Irish Ireland had become in the eighteenth century a peasant nation, harried and poverty-stricken, with the cottier’s smoky cabin for stronghold. But this does not mean that there were no longer any Big Houses, as we may call them, nor well-to-do families in these Gaelic-speaking countrysides. Both the stories of the poets’ lives and the songs they have left us save us from such an idea. Froude tells us that nine-tenths of the land was in 1703 held by Protestants of English or Scotch extraction, an estimate that is probably correct; yet here and there, and especially in Munster, certain big Gaelic Houses had escaped destruction; and only for they had, the story of Irish literature in that century would be very different from what it is, as gradually we shall come to realise.
Through sheer luck, it might be said, these houses had come to survive. They represented hardly ever the main branch of any of the historic families; they were rather the minor branches, far-removed, and not too well known to the authorities in Dublin. Those city-bred, sometimes English-bred, lawyers and statesmen had often only shadowy ideas of the boundaries of the lands they were confiscating. They were not quite sure when their work was done, either in seizing a property or re-parcelling it out among the adventurers. In Cork, in Kerry, and elsewhere, certain old Gaelic families survived not only as landowners but as local magnates right through all the confiscations and penal laws that followed on 1641 and, later, on the Boyne. They had succeeded in holding or getting back small portions of the lands from which their ancestors had been driven; and in many cases they must subsequently have quietly enlarged the property, however they had established themselves in it.
For such houses, in obscurity lay their chance of safety. The less that was known of them, especially in Dublin, the better their chance. Inquiry into the family’s history, or into the leases, would often have meant extinction; and how well they knew this, an anecdote told of the O’Connells of Derrynane — a house we shall often have to mention — will fix in our mind. Dr Smith, the eighteenth century historian of Cork and Kerry, penetrated into the mountains beyond Cahirciveen, and there partook of the O’Connells’ hospitality: we can imagine them as only gradually becoming aware of the Doctor’s interest in all that concerned their far places. Nothing could be so little to their taste. It is said that the historian, having set his eye on a pony of good shape, hinted that in exchange for the animal he would give the house honourable mention in his forthcoming work. They at once presented him with the pony, but only on the condition that his history was to be barren of their name. On a subsequent visit, they are said to have kicked him down the stairs.
In the invaluable book1 that tells the story of this family, we find their eighteenth century house in South Kerry thus described:
It must have resembled the House of the Seven Gables. It resolutely turned its back on sea and sunshine, and looked into a walled courtyard planted with trees. It had dark parlours with deep wainscoted window-seats at either side of the hall-door. It was three stories high, and had gables and dormer windows in the roof. Out-offices formed one wing abutting on the courtyard, and there were kitchens and servants’ quarters at the back. A bridle-road ran along outside the courtyard wall, and a beautiful garden lay beyond, where a mulberry tree, erroneously said to have been planted by the old monks, still exists.
The house was typical of its class. It was only seldom that a house was then built on an open hillside: a wide prospect was not reckoned adequate compensation for the lack of shelter; nor did a magnificent outlook on the sea make up for the south-west storms that drove in from it. A nook on the leeside of a bluff, or a nest in a valley bottom, if a road had been laid in it, was preferred to open situations, however charming or healthy. But other considerations also helped to determine both site and style. The difficulty of transport, for instance, forbade the use of any except local materials; and in handling these the neighbouring workmen followed the traditions of the place, nearly always with happy results. The local stone was availed of, sandstone or limestone; and the building was weather-coated with slates, heavy and thick, from the nearest quarries: whether grey, green-grey or purple, the house quietly harmonised with its surroundings of bush, rock and heather. In the building of Derrynane, we may be sure, many bullocks were sacrificed, for without their blood to mix with the lime a substantial mortar could not be had.
Scores of those old houses remain to us: rarely, however, do the courtyard walls still hide away the sunlit country round about. These walls have been removed; and larger windows let into the parlours; for all that, one does even yet find something in those sunken parlours which recalls the cabin of an old-world sailing ship — dark, snug, and stuffy, their atmosphere a part of themselves.
Our interest does not, however, lie so much in the style of building as in the fact that each of these houses, whether roofed with slate or thatch, or built of limestone or sandstone, was the centre of life in its district. As much might be said, perhaps, of all the big houses in Europe at that date — of those in England, France, Germany. In no European country, however, Russia, perhaps, excepted, can such houses have been so entirely the heart of the district as in Ireland. Only in these two countries did they, without avowing as much, rule absolutely. Evidence of this, as far as Ireland is concerned, is overwhelming. In the county of Carlow there was the house of ‘King’ Bagenal, for instance, speaking of whom, O’Neill Daunt2 says, ‘no monarch was ever more absolute’ within the bounds of his extensive estates. Young, in his travels, came to hear of the ‘Prince’ of Coolavin, although the Prince was then reduced to comparative poverty; while Maria Edgeworth called Richard Martin (‘Humanity Dick’) the King of Connemara; and such princes and kings were common in the landscape — their sway not always dependent either on their wealth or stretch of acres. The O’Connells in South Kerry were kings as much as the Bagenals or the Martins; and yet, at this very time, the O’Donoghues of Glen Flesk and the O’Mahonys of Dunloe, two other Kerry families, probably looked on them as having let slip the bulk of their ancient Gaelic privileges. Indeed, whether Gael or Gall, there was not a big house in Ireland that did not rule as well as manage its domain.
