Part 3

The joint authors of the "R.M." have paid forfeit for achieving popularity by being expected to repeat their first resounding success. Happily the pressure of popular demand has not impaired the artistic excellence of their work, though we cannot help thinking that if they had been left to themselves they might have given us at least one other novel on the lines of "The Real Charlotte." Their later work, again, has been subjected to the ordeal, we do not say of conscious imitation, but of comparison with books which would probably have never been written or would have been written on another plan, but for the success of the "R.M." To regard this rivalry as serious would be, in the opinion of the present writer, an abnegation of the critical faculty. But we have not yet done with Irish women humorists. Miss Eleanor Alexander, the daughter of the Poet Archbishop of Armagh and his poet wife has given us in her "Lady Anne's Walk," a volume of a _genre_ as hard to define as it has been easy to welcome, at times delicately allusive, now daringly funny--an interblending of tender reminiscences and lively fancy, reminding us perhaps most of old Irish music itself with its sweet, strange and sudden changes of mood. Humorous contrasts of the kind will be found in the chapter entitled "Old Tummus and the Battle of Scarva," printed in these pages.

Another woman contestant for humorous literary honours was the late Miss Charlotte O'Conor Eccles, represented in this volume by the moving story of "King William." Her "Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore" and "A Matrimonial Lottery" achieved popularity by their droll situations and exuberant fun, but her "Aliens of the West" contained work of much finer quality. She lets us behind the shutters of Irish country shop life in a most convincing manner, and the characters drawn from her Toomevara are as true to type as those of Miss Barlow. The disillusionment of Molly Devine "The Voteen," with her commonplace, not to say vulgar surroundings, on her return from the convent school with its superior refinements, her refusal to marry so-called eligible, but to her, repulsive suitors, encouraged by her mother and stepfather and her final resolve to become a nun in order to escape further persecution of the kind, is told with convincing poignancy. A variant of this theme is treated with even more power and pathos in "Tom Connolly's Daughter," a story which we should like to see reprinted in separate form as it sets one thinking furiously, and its general circulation might do much to correct the love and marriage relations between young people in provincial Ireland.

And yet a final name has to be added to the long roll of Irishwomen who have won distinction as writers of fiction, beginning with Miss Edgeworth whose Irish writings will receive separate treatment in a volume in "Every Irishman's Library" at the hands of Mr. Malcolm Cotter Seton. Championed by Canon Hannay himself, who furnishes a genial, whimsical, provocative introduction to her "The Folk of Furry Farm," Miss Purdon there describes what, from the point of view of romance, is a new part of Ireland, for West Leinster is a land more familiar to fox-hunters than to poets. Miss Purdon has plenty of independence, but it is not the frigid impartiality of the student who contemplates the vagaries and sufferings of human nature like a connoisseur or collector. She shows her detachment by giving us a faithful picture of Irish peasant society without ever once breathing a syllable of politics, or remotely alluding to the equipment and machinery of modern life. The _dramatis personae_ are all simple folk, most of them poor; the entire action passes within a radius of a few miles from a country village; and only on one occasion, and at second hand do we catch so much as a glimpse of "the quality." Throughout, Miss Purdon relies on the turn of the phrase to give the spirit of the dialect, and uses only a minimum of phonetic spelling.

That is the true and artistic method. But Miss Purdon is much more than a collector or coiner of picturesque and humorous phrases. She has a keen eye for character, a genuine gift of description and a vein of pure and unaffected sentiment; indeed, her whole volume is strangely compounded of mirth and melancholy, though the dominant impression left by its perusal is one of confidence in the essential kindliness of Irish nature, and the goodness and gentleness of Irish women.

But so far, the only formidable competitor Miss Martin and Miss Somerville have encountered is the genial writer who chooses to veil his identity under the freakish pseudonym of "George A. Birmingham." Canon Hannay--for there can be no longer any breach of literary etiquette in alluding to him by his real name--had already made his mark as a serious or semi-serious observer of the conflicting tendencies, social and political, of the Ireland of to-day before he diverged into the paths of fantastic and frivolous comedy. "The Seething Pot," "Hyacinth," and "Benedict Kavanagh" are extremely suggestive and dispassionate studies of various aspects of the Irish temperament, but it is enough for our present purpose to note the consequences of a request addressed to Canon Hannay by two young ladies somewhere about the year 1907 that he would "write a story about treasure buried on an island." The fact is recorded in the dedication of "Spanish Gold," his response to the appeal, and the first of that series of jocund extravaganzas which have earned for him the gratitude of all who regard amusement as the prime object of fiction.

The contrast between his methods and those of the joint authors discussed above is apparent at every turn. He maintains the impartiality which marked his serious novels in his treatment of all classes of the community, but it is the impartiality not of a detached and self-effacing observer, but of a genial satirist. His knowledge of the Ireland that he knows is intimate and precise, and is shown by a multiplicity of illuminating details and an effective use of local colour. But the co-operation of non-Irish characters is far more essential to the development of his plots than in the case of the novels of Miss Somerville and Miss Martin. The mainspring of their stories is Irish right through. Canon Hannay depends on a situation which might have occurred just as well in England or America, while employing the conditions of Irish life to give it a characteristic twist or series of twists. Even his most notable creation, the Reverend Joseph John Meldon, is too restlessly energetic to be an altogether typical Irishman, to say nothing of his unusual attitude in politics: "Nothing on earth would induce me to mix myself up with any party." An Irishman of immense mental activity, living in Ireland, and yet wholly unpolitical is something of a freak. Again, while the tone of his books is admirably clean and wholesome, and while his frankly avowed distaste for the squalors of the problem novel will meet with general sympathy, there is no denying that his treatment of the "love interest" is for the most part perfunctory or even farcical. Again, in regard to style, he differs widely from the authors of the "R.M." Their note is a vivid conciseness; his the easy charm of a flowing pen, always unaffected, often picturesque and even eloquent, never offending, but seldom practising the art of omission.

But it is ungrateful to subject to necessarily damaging comparisons an author to whom we owe the swift passage of so many pleasant hours. It might be hard to find the exact counterpart of "J.J." in the flesh, but he is none the less an unforgettable person, this athletic, exuberant, unkempt curate, unscrupulous but not unprincipled, who lied fluently, not for any mean purpose, but for the joy of mystification, or in order to carry out his plans, or justify his arguments. His strange friendship with Major Kent, a retired English officer, a natty martinet, presents no difficulties on the principle of extremes meeting, and thus from the start we are presented with the spectacle of the reluctant but helpless Major, hypnotised by the persuasive tongue of the curate, and dragged at his heels into all sorts of grotesque and humiliating adventures, and all for the sake of a quiet life. For "J.J.'s" methods, based, according to his own account, on careful observation and a proper use of the scientific imagination, involve the assumption by his reluctant confederate of a succession of entirely imaginary roles.

But if "J.J." was a trying ally, he was a still more perplexing antagonist, one of his favourite methods of "scoring off" an opponent being to represent him to be something other than he really was to third persons. When the process brings the curate and the Major into abrupt conflict with two disreputable adventurers, he defends resort to extreme methods on grounds of high morality. Burglary, theft and abduction become the simple duty of every well-disposed person when viewed as a necessary means of preventing selfish, depraved and fundamentally immoral people from acquiring wealth which the well-disposed might otherwise secure.

"J.J.'s" crowning achievement is his conquest of Mr. Willoughby, the Chief Secretary, by a masterly vindication of his conduct on the lines of Pragmatism: "a statement isn't a lie if it proves itself in actual practice to be useful--it's true." "J.J." only once meets his match--in Father Mulcrone, the parish priest of Inishmore, who sums up the philosophy of government in his criticism of Mr. Willoughby's successor: "A fellow that starts off by thinking himself clever enough to know what's true and what isn't will do no good for Ireland. A simple-hearted innocent kind of man has a better chance."

Needless to say, the rival treasure-hunters, both of them rogues, are bested at all points by the two padres, while poetic justice is satisfied by the fact that the treasure falls into the adhesive hands of the poor islanders, and "J.J.'s" general integrity is fully re-established in the epilogue, where, transplanted to an English colliery village, he devotes his energies to the conversion of agnostics, blasphemers and wife-beaters.

The extravagance of the plot is redeemed by the realism of the details; by acute sidelights on the tortuous workings of the native mind, with its strange blending of shrewdness and innocence; by faithful reproductions of the talk of those "qui amant omnia dubitantius loqui" and habitually say "it might" instead of "yes." And there are delightful digressions on the subject of relief works, hits at the Irish-speaking movement, pungent classifications of the visitors to the wild West of Ireland, and now, and again, in the rare moments when the author chooses to be serious, passages marked by fine insight and sympathy. Such is the picture of Thomas O'Flaherty Pat, the patriarch of the treasure island:

"An elderly man and five out of the nine children resident on the island stood on the end of the pier when Meldon and the Major landed. The man was clad in a very dirty white flannel jacket and a pair of yellowish flannel trousers, which hung in a tattered fringe round his naked feet and ankles. He had a long white beard and grey hair, long as a woman's, drawn straight back from his forehead. The hair and beard were both unkempt and matted. But the man held himself erect and looked straight at the strangers through great dark eyes. His hands, though battered and scarred with toil were long and shapely. His face had a look of dignity, of a certain calm and satisfied superiority. Men of this kind are to be met with here and there among the Connacht peasantry. They are in reality children of a vanishing race, of a lost civilisation, a bygone culture. They watch the encroachments of another race and new ideas with a sort of sorrowful contempt. It is as if understanding and despising what they see around them, they do not consider it worth while to try to explain themselves; as if, possessing a wisdom of their own, an aesthetic joy of which the modern world knows nothing, they are content to let both die with them rather than attempt to teach them to men of a wholly different outlook upon life."

