The hospitality is truly splendid. There is a saying in Ireland that they always put an extra bit in the pot for “the man coming over the hill.” It is an unheard-of thing that you should call at an Irish house and not be asked if “you’ve a mouth on you.” If your visit be within anything like measurable distance of meal-time you will be obliged to stay for the meal.
In England, when people are poor, or comparatively so, or feel the need of retrenchment, they “do not entertain.” It is almost the first form of retrenchment which suggests itself to the Englishman; whereas to curtail his hospitalities would be the last form of retrenchment to an Irishman, and you will be entertained generously and lavishly by people you know to be poor. The Englishman’s different way of looking at the matter is no doubt partly due to the fact that he is a much more domestic person than the Irishman, and depends mainly on his family life for his happiness and pleasure. Now, the French do not give hospitality at all outside the large family circle, so that in that regard at least the Irish will have a long way to travel before they touch with the French.
OFF TO AMERICA.
I have said that the Irish are not domestic. They are gregarious, but not domestic. The Irishman depends a deal on the neighbours; he has no such way of enclosing himself within a little fortified place of home against all the ills of the world as has the Englishman. Irish mothers, like Irish nurses, are often tenderly, exquisitely soft and warm; but the young ones will fly out of the nest for all that. Perhaps the art of making the home pleasant is not an Irish art. Perhaps it is the gregariousness, general and not particular—at least, general in the sense of embracing the parish and not the family. To the young Irish and a good many of their elders the home is dull. They go off to America, leaving the old people to loneliness, because there is no amusement. They do not make their own interests, as the slower, less vivacious nations do. The rainy Irish climate seems made for a people who would find their pleasures indoors. But the Irish will be out and about, telling good stories and hearing them. They are an artistic people, with great traditions; yet books or music or conversation will not keep them at home. If they cannot have the neighbours in, they will go out to the neighbours.
They are very religious, and accept the invisible world with a thoroughness and simplicity of belief which they would say themselves is their most precious inheritance. The Celt is no materialist. He does not love success or riches; most of those whom he holds in esteem have been neither successful nor rich. Money is not the passport to his affections. He ought never to go away, and, alas! he goes away in thousands! Contact with the selfish, money-getting materialism has power to destroy the spiritual qualities of the Celt, once he is outside Ireland. When he comes back—a prosperous Irish-American—he is no longer the Celt we loved. And he does come back: that is one of his contradictions. The home he has left behind because of its dulness, the arid patch of mountain-land, the graves of his people, call him back again at the moment when one would have said every bond with them was loosened.
He is full of sentiment, yet he makes mercenary marriages. The Irish match-making customs are well known. In the South and West of Ireland the prospective bride is bargained over with no more sentiment than if she were a heifer. She may be “turned down” for an iron pot or a feather-bed which her mother will not give up to supplement the dowry. Satin cheeks and speedwell eyes and a head of silk like the raven’s plume will not count against a bullock extra with a yellow spinster of greater fortune, or is not supposed to count; for sometimes Cupid steps in, although the match-making customs are usually accepted as unquestioningly as a similar institution is by the French. And even in such unpromising soil flowers of love and tenderness will spring up. Under my hand I have a letter from an Irish peasant which I think affords a beautiful refutation of the idea that sentiment and match-making cannot go together. Here is a passage from it: