The Year of the French (5 page)

I affirm most sincerely that distinctions which rest upon creed mean little to me, and yet I confess that my compassion for their misery is mingled with an abhorrence of their alien ways. Begin then with creed, but add to this that most speak a tongue not merely foreign, but as grotesque as the prattle of Sandwich Islanders, that they live and thrive in mud and squalor with dunghills piled before their windowless cabins, that their music, for all that antiquarians and fanatics can find to say in its favour, is wild and savage although touched upon occasion by a plaintive, melancholy beauty, that they combine a grave and gentle courtesy with a murderous violence that erupts without warning—pates smashed for pleasure on a fairday, cattle barbarously mutilated, bailiffs put to death with crude tortures—that they worship foetid pools as holy wells and go on pilgrimage to clumps of rock, that their eyes look towards you with an innocence behind which dances malevolence. Yet I avow my sympathy for them, and wish that I might serve them better, or at all.

How else can they live, poor creatures of the Father? The peasant has his few cows and pigs, his brief crops, but all must go to pay the landlord, every forkful of beef, every grain of oats, and he himself and his family must live on potatoes and milk. And he is fortunate, for worse there are who hold no land at all in the law’s eyes, but crouch upon the mountainside or huddle near the bog. They travel with their spades to the hiring fairs, where they stand like slaves upon the block. In late winter, when the potatoes have been exhausted, they wander the roads to beg. And what of those who hold a bit of land but cannot meet the rent? A good landlord, like my dear friend Mr. Falkiner, will let it hang for a season or two, provided that he himself is solvent, but many landlords are mortgaged heavily to the Dublin banks and moneylenders and they too are pressed down by the system. Many others are not true landlords at all, but middlemen to whom the land has been let for reletting, and many of these employ the barbarous practice of the “rack rent.” And there are many landlords great and small who, like Captain Cooper, when grazing proves more profitable than letting, will turn out his tenants to beg or starve upon the roads. I have myself seen families huddled in the sides of hills where they had hewn out holes, entire families, the small ones cowering and rooting beside the gaunt form of the woman.

A system more ingeniously contrived, first for the debasement, and then for the continuance in that debasement, of an entire people cannot easily be imagined. On this subject I lack both the eloquence and the lucidity of George Moore of Moore Hall, a most astonishing man to discover in such parts as these, being an historian of some note, enlightened and humane in his views, and a friend of Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and other notabilities. To attend to his acerb, sardonic voice as he discourses upon the ills of Ireland is to be confirmed in one’s despair, for he has never a remedy to suggest. And yet despair is rightly held the one unforgivable sin, and I have striven mightily against it.

I have striven also to find common ground with this multitude, but with scant success. I except here Mr. Moore and also Thomas Treacy of Bridge-end House, for these are accounted gentlemen, and I have always regarded their Papistry as chivalrous adherence to a persecuted sect. And I except also, strange though this may seem, Mr. Hussey, the priest in Killala, for he is himself almost a gentleman, being the son of a prosperous grazier in the midlands. Often, it has seemed to me, he has been more dismayed than I am myself by the barbarous life and manners of those to whom he ministers. I sought, though, in my first year, to make the acquaintance of the scattering of Papist “half sirs,” such men as Cornelius O’Dowd and Randall MacDonnell, but these two in particular, to speak bluntly, I found to be irreligious men, unless we account fidelity to whiskey, horses, and wanton women to be a form of devotion; and this sorry estimation of their characters was amply vindicated by the violent courses of action which they took in the events which I shall narrate. Beneath that level, of course, were farmers and servants who both understood and spoke English, indeed some who had mastered the art of writing it. But always, below the surface of our pleasant interchanges, I could feel the tremblings of the great chasm which separated us, as though we met to parley on the quaking face of a bog.

