He did settle it. Mayo beat the landlords then, and Mayo became the cradle of popular movements ever after. This most typical of Irish land-owning gentlemen had been forced to sever himself from his class and even to injure his class, and it was not by advocacy of self-government that he estranged so close a friend as Lord Sligo. Fintan Lalor's policy, rejected by the Young Irelanders in 1846, was beginning to take hold in 1868; the movement for self-government was becoming linked on to the driving force of land-hunger. In the eyes of Lord Sligo and all his class Tenant Right meant Landlord Wrong, and Moore himself was not exempt from that feeling. He suffered indeed, for rents that he had reduced to a figure fixed by the tenants' own arbitrators were withheld from him. Yet he knew clearly that it was necessary for the country, and not more necessary than just, to secure the tenants in their holdings. No one disputes now that he was right. But the last thing he desired was to abolish the landlords. If they did not like the leadership of the priests "they have," he said, "a remedy left; let them make themselves more popular than the priests. If the landlords will make common cause with the people, the people will make common cause with them." There was never a truer word spoken, but it fell on closed ears.

Moore himself broke the landlords' power at the polls; their infinitely greater power, proceeding from control of the land, was broken by another Mayo man, Michael Davitt, the evicted peasant from Straide, close by Moore Hall. That fight was bound to come when Moore's warning and the warning of men like him was set at nought. What a change it has made! and what has been lost to Ireland!

Moore died in 1870. His last year of life saw a hope that Presbyterian farmers of the North, interested in Tenant Right, who had been temporarily allied to Catholics in the struggle for Disestablishment, might unite solidly with the Nationalists. Even the Protestant gentry afforded numerous supporters to Butt's Home Rule policy at its outset. But of this nothing serious came. The Land Act of 1870 was ineffective, and it seemed that, in spite of Fenianism, all would go on as before. Throughout the 'seventies the landlord class was in undisturbed supremacy. Country gentlemen still talked in good set phrase about "the robbery of the Church"; in actual fact they were very complacently and competently helping to administer its new constitution. Agriculture was prosperous and rents went high, though the harsh and overbearing landlord was condemned by his fellows. This, however, was poor consolation to the tenants. In the county where I was brought up, one landlord was a name of terror, and there was no redress from his tyranny, until at last the peasantry found it for themselves. The grim old man died fighting hard before his brains were dashed out on the roadside, and two innocent people were killed along with him; but no sane person could fail to perceive that, within five years of his taking off, the whole district was improved out of knowledge. The moral to be drawn was only too obvious; yet none of the landlords drew it; the established interest of a class is too strong a thing for that class to shake themselves out of its influence.

The men of that generation—how well I remember them! most vividly perhaps as they used to come in to church on Sunday morning, when the ladies of their families addressed themselves to devotions kneeling, while the men said their prayers standing, peering mysteriously into their tall hats—a strange ritual, of which traces may be observed at the House of Commons, but nowhere else, I fancy, on earth. On week days they lived an orderly, dignified existence in their big old-fashioned houses, leaving home little, though the more cultivated among them had travelled in their youth and knew thoroughly some foreign country. In their own orbit they had power, leisure, and deference, all of which set a stamp upon them; individuality had great scope to develop, and an able man among them was a man made for government. One such stands out in my memory. Stormy tales were told of his youth, but from himself no one heard a whisper of these far-off exploits; small, exquisitely neat, finely made and finely featured, he was courteous and gentle-spoken with all; but he was of those quiet creatures who breed fear. I cannot imagine the situation of power of responsibility from which he would have shrunk, or to which he would have been unequal; neither can I imagine him anxious in the pursuit of office. That was Parnell's type. Parnell's strength appears to have lain precisely in that self-confidence which was a law to itself and which no prestige of fame or authority could shake or overawe. The men who might have been Ireland's leaders were men extraordinarily suited for the conduct of affairs, but as a class they had been thrown out of their natural relation. Castlereagh, who in his cold efficiency had much in common with Parnell, accomplished a desperate deed when he made the Union through them. He committed their honour to justify for all time that transaction. If those who condemned the Union were not traitors, then the class from whom it was bought with cash and titles stood convicted of infamy; and since the heart of Ireland loathed and detested Castlereagh's work, the whole body of the Irish gentry found themselves inevitably estranged from the heart of Ireland. On one side was the interest of a class—and not merely the material interest but the interest of its honour, which sought a justification in the name of loyalty; on the other was the interest of Ireland; and the landlord who chose the side of Ireland severed himself necessarily, as Moore had to do, from his own friends and kin.

