THE IRISH COUNTRY
Dublin possesses great natural advantages. The sea, the mountains, the
green country, are at her gates. You take one of her many trams, and at
the terminus you step into solitudes, into "dear secret greenness" of
country; on to expanses of sea-sand, with the waves breaking in little
crisped curls of foam at your feet. She is ringed about with mountains.
She has a most beautiful coast-line. Turn which way you will on leaving
her, you are safe to turn to beauty. Round about her are clustered
various beauties. Beyond the Dublin mountains, the Wicklow Mountains,
into which they gently pass, invite you. The mountains have the most
beautiful colouring. It is an effect of the mists and clouds. I have
seen a mountain red as a rose, and I have seen one black as a black
pansy and as velvety. Sometimes they are veiled in silver, with the soft
feet of the flying rain upon them; and sometimes, because the sun is
shining somewhere, that same rain will be a garment of silver or of the
rainbow.
She is the greenest country ever was seen. England may think she wears
the green; but as compared with Ireland her green is rust-coloured and
dust-coloured. I have gone over from London in May and have found a
green in Ireland that absolutely made me wink.
"Sweet rose whose hue, angry and brave,
Bids the rash gazer wipe the eye,"
says Herbert; but the green, which is the eye's comforter of all the
colours, is, in an Irish May, of so intense a greenness as to have
something of the same effect as Herbert's rose. I think of the fat
pasture-lands at the gates of Dublin, as well I know them. In May they
are drifts of greenness, with the cattle sunken to their knees, while
the meadows white with daisies, gold with buttercups, presently to be
brown and green with seeding-grasses, have an exceeding cleanness and
brightness of aspect. Grass-green, milk-white, pure gold--these are
fields of delight. There used to be luxuriant hedges, too, ten or
twelve feet high. What hedges they were in May! with the hawthorn in
full bloom--no one calls it may in Ireland--and, later, the
woodbine--honeysuckle in Ireland is the white and purple clover--and
with the woodbine the sheets of wild roses flung lavishly over every
hedge. Since my young days an improving county surveyor has cut down the
hedges, though not so ruthlessly as here in Hertfordshire, where they
are noted hedgers and ditchers, and so strip the poor things to the
earth almost, just as they are coming into leaf, leaving the roads
pitiless indeed for the summer days.
I think of the lavish Irish hedges and of the strip of grass white with
daisies which ran either side of the footpath. There was always a clear
stream singing along the ditch. It had come down from the mountains, and
was amber-brown in colour, and clear as glass; it ran over pebbles that
were pure gold and silver and precious stones, now and again getting
dammed around a boulder, making a leap to escape, and coming around the
boulder with a swirl and a few specks of foam floating upon it. Ireland
of the Streams is one of the old names for Ireland, and it is justified;
for not only are there lordly rivers like the Shannon and the
Blackwater, to mention but two of them, but there are innumerable
little streams everywhere, undefiled--at least, as I know them--by
factories. You can always kneel down of a summer's day by one, fill your
two hands full and drink your fill; and that mountain water is better
than any wine. You may track it, if you will, up to the mountains, where
you will find it welling out, perhaps, through the fronds of a
hartstongue fern, the first tiny gush of it; and you will find it
widening out and almost hidden by a million flowers and plants that like
to stand with their feet in water. Or you will see it, cool and deep,
with golden shadows sleeping in it, slipping round little boulders and
clattering over stones, in a tremendous hurry to escape from these sweet
places to the noisome city, where it will lose itself in the sewer water
before it finds its way to the sea.
There is no such order in an Irish as in an English landscape: none of
the rich, ordered garden air which in England so delights Americans and
colonials. The Irish landscape is always somewhat forlorn, wild and
soft, with an impalpable melancholy upon it--this even in the fat
pasture-lands of Dublin County. How much more so when the bogs spread
their beautiful brown desolation over miles of country, or in the wild
places where man asks for bread and Nature gives him a stone! At its
most prosperous the country is always a little wild, a little mournful,
a barefooted colleen with cloudy hair and shy eyes sometimes tearful,
and no conventional beauty--only something that takes the heart by storm
and holds it fast.