Within Connemara the Martins, from father to son, reigned with a sway that was absolute and supreme, they being not alone the owners, but also the only magistrates resident within its borders. The keep of a ruined castle on an island within Ballinahinch lake served during many years as prison for the district, and was known as ‘Mr Martin’s Jail.’ Offenders brought before ‘Humanity Dick,’ he would sentence to a week, or fortnight, or three weeks’ imprisonment, according as the heinousness of their misdemeanour merited. They were forthwith ferried over to the island, and there being no possibility of their escape thence had even to remain till their time of durance expired. 3
‘Lord of all the lives of the people,’ is Miss Edgeworth’s description of this ‘Humanity Dick’; and on his Lordship’s being once asked if it were true that the King’s writ did not run in Connemara, he replied: ‘Egad, it does, as fast as any greyhound if any of my good fellows are after it!’4 While of his kinsman, Robert Martin, Colonel Eyre, commander of the troops in Galway, wrote to Dublin Castle (1747) that he was able to bring to the town of Galway in twenty-four hours ‘800 villains as desperate and as absolutely at his devotion as Cameron of Lochiel.’5 And Kennedy, quit-rent collector in Kerry, says of Donal O’Mahony of Dunloe and his 3,000 persons, all of the Pope’s religion: ‘So it may please you, Excie and Lopps, the said Mahony and his mob of Fairesses are so dreaded by his mighty power that noe papist in the Kingdom of Ireland hath the like.’6 The owner of the Aran Islands ruled them as despotically as the Martins ruled Iar-Connacht, only his jail was larger: ‘When any of his islanders were found guilty of any offence, he would say sternly, speaking in their native Irish: “I must transport you to prison in Ireland for a month.”’
In the south-west of County Cork there is a village called Leap, because it stands near the wide ravine that opens out into Glandore Harbour; the district beyond this ravine is called Myross, and of this hinterland it used to be said: ‘Beyond the leap, beyond the law.’ Now, when occasion served, there were not many parts of Ireland in that century that were not as much beyond the leap as Myross itself. Big landowners like Dick Martin, who, magistrates as they were, played fast and loose with the law of the land, were to be found in every county. Sylvester O’Sullivan — a Kerry informer — states in a memorial which he styles ‘depositions ready to be sworn,’ that Archdeacon Lauder, who sat among other magistrates to hear his complaint, spoke as follows in a great ‘huff and fury’: ‘How now, you rogue! Do you think to get any justice against the County Kerry gentlemen, who are all in a knot, and even baffle the very judges on the circuit? Nay, you are mistaken; our bare words are taken and preferred before the Government before the depositions of a thousand such evidences who have no friends to back ’em. This is not France, that severe country where the King’s interest is so strictly maintained. No, this is Kerry, where we do what we please. We’ll teach you some Kerry law, my friend, which is to give no right and take no wrong.’7 Whether the Archdeacon did really in his huff and fury speak in this strain or whether Sylvester the informer simply made him do so, it is certain that both of them in their hearts knew that the words exactly described the state of things, not only in Kerry, but everywhere else as well.
As for putting the law aside, the Gaelic families, like the O’Connells, had to be more circumspect. They preferred to live outside it; not to invoke it was for them ever the safer way; and when they had actually to appear in court, their plan was to declare only as much or as little of their own circumstances as could not be concealed if the case were to be won. Moreover, the Martins, the O’Connells, and indeed every other big family as well, Gall or Gael, along the seaboard, were professional smugglers, and as such had their own ideas of the true functions of the law and its officers. It was only seldom that they failed to bring these officers to recognise at least the convenience, if not the righteousness, of these inbred views — a task that does not seem to have been very difficult when undertaken, with no lack of smuggled sherry and port, in one of those dark and cosy parlours in a district remote and unvexed of regulations and prying officials. When a Captain Butler in 1782 swooped down on the O’Connells in the act of running in a heavy cargo, Hunting Cap, the chief of the O’Connells of that day, submitting to the inevitable, civilly invited the officer to breakfast, and this invitation Captain Butler was pleased to accept. In some such way the good work was begun, usually to end in the officer’s agreeing to take henceforth for himself, as a mere perquisite, a percentage of all cargoes successfully run in. In this case, the breakfast over and the Captain desiring to return across country to his headquarters at Waterville, Hunting Cap, aware of the anger of his people at having had to yield up a valuable cargo, bade one of his nephews to accompany him, and, ‘In Captain Butler’s presence, he handed the crooked knife to his nephew.’8 The crooked knife was an old pruning hook of no value except as a symbol of the chief’s authority. ‘A tenant would walk out and give up his holding at the bidding of the bearer of the crooked knife.’9 So long as any of the O’Connells, the chief’s nephew or his most abject menial, bearing the knife, accompanied the Captain there was no fear of his being molested; and, as a matter of history, he was not set upon and beaten until he had himself persuaded the knife-bearer to leave him and return home.
To read of such happenings is gradually to understand that these houses stood for a patriarchal view of life; and the more fully we go into the details of the story the more assured we are of this. In the homeliest practices of hall and kitchen it was patriarchal, as well as in the larger aspect of authority and outlook. ‘The O’Connells were prosperous people, though their affluence consisted rather of flocks and herds and merchandise than of hard cash. The small mountain tenants mostly paid their rents in labour or kind. Little money changed hands, unless on special occasions.’10 At the house of the Martins of Ross, in Galway, a sheep was killed every week and a bullock once a month; what was not eaten was salted down in huge stone pickling troughs. The country round about provided the fare in such a house — meat, fowl, game, rabbits; the rivers and the sea furnished salmon, trout and other fish. The wines, laces, tea, tobacco, as well as the fineries of household ware, such as mirrors, carpets, velvets, etc., were all smuggled in. The raw materials, if one may so name them, were prepared for use on the spot. The corn grown on the surrounding hillsides was threshed in the adjoining barns, winnowed by hand on the winnowing crag, and ground by women folk in the quern. The kitchen walls contained huge cavernous ovens in their thickness: in these ovens turf fires were kindled and allowed to burn away to ashes, which in turn were swept out that the batch of loaves might be thrust in to bake in the afterheat. The flax and wool were carded and spun under the mistress’s eyes. In autumn there were vast slaughterings and saltings of beeves; and every labourer attached to the house received a salted hide to make himself two pairs of brogues. Of the fat and tallow, mould candles were made for the parlour and ‘dips’ for the kitchen. ‘Add to this the ordinary toil of the laundry, the dairy, the kitchen, and you get some idea of the gangs of people an old-fashioned Irish lady had to rule over.’11
Such a house reckoned among its menials many a quaint calling that is now no more — the turf-boy kept the turf boxes filled with sods from the stack in the yard, the pump-boy kept a supply of water at hand. There were, besides, cow-boys, drovers, and thatchers. There were smiths, carpenters, weavers, ploughmen, tinkers — and all these had their own workshops and meeting-place. Before the dawn had risen, the farmyard was loud with activity; and when darkness had fallen, lanterns went swinging across it, over and thither, from byre to shed, and from shed to barn.
Every one of those trades was, like the house it ministered to, a little world in itself, the centre of manifold activities. A weaver’s shed then was very different from what it afterwards became; and a country carpenter’s shop was not merely a place where wheels, carts, gates and coffins were roughly fashioned, as it now unfortunately is. Of the difference in this matter between then and now we become aware if we look at that poem of Eoghan Ruadh Ó Súilleabháin’s ‘A Ghaibhne Chláir Fodla, mo Chómhairle Anois Déanaidh’ (‘O Smiths of Fodla’s Plain, do now my Bidding’). From it we know that then in a smith’s shop were made or repaired — plough-shares, coulters, surveyor’s chains, shovels, pikes, spades, rakes, trowels, reaping hooks, horse shoes, spurs, bits, stirrups, fishing hooks, compasses, wrenches, anchors, screw-pins, thimbles, scissors, guns, pistols, swords, bolts, springs, knives, spits, scythes — and a crowd of other wares that the ordinary country smith never handles now. In like manner every other trade extended itself to every region of its own sphere, whether its sway was over iron, wood, or yarn.
Besides all these work-people and menials, there were, in the words of the Last Colonel himself, ‘the multitude of our followers and our fosterers.’ Miss Edgeworth knew English as well as Irish life, but it is an Irish house she is describing in her novel, The Absentee, when she says that 104 persons sat down every day to dinner in Lord Kilpatrick’s house.
Indeed it would be hard to state in what those houses differed from the castles of the Middle Ages — each a centre of teeming life, a citadel, as one might say; and this we shall more truly realise if we turn to the contemporary evidence in the Irish poets.
The keen that Eibhlín Dubh, one of those O’Connells, made over her murdered husband, Art O’Leary, has already been mentioned. In the opening lines she recollects how she had fled with him and how he had received her in his mansion:
Do chuiris gan dearmhad
Párlús d’á ghealadh dham,
Rúmana d’á mbreacadh dham,
Bácús d’á dheargadh dham,
Bríc d’á gceapadh dham,
Rósta ar bhearaibh dham,
Mairt d’á leagadh dham,
Cóir mhaith leapthan dam
Codladh i gclúmh lachan dam,
which, literally translated, gives us:
You did not forget
To have parlours brightened for me,
Rooms decked for me,
Ovens heated for me,
Loaves fresh kneaded for me,
Roast on the spits for me,
Beeves slaughtered for me,
The comfort of a fine bed for me,
Sleep in the down of fowl for me,
and the swift lines, without straining, evoke to our very eyes the antique bustle and plenty of such a house as O’Leary’s was. Far richer, however, is Aodhagán Ó Rathaille’s picture of the O’Callaghans at Clonmeen, County Cork. The poet places the words in the mouth of Cliodna, one of the fairy queens of Ireland:
Do dhearcas, ar sí, ’n-a ríogh-bhrogh ceolmhar,
Síodaidhe breaca, is bratacha sróill ghlain,
Cuilg dá ngormadh, othair ag ól miodh,
Is laochra ag imirt ar fidhchill na fóirne.
Cuilte dá ndeargadh ar maidin ’s am nóna,
Córughadh cleiteach ag bairr-fhionnaibh óga,
Fíon ar briseadh dá ibhe, agus mórtas,
Feoil ar bhearaibh, is beathuisce ar bhórdaibh.
Dronga ag taisteal gan mhairg don nósbhrogh,
Dronga ag tuitim ’s a gcuisleanna breoidhte,
Dronga ar meisce gan cheilg don chomhursain,
Dronga borba ag lobhairt go glórach.
Boltanus cumhra dlúth ag coimh-rith,
O anáil bhaeith na cléire cóirne,
Gaotha luatha buana as srónaibh,
Na saoithe chasnamhadh machaire an chomhraic.
Puirt ar chruitibh dá seinm go ceolmhar,
Startha dá léigheadh ag lucht léighinn is eoluis,
Mar a mbíodh trácht gan chaim ar órdaibh,
Is ar gach sloinneadh dar geineadh san Eoruip.
