assuredly hold a distinct place of honour when many a more pompous
political piece of legislation is buried in oblivion. For a long time
the new law, and the Society for Prevention of Cruelty which arose to
work it, were objects of obloquy and jest even from such a man as Sydney
Smith, who did his best in the _Edinburgh Review_ to sneer them down.
But by degrees they formed, as Mr. Lecky says every system of
legislation _must_ do, a system of _moral education_. A sense of the
Rights of Animals has slowly been awakened, and is becoming, by not
imperceptible degrees, a new principle of ethics. In my youth there were
plenty of good people who were fond of dogs, cats and horses; but
nothing in their behaviour, or in that of any one I knew at that time,
testified to the existence of any latent idea that it was _morally
wrong_ to maltreat animals to any extent. Pious sportsmen were wont to
scourge their dogs with frightful dog-whips, for any disobedience or
mistake, with a savage violence which I shudder to remember; and which I
do not think the most brutal men would now exhibit openly. Miss
Edgeworth’s then recent novel of _Ennui_ had described her hero as
riding five horses to death to give himself a sensation, without (as it
would appear) forfeiting in the author’s opinion his claims to the
sympathies of the reader. I can myself recall only laughing, not crying
as I should be more inclined to do now, at the spectacle of miserable
half-starved horses made to gallop in Irish cars to win a bribe for the
driver, who flogged them over ruts and stones, shouting (as I have heard
them) “Never fare! I’ll _batther_ him out of that!” The picture of a
“_Rosinante_,” from Cervantes’ time till a dozen or two years ago,
instead of being one of the most pathetic objects in the world,—the
living symbol of human cruelty,—was always considered a particularly
laughable caricature. Only tender-hearted Bewick in his woodcut,
_Waiting for Death_, tried to move the hearts of his generation to
compassion for the starved and worn-out servant of ungrateful man.
The Irish peasantry do not habitually maltreat animals, but the
frightful mutilations and tortures which of late years they have
practised on cattle belonging to their obnoxious neighbours, is one of
the worst proofs of the existence in the Celtic character of that
undercurrent of ferocity of which I have spoken elsewhere.
Among Irish ladies and gentlemen in the Forties there was a great deal
of interest of course in our domestic pets, and I remember a beautiful
and beloved young bride coming to pay us a visit, and asking in a tone
of profound conviction: “What _would_ life be without dogs?” Still there
was nothing then existing, I think, in the world like the sentiment
which inspired Mathew Arnold’s _Geist_ or even his “_Kaiser Dead_.” The
gulf between the canine race and ours was thought to be measureless.
Darwin had not yet written the Descent of Man or made us imagine that
“God had made of one blood” at least all the mammals “upon earth.” No
one dreamed of trying to realise what must be the consciousness of
suffering animals; nor did anyone, I think, live under the slightest
sense of responsibility for their well-being. Even my dear old friend,
Harriet St. Leger, though she was renowned through the county for her
attachment to her great black Retrievers, said to me one day, many years
after I had left Ireland, “I don’t understand your feelings about
animals at all. To me a _dog is a dog_. To you it seems to be something
else!”
Another difference was, that there was very little popularity-hunting in
the Forties. The “working man” was seen, but not yet heard of; and, so
far as I remember, we thought as little of the public opinion of our
villages respecting us as we did of the public opinion of the stables.
The wretched religious bigotry which, as we knew, made the Catholics
look on us as infallibly condemned of God in this world and the next,
was an insuperable barrier to sympathy from them, and we never expected
them to understand either our acts or motives. But if we cared little or
nothing what they thought of us, I must in justice say that we did care
a great deal for _their_ comfort, and were genuinely unhappy in their
afflictions and active to relieve their miseries. When the famine came
there was scarcely one Irish lady or gentleman, I think, who did not
spend time, money and labour like water to supply food to the needy. I
remember the horror with which my father listened to a visitor, who was
not an Irishwoman but a purse-proud _nouveau riche_ married to a very
silly baronet in our neighbourhood, who told him that her husband’s Mayo
property had just cost them £70. “That will go some way in supplying
Indian meal to your tenants,” said my father, supposing that to such
purpose it must be devoted. “O dear, no! We are not sending it for any
such use,” said Lady —. “We are spending it _on evictions_!” “Good God!”
shouted my father; “how shocking! At such a time as this!”
