IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES ALFRED PERCEVAL GRAVES, M.A. (CANWR CILARN") President oj tke Irak Literary Society of London, Honorary Member of the National Literary Society, and one oj tke Fonder* and Member of Executive of the Folk Song Socirty, and of tht Iritk and Welsh Folk Song Societies NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS M CM XIV DEDICA TION These Essays on Irish and Celtic Poetry and Music, and these Reminiscences and Studies of the writings of Nineteenth Century Irish Poets and Musicians Mangan and Bunting, known to, and Petrie, beloved of my father -Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Sir Samuel Ferguson and William Allingham, his friends and mine from my boyhood to middle manhood of Tennyson, to whom my uncle, Robert Perceval Graves, had been host at Windcrmert, and to whom I was guest at Kilkee and, lastly, of Patrick Weston Joyce, for forty years my generous musical and literary ally I dedicate to my good friends and colleagues, " those kindred Irish spirits banded together to tend the flame of national pride in the heart of London" the members of the Irish Literary Society. A. P. G. Julyy., 1913. 2060711 PREFACE THE Irish Literary and Musical Studies contained in this volume consist of revised versions of lectures delivered from time to time before the Irish Literary Society of London, the Royal Literary Society, the National Literary Society of Dublin, the National Eisteddfod at Carnarvon, the students of Alexandra College, Dublin, and the Belfast Philosophical Society ; also of revised versions of articles and reviews in The Contemporary Review ("Celtic Nature Poetry"), The Diiblin Review (" Early Irish Religious Poetry " and " The Preternatural in Early Irish Poetry"), TJie Cornhill Magazine (" Tennyson in Ireland " and " James Clarence Mangan "), The Spectator ("The English Spoken in Ireland," "The Religious Songs of Connacht," " An Irish Wonder Book " and " Edward Bunting "), and A Treasury of Irish Litei'ature in the English Tongue (" Sir Samuel Ferguson "), published by Smith, Elder and Co., to whose editors and publishers I gratefully acknowledge permission to republish them. My original verse translations from the Irish contained in the articles on " Celtic Nature Poetry," " Early Irish Religious Poetry," and "The Preternatural in Early Irish Poetry," and many others, by my own and other hands, will appear in an anthology of English verse renderings of Irish Poetry entitled Harpstrings of the Irish Gael, with some twenty illustrations in colour, Celtic capital letters, and a cover of Celtic design by George Morrow, to be published coincidently with this volume by the Devin-Adair Company of 437, Fifth Avenue, New York. ALFRED PERCEVAL GRAVES. ERINFA, HARLECH, N. WALES. July 31, 1913. CONTENTS PAGE TENNYSON IN IRELAND i THE ENGLISH SPOKEN IN IRELAND 12 JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN ....... 19 SIR SAMUEL FERGUSON 36 JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU . . . . . -Si WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 70 EARLY IRISH RELIGIOUS POETRY ..... 101 THE RELIGIOUS SONGS OF CONNACHT 122 CELTIC NATURE POETRY 128 THE PRETERNATURAL IN EARLY IRISH POETRY . . .143 DR. JOYCE'S IRISH WONDER BOOK 166 FOLK SONG 175 EDWARD BUNTING 191 GEORGE PETRIE AS AN ARTIST AND MAN OF LETTERS . 200 GEORGE PETRIE AS AN ANTIQUARY . . . . .214 GEORGE PETRIE AS A MUSICIAN AND AMONGST HIS FRIENDS 231 IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES TENNYSON IN IRELAND A REMINISCENCE IT was the summer of 1878. A gale from the south-west, after breaking suddenly over the iron-bound coast of Clare, and raging against it furiously for forty-eight hours, had just died away. Scarcely a breath of air was stirring, and the August sky was intensely blue. Yet the great Atlantic billows, gathering out of the sea distance at ever increasing intervals, still boomed and smoked against the cliffs the last sullen thunders of ocean's retreating insurgency. But the proverbial ill wind that had kept all but the most venturesome spirits close prisoners in the " lodges " of Kilkee had blown the storm-loving Tennyson over from Foynes, where he and his son Hallam were the guests of Lord and Lady Monteagle. So far back as September 1842 he had written to Aubrey de Vere from Killarney : " I have been to your Ballybunion Caves, but could not get into the finest on account of the weather." But in one of these caves, so his son now records, " he made the following lines, which occur in Merlin and Vivien : So dark a forethought rolled about his brain, As on a dull day in an ocean cave The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall In silence." 2 IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES In the year 1848 he had written to de Vere, " I hear that there are larger waves at Bude than on any other part of the British coast ; and I must go hither and be alone with God"; but his friend persuaded him to come to Ireland, where the waves are far higher and the cliffs often rise to 800 feet, and in one spot, Slieve League, to 2,000. On his way to Valencia he slept at Mount Trenchard, the residence of Lord Monteagle, and, de Vere continues, " I led him to the summit of Knock Patrick, the farthest spot in the south-west to which Ireland's apostle, patriarch, and patron advanced. ". . . The sunset was one of extraordinary but minatory beauty. It gave, I remember, a darksome glory to the vast and desolate expanse with all its creeks and inlets from the Shannon, lighted the green islands in the mouth of the Fergus, and fired the ruined castle of Shanid, a stronghold of the Desmonds. . . . " The western clouds hung low, a mass of crimson and gold ; while from the ledge of a nearer one, down plunged a glittering flood empurpled like wine. The scene was a thoroughly Irish one, and gave a stormy welcome to the Sassenach bard. The next morning he pursued his way alone to Valencia. He soon wrote that he had enjoyed it. He had found there the highest waves that Ireland knows, cliffs that at one spot rise to the height of 600 feet, tamarisks and fuchsias that no sea-winds can intimidate, and the old ' Knight of Kerry,' as chivalrous a representative of Desmond's great Norman House as it had ever put forth." And now, a generation afterwards, and having found his full fame in the interval, Tennyson was paying his third and last visit to Ireland, and again revisiting " Kilkee by the great deeps," for a letter from him to de Vere in October 1848 containing this phrase seems to show he had visited the spot in the previous summer, when the guest of his, brother poet at Curragh Chase. TENNYSON IN IRELAND 3 " I am glad," he