Alas for thee, alas for me!
Above thy head the plough shall pass:—
Worse fate is mine, o’er ocean’s wave,
The conqueror’s plaything, and his slave.
THE TRUE IRISH REVOLUTION.
The Irish people, albeit much given to intermittent spasms of insurrection, are at present as peaceable, and apparently as contented, as the contending passions of local politicians and the intrigues of imperial statesmen will allow them to be. The constabulary, in their rifle-green and burnished accoutrements, continue to be the envy and terror of the unsophisticated peasant; the queen’s writ runs unobstructed in the remotest parts of the island; “the castle still stands, though the senate’s no more”; and, save the sharp crack of a rifle at Dolly-mount or the more death-dealing fowling-piece of the sportsman, no warlike sound disturbs the quiet slumbers of the weary sentinel or the superserviceable stipendiary magistrate.
And yet a revolution has been in progress in Ireland and in Irish affairs elsewhere for the last three-quarters of a century as beneficent in its effects and as tangible in its benefits as if blood had flowed in torrents and the pure atmosphere from shore to centre of the land had been polluted by fumes of villainous saltpetre. We mean that within the memory of men now living a radical though gradual change has taken place in the manners, habits, and tastes of the Irish people, but more particularly in their literature, which after all is the best evidence of a nation’s ability to think correctly and express accurately what their minds are capable of conceiving.
Looking back to the condition of Ireland at the beginning of the century—her domestic legislature annihilated and seven-eighths of her people unrepresented in the imperial Parliament—beyond broken relics and dim memories of a glorious past, it can be said truthfully that she had no literature whatever, or rather no literature save what was alien and hostile in tone and spirit. There were no native authors except those who had earned pelf and unenviable notoriety by decrying Ireland’s nationality, maligning her faith, and holding up to the contempt and ridicule of the world the faults and foibles of her unlettered peasantry. But, even had there been men of a different character, they could not have found either encouragement or patronage; for the mass of the population, thanks to the Penal Laws, could not read English, and one-half at least could not even speak it.
The consequence, therefore, was that every young Irishman who felt the spirit of literary ambition stir within him, as soon as he had attained manhood, hastened to pack up his scanty wardrobe and turn his face toward London—then as now the great intellectual focus of the United Kingdom. The pioneers of this movement were generally men little fitted to represent their country. They were merely adventurers, without principle or honor, facile and versatile, and in some instances even educated, but, from previous training and association, just such tools as Grubb Street publishers loved to handle and the lowest class of Britons delighted to patronize. They were the originators of the “Denis Bulgruddery” and “Paddiana” school of so-called comic literature, and were useless if they did not caricature in the grossest manner, on the stage and in the newspapers and periodicals, their Catholic fellow-countrymen. With them a priest was an ignorant and low-bred tyrant; the peasant his abject, superstitious slave. This worthless class, while it did much to destroy the moral effect produced by men of a preceding generation, like Goldsmith, Coleman, O’Keefe, Sheridan, Burke, Barry, and other distinguished Irishmen, did more to instil into the popular mind of England that utter misconception of Irish character and insensate hostility to the Catholic religion of which we find at the present day such marked traces even among fairly intelligent men.
Those mercenaries were followed by others of a higher order of intellect and of greater pretensions, of whom Crofton Croker and Sheridan Knowles may be considered to have been the representatives. The drama, poetry, and prose fiction of every description employed their attention alternately, and in each they proved true to the baser instincts of their nature and the traditions of the faction whence they had sprung. They were stanch no-popery men of the Orange stripe, and, having a Protestant, English audience to gratify, they were consistently and virulently anti-Catholic and anti-Irish. When they wished to delineate their co-patriots, whether before the foot-lights or in the pages of cheap novels, they invariably divided them into two classes: the high-spirited, accomplished Protestant gentleman, and the low, grovelling, ignorant papist. Thus for many years did they thrive on bigotry and fatten upon treason to the land that was unfortunate enough to have given them birth. It was only natural that England should have viewed with complacency the caricatures of a faith she had so long and so strenuously proscribed, and a people whom she had robbed of the last vestige of independence; but it is humiliating to reflect that the works of such libellers were up to a recent period popular in Ireland, and that their comedies and farces “have kept the stage” even to our own day.