 CHAPTER XI THE LONDON IRISH The Irishman in London appears to lose a great deal of his luster. If you wish to see him at his best, in this metropolis, you must go to the bar. If you wish to see him at his worst, you must go to the House of Commons. And both best and worst are pretty bad. The Irishman at the bar shall not be named, but all the world knows that they are a fairly ill-conditioned community, savage, rude, reasonably illiterate, and not in the least witty. Many of them model themselves on the late Lord Russell and come off accordingly. Others again are beefy and vulgar and notorious bullies. The judicial bench does not include an Irish judge. Possibly this is fortunate. In London journalism, the Irish scarcely count. Mr. W. M. Thompson edits a sheet called Reynolds Newspaper to the complete satisfaction of Mr. Clement Shorter, and Mr. T. P. O'Connor edits T. P.'s Weekly, and M. A. P. Both of them journals with which London could well afford to dispense. As for Irish reporters and sub-editors, they are few and timid and well under the heel of the Scotch, who are numerous and rampant and unblushing. In the minor professions, such as physics, publishing, and stock-broking, the Irish do not figure at all impressively. The truly great physicians of London are mostly Scotch. So, thank heaven, are the truly great publishers, while the stockbrokers are commonly believed to belong to the tribe of Manasseh. Of the politicians a great deal more has been written than the politicians are worth. But us draw a decent green veil over them. Few Englishmen nowadays know which of them is alive and which of them is dead. Neither can one tell offhand whether they are for the government or again it. I have heard rumors of the existence in London of an Irish literary society. Somewhere in Hallburn there exists too, I am told, an Irish club. So far as letters are concerned, London is pretty well denuded of Irishmen. Mr. George Moore no longer abides with us. Mr. W. B. Yates has laterally preferred Dublin to the Euston Road. Mr. George Bernard Shaw has become an American playwright. If these gentlemen are members of the Irish Literary Society, so much the better for the Irish Literary Society. There is an Irish poetist resident in Twickenham, but whose who informs us that her Celtic quality has not been stimulated by a sojourn in her native land. The Irish club would seem to devote itself to smokers, socials and enjoyable evenings. Its Saturnalia are duly reported in Reynolds newspaper. Probably the most distinguished Irishman in the Metropolis is Sir Thomas Lipton, whose name is as prominently associated with sport as it is with tea. Then there are the Irish Guards, one of the finest bodies of men in the King's Service, and Mr. Dennis O'Sullivan, England's only Irish actor. It will thus be seen that the London Irish do not shine effulgently. None of them is at the top of things, as it were. None of them has got very far above the middling. The reason no doubt is that the Irish temperament is coy. The Scotchman who comes to London knows that he is an alien, and an interloper, and despised of his fellow men, but he blusters it out. The Irishman on the other hand feels his position keenly and refuses to be other than diffident. As a rule too, he is without commercial aptitude, and not vastly taken with a blessed word thrift. Besides which, Irishmen do not come to London in droves as do the Scotch. When they emigrate, their natural tendency is toward America. In any case it cannot be suggested that the London Irish have at any time presumed to be aggressive. Neither have they made pretensions to superiority or exhibited a disposition to clannishness. That they do not count is therefore probably their own fault. For London, in a greater degree perhaps than any other city in the world, is always open to prostrate herself before the invader, providing he be assertive and pushful enough. Leaving out the more or less eminent and glancing for a moment at the common rank of Irishmen in London, one is confronted with two facts, and two facts only. The first of them is that the London Irish can muster insufficient force to make a St. Patrick's Day concert, or so financially successful. And the second is that the morning after the Metropolitan magistrates have invariably to deal with a fairly noble batch of Irish drunks. Practically this is all that is known by the cockney respecting his Irish fellow citizen, and I think that it is distinctly unfortunate for Ireland, because it fosters a false impression. The Scotch who are wilyer take great care not to get drunk on St. Andrew's Day. CHAPTER XII TOM MORE In the Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue, edited by Messers Staufford A. Brooke and T. W. Walliston, Thomas Moore is represented by eleven pieces, to wit, the song of Fanoula, the Irish peasant to his mistress, at the mid-hour of night, when he who adores thee, after the battle, the light of other days, one music, echo, as slow our ship, no not more welcome, and my birthday. I do not suppose for a moment that the editors intended to suggest that this election represents in any sense the more popular of Moore's writings from the Irish point of view. Only two of the lyrics indeed, namely, the light of other days, and as slow our ship, are really well known among lovers of poetry, even in Ireland. We assume, therefore, that the remaining sets of verses have been inserted because, in the opinion of Mr. Staufford A. Brooke and his co-editor, they are the best of Moore. Qua poet in the English Tongue. We quote here at length the song of Fanoula. Silent, O Moil, be the roar of thy water, break not ye breezes your chain of repose, while murmuring mournfully Lure's lonely daughter tells to the nightstar her tale of woes. When shall the swan, her death-note singing, sleep with wings in darkness furrowed? When will heaven its sweet bells ringing, call my spirit from this stormy world? Sadly, O Moil, to thy winter wave weeping, fate bids me languish long ages away. Yet still in her darkness doth Aaron lie sleeping, still doth the pure light its dawning delay. When will that day-star, mildly springing, warm our isle with peace and love? When will heaven its sweet bells ringing, call my spirit to the fields above? As the devil might inquire, is this poetry? I believe that I shall have with me the sounder critics when I say that it is small sentiment very carelessly set down. In sixteen lines we have quite a number of different measures, and more would seem to have labored under the impression that he was writing in one. In other words, the verses halt. As to the sentiment nobody can question its utter banality. What a critic of Mr. Stafford Brook's caliber can see in it heaven alone knows. He might have got better verses and better sentiment out of any average breach of promise case. Nor are the remaining pieces much above the standard required by those eminent judges of poetry, the gentlemen who write more so for the drawing-room. For myself I venture the opinion that more lives on the strength of rich and rare were the gems she wore, the meeting of the waters, the harp that once threw Tara's halls. Believe me if all those endearing young charms, the minstrel boy, the last rose of summer, and the Canadian boat song, most of which efforts have been set to music and are thereby materially aided to survival. So that on the whole Thomas Moore may not be reckoned as in any sense a purveyor of the higher kinds of poetry. It is credible, however, to the Irish people that they should have produced and put their emotional and moral trust in a more rather than a burns. But morals on one side burns is immeasurably the greater poet, even though at times he wrote drivel of the feeblest sort. All the same it must be confessed that the general consent which keeps more at the head of the Irish poets is sufficiently grounded. For weak vessel, though he may be, we do not find another Irish poet in the English tongue who could properly be placed above him. Right down to and including William Allingham, the history of Irish poetry in the English tongue has been the history of happy-go-lucky mediocrity. Even Mangan, who has laterally been credited with a share of the authentic fire, exhibits a facility, a slip-shotness, and an apness to the banal, which savor of the librettist. From his most considerable production, we take the following stanzas. The nameless one. Roll forth, my song, like the rushing river. That sweeps along to the mighty sea. God will inspire me while I deliver my soul to thee. Tell thou the world when bones lie whitening amid the last homes of youth and eld. That there once was one whose veins ran lightning, no eye beheld. Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour, how shown for him, through his griefs and gloom, no star of all heaven sends to light our path to the tomb. Roll on, my song, and to after ages, tell how disdaining all earth can give. He would have taught men from wisdom's pages the way to live. And tell how trampled, derided, hated, and worn by weakness, disease, and wrong. He fled for shelter to God, who mated his soul with song. With song, which always so blind or rapid, flowed like a reel in the morning beam, perchance not deep, but intense and rapid, a mountain stream. Tell how the nameless condemned for years long, to herd with demons from hell beneath, saw things that made him with groans and tears long for even death. Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, he trade in friendship befooled in love. With spirit shipwrecked and young hopes blasted, he still, still strove. There may be lyrical impulse here, but it is of quite an ordinary quality. The much-vaunted line about veins that ran lightning could, I think, be paralleled out of previous poets. And the first half of it is clumsy and cacophonous. Night hour and light hour might have stepped straight out of the comic poets. And the same may be said of years long and tears long, which J. K. Stephen would have chortled over for a metrical effect. And when we come to still, still strove, we are among the librettists with the vengeance. I have seen James Clarence Mangan co-located with Poe. If comparisons with America must be made, we should range him alongside that bright spirit, Ella Wheeler Wilcox. For Sir Samuel Ferguson, he has been highly praised by Mr. Swinburne, Aubrey Devere, and of course by Mr. W. B. Yates. Mr. Yates pronounces him to be the greatest poet Ireland has produced, one who among the somewhat-sybaritic singers of his day was like some aged sea king, sitting among the inland wheat and poppies, the savor of the sea about him and its strength, hark into the ancient sea king. Then Dyer was their disorder, as the wavering line at first, sway to and fro he resolute. Then all disrupted burst, like waters from a broken dam, effused upon the plain, the shelter of Kilaltis Woods and winding glens to gain. But Kenai Domno, when he stood to view the route air-long, spying that white unmoving head amid the scattering throng, exclaimed, of all their broken host, one only man I see, not flying, and I therefore judge him impotent to be. Of use of limb, go take alive, he cried, and hither fetched the hoary haired unmoving man. A swift battalion went, and breaking through the hindmost line, where Kellock sat hard by, took him alive, and chair and man of hoisting shoulder high. They bore him back, his hoary locks and red eyes gleaming far. The grimus standard yet displayed that day o'er all the war, and grimly, where they set him down, he eyed the encircling ring of bishops and of chafing chiefs who stood about the king. Then with his crozier's nether and turned towards him, the chivalric said, wretch abhorred, to thee it is we owe this bloody work. By whose malignant counsel moved, thy hapless nephew first sought impious aid of foreigners, for which thou be accursed. Surely this is rank butter woman's jog trot to market, the kind of thing, perhaps, that Mr. J. Hickory would, and Mr. Arthur Collins might joyously and jointly produce with the delight of the babies of England. But for the greatest poet Ireland has produced, for the aged sea king sitting among the inland wheat and poppies. It is poor, poor stuff indeed. Of course I do not suggest that Sir Samuel Ferguson, who really was a Scotchman, not a sea king at all, could not do better. The fact, however, that the greatest poet Ireland has produced, managed to do so badly, and was capable even of worse, speaks at any rate a small volume for Irish poetry. The sole remaining Irish poet worth troubling about is Aubrey Devere, and an examination of his work shows that, while he persistently exercised himself on Irish subjects and laid himself open to the charge of Irish slackness and perfunctoriness, he could write poetry of the kind which is entirely classic in its derivation. But it is certain that he cannot be considered to have belonged to the far-famed Celtic movement, and that he was miles behind Landor, even in the severe classic vein. I am afraid that, broadly speaking, Ireland has not produced any poet of convincing greatness at all. The treasury of Irish poetry compared, say, with such a collection of English poetry as Palgrave's golden treasury is a ghastly exhibition. Some of the moderns, set forward by the editors, have at his true accomplished work which is not without a certain distinction. But the ancients, Thomas More included, are not for the reading of the discriminant. Indeed Irish poetry in the English tongue is on the whole, like Ireland itself, a decidedly tumble-down affair. In a sense, the genius of the country may be said to resemble the genius of Japan. That is to say, while every Irishman may be reckoned something of a poet in himself, there are no Irish poets. Just as, while the Japanese are all poets, none of them has managed to evolve a respectable poem. This I cannot help thinking is a pity for Ireland, and more to be sorrowed over than her lack of commercial aptitude, than her poverty, and then her wrongs. There are those who tell us that the true poetry of the Irish is hidden away in the memories of the peasantry, taking the shape of Gaelic folk songs, ballads, and so forth. No doubt much may be said for this theory, particularly as there is a Gaelic League which seems to be making a good deal of impression upon certain sections of the people. At the same time it seems remarkable that if the poetry of the Gael be so rich and ornate and satisfactory as those who are able to read it would have us believe, nobody takes the trouble to put it before us in a form calculated to preserve it. The Gaelic character is pretty enough, and I've seen odd translations of Gaelic poetry which promised rather well for the bulk. Yet it seems more than doubtful if the druid singers, as I suppose Mr. Yates would call them, ever had among their ranks a Homer, or for that matter an anachron or a Theocritus. And talking of the Gaelic League, I should like to note for the entertainment of persons of humor that when I visited its establishment in Dublin some months back I found the upper portion of the window occupied by a placard which announced in large Roman letters that a well-known leaguer was about to open a shop in Dublin, object to push the sale of Irish provisions. People are human even in Ireland. End of Chapter 12 Recording by John Brandon Chapter 13 of The Wild Irishman by Thomas William Hodgson T.W.H. Crossland. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by John Brandon. Chapter 13 W.B. Yates It might reasonably be supposed that the last drop in Ireland's cup of bitterness was Mr. William Butler Yates. An emotional and misfortunate people with the tyrants heel on its neck and poverty and disaster always in attendance upon it may be excused if it does not altogether dance to the pipings of a pretty fellow like Mr. Yates. In point of fact however, Ireland fails to dance not because of her sadness but because Mr. Yates' minstrelry is to all intents and purposes utterly alien to her. In England or more correctly speaking in London it is true that there have been and possibly is now a small cult of what is commonly called a Celtic muse and the head and front of it of course is Mr. Yates. He has found ardent if undiscriminating support among the Irish reporters and reviewers on the daily papers. He enjoys the patronage of Mr. Clemens shorter and he has received respectfully at the Irish Literary Club. Further I am told that there is a musically-minded elocutionist in London who goes about chanting his numbers to the three-stringed sultry. That Mr. Yates is a poet of some parts nobody in his senses would attempt to deny that he is a vast or potent or as he himself would no doubt phrase it a druid poet I am not disposed to admit. The strength of him is slight indeed the thought of him rattles forever around the trivial. He has a still small voice with a wistfulness about it and it is on this wistfulness that he has built it up his business. His contemporaries the men among whom whether he likes it or no he will always have to range are every one of them stronger men than he. They are ruder and more forceful more gusty and less attenuated if only by fits and starts. They do their best to try to belong to the great British poetical tradition. They fail lamentably but their work bears marks of aspiration. Mr. Yates on the other hand has been particular to pose on a little hill of his own. He imagines that he has discovered a sort of private tradition though which he calls Celtic. Out of Ireland he believes himself to have captured druid music and this he has put up for us in sundry lyrical pieces and sundry plays. His lyrical pieces are admired in all the drawing rooms and all the sub-editors rooms and his plays have been stamped with a heartfelt approval of the Chief Secretary for Ireland and Mr. Max Beerbaum. The general opinion of him may be summed up in three words. How charmingly Celtic! It is an old contention of mine that Mr. Yates's qualities are not Celtic at all. I go further and say that as a fact there are no Celtic qualities which are not common in good English poetry. The best Celt we ever had was Mr. Yates's own master, one William Blake, who was sheer cockney. Mr. Yates is just Blake spun out and over-conscious. The moon like a flower in heaven's high bower, with silent delight, sits and smiles on the night. I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea. We tire of the flame of the meteor before it can fade and flee. And the flame of the blue star of twilight hung low on the rim of the sky, as awakened in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die. Sweet babe in thy face, off desires I can trace. Secret joys and secret smiles, little pretty infant wiles. As thy softest limbs I feel, smiles as of the morning steel. O'er thy cheek and o'er thy breast, where thy little heart doth rest. I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart, trembling cold in ghastly fears. Ha! she did depart. Soon after she was gone from me, a traveler came by, silently, invisibly. He took her with a sigh. The beloved gaze in thine own heart, the holy tree is growing there. From joy the holy branches start, and all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colors of its fruit have dowered the stars with merry light. The surety of its hidden root has planted quiet in the night. Which is Blake and which is Yates? He may put the name of either under any of those stanzas without being guilty of an unpardonable critical lapse. Mr. Yates took Blake and imitated him as frankly, and it may be as unconsciously as many less sophisticated versifiers have imitated Tennyson or Mr. Swinburne or Rosetti. It is credible to him that he should have had discernment enough to perceive in Blake an exceptional and individual content. But why having got hold of that content, having saturated himself with it, as it were, and having found the exploitation of it easy and provocative of praise? Mr. Yates should turn round and call it Celtic is something of a puzzle. Of course, one has to remember that among the people whose interests are material rather than spiritual, the poet who would get a hearing is compelled to have resort to a certain amount of adventitiousness and empiricism. We poets in our youth begin in gladness, but thereof come in the end despondency and madness. Sayeth Wordsworth. We poets in our youth also begin in sincerity and with a single lie to the glory of the muses. But too frequently, even while our youth is still with us, we begin to think about the glory of ourselves and take steps accordingly. It is good for us if we have any gift at all to organize and advertise a school, with ourselves carefully elected by ourselves through the position of arch-priest. The critic who in an idle hour sat down cockney school has a great deal to answer for. Somebody followed him hard with the lake school, and in due course we had the fleshy school. It is to be noted, however, that these epithets were bestowed by the critics upon the poets, and not by the poets upon the poets themselves. I venture to suggest that it has been slightly different in the case of Mr. Yates and his following. In Mr. Yates' mind, perhaps without his being wholly alive to it, something like the following has taken place. To be of any account in this world a poet must have a quality or cry of his own. There is a quality or poignancy of individualism about Blake, which has not yet become obvious to the multitude. I admire it and I can imitate it and possibly improve upon it, therefore let me adopt it for my own. And as I am an Irishman, I shall cause it to be known not as the spirit of Blake, but as the Celtic quality, Sela. I do not suggest for a moment that Mr. Yates' conduct in this matter has been either wicked or unjustifiable. I do not even suggest that Mr. Yates has been quite aware of what he was doing. But not to put too fine a point upon it, I do say that he has been modern, and that it is a thousand pities. There is nothing in Ireland, and there never has been anything in Ireland which will justify the