in that episode but a case of priestly intimidation. "One need not blame
the sheep who passed in a frightened huddle from one fold to another."
Yet friends of mine in Galway look back on it in a very different
spirit; they remember the Nolan-Trench election and Captain Nolan's
victory as a triumph of the poor, a first instalment of freedom; it
brought with it an exultation very different from the mere outburst of
hatred that these pages suggest. What is more, having been privileged to
sit in the most widely representative assembly of Irishmen that modern
Ireland has known, I can testify that to-day peer and peasant, clergy
and laymen, those who opposed it, and those others who fought for it,
alike admit that the change which such a victory fore-shadowed was
necessary and was beneficent. But it was a revolution. Ireland of
yesterday was Ireland before the revolution. The Ireland that Miss
Somerville and Martin Ross have lived in as grown women has been a
country in the throes of a revolution, long drawn-out, with varying
phases, yet still incomplete. Those who judge Ireland should remember
this. In time of revolution, life is difficult, ancient loyalties clash
with new yet living principles, sympathy and justice even are unsure
guides. No country could have been kept for forty years in such a
ferment as Ireland has known without profound demoralisation. We may
well envy those who lived more easily and quietly in the Ireland of
yesterday, and held with an unquestioning spirit to the state of things
in which they were born.
Such were the folk of whom Miss Somerville writes with "that indomitable
family pride that is an asset of immense value in the history of a
country." They "took all things in their stride without introspection or
hesitation. Their unflinching conscientiousness, their violent
church-going (I speak of the sisters), were accompanied by a
whole-souled love of a spree and a wonderful gift for a row." I can
corroborate her details, especially the last. All those that I recall
had some talent for feuds; at least, in every family there would be one
warrior, male or female; and all had the complete contempt, not so much
for convention as for those who were affected in their lives (or
costumes) by any standard that was not home-made. But in all humility I
must admit that the real heroines of this book--Mrs. Somerville and Mrs.
Martin--outshine anything that my memory can produce. When Martin Ross
and her mother went back to West Galway and re-established themselves at
their old home, a letter from her to Miss Somerville describes one
incident:--
I wish you had seen Paddy Griffy, a very active little old man, and
a beloved of mine, when he came down on Sunday night to welcome me.
After the usual hand-kissings on the steps, he put his hands over
his head and stood in the doorway, I suppose invoking his saint. He
then rushed into the hall.
"Dance, Paddy," screamed Nurse Bennett (my foster-mother, now our
maid-of-all-work).
And he did dance, and awfully well, too, to his own singing. Mamma,
who was attired in a flowing pink dressing-gown and a black hat
trimmed with lilac, became suddenly emulous, and with her spade
under her arm joined in the jig. This lasted for about a minute,
and was a never-to-be-forgotten sight. They skipped round the hall,
they changed sides, they swept up to each other and back again and
finished with the deepest curtseys.
My own mother would gladly have done the same on a like occasion, but
she lacked Mrs. Martin's talent for the jig. Mrs. Somerville is sketched
with a free and humorous hand. I quote only one detail, but it shows the
real Irishwoman, more deeply in touch with Ireland's traditional life
than any Gaelic League could bring her. Question arose how to find a
suitable offering for 'an old servant of forty years' standing, whose
fancies were few and her needs none.' "Give her a nice shroud," said
Mrs. Somerville, "there's nothing in the world she'd like so well as
that."
Shakespeare could not have outdone that intuition, and only one of the
larger breed would have been unconventional enough to suggest what the
younger generation, hampered by other feelings than those of West
Carbery, "were too feeble to accept."
These two traits belong to the harmonious and thoroughly Irish grouping
in which such ladies as Mrs. Martin and Mrs. Somerville were central
figures of the whole countryside. That grouping exists no longer, and
this book has to describe the discord which interrupted that harmony.
Martin Ross's elder brother, Robert Martin (famous in his day as the
writer and singer of _Ballyhooly_, and a score of other topical songs),
left his work as a London journalist to help in fighting the first
campaign which brought the word "boycott" into usage.