The element of extravaganza is more strongly marked in the plot of "The Search Party," which deals with the kidnapping of a number of innocent people by an anti-militant anarchist who has set up a factory of explosives in the neighbourhood of Ballymoy. "J.J." does not appear _in propria persona_, but most of his traits are to be found in Dr. O'Grady, an intelligent but happy-go-lucky young doctor. The most attractive person in the story, however, is Lord Manton, a genially cynical peer with highly original views on local government and the advantages of unpopularity. Thus, when he did not want Patsy Devlin, the drunken smith, to be elected inspector of sheep-dipping, he strongly supported his candidature for the following reasons:--

"There's a lot of stupid talk nowadays about the landlords having lost all their power in the country. It's not a bit true. They have plenty of power, more than they ever had, if they only knew how to use it. All I have to do if I want a particular man not to be appointed to anything is to write a strong letter in his favour to the Board of Guardians or the County Council, or whatever body is doing the particular job that happens to be on hand at the time. The League comes down on my man at once, and he hasn't the ghost of a chance."

Excellent, too, is the digression on the comparative commonness of earls in Ireland, where untitled people tend to disappear while earls survive, though they are regarded much as ordinary people. Canon Hannay makes great play as usual with the humours of Irish officialdom, and his _obiter dicta_ on the mental outlook of police officers are shrewd as well as entertaining. District-Inspector Goddard had undoubted social gifts, but he was an inefficient officer, being handicapped by indolence and a great sense of humour. There is something attractive, again, about Miss Blow, the handsome, resolute, prosaic young Englishwoman whose heroic efforts to trace her vanished lover are baffled at every turn. Everybody in Ballymoy told her lies, with the result that they seemed to her heartless and cruel when in reality they wished to spare her feelings. Others of the _dramatis personae_ verge on caricature, but the story has many exhilarating moments.

Exhilarating, too, is "The Major's Niece," which is founded on an extremely improbable _imbroglio_. So precise and business-like a man as Major Kent was not likely to make a mistake of seven or eight years in the age of a visitor especially when the visitor happened to be his own sister's child. However, the initial improbability may be readily condoned in view of the entertaining sequel. "J.J." reappears in his best form, Marjorie is a most engaging tomboy, and the fun never flags for an instant. But much as we love "J.J.," we reluctantly recognise in "The Simpkins Plot" that you can have too much of a good thing, and that a man who would be a nuisance as a neighbour in real life is in danger of becoming a bore in a novel. At the same time the digressions and irrelevancies are as good as ever. It is pleasant to be reminded of such facts as that wedding cake is invariably eaten by the Irish post office officials, or to listen to Doctor O'Donoghue on the nutrition of infants:

"You can rear a child, whether it has the whooping cough or not, on pretty near anything, so long as you give it enough of whatever it is you do give it."

Canon Hannay excels in the conduct of an absurd or paradoxical proposition, but he needs a word of friendly caution against undue reliance on the mechanism of the practical joke. Perhaps his English cure has demoralized "J.J.," but we certainly prefer him as he was in Inishgowlan, convinced by practical experience that he would rather do any mortal thing than try to mind a baby and make butter at the same time.

Of Canon Hannay's later novels, two demand special attention and for widely different reasons. In "The Red Hand of Ulster," reverting to politics--politics, moreover, of the most explosive kind--he achieved the well-nigh impossible in at once doing full justice to the dour sincerity of the Orange North, and yet conciliating Nationalist susceptibilities. In "The Inviolable Sanctuary," he has shown that a first-rate public-school athlete, whose skill in pastime is confined to ball games cuts a sorry figure alongside of a chit of a girl who can handle a boat. This salutary if humiliating truth is enforced not from any desire to further Feminist principles--Canon Hannay's attitude towards women betrays no belief in the equality of the sexes--but because he cannot be bothered with the sentimentality of conventional love-making. It may be on this account that he more than once assigns a leading role to an ingenuous young Amazon into whose ken the planet of love will not swim for another four or five years.

