or more daughters; eight of whom form my father’s pet corps of Amazons,
always kept working about the shrubberies and pleasure-grounds, or
haymaking or any light fieldwork; houses which, though poorest of all,
are by no means the most dirty or uncared for. Of course there are
dozens of others literally overflowing with children, children in the
cradle, children on the floor, children on the threshold, children on
the “midden” outside; rosy, bright, merry children, who thrive with the
smallest possible share of buttermilk and stirabout, are utterly
innocent of shoes and stockings, and learn at school all that is taught
to them at least half as fast again as a tribe of little Saxons. Several
of them in Balisk are the adopted children of the people who provide for
them. First sent down by their parents (generally domestic servants) to
be nursed in that salubrious spot, after a year or two it generally
happened that the pay ceased, the parent was not heard of, and the
foster-mother and father would no more have thought of sending the child
to the Poor-house than of sending it to the moon. The Poor-house,
indeed, occupied a very small space in the imagination of the people of
Balisk. It was beyond Purgatory, and hardly more real. Not that the
actual institution was conducted on other than the very mildest
principles, but there was a fearful Ordeal by Water—in the shape of a
warm bath—to be undergone on entrance; there were large rooms with
glaring windows, admitting a most uncomfortable degree of light, and
never shaded by any broken hats or petticoats; there were also stated
hours and rules thoroughly disgusting to the Celtic mind, and, lastly,
for the women, there were caps without borders!
Yes! cruelty had gone so far (masculine guardians, however
compassionate, little recking the woe they caused), till at length a
wail arose—a clamour—almost a Rebellion! “Would they make them wear caps
without borders?” The stern heart of manhood relented, and answered
“No!”
But I must return to Balisk. Does any one ask, was nothing done to
ameliorate the condition of that wretched place? Certainly; at all
events there was much attempted. Mrs. Evans, of Portrane, of whom I
shall say more by and by, built and endowed capital schools for both
boys and girls, and pensioned some of the poorest of the old people. My
father having a wholesome horror of pauperising, tried hard at more
complete reforms, by giving regular employment to as many as possible,
and aiding all efforts to improve the houses. Not being the landlord of
Balisk, however, he could do nothing effectually, nor enforce any kind
of sanitary measures; so that while his own villages were neat, trim and
healthy, poor Balisk went on year after year deserving the epithet it
bore among us, of the Slough of Despond. The failures of endeavours to
mend it would form a chapter of themselves. On one occasion my eldest
brother undertook the true task for a Hercules; to drain, _not_ the
stables of Augeas, but the town of Balisk. The result was that his main
drain was found soon afterwards effectually stopped up by the dam of an
old beaver bonnet. Again, he attempted to whitewash the entire village,
but many inhabitants objected to whitewash. Of course when any flood, or
snow, or storm came (and what wintry month did they not come in
Ireland?) I went to see the state of affairs at Balisk, and provide what
could be provided. And of course when anybody was born, or married, or
ill, or dead, or going to America, in or from Balisk, embassies were
sent to Newbridge seeking assistance; money for burial or passage; wine,
meat, coals, clothes; and (strange to say), in cases of death—always
jam! The connection between dying and wanting raspberry jam remained to
the last a mystery, but whatever was its nature, it was invariable.
“Mary Keogh,” or “Peter Reilly,” as the case might be, “isn’t expected,
and would be very thankful for some jam;” was the regular message. Be it
remarked that Irish delicacy has suggested the euphuism of “isn’t
expected” to signify that a person is likely to die. What it is that he
or she “is not expected” to do, is never mentioned. When the supplicant
was not supposed to be personally known at Newbridge, or a little extra
persuasion was thought needful to cover too frequent demands, it was
commonly urged that the petitioner was a “poor orphant,” commonly aged
thirty or forty, or else a “desolate widow.” The word desolate, however,
being always pronounced “dissolute,” the epithet proved less affecting
than it was intended to be. But absurd as their words might sometimes be
(and sometimes, on the contrary, they were full of touching pathos and
simplicity), the wants of the poor souls were only too real, as we very
well knew, and it was not often that a petitioner from Balisk to
Newbridge went empty away.
