Produced by Marius Masi, Chris Curnow and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
HUMOURS OF
IRISH LIFE
[Illustration: Frank Webber wins the wager
_Drawn by Geo. Morrow_]
HUMOURS
OF IRISH LIFE
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY CHARLES L. GRAVES, M.A.
[Illustration: Fiat Lux]
NEW YORK:
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
PRINTED BY THE
EDUCATIONAL COMPANY
OF IRELAND LIMITED
AT THE TALBOT PRESS
DUBLIN
Introduction.
The first of the notable humorists of Irish life was William Maginn, one
of the most versatile, as well as brilliant of Irish men of letters.
He was born in Cork in 1793, and was a classical schoolmaster there in
early manhood, having secured the degree of LL.D. at Trinity College,
Dublin, when only 23 years of age. The success in "Blackwood's Magazine"
of some of his translations of English verse into the Classics induced
him, however, to give up teaching and to seek his fortunes as a magazine
writer and journalist in London, at a time when Lamb, De Quincey,
Lockhart and Wilson gave most of their writings to magazines.
Possessed of remarkable sparkle and finish as a writer, considering with
what little effort and with what rapidity he poured out his political
satires in prose and verse, and his rollicking magazine sketches, it was
no wonder that he leaped into popularity at a bound. He was the original
of the Captain Shandon of Pendennis and though Thackeray undoubtedly
attributed to him a political venality of which he was never guilty,
whilst describing him during what was undoubtedly the latter and least
reputable period in his career, it is evident that he considered Maginn
to be, as he undoubtedly was, a literary figure of conspicuous
accomplishment and mark in the contemporary world of letters.
Amongst his satiric writings, his panegyric of Colonel Pride may stand
comparison even with Swift's most notable philippics; whilst his Sir
Morgan O'Doherty was the undoubted ancestor of Maxwell's and Lever's
hard drinking, practical joking Irish military heroes, and frequently
appears as one of the speakers in Professor Wilson's "Noctes
Ambrosianae," of which the doctor was one of the mainstays.
Besides his convivial song of "St. Patrick," his "Gathering of the
Mahonys," and his "Cork is an Eden for you, Love, and me," written by
him as genuine "Irish Melodies," to serve as an antidote to what he
called the finicking Bacchanalianism of Moore, he contributed, as Mr. D.
J. O'Donoghue conclusively proves, several stories, including "Daniel
O'Rourke," printed in this volume, to Crofton Croker's "Fairy Legends
and Traditions of Ireland," first published anonymously in 1825--a set
of Folk Tales full of a literary charm which still makes them delightful
reading. For just as Moore took Irish airs, touched them up and
partnered them with lyrics to suit upper class British and Irish taste,
so Croker gathered his Folk Tales from the Munster peasantry with whom
he was familiar and, assisted by Maginn and others, gave them exactly
that form and finish needful to provide the reading public of his day
with an inviting volume of fairy lore.
Carleton and the brothers John and Michael Banim, besides Samuel Lover,
whose gifts are treated of elsewhere in this introduction, followed with
what Dr. Douglas Hyde rightly describes as Folk Lore of "an incidental
and highly manipulated type."
A more genuine Irish storyteller was Patrick Kennedy, twice represented
in this volume, whose "Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celt" and
"Fireside Stories of Ireland" were put down by him much as he heard
them as a boy in his native county of Wexford, where they had already
passed with little change in the telling from the Gaelic into the
peculiar Anglo-Irish local dialect which is markedly West Saxon in its
character.
His lineal successor as a Wexford Folklorist is Mr. P. J. McCall, one of
whose stories, "Fionn MacCumhail and the Princess" we reproduce, and a
woman Folk tale teller, Miss B. Hunt, adds to our indebtedness to such
writers by her recently published and delightful _Folk Tales of Breffny_
from which "McCarthy of Connacht" has been taken for these pages.
We have also the advantage of using Dr. Hyde's "The Piper and the Puca,"
a foretaste, we believe, of the pleasure in store for our readers in the
volume of Folk Tales he is contributing to "Every Irishman's Library"
under the engaging title of "Irish Saints and Sinners."
In a survey of the Anglo-Irish humorous novel of recent times, the works
of Charles Lever form a convenient point of departure, for with all his
limitations he was the first to write about Irish life in such a way as
to appeal widely and effectively to an English audience. We have no
intention of dwelling upon him at any length--he belongs to an earlier
generation--but between him and his successors there are points both of
resemblance and of dissimilarity sufficient to make an interesting
comparison. The politics and social conditions of Lever's time are not
those of the present, but the spirit of Lever's Irishman, though with
modifications, is still alive to-day.
Lever had not the intensity of Carleton, or the fine humanity of
Kickham, but he was less uncompromising in his use of local colour, and
he was, as a rule, far more cheerful. He had not the tender grace or
simplicity of Gerald Griffin, and never wrote anything so moving or
beautiful as "The Collegians," which will form a special volume of this
Library, but he surpassed him in vitality, gusto, exuberance and
knowledge of the world.
