THE LITERARY LIFE 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
Printed by Maunsel ct Roberts, Ltd., Dublin 
 
THE LITERARY LIFE 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 p. '"a/canon sheehan, d.d. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 J. KENEDY AND SONS 
 1922 
 
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CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE LITERARY LIFE I 
 
 OPTIMISM IN LITERATURE 35 
 
 OPTIMISM IN DAILY LIFE 46 
 
 AN UNPUBLISHED PREFACE 58 
 
 CATHOLIC LITERARY CRITICISM 68 
 
 THE AMERICAN REPORT ON IRISH 86 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
 THE IRISH PRIESTHOOD AND POLITICS I 09 
 
 THE DAWN OF THE CENTURY 121 
 
 NON-DOGMATIC RELIGION I5I 
 
 THE MOONLIGHT OF MEMORY I 68 
 
 LENTEN TIME IN DONERAILE I 87 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Canon Sheehan needs no editor's introduction, 
 even to the present generation, though it has lived 
 to see an Ireland vitally different from that so 
 affectionately described in his reminiscent essay, 
 " The Moonlight of Memory " — as different, perhaps, 
 as that rather unheroic epoch was from the time of 
 Sarsfield. That essay and another, *' Lenten Time 
 in Doneraile," in which he tells of an aspect of our 
 national life which is splendidly unchanging, were 
 written only a year or two before his death. The 
 rest are of much earlier date. The papers on 
 literature were delivered as lectures some thirty years 
 ago. The political and religious essays are for the 
 most part the work of the same period of Canon 
 Sheehan's life, and any topical allusions in them 
 explain themselves. 1896 is the date of the admirable 
 but discarded preface to " The Triumph of Failure," 
 which was itself first published in 1899. *' The 
 Dawn of the Century " vras delivered as a lecture 
 in 1904. 
 
 In editing this work I have taken no liberties with 
 the manuscript beyond some trifling alterations in 
 punctuation. The editor of a posthumous work is 
 always faced with this difficulty, that he must pass 
 some things, be they many or few, which he feels 
 sure the author would not have allowed to remain as 
 they are : here and there a little roughness or infelicity 
 of expression which would pass unnoticed, or, indeed, 
 be perhaps not out of place in a lecture, must conse- 
 quently find its v^ay in a permanent form into the 
 published work of a writer who has made for himself 
 his own high place in Anglo-Irish literature. This can- 
 not be helped ; but it is only fair to Canon Sheehan's 
 reputation as a finished writer of English to remind the 
 reader of the form in which these essays were left by 
 their author. And, indeed, it is perhaps remarkable 
 that the number of these evidences of lack of care and 
 polish is so few. 
 
 E. McL 
 
THE LITERARY LIFE^ 
 I 
 
 In accepting the invitation of this Society to read 
 a paper for its members, I selected this subject — the 
 Literary Life — as one that might be made not only 
 interesting, but useful. Because it is one about which 
 ceaseless interrogations are put from young and old 
 aspirants, the fomi of question generally touching 
 the feasibility of making a living by literature, or, at 
 least, of attracting, ever so little, the regards of our 
 fellow men. It is found that some of these queries 
 are pathetic ; some, unreasonable ; some, pitiful ; 
 none, for reasons I shall afterwards detail, altogether 
 condemnable. The replies, given readily by those 
 who have failed and those who have succeeded, are 
 pitched in the same sad key of uniformity. With 
 singular vmanimity they seem to warn off all aspirants 
 from a dangerous and thorny path. Some of these 
 sad verdicts are familiar to you, like the mournful 
 lines of Dr. Johnson : 
 
 *' You know what ills the author's life assail — 
 Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail." 
 
 1 A lecture delivered before the Cork Literary and Scientific 
 Society. 
 
 B 
 
2 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 But his successors in modern times, when it is gene- 
 rally presumed an author's life is happier, seem to 
 repeat the same sad threnody. 
 
 George Augustus Sala was a successful journalist. 
 His last verdict is : 
 
 " Were I a young man, I should certainly not 
 adopt journalism as a profession. With very few 
 exceptions the career leads eventually to premature 
 old age and indigence." 
 
 Grant Allen, who was simply omniscient, if we are 
 to judge by the multiplicity of subjects that engaged 
 his pen, says that " crossing-sweeping is better than 
 literature." 
 
 Gibbon, de Quincey, Scott, Trollope, Thackeray, 
 may be cited as witnesses to the same effect ; and 
 surely the world has always regarded these as the 
 successful few. 
 
 To a correspondent who wrote him on the subject 
 Carlyle replied, ** that he had never heard a madder 
 proposal. It was only one degree less foolish than if 
 he were to throw himself from the top of the Monu- 
 ment in the hope of flying." 
 
 And to Dr. Crozier, who had come from Canada 
 to London to practise not his profession as doctor 
 but as a lesser light of Uterature, the same sage replied : 
 
 ** Na, na, that winna do. Ye'd better stick to your 
 profession, young man. It's time enough to think 
 of literature when you've cleared your own mind, 
 and have something to say." 
 
 And, in still more recent times, a writer, whose 
 sad experience lends such pathetic and mournful 
 interest to his words, writes : 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 3 
 
 " Innumerable are the men and women now writing 
 for bread, who have not the least chance of finding in 
 such work a permanent livelihood. They took to 
 writing, because they knew not what else to do ; or 
 because the literary calling tempted them by its inde- 
 pendence, and its dazzling prizes. They will hang 
 on to the squalid profession, their earnings eked out 
 by begging and borrowing, until it is too late for 
 them to do anything else — and then ? With a life- 
 time of dread experience behind me, I say that he 
 who encourages any young man or woman to look 
 for his living to literature, commits no less than a 
 crime." 
 
 These are sad words, wrung from lips which had 
 tasted disappointment and despair. Are they borne 
 out by facts and experience ? Yes ! alas ! they are 
 only too true. There is no profession, whose borders 
 are strewn with so many wrecks as this of literature ; 
 as there is no profession for whose labours honours 
 and rewards come so tardily — very often never come 
 at all, or only come when it is too late. 1 know you 
 might quote against me such isolated successes as 
 that of Lord Macaulay, who got ;fio,ooo for his 
 History of Englmid ; Mr. John Morley, who got a 
 similar sum for his Life of Gladstone ; George Eliot, 
 who received the same sum for Adam Bede ; Charles 
 Dickens, dying worth ^60,000 ; Victor Hugo, a 
 millionaire ; Marie CoreUi ! But what of Milton— 
 who got five pounds for Paradise Lost ; What of 
 Chatterton ? What of Goldsmith } What of Jane 
 Austen ? What of Shelley — expatriated } What of 
 Keats — murdered ? What of Wordsworth — ridiculed 
 
4 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 and despised for fifty j^ears, and then crowned with 
 laurels, and honoured with academic degrees, when 
 his countrymen should have done penance in sack- 
 cloth and ashes, and atoned for their stupid malevo- 
 lence by respectful and contrite silence ? And 
 Coleridge — dependent in his old age on charity ; and 
 Jean Paul Richter — labouring on his immortal w^orks 
 for ten years, whilst an ignorant and heedless public 
 refused him bread for his wife and children. And 
 Tasso, Cowper, Comte — in their madhouses ; and 
 that vast army of French Parnassiens and Decadents, 
 from Balzac down to Paul Verlaine and Stephen 
 Mallarme, starving and shivering in the attics of the 
 Ouartier Latin, and casting immortal works at the 
 feet of grinding and avaricious pubHshers and a 
 public which thought that the artists, who had given 
 them so freely out of the opulence of their genius, 
 were not worth the few vv^retched francs that would 
 help to keep body and soul together. To-day, after 
 the lapse of nearly a century, certain generous and 
 cultivated Americans, of the same race and type that 
 helped to place that beautiful monument to our 
 Berkely down there in the Cathedral at Cloyne, are 
 labouring to erect into a museum the house where 
 Keats died in Rome. It is very generous and beau- 
 tiful ; but again a symbol of the tardy recognition the 
 world gives to its immortals 1 
 
 And what shall we say of the heart-sickness, the 
 disappointment, the despair, that seem to have ever 
 dogged the feet of the great thinkers of the world ? 
 History is black with the dread record. Even in our 
 own day I know nothing more pathetic than the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 5 
 
 futile attempts of the authors of great works to obtain 
 a little recognition ; of their futile appeals to publish- 
 ers and public, to give them just one chance. Think 
 of Robert Browning's Bells and Pomegranates, abso- 
 lutely extinguished for tvventy years by one word — 
 Balderdash — written as a careful and comprehensive 
 review by some truculent idiot in Taifs Magazine ! 
 x'\nd think that the same magazine had absolutely 
 rejected an elaborate review by John Stuart Mill on 
 the same poems ! Think of Lorna Doone hawked 
 around London for years, until by the chance accident 
 of the marriage of the Marquis of Lome with a Royal 
 Princess, it caught the ear of the public. Think of 
 Francis Thompson — a crossing-sweeper in London ! 
 Think of the Riibaiyat of Omar lying perdu for years, 
 until some intelligent man picked up a frayed copy 
 for twopence in a London bookstall. Think of our 
 own Mangan ! Oh, yes ! We who have inherited the 
 treasures of Mangan 's genius ; we think what an 
 honour we would have esteemed it, had we lived in 
 his time, if we were privileged to give him a night's 
 lodging, or a decent cloak. Too late ! Such is the 
 inscription posterity, inheriting the immortal vrorks Oi 
 genius, has to place with sorrow upon the tomb. 
 
 Such, in brief, is the history of this sad but glorious 
 fraternity. And we need hardly wonder that those 
 who have had experience of the vicissitudes and 
 changes, and been embittered by the uncertainties 
 and sadness of the literary life, should warn off all 
 young postulants who might be modest or humble 
 enough to plead for advice. 
 
 But it may be asked how does it happen, that with 
 
6 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 all these terrible facts and experiences before their 
 eyes, so many are yet anxious to be enrolled in this 
 brotherhood of pain and sorrow ? What is the 
 strange fascination which literature exercises over 
 every one who has come under the spell of great 
 authors ? It is quite certain that there are few men 
 or women of education and culture who do not 
 aspire to the glory of seeing their thoughts, senti- 
 ments, and aspirations in print. The number of 
 students who go to the Bar, or to medicine, or to 
 business, or to engineering, is limited. The number 
 of young ladies who desire to enter the learned pro- 
 fessions, or to earn an independent livelihood as 
 teachers, governesses, or Civil Servants, is limited. 
 The number of literary aspirants is legion. 
 
 I think the motives which underlie or create this 
 fascination for letters, may be summed up thus : — 
 
 ** Admiration for great authors and the desire to 
 imitate them ; a passionate love for books, and the 
 ambition to create something similar ; the craving 
 for what is believed to be a quiet, uneventful, unim- 
 passioned life ; the fancy that a life of literature is 
 absolutely free from care ; the rapture of composition ; 
 the desire of fame ; the passion, so universal, for 
 making money as speedily and as easily as possible." 
 
 Some of these methods are noble and honourable ; 
 some unwise and unreasonable ; some base and dis- 
 honourable under certain aspects. We shall dispose 
 of these latter first. 
 
 I do not for a moment believe, or aver, that it is 
 either unworthy or dishonouring to write for money 
 or for fame. There is no reason whatever why an 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 7 
 
 author should not seek to exchange his services as 
 poet, novelist, essayist, historian for remuneration 
 similar and equal to that which accrues to the doctor, 
 the barrister, or the commercial speculator. If he 
 wishes to coin his brains, and mint them into gold, 
 there is neither simony nor sacrilege in doing so. 
 The pen of the writer is not more sacred than the 
 scalpel of the doctor or the artist's pencil. Yet there 
 is a certain class of people who seem to think that it 
 is quite a degradation to write for money ; and even 
 the legislation about copyright, forced from the hands 
 of unwilling statesmen, and but slowly and reluctantly 
 improved in the course of ages, manifestly supposes 
 that an author's work should be regarded as public 
 property, with the right of every one to enter in and 
 take his share. We hear a great deal about the rights 
 of property, especially in land ; and any violation of 
 those rights is stigmatised as theft or confiscation. 
 It is so easy to forget that the first claim or right 
 upon property should be the right of creation or 
 production ; and the land is God's creation, and th« 
 book is the work of the author. But the idea is that 
 an author, alone of all producers, should be a public 
 benefactor, labouring out of pure philanthropy for 
 men's souls or pleasures, and sacrificing all human 
 and personal rights by reason of his God-given 
 faculty for teaching or pleasing mankind. Slowly 
 and reluctantly the public is losing its grasp on this 
 pleasant theory. The only section that still clings to 
 it is the publishing faculty, who seem to regard the 
 author as a kind of journeyman, who has no rights, 
 only a few attenuated privileges ; and who is speci- 
 
8 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 ally created by God to furnish his publisher with 
 copy that will swell the yearly dividends, and help 
 him to keep his carriage, or his hunting-box in Scot- 
 land. And if an author has the presumption to demand 
 his rights, he is generally greeted with the exclamation 
 of surprise that met poor Oliver Twist, when he had 
 the temerity to ask for " more." 
 
 But where the degradation certainly comes in is 
 when an author, avaricious of money or ambitious 
 of fame, is prepared to use, or abuse, his talents to 
 please the morbid passions of the multitude. A 
 writer who appeals to passion, sensual or other ; who 
 panders to religious prejudice, or turns a sacred talent 
 into a political agency ; the author who sets the 
 " maiden fancies wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism," 
 or perverts the minds, or destroys the principles of 
 the young, should meet with no mercy. Cormptio 
 optimi pessima ! And the perversion of a great talent 
 to base and unworthy uses is the unforgivable sin. 
 
 So far for the principle. But can an author make 
 money ? Is it a lucrative profession ? We have 
 already answered that question. For the vast majority 
 of writers, who hope to make a living by it, it is the 
 source of unspeakable disappointment. There is 
 only one safe advice for young people who are smitten 
 by a passion for literature, and that is : Let it be your 
 pleasure, but not your profession. It is '' an excellent 
 walking-stick ; but an exceedingly bad crutch." 
 
 Again, I cannot see why an author should not 
 write for fame. Fame, or rather the thirst for fame, 
 is *' the last infirmity of noble minds " ; but it is an 
 honourable infirmity. And it sometimes takes a 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 9 
 
 shape that makes it akin to the zeal of an apostle. 
 For there cannot be a doubt that many writers take 
 up their pens, not for gain, sordid or otherwise ; not 
 for life-advancement, but purely with the desire of 
 influencing the minds of many unto good — the desire 
 of creating in other souls the high ideas and lofty 
 principles with which they themselves are animated. 
 To wish to have one's name bruited abroad in the 
 press and amongst the public may be a paltry thing, 
 but it is intelligible. To desire to influence the world 
 by the magnetism of great ideas ; to desire to form 
 even one link in the electric chain that stretches down 
 through the ages, magnetising generation after gene- 
 ration with thoughts that thrill and words that burn — 
 this, so far from being ignoble, may assume the 
 sacredness of a vocation and an apostleship. *' Cast 
 forth thy Act, thy Word, into the ever-living, ever- 
 working universe ; it is a seed grain that cannot die ; 
 unnoticed to-day, it will be found flourishing as a 
 Banyan-grove after a thousand years." 
 
 II 
 
 This naturally leads us to consider the higher and 
 more sacred motives that influence so many in their 
 choice of literature as a profession. The first of 
 these I have specified as a love of books and their 
 authors. The highest worship is the worship of 
 imitation. Whosoever sits at the feet of Gamaliel 
 seeks to become like unto Gamaliel. We like to 
 create what we admire ; and whoever has a favourite 
 author or authors, dreams of one day becoming a 
 
10 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 source of light and leading unto others, as these 
 authors are to himself. And behind that passion for 
 imitation is the instinct that seems to pervade the 
 whole universe ; that mysterious and sublime impulse 
 which seems almost like an attribute of the Divinity, 
 imparted in measure to finite beings — the instinct of 
 creation or production. You see it everywhere : in 
 the atom, in the mineral, in the cell, in the plant, in 
 the animal. The same tremendous process that 
 rounds a nebula into a sun, carries the pollen of a 
 flower from plant to plant on the wings of a bee or 
 a butterfly ; and the same mysterious instinct that 
 vitalizes a seedling compelled Michael Angelo to lie 
 for nights and days on the summit of a scaff'old to 
 paint the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. 
 And it is the same mysterious force which evolved 
 Hamlet and Macbeth that is stirring in the heart and 
 brain of every young boy or girl who takes up a sheet of 
 paper for the first time to write the first vapid story or 
 the first immature poem. And vapid though the story 
 may be, and immature the poem, there is, beside the 
 creative instinct that produced it, another instinct even 
 more wonderful, an innate and supersensuous instinct 
 to create only what is perfect and beautiful. This 
 has always seemed to me one of the greatest and most 
 unfathomable mysteries of our existence. So surely 
 as the crystal flakes of snow form and dissolve into 
 facets of the most perfect geometrical proportions ; 
 so surely as the bee creates, with unconscious art, the 
 perfect hexagons of his cells ; so surely as the bird 
 weaves out of garden refuse his most beautiful nest, 
 and the flower develops its painted perfections ; so 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS ii 
 
 surely does the instinct of beauty and harmony ani- 
 mate and inspire the youngest novice in the art of 
 literature. And this passion for the beautiful, or this 
 instinct for creating the beautiful, is innate in the 
 human mind, as it is innate in Nature. Trelat in 
 his Recherches historiqiies sur lafolie tells us that "under 
 the influence of insanity an ignorant person will make 
 perfect Latin verses ; a woman will sing Latin hymns 
 and verses entirely unknown to her." Marce records 
 the case of a young married woman, of very ordinary 
 intelligence, " who, under an attack of mania, wrote 
 letters to her husband, which for the eloquence and 
 passionate energy of their style, might easily be placed 
 beside the most fei-vent passages in the Nouvelle 
 Helo't'se." Cases of dementia have been known, in 
 which young men of the most ordinary capacity, and 
 who in their sane moments had not the slightest 
 artistic perceptions, have produced sketches, some- 
 times with chalks, sometimes with pencils, sometimes 
 with a red-hot iron on a piece of board, which experts 
 refused to believe were not the work of supreme 
 artists ; which proves, not only the existence of a 
 sub-consciousness of which we are quite unaware, 
 but also of a latent sense of artistic beauty, which 
 only needs some kind of sudden emotion to be deve- 
 loped into action. Hence I see in the crudest eflforts 
 of the pen, nothing but Nature working outwards 
 towards perfection. 
 
 But I shall be met at once by the objection that all 
 this instinct, like the blind instincts of Nature, leads 
 but to sad and melancholy waste ; that the process 
 of natural selection holds in literature as in everything 
 
12 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 else ; that only the fittest and noblest and strong 
 things survive ; and that heUce it would be much 
 better for poetic young ladies to knit stockings than 
 to make verses ; and for moon-struck young men 
 to take up a spade or a hoe, and let the pen alone. 
 True, there is that terrible and unaccountable waste 
 in Nature as in Art. It was the one thing that troubled 
 the intellectual serenity of Tennyson in his old age, 
 and shook the little Christian faith that he possessed. 
 
 " So careful of the type she seems. But no ! 
 From scarped cliff and quarried stone 
 She cries : A thousand types are gone, 
 I care for nothing. All shall go ! " 
 
 It is not the origin of things, but the utter depravity 
 of Nature in sacrificing with criminal and profuse 
 prodigality all that is created with so much pain 
 that forms the cardinal puzzle and problem of exist- 
 ence. If the elm-tree produces 300,000 seeds in a 
 year, and only one seed becomes an elm ; if but one 
 seed of 200,000 of the purple orchis reaches maturity, 
 we pronounce Nature a shocking wastrel. But it does 
 not follow that the seedling that fructified was more 
 vigorous and healthful than the thousands that 
 perished. Their environments were different, and 
 they fell under the other instinct of destruction. And 
 I say that it is quite a mistake to suppose that in 
 Literature — out of the countless poems, and essays, 
 and dramas, that have been evolved from the creative 
 instinct of the intellect — only the best have survived. 
 I do not wish to be misunderstood. I do not affirm 
 that any greater epic than the Iliady any greater drama 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 13 
 
 than Hamlet or Lear, has gone down the waste-pipes 
 of time into the gulf of obHvion. But I do affirm that 
 to-day countless essays are written, printed, read, and 
 forgotten incomparably greater than the insolent 
 platitudes of Macaulay ; and that countless poems 
 are hidden and buried away in magazines" that far 
 more justly entitle their authors to a niche in the 
 Temple of Fame than the crudities that were written 
 by the poets whom Johnson deemed worthy of a 
 place in his gallery of mediocrities. Tennyson used to 
 say that many thousands of lines, quite as precious 
 as those he preserved, went up his chimney in clouds 
 of tobacco-smoke ; and I have no doubt that many 
 a fine lyric and sonnet has helped in our days the 
 utilities which he anticipated for his *' mortal lullabies 
 of pain " — 
 
 " To bind a book, to Hne a box. 
 Or help to curl a maiden's locks." 
 
 What then are we to say ? This — That, inasmuch 
 as it appears to be the law of Nature to create pro- 
 digally, by virtue of the secret and impervious in- 
 stinct that prompts creation ; and that, inasmuch as 
 these creations, again obeying the behests of another 
 secret and imperative law, always round to perfection, 
 even though the vast proportion are doomed to wanton 
 destruction, and perhaps only one solitary specimen 
 of Nature's creative power survives ; so is it the law 
 of Nature that the young, the hopeful, and the buoyant 
 shall seek to perpetuate themselves in prose and 
 verse ; and that we have no more right to check or 
 destroy that instinct than we have to interfere with 
 the mechanical operations that are fortunately placed 
 
14 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 altogether beyond our control. If these pen-produc- 
 tions are doomed to destruction, well, it is only again 
 the law of Nature, even though we may regret it. 
 If they survive, they remain *' a thing of beauty, and 
 a joy for ever." 
 
 Besides, in all this there is the eternal law of Chance. 
 The same Chance that places a seedling in the beak of 
 a migratory bird and bids it be carried to some 
 ocean-beaten rock, there to create a luxuriant vege- 
 tation, may also discover and reveal some hidden 
 beauty and glory in literature. Thomas Gray owes 
 his immortality to one poem ; Blanco White to one 
 sonnet. There are greater poems than the Elegy, 
 which never have been heard of. There are incom- 
 parably greater sonnets unrecognised in the language 
 than the famous sonnet on ** Night." And there is 
 no writer, however humble, who may not stumble on 
 an immortal line, and find a discriminating critic to 
 recognise it. There is a systole and diastole in all 
 human affairs : and the idols of this generation may 
 strew the roads of the next. At one time all Europe 
 went mad over Byron ; and it was seriously debated 
 in Oxford whether Byron or Shelley were the greater 
 poet. No one would dream of asking the question 
 now. The time may come when Shakespeare will be 
 dethroned ; for there is a good deal of lying about 
 Shakespeare. And the slaves of to-day may be the 
 kings of to-morrow. 
 
 This leads me quite naturally to the next motive I 
 have particularized as an attraction to the literary 
 life — the rapture of compositiom ! 
 
 Now it is quite true that for the most part authors 
 have to whip and spur their brains until the jaded or 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 15 
 
 helpless faculties stir themselves reluctantly to work. 
 Very often authors have to write against time to com- 
 plete an engagement or to meet the season when books 
 are most in demand. This is the drudgery of lite- 
 rature ; and such work, under such circumstances, 
 is mostly poor and transitory. But there come 
 moments in the life of every author — at least, of every 
 author of distinction, when they seem to be lifted 
 above the earth, and to see a sudden opening in the 
 firmament, reveahng glimpses of Heaven. Such 
 moments of ecstasy are few and intermittent. They 
 cannot be foreseen or anticipated. They do not 
 come and go with the rhythmic swing of the sea ; 
 but capriciously and at unexpected times, flashing 
 sudden lights on the mind, and as quickly snapping 
 and extinguishing them. In such moments not only 
 are worlds revealed ; but with the inspiration comes 
 also the language fitted to reveal it — the happy ex- 
 pression — the one word out of a million that adapts 
 itself with a precision that no mere Art could discover. 
 I feel quite sure that Shelley experienced this when 
 he wrote his immortal Ode to the West Wind, and 
 stumbled upon such lines as : 
 
 " The blue Mediterranean, where he lay 
 Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams 
 Beside a pumice isle in Baia^'s bay ; " 
 and : 
 
 " Thou, 
 In whose path the Atlantic's level powers 
 Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below 
 The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which bear 
 The sapless foHage of the Ocean, know 
 Thy voice and suddenly grow grey with fear.*' 
 
i6 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 No mere cudgelling of brains could ever elicit that 
 line : 
 
 ** Beside a pumice isle in Baiai's bay," 
 or that expression : 
 
 " The sapless foliage of the Ocean." 
 And when Keats in his immortal sonnet on Chap- 
 man's Homer wrote : 
 
 " Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
 When a new planet swims into his ken ; 
 Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 
 
 He stared at the Pacific — and all his men 
 Looked at each other with a wild surmise 
 Silent, upon a peak in Darien," 
 
 or in his Ode to a Nightingale, broke into what some 
 consider the two most perfect lines in all EngHsh 
 poetry : 
 
 ** Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn," 
 
 he must have experienced something like the levi- 
 tation of spirituaHsts, and floated in the air. 
 
 And when Carlyle said to his wife, on the comple- 
 tion of his French Revolution : " There ! They 
 have not had for many years a book that came so 
 flaming hot from the heart of any man." It was his 
 rapture at having perfected an immortal work, and 
 an ecstasy of defiance to a heedless or stupid public. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But, in the life of men of genius, these, alas ! are 
 transitory, sudden, intermittent emotions. As a rule, 
 authors, especially of the higher type, are very un- 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 17 
 
 happy mortals. Whether it be the perpetual mental 
 strain producing nervousness and irritability ; or 
 whether it be the disappointment of baffled hopes ; 
 or whether it be penury, want, or neglect, that shall 
 be alleged as causes, it is quite certain that a hterary 
 life is mostly an unhappy one. Sudden raptures 
 mean chronic depression ; and the ecstasies of a 
 moment scarcely counterbalance the infelicities of a 
 lifetime. If it had pleased God to give you a brain., 
 the grey cortex of which is so dull and unelastic that 
 no external impression will strike a spark from it, 
 thank God for the favour ! Or if you are endowed 
 with such faculties that you can gaze for hours stupidly 
 into the fire ; or lean over a village bridge and watch 
 the waters curling beneath ; or consume infinite 
 tobacco, whilst engaged in the laudable object of 
 killing man's worst enemy — Time — thank God for 
 it 1 But if you are dov/ered with that nervous irri- 
 t^jihty called genius, throwing out thoughts from 
 the brain as swiftly as the cr}^stal drops are flung 
 
 from a mill-wheel ah, well, you may know, from 
 
 time to tim_e, what is meant by the ecstasy and rap- 
 ture of composition ; but you will never know what 
 happiness means in this life. '* Where thou beholdest 
 Genius," says Goethe, in Tasso, *' there thou be- 
 holdest, too, the martyr's crown." ^ 
 
 Hence, unquestionably, a literary life is for the 
 most part an unhappy Hfe ; because, if you have 
 genius, you must suffer the penalty of genius ; and, 
 if you have only talent, there are so many cares and 
 
 1 du das Genie erblickst 
 Erblickst du aiich Zugleich die Martyrkrome. 
 
i8 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 worries incidental to the circumstances of men of 
 letters, as to make life exceedingly miserable. Besides 
 the pangs of composition, and the continuous dis- 
 appointment which a true artist feels at his inability 
 to reveal himself, there is the ever-recurring difficulty 
 of gaining the public ear. Young writers are buoyed 
 up by the hope and the belief that they have only to 
 throw that poem at the world's feet to get back in 
 return the laurel-crown ; that they have only to push 
 that novel into print to be acknowledged at once as 
 a new light in literature. You can never convince a 
 young author that the editors of magazines and the 
 publishers of books are a practical body of men, who 
 are by no means fanatically anxious about placing 
 the best literature before the public. Nay, that, for 
 the most part, they are mere brokers, who conduct 
 their business on the hardest lines of a Profit and 
 Loss account. 
 
 But supposing your book fairly launched, its perils 
 are only beginning. You have to run the gauntlet 
 of the critics. To a young author, again, this seems 
 to be as terrible an ordeal as passing down the files 
 of Sioux or Comanche Indians, each one of whom is 
 thirsting for your scalp. When you are a little older, 
 you will find that criticism is not much more serious 
 than the bye-play of clowns in a circus, when they 
 beat around the ring the victim with bladders slung 
 at the end of long poles. A time comes in the life of 
 every author when he regards critics as comical, 
 rather than formidable, and goes his way unheeding. 
 But there are sensitive souls that yield under the 
 chastisement, and, perhaps after suffering much silent 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 19 
 
 torture, abandon the profession of the pen for ever. 
 Keats, perhaps, is the saddest example of a fine 
 spirit hounded to death by savage criticism ; because, 
 whatever his biographers may aver, that furious 
 attack of Gifford and Terry undoubtedly expedited 
 his death. But no doubt there are hundreds who 
 suffer keenly from hostile and unscrupulous criticism ; 
 and who have to bear that suffering in silence, because 
 it is a cardinal principle in literature that the most 
 unwise thing in the world for an author is to take 
 public notice of criticism in the way of defending 
 himself. Silence is the only safeguard, as it is the 
 only dignified protest against insult and offence. 
 
 Again, although there is a good deal of good nature 
 and fraternal feeling, and a sense of camaraderie 
 amongst authors, there is also sometimes '' war on 
 Parnassus." I do not know anything more painful and 
 humiliating than to see a beloved poet or a worshipped 
 author, descend into the arena of vulgar controversy. 
 It is a dethronement of our idols that is akin to loss 
 of faith. Hence, the life of a poet should never be 
 written. The world should be satisfied with the 
 legacy of his immortal works. Hence is Shakespeare 
 happy, in that we know practically nothing about his 
 life. It is not pleasant to see our great saints of lite- 
 rature toppling down to our feet in some wretched 
 wordy squabble. I think Tennyson acted most 
 wisely in excluding from the collected edition of his 
 poems his terrible and scathing reply to Lord Lytton 
 in the New Timo?i. Thackeray is not raised in our 
 esteem by his resentment against Charlotte Bronte 
 for his supposed likeness to Rochester. Nor does 
 
20 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 he come well out of his dispute with Edmuud Yates, 
 although, as a man, he has left behind him a most 
 noble character for magnanimity and lordly munifi- 
 cence. I remember, after reading Swinburne's 
 exchanges of compliments with Eric Mackay, about 
 a fulsome poem published by the latter in the World, 
 and which ended in an attorney's letter and a cry for 
 the pohce, I rubbed my eyes and asked myself : Is 
 this the same man that wrote the noble choruses in 
 Atalanta, and the sublime elegy on the Death of 
 Barry Cormvall? Mr. Froude, an unreliable his- 
 torian, but an accomplished litterateur, did wisely in 
 never answering the fierce onslaughts that were made 
 on him and his works, especially by his brother- 
 historian, Freeman. But his reputation was not 
 served by his post-mortem revelations, in which he 
 says with acrimony : 
 
 " I never resented anything more than that article 
 in the Quarterly. I felt as if I w^re tied to a post, 
 and a mule was brought up to kick me. Some day 
 I think I shall take my reviewers all round, and give 
 them a piece of my mind. I acknowledge to find real 
 mistakes in the whole work of 12 volumes — about 
 twenty trifling slips, equivalent to i's not dotted, and 
 fs not crossed ; and that is all the utmost malignity 
 has discovered. Every one of the rascals, too, has 
 made a dozen blunders of his own while detecting 
 one of mine .... You may have seen Free- 
 man's papers in the Contemporary. You will be glad 
 to hear that he is changing his mind on the Eastern 
 question. That I should be on the same side con- 
 vinces him that he must be wrong." 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 21 
 
 I quote this to show how unwise it is for aggrieved 
 authors to lift the veil on their feehngs, and compel 
 the small world to ask, how such anger can find a 
 place in celestial minds ? 
 
 But it proves that the literary life is not all sunshine. 
 I spoke of the eternal and universal law of repro- 
 duction. But there is the counter instinct, alas ! 
 also eternal and universal, and only too well developed 
 in the human heart — the instinct of attack and 
 destruction ; and this always finds its object in what- 
 ever is most fair and beautiful. Weeds have no 
 parasites. These latter find their way to the under 
 leaf of rose and lily. 
 
 I think that here, too, may be found a remote reason 
 for the profound pessimism that seem.s to be a cha- 
 racteristic of all great geniuses. The little we know 
 of Shakespeare, his temporal prosperity, and his placid 
 bust, seem to mark him as an exception. But no ! 
 The man who wrote Timon and Lear, and the sad 
 words about adversity and ingratitude, took but a 
 sombre view of life and humanity ; whilst running 
 through the golden web of his Sonnets is a dark line, 
 denoting the profound depression and melancholy of 
 his character. Milton's solemn sadness is everywhere 
 in his poems. Wordsworth expresses his convictions 
 in such lines as : 
 
 " The still, sad music of humanity," 
 and 
 
 *' The burden and 
 The weight of all this unintelligible world." 
 
22 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 Byron was a misanthrope for ever railing against his 
 kind. Shelley, in the lines : 
 
 *' Yet, now despair itself is mild 
 Even as the winds and waters are, 
 I could lie down like a tired child 
 And weep aw^ay the life of care : 
 Which I have borne, and yet must bear," 
 
 typifies the same. 
 
 I need not quote Carlyle or Tennyson — the two 
 saddest souls of modern times ; nor George Eliot ; 
 nor the host of great thinkers, who, having set out on 
 the journey of life with buoyant hopes and aspirations, 
 closed their eyes on this world, like the ancient pro- 
 phets, with a zioe upon their lips* 
 
 But, besides the petty annoyances and grinding 
 cares inseparable from the literary life, there was 
 another cause for their pessimism. It was this : 
 
 All great thinkers live and move on a high plane 
 of thought. It is only there they can breathe freely. 
 It is only in contact with spirits like themselves they 
 can live harmoniously and attain that serenity which 
 comes from ideal companionship. The studies of all 
 great thinkers must range along the highest altitudes 
 of human thought. I cannot remember the name of 
 any illum.inative genius who did not drink his inspira- 
 tions from the fountains of ancient Greek and Hebrew- 
 writers ; or such among the moderns as were pupils 
 in ancient thought, and, in turn, became masters in 
 their ov/n. I have always thought that the strongest 
 argument in favour of the Baconian theory was, that 
 no man, however indubitable his genius, could have 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 23 
 
 written the plays and sonnets that have come down 
 to us under Shakespeare's name who had not the 
 Hberal education of Bacon. How this habit of inter- 
 course with the gods makes one impatient of mere 
 men. The magnificent ideals that have ever haunted 
 the human mind, and given us our highest proofs of 
 a future immortality by reason of the impossibility 
 of their fulfilment here, are splintered into atoms by 
 contact with life's realities. Hence comes our sublime 
 discontent. You will notice that your first sensation 
 after reading a great book is one of melancholy and 
 dissatisfaction. The ideas, sentiments, expressions, 
 are so far beyond those of ordinary working life that 
 you cannot turn aside from one to the other without 
 an acute sensation and consciousness of the contrast. 
 And the principles are so lofty, so superhuman that 
 it is a positive pain, if once you become imbued 
 with them, to come down and mix in the squalid 
 surroundings of ordinary humanity. It may be 
 spiritual or intellectual pride that is engendered on 
 this high plane — intellectual Hfe. But whatever it is, 
 it becomes inevitable. An habitual meditation on 
 the vast problems that underHe human life, and are 
 knit into human destinies — thoughts of immortality, 
 of the Httleness of mere man, of the greatness of man's 
 soul, of the splendours of the universe that are in- 
 visible to the ordinary traffickers in the street, as the 
 vastness of St. Peter's is to the spider that weaves 
 her web in a corner of the dome — these things do 
 not fit men to understand the average human being, 
 or tolerate with patience the sordid wretchedness of 
 the unregenerate masses, Faust in his midnight study 
 
24 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 was a perplexed man, because he was always pursuing 
 the phantoms of the Unknown. Had he touched 
 earth, and then gone back to his books and alembics, 
 he would have become a cynic and a pessimist. He 
 remained on the lower levels, enjoyed all the lower 
 pleasures, suffered all the lower pains, and all the 
 disillusion that comes from contact with humanity. 
 You cannot come down from the society of Plato 
 without being slightly disgusted with John Anderson ; 
 nor can you descend from " the sacred everlasting 
 calm " of the immortal spirits of our race without 
 suffering irritation at the petty, frivolous, and stupid 
 things that seem to occupy nine-tenths of the time of 
 some of your acquaintance. And when you draw 
 aside and watch this swirling, turbulent tide of 
 humanity, carrying with it the straws and mud and 
 refuse of the world , it is not easy to take a hopeful or 
 sanguine view of the future of the race. It is easy 
 to understand, therefore, why such thinkers fly to 
 the solitude of their own thoughts, or the silent com- 
 panionship of the immortals ; and if they do care to 
 present their views in prose or verse to the world, 
 that these views take a sombre and melancholy setting 
 from '* the pale cast of thought " in which they were 
 engendered. I know but one exception to this uni- 
 versal scepticism — the case of Robert Browning. 
 He was, apparently, a childish, guileless optimist, 
 *' believing all things, hoping all things, loving all 
 things." But I explain the singular fact by the theory 
 that Browning, unHke all his great contemporaries, 
 was a society man. He gave as much time to mortals 
 as to the immortals ; and the contrast, therefore, was 
 not so painful or pronounced. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 25 
 
 IV 
 
 Perhaps 3'ou will be surprised, after this enumera- 
 tion of the many trials and drawbacks in the literary 
 life, when I draw the strange conclusion that I most 
 earnestly recommend it to those whose tastes lead in 
 that direction ; but always with the condition that it 
 is regarded not as a profession or means towards 
 an independent livelihood. And I recommend it for 
 a threefold reason : First, as a resource and pleasure 
 in those hours of depression or ennui that come to 
 all ; second, as a refining and exalting influence ; 
 third, as a possible Apostolate. 
 
 There is certainly no greater or more lasting 
 mental resource than a taste for letters or the literary 
 life. Music palls upon many ; social pleasures are 
 not always available or desirable. But the art of com- 
 position, once acquired, is never lost, and never 
 wearies ; and you can pursue it without extraneous 
 aid and in that solitude that is so dear to those who 
 try to think deeply. " I know no greater pleasure," 
 wrote Jean Paul, " and few more refining, than for 
 a young man to open his portfolio, and walking up 
 and down his room, strive to spoil that virgin page 
 with words that may be immortal." And if you are 
 fortunate enough to get into print, so much the better. 
 
 It seems to me that Reading Circles or Guilds in 
 our chief towns and cities might help materially, not 
 only the cultivation of literary tastes, but the calling 
 or vocation to a literary life. Such Circles exist, and 
 are productive of much good, in all the great cities of 
 
26 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 America ; and are carried on through the summer 
 months in the summer schools at Lake Champlain 
 and elsewhere. At these meetings not only are the 
 great classics discussed and read, but also individual 
 efforts on the part of members are encouraged by 
 being brought forward, and eagerly criticised. It is 
 quite possible that with that sarcastic vein that runs 
 through the Irish temperament, and in the absence 
 of that gentle, serious tone that makes so much for 
 harmony, that a game of bridge or bezique might be 
 better adapted to sustain these amenities that go so 
 far to make our social intercourse tolerable. But it 
 would be a decided impulse towards literary produc- 
 tion if there could be established in our midst a few 
 little coteries where a young author might be heard 
 before coming in front of the footlights. I am aware 
 that philosophers who have studied the intricacies of 
 human nature think otherwise. Leopardi says, that 
 the reading of compositions is *' a social scourge, a 
 public calamity i and adds a new terror to life " ; and 
 he quotes the opinion of a learned friend, who said 
 that if it be true that the Empress Octavia fainted 
 away while Virgil was reading to her the sixth canto 
 of his JEneidy we may be sure that her swoon was 
 caused, not by the poet's pathetic allusion to the fate 
 of Marcellus, but from sheer fatigue and weariness 
 of the poet's reading. And it is no violent stretch of 
 imagination to suppose that in a witty city like this, 
 some young censor might, like Diogenes of old, lean 
 over the shoulder of some unhappy reader and exclaim 
 as he saw the blank spaces at the bottom of the page 
 " Courage, my friends, I see land at last ! " 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 27 
 
 But if it is a daring thing to suggest the formation 
 of Reading Guilds in our midst I am about to do a 
 desperate thing in suggesting, as an incentive to a 
 literary life, the establishment of a purely literary 
 journal. We are so deluged with journals and reforms, 
 and methods of reform, that I am sure at the very 
 suggestion you will cast up your eyes and say, "Yet 
 another ! " But on the one hand, there cannot be a 
 doubt of the steady decadence, and even extinction, 
 of these literary tastes in our midst, which originated 
 fifty or sixty years ago in the hedge schools, and which, 
 helped by the tone of the public journals, constituted 
 quite an Augustine age in our literature. On the other 
 hand, it is quite useless to look to our schools or 
 educational system for such a revival of tastes as 
 would place us on a level with the cultured classes 
 of other nations. But no one can deny that the Hterary 
 talent requisite for working successfully a great 
 literary journal is available in Ireland. One Dublin 
 magazine, if it were limited to purely literary, scien- 
 tific, or artistic subjects, would have all the elements 
 of a great literary organ. And a small quarto paper, 
 published some years ago in Dublin, commanded, it 
 was quite clear, the highest literary talent amongst 
 us ; but it w^as steered, from the day it was launched, 
 right on the rocks and shoals of religious and political 
 controversy, and, of course, suff'ered shipwreck ! 
 But I suppose I am a dreamer of dreams, and we shall 
 let it pass. 
 
 I hold in the second place that a literary life is 
 necessarily a life of refinement and culture. I cannot 
 see how it can be otherwise. I cannot see how any 
 
28 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 man or woman, living habitually with the prophets 
 and seers of the race, can descend wiUingly to the 
 lower levels of sense or self-interest. And I again 
 repeat that no man can attain conspicuous literary 
 success, or become a light to his generation, unless 
 he has sat an obedient pupil at the feet of the great 
 masters in his art. I know you may quote against me 
 certain poets and philosophers who preached or sang 
 divinely and lived diaboHcally. But que voulez-vous ? 
 The divOy who at ten o'clock, in yonder theatre, is 
 raising you to the third heavens on the wings of her 
 voice, v/ill sup at twelve on oysters and champagne. 
 You cannot, alas ! dissever the human from the divine. 
 But I cannot see how anyone who has been reading, 
 say, the Dialogues of Plato ; or who has just finished 
 that chapter, " The Everlasting Year," in the Third 
 Book of Sartor Resartus, can be greedy at a restaurant 
 or can join in a circle of scandal, or cheat his neigh- 
 bour at whist. Of course there is the danger of 
 ultra-refinement, of looking down upon " the man in 
 the street." But this danger is remote, except, as 
 I have said, in the pessimism of great authors. Most 
 others will come down from Olympus with only 
 Infinite Pity in their hearts for poor, sordid, struggling 
 humanity. 
 
 Lastly (and I am sure you are as well pleased with 
 the word, as when you hear in Church, " One word 
 more, and I have done "), there is the Apostolate of 
 Literature. It is a subject that might be developed 
 not only into a Lecture, but into a Book ; and I am 
 acting unwisely in giving it but a paragraph at the 
 end of a paper. But I shall address myself only to 
 one aspect of it, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 29 
 
 I feel that I am contravening the opinions of each 
 and every section into whicli modern Ireland is 
 divided when I say, that in the work of nation-build- 
 ing the chief requisite would be architects of large, 
 liberal ideas, gathered from the w^orld's chief thinkers, 
 and assimilated so perfectly that they would be 
 manifested in iirmer judgments, wider speculations, 
 more generous sympathies, and larger toleration than 
 we find in our little world of to-day. And I do not 
 know v/here that knowledge and experience are to be 
 acquired, unless at the feet of " the masters of those 
 who know," in every age, of every country and clime. 
 And whilst I am very proud of being an ardent propa- 
 gandist of the GaeHc League, I cannot sympathise 
 with those who think, I am sure honestly 
 and sincerely, that w^e should only read Irish 
 books, and write on Irish subjects ; and who 
 speak with some contempt of Anglo-Irish writers 
 and cosmopolitan patriots. If such ideas had 
 been accepted in other countries, I wonder where 
 the literary glories, nay, the political triumphs 
 of England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy 
 would be to-day ? If Shakespeare had not ran- 
 sacked the world for subjects, where would be Julius 
 Ccesar and Coriolanus^ Hamlet and Othello, The Mer- 
 chant of Venice^ Romeo and Juliet ? If Milton had 
 limited his ideas within the British seas, we would 
 not have had Paradise Lost or Samson Agonistes, 
 Byron, Shelley, and Keats would be represented by 
 one sonnet or lyric and an angry diatribe. Swinburne 
 would not exist, except in some political harangue. 
 If Tasso, Dante, Alfieri, had follow^ed a similar prin- 
 
30 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 ciple, Italian literature would be almost limited to 
 Petrarch's Sonnets. And if the great French trage- 
 dians had not gone to antiquity for subjects, the 
 names of Racine and Corneille would be practically 
 unknown. In a word, you would blot out the world's 
 literature if you only regarded what was purely racial 
 or national in the productions of the great masters of 
 literature, in every age, and country, and clime. 
 
 Nor is it reasonable that it should be otherwise. 
 There is a certain fund of original thought stored up 
 in the written archives, the unwritten traditions, and 
 the daily habitudes of every race. And if thought is 
 the parent of thought, and language its vehicle, I think 
 that that nation would soon be starved which would 
 limit itself to the creations of its own children. Even 
 if it be said that home thoughts are the best thoughts, 
 well, they will become more valuable by being ap- 
 praised by comparison with the ideas of others. But 
 certainly in our days, when we may be on the eve 
 of tremendous changes, I would wish for systems of 
 education, based on broader principles than we now 
 possess ; and as that seems almost beyond the horizon 
 of our hopes, I would wish to see literary tastes more 
 widely extended and more liberally developed, to the 
 end that, with larger views and freer sympathies, we 
 might be able to view the present condition of our 
 country, as it were, in the perspective, the true per- 
 spective of solid judgment, and unbiassed and un- 
 prejudiced sympathies. And as we cannot, as a nation, 
 go outside ourselves without courting self-destruc- 
 tion, the only thing that seems possible and feasible 
 is to take our stand, side by side, with the master- 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 31 
 
 thinkers of the ages, and try and look at ourselves 
 with their eyes. I think if we did so we should see 
 many things in a different light from that in which 
 they ROW appear ; and that our views of men and 
 their institutions, their law^s and habits, their history, 
 and their present political and economic conditions, 
 their relations to each other, and to the world v/ith 
 which they are brought into contact ; their social, 
 religious, and political antipathies, narrow- ed and con- 
 centrated in the focus of great cosmic principles 
 would seem to us capable of much emendation ; that 
 is, if we were really prepared to emerge from the 
 toils of factions and parties, and walk in the broader 
 way of free and unfettered principle. And as educa- 
 tion cannot come down to the masses of the people, 
 and there is no pedagogue system so wide as to 
 embrace a whole nation, nothing seems to remain for 
 us in Ireland but an apostolate of Literature, where 
 books will be our University, and each man a teacher 
 unto himself. 
 
