. The occasion was a debate on a certain grant, which was opposed as likely to prove burdensome to posterity. Sir Boyle was in favour of the measure and defended it thus: "What, Mr. Speaker, and so we are to beggar ourselves for the fear of vexing posterity. Now I would ask the honourable gentleman and this still more honourable house, why should we put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity ? For what has posterity done for us ? " Aroarof laughterinterrupted the speaker. He 244 WIT AND HUMOUR felt it necessary to explain carefully what he real- ly meant, and added "that by posterity he did not at all mean our ancestors, but those who were to come immediately after them." B arrington notes that after this explanation it was impossible to do any serious business for half an hour. But Barrington is certainly right in saying, a propos of this particular bull, that Sir Boyle Roche sel- dom launched a blunder from which some fine aphorism or maxim might not easily be extrac- ted. This defence might certainly be put for- ward in the case of a bull perpetrated by another Irish legislator, a member this time, not of the old house in College Green, but of the assembly which meets at Westminster. "What is likely to happen?" he said in the course of an inter- esting speech. "In my opinion nothing is likely to happen. That is what habitually happens in England." But.afterall.the Irish have no mono- poly of this kind of wit. Englishmen occasion- ally make bulls. It was an Englishman, quoted by The Irish Cyclist, who gave the following advice about the best way of keeping the feet warm in a motor car. ' ' There is nothing better for the purpose," he said, "than two empty pet- 245 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE rol tins filled with hot water." No one in Dub- lin or Cork could have bettered that bull, but Birmingham was the place of its nationality. Even the cautious Scot is said to commit him- self to a bull now and then. Mr. Le Fanu records the following conversation between a Scottish professor and a small boy. "I'm sorry to hear," said the professor, "that there was fever in your family last spring. Was it you or your brother that died of it ? " "It was me, sir, " said the boy. Nor is Belfast, though fond of boasting of its anti-Irish sentiments, behindhand in thematter of making bulls. "We will hoist the Union Jack," said a loyalist speaker amid great ap- plause, "on the top of the mast, and we will not allow it to be trampled under foot by the hands of any man." Genuine delicacy of feeling and an instinct- ive dislike for getting another man into a diffi- cult position was responsible for the following very confused bull. A gentleman, at dinner in an hotel, said to a friend who was sitting beside him : "I'm nearly sure that that's an old college chum of mine sitting at table at the opposite side of the room." 246 WIT AND HUMOUR "Then why don't you go and speak to him?" "I'm afraid to ; for he's so very shy that he would feel quite awkward if it turned out to be another man after all." A tendency to produce bulls is not, however, the only characteristic of Irish wit. Most ob- servers have noticed an extreme readiness in reply and repartee, especially among the less educated classes. A charitably inclined Irish nobleman, a bachelor of seventy years or so, used to allow the poor people of his neighbour- hood to roam through his demesne gathering sticks and broken wood for their fires. The only conditionhemadewasthatnogrowingtreeswere to be cut, or shrubs broken. His kindness was occasionally abused ; and he was greatly irri- tated one day to find an aged crone deliberately tearing branches from some rare and valuable ornamental shrubs. "Come along with me," he said, "come with me to the gate and I'll give orders to the lodge-keeper that you are not to be admitted again." "Let your lordship go in front of me," said 247 THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE the withered old woman, "and I'll follow you." But his lordship, suspecting a scheme for es- cape, would not agree to this. "No, no," he said, "come along with me. Walk beside me." " Arrah, don't make me do the like of that," saidtheold woman. "Surewhatwould my char- acter be worth after, if I was seen walking about the demesne with an unmarried man like your- self?" In such coin she paid for breaking the bran- ches and escaped punishment. I remember getting a very smart answer once from a labourer at the side of the road. Pipes for the transmission of a new water supply were being laid down in the streets of a town, and the usual plugs and traps were being fitted at regular intervals so that the water might be available in case of fire. The labourer, when I accosted him, was engaged in fitting one of these plugs outside the gate of a cemetery. There was no house near it, and as a precaution against fire it seemed to be superfluous, since tombstones do not burn easily. I pointed th is out to the man, 248 H < WIT AND HUMOUR and was inclined to laugh at his useless labour. He looked up at me with a half smile, and pointing to the cemetery replied : " I don't know, your honour, but maybe some of them in the inside would be glad enough of a drop of cold water now and again." Mr. Mecredy relates a story of a reply made to a member of the British Association, then visiting Dublin, by an Irish glazier. The Eng- lishman complained to a brother scientist, an Irishman, that although he had been three days in Ireland he had not come across a single ex- ample of Irish wit. A glazier was at work on a broken window near at hand. The Irish sci- entist pointed him out. " Go up to that man," he said, " make some criticism of the way he's doing his work and see what answer you'll get." The Englishman acted on the advice. " My good man," he said, " if you don't use more putty you'll not be able to put in that pane. " " If you don't get away out of that," said the man, "I'll put a pain into you that won't need any putty at all." The repartee was rude, but effective. 249 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE For another rude, but well deserved, reply a railway guard is responsible. A lady, travelling alone, had succeeded in filling every unoccu- pied seat in a first-class compartment with her luggage. She declined to move any of it in order to allow another traveller to enter the car- riage. He appealed to the guard, who remon- strated with the lady on the unreasonable sel- fishness of her conduct. The lady replied to him with great hauteur. " Do you know," she said, "who you're speaking to?" " I do not, ma'am," said the guard, "but who- ever you are you can't have the whole carriage to yourself" " Let me tell you," said the lady, " that I'm one of the Directors' wives." " I can't help it, ma'am," said the guard, "and it wouldn't make a ha'porth of difference if you was his only one." A somewhat similar retort was made by a shop assistant in a provincial town to a high and mighty dame who required to have an out- rageous number of articles sent to her house on approval. The shop assistant, bowing be- fore the lady's carriage, which she was too 250 WIT AND HUMOUR proud or too lazy to leave, apologised for not being able to do as she asked. " Do you know who I am ? " she said, " I'm the bishop's lady." "I'm very sorry, ma'am," said the shop as- sistant, " but I can't do it, not if you was his wife." Equally well deserved was the severe reply made by an I rish peasant who was being chaffed by a smiling English tourist in the irritatingly stupid manner common to his kind. " If the devil was to come here now," said the tourist, "which of us do you think he'd take, you or me ? " "He'd take me," said the peasant. " Why do you think so ? " said the English- man. " Because he'd be sure of your honour any time," was the reply. Mr. S. M. Hussey, in his book of Irish re- miniscences, has an excellent story of an answer given by a policeman to an old lady who in- quired where she would find the particular tram she wanted to take her to Blackrock. She was standing at the time in the middle of the street 251 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISHLIFE near Nelson's Pillar, the place to which nearly all the Dublin trams converge and from which they start. " I n one moment, ma'am," said the policeman, " if you haven't moved out of that, you'll find it in' the small of your back." I have never been able to satisfy myself whether an answer given to a friend of mine was an instance of very conscientious accuracy or of a refined form of wit. My friend was driving on a very dark and wet night to a vil- lage called Killiskey. He met a man walking on the road and stopped him. "Would you mind telling me,"he said, "how far off is Killiskey?" The man made no answer for some time. He was reckoning the distance carefully. At length he replied : " I'd say now that it's not more than five or six perches." My friend had actually reached the begin- ning of the village street when he was making the inquiry. It was, however, not cynical wit but the con- fusion occasioned by nervousness on a very 252 WIT AND HUMOUR important occasion which led a Belfast labourer to attempt a new version of the familiar mar- riage vow. The clergyman said aloud the words "with all my worldly goods I thee endow," and directed the bridegroom to say them after him. The man, looking the bride straight in the face and speaking in a firm voice said, "with all my goodly words I thee endow." Alas ! that so many women have found themselves endowed with little else. One poor bride came to the same clergyman to be married. The bride- groom was plainly very drunk and the clergy- man refused to perform the ceremony, " Take him away," he said, " and bring him back again when he's sober." "But, please your reverence," said the wo- man, " when he's sober he won't come." She, one suspects, would have been endowed with words which were anything but goodly if she had succeeded in carrying out her inten- tion of marrying the man while he did not know what he was doing. Stories connected with drinking are unfor- tunately far too common, but the severest mor- alist will scarcely deny that some of them have 253 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE the redeeming quality of wit. It is related of an Irish member of Parliament that he once walked up to an Englishman in the lobby of the House of Commons and said, without provo- cation, " You're a fool." " Sir," said the Englishman, "you must be drunk." "I may be," said the Irishman, "but I'll be sober to-morrow, whereas you'll be a fool then too." In the days when temperance reformers used to wear little blue ribbons in their button-holes as outward and visible signs of the faith that was in them, a Dublin car-driver was discov- ered somewhat drunk with an enormous blue ribbon prominently displayed on the lappet of his coat. Asked why he wore the badge, he re- plied that he did so in order to tempt wicked gentlemen to offer him drinks. His condition was a valuable testimony to his acute knowledge of human nature. It was, I think, a north of Ireland gentleman who received a sample bottle of a new kind of sherry, guaranteed to be an effective preventative of gout. He replied to the sender in the following brief letter : 254 WIT AND HUMOUR "Dear Sir, I have tried your sherry, and pre- fer the gout." Another north of Ireland gentleman heard from the lips of a clergyman of the death of an inveterate enemy of his who had harassed him for many years. "Well," he said, "it's a comfort to think that the devil's got that fellow at last." The clergyman, being a clergyman, felt bound to protest against this uncharitable view of the dead man's condition. He insinuated a hope that, in spite of all that had passed, the poor man might have escaped the extreme pen- alty. " Well," said the other, " if the devil hasn't got that fellow, all I can say is that I don't see much use in our keeping a devil at all." The following conversation shows a more tol- erant feeling for the infernal regions. 1 1 is sup- posed to have been overheard during the Fen- ian times, when Ireland was in a particularly troubled state. Mr. Le Fanu reports it thus : " Tom: These are terrible times. Bill. ''Bill: Bedad, they are, Tom. It's a wonder if we'll get out of the world alive. 255 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISHLIFE " Tom : I'm afeard we won't, even if we had as many lives as Plutarch. " Bi/l I If Oliver Cromwell could only come up out of hell he'd soon settle it. " Tom : Maybe he'd rather stop where he is." According to Tom, the change would be from comparative quiet and comfort to a disagree- able uproar. But it is only Irishmen who are allowed to say these very hard things about their country. We resent them bitterly when they come from the lips of strangers ; just as a mother who smacks her own boy heartily will not allow any one else to touch him save in the way of kindness. All Irishmen whom I have ever met cherish in their hearts a deep affection for Ireland. We make and repeat sayings to the discredit of our home — " Ireland is a very good country to live out of," and so forth, but in reality we are never contented and happy for very long elsewhere. And there is, in spite of our many differences and our violent political quarrelling, a bond of union between us which residence in a foreign land strengthens and brings to recognition. 256 WIT AND HUMOUR One of the best of our contemporary poets has described us very well in a single line as — " Leaping to greet at a distance, set in the death-grips at home." CHAPTER THIRTEEN SPOIL FIVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN SPOIL FIVE I AM, RECKONING FROM MY OWN STAND- point, no more than middle-aged, and yet I have seen a great change come over Irish life. As a man of some patriotic feeling, I acknowledge that it is a change for the better. As aloverof bright and stimulating national characteristics, I regret it. We have forgotten how to play Spoil Five. Once the game was widely popular. You played it in presbyteries in Donegal. You played it in the shabby lodgings of medical students up for their terms in Dublin. You played it of an even- ing in the low-ceilinged parlours of Connaught Squireens. You found its votaries in the Mid- lands, in Cork, in Kerry, Now it is played no more. Its rules are forgotten, or only survive confusedly in the memories of men who have long ago deserted it, becoming cosmopolitan in spirit and playing Bridge. I had some skill in the game once ; but to-day, so long is it since I have met a player, I can only with an effort re- collect the ways of it. Yet it was a great game, and, I think, truly national, a reflection of the spirit of Ireland in the days of its popularity, a spirit waning now. No one except an Irishman 261 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE could ever have played Spoil Five really well ; for no one else lived the life which Spoil Five expressed as in a parable. The value of the cards was gloriously con- fusing to the beginner. The highest in a red suit took the trick, the lowest in a black. The humble deuce of spades triumphed unexpected- ly over an opulent ten ; but the ten of diamonds lorded it in the familiar way over subservient threes and fours. Just so in actual life. Values in Ireland were bewilderingly uncertain to the strangers within our gates. That man is to be pardoned whosaiddespairingly, "Facts! There are no facts in Ireland." Hewas wrong, of course. There are facts in Ireland as elsewhere. The two of spades does consistently and always beat the ten though his victory seems to be a reversal of all the laws of nature. The nine of diamonds always gets the better of the six. The rule which decides the value of the cards looks confusing, and may be condemned as wholly arbitrary and ridiculous. 