Chapter XXVII: Various Opinions

While I have been writing this book the difficulty of deciding between the things that interested Martin and me, and those that might presumably interest other people, has been ever before me. In the path of this chapter there is another and still more formidable lion, accompanied--as a schoolchild said--by “his even fiercer wife, the Tiger.” By which I wish to indicate Irish politics, and Woman’s Suffrage. I will take the Tiger first, and will dispose of it as briefly as may be.

Martin and I, like our mothers before us, were, are, and always will be, Suffragists, whole-hearted, unshakable, and the longer we have lived the more unalterable have been our convictions. Some years ago we were honoured by being asked to join the Women’s Council of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association; she was a Vice-President of the Munster Women’s Franchise League, and I have the honour of being its President. Since speech-making, even in its least ceremonial and most confidential form, was to her, and is to me, no less appalling than would be “forcible feeding,” we can at least claim that our constitutional wing of the Movement has not been without its martyrs. The last piece of writing together that Martin and I undertook was a pamphlet, written at the request of the C.U.W.F.A., entitled “With Thanks for Kind Enquiries.” It set forth to the best of our power the splendid activities of the various suffrage societies after the Great War broke out, and it pleases me to think that our work together was closed and sealed with this expression of the faith that was and is in us.

This conscientiously and considerately condensed statement will, I trust, sufficiently dispose of the Tiger. But who could hope in half a dozen lines, or in as many volumes, to state their views about Ireland? No one, I fear, save one of those intrepid beings, wondrous in their self-confidence(not to say presumption), who lightly come to Ireland for three weeks, with what they call “an open mind,” which is an endowment that might be more accurately described as an open mouth, and an indiscriminate swallow. Some such have come our way, occasionally, English people whose honesty and innocence would be endearing, if they were a little less overlaid by condescension. It may be enlightening if I mention one such, who told us that he had had “such a nice car-driver.” “He opened his whole heart to me,” said the guileless explorer; “he told me that he and his wife and children had practically nothing to live on but the tips he got from the people he drove about!”

It was unfortunate that I had seen this heart-opening and heart-rending car-driver, and chanced to be aware that he was unmarried and in steady employment.

In my experience, Irish people, of all classes, are, as a rule, immaculately honest and honourable where money is concerned. I have often been struck by the sanctity with which money is regarded, by which I mean the money of an employer. It is a striking and entirely characteristic feature, and is in no class more invariable than in the poorest. But, to return to the car-driver, when a large, kind fish opens his mouth to receive a fly, and one sees within it a waiting coin, it is hardly to be expected that St. Peter’s example will not be followed.

As a matter of fact, the Irish man or woman does not open his or her “whole heart” to strangers. Hardly do we open them to each other. We are, unlike the English, a silent people about the things that affect us most deeply; which is, perhaps, the reason that we are, on the whole, considered to be good company. It is in keeping with the contradictiousness of Ireland that the most inherently romantic race in the British Isles is the least sentimental, the most conversational people, the most reserved, and also that Irish people, without distinction of sex or class, are pessimists about their future and that of their country. Light-hearted, humorous, cheerful on the whole, and quite confident that nothing will ever succeed.

Personally, I have a belief, unreasoning perhaps, but invincible, in the future of Ireland, which is not founded on a three weeks’ study of her potentialities. No one can “run a place,” or work a farm, or keep a pack of hounds, without learning something of those who are necessary to either of these processes. I have done these things for a good many years; the place may have walked more often than it ran, and the farm manager may have made more mistakes than money, and the M.F.H. probably owes it to her sex that she was spared some of the drawbacks that attend her office; but she has learnt some things in the course of the years, and one of them is that in sympathetic and intelligent service a good Irish servant has no equal, and another, that if you give an Irishman your trust he will very seldom betray it.