I propose to set forth in this narrative whatever I have learned of that singular and most unfortunate man, Owen Ruagh MacCarthy. He once came to me at my bidding, for I wished to dispose of some books, and believed that he might make use of them in his “classical academy,” a kind of hedge school in which children were given the rudiments of an education and older boys were prepared for the seminaries. I confess that I had my misgivings, for I had often seen him in the village, a tall, wild red-haired creature with a loping stride, notoriously given to drink and bad company. His earlier reputation was equally daunting, for it was said that he had wandered, or more exactly had been swept, northwards from his native Kerry to Cork and thence through Clare and Galway into Mayo, flitting from troubles with the law, some said, but according to others pursued by posses of outraged fathers and husbands and brothers, for he could keep neither his eyes nor his hands from any woman of appropriate age and here his tastes were catholic in the nondenominational meaning of the term. And yet this was a man who possessed fluent Latin and had a good knowledge of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. More astonishing yet, I have been informed by Treacy of Bridge-end House, a fanatic upon the supposed accomplishments of his race, that MacCarthy was a poet not lacking for fame, his verses being memorised and circulated in manuscript from Donegal to Kerry. I asked Treacy to render several of these into English for me, but he replied that the rhythm and metres, if such be the proper terms, could not be accommodated to English, so that words and sounds would be quarrelling together like husband and wife, an instructive view into Irish attitudes towards matrimony.

At any event, and to end this digression, MacCarthy may for all one knows have been a second Ovid, but his words are locked forever within a barbarous language, which history has sentenced to silence and the plough. Upon this occasion, I assured him that I felt keenly the unhappy lot of his fellow countrymen, and suggested that this might somehow be improved if they were able to experience more completely the safeguards of English law. He responded with the verses of some other poet, which he then put into English for me, Treacy notwithstanding: “Troy and Rome have vanished; Caesar is dead and Alexander. Perhaps someday the English too will have their day.”

I challenged him as to the meaning that he derived from this dark utterance, and he replied it meant only that Greece and Rome had once been empires, and England was now in its turn summoned to greatness. I told him that I did not for a minute suppose it to mean any such thing. Rather did it express the sullen vengefulness which the Irish peasantry notoriously nurse, and which, like their superstitions, distracts them from seeking proper and rational solutions to their problems. Then I reflected: What solutions? Well-meaning Protestant clergymen write books and tracts for them, urging them to dress neatly, when in fact they are half naked; to tell the truth, when only a lie will shield them from a rapacious landlord; to be sober, when the only comfort lies drowned in a bottle.

He then smiled at me, as though he had read my thoughts, and the smile altered his coarse, heavy features, suggesting a lively if sardonic intelligence. In an obvious effort to change the subject, he picked up a small book from the pile which I had set before him, a translation of Le Sage’s romance of
Gil Blas
. “It is well I know this one, Your Reverence. I had it in the tail pocket of my coat when I was on my ramblings, years ago. No better book for the task.” I discovered then that he had in fact a smattering of French, as was not uncommon, apparently, among the schoolmasters of his native Kerry, where there had earlier been much traffic with France. It was from Kerry and Cork that, until some ten years before, lads were shipped off to the seminaries at Douai and Saint-Omer or as recruits for the Irish brigades in the French army, and there was also a brisk smuggling trade. Not merely the last but all three of these enterprises were forbidden by law, but this seemed not to trouble MacCarthy at all. Herein may be discovered yet another sorry consequence of those abominable penal laws by which, for a century, the Papists were kept in a condition of semi-outlawry.

I found it curious in the extreme, this conjunction of
Gil Blas
and the French language with the coarse-moulded cowherd who stood before me in his long-tailed coat of rain-coloured frieze. Upon this occasion and those others when I talked with MacCarthy I was most favourably impressed by his transparent love of words and of books, though doubtless he apprehended these latter in a crabbed, provincial manner, and by his bearing, which was easy but at no time offensively familiar. And yet there was also about him something which did give me offence, a sly, slight mockery as though he knew, as well as I did myself, that we used the same words in quite different ways. How little we will ever know these people, locked as we are in our separate rooms. And often I have glimpsed him in another mood, stumbling drunkenly homewards, more beast than man, towards the bed he shared with some young slut of a widow. The course which he later followed saddened but did not surprise me. He dwelt deep within the world of his people, and theirs is an unpredictable and a violent world.