writes, " that you have thought of me at Kilkee by the great deeps. The sea is my delight" The intelligence of Tennyson's arrival at Moore's Hotel had spread rapidly, and on the splendid forenoon in question it was very noticeable what a number of the Laureate's slim green volumes were in evidence on the terraces and up the cliff side in the hands which had been swinging a racquet in the fine weather of a few days before. "These Limerick girls," remarked a local wit, "are growing more fickle than ever. Yesterday they had lawn- tennis on. To-day they have Alfred Tennyson." Bathing had been out of the question for a couple of days, so it was with a keen sense of exhilaration that I, a visitor to Kilkee at the time, again found myself on the Duggena spring-board. I plunged, and was in mid career, when, rounding a reef corner, I all but knocked heads with another swimmer. " Beg your pardon, sir." " Not at all, sir ! but yes ! What ! You here ? Why, how long have you been in these parts ? " "About ten days, J. G. !" " Very odd, we've not met before, then ? " " Not at all. I've been purposely avoiding you." " That doesn't sound very friendly." " Perhaps not, but my intention was particularly so." " Explain ! " " Well, the fact is, I heard you were showing Tennyson the sights; and knowing how shy he is of strangers, I thought the most friendly thing I could do was to steer clear of your party." " My dear fellow, I'll make that all right." And he did within a few hours ; for that afternoon I got a note from him saying, " Tennyson hopes you will spend the evening with us. Don't bother about dressing. Come just as you are, if not exactly just as you were when last we met." 4 IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES The writer was my old friend John George Butcher, now a well-known figure at the English Bar and in the House of Commons. On the outbreak of the storm he and his two sisters had run over from Mount Trenchard, their brother-in-law Lord Monteagle's country seat, in company with Tennyson and his son Hallam, and I found this party awaiting me at Moore's Hotel. Tennyson received me, beaming, evidently thorougly amused at my marine encounter with Butcher that morning. He offered me a long pipe, pressed me into a chair at his right hand, and plunged into animated conversation. His personality more than satisfied me, though I had been led to anticipate much from Mrs. Cameron's and Rejlander's artistic photographs. " The large dark eyes, generally dreamy, but with an occasional gleam of imaginative alertness," as de Vere describes them, still varied between haunting softness and eager brightness ; " the great shock of rough dusky dark hair," that Carlyle wrote of in 1842, had been somewhat subdued, but far from subjugated by time; it revealed more of the poet's " high-built brow," but its raven hue was unimpaired. " The massive aquiline face " was still " most massive, yet most delicate," and still of a healthy bronze. His gestures were free and spontaneous, his voice full and musical. It was impossible to believe he was in his seventieth year. His accent and speech both surprised me. I was quite prepared for the fastidious articulation and premeditated hesitation in the choice of words to which so many distin- guished English University men are prone. There was a rich burr in his accent, Lincolnshire, I suppose, and a pungent directness in his utterance which were as refreshing as they were unlocked for. Then he evidently possessed the rare knack of getting the very best out of his fellow talkers at the same time that TENNYSON IN IRELAND 5 he gave them much more than he got for it. At this interval of time I cannot, of course, do more than record the general drift of our conversation and the opinions he expressed; his exact words have escaped me, except in an occasional instance. First we talked of the sea, and here he spoke notably. He said that a great storm, such as we had witnessed, was a wonderful and terrible sight of im- potent passion, and he quoted St. Jude's words, " Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame." But he had once seen roll in out of the Atlantic, suddenly, over a still sea and under a still sky, a succession of stupendous b.llows, earthquake waves perhaps, which completely engulfed the shore, and whose awful serenity impressed his imagination far more deeply than any tempest he had ever experienced. It is easy for all who have heard him thus discourse to believe, as we are now told by his son that he claimed a Norse ancestry, that he loved the sea for its own sake, and also because English heroism has ever been conspicuous on shipboard," and that he "gloried," therefore, in having made these lines in Boadicea: Fear not, isle of blowing woodland, isle of silvery parapets I Thine the liberty, thine the glory, thine the deeds to be celebrated Thine the myriad-rolling ocean, light and shadow illimitable ; and Roared as when the roaring breakers boom and blanch on the precipices. When thus talking of the storm to me he rolled out a line from Homer, and challenged Butcher, a fine Greek scholar, to say where it came from. I should imagine that it was ., hiding from the police) at the time of his family's residence in County Limerick, evidently suggested much of the devil- may-care character of Shamus O'Brien to Le Fanu. With a price upon his head, owing to his connection with agrarian outrages, Kirby could not resist the temptation of going to a hunt or a coursing match, narrowly escaping capture on some of these occasions. An informer, learning that Kirby would be at his mother's house one Sunday night, communicated the fact to Major Yokes, of Limerick, the most active magistrate in JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU 67 the south of Ireland, who had more than once been baffled in his efforts to capture the outlaw. Old Mrs. Kirby was in bed when the Major and two constables drew up to the door, but, fortunately, her daughter, Mary, had gone to a wake in the neighbourhood, and stayed out all night. Kirby, who was sitting by the fire, his pistols on a table beside him, sprang to his feet, and seizing them, cried, " At any rate, I'll have the life of one of them before I'm taken." " Whisht ! you fool," said his mother. " Here, be quick ! put on Mary's cap, take your pistols with you, jump into bed, turn your face to the wall, and lave the rest to me." He was scarcely in bed when there was a loud knocking at the door, which his mother, having lit a rush, opened as quickly as possible. In came Major Vokes and the constables. " Where is your son ? " said Vokes. " Plaze God, he's far enough from ye. It's welcome ye/ are this night," she said. " And thanks