THE TOURIST
The tourist is the curse of Ireland, as he is the curse of most places.
When one comes to consider the enormous number of grievances the Irish
and their political figure-heads have managed to rake up, one wonders
that the tourist should hitherto have escaped. That he constitutes a
grievance, and a grievance which affects seriously the main body of
the Irish people, can not be doubted. It is quite obvious, to begin
with, that the tourist in Ireland is usually of the hated Sassenach
race. Irishmen do not tour in their own country as Englishmen do, or
as Scotchmen have been known to do. They have too little money for
indulgences of that kind, and if money be plentiful they prefer to visit
England or America. The Englishman, however, insists on taking a holiday
in Ireland sometime in his life, even though it be only on his honeymoon.
So that in the more suitable months the country bristles with tourists,
and the great majority of them are English. Secondly, the tourist, being
English, is always more or less hilarious, supercilious and aggressive,
and these are qualities of which the Irish of all people least like a
display, at any rate from an Englishman. Time out of mind the English
tourist has been the covert _bête noire_ of the Continental peoples on
account of these very traits. An Englishman on the Continent, especially
if he be a middle-class Englishman, or a very wealthy Englishman, has a
knack of divesting himself utterly of the thin veneer of social decency
which he manages to maintain at home. Somehow the air of the Continent
exhilarates him to all sorts of posturing and ridiculousness. The
vulgarian, the Philistine and the snob in him become greatly emphasized.
He can shout aloud, and be rude to everybody, because he believes that
nobody understands what he is pleased to call his lingo. Besides which
the Englishman on the Continent always believes in his private bosom that
he is a philanthropist, a sort of circular-touring benevolence, as it
were. “Who is it,” he inquires grandiloquently, “that keeps these pore
foreigners going? Why, the English, and the English alone. It is we who
bring millions of pounds to their starved, tax-burdened countries. It is
we who populate their rapacious hotels and make their seasons for them,
and drop our idiot moneys at their gambling tables, and pay francs at
the entrances to their art galleries, and climb their rotten mountains,
and steam, to soft Lydian airs, up their rivers, and bathe in their
lukewarm seas, and tip them and patronize them, and joke with them, and
generally afford them opportunities for existence.” This attitude has
been noted and laughed at by the cynical, time out of mind; but it can
not be eradicated from the Englishman’s fairly comprehensive stock of
idiosyncrasies, and it remains to this day typical of the breed. To
Ireland the English tourist proceeds focused for pretty well the same
view of things. Of course, he is disposed to look upon your Irishman
as being rather more of a man and a brother than is the low foreigner.
Further, he invariably believes that by a judicious expenditure on
“drinks,” coupled with an easy, slap-you-on-the-back but still superior
manner, he can extract from the Irishmen with whom he comes in contact
the whole secret of the Irish Question. In other words, he makes a point
of going to Ireland with his eyes open; so that when he returns he may
remark huskily in his club—“Sir, I have visited Ireland, and I know the
Irish people through and through. Waiter, a large Scotch, please!” Thus
is the altruism of the tourist in Ireland tempered with a taste for
inquiry and politics. I suppose that in no country in the world is the
tourist allowed so much of his fling as in this same green Erin. For
example, in Ireland he takes care to call every man “Pat,” and every
woman “Kathleen mavourneen.” If he called a Frenchman “Froggy,” or a
German “Johnny Deutscher” he would stand a good chance of getting his
nose pulled. But in Ireland a bold peasantry has learned to smile and
smile and touch the hat, and take the coppers, and provide the political
information for which his honor is gasping without so much as turning
a hair. It is not really in the Irish blood to take these traveling
mountebanks, with their loud suits and louder manners and louder money,
seriously or even indifferently. On the other hand, your true Irish
resent in their hearts the entire business. It is their poverty and not
their wills which consent; though singularly enough, as I have already
said, you will seldom find an Irishman indulging himself in growls about
it. And it is this very poverty which might reasonably give rise to
the Irishman’s third grievance against the tourist. For an Englishman
traveling in Ireland is always a sort of perambulating incitement to
envy, because of his apparent wealth. He may be only a clerk out for a
fortnight’s “rest and change” on money squeezed out of the meagerest kind
of salary; yet to the penniless Irishman he seems literally to be made
of wealth. And Pat—let us call him Pat, so that the tourists of this
world may know whom we mean—is not without certain reasoning powers of
his own, poverty-stricken though he may be. It seems to me only human
