It was a fine breezy morning as the Colonel set out with Billy Traynor
for Belmullet. The bridle-path by which they travelled led through a
wild and thinly inhabited tract,--now dipping down between grassy hills,
now tracing its course along the cliffs over the sea. Tall ferns covered
the slopes, protected from the west winds, and here and there little
copses of stunted oak showed the traces of what once had been forest.
It was, on the whole, a silent and dreary region, so that the travellers
felt it even relief as they drew nigh the bright blue sea, and heard the
sonorous booming of the waves as they broke along the shore.
“It cheers one to come up out of those dreary dells, and hear the
pleasant plash of the sea,” said Harcourt; and his bright face showed
that he felt the enjoyment.
“So it does, sir,” said Billy. “And yet Homer makes his hero go
heavy-hearted as he hears the ever-sounding sea.”
“What does that signify, Doctor?” said Harcourt, impatiently. “Telling
me what a character in a fiction feels affects me no more than telling
me what he does. Why, man, the one is as unreal as the other. The fellow
that created him fashioned his thoughts as well as his actions.”
“To be sure he did; but when the fellow is a janius, what he makes is as
much a crayture as either you or myself.”
“Come, come, Doctor, no mystification.”
“I don't mean any,” broke in Billy. “What I want to say is this, that as
we read every character to elicit truth,--truth in the working of human
motives, truth in passion, truth in all the struggles of our poor weak
natures,--why would n't a great janius like Homer, or Shakspeare,
or Milton, be better able to show us this in some picture drawn by
themselves, than you or I be able to find it out for ourselves?”
Harcourt shook his head doubtfully.
“Well, now,” said Billy, returning to the charge, “did you ever see
a waxwork model of anatomy? Every nerve and siny of a nerve was
there,--not a vein nor an artery wanting. The artist that made it all
just wanted to show you where everything was; but he never wanted you to
believe it was alive, or ever had been. But with janius it's different.
He just gives you some traits of a character, he points him out to you
passing,--just as I would to a man going along the street,--and there he
is alive for ever and ever; not like you and me, that will be dead and
buried to-morrow or next day, and the most known of us three lines in
a parish registhry, but he goes down to posterity an example, an
illustration--or a warning, maybe--to thousands and thousands of living
men. Don't talk to me about fiction! What _he_ thought and felt is truer
than all that you and I and a score like us ever did or ever will do.
The creations of janius are the landmarks of humanity; and well for us
is it that we have such to guide us!”
“All this may be very fine,” said Harcourt, contemptuously, “but
give _me_ the sentiments of a living man, or one that has lived, in
preference to all the imaginary characters that have ever adorned a
story.”
“Just as I suppose that you'd say that a soldier in the Blues, or some
big, hulking corporal in the Guards, is a finer model of the human form
than ever Praxiteles chiselled.”
“I know which I 'd rather have alongside of me in a charge, Doctor,”
said Harcourt, laughing; and then, to change the topic, he pointed to
a lone cabin on the sea-shore, miles away, as it seemed, from all other
habitations.
“That's Michel Cady's, sir,” said Traynor; “he lives by birds,--hunting
them saygulls and cormorants through the crevices of the rocks, and
stealing the eggs. There isn't a precipice that he won't climb, not a
cliff that he won't face.”
“Well, if that be his home, the pursuit does not seem a profitable one.”
“'Tis as good as breaking stones on the road for four-pence a day, or
carrying sea-weed five miles on your back to manure the potatoes,” said
Billy, mournfully.
“That's exactly the very thing that puzzles me,” said Harcourt, “why, in
a country so remarkable for fertility, every one should be so miserably
poor!”
“And you never heard any explanation of it?”
“Never; at least, never one that satisfied me.”
“Nor ever will you,” said Billy, sententiously.
“And why so?”
“Because,” said he, drawing a long breath, as if preparing for a
discourse,--“because there's no man capable of going into the whole
subject; for it's not merely an economical question or a social one, but
it is metaphysical, and religious, and political, and ethnological, and
historical,--ay, and geographical too! You have to consider, first, who
and what are the aborigines. A conquered people that never gave in they
were conquered. Who are the rulers? A Saxon race that always felt that
they were infarior to them they ruled over!”
“By Jove, Doctor, I must stop you there; I never heard any
acknowledgment of this inferiority you speak of.”
“I'd like to get a goold medal for arguin' it out with you,” said Billy.
“And, after all, I don't see how it would resolve the original doubt,”
said Harcourt. “I want to know why the people are so poor, and I don't
want to hear of the battle of Clontarf, or the Danes at Dundalk.”
