“For the last few weeks I was anxiously engaged at match-making, as matters were going from bad to worse; having no housekeeper, household jobs and cares prevented me from attending to outside work. Well, at last my match is made. The marriage is to take place next Thursday. The ‘young girl’ is twenty-two years, and I thank God that I am perfectly satisfied with my life-companion-to-be. There were many other matches introduced to me—far more satisfactory from the financial point of view, some having £20, some £30, and one £40 more fortune than my intended wife has, with whom I am getting but £90, while I must ‘by will’ give £120 to my brother, leaving a deficit of £30; but, somehow, I could not satisfy my mind with the other ‘good girls’ if they had over £200—nay, at all. And the poet’s words were true when he said something like ‘pity is akin to love’; pity I felt first for my intended wife, with her simple, yet wise, unaffected ways, not used to world’s ways and wiles, ‘an unspoiled child of Nature,’ never flirted, never went to dances, with the bloom of her maidenhood fresh and pure, and fair and bright. When but a last £5 was between myself and her people re fortune, her very words to me were: ‘Wisha, God help me! if I’m worth anything, I ought to be worth that £5.’ That expression of hers stung me to the quick, so openly, frankly, and innocently uttered, and ‘I’m getting other accounts, but would not marry anyone but you.’ Well, the end was in that one night, sitting beside her in her father’s house, the feeling of pity changed to a warmer feeling, thank God; for if it didn’t, I would rather live and die single than marry against my will. ‘’Tisn’t riches makes happiness.’ I’ve read somewhere that when want comes in at the door, love flies out of the window; but I don’t believe it—I don’t believe it. And my brother is kind; he will be giving me time to pay the balance, £30, by degrees.”
The Irish are notoriously brave, yet they have a fear of public opinion unknown to an Englishman. Underneath their charmingly gay and open manner there is a self-consciousness, a self-mistrust. For all their keen sense of humour, they cannot bear laughter directed at themselves. They dread to be made absurd more than anything else in this world. They are responsive and sympathetic, yet too witty not to be somewhat malicious; and they are warm and generous, yet not always so reliably kind as a duller, slower people. They are irritable, so they are less tolerant of children and animals, although they make excellent nurses, as I have said. They have no tolerance at all for slowness and stupidity, very little for ugliness or want of charm. They adore beauty, though it doesn’t count for much in their most intimate relations; and it is not, therefore, the paradise of plain women.
I have not touched on a hundredth part of their contradictoriness, which makes the Irish so eternally unexpected and interesting. They can be, as they say themselves, “contrairy” when they choose—and they often choose. Yet, when all is said and done, they are the pleasantest people in the world. Nor is their pleasantness insincere. They are pleasant because they feel pleasant; and an Irish man or woman will pay you an amazing, fresh, audacious compliment which an Englishman might feel, but would rather die than say.
Did I say that the Celt was gay and melancholy? He is exquisitely gay and most profoundly melancholy. He is in touch with the other world, and yet desperately afraid of it, or of the passage to it, being a creature of fine nerves and apprehension; whence he will joke about death to cover up his real repugnance, and yet hold the key to heaven as securely as though it were the other side of the wall, with a lonesome passage to be traversed. It is the lonesomeness of death which makes it terrible to the gregarious Irishman, although he knows that the other side of the wall the kinsmen and friends and neighbours await him, friendly and loving as of old.
CHAPTER V
SOUTH OF DUBLIN
IF you go down from Dublin by the wonderful coast-line or through the beautiful country inland which runs by the base of the mountains, you will come upon beautiful scenery, and find a population not at all characteristically Irish. The beauty of Wicklow, its wonderful woods, its deep glens, its placid waters, its glorious mountains, is only less than the beauty of Killarney, which is an earthly paradise. But in Wicklow, in Wexford, in Waterford, the people’s blood is mixed. Sometimes it is Celt upon Celt, the Welsh Celt upon the Irish. There are charming people in Wicklow and Wexford and Waterford, but to those counties belongs also what I call the cynical Irishman—the Irishman without charm of manner, the “independent” Irishman, who will not take off his hat to rank or age or sex; yet he is Irish enough in the core of him. And Wicklow and Wexford, with Kildare and part of Meath, were the scenes of the Rebellion in 1798. Perhaps the memory of those days helps to make the Irishman of the south-east corner of Ireland what he is, and that is often something very unlike the gracious Irishman of the South and West. He has his resentments. I have heard an Irishman say: “A Wexford man will never look at a Tipperary man, because Tipperary didn’t rise in the Rebellion.” The Rebellion, which was hatched in the North by Ulster Presbyterians, broke out, after all, in Wexford, and on a religious, and a Catholic, cause of quarrel. There could have been nothing farther from the thoughts of the leaders of the united Irishmen than to make a religious war, but that was what the Rebellion of 1798 turned out to be—a religious war; a war between Catholic and Protestant, precipitated not by English intriguers, say those who know well, but by outrageous insults to the Catholic altars, led in many cases by priests on the rebel side, foredoomed to failure in spite of the desperate courage of the peasantry who for a time swept all before them. One always thinks of Wexford and the Rebellion simultaneously. It was a time of cynical contrasts. Think of the poor peasants, maddened by outrages to their altars, led by their priests, carrying on the Rebellion planned by Protestants of the North—by leaders deeply imbued with the French revolutionary spirit, which was certainly not Christian! Think of the Western peasants, when Humbert and his men landed at Killala, hailing those good comrades of the Revolution as fellow-Catholics, coming to meet them decked out in religious emblems! One of the strangest and most cynical of these contrasts was the fact that while the peasant army fought desperately at New Ross, where they all but carried the day, on the other side of the Barrow River men were ploughing peacefully in their fields, because it was Wexford that was up and not their county. I suppose it is the clan system which differentiates Irishmen by their counties and their towns. Dublin is heterogeneous, perhaps. It has, at all events, few distinguishing characteristics, whereas Cork and Waterford men are as widely apart almost as though they were of different nationalities; and both are agreed in despising Dublin, although Dublin has made history in the last hundred years—national history—more than either.
