Irish Books and Irish People

by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

Martin Ross, writing in the light of to-day, makes this comment:—

It will not happen again; it belongs to an almost forgotten régime, that was capable of abuse, yet capable too of summoning forth the best impulses of Irish hearts.

War, famine and pestilence—all these are capable of summoning forth splendid impulses; but society should not be organised to give play to these hazards of feeling. The fundamental truth about yesterday in Ireland is that everybody accepted as natural a state of affairs under which Irish gentry were taking rents that could not be earned on the land which was burdened with them. Landlord and tenant alike were really dependent on what was sent back by the sons and daughters of poor people from America to prevent the break-up of homes. The whole situation was false, from top to bottom. At top, a small class, physically and often mentally superb, full of charm, extraordinarily agreeable, fit for great uses, but by temperament, habit and education unequipped for its proper task of equipping and directing the labour out of which ultimately it had to live or perish. It perished. At bottom, a multitude with marvellous constitution, undermined by age-long under-feeding, friendly, most lovable, most winning, but untrained and unequipped, half-hearted in its business of rolling the pitiless stone up the never-ending hill. It survived—clinging with a desperate tenacity to the soil which so meagrely nourished it. But during that generation of yesterday—and how many generations before it?—there grew up inevitably, from the conditions, a traditional toleration of incompetence, a faith as it were in inefficiency. Ireland of yesterday was bound up in one vicious circle of work that was necessarily underpaid because it was inefficient, and work that was necessarily inefficient because it was underpaid. In the lower class there were no reserves; the dependants lived from hand to mouth, and when hand failed to find food, they had to come to the upper class, first for remission of its claims on them and then for actual subsistence. But the dependence was mutual, and there were no reserves at top equal to the needs of that joint hazard. Penury was only at two removes from the "gentry houses." While the first line of defence, the tenants, held good, the world went pleasantly for the Ireland of yesterday. But when that line broke, and starvation burst in, then the best men and women in the big houses flung their all into the common stock, and went under—as did the chief of the Martins in Connemara.

That, however, happened the day before yesterday; yesterday saw nothing so dire. But the menace of it was always there, and the rest of Ireland gradually consolidated itself for a struggle to win what had long ago been acquired for Protestant Ulster—the right of a tenant to what his own labour created. The Ulster custom has done for Ulster, industrial as well as agricultural, more than is generally perceived. It gave in some degree recognition to efficiency. Tenure was there less precarious, less dependent on the landlord's pleasure; men were freer, work had more rights. There was less room for impulse, perhaps less appeal to affection; but when a business relation is based on impulse and affection, where rights are not solid and defined, the sense of obligation easily leads men astray. That which is given out of loyalty and affection comes to be taken as a due. Martin Ross—"Miss Violet," whom the people of Ross called "the gentle lady," as beautiful a name as was ever earned by mortal—inherited with little qualification the landlord standpoint. She recalls the story of an election in 1872, when her father, going to vote in Oughterard, saw "a company of infantry keeping the way for Mr. Arthur Guinness (afterwards Lord Ardilaun) as he conveyed to the poll a handful of his tenants to vote for Captain Trench, he himself walking in front with the oldest of them on his arm." She does not ask if the tenants desired to be so conveyed. She merely describes how her father "ranged through the crowd incredulously, asking for this or that tenant, unable to believe that they had deserted him." When he came home, "even the youngest child of the house could see how great had been the blow. It was not the political defeat, severe as that was, it was the personal wound, and it was incurable."

Looking back through all those years, the "gentle lady" can see nothing in that episode but a case of priestly intimidation. "One need not blame the sheep who passed in a frightened huddle from one fold to another." Yet friends of mine in Galway look back on it in a very different spirit; they remember the Nolan-Trench election and Captain Nolan's victory as a triumph of the poor, a first instalment of freedom; it brought with it an exultation very different from the mere outburst of hatred that these pages suggest. What is more, having been privileged to sit in the most widely representative assembly of Irishmen that modern Ireland has known, I can testify that to-day peer and peasant, clergy and laymen, those who opposed it, and those others who fought for it, alike admit that the change which such a victory fore-shadowed was necessary and was beneficent. But it was a revolution. Ireland of yesterday was Ireland before the revolution. The Ireland that Miss Somerville and Martin Ross have lived in as grown women has been a country in the throes of a revolution, long drawn-out, with varying phases, yet still incomplete. Those who judge Ireland should remember this. In time of revolution, life is difficult, ancient loyalties clash with new yet living principles, sympathy and justice even are unsure guides. No country could have been kept for forty years in such a ferment as Ireland has known without profound demoralisation. We may well envy those who lived more easily and quietly in the Ireland of yesterday, and held with an unquestioning spirit to the state of things in which they were born.

Such were the folk of whom Miss Somerville writes with "that indomitable family pride that is an asset of immense value in the history of a country." They "took all things in their stride without introspection or hesitation. Their unflinching conscientiousness, their violent church-going (I speak of the sisters), were accompanied by a whole-souled love of a spree and a wonderful gift for a row." I can corroborate her details, especially the last. All those that I recall had some talent for feuds; at least, in every family there would be one warrior, male or female; and all had the complete contempt, not so much for convention as for those who were affected in their lives (or costumes) by any standard that was not home-made. But in all humility I must admit that the real heroines of this book—Mrs. Somerville and Mrs. Martin—outshine anything that my memory can produce. When Martin Ross and her mother went back to West Galway and re-established themselves at their old home, a letter from her to Miss Somerville describes one incident:—

I wish you had seen Paddy Griffy, a very active little old man, and a beloved of mine, when he came down on Sunday night to welcome me. After the usual hand-kissings on the steps, he put his hands over his head and stood in the doorway, I suppose invoking his saint. He then rushed into the hall.

"Dance, Paddy," screamed Nurse Bennett (my foster-mother, now our maid-of-all-work).

And he did dance, and awfully well, too, to his own singing. Mamma, who was attired in a flowing pink dressing-gown and a black hat trimmed with lilac, became suddenly emulous, and with her spade under her arm joined in the jig. This lasted for about a minute, and was a never-to-be-forgotten sight. They skipped round the hall, they changed sides, they swept up to each other and back again and finished with the deepest curtseys.