For years now there has been moving through many minds in Ireland the question whether this state of things must permanently endure. Is that estrangement inevitable? I at least think otherwise. Throughout the last two decades of the nineteenth century landlord and tenant were opposed in a struggle for definite material interests; it was a fight not only for free conditions of tenure but for the reduction of rent, if not for its total abolition. A way of peace was found in State-aided land purchase, and in a reconstitution of the whole agricultural order. The landlords, where they have been bought out, have not even the duty of rent collecting. How will this affect their traditional attitude, which calls itself loyalty to the English connexion, but which I interpret rather as a traditional justification of the Union and of the hereditary landlord policy? If self-government is established without dissolution of the Union, is it not reasonable to suppose that there will be a change in men's dispositions?

The question involved is really more serious, though of far less political importance, than that of Ulster. Whatever happens, the industrial community of Belfast and its district is not going to run away. That element will not be lost to Ireland; it is too strong, too well able to assert itself; and it is anchored by its interest. The ex-landlords, now that their occupation is gone, are bound to Ireland only by habit and attachment. At present they fulfil no essential function; and it will be open undoubtedly for the gentry once more to make an error mischievous to Ireland and disastrous to themselves. They may take up the line of unwilling submission, of refusal to co-operate, of cold-shouldering and crying down the new Parliament and the new Ministry. Social pressure may be exercised to keep men from seeking election, and so to perpetuate the existing severance between the leisured and wealthier classes and the main body of the nation. There will be strong tendencies in this direction. But on the other hand I think that among the men who have grown up under the new order there is an increasing willingness to accept the change. One friend of mine—no politician, and, like all non-politicians, a Unionist—said to me lately that he would be rather disappointed if Home Rule did not become law—he was "curious about it"; and he added, "I think a great many like me have the same feeling." Others probably have a more positive outlook, and desire to take an active part in the public life of their country; and there will be a strong desire among Irish Nationalists to bring in at the outset those who wish to come in. On the other hand, no less certainly, there will be the feeling that is natural towards those who wish to reap where they have not sown; and the gentry will need to make allowance for this. If they set out with the notion, as some did when Local Government was established, that places are theirs by right when they condescend to take them—that they are entitled to election because they have more money, more education, because, if you will, they are, in the eye of pure reason, better qualified—nothing but trouble can come of such a disposition. Ireland, which in George Henry Moore's time was the most aristocratically governed part of the British Isles, is now by far more democratic, at all events, than England: the poor man is on a level with the rich, and means to stay there. Those who want to go into Irish politics, under Home Rule as now, must take their chances in the ruck; but if they do, they will find a people ready and even eager to recognise their qualities, and to allot perhaps more consideration than is due to their social position.

With all their practical democracy, the Irish have a great tenderness for "the old stock." In the cases (and there are many hundreds of them) where a landlord or professional man or Protestant clergyman has been for long years a real friend and support and counsellor to his poorer neighbours, as Irish in voice and looks and gesture as they, sharing their tastes and their aversions, their sport and their sorrow, yet divided and cut off from them by a kind of political religion, I believe from my heart that there will be on both sides a willingness to celebrate the end of that old discord in some happy compact. But on both sides there must be generosity and a sympathy with natural hesitations and reluctances. Whatever comes or goes, the old domination of the gentry has disappeared; yet, whatever comes or goes, men of that class may find a sphere of usefulness and even of power in Ireland. But this will be infinitely easier to achieve when the great subject of contention is removed, and when the ex-landlord can seek election, and the ex-tenant can support him, without a sense on either side of turning against the traditional loyalties of a class.

1913.

YESTERDAY IN IRELAND.

