Part 24
An American tourist said to his driver: "Why do you speak to your horse in English, when you talk Celtic to your friends on the road?"
"Sure, an' isn't the English good enough for a beast?" was the reply.
The term "himself" is used to describe the boss, the head of a family, the chief man in an association, the commander of a ship, or the colonel of a regiment. It is applied in the same way as the term "old man" that we are accustomed to in the United States. When a subaltern in the army speaks of "himself," you may understand that he means the colonel of the regiment. When an employee of a railway company alludes to "himself," it is the general manager. And when a sailor uses that term he means the captain of the ship. Wives use it to describe their husbands; children refer to their fathers in that manner and workmen to their superintendent or the boss of the gang:
"Did himself give yez the order?"
"I will not take any directions except from himself."
"You'll have to wait till himself comes in," said a young boy behind the counter in a Dublin shop.
"We're waiting for himself to come home to dinner," was the remark of a good wife, when I inquired for her husband.
"Himself has not been very well lately."
The word "Himself" is frequently written upon envelopes, where it has the same significance as the word "Personal" or "Private" with us, and is a warning that no one should open it but the person to whom it is addressed.
But these ancient customs are being abandoned, and most of the superstitions are dying out. The Irish people are the most highly imaginative and superstitious in the world, and the national schools are blamed for the change that is taking place among them in this respect. John Dillon told me in Dublin that he was not quite satisfied in his own mind whether this was a good thing for the country. Personally, he would much prefer that the people would adhere to the customs and preserve the superstitions of their ancestors. But there is more than one opinion on that subject. The superintendent of the insane asylum at Killarney asserts that the most prolific causes of insanity here are the imagination, the superstitions, and the habitual use of strong tea. But the national schools and the Christian religion have not been able to banish some of the most baneful spirits like the Banshee, which still gives notice of approaching death, sorrow, and misfortune, and still commands the faith and confidence of the great majority of the Irish people. Even those who ridicule the Banshee and deny its omens hate to hear the cry. The superstition is inborn. It is like the evil eye in Italy. People who do not believe in it will nevertheless dodge a person who is accused of carrying such a curse.
There is a great deal of regret, which all of us must share, that the common people of Ireland have abandoned many of the quaint and odd customs that gave them their individuality, and are taking up modern English notions instead. The old sports and games which were inherited from the Gaelic ancestors are becoming obsolete. The peasants never dance in the fields nowadays, and their festivals are very like those of the English yeomen. They are taking up cricket, golf, tennis, and other English games, which you see them playing in the parks and on the commons, instead of the distinctively Irish amusements that were so common in the past generation. The Celtic League is working for a revival with a little success.
A newcomer is always puzzled by the large number of names on the map beginning with the word "Bally." In that amusing book called "Penelope's Experiences in Ireland," one of the girls suggested that in making up their itinerary they should first visit all the places called "Bally," and after that all the places whose names end or begin with "kill." That is the Gaelic word for a grove or a clump of trees.
The word "Bally" means "town," and corresponds with the word "ville" in our geographical nomenclature. The map of Ireland is spattered with names with such a prefix. Here are some of them:
Ballybain Ballybunion Ballyhiskey Ballybarney Ballycumber Ballyhu Ballybeg Ballydehob Ballyhully Ballybully Ballydoo Ballyknockane Ballybought Ballyduff Ballylug Ballyboy Ballygammon Ballymoney Ballybrack Ballygasoon Ballyhack Ballynew Ballyroe Ballywater Ballywilliam Ballydaniel Ballyragget
Each of these names has a significance. Ballyragget means a town where there is a ford, Ballyroe is a red town, Ballysallagn is a dirty town. Ballybunion was named in honor of a man called Bunion, Ballydoo is a black town, Ballykeel is a narrow town, Ballykill is the town of the wood or the town of the woods.
Kilcooly is the church of the corner, Kilcarne is the church of the carne or glen, Kilboy is a yellow church, Killduff is a church of black stone, Killroot is a red church, and so on. Almost every name in Ireland has some significance.
I saw only one harp during the three months we were in Ireland, and that was being played by a man in the street, who had an excellent touch and good expression. Street singers have almost entirely disappeared. The love of music and the love of fighting, however, cannot be eradicated from the race that has possessed them since creation, and the Celtic League is doing much to revive the ancient popular airs like "Home, Sweet Home," "Annie Laurie," and "Way Down on the Suwanee River." All of these are adaptations from melodies that have been sung by mother and child among the peasants of Ireland for centuries. General Sherman used to tell of a joke on himself when he was visiting Ireland shortly after the war. Hearing a band coming down the street playing "Marching through Georgia" he naturally assumed that it was a serenade in his honor. He put on his other coat, brushed his hair and whiskers and sat down to await a summons which did not come. After the music had passed beyond hearing he asked his aid-de-camp to find out what had happened. Colonel Audenreid, who was with him, quickly returned to explain that a local military company had marched down the street to the music of an old Irish air which had been plagiarized for one of our war songs.
