The life of a song—poets have said it again and again in immortal verse—is of all lives the most enduring. Kingdoms pass, buildings crumble, but the work which a man has fashioned "out of a mouthful of air" defies the centuries; it keeps its shape and its quivering substance. Strongest of all such lives are perhaps those where "the mouthful of air" is left by the singer mere air, and no more, unfixed on paper or parchment; when the song goes from mouth to mouth, altering its contours it may be, but unchanged in essence, though coloured by its immediate surroundings as a flower fits itself to each soil. Such was the song that I had the chance to write down, from lips to which it came through who knows how many generations.

The story which it tells is among the finest in that great repertory of legend which, since Ireland began to take count of her own possessions, has become familiar to the world. It is the theme of a play in the last book published by the chief of modern Irish poets, Mr. W. B. Yeats. But since he tells the story in a way of his own, and since it is none too well known even in those parts of Ireland where its hero's name is a proverb (Comh laidir le Cuchulain, Strong as Cuchulain), it may be well to set out the legend here.

Cuchulain, the Achilles of Irish epic, was famous from the day in boyhood when he got his name by killing, bare-handed, the smith's fierce watchdog that would have torn him. The ransom for the killing was laid on by the boy himself, and it was that he should watch Culann's house for a year and a day till a pup should be grown to take the place of the slain dog. So he came to be called Cu Chulain, Culann's Hound, and by that name he was known when, as a young champion, he set out for the Isle of Skye, where the warrior-witch Sgathach (from whom the island is called) taught the crowning feats of arms to all young heroes who could pass through the ordeals she laid upon them.

There was no trial that Cuchulain could not support, and the fame of him drew on a combat with another Amazonian warrior, Aoife, who, in the story that I heard, was Sgathach's daughter, though Lady Gregory in her fine book Cuchulain of Muirthemne gives another version. But, at any rate, Cuchulain defeated Aoife, and she gave love to her conqueror—whose passion for the fierce queen was not strong enough to keep him from Ireland. When he made ready to go, the woman warrior told him that a child was to be born of their embraces, and she asked what should be done with it. "If it be a girl, keep it," said Cuchulain, "but if a boy, wait till his thumb can fill this ring"—and he gave her the circlet—"then send him to me." So he departed, leaving wrath behind him.

The child born was a son, and Aoife reared him and taught him all feats of arms that could be taught to a mortal, except one only, and of that feat only Cuchulain was master: "the way," said James Kelly, prefacing his ballad with such an explanation as I am now giving, "there would be none could kill him but his own father." And when the boy had learnt all and was the perfect warrior, Aoife sent him out to Ireland under a pledge to refuse his name to any that should ask it, well knowing how the wardens of the coast would stop him on the shore. It fell out as she purposed. The young Connlaoch defeated champion after champion till Cuchulain himself went down, and was recognised by his son. But the pledge tied Connlaoch's tongue, and only when he lay dying, slain by the magic throw which Aoife had withheld from his knowledge, could he reveal himself to his father, the great and childless hero, whose lament for his lost son is written in the song that I set out to secure, on a day of sun and rain, last summer, when great soft clouds drove full sail through the moist atmosphere, their shadows sweeping over brown moor and green valley, while far away towards the sea, mountain peaks rose purple and amethystine in the distance.

Twice before this I had been in the little cottage on Cark Mountain; first, when the chance rumour heard in a neighbouring cabin of a man with countless songs and stories sent me off to investigate; and for a second time, when I had come back with a slightly better knowledge of Gaelic and had taken down a few verses of the poem. These, sent to an Irish scholar, had sufficed to identify the ballad with one printed in Miss Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry, a characteristic production of the latter days of the eighteenth century, when Macpherson, with his adaptation of the Ossianic poems, and Bishop Percy, with his gathering of old English ballads, had set a fashion soon to culminate in Scott's great achievement.

They proved, however, not identity only but difference; and the ballad as I have it in full with its nineteen quatrains, is even less like the longer version given by O'Halloran to Miss Brooke, than the opening stanzas suggested. In them the variations were mainly textual, and when I read out O'Halloran's version to James Kelly, his son, a keen listener, declared a preference for the printed text. But the old man was of another mind. "It's the same song," he said, "sure enough, but there's things changed in it, and I know rightly about them. Some one was giving it the way it would be easier to understand, leaving out the old hard words. And I did that myself once or twice the last day you were here, and I was vexed after, when I would be thinking about it. And this day you will be to take down what I say, let you understand it or not; just word for word, the right way it should be spoken."

There you have in a glimpse the custodian of legend. The man was illiterate, technically, but he knew by instinct, as his ancestors had known before him, that he was the guardian of the life of a song; he recognised that it was a scripture which he had no right to mutilate or alter. He had to the full that respect for a work of literature which is the best indication of a scholar, and for him at least the line was unbroken from the Ireland of heroes and minstrels to the hour when he chanted over the poem that some bard in the remote ages had fashioned.

Little wonder, too, for his own way of life was close to that of the Middle Ages. Below in the valley, where the Swilly River debouches into its sea lough, was a prosperous little town with banks and railway; but to reach the bleak brown moor where James Kelly's house stood, you must climb by one of two roads, each so rough and steep that a bicycle cannot be ridden down them. Here, in a little screen of scrub alders, stands the cottage, where three generations of the family live together. His own home consisted simply of two rooms with no upper story, but it was trim and comfortable, the dresser well filled, and the big pot over the turf fire gave out a prosperous steam. The son, a grown man, waited from his turf-cutting to help in our discussion; the wife was abroad that day, and one daughter was just starting for market with a web of homespun cloth which they had dressed in the household. The spinning wheel stood in the corner; but another girl was busy near the fire with more modern work, hemming shirts with a machine for a Derry factory, and the bleached linen was the only thing in the house which had not taken on the brown tints of peat smoke.

