1 f kiC 
 
 RJ.S 
 
 ^;C>t 
 
 ffS 
 
 :> OJiD 
 
 nn 
 
 

:Che 
 CaJboc 
 
 pRess 
 \ books 
 
Irish Books and Irish People 
 
IRISH BOOKS 
 AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 By 
 
 STEPHEN QWYNN^^ 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 FREDERICK A, STOKES COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
 AOST9N G0L]L,E|8B*!tfiBABKif 
 
Printed at 
 
 The Talbot Press, I^td. 
 
 89 Talbot Street 
 
 Dublia 
 
 4'i6«'' 
 
Contents 
 
 ■t 
 
 Page 
 INTRODUCTION - - - - 1 
 
 NOVELS OF IRISH LIFE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY - 7 
 
 A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR - - - 23 
 
 LITERATURE AMONG THE ILLITERATES : 
 
 I.— THE SHANACHY 
 
 II. — THE LIFE OF A SONG - 
 
 IRISH EDUCATION AND IRISH CHARACTER - - 65 
 
 THE IRISH GENTRY - - - - 83 ^^ 
 
 YESTERDAY IN IRELAND - - - 97 
 
 44 
 51 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Y publisher must take at least some of the 
 responsibihty for reviving these essays. 
 All bear the marks of the period at which 
 they were written ; and some of them deal 
 with the beginnings of movements which 
 have since grown to much greater strength, and in 
 growing have developed new characteristics at the 
 expense of what was originally more prominent. 
 Other pages, again, tcike no account of facts which to- 
 day must be present to the mind of every Irish reader, 
 and so are, perhaps significantly, out of date. Nobody 
 for instance, could now complain that Irish humour is 
 lacking in seriousness. Synge disposed of that criti- 
 cism — and, indeed, the Abbey Theatre in its tone as 
 a whole may be accused of neglecting Ireland's gift 
 for simple fun. Yet Lady Gregory made the most of 
 it in her *' Spreading the News,*' and Mr. Yeats in his 
 ** Pot of Broth." — How beautifully W. G, Fay inter- 
 preted an Irish laughter which had no bitterness in it. 
 But the strong intellectual movement which has 
 swept over Ireland has been both embittering and em- 
 bittered. These last five and twenty years have been 
 the most formative in the country's history of any since 
 Ireland became the composite nation that she now is, 
 or, perhaps, has yet to become. At the back of it all 
 lies the great social change involved in the transfer of 
 ownership from the landlord to the cultivators of the 
 
2 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 soil — a change which has Hterally disenserfed three- 
 fourths of Ireland's people. Yet the relations are 
 obscure, indefinite, and intangible, which unite that 
 material result to the outcome of two forces, allied but 
 distinct, which have operated solely on men's minds 
 and spirits. These are, of course, the Gaelic revival 
 and the whole literciry movement which has had its 
 most concrete expression in the Irish theatre, and its 
 most potent inspiration in the personalrty of Mr, Yeats. 
 
 Of these two forces, one can show by far the more 
 tangible effects, for the Gaelic League has issued in 
 action. Setting out to revive and save the Irish lan- 
 guage as a living speech, the instrument of a nation's 
 intercourse, it has failed of its purpose ; but it has re- 
 vived and rendered potent the principle of separation. 
 Nationalist, it will have nothing to do with a nationa- 
 lity that is not as plainly marked off from other 
 nationalities as a red lamp from a green lamp ; and the 
 essential symbol of separate nationality is for orthodox 
 Gaelic Leaguers a separate language . America , said an 
 able exponent of this doctrine the other day in a public 
 debate, will never and never can be a nation till its 
 language is no longer recognisable as English — till its 
 English differs as much from the language of England 
 as German differs from Dutch. An inevitable corol- 
 lary to this view is the necessity for complete political 
 separadon from Great Britain — if only to provide the 
 machinery for this complete differentiation by daily 
 speech. 
 
 I cannot pretend to assess impartially the value of 
 this movement. It asserted itself in passionate 
 deeds at a moment when many thousands of 
 us Nationalists were taking equally vigorous 
 
INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 action in pursuit of a less tribal ideal. Thou- 
 sands of us lost our lives, all of us risked our 
 lives, with the hope of achieving a national unity which 
 could never be built on the basis of regarding no man 
 as an Irishman who did not speak, or at least desire to 
 speak, Gaelic for his mother tongue. The action of 
 Irish soldiers was thwarted and frustrated by the action 
 of a very few separatists, with a very small expense to 
 themselves in bloodshed. But the tribute to the work 
 of the Gaelic League is that Ireland accepted them and 
 rejected us. None can deny that it has been a potent 
 stimulus to national education ; and it only lacks official 
 prohibition by the British Government to become more 
 powerful still. 
 
 Whatever the outcome, I take back nothing of what 
 is written in these papers concerning the Gaelic revival. 
 In a country governed against the will of its people, 
 forces that, under normal and healthy conditions, 
 would be purely beneficent, may easily grow explosive 
 and disruptive. Yet I have not changed my mind on 
 a critical question which led me to sever my connection 
 with the work of the Gaelic League. When that body 
 decided to rely on compulsion rather than persuasion, 
 it took the wrong road, if its object was to endear the 
 Irish language to all Ireland, and to induce all Irishmen 
 to cherish it as part of the common national heritage. 
 As a result Ulstermen have a perfect right to say that 
 if they accepted Home Rule, one of the first steps of 
 an Irish government formed under the present aus- 
 pices would be to demand a knowledge of Gaelic as 
 the necessary qualification for holding any public 
 office. 
 
 I do not believe that this tribal idealism which is 
 
4 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 now so potent will endure. It is out of harmony with 
 the world's development — a world which in order to 
 preserve the very principle of small nationalities, is 
 growing more and more international. America is 
 not only a nation, but is the type of the modern nation 
 — bound together less by what it inherits from the 
 past, than by what it hopes from the future. 
 
 The other force which has been operating through 
 these years is, in a sense, obliged to give the lie to the 
 pretensions of the Gaelic League. Yeats and Synge 
 have showed how completely it is possible to be Irish 
 wfhile using the English language. They have accepted 
 the fact that Ireland to-day thinks in English, but they 
 have endeavoured to give to Ireland a distinctively 
 Irish thought, coloured by the whole racial tradition 
 and temperament. With them has been allied 
 a personality not less Irish, yet less obviously 
 Irish — ** A. E.,*' George Russell. Between them, 
 these writers and thinkers have profoundly 
 influenced the mind of the generation younger 
 than themselves. It is not possible to deny 
 that Ireland's literary output during those last twenty 
 years is far more important and serious than that of the 
 whole preceding century. The only part of it exempt 
 from these influences is the work of Edith Somerville 
 and Martin Ross; and even that is based on a closer 
 study of distinctively Irish speech than had ever been 
 attempted in earlier days. The propagandist work of 
 Pearse and Arthur Griffiths — equal in merit to that of 
 their forerunners, Davis and Mitchel — was Irish only 
 in substance and spirit, not in form or accent — a thing 
 the less surprising, since both men were only half Irish 
 by parentage. But the whole group of writers, of whom 
 
INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 it may be said that their writings are almost as unmis- 
 takably Irish as the work of Burns is Scotch, have 
 followed Mr. Yeats and Synge in this, that in writing 
 they assume an Irish public, not an English one; they 
 make no explanations, they speak as to those who 
 share their own inheritance. In this group has been 
 fostered a spirit of the freedom which belongs properly 
 to art. Thus the school, for it may justly be called a 
 school, has created its own tradition, and it has been 
 a tradition of freedom, not asserted but exercised : a 
 freedom, not as against England, but as against all the 
 world. Everywhere, but especially in countries under- 
 going revolutionary change, there is a tyranny of the 
 crowd. When the Gaelic League decided to make 
 the learning of Irish compulsory, it attorned to this 
 tyranny. On the other hand, Mr. Yeats, at a moment 
 when the Abbey Theatre seemed about to become 
 popular, was threatened by a fiat of this 
 mob-dictatorship; he was told that his theatre 
 must become unpopular unless he would throw 
 overboard most of Synge*s work. By the stand which 
 he then made he did a greater service to freedom of the 
 mind in Ireland than has yet been at all recognised; 
 he helped to make his country fearless and strong. 
 Thanks mainly to him and to those who worked with 
 him, Ireland's thought is freer and more outspoken; 
 there is more thought in Ireland than there used to be. 
 This does not make the country easier to govern, and 
 just now, Ireland, if given the opportunity, would have 
 a hard task to govern itself. But Ireland would 
 not be the only country in the world in that predica- 
 ment. The schoolmaster has been abroad, and 
 where you have education without liberty there is 
 
6 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 bound to be trouble. The only cure is, not to suppress 
 education, but to give the responsibihty of freedom. 
 
 I have left these papers in order as they were 
 written, with dates annexed. One of them, Literature 
 among the illiterates, was published in an earlier 
 volume. To-day and To-morrow in Ireland which is 
 now out of print. I include it here, because it com- 
 pletes the companion essay, called The Life oj a Song. 
 
 My acknowledgments are due to the various publica- 
 tions in which they have all, except the last, previously 
 appeared. 
 
 Dublin, March, 1919. 
 
NOVELS OF IRISH LIFE IN THE NINETEENTH 
 CENTURY. 
 
 HAT Ireland wants/' said an old gentle- 
 man not very long ago, ** is a Walter 
 Scott." The remedy did not seem 
 very practical, since Walter Scotts will 
 not come to order, but the point of view 
 is worth noting, for there you touch the central fact 
 about Irish literature. We desire a Walter Scott that 
 he may glorify our annals, popularise our legends, 
 describe our scenery, and give an attractive view of the 
 national character. In short, we know that Ireland 
 possesses pre-eminently the quality of picturesqueness, 
 and we should like to see it turned to good account. 
 We want a Walter Scott to advertise Ireland, and to 
 fill the hotels with tourists ; but as for desiring to 
 possess a great novelist simply for the distinction of 
 the thing, probably no civilised people on earth is 
 more indifferent to the matter. At present, indeed, 
 a Walter Scott, should he appear in Ireland, would be 
 apt to have a cold welcome. To write on anything 
 connected with Irish history is inevitably to offend the 
 Press of one party, cind very probably of both. Lever 
 is less of a caricaturist than Dickens, yet Dickens is 
 idolised while Lever has been bitterly blamed for 
 lowering Irish character in the eyes of the world; the 
 charge is even repeated in the Dictionary oj National 
 Biography. That may be patriotic sentiment, but it 
 is not criticism. 
 
8 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 Literature in Ireland, in short, is almost inextricably 
 connected with considerations foreign to art; it is 
 regarded as a means, not as an end. During the nine- 
 teenth century the belief being general among all 
 classes of Irish people that the English know nothing 
 of Ireland, every book on an Irish subject was judged 
 by the effect it was likely to have upon English opinion, 
 to which the Irish are naturally sensitive, since it 
 decides the most important Irish questions. But apart 
 from this practical aspect of the matter, there is a 
 morbid national sensitiveness which desires to be con- 
 sulted. Ireland, though she ought to count herself 
 amply justified of her children, is still complaining that 
 she is misunderstood among the nations; she is for 
 ever crying out for someone to give her keener sym- 
 pathy, fuller appreciation, and exhibit herself and her 
 grievances to the world in a true light. The result is 
 that kind of insincerity and special pleading which has 
 been the curse of Irish or Anglo-Irish literature. I 
 write of a literature which has its natural centre in 
 Dublin, not in Connemara; which looks eastward, not 
 westward. That literature begins with the Drapier 
 Letters: it continues through the great line of orators 
 in whom the Irish genius (we say nothing of the Celtic) 
 has found its highest expression; and it produced its 
 first novelist, perhaps also its best, in the unromantic 
 person of Maria Edgeworth. 
 
 Miss Edgeworth had a sound instinct for her art, 
 disfigured though her later writings are by what 
 Madame de Stael called her triste utilite. Her first 
 story is her most artistic production. Castle Rac\rent 
 is simply a pleasant satire upon the illiterate and 
 improvident gentry who have always been too common 
 
NOVELS OF IRISH LIFE 9 
 
 in her country. In this book she holds no brief; she 
 never stops to preach; her moral is impHed, not 
 expressed. A historian might, it is true, go to Castle 
 Rackrent for information about the conditions of land 
 tenure as well as about social life in the Ireland of that 
 day; but the erudition is part and parcel of her story. 
 Throughout the length and breadth of Ireland, setting 
 aside great towns, the main interest of life for all classes 
 is the possession of land. Irish peasants seldom marry 
 for love, they never murder for love; but they marry 
 and they murder for land. To know something of the 
 land-question is indispensable for an Irish novelist, and 
 Miss Edgeworth graduated with honours in this 
 subject. She was her father's agent ; when her brother 
 succeeded to the property she resigned, but in the 
 troubles of 1830 she was recalled t6 the management, 
 and saved the estate. Castle Rackrent is, therefore, 
 like Gait's Annals oj the Parish, a historical document ; 
 but it is none the worse story for that. The narrative 
 is put dramatically into the mouth of old Thady, a 
 lifelong servant of the family. Thady 's son, Jason 
 Quirk, attorney and agent to the estate, has dispos- 
 sessed the Rackrents; but Thady is still ** poor 
 Thady," and regards the change with horror. Before 
 recounting the history of his own especial master and 
 patron, Sir Condy Rackrent, last of the line, Thady 
 gives his ingenuous account of the three who previously 
 bore the name; Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, and Sir Kit. 
 Sir Patrick, the inventor of raspberry whiskey, died at 
 table : ** Just as the company rose to drink his health 
 with three cheers, he fell down in a sort of fit, and was 
 carried off; they sat it out, and were surprised in the 
 morning to find that it was all over with poor Sir 
 £ 
 
10 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 Patrick." That no gentleman likes to be disturbed 
 after dinner, was the best recognised rule of life in 
 Ireland ; if your host happened to have a fit, you knew 
 he would wish you to sit it out. Gerald Griffin in The 
 Collegians makes the same point with his usual vigour. 
 A shot is heard in the dining-room by the maids down- 
 stairs. They are for rushing in, but the manservant 
 knows better : ** Sure, don't you know, if there was 
 anyone shot the master would ring the bell." After 
 Sir Patrick, who thus lived and died, to quote his 
 epitaph, ** a monument of old Irish hospitality," came 
 Sir Murtagh, " who was a very learned man in the 
 law, and had the character of it " ; another passion that 
 seems to go with the land-hunger in Ireland. Sir 
 Murtagh married one of the family of the Skinflints : 
 ** She was a strict observer for self and servants of Lent 
 and all fast days, but not holidays." However, says 
 Thady (is there not a strong trace of Swift in all this?), 
 
 ** However, my lady was very charitable in her own 
 way. She had a charity school for poor children, 
 where they were taught to read and write gratis, and 
 where they were well kept to spinning gratis for my 
 lady in return ; for she had always heaps of duty yarn 
 from the tenants, and got all her household linen out 
 of the estate from first to last ; for after the spinning, 
 the weavers on the estate took il; in hand for nothing, 
 because of the looms my lady's interest could get from 
 the Linen Board to distribute gratis. . . . Her 
 table the same way, kept for next to nothing; duty 
 fowls, and duty turkeys, and duty geese came as fast 
 as we could eat them, for my lady kept a sharp look- 
 out and knew to a tub of butter everything the tenants 
 had all round. ... As for their young pigs, we 
 
NOVELS OF IRISH LIFE 11 
 
 had them, and the best bacon and hams they could 
 make up, with all young chickens in the spring; but 
 they were a set of poor wretches, and v/e had nothing 
 but misfortunes with them, always breaking and run- 
 ning away. This, Sir Murtagh and my lady said, was 
 all their former landlord. Sir Patrick's fault, who let 
 'em get the half year's rent into arrear ; there was some- 
 thing in that, to be sure. But Sir Murtagh was as 
 much the contrary way " 
 
 I have abridged my lady's methods, and I omit Sir 
 Murtagh's, v/ho taught his tenants, as he said, to know 
 the law of landlord and tenant. But, '*though a 
 learned man in the law, he was a little too incredulous 
 in other matters." He neglected his health, broke a 
 blood-vessel in a rage with my lady, and so made way 
 for Sir Kit the prodigal. Sir Kit was shot in a duel, 
 and Sir Condj^ came into an estate which, between Sir 
 Murtagh's law-suits and Sir Kit's gaming, was con- 
 siderably embarrassed; indeed, the story proper is 
 simply a history of makeshifts to keep rain and bailiffs 
 out of the family mansion. Poor Sir Condy; he 
 was the very moral of the man who is no man's enemy 
 but his own, and was left at the last with no friend but 
 old Thady. Even Judy Quirk turned against him, for- 
 getting his goodness in tossing up between her and 
 Miss Isabella Moneygawl, the romantic lady who 
 eloped with him after the toss. She deserted before 
 Judy ; here is a bit of the final scene. Thady was going 
 upstairs with a slate to make up a window-pane. 
 
 ** This window was in the long passage, or gallery, 
 as my lady gave orders to have it called, in the gallery 
 
12 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 leading up to my master's bedchamber and hers. And 
 when I went up with the slate, the door having no lock, 
 and the bolt spoilt, was ajar after Mrs. Jane (my lady's 
 maid), and as I was busy with the window, I heard all 
 that was saying within. * Well, what's in your letter, 
 Bella, my dear? ' says he. * You're a long time spell- 
 ing it over.' ' Won't you shave this morning. Sir 
 Condy?' says she, and put the letter into her pocket. 
 *I shaved the day before yesterday,' says he, * my dear, 
 and that's not what I'm thinking of now; but anything 
 to oblige you, and to have peace and quietness, my 
 dear,' — and presently I had the glimpse of him at the 
 cracked glass over the chimney-piece, standing up 
 shaving himself to please my lady." 
 
 However, the quarrel comes on in a delightful scene, 
 where Sir Condy shows himself at all events an ami- 
 able gentleman ; and so my lady goes home to her own 
 people. There you have Miss Edgeworth at her very 
 best; and, indeed, Castle Rac\rent received such a 
 tribute as no other novel ever had paid to it. Many 
 people have heard how when Waverley came to the 
 Edgeworth household, Mr. Edgeworth, after his 
 custom, read it aloud almost, as it would appear, at 
 one sitting. When the end came for that fascinated 
 circle, amid the chorus of exclamations, Mr. Edge- 
 worth said: ** What is this? Postscript which ought 
 to have been a preface/* Then there was a chorus of 
 protests that he should not break the spell with prose. 
 ** Anyhow," he said, ** let us hear what the man has 
 to say," and so read on to the passage where Scott 
 explained that he desired to do for Scotland what had 
 been done for Ireland: ** to emulate the admirable 
 fidehty of Miss Edgeworth's portraits." What Maria 
 
NOVELS OF IRISH LIFE 13 
 
 Edgeworth felt we know from the letter she posted off 
 ** to the Author of * Waverley,* Aut Scotus aut 
 Diabolus.'* 
 
 It would be unkind to compare Scott with his model. 
 For the poetry and the tragic power of his novels one 
 would never think of looking in Miss Edgeworth. Her 
 work is compact of observation; yet the gifts she has 
 are not to be under- valued. She is mistress of a kindly 
 yet searching satire, real wit, a fine vein of comedy; 
 and she can rise to such true pathos as dignifies the 
 fantastic figure of King Corny in Orniond, perhaps the 
 best thing she ever did. But she had in her father a 
 literary adviser, not of the negative but of the positive 
 order, and there never was a more fully developed 
 prig than Richard Edgeworth. His view of literature 
 was purely utilitarian ; to convey practical lessons was 
 the business of all superior persons, more particularly 
 of an Edgeworth. In Castle Rackrent his suggestions 
 and comments are happily relegated to the position of 
 notes ; in the other books they form part and parcel of 
 the novel. The Absentee, for instance, contains 
 admirable dialogue and many life-like figures ; but the 
 scheme of the story conveys a sense of unreality. 
 Every fault or vice has its counterbalancing virtue 
 represented. Lady Clonbroney, vulgarly ashamed of 
 her country, is set off by the patriotic Lady Oranmore ; 
 the virtuous Mr. Burke forms too obvious a pendant to 
 the rascally agents old Nick and St. Dennis. It is 
 needless to say that the exclusively virtuous people are 
 deadly dull. It is the novel with a purpose written by 
 a novelist whose strength lies in the delineation of 
 character. Miss Edgeworth can never carry you away 
 with her story, as Charles Reade sometimes can, and 
 make you forget and forgive the virtuous intention. 
 
