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Hop e I s a n I m p e rativ e
 pre vious public ations by David W. Orr

Down to the Wire (Oxford, 2009)

Design on the Edge (MIT Press, 2006)
The Last Refuge (Island Press, 2004)
The Nature of Design (Oxford, 2002)
Earth in Mind (Island Press, 1994 /2004)
Ecological Literacy (State University of New York Press, 1992)
Sage Handbook of Environment and Society (Sage Publications, 2007)
edited with Jules Pretty et al.
The Campus and Environmental Responsibility ( Jossey-Bass, 1992)
edited with David Eagan
The Global Predicament: Ecological Perspectives on World Order
(University of North Carolina Press, 1979)
edited with Marvin Soroos
Hope Is an
Imperative
The Essential David Orr


David W.Orr

Foreword by Fritjof Capra

Washington | Covelo | London

 Hope Is an Imperative: The Essential David Orr

© 2011 David W. Orr

Grateful acknowledgment is made to all those who granted permission

to reprint the selections in Hope Is an Imperative. A complete list of permissions
can be found on page 353.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press,
Suite 300, 1718 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20009.

island press is a trademark of the Center for Resource Economics.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Orr, David W., 1944-
Hope is an imperative : the essential David Orr / David W. Orr ;
foreword by Fritjof Capra.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-1-59726-699-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 1-59726-699-X (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-13: 978-1-59726-700-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 1-59726-700-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Environmental quality. 2. Sustainability. 3. Environmental education.
4. Human ecology. 5. Sustainable design. 6. Environmental engineering.
7. Global environmental change. 8. Climatic changes—
Environmental aspects. I. Title.
ge140.o77 2011
333.72—dc22

Printed on recycled, acid-free paper

Keywords: Ecological design, sustainability, education, energy and climate,

climate change, ecological literacy, environmental essays, environmental
movement, environmental studies, green campus movement,
energy policy, architectural design

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To David Ehrenfeld
  Contents 

Foreword by Fritjof Capra xi

Introduction xv

part 1: The Fundamentals

1. Verbicide 5
2. Slow Knowledge 13
3. Speed 21
4. Love 30
5. Reflections on Water and Oil 35
6. Gratitude 41
7. Orr’s Laws 46

part 2: On Sustainability
8. Walking North on a Southbound Train 57
9. Four Challenges of Sustainability 66
10. The Problem of Sustainability 73
11. Two Meanings of Sustainability 93
12. Leverage 112
13. Shelf Life 118
14. The Constitution of Nature 126
15. Diversity 139
16. All Sustainability Is Local:
New Wilmington, Pennsylvania 145
 part 3: On Ecological Design
17. Designing Minds 165
18. Loving Children: A Design Problem 172
19. Further Reflections on Architecture as Pedagogy 180
20. The Origins of Ecological Design 186
21. The Design Revolution: Notes for Practitioners 198

part 4: On Education
22. Place as Teacher 213
23. The Problem of Education 229
24. What Is Education For? 237
25. Some Thoughts on Intelligence 246
26. Ecological Literacy 251
27. Place and Pedagogy 262
28. The Liberal Arts, the Campus, and the Biosphere 270

part 5: On Energy and Climate

29. Pascal’s Wager and Economics in a Hotter Time 285
30. The Carbon Connection 292
31. 2020: A Proposal 300
32. Baggage: The Case for Climate Mitigation 308
33. Long Tails and Ethics: Thinking about the Unthinkable 316
34. Hope (in a Hotter Time) 324
35. At the End of Our Tether?
The Rationality of Nonviolence 333

Sources 341
Permissions 353
About David W. Orr 355
Index 357
  Foreword 

As the twenty-first century unfolds, it is becoming increas-

ingly evident that the state of our natural environment is no longer one
of many “single issues.” It is the context of everything else—of our lives,
our work, our politics.
The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture communities
that are ecologically sustainable. As David Orr explains in this fine col-
lection of essays, a sustainable community is designed in such a manner
that its ways of life, businesses, economy, physical structures, and tech-
nologies respect, honor, and cooperate with nature’s inherent ability to
sustain life.
The first step in this endeavor must be to understand the basic prin-
ciples of organization that the Earth’s ecosystems have evolved over
billions of years to sustain the web of life. We need to understand the lan-
guage of nature, as it were—its flows and cycles, its networks and feedback
loops, and its fluctuating patterns of growth and development. Almost
20 years ago, David Orr coined the term ecological literacy for this basic
ecological knowledge and chose it as the title of his first book. Since then,
ecological literacy, or ecoliteracy, has become a widely used concept within
the environmental movement. Being ecologically literate means under-
standing the basic principles of ecology and living accordingly.
Ecoliteracy is the first step on the road to sustainability; the second step
is ecodesign. We must apply our ecological knowledge to the fundamental
redesign of our technologies, physical structures, and social institutions so
as to bridge the current gap between human design and the ecologically
sustainable systems of nature.
xi
xii  Foreword

Design, in David Orr’s memorable phrase, consists in “shaping flows of

energy and materials for human purposes.” Ecodesign, he writes, is “the
careful meshing of human purposes with the larger patterns and flows of
the natural world.” Thus, ecodesign principles reflect the principles of
organization that nature has evolved to sustain the web of life.
Once we become ecologically literate, once we understand the pro-
cesses and patterns of relationships that enable ecosystems to sustain life,
we will also understand the many ways in which our human civilization,
especially since the Industrial Revolution, has ignored or interfered with
these ecological patterns and processes. And we will realize that these
interferences are the fundamental causes of many of our current world
problems.
Because of the fundamental interconnectedness of the entire biosphere,
the problems caused by our harmful interferences are also fundamentally
interconnected. None of the major problems of our time can be under-
stood in isolation. They are systemic problems—all interdependent and
mutually reinforcing—and they require corresponding systemic solutions.
Thinking systemically means thinking in terms of relationships, patterns,
and context. To use a popular phrase, it means being able to “connect the
dots.”
The interconnectedness of world problems, the need to become eco-
logically literate, and the principles of ecodesign are three major strands
that weave through the essays in this book. David Orr is a systemic thinker
par excellence and a longtime friend and colleague whose thoughts and
writings have influenced and inspired my own work for many years.
With impeccable clarity, he demonstrates again and again that the cur-
rent obsession of economists and politicians with unending growth is a
fatal illusion; that our persistent failure to formulate sound energy policies
has resulted in terrorism, oil wars, economic vulnerability, and climate
change; that climate change is a challenge not only to consumerism and
the growth economy but also to our political institutions, worldviews,
and philosophies.
While all these systemic links are lucidly analyzed, David’s writing
is also deeply moving, thoughtful, and poetic. His intention is always
to foster and expand our awareness of “the connections that bind us to
each other, to all life, and to all life to come.” I am really glad that Island
Press is now publishing David’s essential writings in one volume. They
include many of his classic essays, which I have savored again and again
over the years—for example, Place and Pedagogy, What Is Education
 Foreword  xiii

For?, Loving Children: A Design Problem, and my personal favorite,

Slow Knowledge.
This book is both wake-up call and inspiration. Its trenchant analysis
of the dire state of our world, combined with its passionate call to action,
remind me of the famous maxim by the Italian political theorist Antonio
Gramsci that we need both the pessimism of the intellect and the opti-
mism of the will. Or, as David himself puts it in his introduction, “Hope is
a verb with its sleeves rolled up.”
These essays are eloquent and full of great wisdom. But what shines
through them most of all is their author’s deep passion for humanity and
for the living Earth.

Fritjof Capra, founding director

Center for Ecoliteracy
Berkeley, California
  Introduction 

For bad electrical wiring, the sensible response is to call an elec-

trician sooner than later. When sparks fly, the sensible thing to do is pull
the breaker and reach for the fire extinguisher. When the house is on fire,
the sensible thing to do is to call the fire department. But it would not be
sensible to call the fire department when the problem is bad wiring or to
call an electrician when the house is on fire. The word sensible, in other
words, is relative to the gravity of the situation.
In the past quarter century, something analogous has happened to us
as a nation and to the entire planet. Faced with the overwhelming evi-
dence of environmental stresses, it would have been sensible decades ago
to assemble the expertise necessary to redesign energy, food, materials,
and manufacturing systems in order to eliminate waste and to coincide
with laws of physics and ecology. As things worsened, it would have
been sensible to develop global responses by aggressively implementing
Agenda 21, the Rio Accords, the Kyoto Protocol, and more. Now, in the
second decade of the twenty-first century, it would be sensible to recog-
nize that we have squandered any margin of safety we once had and are in
a planetary emergency and need to act accordingly. But there is no global
equivalent of a 911 call and no intergalactic emergency squad to come to
our rescue. It’s up to us.
Meanwhile, as the years tick by, we are nearing (some say we have
passed) irreversible and irrevocable changes in the oceans, atmosphere,
soils, forests, and entire ecosystems. Now the sensible things we must do
everywhere are merely extraordinary, unprecedented, and heroic at a scale
sufficient to avert global catastrophe.
xv
xvi  Introduction

