Here was the effort of the true impressionist to create an effect regardless of the means.
"Jerry was a grand man. When he'd be idle itself he'd be busy!"
Had the author of this commendation merely said that Jerry's industry was unceasing, he would have been unassailable as to diction, but he would have left his audience cold. It is a melancholy fact that the English mind contrives to miss the artist's intention, and fastens unalterably on the obvious contradiction of terms.
As in converse, so, and with deeper disaster, is it in literature. There is scarcely a week in the life of the English comic papers that is guiltless of some heavy-handed caricature of Irish humour, daubed with false idiom and preposterous spelling, secure in its consciousness of being conventional. It is better to accuse a man of having broken a commandment than to tell him that his sense of humour appears to you defective, so, leaving that branch of the subject open, I will only mention that there are alive many excellent people who will never, on this side of the grave, be convinced that the Irish peasant does not say "indade" for "indeed," "belave" for "believe," or "swape" for "sweep." Inborn and ingrained knowledge of such points is essential; if, among many anomalies, a rule can be found, it seems to be that in an Irish brogue the diphthong "ea" changes to "a," as in "say" for "sea," while the double e remains untampered with; thus you might hear a person say "I was very wake last week."
Writers of fiction have done much that is painful in dealing with Irish people. Thackeray's Captain Costigan spoke like a stage edition of a Dublin car-driver, which is not what one would expect in a gentleman who, according to his own account, "bore his Majesty's Commission in the foighting Hundtherd and Third," and his introduction of Arthur Pendennis as "a person of refoined moind, emiable manners, and a sinsare lover of poethry" is not convincing or even very amusing. It is strange that the error of making Irish ladies and gentlemen talk like their servants should to this hour have a fascination for novelists. It is not so very long since that, in a magazine, I read of a high-born Irish Captain of Hussars, who, in a moment of emotion, exclaimed: "Howly Mither av Hiven!"
Dealing with present day writers is treading on delicate ground, and it is with diffidence that one arraigns one of the most enthralling of living story-tellers. Few of his works have been more popular than "Soldiers Three," yet to me and others of my country, it is the narratives of Private Mulvany that give least pleasure. "Gurl" for girl, "Thimber" for timber, and "Quane" for Queen, are conventions that have unfortunately proved irresistible; they are taken from a random page or two, and there is no page free of such.
But, after all, right or wrong, pronunciation and spelling are small things in the presentment of any dialect. The vitalising power is in the rhythm of the sentence, the turn of phrase, the knowledge of idiom, and of, beyond all, the attitude of mind. A laborious system of spelling exasperates the reader, jades the eye, and fails to convince the ear. If, in illustration, I again quote Mr. Kipling, it is because of the conspicuousness of his figure in literature; he can afford to occupy the position of target, indifferent alike to miss or bull's-eye.
Stripped of its curious and stifling superfluities of spelling, a sentence of Mulvaney's runs thus:
"Oh, boys, they were more lovely than the like of any loveliness in heaven; ay, their little bare feet were better than the white hands of a Lord's lady, and their mouths were like puckered roses, and their eyes were bigger and darker than the eyes of any living women I've seen."