14 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 What was unreal in Miss Edgeworth became mere 
 insincerity in her contemporary, Lady Morgan. Few 
 people could tell you now where Thackeray got Miss 
 Glorvina O'Dowd's baptismal name; yet The Wild 
 Irish Girl had a great triumph in its day, and Glorvina 
 stood sponsor to the milliners' and haberdashers' 
 inventions ninety years before the apotheosis of Trilby. 
 O'Donnell, which is counted Lady Morgan's best 
 novel, gives a lively ideal portrait of the authoress, 
 first as the governess-grub, then transformed by 
 marriage into the butterfly-duchess. But the book is 
 a thinly-disguised political pamphlet, *' Look," she 
 says in effect, **at the heroic virtues of O'Donnell, the 
 young Irishman, driven to serve in foreign armies, 
 despoiled of his paternal estates by the penal laws ; 
 look at the fidelity, the simplicity, the native humour 
 (so dramatically effective) of his servant Rory; and 
 then say if you will not plump for Catholic Emancipa- 
 tion." ** My dear lady," the reader murmurs, ** I 
 wondered why you were so set upon underlining all 
 these things. Can you not tell us a story frankly, and 
 let us alone with your conclusions)" 
 
 Unfortunately, very much the same has to be said of 
 a far greater writer, William Carleton, even in those 
 tales which are based upon his own most intimate 
 experience. The Poor Scholar, his most popular 
 story, proceeds directly from an episode in his own 
 life. He had himself been a poor scholar, had set out 
 from his northern home to walk to Munster, where the 
 best known schools were, trusting to charity by the 
 way to lodge him, and to charity to keep him through- 
 out his schooling for the sake of his vocation, and for 
 the blessing sure to descend upon those who aided a 
 
NOVELS OF IRISH LIFE 15 
 
 peasant's son to become a priest. Nothing could be 
 more vivid than the early scenes, the collection made 
 at the altar for Jimmy McEvoy, the priest's sermon, 
 the boy's parting from home, and the roadside hospi- 
 tality; there is one infinitely touching episode in the 
 house of the first farmer who shelters him. Then 
 come the school itself, and the tyranny of its master, 
 till the boy falls sick of a fever, and is turned out of 
 doors. Then, alas, the conventional intervenes in 
 the person of the virtuous absentee ignorant of his 
 agent's misdoings : the long arm of coincidence is 
 stretched to the uttermost; and we have to wade 
 through pages of discussion upon the relations of land- 
 lord and tenant till we are put wholly out of tune for 
 the beautiful scene of Jimmy's return home in his 
 priestly dress. 
 
 Carleton did for the peasantry what Miss Edgeworth 
 had done for the upper classes. In her books the 
 peasants have only an incidental part, and she 
 describes them shrewdly and sympathetically enough, 
 but with a mind untouched either by their faith or by 
 their superstitions ; seeing their good and bad qualities 
 clearly in a dry light, but never in imagination identify- 
 ing herself with them. Superior to Miss Edgeworth 
 in power and insight, he is immeasurably her inferior 
 in literary skill. One should remember, in comment- 
 ing upon the poverty of Irish literature in English, 
 that, so far as concerns imaginative work, it began in 
 the nineteenth century. Carleton only died in 1869, 
 Miss Edgeworth in 1 849 ; and before them there is no 
 one. 
 
 On the other hand the speech of Lowland Scots, with 
 whose richness in masterpieces our poverty is naturally 
 
16 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 contrasted, has been employed for literature as long as 
 the vernacular English. A king of Scotland wrote 
 admirable verse in the generation after Chaucer; the 
 influence of the Court fostered poetry, and the close 
 intercourse with France kept Scotch writers in touch 
 with first-rate models. Dunbar, strolling as a friar in 
 France, may have known Villon, whom he often re- 
 sembles. In Ireland, till a century ago, English was 
 as much a foreign language as Norman French in Eng- 
 land under the Plantagenets. Among the English 
 Protestants, settled in Ireland, and separated by a hard 
 line of cleavage from the Catholic population, there 
 arose great men in letters. Goldsmith, Burke, 
 Sheridan, who showed their Irish temperament 
 in their handling of English themes. But in 
 Ireland itself, before the events of 1782 
 added importance to Dublin, there was no centre for a 
 literature to gather round. Such national pride as 
 exists in English-speaking Ireland dates from the days 
 of Grattan and Flood. And Irish national aspirations 
 still bear the impress of their origin amid that period 
 of political turmoil, than which nothing is more hostile 
 to the brooding care of literary workmanship, the long 
 labour and the slow result. Irishmen have always 
 shown a strong disinclination to pure literature. The 
 roll of Irish novelists is more than half made up of 
 women's names; Miss Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, Miss 
 Emily Lawless, and Miss Jane Barlow. Journalists 
 Ireland has produced as copiously as orators; the 
 writers of The Spirit oj the Nation, that admirable 
 collection of stirring poems, are journalists working in 
 verse; and Carleton, falling under their influence, 
 became a journalist working in fiction. In his pages. 
 
NOVELS OF IFUSH LIFE 17 
 
 even when the debater ceases to argue and harangue, 
 the style is still journalistic, except in those passages 
 where his dramatic instinct puts living speech into the 
 mouths of men and women. Politics so monopolise 
 the minds of Irishmen, newspapers so make up their 
 whole reading, that the class to which Carle ton and 
 the poet Mangan belonged have never fully entered 
 upon the heritage of English literature. If an English 
 peasant knows nothing else, he knows the Bible and 
 very likely Bunyan ; but a Roman Catholic population 
 has little commerce with that pure fountain of style. 
 Genius cannot dispense with models, and Carleton and 
 Mangan had the worst possible. Yet when it has 
 been said that Carleton was a half -educated peasant, 
 writing in a language whose best literature he had not 
 sufficiently assimilated to feel the true value of words, 
 it remains to be said that he was a great novelist. He 
 cannot be fairly illustrated by quotation ; but read any 
 of his stories and see if he does not bring up vividly 
 before you Ireland as it was before the famine ; Ireland 
 still swarming with beggars who marched about in 
 families subsisting chiefly on the charity of the poor; 
 Ireland of which the hedge-school was plainly to him 
 the most characteristic institution. 
 
 Carleton does not stand by himself; he is the head 
 and representative of a whole class of Irish novelists, 
 among whom John Banim is the best known name. 
 All of them were peasants who aimed at depicting 
 scenes of peasant life from their own experience. 
 What one may call the melodramatic Irish story, in 
 which Lever was so brilliantly successful, has its first 
 famous example in The Collegians of Gerald Griffin. 
 The novel has no concern with college life, and is far 
 
18 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 better described by its stage- title, The Colleen Baton. 
 Here at least is a man with a story to tell and no object 
 but to tell it. Griffin belonged to the lay order of 
 Christian Brothers : his book deals principally with a 
 society no more familiar to him than was the household 
 of Mr. Rochester to Charlotte Bronte ; and his method 
 recalls the Brontes by its strenuous imagination and its 
 vehement painting of passion. The tale was suggested 
 by a murder which excited all Ireland. A young 
 southern squire carried off a girl with some m.oney, 
 and procured her death by drowning. He was arrested 
 at his mother's house and a terrible scene took place, 
 terribly rendered in the book. Griffin, of course, 
 changes the motive ; the girl is carried off not for money 
 but for love, and she is sacrificed to make way for a 
 stronger passion. Eily O'Connor, the victim, is a 
 pretty and pathetic figure: the hero-villain Hardress 
 Cregan, and the mother who indirectly causes the 
 crime, are effective though melodramatic; but the 
 actual murderer, Danny the Lord, Hardress Cregan's 
 familiar, is worthy of Scott or Hugo. 
 
 In his sketches of society, Hyland Creagh, the duel- 
 list, old Cregan, and the rest. Griffin is describing a 
 state of affairs previous to his own experience, the 
 Ireland of Sir Jonah Barrington's memoirs; he is not, 
 as were Carleton and Miss Edgeworth, copying min- 
 utely from personal observation. Herein he resembles 
 Lever who, when all is said and done, remains the 
 chief, as he is the most Irish, of Irish novelists. It is 
 true that Lever had two distinct manners: and in his 
 later books he deals chiefly with contemporary society, 
 drawing largely on his experiences of diplomatic life. 
 
NOVELS OF IRISH LIFE 19 
 
 Like most novelists he preferred his later work; but 
 the books by which he is best known, Harry Lorrequer 
 and the rest, are his earliest productions; and though 
 his maturer skill was employed on different subjects, 
 he formed his imagination in studies of the Napoleonic 
 Wars and of a duelling, drinking, bailiff-beating 
 Ireland. His point of view never altered, and the 
 peculiar attraction of his writings is always the same. 
 Lever's books have the quality rather of speech than 
 of writing; wherever you open the pages there is 
 always a witty, well-informed Irishman discoursing to 
 you, who tells his story admirably, when he has one to 
 tell, and, failing that, never fails to be pleasant. Irish 
 talk is apt to be discursive; to rely upon a general 
 charm diffused through the whole, rather thcin upon 
 any quotable brilliancy ; its very essence is spontaneity, 
 high spirits, fertility of resource. That is a fair 
 description of Lever. He is never at a loss. If his 
 story hangs, off he goes at score with a perfectly irrele- 
 vant anecdote, but told with such enjoyment of the 
 joke that you cannot resent the digression. Indeed the 
 plots are left pretty much to take care of themselves; 
 he positively preferred to write his stories in monthly 
 instalments for a magazine; he is not a conscientious 
 artist, but he lays himself out to amuse you, and he 
 does it. If he advertises a character as a wit, he does 
 not labour phrases to describe his brilliancy; he pro- 
 duces the witticisms. He has been accused of exag- 
 geration. As regards the incidents, one can only say 
 that the memoirs of Irish society at the beginning of 
 this century furnish at least fair warranty for any of his 
 inventions. In character-drawing he certainly over- 
 charged the traits : but he did so with intention, and by 
 
20 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 consistently heightening the tones throughout obtained 
 an artistic impression, which had life behind it, how- 
 ever ingeniously travestied. His stories have no unity 
 of action, but through a great diversity of characters 
 and incidents they maintain their unity of treatment. 
 That is not the highest ideal of the novel, but it is an 
 intelligible one, not lacking famous examples; and 
 Lever perfectly understood it. 
 
 If one wishes to realise how good an artist Lever 
 was, the best way is to read his contemporary Samuel 
 Lover. Handy Aniy appeared somewhat later than 
 Harry Lorrequer. It is just the difference between 
 good whiskey and bad whiskey ; both are indigenous 
 and therefore characteristic, but let us be judged by 
 our best. Obviously the men have certain things in 
 common; great natural vivacity, and an easy cheerful 
 way of looking at life. Lover can raise a laugh, but 
 his wit is horseplay except for a few happy phrases. 
 He has no real comedy; there is nothing in Handy 
 Andy half so ingenious as the story in Jack Hinton of 
 the way Ulick Bourke acquitted himself of his debt to 
 Father Tom. And behind all Lever's conventional 
 types there is a real fund of observation and knowledge 
 which is absolutely wanting in Lover, who simply 
 lacked the brains to be anything more than a trifler. 
 
 A very different talent was that of their younger 
 contemporary J. Sheridan Le Fanu. The author of 
 Uncle Silas had plenty of solid power ; but his art was 
 too highly specialised. No one ever succeeded better 
 in two main objects of the story-teller; first, in exciting 
 interest, in stimulating curiosity by vague hints of some 
 dreadful mystery; and then in concentrating attention 
 upon a dramatic scene. It is true that, although an 
 
NOVELS OF IRISH LIFE 21 
 
 Irishman, he gained his chief successes with stories 
 that had an English setting; but one of the best, The 
 House by the Churchyard, describes very vividly life 
 at Chapelizod in the days when this deserted little 
 village, which lies just beyond the Phoenix Park, was 
 thickly peopled with the families of officers stationed 
 in Dublin. Yet somehow one does not carry away 
 from the reading of it any picture of that society; the 
 story is so exciting that the mind has no time to rest 
 on details, but hurries on from clue to clue till finally 
 and literally the murder is out. Books which keep a 
 reader on the tenter-hooks of conjecture must always 
 suffer from this undue concentration of the interest; 
 and in spite of cheery, inquisitive Dr. Toole, and the 
 remarkable sketch of Black Dillon, the ruffianly genius 
 with a reputation only recognised in the hospitals and 
 the police-courts (a character admirably invented and 
 admirably used in the plot) one can hardly class Le 
 Fanu among those novelists who have left memorable 
 presentments of Irish life. It is a pity; for plainly, if 
 the man had cared less for sensational incident and 
 ingenious construction, he might have sketched life 
 and character with a strong brush and a kind of grim 
 realism 
 
 Realism Lever does not aim at ; he declines to be on 
 his oath about anything. What he gives one, vividly 
 enough, is national colour, not local colour ; he is essen- 
 tially Irish, just as Fielding is essentially English ; but 
 he aims at verisimilitude rather than veracity. The 
 ideal of the novel has changed since his day. Com- 
 pare him with the two ladies who stand out promi- 
 nently among contemporary writers of Irish fiction. 
 Miss Jane Barlow^ and Miss Emily Lawless. To begin 
 
22 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 with, Lever's stories are always concerned with the 
 QuaHty; peasants only come in for an underplot, or in 
 subordinate parts; and the gentry all through Ireland 
 resemble one another within reasonable limits. It is 
 different with the peasantry. In every part of Ireland 
 you will find people who have never been ten miles 
 away from the place of their birth, and upon whom a 
 local character is unmistakably stamped. The con- 
 temporary novelists delight to mark these differences, 
 these salient points of singularity: and their studies are 
 chiefly of the peasantry. They settle down upon some 
 little corner of the country and never stir out of it. 
 Miss Lawless is not content to get you Irish character ; 
 she must show you a Clare man or an Arran islander, 
 and she is at infinite pains to point out how his nature, 
 even his particular actions, are influenced by the place 
 of his bringing up. Lever avoids this specialisation; 
 he prefers a stone wall country for his hunting scenes, 
 but beyond that he goes no further into details. Again 
 Miss Lawless both in Crania and in Hurrish makes 
 you aware that young Irishmen of Hurrish*9 class are 
 curiously indifferent to female beauty. Lever will 
 have none of that; his Irishman must be ** a divil with 
 the girls,'* although Lever is no sentimentalist, and does 
 not talk of love matches among the Irish peasantry. 
 
 The greatest divergence of all, however, is in the 
 temper attributed to the Irish. Lever makes them gay, 
 Miss Lawless and Miss Barlow make them sad. No 
 one denies that sadness is nearer the reality, but it is 
 unreasonable to call Lever insincere. Naturally care- 
 less and lighthearted he does not trouble himself with 
 the riddle of the painful world : the distress which 
 touches him most nearly is a distress for debt. But if 
 
NOVELS OF IRISH LIFE 23 
 
 Lever is not realistic he is natural ; he follows the law 
 of his nature as an artist should; he sees life through 
 his own medium; and if books are to be valued as 
 companions, not many of them are better company 
 than Charles O'Malley or Lord Kilgobhin; for first and 
 last Lever was always himself. 
 
 Yet, I must own it, it does not do to read Lever soon 
 after Miss Barlow. Her stories of Lisconnel and its 
 folk have a tragic dignity wholly out of his range. It 
 is a sad-coloured country she writes of, gray and 
 brown; bodden brown with bog water, gray with rock 
 cropping up through the fields ; the only brightness is 
 up overhead in the heavens, and even they are often 
 clouded. These sombre hues, with the passing gleam 
 of something above them, reflect themselves in every 
 page of her books. She renders that complete har- 
 mony between the people and their surroundings which 
 is only seen in working folk whose clothes are stained 
 with the colour of the soil they live by, and whose 
 lives assimilate themselves to its character. She has 
 a fineness of touch, a poetry, to which no other Irish 
 story-teller has attained. 
 
 Yet, Miss Barlow has xiever succeeded with a regu- 
 lar novel : and she may have been only a forerunner. 
 All great writers proceed from a school, and there does 
 exist now undeniably a school of Irish literature which 
 differs from Miss Edge worth in being strongly tinged 
 with the element of Celtic romance, from Carleton in 
 possessing an admirable standard of style, and from 
 Lever in aiming at a sincere and vital portraiture of 
 Irish life. 
 
 1897. 
 
A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR. 
 
 N a preface to the French translation of 
 Sienkiewicz's works, M. de Wyzewa, 
 the well-known critic, himself a Pole, 
 makes a suggestive comparison between 
 the Polish and the Russian natures. The 
 Pole, he says, is quicker, wittier, more imaginative, 
 more studious of beauty, less absorbed in the material 
 world than the Russian — in a word, infinitely more 
 gifted with the artistic temperament; and yet in every 
 art the Russian has immeasurably outstripped the P;jle. 
 His explanation, if not wholly convincing, is at least 
 suggestive. The Poles are a race of dreamers, and 
 the dreamer finds his reward in himself. He does not 
 seek to conquer the world with arms or with com- 
 merce, with tears or with laughter; neither money 
 tempts him nor fame, and the strenuous, unremitting 
 application which success demands, whether in war, 
 business, or the arts, is alien to his being. 
 
 The same observation and the same reasoning apply 
 with equal force to the English and the Irish. No one 
 who has lived in the two countries will deny that the 
 Irish are apparently the more gifted race; no one can 
 deny, if he has knowledge and candour, that the 
 English have accomplished a great deal more, the 
 Irish a great deal less. Nowhere is this more evident 
 than in the productions of that faculty which Irishmen 
 have always been reputed, and justly reputed, to 
 possess in peculiar measure — the faculty of humour. 
 
A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR 25 
 
 Compare Lever, who for a long time passed as the 
 typical Irish humorist, with his contemporaries 
 Thackeray and Dickens. The comparison is not fair, 
 but it suggests the central fact that the humour of Irish 
 literature is deficient in depth, in intellectual quality, 
 or, to put it after an Irish fashion, in gravity. 
 
 * Humorous * is a word as question-begging as 
 * artistic,' and he would be a rash man who should 
 try to define either. But so much as this will readily 
 be admitted, that humour is a habit of mind essentially 
 complex, involving always a double vision — a refer- 
 ence from the public or norm.al standard of proportion 
 to one that is private and personal. The humorist 
 refuses to part with any atom of his own personality, 
 he stamps it on whatever comes from him. *' If 
 reasons were as plenty as blackberries," says Falstaff, 
 achieving individuality by the same kind of odd pic- 
 turesque comparison as every witty Irish peasant uses 
 in talk, to the delight of himself and his hearers. But 
 the individuality lies deeper than phrases; Falstaff 
 takes his private standard into battle with him. There 
 is nothing more obviously funny than the short paunchy 
 man, let us not say cowardly, but disinclined to action, 
 who finds himself engaged in a fight. Lever has used 
 him a score of times (beginning with Mr. O'Leary in 
 the row at a gambling-hell in Paris), and whether he 
 runs or Vv^hether he fights, his efforts to do either are 
 grotesquely laughable. Shakespeare puts that view 
 of Falstaff too : Prince Hal words it. But Falstaff, the 
 humorist in person, rises on the field cf battle over the 
 slain Percy and enunciates his philosophy of the better 
 part of valour. Falstaff *s estimate of honour — ** that 
 word honour " '** Who hath it? he that died o* Wed- 
 
 c 
 
26 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 nesday Doth he feel it?"), the ** grinning honour'* 
 that Sir Walter Blunt wears where the Douglas left 
 him — is necessary to complete the humorist's vision of 
 a battle-piece. Lever will scarcely visit you with such 
 reflections, for the humorist of Lever's type never 
 stands stands apart and smiles ; he laughs loud and in 
 company. Still less will he give you one of those 
 speeches which are the supreme achievement of this 
 faculty, where the speaker's philosophy is not reas- 
 oned out liked Falstaff's, but revealed in a flash of the 
 onlooker's insight. Is it pardonable to quote ^the 
 account cf Falstaff's death as the hostess narrates it? 
 
 "How now, Sir John, quoth I, what, man! be of good cheer. 
 So a' cried out God, God, three or four times. Now I, to comfort 
 him, bid him a' should not think of God ; I hoped there was no 
 need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet." 
 
 Humour can go no farther than that terrible, illum- 
 inating phrase, which is laughable enough, heaven 
 knows, but scarce likely to make you laugh. Contrast 
 the humour of that v/ith the humour of such a story as 
 Lever delighted in. There were two priests dining 
 with a regiment, we all have read in Harry Lorrequer, 
 who chaffed a dour Ulster Protestant till he was the 
 open derision of the mess. Next tim.e they returned, 
 the Protestant major was radiant with a geniality that 
 they could not explain till they had to make their way 
 out of barracks in a hurry, and found that the counter- 
 sign (arranged by the major) was *' Bloody end to the 
 Pope." Told as Lever tells it, with all manner of 
 jovial amplifications, that story would make anyone 
 laugh. But it does not go deep. The thing is funny 
 in too obvious a way; the mirth finds too large an 
 
A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR 27 
 
 outlet in laughter; it does not hang about the brain, 
 inextricable from the processes of thought; it carries 
 nothing with it beyond the jest. And just as tears 
 help to an assuaging of grief, so in a sense laughter 
 makes an end of mirth. Give a feeling its instinctive 
 vent, and you will soon be done with it, like the child 
 who laughs and cries within five minutes; check it, 
 and it spreads inward, gaining in intellectual quality 
 as it loses in physical expression. The moral is, that 
 if you v/ish to be really humorous you must not be too 
 funny; and the capital defect of most Irish humour is 
 that its aim is too simple — it does not look beyond 
 raising a laugh. 
 
 There are brilliant exceptions in the century that 
 lies between Sheridan and Mr. Bernard Shaw, between 
 Maria Edgev^'orth and Miss Barlow. But serious art 
 or serious thought in Ireland has always revealed itself 
 to the English sooner or later as a species of sedition, 
 and the Irish have v/ith culpable folly allowed them- 
 selves to accept for characteristic excellences what 
 were really the damning defects of their work — an easy 
 fluency of wit, a careless spontaneity of laughter. They 
 have taken Moore for a great poet, and Handy Andy 
 for a humorist to be proud of. Yet an Irishman who 
 wishes to speak dispassionate!}^ must find humour of a 
 very different kind from that of Handy Andy or Harry 
 Lorrequer eitner, to commend without reserve, as a 
 thing that may be put forward to rank wiLh what is 
 best in other literatures. 
 
