Trinity College has been free to follow its own bent, and its eyes to-day are, in scriptural phrase, "on the ends of the earth." Primary education, secondary studies, as governed by the machinery controlled through the Board of Intermediate Education, and university teaching as directed and rewarded through the Royal University, have all in the last resort been inspired by Englishmen who thought it very desirable that Irish boys and girls should learn to read and write and cipher, and that young men and young women should equip themselves for clerkships in the civil service, but who never for one instant realised that the end of education is divergence not conformity--to elicit, whether from the race or from the individual, a full and characteristic development. In twenty years perhaps a paper of interest may be written to show the positive results of education upon Irish character. At present the most noticeable facts are negative, and may be summed up by affirming a total lack of correspondence between the system employed and the needs and qualities of the Irish people.
1907.
THE IRISH GENTRY.
At the height on the struggle over the Home Rule Bill, there was published a book interesting as the biography of a remarkable individual, but no less interesting as depicting the crucial moment in the history of an aristocracy. Colonel Moore wisely ent.i.tles the life of his father simply _An Irish Gentleman_. Versatile, eloquent, quick-tempered and lovable, excessive in generosity, excessive in courage and self-confidence, with the racecourse for his ruling pa.s.sion and horsemanship for his supreme achievement, George Henry Moore was the paragon of his cla.s.s. He displayed in the highest degree those qualities on which the Irish gentry prided themselves and which they most admired: he shared the prestige and power of Irish landlords when prestige and power were at their height; and he confronted the decisive hour when he, and men like him, had to choose between the interest of their country and the interest of their cla.s.s. There he separated himself from his fellows; he parted from all to whom he was bound by ties of immediate advantage, of pleasure, of a.s.sociation, of affection, and he threw in his lot with Ireland. He saw first the moral bankruptcy of his own cla.s.s, then their widespread financial ruin; and though he helped to break their political power, and in so doing earned the general love of his countrymen, yet the troubles which beset the landlord cla.s.s did not spare him, and he died, broken-hearted, forty-three years ago, at the beginning of a struggle which is not ended yet. It is well worth while to consider the circ.u.mstances of that stormy career.
First a brilliant schoolboy, then an idle law student, George Henry Moore was driven to travel by the complications of a pa.s.sionate love affair, and he travelled adventurously, being a pioneer of exploration in the Caucasus and Syria. Sketches reproduced in the book show that he could draw no less well than he wrote. Returning to Ireland at the age of twenty-seven, he devoted himself entirely to hunting and racing, and few men were better known on the turf, nor were there even in the West of Ireland more desperate riders than his brother and himself. George Henry was carried off the field at Cahir in 1843 to all appearance dead; he was alive enough to hear discussion as to his burial. Augustus, less lucky, died of a fall he took riding Mickey Free in the Grand National two years later. The brothers were closely bound to each other in affection, and this was a heavy blow to the survivor; but George Moore continued to race, and in 1846 made the coup of his life, winning 10,000 on "Coranna" for the Chester Cup. He sent 1,000 of it home for distribution among his tenants, and there was soon sore need of the money, for that year saw the second and disastrous failure of the potato crop. The Irish Famine made the turning-point in Moore"s history, as in that of his cla.s.s. The catastrophe which brought him into public life and into the service of his country demonstrated, cruelly enough--though this was the least of its cruelties--the futility of the Irish gentry as a whole.
By the shock of his brother"s death in 1845 Moore"s mind had been turned to serious thoughts. Matter was not lacking. The report of the Devon Commission upon Irish land, joined to the first failure of the potato crop--with its accompaniment of distress and widespread agrarian crime--gave any Irish landlord food for reflection, and in March, 1846, when a vacancy occurred in the representation of Mayo, Moore came forward as a Whig candidate. The whole landlord interest was at his back, but a Repealer opposed him, and O"Connell"s influence carried the day. There were fierce encounters, the landlords marching their tenants to the poll under guards of soldiers, the popular side falling upon these escorts and sometimes carrying off the voters--or enabling them to escape. One of Moore"s friends, Mr. Browne, afterwards Lord Oranmore, wrote: "I now see we owe our lives to the priests, as they can excite the whole people against us whenever they like. Whatever may be the cause, Ireland needs reconquering."