James Kelly himself, as he sat by the fire declaiming at me, was all browns and greys, like the country outside his door; and his eyes were like brown streams running through that peaty mountain, with their movement and sparkle, and their dark depths. At other times easy, like that of all Irish peasants, his manner changed and grew rough and imperious when the business began. I must not interrupt with questions. I must write down, syllable for syllable, that the song might be got "the right way." It was by no means easy to carry out these directions, for the poem was written in an Irish not spoken to-day, as unlike as the Chaucerian English is to our common speech; and even to write down modern Irish by ear I was poorly qualified. Things were made harder, too, by the manner of recitation, as traditional as the words. He chanted, with a continuous vocalisation, and while he chanted, elbow and knee worked like a fiddler's or piper's marking the time. However, with persistence, I got the thing down, letting him first say a verse fully through, then writing line by line or as near as I could; then going back and asking questions in detail: the son coming to my rescue, when the old man lost patience (as he did once in every ten minutes) and interposing usefully in our discussions.

For there were endless discussions as to the meaning of words, and nothing could be more curious than to see the old man's endeavour to give in English not merely a bare rendering, but the colour of every phrase. It made me realise as nothing else could have done, how fine was his feeling for the shade of a word, and I cannot describe his dissatisfaction with the poor equivalents he could find. He was happy enough when the debate drifted into an exposition—always addressed to his son—of the uses of some rare word in the Irish, the manner of exposition being by citation of passages from other songs, or phrases that might occur in talk. I have listened to many a professor doing the same thing in Greek and Latin, but to none who had a finer instinct for the business. Kelly's vexation came when he had to "put English on" a word for me, and the obvious equivalent was not the right one. Sometimes I could help; sometimes he arrived by himself at what satisfied him, though once at least it was droll enough. We were at the lines where Connlaoch, dying, says to his father: "If I could give my secret to any under the sun, it is to your bright body I would tell it." The trouble was about the phrase "bright body," for the word "cneas" means literally "skin," but is used (just like [Greek: chros] in Homer) to signify "person." What James wanted to convey to me was that the word was not the common one for "body," and at last he smote his thigh. "Carkidge," he cried, "it's carkidge (carcase), 'It is to your clear carkidge I would tell it.'" A man with less instinct for literature would have said "body" at once, and never trouble more; but James knew at once too much and too little, and I give the instance to show how an Irishman unlettered in English may be deeply imbued with the true spirit of letters through a literature of his own.

There were, however, several passages where I could get no clear account of the meaning, and in some I have since found by comparison with the text which O'Halloran provided for Miss Brooke that Kelly had got the words twisted. For instance, the first stanza opens simply:—

"There came to us a stout champion, The hearty champion Connlaoch."

But of the next two lines I could get no clearer rendering than that "he just came in full through these people for diversion and for fun to himself." Then the ballad continues at once—for its method is terse and its transitions abrupt throughout—to give us the words of the men who meet Connlaoch on his landing:—

"Where have you been, O tender gallant, Riding like a noble's son? Methinks by the way of your coming, You are wandering or astray."

And Connlaoch answers the taunt and the challenge implied:—

"My coming is over seas from the land Of the High King of the World, To prove my merry prowess Athwart the high chiefs of Erin."

(It seemed to me characteristic that the stock epithet of valour should be "merry" or "laughing.") The ballad added no reply (though in Miss Brooke's version at this point there is a dialogue of warnings), but went on to tell in the shortest possible words how Conall Cearnach ("the Victorious") rode out from Emain Macha and met the challenger:—

"Out started Conall, not weak of hand, To get news of the noble's son. Bitter and hard was the way of it; Conall was tied by Connlaoch."

"'Bring word from us to Hound's head,' Said the King in fierce sullen tones, To Dundalk sunny and bright, To the Hound, Dog's jaw."

Then Cuchulain (thus described by versions of the nickname won when he broke the jaws of Culann's hound) made answer:—

"Hard for us is hearing of the captivity Of the man whose plight is told; And hard it is to try the venom of blades With the warrior that bound Conall."

But the messenger pleads:—

"Do not think but to go to the rescue Of the destroying keen dangerous warrior, Of the hand that had no fear for any, To loose him, and he fettered."

Then (as Miss Brooke in the majestic manner of the eighteenth century puts it):—

"Then with firm step and dauntless air, Cucullin went and thus the foe addrest, Let me, O valiant knight (he cried), Thy courtesy request, To me thy purpose and thy name confide."

And so on through a sonorous description of dialogue and fight till:—

"At length Cucullin's kindling soul arose, Indignant shame recruited fury lends; With fatal aim his glittering lance he throws, And low on earth the dying youth extends."

Or, as I translate almost literally from James Kelly's version, which is considerably briefer than the text which Miss Brooke has so volubly expanded:—

"Out set the Hound of the keen, smooth blade To see the work that Conall made, Till he pierced with a bitter blow, That hero youth his hardy foe."

That is all we are told of the fighting; the ballad passes straight to a terse dramatic dialogue, which Cuchulain opens:—

"Champion, tell your story, For I see your wounds are heavy; 'Twill be short ere they raise your cairn, So hide your testament no longer."

"That's what he said to the son," said James Kelly, finishing the verse, and beginning afresh,

"Let me fall on my face, For methinks 'tis you are my father, And for fear lest men of Eire should see Me retreating from your fierce grapple."

"Then," said James, "the son spoke for to tell him the reason he couldn't spake at the first":—

"I took pledges to my mother Not to give my story to any single man, If I would give it to any under the sun, It is to your bright body I would tell it."