The last of the bards was Carolan, who died in 1788, and whose memory is preserved by a tablet in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. The ancient bards were more influential than warriors or priests or statesmen, and stood next in rank to the king. The praise or the censure of a bard was alike potent. Their satire was as much to be feared as the malediction of a priest, and their approval was as precious as the gifts of the gods.
XX
WICKLOW AND WEXFORD
South of Dublin, along the coast, is a string of summer resorts and bathing places which are attractive in their way, but ought to be very much more so. They are very different from what we are accustomed to. They look more like factory towns than summer resorts. Although land is cheap and there is plenty of it, the hotels and houses are built in solid blocks usually facing upon a highway that runs along the shore. There is no shade, no glorious groves like those which surround the country houses half a mile away; no lawns, no cozy green nooks; only masses of brick and mortar divided into tenements twenty-five feet wide, in the presence of the majesty of the sea. Across the roadway, on the beach, are rows of little frame houses painted dove color, that are called "bathing machines." Each is independent of the other and is about four feet square, with a narrow door and, inside, a seat made of board resting on cleats nailed to the side, and hooks fastened above it on which the bather hangs his or her garments. When the bather is properly clad in the bathing suit, the "machine" is picked up by two stalwart attendants, who run poles through the sides of the house and carry it down to the edge of the water, where my lady may step into the surf.
Back from the seashore all the way down to Waterford on the coast of St. George's Channel is a succession of beautiful villas and mansions and farms, each surrounded by lawns and groves and, in some cases, primeval forests. It is the "Garden of Ireland" and there is no sign of poverty or oppression or unhappiness visible to the human eye. There is no lovelier land on earth. "The Fair Hills of Holy Ireland" are unsurpassed in gentle natural beauty, and about forty miles south of Dublin, in the Wicklow hills, is a little patch of Switzerland surrounded by mountains that rise as high as three thousand feet. You can go there by train from Dublin three or four times a day, taking a jaunting car at Rathdrum or Rathnew station. In the tourist season coaches await the arrival of every train and carry "trippers" through on excursion tickets and at very low rates.
The more enjoyable way, however, is to hire an automobile at Dublin (five guineas or $26.25 a day) and run down to Glendalough by one route, stay over night at the hotel on the lake and return the next day by another. In the meantime circle around through the country and catch its beauties as you go. The only drawback, as I have said before, is the high walls that hide the beautiful estates. These were erected, generations ago, I suppose, because the proprietors were afraid of losing their property. But notwithstanding these massive protections many an Irish estate has slipped out of the hands of its owner. It is a habit they formed about the time of the conquest and the invasion of the Normans.
Some of the most beautiful and valuable property in Ireland has been lost at the gambling table or at the race course; more has been sacrificed for political partisanship and more for religious causes. In the early days kings used to have a funny way of taking a man's property from him because he didn't go to the same church and confess the same creed. Half the land in Ireland has changed owners for this reason, and some of it several times. Henry VIII., as the newspapers might say, was a prominent real estate dealer along about 1540, and Queen Elizabeth did a large business about 1584, at the time of the "flight of the earls," and nearly half the island changed hands by her majesty's grace without the payment of a dollar. When the earls who had resisted her authority ran away to France, she calmly wiped their noble names off the books of the recorder of deeds and transferred their property to English "undertakers," as they were called, because they "undertook" to drive off the rebellious Irish occupants and repopulate the land with loyal English colonists. Many of the great landlords of Ireland of to-day obtained their property and their titles at this time.
And then a gentleman named Oliver Cromwell went into the real estate business over in Ireland about the middle of the seventeenth century. He drove the inhabitants of a vast area from their farms and the towns in which they lived and compelled them to take refuge in other parts of the country, while he issued scrip that could be located upon the farms they left and paid his soldiers with it because he was short of cash. Many of his soldiers remained here and married and were the ancestors of the present population. Others sold their scrip to speculators who located upon large tracts and eventually disposed of them to men who had the money.
These real estate transactions of Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and Cromwell have been severely criticised, but they must have been right because we did very much the same thing with our Indians, the original owners of the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave." Whenever an Indian tribe has rebelled about something, just as the Irish have rebelled from time to time since the conquest of Henry II., we have driven them from the homes of their forefathers; have penned them up in reservations, and have sold their lands to immigrants from Ireland, Sweden, and other European countries, precisely as the English sovereigns disposed of the homes and the farms of the Irish. We did it in the name of civilization; they did it, very often, because they could not worship the same God in the same way.
