Tales and Novels Volume IV Part 12

In anger as well as in sorrow the Irishman is eloquent. A gentleman who was lately riding through the county of ----, in Ireland, to canva.s.s, called to ask a vote from a poor man, who was planting willows in a little garden by the road side.

"You have a vote, my good sir, I am told," said the candidate, in an insinuating tone.

The poor man stuck the willow which he had in his hand into the ground, and with a deliberate pace came towards the candidate to parley with him.

"Please your honour," said he, gravely, "I have a vote, and I have not a vote."

"How can that be?"

"I will tell you, sir," said he, leaning, or rather lying down slowly upon the back of the ditch facing the road, so that the gentleman, who was on horseback, could see only his head and arms.

"Sir," said he, "out of this little garden, with my five acres of land and my own labour, I once had a freehold; but I have been robbed of my freehold: and who do you think has robbed me? why, that man!" pointing to his landlord's steward, who stood beside the candidate. "With my own hands I sowed my own ground with oats, and a fine crop I expected--but I never reaped that crop: not a bushel, no, nor half a bushel, did I ever see; for into my little place comes this man, with I don't know how many more, with their shovels and their barrows, and their horses and their cars, and to work they fell, and they ran a road straight through the best part of my land, turning all to heaps of rubbish, and a bad road it was, and a bad time of year to make it! But where was _I_ when he did this? not where I am now," said the orator, raising himself up and standing firm; "not as you see me now, but lying on my back in my bed in a fever. When I got up I was not able to make my rent out of my land.

Besides myself, I had my five children to support. I sold my clothes, and have never been able to buy any since but such as a recruit could sell, who was in haste to get into regimentals--such clothes as these,"

said he, looking down at his black rags. "Soon I had nothing to eat: but that's not all. I am a weaver, sir: for my rent they seized my two looms; then I had nothing to do. But of all this I do not complain.

There was an election some time ago in this county, and a man rode up to me in this garden as you do now, and asked me for my vote, but I refused him, for I was steady to my landlord. The gentleman observed I was a poor man, and asked if I wanted for nothing? but all did not signify; so he rode on gently, and at the corner of the road, within view of my garden, I saw him drop a purse, and I knew, by his looking at me, it was on purpose for me to pick it up. After a while he came back, thinking, to be sure, I had taken up the purse, and had changed my mind, but he found his purse where he left it. My landlord knew all this, and he promised to see justice done me, but he forgot. Then, as for the candidate's lady, before the election nothing was too fair-speaking for me; but afterward, in my distress, when I applied to her to get me a loom, which she could have had from _the Linen Board_ by only asking for it, her answer to me was, 'I don't know that I shall ever want a vote again in the county.'

"Now, sir," continued he, "when justice is done to me (and no sooner), I shall be glad to a.s.sist my landlord or his friend. I know who _you_ are, sir, very well: you bear a good character: success to you! but I have no vote to give to you or any man."

"If I were to attempt to make you any amends for what you have suffered," replied the candidate, "I should do you an injury; it would be said that I had bribed you; but I will repeat your story where it will meet with attention. I cannot, however, tell it so well as you have told it."

"No, sir," was his answer, "for you cannot feel it as I do."

This is almost in terms the conclusion of Pope's epistle from Eloisa to Abelard:--

"He best can paint them who shall feel them most."

In objurgation and pathetic remonstrancing eloquence, the females of the lower cla.s.s in Ireland are not inferior to the men. A thin tall woman wrapped in a long cloak, the hood of which was drawn over her head, and shaded her pale face, came to a gentleman to complain of the cruelty of her landlord.

"He is the most hard-hearted man alive, so he is, sir," said she; "he has just seized all I have, which, G.o.d knows, is little enough! and has driven my cow to pound, the only cow I have, and only dependence I have for a drop of milk to drink; and the cow itself too standing there starving in the pound, for not a wisp of hay would he give to cow or Christian to save their lives, if it was ever so! And the rent for which he is driving me, please your honour, has not been due but one week: a hard master he is; but these _middle_ men are all so, one and all. Oh!

if it had been but my lot to be a tenant to a _gentleman born_, like your honour, who is the poor man's friend, and the orphan's, and the widow's--the friend of them that have none other. Long life to you! and long may you live to reign over us! Would you but speak three words to my landlord, to let my cow out of pound, and give me a fortnight's time, that I might see and fatten her to sell against the fair, I could pay him then all honestly, and not be racked entirely, and he would be ashamed to refuse your honour, and afraid to disoblige the like of you, or get your ill-will. May the blessing of Heaven be upon you, if you'll just send and speak to him three words for the poor woman and widow, that has none other to speak for her in the wide world!"

