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HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
By the same Author IRISH AND ENGLISH : Portraits and Impressions
By ROBERT LYND
Sinn Fein. — " Most of Mr Lynd's Irish sketches deal with Ulster life ; and written as they are with an abounding sympathy, a keen, penetrating humour and an unfailing lightness of touch, it is no exaggeration to say that they are the most illuminating commentaries on life in that region of acute political and religious divergences which have appeared for a long time."
Pall Mall Gazette. — " His pictures of North Ireland are of a vividness and reality that are equal to the best Irish work of to-day. . . . On the whole, this is one of the most notable recent books of essays that have been published ; and Mr Lynd is an author no lover of English letters can ignore."
The Bookman. — " The best of them are little masterpieces."
Daily Graphic— "The Irish impressions are delightful."
Daily News. — " He has imagination, sympathy, and a most pleasing fancy. He has the sense of contrast, the feeling for situation, the knack of emphasising the dramatic moment."
Belfast Whig. — " Here is a new writer with a distinctive and original point of view, and remarkable powers both of descrip- tion and portraiture."
Nation. — "This hopeful and tolerant outlook gives a great charm to these essays which, besides being entertaining, give a good impression of the new forces at work in Ireland to-day."
Irish Independent. — "All who love Irish life will welcome it. Ulstermen, no matter what shade of thought, will revel in it."
Glasgow Herald. — " His Irish impressions and portraits have the convincingness that ccmes from intimate knowledge."
The Irish Nation. — "A most companionable, humanising, and engaging volume, not least in its moods of merry carelessness and philosophic vagabondage."
Daily Chronicle. — "A writer . . . with the true essayist's temperament of tolerance and affectionate humour."
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en
O X
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HOME LIFE
IN
IRELAND
BY
ROBERT LYND
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
\ / -
.H ' Or
MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 WHITCOMB STREET
LONDON W.C.
Published September 1909
TO
SYLVIA LYND
PREFACE
I WISH to thank Mrs N. F. Dryhurst and Mr J. W. Good for the help they gave me at various points while I was writing this book — help all the more generous because neither of them is likely to agree with all I say. Pddraic 6 Coin- ceannain will perhaps recognise something like the echo of his voice in one of the chapters. Mr and Mrs Robert Steen may not see the image of their kindness reflected in these pages, but it is none the less there, for it was in their house and in the house at Killure that I received the most abundant hospitality I have known, and was initiated into the friendship of country people and places.
R. L.
September 1909.
Tii
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. The Irishman: Introductory
II. Farms and Farmers
-III. Marriages and Match-making
VI. Wakes and Funerals VII. Priests and Parsons VIII. The Ulsterman's Notoriety
IX. The Irish Gentry
XI. Games and Dances . XII. Food, Clothes, etc. . XIII. Eeligion -XIV. The Lives of the Workers
PAGB 1
10 40
IV. Stories and Superstitions (or whatever
YOU LIKE TO CALL ThEM) . . 56
' V. Schools and Children
82 110 122 151 172
X. Town Life, with a Note on Public
Life . . . . .184
198 204 211 226
HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
CHAP.
XV. Sinn F^in : The New Note in Politics
XVI. Politics and Gatherings
XVII. Manners
XVIII. Characters. I. — The Driver
XIX. Characters. II. — The Man of Secrets
XX. Literature and Music
PAOS
247 262 275
285 296 305
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. A Farm House Interior . . Frmtispiece
From a photograph by R. Welch, Belfast.
FACING PAGE
2. A County Down Farm . . . .14
From a photograph by R, Welch, Belfast.
3. Bringing Home Turf in Donegal . . 16
From a photograph by R. Welch, Belfast.
4. An Achill Boy . . . . .32
From a photograph by R. Welch, Belfast.
5. County Antrim Girls . . , .38
From a photograph by R. Welch, Belfast.
6. A Gaelic Story-Teller . . . .60
From a photograph by Mrs N. F. Dryhurst.
7. A Sligo Bog ..... 80
From a photograph by R. Welch, Belfast.
8. Aran Children ..... 90
From a photograph by R. Welch, Belfast.
9. Farm House in Donegal . . .118
From a photograph by R. Welch, Belfast.
V
xii HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
FACme PAGE
10. The M'Kinley Farm, Dervock . . 146
From a photograph by E. Welch, Belfast.
11. Fireplace and Dresser . . .166
From a photograph by R. Welch, Belfast.
12. Galway Fish Market . . . .178
From a photograph by R. Welch, Belfast.
13. The Treaty Stone, Limerick . . .194
From a photograph by W. Lawrence, Dublin.
14. Grinding Corn in the Old Way . . 206
From a photograph by R. Welch, Belfast.
15. Curraghs ..... 232
From a photograph by R. Welch, Belfast.
16. Mud Cottage near Dublin . . . 244
From a photograph by R. Welch, Belfast.
17. An Antrim Farm and an Old-fashioned
Cart . . . . .290
From a photograph by R. Welch, Belfast.
18. Clonbur — A Connacht Village . . 298
From a photograph by R. Welch, Belfast.
HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
CHAPTER I
THE IRISHMAN : INTRODUCTORY
The Irishman is one of the world's puzzles. People seem to be quite unable to agree as to who he is, or as to what constitutes his Irishness. Some people say that he is a Celt. Some say he is a Catholic. Some say he is a comic person. Some say he is a melancholy person. Others say he is both. According to some, he is of a gay, generous nature. According to others, he is a shrivelled piece of miserliness and superstition. "The least criminally-inclined of all the inhabi- tants of Europe," declare those who stand up for him, and they have official statistics on their side. A murderer, a maimer of cattle, a carder of women's hides, squeal the Kiplingesque school of critics, and they, too, have official statistics — very official statistics — on their side. A missionary among the nations, affirm some religious enthusiasts. The buffoon of the world, cry those who are less likely to be found in a church than in a music-hall.
The truth is, there is a great deal of nonsense
A 1
2 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
talked about the " real Irisliman " and tlie " typical Irishman" — to mention two phrases common among thoughtless people. The " real Irishman " is neither essentially a Celt nor essentially a Catholic. He is merely a man who has had the good or bad fortune to be born in Ireland or of Irish parents, and who is interested in Ireland more than in any other country in the world.
The landlord of Norman or Saxon descent is quite as truly an Irishman as the tenant-farmer of Gaelic descent, provided that Ireland is the home of his best thoughts, even if not always of his body. The Orange labourer of the north, whose ancestors may have come from Scotland, has all the attributes of an Irishman no less than the Catholic labourer of the west, whose ancestors may have come from Greece, or from Germany, or from Spain, or from anywhere you care to specu- late. Occasionally, owing to political bitter- nesses, you will find a Northerner denying his Irishness. " We're English in the north," a Derry merchant once said to me, and indeed some of these people have sung " God save the King" so often since the introduction of Mr Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill that their blood now refuses to flow to any other music, and their ears are deaf to the sonors of their own valleys and hills. Even people with Gaelic names are to be found now and then denying the charge of being Irish with a vigour worthy of Peter's denial of the accusation of beins^ a Christian. A
THE IRISHMAN : INTRODUCTORY 3
friend of mine, who is an enthusiast for Irish things, was wandering about Tyrone some time ao^o, when he fell into talk in a hotel-bar with a labourinor man who gave his name as James M'Cabe. " Well, you have a good Irish name, at any rate," my friend said to him in a tone of congratulation. " Good Irish name be damned," retorted the other, bursting into a temper. " It's a good Protestant name."
Luckily, this kind of talk is becoming rarer in Ireland every day. It is a relic of the days of the religious wars of the Tudors and the Stuarts when Catholicism and Irishism were both put on their defence in Ireland, and as a result became somewhat confused till they appeared to be practically the same thing. The Protestant religion came into Ireland, not as a phase of Christianity, but as the religion of foreign in- vaders. Consequently, among the Irish people, Protestant and foreigner came to mean the same thing, and in the older-fashioned Irish language they are denoted by the same word — Gall. Simi- -i larly, Gaedheal or Gael came to signify, not only an Irishman of the Gaelic stock, but an Irishman ; of the Catholic religion.
I remember once when I was in County Sligo I was taken to see a herdsman who knew Irish, in order that I mis^ht listen to a man with so fortunate a possession, and I found that to him Gael meant, not an Irishman at all, but a Catholic. We were talking about Irish things over a sip
4 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
of whiskey with which he filled two small delf cups to the brim, leaving no room for the least drop of water, and I was telling him how even manufacturers and business people now recognise the importance of the language. In proof of this I brought out from my pocket a box of Dublin - made matches, with the words, " Solus na nGaed- heal "— " The Light of the Gael "—printed on the outside. He took the box from me, and looked it up and down — I did not know that he could not read when I handed it to him — and then he gave it back to me, saying that he hadn't his spectacles on him, and would I mind reading what was on it to him. I read the words carefully, " Solus na nGaedheal," feeling very nervous about my accent, and he said, "Ah, that means 'The Light of the Catholics.' " At this, the school- master who had brought me looked both surprised and shocked, for he was the most generous and hospitable of men. " But, John," he protested, " it can't mean that, Mr Lynd himself is a Protestant." " Well," declared the herdsman, with a kindly twinkle in his eye, but determination in his jaw, " he's none the worse for that. There's many a good Protestant Irishman. But that doesn't change the meaning of words, and I tell you Gaedheal means Catholic." I think, indeed, if he had wished to say "Irishman" in the Irish language he would have used the word, " ^fiireannach."
It is curious to find even to-day in Ireland
THE IRISHMAN : INTRODUCTORY 5
an occasional person of one idea who will tell you that nobody is any use except the Gaels, or that nobody is any use except the Catholics, or that nobody is any use except the Ulstermen. As a rule, people who talk like this belong to an old and dwindling school, and are of a crankish nature. The general trend of Irish thought during the past number of years has made for the breaking- down of all such barriers of mistrust and mis- understanding. I heard from a national platform an ancient man of wild notions call upon his audience on one occasion to put no trust in Protestants — " they will betray you, they always have betrayed you" — and passionately proclaim that Ireland must look for salvation to the " sea- divided Gael" alone. His audience, however, greeted his sentiments with no enthusiasm, but maintained a polite approach to silence. Similarly, I have heard an Ulsterman — ridiculously enough, a Catholic and a Nationalist too — speak as though all the southern Irish were worthless people. " Between you and me and the man in the moon," he said once, tapping me on the knee confidentially, " there's not much worth talking about south of the Boyne." Of course, one finds these local and sectional conceits and contempts in all countries. In England, for instance, the Baptist does not always speak flatteringly of the Methodist, nor does the Churchman usually speak flatteringly of either. Manchester and Liverpool are not linked together in a mutual admiration
6 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
society, and the Yorkshireman is not a permanent object of veneration to the Londoner. In the same way, there are Tories who deny the right of the Eadicals to call themselves patriotic Englishmen, and Radicals who think equally bitter things of the Tories, and Socialists who place Eadicals and Tories in one basket of worthlessness. In England, however, these differences of creed and outlook are regarded as normal, and are not counted for national unrighteousness. In Ireland, on the other hand, let one man speak critically of an- other, and immediately we have lurid pictures drawn for us of a people with a genius for dissensions and fighting:, as thous^h differences of opinion were a thing unknown in civilised countries. Political necessities — to give a flatter- ing name to a bad thing — have led to every fault of Ireland's being seen as if through a microscope, and to every virtue's being seen upside down or inside out till it seemed equal to two faults. Personally, I deny the existence of any gulfs between different sections of the inhabitants of Ireland which need prevent us from regarding them as one people, just as we regard the English or the French or the Italians as one people.
This belief in the oneness of the Irish people will colour everything I write in this book. For, great as are the differences between the people of one province and the people of another, between the people of one creed and the people of another, between the people of one parish and the people of
i
THE IRISHMAN : INTRODUCTORY 7
another, the things which unite them and mark them as belonging to one ever-evolving race are more numerous and more remarkable still. The Cork man and the Belfast man realise this when they meet in a foreign country. In England, for instance, they feel some bond of fraternity uniting them to each other different from any bond that may unite them to the Englishman or Scotchman or Frenchman, or any other of the strange races. They are both Irish, and, even if they have not the same friendly interests, they have at least the same things to quarrel over — no unimportant tie in a world where most people persist in living dully. Consequently, when I hear a Belfastman speaking contemptuously of Dublin, I do not take the conversation very seriously, and when I hear a Dubliner speaking contemptuously of Belfast, I do not take the conversation very seriously. The kind of Irishman who does really offend me is the Belfastman, who speaks contemptuously of Belfast, and his counterparts from other parts of Ireland. Everybody has met the escaped Belfast- man in foreign countries, who delights in depreciat- ing his own town, because he thinks that it is the right thing to do. I have almost invariably found him a useless person with all the faults of his birth-place and few of the virtues. He has never felt the heart-beat of Ireland or the thrill of abundant life that makes the laua:hter of children in Ballymena of one spirit with the singing of birds above the beggars on Granard door-steps,
8 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
and with the shrill shouts of boys hurling in a Munster field when a goal is scored.
/^ My theme, then, in this book will be the people of Ireland and their oneness — oneness of customs and character and interests and even of language traditions — their oneness, and, within the circle of that, their curious variableness. The Irishman of the North merges into the Irishman of the Mid- lands, and he into the Irishman of the South and West, as naturally as a similar phenomenon takes place in England. If you travel by easy stages
; from the Giant's Causeway to Cape Clear you will notice how beautifully and gradually the Scotticised accent of Antrim and Down undergoes change after change until it is transformed into the bubbling brogue of Cork. It is the same, if you take the Irish, instead of the Anglo-Irish, language. There are numerous differences of accent — dialects we call them in Ireland — but these surface differ- ences are as nothing compared to the essential unity of speech that links the four provinces together. Country people, who have not travelled, are, of course, inclined to stress these differences. If you go to Connacht with a Munster accent, you need not be surprised to be told that your Irish is not Irish at all, and if you take a Connacht turn of speech to Ulster, some grey-headed old woman will as likely as not shake her head at you, and tell you that Connacht Irish is bad Irish. These are comedies, however, which will always be with us so long as individual patterns remain among
ti-,
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THE IRISHMAN : INTRODUCTORY 9
countries acd men. I know my arguments could
be used — or misused — to support a good many
theories which I do not wish them to support.
But, as a matter of fact, I put them forward in
proof, not so much of the positive things in which
I believe, as of some negations which will clear the
way for the understanding of those positive things.
I wish then merely to enforce the idea that Ireland
is not a country scored and riven internally by
impassable frontier lines — that the common talk
of the "two nations" in Ireland is an exasfgera-
tion, and leads to confused thinking about the
country. I hope to touch on this point more
fully, however, in later pages of the book.
There is a nursery-rhyme in Ireland which
runs : —
Ulster for a soldier, Connacht for a thief, Munster for learning. And Leinster for beef.
There is just as much sense in this as in most of the generalisations we hear about the different parts of Ireland — the dourness of Ulster, the dishonesty of Connacht, the idleness of at least the other two provinces. Almost all generalisa- tions, I suppose, were in the beginning born of some seed of truth. Nearly all the generalisations about Ireland, however, have grown up into per- verted and lying shapes, like monstrous light- hiding trees, and in their branches the parrots of the nations chatter innumerable foolish things.
CHAPTER II
FARMS AND FARMERS
I MET a lady the other day who became very sorrowful over the condition of living into which the Irish farmer has now fallen. She recalled the days of her girlhood, when the house of the large farmer was a centre of hospitality and of a certain kind of culture. In those days it was not a surprising thing to see a new book — even a good book — on a farmer's table. Nowadays, one is astonished to see any new written matter there, except " The Freeman's Journal " or " The Northern Whig," or one of those useless series of volumes on religion or history, of which book-pedlars contrive to get rid on the instalment system.
This lady's lamentation, I believe, had a heart of truth in it. It was not merely the regret of one who saw the past in rose-colour and the present through a grey rain of dullness. If you go into an old farm-house, the books that you see stored away in some shabby case, and the prints that you see hanging on the walls, tell you that a generation of men once lived here, who, if not supermen of taste, were at least giants in this respect compared with those who have come after them.
10
FARMS AND FARMERS 11
The Irish farmer, indeed, the respectable son of the ragged soldier of the land wars, is a failure in the matter of fine living. When, instead of being the respectable son, he is the respectable transmo- grification of the ragged land soldier, his case is little better. I use the word " ragged," let me say, in praise of good fighting, and not in any belittling sense, for, like most of the talking sort of people, I prefer rags to selfish respectability. And selfish respectability is the danger which at the present moment more than any other threatens the delightfulness and human richness of Irish country life.
Of course, it is impossible to make a true generalisation that will cover all the farmers of Ireland. For an Irish farmer may be anything from a private gentleman on a small scale to a labouring man on a large one. Farmers and farmers' families make up the greater part of the varied population of Ireland. There are in the country nearly 600,000 farm holdings of all shapes and sizes, and it has been estimated by a writer who takes the average family as consisting of five persons, that about 75 per cent, of the population are directly dependent upon the soil. Con- sequently, it will be seen that, if the country life of Ireland is decadent and dull, the entire life of the nation is in peril of decadence and dullness.
Personally, I believe that it is the better-off farmers who are most in danger of losing the colour out of their lives. Suddenly finding
12 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
themselves in possession of their own land, or at least with a good prospect of possessing their own land, after a struggle of many generations, they are like men who have come upon a fortune, and are in dread that some neighbour should hear of it, and cast an envious eye on it. They feel now that their crops are their own, that their cattle are their own, that their money is their own, in a way that was never so before. They have arrived in the Utopia towards which their fathers strove as, outside Heaven, the chief end of man, and they wish to rest for a while and enjoy the sweets of it. Like the farmers in Mr Shaw's play, " John Bull's Other Island," they just want things to be left as they are, without change, without disturbance. I was talking to a County Mayo farmer some time ago, who declared in a whirl of not very sensible language : "I was always an extreme man, but I don't believe in going to extremities." It was the protest of one of the contented " haves " against the boycotting and cattle-driving practices of some of the discontented " have-nots."
He affirmed that men of property had now no say in the management of the country — that public life was in the hands of a " lot of lads and tramps." He said that he would like to see the return of the old system under which country government was in the hands of the grand juries instead of, as at present, the County Councils. He pointed to the road outside his house, and declared that, under the old grand jury, this used
FARMS AND FARMERS 13
to cost £14 a year for maintenance — £14, if I remember, for six or eight miles, but that now under the County Council it was, how much ? I guessed twenty pounds, then thirty. " Fifty-five," he declared, fixing his disgusted withered face on me ; " fifty-fifty pounds." I said that, perhaps, the road was better, but the suggestion made him twist his neck as though he were choking. As I looked at the little hedge of white beard that wandered round his throat, and his figure knotted in the chair, and his peevish old eyes, I seemed to see in him the tragedy of a revolutionary — a revolutionary who had aimed too low and got even a little more than he desired. He was like a once-starving man, who, being suddenly well-fed, thought it irrational that anybody else should go on complaining of starvation.