We are in the process of evicting ourselves from the only paradise

humankind has ever known—what geologists call the Holocene. This
12,000-year age has been abnormally benign with a relatively stable and
warm climate, more or less perfect for the emergence of Homo sapiens. But
CO2 levels are now higher than they’ve been in hundreds of thousands of
years and rising still higher each year. We are creating a different and more
capricious and hostile planet than the one we’ve known for thousands
of years—what writer and activist Bill McKibben denotes as “Eaarth”
(McKibben 2010). The challenge of living on this emerging planet is the
challenge of our time, exempting no one, no organization, no nation, and
no generation from here on as far as one can imagine.
The essays that follow, now the chapters of this book, were written
between 1985 and 2010 as human civilization entered the historical equiva-
lent of rapids on a white-water river. No one knows whether the frail
craft of civilization will capsize because of climate destabilization, ter-
rorism, economic collapse, technology run amuck, governmental inepti-
tude, or any number of other threats or whether it will somehow survive,
chastened and hopefully improved. It is clear, however, that our previous
unwillingness to do what was sensible, obvious, and necessary has now
rendered our situation far more difficult and dangerous than it otherwise
might have been.
Every writer works with the refracted influences of other people, places,
and experiences. My interest in things environmental was enhanced by
the great landscape architect Ian McHarg in the early 1970s when I was a
doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. I was inspired to read
everything I could find on the subject and discovered that the study of the
“environment” came with an imperative to roam intellectually in order to
connect things otherwise isolated by department, discipline, and narrow
perspectives. But despite the great range and diversity of disciplines and
perspectives necessary to an informed ecological worldview, the subject
comes down to the one big question of how we fairly, durably, and quickly
remake the human presence on Earth to fit the limits of the biosphere
while preserving hard-won gains in the arts, sciences, law, the open soci-
ety, and governance, which is to say civilization.
The urgency and excitement of that time was palpable. Some of the
best thinking and writing ever about the human place in nature occurred
in that decade. New nongovernmental organizations formed to defend
particular places, ecologies, and the larger environment. The U.S. politi-
cal system responded by creating the Environmental Protection Agency
 Introduction  xvii

and the Council on Environmental Quality. Republicans and Demo-

crats worked together to establish a National Environmental Policy and
pass legislation to protect air, water, rivers, wilderness, open space, and
endangered species. There were surely differences between Democrats
and Republicans, but not paralysis, because there were still enough people
in government with a sufficient regard for the issues that bind us together,
to the web of life, and to all life to come to justify rethinking crusty old
ideas and crossing party lines from time to time in order to protect the
common good.
No road map existed then to define the path ahead, but by the late
1970s a global conversation about the sustainability of humankind was
gathering steam. Many of us were optimistic that with enough science,
better technology, and rational policy reforms, monumental problems
could be solved. In hindsight it is obvious that things were not so simple,
and neither are they today. Many factors come between what we should
do and what we actually do, beginning with the daunting complexity of
the problems and potential responses, whether market based or led by
government or by cultural change, or all of the above. As well, we have
to contend with competing political and economic interests that have
become rigid ideologies rooted in tattered beliefs that humans can do as
they please with nature without consequences. The stranglehold of bad
ideas is deeply rooted often in the inability or unwillingness to see what’s
right before our eyes. And always the gap between what we should do and
what we actually do is widened by ignorance, garden-variety stupidity, and
the tendency to put off to tomorrow what should have been done yester-
day. And lurking in the shadows there is the darker side of human nature
that can’t be wished away. But the fact remains that we know enough to
act much better than we do. More science and better technology won’t be
nearly enough without a larger and more rational rationality. And even
that won’t suffice without summoning help from what Abraham Lincoln
once called “the better angels of our nature.”
The perplexities of human nature aside, we navigate between two rap-
idly flowing currents. Nothing in nature is static, but we have accelerated
the pace of ecological change to a rate that rivals or exceeds that of the
great extinction events of the distant past. The other current is the quick-
ening pace of technological, demographic, social, and economic changes.
In such unpredictable circumstances, no one can say for sure what it means
for humankind to come to terms with nature, but we know that the road
ahead will not be easy or smooth. Along the way, we will be tempted to do
xviii  Introduction

things that in less vexing times we would recognize as foolish or risky. We

will be urged to deploy magic bullet technologies with vast implications
without dealing with underlying problems or larger systemic issues. As
long as civilization lasts, however, we will have to monitor and manage
our demands and impacts on the planet and find widely acceptable and
effective ways to limit what we do, whether by law, regulation, cultural
norms, or religion or by some other means. We will also have to muster the
wisdom to confront old and contentious issues having to do with the fair
distribution of wealth and the balance of rights between generations and
between humans and other life-forms. That in turn will require robust
and competent governments and an ecologically literate and competent
citizenry. However such things play out, we’ve long since passed the time
when we could change atmospheric chemistry or the acidity of oceans, or
unravel ecologies, or even procreate with little thought for the morrow or
the health of the larger whole.
I have organized this collection of essays in five parts that reflect issues
and subjects that caught my attention over the past 25 years. Most all of
the essays were initially written as aids in solving one practical problem or
another. Running through the entire book is the question of how human-
kind can fit harmoniously in the ecosphere—which invites controversy,
multiple opinions, and lots of conjecture. I have only lightly edited the
chapters to take out redundancies and update where necessary, so they
are mostly as initially published but with fewer references and without
footnotes.
The first part deals with fundamental principles. I’ll let those essays
speak for themselves without further comment and without any pre-
sumption that they are exhaustive or scriptural, including the one pre-
sumptuously titled “Orr’s Laws.” The second part, on the challenges of
sustainability, is a bit like a brush-clearing operation that aims to get the
lay of the land. However conceived, described, or analyzed, sustainability
is the issue of our time, all others being subordinate to the global conversa-
tion now under way about whether, how, and under what terms the human
experiment will continue.
The third part deals with possible responses to the challenges of sus-
tainability. Most, if not all, of our environmental problems result from
poor design—factories that produce more waste than product; buildings
that squander energy; farms that bleed soil, excess nitrogen, and pollution;
cities designed to sprawl; and so forth. The logical response, then, is better
design or what is coming to be known as ecological design. It includes
 Introduction  xix

the design professions such as architecture and engineering but is a much

bigger enterprise. It is quite literally about what McHarg described as
“design with nature” in order to remake the human place on Earth. But
the change toward ecological design in the fields of urban planning, agri-
culture, manufacturing, and energy systems as well as architecture will
require a major change in how we think and so changes in education at
all levels.
The fourth part, then, deals with education and specifically with the
problem of education, not problems in education. Tinkering at the edge
of the status quo characteristic of most educational reforms is a kind
of nickel solution to a dollar-sized problem. But in the not-too-distant
future, I can imagine schools, colleges, and universities designed eco-
logically, becoming models for the transition ahead and leaders toward a
better future than the one now on the horizon. But that future is now
clouded by the largest challenge humankind has ever faced, which is the
onset of rapid climate destabilization.
The final part of the book is the most troubling of all and requires
more explanation. We are, indeed, evicting ourselves from the very con-
ditions in which we emerged as a species. Everything we’ve done—all of
our accomplishments and failures, our arts, literatures, cultures, history,
and organizations—occurred under, and partially because of, conditions
that we are now changing for the worse. The increasing temperature of
Earth, rising seas, extinction of species, changing hydrology, and shifting
ecologies are effectively permanent changes that will render the future
progressively more difficult for our descendants. That fact runs against
the grain of the American tendency to regard problems as always solv-
able with enough technology or money. But the climate destabilization
now under way is not solvable in that sense. We hope that the worst can
be contained, but as geophysicist David Archer and others point out, we
have already set planet-changing forces in motion that cannot be stabi-
lized for centuries. If there was ever an issue that required clarity of mind,
steadiness of purpose, and wisdom, this is it. I close with thoughts on the
nature of hope in a progressively hotter and less stable ecosphere. But hope
is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. In contrast to optimism or despair, hope
requires that one actually do something to improve the world. Authentic
hope comes with an imperative to act. There is no such thing as passive
hope.
My thinking and writing have been much influenced by some of
the great minds and personalities of our time. This book is gratefully
xx  Introduction

dedicated to one such person, David Ehrenfeld, who is a physician, a

biologist, a teacher, a renaissance man, and a friend and a teacher to
me and many others. As the founding editor of Conservation Biology,
David invited me to write many of the essays included here and helped
to improve the results.
I also gratefully acknowledge Gary Meffe, who, like David Ehrenfeld,
served with great distinction as editor of Conservation Biology and in that
capacity improved the column I wrote for 20 years. Whatever clarity and
felicity are evident in those essays included here owe much to David and
Gary’s skill, judgment, and, not the least, friendship.
For many years Wes Jackson has been a friend, provocateur, teacher,
and a source of some of the best humor I’ve ever heard. His life has been
one long seminar on soils, farming, civilization, philosophy, religion,
ecology, literature, and more and how all of this is related. In long tele-
phone conversations and visits to the Land Institute in Salina, I have been
privileged to be a part of many of those mostly impromptu and brilliant
sessions which I count mostly as a blessing, occasionally as an irritant, but
always as convivial and often profound stimulation.
It is not possible to acknowledge Wes Jackson without saying an
appreciative word about Wendell Berry. One of the most interesting and
important dialogues of our time is that between Jackson and Berry, who
over three decades have mutually influenced each other in a synergy of
science, literature, good stories, friendship, inspiration, and devotion to
land, agriculture, and rural people. Wendell Berry is described variously
as a prophetic voice, one of the great writers of our time, and the wisest
among us, all of which I believe to be true. For more than 40 years he has
eloquently probed and defined our connections to land and community
without ever being repetitive or tiresome. Above all, he has taught us the
importance of words faithfully spoken and lived and our connectedness
to places and real communities.
Finally, I thank Barbara Dean, Todd Baldwin, and Chuck Savitt at
Island Press for their editorial help, advice, and friendship. And I grate-
fully confess to having been improved, instructed, inspired, sometimes
chastised, but always nurtured by many others too numerous to list. But
to all, my thanks for much that is beyond the saying.
 pa rt 1