Moved by this lamentable story, the effect of which the woman's whole miserable appearance corroborated and heightened, the gentleman sent immediately for her hard-hearted landlord. The landlord appeared; not a gentleman, not a rich man, as the term landlord might denote, but a stout, square, stubbed, thick-limbed, grey-eyed man, who seemed to have come smoking hot from hard labour. The gentleman repeated the charge made against him by the poor widow, and mildly remonstrated on his cruelty: the man heard all that was said with a calm but unmoved countenance.

"And now have you done?" said he, turning to the woman, who had recommenced her lamentations. "Look at her standing there, sir. It's easy for her to put on her long cloak, and to tell her long story, and to make her poor mouth to your honour; but if you are willing to hear, I'll tell you what she is, and what I am. She is one that has none but herself in this world to provide for; she is one that is able to afford herself a gla.s.s of whiskey when she pleases, and she pleases it often; she is one that never denies herself the bit of _staggering bob_[53]

when in season; she is one that has a snug house well thatched to live in all the year round, and nothing to do or nothing that she does; and this is the way of her life, and this is what she is. And what am I? I am the father of eight children, and I have a wife and myself to provide for. I am a man that is at hard labour of one kind or another from sunrise to sunset. The straw that thatched the house she lives in I brought two miles on my back; the walls of the house she lives in I built with my own hands; I did the same by five other houses, and they are all sound and dry, and good to live in, summer or winter. I set them for rent to put bread into my children's mouth, and after all I cannot get it! And to support my eight children, and my wife, and myself, what have I in this world," cried he, striding suddenly with colossal firmness upon his st.u.r.dy legs, and raising to heaven arms which looked like fore-shortenings of the limbs of Hercules; "what have _I_ in this wide world but these four bones?" [54]

No provocation could have worked up a phlegmatic English countryman to this pitch of eloquence. He never suffers his anger to evaporate in idle figures of speech: it is always concentrated in a few words, which he repeats in reply to every argument, persuasive, or invective, that can be employed to irritate or to a.s.suage his wrath. We recollect having once been present at a scene between an English gentleman and a churchwarden, whose feelings were grievously hurt by the disturbance that had been given to certain bones in levelling a wall which separated the churchyard from the pleasure ground of the lord of the manor. The bones belonged, as the churchwarden believed or averred, to his great great grandmother, though how they were identified it might be difficult to explain to an indifferent judge; yet we are to suppose that the confirmation of the suspicion was strong and satisfactory to the party concerned. The pious great great grandson's feelings were all in arms, but _indignation_ did not inspire him with a single poetic idea or expression. In his eloquence, indeed, there was the princ.i.p.al requisite, action: in reply to all that could be said, he repeatedly struck his long oak stick perpendicularly upon the floor, and reiterated these words--

"It's death, sir! death by the law! It's sacrilege, sir! sacrilege by act of parliament! It's death, sir! death by the law! and the law I'll have of him, for it's lawful to have the law."

This was the whole range of his ideas, even when the pa.s.sions had tumbled them all out of their dormitories.

Innumerable fresh instances of Irish eloquence and wit crowd upon our recollection, but we forbear. The examples we have cited are taken from real life, and given without alteration or embellishment.

CHAPTER XI.

THE BROGUE.

Having proved by a perfect syllogism that the Irish must blunder, we might rest satisfied with our labours; but there are minds of so perverse a sort, that they will not yield their understandings to the torturing power of syllogism.

It may be waste of time to address ourselves to persons of such a cast; we shall therefore change our ground, and adapt our arguments to the level of vulgar capacities. Much of the comic effect of Irish bulls, or of such speeches as are mistaken for bulls, has depended upon the tone, or _brogue_, as it is called, with which they are uttered. The first Irish blunders that we hear are made or repeated in this peculiar tone, and afterward, from the power of a.s.sociation, whenever we hear the tone we expect the blunder. Now there is little danger that the Irish should be cured of their brogue; and consequently there is no great reason to apprehend that we should cease to think or call them blunderers.

Of the powerful effect of any peculiarity of p.r.o.nunciation to prepossess the mind against the speaker, nay, even to excite dislike amounting to antipathy, we have an instance attested by an eye-witness, or rather an ear-witness.