that he should reason about the English tourist in a way which brings
him little comfort and throws considerable discredit on England. He
perceives that compared with himself the Englishman is not altogether a
person of genius or an angel of light. His ignorance is appalling, even
to an Irishman; his manners are none of the choicest; his capacity for
eating and drinking borders on the marvelous. “Pat” notes these things
and wonders. He wonders why there should be such tremendous gulfs
between loving subjects of the King. He wonders where people who travel
on cheap tickets get all their money; he wonders how they manage to
pay fifty pounds a rod for certain fishing; or fifty pounds a gun for
certain shooting; he wonders why they cackle so about priestcraft, and
Home Rule, and the development of industry; he wonders whether they have
really been elected by heaven to be a dominant people; he wonders why he
himself should have been given over to their governance; and with all his
wondering he is not consoled. There is probably nobody to tell him that
for irremediable reasons the Irish are never likely to become a happy
and prosperous nation. There is nobody to tell him that this dazzling
Englishman is so much gross material, with no tradition of spirituality
at the back of him. There is nobody to tell him that it is the British
habit to think first and foremost of its own welfare and comfort, and
that it pities rather than admires those countries or persons who have
been foredoomed to contribute to them. Therefore he goes on wondering
without consolation, and within him there is discontent and bitterness,
despite his outward subservience. There has been very tall talk in sundry
well-meaning circles as to the advantages which are to accrue to Ireland
from the development of her trade in tourists. No doubt it is extremely
heterodox to say so, but for myself, I incline to the opinion that the
tourist business on its present lines is a snare and a delusion and a
demoralization. It takes money into the country certainly, but it takes
other things which are not by any means so desirable. Moreover, that
very money helps materially to cloud and confuse important issues. The
real condition of Ireland, as it is known to Irish officialdom, and as
it should be known to Englishmen, is glossed over and hidden away as a
direct result of the eleemosynary tendencies of the English tourist.
A people of the temper and parts of the Irish people should be in a
position to live out of Irish land and Irish industry, and not be in any
serious sense dependent upon the fitful generosity of sight-seers and
problem-solvers. Ireland has had far too much _largesse_, both private
and public. The English tourist distributes his shillings; the English
Government distributes its loans and other financial bolsterings-up. What
is wanted is a fair field and no favor for Irish labor. It will take
many generations of tourists to provide for Ireland any such good gift.
I do not believe that the Government loans can provide either. A newer
and little less rapacious and less unintelligent race of landlords might
achieve it. The bland, benevolent money-dropping Englishman, who out of
his generosity or his scheme of politics desires to assist the Irish
people, should buy a place in Ireland and do his best to live there. The
country is full of properties which would be cheap at treble the prices
that are now being asked for them. There is plenty of land and there
is plenty of labor. The Land Laws, it is true, seem on the face of them
ridiculous, that is to say, if you happen to be a landlord whose eye is
forever on the rent-roll and the automatic improvement of properties at
other people’s expense. But if, on the other hand, you are a comfortable,
high Tory, patriarchal landlord, with bowels, and a proper appreciation
of sport, and a proper interest in agriculture and the breeding of
cattle, Ireland need have no terrors for you. There is a notion abroad
that the Irish farmer has deep-rooted prejudices against landlords of
whatever degree. We are told that he is a confirmed shirker of the prime
duty of rent-paying, and that he will let a holding go to rack and ruin
for the sole purpose of cheapening its value, so that he may himself buy
it in for the merest song. The demand throughout the country, we are
told, is for farmer and peasant proprietorship, and the legislature has
formulated wonderful machinery in the interest of such proprietorship.
My own view is that of two evils the Irish cultivators have in this
matter chosen the lesser. On the one hand they had rack rents, absentee
landlords and agents who, if they had bodies to be shot, appear to have
had very small souls to be saved. On the other hand, they have been
offered schemes of purchase that sound very well but do not work out
quite so well in practise. Still a bad scheme of purchase is better than
bad landlords and worse agents. An intelligent and reasonable landlord
of bucolic tastes, who will look as sharply after his agent or factor as
he will look after his tenants on rent-day, could in my opinion do quite
as well in Ireland as he can do in England. In a sentence, Ireland wants
settling, not touring.