to the Lord it wasn't yesterday ye came, for it's me and Mary there that strove to make him stop the night wid us ; but, thank God, he was afraid." They searched the house, but did not like to disturb the young girl in bed, and finding nothing, went, sadly dis- appointed, back to Limerick. The news of Kirby's escape soon spread through the country. Vokes was much chaffed, but Kirby never slept another night in his mother's house. This incident, which is summarised from his brother's book, does not occur in Le Fanu's Shamus, but Mr. Jessop has seized the situation, and indeed improved upon it for his libretto of the opera of Shamus O'Brien by Sir Charles V. Stanford, which has been received with such pronounced popularity. It is not as easy to see how the song, I'm a yoting man that never yet was daunted, quoted by Mr. W. Le Fanu in his Irish Recollections, suggested to his brother the plot of Shamus O'Brien beyond that it describes, though incoherently enough, the doings of an outlaw, who breaks F 2 68 IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES gaol at Nenagh, and gets off scot-free after knocking down the sentry. Le Fanu's literary life may be divided into three distinct periods. During the first of these, and till his thirtieth year, he was an Irish ballad, song, and story writer, his first published story being the Adventures of Sir Robert Ardagh, which appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in 1838. In 1844 he was united to Miss Susan Bennett, the beautiful daughter of the late George Bennett, Q.C. From this time until her decease in 1858, he devoted his energies almost entirely to Press work, making, however, his first essays in novel writing during that period. The Cock and Anchor, a chronicle of old Dublin city, his first and, in the opinion of competent critics, one of the best of his novels, seeing the light about the year 1850. Torlogh O'Brien was its immediate successor. Their comparative want of success when first published, seems to have deterred Le Fanu from using his pen, except as a Press writer, until 1863, when the House by the Churchyard was published, and was soon followed by Uncle Silas, and other well- known novels. Finally, Le Fanu published in the pages of the Dublin University Magazine, Beatrice and The Legend of the Glaive, revised editions of which form the specially notable feature in the volume of his poems edited by me. Those who possessed the rare privilege of Le Fanu's friendship, and only they, can form any idea of the true character of the man ; for after the death of his wife, to whom he was most deeply devoted, he quite forsook general society, in which his fine features, distinguished bearing, and charm of conversation marked him out as the beau-ideal of an Irish wit and scholar of the old school. From this society he vanished so entirely, that Dublin, always ready with a nickname, dubbed him " The Invisible Prince," and, indeed, he was for long almost invisible, JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU 69 except to his family and most familiar friends, unless at odd hours of the evening, when he might occasionally be seen stealing, like the ghost of his former self, between his news- paper office and his home in Merrion Square. Sometimes, too, he was to be encountered in an old, out-of-the-way bookshop, poring over some rare black letter Astrology or Demonology. To one of these old bookshops he was at one time a pretty frequent visitor, and the bookseller relates how he used to come in and ask with his peculiarly pleasant voice and smile, " Any more ghost stories for me, Mr. ? " and how, on a fresh one being handed to him, he would seldom leave the shop until he had looked it through. This taste for the supernatural seems to have grown upon him after his wife's death, and influenced him so deeply that, had he not been possessed of a deal of shrewd common sense, there might have been danger of his embracing some of the visionary doctrines in which he was so learned. But no ! even Spiritualism, to which not a few of his brother novelists succumbed, whilst affording congenial material for our artist of the superhuman to work upon, did not escape his severest satire. Shortly after completing his last novel, strange to say, bearing the title Willing to Die, Le Fanu breathed his last at his home, No. 18, Merrion Square South, at the age of fifty-nine. " He was a man," writes the author of a brief memoir of him in the Dublin University Magazine, " who thought deeply, especially on religious subjects. To those who knew him he was very dear; they admired him for his learning, his sparkling wit and pleasant conversation, and loved him for his manly virtues, for his noble and generous qualities, his gentleness, and his loving, affectionate nature." And all who knew the man must feel how deeply deserved are these simple words of sincere regard for Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. 70 IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES WILLIAM ALLINGHAM DESCENDED from English forbears, the son of a banker of substance and ability and of a capable and charming mother of the well-know Crawford family, William Ailing- ham was born on March igth, 1824, at Ballyshannon. At an early age he was sent to Mr. Ray's school in his native town, and from his class-fellow and cousin, John Crawford, I have received these hitherto unpublished particulars of those school-days. Mr. Ray taught Latin, nothing more, and the general curriculum was evidently unattractive. For though the boy was a particularly bright and clever one and mastered his most difficult lessons with ease, the routine was so dull and irksome to him that while devoting just sufficient time to it to hold his own in class, he read widely and diligently on his own account. As a result he often caused surprise to his elders by the fixed opinions he held on subjects supposed to be above his years and the remarkably clear expression of them. Mentally much ahead of his compeers he did not associate much with them, but was never so happy as when surrounded by a crowd of boys younger than himself. For these he had a great attraction, and his power of amusing them was inexhaustible. Games of " follow the leader," including all sorts of difficult jumps and feats of bodily prowess, were led by young Allingham. But perhaps the sport to which he was most attached was skating, which he has so well described in his poem WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 71 Frost in the Holidays. Yet whilst keenly enjoying the tricks played by one boy on another and some of these were rough enough he always kept the peace. He was a great lover of nature and particularly humane