Part 5 (1/2)
When he came home, ”even the youngest child of the house could see how great had been the blow. It was not the political defeat, severe as that was, it was the personal wound, and it was incurable.”
Looking back through all those years, the ”gentle lady” can see nothing in that episode but a case of priestly intimidation. ”One need not blame the sheep who pa.s.sed in a frightened huddle from one fold to another.”
Yet friends of mine in Galway look back on it in a very different spirit; they remember the Nolan-Trench election and Captain Nolan's victory as a triumph of the poor, a first instalment of freedom; it brought with it an exultation very different from the mere outburst of hatred that these pages suggest. What is more, having been privileged to sit in the most widely representative a.s.sembly of Irishmen that modern Ireland has known, I can testify that to-day peer and peasant, clergy and laymen, those who opposed it, and those others who fought for it, alike admit that the change which such a victory fore-shadowed was necessary and was beneficent. But it was a revolution. Ireland of yesterday was Ireland before the revolution. The Ireland that Miss Somerville and Martin Ross have lived in as grown women has been a country in the throes of a revolution, long drawn-out, with varying phases, yet still incomplete. Those who judge Ireland should remember this. In time of revolution, life is difficult, ancient loyalties clash with new yet living principles, sympathy and justice even are unsure guides. No country could have been kept for forty years in such a ferment as Ireland has known without profound demoralisation. We may well envy those who lived more easily and quietly in the Ireland of yesterday, and held with an unquestioning spirit to the state of things in which they were born.
Such were the folk of whom Miss Somerville writes with ”that indomitable family pride that is an a.s.set of immense value in the history of a country.” They ”took all things in their stride without introspection or hesitation. Their unflinching conscientiousness, their violent church-going (I speak of the sisters), were accompanied by a whole-souled love of a spree and a wonderful gift for a row.” I can corroborate her details, especially the last. All those that I recall had some talent for feuds; at least, in every family there would be one warrior, male or female; and all had the complete contempt, not so much for convention as for those who were affected in their lives (or costumes) by any standard that was not home-made. But in all humility I must admit that the real heroines of this book--Mrs. Somerville and Mrs.
Martin--outs.h.i.+ne anything that my memory can produce. When Martin Ross and her mother went back to West Galway and re-established themselves at their old home, a letter from her to Miss Somerville describes one incident:--
I wish you had seen Paddy Griffy, a very active little old man, and a beloved of mine, when he came down on Sunday night to welcome me.
After the usual hand-kissings on the steps, he put his hands over his head and stood in the doorway, I suppose invoking his saint. He then rushed into the hall.
”Dance, Paddy,” screamed Nurse Bennett (my foster-mother, now our maid-of-all-work).
And he did dance, and awfully well, too, to his own singing. Mamma, who was attired in a flowing pink dressing-gown and a black hat trimmed with lilac, became suddenly emulous, and with her spade under her arm joined in the jig. This lasted for about a minute, and was a never-to-be-forgotten sight. They skipped round the hall, they changed sides, they swept up to each other and back again and finished with the deepest curtseys.
My own mother would gladly have done the same on a like occasion, but she lacked Mrs. Martin's talent for the jig. Mrs. Somerville is sketched with a free and humorous hand. I quote only one detail, but it shows the real Irishwoman, more deeply in touch with Ireland's traditional life than any Gaelic League could bring her. Question arose how to find a suitable offering for 'an old servant of forty years' standing, whose fancies were few and her needs none.' ”Give her a nice shroud,” said Mrs. Somerville, ”there's nothing in the world she'd like so well as that.”
Shakespeare could not have outdone that intuition, and only one of the larger breed would have been unconventional enough to suggest what the younger generation, hampered by other feelings than those of West Carbery, ”were too feeble to accept.”
These two traits belong to the harmonious and thoroughly Irish grouping in which such ladies as Mrs. Martin and Mrs. Somerville were central figures of the whole countryside. That grouping exists no longer, and this book has to describe the discord which interrupted that harmony.
Martin Ross's elder brother, Robert Martin (famous in his day as the writer and singer of _Ballyhooly_, and a score of other topical songs), left his work as a London journalist to help in fighting the first campaign which brought the word ”boycott” into usage.
It was at this work (his sister writes), that Robert knew for the first time what it was to have every man's hand against him, to meet the stare of hatred, the jeer and the sidelong curse; to face endless drives on outside cars with his revolver in his hand; to plan the uphill tussle with boycotted crops and cattle for which a market could scarcely be found; to know the imminence of death, when by accidentally choosing one of two roads he evaded the man with a gun who had gone out to wait for him.
Robert Martin faced, in a word, the earliest and ugliest phases of that Irish revolution, which was the Nemesis of the all too easy and too pleasant ways of yesterday in Ireland. Later, after his death, Martin Ross herself had to gain some experience of the same trouble. When she went back with her mother to re-establish the family home from which they had been fifteen years absent, there was a hostile element in the parish, and gracious hospitality was ungraciously met. An attempt was made to keep children from a children's party which she had organised.
The move was half-hearted and her energy defeated it, but that the attempt should be made was such ”a facer” as she had never before known.
Like many another ugly thing in Ireland, it originated in that cowardly fear of public opinion which is to be found on the seamy side of all revolutions; and it did not stand against her ”gallant fight to restore the old ways, the old friends.h.i.+ps.”
The old ways, in so far as they meant the old friends.h.i.+ps, she might hope to restore, although the friends.h.i.+p would, half consciously, take on a new accent; personality would count for more in it, position for less. But the old relation which authorised a kind-hearted landlord to feel that his tenants had ”deserted him” because they voted against his wish in an election--that is gone for ever; and gone, at all events, for the present, is the local leaders.h.i.+p of the gentry.
I question whether it is realised that in parting from that leaders.h.i.+p Ireland lost what was in a sense Home Rule. In the ”yesterday” of which I write Ireland was governed in all its parochial and most intimate affairs by a cla.s.s or a caste; but that governing cla.s.s was Irish--Irish with a limitation, no doubt, yet still indisputably Irish. When that rule perished, when that cla.s.s lost its local ascendancy, government became the b.a.s.t.a.r.d compromise that we have known, with power inharmoniously divided between officialdom and agitators. The law was framed and administered by officials, often English or Scotch, possessing no authority except what the law conferred on them. Authority lay very largely with popular leaders; but leaders.h.i.+p and authority alike were purely personal, depending on a man's own qualities and the support which they evoked. No man was born to it as of right, and such authority is far more precarious than the established power of a governing cla.s.s. This is a weakness in all democratically-governed countries, but where there is self-government, the individual, in entering upon office, acquires the support and the prestige of a long-established machinery of power. He ceases to be merely the individual when he becomes part of the Government. For the Irish leaders this reinforcement to the personal authority has never existed; they have been at a terrible disadvantage as compared with all other democratic politicians; and consequently the power exercised by them has always, except perhaps at Parnell's zenith, been far less than was the combined authority of the gentry before the landlord rule was broken.
Those who shared in that authority acted, and could afford to act, with unquestioning confidence; they were surer of themselves, than is any popular leader or any official in Ireland of to-day. It seldom occurred to them to ask whether their conduct in any juncture might meet with approval; being a law to other people, they were naturally a law to themselves, and an Irish law. Their power was excessive, and demoralised them by its lack of limitation; yet many of the qualities which it bred, made them an element of great value in the country. These qualities are by no means extinct in their kindred, nor is the tradition of their right to leaders.h.i.+p forgotten.
Of one thing Miss Somerville and those for whom she speaks (she is a real spokeswoman) may be well a.s.sured. Whatever be the surface mood of the moment, whatever the pa.s.sing effect of war's hectic atmosphere, nothing is more deeply realised throughout Ireland than the need to restore the old ways, the old friends.h.i.+ps--the need to bring back the gentry to their old uses in Ireland, and to so much of leaders.h.i.+p as should be theirs by right of fitness. When the history of the Irish Convention comes to be fully recorded, it will be seen that a great desire was universally felt, cordially uttered, in that a.s.sembly, to bridge over the gulf which divides us from yesterday in Ireland, and to recover for the future much of what was admirable, valuable and lovable in a past that is not unkindly remembered. Indeed, it is plain that Miss Somerville has felt the influences that were abroad on the winds, when she wrote of her comrade:--
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.
North and South--that is a more difficult gulf to bridge, for the one I have been speaking of is only a breach to repair. But industrial Protestant Ulster and the rest of Ireland have never really been one.
Unity there has not to be re-established, but created. Martin Ross went to the North only once ”at the tremendous moment of the signing of the Ulster Covenant,” and she was profoundly impressed by what she saw. She wrote about it publicly and she wrote also privately (in a letter which I had the honour to receive) a pa.s.sage well worth quoting:--