It was at this work (his sister writes), that Robert knew for the
first time what it was to have every man's hand against him, to
meet the stare of hatred, the jeer and the sidelong curse; to face
endless drives on outside cars with his revolver in his hand; to
plan the uphill tussle with boycotted crops and cattle for which a
market could scarcely be found; to know the imminence of death,
when by accidentally choosing one of two roads he evaded the man
with a gun who had gone out to wait for him.
Robert Martin faced, in a word, the earliest and ugliest phases of that
Irish revolution, which was the Nemesis of the all too easy and too
pleasant ways of yesterday in Ireland. Later, after his death, Martin
Ross herself had to gain some experience of the same trouble. When she
went back with her mother to re-establish the family home from which
they had been fifteen years absent, there was a hostile element in the
parish, and gracious hospitality was ungraciously met. An attempt was
made to keep children from a children's party which she had organised.
The move was half-hearted and her energy defeated it, but that the
attempt should be made was such "a facer" as she had never before known.
Like many another ugly thing in Ireland, it originated in that cowardly
fear of public opinion which is to be found on the seamy side of all
revolutions; and it did not stand against her "gallant fight to restore
the old ways, the old friendships."
The old ways, in so far as they meant the old friendships, she might
hope to restore, although the friendship would, half consciously, take
on a new accent; personality would count for more in it, position for
less. But the old relation which authorised a kind-hearted landlord to
feel that his tenants had "deserted him" because they voted against his
wish in an election--that is gone for ever; and gone, at all events, for
the present, is the local leadership of the gentry.
I question whether it is realised that in parting from that leadership
Ireland lost what was in a sense Home Rule. In the "yesterday" of which
I write Ireland was governed in all its parochial and most intimate
affairs by a class or a caste; but that governing class was Irish--Irish
with a limitation, no doubt, yet still indisputably Irish. When that
rule perished, when that class lost its local ascendancy, government
became the bastard compromise that we have known, with power
inharmoniously divided between officialdom and agitators. The law was
framed and administered by officials, often English or Scotch,
possessing no authority except what the law conferred on them. Authority
lay very largely with popular leaders; but leadership and authority
alike were purely personal, depending on a man's own qualities and the
support which they evoked. No man was born to it as of right, and such
authority is far more precarious than the established power of a
governing class. This is a weakness in all democratically-governed
countries, but where there is self-government, the individual, in
entering upon office, acquires the support and the prestige of a
long-established machinery of power. He ceases to be merely the
individual when he becomes part of the Government. For the Irish leaders
this reinforcement to the personal authority has never existed; they
have been at a terrible disadvantage as compared with all other
democratic politicians; and consequently the power exercised by them has
always, except perhaps at Parnell's zenith, been far less than was the
combined authority of the gentry before the landlord rule was broken.
Those who shared in that authority acted, and could afford to act, with
unquestioning confidence; they were surer of themselves, than is any
popular leader or any official in Ireland of to-day. It seldom occurred
to them to ask whether their conduct in any juncture might meet with
approval; being a law to other people, they were naturally a law to
themselves, and an Irish law. Their power was excessive, and demoralised
them by its lack of limitation; yet many of the qualities which it bred,
made them an element of great value in the country. These qualities are
by no means extinct in their kindred, nor is the tradition of their
right to leadership forgotten.
Of one thing Miss Somerville and those for whom she speaks (she is a
real spokeswoman) may be well assured. Whatever be the surface mood of
the moment, whatever the passing effect of war's hectic atmosphere,
nothing is more deeply realised throughout Ireland than the need to
restore the old ways, the old friendships--the need to bring back the
gentry to their old uses in Ireland, and to so much of leadership as
should be theirs by right of fitness. When the history of the Irish
Convention comes to be fully recorded, it will be seen that a great
desire was universally felt, cordially uttered, in that assembly, to
bridge over the gulf which divides us from yesterday in Ireland, and to
recover for the future much of what was admirable, valuable and lovable
in a past that is not unkindly remembered. Indeed, it is plain that Miss
Somerville has felt the influences that were abroad on the winds, when
she wrote of her comrade:--
Her love of Ireland, combined with her distrust of some of those
newer influences in Irish affairs to which her letters refer, made
her dread any weakening of the links that bind the United Kingdom
into one; but I believe that if she were here now, and saw the
changes that the past eighteen months have brought to Ireland, she
would be quick to welcome the hope that Irish politics are lifting
at last out of the controversial rut of centuries, and that
although it has been said of East and West that "never the two
shall meet," North and South will yet prove that in Ireland it is
always the impossible that happens.