towards dumb animals, being always ready to defend them or rescue them from the hands of cruel or thoughtless boys. But for one of his adventurous spirit he was strangely indifferent to field sports. He did not fish or shoot like his fellows, or follow the hounds, abstaining from such pursuits on principle. From Ray's he was sent to a boarding school at Kille- shandra, but for a short time only. Yet distasteful as Ray's had been, this school was doubly so to him. By his own request he left it and was put into his father's bank in Ballyshannon in his fourteenth year. College life he had none, a circumstance over which he long repined, but which in the end he regarded as having been a benefit to him. For he was an indefatigable student of English literature and natural science and taught himself French, German, Latin and Greek, till he was able to enjoy the classics and the works of Continental writers in the original, and few University students can claim to have covered so wide a field of reading. Allingham passed from his father's bank into the Excise in the year 1846. A few years later his cousin Robert Crawford had this experience of him : " On my return from the University I was engaged in making a geological survey around Ballyshannon, when William became my constant companion. Nor could there have been a pleasanter one ; he was so full of general information, and looked at everything from such an interesting and original point of view. Surgeon Tighe of the 1 2th Lancers attached himself to us in these rambles. My cousin and he were for the most part engaged in constant controversies on almost every conceivable topic, from the formation of gneiss to the political questions of the day. It was most amusing to hear the younger 72 IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES philosopher deftly conducting his attacks upon fortresses of opinion which the elder considered impregnable. Indeed, he was altogether lacking in veneration for old-established opinions the reasonableness of which was not apparent to him. One comic case of the kind I rememher. He was taking lessons on the violin, but the universally adopted shape of the instrument shocked his sense of the fitness of things, as he argued that a rectangular body would admit the sounds quite as well as one of the normal type with its fantastic curves, and he carried his theory into practice, for he got Higgins, the violin maker, to make him one on this pattern. What is more he had the courage of his opinions, insisting that the tone of his instrument surpassed that of any other he had heard, notwithstanding that there were a couple of Cremonas in the neighbourhood." But his father, proud though he was of his son's intelligence, had little sympathy with his constant craving for knowledge. In the bank manager's eyes it was not the scholar, but the thorough business man who ranked highest. From the counting-house the young poet at last succeeded in escaping. " Heart-sick of more than seven years of bank-clerking," he writes, " I found a door suddenly opened, not into an ideal region, or anything like one, but at least into a roadway of life somewhat less narrow and tedious than that in which I was plodding." A place had been found for him in the Customs, as it was found for another and a greater dreamer on the other side of the Atlantic. "In the spring of 1846 I gladly took leave for ever of discount ledgers and current accounts, and went to Belfast for two months' instruction in the duties of Principal Coast Officer of Customs, a tolerably well-sounding title, but which carried with it a salary of but ;8o a year. I trudged daily about the docks and timber-yards, learning to measure logs, piles of planks, and, more troublesome, ships of tonnage; indoors, part of the time practised customs WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 73 book-keeping, and talked to the clerks about literature and poetry in a way that excited some astonishment, but on the whole, as I found at parting, a certain degree of curiosity and respect. I preached Tennyson to them. My spare time was mostly spent in reading and haunting book- sellers' shops, where, I venture to say, I laid out a good deal more than most people, in proportion to my income, and manged to get glimpses of many books which I could not afford or did not care to buy. I enjoyed my new position, on the whole, without analysis, as a great improve- ment on the bank ; and for the rest, my inner mind was brimful of love and poetry, and usually all external things appeared trivial save in their relation to them. Yet I am reminded, by old memoranda, that there were sometimes overclouding anxieties : sometimes, but not very frequently, from lack of money ; more often from longing for culture, conversation, opportunity ; oftenest from fear of a sudden development of some form of lung disease, the seeds of which I supposed to be sown in my bodily constitution." This weakness he outgrew. During his banking days Allingham had begun to write poetry, Leigh Hunt's journal being the first to print his lyrics. Leigh Hunt himself he met for the first time in Edwardes Square in 1847. In 1849 Henry Sutton, a poet now too little known, gave him a letter of introduction to Coventry Patmore, who later introduced him to Tennyson, with whom he afterwards became intimate. He also was made acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Emerson, Arthur Hugh Clough, George Eliot, Thackeray, and Dickens. Moreover, Patmore brought him into the artist group, which comprised Rossetti, Millais, and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Allingham's acquaintance with Rossetti ripened into friendship, and the letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, edited by Dr. Birkbeck Hill, record the chief facts of his life and literary friendships. Much supple- 74 IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES mentary detail, however, is to be found in a set of remi- niscences chiefly relating to Tennyson and Carlyle, which Mrs. Allingham has edited. For it should be added that Leigh Hunt introduced our poet to Carlyle in early days, and that later on they became close companions. In the year 1862 Allingham came over to London, still engaged in the Customs, but he disliked the noise and the confinement of city life near the docks, and was very glad of a transfer to Lymington, where for seven years he saw much of Tennyson. He retired from the Government service in 1870, when he became sub-editor, under Mr. Froude, of Fraser's Magazine, succeeding him as editor in 1874. It was during this period that I became personally acquainted with the poet. He was then a well preserved man of middle age, and