THE LONDON IRISH
The Irishman in London appears to lose a great deal of his luster. If
you wish to see him at his best in this Metropolis you must go to the
Bar. If you wish to see him at his worst you must go to the House of
Commons. And both best and worst are pretty bad. The Irishmen at the
Bar shall not be named, but all the world knows that they are a fairly
ill-conditioned community—savage, rude, reasonably illiterate, and not in
the least witty. Many of them model themselves on the late Lord Russell
and come off accordingly. Others again are beefy and vulgar and notorious
bullies. The judicial bench does not include an Irish judge. Possibly
this is fortunate. In London journalism the Irish scarcely count. Mr. W.
M. Thompson edits a sheet called _Reynolds’s Newspaper_ to the complete
satisfaction of Mr. Clement Shorter, and Mr. T. P. O’Connor edits _T.
P.’s Weekly_ and _M. A. P._, both of them journals with which London
could well afford to dispense. As for Irish reporters and sub-editors,
they are few and timid and well under the heel of the Scotch, who are
numerous and rampant and unblushing. In the minor professions, such as
physic, publishing, and stockbroking, the Irish do not figure at all
impressively. The truly great physicians of London are mostly Scotch,
so—thank Heaven!—are the truly great publishers; while the stockbrokers
are commonly believed to belong to the tribe of Manasseh. Of the
politicians a great deal more has been written than the politicians are
worth. Let us draw a decent green veil over them. Few Englishmen nowadays
know which of them is alive and which of them is dead; neither can one
tell off-hand whether they are for the Government or agin it. I have
heard rumors of the existence in London of an Irish Literary Society.
Somewhere in Holborn there exists, too, I am told, an Irish Club. So far
as letters are concerned, London is pretty well denuded of Irishmen.
Mr. George Moore no longer abides with us. Mr. W. B. Yeats has latterly
preferred Dublin to the Euston Road. Mr. George Bernard Shaw has become
an American playwright. If these gentlemen are members of the Irish
Literary Society so much the better for the Irish Literary Society. There
is an Irish poetess resident in Twickenham, but _Who’s Who_ informs us
that her Celtic quality has not been stimulated by a sojourn in her
native land. The Irish Club would seem to devote itself to “Smokers,”
“Socials,” and “Enjoyable Evenings.” Its saturnalia are duly reported in
_Reynolds’s Newspaper_. Probably the most distinguished Irishman in the
Metropolis is Sir Thomas Lipton, whose name is as prominently associated
with sport as it is with tea. Then there are the Irish Guards, one of the
finest bodies of men in the King’s service, and Mr. Dennis O’Sullivan,
England’s only Irish actor. It will thus be seen that the London Irish
do not shine effulgently. None of them is at the top of things, as it
were; none of them has got very far above the middling. The reason no
doubt is that the Irish temperament is coy. The Scotchman who comes to
London knows that he is an alien and an interloper, and despised of his
fellow-men, but he blusters it out. The Irishman, on the other hand,
feels his position keenly and refuses to be other than diffident. As a
rule, too, he is without commercial aptitude, and not vastly taken with
the blessed word thrift. Besides which, Irishmen do not come to London
in droves, as do the Scotch. When they emigrate, their natural tendency
is toward America. In any case it cannot be suggested that the London
Irish have at any time presumed to be aggressive. Neither have they made
pretensions to superiority, or exhibited a disposition to clannishness.
That they do not count is therefore probably their own fault; for
London, in a greater degree perhaps than any other city in the world,
is always open to prostrate herself before the invader, providing he be
assertive and pushful enough. Leaving out the more or less eminent, and
glancing for a moment at the common rank of Irishmen in London, one is
confronted with two facts, and two facts only. The first of them is that
the London Irish can muster in sufficient force to make a St. Patrick’s
Day concert or so financially successful, and the second is that the
morning after, the metropolitan magistrates have invariably to deal with
a fairly noble batch of Irish “drunks.” Practically this is all that is
known by the Cockney respecting his Irish fellow-citizen, and I think
that it is distinctly unfortunate for Ireland, because it fosters a false
impression. The Scotch, who are wilier, take great care not to get drunk
on St. Andrew’s Day.