especially attractive because of the monotony of the recently-crossed
sea, and the houses, too, in this strip, are enveloped in flowers; but
this is not because they are in Ireland, but is rather due to their
being occupied by English or Scotch or their descendants, who sing thus
"the Lord's song in a strange land." Yet from Cork to Killarney, by the
Prince of Wales route, you rarely see a bit of verdure; not a flower
by the roadside, nor in a window, nor the slightest attempt at the
beautification of a home, or to make the best of little. For part of the
way not a green field, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor a weed, nor a blade
of grass, nor the song of a bird, nor the hum of an insect,--nothing,
absolutely, but brown, barren desolation, associated with a sort of
solitude that but intensifies the gloom. Occasionally a narrow belt of
potatoes encircling a cabin, always built without mortar, as there is
no sand in Ireland, is the only relief from the depressing waste until
you reach Glengariff, where you find the English idea again, which has
covered the barren rocks with flowers and fruit, comfortable homes and
waving grain, the contrast, indeed, making the most taciturn eloquent in
praise. From Glengariff to Killarney the same sterile desolation. Miles
and miles without a bit of pleasant vegetation to rest the weary eyes.
The district suggesting rather some of the dismal places described by
Dante or Virgil, Ariosto, Tasso, or Milton, as the abode of souls
condemned, rather than districts occupied by living men.
[Illustration: CUSTOM-HOUSE, DUBLIN, IRELAND]
After passing through these regions of perpetual misery and despair,
these birdless and treeless wastes, you get to regard any little bit of
green as a godsend. You have, perhaps, closed your eyes to shut out the
depressing melancholy of the apparently anathematized place; you cannot
shut out all thoughts of the wretched and benighted men that relentless
fate seems to have anchored on these more relentless shores. You have
for some time past been ascending the side of a whin-spangled mountain;
having reached the summit, the vehicle stops,--you look abroad, and
behold the Islands of the Blest, Civitas Solis, Utopia, the New
Atlantis, Paradise, what you will; otherwise, Killarney is at your feet,
and you feel
"Like stout Cortez when, with eagle eyes,
He stared at the Pacific,--and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise,--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
It was here that, when we sought O'Holleron [an enthusiastic Irish
patriot of the party], who had suddenly disappeared, we found him
with bent head, tears running down his cheeks, and sobbing. You descend
from this Pisgah to the lakes, and remain for a few days, until you have
exhausted your collection of exclamations, and have repeated them again
in writing to your friends, when you proceed.
From here to the Liffey the country is not so brown as the region
through which you have passed, but still unattractive in the extreme. It
is not green, but greenish, with most of the small fields, as is the
mode here, enclosed within thick walls of stone, built without mortar,
and void of vegetation. Farms small (average size about six acres),
tumble-down houses, no inspiring legends nor traditions, intellects
dead, no past, present, nor future, nothing but the same dreary lament,
in which everything participates,--the emigrant, landlord, tenant; the
very clouds weep over it; hardly ever cease. At every cluster of houses,
at a crossroad, the number of bare-limbed women, wearing but two
garments, one of them a petticoat, coming only below the knees, makes
you think of Gros's remark, that "Irishwomen have a dispensation from
the pope to wear the thick end of their legs downward."...
Visitors here find the country so ludicrously, or rather so mournfully,
different from what they have been taught to expect--the Isle of
Saints; the Emerald Isle; "the land of chaste women and brave men;" the
hospitable land; "a kind-hearted people;" "a people of sobriety and
industry," are some of the epithets used--that, unless sickened into
silence by the humiliating reality, they think of what they have read
and heard as a joke, and, to keep the tears back, joke too; and this I
believe is the origin of many of the hilarious things written about
Ireland.
You might think the birth of the Duke of Wellington and Oliver Goldsmith
here would have raised this part of the island above the commonplace,
as that of Burns did Ayr; of Shakespeare, Stratford; of Gray and Penn,
Stoke Poges; of Goethe, Frankfort; or of Emerson, a few white houses
upon a New England plain; but no, there are no memorials in this
district at all, except the scant fragments left by the old pagan
and semi-christianized natives before the land was the home of
thriftlessness and whiskey. The picture is the saddest of all the sad
pictures of modern retrogression, with no prospect of the advent of a
mind capable of suggesting the proper remedy.