Not often does the personal appeal fail. Not in the country I know best, at any rate, nor in Martin’s. I have heard of a case in point. A property, it matters not where, west or south, was being sold to the tenants, “under the Act,” _i.e._ Mr. Gerald Balfour’s Land Purchase Act, that instrument of conciliation that has emulated the millennium in protecting the cockatrice from the weaned child, and has brought peace and ensued it. I remember the regret with which a woman said that she “heard that Mr. Balfour was giving up his reins”; a phrase that has something of almost Scriptural self-abnegation about it. On this property, all had been happily settled between landlord and tenants, when a sudden hitch developed itself; a hitch essentially Irish, in that it was based upon pride, and was nourished by and rooted in a family feud. A small hill of rock, with occasional thin smears of grass, divided two of the farms. It was rated at 9_d._ a year. Each of the adjoining tenants claimed it as appertaining to his holding. The wife of one had always fed geese on it, the mother of the other was in the habit of “throwing tubs o’ clothes on it to blaych.” A partition was suggested by the agent, and was rejected with equal contempt by James on the one hand, and Jeremiah on the other. The priest attempted arbitration; an impartial neighbour did the same; finally the landlord, home on short leave from his ship, joined with the other conciliators, and a step or two towards a settlement was taken, but there remained about fifty yards of rock that neither combatant would yield. The sale of the estate was arrested, the consequent abatement of all rents could not come into operation, and for their oaths’ sake, and the fractional value of fourpence-halfpenny, James and Jeremiah continued to sulk in their tents. At this juncture, and for the first time, the landlord’s sister, who may, non-committally, be called Lady Mary, seems to have come into the story. She interviewed James, and she held what is known as “a heart-to-heart” with Jeremiah. She even brought the latter to the point of conceding twenty yards; the former had already as good as promised that he would yield fifteen. There remained therefore fifteen yards, an irreducible minimum. Lady Mary, however, remained calm. She placed a combatant each on his ultimate point of concession. Then, in, so she has told me, an awful silence, she paced the fifteen yards. At seven yards and a carefully measured half, she, not without difficulty, drove her walking-stick into a crevice of the rock. Still in silence, and narrowly observed by the disputants, she collected a few stones, and, like a Hebrew patriarch, she built, round the walking-stick, a small altar. Then she stood erect, and looking solemnly upon James and Jeremiah,

“Now men,” she said, “In the name of God, let this be the bounds.”

And it was so.

What is more, a few Sundays later, one of the twain, narrating the incident after Mass, said with satisfaction,

“It failed the agent, and it failed the landlord, and it failed the priest; but Lady Mary settled it!”

As a huntsman I knew used to say (relative to puppy-walking), “It’s all a matter o’ taact. I never see the cook yet I couldn’t get over!”

A cousin of my mother’s, whose name, were I to disclose it, would be quickly recognised as that of a distinguished member of a former Conservative administration, and an orator in whom the fires of Bushe and Plunket had flamed anew, once told me that he had occasion to consult Disraeli on some matter in connection with Ireland. He found him lying ill, on a sofa, clad in a gorgeous, flowered dressing-gown, and with a scarlet fez on his ringlets.

“Ah, Ireland, my dear fellow,” he said, languidly, “that damnable delightful country, where everything that is right is the opposite of what it ought to be!”

There was never a truer word; Ireland is a law unto herself and cannot be dogmatised about. Of the older Ireland, at least, it can be said that an appeal to generosity or to courtesy did not often fail. Of the newer Ireland I am less certain. I remember knocking up an old postmaster, after hours, on a Sunday, and asking for stamps, abjectly, and with the apologies that were due.

“Ah then!” said the postmaster, with a decent warmth of indignation that it should be thought he exacted apologies in the matter; “It’d be the funny Sunday that I’d refuse stamps to a lady!”

My other instance, of the newer Ireland, is also of a post-office, this time in a small town that prides itself on its republican principles. A child deposited a penny upon the counter, and said to the lady in charge, “A pinny stamp, please.”

“Say-Miss-ye-brat!” replied the lady in charge, in a single sabre-cut of Saxon speech.

* * * * *

Martin had ever been theoretically opposed to Home Rule for Ireland, and was wont to combat argument in its favour with the forebodings which may be read in the following letters. They were written to her friend, Captain Stephen Gwynn, in response to some very interesting letters from him (which, with hers to him, he has most kindly allowed me to print here). Her love of Ireland, combined with her distrust of some of those newer influences in Irish affairs to which her letters refer, made her dread any weakening of the links that bind the United Kingdom into one, but I believe that if she were here now, and saw the changes that the past eighteen months have brought to Ireland, she would be quick to welcome the hope that Irish politics are lifting at last out of the controversial rut of centuries, and that although it has been said of East and West that “never the two shall meet,” North and South will yet prove that in Ireland it is always the impossible that happens.