But readers will know that this is not only a book of memories; it is, if not a memoir, at least the memorial of a singularly brilliant Irish woman. Miss Somerville had planned to write her recollections, as she had written so much else, in collaboration with her cousin and comrade, "Martin Ross"—Miss Violet Martin, of Ross, in County Galway. It did not so fall out; and though in this volume one is aware that the narrator is often (by a sort of sub-conscious habit) speaking out of two minds, from a dual complex of associations, and though considerable fragments of Martin Ross's own writing give a justification to the joint signature, yet one of the two comrades is joint author now only in so far as she is part of all the memories, and a surviving influence little likely to pass away. But her stock, so to say, in the partnership remains; Galway, no less than Cork, is the field over which these memories travel. In the main, the book is concerned with recalling the joint kindred of the two friends and cousins, and reconstituting the surroundings and the atmosphere of both families. Families, however, are conceived and depicted in their most extended relations; figures are evoked of chief, vassal, page and groom, tenant and master; and with them go their "opposite numbers" (to borrow an army term) from chieftainess to cook. Chieftainesses are there unmistakably. One ex-beauty had retired from the Court of the Regent to Castle Townshend (Miss Somerville's personal background), and there lived long, "noted for her charm of manner, her culture and her sense of humour."

Miss Somerville observes that such stories may help to explain the French Revolution; but she adds, quite plausibly:—

Undoubtedly the chieftain-spirit is admired, and not least when it shows itself in a woman. A more lenient and more modern example is to be found in the account of a dispute about bounds in a transaction under the Land Purchase Act. After all other agencies failed, the landlord's sister called the disputants before her to the disputed spot, stepped the distance of the land debatable, drove her walking-stick into a crevice of the rock (disputes are passionate in opposite ratio to the value of the land) and, collecting stones, built a small cairn round it. "Now men," she said, "in the name of God let this be the bounds." And it was so. "It failed the agent, and it failed the landlord, and it failed the priest; but Lady Mary settled it," was the summing up of one of the disputants. That was a chieftainess for you.

Not inferior in chieftainly spirit was Martin Ross's grandfather who "had the family liking for a horse."

Somehow that picture gives a measure of the remoteness. Stephen's Green was not then a place of square-set granite pavement, tram-rails and large swift-moving electric trams; it was a leisurely promenade where large slow-moving country gentlemen turned out in tall hats and frock-coats. We of Miss Somerville's generation depend on our imagination, not on memory, to reconstruct the scene. The grandfather in question died before the great famine of 1847, which shook and in many places uprooted the old order without yet bringing in the new. His son, Martin Ross's father, had the famine to cope with and survived it; but of the second convulsion from which emerged the Ireland of to-day he saw only the beginning, for he died in 1873, when the organised peasant uprising was at most a menace. But his wife knew both periods—the bad times of the late 'forties and the bad times of the early eighties. The true link with the past for the writers of Irish Memories is through the female line. This is a book of mothers and daughters rather than of fathers and sons.

Martin Ross's mother went back easily in memory to the society which had known the Irish Parliament, had made or accepted the Union, and which, after the Union, exercised chieftainship in Ireland. She was the daughter of Chief Justice Bushe, one of Grattan's rivals in oratory, who, like Grattan, had opposed the Union with all the resources of his eloquence. Against his name in the private Castle list of voters for the crucial division had been written in despair one word: "Incorruptible." He was the common ancestor whose blood made the bond of kinship between Miss Somerville and Martin Ross, and both these staunch Unionist ladies are passionately proud of the part which their grandfather played in resisting the Union; just as you will find the staunchest Ulster Covenanters exulting in the fact that they had a forbear "out" with the United Irishmen at Antrim or Ballynahinch in 1798. No wonder Englishmen find Ireland puzzling; but Scots understand, for their own records abound in examples of the same paradoxes of historic sentiment.

