BLARNEY
Blarney has come to mean a certain adroitness and winningness of speech
supposed to be peculiar to the Irish. If an Irishman open his mouth,
the English and Scotch insist on assuming that they are being treated
to blarney. The persons who affect Messrs. Cook’s tours hang on to the
words of every Irishman they meet, particularly if he be a jarvey, and
wait lovingly and with bated breath for the same phenomenon. There
are no snakes in Ireland, and, sad to relate, there is very little
blarney. Broadly speaking, the people seem too poverty-stricken and too
apathetic for talk of any kind, much less for that sprightly loquacity
and skilfulness of retort which we call blarney. The Irish jarvey,
who is commonly believed to be an adept in the art, is just as much a
disappointment as the London cabby. Even in “the noble city of Dublin”
you find, as a rule, that you are being driven by a dull, flea-bitten,
porter-full person, who has really not two words to say for himself. That
he is a daring and reckless driver I am quite willing to admit; that he
has a passion for stout and whisky goes without saying; but that he is a
wit, or a humorist, or a wheedling talker, or in any sense gifted above
ordinary hack-drivers, I deny. In the smaller centers of population and
in the country districts he is even duller and more flea-bitten and more
taciturn. When he tries to charge you treble fare, which is his usual
practise, he does it with a snap and gracelessly; as a pointer-out of
local monuments he lacks both salt and information; he has no gift for
entertainment, and he drinks sullenly and with a careful eye on the
clock. As for the Irish waiters, grooms, handy men, railway porters, and
kindred creatures, of whose powers of humorous persuasion and repartee
so much has been written, I have no hesitation in pronouncing them to be
a sad, uncertain, curt, fiddle-faced company, with scarcely a smile or
the materials for a smile among them. Their conversation is monosyllabic,
their manner barely civil, their apprehension slow, and their habit
slack and perfunctory. And they are about as blarnified as the Trafalgar
Square lions. Of the peasantry I can only say that cheerfulness, whether
of notion or word, is not nowadays their strong point. They have a great
way of saying “your honor” to you if you are a man, and “your ladyship’s
honor” if you are a woman; but after that the amount of blarney to be got
out of them is infinitesimal. Grinding poverty, short-commons, a solitary
life on some dreary mountain-side, and a fine view of the workhouse,
do not tend to sharpen the Irish tongue any more than they sharpen the
Irish wit. On the whole, therefore, I am inclined to think that nearly
all the blarney that should be in Ireland has for some reason or other
taken unto itself wings and flown away. The people are no longer racy of
the soil. Even the gentry, who once had the credit of being roguish and
devil-may-care to a fault, are become sad and somber and flat of speech.
The milk of human kindness in the Irish blood appears, in short, to
have gone sour, and in place of the old disposition to humor we have a
tendency to cynicism and vituperative remark. And when an Irishman turns
cynic or vituperator he takes a wonderful deal of beating, as witness the
utterances in Parliament and elsewhere of that choice body of gentlemen
known as the Irish Party, or the proceedings of the Dublin Corporation,
or the lucubrations of the Irish press. A singular exhibition of this
particular Irish weakness has quite lately been offered us by no less a
person than Mr. Samuel M. Hussey, who, I believe, rather prides himself
on having been described as the best abused man in Ireland. Of Mr.
Gladstone, Mr. Hussey writes as follows:
“If Napoleon was the scourge of Europe, Mr. Gladstone was the most
malevolent imp of mischief that ever ruined any one country.… I heard him
introduce the motion [The Land Act of 1881] in the House of Commons, and
his speech was a truly marvelous feat of oratory. He was interrupted on
all sides of the House, and in a speech of nearly five hours in length
never once lost the thread of his discourse. As far as I could judge, he
never, even by accident, let slip one word of truth.
“To do them justice, the Irish Members gave such an exhibition of
blackguardism as has no parallel on earth, though it earned but the
mildest rebuke from their obsequious ally, Mr. Gladstone.
