Chapter II: Dublin Life

As there is little aristocracy in Dublin there are few lordly dwellings besides the Vice-regal castle. This is very striking in this country of lords and serfs. The masters of the land, mostly of English origin, do not care at all to live in the capital of Ireland; all the time that they do not spend on their property they prefer to beguile away in London, Paris, Naples or elsewhere. Few of their tradesmen are Irish; and the greatest part of the rents they raise on their lands merely accumulate in the banks of Dublin to be afterwards spent on the foreign markets. Thence this consequence, which explains many things:—The clearest of the nett product of the country’s one industry—agricultural industry,—is poured outside it every year, without having circulated in Ireland, without having strengthened the local commerce or even invigorated agriculture itself, without having contributed to the well-being of a single Irishman. Let us set down this nett product, the Irish aggregate rental, at its lowest estimate, £8,000,000 per annum, a sum much inferior to the nominal one, and admit that one-half of it is sent abroad to absentee landlords. There we have £4,000,000 leaving the island every year without conferring the slightest benefit to any one of its inhabitants. In ten years’ time that represents 40 millions sterling; in fifty years, 200 millions sterling, or five milliards francs, that Ireland has, so to speak, thrown into the sea, for that is to her the precise equivalent of such a continuous deperdition of capital.... And this has lasted for three centuries!...[1] What country would not be worn threadbare by such usage? What nation could resist it? Which individual, submitting to such periodical blood-lettings, would not succumb to anæmia?

This anæmia betrays itself, even in Dublin, by many a symptom. For example, it is not long before one discovers that the finest shops, in the seven or eight principal streets, are a mere empty pretence; great windows displaying all the wares possessed by the merchant and beyond which the stock is _nil_. Money is so scarce that if you want to exchange a five pound note, in nine cases out of ten you do not get your right amount of change in specie. They give you back a quantity of small Irish banknotes, plus the change in half-crowns and shillings, and that not without having caused you to wait a long time while the important transaction was entered in and brought to a termination, and then only by the united energies of half the neighbourhood.

There is not in all the city one tolerable _restaurant_ or _café_ where a stranger can read the papers or obtain a decent beefsteak. The two or three pretentious taverns that aspire to fulfil that purpose are horrible dens, where, without the civilized accompaniment of napkins, they give you slices of cow, tough as leather, which are charged for at Bignon’s prices.

Necessity compels you to fall back on the hotels, where they pitilessly give you the same fare night after night,—salmon and roast beef. The first day this can be borne, for the Shannon salmon deserves its reputation; the second day one begins to find it indigestible; the third, one would like to see all the salmon of Ireland choking the head waiter. The fourth, one takes the train rather than remain any longer exposed to this implacable fare.... Vain hope! it pursues you everywhere: on the shores of Kingstown or those of Blackrock, in the pretty town of Bray, or at the furthermost end of Wicklow’s lakes. It is impossible to travel in Ireland without taking a dislike to salmon that will last the term of your natural life.

And yet the fresh herrings of the Bay of Dublin are eating fit for the gods, and the good wives sell them in the streets at three a penny. Do not hope to taste them, however, unless you do your own marketing, and insist, with conditional threats, upon having your herrings brought up for breakfast. You will have a fight to sustain; you will run the risk of appearing in the eyes of the waiter as a man of no breeding, one who does not shrink from exhibiting his morbid tastes to the public view. But your pains and your humiliations will be rewarded by such a dish as is not often to be met with in this vale of tears and bad cooking.

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Dublin possesses three theatres, not including the future Opera-House, for which a site has already been chosen. The Gaiety, the most elegant of the three, gives musical burlesques that are rather entertaining, though they come straight from London. But they are acted by Irishmen and Irishwomen, with all the dash, the brilliancy, the wit of the Celt. The comic actor of the company neglects nothing to amuse his audience; extravagant costumes, insane grimaces, jigs danced in brogues, impromptu verses on the events of the day,—he has any number of tricks at his command. That gentleman would score a sure success at the _Concert des Ambassadeurs_, with the ditty that actually delights the hearts of the Dublin public—“_That’s all_;” it is about as stupid as the general literature of the Champs Elysées. The accomplished and fascinating _corps de ballet_ exhibit tights of such indiscretion as the Lord Chamberlain would assuredly not tolerate in London. Is it that his jurisdiction does not extend to the sister isle; or does the thing which would imperil the virtue of club-loungers in Pall Mall appear to him without danger for those of Kildare Street? The problem would be worth studying. However that be, a boxfull of young officers in H. B. M.’s service seem greatly exhilarated by the display of ankles of the ladies, unless it be by the port wine of the mess.