("Complimenting him, like," said James.) Then he recited the stanza which tells by implication how in the long duel Cuchulain was at last driven to use the irresistible stroke of Sgathach's teaching:—

"I lay my curse on my mother, That she put me under pledge; But if it were not for the feat of magic I had not been got for nothing."

(It is a fine phrase surely, "You had paid dear in blood before you mastered me.")

Cuchulain answers groaning, with a wail for the lineage that is cut off:

"I lay my curse on your mother, For she destroyed a multitude of young ones; And because the treachery that was in her Left your smooth flesh reddened."

Then comes, with the boy's dying word, the revelation of the most tragic moment in the fight.

"Cuchulain, beloved father, Is it not a wonder you did not know me When I cast my spear crooked and feebly Against your bush of blades."

Where will you find a finer stroke of invention? The boy, tongue-tied by his pledge, knows his father and feels his defence failing against the terrible onset; he would not, if he could, be the victor, but he thinks of a way within the honour of his bond which may awaken knowledge of him; and he casts his javelin with a clumsiness not to be looked for in the champion "that tied Conall." It is useless, the battle madness is in Cuchulain, he thinks only of conquest, an end to the supple, quick parrying, and he throws the gaebulg, a spear of dragon's bones bristling with points (his "bush of blades"), with the magic cast that there is no meeting. And now there is nothing left to him but the lamentation,

"Och, och! Great is my madness! I lifting here my young lad! My son's head in my one hand, His arms and his raiment on the other.

"I, the father that slew his son, May I never throw spear nor noble javelin; The hand that slew its son, May it win torture and sharp wounding.

"The grief for my son I put from me never, Till the flagstones of my side crumble, It is in me, and through my heart, Like a sharp blaze in the hoar hill grasses.

"If I and my heart's Connlaoch Were playing our kingly feats together, We could range from wave to shore Over the five provinces of Erin."

The penultimate stanza, with its magnificent closing image and its truly AEschylean hyperbole, is not even suggested in Miss Brooke's version. It is, perhaps, the finest thing in the poem; but I hardly know any ballad finer as a piece of dramatic narrative; and the resonant verse, strongly rhymed (in the Gaelic assonances), and copiously stressed with alliteration, bears out the theme.

These, I trust, are critical opinions. But if the collector would have a special weakness for a vase which his own spade had unearthed, I may be prejudiced in favour of the poem, which I got in the sweat of my brow from very probably the one man living who knew it in that form.

Tellers of old Irish fairy tales about enchanted princes, magic cocks and hens, and the like, are still numerous; but it is very rare to find a man who keeps living the old poetry which was made, perhaps, in the twelfth century. Yet while any survive the tradition is still there; the song still lives, for I did not spend my hours without feeling that this old man could respond to any emotion that the song-maker put into the sound and the meaning and the associations of his words. There are still those to whom the Irish even of the twelfth century is no dead language. Even if it were, no doubt the songs made in it might still be strong in life, as are to-day those of Homer and a hundred others. But in the case of these smaller literatures, once the tongue itself has ceased to be heard, dumbness and paralysis fall upon what might else be so full of vitality. And a song has more than its own life, it has power to quicken, to breed. If any one considers that legend of the son and father (found in many languages, yet in none, I think, more finely shaped), it is easy to see how from age to age it may revive itself in new forms, entering into other shapes, as Helen's figure adorns not her own story only, but the praise of a thousand women. Let it be understood that this legend is only one of a cycle, and that the song which I wrote down was only the barest fraction of James Kelly's repertory. Indeed, he was vexed that I should take it as a specimen, for he himself "had more conceit in" the lays that tell of Finn and his companions, and I could have filled a volume, and maybe several volumes, from his recitations.

These songs may die, the language may die, the Irish race may be swallowed up in England and America. But it is my belief that the strong intellectual life which made of Ireland a home of the arts before the Normans came across channel may, like many another life in nature, spring after centuries of torpor into vigour and fertility again. That is the belief and hope of many of us; but nothing has rendered me so confident in it as to find this work of a strong and fine art not laid aside and neglected, but honoured and current to-day, and, though in a poor man's cottage, living with as full a life as when it was chanted at the feasts of princes.



IRISH EDUCATION AND IRISH CHARACTER.

Education in Ireland has been organised by the State in accordance with English ideas. Had English influence been able to bring about any large measure of conformity between the two countries, there would have been little or no need for a separate paper on moral training in Irish schools. But what conformity there is, is purely superficial; and although free development has been hindered, and Irish institutions for teaching are less characteristic than they would have been if entirely left to themselves, still the moral influences which emerge wherever pupils and teachers are brought together reveal themselves in Ireland, and reveal themselves as Irish. The object of this paper, then, is to illustrate, so far as possible, the nature and the symptoms of these distinctive influences.

First of all, it may be said broadly that no ordinary person in Ireland contemplates the possibility of teaching morality apart from religion; and by religion is meant emphatically this or that particular creed. Almost every school maintained by the State is managed locally by a clergyman, who appoints the teacher, and public feeling is so strong on the matter that in any neighbourhood even a small group of families of any particular denomination is always provided with a separate school of its own. Of late, indeed, opinion has begun to agitate for associating the laity with the clergy in the management of schools; but this does not indicate any desire to lessen the importance given to the part played by religion in education.

Further, so far as Catholic Ireland is concerned, an immense proportion of the teaching both in primary and secondary schools is done by members of religious orders, and in these, of course, there is no conception of separating moral influences from religious. There is, however, no evidence known to me that even in the few Protestant schools which are partly or wholly under lay control any duties, other than those of ordinary school work, are inculcated except as part of a Christian's religious obligations. This entire state of things is due to the fact that positive Christian belief, and the practice of religious observances, are everywhere in Ireland very general, and among the Catholic population almost universal. It is also hardly necessary to point out that in many respects the standard of Irish morality is so high that the example of Ireland may be quoted with confidence in support of the view which makes moral teaching necessarily a part of religion.

But from such broad generalities there is not much to be gathered, and I proceed to examine in some detail the existing institutions—beginning at the top with higher education.

It follows from what has been said that, in the general opinion of Irishmen, there can be no positive moral influence where there is no religious teaching; and for that reason a university without a school of theology or arrangements for corporate worship is, to Irishmen, a university deficient in moral safeguards. This accounts for the fact that Catholic opinion was much less opposed to the Protestant University of Dublin than to the more modern Queen's Colleges, which, designed by England to provide for her wants of Ireland, excluded religion entirely from their purview. This provision satisfied no one, except to some extent the Presbyterians, who accepted Queen's College, Belfast, with some alacrity, though in practice demanding that its head should always be a staunch professor of their own persuasion. But Catholics as a body refused to accept either the University of Dublin with its Protestant atmosphere or the "godless" Queen's Colleges; and since Ireland is mainly a Catholic country, and the National University has not yet created a tradition, it is clear that not much can be gleaned on the subject of Irish ideas of moral training from Irish universities.

Yet Trinity College is well worth study, for in it we have a free growth, typifying both in its virtues and in its defects the ruling Protestant class, landed and professional. Here, unquestionably, the chief moral influence is that of the Church, felt, as at Oxford, directly through the chapel services and sermons, and indirectly through the presence of a large body of theological students. The second of these influences is specially strong in Dublin, because these students have an organisation of their own in the University Theological Society, and also because the work of the Divinity School at Dublin comprises much that is done in England by the training colleges. I should therefore be inclined to put the positive influence of dogmatic religion higher at Dublin than at Oxford.

On the other hand, the vaguer humanitarian enthusiasms which are more or less allied to Socialism, and with which the High Church party willingly allies itself, have, I think, much less hold in Trinity than at the English universities; though the movement which sends so many brilliant young Englishmen into work (temporary or permanent) in the East End of London has its parallel in the recently organised Social Service Society, which attempts something for the reclamation of Dublin slums. Again, in regard to more definitely political aspirations, Irish Protestants are somewhat unfortunately situated. Trinity as a whole has no sympathy with the ideals that appeal to Ireland as a nation, and it always seems to lack first-hand touch with the best English thought, whether Liberal or Tory. This isolation from the main movement of Irish thought and feeling on the one hand, and on the other, this enforced separation from the current of English life, keep the place a little old-fashioned; and to generate enthusiasm, ideals and feelings need a certain freshness. If it be held (as I should hold) that a university's main moral function is to produce enthusiasts rather than merely decent citizens, in this respect, I think, Trinity fails.

In regard to the less direct influences, a good deal may be noted. The general trend of life in Trinity is towards frugality, just as at Oxford it is towards extravagance. Consequently, money is less of an advantage, poverty less of a drawback than at the English universities; the standard of living is more uniform; and in the society of which the university is typical, and which it influences, respect for wealth as wealth is noticeably rare. Again, the idea of education is more disciplinary than in England. Irishmen go to college, not to acquire culture by contact, but to learn certain definite things; and the university, in its anxiety to find out if the task is being learnt, multiplies examinations. The same idea pervades all Irish education—the old-fashioned demand for a positive result in knowledge; and if it leads to an excessive value set upon these tests, it also goes far to discourage idleness.

In another matter Trinity College is typical of Irish ideas generally. Games are simply taken as games, not as a main business of life in which success may even have a marketable value. Everybody recognizes their physical use, and more than that, their use as a means of bringing men together. But nobody in Ireland, save here and there a stray apostle of English notions, talks of the moral lessons to be acquired by fielding out or by patient batting. Compulsory games at school are practically unknown; nobody plays unless he wants to; so that the duffer does not experience the questionable moral advantage of physical discomfort and frequent humiliation, and the naturally painstaking or excellent athlete gets no more than his fair chance of exercising his gifts. And these are less likely to have an undue importance in their possessor's eyes, because they will not of themselves lead him to a position of great distinction in an Irish university.

Unfortunately, Trinity College is the only place in Ireland—unless perhaps a saving clause should be made for Queen's College, Belfast—which offers what is meant by a university life. The National University, whether in Dublin, Cork or Galway, brings young men together only in classes and in one or two debating societies. Yet even so, I question whether, in some ways, life does not beat stronger in it than in Trinity; whether the moral influences proper to a university, the enthusiasm, the contagion of generous ideas, are not here more strongly felt. The reason for this view must be given.

Trinity has never been the University of Ireland. It is ceasing to be the University of Protestant Ireland, for Protestants, who can afford to do so, send their sons increasingly to Oxford or Cambridge, and Trinity, which has not known how to create a true and special function for itself, is becoming merely a cheap substitute for these English institutions. And the reason for this is a moral reason which goes to the root of many questions connected with Irish education. Should Irish schools and colleges seek to educate citizens for the Empire, or citizens for Ireland? During the last half century, while the Imperialist idea has been developing in England, Trinity has thrown all its moral weight into support of that idea. But the Imperialist idea in England is very different from the same idea as viewed in Canada or New Zealand or Australia; and universities in these countries address themselves particularly to local needs. In the section of Ireland which Trinity represents, local patriotism is held to conflict with Imperial patriotism, and one has to observe that Trinity's Imperialism is forwarding tendencies which are leaving her drained. Nationalists may respect the sincerity of convictions so pressed in defiance of a local interest; but a university, whose main emotional appeal is directed towards evoking primarily an enthusiasm for England, cannot be of much use to Nationalist Ireland. Catholics may (and do) respect the thoroughness of the religious teaching, and the strong grip which Protestantism keeps on the university; but a university which inculcates morals through a Protestant religion is not precisely suitable to Catholics. Yet Catholics and Nationalists alike infinitely prefer a university or a college or a school with strong Protestant beliefs, or strong Imperialist patriotism, to an institution with neither beliefs nor patriotism at all. The colourless and merely scholastic ideals of the Queen's Colleges, and the huge examining machinery known as the Royal University, typified in their total lack of moral influences all that was worst in the educational system under which Ireland labours.

I pass to a brief examination of the boarding schools, institutions which have never flourished in Ireland. Nearly all Protestants and many Catholics, if they can afford it, send their sons to England to be taught. The ideals of the English Public School have reacted so strongly upon Irish Protestant schools that nothing need be said of these—not one of which has ever, within living memory, had a continuous prosperity. The important Catholic schools are managed by the great teaching orders, especially by the Jesuits, and managed at astonishingly low cost. They give everywhere more than value for the fees which they receive. No unendowed institution could compete with them; and it practically comes to this, that the regular clergy subsidise education with their own unpaid labour and even with their own funds, in order to maintain their influence over the faith and morals of their country. Whether it might be more to the advantage of Irish parents to pay more and get something different, is another question; but those of us who least like the exclusive delegation of these important functions to the priesthood, cannot but admire the thoroughness and consistency with which the Catholic priesthood's idea is carried out. It would be hard to overstate the moral effect of that vast organised system of self-sacrifice and self-suppression.

Three or four points may be noted in relation to these schools. One is, that in all classrooms and playgrounds, a master is always present. Comparing this with the system in vogue at many English schools, under which a boy out of school hours is always forced to live in public by rules which compel him either to be playing some game or looking on while others play, I prefer the system of frank supervision, as leaving more individual freedom and choice of pursuits, and as making serious bullying impossible. Generally, the idea that it is good for a boy to be knocked about without stint is foreign to Irish ideas. A pleasant and characteristic feature of Jesuit schools is the habit of telling off some boy to act as companion and cicerone to a newcomer for his first week or fortnight; and the ridiculous English fashion which prescribes that the smallest fag should be described as a "man" is unknown. Christian names, not surnames, are used generally. The unpopularity of boarding schools in Ireland is due to the great value set upon home life; and an Irish boarding school is far less distinct from home life than an English one.

English eyes would be surprised and a good deal shocked by the presence of a billiard table in every playroom; yet it may fairly be argued that it is wise to limit the number of things that have the fascination of the forbidden. A more serious criticism would address itself to the permitted slovenliness. Untidiness amounts to a national vice in Ireland, and, though one may overstate its gravity, the secondary schools could and should do much more to remedy this national defect than they are at present doing. At one first-class Irish establishment—admirably equipped with buildings, playground, and all other appliances—boots used to go unblacked from one end of the month to the other. The boys who come here come largely from the well-to-do farming class, in whose homes, in many ways so pleasant and worthy of respect, there is often a lamentable lack of that charm which comes of notable housewifery. The young men who return from this school will be less apt than they should be to value good housewifery in their wives and mothers.

But of all sinners in this regard the State is the chief offender. Under the Code of the National Board of Education a national schoolmaster or mistress is bound to teach cleanliness and decency by precept and example. He or she is paid an average wage (without allowances) of thirty shillings or one pound a week according to sex; and out of that an appearance befitting superior station has to be maintained—for in Ireland the schoolmaster has always a position of some dignity. For the school the State provides four bare walls, a roof, not always weatherproof, and a few desks. Firing is not provided. Decoration is subject to inspection, and any picture which can be held to have a religious or remotely political bearing is a gross offence against the Code. It follows, in practice, that bare walls are kept bare, though not clean; and let it be remembered that Catholicism, if left to itself, in education always trusts greatly to the appeal to the eye. In every Catholic school uncontrolled by the State the emblems of religion are everywhere present. National schools under State control, even in places where there is not a Protestant child within twenty miles, are rigorously forbidden the use of any such embellishment. On the other hand, Protestant schools which would gladly, and, as I think, most laudably, furnish themselves with pictures recalling such memories as the shutting of the Derry gates, come under the same tyranny of compromise. Taste and culture are the expression of an individuality, and individuality is forbidden to Irish teachers in State employ. The State puts a schoolmaster into a schoolhouse, without adequate payment for himself, without adequate provision either for building or the upkeep of building; it bids him to keep it clean, but pays no servant to wash or sweep; and, while enjoining the absence of dirt, it checks and hampers that desire to decorate, which is the positive side of order and taste. The result is, broadly, slatternly schools.

There could hardly be a better moral influence in Ireland than tastefully and brightly decorated schools, cleanly kept. But to secure this the State must provide money, and must give individual freedom. Instead of that, it adapts its institution to the lowest standard of living; and the raggedest child out of the dirtiest cottage will probably be in full keeping with his environment when he takes his place in class.

