When the Irish go away they are always lonely for the mountains. No other mountains are so soft-bosomed and so mild. They have wisps of cloud lying along the side of them and the blue peak showing above. I have seen a rainbow, one end of the arch planted in the sea, the other somewhere behind the mountains, “over the hills and far away.” Seeing that incomparable sight, I understood why the Irish peasant imagines fairy treasures hidden at the foot of the rainbow. I, too, have been in Arcadia.
CHAPTER IV
THE IRISH PEOPLE
I MUST warn you, before proceeding to write about the Irish people, that I have tried to explain them, according to my capacity, a thousand times to my English friends and neighbours, and have been pulled up short as many times by the reflection that all I have been saying was contradicted by some other aspect of my country-people. For we are an eternally contradictory people, and none of us can prognosticate exactly what we shall feel, what do, under given circumstances; whereas the Englishman is simple. He has no mysteries. Once you know him, you can pretty well tell what he will say, what feel, and do under given circumstances. You have a formula for him: you have no formula for the Irish. The Englishman is simple, the Irish complex. The Anglo-Irish, who stand to most English people for the Irish, have had grafted on to them the complexity of the Irish without their pliability. It makes, perhaps, the most puzzling of all mixtures, and it may be the chief difficulty in a proper estimate of the Irish character.
They will tell you in Ireland that you have to go some forty or fifty miles from Dublin before you get into Irish Ireland. There are a good many Irish in Anglo-Ireland, usually in the humbler walks of life, whence you shall find in Dublin servants, car-drivers, policemen, newspaper-boys, and so on, the raciness, the vivacity, the charm, which in Irish Ireland is a perpetual delight. Dublin drawing-rooms are not vivacious, nor are the manners gracious, although the Four Courts still produce a galaxy of wit, and Dublin citizens buttonhole each other with good stories all along the streets, roaring with laughter in a way that would be regarded as Bedlam in Fleet Street.
Get into Irish Ireland and the manners have a graciousness which is like a blessing. I asked the way in Ballyshannon town once. The woman who directed me came out into the street and a little way with me, and when she left me called to me sweetly, “Come back soon to Donegal!” which left a sense of blessing with me all that day. There was a certain curly-haired “Wullie,” who drove the long car from Donegal to Killybegs. I can see “Wullie” yet helping the women on and off the car with their myriad packages, can see the delightful grief with which he parted from us, his shining face of welcome when he met us again a fortnight later. To set against “Wullie” were the car-drivers, who certainly are unpleasant if the “whip-money” does not come up to their expectations. We say of such that they are “spoilt by the tourists,” yet I remember some who were not spoilt by the tourists, although they were perpetually in touch with them—boatmen and pony-boys at Killarney; and a certain delightful guide, whose winning gaiety was not at all merely professional.
Thinking over my country-people, I say, “They are so-and-so,” and then I have a misgiving, and I say, “But, after all, they are not so-and-so.”
They are the most generous people in the world. They enjoy to the fullest the delight of giving; and what a good delight that is! I pity the ungiving people. You will receive more gifts in Ireland in a twelvemonth than in a lifetime out of it. The first instinct of Irish liking or loving is to give you something. The giving instinct runs through all classes. If you sit down in a cabin and see an old piece of lustre-ware or something else of the sort, do not admire it unless you mean to accept it; for it will be offered to you, not in the Spanish way which does not expect acceptance, but in the Irish way which does. I have many little bits of china given so, usually the one thing of any consideration or value the donor possessed. I once sought to buy an old china dish, much flawed and cracked by hot ovens, in a Dublin hotel, as much to save it from following its fellows to destruction as for any other reason. The owner would not sell the dish, but he offered it for my acceptance in such a way that I could not refuse. When I go back to my old home, the cottagers bring a few new-laid eggs or a griddle-cake for my acceptance. I have a friend in an Irish village whose income from an official source is £10 a year. She has a cottage, a few hens, and enough grass for a cow when she can get one. Her gifts come at Christmas, at Easter, on St. Patrick’s Day, and on some special, private feasts of my own—eggs, sweets, flowers, a bit of lace, or a fine embroidered handkerchief, and, in times of illness, a pair of chickens. That is royal giving out of so little; and I assure you that it blesses the giver as well as the recipient.
On the other hand, the farmers grow thriftier and thriftier. Sir Horace Plunkett and men like him, truly patriotic Irishmen, are showing them the way. Successive Land Acts lift them more and more into a position of security from one of precariousness. They have more money now to put in the savings-banks. Their prosperity does not mean a higher standard of living, although that is badly needed. It means more money in the banks—that is all.
The Irish are very like the French. If the day should come when they should learn, like the French, to be thrifty and usurious, I hope I shall not be there to see it. Better—a thousand times better—that they should remain royal wastrels to the end.
As yet we need not fear it. Still, if you ask a drink of water at a mountain cabin in the poorest parts of Ireland, you are given milk; and do not offer to pay for it, lest you sink to the lowest place in the estimation of these splendid givers.