Irish life in Irish fiction

Preface

No attempt has, I believe, been made before to bring into a single survey the Irish novelists of the first half of the nineteenth century and their work. This book aims to give — between a few introductory remarks upon Irish society and a literary estimate — a sketch of the vista of Irish life opened by the novelists, and, in doing this, to consider their novels most carefully where they seem, in one way or another, representative of national life and character. The value of the fiction of the period before the great famine is on the whole historical in the larger sense; not artistic. It takes on significance chiefly as a remaking of Irish life, which, by virtue of such artistic qualities as it possesses, does what history proper can hardly do, — creates the illusion of the life of the past. In the novels may be seen just how the racial antipathies, the religious antagonisms, the sleepless consciousness of past wrongs, and, in short, all the discords that broke harshly upon the everyday intercourse of man and man, found expression.

PREFACE

I am glad of this opportunity of thanking Mr. William Butler Yeats for the criticisms which he has contributed to the magazines or prefixed to the anthologies he has edited. They have been directly helpful to me because of their unfailing sympathy, their knowledge, and their correct perspective, which I have not found combined in the criticism of a slightly earlier day upon the same or kindred subjects. I wish also to thank my friend, Mr. Lewis Nathaniel Chase, for his kind help. Finally, I must express my indebtedness to Professor George Edward Woodberry for the stimulus of his instruction in the years of undergraduate and graduate work, and in particular for the criticism and suggestion that have been invaluable to me in writing this book.

The bibliography at the end of this volume may be useful to any who wish to acquaint themselves with the Irish fiction of the period here considered. Some authors and a number of novels that did not seem to call for attention in the text are included in the bibliography, together with a list of biographical and other works that have been found especially helpful.

H. S. K.

Columbia University, September, 1903.

Chapter I

Irish society as it was between the independence of the Irish Parliament and the Union, 1782-1800 — the heart of the period in which the Irish novelists of the first half of the nineteenth century like best to lay the scenes of their stories — was everywhere stamped with the impress of historical events and political conditions that produced distinctive social types and a most curious set of manners. The nation was divided into two great classes, one chiefly a Protestant nobility and gentry professing the religion of the Established Church, the other chiefly a Catholic peasantry. Among the nobility and gentry there was a scattering of Catholic families. Though the great body of

B 1 the peasantry was Catholic, there was in the North of Ireland a large population of Protestant, mainly Presbyterian, peasants. The middle class was small and unimportant.

The Protestant nobility and gentry were the monopolists of every kind of power and privilege and the possessors of most of the wealth of the country. Many of them, the descendants of the English conquerors, still looked upon themselves as mere settlers, and disclaimed the name of Irishman. They were not Irish in spirit, and prided themselves upon their English extraction. Growing up under the conditions of Ascendency, they of course bore the marks of it upon them. They were unique both in the combination of qualities included in their make-up and in the degree to which certain of these qualities were developed. They had the frankness and high spirit of an aristocracy, but lacked the sense of responsibility that generally goes with power. From his earliest appearance in history the Celtic Irishman was preeminently hospitable and convivial ; and the Saxons caught these contagious qualities as soon as they set foot upon Irish soil, and practised them to a fault. These gentry, as was natural to men in whose favor the laws were made and against whom they were scarcely operative, were a lawless class, overbearing, unused to contradiction in their domains at home and impatient of it abroad. Many of them, new to the duties and responsibilities of landed proprietors, which were most trying in Ireland even to the patient and experienced, came by royal grant suddenly to great estates. Sudden accession to great possessions could not fail to stimulate and give play to all the tendencies to recklessness and extravagance so marked in the Irish upper classes. As masters, though often indulgent, they were autocratic, irresponsible, reckless, and violent, ruling their estates literally as despots, binding and loosing as they chose. Eminent examples of the type just described were not wanting. A personal acquaintance with a distinguished member of the class — Mr. Beauchamp Bagenal, of Dunleckny, County Carlow — will be more to the purpose than an enumeration of the traits of the gentry. Mr. Bagenal is described with comic gusto in the pages of Froude, and in Mr. Daunt's Eighty-five Tears of Irish History, Mr. Daunt will present him : —