appropriation of Blake as a sort of exclusive Irish product. And Mr. Yates has written nothing which he could not have written just as well had even a cockney, or a Hebrew, capable of appreciating the spiritual and technical parts of Blake, and of perceiving the beauty of certain scraps of Irish history and folklore. As an Irish poet, Mr. Yates, in my opinion, fails completely. It is as reasonable to call him an Irish poet as it would be to call Milton a Hebrew poet because he wrote Paradise Lost, or Mr. Swinburne, a Greek poet because he wrote Atalanta. There is not an Irishman, Qua Irishman, who wants Mr. Yates any more than there is an Irishman, Qua Irishman, who wants Mr. Yates' Irish literary theatre. Mr. Yates' poetry and Mr. Yates' Irish literary theatre are Blake's poetry and Blake's literary theatre. They belong to the Houston Road and not to Tara. They are cultivated, wary, wistful, minor English, and not Irish at all. You have to be English and a trifle subtle at that to get on with them. Blake's laurels are very posthumous and recent because the Englishman of his time was busy with pope and crab and had a sort of suspicion that Wordsworth was a lunatic. Englishmen did not know even Shakespeare in those days. At any rate, not in the way we know him nowadays. To the pope suckled Englishmen of culture, Shakespeare, if he was anything at all, was a sort of robustius and flowery dramatist. They played him in full-bottomed wigs and small clothes. Today the tendencies are all the other way. Shakespeare, we shall tell you, was no playwright but a poet and the biggest of them. Our modern actors spoil him for us, not by their cuts and modifications, but by their rarity shows and mouthings. Who of them can say for you to your soul's satisfaction? Oh, here will I set up my everlasting rest and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world weary flesh. Shakespeare is for all time and more and more for the closet. Blake is a greater poet than the critical are disposed to admit. Even in this age of tender enthousiasms, and Mr. Yates is a poet not because he is Irish or Celtic, but insofar and precisely as far as he has had the good sense to take Blake for his master. For Celticism, as it is understood by its professors, Shakespeare abounds in it. First Lady Whom, my gracious Lord, shall I be your playfellow? Ma'am? No, I'll none of you. First Lady, why, my sweet Lord? Ma'am, you'll kiss me hard and speak to me as if I were a baby still. I love you better. Second Lady, and why so, my Lord? Ma'am? Not for because your brows are blacker, yet black brows, they say, become some women best, so that there be not too much hair there, but in a semicircle or half moon made with a pen. Second Lady, who taught you this? Ma'am, I learned it out of women's faces. Pray now, what color are your eyebrows? First Lady Lou, my Lord? Ma'am? Nay, there's a mock. I have seen a lady's nose that has been blue, but not her eyebrows. Second Lady Harky, the queen your mother rounds apace. We shall present our service to a fine new prince one of these days, and then you'd wanton with us if we would have you. First Lady She is spread of light into a goodly bulk. Good time encounter her. Her? What wisdom stirs amongst you? Come, sir, now, I am for you again. Pray you sit by us and tell the tale. Ma'am, Mary or sad shalt be. Her, as Mary as you will. Ma'am? A sad tale's best for winter. I have one of sprites and goblins. Her? Let's have that, good sir. Come on, sit down, come on, and do your best to frighten me with your sprites. You're powerful at it. Ma'am, there was a man. Her. Nay, come sit down, then on. Ma'am, dwelt by a churchyard. I will tell it softly. Yand crickets shall not hear it. Her. Come on, then, and gift in mine ear. There is enough Celtic quality here, surely, to satisfy both Mr. Yates and Mr. Shorter. In fine, this tiny episode, out of a winter's tale, is quite as good and quite as Celtic, as anything the Blake school, to give it its honest title, has managed hitherto to produce. What the average Irishman would think about it is another story. It is a pity to take from Ireland even a trifle over which she might, not improperly, loom herself. But Mr. Yates, in the figure of Irish poet, reminds us of nothing so much as a peacock butterfly, purchased in the chrysalis state out of France by the careful entomologist, hidden in a plant pot at his parlor window, and slaughtered in labelled British, so soon as it has had time to spread its wistful wings. End of Chapter 13 Recording by John Brandon Chapter 14 It has been remarked by a certain hawker of platitudes, that humor is that which makes a man laugh. There have been several definitions of wit, one of them by Sidney Smith, and all of them more or less wanting incompleteness. But in a general way, nobody is particularly keen on definitions, provided they can get for their amusement and exhilaration, either humor or wit. During the past few decades, we have heard a vast deal of the advantages which accrue from the possession of what is called a sense of humor. The special sense of faculty for appreciating a joke is nowadays cultivated and consciously cultivated by all sorts and conditions of people. The gravest and most reverent persons are want to enliven their conversation or their discourse with quips, cranks, jibes, and other sallies ingeniously calculated to set the listener in a roar. The House of Commons has laterally appeared to be filled with gentlemen who live to amuse each other. There are judges who seem almost incapable of opening their mouths without attempting the hilarious, and even bishops and bankers must have their little joke. The press also strains after humorsomeness in every degree, and when critics wish to be particularly severe, they write simply, Mr. So-and-So has no sense of humor. And here, in effect, we have what I conceive to be another distinct injustice to Ireland. For Irish wit and humor have passed into a tradition, and are believed, by good judges, to be the very wittiest and most humorous wit and humor that gods are likely to vouch safe to us. In the course of years, many fairly thick volumes have been compiled out of the abundance of humorous material Ireland has furnished forth. To turn to such a volume, however, is in my opinion to experience a certain disappointment. There are jokes that is true and jokes innumerable, but somehow, for the modern laughter seeker, there is a distinct flatness about them. Furthermore, they are nearly all chestnuts, a fact which renders it pretty plain that the people of Ireland have come to a full stop as it were, and cease to produce them. I subjoin a few examples called Haphaazard from a book published so recently as last year. A prisoner was trying to explain to a judge and jury his innocence of a certain crime. It's not me self, he cried, as will be after trying to de-save your honours. I didn't hit the poor dead gentleman at all. It was him that struck the blow, and the exhaustion killed him. And what's more, I wasn't there at the time. I perceive, observed the judge, your trying to prove an alibi. An alibi? exclaimed the prisoner, evidently pleased at the big word being suggested to strengthen his defence. Yes, said the judge. Can you tell me what is a good alibi? Faith, your honour, replied the prisoner, and it's a loy boy which the prisoner gets off. What past between yourself and the complainant inquired the magistrate in a county court? I think so, replied the worthy O'Brien. A half-dozen bricks and a lump of paving stone. I say, Paddy, set a tourist to his car-driver. That is the worst-looking horse you drive I ever saw. Why don't you fatten him up? Fat him up, is it? queried the Jehu. Faith, the poor-based, can hardly carry the little mate that's on him now. No. Have you had any experience with children, inquired a lady of a prospective nurse? Oh, yes, mum, replied the woman blandly. All used to be a child me self-wanced. A Jarvie who was driving through the streets of Dublin meant with an obstruction in the shape of a man riding a donkey. Now then, you too, he exclaimed. An Irish member named Dockardy, who subsequently became Chief Justice of Ireland, asked Canning what he thought of his maiden speech. The only fault I could find with it, said Canning, is that you called the speaker, sir, too often. My dear fellow, replied Dockardy, if you knew the mental state I was in while speaking, you would not wonder if I called him mum. Get on, man, get on, said a traveller to his car-driver. Wake up your nag. Sure, sir, was the reply. I haven't the heart to bait him. What's the matter with him, inquired the traveller. Is he sick? No, sir, answered the Jarvie. He's not sick, but it's unlucky he is, sir, unlucky. You see, sir, every morning before I put him in the car, I tosses him whether he'll have a feed of oats, or I'll have a drink of whisky, and the poor bassed has lost five mornings running. Did you notice no suspicious character about the neighbourhood? Said a magistrate to an inexperienced policeman. Sure, your hanner, replied the policeman. I saw but one man, and I asked him what he was doing there at that time of night. Says he, I have no business here just now, but I expect to open a jewellery store in the vicinity later on. At that I says, I wish you success, sir. Yes, said the magistrate, and he did open a jewellery store in the vicinity later on, and stole seventeen watches. Be gora, your hanner, answered the constable after a pause. The man may have been a thief, but he was no liar. Bridges, I don't think it's quite the thing for you to entertain company in the kitchen. Don't you worry, Mum. Sure, I wouldn't be after depriving ye of the parlour. An old lady in Dublin, weighing about sixteen stone, engaged a car driver to convey her to a north wall steamer. Arrived there she handed the driver his legal fare, sixpence, gazing disconsolately at the coin in his hand, and then at the fat old lady he exclaimed as he turned away, I'll leave ye to the almighty, Mum. Prisoner demanded the magistrate of a man charged with begging. Have you any visible means of support? Yes, your honour, replied the prisoner, and then turning to his wife who was in court he said, Bridget, stand up, so that the court can see ye as. Now it is plain that we have here a fairly represented selection of the kind of wit and humor that is supposed to come to us out of Ireland. Some of it no doubt is reasonably good. Some of it is quite mild. Possibly it is amusing and calculated to tickle old-fashioned people. It one has distinct qualms about it, when one considers it as a means of provoking the laughter of the twentieth-century person. The fact is that humor has been made so much of a cult in the modern mind that it has to be very humorous indeed, not to say a trifle subtle, if it is to raise a smile. And in considering the examples quoted we are faced with a further difficulty. Are these anecdotes of unquestionable Irish extraction? I'm afraid not. Their authenticity is impeachable. Mutates mutandes. They have been told of cockneys