 
HUMOURS OF : IRISH LIFE :
HUMOURS WITH AN INTRODUCTION
NEW YORK:
Printed by The
Introduction. The first of the notable humorists of Irish life was William Maginn, one of the most versatile, as well as brilliant of Irish men of letters. He was born in Cork in 1793, and was a classical schoolmaster there in early manhood, having secured the degree of LL.D. at Trinity College, Dublin, when only 23 years of age. The success in “Blackwood’s Magazine” of some of his translations of English verse into the Classics induced him, however, to give up teaching and to seek his fortunes as a magazine writer and journalist in London, at a time when Lamb, De Quincey, Lockhart and Wilson gave most of their writings to magazines. Possessed of remarkable sparkle and finish as a writer, considering with what little effort and with what rapidity he poured out his political satires in prose and verse, and his rollicking magazine sketches, it was no wonder that he leaped into popularity at a bound. He was the original of the Captain Shandon of Pendennis and though Thackeray undoubtedly attributed to him a political venality of which he was never guilty, whilst describing him during what was undoubtedly the latter and least reputable period in his career, it is evident that he considered Maginn to be, as he undoubtedly was, a literary figure of conspicuous accomplishment and mark in the contemporary world of letters. Amongst his satiric writings, his panegyric of Colonel Pride may stand comparison even with Swift’s most notable philippics; whilst his Sir Morgan O’Doherty was the undoubted ancestor of Maxwell’s and Lever’s hard drinking, practical joking Irish military heroes, and frequently appears as one of the speakers in Professor Wilson’s “Noctes Ambrosianae,” of which the doctor was one of the mainstays. Besides his convivial song of “St. Patrick,” his “Gathering of the Mahonys,” and his “Cork is an Eden for you, Love, and me,” written by him as genuine “Irish Melodies,” to serve as an antidote to what he called the finicking Bacchanalianism of Moore, he contributed, as Mr. D. J. O’Donoghue conclusively proves, several stories, including “Daniel O’Rourke,” printed in this volume, to Crofton Croker’s “Fairy Legends and Traditions of Ireland,” first published anonymously in 1825—a set of Folk Tales full of a literary charm which still makes them delightful reading. For just as Moore took Irish airs, touched them up and partnered them with lyrics to suit upper class British and Irish taste, so Croker gathered his Folk Tales from the Munster peasantry with whom he was familiar and, assisted by Maginn and others, gave them exactly that form and finish needful to provide the reading public of his day with an inviting volume of fairy lore. Carleton and the brothers John and Michael Banim, besides Samuel Lover, whose gifts are treated of elsewhere in this introduction, followed with what Dr. Douglas Hyde rightly describes as Folk Lore of “an incidental and highly manipulated type.” A more genuine Irish storyteller was Patrick Kennedy, twice represented in this volume, whose “Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celt” and “Fireside Stories of Ireland” were put down by him much as he heard them as a boy in his native county of Wexford, where they had already passed with little change in the telling from the Gaelic into the peculiar Anglo-Irish local dialect which is markedly West Saxon in its character. His lineal successor as a Wexford Folklorist is Mr. P. J. McCall, one of whose stories, “Fionn MacCumhail and the Princess” we reproduce, and a woman Folk tale teller, Miss B. Hunt, adds to our indebtedness to such writers by her recently published and delightful Folk Tales of Breffny from which “McCarthy of Connacht” has been taken for these pages. We have also the advantage of using Dr. Hyde’s “The Piper and the Puca,” a foretaste, we believe, of the pleasure in store for our readers in the volume of Folk Tales he is contributing to “Every Irishman’s Library” under the engaging title of “Irish Saints and Sinners.” In a survey of the Anglo-Irish humorous novel of recent times, the works of Charles Lever form a convenient point of departure, for with all his limitations he was the first to write about Irish life in such a way as to appeal widely and effectively to an English audience. We have no intention of dwelling upon him at any length—he belongs to an earlier generation—but between him and his successors there are points both of resemblance and of dissimilarity sufficient to make an interesting comparison. The politics and social conditions of Lever’s time are not those of the present, but the spirit of Lever’s Irishman, though with modifications, is still alive to-day. Lever had not the intensity of Carleton, or the fine humanity of Kickham, but he was less uncompromising in his use of local colour, and he was, as a rule, far more cheerful. He had not the tender grace or simplicity of Gerald Griffin, and never wrote anything so moving or beautiful as “The Collegians,” which will form a special volume of this Library, but he surpassed him in vitality, gusto, exuberance and knowledge of the world. Overrated in the early stages of his career, Lever paid the penalty of his too facile triumphs in his lifetime, and his undoubted talents have latterly been depreciated on political as well as artistic grounds. His heroes were drawn, with few exceptions, from the landlord class or their faithful retainers. The gallant Irish officers, whose Homeric exploits he loved to celebrate, held commissions in the British army. Lever has never been popular with Nationalist politicians, though, as a matter of fact no one ever exhibited the extravagance and recklessness of the landed gentry in more glaring colours. And he is anathema to the hierophants of the Neo-Celtic Renascence on account of his jocularity. There is nothing crepuscular about Lever; you might as well expect to find a fairy in a railway station. Again, Lever never was and never could be the novelist of literary men. He was neither a scholar nor an artist; he wrote largely in instalments; and in his earlier novels was wont to end a chapter in a manner that rendered something like a miracle necessary to continue the existence of the hero: “He fell lifeless to the ground, the same instant I was felled to the earth by a blow from behind, and saw no more.” In technique and characterisation his later novels show a great advance, but if he lives, it will be by the spirited loosely-knit romances of love and war composed in the first ten years of his literary career. His heroes had no scruples in proclaiming their physical advantages and athletic prowess; Charles O’Malley, that typical Galway miles gloriosus, introduces himself with ingenuous egotism in the following passage: “I rode boldly with