From sketch-book and diary. Elizabeth Butler
here another bit of chapel interior. A rough, plain little building, too formless to be picturesque, packed with peasant men, women, and children. Where but in Ireland could such a scene take place as I witnessed there? The priest, before the beginning of the service, gave a tremendous swish of holy water to the congregation with a mop out of a zinc pail, from the altar. He had previously heard nearly half the congregation’s confessions, men, women, boys, and girls kneeling in turn beside his chair at one side of the altar, without any sort of screen. I wondered, as they pressed round him, that they did not overhear each other, but indeed I reflected that would be “no matther whativer,” as these people must have but little to tell!
The server ran a match along the earthen floor to light the two guttering, unequal candles on the altar, and at the end of Mass he produced the mop and zinc pail again. Swish went the holy water once more from the mop, wielded by the athletic sword-arm of the gigantic young priest. For fear the nearer people should have been but poorly sprinkled under that far-reaching arc of water, which went to the very end wall of the chapel, he soused the mop again with a good twist and gave everybody in the front benches a sharp whack full in their faces, tactfully leaving us out. They received it with beaming and grateful smiles.
There are wonderful studies of old men’s and women’s heads here full of that character which in the more “educated” parts of Ireland the School Board seems to be rubbing out, and I was delighted to see the women and girls wearing the head-shawls and white caps and the red petticoats that charmed me in Kerry in ‘77. The railway is sure to bring the dreadful “Frenchy” hat here in time, and then good-bye to the comely appearance of these women. Their wild beauty undergoes an extraordinary change under the absurd hat and feathers – these winsome colleens then lose all their charm.
Yet I must thank this same railway for having brought us to this haven of rest, right up to the doors of a charming, very modern hotel, on quite different lines from the dear little inn that fascinated me in the old Glenaragh days. In its way it is fascinating too, for here you have all the up-to-date amenities in the very heart of the wildest country you could wish for. The electric light is generated by the mountain streams and the baths filled from the glorious bay that lies below the hotel terraces, a never-failing delight in all its moods of sun and shadow, wind and calm.
Sad it is to see so many cabins deserted. The strength of the country is ebbing away. The few people that are left are nice and wholesome in mind and manner; they have the quiet urbanity of the true peasant all the world over. They remind me of the Tuscan in this particular, but, of course, they have not his light-heartedness. More seriousness, I should think, these Irish have. I was sketching sheep, for a contemplated picture, in the evenings on the lovely marshes by the sea, and one evening a widow, left completely lonely in her little cabin on the heights above by the departure for America of her last child, came down to fetch home her solitary sheep from amongst the others, and I told her I thought these creatures were leading a very happy life. “Yes,” she answered, pausing for a moment and looking down on the flock, “and they are without sin.”
At the ringing of the Angelus the work in the fields, the bogs, the potato patches stops till the words of St. Luke’s Gospel have been repeated, just as we remember them said in Italy. It was a surprise – and one of great interest to me – when I first saw peasants saying the Angelus under a northern sky.
My studies of the wild mountain sheep on the marshes came to an abrupt close. I was reposing under a rock (it was well on in July) with palette and panels ready, waiting for the sunset and its after-glow, to get final precious notes of colour upon the fleeces. One particular sheep had been a very useful model. It ambled in a graceful way on three legs and we called it “Pacer.” I became aware of an opaque body rising between my closed eyes and the sun, and looking up I beheld the head of “Pacer” peering at me over the edge of the rock over my head. But what had happened to “Pacer’s” neck? Good gracious! I jumped up and beheld a shorn “Pacer” and all the flock in the same lamentable condition. It had all happened in twenty-four hours.
I want to bring before your mind two little rocky islands with green summits off the coast of Clare, not far from here. Of all the wind-swept little islands none could be more wind-swept. On one, the smallest, I heard that a ferocious and unmanageable billy-goat was deposited as a useless member of the community, and one night he was blown out to sea – a good riddance. On the other you perceive, through the spray, little nodules on the turf – the graves of unbaptized infants. And the sea-gulls along the cliffs are for ever crying like legions of children.
By returning from Mulranny by way of Tipperary and the Rosslare route to England you can voyage down the Shannon and have an experience not lightly to be foregone. This is the “lordly Shannon,” a great wide, slowly-flowing and majestic river of dark, clear, bluish water – blue shot with slate. You sit at the bows of the little steamboat which takes you from Athlone to Killaloe, so that neither smoke nor screw interferes with your enjoyment of the lovely scenes you are to pass through. If the time is July (the time to choose) you are at once greeted on clearing the little grey town of Athlone with the most exquisite scent from the level banks which form two wide belts of creamy meadow-sweet all the way to the end, at Lough Derg. These belts are interrupted, once only, by the lock at Shannon Bridge, that little gathering of houses and gaunt dismantled barracks and breastworks built in the days of the threatened French invasion. Near here lived Charlotte Brontë’s husband till his death only the other day.
You will see in the Shannon a mighty waterway for commerce, left to the wild things that haunt it; and it has haunted me ever since that July day on which I saw it with a sense of regret that the condition of Ireland makes such a river out of scale with the requirements of the country. It flows for the wild birds, the cattle, the fishes, and for its own pleasure; and it flowed for mine that day, for I let no phase of it escape me and gladly added its sonorous name to the long list of those of the great rivers of the world I have already seen.
We hardly saw a soul along the banks, but many kinds of aquatic birds, flying, diving, and swimming, enlivened the voyage with their funny ways, scurrying out of the track of the puffing little steamer. Along the whole course of the great stream there stood at regular intervals, planted in more hopeful days, navigation posts, marking the channel for the ships that never come, and on these scarlet signs perched black cormorants eyeing us like vultures. The herons rose slowly from the meadow-sweet and the sedges, with their long flapping wings; the cattle standing in the water followed us with their mild eyes. It was all beautiful, mournful, eloquent, and when the ruins of Clonmacnoise hove in sight I heard the spirit of Ireland speaking to me from the grave.
Clonmacnoise! A mere curious name to us in England. Perhaps nowhere, even in depopulated Ireland, can a more desolate, abandoned plot of land than this be seen. And yet this great monastery and university, founded in A.D. 544, and at the height of her renown in the eighth century while our country was in a very immature state, was a European centre to which scholars on the Continent came to study; which was quoted and referred to by them as a conspicuous authority, and which for long was in what I might call brisk communication with the centres of learning abroad, if “brisk” was not too bizarre a word in such a place to-day. A more mournful oblivion never fell on any once flourishing centre of active thought and teaching.
The slow havoc of time amongst these seven remaining little churches and blunt round towers was one day accelerated by Cromwell’s gunpowder, which has left the “Guest House” of the monastery a heap of ruins split into ugly shapes quite out of keeping with the rest.
As the grey group passed away from sight I thought I had never known more eloquent silence than that which enfolds the ruins bearing the sounding name of Clonmacnoise.
Will the electric chain ever be linked up again that carried Ireland’s intellect and mental energy to the Continent in those remote times, and round again from the great sources of learning there, with fresh material to enrich her own store?
You will have the wish to “Come back to Erin, Mavourneen,” after making this little tour. To me Ireland is very appealing, though I owe her a grudge for being so tantalizing and evasive for the painter. The low clouds of her skies cause such rapid changes of sun and shadow over her landscapes that it requires feats of technical agility to catch them on the wing beyond my landscape powers. My only