and Yorkshire men, and Somersetshire men, and even of Scotchmen. Furthermore there is nothing in them that can be considered particularly, and exclusively, Irish. Or indicative of the Irish temperament and character as it exists today. Your modern Irishman, as I have pointed out, is a dreary and melancholy white. Laughter and sprightliness have died out of him, and whether in thought or word he is about as dull and plant-a-grade as even a sad man can well be. The eminent people who stand for Ireland in this country are all of them afflicted with a similar lack of cheerfulness. Rouse them, and they can be as bitter and retuperative and aboriginal as any Scotchmen of them all. But their ordinary habit is sad, uncertain, and inept, and they do not know how to laugh. Here and there one of them at the bar, or the House of Commons, or at a greasy journalistic banquet, does his evil best to keep up the Irish tradition for smartness and wittiness of remark. But the attempt is invariably a failure, because at the back of it there is no real brain and no real flow of spirits. One of the biggest bullies at the bar is a beefy Irishman who esteems himself a great humorist. I've heard him fire off twenty or thirty idiotic jokes in the course of half an hour or so. And always does he snigger at the beginning of his precious jib. Always does he snigger in the middle. Always does he make pretense of becoming apoplectic with chortle at the end. The circumstance that people laugh at him and not with him does not appear to occur to his small, if legal mind. His dearest friends call him the snigger. And it is said that he is in the habit of retiring to his chambers of afternoons for the purpose of having a protracted fit of giggling. Primed with four or five glasses of cheap port, his capacity for low comedy becomes so evident that one trembles lest some enterprising theatrical manager should offer him the Leno Welch part in next year's Little Goodie Two Shoes. Another witty Irishman who shall be nameless came to these shores with a fair array of good gifts at his disposal. Knowing himself for an Irishman and having faith in the Irish tradition, he forthwith set up in business as a posturing clown and professional grinner through horse collars with a result that his genius is altogether obscured. Irishmen of all degrees will do better if they endeavor to remember that they have really no sense of humor left. The only one of them who has made anything like a satisfactory reputation in London, Mr. W. B. Yates, to wit, has helped himself to it by being as devoid of humor as a boneyard. Mr. Yates has never been known publicly to try his hand at the very smallest joke. The sobriety of the hearse is his and much good sense also. For the eminent Irish, as we know them among us, are by nature neither witty nor humorous. And those who try to be so succeed in being only fatuous and vulgar. Somebody has said cuttingly that a Frenchman consists of equal parts of tiger and monkey. Of certain of the eminent Irish in London, it may be said that they are half jackal and half performing dog, for they are at once hungry and fantastic. CHAPTER XV MORE WIT AND HUMER The real truth about Irish humor, as a thing to itself and apart, is that it is based either on ignorance or on a certain slowness of mind. The Dublin car driver, who, on being told by a constable that his name was obliterated from his car, replied, Are my names not obliterated? It's O'Grady. No doubt achieved what will pass among the average for humor. All the same he did not know that he was saying anything good, and his mot, if mot one may call it, was the direct outcome of a profound ignorance of the English language. The books of Irish humor abound with instances of this form of humorsomeness. You are not opaque, are you? Sarcastically asked one Irishman of another who is standing in front of him at the theatre. Indeed, I'm not, replied the other. It's O'Brien that I am. Clearly one might manufacture this kind of humor, odd infinitum. The Chinese are said to consider it a great joke if a man should fall down and break his arm, and I have seen Englishmen laughing at a man who has been unfortunate enough to have his hat blown off in a high wind. But the Irish do not laugh at these things. Even the native bull of which they are so proud fails to tickle them. The Irishman says his bull solemnly and unconsciously, and the Englishman does the laughing. In essence the Irish bull is really a blunder. Not all, with its usual frankness, defines a bull as a ludicrous inconsistency or blunder in speech. Children and Irishmen are always making them. If it please the court, quote an Irish attorney, if I am wrong in this I have another pint which is equally conclusive. An Irish reporter giving an account of a burglary remarked, after a fruitless search all the money was recovered, except one pair of boots. A Dublin clerk on being asked why he was a quarter of an hour late at the office made answer, the tram-car I came by was full, so I had to walk. This is the seventh night you've come home in the morning, observed an Irish lady to her spouse. The next time you go out you'll stay at home and open the door for yourself. The following advertisement is said to have appeared in a Dublin newspaper, whereas John Hall has fraudulently taken away several articles of wearing apparel without my knowledge. This is to inform him that if he does not forthwith return the same, his name shall be made public. An Irishman who accidentally came across another Irishman who had failed to meet him after a challenge addressed him in these words. Well, sir, I met you this morning and you did not turn up. However, I am determined to meet you tomorrow morning, whether you come or not. Drunk, said a man, speaking of his neighbor. He was that drunk that he made ten halves of every word. A man who was employed as a hod carrier was told that he must always carry up fourteen bricks in his hod. One morning the supply of bricks ran short, and the man could find but thirteen to put in his hod. In answer to a loud yell from the street one of the masons on top of the scaffolding called out, what do you want? Troll me down one brick, bald pat, pointing to his hod, to make me number good. Of course the great and abiding glory of Ireland, in the way of bull-makers, was the never-to-be-forgotten Sir Boyle Roach. This worthy night once charged a political opponent with being an enemy to both kingdoms, who wishes to diminish the brotherly affection of the two sister countries. He also said that a man differs from a bird in not being able to be in two places at once, and that the Irish people were living from hand to mouth, like the birds of the air. A petition of the citizens of Belfast, in favour of Catholic emancipation, he stigmatised as an airy fabric based upon a sandy foundation, and he expressed his willingness to give up not only a part, but if necessary, even the whole of our constitution, to preserve the remainder. In one of his most famous speeches there occurs the appended passage. Mr. Speaker, if we once permitted the villainous French masons to meddle with the buttresses and walls of our ancient constitution, they would never stop, nor stay, Sir, until they brought the foundation stones tumbling down about the ears of the nation. If these Gallican villains should invade us, tis on that table, maybe, those honourable members might see their own destinies lying in heaps atop of one another. Here perhaps, Sir, the murderous crew would break in and cut us to pieces, and throw our bleeding heads upon that table to stare us in the face. Is your father alive yet? inquired one O'Brien, of one Magori. No replied Magori solemnly, not yet. A beggar called at a house and said, for the love of heaven, Mom, give me a crust of bread, for I'm so thirsty I don't know where I'll sleep tonight, all of which is very funny, and as who should say, very quaint, but is it humor? It provokes a smile certainly, yet it points to simplicity rather than subtlety in the Irish character. Indeed the absolute truth about the bull is that it is the child of a plentiful lack of wit. A nice derangement of epitaphs, an opening of one's mouth and putting of one's foot in it, may provoke mirth in other people, but it does not prove one to be either witty or merry. It is satisfactory to know that according to the latest observations, the fine art of bullmaking is going out of fashion among Irishmen. The Irish were the inventors of the bull. They brought it to its greatest perfection. They made it redound, to their credit, as a witty nation, and one cannot deny their right to cease from its manufacture if they see fit. In the House of Commons, a bull is nowadays seldom perpetrated, whether consciously or unconsciously, at any rate, by the Irish party. Irish members of parliament have grown too wary to be called bullying. They walk delicately in English-cut frock coats. They rather pride themselves on their ability to keep down the brogue, and at the bare mention of the word bull, they are prone to shiver. There is one feature of Irish wit and humor, which is worthy of admiration and imitation. It is a negative feature, truly, but an excellent one. Irishmen do not seem capable of that last infirmary of the doting mind, the pawn. To play effectively upon words is, of course, an art in itself, and kept within bounds, it is an amusing art. But the man who drops out of art into sheer mechanism, which is what has happened to the average punster, cannot be considered worthy of the respect of his fellows. The Irish, as I have said, do not appear to have descended to these depths. They may be a worn-out, a weary, a dull-witted, an exhausted, and a brooding and melancholy people, but they are not punsters. Herein they have a distinct advantage over the English, among whom the pun appears to obtain wider and wider currency. It is a lamentable fact that there are judges on the English bench who never let slip an opportunity for punning. It makes juries and the gallery guffaw, and it gets a judge the reputation of being a wit and the possessor of those minor literary graces which are supposed to be included in the judicial prerogative. Judges are commonly understood to be irremovable, but I think that after their third pun, retirement should be the only course for them. The man who makes a pun insults the intellect of his auditors and commits a gross outrage upon the language, let all punsters, whether in high or low places, take heed that they are vulgar and vicious persons, and neither witty nor wise. A thousand honest bulls are less to be deprecated than the weeniest pun that was ever let loose. Before leaving this part of our subject, it is perhaps desirable that we should remember that two of the very wittiest men of our time have come to us from Ireland. One of them was the late Mr. Oscar Wilde, and the other is Mr. George Bernard Shaw. Of Oscar Wilde, accepting that in his prime he was a wit of the first water, I shall say nothing. Mr. George Bernard Shaw, however, is another story. As a reformer and a serious writer, I make small account of him. On the other hand, as a wit he is a portent. He has been an unconscionable time coming into his own. But in America, at any rate, people are beginning, by childlike dim degrees, to perceive that he has brilliance. If he had published the substance of his printed work in any other form but that of plays, he might have been a recognized and prosperous humorist long ago. The people who supply the wit and humor of the day may be sat down, without injustice, for a sorry and indifferent company. Bernand, Paine, Immanuel, Jerome, Lucas, Sims, Hickory, Wood, and Barry. These are some of the names of them. And what do they stand for? Parts of Punch, Eliza, three men in a boat, the inside complete or a Britannia wear, o' blood and knives, Mustard and Cress, or the fat man's Sabbath morning, the white cat, or Cooper's Entire, Peter Pan, or the old man's crutch. Heaven save us and keep us from wishing that this squad of awkward witlings had never been born. Mr. George Bernard Shaw, in his sole person, an Irishman though he be, is worth a wilderness of them. Someday we shall find it out, and in that good hour Ireland will be able to boast that one of her sons was nearly as great, nearly as humorous, and nearly as popular as, say, Mr. Mark Twain. William Hodgson, T. W. H. Crossland. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by John Brandon. Chapter 16 Dirt I suppose that next to the Scotch, the Irish are out now at the dirtiest people on the earth. But whereas Scotch dirt is a crude and gross affair, Irish dirt is still a pathetic and almost tender grace about it. Dear dirty Dublin sigh the emotional in such matters. Though you never catch anybody shedding a tear for remembrance of dear filthy Glasgow, Dublin is indubitably a dirty city. Just as Ireland is a dirty country, and for Irishmen at any rate the government is a dirty government. And it is not because Dublin or Ireland is dirty of necessity, or in the way that the black country or the east end of London are dirty, not a bit of it. Dublin and Ireland are dirty simply and solely because the Dublin and Irish people steadfastly refuse to keep them clean. To all intents and purposes the Irish people have lost, if indeed they ever possessed, that gift of punctilious domesticity, which insists first and last and always on cleanliness. In Dublin you will come upon more dirty hotels and more dirty houses than in pretty well any other city of its size in Europe. True, the dirt has the merit of not being too obvious, and falling short of the scandalous, but it is still there, and you cannot get away from it. Properly looked into it recommends itself to you as the dirt of a happy-go-lucky, neglectful, behind-hand, and poverty-stricken people, rather than of the people who are flagrantly given over to dirt for its own sake. It is the dirt of the slattern, who is forever dusting things with her apron, rather than of the stout idle-back, for whom dust and grime and sloppiness have no terrors and no reproach. It is a dirt which is the direct consequence of bad seasons, the decay of trade, monetary stringency and public and private listlessness and apathy. It is the kind of dirt which one associates with the boarding houses of elderly ladies who have seen better days. Ireland's better days have been few and far between, and they would seem to be all past, hence no doubt the dustiness and dinginess and shabby gentility of her parlors. In an Irish hotel dirt and its common concomitant tumble-downness are ever before you. The floors clamor to be swept. The furniture would give a day of its life for a polishing. The wallpapers are faded and fly-blown. There are cobwebs in the top corners and dust in the bottom corners. The windows are rickety and perfunctorily cleaned. The carpets infirm and old. The linen worn and yellow with age. The crockery cracked and chipped. The cutlery dull and greasy. And the general air of the place shabby and forlorn. I do not say that there are no cleanly and spick and span hotels in Dublin, for there is at least one such establishment. But in the main, what one may term the semi-clean, semi-dirty, used to be kind of hotel, prevails. Even the waiters, though their hair be greased and their faces shine by virtue of vigorous applications of soap, wear frayed and threadbare swallowtails and a sort of perennial yesterday's shirt front. And what is true of the hotels is true of the houses. There is a district between Sacfield Street and the railway station, which contains a very large number of the somberest, most forbidding and dirtiest-looking domiciles it has ever been my lot to come across. Formerly these houses were the homes of the easy and the well-to-do. Now they are let off in tenements to the poorest of the poor. Black and grinding poverty peeps out of the cracked and paper-patched windows of them. Groups of grubby, bare-legged, blue-cold children huddle around their decrepit doors, or scamper up and down the filthy pavements in front of them. The places may be sanitary enough within the meaning of the acts, but that they are filthy and foul to a nauseating degree no person can doubt. Such rookeries would be cleaned swept away by the authorities in any English city. In Dublin nobody seems to trouble about them, or to be in the smallest sense disturbed by them. They are a part and parcel of dear, dirty Dublin, and happily Dublin would not be Dublin without them. In the other Irish cities and towns the same tendency to squalor and grime and filth is painfully noticeable. Even in a centre like Porta Down, which be had noted is protestant, and to a great extent new, the same undesirable traits assail you pretty well wherever you go. In a city set on a hill without a factory to its name, I found a blackness and a grime which reminded me of nothing so much as Gravesend or Stockport. A hotel in that same city was as crazy as it was chilly and comfortless. Hokey rooms and dark little passages, meager and dubious furnishings, and dirt, dirt, dirt, from basement to attic. Yet the place seemed populace with cleaner wenches, floor scrubbers, and clout women. There was a boy in a green apron who appeared to do nothing all day but dust the banisters, and the waiters were eternally flicking the dust off things with their napkins. And such waiters, wall-eyed, heated, fumbling, grumpy, and incompetent. They insisted on getting in one another's way, and they had a gift of dilatoriness that amounted to genius. In this way, let me set down a small fact about the Irish waiter, which may perhaps save future travelers in Ireland some trouble. If you ask an English waiter for a timetable, he will bring it to you, and leave you to your own devices. If you ask an Irish waiter, he will say timetable? Yes, sir. Where will you be after going, sir? You are taken under wares, and quite foolishly tell him the name of the next town on your itinerary. Fourth with, he informs you, that there is a very good hotel there. Be the name of the Duke's head, and that the next train, convenient, goes at one-thirty. Is it a quick train? Oh yes. Will he see that your luggage is taken to the station in time to catch it? Certainly he will. You keep your mind easy, and turn up at the station at one-thirty. There is a train at one-thirty, it is true. But, unluckily for you, it does not go within a hundred miles of your place of destination. The train you ought to have caught went at ten-thirty, and there is not another one till late at night. While if it be Saturday, you must wait till Monday morning, because there are practically no Sunday trains in Ireland. Do not imagine for a moment that your Irish waiter has misinformed you with malice of forethought, or out of a desire to lengthen your sojourn in his employer's hotel. Because this is not the case. He is merely an Irishman, and therefore a born blunderer, and he does his best to blunder every time. End of Chapter 16, Recording by John Brandon Chapter 17 of The Wild Irishman by Thomas William Hodgson, T. W. H. Crossland This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by John Brandon. Chapter 17 The Tourist The tourist is the curse of Ireland, as he is the curse of most places. When one comes to consider the enormous number of grievances the Irish and their political figureheads have managed to wake up, one wonders that the tourist should hither to have escaped. That he constitutes a grievance, and a grievance which affects seriously the main body of the Irish people cannot be doubted. It is quite obvious, to begin with, that the tourist in Ireland is usually of the hated Sasanich race. Irishmen do not tour in their own country as Englishmen do, or as Scotchmen have been known to do. They have too little money for indulgences of that kind, and if money be plentiful, they prefer to visit England or America. The Englishman, however, insists on taking a holiday in Ireland sometime in his life, even though it be only on his honeymoon, so that in the more suitable months the country bristles with tourists, and the great majority of them are English. Secondly, the tourist being English is always more or less hilarious, supercilious, and aggressive, and these are qualities of which the Irish of all people least like a display at any rate from an Englishman. Time out of mind, the English tourist has been the covert bête-moire of the continental peoples on account of these very traits. An Englishman on the continent, especially if he be a middle-class Englishman, or a very wealthy Englishman, has a lack of divesting himself utterly of the thin veneer of social decency which he manages to maintain at home. Somehow the air of the continent exhilarates him to all sorts of posturing and ridiculousness. The Bulgarian, the Philistine, and the snob in him become greatly emphasized. He can shout aloud and be rude to everybody because he believes that nobody understands what he is pleased to call his lingo. Besides which the Englishman on the continent always believes in his private bosom that he is a philanthropist, a sort of circular touring benevolence, as it were. Who is it, he inquires grand eloquently, that keeps these poor foreigners going? Why the English and the English alone? It is we who bring millions of pounds to their starved tax-burdened countries. It is we who populate their rapacious hotels and make their seasons for them and drop our idiot monies at their gambling tables and pay francs at the entrances to their art galleries, and climb their rotten mountains and steam to soft Lydian airs up their rivers and bathe in their lukewarm seas and tip them and patronize them and joke with them and generally afford them opportunities for existence. This attitude has been noted and laughed at by the cynical, time out of mind, but it cannot be eradicated from the Englishman's fairly comprehensive stock of idiosyncrasies, and it remains to this day typical of the breed. To Ireland, the English tourist proceeds focused for pretty well the same view of things. Of course, he is disposed to look