By Charles L. Graves.
No record of the glories of Ireland would be complete without an
effort, however inadequate, to analyze and illustrate her wit and
humor. Often misunderstood, misrepresented, and misinterpreted, they
are nevertheless universally admitted to be racial traits, and for an
excellent reason. Other nations exhibit these qualities in their
literature, and Ireland herself is rich in writers who have furnished
food for mirth. But her special pre-eminence resides in the
possession of what, to adapt a famous phrase, may be called an _anima
naturaliter jocosa_. Irish wit and Irish humor are a national
inheritance. They are inherent in the race as a whole, independent of
education or culture or comfort. The best Irish sayings are the
sayings of the people; the greatest Irish humorists are the nameless
multitude who have never written books or found a place in national
dictionaries of biography. None but an Irishman could have coined
that supreme expression of contempt: "I wouldn't be seen dead with
him at a pig-fair," or rebuked a young barrister because he did not
"squandher his carcass" (_i.e._, gesticulate) enough. But we cannot
trace the paternity of these sayings any more than we can that of the
lightning retort of the man to whom one of the "quality" had given a
glass of whisky. "That's made another man of you, Patsy," remarked
the donor. "'Deed an' it has, sor," Patsy flashed back, "an' that
other man would be glad of another glass." It is enough for our
purpose to note that such sayings are typically Irish and that their
peculiar felicity consists in their combining both wit and humor.
To what element in the Irish nature are we to attribute this joyous
and illuminating gift? No one who is not a Gaelic scholar can venture
to dogmatize on this thorny subject. But, setting philology and
politics aside, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Ireland has
gained rather than lost in this respect by the clash of races and
languages. Gaiety, we are told, is not the predominating
characteristic of the Celtic temperament, nor is it reflected in the
prose and verse of the "old ancient days" that have come down to us.
Glamour and magic and passion abound in the lays and legends of the
ancient Gael, but there is more melancholy than mirth in these tales
of long ago. Indeed, it is interesting to note in connection with
this subject that the younger school of Irish writers associated with
what is called the Celtic Renascence have, with very few exceptions,
sedulously eschewed anything approaching to jocosity, preferring the
paths of crepuscular mysticism or sombre realism, and openly avowing
their distaste for what they consider to be the denationalized
sentiment of Moore, Lever, and Lover. To say this is not to disparage
the genius of Yeats and Synge; it is merely a statement of fact and
an illustration of the eternal dualism of the Irish temperament,
which Moore himself realized when he wrote of "Erin, the tear and the
smile in thine eye."
A reaction against the Donnybrook tradition was inevitable and to a
great extent wholesome, since the stage Irishman of the transpontine
drama or the music-halls was for the most part a gross and unlovely
caricature, but, like all reactions, it has tended to obscure the
real merits and services of those who showed the other side of the
medal. Lever did not exaggerate more than Dickens, and his portraits
of Galway fox-hunters and duellists, of soldiers of fortune, and of
Dublin undergraduates were largely based on fact. At his best he was
a most exhilarating companion, and his pictures of Irish life, if
partial, were not misleading. He held no brief for the landlords, and
in his later novels showed a keen sense of their shortcomings. The
plain fact is that, in considering the literary glories of Ireland,
we cannot possibly overlook the work of those Irishmen who were
affected by English influences or wrote for an English audience.
Anglo-Irish humorous literature was a comparatively late product, but
its efflorescence was rapid and triumphant. The first great name is
that of Goldsmith, and, though deeply influenced in technique and
choice of subjects by his association with English men of letters and
by his residence in England, in spirit he remained Irish to the
end--generous, impulsive, and improvident in his life; genial, gay,
and tender-hearted in his works. The Vicar of Wakefield was Dr.
Primrose, but he might just as well have been called Dr. Shamrock. No
surer proof of the pre-eminence of Irish wit and humor can be found
than in the fact that, Shakespeare alone excepted, no writers of
comedy have held the boards longer or more triumphantly than
Goldsmith and his brother Irishman, Sheridan. _She Stoops to Conquer,
The Rivals, The School for Scandal_, and _The Critic_ represent the
sunny side of the Irish genius to perfection. They illustrate, in the
most convincing way possible, how the debt of the world to Ireland
has been increased by the fate which ordained that her choicest
spirits should express themselves in a language of wider appeal than
the ancient speech of Erin.
On the other hand, English literature and the English tongue have
gained greatly from the influence exerted by writers familiar from
their childhood with turns of speech and modes of expression which,
even when they are not translations from the Gaelic, are
characteristic of the Hibernian temper. The late Dr. P.W. Joyce, in
his admirable treatise on English as spoken in Ireland, has
illustrated not only the essentially bilingual character of the
Anglo-Irish dialect, but the modes of thought which it enshrines.