Overrated in the early stages of his career, Lever paid the penalty of
his too facile triumphs in his lifetime, and his undoubted talents have
latterly been depreciated on political as well as artistic grounds. His
heroes were drawn, with few exceptions, from the landlord class or their
faithful retainers. The gallant Irish officers, whose Homeric exploits
he loved to celebrate, held commissions in the British army. Lever has
never been popular with Nationalist politicians, though, as a matter of
fact no one ever exhibited the extravagance and recklessness of the
landed gentry in more glaring colours. And he is anathema to the
hierophants of the Neo-Celtic Renascence on account of his jocularity.
There is nothing crepuscular about Lever; you might as well expect to
find a fairy in a railway station.
Again, Lever never was and never could be the novelist of literary men.
He was neither a scholar nor an artist; he wrote largely in instalments;
and in his earlier novels was wont to end a chapter in a manner that
rendered something like a miracle necessary to continue the existence of
the hero: "He fell lifeless to the ground, the same instant I was felled
to the earth by a blow from behind, and saw no more." In technique and
characterisation his later novels show a great advance, but if he lives,
it will be by the spirited loosely-knit romances of love and war
composed in the first ten years of his literary career. His heroes had
no scruples in proclaiming their physical advantages and athletic
prowess; Charles O'Malley, that typical Galway _miles gloriosus_,
introduces himself with ingenuous egotism in the following passage:
"I rode boldly with fox-hounds; I was about the best shot within
twenty miles of us; I could swim the Shannon at Holy Island; I drove
four-in-hand better than the coachman himself; and from finding a hare
to cooking a salmon, my equal could not be found from Killaloe to
Banagher."
The life led by the Playboys of the West (old style) as depicted in
Lever's pages was one incessant round of reckless hospitality, tempered
by duels and practical joking, but it had its justification in the
family annals of the fire-eating Blakes and Bodkins and the records of
the Connaught Circuit. The intrepidity of Lever's heroes was only
equalled by their indiscretion, their good luck in escaping from the
consequences of their folly, and their susceptibility. His womenfolk may
be roughly divided into three classes; sentimental heroines, who sighed,
and blushed and fainted on the slightest provocation; buxom Amazons,
like Baby Blake; and campaigners or adventuresses. But the gentle,
sentimental, angelic type predominates, and finds a perfect
representative in Lucy Dashwood.
When Charles O'Malley was recovering from an accident in the hunting
field, he fell asleep in an easy-chair in the drawing-room and was
awakened by the "thrilling chords of a harp":
"I turned gently round in my chair and beheld Miss Dashwood. She was
seated in a recess of an old-fashioned window; the pale yellow glow of
a wintry sun at evening fell upon her beautiful hair, and tinged it
with such a light as I have often since then seen in Rembrandt's
pictures; her head leaned upon the harp, and, as she struck its chords
at random, I saw that her mind was far away from all around her. As I
looked, she suddenly started from her leaning attitude, and, parting
back her curls from her brow, she preluded a few chords, and then
sighed forth, rather than sang, that most beautiful of Moore's
melodies--
'She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps.'
Never before had such pathos, such deep utterance of feeling, met my
astonished sense; I listened breathlessly as the tears fell one by one
down my cheek; my bosom heaved and fell; and when she ceased, I hid my
head between my hands and sobbed aloud."
Lever's serious heroines, apart from the fact that they could ride, did
not differ in essentials from those of Dickens, and a sense of humour
was no part of their mental equipment. The hated rival, the dark-browed
Captain Hammersly, was distinguished by his "cold air and repelling
_hauteur_," and is a familiar figure in mid-Victorian romance. Lever's
sentiment, in short, is old-fashioned, and cannot be expected to appeal
to a Feminist age which has given us the public school girl and the
suffragist. There is no psychological interest in the relations of his
heroes and heroines; Charles's farewell to Lucy is on a par with the
love speeches in "The Lyons Mail." There is seldom any doubt as to the
ultimate reunion of his lovers; we are only concerned with the ingenuity
of the author in surmounting the obstacles of his own invention. He was
fertile in the devising of exciting incident; he was always able to eke
out the narrative with a good story or song--as a writer of convivial,
thrasonic or mock-sentimental verse he was quite in the first class--and
in his earlier novels his high spirits and sense of fun never failed.
In his easy-going methods he may have been influenced by the example of
Dickens--the Dickens of the "Pickwick Papers"--but there is no ground
for any charge of conscious imitation, and where he challenged direct
comparison--in the character of Mickey Free--he succeeded in drawing an
Irish Sam Weller who falls little short of his more famous Cockney
counterpart. For Lever was a genuine humorist, or perhaps we should say
a genuine comedian, since the element of theatricality was seldom
absent. The choicest exploits of that grotesque Admirable Crichton,
Frank Webber, were carried out by hoaxing, disguise, or trickery of some
sort. But the scene in which Frank wins his wager by impersonating Miss
Judy Macan and sings "The Widow Malone" is an admirable piece of
sustained fooling: admirable, too, in its way is the rescue of the
imaginary captive in the Dublin drain. As a delineator of the humours of
University life, Lever combined the atmosphere of "Verdant Green" with
the sumptuous upholstery of Ouida. Here, again, in his portraits of dons
and undergraduates Lever undoubtedly drew in part from life, but fell
into his characteristic vice of exaggeration in his embroidery. Frank
Webber's antics are amusing, but it is hard to swallow his amazing
literary gifts or the contrast between his effeminate appearance and his
dare-devil energy.