This old farmer is typical of a good many of his class. I do not mean in his attitude to the County Councils — most farmers will admit the virtues of these — but in his general conversation. The truth is, the Irish farmer has been demoralised by three great forces — by the education given in the National Schools, by landlordism, and by agrarian politics. The schools de-Irishised him and BO robbed him of a sort of culture, which made the air about him exhilarating and the land a land of memories and enriching thoughts. Agrarian \ politics, taking the place of national politics, have trained him to be a self-seeker, a materialist, look- ing outside his own country to a foreign Parliament
\
14 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
for the beginnings of justice, and, if not for the beginnings of justice, for doles. Landlordism, again, by fining him for every effort he made after better things, by appropriating all the fruits of his labour as far as was in its power, trained him to cultivate an idle, shiftless, untidy air, and to avoid the very appearance of prosperity.
Ireland is in the result an untidy-looking country, a country of untidy houses, of untidy stone walls and hedges, of untidy fields. In many parts if a gate is broken down, as likely as not it will be fixed up temporarily with bits of rope, or with the help of stones or thorn branches, instead of being properly repaired. Similarly, if a window is broken or a spout injured, some hopelessly inefficient steps will often be taken to stave off the critical day when a new window must be put in or the spout properly seen to. People who do not examine into the causes of things look upon this untidiness of the country-side as a deep-seated Irish characteristic, born of Irish blood rather than of Irish conditions. There could not be a shallower thought. The Irish farmer originally became untidy in self-defence. He knew that, if his house looked beautiful and his hedges trim, the quick eye of the land-agent would soon size him up as a prosperous man, and raise his rent accordingly. Ever since the 1881 Land Act enabled him to stand up to the rent-raising landlord with some prospect of success — certainly since the beginning of the present century — there has been a slow but
<
FARMS AND FARMERS 15
sure tendency to improvement in the appearance of Irish farms and farm-houses. If the tendency has been too slight and slow for the censorious, it is because the traditions of generations cannot suddenly be made as though they were not, and because the farmer continued to suspect, even under the 1881 Land Act, that the landlord still reaped no small benefit from the tenant's improvements.
Now that the land is coming into his own hands, the Irish farmer is showing, as I have stated, a wonderful instinct for improving his surroundings. The farms themselves are still shaggy — I say shaggy rather than shabby — in appearance, but the houses, especially the houses of the small farmers, are beginning to wear a new air of bright- ness and prosperity.
One thing that will strike you about the houses in most parts of the country — it will strike you especially forcibly if you have listened with an attentive ear to all the old falsehoods about Ireland — is their cleanliness. I do not mean that they are as clean as a new pin or as some of those spick- and-span hydrangia-guarded cottages in North Wales. But they are clean beyond all the con- ceptions of nearly all the people who have ever written about Ireland. Ireland has always been set down as a country of dirty houses, as though people living in London or Manchester ought to feel almost unwell at the thought of it. The picture is a false one. I am sure there is more
16 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
dirt in London or in Manchester than in all Connacht. The comparison between town and country may seem unfair ; but dirt is dirt wherever you find it, and there has been too much uncon- tradicted nonsense talked about the dirtiness of Ireland.
If I seem to exaggerate on this matter, it is because I wish to redress a balance and bring the truth nearer. Politicians, I believe, have for a long time had the loudest say about Ireland, and they have almost invariably maligned her either out of love or from malice. Pro- Irish politicians, wishing to make a pitiable and sympathy- winning show of the country, have dragged forward the dirtiest and most dismantled mud hovels as demonstrations of the wretched condition of the people. Anti- Irish politicians, on the other hand, have called up these same dirty and dismantled hovels as witnesses to the fact that the Irish are a half-savage and worthless people, less fit than any other in Europe to be trusted with the govern- ment of their own land. Thus a very deceptive myth has been created — a myth which many of us even in Ireland have begun to believe. All sides have agreed to judge Ireland by its worst, and have held up as the typical Irish home not anything like the average Irish home, but the most tumbledown and ill-kept Irish home they could find.
Irish farm-houses vary, of course, from imposing stone-finished dwellings, fitted out with pianos
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55
I
FARMS AND FARMERS 17
and Victorian furniture, down to small two-roomed and even one-roomed cottages, white-washed, and with thatched roofs held down by numerous stones hanging from cords over the eaves. I for one like the smaller houses better than the larger. There is no room here for any decorations, save the decorations that are in themselves necessary things.
The turf fire burns on the floor against the wall furthest from the door, and over it from hooks and hangers swings a coal-black pot with swollen sides and insect-like feet, or a heavy old-fashioned kettle. High upon another wall rises the dresser with its rows of pleasant and many-coloured delf — the most comfortable of all ornaments. Perhaps, there is a wooden bed in the corner of the room — a large and lordly bed, high beyond all temptation to sit down on the edge of it. There is a wooden chair here and there, and, perhaps, a long bench against the wall in which the door is built. ^ If there is a second room, the instinct for ornamentation will as likely as not have been at work. Sometimes, in a room like this, you see crudely-coloured pictures of saints plastered all over the wall — pictures sold by pedlars or given away with re- ligious papers. Or there may be political cartoons or portraits of heroes — equally horrible in colour.
Perhaps the two most popular pictures in Irish houses are the Holy Family and Robert Emmet.
1 People who talk of the bad ventilation of Irish country houses often forget the half-door over which a constant stream of air pours in.
B
18 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
After these come Daniel O'Connell and tlie things that grocers give away at Christmas, and occasion- ally portraits of royal people like Queen Victoria or King Edward VII. These royal pictures are sometimes to be seen in the same room with portraits of Wolfe Tone and Emmet, and are to be taken as proofs that the people want cheap decorations, not that they are becoming loyal to the English connection. In Unionist homes, of course, they have another meaning. Here they add to the dulness of walls already made dull by framed photographs — dismal photographs dismally framed — of those who have emigrated and those who have died. In the Orange homes of Ulster, too, the portrait of King William the Third, blue-coated and on a white horse, takes the place of the portrait of Emmet, and the Rev. Henry Cooke, the genius of bigotry and debate, is the Presbyterian substitute for Daniel O'Connell. In the poorer houses the black mantelpiece has often as its proudest ornament a coloured delf statue of King William of Orange seated on a charger.
Many of the houses in all parts of the country make an attempt at civilisation and liveliness with pictures taken from the English magazines — pictures of pretty, flufiy women, pictures of deanimalised animals, pictures of the splendours of war. The country houses are not so bad in this respect as the houses in town. The ugliness of the country house, in other words, is more Irish and therefore less deadly than the ugliness of the
FARMS AND FARMERS 19
town house. But they are both tolerably — or intolerably — ugly.
It is my strenuous opinion that there is nothing in the world more essentially a national matter than taste — taste in dress, in food, in manners, in household arrangement — and that a people with- out nationality must always be a people without taste. Ireland is a country whose nationality has become as weak as watered gruel, and, until this is made strong and real again, as I believe it will be with the help of the Gaelic spirit, I see no prospect that Irish farm - houses will become beautiful and coloured-haunted places, inhabited by distinctively-dressed women and well-mannered men. Even now, if one wants to see that part of Ireland in which dress is least dull and manners most gentle, one must go to the most impoverished and most Irish districts, like Achill in the west.
Taste, however, in the sense of that fine spirit which touches nothing that it does not adorn, is a rare thing anywhere in Ireland. That it is growing with the other new national forces is shown by the fact that every day it is becoming a less surprising thing to see a few flowers in bloom outside a farmer's house or a labourer's cottage. The Orangeman of Ulster, I may say, had always these flowers outside his window. The Orange lily, flaming and erect upon its stalk, is by good fortune the emblem of all to which he clings most passionately, and this has probably encouraged him in the taste for growing flowers. If
20 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
Nationalism had been symbolised by a rose in- stead of the shamrock, it might have made all the difference in the world in the appearance of Irish country places.
There is no feature in the economy of the Irish home which has been more commented upon than the manure-heap which so often lies in shapeless squalor not far from the door. This has been pointed to as a breeder of disease — a direct ancestor of consumption and the direst fevers. I met a brilliant doctor some time ago who quarrels with the evil fame of the manure-heap. He admits its ugliness of look, and, at times, of smell, but he holds that its influence on the health of the people has been greatly exaggerated. If Irish farm-children were brought up on good food — if they had something more invigorating to eat and drink than tea and white bread and potatoes and American bacon — they would not have much difficulty in resisting all the germs that a manure- heap could nourish. I am inclined to think, too, that if the Irish were not the worst cooks in Europe, the country would be a good deal healthier. Perhaps, however, this applies to farmers of the middle sort, and to the people in towns rather than to the poorest of the peasantry. For the Irish certainly make tea admirably and bake admirably, and boil and fry bacon sufficiently well, and these are practically all the foods with which the poor have much acquaintance.
The farmer who is above the line of poverty,
FARMS AND FARMERS 21
however, occasionally gets his wife to experiment with beef, and the result is often a woe to the stranger. Never in any place have I seen such leathery and impracticable gobbets of meat as I have sat down to ao;ain and again in the houses of small Irish farmers. Perhaps the meat is taken from some part of the animal that the townsman is accustomed to scorn, or it may be that it is too fresh. I do not know. I cannot believe, however, that any meat would be so militantly bad, so defiant to the human tooth, if it were treated with proper gentleness in the cooking. Let me admit, on the other hand, that there are many exceptional houses which good cooking makes pleasant in the memory, and that, even in those places where the meat is most impossible, they can nearly always cook a chicken excellently. It is all a matter of training. There is a low standard of taste in the country, and bad cooking is but one feature in the general disorder.
While on the subject of food, I may mention one curious thing about the tastes of the country- people. They look with a kind of modest shame on their home-baked bread as compared with the white loaves of the town. More than once, when I have chanced to have a meal in a small farm- house, have I had to listen to royal apologies because there was no loaf, but only home-baked bread, to set on the table. Equally odd must it seem to many that, not even in the poorest Irish home, will the people dream of eating so passable
22 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
a vegetable as turnip-tops. I remember when I came to England first and had turnip-tops offered to me in a restaurant, I felt a sort of disgust, as though I had been asked to eat some indecent thing. There is a change coming over Ireland in regard to food and cooking as in most other matters. Cookery is now being taught as an art in the technical schools and elsewhere, and if the tables of some of the farm-houses are not sensibly the more agreeable, it is because the conservatism of the people holds out against new-fangled things, even when they are sweet to the taste. I heard of one instance in which there was a more absurd cause for the new talent's being left to rust without use. A farmer's daughter in the south, having returned home with her training in cookery, was permitted amid some excitement to prove her gifts in getting ready the midday dinner. She prepared a magnificent steak pudding, the like of which had never been seen in the house before, and her father glowed with enthusiasm at the end of the meal. " We must always let Mary do the cooking after this ! " he cried, and the happiness on the children's faces echoed him. All the greater was their surprise when the woman of the house, hearing this, suddenly lifted up her voice and wept. " Oh ! " she lamented, wringing her hands. " After me cooking and slaving for you for twenty years! And now ta have my own daughter put against me ! " And she finished with a flood of tears. Stunned by
FARMS AND FARMERS 23
the new twist things had taken, the family made haste to comfort her. They w^eren't thinking what they were saying, they explained ; they were only meaning to tell Mary how they liked her cooking.
Slowly the mother dried her eyes and cheered up, and no one ever dared to propose Mary as family cook again. Thus, in at least one house, the old cookery won its decisive battle against the new, and a family that might be taking in health with its food still sits down at meal- times to hard and knobby matter swimming in watery gravy. Let me warn rash generalisers, however, that this is not to be taken as a picture of an average Irish home.
I am afraid I have wandered some way from the point which led me to speak of food in connec- tion with farms. I mentioned it chiefly in order to bring in an opinion that bad food — and badly- cooked food — is the cause of more weakness and disease in Ireland than all the obtrusive manure- heaps you will see between the house-doors and the roads. I think the clothes of the people are also somewhat to blame. Country people very rarely change their clothes when they get a wetting : often they have no other clothes into which to change. Children and grown-up people go about in the rain as though the sun were shining, and in a wet country like Ireland the result of this is bound to be disastrous. Add to this the fact that in too many places the houses are built on regularly-flooded lands, and on the
24 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
marshy edges of streams, and you have another fruitful cause of bodily ills.
Poverty and the want of an enlivening national spirit, however, are the real cause of the weakness of Ireland. If disease results, for instance, from the presence of an animal in the house during the winter months, this must be put down in some measure to the generosity of very poor people. One has heard so much of the pig as an inmate of the Irish home that one is almost inclined to put it down as a myth, so comparatively rare a sight is it in the thirty-two counties. Thousands of Irish people believe that the household pig is only an English music-hall joke, for they have never seen such a thing. It is only in poor and unsheltered places, indeed, it is ever to be found, and then, chiefly, in the cold stormy times of winter. If in those shrill nights and days the pig is admitted to the comfort of the hearth, it by no means follows that the house is turned into a pig-sty. The pig is not necessarily a filthier animal than the dog, but can be equally accus- tomed to habits of cleanliness. I knew a most refined and wealthy lady who kept a pig as a pet. At the same time I am not going to argue that the very poor people in Ireland can fight against the dirt of circumstances any more than the very poor people in any other country. Poverty, when she settles down in a country, always ends by bringing in her little sister, dirt, to live with her. Crowded houses are bad enough when the crowd
FARMS AND FARMERS 25
is entirely composed of human beings. They are, in the imagination of sensitive people, intolerable, when added to the human beings are animals — especially farm animals like pigs and cows — which must at all costs be kept from perishing in the cold.
I must say, however, if I had a miserable hovel and a pig, and had not the means of putting up a second miserable hovel in which the pig could enjoy that minimum of warmth and shelter to which even pigs have a natural claim, I would count myself more charitable to give the animal a corner of my hut than to send it out to a death of cold. There is the obvious retort, " But why keep a pig ? " Equally to the point would it be to ask, " Why live ? " The pig and the potato- patch are among the first of the assets of life on the small farms of Ireland.
It is impossible, I imagine, for any one who has not travelled in Ireland to realise the bad conditions in which the poorest of the peasantry live. I might almost say, in which all the country people live, for Irish farming life is unsatisfactory from top to bottom. Especially so is the way in which the people have been driven out of possession of the good lands. Ireland is a country in which, to put the truth in an extreme way, all the land not worth cultivating is cultivated, and all the land worth cultivating is left out of cultivation. It is a country in which the farmer with ten talents hides them in a napkin, and the peasant with only one talent — or a chipped piece
26 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
of one — puts it to the most marvellous usury. There is no parallel in Europe to the state of ill-cultivation which results from this condition of things. Indeed, as one interpreter of statistics has put it, "such a fact as that 63.1 per cent, (nearly two-thirds !) of the whole country should be given up to hay and pasture is unparalleled in the world." For the rest nearly a quarter of the surface of the country is barren and unfit even for pasture, while a miserable one-and-a-half per cent, is given up to " woods and forests." The remainder — about 12 per cent. — is the difficult kingdom of the plough and the spade.
It is an old story that nearly all the best land in Ireland is in possession of bullocks. The fatness of Meath and the rich glories of the Golden Vale that runs across Munster are too good for human beings. So human beings withdraw,^ with some grumblings, but still for the most part courteously, to America, in order that cattle may come in and possess the land with their idle strength and the will of God be accomplished. Sometimes the purseless people, gathering from some vague part of their souls the conviction that so wasteful a system of land-using proceeds from the will, not of God, but of the Devil, take it into their heads to protest effectively against sin, and a cattle-drive
1 This is less true of the Golden Vale than of Meath. In parts of the Golden Vale the people have shown themselves magnificently tenacious, and no district in Ireland has been more progressive in the matter of building labourers' cottages.
FARMS AND FARMERS 27
ensues. A Ccattle-drive, it may be noted in this connection, means simply what it says — a driving of cattle. It does not mean cattle-maiming or any other kind of brutality. There is more cruelty to animals, I imagine, practised in a single week by the Irish railway-companies, with their inhuman methods of transporting animals, than all the cattle-drivers of the country would be guilty of through an entire year. Occasionally, I know, some ill-balanced person, made brutal by brutal circumstances, creeps out in the night to wreak a hysterical revenge on the dumb beast of a man, who, he thinks, has wronged him. Things like this, are done by isolated, ill-witted individuals ; they are not the characteristic Irish deeds of Irish- men. They are things that happen, as Mr E. E. Prothero, a Conservative Englishman, shows in his "Pleasant Land of France," even among the most humane people. They broke out like a disease among the gentlest people in France — the people of Picardy — in land-war times, just as they broke out during the eighties of last century in Ireland. There are always some men whom excite- ment and poverty make mad.