I agree in Nathaniel Hawthorne's description of his looks as " intelligent, dark, pleasing, and not at all John Bullish." His voice was musical, touched with the Donegal accent, but his pronunciation of English was finely correct and he was a most fascinating conversationalist, who, if he did not set the table in a roar, always started it smiling and thinking. Much my senior, he was singularly courteous to my young opinions, and I well remember that when I sent my first long poem to fraser, calling it Vox Vcris, and on getting, no reply, perhaps too impatiently suggested that spring was passing and my verses would soon be out of date, he replied in choice Latin, " Spring is ever with us," at the same time accepting the poem. We became engaged to be married at about the same time, and I had the pleasure of meeting him and his then fiancee, Miss Helen Paterson, the well-known water-colour artist and book illustrator, at the house of Tom Taylor, the dramatist, whose wife arranged the Irish airs collected by Allingham and enriched by his lyrics. Of Carlyle he saw much more than most of that great WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 75 man's friends, for during some years scarcely a week went by in which they did not walk together. " Strange to say," writes Dr. Hill, " this intimacy has been passed over in total silence by Mr. Froude. In the four volumes of his hero's life there are sins of omission as well as of commission." Allingham used to recount how Carlyle would sometimes begin by flatly contradicting him, and end by tacitly adopting what he had said. One day the old man was describing his interview with the Queen at the Dean of Westminster's. " She came sliding into the room," he said " as if on wheels," exclaimed Allingham, interrupting him. " Not at all, Allingham," he gruffly replied. A few days later his friend overheard him telling the story to Mr. Lecky. " The Queen," he said, " came sliding into the room as if on wheels," and in that form he ever afterwards told it. He used to add that he saw that he was expected to stand during the interview, but that he took hold of a chair, and saying that he hoped Her Majesty would allow an old man to sit down, down he sat. During his connection with Frasers Magazine, Ailing- ham lived near Carlyle, in Chelsea, and walked out regu- larly with him on several afternoons of each week. It was at his suggestion that Allingham started a series of chapters on Irish history in Fraser. But Allingham's walks were not all strolls with brother men of letters. A large proportion of his prose work and much of his best poetical description had their origin in solitary rambles undertaken from his boyhood upwards, and which he kept up all through his life. In this way as " Patricius Walker " he tramped through Ireland, England, Wales, and Scotland, collecting his " harvest of the quiet eye," studying the country folk as he went, musing over the great cathedrals and abbeys, and reviving recollections of Swift and Prior, Herbert and Dickens, Burns and Scott, on the very ground where they had walked and talked, written 7 6 IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES and sung. These rambles awakened many an interesting train of thought, and his records of them crystallise into charming essays, amongst which we can trace the germs of subsequent poems. His later poems give a delightful picture of his home life in Surrey, and during this period Allingham saw Tennyson several times each summer, when the Laureate and his wife came to Blackdown. Eraser's Magazine had by this time ceased to be, and Allingham occupied his time with prose and verse composition entirely, including the preparation of his various works for the Press, as well as a complete edition of them. He had a fall from his horse in the year 1888, from which serious consequences ensued. He removed to Hampstead in bad health, and died on November i8th, 1889. In the preface to The Music Master, published in 1855, Allingham states that five of the songs or ballads, namely, The Milkmaid, The Girl's Lamentation, Lovely Mary Donnelly, Nanny's Sailor Lad, and The Nobleman's Wedding, have already had an Irish circulation as halfpenny ballads, and the first three were written for this purpose. This statement is explained in Dr. Birkbeck Hill's letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham. In evening walks at Ballyshannon he would hear the Irish girls at their cottage doors singing old ballads which he would pick up. If they were broken or incomplete he would add to them or finish them ; if they were improper he would refine them. He could not get them sung till he got the Dublin Catnach of that day to print them on long strips of blue paper, like old songs ; and if about the sea, with the old rough woodcut of a ship at the top. He either gave them away or they were sold in the neighbour- hood. Then, in his evening walks, he had at last the pleasure of hearing some of his own ballads sung at the WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 77 cottage doors by the crooning lasses, who were quite unaware that it was the author who was passing by. This is exactly what Oliver Goldsmith had done a century before, when a student of Trinity College, Dublin, though the lanes in which he listened to his ballads were very other from those at beautiful Ballyshannon. In this connection Allingham raises a very interesting literary question. He states he did not find it easy in ballad writing to employ a diction that might hope to come home to the English-speaking Irish peasant using his customary phraseology, and also keep within the laws of poetic taste and the rules of grammar ; " for that phraseology, being as regards its structural peculiarities but an imperfect or distorted expression, not an ancient dialect like that of Scotland, is generally too corrupt, though often forcible, to bear transplantation into poetry. Only familiar experience, too, and constant attention can enable one to use words in the exact significance which the popular custom has assigned. For instance, among the Irish peasantry c distress,' as far as I know, always means bodily want, ' trouble ' affliction of mind, ' misery ' penuriousness, ' care ' responsibility, and ' sorrow ' com- monly means ill-luck or misfortune, while ' sorry ' has the usual dictionary meaning. From these conditions it comes that the choice of words for poetry in Irish-English is narrowly limited, instead of there being both that variety and raciness which is sometimes in the gift of a genuine peculiar dialect." But after fifteen years' experience, Allingham qualifies the strong term " imperfect or distorted expression," as applied to