THE IRISH PEOPLE
I must warn you, before proceeding to write about the Irish people, that
I have tried to explain them, according to my capacity, a thousand times
to my English friends and neighbours, and have been pulled up short as
many times by the reflection that all I have been saying was
contradicted by some other aspect of my country-people. For we are an
eternally contradictory people, and none of us can prognosticate
exactly what we shall feel, what do, under given circumstances; whereas
the Englishman is simple. He has no mysteries. Once you know him, you
can pretty well tell what he will say, what feel, and do under given
circumstances. You have a formula for him: you have no formula for the
Irish. The Englishman is simple, the Irish complex. The Anglo-Irish, who
stand to most English people for the Irish, have had grafted on to them
the complexity of the Irish without their pliability. It makes, perhaps,
the most puzzling of all mixtures, and it may be the chief difficulty in
a proper estimate of the Irish character.
They will tell you in Ireland that you have to go some forty or fifty
miles from Dublin before you get into Irish Ireland. There are a good
many Irish in Anglo-Ireland, usually in the humbler walks of life,
whence you shall find in Dublin servants, car-drivers, policemen,
newspaper-boys, and so on, the raciness, the vivacity, the charm, which
in Irish Ireland is a perpetual delight. Dublin drawing-rooms are not
vivacious, nor are the manners gracious, although the Four Courts still
produce a galaxy of wit, and Dublin citizens buttonhole each other with
good stories all along the streets, roaring with laughter in a way that
would be regarded as Bedlam in Fleet Street.
Get into Irish Ireland and the manners have a graciousness which is like
a blessing. I asked the way in Ballyshannon town once. The woman who
directed me came out into the street and a little way with me, and when
she left me called to me sweetly, "Come back soon to Donegal!" which
left a sense of blessing with me all that day. There was a certain
curly-haired "Wullie," who drove the long car from Donegal to Killybegs.
I can see "Wullie" yet helping the women on and off the car with their
myriad packages, can see the delightful grief with which he parted from
us, his shining face of welcome when he met us again a fortnight later.
To set against "Wullie" were the car-drivers, who certainly are
unpleasant if the "whip-money" does not come up to their expectations.
We say of such that they are "spoilt by the tourists," yet I remember
some who were not spoilt by the tourists, although they were perpetually
in touch with them--boatmen and pony-boys at Killarney; and a certain
delightful guide, whose winning gaiety was not at all merely
professional.
Thinking over my country-people, I say, "They are so-and-so," and then I
have a misgiving, and I say, "But, after all, they are not so-and-so."
They are the most generous people in the world. They enjoy to the
fullest the delight of giving; and what a good delight that is! I pity
the ungiving people. You will receive more gifts in Ireland in a
twelvemonth than in a lifetime out of it. The first instinct of Irish
liking or loving is to give you something. The giving instinct runs
through all classes. If you sit down in a cabin and see an old piece of
lustre-ware or something else of the sort, do not admire it unless you
mean to accept it; for it will be offered to you, not in the Spanish way
which does not expect acceptance, but in the Irish way which does. I
have many little bits of china given so, usually the one thing of any
consideration or value the donor possessed. I once sought to buy an old
china dish, much flawed and cracked by hot ovens, in a Dublin hotel, as
much to save it from following its fellows to destruction as for any
other reason. The owner would not sell the dish, but he offered it for
my acceptance in such a way that I could not refuse. When I go back to
my old home, the cottagers bring a few new-laid eggs or a griddle-cake
for my acceptance. I have a friend in an Irish village whose income from
an official source is £10 a year. She has a cottage, a few hens, and
enough grass for a cow when she can get one. Her gifts come at
Christmas, at Easter, on St. Patrick's Day, and on some special, private
feasts of my own--eggs, sweets, flowers, a bit of lace, or a fine
embroidered handkerchief, and, in times of illness, a pair of chickens.
That is royal giving out of so little; and I assure you that it blesses
the giver as well as the recipient.
On the other hand, the farmers grow thriftier and thriftier. Sir Horace
Plunkett and men like him, truly patriotic Irishmen, are showing them
the way. Successive Land Acts lift them more and more into a position of
security from one of precariousness. They have more money now to put in
the savings-banks. Their prosperity does not mean a higher standard of
living, although that is badly needed. It means more money in the
banks--that is all.
The Irish are very like the French. If the day should come when they
should learn, like the French, to be thrifty and usurious, I hope I
shall not be there to see it. Better--a thousand times better--that they
should remain royal wastrels to the end.
As yet we need not fear it. Still, if you ask a drink of water at a
mountain cabin in the poorest parts of Ireland, you are given milk; and
_do not offer to pay for it_, lest you sink to the lowest place in the
estimation of these splendid givers.
The hospitality is truly splendid. There is a saying in Ireland that
they always put an extra bit in the pot for "the man coming over the
hill." It is an unheard-of thing that you should call at an Irish house
and not be asked if "you've a mouth on you." If your visit be within
anything like measurable distance of meal-time you will be obliged to
stay for the meal.
In England, when people are poor, or comparatively so, or feel the need
of retrenchment, they "do not entertain." It is almost the first form of
retrenchment which suggests itself to the Englishman; whereas to curtail
his hospitalities would be the last form of retrenchment to an Irishman,
and you will be entertained generously and lavishly by people you know
to be poor. The Englishman's different way of looking at the matter is
no doubt partly due to the fact that he is a much more domestic person
than the Irishman, and depends mainly on his family life for his
happiness and pleasure. Now, the French do not give hospitality at all
outside the large family circle, so that in that regard at least the
Irish will have a long way to travel before they touch with the French.
[Illustration: OFF TO AMERICA.]