fox-hounds; I was about the best shot within twenty miles of us; I could swim the Shannon at Holy Island; I drove four-in-hand better than the coachman himself; and from finding a hare to cooking a salmon, my equal could not be found from Killaloe to Banagher.” The life led by the Playboys of the West (old style) as depicted in Lever’s pages was one incessant round of reckless hospitality, tempered by duels and practical joking, but it had its justification in the family annals of the fire-eating Blakes and Bodkins and the records of the Connaught Circuit. The intrepidity of Lever’s heroes was only equalled by their indiscretion, their good luck in escaping from the consequences of their folly, and their susceptibility. His womenfolk may be roughly divided into three classes; sentimental heroines, who sighed, and blushed and fainted on the slightest provocation; buxom Amazons, like Baby Blake; and campaigners or adventuresses. But the gentle, sentimental, angelic type predominates, and finds a perfect representative in Lucy Dashwood. When Charles O’Malley was recovering from an accident in the hunting field, he fell asleep in an easy-chair in the drawing-room and was awakened by the “thrilling chords of a harp”: “I turned gently round in my chair and beheld Miss Dashwood. She was seated in a recess of an old-fashioned window; the pale yellow glow of a wintry sun at evening fell upon her beautiful hair, and tinged it with such a light as I have often since then seen in Rembrandt’s pictures; her head leaned upon the harp, and, as she struck its chords at random, I saw that her mind was far away from all around her. As I looked, she suddenly started from her leaning attitude, and, parting back her curls from her brow, she preluded a few chords, and then sighed forth, rather than sang, that most beautiful of Moore’s melodies— ‘She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps.’ Never before had such pathos, such deep utterance of feeling, met my astonished sense; I listened breathlessly as the tears fell one by one down my cheek; my bosom heaved and fell; and when she ceased, I hid my head between my hands and sobbed aloud.” Lever’s serious heroines, apart from the fact that they could ride, did not differ in essentials from those of Dickens, and a sense of humour was no part of their mental equipment. The hated rival, the dark-browed Captain Hammersly, was distinguished by his “cold air and repelling hauteur,” and is a familiar figure in mid-Victorian romance. Lever’s sentiment, in short, is old-fashioned, and cannot be expected to appeal to a Feminist age which has given us the public school girl and the suffragist. There is no psychological interest in the relations of his heroes and heroines; Charles’s farewell to Lucy is on a par with the love speeches in “The Lyons Mail.” There is seldom any doubt as to the ultimate reunion of his lovers; we are only concerned with the ingenuity of the author in surmounting the obstacles of his own invention. He was fertile in the devising of exciting incident; he was always able to eke out the narrative with a good story or song—as a writer of convivial, thrasonic or mock-sentimental verse he was quite in the first class—and in his earlier novels his high spirits and sense of fun never failed. In his easy-going methods he may have been influenced by the example of Dickens—the Dickens of the “Pickwick Papers”—but there is no ground for any charge of conscious imitation, and where he challenged direct comparison—in the character of Mickey Free—he succeeded in drawing an Irish Sam Weller who falls little short of his more famous Cockney counterpart. For Lever was a genuine humorist, or perhaps we should say a genuine comedian, since the element of theatricality was seldom absent. The choicest exploits of that grotesque Admirable Crichton, Frank Webber, were carried out by hoaxing, disguise, or trickery of some sort. But the scene in which Frank wins his wager by impersonating Miss Judy Macan and sings “The Widow Malone” is an admirable piece of sustained fooling: admirable, too, in its way is the rescue of the imaginary captive in the Dublin drain. As a delineator of the humours of University life, Lever combined the atmosphere of “Verdant Green” with the sumptuous upholstery of Ouida. Here, again, in his portraits of dons and undergraduates Lever undoubtedly drew in part from life, but fell into his characteristic vice of exaggeration in his embroidery. Frank Webber’s antics are amusing, but it is hard to swallow his amazing literary gifts or the contrast between his effeminate appearance and his dare-devil energy. While “Lord Kilgobbin”—which ran as a serial in the “Cornhill Magazine” from October, 1870, to March, 1872—was not wholly free from Lever’s besetting sin, it is interesting not only as the most thoughtful and carefully written of his novels, but on account of its political attitude. Here Lever proved himself no champion À outrance of the landlords, but was ready to admit that their joyous conviviality was too often attended by gross mismanagement of their estates. The methods of Peter Gill, the land steward, are shown to be all centred in craft and subtlety—“outwitting this man, forestalling that, doing everything by halves, so that no boon came unassociated with some contingency or other by which he secured to himself unlimited power and uncontrolled tyranny.” The sympathy extended to the rebels of ’98 is remarkable and finds expression in the spirited lines:—
These must have been almost the last lines Lever ever wrote, unless we accept the bitter epitaph on himself:
The bitterness of the epitaph lies in the fact that it was largely true; he had exhausted the vein of rollicking romance on which his fame and popularity rested. For the rest the charge of misrepresenting Irish life is met by so judicious a critic as the late Dr. Garnett with a direct negative:— “He has not actually misrepresented anything, and cannot be censured for confining himself to the society which he knew; nor was his talent adapted for the treatment of such life in its melancholy and poetic aspects, even if these had been more familiar to him.” Of the humorous Irish novelists who entered into competition with Lever for the favour of the English-speaking public in his lifetime, two claim special notice—Samuel Lover and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Lover has always been bracketed with Lever, whom he resembled in many ways, but he was overshadowed by his more brilliant and versatile contemporary. Yet within his limited sphere he was a true humorist, and the careless, whimsical, illogical aspects of Irish character have seldom been more effectively illustrated than by the author of ‘Handy Andy,’ and ‘The Gridiron.’ Paddy, as drawn by Lover, succeeds in spite of his drawbacks, much as Brer Rabbit does in the tales of Uncle Remus. His mental processes remind one of the story of the Hungarian baron who, on paying a visit to a friend after a railway journey, complained of a bad headache, the result of sitting with his back to the engine. When his friend asked, “Why did not you change places with your vis-À-vis?” the baron replied, “How could I? I had no vis-À-vis.” Lover’s heroes “liked action, but they hated work”: the philosophy of thriftlessness is summed up to perfection in “Paddy’s Pastoral”:—
For all his kindliness Lover laid too much stress on this happy-go-lucky fecklessness to minister to Irish self-respect. His pictures of Irish life were based on limited experience; in so far as they are true, they recall and emphasise traits which many patriotic Irishmen wish to forget or eliminate. An age which has witnessed the growth of Irish Agricultural Co-operation is intolerant of a novelist who for the most part represents his countrymen as diverting idiots, and therefore we prefer to represent him in this volume by “The Little Weaver,” one of those mock heroic tales in which Irishmen have excelled from his day to that of Edmund Downey. No better example could be given of his easy flow of humour in genuine Hiberno-English or of his shrewd portraiture of such simple types of Irish peasant character. The case of Le Fanu is peculiar. His best-known novels had no specially characteristic Irish flavour. But his sombre talent was lit by intermittent flashes of the wildest hilarity, and it was in this mood that the author of “Uncle Silas” and “Carmilla” wrote “The Quare Gandher” and “Billy Malowney’s Taste of Love and Glory,” two of the most brilliantly comic extravaganzas which were ever written by an Irishman, and which no one but an Irishman could ever have written. There is no Salic Law in letters, and since the deaths of Lever and Le Fanu the sceptre of the realm of Irish fiction has passed to women. But the years between 1870 and 1890 were not propitious for humorists, and the admirable work of the late Miss Emily Lawless, who had already made her mark in “Hurrish” before the latter date, does not fall within the present survey. The same remark applies to Mrs. Hartley, but there is a fine sense of humour in the delicate idylls of Miss Jane Barlow, twice represented in this volume. By far the most widely read Irish novelist between 1880 and 1900 was the late Mrs. Hungerford, the author of “Molly Bawn” and a score of other blameless romances which almost rivalled “The Rosary” in luscious sentimentality. The scenes of her stories were generally laid in Ireland, and the stories themselves were almost invariably concerned with the courtship of lovely but impecunious maidens by eligible and affluent youths. No one in Mrs. Hungerford’s novels ever seemed to have any work to do. The characters lived in a paradise of unemployment, and this possibly accounts for Mrs. Hungerford’s immense popularity in America, where even the most indolent immigrants become infected with a passion for hard work. In the quality of gush she was unsurpassed, but her good nature and her frank delight in her characters made her absurdity engaging. Sentiment was her ruling passion; she did no more than scrape the surface of Irish social life; and she had no humour but good humour. But she had not enough of literary quality to entitle her work to rank beside that of the other women writers represented in this volume. The literary partnership of Miss Edith Somerville and Miss Violet Martin—the most brilliantly successful example of creative collaboration in our times—began with “An Irish Cousin” in 1889. Published over the pseudonyms of “Geilles Herring” and “Martin Ross,” this delightful story is remarkable not only for its promise, afterwards richly fulfilled, but for its achievement. The writers proved themselves the possessors of a strange faculty of detachment which enabled them to view the humours of Irish life through the unfamiliar eyes of a stranger without losing their own sympathy. They were at once of the life they described and outside it. They showed a laudable freedom from political partisanship; a minute familiarity with the manners and customs of all strata of Irish Society; an unerring instinct for the “sovran word;” a perfect mastery of the Anglo-Irish dialect; and an acute yet well-controlled sense of the ludicrous. The heroine accurately describes the concourse on the platform of a small country station as having “all the appearance of a large social gathering or conversazione, the carriages being filled, not by those who were starting, but by their friends who had come to see them off.” When she went to a county ball in Cork she discovered to her dismay that all her partners were named either Beamish or Barrett:— “Had it not been for Willy’s elucidation of its mysteries, I should have thrown away my card in despair. ‘No; not him. That’s Long Tom Beamish! It’s English Tommy you’ve to dance with next. They call him English Tommy because, when his Militia regiment was ordered to Aldershot, he said he was ‘the first of his ancestors that was ever sent on foreign service.’... I carried for several days the bruises which I received during my waltz with English Tommy. It consisted chiefly of a series of short rushes, of so shattering a character that I at last ventured to suggest a less aggressive mode of progression. ‘Well,’ said English Tommy confidentially, ‘ye see, I’m trying to bump Katie,’ pointing to a fat girl in blue. ‘She’s my cousin, and we’re for ever fighting.’” As a set-off to this picture of the hilarious informality of high life in Cork twenty-five years ago, there is a wonderful study of a cottage interior, occupied by a very old man, his daughter-in-law, three children, two terriers, a cat, and a half-plucked goose. The conversation between Willy Sarsfield—who foreshadows Flurry Knox in “Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.” by his mingled shrewdness and naivetÉ—and Mrs. Sweeny is a perfect piece of realism. “Mrs. Sweeny was sitting on a kind of rough settle, between the other window and the door of an inner room. She was a stout, comfortable woman of about forty, with red hair and quick blue eyes, that roved round the cabin, and silenced with a glance the occasional whisperings that rose from the children. ‘And how’s the one that had the bad cough?’ asked Willy, pursuing his conversation with her with his invariable ease and dexterity. ‘Honor her name is, isn’t it?’—‘See, now, how well he remembers!’ replied Mrs. Sweeny. ‘Indeed, she’s there back in the room, lyin’ these three days. Faith, I think ’tis like the decline she have, Masther Willy.’—‘Did you get the Doctor to her?’ said Willy. ‘I’ll give you a ticket, if you haven’t one.’