The Fundamentals
   author’s note 2010  
Having nearly boxed ourselves into a corner, we hear a growing chorus of folks
proposing that we search for “breakthrough” solutions that consist mostly of
expensive, untested, and risky technologies to do what, in saner times and with
a bit of reflection, we’d prefer not to do. Talk about “geoengineering” the Earth
is mounting, along with new proposals for perpetually bad, old, and highly
subsidized ideas such as more nuclear power and clean coal—an oxymoronic,
people-killing, and land-destroying absurdity. Absent in most of this is any
thought that we might consider changing course or question why we should
want a perpetually growing, consumer-driven economy in the first place, even
if that were a biophysical possibility. We might do a great deal better with less
stuff, less energy, less hassle, less frenzy, and more conviviality, more leisure,
better poetry, more silence, slower food, more bike trails, and more face-to-face
friends.
Rather than technological breakthroughs, what we need, I think, is more
like a homecoming that requires fewer highly paid experts and consultants,
fewer conferences in exotic and expensive places, and more local knowledge,
a more competent and empowered citizenry, and more reflection on what’s
important and what’s not. To some, that will sound quaint and old-fashioned,
and I suppose that in some ways it is. So be it. I propose a return to funda-
mentals and offer a starting point for a few—having to do with words and
language, how we know and what we presume to know, our fetish with speed,
our capacity for love, the miracle of water, gratitude, and a summing-up that
I’ve ostentatiously called “Orr’s laws,” which is just a distillation of lots of
other people’s wisdom—the most elusive and important fundamental of all.
  Chapter 1 

Verbicide
(1999)

In the beginning was the word. . . .

H e entered my office for advice as a freshman advisee

sporting nearly perfect SAT scores and an impeccable aca-
demic record—by all accounts a young man of considerable
promise. During a 20-minute conversation about his academic future,
however, he displayed a vocabulary that consisted mostly of two words:
cool and really. Almost 800 SAT points hitched to each word. To be fair,
he could use them interchangeably, as in “really cool” or “cool . . . really!”
He could also use them singly, presumably for emphasis. When he was
a student in a subsequent class, I later confirmed that my first impres-
sion of the young scholar was largely accurate and that his vocabulary,
and presumably his mind, consisted predominantly of words and images
derived from overexposure to television and the new jargon of “computer-
speak.” He is no aberration, but an example of a larger problem, not of
illiteracy but of diminished literacy in a culture that often sees little reason
to use words carefully, however abundantly. Increasingly, student papers,
from otherwise very good students, have whole paragraphs that sound
like advertising copy. Whether students are talking or writing, a growing
number of them have a tenuous grasp on a declining vocabulary. Excise
“uh . . . like . . . uh” from virtually any teenage conversation, and the effect
is like sticking a pin into a balloon.

This article was originally published in 1999.

D.W. Orr, Hope Is an Imperative: The Essential David Orr, 5

DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-017-0_1, © David W. Orr 2011
6  The Fundamentals

In the past 50 years, by one reckoning, the working vocabulary of the

average 14-year-old has declined from some 25,000 words to 10,000
words (Harper’s Index 2000). This is a decline in not merely numbers of
words but in the capacity to think. It is also a steep decline in the num-
ber of things that an adolescent needs to know and to name in order to
get by in an increasingly homogenized and urbanized consumer society.
This is a national tragedy virtually unnoticed in the media. It is no mere
coincidence that in roughly the same half century, by one estimate, the
average person has learned to recognize over 1000 corporate logos, but
can now recognize fewer than 10 plants and animals native to their locality
(Hawken 1994, 214). That fact says a great deal about why the decline in
working vocabulary has gone unnoticed—few are paying attention. The
decline is surely not consistent across the full range of language but con-
centrates in those areas having to do with large issues such as philosophy,
religion, public policy, and nature. On the other hand, vocabulary has
probably increased in areas having to do with sex, violence, recreation,
consumption, and technology. Words like twitter and google have been
appropriated or invented to describe entirely new ways to be illiterate
and incoherent. As a result we are losing the capacity to say what we
really mean and ultimately to think about what we mean. We are losing
the capacity for articulate intelligence about the things that matter most.
“That sucks,” for example, is a common way for budding young scholars to
announce their displeasure about any number of things that range across
the spectrum of human experience. But it can also be used to indicate a
general displeasure with the entire cosmos. Whatever the target, it is the
linguistic equivalent of duct tape, useful for holding disparate thoughts
in rough proximity to some vague emotion of dislike.
The problem is not confined to teenagers or young adults. It is part of
a national epidemic of incoherence evident in our public discourse, street
talk, movies, television, and music. We have all heard popular music that
consisted mostly of pre-Neanderthal grunts. We have witnessed “conver-
sation” on TV talk shows that would have embarrassed retarded chimpan-
zees. We have listened to many politicians of national reputation proudly
and heatedly mangle logic and language in less than a paragraph, although
they can do it on a larger scale as well. However manifested, it is aided and
abetted by academics, including whole departments specializing in various
forms of postmodernism and the deconstruction of one thing or another.
Not so long ago they propounded ideas that everything was relative, hence
 Verbicide  7

largely inconsequential, and that the use of language was an exercise in

power, hence to be devalued. They taught, in other words, a pseudointel-
lectual contempt for clarity, careful argument, and felicitous expression.
Being scholars of their word, they also wrote without clarity, argument,
and felicity. Remove half a dozen arcane words from any number of aca-
demic papers written in the past 10 years, and the argument—whatever
it was—evaporates. But the situation is not much better elsewhere in the
academy, where thought is often fenced in by disciplinary jargon. The fact
is that educators have all too often been indifferent trustees of language.
This explains, I think, why the academy has been a lame critic of what ails
the world, from the preoccupation with self to technology run amuck. We
have been unable to speak out against the barbarism engulfing the larger
culture because we are part of the process of barbarization that begins
with the devaluation of language.
The decline of language, long lamented by commentators such as
H. L. Mencken, George Orwell, William Safire, and Edwin Newman, is
nothing new. Language is always coming undone. Why? For one thing it
is always under assault by those who intend to control others by first seiz-
ing the words and metaphors by which people describe their world. The
goal is to give partisan aims the appearance of inevitability by diminishing
the sense of larger possibilities. In our time, language is under assault by
those whose purpose it is to sell one kind of quackery or another: eco-
nomic, political, religious, or technological. It is under attack because the
clarity and felicity of language—as distinct from its quantity—is devalued
in an industrial-technological society. The clear and artful use of language
is, in fact, threatening to that society. As a result we have highly distorted
and atrophied conversations about ultimate meanings, ethics, public pur-
poses, or the means by which we live. Since we cannot solve problems that
we cannot name, one result of our misuse of language is a growing agenda
of unsolved problems that cannot be adequately described in words and
metaphors derived from our own creations such as machines and com-
puters.
Second, language is in decline because it is being balkanized around
the specialized vocabularies characteristic of an increasingly specialized
society. The highly technical language of the expert is, of course, both
bane and blessing. It is useful for describing fragments of the world,
but not for describing how these fit into a coherent whole. But things
work as whole systems whether we can say it or not or whether we per-
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
hawthorn in full bloom—no one calls it may in Ireland—and, later, the
woodbine—honeysuckle in Ireland is the white and purple clover—and
with the woodbine the sheets of wild roses flung lavishly over every hedge.
Since my young days an improving county surveyor has cut down the
hedges, though not so ruthlessly as here in Hertfordshire, where they are
noted hedgers and ditchers, and so strip the poor things to the earth almost,
just as they are coming into leaf, leaving the roads pitiless indeed for the
summer days.
I think of the lavish Irish hedges and of the strip of grass white with
daisies which ran either side of the footpath. There was always a clear
stream singing along the ditch. It had come down from the mountains, and
was amber-brown in colour, and clear as glass; it ran over pebbles that were
pure gold and silver and precious stones, now and again getting dammed
around a boulder, making a leap to escape, and coming around the boulder
with a swirl and a few specks of foam floating upon it. Ireland of the
Streams is one of the old names for Ireland, and it is justified; for not only
are there lordly rivers like the Shannon and the Blackwater, to mention but
two of them, but there are innumerable little streams everywhere, undefiled
—at least, as I know them—by factories. You can always kneel down of a
summer’s day by one, fill your two hands full and drink your fill; and that
mountain water is better than any wine. You may track it, if you will, up to
the mountains, where you will find it welling out, perhaps, through the
fronds of a hartstongue fern, the first tiny gush of it; and you will find it
widening out and almost hidden by a million flowers and plants that like to
stand with their feet in water. Or you will see it, cool and deep, with golden
shadows sleeping in it, slipping round little boulders and clattering over
stones, in a tremendous hurry to escape from these sweet places to the
noisome city, where it will lose itself in the sewer water before it finds its
way to the sea.
There is no such order in an Irish as in an English landscape: none of the
rich, ordered garden air which in England so delights Americans and
colonials. The Irish landscape is always somewhat forlorn, wild and soft,
with an impalpable melancholy upon it—this even in the fat pasture-lands
of Dublin County. How much more so when the bogs spread their beautiful
brown desolation over miles of country, or in the wild places where man
asks for bread and Nature gives him a stone! At its most prosperous the
country is always a little wild, a little mournful, a barefooted colleen with
cloudy hair and shy eyes sometimes tearful, and no conventional beauty—
only something that takes the heart by storm and holds it fast.
Irish skies weep a deal. That accounts, of course, for the great
vegetation, the intense greenness. If I did not know the Irish green I should
be unable to realize the mantle of grass-green silk which so often the old
ballad-makers gave their knights and ladies. Knowing the Irish grass, I see
an intenser green than if I did not know it. Where there are not rocks and
stones and mountains, where there is cultivation in Ireland, there is leafage
and grass of great luxuriousness. Of a wet summer in Ireland you could
scarcely walk through the grass; it might meet above a child’s head.
Contrariwise, the flora of Ireland, as I know it, is much less various and
luxuriant than that of England. In a childhood and youth spent in the Irish
country—it was round about Dublin—I recall only the simpler and
commoner wild-flowers. On a chalk cliff at Dover, when May spread a
carpet of flowers, I have seen a greater variety of wild-flowers than I knew
in a lifetime in Ireland—most of them unknown to me by name.

