Irish Books and Irish People

by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

There is always a temptation to hold a brief for Lever, because he has been most unjustly censured by Irishmen, even in so august and impartial a court as the Dictionary of National Biography, as if he had traduced his countrymen. Did Thackeray, then, malign the English? The only charge that may fairly be brought against him is the one that cannot be rebutted—the charge of superficiality and of scamped work, of a humour that only plays over the surface of things—a humour which sees only the comic side that anybody might see. And because I cannot defend him, I say no more. Lever is certainly not a great humorist, but he is delightful company.

One may mention in passing the excursions into broad comedy of another brilliant Irishman—Le Fanu's short stories in the Purcell Papers, such as the Quare Gander, or Billy Molowney's Taste of Love and Glory. These are good examples of a particular literary type—the humorous anecdote—in which Irish humour has always been fertile, and of which the ne plus ultra is Sir Samuel Ferguson's magnificent squib in Blackwood, Father Tom and the Pope. Everybody knows the merits of that story, its inexhaustible fertility of comparison, its dialectic ingenuity, its jovialty, its drollery, its Rabelaisian laughter. But, after all, the highest type of humour is humour applying itself to the facts of life, and this is burlesque humour squandering itself in riot upon a delectable fiction. Humour is a great deal more than a plaything; it is a force, a weapon—at once sword and shield. If there is to be an art of literature in Ireland that can be called national, it cannot afford to devote humour solely to the production of trifles. Father Tom is a trifle, a splendid toy; and what is more, a trifle wrought in a moment of ease by perhaps the most serious and conscientious artist that ever made a contribution to the small body of real Irish literature in the tongue that is now native to the majority of Irishmen.

Of contemporaries, with one exception, I do not propose to speak at any length, nor can I hope that my review will be complete. There is first and foremost Miss Barlow, a lady whose work is so gentle, so unassuming, that one hears little of it in the rush and flare of these strident times, but who will be heard and listened to with fresh emotion as the stream is heard when the scream and rattle of a railway train have passed away into silence. Is she a humorist? Not in the sense of provoking laughter—and yet the things that she sees and loves and dwells on would be unbearable if they were not seen through a delicate mist of mirth. The daily life of people at continual handgrips with starvation, their little points of honour, their little questions of precedence, the infinite generosity that concerns itself with the expenditure of six-pence, the odd shifts they resort to that a gift may not have the appearance of charity,—all these are set down with a tenderness of laughter that is peculiarly and distinctively Irish.

Yet, though we may find a finer quality of humour in those writers who do not seek to raise a laugh—for instance, the subtle pervasive humour in Mr. Yeats's Celtic Twilight—still there are few greater attractions than that of open healthy laughter of the contagious sort; and it would be black ingratitude not to pay tribute to the authoresses of Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.—a book that no decorous person can read with comfort in a railway carriage. These ladies have the keenest eye for the obvious humours of Irish life, they have abundance of animal spirits, and they have that knack at fluent description embroidered with a wealth of picturesque details that is shared by hundreds of peasants in Ireland, but is very rare indeed on the printed page. And, mingling with the broad farce there is a deal of excellent comedy—for instance, in the person of old Mrs. Knox of Aussolas. But there is the same point to insist on—and since these witty and delightful ladies have already the applause of all the world one insists less unwillingly—this kind of thing, admirable as it is, will not redeem Irish humour from the reproach of trifling. But in the novel, The Real Charlotte, there is humour as grim almost as Swift's—and as completely un-English; it is a humour which assuredly stirs more faculties than the simple one of laughter.

