The Glories Of Ireland Part 24

He escaped the perils of the Mambi Land and the Sudan, and survived to serve Ireland for many years as a Nationalist member in the British parliament. John Augustus O'Shea, better known, perhaps, as "The Irish Bohemian", also deserves remembrance for his quarter of a century's work as special correspondent in Europe--including Paris during the siege--for the London _Standard_.

Indeed, no matter to what side of journalism we turn, we find Irishmen filling the foremost and the highest places. John Thaddeus Delane, under whose editors.h.i.+p the _Times_ became for a time the most influential newspaper in the world, was of Irish parentage. The first editor of the _Ill.u.s.trated London News_ (1842)--one of the pioneers in the elucidation of news by means of pictures--was an Irishman, Frederick Bayley. Among the projectors of _Punch_, and one of its earliest contributors, was a King's county man, Joseph Sterling Coyne. The founder of the _Liverpool Daily Post_ (1855), the first penny daily paper in Great Britain, was Michael Joseph Whitty, a Wexford man. His son, Edward M. Whitty, was the originator of that interesting feature of English and Irish journalism, the sketch of personalities and proceedings in parliament. Of the editors of the _Athenaeum_--for many years the leading English organ of literary criticism--one of the most famous was Dr. John Doran, who was of Irish parentage. "Dod" is a familiar household word in the British Parliament. It is the name of the recognized guide to the careers and political opinions of Lords and Commons. Its founder was an Irishman, Charles Roger Dod, who for twenty-three years was a parliamentary reporter for the _Times_. And what name sheds a brighter light on the annals of British journalism for intellectual and imaginative force than that of Justin MacCarthy, novelist and historian, as well as newspaper writer?

At home in Ireland the name of Gray is inseparably a.s.sociated with the _Freeman's Journal_. Under the direction of Dr. John Gray this newspaper became in the sixties and seventies the most powerful organ of public opinion in Ireland; and in the eighties it was raised still higher in ability and influence by his son and successor, Edmund Dwyer Gray. In the south of Ireland the most influential daily newspaper is the _Cork Examiner_, which was founded in 1841 by John Francis Maguire, who wrote in 1868 _The Irish in America_. It is doubtful whether any country ever produced a more militant and able political journal than was _United Ireland_ in the stormy years during which it was edited by William O'Brien as the organ of the Land League.

The Irish mood is gregarious, expansive, glowing, and eager to keep in intimate touch with the movements and affairs of humanity. That, I think, is the secret of its success in journalism.

REFERENCES:

Madden: Irish Periodical Literature (1867); Andrews: English Journalism (1855); North: Newspaper and Periodical Press of the United States (1884); MacDonagh: The Reporter's Gallery (1913).

THE IRISH LITERARY REVIVAL

By HORATIO S. KRANS, Ph.D.

In the closing decade of the nineteenth century and in the opening years of the twentieth, no literary movement has awakened a livelier interest than the Irish Literary Revival, a movement which, by its singleness and solidarity of purpose, stood alone in a time of confused literary aims and tendencies. Movements, like individuals, have their ancestry, and that of the Irish Literary Revival is easily traced. It descends from Callanan and Walsh, and from the writers of '48. It is to this descent that the lines in William Butler Yeats's "To Ireland in Coming Times" allude:

Know that I would accounted be True brother of that company, Who sang to sweeten Ireland's wrong, Ballad and story, rann and song.

With the pa.s.sing of the mid-nineteenth-century writers, the old movement waned, and in the field of Irish letters there was, in the phrase of a famous bull, nothing stirring but stagnation. A witty critic of the period, commenting upon this unhappy state of affairs, declared that, though the love of learning in Ireland might still be, as the saying went, indestructible, it was certainly imperceptible.

But after the fall of Parnell a new spirit was stirring. Politics no longer absorbed the whole energy of the nation. Groups of men inspired with a love of the arts sprang up here and there. In 1890 Yeats proved himself a real prophet when he wrote: "A true literary consciousness--national to the centre--seems gradually to be forming out of all this disguising and prettifying, this penumbra of half-culture. We are preparing likely enough for a new Irish literary movement--like that of '48--that will show itself in the first lull in politics."

