IRISH TRAITS AND WAYS
An English person in Ireland may find himself astray because he will
have no clue to the minds of the people. I once heard two English ladies
returning from an Irish trip say to each other across a
railway-carriage, otherwise full of Irish people, that the Irish all
told lies. This was a rash judgment and a harsh one; I do not know what
the occasion of it was. Sometimes the Irish, through their naturally
gracious manners, will say the thing that will please you best to hear
rather than the absolute truth by rule of thumb. There is the
well-known, well-founded complaint about Irish distances; a peasant will
tell you that you are three miles from a place when you are really
seven. Now, of course you may be misled by the difference between the
Irish and English mile; and thereby hangs a tale. The Irish or
Plantation measure was adopted by Cromwell's planted English, so that
they might get a bigger slice of land than was intended for them. But if
you are told you have three Irish miles to go and find that you have
seven, almost certainly the thought uppermost in your misinformant's
mind was: "The crathur! Sure, he'll think nothin' of it if he believes
it's only three miles; and the spring 'ud be taken out of him altogether
if he thought he'd seven weary miles before him yet. And, sure, by the
time he's travelled the three miles he won't be far off the seven."
The Irish mind, besides being very nimble, is subtle and complicated. It
may have gone off on an excursion before answering you which you in your
Anglo-Saxon plainness would never dream of; and your truth may not be
the Irish truth at all, and yet both of them be the genuine article.
A very small Irish boy of my acquaintance, being rudely accused of
having told a lie, responded meekly: "I don't think it were really a
lie; I think it were only an imagination."
"Are there any priests in the town?" you ask an Irishman; and he
replies, there being some half-dozen: "The streets are black with them."
"You can't always depend on eggs, not if they comes in fresh from the
nest," said an Irish servant to me, when some of the grocer's "new-laid"
eggs had "popped" in the saucepan. The remark was purely consolatory
and was not at all intended to convey that the hens laid stale eggs.
The Irish "bull," so-called, very often is the result of the
nimble-wittedness of the speaker. He has thought more than he has
expressed, and the bull implies a hiatus. "I'd better be a coward for
ten minutes than be dead all my life" is a famous example of an Irish
bull; but it only means "all the days of my natural life"; so much was
not expressed.
My harsh critics of the London and North-Western express would doubtless
have found the soft, flattering ways of the Irish false and
hypocritical. One remembers the famous compliment, "No matter what age
you are, ma'am, you don't look it," and the historical compliment of the
Irish coal-porter to one of the beautiful Gunnings: "Sure, I could light
my pipe by the fire of her eye."
Sometimes a compliment or a wheedling good wish will take a sudden turn.
"May the blessin' of God go afther you!" says an Irish beggar--"may the
blessin' of God go afther you!" The desired alms not being forthcoming,
the blessing flows naturally into--"and never overtake you."
The beggars are great wits, of a sardonic kind usually. A rather short
friend of mine walking with his tall sister, the two were importuned
fruitlessly by a beggar-woman. Before they passed out of hearing she
called gently to the lady: "Well, there you go! And goodness help the
poor little crathur that hadn't the spirit to say no to you." This
double insult to the supposed husband and wife was very neat.
A matter-of-fact young sister of mine, having been begged from by a
ragged woman with a string of ragged children at one end of the village,
was importuned at the other end by a man, similarly accompanied, whom
she took rightly to be the woman's mate. "We're poor orphans," whined
the second string of children; "our poor mother's dead and buried." "I
don't believe it," she said; "I met your mother at the other end of the
village." "Take no notice of her, childer," said the man sorrowfully.
"It wouldn't be right to touch a penny of her money. She's an
unbeliever--that's what she is."
An old beggar-man, to whom I explained apologetically that I was without
my purse, looked at me benevolently. "Never mind!" he said; "you'd give
it if you had it, wouldn't you? But there's one thing I want to tell
you: your dog's gone home without you." I don't quite know how it was
meant, but it conveyed to me a sense of well-meaning failure and
inefficiency generally.