Dóirse gan dúnadh ar dhuntaibh ómrach,
Céir dá lasadh ar gach balla agus seomra,
Caisc dá mbriseadh dhon bhfuirinn gach noimeat,
’S gan trághadh lachta ag teacht san ól soin.
Eich dá mbronnadh aca ar ollamhnaibh Fódla;
Eachra garbha ar leacain ag coimhrith,
Troightheacha i n-iorghuil, iomarca beorach
I gcornaibh aithleaghtha d’airgead ró-ghlan.
Ba mhinic san chluain seo fuaim na ngleostoc,
Tromgháir sealg i sleasaibh na gceochnoc,
Sionnaigh dá ndúscadh chúcha is crónphuic,
Míolta as mongaibh, cearca uisce, agus smólaigh.
Luin na seilge ag sceinnim le fórlucht,
ls cearca feádha go fánach glórach,
Connairt an ríogh ’s a shaoithe tóirseach
D’éis a reatha i n-aghaidh sleasaibh na gceochnoc.12
I beheld, said she, in his musical, princely mansion,
Speckled silks, and garments of pure satin,
Swords being whetted, invalids quaffing mead,
And warriors playing at fidhchill of the chessmen.
Coverlets being prepared, morn and even,
Young maidens engaged in arranging down,
Wines, newly-opened, being drunk, and jollity,
Viands on spits, and uisquebagh on tables;
Companies coming to the famous mansion without sorrow,
Companies falling down with feverish pulse,
Companies inebriate without offence to their neighbours,
Companies of pride discoursing uproariously.
A fragrant odour issuing in strength
From the tender breath of the trumpeting band,
Swift, continuous currents from the nostrils
Of the nobles who were wont to hold the battle field.
Airs being played harmoniously on harps,
The wise and learned reading histories,
In which an account was faultlessly given of the clergy
And of each great family that arose in Europe.
The doors wide open on enclosures bright as amber,
Waxlights blazing from every wall and chamber,
Every moment fresh casks being opened for the multitude,
With no ebb in the liquid coming to that drinking feast.
Steeds being bestowed on the ollamhs of Fodla,
Strong steeds in teams racing on the hillside,
Foot soldiers contending, abundance of beoir
In goblets of wrought silver, of great purity.
Often in that plain was heard the sound of war-bugles,
The loud cry of the chase on the sides of the misty hills,
Foxes and red bucks were being wakened for them,
Hares from the mead, waterhens, and thrushes.
The birds of the chase starting up with great force,
With pheasants dispersed and wildly screaming;
The prince’s hounds and his men fatigued
From their pursuit up the slope of the misty mountains.
These lines were written on the death of Daniel O’Callaghan in 1724, that is, fifty years before Eibhlín Dubh wrote her keen. If we had not made some preliminary study, we might think it wise of the poet to speak through the mouth of a fairy queen, thus baffling our criticism; but our study, slight as it has been, leaves us aware that the poet scarcely took even poetic licence with the facts, as is the manner of Irish poets. He invented nothing; he hardly even heightened the tints: the clear vision in his mind of the house at Clonmeen was, if anything, already too full and too rich. The whetting of the swords, the invalids drinking mead, the young girls stripping the feathers with their slender fingers, the laden tables, the heavy drinking, the harpers, the scanning of the genealogies, the crowds coming and going, the rewarding of the poets, the racing on the hillsides, the fox-chase along the misty slopes, the fowling — it is all flung out at us, as it were, with swiftness, with energy, as if the reason for thus recalling the glories of Clonmeen was all the time so urgent in the poet’s thoughts, that hastening towards it, he could not bear to dally on the arranging of his picture or to linger on its choicer features. The theme was a favourite with him; he was of the old order, and held that a poet’s trade was to sing the deeds of a patron while living, and to raise a keen for him when dead. Twenty-eight years before, in 1696, he had written thus of the house of Diarmuid O’Leary of Killeen, near Killarney:
Monuar, a thighthe go sinnil san bhfóghmhar,
Gan ceol cláirseach, fáidh ná eolach,
Gan fleadh, gan fíon, gan bhuidhean, gan chóisir,
Gan scoil éigse, cléir ná óird bhinn!
Mar a mbiodh gasra chearrbhach chomhfhoclach,
Fíonta fairsinge i n-eascaraibh órdha,
Laochra gaisce, is buidhean mheanmnach mhodhmhar
Ag rinnce ar halla tighe th’athar le ceoltaibh.
Mar a mbiodh éigse, cléir, is geocaigh;
Mar a mbiodh dáimh, is báird na gcóige;
I ríoghbhrogh th’athar cois Gleannamhair Eoghanacht.
Mo scíos ’n fhaid mhairfead, fé leacaibh mo leoghan.
Buidhne dhíobh nár chlaoidhte ón gcóisir
Ag aithris grinn gach líne romhainne,
I starthaibh Gaoidhilge ar ghaois na leoghan,
Clanna Baoiscne is Ghuill mhic Mhórna.
Alas! his dwellings are lonely in the Autumn,
Without the music of harps, without seer, or learned man,
Without a banquet, without wine, without company, without a festive gathering,
Without a poetic meeting, without clergymen or musicians!
Where there used to be a multitude of talkative gamblers,
Abundant wine in golden goblets,
Champion warriors, and a high-spirited, courteous band
Dancing to music in the hall of thy father’s house.