upon your Irishman as being rather more of a man and a brother, than is the low foreigner. Further, he invariably believes that by a judicious expenditure on drinks, coupled with an easy slap you on the back but still superior manner, he can extract from the Irishman with whom he comes in contact the whole secret of the Irish question. In other words, he makes a point of going to Ireland with his eyes open, so that when he returns he may remark huskily in his club, Sir, I have visited Ireland and I know the Irish people through and through. Waiter, a large scotch, please. Thus is the altruism of the tourists in Ireland tempered with the taste for inquiry and politics. I suppose that in no country in the world is the tourist allowed so much of his fling as in this same green errand. For example, in Ireland, he takes care to call every man Pat, and every woman Kathleen Mavornin. If he called a Frenchman froggie or a German Johnny Deutcher, he would stand a good chance of getting his nose pulled. But in Ireland, a bold peasantry has learned to smile and smile and touch the hat and take the coppers and provide the political information for which his honour is gasping without so much as turning a hair. It is not really in the Irish blood to take these travelling motorbanks with their loud suits and louder manners and louder money seriously or even indifferently. On the other hand, your true Irish resent in their hearts the entire business. It is their poverty and not their wills which consent, though singularly enough, as I have already said, you will seldom find an Irishman indulging himself in growls about it. And it is this very poverty which might reasonably give rise to the Irishman's third grievance against the tourists. For an Englishman travelling in Ireland is always a sort of perambulating incitement to envy because of his apparent wealth. He may be only a clerk, out for a fortnight's rest and change, on money squeezed out of the meagerest kind of salary, yet to the penniless Irishman he seems literally to be made of wealth. And Pat, let us call him Pat, so that the tourists of this world, we know whom we mean, is not without certain reasoning powers of his own, poverty stricken though he may be. It seems to me only human that he should reason about the English tourist in a way which brings him little comfort and throws considerable discredit on England. He perceives that compared with himself the Englishman is not altogether a person of genius or an angel of light. His ignorance is appalling, even to an Irishman. His manners are none of the choicest. His capacity for eating and drinking borders on the marvellous. Pat notes these things and wonders. He wonders why there should be such tremendous gulfs between loving subjects of the king. He wonders where people who travel on cheap tickets get all their money. He wonders how they manage to pay fifty pounds a rod for certain fishing, or fifty pounds a gun for certain shooting. He wonders why they cackle so about priestcraft and home rule and the development of industry. He wonders whether they have really been elected by heaven to be a dominant people. He wonders why he himself should have been given over to their governance, and with all his wondering, he is not consoled. There is probably nobody to tell him that for irremediable reasons the Irish are never likely to become a happy and prosperous nation. There is nobody to tell him that this dazzling Englishman is so much gross material, with no tradition of spirituality at the back of him. There is nobody to tell him that it is the British habit to think first and foremost of his own welfare and comfort, and that it pities rather than admires those countries or persons who have been for doomed to contribute to them. Therefore, he goes on wondering without consolation, and within him there is discontent and bitterness. Despite his outward subservience, there has been very tall talk in sundry well-meaning circles as to the advantages which are to accrue to Ireland from the development of her trade in tourists. No doubt it is extremely heatherodox to say so, but for myself I incline to the opinion that the tourist business on its present lines is a snare and a delusion and a demoralization. It takes money into the country certainly, but it takes other things which are not by any means so desirable. Moreover, that very money helps materially to cloud and confuse important issues. The real condition of Ireland, as it is known to Irish officialdom, and as it should be known to Englishmen, is glossed over and hidden away as a direct result of the eally-emocinary tendencies of the English tourist. A people of the temper and parts of the Irish people should be in position to live out of Irish land and Irish industry, and not be in any serious sense dependent upon the fitful generosity of sightseers and problem solvers. Ireland has had far too much largesse, both private and public. The English tourist distributes his shillings. The English government distributes its loans and other financial bolsterings up. What is wanted is a fair field, no favour for Irish labour. It will take many generations of tourists to provide for Ireland any such good gift. I do not believe that the government loans can provide either a newer and less rapacious and less unintelligent race of landlords might achieve it. The bland benevolent, money-dropping Englishman, who out of his generosity or his scheme of politics desires to assist the Irish people, should buy a place in Ireland and do his best to live there. The country is full of properties, which would be cheap at treble the prices that are now being asked for them. There is plenty of land and there is plenty of labour. The landlords, it is true, seem on the face of them ridiculous. That is to say, if you happen to be a landlord whose eye is forever on the rent-roll and the automatic improvement of properties at other people's expense. But if on the other hand you are a comfortable, high Tory, patriarchal landlord with bowels, and a proper appreciation of sport, and a proper interest in agriculture and the breeding of cattle, Ireland's need have no terrors for you. There is a notion abroad that the Irish farmer has deep-rooted prejudices against landlords of whatever degree. We are told that he is a confirmed shirker of the prime duty of rent-paying, and that he will let a holding go to rack and ruin for the sole purpose of cheapening his value so that he may himself buy it for the nearest song. The demand throughout the country, we are told, is for farmer and peasant proprietorship, and the legislature has formulated wonderful machinery in the interest of such proprietorship. My own view is that of two evils the Irish cultivators have in this matter chosen the lesser. On the one hand they have rack rents, absentee landlords, and agents, who if they had bodies to be shot, appear to have had very small souls to be saved. On the other hand they have been offered schemes of purchase that sound very well, but do not work out quite so well in practice. Still a bad scheme of purchase is better than bad landlords and worse agents. An intelligent and reasonable landlord of bucolic tastes, who will look as sharply after his agent or factor as he will look after his tenants on rent-day, could in my opinion do quite as well in Ireland as he can do in England. In a sentence Ireland wants settling, not touring. CHAPTER XVIII A gentleman who is universally applauded, as a handler of the pencil and a smart after-dinner speaker, lately remarked that if he were compelled to give up one of two things, to wit, tobacco, or Christianity, he would give up Christianity. Then with a slack-minded man's weakness, he went on to explain that a Christianity which prohibited tobacco would not be Christianity at all. When all things were made, we are told, nothing was made better than tobacco. Without being an anti-tabaconist, without being a nonsmoker, without indeed being other than a great blower of the cloud, it is quite reasonable for wanted-out weather on the whole tobacco is the blessing that modern man hold it to be. There is no evidence to show that man's intellects have improved since the introduction of smoking. It seems probable that the high watermark of British brains had been reached somewhat prior to the time in which James I had occasioned to adorn polite letters with his notorious counter-blast. Shakespeare did not smoke, Mitcham Shagg was nothing to Ben Johnson, nor Navy plug to Milton. It is our Barrys, and our J. K. Jerome's, and our F. C. Gools, who electrify the country with their pipes in their mouths. Now the person who is commonly credited with having introduced the art and practice of tobacco smoking into England is Sir Walter Raleigh. There is a legend that when the gentleman's servant first saw him smoking, he rushed out for a bucket of water in the belief that his master was on fire. By a strange coincidence it is the same Sir Walter Raleigh, who is commonly credited with having introduced the potato into Ireland. Could Sir Walter Raleigh's servant have perceived what black and fearsome troubles the potatoes in his master's pockets or other receptacle would one day call down upon the Irish people? It is conceivable that he might have rushed out for something even more drastic than a bucket of water. The potato undoubtedly is an elegant fruit. All men know that with beef, mutton, and flesh meats in general it is everything that could be desired. As a staple article of food, however, it cannot be considered otherwise than as a flagrant and wicked mistake. In Ireland the potato has become a staple article of food. Whole generations of Irishmen have battened upon it, in good times, with the addendum of a little buttermilk or a scrap of bacon, in bad times with the addendum of a pinch of salt, and as the times in Ireland have been immemorially bad times, the pinch of salt has been most frequently to the fore. In plain times the Irish people are a potato-fed people. In theory the potato might well have been specially created by Providence to fit in with the Irish temperament. The Irish temperament has distinct tendencies in the direction of indolence. The potato, heaven be thanked, is a tuber which does not demand too great a skill or too great an amount of labor in cultivation. You cut it up, dump it into the ground, and it grows of itself. Also it is a prolific plant and will make more dead weight to the rude than almost anything else that grows, though which of course saves digging. A peasant with a potato patch is believed to be holy beyond the reach of hunger, and his standard of a monument may conveniently be adjusted for him accordingly. He himself is aware that it is out of his potato patch that he and his family have got to subsist, and that all the rest is luxury of the most bloated order. Philosophers can invariably dispense with luxury, and the Irishman is a philosopher. He can afford to sit and watch his potatoes growing as content as any king, for not only shall that green plant yield unto