North and South--that is a more difficult gulf to bridge, for the one I
have been speaking of is only a breach to repair. But industrial
Protestant Ulster and the rest of Ireland have never really been one.
Unity there has not to be re-established, but created. Martin Ross went
to the North only once "at the tremendous moment of the signing of the
Ulster Covenant," and she was profoundly impressed by what she saw. She
wrote about it publicly and she wrote also privately (in a letter which
I had the honour to receive) a passage well worth quoting:--
I did not know the North at all. What surprised me about the place
was the feeling of cleverness and go, and also the people struck me
as being hearty. If only the South would go up North and see what
they are doing there, and how they are doing it, and ask them to
show them how, it would make a good deal of difference. And then
the North should come South and see what nice people we are, and
how we do that.
When that reciprocal pilgrimage was accomplished by the Convention, her
anticipations were more than justified. But how clever she was! In a
flash, she, coming there a stranger, hits on the word which describes
Ulster and differentiates it from the rest of Ireland. "Hearty," that is
what they are; it is the good side of their self-content. No people that
is in revolution can be hearty--least of all when revolution has dragged
on through more than a generation. Distrust of your comrades--distrust
of your leaders--self-distrust--these are the characteristic vices of
revolution (look at Russia), and they sow a bitter seed. Protestant
Ulster has never known revolution; for it yesterday and to-day have been
happily, naturally, continuous. Political change it has known, normal
and beneficent; land purchase came to Ulster as a by-product of what the
rest of Ireland endured in torment, and agony, and self-mutilation.
Clever the Northerns are, but their cleverness issues prosperously in
action; they carry on in a solidly-established order; they have not
needed to break down before they could begin to build. That is why their
heartiness stood out when they were assembled, as I have seen them in a
common council of Irishmen, which was also, thank heaven, a
companionship. But the world at large can see it exhibited in another
way. Contrast the work of the Ulster Players with that of the Abbey
Theatre. _The Drone_ is perhaps not the best of new Irish comedies, but
it is infinitely the pleasantest; there is no bitter tang in its hearty
humour. Even in _The Enthusiast_, a sketch which has some touch of
pessimism, there is little more than a good-humoured shrug of the
shoulders when the Enthusiast abandons his pretensions to make himself
heard against the banging of Orange drums. I find a very different note,
not merely in the work of Synge, of Boyle, Colum, Lennox Robinson, and
the rest of the Abbey dramatists, but even in the books of which Miss
Somerville was joint author. When Ireland is seen with the eyes, for
instance, of her Major Yeates, is not the whole attitude one of amused
and acquiescent resignation? Take the hunting out of it (with all the
humours of the hunt)--take the shooting and fishing--and what is left
but a life (to borrow a phrase from Mr. George Moore) "as melancholy as
bog-water and as ineffectual." Miss Somerville would probably decline
to imagine an Ireland with these unthinkable suppressions, but after
all, we cannot live by or for sport alone. What gave dignity and reality
to the life of yesterday was leadership in one class, and loyalty in the
other. Leadership resting on ownership is gone now, dead as the dodo;
what is left for the like (say) of Mr. Flurry Knox if he should begin to
take himself seriously? You can easily make a soldier of him; we have
all met him in trenches and observed his airy attitude in No Man's Land.