About an hour by automobile from Dublin, beyond Bray and Greystone and other summer resorts, is a lovely place that you will be pleased to hear about because there is a pretty story attached to it. It is an old Tudor mansion of the seventeenth century, covered with luxuriant ivy and half concealed by ilex, arbutus, hawthorn, and rhododendron bushes that are all in bloom in May. They call it "Hollybrook" and it is the seat of Sir Robert Adair Hodson, whose great-grandfather, Sir Robert Adair, a dashing soldier, was knighted by his king on the field of battle for the handy way he had of amputating the heads of his majesty's enemies. He afterward became a lieutenant-general and one of the most famous soldiers in the United Kingdom. But what interests us more is that he was the young gentleman for whom the song "Robin Adair" was written by Lady Katherine Keppel. She loved him very much, they say, and broke her heart for him.
Just beyond the railway station of Rathdrum is the Avondale estate, the seat of the family of the late Charles S. Parnell, the Irish political leader, which has recently been purchased by the new Irish department of agriculture, as a school for the training of foresters. Here we enter that romantic region known as the Vale of Avoca, which has been described in a pretty ballad by Tom Moore, called "The Meeting of the Waters"--the rivers Avonbeg and Avonmore. Here was a meeting place of the Druids in ancient times. Their altars and seats of judgment remain, and you can see the hurling stone of the great Finn McCool, which is fourteen feet long, ten feet wide, and seven feet thick, but he was so strong that he had no trouble in tossing it about like a football.
Beyond "The Meeting of the Waters," seven or eight miles over a very attractive road, are the Woods of Shillelagh, which gave their name to the traditional weapon of offense and defense, formerly carried by every Irishman, but long ago obsolete. You can buy genuine shillalahs at the curio stores, those that have been in actual use and "have cracked many a head," as the dealer will tell you. You will find them also put away in the cabins with other heirlooms, with the christening clothes of the gossoons and the confirmation dresses of the colleens, but that interesting and typical weapon of the Irish peasant has entirely disappeared. It was a blackthorn stick, about eighteen inches long, from an inch to an inch and a half thick and a knot at one end of it. The best material in Ireland was found in the woods that surround the ancient little village of Shillelagh--hence the name.
Wicklow is especially fascinating to the artist and the antiquarian. The scenery is not so wild nor on so large a scale as that of the Alps, but bits of Switzerland in miniature are scattered about among the Wicklow hills and, indeed, several other very respectable mountains. Douce is 2,384 feet high, Duffhill 2,364, Gravale, 2,352, and Kippure 2,473 feet, and they rise immediately from the level of tide water within a few miles of the sea, so that they seem much higher. There are twenty-one mountains more than two thousand feet high, three more than two thousand five hundred, and one more than three thousand (Lugnaynilla) in this immediate neighborhood and within twenty miles of the coast. Concealed among them are several charming little lakes and rugged canyons and glens and dense forests. Nearly all of these are associated with religious history, with the lives of several saints who went there in retreat for meditation or lived like hermits in the caves and dells and prayed for the salvation of the world.
This was the home of Laurence Sterne, author of "Uncle Toby" and "Corporal Trim." The record of his baptism is inscribed upon the registry of a quaint old church, and in 1720, according to the local traditions, he accidentally fell into a mill race and narrowly escaped being crushed to death by the water wheel which was working at the time. This was the land of the O'Tooles. The ruins of Castle Keven, the stronghold of the clan, are visited daily in the summer by hundreds of people.
Glendalough is known as "the ancient City of Refuge," and the weird, mysterious, somber scenery is associated with one of the strangest manifestations of human piety that may be seen anywhere. For there, within the shadow of gaunt and gloomy mountains, St. Kevin, "The Fair Born," a prince of the House of Leinster, which produced five saints in a single generation, three brothers and two sisters, built seven tiny churches in a group. It is known as the Valley of the Seven Churches. Each of them has its own individuality. Each of them is dedicated to a different saint, and all have been the homes and the places of worship and the object of pilgrimage for holy men and devout Christians for thirteen hundred years. As Sir Walter Scott says, they are probably the oldest buildings now surviving in any country in which the Christian religion was taught, and naturally have a corresponding interest and sanctity to all who love their Lord.
St. Kevin died in 618 after a remarkable experience. The date of his birth is unknown. He stands in fame and sanctity among the Irish saints after St. Patrick, St. Bridget, and St. Columba only. His uncle, the Bishop of Ardstrad, was his preceptor, and, having renounced his claims to the throne of Leinster, and to all the pomps and vanities of the world, he retired to this retreat and here spent the rest of his life. His biography has been written several times, and as far back as the ninth century. It has recently been rewritten and published at the expense of the Marquis of Bute. One of the early writers calls him "A soldier of Christ in the land of Eire, a high name over sea and wave, chaste and fair, living in the glen of the broad line, in the valley of the two lakes."
