CORK AND THEREABOUTS
There is something of rich and racy association about the very name of
Cork--something that suggests joviality, wit, a warm southern
temperament. Corkmen only out of all Ireland hold together. The rest of
Ireland may be fissiparous, disunited. Corkmen cleave closer than
Scotsmen to one another, and to be a Corkman is to another Corkman a
cloak that covers a multitude of sins. A Corkman in Dublin will have
friends in all sorts of unlikely places. What matter though a man be in
a humble rank of life--a cabman, a policeman, a postman, even a
scavenger! So he be a Corkman, he has an appeal to the heart of his
brother Corkman. It is a Freemasonry. There is nothing else like it in
Ireland, nor anywhere else, so far as I know; for the Scotsman coming
into England may draw other Scotsmen to follow him, but in the Scotch
sticking together there is less real affection than there is in the case
of the Corkman. To be able to exchange memories of the Mardyke, of the
River Lee, of Shandon and Sunday's Well, is to make Corkmen brothers
all the world over. Cork looks on itself as the real capital of Ireland,
and has always its eye on a day when Dublin will be dispossessed.
It has a most excellent situation on the River Lee, and is surrounded by
all manner of natural beauties. There is plenty of business stirring,
and there is a good deal of opulence in Cork, where, Corkmen being men
of taste, they display it in their houses, their way of living and on
the persons of their beautiful women, with the irresistible Cork brogue
to crown all their other charms. Cork is nothing if not artistic. She
has produced artists of all descriptions--poets, painters, great
newspaper men (was not Delane of the _Times_ a Corkman?), musicians,
sculptors, orators, preachers. The words roll off the Cork tongue sweet
as honey. There is something extraordinarily rich, gay and alluring
about Cork and Cork people. They were always audacious. They set up
Perkin Warbeck as a Pretender to the English Crown, clad him in silks
and velvets, and demanded his acknowledgment at the hands of the Lord
Deputy. I do not know that as a city Cork took a great part in any of
the many Irish rebellions. It would make a city of diplomatists because
of its honeyed tongue. Queen Elizabeth, they say, was the first one to
talk of Blarney, which is a Cork commodity. There was a certain
McCarthy, Lord of Blarney, who would not come in and submit to the
Queen's forces, though week by week he promised to come and kept the
Queen's anger off by cozening words. "It is all Blarney," the Queen came
to say of fair words that meant nothing; but that is a derivation I
somewhat suspect. I do not know what Cork was doing in the Desmond
Rebellion, of the results of which Spenser has left us so harrowing a
description. She was perhaps enjoying herself after the fashion of that
day. Spenser married a Cork-woman, and has enshrined her in the
"Epithalamion," the most beautiful love-poem in the English language.
Cork has its links with the Golden Age of England, for Raleigh was at
Youghal, and Spenser at Kilcolman close by; and in Raleigh's house at
Youghal they show you the oriel in which Spenser sat and read the
"Faërie Queene" to his host, the Shepherd of the Ocean. Youghal and all
that part of the country round about Cork is steeped in traditions and
memories. St. Mary's Collegiate Church at Youghal might be in an English
town, and there are malls and promenades in those parts, with high,
crumbling houses, which suggest the English civilization of the Middle
Ages and not the Irish civilization before the Norman Conquest. The
Normans were great church-builders, but of their churches, as in the
case of the old Abbey of St. Francis at Youghal, there remain now only
ruins--a naked gable standing up amid a wilderness of graves, buried in
coarse grasses, which, when I was there, had a greater decency towards
the dead than had the living. For it is strange that the Irish, who love
the dead, have little piety towards their graves.
From Youghal Sir Walter Raleigh sailed away to Virginia on his last
disastrous voyage. Spenser had gone back to London earlier than that,
heart-broken by the loss of his little son, who was burnt to death in a
fire at Kilcolman Castle. Raleigh and Spenser had received grants of the
lands of the attainted Desmonds. Very little profit either had of them,
and Raleigh's lands passed to the Earl of Cork, commonly called "the
Great," whose flaring chapel destroys the quiet of St. Mary's dim aisles
and chancel. Never was there so worldly a monument as this of Robert
Boyle, his mother, his two wives, and his nine children, all in
hideously painted and decorated Italian marble. The fierce eyes of the
great Earl are something to remember with dismay.
I recall the evidence the great Earl adduced to prove that Sir Walter
did really hand him over his Irish estates on the eve of that journey
to Virginia--for a small consideration of money and plenishing for the
expedition. "If you do not take the lands, some Scot will have them,"
said, or is reported to have said, Sir Walter, which reminds us that
Jamie had succeeded Elizabeth, and was already transplanting his
Scots--Jamie, who was to keep so brilliant a bird as Sir Walter in so
squalid a cage as a prison till he made up his mind to send him to the
block. Youghal is haunted by Sir Walter and Spenser. My memories of the
place in a windy autumn are brightened by sudden gleams, as of splendid
attire and golden olive faces with the Elizabethan ruff and the
Elizabethan pointed beard.
The Blackwater, which runs through Youghal, dropping into the sea at
that point, had at Rhincrew Point its House of Knights Templars. From
Youghal they also sailed away in search of El Dorado, but a heavenly
one. May they have found it!
And also there is Templemichael, of the Earls of Desmond, the southern
branch of the Fitzgeralds, which Cromwell battered down for "dire
insolence." There is a story of a Desmond lord who was buried across the
water at Ardmore, the holy place of St. Declan, where there is a
pilgrimage and a patronage to this day. But holy as Ardmore was and is,
Earl Gerald could not sleep there. He wanted to be back at
Templemichael, where his young wife lay in her lonely grave. So that
night after night there came a terrible cry, "Garault Arointha! Garault
Arointha!"--that is to say: "Give Gerald a ferry!" So at last some of
his faithful followers rowed over by night, took up the body of Earl
Gerald, and carried it back to Templemichael and to the dead Countess's
side. And after that Earl Gerald slept in peace.
My memory of Youghal in that far-away windy autumn is compounded of
three or four things. There was purple wistaria hanging in great masses
over the walls of the college which was the foundation of one of the
Desmonds. There was provision there for so many singing men--twenty, was
it?--who were to sing in St. Mary's choir. The great Earl of Cork had a
great maw, one that never suffered from indigestion. The revenues of St.
Mary's College went the same way as Sir Walter's slice of the Desmond
lands. Then, again, in a little shop-window of the town, there was a
glorious show of fruit--great scarlet-skinned tomatoes, gorgeous plums
and pears and apples, which reminded one that Raleigh had planted
orchards at Affane, on the Blackwater. As a rule, fruit is sadly to seek
in a small Irish town, although Cork produces some of the finest fruit
I have ever seen. Then, again, there was a room in Raleigh's house,
Myrtle Grove, unlit save for the flicker of firelight, the darkness all
about us, and an old voice bidding us to notice the earthy smell, which
was supposed to enter the room from a subterranean passage that led to
St. Mary's.
Again, I have another widely different memory. It is of a fine, tall,
beautifully-complexioned girl standing behind the counter of a draper's
shop, her shining red-golden head showing against a background of little
plaid shawls and kerchiefs, while she lamented in her wailing southern
brogue the fact that no one could hope to get married in Youghal, unless
one had £300 to buy an old "widda-man"; and they were all the men that
were going.
I like to get back from Youghal and its ghosts, and Rosanna, who never
thought of rebelling against the marriage customs of her forbears, to
cheerful Cork of the living and not the dead, with her tramcars, her
jingles--the curious covered car which takes the place of the outside
car in other Irish towns--her citizens laughing and button-holing each
other with a greater gaiety than the Dubliners; her excellent shops, her
beautiful girls promenading Patrick Street, her club-houses, her
churches, her Queen's College, and all the rest of it, down to her
river with its busy steamers. Cork's citizens live outside her gates, at
Monkstown, at Blackrock, at Glenbrook; and the busy steamers carry them
to and fro by the loveliest of waterways. "Are the steamers punctual?" I
asked a Cork friend. "Is it punctual?" repeated he. "They're the most
punctual things in Ireland, for they always get in before their time."
Father Mathew is one of Cork's memories; Father Prout is another; Dr.
Maginn is another. But the list of Cork's worthies is a long one, and I
shall not enter upon it here.
[Illustration: RALEIGH'S HOUSE, MYRTLE GROVE.]
Cork has the most enervating climate for one who comes to it from more
northern latitudes. It is always soft and warm, and often wet. "Good
heavens!" said John Mitchel, when he came back from twenty years or so
of Australia, gliding in by Spike Island in that same silver mist of
rain in which he had gone out, "isn't that shower over yet?" The flowers
are wonderful in Cork, as well as the fruit. I have seen the suburban
gardens of Corkmen a luxuriance of vivid, closely packed, overflowing
blossom. Myrtles and fuchsias grow in the open air. There are hedges of
fuchsias at Killarney. There are hydrangeas also; but the same is true
of Dublin and its precincts. No one coming in from outside has energy to
do anything in Cork. But the Corkman lacks nothing of energy, nothing
of the joy of life. He is a keen business man, and there is plenty of
industrial enterprise. He is interested in the affairs of the world at
large and of Cork in particular. He has his enthusiasms. He is a
tremendous politician, and does not mind being on the losing side so
long as it is the right one. He is a sportsman and a bit of a gambler;
he makes love and is a good friend. The place is full of wit and gaiety
and humour. His standard of living when he has money, or ought to have
it, is an unusually high one for Ireland. Some of those successful
merchants live, I am told, like merchant princes. He is lavish and
generous, and fond of display--altogether a rich, abundant,
highly-coloured character. He lives in an atmosphere of incessant wit
and humour. Hardly a man in Cork but has his nickname. "There goes Billy
Boulevard," you hear, and you are told that the gentleman so designated
desired to embellish Patrick Street with trees. But it was in Dublin
that they called one who had made his money in pneumatic tyres, and was
exalted above his humbler neighbours, "Lord Tyre and Side-on."