Romantic Ireland; volume 1/2

by M. F. Mansfield; Blanche McManus

Therein lies the charm of association which surrounds the very shores and rocks and rills of Ireland.

Here are a few brief lines from McCarthy which express it far more succinctly and with more feeling than it would perhaps be possible for any other living historian to write, be he Irishman or not:

“Every stream, well, and cavern, every indentation of the seashore, every valley and mountain peak, has its own stories and memories of beings who did not belong to this earth. A distinguished Englishman once said that whereas in the inland counties of England he had found many a peasant who neither knew the name of the river within sight of his cottage, nor troubled himself about its early history, he never met with an Irish peasant who was not ready to give him a whole string of legends and stories about the stream which flowed under his eyes every day.”

An American writer, Horatio Krans, has recently attempted to dissect the motives of the Irish novelist of the first half of the nineteenth century. He has put his finger upon one notably weak spot in the earlier novels,—the delineation of female character. He claims particularly (though the Irish novelist is not alone in this sinning) that the heroines, with a few exceptions,—Lady Geraldine in Miss Edgeworth’s “Ennui” and Baby Blake in “Charles O’Malley,”—are hopelessly conventional in speech, in sentiment, and in manner; all of which is undeniably true.

The Irish novelists of the time divided their product into two distinct classes, “the novels of the gentry” and “the novels of the peasantry,” and there is, as a fact, much in favour of the heroine of the peasantry class.

The names of the novelists of that time most generally known, and most readily recalled, are unquestionably, first of all, Goldsmith, then perhaps Miss Edgeworth, Charles Lever, Maxwell, and Samuel Lover. Among themselves they have apportioned the various types which we of a later generation have come to recognize as of the soil. The most notable, and one common to all, is that strange product of Irish life (to which, it may be observed, Oliver Goldsmith called attention), the “squireen,” who was without an idea beyond a dog, a gun, and a horse.

It is a commonplace to remark here that many of the gentry of that time lived in barbaric and slovenly splendour, led devil-may-care lives, hunted during the day, and drank, played cards, and quarrelled at night.

But new forces are certainly bestirring themselves in the Ireland of to-day, and a new standard of life, a wider knowledge, and a finer culture is broadcast. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of Ireland’s imaginative literature, in prose as well as verse.

Of the actual life of the times, the present-day Irish novelist draws not with so firm a hand as his predecessor, but he makes a more pleasing picture.

The duel, as an institution, is extinct to-day, but much the same mode of life as that of a former day is depicted in the stories of Miss Sommerville and Miss Martin Ross. In these modern novels are found the horse-dealing, hunt-loving gentry; but the peasants appear only as retainers and as necessary adjuncts to the occupations of their betters. The Ireland of these writers, then, is a land of happy-go-lucky and thriftless enjoyment and cheerful impecuniosity, with an occasional glimpse of tragedy. Miss Katherine Tynan, too, deals with the same class and succeeds in depicting Irish landscape, in its quick-changing colours, its gloom and sunshine strangely mingled, mountain and bog, dew and rain, in a manner which suggests that her books are a genuine distillation of Ireland itself.