The salutations in Ireland used to be delightful. I hope it may be long
before they are out of date. "God save you kindly," was the salutation
on the roadside. "God save all here!" you said, entering a house. And if
any work was in progress, you said: "God bless the work!" If they were
churning in the kitchen as you entered it, with the old up-and-down
dasher or "dash," as I knew it, you took a few turns with the dash lest
you should carry off the butter. Butter and milk are things often
charmed away. When I was a young girl, there was at Lucan, in the county
Dublin, a fairy doctor, who was called in if the cows weren't milking
well, or the butter didn't come to the churn, or if the beasts were
ailing. A more Christian thing was to bring the live-stock to the priest
to be blessed, or to bring the priests to the field to bless them, which
is done every year. Even the Orangeman of the North, if he has a cow
ailing, thinks it not amiss to ask for the priest's blessing. All the
same, the Irish Celts, in their superstitions, have a way of rounding on
their good friends, the priests. Priests' marriages--that is, marriages
arranged by the priests--are proverbially unlucky. And to buy the
priest's cow in a fair is notoriously unlucky for the general dealing
of the day, as well as that particular one.
[Illustration: A HOME IN DONEGAL.]
The freedom of the people with their superiors is often a
stumbling-block to the stranger; while to the Irish man or woman the
division between classes in England will seem strange and
unnatural--inhuman almost. "That's an elegant new trousers you have on,
Master John," I heard an apple-woman by the kerb say to a young
gentleman. The intimacy is not at all presumptuous; very far from it.
Indeed, Irish people coming to live in England often blunder into
treating their inferiors with the easy intimacy of the life at home,
only to find that it is neither desired nor expected.
Irish servants of the old class were retainers and very much devoted to
the families they lived with. The conditions were strange and difficult
to those not accustomed to them. You would find a family of the gentry
of the lowest Low Church on terms of tender affection with its
Papistical servants and with the neighbouring peasants. They would have
told you as abstract facts that Home Rule would mean the massacre of the
Protestants, and that already their lands and properties were
partitioned in the secret councils of whatever League happened to be
uppermost at the moment. It would be an article of their creed that the
priests were accountable for all the troubles of Ireland. They would
have consented generally to the axiom that no Irish Papist told the
truth. Yet they would always exempt their own servants, and perhaps
their own tenants, and would fly at you as being anti-Irish if you
suggested a flaw in the Irish character, or even an excellency in the
English, which is almost as bad, if not quite. There are families of
Irish gentlefolk come down in the world whose servants, having feasted
with them, starve with them. One such servant I knew who managed the
whole finances of the family, and laid out the few coins to the greatest
advantage, allotting the supplies with a carefulness which must have
been bitter to her Irish heart. If the family lived too well at the
beginning of the week, it must go hungry at the end.
In an Irish house the young ladies and gentlemen are very often found in
the kitchen, not in pursuit of the housewifely virtues, but for social
reasons. The kitchen-fire is the best "to have a heat by." The cook will
rake out the ashes and make the fire bright for Master Rody or Miss
Sheila to warm their feet by; and in the kitchen Irish children of the
gentle class get filled to the lips with the peculiarly awful
ghost-stories of the Celt, with old songs and charms and folklore of
one sort or another; sometimes, too, with old legends and stories which
make young rebels of the children of the garrison and perhaps old rebels
as well. There is no nurse so warm and comfortable as a good Irish
nurse, as the little children of the Irish nobility and gentry--invading
or planted families, very often--found, drawing life from an Irish
breast, and wrapped up in a comfortable Irish embrace from all ghosts
and hobgoblins.
I remember the young daughter of very Evangelical gentlepeople in
Ireland who used to spend her Sunday afternoons, with the full knowledge
of her parents, seated on the kitchen-table reading Papistical
newspapers to the servants, whom she adored, and who adored her with at
least an equal warmth. Her gold watch was the gift of one old servant;
and on the eve of her marriage to a London curate she found pinned to
her pincushion an envelope containing a five-pound note--"For my darling
Miss Biddy, from Mary Anne."
It has always seemed to me that the tie is closer and tenderer between
the Irish Catholic servant and the Protestant gentry than when the
employers are also of the old religion. It is certain that in the
burning of Scullabogue Barn, and at the Bridge of Wexford, during the
Rebellion, Catholic servants perished with their Protestant employers.
The tender concern that may be shown for you by an Irish person of whom
you ask the way will stir you to wonderment. "Is it permissible to walk
on the sea-wall?" a friend of mine asked of an Irish policeman. "Sure it
is; but I wouldn't do it if I was you. It 'ud be terrible cowld," was
the reply. "I wouldn't walk it if I was you," you may be answered when
you ask how far a place is; "you wouldn't be killin' yourself--now,
would you?"