" Of manners elegant, fascinating, polished by extensive intercourse with the great world, of princely income, and of boundless hospitality, Mr. Bagenal possessed all the qualities and attributes calculated to procure him popularity with every class. A terrestrial paradise was Dunleckny for all lovers of good wine, good horses, good dogs, and good society. His stud was magnificent, and he had a large number of capital hunters at the service of visitors who were not provided with steeds of their own. He derived great delight from encouraging the young men who frequented his house to hunt, drink, and solve points of honor at twelve paces.

"Enthroned at Dunleckny, he gathered around him a host of spirits congenial to his own. He had a tender affection for pistols, a brace of which implements, loaded, were often placed before him on the dinner table. After dinner the claret was produced in an unbroached cask ; Bagenal's practice was to broach the cask with a bullet from one of his pistols, whilst he kept the other pistol in terrorem for any of the convives who should fail in doing ample justice to the wine.

" Nothing could be more impressive than the bland, fatherly, affectionate air with which the old gentleman used to impart to his junior guests the results of his own experience, and the moral lessons which should regulate their conduct through life.

"'In truth, my young friends, it behooves a youth entering the world to make a character for himself. Respect will only be accorded to character. A young man must show his proofs. I am not a quarrelsome person — I never was — I hate your mere duellist ; but experience of the world tells me there are knotty points of which the only solution is the saw handle. Rest upon your pistols, my boys ! Occasions will arise in which the use of them is absolutely indispensable to character. A man, I repeat, must show his proofs — in this world courage will never be taken upon trust. I protest to Heaven, my dear young friends, I am advising you exactly as I should advise my own son.'

" And having thus discharged his conscience, he would look blandly around with the most patriarchal air imaginable.

"His practice accorded with his precept. Some pigs, the property of a gentleman who had recently settled near Dunleckny, strayed into an enclosure of King Bagenal's, and rooted up a flower knot. The incensed monarch ordered that the porcine trespassers should be shorn of their ears and tails ; and he transmitted the severed appendages to the owner of the swine with an intimation that he, too, deserved to have his ears docked ; and that only he had not got a tail, he (^King Bagenal) would sever the caudal member from his dorsal extremity. ' Now,' quoth Bagenal, ' if he's a gentleman, he must burn powder after such a message as that.'

" Nor was he disappointed. A challenge was given by the owner of the pigs. Bagenal accepted it with alacrity, only stipulating that as he was old and feeble, being then in his seventyninth year, he should fight sitting in his armchair ; and that as his infirmities prevented early rising, the meeting should take place in the afternoon. ' Time was,' said the old man, with a sigh, ' that I would have risen before daylight to fight at sunrise, but we cannot do these things at seventy-eight. Well, Heaven's will be done.'

"They fought at twelve paces. Bagenal wounded his antagonist severely ; the arm of the chair in which he sat was shattered, but he remained unhurt ; and he ended the day with a glorious carouse, tapping the claret, we may presume, as usual, by firing a pistol at the cask.

"The traditions of Dunleckny allege that when Bagenal, in the course of his tour through Europe, visited the petty court of Mecklenburg Strelitz, the Grand Duke, charmed with his magnificence and the reputation of his wealth, made him an offer of the hand of the fair Charlotte, who, being politely rejected by King Bagenal, was afterwards accepted by King George III." ^

The great factor in shaping the gentlemen of the type described was the code of penal laws against the Catholics which began under King William and assumed its worst features under Queen Anne. At the end of the seventeenth century the struggle between the Protestants

1 Daunt's Eighty-five Years of Irish History, pp. 5-7.

and the Catholics for the control of the country ended in a victory for the Protestants. After the victory the Parliament and the power of the country were in Protestant hands. The penal code passed by the Parliament aimed to root the old Irish from the soil, to disinherit them and transfer the ownership of the land from the Irish Catholics to the Protestants, and further to stamp out the Roman Catholic faith in Ireland, if possible, or in any case to rob it of even a shadow of political importance. The scope of this code, its petty tyranny, and how it galled the Catholics whom it was intended to degrade, will become clear from a brief summary of its main provisions : —

