Humours of Irish Life Part 1

Humours of Irish Life.

by Various.

Introduction.

The first of the notable humorists of Irish life was William Maginn, one of the most versatile, as well as brilliant of Irish men of letters.

He was born in Cork in 1793, and was a cla.s.sical schoolmaster there in early manhood, having secured the degree of LL.D. at Trinity College, Dublin, when only 23 years of age. The success in "Blackwood's Magazine"

of some of his translations of English verse into the Cla.s.sics induced him, however, to give up teaching and to seek his fortunes as a magazine writer and journalist in London, at a time when Lamb, De Quincey, Lockhart and Wilson gave most of their writings to magazines.

Possessed of remarkable sparkle and finish as a writer, considering with what little effort and with what rapidity he poured out his political satires in prose and verse, and his rollicking magazine sketches, it was no wonder that he leaped into popularity at a bound. He was the original of the Captain Shandon of Pendennis and though Thackeray undoubtedly attributed to him a political venality of which he was never guilty, whilst describing him during what was undoubtedly the latter and least reputable period in his career, it is evident that he considered Maginn to be, as he undoubtedly was, a literary figure of conspicuous accomplishment and mark in the contemporary world of letters.

Amongst his satiric writings, his panegyric of Colonel Pride may stand comparison even with Swift's most notable philippics; whilst his Sir Morgan O'Doherty was the undoubted ancestor of Maxwell's and Lever's hard drinking, practical joking Irish military heroes, and frequently appears as one of the speakers in Professor Wilson's "Noctes Ambrosianae," of which the doctor was one of the mainstays.

Besides his convivial song of "St. Patrick," his "Gathering of the Mahonys," and his "Cork is an Eden for you, Love, and me," written by him as genuine "Irish Melodies," to serve as an antidote to what he called the finicking Baccha.n.a.lianism of Moore, he contributed, as Mr. D.

J. O'Donoghue conclusively proves, several stories, including "Daniel O'Rourke," printed in this volume, to Crofton Croker's "Fairy Legends and Traditions of Ireland," first published anonymously in 1825--a set of Folk Tales full of a literary charm which still makes them delightful reading. For just as Moore took Irish airs, touched them up and partnered them with lyrics to suit upper cla.s.s British and Irish taste, so Croker gathered his Folk Tales from the Munster peasantry with whom he was familiar and, a.s.sisted by Maginn and others, gave them exactly that form and finish needful to provide the reading public of his day with an inviting volume of fairy lore.

Carleton and the brothers John and Michael Banim, besides Samuel Lover, whose gifts are treated of elsewhere in this introduction, followed with what Dr. Douglas Hyde rightly describes as Folk Lore of "an incidental and highly manipulated type."

A more genuine Irish storyteller was Patrick Kennedy, twice represented in this volume, whose "Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celt" and "Fireside Stories of Ireland" were put down by him much as he heard them as a boy in his native county of Wexford, where they had already pa.s.sed with little change in the telling from the Gaelic into the peculiar Anglo-Irish local dialect which is markedly West Saxon in its character.

His lineal successor as a Wexford Folklorist is Mr. P. J. McCall, one of whose stories, "Fionn Macc.u.mhail and the Princess" we reproduce, and a woman Folk tale teller, Miss B. Hunt, adds to our indebtedness to such writers by her recently published and delightful _Folk Tales of Breffny_ from which "McCarthy of Connacht" has been taken for these pages.

We have also the advantage of using Dr. Hyde's "The Piper and the Puca,"

a foretaste, we believe, of the pleasure in store for our readers in the volume of Folk Tales he is contributing to "Every Irishman's Library"

under the engaging t.i.tle of "Irish Saints and Sinners."

In a survey of the Anglo-Irish humorous novel of recent times, the works of Charles Lever form a convenient point of departure, for with all his limitations he was the first to write about Irish life in such a way as to appeal widely and effectively to an English audience. We have no intention of dwelling upon him at any length--he belongs to an earlier generation--but between him and his successors there are points both of resemblance and of dissimilarity sufficient to make an interesting comparison. The politics and social conditions of Lever's time are not those of the present, but the spirit of Lever's Irishman, though with modifications, is still alive to-day.

Lever had not the intensity of Carleton, or the fine humanity of Kickham, but he was less uncompromising in his use of local colour, and he was, as a rule, far more cheerful. He had not the tender grace or simplicity of Gerald Griffin, and never wrote anything so moving or beautiful as "The Collegians," which will form a special volume of this Library, but he surpa.s.sed him in vitality, gusto, exuberance and knowledge of the world.

Overrated in the early stages of his career, Lever paid the penalty of his too facile triumphs in his lifetime, and his undoubted talents have latterly been depreciated on political as well as artistic grounds. His heroes were drawn, with few exceptions, from the landlord cla.s.s or their faithful retainers. The gallant Irish officers, whose Homeric exploits he loved to celebrate, held commissions in the British army. Lever has never been popular with Nationalist politicians, though, as a matter of fact no one ever exhibited the extravagance and recklessness of the landed gentry in more glaring colours. And he is anathema to the hierophants of the Neo-Celtic Renascence on account of his jocularity.

There is nothing crepuscular about Lever; you might as well expect to find a fairy in a railway station.

Again, Lever never was and never could be the novelist of literary men.

He was neither a scholar nor an artist; he wrote largely in instalments; and in his earlier novels was wont to end a chapter in a manner that rendered something like a miracle necessary to continue the existence of the hero: "He fell lifeless to the ground, the same instant I was felled to the earth by a blow from behind, and saw no more." In technique and characterisation his later novels show a great advance, but if he lives, it will be by the spirited loosely-knit romances of love and war composed in the first ten years of his literary career. His heroes had no scruples in proclaiming their physical advantages and athletic prowess; Charles O'Malley, that typical Galway _miles gloriosus_, introduces himself with ingenuous egotism in the following pa.s.sage:

"I rode boldly with fox-hounds; I was about the best shot within twenty miles of us; I could swim the Shannon at Holy Island; I drove four-in-hand better than the coachman himself; and from finding a hare to cooking a salmon, my equal could not be found from Killaloe to Banagher."

The life led by the Playboys of the West (old style) as depicted in Lever's pages was one incessant round of reckless hospitality, tempered by duels and practical joking, but it had its justification in the family annals of the fire-eating Blakes and Bodkins and the records of the Connaught Circuit. The intrepidity of Lever's heroes was only equalled by their indiscretion, their good luck in escaping from the consequences of their folly, and their susceptibility. His womenfolk may be roughly divided into three cla.s.ses; sentimental heroines, who sighed, and blushed and fainted on the slightest provocation; buxom Amazons, like Baby Blake; and campaigners or adventuresses. But the gentle, sentimental, angelic type predominates, and finds a perfect representative in Lucy Dashwood.

When Charles O'Malley was recovering from an accident in the hunting field, he fell asleep in an easy-chair in the drawing-room and was awakened by the "thrilling chords of a harp":

"I turned gently round in my chair and beheld Miss Dashwood. She was seated in a recess of an old-fashioned window; the pale yellow glow of a wintry sun at evening fell upon her beautiful hair, and tinged it with such a light as I have often since then seen in Rembrandt's pictures; her head leaned upon the harp, and, as she struck its chords at random, I saw that her mind was far away from all around her. As I looked, she suddenly started from her leaning att.i.tude, and, parting back her curls from her brow, she preluded a few chords, and then sighed forth, rather than sang, that most beautiful of Moore's melodies--

'She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps.'

Never before had such pathos, such deep utterance of feeling, met my astonished sense; I listened breathlessly as the tears fell one by one down my cheek; my bosom heaved and fell; and when she ceased, I hid my head between my hands and sobbed aloud."

Lever's serious heroines, apart from the fact that they could ride, did not differ in essentials from those of d.i.c.kens, and a sense of humour was no part of their mental equipment. The hated rival, the dark-browed Captain Hammersly, was distinguished by his "cold air and repelling _hauteur_," and is a familiar figure in mid-Victorian romance. Lever's sentiment, in short, is old-fashioned, and cannot be expected to appeal to a Feminist age which has given us the public school girl and the suffragist. There is no psychological interest in the relations of his heroes and heroines; Charles's farewell to Lucy is on a par with the love speeches in "The Lyons Mail." There is seldom any doubt as to the ultimate reunion of his lovers; we are only concerned with the ingenuity of the author in surmounting the obstacles of his own invention. He was fertile in the devising of exciting incident; he was always able to eke out the narrative with a good story or song--as a writer of convivial, thrasonic or mock-sentimental verse he was quite in the first cla.s.s--and in his earlier novels his high spirits and sense of fun never failed.

In his easy-going methods he may have been influenced by the example of d.i.c.kens--the d.i.c.kens of the "Pickwick Papers"--but there is no ground for any charge of conscious imitation, and where he challenged direct comparison--in the character of Mickey Free--he succeeded in drawing an Irish Sam Weller who falls little short of his more famous c.o.c.kney counterpart. For Lever was a genuine humorist, or perhaps we should say a genuine comedian, since the element of theatricality was seldom absent. The choicest exploits of that grotesque Admirable Crichton, Frank Webber, were carried out by hoaxing, disguise, or trickery of some sort. But the scene in which Frank wins his wager by impersonating Miss Judy Macan and sings "The Widow Malone" is an admirable piece of sustained fooling: admirable, too, in its way is the rescue of the imaginary captive in the Dublin drain. As a delineator of the humours of University life, Lever combined the atmosphere of "Verdant Green" with the sumptuous upholstery of Ouida. Here, again, in his portraits of dons and undergraduates Lever undoubtedly drew in part from life, but fell into his characteristic vice of exaggeration in his embroidery. Frank Webber's antics are amusing, but it is hard to swallow his amazing literary gifts or the contrast between his effeminate appearance and his dare-devil energy.

While "Lord Kilgobbin"--which ran as a serial in the "Cornhill Magazine"

from October, 1870, to March, 1872--was not wholly free from Lever's besetting sin, it is interesting not only as the most thoughtful and carefully written of his novels, but on account of its political att.i.tude. Here Lever proved himself no champion _a outrance_ of the landlords, but was ready to admit that their joyous conviviality was too often attended by gross mismanagement of their estates. The methods of Peter Gill, the land steward, are shown to be all centred in craft and subtlety--"outwitting this man, forestalling that, doing everything by halves, so that no boon came una.s.sociated with some contingency or other by which he secured to himself unlimited power and uncontrolled tyranny." The sympathy extended to the rebels of '98 is remarkable and finds expression in the spirited lines:--

"Is there anything more we can fight or can hate for?

The 'drop' and the famine have made our ranks thin.

In the name of endurance, then, what do we wait for?

Will n.o.body give us the word to begin?"

These must have been almost the last lines Lever ever wrote, unless we accept the bitter epitaph on himself:

"For sixty odd years he lived in the thick of it, And now he is gone, not so much very sick of it, As because he believed he heard somebody say, 'Harry Lorrequer's hea.r.s.e is stopping the way.'"

The bitterness of the epitaph lies in the fact that it was largely true; he had exhausted the vein of rollicking romance on which his fame and popularity rested. For the rest the charge of misrepresenting Irish life is met by so judicious a critic as the late Dr. Garnett with a direct negative:--

"He has not actually misrepresented anything, and cannot be censured for confining himself to the society which he knew; nor was his talent adapted for the treatment of such life in its melancholy and poetic aspects, even if these had been more familiar to him."

Of the humorous Irish novelists who entered into compet.i.tion with Lever for the favour of the English-speaking public in his lifetime, two claim special notice--Samuel Lover and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Lover has always been bracketed with Lever, whom he resembled in many ways, but he was overshadowed by his more brilliant and versatile contemporary. Yet within his limited sphere he was a true humorist, and the careless, whimsical, illogical aspects of Irish character have seldom been more effectively ill.u.s.trated than by the author of 'Handy Andy,' and 'The Gridiron.' Paddy, as drawn by Lover, succeeds in spite of his drawbacks, much as Brer Rabbit does in the tales of Uncle Remus. His mental processes remind one of the story of the Hungarian baron who, on paying a visit to a friend after a railway journey, complained of a bad headache, the result of sitting with his back to the engine. When his friend asked, "Why did not you change places with your _vis-a-vis_?" the baron replied, "How could I? I had no _vis-a-vis_." Lover's heroes "liked action, but they hated work": the philosophy of thriftlessness is summed up to perfection in "Paddy's Pastoral":--

"Here's a health to you, my darlin', Though I'm not worth a farthin'; For when I'm drunk I think I'm rich, I've a featherbed in every ditch!"

