IRELAND
120
IRELAND
England, tended also in some measure towards the up-
lifting of the enslaved and ilisfraneliised native Irish.
But Molyneux did not wield the pen of Swifl . He was
a thinker, not a stylist, a pliilosopher rather than a
writer. Swift was both. He who in Englaixl had lieeii
beyond all comparison the most powerful jidHtioal
pamphleteer of his day, the protagonist and mainstay
of his party, be-
came in Ireland
the determineil
supporter of the
civil rights of his
fell ow -country-
men and their out-
spoken champion
againstEnglish ag-
gression. His ser-
vices to his native
country rendered
his name endeared
to hundreds of
thousands of the
native Irish Cath-
olics, men whom
he himself looked
on, and quite truly,
as being powerless
in Ireland either
for good or evil,
merely " hewers of
Thomas D.^vis ^.^^ ^„^| drawers
of water ". Indeed the dean was, like all the other Prot- estant dignitaries of his day, the declared enemy, if not of the Irish race, at least of the Irish language,whichwas the only one used by the great maj ority of the native in- habitants. At one time he thought he had a scheme by which the Irish language "might easily be abol- ished and become a dead one in half an age, with little expense and less trouble". "It would be", he said again, "a noble achievement to abolish the Irish lan- guage in the kingdom", but whatever his scheme was, he did not further enlighten the public upon it and it died with him. One of his own most spirited poems, "O'Rorke's P>ast", is a translation from the Irish, perhaps the first of the kind ever made in Ire- land. He heard it sung at a banquet in the County Leitrim, and was so taken by the air that he asked for a translation and was told that Mac(!overn, the au- thor, could give it to him eitlier in Latin or in English. Several other poems of the dean's relate to his life in Ireland and his surroundings there.
It is because a certain percentage of Swift's writ- ings both in prose and verse are concerned with the people and conditions of Ireland, that he may be re- garded as the father of Anglo-Irish literature, a term which can properly be applied only to literature col- oured by or inspired by Ireland and Irish themes, written in the English language but by Irish-born people. If this definition of Anglo-Irish literature be correct it would exclude almost all Swift's predeces- sors and many of his successors also, for indifference to Ireland on the part of Irish writers of English did notby any means end with Swift. With thccif;htci'Mth century it becomes increasingly diflieult to place Irish- born writers, for an ever-growing nuinljer belong, like Swift, to both countries. It is hard to sec how l)y any stretch of imagination Laureiiee Sterne, the author of "Tristram Shandv". though liorn and partly educated in Irelanil, could l)c i-.illed an .\nglo-lrish writer. Ire- land, as the I'.salmist says, was not in all his thoughts. The .same is true of Sir Philip Francis, the rejjuted author of the " Letters of Junius". Even our lieioved Coldsmith (1728-1774), typical and altogether de- lightful Irishman though he was, cannot properly be termed an Anglo-Irish poet. His "Vicar of Wake- field" struck a new note in English literature and even profoundly afTected the rising genius of (ioethe, but
neither it nor his plays nor his poetry concerned them-
selves even indirectly with his native country'. What
is true of (ioldsmifh is true to some extent even of
Richard Brinsli'v Sheridan (1751-1816), who was of
pure Milesian descent, and whose nature like that of
( Jdldsniith was Irish in the extreme. Bishop Berkeley
(l(i.S4-17.):!), on the other hand, after whom the State
University of California is named, is really an Irish
writer. His wonderful " Queries " are almost as perti-
nent to the case of Ireland to-day as they were eight
score years ago. Edmund Burke (1730-1797), the
profoundest and perhaps the noblest political thinker
that the British Isles ever produced, while he was
never for a moment forgetful of the country of his
birth, yet belongs for the most part, as far as his writ-
ings go, to England and English politics.
It is apparent from what we have written that Ire- land gave to England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries some of its most distinguished authors, that these authors, though born in Ireland and brought up amidst Irish surroundings, were mostly of English de- scent, and turned naturally for a public to the Eng- land of their fathers, whose language they spoke and wrote. It is also evident that, as time went on, an ever-increasing number of Irish Gaels (still unemanci- pated and denied education in their own language) joined the ranks of those English writers who looked to an English and not to an Irish public. It is only within the nineteenth century, however, that we get a vigorous and thriving Anglo-Irish literature, inspired wholly by Irish themes and written mainly for the Irish people themselves. The foremost of these new Anglo-Irish writers were, in prose. Miss Edgeworth and, in poetry, Thomas Moore.
Maria Edgeworth (1767-1S49), the creator of the Anglo-Irish novel, was the scion of a good family, some of whose members belonged to the Catholic and some to the Protestant religion. She herself belonged to the latter, but it was a relative of hers (see Edgeworth, Henry Essex) who attended the unfortunate Louis XVI to the scaffold. She was gifted with a mind as singularly open and unprejudiced as it was acute and observant. To this she united an admirable style, clear and pungent, and a dramatic power of present- ment which rarely failed her. She never looked upon herself as a writer with a mission, but undoubtedly she was not with- out a certain di- dactic sense which impelled her to point out to Irish- men in her novels, some of the absur- dities and faults of which they were guilty. Her "Castle Rack- rent", the story of the downfall through its own reckless squan- dering of a groat Irish family, as told through the mouth of an an- cient servitor of their house, is a tale of very great power. In her novel the " Absentee" she attacks, and with equal force though in a different vein, another side of the same social evil whose effects she had portrayed .so powerfully in "Castle Rackrent". Following ,Mack- lin (really McLaughlin) in his )ilay of "The True-Born Irishm.an" produced in 17(i.'l, she holds up to merciless ridicule (he Irish land-owners who deserted their own estates to try to cut a ligure in London, and there coni- ])ete with men who were at once much wealthier than
