a big bill of indictment against you that I fear may never be settled
in _my_ day. Why should not Scotland be contented? Is she not fed on
sugar-plums? Is there not a sandy-haired Scotchman in every position
worth having, from the cabinet to the custom-house? Do you not develop
all her industries, and pat her on the back like a spoiled child? Are
not your royal family _ipsis Hibernicis Hiberniores_, or, if I freely
translate myself, more Scotch than the Scotch themselves? Why should
she not be contented and prosperous when she gets everything she asks
for?”
“But you ask too much, reverend sir.”
“It is scarcely asking too much to ask for one’s own.”
“Surely yours are at best but—ahem!—sentimental grievances, and the
House makes every—ahem!—effort at conciliation.”
“We can stand hard knocks and square fighting, and possibly feel all
the better for it; but when you speak of conciliation and all that sort
of thing we get on our edge at once, as we know that we are going to be
bamboozled.”
“But surely you will admit that we have done a good deal for the
country. See the Church Disestablishment Act and the Land Act.”
“Only two patches on our ragged coats, my dear sir. We want
independence, and that you won’t give us; nor will you offer us a _quid
pro quo_, as you did with Scotland, because you know we would not
accept it. No, Mr. Hawthorne, we’ll have to fight you for this, and our
Irish members must do the Mrs. Caudle for John Bull, and give him
sleepless and wretched nights in the big house at St. Stephen’s.”
“Have you any fault to find with the administration of the laws?”
“Fault! When we find ourselves gagged and fettered by a miserably weak
administration, and hedged in by a set of uncertain and floating laws,
we begin to think about righting ourselves. You send us a
lord-lieutenant who knows as much about Ireland as he does of
Bungaroo—who comes over with a hazy idea that there’s some one to be
conciliated and some one to be hanged; a chief-secretary who knows
less; an attorney-general who, if active, means a necessity for
strengthening the garrison; and a commander of the forces who pants for
a chance of manœuvring his flying columns over our prostrate bodies.
But here comes Biddy Finnegan with a cutlet of mountain mutton, and I
can give you a drop of the real mountain dew that never paid the Saxon
gauger a farthing duty—or, at least, if we had our rights, ought not,
according to Peter O’Brien.” And he laughed. “These subjects are much
better worth discussing than English misrule. _Quantum est in rebus
inane._” And ushering Mr. Hawthorne to a seat upon his right hand, he
proceeded to do the honors with a courtly grace blended with a
fascinating hospitality.
“That _poteen_ has its story. As I have already told you, it never paid
duty. A friend of mine was anxious that I should keep it on tap, as he
constantly comes this way. It is somewhat difficult to obtain it now,
as the excise officers are, like you members of Parliament,
particularly wide awake.” The M.P. bowed solemnly in recognition of the
compliment. “At last, however, he managed to drop on a man, who knew
another man, who knew another man, in whose cabin this particular
crayture was to be found. My friend ferreted him out, and, upon asking
the price per gallon, was informed by the manufacturer that he would
only charge _him_ eighteen shillings.
“‘Eighteen shillings!’ exclaimed my friend. ‘Why, that’s an enormous
price.’
“‘Och! shure,’ replied the other, with a droll look perfectly
indescribable, ‘I cudn’t part it for less, _as the duty’s riz_.’”
It took a considerable time to drive the point of Father O’Dowd’s
fictitious narrative and the illicit distiller’s rejoinder into the
head of the member for Doodleshire; and when he did manage to grapple
it, wishing to lay it by in order to retail it in the House, it was
found impossible to get him completely round it, as the word “riz”
invariably balked him, and it is scarcely necessary to observe that his
Anglican substitution failed in every way to improve the story. The
cutlets were deliciously tender, and the potatoes in their jackets so
mealy and inviting that the Saxon fell to with a vigor that fairly
astonished me. As dish after dish of the diminutive shies disappeared,
and potato after potato left its jacket in shreds behind it, I
congratulated myself upon the signal success of this visit.
“My drive gave me an appetite, father,” he said. “I haven’t eaten
luncheon for many months. In the House I generally pair off with some
friend to a biscuit and a glass of sherry; but here I have—ahem!—eaten
like a navvy.”
“I’m delighted to hear you mention the drive as the cause of the
appetite; for I must endeavor to induce you to repeat it and help me to
eat a saddle of mutton that will be fit for Lucullus on Thursday.”