"Under these laws Catholics could not sit in the Irish Parliament or vote members to it. They were excluded from the army, and navy, the magistracy, and the bar, the bench, the grand juries, and the vestries. They could not be sheriffs, or soldiers, game-keepers, or constables. They were forbidden to own any arms, and any two justices or sheriffs might at any time issue a search warrant for arms. The discovery of any kind of weapons rendered their Catholic owner liable to fines, imprisonment, whipping, or the pillory. They could not own a horse worth more than five pounds, and any

Protestant tendering that sum could compel his Catholic neighbor to sell his steed. No education whatever was allowed to Catholics. A Catholic could not go to the university ; he might not be the guardian of a child ; he might not keep a school, or send his children to be educated abroad, or teach himself. No Catholic might buy land, or inherit or receive it as a gift from Protestants, or hold life annuities, or lease it for more than thirty-one years, or any lease on such terms as that the profits of the land exceeded one-third the value of the land. If a Catholic purchased an estate, the first Protestant who informed against him became its proprietor. The eldest son of a Catholic, upon apostatizing, became heir at law to the whole estate of his father, and reduced his father to the position of a mere life tenant. A wife who apostatized was immediately freed from her husband's control, and assigned a certain portion of her husband's property. Any child, however young, who professed to be a Protestant, was at once taken from his father's care, and a certain proportion of his father's property assigned to him. In fact, the Catholics were excluded, in their own country, from every profession, from every Government office from the highest to the lowest, and from almost every duty or privilege of a citizen." ^

These penal laws, which favored the gay, reckless, sporting Protestant gentry, brought

1 Justin McCarthy's Outline of Irish History, p. 61.

the Catholic gentlemen face to face with almost intolerable conditions. The flower of them left a country where a spirit of selfish monopoly ruled, to seek their fortunes in other lands. To those of them who remained in Ireland two courses were open, — to turn Protestant and step at once into the privileged class, or to acquiesce in the humiliating and unmanning conditions imposed by the code. Many of the Catholic gentlemen chose the former course and conformed to the Established Church. Those who chose the other alternative, and held fast to the old faith, often sank down through enforced apathy and ignorance to a condition not far above the peasantry about them.

The Catholic gentry suffered grievously from the code, but it was the peasantry most especially who bore its brand. Their ignorance, their lawlessness, their fervent devotion to their faith, were in large measure due to it.

The social life of Ireland centred in Dublin, and the social life of the smaller towns was cut as closely as possible after the same pattern. The years from 1782 to the end of the century were the palmy days of the Ireland of the Ascendency, the days of drink and debt, improvidence and extravagance. The Irish capital was tumultuous. Street brawls growing out of religious feuds were of frequent occurrence, some, by the number of combatants and their systematic conduct, more like pitched battles. In 1790 one of these conflicts occurred in which above a thousand men were engaged, a society of Protestant weavers and tailors pitting themselves against a band of Catholic butchers who advanced under a banner inscribed "V. B. Mary.''^ The watchmen of the city gave up all hope of controlling the disturbance, and retired to a point of vantage, well out of reach of stick and stone, to enjoy the spectacle. The disturbance was formally reported to the Mayor, but he declined to interfere, on the ground that " it was as much as his life was worth to go among them." A curious fact in connection with these rows was the participation in them of the young aristocrats — the bucks and beaux of Dublin, and the students of Trinity College, who could have no other motive than a liking for the sport on its own account. The Trinity boys, with their strong esprit de corps^ were

1 [J. E. Walsh's] Ireland Sixty Years A(/o, Chap. I, contains an account of these street fights.

always a valuable acquisition to a faction, and with the great keys of their rooms slung in the tails of their gowns did splendid execution. A number of clubs, resembling the London Mohocks, contributed to the disorders of the city. Wild young fellows, often of the better sort, made up the membership. Notable among these were the Hell-Fire Club (perhaps the most notorious of all), the Hawkabites, Cherokees. Sweaters, Pinkindindies, and Chalkers. Each had its peculiar excuse for existing, and all had in common the purpose " to be sociable together," and, after dining, to pour tumultuously into the midnight streets, " flown with insolence and wine," and bent upon breaking the King's peace in one way or another. The specialty of the Sweaters was midnight raids upon the homes of Catholics on the pretext of searching for arms. The search for arms was the pretext ; the real motive the pleasure of terrorizing the household. The Chalkers and Pinkindindies made a specialty, as an act passed against the former in 1773 recites, of mangling others, merely with the wanton and wicked intent to disable and disfigure them." Their operations were by way of rebuke to dunning or procrastinating tradesmen and the like, or to a barber, perhaps, who disappoinfed one of the members when his services were the condition of attendance at a dinner or ball. The Pinkindindies were ingeniously humane. Shrinking from inflicting upon their victims the slightest serious injury, they cut off the tips of the scabbards of their swords, and were thus enabled to prick them full of holes without fear of going beyond the bounds of a good practical joke.

The Dublin society of rank and fashion, the most brilliant that Ireland had to offer, was in full bloom just after the Irish Parliament regained its freedom. The removal at this time of commercial restrictions gave an impulse to prosperity, and better times seemed to be dawning. The Parliament met yearly, and for each season the members took up their abode in Dublin, composing a leading class. Two hundred and fifty of the peerage and three hundred of the House of Commons, with their families and connections, annually poured into town from their country seats. Among the peerage there was much wealth, taste, and cultivation, and the polish and elegance that travel and a wide intercourse with society in England and on the continent produced. A large proportion of the House of Commons were the true old gentry of the land, of the most hearty and festive type, overflowing with family pride, sociability, and a hospitality whose manifestations prudence was never permitted to check. In the wake of the gentry came many of the country class, with all their provincial and personal oddities and eccentricities, to give society a touch of distinctly local color.

The eighteenth century was everywhere a century of violence and hard drinking. In Dublin the violence found an outlet in disturbances like those alluded to above, in which the lower classes and some wild fellows of the better sort participated. But for the nobility and gentry duelling was the mania, and it was indulged in to an extent almost beyond belief. Sir Jonah Barrington in his Personal Sketches vouches for two hundred and twenty-seven memorable and official duels fought in his time, and the author of Ireland Sixty Years Ago states that three hundred duels by men of note were fought between 1780-1800. Even the gravest persons settled their differences in single combat. Sir Jonah's remark, "I think I may challenge any country in Europe to show such an assemblage of gallant judicial and official antagonists at fire and sword," ^ cannot be gainsaid. Scarcely a man on the bench or at the bar could be found who had not fought at least one duel. 2

In 1777 a lack of uniformity in the conduct of affairs of honor was universally recognized by the gentlemen of Ireland as a crying evil no

1 Barrington's Personal Sketches^ Vol. I, p. 270.

2 An extract from a long list of duels given by Sir Jonah indicates the universality of the custom among all classes : —

*'The Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Earl Clare, fought the Master of the Rolls, Curran.

"The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Right Honorable Isaac Corry, fought the Right Honorable Henry Grattan, a Privy Counsellor.

"The Chief Justice C. P., Lord Norbury, fought Fireeater Fitzgerald, and two other gentlemen, and frightened Napper Tandy and several besides : only one hit.

"The provost of the University of Dublin, the Rt. Hon. Hely Hutchinson, fought Mr. Doyle, master in Chanceiy, — and some others.

"Counsellor O'Connell fought the champion of the Corporation, Captain d' Est^rre : fatal to the champion of Protestant Ascendency." — Ibid,^ Vol. I, pp. 271-272.

longer to be endured. A reform was consequently instituted. Delegates from different quarters met at Clonmel and drew up a code called the " Thirty-six Commandments," to hold good throughout the country. The heading of this code ran : —

" The practice of duelling and points of honor settled at Clonmel summer assizes, 1777, by the gentlemen delegates of Tipperary, Galway, Mayo, Sligo, and Roscommon, and prescribed for general adoption throughout Ireland."