 I do not despair of seeing yet in Ireland — in its 
 populous centres, which ought to become luminous 
 points, radiating light all around ; and its quiet, 
 country places, where all the surroundings are favour- 
 able to peaceful thought and meditation — large 
 circles of thinkers, devoted to literature, and science, 
 and art, and insensibly leading up the masses of the 
 people to their own regions of high thought, and 
 refined and exalted sentiment. I feel sure that outside 
 the storm-belt, the torrid zone of political life, there 
 must be many of both sexes who desire to live more 
 gentle lives in the temperate regions where passion 
 
32 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 has no place, where there is no intriguing, no states- 
 manship (as the euphemism has it), no contention, 
 except the academic striving after Uterary success, or 
 a calm and passionless debate about a point of art, or 
 a subtlety of expression. Such a literary, shall I say 
 ideal, world must not expect recognition. Nothing 
 is recognised in Ireland except what is entangled in 
 the meshes of politics. The last trump of doom would 
 sound before we would think of putting up a monu- 
 ment to such a thinker as Bishop Berkeley. It is quite 
 different with other nationalities, who look at things 
 with *' larger, other eyes " than ours. The grfcat, 
 generous American people do not ask if a dead poet 
 were a Democrat or a Republican, whether he was 
 enmeshed in the toils of Tammany or other political 
 organisation. They only ask : Was he a Poet ? and 
 they recognise his worth accordingly. The great 
 German nation acknowledge as the " bright, par- 
 ticular star *' of its firmament, Goethe, who w^as 
 decidedly unpatriotic in our sense of the word. It 
 would seem difficult to defend the man who was so 
 absolutely indifferent to the fate of his country during 
 the Napoleonic invasion that he was engrossed in 
 fossil-hunting at the very time that the battle of 
 Zena was raging outside the walls of his dwelling. 
 But, because he was the supreme artist and inter- 
 preter of his nation, he has obtained the first place in 
 the Temple of Fame, which is so well and honourably 
 crowded with the effigies of artists and men of letters, 
 scientists and politicians, statesmen and orators, in 
 the Fatherland. 
 
 I cannot recall just now any public recognition of 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 33 
 
 genius in Ireland — of genius as such, and apart from 
 political services — except that most brilliant and 
 honourable episode in the history of Trinity College, 
 when, on the 15th August, 1835, in the presence of 
 three hundred members of the British Association, 
 and all the Fellows of Trinity, assembled in the 
 dining-hall of the College, a young Professor and 
 Fellow, of twenty-seven years, William Rowan Hamil- 
 ton, was suddenly summoned by the Viceroy and 
 knighted, " not," as his Excellency said, *' as con- 
 ferring a distinction, but as setting the royal and 
 national mark on a distinction already acquired by 
 genius and labour." 
 
 But this is not the point. I am contemplating a 
 condition of things where literature will be pursued 
 for its own sake, and for the effects it must necessarily 
 have on those who are happy to be its votaries. I do 
 not yet despair of seeing a shelf of books in every 
 labourer's cottage in the land. I do not despair of 
 seeing our artisans seeking their evening recreation 
 and their Sunday pleasure in the company of great 
 thinkers and sweet singers. I hope I may see the 
 time when one could say " Dante " or " Browning," 
 without inducing the dread silence of an earthquake 
 panic in the higher circles of the land ; and when 
 one might say " Turner "or " BotticeUi " without 
 incurring the suspicion of affectation or pedantry. 
 The day may be remote ; when it comes it will usher 
 in a Golden Age, fraught with vast possibilities for 
 the social, religious, and political welfare of Ireland. 
 For our social advancement — inasmuch as it may 
 raise the tone of daily life and bring an atmosphere 
 
 D 
 
34 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 of refinement and gentleness where now there is too 
 much persiflage and frivolity. For our religious well- 
 being — because the deeper we read the stronger 
 becomes our hold on those cardinal dogmas and 
 principles that are common to all Christian creeds. 
 ** The contemplative Atheist," says Lord Bacon, '* is 
 rare. A little philosophy incHneth man's mind to 
 Atheism ; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's 
 minds around to religion," For our political welfare — 
 for a commonwealth founded by a people of large 
 knowledge, trained understanding, quickened per- 
 ceptions, and solid principles, that will not sway to 
 every wind of speech, will have elements of stability 
 and permanency, with " Freedom slowly broadening 
 down, from precedent to precedent." 
 
 As yet we live by hope : but we must work on, 
 humbly and hopefully straining after an ideal, doing 
 our duty in the narrowest social and parochial sur- 
 roundings, and trusting that an aggregate of effort 
 will achieve success in more spacious times and more 
 gentle surroundings than it is our lot to experience 
 at present. 
 
OPTIMISM 
 II 
 
 IN LITERATURE 
 
 The clever agent of a circus-troupe— sent in 
 advance with bills and flaming posters to excite the 
 curiosity of the young, and it may be, of the old — 
 generally has some latent charm, hidden away under 
 some obscure and unknown phrase, to stimulate all 
 the more the curiosity of his future clients, and assure 
 himself of their sixpences. Somewhat in the same 
 way I was awfully tempted to call this lecture by some 
 mysterious name, so that, if you were not tempted 
 to come for the lecturer's sake, you might come 
 through that universal and insatiable little vice — 
 curiosity. And I had no trouble in finding such a 
 phrase ; for, as Robert Browning is my ideal of an 
 optimist poet — indeed the only optimist poet of our 
 generation ; and as Robert Browning's verses are 
 synonymous with everything that is obscure, involved, 
 or — to use a word that has a special interest at present 
 through Dr. Jameson and Oom Paul — outlandish, I 
 had only to open this Uttle duodecimo volume and 
 presto ! here is the word, ready, cut, and dry — " Pippa 
 passes." Not to keep you too long on the tenter- 
 
 35 
 
36 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 hooks of expectation, let me say at once, that Pippa 
 is a little Italian girl, working in a silk factory in Asolo, 
 and Pippa has got a holiday. It is a rare event ; and 
 she is determined to enjoy it to the uttermost. She 
 will not squander a wavelet of it ; no, not " one mite 
 of her twelve hours' treasure." Now Pippa, like all 
 Italians, can sing ; and she goes around the vine-clad 
 hills, and down the singing valleys, with a carol on 
 her lips, and lightness in her heart ; and the burden 
 of her song is this : 
 
 The year's at the spring, 
 And day's at the morn ; 
 Morning's at seven ; 
 The hill-side's dew-pearled ; 
 The lark's on the wing ; 
 The snail's on the thorn ; 
 God's in his heaven — 
 All's right with the world ! 
 
 Now, it happens, as she goes along, four distinct 
 groups of persons, unseen by her — four groups, who 
 are contemplating either crimes or critical balances in 
 their lives, are so affected by her simple artless song, 
 full of hope and trust, that they pause — some stricken 
 by remorse ; others, appalled at the step they were 
 about to take. And all, touched by the simple faith 
 of this child, are moved to change into better and 
 hopefuller things ; and consciences seared with sin, 
 and hearts hardened in iniquity, spring towards better 
 and loftier things by the tender faith of this guileless 
 child. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 37 
 
 Now the burden of her song : — 
 
 God's in his heaven^ 
 AlVs right with the world, 
 
 is the burden of al! Browning*s poetry. He is essen- 
 tially — Browning the optimist. '* All's right with the 
 world." This note runs through all his poems. In 
 Nature, in Man, in Science, in Social life — every- 
 where, there is either some good, or some tendency 
 towards final good. He will not see gloom anywhere ; 
 arid should a passing cloud darken his sunlight, he 
 looks only at the silver lining. You remember the 
 melancholy of Tennyson : and how he made the 
 lonely mere, the sombre sky, the cold grey stones of 
 the sea, etc., typify his own sombre spirit. Browning 
 will not have this. 
 
 '' The lark 
 Soars up and up, shivering for very joy ; 
 Afar the ocean sleeps ; white fishing gulls 
 Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe 
 Of nested limpets ; savage creatures seek 
 Their loves in wood and plain — and God renews 
 His ancient rapture ! " 
 
 The same spirit pervades all his poems. Where 
 others spell failure, despair, despondency. Browning 
 spells success, hope, and that lofty elevation of spirit 
 that passes from mere human joy to the highest 
 dreams of inspiration. Of course there are flaws in 
 the handiwork of creation ; but they only show the 
 grace and beauty of the rest of the work, and they 
 in turn will be filled up and polished into perfect- 
 ness. There are discords in the music, but they only 
 
38 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 emphasise the harmony ; and life, with all its sorrows, 
 is very sweet and good, and a gift from Heaven, and 
 can be rounded into perfect form by our own efforts, 
 that is, if we are generous, hopeful, and true. 
 
 In strange contradiction to all this is the melan- 
 choly, the despair, the pessimism, that is the knoteey- 
 of all other philosophers and poets. And, as I have 
 here introduced a new word, let me define it, or rather, 
 let me define my contradictories. Optimism is the 
 theory that, " all that is, is right," that it is a glorious 
 world, full of all fine possibilities, and that mankind 
 is ever moving onward, onward, to the goal of perfect 
 happiness. Pessimism, on the other hand, is the sad 
 and terrible doctrine, that life is, at best, a miserable 
 business, to be terminated as soon as possible by 
 annihilation ; that all this thing called progress is 
 really retrogression, and that the sooner it is all over 
 the better. Of course, this dismal teaching was known 
 to the philosophers of old ; but in our century, it has 
 permeated all literature, the poem, the novel, the 
 historical work, the treatise on philosophy ; and its 
 chief apostles were Schofenhauer and Hartmann, in 
 Germany ; and a poet, named l/copardi, in Italy. 
 One, however, could be disposed to forgive and forget 
 these idle dreamers, but the evil theory has infiltrated 
 down into the lives and souls of men, and made miser- 
 able very beautiful and lofty spirits, whose words and 
 deeds have been, instead of a gospel of humanity, a 
 sad legacy of the untruthfulness of despair. It runs 
 like a black warp through all Carlyle's philosophy. 
 '* England consists," he says, '' of thirty million people 
 — mostly fools." And such expressions as everlasting 
 falsities and negations, want of verity in public men, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 39 
 
 wind bags, and all the rest of the intolerable coarseness 
 of a poor, diseased mind, which the world will have 
 us believe was a philosophic one, forces itself on you 
 at everv^ page, and makes you believe at last that if 
 ever there was a sham philosopher it was Carlyle ; 
 and if ever there was cant and humbug it is in the 
 twenty odd volumes which a misappHed industry has 
 left the world. You will find the same in all his 
 successors— in CHfford, Spencer, Martineau. They 
 all set out with the original faith — that science means 
 progress, and that the whole race is moving onward 
 and upward to perfection. Then the disillusion comes 
 with experience ; and when the zeal and heat of youth 
 is over, it gives place to the blackness of despair. 
 
 I think I could forgive this in the philosophers. 
 But how can you pardon it in the poets— the world's 
 singers and prophets ? What a frightful deordination 
 it is, that they, whose music should Hft up the weary 
 heart of humanity, sing but to depress it, and bring 
 into the lives of men not the songs of gladness and 
 hope, but the threnodies of anguish and despair. And 
 despair, despair, is the dominant note in all the grand 
 organ-music of the nineteenth century. As I have 
 said of the philosophers, so do I say of the poets. No 
 matter what songs of gladness burst from their lips 
 in the morning of their lives, it soon dies away into 
 one melancholy monotone of sadness and regret. 
 You might forgive Tennyson that lovely lyric : — 
 
 *' Break, break, break 
 On thy cold grey stones, O Sea, 
 But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
 Will never come back to me." 
 
40 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 But how can you forgive him for these : — 
 
 " There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
 Believe me, than in half the creeds." 
 
 Or this : — 
 
 ** Sooner or later I too may take the print 
 Of the golden age — why not ? I have neither hope 
 
 nor trust ; 
 May make my heart as a mill-stone, set my face as 
 
 a flint ; 
 Cheat and be cheated, and die ; who knows ? we 
 
 are ashes and dust." 
 
 And if you protest and say : He rose above all that, 
 even in that poem from which you have quoted 
 (" Maud "), and wound up his awful phillipics 
 against society by declaring : 
 
 ** It is better to fight for the good than rail at the 
 
 ill; 
 I have felt with my native land. I am one with 
 
 my kind ; 
 I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom 
 
 assigned." 
 
 Yet he retracted again in his extreme old age, and 
 passed his final sentence of eternal reprobation 
 against humanity in the very last extended poem 
 which he wrote. 
 
 The same is true in even a more intense sense of 
 a still more delicate and refined nature — Matthew 
 Arnold. Many more modern critics will place his 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 41 
 
 name even higher than that of Tennyson ; and it is 
 more true of his poetry than of Tennyson's that one 
 long wail of sadness runs through it all. In that well- 
 known poem Dover Beach ^ he, too, makes the eternal 
 sea re-echo his own despair : — 
 
 " The sea of faith 
 Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 
 Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. 
 But now I only hear 
 Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. 
 Retreating to the breath 
 
 Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 
 And naked shingles of the world. 
 
 " Let us be true 
 To one another ! for the world, which seems 
 To lie before us like a land of dreams 
 So various, so beautiful, so new. 
 Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 
 Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain ; 
 And we are here, as on a darkling plain 
 Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight 
 Where ignorant arms clash by night." 
 
 And so on, through pages of " most musical, most 
 melancholy verse." 
 
 Of course I have not quoted Byron, who was a 
 professed pessimist ; nor Swinburne, who tries to 
 infuse into his poems a Greek lightness and joy, and 
 would have succeeded but that the curse of Paganism 
 is on all he wrote, and his pages are floating into the 
 waters of Lethe. Nor do I quote John Ruskin, who.. 
 
42 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 as you know, thinks we are all rushing, on the wings 
 of modern science, to certain damnation. Neither 
 shall I mention any of our modern novelists, but to 
 say, that if any lingering doubt remained in the minds 
 of men, that our literature is also in a state of de- 
 cadence, I need only quote Trilby and the far worse 
 abominations that pour forth from men and, alas ! 
 women-novelists, until one is inclined to believe that 
 this awful flood of prurient literature will sweep away 
 every old and venerated landmark of decency and 
 propriety. But as I half share Ruskin's detestation 
 of the ravages on the face of Nature made by modern 
 science, here is a rather sharp echo and confirmation 
 of his worst predictions. 
 
 x\ll the valleys of the Meuse and Moselle are sullied 
 with factory smoke and blasting powder. 
 
 The Bay of Amalfi and the shore of Posilippo are 
 defiled by cannon foundries. 
 
 All the Ardennes are scorched and soiled, and 
 sickened with stench of smoke and suffocating slag. 
 
 The Peak country and the Derwent valley are being 
 scarred and charred for railway lines, mines, and 
 factories. 
 
 What has been done to Venice is such an outrage 
 that it might wake Tiziano from under his weight of 
 marble in the Frari Church, and call the Veronese 
 back from his grave. 
 
 The finest torrent in Scotland is about to be diverted 
 from its course and used for aluminium works. 
 
 The fumes of these aluminium works will, when 
 they are in full blast , emit hydrofluoric acid gas which 
 will destroy all the vegetation on Loch Ness for miles 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 43 
 
 The lakes of Maggiorc, of Como, and Garda, are 
 all being defiled by factories and steam-engines. 
 Thirlmere and Loch Katrine have been violated, 
 and all the other English and Scotch lakes will be 
 similarly ravaged. Fucina has been dried up as a 
 speculation, and Thrasymene is threatened. The 
 Rhone is dammed up, and tapped, and tortured, 
 until all its rich alluvial deposits are lost to the soil 
 of Provence. 
 
 So says " Ouida " in the Nineteenth Century for 
 January, 1896. And so all the beauty and grandeiu' 
 of the old world is blighted and poisoned by the in- 
 satiable lust of men and peoples for gold. It is a 
 dismal prospect ; and some will think that amongst 
 the few consolations we have left us in Ireland, we 
 may number the probability that our blue skies will 
 never be blackened by belching chimneys, nor our 
 fair vales seamed and scarred as are the sweetest spots 
 that the Great Artist, God, framed and beautified for 
 the delight of the children of men. 
 
 And so the litany of despair goes on. In science, 
 in literature, in the relations of great powers towards 
 each other, in the impending and inevitable cataclysm 
 that will rend Europe from the Ural mountains to 
 the Atlantic seaboard, in the total absence of honour 
 and sincerity amongst nations as amongst individuals, 
 in the new ideas that are being advanced about social, 
 parental, and marital relations, in the lust of the rich 
 for more wealth — for wealth is insatiable — in the 
 subterranean thunders that herald a terrible revolution 
 amongst the working classes — above all, in the ever- 
 growing indiflPerence to religion in Protestant lands, 
 
44 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 and the substitution of some new codes of ethics for 
 the eternal gospel of Christ ; in all these things the 
 prophets of despair — and they are legion — forecast 
 a future pregnant with possibilities that may not be 
 imagined, and full of doubt and gloom that should 
 make sick at heart anyone who thought well of his 
 race, or yet entertained a lingering regard for a 
 humanity that appears to be bent on destruction. 
 Where now is little Pippa : — 
 
 God's in his heaven, 
 
 AlVs right zvith the zvorld? 
 
 Where is the great optimist poet who sings : — 
 
 " Grow old along with me ! 
 The best is yet to be, 
 
 The last of life, for which the first was made, 
 Our times are in His hand 
 Who saith : ' A whole I planned. 
 Youth shows but half ; trust God, 
 See all, nor be afraid ! ' " 
 
 You will ask, however, very naturally here, where 
 is the point for discussion : what is your thesis, 
 which we are to support or contradict ? It is simple, 
 apparently, a very easy question for solution ; yet I 
 venture to say that you never discussed a question 
 in this hall which is so many sided, or which leaves 
 the decision so uncertain. The thesis is : — 
 
 The optimistic, the hopeful view of the world and 
 humanity, is the viev/ that commends itself to us, as 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 45 
 
 fraught with the larger and higher possibilities for 
 our race. 
 The contradictory thesis is : — 
 
 The pessimists are the thinkers that really — and in 
 very deed, by their criticism, their dissatisfaction, their 
 sublime restlessness — are pushing on the race towards 
 the very perfection in which they do not believe. 
 
46 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 OPTIMISM IN DAILY LIFE 
 
 But before you argue the question it may well be 
 asked what practical bearing has such a discussion 
 on daily life, or the real progress of the race. It 
 would be unkind in us, who owe so much to our poets 
 and philosophers, to ask what influence do they exer- 
 cise on the first movements and the generic ideas, 
 which are the well-springs of all human actions. 
 There are thinkers who trace every revolution, pro- 
 gressive or reactionary, to our sages of the attic and 
 the closet, on the theory : Give me the making of a 
 nation's ballads, and I will leave you the making of 
 a nation's laws. But, apart from all that, does not 
 this vital question enter into our daily life, colouring 
 all our ideas, and giving a bias towards all our emo- 
 tions and actions. You will ask : But we never have 
 met your optimists and pessimists in daily life. Have 
 you not ? Let me come down from the Olympians 
 for a moment, and challenge the man in the street. 
 
 When you are down below zero in spirits, unable 
 to meet that little bill at the bank, with your child 
 sick at home ; when you walk under dripping Decem- 
 ber skies, your hands stuck deep in your pockets — a 
 picture of misery and despair, do you know the man 
 that comes up with a smile, slaps you on the back till 
 you gasp for breath, shouts at you to cheer up — that 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 47 
 
 the hanker will be considerate, that your chil<i's sick- 
 ness is a trifle, that the sun is shining somewhere 
 away behind those leaden clouds, etc., etc. ? Well, 
 that's an optimist. 
 
 Do you know the man who tells you, just as you 
 are starting on that picnic in the middle of June, 
 with high hopes and presages of the good time you 
 are going to have, that it will rain cats and dogs before 
 twelve o'clock, that you will eat your muddy sand- 
 wiches and watery pies under dripping umbrellas ; 
 and that you need take no water to dilute Jameson. 
 He even will supply it by the gallon ! There's your 
 social pessimist. 
 
 Do you know the man who buttonholes you on the 
 street, when you are rushing for a train, asks you how 
 many miles to Sirius, and would trouble you to cal- 
 culate how long an express train (just coming in to 
 your station) at 45 miles an hour, would take to touch 
 the nearest fixed star. Do you recognise the same 
 idiot who asks you how many microbes there are in 
 a spoonful of milk, and how many will there be if 
 you leave it standing for twenty-four hours in a tem- 
 perature of 77 Fahrenheit ? Do you remember your 
 delight, when he informed you that you have 
 24,176,348 microbes waltzing around your mouth, 
 and that is only the advance guard, lying in ambush 
 for the countless legions that yon swallow every time 
 you sit down to a meal, for that innocent spoonful of 
 milk contains 10,548,000 microbes, and in twenty-four 
 hours, if you have the courage to swallow it, you will 
 add to the population of your interior 17,402,000,000 
 of the same fertile and interesting subjects } Is it 
 
48 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 the same individual who informs you that early in 
 the 20th century you can carry all your meals in your 
 waistcoat pocket — breakfast, luncheon, dinner, and 
 supper ; and that when you wish to breakfast, you 
 just take out a capsule, as you now take a pinch of 
 snuff, and, presto, here is the concentrated essence 
 of a breakfast, two rashers of bacon, two poached eggs, 
 two cups of tea, and several cuts of toast ? And when 
 you invite your friend to dine — no more courses, no 
 more waiters, no more napkins, nor knives and forks, 
 nor flowers, nor glass, nor silver ; no toasts, no after- 
 dinner speeches ! You touch an electric button, and 
 lo ! you have a delicious heat, and a soft lambent 
 light playing around the room ; you take out your 
 silver box, tap it, ask your friend to take a pill, and — 
 he has done in a moment and in a simple way all that 
 we do through the long hours and exquisite tortures 
 of an eleven course dinner d la Riisse. He expects 
 you to be enthusiastic. But if you are still dull and 
 uncomprehensive, he will excite your imagination by 
 fairy stories of flying machines, kinematographs, tele- 
 pathy, earth-inoculation, ether-electricity, etc., etc. 
 Space annihilated, time reduced to minutes by sur- 
 passing volume and elasticity. You want to see Rome ? 
 Touch a button, here in your study ; and lo ! you're 
 in Rome, walking down the Appian Way, studying 
 statues in the Vatican, or treading the pavement of 
 St, Peter's. You'd hke to see Calcutta ? Here you 
 are. Blazing sun, ill-smelling Hooghly, black Hin- 
 doos, yellow Musselmen, bells ringing from the 
 temples, lamps floating on the stream. Let's see 
 Chicago ! Presto ! Here's Chicago — Porkopolis. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 49 
 
 Tramcars ringing, men and women pushing along 
 on the side- walks, the white walls of the Exhibition 
 mirrored in the black waters of Lake Michigan, pigs 
 squeahng as they pass into the machines, and come 
 out hams and sausages. Sausages put into the other 
 end of the machine, and out comes a lively porker ! 
 Madame Patti (or rather her great successor, for 
 Madame Patti is not immortal — however, stop there, 
 science will make her so) is singing in Manchester 
 to-night. Very well, we shall hear her. You touch 
 a button here, sitting down in your armchair : and 
 lo ! her wonderful voice comes floating over the wires, 
 and you sit enchanted — but you'd give all the world 
 to see her. Certainly. The good genie of science is 
 here. You call up another number. Your little study 
 and arm-chair and books and pictures float away : 
 and ecce ! here is the vast tlieatre, the stage with its 
 footlights, the gorgeous scenery, the orchestra, the 
 box-stalls, the wonderful dresses, the man standing 
 up to go out to see a friend, etc. Isn't science wonder- 
 ful ? My dear fellow ! but your train is gone, and 
 you are tempted to be profane. Do you know the 
 demon ? Well, that's your scientific optimist ! 
 
