Irish Books and Irish People | Page 6

were, trusting to charity by the way to

lodge him, and to charity to keep him throughout his schooling for the
sake of his vocation, and for the blessing sure to descend upon those
who aided a peasant's son to become a priest. Nothing could be more
vivid than the early scenes, the collection made at the altar for Jimmy
McEvoy, the priest's sermon, the boy's parting from home, and the
roadside hospitality; there is one infinitely touching episode in the
house of the first farmer who shelters him. Then come the school itself,
and the tyranny of its master, till the boy falls sick of a fever, and is
turned out of doors. Then, alas, the conventional intervenes in the
person of the virtuous absentee ignorant of his agent's misdoings: the
long arm of coincidence is stretched to the uttermost; and we have to
wade through pages of discussion upon the relations of landlord and
tenant till we are put wholly out of tune for the beautiful scene of
Jimmy's return home in his priestly dress.
Carleton did for the peasantry what Miss Edgeworth had done for the
upper classes. In her books the peasants have only an incidental part,
and she describes them shrewdly and sympathetically enough, but with
a mind untouched either by their faith or by their superstitions; seeing
their good and bad qualities clearly in a dry light, but never in
imagination identifying herself with them. Superior to Miss Edgeworth
in power and insight, he is immeasurably her inferior in literary skill.
One should remember, in commenting upon the poverty of Irish
literature in English, that, so far as concerns imaginative work, it began
in the nineteenth century. Carleton only died in 1869, Miss Edgeworth
in 1849; and before them there is no one.
On the other hand the speech of Lowland Scots, with whose richness in
masterpieces our poverty is naturally contrasted, has been employed for
literature as long as the vernacular English. A king of Scotland wrote
admirable verse in the generation after Chaucer; the influence of the
Court fostered poetry, and the close intercourse with France kept
Scotch writers in touch with first-rate models. Dunbar, strolling as a
friar in France, may have known Villon, whom he often resembles. In
Ireland, till a century ago, English was as much a foreign language as
Norman French in England under the Plantagenets. Among the English
Protestants, settled in Ireland, and separated by a hard line of cleavage

from the Catholic population, there arose great men in letters,
Goldsmith, Burke, Sheridan, who showed their Irish temperament in
their handling of English themes. But in Ireland itself, before the events
of 1782 added importance to Dublin, there was no centre for a literature
to gather round. Such national pride as exists in English-speaking
Ireland dates from the days of Grattan and Flood. And Irish national
aspirations still bear the impress of their origin amid that period of
political turmoil, than which nothing is more hostile to the brooding
care of literary workmanship, the long labour and the slow result.
Irishmen have always shown a strong disinclination to pure literature.
The roll of Irish novelists is more than half made up of women's names;
Miss Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, Miss Emily Lawless, and Miss Jane
Barlow. Journalists Ireland has produced as copiously as orators; the
writers of The Spirit of the Nation, that admirable collection of stirring
poems, are journalists working in verse; and Carleton, falling under
their influence, became a journalist working in fiction. In his pages,
even when the debater ceases to argue and harangue, the style is still
journalistic, except in those passages where his dramatic instinct puts
living speech into the mouths of men and women. Politics so
monopolise the minds of Irishmen, newspapers so make up their whole
reading, that the class to which Carleton and the poet Mangan belonged
have never fully entered upon the heritage of English literature. If an
English peasant knows nothing else, he knows the Bible and very likely
Bunyan; but a Roman Catholic population has little commerce with that
pure fountain of style. Genius cannot dispense with models, and
Carleton and Mangan had the worst possible. Yet when it has been said
that Carleton was a half-educated peasant, writing in a language whose
best literature he had not sufficiently assimilated to feel the true value
of words, it remains to be said that he was a great novelist. He cannot
be fairly illustrated by quotation; but read any of his stories and see if
he does not bring up vividly before you Ireland as it was before the
famine; Ireland still swarming with beggars who marched about in
families subsisting chiefly on the charity of the poor; Ireland of which
the hedge-school was plainly to him the most characteristic