Responsive to the need of the young writers a.s.sociated with Yeats, the National Literary Society was founded in Dublin in 1892, and a year later London Irishmen, among them men already distinguished in letters, founded in the English metropolis the Irish Literary Society. From the presses in Dublin, in London, and in New York as well, books began to appear in rapid succession--slender volumes of verse, novels, short stories, essays, plays, translations, and remakings of Irish myths and legends, all inspired by, and closely related to, the past or the present of Ireland, voicing an essentially national spirit and presenting the n.o.blest traits of Irish life and character.

Not content with the organization of the two literary societies, Yeats, with courage and relentless tenacity, cast about to realize his long-cherished dream of a theatre that should embody the ideals of the Revival. In Lady Gregory, and in Edward Martyn, an Irishman of large means, who with both pen and purse lent a willing hand, he found two ardent laborers for his vineyard. George Moore, who in the event proved a fish out of water in Ireland, Yeats and Martyn contrived to lure from his London lodgings and his cosmopolitan ways, and to enlist in the theatrical enterprise. The practical knowledge of the stage which this gifted _enfant terrible_ of literature contributed was doubtless of great value in the early days of the dramatic adventure, though Moore's free thoughts, frank speech, and mordant irony brought an element of discord into Dublin literary circles, which may well have left Yeats and his a.s.sociates with a feeling that they had paid too dear for a piper to whose tunes they refused to dance. Be that as it may, in 1899 Yeats's dream was measurably realized, and the Irish Literary Theatre established, to be succeeded a little later by the Irish National Theatre Society.

Enough, however, of the dramatic aspect of the Revival, which receives separate treatment elsewhere in these pages, as does also the dramatic work of certain of the authors considered here.

From what has already been said, it should be plain that in the last decade of the last century the ranks of the Irish Literary Revivalists filled rapidly, and that the movement was really under way. The renascent spirit took various forms. To one group of poets the humor, pathos, and tragedy of peasant life deeply appealed, and found expression in a poetry distinctively and unmistakably national, from which a kind of pleasure could be drawn unlike anything else in other literatures. In this group Alfred Perceval Graves and Moira O'Neill cannot pa.s.s unmentioned. Who would ask anything racier in its kind than the former's "Father O'Flynn"?

Of priests we can offer a charmin' variety, Far renowned for larnin' and piety, Still I'd advance you without impropriety, Father O'Flynn as the flower of them all.

Here's a health to you, Father O'Flynn, Slainte,[1] and slainte, and slainte agin.

Powerfullest preacher, And tinderest teacher, And kindliest creature in Old Donegal.

[Footnote 1: "Your health."]

Or was the homing instinct, the homesick longing for the old sod, ever more truly rendered than in Moira O'Neill's song of the Irish laborer in England?

Over here in England I'm helpin' wi' the hay, An' I wish I was in Ireland the livelong day; Weary on the English, an' sorra take the wheat!

Och! Corrymeela an' the blue sky over it.

D'ye mind me now, the song at night is mortial hard to raise, The girls are heavy-goin' here, the boys are ill to plase; When ones't I'm out this workin' hive, 'tis I'll be back again-- Aye, Corrymeela in the same soft rain.

Here, too, should be named Jane Barlow, whose poems and stories are faithful imaginative transcripts of the face of nature and the hearts of men as she knew them in Connemara. Finally there is William Butler Yeats, who, on the whole, is the representative man of the Revival.

Except in the translator's sphere, his writings have given him a place in almost all the activities of this movement. As a lyric poet, he has expressed the moods of peasant and patriot, of mystic, symbolist, and quietist, and it is safe to say that in lyric poetry no one of his generation writing in English is his superior. We cannot resist the pleasure of quoting here from his "Innisfree", which won the praise of Robert Louis Stevenson, and which, if not the high mark of Yeats's achievement, is still a flawless thing in its way:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnets' wings.

