Irish Books and Irish People

by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

There are brilliant exceptions in the century that lies between Sheridan and Mr. Bernard Shaw, between Maria Edgeworth 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 with culpable folly allowed themselves 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 dispassionately must find humour of a very different kind from that of Handy Andy or Harry Lorrequer either, to commend without reserve, as a thing that may be put forward to rank with what is best in other literatures.

Taking Sheridan and Miss Edgeworth as marking the point of departure, it becomes obvious that one is an end, the other at a beginning. Sheridan belongs body and soul to the eighteenth century; Miss Edgeworth, 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 circumstances in a special place. Mr. Yeats, who, like all poets, is a most suggestive and a most misleading critic, has declared that modern 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 Irish woman 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 Edgeworth 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 she 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 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 disappointment—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 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 arrangement. "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 meanings, 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 we have to show; and his faults, almost 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 vernacular song and ballad; Carleton had to make his own, and the genius for form was 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 Midnight Mass he rings the changes interminably upon the old business of the wonderful 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 sermon where the priest so artfully wheedles and coaxes his congregation into generosity towards the boy who is going out on the world, 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 mowers 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 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 purpose 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 dependence. There is nothing so just as true humour, for by the law of its being it sees inevitably two sides; and this strange compound of vices and virtues, so rich in all the softer 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 spiritual, which happily have largely ceased to exist, yet operate indefinitely as causes among us, producing eternal though eternally modifiable effects.

But, for the things in human nature that are neither of yesterday, to-day, nor to-morrow, but unchangeable, he has the humorist's true touch. When the poor scholar is departing, and has actually torn himself away from home, his mother 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 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 English was still a strange tongue on his lips and in the ears of those he lived among; and his work comes down distracted between the two languages, imperfect 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 demanded something witty, he would flash 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 equivalent 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 skipping. 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 Continent, a pork-butcher making his first experience of Italy, hit off 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 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 concentration of thought.