There is indeed a literature which, if not always exactly humorous, is closely allied to it—the literature of satire and invective; and in this Ireland has always been prolific. In the days of the old kings the order of bards had grown so numerous, that they comprised a third of the whole population, and they devoted themselves with such talent and zeal to the task of invective that no man could live in peace, and the country cried out against them, and there was talk of suppressing the whole order. The king spared them on condition that they would mend their manners. We have those bards still, but nowadays we call them politicians and journalists; and frankly I think we are ripe for another intervention, if only in the interests of literature. So much good talent goes to waste in bad words; and, moreover, an observance of the decencies is always salutary for style. And it seems that as the years have gone on, humour has diminished in Irish politics, while bad humour has increased; and therefore I leave alone any attempt to survey the humour of the orators, though Curran tempts one at the beginning and Mr. Healy at the close. Of purely literary satire there has been little enough, apart from its emergence in the novel; but there is one example which deserves to be recalled. I have never professed enthusiasm for Thomas Moore, but I am far indeed from agreeing with a recent critic who would claim literary rank for him rather in virtue of the Fudge Family than of the Irish Melodies. That satire does not seem to get beyond brilliancy; it is very clever, and not much more. Still, there are passages in it which cannot be read without enjoyment; and one quotation may be permitted, since it puts with perfect distinctness what it is always permissible to put—the English case against Ireland.

I'm a plain man who speak the truth.
And trust you'll think me not uncivil
When I declare that from my youth
I've wished your country at the devil.
Nor can I doubt indeed from all
I've heard of your high patriot fame,
From every word your lips let fall,
That you most truly wish the same.

It plagues one's life out; thirty years
Have I had dinning in my ears—
Ireland wants this and that and t'other;
And to this hour one nothing hears
But the same vile eternal bother.
While of those countless things she wanted,
Thank God, but little has been granted.

The list of writers of humorous verse in Ireland is a long one, but a catalogue of ephemera. Even Father Prout at this time of day is little more than a dried specimen labelled for reference, or at most preserved in vitality by the immortal Groves of Blarney. But neither that work, nor even The Night before Larry was stretched, nor Le Fanu's ballad of Shemus O'Brien, can rank altogether as literature. About the humorous song I need only say that, so far as my experience goes, there is one, and one only, which a person with no taste for music and some taste for literature can hear frequently with pleasure, and that song of course is Father O'Flynn. To recall the delightful ingenuity and the nimble wit shown by another Irishman of the same family in the Hawarden Horace, and in a lesser degree by Mr. Godley in his Musa Frivola, leads naturally to the inquiry why humour from Aristophanes to Carlyle has always preferred the side of reaction—a question that would need an essay, or a volume, all to itself.

But the central question is after all why in a race where humour is so preponderant in the racial temperament does so little of the element crystallise itself in literature. Humour ranks with the water power as one of the great undeveloped resources of the country. Something indeed has been done in the past with the river of laughter that almost every Irish person has flowing in his heart; but infinitely more might be done if these rivers were put in harness.

Yet, take away two Irish names from the field of modern comedy in the English language written during the nineteenth century, and you have uncommonly little for which literary merit can be claimed. The quality of Oscar Wilde's is scarcely disputed. There is the more reason to dwell on Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays, because they have not even in the twentieth century been fully accepted by that queer folk, the theatre-going public. But I never yet heard of anyone who saw You Never can Tell, and was not amused by it. That was a farce, no doubt, but a farce which appealed to emotions less elementary than those which are touched by the spectacle of a man sitting down by accident on his hat; it was a farce of intellectual absurdities, of grotesque situations arising out of perversities of character and opinion; a farce that you could laugh at without a loss of self-respect. But it is rather by his comedies than by his farces that Mr. Shaw should be judged. If they are not popular, it is for a very good reason: Mr. Shaw's humour is too serious. His humour is a strong solvent, and one of the many things about which this humorist is in deadly earnest is the fetish worship of tradition. To that he persists in applying—in Candida as in half a dozen other plays—the ordeal by laughter—an ordeal which every human institution is bound to face. Candida will not only make people laugh, it will make them think; and it is not easy to induce the public to think after dinner on unaccustomed lines. They will laugh when they have been used to laugh, weep when they have been used to weep; but if you ask them to laugh when they expect to weep, or vice versâ, the public will resent the proceeding. The original humorist, like every other original artist, has got slowly and laboriously to convert his public before he can convince them of his right to find tears and laughter where he can.