To return to the Irish — or anti-Irish — system of land-using which gives a preference to bullocks over men and women and joyous children, it must be admitted at once that the cattle-drivers, vaguely conscious though they are of the economic wrong of the present system, would not necessarily them- selves turn that economic wrong into an economic
28 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
right, if they came into possession of the rich lands. Not immediately, at any rate. The National Schools did not educate them to be efficient Irishmen — farmers or anything else. Pro- bably, until Sir Horace Plunkett's organisation and other agencies have spread agricultural common- sense in the country, the cattle-drivers would be quite as uneconomic farmers as the red-faced grazier who rolls about the country on his car with his armed policemen following him on their bicycles. The truth is, the Irish farmer is very often ignorant of the first principles of agriculture. His teachers, whether in or out of school, never made any attempt to give him light on the matter. In many parts of the country he will only till his land when it is too poor to be of any use for grazing purposes. When I was in a town in the southern midlands lately, I noticed that a great deal of the land to the north of the town was tilled while to the south nearly all the fields were grass- green. '* You see," explained a friend who was with me ; " the land on the north side is poor soil, and they have to till it,"
It is the poor people on the poor land, who cultivate the ground with the most passionate earnestness. Consequently, it is in the poorest counties, not in the richest, that you will often find the greatest press of life, the highest social energy, the liveliest minds. I had rather live in the most con2;ested district in Donegal than on the most fertile estate in Meath, and Achill Island
FARMS AND FARMERS 29
interests me more than the Golden Vale. In Meath you may walk a long way and meet no human being and see only an occasional isolated human habitation amid the wastes of lavish fields. The loneliness of this bullock-land came home to me most overwhelmingly when I was told recently how a visitor, tramping the country one Friday, fell in with a herdsmen and besjan to talk of some one who had lately died. The stranger asked the herdsman when the funeral was to be, but the herdsman replied how would he know, as he had seen no one to speak to since he had been to Mass on Sunday. One hears a good deal of the loneli- ness of Canadian prairies, but the loneliness of some Irish pasture-lands is more tragically terrible, for it is a loneliness ghost-haunted by one's vision of the men who once dwelt there with their families and there flow of talk and their little cares. Compare with this rich, idle, solitary country the small brown fragments of farms that crowd into each other's sides among the shelterless hills of Achill. Here, amid the gloom and the dark wind, rises a land populous in parts with cot- tages as a city with human beings. It is a place of tiny dwellings and tiny farms. Out in the fields you see the women labouring and bring- ing wonder into the rocky darkness of the island with their heavy petticoats of red and blue that you will not surpass for colour in a Titian. The men dig the earth into strange shapes — furrows and ridges that you would conceive might be dug
30 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
blindly by nigbt. The social spirit is liere, however, making continual war on the hungry bareness of things. The people delight in dancing and song, and old men scrape a living from twittering fiddles on the earthen cottage floors in the evenings. Irish, of course, is the language of the place, and Irish are the ways. This is the more curious, because no part of Ireland sends the same continuous swarm of people to England and Scotland as does Achill. Every summer, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say, the population of Achill flings itself into British fields to help with the potatoes and turnips and harvests, and it seems as though few but old men and the mothers of children are left to gather in such harvest as there is at home. Excursion trains carry the young and the strong and the ad- venturous from this westernmost part of Ireland to Glasgow or Liverpool for a fare of twelve shillings — I believe there is even a boat which takes a labourer from Westport to Glasgow for six shillings ; and in those few weeks of stooping labour among the potato and corn fields of England and Scotland must be amassed sufficient wealth to keep the farms at home out of bankruptcy during the rest of the year.
Sometimes you will hear foolish people, who may have seen an Irishman making a noise outside a public-house in Liverpool, talking as though the harvesters were a pack of uproarious, drunken, good-for-nothings who go back to Ireland as poor as they left it. The people at home know better.
FARMS AND FARMERS
31
The shop-keepers know better, for they allow debts to run all winter, knowing that they will be paid — with a little interest heaped-up — after the home- coming from the British harvests. There are said to be some 200,000 "uneconomic holdings" in Ireland. Achill must contribute her share to this figure. It seems a ludicrous thing that people should run farms which do not pay any more than they should run shops which do not pay. There is a certain royalty of extravagance about it. Yet many Irish farmers could never make ends meet,^ were it not for the steady gifts of sons and daughters
1 The following budgets of typical families in the congested districts were collected and published by Mr W. Micks in the first Report of the Board (1892). They give a vivid idea of the poverty of some of the Irish farms.
No. I
Receipts and Expenditure of a family in ordinary circumstances,
THE RECEIPTS BEING DERIVED FROM AGRICULTURE, FiSHING
AND Home Industries.
|
Recei'pts. |
Expenditure. |
|||||
|
Sale of heifer or bul- |
Rent . . . . |
£2 0 |
0 |
|||
|
lock |
£4 10 |
0 |
County cess |
0 5 |
8 |
|
|
Sale of five sheep |
3 15 |
0 |
Tea . |
5 17 |
0 |
|
|
» pig • |
3 10 |
0 |
Sugar |
1 19 |
0 |
|
|
„ eggs |
2 4 |
4 |
Meal . |
7 14 |
0 |
|
|
„ flannel ortweed |
3 10 |
0 |
Flour |
1 17 |
6 |
|
|
„ corn |
0 15 |
0 |
Clothing . |
6 8 |
6 |
|
|
„ fish . |
8 0 |
0 |
Tobacco |
2 7 |
8 |
|
|
„ knitting, etc. . |
1 0 |
0 |
One young pig Implements |
0 15 1 4 |
0 9 |
£27 4 4
£30 9 1
Home produce consumed by the family is valued at from £5, 10s. to £10.
32
HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
who have gone to America. Thousands of others, like the Achill people, regularly cross over to Great Britain and raid it for the gold and silver of subsistence.
No. II Receipts and Expenditure op a family in very poor circumstances THE Receipts being derived from Agriculture and Fishing.
Expenditure.
0 0
0 16 0
0 0
0 0
0 0
|
Receipts. |
|
|
Sale of calf |
£2 |
|
„ two slieep „ pig (profit) „ fish |
0 2 3 |
|
„ eggs |
2 |
|
Rent . |
.£1 10 |
0 |
|
County cess |
. 0 2 |
0 |
|
Clerical charges, etc. |
. 0 6 |
0 |
|
Meal . |
. 2 0 |
0 |
|
Flour |
. 1 10 |
0 |
|
Groceries, etc. . |
. 0 10 |
0 |
|
Clothing . |
. 3 0 |
0 |
|
Lights |
. 0 5 |
0 |
|
Utensils, tools, etc. |
. 0 10 |
0 |
|
Tobacco |
. 1 6 |
0 |
0
£9 16 0 £10 19
Home produce consumed by the family is valued at from £12 to
£17.
No. Ill
Receipts and Expenditure of a family in the poorest possible circumstances, the receipts being derived from Agricul- ture and Labour in the locality.
|
Receipts. |
Expenditure. |
|
|
Eggs . . . .£130 Sixty days labour at Is. per day . .300 Herding cattle . .400 |
Rent . . . .£10 County cess . .02 Meal . . . . 5 17 Clothing . . . 0 10 Groceries . . .40 |
0 0 0 0 0 |
£8 3 0
£11 9 0
Home produce consumed by the family is valued at about £6.
These budgets, by the way, do not include families in which there are migratory labourers who bring a few more pounds back from Scotland and England.
f
?^:
'tW~ >
o
a: o
FARMS AND FARMERS 33
Three years ago, the Irish Department of Agri- culture issued a Report, showing the number of Irish men and women who went out on this yearly- adventure to England and Scotland. It was estimated that the number of Achill workers who temporarily left Ireland in 1905 on this errand was between 1500 and 1600, the entire population of Achill being, I believe, between 6000 and 7000. The term "Achill workers," however, covers others besides the people of Achill, and is used technically to describe the labourers from Achill and neigh- bouring places who go to Scotland — and especially to Ayrshire — to help in the work of potato-lifting.
These labourers are engaged in squads for the season, and it is calculated that in a season of four- and-a-half months one of them may with luck save about eight pounds. The Achill labourers are said to be distinguished from the other Irish migratory workers in several respects. Women take part in the adventure as well as the men ; they are, if anything, more numerous than the men. Further, " there is more of the family group relationship among the workers," and other workers are not in the same way engaged in squads and for the season. At the same time, I imagine that a good many people leave Achill for Great Britain every year who are not classified as "Achill workers." The Connacht men who go to England must include a share of them, for I have talked with men in Achill familiarly about England and one of them even sang me a song about " Sweet Liverpool." c
34 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
The Connacht man with the keenest eye to prosperity is said to go to Lancashire for the haying, then to Lincolnshire or Cambridgeshire for the corn harvest, and after that to Warwick- shire or Staffordshire for the potato-lifting. If he has a saving disposition, and is fortunate enough to have no fortnight's spell of unemployment, he may be able to take £20 home with him as the result of five months' work. The number of labourers who left Ireland in 1905 to help in the work of British farms was 14,830. Mr W. G. S. Adams, the statistican who prepared the Eeport for the Department of Agriculture, estimates the savings brought back (or sent back) by all these people to Ireland in a year at about £275,000. A heroic-looking sum, which does infinite credit to the Irish peasant but reflects somewhat on a system which leaves the fields of Ireland deserted and unprofitable.
The lives of the majority of these labourers and of many of the small farmers of the west of Ireland, I think, are the strongest disproof that could be desired of the common theory that the Irish are by nature a lazy people. "The western peasantry," declared Sir Horace Plunkett, in a recent article in "The Nineteenth Century," "when working for wages in England and Scotland, or engaged in a struggle for bare life in almost impossible physical surroundings, develop surpris- ing industry and resourcefulness." Another close observer, the editor of "The Irish Nation," wrote
FARMS AND FARMERS 35
the other daj in a similar mood : " The Connemara man's capacity for spade-work on his own soil, to which he is so intensely devoted, is almost miraculous." I remember some years ago a friend of mine, a Unionist and a doubter of Ireland, went to Donegal on some agricultural business for a Dublin Castle department, and came back with the same story. " I used to believe that all the Irish were lazy," he wrote to me, " but since I came to Donegal I have seen men forcing a livelihood out of patches of rocks and stones, where any other people I ever met" — and my friend had enthusiastic experience of farm- work both in England and Scotland — "would have thrown themselves over the cliffs in despair." The truth is, there is plenty of energy in Ireland. It is, however, as often as not, energy wasted through ignorance or through want of capital or because the Irish farmer is most demoniacally energetic where being energetic is least worth while. The tragedy of Ireland, indeed, is not so much the tragedy of want of character — though it is partly that — as the tragedy of waste of character. Ireland is a country, not only of wasted fields, but of wasted men and women. And of all the conditions that waste the men and women of the nation there is none more wasteful than this system of settling them on small, hard-hearted farms.
Sir Horace Plunkett, whom I have quoted already — he is one of the few writers worth quot-
36 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
ing about Ireland — has again and again drawn attention to this wasteful sort of land-distribution. It is especially wasteful because, not only are the holdings in the poor districts absurdly small, but frequently they lie about in scattered parts like the torn limbs of Pentheus. " Often," as Sir Horace puts it, "a holding of three or four acres will be divided into as many as a dozen or twenty patches, lying intermingled with patches held by other tenants." It is like a child's puzzle of Find the Farm. More inconvenient and more primitive still is it when the fragmentary estates are shaken up regularly in the basket and redistributed accord- ing to the system known as "rundale." I re- member when I was driving along the coast road on the north of Donegal, one day, I noticed the fields running up from the side of the road in little lean strips, looking much as I had always pictured the lands of village communities in my imagination, except for their ill-fed appearance. I asked a neighbour the meaning of these strange shapes. "Well," he said,/' they divide it like that so as to make sure everybody has a good bit." One cannot help having a grave doubt as to their success in this laudable aim.
I will say nothing more about the Irish farmer here, but I suspect he will appear in a good many of the succeeding chapters. I hope I have been fair to him. I only wish the generations had treated him less scurvily. Ireland of the coming times must be built largely in farm-houses and in
FARMS AND FARMERS 37
labourers' cottages, and therefore the farmer and the farm-labourer are to me potential heroes. The building of Ireland, however, will be at the hands of a new race of men, more cultured, more in- dependent, more tolerant and at the same time more intolerant, than the present. Ireland has escaped the dehumanising shock of the Industrial Revolution. She will, I believe, discover an industrial life that is nearer the life of the farms than is the industrial life of most western countries at present. She will fill her countrysides, I trust, with energy and music and exuberant living, and in doing this will beat out a new civilisation upon the anvil of the world.
I had better, perhaps, say before closing this chapter, that there are many country places in Ireland where the lands are rich and yet not given up to death by grazing, but are cul- tivated as well as the means of the occupier will permit on a common-sense system of rota- tion of crops (though it is surprising to see how the principle of the rotation of crops is ignored in some districts which have a fairly comfortable look.) These farms have well-kept hedges and iron gates that swing clear on hinges of prosperity. The farmers' carts lumber along the roads with brightly-painted red and blue cribs. The harness on the horse is not make-shift but stout and well- kept. The potato-plants are sprayed carefully to a blue tint with the copper sulphate mixture to keep away the blight. Even on the careless farms,
38 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
however, potato spraying is common, for very few- farmers entertain the early religious objection of one stout conservative that to put chemicals on the potatoes was an interference with the will of God. The farm-house of the prosperous sort has little plantations of trees around it, and an orchard and flower-beds, and often a lawn for games. The houses are stone-finished and four-square and roofed with slate — not so beautiful as the old rain-marked thatched houses, perhaps, but much more prosperous and settled-looking. Even in these places of success, however, the atmosphere of sleepy fatness which you will sometimes see in the south of England is uncommon. The differ- ence between Ireland and the south of England, I should say, is the difference between a dreaming country and a sleepy country. Not that either Ireland or the south of England can be compre- hensively defined in these phrases, but there is an element of truth in the contrast.
I may note another thing. Irish countrysides are so different from each other that it is not easy to find an interpreting word which will cover them all. Still, there is one thing which gives a unity — a personality, as it were — to Ireland. It is the glory of light which comes towards evening and rests on every field and on every hill and in the street of every town like a strange tide. Everywhere in Ireland, north, south, east, and west, the evening air is, as a fine living poet has perceived, a shimmer as of diamonds. It gives a
cc
J ti
H <
D
FARMS AND FARMERS 39
new wonderfulness to the untidy farms, to the horses out in the fields as they munch the darken- ing grass with a noise, to the carelessly clad farmer hanging over a gate with invisible lapwings crying above his head, to the stained white little house with its oil-lamp not yet lit, and the glow of the turf-fire growing momently stronger. I believe and hope that this light is the symbol of some good thing which will one day find its way into the breast and limbs of the Irish country- man and make him, not only an imaginative and therefore progressive farmer, but a man of high dreams and a hig-h heart who will establish in Ireland a kingdom of the spirit, beautiful and adventurous.
CHAPTER III
MARRIAGES AND MATCH-MAKING
It is unlucky to marry for love, according to an Irish proverb.^ Ireland, if one can trust the general belief, is a land of marriages of convenience rather than of marriages of romance, and un- doubtedly it is also a land of happy marriages. Consequently, the proverb seems to have a kind of negative justification. I think myself that there has been a good deal of exaggeration as to the extent to which the match-making custom prevails in Ireland. Certainly, there has been some exaggeration regarding the evil effects of the custom. Still, to any one who respects the economic or social independence of woman, it is an uncomfortable thing that a custom of this sort should be so general as it is, even if it is not a frequent begetter of tragic consequences. The mind of young Ireland is at the present moment in the beginnings of revolt against it. In ancient Ireland, it is interesting to note, it was the man who always brought the marriage portion — not the woman, as it is at present. As this was a
^ A contradictory proverb on the same subject runs : " Marry for love, and induster for riches."
40
MARRIAGES AND MATCH-MAKING 41
survival from times when men bought their wives, the modern method must be considered on the whole as an advance on it. At the same time, the older system had many points of superiority. Under it a certain amount of the marriage portion became the woman's to do with as she liked. Married women's property was secured to them in Ireland many centuries before the Married Women's Property Act conferred equal rights upon women in England. The present system in Ireland works out less advantageously for women. Now, it is the husband who appropriates the marriage-portion, or most of it. Sometimes, he even uses the portion which his wife brings him to marry off his sisters. And so the same fortune may play a part in the making of many marriages, and pass from man to man, almost intact.
Match-making, of course, is known in every country where money is reverenced, and it is not only in Ireland that men marry with an eye to a dowry. Still, Irish match-making is a distinct institution. It is not an unheard-of, though it is an uncommon, thing in rural Ireland for the woman never to have seen the man she is going to marry until he calls at her father's house to take away the dowry. Cases even have been known where the girl had not set eyes on her husband till the marriage-morning. The marriage is frequently arranged without any reference to her tastes and wishes. Her father comes home one evening and tells her that he has got a hus-
42 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
band for her, and she can but wait in patience and wonder till the young man calls.
Marriages like these are brought about by a curious machinery. It is often difficult to know who first suggests them. Sometimes, it is an old busy-body with an appetite for glory. He casts his glance at a young girl and learns by some means or other the amount of the fortune which her father is willing to give with her. After this, he puzzles his brains to find a suitable husband. He picks out some farmer of substance and broaches the matter to him in hints, say, during a drink at a fair.^ If the farmer seems inclined for the marriage, the match-maker goes oflT and arranges a conference between him and the girl's father. It is then the bargaining begins, the girl's father doing his utmost to lessen his pro- spective son-in-law's demands by it may be fifty sovereigns or it may be a cow. Indecent scenes of heat and miserly excitement in connection with
1 Mr Stephen Gwynn, in " A Holiday in Connemara," gives a description of a match-making party, in which eight or ten of the boy's friends called at the girl's house and met an equal number of her people. " The host sat at the head of the centre table ; on his right was the suitor's spokesman, on his left the bride's spokes- man." This curious parliament settled the terms of the marriage. " Lastly, the father dealt with the question of the ceremonial heifer, which is always given with a bride by any father who wishes to hold up his head in the country. He must buy one, he said, having no heifer beast that he would think good enough to send with his daughter." The girl's mother was unofficially present during the proceedings in a wall-cupboard behind curtains. The evening ended in a dance, the old men sitting over their liquor at a table in the corner till morning.
MARRIAGES AND MATCH-MAKING 43
these preliminary meetings are a favourite subject with Irish novelists, and indeed there is plenty of material both for satire and tragedy in the match- making business. Still, I think the novelists ex- aggerate the dark side. If the custom were altogether cruel and selfish in practice, Irish homes would not be so full of a pleasant atmosphere of affectionateness as they usually are.
As a matter of fact, the custom of match- making does not often seem to involve the forcing of husbands on unwilling girls, as we might at first think would be probable. Girls, I imagine, are not forced into marriage against their will in Ireland more frequently than in other countries. If the girl is not always at liberty to choose a husband, she is generally at liberty to refuse a husband she does not want. I know a girl who had to leave home in order to escape being married to an old man with money, who had been afraid to get married till his mother died, but the situation, I believe, is not particularly Irish. The very fact that the girls can and do leave their homes so freely is a proof that Irish women are not so slavishly dependent on their fathers as, in the dislike of match-making, one may be inclined to think. Very few of them find it necessary to leave their homes, even if they refuse to fall in with their father's choice of a husband for them. The ordinary aflfectionate father will be guided by his daughter's preference in arranging a match, and so it comes about that, even where
44 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
the custom of match-making prevails, the young people in kindly households choose their own husbands or wives as unconstrainedly as if they were in America.