 Taking Sheridan and Miss Edgeworth as marking 
 the point of departure, it becomes obvious that one is 
 at an end, the other at a beginning. Sheridan belongs 
 body and soul to the eighteenth century; Miss Edge- 
 
28 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 worth, though her name sounds oddly in that context, 
 is part and parcel of the romantic movement. The 
 *' postscript which ought to have been a preface ** to 
 Waverley declared, though after Scott's magnificent 
 fashion, a real indebtedness. Sheridan's humour, 
 essentially metropolitan, had found no use for local 
 colour ; Miss Edgeworth before Scott proved the artistic 
 value that could be extracted from the characteristics 
 of a special breed of people under special circum- 
 stances in a special place. Mr. Yeats, who, like all 
 poets, is a most suggestive and a most misleading 
 critic, has declared that modem Irish literature begins 
 with Carleton. That is only true if we are determined 
 to look in Irish literature for qualities that can be called 
 Celtic — if we insist that the outlook on the world shall 
 be the Catholic's or the peasant's. Miss Edgeworth 
 had not a trace of the Celt — as I conceive that rather 
 indefinite entity — about her; but she was as good an 
 Irishwoman as ever walked, and there are hundreds 
 of Irish people of her class and creed looking at Irish 
 life with kindly humorous Irish eyes, seeing pretty 
 much what she saw, enjoying it as she enjoyed it, but 
 with neither her power nor her will to set it down. 
 Castle Rackrent is a masterpiece ; and had Miss Edge- 
 worth been constant to the dramatic method which she 
 then struck out for herself, with all the fine reticences 
 that it involved, her name might have stood high in 
 literature. Unhappily, her too exemplary father 
 repressed the artist in her, fostered the pedagogue, and 
 in her later books she commits herself to an attitude in 
 which slie can moralise explicitly upon the ethical and 
 social bearings of every word and action. The fine 
 humour in Ormond is obscured by its setting ; in Castle 
 
A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR 29 
 
 Rackrent the humour shines. Sir Condy and his lady 
 we see none the less distinctly for seeing them through 
 the eyes of old Thady, the retainer who narrates the 
 Rackrent history ; and in the process we have a vision 
 of old Thady himself. Now and then the novelist 
 reminds us of her presence by some extravagantly 
 ironic touch, as when Thady describes Sir Condy *s 
 anger with the Government ** about a place that was 
 promised him and never given, after his supporting 
 them against his conscience very honourably and 
 being greatly abused for, he having the name of a 
 great patriot in the country.'* Thady would hardly 
 have been so ingenuous as that. But for the most 
 part the humour is truly inherent in the situation, and 
 you might look far for a better passage than the 
 description of Sir Condy 's parting with his lady. But 
 it is better to illustrate from a scene perhaps less 
 genuinely humorous, but more professedly so — Sir 
 Condy 's wake. Miss Edgeworth does not dwell on 
 the broad farce of the entertainment; she does not 
 make Thady eloquent over the whisky that was drunk 
 and the fighting that began and so forth, as Lever or 
 Carleton would certainly have been inclined to do. 
 She fixes on the central comedy of the situation. Sir 
 Condy's innocent vanity and its pitiable disappoint- 
 ment — is it necessary to recall that he had arranged 
 for the wake himself, because he always wanted to 
 see his own funeral? Poor Sir Condy ! — even Thady, 
 who was in the secret, had forgotten all about him, 
 when he was startled by the sound of his master's 
 voice from under the greatcoats thrown all atop. 
 
 "'Thady,' says he, 'I've had enough of this; I'm smothering 
 and can't hear a word of all they're saying of the deceased.' ' God 
 
30 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 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 arrange- 
 ment. ** 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 mean- 
 ings, 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 vve have to show; and his faults, almost 
 
A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR 31 
 
 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 ver- 
 nacular song and ballad ; Carleton had to make his 
 own, and the genius for form v/as 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 MidnrgJ^* 
 Mass he rings the changes interminably upon the old 
 business of the v/onderful 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 
 serm^on where the priest so artfully wheedles and 
 coaxes his congregation into generosity towards the 
 boy who is going out on the w^orld, 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 mvowers 
 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 
 
32 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 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 puprpose 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 depen- 
 dence. There is nothing so just as true humour, for 
 by the law of its being it sees inevitably two sides; 
 and this strange comxpound of vices and virtues, so 
 rich in ail the sorter 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 spiri- 
 tual, which happily have largely ceased to exist, yet 
 operate indefinite!}^ as causes among us, producing 
 eternal though eternally modifiable effects. 
 
 But, for the things in human nature that are neither 
 of yesterday, to-da3^ nor to-morrow, but unchange- 
 able, he has the humorist's true touch. When the 
 poor scholar is departing, and has actually torn him- 
 self away from home, his niother 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 
 
A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR 33 
 
 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 Eng- 
 lish was still a strange tongue on his lips and in the 
 ears of those he lived among; and his v/ork comes 
 down distracted between the two languages, imper- 
 fect 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 
 
34 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 demanded something witty, lie would Rash 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 equi- 
 valent 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 skip- 
 ping. 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 Conti- 
 nent, a pork-butcher making his first experience of 
 Italy, hit o^ 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 
 
A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR 35 
 
 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 con- 
 centration 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 Molovoney s Taste oj 
 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 mag- 
 nificent 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 hum.our 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 
 
36 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 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 majo- 
 rity 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 fore- 
 most 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 gene- 
 rosity 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 
 
A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR 37 
 
 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 tri- 
 bute to the authoresses of Some Experiences oj 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 hun- 
 dreds 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 them- 
 selves with such talent and zeal to the task of invec- 
 tive that no man could live in peace, and the country 
 cried out against them, and there was talk of suppress- 
 ing the whole order. The king spared them on con- 
 
38 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 dition 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 there- 
 fore I leave alone any attempt to survey the humour 
 of the orators, though Curran tempts one at the begin- 
 ning and Mr. Healy at the close. Of purely literary 
 satire there has been little enough, apart from its 
 emergence in the novel; but thore 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. 
 
A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR 39 
 
 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 oj Blarney. But 
 neither that work, nor even The Night bejore 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 
 3ong of course is Father O'Flynn. To recall the 
 delightful lingenuity 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 pre- 
 fe^rred 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 tem- 
 perament 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 
 
40 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 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 dur- 
 ing 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 any- 
 one who saw You Never can Tell, and v/as 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 per- 
 versities 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 
 
A CENTURY OF IRISH HU?v10UR 41 
 
 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 con- 
 vince ihem 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 fami- 
 liar with the limelight, so unused to the illumination 
 by laughter, who finds himself in the long run deplor- 
 ably 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 
 
 P 
 
42 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOI^LE 
 
 nobody wants to pin dov/n English humour to the for- 
 mula of a definition; no one wants to say, Thus far 
 shalt thou go, and beyond that shalt cease to be Eng- 
 lish. 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 hum.our 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 accu- 
 mulation 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 v/eakness; 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 belter 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 1 
 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 
 
A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR 43 
 
 over spontaneously — but is the expression of deep 
 feeling and deep thought, made possible by deep 
 study of the means to expn-ess it; and secondly, that 
 literature, which through the earlier part of last cen- 
 tury 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 v/ider 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 no^v than a century ago. 
 
 1901. 
 
LITERATURE AMONG THE ILLITERATES 
 
 I 
 
 THE SHANACHY 
 
 ^HERE is nothing belter known about Ire- 
 land than this fact : that ilhteracy 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 pre- 
 cisely "v/hat 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? 
 
 The Gaelic revival sends many of us to school in 
 Irish-speaking districts, and, if it did nothing else, at 
 least it would have sent us to school in pleasant places 
 among the most lovable preceptors. It was a blessed 
 change from London to a valley among hills that look 
 
THE SHANACHY 45 
 
 over the Atlantic, with its brown stream tearing down 
 among boulders, and its heathy banks, where the keen 
 fragrance of bog-myrtle rose as you brushed through 
 in the morning on your way to the head of a pool. 
 Here was indeed a desirable academy, and my pre- 
 ceptor matched it. A big, loose-jointed old man, 
 rough, brownish-gray all over, clothes, hair, and face; 
 his cheeks were half-hidden by the traditional close- 
 cropped whisker, and the rest v^^as an ill-shorn stubble. 
 Traditional, too, was the small, deep-set, blue eye, the 
 large, kindly mouth, uttering English with a soft 
 brogue, which, as is always the case among those 
 whose real tongue is Irish, had no trace of vulgarity. 
 Indeed, it would have been strange that vulgarity of 
 any sort should show in one who had perfect man- 
 ners, and the instinct of a scholar, for this preceptor 
 was not even technically illiterate. He could read 
 and write English, anc) Irish, too, which is by no 
 means so common; and I have not often seen a man 
 happier than he was over Douglas Hyde's collection 
 of Connacht love-songs, which I had fortunately 
 brought v/ith me. But his main interest v/as in his- 
 tory — that history which had been rigorously excluded 
 from his school training, the history of Ireland. I 
 would go on ahead to fish a pool, and leave him poring 
 over Hyde's book; but when he picked me up, 
 conversation went on where it broke off — somewhere 
 among the fortunes of Desmonds and Burkes, O'Neills 
 and O'Donnells. And when one had hooked a large 
 sea- trout, on a singularly bad day, in a place where no 
 sea-trout was expected, it was a little disappointing 
 to find that Charlie's only remark, as he swept the net 
 under my capture, was : ** The Clancartys was great 
 
46 LRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 men too. Is there any of them living?" The scholar 
 in him had completely got the better of the sportsman. 
 
 Beyond his historic lore (which v/as really consider- 
 able, and by no means inaccurate) he had many songs 
 by heart, some of them made by Carolan, some by 
 nameless poets, written in the Irish which is spoken 
 to-day. I wrote down a couple of Charlie's lyrics 
 which had evidently a local origin ; but what I sought 
 v/as one of the Shanachies who carried in his m.emory 
 the classic literature of Ireland, the epics or ballads of 
 an older day. Charlie Vv^as familiar, of course, with 
 the matter of this ** Cssianic " literature, as we all 
 are, for example, v/ith the story of Ulysses. He knew 
 hov/ Oisin dared to go v/ith a fairy wom.an to her own 
 land; how he returned in defiance of her warning; 
 hov/ he found himself lonely and broken in a changed 
 land; and how, in the end, he gave in to the teaching 
 of St. Patrick (" Sure how v/ould he stand up against 
 it?" said Charlie), and was converted to Christ. But 
 all the mass of rhymed verse which relates the dia- 
 logues between Oisin and Patrick, the tales of Finn 
 and his heroes which Oisin told to the Saint, the fierce 
 ansvvers with v/hich the old v/arrior met the Gospel 
 arguments — all this vvas only vaguely familiar to him. 
 I was looking for a m.an who had it by heart. 
 
 The search for the repositories of this knowledge 
 leads sometimes into strange contrasts. One friend 
 of mine lay stretched for long hours on top of a roof 
 of sticks and peat-scraws which was propped against 
 the wall of a rained cabin, v;hile within the evicted 
 tenant, still clinging to his home as life clings to the 
 shattered body, lay bedridden on a lair of rushes, and 
 chanted the deeds of heroes ; his voice issuing through 
 
THE SHANACHY 47 
 
 tne vent in the roof, at once windov/ and chimney, 
 from the kennel in which was neither room nor light 
 for a man to sic and record the verses. My own 
 chance was luckier and happier. It came on a day 
 when a party of us had set out in quest of a remote 
 mountain lough. Our way led along the river, and 
 as we drove up to vvhere the valley contracted, and 
 the tillage land decreased in extent and fertility, the 
 type of the people changed. They v/ere Celts and 
 Catholics, evident to the least practised eye. A little 
 further still from civilisation we reached the fringe 
 that was Gaelic not merely in blood ; the kindly woman 
 whose cottage warmed and sheltered us when we 
 returned half-foundered from plunging through bogs 
 was an Irish speaker. She had no songs herself, but 
 if I wanted them her neighbour, James Kelly, was the 
 best of company, and would keep me listening the 
 length of a night. 
 
 I pushed my bicycle through a drizzle of misty rain 
 up the road over mountainous moor, before I saw his 
 cottage standing trim and v/hite under its thatch in a 
 screen of trees, and as I v/as nearing it, the boy with 
 me showed me James down in a hollow, filling a 
 barrov/ wiih turf. He stopped work as I came down, 
 and called off his dog, looking at me curiously enough, 
 for, indeed, strangers were a rarity in that spot, clean 
 off the tourist track, and away from any thoroughfare. 
 One's presence had to be explained out of hand, and 
 I told him exactly why I had come. He looked sur- 
 prised and perhaps a little pleased, that his learning 
 should draw students. But he made no pretence of 
 ignorance; the only question was, how he could help 
 me. Did I v/ant songs of the modem kind, or the 
 
48 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 older songs of Finn Mac-Cool ? If it was the latter, it 
 seemed I v/as not well able to manage the common 
 talk, and these songs were v/rilten in ** very hard Irish, 
 full of ould strong words.'* 
 
 I should like to send the literary Irishmen of my 
 acquaintance one by one to converse with James Kelly 
 as a salutary discipline. He was perfectly courteous, 
 but through his courtesy there pierced a kind of tolera- 
 tion that carried home to one's mind a profound con- 
 viction of ignorance. People talk about the servility 
 of the Irish peasant. Plere was a man who professed 
 his inability to read or write, but stood perfectly secure 
 in his sense of superior education. His respect for me 
 grew evidently v^hen he found me familiar with the 
 details of more stories than he expected. I was raised 
 to the level of a hopeful pupil. They had been put 
 into English, I told him. **Oh, ay, they v/ould be, 
 in a sort of a way," said James, with a fine scorn. 
 Soon v/e broke new ground, for James had by heart 
 not only the Fenian or Ossianic cycle, but also the 
 older Sagas of Cuchulain. He confused the cycles, 
 it is true, taking the Red Branch heroes for contem- 
 poraries of the Fianna, which is much as if one should 
 make Heracles meet Odysseus or Achilles in battle; 
 but he had these earlier legends by heart, a rare 
 acquirement among the Shanachies of to-day. 
 
 Here then was a tj^pe of the Irish illiterate. A man 
 somewhere between fifty and sixty, at a guess; of 
 middle height, spare and well-knit, high-nosed, fine- 
 featured, keen-eyed ; standing there on his own ground, 
 courteous and even respectful, yet consciously a 
 scholar; one who had travelled too — had worked in 
 England and Scotland, and could tell me that the High- 
 
THE SHANACHY 49 
 
 land Gaelic was far nearer to the language of the old 
 days than the Irish of to-day; finally, one who could 
 recite without apparent effort long narrative poems in 
 a dead literary dialect. When I find an English work- 
 nicin who can stand up and repeat the works of 
 Chaucer by heart, then and not till then I shall see an 
 equivalent for James Kelly. 
 
 And 3'et it would be a different thing entirely. 
 Chaucer has never survived in oral tradition. But 
 in the West of Donegal, whence James Kelly's father 
 emigrated to where 1 found his son, every old person 
 had this literature in mind, and my friend was no 
 exception. It is among the younger generation, who 
 have been taught in the National Schools (surely the 
 most ironic of all titles), that the language and the his- 
 tory of the nation are dying out. Yet that is changing. 
 For instance, James Kelly's son reads and writes 
 Irish, and on another day helped me to note down 
 some of his father's lore. 
 
 For it was late when I came first to the house, and 
 though the Shanachie pressed me (not knowing even 
 my name) to stay the night, I had to depart for that 
 day, after I had heard him recite in the traditional 
 chant some staves of an Ossianic lay, and sing to the 
 traditional air Cardan's famous lyric, ** The Lord of 
 Mayo." We drank a glass of whisky from my flask, 
 a cup of tea that his wife made ; and as we went into 
 the house he asked a favour in a whisper. It was 
 that I should eat plenty of his good woman's butter. 
 He escorted me a good way over the hill, for, said 
 he, when I had come that far to see him, it was the 
 least that he should put me a piece on my road, and 
 he exhorted me to come again for ** a good crack 
 
50 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 together.*' And if 1 deferred visiting him for another 
 year that was largely because 1 did not like to face 
 again 'this illiterate without acquiring a little more 
 knowledge. 
 
 What came of my second visit must be written in 
 another paper. But here, let it be understood this is 
 no exceptional case. In every three or four parishes 
 along the Western seaboard and for twenty miles 
 inland, from Donegal to Kerr)^ there is the like of 
 James Kelly to be found. It may be that in another 
 fifty years not one of these Shanachies v/ill linger; 
 education will have made a clean sv/eep of illiteracy. 
 And yet again, it may be that by that time, not only 
 in the Western baronies but through the length and 
 breadth of Ireland, both song and ctory and legend 
 will be living again on the lips and in the hearts of 
 the people. Go leigidh Dia sin. 
 
LITERATURE AiVIONG THE ILLITERATES 
 
 II 
 
 THE LIFE OF A SONG 
 
 HERE v/as a great ccntenlion some years 
 ago fought out in a law court between the 
 British Museum and the Royal Irish 
 Academy, for the custody of certain 
 treasure trove, gold vessels and orna- 
 ments disinterred on an Irish beach. The treasures 
 v/ent back, as was only right, to Ireland, where is a 
 rich storehouse of such things, for the soil has been 
 dug over in search for the material relics of ancient 
 art. Yet little heed has been paid to treasures of far 
 greater v/orth and interest, harder to sell, it is true, but 
 easier to coine by— the old songs and stories which 
 linger in oral tradition or in old manuscripts handed 
 down from peasant to peasant. Only within the last 
 few years did the Irish suddenly awake to a conscious- 
 ness that the authentic symbols, or, rather, the indis- 
 putable proofs of the national existence so dear to 
 them, were slippmg out of their hands. So far had 
 the heritage perished, so ill had the tradition been 
 maintained, that when they turned to revive their 
 expiring language and literature, the first question 
 asked was, ** What is it you v/ould revive? Was 
 there ever a literature in Irish or merely a collection of 
 ridiculous rhodomontade ? Is there a lans^uare, or 
 
52 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 does there survive merely a debased jargon, employed 
 by ignorant peasants among themselves, and chiefly 
 useful, like a thieves' lingo, to baffle the police?** 
 
 These were the questions put, and not one in a thou- 
 sand of Irish Nationalists could give an answer accord- 
 ing to knowledge. 
 
 Now, matters are changed. The books that were 
 available in print have been read ; the v/ork of poets 
 extant only in manuscript has been printed and widely 
 circulated; the language is studied with zeal, and not 
 in Ireland only, but wherever Irishmen are gathered. 
 Yet nothing has so strongly moved me to believe that 
 we cherish the living rather than pay funeral honours 
 to the dead, as certain hours spent with a peasant who 
 could neither write nor read. 
 
 The life of a song — poets have said it again and 
 again in immortal verse — is of all lives the most endur- 
 ing. Kingdoms pass, buildings crumble, but the work 
 which a man has fashioned " out of a mouthful of 
 air** defies the centuries; it keeps its .shape and its 
 quivering substance. Strongest of all such lives are 
 perhaps those where " the mouthful of air " is left by 
 the singer mere air, and no more, unfixed on paper or 
 parchment; v/hen the song goes from mouth to mouth, 
 altering its contours it may be, but unchanged in 
 essence, though coloured by its immediate surround- 
 ings as a flower fits itself to each soil. Such was the 
 song that I had the chance to write down, from lips to 
 which it came through who knows how many genera- 
 tions. 
 
 The story which it tells is among the finest in that 
 great repertory of legend v/nich, since Ireland began to 
 take count of her own possessions, has become fami- 
 
THE LIFE OF A SONG 53 
 
 liar to the world. It is the theme of a play in the last 
 book published by the chief of modem Irish poets, 
 Mr. W. B. Yeats. But since he tells the story in a way 
 of his own, and since it is none too well known even 
 in those parts of Ireland where its hero's name is 
 a proverb (Comh laidir le Cuchidain, Strong as Cuchu- 
 lain), it may be well to set out the legend here. 
 
 Cuchulain, the Achilles of Irish epic, was famous 
 from the day in boyhood when he got his name by 
 killing, bare-handed, the smith's fierce watchdog that 
 would have torn him. The ransom for the killing was 
 laid on by the boy himself, and it was that he should 
 watch Culann's house for a year and a day til] a pup 
 should be grown to take the place of the slain dog. 
 So he came to be called Cu Chulain, Culann's Hound, 
 and by that name he w^as known when, as a young 
 champion, he set out for the Isle of Skye, where the 
 warrior- witch Sgathach (from whom the island is 
 called) taught the crowning feats of arms to all young 
 heroes who could pass through the ordeals she laid 
 upon them. 
 
 There was no trial that Cuchulain could not support, 
 and the fame of him drew on a combat with another 
 Amazonian warrior, Aoife, who, in the story that 1 
 heard, was Sgathach's daughter, though Lady Gre- 
 gory in her fine book Cuchulain of Muirthemne gives 
 another version. But, at any rate, Cuchulain defeated 
 Aoife, and she gave love to her conqueror — whose 
 passion for the fierce queen was not strong enough to 
 keep him from Ireland. When he made ready to go, 
 the woman warrior told him that a child v/as to be 
 born of their embraces, and she asked what should be 
 done with it. *' If it be a girl, keep it," said Cuchu- 
 
54 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 Iain, " but if a hoy, wait till his thumb can fill this 
 ring " — and he gave her the circlet—** then send him 
 to me." So he departed, leaving wrath behind him. 
 
 The child born was a son, and Aoife reared him and 
 taught him all feats of arms that could be taught to a 
 mortal, except one only, and of that feat only Cuchu- 
 lain was master : ** the way," said James Kelly, pre- 
 facing his ballad with such an explanation as I am 
 now giving, *' there would be none could kill him but 
 his own father." And when the boy had learnt all 
 and was the perfect warrior, Aoife sent him out to 
 Ireland under a pledge to refuse his name to any that 
 should ask it, well knowing how the wardens of the 
 coast would stop him on the shore. It fell out as she 
 purposed. The young Connlaoch defeated champion 
 after champion till Cuchulain him.self went dov/n, and 
 was recognised by his son. But the pledge tied Conn- 
 Iaoch*s tongue, and only when he lay dying, slain by 
 the m.agic throv/ v/hich Aoife had withheld from his 
 knowledge, could he reveal himself to his father, the 
 great and childless hero, whose lament for his lost 
 son is written in the song that I set out to secure, on a 
 day of sun and rain, last summer, v/hen great soft 
 clouds drove full sail through the moist atmosphere, 
 their shadov/s sv/eeping over brown moor and green 
 valley, while far away tov/ards the sea, mountain 
 peaks rose purple and amethystine in the distance. 
 
 Tv/ice before this I had been in the little cottage on 
 Cark Mountain; first, when the chance rum.our heard 
 in a neighbouring cabin of a man Vvrith countless songs 
 and stories sent me off to investigate ; and for a second 
 time, when I had come back v/ith a slightly better 
 knov/ledge of Gaelic and had taken down a few verses 
 
THE LIFE OF A SONG 55 
 
 of the poem. These, sent to an Irish scholar, had 
 sufhced to identify the ballad with one printed in Miss 
 Brooke's Reliques oj Irish Poetry, a characteristic pro- 
 duction of the latter days of the eighteenth century, 
 when Macpherson, with his adaptation of the Ossianic 
 poems, and Bishop Percy, with his gathering of old 
 English ballads, had set a fashion soon to culminate 
 in Scott's great achievement. 
 
 They proved, however, not identity only but dif- 
 ference; and the ballad as I have it in full with its 
 nineteen quatrains, is even less like the longer version 
 given by O'Halloran to Miss Brooke, than the open- 
 ing stanzas suggested. In them the variations vvere 
 mainly textual, and when I read out O'Halloran's ver- 
 sion to James Kelly, his son, a keen listener, declared 
 a preference for the printed text. But the old m.an 
 was of another mind. '* It's the same song," he said, 
 **sure enough, but there's things changed in it, and I 
 know rightly about them. Some one was giving it 
 the vv'ay it would be easier to understand, leaving cut 
 the old hard words. And I did that m^yself once or 
 tv/ice the last day you were here, and I v/as vexed 
 after, when I would be thinking about it. And this 
 day you will be to take down what I say, let you 
 understand it or not; just v/ord for v/ord, the right 
 way it should be spoken." 
 
 There you have in a glimpse the custodian of legend. 
 The man was illiterate, technically, but he knew by 
 instinct, as his ancestors had known before him, that 
 he was the guardian of the life of a song; he recog- 
 nised that it v/as a scripture v/hich he had no right 
 to mutilate or alter. He had to the full that respect 
 for a work of literature which is the best indication of 
 
56 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 a scholar, and for him at least the line was unbroken 
 from the Ireland of heroes and minstrels to the hour 
 when he chanted over the poem that some bard in 
 the remote ages had fashioned. 
 
 Little wonder, too, for his own way of life was close 
 to that of the Middle Ages. Below in the valley, 
 where the S willy River debouches into its sea lough, 
 was a prosperous little town with banks and railway ; 
 but to reach the bleak brown moor where James 
 Kelly's house stood, you must climb by one of two 
 roads, each so rough and steep that a bicycle cannot 
 be ridden down them. Here, in a little screen of 
 scrub alders, stands the cottage, v/here three genera- 
 tions of the family live together. His own home con- 
 sisted simply of two rooms with no upper story, but it 
 was trim and comfortable, the dresser well filled, and 
 the big pot over the turf fire gave out a prosperous 
 steam. The son, a grown man, waited from his turf- 
 cutting to help in our discussion ; the wife was abroad 
 that day, and one daughter was just starting for market 
 with a web of homespun cloth which they had dressed 
 in the household. The spinning wheel stood in the 
 corner; but another girl was busy near the fire with 
 more modern work, hemming shirts with a machine 
 for a Derry factory, and the bleached linen was the 
 only thing in the house which had not taken on the 
 brown tints of peat smoke. 
 
 James Kelly himself, as he sat by the fire declaim- 
 ing at me, was all browns and greys, like the country 
 outside his door ; and his eyes were like brown streams 
 running through that peaty mountain, with their move- 
 ment and sparkle, and their dark depths. At other 
 times easy, like that of aill Irish peasants, his manner 
 
THE LIFE OF A SONG 57 
 
 changed and grew rough and imperious when the 
 business began. I must not interrupt with questions. 
 I must write down, syllable for syllable, that the song 
 might be got *' the right way." It was by no means 
 easy to carry out these directions, for the poem was 
 written in an Irish not spoken to-day, as unlike as the 
 Chaucerian English is to our common speech; and 
 even to v/rite down modern Irish by ear I was poorly 
 qualified. Things were made harder, too, by the 
 manner of recitation, as traditional as the words. He 
 chanted, with a continuous vocalisation, and while he 
 chanted, elbow and knee worked like a fiddler's or 
 piper's marking the time. However, with persistence, 
 I got the thing down, letting him first say a verse fully 
 through, then writing line by line or as near as I 
 could ; then going back and asking questions in detail : 
 the son coming to my rescue, when the old man lost 
 patience (as he did once in every ten minutes) and 
 interposing usefully in our discussions. 
 
 For there were endless discussions as to the mecin- 
 ing of words, and nothing could be more curious than 
 to see the old man's endeavour to give in English not 
 merely a bare rendering, but the colour of every 
 phrase. It made me realise as nothing else could 
 have done, how fine was his feeling for the shade of 
 a word, and I cannot describe his dissatisfaction with 
 the poor equivalents he could find. He was happy 
 enough when the debate drifted into an exposition — 
 always addressed to his son — of the uses of some rare 
 word in the Irish, the manner of exposition being by 
 citation of passages from other songs, or phrases that 
 might occur in talk. I have listened to many a pro- 
 fessor doing the same thing in Greek and Latin, but 
 
 E 
 
58 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 to none who had a finer instinct for the business. 
 Kelly's vexation came when he had to *'put English 
 on " a word for me, and the obvious equivalent was 
 not the right one. Sometimes I could help ; sometimes 
 he arrived by himself at what satisfied him, though 
 once at least it was droll enough. We were at the 
 lines where Connlaoch, dying, says to his father : '* If 
 I could give my secret to any under the sun, it is to 
 your bright body I would tell it." The trouble was 
 about the phrase ** bright body," for the word *'cneas" 
 means literally ** skin," but is used (just like XP^^ 
 in Homer) to signify *' person." What James wanted 
 to convey to me was that the word was not the com- 
 mon one for ** body," and at last he smote his thigh. 
 ** Carkidge," he cried, ** it*s carkidge (carcase), * It is 
 to your clear carkidge I would tell it.' " A man with 
 less instinct for literature would have said " body " 
 at once, and never trouble more; but James knew at 
 once too much and too little, and I give the instance 
 to show how an Irishman unlettered in English may 
 be deeply imbued with the true spirit of letters through 
 a literature of his own. 
 
 There were, however, several passages where I 
 could get no clear account of the meaning, and in 
 some I have since found by comparison with the text 
 which O'Halloran provided for Miss Brooke that Kelly 
 had got the words twisted. For instance, the first 
 stanza opens simply : — 
 
 " There came to us a stout champion, 
 The hearty champion Connlaoch." 
 
 But of the next two lines I could get no clearer ren- 
 dering than that ** he just came in full through these 
 
THE LIFE OF A SONG 59 
 
 people for diversion and for fun to himself." Then 
 the ballad continues at once — for its method is terse 
 and its transitions abrupt throughout — to give us the 
 v/ords of the men who meet Connlaoch on his land- 
 ing :— 
 
 " Where have you been, O tender gallant, 
 
 Riding like a noble's son? 
 
 Mcthinks by the way of your coming, 
 
 You are wandering or astray." 
 
 And Connlaoch ansv^ers the taunt and the challenge 
 implied : — 
 
 " My coming is over seas from the land 
 Of the High King of the World, 
 To prove my merry prowess 
 Athwart the high chiefs of Erin." 
 
 (It seemed to me characteristic that the stock epithet 
 of valour should be *' merry " or ** laughing.") The 
 ballad added no reply (though in Miss Brooke's ver- 
 sion at this point there is a dialogue of warnings), but 
 went on to tell in the shortest possible words how 
 Conall Cearnach ('* the Victorious ") rode out from 
 Emain Macha and met the challenger : — 
 
 " Out started Conall, not weak of hand, 
 To get news of the noble's son. 
 Bitter and hard was the way of it ; 
 Conall was tied by Connlaoch." 
 
 " ' Bring word from us to Hound's head,' 
 Said the King in fierce sullen tones, 
 To Dundalk sunny and bright, 
 To the Hound, Dog's jaw." 
 
 Then Cuchulain (thus described by versions of the 
 nickname won when he broke the jaws of Culann's 
 hound) made ansv/er : — 
 
60 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 " Hard for us is hearing of the captivity 
 Of the man whose plight is told ; 
 And hard it is to try the venom of blades 
 With the warrior that bound Conall." 
 
 But the messenger pleads : — 
 
 " Do not think but to go to the rescue 
 
 Of the destroying keen dangerous warrior, 
 
 Of the hand that had no fear for any, 
 
 To loose him, and he fettered." 
 
 Then (as Miss Brooke in the majestic manner of the 
 eighteenth century puts it) : — 
 
 " Then with firm step and dauntless air, 
 Cucullin went and thus the foe addrest, 
 Let me, O valiant knight (he cried), 
 
 Thy courtesy request, 
 To me thy purpose and thy name confide." 
 
 And so on through a sonorous description of dia- 
 logue and fight till : — 
 
 " At length Cucullin's kindling soul arose, 
 Indignant shame recruited fury lends; 
 With fatal aim his glittering lance he throws, 
 And low on earth the dying youth extends." 
 
 Or, as I translate almost literally from James Kelly*s 
 version, which is considerably briefer than the text 
 which Miss Brooke has so volubly expanded : — 
 
 " Out set the Hound of the keen, smooth blade 
 To see the work that Conall made, 
 Till he pierced with a bitter blow. 
 That hero youth his hardy foe." 
 
 That is all we are told of the fighting; the ballad 
 passes straight to a terse dramatic dialogue, which 
 Cuchulain opens : — 
 
THE LIFE OF A SONG 61 
 
 " Champion, tell your story, 
 
 For I see your wounds are heavy : 
 'Twill be short ere they raise your cairn, 
 So hide your testament no longer." 
 
 ** That's what he said to the son," said James Kelly, 
 finishing the verse, and beginning afresh, 
 
 " Let me fall on my face, 
 
 For methinks 'tis you are my father, 
 And for fear lest men of Eir6 should see 
 Me retreating from your fierce grapple." 
 
 ** Then,** said James, *' the son spoke for to tell 
 him the reason he couldn't spake at the first " : — 
 
 " I took pledges to my mother 
 
 Not to give my story to any single man, 
 If I would give it to any under the sun, 
 It is to your bright body I would tell it." 
 
 (** Complimenting him, like,*' said James.) Then 
 he recited the stanza which tells by implication how in 
 the long duel Cuchulain was at last driven to use the 
 irresistible stroke of Sgathach's teaching : — 
 
 " I lay my curse on my mother, 
 That she put me under pledge ; 
 But if it were not for the feat of magic 
 I had not been got for nothing." 
 
 (It is a fine phrase surely, *' You had paid dear in 
 blood before you mastered me.") 
 
 Cuchulain answers groaning, with a wail for the 
 lineage that is cut off : 
 
 " I lay my curse on your mother. 
 
 For she destroyed a multitude of young ones ; 
 And because the treachery that was in her 
 Left your smooth fiesh reddened." 
 
62 IRISH BOOKS AND IFIISH PEOPLE 
 
 Then comes, with the boy's dying word, the revela- 
 tion of the most tragic moment in the fight. 
 
 " Cuchulain, beloved father, 
 
 Is it not a wonder you did not know me 
 When I cast my spear crooked and feebly 
 Against your bush of blades." 
 
 Where will you find a finer stroke of invention? 
 The boy, tongue-tied by his pledge, knov/s his father 
 and feels his defence failing against the terrible onset ; 
 he would not, if he could, be the victor, but he thinks 
 of a way within the honour of his bond which may 
 awaken knowledge of him; and he casts his javelin 
 with a clumsiness not to be looked for in the champion 
 ** that tied Conall." It is useless, the battle madness 
 is in Cuchulain, he thinks only of conquest, an end to 
 the supple, quick parrying, and he throws the gaebulg, 
 a spear of dragon's bones bristling with points (his 
 ** bush of blades "), with the magic cast that there is 
 no m^eeting. And now there is nothing left to him but 
 the lamentation, 
 
 " Och, och ! Great is my madness! 
 I lifting here my young lad ! 
 My son's head in my one hand, 
 His arms and his raiment on the other, 
 
 ' I, the father that slew his son, 
 
 May I never throw spear nor noble javelin ; 
 
 The hand that slew its son. 
 
 May it win torture and sharp wounding. 
 
 " The grief for my son I put from me never, 
 Till the flagstones of my side crumble, 
 It is in me, and through my heart. 
 Like a sharp blaze in the hoar hill grasses. 
 
THE LIFE OF A SONG 63 
 
 " If I and my heart's Connlaoch 
 
 Were playing our kingly feats together, 
 We could range from wave to shore 
 Over the five provinces of Erin." 
 
 The penuldmate stanza, with its magnificent closing 
 image and its truly /Eschylean hyperbole, is not even 
 suggested in Miss Brooke's version. It is, perhaps, 
 the finest thing in the poem; but I hardly know any 
 ballad finer as a piece of dramatic narrative; and the 
 resonant verse, strongly rhymed (in the Gaelic asso- 
 nances), and copiously stressed with alliteration, bears 
 out the theme. 
 
 These, I trust, are critical opinions. But if the col- 
 lector v/ould have a special weakness for a vase which 
 his own spade had unearthed, I may be prejudiced in 
 favour of the poem, which I got in the sweat of my 
 brow from very probably'; the one man living who 
 knew it in that form. 
 
 Tellers of old Irish fairy tales about enchanted 
 princes, magic cocks and hens, and the like, are still 
 numerous ; but it is very rare to find a man who keeps 
 living the old poetry which was made, perhaps, in the 
 twelfth century. Yet while any survive the tradition 
 is still there; the song still lives, for I did not spend 
 my hours without feeling that this old man could 
 respond to any emotion that the song-maker put into 
 the sound and the meaning and the associations of his 
 words. There are still those to whom the Irish even 
 of the twelfth century is no dead language. Even if it 
 were, no doubt the songs made in it might still be 
 strong in life, as are to-day those of Homer and a 
 hundred others. But in the case of these smaller 
 literatures, once the tongue itself has ceased to be 
 
64 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 heard, dumbness and paralysis fall upon what might 
 else be so full of vitality. And a song has more than 
 its own life, it has power to quicken, to breed. If 
 any one considers that legend of the son and father 
 (found in many languages, yet in none, I think, more 
 finely shaped), it is easy to see how from age to age 
 it may revive itself in new forms, entering into other 
 shapes, as Helen's figure adorns not her own story 
 only, but the praise of a thousand women. Let it be 
 understood that this legend is only one of a cycle, and 
 that the song which I wrote down was only the barest 
 fraction of James Kelly's repertory. Indeed, he was 
 vexed that I should take it as a specimen, for he him- 
 self ** had more conceit in " the lays that tell of Finn 
 and his companions, and I could have filled a volume, 
 and maybe several volumes, from his recitations. 
 
 These songs may die, the language may die, the 
 Irish race may be swallowed up in England and 
 America. But it is my belief that the strong intellec- 
 tual lie which made of Ireland a home of the arts 
 before the Normans came across channel may, like 
 many another life in nature, spring after centuries of 
 torpor into vigour and fertility again. That is the 
 belief and hope of manj^ of us; but nothing has ren- 
 dered me so confident in it as to find this work of a 
 strong and fine art not laid aside and neglected, but 
 honoured and current to-day, and, though in a poor 
 man's cottage, living with as full a life as when it was 
 chanted at the feasts of princes. 
 
IRISH EDUCATION AND IRISH CHARACTER. 
 
 DUCATION in Ireland has been organised 
 by the State in accordance with English 
 ideas. Had English influence been able 
 to bring about any large measure of con- 
 formity between the two countries, there 
 would have been little or no need for a separate paper 
 on moral training in Irish schools. But what confor- 
 mity there is, is purely superficial; and although free 
 development has been hindered, and Irish institutions 
 for teaching are less characteristic than they would 
 have been if entirely left to themselves, still the moral 
 influences which emerge wherever pupils and teachers 
 are brought together reveal themselves in Ireland, and 
 reveal themselves as Irish. The object of this paper, 
 then, is to illustrate, so far as possible, the nature and 
 the symptoms of these distinctive influences. 
 
 First of all, it may be said broadly that no ordinary 
 person in Ireland contemplates the possibility of teach- 
 ing morality apart from religion; and by religion is 
 meant emphatically this or that particular creed. 
 Almost every school maintained by the State is 
 managed locally by a clergyman, who appoints the 
 teacher, and public feeling is so strong on the matter 
 that in any neighbourhood even a small group of 
 families of any particular denomination is always pro- 
 vided with a separate school of its own. Of late, 
 indeed, opinion has begun to agitate for associating 
 the laity with the clergy in the management of schools ; 
 
66 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 but this does not indicate any desire to lessen the 
 importance given to the part played by religion in 
 education. 
 
 Further, so far as Catholic Ireland is concerned, an 
 immense proportion of the teaching both in primary 
 and secondary schools is done by members of religious 
 orders, and in these, of course, there is no conception 
 of separating moral influences from religious. There 
 is, however, no evidence known to me that even in 
 the few Protestant schools which are partly or wholly 
 under lay control any duties, other than those of ordi- 
 nary school work, are inculcated except as part of 
 a Christian's religious obligations. This entire state 
 of things is due to the fact that positive Christian belief, 
 and the practice of religious observances, are every- 
 where in Ireland very general, and among the Catholic 
 population almost universal. It is also hardly neces- 
 sary to point out that in many respects the standard 
 of Irish morality is so high that the example of Ireland 
 may be quoted with confidence in support of the view 
 which makes moral teaching necessarily a part of 
 religion. 
 
 But from such broad generalities there is not much 
 to be gathered, and I proceed to examine in some detail 
 the existing institutions — beginning at the top with 
 higher education. 
 
 It follows from what has been said that, in the 
 general opinion of Irishmen, there can be no positive 
 moral influence where there is no religious teaching; 
 and for that reason a university without a school of 
 theology or arrangements for corporate worship is, to 
 Irishmen, a university deficient in moral safeguards. 
 This accounts for the fact that Catholic opinion was 
 
IRISH EDUCATION AND CHARACTER 67 
 
 much less opposed to the Protestant University of 
 Dublin than to the more modern Queen's Colleges, 
 which, designed by England to provide for her wants 
 of Ireland, excluded religion entirely from their pur- 
 view. This provision satisfied no one, except to some 
 extent the Presbyterians, who accepted Queen's 
 College, Belfast, with some alacrity, though in prac- 
 tice demanding that its head should always be a 
 staunch professor of their own persuasion. But 
 Catholics as a body refused to accept either the Univer- 
 sity of Dublin with its Protestant atmosphere or the 
 ** godless " Queen's Colleges; and' since Ireland is 
 mainly a Catholic country, and the National Univer- 
 sity has not yet created a tradition, it is clear that not 
 much can be gleaned on the subject of Irish ideas of 
 moral training from Irish universities. 
 
 Yet Trinity College is well worth study, for in it we 
 have a free growth, typifying both in its virtues and in 
 its defects the ruling Protestant class, landed and pro- 
 fessional. Here, unquestionably, the chief moral 
 influence is that of the Church, felt, as at Oxford, 
 directly through the chapel services and sermons, and 
 indirectly through the presence of a large body of theo- 
 logical students. The second of these influences is 
 specially strong in Dublin, because these students have 
 an organisation of their own in the University Theo- 
 logical Society, and also because the work of the 
 Divinity School at Dublin comprises much that is done 
 in England by the training colleges. I should there- 
 fore be inclined to put the positive influence of dog- 
 matic religion higher at Dublin than at Oxford. 
 