While "Lord Kilgobbin"--which ran as a serial in the "Cornhill Magazine"
from October, 1870, to March, 1872--was not wholly free from Lever's
besetting sin, it is interesting not only as the most thoughtful and
carefully written of his novels, but on account of its political
attitude. Here Lever proved himself no champion _a outrance_ of the
landlords, but was ready to admit that their joyous conviviality was too
often attended by gross mismanagement of their estates. The methods of
Peter Gill, the land steward, are shown to be all centred in craft and
subtlety--"outwitting this man, forestalling that, doing everything by
halves, so that no boon came unassociated with some contingency or other
by which he secured to himself unlimited power and uncontrolled
tyranny." The sympathy extended to the rebels of '98 is remarkable and
finds expression in the spirited lines:--
"Is there anything more we can fight or can hate for?
The 'drop' and the famine have made our ranks thin.
In the name of endurance, then, what do we wait for?
Will nobody give us the word to begin?"
These must have been almost the last lines Lever ever wrote, unless we
accept the bitter epitaph on himself:
"For sixty odd years he lived in the thick of it,
And now he is gone, not so much very sick of it,
As because he believed he heard somebody say,
'Harry Lorrequer's hearse is stopping the way.'"
The bitterness of the epitaph lies in the fact that it was largely true;
he had exhausted the vein of rollicking romance on which his fame and
popularity rested. For the rest the charge of misrepresenting Irish life
is met by so judicious a critic as the late Dr. Garnett with a direct
negative:--
"He has not actually misrepresented anything, and cannot be censured
for confining himself to the society which he knew; nor was his talent
adapted for the treatment of such life in its melancholy and poetic
aspects, even if these had been more familiar to him."
Of the humorous Irish novelists who entered into competition with Lever
for the favour of the English-speaking public in his lifetime, two claim
special notice--Samuel Lover and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Lover has
always been bracketed with Lever, whom he resembled in many ways, but he
was overshadowed by his more brilliant and versatile contemporary. Yet
within his limited sphere he was a true humorist, and the careless,
whimsical, illogical aspects of Irish character have seldom been more
effectively illustrated than by the author of 'Handy Andy,' and 'The
Gridiron.' Paddy, as drawn by Lover, succeeds in spite of his
drawbacks, much as Brer Rabbit does in the tales of Uncle Remus. His
mental processes remind one of the story of the Hungarian baron who, on
paying a visit to a friend after a railway journey, complained of a bad
headache, the result of sitting with his back to the engine. When his
friend asked, "Why did not you change places with your _vis-a-vis_?" the
baron replied, "How could I? I had no _vis-a-vis_." Lover's heroes
"liked action, but they hated work": the philosophy of thriftlessness is
summed up to perfection in "Paddy's Pastoral":--
"Here's a health to you, my darlin',
Though I'm not worth a farthin';
For when I'm drunk I think I'm rich,
I've a featherbed in every ditch!"
For all his kindliness Lover laid too much stress on this happy-go-lucky
fecklessness to minister to Irish self-respect. His pictures of Irish
life were based on limited experience; in so far as they are true, they
recall and emphasise traits which many patriotic Irishmen wish to forget
or eliminate. An age which has witnessed the growth of Irish
Agricultural Co-operation is intolerant of a novelist who for the most
part represents his countrymen as diverting idiots, and therefore we
prefer to represent him in this volume by "The Little Weaver," one of
those mock heroic tales in which Irishmen have excelled from his day to
that of Edmund Downey. No better example could be given of his easy flow
of humour in genuine Hiberno-English or of his shrewd portraiture of
such simple types of Irish peasant character.
The case of Le Fanu is peculiar. His best-known novels had no specially
characteristic Irish flavour. But his sombre talent was lit by
intermittent flashes of the wildest hilarity, and it was in this mood
that the author of "Uncle Silas" and "Carmilla" wrote "The Quare
Gandher" and "Billy Malowney's Taste of Love and Glory," two of the most
brilliantly comic extravaganzas which were ever written by an Irishman,
and which no one but an Irishman could ever have written.
There is no Salic Law in letters, and since the deaths of Lever and Le
Fanu the sceptre of the realm of Irish fiction has passed to women. But
the years between 1870 and 1890 were not propitious for humorists, and
the admirable work of the late Miss Emily Lawless, who had already made
her mark in "Hurrish" before the latter date, does not fall within the
present survey. The same remark applies to Mrs. Hartley, but there is a
fine sense of humour in the delicate idylls of Miss Jane Barlow, twice
represented in this volume.
By far the most widely read Irish novelist between 1880 and 1900 was the
late Mrs. Hungerford, the author of "Molly Bawn" and a score of other
blameless romances which almost rivalled "The Rosary" in luscious
sentimentality. The scenes of her stories were generally laid in
Ireland, and the stories themselves were almost invariably concerned
with the courtship of lovely but impecunious maidens by eligible and
affluent youths. No one in Mrs. Hungerford's novels ever seemed to have
any work to do. The characters lived in a paradise of unemployment, and
this possibly accounts for Mrs. Hungerford's immense popularity in
America, where even the most indolent immigrants become infected with a
passion for hard work. In the quality of gush she was unsurpassed, but
her good nature and her frank delight in her characters made her
absurdity engaging. Sentiment was her ruling passion; she did no more
than scrape the surface of Irish social life; and she had no humour but
good humour. But she had not enough of literary quality to entitle her
work to rank beside that of the other women writers represented in this
volume.
The literary partnership of Miss Edith Somerville and Miss Violet
Martin--the most brilliantly successful example of creative
collaboration in our times--began with "An Irish Cousin" in 1889.
Published over the pseudonyms of "Geilles Herring" and "Martin Ross,"
this delightful story is remarkable not only for its promise, afterwards
richly fulfilled, but for its achievement. The writers proved themselves
the possessors of a strange faculty of detachment which enabled them to
view the humours of Irish life through the unfamiliar eyes of a stranger
without losing their own sympathy. They were at once of the life they
described and outside it. They showed a laudable freedom from political
partisanship; a minute familiarity with the manners and customs of all
strata of Irish Society; an unerring instinct for the "sovran word;" a
perfect mastery of the Anglo-Irish dialect; and an acute yet
well-controlled sense of the ludicrous. The heroine accurately describes
the concourse on the platform of a small country station as having "all
the appearance of a large social gathering or _conversazione_, the
carriages being filled, not by those who were starting, but by their
friends who had come to see them off." When she went to a county ball in
Cork she discovered to her dismay that all her partners were named
either Beamish or Barrett:--
"Had it not been for Willy's elucidation of its mysteries, I should
have thrown away my card in despair. 'No; not _him_. That's _Long_ Tom
Beamish! It's _English_ Tommy you've to dance with next. They call him
English Tommy because, when his Militia regiment was ordered to
Aldershot, he said he was 'the first of his ancestors that was ever
sent on foreign service.'... I carried for several days the bruises
which I received during my waltz with English Tommy. It consisted
chiefly of a series of short rushes, of so shattering a character that
I at last ventured to suggest a less aggressive mode of progression.
'Well,' said English Tommy confidentially, 'ye see, I'm trying to bump
Katie,' pointing to a fat girl in blue. 'She's my cousin, and we're
for ever fighting.'"
As a set-off to this picture of the hilarious informality of high life
in Cork twenty-five years ago, there is a wonderful study of a cottage
interior, occupied by a very old man, his daughter-in-law, three
children, two terriers, a cat, and a half-plucked goose. The
conversation between Willy Sarsfield--who foreshadows Flurry Knox in
"Some Experiences of an Irish R.M." by his mingled shrewdness and
_naivete_--and Mrs. Sweeny is a perfect piece of realism.
"Mrs. Sweeny was sitting on a kind of rough settle, between the other
window and the door of an inner room. She was a stout, comfortable
woman of about forty, with red hair and quick blue eyes, that roved
round the cabin, and silenced with a glance the occasional whisperings
that rose from the children. 'And how's the one that had the bad
cough?' asked Willy, pursuing his conversation with her with his
invariable ease and dexterity. 'Honor her name is, isn't it?'--'See,
now, how well he remembers!' replied Mrs. Sweeny. 'Indeed, she's there
back in the room, lyin' these three days. Faith, I think 'tis like the
decline she have, Masther Willy.'--'Did you get the Doctor to her?'
said Willy. 'I'll give you a ticket, if you haven't one.'--'Oh,
indeed, Docthor Kelly's afther givin' her a bottle, but shure I
wouldn't let her put it into her mouth at all. God-knows what'd be in
it. Wasn't I afther throwin' a taste of it on the fire to thry what'd
it do, and Phitz! says it, and up with it up the chimbley! Faith, I'd
be in dread to give it to the child. Shure, if it done that in the
fire, what'd it do in her inside?--'Well, you're a greater fool than I
thought you were,' said Willy, politely.--'Maybe I am, faith,' replied
Mrs. Sweeny, with a loud laugh of enjoyment. 'But, if she's for dyin',
the crayture, she'll die aisier without thim thrash of medicines; and
if she's for livin', 'tisn't thrusting to them she'll be. Shure, God
is good, God is good----'--'Divil a betther!' interjected old Sweeny,
unexpectedly. It was the first time he had spoken, and having
delivered himself of this trenchant observation, he relapsed into
silence and the smackings at his pipe."
But the tragic note is sounded in the close of "An Irish Cousin"--Miss
Martin and Miss Somerville have never lost sight of the abiding dualism
enshrined in Moore's verse "Erin, the tear and the smile in thine
eyes"--and it dominates their next novel, "Naboth's Vineyard," published
in 1891, a sombre romance of the Land League days. Three years later
they reached the summit of their achievement in "The Real Charlotte,"
which still remains their masterpiece, though easily eclipsed in
popularity by the irresistible drollery of "Some Experiences of an Irish
R.M." To begin with, it does not rely on the appeal to hunting people
which in their later work won the heart of the English sportsman. It is
a ruthlessly candid study of Irish provincial and suburban life; of the
squalors of middle-class households; of garrison hacks and "underbred,
finespoken," florid squireens. But secondly and chiefly it repels the
larger half of the novel-reading public by the fact that two women have
here dissected the heart of one of their sex in a mood of unrelenting
realism. While pointing out the pathos and humiliation of the thought
that a soul can be stunted by the trivialities of personal appearance,
they own to having set down Charlotte Mullen's many evil qualities
"without pity." They approach their task in the spirit of Balzac. The
book, as we shall see, is extraordinarily rich in both wit and humour,
but Charlotte, who cannot control her ruling passion of avarice even in
a death chamber, might have come straight out of the pages of the
_Comedie Humaine_. Masking her greed, her jealousy and her cruelty under
a cloak of loud affability and ponderous persiflage, she was a perfect
specimen of the _fausse bonne femme_. Only her cats could divine the
strange workings of her mind:
"The movements of Charlotte's character, for it cannot be said to
possess the power of development, were akin to those of some
amphibious thing whose strong darting course under the water is only
marked by a bubble or two, and it required almost an animal instinct
to note them. Every bubble betrayed the creature below, as well as the
limitations of its power of hiding itself, but people never thought of
looking out for these indications in Charlotte, or even suspected that
she had anything to conceal. There was an almost blatant simplicity
about her, a humorous rough-and-readiness which, joined to her
literary culture, proved business capacity, and her dreaded temper,
seemed to leave no room for any further aspect, least of all of a
romantic kind."
Yet romance of a sort was at the root of Charlotte's character. She had
been in love with Roddy Lambert, a showy, handsome, selfish squireen,
before he married for money. She had disguised her tenderness under a
bluff _camaraderie_ during his first wife's lifetime, and hastened Mrs.
Lambert's death by inflaming her suspicions of Roddy's fidelity. It was
only when Charlotte was again foiled by Lambert's second marriage to her
own niece that her love was turned to gall, and she plotted to compass
his ruin.
The authors deal faithfully with Francie FitzPatrick, Charlotte's niece,
but an element of compassion mingles with their portraiture. Charlotte
had robbed Francie of a legacy, and compounded with her conscience by
inviting the girl to stay with her at Lismoyle. Any change was a
god-send to poor Francie, who, being an orphan, lived in Dublin with
another aunt, a kindly but feckless creature whose eyes were not formed
to perceive dirt nor her nose to apprehend smells, and whose ideas of
economy was "to indulge in no extras of soap or scrubbing brushes, and
to feed her family on strong tea and indifferent bread and butter, in
order that Ida's and Mabel's hats might be no whit less ornate than
those of their neighbours." In this dingy household Francie had grown
up, lovely as a Dryad, brilliantly indifferent to the serious things of
life, with a deplorable Dublin accent, ingenuous, unaffected and
inexpressibly vulgar. She captivates men of all sorts: Roddy Lambert,
who lunched on hot beefsteak pie and sherry; Mr. Hawkins, an amorous
young soldier, who treated her with a bullying tenderness and jilted her
for an English heiress; and Christopher Dysart, a scholar, a gentleman,
and the heir to a baronetcy, who was ruined by self-criticism and
diffidence. Francie respected Christopher and rejected him; was thrown
over by Hawkins, whom she loved; and married Roddy Lambert, her motives
being "poverty, aimlessness, bitterness of soul and instinctive leniency
towards any man who liked her." Francie had already exasperated
Charlotte by refusing Christopher Dysart: by marrying Lambert she dealt
a death-blow to her hopes and drove her into the path of vengeance.
But the story is not only engrossing as a study of vulgarity that is
touched with pathos, of the vindictive jealousy of unsunned natures, of
the cowardice of the selfish and the futility of the intellectually
effete. It is a treasure-house of good sayings, happy comments,
ludicrous incidents. When Francie returned to Dublin we read how one of
her cousins, "Dottie, unfailing purveyor of diseases to the family, had
imported German measles from her school." When Charlotte, nursing her
wrath, went to inform the servant at Lambert's house of the return of
her master with his new wife, the servant inquired "with cold
resignation" whether it was the day after to-morrow:--
"'It is, me poor woman, it is,' replied Charlotte, in the tone of
facetious intimacy that she reserved for other people's servants.
'You'll have to stir your stumps to get the house ready for
them.'--'The house is cleaned down and ready for them as soon as they
like to walk into it,' replied Eliza Hackett, with dignity, 'and if
the new lady faults the drawing-room chimbley for not being swep, the
master will know it's not me that's to blame for it, but the sweep
that's gone dhrilling with the Mileetia.'"
Each of the members of the Dysart family is hit off in some memorable
phrase; Sir Benjamin, the old and irascible paralytic, "who had been
struck down on his son's coming of age by a paroxysm of apoplectic
jealousy "; the admirable and unselfish Pamela with her "pleasant
anxious voice"; Christopher, who believed that if only he could "read
the 'Field,' and had a more spontaneous habit of cursing," he would be
an ideal country gentleman; and Lady Dysart, who was "a clever woman, a
renowned solver of acrostics in her society paper, and a holder of
strong opinions as to the prophetic meaning of the Pyramids." With her
"a large yet refined bonhomie" took the place of tact, but being an
Englishwoman she was "constitutionally unable to discern perfectly the
subtle grades of Irish vulgarity." Sometimes the authors throw away the
_scenario_ for a whole novel in a single paragraph, as in this
compressed summary of the antecedents of Captain Cursiter:
"Captain Cursiter was 'getting on' as captains go, and he was the less
disposed to regard his junior's love affairs with an indulgent eye, in
that he had himself served a long and difficult apprenticeship in such
matters, and did not feel that he had profited much by his
experiences. It had happened to him at an early age to enter
ecstatically into the house of bondage, and in it he had remained with
eyes gradually opening to its drawbacks until, a few years before, the
death of the only apparent obstacle to his happiness had brought him
face to face with its realisation. Strange to say, when this supreme
moment arrived, Captain Cursiter was disposed for further delay; but
it shows the contrariety of human nature, that when he found himself
superseded by his own subaltern, an habitually inebriated viscount, he
committed the imbecility of horsewhipping him; and finding it
subsequently advisable to leave his regiment, he exchanged into the
infantry with the settled conviction that all women were liars."
Nouns and verbs are the bones and sinews of style; it is in the use of
epithets and adjectives that the artist is shown; and Miss Martin and
Miss Somerville never make a mistake. An episode in the life of one of
Charlotte's pets--a cockatoo--is described as occurring when the bird
was "a sprightly creature of some twenty shrieking summers." We read of
cats who stared "with the expressionless but wholly alert scrutiny of
their race"; of the "difficult revelry" of Lady Dysart's garden party
when the men were in a hopeless minority and the more honourable women
sat on a long bench in "midge-bitten dulness." Such epithets are not
decorative, they heighten the effect of the picture. Where adjectives
are not really needed, Miss Martin and Miss Somerville can dispense with
them altogether and yet attain a deadly precision, as when they describe
an Irish beggar as "a bundle of rags with a cough in it," or note a
characteristic trait of Roddy Lambert by observing that "he was a man in
whom jealousy took the form of reviling the object of his affections, if
by so doing he could detach his rivals"--a modern instance of
"displiceas aliis, sic ego tutus ero." When Roddy Lambert went away
after his first wife's funeral we learn that he "honeymooned with his
grief in the approved fashion." These felicities abound on every page;
while the turn of phrase of the peasant speech is caught with a fidelity
which no other Irish writer has ever surpassed. When Judy Lee, a poor
old woman who had taken an unconscionable time in dying was called by
one of the gossips who had attended her wake "as nice a woman as ever
threw a tub of clothes on the hills," and complimented for having
"battled it out well," Norry the Boat replied sardonically:--
"Faith, thin, an' if she did die itself she was in the want of it;
sure, there isn't a winther since her daughther wint to America that
she wasn't anointed a couple of times. I'm thinking the people th'
other side o' death will be throuncin' her for keepin' them waitin' on
her this way."
Humour is never more effective than when it emerges from a serious
situation. Tragedy jostles comedy in life, and the greatest dramatists
and romancers have made wonderful use of this abrupt alternation. There
are many painful and diverting scenes in "The Real Charlotte," but none
in which both elements are blended so effectively as the story of Julia
Duffy's last pilgrimage. Threatened with eviction from her farm by the
covetous intrigues of Charlotte, she leaves her sick bed to appeal to
her landlord, and when half dead with fatigue falls in with the insane
Sir Benjamin, to be driven away with grotesque insults. On her way home
she calls in at Charlotte's house, only to find Christopher Dysart
reading Rossetti's poems to Francie FitzPatrick, who has just timidly
observed, in reply to her instructor's remark that the hero is a
pilgrim, "I know a lovely song called 'The Pilgrim of Love'; of course,
it wasn't the same thing as what you were reading, but it was awfully
nice, too." This interlude is intensely ludicrous, but its cruel
incongruity only heightens the misery of what has gone before and what
follows.
"The Silver Fox," which appeared in 1897, need not detain us long,
though it is a little masterpiece in its way, vividly contrasting the
limitations of the sport-loving temperament with the ineradicable
superstitions of the Irish peasantry. Impartial as ever, the authors
have here achieved a felicity of phrase to which no other writers of
hunting novels have ever approached. Imagination's widest stretch cannot
picture Surtees or Mr. Nat Gould describing an answer being given "with
that level politeness of voice which is the distilled essence of a
perfected anger," or comparing a fashionable Amazon with the landscape
in such words as these:--
"Behind her the empty window framed a gaunt mountain peak, a lake that
frittered a myriad of sparkles from its wealth of restless silver, and
the gray and faint purple of the naked wood beyond it. It seemed too
great a background for her powdered cheek and her upward glances at
her host."
But the atmosphere of "The Silver Fox" is sombre, and a sporting novel
which is at once serious and of a fine literary quality must necessarily
appeal to a limited audience. The problem is solved to perfection in
"Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.," a series of loosely-knit episodes
which, after running a serial course in the "Badminton Magazine," were
republished in book form towards the close of 1899. There is only one
chapter to cloud the otherwise unintermittent hilarity of the whole
recital. The authors have dispensed with comment, and rely chiefly on
dialogue, incident, and their intimate and precise knowledge of horses,
and horse-copers of both sexes. An interested devotion to the noble
animal is here shown to be the last infirmity of noble minds, for old
Mrs. Knox, with the culture of a _grande dame_ and the appearance of a
refined scarecrow, went cub-hunting in a bath chair. In such a company a
young sailor whose enthusiasm for the chase had been nourished by the
hirelings of Malta, and his eye for points probably formed on circus
posters, had little chance of making a good bargain at Drumcurran horse
fair:--
"'The fellow's asking forty-five pounds for her,' said Bernard Shute
to Miss Sally; 'she's a nailer to gallop. I don't think it's too
much.'--'Her grandsire was the Mountain Hare,' said the owner of the
mare, hurrying up to continue her family history, 'and he was the
grandest horse in the four baronies. He was forty-two years of age
when he died, and they waked him the same as ye'd wake a Christian.
