Chapter II: The Devil and the Potato Blight

The concert glen and romantic brook witnessed very different ceremonies from that just described. At one period an awful drama took the place of lissome glee, when Hugh Brontë, “the giant,” in wild passion, sought to come into actual bodily conflict with the devil.

The potato blight fell as a crushing blow on the hopes of the Brontës, and proved the turning-point of their fortunes. They were growing in prosperity, and had enlarged their farm by the savings of many years. Through industry and frugality they had added field to field until their material success seemed to be assured; but while they were rejoicing in the position to which they had attained, the potato crop blackened, and melted away before their eyes.

Ireland at that period had two kinds of tenant farmers. One resembled the drowsy oriental, who basks in the sun, and seems content, not to live, but to exist.

In Ireland a large number of people on the land simply existed in those days. They knew that if they drained or improved their farms the landlords would raise their rents, so as to sweep away the entire profits arising from their improvements. They were well aware that any enlargement or brightening of their homesteads would cause the agent to scent superfluous money, and put on the screw; for a tenant would be more likely to make an effort to hold on to a comfortable house than to an uncomfortable one. Every staple of thatch put upon the leaky roof, or bucket of whitewash brushed on to the sooty walls of the cabin, gave the landlord a new hold on the tenant, and supplied the agent with a new pretext for increasing the rent for his master, or securing a present for himself. And there were agents so kindly disposed towards the miserable tenants that they preferred one pound as a present to themselves to two pounds added to the landlord’s rent-roll.

Under these circumstances tenants of the indolent type did not drain their lands or improve the appearance of their houses; and if they had thriving cattle they kept them concealed in remote fields when the agent was about; and when they were obliged to meet either agent or landlord, they decked themselves out like Jebusites, in ragged and squalid garments. It thus happened that landlords and land agents never saw their tenantry except in rags, and thus the tenants contrived to order themselves lowly and reverently to their betters.

The land of the thriftless brought forth potatoes in plenty. A little lime and dike scourings, mixed together, sufficed for manure. The potato seed was planted on the lea-sod, and covered up in ridges four or five feet wide. The elaborate preparation for planting potatoes in drills was then unheard of. Cabbage plants were dibbled into the edges of the ridges, and the potatoes and cabbages grew together. Abundant supplies of _West-reds_ and _Yellow-legs_ and _Copper-duns_, with large Savoy and Drumhead cabbages, only needed to be dug and gathered, to maintain existence.

Oats, following the potato crop, provided rough, wholesome bread, and little yellow rats of Kerry cows supplied milk. Great stalwart men and women lived on potatoes three times a day, with bread and buttermilk and an occasional egg. Sometimes, in the autumn, a lean and venerable cow would be fed for a few weeks on the after grass (flesh put on in a hurry being considered more tender) and then killed, salted, and hung up to the black back in the kitchen for family use. This _pièce de résistance_ was the only flesh-meat ever known in the homes of such people.

Two pigs, fattened yearly on potatoes, and a few lambs, taken from the early clover, met the demands of the landlord. The wool of the sheep, spun, knitted, or woven at home, supplied scant, but sufficient, wardrobes. For fuel they had whins, or furze, cut from the fences, and turf from the bogs. The fire was preserved by _raking_ a half-burned turf every night in the ashes, but a coal to light the fire was occasionally borrowed from more provident neighbors, and carried by a pair of tongs from house to house. Matches were unknown in those days.

The men broke stones by the roadsides, on warm days, for pocket-money or tobacco, and the women obtained their little extras by the produce of their surplus eggs, which they carried to market in little osier hand-baskets.

Existence in such homes flowed smoothly, one year being exactly like another. The people had no prospects, no hopes, no ambitions. They lived from hand to mouth, and, while all went well, the fulness of each day was sufficient for their simple wants. In their diurnal rounds they gathered their _creels_ of potatoes, and drove their Kerry cows to the fields, golden with tufted ragweeds and purple with prickly thistles.

Such people seldom had their rents raised or their improvements confiscated, for the simple reason that they never made improvements, and never sought, through sustained effort, to better their conditions. They had no margin beyond the bare necessaries of life, no resources to fall back upon, in case of calamity. With barely enough to supply their daily wants, they lived on the verge of starvation, and when the famine came they starved.

The Brontës were people of a different fibre. They would not succumb without a struggle. They had advanced from the Emdale cabin to the Lisnacreedy cottage, and thence to the house and farm in Ballynaskeagh. The primitive corn-kiln, with its insignificant and precarious profits, had been abandoned for the lucrative occupation of macadamizing roads, and cultivating the land.

