SOUTH OF DUBLIN
If you go down from Dublin by the wonderful coast-line or through the
beautiful country inland which runs by the base of the mountains, you
will come upon beautiful scenery, and find a population not at all
characteristically Irish. The beauty of Wicklow, its wonderful woods,
its deep glens, its placid waters, its glorious mountains, is only less
than the beauty of Killarney, which is an earthly paradise. But in
Wicklow, in Wexford, in Waterford, the people's blood is mixed.
Sometimes it is Celt upon Celt, the Welsh Celt upon the Irish. There are
charming people in Wicklow and Wexford and Waterford, but to those
counties belongs also what I call the cynical Irishman--the Irishman
without charm of manner, the "independent" Irishman, who will not take
off his hat to rank or age or sex; yet he is Irish enough in the core of
him. And Wicklow and Wexford, with Kildare and part of Meath, were the
scenes of the Rebellion in 1798. Perhaps the memory of those days helps
to make the Irishman of the south-east corner of Ireland what he is, and
that is often something very unlike the gracious Irishman of the South
and West. He has his resentments. I have heard an Irishman say: "A
Wexford man will never look at a Tipperary man, because Tipperary didn't
rise in the Rebellion." The Rebellion, which was hatched in the North by
Ulster Presbyterians, broke out, after all, in Wexford, and on a
religious, and a Catholic, cause of quarrel. There could have been
nothing farther from the thoughts of the leaders of the united Irishmen
than to make a religious war, but that was what the Rebellion of 1798
turned out to be--a religious war; a war between Catholic and
Protestant, precipitated not by English intriguers, say those who know
well, but by outrageous insults to the Catholic altars, led in many
cases by priests on the rebel side, foredoomed to failure in spite of
the desperate courage of the peasantry who for a time swept all before
them. One always thinks of Wexford and the Rebellion simultaneously. It
was a time of cynical contrasts. Think of the poor peasants, maddened by
outrages to their altars, led by their priests, carrying on the
Rebellion planned by Protestants of the North--by leaders deeply imbued
with the French revolutionary spirit, which was certainly not Christian!
Think of the Western peasants, when Humbert and his men landed at
Killala, hailing those good comrades of the Revolution as
fellow-Catholics, coming to meet them decked out in religious emblems!
One of the strangest and most cynical of these contrasts was the fact
that while the peasant army fought desperately at New Ross, where they
all but carried the day, on the other side of the Barrow River men were
ploughing peacefully in their fields, because it was Wexford that was up
and not their county. I suppose it is the clan system which
differentiates Irishmen by their counties and their towns. Dublin is
heterogeneous, perhaps. It has, at all events, few distinguishing
characteristics, whereas Cork and Waterford men are as widely apart
almost as though they were of different nationalities; and both are
agreed in despising Dublin, although Dublin has made history in the last
hundred years--national history--more than either.
[Illustration: A WICKLOW GLEN.]
The men who were the first begetters of the Rebellion, and the men who
saved Ireland for the English Crown, were alike men of Anglo-Irish
blood. The Rebellion was put down by the Irish yeomanry, as English
statesmen had to acknowledge, however little they liked the methods of
their allies. The yeomanry did not make war with rose-water, any more
than they precipitated the Rebellion by gentle methods. It is a bloody
and brutal chapter of Irish history, and the memories of it accounted
for the religious animosities which I remember in my youth, which are
fading out as the memories of the Rebellion are fading. The year 1798
has ceased to be a landmark in Irish life. When I was a child, there yet
lived people who could tell at first hand or second hand of the terrible
happenings of those days. People used to say, fixing an age: "He was
born the year of the Rebellion." Now all that has passed away. Even in
those times it was becoming more customary to date events by the year of
the Big Wind, 1839. Now, with the establishment of parish
registers--which did not come in in Ireland till the sixties--and the
spread of newspapers and cheap knowledge generally, such landmarks are
no longer required; and the Big Wind of 1903 has wiped out the memory of
its predecessor.
In the mountains of Wicklow the insurgents of those days found their
refuges and their fastnesses and their graves. I remember having seen
somewhere near Roundwood, in the Wicklow Mountains, in the midst of a
ploughed field a long strip of greenest grass covering the grave of many
rebels. The plough had gone round it ever since then, but not a sod of
it had been turned up; it had remained inviolate.
A great deal of Irish history gathers round the Rebellion--_the_
Rebellion, the Irish yet call it, as though there had never been any
other. The men who made it were literary men, in a more vital sense than
the men of '48, who were also literary. Two books of that day stand out
pre-eminently--Lord Edward Fitzgerald's "Life and Letters," edited by
Thomas Moore, and the Journal of Theobald Wolfe Tone. Lord Edward had an
exquisite style. His letters are the frank revelation of a beautiful and
gallant and innocent mind and heart. Without deliberation, without
knowledge, his family letters achieved the highest art. They are
immortal, imperishable things.
Then Tone's Journal is as remarkable a human document. Tone swaggers
through these pages better than any hero of romance. Life, after all,
is the greatest artist, and one does not say, "Here is a true Dumas
hero! Here is a true Stevenson hero!" For Life is better than her
children.
Nearly all the United Irish leaders left memoirs or journals behind
them. There was, perhaps, something of the self-consciousness of the
French Revolution in this keeping a journal in the face of battle.
Anyhow, we are grateful to Holt, to Teeling, to Cloney, for keeping
alive for us those days and those men.
In Lady Sarah Napier's letters you also get most vivid glimpses of the
Rebellion--as, indeed, you do in the letters of the whole Leinster
family. Mary Ledbetter, that gentle Quakeress, of Ballitore, has told
her experiences of the Rebellion in Kildare; there is Bishop Stock's
Narrative of the French landing at Killala and those days in which he
entertained willy-nilly the French leaders and found them the most
considerate of guests. In fact, there is a whole library of Rebellion
literature.
I ask pardon for treating Wicklow and Wexford as though they were the
theatre of '98, and nothing more; but, indeed, in the story of Wexford
the Rebellion stands up like White Mountain and Mount Leinster, and one
finds little else to say.