can't hear a word of all they're saying of the deceased.' 'God
bless you, and lie still and quiet a bit longer,' says I, 'for my
sister's afraid of ghosts, and would die on the spot with fright if
she was to see you come to life all on a sudden this way without
the least preparation.' So he lays him still, though well-nigh
stifled, and I made haste to tell the secret of the joke,
whispering to one and t'other, and there was a great surprise, but
not so great as he had laid out there would. 'And aren't we to have
the pipes and tobacco after coming so far to-night?' said some one;
but they were all well enough pleased when his honour got up to
drink with them, and sent for more spirits from a shebeen house
where they very civilly let him have it upon credit. So the night
passed off very merrily; but to my mind Sir Condy was rather upon
the sad order in the midst of it all, not finding there had been
such great talk about himself after his death as that he had always
expected to hear."
In the end Sir Condy died, not by special arrangement. "He had but a
poor funeral after all," is Thady's remark; and you see with the kindly
double vision of the humorist Thady's sincere regret for the
circumstance that would most have afflicted the deceased, as well as the
more obviously comic side of Thady's comment and Sir Condy's lifelong
aspiration. Indeed, the whole narrative is shot with many meanings, and
one never turns to it without a renewed faculty of laughter.
If it were necessary to compare true humour with the make-believe, a
comparison might be drawn between Thady and the servant in Lady Morgan's
novel _O'Donnell_. Rory is the stage Irishman in all his commonest
attitudes. But it is better to go straight on, and concern ourselves
solely with the work of real literary quality, and Carleton falls next
to be considered.
Of genius with inadequate equipment it is always difficult to speak.
Carleton is the nearest thing to Burns that we have to show; and his
faults, almost insuperable to the ordinary reader, are the faults which
Burns seldom failed to display when writing in English. But to Burns
there was given an instrument perfected by long centuries of use--the
Scotch vernacular song and ballad; Carleton had to make his own, and the
genius for form was lacking in him. Some day there may come a man of
pure Irish race who will be to Carleton what Burns was to Ferguson, and
then Ireland will have what it lacks; moreover, in the light of his
achievement we shall see better what the pioneer accomplished. Every
gift that Carleton had--and pathos and humour, things complementary to
each other, he possessed in profusion--every gift is obscured by faulty
technique. Nearly every trait is overcharged; for instance, in his story
of the _Midnight Mass_ he rings the changes interminably upon the old
business of the wonderful medicine in the vagrants' blessed horn that
had a strong odour of whisky; but what an admirably humorous figure is
this same Darby O'More! Out of the _Poor Scholar_ alone, that inchoate
masterpiece, you could illustrate a dozen phases of Carleton's mirth,
beginning with the famous sermon where the priest so artfully wheedles
and coaxes his congregation into generosity towards the boy who is going
out on the world, and all the while unconsciously displays his own
laughable and lovable weaknesses. There you have the double vision, that
helps to laugh with the priest, and to laugh at him in the same breath,
as unmistakably as in the strange scene of the famine days where the
party of mowers find Jimmy sick of the fever by the wayside and "schame
a day" from their employer to build him a rough shelter. That whole
chapter, describing the indefatigable industry with which they labour
on the voluntary task, their glee in the truantry from the labour for
which they are paid, their casuistry over the theft of milk for the
pious purpose of keeping the poor lad alive, the odd blending of
cowardice and magnanimity in their terror of the sickness and in their
constant care that some one should at least be always in earshot of the
boy, ready to pass in to him on a long-handed shovel what food they
could scrape up, their supple ingenuity in deceiving the pompous
landlord who comes to oversee their work,--all that is the completest
study in existence of Irish character as it came to be under the system
of absolute dependence. There is nothing so just as true humour, for by
the law of its being it sees inevitably two sides; and this strange
compound of vices and virtues, so rich in all the softer qualities, so
lacking in all the harder ones, stands there in Carleton's pages,
neither condemned nor justified, but seen and understood with a kindly
insight. Carleton is the document of documents for Ireland in the years
before the famine, preserving a record of conditions material and
spiritual, which happily have largely ceased to exist, yet operate
indefinitely as causes among us, producing eternal though eternally
modifiable effects.