What most weighed down upon me in my first years in Mayo was that all seemed agreed, rich and poor alike, that the dreadful circumstances to which I have alluded were changeless, woven from a history of so thick a texture that it could never be pulled or tugged to a more acceptable shape. I am no manner of a radical. I know that the laws of human economy, like those of astronomy, are inexorable and strict. Yet I cannot escape the feeling that here these laws have been pulled awry, as comets and meteors are pulled down upon the earth. The poor we shall always have with us, but need we have them in such numbers, accounting at the very least for a simple majority of the population?

But the few remedies which have been proposed are more hideous than the disease which they affect to cure. Thus I have heard it proposed, by men no more inhumane than most, that the recurrent famines are Providential, and will in time bring down the population to a proper size, but this I hold to be blasphemy. Or, again, take the matter of the Whiteboys, which has its role to play in my narrative. For some thirty years these agrarian terrorists had been a scourge upon the land, ravaging countrysides, murdering bailiffs, maiming or killing cattle, pulling down the fences which enclose pastures, inflicting crude and loathsome punishment upon enemies and informers. In some few places their ambitions were satisfied; rents were lowered, or the expansion of grazing was halted. But in most, the Whiteboys were hunted down as stags and wolves are hunted, and were then destroyed. As destroyed they had to be, for civilisation cannot abide such savagery. Famine or terror: what a fearful brace of proffered remedies!

And of what assistance is religion itself? I shall say little about the Church of the people. Doubtless it has been deformed and brutalised by the century or more of persecution which it has endured, and doubtless too it exercises a moderating influence upon its children, and yet I cannot profess to a great sympathy. Mr. Hussey, as I have remarked, is a man of education and good manners. Few sights were more ludicrous than that of Mr. Hussey in his silver-buckled shoes, picking his way into some cabin where his presence was required, all but holding his nose against the stench. In his chapel, which had been erected with the assistance of Mr. Falkiner and other of the more liberal-minded Protestant gentry, I believe that he inveighed steadily alike against Whiteboys and against the superstitious practices of his auditors. And yet far more typical of the Roman clergy was his curate, the egregious Murphy, the son of peasants and a peasant himself, a coarse, ignorant man, red-faced, young, stout, with the voice of a bull calf. Risen from the people, he could offer no example to them. And when the crisis fell upon us, he demonstrated that he shared to the full their darkest passions. Neither was he cleanly in his habits, and of his fondness for the bottle there is abundant evidence.

But of my own Church, what can I say, save that it is the Church of a governing garrison? My church, unlike those in many other parishes, is well attended, and here I claim some credit for my sermons, which are not empty vapourisings upon obscure Scriptural texts, but are addressed to the daily business of life. And yet when I look to the bare white walls and slender windows, to the two battleflags which Mr. Falkiner’s great-great-grandfather brought home from the wars of Marlborough, to the plaques erected to those who fell serving our sovereign on the fields of France and Flanders, when I look to my parishioners, stiff and erect as turkeycocks or conquistadors, then the troubling thought occurs to me that I am less minister to Christ’s people than I am priest to a military cult, as Mithra was honoured by the legions of Rome. Here, I think at such truant moments, is an outpost stationed in the land by the perpetual edicts of Elizabeth and James and Cromwell and William and charged to hold this land for our lord the King.

Why else does the Protestant gentry of Ireland send forth its young men into the British army and the army of the East India Company if not from an instinct bred in the bone, bred perhaps of childhoods of Sundays spent staring at battleflags? And yet one thing is certain: that if England advances upon a land with the sword, there follow soon after the arts and benefits of civilisation, an orderly existence, security of person and property, education, just laws, true religion, and a hopeful view of man’s lot on earth. Only here have we failed, in the very first land we entered, for reasons which were in part our fault and in part the fault of the natives. But I think it pernicious to rummage over the past, sorting out wrongs and apportioning guilts.