Jane Barlow
(18-)
he general reader has yet to learn the most private and sacred events of Miss Jane Barlow's life, now known only to herself and friends. She is the daughter of Dr. Barlow of Trinity College, and lives in the seclusion of a collage at Raheny, a hamlet near Dublin. Her family has been in Ireland for generations, and she comes of German and Norman stock. As some one has said, the knowledge and skill displayed in depicting Irish peasant life, which her books show, are hers not through Celtic blood and affinities, but by a sympathetic genius and inspiration.
Jane Barlow.
The publication of her writings in book form was preceded by the appearance of some poems and stories in the magazines, the Dublin University Review of 1885 containing 'Walled Out; or, Eschatology in a Bog.' 'Irish Idyls' (1892), and 'Bogland Studies' (of the same year), show the same pitiful, sombre pictures of Irish peasant life about the sodden-roofed mud hut and "pitaties" boiling, which only a genial, impulsive, generous, light-hearted, half-Greek and half-philosophic people could make endurable to the reader or attractive to the writer. The innate sweetness of the Irish character, which the author brings out with fine touches, makes it worth portrayal. "It is safe to say," writes a critic, "that the philanthropist or the political student interested in the eternal Irish problem will learn more from Miss Barlow's twin volumes than from a dozen Royal Commissions and a hundred Blue Books." Her sympathy constantly crops out, as, for instance, in the mirthful tale of 'Jerry Dunne's Basket,' where--
"Andy Joyce had an ill-advised predilection for seeing things which he called 'dacint and proper' about him, and he built some highly superior sheds on the lawn, to the bettering, no doubt, of his cattle's condition. The abrupt raising of his rent by fifty per cent, was a broad hint which most men would have taken; and it did keep Andy ruefully quiet for a season or two. Then, however, having again saved up a trifle, he could not resist the temptation to drain the swampy corner of the farthest river-field, which was as kind a bit of land as you could wish, only for the water lying on it, and in which he afterward raised himself a remarkably fine crop of white oats. The sight of them 'done his heart good,' he said, exultantly, nothing recking that it was the last touch of farmer's pride he would ever feel. Yet on the next quarter-day the Joyces received notice to quit, and their landlord determined to keep the vacated holding in his own hands; those new sheds were just the thing for his young stock. Andy, in fact, had done his best to improve himself off the face of the earth."
The long story which Miss Barlow has published, 'Kerrigan's Quality' (1894), is told with her distinguishing charm, but the book has not the close-knit force of the 'Idyls.' Miss Barlow herself prefers the 'Bogland Studies,' because, she says, they are "a sort of poetry." "I had set my heart too long upon being a poet ever to give up the idea quite contentedly; 'the old hope is hardest to be lost.' A real poet I can never be, as I have, I fear, nothing of the lyrical faculty; and a poet without that is worse than a bird without wings, so, like Mrs. Browning's Nazianzen, I am doomed to look 'at the lyre hung out of reach.'"