"In the year 1755," says the Rev. James Adams, "I attended a public disputation in a foreign university, when at least 400 Frenchmen literally hissed a grave and learned _English_ doctor, not by way of insult, but irresistibly provoked by the quaintness of the repet.i.tion of sh. The thesis was, the concurrence of G.o.d _in actionibus viciosis_: the whole hall resounded with the hissing cry of sh, and its continual occurrence in _actio, actione, viciosa_, &c."

It is curious that Shibboleth should so long continue a criterion among nations!

What must have been the degree of irritation that could so far get the better of the politeness of 400 Frenchmen as to make them hiss in the days of _l'ancien regime_! The dread of being the object of that species of antipathy or ridicule, which is excited by unfashionable peculiarity of accent, has induced many of the _misguided_ natives of Ireland to affect what they imagine to be the English p.r.o.nunciation. They are seldom successful in this attempt, for they generally overdo the business. We are told by Theophrastus, that a _barbarian_, who had taken some pains to attain the true Attic dialect, was discovered to be a foreigner by his speaking the Attic dialect with a greater degree of precision and purity than was usual amongst the Athenians themselves. To avoid the imputation of committing barbarisms, people sometimes run into solecisms, which are yet more ridiculous. Affectation is always more ridiculous than ignorance.

There are Irish ladies, who, ashamed of their country, betray themselves by mincing out their abjuration, by calling tables _teebles_, and chairs _cheers_! To such renegadoes we prefer the honest quixotism of a modern champion[55] for the Scottish accent, who boldly a.s.serted that "the broad dialect rises above reproach, scorn, and laughter," enters the lists, as he says of himself, in Tartan dress and armour, and throws down the gauntlet to the most prejudiced antagonist. "How weak is prejudice!" pursues this patriotic enthusiast. "The sight of the Highland kelt, the flowing plaid, the buskined leg, provokes my antagonist to laugh! Is this dress ridiculous in the eyes of reason and common sense? No; nor is the dialect of speech: both are characteristic and national distinctions.

"The arguments of general vindication," continues he, "rise powerful before my sight, like the Highland bands in full array. A louder strain of apologetic speech swells my words. What if it should rise high as the unconquered summits of Scotia's hills, and call back, with voice sweet as Caledonian song, the days of ancient Scotish heroes; or attempt the powerful speech of the Latian orator, or his of Greece! The subject, methinks, would well accord with the attempt: _Cupidum, Scotia optima, vires deficiunt_. I leave this to the _king of songs_, Dunbar and Dunkeld, Douglas in _Virgilian_ strains, and later poets, Ramsay, Ferguson, and Burns, awake from your graves; you have already immortalized the Scotish dialect in raptured melody! Lend me your golden target and well-pointed spear, that I might victoriously pursue, to the extremity of South Britain, reproachful ignorance and scorn still lurking there: let impartial candour seize their usurped throne. Great, then, is the birth of this national dialect," &c.

So far so good. We have some sympathy with the rhapsodist, whose enthusiasm kindles at the names of Allan Ramsay and of Burns; nay, we are willing to hear (with a grain of allowance) that "the manly eloquence of the Scotish bar affords a singular pleasure to the candid English hearer, and gives merit and dignity to the n.o.ble speakers, who retain so much of their own dialect and tempered propriety of English sounds, that they may be emphatically termed _British orators_." But we confess that we lose our patient decorum, and are almost provoked to laughter, when our philological Quixote seriously sets about to prove that Adam and Eve spoke broad Scotch in Paradise.

How angry has this grave patriot reason to be with his ingenious countryman Beattie,[56] the celebrated champion of _Truth_, who acknowledges that he never could, when a boy or man, look at a certain translation of Ajax's speech into one of the vulgar Scotch dialects without laughing!

We shall now with boldness, similar to that of the Scotch champion, try the risible muscles of our English reader; we are not, indeed, inclined to go quite such lengths as he has gone: he insists that the Scotch dialect ought to be adopted all over England; we are only going candidly to confess, that we think the Irish, in general, speak _better English_ than is commonly spoken by the natives of England. To limit this proposition so as to make it appear less absurd, we should observe, that we allude to the lower cla.s.ses of the people in both countries. In some counties in Ireland, a few of the poorest labourers and cottagers do not understand English, they speak only Irish, as in Wales there are vast numbers who speak only Welsh; but amongst those who speak English we find fewer vulgarisms than amongst the same rank of persons in England.

