cradle of popular movements ever after. This most typical of Irish
land-owning gentlemen had been forced to sever himself from his class
and even to injure his class, and it was not by advocacy of
self-government that he estranged so close a friend as Lord Sligo.
Fintan Lalor's policy, rejected by the Young Irelanders in 1846, was
beginning to take hold in 1868; the movement for self-government was
becoming linked on to the driving force of land-hunger. In the eyes of
Lord Sligo and all his class Tenant Right meant Landlord Wrong, and
Moore himself was not exempt from that feeling. He suffered indeed, for
rents that he had reduced to a figure fixed by the tenants' own
arbitrators were withheld from him. Yet he knew clearly that it was
necessary for the country, and not more necessary than just, to secure
the tenants in their holdings. No one disputes now that he was right.
But the last thing he desired was to abolish the landlords. If they did
not like the leadership of the priests "they have," he said, "a remedy
left; let them make themselves more popular than the priests. If the
landlords will make common cause with the people, the people will make
common cause with them." There was never a truer word spoken, but it
fell on closed ears.
Moore himself broke the landlords' power at the polls; their infinitely
greater power, proceeding from control of the land, was broken by
another Mayo man, Michael Davitt, the evicted peasant from Straide,
close by Moore Hall. That fight was bound to come when Moore's warning
and the warning of men like him was set at nought. What a change it has
made! and what has been lost to Ireland!
Moore died in 1870. His last year of life saw a hope that Presbyterian
farmers of the North, interested in Tenant Right, who had been
temporarily allied to Catholics in the struggle for Disestablishment,
might unite solidly with the Nationalists. Even the Protestant gentry
afforded numerous supporters to Butt's Home Rule policy at its outset.
But of this nothing serious came. The Land Act of 1870 was ineffective,
and it seemed that, in spite of Fenianism, all would go on as before.
Throughout the 'seventies the landlord class was in undisturbed
supremacy. Country gentlemen still talked in good set phrase about "the
robbery of the Church"; in actual fact they were very complacently and
competently helping to administer its new constitution. Agriculture was
prosperous and rents went high, though the harsh and overbearing
landlord was condemned by his fellows. This, however, was poor
consolation to the tenants. In the county where I was brought up, one
landlord was a name of terror, and there was no redress from his
tyranny, until at last the peasantry found it for themselves. The grim
old man died fighting hard before his brains were dashed out on the
roadside, and two innocent people were killed along with him; but no
sane person could fail to perceive that, within five years of his taking
off, the whole district was improved out of knowledge. The moral to be
drawn was only too obvious; yet none of the landlords drew it; the
established interest of a class is too strong a thing for that class to
shake themselves out of its influence.
The men of that generation--how well I remember them! most vividly
perhaps as they used to come in to church on Sunday morning, when the
ladies of their families addressed themselves to devotions kneeling,
while the men said their prayers standing, peering mysteriously into
their tall hats--a strange ritual, of which traces may be observed at
the House of Commons, but nowhere else, I fancy, on earth. On week days
they lived an orderly, dignified existence in their big old-fashioned
houses, leaving home little, though the more cultivated among them had
travelled in their youth and knew thoroughly some foreign country. In
their own orbit they had power, leisure, and deference, all of which set
a stamp upon them; individuality had great scope to develop, and an able
man among them was a man made for government. One such stands out in my
memory. Stormy tales were told of his youth, but from himself no one
heard a whisper of these far-off exploits; small, exquisitely neat,
finely made and finely featured, he was courteous and gentle-spoken with
all; but he was of those quiet creatures who breed fear. I cannot
imagine the situation of power of responsibility from which he would
have shrunk, or to which he would have been unequal; neither can I
imagine him anxious in the pursuit of office. That was Parnell's type.
