Irish Books and Irish People

by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

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.