[Certainly one cannot but say, after this depressing picture
by one "to the manner born," that Ireland needs regenerating.
We give next his impressions of Dublin, which are no more
enlivening in tone.]
But about Dublin. What of it? It is certainly a place of handsome
municipal buildings, and others, too, built in an imposing manner,
and yet all there is architecturally great in the whole city you see
at a glance, the moment you cross O'Connell's Bridge. The first view,
therefore, is impressive in the extreme; the buildings magnificent,
splendidly proportioned, symmetrical. You can see them all at once, and
are delighted; but penetrate those vistas, and behold them,--a suit of
sixteenth-century mail for man and horse on Sancho Panza and his mule,
or a gracefully painted window that shuts off an ugly view,--all that
you see at the first glance is all that there is.
To be sure, there are many churches,--perhaps one hundred,--including
Methodists, Moravians, Friends, Baptists, Unitarians, Presbyterians,
Jews, besides those belonging to the two religious bodies most numerous
here,--the Churches of Ireland and Rome; some of them of great beauty;
ostentatious, to be sure, as if they were competing with each other in
display; and yet with all this the city has none of those pleasant
surprises that you expect in old towns, and that you find even with us
[in America], and more so, I judge, in towns on the Continent; that is
to say, narrow, clean streets opening into wide courts, having buildings
with carved fronts and pillars, and the like, or sudden bends in a
street, where the commonplace becomes magnificence. There is nothing
of this in Dublin,--no curious doors or windows, no "jutty frieze" nor
"coign of vantage." Very often an attempt at grandeur, but marred by
defective details. The interiors, too, as far as I could penetrate,
indicating more the desire for elegance than the capacity,--gay-colored
window-shades, but torn; door- and window-curtains, but faded;
window-boxes, broken and hanging askew, with flowers withering, either
from the smoky atmosphere or neglect; everything black from coal-dust,
and no flowers at all. No wonder Moore wrote so touchingly about the
last rose of summer.
Plants, to my sorrow, were not in abundance. I searched the grounds of
Trinity and everywhere else in vain for a rose or anything else that
bloomed, and feel, therefore, as if Tom Moore's rose must have been
the last of its race; but what Dublin lacks in flowers it makes up in
taverns. Myriads--to quote again from Adam Clarke--of groggeries and
distilleries; one of these so large that it looks as if the muddy river
that runs through the city was dug there merely to carry its barges of
stout to people at the other end. It appears also here, like home, as
if these same gentry, who become rich on the drunkenness of the people,
were rather important factors in municipal affairs. One of these,
Guinness,--I feel, though, like apologizing for mentioning his name in
connection with liquor-dealers, as his commodity is stout,--however,
is the philanthropist of Dublin, the restorer of St. Patrick's, the
supporter of missionaries, the insurer of all his employes' lives, etc.,
and not only has a monument here by Foley, but was also knighted during
the present reign. You remember Dickens,--"The nobility can brew, but
they can't bake."
The streets are ornamented with many good statues, including Goldsmith,
Moore, Burke, Grattan, Stokes, Lords Carlisle, Corrigan, Eglinton, Smith
O'Brien, and others; but the University, the gift of that friend of
learning, Queen Elizabeth, is perhaps the chief glory of the town;
while "the Liberties," a portion of which I explored to-day, is probably
her greatest disgrace. From the lanes and alleys that penetrate this
malodorous district emerge the most curious race, I would judge, that
has ever been found in a civilized town. Here you find illustrations in
abundance, not only of the "philosophy of clothes," but of the comedy
and tragedy as well; this tendency to wear other people's garments being
one of the characteristics of the tribe, and the city being very liberal
in the matter of supplying them with shops where they may procure their
wares.
In Cork the chief articles of _petit_ commerce are cast-off clothing
and "bits of mate," especially tails of things piled up on stalls, the
clothing spread on the streets; while in Dublin it is second-hand
clothing and bones, sold in mouldy dens,--"bone warehouses,"--twelve
feet wide, yawning like Elijah's cave after the ravens had been doing
the generous thing by him for months. In turning a corner, a fellow,
standing on his knees (stumps) near one of these, accosted me, asking
for money to help pay for a pair of cork legs, his own blown off in a
dynamite "experiment." Why not Dublin legs? I thought. "He needed but
five shillings more," he said; "they were already made, but the thief
of a maker would not let him have them until he had paid every penny."
Looking up into my face in a sort of confidential aside, he added,
"True enough, sir; he's giving them to me at cost."
In the act of contributing to the needed balance, a young lady of
perhaps thirty-five autumns, and dressed in a crape hat, linen duster,
split down the back, and who had heard the pitiful story of the
descendant of Simon Tappertit, approached and said, "Don't give him a
ha'penny, sir; he has one pair of legs in pawn already; and he has two
wives and nine children that beg for him besides. If you have anything
to spare, give it to me, sir; I'm an orphan."
What could not Herr Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh say about such a pandemonium
of rags as are to be found here? "Happy he who can look through the
clothes of man into the man." No difficulty here in being happy, if
holes can help you. You are among a colony of savages, as much in
conceit with their parti-colored wardrobe as a Mohawk with his beads.
Everything, from the "goodly Babylonish garments--the mantles of Shinar,
from Assyrian looms," down to the cast-off tarpaulin of discharged or
disgraced tars, are on the backs of the denizens of the Liberties. No
one is wearing the clothes made for him. The unexpected is the most
common. One fellow had on the cast-off coat of a policeman, too small
to reach across his naked body, with a pair of trousers with scarlet
stripes, billowing down to the uppers of his soleless shoes. Another
bare-footed man had nothing on but an ulster; another, daintily picking
his way across the street to one of the rag and bone shops that are
as thick here as leaves in Vallombrosa, and between his trousers and
short-waisted coat, with long tails, was a yawning gulf of dark flesh,
that a crimson sash tried in vain to conceal. Another had on an overcoat
with but one sleeve; a hole in the back large enough for him to thrust
his head through; fastened down the front by having bits of the coat
pulled through the buttonholes, and kept from slipping back by butchers'
skewers.
Knee-breeches, red coats, cocked and battered stove-pipe hats,
swallow-tailed coats, costumes of every clime, together with the
official garments of the army in rags, are found here on the backs of
scoundrels that look as if they would run from a bit of soap as if it
were the plague,--if, indeed, they would _run_ from anything. The women,
like the men, indescribable. The saddest part of it, the children;
scores of half-naked little souls, swarming around and looking as if
all they ever had to eat they picked up in the streets; have nothing
of childhood about them but its seriousness; children that have never
been combed or washed; boys having nothing on but the trousers of men,
the waistband tied about their necks, their arms thrust through the
pocket-holes, and the legs rolled up like the coat-sleeves of "the
Artful Dodger." One little fellow wore a swallow-tailed coat and
stockings, nothing else; the strange thing about it, they are not aware
how curious they look; but the ladies! the very exuberance of grotesque
finery they exhibit silences my modest pen....
P.S.--You know that it is a custom among the subjects of England to
conclude all public meetings, especially of a secular nature, by singing
"God save the Queen." The only exception to this rule, I believe, are
the Irish Nationalists; they don't want God to do anything of the sort,
and have consequently substituted for the National Anthem a song
entitled "God save Ireland," which they sing in season and out of
season. You can always tell the politics of a district by the number of
fiddlers, _prima donnas_, tin whistle and jews-harp performers that play
this new vent for patriotism.
_A propos_ of this, in coming home this evening I read on a great
sign, at the door of a dingy little drug-shop near the Liberties, the
following combination of enterprise and patriotism (which struck me as
being odd, and which, for your amusement, I transcribed, punctuation
points and all):
"Prepared Castor Oil a penny a dose!
God Save Ireland?
Epsom salts 4 doses for a half-penny!
God Save Ireland?
Seidlitz Powder 6 pence a box!
God Save Ireland?"
and so on, all the way to the bottom, until God had saved Ireland, I
think, some fifteen or sixteen times, but always after a powerful
physic; the last line of the placard was,--
"Home Rule Forever!
God Save Ireland?"
FROM CORK TO KILLARNEY.
SARAH J. LIPPINCOTT.
[Mrs. Lippincott, the favorite "Grace Greenwood" of former
American readers, was the author of several works of European
travel. The following selection is from her "Haps and Mishaps
of a Tour in Europe," and includes her interesting description
of Blarney Castle, Killarney, and the country between.]
The passage from Holyhead to Kingstown was accomplished in four hours;
but throughout the trip I felt that I would sooner cross the Styx to the
Plutonian shores than attempt it again. I thought that I had sounded the
lowest depths of mortal suffering in the way of sea-sickness, but I
found that my Atlantic experiences were but a faint prelude to a mild
suggestion of this.
A gentleman at Cork told me an anecdote of a company of emigrants who
were observed passing back and forth on one of the ferry-boats during an
entire day, and when questioned in regard to their strange movements,
answered, they were bound to America in the next ship, and were
"practising at say-sickness, just." So the tourist in the utmost he may
endure on an Atlantic voyage, before crossing the Irish Channel, may
have the consolation of knowing that he is but "practising at
say-sickness."
At Kingstown we were treated to a taste of nationality in the shape of
a bit of a row between two carmen. At the Dublin station we took that
peculiar and distinctive Irish vehicle, an outside jaunting-car, which
has the merit of giving you a variety in the way of exercise,--joltings,
backward, forward, and sidewise,--a vigilant and vigorous endeavor to
keep yourself and your luggage on, and an alert watchfulness to keep
other vehicles off. There are two kinds of jaunting-cars, which are thus
distinguished by the Irish carmen: "The outside car, yer honor, has the
wheels inside, and the inside car has the wheels outside."...
The route from Dublin to Cork leads mostly through a barren, boggy,
miserable country, with here and there an oasis of waving green and
gold, telling of careful cultivation and wise husbandry. There are some
fine old ruins along the way, among which I best remember those of
Kilmallock, Kildare, where the pious nuns once kept the holy fires
burning "through long ages of darkness and storm," Loughman Castle,
and the Rocks of Dunamore and Cashel. But all along the line the ruins
are almost countless. You grow mortally weary of crumbling turrets,
tumble-down gate-ways, battered arches, and staggering towers, all
standing out boldly in the sun and storm, for the absence of trees and
shrubbery is a marked feature in the agricultural districts of Ireland.
Indeed, the larger part of this ill-fated isle seems, in contrast with
fruitful, prosperous, beautiful England, a wild, weary, shadowless
waste, scathed, peeled, desolated, and abandoned.
On the following morning [after a night spent at Cork], amid golden
sunshine and silvery showers, we drove to Blarney Castle, and wandered
through those umbrageous grounds immortalized by the poet in the famous
song of the "Groves of Blarney." The castle itself is a noble old ruin,
and its situation and surroundings are remarkably picturesque and
curious. There are natural subterranean passages leading down to the
lake, and a black dungeon, where, according to our guide, "Cromwell, the
bloody nagur," confined his prisoners. The lake is small, but, according
to the above-mentioned authority, quite bottomless. He told us, with a
grave face, that the late "Lady Jeffers," having taken a whim into her
head to draw it off, had a drain dug full three feet below the surface,
but not a drop would run out,--a sturdy, conservative old lake.
We ascended the great tower, at the top of which we all kissed the new
Blarney stone,--it being morally and physically impossible for ladies to
salute the real Simon Pure, which is outside the wall some feet from the
summit. The gentlemen who accomplish this feat must be held by the feet
over the wall, one hundred and twenty feet from the ground, by a stout
guide, who is liable to be seized with a sudden weakness, and to call
out that he must stop "to spit on his hands,"--that he can _howld_ on
no longer, unless his fee is double; and the unhappy dog in suspense
pledges himself to a treat. Our guide assured me that the new Blarney
stone was quite as good as the "rale,"--that a certain "widdy lady" made
a pilgrimage all the way from the north of England, kissed the spurious
stone most rapturously, and made a great match soon after. The question
arises, Lay the virtue in the stone, or in the pilgrim's faith?