They had whisky and porther--and bread--and a piper in it.'--'Thim
Mountain Hare colts is no great things,' interrupted Mr. Shute's
groom, contemptuously. 'I seen a colt once that was one of his stock,
and if there was forty men and their wives, and they after him with
sticks, he wouldn't lep a sod of turf.'--'Lep, is it!' ejaculated the
owner in a voice shrill with outrage. 'You may lead that mare out
through the counthry, and there isn't a fence in it that she wouldn't
go up to it as indepindent as if she was going to her bed, and your
honour's ladyship knows that dam well, Miss Knox.'--'You want too much
money for her, McCarthy,' returned Miss Sally, with her air of
preternatural wisdom. 'God pardon you, Miss Knox! Sure a lady like you
knows well that forty-five pounds is no money for that mare.
Forty-five pounds!' He laughed. 'It'd be as good for me to make her a
present to the gentleman all out as take three farthings less for her!
She's too grand entirely for a poor farmer like me, and if it wasn't
for the long, weak family I have, I wouldn't part with her under twice
the money.'--'Three fine lumps of daughters in America paying his rent
for him,' commented Flurry in the background. 'That's the long, weak
family.'"
The turn of phrase in Irish conversation has never been reproduced in
print with greater fidelity, and there is hardly a page in the book
without some characteristic Hibernianism such as "Whisky as pliable as
new milk," or the description of a horse who was a "nice, flippant
jumper," or a bandmaster who was "a thrifle fulsome after his luncheon,"
or a sweep who "raised tallywack and tandem all night round the house to
get at the chimbleys." The narrative reaches its climax in the chapter
which relates the exciting incidents of Lisheen races at second-hand.
Major Yeates and his egregious English visitor Mr. Leigh Kelway, an
earnest Radical publicist, having failed to reach the scene, are
sheltering from the rain in a wayside public-house where they are
regaled with an account of the races by Slipper, the dissipated but
engaging huntsman of the local pack of hounds. The close of the meeting
was a steeplechase in which "Bocock's owld mare," ridden by one
Driscoll, was matched against a horse ridden by another local sportsman
named Clancy, and Slipper, who favoured Driscoll, and had taken up his
position at a convenient spot on the course, thus describes his mode of
encouraging the mare:
"'Skelp her, ye big brute!' says I. 'What good's in ye that ye aren't
able to skelp her?'... Well, Mr. Flurry, and gintlemen,... I declare
to ye when owld Bocock's mare heard thim roars she stretched out her
neck like a gandher, and when she passed me out she give a couple of
grunts and looked at me as ugly as a Christian. 'Hah!' says I, givin'
her a couple o' dhraws o' th' ash plant across the butt o' the tail,
the way I wouldn't blind her, 'I'll make ye grunt!' says I, 'I'll
nourish ye!' I knew well she was very frightful of th' ash plant since
the winter Tommeen Sullivan had her under a sidecar. But now, in place
of havin' any obligations to me, ye'd be surprised if ye heard the
blaspheemious expressions of that young boy that was riding her; and
whether it was over-anxious he was, turning around the way I'd hear
him cursin', or whether it was some slither or slide came to owld
Bocock's mare, I dunno, but she was bet up against the last obstackle
but two, and before you could say 'Shnipes,' she was standin' on her
two ears beyant in th' other field. I declare to ye, on the vartue of
me oath, she stood that way till she reconnoithered what side Driscoll
would fall, an' she turned about then and rolled on him as cosy as if
he was meadow grass!' Slipper stopped short; the people in the doorway
groaned appreciatively; Mary Kate murmured 'The Lord save us'--'The
blood was druv out through his nose and ears,' continued Slipper, with
a voice that indicated the cream of the narration, 'and you'd hear his
bones crackin' on the ground! You'd have pitied the poor boy.'--'Good
heavens!' said Leigh Kelway, sitting up very straight in his chair.
'Was he hurt, Slipper?' asked Flurry, casually. 'Hurt is it?' echoed
Slipper, in high scorn, 'killed on the spot!' He paused to relish the
effect of the _denouement_ on Leigh Kelway. 'Oh, divil so pleasant an
afthernoon ever you seen; and, indeed, Mr. Flurry, it's what we were
all sayin', it was a great pity your honour was not there for the
likin' you had for Driscoll.'"
Leigh Kelway, it may be noted, is the lineal descendant of the pragmatic
English under-secretary in "Charles O'Malley," who, having observed that
he had never seen an Irish wake, was horrified by the prompt offer of
his Galway host, a notorious practical joker, to provide a corpse on the
spot. But this is only one of the instances of parallelism in which the
later writers though showing far greater restraint and fidelity to
type, have illustrated the continuance of temperamental qualities which
Lever and his forerunner Maxwell--the author of "Wild Sports of the
West"--portrayed in a more extravagant form. On the other hand it would
be impossible to imagine a greater contrast than that between Lever's
thrasonical narrator heroes and Major Yeates, R.M., whose fondness for
sport is allied to a thorough consciousness of his own infirmities as a
sportsman. There is no heroic figure in "Some Experiences of an Irish
R.M.," but the characters are all lifelike, and at least
half-a-dozen--"Flurry" Knox, his cousin Sally, and his old grandmother,
Mrs. Knox, of Aussolas, Slipper, Mrs. Cadogan, and the incomparable
Maria--form as integral a part of our circle of acquaintance as if we
had known them in real life. "The Real Charlotte" is a greater
achievement, but the R.M. is a surer passport to immortality.