That was a typical expression of the gentry"s view. Plainly Ireland was in rebellion when landlords could no longer carry their tenants to the polls to vote as the landlord directed. Moore however differed from the generality of Irish landlords in one important respect. He was not divided by religion from the people over whom he ruled, and he can never have had Mr. Browne"s feeling of aloofness from Ireland as a country which might need reconquering to re-establish the ascendancy of the "English garrison"; nor was it natural to him to distrust the priests as leaders of a separate and subject race.
In the autumn of 1846, when the threat of famine had become a certainty, Moore came home to Mayo, where there was grim business to be done. His tenants, on an estate running up into the wild Partry mountains, numbered five thousand souls. For their benefit he utilised far more of his winnings on "Coranna" than the t.i.the which he had originally ear-marked; and not one of all these his dependants died of want in that outlandish region, though in places far less remote death was ravenous. He was chairman of the Relief Board for the whole county, and slaved at his task--not harder than other landlords in other parts of Ireland. But his methods were more drastic, his view of the situation clearer. Folk must have rubbed their eyes and perhaps stopped to think twice when the owner of "Wolfdog," of "Anonymous," and a score of other famous horses, wrote, in answer to a request for his annual subscription to the local races, that he thought the county of Mayo "as little fit to be the scene of such festivities as he to contribute to their celebration."
But Moore did not content himself with mere administration of relief. He saw that the English Government was apathetic and incompetent to face so terrible an affliction, and he took in hand to create within his own cla.s.s an organised force of Irish opinion to bind together the ruling Irishmen for the good of Ireland. In company with his friend and kinsman, Lord Sligo, he "travelled through twenty-seven counties and personally conferred with most of the leading men in Ireland on the urgent necessity of a united effort to save the sinking people." The result was that between sixty and seventy members of Parliament and some forty peers pledged themselves to endeavour to secure united action upon measures regarding Ireland in the new session. On the 14th of January, 1847, the Irish landlord cla.s.s held such a muster as had not been seen since the Union. "Nearly twenty peers, more than thirty members of Parliament, and at least six hundred gentlemen of name and station took part in it. The meeting called on Government to prohibit export of food stuffs and to sacrifice any sum that might be required to save the lives of the people." It pa.s.sed thirty resolutions without dissension; and then some one asked what was to be done if the Government refused to adopt any of their suggestions. Would Irish members then unite to vote against the Government? To this, Irish members refused to pledge themselves, and Moore, as he said afterwards, "saw at a glance that the confederacy had broken down."
That was the end of the revolt of the Irish gentry. It was really the decisive moment of their failure; disorganised and futile, they went down by scores in the ruin of the Enc.u.mbered Estates Court, while their tenants were marking with their bones a road across the Atlantic. As for the landlords who were popular leaders, within a few months after that great a.s.sembly, Daniel O"Connell, who had proposed the first resolution, died in Rome, heart-broken. A few months more and Smith O"Brien, the mover of another resolution, headed a rebellion in sheer despair.
Smith O"Brien had twenty years of parliamentary life behind him when he was driven to the wild protest of insurrection. Twenty years of the same experience were to bring Moore to a very similar att.i.tude; but in 1847 Moore was hopeful of building up in Parliament the nucleus of an Independent Irish Party. When the dissolution came, in 1847, he stood for a second time, but as an Independent, and his work in the famine times carried at least its recognition. Every single elector who went to the poll gave one of his two votes to the Independent. He went to Westminster and denounced with equal energy the agrarian murders, which were then rife in Ireland, and those organs of publicity in England which sought to magnify these outrages into an indictment against the Irish nation. The ferment of indignation against English methods had not yet died out in the hearts of Irish landlords. Lord Sligo, writing to Moore concerning the controversy which followed, used these words: "I believe that _The Times_ did much to cause the feeling which resulted in landlord and parson shooting; it will end by turning us all into Repealers." If only it had! But Moore got no help from the landlord cla.s.s, and the well-to-do Catholic professional men with whom he was princ.i.p.ally allied proved themselves unable to resist the temptations of office and of personal interest. In the days of Sadleir and Keogh he fought a desperate fight against Whig place-seekers; his reward was to be finally unseated (in 1857) on an election pet.i.tion, the charge being that spiritual intimidation had been exercised on his behalf by the priests. As Colonel Moore observes, if a landlord threatened his tenants with disfavour, which meant eviction, that was "only a legitimate exercise of their rights of property"; but if a priest told his flock that a man would imperil his soul by selling his vote or prost.i.tuting it to the use of a despot, the candidate whom that priest supported would lose his seat and be disqualified for re-election.
