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IRISH BOOKS
AND IRISH PEOPLE
By
STEPHEN GWYNN.
DUBLIN
The Talbot Press Ltd.
89 Talbot Street
LONDON
T. Fisher Unwin Ltd.
1 Adelphi Terrace
CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION 1
NOVELS OF IRISH LIFE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 7
A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR 23
LITERATURE AMONG THE ILLITERATES:
I.--THE SHANACHY 44
II.--THE LIFE OF A SONG 51
IRISH EDUCATION AND IRISH CHARACTER 65
THE IRISH GENTRY 83
YESTERDAY IN IRELAND 97
INTRODUCTION.
My publisher must take at least some of the responsibility for reviving
these essays. All bear the marks of the period at which they were
written; and some of them deal with the beginnings of movements which
have since grown to much greater strength, and in growing have developed
new characteristics at the expense of what was originally more
prominent. Other pages, again, take no account of facts which to-day
must be present to the mind of every Irish reader, and so are, perhaps
significantly, out of date. Nobody for instance, could now complain that
Irish humour is lacking in seriousness. Synge disposed of that
criticism--and, indeed, the Abbey Theatre in its tone as a whole may be
accused of neglecting Ireland's gift for simple fun. Yet Lady Gregory
made the most of it in her "Spreading the News," and Mr. Yeats in his
"Pot of Broth."--How beautifully W. G. Fay interpreted an Irish laughter
which had no bitterness in it.
But the strong intellectual movement which has swept over Ireland has
been both embittering and embittered. These last five and twenty years
have been the most formative in the country's history of any since
Ireland became the composite nation that she now is, or, perhaps, has
yet to become. At the back of it all lies the great social change
involved in the transfer of ownership from the landlord to the
cultivators of the soil--a change which has literally disenserfed
three-fourths of Ireland's people. Yet the relations are obscure,
indefinite, and intangible, which unite that material result to the
outcome of two forces, allied but distinct, which have operated solely
on men's minds and spirits. These are, of course, the Gaelic revival and
the whole literary movement which has had its most concrete expression
in the Irish theatre, and its most potent inspiration in the personality
of Mr. Yeats.
Of these two forces, one can show by far the more tangible effects, for
the Gaelic League has issued in action. Setting out to revive and save
the Irish language as a living speech, the instrument of a nation's
intercourse, it has failed of its purpose; but it has revived and
rendered potent the principle of separation. Nationalist, it will have
nothing to do with a nationality that is not as plainly marked off from
other nationalities as a red lamp from a green lamp; and the essential
symbol of separate nationality is for orthodox Gaelic Leaguers a
separate language. America, said an able exponent of this doctrine the
other day in a public debate, will never and never can be a nation till
its language is no longer recognisable as English--till its English
differs as much from the language of England as German differs from
Dutch. An inevitable corollary to this view is the necessity for
complete political separation from Great Britain--if only to provide the
machinery for this complete differentiation by daily speech.
I cannot pretend to assess impartially the value of this movement. It
asserted itself in passionate deeds at a moment when many thousands of
us Nationalists were taking equally vigorous action in pursuit of a
less tribal ideal. Thousands of us lost our lives, all of us risked our
lives, with the hope of achieving a national unity which could never be
built on the basis of regarding no man as an Irishman who did not speak,
or at least desire to speak, Gaelic for his mother tongue. The action of
Irish soldiers was thwarted and frustrated by the action of a very few
separatists, with a very small expense to themselves in bloodshed. But
the tribute to the work of the Gaelic League is that Ireland accepted
them and rejected us. None can deny that it has been a potent stimulus
to national education; and it only lacks official prohibition by the
British Government to become more powerful still.
Whatever the outcome, I take back nothing of what is written in these
papers concerning the Gaelic revival. In a country governed against the
will of its people, forces that, under normal and healthy conditions,
would be purely beneficent, may easily grow explosive and disruptive.
Yet I have not changed my mind on a critical question which led me to
sever my connection with the work of the Gaelic League. When that body
decided to rely on compulsion rather than persuasion, it took the wrong
road, if its object was to endear the Irish language to all Ireland, and
to induce all Irishmen to cherish it as part of the common national
heritage. As a result Ulstermen have a perfect right to say that if they
accepted Home Rule, one of the first steps of an Irish government formed
under the present auspices would be to demand a knowledge of Gaelic as
the necessary qualification for holding any public office.
I do not believe that this tribal idealism which is now so potent will
endure. It is out of harmony with the world's development--a world which
in order to preserve the very principle of small nationalities, is
growing more and more international. America is not only a nation, but
is the type of the modern nation--bound together less by what it
inherits from the past, than by what it hopes from the future.
The other force which has been operating through these years is, in a
sense, obliged to give the lie to the pretensions of the Gaelic League.
Yeats and Synge have showed how completely it is possible to be Irish
while using the English language. They have accepted the fact that
Ireland to-day thinks in English, but they have endeavoured to give to
Ireland a distinctively Irish thought, coloured by the whole racial
tradition and temperament. With them has been allied a personality not
less Irish, yet less obviously Irish--"A.E.," George Russell. Between
them, these writers and thinkers have profoundly influenced the mind of
the generation younger than themselves. It is not possible to deny that
Ireland's literary output during those last twenty years is far more
important and serious than that of the whole preceding century. The only
part of it exempt from these influences is the work of Edith Somerville
and Martin Ross; and even that is based on a closer study of
distinctively Irish speech than had ever been attempted in earlier days.
The propagandist work of Pearse and Arthur Griffiths--equal in merit to
that of their forerunners, Davis and Mitchel--was Irish only in
substance and spirit, not in form or accent--a thing the less
surprising, since both men were only half Irish by parentage. But the
whole group of writers, of whom it may be said that their writings are
almost as unmistakably Irish as the work of Burns is Scotch, have
followed Mr. Yeats and Synge in this, that in writing they assume an
Irish public, not an English one; they make no explanations, they speak
as to those who share their own inheritance. In this group has been
fostered a spirit of the freedom which belongs properly to art. Thus the
school, for it may justly be called a school, has created its own
tradition, and it has been a tradition of freedom, not asserted but
exercised: a freedom, not as against England, but as against all the
world. Everywhere, but especially in countries undergoing revolutionary
change, there is a tyranny of the crowd. When the Gaelic League decided
to make the learning of Irish compulsory, it attorned to this tyranny.
On the other hand, Mr. Yeats, at a moment when the Abbey Theatre seemed
about to become popular, was threatened by a fiat of this
mob-dictatorship; he was told that his theatre must become unpopular
unless he would throw overboard most of Synge's work. By the stand which
he then made he did a greater service to freedom of the mind in Ireland
than has yet been at all recognised; he helped to make his country
fearless and strong. Thanks mainly to him and to those who worked with
him, Ireland's thought is freer and more outspoken; there is more
thought in Ireland than there used to be. This does not make the country
easier to govern, and just now, Ireland, if given the opportunity, would
have a hard task to govern itself. But Ireland would not be the only
country in the world in that predicament. The schoolmaster has been
abroad, and where you have education without liberty there is bound to
be trouble. The only cure is, not to suppress education, but to give the
responsibility of freedom.
I have left these papers in order as they were written, with dates
annexed. One of them, _Literature among the Illiterates_, was published
in an earlier volume, _To-day and To-morrow in Ireland_ which is now out
of print. I include it here, because it completes the companion essay,
called _The Life of a Song_.
My acknowledgments are due to the various publications in which they
have all, except the last, previously appeared.
<sc>Dublin</sc>, _March_, 1919.
NOVELS OF IRISH LIFE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
"What Ireland wants," said an old gentleman not very long ago, "is a
Walter Scott." The remedy did not seem very practical, since Walter
Scotts will not come to order, but the point of view is worth noting,
for there you touch the central fact about Irish literature. We desire a
Walter Scott that he may glorify our annals, popularise our legends,
describe our scenery, and give an attractive view of the national
character. In short, we know that Ireland possesses pre-eminently the
quality of picturesqueness, and we should like to see it turned to good
account. We want a Walter Scott to advertise Ireland, and to fill the
hotels with tourists; but as for desiring to possess a great novelist
simply for the distinction of the thing, probably no civilised people on
earth is more indifferent to the matter. At present, indeed, a Walter
Scott, should he appear in Ireland, would be apt to have a cold welcome.
To write on anything connected with Irish history is inevitably to
offend the Press of one party, and very probably of both. Lever is less
of a caricaturist than Dickens, yet Dickens is idolised while Lever has
been bitterly blamed for lowering Irish character in the eyes of the
world; the charge is even repeated in the _Dictionary of National
Biography_. That may be patriotic sentiment, but it is not criticism.
Literature in Ireland, in short, is almost inextricably connected with
considerations foreign to art; it is regarded as a means, not as an end.
During the nineteenth century the belief being general among all classes
of Irish people that the English know nothing of Ireland, every book on
an Irish subject was judged by the effect it was likely to have upon
English opinion, to which the Irish are naturally sensitive, since it
decides the most important Irish questions. But apart from this
practical aspect of the matter, there is a morbid national sensitiveness
which desires to be consulted. Ireland, though she ought to count
herself amply justified of her children, is still complaining that she
is misunderstood among the nations; she is for ever crying out for
someone to give her keener sympathy, fuller appreciation, and exhibit
herself and her grievances to the world in a true light. The result is
that kind of insincerity and special pleading which has been the curse
of Irish or Anglo-Irish literature. I write of a literature which has
its natural centre in Dublin, not in Connemara; which looks eastward,
not westward. That literature begins with the _Drapier Letters_: it
continues through the great line of orators in whom the Irish genius (we
say nothing of the Celtic) has found its highest expression; and it
produced its first novelist, perhaps also its best, in the unromantic
person of Maria Edgeworth.
Miss Edgeworth had a sound instinct for her art, disfigured though her
later writings are by what Madame de Stael called her _triste utilite_.
Her first story is her most artistic production. _Castle Rackrent_ is
simply a pleasant satire upon the illiterate and improvident gentry who
have always been too common in her country. In this book she holds no
brief; she never stops to preach; her moral is implied, not expressed. A
historian might, it is true, go to _Castle Rackrent_ for information
about the conditions of land tenure as well as about social life in the
Ireland of that day; but the erudition is part and parcel of her story.
Throughout the length and breadth of Ireland, setting aside great towns,
the main interest of life for all classes is the possession of land.
Irish peasants seldom marry for love, they never murder for love; but
they marry and they murder for land. To know something of the
land-question is indispensable for an Irish novelist, and Miss Edgeworth
graduated with honours in this subject. She was her father's agent; when
her brother succeeded to the property she resigned, but in the troubles
of 1830 she was recalled to the management, and saved the estate.
_Castle Rackrent_ is, therefore, like Galt's _Annals of the Parish_, a
historical document; but it is none the worse story for that. The
narrative is put dramatically into the mouth of old Thady, a lifelong
servant of the family. Thady's son, Jason Quirk, attorney and agent to
the estate, has dispossessed the Rackrents; but Thady is still "poor
Thady," and regards the change with horror. Before recounting the
history of his own especial master and patron, Sir Condy Rackrent, last
of the line, Thady gives his ingenuous account of the three who
previously bore the name; Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, and Sir Kit. Sir
Patrick, the inventor of raspberry whiskey, died at table: "Just as the
company rose to drink his health with three cheers, he fell down in a
sort of fit, and was carried off; they sat it out, and were surprised in
the morning to find that it was all over with poor Sir Patrick." That
no gentleman likes to be disturbed after dinner, was the best recognised
rule of life in Ireland; if your host happened to have a fit, you knew
he would wish you to sit it out. Gerald Griffin in _The Collegians_
makes the same point with his usual vigour. A shot is heard in the
dining-room by the maids downstairs. They are for rushing in, but the
manservant knows better: "Sure, don't you know, if there was anyone shot
the master would ring the bell." After Sir Patrick, who thus lived and
died, to quote his epitaph, "a monument of old Irish hospitality," came
Sir Murtagh, "who was a very learned man in the law, and had the
character of it"; another passion that seems to go with the land-hunger
in Ireland. Sir Murtagh married one of the family of the Skinflints:
"She was a strict observer for self and servants of Lent and all fast
days, but not holidays." However, says Thady (is there not a strong
trace of Swift in all this?).
"However, my lady was very charitable in her own way. She had a
charity school for poor children, where they were taught to read
and write gratis, and where they were well kept to spinning gratis
for my lady in return; for she had always heaps of duty yarn from
the tenants, and got all her household linen out of the estate from
first to last; for after the spinning, the weavers on the estate
took it in hand for nothing, because of the looms my lady's
interest could get from the Linen Board to distribute gratis....
Her table the same way, kept for next to nothing; duty fowls, and
duty turkeys, and duty geese came as fast as we could eat them, for
my lady kept a sharp look-out and knew to a tub of butter
everything the tenants had all round.... As for their young pigs,
we had them, and the best bacon and hams they could make up, with
all young chickens in the spring; but they were a set of poor
wretches, and we had nothing but misfortunes with them, always
breaking and running away. This, Sir Murtagh and my lady said, was
all their former landlord, Sir Patrick's fault, who let 'em get the
half year's rent into arrear; there was something in that, to be
sure. But Sir Murtagh was as much the contrary way--"
I have abridged my lady's methods, and I omit Sir Murtagh's, who taught
his tenants, as he said, to know the law of landlord and tenant. But,
"though a learned man in the law, he was a little too incredulous in
other matters." He neglected his health, broke a blood-vessel in a rage
with my lady, and so made way for Sir Kit the prodigal. Sir Kit was shot
in a duel, and Sir Condy came into an estate which, between Sir
Murtagh's law-suits and Sir Kit's gaming, was considerably embarrassed;
indeed, the story proper is simply a history of makeshifts to keep rain
and bailiffs out of the family mansion. Poor Sir Condy; he was the very
moral of the man who is no man's enemy but his own, and was left at the
last with no friend but old Thady. Even Judy Quirk turned against him,
forgetting his goodness in tossing up between her and Miss Isabella
Moneygawl, the romantic lady who eloped with him after the toss. She
deserted before Judy; here is a bit of the final scene. Thady was going
upstairs with a slate to make up a window-pane.
"This window was in the long passage, or gallery, as my lady gave
orders to have it called, in the gallery leading up to my master's
bedchamber and hers. And when I went up with the slate, the door
having no lock, and the bolt spoilt, was ajar after Mrs. Jane (my
lady's maid), and as I was busy with the window, I heard all that
was saying within. 'Well, what's in your letter, Bella, my dear?'
says he. 'You're a long time spelling it over.' 'Won't you shave
this morning, Sir Condy?' says she, and put the letter into her
pocket. 'I shaved the day before yesterday,' says he, 'my dear, and
that's not what I'm thinking of now; but anything to oblige you,
and to have peace and quietness, my dear,'--and presently I had the
glimpse of him at the cracked glass over the chimney-piece,
standing up shaving himself to please my lady."
However, the quarrel comes on in a delightful scene, where Sir Condy
shows himself at all events an amiable gentleman; and so my lady goes
home to her own people. There you have Miss Edgeworth at her very best;
and, indeed, _Castle Rackrent_ received such a tribute as no other novel
ever had paid to it. Many people have heard how when _Waverley_ came to
the Edgeworth household, Mr. Edgeworth, after his custom, read it aloud
almost, as it would appear, at one sitting. When the end came for that
fascinated circle, amid the chorus of exclamations, Mr. Edgeworth said:
"What is this? _Postscript which ought to have been a preface_." Then
there was a chorus of protests that he should not break the spell with
prose. "Anyhow," he said, "let us hear what the man has to say," and so
read on to the passage where Scott explained that he desired to do for
Scotland what had been done for Ireland: "to emulate the admirable
fidelity of Miss Edgeworth's portraits." What Maria Edgeworth felt we
know from the letter she posted off "to the Author of 'Waverley,' _Aut
Scotus aut Diabolus_."
It would be unkind to compare Scott with his model. For the poetry and
the tragic power of his novels one would never think of looking in Miss
Edgeworth. Her work is compact of observation; yet the gifts she has are
not to be under-valued. She is mistress of a kindly yet searching
satire, real wit, a fine vein of comedy; and she can rise to such true
pathos as dignifies the fantastic figure of King Corny in _Ormond_,
perhaps the best thing she ever did. But she had in her father a
literary adviser, not of the negative but of the positive order, and
there never was a more fully developed prig than Richard Edgeworth. His
view of literature was purely utilitarian; to convey practical lessons
was the business of all superior persons, more particularly of an
Edgeworth. In _Castle Rackrent_ his suggestions and comments are happily
relegated to the position of notes; in the other books they form part
and parcel of the novel. _The Absentee_, for instance, contains
admirable dialogue and many life-like figures; but the scheme of the
story conveys a sense of unreality. Every fault or vice has its
counterbalancing virtue represented. Lady Clonbroney, vulgarly ashamed
of her country, is set off by the patriotic Lady Oranmore; the virtuous
Mr. Burke forms too obvious a pendant to the rascally agents old Nick
and St. Dennis. It is needless to say that the exclusively virtuous
people are deadly dull. It is the novel with a purpose written by a
novelist whose strength lies in the delineation of character. Miss
Edgeworth can never carry you away with her story, as Charles Reade
sometimes can, and make you forget and forgive the virtuous intention.
What was unreal in Miss Edgeworth became mere insincerity in her
contemporary, Lady Morgan. Few people could tell you now where Thackeray
got Miss Glorvina O'Dowd's baptismal name; yet _The Wild Irish Girl_ had
a great triumph in its day, and Glorvina stood sponsor to the milliners'
and haberdashers' inventions ninety years before the apotheosis of
Trilby. _O'Donnell_, which is counted Lady Morgan's best novel, gives a
lively ideal portrait of the authoress, first as the governess-grub,
then transformed by marriage into the butterfly-duchess. But the book is
a thinly-disguised political pamphlet. "Look," she says in effect, "at
the heroic virtues of O'Donnell, the young Irishman, driven to serve in
foreign armies, despoiled of his paternal estates by the penal laws;
look at the fidelity, the simplicity, the native humour (so dramatically
effective) of his servant Rory; and then say if you will not plump for
Catholic Emancipation." "My dear lady," the reader murmurs, "I wondered
why you were so set upon underlining all these things. Can you not tell
us a story frankly, and let us alone with your conclusions?"
Unfortunately, very much the same has to be said of a far greater
writer, William Carleton, even in those tales which are based upon his
own most intimate experience. _The Poor Scholar_, his most popular
story, proceeds directly from an episode in his own life. He had himself
been a poor scholar, had set out from his northern home to walk to
Munster, where the best known schools were, trusting to charity by the
way to lodge him, and to charity to keep him throughout his schooling
for the sake of his vocation, and for the blessing sure to descend upon
those who aided a peasant's son to become a priest. Nothing could be
more vivid than the early scenes, the collection made at the altar for
Jimmy McEvoy, the priest's sermon, the boy's parting from home, and the
roadside hospitality; there is one infinitely touching episode in the
house of the first farmer who shelters him. Then come the school itself,
and the tyranny of its master, till the boy falls sick of a fever, and
is turned out of doors. Then, alas, the conventional intervenes in the
person of the virtuous absentee ignorant of his agent's misdoings: the
long arm of coincidence is stretched to the uttermost; and we have to
wade through pages of discussion upon the relations of landlord and
tenant till we are put wholly out of tune for the beautiful scene of
Jimmy's return home in his priestly dress.
Carleton did for the peasantry what Miss Edgeworth had done for the
upper classes. In her books the peasants have only an incidental part,
and she describes them shrewdly and sympathetically enough, but with a
mind untouched either by their faith or by their superstitions; seeing
their good and bad qualities clearly in a dry light, but never in
imagination identifying herself with them. Superior to Miss Edgeworth in
power and insight, he is immeasurably her inferior in literary skill.