“I am in Mr. Ormonde’s hands.”
I was in an agony—another day from Mabel!
“Oh! Ormonde will do as I direct him; and I’ll tell you what we must
conspire about to-night—to induce the ladies to drive over. I should be
very pleased to show Miss Hawthorne a little this side of the county.”
I breathed again.
“You shall have my vote,” said the M.P.; “and, if I might dare suggest
an amendment to the saddle, it would be in ‘chops.’”
“We might do the swell thing,” laughed the _padre_, “and have two
dishes—an _entrée_; how magnificently that sounds! In any case I can
say with Horace:
“Hinc tibi copia
Manabit ad plenum, benigno
Ruris bonorum opulenta cornu.”
“I have—ahem!—almost forgotten my Horace,” sighed our guest.
“One might say to you, as was said to the non-whist-player, What an
unhappy old age you are laying up for yourself, Mr. Hawthorne!”
“Well, reverend sir, so long as a man has the _Times_ he can defy
_ennui_; every leader is an essay.”
“You cannot commit the _Times_ to memory.”
“I read it every day, sir,” was the pompous reply.
“Apropos of the _Times_, they tell a story of Chief-Baron Pigott which
is eminently characteristic. He is one of the most scrupulous,
painstaking men the world ever saw, who, sooner than do a criminal
injustice, would go over evidence _ad nauseam_ and weigh the _pros_ and
_cons_, driving the bar nearly to distraction. One day a friend found
him upon the steps of his house superintending the removal of a huge
pile of newspapers.
“‘What papers are those, Chief-Baron?’ he asked.
“‘The London _Times_.’
“‘Do you read the _Times_ regularly?’
“‘Oh! dear, yes.’
“‘Did you read that slashing leader on Bright’s speech?’
“‘No; when did it appear?’
“‘Last Thursday.’
“‘Oh! my dear friend, I shall come to it by and by; but at present I am
_a year in arrear_.’”
“Am I to understand that he intended to read up to that speech?”
“Certainly. This will illustrate the man. At his house in Leeson
Street, Dublin, the hall-door was divided into two, and a knocker
attached to each door. The chief-baron has been known to stand for
hours, pausing to consider which knocker he would rap with, fearing to
act unjustly by the unutilized one.”
“I can scarcely credit this,” exclaimed the member.
“Oh! you’ll hear of stranger things than that before you leave
Ireland.” And the merry twinkle in the priest’s eye dissipated any
doubts still lingering in the ponderous mind of the learned member for
Doodleshire.
“That story is worthy of our—ahem!—charioteer.”
“Who? Peter O’Brien? What good company the rascal is! Of him one can
safely say with Publius, _Comes jucundus in via pro vehiculo est_.
Peter would lighten any journey. What was the subject of the debate
to-day?”
“Well—ahem!—he gave us a new and original version of _A Strange
Adventure with a Phaeton_.” And the little man chuckled at his wit.
“I know the story,” said Father O’Dowd. “It is one of Peter’s
favorites, and it takes Peter to tell it.”
“From the phaeton he plunged into Home Rule.”
“Freddy,” addressing me, “you must get Peter to tell our English friend
here the story of how ‘ould Casey done Dochther Huttle out av a
guinea’; it’s racy of the soil.”
“There are—ahem!—some words of his that I cannot exactly follow. They
are Irish, but they have quite a Saxon ring about them, which evidently
shows the affinity in the languages.”
“And a further reason for uniting us. You English will never rest
content until a causeway is built between Kingstown and Holyhead,
garrisoned for the whole sixty miles by a Yorkshire or Shropshire
regiment—one that can be depended upon.”
“That idea has been mooted in the House before now; I mean
the—ahem!—connection of the two countries by a tunnel.”
“So you would bind us in the dark, Mr. Hawthorne?”
“Ha! ha! ha! Father O’Dowd, that is so good that I must book it here,”
tapping his forehead in a ghastly way. “Don’t be surprised if it is
heard in the House. We are very witty there.”
“If there is any wit in the House of Commons we send it to you. But I
doubt if there is a sparkle of repartee among all the Irish members
even. I’ve seen a French _mot_ rehashed, with the epigram left out in
the cold, and an Irish story with the point striking somewhere in
Tipperary.”
