Not a small portion of the humour of Ireland is the unconscious variety in the half-educated local poets. Sometimes real wit struggles for adequate expression in English with ludicrous and unlooked-for results. A goodly number of the street ballads are very comic in description, phraseology, or vituperation, and “Nell Flaherty’s Drake” may be taken as a fair specimen of the latter class. Occasionally there is coarseness, usually absent from genuine Irish songs; sometimes a ghastly sort of grotesquerie, as in “The Night before Larry was Stretched.” Only a few examples of such are necessary to form an idea of the whole. Maginn’s great service in exposing the true character of the wretched rubbish often palmed off on the English public as Irish songs deserves to be noticed here. He proved most conclusively that the stuff thus styled Irish, with its unutterable refrains of the “Whack Bubbaboo” kind, was of undoubted English origin, topography, phraseology, rhymes, and everything else being utterly un-Irish. The internal evidence alone convicts their authors. No Irishman rhymes O’Reilly to bailie, for instance, and certainly he would never introduce a priest named “Father Quipes” into a song, even if driven to desperation for rhymes to “swipes.” Any compiler who gives a place in a collection of Irish songs to such trash as “Looney Mac*-twolter,” “Dennis Bulgruddery,” or any other of the rather numerous effusions of their kind, with their Gulliverian nomenclature and their burlesque of Irish manners, is an accomplice in the crime of their authors. In this connection it may be pointed out that not only in songs, but in many stories and other writings purporting to be Irish, the phraseology is anything but Irish. Irishmen do not, and never did, speak of their spiritual guardian as the praste. The Irishman never mispronounces the sound of ie, and if he says tay for tea and mate for meat he is simply conforming to the old and correct English pronunciation, as may be seen by consulting the older English poets, who always rhymed sea with day, etc. To this hour, the original sound is preserved by English people in great and break.
To leave the anonymous, the hybrid, and the spurious, it will be well to consider the continuity of the humour of Ireland. The long line of humorous writers who have appeared in our literary history has never been broken, despite many intervals of tribulation. In Anglo-Irish literature they commence practically with Farquhar, whose method of treating the follies of fine ladies and “men of honour” is anticipatory of that of the Spectator. Swift’s irony, unsurpassable as it is, is cruel to excess, and has little that is Irish about it. A contemporary and countryman, Dean Smedley, said he was “always in jest, but most so in prayer,” but that is an exaggeration, for Swift was mostly in grim earnest. The charge implies that many of his contemporaries, like several moderns, had a difficulty in satisfying themselves as to when he joked and when he did not. Smedley is also responsible for another poem directed against Swift, which was posted upon the door of St. Patrick’s, Dublin, when the great writer was appointed its Dean, and of which the following is the best stanza:—
“This place he got by wit and rhyme,
And many ways most odd,
And might a bishop be in time,
Did he believe in God.”
The impassive and matter-of-fact way in which Swift, using the deadliest of weapons, ridicule, reformed the abuses of his time, deceived a good many. He never moved a muscle, and his wit shone by contrast with his moody exterior as a lightning-flash illuminates a gloomy sky. It has that element of unexpectedness which goes far to define the nature of wit.
Real drollery in Anglo-Irish literature seems to have begun with Steele. In the case of Steele there is rarely anything to offend modern taste. His tenderness is akin to Goldsmith’s, and the natural man is clearly visible in his writings. A direct contrast is seen in Sterne, who was more malicious and sly, full of unreality and misplaced sentiment, and depending chiefly upon his constant supply of doubles entendres and the morbid tastes of his readers. Writers like Derrick and Bickerstaffe were hardly witty in the modern sense, but rather in the original literal meaning of the term. There are many wits, highly popular in their own day, who are no longer readable with any marked degree of pleasure. Wit depends so largely upon the manner of its delivery for the effect produced that the dramatists are not so numerously represented in this collection as might be expected from the special fecundity and excellence of the Irish in that branch of literature. To extract the wit or humour from some of the eighteenth-century plays is no easy task. In men like Sheridan, it is superabundant, over-luxuriant, and easily detachable; but others, like Kane O’Hara, Hugh Kelly, William O’Brien, James Kenney, and so on, whose plays were famous at one time and are not yet forgotten, find no place in this work on account of the difficulty of bringing the wit of their plays to a focus.
There never was a writer, perhaps, concerning whose merits there has been less dispute than Goldsmith. Sheridan, with all his brilliance, has not been so fortunate. Lysaght and Millikin were and are both greatly overrated as poets and wits, if we are to judge by the fragments they have left. Lysaght, however, must have been considered a genuine wit, for we find a number of once popular songs wrongly attributed to him. He most unquestionably did not write “The Sprig of Shillelagh,” “Donnybrook Fair,” “The Rakes of Mallow,” or “Kitty of Coleraine,” though they have all been put down as his. The first two were written by H. B. Code and Charles O’Flaherty respectively. Millikin’s fame is due to one of those literary accidents which now and then occur. Henry Luttrell in his verse had something of the sprightliness and point of Moore.
Very few specimens of parody have been included in this collection. Two extracts are here given from Eaton Stannard Barrett’s burlesque romance, which ridiculed a school of writers whose mannerisms were once very prevalent. Maginn was a much better parodist. He was a great humorist in every way, and may be claimed as the earliest writer who showed genuine rollicking Irish humour. “Daniel O’Rourke” is here given to him for the first time, probably, in a collection; though it appeared in Crofton Croker’s “Fairy Legends” it was known to their contemporaries as Maginn’s. He could be both coarse and refined; his boisterous praise of the bottle was not a sham, but his occasional apparent delight in savage personal criticism was really quite foreign to his character, as he was a most amiable man, much loved by those who knew him. It was different with “Father Prout,” who was one of the venomous order of wits, and certainly not a personal favourite with his colleagues. His frequent and senseless attacks on O’Connell and other men, dragged into all his essays, are blots on his work. His wit is too often merely abusive, like that of Dr. Kenealy, who, almost as learned as “Prout,” was quite as unnecessarily bitter. It is from Lover that we get the cream, not the curds of Irish humour. He is the Irish arch-humorist, and it is difficult to exaggerate the excellence of his lovesongs. Others may be more classical, more polished, more subtle, but there is no writer more irresistible. Among his earlier contemporaries Ettingsall was his nearest counterpart in one notable story. It must not be forgotten, either, that “Darby Doyle’s Voyage to Quebec” appeared in print before Lover’s “Barney O’Reirdon.” Carleton and Lever were admirable humorists, but only incidentally so, whereas Lover was nothing if not a humorist before all. There are many excellent comic passages in the novels of both, as also in one or two of Lefanu’s works, and if it should be thought that proportionately they are under-represented, it need only be pointed out that though a large volume might easily be made up of examples of their humour alone, other writers also have a good claim to a considerable amount of space. It has been thought preferable to restrict the selections from such famous novelists in order to give a place to no less admirable but much less familiar work.