 On the other hand, the vaguer humanitarian enthu- 
 siasms which are more or less allied to Socialism, and 
 
68 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 with which the High Church party wilHngl)» allies 
 itself, have, I think, much less hold in Trinity than at 
 the English universities; though the movement which 
 sends so many brilliant young Englishmen into work 
 (temporary or permanent) in the East End of London 
 has its parallel in the recently organised Social Service 
 Society, which attempts something for the reclamation 
 of Dublin slums. Again, in regard to more definitely 
 political aspirations, Irish Protestants are somewhat 
 unfortunately situated. Trinity as a whole has no 
 sympathy with the ideals that appeal to Ireland as a 
 nation, and it always seems to lack first-hand touch 
 with the best English thought, whether Liberal or 
 Tory. This isolation from the main movement of Irish 
 thought and feeling on the one hand, and on the other, 
 this enforced separation from the current of English 
 life, keep the place a little old-fashioned ; and to gene- 
 rate enthusiasm, ideals and feelings need a certain 
 freshness. If it be held (as I should hold) that a uni- 
 versity's main moral function is to produce enthusiasts 
 rather than merely decent citizens, in this respect, I 
 think. Trinity fails. 
 
 In regard to the less direct influences, a good deal 
 may be noted. The general trend of life in Trinity is 
 towards frugality, just as at Oxford it is towards extra- 
 vagance. Consequently, money is less of an advan- 
 tage, poverty less of a drawback than at the English 
 universities ; the standard of living is more uniform ; 
 and in the society of which the university is typical, 
 and which it influences, respect for wealth as wealth 
 is noticeably rare. Again, the idea of education is 
 more disciplinary than in England. Irishmen go to 
 college, not to acquire culture by contact, but to learn 
 
IRISH EDUCATION AND CHARACTER 69 
 
 certain definite things; and the university, in its 
 anxiety to find out if the task is being learnt, multipHes 
 examinations. The same idea pervades all Irish 
 education — the old-fashioned demand for a positive 
 result in knowledge; and if it leads to an excessive 
 value set upon these tests, it also goes far to discourage 
 idleness. 
 
 In another matter Trinity College is typical of Irish 
 ideas generally. Games are simply taken as games, 
 not as a main business of life in which success may 
 even have a marketable value. Everybody recognizes 
 their physical use, and more than that, their use as a 
 means of bringing men together. But nobody in Ire- 
 land, save here and there a stray apostle of English 
 notions, talks of the moral lessons to be acquired by 
 fielding out or by patient batting. Compulsory games 
 at school are practically unknown; nobody plays 
 unless he wants to; so that the duffer does not expe- 
 rience the questionable moral advantage of physical 
 discomfort and frequent humiliation, and the naturally 
 painstaking or excellent athlete gets no more than his 
 fair chance of exercising his gifts. And these are less 
 likely to have an undue importance in their possessor's 
 eyes, because they will not of themselves lead him to a 
 position of great distinction in an Irish university. 
 
 Unfortunately, Trinity College is the only place in 
 Ireland — unless perhaps a saving clause should be 
 made for Queen's College, Belfast — which offers what 
 is meant by a university life. The National Univer- 
 sity, whether in Dublin, Cork or Galway, brings young 
 men together only in classes and in one or two debat- 
 ing societies. Yet even so, I question whether, in 
 some ways, life does not beat stronger in it than in 
 
70 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 Trinity ; whether the moral influences proper to a uni- 
 versity, the enthusiasm, the contagion of generous 
 ideas, are not here more strongly felt. The reason for 
 this view must be given. 
 
 Trinity has never been the University of Ireland. 
 It is ceasing to be the University of Protestant 
 Ireland, for Protestants, who can afford to do so, send 
 their sons increasingly to Oxford or Cambridge, and 
 Trinity, which has not known how to create a true and 
 special function for itself, is becoming merely a cheap 
 substitute for these English institutions. And the 
 reason for this is a moral reason which goes to the root 
 of many questions connected with Irish education. 
 Should Irish schools and colleges seek to educate 
 citizens for the Empire, or citizens for Ireland? During 
 the last half century, while the Imperialist idea has 
 been developing in England, Trinity has thrown all its 
 moral weight into support of that idea. But the Impe- 
 rialist idea in England is very different from the same 
 idea as viewed in Canada or New Zealand or Aus- 
 tralia; and universities in these countries address 
 themselves particularly to local needs. In the section 
 of Ireland which Trinity represents, local patriotism is 
 held to conflict with Imperial patriotism, and one has 
 to observe that Trinity's Imperialism is forwarding 
 tendencies which are leaving her drained. Nationa- 
 lists may respect the sincerity of convictions so pressed 
 in defiance of a local interest; but a university, whose 
 main emotional appeal is directed towards evoking 
 primarily an enthusiasm for England, cannot be of 
 much use to Nationalist Ireland. Catholics may (and 
 do) respect the thorour^hness of the religious teaching, 
 and the strong grip which Protestantism keeps on the 
 
IRISH EDUCATION AND CHARACTER 71 
 
 university; but a university which inculcates morals 
 through a Protestant religion is not precisely suitable 
 to Catholics. Yet Catholics and Nationalists alike 
 infinitely prefer a university or a college or a school 
 with strong Protestant beliefs, or strong Imperialist 
 patriotism, to an institution with neither beliefs nor 
 patriotism at all. The colourless and merely scho- 
 lastic ideals of the Queen's Colleges, and the huge 
 examining machinery known as the Royal University, 
 typified in their total lack of moral influences all that 
 was v/orst in the educational system under which Ire- 
 land labours. 
 
 I pass to a brief examination of the boarding schools, 
 institutions which have never flourished in Ireland. 
 Nearly all Protestants and many Catholics, if they can 
 afford it, send their sons to England to be taught. The 
 ideals of the English Public School have reacted so 
 strongly upon Irish Protestant schools that nothing 
 need be said of these — not one of v/hich has ever, 
 within living memory, had a continuous prosperity. 
 The important Catholic schools are managed by the 
 great teaching orders, especially by the Jesuits, and 
 managed at astonishingly low cost. They give every- 
 where more than value for the fees which they receive. 
 No unendowed institution could compete with them; 
 and it practically^ comes to this, that the regular 
 clergy subsidise education with their own unpaid 
 labour and even with their own funds, in order to 
 maintain their influence over the faith and morals of 
 their country. Whether it might be more to the 
 advantage of Irish parents to pay more and get some- 
 thing different, is another question: but those of us 
 who least like the exclusive delegation of these impor- 
 
11 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 tant functions to the priesthood, cannot but admire 
 the thoroughness and consistency with which the 
 Cathohc priesthood's idea is carried out. It would 
 be hard to overstate the moral effect of that vast orga- 
 nised system of self- sacrifice and self -suppression. 
 
 Three or four points may be noted in relation to 
 these schools. One is, that in all classrooms and play- 
 grounds, a master is always present. Compeiring this 
 with the system in vogue at many English schools, 
 under which a boy out of school hours is always forced 
 to live in public by rules which compel him either to 
 be playing some game or looking on while others 
 play, I prefer the system of frank supervision, as leav- 
 ing more individual freedom and choice of pursuits, 
 and as making serious bullying impossible. Generally, 
 the idea that it is good for a boy to be knocked about 
 without stint is foreign to Irish ideas. A pleasant and 
 characteristic feature of Jesuit schools is the habit of 
 telling off some boy to act as companion and cicerone 
 to a newcomer for his first week or fortnight ; and the 
 ridiculous English fashion which prescribes that the 
 smallest fag should be described as a ** man " is 
 unknown. Christian names, not surneimes, are used 
 generally. The unpopularity of boarding schools in 
 Ireland is due to the great value set upon home life ; 
 and an Irish boarding school is far less distinct from 
 home life than an English one. 
 
 English eyes would be surprised and a good deal 
 shocked by the presence of a billiard table in every 
 playroom ; yet it may fairly be argued that it is wise to 
 limit the number of things that have the fascination 
 of the forbidden. A more serious criticism would 
 address itself to the permitted slovenliness. Untidi- 
 
IRISH EDUCATION AND CHARACTER 73 
 
 ness amounts to a national vice in Ireland, and, 
 though one may overstate its gravity, the secondary 
 schools could and should do much more to remedy 
 this national defect than they are at present doing. 
 At one first-class Irish establishment — admirably 
 equipped with buildings, playground, and all other 
 appliances — boots used to go unblacked from one end 
 of the month to the other. The boys who come here 
 come largely from the well-to-do farming class, in 
 whose homes, in many ways so pleasant and worthy 
 of respect, there is often a lamentable lack of that 
 charm which comes of notable housewifery. The 
 young men who return from this school will be less 
 apt than they should be to value good housewifery in 
 their wives and mothers. 
 
 But of all sinners in this regard the State is the chief 
 offender. Under the Code of the National Board of 
 Education a national schoolmaster or mistress is bound 
 to teach cleanliness and decency by precept and 
 example. He or she is paid an average wage (without 
 allowances) of thirty shillings or one pound a week 
 according to sex ; and out of that an appearance befit- 
 ting superior station has to be maintained — for in Ire- 
 land the schoolmaster has always a position of some 
 dignity. For the school the State provides four bare 
 walls, a roof, not always weatherproof, and a few 
 desks. Firing is not provided. Decoration is subject 
 to inspection, and any picture which can be held to 
 have a religious or remotely political bearing is a gross 
 offence against the Code. It follows, in practice, that 
 bare walls are kept bare, though not clean; and let it 
 be remembered that Catholicism, if left to itself, in 
 education always trusts greatly to the appeal to the eye, 
 
 F 
 
74 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 In every Catholic school uncontrolled by the State the 
 emblems of religion are everywhere present. National 
 schools under State control, even in places where 
 there is not a Protestant child within twenty miles, 
 are rigorously forbidden the use of any such embel- 
 lishment. On the other hand, Protestant schools 
 which would gladly, and, as I think, most laudably, 
 furnish themselves with pictures recalling such 
 memories as the shutting of the Derry gates, come 
 under the same tyranny of compromise. Taste and 
 culture are the expression of an individuality, and 
 individuality is forbidden to Irish teachers in State 
 employ. The State puts a schoolmaster into a school- 
 house, without adequate payment for himself, with- 
 out adequate provision either for building or the up- 
 keep of building; it bids him to keep it clean, but 
 pays no servant to wash or sweep; and, while enjoin- 
 ing the absence of dirt, it checks and hampers that 
 desire to decorate, which is the positive side of order 
 and taste. The result is, broadly, slatternly schools. 
 
 There could hardly be a better moral influence in 
 Ireland than tastefully and brightly decorated schools, 
 cleanly kept. But to secure this the State must pro- 
 vide money, and must give individual freedom. 
 Instead of that, it adapts its institution to the lowest 
 standard of living; and the raggedest child out of the 
 dirtiest cottage will probably be in full keeping with 
 his environm.ent when he takes his place in class. 
 
 The same tyranny of compromise sterilises the whole 
 teaching on the moral side. Nothing must be taught 
 anywhere which could offend any susceptibility — 
 except in the hour licensed for the teaching of denomi- 
 iiational religion. There must be no appeal to Irish 
 
IRISH EDUCATION AND CHARACTER 73 
 
 patriotism, whether it be of Protestant or Catholic. 
 Irish history may not be taught as a subject, and, until 
 lately, anything bearing on it, however remotely, was 
 tabooed. The poem Breathes there a man with soul 
 so dead was struck out of a lesson book, lest it should 
 encourage sedition. To-day certain accepted books 
 on Irish history may be used as readers ; the Irish lan- 
 guage may be taught, and is taught; and gradually 
 with these changes new moral influences are coming 
 in. Irish children are being encouraged to remember 
 their nationality. Yet, meanwhile, the teacher, who 
 is to instruct them in the duties of a good citizen, is 
 debarred from taking any part in local politics, from 
 serving on any local council. He is forbidden, in 
 fact, to be himself a good citizen ; forbidden to be any- 
 thing more than the colourless instrument of a system 
 of compromise and countercheck. Nothing is more 
 certain than this, that to get a good teacher you need 
 a man's whole personality; you must enlist all his 
 beliefs and his feelings in the exercise of that moral 
 function of education which can never be fulfilled by 
 a mere machine for imparting the rudiments. Man 
 everywhere, but especially in Ireland, is, as Aristotle 
 said, a political animal. 1 he State in Ireland, when 
 organising education, tries as far as possible to elimi- 
 nate the man and produce the pedagogue. 
 
 Take, for contrast with all this, the purely native 
 institution, now unhappily extinct, of the old ** classi- 
 cal academies '* kept in the country parts of Munster 
 by private laymen. In the eighteenth century, and on 
 into the nineteenth, these men kept alive the tradition 
 of Irish popular poetry, sometimes with a real gift. 
 For good or for bad they were persons of character 
 
76 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 and of talent, and the last of them is alive, though he 
 keeps school no longer. He taught boys who had 
 learnt the rudiments at the ordinary national school, 
 and who wished to carry on their studies with a view 
 either to the priesthood or to medicine. He was paid 
 only by the fees of his scholars, who were either the 
 sons of farmers about him, or of men living at a dis- 
 tance, who sent their children to be part of the family 
 in some farm where they had kinship or acquaintance. 
 Thus existence for these scholars was divided between 
 the home life of a farm and the hours of school. 
 There was, however, a small element of what in Ire- 
 land were called *' poor scholars '* — boys from the less 
 prosperous North and West, who came (sometimes 
 walking the whole journey) to get learning gratis. To 
 them teaching was never refused, and their board was 
 provided by the farmers, who ** would be snatching 
 them from one and other,'* since they assisted the 
 other children in preparing tasks. 
 
 Now, in the school which my friend has described to 
 me, there was no formal teaching of anything but the 
 prescribed subjects. But literature would be lying 
 about — Haverty's History oj Ireland, and the Nationa- 
 list papers of the day — and the teacher was there 
 always ready to expound and answer questions. Him- 
 self a fighting politician (a member of the Fenian orga- 
 nisation, whose name is still sacred throughout Ire- 
 land), he was careful never to draw in or compromise 
 his pupils ; but to teach them the story of their country 
 and discuss it with them was part of his natural occu- 
 pation. He taught Irish also, the tongue readiest to 
 him, for he held that Irishmen should know their own 
 language ; but the essential business of his school was 
 
IRISH EDUCATION AND CHARACTER 77 
 
 teaching the simple old-fashioned curriculum, Latin, 
 mathematics, and some Greek. Yet because he was 
 a man who loved and valued knowledge for its own 
 sake, and loved and valued literature, it is probable 
 that he gave a more real training to the mind than is 
 achieved by the most modern system of hand and eye 
 culture and the rest of it. He taught neither religion 
 nor morals, but his teaching assumed throughout, 
 what his example showed, that a man should be true 
 and thorough in what he professed to believe, and 
 should be ready at all times to make sacrifices for 
 principle. Such a school had the only moral influence 
 which in Ireland has ever counted for much — the 
 influence of a strong personality, acting in allicince 
 with the influences of a fully realised religion and of 
 an ordered family life. 
 
 I sketch a more concrete picture that always rises in 
 my mind with a ray of hope, when I think of educa- 
 tion in Ireland. Out of doors, winter twilight falling 
 on a wild landscape within hearing of the Atlantic 
 surf ; the man of the house coming out to talk to me, a 
 handsome Irishman of the old school, frieze-clad, with 
 the traditional side whiskers, the humorous eye and 
 mouth. We talked for a while in the cold, then 
 ** Gabh i leith isteach," he said, ** for I hear you have 
 the Irish." As I paused in the door to phrase the 
 Gaelic salutation, more devout and courteous than 
 would come to my lips in any other tongue, I was 
 astonished at the company gathered in the long low 
 room. Chairs were set by the wide hearth of course, 
 and from one of them the woman of the house rose 
 to greet me; a settle ran along the side wall, and its 
 length was filled with men and women blotted against 
 
78 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 the dusk background. But the centre of the picture 
 was a narrow deal table set in the middle of the room, 
 with candles on it, and benches on each side, and on 
 the benches fully ten children busy with books and 
 copies, "Are these your burden?" I asked in the 
 quaint Irish phrase. " A share of them," the mcin 
 answered; and then I understood that some belonged 
 to other neighbours, and that it was a mutual arrange- 
 ment for friendliness and help. None of the children 
 budged ; there they were, drilled and disciplined at 
 their work, in the middle of the room, while their 
 elders sat and chatted quietly. I have never seen 
 elsewhere anything which so filled my conception of 
 what a home should be, as that farmhouse in Corca- 
 bascinn — so full of order and gfood governance, yet 
 so free of constraint, so full of welcome, yet so lack- 
 ing in expense or display. For, understand, we who 
 were strangers were brought (much against my will) 
 into the state-room or parlour beyond the party wall, 
 and drink was pressed upon us hospitably. But the 
 neighbours who had come there (and came daily, I 
 fancy) came neither to eat nor drink (unless maybe 
 tea might be brewing) but simply to sit and smoke 
 and talk, and watch that their children got their lessons 
 properly. And at the end, perhaps before they 
 parted, perhaps when the family was alone, the rosary 
 would be said by the turf fire, that made, winter or 
 summer, the centre of all that pleasant existence. 
 
 It is a pity to think of how poorly the National 
 school, to which those children would go with their 
 tasks in the morning, seconds the help which this 
 home life gives it. Easily could the school — which 
 takes whatever real light it has from the home, just as 
 
IRISH EDUCATION AND CHARACTER 79 
 
 it depends for warmth on the few turf which scholars 
 bring daily along with their books — reflect sound and 
 fruitful ideas on to the home through the children. It 
 could teach the children and the parents, not only the 
 political, but the economic history of their own coun- 
 try; it could teach them what has been done in Ireland, 
 what has succeeded, what has failed, and why; it 
 could teach them, who are already proud of being 
 Irish, to have new reasons for their pride; it could 
 teach them, who are already willing to do their best 
 for Ireland, into what channels the driving force of 
 that willingness may be poured. 
 
 Outside of definite religion, the only fruitful source 
 of educational ideas connected with the moral order 
 that I see in Ireland is the Gaelic League. This orga- 
 nisation, founded to save from extinction, and to 
 revive into new prosperity the national language of 
 Ireland, based itself entirely upon a moral appeal. 
 It appealed to Irishmen as they were proud of their 
 race, to save the most distinctive symbol of their 
 nationality ; and the appeal met with an extraordinary 
 promptness of response. But to stimulate and pro- 
 mote the movement, it was found necessary to widen 
 the propaganda. Irishmen were urged to learn Irish, 
 and to speak Irish because of pride in their country; 
 the same organisation soon began to teach that an 
 Irishman who set an example of drunkenness, or gave 
 an occasion of it, not only sinned against himself, but 
 against his country. Vulgar and indecent literature 
 was denounced as un-Irish; Irish dances were advo- 
 cated, not only for their admirable grace and their his- 
 toric interest, but also because it was held that dances 
 like the waltz, departed from the austere standard of 
 
80 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 Irish morality. Irish men and women were taught to 
 buy goods of Irish manufacture by the people who 
 taught them to learn the language, on the ground that 
 if the Irish nation continued to ebb away out of Ire- 
 land, nationality and language must perish together. 
 Thus through the medium of a propaganda which 
 at first sight would seem merely literary and archaeo- 
 logical, many practical issues of life were related to a 
 purely educational purpose. There is no doubt that 
 the Gaelic League, now a widespread and solidly 
 established organisation, spending on the whole, per- 
 haps, £30,000 or £40,000 a year on its enterprise, has 
 done as much to promote temperance, and to further 
 Irish industries, as it has accomplished in its peculiar 
 task of reviving the old tongue. Primarily a teaching 
 institution — for each of the League's eight hundred 
 branches exists to hold classes for Irish study — it has 
 linked with the linguistic teaching a moral idea. The 
 reaction has been mutual, for there is more intelligent 
 thought on the methods of linguistic teaching in the 
 Gaelic League than one would easily find in all the 
 schools and universities of Ireland. The appeal to 
 pride of race has quickened intelligence no less than 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 It is a very remarkable fact, that the great teaching 
 order of the Christian Brothers has taken up the teach- 
 ing of Irish and generally the Gaelic League*s whole 
 propaganda more thoroughly than any other organisa- 
 tion in Ireland; very remarkable, for their practical 
 success is so conspicuous that Protestant clergymen 
 have repeatedly from the pulpit appealed for extra 
 support to Protestant schools whose pupils, as one 
 preacher said in my hearing, were being ousted in all 
 
IRISH EDUCATION AND CHARACTER 81 
 
 competition for employment by the lads from the 
 Christian Brothers' schools. \A/hatever the post was, 
 the preacher said, this body of lay Catholics seemed 
 always to have a candidate specially prepared for it. 
 One of the greatest institutions in charge of that order 
 is the industrial school at Artane, near Dublin, where 
 eight hundred boys are being prepared for different 
 trades. Every single one of those boys is now being 
 taught Irish ; that is to say, a linguistic training with a 
 special appeal to the learner's patriotism has been 
 superimposed on the ordinary rudiments. It is a 
 great experiment made by enthusiasts who are also 
 teachers with an intensely practical bent. 
 