—‘Oh, indeed, Docthor Kelly’s afther givin’ her a bottle, but shure I wouldn’t let her put it into her mouth at all. God-knows what’d be in it. Wasn’t I afther throwin’ a taste of it on the fire to thry what’d it do, and Phitz! says it, and up with it up the chimbley! Faith, I’d be in dread to give it to the child. Shure, if it done that in the fire, what’d it do in her inside?—‘Well, you’re a greater fool than I thought you were,’ said Willy, politely.—‘Maybe I am, faith,’ replied Mrs. Sweeny, with a loud laugh of enjoyment. ‘But, if she’s for dyin’, the crayture, she’ll die aisier without thim thrash of medicines; and if she’s for livin’, ’tisn’t thrusting to them she’ll be. Shure, God is good, God is good——’—‘Divil a betther!’ interjected old Sweeny, unexpectedly. It was the first time he had spoken, and having delivered himself of this trenchant observation, he relapsed into silence and the smackings at his pipe.” But the tragic note is sounded in the close of “An Irish Cousin”—Miss Martin and Miss Somerville have never lost sight of the abiding dualism enshrined in Moore’s verse “Erin, the tear and the smile in thine eyes”—and it dominates their next novel, “Naboth’s Vineyard,” published in 1891, a sombre romance of the Land League days. Three years later they reached the summit of their achievement in “The Real Charlotte,” which still remains their masterpiece, though easily eclipsed in popularity by the irresistible drollery of “Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.” To begin with, it does not rely on the appeal to hunting people which in their later work won the heart of the English sportsman. It is a ruthlessly candid study of Irish provincial and suburban life; of the squalors of middle-class households; of garrison hacks and “underbred, finespoken,” florid squireens. But secondly and chiefly it repels the larger half of the novel-reading public by the fact that two women have here dissected the heart of one of their sex in a mood of unrelenting realism. While pointing out the pathos and humiliation of the thought that a soul can be stunted by the trivialities of personal appearance, they own to having set down Charlotte Mullen’s many evil qualities “without pity.” They approach their task in the spirit of Balzac. The book, as we shall see, is extraordinarily rich in both wit and humour, but Charlotte, who cannot control her ruling passion of avarice even in a death chamber, might have come straight out of the pages of the ComÉdie Humaine. Masking her greed, her jealousy and her cruelty under a cloak of loud affability and ponderous persiflage, she was a perfect specimen of the fausse bonne femme. Only her cats could divine the strange workings of her mind: “The movements of Charlotte’s character, for it cannot be said to possess the power of development, were akin to those of some amphibious thing whose strong darting course under the water is only marked by a bubble or two, and it required almost an animal instinct to note them. Every bubble betrayed the creature below, as well as the limitations of its power of hiding itself, but people never thought of looking out for these indications in Charlotte, or even suspected that she had anything to conceal. There was an almost blatant simplicity about her, a humorous rough-and-readiness which, joined to her literary culture, proved business capacity, and her dreaded temper, seemed to leave no room for any further aspect, least of all of a romantic kind.” Yet romance of a sort was at the root of Charlotte’s character. She had been in love with Roddy Lambert, a showy, handsome, selfish squireen, before he married for money. She had disguised her tenderness under a bluff camaraderie during his first wife’s lifetime, and hastened Mrs. Lambert’s death by inflaming her suspicions of Roddy’s fidelity. It was only when Charlotte was again foiled by Lambert’s second marriage to her own niece that her love was turned to gall, and she plotted to compass his ruin. The authors deal faithfully with Francie FitzPatrick, Charlotte’s niece, but an element of compassion mingles with their portraiture. Charlotte had robbed Francie of a legacy, and compounded with her conscience by inviting the girl to stay with her at Lismoyle. Any change was a god-send to poor Francie, who, being an orphan, lived in Dublin with another aunt, a kindly but feckless creature whose eyes were not formed to perceive dirt nor her nose to apprehend smells, and whose ideas of economy was “to indulge in no extras of soap or scrubbing brushes, and to feed her family on strong tea and indifferent bread and butter, in order that Ida’s and Mabel’s hats might be no whit less ornate than those of their neighbours.” In this dingy household Francie had grown up, lovely as a Dryad, brilliantly indifferent to the serious things of life, with a deplorable Dublin accent, ingenuous, unaffected and inexpressibly vulgar. She captivates men of all sorts: Roddy Lambert, who lunched on hot beefsteak pie and sherry; Mr. Hawkins, an amorous young soldier, who treated her with a bullying tenderness and jilted her for an English heiress; and Christopher Dysart, a scholar, a gentleman, and the heir to a baronetcy, who was ruined by self-criticism and diffidence. Francie respected Christopher and rejected him; was thrown over by Hawkins, whom she loved; and married Roddy Lambert, her motives being “poverty, aimlessness, bitterness of soul and instinctive leniency towards any man who liked her.” Francie had already exasperated Charlotte by refusing Christopher Dysart: by marrying Lambert she dealt a death-blow to her hopes and drove her into the path of vengeance. But the story is not only engrossing as a study of vulgarity that is touched with pathos, of the vindictive jealousy of unsunned natures, of the cowardice of the selfish and the futility of the intellectually effete. It is a treasure-house of good sayings, happy comments, ludicrous incidents. When Francie returned to Dublin we read how one of her cousins, “Dottie, unfailing purveyor of diseases to the family, had imported German measles from her school.” When Charlotte, nursing her wrath, went to inform the servant at Lambert’s house of the return of her master with his new wife, the servant inquired “with cold resignation” whether it was the day after to-morrow:— “‘It is, me poor woman, it is,’ replied Charlotte, in the tone of facetious intimacy that she reserved for other people’s servants. ‘You’ll have to stir your stumps to get the house ready for them.’