But soldiering has generally meant expatriation. For my part, I hope
some day to see this gentleman (or his like) play a useful part in some
battalion of Irish territorials--some home service offshoot of the
Connaught Rangers. But that is not enough. If those who, like Miss
Somerville, love Ireland's yesterday and desire to link it up with a
worthy to-morrow, there must be a wider understanding of Ireland, not in
the North only, but in that element of the South and West which stands
to-day in a sense morally expatriated. The Irish gentry who complain
that their tenants "deserted" them must learn where they themselves
failed their tenants. Leadership cannot depend merely on a power to
evict, and they would to-day repudiate the desire for a leadership so
grounded. But between free men where there is not comprehension there
can be no leadership.
I take first what is most difficult--the very heart of antagonism.
Everyone who desires to understand Ireland to-day should read Patrick
Pearse's posthumous book, called boldly _The Story of a Success_.[1] It
is the spiritual history of Pearse's career as a schoolmaster, edited
and completed by his pupil, Desmond Ryan; and it is a book by which no
one can be justly offended--a book instinct with nobility, chivalry and
high courtesy, free from all touch of bitterness; a book, too, shot
through and slashed with that tragic irony which the Greeks knew to be
the finest thrill in literature--the word spoken, to which the foreknown
event gives an echo of double meaning. Pearse was concerned with
Ireland's yesterday; he desired to bring the present and the future into
organic rotation with the past. But his yesterday was not Miss
Somerville's nor mine. The son of an English mechanic and a Galway
woman, he was brought up in Connemara after the landlord power had
ceased to exist. Ireland's past for him and Irish tradition were seen
through the medium of an imagination in touch only with the peasant
life, but inspired by books and literature, written and spoken. His
yesterday was of no definite past, for he had been born in a revolution
when the immediate past was obliterated. In his vision a thousand years
were no more than the watch of some spellbound chivalry, waiting for the
voice that should say, "It is the time." Cuchulain and Robert Emmet were
his inspirations, but the champion of the legendary Red Branch cycle and
the young revolutionary of Napoleon's days were near to him one as the
other, in equally accessible communion. Going back easily to the heroic
legends, on which, though blurred in their outline, his boyhood had been
fostered by tellers of long-transmitted tales at a Connemara hearthside,
he found the essential beauty and significance where more learned though
less cultured readers have been bewildered by what seemed to them wild
extravagances of barbarism. What he gathered from them did not lie
inert, but quickened in him and in others, for he was the revolutionary
as schoolmaster--the most drastic revolutionary of all. In the school
review which was the first vehicle for these writings of his, he hoped
to found "the rallying point for the thought and aspirations of all
those who would bring back again in Ireland that Heroic Age which
reserved its highest honour for the hero who had the most childlike
heart, for the king who had the largest pity, and for the poet who
visioned the truest image of beauty." All his theory of education was
based on the old Irish institution of fosterage, which was no mere
physical tie of the breast; the child sent to be fostered was sent to be
bred and trained, and it was a tie stronger than that of its blood or of
the breast. _Irish Memories_ shows incidentally how great a part this
fosterage played in the Ross of yesterday--that family with its
multitude of children was bound to the countryside by all the "Nursies."
But the Martin household, and all similar households were, in a less
literal sense, fostered by the peasantry at large. The truest part of
education should be to know your own country (a principle much neglected
in Ireland), and which of us all, who had the good fortune to be brought
up in touch with Irish peasant life, does not realise our debt? We
received a devotion, an affection, for which no adequate return could be
made--it is the nature of fosterage that the fosterer should give more
than can ever be requited; but we gained also our real knowledge, in so
far as we ever had it, of the countryside, the traditional wisdom, the
inherited way of life. There was more to be got if we had the wit to
assimilate it. Almost all of modern Irish literature that has lasting
value is evoked from elements floating in peasant memory, in the peasant
mind, and in the coloured peasant speech of an Ireland which keeps
unbroken descent from a long line of yesterdays. Mr. Yeats is only the
chief of those who draw from this source. Miss Somerville herself and
her cousin must have known well that the real worth of their work lies
in their instinct for the poetry which, more specially in
Gaelic-speaking regions, sits in rags by roadside and chimney corner.