"Kevin loves a narrow hovel. It is a work of religious mortification To be everlastingly praying But a great shelter against demons."
St. Kevin lived in a hollow tree for seven years and afterward in a narrow cave in a precipice of great height overhanging the lake, to which there is no access but by a boat. According to tradition he came here to escape from "Eyes of Most Unholy Blue," worn by a maid named Kathleen with whom he fell in love in spite of his monastic vows. The legend says that she traced him out, and when St. Kevin woke from his sleep one morning he found her sitting beside his bed. He rose and hurled her into the lake, afterwards whipping himself with nettles as penance. There are many other legends concerning him, but most of them are romance. There is no doubt, however, of his piety, and that he founded the Seven Churches. His feast is celebrated on June 3, the day on which he died, with great ceremony.
The Seven Churches are all small and stand in a group around a cathedral, within sight of each other, except for the foliage. They are roofless and partially ruined, but of late years the board of public works has taken possession of them, repaired them, and is keeping them in order. Several monasteries have been maintained there from time to time, and a thousand years ago Glendalough was one of the most famous seats of learning in the world. Scholars and students went there from all parts of Europe to study.
The cathedral, which is the center of interest, is probably the smallest sanctuary of that dignity in existence. The nave is only 48 feet long by 30 feet wide, and the chancel is 25 by 22 feet, but the masonry is massive. The Church of the Trinity has a chancel only 13 feet 6 inches long by 9 feet wide and a nave 29 by 17 feet. It contains the tomb of Mochuarog, son of Brachan, King of Britain, who was a disciple of St. Kevin and administered the last rites to him when he died. The Church of St. Savior is 45 by 19 feet; the Church of Our Lady has a nave 32 by 20 and a chancel 21 by 19; St. Chalaran's has a nave 18 by 15 feet and a chancel 8 feet 8 inches by 8 feet 4 inches; Reefert Church has a nave 29 by 18 feet and a chancel 14 by 9 feet. This was the burial place of the O'Tooles and contains several tombs dating as far back as 1010. What is called "Kevin's Kitchen" is an oblong oratory, 23 by 15 feet in size. There is a tower of imposing dimensions, 110 feet high and 52 feet in circumference, standing in the center of an ancient cemetery and surrounded by tombstones. There are several fine Celtic crosses of great age and sanctity before which pilgrims are constantly kneeling, and many other objects of great interest.
What was once a beautiful interlaced cross has been half carried away by vandals in chips as "mementos" from the grave of a "rale oulde Irish king." One of the tombs has an inscription in Celtic, reading, "The body of King Mac Thuill, in Jesus Christ, 1010"; another is inscribed, "Pray for Carbre ma Cahail," but most of the inscriptions are obscure.
A few miles down to the south of Glendalough, on the other side of the divide, is the village of Ennisworthy, where the great Grattan lived between the sessions of the Irish parliament, and where many scenes are associated with his memory. It was near Ennisworthy or Vinegar Hall that one of the fiercest battles was fought between the British troops and the Irish rebels on the 21st of June, 1798. The rebels threw up hurried earthworks around a ruined windmill and defended them with pikes, scythes, and other agricultural implements, for those were all the arms they had. The British assaulted the hill and massacred or captured the entire force. Five hundred are said to have been killed in the engagement.
The little place is called Ferns, is a favorite resort of rich Dublin people, and has many interesting historical associations. It was the seat of government of Leinster in early times, and the home of Dermot MacMurrough, who betrayed Ireland to the Normans. His castle, which stood upon an eminence overlooking the town, is believed to date back to the sixth century and was besieged and burned and partially destroyed several times. Near by is the ruin of an Augustinian monastery, with a tower seventy-five feet high, which was founded by MacMurrough in 1160, and in which he is buried. The Protestant Church of Ireland has a cathedral here and an Episcopal palace built in 1630 by Bishop Ram, then in charge of the ecclesiastical affairs of this diocese. Being of very advanced age when he built the house, he placed the following inscription over the entrance:
"This house Ram built for his succeeding brothers: Thus sheep bear wool, not for themselves, but for others."
We walked from the station at Wexford along a very narrow street to a deceptive hotel called the White's. It has a dark, narrow, uninviting entrance, but extends back into the middle of the block like the roots of a tree, and contains comfortable beds, neat sitting-rooms, and a dining-room, wherein toothsome, orange-colored salmon just from the river and most excellent gooseberry tarts are served.