the structural peculiarities of the Irish peasants' phraseology, to mean unusual forms, some of them old- fashioned English, some translated or adapted from Gaelic forms. This is a very important modification of view, and surely such forms, derived as they are from Shakespearean English and classical Gaelic, are as ancient and respectable 78 IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES in their historic and literary associations as the idioms ot the modern Scotch dialect. Allingham's final concession that some not unimportant poetical results might flow from a judicious treatment of Irish dialect has been more than justified by the event. The water has been flowing for thirty-three years under Essex now the O'Connell Bridge since then, and we have half-a-dozen writers of successful Irish-English dialect poetry, amongst whom may be mentioned Moira O'Neill, Francis Fahy, P. J. McCall, George Savage Armstrong, John Stephenson, and others, whilst quite as much interest attaches to " Gaelic English," now familiar in the prose and poetry of Douglas Hyde and the plays of Synge, Yeats, Boyle, Lady Gregory, and other dramatists of the Irish Literary Theatre. Allingham has, however, very justly pointed out that during his time Irish-English has never been properly examined, though quite recently this deficiency has been atoned for by Dr. Joyce in his admirable little volume, The English we speak in Ireland published by Longmans for only half-a-crown. Allingham, in spite of his preface to his 1855 edition, returned to Irish ballad writing, and may be said to have achieved his masterpiece in the Winding Banks of Erne or the Emigranfs Adieu to Bally shannon, a ballad which has gone round the world, in spite of Mr. Stephen Gwynn's statement that it is too little known. To readers of the class to whom Mr. Gwynn has addressed his delightful Highways and Byways in Donegal and Antrim this is doubtless true, but the beautiful ballad has reached the hearts of the Irish people, wedded to the haunting old air to which it is set. It is still difficult to fix Allingham's position in the poetical hierarchy. This is undoubtedly due to his remarkable open-mindedness to the influences of both nature and art. A lover of nature before he could read, Allingham, almost as soon as he could do so, saturated WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 79 himself with Tennyson's poems. Then, as has been pointed out, he was brought into touch with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and caught some of their inspiration, but he was none the less an "open-air poet," which Rossetti certainly was not, and wholly original in all his best work. But with Irish nature and Irish human nature he had most affinity, though his Anglo-Irish race and creed kept him, like Ferguson, apart from, though not without warm sym- pathy for, his Celtic compatriots, literary and political. He lamented the destruction of early Irish civilisation and the internecine feud, political and religious, between Saxon and Celt. If Home Rule could make Ireland as " homely," as he puts it, " as Devonshire," which delighted him by its happy union of Celtic and Saxon characteristics, he would have given his vote for Home Rule, but he dreaded leaving the dissident elements in Ireland to take care of themselves. Yet he was proud to call himself an Irishman, and Carlyle got little change out of him when he insisted that Allingham was an Anglian name, meaning the " hame " or " home " of one of the Ellings. His earliest volume contains five Irish ballads. Lawrence Bloomfield is an entirely Irish theme, and his last collection of Irish songs and poems consists of thirty- two pieces written round "Ballyshanny." But this is not all, as Lionel Johnson finely puts it in his estimate of Allingham in The Treasury of Irish Poetry p , edited by Stopford Brooke and Rolleston. " Song upon song makes no mention, direct or indirect, of Ireland, yet reveals an Irish atmosphere and temperament. As the outward aspect of the man so is his characteristic work, the work of a poet who is many things but always essentially an Irishman of the secluded west, with ancient visions and ponderings in his heart, and the gift of tears and smiles. He passed along his way alone, with a heart responding, a soul vibrating to the voices of nature and of tranquil lives, and to him came those voices in Irish. He wrote much ambitious work 8o IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES which may not live, but his lyric voice of singular sweetness, his muse of passionate and pensive meditation, his poetic consecration of common things, his mingled aloofness and homeliness assured him a secure place among the poets of his land and the Irish voices which never will fall silent ; and though the Irish cause receives from him but little direct encouragement or help, let it be remembered that Allingham wrote this great and treasurable truth : We're one at heart if you be Ireland's friend, Though leagues asunder our opinions tend, There are but two great parties in the end." Lionel Johnson has not done him justice in the matter of his assistance to the Irish cause if, as seems almost certain, Lawrence Bloomfield first fired Gladstone's imagination upon the Irish Land Question. For a highly eulogistic review of this poem in The At/ienceum, in which statesmen were besought to read it, was followed by an invitation to the poet to breakfast with the famous Irish land-law reformer. Let me press my point that Allingham was a good Irishman on Irish questions by a few passages from this poem, which both Stopford Brooke and Lionel Johnson fitly describe as combining the descriptive grace of Goldsmith and the ironic force of Crabbe. Very justly indeed Lawrence Bloomfield has been called the epic of the Irish Land Question. SIR ULICK HARVEY. You find in old Sir Ulick Harvey's face The looks of long command and comely race ; No small man sees a brother in those eyes Of calm and frosty blue, like winter skies ; Courteous his voice, yet all the pride is there, Pride like a halo crowns the silvery hair ; 'Tis unmisgiving pride that makes him frank With humble folk, and dress beneath his rank. WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 8 1 Born in the purple, he could hardly know Less of the tides of life that round him flow. The Laws were for the Higher Classes made ; But while the Lower gratefully obey'd, To patronise them you had his consent, Promote their comfort, to a safe extent, And teach them just enough, and not too much ; Most careful lest with impious hand you touch Order and grade as planned by Providence. He sometimes took a well-meant scheme in hand, Which must be done exactly