In this place, and for convenience sake, it may be permitted to speak of aspects of Yeats's work other than that by virtue of which he is to be cla.s.sed with the group we have just considered. In his narrative poem, "The Wanderings of Usheen", as well as in his plays and lyrics, he is of the best of those--among them we may mention by the way Dr. John Todhunter, Nora Hopper (Mrs. W.H. Chesson), and William Larminie--who have revealed to our day the strange beauty of the ancient creations of the Gaelic imagination. In prose he has written short stories, a novelette, _John Sherman and Dhoya_, and essays that reveal a subtle critical insight, and a style of beautiful finish and grace, suggestive of the style of Sh.e.l.ley's _Defence of Poetry_. Yeats's plays const.i.tute a considerable and an important part of his work, but these must be reserved for treatment elsewhere in this book. In prefaces to anthologies of prose and verse of his editing, in the pages of reviews, and elsewhere, he appears as the chief apologist of the aims of the Literary Revival, and in particular of the methods of the dramatists of the Revival. Whatever he has touched he has lifted into the realm of poetry, and this is in large measure true of his prose, which proceeds from the poet's point of view and breathes the poetic spirit. A man of rare versatility, a finished artist with a scrupulous artistic conscience, he has done work of high and sustained quality, and is certain to exert a good and lasting influence upon the literature of his country.

In a literary movement in the "Isle of Saints", we look naturally for religious poetry, and we do not look in vain. This poetry, chiefly Catholic, has a quality of its own as distinctive as that of the writers of the group we have just left. Now it voices a nave, devoted simplicity of Christian faith; now it attains to a high and keen spirituality; now it is mystic and pagan. Among the religious poets, Lionel Johnson easily stands first--perhaps the Irish poet of firmest fibre and most resonant voice of his generation. A note of high courage and of spiritual triumph rings through his verse, even from the shadow of the wings of the dark angel that gives a t.i.tle to one of the saddest of his poems. Often he strikes a note of genuine religious ecstasy and exaltation rarely heard in English, as in "Te Martyrum Candidatus":

Ah, see the fair chivalry come, the companions of Christ!

White Hors.e.m.e.n, who ride on white horses, the Knights of G.o.d!

They, for their Lord and their Lover who sacrificed All, save the pleasure of treading where He first trod.

These through the darkness of death, the dominion of night, Swept, and they woke in white places at morning tide: They saw with their eyes, and sang for joy of the sight, They saw with their eyes the Eyes of the Crucified.

Among the men of the Revival, no personality is stronger or more attractive than that of G.W. Russell--"ae", as he is always called--who may be regarded as the hero of George Moore's _Hail and Farewell_, and who alone in that gallery of wonderful pen-portraits looks forth with complete amiability. He is a pantheist, a mystic, and a visionary, with what would seem a literal and living faith in many G.o.ds, though strongly prepossessed in favor of the ancient divinities of the Gael, now long since in exile. Impressive and striking by a certain spiritual integrity, so to say, "ae" unites gifts and faculties seldom combined. He is a poet of rare subtlety, a painter in whose genius so good a judge as George Moore believed, and a most practical man of affairs, who, as a.s.sistant to Sir Horace Plunkett, held up the latter's hands in his labors on behalf of co-operative dairies and the like. His poems have their roots in a pantheism which half reveals the secrets of an indwelling spirit, speaking alike "from the dumb brown lips of earth" and from the pa.s.sions of the heart of man.

Of novelists, both men and women, the Irish Revival can, in the words of "Father O'Flynn", offer a charming variety, and among their novels and short stories are some books of high quality and not a few in a high degree interesting and entertaining. To Standish O'Grady we turn for tales, with a kind of bardic afflatus about them, of the hero age of legendary Ireland--tales which drew attention to the romantic Celtic past of myth and saga, and must have been an inspiration to more than one writer of the younger generation. In contrast to the broad epic sweep and remote romantic backgrounds of O'Grady, are the stories of Jane Barlow, whose _genre_ pictures of peasant life in the west of Ireland, like her poems mentioned above, show how sympathetically she understands the ways of thinking, feeling, and acting of her humble compatriots. A like minute and faithful knowledge is evident in the work of two story-tellers of the north, Seumas MacMa.n.u.s and Shan Bullock. The former's outlook is humorous and pathetic. He tells fairy and folk tales well, and is a past master of the dialect and idiom that combine to give his old-wives'

yarns an honest smack of the soil. Let him who doubts it read _Through the Turf Smoke_ or _Donegal Fairy Stories_. If Shan Bullock walks the same fields as Seumas MacMa.n.u.s, he does so with a different air and with a more definite purpose. Sometimes he turns to the squireens, small farmers, or small country gentry, and lays bare the hardness and narrowness that are a part of their life. Or, again, in pictures whose sadness and gloom are lightened, to be sure, with humor or warmed with love, he studies the necessitous life of the poor. _The Squireen, The Barrys_, and _Irish Pastorals_ are some of his representative books.

In the novel as in poetry the ladies have worked side by side with their literary brethren. Miss Hermione Templeton, in her _Darby O'Gill_, and elsewhere, has written pleasantly and gracefully of the fairies. In a very different vein are the novels of the collaborators, Miss Somerville and "Martin Ross" (Miss Violet Martin), over which English and American readers have laughed as heartily as their own fellow countrymen. _The Experiences of an Irish R.M._remains, perhaps, their best book. The work of these ladies, be it said by the way, is in the line of descent from that group of older Irish novelists who wrote in the spirit of the devil-may-care gentry, the novelists from Maxwell to Lover and Lever, who were ever questing "divilment and divars.h.i.+on," and who in their moods of boisterous fun forgot the real Irishman, and presented in his place a caricature--him of the Celtic screech and the exhilarating whack of the s.h.i.+llelagh, the famous stage Irishman who has made occasional appearances in English literature from the time of Shakespeare's _Henry V._, on through the works of Fielding and the plays of Sheridan, to the present moment of writing.

Of a very different stripe from the work of the collaborating ladies just mentioned are the novels of the recently deceased Canon Sheehan--notable among them _Luke Delmege_ and _My New Curate_--rambling, diffuse, and a trifle provincial from the artistic standpoint, but interesting as studies of manners, and for the pictures they afford of the priesthood of modern Ireland in the pleasantest light. If the stories of Miss Somerville and "Martin Ross" are related to the comic stories of the old novelists of the gentry, those of Canon Sheehan must be a.s.sociated with the work of the older novelists who wrote more or less in the spirit of the peasantry, that is, with Gerald Griffin, the Banim brothers, and William Carleton, less famous than he deserves to be by his _Traits and Stories_ and a long line of novels and tales.

No survey of Irish novelists, however brief, can afford to forget the Rev. James Owen Hannay ("George A. Birmingham"), canon of St.

Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, whose work is as distinctively Protestant in its point of view as Father Sheehan's is Catholic. His more substantial novels are a careful transcript of the actualities of Irish life today, and in them one meets, incognito but easily recognizable, many Irishmen now prominent in literature or politics in Ireland. Of his numerous books may be mentioned _The Seething Pot, Hyacinth_, and _Northern Iron_.

Finally there is George Moore, whose enlistment in the Revival was responsible for the novel _The Lake_ and the short stories of _The Unfilled Field_, and for a largely autobiographic and entirely indiscreet trilogy ent.i.tled _Hail and Farewell_, the separate volumes appearing as _Ave, Salve, Vale_, and the last of them as late as 1914. George Moore's anti-Catholic bias is strong, but his is the pen of an accomplished artist. He has the story-teller's beguiling gift, and he bristles with ideas which his books cleverly embody and to which the dramatic moments of his novels give point and relief.

Not the least important work of the Irish Literary Revival has been done by translators, who have put into English the old Gaelic romances and the folklore still current among the little remnant of Irish-speaking country folk. Dr. Douglas Hyde is in the forefront of this group. He it was who organized the Gaelic League, a band of enthusiasts zealous for the revival of the Irish language both as a spoken tongue and as the medium for a national literature, and eager, also, to breed up a race of Celtic scholars. The lyrics in his _Love Songs of Connacht_ are full of grace, tenderness, and fire, and indicate the kind of gems which he and his fellow laborers have added to the treasury of poetry in English. But it is Lady Gregory, especially in her _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_ and _G.o.ds and Fighting Men_, who more than any other has found a way to stir the blood of readers of to-day by the romantic hero tales of Ireland. From the racy idiom of the dwellers on or about her own estate in Galway, she happily framed a style that gave her narratives freshness, novelty, and a flavor of the soil. Upon the work of scholars she drew heavily in making her own renderings, but she has justified all borrowings by breathing into her books the breath and the warmth of life, and her adaptation to epic purposes of the dialect of those who still retain the expiring habit of thinking in Gaelic was a real literary achievement. She has, indeed, in sins of commission and of omission, taken liberties with the old legends, but this may render them not less, and perhaps more, delightful to the general reader, however just complaints may be from the standpoint of the scholar.