But, for the things in human nature that are neither of yesterday,
to-day, nor to-morrow, but unchangeable, he has the humorist's true
touch. When the poor scholar is departing, and has actually torn himself
away from home, his mother runs after him with a last token--a small
bottle of holy water. "Jimmy, alanna," said she, "here's this an' carry
it about you--it will keep evil from you; an' be sure to take good care
of the written characther you got from the priest an' Squire Benson;
an', darlin', don't be lookin' too often at the cuff o' your coat, for
feard the people might get a notion that you have the banknotes sewed in
it. An', Jimmy agra, don't be too lavish upon their Munsther crame; they
say 'tis apt to give people the ague. Kiss me agin, agra, an' the
heavens above keep you safe and well till we see you once more."
Through all that catalogue of precautions, divine and human, one feels
the mood between tears and laughter of the man who set it down. But I
think you only come to the truth about Carleton in the last scene of
all, when Jimmy returns to his home, a priest. Nothing could be more
stilted, more laboured, than the pages which attempt to render his
emotions and his words, till there comes the revealing touch. His mother
at sight of him, returned unlooked-for after the long absence, loses for
a moment the possession of her faculties, and cannot be restored. At
last, "I will speak to her," said Jimmy, "in Irish; it will go directly
to her heart." And it does.
Carleton never could speak to us in Irish; the English was still a
strange tongue on his lips and in the ears of those he lived among; and
his work comes down distracted between the two languages, imperfect and
halting, only with flashes of true and living speech.
When you come to Lever, it is a very different story. Lever was at no
lack for utterance; nobody was ever more voluble, no one ever less
inclined to sit and bite his pen, waiting for the one and only word.
Good or bad, he could be trusted to rattle on; and, as Trollope said, if
you pulled him out of bed and demanded something witty, he would flash
it at you before he was half awake. Some people are born with the
perilous gift of improvisation; and the best that can be said for Lever
is that he is the nearest equivalent in Irish literature, or in English
either, to the marvellous faculty of D'Artagnan's creator. He has the
same exuberance, the same inexhaustible supply of animal spirits, of
invention that is always spirited, of wit that goes off like fireworks.
He delighted a whole generation of readers, and one reader at least in
this generation he still delights; but I own that to enjoy him you must
have mastered the art of skipping. Whether you take him in his earlier
manner, in the "Charles O'Malley" vein of adventure, fox-hunting,
steeple-chasing, Peninsular fighting, or in his later more intellectual
studies of shady financiers, needy political adventurers, and the whole
generation of usurers and blacklegs, he is always good; but alas and
alas, he is never good enough. His work is rotten with the disease of
anecdote; instead of that laborious concentration on a single character
which is necessary for any kind of creative work, but above all for
humorous creation, he presents you with a sketch, a passing glimpse, and
when you look to see the suggestion followed out he is off at score with
a story. In the first chapter of _Davenport Dunn_, for instance, there
is an Irish gentleman on the Continent, a pork-butcher making his first
experience of Italy, hit off to the life. But a silhouette--and a very
funny silhouette--is all that we get of Mr. O'Reilly, and the figures
over whom Lever had taken trouble--for in that work Lever did take
trouble--are not seen with humour. Directly he began to think, his
humour left him; it is as if he had been funny in watertight
compartments. And perhaps that is why, here as elsewhere, he shrank from
the necessary concentration of thought.
There is always a temptation to hold a brief for Lever, because he has
been most unjustly censured by Irishmen, even in so august and impartial
a court as the _Dictionary of National Biography_, as if he had traduced
his countrymen. Did Thackeray, then, malign the English? The only charge
that may fairly be brought against him is the one that cannot be
rebutted--the charge of superficiality and of scamped work, of a humour
that only plays over the surface of things--a humour which sees only the
comic side that anybody might see. And because I cannot defend him, I
say no more. Lever is certainly not a great humorist, but he is
delightful company.
One may mention in passing the excursions into broad comedy of another
brilliant Irishman--Le Fanu's short stories in the _Purcell Papers_,
such as the _Quare Gander_, or _Billy Molowney's Taste of Love and
Glory_. These are good examples of a particular literary type--the
humorous anecdote--in which Irish humour has always been fertile, and of
which the _ne plus ultra_ is Sir Samuel Ferguson's magnificent squib in
Blackwood, _Father Tom and the Pope_. Everybody knows the merits of that
story, its inexhaustible fertility of comparison, its dialectic
ingenuity, its jovialty, its drollery, its Rabelaisian laughter. But,
after all, the highest type of humour is humour applying itself to the
facts of life, and this is burlesque humour squandering itself in riot
upon a delectable fiction. Humour is a great deal more than a
plaything; it is a force, a weapon--at once sword and shield. If there
is to be an art of literature in Ireland that can be called national, it
cannot afford to devote humour solely to the production of trifles.
_Father Tom_ is a trifle, a splendid toy; and what is more, a trifle
wrought in a moment of ease by perhaps the most serious and
conscientious artist that ever made a contribution to the small body of
real Irish literature in the tongue that is now native to the majority
of Irishmen.
Of contemporaries, with one exception, I do not propose to speak at any
length, nor can I hope that my review will be complete. There is first
and foremost Miss Barlow, a lady whose work is so gentle, so unassuming,
that one hears little of it in the rush and flare of these strident
times, but who will be heard and listened to with fresh emotion as the
stream is heard when the scream and rattle of a railway train have
passed away into silence. Is she a humorist? Not in the sense of
provoking laughter--and yet the things that she sees and loves and
dwells on would be unbearable if they were not seen through a delicate
mist of mirth. The daily life of people at continual handgrips with
starvation, their little points of honour, their little questions of
precedence, the infinite generosity that concerns itself with the
expenditure of six-pence, the odd shifts they resort to that a gift may
not have the appearance of charity,--all these are set down with a
tenderness of laughter that is peculiarly and distinctively Irish.
Yet, though we may find a finer quality of humour in those writers who
do not seek to raise a laugh--for instance, the subtle pervasive humour
in Mr. Yeats's _Celtic Twilight_--still there are few greater
attractions than that of open healthy laughter of the contagious sort;
and it would be black ingratitude not to pay tribute to the authoresses
of _Some Experiences of an Irish R.M._--a book that no decorous person
can read with comfort in a railway carriage. These ladies have the
keenest eye for the obvious humours of Irish life, they have abundance
of animal spirits, and they have that knack at fluent description
embroidered with a wealth of picturesque details that is shared by
hundreds of peasants in Ireland, but is very rare indeed on the printed
page. And, mingling with the broad farce there is a deal of excellent
comedy--for instance, in the person of old Mrs. Knox of Aussolas. But
there is the same point to insist on--and since these witty and
delightful ladies have already the applause of all the world one insists
less unwillingly--this kind of thing, admirable as it is, will not
redeem Irish humour from the reproach of trifling. But in the novel,
_The Real Charlotte_, there is humour as grim almost as Swift's--and as
completely un-English; it is a humour which assuredly stirs more
faculties than the simple one of laughter.
There is indeed a literature which, if not always exactly humorous, is
closely allied to it--the literature of satire and invective; and in
this Ireland has always been prolific. In the days of the old kings the
order of bards had grown so numerous, that they comprised a third of the
whole population, and they devoted themselves with such talent and zeal
to the task of invective that no man could live in peace, and the
country cried out against them, and there was talk of suppressing the
whole order. The king spared them on condition that they would mend
their manners. We have those bards still, but nowadays we call them
politicians and journalists; and frankly I think we are ripe for another
intervention, if only in the interests of literature. So much good
talent goes to waste in bad words; and, moreover, an observance of the
decencies is always salutary for style. And it seems that as the years
have gone on, humour has diminished in Irish politics, while bad humour
has increased; and therefore I leave alone any attempt to survey the
humour of the orators, though Curran tempts one at the beginning and Mr.
Healy at the close. Of purely literary satire there has been little
enough, apart from its emergence in the novel; but there is one example
which deserves to be recalled. I have never professed enthusiasm for
Thomas Moore, but I am far indeed from agreeing with a recent critic who
would claim literary rank for him rather in virtue of the _Fudge Family_
than of the Irish Melodies. That satire does not seem to get beyond
brilliancy; it is very clever, and not much more. Still, there are
passages in it which cannot be read without enjoyment; and one quotation
may be permitted, since it puts with perfect distinctness what it is
always permissible to put--the English case against Ireland.
I'm a plain man who speak the truth.
And trust you'll think me not uncivil
When I declare that from my youth
I've wished your country at the devil.
Nor can I doubt indeed from all
I've heard of your high patriot fame,
From every word your lips let fall,
That you most truly wish the same.
It plagues one's life out; thirty years
Have I had dinning in my ears--
Ireland wants this and that and t'other;
And to this hour one nothing hears
But the same vile eternal bother.
While of those countless things she wanted,
Thank God, but little has been granted.
The list of writers of humorous verse in Ireland is a long one, but a
catalogue of ephemera. Even Father Prout at this time of day is little
more than a dried specimen labelled for reference, or at most preserved
in vitality by the immortal _Groves of Blarney_. But neither that work,
nor even _The Night before Larry was stretched_, nor Le Fanu's ballad of
_Shemus O'Brien_, can rank altogether as literature. About the humorous
song I need only say that, so far as my experience goes, there is one,
and one only, which a person with no taste for music and some taste for
literature can hear frequently with pleasure, and that song of course is
_Father O'Flynn_. To recall the delightful ingenuity and the nimble wit
shown by another Irishman of the same family in the _Hawarden Horace_,
and in a lesser degree by Mr. Godley in his _Musa Frivola_, leads
naturally to the inquiry why humour from Aristophanes to Carlyle has
always preferred the side of reaction--a question that would need an
essay, or a volume, all to itself.
But the central question is after all why in a race where humour is so
preponderant in the racial temperament does so little of the element
crystallise itself in literature. Humour ranks with the water power as
one of the great undeveloped resources of the country. Something indeed
has been done in the past with the river of laughter that almost every
Irish person has flowing in his heart; but infinitely more might be
done if these rivers were put in harness.
Yet, take away two Irish names from the field of modern comedy in the
English language written during the nineteenth century, and you have
uncommonly little for which literary merit can be claimed. The quality
of Oscar Wilde's is scarcely disputed. There is the more reason to dwell
on Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays, because they have not even in the twentieth
century been fully accepted by that queer folk, the theatre-going
public. But I never yet heard of anyone who saw _You Never can Tell_,
and was not amused by it. That was a farce, no doubt, but a farce which
appealed to emotions less elementary than those which are touched by the
spectacle of a man sitting down by accident on his hat; it was a farce
of intellectual absurdities, of grotesque situations arising out of
perversities of character and opinion; a farce that you could laugh at
without a loss of self-respect. But it is rather by his comedies than by
his farces that Mr. Shaw should be judged. If they are not popular, it
is for a very good reason: Mr. Shaw's humour is too serious. His humour
is a strong solvent, and one of the many things about which this
humorist is in deadly earnest is the fetish worship of tradition. To
that he persists in applying--in _Candida_ as in half a dozen other
plays--the ordeal by laughter--an ordeal which every human institution
is bound to face. _Candida_ will not only make people laugh, it will
make them think; and it is not easy to induce the public to think after
dinner on unaccustomed lines. They will laugh when they have been used
to laugh, weep when they have been used to weep; but if you ask them to
laugh when they expect to weep, or _vice versa_, the public will resent
the proceeding. The original humorist, like every other original artist,
has got slowly and laboriously to convert his public before he can
convince them of his right to find tears and laughter where he can.
Whatever Mr. Shaw touches, whether it be the half-hysterical impulse
that sometimes passes current for heroism, as in _Arms and the Man_, or,
as in the _Devil's Disciple_, the conventional picturesqueness of a Don
Juan--that maker of laws, breaker of hearts, so familiar with the
limelight, so unused to the illumination by laughter, who finds himself
in the long run deplorably stigmatised as a saint--there is a flood of
light let in upon all manner of traditional poses, literary
insincerities that have crept into life. There are few things of more
value in a commonwealth than such a searching faculty of laughter. Like
Sheridan, Mr. Shaw lives in England, and uses his comic gift for the
most part on subjects suggested to him by English conditions of life,
but with a strength of intellectual purpose that Sheridan never
possessed. Irishmen may wish that he found his material in Ireland. But
an artist must take what his hand finds, and there is no work in the
world more full of the Scottish spirit or the Scottish humour than
Carlyle's _French Revolution_. If it be asked whether Mr. Shaw's humour
is typically Irish, I must reply by another question: "Could his plays
have conceivably been written by any but an Irishman?"
Is there, in fact, a distinctively Irish humour? In a sense, yes, no
doubt, just as the English humour is of a different quality from the
Greek or the French. But nobody wants to pin down English humour to the
formula of a definition; no one wants to say, Thus far shalt thou go,
and beyond that shalt cease to be English. Moreover, a leading
characteristic of the Irish type is just its variety--its continual
deviation from the normal. How, then, to find a description that will
apply to a certain quality of mind throughout a variable race; that
quality being in its essence the most complete expression of an
individuality, in its difference from other individualities, since a
man's humour is the most individual thing about him? Description is
perhaps more possible than definition. One may say that the Irish humour
is kindly and lavish; that it tends to express itself in an exuberance
of phrase, a wild riot of comparisons; that it amplifies rather than
retrenches, finding its effects by an accumulation of traits, and not by
a concentration. The vernacular Irish literature is there to prove that
Irish fancy gives too much rather than too little. One may observe,
again, that a nation laughs habitually over its besetting weakness; and
if the French find their mirth by preference in dubious adventures, it
cannot be denied that much Irish humour has a pronounced alcoholic
flavour. But it is better neither to define nor to describe; there is
more harmful misunderstanding caused by setting down this or that
quality, this or that person, as typically French, typically English,
typically Irish, than by any other fallacy; and we Irish have suffered
peculiarly by the notion that the typical Irishman is the funny man of
the empire. What I would permit myself to assert is, first, that the
truest humour is not just the light mirth that comes easily from the
lips--that, in the hackneyed phrase, bubbles over spontaneously--but is
the expression of deep feeling and deep thought, made possible by deep
study of the means to express it; and secondly, that literature, which
through the earlier part of last century never received in Ireland the
laborious brooding care without which no considerable work of art is
possible, now receives increasingly the artist's labour; and
consequently that among our later humorists we find a faculty of mirth
that lies deeper, reaches farther, judges more subtly, calls into light
a wider complex of relations. After all, laughter is the most
distinctive faculty of man; and I submit that, so far as literature
shows, we Irish can better afford to be judged by our laughter now than
a century ago.
1901.
LITERATURE AMONG THE ILLITERATES
I
THE SHANACHY
There is nothing better known about Ireland than this fact: that
illiteracy is more frequent among the Irish Catholic peasantry than in
any other class of the British population; and that especially upon the
Irish-speaking peasant does the stigma lie. Yet it is, perhaps, as well
to inquire a little more precisely what is meant by an illiterate. If to
be literate is to possess a knowledge of the language, literature, and
historical traditions of a man's own country--and this is no very
unreasonable application of the word--then this Irish-speaking peasantry
has a better claim to the title than can be shown by most bodies of men.
I have heard the existence of an Irish literature denied by a roomful of
prosperous educated gentlemen; and, within a week, I have heard, in the
same county, the classics of that literature recited by an Irish peasant
who could neither write nor read. On which part should the stigma of
illiteracy set the uglier brand?