him and the children the staff of life, but it shall also furnish for him the wherewithal for the innocent manufacture of poutine, which is life itself. It is a singular fact, though a fact big with meaning, that while the Irishman has been a potato grower from Raleigh's time, he has not succeeded in attracting to himself any special reputation as a cultivator in this department. Nobody sets up the Irish potato for a peculiar delicacy. Jersey, Cheshire, Lancashire, and parts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire have secured for themselves all the glory and honor and profit which is to be got out of potato growing. It is said, however, that the Irish can cook a potato against anybody in the world. But this is doubtful. Inasmuch as the Dublin potato, and for that matter the cork or Kilkenny or Noury potato, is neither better nor worse cooked than the common tuber of Cacain. This, however, is by the way, the hard fact is that all over Ireland you are brought face to face with a poverty and a desolation which are the palpable outcome of too great a reliance upon a doubtful staple. The very physique of the people bears abundant witness to the circumstance that a diet of pure potato is not good for one. It induces a wickedness of build, a lankness, and a want of tone, not to mention a confirmed hungriness of look. Quite half the people of Ireland might pass for persons who had lately been emulating the fasting man or had just been let loose from a severe term of penal servitude. It is intolerable that it should be so, but there is no getting away from it. The Irish people are physiologically underfed. They may eat to repletion, but as even an Irish potato consists mainly of starch and water, precious little corporeal good is to be got out of it. When the body is starved, the mind windles and languishes. A potato-fed man can no more be witty or wise or energetic than a man fed on draught and husks. That is why the Irish have almost entirely lost the spirits and the volatility and the graces for which they were formerly renowned. If you are to make good use of an Irishman, as of any other man, you must ply him with nutriment. The potato is not nutriment, in anything like a complete sense. Even that exceedingly popular work, the Encyclopedia Britannica, has no feeling for the potato where the Irish are concerned. Under the head of Ireland, I found among other things the following sentences. Introduced by Raleigh in 1610, the cultivation of this dangerous tuber developed with extraordinary rapidity. When Petty wrote early in Charles II's reign, this demoralizing escalant was already the national food. When the precarious exotic failed, an awful famine was the result. The Encyclopedia Britannica also obliges us, with the appended information, the labour of one man could plant potatoes enough to feed forty. Potatoes cannot be kept very long. But there was no attempt to keep them at all. They were left in the ground and dug as required. A frost which penetrated deep caused the famine of 1739. Even with the modern system of storing in pits, the potato does not last through the summer, and the meal months, June, July and August, always brought great hardship. Between 1831 and 1842, there were six seasons of dearth, approaching in some places to famine. In 1845, the population had swelled to 8,295,061, the greater part of whom depended on the potato only. The greater part of the population of Ireland proper, that is to say of Ireland with northern diamond left out, depends upon the potato to this day. It is a state of affairs which cannot be too severely deprecated. It is a state of affairs which ought in no circumstances to be allowed to continue. It is a state of affairs which convinces one only too clearly that Ireland has for centuries been governed either by rogues or by blockheads. Yet the potato, like the tourist, does not appear hitherto to have been written down for an Irish grievance or injustice. True, the Encyclopedia Britannica condemns it, as we have seen, but it does so rather by innuendo than of set purpose. I am not aware that the restriction of potato growing has ever figured as a plank in the platform of the Irish party. Indeed, to suggest it would have looked like infamy in the face of the condition of the people. But until the Irish are taught that the potato is not the first and last thing God made, they will remain open to the disasters and the disabilities which too great a dependence upon it have invariably brought about. It is lamentable to note the limitations of the Irish mind as to what is possible in the matter of food. With sixpence your indigenous starving Irishman will purchase inevitably a dish of potatoes and as much whisky as can be screwed out of the money when the potatoes have been paid for. The beer and bread and cheese, or bread and bacon of the English rustic, may be reckoned a Lucullian feast in comparison, and they are at least three times more nourishing to the body if not to the brain. And the worst of it is that your proper potato-fed Irishman cannot forego his hereditary appetite for the escalant ailment of his country any more than a Scotchman can forego oatmeal and offal. In the midst of plenty an Irishman of the Irish will make for potatoes as surely as the needle makes for the north, he prefers them. To take an instance Mr. George Bernard Shaw believes himself to be a vegetarian by free will and out of altruism. In point of fact vegetarianism is easy and possible for him, because he is an Irishman and consequently comes of an ingrained potato-feeding stock, however remote. His wit and other parts, if any, are to be accounted for by the circumstance that he has the good sense to supplement his potato flour with pea-meal, cocoa butter, and other garnishes. A few thousand tons of lentils, with pepper and salt to taste, would do Ireland more good than a new land-act. She has had enough potato and enough land-axe to last her for the next hundred years. In Ireland the pig has long been understood to pay the rent. Hence no doubt it comes to pass that Irish rents are not always paid up. That an animal such as the pig of grunting, grobbling, wallower, and slows, should be so popular a favourite among the Irish, does not speak too well for them. In England the favourite and most be praised domestic beast is the dog. The keeping of a pup of some sort is a mark of true English blood. Dogs in Ireland do not appear to be so popular. The fact is, of course, that the pig has been thrust down the Irish throat by greedy grasping landlordism. Their worships, the factors and agents, perceiving that good man Patrick, was hard put to it for the means of subsistence when he had satisfied their rapacious demands, informed him blithely that a pig would make an admirable domestic pet and addendum to the potato patch, and unlike a common dog, could, when you have petted him to a certain sleekness, be killed and eaten or salted and sold. So that the wild Irishman has taken to pig-keeping with his zest, which is without parallel, among other races, whereas for dogs he has little or no room. The English Collier, who on being met in a lane with a couple of fine terriers, was asked by a thrifty land-holder, if he, the Collier, might have shown greater wisdom had he spent his money on pigs rather than on terriers, replied, perhaps so, but a man would look a damned fool going ratting we two pigs. One supposes that in Ireland, if the people ever do go ratting, they do it with these same porkers. Quite apart from questions of sport, however, the pig is certainly not the sweetest of quadrupeds, and to have him with you continually in the house, like William had Dora, must be something of a trial, rent or no rent. It is notable, as indicating the difference between the treatment meted out to the English and to the Irish, that when a certain woman of epping, or some such neighborhood, took to the keeping of pigs on the Irish principle, she was swooped down upon by the authorities who have charge of the public sanitation and compelled to part with her pet. In Ireland, you can maintain familiarly in your kitchen as many pigs as you like, and nobody will interfere with you. Possibly, the relationship between the Irishman and his pig might be considered reasonable if one were by any means certain that when the pig has discharged his duties as a household pet and comes squalling to the knife, he were really meat for the Irishman and his family. I am afraid, however, that in too many instances the people are so frightfully poor that the bulk and best parts of the family pigs carcass pass out of Ireland onto the breakfast tables of the bloated English under the name and guise of Irish provisions. On the whole, one inclines to the view that even as in the long run the Irish would be the happier and the better fed without the potato. They might, with advantage, dispense also with the pig. It sounds like rank heresy, but I commend this suggestion to all thoughtful legislators. The pig requires neither care nor attention in the matter of his bringing up. He is a feed-a-run refuse and garbage. He would just as soon sleep on your domestic hearth as in the snuggest stye that was ever built, and generally speaking he may be considered a very proper beast for association with an indolent man. With the potato shooting up merrily fornished your cabin door, and the pig fattening himself gruntingly and without assistance from yourself, you may well incline in honey-dies and never really trouble to do a day's work. And it follows that in the course of time, you fall irrevocably into the potato and pig habit, an acquiesce in the potato and pig standard of living, comfort, and culture. You vegetate like the tuber, and you grunt and snore and thrive on nothing like the porker. It suits the landlords and the legislators and the philosophers, and it fits in entirely with the taint of indolence which always lurks in the Irish blood. The farming of one pig, not to mention the keeping of pigs in cabins, should be prohibited by active parliament. There would naturally be great howls from the Irish people, for nobody is loved with a greater love or treated with a greater amount of respect in Ireland than the single pig. But he is a blight and a mistake, and a failure both economically and socially. The Irish of America, it is true, have made fortunes out of him. There are cities in America that have been built entirely on pig, and the American pork-packing interest appears to keep quite half the country going. But how have these things been accomplished? Certainly not by the breeding and rearing of single pigs in people's houses. No, the American Irish have gone in for pig keeping on wholesale and colossal lines. They have turned the gentleman that pays the rent out of the house into fields and pens. They have made a business of the feeding and fattening of him. And they have erected monmouth factories, wherein he may be slaughtered and salted down by the thousand. Ireland might with indisputable advantage take a leaf out of the bulky, large-stained book of Chicago. Irish bacon will always command quite as good a price as the best American that was ever exported. The English market ford is practically inexhaustible. But apparently nobody but the Americans has enterprise or courage enough to exploit that market. In America the pigs for the packing trade are understood to be fed on apples and pea flour. And I have seen it suggested that because they are amply supplied with these staples the American pig feeders will always have the advantage of possible competitors. There are neither apples nor pea flour in Ireland. But there is the potato. And if ever an article of food was designed for a special sort of beast the potato was designed for the pig. The Irish should endeavor to remember that if the potato have any virtue at all it is intended for the feeding of pigs and not of human beings. The English farmer does not when the dinner hour draws near lead forth his wife and children to his hay chamber for nutriment. And the Irishmen should have just a small augustatory regard for his store of potatoes. It is pig feed, my dear Patrick, pig feed, and not vitals at all. If the English peasantry were to take to a diet of chopped hay and husks tomorrow the English landlords would not lift a little finger to prevent them. And within a twelve month they would adjust matters by putting up rents all round. So long as you, the low wild Irish, choose to be content with the same diet as your household pet so long may you remain content and so long will the landlords look to it that you get no other food. I do not believe for a moment that Ireland is going to be regenerated on political and measure making parliamentary lines. Her regeneration will have to come out of herself. So much of it as has already been accomplished has come wholly out of herself and not out of legislation at all. The rest will follow if the Irish people have a mind to deal as straightly with themselves in the future as they have dealt with themselves in the past. And I should say that at all cost the potato and pig habit, as it now exists in Ireland, should be broken and got rid of and utterly wiped out. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by John Brandon. When Ireland desires to sup the sweeter drops out of the cup of sorrow, she has a way of babbling about exiles from Aaron. And that kind of thing. That her population has been greatly reduced by emigration cannot be denied. Neither can one get away from the fact that the true-blooded Irishman has a peculiar affection for the soil on which he was born. And that the pains of expatriation have for him a special and almost intolerable poignancy. But accepting as it bears upon the peace of mind of individuals on the breaking up of homes and the wrenching of family ties, I do not think that the emigration, which it is the fashion so to deplore, has been at all a bad thing for Ireland. It is clear that if the country is incapable of supporting adequately the mass of people now resident in it, the persons who have left it for fresh woods and pastures new, are on the whole to be congratulated. If it be contented that it is shameful that a man should be compelled to leave his native country because that country does not offer sufficient scope for his energies and fails to provide for him the means of rational human subsistence, I should say that Ireland is by no means singular in such failure. The Scotch emigrate and boast about it. Scotland is a stony country, they say. There are plenty of mouths and little wherewith to feed them. Lo, we will go forth into the undiscovered places of the world and seek food and fortune, where they are most likely to be found. The Irish, on the other hand, weep and wail and keen about it. We are leaving the owl country. O corn, weera, weera, and weera is true. I'll sit at the top of vinegar hill, and there I'll weep till I've wept my fill, and every tear would turn a mill. For, be dad, it's across the se. I'll be after going, and glory knows when I'll be after coming back again. Goodbye, Terence, and Brian, and Patrick, and Judy, and Kathleen, and all the rest of yeas. It's me that's got to leave yeas, and may all the leading fiends assail the dirty government. And so on and so forth. Tears and howls are the Irish emigrant stock and trade. I do not deny that this is wrong, but it seems possible that a great deal too much capital has been made out of it, both by the poets and by the politicians. Accepting, at the immediate hour of embarkation, the Irish emigrant makes a very good emigrant indeed. If his emigration takes him only so far as England, he becomes at once an industrious and not infrequently a fairly prosperous member of the community. If his emigration takes him to America, the same thing happens to him, and he has been known to blossom out into millionairedom. Why weep for him? Why recite touching poetry about him, and why call the government names his behoof? It is the people who are left at home who should be cried over, and recited over, and whose condition should provoke the obsecration of the government. Of course, the real truth about the Irish emigrant is that when he gets into a new country, he is compelled to fall into line with a scheme of existence, which is far in advance of anything which has been considered possible in his own country. The great stumbling blocks of his life, namely the potato patch and the pig, pass forthwith out of his purview. In England, he must live like a civilized being in a house erected and maintained on lines which conform to the requirements of county councils and sanitary authorities. Very naturally, too, he drops into the English view as to diet, clothing, recreations, and the like, and to secure these things, he is compelled to work, maybe twelve, or it may be fourteen hours a day. If the work be hard, it is more or less regular, and to pay assure, and from the Irish standpoint, princely. In America, with anything like luck, the Irish emigrant finds himself even more favorably conditioned, and if he possesses an ounce of sense, and he usually does, there are chances for him which lead to prosperity. At home, in Ireland, the Irishman of the poorer class, and even of the middle class, is absolutely without opportunity. He must take things as they are, and if he ever thinks about such matters at all, resign himself to the mean and uninspiring facts. There is nothing in Ireland that a man who wishes to get along in life may do, the fact being that the country is exhausted and devoid of the elements which are necessary to activity, and it seems more than likely that this state of affairs will continue for many years to come. Capital that is not backed up by aren't greed has become extremely rare of late. There is little hope for Ireland, in the modern sense, unless she be exploited, and for some reason or other, exploitation is nowadays attempted only by persons without bowels, who, with all their exploiting, succeed only in enriching themselves and degrading the persons who toil for them. I have said before that Ireland's true regeneration must come from within. When she took to emigration, she began practically this work. For years it has been the only way for her. It will go on just as long as it is necessary and good for her. Meanwhile, the people at home must be roused from their apathy. If the gentleman who periodically stumped the country with a miscellaneous selection of political and religious shibboleths would direct some of their energy and oratory to the social and intimate life of the Irish people, they might yet accomplish for Ireland a work that would be of real benefit to her. There is far too much complacency, even in the ranks of Ireland's best wishers. It is taken for granted that the main body of the people of Ireland are peasants. Everybody speaks of them as peasants, and everybody talks of them as peasants. When Goldsmith wrote about a bold peasantry, their country pried. He did not mean peasantry in the same way that the glib writers and talkers of our own day mean it. The word peasant, like many another good word, has had its ups and downs. And for the last half century, if not for a longer period, peasant has applied to an Irishman, has amounted really to a condemnation and an excuse. Ah, my dear sir, cry the wise. You do not know the Irish peasant. If one is to believe all that one hears, the Irish peasant is a sort of inferior in human creation. Anything is good enough for him, and like the dog in the adage, the less you give him and the more you kick him, the better he will like you. One never hears the slackest politician of them all talking or writing about the English peasant. It is the sturdy men of Kent, the hardy men of Yorkshire, and comrades and fellow workers all the time. These men eat bacon and cheese, and as much beef as they can lay tooth upon. Also they drink beer in and out of season and buy the bucket full. Also their children are reasonably well fed and reasonably well clad. There's not the smallest boy in England but travels in his shoes. Hence the English peasantry retain those qualities of boldness and masterfulness and independence, without which a peasantry cannot thrive. And nobody dare call them peasants, nor offer them the treatment which peasants are commonly supposed to delight in. The Irish need to be taught that they are a race of men and not merely dreamers and martyrs and kickable persons. And the first thing for a proper man to do is to make sure that himself and his family live like human beings and compass the food and shelter and decencies which are nowadays considered necessary to human beings. The Irish politicians have helped Ireland to something in the nature of reasonable government. They might now conveniently lay themselves out to help her into something that resembles reasonable living. At the forthcoming general election, we are told great political and party play is to be made with that ancient and bedraggled question, home rule. The friends of Ireland and the friends of England fancy that they see in it something which is going to be very good for Ireland. In point of fact, it is a matter of which next to nothing would have been heard had not Mr. Balfour stood in sore need of a red herring to drag across the idiot noses of the electorate. From Mr. Balfour's point of view, no doubt, the resurrection of the home rule boogie is a singularly a droid move. It will confuse the fiscal tariff mongers. It will placate the dunderheaded liberal party, and it will tickle the Irish to death. But any man who believes for one moment that it will be of the smallest benefit to Ireland is just a fool. England made up her mind long ago that home rule for Ireland was a sheer impossibility, and what is more to the point Ireland proper and in the mass is of the same opinion. If she desires to take advantage of the opportunities which a general election is bound to provide for her, she will let home rule severely alone, and base her demands on less political but considerably more urgent and vital things. THE END