Where the learned, the clergy, and strollers were wont to be;
Where the poets and bards of the country were
In the princely mansion of thy father beside Gleannamhair of the Eoghanacht.
My woe while I live, that my hero lies beneath a stone!
Companies of them, not fatigued by the revel,
Rehearsing the witty compositions of past generations,
In Gaelic tales about the wisdom of the heroes,
Of Clanna Baoiscne, and Goll mac Morna.
Here, as one would expect from the earlier date, the lineaments are more Gaelic, for those big houses were, of course, becoming less and less Gaelic as the years passed. About this long poem, the whole consisting of 229 lines, it is interesting to learn that the greater part has been found ‘alive’ on the lips of ‘illiterate’ peasants in Kerry in our own days.
A house that had fallen from the hands of the MacCarthys into those of a man named Warner we find described in O’Rahilly’s poem on Castle Tochar:
Feoil de bhearaibh is éanlaith ón dtuinn
Ceolta, is cantain, is craos na dighe;
Rósta blasta, agus céir gan teimheal,
Conairt is gadhair is amhstrach.
Drong ag imtheacht, is drong ag tigheacht,
Is drong ag racaireacht dúinn go binn,
Drong ar spallaibh úra ag guidhe,
’S ag leaghaidh na bhflaitheas go ceannsa.
Meat on spits, and wild fowl from the ocean;
Music and song, and drinking bouts;
Delicious roast meat and spotless honey,
Hounds and dogs and baying.
A company going, and a company coming,
And a company entertaining us melodiously,
And a company praying on the cold flags,
And meekly melting the heavens.
For us the point lies in the praise given to the new owner — the Planter — for maintaining in the house the Gaelic traditions of the former owners, the MacCarthys, maintaining them so unimpairedly that the poet cries out:
Do mheasas im aigne is fós im chroidhe,
An marbh ba mharbh gur beo do bhí.
I thought in my soul and even in my heart
That the dead who had died was living.
Not to be depending entirely on this one poet’s testimony, it may be well to take a fragment from another poet of the first half of the eighteenth century: Seán Clárach Mac Domhnaill’s account of the household of Thomas Greene of Gort an Tochair, in the county of Clare:
Is gnáth go síor i dtigheas mo mharcaigh
Buidhean go seascair súgach,
Is sásta síothach a bhíd na sagairt
Chríost le sleasaibh búird ann;
Bradán ó’n linn, is caoirigh is ealtain,
Saill na mairt is úire,
Biotáille bríoghmhar thigheann tar lear
De dhruím na mara is lionnta;
Ol is imirt, ceol ar fhidil,
Beol-ghuth binneas ciuin ceart,
Fóirne ar mire mór le meisce,
Is cóip le sult ag súgradh.
Ever and aye in my hero’s house
Is a bright and care-free company;
And in peace and comfort the priests of Christ
Sit at the table’s edge;
Salmon from the pool, and sheep and fowl,
The freshest flesh of beeves.
Heady spirits and ales that come
Over the ridge of the sea;
Drinking, gambling, violins,
The sweetness of gentle song in tune,
A crowd uproariously drunk,
And a band eager for merriment.
Of the four poems quoted from, two describe purely Gaelic houses, the other two, Planter houses in Gaelic districts; and it would seem that there was no other striking difference between the way of living in both classes of houses, except that the great stories of the Gael were naturally welcomed in the one and thought alien in the other. The structure of life in such districts as West Cork was still so firm and self-contained that the change of ownership in a big house, like Castle Tochar, from Gael to Planter, did not immediately make much difference in what its ancient walls looked upon, day in, day out: it was only the flowing by of long years, each with its own particular assault, that succeeded little by little in depriving Gaeldom of its vigour, in stopping up its numerous ways of manifesting openly what its ancient spirit brooded upon.
We may reckon such descriptions as true, for Irish poets were not given to dressing up: they wrote for an entirely local audience, their own neighbours, who were, of course, as familiar as themselves with the life depicted, an audience, moreover, not slow of wit or sparing of sarcasm. The other writers on whom we have depended wrote in English, and we could not, therefore, expect to find them dwelling on that side of life which was all-in-all to the Gaelic poets — the singing, the harping, the story-telling, the reciting of the deeds of Clanna Baoiscne and Goll mac Morna. Allowing for this, we receive the one impression from both sets of writers. Moreover, not only do the poets confirm for us what those other writers relate of the activities in kitchen, hall and hunting-field, but, going further, they carry us into the very mind of the dwellers in them, giving us a deeper sense of the whole, as has ever been the privilege of poets. And how soon we become aware that what the writers in English omitted concerned the mind and the soul — the hidden world!