For all his kindliness Lover laid too much stress on this happy-go-lucky f.e.c.klessness to minister to Irish self-respect. His pictures of Irish life were based on limited experience; in so far as they are true, they recall and emphasise traits which many patriotic Irishmen wish to forget or eliminate. An age which has witnessed the growth of Irish Agricultural Co-operation is intolerant of a novelist who for the most part represents his countrymen as diverting idiots, and therefore we prefer to represent him in this volume by "The Little Weaver," one of those mock heroic tales in which Irishmen have excelled from his day to that of Edmund Downey. No better example could be given of his easy flow of humour in genuine Hiberno-English or of his shrewd portraiture of such simple types of Irish peasant character.

The case of Le Fanu is peculiar. His best-known novels had no specially characteristic Irish flavour. But his sombre talent was lit by intermittent flashes of the wildest hilarity, and it was in this mood that the author of "Uncle Silas" and "Carmilla" wrote "The Quare Gandher" and "Billy Malowney's Taste of Love and Glory," two of the most brilliantly comic extravaganzas which were ever written by an Irishman, and which no one but an Irishman could ever have written.

There is no Salic Law in letters, and since the deaths of Lever and Le Fanu the sceptre of the realm of Irish fiction has pa.s.sed to women. But the years between 1870 and 1890 were not propitious for humorists, and the admirable work of the late Miss Emily Lawless, who had already made her mark in "Hurrish" before the latter date, does not fall within the present survey. The same remark applies to Mrs. Hartley, but there is a fine sense of humour in the delicate idylls of Miss Jane Barlow, twice represented in this volume.

By far the most widely read Irish novelist between 1880 and 1900 was the late Mrs. Hungerford, the author of "Molly Bawn" and a score of other blameless romances which almost rivalled "The Rosary" in luscious sentimentality. The scenes of her stories were generally laid in Ireland, and the stories themselves were almost invariably concerned with the courtship of lovely but impecunious maidens by eligible and affluent youths. No one in Mrs. Hungerford's novels ever seemed to have any work to do. The characters lived in a paradise of unemployment, and this possibly accounts for Mrs. Hungerford's immense popularity in America, where even the most indolent immigrants become infected with a pa.s.sion for hard work. In the quality of gush she was unsurpa.s.sed, but her good nature and her frank delight in her characters made her absurdity engaging. Sentiment was her ruling pa.s.sion; she did no more than sc.r.a.pe the surface of Irish social life; and she had no humour but good humour. But she had not enough of literary quality to ent.i.tle her work to rank beside that of the other women writers represented in this volume.

The literary partnership of Miss Edith Somerville and Miss Violet Martin--the most brilliantly successful example of creative collaboration in our times--began with "An Irish Cousin" in 1889.

Published over the pseudonyms of "Geilles Herring" and "Martin Ross,"

this delightful story is remarkable not only for its promise, afterwards richly fulfilled, but for its achievement. The writers proved themselves the possessors of a strange faculty of detachment which enabled them to view the humours of Irish life through the unfamiliar eyes of a stranger without losing their own sympathy. They were at once of the life they described and outside it. They showed a laudable freedom from political partisanship; a minute familiarity with the manners and customs of all strata of Irish Society; an unerring instinct for the "sovran word;" a perfect mastery of the Anglo-Irish dialect; and an acute yet well-controlled sense of the ludicrous. The heroine accurately describes the concourse on the platform of a small country station as having "all the appearance of a large social gathering or _conversazione_, the carriages being filled, not by those who were starting, but by their friends who had come to see them off." When she went to a county ball in Cork she discovered to her dismay that all her partners were named either Beamish or Barrett:--

"Had it not been for w.i.l.l.y's elucidation of its mysteries, I should have thrown away my card in despair. 'No; not _him_. That's _Long_ Tom Beamish! It's _English_ Tommy you've to dance with next. They call him English Tommy because, when his Militia regiment was ordered to Aldershot, he said he was 'the first of his ancestors that was ever sent on foreign service.'... I carried for several days the bruises which I received during my waltz with English Tommy. It consisted chiefly of a series of short rushes, of so shattering a character that I at last ventured to suggest a less aggressive mode of progression.