It has been people like these who have ever since done the hard things
of which so much capital has been made by those whose interest it has
been to stir up strife in the “distressful country.”
I happen to be able to recall precisely the day, almost the hour, when
the blight fell on the potatoes and caused the great calamity. A party
of us were driving to a seven o’clock dinner at the house of our
neighbour, Mrs. Evans, of Portrane. As we passed a remarkably fine field
of potatoes in blossom, the scent came through the open windows of the
carriage and we remarked to each other how splendid was the crop. Three
or four hours later, as we returned home in the dark, a dreadful smell
came from the same field, and we exclaimed, “Something has happened to
those potatoes; they do not smell at all as they did when we passed them
on our way out.” Next morning there was a wail from one end of Ireland
to the other. Every field was black and every root rendered unfit for
human food. And there were nearly eight millions of people depending
principally upon these potatoes for existence!
The splendid generosity of the English public to us at that time warmed
all our Anglo-Irish hearts and cheered us to strain every nerve to feed
the people. But the agitators were afraid it would promote too much good
feeling between the nations, which would not have suited their game. I
myself heard O’Connell in Conciliation Hall (that ill-named place!)
endeavour to belittle English liberality. He spoke (a strange figure in
the red robes of his Mayoralty and with a little sandy wig on his head)
to the following purpose:—
“They have sent you over money in your distress. But do you think they
do it for love of you, or because they feel for you, and are sorry for
your trouble? Devil a bit! _They are afraid of you!_—that is it! _They
are afraid of you._ You are eight millions strong.”
It was as wicked a speech as ever man made, but it was never, that I
know of, reported or remarked upon. He spoke continually to similar
purpose no doubt, in that Hall, where my cousin—afterwards the wife of
John Locke, M.P. for Southwark—and I had gone to hear him out of girlish
curiosity.
The part played by Anglo-Irish ladies when the great fever which
followed the famine came on us, was the same. It became perfectly well
known that if any of the upper classes caught the fever, they almost
uniformly died. The working people could generally be cured by a total
change of diet and abundant meat and wine, but to the others no
difference could be made in that way, and numbers of ladies and
gentlemen lost their lives by attending their poor in the disease. It
was very infectious, or at least it was easily caught in each locality
by those who went into the cabins.
There were few people whom I met in Ireland in those early days whose
names would excite any interest in the reader’s mind. One was poor
Elliot Warburton, the author of the _Crescent and the Cross_, who came
many times to Newbridge as an acquaintance of my brother. He was very
refined and, as we considered, rather effeminate; but how grand, even
sublime, was he in his death! On the burning _Amazon_ in mid-Atlantic he
refused to take a place in the crowded boats, and was last seen standing
alone beside the faithful Captain at the helm as the doomed vessel was
wrapped in flames. I have never forgotten his pale, intellectual face
and somewhat puny frame, and pictured him thus—a true hero.
His brother, who was commonly known as _Hochelaga_, from the name of his
book on Canada, was a hale and genial young fellow, generally popular.
One rainy day he was prompted by a silly young lady-guest of ours to
sing a series of comic songs in our drawing-room, the point of the jokes
turning on the advances of women to men. My dear mother, then old and
feeble, after listening quietly for a time, slowly rose from her sofa,
walked painfully across the room, and leaning over the piano said in her
gentle way a few strong words of remonstrance. She could not bear, she
said, that men should ridicule women. Respect and chivalrous feeling for
them, even when they were foolish and ill-advised, were the part, she
always thought, of a generous man. She would beg Mr. Warburton to choose
some other songs for his fine voice. All this was done so gently and
with her sweet, kind smile, that no one could take offence. Mr.
Warburton was far from doing so. He was, I could see, touched with
tender reverence for his aged monitress, and rising hastily from the
piano, made the frankest apologies, which of course were instantly
accepted. I have described this trivial incident because I think it
illustrates the kind of influence which was exercised by women of the
old school of “_decorum_.”