Irish skies weep a deal. That accounts, of course, for the great
vegetation, the intense greenness. If I did not know the Irish green I
should be unable to realize the mantle of grass-green silk which so
often the old ballad-makers gave their knights and ladies. Knowing the
Irish grass, I see an intenser green than if I did not know it. Where
there are not rocks and stones and mountains, where there is cultivation
in Ireland, there is leafage and grass of great luxuriousness. Of a wet
summer in Ireland you could scarcely walk through the grass; it might
meet above a child's head. Contrariwise, the flora of Ireland, as I know
it, is much less various and luxuriant than that of England. In a
childhood and youth spent in the Irish country--it was round about
Dublin--I recall only the simpler and commoner wild-flowers. On a chalk
cliff at Dover, when May spread a carpet of flowers, I have seen a
greater variety of wild-flowers than I knew in a lifetime in
Ireland--most of them unknown to me by name.
[Illustration: BLARNEY CASTLE.]
Nor do I think the birds are so many as in England, perhaps because so
much of Ireland is stripped of its woods; perhaps because Ireland has
been slower to protect the birds than England; perhaps, also, because of
the scantier population, which leaves the birds to suffer hunger in the
winter. There are no nightingales in Ireland, but I do not think we have
missed them, having the thrush and the blackbird, which seem to me to
sing with a richer sweetness in Ireland than in England; but that may be
because the Irish-born person is prone to exaggerate the sweetness he
has lost. But the most characteristic note of the Irish summer is the
corn-crake's. Somehow the Irish corn-crake has a bigger note and is much
more in evidence than his English brother. All the nights of the early
summer in Ireland he saws away with his rasping note, till the hay is
cut, when he disappears. I suppose one hears him as much in the
day-time, but one does not notice him. He is the harsh Irish
nightingale. Poor fellow! he is often immolated before the
mowing-machine; and you shall see him flying with his long-legged wife
and children--or rather scurrying--to the nearest hedgerow, where there
is always a plentiful supply of grass to cover him till he can make up
his mind to go elsewhere. It is a saying in Ireland that you never see
a corn-crake after the meadows are cut. A learned doctor has assured me
that they migrate to Egypt for the good of their voices.
For the rest, in the Irish country there are villages of an incredible
poverty. The Irish village mars a landscape, whereas so often an English
one enhances its beauty. There are farmhouses and isolated cottages. The
farmhouses are seldom even pretty. Irish house architecture is terribly
ugly, as a rule, except for the few eighteenth-century houses which
derive from the English. The Irish farmhouse is generally a two-story
building, slated and whitewashed. It is too narrow for its height,
although the height may be no great thing. A mean hall-door in the
middle, with a mean window to either side, three mean windows
above--that is the Irish farmer's idea of house-building. I remember an
Irishman of genius objecting to Morland that his cottages were
impossible; there was never the like out of Arcadia. As a matter of
fact, the cottages were such as are the commonplaces of English
villages. But no good Irishman will concede to England a beauty, natural
or otherwise, which Ireland does not possess. The country shows many
ruins--ruined houses, the houses of the Irish gentry; ruined mills;
ruined churches and castles; and behind grey stone walls, unthought of,
uncared for, old disused graveyards filled with prairie grass to the
height of the crumbling walls.
When the Irish go away they are always lonely for the mountains. No
other mountains are so soft-bosomed and so mild. They have wisps of
cloud lying along the side of them and the blue peak showing above. I
have seen a rainbow, one end of the arch planted in the sea, the other
somewhere behind the mountains, "over the hills and far away." Seeing
that incomparable sight, I understood why the Irish peasant imagines
fairy treasures hidden at the foot of the rainbow. I, too, have been in
Arcadia.