'Well,' said English Tommy confidentially, 'ye see, I'm trying to b.u.mp Katie,' pointing to a fat girl in blue. 'She's my cousin, and we're for ever fighting.'"

As a set-off to this picture of the hilarious informality of high life in Cork twenty-five years ago, there is a wonderful study of a cottage interior, occupied by a very old man, his daughter-in-law, three children, two terriers, a cat, and a half-plucked goose. The conversation between w.i.l.l.y Sarsfield--who foreshadows Flurry Knox in "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M." by his mingled shrewdness and _naivete_--and Mrs. Sweeny is a perfect piece of realism.

"Mrs. Sweeny was sitting on a kind of rough settle, between the other window and the door of an inner room. She was a stout, comfortable woman of about forty, with red hair and quick blue eyes, that roved round the cabin, and silenced with a glance the occasional whisperings that rose from the children. 'And how's the one that had the bad cough?' asked w.i.l.l.y, pursuing his conversation with her with his invariable ease and dexterity. 'Honor her name is, isn't it?'--'See, now, how well he remembers!' replied Mrs. Sweeny. 'Indeed, she's there back in the room, lyin' these three days. Faith, I think 'tis like the decline she have, Masther w.i.l.l.y.'--'Did you get the Doctor to her?'

said w.i.l.l.y. 'I'll give you a ticket, if you haven't one.'--'Oh, indeed, Docthor Kelly's afther givin' her a bottle, but shure I wouldn't let her put it into her mouth at all. G.o.d-knows what'd be in it. Wasn't I afther throwin' a taste of it on the fire to thry what'd it do, and Phitz! says it, and up with it up the chimbley! Faith, I'd be in dread to give it to the child. Shure, if it done that in the fire, what'd it do in her inside?--'Well, you're a greater fool than I thought you were,' said w.i.l.l.y, politely.--'Maybe I am, faith,' replied Mrs. Sweeny, with a loud laugh of enjoyment. 'But, if she's for dyin', the crayture, she'll die aisier without thim thrash of medicines; and if she's for livin', 'tisn't thrusting to them she'll be. Shure, G.o.d is good, G.o.d is good----'--'Divil a betther!' interjected old Sweeny, unexpectedly. It was the first time he had spoken, and having delivered himself of this trenchant observation, he relapsed into silence and the smackings at his pipe."

But the tragic note is sounded in the close of "An Irish Cousin"--Miss Martin and Miss Somerville have never lost sight of the abiding dualism enshrined in Moore's verse "Erin, the tear and the smile in thine eyes"--and it dominates their next novel, "Naboth's Vineyard," published in 1891, a sombre romance of the Land League days. Three years later they reached the summit of their achievement in "The Real Charlotte,"

which still remains their masterpiece, though easily eclipsed in popularity by the irresistible drollery of "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M." To begin with, it does not rely on the appeal to hunting people which in their later work won the heart of the English sportsman. It is a ruthlessly candid study of Irish provincial and suburban life; of the squalors of middle-cla.s.s households; of garrison hacks and "underbred, finespoken," florid squireens. But secondly and chiefly it repels the larger half of the novel-reading public by the fact that two women have here dissected the heart of one of their s.e.x in a mood of unrelenting realism. While pointing out the pathos and humiliation of the thought that a soul can be stunted by the trivialities of personal appearance, they own to having set down Charlotte Mullen's many evil qualities "without pity." They approach their task in the spirit of Balzac. The book, as we shall see, is extraordinarily rich in both wit and humour, but Charlotte, who cannot control her ruling pa.s.sion of avarice even in a death chamber, might have come straight out of the pages of the _Comedie Humaine_. Masking her greed, her jealousy and her cruelty under a cloak of loud affability and ponderous persiflage, she was a perfect specimen of the _fausse bonne femme_. Only her cats could divine the strange workings of her mind: