GREENANE HOUSE, THOMASTOWN, _March 5th._--The breakfast-room at Borris
this morning was gay with pink coats. A meet was to come off at a place
between Borris and Thomastown, and bidding fare-well to my cordial host
and hostess, I set out at 11 o'clock for a flying visit to this quaint
and charming house of Mr. Seigne, one of the best known and most highly
esteemed agents in this part of Ireland.
My jarvey from Borris had an unusually neat and well-balanced car. When
I praised it he told me it was "built by an American," not an Irish
American, I understood him to say, but a genuine Yankee, who, for some
mysterious reason, has established himself in this region, where he has
prospered as a cart and car builder ever since. "Just the best cars in
all Ireland he builds, your honour!" Why don't he naturalise them in
America?
All the way was charming, the day very bright, and even warm, and the
hill scenery picturesque at every turn. We looked out sharply for the
hunt, but in vain. My jarvey, who knew the whole country, said they must
have broken cover somewhere on the upper road, and we should miss them
entirely. And so we did.
The silting up of the river Nore has reduced Thomastown or
Ballymacanton, which was its Irish name, from its former importance as
an emporium for the country about Kilkenny. The river now is not
navigable above Inistiogue. But two martial square towers, one at either
end of a fine bridge which spans the stream here, speak of the good old
times when the masters of Thomastown took toll and tribute of traders
and travellers. The lands about the place then belonged to the great
monastery of Jerpoint, the ruins of which are still the most interesting
of their kind in this part of Ireland. They have long made a part of the
estate of the Butlers. We rattled rapidly through the quiet little town,
and whisking out of a small public square into a sort of wynd between
two houses, suddenly found ourselves in the precincts of Grenane House.
The house takes its name from the old castle of Grenane, an Irish
fortress established here by some native despot long before Thomas
Fitz-Anthony the Norman came into the land. The ruins of this castle
still stand some half a mile away. "We call the place Candahar," said
Mr. Seigne, as he came up with two ladies from the meadows below the
house, "because you come into it so suddenly, just as you do into that
Oriental town." But what a charming occidental place it is! It stands
well above the river, the slope adorned with many fine old trees, some
of which grow, and grow prosperously, in the queerest and most
improbable forms, bent double, twisted, but still most green and
vigorous. They have no business under any known theory of arboriculture
to be beautiful, but beautiful they are. The views of the bridge, of the
towers, and of the river, from this slope would make the fortune of the
place in a land of peace and order.
A most original and delightful lady of the country lunched with
us,--such a character as Miss Edgeworth or Miss Austen might have drawn.
Shrewd, humorous, sensible, fearless, and ready with impartial hand to
box the ears alike of Trojan and of Tyrian. She not only sees both sides
of the question in Ireland as between the landlords and the tenants, but
takes both sides of the question. She holds lands by inheritance, which
make her keenly alive to the wrongs of the landlords, and she holds
farms as a tenant, which make her implacably critical as to their
claims. She mercilessly demolished in one capacity whatever she advanced
in the other, and all with the most perfect nonchalance and good faith.
This curiously dual attitude reminded me of the confederate General,
Braxton Bragg, of whom his comrades in the old army of the United States
used to say that he once had a very sharp official correspondence with
himself. He happened to hold a staff appointment, being also a line
officer. So in his quality of a staff officer, he found fault with
himself in his capacity as a line officer, reprimanded himself sharply,
replied defiantly to the reprimand, and eventually reported himself to
himself for discipline at head-quarters. She told an excellent story of
a near kinsman of hers who, holding a very good living in the Protestant
Irish Church, came rather unexpectedly by inheritance into a baronetcy,
upon which his women-folk insisted that it would be derogatory to a
baronet to be a parson. "Would you believe it, the poor man was silly
enough to listen to their cackle, and resign seven hundred a year!"
"That didn't clear him," I said, "of the cloth, did it?"
"Not a bit, of course, poor foolish man. He was just as much a parson as
ever, only without a parsonage. Men are fools enough of themselves,
don't you think, without needing to listen to women?"
Mr. Seigne comes of a French Protestant stock long ago planted in
Ireland, and his Gallic blood doubtless helps him to handle the
practical problems daily submitted in these days to an Irish
land-agent--problems very different, as he thinks, from those with which
an Irish agent had to deal in the days before 1870. The Irish tenant has
a vantage-ground now in his relations with his landlord which he never
had in the olden time, and this makes it more important than it ever was
that the agent should have what may be called a diplomatic taste for
treating with individuals, finding out the bent of mind of this man and
of that, and negotiating over particulars, instead of insisting, in the
English fashion, on general rules, without regard to special cases. I
have met no one who has seemed to me so cool and precise as Mr. Seigne
in his study of the phenomena of the present situation. I asked him
whether he could now say, as Mr. Senior did a quarter of century ago,
that the Irish tenants were less improvident, and more averse from
running into debt than the English.
"I think not," he replied; "on the contrary, in some parts of Ireland
now the shopkeepers are kept on the verge of bankruptcy by the
recklessness with which the tenants incurred debts immediately after the
passing of the Land Act of 1870--a time when shopkeepers, and bankers
also, almost forced credit upon the farmers, and made thereby 'bad
debts' innumerable. Farmers rarely keep anything like an account of
their receipts and expenses. I know only one tenant-farmer in this
neighbourhood who keeps what can be called an account, showing what he
takes from his labour and spends on his living."[20] "They save a great
deal of money often," he says, "but almost never in any systematic way.
They spend much less on clothes and furniture, and the outward show of
things, than English people of the same condition do, and they do not
stint themselves in meat and drink as the French peasants do. In fact,
under the operation of existing circumstances, they are getting into the
way of improving their condition, not so much by sacrifices and savings,
as by an insistence on rent being fixed low enough to leave full margin
for improved living."
"I had a very frank statement on this point," said Mr. Seigne, "not long
ago from a Tipperary man. When I tried to show him that his father had
paid a good many years ago the very same rent which he declares himself
unable to pay now, he admitted this at once. But it was a confession and
avoidance. 'My father could pay the rent, and did pay the rent,' he
said, 'because he was content to live so that he could pay it. He sat on
a boss of straw, and ate out of a bowl. He lived in a way in which I
don't intend to live, and so he could pay the rent. Now, I must have,
and I mean to have, out of the land, before I pay the rent, the means of
living as I wish to live; and if I can't have it, I'll sell out and go
away; but I'll be--if I don't fight before I do that same!'"
"What could you reply to that?" I asked.
"Oh," I said, "'that's square and straightforward. Only just let me know
the point at which you mean to fight, and then we'll see if we can agree
about something.'"
"The truth is," said Mr. Seigne, "that there is a pressure upward now
from below. The labourers don't want to live any longer as the farmers
have always made them live; and so the farmers, having to consider the
growing demands of the labourers, and meaning to live better themselves,
push up against the landlord, and insist that the means of the
improvement shall come out of him."
He then told me an instructive story of his calling upon a
tenant-farmer, at whose place he found the labourers sitting about their
meal of pork and green vegetables. The farmer asked him into another
room, where he saw the farmer's family making their meal of stirabout
and milk and potatoes.
"I asked you in here," said the farmer, "because we keep in here to
ourselves. I don't want those fellows to see that we can't afford to
give ourselves what we have to give them,"--this with strong language
indicating that he must himself be given a way to advance equally with
the progressive labourer, or he would know the reason why!
This afternoon Mr. Seigne drove me over through a beautiful country to
Woodstock, near Inistiogue, the seat of the late Colonel Tighe, the head
of the family of which the authoress of "Psyche" was an ornament.
It is the finest place in this part of Ireland, and one of the finest I
have seen in the three kingdoms, a much more picturesque and more nobly
planted place indeed than its namesake in England. The mansion has no
architectural pretensions, being simply a very large and, I should
think, extremely comfortable house of the beginning of this century. The
library is very rich, and there are some good pictures, as well as
certain statues in the vestibule, which would have no interest for the
Weissnichtwo professor of _Sartor Resartus_, but are regarded with some
awe by the good people of Inistiogue.
The park would do no discredit to a palace, and if the vague project of
establishing a royal residence in Ireland for one of the British Princes
should ever take shape, it would not be easy, I should say, to find a
demesne more befitting the home of a prince than this of the Tighes. At
present it serves the State at least as usefully, being the "pleasaunce"
of the people for miles around, who come here freely to walk and drive.
It stretches for miles along the Nore, and is crowned by a gloriously
wooded hill nearly a thousand feet in height. The late Colonel Tighe, a
most accomplished man, and a passionate lover of trees, made it a kind
of private Kew Gardens. He planted long avenues of the rarest and finest
trees, araucarias, Scotch firs, oaks, beeches, cedars of Lebanon; laid
out miles of the most varied and delightful drives, and built the most
extensive conservatories in Ireland.
The turfed and terraced walks among those conservatories are
indescribably lovely, and the whole place to-day was vocal with
innumerable birds. Picturesque little cottages and arbours are to be
found in unexpected nooks all through the woodlands, each commanding
some green vista of forest aisles, or some wide view of hill and
champaign, enlivened by the winding river. From one of those to-day we
looked out over a landscape to which Turner alone or Claude could have
done justice, the river, spanned by a fine bridge, in the middle
distance, and all the region wooded as in the days of which Edmund
Spenser sings, when Ireland
"Flourished in fame,
Of wealth and goodnesse far above the rest
Of all that bears the British Islands' name."
Over the whole place broods an indefinable charm. You feel that this was
the home at once and the work of a refined and thoughtful spirit. And so
indeed it was. Here for the greater part of the current century the
owner lived, making the development of the estate and of this demesne
his constant care and chief pleasure. And here still lives his widow,
with whom we took tea in a stately quiet drawing-room. Lady Louisa Tighe
was in Brussels with her mother, the Duchess of Richmond, on the eve of
Waterloo. She was a child then of ten years old, and her mother bade
them bring her down into the historic ball-room before the Duke of
Wellington left it. The duke took up his sword. "Let Louisa buckle it
for you," said her mother, and when the little girl had girded it on,
the great captain stooped, took her up in his arms, and kissed her. "One
never knows what may happen, child," he said good-naturedly; and taking
his small gold watch out of his fob, he bade her keep it for him.
She keeps it still. For more than sixty years it has measured out in
this beautiful Irish home the hours of a life given to good works and
gracious usefulness. To-day, with all the vivacity of interest in the
people and the place which one might look for in a woman of twenty, this
charming old lady of eighty-three, showing barely threescore years in
her carriage, her countenance, and her voice, entertained us with minute
and most interesting accounts of the local industries which flourish
here mainly through her sympathetic and intelligent supervision. We
seemed to be in another world from the Ireland of Chicago or
Westminster!
Mr. Seigne drove me back here by a most picturesque road leading along
the banks of the Nore, quite overhung with trees, which in places dip
their branches almost into the swift deep stream. "This is the favourite
drive of all the lovers hereabouts," he said, "and there is a spice of
danger in it which makes it more romantic. Once, not very long ago, a
couple of young people, too absorbed in their love-making to watch their
horse, drove off the bank. Luckily for them they fell into the branches
of one of these overhanging trees, while the horse and car went plunging
into the water. There they swung, holding each other hand in hand,
making a pretty and pathetic tableau, till their cries brought some
anglers in a boat on the river to the rescue."
We spoke of Lady Louisa, and of the watch of Waterloo. "That watch had a
wonderful escape a few years ago," said Mr. Seigne.
Lady Louisa, it seems, had a confidential butler whom she most
implicitly trusted. One day it was found that a burglary had apparently
been committed at Woodstock, and that with a quantity of jewelry the
priceless watch had vanished. The butler was very active about the
matter, and as no trace could be found leading out of the house, he
intimated a suspicion that the affair might possibly have some
connection with a guest not long before at the house. This angered Lady
Louisa, who thereupon consulted the agent, who employed a capable
detective from Dublin. The detective came down to Inistiogue as a
commercial traveller, wandered about, made the acquaintance of Lady
Louisa's maid, of the butler, and of other people about the house, and
formed his own conclusions. Two or three days after his arrival he
walked into the shop of a small jeweller in a neighbouring town, and
affecting a confidential manner, told the jeweller he wanted to buy
"some of those things from Woodstock." The man was taken by surprise,
and going into a backshop produced one very fine diamond, and a number
of pieces of silver plate, of the disappearance of which the butler had
said nothing to his mistress. This led to the arrest of the butler, and
to the discovery that for a long time he had been purloining property
from the house and selling it. Many cases of excellent claret had found
their way in this fashion to a public-house which had acquired quite a
reputation for its Bordeaux with the officers quartered in its
neighbourhood. The wine-bins at Woodstock were found full of bottles of
water. Much of the capital port left by Colonel Tighe had gone--but the
hock was untouched. "Probably the butler didn't care for hock," said Mr.
Seigne. The Waterloo watch was recovered from a very decent fellow, a
travelling dealer, to whom it had been sold: and many pieces of jewelry
were traced up to London. But Lady Louisa could not be induced to go up
to London to identify them or testify.
DUBLIN, _Tuesday, March 6._--It is a curious fact, which I learned
to-day from the Registrar-General, that the deposits in the Post-office
Savings Banks have never diminished in Ireland since these banks were
established.[21] These deposits are chiefly made, I understand, by the
small tenants, who are less represented by the deposits in the General
Savings Banks than are the shopkeepers and the cattle-drovers. In the
General Savings Banks the deposit line fluctuates more; though on the
whole there has been a steady increase in these deposits also throughout
Ireland.
Of the details of the dealings of the private banks it is very hard to
get an accurate account. One gentleman, the manager of a branch of one
important bank, tells me that a great deal of money is made by usurers
out of the tenants, by backing their small bills. This practice goes
back to the first establishment of banks in Ireland. Formerly it was not
an uncommon thing for a landlord to offer his tenants a reduction, say,
of twenty per cent., on condition of their paying the rent when it fell
due. Such were the relations then between landlord and tenants, and so
little was punctuality expected in such payments that this might be
regarded as a sort of discount arrangement. The tenant who wished to
avail himself of such an offer would go to some friendly local usurer
and ask for a loan that he might avail himself of it. "One of these
usurers, whom I knew very well," said the manager, "told me long ago
that he found these operations very profitable. His method of procedure
was to agree to advance the rent to the tenant at ten per cent., payable
at a near and certain date. This would reduce the landlord's reduction
at once, of course, for the tenant, to ten per cent., but that was not
to be disdained; and so the bargain would be struck. If the money was
repaid at the fixed date, it was not a bad thing for the usurer. But it
was almost never so repaid; and with repeated renewals the usurer, by
his own showing, used to receive eventually twenty, fifty, and, in some
cases, nearly a hundred per cent, for his loan."
It is the opinion of this gentleman that, under the "Plan of Campaign,"
a good deal of money-making is done in a quiet way by some of the
"trustees," who turn over at good interest, with the help of friendly
financiers, the funds lodged with them, being held to account to the
tenants only for the principal. "Of course," he said, "all this is
doubtless at least as legitimate as any other part of the 'Plan,' and I
daresay it all goes for 'the good of the cause.' But neither the tenants
nor the landlords get much by it!"