Another man who sometimes came to our house, was Dr. Longley, then
Bishop of Ripon, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a very
charming person, without the slightest episcopal _morgue_ or
affectation, and with the kindest brown eyes in the world. His wife was
niece, and, I believe, eventually heiress, of our neighbour Mrs. Evans;
and he and his family spent some summers at Portrane in the Fifties when
we had many pleasant parties and picnics. I shall not forget how the
Bishop laughed when the young Longleys and I and a few guests of my own,
inaugurated some charades, and our party, all in disguise, were
announced on our arrival at Portrane, as “Lady Worldly,” “Miss Angelina
Worldly,” “Sir Bumpkin Blunderhead,” and the “Cardinal Lord Archbishop
of Rheims.”
Our word was “Novice.” I, as Lady Worldly, in my great-grandmother’s
petticoat and powdered _toupee_, gave my daughter Angelina a lecture on
the desirability of marrying “Sir Bumpkin Blunderhead” who was rich, and
of dismissing Captain Algernon who was poor. Sir Bumpkin then made his
proposals, to which Angelina emphatically answered “No.” In the second
scene I met Sir Bumpkin at the gaming table, and fleeced him utterly;
the end of his “VICE” being suicide on the adjacent sofa. Angelina then,
in horror took the veil, and became a “_No-vice_,” duly admitted to her
Nunnery by the Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims (my youngest brother
in a superb scarlet dressing gown) who pronounced a Sermon on the
pleasures of fasting and going barefoot. Angelina retired to her cell,
but was soon disturbed by a voice outside the window (Henry Longley’s);
and exclaiming “Algernon, beloved Algernon!” a speedy elopement over the
back of the sofa concluded the fate of the _Novice_ and the charade.
There was another charade in which we held a debate in Parliament on a
Motion to “abolish the sun and moon,” which amused the bishop to the
last degree, especially as we made fun of Joseph Hume’s retrenchments;
he being a particular friend and frequent guest of our hostess. The
abolition of the Sun would, we feared, affect the tax on parasols.
At Ripon, as Dr. Longley told me, the Palace prepared for him (the first
bishop of the new see) had, as ornaments of the front of the house, two
full-sized stone (or plaster) Angels. One day a visitor asked him:
“Pray, my Lord, is it supposed by Divines that Angels wear the order of
the Garter?” On inspection it proved that the Ripon Angels had formerly
done service as statues of the Queen and Prince Albert, but that wings
had been added to fit them for the episcopal residence. Sufficient care,
however, had not been taken to efface the insignia of the Most
Illustrious Order; and “_Honi soit qui mal y pense_” might be dimly
deciphered on the leg of the male celestial visitant.
A lady nearly related to Mrs. Longley, who had married an English
nobleman, adopted the views of the Plymouth Brothers (or as all the Mrs.
Malaprops of the period invariably styled them, the “Yarmouth
Bloaters”), which had burst into sudden notoriety. When her husband died
leaving her a very wealthy woman, she thought it her duty to carry out
the ideas of her sect by putting down such superfluities of her
establishment as horses and carriages, and a well appointed table. She
accordingly wrote to her father and begged him to dispose of all her
plate and equipages. Lord C—— made no remonstrance and offered no
arguments; and after a year or two he received a letter from his
daughter couched in a different strain. She told him that she had now
reached the conviction that it was “the will of God that a peeress
should live as a peeress,” and she begged him to buy for her new
carriages and fresh plate. Lord C——’s answer must have been a little
mortifying. “I knew, my dear, that you would come sooner or later to
your senses. You will find your carriages at your coachmakers and your
plate at your bankers.”
Mrs. Evans, _née_ Sophia Parnell, the aunt of both these ladies, and a
great-aunt of Charles Stewart Parnell, was, as I have said, our nearest
neighbour and in the later years of my life at Newbridge my very kind
old friend. For a long time political differences between my father and
her husband,—George Hampden Evans, M.P., who had managed to wrest the
county from the Tories,—kept the families apart, but after his death we
were pleasantly intimate for many years. She often spoke to me of the
Avondale branch of her family, and more than once said: “There is
mischief brewing! I am troubled at what is going on at Avondale. My
nephew’s wife” (the American lady, Delia Stewart) “has a hatred of
England, and is educating my nephew, like a little Hannibal, to hate it
too!” How true was her foresight there is no need now to rehearse, nor
how near that “little Hannibal” came to our Rome! Charles Parnell was
very far from being a representative Irishman. He was of purely English
extraction, and even in the female line had no drop of Irish blood. His
mother, as all the world knows, was an American; his grandmother was one
of the Howards of the family of the Earls of Wicklow, his
great-grandmother a Brooke, of a branch of the old Cheshire house; and,
beyond this lady again, his grand-dames were Wards and Whitsheds. In
short, like other supposed “illustrious Irishmen”—Burke, Grattan,
Goldsmith, and Wellington—Mr. Parnell was only one example more of the
supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon intellect in every land of its adoption.