Perhaps, it is the husband rather than the father who is the least commendable person in many country marriages. Money is often a rare and precious thing to a young farmer, and since it is the custom to give dowries, a marriage without a dowry would seem to him to be lacking in one of its most agreeable incidents just as a marriage without a wedding-dress would be re- garded as tragically imperfect by a bride. High as may be his ideal of the purity of the home, his ideal of marriage is often only an ideal of convenience and comfort. Consequently, he does not feel that he is belittling either himself or the woman he marries in giving preference to girls in proportion to the fortunes they bring. Like all men, of course, he will take a good-looking woman with a smaller fortune than he will expect with a plain one ; for the Irish, I think, are beyond most people lovers of personal beauty. Still, it is often said that a plain woman with a bit of money has a better chance of a good marriage than a handsome woman with none. Sometimes, when a very plain woman is mentioned, you will hear remarks such as: "It will need a good lump of money to get her a husband." But, the money being sufficient, the husband will ultimately turn up even for her.
MARRIAGES AND MATCH-MAKING 45
Many girls, knowing the demands of husbands, do not wait for their fathers to make matches for them. They go out to America or elsewhere and slave and scrape till they have a little treasure collected, and, a few years after their departure from home, they appear in their native parish again. It soon becomes known that they have a little money put by and are willing to settle down, should a suitable home be offered. Re- turned emigrants of this sort are not at all uncommon in parts of the west. Irish girls would rather marry Irish husbands than Americans any day, though, it is said, they are generally deter- mined to take no husband who is not worthy of the fortune they have earned with so much labour and adventure. If a girl who has been to America finds after a month or two, or a year or two, of waiting at home that no suitable husband is to be had, she as likely as not packs up her trunk and again steams off for New York with an invincible heart. Her courage and determination will appear comical or tragical, according as you consider her an isolated and ambitious figure or a symbol of the eternal Odyssey of Ireland — the Odyssey that does not end in a return.
With regard to the girl who has come home from America, I may say that there are two opinions about her in rural Ireland. Progressive young farmers are rather attracted by her, because travel has sharpened her intelligence and taught her many desirable things about food and dress
46 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
and housekeeping. She is awake and ambitious and is a wife of whom one may be proud before one's neighbours. Other people take a less favourable view of her. They say that America has spoiled her, and taught her only airs and extravagance and that she is no longer fit to be the wife of a simple man. " Better one pound of Irish money than ten of American. That's what all the people about here will tell you," said a cross-looking old man who spoke to me on the subject one day. He meant, of course, that an Irish-American girl would run her husband into ten times as much expense as a home- staying girl.
He declared that American girls were only wasters of money, who would lead their husbands a terrible and ruinous dance. They had got used in America to all sorts of things and were not con- tent to live in an ordinary way like other people.
The chief marriage trouble in Ireland, however, is not that so many people marry for money : it is that so many people do not marry at all, or not until very late. The labourer marries early, because he is as well ofi" at twenty as he is likely to be at forty. The labourer, too, is free from the worries of match-making, though he has usually sufficient self-interest to choose for a wife a woman who will be able to add to the income of the house at times of turnip- thinning, hay-making, and the corn harvest. The most unhappily placed man in Ireland as regards marriage is the eldest son on a small farm. The
MARRIAGES AND MATCH-MAKING 47
other sons adventure forth to America, to England, anywhere out of Ireland, and marry when and 'V whom they will. The eldest son remains on the farm to which he is heir and which cuts him off from all freedom of life until his father is in the grave. The farm does not produce sufficient wealth for two generations of married people, and the eldest son, being usually a dutiful person, waits on and on, obeying his parents, and filling the position of a farm-labourer, without the farm- labourer's hire or his freedom to marry and establish a new home in the world.
This tragedy of the eldest son is common in all parts and provinces of Ireland. It is as common in Protestant as in Catholic places. It is as common in valleys that look rich and prosperous as it is on hill-sides that are stony and barren. As a consequence of this, in Ireland the eldest son is often the last of the family to grow up. It does not seem an abuse of language that unmarried men should be called "boys" and unmarried women "girls," no matter how old they are, as is the custom through the country. (As an in- stance of this custom^ I have heard a man describ- ing how^, when he w^as doing some work near a house, a girl ran out and interrupted him — " a middle-aged girl of about forty," he said.) The eldest son seems to me to be frequently a middle- aged boy. His parents treat him as a boy no matter what his age, and, as often as not, he remains one till they die.
48 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
I have heard that among the very poor people the old age pensions have made a difference in the position of the eldest son. His energies are no longer altogether occupied in making ends meet for his parents and himself His parents with their pensions are almost self-supporting, so that he is free to go out and look for a wife if he wants one. According to report he has already in many cases done so.
Ireland is largely a country of late marriages and of few marriages. Emigration has drained the country to an unnatural degree of the young men and women of the marrying age, and those who remain are, as I have shown, frequently unable to marry until all the exuberance of life has gone out of them. Ireland stands third from the bottom in a list of thirty countries, whose marriage-rates have been compared bythe Registrar- General of England. During a recent period of ten years, Ireland has shown an annual average of only ten people married for every 1000 of the population. Of the thirty countries compared, Servia has the highest rate — 19.5 per 1000 : England, along with Wales, is twelfth in the list with 15.8 ; France sixteenth with 15.1. This low Irish marriage-rate has, it is only right to say, been rising steadily during the past twenty years.
The average birth-rate in Ireland gives as serious cause for alarm — at least, for desire for change — as the marriage-rate. During the ten years, 1894-1903, it reached a lower average than any
MARRIAGES AND MATCH-MAKING 49
of the thirty countries to which I have referred except France. The low French birth-rate, how- ever, is due to the infertility of marriages ; the low Irish rate to their fewness.
This last fact reminds us that things in Ireland are not so bad as a superficial glance at the statistics would suggest. It has been pointed out by Mr F. F. Montague in " Leabhar na h-]j]ireann " that, while the birth-rate per head of the popula- tion has declined rapidly during the last ten years in most countries, in Ireland during the same period it has remained stationary. The same writer quotes a paper read before the London Statistical Society in 1906 to show that, if we consider the birth-rate, not with reference to the whole population of the country, but with reference to the population of a child-bearing age, the position of Ireland is still happier. Ireland, it is proved, is inhabited by almost the most fertile* race in Europe, and " Ireland and all its divisions alone among all the countries for which figures could be obtained show an increased fertility." Protestant Ireland and Catholic Ireland share this virtue of fertility as they share so many others.
Until the last paragraph or so, we have been discussing marriage for the most part with reference to the farming classes. Marriage, it may be said, is a subject of perpetual interest and speculation with them. If old country-women meet a pleasant girl on the road and get into talk with her, it is unlikely they will proceed on their journey without
D
50 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
having made a few humorous observations on husbands and marriage. Among other classes there are few marriage customs which differentiate Ireland from America or England. The gentry, of course, follow the English fashion, and the most notable thing about the town artisan is that, like the artisan elsewhere, he gets married by preference on a holiday like Easter Monday and goes off with his bride for a day's excursion.
Among the working classes in one Ulster town, according to an exaggerator, it is the way of the women to support their husbands. He affirms that it is the ambition of unmarried girls in the town to get sufficiently well-paid work to be able to keep a husband. A typical girl, he declares, will go to the clergyman and give him notice that she is going to marry, say, Jimmy Brown. The clergyman warns her that Jimmy is an irregular, thriftless character, who cannot be relied on to earn a steady living. "And what does that matter ? " cries the girl. " Amn't I as well able to keep a man as Lizzie M'Keown that was married on Joe Harbison last week ? " In Ulster, people — average people — are not married " to " but always " on " each other.
The young Protestant in the commercial and professional classes has also the reputation of being something of a materialist in his love-making. It is said that, when he hears of a girl who might suit him as a wife, he asks three questions : " What's her religion ? How old is she ? Has
MARRIAGES AND MATCH-MAKING 51
she any money ? " Sometimes, however, he falls in love before he knows what he is doing and marries a poor girl, or even a middle-aged one, or, more terrible still, a Catholic.
Mixed marriages — marriages between Catholics and Protestants — are, as I show elsewhere, as frequent as is wise, though usually, so far as I have seen, either the husband or the wife takes the " mixed " element out of the marriage by becoming converted to the religion of the other. The clergy of all the churches oppose these marriages tooth and nail. The Catholic clergy are often blamed for the intensity of their opposition, an opposition which, I imagine, has become more uncompromising since the present Pope was raised to the Papal Chair. Within the last few years, a Catholic, whose marriage with a Protestant girl an Irish Bishop refused to sanction, had to cross over to England to get a priest of his own church to marry him, and no doubt the same kind of thing had frequently happened. Protestants whom this annoys ought in fairness to consider the attitude of their own clergy in regard to the question of mixed marriages. Some years ago I remember hearing from a broad-minded Presby- terian minister how he himself had prevented a mixed marriage in the south of Ireland. A Presbyterian soldier in a Scottish regiment, which was quartered in a southern town, fell in love with a Catholic girl, and again and again besought her to marry him. The girl at last consented on
52 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
condition that the soldier would become a Catholic, and the soldier, probably not caring two pins for any religion, promised to do so. The Presbyterian minister heard of this and rushed off to the Colonel, urging the latter to save the man from so fatal a step. As a result, the Colonel immediately bundled the man out of the town and had him transferred to another regiment beyond the circle of temptation. The minister boasted of all this to me as though he had performed a noble work. Perhaps he had.
It may not be out of place here to remark that love-making is a good deal commoner in the towns than in the country, and in Protestant places than in Catholic places. The common joke among country boys in Ulster — " Are you doin' any coortin' this weather " ? — springs from social conditions in which the sexes meet on easy and intimate terms. These conditions have their bad as well as their good side. Ulster pays for its greater sexual freedom by a frequency of illegiti- mate births unknown in the other provinces.
An illegitimate birth, of course, does not always imply immorality of a gross sort, and the people recognise this for all their Puritanism. I have known more than one admirable woman in country places whose child had no legal father and whose neighbours were sufficiently human in their philosophy to treat her as they would any married woman. Usually, the child is called frankly after its father, though not always. Its respectability
MARRIAGES AND MATCH-MAKING 53
is even measured in part by the father's — or supposed father's — position in life. I once was startled to hear a very religious lady, who was praising a farm-labourer say : " And indeed it's no wonder he is a decent man, for they say his father was a Presbyterian minister." No one need construe this as a thrust at the Presbyterian clergy, who are as clean-living a body of men as could be found in any country. Even among them, how- ever, a rare exception will be found. As for the laity, there are a sufficient number of exceptions among them to make " Holy Willie's Prayer " a very intelligible poem in Ulster.
On the other hand, I think the Ulster atmosphere is sufficiently clean if you contrast it with that of the majority of civilised countries. But the sensualist disguised as a lover is unquestionably one of the persons of the play. The clergy and the parents make no attempt to teach sexual common- sense to the young. Among the middle classes in Belfast, hundreds of youths fling their arms round girls with an undesirable promiscuity, and, indeed, consider the girls rather dull — " chil- blains " is an expressive word I have heard them described by — if they object to the business. The curious thing is that practically all this amorousness which goes on within the middle classes them- selves is quite moral from a conventional point of view. It is none the less demoralising on this account, for, where it exists, there can of course be no intelligent friendship between the sexes.
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The young male amorists, too, frequently end by going forth on adventures among women outside their own class.
I think, nevertheless, there is a good deal of respect shown to women in Ireland. A youth does not take a girl into public-houses for drink in any part of Ireland as you will see youths doing in London and in Manchester. Neither will you see him embracing her on tram-cars, and in all sorts of public places, with the frequency which is so odd a feature of the social phantasmagoria in cities like London. In London these public embraces seem to pass without notice. In Belfast, in the day- light hours, hugging couples would, I am afraid, be figures of satire for small boys.
I am getting away from the subject of marriages and matchmaking, however. Before closing the chapter, let me return to the point, if only to mention one curious custom connected with marriages. It is considered the right thing in some parts of Ireland, if you are going along the road with a gun and meet a newly married couple driving on a car, to fire a shot into the air in their honour. I have seen a man suddenly catch up his gun, in a public-house, where he was hav- ing a drink, and rush out into the road to fire a shot skywards with every sign of enthusiasm when a bridal couple had driven by.
The excitements of wedding-days have lessened during the last century, for a hundred years ago — even, I have heard, a generation ago — there were
MARRIAGES AND MATCH-MAKING 55
still traces of something that looked like the cus- tom of marriage by capture in many country places. Something more than traces, indeed, if half the stories about eighteenth century abduc- tions can be believed. I do not know whether the abduction habit had its origin in the Gaelic 2)arts of Ireland, or among the invaders from England. Whichever may be the case, there is no doubt that young men in those days often sought girls who had fortunes by force where they now seek them by peaceable persuasion. In 1634 the Irish Parliament had to pass a measure for punishing those who " carried away maydens that be inheritors," and a century later abduction was made a capital offence. It was easy to break through the spirit of the law, however, for if the girl was placed in front of the man on the horse on which he carried her off, she, and not he, was technically responsible for the abduction.
The excitements of eighteenth century Ireland, it must be remembered, were the excitements of an abnormal country out of which many of the finest elements had been driven by persecution and war.
I am assured by a friend that traces of marriage by capture were still to be found in some parts of Cavan till fairly recent years, and that it was not an unknown thing for the bridegroom to ride up chal- lengingly on horseback to the bride's house, and for the bride to climb out to him through the window. This was but a tradition and a ritual, the meanino- of which had probably been long forgotten.
CHAPTER IV
STORIES AND SUPERSTITIONS (OR WHATEVER YOU LIKE TO CALL THEM)
It is a common opinion that the Irish are very superstitious, and, reading some books, you would imagine that a great number of Irish men and women passed their spare time in trances on the hill- sides, hearing the music and beholding the goings-forth of the fairy hosts. Ireland, however, is by no means a country of visionaries. I think that for every visionary you meet with, you will discover ten or even twenty people who occupy their idleness with gambling on the English horse- races. Still, there is no doubt that the old people — especially in the least Anglicised parts — have plenty of strange and incredible stories to tell, though the grown-up boys and girls smile across the fire at them with materialistic wisdom.
There are few parts of the country where you will not meet with some belief in witch-craft. Especially common is the belief in that form of witch-craft by means of which the butter is taken from your cows to enrich a wicked neigh- bour's churn. I have heard it said that old women are still to be found here and there in the fields
56
STORIES AND SUPERSTITIONS 57
on May Eve, gathering herbs over which to murmur their butter-stealing spells. Usually, however, these moony ceremonies do not seem to be a necessary part of the bewitchment. " A very small drop of milk taken from the cow is enough to work the charm," is the account a girl from the midlands gives of the business. It seems to be with the idea of preventing the milk in its pure state from failing into doubtful hands that a farmer's wife in Meath, of whom I have heard, never sends a present of milk to a poor neighbour without first putting a pinch of salt in it. " It is not right," as the girl from whom I had the story said, " to let milk out into the wind without putting salt into it." The same girl told me a curious story of butter-stealing in her neighbour- hood. There was a woman, she said, living not far from her father's, who was noticed getting a powerful lot of butter off her few cows. One day her mother determined to get to the heart of the mystery, and went to the woman's house. She said when she came home that she had found the woman standing on a creepie stool with her head down into the churn and her rosary in her hand. " It was praying she was," she declared, " but maybe to the devil." The girl's mother cer- tainly was inclined to believe that something dishonest was afoot, for she herself had been brought up in a home where there was a charm nailed to the bottom of the big churn to protect the butter.
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I have heard many similar stories of stolen butter in County Mayo. One of them told of an old woman, with one lean cow, who always managed to have two crocks full of butter to take with her to market — much more than she could ever have come by honestly. She was going to market one day, with her ass carrying the two crocks, when, just as they were crossing a bridge, something broke, and the crocks of butter fell out into the road and were smashed. Well, would you believe it, whatever was the matter with the butter, no dog or bird or beast would touch or taste it, but it lay there on the road rotting till the sun had melted it and the horses and cattle had trodden it away. It was some- thing more than butter that was in it, my in- formant concluded.
If stories like these were only told as anecdotes to make a fireside interesting, they would have comparatively little value as revelations of the mind of a people ; but they are nearly always related as a part of the history of the story-teller's neighbourhood and even of his family. Usually they deal with matters that have come within his own experience — real or imagined. When they go back as far as the days of his grandfathers and greatgrandfathers, they have a way of being more artistically shaped and more definite in detail. One does not often hear as full a story concerning contemporary or recent events as the story of the scholar and the three black bottles,
STORIES AND SUPERSTITIONS 59
which I heard as an old true story during my last holiday. It related to the time when the poor scholars used to be going about the country — the poor scholars who, as every one knows, had knowledge more than common men. A learned man of them arrived one night in a farm- house, where, churn as they might, they had been getting hardly any butter from the milk. " Put a pot on the fire," he said to the farmer's wife, when he heard the story, " and boil some milk in it, and I'll find out who it is that's stealing your butter." He got a large black bottle from the farmer's wife, and, when he had sealed and corked it, he put it into the pot where the milk was boiling, saying a number of words that you couldn't understand while he did so. After a while, the bottle cracked, and with that there was a sound like a cry far away from the house. " Listen to that," said the scholar. " I'll put in another bottle and you will hear something more." He closed up a second black bottle, and put it into the pot, saying more words over it. When in due course this gave a crack, there was a shriek, as of a woman in great pain, much nearer the house than the first cry. "Do you hear that?" said the scholar, becoming interested in his work. " It isn't lonff till she'll be here now and she yelling in her pain. So bolt the door and don't let her in till I tell you." With that he took a third bottle, and saw that the cork was in it, and was just going to put it in the pot, when there
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came a loud banging and shrieking at the door. " Let me in, let me in ! " cried a voice from the outside, whining and supplicating. "Oh, you're killing me, you're killing me. If anything else cracks in me, I'll surely die." The man at the fire told them to wait, however, and to make her confess that she had stolen the butter, and promise never to do it again, while all the time the groaning and moaning went on as if she were in fearful torment. As he put the third bottle into the boiling milk, she let a shriek out of her and confessed, so he took the bottle out again, and told them to let her in. They let her in, and saw that it was an old woman from near the place. She confessed everything, and promised to give up the butter, so they let her off. After that, they were never troubled with scarcity of butter again.
Mr W. B. Yeats, whose "Celtic Twilight" should be read by all who are interested in Irish beliefs and visions, tells us in his collection of "Irish Fairy and Folk Tales," that, when the butter has been bewitched as in the story of the three black bottles, " sometimes the coulter of a plough will be heated red-hot, and the witch will rush in, crying out that she is burning. A new horse-shoe or donkey-shoe, heated and put under the churn, with three straws, if possible, stolen at midnight from over the witch's door, is quite infallible." I do not wish in the present book, however, to quote passages from books
A c;ap:lic story-teller.
(Bridiict Costcllo, of I he Cladclagh. who won a prize at a recent Oireaclitas for her story-telling.)
STORIES AND SUPERSTITIONS 61
which everybody ought to have read for them- selves, but rather to give a sense of what I have seen with my own eyes, and heard with my own ears, in Ireland or in the company of Irish people. Consequently, I will only mention here those beliefs which I know to be in existence, because I have met and spoken to the people who believed in them.
Very intimately connected with the belief in the stealing of butter by witchcraft is the belief in the evil eye or something like it. This belief may be expressed in the words of a Meath girl, who de- clared that " any one that has a grudging eye, to cast it on a live thing would make it decay away if it was not given to them." One of the tradi- tional charms to protect cattle from being bewitched or " grudged " she described as follows. Get a bit of string, and put a certain number of knots on it, saying a prayer over each knot. The string should then be tied to the animal's tail in case any one had overlooked or grudged it. Another charm, " when a nice beast has been grudged," is to get a bit of the oTudo^er's coat and burn it under the beast's nose.
It is not only from witches with the gift for steal- ing butter — there are some delightful stories, by the way, of witches who transform themselves into hares, and milk their neighbours' cows in this guise — and from people with malice in their eyes that the imaginative peasant apprehends danger. There is still plenty of belief in fairies in the country —
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though it is not nearly so common, I think, as the belief in witchcraft — and in spite of the fact that fairies are known as " good people," sensitive parents none the less object to having their children carried off by them. A Mayo man lately told me how, when he was a child, he was never sent out of the house on a message down the road without someone putting a coal or something of the sort in his pocket to protect him from unseen harm. There is no need, on the other hand, to suppose that it is necessarily a tragic fate for a child to be taken off by the fairies. A good many years ago, there was a lame boy in Mulranny on the coast of Mayo who used to be sent out to mind the cattle. One time he disappeared for two days, and, when he came home, he said that he had been with the fairies. As a proof that something supernatural had happened to him, he went out where there was only grass then, but where there are houses, and a hotel, and a railway station now, and he prophesied that a bis house would be built here, and another house there, and something corresponding to a rail- way station in yet a third place. He pointed out the exact spots where all the new buildings in Mulranny stand to-day, and not only this but he traced the line of all the foundations. This, it must be re- membered, was in days long before any one expected the great hotel to be built, and before there was any thought of railways in those parts. I heard the story as a true one from a man who himself was brought up in Mulranny.
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I heard another story from him of a young woman who was stolen by the fairies in the same county — a story that, no doubt, has its parallels in other districts, for I seem to have heard something like it before. There was once a young farmer, he said, who lived in such-and-such a place, and who did not believe in the fairies, so that he would walk past a certain fairy rath on any night of the year without caring. One night he was going along the road, and had got past the rath when he saw a curious sight coming towards him. This was a coffin being carried by three tall, dark men, with no one in the place where the fourth man should have been. The young farmer thought this was queer. However, out of respect to the dead, he offered to help the bearers of the coffin, and went over and put his shoulder in the fourth place. The bearers walked forward in silence, but they had not gone far when one of the three said that it was time they had a rest. With that they laid the coffin down on the road. The young farmer may have looked away for a minute, or something of the sort. Anyway, he suddenly woke up to the fact that the three others had disappeared, and that he was alone with the coffin lying at his feet on the road.
After a while, when the others showed no signs of coming back, something impelled him to look inside the coffin, and there he saw a beautiful, fair-haired young woman, dressed not like a corpse at all, but in her ordinary clothes. She opened
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her eyes while the young man was looking inside, and after a minute she sat up in the coffin, and he, being quite fearless, helped her to stand up and to come out on to the road. He asked her how she came to be there, but in answer to all his questions she only shook her head, so that he thought she must be dumb, and, not knowing what to do with her, took her along with him to his house. Well, she lived there for a good many years, looking after the house and keeping every- thing in beautiful order, but never opening her mouth to speak.
Among other things, she knitted him a long- sleeved vest or waistcoat, of which he was very proud. He was wearing this at a fair twenty or thirty miles away from his home one day, when he saw two men, an elderly man and a young one, looking at him very hard. First they looked at his waistcoat, and then they looked at him, and in the end they came up and asked him where he had got the vest. He asked them what they wanted to know for, and they told him that there was some kind of a stitch or pattern in it which they recognised, and that they only knew one person who could do that kind of work, and that they had lost her some years ago. The young man became interested in what he heard, and, thinking that this might be the father and brother of the girl in his house, he told them the story of the coffin and the three tall dark men, and asked them to go home with him and see the girl. They went, and,
STORIES AND SUPERSTITIONS 65
sure enough, it was the old man's daughter. They were in great delight at first, but, when they found that none of them could get the girl to speak a word, they became as mournful as they had pre- viously been happy. The girl then went off with the two strangers, and the young farmer promised to go and see her soon. Some nights after this, he was walking down past the fairy rath again when he heard voices near him. He stopped to listen and discovered that, whoever the speakers were, they were talking about the young girl, and grumbling about how they had been prevented from carrying her off on that first night. " Well," said one of them with satisfaction, " he has never been able to make her talk any way." " No," said another with a malicious chuckle, " and never will. It's not likely he'll ever notice that silver pin behind her ear, and pull it out so that she'll get back her speech."
On hearing this, the young man hurried off as fast as he could without being perceived, and on the next morning at break of day he rode off to the distant farm in which the girl's family lived. He found the girl sitting over the kitchen fire, and going up behind her, he saw the silver pin at the back of her ear just as he expected. He pulled this out, and no sooner had he done so than she got back her power of speech, and sat up and began talking to him. After that, her father and brother came in, and everybody was so happy that a match was immediately made of
E
66 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
it between the girl and the young farmer. It is to be presumed that they lived happily ever afterwards.
Of course, the fairy whose credit is most generally and firmly established in Ireland is not the fairy who steals children or beautiful young women, sometimes leaving a changeling in their place, but the Banshee — the fairy-woman whose cry is a portent of coming death. You will not have to go into the Irish-speaking districts, or even into the Catholic districts, to find people who believe in the Banshee. You will meet Protestants in County Antrim who believe that there is a Banshee in their family, and who say that they have heard its terrible cry. Occasionally, too, one meets among the Ulster Protestants with the belief in witches, but the last County Antrim girl who said to me that she knew a witch added significantly that the witch was a " Eoman Catholic."
To return to the Banshee, I have never myself met any one who had seen her in human shape, but that she has a human and alterable form many of the legends attest. " Sometimes," declares Lady Wilde in " Ancient Legends of Ireland," " the Banshee assumes the form of some sweet-singing virgin of the family who died young, and has been given the mission by the invisible powers to become the harbinger of coming doom to her mortal kindred. Or she may be seen at night as a shrouded woman, crouched beneath the trees, lamenting with veiled face ; or flying past in the
STORIES AND SUPERSTITIONS Q7
moonlight, crying bitterly." Another portent of death, comparable to the Banshee, is the C6iste Bodhar — the Death (or, rather. Deaf) Coach — which, according to some, is a kind of hearse drawn by headless horses. I know a man of fine intellect from Connemara who declares that he has seen the phantom. He says that he was driving out one day with some other people when they saw the silent shadow of a hearse drawn by four horses passing along the side of the road. There was no hearse in reality to cast this shadow.
Besides the Banshee and the Soundless Coach, there are numerous other evil portents in Ireland. Here as elsewhere it is bad luck to have a hare running across your path. Here as elsewhere you will find the rhyme about magpies :
One for sorrow, Two for joy, Three for a marriage, Four for a boy,
or one of its variants. It is unlucky to kill robins, for they got their red breasts at the cross of Christ. It is unlucky to meet a priest or a red- haired person when one is setting out on a journey. *' God forgive you, father, you've spoilt my day on me," said a holiday-making girl the other day to a priest she met on the road. " God forgive you, Bridget, for your foolish superstition," replied the priest. All the same, as her friend told me, the girl did not meet the boy she went out in the
68 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND
hope of seeing that day. It is unlucky to meet funerals and not to turn with them, and I remember a medical student who was at colleo;e with me saying that funerals always brought him luck. Once, on one of the few occasions that I was ingenuous enough to put money on a horse, he and I had just been sending a postal order from the country town where we were staying to a Belfast book-maker when a funeral came up the road. My friend insisted — half laughing at his superstition — that we should go along with it, and we even accompanied it into the graveyard, where a Methodist minister delivered an address, holding up the conduct of the dead young man as an example for the bystanders to follow. I am curiously puzzled by myself when I look back on it, and wonder what the minister would have thought if he could have seen behind our serious eyes to the thoughts that were con- cerned, not with death and beauty of conduct, but with the fortunes of an English horse-race. The horse we backed did not win, I may add, and, having lost five shillings out of an already empty pocket, I no longer believed in the super- stition about funerals.
The superstition that it is unlucky to let a red- haired person into the house the first thing in the New Year is, of course, not confined to Ireland. In many places, too, outside Ireland ill luck is supposed to be foretold by a crowing hen or a cock crowing at irregular times. On one occasion
STORIES AND SUPERSTITIONS 69
a farmer's daughter told me how, when her uncle lay ill of blood-poisoning, " two hens came up to the door, where they do be strolling about, and one of them clapped her wings and crowed loudly." Said she to the serving boy, " What the deuce is the matter with the hen ? " '' I'm damned if I know," he replied. " With that," continued the girl who told the story, " I gave her a clatter with a stick and killed her — she was an awful old hen. Then the other, a young one, came up to the door and crowed and clapped her wings, and I threw the stick at her and lamed her. She had to be killed, and we made soup out of her. When my aunt came down the stairs she asked what had happened to the two hens, but I didn't like to frighten her by telling her what the hen had done. And my uncle died the third day after that."
There are, as might be expected, a good many families in Ireland in which the death of one of the members is often preceded by the dis- appearance of the rooks from the trees round the house, and ominous dreams are as common in Ireland as in most places. I knew one very beautiful and clever old Presbyterian lady who usually dreamt that she had lost one of her teeth a short time before the death of any of her near relations. She seemed to have other gifts of prophecy, too, for she told me how she had seen her husband's face in a dream three times before ever she set eyes on him in real life.
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Besides the beliefs in omens, witches, fairies and ghosts — beliefs which exist in a hundred other forms than those I have mentioned — the country is full of strange stories about human beings who can change themselves into animals, and of animals who have lived for a time as human beings. I have already told how old women who bewitch butter are sometimes supposed to turn themselves into hares, this being a more convenient shape for the purpose of committing their thefts of the necessary drops of milk.
In County Mayo people will tell you that you must never say " Girrie " — this is a semi-phonetic spelling of the Irish word girrfhiadh, " a hare " — to a M'Cann. This is because one of the M'Cann women of those parts was in a former age suspected of being a witch, and because a farmer whom she was injuring discovered her in her witchery. See- ing that his cows were ceasing to yield any butter in their milk, he began to spy on them in the field, and, one day, as he was looking through a space in the wall, he saw a hare busy taking the milk from them. He didn't let a sign or sound out of him then, but the next time he came he brought the greyhounds with him. Well, the hare turned up again and began milking one of the cows, and, when she was in the middle of her work, he set the dogs at her. Off she ran, and the dogs after her, over wall and field, and wall and field, till she came near Girrie M'Cann's cottage. The dogs were nearly touching her when she
STORIES AND SUPERSTITIONS 71
reached it, and she made a wild leap for the window of the cottage as if it was her last chance of safety. Just as she was jumping, one of the dogs caught her scut in his mouth, though the window was too small for him to follow her. The farmer on coming up saw the dog standing there with the hare's scut in his mouth, and signs of blood on it where it had been bitten off. He went into the house to see if the hare was there, but he only found old Mrs M'Cann lying in the bed, groaning, and with marks of blood on the floor and the bed- clothes. She denied that any hare had come in through the window, and the farmer looked at her, and knew that she herself was the hare. After that, he told the neighbours what he had seen, and from that day she was always known as "Girrie" M'Cann. "And that's why," wound up the man who told me the story, "the M'Canns get angry if you say ' Girrie ' to one of them."
The O'Tooles of Clare Island are said to become angry in a similar way if seals are mentioned in their presence. There is every reason why they should, if the story one hears about their ancestry is to be believed. In the beginning of the genera- tions of the O'Tooles, we are told, a man of the family was wandering one day towards the edge of the island, which lies amid the coloured and wonderful tides of Clew Bay. In the water by the shore he espied three seals swimming about, and something gave him the idea that they were not ordinary seals. He had not been watching long,
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when, sure enough, the three seals came suddenly up to the land, stepped out of their skins, and began dancing and running along the shore in the appearance of three beautiful young women. The man of the O'Tooles watched them for some time in amazement, but it did not take him long to recover his wits and decide upon a plan for captur- ing one of them. He crept down towards where the skins were lying, hiding himself from time to time behind a big stone so that he should not be seen. Having reached . the shore, he caught up one of the skins, and made off with it as fast and as secretly as he could towards his home. He knew well that the seal-woman would follow where her skin had been taken, so he hid it cunningly in the thatch of his house, where no one would be likely to think of looking for it.
When the seals had had their fill of danciuQ- and play on the shore, they went back to look for their skins, and their surprise was great to find that one of these was missino-.
That night, O'Toole was sitting in his house, when, as he had expected, a beautiful woman in her bare pelt came to the door and asked him to give her back her coat. He did not let on that he knew anything about it, though she cried and moaned and besought him to give it back again. He held out so well, and had hidden the skin so cleverly, that in the end she had to settle down and stay on in his house, for she could not go away without her skin.
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Well, she lived there a good number of years, and had four children, and O'Toole and she were very happy together, when one day during his absence a fire broke out in the house. It soon spread to the thatch, and there was a queer smell of singeing. The woman knew it was her seal's coat was burning, and climbed up to where it was, and, when she had found it, off with her to the water as fast as she was able. She forgot all about her husband and all about her children, and nothing would do her but she must get into the seal-skin again, and go out swimming into the sea where the other seals were. O'Toole never got her back again, but there was a hole in the seal's coat where it had been burnt by the fire, and when the seals came up swimming near the land you could tell this one by the burnt patch.
" You needn't believe the story," said the man who told it to me, " if you don't like ; but it's a queer thing the O'Tooles have always been known for their short arms. And if you called one of them a seal, there would be murder."
Ireland — at least, that part of it which lies within sound of the sea — is full of stories like this. " It would not do to injure a seal," said an old Kerry fisherman to a friend of mine ; " the seals are God's blessed creatures."
On the other hand, if it is wronof for a man to work injury among the creatures of the deep, it is equally wrong to have commerce with them of a more intimate kind. Old people of Kilkee will
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tell you of a man who used to be there within living memory, and who took a mermaid as his wife. Nobody in the place would speak to him, or have anything to do with him.
The sea is full of strange mysteries, indeed, and the best course for men is to walk warily and separately among them. I was out in a lonely part of St John's Point in Donegal about two years ago, where a friend of mine was examining the dilapidated fragments of an old church. Near the ruin was a kind of harbour where some fishing- boats lay, and a number of fishermen were pulling out a boat full of their brown nets over the heavy, purple water. There was a young man standing beside me, dressed in Sunday respectability, an extraordinarily handsome, strong man, with dark, shining hair, and eyes the colour of a dark pool among rocks. His bowler-hat and the watch-chain running across his waist-coat, with a medal hanging from it, gave him an air of town ordinariness for all his beauty. We got into conversation about the fishing in those parts, and he was telling me how the fish were being destroyed at a terrible rate by some curious kind of monster, I said that I sup- posed he meant porpoises.
"Well," he said, "perhaps you might call them porpoises, but they're no porpoises." I asked him what did he think they were then.
" I don't know whether there's any name for them," he said. " But I call them magic fish, for there's magic in them, and all the fishermen here
STORIES AND SUPERSTITIONS 75
know it. One of them came into the bay there on the other side of the Point last year, and the fishermen had the idea that it was a porpoise, and the Government sent round a boat to destroy it. But when they had this one destroyed, it's a queer thing they could find no sign of its body, but two other ones came in its place to look for vengeance for it. There's no use trying to destroy them, because, for every one you destroy, there'll come two others in place of it. And the fishermen know that now." I do not remember whether he mentioned any other way, save the way of war, to get rid of these magic enemies.
In some parts of the country, where the imagina- tions of the people are not filled with the sea and its miracles, a beast which causes most ex- quisite terror is one which I always heard called in my childhood by the name of the "man-keeper." ^ It is a children's bogey. It is, I think, something about the size of a frog, and it haunts spring wells. I know that, when I was a child, I never got down on my knees beside a country well for a drink of water without looking carefully to see whether the eye of this small monster was anywhere watching me. If a man-keeper catches you drinking out of a well, he always makes straight for your mouth, and, no matter how tight you may close it, he will force his way in. I used to hear a story of a man near Maghera, in County Derry, who was chased by a man-keeper. He ran down the road with all
^ The lizard, I suppose.
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his might, and, feeling that he was being over- taken, he made a superhuman effort, and leaped over a six-foot hedge into a field. The man- keeper leaped the hedge, too, and with a series of vicious little jumps and wrigglings got into his shut mouth, and, I suppose, into his stomach. Salt, they say, is the only thing with which the evil beast can be forced into the open world again, and it was with salt the Mas^hera man was treated when he reached home in torture.
I remember there were horrible tales about dangers from weasels and whittrets which affected my childish imagination almost as painfully as man-keepers. It was said that, if you injured a weasel, it would whistle on the other weasels in the neighbourhood, and that they would all come together in answer to the call, and give you the chase of your life.
There are a good many stories in Ireland which have nothing to do with either fairies or with animals, magical or otherwise, but are a part of the religious imagination of the people. Every holy well in the country — and they are sufficiently numerous — has its cycle of stories of marvellous cures, and the votive rags of those whom God has restored to sight, or to purity of blood, or to the power of walking, flutter on the thorn-trees near them, a testimony to the Irish faith in the eternal wonderfulness of life. There are many secular stories of the saints, too, which still continue among the people — stories of brave adventures in the old
STORIES AND SUPERSTITIONS 11
times, and of timely interventions in modem days.
I heard a gruesome story not long ago of the help given by a saint to a young married woman in time of need. She was married to an old farmer, who lived in a lonely place, a mile and more away from any other house, and she had not been married long when one night, in the middle of the night, he took sick without any warning. She got up and called the servant-girl to go and get help, and while the girl was away the old man died on her. She laid him out, and then sat down to watch till the neighbours came. Suddenly the corpse rose up in the bed and began to make the most fearful faces, for it had died without anointment, and the devil was in it. It would lie back and then sit up and begin making faces again, and the poor woman was nearly at her wits' end with terror. It kept doing this for a long time, and she praying and nearly out of her mind, when a knock came at the door, and she let in a tall man, dressed something like a soldier, and with a piece of a stick, or a wand, in his hand. He went over to the side of the bed where the corpse was, and touched it with the stick, and it lay back on the bed calm and quiet. Then he sat down to watch with the woman, and every time the corpse moved he touched it again, and it subsided.
He stayed with her till near dawn, and just before he was going he turned to her and put the
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stick into her hand, and said, " Take this, and whenever he begins to make faces, just touch him on the shoulder with the stick, and he'll lie down again. He died without oil, and the devil's in him, and, if I hadn't come, he would have got up and torn you to pieces." She thanked him for his kindness, and he was turning to go away, when she said, " But before you go, you must tell me who it is I have to thank for what you've just done. I see you're not a priest, and I don't think you're a doctor, but who are you ? " " Well," he said, " do you remember last All Hallows' Eve, when you and the other girls were drawing lots for what saints you would have to protect you during the year, and you drew Saint Dominic ? The other girls laughed at you, but you said you were quite content with the saint you had drawn. Well, I'm Saint Dominic, and this night I have come to reward you." So he left her the stick, and, every time the corpse would try to get up and make faces, she hit it a tap, and it lay down again. In regard to this story, I may say it is still a Hallowe'en game in some parts of Catholic Ireland to draw lots out of a hat for guardian saints.
I have not yet touched upon one of the most interesting of all the streams of story-telling which are to be found in Ireland — the legends of the heroes who loom over the beginnings of Irish history with something of the immense glory of the gods and the demi-gods of Greece.
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Lady Gregory has put the world in her debt by collecting these stories in at least one imperishable volume, " Gods and Fighting Men," and in another which is full of beautiful things, " Cuchullain of Muirthemne." Most of these stories she found in books and in manuscripts, but bits of them she heard, too, from the lips of country people with inherited memories. In proof of the long memories of the people, she tells us in one of her essays how some time ago a poem was taken down from a countryman, and how the same poem was afterwards found in a generations-old nianuscri|)t in the Irish Academy. " There was only one word different," she says, "between the written and the spoken version, and in that it was manifest that the pen had made the slip and not the tongue." These poems and stories, naturally, are remembered most clearly where the people speak Irish, and the exactness with which a poem like that just mentioned has been handed down through the generations helps us to under- stand how the Homeric epics may have survived so long before they were ever put into writing.
Speaking about heroic stories reminds me of the surprise I once felt, when I was in County Sligo, to hear from a farmer a story which Mr Neil Munro has told in his most delightful book, " The Lost Pibroch."
Sligo is a county overmarked with little circular forts which some associate with fairies, some with old Danish invaders. The farmer was talkinsf to
o
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me about the Danes, when a land-agent who was present said to him, "Don't they say the Danes used to make some kind of beer out of heather ? " The farmer said yes, but that no one now knew how they did it, and then he told us the story of the chieftain who sacrificed his sons and himself rather than let the Danes know the secret of his clan. The story was more blurred than in Mr Munro's version, but it was essentially the same, and those who wish to read one of the best of short stories should turn to Mr Munro's " The Secret of the Heather Ale." Some people may imagine that the farmer read the story in "The Lost Pibroch," but I am certain that it came from tradition, and that Mr Munro himself heard the story from some old Gael on a Scottish hill-side.
Lately, many enthusiastic people have been going among the Irish-speakers and taking down the old stories, and a good many of these have been published in the Irish language. Most of the stories which have been collected have been in the nature of fairy-tales rather than heroic and semi-historical legends, but even of the latter there has been a considerable share. Naturally, many of the stories are only remembered in hints and glimpses, and the imagination of the people has too often become confused as a result of poverty and long subjection. Lady Gregory gives us an instance of the mixed condition into which some of the stories have fallen. She was told on Slieve Echtge that " Oisin and Finn took
STORIES AND SUPERSTITIONS 81
the lead for strength, and Samson, too, he had great strength," " I would rather hear about the Irish strong men," she said. " Well," was the reply, " and Samson was of the Irish race, all the world was Irish in those times, and he killed the Philistines, and the eyes were picked out of him after. He was said to be the strongest, but I think myself Finn MacCumhall was stronger."
I believe Irish imaginations will return soon to a consciousness of that literature of beauty and nobleness in which it expressed so long ago its abundant joy in living. It is impossible to predict exactly the effect which this will have on Irish life and art and literature. We cannot be sure that in the result Ireland will produce a great drama, like the legend-loving Greek, or a great music-drama, like the legend-loving German. We can be sure, however, that Irish life will become infinitely richer when it is coloured with a sense of its heroic circumstances. It will be put, too, in the way of building up a great home litera- ture, for memory and imagination will be restored to it, and these, with character and passion, are the makers of all the beautiful things in the world. Of memory and imagination — even of character and passion — the Irish heroic stories are clear and inexhaustible wells.
CHAPTER V
SCHOOLS AND CHILDREN
If you wish to obtain both the happiest and the unliappiest look at contemporary Ireland, you must go into the National Schools — the word "■ National," of course, being used in a strictly Pickwickian sense. The children, vivacious, alert, quick-eyed, are a golden proof that, despite all the emigration and decay and poverty, Ireland is not yet a ruined country, but has even now within her the makings of a pleasant and virile nation. The school buildings, on the other hand, too often bear witness to the fact that by the authorities who govern Ireland the child is made of less account than the criminal. Only a revolutionist at the present moment would propose that the authorities should make the schoolhouse as clean, say, as a church, or as comfortable as a police-barracks.
At the same time there is a great deal of mournful nonsense talked about the schools of Ireland. One sometimes hears the National Schools spoken of as though they were for the most part filthy barns — with birds flying in and out through the holes in the roof, or, should the school not be ventilated in this ready way, haunts of
82
SCHOOLS AND CHILDREN 83
fetid and disease-laden air in which children grow up with pale faces, dull eyes, and songless voices. There is no doubt that many of the town schools, especially in Belfast, are overcrowded and un- healthy, and that some of the country schools are more exposed to the moods of the sky than is pardonable in a wet country. It is equally true, however, that many of the schools are clean and merry places, and that children bloom healthily in them, and grow up as unconsumptive-looking as clergymen.
As a matter of fact, the condition of the schools depends largely upon the individual temperaments of that badly-treated body of men and women, the National school-teachers. The school-teacher is sometimes represented to us as a pauper ignoramus, a bumptious loather of his trade, who is the fourth person in the tyrannical village hierarchy, the other three being the priest or parson, the gombeen-man and the policeman. He is un- questionably as often as not a pauper ; he begins his career at a salary of £58 — in the case of women teachers the salary is £48 — but, on the whole, considering their miserable opportunities, I am inclined to think that no class of Irish men and women serve their country more faithfully according to their lights than the teachers in the National Schools.
I have said that the good or bad condition of any particular school is due for the most part to the teacher who happens to be in charge of it.
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The National Board provides no caretaker to see tliat the floors are swept, or the walls hung with pictures, or the fires lit. If the floor is to be swept, the teacher must either do it himself, or get some of the pupils to do it for him. If pictures are needed for the walls, the teacher must paint them himself — which, thank heaven, he can seldom do — or buy them with his wages, or tear them out of the English magazines. Worse still, if the school is to be kept warm during the winter, the teacher must once more put his fingers into his purse and provide his share of the coal or turf supply. The custom is, no doubt, that the pupils, or their parents, should contribute either in money or in kind to the keeping up of the fires. In the towns and in districts where turf is not used, the con- tribution is usually in money.
In some of the poorer districts where turf is plentiful, however, the labourer's child may still be seen of a winter's morning carrying his sod of tnrf to the schoolhouse as his share of the burden of the expenses of a warm, if otherwise unsatisfactory, education. The farmer as a rule spares his son such an indignity by sending round an occasional cart-load of turf to the school during the cold months. The amount of fuel supplied in this way, it may be said, is rarely sufficient for the needs of the school, and either the pupils must be left to starve in the cold, or the teacher has to pay for the extra amount required. I have heard of children — children who were not given to blub-
SCHOOLS AND CHILDREN 85
bering either — crying regularly as they were sent off to school on winter mornings. These were bare- footed children, and the schools had stone floors, and were without fires, so that the tears, perhaps, were not without justification.
Obviously, the Irish teachers' lines are not cast in superabundant places. I have been all the more surprised by the energy and cheerfulness with which some of them throw themselves into their work, and with the clean bright look they manage to put on their schools. Some of the schools it would be impossible to keep clean or bright. I have seen schools in the County of Tipperary in which holes had been worn in the floor by the drip of the rain through corresponding holes in the roof, and where the ivy had pushed its way through numberless cracks, and was clambering in ease and disease over the walls and the ceiling. On the other hand, I have seen schools in County Limerick, where everything was neat and sound and healthy, and where portraits of Wolfe Tone and Douglas Hyde and Daniel O'Connell, and other notable Irishmen, looked inspiringly from the walls, not to mention pardonable prettinesses in colour from the Christmas numbers. These schools were little nests of music and cheerfulness — centres of country light and eager spirits. If they were ineflScient, it was not the fault of the teachers, but of a system of government which discourages the people of Ireland from taking an interest in education.
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This brings us to the fact that a priest, parson or minister, is almost invariably the manager of the National School, and that, even though he may not care very much about education himself, he is inclined to be suspicious when any one else threatens to care about it. In the Protestant churches, the clergyman too often regards the teacher as a useful hack, good for playing the organ on Sunday, or teaching a Sunday-school class, and so forth, and under the Catholic priest the teacher is not usually said to enjoy any greater esteem.
The odd thing is that, in spite of all the sectarian turmoil and tyranny in Irish education, the National Schools are among the most non-sectarian imagin- able. Go into a priest-managed school in Ireland, and you will hear no word of religious teaching outside the hour set apart for it ; you will see no statue of the Mother of God, surrounded with faded flowers, in a nook in the walls, such as you will see in a priest-managed school in England. If you must compare the buildings to barns, they resemble barns in nothing so much as in their non-sectarian, not to say non-religious, character. The Christian Brothers, a lay Catholic order, have a number of schools in the more prosperous centres, free of the control of the National Board and provided with the emblems of religion. An ex- pupil of one of these schools told me how he and his companions used to despise the ordinary non- sectarian priest -managed schools as institutions that had " given in to the enemy."
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One happy consequence of this absence of sectarianism from the atmosphere of the schools is that Protestant children attend Catholic schools, and Catholic children Protestant schools, in much greater numbers than is generally realised. Three years ago, there were 8559 Protestant pupils studying in schools exclusively under Catholic teachers, and 5174 Catholic pupils in schools exclusively under Protestant teachers. These figures are, I admit, low enough, in comparison with the size of the school-going population, but they show that the religious compartments in Irish education are not quite water-tight. (The Ten Commandments, by the way, are, by order of the National Board, hung on squares of card-board from the walls of every school-building, but I never heard of any of the pupils of either religion leaving school any the worse for this.) I have seen Protestant children enthusiastically learning Irish, and singing Irish songs in Catholic schools in the south. This, too, was in a district where a few years ago political passion ran so high that the priest called for a boycott, not only of the police- men in the district, but of the policemen's children. In the Catholic parts of Ireland, people have often been boycotted for political reasons, practically never for religious reasons.
One of the many things which I dislike in the educational system in Ireland is the early age at which children are permitted to begin going to school. This seems all the worse as the ordinary
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school hours are from ten in the morning till three in the afternoon. I was in a country school lately where some of the children were only three years old, and I do not like to see an infant thrust thus early into the atmosphere of learning, unless where there are crabbed or debauched parents darkening the home. The evil sort of parents, I may say in passing, are rare, outside the slums in the big cities of Ireland. Even in the slums — and there are slums in Dublin that would disfigure the civilisa- tion of any place or any period — cruelty of the fiendish kind, of which one occasionally hears among the poor and degenerate in England, is practically unknown. A high official in the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty for Children has told me that there is no comparison between England and Ireland in regard to the treatment of children. One occasionally hears, of course, of a drunken mother who parts with her child to proselytising agents for the sake of quietness and gin. It is also true that, in cases of parental cruelty, the clergy usually have the child removed to some humane atmosphere long before things have reached the stage demanding the attention of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Still, from all I have seen and heard, I am inclined to think that the lot of the Irish child is, so far as its parents know how to make it so, usually a not unenviable one.
This is in explanation of the pleasant, variable faces one sees so often on the children in the Irish
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schools. They are clean faces, too, as children's faces go, and one sometimes sees a basin of water in the school-porch where they may wash their hands as they go in. They are, for the most part, bare- footed, some from necessity, some from choice — at least, in the summer — for boots are becoming commoner in Ireland every day. I have known children who were sent off from home wearing boots, but who took these and their stockings off as soon as they were out of reach of their mother's eye, in order that their feet might enjoy the greater coolness and liberty along the grassy sides of the road. There is, it is pleasant to know, an almost perfect democracy of feeling in the Irish schools. The farmer's daughter in her boots and her bright pinafore wears no airs of superiority over the bare-footed labourer's child with too few buttons and too many raggednesses showing in her faded dress. The boys mix freely in their games as in their classes, and many friendships begin which are only broken when differences of wealth and environment at last compel the grown- up youths into separate worlds.
I hope I have said nothing to give the impres- sion that everything, or indeed anything, in the Irish educational system is in a fairly satisfactory condition. I have merely stated certain human facts in answer to those who, for political reasons or from a tradition of sentimentalism, are always drawing pictures of Ireland as a ruin and a helpless desolation. The Irish schools are not the schools
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of a ruined and helpless people. They are the schools rather of a people who have been for a long time intellectually aimless — who have allowed out- siders to take their money and spend it for them, and to dictate the lines upon which their education should be run. This, indeed, is the worst that you can say of the schools. However white may be their walls, however lively and lovely the faces of the children, however blameless the intentions of the teachers, the National Schools were not established to meet the needs of Ireland, but to fulfil certain political objects. Instead of fitting boys and girls to live useful and charming lives in Ireland, they were used as a means of making the children forget that there was any such country as Ireland. It will be no harm, perhaps, to give some well- known instances of this.
In the early half of last century, when the school readers were being prepared, it was proposed by a Scotch Presbyterian minister on the controlling Board to include Sir Walter Scott's lines, " Breathes there a man with soul so dead," etc, in one of them. Archbishop Whately, who had been entrusted by the English Government with the work of civilising Ireland, caught sight of the words, and, realising how indecent was the sen- timent they might convey to the imaginations of Irish children, insisted upon their omission. Poetry about things like Irish harpers was treated in the same summary way, and children were taught to repeat, instead of the sincere songs of their own
<
<
f
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people, a pseudo-religious jingle containing the words : —
I thank the goodness and the grace
That on my birth have smiled, And made me in these Christian days A happy English child.
The chief lesson to be learned by the school children was ignorance — not to say contempt — of Ireland and everything Irish, and reverence for England and everything English. Even in districts where Irish was the only language spoken, the children were taught that English and not Irish was their native language. "On the east of Ireland," runs a passage in one of the archiepiscopal school-books, " is England, where the Queen lives ; many people who live in Ireland were born in England, and we speak the same language, and are called the same nation." This passage was written, be it noted, at a time when the Irish language was still spoken by probably half the Irish people.
The authorities, however, did not like the Irish language and so they affected to believe that it did not exist. Teachers who knew no Irish were put in charge of schools where the pupils knew no English, and the absurd spectacle was common of a teacher trying to instruct in reading, writing and arithmetic children who did not understand a word he said. I met an English-speaking teacher the other day who began his career in a Galway school in which all the children were exclusively
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Irish speaking. I asked him how on earth he managed. "Damned badly," he said with a twinkle. It is only fair to him to say that, if he performed de-Irishising work, he did it reluctantly and not with a punitive enthusiasm, as some of the teachers did. In many places, teacher, priest and parent combined with the authorities in stamping out all knowledge of the native language from the minds of the children. The children were forbidden to speak any Irish in the schools, and they carried little tally-sticks hung round their necks so that, every time they lapsed into Irish in their homes, their parents might cut a notch in these and the teacher might award as many strokes of the cane as he found notches in the tally-stick on the next morning.
It is difficult to forgive a generation of parents, priests, politicians and teachers who thus flogged the children of the country out of the knowledge of their natural speech. Many parents, it is clear, looking at the course of events in the world, came to the conclusion that English was the language of success and Irish the language of decay and starva- tion. If they punished their children for being Irish, they thought they were punishing bread- and-butter into their stomachs, if not the bread of life into their souls. Curious to relate, this idea is not dead among Irish-speaking parents even to- day. Those who know English, though they speak Irish to each other and to grown-up neigh- bours, very often drop into English when they
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address their children. They still think that English is the language of respectability — an idea that is only dying slowly under the persistent assaults of the Gaelic League propaganda. The priest nearly always preaches in it, the member of Parliament orates in it, the newspapers are written in it, and how, in face of all this, is an average badly-educated parent to guess that the praise of the Irish language is anything but the jingle- jangle of hare-brained agitators ?
It will be seen from what I have said that the National Schools were intended to destroy any traces of an Irish civilisation that were left by the early part of last century. They have been fairly successful in accomplishing the aims of their founders, and there were probably fewer signs of an interesting and distinct civilisation in Ireland during the closing years of the nineteenth century than at any other period of the country's history. The present adult population of Ireland is probably the least Irish, the least interesting, the least capable of beauty of thought and effort, that ever inherited the five provinces. The present genera- tion of growing children is likely to prove the very opposite. Moderate people like myself believe that there is at present growing up to manhood and womanhood in Ireland a race of boys and girls who will make sure the foundations of a new civilisation, and so leave a long memory after them.
Education in Ireland, when it ceased to be a
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violent political attack on the spirit of the people, did so in order to take on, not the fair colours of nationality, but a kind of dull negative hue. The training-colleges, through which the teachers have to pass for want of a university education, do nothing to encourage the knowledge and spirit of Ireland in those whose duty it will one day be to capture the imaginations and shape the minds of Irish children. Consequently, manned by teachers without any national knowledge, the schools have always been great breeding-grounds for boy clerk- ships in the British Civil Service. The child has never been trained at school to live in an Irish home, to work on an Irish farm or in an Irish shop. If he has shown any signs of ability, he has generally been taught to despise Ireland as a sphere of labour for so promising a genius, and to set his heart on some Government position, the salary of which seems princely to him in his narrow home. Too many fresh-faced boys have been wasted on these London clerkships to allow such dreams of wealth to mislead the people permanently, and both teachers and parents are beginning to know that a boy clerk's wage in London is not a living wage, and that, poor as it is, it may be brought to a sudden end in three or four years. Consequently, fewer Irish children are now sent over to London with their incipient brains than used to be. Still, the bad tradition of teach- ing remains, and the Irish boy and girl are for the , most part even now educated on the supposition
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that they have not a country of their own, but / will one day emigrate. One of the arguments ■ used against the revival of the Irish language was : " What use will it be to anybody outside Ireland ? " As though every language did not first grow up, not because it was suited for use in foreign countries, but because it was suited for use in the country in which it was native and vital.