Of that hidden life, that Gaelic spirit, Young came to hear and, as shrewd as ever, noted carefully, even if he did not follow up, the surprise it awoke in him:
At Clonells, near Castlerea, lives O’Connor, the direct descendant of Roderick O’Connor, who was King of Connaught six or seven hundred years ago; there is a monument of him in Roscommon Church, with his sceptre, etc … I was told as a certainty that the family were here long before the coming of the Milesians. Their possessions, formerly so great, are reduced to three or four hundred pounds a year, the family having fared in the revolutions of so many ages much worse than the O’Niels and O’Briens. The common people pay him the greatest respect, and send him presents of cattle, etc., upon various occasions. They consider him as the prince of a people involved in one common ruin. Another great family in Connaught is MacDermot, who calls himself Prince of Coolavin. He lives at Coolavin in Sligo, and though he has not above one hundred pounds a year, will not admit his children to sit down in his presence. This was certainly the case with his father, and some assured me even with the present chief. Lord Kingsborough, Mr Ponsonby, Mr O’Hara, Mr Sandford, etc., came to see him, and his address was curious: ‘O’Hara, you are welcome! Sandford, I’m glad to see your mother’s son’ (his mother was an O’Brien): ‘as to the rest of ye, come in as ye can.’13
It was only at second hand that Young came to know of the strange ways of the Gaelic houses; but would it have been any better for him to have gone into them? What could he have brought with him, what report made of the spirit that ruled in them? Little or none; for the Gaels of that day had learned to live a double life: in externals they were on all fours with the Planters round about them, except that they were seldom so rich. To the Planters and their hangers-on, to the troop of officials, they spoke English; they wrote their letters in English; went to law in English; and when they died were laid away beneath English inscriptions. On Art O’Leary’s tomb in Kilcrea Abbey we read:
‘Lo! Art O’Leary, generous, handsome, brave,
Slain in his youth, lies in this humble grave!’
These lines, and the trite mode of them, Young could well understand, but what could he have made of the keen — some lines of which have already been quoted — Art O’Leary’s wife, Eibhlín Dubh Ni Chonaill, cried out to find him murdered in Carriganimma! As little could he have made of the whole Gaelic economy of such houses as those of the O’Connors, the MacDermots, the O’Connells, the O’Callaghans, had he visited them. He would have gone into and come out of them entirely unaware of the Gaelic spirit that awoke about their hearths when no alien eyes were present to affright it. Had he gone to Derrynane, the house of Eibhlín Dubh, Art O’Leary’s wife, it was only the exterior, official life — life! — that he would have experienced. He would have surveyed the vast flocks and herds (one hundred head of cattle were often bought or sold at a fair), he would have learned of their trading, would have suspected their smuggling, would have heard of their close connection with certain merchants in Cork, would have learned much of the many O’Connells who were serving abroad under foreign kings; but of the hidden life of Derrynane, as it, even still, breathes warm on us in every line of Eibhlín Dubh’s keen (Young might have spoken with her), he would have learned little or nothing. He could have, it is probable, spent a fairly long time in the house without suspecting that the Irish language was anything but a patois in which the master spoke to his herdsmen and shepherds. He would never have dreamed that that language was the gateway to a complete and unique civilisation, to a world in itself; a world into which retired the souls of the O’Connells whenever they were deeply moved, yearning for the companionship of their own myriad dead, it may be, or because they felt they could not utter their deeper thoughts in any other mode than that which their fathers had wrought for them.
When the O’Connells were writing business letters, or indeed putting their hands to any official document whatever, they signed themselves Connell, omitting the distinctively Gaelic O. But when anyone of them succeeded in making his way on the Continent and found himself at last of some importance in the world, little by little he came to sign himself O’Connell again; that is, he resumed the Gael. Of the Connells, Young could have made some report; of the O’Connells, none.
The keen made over her dead husband by Eibhlín Dubh represents the secret life, the Gaelic spirit, of such a house as Derrynane. Behind its mode lies a thousand years of Irish literature. The other side of the life of that family is represented by a large collection of contemporary letters.14 Whether concerned with business or family affairs, they are all dry, hard, precise, formal; and scarcely once give a hint of the secret world that was all the time so close to their writers’ thoughts. The Last Colonel himself, as we find him in them, was a very Wellington for preciseness and frigid common-sense; and we might think that he had never heard of that immemorial world that is the background of the famous keen; yet of his closing years, when his passion for getting on had finally ebbed, we find this written:
Miss Eveline MacCarthy tells me she remembers her venerable grand-uncle, Count O’Connell, in his old age in Paris, reciting and expounding to her long passages in Irish verse.15
He had lived on the Continent ever since his boyhood. He had witnessed the scenes that led up to the French Revolution, had suffered under it, had survived it, lingering on into the nineteenth century; during all those long years of army life, of routine, of campaigning in many lands, of battles, of revolution and disaster, the memory of the Gaelic surroundings of his boyhood among the Kerry mountains lay concealed and suppressed within him; and so far as we are concerned might have lain concealed for ever only for his good fortune in finding a biographer who was nothing better than a freelance in history. Mrs Morgan John O’Connell, who wrote the book, could not tell the story of that hidden life which came flooding so freely to the old man’s lips as the daily business of living grew less and less; she did not know Irish, she had only the vaguest knowledge of either the vastness or the worth of the Gaelic civilisation; nevertheless she saw that it was there, living, and what is more to her credit, said frankly that it was that that ought to be the chief interest of our historians. In such a sentence as: ‘What it seems to me Irish people ought to study is the real inner life of the old native Irish Catholics,’ we find an insight far deeper than Lecky’s. He, too, saw that that ‘real inner life’ existed. He wrote: ‘Ejected proprietors whose names might be traced in the Annals of the Four Masters or around the sculptured crosses of Clonmacnoise might be found in abject poverty hanging around the land which had lately been their own, shrinking from servile labour as from an intolerable pollution and still receiving a secret homage from their old tenants.16 But he seems never to have wondered if that secret life might not be worthy of study: he never gave it any; nor did he encourage others to do so. He turned him to the little annals of the Parliament in Dublin.
This treasure that so resembled a slumbering fire in the breast of that old soldier, was not peculiar to him alone of all the Wild Geese.17 Many thousands of them were fundamentally as Gaelic as he; and when one recollects how picturesque and taking the story of their lives is, even as told, one wonders what it might have been if their historians had been learned in, as well as in living sympathy with, the Gaelic spirit that, though suppressed and hidden, had made those soldiers of fortune what they were. Their sense of an immemorial past, the peculiar culture in which they had been trained — all that is omitted, just as, and for the same reasons, it has been, until quite recently, omitted in the ‘history’ of their fatherland. Behind every Gael of those Wild Geese lay the Hidden Ireland; and behind such of them as sought commissions in foreign armies lay very often such houses as Derrynane, a thing we do not realise. Behind them, rolling backward into the primeval clouds, lay that vast hinterland into which swept their eager thoughts whenever the depths of their souls were stirred; into which, in an uncertain way, we ourselves make entrance when we begin to speak with the Irish poets of their time. The scenes that these describe, and the great stories to which they so familiarly refer, the sagas of the Gaels rather than those of the Greeks, were the pasture grounds wherein the Wild Geese were nurtured. It was not what Young, for all his shrewdness, would have noted, had he gone into their Irish homes, had made these Wild Geese the men they were; it was what he would have scanted.
Those big houses, when Gaelic, shared a common culture with the lowly peasant’s hut; but they also shared the culture of the Planters. Before he sailed, in his teens, for France, young Daniel O’Connell, not the Liberator, but the Last Colonel, had studied French and Latin, to fit him for his chosen career; and this was the usual practice with all those whose ambitions were the same colour as his. Such studies re-acted, of course, on the intellectual level of the household. The culture common to both Gaelic and Planter houses compares favourably with that of families of equal rank in England. Indeed it may be that the cult of the classics among the Gaels was more alive; it was certainly in closer touch with the Continent.
To fix the notes of the culture of such houses as Derrynane, it may, however, serve us better to recall definite statements and incidents. As for contact with the Continent, we find in Mrs Morgan John O’Connell’s book quite conclusive evidence in this passage: ‘I find by letters that eighteen young and old kinsmen were serving France, Spain, Austria, at one time’ — eighteen of one rather undistinguished house! Now, it was the custom for all those Wild Geese to make flying secret visits to their homes; and though the whole eighteen kinsmen of Derrynane were not all of high rank, nor all given to intellectual trafficking, it is impossible to think that such a house was not, through those exiles, informed of European life, culture, and affairs in a more intimate sense than the Planter houses in Ireland or the houses of the nobility and squirearchy in England, where only one or two, father or son or both, would or might have made the Grand Tour in their nonage. Let us, moreover, remember that France, Spain and Austria did not share only one culture; each had its own national language and rich national life; such houses, then, as Derrynane cannot but have been in touch, and not infrequently, with the cultures of those three peoples. This we may feel confident of from the one bald statement quoted; and our confidence is again confirmed if we turn to the poets. In their verses, whenever politics is touched upon, it is sure to be the politics of the European courts, hardly ever the politics of London, and stranger still, never the politics of Dublin! Our historians of that century fill their pages with the strange doings of the politicians in Dublin; there only, it would seem, was history being wrought out; yet the names of the memorable figures that played their parts with such little reserve either of eloquence or gesture, in that city, are never even mentioned by the contemporary Irish poets of Munster.
To these, Paris was nearer than Dublin, and Vienna than London. Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, who probably never went outside Cork and Kerry, reckons up the consequences of the death of the King of Spain (1700); and Seán Clárach Mac Domhnaill, who, though he does seem to have once visited London, passed nearly all his years in a small town in County Cork, troubles himself now with the death of the Regent of France (1723) and then with the war of the Austrian Succession. Brian Merriman, who never wandered far from his native county, Clare, wrote his well-known poem, Cúirt an Mheadhon Oidhche, in 1779–80; and the Rousseau-like turn of thought in it is held by some, though perhaps not on sufficient evidence, to be due to his contact with Continental officers in the big houses he was wont to visit. Many other such scraps of evidence could be gathered from the poets of that time; for most of them were familiar with those houses which, like Derrynane, had each its eighteen kinsmen, or more or less, passing to and from the Continent.
Those poets’ alertness to what was towards on the Continent rather than in England reflected, of course, the interests of the big houses: but these interests were not alien to those of the community at large; to the people, so many of whose sons were ranging Europe hither and thither, ‘from Dunkirk to Belgrade,’ those poets were news-bringers and interpreters; so that Irish Ireland as a whole kept an ear open for the whispers from European courts. The common people were surely concerned in an incident that took place in Galway in 1747. All through the eighteenth century that city was very recalcitrant; and its Governor at this time, Colonel Stratford Eyre, was never tired of complaining it to Dublin Castle: ‘writing on the 23rd October, he says that at that moment the whole of Galway was illuminated, and that there were candles even in the windows of the convents. Colonel Eyre does not mention the cause of these rejoicings, that being, of course, well known to those to whom he was writing, but we have no difficulty in divining it. Bergen-op-zoon, the strongest fortress in Dutch Brabant, believed to be impregnable, and well-furnished with victuals and munitions of war, was carried by assault by the French on Sept. 16th, 1747. The outlying forts of Frederick Henry, Lillo and St Croix still held out, and the task of reducing them was entrusted to Lally and his Irish brigade. Frederick Henry was stormed on the 2nd October, and the two remaining forts surrendered on the 8th. No doubt it was the news of this triumph (a triumph over England’s allies) which had reached Galway a fortnight later, and the windowpanes of the town were ablaze that night to celebrate the gallant feat of arms which the exiled Irishmen in the service of a foreign king had accomplished.’18
One can hardly doubt that Lally’s fame and name that night were spoken of and toasted in hut as well as in mansion, in tavern as well as in cloister. The mention of the convents reminds us that the Gaels were not entirely dependent on the Wild Geese for contact with Europe: there were also the friars. In 1747, when Colonel Eyre was thus indicting the convent as being no better than other houses, very few cloisters indeed were left, but nowhere else was the condition of Europe better understood. From and to Louvain, Salamanca, and Rome, to name, perhaps, the three most important ecclesiastical centres, as far as we were concerned, in Europe, friars were incessantly making their way to and from the most hidden places in Ireland; a trafficking that did not ever cease, no matter how severely the Penal Laws punished it. Those travelling friars, disguised as laymen, commonly acted as teachers in those big houses; and thus other connections with the Continent were established in addition to those created by the trafficking of the soldiers. In perhaps every well-known elegy written by the poets of the time, the lamented deceased is praised insomuch as his house and board were open to those spiritual voyagers; while if the elegy is actually written on a dead priest we are sure to find some reference to his Continental training.