“Tipperary is very Irish, is it not? They speak the Irish language
there, and run their vowels into each other.”
“You are right, sir; that is the place where you’d get your two _i_’s
knocked into one.”
Mr. Hawthorne saw this, and, although the laugh was against him,
enjoyed it amazingly. Father O’Dowd could hit from the shoulder, but
could also pick up his prostrate foe with the delicacy of a woman. When
creed or country came up, one found a stalwart champion in the worthy
priest, who could meet his adversary with shillelah or polished steel,
as the requirements of the case demanded.
“Finish that glass of wine, and let me show you a set of the finest
boneens in the county.”
“Boneens? What are boneens?”
“This is more of your Saxon ignorance,” laughed Father O’Dowd, as,
followed by Mr. Hawthorne and myself, he led the way in the direction
of the stable-yard.
TO BE CONTINUED.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
OUTSIDE ST. PETER’S.
How grand the approach! The dome’s Olympian disc
Albeit has sunk behind the huge façade.
Lo! with its cross the sentinel obelisk
Salutes as on parade.
“Hewn from the red heart of primeval granite,”
It says, “among the monuments which man
Reared to outmass the mountains of his planet,
I was, ere Rome began.
“By no dark hieroglyphs my sides are storied;
My titular god, in Heliopolis,
In the world’s morning burned into my forehead
The signet of his kiss.
“Converted like an ancient scroll rewritten,
What heeds the Sun of Righteousness my date?
I lift his symbol on my brow, dawn-smitten,
And at his portal wait!”
And the twin fountains leap in joy, and twist
Their silvery shafts in foaming strength amain,
Whose loosening coil is whirled into a mist
Of sun-illumined rain.
Therein the bow of promise tenderly,
A Heart in glory, palpitates and glows;
And musically, in words of melody,
The crystal cadence flows:
“Ho! fallen ones, Eve’s sorrowing sons and daughters!
In our lustration nothing is accurst;
Ho! come ye, come ye to the living waters,
Whoever is athirst.”
The colonnaded, stately double-porch
For world-wide wanderers stretches arms of grace;
The bosom of the universal church
Draws us to her embrace.
In their white silence the apostles look
Benignantly upon us. Waving hands
Of welcome—if our tears such vision brook—
In midst the Master stands.
“Humanity,” he pleadeth, “heavy laden,
Come unto me, and I will give you rest!
Through this, my portal, to the nobler Eden
Enter, and be possessed!”
’Tis Easter; and they sing the risen Christ—
How jubilant St. Peter’s wondrous choir!
But now no vision of the Evangelist,
Preceding throne and tiar,
Is borne amid the mystic candlesticks;
No waving feathers flash with starry eyes;
In the gold chalice and the gold-rayed pyx,
For paschal sacrifice,
No pontiff consecrates the elements;
And dost remember, in the olden time,
How heaven was stormed with silver violence—
That trumpet-burst sublime,
Like cherubim in battle? Or, all sound
Tranced for the elevation of the Host,
How tingling silence thrilled through worlds profound,
Where moved the Holy Ghost,
And then Rome rocked with bells? If such things were,
They are not now. But we are strangely wrought
And vibrant, answering like a harp in air
The impalpable wind of thought.
O’er the Campagna’s wastes of feverous blight
I’ve watched St. Peter’s mighty dome expand
In soaring cycloids to the infinite,
When heaven was blue and bland.
When storm was on the mountains and the sea,
Have seen its whole empyreal glory tost
Like shipwreck on a wild immensity,
That heaved without a coast.
But it was grand through all. From far or near,
It seemed too vast for heresies or schisms;
No colored glass, within its hemisphere,
Breaks white light as with prisms.
I have dreamed dreams therein: of charity
Wide as the world, impartial as the sun;
That on such Sion, in fraternity,
Might all men meet as one.
Dreams! Yet one cross, one hope—we scarce can err—
May, must all wanderers to one fold recall:
The Apostles’ Creed, the bunch of precious myrrh,
Can purify us all.
“I have builded on a rock!” His word symbolic
He will make plain—the Eternal cannot fail:
“Earth shall not shake my One Church Apostolic,
Nor gates of hell prevail!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FRENCH HOME LIFE.[178]
Philosophers, theologians, and political economists alike are agreed
that the family is the basis of society and the type of government.