Mrs. Evans had known Madame de Stael, Condorcet and many other
interesting French people in her youth, and loved the Condorcets warmly.
She described to me a stiff, old-fashioned dinner at which she had been
present when Madame de Stael was a guest. After dinner, the ladies,
having retired to the drawing-room, sat apart from Madame de Stael in
terror, and she looked them over with undisguised contempt. After a
while she rose and, without asking the consent of the mistress of the
house, rang the bell. When the footman appeared, she delivered the
startling order: “Tell the gentlemen to come up!” The sensation among
the formal and scandalized ladies upstairs, and the gentlemen just
settling down to their usual long potations below, may be well imagined.
When her husband died, Mrs. Evans built in his memory a fine Round Tower
on the plan and of the size of the best of the old Irish towers. It
stands on high ground on what was her deer-park, and is a useful
landmark to sailors all along that dangerous coast, where the dreadful
wreck of the _Tayleur_ took place. On the shore below, under the lofty
black cliffs, are several very imposing caverns. In the largest of
these, which is lighted from above by a shaft, Mrs. Evans, on one
occasion, gave a great luncheon party, at which I was present. The
company were all in high spirits and thoroughly enjoying the pigeon-pies
and champagne, when some one observed that the tide might soon be
rising. Mrs. Evans replied that it was all right, there was plenty of
time, and the festival proceeded for another half-hour, when somebody
rose and strolled to the mouth of the cavern and soon uttered a cry of
alarm. The tide _had_ risen, and was already beating at a formidable
depth against both sides of the rocks which shut in the cave.
Consternation of course reigned among the party. A night spent in the
further recesses of that damp hole, even supposing the tide did not
reach the end (which was very doubtful), afforded anything but a
cheerful prospect. Could anybody get up through the shaft to the upper
cliff? Certainly, if they had a long ladder. But there were no ladders
lying about the cave; and, finally, everybody stood mournfully watching
the rising waters at the mouth of their prison. Mrs. Evans all this time
appeared singularly calm, and administered a little encouragement to
some of the almost fainting ladies. When the panic was at its climax,
Mrs. Evans’ own large boat was seen quietly rounding the projecting
rocks and was soon comfortably pushed up to the feet of the imprisoned
party, who had nothing to do but to embark in two or three detachments
and be safely landed in the bay outside, beyond the reach of the sea.
The whole incident, it is to be suspected, had been pre-arranged by the
hostess to infuse a little wholesome excitement among her country
guests.
Our small village church at Donabate was not often honoured by this
lady’s presence, but one Sunday she saw fit to attend service with some
visitors; and a big dog unluckily followed her into the pew and lay
extended on the floor, which he proceeded to beat with his tail after
the manner of impatient dogs under durance. This disturbance was too
much for the poor parson, who did not love Mrs. Evans. As he proceeded
with the service and the rappings were repeated again and again, his
patience gave way, and he read out this extraordinary lesson to his
astonished congregation:—“The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with
himself. Turn out that dog, if you please! It’s extremely wrong to bring
a dog into church.” During the winter Mrs. Evans was wont to live much
alone in her country house, surrounded only by her old servants and
multitudes of old books. When at last, in old age, she found herself
attacked by mortal disease she went to Paris to profit by the skill of
some French physician in whom she had confidence, and there, with
unshaken courage she passed away. Her remains, enclosed in a leaden
coffin, were brought back to Portrane, and her Irish terrier who adored
her, somehow recognised the dreadful chest and exhibited a frenzy of
grief; leaping upon it and tearing at the pall with piteous cries. Next
morning, strange to say, the poor brute was, with six others about the
place, in such a state of excitement as to be supposed to be rabid and
it was thought necessary to shoot them all. One of them leaped the gate
of the yard and escaping bit two of my father’s cows, which became
rabid, and were shot in my presence. Mrs. Evans was buried beside her
beloved husband in the little roofless and ruined church of Portrane,
close by the shore. On another grave in the same church belonging to the
same family, a dog had some years previously died of grief.