In his chapter on the " Fire-Eaters," Barrington declares that a duel was considered a necessary part of a young man's education, but in no way a ground of future animosity toward his opponent. "No young fellow," he says, " could finish his education till he had exchanged shots with some of his acquaintances. The first two questions always asked as to a young man's respectability and qualifications, when he proposed for a lady- wife, were, ' What family is he of ? ' — 'Did he ever blaze ? i •

The duelling mania began to die out toward 1800, though long after that date duels were not of very rare occurrence. It was well on in 1 Barrington's Personal Sketches, Vol. I, p. 273.

the nineteenth century that Daniel O'Connell was challenged by Disraeli for having referred to him in a speech to his constituents as "a lineal descendant of the impenitent thief." Charles Lever, one of the Irish novelists, called out S. C. Hall, the husband of another Irish novelist, travelling all the way to London for an exchange of shots, though for some reason or other the meeting never took place ; and the duel of another Irish writer, Maginn, with Grantley Berkeley is a well-known incident of literary history. Duelling has had its day, and is now in disfavor ; but the men of a century ago dwelt on its advantages : bad blood 'was got rid of; it wiped out old scores ; and it put a stop to the everlasting lawsuits in which Irishmen seemed to be always involved, for the " trigger process " set aside the legal.

The gentry of Ireland were notoriously hard drinkers, and on this score surpassed those of the same class in England. Englishmen were astonished at their capacity and endurance. An attorney named John Howard, writing in 1776 on the evils of his profession and the need of reform, said it was a common remark of

English men of business who visited Dublin that they could not conceive how men in this kingdom transacted any business, for they seemed to do nothing but walk the courts the whole morning, and devote the whole evening to the bottle." ^ Habits of intemperate drinking were very general in the last half of the eighteenth century, and, as in the case of duelling, not even the gravest were exempt from this indulgence. "The great end and aim of life in the upper classes," says the author of Ireland Sixty Years Ago^ . . seemed to be convivial indulgence to excess. The rule of drinking was that no man was allowed to leave the company until he was unable to stands and then he might depart if he could walk." The writers of memoirs have thought it worth while to chronicle many of the customs that prevailed among the convivialists of the day. Under the head of "Customs and Precepts of Drinking," the writer quoted above mentions the following among many others. Round-bottomed decanters, which could not stand of themselves but must pass from hand to hand, were used to prevent the stopping of the bottle. The stems 1 Ireland Sixty Years Ago, p. 68.

c of glasses were knocked off with a knife so that the glasses must be emptied before they could be set upon the table again. Sir Jonah Barrington tells a tale of a host who was entertaining a number of gentlemen at dinner. When the viands were removed, and the gentlemen sat over their wine, he arose, locked the door, tossed the key out of the window to a servant, and announced that the doors would be opened at the close of the festivities. Not the least ingenious of the devices contrived by the thirsty souls to spur on lukewarm devotees to the bottle and prevent "stealing away" was that of a host who possessed a mechanical sideboard that of its own volition took up a position across the door after the feast was well under way. But these efforts, to judge from innumerable anecdotes in the novels, and in the memoirs of the time illustrating the unmeasured devotion to the bottle, were altogether works of supererogation.

T. C. Grattan, in Highways and Byways^ gives a picturesque illustration of the convivial customs of the time in an anecdote of the days of his youth. He was the guest of a country squire at dinner. The entertainment went on for hours in the usual hilarious waj^, when suddenly the host called for silence ; the servant was summoned, and ordered to open the shutters, whereupon the bright light of a sunny morning poured in upon the revel. Through the window were seen the huntsmen, the hounds, and the horses ready saddled, and those who were able were invited to step from the table into the saddle, and powdered off across country after the dogs.