Home life and teaching, therefore, is the most important thing in
youth, and of whatsoever kind it is, so will be the behavior in riper
years of the generation brought up in its precepts. If parents did
their duty, the state would need fewer prisons; or, as a Chinese
proverb more tersely puts it, “If parents would buy rods, the hangman
would sell his implements.” Individual effort, however heroically it
may make head against the stream, has but a hard and uncertain task in
an atmosphere the very reverse of Christian and Scriptural, and in the
teeth of laws becoming every day more and more antagonistic to the Ten
Commandments. Still, since the spirit of the age has almost put on one
side, as obsolete, the ideal of reverence for age and experience, and
the respect due to parents, husbands, masters, and superiors, the
preservation of the worthy traditions of Christian home-life falls
necessarily to the hands of families themselves. We have to live not up
to or within the laws, but beyond them, and to train our children not
only as good and obedient citizens but as earnest and practical
Christians. Not only in one country is this the case, nor even among
the countries of one race, but everywhere, from modernized Japan to
Spain, from Russia to the reservations of friendly Indians.
There is one country, however, whose modern literature and practice for
a century and a half has been a synonym for looseness of teaching, for
disregard of family ties, honor, authority, and restraint, for every
element brilliantly and fatally disintegrating, for every moral and
philosophical novelty. France is perhaps the nation most misrepresented
and maligned by her public literature—at least the France whose
delinquencies have been so shamelessly and with seeming enjoyment
dissected before our eyes by her novelists and satirists. The sound
body on whose surface these sores break out is ignored; the old
tradition, rigid and artificial in many points, but made so by the very
license of court and city which for ever assaulted its simplicity, is
overlooked, and the decent, quiet, and strong substratum of manliness,
truth, and purity underlying the froth of vice in the capital and the
large towns is forgotten.
The first French Revolution was prepared by atheistical epicures, the
airy and refined unbelievers of the court of Louis XIV. and XV.; and
though turbulent masses here and there caught the infection, and with
cruel precision put in practice against the court nobility the theories
about which the latter so complacently wrote essays and epigrams, yet
the rural populations still believed in God and virtue—the evil had not
struck root among the body of the nation. The infidelity of the present
century has completed the task left unfinished by Voltaire and
Rousseau; newspapers have carried doubt and arrogance among the simple
people of the country; the laws of partition have destroyed many
homesteads once centres of families, and driven people into crowded and
unhealthy cities; the example of a noisily prominent class of
self-styled leaders has carried away the senses of otherwise sober and
decent men; the increase of drunkenness has further loosened family and
home ties; politics have become a mere profession, instead of the
portion allotted by duty to the collective body of fathers of families,
and so the old ideal is vanishing fast. Frenchmen of the right sort
look despairingly into the far past of their own country, and into the
history of foreign nations—English, American, Dutch, Hanoverian—for
models of pure living, respect for authority, law-abidingness, and
attachment to home. Some have set themselves to study Hindoo, Chinese,
and Egyptian models, and to put together from the Proverbs and
Ecclesiastes of Solomon, and the exhortations of Plato and Cicero, an
ideal code of home-life; some have gathered together and published with
loving regret the memorials of French life at its purest, of the
patriarchal ideal which survived even till the seventeenth century—the
age, pre-eminently, of great Frenchmen and women, and of which some
shadows lingered into our own century. From the _naïf_ advice of Louis
IX., the saintly king of France, to his son and daughter, Philip and
Isabel, to the family registers of small yeomen of Provençal valleys
and the grave admonitions of a judge to his newly-married daughter just
before the French Revolution, the same spirit breathes through the
dying addresses of Christian fathers of families in what we only know
as infidel and immoral France. “The seven thousand who bowed not the
knee to Baal” were always represented, though the licentious courts of
the Valois and the Bourbons threw a veil over the virtues of the
country; not one class alone, but all, from the titled proprietor to
the small tradesman and struggling _ménager_, or yeoman, contributed
its quota of redeeming virtue. But it is noticeable that the majority
of these upright men were poor. They could not afford to be idle; they
had large families to support; they had their patrimony to keep in the
family, and, if possible, to increase. All the customs that we are
going to see unrolled before us, the sentiments expressed, the simple,
dull, serious life led, are utterly alien from anything we call
technically French. We shall be surprised at every page, but less so if
we remember that this patriarchal life was generally spent in the
country, and often in mountainous regions and severe climates. While
reading of these scenes some may be reminded of a story placed in a
singular region in the south of France,—the Camargue, not far from
Aigues-Mortes—in which Miss Bowles has embodied the characteristic
traits of a magnificent, healthy, hardy, and upright race. One of these
Provençal farms had much in common with some described in that book.