Yesterday in Ireland, I think, for my present purpose comes to define itself as the period between the famine of 1847 and the famine of 1879—between the downfall of O'Connell and Parnell's coming to power. We who were born in the 'sixties grew up in the close of it, and perhaps recognise now more clearly than when they were with us the characters of our kindred who were a part of it as mature human beings. "The men and women, but more specially the women of my mother's family and generation, are a lost pattern, a vanished type." I could say the same as Miss Somerville. There was a spaciousness about those people, a disregard of forms and conventions, a habit of thinking and acting for themselves which really came down from a long tradition of interpreting the law to their own liking. Miss Somerville and her comrade knew the type in its fullest development, for both grew up in far-out Atlantic-bordering regions—Carbery of West Cork, Connemara of West Galway—where the countryside knew scarcely "any inhabitants but the gentry and their dependents. 'Where'd we be at all if it wasn't for the Colonel's Big Lady?' said the hungry country-women, in the Bad Times, scurrying, barefooted, to her in any emergency to be fed and doctored and scolded." So writes Miss Somerville of her mother; so might Martin Ross have written of her father, who was, so far as in him lay, a Providence for his tenantry. Yet there is a story told of Mr. Martin that throws a flood of light on the whole position of affairs. Who were indeed the dependents? And on what did they depend? The story tells of a widow down by Lough Corrib, long in arrears with her rent.

Martin Ross, writing in the light of to-day, makes this comment:—

War, famine and pestilence—all these are capable of summoning forth splendid impulses; but society should not be organised to give play to these hazards of feeling. The fundamental truth about yesterday in Ireland is that everybody accepted as natural a state of affairs under which Irish gentry were taking rents that could not be earned on the land which was burdened with them. Landlord and tenant alike were really dependent on what was sent back by the sons and daughters of poor people from America to prevent the break-up of homes. The whole situation was false, from top to bottom. At top, a small class, physically and often mentally superb, full of charm, extraordinarily agreeable, fit for great uses, but by temperament, habit and education unequipped for its proper task of equipping and directing the labour out of which ultimately it had to live or perish. It perished. At bottom, a multitude with marvellous constitution, undermined by age-long under-feeding, friendly, most lovable, most winning, but untrained and unequipped, half-hearted in its business of rolling the pitiless stone up the never-ending hill. It survived—clinging with a desperate tenacity to the soil which so meagrely nourished it. But during that generation of yesterday—and how many generations before it?—there grew up inevitably, from the conditions, a traditional toleration of incompetence, a faith as it were in inefficiency. Ireland of yesterday was bound up in one vicious circle of work that was necessarily underpaid because it was inefficient, and work that was necessarily inefficient because it was underpaid. In the lower class there were no reserves; the dependants lived from hand to mouth, and when hand failed to find food, they had to come to the upper class, first for remission of its claims on them and then for actual subsistence. But the dependence was mutual, and there were no reserves at top equal to the needs of that joint hazard. Penury was only at two removes from the "gentry houses." While the first line of defence, the tenants, held good, the world went pleasantly for the Ireland of yesterday. But when that line broke, and starvation burst in, then the best men and women in the big houses flung their all into the common stock, and went under—as did the chief of the Martins in Connemara.

That, however, happened the day before yesterday; yesterday saw nothing so dire. But the menace of it was always there, and the rest of Ireland gradually consolidated itself for a struggle to win what had long ago been acquired for Protestant Ulster—the right of a tenant to what his own labour created. The Ulster custom has done for Ulster, industrial as well as agricultural, more than is generally perceived. It gave in some degree recognition to efficiency. Tenure was there less precarious, less dependent on the landlord's pleasure; men were freer, work had more rights. There was less room for impulse, perhaps less appeal to affection; but when a business relation is based on impulse and affection, where rights are not solid and defined, the sense of obligation easily leads men astray. That which is given out of loyalty and affection comes to be taken as a due. Martin Ross—"Miss Violet," whom the people of Ross called "the gentle lady," as beautiful a name as was ever earned by mortal—inherited with little qualification the landlord standpoint. She recalls the story of an election in 1872, when her father, going to vote in Oughterard, saw "a company of infantry keeping the way for Mr. Arthur Guinness (afterwards Lord Ardilaun) as he conveyed to the poll a handful of his tenants to vote for Captain Trench, he himself walking in front with the oldest of them on his arm." She does not ask if the tenants desired to be so conveyed. She merely describes how her father "ranged through the crowd incredulously, asking for this or that tenant, unable to believe that they had deserted him." When he came home, "even the youngest child of the house could see how great had been the blow. It was not the political defeat, severe as that was, it was the personal wound, and it was incurable."