Our return drive was very charming,--the rain was past and sunlight and
fresh breezes poured beauty and gladness on our way. I cannot remember
to have seen anywhere within so short a distance so many wild flowers.
The shrubbery was more luxuriant, the trees finer and more abundant,
than we had ever seen,--everything on our path was beautiful and
gracious save the _humanity_, which was wretched and poverty-stricken
in the extreme. From the miserable little mud huts along the road
ran scores of children, of all sizes, bare-headed, bare-footed, and
bare-legged, with rags of all imaginable hues and textures fluttering in
the wind, and attached to their bodies by some unknown and mysterious
law of attraction, certainly by no visible bond or support. With faces
begrimed by smoke, and wild eyes overhung with wilder locks, they
stretched out their dirty beseeching palms, and assailed us on all sides
of our outside car,--most assailable of vehicles,--fit contrivance for a
beggared land.
Irish carmen are a race of Jehus,--driving with eccentric flourishes
of the whip, and when more than usually excited, with strange barbaric
whoops and hellos, making their odd little vehicles jump along at an
astonishing rate. They are commonly communicative and amusing, though by
no means the quaint, cunning, delightful, inimitable wags and wits your
Lovers and Levers, your Edgeworths and Halls, have pictured. It is a
singular thing that, though they are from the first free and easy in
word and manner, they are never offensively so. Native tact, good humor,
and warmth of heart take from their advances all appearance of boldness
or impertinence. Our driver on this occasion was disposed to be
particularly sociable, though not in the jocular way. He was a man of
much intelligence for his station, of a serious, even sad expression
of face, and he talked powerfully and with intense bitterness of the
wrongs and sorrows of the Irish peasantry. I was struck by hearing him
ascribe most of their sufferings not to the English government but
to the _native_ _Irish proprietors_, who, he averred, had revelled in
heartless, wasteful extravagance, while the people starved, until, since
the failure of the potato, many of them have been reduced to absolute
want. It was almost fearful to mark the wild gleam in the man's eye as
he spoke his fierce joy in this retributive justice....
On the morning of August 16 we left Cork for Killarney, by way of Bantry
and Glengariff. After a short run on the rail we took a stage-coach,
choosing outside seats, like enthusiastic tourists as we are, though the
day was dark and showery. There was little in the scenery, and less in
the condition of the country and people, to repay us for our exposure to
wind and weather till we reached Bantry. I can never forget the forlorn
unmitigated wretchedness of the people who thronged around us at the
little town of Dunmanway. Among the crowd appealing to us, in all
possible variations of the whine mendicious and mendacious, we saw not
one man or woman in the national costume and cover-all,--the double
cape great-coat and the hooded cloak; all was squalor and tatters
soul-sickening and disgusting. Here was infancy, nude and needy,
reaching out its dirty little hands; and second childhood bent and
tottering, with palsied palm extended, eying you with all the mute
wistfulness of a starved spaniel. There was a full assortment of the
halt, the hump-backed, and the crippled,--all degrees of sightlessness
and unsightliness. I turned away from the miserable creatures with a
heart heavy with hopeless sympathy and vain pity, and with a conscience
stricken for all my own sins of unthankfulness and discontent.
And here I may as well pause to remark briefly on the condition and
appearance of the peasants in the south of Ireland. Knowing that I could
not fairly judge of this class by the idle and ragged crowd who gather
round the coach or car in the towns and hamlets, I took occasion,
during my stay at Cork, to visit several of the country cottages of the
working peasants in company with one of the landed proprietors. In but
one out of six did I find a regular fireplace and chimney; in but one
was there a window of glass, and that consisted of a single pane. The
others had--with the exception of the door, and a hole in the roof, from
which the smoke, after wandering at its own sweet will through the
cabin, found its way out--no opening whatever for light or ventilation.
But I forget--we did remark a sort of improvised window in one other.
In a low, miserable hovel, belonging to a carman, we found a horse
occupying full a third of the scanty room; and above his manger a small
hole had been made through the mud wall, the good man having found that
the health of the animal required what himself and family lived
without,--air.