organization, which gives them their _improvisatori_, is perhaps in
precise opposition to the necessary qualifications of a _raconteur_. The
sure, rapid, deep, but careless touching-off, which gives colloquial
narration its charm and spirit, the imitative humour, inevitable mimicry,
appropriate gesticulations, changeful accent, and vivid conception, of
the fact or scene related, require quite another sort of _physique_
from that which forms the slow, solemn declaimer, and oracular
_improvisatore_—who looks all in the clouds, warming his fancy with
unearthly fires, and arranging his ready-made phrases and conventional
rhymes, with eyes up-raised, and glance of fanciful abstraction—apart,
and beyond all the graphic realities of life. Even in conversation,
the Italians are more impressive than agreeable—more passionate than
witty;—they talk in sentences _à longue haleine_, and forget that the
world was made in six days—the first and greatest lesson given by
Providence on the value of time, even within view of eternity!
The Italians complain of the disproportionate number of _seccatori_
(_Anglice_, bores) which creep into their circles; without accounting
for the circumstance. But men who by their religion and institutions,
are forbidden to think freely, or to discuss those great questions
which concern the main facts of life, must be tied down to matters of
minor importance. They are impelled to substitute words for deeds, and
are rendered feeble, in their intellectual intercourse, because they
are false in their political position. Still “their stars are more in
fault than they.” Boccaccio was no bad _raconteur_; Ariosto knew how to
relate; and from the _novellisti_ of the free states of Italy in her
glorious middle ages, Chaucer and Shakspeare borrowed their most humorous
details. Strong and stirring combinations will always produce striking
and graphic delineations.
But of all the _raconteurs_ in the world, (the French excepted)—they,
whose own story is so lamentable to relate, and so piteous to hear,—the
poor Irish are the most humorous and amusing. So many causes, physical
and political, have conspired to form and finish this talent in the
Irish, that it would be irrelevant to the lightness of the present theme
to enter on them. It is a curious fact, that Ireland, like France, had
her _conteurs_, from the earliest periods; who, by the significant name
of Dres-beartagh[18] (story-tellers), made a part of the establishment
of great families down to the latter end of the 16th century. “The great
men of their septs,” says Sir W. Temple, “among the many offices of their
establishment, which continued always in the same family, had not only
a physician and a poet, but a tale-teller. A very gallant gentleman of
the north has told me, of his own experience, that in his wolf-huntings
there, when he used to be in the mountains three or four days together,
and lay very ill at nights, so that he could not well sleep, they would
bring him one of these story-tellers, who, when he lay down, would begin
a tale of a king, or a giant, or a dwarf and a damsel, and such rambling
stuff; and continue it, all night long, in such an even tone, that one
heard it going on whenever one awaked.”
This is not precisely the effect that a modern _raconteur_ would like
to produce. But the talent, the gift, was there; and the whole scene
connected with it, the wolf-hunter, the mountains, and the story-teller,
are all curious and picturesque, and not a little illustrative of the
wild and primitive state of Ireland, even down to the times of Sir
William Temple, the patron and master of Swift.
One of the last Irish _conteurs_ by profession was still living about
thirty years ago, in the county of Galway, and the fame of Cormac Common
the _Fin-sgealaighthe_ or _Dres-beartagh_, the “man of talk,” has not
yet passed away in that province, which is still the repertory of all
that is most national in Ireland. Blind, poor, but gifted, Cormac early
adopted a profession consonant to his position and his endowments. The
tale he narrated, and the genealogical illustrations which he picked up
in his wanderings, and which he eloquently adorned, were his passports
alike to the mansions of the great, and to the cabin of the lonely—his
letter of credit on the festivities of the wake, and his billet on the
hospitality of the fair. He was a poet also, no less than a story-teller;
and we owe to him the oft-told and beautiful tale of Ellen na Roon,
which he threw into verse, and adapted to an air of his own composition.
More than one Italian Syren has owed the enthusiastic raptures she has
inspired in an Irish audience, to the notes of poor Cormac.
I remember telling Madame Catalani, when she was paying me a morning
visit in Dublin, that I did not like the manner in which she had the
night before jerked out the last notes in “Johnny Adair;”—that the air
was not Scotch, but Irish, (of which its smooth, flowing melody, in
regular progression, so characteristic of Irish music, was a proof). We
went to the piano-forte; and I gave our Irish way of singing the passage.