But such help was only of temporary avail. The Famine came and things
grew worse. In poor families, that is, families where there was only one
man to earn and five or six mouths to feed, the best wages given in the
country proved insufficient to buy the barest provision of food;
wheatmeal for “griddle” bread, oatmeal for stirabout, turnips to make up
for the lost potatoes. Strong men fainted at their work in the fields,
having left untasted for their little children the food they needed so
sorely. Beggars from the more distressed districts (for Balisk was in
one of those which suffered least in Ireland) swarmed through the
country, and rarely, at the poorest cabin, asked in vain for bread.
Often and often have I seen the master or mistress of some wretched
hovel bring out the “griddle cake,” and give half of it to some
wanderer, who answered simply with a blessing and passed on. Once I
remember passing by the house of a poor widow, who had seven children of
her own, and as if that were not enough, had adopted an orphan left by
her sister. At her cabin door one day, I saw, propped up against her
knees, a miserable “traveller,” a wanderer from what a native of Balisk
would call “other nations; a bowzy villiain from other nations,” that is
to say, a village eight or ten miles away. The traveller lay senseless,
starved to the bone and utterly famine-stricken. The widow tried
tenderly to make him swallow a spoonful of bread and water, but he
seemed unable to make the exertion. A few drops of whiskey by and by
restored him to consciousness. The poor “bowzy” leaned his head on his
hands and muttered feebly, “Glory be to God”! The widow looked up,
rejoicing, “Glory be to God, he’s saved anyhow.” Of course all the
neighbouring gentry joined in extensive soup-kitchens and the like, and
by one means or other the hard years of famine were passed over.
Then came the Fever, in many ways a worse scourge than the famine. Of
course it fell heavily on such ill-drained places as Balisk. After a
little time, as each patient remained ill for many weeks, it often
happened that three or four were in the fever in the same cabin, or even
all the family at once, huddled in the two or three beds, and with only
such attendance as the kindly neighbours, themselves overburdened, could
supply. Soon it became universally known that recovery was to be
effected only by improved food and wine; not by drugs. Those whose
condition was already good, and who caught the fever, invariably died;
those who were in a depressed state, if they could be raised, were
saved. It became precisely a question of life and death how to supply
nourishment to all the sick. As the fever lasted on and on, and
re-appeared time after time, the work was difficult, seeing that no
stores of any sort could ever be safely intrusted to Irish prudence and
frugality.
Then came Smith O’Brien’s rebellion. The country was excited. In every
village (Balisk nowise behindhand) certain clubs were formed, popularly
called “Cutthroat Clubs,” for the express purpose of purchasing pikes
and organising the expected insurrection in combination with leaders in
Dublin. Head-Centre of the club of Balisk was the ex-schoolmaster, of
whom we have already spoken. How he obtained that honour I know not;
possibly because he could write, which most probably was beyond the
achievements of any other member of the institution; possibly also
because he claimed to be the lawful owner of the adjoining estate of
Newbridge. How the schoolmaster’s claim was proved to the satisfaction
of himself and his friends is a secret which, if revealed, would
probably afford a clue to much of Irish ambition. Nearly every parish in
Ireland has thus its lord _de facto_, who dwells in a handsome house in
the midst of a park, and another lord who dwells in a mud-cabin in the
village and is fully persuaded he is the lord _de jure_. In the endless
changes of ownership and confiscation to which Irish land has been
subjected, there is always some heir of one or other of the dispossessed
families, who, if nothing had happened that did happen, and nobody had
been born of a score or two of persons who somehow, unfortunately, were
actually born, then he or she might, could, would, or should have
inherited the estate. In the present case my ancestor had purchased the
estate some 150 years before from another English family who had held it
for some generations. When and where the poor Celtic schoolmaster’s
forefathers had come upon the field none pretended to know. Anxious,
however, to calm the minds of his neighbours, my father thought fit to
address them in a paternal manifesto, posted about the different
villages, entreating them to forbear from entering the “Cutthroat
Clubs,” and pointing the moral of the recent death of the Archbishop of
Paris at the barricades. The result of this step was that the newspaper,
then published in Dublin under the audacious name of _The Felon_,
devoted half a column to exposing my father by name to the hatred of
good Clubbists, and pointing him out as “one of the very first for whose
benefit the pikes were procured.” Boxes of pikes were accordingly
actually sent by the railway before mentioned, and duly delivered to the
Club; and still the threat of rebellion rose higher, till even calm
people like ourselves began to wonder whether it were a volcano on which
we were treading, or the familiar mud of Balisk.