The same tyranny of compromise sterilises the whole teaching on the moral side. Nothing must be taught anywhere which could offend any susceptibility—except in the hour licensed for the teaching of denominational religion. There must be no appeal to Irish patriotism, whether it be of Protestant or Catholic. Irish history may not be taught as a subject, and, until lately, anything bearing on it, however remotely, was tabooed. The poem Breathes there a man with soul so dead was struck out of a lesson book, lest it should encourage sedition. To-day certain accepted books on Irish history may be used as readers; the Irish language may be taught, and is taught; and gradually with these changes new moral influences are coming in. Irish children are being encouraged to remember their nationality. Yet, meanwhile, the teacher, who is to instruct them in the duties of a good citizen, is debarred from taking any part in local politics, from serving on any local council. He is forbidden, in fact, to be himself a good citizen; forbidden to be anything more than the colourless instrument of a system of compromise and countercheck. Nothing is more certain than this, that to get a good teacher you need a man's whole personality; you must enlist all his beliefs and his feelings in the exercise of that moral function of education which can never be fulfilled by a mere machine for imparting the rudiments. Man everywhere, but especially in Ireland, is, as Aristotle said, a political animal. The State in Ireland, when organising education, tries as far as possible to eliminate the man and produce the pedagogue.

Take, for contrast with all this, the purely native institution, now unhappily extinct, of the old "classical academies" kept in the country parts of Munster by private laymen. In the eighteenth century, and on into the nineteenth, these men kept alive the tradition of Irish popular poetry, sometimes with a real gift. For good or for bad they were persons of character and of talent, and the last of them is alive, though he keeps school no longer. He taught boys who had learnt the rudiments at the ordinary national school, and who wished to carry on their studies with a view either to the priesthood or to medicine. He was paid only by the fees of his scholars, who were either the sons of farmers about him, or of men living at a distance, who sent their children to be part of the family in some farm where they had kinship or acquaintance. Thus existence for these scholars was divided between the home life of a farm and the hours of school. There was, however, a small element of what in Ireland were called "poor scholars"—boys from the less prosperous North and West, who came (sometimes walking the whole journey) to get learning gratis. To them teaching was never refused, and their board was provided by the farmers, who "would be snatching them from one and other," since they assisted the other children in preparing tasks.

Now, in the school which my friend has described to me, there was no formal teaching of anything but the prescribed subjects. But literature would be lying about—Haverty's History of Ireland, and the Nationalist papers of the day—and the teacher was there always ready to expound and answer questions. Himself a fighting politician (a member of the Fenian organisation, whose name is still sacred throughout Ireland), he was careful never to draw in or compromise his pupils; but to teach them the story of their country and discuss it with them was part of his natural occupation. He taught Irish also, the tongue readiest to him, for he held that Irishmen should know their own language; but the essential business of his school was teaching the simple old-fashioned curriculum, Latin, mathematics, and some Greek. Yet because he was a man who loved and valued knowledge for its own sake, and loved and valued literature, it is probable that he gave a more real training to the mind than is achieved by the most modern system of hand and eye culture and the rest of it. He taught neither religion nor morals, but his teaching assumed throughout, what his example showed, that a man should be true and thorough in what he professed to believe, and should be ready at all times to make sacrifices for principle. Such a school had the only moral influence which in Ireland has ever counted for much—the influence of a strong personality, acting in alliance with the influences of a fully realised religion and of an ordered family life.

I sketch a more concrete picture that always rises in my mind with a ray of hope, when I think of education in Ireland. Out of doors, winter twilight falling on a wild landscape within hearing of the Atlantic surf; the man of the house coming out to talk to me, a handsome Irishman of the old school, frieze-clad, with the traditional side whiskers, the humorous eye and mouth. We talked for a while in the cold, then "Gabh i leith isteach," he said, "for I hear you have the Irish." As I paused in the door to phrase the Gaelic salutation, more devout and courteous than would come to my lips in any other tongue, I was astonished at the company gathered in the long low room. Chairs were set by the wide hearth of course, and from one of them the woman of the house rose to greet me; a settle ran along the side wall, and its length was filled with men and women blotted against the dusk background. But the centre of the picture was a narrow deal table set in the middle of the room, with candles on it, and benches on each side, and on the benches fully ten children busy with books and copies. "Are these your burden?" I asked in the quaint Irish phrase. "A share of them," the man answered; and then I understood that some belonged to other neighbours, and that it was a mutual arrangement for friendliness and help. None of the children budged; there they were, drilled and disciplined at their work, in the middle of the room, while their elders sat and chatted quietly. I have never seen elsewhere anything which so filled my conception of what a home should be, as that farmhouse in Corcabascinn—so full of order and good governance, yet so free of constraint, so full of welcome, yet so lacking in expense or display. For, understand, we who were strangers were brought (much against my will) into the state-room or parlour beyond the party wall, and drink was pressed upon us hospitably. But the neighbours who had come there (and came daily, I fancy) came neither to eat nor drink (unless maybe tea might be brewing) but simply to sit and smoke and talk, and watch that their children got their lessons properly. And at the end, perhaps before they parted, perhaps when the family was alone, the rosary would be said by the turf fire, that made, winter or summer, the centre of all that pleasant existence.

It is a pity to think of how poorly the National school, to which those children would go with their tasks in the morning, seconds the help which this home life gives it. Easily could the school—which takes whatever real light it has from the home, just as it depends for warmth on the few turf which scholars bring daily along with their books—reflect sound and fruitful ideas on to the home through the children. It could teach the children and the parents, not only the political, but the economic history of their own country; it could teach them what has been done in Ireland, what has succeeded, what has failed, and why; it could teach them, who are already proud of being Irish, to have new reasons for their pride; it could teach them, who are already willing to do their best for Ireland, into what channels the driving force of that willingness may be poured.