These officers, in plain clothes as they are always when out of duty, are nevertheless easy to recognise and seem about the only _swells_ visible in the boxes. The rest of the audience manifestly belong to the commercial and working classes.

For it is a fact that there is in Dublin no more upper middle class than there is aristocracy. The upper middle class seem not to exist, or to be only represented by tradespeople, the liberal professions, or the students. But these young men being, after the excellent English custom, lodged at the University, do not count in the pleasure-seeking public. In other words, they spend the evening in their rooms drinking toddy, instead of spending it, as with us, drinking small-beer in _brasseries_.

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The University of Dublin, or rather, to speak more exactly, Trinity College, rises opposite Grattan’s Parliament, in the very heart of the town. It is an agglomeration of buildings of sufficiently good style, separated by spacious courts, and surrounded by about thirty acres of ground planted with ancient trees. Technical museums, lecture-rooms, refectories, rooms for the Fellows and the pupils are all to be found there. There is a Section of Theology, one for Letters and Science, a Musical Section, a School of Medicine, a Law School, an Engineering School. Students and Masters all wear, as in Oxford or Cambridge, the stuff gown and the kind of black _Schapska_, which is the University head-covering throughout the United Kingdom.

Thinking of this, why is it we see so many Eastern head-dresses in the school of the west? With us the cap of the professors is the same that Russian popes wear. The Anglo-Saxons take theirs from Polish Lancers. That is an anomaly in the history of dress which ought to attract the meditations of academies.

Another anomaly, peculiar to Trinity College, is that the porters (most polite and benevolent of men) are provided with black velvet jockey caps, like the Yeomen of the Queen. They take the visitors through the museums of the place, and show them the plaster cast taken from the dead face of Swift, the harp of Brian Boru, and other relics of a more or less authentic character. The Dining Hall is ornamented with full-length portraits of the local celebrities. The library, one of the finest in the world, is proud of possessing, among many other riches, the manuscript (in the Erse tongue), of the “Seven times fifty Stories,” which the bards of the Second Order of Druids used to recite, on ancient feast days, before the assembled kings and chieftains. Those venerable tales are subdivided into Destructions, Massacres, Battles, Invasions, Sieges, Pillages, Raids of Cattle, Rapes of Women, Loves, Marriages, Exiles, Navigations, Marches, Voyages, Grottoes, Visions, Pomps, and Tragedies. This shows that “documentary literature” was not invented yesterday: all the primitive life of Celtic Ireland is told there.

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The undergraduates at Trinity College do not seem, as a rule, like those of Oxford and Cambridge, to belong to the privileged or unoccupied classes. They are embryo doctors, professors, or engineers, who work with all their might to gain one of the numerous scholarships given by competition at the University. These competitions evidently excite an ardent emulation. I chanced to pass before the Examination Hall at the moment when the Rector at the top of the steps proclaimed the name of the candidate who had just won the Fellowship. Five hundred students at least, grouped at the gate, had been waiting for an hour to hear it, and saluted it with frantic cheers.

The Fellowship gives a right to board and lodging for seven years, with a stipend of some £400. It is a kind of prebend that implies few duties and leaves the titulary free to give himself up to his favourite studies. It has been the fashion in a certain set in France to go into ecstasies over this institution, and to regret that it should not have entered our own customs. The life of a Fellow at Oxford, Cambridge, or Dublin, was fondly represented to us as an ideal existence, freed from material cares, devoted exclusively to the culture of the mind. If we look at things more closely, we shall see that this opinion is wide of the mark. We find some of the prebendaries poorly lodged enough, submitted, by the exigencies of life in a community, to many a puerile rule, imprisoned within the narrow circle of scholastic ideas, and in too many cases buried up to the eyes in the sands of routine, if not in sloth, or drunkenness.

After all, for what strong, manly work is the world indebted to these much-praised Fellows?... The true effort of science or letters was never brought forth in these abbeys of Thelema of pedantry. Indeed it is much sooner born of individual struggle and large contact with the outside world. Even in the English Universities there is now a marked tendency to demand from the Fellow a work of positive utility in exchange for his salary. He must take his part in educating the pupils, help in the examinations, and in elaborating programmes; his life is much the same as that of our _Agrégés de Facultés_, with a something in it of lesser freedom and a semi-priestly character, if he be a bachelor. But he is free to marry now, and has been for a few years, on condition that he lives outside the college buildings.

The students, fourteen hundred in number, live two by two, in rooms of extreme simplicity, which they are at liberty to decorate according to their taste or means, with carpets, prints, and flowers. The names of the occupants are written over each door. The rooms generally include a small ante-chamber and a closet with glass doors. Women of venerable age and extraordinary ugliness are charged with the care of those young Cenobites’ abode.