Newbridge, as described in the first chapter of this book, bore some
testimony to the troubles of the last century when it was erected. There
was a long corridor which had once been all hung with weapons, and there
was a certain board in the floor of an inner closet which could be taken
up when desirable, and beneath which appeared a large receptacle wherein
the aforesaid weapons were stored in times of danger. Stories of ’98
were familiar to us from infancy. There was the story of Le Hunts of
Wexford, when the daughter of the family dreamed three times that the
guns in her father’s hall were all broken and, on inducing Colonel Le
Hunt to examine them, the dream was found to be true and his own butler
the traitor. Horrible stories were there, also, of burnings and cardings
(_i.e._, tearing the back with the iron comb used in carding wool); and
nursery threats of rebels coming up back stairs on recalcitrant
“puckhawns” (naughty children—children of Puck), insomuch that to “play
at rebellion” had been our natural resource as children. Born and bred
in this atmosphere, it seemed like a bad dream come true that there were
actual pikes imported into well-known cabins, and that there were in the
world men stupid and wicked enough to wish to apply them to those who
laboured constantly for their benefit. Yet the papers teemed with
stories of murders of good and just landlords; yet threats each day more
loud, came with every post of what Smith O’Brien and his friends would
do if they but succeeded in raising the peasantry, alas! all too ready
to be raised. Looking over the miserable fiasco of that “cabbage garden”
rebellion now, it seems all too ridiculous to have ever excited the
least alarm. But at that time, while none could doubt the final triumph
of England, it was very possible to doubt whether aid could be given by
the English Government before every species of violence might be
committed by the besotted peasantry at our gates.
I have been told on good authority that Smith O’Brien made his escape
from the police in the “habit” of an Anglican Sisterhood, of which his
sister, Hon. Mrs. Monsell, was Superior.
A little incident which occurred at the moment rather confirmed the idea
that Balisk was transformed for the nonce into a little Hecla; not under
snow, but mud. I was visiting the fever patients, and was detained late
of a summer’s evening in the village. So many were ill, there seemed no
end of sick to be supplied with food, wine and other things needed. In
particular, three together were ill in a house already mentioned, where
there were several grown-up sons, and the people were somewhat better
off than usual, though by no means sufficiently so to be able to procure
meat or similar luxuries. Here I lingered, questioning and prescribing,
till at about nine o’clock my visit ended; and I left money to procure
some of the things required. Next morning my father addressed me:—
“So you were at Balisk last night?”
“Yes, I was kept there.”
“You stayed in Tyrell’s house till nine o’clock?”
“Yes; how do you know?”
“You gave six and sixpence to the mother to get provisions?”
“Yes; how do you know?”
“Well, very simply. The police were watching the door and saw you
through it. As soon as you were gone the Club assembled there. They were
waiting for your departure; and the money you gave was subscribed to buy
pikes; of course to _pike me_!”
A week later, the bubble burst in the memorable Cabbage garden. The
rebel chiefs were leniently dealt with by the Government, and their
would-be rebel followers fell back into all the old ways as if nothing
had happened. What became of the pikes no one knew. Possibly they exist
in Balisk still, waiting for a Home Rule Government to be brought forth.
At the end of a few months the poor schoolmaster, claimant of Newbridge,
died; and as I stood by his bedside and gave him the little succour
possible, the poor fellow lifted his eyes full of meaning, and said, “To
think _you_ should come to help me now!” It was the last reference made
to the once-dreaded rebellion.
After endless efforts my brother carried his point and drained the whole
village—beaver bonnets notwithstanding. Whitewash became popular.
“Middens” (as the Scotch call them, the Irish have a simpler phrase)
were placed more frequently behind houses than in front of them. Costume
underwent some vicissitudes, among which the introduction of shoes and
stockings, among even the juvenile population, was the most remarkable
feature; a great change truly, since I can remember an old woman, to
whom my youngest brother had given a pair, complaining that she had
caught cold in consequence of wearing, for the first time in her life,
those superfluous garments.