I have said that the Irish are not domestic. They are gregarious, but
not domestic. The Irishman depends a deal on the neighbours; he has no
such way of enclosing himself within a little fortified place of home
against all the ills of the world as has the Englishman. Irish mothers,
like Irish nurses, are often tenderly, exquisitely soft and warm; but
the young ones will fly out of the nest for all that. Perhaps the art of
making the home pleasant is not an Irish art. Perhaps it is the
gregariousness, general and not particular--at least, general in the
sense of embracing the parish and not the family. To the young Irish and
a good many of their elders the home is dull. They go off to America,
leaving the old people to loneliness, because there is no amusement.
They do not make their own interests, as the slower, less vivacious
nations do. The rainy Irish climate seems made for a people who would
find their pleasures indoors. But the Irish will be out and about,
telling good stories and hearing them. They are an artistic people, with
great traditions; yet books or music or conversation will not keep them
at home. If they cannot have the neighbours in, they will go out to the
neighbours.
They are very religious, and accept the invisible world with a
thoroughness and simplicity of belief which they would say themselves is
their most precious inheritance. The Celt is no materialist. He does not
love success or riches; most of those whom he holds in esteem have been
neither successful nor rich. Money is not the passport to his
affections. He ought never to go away, and, alas! he goes away in
thousands! Contact with the selfish, money-getting materialism has power
to destroy the spiritual qualities of the Celt, once he is outside
Ireland. When he comes back--a prosperous Irish-American--he is no
longer the Celt we loved. And he does come back: that is one of his
contradictions. The home he has left behind because of its dulness, the
arid patch of mountain-land, the graves of his people, call him back
again at the moment when one would have said every bond with them was
loosened.
He is full of sentiment, yet he makes mercenary marriages. The Irish
match-making customs are well known. In the South and West of Ireland
the prospective bride is bargained over with no more sentiment than if
she were a heifer. She may be "turned down" for an iron pot or a
feather-bed which her mother will not give up to supplement the dowry.
Satin cheeks and speedwell eyes and a head of silk like the raven's
plume will not count against a bullock extra with a yellow spinster of
greater fortune, or is not supposed to count; for sometimes Cupid steps
in, although the match-making customs are usually accepted as
unquestioningly as a similar institution is by the French. And even in
such unpromising soil flowers of love and tenderness will spring up.
Under my hand I have a letter from an Irish peasant which I think
affords a beautiful refutation of the idea that sentiment and
match-making cannot go together. Here is a passage from it:
"For the last few weeks I was anxiously engaged at match-making, as
matters were going from bad to worse; having no housekeeper, household
jobs and cares prevented me from attending to outside work. Well, at
last my match is made. The marriage is to take place next Thursday. The
'young girl' is twenty-two years, and I thank God that I am perfectly
satisfied with my life-companion-to-be. There were many other matches
introduced to me--far more satisfactory from the financial point of
view, some having £20, some £30, and one £40 more fortune than my
intended wife has, with whom I am getting but £90, while I must 'by
will' give £120 to my brother, leaving a deficit of £30; but, somehow, I
could not satisfy my mind with the other 'good girls' if they had over
£200--nay, at all. And the poet's words were true when he said something
like 'pity is akin to love'; pity I felt first for my intended wife,
with her simple, yet wise, unaffected ways, not used to world's ways and
wiles, 'an unspoiled child of Nature,' never flirted, never went to
dances, with the bloom of her maidenhood fresh and pure, and fair and
bright. When but a last £5 was between myself and her people _re_
fortune, her very words to me were: 'Wisha, God help me! if I'm worth
anything, I ought to be worth that £5.' That expression of hers stung me
to the quick, so openly, frankly, and innocently uttered, and 'I'm
getting other accounts, but would not marry anyone but you.' Well, the
end was in that one night, sitting beside her in her father's house, the
feeling of pity changed to a warmer feeling, thank God; for if it
didn't, I would rather live and die single than marry against my will.
''Tisn't riches makes happiness.' I've read somewhere that when want
comes in at the door, love flies out of the window; but I don't believe
it--I don't believe it. And my brother is kind; he will be giving me
time to pay the balance, £30, by degrees."
The Irish are notoriously brave, yet they have a fear of public opinion
unknown to an Englishman. Underneath their charmingly gay and open
manner there is a self-consciousness, a self-mistrust. For all their
keen sense of humour, they cannot bear laughter directed at themselves.
They dread to be made absurd more than anything else in this world.
They are responsive and sympathetic, yet too witty not to be somewhat
malicious; and they are warm and generous, yet not always so reliably
kind as a duller, slower people. They are irritable, so they are less
tolerant of children and animals, although they make excellent nurses,
as I have said. They have no tolerance at all for slowness and
stupidity, very little for ugliness or want of charm. They adore beauty,
though it doesn't count for much in their most intimate relations; and
it is not, therefore, the paradise of plain women.
I have not touched on a hundredth part of their contradictoriness, which
makes the Irish so eternally unexpected and interesting. They can be, as
they say themselves, "contrairy" when they choose--and they often
choose. Yet, when all is said and done, they are the pleasantest people
in the world. Nor is their pleasantness insincere. They are pleasant
because they feel pleasant; and an Irish man or woman will pay you an
amazing, fresh, audacious compliment which an Englishman might feel, but
would rather die than say.
Did I say that the Celt was gay and melancholy? He is exquisitely gay
and most profoundly melancholy. He is in touch with the other world, and
yet desperately afraid of it, or of the passage to it, being a creature
of fine nerves and apprehension; whence he will joke about death to
cover up his real repugnance, and yet hold the key to heaven as securely
as though it were the other side of the wall, with a lonesome passage to
be traversed. It is the lonesomeness of death which makes it terrible to
the gregarious Irishman, although he knows that the other side of the
wall the kinsmen and friends and neighbours await him, friendly and
loving as of old.