I myself, who was brought up in a district rich in history and in heroic tales, was never allowed to know at school a single human fact suggesting that this country around me and I had any relation to each other — or even, indeed, that this country existed, except in the geographical sense. Cuchul- lain, the hero of Ulster, is to my mind one of the great figures in the world's imaginative literature. His story is as wonderful and varied as the story of Achilles, a thousand times more wonderful and varied than the story of Hercules. Yet I, living in the capital of Ulster, was taught my fair share about Achilles and Hercules, but heard never a word about Cuchullain. Near my father's house were mounds that had once been the dwelling- places of Cuchullain's companions, the Knights of the Eed Branch, but my father had been told nothing about these places, and so he could com- municate none of their mystery to me. I say that it is an evil thing to let all this beauty, beauty of memory and imagination, go to waste and not use it to enrich the lives of Irish children. History, again, meant to me, just as literature did, some-
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thing about anywhere except Ireland. We had the flaming youth of Eed Hugh O'Donnell at our doors, and the humours and heroisms of the O'Neills, and the passionate drama of Wolfe Tone, and the passionate sacrificeof Henry Joy M'Cracken. Never, however, during all my schooldays do I remember hearing a single intelligent fact stated in regard to any of these men or anybody like them. I do not blame my teachers. They, too, were brought up in a system which aimed at educating Irish boys and girls largely by ignoring their own country. Some of them were un- surpassed teachers on their own lines, but they never realised that the object of Irish education ought to be to produce a race of men and women who would be useful and many- sided citizens of Ireland.
It may be argued that Irish education is no worse-ofF than English in this respect, and that the English schools lay very little stress on history. The case is different, however. The English child, at least, is not taught to ignore Waterloo and Trafalgar and the Armada as though they were shameful things. He is brought up in the idea that his is a country to be proud of. The trend of Irish education, on the other hand, is largely — or was until the day before yesterday — to convince a child that his is a country of which to be ashamed. jl Sir Horace Plunkett has put the case in regard to this aspect of Irish education so well that I shall quote a few of his sentences and so anticipate the
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many people who in all honesty and innocence will accuse me of exagoreration. " The national factor in Ireland," he writes in " Ireland in the New Century," " has been studiously eliminated from national education, and Ireland is perhaps the only country in Europe where it was part of the settled policy of those who had the guidance of education to ignore the literature, history, arts, and tradition of the people. It was a fatal policy, for it obviously tended to stamp their native country in the eyes of Irishmen with the badge of inferiority and to extinguish the sense of healthy self-respect which comes from the consciousness of hicrh national ancestry and traditions. This policy, rigidly adhered to for many years, almost extinguished native culture among Irishmen, but it did not succeed in making another form of culture accept- able to them. It dulled the intelligence of the people, impaired their interest in their own surroundings, stimulated emigration by teaching them to look on other countries as more agreeable places to live in, and made Ireland almost a social desert. Men and women without culture or knowledge of literature or of music have succeeded a former generation who were passionately in- terested in these things, an interest which extended down even to the wayside cabin."
I do not think you could damn an educational system much more comprehensively than Sir Horace Plunkett damns the Irish "National" system in these measured words. His words are
G
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true, however, not only of the National Schools, but of almost all the primary schools in Ireland, except some of those belonging to the Christian Brothers. The private schools, to which the rich and comfortable send their children in the towns, are roomier and more respectable than the National Schools, but in the essentials of a worthy Irish educational establishment they are even more miserably lacking. Some of them are run by very able ladies ; some of them are run by very silly ladies ; practically all of them are run by ladies who seem never to have heard of Ireland.
As for the secondary schools, it is not an ex- aggeration to say that where the primary schools have chastised the country with whips, the second- ary schools have chastised it with scorpions. They have been absolutely inefficient in accomplishing what ought to have been their sole large end — strengthening the character and affecting the culture of Ireland. As the secondary schools — public and private — have progressed, the country instead of approaching anything in the shape of culture has receded further and further away from it. These schools are efficient machines for only one purpose — the pre^Daration of boys and girls for competitive examinations, ranging from the Intermediate Board's examinations at home to the examinations for the English Civil Service. The Intermediate Exhibitions are well worth getting — they amounted to from £20 in the Preparatory Grade to £40 in the Senior Grade in my own day
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— and Ireland in its teens makes a rush for them to the exclusion of practically every other intel- lectual interest. In the result, never surely were schools, taught by able masters and mistresses and filled with clever boys and girls, so barren of use or beauty. One of the most brilliant educa- tionists in Ireland told me on one occasion that nowhere in his experience had he found a higher level of intelligence than in Ulster, but that, owing to the lifeless state in which the intellect of the people had been left by the schools and other provincial forces, it was useless, in his opinion, to look for any good thing like literature from that quarter for many generations. Now literature is by no means everything, or even the chief thing, in this world. But the utter absence of it from a country shows that the schools of that country are in a dangerous condition.
The odd thing to be noted in this connection is that the Irish secondary schools, if they were in England, would be excellent institutions. Many of them are simply good things in the wrong place. Thus, they are quite unlike the National Schools, which are often bad things in the wrong place. In the secondary schools, if you take the trouble, you may certainly learn English well, you may learn the Classics well, you may learn physical and mathematical science well, you may sometimes learn even French and German well. The worst of it is, you are taught everything as though your brain were a fact-store
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— or at the best a good-taste-store — instead of a living thing to be used for the building and beautifying of the world within the borders of your own country first and anywhere else you like afterwards.
Many of the Irish secondary schools are boarding-schools, but neither the boarding-schools nor the day-schools have many points of com- parison with the more famous public schools of England. For one thing, the boys are mostly the sons of not too wealthy parents, and the need to earn a living is so pressing that comparatively few of them stay on long enough to enter one of the professions or the English Civil Service. As a result — or as one of the results — ^Irish boys have not time to play cricket with the perfection common among English boys, though they some- times try. Besides, by good luck, the Irish schools make real cricket-playing impossible by rising for the holidays at the end of June and remaining closed till the beginning of September. Again, Irish school-boys practically never wear any distinctive uniform — nothing but a cap with the initials of their school sewn on it. They have a pleasant disordered air in a class-room, some of them sitting about in their overcoats, others disdaining such trappings of weakness. They are an eager, quick, conversational crowd, difficult for a nervous master to keep in hand. People who have taught schools both in England and Ireland tell me, that, after having been accus-
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tomed to Ireland, the decorum of English chil- dren comes upon one as a shock. When I read Mr Kipling's "Stalky and Co.," and saw it de- nounced as being quite unlike English school- life, I felt like putting in a claim for it as in some measure a picture of Irish school-life. Mr Kipling's unruly, vigorous, adventurous boys are not unlike Irish boys. Irish boys, however, are much less sentimental than English boys about headmasters or indeed any masters, or about the " old school " or about each other. Irish girls, too, gush and sentimentalise over their mistresses to a much less degree than school- girls in England. Take another point. Irish boys of all ages mix with each other much more freely than boys in England seem to do. There is no " cock-of-the- walking," on the one hand, and no deep bowing to authority, on the other. Priggish- ness is a rare vice among them, and so is bullying. Possibly, fifty per cent, of them or so do not reverence the truth, when a master is on the hunt for it, but what school-boys do ? They are among the cleanest-minded boys to be found, I should imagine. At the school at which I was, only a disreputable few of us ever aimed at anything like Rabelaisianism in our conversation, and, as for vice of conduct, it was hinted at by hardly more than two of the boys, who were looked on, one tolerantly, the other dislikingly, as bad eggs. Schools vary a great deal in this regard, I know, and there is plenty of filth spoken — I once had a
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taste for it myself — here and there in Ireland. From all I have heard, however, I should judge that a boy at school has a better chance of enjoy- ing a clean time in Ireland than in most countries.
f There are other ways of demoralising children besides putting them in immoral company, and the Irish schools in many cases tend to encourage the most dreary form of snobbishness — what is called " shoneenism." This is said to be especially true of some of the Convent schools, which aim at making lively-minded Irish girls " respectable " and "more English than the English." They teach any music except Irish music, any language except the Irish language, any literature except Irish literature. They train everything except the character, the body and the intelligence. They make up for the want of these with a plethora of " accomplishments." They inculcate that lowly and reverent obedience to one's "betters" which still keeps alive the essentials
V .of the slave system in so many countries nominally
free. They praise success, and one feels that, if it were in their power to prevent it, there would be no vivid national movement in Ireland. This is, of course, not true of all the Convent schools, but it is true of enough of them to make what I have said fair as a generalisation. It is due partly to the fact that so many of the nuns are foreigners, who do not realise that there is such a thing as a distinct Irish nation. It is one of the anomalies of Irish life that parents, the
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majority of whom are nominally Nationalists, should continue to send their daughters to these schools.
I know of one school, for instance, where during the Boer War the children were encouraged to wear little Union Jacks and to sing " God save the Queen " in anticipation of a visit from Queen Victoria. One of the girls who refused to surrender her independence even to keep the favour of her teachers, appeared in class one day with a Kruger button instead of the usual British symbol. She was ordered to take it off at once, but stoutly refused. She was threatened with all sorts of punishments, but still she held out. In the end, I believe, the girl went home and remained there till the Royal visit was over, her mother declaring in answer to her indignant teachers that she wished her daughter to be trained in obedience and good manners, but not in loyalty to foreign rule. From a Unionist point of view, the nuns may seem to have been justified in their attitude all through. Consider, on the other hand, what this attitude meant in Ireland. It meant that the children were quietly having wrung out of them all the ideals which were in the atmosphere of their homes. It meant that the gentle and un- selfish ideal of a nation was being deliberately displaced by the ideal of bigness and success and worldly power. Need I say again, that I do not wish all the Convent schools of Ireland to be taken as included in this indictment ? Some of these
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schools do all in their power to become a real educational force in the life of the Irish nation.
It may be doubted, however, whether on the whole the influence of the religious schools on Irish life is a healthy one. I say this, of course, not because the schools make the children too religious, but because they make them too " re- fined," in the sense that they unfit them for the mixed surroundings to which they are accustomed at home. A farmer's daughter who has been educated at a Convent, sometimes loses all taste /•for settling down on a farm. Her education has ( trained her, not to be a good farmer's wife, but ; to be an amiable ornament in the drawings-room. She belongs to a difl'erent world from her soil- I stained father and his neighbours and his neio-h- ' hours' sons. The horror of their home-life, in its carelessness of the niceties, its very earthy un- refinement, has undoubtedly driven many Irish girls into the nunneries for a refuge. Catholic parents tell you of these things and speak com- plainingly of the spread of the educational religious orders, but still they send their children to the religious schools, for they are commonly the best to be had in the district. Teachers in the ordinary schools also complain. They say that it does not pay a teacher to work up a school to a point of too great excellence, for, if he does, the religious orders come in and establish another school, and take away his pupils from him.
The spread of the religious orders is one of
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tlie most remarkable phenomena of our time. In Loughglynn, in the County of Roscommon, the Franciscan nuns are now in possession of Lord Dillon's great mansion and grounds, but 1 believe the influence of these ladies on the district in which they have settled is a good one. In Nenagh, in County Tipperary, the nuns have found a still stranger home, for there they occupy the old gaol, and the statue of the Virgin now stands over the porch where two innocent men were brought out and hanged a good many years ago — the last public hanging that took place in Nenagh. It is said, by the way, that ruin came upon the house of every member of the jury, who were stupefied by drink into condemning those innocent men, some of them going mad, some dying in drink and poverty, some of horrible diseases. People tell you, further, that when the authorities had a lamp put outside the gaol at the place of hanging, it flickered and went out, and, no matter what they did or how calm the evening was, it would still go out in the most ghostly way. It was thought that the troubled spirits of the dead moved about there, disturbing the scene of their great wroncr. Since the nuns came, however, the lamp has begun to burn brightly and the ghosts trouble the place no more.
Now that I have had my bad say about a great deal in modern Irish education, let me add that there are signs of a new life — to use a phrase
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that is becoming threadbare — springing up in the country and especially in the elementary schools. Education is now bi-lingual in many of the dis- tricts where the children speak Irish,i though sometimes a lazy teacher hides the fact that his pupils are Irish-speaking in order that he may continue along the old, useless, indolent paths. In schools outside these districts, bi-lino;ual education is still forbidden, and teachers are not encouraged too strongly to make Irish one of the ordinary subjects of study. Sometimes, too, the teacher knows no Irish. The Gaelic League provides a certain number of travellinsj teachers, who o^o about from school to school on bicycles and give weekly or bi-weekly lessons in Irish to the children. The ordinary teachers themselves some- times help the language forward by teaching Irish songs during the singing lesson, though I was horrified on one occasion, when I asked a child for a song in a very Irish district, and she broke out with " I never loved a dear gazelle." I suppose Ireland is the only part of the civilised
1 The bi-lingual programme is now (1909) in force in 174 schools as compared with 126 last year.
Fees were paid for Irish as an extra subject in the year 1908 in 1507 national schools, 46,006 being the number of pupils in average attendance for whom fees were paid. The fees amounted to £10,227, 16s. 8d.
The number of pupils who were receiving instruction in Irish as an optional subject on December 31st, 1908, was 56,800 approximately.
There were 385 evening schools opened for the 1908-9 session.
Irish was taught in 185 of these evening schools.
) ■
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world where anyone would sing a song like that nowadays.
The school-books in general are becoming more Irish than they used to be. Nationality is as yet permitted only in moderate doses, but the great thing is that it should be permitted at all. It has not yet made as great progress in the secondary as in the elementary schools. Even there, how- ever, I hear Irish history is being taught much less contemptuously than it used to be. Of late, too, we have had fine prospects opened out by the way in which important girls' schools like Alexandra College in Dublin — one of the principal Protestant schools in the country — have shown an inclination to play a significant part in the life of Ireland. Add to this the fact that last year a Catholic boys' school, St Enda's, was opened in Dublin as an institution intended to be as Irish as Eton or the City of London School is English.
St Enda's, comfortably set in a beautiful garden, is the fruit of a passionate enthusiasm. It is an efibrt to accomplish the dream of the headmaster, Mr P. H. Pearse, a barrister, a scholar, and the editor of An Claidheamh Soluis, the official journal of the Gaelic League. In the hall as one enters one is faced by a lunette representing Cuchullain at the heroic feats of his boyhood. In another room are pictures by Mr George Russell {A. E.), Mr Jack Yeats, and others. High on the walls of the principal class-room is a line of the names of the great heroes of Ireland, coming down to Wolfe
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Tone and Robert Emmet and Thomas Davis. The teaching is carried on partly in Irish and partly in English. When I visited the school during the past spring a class was in progress in which a lesson in Irish phonetics was being given first in Irish, then in English. The English classes, of course, are carried on through the medium of English, the French through the medium of French, and so forth, but history, geography, science, and similar subjects are taught now in the one language and now in the other. Everybody in the establishment is an Irish-speaker except the cook. The gardener is an especially useful person, as in the hours devoted to nature study he can be turned into a familiar teacher and give easy lessons in the Irish names of the flowers and the trees. Of course, there is a playing-ground where Irish games, like hurling and Gaelic football are played, and there is also a ball-alley — an essentially Irish thing to be found in even the most an ti- Irish schools in the country. Tennis is played by the boys during summer. A good many of the pupils wear the Irish kilt — a comely costume, though there are still some of us who thank God we have trousers in the tubes of which to hide our crooked limbs. I have said enough, I think, to give an idea of the Irish atmosphere of this pioneer school. It is likely before long to have a good many imitators — especially on that day, sure to come at last, when the new National University will make Irish an
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essential subject for matriculation and so force the secondary schools to give it a prominent place in their curricula.
Irish education, however, will never be in a satis- factory condition until the Irish people have taken it largely into their own hands. That the British Government is not fit to control it is proved, if by nothing else, by the way in which they consider it less important than the policing of the country. In Scotland, as Mr Barry O'Brien points out in "Dublin Castle and the Irish People," the cost per head of the population is 2s. 6d. for Police and 8s. 8d. for Education. In Ireland it is 6s. 7d. for Police and 6s. 6d. for Education. This shows how thoroughly necessary it is that the Irish people should take over the control of the secular part of it, and put an end to a state of affairs which neither the British Government nor the clergy as a whole ^ show any mind to remedy.
^ A Bill was recently introduced by Mr Craig, M.P., in the English Parliament, to throw a portion of the school expenses on the local rates, and the Central Council of the Irish Clerical Managers has passed a resolution in opposition to it. This body, however, offers to make the managers responsible for half the expenses of heating, cleansing, and the sanitation of schools, the Treasury supplying the other half.
J-
CHAPTER VI
WAKES AND FUNERALS
No Irish custom, I suppose, is more famous than that of "waking" the dead. The custom goes back to pagan times, when we are told great persons were usually waked for seven nights and days. The introduction of Christianity seems to have lengthened the ceremonies, for St Patrick's wake lasted twelve nights, during which lights were kept burning and, as Dr Joyce reminds us, "night was made like day with the blaze of torches. "
The modern wake seems to be but a pale reflection, a bewildered memory, of the ceremonies which used to follow a death till about a hundred years ago. In the old days, according to an account preserved by Lady Wilde, the room or barn in which the dead body lay was hung with "branches of evergreen and festoons of laurel and holly." On a bed lay the corpse, surrounded by branches of green leaves. The mourning women came in and sat down on the ground in a circle. In the centre one of them, cloaked and hooded, began the funeral waij, the others joining in the chorus. The lament ceased at intervals only to
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be raised again, and, when it was over, the women went out, and their places were taken by a new crowd of people who performed a kind of mystery- play. Before the play began, there was pipe- music, and whiskey was served round. With respect to the plays acted on these occasions, some of them appear to have been serious and symbolic. Others contained farcical elements like the mystery plays in all Christian countries during the middle ages. We hear, for instance, of " one called ' Hold the light,' where the passion of the Lord Christ is travestied with grotesque imitation." Many of them were full of sarcastic references to Christianity — references which are to be found also in tradi- tional Irish literature — and the priests fought hard to put an end to these irreverent relics of the pagan spirit. As regards the effectiveness of some of these old dramas, Lady Wilde repeats an interesting criticism of an "intelligent peasant" who had been to Dublin and had been taken to the theatre. " I have now," he said on his return, " seen the great English actors, and heard plays in the English tongue, but poor and dull they seemed to me after the acting of our own people at the wakes and fairs : for it is a truth, the English cannot make us weep and laugh as I have seen the crowds with us when the players played and the poets recited their stories."