A brother of this lady, who walked over often to Newbridge from Portrane
to bring my mother some scented broom which she loved, was a very
singular and pathetic character. He was a younger brother of that
sufficiently astute man of the world, Sir Henry Parnell, afterwards Lord
Congleton, but was his antipodes in disposition. Thomas Parnell, “Old
Tom Parnell,” as all Dublin knew him for forty years, had a huge
ungainly figure like Dr. Johnson’s, and one of the sweetest, softest
faces ever worn by mortal man. He had, at some remote and long forgotten
period, been seized with a fervent and self-denying religious enthusiasm
of the ultra-Protestant type; and this had somehow given birth in his
brain to a scheme for arranging texts of the Bible in a mysterious order
which, when completed, should afford infallible answers to every
question of the human mind! To construct the interminable tables
required for this wonderful plan, poor Tom Parnell devoted his life and
fortune. For years which must have amounted to many decades, he laboured
at the work in a bare, gloomy, dusty room in what was called a
“Protestant Office” in Sackville Street. Money went speedily to clerks
and printers; and no doubt the good man (who himself lived, as he used
to say laughingly, on “a second-hand bone,”) gave money also freely in
alms. One way or another Mr. Parnell grew poorer and more poor, his coat
looked shabbier, and his beautiful long white hair more obviously in
need of a barber. Once or twice every summer he was prevailed on by his
sister to tear himself from his work and pay her a few weeks’ visit in
the country at Portrane; and to her and all her visitors he preached
incessantly his monotonous appeal: “Repent; and cease to eat good
dinners, and devote yourselves to compiling texts!” When his sister—who
had treated him as a mother would treat a silly boy—died, she left him a
small annuity, to be paid to him weekly in dribblets by trustees, lest
he should spend it at once and starve if he received it half-yearly.
After this epoch he worked on with fewer interruptions than ever at his
dreary text-books in that empty, grimy office. Summer’s sun and winter’s
snow were alike to the lonely old man. He ploughed on at his hopeless
task. There was no probability that he should live to fill up the
interminable columns, and no apparent reason to suppose that any human
being would use the books if he ever did so and supposing them to be
printed. But still he laboured on. Old friends—myself among them—who had
known him in their childhood, looked in now and then to shake hands with
him, and, noticing how pale and worn and aged he seemed, tried to induce
him to come to their homes. But he only exhorted them (like Tolstoi,
whom he rather resembled), as usual, to repent and give up good dinners
and help him with his texts, and denounced wildly all rich people who
lived in handsome parks with mud villages at their gates, as he said,
“like a velvet dress with a draggled skirt.” Then, when his visitor had
departed, Mr. Parnell returned patiently to his interminable texts. At
last one day, late in the autumn twilight, the porter, whose duty it was
to shut up the office, entered the room and found the old man sitting
quietly in the chair where he had laboured so long—fallen into the last
long sleep.
I never saw much of Irish society out of our own county. Once, when I
was eighteen, my father and I went a tour of visits to his relations in
Connaught, travelling, as was necessary in those days, very slowly with
post-horses to our carriage, my maid on the box, and obliged to stop at
inns on the way. Some of these inns were wretched places. I remember in
one finding a packet of letters addressed to some attorney, under my
bolster! At another, this dialogue took place between me and the
waiter:—
“What can we have for dinner?”
“Anything you please, Ma’am. _Anything_ you please.”
“Well, but exactly what can we have?”
(Waiter, triumphantly): “You can have a pair of ducks.”
“I am sorry to say Mr. Cobbe cannot eat ducks. What else?”
“They are very fine ducks, Ma’am.”
“I dare say. But what else?”
“You might have the ducks boiled, Ma’am!”
“No, no. Can we have mutton?”
“Well; not mutton, to-day, Ma’am.”
“Some beef?”
“No, Ma’am.”
“Some veal?”
“Not any veal, I’m afraid.”
“Well, then, a fowl?”
“We haven’t got a fowl.”
“What on earth have you got, then?”
“Well, then, Ma’am, I’m afeared if you won’t have the fine pair of
ducks, there’s nothing for it but bacon and eggs!”