XXIV.
DUBLIN IN 1924.
A city so beautiful as Dublin may survive a couple of wars within as many years, but can it survive the peace which now possesses it? This is the question that has haunted me since a visit recently paid of a few hours duration. There were the same spacious squares of trees and grass surrounded by broad-faced reticent houses, the same wide streets of ample dignity, there was the same river with its fine stone bridges—a river lined indeed with the ruins of the town’s two noblest buildings, but hardly less picturesque because of that; you approached the city from the sea through the same magnificent bay, with the same fine coast line with its stately headlands on either side, and the mountains and parklands behind. Yet the city itself was different. It wore a different air, it carried itself with a different spirit. Superficially it seemed down-at-heels, yet jaunty withal. One would not mind the down-at-heels atmosphere, but jaunty self-complacency is another matter. One is accustomed to decay in many a beautiful Italian town. The decay of beautiful things has in itself an element of romance. Even artificial decay sometimes possesses this quality. I found the battered Four Courts interesting in a new way. They had the interest that the ruins of ancient Rome had, before they were cleaned, garnished and labelled by the archæologists—the interest they still have in Piranesi’s etchings. You saw at the Four Courts pieces of magnificent carving, perhaps a trophy of arms over a doorway, against a disorder of broken walls. The carving seemed thereby to possess a new and more vivid life. It looked as some French courtier might have looked in his brocaded clothes among the debris of the Bastille. Besides the Four Courts can be repaired, and I suppose even the lost dome can be restored to the Customs House. Till the latter is done, however, the city is definitely the poorer. Its absence is a gap that is felt acutely. The pierced dome of the Four Courts is but a reveller whose fine clothes have been somewhat torn and muddied, but who still keeps his feet and even adds a little ironic gaiety to the scene. But the Customs House, as a whole, is laid low by its loss. Without its dome—the envy of all non-metropolitan towns in spite of their modern attempts—the great building is in the gutter. Its massive walls and columns remain, but they have lost their meaning. The long façade straggles on with nothing to hold it together. With its dome it was the most powerful yet buoyant civic building in these islands. Now it is not only prostrate but dull. But Irishmen will, I know, see that these two buildings are restored to their pristine grandeur. The uneasiness I feel about the town is not due to them nor to ruins of whole sections to cellar level as at Ypres or Albert. It is due rather to the innovations, to the new red Ruabon brick buildings in Sackville Street, to the sixpenny stores in Grafton Street—the Bond Street of the town—to the coarse granite Celtic Cross in front of the beautiful Leinster House as a memorial to Michael Collins. Was any hero so badly served by those who meant so well? I would have taken Nelson off his column if I could have done no better, or I would have gone to America for another Parnell monument. It is this acceptance of the second rate which frightens me in a town too, which, till now, has possessed more for its size that is first rate than either London or Edinburgh. It may be a passing phase. The best architects of the town are desirous enough to do well if they are employed. The republican spirit, which prevented both the railway porter, who found me a seat in the mail train, and the boots at my hotel from taking my modest tips, will in time find its due expression. So far it has not done so, at any rate in material things. Rather it has been content with a bourgeois vulgarity which even Lancashire would scorn.
Perhaps it is waiting till the last of the Sassenach has disappeared. I hope they came away on my boat—three women in monocles and a man dressed as and with a face like a horse. But there was something too in the remark of the jarvie who drove me on his car to Westland Row, “What’s wrong with this town is that it has too many darned heroes.” Certainly if all these heroes have monuments erected to them like poor Michael Collins’s there will be no more Dublin. No town could stand such treatment, least of all one whose charm is so finely gracious, and who is at heart so truly aristocratic. Dubliners could at any rate no longer gibe as pleasantly as they do now at that northern city with its one book shop, if their own became but an expression of the rivalries of petty commerce relieved with a multitude of barbaric monuments.