Another striking feature of this society, as it was in fact of every social class, was the passion for giving a touch of absurdity to every transaction of life. It was carried into even life-and-death matters — duelling, for instance. Thus Fitzpatrick, in his Life of Lever ^ tells of a duel fought indoors across the table of the dinner-room, in which the seconds, lightly regarding their responsibilities, charged the pistols with squibs of powder and red-currant jelly, and then stood by to enjoy the astonishment of the principals, as each stared aghast at the apparently frightful damage done the countenance of his opponent. It must have been with something of a sense of comic incongruity too, that politicians, judges on the bench, and ministers of state emulated the performances of the hilt-and-muzzle boys, until it was said of some that they "shot into preferment." The proceedings of the Hell-Fire Club, the Pinkindindies, and like associations had always some touch of savage humor. In fact, it was certainly a whim of the day, or a national trait perhaps, to turn the tragic to grotesque and the serious to burlesque.

The leaders of fashion in the days of 1782 kept up princely establishments and gave entertainments on the grand scale. The court of the viceroy set the pace, and the rest were not slow to follow. The seeds of extravagance had been sown in the past by the social conditions under which many of the nobility and gentry grew up, and they flowered at this time. All seemed running a wild race to ruin, the effects of which were felt far into the following century. Coaches-and-six and coaches-andfour were plenty. These, with long rows of carriages and horsemen, made gay the fashionable drives of Dublin. But the pace was too rapid to be sustained. The Rebellion and the Union brought the revel abruptly to an end. The crash came with the Union. Many of the gentry were embarrassed; many were utterly ruined. An exodus took place to the country or to the continent to recuperate from the effects of this reckless profusion and extravagance.

The contrast between the life of these wits, duellists, and convivialists, which centred in Dublin, and the life of the peasantry in the country at large was even stronger than the usual contrast between the life of gayety, wealth, and fashion and the life of the sons of the soil. The eighteenth century was for the peasant, crushed into quiescent misery by the code, a time of wretched discontent. The legal tyranny under which the peasants groaned left them, as Swift bitterly said, "hewers of wood and drawers of water to their conquerors." They were mainly cotters, sunk in extreme poverty. Cold and famine killed them off by thousands.

It has been said that the two aims of the penal laws were to transfer the land of Ireland from Catholic to Protestant hands and to extirpate Romanism. In the first aim they were eminently successful; in the second they failed completely. The measure of their success in eradicating Catholicism lay in the apostasy of numbers of Catholic gentlemen to save their estates. On the whole, persecution had its usual effect. It only served to deepen faith, to crown it with a halo, and to make it dear and sacred to the mass of people. Throughout a long ordeal of religious persecution the majority of the peasantry remained faithful to their creed, and emerged from the trial penetrated with an attachment to it, unsurpassed, if not unequalled, elsewhere.

It was natural that the peasant should hate the law which to him was the maleficent power that persecuted his creed. From this feeling, in part, arose the lawlessness that characterized peasant life. This took form chiefly in the organized operations of the secret societies which waged desperate war especially upon the intolerable land system and upon the collection of tithes. They undertook to regulate the whole relation of landlord and tenant, and to enforce a system of law different from the law of the land. The outrages of the societies were systematically planned and successfully directed to the enforcement of their code. Any who infringed this code or refused to obey the demands of the societies were punished with great atrocity. Such offenders were often mutilated or murdered; or their houses were burned, their crops destroyed, or their cattle houghed or killed. The operations of the societies were at times so extensive and successful as to reduce large districts of the country almost to anarchy.

The peasantry were as fond of breaking the King's peace as the gentry. Fighting was a common amusement. The peasants took to the cudgel as the upper classes took to the pistol. The national pugnacity found an outlet in the party and faction fights in which large bodies of men were often engaged. In the so-called Battle of the Diamond, fought in 1795, several hundred men participated, and between twenty and thirty of the combatants were left dead upon the field. In the party fights Protestants ranged themselves against Catholics. The faction fights were not religious quarrels, but grew out of private feuds which often divided the fighting men of a village into hostile ranks.