 But don't you know that man that damns science, 
 wishes back the good old times when it took four 
 days to go to Dublin, dilates on the morning coaches 
 a la Dickens^ the early breakfasts on cold beef and 
 tankards of ale, the bugle cheerily waking up the 
 sleepy passengers, the glorious scenery by wood and 
 lake and river, the nevv^ towns you come to, the curio- 
 sity your arrival excites, the glorious dinner of veal 
 pie, pigeon pie, legs of mutton, sirloin of beef, oceans 
 
 E 
 
50 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 of claret, and plenty of time to eat it and digest it ; not 
 like your leather sandwich and your boiling coffee, 
 and a whistling engine, and a shouting guard — Ah ! 
 the good old times, when science was unknown — 
 when men and women were fine, healthy, God-fearing 
 beings, living on wholesome food, and not on your 
 deleterious Oriental drugs of tea and coffee — when 
 disease was practically unknown — when science had 
 not invented stethoscopes and electric batteries — 
 when there was no neurosis, or neurasthenia, and no 
 man knew he had a liver — when we were clothed in 
 good old Irish frieze, not in Manchester shoddy — 
 when there were no newspapers, bat you could talk 
 for six months about a w^edding or a christening — 
 when, in a word, the world of each man was a small 
 world, and we were more interested about our neigh- 
 bours than about naked savages in Matabele, or what 
 is to be done with the " sick man " in Constantinople. 
 Don't you know him — the scientific pessimist ? 
 
 And the educational optimist — with his piles of 
 statistics about the Intermediate Examinations — 5,340 
 boys and girls passing in Botany, Mineralogy, Mettal- 
 urgy, Trigonometry, Physiology, Differential and 
 Integral Calculus, Latin, Greek, Italian, German, 
 French, Gaelic, etc. Ah ! my dear sir, what advan- 
 tages young people have now that we never enjoyed ! 
 And what a glorious future Hes before our country 
 when these young people grow to manhood and 
 womanhood, and form the commercial and profes- 
 sional classes — the backbone of the country ! Educate! 
 educate ! educate ! Take your stand amongst the 
 nations of the earth, and sweep away the curse of 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 51 
 
 illiteracy ! We are doing it. In Primary, Inter- 
 mediate, and, very soon, in University Education, 
 we will come into line with the best intellects of Eng- 
 land, Germany, and America ; and then the rest is 
 easy. Ireland's future is assured ! 
 
 But here, suddenly, as the stream of optimistic 
 eloquence flows on, a big block is flung across it by 
 the no less fervid but denunciatory eloquence of the 
 pessimist : — 
 
 Education ! there's no such thing in Ireland ! 
 There are not ten educated men in Ireland, from 
 Malin Head to Cape Clear. Your systems of educa- 
 tion are a mockery, a delusion and a snare. You cram 
 for examinations, as turkeys are crammed for Christ- 
 mas : and your boys and girls are consequently 
 sufl^ering from intellectual plethora and indigestion, 
 resulting in mental atrophy and paralysis. Take any 
 of your gold-medallists or exhibitioners three months 
 after examination, and he cannot translate a line or 
 sentence in the very books in which he passed with 
 glowing colours. And if he goes up for a bank exa- 
 mination, or some minor office in the Civil Service, 
 he cannot pass in the elements of grammar, or the 
 rudiments of Geography or Arithmetic. He will talk 
 of Homer, and believe that Troy was in N. America ; 
 he will tell you that Mount Parnassus was in Ireland, 
 and that the Nile flows into St. George's Channel ; 
 that Caesar was killed at Clontarf, and that the battle 
 of the Pyramids was won by Brian Boru. In other 
 words, he is a conceited ignoramus, despising every- 
 one, and despised by all. And it only stands to 
 reason. You cannot cram a boy's head with all this 
 learning to any advantage. Meat for man ; milk for 
 
52 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 babes. But you want the babes to fatten on roast- 
 beef. You don't know that over-feeding, as any 
 doctor will tell you, is but another word for starvation 
 God be with the good old times, when the hedge- 
 schoolmasters were as plentiful as blackberries in 
 Ireland, when the scholars took their sods of turf 
 under their arms for school seats ; but every boy 
 knew his Virgil and Horace and Homer as well as 
 the last ballad about some rebel that was hanged, 
 and every farmer's son could survey his father's land 
 by merely looking at it — when the Kerry peasants 
 talked to each other in Latin ; and when they came up 
 to the Palatines in Limerick, as harvestmen in the 
 autumn, they could make uncomplimentary re- 
 marks and say cuss- words ad libitum, before their 
 master's face, and he couldn't understand them, for 
 they spoke the tongue of Cicero and Livy — the 
 language of the educated world. These were the 
 times when Irishmen knew well what they did know ; 
 when every Irishman knew three languages perfectly. 
 Voster from cover to cover, the six books of Euclid, 
 the science of mensuration ; how to season a hurley 
 for the Sunday game, and how to polish the pike-head 
 
 for ?^ But we are degenerates. And what's the 
 
 purpose of it all. Ivook at the way you educate your 
 children in the National Schools. Listen ! Here is 
 a logical proposition. Any system of education is 
 a dismal failure that does not supply the means 
 towards the end. Now, the end of education is to 
 fit pupils for the spheres they shall occupy in life. 
 But the spheres that most pupils occupy in life are 
 
 ^ ''The Muster in the Valley, beside the singing river, at the 
 rising of the Moon." 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 53 
 
 either spheres of menial or manual labour. Therefore, 
 the education of your children should be a literary 
 education by accident, but a technical education by 
 necessity. Yet we adopt the opposite course. There 
 is no such thing as technical education in Ireland, 
 and the literary education is far beyond the necessities, 
 mental or social, of nine-tenths of the children who 
 attend our primary schools. What, for example, 
 does a poor girl, who has to earn her bread as house- 
 maid, want to know about free-hand drawing or per- 
 spective ? And what does a factory hand want to 
 know about the intricacies of the Tonic-Sol-Fa 
 System, the science of Transposition, the Modulator, 
 or the humming song ? And what's the result ? Our 
 country overwhelmed with professional men, clerks, 
 secretaries, teachers, etc. ; and the further result a 
 complete dearth of business men and skilled artisans, 
 and the further result of the decadence of Cork and 
 Dublin and all purely Irish cities, and the advance 
 by leaps and bounds of a half-Scotch, half-American 
 city, hke Belfast ! 
 
 There is your educational pessimist. \^ ho does 
 not know the political pessimist ? 
 
 " The country gone to the dogs — Ireland once 
 more on the dissecting-table — the spirit of faction 
 dominant— the world laughing at us — the country 
 flung back fifty years, etc., etc." It's all well if he 
 does not quote poetry, and tell us :-- 
 
 " Thy treasure with taunts shall be taken, 
 
 Thy valour with jibes be repaid, 
 And of millions who see thee, now sad and forsaken, 
 
 Not one shall step forth to thy aid. 
 
54 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 Thou art doomed for thy tyrant to toil, 
 
 Thou art doomed for the proud to disdain, 
 And the blood of thy sons and the wealth of thy soil 
 
 Shall be lavished, and lavished in vain. 
 Thou art chained to the wheel of the foe, 
 
 By Hnks that the world cannot sever, 
 With thy tyrant through sunshine and storm shalt 
 thou go, 
 
 And thy sentence is : Banished for ever." 
 
 Who does not know him, particularly in these latter 
 days when hardly a rift appears in an ever ominous 
 and darkening sky ? 
 
 But is there not a political optimist who tells you, 
 cheer up ! the darkest hour is just before the dawn. 
 We don't want mechanical unity. Better Ireland 
 free, than Ireland united. Ca ira ! all will come right 
 Wait till you see the scattered battalions re-forming on 
 the floor of the House of Commons ; and the reveille 
 of the new campaign sounded, and the fighting-men 
 putting on their armour, and all opposing forces mar- 
 shalled together for the fiercest, bravest, angriest 
 Session yet recorded in the annals of the British 
 Parliament — Ay de mi ! says the pessimist. 
 
 W^e had one such magnificent optimist in Ireland— 
 always, of course, excepting our own inimitable 
 Thomas Davis — in the awful gloom of '48. If ever 
 there was a time when men's hearts w^re in their 
 boots, through fear and trembling of the awful tri- 
 bulation that lay upon the land, surely it was then. 
 But one great trumpet-voice echoed from end to end 
 of Ireland in that awful gloom. ; and it was the voice 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 55 
 
 of a woman — a great optimist, full of hope and 
 courage — Speranza. You remiember that *' Year of 
 Revolutions " ! 
 
 I have now drav/n portraits of these two classes, 
 into which, in the aggregate, humanity may be divided. 
 And now com.es the important, and by no means easy 
 question : which class best promotes the interests of 
 humanity ? Naturally, one's sympathies go out, at 
 once, to the optimists who sing, Hke Pippa : — 
 
 God's i?i his heaven^ 
 All's right ivith the zoorld. 
 
 We feel a powerful attraction towards those bright, 
 sunny souls, who hold their heads aloft, with an 
 eternal siirsum cor da on their lips. We feel a no 
 less powerful repulsion against these sallow, cada- 
 verous, dyspeptic, despondent cynics, who are for 
 ever railing against the world, and clamouring for 
 the better things in which they have no hope. But 
 when we come down to reasoning, perhaps the case 
 differs. For, after all, shorn of his benevolence, what 
 is your optimist but the easy, self-satisfied lover of 
 good things, who hates to have his rest disturbed and 
 who has ever on his lips the watchwords of reaction 
 and retrogression : *' Can't you let well alone ? " 
 " Aren't we just as well where we are ? " " What 
 was good enough for our fathers, is it not quite good 
 enough for us ? " etc., etc. And is there not some- 
 thing inspiring even in the despairful, yet lofty dis- 
 satisfaction which protests : '' Certainly not ! Every- 
 thing is not right in your stagnancy and self-posses- 
 
56 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 sion. You must rise up, and onwards. En avant ! 
 Everything is wrong, and we shall try to right it, 
 though we should fail. Better failure a thousand times 
 than to see without protest the lies that are daily 
 before us, in men's lips and in their lives. Better 
 one sharp struggle, though it end in failure, than the 
 ignoble faith of those who stand up with folded arms, 
 and witness the eternal tragedy that is going on 
 around them.'* 
 
 *' Troublesome fellows, dangerous fellows, revolu- 
 tionaries," says the optimist, " These fellow^s will 
 upset all decent society, ruin our digestions, bring 
 down our stocks and shares, and scatter to the wind 
 all our dreams of present and possible happiness." 
 
 " No matter," says the pessimist, " anything is 
 better than to live a lie. Come, you sleek hypocrites, 
 and look at the world. Here, in the midst of your 
 civilisation, human beings are rotting in misery and 
 hunger, whilst their souls are in the grasp of the Evil 
 One. Can you sit dow^n to your comfortable dinner, 
 and know that thousands of your fellow-beings are 
 starving ? In want and ignorance, in sin and sorrow, 
 half mankind live out their weary lives, and you say 
 this is the best possible world for them and you." 
 
 " Yes ! but you say you cannot correct it .? " says 
 the optimist. *' Where's the use in beating the air ? " 
 
 *' Where indeed } " And so the eternal discussion 
 goes on — the one side maintaining that it is best to 
 let well alone, and enjoy life as best you can ; the 
 other, that the progress of the race is due to the sub- 
 lime dissatisfaction, the eternal restlessness, the 
 issuing in healthy or unhealthy revolution. For " out 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 57 
 
 of the black smoke cometh flame," say they ; and 
 out of the brooding thunder-cloud the lightning that 
 breaks the burden of the storm ; and from the hot 
 hearts of angry men the thoughts that shaped them- 
 selves into burning words. And from the words came 
 deeds, fraught with the germs of all the great things, 
 and all the noble things, and all the inspirement, 
 that drew man from the beast and pushed him ever 
 higher and higher, until nov/ he can see in the future 
 that looms before him 
 
 " What ? " says the optimist. 
 
 And he must acknowledge with bent head and 
 faltering tongue that all his visions and dreams, all 
 the apocalyptic splendours of his hopes and fancy 
 are blotted out, Hke a shower of fireworks on a black, 
 frowning sky, on which is written in lurid light one 
 word — despair ! 
 
 Meanwhile Pippa, tired out, lies dov/n to rest — 
 
 " God bless me ! I can pray no more to-night. 
 No doubt, some way or other, hymns say right 
 
 All service ranks the same with God — 
 With God, whose puppets, best or worst. 
 Are we ; there is no last, nor first." 
 
AN UNPUBLISHED PREFACE 
 
 III 
 
 In the Imh Ecclesiastical Record for September, 
 1 88 1, an article, entitled Religious Instruction in Inter- 
 mediate Schools, appeared. It professed to be a 
 warning to those immediately concerned, that the 
 system of education just then introduced, if not 
 sdirectly levelled at the subversion of the religion 
 beliefs of the vast masses of Irish students, would at 
 least have the tendency to throw into the background 
 those studies which are presumed to be of overwhelm- 
 ing importance in the education of Catholic youth. 
 I do not know whether — in the fierce rivalry for 
 honours and emoluments which then originated, and 
 which has grown more intense as the years sped by — 
 that article was even glanced at by the superiors of 
 our colleges and academies ; but it was deemed of 
 sufficient importance by the London Tablet to be 
 transferred, almost in extenso, to its columns, and it 
 probably led to the establishment of a system, of 
 diocesan inspection in one or two places in Ireland. 
 The experience of fifteen years has not lessened the 
 apprehensions of the writer ; and the yearly reports, 
 submitted by the managers of schools to the public, 
 have rather tended to confirm them. These reports 
 read more like the returns of the headmaster of some 
 Parisian Lvcee to the Minister of Public Instruction 
 
 08 
 
THE LITERARY LIFE AND OTHER ESSAYS 59 
 
 than the account rendered by Catholic teachers to 
 their Prelates of the scrupulous care of the students' 
 highest interests, and the conscientious discharge of 
 the lofty and onerous stewardship they have under- 
 taken. The answer, of course, is : This is what the 
 public require, and this is what we must give. Perhaps 
 so. But there is no loftier ambition than an ephemeral 
 success in secular teaching ; or rather, is there not 
 some minimum of Christian teaching that might be 
 expected, and that ought to be enforced } Unkind 
 people are censorious enough to assert that, in our 
 efforts to prove our liberalism in education, we may 
 run the risk of eliminating Christianity from it 
 altogether. And still more uncharitable critics have 
 gone the length of insinuating that amongst the many 
 causes that retard the conversion of England may be 
 mentioned the ignorance of dogmatic truth, and the 
 indiiference to Catholic interests, that obtain amongst 
 a good many of our people who are thrown into direct 
 contact with earnest and inquiring minds. 
 
 That minimum I take to be : — 
 
 (i) — A dogmatic training on all those points of 
 Catholic doctrine and discipline which are contro- 
 verted by those outside the Church. 
 
 (2) — A knowledge of at least all the salient events 
 in the Church's history which are of importance, or 
 even interest, to the students. 
 
 (3) — A clear understanding of all the rites and 
 ceremonies of the Church ; their meaning, their sug- 
 gestiveness, and the mysticism that underlies them. 
 
 (4) — An acquaintance with the Church's hymnal 
 and sacred music. 
 
6o THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 (5) — And most important, that impression on the 
 emotional nature of boys, through ceremonies, music, 
 prayer, lectures, etc., that shall last through life, when 
 perhaps principles are in danger of being forgotten. 
 
 Under this conviction, therefore, I supposed that 
 the time had come when a similar warning might 
 again be directed to those who were responsible for 
 the education of our Catholic youth. But, as an 
 ephemeral essay in a Review is merely glanced at, 
 and leaves but a light impression, I determined to 
 use as a vehicle for this idea that most potent of all 
 modern agencies for the diffusion of ideas, namely, 
 the story — the novel. And to avoid hurting the 
 sensibilities of men, whose responsibilities make them 
 keenly alive to criticism, I threw the story back a 
 quarter of a century, localised it in a college that has 
 long since ceased to exist, and peopled it with charac- 
 ters, that, under no possible circumstances, could be 
 identified with any existing persons. I thought I had 
 taken the most scrupulous care to exclude the possi- 
 bility of the identification of Mayfield with any 
 existing institution. In discipline and method of 
 studies, in its tutorial system, in every single detail, 
 that College is no more like any existing college or 
 school in Ireland than it is like Dotheboy's Hall on 
 the one hand, or Christ Church, Oxford, on the other. 
 Yet, with singular perversity, Mayfield was found to 
 have its prototype in half a dozen Irish colleges, and 
 some of my dramatis personam were supposed to be 
 easily recognised in certain well-known professors. 
 On the other hand, although admitted to be real and 
 intense in its presentment of the distinguishing fea- 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 6l 
 
 tures of Mayfield, as it existed, by the professors and 
 students of that institution who still survive, it was 
 called visionary and unreal, and " too extravagant 
 even for fiction," by those who had never heard its 
 name ; and, worst of all, with that peculiar inaccu- 
 racy and habit of generalising from very minute par- 
 ticulars, which is not the worst effect of that system of 
 education under which we are just now labouring, 
 one of my characters was made an infidel, another a 
 profligate, and the grave imputation was extended, 
 by lively and not too scrupulous imaginations, to the 
 entire body of Irish students. Thus a book which 
 was intended to be, and has been, a stimulus to 
 CathoHc education, was described as being, to use 
 the dishonest criticism of the Months " an attack on 
 Catholic institutions." And thus a secret and in- 
 sidious attempt was made to wreck the sale of the 
 book, whilst not one of its secret critics had the man- 
 liness to come forward and contravene what was 
 palpably the main, and, indeed, the only thesis 
 advanced. If I could be assured that I was wrong 
 in my surmises, and that Catholic education in the 
 Primary and Intermediate Schools of Ireland was all 
 that could be desired, I should gladly make every 
 amende in my power. But the pile of letters that 
 have poured in on me from all sides forbid the 
 assumption that I was altogether wrong. 
 
 With singular unanimity the Catholic press of 
 Ireland and America interpreted the book as a plea 
 for a more thorough system of CathoUc education 
 in our Colleges ; and all took it for granted that the 
 plea was a timely one. Some faint demurrers were 
 
62 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 whispered by one or two professors who, daily sur- 
 rounded by a corona of guileless students, may be 
 supposed to be happily unconscious of the storm 
 and stress of human passion that sweep up to the 
 very walls of their citadels. But the men of the 
 world — missionary priests, journalists, professional 
 men, whose fingers are on the pulses of humanity, 
 and whose doors swing open every minute for those 
 messages of sorrow and crime that are for ever sent 
 out from the masses of tempted souls, had but one 
 opinion of the book — that the circumstances of the 
 times demanded it, and that it erred only in being 
 too feeble a presentment, or too timid and irresolute 
 a call. 
 
 But I owe a great deal of gratitude to our own 
 CathoUc journals for the honesty with which they 
 interpreted my ideas ; and if there be any gleam of 
 hope in an ever darkening and ominous sky, it will 
 be found in the facility with which great pubhc organs 
 gauged the importance and far-reaching influences of 
 such a presentment of CathoUc principle as I ventured 
 to put forward ; and in the fidelity with which, in 
 the face of much irritabihty and super-sensitiveness, 
 they admitted the correctness of my statements and 
 the opportuneness of the warning which, with all 
 diffidence, I ventured to utter. 
 
 The sequel to Geoffrey Austin : Student, which I 
 promised, 1 now put forward. It is again a history 
 of two lives, running in parallel lines — the one on 
 the high mountains of faith, the other in the darkness 
 and mists of the valleys of irreligion, but not unbelief. 
 I have attempted to show how exalted was the one. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 63 
 
 how pitiful and depressed was the other. The many 
 readers who followed the career of Geoffrey Austin 
 and Charlie Travers up to the " parting of the waA^s " 
 will, I hope, with an equal interest, read the sub- 
 sequent history of their lives up to the happy denoue- 
 ment. They were both very ordinary types of students. 
 Amongst the many absurd things that were said of 
 these two lads, probably the climax was reached in 
 the statement that I had made Charlie a drunkard, 
 because once he had yielded to temptation under 
 pressure of great despondency ; and that I had made 
 Geoffrey an infidel because he neglected his prayers 
 and became absorbed in the classics. And if, in this 
 volume, I have cast a faint halo of the supernatural 
 around Charlie's career, let m.e anticipate all criticism 
 by saying that I am one of those who believe that a 
 spiritual world is all around us, that we are for ever 
 touching the fringe of mysteries that elude us ; and 
 that perhaps it needs only a little less materiahsm in 
 our concepts and desires to enable us to hear the 
 rustling of angels' wings over our heads, or touch the 
 garments of the dead beloved ones as they sweep by. 
 It is quite probable that the usual objection that 
 all this is ideal, visionary, and unreal, may be launched 
 against this book as against its prelude. Yet the 
 critics of Geojfrey Austin will perhaps be more careful 
 in the use of such adjectives after what has been stated 
 in this preface, and their own riper experience. But 
 is it not true to say that a writer of fiction must aim 
 at being not only a dramatist, but a creator ; not a 
 mere delineator of types, but an architect and framer 
 of personaHties, which may not exist just now ; but 
 
64 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 which, it would be rash to say, are beyond the domain 
 of possibihty ? I think this is the larger vocation of 
 the artist. The greatness of any work depends on 
 the idea, as well as upon its execution. The great 
 dreamers of the Italian school are somewhat beyond 
 the portrait painters of England and Spain. And the 
 fame of the great English academicians of to-day 
 will not depend on their portraits, though perhaps 
 their existence did, but on the creations of their 
 fancy, and the higher subhmations of their art. In 
 the same way, the creator of ideals in fiction is more 
 than a mere delineator of existing types ; and when 
 it is said that " such a character is not true to Nature," 
 it is only meant that the particular taste or imagination 
 of the speaker does not reach so far. Whether this 
 creation of new types is altogether for the benefit of 
 the reading pubHc may, of course, be controverted. 
 But no one will deny that society just now is based 
 on rather low levels ; and that it is almost a public 
 benefaction to lift it, through new creations, ever so 
 little. We have had quite enough of Pagan realism 
 in the squalid and nauseous literature of the last few 
 years. Let us try the effect of Christian idealism ; 
 and let us try the experiment at home. The literary 
 instinct has died out in Ireland since '48. Our colleges 
 and universities, with one or two notable exceptions, 
 are dumb. The art of conversation is as dead as the 
 art of embalming. And a certain unspeakable vulgar- 
 ism has taken the place of all the grace and courtesy, 
 all the dignity and elegance of the last century. Every- 
 one admits all this, admits it to be deplorable ; 
 deplorable above all in its consequences, and in its 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 65 
 
 worst consequence — the loss of dignity and self- 
 respect that is so observable. If I have painted other 
 things, and placed a modest picture of a Christian 
 Hypatia in Dublin, and gathered around her feet 
 some young emotional students, I do not pretend 
 that every drawing-room in Dublin is a theatre for 
 the display of high erudition, or an Academia of 
 more than Grecian culture. So, too, if CharHe 
 Travers is an Irish Ozanam (the idea that excites so 
 much the contemptuous hilarity of the Month), I do 
 not pretend that you will find his counterpart in 
 every professional man in Dublin. I only desire that 
 these things should be so. And I beg leave to say 
 that such creations are by no means impossibilities, 
 and that such work as his lies at our own doors. 
 Perhaps this modest volume may be the means, 
 under Divine Providence, of developing such desirable 
 types of Irish character. That the material is there, 
 no one can for a moment doubt. 
 
 Let me say, however, that no one can be more 
 keenly aw^are than I that the execution of this work 
 falls very far short of the ideal. Here again I am only 
 repeating the experience of every one that has painted 
 or written, chisseled or sung. The Divine idea of 
 the worker never yet came forth from the marble or 
 the canvas. This very imperfection has been taken 
 by many as a proof of our immortality. In eternity 
 only shall we reaHse our ideals. But from a literary 
 standpoint I have had the ambition (i) of writing an 
 Irish story without peasants or policemen, believing 
 that the best material for Irish fiction — in the little 
 dramas of our cities and towns — lies still untouched. 
 