There is no better known form of Irish humor than that commonly
called the "Irish bull," which is too often set down to lax thinking
and faulty logic. But it is the rarest thing to encounter a genuine
Irish "bull" which is not picturesque and at the same time highly
suggestive. Take, for example, the saying of an old Kerry doctor who,
when conversing with a friend on the high rate of mortality,
observed, "Bedad, there's people dyin' who never died before." Here a
truly illuminating result was attained by the simple device of using
the indicative for the conditional mood--as in Juvenal's famous
comment on Cicero's second Philippic: _Antoni gladios potuit
contemnere si sic omnia dixisset_. The Irish "bull" is a heroic and
sometimes successful attempt to sit upon two stools at once, or, as
an Irishman put it, "Englishmen often make 'bulls,' but the Irish
'bull' is always pregnant."
Though no names of such outstanding distinction as those of Goldsmith
and Sheridan occur in the early decades of the nineteenth century,
the spirit of Irish comedy was kept vigorously alive by Maria
Edgeworth, William Maginn, Francis Mahony (Father Prout), and William
Carleton. Sir Walter Scott's splendid tribute to the genius of Maria
Edgeworth is regarded by some critics as extravagant, but it is
largely confirmed in a most unexpected quarter. Turgenief, the great
Russian novelist, proclaimed himself her disciple, and has left it on
record that but for her example he might never have attempted to give
literary form to his impressions of the classes in Russia
corresponding to the poor Irish and the squireens and the squires of
county Longford. Maginn and Mahony were both scholars--the latter
happily called himself "an Irish potato seasoned with Attic
salt"--wrote largely for English periodicals, and spent most of their
lives out of Ireland. In the writings of all three an element of the
grotesque is observable, tempered, however, in the case of Mahony,
with a vein of tender pathos which emerges in his delightful "Bells
of Shandon." Maginn was a wit, Mahony was the hedge-schoolmaster _in
excelsis_, and Carleton was the first realist in Irish peasant
fiction. But all alike drew their best inspiration from essentially
Irish themes. The pendulum has swung back slowly but steadily since
the days when Irish men of letters found it necessary to accommodate
their genius to purely English literary standards. Even Lever, though
he wrote for the English public, wrote mainly about Ireland. So, too,
with his contemporary Le Fanu, whose reputation rests on a double
basis. He made some wonderful excursions into the realm of the
bizarre, the uncanny, and the gruesome. But in the collection known
as _The Purcell Papers_ will be found three short stories which for
exuberant drollery and "diversion" have never been excelled. That the
same man could have written _Uncle Silas_ and _The Quare Gander_ is
yet another proof of the strange dualism of the Irish character.
The record of the last fifty years shows an uninterrupted progress in
the invasion of English _belles lettres_ by Irish writers. Outside
literature, perhaps the most famous sayer of good things of our times
was a simple Irish parish priest, the late Father Healy. Of his
humorous sayings the number is legion; his wit may be illustrated by
a less familiar example--his comment on a very tall young lady named
Lynch: "Nature gave her an inch and she took an ell." In the House of
Commons today there is no greater master of irony and sardonic humor
than his namesake, Mr. Tim Healy. On one occasion he remarked that
Lord Rosebery was not a man to go tiger-shooting with--except at the
Zoo. On another, being anxious to bring an indictment against the
"Castle" _régime_ in Dublin and finding the way blocked by a debate
on Uganda, he successfully accomplished his purpose by a judicious
geographical transference of names, and convulsed the House by a
speech in which the nomenclature of Central Africa was applied to the
government of Ireland.
But wit and humor are the monopoly of no class or calling in Ireland.
They flourish alike among car-drivers and K.C.'s, publicans and
policemen, priests and parsons, beggars and peers. It is a
commonplace of criticism to deny these qualities in their highest
form to women. But this is emphatically untrue of Ireland, and was
never more conclusively disproved than by the recent literary
achievements of her daughters. The partnership of two Irish ladies,
Miss Edith Somerville and Miss Violet Martin, has given us, in _Some
Experiences of an Irish R.M._ (_i.e._, Resident Magistrate), the most
delicious comedy, and in _The Real Charlotte_ the finest
tragi-comedy, that have come out of Great Britain in the last thirty
years. The _R.M._, as it is familiarly called, is already a classic,
but the Irish _comédie humaine_--to use the phrase in the sense of
Balzac--is even more vividly portrayed in the pages of _The Real
Charlotte_. Humor, genuine though intermittent, irradiates the
autumnal talent of Miss Jane Barlow, and the long roll of gifted
Irishwomen who have contributed to the gaiety of nations may be
closed with the names of Miss Hunt, author of _Folk Tales of
Breffny_; of Miss Purdon and Miss Winifred Letts, who in prose and
verse, respectively, have moved us to tears and laughter by their
studies of Leinster peasant life; and of "Moira O'Neill" (Mrs.
Skrine), the incomparable singer of the Glens of Antrim. To give a
full list of the living Irish writers, male and female, who are
engaged in the benevolent work of driving dull care away would be
impossible within the space at our command. But we cannot end without
recognition of the exhilarating extravaganzas of "George A.
Birmingham" (Canon Hannay), the freakish and elfin muse of James
Stephens, and the coruscating wit of F.P. Dunne, the famous
Irish-American humorist, whose "Mr. Dooley" is a household word on
both sides of the Atlantic.