While on the subject of the old funeral customs, it may be of interest to note that some of them at least were common both to Catholic and
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Protestant Ireland. When John Wesley was in Ireland in 1750, he preached at a burial service^ and was greatly shocked by the " Irish howl " which followed. This was the " dismal inarticulate yell" of the four mourning women who were hired to stand by the grave and raise the lament. " But I saw not one that shed a tear," comments Wesley ; " for that, it seems, was not in their bargain."
Wakes are sufficiently common both in Catholic and Protestant Ireland to-day, but they are fast becoming a discredited institution. In many dioceses the Catholic Bishops have absolutely forbidden them. The priests sometimes go so far as to threaten to withhold the rites of Christian burial if the wake is not dispensed with. The reason of this is, of course, not that the wake is a relic of paganism, but that it is apt to cause an excessive amount of drinking and extravagance. As a result of the determined attitude of the clergy, wakes are now practically unknown in some parts of the country. When a man dies, his body is almost at once put into the coffin and carried off to the chapel, where it remains till the day of the funeral. If he dies early in the morning, his body may be removed to the chapel towards the evening of the same day. If he dies in the evening, the coffin is taken to the church on the following morning. Thus he has a sort of double funeral.
I saw the first part of a funeral like this when
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I was in a town in County Tipperary some time ago. Every shop in the place had half the shutters up an hour or two in advance, out of respect to the funeral procession that was to pass along the streets. The dead man was a man with- out note, yet a great number of the townspeople, including some women, turned out to walk after the hearse. The coffin was left in a corner of the church near the door, and most of those who had followed it went into the church to say a prayer before returning home. It was as silent a ceremony as you could imagine.
Compare with this the wakes that still survive in many parts of Ireland. Nowhere, I imagine, is their traditional form preserved more fully than in Connemara. Here, as Mr W. P. Ryan tells us, " the elders sit by the fire and tell stories of the Fianna ; the younger folk, the girls at one side, the boys at the other, sit in rows on the straw- strewn floor ; the corpse very often lies on a table in the centre of the room or kitchen." About eleven o'clock at night, poteen — the poison- ous watery-looking whiskey which is still manu- factured secretly in some parts of Ireland — is served out to all present. At midnight the first keen over the dead is raised — the sgread na maidne, or morning cry, as it is called, " which no one who has heard it in Connacht is likely to forget." The keen is repeated at intervals till the burial takes place. At about three o'clock in the morning, the poteen goes round again, and
H
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this, like the keen, is repeated at intervals till the time of burial.
The professional story-tellers used to be an in- dispensable feature in an Irish wake, and the old men of Connemara telling their Fenian tales are their true heirs. Story-telling, indeed, seems to be an essential part of the wake all over Ireland, but the stories in most places now are not necessarily on the old heroic themes, but are as likely to be concerned with the good deeds of the dead man or woman as with the brave and beauti- ful people of the legends. Songs, too, are raised from time to time, and there is occasionally a good deal of drinking, for everybody is welcome at a wake, and it is a point of honour with the relatives of the dead to show hospitality to all. Formerly, when a member of any prominent family died, people would come to the wake from all quarters, the worthless with the worthy, and occasionally these indiscriminate gatherings had the appearance of something like a debauch. It is a mistake, however, to think that a wake always degenerates into an orgy. The man who is drunk at a wake is very often a man who has been drunk, or nearly so, before he came in. Young men, knowing they are going to have a late sitting, are inclined to prepare for it by a visit to a public-house on the way. The ordinary man who assists at a wake is as sober as the ordinary man who assists at a wedding.
In some parts of the country where the wake
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still survives, the sitting-up has come to be re- garded as a kind of excitement for the young men. The older men do not believe in losing their sleep for it, and only turn in to pay their respects to the dead man's family for a few minutes before going to work in the morning, or at some other time.
Protestant wakes, especially, are coming more and more to be recognised as excitements for the young. Near a watering-place in the north of Ireland is an island inhabited by some Pro- testant farmers and their families. Recently, there was a death on the island, and many young holiday-makers from the mainland joined in the wake that followed. On the day of the funeral the coffin was brought over to the mainland on a boat, and the boats of the fishermen of the place followed it like carriages at a funeral.
It is a curious fact that wakes are not un- common among the working people of Belfast, Protestant as well as Catholic. As often as not, the music on these occasions is of the Moody- and-Sankey order. Whiskey is served round hos- pitably, and one hears of a good deal of court- ing going on among the young people in the background.
When a man dies in an Irish countryside, all the neighbourhood unites to do him honour. In some parts of Ulster a mourning card is at once printed off, with a deep black border, and sent round the neighbours to inform them of the day
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of the funeral. Before the funeral, every one flocks to the house, with its piece of crepe on the knocker, if there is a knocker, and those who have not already seen the corpse now go into the room where it is lying and offer some remark of praise. In some of the Catholic districts of Ire- land a collection is made for the priest on the day of the funeral. Writing of this with special re- ference to Connemara, Mr Ryan says, " These collections are curiously styled ' altars.' The P.P., or the P.P. and curate, stand near the table, and every one attending the funeral is expected to come up and contribute. This has come to be a source of considerable hardship in Connemara, especially on the very poor — to provide even a shilling is naturally a strain very often on a poor man in a Connacht nook or village, and in point of fact in order to be able to furnish the contribu- tions the villagers and country folk have often to trudge to the towns and sell something or other. No neighbour with any respect for the departed, or the friends of the departed, will dream of stay- ing away from the funeral, and to the collection everybody, fearing the charge of meanness, and the public opinion which is terrible and subtle in villages and country places, must be sure to contribute."
Recently, according to the same writer, a sen- sational incident occurred in Connemara in con- nection with the "altar." The wake seems to have been something of an orgy, for when the
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money collected was handed to a young curate who was present he threw it down in disgust, saying in Irish that it was the price of devihy. The Parish Priest came forward and — in Irish, too, of course — told the people not to mind the curate, for he was here to-day and would be gone to-morrow, and did not understand the question. Both priest and curate ultimately went to the Archbishop with reference to the incident, and it is hinted that the Archbishop took the curate's side. It is certainly a fine thing that a number of the young clergy are trying to put an end to the " altars." I wonder, however, whether the " altars " and the poteen are so intimately related as Mr Ryan contends they are. Even in parts of the country where there is neither wake nor free drinking, these collections in the house of the dead are frequently made.
Coming to the funeral ceremony itself, one may say that customs vary in diff'erent parts of the country. In some places, the hearse is followed to the grave by men only : elsewhere women form a part of the procession. In the greater part of Ulster women stay in the house of mourning, condoling with each other, while the men are at the funeral, though among the working-classes in the towns it is common for the women to follow the coffin to the grave. In the Aran Islands, as every one who has read J. M. Synge's account of them will remember, women are an essential part of the procession. Mr Synge, describing an Aran
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funeral, tells how, as the coffin, sewn loosely in. sailcloth, was carried down to the graveyard, "nearly all the men, and all the oldest women, wearing petticoats over their heads, came out and joined in the procession." When they reached the graveyard, the women sat down among the flat tombstones and began keening for the dead. "Each old woman, as she took her turn in the leading recitative, seemed possessed for the moment with a profound ecstasy of grief, swaying to and fro, and bending her forehead to the stone before her, while she called out to the dead with a per- petually recurring chant of sobs. All round the graveyard other wrinkled women looking out from under the deep red petticoats that cloaked them, rocked themselves with the same rhythm, and in- toned the inarticulate chant that is sustained by all as an accompaniment." This crying for the dead is not always confined to the day of the funeral. There are parts of the country in which, after Mass on a Sunday, you will see the women sway- ing and sobbing over their dead in the chapel graveyard as though they had lost them the day before.
It is the custom in most places for the friends of the dead to carry the coffin on their shoulders a part of the way, the hearse moving slowly in front. Sometimes, it is the rule to give every pair of bearers a turn at each end of the coffin. In Dublin, 1 believe, funerals going through the city are compelled by a bye-law to move at a
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brisk trot — a thing which startled me the first time I saw it, for in Belfast funerals move at a snail's pace through the most crowded traffic. Funerals in town generally take place in the morning, in order that business people may not be put to too great inconvenience in attending them. I used to have something like a passion for, going to funerals — not an uncommon taste in the country — and I was often struck by the philosophic way in which the poorer people seemed to accept the death of the old. I attended one country funeral where the grown-up sons of the dead man smoked their pipes steadily as they walked after the hearse. An Ulster country funeral, indeed, has an air of stoical resignation, of grim fatalism. Every farmer in the neighbourhood goes to it, or sends his car, or his polo-cart, and it is a common thing for cars that meet the procession on the road to turn and follow it. While it is going by, the driver of the car always pulls in towards the ditch, and remains there with his raised hat almost hiding his inquisitive eyes till the front part has gone past. Arrived at the grave, when the coffin has been committed to the ground, some of the young men present will occasionally take a spade and help the grave-digger to fill in the earth. I remember one day I had driven with a friend some two miles to a funeral, and after the service we were about to drive oflf again, when we heard a loud whistle. Looking over the wall of the graveyard, we saw a young countryman at the
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graveside gesticulating and calling on us to stop, and, as we waited for him, he flung down the spade that he had been using and ran over the graves to us. He lived in the same district as ourselves, and did not fancy the idea of walking home when he could get a drive. I never saw so practical a man, so cool a disregarder of the con- ventions, in a graveyard before or since.
Before leaving the subject of wakes and funerals, it may be worth noting that another kind of wake is common in Ireland besides the wake of the dead. This is known as the American wake, and is held in the west in honour of those who are emigrating to America. It is a strange mixture of dancing and sudden lamentation which continues all through the night till morning. It is not without significance that so funereal a name should be given to these emigration ceremonies, for the Irish emigrant is not the personification of national adventure, but of something that has the appear- ance of national doom. To be in a Connemara station when emigrants are going ofi" by the train is one of the most torturing experiences that I know. When it is a girl that is going ofi", she is almost carried along the platform in the arms of her male relatives, and the shrill lament that she raises as the train comes in is as terrible as though she were keening her dead. As she hangs from the railway-carriage kissing the men of her family good-bye, it seems as though they were fighting to hold her back among them, and the railway-
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porters have to struggle with them as the train moves out to keep them from being dragged away. Sometimes, the lamenting girl seems to lose her grief as suddenly as she found it, and as she arrives at various railway stations she leans out of the window to see if there are any friendly faces about which will be wakened into interest by her momentary tragedy. /After all, the worst tragedy of Irish emigration is not the tragedy of hopeful youth, but the tragedy of the old people who are left. - The tragedy of youth occurs amid the disillusionments of the big cities of America.
I heard recently of yet a third kind of wake which took place in a town in County Tipperary. A young Protestant fell in love with a Catholic girl, and changed his religion in order to marry her. He was his mother's only son, and, when he left both her and her religion, she pulled down the blinds of the house and waked him for two nights and two days as though he were dead. And dead he is to her, for change of creed is not easily forgiven. One is sometimes told that there is no dramatic interest in the life of the people of modern Ireland, because there is so rigid a sup- pression of the emotions of sex. Only a person whose mind was monopolised by the sexual side of life, however, could believe this.
CHAPTER YII
PRIESTS AND PARSONS
The Irish priest is the most difficult of all subjects for any one writing about Ireland. It is easy enough to make generalisations about him and even to believe them. But to see him fairly as a human being, to appreciate his virtues and to understand his faults and the cause of them, would involve a knowledge, an imagination, and a sense of justice such as have been united in no writer of Irish critical books that I can remember. Emphatically, I am not the person who can fill this gap of perfectness. For one thing, I was reared a Presbyterian, as they say in Ulster, and priests are not an essential part of the colour of my life as they are of the life of an Irish Catholic. The attitude of many of the Irish people to the priests has often struck me as curious. The average intelligent Irish Catholic, so far as my experience holds, is as critical of priests as the average Protestant is of the Protestant clergy. He will tell you in conversation how this one is grasping and the other narrow to the point of bigotry, as freely as he will praise a courageous priest for his courage and a good priest for his
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generosity. At the same time he has not yet succeeded in creating an atmosphere of critical opinion in the light of which the bad qualities of bad priests would gradually disappear, and the good qualities of good priests have due and intelli- gent honour.
Probably, the reason why in the public as opposed to the private life of the country the priests have been thus kept outside the scope of criticism is that they have already been attacked and criticised so much and so wrongheadedly by the other side. I am sure, if the Protestant clergy had been attacked by the Catholics with the same blind bitterness with which the Catholic clergy have been attacked by the Protestants, we should see the Protestants rallying around their ecclesiastical leaders with a bewildering warlike enthusiasm. If Ireland is a priest-ridden country — and it is not a priest-ridden country to anything like the degree which most people suppose — it is largely because the Irish people as a whole have not been left to work out their own salvation without interference from England, and because the Catholics of the country have not been left to work out their own salvation without inter- ference from Protestants.
If you doubt the first of these reasons, you had better read Mr George Bernard Shaw's preface to "John Bull's Other Island." If you doubt the second, I cannot think that you have studied the kind of book which an Irish Protestant
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usually reads when he sits down to learn the truth about Ireland. It is by preference a book attacking priests, and if it is written by a Catholic, or a professing Catholic — so much the better. This represents the Protestant spirit, the Protestant attitude, not at its best, but at its most usual. It is this, along with British policy, as set forth in a well-known letter of Lord Randolph Churchill, that has done more than anything else to drive the Irish Catholic publicly into the priest's arms.
I say " publicly," because, as I have already mentioned, there is almost a superfluity of private criticism of the priests among the people. The Irish temperament seems to me to show a curious combination of the satirical and the idealistic, and the priest is as likely to be a figure of mirth in a satirical phrase as he is to be idealised into a saint. The priest, it must be remembered, is not a stranger who has come down from the sacred mountains among the people ; he is almost always one of the people themselves. I have no means of getting at figures about the family origin of the priests ; but, from all I can hear, it would be near the truth to say that the priest is usually the son of a farmer, and that, when he is not the son of a farmer, he is usually the son of a publican. It is the Catholic farmer's summit of pride to have a son clever enough at books to be sent in for the priesthood, just as it is the Presbyterian farmer's ultimate glory
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to have a son of sufficient learning to be sent on for the ministry.
Jewish parents never dedicated their children to the priesthood of God with greater pride than is sometimes felt by Catholic and Presbyterian parents in Ireland when devoting their sons to a similar service. I am sure, indeed, that in both creeds the ambitions of religious fathers, and especially of religious mothers, have thrust up into the pulpit a good many young men who were by nature intended to live on a more commonplace and human level.
One of the most generally satirised faults among priests — a fault which is a constant subject of joking all over the country — is one to which the farming classes are especially liable, and if many priests are guilty of it, this is not because they are priests, but because they are farmers' sons. Farmers in the mass, I think, are every- where noted for their reverent tenderness for money. Sometimes they cling to money thriftily ; sometimes they cling to money wastefully. In Ireland, where thrift has been so frequently dis- couraged by law, and where even a small sufficiency of money has about it something of a miraculous wonderfulness, the unprofitable sort of saving is the general rule. The Irish farm- born priest often brings his father's money-loving characteristics with him into his new callino-. It is only fair to him to say, on the other hand, that, so far as one can hear from Catholic
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witnessess, the priest usually gathers money, not for his own enrichment, but either for the glory of his church, or in order to help his parents, sisters, and brothers.
There is nothing for which the priests are more freely blamed, perhaps, than for the fees which they demand in connection with marriages. Some people talk, indeed, as though every priest in the country were a leech-like creature, who w^ould never perform a marriage ceremony until he had drained the unfortunate brideofroom of the last possible penny. This, of course, is nonsense, and a libel on many good men. As one of the gentlest of priests said to a friend of mine some time ago, "Not only does the priest often marry poor people for nothing, but sometimes you will find him buying the ring with which he marries them." It is not long since a Munster priest made an effective protest from the pulpit against the idea that the clergy will refuse to marry a poor man unless he can give them a rich reward for it. " If any man here," he announced from the altar, " has the courage to take a woman by the hand and say in the presence of God that he wants to marry her, let him come to me and I'll marry him without any charge."
The majority of priests, of course, expect a good fee when the bridegroom is able to afford it. I heard of a rich Catholic who was married some time ago, and who after the ceremony
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banded the priest ten pounds. " Are you joking ? " said the priest, with a scornful look at the money. Personally, I think it is a good thing that the marria.ge-fee should have some relation to the means of the bride and bridegroom. On the other hand, there is no doubt that there are more than a handful of really extortionate priests scattered through the country who are a burden both to rich and poor. It is almost impossible to give any approximate idea of the extent to which extortion is practised on the occasion of marriages. Accounts vary from place to place, and most people judge all the clergy by the priest in their own neighbourhood. Add to this the fact that one bad priest gets talked about more than twenty good ones, and you will see how difficult it is to arrive at anything like a confident conclusion on the matter.
I do not know how far the figures given by a correspondent in " The Irish Nation " some time ago may be regarded as typical of Catholic Ireland. Speaking of a district in the west of Ireland, the writer declared that it is customary for the priest to demand £4 for marrying a poor man like a labourer, and £10 for a man in the position of a schoolmaster. When the bride and bridegroom belong to the farming classes, the priest, we are told, discovers the amount of the fortune which goes with the marriage, and assesses his fee accordingly. Often on occasions like this, says the same writer, a bargain is struck, and the
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holy sacrament is preceded by a conversation such as: "Do it for £13, father." "No, I won't marry you under £16." "Split the difference, father." And so on, and so on. That there are priests as bad as this is unquestionable. But are they numerous ? Are they in the majority ? I have met too many kindly and manly-eyed priests myself to believe that this supposition can be true.^
^ Charles Kickham, who was sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment for Fenianism, wrote a too little known novel, " Knocknagow," wliicbi gives an excellent picture of Irish life and customs in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Kickham, who was an earnest Catholic, expressed the view of many of the clergy and laity of his church regarding exorbitant marriage-fees in the following passage of dialogue in that novel :
" Maybe," said Maurice Kearney, " the marriage money has something to do with keeping people from getting married. Ned Brophy tells me the priest will charge twenty pounds for marrying him."
" Well," replied Father MacMahon with a laugh, " that is not so much, bearing in mind that old sauce-pan