as he plann'd ; His judgment feeble, and his self-will strong, He had his way, and that was mostly wrong. The whim was such, that seized his mind of late, To "square" the farms on all his wide estate ; Tim's mountain grazing, Peter's lough-side patch, This onion-field of Ted's that few could match, Phil's earliest ridges, Bartly's bog, worse hap ! By mere new lines across his Honour's map From ancient holdings have been dipt away, Despite the loud complaints, or dumb dismay. LORD CRASHTON THE ABSENTEE LANDLORD. Joining Sir Ulick's at the river's bend, Lord Crashton's acres east and west extend ; Great owner here, in England greater still. As poor folk say, " The world's divided ill." On every pleasure men can buy with gold He surfeited, and now, diseased and old, He lives abroad ; a firm in Molesworth Street Doing what their attorneyship thinks meet. Twice only in the memory of mankind Lord Crashton's proud and noble self appear'd ; Up-river, last time, in his yacht he steer'd, With Maltese valet and Parisian cook, And one on whom askance the gentry look, Altho' a pretty, well-dress'd demoiselle Not Lady Crashton, who, as gossips tell, Goes her own wicked way. They stopped a week ; 82 IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES Then, with gay ribbons fluttering from the peak, And snowy skirts wide spread, on either hand, The Aphrodite curtsied to the land, And glided off. My Lord, with gouty legs, Drinks Baden-Baden water, and life's dregs ; With cynic jest inlays his black despair, And curses all things from his easy chair. FlNLAY. Finlay, next landlord (I'll abridge the tale), Prince of Glenawn, a low and fertile vale, No fool by birth, but hard, and praised for wise, The more he learn'd all softness to despise, Married a shrew for money, louts begot, Debased his wishes to a vulgar lot, To pence and pounds coin'd all his mother-wit, And ossified his nature bit by bit. A dull, cold home, devoid of every grace, Distrust and dread in each dependent's face, Bullocks and turnips, mighty stacks of grain, Plethoric purse, impoverished heart and brain Such Finlay's life ; and when that life shall end, He'll die as no man's debtor, no man's friend. TOM DYSART. Unlike this careful management (between The two, Sir U lick's townlands intervene) Is that of Termon on the river-side, Domain and mansion of insolvent pride, Where Dysart, drawing from ancestral ground One sterling shilling for each phantom pound Of rent-roll lives, when all the truth is known, Mere factor in the place he calls his own ; Through mortgages and bonds, one wide-spread maze, Steps, dances, doubles round by devious ways, While creditor, to creditor a foe, Hangs dubious o'er the vast imbroglio. And thus, minute in bargain where he can, There, closing quick with ready-money man, WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 83 Despised for cunning, and for malice fear'd, Yet still by custom and old name endear'd, To Keltic minds, who also better like A rule of thumb than Cough's arithmetic, Tom Dysart shuffles on, to this good day, Let creditors and courts do what they may. ISAAC BROWN. Pass on to Isaac Brown, a man elect, Wesleyan stout, our wealthiest of his sect ; Who bought and still buys land, none quite sees how, Whilst all his shrewdness and success allow. On Crashton's mortgage he has money lent, He takes a quiet bill at ten per cent., The local public business much he sways, He's learn'd in every neighbour's means and ways, For comfort cares, for fashion not a whit, Nor if the gentry to their ranks admit. All preachers love him ; he can best afford The unctuous converse and the unctuous board ; Ev'n the poor nag, slow-rattling up the road In ancient rusty gig a pious load, Wags his weak tail, and strikes a brisker trot, Approaching Brownstown, Isaac's pleasant lot. For though at Poor-House Board was never known A flintier Guardian-angel than good Brown, As each old hag and shivering child can tell, Go dine with Isaac, and he feeds you well. And hear him pray, with fiercely close-shut eyes ! Gentle at first the measured accents rise, But soon he waxes loud, and storms the skies. Deep is the chest and powerful bass the voice, The language of a true celestial choice ; Handorgan-wise the holy phrases ground Go turning and returning round and round ; The sing-song duly runs from low to high ; The chorus'd groans at intervals reply ; Till after forty minutes' sweat and din, Leaving perhaps too little prayer within, Dear Brother Brown, athletic babe of grace, Resumes his bench, and wipes his reeking face. G 2 84 IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES JACK DORAN. Jack was a plodding man, who deem'd it best To hide away the wisdom he possess'd ; Of scanty words, avoiding all dispute ; But much experience in his mind had root ; Most deferential, yet you might surprise A secret scanning in the small grey eyes ; Short, active, tho' with labour's trudge, his legs ; His knotted fingers, like rude wooden pegs, Still firm of grip ; his breath was slow and deep ; His hair unbleach'd with time, a rough black heap. Fond, of a night, to calmly sit and smoke, While neighbours plied their argument or joke, To each he listen'd, seldom praised or blamed, All party-spirit prudently disclaim'd, Repeating, in his wise old wrinkled face, " I never knew it help a poor man's case " ; And when they talked of " tyrants " Doran said Nothing, but suck'd his pipe and shook his head. THE EVICTION. The Sheriff's painful duty must be done ; He begs for quiet and the work's begun. The strong stand ready ; now appear the rest, Girl, matron, grandsire, baby on the breast, And Rosy's thin face on a pallet borne ; A motley concourse, feeble and forlorn. One old man, tears upon his wrinkled cheek, Stands trembling on a threshold, tries to speak, But, in defect of any word for this, Mutely upon the doorpost prints a kiss, Then passes out for ever. Through the crowd The children run bewilder'd, wailing loud ; Where needed most, the men combine their aid And, last of all, is Oona forth convey'd, Reclined in her accustom'd strawen chair, Her aged eyelids closed, her thick white hair Escaping from her cap ; she feels a chill, Looks round and murmurs, then again is still. WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 85 Poor consumptive Rosy has shared in the Eviction, but her poor friends come to her rescue. Those, too, with less to spare, and those with nought, To this poor girl their friendly succour brought. Here in a neighbouring house, but whence no noise Can reach her, some well-wishing girls and boys Have clubb'd their moneys, raffling for a shawl ; Of Rose's other shreds the pawn has all. Three simple pence entitle to a throw ; Down on a slate the names and numbers go ; The wooden cubes mark'd with a red-hot wire (No better dice or dice-box they require) In old tin porringer flung rattling fast. A warmer interest watches every cast ; " Follie' your ban' ! " "You're lucky, throw for me ! " " More power ! " "Tim Ryan has it fifty-three ! " Then silver, copper, mix'd, a bulky pound Makes haste to Rosy, feebly turning round With grateful smile ; and back the shawl comes too, The winner swearing 'twas for her he threw. THE UNHAPPY COUNTRY. Derided in her torture and her tears, In sullen slavery dragging hopeless years ; Of social ties mere cruel scourges made ; A ban upon her learning and her trade ; Possessions, rights, religion, language, torn And crushed by Law a word to hate and scorn For those taught English in oppression's school, And reading good words by the witches' rule ; A name for powerful wrong, with no appeal ; Since law at every moment made them feel To live an Irishman on Irish ground The sole unpardonable crime was found. Island of bitter memories, thickly sown From winding Boyne to Limerick's treaty-stone, Bare Connaught Hills to Dublin Castle wall, Green Wexford to the glens of Donegal, Through sad six hundred years of hostile sway, From Strongbow fierce to cunning Castlereagh ! These will not melt and vanish in a day. These can yet sting the patriot thoughts which turrj To Erin's past, and bid them weep and burn. 86 IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES In another respect Allingham has not been done justice to by Lionel Johnson. He is spoken of as no Irish scholar and therefore unable to draw inspiration from Gaelic litera- ture. Allingham's essays distinctly show that he was a student of Gaelic literature, even to the extent of wading through The Four Masters, and though unfortunately he did not, until rather late in life, try his hand at a subject inspired by Gaelic literature, the one piece of work of the kind that he attempted only makes us regret that he had not turned his thoughts in that direction long before. I refer to his Lady of the Sea. He is also taxed with not seeking a centre of Irish Literary Society. But what centre of Irish Literary Society existed in England or Ireland until the Irish Literary Society of London and the National Literary Society of Dublin were founded in the year 1892, three years after Allingham's death? In the bibliography of Allingham's works in The Treasury of Irish Poetry, no men- tion is made of his prose writings, but had Johnson studied Allingham's Varieties in Prose he would have given him credit for even greater versatility than he allows him. I give a few brief selections from his Rambles by Patricius Walker as evidence of his powers as a prose writer. Here is his new-style description of the river Erne : After running swiftly half a mile between bare slopes, the Erne finds its channel suddenly contracted to a narrow passage between two ledges of limestone, and down into this gully it sweeps, racing in long black ridges, leaping in amber curves, dashed into foam against hidden rocks in its bed, sending up from the boiling depths great gulching bubbles, and whirling into crannies and corners, raging continually, with a commingled roaring and hissing as of lions and serpents. After this tumultuous rush at " Kathleen's Fall," the Erne, spreading wide, runs at a steadier pace, but still rapidly, by the walls of Ballyshannon and under the arches of the old long bridge, and 300 yards lower down makes its final plunge into the tidal waters of the harbour, over the Fall of Assaroe, otherwise called the Salmon Leap. How curiously this contrasts with the old style prose WILLIAM ALLINGHAM 87 description of the same fall, in an ancient Irish tale, The Banquet of Dunagay and the Battle of Moira, translated by John O'Donovan (Irish Archaeological Society, 1842), which Allingham himself calls attention to : The clear-watered, snowy-foamed, ever-roaring, parti-coloured, bellowing, in-salmon-abounding, beautiful old torrent, whose cele- brated well-known name is the lofty-great, clear-landed, contentious, precipitate, loud-roaring, headstrong, rapid, salmon-ful, sea-monster- ful, varying, in-large-fish-abounding, rapid-flooded, furious-streamed, whirling, in-seal-abounding, royal and prosperous cataract of Eas Ruaidh. Here is a very different specimen of Allingham's prose : Was it while he was staying at Broadstairs (it was certainly in Kent) that I Patricius met Charles Dickens one day in Regent Street ? With one sharp glance, and a quiver of the wide flexible nostrils, " O, lord!" he exclaimed, "how are you?" and taking my arm walked off at five miles an hour towards a railway station. But great as his hurry was, he suddenly stopped short as quickly, and pressed with me into the edge of a crowd in the street to see what was happening. It was only a horse down, and Dickens hurried me along again, saying, " I'm a country cousin now, and stare at everything when I come up." A trivial anecdote, but it recalls the man. Nor was it a trivial incident to the worshipping youth ; it was almost as though his arm were taken by an angel dropping from the sky ! But much more valuable specimens of his prose style, and specially interesting as exhibiting his own intellectual points of view, are the following sketches, criticisms, and recollections of his great compeers, Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, and Jowett, extracted from Allingham's Diary, edited by Mrs. Allingham and Mrs. Ernest Radford, and published by Macmillan and Co., in 1907. The first extract has to me a special interest, because Allingham once told me himself how Tennyson had abandoned the theme of King Arthur when " his mind was in flower with it " owing to a want of warmth in the recep- tion by the critics of his Morte a" Arthur, due, in part, he himself afterwards felt, to his own somewhat apologetic 88 IRISH LITERARY AND MUSICAL STUDIES verse preface to that incomparable poem, of which Froude once said to me, "Alfred will not live except in selection, but the Morte cT Arthur is immortal." Sunday, October i6th, 1881. T. told me that he had planned out his Arthuriad, and could have written it all off without any trouble. But in 1842 he published, with other poems, the Morte (? Arthur, which was one book of his Epic (though not really the eleventh), and the review in the Quarterly disheartened him, so that he put the scheme aside. He afterwards took it up again, but not as with the first inspiration. This unlucky article in the Quarterly was written by John Sterling, who was then thirty-six years old, just three years older than Tennyson. It may be interesting now to read what it said of the Morte