CHAPTER XIV. BILLY TRAYNOR AND THE COLONEL
It was a fine breezy morning as the Colonel set out with Billy Traynor for Belmullet. The bridle-path by which they travelled led through a wild and thinly inhabited tract,—now dipping down between grassy hills, now tracing its course along the cliffs over the sea. Tall ferns covered the slopes, protected from the west winds, and here and there little copses of stunted oak showed the traces of what once had been forest. It was, on the whole, a silent and dreary region, so that the travellers felt it even relief as they drew nigh the bright blue sea, and heard the sonorous booming of the waves as they broke along the shore.
“It cheers one to come up out of those dreary dells, and hear the pleasant plash of the sea,” said Harcourt; and his bright face showed that he felt the enjoyment.
“So it does, sir,” said Billy. “And yet Homer makes his hero go heavy-hearted as he hears the ever-sounding sea.”
“What does that signify, Doctor?” said Harcourt, impatiently. “Telling me what a character in a fiction feels affects me no more than telling me what he does. Why, man, the one is as unreal as the other. The fellow that created him fashioned his thoughts as well as his actions.”
“To be sure he did; but when the fellow is a janius, what he makes is as much a crayture as either you or myself.”
“Come, come, Doctor, no mystification.”
“I don't mean any,” broke in Billy. “What I want to say is this, that as we read every character to elicit truth,—truth in the working of human motives, truth in passion, truth in all the struggles of our poor weak natures,—why would n't a great janius like Homer, or Shakspeare, or Milton, be better able to show us this in some picture drawn by themselves, than you or I be able to find it out for ourselves?”
Harcourt shook his head doubtfully.
“Well, now,” said Billy, returning to the charge, “did you ever see a waxwork model of anatomy? Every nerve and siny of a nerve was there,—not a vein nor an artery wanting. The artist that made it all just wanted to show you where everything was; but he never wanted you to believe it was alive, or ever had been. But with janius it's different. He just gives you some traits of a character, he points him out to you passing,—just as I would to a man going along the street,—and there he is alive for ever and ever; not like you and me, that will be dead and buried to-morrow or next day, and the most known of us three lines in a parish registhry, but he goes down to posterity an example, an illustration—or a warning, maybe—to thousands and thousands of living men. Don't talk to me about fiction! What he thought and felt is truer than all that you and I and a score like us ever did or ever will do. The creations of janius are the landmarks of humanity; and well for us is it that we have such to guide us!”
“All this may be very fine,” said Harcourt, contemptuously, “but give me the sentiments of a living man, or one that has lived, in preference to all the imaginary characters that have ever adorned a story.”
“Just as I suppose that you'd say that a soldier in the Blues, or some big, hulking corporal in the Guards, is a finer model of the human form than ever Praxiteles chiselled.”
“I know which I 'd rather have alongside of me in a charge, Doctor,” said Harcourt, laughing; and then, to change the topic, he pointed to a lone cabin on the sea-shore, miles away, as it seemed, from all other habitations.
“That's Michel Cady's, sir,” said Traynor; “he lives by birds,—hunting them saygulls and cormorants through the crevices of the rocks, and stealing the eggs. There isn't a precipice that he won't climb, not a cliff that he won't face.”
“Well, if that be his home, the pursuit does not seem a profitable one.”
“'Tis as good as breaking stones on the road for four-pence a day, or carrying sea-weed five miles on your back to manure the potatoes,” said Billy, mournfully.
“That's exactly the very thing that puzzles me,” said Harcourt, “why, in a country so remarkable for fertility, every one should be so miserably poor!”
“And you never heard any explanation of it?”
“Never; at least, never one that satisfied me.”
“Nor ever will you,” said Billy, sententiously.
“And why so?”
“Because,” said he, drawing a long breath, as if preparing for a discourse,—“because there's no man capable of going into the whole subject; for it's not merely an economical question or a social one, but it is metaphysical, and religious, and political, and ethnological, and historical,—ay, and geographical too! You have to consider, first, who and what are the aborigines. A conquered people that never gave in they were conquered. Who are the rulers? A Saxon race that always felt that they were infarior to them they ruled over!”
“By Jove, Doctor, I must stop you there; I never heard any acknowledgment of this inferiority you speak of.”
“I'd like to get a goold medal for arguin' it out with you,” said Billy.