The reason which makes the author of _La Vie Domestique_ choose the
Courtois family register as the first subject of his two volumes is
that it is the latest that has come to his knowledge; and reproducing,
almost in our own generation, the traits of a vanished society, it is
of more interest and of greater weight as a possible model. The author
of it, descended from a family of lawyers and judges at least two
hundred years old, died in 1828, and his descendants still live in the
valley of Sault—one of those natural republics not uncommon in
mountainous districts—retired from the outer world, faithful to
ancestral tradition, and governing themselves patriarchally according
to their old and never-interrupted communal liberties. There is a vast
field for research, and more for meditation, in the liberties of the
old mediæval states north and south of the Pyrenees; it is startling to
see what bold claims the parliaments of Aragon and Navarre could
enforce, and their Spartan disregard of the kingly office unless joined
to almost perfect virtue. But centralization, the genius of our time,
has ruthlessly declared that sort of liberty antiquated, and, after the
decay of the despotism which the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
began, the liberty of the individual was insisted on rather than that
of the commonwealth.
The valley of Sault was originally independent of any feudal duties,
and though later on its lords, the D’Agoults, paid homage and fealty to
the counts of Provence and then to the counts D’Anjou, they still
retained the sovereign rights of coinage and independent legislation.
The country is rocky and woody; for, though reckless wood-cutting
decreased the forests round this commune, Sault itself remained a
forest oasis, which the provident inhabitants have tried to perpetuate
by planting young oaks on the barren slopes of their hills. The
Courtois were assiduous planters of trees, and a grove of fairly-grown
oaks formed a background to their farm buildings. Quantities of
aromatic herbs grow in this neighborhood, and their distillation into
essences forms an industry of the country. But the beauty that Sault
chiefly lacks is that of water; for, though not far from the famous
fountain of Vaucluse, there is no local stream of any importance. This
is Alpine scenery without Alpine torrents. But, on the other hand,
Sault has a sulphur spring, as yet only locally famous, and the meadows
are green and moist. The principal natural curiosity of the valley is
the _Avens_, a kind of rifts in the earth, like craters, which, at the
rainy season, gape open and absorb floods of rain, leaving only a small
portion to feed the Nesque, a tiny tributary of the Rhone. Beech,
birch, and maple abound, and pasturage forms a surer road to fortune
than agriculture. Yet the small freeholds are pretty equally divided,
and the more advanced among the inhabitants have very clear and
approved notions of practical farming. The custom of selling or
exchanging the paternal acres was, till the last quarter of a century,
unknown, or at least abhorred; and a local tradition dating hundreds of
years back had established a modified right of primogeniture—one of the
sons, generally but not necessarily the eldest, devoting himself to the
care of his aged parents, the settlement of his sisters, the management
of the farm, and the accumulation of a reserve fund from his income for
the unforeseen necessities of the younger branches of the family. His
portion in money was sometimes double, according to the Mosaic
precedent, but it was understood that the Support of the House (such
was the phrase) should use his advantages only for the general benefit
of the family, and also that his wife’s dowry should nearly cover the
deficit caused by the marriage and dowries of his sisters.
Those simple people knew nothing of laws, such as shameful excesses
have made necessary in Anglo-Saxon countries, for the protection,
against the husband and father, of the wife’s fortune and children’s
inheritance. Antoine de Courtois, one of these model yeomen of southern
France, looked upon any alienation of ancestral property, or even any
use of capital, as sheer robbery of his descendants, and says in his
family register: “To sell our forefathers’ land is to renounce our name
and disinherit our children. Never believe that it can be replaced by
other property, and remember that all those who have been ready to
exchange their ancestors’ for other land have ruined themselves.... If
our farm is well managed, it will always bring in more than six per
cent. Any other land you could buy would not bring in three per cent.,
and would ruin you to improve it. You would have a decreased capital
and no income, and it would break your heart.”