Outside of definite religion, the only fruitful source of educational ideas connected with the moral order that I see in Ireland is the Gaelic League. This organisation, founded to save from extinction, and to revive into new prosperity the national language of Ireland, based itself entirely upon a moral appeal. It appealed to Irishmen as they were proud of their race, to save the most distinctive symbol of their nationality; and the appeal met with an extraordinary promptness of response. But to stimulate and promote the movement, it was found necessary to widen the propaganda. Irishmen were urged to learn Irish, and to speak Irish because of pride in their country; the same organisation soon began to teach that an Irishman who set an example of drunkenness, or gave an occasion of it, not only sinned against himself, but against his country. Vulgar and indecent literature was denounced as un-Irish; Irish dances were advocated, not only for their admirable grace and their historic interest, but also because it was held that dances like the waltz, departed from the austere standard of Irish morality. Irish men and women were taught to buy goods of Irish manufacture by the people who taught them to learn the language, on the ground that if the Irish nation continued to ebb away out of Ireland, nationality and language must perish together.

Thus through the medium of a propaganda which at first sight would seem merely literary and archaeological, many practical issues of life were related to a purely educational purpose. There is no doubt that the Gaelic League, now a widespread and solidly established organisation, spending on the whole, perhaps, L30,000 or L40,000 a year on its enterprise, has done as much to promote temperance, and to further Irish industries, as it has accomplished in its peculiar task of reviving the old tongue. Primarily a teaching institution—for each of the League's eight hundred branches exists to hold classes for Irish study—it has linked with the linguistic teaching a moral idea. The reaction has been mutual, for there is more intelligent thought on the methods of linguistic teaching in the Gaelic League than one would easily find in all the schools and universities of Ireland. The appeal to pride of race has quickened intelligence no less than enthusiasm.

It is a very remarkable fact, that the great teaching order of the Christian Brothers has taken up the teaching of Irish and generally the Gaelic League's whole propaganda more thoroughly than any other organisation in Ireland; very remarkable, for their practical success is so conspicuous that Protestant clergymen have repeatedly from the pulpit appealed for extra support to Protestant schools whose pupils, as one preacher said in my hearing, were being ousted in all competition for employment by the lads from the Christian Brothers' schools. Whatever the post was, the preacher said, this body of lay Catholics seemed always to have a candidate specially prepared for it. One of the greatest institutions in charge of that order is the industrial school at Artane, near Dublin, where eight hundred boys are being prepared for different trades. Every single one of those boys is now being taught Irish; that is to say, a linguistic training with a special appeal to the learner's patriotism has been superimposed on the ordinary rudiments. It is a great experiment made by enthusiasts who are also teachers with an intensely practical bent.

It is too early even to forecast the effect which is likely to be produced upon Irish education generally by the new university colleges set up under Mr. Birrell's Act. Yet this may be said. Irish education needs reform from the top downwards, not from the bottom upwards. It has lacked idealism, and these universities in which Ireland, whether of the north or the south, will be free to express its own character, can and should set up ideals which will govern every school in the country. 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 entitles 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 passion and horsemanship for his supreme achievement, George Henry Moore was the paragon of his class. 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 class. There he separated himself from his fellows; he parted from all to whom he was bound by ties of immediate advantage, of pleasure, of association, of affection, and he threw in his lot with Ireland. He saw first the moral bankruptcy of his own class, 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 class 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 circumstances 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 passionate 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 L10,000 on "Coranna" for the Chester Cup. He sent L1,000 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 class. 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 tithe 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 class 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 class 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 passed 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 Encumbered 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 assembly, 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 attitude; 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 class, and the well-to-do Catholic professional men with whom he was principally 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 petition, 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 prostituting 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 titular head, was influenced profoundly by the aristocratic conception of his rightful place as representing the Kings of Thomond. 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 sturdy 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 class. 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 class and even to injure his class, 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 class 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 Butt'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 class 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 constitution. 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 class is too strong a thing for that class 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 class 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 class from whom it was bought with cash and titles 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 class—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 reconstitution 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 attitude, 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 assert itself; and it is anchored 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 classes 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 entitled 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 class 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 class.

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 class 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 passing, 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 associations, 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 pass 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 reconstituting the surroundings and the atmosphere of both families. Families, however, are conceived and depicted in their most extended relations; figures are evoked of chief, vassal, 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 attitude 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 passionate 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 God 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 passionately 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 spaciousness 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 class, 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 multitude with marvellous constitution, 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 class 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 class, 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." When he came home, "even the youngest child of the house could see how great had been the blow. It was not the political defeat, severe as that was, it was the personal wound, and it was incurable."

Looking back through all those years, the "gentle lady" can see nothing in that episode but a case of priestly intimidation. "One need not blame the sheep who passed in a frightened huddle from one fold to another." Yet friends of mine in Galway look back on it in a very different spirit; they remember the Nolan-Trench election and Captain Nolan's victory as a triumph of the poor, a first instalment of freedom; it brought with it an exultation very different from the mere outburst of hatred that these pages suggest. What is more, having been privileged to sit in the most widely representative assembly of Irishmen that modern Ireland has known, I can testify that to-day peer and peasant, clergy and laymen, those who opposed it, and those others who fought for it, alike admit that the change which such a victory fore-shadowed was necessary and was beneficent. But it was a revolution. Ireland of yesterday was Ireland before the revolution. The Ireland that Miss Somerville and Martin Ross have lived in as grown women has been a country in the throes of a revolution, long drawn-out, with varying phases, yet still incomplete. Those who judge Ireland should remember this. In time of revolution, life is difficult, ancient loyalties clash with new yet living principles, sympathy and justice even are unsure guides. No country could have been kept for forty years in such a ferment as Ireland has known without profound demoralisation. We may well envy those who lived more easily and quietly in the Ireland of yesterday, and held with an unquestioning spirit to the state of things in which they were born.