BLARNEY CASTLE.
 Nor do I think the birds are so many as in England, perhaps because so
much of Ireland is stripped of its woods; perhaps because Ireland has been
slower to protect the birds than England; perhaps, also, because of the
scantier population, which leaves the birds to suffer hunger in the winter.
There are no nightingales in Ireland, but I do not think we have missed
them, having the thrush and the blackbird, which seem to me to sing with a
richer sweetness in Ireland than in England; but that may be because the
Irish-born person is prone to exaggerate the sweetness he has lost. But the
most characteristic note of the Irish summer is the corn-crake’s. Somehow
the Irish corn-crake has a bigger note and is much more in evidence than his
English brother. All the nights of the early summer in Ireland he saws away
with his rasping note, till the hay is cut, when he disappears. I suppose one
hears him as much in the day-time, but one does not notice him. He is the
harsh Irish nightingale. Poor fellow! he is often immolated before the
mowing-machine; and you shall see him flying with his long-legged wife
and children—or rather scurrying—to the nearest hedgerow, where there is
always a plentiful supply of grass to cover him till he can make up his mind
to go elsewhere. It is a saying in Ireland that you never see a corn-crake
after the meadows are cut. A learned doctor has assured me that they
migrate to Egypt for the good of their voices.
For the rest, in the Irish country there are villages of an incredible
poverty. The Irish village mars a landscape, whereas so often an English
one enhances its beauty. There are farmhouses and isolated cottages. The
farmhouses are seldom even pretty. Irish house architecture is terribly ugly,
as a rule, except for the few eighteenth-century houses which derive from
the English. The Irish farmhouse is generally a two-story building, slated
and whitewashed. It is too narrow for its height, although the height may be
no great thing. A mean hall-door in the middle, with a mean window to
either side, three mean windows above—that is the Irish farmer’s idea of
house-building. I remember an Irishman of genius objecting to Morland that
his cottages were impossible; there was never the like out of Arcadia. As a
matter of fact, the cottages were such as are the commonplaces of English
villages. But no good Irishman will concede to England a beauty, natural or
otherwise, which Ireland does not possess. The country shows many ruins
—ruined houses, the houses of the Irish gentry; ruined mills; ruined
churches and castles; and behind grey stone walls, unthought of, uncared
for, old disused graveyards filled with prairie grass to the height of the
crumbling walls.
When the Irish go away they are always lonely for the mountains. No
other mountains are so soft-bosomed and so mild. They have wisps of cloud
lying along the side of them and the blue peak showing above. I have seen a
rainbow, one end of the arch planted in the sea, the other somewhere behind
the mountains, “over the hills and far away.” Seeing that incomparable
sight, I understood why the Irish peasant imagines fairy treasures hidden at
the foot of the rainbow. I, too, have been in Arcadia.
 CHAPTER IV

THE IRISH PEOPLE

I MUST warn you, before proceeding to write about the Irish people, that I
have tried to explain them, according to my capacity, a thousand times to
my English friends and neighbours, and have been pulled up short as many
times by the reflection that all I have been saying was contradicted by some
other aspect of my country-people. For we are an eternally contradictory
people, and none of us can prognosticate exactly what we shall feel, what
do, under given circumstances; whereas the Englishman is simple. He has
no mysteries. Once you know him, you can pretty well tell what he will say,
what feel, and do under given circumstances. You have a formula for him:
you have no formula for the Irish. The Englishman is simple, the Irish
complex. The Anglo-Irish, who stand to most English people for the Irish,
have had grafted on to them the complexity of the Irish without their
pliability. It makes, perhaps, the most puzzling of all mixtures, and it may
be the chief difficulty in a proper estimate of the Irish character.
They will tell you in Ireland that you have to go some forty or fifty miles
from Dublin before you get into Irish Ireland. There are a good many Irish
in Anglo-Ireland, usually in the humbler walks of life, whence you shall
find in Dublin servants, car-drivers, policemen, newspaper-boys, and so on,
the raciness, the vivacity, the charm, which in Irish Ireland is a perpetual
delight. Dublin drawing-rooms are not vivacious, nor are the manners
gracious, although the Four Courts still produce a galaxy of wit, and Dublin
citizens buttonhole each other with good stories all along the streets, roaring
with laughter in a way that would be regarded as Bedlam in Fleet Street.
Get into Irish Ireland and the manners have a graciousness which is like
a blessing. I asked the way in Ballyshannon town once. The woman who
directed me came out into the street and a little way with me, and when she
left me called to me sweetly, “Come back soon to Donegal!” which left a
sense of blessing with me all that day. There was a certain curly-haired
“Wullie,” who drove the long car from Donegal to Killybegs. I can see
“Wullie” yet helping the women on and off the car with their myriad
packages, can see the delightful grief with which he parted from us, his
shining face of welcome when he met us again a fortnight later. To set
against “Wullie” were the car-drivers, who certainly are unpleasant if the
“whip-money” does not come up to their expectations. We say of such that
they are “spoilt by the tourists,” yet I remember some who were not spoilt
by the tourists, although they were perpetually in touch with them—
boatmen and pony-boys at Killarney; and a certain delightful guide, whose
winning gaiety was not at all merely professional.
Thinking over my country-people, I say, “They are so-and-so,” and then
I have a misgiving, and I say, “But, after all, they are not so-and-so.”
They are the most generous people in the world. They enjoy to the fullest
the delight of giving; and what a good delight that is! I pity the ungiving
people. You will receive more gifts in Ireland in a twelvemonth than in a
lifetime out of it. The first instinct of Irish liking or loving is to give you
something. The giving instinct runs through all classes. If you sit down in a
cabin and see an old piece of lustre-ware or something else of the sort, do
not admire it unless you mean to accept it; for it will be offered to you, not
in the Spanish way which does not expect acceptance, but in the Irish way
which does. I have many little bits of china given so, usually the one thing
of any consideration or value the donor possessed. I once sought to buy an
old china dish, much flawed and cracked by hot ovens, in a Dublin hotel, as
much to save it from following its fellows to destruction as for any other
reason. The owner would not sell the dish, but he offered it for my
acceptance in such a way that I could not refuse. When I go back to my old
home, the cottagers bring a few new-laid eggs or a griddle-cake for my
acceptance. I have a friend in an Irish village whose income from an official
source is £10 a year. She has a cottage, a few hens, and enough grass for a
cow when she can get one. Her gifts come at Christmas, at Easter, on St.
Patrick’s Day, and on some special, private feasts of my own—eggs,
sweets, flowers, a bit of lace, or a fine embroidered handkerchief, and, in
times of illness, a pair of chickens. That is royal giving out of so little; and I
assure you that it blesses the giver as well as the recipient.
On the other hand, the farmers grow thriftier and thriftier. Sir Horace
Plunkett and men like him, truly patriotic Irishmen, are showing them the
way. Successive Land Acts lift them more and more into a position of
security from one of precariousness. They have more money now to put in
the savings-banks. Their prosperity does not mean a higher standard of
living, although that is badly needed. It means more money in the banks—
that is all.
The Irish are very like the French. If the day should come when they
should learn, like the French, to be thrifty and usurious, I hope I shall not be
there to see it. Better—a thousand times better—that they should remain
royal wastrels to the end.
As yet we need not fear it. Still, if you ask a drink of water at a mountain
cabin in the poorest parts of Ireland, you are given milk; and do not offer to
pay for it, lest you sink to the lowest place in the estimation of these
splendid givers.
The hospitality is truly splendid. There is a saying in Ireland that they
always put an extra bit in the pot for “the man coming over the hill.” It is an
unheard-of thing that you should call at an Irish house and not be asked if
“you’ve a mouth on you.” If your visit be within anything like measurable
distance of meal-time you will be obliged to stay for the meal.
In England, when people are poor, or comparatively so, or feel the need
of retrenchment, they “do not entertain.” It is almost the first form of
retrenchment which suggests itself to the Englishman; whereas to curtail his
hospitalities would be the last form of retrenchment to an Irishman, and you
will be entertained generously and lavishly by people you know to be poor.
The Englishman’s different way of looking at the matter is no doubt partly
due to the fact that he is a much more domestic person than the Irishman,
and depends mainly on his family life for his happiness and pleasure. Now,
the French do not give hospitality at all outside the large family circle, so
that in that regard at least the Irish will have a long way to travel before
they touch with the French.
 OFF TO AMERICA.

