He goes to a tent, and he spends half a crown,
He meets with a friend, and for love knocks him down
With his sprig of shillelagh and shamrock so green!”
“And for love knocks him down” is quite in the “rale ould” spirit. A spectator[1] of the Donnybrook held on the 29th August 1828, described it as follows: “I rode out again to-day for the first time, to see the fair at Donnybrook, near Dublin, which is a kind of popular festival. Nothing, indeed, can be more national! The poverty, the dirt, and the wild tumult were as great as the glee and merriment with which the cheapest pleasures were enjoyed. I saw things eaten and drunk with delight, which forced me to turn my head quickly away, to remain master of my disgust. Heat and dust, crowd and stench made it impossible to stay long; but these do not annoy the natives. There were many hundred tents, all ragged, like the people, and adorned with tawdry rags instead of flags; many contented themselves with a cross on a hoop; one had hoisted a dead and half-putrid cat as a sign. The lowest sort of rope-dancers and posture-makers exercised their toilsome vocation on stages of planks, and dressed in shabby finery, dancing and grimacing in the dreadful heat till they were completely exhausted. A third part of the public lay, or rather rolled, about drunk; others ate, screamed, shouted and fought. The women rode about, sitting two or three upon an ass, pushing their way through the crowd, smoked with great delight, and coquetted with their sweethearts.” It is notable, however, that our eye-witness continues: “My reverence for truth compels me to add, that not the slightest trace of English brutality was to be perceived; they were more like French people, though their gaiety was mingled with more humor and more genuine good-nature; both of which are national traits of the Irish, and are always doubled by poteen.”
Not only is Donnybrook gone, but the whole atmosphere which rendered Donnybrook possible appears to have gone with it. The knocking down of a friend for love or out of sheer gaiety and volatility of soul no longer ranks among the Irishman’s accomplishments. If he fights at all, which is seldom, he fights now with clenched teeth and a fierce hatred at his heart, and usually it is about religion and has nothing whatever to do with either fun or poteen. In Dublin no more fighting goes on than occurs in the average English city of the same size. In Belfast the fighting is frequent, but it is eminently Scotch, and therefore not to be charged against Ireland. Out of Ulster, there is scarcely any fighting at all, poteen or no poteen. At the same time in one city out of Ulster, which I will not name, I was advised by the proprietor of an hotel to prolong my stay because “we are expecting riots on Monday.” Whether the riots came off or not I do not know, but I saw no accounts of them in the papers.
It is, of course, common knowledge that, shillelaghs laid on one side, the Irishman makes an admirable soldier. In point of fact he is a much better soldier than the Scot, though he has never had the credit for it. The best English generals from Wellington to Lord Roberts have been Irishmen, which is paradox, not a “bull.” The Irish never run away; in our late wars certain non-Irish regiments, which were neither English nor Welsh, did run away. It is significant that Mr. Kipling’s soldiers—in Soldiers Three for example—are Irish, Cockney, and Yorkshire, and that the Irishman is set down for the smartest man. I have seen it remarked, and I believe it can be justified out of the military histories, that while the Irish and English regiments have usually done the rough and tumble hand-to-hand fighting in our most famous engagements, the gentlemen with the bare knees have had the good fortune to be sent in at the tail end of the trouble, merely to execute a little ornamental sweeping up. To the eye of officers and women “nothing looks nicer” than kilts and spats. To disarrange them were a pity; therefore wherever possible we shall hold them “in reserve.” On the parade ground and in processions the same thing applies; the plaudits of the crowd being invariably forthcoming for the “bonnie bare-legged laddies” newly enlisted, mayhap, out of Glasgow and Dumfries, while “seasoned Irish warriors” go past without a hand-clap. But it is the kilts that do it. There may be nothing in this, and anyway I do not suppose that the Irish care twopence. But the points for us to remember while we are on this part of our subject are, that the shillelagh is an effete weapon, that in Irish differences the principle of “a word and a blow” does not prevail, and that the Irish soldier is very competent and very courageous.
[1] Prince Pückler Muskau, quoted by Croker.
CHAPTER III
BLARNEY
Blarney has come to mean a certain adroitness and winningness of speech supposed to be peculiar to the Irish. If an Irishman open his mouth, the English and Scotch insist on assuming that they are being treated to blarney. The persons who affect Messrs. Cook’s tours hang on to the words of every Irishman they meet, particularly if he be a jarvey, and wait lovingly and with bated breath for the same phenomenon. There are no snakes in Ireland, and, sad to relate, there is very little blarney. Broadly speaking, the people seem too poverty-stricken and too apathetic for talk of any kind, much less for that sprightly loquacity and skilfulness of retort which we call blarney. The Irish jarvey, who is commonly believed to be an adept in the art, is just as much a disappointment as the London cabby. Even in “the noble city of Dublin” you find, as a rule, that you are being driven by a dull, flea-bitten, porter-full person, who has really not two words to say for himself. That he is a daring and reckless driver I am quite willing to admit; that he has a passion for stout and whisky goes without saying; but that he is a wit, or a humorist, or a wheedling talker, or in any sense gifted above ordinary hack-drivers, I deny. In the smaller centers of population and in the country districts he is even duller and more flea-bitten and more taciturn. When he tries to charge you treble fare, which is his usual practise, he does it with a snap and gracelessly; as a pointer-out of local monuments he lacks both salt and information; he has no gift for entertainment, and he drinks sullenly and with a careful eye on the clock. As for the Irish waiters, grooms, handy men, railway porters, and kindred creatures, of whose powers of humorous persuasion and repartee so much has been written, I have no hesitation in pronouncing them to be a sad, uncertain, curt, fiddle-faced company, with scarcely a smile or the materials for a smile among them. Their conversation is monosyllabic, their manner barely civil, their apprehension slow, and their habit slack and perfunctory. And they are about as blarnified as the Trafalgar Square lions. Of the peasantry I can only say that cheerfulness, whether of notion or word, is not nowadays their strong point. They have a great way of saying “your honor” to you if you are a man, and “your ladyship’s honor” if you are a woman; but after that the amount of blarney to be got out of them is infinitesimal. Grinding poverty, short-commons, a solitary life on some dreary mountain-side, and a fine view of the workhouse, do not tend to sharpen the Irish tongue any more than they sharpen the Irish wit. On the whole, therefore, I am inclined to think that nearly all the blarney that should be in Ireland has for some reason or other taken unto itself wings and flown away. The people are no longer racy of the soil. Even the gentry, who once had the credit of being roguish and devil-may-care to a fault, are become sad and somber and flat of speech. The milk of human kindness in the Irish blood appears, in short, to have gone sour, and in place of the old disposition to humor we have a tendency to cynicism and vituperative remark. And when an Irishman turns cynic or vituperator he takes a wonderful deal of beating, as witness the utterances in Parliament and elsewhere of that choice body of gentlemen known as the Irish Party, or the proceedings of the Dublin Corporation, or the lucubrations of the Irish press. A singular exhibition of this particular Irish weakness has quite lately been offered us by no less a person than Mr. Samuel M. Hussey, who, I believe, rather prides himself on having been described as the best abused man in Ireland. Of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Hussey writes as follows:
“If Napoleon was the scourge of Europe, Mr. Gladstone was the most malevolent imp of mischief that ever ruined any one country.