Madame Catalani tried it—liked it, but doubted that the air was Irish. To
satisfy her doubts, I gave her its history, with the birth, parentage,
and education of Cormac, its composer; and a sketch of the story of its
subject, pretty Ellen Kavanagh, into the bargain. Her charming _naïveté_
was instantly under arms; she would have the story in French; and when
I had done it, I was quite surprised to find how well the loves and
sorrows of Caroll O’Daly and Ellen O’Kavenah, with all the Irish idioms,
and grating gutturals, could be translated into the precise phrases
of “_Messieurs les quarante_.” True passion is translatable into all
languages; with conventional feelings it is quite the reverse.
Cormac Common told his stories in prose. His verses he recited to
a sweet, wild recitative, whose modulations are said to have been
diversified by cadences of peculiar beauty.
“In rehearsing any of Oisin (or Ossian), or any composition in verse,”
says one of the most accomplished of his surviving auditors, Sir William
Ouseley, “he chaunts them pretty much in the same manner as our
cathedral service.”
The national endowment, which once gave a rank, still exists in
Ireland in an eminent degree; though no longer, as of old, bestowing
an hereditary _grade_. It is chiefly confined, however, to the “mere
Irish,” whose temperament lends itself to receive impressions with
force, and to give them out with felicity. While the mixed race of
Cromwellian colonists and Scotch undertakers preserves the even tenor
of its way, “sober, steadfast, and demure,” and takes the route which
in Ireland “leads on to fortune,”—the more sensitive descendant of the
aborigines—alive to every external form, and colouring every fact with
the glowing medium of his mind—led more by fancy than by interest, and
satisfied with the social apotheosis produced by social endowments,—lives
too often for the amusement of others, rather than for his own
advancement. Who that remembers Edward Lysaght will not apply to him this
assertion, so applicable to his genius and to his fate?
It is certainly amongst the most Irish members of Irish society, that
the best _raconteurs_ are still to be found; and it is among the many
privations inflicted upon those English officials, who are sent to
administer our proconsular government, that they have been restricted
to the same dull round of office society, as had stupified their
predecessors,—a society into which the wit and humour of the natives are
so rarely permitted to penetrate. What yawnings might have been spared
to bored vice-roys, and to listless secretaries, had they been allowed
to throw open their _salons_ to that humour and colloquial vivacity,
so long proscribed by the ascendancy! However powerful at the bar, and
eloquent in the senate Irish intellect may appear, it is only under the
influence of social feelings that Irish spirit kindles into its brightest
lights. It is in the collision of social contact that it strikes out its
most sparkling emanations. In the sanctuary of private intercourse, its
reckless confidence and careless gaiety suspect no treachery and know no
restraint. Even penal laws are forgotten, under the sacred protection of
the law of hospitality; and those, disqualified by religion for the dull
routine of office, prove their claims by nature to the highest ranks in
the great commonwealth of wit.
Whoever has read those delightful Irish articles, which give such _éclat_
to the most fashionable and popular of British periodicals,—whoever has
laughed or wept over those pages of mingled pathos and humour, its Irish
sketches,—or has chatted with Canova and Cammucini on the arts of Rome,
in the same miscellany, would find those delineations cold and feeble,
could he witness the superior animation, with which I heard them given,
_vivâ voce_, at our own round table of ten. There, the narrators added
to the raciness of Irish humour, the high finish of dramatic mobility,
the tone, the look, the accent, which constitute the merit of a well-told
tale, but which will not print. To judge of this natural gift in all
its felicity, it were well to become the auditor of one, whom it is a
boast to know,[19]—who, whether he tells his humorous Irish story round
the festive board of his own paternal mansion in Kildare, or, in his
pretty hotel in the _Chaussée d’Antin_, relates his anecdote, in French,
rivalling the _purisme_ of Madame de Genlis, to the delight of listening
academicians, and the envy of professed _beaux esprits_, still most
happily illustrates that description of a _raconteur_, which he who has
left no subject untouched, and was himself the best of story-tellers, has
bequeathed to posterity—
“A merrier man,
Within the limit of becoming mirth,
I never spent an hour’s talk withal.