1 1 was really a reflection of the ways of Irish life during the last century. To us who lived the life, the rule seemed natural enough. We expected some twos to beat some tens. We 362 SPOIL FIVE should have been surprised if they had not ; be- cause all around us the race was occasionally to the swift and the battle to the strong, but quite as often the sluggard took the prize and the fee- ble waved the sword of final triumph. There was also a peculiar honour accorded to the knave. The knave of a plain suit was no more than he should be, the inferior of kings andqueens. But whenhis party came into power and he found himself one of the dominant trump class, he leaped into unexpected prominence. The knave of trumps led captive his own king, and trampled his queen as dirt beneath his feet. Again we recognise a mirror of our life. Solid worth counted in the days of trouble and adver- sity. The best and strongest led the squadrons of reforming oppositions. But the wheel came full circle at last. In great affairs or village poli- tics the turn of the opposition arrived. 1 1 became the government. Then it was the knave who got the honours and the prizes, the knave who ruled. Kings, queens, and common cards alike bowed down to him. All of them except the five of his own suit. This favoured creature, paltry and inconsider- 263 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE able in the days when he was not a trump, claimed and took absolute leadership when his party was in power. There was no accounting for his prominence. The knave rose high on the wave of fortune because he was a knave. Such things happen everywhere. Only in Ireland, I suppose, did quite commonplace people, un- helped even by any special skill in knavery, find themselves in a position now and then to patron- ise all the rest of the pack. There was something delightfully stimulating in such possibilities. We cannot all be kingsandqueens. Wehave, someof us,aprejudiceagainstbeingknaves;butthemost mediocre man may without vanity reckon him- self a five. What splendid chances our old game, our passing ways of national life, offered to us ! Yet the game would have been but an imper- fect counterpart of our life if it had not provided a special position for the ace of hearts. N o change of government affects his power. It is not the highest. The trump ace beats him and the trump knave and the five. But his strength is very great and is unchangeable. Haying him safely on your side, you viewed with comparative in- difference the turn of the trump card. He is 264 SPOIL FIVE thehlghpermanentofficial, civil orecclesiastical. Whatever government may come into office, his power endures. He does not care for showy splendour. Lords-Lieutenant make State en- tries. Chief Secretaries' names are graven on the perishable pulp of linotype machines. They are the trump aces and the trump kings, the creat- ures of a day. Behind them, unobtrusive but strong as death, lowered the ace of hearts, the bishop or the Vice-President of the Board. H ere again the game was confusing to a stranger. Accustomed to the unquestioned rule of the trump suit, the dominance of the party in power, he could not understand how it was that in Ire- land the sentimental Radical could not senti- mentalise satisfactorily, or the reactionary Con- servative react to the full scope of his desire. We who played Spoil Five, when Spoil Five was a national game, understood. The most sympathetic sentimentalist was stopped in mid- career, the most determined reactionary was checked by the persistence of the unchanging ace of hearts. These curious card values were a great feat- ure of the old game ; but its fascination did not 265 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE lie wholly in them. It was a game played for a pool. It was conceivable that no one would ever win the pool. A party might sit down to Spoil Five and play for hours and hours. It was quite possible that every one of the party might get poorer and poorer all the time, that nobody would win. The pool indeed grew a,nd kept on growing, a dazzling prize ; but the pool was nobody's property. Each player contri- buted to it, shilling after shilling, up, perhaps, to the last shilling that he owned. Each player did all that in him lay to prevent any other win- ning it. He was content to part with his own property. He could not bear to see another get it. The game was always a fight to pre- vent other people winning. No wise player ever admitted by his style of play that he had any expectation of winning himself. Hard- headed, shrewd Anglo-Saxons do not play such games, or, if they play, do not excel in them. We played Spoil Five with extraordinary skill. We all played life and politics in the same spirit; or used to play them so in the days when Spoil Five was popular. We contributed shilling after shilling contentedly enough so long as no 266 SPOIL FIVE one won. When the prize seemed to be com- ing within the grasp of some individual we united against him. The rapidly shifting alliances and enmities of the game always particularly delighted me. In other games, friendships are more enduring, or perhaps no friendships are formed at all. In Whist and Bridge a partnership lasts for a rub- ber at least. 