Contact with Europe, then, was one of the notes that distinguished the culture of the Catholic Gaels from that of the Planters. Another was the unity of mind between the Big House and the cabin. The Gaels in the big houses were one with the cottiers in race, language, religion and, to some extent, culture. Those O’Connells, O’Connors, O’Callaghans, O’Donoghues — all the Gaels — were one, it may be maintained, with the very landscape itself. In the poems and stories written hundreds of years, perhaps a thousand years, before, the places mentioned were not fictitious: in those same stories were to be found the names of those ancient families as well, so that to run off the family names connected with one of those houses was to call to vision certain districts — hills, rivers and plains; while contrariwise, to recollect the place-names in certain regions was to remember the ancient tribes and their memorable deeds. How different it was with the Planters round about them. For them, all that Gaelic background of myth, literature and history had no existence. They differed from the people in race, language, religion, culture; while the landscape they looked upon was indeed but rocks and stones and trees.
Perhaps the unity that existed between Big House and cabin in the Gaelic districts was a phenomenon not known anywhere else in Europe, inasmuch as feudalism in Ireland had never been quite the same as feudalism abroad. The first rough vigour of the feudal spirit was spent before it had spread into the farther places in Ireland. Feudalism was, moreover, right from the start, cut across by the Brehon laws — that law system so precise, so well-worn and firmly established; it is, then, very probably, correct to say that the division of the whole nation into high and low was very different in Ireland from what it was elsewhere: there was surely less of a gap. Where else had feudalism to contend with a national law-system so strong and homogeneous? If nowhere else, it does not seem profitable to write of Ireland in any age in the same terms as one does of a completely feudalised country; and one thinks that it is the less profitable according as age or district is the more Gaelic. Definite instances of quarrelling between landowner and labourer — both Gaels — as well as definite complaints in the poems of the covetousness, and even tyranny, of the landlords, may, of course, be come upon, but no matter how stressed, these instances do not contradict the general truth that the Irish side was far more homogeneous than the Planter side of Ireland’s life. The Gaels, moreover, were, in Young’s phrase, a people involved in one common ruin. In the Irish-speaking districts life was, perhaps, more homogeneous than even in the rural community of squirearchy and tenantry in England. There little or no common culture flowed to and fro, up and down, in hall and cottage; nor were there any traditions of triumphs and disasters shared in common in an immemorial fight, to unify rich and poor in mood and temper. It was for the big houses that Aodhagán Ó Rathaille chiefly wrote, the bulk of his work consisting of elegies written on such of their owners as died in his time. For all that, the greater portion of his days must have been passed in the company of poor men; and we are sure that he died in poverty. Brian Merriman, never a rich man, visited these houses, and perhaps was set to teach the children in some of them. Ó Cearbhalláin knew them only too well, passing from one to another, singing his own songs and playing his own planxties and reels. Eoghan Ruadh Ó Súilleabháin worked for them, not only as spailpín, but as schoolmaster, as also did Donnchadh Ruadh and many another. Seán Ó Tuama received their masters at the door of his inn and speeded them on the road when the time was come. Seán Clárach Mac Domhnaill proposed to them a scheme for the translation of Homer into Irish. Seán na Ráithíneach, and many another earlier and later than his time, copied manuscripts for them. It was purely their Gaelic culture that gave these poets entrance to the big houses; no other passport had they; yet that culture was obtained by them in humble cottages and taken by them to the big houses rather than contrariwise. It was a culture alien neither to poor Gael nor to rich Gael; but every passing year, of course, saw it become more and more peculiarly the appanage of the poor.
One is right, therefore, in saying that there was a common culture flowing up and down between hut and Big House in Irish Ireland; and that this phenomenon can be met with in no other country in Europe, since the conditions that had brought it about among us were not known in any country abroad.
We must, to finish, conceive of those Gaelic houses first as very much resembling the Planter houses that surrounded them — each a landmark, the centre of a little world; built of local stone after local traditions; self-supporting, seating a hundred at its tables of a daytime, marshalling its followers by the hundred; patriarchal in its conception of human society, patriarchal in the vastness of its flocks and herds. But then we must, at the same time, conceive of those Gaelic houses as possessed of certain notes of their own — freer contact with Europe, a culture over and above that which they shared with their neighbours, and a sense of historic continuity, a closeness to the land, to the very pulse of it, that those Planter houses could not even dream of.