Many were drawn into the stream of the Exodus, and have left the
country. How helpless they are in their migrations, poor souls! was
proved by one sad story. A steady, good young woman, whose sister had
settled comfortably in New York, resolved to go out to join her, and for
the purpose took her passage at an Emigration Agency office in Dublin.
Coming to make her farewell respects at Newbridge, the following
conversation ensued between her and myself:
“So, Bessie, you are going to America?”
“Yes, ma’am, to join Biddy at New York. She wrote for me to come, and
sent the passage-money.”
“That is very good of her. Of course you have taken your passage direct
to New York?”
“Well, no, ma’am. The agent said there was no ship going to New York,
but one to some place close by, New-something-else.”
“New-something-else, near New York; I can’t think where that could be.”
“Yes, ma’am, New—New—I disremember what it was, but he told me I could
get from it to New York immadiently.”
“Oh, Bessie, it wasn’t New Orleans?”
“Yes, ma’am, that was it! New Orleans—New Orleans, close to New York, he
said.”
“And you have paid your passage-money?”
“Yes, ma’am, I must go there anyhow, now.”
“Oh, Bessie, Bessie, why would you never come to school and learn
geography? You are going to a terrible place, far away from your sister.
That wicked agent has cheated you horribly.”
The poor girl went to New Orleans, and there died of fever. The birds of
passage and fish which pass from sea to sea seem more capable of knowing
what they are about than the greater number of the emigrants driven by
scarcely less blind an instinct. Out of the three millions who are said
to have gone since the famine from Ireland to America, how many must
there have been who had no more knowledge than poor Bessie Mahon of the
land to which they went!
Before I conclude these reminiscences of Irish peasant life in the
Forties, I must mention an important feature of it—the Priests. Most of
those whom I saw in our villages were disagreeable-looking men with the
coarse mouth and jaw of the Irish peasant undisguised by the beards and
whiskers worn by their lay brethren; and often the purple and bloated
appearance of their cheeks suggested too abundant diet of bacon and
whisky-punch. They worried me dreadfully by clearing out all the
Catholic children from my school every now and then on the pretence of
withdrawing them from heretical instruction, though nothing was further
from the thoughts or wishes of any of us than proselytizing; nor was a
single charge ever formulated against our teachers of saying a word to
the children against their religion. What the priests really wanted was
to obstruct education itself and too close and friendly intercourse with
Protestants. For several winters I used to walk down to the school on
certain evenings in the week and give the older lads and lassies lessons
in Geography (with two huge maps of the world which I made myself, 11
ft. by 9 ft.!) and the first steps in Astronomy and history. Several
times, when the class had been well got together and began to be
interested, the priest announced that _he_ would give them lessons on
the same night, and they were to come to him instead of to me. Of course
I told them to do so, and that I was very glad he would take the
trouble. A fortnight or so later however I always learnt that the
priest’s lessons had dropped and all was to be recommenced.
The poor woman I mentioned above as so devoted to her mother went to
service with one of the priests in the neighbourhood in the hope that
she would receive religious consolation from him. Meeting her some time
after I expressed my hope that she had found it. “Ah, no Ma’am!” she
answered sorrowfully, “He never spakes to me unless about the bacon or
the like of that. _Priests does be dark!_” I thought the phrase
wonderfully significant.
My father, though a Protestant of the Protestants as the reader has
learned, thought it right to send regularly every year a cheque to the
priest of Donabate as an aid to his slender resources; and there never
was _openly_, anything but civility between the successive _curés_ and
ourselves. We bowed most respectfully to each other on the roads, but I
never interchanged a word with any of them save once when I was busy
attending a poor woman in Balisk in the cramps of cholera; the disease
being at the time raging through the country. With the help of the good
souls who in Ireland are always ready for any charitable deed, I was
applying mustard poultices, when Father M—— entered the cabin (a
revolting looking man he was, whose nose had somehow been frost-bitten),
and turned me out. I implored him to defer, or at least hasten his
ministrations; and stood outside the door in great impatience for half
an hour while I knew the hapless patient was in agony and peril of
death, inside. At last the priest came out,—and when I hurried back to
the bedside I found he had been gumming some “Prayers to the Holy
Virgin” on the wall. Happily we were not too late with our mustard and
“sperrits,” and the woman was saved; whether by Father M—— and the
Virgin or by me I cannot pretend to say.
