IRELAND
128
IRELAND
Samuel Lover (1797-1868), on the other hand, and
John Banim (1798-1844), were the noveUsts of the
bourgeois class, and Charles Lever (1797-1868) and
perhaps W. H. Maxwell, of the rollicking, sporting,
jovial gentry, whose day of doom was even then ap-
proaching, though they knew it not. The gentle and
retiring Gerald Griffin, a poet also, gave Ireland at
least one novel of supreme excellence in the "Colleen
Bawn ", and Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-187.3) left behind
him some very weird stories, the excellent ballad
"Shamus O'Brien", and a capital novel of eighteenth
century life in Ireland, "The House by the Church-
yard". On the whole it may be said of the Young
Ireland movement that it, more than any other move-
ment either before or after it, worked by and through
letters; but strong political passions do not make for
a true and abiding literature; and the vigorous ballads
and political verses of Davis, Gavan Duffy (cj. v.), and
D'.A.rcy McCiee and their group seem to us to-day to
coiitiiiii but little iiriL.'itiality. After the great famine,
and the dispersion
of the Young Irish
group, Ireland lay
exhausted and
listless until the
Fenian movement
stirred her into ac-
tivity once more,
in the sixties. But
this movement
[.T.ssed off without
"ny great influ-
ence upon litera-
ture. Charles
Ivickham whose
[Teasant ballads
are admirable and
whose novel of
" Knocknagow " is
still widely read,
was almost the
only literary Fe-
nian of any note.
Then came the Land War and the Parnell movement,
but it too produced no literary output of any conse-
quence. The ballads and poems of Timothy D. Sulli-
van are probably the most popular and enduring of
these wTitings.
Tlirough all these periods of storm and stress, but almost wholly untouched by them so far as their art went, lived Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-1886), the first and greatest poet to draw extensive inspiration from Ireland's Gaelic past, William Allingham (1824-1889), a graceful singer of the fairies, and Aubrey De Vere (1814-19U2), the friend of Teimyson, and at once the most productive and the most essentially Catholic poet ever born in Ireland. Of these names Ferguson's is the greatest. A scholar, an antiquary, and a success- ful man of the world he gave Ireland her best epic poems ill his "('onary" and his "Congal", while his translations from the Irish language have seldom been excelled. Dowden characterizes him as " the only epic poet of the Victorian age", and Stopford Brooke as " the first and perhaps the best of all who have striven to bring into recognition, light, and beauty the Ancient iSagas and tales of Ireland".
Taking as a whole tlu- popular English poetry of Ireland, as produced from the close of the eighteenth till the lust dcnuleof the nineteenth century, we find it replete with notes and tliemes that would be practi- cally unrepresented in iOiiglish literature were it not for Ireland. Through a vast proportion (jf this poetrv flame the lightnings of rebellion. To this is frequently joined a devoted Catholicism; for tlumgh the worst of the .'Vscendancy was over, and the bhjcjd-houtuls were no longer taught, in the phrase of Thomas Davis, "alike to run upon the scent of wolf raid friar", still
CiERALD OltlFFl
the memory of those days remained, and continued to
colour men's passions and their poetry. Almost all of
it is shot tlirough with insistent national aspirations.
Then we have the poetry of e.xile, which fills so dread-
ful a space in every Irish anthology, the wail of the
emigrant, the cry of the coffin ship, the poetry of
misery — the misery not of units but of a whole coun-
try — for as Stopford Brooke has well put it, " Ireland
has added to English literature this poetry of the
Sword, the Famine anil the pestilence " (preface to the
"Treasury of Irish Poetry").
The early English verses of the Irish peasant him- self, as distinguished from the poets of education, were made upon the models of his native songs, and con- sisted principally of word-rhyming. Unhappily no collection has been made of these pieces which are of great, interest, for their manner rather than for their matter.
The last decade of the nineteenth century ushered in a fresh eia for English-Irish poetry. A new band of poets made their appearance who sacrificed less to passion and more to craftsmanship. The Gaelic movement, unlike the upheavals that went before it, has created an atmosphere which is more favourable to poetry than the reverse, and many of these poets have written under its influence. Others of them, however, as Stopford Brooke writes in the preface to his and RoUeston's anthology, "have been so deeply in- fluenced by Wordsworth, Keats, and in part by Shel- ley, that even when they write on Irish subjects the airs of England breathe and the waters of England rip- ple in their poetry ". Of all these new writers there is an almost universal consensus of opinion that the greatest is William Butler Yeats. He has in his art applied the most refined technique to a subject-matter drawn alternately from things symbolic and mystic, or from nature in its simplest moods, or again from the old Irish sagas and folklore, which he visualizes from his own standpoint. Mysticism is also the prevailing note of George Russell ("A. E."), painter, poet, and editor. On the other hand religion and simple faith are the distinguishing characteristics of Katherine Tynan Ilinkson. Ardent love of country and depth of feeling mark the works of Anna MacManus (" Ethna Carbery"). Almost all the poets of the last fifteen years draw their inspiration more or less from Ireland and things Gaelic.
The greatest Irish historian of the last half century has been beyond all question W. E. Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903). His earliest writings were colom'ed by a strong nationalism; this, however, gradually de- parted from him. Of the seventeen volumes of his "History of England" in the eighteenth century, five are given up to the history of Irelantl during the same period, and these are written with an admirable im- partiality which makes them a valuable and necessary antidote to the biassed pictures of Froude. After Lecky's works .Mexaiuler Ridley's (1S30-1S83) "Lec- tures on Irish History" present us with what are probably the soundest and most philosophic studies that have appeared on this subject. Another book which has produced a deep effect upon the country and upon the current of historic thought has been Alice Stopford Green's "Making of Ireland and its Undoing" which appeared in 1908. A. M. Sullivan's " Story of Ireland " and P. W. Joyce's " Social History of Ireland " arc two popular and useful works.
We must now turn to Anglo-Irish drama. The Irish have always been a dramatic race, and also a race of born actors. Beginning with Lodowick Barry, an Irishman who.'ie play of "Ham Alley" was actually written during Shakespeare's life, Ireland has given to England an entirely disproportionate number of her best dramatists and actors. It is necessary only to mention the names of Southern, .Macklin, Farquhar, Steele, Goldsmith, Sheridan. O'Keefe, Kenney — and so on through Sheridan Knowles, Dion Boucicault
