Irishwoman

“ said the Irishwoman. "I have one more word for you both; for you will both see me again before all is over. Those that wish to be clean, clean they will be; and those that wish to be foul, foul they will be. ”

“ In a word, never was there heard at Hall Place—not even when the fox was killed in the conservatory, among acres of broken glass, and tons of smashed flower-pots—such a noise, row, hubbub, babel, shindy, hullabaloo, stramash, charivari, and total contempt of dignity, repose, and order, as that day, when Grimes, gardener, the groom, the dairymaid, Sir John, the steward, the ploughman, the keeper, and the Irishwoman, all ran up the park, shouting, “Stop thief,” in the belief that Tom had at least a thousand pounds’ worth of jewels in his empty pockets ”

“ Bedonebyasyoudid as the Irishwoman; Hears Grimes sentenced to sweep out Aetna; Is blindfolded and taken up the back stairs; Recognizes St. Brandon’s Isle and hears the song; Rejoices with Ellie and goes with her Sundays; Becomes a man of science and knows everything; And, it may be, marries Ellie.
II. Fact and Fancy. The story begins with a vivid description of the little sweep and his master, and it is not till we have read several pages that we have reason to suspect that we are reading a fairy story. In fact the “poor Irishwoman” might be a veritable Irishwoman till we have read page 247. ”

“ That is to say the blondes might readily pass for sisters, and so might the brunettes, both sorts lacking the ultimate gift of individuality. Irish women are different—indeed, you may safely say of them that they are all pretty and all different. They never repeat their beauty, there is nothing of the white rabbit or puss, puss, puss about them, and consequently they do not bore you. As most things have a cause it seems possible that there are reasons for the beauty of Irish womanhood. ”

“ After wondering for some time, however, why the quick-witted women of Ireland should be less apt than those of other countries in catching the air of high breeding usually deemed so desirable, I began to like them better for the deficiency, and to find a reason for it in the very qualities which make them so attractive. Nothing could be more captivating and delightful than the manners of Irish women, and nothing, at the same time, could be more at war with the first principles of English high breeding—coldness and retenu. ”

“ It is [95] generally understood among artists that Irish women have delicate hands and an eye with a sparkle about it. Irish poets, in more or less halting English verse, have done their best to indicate that Irish women are, to say the least of it, worth looking at. But I am not aware that on the whole the literature about Ireland insists, to anything like a reasonable degree, on the beauty of Irish women. ”

“ In the ancient tales of Ireland we read of great female physicians and distinguished female lawyers and judges. There were ban-file, or women-poets, who, like the file, were at the same time soothsayers and poetesses, and there are other evidences of the high esteem in which women were held. There can be no doubt, to judge by the elaborate descriptions of garments in the saga-texts, that the women were very skilful in weaving and needlework. The Irish peasant girls of today inherit from them not a little of their gift for lace-making and linen-embroidery. ”

“ For our own part, we think the rich, tender, motherly nature of the Irish girl an element a thousand times more hopeful in our population than the faded, washed-out indifferentism of fashionable women, who have danced and flirted away all their womanly attributes, till there is neither warmth nor richness nor maternal fulness left in them,—mere paper-dolls, without milk in their bosoms or blood in their veins. ”

“ Irish women are not without the wit to know that they are beautiful; they have an armory of feminine allurements, and [99] wit enough to handle them with skill, and they cannot be considered insensible to the fripperies which all women love. But they do not make gaiety and ostentation the aim and end of their existence, and they do not shirk the plain duties of womanhood. In Ireland, though the women of the poorer classes have to work in the fields and undertake tasks which by good rights should be done by men, there is absolutely no third sex. ”

“ There are sadder things in Ireland than the weeping skies.
But though the right of marriage may be often denied them, young Irish girls have always their inalienable right of dreams. Soft winds and nodding flowers and sun going down on the western hills, and with the twilight comes always a love. Out of the blue twilight and soft wind they weave a magical life of love that will be always young, of a world that will be ever kind, of little dark children and loyal friends, of the pageantry of foreign cities, of triumphs for their own beauty and the lover's ability. ”

“ In the stories of the loves of the ancient Irish, whether immortals or mortals, the woman's role is the more accentuated, while in Teutonic tradition man plays the chief part. Again, it has often been remarked that the feminine interest is absent from the earlier heroic forms of some literatures. Not so, however, in the earliest saga-texts of the Irish. Many are the famous women to whom the old tales introduce us and who stand out and compel attention like the characters of the Greek drama. ”

“ In the love that exists between two true Irish hearts that have been pledged to each other, deliberately and solemnly on the threshold of man and womanhood, there is often something so confiding, so unreasoning and so unselfish, as to put one in good humor with humanity. There is no country on earth in which the love of gain intermixes with the affections of the heart to so small an extent as in Ireland. ”

“ The charming gaiety and frankness of the Irish ladies have been noted and admired by every foreigner who has had the good fortune to mingle in their society; and I hope it is not detracting from the merit of the upper classes to say that the lower are not a whit less pleasing. I never saw in any country such a general grace of manner and ladyhood. In the midst of their gaiety, too, it must be remembered that they are the chastest of women, and that no country in Europe can boast of such a general purity. ”

“ There are plenty of women in Ireland, however, who come quite up to the Gibson girl standard, and for that matter beat it. In journeying through the country I have been struck continually by the remarkable facial resemblance which exists between the Irish and the American people. In an Irish railway train you see faces which at once give you the impression that you are at the Hotel Cecil. The high cheek bones and lank shaven jaw of the full-blooded American are here in great force, and it is only when their possessors open their mouths that you can tell the difference. ”