“And, after all, I don't see how it would resolve the original doubt,” said Harcourt. “I want to know why the people are so poor, and I don't want to hear of the battle of Clontarf, or the Danes at Dundalk.”
“There it is, you'd like to narrow down a great question of race, language, traditions, and laws to a little miserable dispute about labor and wages. O Manchester, Manchester! how ye're in the heart of every Englishman, rich or poor, gentle or simple! You say you never heard of any confession of inferiority. Of course you did n't; but quite the reverse,—a very confident sense of being far better than the poor Irish; and I'll tell you how, and why, just as you, yourself, after a discusshion with me, when you find yourself dead bate, and not a word to reply, you 'll go home to a good dinner and a bottle of wine, dry clothes and a bright fire; and no matter how hard my argument pushed you, you'll remember that I'm in rags, in a dirty cabin, with potatoes to ate and water to drink, and you 'll say, at all events, 'I 'm better off than he is;' and there's your superiority, neither more or less,—there it is! And all the while, I'm saying the same thing to myself,—'Sorrow matter for his fine broadcloth, and his white linen, and his very best roast beef that he's atin',—I 'm his master! In all that dignifies the spacies in them grand qualities that makes us poets, rhetoricians, and the like, in those elegant attributes that, as the poet says,—
“In all our pursuits
Lifts us high above brutes,'”
—in these, I say again, I 'm his master!'”
As Billy finished his growing panegyric upon his country and himself, he burst out in a joyous laugh, and cried, “Did ye ever hear conceit like that? Did ye ever expect to see the day that a ragged poor blackguard like me would dare to say as much to one like you? And, after all, it's the greatest compliment I could pay you.”
“How so, Billy? I don't exactly see that.”
“Why, that if you weren't a gentleman,—a raal gentleman, born and bred,—I could never have ventured to tell you what I said now. It is because, in your own refined feelings, you can pardon all the coarseness of mine, that I have my safety.”
“You're as great a courtier as you are a scholar, Billy,” said Harcourt, laughing; “meanwhile, I'm not likely to be enlightened as to the cause of Irish poverty.”
“'T is a whole volume I could write on the same subject,” said Billy; “for there's so many causes in operation, com-binin', and assistin', and aggravatin' each other. But if you want the head and front of the mischief in one word, it is this, that no Irishman ever gave his heart and sowl to his own business, but always was mindin' something else that he had nothin' to say to; and so, ye see, the priest does be thinkin' of politics, the parson's thinkin' of the priest, the people are always on the watch for a crack at the agent or the tithe-proctor, and the landlord, instead of looking after his property, is up in Dublin dinin' with the Lord-Leftinint and abusin' his tenants. I don't want to screen myself, nor say I'm better than my neighbors, for though I have a larned profession to live by, I 'd rather be writin' a ballad, and singin' it too, down Thomas Street, than I 'd be lecturin' at the Surgeons' Hall.”
“You are certainly a very strange people,” said Harcourt.
“And yet there's another thing stranger still, which is, that your countrymen never took any advantage of our eccentricities, to rule us by; and if they had any wit in their heads, they 'd have seen, easy enough, that all these traits are exactly the clews to a nation's heart. That's what Pitt meant when he said, 'Let me make the songs of a people, and I don't care who makes the laws.' Look down now in that glen before you, as far as you can see. There's Belmullet, and ain't you glad to be so near your journey's end? for you're mighty tired of all this discoorsin'.”
“On the contrary, Billy, even when I disagree with what you say, I'm pleased to hear your reasons; at the same time, I 'm glad we are drawing nigh to this poor boy, and I only trust we may not be too late.”
Billy muttered a pious concurrence in the wish, and they rode along for some time in silence. “There's the Bay of Belmullet now under your feet,” cried Billy, as he pulled up short, and pointed with his whip seaward. “There's five fathoms, and fine anchoring ground on every inch ye see there. There's elegant shelter from tempestuous winds. There's a coast rich in herrings, oysters, lobsters, and crabs; farther out there's cod, and haddock, and mackerel in the sayson. There's sea wrack for kelp, and every other con-vanience any one can require; and a poorer set of devils than ye 'll see when we get down there, there's nowhere to be found. Well, well! 'if idleness is bliss, it's folly to work hard.'” And with this paraphrase, Billy made way for the Colonel, as the path had now become too narrow for two abreast, and in this way they descended to the shore.