 It is too early even to forecast the eflect which is 
 likely to be produced upon Irish education generally 
 by the new university colleges set up under Mr. Bir- 
 rell's Act. Yet this may be said. Irish education 
 needs reform from the top downwards, not from the 
 bottom upwards. It has lacked idealism, and these 
 universities in which Ireland, whether of the north 
 or the south, will be free to express its own character, 
 can and should set up ideals which will govern every 
 school in the country. 1 rinity College has been free 
 to follow its own bent, and its eyes to-day are, in 
 scriptural phrase, ** on the ends of the earth." Pri- 
 mary education, secondary studies, as governed by 
 the machinery controlled through the Board of Inter- 
 mediate Education, and university teaching as directed 
 and rewarded through the Royal University, have all 
 in the last resort been inspired by Englishmen who 
 thought it very desirable that Irish boys and girls 
 should learn to read and write and cipher, and that 
 young men and young women should equip them- 
 
82 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 selves for clerkships in the civil service, but who never 
 for one instant realised that the end of education is 
 divergence not conformity — to elicit, whether from the 
 race or from the individual, a full and characteristic 
 development. In twenty years perhaps a paper of 
 interest may be written to show the positive results of 
 education upon Irish character. At present the most 
 noticeable facts are negative, and may be summed up 
 by affirming a total lack of correspondence between 
 the system employed and the needs and qualities of 
 the Irish people. 
 
 1907. 
 
THE IRISH GENTRY. 
 
 T the height on the struggle over the Home 
 Rule Bill, there was published a book 
 interesting as the biography of a remark- 
 able individual, but no less interesting as 
 depicting the crucial moment in the his- 
 tory of an aristocracy. Colonel Moore wisely entitles 
 the life of his father simply An Irish Gentleman. Ver- 
 satile, eloquent, quick-tempered and lovable, exces- 
 sive in generosity, excessive in courage and self-confi- 
 dence, with the racecourse for his ruling passion and 
 horsemanship for his supreme achievement, George 
 Henry Moore was the paragon of his class. He dis- 
 played in the highest degree those qualities on which 
 the Irish gentry prided themselves and which they 
 most admired : he shared the prestige and power of 
 Irish landlords when prestige and power were at their 
 height; and he confronted the decisive hour when he, 
 and men like him, had to choose between the 
 interest of their country and the interest of 
 their class. There he separated himself from his 
 fellows ; he parted from all to whom he was bound by 
 ties of immediate advantage, of pleasure, of associa- 
 tion, of affection, and he threw in his lot with Ireland. 
 He saw first the moral bankruptcy of his own class, 
 then their widespread financial ruin; and though he 
 helped to break their political power, and in so doing 
 earned the general love of his countrymen, yet the 
 troubles which beset the landlord class did not spare 
 
 '^ 
 
84 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 iiim, and he died, broken-hearted, forty-three years 
 ago, at the beginning of a struggle which is not ended 
 yet. It is well worth while to consider the circum- 
 stances of that stormy career. 
 
 First a brilliant schoolboy, then an idle law student, 
 George Henry Moore was driven to travel by the com- 
 plications of a passionate love affair, and he travelled 
 adventurously, being a pioneer of exploration in the 
 Caucasus and Syria. Sketches reproduced in the 
 book show that he could draw no less well than he 
 wrote. Returning to Ireland at the age of twenty- 
 seven, he devoted himself entirely to hunting and rac- 
 ing, and few men were better known on the turf, nor 
 were there even in the West of Ireland more desperate 
 riders than his brother and himself. George Henry was 
 carried oflF the field at Cahir in 1843 to all appearance 
 dead ; he was alive enough to hear discussion as to 
 his burial Augustus, less lucky, died of a fall he took 
 riding Mickey Free in the Grand National two years 
 later. The brothers were closely bound to each other 
 in affection, and th.is was a heavy blow to the sur- 
 vivor; but George Moore continued to race, and in 
 1846 made the coup of his life, winning £10,000 on 
 **Coranna" for the Chester Cup. He sent £1,000 of it 
 home for distribution among his tenants, 2ind there 
 was soon sore need of the money, for that year saw 
 the second and disastrous failure of the potato crop. 
 The Irish Famine made the turning-point in Moore's 
 history, as in that of his class. The catastrophe which 
 brought him into public life and into the service of his 
 country demonstrated, cruelly enough — though this 
 was the least of its cruelties — the futility of the Irish 
 gentry as a whole. 
 
THE IRISH GENTRY 85 
 
 By the shock of his brother's death in 1845 Moore's 
 mind had been iTirned to serious thoughts. Matter 
 was not lacking. The report of the Devon Commis- 
 sion upon Irish land, joined to the first failure of the 
 potato crop — with its accompaniment of distress and 
 widespread agrarian crime — gave any Irish landlord 
 food for reflection, and in March, 1846, when a 
 vacancy occurred in the representation of Mayo, 
 Moore came forward as a Whig candidate. Ihe 
 whole landlord interest was at his back, but a Repealer 
 opposed him, and O'Connell's influence carried the 
 day. There were fierce encounters, the landlords march- 
 ing their tenants to the poll under guards of soldiers, the 
 popular side falling upon these escorts and sometimes 
 carrying off the voters — or enabling them to escape. 
 One of Moore's friends, Mr. Browne, afterwards Lord 
 Oranmore, wrote : ** I now see we owe our lives to 
 the priests, as they can excite the whole people against 
 us whenever they like. Whatever may be the cause, 
 Ireland needs reconquering." 
 
 That was a typical expression of the gentry's view. 
 Plainly Ireland was in rebellion when landlords could 
 no longer carry their tenants to the polls to vote as the 
 landlord directed. Moore however differed from ihe 
 generality of Irish landlords in one important respect. 
 He was not divided by religion from the people over 
 whom he ruled, and he can never have had Mr. 
 Browne's feeling of aloofness from Ireland as a coun- 
 try which might need reconquering to re-establish the 
 ascendancy of the ** Enghsh garrison"; nor was it 
 natural to him to distrust the priests as leaders of a 
 separate and subject race. 
 
 In the autumn of 1846, when the threat of famine 
 
86 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 had become a certainty, Moore came home to Mayo, 
 where there was grim business to be done. His 
 tenants, on an estate running up into the wild Partry 
 mountains, numbered five thousand souls. For iheir 
 benefit he utilised far more of his winnings on 
 ** Coranna '* than the tithe which he had originally 
 ear-marked; and not one of all these his dependants 
 died of want in that outlandish region, though in 
 places far less remote death was ravenous. He was 
 chairman of the Relief Board for the whole county, 
 and slaved at his task — not harder than other land- 
 lords in other parts of Ireland. But his methods were 
 more drastic, his view of the situation clearer Folk 
 must have rubbed their eyes and perhaps stopped to 
 think twice when the owner of ** Wolfdocr,** of 
 ** Anonymous," and a score of other famous horses, 
 wrote, in answer to a request for his annual subscrip- 
 tion to the local races, that he thought the county of 
 Mayo ** as little fit to be the scene of such festivities 
 as he to contribute to their celebration.** 
 
 But Moore did not content himself with mere admini- 
 stration of relief. He saw that the English Govern- 
 ment was apathetic and incompetent to face so terrible 
 an affliction, and he took in hand to create within his 
 own class an organised force of Irish opinion to bind 
 together the ruling Irishmen for the good of Ireland. 
 In company with his friend and kinsman, Lord Sligo, 
 he ** travelled through twenty-seven counties and per- 
 sonally conferred with most of the leading men in Ire- 
 land on the urgent necessity of a united effort to save 
 the sinking people.** The result was that between 
 sixty and seventy members of Parliament and some 
 forty peers pledged themselves to endeavour to secure 
 
THE IRISH GENTRY 87 
 
 united action upon measures regarding Ireland in the 
 new session. On the 14th of January, 1847, the Irish 
 landlord class held such a muster as had not been 
 seen since the Union. ** Nearly twenty peers, more 
 than thirty members of Parliament, and at least six 
 hundred gentlemen of name and station took part in 
 it. The meeting called on Government to prohibit 
 export of food stuffs and to sacrifice any sum that 
 might be required to save the lives of the people." 
 It passed thirty resolutions without dissension; and 
 then some one asked what was to be done if the 
 Government refused to adopt any of their suggestions. 
 Would Irish members then unite to vote against the 
 Government? To this, Irish members refused to 
 pledge themselves, and Moore, as he said afterwards, 
 ** saw at a glance that the confederacy had broken 
 down." 
 
 That was the end of the revolt of the Irish gentry. 
 It was really the decisive moment of their failure ; dis- 
 organised and futile, they went down by scores in the 
 ruin of the Encumbered Estates Court, while their 
 tenants were marking with their bones a road across 
 the Atlantic. As for the landlords who were popular 
 leaders, within a few months after that great assembly, 
 Daniel O'Connell, who had proposed the first resolu- 
 tion, died in Rome, heart-broken. A few months 
 more and Smith O'Brien, the mover of another reso- 
 lution, headed a rebellion in sheer despair. 
 
 Smith O'Brien had twenty years of parliamentary 
 life behind him when he was driven to the wild protest 
 of insurrection. Twenty years of the same experience 
 were to bring Moore to a very similar attitude ; but in 
 1847 Moore was hopeful of building up in Parliament 
 
88 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 the nucleus of an Independent Irish Party. When the 
 dissolution came, in 1847, he stood for a second time, 
 but as an Independent, and his work in the famine 
 times carried at least its recognition. Every single 
 elector who went to the poll gave one of his two votes 
 to the Independent. He went to Westminster and 
 denounced with equal energy the agrarian murders, 
 which were then rife in Ireland, and those organs of 
 publicity in England which sought to magnify these out- 
 rages into an indictment against the Irish nation. The 
 ferment of indignation against English methods had 
 not yet died out in the hearts of Irish landlords. Lord 
 Sligo, writing to Moore concerning the controversy 
 which followed, used these words : ** I believe that 
 The Times did much to cause the feeling w!..ich 
 resulted in landlord and parson shooting; it will end 
 by turning us all into Repealers.'* If only it had ! 
 But Moore got no help from the Icundlord class, and the 
 well-to-do Catholic professional men with v/hom he 
 was principally allied proved themselves unable to 
 resist the temptations of ofHce and of personal interest. 
 In the days of Sadleir and Keogh he fought a desperate 
 fight against Whig place-seekers ; his reward was to be 
 finally unseated (in 1857) on an election petition, the 
 charge being that spiritual intimidation had been exer- 
 cised on his behalf by the priests. As Colonel Moore 
 observes, if a landlord threatened his tenants with dis- 
 favour, which meant, eviction, that was ** only a legiti- 
 mate exercise of their rights of property*'; but if a 
 priest told his flock that a man would imperil his soul 
 by selling his vote or prostituting it to the use of a 
 despot, the candidate whom that priest supported 
 would lose his seat and be disqualified for re-election. 
 
THE IRISH GENTRY 89 
 
 From this time onward George Henry Moore found 
 himself heading the same way as Smith O'Brien had 
 gone. In 1861 he told the Irish people that if they 
 desired freedom they must take a lesson from Italy; 
 they must * * become dangerous ' * ; and he advocated 
 the formation of a new Irish volunteer force to emulate 
 that of 1782. Nothing came of this; but after the 
 American war a new movement grew up, not this time 
 among the landlords or the professional men, nor coun- 
 tenanced by the priests, but nursed in the fierce heart 
 of the people. Ireland had become dangerous. 
 Colonel Moore recognises rightly the difference 
 between the Fenian organisation and the Young Ire- 
 Icind movement which had preceded it. Both were 
 idealistic, but the idealism of 1848 was ** the inspira- 
 tion of a few literary gentlemen, poets, and writers." 
 Smith O'Brien, its titular head, was influenced pro- 
 foundly by the aristocratic conception of his rightful 
 place as representing the Kings of Thomond. 
 Fenicinism was democratic; it was officered largely 
 by men who had themselves fought in the most stub- 
 born of modern wars and who had seen what Irish 
 regiments could do in the citizen levies of Federals and 
 Confederates. It was spontaneous, and it was "strong; 
 the measure of its strength is given not by the few 
 flickering outbreaks easily suppressed, but by the 
 terror which it inspired, and by the change which it 
 wrought in the spirit of the people. Moore when he 
 took the step, extraordinary for a man in his position, 
 of enrolling himaelf in that sworn and secret conspiracy 
 can hardly have failed to foresee the collapse of 
 Fenianism as a fighting force; but he recognised that 
 (in his son's words) ** the old complacent toleration of 
 
 G 
 
90 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 schemers and dishonest politicians had vanished and 
 a sturdy independence had taken its place." 
 
 With the advent of that spirit the power of the Irish 
 landlords was doomed. They had made their choice; 
 when they might have made common cause with the 
 whole people of Ireland they had refused to rise beyond 
 their immediate personal advantage and the interests 
 of their class. Moore, who was of themselves, who 
 shared all their pleasures, who loved them, was forced 
 to take a hand in their overthrow. From 1858 onward 
 he had been almost entirely out of politics, living the 
 life of a popular country gentleman, racing and hunt- 
 ing more successfully than ever; his most famous 
 horse, ** Croagh Patrick,** ran in the 'sixties. But in 
 1868 he flung all this aside, sold his horses, and under- 
 took to fight the alliance of Whig and Tory which had 
 dominated County Mayo in the landlord interest for 
 ten years. 
 
 I shall have the question settled (he said) whether one lord shall 
 drive a hundred human souls to the hustings, another fifty, another 
 a score ; whether this or that squire shall call twenty, or ten, or 
 five as good men as himself " his voters " and send them up with 
 his brand on their backs to vote for an omadhaun at his bidding. 
 
 He did settle it. Mayo beat the landlords then, and 
 Mayo became the cradle of popular movements ever 
 after. This most typical of Irish land-owning gentle- 
 men had been forced to sever himself from his class 
 and even to injure his class, and it was not by advo- 
 cacy of self-government that he estranged so close a 
 friend as Lord Sligo. Fintan Lalor*s policy, rejected 
 by the Young Irelanders in 1846, was beginning to 
 take hold in 1 868 ; the movement for self-government 
 was becoming linked on to the driving force of land- 
 
THE IRISH GENTRY 91 
 
 hunger. In the eyes of Lord SHgo and all his class 
 Tenant Right meant Land'lord Wrong, and Moore 
 himself was not exempt from that feeling. He suf- 
 fered indeed, for rents that he had reduced to a figure 
 fixed by the tenants* own arbitrators were withheld 
 from him. Yet he knew clearly that it was necessary 
 for the country, and not more necessary than just, to 
 secure the tenants in their holdings. No one disputes 
 now that he was right. But the last thing he desired 
 was to abolish the landlords. If they did not like the 
 leadership of the priests ** they have,** he said, ** a 
 remedy left; let them make themselves more popular 
 than the priests. If the landlords will make common 
 cause with the people, the people will make common 
 cause with them.'* There was never a truer word 
 spoken, but it fell on closed ears. 
 
 Moore himself broke the landlords* power at the 
 polls; their infinitely greater power, proceeding from 
 control of the land, was broken by another Mayo man, 
 Michael Davitt, the evicted peaseint from Straide, 
 close by Moore Hall. That fight was bound to come 
 when Moore *s warning cind the warning of men like 
 him was set at nought. What a change it has made ! 
 and what has been lost to Ireland ! 
 
 Moore died in 1870. His last year of life saw a hope 
 that Presbyterian farmers of the North, interested in 
 Tenant Right, who had been temporarily allied to 
 Catholics in the struggle for Disestablishment, might 
 unite .solidly with the Nationalists. Even the Protes- 
 tant gentry afforded numerous supporters to Butt*s 
 Home Rule policy at its outset. But of this nothing 
 serious came. The Land Act of 1870 was ineffective, 
 and it seemed that, in spite of Fenianism, all would 
 
92 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 go on as before. Throughout the 'seventies the land- 
 lord class was in undisturbed supremacy. Country 
 gentlemen still talked in good set phrase about ** the 
 robbery of the Church * * ; in actual fact they were very 
 complacently and competently helping to administer 
 its new constitution. Agriculture was prosperous and 
 rents v/ent high» though the harsh and overbearing 
 landlord was condemned by his fellows. This, how- 
 ever, was poor consolation to the tenants. In the 
 county where I was brought up, one landlord was a 
 name of terror, and there was no redress from his 
 tyranny, until at last the peasantry found it for them- 
 selves. The grim old man died fighting hard before 
 his brains were dashed out on the roadside, and two 
 innocent people were killed along with him; but no 
 sane person could fail to perceive that, within five 
 years of his taking off, the whole district was improved 
 out of knowledge. The moral to be drawn was only 
 too obvious; yet none of the landlords drew it; the 
 established interest of a class is too strong a thing for 
 that class to shake themselves out of its influence. 
 
 The men of that generation^ — how well I remember 
 them ! most vividly perhaps as they used to come in 
 to church on Sunday rriorning, when the ladies of their 
 families addressed themselves to devotions kneeling, 
 while the men said their prayers standing, peering 
 mysteriously into their tall hats — a strange ritual, of 
 which traces may be observed at the House of Com- 
 mons, but nowhere else, I fancy, on earth. On week 
 days they lived an orderly, dignified existence in their 
 big old-fashioned houses, leaving home little, though 
 the more cultivated zimong them had travelled in their 
 youth and knew thoroughly some foreign country. In 
 
THE IRISH GENTRY 93 
 
 their own orbit they had power, leisure, and defer- 
 ence, all of which set a stamp upon them ; individuality 
 had great scope to develop, and an able man among 
 them was a man made for government. One such 
 stands out in my memory. Stormy tales were told of 
 his youth, but from himself no one heard a whisper of 
 these far-off exploits; small, exquisitely neat, finely 
 made and finely featured, he was courteous cind gentle- 
 spoken with all; but he was of those quiet creatures 
 who breed fear. I cannot imagine the situation of 
 power of responsibility from which he would have 
 shrunk, or to which he would have been unequal; 
 neither can I imagine him anxious in the pursuit of 
 office. That was Pamell's type. Pamell's strength 
 appears to have Iain precisely in that self-confidence 
 which was a law to itself and which no prestige of 
 fame or authority could shake or overawe. The men 
 who might have been Ireland's leaders were men 
 extraordinarily suited for the conduct of affairs, but as 
 a class they had been thrown out of their natural rela- 
 tion. Castlereagh, who in his cold efficiency had 
 much in common with Parnell, accomplished a despe- 
 rate deed when he made the Union through them. He 
 committed their honour to justify for all time that 
 transaction. If those who condemned the Union were 
 not traitors, then the class from whom it was bought 
 with cash and titles stood convicted of infamy; and 
 since the heart of Ireland loathed and detested Castle- 
 reagh's work, the whole body of the Irish gentry found 
 themselves inevitably estranged from the heart of Ire- 
 land. On one side was the interest of a class — and 
 not merely the material interest but the interest of its 
 honour, which sought a justification in the name of 
 
94 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 loyalty ; on the other wels the interest of Ireland ; and 
 the landlord who chose the side of Ireland severed 
 himself necessarily, as Moore had to do, from his own 
 friends and kin. 
 
 For years now there has been moving through many 
 minds in Ireland the question whether this state of 
 things must permanently endure. Is that estrange- 
 ment inevitable ? I at least think otherwise. Through- 
 out the last two decades of the nineteenth century 
 landlord and tenant were opposed in a struggle for 
 definite material interests; it was a fight not only for 
 free conditions of tenure but for the reduction of rent, 
 if not for its total abolition. A way of peace was 
 found in State-aided land purchase, and in a recon- 
 stitution of the whole agricultural order. The land- 
 lords, where they have been bought out, have not even 
 the duty of rent collecting. How will this aifect 
 their traditional attitude, which calls itself loyalty to 
 the English connexion, but which I interpret rather as 
 a traditional justification of the Union and of the here- 
 ditary landlord policy? If self-government is estab- 
 lished without dissolution of the Union, is it not rea- 
 sonable to suppose that there will be a change in 
 men's dispositions? 
 
 The question involved is really more serious, though 
 of far less political importance, than that of Ulster. 
 Whatever happens, the industrial community of Bel- 
 fast and its district is not going to run away. That 
 element will not be lost to Ireland ; it is too strong, too 
 well able to assert itself ; and it is anchored by its inte- 
 rest. The ex-landlords, now that their occupation is 
 gone, are bound to Ireland only by habit and attach- 
 ment. At present they fulfil no , essential function ; 
 
THE IRISH GENTRY 95 
 
 and it will be open undoubtedly for the gentry once 
 more to make an error mischievous to Ireland and 
 disastrous to themselves. Ihey may take up the line 
 of unwilling submission, of refusal to co-operate, of 
 cold-shouldering and crying down the new Parliament 
 and the new Ministry. Social pressure may be exer- 
 cised to keep men from seeking election, and so to 
 perpetuate the existing severance between the leisured 
 and wealthier classes and the in a in body of the nation. 
 There will be strong tendencies in this direction. But 
 on the other hand I think that among the men who 
 have grown up under the new order there is an increas- 
 ing willingness to accept the change. One friend of 
 mine — ^no politician, and, like all non-politicians, a 
 Unionist — said tO' me lately that he would be rather 
 disappointed if Home Rule did not become law — he 
 was ** curious about it"; and he added, ** 1 think a 
 great many like me have the same feelmg." Others 
 probably have a more positive outlook, and desire to 
 take an active part in the public life of their country; 
 and there will be a strong desire among Irish Nationa- 
 lists to bring in at the outset those who wish to come 
 in. On the other hand, no less certainly, there will be 
 the feeling that is natural towards those who wish to 
 reap where they have not sown ; and the gentry will 
 need to make allowance for this. If they set out with 
 the notion, as some did when Local Government was 
 established, that places are theirs by right when they 
 condescend to take them — that they are entitled to 
 election because they have more money, more educa- 
 tion, because, if you will, they are, in the eye of pure 
 reason, better qualified — nothing but trouble can come 
 of such a disposition. Ireland, which in George Henry 
 
96 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 Moore's time was the most aristocratically governe<l 
 part of the British Isles, is now by far more democratic, 
 at all events, than England : the poor man is on a level 
 with the rich, and means to stay there. Those who 
 want to go into Irish politics, under Home Rule £is 
 now, must take their chances in the ruck ; but if they 
 do, they will find a people ready and even eager to 
 recognise their qualities, and to allot perhaps more 
 consideration than is due to their social position. 
 