1 1 becomes, as hand after hand is played, a firmly knit friendship. Enmities are equally fixed and enduring. There is a com- fortable confidence from beginning to end that your partner will do the best he can for you through good luck or bad. He never deserts you. You can count on him. He will rejoice when you rejoice and weep when you weep. In Nap you play as an Ishmael, every man's hand against you, yours against the world. The friendships in that game, the alliances against the player who has openly backed himself to win, endure until the cards are dealt again. But in Spoil Five swift alliances were formed and dissolved. Yourmostdangerousenemy became by the turn of a card your most valued friend. For two tricks you trusted the man on your 267 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE right, suspected him of no evil design, played up to him, helped him in every way, for you and he were bent on the defeat of some third player whom you both suspected of hoping to win. Then at the next trick the alliance broke up. Your former enemy, whose ambitions your skill had baulked, became your friend. You and he turned with the utmost ferocity upon your former ally. Nothing in the game, nothing in the old I rish life, was more exciting than these kaleidoscopic changes. They added a zest to effort unknown to the sober Bridge player, foreign to the very nature of the Anglo-Saxon of whom a kindly satirist has written, that " Every little boy or girl who's born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative." With our traditions of public life we can never, I suspect, become a nation of great Bridge players. We once were, and still might be, the most skilful people in the world at Spoil Five. Why have we let the game pass into obliv- ion ? It was surely worth preserving if only for the sake of the way its rules encouraged the art of keeping a card up your sleeve. In other games, in Bridge or Whist, there is a certainty 268 SPOIL FIVE that under favourable circumstances you can draw your adversary's ace of trumps. H e wins with it, of course, but once he has won its trick the thing is gone. You need fear it no longer. Your way is clear before you. No hidden dan- gers can exist for you. But in Spoil Five it was possible to hold off certain cards. The skilful player refused to have them drawn, kept the strength of his hand concealed trick after trick, burst upon you with overwhelming force just when it seemed certain that he was help- less. There was an immense joy in doing this. There was also an ever-present dread that it would be done to you. Those games are com- paratively dull in which no such strategy is pos- sible. Life in a country where men do not hold off their cards is a tame and unexciting thing. We knew a better way. I suppose we are changing our natures and mending our ways. I rish life is at last becoming obvious, reasonable, Saxon. It is hard to be- lieve that we can ever really be content to live without that most fascinating of all inconsist- encies, the beating of some tens and nines by some threes and twos. Are we going to deny 269 THE LIGHTER SIDE OFIRISH LIFE our knaves their chance of sudden splendour and condemn our fivesto perpetual inglorious medi- ocrity ? We have forgotten how to play Spoil Five, and our desertion of the game seems evi- dence that we are forsaking all that the game expressed. But surely no Irishman, in his in- most heart, desires to curtail the privileges and powers of the ace of hearts, the permanent offi- cials of Church or State, bishops or Vice-Presi- dents ? In the evil days of protest against the will of some shameful faction, it used to be a solid comfort to feel that at the last resort the Local Government Board would send an in- spector down ; or amid the confused alarms of party skirmishes to flourish in the face of ad- versaries an episcopal pronouncement. Now, with the increasing popularity of Bridge, Nap, and such games there seems a general tendency to curtail the glories of the ace of hearts, and to let him take his ordinary place among the other cards, to subject him like them to time and chance. It is all for the best, no doubt, this flatten- ing of our old characteristics under the hammer of democratic rationality. But there will be 270 SPOIL FIVE some who mourn the change ; and many, no doubt, who will part most reluctantly at least with the privilege of holding up their best cards until thepsychological moment when