Parnell's strength appears to have lain precisely in that
self-confidence which was a law to itself and which no prestige of fame
or authority could shake or overawe. The men who might have been
Ireland's leaders were men extraordinarily suited for the conduct of
affairs, but as a class they had been thrown out of their natural
relation. Castlereagh, who in his cold efficiency had much in common
with Parnell, accomplished a desperate deed when he made the Union
through them. He committed their honour to justify for all time that
transaction. If those who condemned the Union were not traitors, then
the class from whom it was bought with cash and titles stood convicted
of infamy; and since the heart of Ireland loathed and detested
Castlereagh's work, the whole body of the Irish gentry found themselves
inevitably estranged from the heart of Ireland. On one side was the
interest of a class--and not merely the material interest but the
interest of its honour, which sought a justification in the name of
loyalty; on the other was the interest of Ireland; and the landlord who
chose the side of Ireland severed himself necessarily, as Moore had to
do, from his own friends and kin.
For years now there has been moving through many minds in Ireland the
question whether this state of things must permanently endure. Is that
estrangement inevitable? I at least think otherwise. Throughout the last
two decades of the nineteenth century landlord and tenant were opposed
in a struggle for definite material interests; it was a fight not only
for free conditions of tenure but for the reduction of rent, if not for
its total abolition. A way of peace was found in State-aided land
purchase, and in a reconstitution of the whole agricultural order. The
landlords, where they have been bought out, have not even the duty of
rent collecting. How will this affect their traditional attitude, which
calls itself loyalty to the English connexion, but which I interpret
rather as a traditional justification of the Union and of the hereditary
landlord policy? If self-government is established without dissolution
of the Union, is it not reasonable to suppose that there will be a
change in men's dispositions?
The question involved is really more serious, though of far less
political importance, than that of Ulster. Whatever happens, the
industrial community of Belfast and its district is not going to run
away. That element will not be lost to Ireland; it is too strong, too
well able to assert itself; and it is anchored by its interest. The
ex-landlords, now that their occupation is gone, are bound to Ireland
only by habit and attachment. At present they fulfil no essential
function; and it will be open undoubtedly for the gentry once more to
make an error mischievous to Ireland and disastrous to themselves. They
may take up the line of unwilling submission, of refusal to co-operate,
of cold-shouldering and crying down the new Parliament and the new
Ministry. Social pressure may be exercised to keep men from seeking
election, and so to perpetuate the existing severance between the
leisured and wealthier classes and the main body of the nation. There
will be strong tendencies in this direction. But on the other hand I
think that among the men who have grown up under the new order there is
an increasing willingness to accept the change. One friend of mine--no
politician, and, like all non-politicians, a Unionist--said to me lately
that he would be rather disappointed if Home Rule did not become law--he
was "curious about it"; and he added, "I think a great many like me have
the same feeling." Others probably have a more positive outlook, and
desire to take an active part in the public life of their country; and
there will be a strong desire among Irish Nationalists to bring in at
the outset those who wish to come in. On the other hand, no less
certainly, there will be the feeling that is natural towards those who
wish to reap where they have not sown; and the gentry will need to make
allowance for this. If they set out with the notion, as some did when
Local Government was established, that places are theirs by right when
they condescend to take them--that they are entitled to election because
they have more money, more education, because, if you will, they are, in
the eye of pure reason, better qualified--nothing but trouble can come
of such a disposition. Ireland, which in George Henry Moore's time was
the most aristocratically governed part of the British Isles, is now by
far more democratic, at all events, than England: the poor man is on a
level with the rich, and means to stay there. Those who want to go into
Irish politics, under Home Rule as now, must take their chances in the
ruck; but if they do, they will find a people ready and even eager to
recognise their qualities, and to allot perhaps more consideration than
is due to their social position.