I have said that the Irish are not domestic. They are gregarious, but not
domestic. The Irishman depends a deal on the neighbours; he has no such
way of enclosing himself within a little fortified place of home against all
the ills of the world as has the Englishman. Irish mothers, like Irish nurses,
are often tenderly, exquisitely soft and warm; but the young ones will fly
out of the nest for all that. Perhaps the art of making the home pleasant is
not an Irish art. Perhaps it is the gregariousness, general and not particular
—at least, general in the sense of embracing the parish and not the family.
To the young Irish and a good many of their elders the home is dull. They
go off to America, leaving the old people to loneliness, because there is no
amusement. They do not make their own interests, as the slower, less
vivacious nations do. The rainy Irish climate seems made for a people who
would find their pleasures indoors. But the Irish will be out and about,
telling good stories and hearing them. They are an artistic people, with great
traditions; yet books or music or conversation will not keep them at home.
If they cannot have the neighbours in, they will go out to the neighbours.
They are very religious, and accept the invisible world with a
thoroughness and simplicity of belief which they would say themselves is
their most precious inheritance. The Celt is no materialist. He does not love
success or riches; most of those whom he holds in esteem have been neither
successful nor rich. Money is not the passport to his affections. He ought
never to go away, and, alas! he goes away in thousands! Contact with the
selfish, money-getting materialism has power to destroy the spiritual
qualities of the Celt, once he is outside Ireland. When he comes back—a
prosperous Irish-American—he is no longer the Celt we loved. And he does
come back: that is one of his contradictions. The home he has left behind
because of its dulness, the arid patch of mountain-land, the graves of his
people, call him back again at the moment when one would have said every
bond with them was loosened.
He is full of sentiment, yet he makes mercenary marriages. The Irish
match-making customs are well known. In the South and West of Ireland
the prospective bride is bargained over with no more sentiment than if she
were a heifer. She may be “turned down” for an iron pot or a feather-bed
which her mother will not give up to supplement the dowry. Satin cheeks
and speedwell eyes and a head of silk like the raven’s plume will not count
against a bullock extra with a yellow spinster of greater fortune, or is not
supposed to count; for sometimes Cupid steps in, although the match-
making customs are usually accepted as unquestioningly as a similar
institution is by the French. And even in such unpromising soil flowers of
love and tenderness will spring up. Under my hand I have a letter from an
Irish peasant which I think affords a beautiful refutation of the idea that
sentiment and match-making cannot go together. Here is a passage from it:
“For the last few weeks I was anxiously engaged at match-making, as
matters were going from bad to worse; having no housekeeper, household
jobs and cares prevented me from attending to outside work. Well, at last
my match is made. The marriage is to take place next Thursday. The ‘young
girl’ is twenty-two years, and I thank God that I am perfectly satisfied with
my life-companion-to-be. There were many other matches introduced to me
—far more satisfactory from the financial point of view, some having £20,
some £30, and one £40 more fortune than my intended wife has, with whom
I am getting but £90, while I must ‘by will’ give £120 to my brother,
leaving a deficit of £30; but, somehow, I could not satisfy my mind with the
other ‘good girls’ if they had over £200—nay, at all. And the poet’s words
were true when he said something like ‘pity is akin to love’; pity I felt first
for my intended wife, with her simple, yet wise, unaffected ways, not used
to world’s ways and wiles, ‘an unspoiled child of Nature,’ never flirted,
never went to dances, with the bloom of her maidenhood fresh and pure,
and fair and bright. When but a last £5 was between myself and her people
re fortune, her very words to me were: ‘Wisha, God help me! if I’m worth
anything, I ought to be worth that £5.’ That expression of hers stung me to
the quick, so openly, frankly, and innocently uttered, and ‘I’m getting other
accounts, but would not marry anyone but you.’ Well, the end was in that
one night, sitting beside her in her father’s house, the feeling of pity
changed to a warmer feeling, thank God; for if it didn’t, I would rather live
and die single than marry against my will. ‘’Tisn’t riches makes happiness.’
I’ve read somewhere that when want comes in at the door, love flies out of
the window; but I don’t believe it—I don’t believe it. And my brother is
kind; he will be giving me time to pay the balance, £30, by degrees.”
The Irish are notoriously brave, yet they have a fear of public opinion
unknown to an Englishman. Underneath their charmingly gay and open
manner there is a self-consciousness, a self-mistrust. For all their keen sense
of humour, they cannot bear laughter directed at themselves. They dread to
be made absurd more than anything else in this world. They are responsive
and sympathetic, yet too witty not to be somewhat malicious; and they are
warm and generous, yet not always so reliably kind as a duller, slower
people. They are irritable, so they are less tolerant of children and animals,
although they make excellent nurses, as I have said. They have no tolerance
at all for slowness and stupidity, very little for ugliness or want of charm.
They adore beauty, though it doesn’t count for much in their most intimate
relations; and it is not, therefore, the paradise of plain women.
I have not touched on a hundredth part of their contradictoriness, which
makes the Irish so eternally unexpected and interesting. They can be, as
they say themselves, “contrairy” when they choose—and they often choose.
Yet, when all is said and done, they are the pleasantest people in the world.
Nor is their pleasantness insincere. They are pleasant because they feel
pleasant; and an Irish man or woman will pay you an amazing, fresh,
audacious compliment which an Englishman might feel, but would rather
die than say.
Did I say that the Celt was gay and melancholy? He is exquisitely gay
and most profoundly melancholy. He is in touch with the other world, and
yet desperately afraid of it, or of the passage to it, being a creature of fine
nerves and apprehension; whence he will joke about death to cover up his
real repugnance, and yet hold the key to heaven as securely as though it
were the other side of the wall, with a lonesome passage to be traversed. It
is the lonesomeness of death which makes it terrible to the gregarious
Irishman, although he knows that the other side of the wall the kinsmen and
friends and neighbours await him, friendly and loving as of old.
 CHAPTER V

SOUTH OF DUBLIN
IF you go down from Dublin by the wonderful coast-line or through the
beautiful country inland which runs by the base of the mountains, you will
come upon beautiful scenery, and find a population not at all
characteristically Irish. The beauty of Wicklow, its wonderful woods, its
deep glens, its placid waters, its glorious mountains, is only less than the
beauty of Killarney, which is an earthly paradise. But in Wicklow, in
Wexford, in Waterford, the people’s blood is mixed. Sometimes it is Celt
upon Celt, the Welsh Celt upon the Irish. There are charming people in
Wicklow and Wexford and Waterford, but to those counties belongs also
what I call the cynical Irishman—the Irishman without charm of manner,
the “independent” Irishman, who will not take off his hat to rank or age or
sex; yet he is Irish enough in the core of him. And Wicklow and Wexford,
with Kildare and part of Meath, were the scenes of the Rebellion in 1798.
Perhaps the memory of those days helps to make the Irishman of the south-
east corner of Ireland what he is, and that is often something very unlike the
gracious Irishman of the South and West. He has his resentments. I have
heard an Irishman say: “A Wexford man will never look at a Tipperary man,
because Tipperary didn’t rise in the Rebellion.” The Rebellion, which was
hatched in the North by Ulster Presbyterians, broke out, after all, in
Wexford, and on a religious, and a Catholic, cause of quarrel. There could
have been nothing farther from the thoughts of the leaders of the united
Irishmen than to make a religious war, but that was what the Rebellion of
1798 turned out to be—a religious war; a war between Catholic and
Protestant, precipitated not by English intriguers, say those who know well,
but by outrageous insults to the Catholic altars, led in many cases by priests
on the rebel side, foredoomed to failure in spite of the desperate courage of
the peasantry who for a time swept all before them. One always thinks of
Wexford and the Rebellion simultaneously. It was a time of cynical
contrasts. Think of the poor peasants, maddened by outrages to their altars,
led by their priests, carrying on the Rebellion planned by Protestants of the
North—by leaders deeply imbued with the French revolutionary spirit,
which was certainly not Christian! Think of the Western peasants, when
Humbert and his men landed at Killala, hailing those good comrades of the
Revolution as fellow-Catholics, coming to meet them decked out in
religious emblems! One of the strangest and most cynical of these contrasts
was the fact that while the peasant army fought desperately at New Ross,
where they all but carried the day, on the other side of the Barrow River
men were ploughing peacefully in their fields, because it was Wexford that
was up and not their county. I suppose it is the clan system which
differentiates Irishmen by their counties and their towns. Dublin is
heterogeneous, perhaps. It has, at all events, few distinguishing
characteristics, whereas Cork and Waterford men are as widely apart almost
as though they were of different nationalities; and both are agreed in
despising Dublin, although Dublin has made history in the last hundred
years—national history—more than either.
 A WICKLOW GLEN.

