Chapter 1

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IRISH BOOKS AND IRISH PEOPLE

By

STEPHEN GWYNN.

DUBLIN The Talbot Press Ltd. 89 Talbot Street

LONDON T. Fisher Unwin Ltd. 1 Adelphi Terrace

CONTENTS

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 44

II.--THE LIFE OF A SONG 51

IRISH EDUCATION AND IRISH CHARACTER 65

THE IRISH GENTRY 83

YESTERDAY IN IRELAND 97

INTRODUCTION.

My publisher must take at least some of the responsibility 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, take no account of facts which to-day must be present to the mind of every Irish reader, and so are, perhaps significantly, out of date.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 criticism--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 interpreted an Irish laughter which had no bitterness in it.

But the strong intellectual movement which has swept over Ireland has been both embittering and embittered. 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 soil--a change which has literally 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 literary movement which has had its most concrete expression in the Irish theatre, and its most potent inspiration in the personality 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 language as a living speech, the instrument of a nation's intercourse, it has failed of its purpose; but it has revived and rendered potent the principle of separation. Nationalist, it will have nothing to do with a nationality 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 corollary to this view is the necessity for complete political separation 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 action in pursuit of a less tribal ideal. Thousands 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 auspices 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 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 while 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 it may be said that their writings are almost as unmistakably 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 undergoing 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 predicament. The schoolmaster has been abroad, and where you have education without liberty there is bound to be trouble. The only cure is, not to suppress education, but to give the responsibility 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 completes the companion essay, called _The Life of a Song_.

My acknowledgments are due to the various publications in which they have all, except the last, previously appeared.

Dublin , _March_, 1919.

NOVELS OF IRISH LIFE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

"What Ireland wants," said an old gentleman 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, and 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 of National Biography_. That may be patriotic sentiment, but it is not criticism.

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 nineteenth 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 consulted. 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 sympathy, 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 Rackrent_ is simply a pleasant satire upon the illiterate and improvident gentry who have always been too common in her country. In this book she holds no brief; she never stops to preach; her moral is implied, 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 to the management, and saved the estate. _Castle Rackrent_ is, therefore, like Galt's _Annals of 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 dispossessed 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 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 downstairs. 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 it 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 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 we had nothing but misfortunes with them, always breaking and running 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 something 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, who 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 Condy came into an estate which, between Sir Murtagh's law-suits and Sir Kit's gaming, was considerably 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, forgetting 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 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 spelling 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 amiable gentleman; and so my lady goes home to her own people. There you have Miss Edgeworth at her very best; and, indeed, _Castle Rackrent_ 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. Edgeworth 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 fidelity of Miss Edgeworth's portraits." What Maria 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 _Ormond_, 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.

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 Emancipation." "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 throughout his schooling for the sake of his vocation, and for the blessing sure to descend upon those who aided a 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 hospitality; 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 landlord and tenant till we are put wholly out of tune for the beautiful scene of Jimmy's return home in his priestly dress.