From this time onward George Henry Moore found himself heading the same way as Smith O"Brien had gone. In 1861 he told the Irish people that if they desired freedom they must take a lesson from Italy; they must "become dangerous"; and he advocated the formation of a new Irish volunteer force to emulate that of 1782. Nothing came of this; but after the American war a new movement grew up, not this time among the landlords or the professional men, nor countenanced by the priests, but nursed in the fierce heart of the people. Ireland had become dangerous.
Colonel Moore recognises rightly the difference between the Fenian organisation and the Young Ireland movement which had preceded it. Both were idealistic, but the idealism of 1848 was "the inspiration of a few literary gentlemen, poets, and writers." Smith O"Brien, its t.i.tular head, was influenced profoundly by the aristocratic conception of his rightful place as representing the Kings of Th.o.m.ond. Fenianism was democratic; it was officered largely by men who had themselves fought in the most stubborn of modern wars and who had seen what Irish regiments could do in the citizen levies of Federals and Confederates. It was spontaneous, and it was strong; the measure of its strength is given not by the few flickering outbreaks easily suppressed, but by the terror which it inspired, and by the change which it wrought in the spirit of the people. Moore when he took the step, extraordinary for a man in his position, of enrolling himself in that sworn and secret conspiracy can hardly have failed to foresee the collapse of Fenianism as a fighting force; but he recognised that (in his son"s words) "the old complacent toleration of schemers and dishonest politicians had vanished and a st.u.r.dy independence had taken its place."
With the advent of that spirit the power of the Irish landlords was doomed. They had made their choice; when they might have made common cause with the whole people of Ireland they had refused to rise beyond their immediate personal advantage and the interests of their cla.s.s.
Moore, who was of themselves, who shared all their pleasures, who loved them, was forced to take a hand in their overthrow. From 1858 onward he had been almost entirely out of politics, living the life of a popular country gentleman, racing and hunting more successfully than ever; his most famous horse, "Croagh Patrick," ran in the "sixties. But in 1868 he flung all this aside, sold his horses, and undertook to fight the alliance of Whig and Tory which had dominated County Mayo in the landlord interest for ten years.
I shall have the question settled (he said) whether one lord shall drive a hundred human souls to the hustings, another fifty, another a score; whether this or that squire shall call twenty, or ten, or five as good men as himself "his voters" and send them up with his brand on their backs to vote for an omadhaun at his bidding.
He did settle it. Mayo beat the landlords then, and Mayo became the cradle of popular movements ever after. This most typical of Irish land-owning gentlemen had been forced to sever himself from his cla.s.s and even to injure his cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s 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 b.u.t.t"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 cla.s.s 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 const.i.tution. 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 cla.s.s is too strong a thing for that cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s from whom it was bought with cash and t.i.tles 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 cla.s.s--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 reconst.i.tution 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 att.i.tude, 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 a.s.sert itself; and it is anch.o.r.ed 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 cla.s.ses 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 ent.i.tled 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s.
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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sing, 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 a.s.sociations, 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 pa.s.s 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 reconst.i.tuting the surroundings and the atmosphere of both families. Families, however, are conceived and depicted in their most extended relations; figures are evoked of chief, va.s.sal, 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sionately 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 s.p.a.ciousness 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 cla.s.s, 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 mult.i.tude with marvellous const.i.tution, 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s, 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."