66 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 (2) I have tried to write an interesting tale without 
 that mawkish and ridiculous sentimentality which is 
 so revolting to Catholic instincts. (3) I have tried to 
 write a CathoHc tale that may escape the fate of most 
 Catholic books of our generation. For, assuredly, 
 our Catholic literature is smitten with the curse "bf 
 barrenness. We have produced no great poem since 
 the Divina Commeddia was written ; our philosophy 
 lies mouldering under pig-skin covers and brass 
 clasps. But two or three writers in our century — 
 such as Lacordaire and Pere Gratry in France, and 
 Father Faber in England — have popularised Catholic 
 theology. In our own language, the Blessed Sacrament 
 of the latter is the high-water mark of Catholic achieve- 
 ment — the culmination of Catholic poetry, philosophy, 
 and theology. Our other writers have not touched 
 the masses. They have written for the select few, 
 and the select few, under an affectation of contempt, 
 but ill conceal the dread they have of being brought 
 face to face with truth. But, assuredly, for the most 
 part, error — and such error — has been endowed with 
 a fatal fascination, with which truth. Divine truth, 
 has never been clothed, even by its most faithful 
 and loving followers. Why we cannot unlock the 
 infinite treasures of Catholic literature, and show them 
 to the world, is a puzzle to more than the present 
 writer. To suppose, for a moment, that this modest 
 volume is going to break the spell of silence that hangs 
 around us is a presumption that I am not so foolish 
 as to entertain. But I know, to vary the simile, that 
 I am turning up the first sod over a rich and inex- 
 haustible mine, that would yield undreamed of riches 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 67 
 
 under a better system of Catholic education. And 
 from this retreat I think I can see indications in 
 Ireland that these happy times are near at hand. 
 
 I think in journalistic and professional circles in 
 Dublin and elsewhere there has arisen a taste for 
 higher studies on Catholic Hnes. Perhaps the work 
 I have sketched out for Charlie has already begun — 
 that the idea of a new Catholic propaganda is not 
 altogether illusory. However that may be, I launch 
 this new volume on the very turbid seas of English 
 literature. And whether it succeeds or fails, I think 
 I may send it forward with these assurances culled 
 from the greatest living dramatist, and perhaps the 
 greatest of living poets : — 
 
 " If there be good in that I wrought, 
 Thy hand compelled it, Master, Thine. 
 Where I have failed to meet Thy Thought, 
 I know through Thee the blame is mine. 
 
 *' One stone the more swings to her place 
 In the dread Temple of Thy Worth — 
 It is enough that through Thy grace 
 I saw nought common on Thy earth. 
 
 " Take not that vision from my ken ! 
 Oh, whatsoe'er may spoil or speed 
 Help me to need no aid from men, 
 That I may help such men as need." 
 
 Doneraile, Sept. 8th, 1896. 
 
CATHOLIC LITERARY 
 CRITICISM 
 
 IV 
 
 It is only in very recent times that criticism has 
 come to be regarded as a science, or to speak more 
 correctly, as an accomplishment, the only credentials 
 of which are the assumption of its possession. A 
 science supposes apprenticeship, and quahfications 
 tested by examination, or the tacit approval of experts. 
 But no one, surely, expects that the vast majority of 
 critics should be subjected to such trials, or should 
 be expected to submit the only diploma of merit in 
 a work of their own creation. Yet no man has a right 
 to pull down who cannot build up again. For it is 
 plain that a child may pluck to pieces a flower, which 
 only the All-Powerful could frame and decorate. I 
 am speaking of analytical and destructive criticism, 
 for the science of synthetic and constructive criticism 
 has yet to be discovered. And yet it is the great 
 desideratum in modern times, especially for us, 
 Catholics. Mr. Arnold, who approaches nearer to 
 the ideal of this master-critic than any writer of our 
 century (if we may, perhaps, except Mr. Taine), has 
 told us that the great work to which moderns are 
 called is a better, higher, more world-wide criticism 
 than any we have yet known. This he defines to be 
 " the disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate 
 
THE LITERARY LIFE AND OTHER ESSAYS 69 
 
 the best that is known and thought in the world." 
 " Real criticism," he says, " is essentially the exercise 
 of curiosity as to ideas and all subjects, for their own 
 sakes, apart from any practical interest they may 
 serve ; it obeys an instinct prompting it to try to 
 know the best that is known and thought in the world, 
 irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of 
 the kind, and to value knowledge and thought as they 
 approach this best, without the intrusion of any other 
 consideration whatever." I would, of course, entirely 
 disagree with Mr. Arnold in what he considers the 
 best thought of the world ; for he would regard it 
 from a purely literary and artistic standpoint ; and we 
 cannot regard thought, or written or spoken word, 
 without relation to the highest and supremest issues 
 that are at stake in the world. But I gladly welcome 
 the definition that criticism is the pursuit and study 
 of high thought and adequate execution ; and as such 
 takes its rank amongst the very greatest of the sciences 
 that cast their light athwart the footsteps of humanity. 
 For men need guidance to-day as of old. Not many 
 readers can trust their own judgments. And it is 
 easy to conceive readers, young and old, hopelessly 
 bewildered and dazed in the awful flood of printed 
 matter that is yearly flung from the printing-presses 
 of the world ; and still more hopelessly bewildered 
 at the conflicting opinions that are thrust upon them 
 from^ all directions as to what is vicious and ephemeral, 
 or what is useful and permanent, in modern literature. 
 A critic, therefore, serves a most useful purpose in 
 wisely discriminating between the valuable and useful 
 elements of literature ; and I should consider a good 
 
70 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 Catholic critic endowed almost with an apostolic 
 vocation of being able to '* try all things " with im- 
 punity, and " hold fast by what is good." 
 
 Of the intelligence and wisdom, the delicacy of 
 perception, and the wide liberalism of thought, that 
 should be the dowry of such a writer, it would be 
 difficult to speak with exaggeration. Very great 
 issues are at stake. The best thinkers in America 
 and the British Isles are unanimous in the belief that 
 quite a new departure in our Catholic literature is 
 demanded by our own necessities, and still more by 
 the duties we owe our Christian brethren who are 
 outside the pale of the Church. It is the written w^ord 
 that tells best to a generation that is omnivorous in 
 its reading. But the written word must be conveyed 
 through an attractive channel ; and that channel is 
 what is designated by the broad title — literature. It 
 is through literature we have to work and convey to 
 the minds of our own people a thirst for knowledge 
 and principle and the encouragement that comes 
 from high ideas and noble language, the exalted truths 
 and the thrilling ideas that are part of our heritage. 
 And it is through literature we have to open the vast 
 treasures of the Church, and show them to those who 
 believe we are stricken with the curse of intellectual 
 poverty. Let me take one department. Have we 
 popularised our philosophy ? Attempts have been 
 made to translate it from the folios of the Fathers to 
 the dainty octavos and duodecimos of modern libraries. 
 Some manuals of philosophy and its history have been 
 published. Yet they lack attractiveness. And here 
 under my hand is a treatise on Modern Pantheism, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 71 
 
 to which, owing to its wonderful brilliancy of style, 
 any reader might turn with pleasure when wearied 
 with the inanities of a modern novel. Is our fiction 
 attractive and readable ? Mr. Edmond Gosse, in the 
 North American Reviezv, declares that the great cha- 
 racteristic of the last decade of years has been the 
 abnormal and disproportionate, but unquestioned 
 development of the novel. He even startles us with 
 the assertion that our best writers are drawn irresis- 
 tibly in that direction ; and he even puts forward the 
 rather daring speculation that if men like Buckle, 
 Newman or Ruskin had been in their prime during 
 the last few years, they would have chosen fiction as 
 the means of putting forward and emphasizing their 
 pet theories. How do we Catholics stand in that 
 particular ? And in poetry, what position do we hold ? 
 And is our Ecclesiastical History, with all its beautiful 
 episodes, famiHar to the reading public ? These are 
 questions that may cause us some heart-burnings and 
 anxious searching of consciences ; and these are the 
 questions which a Catholic critic has the power of 
 solving to our satisfaction. For it is not either writers 
 or material that we lack. It is the sympathetic appre- 
 ciation of what is good in our literature and the 
 kindly rejection of what is weak. As to our material, 
 we have for philosophy, the vast treasure-houses of 
 the Fathers ; for poetry, subjects that reach from 
 the lowUest work of Nature, seen as the handiwork 
 of God, up to the vast and awful subUmities of the 
 last Cantos of the Paradiso ; for essays, we have all 
 the complexities of modern civilisation as they are 
 studied under the piercing light and unravelled by 
 
72 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 the unerring hand of the Church's teaching and dis- 
 cipline ; for fiction, we have Catholic life in our cities, 
 aur towns, our prairies, on Irish hills, in English 
 oastles, on American lakes and mountains, in the sweet 
 cmenities and regularities of Catholic married life, in 
 the sublime simplicity of our convents ; in our 
 soldiers and sailors, our schoolboys, our priests, our 
 professional men, our merchants, our great ladies, 
 our simple, faithful servants. We have English and 
 German Catholicity, Polish and Irish to deal with ; 
 and we have above all certain well-defined elements 
 and principles that will keep our novels from running 
 into the dreadful issues that mark all modern English 
 novels. And the writers, where are they ? There 
 are many in the field ; many more, who would come 
 forward if they expected, or had any reason to expect, 
 a fair, if not a kindly recognition of their work. Now, 
 it is just here that a good Catholic critic is invaluable 
 to our literature. He can understand what is written. 
 This should be his first accomplishment. And it is 
 a rare one. To enter into an author's feehngs and 
 designs, to know what he aims at, to separate essen- 
 tials from accidentals ; and, if the work is solidly 
 good, to recognize it as such — these are qualifications 
 that suppose a great deal of discernment and experi- 
 ence. In judging, for instance, of poetry, what delicacy 
 of feeling, what a sense of musical notation, may be 
 required ! It is notorious that great thinkers on 
 great subjects, may be absolutely without a sense of 
 harmony. It is even true that writers whose prose 
 style is absolutely perfect in tone and form, may lack 
 not only the musical sense, but even the conception 
 
AND OTHER ESSAY9 73 
 
 of the essentials of poetry. I have before my mind, 
 as I write, the name of a writer, whose works from a 
 historical and philosophical standpoint are monu- 
 mental ; and who has also written some chopped 
 lines of prose, which not all the charity of his friends 
 can keep him from believing are Miltonic in form and 
 conception. The highest poetry, as a fact, does not 
 come into the domain of criticism at all. It soars 
 above, and eludes the grasp of the critic. It is some- 
 times not unintelligible but inexplicable to the poet 
 himself. He can neither analyze, nor explain it. 
 Does not Plato say so : " All good poets, epic as well 
 as lyric, compose their beautiful poems, not as works 
 of art, but because they are inspired and possessed. 
 For the poet is a light, and winged, and holy thing, 
 and there is no invention in him until he has been 
 inspired." How then can a man who knows nothing 
 of the divine afflatus, deal with this aerial being } 
 Well, he clips and burns the wings of this *' light, 
 winged, and holy thing," and makes him a creeping 
 caterpillar. 
 
 Again, some lonely student, who has been, in his 
 seclusion, feeding on the marrow of giants, puts forth, 
 it may be resolutely, it may be timidly, some essence 
 of what has become to him vital and necessar}^ truth. 
 It is put in strange language, and is without the musty 
 odour of mediievalism or the schools. A timid critic 
 will sniff ominously at it, and pass it by. A too daring 
 critic will strive to annihilate it, and fail. The matured 
 and discriminating mind of one who is well grounded 
 in sacred sciences and their modern applications will 
 alone understand it and let the world know of it. 
 
74 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 Yet, if this grave critic does not come by, how surely 
 that work, which might be fraught with all kinds of 
 important consequences to the Church and the world, 
 will be flung aside to rot on bookseller's shelves or 
 adorn the topmost level of a lending-library. 
 
 Granted, then, sufficient knowledge and liberality 
 of mind in our critic, I should say that his first prin- 
 ciple in selecting for commendation a Catholic book 
 should be the reversal or rather the direct contra- 
 dictory of the old scholastic maxim, Bo7ium ex Integra 
 causa, malum ex quocunque defectu. A perfectly heahhy 
 axiom in moral science. A vicious and pernicious 
 maxim in criticism. Writers, like their books, are 
 not perfect. Young writers, particularly, will slip 
 into solecisms very easily, because in aiming at a 
 main object they are prone to forget side issues. 
 Again, writers who are vividly impressed with certain 
 ideas, are naturally intense in their expressions. Is 
 it not George Eliot who has said somewhere, '' Art, 
 of necessity, intensifies " ? It is its province — its 
 vocation. What would Turner be without his in- 
 tense idealism ? What would Watts be, without his 
 intense, sometimes painful realism ? The bare truth 
 never convinces. A too strict adherence to the features 
 of man or nature generally ends in a bathos. If, 
 therefore, a writer who feels intensely the necessity 
 of driving home his ideas to the public mind, sins 
 inadvertently by faults of art or even by venial extra- 
 vagances of principles, it is neither prudent nor kind 
 to condemn him absolutely and to close the book to 
 a large class of readers. 
 
 And this thought brings me naturally to what is 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 75 
 
 the immediate subject of this paper — the ethical 
 aspect of criticism. I am addressing Catholics, who, 
 whatever their position may be, can never put off the 
 sense of moral responsibility. I am not addressing 
 that school of insolence and incompetence which is 
 best represented by such sheets as the Saturday Review. 
 Let us keep two facts in view, which will enable us 
 to determine principles. The first is that which Jean 
 Paul Richter states, and which is unhappily too true, 
 namely, that the anonymous character of a reviewer 
 gives to the judgment of an individual the weight of 
 a college. The second is, that nowadays no Catholic 
 writer can publish a volume except at his own expense. 
 As to the first, however much we may regret it, it is 
 but too true. The writer, who sits at his desk, and 
 hastily cuts the leaves of a new volume, wields judi- 
 cial power of life and death over that volume, according 
 to the journal he represents. And many a book has 
 passed rapidly over the counter until some foolish 
 novice at the pen thinks he has discovered a mistake, 
 and gloats over it and magnifies it until the pubUc 
 become suspicious, and the sale is suddenly stopped. 
 What is the result ? The pubUcation of the book has 
 cost the author from seventy to one hundred pounds. 
 It becomes a dead loss. If then, the critique which 
 has killed the book has been an unscrupulous and 
 an unjust one, the writer is unquestionably bound to 
 restitution. 
 
 A book is pretio aestimahilis^ the same as a horse, 
 or a piece of merchandise. If a flippant, unthinking 
 critic, whose opinion, however, is regarded by the 
 public, pronounces unjustly that an animal is unsound 
 
76 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 and unsaleable, or a piece of dry goods damaged, he 
 is bound to restitution if such an opinion is wrong, 
 and he has uttered it maliciously or carelessly. It is 
 the property of the author or the publisher ; and they 
 have a right that their property shall not be injured 
 by statements that are untrue or unsound. 
 
 Does the neglect or contempt of this theological 
 principle account for the very pitiful condition of our 
 Catholic literature ? Does it account for the fact 
 that our best writers have laid down their pens ; and 
 that a great many gifted souls whose vocation is litera- 
 ture, dread the loss of money on the one hand, or the 
 loss of reputation on the other ? Would it account in 
 some measure for that amusing, but pathetic and 
 painful admission of the greatest of our Catholic living 
 poets :^ *' I can call no man in my position badly off, 
 for I can double my income any day — by laying down 
 my pen " ? That melancholy fact is staring us in the 
 face, that Aubrey de Vere, the friend of Wordsworth 
 and Tennyson, and quite their equal, has had not 
 audience, because of the Catholicity that deeply per- 
 meates every line he wrote. I would rather have 
 written " May Carols " than " In Memoriam." Yet, 
 who reads the former ; and who has not read the 
 latter ? 
 
 I am distinctly of opinion, therefore, that we have 
 no CathoUc reading pubHc, because the Higher Criti- 
 cism, or what 1 have ventured to call constructive 
 criticism, is unknown. We have a good deal of 
 negative criticism — of v/hich there are two great 
 schools — the hyperaemic and the anaemic. Of the tWo 
 * Aubrey de Vere, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 77 
 
 the latter is the most formidable ; but let me take 
 them in detail. 
 
 The hyperagmic critic is always young, inexperienced 
 sanguine, self-reliant. He does not, to use a phrase 
 of Cardinal Newman's, understand the solemn weight 
 and meaning of words. He is as irresponsible with 
 his pen as a boy with a new revolver. He feels it his 
 duty to kill or maim something. To praise a book 
 means weakness or want of knowledge. To find 
 fault presupposes wisdom and superiority. And, 
 therefore, is he always '' on the pounce " to discover 
 faults and mistakes on w^hich he can build his final 
 judgment, which is always that of the Quarterly 
 Review on Keats : '' This will never do." His mode 
 of reviewing is peculiar. He commences with a quo- 
 tation from Aristotle or Plato, generally the latter, as 
 being much more in vogue than his great logical rival. 
 The application of this great principle, thus quoted, 
 he leaves to the reader ; and descends to particulars. 
 Waiving altogether the object of the book, its con- 
 struction and technique, he addresses himself to a 
 microscopic inspection of phrases and even words. 
 A printer's error is a crime ; a mistake in date, or a 
 slip in some secondary phrase is magnified into a 
 literary misdemeanour. *' This author mistakes an 
 acid for an alkali, surely this is unpardonable." " Is 
 the author quite correct in the date of the second 
 crusade } We think not. Surely the public have a 
 right to expect something better than this slip-shod 
 writing." " The author here falls into a blunder that 
 would be unpardonable in a school-boy. He makes 
 Sirius blaze away in the south at midnight in the 
 
78 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 month of June/' These appear rather trifling mis- 
 takes, but they leave the book limp and tattered 
 in the end, for a good many readers follow the principle 
 we have already condemned, malum ex quocunque 
 defectu ; and judge of the value of the book by some 
 quite extrinsic standard, just as in some parts of 
 England, the rustics judge of the qualifications of a 
 new parson by his style of horsemanship. Then 
 comes the final verdict : *' On the whole we think 
 the book may be recommended to our readers ; but 
 we hope the author will do better in his next volume." 
 Who would invest a dollar in a book that comes before 
 the world with such an introduction ? 
 
 The anaemic school is worse, for it generally takes 
 the high moral tone. Its eternal warning to authors 
 is petirisy virginihusque ; its motto, maxima reverentia 
 pueris dehetur. Very true. But what of grown men 
 and women ? Are they to be always fed on whey ? 
 They demand a stronger diet. Can we give it .^ If 
 not, they have the poisonous narcotics of English and 
 French literature, that will drown all their Christian 
 sensibilities and steep them in that spiritual torpor, 
 which is like unto death. 
 
 There is a great temptation here to enter into a 
 cognate question, which, however, does not come 
 strictly within the scope of this paper, namely, the 
 question of the Catholic novel. It may be passed by 
 the more easily, because it has been so frequently 
 discussed in our journals these latter years. But to 
 show how Catholic authors may be driven from the 
 field by criticisms of these retrogressive schools, let 
 me quote two instances. In these islands, within the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 79 
 
 last few years, we have had two promising writers — 
 the one in poetry, the other in prose. It is no exaggera- 
 tion to say that when the first volume of poems by 
 Francis Thompson appeared a few years ago, they 
 created quite a sensation in London literary circles. 
 The life of the author, full of all kinds of strange 
 vicissitudes, may have had something to say to his 
 sudden popularity in a community that is always on 
 the search for new sensations. But the novelty of 
 these poems, constructed on new principles, and 
 inspired with the loftiest thought, attracted the atten- 
 tion of the leading literati of London and forced 
 reluctant praise from circles where the rehgious tenets 
 of the author, and the subjects of his poems, were by 
 no m.eans recommendations. The author was ranked 
 amongst the Dii Major es of song, by the great Scottish 
 review on the one hand, and by such authors and 
 critics as Richard le Gallienne, etc., on the other. 
 But the author has retired. For the present he will 
 write no more poetry. Why ? I should hardly like 
 to intrude upon the privacy of another's thoughts ; 
 but Francis Thompson, who, with all his incon- 
 gruities, ranks in English poetry with Shelley, and 
 only beneath Shakespeare, has hardly had any recog- 
 nition in CathoHc circles. If Francis Thompson had 
 been an Anglican or a Unitarian, his praises would 
 have been sung unto the ends of the earth. He would 
 have been the creator of a new school of poetry. 
 Disciples would have knelt at his feet. Had he been 
 a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge, his bust would 
 have been placed in their halls. But being only a 
 Catholic and an Ushaw student, he is allowed to retire, 
 
So THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 and bury in silence one of the noblest imaginations 
 that has ever been given to Nature *s select ones — her 
 poets. Only two Catholics — literary Catholics — have 
 noticed this surprising genius — Coventry Patmore 
 and Wilfred Meynell. The vast bulk of our co- 
 religionists have not even heard his name, although 
 it is already bruited amongst the immortals ; and the 
 great Catholic poet, for whose advent we have been 
 straining our vision, has passed beneath our eyes, 
 sung his immortal songs, and vanished. Now, to what 
 class of criticism has this great poet been subjected ? 
 To the verbal and puerile criticism I have detailed 
 above. All his crudities and irregularities were care- 
 fully noted and exaggerated ; and the great kernels 
 of his marvellous conceptions were feebly praised. 
 His latinisms and coined, phrases were counted as 
 solecisms that could not be tolerated ; as if a poet 
 had not a perfect right to do what he liked with mere 
 language. It is the poets that have given us the English 
 language as it is ; and to refuse to a Victorian poet 
 what was so freely conceded to an Elizabethan, is to 
 declare that the tongue of Shakespeare and Milton 
 had reached a point beyond which it must not be 
 developed. There are undoubtedly in this great 
 master, I do not say of verse, but of thought, certain 
 incongruities that we cannot explain, such as applying 
 to our Divine Lord the epithet '* The Hound of 
 Heaven " ; but perhaps the poet had some inner 
 meaning which we may not discern, and if we object 
 to the title, at least we accept the poem as the most 
 wonderful piece of literary mechanism we possess. 
 If this be so why have we not said so to the world, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 8i 
 
 instead of shaking our heads at points of versiculation 
 or metre, that are really of no consequence ? No ; 
 our great poet has come and gone. He is now writing 
 little prose sketches for Franciscan Annals at Pan- 
 tasaph. He will write no more poetry for the present. 
 
 The other example of our utter incompetency to 
 appreciate our Catholic authors and their works may 
 be found in our dealings with the author of The New 
 Antigone. When that book appeared, some said : 
 " At last we have entered the arena with the world's 
 own weapons. It will go hard with us or we shall 
 succeed. The novel is the modern vehicle of thought. 
 We shall use it to propagate truth, as the world uses 
 it to propagate error." Were there faults in that book ? 
 Yes. But why did we dwell on and exaggerate them, 
 forgetful of the main object at stake, and heedless of 
 the splendid valor of the writer, who took the enemy's 
 weapons and turned them against himself ? Had 
 this brilliant CathoHc writer been encouraged he 
 would probably, by this time, have poured forth a 
 library of standard Catholic novels from his pen. 
 But he has retired from the prosecution of a task 
 thankless and dangerous ; and he has been driven 
 into this retirement by the critics of the anaemic school. 
 " When he appears again," says a witty American 
 priest, " it will be as the author of a goody-goody 
 story, which tells how little Jemmy, the shoeblack, 
 laboured and toiled for the support of an aged mother, 
 then sickened and died ; and how little Mamie was 
 altogether too good for this world, and so entered a 
 convent and lived for ever and for ever." 
 