With all their practical democracy, the Irish have a great tenderness
for "the old stock." In the cases (and there are many hundreds of them)
where a landlord or professional man or Protestant clergyman has been
for long years a real friend and support and counsellor to his poorer
neighbours, as Irish in voice and looks and gesture as they, sharing
their tastes and their aversions, their sport and their sorrow, yet
divided and cut off from them by a kind of political religion, I believe
from my heart that there will be on both sides a willingness to
celebrate the end of that old discord in some happy compact. But on both
sides there must be generosity and a sympathy with natural hesitations
and reluctances. Whatever comes or goes, the old domination of the
gentry has disappeared; yet, whatever comes or goes, men of that class
may find a sphere of usefulness and even of power in Ireland. But this
will be infinitely easier to achieve when the great subject of
contention is removed, and when the ex-landlord can seek election, and
the ex-tenant can support him, without a sense on either side of turning
against the traditional loyalties of a class.
1913.
YESTERDAY IN IRELAND.
"Oh, maybe it was yesterday, or forty years ago," says the verse of an
Irish song. That is the kind of indeterminate "yesterday" which is
described in _Irish Memories_ by two friends who have made some memories
of Ireland imperishable. "The Ireland that Martin and I knew when we
were children," writes Miss Somerville, "is fast leaving us; every day
some landmark is wiped out." No one knows better than she that while in
many parts of Ireland you must go back very close on forty years to
reach any likeness of that old way of life, yet in other parts yesterday
and forty years ago are very much the same. Still, she would reply, and
I must admit, that one profound modification has affected even the most
unchanging places, altering the whole position of the class in which she
was born and bred. In a sense, all her memories of Ireland concern
themselves with this change, depicting either what formerly was, and the
process of its passing, or what yet remains and seems likely to vanish
too. Her presentment of yesterday is well worth study, for its outlook
is typical of the most generous and shrewdest minds among the Irish
gentry. I use here an old-fashioned word, somewhat decried, but it is
the only one that expresses my meaning.
But readers will know that this is not only a book of memories; it is,
if not a memoir, at least the memorial of a singularly brilliant Irish
woman. Miss Somerville had planned to write her recollections, as she
had written so much else, in collaboration with her cousin and comrade,
"Martin Ross"--Miss Violet Martin, of Ross, in County Galway. It did not
so fall out; and though in this volume one is aware that the narrator is
often (by a sort of sub-conscious habit) speaking out of two minds, from
a dual complex of associations, and though considerable fragments of
Martin Ross's own writing give a justification to the joint signature,
yet one of the two comrades is joint author now only in so far as she is
part of all the memories, and a surviving influence little likely to
pass away. But her stock, so to say, in the partnership remains; Galway,
no less than Cork, is the field over which these memories travel. In the
main, the book is concerned with recalling the joint kindred of the two
friends and cousins, and reconstituting the surroundings and the
atmosphere of both families. Families, however, are conceived and
depicted in their most extended relations; figures are evoked of chief,
vassal, page and groom, tenant and master; and with them go their
"opposite numbers" (to borrow an army term) from chieftainess to cook.
Chieftainesses are there unmistakably. One ex-beauty had retired from
the Court of the Regent to Castle Townshend (Miss Somerville's personal
background), and there lived long, "noted for her charm of manner, her
culture and her sense of humour."
Near the end of her long life she went to the funeral of a
relative, leaning decorously upon the arm of a kinsman. At the
churchyard a countryman pushed forward between her and the coffin.
She thereupon disengaged her arm from that of her squire and struck
the countryman in the face.
Miss Somerville observes that such stories may help to explain the
French Revolution; but she adds, quite plausibly:--
It is no less characteristic of the time that the countryman's
attitude does not come into the story, but it seems to me probable
that he went home and boasted then, and for the rest of his life,
that old Madam---- had "bet him in a blow in the face."
Undoubtedly the chieftain-spirit is admired, and not least when it shows
itself in a woman. A more lenient and more modern example is to be found
in the account of a dispute about bounds in a transaction under the Land
Purchase Act. After all other agencies failed, the landlord's sister
called the disputants before her to the disputed spot, stepped the
distance of the land debatable, drove her walking-stick into a crevice
of the rock (disputes are passionate in opposite ratio to the value of
the land) and, collecting stones, built a small cairn round it. "Now
men," she said, "in the name of God let this be the bounds." And it was
so. "It failed the agent, and it failed the landlord, and it failed the
priest; but Lady Mary settled it," was the summing up of one of the
disputants. That was a chieftainess for you.
Not inferior in chieftainly spirit was Martin Ross's grandfather who
"had the family liking for a horse."
It is recorded that in a dealer's yard in Dublin he mounted a
refractory animal, in his frock-coat and tall hat, and took him
round St. Stephen's Green at a gallop, through the traffic, laying
into him with his umbrella.
Somehow that picture gives a measure of the remoteness. Stephen's Green
was not then a place of square-set granite pavement, tram-rails and
large swift-moving electric trams; it was a leisurely promenade where
large slow-moving country gentlemen turned out in tall hats and
frock-coats. We of Miss Somerville's generation depend on our
imagination, not on memory, to reconstruct the scene. The grandfather in
question died before the great famine of 1847, which shook and in many
places uprooted the old order without yet bringing in the new. His son,
Martin Ross's father, had the famine to cope with and survived it; but
of the second convulsion from which emerged the Ireland of to-day he saw
only the beginning, for he died in 1873, when the organised peasant
uprising was at most a menace. But his wife knew both periods--the bad
times of the late 'forties and the bad times of the early eighties. The
true link with the past for the writers of _Irish Memories_ is through
the female line. This is a book of mothers and daughters rather than of
fathers and sons.
Martin Ross's mother went back easily in memory to the society which had
known the Irish Parliament, had made or accepted the Union, and which,
after the Union, exercised chieftainship in Ireland. She was the
daughter of Chief Justice Bushe, one of Grattan's rivals in oratory,
who, like Grattan, had opposed the Union with all the resources of his
eloquence. Against his name in the private Castle list of voters for the
crucial division had been written in despair one word: "Incorruptible."
He was the common ancestor whose blood made the bond of kinship between
Miss Somerville and Martin Ross, and both these staunch Unionist ladies
are passionately proud of the part which their grandfather played in
resisting the Union; just as you will find the staunchest Ulster
Covenanters exulting in the fact that they had a forbear "out" with the
United Irishmen at Antrim or Ballynahinch in 1798. No wonder Englishmen
find Ireland puzzling; but Scots understand, for their own records
abound in examples of the same paradoxes of historic sentiment.
_Yesterday in Ireland_, I think, for my present purpose comes to define
itself as the period between the famine of 1847 and the famine of
1879--between the downfall of O'Connell and Parnell's coming to power.
We who were born in the 'sixties grew up in the close of it, and perhaps
recognise now more clearly than when they were with us the characters of
our kindred who were a part of it as mature human beings. "The men and
women, but more specially the women of my mother's family and
generation, are a lost pattern, a vanished type." I could say the same
as Miss Somerville. There was a spaciousness about those people, a
disregard of forms and conventions, a habit of thinking and acting for
themselves which really came down from a long tradition of interpreting
the law to their own liking. Miss Somerville and her comrade knew the
type in its fullest development, for both grew up in far-out
Atlantic-bordering regions--Carbery of West Cork, Connemara of West
Galway--where the countryside knew scarcely "any inhabitants but the
gentry and their dependents. 'Where'd we be at all if it wasn't for the
Colonel's Big Lady?' said the hungry country-women, in the Bad Times,
scurrying, barefooted, to her in any emergency to be fed and doctored
and scolded." So writes Miss Somerville of her mother; so might Martin
Ross have written of her father, who was, so far as in him lay, a
Providence for his tenantry. Yet there is a story told of Mr. Martin
that throws a flood of light on the whole position of affairs. Who were
indeed the dependents? And on what did they depend? The story tells of a
widow down by Lough Corrib, long in arrears with her rent.