His eye begets occasion for his wit,
For every object that the one doth catch
The other turns to a mirth-moving jest;
Which his fair tongue (conceit’s expositor)
Delivers in such apt and gracious words,
That aged ears play truant to his tales,
And younger hearings are quite ravished:
So sweet and voluble is his discourse.”
ETERNITY.
A collection of the opinions and desires of individuals, respecting
eternity, would afford good food for meditation. The desire for existence
beyond the grave is an almost inevitable consequence of the organic
desire to live in the flesh; yet few would relish an eternity of the life
they now lead, or even consent to retrace the past. Horne Tooke was among
these few, and was so satisfied with his mortal career, as to wish its
repetition in a perpetually recurring series. One day at dinner, he said,
“A little Brentford election—a little trial for high treason (though, on
another occasion, he said he would plead guilty, rather than undergo a
second speech from the Attorney General)—a little contest with Junius—a
little everything, down to the hare upon the table.”
This, however, was the sentiment of a man refreshed by good cheer, and
enlivened by good wine; and the philosophy of the dinner-table is always
suspicious. One must appeal from “Philip drunk to Philip sober,” to come
at the real opinion of the individual.
“L’esprit que tient du corps,
En bien mangeant, remonte ses ressorts;”
but the tones of an overstrained instrument are always false; and the
proverb of ‘truth in wine’ fails in its application to the instance in
question. To judge with _sang-froid_ of existence, the party must be
neither full nor fasting.
HORNE TOOKE.
Horne Tooke used to tell a juvenile story to my husband, (who in his
boyhood occasionally partook of the ‘Diversions of Purley,’) very
illustrative of the narrator. Horne, when at Eton, was one day asked by
the master why a certain verb governed a particular case? he answered,
“I don’t know.” “That’s impossible!” said the master. “I know you are
not ignorant, but obstinate.” Horne, however, persisted, and the master
flogged. After punishment, the pedagogue quoted the rule of grammar which
bore on the subject, and Horne instantly replied, “I know that very well;
but you did not ask for the rule, you demanded the reason.” Here we have
the perspicuity of the mature dialectitian, and the dogged obstinacy
which would not yield a step to authority, and could purchase a victory
at any expense of suffering. Opinions may change, but the man, in his
leading characteristics, is at fifty what he is at fifteen.
RICHARD KIRWAN, ESQ.
There is scarcely a catholic family of gentility in Ireland, whose story,
if impartially told, would not illustrate the misrule by which the
prosperity of the country has been overthrown, and its genius nullified.
From the beginning to the end of the last century, to have been born
a catholic was a stigma, which no talent could efface, no patriotism
remove. To exhibit either, was, at one period, to ensure proscription,
or at least persecution; and the market opened for Irish abilities
abroad, was so much more profitable, honourable, and secure, that few of
the condemned faith remained in their native country, whose endowments
exceeded the quality demanded for home consumption.
While all Europe applauded the genius and hailed the scientific
researches of Richard Kirwan, (one of the most distinguished chemists
and philosophers of his time,) he was utterly unappreciated, and all but
unknown in his native land; and, but for an accident, he probably would
never have returned to the country, from which his religion had banished
him, to give to it the benefits of his knowledge and the glory of his
name.
Richard Kirwan, of Cregg Castle, in the county of Galway, was the
descendant of one of the most ancient and respectable families of
Connaught,[20] a province in which few families condescended to date
from a more modern epoch, than the flood. He was born in the year 1734,
a fearful time in Ireland. Being a younger son, he was (like all the
_cadets_ of his rank and class) sent to a foreign country to receive
the benefit of a liberal education; and he passed his boyhood and early
youth at the seminary of St. Omer, where, having completed his classical
studies, he gave himself up to natural science and philosophical
pursuits, with such enthusiasm and such brilliant success, as declared a
higher vocation, than he would have been permitted to follow in his own
country. The death of his elder brother, by calling him to the succession
of a noble estate, enabled him to follow with more effect the bent of his
intellect; and he continued to cultivate science with that persevering
diligence, and eager love of truth, which are ever the tests of the
highest order of genius. As a chemist, for many years he stood alone; and
if, afterwards, he was outstripped in the career of improvement, by more
youthful successors, he still led the way to some of their most important
discoveries. Living much abroad, where he was most known and esteemed, he
was elected a member of the academies of Stockholm, Berlin, Upsal, Jena,
and Philadelphia; as he was, afterwards, Fellow of the Royal Societies
of London and Edinburgh. It was not, I believe, till long after these
foreign honours were showered upon him, that he was elected President
of the Royal Irish Academy, and created a Doctor of Laws in the Irish
University. His unrivalled mineralogical attainments pointed him out also
to the government, as the fittest person to hold the office of Inspector
General of his Majesty’s mines in Ireland.
From that period, he resided chiefly in his native country—sometimes at
his mansion in Rutland-square, and occasionally, as long as his health
permitted, at his patrimonial castle of Cregg. The victim of a singular
affection of the throat, which prevented him from eating in company,
Mr. Kirwan retired from what is called “the world;” and, much more
celebrated than known, he lived only with the literary, the liberal, and
the scientific, (in Ireland, a very select and circumscribed circle;)
but he kept up a correspondence with all that was most distinguished
in Europe. Of his numerous works, those most known are his “Elements
of Mineralogy;” “Geological Essays;” “Analysis of Mineral Waters;”
“Logic, or an Essay on the Elements, Principles, and Different Modes of
Reasoning;” “Metaphysical Essays;” “Essay on Phlogiston;” and his work on
the “Temperature of Different Latitudes,” which was, I believe, his last.
I remember, when I was a child (_du temps du bon Roi Dagobert_), hearing
a great deal of Mr. Kirwan, and of chemistry: not that my family were
particularly given to that, or any other of the sciences, (good folks!)
though we had all a great calling to the arts. But the most eminent
chemist of the day was an Irishman—and, still more, a Connaught man—and,
more still, a Galway man—and, beyond all this, we were kin to the whole
Thirteen Tribes of Galway, of which the Kirwans were one; “aye, in
truth, dear, from Maoldal-hreock down,” as my father used to say: for
upon such Irish lore I was fed from the cradle. Thus the name of Kirwan
got associated in my infant mind, with that of Shakspeare, Handel, and
Carolan the Irish bard; the three _Dii majorum Gentium_ of our household
altars.
My father (as fine and genuine a specimen of the true Irish soil, as the
Irish wolf-dog) discovered in me an apt predisposition for all that was
Irish—for its music, its poetry, its wild and imaginative fables, and
local gossip; and “the genius of my country found me,” as the immortal
Robert Burns said, not indeed “_at the plough_,” but on my father’s knee,
listening, with open mouth, up-raised eyes, and tremulous attention, to
that species of “rambling stuff,” called in the language of the land, so
early my inspiration and my theme, _Shanaos_.
It was in enumerating the glories of his native province, the worthies
it had produced, and the antiquity and respectability of its Thirteen
Tribes, that my father was wont particularly to dilate on the
illustration thrown on the family of the Kirwans by some of its living
members: and having sketched off the genealogical distinction of the
Forts, or Fuentes, the Joyces, the Trenches, the Blakes, and Bodkins
(or the “_Buaidh Baudikin_,” as he called them), he always paused in
long digression on the family of the Kirwans—or, as he pronounced it the
O’quirivans, “for, my dear, the Kirwans, I am sorry to say, dropt _the
vowel_ in the troubles; like many others, who dared not exhibit the O
or the Mac;—(which was our own case, God help us!) and the Mac-owens,
_Anglice_ Owensons, and the O’quirivans, or _O’Kirwans_, remain stripped
of these family patronymics to this day. But they are, ever were, and
will be, a great family. It was one of the Kirwans of Castle Hacket who
first introduced glass windows into county Galway; and I have heard tell
that the first tea-pot seen in the province, was in the buffet of the
Kirwans of Blindacre. But the Castle Hackets have to boast of producing
that inspired preacher, Doctor Kirwan—the greatest pulpit orator, as
Father O’Leary assured me, since the time of Bossuet. Then there are the
Kirwans of Cregg, their chief, at this day, being the greatest chemist
and philosopher in Europe. I remember well, when Richard Kirwan first
returned from abroad to Cregg Castle, seeing him walk of a Sunday to the
Mass House, on the road-side, in a rich suit of embroidered clothes;
his _chapeau-bras_ under his arm, and picking his steps along the dirty
road, with brilliant stone buckles in his shoes. He was a tall, elegant,
comely young man then, and spoke good Irish, though somewhat too fond of
interlarding his discourse with foreign phrases. He was then, what is
called in Irish a ‘_chi shin_,’[21] and we little thought he would have
turned out the greatest philosopher and chemist of his age.” This was an
image; the true source of deep and indelible impressions: and there it
is, fresh as I received it—a proof copy, not a line worn out.
It was probably this graphic sketch, and the ideas, associated with it,
of the value of philosophy and the importance of chemistry, which, at a
very early period of my life, influenced my pursuits. For before I was
fourteen I had read Locke (which chance threw in my way in a parlour
window) with infinite delight; and I imbibed a very ardent, but very
short-lived passion for chemistry, not a little seduced by hearing a
great deal of the charms of Pauline Lavoisier, and reading some of her
experiments. My experiments, however, were cut short by my burning
my fingers severely with phosphorus, while fired by the ambition of
frightening my maid, by writing flaming letters on the walls of her
bed-room in a dark night. The danger I incurred of being burned to death,
and the fright my unlucky experiment caused to my family, checked my
“vaulting ambition;” and thus my love of philosophy fell a victim to my
love of fun. From that moment—
“Fair Science, to you
I then bid a long and careless adieu.”
The restless vivacity of intellectual youth, feeling its way to truth,
and impelled, by its own energies, to experiments upon all sorts of
knowledge, is frequently mistaken for a decided vocation to some one
subject, for which the student has neither will nor organization. Nature,
however, left free to act, soon finds her own level, and discovers her
own bent. It is the folly of parents to force or restrain her. She may
be assisted—she cannot be reorganized: and though it may be easier to
inculcate science, than to inspire a talent for the arts, yet mediocrity
in both must be the consequence of those forced marches of mind, which
enfeeble the victim, without attaining the end.
But though I gave up chemistry, I had not forgotten the chemist; and
I borrowed and read the works of Richard Kirwan—at least, as much of
them as I could understand; and perhaps a little more—for I dipped into
his Elements of Mineralogy, worked hard at his Essays, and picked up
just enough of his favourite doctrine of Phlogiston, to astonish the
vulgar and amuse the wise;—among whom I reckoned my governess, and my
writing-master. Truth, however, to tell, my ideas of the profound and
celebrated philosopher still remained mixed up and associated with my
father’s description of the tall, comely, elegant young man, picking his
steps through the mud of Connaught roads, with diamond buckles in his
shoes, and an opera hat under his arm.
In process of time when school was up, and “Alley Croaker made a mighty
noise”—when one “wild Irish girl” brought the other into notice—it became
the fashion to ask that other and her Irish harp to Dublin parties. This
(_par parenthèse_), not because she wrote novels, and was an honest,
pains-taking little person, leaving no calling for the idle trade, and
turning to account the _petit bout de talent_, given her, by Him, from
whom all is derived, to lighten the burden, which misfortune had heaped
on her family;—but because she was the _enfant gâté_ of a particular
circle, and lived with the Lady Harringtons, Asgills, and all sorts of
great official English ladies. As for the Irish Protestant Ascendancy
dames, the Mrs. Chief Baron this, and Mrs. Chief Justice that, Mrs.
Commissioner of wide streets, and Mrs. Secretary of the paving board,
she might have perished in the streets, in want or infamy, before one of
their ascendancyships would have stretched forth a finger to save her
from either. But, “let that pass,” as the Scotch novels say.
It happened, that shortly after the publication of the Wild Irish Girl,
as I sat making up one of those “tissues of woven air,” in which I then
clothed my heroines, and in which I intended to dress myself for a ball
at the Barracks, given that night by Lady Augusta Leith,—a plain, dark,
old-fashioned chariot drove to the door, and up came a card, thus
inscribed—“Mr. Kirwan, to pay his respects to the fair authoress of the
Wild Irish Girl.”—My stars! what a fuss! The great Richard Kirwan, the
philosopher! the chemist! the comely! the elegant! the celebrated! What
stowing away of breadths and gores (we had not come to _ruches_ and
_falbalas_)—what pushing of work baskets under the sofa, and ramming the
Sorrows of Werter into the bread basket!—for work, Werter, and bread and
butter, were then all in equal requisition.