UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Dublin this Summer
By BRIAN GARDNER (Trinity, College Dublin.) SURELY the streets of Dublin are among the most beauti- ful in the world. The long flat 'facades and the plain Georgian squares are all exactly set in definite plan. But in the summer there is no other pattern of streets to sur- pass them. The dark rusty houses of winter become long lines of gliftering window and pink brick. And on a fine sunny day Fitzwilliam Street, in all shades of red, majestic and straight, with immaculate precision of ironwork and fanlight, telescopes the green, distant mountains. The city lies basking between the hills and the sea.
Dublin in the summer. It is just the same this year. The children are out in force in St. Stephen's Green, playing on the grass, while a Senator and a tramp sit vaguely smiling on adjacent deck-chairs and watch. Middle-aged men Walk along the hot dusty pavements, mumbling away to themselves. Old ladies in shawls are overcome- by, the heat, and sit exhausted on the kerb. The doors of the bars are gaping open, and inside you can see the barman, engrossed in his evening paper. The birds sing in the tree-lined suburbs. The buses are unbearably hot and stuffy. The Guinness is luke-warm and the Bay, seen from the Wicldows, is glistening, Neapolitan and smooth. .
At the Abbey Juno and the .Paycock has been performed once again. New plays are hard come by in Dublin these days. The literary revival and its tradition of culture are gone long ago. They were associated with the nationalism at • the beginning of the century. And now it is all over. The last link went -when the old Abbey Theatre was _gutted by fire. Only Michael MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards retain some- thing of the former glory of the Irish stage. They present their Hamlet at Elsinor this summer.
At Trinity the exams are far enough away for College Park to be crowded all afternoon. We lie in our shirt-sleeves all along the bank, and watch the cricket go its leisurely way; or watch the girls pretending to be flirtatious. Lectures are sparsely attended and boring, and American tourists are peer- ing at the Book of Kells. Trinity Week is now a memory. As usual there was much dancing and party-going, and the socialites came into their own. But the gaiety of previous years was lacking. The vitality and consequence prominent in college-life after the war are rapidly fading. Perhaps it is because the ex-Servicemen are nearly all gone. When they left, they took the influence of their maturity with them, and they are. missed. The broad accents of Ulster are prominent again in debates. Soon Trinity will belong to the North once more, surrounded by its wall; a minor European university with a major reputation, its cobblestones hot in the sun. There has been a Nobel Prize-winner in College recently, a new Provost, and now there is a peacock in College Park. And it is too sunny for work.
It is difficult for the T.D.s in the Dail also. There is a glass roof overhead which makes the atmosphere stifling, and tempers are short. The Budget was terrible, according to the Opposition, quite unnecessarily so. But, like the theatre, politics are wanting. Something new is needed. Before, party politics were concerned with the extent of one's anti-British feelings. But that is finished now, and anti-Partition, although the political parties try to make it a substitute, is not really viewed passionately, least of all by the Dublin business-men. Admit- tedly a couple of bombs were thrown at the British Embassy around this time last year. But they were isolated incidents and caused by special incitements. At that time I lived oppo- site the Embassy, and I remember after one of the explosions going excitedly out into the street in my dressing-gown and slippers. I went up to,a policeman,r or a Guard I should say. It was a mild summer evening, and he was staring up, dreamily, into the darkening sky. "Grand old evening," he said. Yes, the nationalism is over now.
In many ways the 1930s live on in Ireland. There is increas- ing interest in social welfare. It is still possible to lead a life of country-houses, cocktails, and hunt-balls. Everywhere there are extremes of poverty and wealth. There is respect for culture and art, noticeable for instance in Radio Eireann. The middle class is still more powerful and influential than the lower. It was comparatively unaffected by the war, during which Dublin's Bohemian population was increased by refugees from Europe, making it less English still. In Dublin itself the numerous coffee-shops are crowded every morning it eleven; the women are neat and smart and go to fashion parades in the large stores, and a social life circulates around the legations. The whole city fights to get tickets for the visiting ballet com- panies, and amateur groups present Gilbert and Sullivan in the city's best theatre. Newspapers, apart from the superior Irish Times, are taken for competitions, weather-forecasts, entertain- ments and advertisements. European armies are relegated to an inner page.
Young people; if they come from the large Dublin middle class, belong to tennis clubs and spend their holidays abroad. They have no National Service. They have good office-jobs in town, and live in their parents' new-estate-style houses sprout- ing up on the outskirts of the city. They earn more, and are thus able to marry .much younger, than their cousins in the country. They go to American hairdressing saloons and have American haircuts, and go to dances in their fathers' cheap American cars. They sit in soda-fountains, and play the hit tunes on the juice-boxes. There is nothing left of the dedication and purpose of their parents' youth. There is„in fact, a growth of a new, suburban, uninterested middle class. The old lacka- daisical middle class of intelligent conversation and sparkling wit is being replaced by a middle class of beltless raincoats and small saloon cars who, strange thing in this city, are more concerned with enlarging their bank-balances than with idle talk. Individuality is becoming rare in Dublin's middle class. Joyce's Dublin is dead.
But O'Casey's Dublin upholds the tradition. The poor still live in their tenement slums, not so bad as they used to be, but very bad nevertheless. The social busybodies, Although they are trying, have not really reached them yet, and they have not changed—not yet. The Dublin down-and-out, and it is a city of down-and-outs, will never, be as poor as slum- dwellers elsewhere in the world, as he has a general knowledge twice as large and a vocabulary ten times the size of theirs. He talks on every conceivable subject, just as he always did. But what good does this gift of the gab do him while he lives in appalling tenement slums, on a starvation diet and suffering from T.B.?, the English tourist, more interested in social wel- fare, will ask. The truth is that so long as the Dubliner has a glass of stout in his hand and plenty of time to discuss all things, he is happy. And a happy man is best left alone.
Dublin indeed is still very like its old self, very much as it is imagined to be by people who have never been there. But there are things they don't know—the narrow censorship, the frequent strikes, the swarms of bicycles and the new middle class. It is stilrbasically the same—but it is changing. Mean- while another summer is following its course. The pavements are dusty and warm; out-at-heel men scrummage for hours in the book-shops along the quays, and the sun is shining the whole length of the long, red Georgian streets.
One evening last week I was walking down a main resi- dential street. and I saw two old men talking. They were leaning against the iron railings in front of a house, lost to the world. They were chatting away, vigorously nodding their heads and pulling on their pipes. Their eyes gleamed in their worn wrinkled faces. Neither was able to say a few phrases before the other eagerly butted in. The next morning I happened to be in the same street. There were the two old men, leaning on the same railings, in exactly the same positions. I don't know, but I suppose they had been talking ever, since, oblivious of the coming and passing of night. I wish I could have heard them.
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