—‘The house is cleaned down and ready for them as soon as they like to walk into it,’ replied Eliza Hackett, with dignity, ‘and if the new lady faults the drawing-room chimbley for not being swep, the master will know it’s not me that’s to blame for it, but the sweep that’s gone dhrilling with the Mileetia.’” Each of the members of the Dysart family is hit off in some memorable phrase; Sir Benjamin, the old and irascible paralytic, “who had been struck down on his son’s coming of age by a paroxysm of apoplectic jealousy “; the admirable and unselfish Pamela with her “pleasant anxious voice”; Christopher, who believed that if only he could “read the ‘Field,’ and had a more spontaneous habit of cursing,” he would be an ideal country gentleman; and Lady Dysart, who was “a clever woman, a renowned solver of acrostics in her society paper, and a holder of strong opinions as to the prophetic meaning of the Pyramids.” With her “a large yet refined bonhomie” took the place of tact, but being an Englishwoman she was “constitutionally unable to discern perfectly the subtle grades of Irish vulgarity.” Sometimes the authors throw away the scenario for a whole novel in a single paragraph, as in this compressed summary of the antecedents of Captain Cursiter: “Captain Cursiter was ‘getting on’ as captains go, and he was the less disposed to regard his junior’s love affairs with an indulgent eye, in that he had himself served a long and difficult apprenticeship in such matters, and did not feel that he had profited much by his experiences. It had happened to him at an early age to enter ecstatically into the house of bondage, and in it he had remained with eyes gradually opening to its drawbacks until, a few years before, the death of the only apparent obstacle to his happiness had brought him face to face with its realisation. Strange to say, when this supreme moment arrived, Captain Cursiter was disposed for further delay; but it shows the contrariety of human nature, that when he found himself superseded by his own subaltern, an habitually inebriated viscount, he committed the imbecility of horsewhipping him; and finding it subsequently advisable to leave his regiment, he exchanged into the infantry with the settled conviction that all women were liars.” Nouns and verbs are the bones and sinews of style; it is in the use of epithets and adjectives that the artist is shown; and Miss Martin and Miss Somerville never make a mistake. An episode in the life of one of Charlotte’s pets—a cockatoo—is described as occurring when the bird was “a sprightly creature of some twenty shrieking summers.” We read of cats who stared “with the expressionless but wholly alert scrutiny of their race”; of the “difficult revelry” of Lady Dysart’s garden party when the men were in a hopeless minority and the more honourable women sat on a long bench in “midge-bitten dulness.” Such epithets are not decorative, they heighten the effect of the picture. Where adjectives are not really needed, Miss Martin and Miss Somerville can dispense with them altogether and yet attain a deadly precision, as when they describe an Irish beggar as “a bundle of rags with a cough in it,” or note a characteristic trait of Roddy Lambert by observing that “he was a man in whom jealousy took the form of reviling the object of his affections, if by so doing he could detach his rivals”—a modern instance of “displiceas aliis, sic ego tutus ero.” When Roddy Lambert went away after his first wife’s funeral we learn that he “honeymooned with his grief in the approved fashion.” These felicities abound on every page; while the turn of phrase of the peasant speech is caught with a fidelity which no other Irish writer has ever surpassed. When Judy Lee, a poor old woman who had taken an unconscionable time in dying was called by one of the gossips who had attended her wake “as nice a woman as ever threw a tub of clothes on the hills,” and complimented for having “battled it out well,” Norry the Boat replied sardonically:— “Faith, thin, an’ if she did die itself she was in the want of it; sure, there isn’t a winther since her daughther wint to America that she wasn’t anointed a couple of times. I’m thinking the people th’ other side o’ death will be throuncin’ her for keepin’ them waitin’ on her this way.” Humour is never more effective than when it emerges from a serious situation. Tragedy jostles comedy in life, and the greatest dramatists and romancers have made wonderful use of this abrupt alternation. There are many painful and diverting scenes in “The Real Charlotte,” but none in which both elements are blended so effectively as the story of Julia Duffy’s last pilgrimage. Threatened with eviction from her farm by the covetous intrigues of Charlotte, she leaves her sick bed to appeal to her landlord, and when half dead with fatigue falls in with the insane Sir Benjamin, to be driven away with grotesque insults. On her way home she calls in at Charlotte’s house, only to find Christopher Dysart reading Rossetti’s poems to Francie FitzPatrick, who has just timidly observed, in reply to her instructor’s remark that the hero is a pilgrim, “I know a lovely song called ‘The Pilgrim of Love’; of course, it wasn’t the same thing as what you were reading, but it was awfully nice, too.” This interlude is intensely ludicrous, but its cruel incongruity only heightens the misery of what has gone before and what follows. “The Silver Fox,” which appeared in 1897, need not detain us long, though it is a little masterpiece in its way, vividly contrasting the limitations of the sport-loving temperament with the ineradicable superstitions of the Irish peasantry. Impartial as ever, the authors have here achieved a felicity of phrase to which no other writers of hunting novels have ever approached. Imagination’s widest stretch cannot picture Surtees or Mr. Nat Gould describing an answer being given “with that level politeness of voice which is the distilled essence of a perfected anger,” or comparing a fashionable Amazon with the landscape in such words as these:— “Behind her the empty window framed a gaunt mountain peak, a lake that frittered a myriad of sparkles from its wealth of restless silver, and the gray and faint purple of the naked wood beyond it. It seemed too great a background for her powdered cheek and her upward glances at her host.” But the atmosphere of “The Silver Fox” is sombre, and a sporting novel which is at once serious and of a fine literary quality must necessarily appeal to a limited audience. The problem is solved to perfection in “Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.,” a series of loosely-knit episodes which, after running a serial course in the “Badminton Magazine,” were republished in book form towards the close of 1899. There is only one chapter to cloud the otherwise unintermittent hilarity of the whole recital. The authors have dispensed with comment, and rely chiefly on dialogue, incident, and their intimate and precise knowledge of horses, and horse-copers of both sexes. An interested devotion to the noble animal is here shown to be the last infirmity of noble minds, for old Mrs. Knox, with the culture of a grande dame and the appearance of a refined scarecrow, went cub-hunting in a bath chair. In such a company a young sailor whose enthusiasm for the chase had been nourished by the hirelings of Malta, and his eye for points probably formed on circus posters, had little chance of making a good bargain at Drumcurran horse fair:— “‘The fellow’s asking forty-five pounds for her,’ said Bernard Shute to Miss Sally; ‘she’s a nailer to gallop. I don’t think it’s too much.’—‘Her grandsire was the Mountain Hare,’ said the owner of the mare, hurrying up to continue her family history, ‘and he was the grandest horse in the four baronies. He was forty-two years of age when he died, and they waked him the same as ye’d wake a Christian. They had whisky and porther—and bread—and a piper in it.’—‘Thim Mountain Hare colts is no great things,’ interrupted Mr. Shute’s groom, contemptuously. ‘I seen a colt once that was one of his stock, and if there was forty men and their wives, and they after him with sticks, he wouldn’t lep a sod of turf.’—‘Lep, is it!’ ejaculated the owner in a voice shrill with outrage. ‘You may lead that mare out through the counthry, and there isn’t a fence in it that she wouldn’t go up to it as indepindent as if she was going to her bed, and your honour’s ladyship knows that dam well, Miss Knox.’—‘You want too much money for her, McCarthy,’ returned Miss Sally, with her air of preternatural wisdom. ‘God pardon you, Miss Knox! Sure a lady like you knows well that forty-five pounds is no money for that mare. Forty-five pounds!’ He laughed. ‘It’d be as good for me to make her a present to the gentleman all out as take three farthings less for her! She’s too grand entirely for a poor farmer like me, and if it wasn’t for the long, weak family I have, I wouldn’t part with her under twice the money.’—‘Three fine lumps of daughters in America paying his rent for him,’ commented Flurry in the background. ‘That’s the long, weak family.’” The turn of phrase in Irish conversation has never been reproduced in print with greater fidelity, and there is hardly a page in the book without some characteristic Hibernianism such as “Whisky as pliable as new milk,” or the description of a horse who was a “nice, flippant jumper,” or a bandmaster who was “a thrifle fulsome after his luncheon,” or a sweep who “raised tallywack and tandem all night round the house to get at the chimbleys.” The narrative reaches its climax in the chapter which relates the exciting incidents of Lisheen races at second-hand. Major Yeates and his egregious English visitor Mr. Leigh Kelway, an earnest Radical publicist, having failed to reach the scene, are sheltering from the rain in a wayside public-house where they are regaled with an account of the races by Slipper, the dissipated but engaging huntsman of the local pack of hounds. The close of the meeting was a steeplechase in which “Bocock’s owld mare,” ridden by one Driscoll, was matched against a horse ridden by another local sportsman named Clancy, and Slipper, who favoured Driscoll, and had taken up his position at a convenient spot on the course, thus describes his mode of encouraging the mare: “‘Skelp her, ye big brute!’ says I. ‘What good’s in ye that ye aren’t able to skelp her?’... Well, Mr. Flurry, and gintlemen,... I declare to ye when owld Bocock’s mare heard thim roars she stretched out her neck like a gandher, and when she passed me out she give a couple of grunts and looked at me as ugly as a Christian. ‘Hah!’ says I, givin’ her a couple o’ dhraws o’ th’ ash plant across the butt o’ the tail, the way I wouldn’t blind her, ‘I’ll make ye grunt!’ says I, ‘I’ll nourish ye!’ I knew well she was very frightful of th’ ash plant since the winter Tommeen Sullivan had her under a sidecar. But now, in place of havin’ any obligations to me, ye’d be surprised if ye heard the blaspheemious expressions of that young boy that was riding her; and whether it was over-anxious he was, turning around the way I’d hear him cursin’, or whether it was some slither or slide came to owld Bocock’s mare, I dunno, but she was bet up against the last obstackle but two, and before you could say ‘Shnipes,’ she was standin’ on her two ears beyant in th’ other field. I declare to ye, on the vartue of me oath, she stood that way till she reconnoithered what side Driscoll would fall, an’ she turned about then and rolled on him as cosy as if he was meadow grass!’ Slipper stopped short; the people in the doorway groaned appreciatively; Mary Kate murmured ‘The Lord save us’—‘The blood was druv out through his nose and ears,’ continued Slipper, with a voice that indicated the cream of the narration, ‘and you’d hear his bones crackin’ on the ground! You’d have pitied the poor boy.’—‘Good heavens!’ said Leigh Kelway, sitting up very straight in his chair. ‘Was he hurt, Slipper?’ asked Flurry, casually. ‘Hurt is it?’ echoed Slipper, in high scorn, ‘killed on the spot!’ He paused to relish the effect of the denouement on Leigh Kelway. ‘Oh, divil so pleasant an afthernoon ever you seen; and, indeed, Mr. Flurry, it’s what we were all sayin’, it was a great pity your honour was not there for the likin’ you had for Driscoll.’” Leigh Kelway, it may be noted, is the lineal descendant of the pragmatic English under-secretary in “Charles O’Malley,” who, having observed that he had never seen an Irish wake, was horrified by the prompt offer of his Galway host, a notorious practical joker, to provide a corpse on the spot. But this is only one of the instances of parallelism in which the later writers though showing far greater restraint and fidelity to type, have illustrated the continuance of temperamental qualities which Lever and his forerunner Maxwell—the author of “Wild Sports of the West”—portrayed in a more extravagant form. On the other hand it would be impossible to imagine a greater contrast than that between Lever’s thrasonical narrator heroes and Major Yeates, R.M., whose fondness for sport is allied to a thorough consciousness of his own infirmities as a sportsman. There is no heroic figure in “Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.,” but the characters are all lifelike, and at least half-a-dozen—“Flurry” Knox, his cousin Sally, and his old grandmother, Mrs. Knox, of Aussolas, Slipper, Mrs. Cadogan, and the incomparable Maria—form as integral a part of our circle of acquaintance as if we had known them in real life. “The Real Charlotte” is a greater achievement, but the R.M. is a surer passport to immortality. The further instalment of “Experiences,” published a few years later did not escape the common lot of sequels. They were brilliantly written, but one was more conscious of the excellence of the manner than in any of their other works. The two volumes of short stories and sketches published in 1903 and 1906 under the titles of “All on the Irish Shore” and some “Irish Yesterdays” respectively show some new and engaging aspects of the genius of the collaborators. There is a chapter called “Children of the Captivity,” in which the would-be English humorist’s conception of Irish humour is dealt with faithfully—as it deserves to be. The essay is also remarkable for the passage in which they set down once and for all the true canons for the treatment of dialect. Pronunciation and spelling, as they point out, are, after all, of small account in its presentment:— “The vitalising power is in the rhythm of the sentence, the turn of phrase, the knowledge of idiom, and of, beyond all, the attitude of mind.... The shortcoming is, of course, trivial to those who do not suffer because of it, but want of perception of word and phrase and turn of thought means more than mere artistic failure, it means want of knowledge of the wayward and shrewd and sensitive minds that are at the back of the dialect. The very wind that blows softly over brown acres of bog carries perfumes and sounds that England does not know; the women digging the potato-land are talking of things that England does not understand. The question that remains is whether England will ever understand.” The hunting sketches in these volumes include the wonderful “Patrick Day’s Hunt,” which is a masterpiece in the high bravura of the brogue. Another is noticeable for a passage on the affection inspired by horses. When Johnny Connolly heard that his mistress was driven to sell the filly he had trained and nursed so carefully, he did not disguise his disappointment: “‘Well, indeed, that’s too bad, miss,’ said Johnny comprehendingly. ‘There was a mare I had one time, and I sold her before I went to America. God knows, afther she went from me, whenever I’d look at her winkers hanging on the wall I’d have to cry. I never seen a sight of her till three years afther that, afther I coming home. I was coming out o’ the fair at Enniscar, an’ I was talking to a man an’ we coming down Dangan Hill, and what was in it but herself coming up in a cart! An’ I didn’t look at her, good nor bad, nor know her, but sorra bit but she knew me talking, an’ she turned into me with the cart. ‘Ho, ho, ho!’ says she, and she stuck her nose into me like she’d be kissing me. Be dam, but I had to cry. An’ the world wouldn’t stir her out o’ that till I’d lead her on meself. As for cow nor dog nor any other thing, there’s nothing would rise your heart like a horse!’” And if horses are irresistible, so are Centaurs. That is the moral to be drawn from “Dan Russel the Fox,” the latest work from the pen of Miss Somerville and Miss Martin, in which the rival claims of culture and foxhunting are subjected to a masterly analysis. The joint authors of the “R.M.” have paid forfeit for achieving popularity by being expected to repeat their first resounding success. Happily the pressure of popular demand has not impaired the artistic excellence of their work, though we cannot help thinking that if they had been left to themselves they might have given us at least one other novel on the lines of “The Real Charlotte.” Their later work, again, has been subjected to the ordeal, we do not say of conscious imitation, but of comparison with books which would probably have never been written or would have been written on another plan, but for the success of the “R.M.” To regard this rivalry as serious would be, in the opinion of the present writer, an abnegation of the critical faculty. But we have not yet done with Irish women humorists. Miss Eleanor Alexander, the daughter of the Poet Archbishop of Armagh and his poet wife has given us in her “Lady Anne’s Walk,” a volume of a genre as hard to define as it has been easy to welcome, at times delicately allusive, now daringly funny—an interblending of tender reminiscences and lively fancy, reminding us perhaps most of old Irish music itself with its sweet, strange and sudden changes of mood. Humorous contrasts of the kind will be found in the chapter entitled “Old Tummus and the Battle of Scarva,” printed in these pages. Another woman contestant for humorous literary honours was the late Miss Charlotte O’Conor Eccles, represented in this volume by the moving story of “King William.” Her “Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore” and “A Matrimonial Lottery” achieved popularity by their droll situations and exuberant fun, but her “Aliens of the West” contained work of much finer quality. She lets us behind the shutters of Irish country shop life in a most convincing manner, and the characters drawn from her Toomevara are as true to type as those of Miss Barlow. The disillusionment of Molly Devine “The Voteen,” with her commonplace, not to say vulgar surroundings, on her return from the convent school with its superior refinements, her refusal to marry so-called eligible, but to her, repulsive suitors, encouraged by her mother and stepfather and her final resolve to become a nun in order to escape further persecution of the kind, is told with convincing poignancy. A variant of this theme is treated with even more power and pathos in “Tom Connolly’s Daughter,” a story which we should like to see reprinted in separate form as it sets one thinking furiously, and its general circulation might do much to correct the love and marriage relations between young people in provincial Ireland. And yet a final name has to be added to the long roll of Irishwomen who have won distinction as writers of fiction, beginning with Miss Edgeworth whose Irish writings will receive separate treatment in a volume in “Every Irishman’s Library” at the hands of Mr. Malcolm Cotter Seton. Championed by Canon Hannay himself, who furnishes a genial, whimsical, provocative introduction to her “The Folk of Furry Farm,” Miss Purdon there describes what, from the point of view of romance, is a new part of Ireland, for West Leinster is a land more familiar to fox-hunters than to poets. Miss Purdon has plenty of independence, but it is not the frigid impartiality of the student who contemplates the vagaries and sufferings of human nature like a connoisseur or collector. She shows her detachment by giving us a faithful picture of Irish peasant society without ever once breathing a syllable of politics, or remotely alluding to the equipment and machinery of modern life. The dramatis personÆ are all simple folk, most of them poor; the entire action passes within a radius of a few miles from a country village; and only on one occasion, and at second hand do we catch so much as a glimpse of “the quality.” Throughout, Miss Purdon relies on the turn of the phrase to give the spirit of the dialect, and uses only a minimum of phonetic spelling. That is the true and artistic method. But Miss Purdon is much more than a collector or coiner of picturesque and humorous phrases. She has a keen eye for character, a genuine gift of description and a vein of pure and unaffected sentiment; indeed, her whole volume is strangely compounded of mirth and melancholy, though the dominant impression left by its perusal is one of confidence in the essential kindliness of Irish nature, and the goodness and gentleness of Irish women. But so far, the only formidable competitor Miss Martin and Miss Somerville have encountered is the genial writer who chooses to veil his identity under the freakish pseudonym of “George A. Birmingham.” Canon Hannay—for there can be no longer any breach of literary etiquette in alluding to him by his real name—had already made his mark as a serious or semi-serious observer of the conflicting tendencies, social and political, of the Ireland of to-day before he diverged into the paths of fantastic and frivolous comedy. “The Seething Pot,” “Hyacinth,” and “Benedict Kavanagh” are extremely suggestive and dispassionate studies of various aspects of the Irish temperament, but it is enough for our present purpose to note the consequences of a request addressed to Canon Hannay by two young ladies somewhere about the year 1907 that he would “write a story about treasure buried on an island.” The fact is recorded in the dedication of “Spanish Gold,” his response to the appeal, and the first of that series of jocund extravaganzas which have earned for him the gratitude of all who regard amusement as the prime object of fiction. The contrast between his methods and those of the joint authors discussed above is apparent at every turn. He maintains the impartiality which marked his serious novels in his treatment of all classes of the community, but it is the impartiality not of a detached and self-effacing observer, but of a genial satirist. His knowledge of the Ireland that he knows is intimate and precise, and is shown by a multiplicity of illuminating details and an effective use of local colour. But the co-operation of non-Irish characters is far more essential to the development of his plots than in the case of the novels of Miss Somerville and Miss Martin. The mainspring of their stories is Irish right through. Canon Hannay depends on a situation which might have occurred just as well in England or America, while employing the conditions of Irish life to give it a characteristic twist or series of twists. Even his most notable creation, the Reverend Joseph John Meldon, is too restlessly energetic to be an altogether typical Irishman, to say nothing of his unusual attitude in politics: “Nothing on earth would induce me to mix myself up with any party.” An Irishman of immense mental activity, living in Ireland, and yet wholly unpolitical is something of a freak. Again, while the tone of his books is admirably clean and wholesome, and while his frankly avowed distaste for the squalors of the problem novel will meet with general sympathy, there is no denying that his treatment of the “love interest” is for the most part perfunctory or even farcical. Again, in regard to style, he differs widely from the authors of the “R.M.” Their note is a vivid conciseness; his the easy charm of a flowing pen, always unaffected, often picturesque and even eloquent, never offending, but seldom practising the art of omission. But it is ungrateful to subject to necessarily damaging comparisons an author to whom we owe the swift passage of so many pleasant hours. It might be hard to find the exact counterpart of “J.J.” in the flesh, but he is none the less an unforgettable person, this athletic, exuberant, unkempt curate, unscrupulous but not unprincipled, who lied fluently, not for any mean purpose, but for the joy of mystification, or in order to carry out his plans, or justify his arguments. His strange friendship with Major Kent, a retired English officer, a natty martinet, presents no difficulties on the principle of extremes meeting, and thus from the start we are presented with the spectacle of the reluctant but helpless Major, hypnotised by the persuasive tongue of the curate, and dragged at his heels into all sorts of grotesque and humiliating adventures, and all for the sake of a quiet life. For “J.J.’s” methods, based, according to his own account, on careful observation and a proper use of the scientific imagination, involve the assumption by his reluctant confederate of a succession of entirely imaginary roles. But if “J.J.” was a trying ally, he was a still more perplexing antagonist, one of his favourite methods of “scoring off” an opponent being to represent him to be something other than he really was to third persons. When the process brings the curate and the Major into abrupt conflict with two disreputable adventurers, he defends resort to extreme methods on grounds of high morality. Burglary, theft and abduction become the simple duty of every well-disposed person when viewed as a necessary means of preventing selfish, depraved and fundamentally immoral people from acquiring wealth which the well-disposed might otherwise secure. “J.J.’s” crowning achievement is his conquest of Mr. Willoughby, the Chief Secretary, by a masterly vindication of his conduct on the lines of Pragmatism: “a statement isn’t a lie if it proves itself in actual practice to be useful—it’s true.” “J.J.” only once meets his match—in Father Mulcrone, the parish priest of Inishmore, who sums up the philosophy of government in his criticism of Mr. Willoughby’s successor: “A fellow that starts off by thinking himself clever enough to know what’s true and what isn’t will do no good for Ireland. A simple-hearted innocent kind of man has a better chance.” Needless to say, the rival treasure-hunters, both of them rogues, are bested at all points by the two padres, while poetic justice is satisfied by the fact that the treasure falls into the adhesive hands of the poor islanders, and “J.J.’s” general integrity is fully re-established in the epilogue, where, transplanted to an English colliery village, he devotes his energies to the conversion of agnostics, blasphemers and wife-beaters. The extravagance of the plot is redeemed by the realism of the details; by acute sidelights on the tortuous workings of the native mind, with its strange blending of shrewdness and innocence; by faithful reproductions of the talk of those “qui amant omnia dubitantius loqui” and habitually say “it might” instead of “yes.” And there are delightful digressions on the subject of relief works, hits at the Irish-speaking movement, pungent classifications of the visitors to the wild West of Ireland, and now, and again, in the rare moments when the author chooses to be serious, passages marked by fine insight and sympathy. Such is the picture of Thomas O’Flaherty Pat, the patriarch of the treasure island: | |||||||||
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