During the last thirty years the alleged decadence of Irish humour has been a frequent theme of pessimistic critics. Various causes have been invoked to account for the phenomenon, which, when dispassionately considered, amounted to this, that the rollicking novel of incident and adventure had died with Lever. So, for the matter of that, had novels of the "Frank Fairleigh" type, with their authors. The ascendancy of Parnell and the regime of the Land League did not make for gaiety, yet even these influences were powerless to eradicate the inherent absurdities of Irish life, and the authors of the "R.M." entered on a career which has been a triumphal disproval of this allegation as far back as 1889. At their best they have interpreted normal Irishmen and Irishwomen, gentle and simple, with unsurpassed fidelity and sympathy. But to award them the supremacy in this _genre_ both as realists and as writers does not detract from the success won in a different sphere by Canon Hannay. His goal is less ambitious and aim is less unfaltering, but as an improvisor of whimsical situations and an ironic commentator on the actualities of Irish life he has invented a new form of literary entertainment which has the double merit of being at once diverting and instructive.

But as we believe this volume will sufficiently show, though these three novelists have so far transcended the achievements of contemporary writers on Irish life, they are being followed at no long distance by younger writers, for whom they have helped to find a public and in whose more mature achievements they may have to acknowledge a serious literary rivalry. We have dealt with the women writers to be found in this new group. It remains for us to criticise the work of the men who belong to it.

Mr. John Stevenson, otherwise Pat Carty, whose Rhymes have been so charmingly set to music by Sir Charles Stanford, and so delightfully sung by Mr. Plunket-Greene, possesses a whimsical gift, both in prose and verse, which gives fresh evidence of the awakening of an Ulster school of humorists. His "Boy in the Country" is descriptive of a child's companionship in the country with farmers and their wives and servants, his falling under the spell of a beautiful lady whose romance he assists like a true young cavalier, and his association with that formidable open-air imp, Jim, a little dare-devil poacher and hard swearer, who sailed his boats with strips cut from his shirt tails and could give a canting minister as good as he got, instead of cowering under his preachment. The manners and customs of the farming class in the "Nine Glens of Antrim" could not be more simply and humorously told, and when the author divagates into such sketches as "The Wise Woman and the Wise Man," and breaks into occasional verse faithfully descriptive of his natural surroundings, he is equally delightful.

Of course, he is not as old a craftsman as Mr. Shan Bullock, whose dry drollery has given the readers of his novels and stories so much pleasure, and whose serious purpose and close observation of Northern Irish character are so well recognised by all serious students of Irish life. He is represented in the volume by "The Wee Tea-Table," a life-like sketch taken from his "Irish Pastorals."

Mr. Frank Mathew, whose first literary work was his biography of his illustrious grand-uncle Father Mathew, has also written some admirable stories of Irish life, which appeared in "The Idler," and have been collected in a volume called "At the Rising of the Moon." "The Last Race," by which he is represented in this volume, will give our readers a good taste of his graphic quality.

Mr. Padric Colum will speak for himself on Irish fiction in his introduction to an edition of Gerald Griffin's "Collegians," which is to form part of this series of Irish volumes. His finely distinctive literary style and intimate knowledge of Irish peasant life so clearly exhibited in his poems, plays and stories, is shown in these pages by that remarkable sketch of "Maelshaughlinn at the Fair," written with the elemental abandon of Synge himself.

Finally, in absolute contrast with Mr. Colum's idealistic work, comes the humorous realism of Lynn Doyle's pictures of the Ulster Peasantry. But their efforts to over-reach one another, their love of poaching, and their marriage operations, afford the author of "Ballygullion" a congenial field for the display of his observation, his high spirits, and his genuine sense of the ridiculous. His comedy of "The Ballygullion Creamery Society" which fitly concludes this volume, is good, hearty, wholesome fun, and we only trust, in Ireland's best interests, that its official stamp, a wreath of shamrocks and orange lilies--is not merely an unlikely if amiable suggestion, but is yet to have its counterpart in reality.

Preface.

The fiction of which this volume consists is in part fabulous in character, in part descriptive of actual Irish life upon its lighter side.

The Heroic stories and Folk-tales are, on chronological grounds, printed early in the book and are then followed by extracts from the writings of the Irish novelists of the first half and third quarter of the 19th Century--Maginn, Lever, Lover, and LeFanu.

Then come the writers who have made their mark in recent times, such as Miss Jane Barlow, the authors of "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.," and Canon Hannay, and lastly those of a new school amongst whom may be named Mr. Padraic Colum, "Lynn Doyle," and Miss K. Purdon.

This may be said to be the general order of the contents of "Humours of Irish Life." But where artistic propriety, suggesting contrasts of local colour and changes of subject, has called for it, a strict chronological sequence has been departed from; yet enough of it remains to enable the critic to observe what we believe to be a change for the better, both in the taste and technique of these Irish stories and sketches, as time has gone by.