The further instalment of "Experiences," published a few years later did
not escape the common lot of sequels. They were brilliantly written, but
one was more conscious of the excellence of the manner than in any of
their other works. The two volumes of short stories and sketches
published in 1903 and 1906 under the titles of "All on the Irish Shore"
and some "Irish Yesterdays" respectively show some new and engaging
aspects of the genius of the collaborators. There is a chapter called
"Children of the Captivity," in which the would-be English humorist's
conception of Irish humour is dealt with faithfully--as it deserves to
be. The essay is also remarkable for the passage in which they set down
once and for all the true canons for the treatment of dialect.
Pronunciation and spelling, as they point out, are, after all, of small
account in its presentment:--
"The vitalising power is in the rhythm of the sentence, the turn of
phrase, the knowledge of idiom, and of, beyond all, the attitude of
mind.... The shortcoming is, of course, trivial to those who do not
suffer because of it, but want of perception of word and phrase and
turn of thought means more than mere artistic failure, it means want
of knowledge of the wayward and shrewd and sensitive minds that are at
the back of the dialect. The very wind that blows softly over brown
acres of bog carries perfumes and sounds that England does not know;
the women digging the potato-land are talking of things that England
does not understand. The question that remains is whether England will
ever understand."
The hunting sketches in these volumes include the wonderful "Patrick
Day's Hunt," which is a masterpiece in the high _bravura_ of the brogue.
Another is noticeable for a passage on the affection inspired by horses.
When Johnny Connolly heard that his mistress was driven to sell the
filly he had trained and nursed so carefully, he did not disguise his
disappointment:
"'Well, indeed, that's too bad, miss,' said Johnny comprehendingly.
'There was a mare I had one time, and I sold her before I went to
America. God knows, afther she went from me, whenever I'd look at her
winkers hanging on the wall I'd have to cry. I never seen a sight of
her till three years afther that, afther I coming home. I was coming
out o' the fair at Enniscar, an' I was talking to a man an' we coming
down Dangan Hill, and what was in it but herself coming up in a cart!
An' I didn't look at her, good nor bad, nor know her, but sorra bit
but she knew me talking, an' she turned into me with the cart. 'Ho,
ho, ho!' says she, and she stuck her nose into me like she'd be
kissing me. Be dam, but I had to cry. An' the world wouldn't stir her
out o' that till I'd lead her on meself. As for cow nor dog nor any
other thing, there's nothing would rise your heart like a horse!'"
And if horses are irresistible, so are Centaurs. That is the moral to be
drawn from "Dan Russel the Fox," the latest work from the pen of Miss
Somerville and Miss Martin, in which the rival claims of culture and
foxhunting are subjected to a masterly analysis.
The joint authors of the "R.M." have paid forfeit for achieving
popularity by being expected to repeat their first resounding success.
Happily the pressure of popular demand has not impaired the artistic
excellence of their work, though we cannot help thinking that if they
had been left to themselves they might have given us at least one other
novel on the lines of "The Real Charlotte." Their later work, again, has
been subjected to the ordeal, we do not say of conscious imitation, but
of comparison with books which would probably have never been written or
would have been written on another plan, but for the success of the
"R.M." To regard this rivalry as serious would be, in the opinion of the
present writer, an abnegation of the critical faculty. But we have not
yet done with Irish women humorists. Miss Eleanor Alexander, the
daughter of the Poet Archbishop of Armagh and his poet wife has given us
in her "Lady Anne's Walk," a volume of a _genre_ as hard to define as it
has been easy to welcome, at times delicately allusive, now daringly
funny--an interblending of tender reminiscences and lively fancy,
reminding us perhaps most of old Irish music itself with its sweet,
strange and sudden changes of mood. Humorous contrasts of the kind will
be found in the chapter entitled "Old Tummus and the Battle of Scarva,"
printed in these pages.
Another woman contestant for humorous literary honours was the late Miss
Charlotte O'Conor Eccles, represented in this volume by the moving story
of "King William." Her "Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore" and "A
Matrimonial Lottery" achieved popularity by their droll situations and
exuberant fun, but her "Aliens of the West" contained work of much
finer quality. She lets us behind the shutters of Irish country shop
life in a most convincing manner, and the characters drawn from her
Toomevara are as true to type as those of Miss Barlow. The
disillusionment of Molly Devine "The Voteen," with her commonplace, not
to say vulgar surroundings, on her return from the convent school with
its superior refinements, her refusal to marry so-called eligible, but
to her, repulsive suitors, encouraged by her mother and stepfather and
her final resolve to become a nun in order to escape further persecution
of the kind, is told with convincing poignancy. A variant of this theme
is treated with even more power and pathos in "Tom Connolly's Daughter,"
a story which we should like to see reprinted in separate form as it
sets one thinking furiously, and its general circulation might do much
to correct the love and marriage relations between young people in
provincial Ireland.