I have spoken of our village school and must add that the boys and girls
who attended it were exceedingly clever and bright. They caught up
ideas, were moved by heroic or pathetic stories and understood jokes to
a degree quite unmatched by English children of the same humble class,
as I found later when I taught in Miss Carpenter’s Ragged Schools at
Bristol. The ingenuity with which, when they came to a difficult word in
reading, they substituted another was very diverting. One boy read that
St. John had a leathern _griddle_ about his loins; and a young man with
a deep manly voice, once startled me by announcing, “He casteth out
divils through,—through, through,—_Blazes_, the chief of the Divils!”
In Drumcar school a child, elaborately instructed by dear, good Lady
Elizabeth M‘Clintock concerning Pharisees, and then examined:—“What was
the sin of the Pharisees?” replied promptly: “_Ating camels_, my lady!”
Alas, I have reason to fear that the erudition of my little scholars, if
quickly obtained, was far from durable. Paying a visit to my old home
ten years later I asked my crack scholar, promoted to be second gardener
at Newbridge, “Well, Andrew, how much do you remember of all my
lessons?”
“Ah, Ma’am, then, never a word!”
“O, Andrew, Andrew! And have you forgotten all about the sun, the moon
and stars, the day and night, and the Seasons?”
“O, no, Ma’am! I do remember now, and you set them on the schoolroom
table, and Mars was a red gooseberry, and I ate him!”
CHAPTER
VII.
_IRELAND IN THE FORTIES._
_THE GENTRY._
I now turn to describe, as my memory may serve, the life of the Irish
gentry in the Forties. There never has been much of a middle class,
unhappily, in the country, and therefore in speaking of the gentry I
shall have in view mostly the landowners and their families. These, with
few and always much noted exceptions, were Protestants, of English
descent and almost exclusively of Saxon blood; the Anglo-Irish families
however long settled in Ireland, naturally intermarrying chiefly with
each other. So great was, in my time, the difference in outward looks
between the two races, that I have often remarked that I could walk down
Sackville Street and point to each passenger “Protestant,” “Catholic,”
“Protestant,” “Catholic”; and scarcely be liable to make a mistake.
As I have said, my memory bridges over the gulf between a very typical
_ancien régime_ household and the present order of things, and I may be
able to mark some changes, not unworthy of registration. But it must be
understood that I make no attempt to describe what would be precisely
called _Irish society_, for into this, I never really entered at all. I
wearied of the little I had seen of it after a few balls and
drawing-rooms in Dublin by the time I was eighteen and thenceforward
only shared in home entertainments and dinners among neighbours in our
own county, with a few visits to relatives at greater distance. I
believe the origin of my great boredom in Dublin balls (for I was very
fond of dancing) was the extraordinary inanity of the men whom I met.
The larger number were officers of Horse Artillery, then under the
command of my uncle, and I used to pity the poor youths, thinking that
they danced with me as in duty bound, while their really marvellous
silliness and dulness made conversation wearisome in the extreme. Many
of these same empty-headed young coxcombs afterwards fought like Trojans
through the Crimean War and came back,—transformed into heroes! I
remember my dentist telling me, much to the same purpose, that half the
officers in the garrison had come to him to have their teeth looked
after before they went to the Crimea and had behaved abominably in his
chair of torture, groaning and moaning and occasionally vituperating him
and kicking his shins. But it was another story when some of those very
men charged at Balaklava! We are not, I think, yet advanced far enough
to dispense altogether with the stern teaching of war, or the virtues
which spring out of the dreadful dust of the battlefield.
Railways were only beginning to be opened in 1840, and were much dreaded
by landed proprietors through whose lands they ran. When surveyors came
to plan the Dublin and Drogheda Railway my father and our neighbour Mrs.
Evans, were up in arms and our farmers ready to throttle the
trespassers. I suggested we should erect a Notice-board in Donabate with
this inscription:—
“Survey the world from China to Peru;
Survey not here,—we’ll shoot you if you do.”