When ladies first rode the bicycle in Ireland they excited different
emotions, according to the character of the looker-on. "What would the
blessed saints in heaven think of you?" the old women used to call out;
but one old man had only compassion for the female cyclist. "God help
yez," he said; "'tis killin' yourselves yez'll be with them little
wheely things, bad luck to them!"
You will find the soft, insinuating ways in a shop when you make a
purchase or mean to make one. "It looks lovely on you," a shop-assistant
will say, with an air of being dispassionate. "Can you send this home
to-night?" you ask, having concluded your purchase. "Sure, why not?" If
you are English-born and bred, you will be at a loss to say why not.
A policeman in Dublin will direct you: "You take that turn over there,
an' you go along till you meet a turn on your left, but you'll take no
notice of that; you'll keep straight on, and there'll be another turn,
but you'll take no notice of that. An' after that, you'll come to a
third turn, an' you'll take notice of that, for that's the street you're
after."
I recognized a countryman of my own in London when I asked a policeman
the way and demurred from his instructions, remarking that I had been
told to approach by a different way. "Sure you can, if you like," he
said, looking at me with his head on one side, "but I wouldn't if I was
you; it 'ud be a terrible long way round."
An Irishman will always agree with you if he can--or even if he can't.
It is the Irish politeness. If you were to say to him, "Three years ago
to-day I had as bad a cold as ever I had in my life," he will say, "To
be sure you had; I remember it well. 'Twas a terrible dose of a cowld,
all out." This makes the Irish a very agreeable people to live with if
you have not offended them.
There are one or two virtues, not of the shining sort, which are hardly
virtues at all, but rather vices to the Irish. Thrift is one of these.
Another is its cousin, punctuality. No Irishman holds punctuality in
honour. Irish time is twenty-five minutes later than English time and
takes a deal longer than that to come up with English time. Any time at
all will do for an Irishman. "Punctuality is the thief of time" is one
of his axioms. Above all things, he despises punctuality about
meal-times, and this, I know, will wring an Englishman's withers. An
Irish meal is served whenever it is ready; and if it is never ready at
all, the Irishman will take a snack when he feels he really wants it. No
Irishman is ill-tempered because his meals are late. He prides himself
on his indifference to food as one of the things that set him apart from
the unspiritual Saxon. You could hardly offend an Irishman more than by
accusing him of having a hearty appetite. His meals are all movable
feasts. Oddly enough, the Anglo-Irishman is quite as unpunctual as the
Celt, if not more so. He assimilates the ways of the Celt, while the
Celt remains untouched by his. The Anglo-Irishman is often as good a
trencherman as his English brother, but he would never think of
disturbing the machinery of Irish life so far as to expect his dinner at
a given time. I have been asked to dine in Dublin and have arrived
punctually, only to find the tradesmen's carts delivering the dinner;
and, having grown accustomed to English ways, I have made a frantic
effort to arrive at the appointed hour for a luncheon-party, only to
find the hostess lying down with toothache, and the drawing-room fire
still unlit.
To be sure, you may arrive at a house at any hour of the day in Ireland
and fall in for a meal. If you arrive at a time within at all measurable
distance of meal-time, you shall not go forth unfed, although you be
press-ganged to stay. I shall never forget the horror of my Irish
friends when they heard that one was allowed to leave an English house
with the dinner-bell in one's ears. "It must be an _awful_ country,"
they said; then, detecting something of guilt, perhaps, in my air, they
ventured: "But that wouldn't happen in an _Irish_ house--not in
_yours_." When I confessed that it had happened in mine they changed the
subject. If they had allowed themselves to speak, they would have said
too much.
I know an Irishman settled in England--a North of Ireland, that is to
say a Scotch-Irishman, and a man of business--who always has the motor
round for a spin as soon as the dinner-bell rings. He cannot keep his
English servants, and is grieved at their perversity, which would keep
him chained to a hot dining-room on an ideal evening for a motor-run.
His guests stay their hunger with sherry and biscuits while they await
his return.
End of Project Gutenberg's Peeps at Many Lands: Ireland, by Katharine Tynan