 With all their practical democracy, the Irish have a 
 great tenderness for ** the old stock.** In the cases 
 (and there are many hundreds of them) where a land- 
 lord or professional man or Protestant clergyman has 
 been for long years a real friend and support and coun- 
 sellor to his poorer neighbours, as Irish in voice and 
 looks and gesture as they, sharing their tastes and 
 their aversions, their sport and their sorrow, yet 
 divided and cut off from them by a kind of political 
 religion, I believe from my heart that there will be on 
 both sides a willingness to celebrate the end of that 
 old discord in some happy compact. But on both 
 sides there must be generosity and a sympathy with 
 natural hesitations and reluctances. Whatever comes 
 or goes, the old domination of the gentry has disap- 
 peared; yet, whatever comes or goes, men of that 
 class may find a sphere of usefulness and even of 
 power in Ireland. But this will be infinitely easier to 
 achieve when the great subject of contention is 
 removed, and when the ex-landlord can seek election, 
 EUid the ex-tenant can support him, without a sense on 
 either side of turning against the traditional loyalties 
 of a class. 
 
 1913. 
 
YESTERDAY IN IRELAND. 
 
 |H, maybe it was yesterday, or forty years 
 ago," says the verse of an Irish song. 
 That is the kind of indeterminate * * yes- 
 terday " which is described in Irish 
 Memories by two friends who have made 
 some memories of Ireland imperishable. ** The Ire- 
 land that Martin and I knew when we were children," 
 writes Miss Somerville, ** is fast leaving us; every 
 day some landmark is wiped out." No one knows 
 better than she that while in many parts of Ireland you 
 must go back very close on forty years to reach any 
 likeness of that old way of life, yet in other parts yes- 
 terday and forty years ago are very much the same. 
 Still, she would reply, and I must admit, that one 
 profound modification has affected even the most 
 unchanging places, altering the whole position of the 
 class in which she was born and bred. In a sense, all 
 her memories of Ireland concern themselves with 
 this change, depicting either what formerly was, and 
 the process of its passing, or what yet remains and 
 seems likely to vanish too. Her presentment of yes- 
 terday is well worth study, for its outlook is typical of 
 the most generous and shrewdest minds among the 
 Irish gentry. I use here an old-fashioned word, some- 
 what decried, but it is the only one that expresses my 
 meaning. 
 
 But readers will know that this is not only a book of 
 memories; it is, if not a memoir, at least the memo- 
 
98 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 rial of a singularly brilliant Irish woman. Miss Somer- 
 ville had planned to write her recollections, as she 
 had written so much else, in collaboration with her 
 cousin and comrade, ** Martin Ross *' — Miss Violet 
 Martin, of Ross, in County Gal way. It did not so 
 fall out; and though in this volume one is aware that 
 the narrator is often (by a sort of sub-conscious habit) 
 speaking out of two minds, from a dual complex of 
 associations, and though considerable fragments of 
 Martin Ross's own writing give a justification to the 
 joint signature, yet one of the two comrades is joint 
 author now only in so far cts she is part of all the 
 memories, and a surviving influence little likely to pass 
 away. But her stock, so to say, in the partnership 
 remains; Galway, no less than Cork, is the field over 
 which these memories travel. In the main, the book 
 is concerned with recalling the joint kindred of the 
 two friends and cousins, and reconstituting the sur- 
 roundings and the atmosphere of both families. 
 Families, however, are conceived and depicted in 
 their most extended relations; figures are evoked of 
 chief, vassal, page and groom, tenant and master; 
 and with them go their * * opposite numbers * ' (to bor- 
 row an army term) from chief tainess to cook. Chief- 
 tainesses are there unmistakably. One ex-beauty had 
 retired from the Court of the Regent to Castle Towns- 
 hend (Miss Somerville's personal background), and 
 there lived long, ** noted for her charm of manner, her 
 culture and her sense of humour.*' 
 
 Near the end of her long life she went to the funeral of a rela- 
 tive, leaning decorously upon the arm of a kinsman. At the 
 churchyard a countryman pushed forward between her and the 
 coifm. She thereupon disengaged her arm from that of her squire 
 and struck the countryman in tha face. 
 
YESTERDAY IN IRELAND 99 
 
 Miss Somerville observes that such stories may help 
 to explain the French Revolution; but she adds, quite 
 plausibly : — 
 
 It is no less characteristic of the time that the countryman's 
 attitude does not come into the story, but it seems to me probable 
 that he went home and boasted then, and for the rest of his life, 
 that old Madam had "bet him in a blow in the face." 
 
 Undoubtedly the chieftain-spirit is admired, and not 
 least when it shows itself in a woman. A more 
 lenient and more modern example is to be found in 
 the account of a dispute about bounds in a transaction 
 under the Land Purchase Act. After all other 
 agencies failed, the landlord's sister called the dispu- 
 tants before her to the disputed spot, stepped the dis- 
 tance of the land debatable, drove her walking-stick 
 into a crevice of the rock (disputes are passionate in 
 opposite ratio to the value of the land) and, collecting 
 stones, built a small cairn round it. ** Now men, 
 she said, ** in the name of God let this be the bounds." 
 And i: was so. ** It failed the agent, and it failed the 
 landlord, and it failed the priest; but Lady Mary 
 setded it,'* was the summing up of one of the dis- 
 putants. That was a chief tainess for you. 
 
 Not inferior in chieftainly spirit was Martin Ross's 
 grandfather who " had the family liking for a horse." 
 
 It is recorded that in a dealer's yard in Dublin he mounted a 
 refractory animal, in his frock-coat and tall hat, and took him 
 round St. Stephen's Green at a gallop, through the traffic, laymg 
 into him with his umbrella. 
 
 Somehow that picture gives a measure of the remote- 
 ness. Stephen's Green was not then a place of square- 
 set granite pavement, tram-rails and large swift-mov- 
 ing, electric trams; it was a leisurely promenade where 
 
100 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 large slow-moying country gentlemen turned out in 
 tall hats and frock-coats. We of Miss Somerville's 
 generation depend on our imagination, not on memory, 
 to reconstruct the scene. The grandfather in ques- 
 tion died before the great famine of 1847, which shook 
 and in many places uprooted the old order without yet 
 bringing in the new. His son, Martin Ross's father, 
 had the famine to cope with and survived it; but of 
 the second convulsion from which emerged the Irelcuid 
 of to-day he saw only the beginning, for he died in 
 1873, when the organised peasant uprising was at 
 most a menace. But his wife knew both periods — the 
 bad times of the late 'forties and the bad times of the 
 early eighties. The true link with the past for the 
 writers of Irish Memories is through the female line. 
 This is a book of mothers and daughters rather than 
 of fathers and sons. 
 
 Martin Ross's mother went back easily in memory 
 to the society which had known the Irish Parliament, 
 had made or accepted the Union, and which, after 
 the Union, exercised chieftainship in Ireland. She 
 was the daughter of Chief Justice Bushe, one of 
 Grattan's rivals in oratory, who, like Grattan, had 
 opposed the Union with all the resources of his 
 eloquence. Against his name in the private Castle 
 list of voters for the crucial division had been written 
 in despair one word : ** Incorruptible.** He was the 
 common ancestor whose blood made the bond of kin- 
 ship between Miss Somerville and Martin Ross, and 
 both these staunch Unionist ladies are passionately 
 proud of the part which their grandfather played in 
 resisting the Union ; just as you will find the staunchest 
 Ulster Covenanters exulting in the fact that they had 
 
YESTERDAY IN IRELAND 101 
 
 a forbear ** out " with the United Irishmen at Antrim 
 or Ballynahinch in 1798. No wonder Enghshmen 
 find Ireland puzzhng; but Scots understand, for their 
 own records abound in examples of the same para- 
 doxes of historic sentiment. 
 
 Yesterday in Ireland, I think, for my present pur- 
 pose comes to define itself as the period between the 
 famine of 1847 and the famine of 1879 — between the 
 downfall of O'Connell and Parnell's coming to power. 
 We who were born in the 'sixties grew up in the close 
 of it, and perhaps recognise now more clearly than 
 when they were with us the characters of our kindred 
 who were a part of it as mature human beings. ** The 
 men and women, but more specially the women of 
 my mother's family and generation, are a lost pattern, 
 a vanished type." I could say the same as Miss 
 Somerville. There was a spaciousness about those 
 people, a disregard of forms cmd conventions, a habit 
 of thinking and acting for themselves which really 
 came down from a long tradition of interpreting the 
 law to their own liking. Miss Somerville and her 
 comrade knew the type in its fullest development, for 
 both grew up in far-out Atlantic-bordering regions — 
 Carbery of West Cork, Connemara of West Galway — 
 where the countryside knew scarcely ** any inhabitants 
 but the gentry and their dependents. * Where'd we 
 be at all if it wasn't for the Colonel's Big Lady?' said 
 the hungry country- wom.en, in the Bad Times, scurry- 
 ing, barefooted, to her in any emergency to be fed 
 and doctored and scolded." So writes Miss Somer- 
 ville of her mother ; so might Martin Ross have written 
 of her father, who was, so far as in him lay, a Provi- 
 dence for his tenantry. Yet there is a story told of 
 
102 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 Mr. Martin that throws a flood of light on the whole 
 position of affairs. Who were indeed the dependents? 
 And on what did they depend? The story tells of a 
 widow down by Lough Corrib, long in arrears with 
 her rent. 
 
 The Master sent to her two or three times, and in the end he 
 walked down himself, after his breakfast, and he took Thady (the 
 steward) with him. Well, when he went into the house, she was 
 so proud to see him, and " Your Honour is welcome," says she, 
 and she put a chair for him. He didn't sit down at all, but he 
 was standing up there with his back to the dresser, and the children 
 were sitting down one side the fire. The tears came from the 
 Master's eyes, Thady seen them fall down the cheek. " Say no 
 more about the rent," says the Master to her, " you need say no 
 more about it till I come to you again." Well, it was the next 
 winter, men were working in Gurthnamuckla and Thady with 
 them, and the Master came to the wall of the field, and a letter in 
 his hand, and he called Thady over to him. What had he to show 
 but the widow's rent that her brother in America sent her, 
 
 Martin Ross, writing in the light of to-day, makes 
 this comment : — 
 
 It will not happen again ; it belongs to an almost forgotten 
 regime, that was capable of abuse, yet capable too of summoning 
 forth the best impulses of Irish hearts. 
 
 War, famine and pestilence — all these are capable 
 of summoning forth splendid impulses: but society 
 should not be orgcinised to give play to these hazards 
 of feeling. The fundamental truth about yesterday 
 in Ireland is that everybody accepted as natural a 
 state of affairs under which Irish gentry were taking 
 rents that could not be earned on the land which was 
 burdened with them. Landlord and tenant alike were 
 really dependent on what was sent back by the sons 
 and daughters of poor people from America to prevent 
 the break-up of homes. The whole situation was 
 
YESTERDAY IN IRELAND 103 
 
 false, from top to bobtom. At top, a small class, 
 physically and often mentally superb, full of charm, 
 extraordinarily agreeable, fit for great uses, but by 
 temperament, habit and education unequipped for its 
 proper task of equipping and directing the labour out 
 of which ultimately it had to live or perish. It 
 perished. At bottom, a multitude with marvellous 
 constitution, undermined by age-long under-feeding, 
 friendly, most lovable, most winning, but untrained 
 and unequipped, half-hearted in its business of rolling 
 the pitiless stone up the never-ending hill. It survived 
 — clinging with a desperate tenacity to the soil which 
 so meagrely nourished it. But during that generation 
 of yesterday — and how many generations before it? — 
 there grew up inevitably, from the conditions, a tradi- 
 tional toleration of incompetence, a faith as it were in 
 inefficiency. Ireland of yesterday was bound up in 
 one vicious circle of work that was necessarily under- 
 paid because it was inefficient, and work that was 
 necessarily inefficient because it was underpaid. In 
 the lower class there were no reserves ; the dependants 
 lived from hand to mouth, and when hand failed to 
 find food, they had to come to the upper class, first 
 for remission of its claims on th^m and then for actual 
 subsistence. But the dependence was mutual, and 
 there were no reserves at top equal to the needs of 
 that joint hazard. Penury was only at two removes 
 from the **gentry houses.'* While the first line of 
 defence, the tenants, held good, the world went plea- 
 santly for the Ireland of yesterday. But when that 
 line brojce, and starvation burst in, then the best men 
 and women in the big houses flung their all into the 
 common stock, and went under — as did the chief of 
 the Martins in Connemara. 
 
104 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 That, however, happened the day before 
 yesterday; yesterday saw nothing so dire. But 
 the menace of it was always there, and the 
 rest of Ireland gradually consolidated itself for a 
 struggle to win what had long ago been acquired for 
 Protestant Ulster — ^the right of a tenant to what his 
 own labour created. The Ulster custom has done for 
 Ulster, mdustrial as well as agricultural, more than is 
 generally perceived. It gave in some degree recogni- 
 tion to efficiency. Tenure was there less precarious, 
 less dependent on the landlord's pleasure; men were 
 freer, work had more rights. There was less room for 
 impulse, perhaps less appeal to affection; but when a 
 business relation is based on impulse and affection, 
 where rights are not solid and defined, the sense of 
 obligation easily leads men astray. That which is 
 given out of loyalty and affection comes to be taken 
 as a due. Martin Ross — ** Miss Violet," whom the 
 people of Ross called ** the gentle lady," as beautiful 
 a name as was ever earned by mortal — inherited with 
 little qualification the landlord standpoint. She recalls 
 the story of an election in 1872, when her father, going 
 to vote in Oughterard, saw ** a company of infantry 
 keeping the way for Mr. Arthur Guinness (afterwards 
 Lord Ardilaun) as he conveyed to the poll a handful 
 of his tenants to vote for Captain Trench, he himself 
 walking in front with the oldest of them on his arm." 
 She does not ask if the tenants desired to be so con- 
 veyed. She merely describes how her father ** ranged 
 through the crowd incredulously, asking for this or 
 that tenant, unable to believe that they had deserted 
 him." When he came home, " even the youngest 
 child of the house could see how great had been the 
 
YESTERDAY IN IRELAND 105 
 
 blow. It was not the political defeat, severe as that 
 was, it was the personal wound, and it was incur- 
 able.'* 
 
 Looking back through all those years, the ** gentle 
 lady '* can see nothing in that episode but a case of 
 priestly inftimidation. ** One tneed not blame the 
 sheep who passed in a frightened huddle from one 
 fold to another." Yet friends of mine in Galway look 
 back on it in a very different spirit; they remember 
 the Nolan-Trench election and Captain Nolan's vic- 
 tory as a triumph of the poor, a first instalment of 
 freedom ; it brought with it an exultation very different 
 from the mere outburst of hatred that these pages 
 suggest. What is more, having been privileged to sit 
 in the most widely representative assembly of Irish- 
 men that modem Ireland has known, I can testify that 
 to-day peer and peasant, clergy and laymen, those 
 who opposed it, and those others who fought for it, 
 alike admit that the change which such a victory fore- 
 shadowed was necessary and was beneficent. But it 
 was a revolution. Ireland of yesterday was Ireland 
 before the revolution. The Ireland that Miss Somer- 
 ville and Martin Ross have lived in as grown women 
 hcis been a country in the throes of a revolution, long 
 drawn-out, with varying phases, yet still incomplete. 
 Those who judge Ireland should remember this. In 
 time of revolution, life is difficult, ancient loyalties 
 clash with new yet living principles, sympathy and 
 justice even are unsure guides. No country could have 
 been kept for forty years in such a ferment as Ireland 
 has known without profound demoralisation. We 
 may well envy those who lived more easily and 
 quietly in the Ireland of yesterday, and held with an 
 
 H 
 
106 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 unquestioning spirit to the state of things in which 
 they were born. 
 
 Such were the folk of whom Miss Somerville writes 
 with ** that indomitable family pride that is an asset 
 of immense value in the history of a country.*' They 
 ** took all things in their stride without introspection 
 or hesitation. Their unflinching conscientiousness, 
 their violent church-going (I speak of the sisters), were 
 accompanied by a whole-souled love of a spree and a 
 wonderful gift for a row.*' I can corroborate her 
 details, especially the last. All those that I recall had 
 some talent for feuds; at least, in every family there 
 would be one warrior, male or female; eind all had 
 the complete contempt, not so much for convention 
 as for those who were affected in their lives (or cos- 
 tumes) by any standard that was not home-made. But 
 in all humility I must admit that the real heroines of 
 this book — Mrs. Somerville and Mrs. Martin — outshine 
 anything that my memory can produce. When 
 Martin Ross and her mother went back to West Gal- 
 way sund re-established themselves at their old home, 
 a letter from her to Miss Somerville describes one 
 incident : — 
 
 I wish you had seen Paddy Griffy, a ver>' active little old man, 
 and a beloved of mine, when he came down on Sunday night to 
 welcome me. After the usual hand-kissings on the steps, he put 
 his hands over his head and stood in the doorway, I suppose invok- 
 ing his saint. He then rushed into the hall. 
 
 " Dance, Paddy," screamed Nurse Bennett (my foster-mother, 
 now our maid-of-all-work). 
 
 And he did dance, and awfully well, too, to his own singing. 
 Mamma, who was attired in a flowing pink dressing-gown and a 
 black hat trimmed with lilac, became suddenly emulous, and with 
 her spade under her arm joined in the jig. This lasted for about 
 a minute, and was a never-to-be. forgotten sight. They skipped 
 round the hall, they changed sides, they swept up to each other and 
 back again and finished with the deepest curtseys. 
 
YESTERDAY IN IRELAND 107 
 
 My own mother would gladly have done the same 
 on a like occasion, but she lacked Mrs. Martin's 
 talent for the jig. Mrs. Somerville is sketched with a 
 free and humorous hand. I quote only one detail, 
 but it shows the real Irishwoman, more deeply in 
 touch with Ireland's traditional life than any Gaelic 
 League could bring her. Question arose how to find 
 a suitable offering for * an old servant of forty years' 
 standing, whose fancies were few and her needs 
 none.' ** Give her a nice shroud," said Mrs. Somer- 
 ville, ** there's nothing in the world she'd like so well 
 as that." 
 
 Shakespeare could not have outdone that intuition, 
 and only one of the larger breed would have been 
 unconventional enough to suggest what the younger 
 generation, hampered by other feelings than those of 
 West Carbery, " were too feeble to accept." 
 
 These two traits belong to the harmonious and 
 thoroughly Irish grouping in which such ladies as Mrs. 
 Martin and Mrs. Somerville were central figures of the 
 whole countryside. That grouping exists no longer, 
 and this book has to describe the discord which inter- 
 rupted that harmony. Martin Ross's elder brother, 
 Robert Martin (famous in his day as the writer and 
 singer of Ballyhooly, and a score of other topical 
 songs), left his work as a London journalist to help in 
 fighting the first campaign which brought the word 
 ** boycott " into usage. 
 
 It was at this work (his sister writes), that Robert knew for the 
 first time what it was to have every man's hand against hirn, to 
 meet the stare of hatred, the jeer and. the sidelong curse ; to face 
 endless drives on outside cars with his revolver in his hand ; to 
 plan the uphill tussle with boycotted crops and cattle for which a 
 market could scarcely be found : to know the imminence of death, 
 
108 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 when by accidentally choosing one of two roads he evaded the man 
 with a gun who had gone out to wait for him. 
 
 Robert Martin faced, in a word, the earliest eind 
 ugliest phases of that Irish revolution, which was the 
 Nemesis of the all too easy and too pleasant ways of 
 yesterday in Ireland. Later, after his death, Martin 
 Ross herself had to gain some experience of the same 
 trouble. When she went back with her mother to 
 re-establish the family home from which they had 
 been fifteen years absent, there was a hostile element 
 in the parish, and gracious hospitality was ungra- 
 ciously met. An attempt was made to keep children 
 from a children's party which she had organised. The 
 move was half-hearted and her energy defeated it, but 
 that the attempt should be made was such ** a facer *' 
 as she had never before known. Like many another 
 ugly thing in Ireland, it originated in that cowardly 
 fear of public opinion which is to be found on the 
 seamy side of all revolutions; and it did not stand 
 against her ** gallant fight to restore the old ways, the 
 old friendships.** 
 
 The old ways, in so far as they meant the old 
 friendships, she might hope to restore, although the 
 friendship would, half consciously, take on a new 
 accent; personality would count for more in it, posi- 
 tion for less. But the old relation which authorised 
 a kind-hearted landlord to feel that his tenants had 
 ** deserted him ** because they voted against his wish 
 in an election — that is gone for ever; and gone, at all 
 events, for the present, is the local leadership of the 
 gentry. 
 