Looking back through all those years, the "gentle lady" can see nothing in that episode but a case of priestly intimidation. "One need not blame the sheep who passed in a frightened huddle from one fold to another." Yet friends of mine in Galway look back on it in a very different spirit; they remember the Nolan-Trench election and Captain Nolan's victory as a triumph of the poor, a first instalment of freedom; it brought with it an exultation very different from the mere outburst of hatred that these pages suggest. What is more, having been privileged to sit in the most widely representative assembly of Irishmen that modern Ireland has known, I can testify that to-day peer and peasant, clergy and laymen, those who opposed it, and those others who fought for it, alike admit that the change which such a victory fore-shadowed was necessary and was beneficent. But it was a revolution. Ireland of yesterday was Ireland before the revolution. The Ireland that Miss Somerville and Martin Ross have lived in as grown women has been a country in the throes of a revolution, long drawn-out, with varying phases, yet still incomplete. Those who judge Ireland should remember this. In time of revolution, life is difficult, ancient loyalties clash with new yet living principles, sympathy and justice even are unsure guides. No country could have been kept for forty years in such a ferment as Ireland has known without profound demoralisation. We may well envy those who lived more easily and quietly in the Ireland of yesterday, and held with an unquestioning spirit to the state of things in which they were born.

Such were the folk of whom Miss Somerville writes with "that indomitable family pride that is an asset of immense value in the history of a country." They "took all things in their stride without introspection or hesitation. Their unflinching conscientiousness, their violent church-going (I speak of the sisters), were accompanied by a whole-souled love of a spree and a wonderful gift for a row." I can corroborate her details, especially the last. All those that I recall had some talent for feuds; at least, in every family there would be one warrior, male or female; and all had the complete contempt, not so much for convention as for those who were affected in their lives (or costumes) by any standard that was not home-made. But in all humility I must admit that the real heroines of this book—Mrs. Somerville and Mrs. Martin—outshine anything that my memory can produce. When Martin Ross and her mother went back to West Galway and re-established themselves at their old home, a letter from her to Miss Somerville describes one incident:—

My own mother would gladly have done the same on a like occasion, but she lacked Mrs. Martin's talent for the jig. Mrs. Somerville is sketched with a free and humorous hand. I quote only one detail, but it shows the real Irishwoman, more deeply in touch with Ireland's traditional life than any Gaelic League could bring her. Question arose how to find a suitable offering for 'an old servant of forty years' standing, whose fancies were few and her needs none.' "Give her a nice shroud," said Mrs. Somerville, "there's nothing in the world she'd like so well as that."

Shakespeare could not have outdone that intuition, and only one of the larger breed would have been unconventional enough to suggest what the younger generation, hampered by other feelings than those of West Carbery, "were too feeble to accept."

These two traits belong to the harmonious and thoroughly Irish grouping in which such ladies as Mrs. Martin and Mrs. Somerville were central figures of the whole countryside. That grouping exists no longer, and this book has to describe the discord which interrupted that harmony. Martin Ross's elder brother, Robert Martin (famous in his day as the writer and singer of Ballyhooly, and a score of other topical songs), left his work as a London journalist to help in fighting the first campaign which brought the word "boycott" into usage.

Robert Martin faced, in a word, the earliest and ugliest phases of that Irish revolution, which was the Nemesis of the all too easy and too pleasant ways of yesterday in Ireland. Later, after his death, Martin Ross herself had to gain some experience of the same trouble. When she went back with her mother to re-establish the family home from which they had been fifteen years absent, there was a hostile element in the parish, and gracious hospitality was ungraciously met. An attempt was made to keep children from a children's party which she had organised. The move was half-hearted and her energy defeated it, but that the attempt should be made was such "a facer" as she had never before known. Like many another ugly thing in Ireland, it originated in that cowardly fear of public opinion which is to be found on the seamy side of all revolutions; and it did not stand against her "gallant fight to restore the old ways, the old friendships."

The old ways, in so far as they meant the old friendships, she might hope to restore, although the friendship would, half consciously, take on a new accent; personality would count for more in it, position for less. But the old relation which authorised a kind-hearted landlord to feel that his tenants had "deserted him" because they voted against his wish in an election—that is gone for ever; and gone, at all events, for the present, is the local leadership of the gentry.

I question whether it is realised that in parting from that leadership Ireland lost what was in a sense Home Rule. In the "yesterday" of which I write Ireland was governed in all its parochial and most intimate affairs by a class or a caste; but that governing class was Irish—Irish with a limitation, no doubt, yet still indisputably Irish. When that rule perished, when that class lost its local ascendancy, government became the bastard compromise that we have known, with power inharmoniously divided between officialdom and agitators. The law was framed and administered by officials, often English or Scotch, possessing no authority except what the law conferred on them. Authority lay very largely with popular leaders; but leadership and authority alike were purely personal, depending on a man's own qualities and the support which they evoked. No man was born to it as of right, and such authority is far more precarious than the established power of a governing class. This is a weakness in all democratically-governed countries, but where there is self-government, the individual, in entering upon office, acquires the support and the prestige of a long-established machinery of power. He ceases to be merely the individual when he becomes part of the Government. For the Irish leaders this reinforcement to the personal authority has never existed; they have been at a terrible disadvantage as compared with all other democratic politicians; and consequently the power exercised by them has always, except perhaps at Parnell's zenith, been far less than was the combined authority of the gentry before the landlord rule was broken. Those who shared in that authority acted, and could afford to act, with unquestioning confidence; they were surer of themselves, than is any popular leader or any official in Ireland of to-day. It seldom occurred to them to ask whether their conduct in any juncture might meet with approval; being a law to other people, they were naturally a law to themselves, and an Irish law. Their power was excessive, and demoralised them by its lack of limitation; yet many of the qualities which it bred, made them an element of great value in the country. These qualities are by no means extinct in their kindred, nor is the tradition of their right to leadership forgotten.

Of one thing Miss Somerville and those for whom she speaks (she is a real spokeswoman) may be well assured. Whatever be the surface mood of the moment, whatever the passing effect of war's hectic atmosphere, nothing is more deeply realised throughout Ireland than the need to restore the old ways, the old friendships—the need to bring back the gentry to their old uses in Ireland, and to so much of leadership as should be theirs by right of fitness. When the history of the Irish Convention comes to be fully recorded, it will be seen that a great desire was universally felt, cordially uttered, in that assembly, to bridge over the gulf which divides us from yesterday in Ireland, and to recover for the future much of what was admirable, valuable and lovable in a past that is not unkindly remembered. Indeed, it is plain that Miss Somerville has felt the influences that were abroad on the winds, when she wrote of her comrade:—

North and South—that is a more difficult gulf to bridge, for the one I have been speaking of is only a breach to repair. But industrial Protestant Ulster and the rest of Ireland have never really been one. Unity there has not to be re-established, but created. Martin Ross went to the North only once "at the tremendous moment of the signing of the Ulster Covenant," and she was profoundly impressed by what she saw. She wrote about it publicly and she wrote also privately (in a letter which I had the honour to receive) a passage well worth quoting:—

When that reciprocal pilgrimage was accomplished by the Convention, her anticipations were more than justified. But how clever she was! In a flash, she, coming there a stranger, hits on the word which describes Ulster and differentiates it from the rest of Ireland. "Hearty," that is what they are; it is the good side of their self-content. No people that is in revolution can be hearty—least of all when revolution has dragged on through more than a generation. Distrust of your comrades—distrust of your leaders—self-distrust—these are the characteristic vices of revolution (look at Russia), and they sow a bitter seed. Protestant Ulster has never known revolution; for it yesterday and to-day have been happily, naturally, continuous. Political change it has known, normal and beneficent; land purchase came to Ulster as a by-product of what the rest of Ireland endured in torment, and agony, and self-mutilation. Clever the Northerns are, but their cleverness issues prosperously in action; they carry on in a solidly-established order; they have not needed to break down before they could begin to build. That is why their heartiness stood out when they were assembled, as I have seen them in a common council of Irishmen, which was also, thank heaven, a companionship. But the world at large can see it exhibited in another way. Contrast the work of the Ulster Players with that of the Abbey Theatre. The Drone is perhaps not the best of new Irish comedies, but it is infinitely the pleasantest; there is no bitter tang in its hearty humour. Even in The Enthusiast, a sketch which has some touch of pessimism, there is little more than a good-humoured shrug of the shoulders when the Enthusiast abandons his pretensions to make himself heard against the banging of Orange drums. I find a very different note, not merely in the work of Synge, of Boyle, Colum, Lennox Robinson, and the rest of the Abbey dramatists, but even in the books of which Miss Somerville was joint author. When Ireland is seen with the eyes, for instance, of her Major Yeates, is not the whole attitude one of amused and acquiescent resignation? Take the hunting out of it (with all the humours of the hunt)—take the shooting and fishing—and what is left but a life (to borrow a phrase from Mr. George Moore) "as melancholy as bog-water and as ineffectual." Miss Somerville would probably decline to imagine an Ireland with these unthinkable suppressions, but after all, we cannot live by or for sport alone. What gave dignity and reality to the life of yesterday was leadership in one class, and loyalty in the other. Leadership resting on ownership is gone now, dead as the dodo; what is left for the like (say) of Mr. Flurry Knox if he should begin to take himself seriously? You can easily make a soldier of him; we have all met him in trenches and observed his airy attitude in No Man's Land. But soldiering has generally meant expatriation. For my part, I hope some day to see this gentleman (or his like) play a useful part in some battalion of Irish territorials—some home service offshoot of the Connaught Rangers. But that is not enough. If those who, like Miss Somerville, love Ireland's yesterday and desire to link it up with a worthy to-morrow, there must be a wider understanding of Ireland, not in the North only, but in that element of the South and West which stands to-day in a sense morally expatriated. The Irish gentry who complain that their tenants "deserted" them must learn where they themselves failed their tenants. Leadership cannot depend merely on a power to evict, and they would to-day repudiate the desire for a leadership so grounded. But between free men where there is not comprehension there can be no leadership.

I take first what is most difficult—the very heart of antagonism. Everyone who desires to understand Ireland to-day should read Patrick Pearse's posthumous book, called boldly The Story of a Success.[1] It is the spiritual history of Pearse's career as a schoolmaster, edited and completed by his pupil, Desmond Ryan; and it is a book by which no one can be justly offended—a book instinct with nobility, chivalry and high courtesy, free from all touch of bitterness; a book, too, shot through and slashed with that tragic irony which the Greeks knew to be the finest thrill in literature—the word spoken, to which the foreknown event gives an echo of double meaning. Pearse was concerned with Ireland's yesterday; he desired to bring the present and the future into organic rotation with the past. But his yesterday was not Miss Somerville's nor mine. The son of an English mechanic and a Galway woman, he was brought up in Connemara after the landlord power had ceased to exist. Ireland's past for him and Irish tradition were seen through the medium of an imagination in touch only with the peasant life, but inspired by books and literature, written and spoken. His yesterday was of no definite past, for he had been born in a revolution when the immediate past was obliterated. In his vision a thousand years were no more than the watch of some spellbound chivalry, waiting for the voice that should say, "It is the time." Cuchulain and Robert Emmet were his inspirations, but the champion of the legendary Red Branch cycle and the young revolutionary of Napoleon's days were near to him one as the other, in equally accessible communion. Going back easily to the heroic legends, on which, though blurred in their outline, his boyhood had been fostered by tellers of long-transmitted tales at a Connemara hearthside, he found the essential beauty and significance where more learned though less cultured readers have been bewildered by what seemed to them wild extravagances of barbarism. What he gathered from them did not lie inert, but quickened in him and in others, for he was the revolutionary as schoolmaster—the most drastic revolutionary of all. In the school review which was the first vehicle for these writings of his, he hoped to found "the rallying point for the thought and aspirations of all those who would bring back again in Ireland that Heroic Age which reserved its highest honour for the hero who had the most childlike heart, for the king who had the largest pity, and for the poet who visioned the truest image of beauty." All his theory of education was based on the old Irish institution of fosterage, which was no mere physical tie of the breast; the child sent to be fostered was sent to be bred and trained, and it was a tie stronger than that of its blood or of the breast. Irish Memories shows incidentally how great a part this fosterage played in the Ross of yesterday—that family with its multitude of children was bound to the countryside by all the "Nursies." But the Martin household, and all similar households were, in a less literal sense, fostered by the peasantry at large. The truest part of education should be to know your own country (a principle much neglected in Ireland), and which of us all, who had the good fortune to be brought up in touch with Irish peasant life, does not realise our debt? We received a devotion, an affection, for which no adequate return could be made—it is the nature of fosterage that the fosterer should give more than can ever be requited; but we gained also our real knowledge, in so far as we ever had it, of the countryside, the traditional wisdom, the inherited way of life. There was more to be got if we had the wit to assimilate it. Almost all of modern Irish literature that has lasting value is evoked from elements floating in peasant memory, in the peasant mind, and in the coloured peasant speech of an Ireland which keeps unbroken descent from a long line of yesterdays. Mr. Yeats is only the chief of those who draw from this source. Miss Somerville herself and her cousin must have known well that the real worth of their work lies in their instinct for the poetry which, more specially in Gaelic-speaking regions, sits in rags by roadside and chimney corner. Irish poetry is not only the tragic voice of the keene; Gaelic had its comic muse as well, a robust virago, of the breed which produced Aristophanes and Rabelais—and Slipper with his gift for epic narrative is a camp-follower of that regiment.