“Mr. Gladstone considered that if you gave a scoundrel a vote it made
him into a philanthropist, whereas events proved it made him an eager
accessory of murder, outrage, and every other crime.”
It is only fair to Mr. Hussey to say that he himself has received as good
as he gives. For example, an Irish demagogue once treated him to the
following:
“Sam Hussey is a vulture with a broken beak, and he laid his voracious
talons on the conscience of the voters. (Boos.) The ugly scowl of Sam
Hussey came down upon them. He wanted to try the influence of his dark
nature on the poor people. (Groans.) Where was the legitimate influence
of such a man? Was it in the white terror he diffused? Was it not the
espionage, the network of spies with which he surrounded his lands? He
denied that a man who managed property had for that reason a shadow of a
shade of influence to justify him in asking a tenant for his vote. What
had they to thank him for?”
A voice: “Rack rents.”
“They knew the man from his boyhood, from his _gossoonhood_. He knew
him when he began with a _collop_ of sheep as his property in the world.
(Laughter.) Long before he got God’s mark on him. It was not the man’s
fault but his misfortune that he got no education. (Laughter.) He had in
that parish schoolmasters who could teach him grammar for the next ten
years. The man was in fact a Uriah Heep among Kerry landlords.” (Cheers.)
Here surely is blarney with a vengeance. Among a people which was
otherwise than glib of expression such writing and such oratory would be
difficult to evolve. When presumably cultivated men, for Mr. Hussey’s
assailant in this instance was a priest, allow themselves to indulge in
such childish objurgation, what wonder is it that the commonalty should
be found to have lost their sense of what is proper to decent speech and
reasonable argument. The demagogues of Ireland have indubitably gone a
great way toward ruining the native taste and innate good breeding of
the Irish people. Like the ha’penny papers of England they have made
their fortunes and their power by the degradation of the masses. It is
possible that the poverty of the country left them absolutely without
other weapons wherewith to fight the haughty national enemy, England;
it is certain that without these demagogues, and without their raging
and blistering words, and the foul and brutal actions which frequently
followed them, landlordism in Ireland would never have been scotched.
As it is, the landlord has been put in his place and the chances of
the natural heirs of the soil have been greatly enhanced. No drastic
revolution of this kind can be brought about without loss even to the
winning side. And in my opinion not the least of the losses of the
winning side in this matter has been the transformation of blarney into
flatness and commination. Under the heel of the tyrant the Irish people
retained their faculty for mirth and mirthful speech; the exhortations
of the demagogue and the agitator have brought them freedom, opportunity
and a distinct abatement of spirits. As the world goes, one is now
compelled to reckon Ireland in the same category that one reckons those
innocuous islets named Man and Wight. There is more devil in the Isle
of Dogs than all Ireland is for the moment in a position to show. It is
not Ireland’s fault, and it is not England’s fault; it is the horrible
fault of the nature of things. Whatever has happened in the past has
happened because nothing better nor worse could in the nature of things
have happened. What will happen in the future remains to be seen. It may
be peace and the rehabilitation of a kindly, lively, and interesting
people; it may be peace and the dullest sorts of apathy and decay. In any
case it will be peace. The _Times_, which, after the _Saturday Review_,
is admittedly the least consistent journal published on this footstool,
has frequently been reproved over the mouth for remarking years ago that
“In a short time, a Catholic Celt will be as rare on the banks of the
Shannon as a red Indian on the shores of Manhattan.” This in effect was
prophecy, though it is a hundred to one that the _Times_ did not know
it. If the resilient and recuperative powers of the Irish people have
not been destroyed there is hope for the Irish people in Ireland. If
those powers have been destroyed there is no hope for the Irish people in
Ireland. Blarney even of the vituperative order will go entirely out, and
the low Scotch will come entirely in. I will do the low Scotch the credit
of saying, that if they had their way, and no Irish Catholics to contend
with, they could make Ireland a highly successful business proposition
inside a quarter of a century. Whether they will ever get the chance is
on the knees of the gods. For my own part, and this is not blarney, I
hope sincerely that they never will.