V. F. M. to CAPTAIN STEPHEN GWYNN, M.P.

“DRISHANE HOUSE, “SKIBBEREEN. “_Feb. 1, 1912._

“...The day after ---- was here I rode on a large horse, of mild
and reflective habit, away over a high hill, where farms reached up
to the heather. We progressed by a meandering lane from homestead
to homestead, and the hill grass was beautifully green and clean,
and the sun shone upon it in an easterly haze. There was ploughing
going on, and all the good, quiet work that one longs to do,
instead of brain-wringing inside four walls. I wondered deeply and
sincerely whether Home Rule could increase the peacefulness, or
whether it will not be like upsetting a basket of snakes over the
country. These people have bought their land. They manage their own
local affairs. Must there be yet another upheaval for them--and a
damming up of Old Age Pensions, which now flow smoothly and balmily
among them, to the enormous comfort and credit of the old people?
(And since I saw my mother’s old age and death I have understood
the innermost of that tragedy of failing life.)

“My Cousin and I, in our small way, live in the manner that seems
advisable for Ireland. We make money in England and we spend it
over here. We are sorry for those who have to live in London, but
Ireland cannot support us all without help.

“You will understand now how badly I bored your friend, and how
long-suffering he was.”

From CAPTAIN STEPHEN GWYNN, M.P., to V. F. M.

“HOUSE OF COMMONS. “_Feb. 8th, 1912._

“Your letter filled me with a desire to talk to you for about 24
hours, concerning Ireland. Why snakes?... what demoralisation is
going to come to your nice country-side because they send ---- or
another, to sit in Dublin and vote on Irish affairs, which he
understands less or more, instead of hanging round at St. Stephens?

“We have too much _abstract_ politics in Ireland, we want them real
and concrete. Take Old Age Pensions, for instance. I don’t for an
instant believe that the pension will ever be cut down, but I do
think that an Irish Assembly ought to decide whether farmers should
qualify for it by giving their farms to their sons. I do think that
we ought to be able to pass a law enabling us to put a ferry across
Corrib with local money; it is now impossible because of one
Englishman’s opposition. I think we ought to be able to tackle the
whole transit question, including the liberation of canals from
railway control, and including also the Train Ferry and All Red
Route possibilities. In 1871 Lord Hartington said it was a strong
argument for Home Rule that a Royal Commission had reported in 1867
for the State control of Irish railways, forty years ago, and
nothing has been done but to appoint another Commission. Poor Law,
the whole Education system--all these things want an assembly of
competent men, with leisure and local knowledge. You think we can’t
get them? That is the trouble with people like you. You know the
peasantry very well; you don’t know the middle class.... There are
plenty of men in Ireland--men of the Nationalist party--brilliant
young men, like Kettle,[15] who has also courage and enterprise. He
once gave us all a lead in a very ugly corner with a crowd.

“Devlin is to my thinking as good a man as Lloyd George, and that
is a big word. Redmond and Dillon seem to me more like statesmen
than anyone on either front bench. Of course, in many cases here
you feel the want of an educated tradition behind. No one can count
the harm that was done by keeping Catholics out of Trinity Coll.,
Dublin. But beside the Nationalists there will be no disinclination
to employ other educated men, witness Kavanagh. Some of our fiercer
people wanted to stop his election, right or wrong, but we reasoned
them over, and once he got into the party no man was better
listened to, even when, as sometimes happened, he differed with the
majority.... He would be in an Irish Parliament, in one house or
the other, and a better public man could not be found.... To my
mind the present System _breeds_ what you have called ‘snakes.’ In
Clare, among the finest people I ever met in Ireland, you have the
beastly and abominable shooting, and no man will bring another to
justice. They are out of their bearings to the law, and will be,
till they are made to feel it is their own law. And the scandal of
bribery in ‘Local Elections’ will never be put down till you have a
central assembly where things will be thrashed out without any
fear of seeming to back ‘Dublin Castle’ against a ‘good
Nationalist.’