Yet in Miss Somerville's appreciation there is often—not always—a sense of the incongruity as well as of the beauty in peasant speech. The woman crying for alms of bread who described her place of habitation, "I do be like a wild goose over on the side of Drominidy Wood," moves to laughter as well as to pity with the dignity of her phrase. Ireland so felt is Ireland perceived from the outside—seen as a picturesque ruin. You cannot so see Pearse; he is too strong for even compassionate laughter. What he embodies is the central strength of Irish nationalism—its disregard of the immediate event.

By such teaching he commended to his scholars, and to Ireland, the spirit which he desired to see expressed in "that laughing gesture of a young man that is going into battle or climbing to a gibbet." Strange country, that has the gibbet always before the eyes and almost before the aspiration of its idealists! It was so yesterday—in all the yesterdays—and yet the reason is plain. All the aspirations of such idealists have been regarded as criminal by the class for which Miss Somerville and her cousin speak—criminal and menacing to those who, holding the power, arrogated to themselves a monopoly of loyalty. They have always conceived of Pearse and his like as thirsting for their blood. Miss Edgeworth, in a letter printed for the first time in Irish Memories, writes:—"I fear our throats will be cut by order of O'Connell and Co. very soon." We know enough to-day about O'Connell to realise how far this estimate lay from the truth of things; yet Miss Somerville herself talks about "Parnell and his wolf-pack." Justin McCarthy, John Redmond, Willie Redmond—these were some of the wolves who presumably wanted to tear Miss Somerville's kindred to pieces. That is where the change must come; there must be among the gentry some generous understanding of Nationalist leaders before the grave has closed over them. Anyone can see what is bad in Sinn Féin, but no one can fight that evil effectively, no one can convert to better uses the ill-guided force which Sinn Féin represents, until he understands what is best in it. Sinn Féin has largely replaced a movement which, in its later phases, dwelt perhaps too much on the material advantages which it offered as the reward of support. Sinn Féin's strength has lain not in what it has offered, but in what it has asked; it has asked for devotion, and Pearse certainly both gave that and received it. Such was his teaching, and I do not know a better saying for the Irish gentry to ponder over than the last sentence in these essays of his: "The highest thing anyone can do is to serve."

That temper was perhaps lacking in the Ireland of yesterday which Miss Somerville so lovingly describes. To command loyalty as a right, to reward it by generosity, by indulgence—this made part of the ideal of leadership; but scarcely to be laborious either in rendering or exacting capable work.

The old way of life was good for children, as Martin Ross describes it in her sketch of her brother's upbringing.