The English which they speak is chiefly such as has been traditional in their families from the time of the early settlers in the island. During the reign of Elizabeth and the reign of Shakspeare, numbers of English migrated to Ireland; and whoever attends to the phraseology of the lower Irish may, at this day, hear many of the phrases and expressions used by Shakspeare. Their vocabulary has been preserved nearly in its pristine purity since that time, because they have not had intercourse with those counties in England which have made for themselves a jargon unlike to any language under heaven. The Irish _brogue_ is a great and shameful defect, but it does not render the English language absolutely unintelligible. There are but a few variations of the brogue, such as the long and the short, the Thady brogue and Paddy brogue, which differ much in tone, and but little in phraseology; but in England, almost all of our fifty-two counties have peculiar vulgarisms, dialects, and brogues, unintelligible to their neighbours. Herodotus tells us that some of the nations of Greece, though they used the same language, spoke it so differently, that they could not understand each other's conversation. This is literally the case at present between the provincial inhabitants of remote parts of England. Indeed the language peculiar to the metropolis, or the _c.o.c.kney_ dialect, is proverbially ridiculous. The Londoners, who look down with contempt upon all that have not been _bred and born_ within the sound of Bow, talk with unconscious absurdity of _w_eal and _w_inegar, and _v_ine and _v_indors, and idea_r_s, and ask you _ow_ you do? and '_ave ye bin taking_ the _h_air in 'yde park? and '_as_ your 'orse 'ad any _h_oats, &c.? aspirating always where they should not, and never aspirating where they should.

The _Zummerzetzheer_ dialect, full of broad _oos_ and eternal _zeds_, supplies never-failing laughter when brought upon the stage. Even a c.o.c.kney audience relishes the broad p.r.o.nunciation of John Moody, in the Journey to London, or of Sim in Wild Oats.

The cant of Suffolk, the vulgarisms of Shropshire, the uncouth phraseology of the three ridings of Yorkshire, amaze and bewilder foreigners, who perhaps imagine that they do not understand English, when they are in company with those who cannot speak it. The patois of Languedoc and Champagne, such as "_Mein fis sest ai bai via_," Mon fils c'est un beau veau, exercises, it is true, the ingenuity of travellers, and renders many scenes of Moliere and Marivaux difficult, if not unintelligible, to those who have never resided in the French provinces; but no French patois is more unintelligible than the following specimen of _Tummas_ and _Meary's_ Lancashire dialogue:--

_Thomas_. "Whau, but I start.i.t up to goa to th' t.i.ts, on slurr'd deawn to th' lower part o' th' heymough, on by th' maskins, lord! whot dust think? boh leet hump stridd'n up o' summot ot felt meety heury, on it start.i.t weh meh on its back, deawn th' lower part o' th' mough it jumpt, crost th' leath, eaw't o' th' dur whimmey it took, on into th' weturing poo, os if th' dule o' h.e.l.l had driv'n it, on there it threw meh en, or I fell off, I connaw tell whether, for th' life o' meh, into the poo."

_Mary_. "Whoo-wo, whoo-wo, whoo! whot, ith neme o' G.o.d! widneh sey?"

_Thomas_. "If it wur naw Owd Nick, he wur th' orderer on't, to be shure----. Weh mitch powlering I geet eawt o' th' poo, 'lieve[57] meh, as to list, I could na tell whether i'r in a sleawm or wak'n, till eh groapt ot meh een; I crope under a wough and stode like o'

gawmbling,[58] or o parfit neatril, till welly day," &c.

Let us now listen to a conversation which we hope will not be quite so unintelligible.

CHAPTER XII.

BATH COACH CONVERSATION.

In one of the coaches which travel between Bath and London, an Irish, a Scotch, and an English gentleman happened to be pa.s.sengers. They were well informed and well-bred, had seen the world, had lived in good company, and were consequently superior to local and national prejudice.

As their conversation was ill.u.s.trative of our subject, we shall make no apology for relating it. We pa.s.s the usual preliminary compliments, and the observations upon the weather and the roads. The Irish gentleman first started a more interesting subject--the Union; its probable advantages and disadvantages were fully discussed, and, at last, the Irishman said, "Whatever our political opinions may be, there is one wish in which we shall all agree, that the Union may make us better acquainted with one another."