With another guest I had an interesting conversation about the Ulster tenant-right, which got itself more or less enacted into British law only in 1870, and of which Mr. Froude tells me he sought in vain to discover the definite origin. “The best lawyers in Ireland” could give him no light on this point. He could only find that it did not exist apparently in 1770, but did exist apparently twenty years later. The gentleman with whom I talked to-night tells me that the custom of Ulster was really once general throughout Ireland, and is called the “Ulster” custom, only because it survived there after disappearing elsewhere. There is a tradition too, he says, in Ulster that the recognition of this tenant-right as a binding custom there is really due to Lord Castlereagh. It would be a curious thing, could this be verified, to find Lord Castlereagh, whose name has been execrated in Ireland for fourscore years, recommending and securing a century ago that recognition of the interest of the Irish tenant in his holding, which, in our time, Mr. Gladstone, just now the object of Irish adulation, was, with much difficulty and reluctance, brought to accord in the Compensation for Disturbances clause of his Act of 1870!
Of this clause, too, I am told to-night that the scale of compensation fixed for the awards of the Court in the third section of it was devised (though Mr. Gladstone did not know this) by an Irish member in the interest of the “strong farmers,” who wish to root out the small farmers. There is an apparent confirmation of this story in the fact that under this section the small farmers, under £10, may be awarded against the landlord seven years’ rent as compensation for disturbance, while the number of years to be accounted for in the award diminishes as the rental increases, a discrimination not unlikely to strengthen the preference of the landlords for the large farm system.
CHAPTER V.
DUBLIN, Tuesday, Feb. 14th.—I left Abbeyleix this morning for Dublin, in company with Mr. and Mrs. Henry Doyle. Mr. Doyle, C.B., a brother of that inimitable master of the pencil, and most delightful of men, Richard Doyle, is the Director of the Irish National Gallery. He was kind enough to come and lunch with me at Maple’s, after which we went together to the Gallery. It occupies the upper floors of a stately and handsome building in Merrion Square, in front of which stands a statue of the founder, Mr. William Dargan, who defrayed all the expenses of the Dublin Exhibition in 1853, and declined all the honours offered to him in recognition of his public spirited liberality, save a visit paid to his wife by Queen Victoria. The collection now under Mr. Doyle’s charge was begun only in 1864, and the Government makes it an annual grant of no more than £2500, or about one-half the current price, in these days, of a fine Gainsborough or Sir Joshua! “They manage these things better in France,” was evidently the impression of a recent French tourist in Ireland, M. Daryl, whose book I picked up the other day in Paris, for after mentioning three or four of the pictures, and gravely affirming that the existence here of a gallery of Irish portraits proves the passionate devotion of Dublin to Home Rule, he dismisses the collection with the verdict that “ce ne vaut pas le diable.” Nevertheless it already contains more really good pictures than the Musée either of Lyons or of Marseilles, both of them much larger and wealthier cities than Dublin. Leaving out the Three Maries of Perugino at Marseilles, and at Lyons the Ascension, which was once the glory of San Pietro di Perugia, the Moses of Paul Veronese, and Palma Giovanni’s Flagellation, these two galleries put together cannot match Dublin with its Jan Steen, most characteristic without being coarse, its Terburg, a life-size portrait of the painter’s favourite model, a young Flemish gentleman, presented to him as a token of regard, its portrait of a Venetian personage by Giorgione, with a companion portrait by Gian Bellini, its beautiful Italian landscape by Jan Both, its flower-wreathed head of a white bull by Paul Potter, its exquisitely finished “Vocalists” by Cornells Begyn, its admirable portrait of a Dutch gentleman by Murillo, and its two excellent Jacob Ruysdaels. A good collection is making, too, of original drawings, and engravings, and a special room is devoted to modern Irish art. I wish the Corcoran Gallery (founded, too, by an Irishman!) were half as worthy of Washington, or the Metropolitan Museum one-tenth part as worthy of New York!
The National Gallery in London has loaned some pictures to Dublin, and Mr. Doyle is getting together, from private owners, a most interesting gallery of portraits of men and women famous in connection with Irish history. The beautiful Gunnings of the last century, the not less beautiful and much more brilliant Sheridans of our own, Burke, Grattan, Tom Moore, Wellington, Curran, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, O’Connell, Peg Woffington, Canning, and Castlereagh, Dean Swift, Laurence Sterne are all here—wits and statesmen, soldiers and belles, rebels and royalists, orators and poets. Two things strike one in this gallery of the “glories of Ireland.” The great majority of the faces are of the Anglo-Irish or Scoto-Irish type; and the collection owes its existence to an accomplished public officer, who bears an Irish name, who is a devout Catholic, and who is also an outspoken opponent of the Home Rule contention as now carried on.
The gallery is open on liberal conditions to students. Mr. Doyle tells me that a young sister of Mr. Parnell was at one time an assiduous student here. He used to stop and chat with her about her work as he passed through the gallery. One day he met her coming out. “Mr. Doyle,” she said, “are you a Home Ruler?” “Certainly not,” he replied good-naturedly. Whereupon, with an air of melancholy resignation, the young lady said, “Then we can never more be friends!” and therewith flitted forth.
A small room contains some admirable bits of the work of Richard Doyle, among other things a weird and grotesque, but charming cartoon of an elfish procession passing through a quaint and picturesque mediaeval city. It is a conte fantastique in colour—a marvel of affluent fancy and masterly skill.
I found here this morning letters calling me over to Paris for a short time, and one also from Mr. Davitt, in London, explaining that my note to him through the National League had never reached him, and that he had gone to London on his woollen business. I have written asking him to meet me to-morrow in London, and I shall cross over to-night.
LONDON, Wednesday, Feb. 15th.—Mr. Davitt spent an hour with me to-day, and we had a most interesting conversation. His mind is just now full of the woollen enterprise he is managing, which promises, he thinks, in spite of our tariff, to open the American markets to the excellent woollen goods of Ireland. He has gone into it with all his usual earnestness and ability. This is not a matter of politics with him, but of patriotism and of business. He tells me he has already secured very large orders from the United States. I hope he is not surprised, as I certainly am not, to find that the Parliamentarian Irish party give but a half-hearted and lukewarm support to such enterprises as this. Perhaps he has forgotten, as I have not, the efforts which a certain member of that party made in 1886 to persuade an Irish gentleman from St. Louis, who had brought over a considerable sum of money for the relief of the distress in North-Western Ireland, into turning it over to the League, on the express ground that the more the people were made to feel the pinch of the existing order of things, the better it would be for the revolutionary movement.
The Irish Woollen Company will, nevertheless, be a success, I believe, and a success of considerably more value to Ireland than the election of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt as M.P. for Deptford would be.