Even so brief a sketch as this may suffice to bring home to those not already aware of it a realization of the delights to be drawn from the creations of a living literary movement, which is perhaps the most notable of its generation, and which has gathered together a remarkable group of poets, novelists, and dramatists, who, as men and women, are a most interesting company--a fact to which even George Moore's _Hail and Farewell_, with its quick eye for defects and foibles and its ironic wit, bears abundant testimony.

REFERENCES:

Brooke and Rolleston: Treasury of Irish Poetry (New York and London, 1900); Krans: William Butler Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival (New York and London, 1904); Yeats: Ideas of Good and Evil (London, 1903); Moore: Hail and Farewell, 3 vols. (London and New York, 1912-1914); Lady Gregory: Our Irish Theatre (New York and London, 1913); Weygandt: Irish Plays and Playwrights (New York, 1913); Yeats: Introduction to Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (London, 1889), Representative Irish Tales (London, 1890), Book of Irish Verse (London, 1895). There is much of interest, though chiefly as regards the drama, in the reviews, Beltaine (London and Dublin, 1899-1900) and Samhain (London and Dublin, 1901-1903).

IRISH WRITERS OF ENGLISH

By P.J. LENNOX, B.A., Litt.D.

The Gaelic literature of Ireland is not only of wonderful volume and priceless worth, but is also of great antiquity, whereas the English literature of Ireland, while also of considerable extent and high value, is of comparatively modern origin. The explanation of this fact is that for more than six centuries after the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 the Irish language continued to be both the spoken and, with Latin, the written organ of the great ma.s.s of the Irish people, and that for nearly the whole of that period those English settlers who did not become, as the well-known phrase has it, more Irish than the Irish themselves by adopting the native language, customs, and sentiments, were kept too busy in holding, defending, and extending their territory to devote themselves to literary pursuits. Hence we need not wonder if, leaving out of account merely technical works like Lionel Power's treatise on music, written in 1395, we find that the English literature of Ireland takes its comparatively humble origin late in the sixteenth century. For more than two centuries thereafter, owing to the fact that the native Irish, because they were Catholics, were debarred by law from an education, the writing of English remained almost exclusively in the hands of members or descendants of the Anglo-Irish colony, who, with scarcely an exception, were Protestants and had as their princ.i.p.al Irish seat of learning the then essentially Protestant inst.i.tution, Trinity College, Dublin. Alien in race and creed though these writers mainly were, they have nevertheless spread a halo of glory around their adopted country, and have won the admiration, and often the affection, of Irishmen of every shade of religious and political belief. For example, there is no Irishman who is not proud of Molyneux and Swift, of Goldsmith and Burke, of Grattan and Sheridan.

From the nineteenth century onward Irish Catholics have taken their full share in the production of English literature. Here, however, it will be necessary to consider the writers of none but the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, as in other pages of this volume considerable attention has been given to those of later date.

I. SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

Richard Stanyhurst (1547-1618), born in Dublin but educated at Oxford, is the first representative of the sixteenth century with whom we are called upon to deal. He belonged to a family long settled in or near Dublin and of some note in munic.i.p.al annals. Under the direction of the Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, Stanyhurst wrote a _Description_, as well as a portion of the _History_, of Ireland for Holinshed's _Chronicles_, published in 1577. He also translated (1582) the first four books of _Virgil his Aeneis_ into quant.i.tative hexameters, on the unsound pedantic principles which Gabriel Harvey was at that time trying so hard to establish in English prosody; but the experiment, which turned out so badly in the master's hands, fared even worse in those of the disciple, and Stanyhurst's lines will always stand as a noted specimen of inept translation and ridiculous versification. Equally inartistic was his version of some of the Psalms in the same metre. In Latin he wrote a profound commentary on Porphyry, the Neo-Platonic mystic. Stanyhurst, who was uncle to James Ussher, the celebrated Protestant archbishop of Armagh, was himself a convert to Catholicity, and on the death of his second wife became a priest and wrote in Latin some edifying books of devotion. Two of his sons joined the Jesuit order. He died at Brussels in 1618. Stanyhurst viewed Ireland entirely from the English standpoint, and in his _Description_ and _History_ is, consciously or unconsciously, greatly biased against the native race.