 What, then, do we contend for ? Simply the criti- 
 G 
 
83 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 cism that creates, instead of destroying. Never in 
 the history of the Church's Hfe was there a period 
 more favourable for the creation of a great Catholic 
 literature. The vv^orld is Ustening, if we could speak. 
 We are in the midst of a revolt against all modern 
 literature. In poetry there is an outcry against the 
 artificialities that are poured from the press like 
 Christmas cards and Christmas numbers, and are 
 quite as inane and inartistic. There is a desire even 
 to get back to the simplicities of Pope and Goldsmith. 
 In philosophy we have but a rehash of ancient errors 
 and a feeble attempt to reconstruct them into modern 
 systems. In religious literature we have dull sermons, 
 platitudes about Christianity without Christ, denial of 
 dogma, and all the dreary latitudinarianism that is the 
 chief characteristic of modern Protestantism. There 
 is no criticism nor critical school. In essay writing, 
 obiter dicta, etc., we have but the ephemeral papers 
 of magazines. No one now dreams of reproducing 
 his articles in the reviews. And the novel has gone 
 down into the lowest depths of suggestiveness. When 
 Dean Farrar and Mr. Stead are at loggerheads as to 
 whether a certain situation in The Christian means 
 adultery or not, we can understand how low the 
 English novel has fallen. And the world is disgusted. 
 It craves for some higher intellectual food. It is tired 
 of frothy salaciousness. Here, then, is the grand 
 opportunity for Catholic authors. We have solid 
 truth to teach the world, if only we can put it into 
 attractive form. But we must keep ourselves always 
 distinct and separate in our literature. Whatever 
 be said of the wisdom of our mixing freely amongst 
 our separated brethren and familiarizing them with 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 83 
 
 our practices and teachings, our literature must be 
 always exclusive and characteristic. It must not be 
 imitative of modern styles, still less of modern ideas. 
 We have abundant material for building up a great 
 masculine literature, human and sympathetic, divine 
 and transcendental. It must touch human infirmity 
 without gross realism ; it must deal with passions 
 without the luridness of detail that makes passions 
 absorbing and infectious. And, above all, it must 
 shed around human life and all its many environments 
 that beautiful idealism, which is our exclusive posses- 
 sion. All the tendencies of the world to-day point 
 to a levelHng down of age, sex, position, dignity ; ice 
 know that there must be diversity and distinctiveness 
 to maintain the Christian ideal. And we also know- 
 that it is only in this conservatism, that draws its 
 ancient lines and barriers around rank and sex, that 
 either Christian dignity or Christian moraHty are to 
 be maintained. But it is only the ideaHsm founded 
 on CathoHc dogma that can effect this. If, then, the 
 world is so fanatical in its opposition to this Christian 
 ideal, and if to-day the leaders of its literature are 
 iconoclasts of every sacred image and tradition that 
 have hitherto been the hope of our race, surely it is 
 incumbent upon us to maintain in all their integrity 
 those ideas that are the soul of our religious systems. 
 And can there be a more ignoble treason than to bow 
 to every foolish whim, that under the guise of lite- 
 rature, is put forth to please or pander to the irregu- 
 arities of a world that is drifting steadily backward 
 Into yet another phase of Neo-Paganism ? 
 
 It follows, then, that the world has again to be 
 taught Christianity, and has to be taught it in its own 
 
84 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 idioms and dialects, that is, not in scholastic phrases 
 or syllogisms, not in the language of mediaeval 
 schools, but in its own tongue — that is, through the 
 medium of literature. It has been said that if St. 
 Paul were living to-day he would be a journaHst, 
 that is, he would use the speediest and easiest medium 
 of conveying to the world the ideas that were to him 
 as the breath of Hfe. Here, then, is the vocation of 
 the young and ardent Catholic who wishes to do 
 something for Christ before the shadows fall and the 
 night comes on. And there cannot be a loftier voca- 
 tion than to preach and teach to the wide world, that 
 is drifting so rapidly from the side of Christ, some- 
 thing of that divine sweetness and light that have 
 been, and must ever be, the hope and solace of 
 humanity. But such neophytes need encouragement, 
 and as such they become the wards of the Catholic 
 Press. If inefficient or weak, it is not beyond the 
 courtesies of the language or the delicacy of Christian 
 refinement to ask them, without giving pain, to 
 retire from an arena where their presence would but 
 embarrass better quahfied champions. But if there 
 be a hope or promise of success it is surely the duty 
 of the press to raise those hopes and confirm such 
 promise, and this on independent grounds, heedless 
 of what a godless journalism, to which the name of 
 Catholicism is maranatha^ may put forth. Nay, the 
 very highest testimony to the excellence of a Catholic 
 work should be the revilings of a press that is not 
 only material in all its concepts, but which seems to 
 be always hesitating between the mock humility of 
 agnosticism and the unblushing indecorum of 
 blasphemy. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 85 
 
 It is a question, whether up to this time we have 
 not been too deferential to the criticism of a hostile 
 press, as w^U as too liberal in our estimates not only 
 of anti-Catholic, but even anti-theistic literature. 
 There is a kind of CathoHc hberalism that sees too 
 much good in the poisonous and noxious products 
 of the Protestant and infidel press, and there is a 
 tendency to bow down before the fetishes which a 
 corrupt generation finds to worship in its sciences, 
 in its arts and in its letters. Our writers forget that 
 in the w^ords of Tertullian " every arrow that is shot 
 against us has been dragged from the quiver of 
 truth." If we have strength to use the world's 
 weapons against itself it is what the world has already 
 done to ourselves. And we have some idea that the 
 equipments of our armouries are not only adequate, 
 but superabundant for the warfare in which we are 
 engaged. Let us, therefore, have a Catholic literature, 
 and let us acknowledge it. Let us reserve our scorn 
 for our antagonists, and keep our encouragement for 
 ourselves. It is unwise in the forefront of the battle 
 to depreciate our forces. Not that we need admit 
 the puerile and weakly elements that may undermine 
 our strength. But our solicitude should be to 
 strengthen the ranks of our literary workers, to be 
 eager for their success, so that when the w^orld bow^s 
 down before Catholic genius, it may be tempted to 
 consider Catholic truth, and to forget the traditional 
 scorn, which, unfortunately, we ourselves too fre- 
 quently adopt ; and whose watchword is : '' Can 
 anything good come out of Nazareth ? " 
 
THE AMERICAN REPORT 
 ON IRISH EDUCATION 
 
 V 
 
 This important document, compiled by W. 
 Cloudesley Brereton, formerly Inspector under the 
 Intermediate Board, is to appear next year ; and the 
 Times in its Literary Supplement has deemed it of 
 such importance that it has already published a 
 Summary, which gives, we presume, a fair idea of 
 what the Report will contain. If we are to judge 
 the Report by this Summary, it will be valuable so 
 far as the history of educational movements and 
 changes in Ireland is concerned. But we have a 
 suspicion that, as is quite usual in all such cases, it 
 is only officials or professional experts that have been 
 consulted ; and that the Inspector has not gone 
 down to face the problem and examine it in those 
 places where alone it can be studied and solved ; 
 that is, in the schools themselves, and in the lives 
 of the children after they have left school, and passed 
 into the work-a-day world. If an inspector had taken 
 that trouble, it would have probably saved him the 
 gigantic and useless labour of poring over worthless 
 statistics in the pigeon-holes of Education Offices ; 
 and probably, he could have compressed what we 
 presume will be an elaborate account of the progress 
 and prospects of education in Ireland in the simple 
 
THE LITERARY LIFE AND OTHER ESSAYS 87 
 
 words : There is none ! At least, that is the verdict 
 of every thoughtful man in Ireland to-day. 
 
 The census returns of the number of '' illiterate " 
 persons in Ireland are very misleading. We do not 
 believe there is wilful deception of the Officers ; 
 but the standard of education is so very low that 
 thousands are returned as capable of reading and 
 writing, who are barely able to spell laboriously 
 through the columns of a newspaper, or scrawl their 
 names in a half illegible manner on a bank-bill. 
 Most of these semi-illiterate persons have passed 
 through the usual classes or standards in the Primary 
 Schools ; but owing to causes, which we shall after- 
 wards specifically mention, they abandon the habit 
 of reading and writing after leaving school, and sink 
 back into a condition of almost absolute illiteracy. 
 Any one who has ever witnessed a few peasants 
 drawing a bill on a village bank, or signing a paper 
 for the purchase of land, and seen their mental agony 
 whilst they try to decipher the meaning of the docu- 
 ment, and then append their signatures, will testify 
 to this. And what is true of our agricultural districts, 
 is equally true of manufacturing centres, w^here the 
 young lads and lasses, after two years, have almost 
 entirely lost the faculty of reading and writing. As 
 for a taste for reading anything beyond some light 
 novel — or the weekly political newspaper — it is 
 absolutely unknown. 
 
 We do not know whether Mr. Brereton has studied 
 this aspect of his subject ; but as it embraces the 
 whole subject, being simply the net result of all this 
 elaborate mechanism, with its ever-growing staffs of 
 
88 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 officials ; and as it means, in very plain English, 
 comparative, if not absolute failure, it may be a 
 useful, although an ungracious task, to cast a little 
 light on the subject. And first with regard to primary 
 education. 
 
 Perhaps the best manner of elucidating this 
 subject is by comparison of the old and new methods, 
 so far as the attitude of the teachers and the nature 
 of educational work and methods are concerned. 
 
 There is a marked difference between the old 
 untrained school-master and the young teachers who 
 now come out, year after year, from our Training 
 Colleges, and pass at once into our schools as assist- 
 ants or principals. With the old generation, teaching 
 was something like what Carlyle was always dreaming 
 of and talking about — a kind of lofty vocation, a 
 priestly function, which he would not rank lower 
 than that of a Kirk-Minister or voluntary preacher 
 under the Free Church. The principal teachers then 
 were all old men, who had been trained under fiery 
 discipline, and were rather too anxious that the 
 characters of the young should be annealed, mentally 
 and morally, in the same way. The discipline of 
 the school was severe. Corporal punishment was 
 administered in a manner which would send a 
 teacher of to-day into penal servitude. The hours 
 were long, generally from lo a.m. to 5 p.m. In many 
 places there were morning sessions from 7 a.m. to 
 9 a.m. ; and night-schools w^re the rule, not the 
 exception. There were no stated times for vacations. 
 The old teachers strenuously objected to such a 
 waste of time ; and in many towns in Ireland to-day, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS §9 
 
 weird traditions have come down of desperate 
 attempts made by the boys to *' bar out " the masters, 
 until the latter yielded to the demand of at least a 
 short cessation from school-work. 
 
 It is rather an interesting speculation why these old 
 men were so much averse from granting periodical 
 holidays, or lessening the hours of daily school- 
 work. There really is no explanation of such an 
 attitude so totally different from everything we are 
 accustomed to in modern life, except that those men 
 had conceived a perfect passion for work ; that 
 solitude was unbearable ; that they were never 
 happy without the book and the ferule, and the 
 daily worship of a crowd of awe-stricken and reverent 
 pupils. It must be remembered that at that time 
 travelling was almost unknown except amongst the 
 wealthier classes. No teacher would think of wasting 
 weeks by the seaside, much less of going abroad. 
 And a very important factor in their monotonous 
 but singularly useful lives was that they were all 
 deeply conscientious men, and that in addition to 
 their obligations to the State, they had, owing to the 
 then prevailing system of school-fees, a sense of 
 personal duty to the pupils, and a corresponding 
 interest in their educational advancement. There 
 never was a bolder or wiser plan, from their own 
 standpoint, than the attempt of British Ministers, 
 from time to time, to subsidise the Irish Catholic 
 Clergy ; and never a wiser policy than that adopted 
 by these latter in thwarting and rejecting such 
 attempts. And for the same reason there never was 
 a greater, and alas ! more irremediable mistake than 
 
go THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 that made by the National Board of Education in 
 aboHshing school-fees. It converted the teachers 
 into State-officials, and destroyed all personal interest 
 in their pupils. And it broke up that sympathy, 
 arising out of mutual assistance, that existed between 
 the teacher and the parents of the children. It turned 
 the schools into Government Lycies^ controlled by 
 penal laws ; and whilst it removed from the con- 
 sciences of the teachers that sense of commutative 
 justice that arose from the personal obligations of 
 giving value for the stipends received, it took away 
 at the same time from the minds of the parents that 
 keen interest in the educational progress of their 
 children that naturally is felt where it is well paid 
 for. Hence, to-day we find, in the few voluntary 
 schools of the country, which are not under the 
 management of the National Board, and where fees 
 of one penny or twopence a week, up to ten shillings 
 a quarter, are paid by the pupils, the attendance is 
 cent, per cent. ; whereas, in the National Schools, 
 where no fees are paid, and where very often, as in 
 the case of Convent Schools, books, papers, slates, 
 pens, etc., are supplied gratis to the children, the 
 attendance seldom reaches beyond 65 per cent, of 
 the pupils on rolls. 
 
 Under the old system again, a great deal of 
 initiative or voluntary work was permitted to the 
 teachers ; and with their extraordinary zeal, they 
 eagerly availed themselves of the permission. The sub- 
 jects marked on the Time-tables were very limited in 
 number ; and the educational capacities of the 
 teachers did not reach beyond them. But what they 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 91 
 
 knew, they knew well ; and they had the talent to im- 
 part it thoroughly. The inspection was loose and 
 unmethodical. The managers rarely visited the 
 schools ; the inspectors came once a year for the 
 annual examination. There was a certain freedom 
 permissible in the arrangement of lessons, so that if 
 boys or girls had a fancy or an aptitude for a particu- 
 lar subject or science, they were allowed to exercise 
 it without molestation. And if a class interested in 
 geography or mathematics seemed to covet a few 
 minutes more in that class, no objection was made. 
 We remember one clear instance, where two young 
 lads, aged 12 to 14 respectively, were permitted by 
 the master to spend the seven hours of a day for the 
 last two years of their course in working out problems 
 in algebra, or exercises (or as they were called *' cuts ") 
 in Euclid to the exclusion of every other subject. 
 This gave them an extraordinary power of mental 
 concentration, that made all succeeding subjects 
 comparatively easy. 
 The results of this old system were at least twofold : 
 
 (i) Thoroughness in Teaching ; 
 (2) A passion for self-improvement on the 
 pupil's part. 
 
 As we have already said, the subjects were limited. 
 They embraced : 
 
 Reading, Euclid, 
 
 Writing, Algebra, 
 
 Arithmetic, Mensuration, 
 
 Geography. 
 
9^ THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 And all of these, with the exception, perhaps, of read- 
 ing (the comparative unimportance of which we shall 
 discuss hereafter) were taught in a manner which is 
 now impossible. 
 
 And the teachers had the singular and unique 
 success of implanting in the minds of their pupils 
 a sense that, on leaving school, they were hut com- 
 mencing their lifers education^ zcJiich would end only 
 with life. Hence they turned out generation after 
 generation of reading men, eager to supplement the 
 elementary education of their childhood by the larger 
 reading of after life. The very fact that so much 
 liberty of initiative was allowed, that studies were 
 not altogether taskwork, that there was a kind of 
 sympathy between teachers and pupils arising out 
 of a mutual love for kindred subjects, would go far 
 to account for this. The eye of the pupil was upon 
 his master ; the eye of the master on his pupil. The 
 inspector was not much considered. If he chose to 
 give an unfavourable report, the master's pocket did 
 not suffer too severely, if the parents thought their 
 boys were treated well. 
 
 All this is now changed. The personnel of the 
 teaching staff has undergone surprising modifications, 
 and the methods of teaching have been revolutionised. 
 The principals and assistants in all National Schools 
 to-day are comparatively young men, most of whom 
 have been recently trained at some recognised 
 colleges here and there in the country ; but with 
 no further experience. They have learned to teach 
 scientifically. Many of them have no idea of making 
 teaching a profession. Conscious of much ability, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 93 
 
 they determine that that school shall be a stepping- 
 stone to something higher — a little pause in the race 
 of life before striding on to the final goal. The little 
 children are no longer the sons and daughters of 
 friends, who are to be watched over with more than 
 paternal vigilance, and whose futures are an object 
 of as much sohcitude to the teacher as his own. 
 Unlike the old teachers, he does not look forward 
 to the time when that brilliant young barrister will 
 call to his school and thank him pubUcly for all the 
 wise counsel, all the sage admonitions, that he 
 received ; or the young priest or minister, flushed 
 with the glory of ordination, will steal in and greet 
 his old master, and give him his blessing ; or that 
 young girl, who has made a prosperous match, will 
 roll up in her carriage and place a bunch of violets 
 on the master's desk without a word. All that has 
 gone ; the pupils are now so many units, who have 
 to be worked up into decimals to prove to Treasury 
 officials that there has been a certain number of 
 wild Irish in attendance at that school, and that 
 there is no loophole, alas ! for escape. His salary, 
 even to the decimals, must be paid. 
 
 It would be the gravest injustice here if we let it 
 for a moment be supposed that the modern teacher 
 is indifl"erent or careless about his pupils, except in 
 so far as they help him to his salary and increments. 
 But, in view of the fact that there is scarcely a teacher 
 in the country who has settled down permanently 
 in his locality without hope of a better school in a 
 more comfortable place ; and in view of the fact that 
 so many Irish teachers are flying away to England, 
 
94 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 or seeking situations in the Civil Service, and in view 
 of the fact that there are no longer those mutual 
 relations between teachers and pupils that arose from 
 the payment of school fees, it is no exaggeration to 
 say that the calling of a National Teacher in Ireland 
 has sunk down from the Carlylean idea to one of 
 mere officialdom — the paid hireling of the State. 
 
 The modern methods of education tend to accen- 
 tuate this. The teacher is now bound, hand and foot, 
 without the slightest power of initiative. The 
 manager, generally a clergyman, visits the schools 
 once a week or oftener. The manager's eye is on 
 the time-table, lest, perchance, the inspector may 
 come in and find a class out of order, and a prompt, 
 and perhaps peremptory message will reach him from 
 DubUn. The inspectors (senior, district, and 
 assistants) visit the schools at all times, and a few 
 days after the annual examination a visit of surprise 
 may be invariably expected. That visit is promptly 
 begun by a prompt examination of " Rolls," a com- 
 parison between the rolls marked and the number 
 present ; a sharp survey of the names that might be 
 stricken off the rolls ; an elaborate examination of 
 decimals along frightful columns of figures ; the 
 abstracts of each day's work, of monthly summaries, 
 of yearly reports, etc., etc. The efficiency of the 
 school is nowhere in comparison with the neatness 
 and accuracy of roll-books. And so, too, the least 
 divergence from the time-table which, to the un- 
 initiated at least, is as puzzling as a Bradshaw, is 
 instantly reported to head-quarters. Let a class be 
 ever so interested in a subject, let a boy or girl be 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 95 
 
 ever so engrossed in some problem of physics or 
 mathematics — the clock strikes, and the book is 
 shut — and the interest of that young mind in that 
 subject vanishes, never to return. 
 
 This abuse arises in great part from the multiplicity 
 of subjects that now form the curriculum of primary 
 education. Let it be remembered that it is oi primary 
 education alone we are speaking now. For one of 
 the worst abuses that prevail in Ireland is the unhappy 
 tendency to foster the foolish ambition and pride of 
 the people by allowing primary education to overlap 
 Intermediate studies ; and these latter to encroach 
 upon the University Curriculum. We have heard 
 "■ Analysis " taught to little girls in the fourth 
 standard in a manner that might suit young gra- 
 duates in a Scotch University ; and the higher grades 
 of Tonic Sol-Fa taught to girls who would much 
 prefer the latest music-hall chorus from London or 
 Liverpool. There are two truths that seem never 
 to have been grasped by Irish educationists. The 
 first is that they rate the average intelligence of Irish 
 children altogether too highly ; the second is, that 
 education should also be adaptation ; that is, in the 
 great majority of cases, the preparation and training 
 of children for their positions in after life. 
 
 The present idea appears to be that children's 
 minds should be made not only repositaries of 
 universal information, but should also be trained to 
 a degree of mental efficiency that is only attained in 
 the grand climacteric of life. The question really is, 
 whether the child's mind is to be made the storehouse, 
 like a doll's shop, full of all small but pretty things ; 
 
96 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 or whether the tastes and talents of the child shall 
 be cultivated towards something higher to be 
 acquired in after life. This latter is our opinion ; 
 and that is the reason we insist so strongly on the 
 right of allowing some originality or initiative in the 
 selection of subjects by teachers or pupils. 
 
 A simple example will suffice to show how in one 
 department alone immense trouble is taken in one 
 manner of handUng a very common subject which 
 practically is of no utility whatever in after life, 
 except to a chosen few ; and no trouble whatever is 
 taken in teaching the same subject in that manner, 
 and under that aspect, when it might be universally 
 profitable. 
 
 How many children in any National School in 
 Ireland will be called upon in their after lives to read 
 aloud either to an individual or some select gathering ? 
 How many will become professional elocutionists ? 
 One boy out of five hundred will be a clergyman, 
 and must read distinctly and with a certain grace. 
 One girl out of ten thousand may be a companion 
 to a lady, who may require her to read for her at 
 night, or during illness. The remaining legions will 
 never, as a rule, be called upon to read distinctly, 
 pronounce correctly, or understand the proper 
 emphasis of words or phrases. Yet, what time, 
 what labour, what pains are expended on an accom- 
 pUshment which will seldom or never be requisitioned 
 in after .life. Let it be remembered that we are not 
 making light of the accomplishment. It is a very 
 beautiful one ; but we are speaking now of educational 
 methods in their application to the utilities of after 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 97 
 
 life ; and there, in the vast multitude of cases, the 
 accomplishment is practically useless. On the other 
 hand, reading in the sense of creating a passion for 
 reading and a knoivledge of what ought to be read, is 
 never taught. The minds of young lads and young 
 maidens of sixteen and seventeen are fed with the 
 crumbs and pills of scrappy literature — elegant 
 extracts, bits of poetry, dissertations on political 
 economy, etc., in which, because they are task- work, 
 the children can take no interest whatsoever. The 
 beauties of EngHsh literature, the vast treasures that 
 have been accumulated for centuries by the rich and 
 prolific authorship of great and enlightened men ; 
 the hoard of precious thoughts that lie hidden there 
 beneath the covers of books which modern compe- 
 tition has made available for the slenderest purse — 
 all are unknown and concealed from the eager and 
 inquiring spirits, who then go out into the world to 
 feed their minds on the only pabulum of which they 
 have ever heard — the garbage of London flimsies, 
 or the poison of party political organs, where there 
 is neither '' truth, justice, or judgment." A taste 
 for reading — I mean reading anything wholesome or 
 elevating — is almost unknown in this country. A 
 young Englishman or a young Scotchman will be 
 found to have a pretty fair idea of the English 
 Classics — a pretty fair idea of what books are worth 
 reading, and what books are worthless. And, con- 
 sidering the fact that really half the joy and pleasure 
 of most lives is to be found in books, is it not pitiable 
 that our children's minds should be so starved that, 
 in after life, they cannot distinguish food from poison 
 
 H 
 
98 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 —the great thoughts that elevate and refine from the 
 pitiable trivialities that weaken the intellect, lower the 
 standards of ethical and moral worth, and create an 
 effeminate and thoughtless people, swayed by passion, 
 and regardless, because ignorant of, the higher 
 principles of reason and pubHc morality. 
 
 This is only one instance of the irrational manner 
 in Vv^hich the minds of our children are formed. How 
 this may be remedied I shall point out when treating 
 of Intermediate Education. A few brief suggestions 
 on the general question must suffice here. 
 
 And first, with regard to the persojinel and the 
 training of teachers. I doubt if the educationists of 
 Ireland have ever realised the dignity and importance 
 of the office of teacher. They are so accustomed to 
 consider teaching as a mere means of livelihood, and 
 teachers as mere Civil Servants, that it must be 
 difficult, if not impossible, for these latter to rise to 
 a higher conception of their profession. In fact, it 
 is only once or twice in a generation that some 
 profound and reverent thinker seizes on the idea that 
 next in dignity and honour after the sacred profes- 
 sions comes the very exalted and honourable vocation 
 of training the young minds of the country. It is 
 difficult to see why the profession of teaching should 
 be regarded as less honourable than the legal or 
 medical professions. If we judge by its importance, 
 and not by its emoluments, it should rank far beyond 
 them. If we are to judge by its services to the State, 
 there is no comparison. If we are to judge by its 
 influence on humanity, it stands out the premier 
 secular profession. Probably it will take many 
 
AND OTHER ESSx\YS 99 
 
 generations to understand this. But it should be 
 said at once that in our Training Colleges, especially 
 those under the management of religious guides, this 
 view of the sacredness and solemnity of the teaching 
 office should be kept before the minds of the pupils, 
 in season and out of season. They have got to deal, 
 not with human decomposition and disease, not with 
 human crime and folly and dishonesty, not with 
 mechanical contrivances and dull, inert matter ; but 
 with human souls, which are placed in their hands 
 for formation ; and which receive at their hands 
 that bias towards good or evil that must influence all 
 their after lives, and make them a burden or a curse, 
 or a blessing and a help, towards the entire com- 
 munity. 
 
