(18-)
The general reader has yet to learn the most private and sacred events
of Miss Jane Barlow's life, now known only to herself and friends. She
is the daughter of Dr. Barlow of Trinity College, and lives in the
seclusion of a collage at Raheny, a hamlet near Dublin. Her family has
been in Ireland for generations, and she comes of German and Norman
stock. As some one has said, the knowledge and skill displayed in
depicting Irish peasant life, which her books show, are hers not through
Celtic blood and affinities, but by a sympathetic genius and
inspiration.
[Illustration: Jane Barlow]
The publication of her writings in book form was preceded by the
appearance of some poems and stories in the magazines, the Dublin
University Review of 1885 containing 'Walled Out; or, Eschatology in a
Bog.' 'Irish Idyls' (1892), and 'Bogland Studies' (of the same year),
show the same pitiful, sombre pictures of Irish peasant life about the
sodden-roofed mud hut and "pitaties" boiling, which only a genial,
impulsive, generous, light-hearted, half-Greek and half-philosophic
people could make endurable to the reader or attractive to the writer.
The innate sweetness of the Irish character, which the author brings out
with fine touches, makes it worth portrayal. "It is safe to say," writes
a critic, "that the philanthropist or the political student interested
in the eternal Irish problem will learn more from Miss Barlow's twin
volumes than from a dozen Royal Commissions and a hundred Blue Books."
Her sympathy constantly crops out, as, for instance, in the mirthful
tale of 'Jerry Dunne's Basket,' where--
"Andy Joyce had an ill-advised predilection for seeing things
which he called 'dacint and proper' about him, and he built
some highly superior sheds on the lawn, to the bettering, no
doubt, of his cattle's condition. The abrupt raising of his
rent by fifty per cent, was a broad hint which most men would
have taken; and it did keep Andy ruefully quiet for a season
or two. Then, however, having again saved up a trifle, he
could not resist the temptation to drain the swampy corner of
the farthest river-field, which was as kind a bit of land as
you could wish, only for the water lying on it, and in which
he afterward raised himself a remarkably fine crop of white
oats. The sight of them 'done his heart good,' he said,
exultantly, nothing recking that it was the last touch of
farmer's pride he would ever feel. Yet on the next
quarter-day the Joyces received notice to quit, and their
landlord determined to keep the vacated holding in his own
hands; those new sheds were just the thing for his young
stock. Andy, in fact, had done his best to improve himself
off the face of the earth."
The long story which Miss Barlow has published, 'Kerrigan's Quality'
(1894), is told with her distinguishing charm, but the book has not the
close-knit force of the 'Idyls.' Miss Barlow herself prefers the
'Bogland Studies,' because, she says, they are "a sort of poetry." "I
had set my heart too long upon being a poet ever to give up the idea
quite contentedly; 'the old hope is hardest to be lost.' A real poet I
can never be, as I have, I fear, nothing of the lyrical faculty; and a
poet without that is worse than a bird without wings, so, like Mrs.
Browning's Nazianzen, I am doomed to look 'at the lyre hung out
of reach.'"
Besides the three books named, Miss Barlow has published 'Mockus of the
Shallow Waters' (1893); 'The End of Elfintown' (1894); 'The Battle of
the Frogs and Mice in English' (1894); 'Maureen's Fairing and other
Stories' (1895); and 'Strangers at Lisconnel,' a second series of 'Irish
Idyls' (1895). In the last book we again have the sorrows and joys of
the small hamlet in the west of Ireland, where "the broad level spreads
away and away to the horizon before and behind and on either side of
you, very sombre-hued, yet less black-a-vised than more frequent bergs,"
where in the distance the mountains "loom up on its borders much less
substantial, apparently, in fabric than so many spirals of blue turf
smoke," and where the curlew's cry "can set a whole landscape to
melancholy in one chromatic phrase."