“For Gentlefolk (to use the old word) who want to live in the
country, Ireland is going to be a better place to live in than it
has been these thirty years--yes, or than before, for it is bad for
people to be a caste. They will get their place in public business,
easily and welcome, those who care to take it, but on terms of
equality, with the rest. Don’t tell me that Ireland isn’t a
pleasanter place for men like Kavanagh or Walter Nugent, than for
the ordinary landlord person who talks about ‘we’ and ‘they.’

“Caste is at the bottom of nine-tenths of our trouble. A Catholic
bishop said to me, drink did a lot of harm in Ireland, but not half
as much as gentility. Everybody wanting to be a clerk. Catholic
clerks anxious to be in Protestant tennis clubs, Protestant tennis
clubs anxious to keep out Catholic clerks, and so on, and so on. My
friend, a guest for anybody’s house in London, in half of Dublin
socially impossible.

“I am prophesying, no doubt, but I know, and you, with all your
knowledge and your insight _don’t_ know--what is best worth knowing
in Ireland, better even than the lovely ways of the peasant folk.
I’ve seen and rubbed shoulders with men in the making.

“You don’t, for instance, know D. E., who used to drive a van
in ---- and was a Fenian in arms, and the starved orphan of a ----
labourer first of all,--and is now the very close personal friend
of a high official personage. Now, if ever I met Don Quixote I met
him in the shoes of D. E.; if you like a little want of training to
digest the education that he acquired, largely in gaol, but with a
real love of fine thoughts. If Sterne could have heard D. E. and
another old warrior, E. P. O’Kelly--and a very charming, shrewd old
person--quoting ‘Tristram Shandy’ which they got by heart in
Kilmainham, Sterne would have got more than perhaps he deserved in
the way of satisfaction.

“This inordinate epistle is my very embarrassing tribute. You know
so much. You and yours stand for so much that is the very choice
essence of Ireland, that it fills me with distress to see you all
standing off there in your own paddock, distrustful and not even
curious about the life you don’t necessarily touch.

“You and I will both live, probably, to see a new order growing up.
I daresay it may not attract you, and may disappoint me, only, for
heaven’s sake, don’t think it is going to be all ‘snakes.’

“And do forgive me for having inflicted all this on you. After all,
you needn’t read it--and very likely you can’t!...”

V. F. M. to CAPTAIN GWYNN, M.P.

“DRISHANE HOUSE, “SKIBBEREEN, “_Feb. 10, 1912._

“I do indeed value your letter, and like to think you snatched so
much from your busy day in order to write it.... By ‘snakes’ in
Ireland, I mean a set of new circumstances, motives, influences,
and possibilities acting on people’s lives and characters, and
causing disturbance. My chief reason for this fear that I have is
that Irish Nationalism is not one good solid piece of homespun. It
is a patch work. There are some extremely dangerous factors in it,
one of the worst being the Irish-American revolutionary. The older
Fenianism lives there, _plus_ all that is least favourable in
American republicanism.... (These) will look on Ireland as the
depot and jumping-off place for their animosity to England. Apart
from America there is much hostility to England, dormant and
theoretical, innate and inherited--and it is fostered by certain
Gaelic League teachings. Here again I speak only of what I know
personally. I have seen the prize book of Irish poetry given at a
‘Feis’ to a little boy as a prize for dancing. A series of war
songs against England.... You see what I am aiming at. There are
dangerous elements in Ireland, and strong ones, Irish-American,
Gaelic League, Sinn Fein, and what I feel very uncertain about is
whether straight and genuine and tolerant people, like you, will
have the power to control them. With the Home Rule banner gone,
what is to keep them in hand?... I am sure that you will despise
this feeling on my part. You feel that the Church of Rome is with
you, and that with its help all will fall into line. And you feel
that men of high and practical talent are with you and must
prevail.... A Roman Catholic ascendancy and government will bring
Socialism, because now-a-days Socialism is the complementary colour
of R.C. government or ascendancy. America will play its part
there--the general trend of the world will continue; the priesthood
knows it, and I am sorry for them. I do not want to see them
dishonoured and humiliated. I know their influence for good as well
as I know the danger of the policy of their Church. That is my
second point. A Vatican policy for Ireland it will have to be,
under Home Rule, or else the Priesthood is shouldered aside, and
that is an ugly and demoralising thing. The religious question is
deep below all others, and we all are aware of that. There is
perfect toleration between the Protestants and Catholics
individually (except for the North). All, as far as I have ever
known, is give and take and good-breeding on the subject. We accept
the Holydays of the R.C. Church (which are still in full force in
the West) and they go to early Mass in order that they may drive us
to church later in the day. There is no trouble whatever, and we go
to each other’s funerals, etc.! But the larger policy of the Church
of Rome is a different thing, and a dangerous--and Socialism is its
Nemesis....