The Brontës worked hard, and were frugal as well as industrious. They had hoarded the savings of many years, and invested all in a new farm, and they felt that they had a right to look forward to a condition of prosperity and independence.

The class to which the Brontës belonged differed widely from the inert and feckless farmers that encumbered many a bankrupt estate. They did not live from hand to mouth, spending each day’s efforts on each day’s wants, and passing the summer in an easy doze. No people on earth slaved and saved as they did. They worked late and early. Their wives and daughters and little children rose with the sun, and labored the live-long day. Every good thing raised on the farm went to market, to meet the landlord’s exactions, and to add to the little store. Butter, bacon, fowl, eggs, and such like, raised by the laborious housewife, were sacred to the landlord, and to the hoard accumulated against the rainy day.

For such slaves there was little recreation except a half holiday on Christmas Day, with a party display on the Twelfth of July or the Seventeenth of March. No toil, however, could crush out of them the desire to better their lot, but their moiling and saving seldom resulted in anything more brilliant than a five-pound note to pay a son’s passage to America, or a twenty-pound portion for the daughter.

The industry of the Brontës was not in vain. They lived under the best landlords that Ireland has ever produced. “The Sharman estate,” now known as “the Sharman-Crawford property,” has been blessed by a succession of Christian landlords, who recognized that landed property had duties as well as privileges, and who have made it their life work to propagate their doctrines by peaceful persuasion.

On the Sharman estate the Brontës had a fair field for their industries. They worked in absolute harmony, as far as appeared to the outside world. They were a loving family in their way, but without the shows of love. Their home was all the world to them, and they clung to it, in early life, with something of the affectionate attachment that Emily Brontë and her sisters afterwards manifested towards the sombre parsonage at Haworth. They were healthful, hopeful and happy in their farm, with the growing signs of plenty around them.

At this juncture the potato blight, which cracked the framework of Ireland’s economic arrangements, blasted the Brontë paradise. The affection of the farmer towards his growing crops is in proportion to the solicitude with which he has watched over them; but the Brontës only learned fully what a treasure the potato crop had been to them when it was taken away. Never had their farm seemed so beautiful, or the potatoes appeared so bountiful, but, in a night, the fields were smitten black, and the stench of rotting leaves filled the air. The tubers became rotten and repulsive, instead of being white and floury.

Many theories were advanced to account for the calamity. Pamphlets were published and sermons preached, to show that national disaster had followed on the heels of national wrongdoing. Seasons for humiliation and fasting and prayer were set apart, to supplicate Almighty God to take away the awful judgment.

The Brontë mind never ran smoothly with the common current. To them the evil appeared to be simply the work of the devil. The Brontës held the simple old Zoroastrian creed that everything beneficent was the work of God, and everything maleficent the work of the Evil One.

Such opinions were not confined to the Brontës. As children we were given to understand that frosted blackberries were _clubbed_ by the devil, who had blown his breath upon them as he passed by; and of course we all knew that the old Enemy, with the club foot, lurked in the blackberry bushes.

Servants and common laborers held to the belief, no doubt prompted and fortified by the action of the Brontës, that the devil went bodily from potato field to potato field, in his work of destruction; and many reports got into circulation, that he had been actually seen among the potatoes, in the form of a black dog or black bull, but that he always vanished in a flash of lurid light when challenged.

Hugh Brontë no more doubted that the devil, in bodily form, had destroyed the potato crop than he doubted his own existence. He saw the prop struck from under the family by a malignant enemy, and he would not tamely submit to the personal injury. It was both cruel and unjust that the devil, who never did any work, should pollute the fruits of their toil. He would shame the fiend out of his foul work; and for this purpose he would go deliberately to the field, and gather a basketful of rotten potatoes. These he would carry solemnly to the brink of the glen, and, standing on the edge of a precipice, call on the fiend to behold his foul and filthy work; and then, with great violence, dash them down as a feast for the fetid destroyer. This ceremony of feasting the fiend on the proceeds of his own foul work was often repeated, with fierce and desperate energy; and the Devil’s Dining-room is still pointed out by the neighbors.

I knew a man who witnessed one of these scenes. He spoke of Hugh Brontë’s address to the devil as being sublime in its ferocity. With bare, outstretched arms, the veins in his neck and forehead standing out like hempen cords, and his voice choking with concentrated passion, he would apostrophize Beelzebub, as the bloated fly, and call upon him to partake of the filthy repast he had provided. The address ended with wild, scornful laughter as Brontë hurled the rotten potatoes down the bank.

The dramatic power of the ceremony was so real, and the spell of Brontë’s earnestness was so contagious, that my informant, who was not a superstitious man, declared that for a few seconds after the challenge was given he watched in terror, expecting the fiend to appear.