i6 
Land & Water 
March 14, 191 8 
Life and Letters (nj J. C Souire 
The Stage Irishmaa 
WE cannot definitely deny tint every good book 
in the end comes into its own and there are 
cases (that of Herrick is cne) in which the 
process has taken a centuiv. What happens 
"in the end" we cannot say, as the universe 
has not vet been wound up. But at this moment of time 
ih^rc are certainly a good man v entertaining works which 
havXenTn eSence\nything from ten to a hundred and 
Sftv voars wluch have never reached the large audiences or 
which thev are perfectly adapted or which have accidentally 
and unjus^^^v slipped out of notice^ I'ate is ^on.et.mes uukind 
even to works of fiction; as, for mstance, T^ Wallet of 
K^Lung, about which I recently wrote here. But injustice 
is far more frequently done to books of memoirs and bio- 
Uphv. Any such book, if in the lerst candid, ^s readable 
but there are scores of really exceptional ones which ahiiost 
anybody would enjoy, but scarcely anybody reads. Among 
them one may mention the staggering autobiography of 
Tames Lackington, the first bookseller to deal on a large 
scale in "remainders"; the Adventures of a Younger Son 
by Shelley's friend Trelawney— an extraordinary record ot 
adventure, accessible in Bohn's Shilling Library; Burdy s 
Life of Skelt'm. which is as good as a fragment of Boswell ; 
and Barringions Memoirs, now reprinted m every. Irishman s 
Library (Fisher Unwin, 3s. net). 
****** 
The "recoUections" of Sir Jonah Barrington are suffi- 
ciently "established" to obtain a place in any Irish literary 
liistor>' ; but how many Englishmen have read them ? 
There was a time, perhaps, when one would have hesitated 
to recommend them to Englishmen. That was the time 
when the ordinary' EngUshman saw Ireland entirely through 
the eyes of Lever and Lover. The island appeared to be 
entirely populated by reckless hunting squires with a pasSion 
for whisky and broiled bones, and devoted servants with 
long upper lips and an unlimited capacity for saying 
"Bejabers, Begorrah, Bedad," and constructing bulls. A 
British farce was incomplete without an utterly incapable 
and incorrigible Irishman, with towsled red hair ; and the 
Irish stranger in England was expected to Uve the part. 
It was scarcely unnatural that the intelligent Irishman 
should revolt against this conception, and (as Canon Hannay 
points out in his introduction to the hqw edition) there have 
been several schools of protest. We have had generations 
of grim young revolutionists "laming" England through the 
medium of pohtics. We have had Mr. Bernard Shaw sug- 
gesting that the Irish are a serious and a humourless race, 
and contrasting the taciturn solid realistic Irishman Welling- 
ton with the sentimental and feminine Englishman Nelson, 
these two being, with as much solemnity as Mr. Shaw can 
command, placed before us as characteristic types qf the 
two races. Finally, we have had the neo-Celts who, in Canon 
Hannay's words, "saw us/ and half persuaded cultured 
England to see us, as a long procession of fate-driven 
peasants with sorrowful eyes, behind whose shadowy figures 
hover vast, maUgnant powers, spirits of cloudy poetry, and 
tragical romance." This atmosphere has so dominated 
Irish literature in our time, that Irish literary officialdom 
has almost entirely neglected the stories of Somerville and 
Ross. They have been resented rather as heirs of the Lover 
and Lever tradition. But there was a foundation for Lover ; 
and Lever was scarcely a caricature at all. He did not 
represent all Ireland, any more than that admirable realist 
Mr. W. W. Jacobs (riot to mention the Pickwick Papers) 
represents all England ; and times change. But he was as 
true to the facts of his day, and to Jonah Barrington, 
as Thackeray and Trollope were to the facts of their day 
and the Victorian diarists. 
There is no risk, at this date, of anybody supposing that 
Mr. W. B. Yeats, or even Mr. John Dillon, is a red-headed 
man who makes bulls and attends wakes. It is therefore 
permissible to observe that Barrington is the justification of 
the nineteenth-century Irish novelists, and the stage Irish- 
man not only existed, but existed in large quantities. 
Englishmen, a hundred years ago, used to drink and sing 
more than they do to-day ; but they did not drink and 
sing like Irishmen. One would not go bail for all Sir Jonah's 
stories ; but if he was a picturesque liar, he was so much 
the more a stage Irishman himself. His memoirs deal, to 
sonic extent, with important "affairs" of the day- the 
Union with England, the wars, the fall of Napoleon. But 
he writes of these with the same vivacity, discursiveness. 
and airy independence as he employs upon the nipre con- 
genial to]Mcs of divorce cases, duels, and junketings. He 
had liis principles ;- he adored liberty and hated democracy, 
lie said. But it was the. human, and particularly the human 
weakness that he was interested in ; and there is no blunter 
or more jaunty chronicler in English. 
«|l«^<>* * * • 
** Barrington's Irish gentry might have come straight out of 
Lover ; his servants are "preposterously loyal, and they do 
say "Arrah" and "By the hokey" ; and his pages ar<5 
crowded with inadder freaks than any noveUst ever dreamed 
of. He gets the atmosphere, no doubt a little ideahsed, at 
the very start : 
No gentleman of this degree ever distrainecl a tenant lor rent ; 
indeed, the parties appeared to be quite united and knit together. 
The greatest abhorrence, however, prevailed as to tithe-proctors, 
coupled with no great predilection for the clergy who employed 
them. . . . Every estated gentleman in the Queen's Couaty 
was honoured by the gout. I have since considered that its 
extraordinary prevalence was not difficult to be accounted for, 
by the disproportionate quantity of adid contained in their 
seductive beverage, called rum-shrub, which was then universally 
drunk in quantities nearly incredible, generally from supper- 
time till morning, by all country gentlemen, as they said, to 
keep down their claret. 
It is not long J)ef ore we come upon the first of his hundreds 
of fearful anecdotes. His grandmother, exasperated with a 
neighbour, Mr. Dennis Bodkin, said: "I wish the fellow's 
ears were cut off ! That might quiet him " : 
It passed over as usual : the subject was changed, and all went 
on comfortably till supper ; at which time, when everybody 
was in full glee, the old butler, Ned Regan, who had drunk 
enough, came in — joy was in his eye ; and, whispering some- 
thing to his mistress which she did not comprehend, he put a 
large snuff-box into her hand. Fancying it was some whim of 
her old domestic, she opened the box and shook out its contents 
— when, lo ! a considerable portionjof a pair of bloody ears 
dropped on the table ! 
After this, we are not surprised to hear of the baronet who 
dreamt that his wife was a "Papist rebel" and nearly 
strangled her in bed ; or of the young sportsmen who shut 
themselves up in a cottage for a week with a cow and infinite 
drink, pledged not to emerge until they had eaten the whole 
cow ; whilst pipers, a fiddler, and two couple of favourite 
hounds made music for the feast. Murders, elopements, 
spectres, and discussions on the decadence of a later age, 
pleasantly fill the interstices. "When," sighed Sir Jonah, 
"I compare the foregoing the habits of the present day 
..." Poor old man ! 
Among those vi-ho have put down their impressions of the 
war as they have seen it, Mr. Jeffery Farnol, in Some War 
Impressions, must hold a prominent place, for he, out of 
visits to the Flanders battle line, and to munition factories, 
has compiled a record which is something more than a cata- 
logue — it is alive, which is more than can be said of a good 
many books of this kind. This little volume (Sampson Low, 
is.6d.) takes the rekder to the making of guns, to battle cruisers, 
into a training camp, and out to the Ypres salient— and to 
other places and doings as well — and it shows that there is 
humour as well as tragedy in war and the things that are 
made for war purposes. We commend the book most heartily 
as a series of pictures of war. 
Czech Folk Tales, by Dr. Josef Baudis (Allen & Unwin, 4s. 6d. ) 
is a book that may be taken two ways. It may be handed to ' 
a Qhild as a volume of fairy stories, or it may be con- 
sidered as a serious contribution to the study of the Czech 
peoples, and wrangled over by the erudite who wish to decide 
whether the matter in "Nine at a Blow" was originally 
Czech, or whether it came from a more Western source. The 
main point of interest to the average grown-up is that these 
stories are very close parallels on the fairy tales of the brothers 
Grimm and Hans Andersen, and yet there are divergencies 
that mark them as designed" for a race of a different tempera- 
ment. In some of them is much beauty of imagery ; "Tlie 
Twelve Months," for instance, has" a charm equal to that in 
the story of Cinderella, and there are others in the volume 
that will bear comparison with the best of Hans Andersen's 
work. One thing is certain ; children will delight in this 
new book of fairy tales, and most grown-ups will_find in the 
book a new light on the Slavonic character. 