One should remember, in commenting upon the poverty of Irish literature
in English, that, so far as concerns imaginative work, it began in the
nineteenth century. Carleton only died in 1869, Miss Edgeworth in 1849;
and before them there is no one.
On the other hand the speech of Lowland Scots, with whose richness in
masterpieces our poverty is naturally contrasted, has been employed for
literature as long as the vernacular English. A king of Scotland wrote
admirable verse in the generation after Chaucer; the influence of the
Court fostered poetry, and the close intercourse with France kept Scotch
writers in touch with first-rate models. Dunbar, strolling as a friar in
France, may have known Villon, whom he often resembles. In Ireland, till
a century ago, English was as much a foreign language as Norman French
in England under the Plantagenets. Among the English Protestants,
settled in Ireland, and separated by a hard line of cleavage from the
Catholic population, there arose great men in letters, Goldsmith, Burke,
Sheridan, who showed their Irish temperament in their handling of
English themes. But in Ireland itself, before the events of 1782 added
importance to Dublin, there was no centre for a literature to gather
round. Such national pride as exists in English-speaking Ireland dates
from the days of Grattan and Flood. And Irish national aspirations still
bear the impress of their origin amid that period of political turmoil,
than which nothing is more hostile to the brooding care of literary
workmanship, the long labour and the slow result. Irishmen have always
shown a strong disinclination to pure literature. The roll of Irish
novelists is more than half made up of women's names; Miss Edgeworth,
Lady Morgan, Miss Emily Lawless, and Miss Jane Barlow. Journalists
Ireland has produced as copiously as orators; the writers of _The Spirit
of the Nation_, that admirable collection of stirring poems, are
journalists working in verse; and Carleton, falling under their
influence, became a journalist working in fiction. In his pages, even
when the debater ceases to argue and harangue, the style is still
journalistic, except in those passages where his dramatic instinct puts
living speech into the mouths of men and women. Politics so monopolise
the minds of Irishmen, newspapers so make up their whole reading, that
the class to which Carleton and the poet Mangan belonged have never
fully entered upon the heritage of English literature. If an English
peasant knows nothing else, he knows the Bible and very likely Bunyan;
but a Roman Catholic population has little commerce with that pure
fountain of style. Genius cannot dispense with models, and Carleton and
Mangan had the worst possible. Yet when it has been said that Carleton
was a half-educated peasant, writing in a language whose best literature
he had not sufficiently assimilated to feel the true value of words, it
remains to be said that he was a great novelist. He cannot be fairly
illustrated by quotation; but read any of his stories and see if he does
not bring up vividly before you Ireland as it was before the famine;
Ireland still swarming with beggars who marched about in families
subsisting chiefly on the charity of the poor; Ireland of which the
hedge-school was plainly to him the most characteristic institution.
Carleton does not stand by himself; he is the head and representative of
a whole class of Irish novelists, among whom John Banim is the best
known name. All of them were peasants who aimed at depicting scenes of
peasant life from their own experience. What one may call the
melodramatic Irish story, in which Lever was so brilliantly successful,
has its first famous example in _The Collegians_ of Gerald Griffin. The
novel has no concern with college life, and is far better described by
its stage-title, _The Colleen Bawn_. Here at least is a man with a story
to tell and no object but to tell it. Griffin belonged to the lay order
of Christian Brothers: his book deals principally with a society no more
familiar to him than was the household of Mr. Rochester to Charlotte
Bronte; and his method recalls the Brontes by its strenuous imagination
and its vehement painting of passion. The tale was suggested by a murder
which excited all Ireland. A young southern squire carried off a girl
with some money, and procured her death by drowning. He was arrested at
his mother's house and a terrible scene took place, terribly rendered in
the book. Griffin, of course, changes the motive; the girl is carried
off not for money but for love, and she is sacrificed to make way for a
stronger passion. Eily O'Connor, the victim, is a pretty and pathetic
figure; the hero-villain Hardress Cregan, and the mother who indirectly
causes the crime, are effective though melodramatic; but the actual
murderer, Danny the Lord, Hardress Cregan's familiar, is worthy of Scott
or Hugo.
In his sketches of society, Hyland Creagh, the duellist, old Cregan, and
the rest, Griffin is describing a state of affairs previous to his own
experience, the Ireland of Sir Jonah Barrington's memoirs; he is not, as
were Carleton and Miss Edgeworth, copying minutely from personal
observation. Herein he resembles Lever who, when all is said and done,
remains the chief, as he is the most Irish, of Irish novelists. It is
true that Lever had two distinct manners: and in his later books he
deals chiefly with contemporary society, drawing largely on his
experiences of diplomatic life. Like most novelists he preferred his
later work; but the books by which he is best known, _Harry Lorrequer_
and the rest, are his earliest productions; and though his maturer skill
was employed on different subjects, he formed his imagination in studies
of the Napoleonic Wars and of a duelling, drinking, bailiff-beating
Ireland. His point of view never altered, and the peculiar attraction of
his writings is always the same. Lever's books have the quality rather
of speech than of writing; wherever you open the pages there is always a
witty, well-informed Irishman discoursing to you, who tells his story
admirably, when he has one to tell, and, failing that, never fails to be
pleasant. Irish talk is apt to be discursive; to rely upon a general
charm diffused through the whole, rather than upon any quotable
brilliancy; its very essence is spontaneity, high spirits, fertility of
resource. That is a fair description of Lever. He is never at a loss. If
his story hangs, off he goes at score with a perfectly irrelevant
anecdote, but told with such enjoyment of the joke that you cannot
resent the digression. Indeed the plots are left pretty much to take
care of themselves; he positively preferred to write his stories in
monthly instalments for a magazine; he is not a conscientious artist,
but he lays himself out to amuse you, and he does it. If he advertises a
character as a wit, he does not labour phrases to describe his
brilliancy; he produces the witticisms. He has been accused of
exaggeration. As regards the incidents, one can only say that the
memoirs of Irish society at the beginning of this century furnish at
least fair warranty for any of his inventions. In character-drawing he
certainly overcharged the traits: but he did so with intention, and by
consistently heightening the tones throughout obtained an artistic
impression, which had life behind it, however ingeniously travestied.
His stories have no unity of action, but through a great diversity of
characters and incidents they maintain their unity of treatment. That is
not the highest ideal of the novel, but it is an intelligible one, not
lacking famous examples; and Lever perfectly understood it.
If one wishes to realise how good an artist Lever was, the best way is
to read his contemporary Samuel Lover. _Handy Andy_ appeared somewhat
later than _Harry Lorrequer_. It is just the difference between good
whiskey and bad whiskey; both are indigenous and therefore
characteristic, but let us be judged by our best. Obviously the men have
certain things in common; great natural vivacity, and an easy cheerful
way of looking at life. Lover can raise a laugh, but his wit is
horseplay except for a few happy phrases. He has no real comedy; there
is nothing in _Handy Andy_ half so ingenious as the story in _Jack
Hinton_ of the way Ulick Bourke acquitted himself of his debt to Father
Tom. And behind all Lever's conventional types there is a real fund of
observation and knowledge which is absolutely wanting in Lover, who
simply lacked the brains to be anything more than a trifler.
A very different talent was that of their younger contemporary J.
Sheridan Le Fanu. The author of _Uncle Silas_ had plenty of solid power;
but his art was too highly specialised. No one ever succeeded better in
two main objects of the story-teller; first, in exciting interest, in
stimulating curiosity by vague hints of some dreadful mystery; and then
in concentrating attention upon a dramatic scene. It is true that,
although an Irishman, he gained his chief successes with stories that
had an English setting; but one of the best, _The House by the
Churchyard_, describes very vividly life at Chapelizod in the days when
this deserted little village, which lies just beyond the Phoenix Park,
was thickly peopled with the families of officers stationed in Dublin.
Yet somehow one does not carry away from the reading of it any picture
of that society; the story is so exciting that the mind has no time to
rest on details, but hurries on from clue to clue till finally and
literally the murder is out. Books which keep a reader on the
tenter-hooks of conjecture must always suffer from this undue
concentration of the interest; and in spite of cheery, inquisitive Dr.
Toole, and the remarkable sketch of Black Dillon, the ruffianly genius
with a reputation only recognised in the hospitals and the police-courts
(a character admirably invented and admirably used in the plot) one can
hardly class Le Fanu among those novelists who have left memorable
presentments of Irish life. It is a pity; for plainly, if the man had
cared less for sensational incident and ingenious construction, he might
have sketched life and character with a strong brush and a kind of grim
realism.
Realism Lever does not aim at: he declines to be on his oath about
anything. What he gives one, vividly enough, is national colour, not
local colour; he is essentially Irish, just as Fielding is essentially
English; but he aims at verisimilitude rather than veracity. The ideal
of the novel has changed since his day. Compare him with the two ladies
who stand out prominently among contemporary writers of Irish fiction,
Miss Jane Barlow and Miss Emily Lawless. To begin with, Lever's stories
are always concerned with the Quality; peasants only come in for an
underplot, or in subordinate parts; and the gentry all through Ireland
resemble one another within reasonable limits. It is different with the
peasantry. In every part of Ireland you will find people who have never
been ten miles away from the place of their birth, and upon whom a local
character is unmistakably stamped. The contemporary novelists delight to
mark these differences, these salient points of singularity; and their
studies are chiefly of the peasantry. They settle down upon some little
corner of the country and never stir out of it. Miss Lawless is not
content to get you Irish character; she must show you a Clare man or an
Arran islander, and she is at infinite pains to point out how his
nature, even his particular actions, are influenced by the place of his
bringing up. Lever avoids this specialisation; he prefers a stone wall
country for his hunting scenes, but beyond that he goes no further into
details. Again Miss Lawless both in _Grania_ and in _Hurrish_ makes you
aware that young Irishmen of Hurrish's class are curiously indifferent
to female beauty. Lever will have none of that: his Irishman must be "a
divil with the girls," although Lever is no sentimentalist, and does not
talk of love matches among the Irish peasantry.
The greatest divergence of all, however, is in the temper attributed to
the Irish. Lever makes them gay, Miss Lawless and Miss Barlow make them
sad. No one denies that sadness is nearer the reality, but it is
unreasonable to call Lever insincere. Naturally careless and
lighthearted he does not trouble himself with the riddle of the painful
world; the distress which touches him most nearly is a distress for
debt. But if Lever is not realistic he is natural; he follows the law
of his nature as an artist should; he sees life through his own medium;
and if books are to be valued as companions, not many of them are better
company than _Charles O'Malley_ or _Lord Kilgobbin_; for first and last
Lever was always himself.
Yet, I must own it, it does not do to read Lever soon after Miss Barlow.
Her stories of Lisconnel and its folk have a tragic dignity wholly out
of his range. It is a sad-coloured country she writes of, gray and
brown; sodden brown with bog water, gray with rock cropping up through
the fields; the only brightness is up overhead in the heavens, and even
they are often clouded. These sombre hues, with the passing gleam of
something above them, reflect themselves in every page of her books. She
renders that complete harmony between the people and their surroundings
which is only seen in working folk whose clothes are stained with the
colour of the soil they live by, and whose lives assimilate themselves
to its character. She has a fineness of touch, a poetry, to which no
other Irish story-teller has attained.
Yet, Miss Barlow has never succeeded with a regular novel: and she may
have been only a forerunner. All great writers proceed from a school,
and there does exist now undeniably a school of Irish literature which
differs from Miss Edgeworth in being strongly tinged with the element of
Celtic romance, from Carleton in possessing an admirable standard of
style, and from Lever in aiming at a sincere and vital portraiture of
Irish life.
1897.
A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR.
In a preface to the French translation of Sienkiewicz's works, M. de
Wyzewa, the well-known critic, himself a Pole, makes a suggestive
comparison between the Polish and the Russian natures. The Pole, he
says, is quicker, wittier, more imaginative, more studious of beauty,
less absorbed in the material world than the Russian--in a word,
infinitely more gifted with the artistic temperament; and yet in every
art the Russian has immeasurably outstripped the Pole. His explanation,
if not wholly convincing, is at least suggestive. The Poles are a race
of dreamers, and the dreamer finds his reward in himself. He does not
seek to conquer the world with arms or with commerce, with tears or with
laughter; neither money tempts him nor fame, and the strenuous,
unremitting application which success demands, whether in war, business,
or the arts, is alien to his being.
The same observation and the same reasoning apply with equal force to
the English and the Irish. No one who has lived in the two countries
will deny that the Irish are apparently the more gifted race; no one can
deny, if he has knowledge and candour, that the English have
accomplished a great deal more, the Irish a great deal less. Nowhere is
this more evident than in the productions of that faculty which Irishmen
have always been reputed, and justly reputed, to possess in peculiar
measure--the faculty of humour. Compare Lever, who for a long time
passed as the typical Irish humorist, with his contemporaries Thackeray
and Dickens. The comparison is not fair, but it suggests the central
fact that the humour of Irish literature is deficient in depth, in
intellectual quality, or, to put it after an Irish fashion, in gravity.
'Humorous' is a word as question-begging as 'artistic,' and he would be
a rash man who should try to define either. But so much as this will
readily be admitted, that humour is a habit of mind essentially complex,
involving always a double vision--a reference from the public or normal
standard of proportion to one that is private and personal. The humorist
refuses to part with any atom of his own personality, he stamps it on
whatever comes from him. "If reasons were as plenty as blackberries,"
says Falstaff, achieving individuality by the same kind of odd
picturesque comparison as every witty Irish peasant uses in talk, to the
delight of himself and his hearers. But the individuality lies deeper
than phrases: Falstaff takes his private standard into battle with him.
There is nothing more obviously funny than the short paunchy man, let us
not say cowardly, but disinclined to action, who finds himself engaged
in a fight. Lever has used him a score of times (beginning with Mr.
O'Leary in the row at a gambling-hall in Paris), and whether he runs or
whether he fights, his efforts to do either are grotesquely laughable.
Shakespeare puts that view of Falstaff too: Prince Hal words it. But
Falstaff, the humorist in person, rises on the field of battle over the
slain Percy and enunciates his philosophy of the better part of valour.
Falstaff's estimate of honour--"that word honour" ("Who hath it? he that
died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it?"), the "grinning honour" that Sir
Walter Blunt wears where the Douglas left him--is necessary to complete
the humorist's vision of a battle-piece. Lever will scarcely visit you
with such reflections, for the humorist of Lever's type never stands
apart and smiles; he laughs loud and in company. Still less will he give
you one of those speeches which are the supreme achievement of this
faculty, where the speaker's philosophy is not reasoned out liked
Falstaff's, but revealed in a flash of the onlooker's insight. Is it
pardonable to quote the account of Falstaff's death as the hostess
narrates it?
"How now, Sir John, quoth I, what, man! be of good cheer. So a'
cried out God, God, three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid
him a' should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to
trouble himself with any such thoughts yet."
Humour can go no farther than that terrible, illuminating phrase, which
is laughable enough, heaven knows, but scarce likely to make you laugh.
Contrast the humour of that with the humour of such a story as Lever
delighted in. There were two priests dining with a regiment, we all have
read in _Harry Lorrequer_, who chaffed a dour Ulster Protestant till he
was the open derision of the mess. Next time they returned, the
Protestant major was radiant with a geniality that they could not
explain till they had to make their way out of barracks in a hurry, and
found that the countersign (arranged by the major) was "Bloody end to
the Pope." Told as Lever tells it, with all manner of jovial
amplifications, that story would make anyone laugh. But it does not go
deep. The thing is funny in too obvious a way; the mirth finds too large
an outlet in laughter; it does not hang about the brain, inextricable
from the processes of thought; it carries nothing with it beyond the
jest. And just as tears help to an assuaging of grief, so in a sense
laughter makes an end of mirth. Give a feeling its instinctive vent, and
you will soon be done with it, like the child who laughs and cries
within five minutes; check it, and it spreads inward, gaining in
intellectual quality as it loses in physical expression. The moral is,
that if you wish to be really humorous you must not be too funny; and
the capital defect of most Irish humour is that its aim is too
simple--it does not look beyond raising a laugh.
There are brilliant exceptions in the century that lies between Sheridan
and Mr. Bernard Shaw, between Maria Edgeworth and Miss Barlow. But
serious art or serious thought in Ireland has always revealed itself to
the English sooner or later as a species of sedition, and the Irish have
with culpable folly allowed themselves to accept for characteristic
excellences what were really the damning defects of their work--an easy
fluency of wit, a careless spontaneity of laughter. They have taken
Moore for a great poet, and Handy Andy for a humorist to be proud of.
Yet an Irishman who wishes to speak dispassionately must find humour of
a very different kind from that of _Handy Andy_ or _Harry Lorrequer_
either, to commend without reserve, as a thing that may be put forward
to rank with what is best in other literatures.
Taking Sheridan and Miss Edgeworth as marking the point of departure, it
becomes obvious that one is an end, the other at a beginning. Sheridan
belongs body and soul to the eighteenth century; Miss Edgeworth, though
her name sounds oddly in that context, is part and parcel of the
romantic movement. The "postscript which ought to have been a preface"
to _Waverley_ declared, though after Scott's magnificent fashion, a real
indebtedness. Sheridan's humour, essentially metropolitan, had found no
use for local colour; Miss Edgeworth before Scott proved the artistic
value that could be extracted from the characteristics of a special
breed of people under special circumstances in a special place. Mr.
Yeats, who, like all poets, is a most suggestive and a most misleading
critic, has declared that modern Irish literature begins with Carleton.
That is only true if we are determined to look in Irish literature for
qualities that can be called Celtic--if we insist that the outlook on
the world shall be the Catholic's or the peasant's. Miss Edgeworth had
not a trace of the Celt--as I conceive that rather indefinite
entity--about her; but she was as good an Irish woman as ever walked,
and there are hundreds of Irish people of her class and creed looking at
Irish life with kindly humorous Irish eyes, seeing pretty much what she
saw, enjoying it as she enjoyed it, but with neither her power nor her
will to set it down. _Castle Rackrent_ is a masterpiece; and had Miss
Edgeworth been constant to the dramatic method which she then struck out
for herself, with all the fine reticences that it involved, her name
might have stood high in literature. Unhappily, her too exemplary father
repressed the artist in her, fostered the pedagogue, and in her later
books she commits herself to an attitude in which she can moralise
explicitly upon the ethical and social bearings of every word and
action. The fine humour in _Ormond_ is obscured by its setting; in
_Castle Rackrent_ the humour shines. Sir Condy and his lady we see none
the less distinctly for seeing them through the eyes of old Thady, the
retainer who narrates the Rackrent history; and in the process we have a
vision of old Thady himself. Now and then the novelist reminds us of her
presence by some extravagantly ironic touch, as when Thady describes Sir
Condy's anger with the Government "about a place that was promised him
and never given, after his supporting them against his conscience very
honourably and being greatly abused for, he having the name of a great
patriot in the country." Thady would hardly have been so ingenuous as
that. But for the most part the humour is truly inherent in the
situation, and you might look far for a better passage than the
description of Sir Condy's parting with his lady. But it is better to
illustrate from a scene perhaps less genuinely humorous, but more
professedly so--Sir Condy's wake. Miss Edgeworth does not dwell on the
broad farce of the entertainment; she does not make Thady eloquent over
the whisky that was drunk and the fighting that began and so forth, as
Lever or Carleton would certainly have been inclined to do. She fixes on
the central comedy of the situation, Sir Condy's innocent vanity and its
pitiable disappointment--is it necessary to recall that he had arranged
for the wake himself, because he always wanted to see his own funeral?
Poor Sir Condy!--even Thady, who was in the secret, had forgotten all
about him, when he was startled by the sound of his master's voice from
under the greatcoats thrown all atop.