“I wish that I did know the men you speak of. I am sure they are
tip-top men, and no one realises more than I do the talent and the
genius that lie among the Irish lower and middle classes. I am not
quite clear as to what either you or I mean by ‘middle classes,’ I
think of well-to-do farmers, and small professional people in the
towns. We know both these classes pretty well down here.... Last
year we had a middle-class man at luncheon here, an able business
man, working like a nigger, and an R.C. and Home Ruler. We
discussed the matter. He said, as all you genuine people say and
believe, that once Home Rule was granted, the good men among
Protestant Unionists would be selected, and the wasters flung
aside. I said, and still say, that the brave and fair thing would
be to select them _beforehand_, show trust in them, give them
confidence, and then indeed there would be a strong case for Home
Rule. His argument was that they must keep up this artificial,
feverish, acrid agitation, or their case falls to the ground. Two
exactly opposite points of view.

“The people that I am most afraid of are the town politicians. I am
not fond of anything about towns; they are full of second-hand
thinking; they know nothing of raw material and the natural
philosophy of the country people. As to caste, it is in the towns
that the _vulgar_ idea of caste is created. The country people
believe in it strongly; they cling to a belief in what it should
stand for of truth and honour--and there the best classes touch the
peasant closely, and understand each other. ‘A lady’s word.’[16]
How often has that been brought up before me as a thing
incorruptible and unquestionable, and it incites one, and humbles
one, and gives a consciousness of deep responsibility.

“I think the social tight places you speak of exist just as tightly
in England, Scotland, and Wales. Social ambition is vulgarity, of
course, and even a republican spirit does not cure it--witness
America. It is not Ireland alone that is ‘sicklied o’er with the
pale thought of caste!’ ... I venture to think that your friend
looks on me with a friendly eye, especially since I told him that
my foster-mother took me secretly, as a baby to the priest and had
me baptised. It was done for us all, and my father and mother knew
it quite well, and never took any notice. I was also baptised by
Lord Plunket in the drawing-room at Ross, so the two Churches can
fight it out for me!...”

V. F. M. to CAPTAIN GWYNN.

“DRISHANE, “_Nov. 8, 1912_.

“It is nice of you to let the authors of ‘Dan Russel’ know that
what they said has helped[17] ... and I can assure you that it
gives us real pleasure to think of it.

“I am very glad that you yourself like it, and feel with us about
John Michael and Mrs. Delanty.

“One does not meet these people out of Ireland; they are a blend
not to be arrived at elsewhere. But I wish there were more John
Michaels; shyness is so nice a quality when it goes deep. In fact
all really nice people have shy hearts, I think--but their friends
enjoy the quality more than they do, ... I was up in the North
myself at the Signing of the Covenant, not in Belfast, but in the
country. I went up on a visit there, not as a journalist, but when
I saw what I saw I wrote an article about it for the _Spectator_. I
did not know the North at all.... I send you what I wrote, because
it is an honest impression. What surprised me about the place was
the feeling of cleverness, and go, and also the people struck me as
being hearty. If only the South would go up North and see what they
are doing there, and how they are doing it, and ask them to show
them how, it would make a good deal of difference. And then the
North should come South and see what nice people we are, and how we
do _that_! Your lovely Donegal I did not see, but hope to do that
next time. You need not send back the _Spectator_, because that is
a heavy supertax on the reader.”