the dump- ing of them down secures the pool. BOOKS TO ENTERTAIN THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE By George A. Birmingham. Its title suggests unbridled jocular- ity— and it is in fact full of inimitable fun ; but there is a basis of solid thought and sympthy to all the mirth. While replenishing the common stock of Irish stories, Mr Birmingham adjusts our con- ception of the race. Mr Kerr's sixteen illustrations in colour form a gallery of genre studies, sympathetic and yet sincere, that allows us to look with our own eyes upon Ireland as she really is to-day. 288 pp^Buckram, S/- net. Velvet Persian, 7/6 net. IRISH LIFE tf CHARACTER ByMrsS. C. Hall. "Tales of Irish Life "will remind the reader more of Lever or Sam Lover than of ' ' Lavengro. " It is eflfervescent and audacious, ringing with all the fun of the fair, and spiced with the constant presence of a vivacious and irresistible personality. The sixteen illustrations by Erskine Nicol are in precisely the same vein, matching Mrs Hall's sketches so manifestly that it is strange they have never been united before. To look at them is to laugh, 330 pp. Buckram, 5/- net. Velvet Persian, 7/6 net. LORD COCKBURN'S MEMORIALS "This volume,'' says The Saturday Review, "is one of the most entertaining books a reader could lay his hands on." ' ' The book," says The Edinburgh Review, "is one of the pleasantest fireside volumes that has ever been published." Cockburn's pen could tell a tale as well as his tongue, and to read this book is to sit, unob- served, at that immortal Round Table, with anecdote and reminis- cence in full tide. With twelve portraits in colour by Sir Henry Kaeburn, and other illustrations. Extra Crown 8vo. - 480 pp. Buckram, 6/- net. AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARLYLE of INVESESK (1722-1805), edited by J. Hill Burton."- "He was the grandest demi-god I ever saw," wrote Sir Walter Scott of the author of this book. But, as these Memoirs show, he was a demi-god with a very human heart, — or, at any rate, a "divine" with a thorough knowledge of the world. It was probably these qualities that made him such a prominent figure in his day, and it is certainly these that give his Recollections their upique importance and raciness. They provide ' ' by far the most vivid picture of Scot- tish life and manners that has been given to the world since Scott's day." This edition has been equipped with a series of thirty-six portraits reproduced in photogravure of the chief personages who move in its pages. 612 pp. Buckram, (>{• net. T- N • FOULIS • PUBLISHER SOME SCOTTISH BOOKS THE KIRK & ITS WORTHIES By Nicholas Dickson and D. MacLeod Malloch. Out Scot- tish kirk has a great reputation for dourness — but it has probably kindled more humour than it ever quenched. The pulpits have inevitably been filled by a race of men disproportionately rich in "characters," originals, vforthies with a gift for pungent expres- sion and every opportunity for developing it. 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Moir was one of John Gait's chief friends, and, like a good comrade, he brought out a rival book. Its native blitheness and its racy use of the vernacular will always keep it alive. 360pp. Buckram, 5/- net; Velvet Persian, 7/6 net. T-N-FOULIS PUBLISHER SOME ENGLISH BOOKS THE ENGLISH CHARACTER By Spbnckr Lbigh Hughes, M.P., Sub-Rosa (AUde Daily News and leader. Although his pen has probably covered more pages than Balzac's, this is the first time A/^-^ora has really "turned au- thor." The charm and penetration of the result suggest that his readers will never allow him to turn back again. He is a bom essayist, but he has, in addition, the breadth and generosity that journalism alone can give a man. The combination gives a kind of golden gossip — criticism without acrimony, fooling without folly. The work contains sixteen pictures in colour of English types by Frederick Gardner. 300 pp. Buckram, 5/- net. Leather, 7/6 net. ENGLISH COUNTRY LIFE By Walter Raymond. 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THE RIVER OF LONDON By HiLAiRE Belloc, Everybody who has read the "Path to Rome " will learn with gladness that Mr Hilaire Belloc has written another book in the same sunny temper, dealing with the oldest highway in Britain. It is a subject that brings into play all those high faculties which make Mr Belloc the most genuine man of letters now alive. The record of the journey makes one of the most exhilarating books of our time, and the series of Mr Muirhead's sixteen pictures painted for this book sets the glittering river itself flowing swiftly past before the eye. 200 pp. Buckram, 5/- net. Leather, 7/6 net. T • N • FOULIS • PUBLISHER PRESENTATION VOLUMES NELL GWYN By Cecil Chesterton. The author has carried out the task en- trusted to him with an admirable clearness and impartiality. The book is richly illustrated ; the many portraits reflect the impudent, infamous, irresistible child-face in all its enchanting phases. Twenty illustrations — four in colour. 232 pp. Buckram, s/- net. 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