“There it is, you'd like to narrow down a great question of race,
language, traditions, and laws to a little miserable dispute about labor
and wages. O Manchester, Manchester! how ye're in the heart of every
Englishman, rich or poor, gentle or simple! You say you never heard
of any confession of inferiority. Of course you did n't; but quite
the reverse,--a very confident sense of being far better than the poor
Irish; and I'll tell you how, and why, just as you, yourself, after a
discusshion with me, when you find yourself dead bate, and not a word
to reply, you 'll go home to a good dinner and a bottle of wine, dry
clothes and a bright fire; and no matter how hard my argument pushed
you, you'll remember that _I'm_ in rags, in a dirty cabin, with potatoes
to ate and water to drink, and you 'll say, at all events, 'I 'm
better off than he is;' and there's your superiority, neither more or
less,--there it is! And all the while, _I'm_ saying the same thing to
_myself_,--'Sorrow matter for his fine broadcloth, and his white linen,
and his very best roast beef that he's atin',--I 'm his master! In all
that dignifies the spacies in them grand qualities that makes us poets,
rhetoricians, and the like, in those elegant attributes that, as the
poet says,--
“In all our pursuits
Lifts us high above brutes,'”
--in these, I say again, I 'm his master!'”
As Billy finished his growing panegyric upon his country and himself, he
burst out in a joyous laugh, and cried, “Did ye ever hear conceit like
that? Did ye ever expect to see the day that a ragged poor blackguard
like _me_ would dare to say as much to one like _you?_ And, after all,
it's the greatest compliment I could pay you.”
“How so, Billy? I don't exactly see _that_.”
“Why, that if you weren't a gentleman,--a raal gentleman, born and
bred,--I could never have ventured to tell you what I said now. It
is because, in _your own_ refined feelings, you can pardon all the
coarseness of _mine_, that I have my safety.”
“You're as great a courtier as you are a scholar, Billy,” said Harcourt,
laughing; “meanwhile, I'm not likely to be enlightened as to the cause
of Irish poverty.”
“'T is a whole volume I could write on the same subject,” said Billy;
“for there's so many causes in operation, com-binin', and assistin',
and aggravatin' each other. But if you want the head and front of the
mischief in one word, it is this, that no Irishman ever gave his heart
and sowl to his own business, but always was mindin' something else that
he had nothin' to say to; and so, ye see, the priest does be thinkin' of
politics, the parson's thinkin' of the priest, the people are always
on the watch for a crack at the agent or the tithe-proctor, and the
landlord, instead of looking after his property, is up in Dublin dinin'
with the Lord-Leftinint and abusin' his tenants. I don't want to screen
myself, nor say I'm better than my neighbors, for though I have a larned
profession to live by, I 'd rather be writin' a ballad, and singin' it
too, down Thomas Street, than I 'd be lecturin' at the Surgeons' Hall.”
“You are certainly a very strange people,” said Harcourt.
“And yet there's another thing stranger still, which is, that your
countrymen never took any advantage of our eccentricities, to rule us
by; and if they had any wit in their heads, they 'd have seen, easy
enough, that all these traits are exactly the clews to a nation's heart.
That's what Pitt meant when he said, 'Let me make the _songs_ of a
people, and I don't care who makes the _laws_.' Look down now in that
glen before you, as far as you can see. There's Belmullet, and ain't you
glad to be so near your journey's end? for you're mighty tired of all
this discoorsin'.”
“On the contrary, Billy, even when I disagree with what you say, I'm
pleased to hear your reasons; at the same time, I 'm glad we are drawing
nigh to this poor boy, and I only trust we may not be too late.”
Billy muttered a pious concurrence in the wish, and they rode along
for some time in silence. “There's the Bay of Belmullet now under your
feet,” cried Billy, as he pulled up short, and pointed with his whip
seaward. “There's five fathoms, and fine anchoring ground on every inch
ye see there. There's elegant shelter from tempestuous winds. There's
a coast rich in herrings, oysters, lobsters, and crabs; farther out
there's cod, and haddock, and mackerel in the sayson. There's sea wrack
for kelp, and every other con-vanience any one can require; and a poorer
set of devils than ye 'll see when we get down there, there's nowhere to
be found. Well, well! 'if idleness is bliss, it's folly to work hard.'”
And with this paraphrase, Billy made way for the Colonel, as the
path had now become too narrow for two abreast, and in this way they
descended to the shore.