The men who were the first begetters of the Rebellion, and the men who
saved Ireland for the English Crown, were alike men of Anglo-Irish blood.
The Rebellion was put down by the Irish yeomanry, as English statesmen
had to acknowledge, however little they liked the methods of their allies.
The yeomanry did not make war with rose-water, any more than they
precipitated the Rebellion by gentle methods. It is a bloody and brutal
chapter of Irish history, and the memories of it accounted for the religious
animosities which I remember in my youth, which are fading out as the
memories of the Rebellion are fading. The year 1798 has ceased to be a
landmark in Irish life. When I was a child, there yet lived people who could
tell at first hand or second hand of the terrible happenings of those days.
People used to say, fixing an age: “He was born the year of the Rebellion.”
Now all that has passed away. Even in those times it was becoming more
customary to date events by the year of the Big Wind, 1839. Now, with the
establishment of parish registers—which did not come in in Ireland till the
sixties—and the spread of newspapers and cheap knowledge generally, such
landmarks are no longer required; and the Big Wind of 1903 has wiped out
the memory of its predecessor.
In the mountains of Wicklow the insurgents of those days found their
refuges and their fastnesses and their graves. I remember having seen
somewhere near Roundwood, in the Wicklow Mountains, in the midst of a
ploughed field a long strip of greenest grass covering the grave of many
rebels. The plough had gone round it ever since then, but not a sod of it had
been turned up; it had remained inviolate.
A great deal of Irish history gathers round the Rebellion—the Rebellion,
the Irish yet call it, as though there had never been any other. The men who
made it were literary men, in a more vital sense than the men of ‘48, who
were also literary. Two books of that day stand out pre-eminently—Lord
Edward Fitzgerald’s “Life and Letters,” edited by Thomas Moore, and the
Journal of Theobald Wolfe Tone. Lord Edward had an exquisite style. His
letters are the frank revelation of a beautiful and gallant and innocent mind
and heart. Without deliberation, without knowledge, his family letters
achieved the highest art. They are immortal, imperishable things.
Then Tone’s Journal is as remarkable a human document. Tone swaggers
through these pages better than any hero of romance. Life, after all, is the
greatest artist, and one does not say, “Here is a true Dumas hero! Here is a
true Stevenson hero!” For Life is better than her children.
Nearly all the United Irish leaders left memoirs or journals behind them.
There was, perhaps, something of the self-consciousness of the French
Revolution in this keeping a journal in the face of battle. Anyhow, we are
grateful to Holt, to Teeling, to Cloney, for keeping alive for us those days
and those men.
In Lady Sarah Napier’s letters you also get most vivid glimpses of the
Rebellion—as, indeed, you do in the letters of the whole Leinster family.
Mary Ledbetter, that gentle Quakeress, of Ballitore, has told her experiences
of the Rebellion in Kildare; there is Bishop Stock’s Narrative of the French
landing at Killala and those days in which he entertained willy-nilly the
French leaders and found them the most considerate of guests. In fact, there
is a whole library of Rebellion literature.
I ask pardon for treating Wicklow and Wexford as though they were the
theatre of ‘98, and nothing more; but, indeed, in the story of Wexford the
Rebellion stands up like White Mountain and Mount Leinster, and one finds
little else to say.
 CHAPTER VI

THE NORTH
BETWEEN Dublin and Newry there is not much to see or to remember
except that Cromwell sacked Drogheda with a thoroughness, and that at
Dundalk Edward Bruce, the brother of Robert, was crowned King of
Ireland. The Mourne Mountains and Carlingford Lough bring us back to
characteristic Ireland. Beyond them one enters the manufacturing districts
—that north-east corner of Ireland which no Celt looks upon as Ireland at
all. In speech, in character, in looks, the people become Scotch and not
Irish. One has crossed the border and Celtic Ireland is left behind.
In the north-east corner of Ulster they are all busy money-making and
money-getting. The North of Ireland has admirable qualities—thrift, energy,
industry, ambition, capacity. In other parts of Ireland you find these
qualities here and there; they are mainly, but not altogether, the qualities of
the Anglo-Irish—that is, in so far as they are a business asset. The Celt has
no real capacity for money-making, though at the wrong end of the virtue of
thrift—that dreariest of the virtues—he may accumulate it. He will put an
enormous deal of energy into something that does not pay him in hard cash.
Honorary positions are greedily sought after by the Irish everywhere. They
will run any number of societies for nothing, will do the business of
Leagues, of the Poor Law, of the County Councils. The energy shown by
the Celt in doing the public business would enrich him if applied to his
own. He has a large capacity for public business, and an extraordinary
readiness to do it, which is, I suppose, the reason why he does the public
business of America, while non-Irish Americans sit by and grumble at his
way of doing it.
In Ireland and in America he does hard manual labour, but somehow the
genius of finance is not his. His hard work is on the land in one form or
another. Now and again he may build up quite a considerable fortune in
petty shop-keeping—the big traders are nearly all Anglo-Irish—but when
he does, his sons become professional men and the business ceases to be.
One can hardly imagine in Celtic Ireland what occurs every day in English
business life, where the son of a successful business man may be a public-
school man, a University man, and have had all the advantages of wealth,
and yet succeed his father in the business. And his son succeeds him, and so
on. This, in Celtic Ireland, would, I fear, be taken as indicative of a
pettifogging spirit. The Anglo-Irishman, on the contrary, succeeds to the
business his father has made, even though he be a University man; and the
Grafton Street shops are often run by men who are graduates and
honourmen of the University, and yet do not disdain to be seen in their
shops.
There is nothing Irish about North-East Ulster except the country itself,
which does not materially alter its character, because it is studded with
factories. From the streets of Belfast you see the Cave Hill, as from easy-
going Dublin you see the Dublin Mountains. Perhaps there is something of
exuberance caught from the Celt in the paraphernalia and ceremonial of the
Orange Society. Who can say how much of poetry it may not mean, that
crowded hour of glorious life which comes about mid-July, when men who
have worked side by side in amity all the rest of the year suddenly become
bitter enemies, when the wearing of an Orange sash and the sight of an
Orange lily stir a fever in the blood?
Apart from such occasions, they are given in Belfast to minding their
own business, and minding it very well. The Belfast man is very shrewd,
but he has a great simplicity withal. He has none of the uppish notions of
the Celt, and though he makes money he does not make it to display it. He
is blunt and brusque in his speech and manner, and so not unlike his
Lancashire brother. He lives simply. In public matters he has the priceless
advantage, in Ireland, of knowing what he wants; and he usually gets it,
unless his demands be too outrageous. He is a hard man of business, but in
his human relationships he is kind and sincere. I have known exiles of
Dublin who went to Belfast in tears, and for the first months or years of
their residence were always sighing after Dublin. When, however, they
came to know the man of the North—he takes a good deal of knowing—
nothing would induce them to return to Dublin.
Like his Scottish progenitors, he stands by the Bible. There is as much
Bible-reading in the fine red-brick mansions of Belfast as there is in
Scotland. He does not produce literature. The more artistic parts of Ireland
look down on him as one to whom “boetry and bainting” are as
unacceptable as they were to the Second George. But he encourages solid
learning, and he endows seats of learning as generously as does the
American millionaire, who in this respect offers an example to his English
brother. The Belfast man has the Scottish love of education. He has many of
the homespun Scottish virtues, and much less than the Scottish love of
money.
At the very gates of Belfast you find the Irish country. The Glens of
Antrim are as Irish as Limerick or Clare. They are very beautiful, and not
much exploited. There is also the Giant’s Causeway to see. The legend of
its construction is that Finn, the Irish giant, invited a Scotch giant over to
fight him, and generously provided the Causeway for him to cross by; but
he played a nasty trick on him, for he pretended to the Scottish giant when
he came that he was his own little boy. “If you are the little son, what must
your father be?” the Scottish giant is reported to have said before taking to
his heels.
I do not believe the story. I believe that the Scottish giant came and
stayed. You see his children all over North-East Ulster.
There are women-poets whom one associates with the North—Moira
O’Neill of the Glens, and Alice Milligan, a daughter of Belfast. They are
both