 Hence I am of opinion that, at once, the material 
 interests of the teachers, their salaries and pensions, 
 should be placed in such a position of adequacy and 
 proportion that would liberate the minds of teachers 
 from all anxiety about their futures, and leave them 
 absolutely free to devote themselves to the more 
 spiritual side of their exalted calling. I do not think, 
 therefore, that the salary of a teacher should be made 
 dependent on the size of his school, or the number 
 of his pupils. For thence arises the deadly temptation 
 of regarding himself as a mere bird-of-passage, who 
 has not, and never can, have an interest in his pupils ; 
 but is ever looking out in the daily paper for an 
 advertisement for principal in some more populous 
 place, whence again he is to emigrate when the 
 opportunity offers. On the other hand, reason, 
 justice, public opinion, and common sense demand 
 
100 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 that when a teacher has honestly and conscientiously 
 devoted his life to the services of the State, he should 
 be protected by the State by adequate pensions 
 from any hardship of poverty or sickness, when 
 incapacitated from work by old age or infirmity. 
 
 With regard to the time devoted to education in 
 Ireland, we find that 200 days is the minimum exacted 
 by the National Board. That is to say, the working 
 days in our schools are little more than half the days 
 of the year. Setting aside Sundays and holidays, 
 there should be 306 w^orking days at least ; and 
 allowing the 40 days, which is the maximum of 
 vacation allowed by the Board, there should be 266 
 working days in the year. Yet a minimum of 200 
 days is all that is required from teachers or pupils. 
 And each working day means but four hours. Now 
 considering the multipHcity of subjects required by 
 the Board, and the very limited time that is imperative 
 and obligatory on the teachers, it follows that only 
 the most superficial education can be imparted to 
 the children of the country. Add to this the number 
 of days that are lost by individual pupils, who are 
 absent through sickness, epidemic or otherwise ; by 
 agricultural requirements, and through the thousand 
 and one excuses that are made by negligent and 
 ignorant parents, and it will be seen how impossible 
 it is to create in Ireland a body of youths of both 
 sexes, who may be said to leave school even fairly 
 equipped for the responsibilities of life. There 
 seems to be no reason why (except in the case of 
 infants) the school hours should not be extended 
 to five ; there is no reason why, as in former times, 
 Saturdays should not be half-holidays ; there is no 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS loi 
 
 reason why a uniform standard of vacation — allowing 
 a fortnight at Christmas, ten days at Easter, and four 
 weeks in summer — should not be rigidly maintained > 
 
 The night-extension schools was an admirable idea. 
 It failed ; and it failed because the youth of the 
 country were not already prepared by the day-schools 
 to recommence their education. They were never 
 taught that education meant anything but task- work, 
 without design or object but to help the teacher to 
 live ; and they had no notion of commencing such 
 task- work again, when tired and weary after the manual 
 labour of the day. 
 
 With regard to the programmes of primary educa- 
 tion, let it be again insisted upon that the systems 
 should not be allowed to overlap each other, but 
 that each, primary, intermediate, and university, 
 should be kept rigidly within its own Hmits. Hence, 
 what are called ** accompHshments," the frills and 
 decorations of education, should be absolutely 
 excluded from primary education, for the object of 
 primary education is not to discover talent, not to help 
 on a favoured few, not to create reputations for clever 
 teachers or pupils ; hut to extend the blessings of an 
 elementary training amongst the vast masses of the 
 population. To raise these masses up from their 
 frightful ignorance in which they now spend their 
 lives ; to introduce into their homes something of 
 the " sweetness and light " of modern civiHsation ; 
 to show them, the poorest of the poor, and the 
 humblest of the humble, that human life has higher 
 issues than are involved in mere drudgery for daily 
 
 ^ In Germany, by Act of Parliament, the Schools throughout 
 the Empire open and close simultaneously. 
 
102 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 bread ; and, in a practical sense, to show them how 
 to avail of the vast utilities that lie beneath their 
 hands, and which only a fairly educated people can 
 adequately develop— this is the sole object of primary 
 education in Ireland. It may be fairly said that 
 90 per cent, of the children frequenting our schools 
 will have to earn their bread by manual labour. It 
 would seem reasonable then, that whilst technical 
 education should hold a primary place, everything 
 that savours of mere *' accomplishments," or that 
 belongs to a higher and secondary course, should be 
 rigidly explained. Let us now see how the pro- 
 gramme for National Schools meets these demands. 
 The entire programme in an ordinary girl's school 
 embraces the following subjects : — 
 
 Reading, 
 Writing, 
 Composition, 
 Dictation, 
 
 Geography : — 
 Local, 
 Physical, 
 Mathematical, 
 
 Arithmetic : — 
 Mental, 
 
 Laundry, 
 Knitting, 
 
 Written, 
 
 Grammar, 
 
 Cookery, 
 Irish, 
 
 Parsing, 
 Analysis, 
 
 History, 
 Sewing, 
 Crochet, 
 
 Tonic Sol-Fa, 
 Staff Notation, 
 Kindergarten, 
 
 Drawing : — 
 Geometrical, 
 Freehand, 
 
 Object Lesson, 
 
 Hand and Eye Training, 
 
 Drill, 
 
 Scale, 
 
 Fancy-work, 
 
 Religious Instruction. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 103 
 
 This is an extensive programme for two hundred 
 days at four hours a day, and one wonders whether 
 it is possible for the pupils to obtain more than the 
 merest superficial and elementary knowledge of these 
 many subjects. 
 
 As mere " accompHshments," such subjects as 
 Freehand, Geometrical and Scale Drawing, Analysis 
 (which is only fit for University students), Tonic 
 Sol-Fa, Staff-Notation, Fancy-work, Mathematical 
 and Physical Geography, might be struck out at once. 
 Imagine a class of grown girls, staring at a blackboard 
 crowded with geometrical figures, and knowing all 
 the time that in a few weeks they will be milking 
 cows and washing clothes ! Or a class struggHng 
 through the intricacies of Tonic Sol-Fa, when we 
 know that every girl there will discard all that in a 
 few weeks, and pick up the latest music-hall song 
 from London ! And imagine little children in a 
 fourth standard puzzHng their poor brains over 
 subject, predicate, quahfying predicates and objects, 
 when we have known young philosophers in the 
 higher colleges torturing their intellects about such 
 things. 
 
 Surely, so far as mere literary training is concerned, 
 it should be quite enough for working boys and girls 
 to know how to read and what to read ; to write a 
 decent legible hand ; to compose an interesting and 
 grammatical letter ; to speak distinctly and clearly 
 without mouthing, mumbling, or slang ; to know how 
 to tot up figures and keep accounts, and understand 
 the intricacies of buying and seUing ; for boys, some 
 technical training should be made indispensable, 
 
104 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 and for girls, cooking and laundry ; and for both, 
 some elementary knowledge of hygeine. 
 
 It seems incredible, but it is a fact, that the ordinary 
 people who form the bulk of our population do no; 
 know, have not even the faintest idea, of how their 
 bodies are constructed, what are the organs of the 
 body, and how placed ; what are the natures of 
 specific diseases, how they are contracted, how they 
 may be prevented, or cured. Many children have 
 the most fantastic notions of the organs of the body 
 and their location ; whilst the processes of circula- 
 tion, respiration, and digestion are sealed mysteries 
 to them. Most of the diseases of middle life are the 
 results of the indiscretions of youth, and many of 
 these indiscretions are the results of ignorance as 
 well as misdirected passion. I once heard a young 
 man who, in the very springtime and promise of a 
 useful and even distinguished life, was suddenly 
 stricken by an hereditary malady, curse bitterly the 
 parents who had brought him into the world. How 
 many young men and women have reason to resent 
 bitterly, the culpable neglect of parents and teachers 
 who, through false shame, or more often through 
 indifference, allowed these young and unprotected 
 creatures to enter upon the solemn duties of life 
 without a word that could guard them from bodily 
 disease, or spiritual corruption ! Surely, one of the 
 very first things that should be taught the young of 
 both sexes is to protect the temples of their bodies, 
 and save themselves from the years of agony and the 
 premature deaths that are the result of the neglect 
 or the indiflference of their inexperienced years. A 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 105 
 
 good deal of attention is now given in some schools 
 to the care of the teeth and the eyes, and the hair ; 
 and some progress has been made. But there are 
 deeper and more radical problems which ought to 
 be faced. I have heard that in some high-class 
 Protestant institutions the matrons pay enormous 
 attention to the physiological development of their 
 pupils ; and w^hen leaving school, young ladies are 
 carefully instructed as to how they are to maintain 
 their physical health, as well as to protect themselves 
 against dangers that may arise from social corruption. 
 Would that this system were extended to our primary 
 schools ; and that our young boys and girls, who are 
 flung into the very teeth of temptation, might be 
 taught how to safeguard health and virtue together. 
 I regard, then, instruction in elementary physiology 
 and elementary pathology as absolutely necessary in 
 our primary schools. And for girls, a knowledge of 
 the science of nursing should be made equally indis- 
 pensable. Nursing of infants and of the sick is the 
 natural duty and calling of young girls. Apart from 
 argument, the eagerness and zeal with which the 
 profession of nursing has been taken up of late years 
 by hundreds of young ladies throughout the land, is a 
 proof of this. If there were not some natural instinct, 
 some divinely-planted calHng in this direction, these 
 ladies, many of whom have been delicately reared, 
 could never face the hardships and the painful 
 surroundings which are inseparable from the sick- 
 room. This instinct should be fostered and en- 
 couraged in our young girls, so that in their own 
 homes and families they may be able at any time to 
 
io6 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 render their parents or their brothers and sisters 
 such help as can only come from a trained 2nd 
 experienced hand. Practical education of this kind 
 would make our young people more studious about 
 themselves, more inteUigent helpers to others, than 
 if they could draw circles with the genius of a Giotto, 
 or could analyse the longest sentence in Ruskin. 
 And I have but faintly understood the teaching of 
 this artist and philosopher, if these are not also his 
 ideas. Just now, too, an opportunity is afforded by 
 the estabUshment in many districts in the country 
 of the Victoria Jubilee Nurses. The local committees 
 where these nurses are placed find it extremely 
 difficult to collect the requisite funds for the main- 
 tenance of the nurse and the appliances she requires 
 for the homes of the sick. A small fee given by the 
 National Board to these ladies for special lectures 
 on Hygiene in the schools of their districts would 
 materially help the local committees, and advance 
 the cause of education. 
 
 Finally, there just now arises a temptation that 
 must be promptly m.et. The Irish people are par- 
 ticularly prone to be caught by catch- words, which 
 are passed on from mouth to mouth, carrying no 
 sense, but like a Tale of little jneaning, though the 
 zvords be strong. One of these catch-words is just now 
 flying from lip to lip in connection with university 
 scholarships. We hear a great deal about " the 
 poor man's son," and the necessity of giving clever 
 boys a chance of developing undoubted talents in 
 the halls of some university. It is a specious cry 
 because it holds an elemental truth— that it is a de- 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 107 
 
 ordination in Nature to have splendid talents allowed 
 to run to waste ; and to see brave young geniuses, 
 who might be Newtons or Lavaters, condemned for 
 life to the spade and mattock. But the temptation 
 lies in this — that ambitious parents, confident of 
 their children's ability, or ambitious teachers, 
 anxious for the honour of their schools, might be 
 induced to demand and give special time and attention 
 to some favoured few, to the detriment of the many. 
 If a teacher thinks he has discovered a particularly 
 clever lad, who will probably take a scholarship, and 
 if he is willing to devote special time to his develop- 
 ment, by all means let him do so ; but it must be 
 outside school-hours. It would be a crime to take 
 away from ninety pupils the teacher's care and 
 attention for the purpose of developing one case of 
 talent. For, again let us repeat, and it cannot be 
 repeated too often, the crying evil of our country 
 and our time is the lack of ordinary decent education 
 amongst the masses of the people ; and that the 
 object of the National and other systems of primary 
 education is not to discover or develop the genius of 
 one pupil, but to diffuse throughout the entire 
 community a sound elementary education that will 
 quahfy them to act the part of intelligent and 
 responsible citizens. How necessary this is in the 
 rapid developments through which the country is 
 now passing should be evident to the most super- 
 ficial thinker. For good or ill, the processes of 
 successive Reform Bills have eventuated in manhood 
 suffrage. Every individual, therefore, is part and 
 parcel of the administration of the country. To 
 
io8 THE LITERARY LIFE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 commit that administration into the hands of an 
 unthinking, unlettered, and, therefore, irresponsible 
 population would be to pledge the country to 
 disaster. Yet this is what we have to face, unless 
 some revolutionary methods be adopted which will 
 bring the means of education within the power of 
 every citizen, and the blessings of a Hberal education 
 into the homes of the humblest cotter or labourer. 
 
THE IRISH PRIESTHOOD 
 AND POLITICS 
 
 VI. 
 
 The present condition of politics in Ireland raises 
 anew the question, what exactly are the views enter- 
 tained by the vast majority of Irish priests on the 
 present crisis, and what are the habitual relations 
 between the Irish priesthood and the Government 
 of the country. It cannot be denied that the Ciovern- 
 ment, faithful to cherished traditions, regard the vast 
 body of Irish priests with dislike, suspicion, and fear ; 
 and the English journals, which interpret English 
 Tory opinion, indulge in hysterical alternatives of 
 contemptuous hatred and pitiful appeals, grounded, 
 of course, on exalted principles of justice and morality. 
 
 It has passed into a truism in Irish poHtics, modified 
 a Httle in recent years, that EngUshmen cannot under- 
 stand our countr}^men — their wishes, their hopes, 
 their ambitions. If this be true of the Irish as a whole, 
 it is not too much to say that the opinions and 
 practices of the Irish Roman Catholic clergy must 
 be doubly mysterious to them. That they still remain 
 the principal factor in Irish politics is certain. That 
 the opinions of certain dignitaries and certain priests 
 are also defined and declared is also certain. But 
 what are the opinions of the hundreds of Irish priests 
 
 109 
 
no THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 who never speak in Press or on platform ? And what 
 is the meaning of the attitude of silent watchfulness 
 which they assume ? 
 
 It has been remarked that the Irish character is so 
 sensitive, unsettled, and impulsive that it changes 
 periodically, vibrating to new ideas, new emotions, 
 so long as their influence continues. Whether this 
 be philosophically correct we know not ; but it is 
 certain that the present century has beheld three 
 generations of Irish priests, specifically distinct in 
 feeling, character, modes of thought ; and that these 
 changes have been effected by circumstances, and by 
 the education which men in public life insensibly 
 receive from the events which are passing around 
 them. In the closing years of the last Century the 
 young Irish Levite was compelled by penal laws to 
 steal to France or Spain for the education denied 
 him at home. He returned with all the polish and 
 suavity of Continental life, engrafted on the pure 
 and noble, yet turbulent elements of character he 
 had inherited from his race. He reverenced his 
 countrymen for their marvellous fidelity to the 
 principles of faith ; but, somehow, his spirit was 
 weakened and broken. Still patriotic, he had neither 
 the taste nor ability to initiate, or push to any issue, 
 a great political movement. He was friendly with 
 the gentry and the Protestant clergy ; would not 
 recognise any natural antagonism between the racial 
 characteristics of Celt and Saxon ; and was scarcely 
 a believer in the possibility that Ireland might yet 
 be a Nation. Maynooth was built ; the Emancipation 
 Act was passed, and forth from the halls of the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS in 
 
 Government Seminary, built specially for the promo- 
 tion of loyalty, came another class, no more like the 
 priest from Loiivain or Salamanca than an English 
 parson is like a mediaeval friar. Less refined, but 
 more solid, knowing no language but their own 
 native Gaelic and the tongue of the stranger ; but 
 firmly grounded in the theology of Aquinas, and 
 widely acquainted with the religion and political 
 history of their Country and Church ; heartily loving 
 their own people, and heartily hating the Government 
 and the '' landlord garrison " ; they might have 
 changed the whole history of Ireland were there 
 one spirit amongst them bold and original enough 
 to shape a policy, and show them how to pursue it. 
 But years were wasted, and spirit and energy thrown 
 away in the agitation for repeal. Then the great 
 mind that held all the nation in hand passed away, 
 and the stormy excitement of 1848-49, from famine 
 and rebelUon, was succeeded by a long period of 
 apathy and repose. 
 
 The second period is rich in eloquence and poetry ; 
 and possibly the names of MacHale, Cahill, and 
 Doyle are amongst the immortals ; but it is singularly 
 barren of any political fruit. No great measure was 
 suggested to Parliament by the Irish priesthood. 
 No Bill, amehorative of the condition of the Irish 
 people, was passed by the British Parliamxcnt during 
 the long term of years that elapsed between 1829 
 and 1870. 
 
 Meanwhile a gradual change was creeping over 
 the Alma Mater of the Irish priesthood. Eager and 
 inquiring intellects were growing impatient of a 
 
112 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 curriculum of studies that was limited to Theology 
 and Ecclesiastical History. The class business which 
 satisfied their conscience and the professor was easily 
 mastered, the hours of study were long — six hours 
 in class-halls or in their private rooms. The young 
 clerical student is no dreamer. He could not spend 
 all this time decorating the naked whitewash of his 
 cell- with fancy portraits, or admiring the stately elms 
 which stretched in parallel lines before him to the 
 horizon. He must have some mental pabulum 
 different from the scholastic disquisitions of his 
 leather-bound, musty folios. During his Logic 
 Course, he had got a glimpse of a strange new world, 
 peopled with poets and philosophers, and the music 
 of the former haunted him, and the splendid conjec- 
 tures of the latter fascinated him. He knew of course 
 it was all visionary. Here was the solid earth beneath 
 his feet. Prayer and not problems would keep him 
 from sin. 
 
 I think it was on the 25th August, 1869, I passed 
 through the Sphinx-guarded gates of Maynooth 
 College, and stood near what was then the Senior 
 Chapel, and saw, with a certain melancholy feeling, 
 the old keep of the Geraldine Castle lighted up by 
 the yellow rays of the sinking sun. I remember well 
 that the impression made upon me by Maynooth 
 College then, and afterwards, when I saw its long, 
 stone corridors, its immense bare stony halls, the 
 huge massive tables, etc., was one of rude, Cyclopean 
 strength, without one single aspect or feature of 
 refinement. So too with its studies. Relentless 
 logic, with its formidable chevaux-de-frise of syllogisms. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 113 
 
 propositions, scholia ; metaphysics, sublime, but 
 hardened into slabs of theories, congealed in mediaeval 
 Latin ; Physics, embracing a course that would have 
 appalled a young Newton or Kepler ; and then the 
 vast shadow of four years' Divinity towering above 
 and over-shadowing all ! 
 
 The Graces were nowhere ! Even in the English 
 Literature or Belles-Lettres class, as it was called, 
 the course seemed to be limited to hard grinding 
 Grammar, and nothing more. During the first 
 semestre, a few lectures were given on literature. 
 All that I can ever remember of that period were 
 the words " Lake Poets," which the good professor 
 was for ever repeating. 
 
 After Christmas, however, there was a change ; 
 rather a momentous one for some, at least. Father 
 O'Rourke, a very gentle, polished man, had to leave 
 College, and go abroad in delicate health ; and his 
 chair was taken by a young priest, just then finishing 
 his third and last year in the Dunboyne House. 
 This was one of the most remarkable, if not one of 
 the most distinguished, students that ever passed 
 through Maynooth. It shows the passing nature of 
 all things, that one, who was such a celebrity in his 
 own time, should be now almost forgotten. The 
 students of the present day have never heard of his 
 name ; and yet his classmates, many of whom are 
 still living, and some of whom are occupying the 
 highest positions in the Irish Church, speak of him, 
 of his intellectual power, his imperious ways and 
 address, his talent for unwearied work, as something 
 phenomenal in a student. The only parallel I have 
 ever seen to the brilliant career and subsequent tragic 
 I 
 
114 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 failure of this young priest was in the case of WiUiam 
 Sutherland, the acknowledged leader and princeps 
 in that brilliant group at Oxford, which numbered 
 A. Henry Hallam, the Tennysons, Manning, Ward, 
 Froude, Monckton, Milnes, etc., amongst its members, 
 In Maynooth he speedily established a reputation, 
 which had just reached its zenith when I sat beneath 
 his pulpit, close to the wall at the left hand side in 
 the Logic Hall, near the Junior Chapel. 
 
 He was a tall, splendidly -formed man, with a cast 
 of features distinctively Roman. One or two photo- 
 graphs remain of him in the albums of friends. The 
 face with the stern brow, the lock of hair falling over 
 it in studied affectation, the curved lips, the firm, 
 broad nose, is the face of a lost archangel. His career 
 was tragical ; one other instance of genius misplaced, 
 and, therefore, hurled to prompt and inevitable ruin. 
 
 To us, young hero- worshippers, sick and tired of 
 logic-chopping, and the awful dulness of the morning 
 classes, he carne as a herald of light and leading. 
 Swiftly he opened up to our wondering eyes the vast 
 treasures of European and, particularly, of English 
 literature. He was a trained elocutionist ; and it was 
 a pleasure to hear him read either one of his own 
 compositions or some masterpiece of prose or poetry 
 from the great classic authors. From him I first 
 heard the names of Carlyle, Tennyson, and Brown- 
 ing ; and I never rested until their books were in 
 my hands. 
 
 Before Christmas I remem.ber having, in the usual 
 course of things, recited publicly The Dozvnfall of 
 Poland. Then one night in the Lent of the year 1870, 
 I was marked for another recitation. I had been filled 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 115 
 
 and saturated with the poetry of 1848, and I had 
 committed to memory many of its stirring pieces. 
 In the innocence and inexperience of youth, I selected 
 this evening the most revolutionary ode of that 
 stirring epoch ; and quite ignorant or forgetful of 
 its inappropriateness within the walls of Maynooth, 
 I thundered out (it is worth repeating here) : 
 
 THE YEAR OF REVOLUTIONS 
 
 I 
 
 *' Lift up your pale faces, ye children of sorrow ! 
 
 The night passes on to a glorious to-morrow ; 
 
 Hark ! Heard you not sounding glad Liberty's pa?an 
 
 From the Alps to the Isles of the tideless iEgean ? 
 
 And the rhythmical march of the gathering nations, 
 
 And the crashing of thrones 'neath their fierce exul- 
 tations. 
 
 And the cries of humanity cleaving the ether, 
 
 And the songs of the conquering arising together. 
 
 God, Liberty, Truth ! How they burn heart and 
 brain ! 
 
 Those words shall they burn, shall they waken in 
 vain ? 
 
 II 
 
 " No ! Soul answers Soul, steel clashes on steel ; 
 And land wakens land with a grand thunder-peal. 
 Shall we, O my brothers, but weep, pray and groan, 
 When France reads her rights by the flames of a 
 
 Throne ? 
 Shall we fail and falter to join the grand chorus, 
 When Europe has trod the dark pathway before us } 
 
ii6 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 No ! Courage, and we, too, will trample them down. 
 Those minions of power, those serfs of a crown ; 
 Ay, courage, but courage, if once to the winds 
 You fling freedom's banners, no tyranny binds. 
 
 Ill 
 
 " At the voice of the people the weak symbols fall, 
 And humanity marches o'er purple and pall ; 
 O'er sceptre and crown with a noble disdain, 
 For the symbol must fall, and Humanity reign. 
 On, on, in your masses, dense, resolute, strong. 
 To war against treason, oppression, and wrong. 
 On, on, with your leaders, and Him we adore most, 
 Who strikes with the bravest, and leads with the fore- 
 most. 
 Who brings the proud light of a name great in story 
 To light us to danger ; unconquered, to glory. 
 