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Trinity College was founded by Queen Elizabeth when she undertook the task of Anglicizing Ireland, and it has remained to our own day one of the strongholds of the conquering race. It is only since the year 1873 that the chairs and offices of this University have been accessible to Roman Catholics. Up to that time they were exclusively reserved for Anglicans, and Mr. Matthew Arnold would exclaim with good reason that such a state of things was the most scandalous in Europe. In France, he said, Protestant masters occupied all the chairs to which their merits entitled them; in Germany, Catholic professors taught history or philosophy at Bonn and elsewhere; while, in Catholic Ireland, the one University the country possessed remained closed during two centuries to all students that were not of the Protestant persuasion, and for three-quarters of the present century a Catholic could neither attain to a chair or to any degree of influence in it.

It was in the year 1845 that the movement began which was to triumph definitely in 1873, under the initiative of Mr. Gladstone. A certain Mr. Denis Caulfield Heron went up in that year for the competition for a fellowship, and took the first place. When he was, according to custom, invited to sign the Thirty-Nine Articles and to communicate in the University chapel, he opposed an absolute refusal, declaring himself to be a Roman Catholic; whereupon he was disqualified by the University Council. Mr. Heron exposed this judgment before the public, and succeeded in winning opinion to his side. But it proved an impossibility to make the Council recall their decision. The only thing Mr. Heron obtained, after a protracted struggle, was the creation of a new class of fellowships, accessible to Roman Catholics.

Finally, in 1873 the College authorities at last made up their minds to render the offices and emoluments of the University independent of any sectarian denomination; nevertheless the Anglican spirit remains alive within its precincts, and manifests itself in the clearest manner upon occasions.

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Intellectual life is alive in Dublin, as many a learned or literary society, a flourishing review, four great daily and several weekly papers, can testify. The daily papers especially are edited with a spirit and humour truly characteristic. It is a well known fact that the Sister Isle contributes a third at least to the recruiting of the Anglo-Saxon press, not only in Great Britain, but in the United States, in Australia, and in the whole of the English speaking world. The Irishman a writer or a soldier born, as the Englishman is a born shopkeeper. The consequence is that the great papers in Dublin, the _Freeman’s Journal_, the _Irish Times_, _United Ireland_, the _Express_, the _Evening Telegraph_, are admirably edited each in its own line.

But the same thing can hardly be said of the illustrated and coloured sheets that accompany the weeklies, and which are placarded everywhere. Those prints, bearing upon the political topics of the day, may possess the merit of teaching the crowd the lesson to be drawn from events; but they are lamentably inefficient from an artistic point of view.

Ireland, decidedly, shines no more than does our own Brittany in the plastic arts. Her best painter has been Maclise, and he is by no means a great master. However, her coloured prints delight the hearts of the good people of Dublin. An old newspaper-seller, smoking her pipe at the corner of Leinster Street, holds her sides for very laughter as she contemplates the cartoon given this day by the _Weekly News_; it represents a mob of Orangemen in the act of pelting the Queen’s police with stones at Belfast. Underneath run the words: “_Behold loyal Ulster!_”

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The quays of the Liffey are lined with book-shops like those of the Seine in Paris, to which they present a certain likeness. Following the quays from the west, one passes the building where sit the four Supreme Courts—Chancery, Exchequer, Queen’s Bench, and Common Pleas. The statues of Faith, Justice, Wisdom, and Piety rise under its Corinthian peristyle, which caused the typical Irish peasant, the Paddy of legend, to exclaim:

“They did well to place them outside, for no one will ever meet them inside!”

The judges, chosen by the Queen’s government, bear the title of _Chief Justice_ or _Baron_. There are four at each tribunal, each provided with a salary ranging from three to eight thousand pounds a year. They sit in groups of three, bewigged and clad in violet gowns, with peach-coloured facings, at the extremity of a recess screened by red curtains. Before them sit the barristers and clerks in black gowns and horsehair wigs. The writs and briefs of procedure, written out upon awe-inspiring sheets of foolscap paper, are piled up within capacious green bags, such as are only seen with us at the Comédie Française when they play _Les Plaideurs_. The judges appear to be a prey to overwhelming _ennui_, so do the barristers. The public, not being paid as highly as they are for remaining in this sleepy atmosphere, keep constantly going in and out. Now and then, however, Irish wit must have its due: some one delivers himself of a spicy remark; everyone wakes up a bit to laugh, after which business quietly resumes its dull course.