“Kindly Irish of the Irish

Neither Saxon nor Italian,”

nor Scottish.
THE RIVER LEE.
Cork and Thereabouts
 CHAPTER VII

CORK AND THEREABOUTS

THERE is something of rich and racy association about the very name of
Cork—something that suggests joviality, wit, a warm southern
temperament. Corkmen only out of all Ireland hold together. The rest of
Ireland may be fissiparous, disunited. Corkmen cleave closer than Scotsmen
to one another, and to be a Corkman is to another Corkman a cloak that
covers a multitude of sins. A Corkman in Dublin will have friends in all
sorts of unlikely places. What matter though a man be in a humble rank of
life—a cabman, a policeman, a postman, even a scavenger! So he be a
Corkman, he has an appeal to the heart of his brother Corkman. It is a
Freemasonry. There is nothing else like it in Ireland, nor anywhere else, so
far as I know; for the Scotsman coming into England may draw other
Scotsmen to follow him, but in the Scotch sticking together there is less real
affection than there is in the case of the Corkman. To be able to exchange
memories of the Mardyke, of the River Lee, of Shandon and Sunday’s Well,
is to make Corkmen brothers all the world over. Cork looks on itself as the
real capital of Ireland, and has always its eye on a day when Dublin will be
dispossessed.
It has a most excellent situation on the River Lee, and is surrounded by
all manner of natural beauties. There is plenty of business stirring, and there
is a good deal of opulence in Cork, where, Corkmen being men of taste,
they display it in their houses, their way of living and on the persons of
their beautiful women, with the irresistible Cork brogue to crown all their
other charms. Cork is nothing if not artistic. She has produced artists of all
descriptions—poets, painters, great newspaper men (was not Delane of the
Times a Corkman?), musicians, sculptors, orators, preachers. The words roll
off the Cork tongue sweet as honey. There is something extraordinarily rich,
gay and alluring about Cork and Cork people. They were always audacious.
They set up Perkin Warbeck as a Pretender to the English Crown, clad him
in silks and velvets, and demanded his acknowledgment at the hands of the
Lord Deputy. I do not know that as a city Cork took a great part in any of
the many Irish rebellions. It would make a city of diplomatists because of
its honeyed tongue. Queen Elizabeth, they say, was the first one to talk of
Blarney, which is a Cork commodity. There was a certain McCarthy, Lord
of Blarney, who would not come in and submit to the Queen’s forces,
though week by week he promised to come and kept the Queen’s anger off
by cozening words. “It is all Blarney,” the Queen came to say of fair words
that meant nothing; but that is a derivation I somewhat suspect. I do not
know what Cork was doing in the Desmond Rebellion, of the results of
which Spenser has left us so harrowing a description. She was perhaps
enjoying herself after the fashion of that day. Spenser married a Cork-
woman, and has enshrined her in the “Epithalamion,” the most beautiful
love-poem in the English language. Cork has its links with the Golden Age
of England, for Raleigh was at Youghal, and Spenser at Kilcolman close by;
and in Raleigh’s house at Youghal they show you the oriel in which Spenser
sat and read the “Faërie Queene” to his host, the Shepherd of the Ocean.
Youghal and all that part of the country round about Cork is steeped in
traditions and memories. St. Mary’s Collegiate Church at Youghal might be
in an English town, and there are malls and promenades in those parts, with
high, crumbling houses, which suggest the English civilization of the
Middle Ages and not the Irish civilization before the Norman Conquest. The
Normans were great church-builders, but of their churches, as in the case of
the old Abbey of St. Francis at Youghal, there remain now only ruins—a
naked gable standing up amid a wilderness of graves, buried in coarse
grasses, which, when I was there, had a greater decency towards the dead
than had the living. For it is strange that the Irish, who love the dead, have
little piety towards their graves.
From Youghal Sir Walter Raleigh sailed away to Virginia on his last
disastrous voyage. Spenser had gone back to London earlier than that,
heart-broken by the loss of his little son, who was burnt to death in a fire at
Kilcolman Castle. Raleigh and Spenser had received grants of the lands of
the attainted Desmonds. Very little profit either had of them, and Raleigh’s
lands passed to the Earl of Cork, commonly called “the Great,” whose
flaring chapel destroys the quiet of St. Mary’s dim aisles and chancel.
Never was there so worldly a monument as this of Robert Boyle, his
mother, his two wives, and his nine children, all in hideously painted and
decorated Italian marble. The fierce eyes of the great Earl are something to
remember with dismay.
 I recall the evidence the great Earl adduced to prove that Sir Walter did
really hand him over his Irish estates on the eve of that journey to Virginia
—for a small consideration of money and plenishing for the expedition. “If
you do not take the lands, some Scot will have them,” said, or is reported to
have said, Sir Walter, which reminds us that Jamie had succeeded Elizabeth,
and was already transplanting his Scots—Jamie, who was to keep so
brilliant a bird as Sir Walter in so squalid a cage as a prison till he made up
his mind to send him to the block. Youghal is haunted by Sir Walter and
Spenser. My memories of the place in a windy autumn are brightened by
sudden gleams, as of splendid attire and golden olive faces with the
Elizabethan ruff and the Elizabethan pointed beard.
The Blackwater, which runs through Youghal, dropping into the sea at
that point, had at Rhincrew Point its House of Knights Templars. From
Youghal they also sailed away in search of El Dorado, but a heavenly one.
May they have found it!
And also there is Templemichael, of the Earls of Desmond, the southern
branch of the Fitzgeralds, which Cromwell battered down for “dire
insolence.” There is a story of a Desmond lord who was buried across the
water at Ardmore, the holy place of St. Declan, where there is a pilgrimage
and a patronage to this day. But holy as Ardmore was and is, Earl Gerald
could not sleep there. He wanted to be back at Templemichael, where his
young wife lay in her lonely grave. So that night after night there came a
terrible cry, “Garault Arointha! Garault Arointha!”—that is to say: “Give
Gerald a ferry!” So at last some of his faithful followers rowed over by
night, took up the body of Earl Gerald, and carried it back to
Templemichael and to the dead Countess’s side. And after that Earl Gerald
slept in peace.
My memory of Youghal in that far-away windy autumn is compounded
of three or four things. There was purple wistaria hanging in great masses
over the walls of the college which was the foundation of one of the
Desmonds. There was provision there for so many singing men—twenty,
was it?—who were to sing in St. Mary’s choir. The great Earl of Cork had a
great maw, one that never suffered from indigestion. The revenues of St.
Mary’s College went the same way as Sir Walter’s slice of the Desmond
lands. Then, again, in a little shop-window of the town, there was a glorious
show of fruit—great scarlet-skinned tomatoes, gorgeous plums and pears
and apples, which reminded one that Raleigh had planted orchards at
Affane, on the Blackwater. As a rule, fruit is sadly to seek in a small Irish
town, although Cork produces some of the finest fruit I have ever seen.
Then, again, there was a room in Raleigh’s house, Myrtle Grove, unlit save
for the flicker of firelight, the darkness all about us, and an old voice
bidding us to notice the earthy smell, which was supposed to enter the room
from a subterranean passage that led to St. Mary’s.
Again, I have another widely different memory. It is of a fine, tall,
beautifully-complexioned girl standing behind the counter of a draper’s
shop, her shining red-golden head showing against a background of little
plaid shawls and kerchiefs, while she lamented in her wailing southern
brogue the fact that no one could hope to get married in Youghal, unless one
had £300 to buy an old “widda-man”; and they were all the men that were
going.
I like to get back from Youghal and its ghosts, and Rosanna, who never
thought of rebelling against the marriage customs of her forbears, to
cheerful Cork of the living and not the dead, with her tramcars, her jingles
—the curious covered car which takes the place of the outside car in other
Irish towns—her citizens laughing and button-holing each other with a
greater gaiety than the Dubliners; her excellent shops, her beautiful girls
promenading Patrick Street, her club-houses, her churches, her Queen’s
College, and all the rest of it, down to her river with its busy steamers.
Cork’s citizens live outside her gates, at Monkstown, at Blackrock, at
Glenbrook; and the busy steamers carry them to and fro by the loveliest of
waterways. “Are the steamers punctual?” I asked a Cork friend. “Is it
punctual?” repeated he. “They’re the most punctual things in Ireland, for
they always get in before their time.”
Father Mathew is one of Cork’s memories; Father Prout is another; Dr.
Maginn is another. But the list of Cork’s worthies is a long one, and I shall
not enter upon it here.
 RALEIGH’S HOUSE, MYRTLE GROVE.

Cork has the most enervating climate for one who comes to it from more
northern latitudes. It is always soft and warm, and often wet. “Good
heavens!” said John Mitchel, when he came back from twenty years or so
of Australia, gliding in by Spike Island in that same silver mist of rain in
which he had gone out, “isn’t that shower over yet?” The flowers are
wonderful in Cork, as well as the fruit. I have seen the suburban gardens of
Corkmen a luxuriance of vivid, closely packed, overflowing blossom.
Myrtles and fuchsias grow in the open air. There are hedges of fuchsias at
Killarney. There are hydrangeas also; but the same is true of Dublin and its
precincts. No one coming in from outside has energy to do anything in
Cork. But the Corkman lacks nothing of energy, nothing of the joy of life.
He is a keen business man, and there is plenty of industrial enterprise. He is
interested in the affairs of the world at large and of Cork in particular. He
has his enthusiasms. He is a tremendous politician, and does not mind being
on the losing side so long as it is the right one. He is a sportsman and a bit
of a gambler; he makes love and is a good friend. The place is full of wit
and gaiety and humour. His standard of living when he has money, or ought
to have it, is an unusually high one for Ireland. Some of those successful
merchants live, I am told, like merchant princes. He is lavish and generous,
and fond of display—altogether a rich, abundant, highly-coloured character.
He lives in an atmosphere of incessant wit and humour. Hardly a man in
Cork but has his nickname. “There goes Billy Boulevard,” you hear, and
you are told that the gentleman so designated desired to embellish Patrick
Street with trees. But it was in Dublin that they called one who had made
his money in pneumatic tyres, and was exalted above his humbler
neighbours, “Lord Tyre and Side-on.”
 CHAPTER VIII