Irish poetry is not only the tragic voice of the keene; Gaelic had its
comic muse as well, a robust virago, of the breed which produced
Aristophanes and Rabelais--and Slipper with his gift for epic narrative
is a camp-follower of that regiment.
[Footnote 1: "The Story of a Success." By P. H. Pearse. Being a Record of
St. Erda's College, September, 1908, to Easter, 1916. Edited by Desmond
Ryan, B.A. Maunsel & Co.]
Yet in Miss Somerville's appreciation there is often--not always--a
sense of the incongruity as well as of the beauty in peasant speech. The
woman crying for alms of bread who described her place of habitation, "I
do be like a wild goose over on the side of Drominidy Wood," moves to
laughter as well as to pity with the dignity of her phrase. Ireland so
felt is Ireland perceived from the outside--seen as a picturesque ruin.
You cannot so see Pearse; he is too strong for even compassionate
laughter. What he embodies is the central strength of Irish
nationalism--its disregard of the immediate event.
Wise men have told me that I ought never to set my foot on a path
unless I can see clearly whither it will lead me. But that
philosophy would condemn most of us to stand still till we rot.
Surely one can do no more than assure one's self that each step one
takes is right; and as to the rightness of a step one is
fortunately answerable only to one's conscience and not to the wise
men of the counting house. The street will pass judgment on our
enterprises according as they have "succeeded" or "failed." But if
one can feel that one has striven faithfully to do a right thing,
does not one stand ultimately justified, no matter what the issue
of one's attempt, no matter what the sentence of the street?
By such teaching he commended to his scholars, and to Ireland, the
spirit which he desired to see expressed in "that laughing gesture of a
young man that is going into battle or climbing to a gibbet." Strange
country, that has the gibbet always before the eyes and almost before
the aspiration of its idealists! It was so yesterday--in all the
yesterdays--and yet the reason is plain. All the aspirations of such
idealists have been regarded as criminal by the class for which Miss
Somerville and her cousin speak--criminal and menacing to those who,
holding the power, arrogated to themselves a monopoly of loyalty. They
have always conceived of Pearse and his like as thirsting for their
blood. Miss Edgeworth, in a letter printed for the first time in _Irish
Memories_, writes:--"I fear our throats will be cut by order of
O'Connell and Co. very soon." We know enough to-day about O'Connell to
realise how far this estimate lay from the truth of things; yet Miss
Somerville herself talks about "Parnell and his wolf-pack." Justin
McCarthy, John Redmond, Willie Redmond--these were some of the wolves
who presumably wanted to tear Miss Somerville's kindred to pieces. That
is where the change must come; there must be among the gentry some
generous understanding of Nationalist leaders before the grave has
closed over them. Anyone can see what is bad in Sinn Fein, but no one
can fight that evil effectively, no one can convert to better uses the
ill-guided force which Sinn Fein represents, until he understands what
is best in it. Sinn Fein has largely replaced a movement which, in its
later phases, dwelt perhaps too much on the material advantages which it
offered as the reward of support. Sinn Fein's strength has lain not in
what it has offered, but in what it has asked; it has asked for
devotion, and Pearse certainly both gave that and received it. Such was
his teaching, and I do not know a better saying for the Irish gentry to
ponder over than the last sentence in these essays of his: "The highest
thing anyone can do is to serve."
That temper was perhaps lacking in the Ireland of yesterday which Miss
Somerville so lovingly describes. To command loyalty as a right, to
reward it by generosity, by indulgence--this made part of the ideal of
leadership; but scarcely to be laborious either in rendering or exacting
capable work.
The old way of life was good for children, as Martin Ross describes it
in her sketch of her brother's upbringing.
Everything in those early days of his was large and vigorous; tall
trees to climb, great winds across the lake to wrestle with,
strenuous and capable talk upstairs and downstairs, in front of
furnaces of turf and logs, long drives and the big Galway welcome
at the end of them.