The Master sent to her two or three times, and in the end he walked
down himself, after his breakfast, and he took Thady (the steward)
with him. Well, when he went into the house, she was so proud to
see him, and "Your Honour is welcome," says she, and she put a
chair for him. He didn't sit down at all, but he was standing up
there with his back to the dresser, and the children were sitting
down one side the fire. The tears came from the Master's eyes,
Thady seen them fall down the cheek. "Say no more about the rent,"
says the Master to her, "you need say no more about it till I come
to you again." Well, it was the next winter, men were working in
Gurthnamuckla and Thady with them, and the Master came to the wall
of the field, and a letter in his hand, and he called Thady over to
him. What had he to show but the widow's rent that her brother in
America sent her.
Martin Ross, writing in the light of to-day, makes this comment:--
It will not happen again; it belongs to an almost forgotten regime,
that was capable of abuse, yet capable too of summoning forth the
best impulses of Irish hearts.
War, famine and pestilence--all these are capable of summoning forth
splendid impulses; but society should not be organised to give play to
these hazards of feeling. The fundamental truth about yesterday in
Ireland is that everybody accepted as natural a state of affairs under
which Irish gentry were taking rents that could not be earned on the
land which was burdened with them. Landlord and tenant alike were really
dependent on what was sent back by the sons and daughters of poor people
from America to prevent the break-up of homes. The whole situation was
false, from top to bottom. At top, a small class, physically and often
mentally superb, full of charm, extraordinarily agreeable, fit for great
uses, but by temperament, habit and education unequipped for its proper
task of equipping and directing the labour out of which ultimately it
had to live or perish. It perished. At bottom, a multitude with
marvellous constitution, undermined by age-long under-feeding, friendly,
most lovable, most winning, but untrained and unequipped, half-hearted
in its business of rolling the pitiless stone up the never-ending hill.
It survived--clinging with a desperate tenacity to the soil which so
meagrely nourished it. But during that generation of yesterday--and how
many generations before it?--there grew up inevitably, from the
conditions, a traditional toleration of incompetence, a faith as it were
in inefficiency. Ireland of yesterday was bound up in one vicious circle
of work that was necessarily underpaid because it was inefficient, and
work that was necessarily inefficient because it was underpaid. In the
lower class there were no reserves; the dependants lived from hand to
mouth, and when hand failed to find food, they had to come to the upper
class, first for remission of its claims on them and then for actual
subsistence. But the dependence was mutual, and there were no reserves
at top equal to the needs of that joint hazard. Penury was only at two
removes from the "gentry houses." While the first line of defence, the
tenants, held good, the world went pleasantly for the Ireland of
yesterday. But when that line broke, and starvation burst in, then the
best men and women in the big houses flung their all into the common
stock, and went under--as did the chief of the Martins in Connemara.
That, however, happened the day before yesterday; yesterday saw nothing
so dire. But the menace of it was always there, and the rest of Ireland
gradually consolidated itself for a struggle to win what had long ago
been acquired for Protestant Ulster--the right of a tenant to what his
own labour created. The Ulster custom has done for Ulster, industrial as
well as agricultural, more than is generally perceived. It gave in some
degree recognition to efficiency. Tenure was there less precarious, less
dependent on the landlord's pleasure; men were freer, work had more
rights. There was less room for impulse, perhaps less appeal to
affection; but when a business relation is based on impulse and
affection, where rights are not solid and defined, the sense of
obligation easily leads men astray. That which is given out of loyalty
and affection comes to be taken as a due. Martin Ross--"Miss Violet,"
whom the people of Ross called "the gentle lady," as beautiful a name as
was ever earned by mortal--inherited with little qualification the
landlord standpoint. She recalls the story of an election in 1872, when
her father, going to vote in Oughterard, saw "a company of infantry
keeping the way for Mr. Arthur Guinness (afterwards Lord Ardilaun) as he
conveyed to the poll a handful of his tenants to vote for Captain
Trench, he himself walking in front with the oldest of them on his arm."
She does not ask if the tenants desired to be so conveyed. She merely
describes how her father "ranged through the crowd incredulously, asking
for this or that tenant, unable to believe that they had deserted him."
When he came home, "even the youngest child of the house could see how
great had been the blow. It was not the political defeat, severe as
that was, it was the personal wound, and it was incurable."