“ We have scarcely a beauty [94] left, even at the Gaiety Theater. In fact, leaving out the ravishing pictures of the illustrated press, there are really only two beautiful women in England, and both of these are married to reviewers. Now, I say and maintain that any male person, possessed of an eye for the charms of what is commonly called the opposite sex, will find that in Ireland the decay of female beauty has not yet commenced. Whether he be in Dublin or in Cork, in Sligo or in Limerick, pretty women take his vision—as the daffodils take the winds of March—at every corner. ”

“ Modest to a proverb, the Irish woman is as unsuspecting of an impropriety as if it were an impossible thing, and she is as fearless and joyous as a midshipman, and sometimes as noisy. In a ball-room she looks ill-dressed, not because her dress was ill-put-on, but because she dances, not glides, sits down without care, pulls her flowers to pieces, and if her head-dress incommodes her, gives it a pull or a push—acts which would be perfect insanity at Almack’s. ”

“ It is absolutely so in fact, that every husband of any fortune in the kingdom, is nourishing a poisonous, devouring serpent in his bosom, with all the mischief, but with none of its wisdom.
If all the women were clad with the growth of their own country, they might still vie with each other in the course of foppery; and still have room left to vie with each other and equally show their wit and judgment, in deciding upon the variety of Irish stuffs. ”

“ The Irish are an extremely warm-hearted people. Their well educated women have an innocent gayety, frankness and naiveté of manner, that is extremely bewitching. As a people, they are remarkably characterized by a want of foresight, and keen enjoyment [Pg 149] of the present moment. The style of Irish beauty indicates this; being generally bright-eyed, fresh, and laughing. If a young couple were in love with each other, it would, in most cases, be in vain to remind them of their extreme poverty, with a view to inculcate maxims of worldly prudence. ”

“ It may be said roughly, that the beauty of an Irish woman, while quite tangible and perfect to the vision, is an elusive matter when one comes to cold type. The Anglo-Saxon beauty can be hit off in words, quite [96] as handily as she can be hit off in paint. What she amounts to as a rule is pink and white, and yellow hair, or mouse-colored hair, and a genteel pallidity. But in Ireland all this is different, beauty of a witching and almost eerie quality is a commonplace throughout the country. ”

“ If you are fortunate enough to be bidden to the right houses in Ireland to-day, you will have as much good talk as you are likely to listen to anywhere else in this degenerate age, which has mostly forgotten how to converse in learning to chat; and any one who goes to the Spring Show at Ball's Bridge, or to the Punchestown or Leopardstown races, or to the Dublin horse show, will have to confess that the Irishwomen can dispute the palm with any nation. ”

“ WE are often told that the civilization of a people is marked by the place of its women: a rule by which the Irish stand high. In the fifteenth century, as at all times, their annals record many noble ladies “distinguished for knowledge, hospitality, good sense and piety”; “humane and charitable”; “a nurse to all guests and strangers, and to all the learned men in Ireland.” Of these Margaret, daughter of O’Carroll lord of Ely, wife of Calvagh O’Connor Faly lord of Offaly (lands which lie across the boundaries of the modern King’s and Queen’s Counties and Kildare) , was the most illustrious. ”

“ Margaret’s munificence were among those to whom we owe all that we now know of Irish history; they were of the men who in the Irish revival of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries spent their lives in searching out, preserving, copying, the records, laws, and traditions of their people. They were the lively translators of books from abroad, the students of the modern sciences, the band of scholars whose powerful influence was drawing the inhabitants of Ireland, English and Irish, into one culture. Their spirit is shewn in many sayings of the time. ”

“ Some Irishwomen here and there have heard beyond the four walls in which so much of their lives are spent the music of a new day, and have started out to help and inspire the men and be good comrades to them; and calling themselves United Irish-women, they have joined, as men have joined, to help their sisters who are in economic servitude, or who suffer from the ignorance and indifference to their special needs in life which pervade the administration of local government. We cannot build up a rural civilization in Ireland without the aid of Irish women. ”

“ The home-bred young men gazed with wonder and admiration at the finery worn by their sweethearts from America, who, by the way, although they came third class, and were undoubtedly chambermaids or shop girls in our cities, were the best-looking and the best-dressed women we saw in Ireland. ”

“ The Irish character must be considered, therefore, as an unfavourable case: yet, whenever the circumstances of the individual have been at all favourable, what people have shown greater capacity for the most varied and multifarious individual eminence? Like the French compared with the English, the Irish with the Swiss, the Greeks or Italians compared with the German races, so women compared with men may be found, on the average, to do the same things with some variety in the particular kind of excellence. ”

“ At one of the fine hotels in Glengariff, a watering place, I made the acquaintance of an Irish lady, a resident of Cork. Her husband is a wealthy citizen, a thorough Irishman, a Land Leaguer and all that, and she is a more ardent Land Leaguer than her husband. She is a more than usually intelligent lady, with a warm heart, and she realized, she thought, the wrongs Ireland was suffering, and was doing, she supposed, all she could to aid the oppressed people. ”

“ I drove to church to-day in the wood wagon, with Jack and Aleck, Hector being our charioteer, in a gilt guard-chain and pair of slippers to match as the Sabbatic part of his attire. The love of dirty finery is not a trait of the Irish in Ireland, but I think it crops out strongly when they come out here; and the proportion of their high wages put upon their backs by the young Irish maid-servants in the north, indicates a strong addiction to the female passion for dress. Here the tendency seems to exist in men and women alike ”

“ It is not that there is much of diverse interest in the broad aspects of the life of the women that the recital of the history of the women of Scotland and Ireland is to have separate treatment, but to throw in strong light upon the pages of history the figures of women who belonged not to Great Britain, as such, but to Scotland or to Ireland, and who, if they date after the cementing of the union of the peoples, still perpetuate that which is distinctive in quality of life and of character. ”