Such were the folk of whom Miss Somerville writes with "that indomitable family pride that is an asset of immense value in the history of a country." They "took all things in their stride without introspection or hesitation. Their unflinching conscientiousness, their violent church-going (I speak of the sisters), were accompanied by a whole-souled love of a spree and a wonderful gift for a row." I can corroborate her details, especially the last. All those that I recall had some talent for feuds; at least, in every family there would be one warrior, male or female; and all had the complete contempt, not so much for convention as for those who were affected in their lives (or costumes) by any standard that was not home-made. But in all humility I must admit that the real heroines of this book—Mrs. Somerville and Mrs. Martin—outshine anything that my memory can produce. When Martin Ross and her mother went back to West Galway and re-established themselves at their old home, a letter from her to Miss Somerville describes one incident:—

I wish you had seen Paddy Griffy, a very active little old man, and a beloved of mine, when he came down on Sunday night to welcome me. After the usual hand-kissings on the steps, he put his hands over his head and stood in the doorway, I suppose invoking his saint. He then rushed into the hall.

"Dance, Paddy," screamed Nurse Bennett (my foster-mother, now our maid-of-all-work).

And he did dance, and awfully well, too, to his own singing. Mamma, who was attired in a flowing pink dressing-gown and a black hat trimmed with lilac, became suddenly emulous, and with her spade under her arm joined in the jig. This lasted for about a minute, and was a never-to-be-forgotten sight. They skipped round the hall, they changed sides, they swept up to each other and back again and finished with the deepest curtseys.

My own mother would gladly have done the same on a like occasion, but she lacked Mrs. Martin's talent for the jig. Mrs. Somerville is sketched with a free and humorous hand. I quote only one detail, but it shows the real Irishwoman, more deeply in touch with Ireland's traditional life than any Gaelic League could bring her. Question arose how to find a suitable offering for 'an old servant of forty years' standing, whose fancies were few and her needs none.' "Give her a nice shroud," said Mrs. Somerville, "there's nothing in the world she'd like so well as that."

Shakespeare could not have outdone that intuition, and only one of the larger breed would have been unconventional enough to suggest what the younger generation, hampered by other feelings than those of West Carbery, "were too feeble to accept."

These two traits belong to the harmonious and thoroughly Irish grouping in which such ladies as Mrs. Martin and Mrs. Somerville were central figures of the whole countryside. That grouping exists no longer, and this book has to describe the discord which interrupted that harmony. Martin Ross's elder brother, Robert Martin (famous in his day as the writer and singer of Ballyhooly, and a score of other topical songs), left his work as a London journalist to help in fighting the first campaign which brought the word "boycott" into usage.

It was at this work (his sister writes), that Robert knew for the first time what it was to have every man's hand against him, to meet the stare of hatred, the jeer and the sidelong curse; to face endless drives on outside cars with his revolver in his hand; to plan the uphill tussle with boycotted crops and cattle for which a market could scarcely be found; to know the imminence of death, when by accidentally choosing one of two roads he evaded the man with a gun who had gone out to wait for him.

Robert Martin faced, in a word, the earliest and ugliest phases of that Irish revolution, which was the Nemesis of the all too easy and too pleasant ways of yesterday in Ireland. Later, after his death, Martin Ross herself had to gain some experience of the same trouble. When she went back with her mother to re-establish the family home from which they had been fifteen years absent, there was a hostile element in the parish, and gracious hospitality was ungraciously met. An attempt was made to keep children from a children's party which she had organised. The move was half-hearted and her energy defeated it, but that the attempt should be made was such "a facer" as she had never before known. Like many another ugly thing in Ireland, it originated in that cowardly fear of public opinion which is to be found on the seamy side of all revolutions; and it did not stand against her "gallant fight to restore the old ways, the old friendships."

The old ways, in so far as they meant the old friendships, she might hope to restore, although the friendship would, half consciously, take on a new accent; personality would count for more in it, position for less. But the old relation which authorised a kind-hearted landlord to feel that his tenants had "deserted him" because they voted against his wish in an election—that is gone for ever; and gone, at all events, for the present, is the local leadership of the gentry.

I question whether it is realised that in parting from that leadership Ireland lost what was in a sense Home Rule. In the "yesterday" of which I write Ireland was governed in all its parochial and most intimate affairs by a class or a caste; but that governing class was Irish—Irish with a limitation, no doubt, yet still indisputably Irish. When that rule perished, when that class lost its local ascendancy, government became the bastard compromise that we have known, with power inharmoniously divided between officialdom and agitators. The law was framed and administered by officials, often English or Scotch, possessing no authority except what the law conferred on them. Authority lay very largely with popular leaders; but leadership and authority alike were purely personal, depending on a man's own qualities and the support which they evoked. No man was born to it as of right, and such authority is far more precarious than the established power of a governing class. This is a weakness in all democratically-governed countries, but where there is self-government, the individual, in entering upon office, acquires the support and the prestige of a long-established machinery of power. He ceases to be merely the individual when he becomes part of the Government. For the Irish leaders this reinforcement to the personal authority has never existed; they have been at a terrible disadvantage as compared with all other democratic politicians; and consequently the power exercised by them has always, except perhaps at Parnell's zenith, been far less than was the combined authority of the gentry before the landlord rule was broken. Those who shared in that authority acted, and could afford to act, with unquestioning confidence; they were surer of themselves, than is any popular leader or any official in Ireland of to-day. It seldom occurred to them to ask whether their conduct in any juncture might meet with approval; being a law to other people, they were naturally a law to themselves, and an Irish law. Their power was excessive, and demoralised them by its lack of limitation; yet many of the qualities which it bred, made them an element of great value in the country. These qualities are by no means extinct in their kindred, nor is the tradition of their right to leadership forgotten.