GALWAY
GALWAY is so synonymous with racy Irish life that a peep at Ireland must
be incomplete unless it includes a peep at Galway. It is full of the strangest
monuments of the past. It was once a town of the Irishry, in the O’Flaherty
country. But with the Norman Conquest there came in that group of Anglo-
Norman families known as the Tribes, who in course of time went the way
of all their compeers, becoming more Irish than the Irish. “Lord!” said
Edmund Spenser, “how quickly doth that country alter men’s natures!” The
Tribes were, and are—for happily there are still the Tribes of Galway—
thirteen, viz.: Athy, Blake, Bodkin, Browne, D’Arcy, Font, French, Joyce,
Kirwan, Lynch, Martin, Morris, and Skerrett. These Tribes became
responsible in time for so much of the wild and picturesque life of the Irish
gentry of the eighteenth century—the duelling, the drinking, the racing, the
gambling, the general devil-may-care life—that Galway looms more
largely, perhaps, than any town in the social history of Ireland. Galway
drew up a code for duellists known as the Galway Code; and in the
irresponsible life of the eighteenth century, such as you find in Miss
Edgeworth’s “Castle Rackrent” and in Lever’s novels, the life which the
Encumbered Estates Act put a period to, the names of the Tribes figure
oftener than more Celtic names. For the picturesque wildness of Irish life
was the wildness of the settlers rather than the wildness of the native Irish.
However, in the great days of Galway’s trade with Spain and other
continental ports, traces of which are scattered all over the old ruined city,
which is as much Spanish as it is Irish, the Tribes were just merchant
princes, not anticipating the time when, more Hibernico, they should fling
trade to the winds and become the maddest crew of dare-devils known in
the social life of any country. And here I find, in the record of the duelling
and drinking days, traces and indications of the English descent of the
roysterers. For certainly there was a lack of humour in the actors, though
none for the spectator; there was a solemnity—not always a drunken
solemnity—in the way their pranks were performed that was not Celtic; for
the Celt has a terrible sense of the ridiculous. Doubtless it was from his
Anglo-Irish betters that the Celt derived the habit of “trailing his coat”
through a fair when he was spoiling for a fight, though, to do him justice, he
practised it only when he was drunk. The Anglo-Irish duellists inaugurated
the custom. When on no pretext could they find a friend or neighbour to kill
or be killed by, they went out and “trailed the coat,” like the gentleman who
rode on a tailless horse, with his face to the crupper, and, seeing an unwary
stranger smile, immediately challenged him, and rode home in huge delight
to look to his pistols. They were extremely solemn over their pranks. One
wonders how often the Celtic servants had a smile behind their hand at such
strange goings-on of their masters, which would not have been possible to
the self-conscious Celt.
Over one of the gates of Galway was the pious legend, “From the
ferocious O’Flaherties, good Lord deliver us!” I have heard of other
inscriptions referring to other Irish septs over the remaining gates of the
town, but those I think are apocryphal. The fact remains that the Tribes,
having seized the town of the Irish after their rapacious Norman manner,
were obliged to wall it against the O’Flaherties, and doubtless often slept ill
at night because of the wild Irish battering at their gates, as did their
brothers of the English pale up in Dublin.
Galway would at that time have been well worth sacking. A traveller of
the early seventeenth century reports: “The merchants of Galway are rich
and great adventurers at sea: their commonalitie is composed of the
descendants of the ancient English families of the towne: and rairlie admit
of any new English among them, and never of any of the Irish; they keep
good hospitalitie and are kind to strangers, and in their manner of
entertainment and in fashioninge and apparellynge themselves and their
wives do most preserve the ancient manners and state of annie towne that
ever I saw.”
They had their enactments against the Irish, including the MacWilliam
Burkes, who had gone over to the Irish, bag and baggage:
“That none of the towne buy cattle out of the country but only of true
men.
“That no man of the towne shall sell galley, bote or barque to an
Irishman.
 “That no person shall give or sell to the Irish any munition as hand-
povins, calivres, poulter, leade, nor salt-peter, nor yet large bowes, cross-
bowes, cross-bowe strings, nor yearne to make the same, nor any kind of
weapon on payn to forfayt the same and an hundred shyllinges.
“If anie man being an Irishman to brag and boste upon the towne, to
forfayt 12 pence.
“That no man of this towne shall ostle or receive into their house at
Christmasse or Easter nor no feast elles, anny of the Burkes MacWilliams,
the Kellies, nor no septs elles, without the licence of the Maior and Council
on payn to forfayt £5. That neither O’ ne Mac shall strutt or swagger
through the streets of Galway.”
You still find traces of the commerce of the Tribes with Spain, not only
in the old Spanish buildings of the town, but in the black Spanish eyes and
hair of the people. I remember to have been struck in Donegal by a dignity,
a loftiness of bearing, as well as by a height and stateliness of the peasant
people that made one murmur “Spanish” to one’s own ear.
One of the sights of Galway is the ruins of the house from the window of
which James Lynch Fitz Stephen, a Chief Magistrate of Galway in 1493,
hanged his only son for murder with his own hand, lest the townspeople
should rescue him. The house is called The Cross Bones nowadays, and is
situated most appropriately in Dead-Man’s Lane. There remains but an old
wall, with a couple of doorways having the pointed Spanish arches and
some ornate window-spaces above. There is a tablet on the wall, bearing a
skull and cross-bones, with the inscription:

“Remember Deathe,
Vaniti of vanitis, all is but vaniti.”

Some people believe that this Lynch is the “onlie begetter” of Lynch
Law. This, however, I do not believe, and I think it more likely to have been
derived from a Lynch of the mining-camps in Southern California, who was
the first to promulgate and put in practice the wild justice of execution
without judge or jury. Anyhow, I cannot see that the example of James
Lynch FitzStephen was an admirable one, and I do not believe the legend
that he died heart-broken as a result of his own stern sense of justice.
The palmy days of the Tribes were over with the Reformation, for they
did not cease to be Catholics, and so were in no great favour with the
predominant partner. Galway also stood for the King against the Parliament,
was besieged and taken by the Parliamentary soldiers under Ludlow, who
stabled his horses, according to report, in St. Nicholas’s Cathedral. After
that Galway’s great prosperity as a trading centre passed away, and the
Tribes scattered among the ferocious O’Flaherties and others of their sort
and became country gentlemen, with a noble contempt for trade. The
situation of Galway, on its magnificent Bay, still cries out for commerce.
The spectacle of Galway as a port of call for American steamers has
dangled before the eyes of the Galwegians for a long time without being
realized, although they made preparations for it long ago, by building a
hotel that would house a Mauretania-load of travellers.
Only the other day I listened to a Galway Tribesman conversing with
someone who had lived in Galway, and who asked after the old places and
persons. “What’s become of So-and-so?” “He’s just the same as ever; not a
bit of change in him. He comes home every night strapped to the outside car
to keep him from falling off.” “And what’s become of So-and-so?” “Oh,
he’s done very well for himself. His father says, ‘Mac’s all right; he’s got
the run of a kitchen in Yorkshire,’ meaning that he married an English
heiress.”
This conversation made me feel that to some extent Galway stands
where it did.
 GLENCOLUMBKILLE HEAD. PAGE 70.

The Claddagh fishing village by Galway is something not to be missed.

It keeps itself to itself, with a reserve Celtic or Spanish or anything else you
like, but not English. It used to be ruled by its own King, who was just a
fisherman like his subjects, and was not exalted in his manner of living by
his royal state. He was chosen for his governing powers and his mental and
moral qualities, and his subjects were ruled by him with a despotism that
was never anything but fatherly. They intermarried, too, among themselves
—I do not know if this usage survives—and their ring of betrothal, handed
on from one generation to another, has a design of two hands holding up a
heart. At the Claddagh they still have the Blessing of the Sea, but they will
not make a show of it, and even the Galway people are kept in ignorance of
the time when the ceremony takes place.
 CHAPTER IX

DONEGAL OF THE STRANGERS

IT once fell to my lot to make a hasty scamper through Donegal from end to
end; that is to say, as far as possible, I made the circuit of the county,
beginning with Ballyshannon, following the coast-line, with divergences,
from Donegal to Gweedore, going round by Bloody Foreland, by
Falcarragh and Dunfanaghy, and ending up by way of Letterkenny at
Ballyshannon again. I took ten or twelve days to do it—perhaps a fortnight
—staying each night at an inn. To Gweedore I devoted the best portion of a
week. Now, in that scamper I had a very characteristic peep at Ireland. I
missed, indeed, the wild gaiety of the South. Donegal people are somewhat
sorrowful. But I found plenty of types and racy life nevertheless.
It is a good many years ago now; and travelling in Donegal has been
simplified since then by the light railways with which the names of Mr.
Arthur Balfour and Mr. Gerald Balfour are gratefully associated. When I
was there I drove through the country, only taking the train from
Letterkenny to Ballyshannon on my return journey; and it was an excellent,
though somewhat expensive, way of seeing the country. However, the
hospitality was so wonderful that one only slept and breakfasted in one’s
hotel. For the rest, the kind priests were only too eager to give hospitality to
myself and my companion.
At Ballyshannon we stayed a night in one of those enormous old hotels
with a maze of winding passages, which suggest to one in the dead waste
and middle of the night that in case of a fire one never could get out. The
next day we came upon the first of the priests, who carried us off to see
everything that could be seen of Ballyshannon, including a visit to Abbey
Assaroe, which we knew already in William Allingham’s poetry. To the
grief of these kind friends of ours, we insisted on going off the same
afternoon to Donegal town, to which we were driven by “Wullie”—the first
“Wullie”—a red-haired, taciturn youth, who suspected us of laughing at
him and was closer than an oyster. Your English man or woman is the truly
expansive person. When you want to get at anything from an Irishman
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