 I question whether it is realised that in parting from 
 Jiat leadership Irelcind lost what was in a sense Home 
 
YESTERDAY IN IRELAND 109 
 
 Rule. In the ** yesterday '* of which I write Ireland 
 was governed in all its parochial cind most intimate 
 affairs by a class or a caste; but that governing class 
 was Irish — Irish with a limitation, no doubt, yet still 
 indisputably Irish. When that rule perished, when 
 that class lost its local ascendancy, government 
 became the bastard compromise that we have known, 
 with power inharmoniously divided between official- 
 dom and agitators. The law was framed and admini- 
 stered by officials, often English or Scotch, possessing 
 no authority except what the law conferred on them. 
 Authority lay very largely v^ith popular leaders; but 
 leadership and authority alike were purely personal, 
 depending on a man's own qualities and the support 
 which they evoked. No man was born to it as of 
 right, and such authority is far more precarious than 
 the established power of a governing class. This is 
 a weakness in all democratically-governed countries, 
 but where there is self-government, the individual, in 
 entering upon office, acquires the support and the 
 prestige of a long-established machinery of power. 
 He ceases to be merely the individual when he 
 becomes part of the Government. For the Irish 
 leaders this reinforcement to the personal authority 
 has never existed; they have been at a terrible dis- 
 advantage as compared with all other democratic poli- 
 ticians; and consequently the power exercised by 
 them has always, except perhaps at ParnelFs zenith, 
 been far less than was the combined authority of the 
 gentry before the landlord rule was broken. Those 
 who shared in that authority acted, and could afford 
 to act, with unquestioning confidence; they were surer 
 of themselves, than is any popular leader or any offi- 
 
no IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 cial in Ireland of to-day. It seldom occurred to them 
 to ask whether their conduct in cUiy juncture might 
 meet with approval; being a law to other people, they 
 were naturally a law to themselves, and an Irish law. 
 Their power was excessive, and demoralised them by 
 its lack of limitation; yet many of the qualities which 
 it bred, made them an element of great value in the 
 country. These qualities are by no means extinct in 
 their kindred, nor is the tradition of their right to 
 leadership forgotten. 
 
 Of one thing Miss Somerville and those for whom 
 she speaks (she is a real spokeswoman) may be well 
 assured. Whatever be the surface mood of the 
 moment, whatever the passing effect of war's hectic 
 atmosphere, nothing is more deeply realised through- 
 out Ireland than the need to restore the old ways, the 
 old friendships — the need to bring back the gentry to 
 their old uses in Ireland, and to so much of leadership 
 as should be theirs by right of fitness. When the his- 
 tory of the Irish Convention comes to be fully recorded, 
 it will be seen that a great desire was universally felt, 
 cordially uttered, in that assembly, to bridge over the 
 gulf which divides us from yesterday in Ireland, and 
 to recover for the future much of what Wcis admirable, 
 valuable and lovable in a past that is not unkindly 
 remembered. Indeed, it is plain that Miss Somer- 
 ville has felt the influences that were abroad on the 
 winds, when she wrote of her comrade : — 
 
 Her love of Ireland, combined with her distrust of some of those 
 newer influences in Irish affairs to which her letters refer, made 
 her dread any weakening of the links that bind the United King- 
 dom into one ; but I believe that if she were here now, and saw 
 the changes that the past eighteen months have brought to Ire- 
 land, she would be quick to welcome the hope that Irish politics 
 
YESTERDAY IN IRELAND 111 
 
 are lifting at last out of the controversial rut of centuries, and that 
 although it has been said of East and West that " never the two 
 shall meet," North and South will yet prove that in Ireland it is 
 always the impossible that happens. 
 
 North and South — that is a more difficult gulf to 
 bridge, for the one I have been speaking of is only a 
 breach to repair. But industrial Protestant Ulster and 
 the rest of Ireland have never really been one. Unity 
 there has not to be re-established, but created. Martin 
 Ross went to the North only once ** at the tremendous 
 moment of the signing of the Ulster Covenant," and 
 she v^as profoundly impressed by what she saw. She 
 wrote about it publicly and she wrote also privately 
 (in a letter which I had the honour to receive) a pas- 
 sage well worth quoting : — 
 
 I did not know the North at all. What surprised me about the 
 place was the feeling of cleverness and go, and also the people 
 struck me as being hearty. If only the South would go up North 
 and see what they are doing there, and how they are doing it, and 
 ask them to show them how, it would make a good deal of differ- 
 ence. And then the North should come South and see what nice 
 people we are, and how we do that. 
 
 When that reciprocal pilgrimage was accomplished 
 by the Convention, her anticipations were more them 
 justified. But how clever she was ! In a flash, she, 
 coming there a stranger, hits on the word w^hich 
 describes Ulster and differentiates it from the rest of 
 Ireland, ** Hearty," that is what they are; it is the 
 good side of their self -content. No people that is in 
 revolution can be hearty — least of all when revolution 
 has dragged on through more than a generation. Dis- 
 trust of your comrades — distrust of your leaders — self- 
 distrust — these are the characteristic vices of revolu- 
 tion (look at Russia), and they sow a bitter seed. Pro- 
 
112 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 testant Ulster has never known revolution; for it yes- 
 terday and to-day have been happily, naturally, con- 
 tinuous. Political change it has known, normal and 
 beneficent ; land purchase came to Ulster as a by-pro- 
 duct of what the rest of Ireland endured in torment, 
 and agony, and self -mutilation. Clever the Northerns 
 are, but their cleverness issues prosperously in action ; 
 they carry on in a solidly "established order; they have 
 not needed to break down before they could begin to 
 build. That is why their heartiness stood out when 
 they were assembled, as I have seen them in a common 
 council of Irishmen, which was also, thank heaven, 
 a companionship. But the world at large can see it 
 exhibited in another way. Contrast the work of the 
 Ulster Players with that of the Abbey Theatre. The 
 Drone is perhaps not the best of new Irish comedies, 
 but it is infinitely the pleasantest; there is no bitter 
 tang in its hearty humour. Even in The Enthusiast, 
 a sketch which has some touch of pessimism, there is 
 little more than a good-humoured shrug of the 
 shoulders when the Enthusiast abandons his preten- 
 sions to make himself heard against the banging of 
 Orange drums. I find a very different note, not 
 merely in the work of Synge, of Boyle, Colum, Len- 
 nox Robinson, and the rest of the Abbey dramatists, 
 but even in the books of which Miss Somerville was 
 joint author. When Ireland is seen with the eyes, for 
 instance, of her Major Yeates, is not the whole atti- 
 tude one of amused and acquiescent resignation ? Take 
 the hunting out of it (with all the humours of the 
 hunt) — take the shooting and fishing — and what is left 
 but a life (to borrow a phrase from Mr. George Moore) 
 ** as melancholy as bog-water and as ineffectual." 
 
YESTERDAY IN IRELAND 113 
 
 Miss Somerville would probably decline to imagine an 
 Irelemd with these unthinkable suppressions, but after 
 all, we cannot live by or for sport alone. What gave 
 dignity and reality to the life of yesterday was leader- 
 ship in one class, eind loyalty in the other. Leader- 
 ship resting on ownership is gone now, dead as the 
 dodo ; what is left for the like (say) of Mr. Flurry Knox 
 if he should begin to take himself seriously? You 
 can easily make a soldier of him ; we have all met him 
 in trenches and observed his air>' attitude in No Man's 
 Land. But soldiering has generally meant expatria- 
 tion. For my part, I hope some day to see this gentle- 
 man (or his like) play a useful part in some battalion of 
 Irish territorials — some home service offshoot of the 
 Connaught Rangers. But that is not enough. If 
 those who, like Miss Somerville, love Ireland's yester- 
 day and desire to link it up with a worthy to-morrow, 
 there must be a wider understanding of Ireland, not 
 in the North only, but in that element of the South 
 and West which stands to-day in a sense morally 
 expatriated. The Irish gentry who complain that 
 their tenants ** deserted " them must leam where they 
 themselves failed their tenants. Leadership cannot 
 depend merely on a power to evict, and they would 
 to-day repudiate the desire for a leadership so 
 grounded. But between free men where there is not 
 comprehension there can be no leadership. 
 
 I take first what is most difFiCult — the very heart 
 of antagonism. Everyone who desires to understand 
 Ireland to-day should read Patrick Pearse's post- 
 humous book, called boldly The Story oj a Success 
 
 1 " The Story of a Success." By P. H. Pearse. Being a Record 
 of St. Erda's College, September, 1908, to Easter, igi6. Edited by 
 Desmond Ryan, B.A. Maunsel & Co. 
 
114 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 It is the spiritual history of Pearse's career as a school- 
 master, edited and completed by his pupil, Desmond 
 Ryan ; and it is a book by which no one can be justly 
 off ended—a book instinct with nobility, chivalry and 
 high courtesy, free from all touch of bitterness ; a book, 
 too, shot through and slashed with that tragic irony 
 which the Greeks knew to be the finest thrill in litera- 
 ture — the word spoken, to which the foreknown event 
 gives an echo of double meaning. Pearse was con- 
 cerned with Ireland's yesterday; he desired to bring 
 the present and the future into organic rotation with 
 the past. But his yesterday was not Miss Somerville's 
 nor mine. The son of an English mechanic and a 
 Galway woman, he was brought up in Connemara 
 after the landlord power had ceased to exist. Ireland's 
 past for him and Irish tradition were seen through the 
 medium of an imagination in touch only with the pea- 
 sant life, but inspired by books and literature, written 
 and spoken. His yesterday was of no definite past, 
 for he had been bom in a revolution when the imme- 
 diate past was obliterated. In his vision a thousand 
 years were no more than the watch of some spell- 
 bound chivalry, waiting for the voice that should say, 
 ** It is the time." Cuchulain and Robert Emmet were 
 his inspirations, but the champion of the legendary 
 Red Branch cycle and the young revolutionary of 
 Napoleon's days were near to him one as the other, in 
 equally accessible communion. Going back easily to 
 the heroic legends, on which, though blurred in their 
 outline, his boyhood had been fostered by tellers of 
 long-transmitted tales at a Connemara hearthside, he 
 found the essential beauty and significance where 
 more learned thousrh less cultured readers have been 
 
YESTERDAY IN IRELAND 115 
 
 bewildered by what seemed to them wild extrava- 
 gances of barbarism. What he gathered from them 
 did not lie inert, but quickened in him and in others, 
 for he was the revolutionary as schoolmaster — ^^the 
 most drastic revolutionary of all. In the school review 
 which v/as the first vehicle for these writings of his, he 
 hoped to found *' the rallying point for the thought and 
 aspirations of all those who would bring back again 
 in Ireland that Heroic Age which reserved its highest 
 honour for the hero who had the most childlike heart, 
 for the king who had the largest pity, and for the poet 
 who visioned the truest image of beauty." All his 
 theory of education was based on the old Irish institu- 
 tion of fosterage, which was no mere physical tie of 
 the breast ; the child sent to be fostered was sent to be 
 bred and trained, and it was a tie stronger than that 
 of its blood or of the breast. Irish Memories shows 
 incidentally how great a part this fosterage played in 
 the Ross of yesterday- — that family with its multitude 
 of children was bound to the countryside by all the 
 ** Nursies.** But the Martin household, cind all similar 
 households were, in a less literal sense, fostered by 
 the peasantry at large. The truest part of education 
 should be to know your own country (a prin- 
 ciple much neglected in Ireland), and which of us all, 
 who had the good fortune to be brought up in touch 
 with Irish peasant life, does not realise our debt? We 
 received a devotion, an affection, for which no 
 adequate return could be made — it is the nature of 
 fosterage that the fosterer should give more than can 
 ever be requited; but we gained also our real know- 
 ledge, in so far as we ever had it, of the countryside, 
 the traditional wisdom, the inherited way of life. 
 
116 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 There was more to be got if we had the wit to assimi- 
 late it. Almost all of modern Irish literature that has 
 lasting value is evoked from elements floating in 
 peasant memory, in the peasant mind, and in the 
 coloured peasant speech of ein Ireland which keeps 
 unbroken descent from a long line of yesterdays. Mr. 
 Yeats is only the chief of those who draw from this 
 source. Miss Somerville herself and her cousin must 
 have known well that the real worth of their work lies 
 in their instinct for the poetry which, more specially 
 in Gaelic-speaking regions, sits in rags by roadside and 
 chimney corner. Irish poetry is not only the tragic 
 voice of the keene; Gaelic had its comic muse as well, 
 a robust virago, of the breed which produced Aristo- 
 phanes and Rabelais — and Slipper with his gift for 
 epic narrative is a camp-follower of that regiment. 
 
 Yet in Miss Somerville*s appreciation there is often 
 — not always — a sense of the incongruity as well as of 
 the beauty in peasant speech. The woman crying for 
 alms of bread who described her place of habitation, 
 ** I do be like a wild goose over on the side of Dro- 
 minidy Wood,*' moves to laughter as well as to pity 
 with the dignity of her phrase. Ireland so felt is Ire- 
 land perceived from the outside — seen as a picturesque 
 ruin. You cannot so see Pearse; he is too strong for 
 even compassionate laughter. What he embodies is 
 the central strength of Irish nationalism — its disregard 
 of the immediate event. 
 
 Wise men have told me that I ought never to set my foot on a 
 path unless I can see clearly whither it will lead me. But that 
 philosophy would condemn most of us to stand still till we rot. 
 Surely one can do no more than assure one's self that each step 
 -one takes is right ; and as to the Tightness of a step one is fortu- 
 nately answerable only to one's conscience and not to the wise men 
 
YESTERDAY IN IRELAND 117 
 
 of the counting house. The street will pass judgment on our enter- 
 prises according as they have "succeeded" or "failed." But if 
 one can feel that one has striven faithfully to do a right thing, does 
 not one stand ultimately justified, no matter what the issue of one's 
 attempt, no matter what the sentence of the street? 
 
 By such teaching he commended to his scholars, 
 and to Ireland, the spirit which he desired to see 
 expressed in ** that laughing gesture of a young man 
 that is going into battle or climbing to a gibbet.'* 
 Strange country, that heis the gibbet always before the 
 eyes and almost before the aspiration of its idealists ! 
 It was so yesterday— in all the yesterdays — and yet 
 the reason is plain. All the aspirations of such 
 idealists have been regarded as criminal by the class 
 for which Miss Somerville and her cousin speak — 
 criminal and menacing to those who, holding the 
 power, arrogated to themselves a monopoly of loyalty. 
 They have always conceived of Pearse and his like as 
 thirsting for their blood. Miss Edgeworth, in a letter 
 printed for the first time in Irish Memories, writes : — 
 ** I fear our throats will be cut by order of O'Connell 
 and Co. very soon." We know enough to-day about 
 O'Connell to realise how far this estimate lay from the 
 truth of things ; yet Miss Somerville herself talks about 
 ** Parnell and his wolf-pack." Justin McCarthy, John 
 Redmond, Willie Redmond — these were some of the 
 wolves who presumably wanted to tear Miss Somer- 
 ville's kindred to pieces. That is where the change 
 must come; there must be among the gentry some 
 generous understanding of Nationalist leaders before 
 the grave has closed over them. Anyone can see 
 what is bad in Sinn Fein, but no one can fight that 
 evil effectively, no one can convert to better uses the 
 
118 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 ill-guided force which Sinn Fein represents, until he 
 understands what is best in it. Sinn Fein has largely 
 replaced a movement which, in its later phases, dwelt 
 perhaps too much on the material advantages which 
 it offered as the reward of support. Sinn Fein*s 
 strength has lain not in what it has offered, but in 
 what it has cisked; it has asked for devotion, and 
 Pearse certainly both gave that and received it. Such 
 was his teaching, and I do not know a better saying 
 for the Irish gentry to ponder over than the last sen- 
 tence in these essays of his : '* The highest thing any- 
 one can do is to serve.** 
 
 That temper was perhaps lacking in the Ireland of 
 yesterday which Miss Somerville so lovingly describes. 
 To command loyalty as a right, to reward it by gene- 
 rosity, by indulgence — this made part of the ideal of 
 leadership; but scarcely to be laborious either in ren- 
 dering or exacting capable work. 
 
 The old way of life was good for children, as 
 Martin Ross describes it in her sketch of her brother's 
 upbringing. 
 
 Everything in those early days of his was large and vigorous ; 
 tali trees to climb, great winds across the lake to wrestle with, 
 strenuous and capable talk upstairs and downstairs, in front of 
 furnaces of turf and logs, long drives and the big Galway welcome 
 at the end of them. 
 
 But for the grown men, it lacked one thing : effort. 
 Pleasant it was; lots of everything, lots of hunting, 
 lots of game on the moors and bogs, lots of fish in lake 
 and river, lots of beef and mutton on the farm, lots of 
 logs and turf, lots of space — above all, lots of time, 
 and always the spirit for a spree that made everyone 
 ** prefer good fun to a punctual dinner.** There was 
 
YESTERDAY IN IRELAND 119 
 
 only one deficiency : that way of life was apt to be 
 short of cash. It was, in short, a life that could not 
 pay its way. The ** big Galway welcome " is just 
 as big with a sounder economic system, that rests 
 solidly on men's own work. Anyone who knows 
 Western Ireland can tell you that the quality of work 
 is better on the land where men are their own masters 
 than it was in the old days. Yet even there we are not 
 out of the old vicious circle of under-pay and under- 
 work ; and in the industrial life we are fully entangled 
 in it. But here also the revolutionary as schoolmaster 
 has appeared. To my thinking the most momentous 
 apparition in Ireland of our times is that of Mr. Ford, 
 who is paying American wage rates for labour in Cork, 
 and calculating, not to get value for his money at once, 
 but to teach labour to be worth it. According to his 
 gospel, as it was expounded to me, you will not get 
 efficiency by offering to pay the wages of efficiency 
 when labour becomes efficient : you must first provide 
 the conditions of efficiency and then teach, just as in 
 the army your first care is to get a recruit fit and your 
 second to make him thorough in his ground work. 
 That is the practical recognition of what yesterday in 
 Ireland failed to recognise. 
 
 Nor does this ideal of strenuous and capable work 
 exclude either the strenuous and capable talk of Martin 
 Ross's Galway household or anything else that was 
 excellent in the old way. Certainly the most labo- 
 rious and the most prosperous peasant household that 
 I have ever known (and for many months I was part 
 of it) was the most thoroughly and traditionally Irish, 
 except that it was removed by one generation from 
 Gaelic speech. But the whole cast of mind was 
 
120 IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE 
 
 Gaelic, remote as the poles from that ** newer Ire- 
 land " which is in revolt against all tradition of autho- 
 rity — and, if they only knew it, against all Irish tradi- 
 tion. Miss Somerville thinks, as a page in her book 
 shows, that the newer Ireland has lost the endearing 
 courtesy which is imposed by the genius of the Gaelic 
 tongue, and is for that matter to be found in every 
 line of Pearse's essays. We can educate back to that 
 without any detriment; we can be as efficient and as 
 courteous as the Japanese. Another thing is gone. 
 Ireland of yesterday, even in its poverty, was a merry 
 country; to-day, even in its prosperity, it is full of 
 bitter, mirthless rancour and hate. It will be a great 
 thing if we can help to preserve for Ireland the exqui- 
 site benediction which a beggar woman in Skibbereen 
 laid upon Martin Ross : ** Sure, ye*re always laugh- 
 ing ! That ye may laugh in the sight of the glory of 
 Heaven." 
 
 1918. 
 

 Date Due 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 i^V 
 
 
 
 
 ,.^;- :■■■ 
 
 
 
 
 Jill 6'3B 
 
 
 
 
 JUL25'3G 
 
 
 
 
 1 1 r, \ 1 O C 1 C 
 
 
 
 
 • FtB?ir(*f 
 
 
 
 
 Mnp ^'/,n 
 
 
 
 
 .iPS I'/^O 
 
 n-)f 
 
 
 
 ju120'40 
 
 
 
 
 - .. . — 1 
 
 ' i 
 
 
 
 ' LioKi;,-,.- 
 
 i c:s U 
 
 
 i 
 
 Hiin.^/. M,n 
 
 ^, o Ov 
 
 
 
 
 tp^A 
 
 
 
 nr- 
 
 
 
 
 Ui 1 
 
 low 
 
 
 
 MAR 2 
 
 fi 2002 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 f) 
 
 
 
 
BOSTON COLLEGE 
 
 3 9031 01213820 2 
 
 42607 
 
 ^fe^is^f^f^i'^^t^^.'v^^^r^^ai*^^ 
 
 BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS 
 
 CHESTNUT HILL. MASS. 
 
 Books may be kept for two weeks and may 
 be renewed for the same period, unless re- 
 served. 
 
 Two cents a day is charged for each book 
 kept overtime. 
 
 If you cannot find what you want, ask the 
 L/ibrarian who will be glad to help you. 
 
 The borrower is responsible for books drawn 
 on his card and for all fines accruing on the 
 same.