 IV 
 
 *' With faith, like the Hebrews, we'll stem the Red 
 
 Sea, 
 God, smite down the Pharaohs, our hope is in Thee. 
 Be it blood of the t3Tant, or blood of the slave, 
 We'll cross it to freedom, or find there a grave. 
 Lo, a throne for each worker, a crown for each brow, 
 The palm for each martyr who dies for us now ! 
 Spite the flash of their muskets, the roar of their 
 
 cannon. 
 The assassins of freedom shall lower their pennon ; 
 For the will of a nation, what foe dare withstand? 
 Then, patriots, heroes, strike ! God for our Land ! " 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 117 
 
 Maynooth had just been disendowed ; and the 
 place was no longer a Government institution. The 
 mutton which the students ate was no longer the 
 Queen's mutton. But you cannot exorcise the tra- 
 ditional spirit of a place in a day. The government 
 of the House at that time was distinctively conservative, 
 if not anti-national ; and it was certainly rash for a 
 young student to select such a fierce, revolutionary 
 ode for recitation in a college where there was a 
 traditional dread of such things. 
 
 Many readers will recognise in these lines the 
 famous ode for which, and for a correspondingly 
 inflammatory article, the editors of the Nation were 
 arrested. And they will recall the dramatic scene, 
 when the Crown Prosecutor, at the time, scornfully 
 declared that the writer was hiding under the anonym, 
 *' Speranza," and afraid to reveal his name ; and how 
 a lady stood up in the gallery over his head, and 
 declared that she was the authoress. This was Lady 
 Wilde, wife of Sir William Wilde, fam.ous oculist and 
 antiquarian, and mother of another unhappy Irish 
 genius — Oscar. In my youth, her poemxS were on 
 all our lips ; and glorious and spirited poems they 
 w^ere, sending the blood bounding under the trumpet- 
 call, to do something for Ireland. 
 
 Although I acted rashly enough, however, on that 
 occasion in selecting these burning words in such a 
 staid and solemn place, I was pretty safe, because at 
 that very time our lecturer was writing some similar 
 verses for the DubHn Nation, under the nom-de- 
 plume, " Fion-Barra." There was one poem which 
 I have never seen since, which seemed to express 
 
ii8 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 the intense pride and defiance of the writer. I can 
 only remember the words : — 
 
 '* Black does it look, my future, 
 Masters, that see so far ? 
 But I'll make each span of its blackness 
 The throne of a stately star." 
 
 And :— 
 
 " Fear was made for the hearts of hares ; 
 It was never made for mine." 
 
 I wonder did he foresee the stormy scenes that were 
 to be crammed into his little life ; and the fearful 
 cataclysm which was to close it ? 
 
 One of his poems, however, I well remember, for 
 I committed it to memory at the time, and I have 
 never lost hold of it. It is called : 
 
 VINEGAR HILL 
 
 I 
 
 *' Ah, dear Father Tom, how you're panting ! I'm 
 
 sorry I hurried you so ; 
 But the heart was red-hot in my bosom, to see the 
 
 old hill ere I go ; 
 To stand on its top, as I'm standing, the town huddled 
 
 there at my feet, 
 Some eyes, I dare say, in its bosom that looked on 
 
 the rebel's retreat. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 119 
 
 II 
 
 *' Very dark is the green of the grass here, and sullen 
 
 it shows to the brutes ; 
 But we know what 'tis drinking for ever beneath 
 
 from the sod where it shoots ; 
 We know, but we're not going to mention the flesh, 
 
 and the blood, and the bones, 
 Hidden here since our Wicklow w^as widowed, and 
 
 Wexford was glutted with groans. 
 
 Ill 
 
 *' You mind. Father Tom, how around us, the land 
 
 stretches flatly for miles ? 
 You can see every road winding whitely, no rocks, 
 
 and no sheltered defiles. 
 Oh God ! hov/ six brave rifled cannon, crammed 
 
 home with the vengeance of years. 
 Had shattered the skulls of the Saxon, till Ireland 
 
 rang loud with her cheers I 
 
 IV 
 
 " But you see the poor fellows had pitch-forks, and 
 
 pikes, and a pistol or two ; 
 And friends from afar had not risen to teach their 
 
 rude hands what to do ; 
 So they came here to die, dimly dreaming that the 
 
 will was as good as the deed ; 
 And that Ireland would honour her children, who 
 
 knew not to fight, but to bleed. 
 
120 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 V 
 
 *' And the poor fellows, too, were half-starving ; they 
 
 tell of a thousand or more 
 Whose food for a week was raw turnips, raw turnips 
 
 and soft at the core — 
 Bad stuff for a stomach that's stationed to stand 
 
 against bayonet and ball ; 
 Bad stuff when the heart must be steady, and the 
 
 feet rooted fast Hke a wall. 
 
 VI 
 
 *' And yet on this hill-top bare-breasted, and starving 
 
 and hungry and weak, 
 They taught the brave truth that our babies are 
 
 learning to think and to speak — 
 That the race is not all to the swift ; nor the victory 
 
 all for the strong ; 
 But the great law of God and of Nature is war to 
 
 the knife against wrong. 
 
 VII 
 
 *' Never mind ! Let's go down from the hill-top ; 
 
 we've seen what we wanted to see ; 
 The rank grass that feeds on our fathers ; the fields 
 
 where their feet used to be ; 
 Poor fellows ! We don't call them heroes ; the land 
 
 of their love w^asn't Greece, 
 But we, you and I, give them pardon ; and we pray 
 
 that their souls may have peace." 
 
THE DAWN OF THE CENTURY' 
 
 VII 
 
 I propose this evening to put before you a limited, 
 but let me hope, a clear, well-defined view of that 
 outer intellectual world, in which you will soon be 
 called to take your place, and an important one ; and 
 with that view to stimulate you to more zealous and 
 earnest preparation for the part you will have to 
 perform. For it is sometimes wise for us all to pause 
 and think and look around us ; to wait till the smoke 
 clears away from the field of battle, that we may the 
 better see the alignments of the enemy, arrange our 
 own forces, and make such dispositions that we may 
 gain at least an advantage ; for the ultimate victory, 
 I presume, is not for us, nor for any soldiers of Christ, 
 until the day when the great Captain Himself shall 
 come. And measuring as I do the vast energies that 
 lie hidden, and as yet bounded and locked, in the 
 assemblage which I have the honour to address 
 to-night, I feel a certain sense of responsibility — so 
 great, that were it not for the deference I owed to the 
 courteous invitation of your late President, repeated 
 
 1 An Address delivered to the Maynooth Students in the A ula 
 Maxima of the College, December ist, 1903. 
 
 131 
 
122 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 by your present Superior ; and at the same time an 
 ambition, I hope a lawful one, of addressing at least 
 once in my life the young minds and hearts that 
 are to control the future destinies of the Church in 
 Ireland, I should have hesitated about assuming a 
 duty, which might be left in more capable and zealous 
 hands. Nevertheless, I may be able to give you a 
 glance into the outer world, its forces, its movements, 
 its processes of thought, which may awaken new^ ideas, 
 and perhaps larger conceptions of your vocation ; and 
 with these, fresh determinations that in the serious 
 and solemn duties that He before the Catholic priest- 
 hood in our time, you will at least acquit yourselves 
 like men. 
 
 All life is a process. Things do not hurry, neither 
 do they pause. But, from time to time, there is just 
 a rush as of forces breaking their bounds ; and then 
 again a lull in human affairs — a little breathing time 
 for poor humanity, wherein it stops suddenly, and as 
 if, through sheer exhaustion, refuses to be swept along 
 on the eternal currents of thought. Just such a 
 breathing time we have in the intellectual world of 
 to-day. There is no great " movement," as it is 
 called, going on in the world outside. The chief 
 revolutions of the nineteenth century ran through 
 their little cycles and ceased. And we, who have 
 seen them, and been blinded by their dust, and 
 stunned by their noise, now look back with a certain 
 kind of wondering humiliation, that we could ever 
 have allowed ourselves to be even temporarily dis- 
 turbed by such feeble and transitory things. And if 
 we needed a proof of that Divine arrangement in the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 123 
 
 economy of life, by which truth is safeguarded in 
 the custody of an unerring Church, surely we rnay 
 find it in the swift judgment that I'ime has passed 
 upon the insolent assumptions of the century that 
 has just expired. Not that these systems and move- 
 ments are forgotten. Nay, it is only now that they 
 are being studied in detail. There is a curious leisure 
 and repose in the thought of the world of to-day. 
 It is not fretted by any particular system of philo- 
 sophy. Over there, on the sands of Brighton, Herbert 
 Spencer is rolled up and down in a bath-chair, 
 speaking to no one, looking out with dimmed eyes on 
 the unfathomable sea. He has left a fair amount of 
 printed formulas which no one reads. In that highest 
 domain of philosophic thought, I know no other name 
 that men would care to remember. Science has 
 passed from great principles into mere experiment. 
 Instead of being mistress of great minds, she has 
 become an artificer of toys for men's hands and 
 human convenience. The discovery of the new 
 metals, ** uranium " and " radium," is heralded as a 
 revolution in Science. But w^e are too much accus- 
 tomed to these revolutions to heed them. Darwin 
 and Owen, Huxley and Tyndall have vanished, and 
 Edison and Marconi remain. Great principles, for 
 right or wrong, are no longer laid down, fought for, 
 assailed, accepted, or rejected. The dog listening 
 for his dead master's voice in the phonograph, and 
 the group around the Marconi wires in the saloon of 
 a Transatlantic steamer, eager to catch the gossip of 
 two continents, are types of the present. The great 
 voice of poetry has died down into a few artificial 
 
124 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 notes, that have neither the vigour nor the secret of 
 inspiration. All the chief singers of the Victorian 
 era, except one, are hushed in death. Swinburne 
 lives, but is silent. The Poet-Laureate seems to have 
 already passed out of public consideration. There 
 are but two names before the world to-day, and they 
 are called by the damning term of '' minor poets," — 
 Stephen Phillips and William Watson. There is one 
 great poet — a Catholic— Francis Thompson ; but he, 
 having given to men of all he was worth, and they 
 were unworthy, has flung his two volumes, with a 
 kind of disdain, at the world's feet, and passed, like 
 a wise man, into the peace and seclusion of a Fran- 
 ciscan monastery. Mr. Lecky, representing history, 
 has just passed away ; and amongst the vast crowd 
 of wTiters, who come under the general designation 
 of " Men of IvCtters," and the great majority of w^hom 
 are mere magazine writers with but ephemeral repu- 
 tations, there seems but one who will conquer the 
 neglect of time, and the indifference and coquetry 
 of fame — and that, too, is a Catholic — Dr. William 
 Barry. Ireland alone appears to be alive amidst the 
 general torpor. The breath of life that seems to have 
 abandoned a dead world is passing through her veins. 
 
 What, then, has the " Dawn of the Century " to 
 show ? What are the m.anifestations that w^e have 
 to study ; and how are we to forecast the future from 
 the s5aTaptoms of the present ? 
 
 Travellers who have ventured to climb the steep 
 ascent and dread escarpments of Vesuvius, tell us of 
 the feeling of utter soHtude and desolation they ex- 
 perience when they have reached half-way up the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 125 
 
 mountain. They walk ankle-deep in hot ashes ; the 
 half-cooled streams of lava, ridged and smooth, are 
 here and there on every side ; the air is dark and 
 sulphurous, and difficult to breathe ; the guides are 
 timid and uncertain about proceeding further. All 
 around is horror upon horror ; and their hearts are 
 chilled with a sense of loneliness and fear. Yet, 
 looking upward and onward, there is something more 
 terrible. The cloud that ever hangs above the crater 
 is lurid from the sulphurous fires beneath, and now 
 and again the mountain is shaken by the deep re- 
 verberations of the terrible forces that are trying to 
 free themselves there beneath the surface, and high 
 into the air is flung a burning showier of ashes and 
 scorise and red-hot stones, and new streams of molten 
 lava are poured down the mountain side. Here is 
 desolation ; but there is death. The frightened 
 travellers dare not look upwards ; they look around 
 them and behind them, and ask many questions of 
 their guides as to how best they may retrace their 
 steps. Such is the attitude of the intellectual world 
 of to-day. All around it is desolation — the desolation 
 of abandoned spirits on the lonely heights. It dares 
 not look forward. There is but death. Its guides — 
 the prophets of agnosticism- -are dumb. All it can 
 do is to stop and look back, and try to see if haply 
 the past can be any guide to the future. Its attitude 
 then to-day is essentially retrospective. It is wearied 
 and tired and frightened. Nothing remains but to 
 study the past, and see is there a gleam of hope, a 
 guidance of hfe for the enigmatic future that lies 
 before it. Let us, for our own wise ends, follow the 
 
126 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 example, looking through its eyes, and see what were 
 the forces that guided the world into its present 
 perilous condition, and leave it there with the ashes 
 of dead faiths about its feet. 
 
 The great intellectual forces of the nineteenth 
 century resolved themselves into two movements, 
 known to historians as the transcendental and em- 
 pirical. The former sprang from the writings of 
 Rousseau ; affected, even created, the French Revo- 
 lution, broadened out and developed into the great 
 German systems of philosophy, passed into England 
 and coloured the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, 
 generated in France a whole tribe of soHloquists and 
 dreamers, and finally was caught up and crystallised 
 in the half-prophetic, half-deUrious preachings and 
 rantings of Carlyle. I'hence it crossed the Atlantic, 
 inspired and originated New England Transcenden- 
 talism through the Concord School of philosophy, of 
 which Emerson, a pupil of Carlyle's, was chief prophet. 
 The essential characteristics of this school were 
 vagueness and abstraction. It took its very name 
 from the fancy that this new knowledge transcended 
 all experience, and was quite independent of reason, 
 authority, the testimony of the senses, or the testi- 
 mony of mankind. Its knowledge was intuitive and 
 abstract. It despised definition. It taught the swift 
 and immediate grasping of a something unrevealed 
 and indefinite, which had hitherto eluded all human 
 effort to compass, embrace, or define. Hence its 
 terminology was vague. It spoke freely of the Infinite, 
 the Infinite Nothing, the Infinite Essence of Things. 
 Then the Germans invented a more prosaic name — 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 127 
 
 the thing that is not-I. Coleridge made sub-divisions 
 and introduced the now well-worn words, subjective 
 and objective knowledge. Carlyle spoke of Eternal 
 Verities, the Immensities, the Infinite, the Eternal 
 Silences, etc. Emerson wrote of it as the Over- Soul, 
 the Spirit of the Universe. How far all this differed 
 from pure Pantheism it were difficult to say ; but it 
 permeated all literature — history was studied by its 
 Hght, poetry was inspired by it, it ran through all 
 fiction, became a religious creed, until men every- 
 where sought the Secret of Being in the question put 
 by Coleridge : — 
 
 " And what if all of animated nature 
 Be but organic harps diversely framed, 
 That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps, 
 Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, 
 At once the Soul of each, and God of all }'' 
 
 Then, somewhere about the middle of the century, 
 men began to ask whether there w^as any rule of 
 conduct, any code of ethics, under all this cloudy 
 verbiage. Men are known by their works. Systems 
 are judged by their results. What have you to show 
 for all this transcendentalism ? How does it affect 
 human life, human relations, human progress ? How 
 do such doctrines influence the political common- 
 w^ealth by educating statesmen into higher ideas of 
 political advancement and social amelioration ? What 
 do your prophets say ? And lo ! it began to be 
 whispered that the sentimental Rousseau did actually 
 send his children away to be shut up in an orphan 
 
128 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 asylum ; and that Carlyle, interpreting the Infinite 
 Verities as merely brute, blind force, did defend the 
 man who broke his word of honour hundreds of 
 times, and carried fire and sword into every valley 
 and hamlet and town in Ireland ; and honoured the 
 Governor w^ho scourged with whips of wire the naked 
 slaves of Jamaica; and wrote his ''Iliad in a nutshell" 
 to condemn the Northern States of America for the 
 emancipation of the Negro. And yet, it would be 
 unjust not to say that TranscendentaUsm did raise 
 men's minds above a sordid level. If its dogmas 
 were vague, at least it appealed to the higher instincts 
 and emotions. It certainly rated spiritual and mental 
 life above the adjuncts of mere material existence. 
 It took men away from mammon-worship and self- 
 seeking ; and by insisting on the paramount import- 
 ance of Duty, and the vast responsibilities of our 
 short but sublime existence on this planet, it gave 
 the young particularly higher conceptions of their 
 calling, and put many on the high road towards nobler 
 and sweeter lives. In Fichte's Nature of the Scholar ; 
 in Carlyle 's Past and Present ; and in Emerson's 
 Address to the American Scholar, you will find all this 
 exemplified. Yet, men were not satisfied. All these 
 nebulous hypotheses about Over-Souls and Immen- 
 sities could not satisfy the imperious demand of the 
 ever-impatient mind of man for something more 
 structural and solid. The eternal question arose as 
 to the First Principles ; and reason and logic alike 
 declared the fundam.ental truth : No Dogma ; No 
 Ethics ! A rule of life for men and nations must be 
 founded on something more solid than mere verbal 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 129 
 
 abstractions. Yet, all this time, de Maistre in France, 
 Newman in England, were thundering this very 
 truth into the ears of the multitude ; but the multi- 
 tude looked everywhere for illumination, except from 
 the central sun. 
 
 Suddenly, a momentous change swept over human 
 thought. With one bound it leaped to the opposite 
 extreme. "We are tired of abstractions," it cried. 
 " W^e want facts ! No more intuition, but demonstra- 
 tion ! Reason shall be omnipotent. There is Nature 
 under our eyes and hands. We will question her ; 
 and she will answer. She will give up her secrets to 
 us, and we will build our systems upon them. We 
 will tear open the bowels of the moimtains, and read 
 their signs, as the haruspices of old read the entrails 
 of the sacred, sacrificial fowl, and augured well or ill 
 from the revelation. W^e will pull down the stars 
 from the skies, weigh them, and test their constituents. 
 W^e will seek the elemental forces of Nature, and there 
 we shall find the elemental truths. We will pry into 
 all things and everywhere, dredge the seas, sweep 
 the rivers, drag fossils out of mammoth caves, con- 
 struct the forms of dead leviathans from one bone, 
 examine the dust of stars in shattered aerolites, and 
 the structure of the animal creation in the spawn of 
 frogs by the wayside pool, or the tadpoles in the 
 month of May. And we shall find that all things are 
 made for man ; and that man alone is the Omnipotent 
 and Divine." Poets took up the paean of the New 
 Era, and sang it in verse that is more immortal than 
 the cause. Tennyson laid aside his Higher Pantheism, 
 and all the idealizations of youth to chaunt the praises 
 
130 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 of the new pioneers of humanity. And the world 
 took up the cry. Through the steamship, the tele- 
 graph, distance was annihilated. Mankind was 
 shaken by new emotions. The world was moved 
 from its solid basis, and began to shift its centres 
 of population. Old countries were dispeopled, 
 and new states formed, out of a curious congeries 
 of mixed and very dissimilar nationalities. The 
 agricultural masses began to sweep into the towns, 
 which rapidly grew into cities under the increase of 
 population. Vast buildings were flung into the sky, 
 filled with all modern appliances and conveniences ; 
 and in the exultation of the moment, men looked 
 back upon the past with a kind of pitying ridicule. 
 " We are done with cloud-building and abstractions 
 for ever," they said. " We have facts instead of faith. 
 This is our earth, our w^orld ; and we w^ant no other, 
 The ultimate triumph of humanity is at hand ! " 
 
 And then ? — well, then, at the very height of all 
 this pride, men suddenly discovered that under all 
 this huge mechanism and masonry they had actually 
 driven out the soul of man ; and they began to ask 
 themselves : Is this the result ? And is it a result 
 that w^e can boast of } Empiricism has triumphed. 
 But is the building of sky-scrapers, the slaughter of 
 so many milHon of hogs, the stretching of wires 
 across our cities, our underground railways, our sea- 
 tunnels — is all this a substitute or compensation for 
 all the ideals we have sacrificed and lost } And w^hen 
 men began to see that beneath all this material 
 splendour every noble quality that distinguishes 
 man was utterly extinguished ; when they saw the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 131 
 
 horrors of their midnight streets, the masses festering 
 in city slums, the great gulf broadening between the 
 rich and poor, selfishness, greed, Mammon-worship, 
 the extinction of the weak, the sovereignty of the 
 strong, the cruelty, the brutality, that are ever latent 
 in the human heart, developed by the new civilization, 
 they began to shrink back appalled from their own 
 creation, and to think that after all, " man liveth not 
 by bread alone." And if for a moment they hesitated 
 about this new beUef in the terrible destructiveness 
 of a Godless science, there came, ever and anon, the 
 deep mutterings of a new terror, the very offspring 
 of the science they had worshipped — the spectre of 
 Socialism and Anarchy. " Yes," cried the latter, *' we, 
 too, are the children of science. Nay more, we are 
 its servants and ministers ; we feed its furnaces with 
 shades over our eyes to protect them from the blinding 
 glare ; w^e w^ork ten hours a day, stripped to the 
 waist, and buckets of water have to be flung over us 
 from time to time to cool our burning flesh ; and you, 
 dressed in your silks, with your Turkish baths and 
 servants to fan you from the slightest breath of a 
 summer wind ! Who hath decreed this inequality ? 
 It is our labour and sweat that have built up your 
 eighty millions of dollars, and our guerdon is 
 barely a dollar a day. You roll by in your Pullman, 
 whilst we keep the road clear for you under a 
 tropical sun. Your children are absolutely w^eakened 
 with excessive luxury ; ours are starving, body and 
 soul, in the slums. And after all, where is the differ- 
 ence between you and us ? You doubt it. We'll 
 prove it. You are the same clay as we. Mark you, 
 
132 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 this dagger will pierce your flesh, this tiny bullet will 
 extinguish your life. You have w^hipped us with 
 scorpions. But we hereby order that you shall sleep 
 beneath the crossed baj^onets of your soldiers ; that 
 your mightiest Emperor and Czar shall never enter 
 Rome ; and you must draw a cordon of soldiers 
 around the quays of New York to save your 
 President's life from the pious vengeance of our 
 emissaries." So says, in unmistakable language, the 
 latest creation of Empiricism, and the poets take up 
 the cry ; and the prophetic voice that chaunted the 
 glories of science in *' Locksley Hall " growls hoarse 
 in its wailings over a lost world in the '' Locksley Hall 
 Sixty Years After." Yes ! Science hath wrested all 
 its secrets from Nature but one, the great secret, 
 which she never reveals but to the children of faith. 
 The attitude of the intellectual world to-day, then, 
 is an attitude of waiting ; and in waiting, an attitude 
 of indifferentism. Not indifference, because it is 
 acutely aware of its critical condition, and looks 
 forward with anxious eyes. Nay, from time to time, 
 it turns around and gazes towards the Eternal City 
 and the Supreme Pontiff ; and in view of the power- 
 lessness of states and governments to conquer the 
 anarchy that seethes in every Empire, it is watching 
 the Church with a "perhaps" upon its lips. Great 
 Kings have already gone thither, and their royal 
 pilgrimages were universally interpreted as an ad- 
 mission that Rome alone could battle with the new 
 forces which irreligion had let loose on the world ; 
 and the peoples, following their royal masters, and 
 in view not only of shattered faith, but of shattered 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 133 
 
 beliefs in human systems, that promised so much 
 and performed so little, are beginning to ask if, after 
 all that has been said and suggested, Rome alone 
 held the secret of the stability of Empires, and the 
 safety and happiness of the individual in those 
 doctrines and precepts which she preaches so un- 
 compromisingly to an unbelieving and scoffing world. 
 Across the Atlantic, w^here she has more freedom than 
 in older and more conservative states, she is making 
 rapid progress. There, too, the distinction of classes 
 is more sharply drawn, because there wealth and 
 poverty reach greater extremes than in older countries. 
 And there is wanting in America that strong conserva- 
 tism, born of traditional feudalism, that is saving, in 
 some measure, the thrones of Europe. And the non- 
 CathoHc world of America is beginning to perceive 
 that should the forces of Anarchy and Socialism ever 
 break bounds and attempt revolution, there is no 
 moral force to stop the outbreak but the Catholic 
 Church. Hence, statesmen and Presidents court 
 friendship, if not alliance, with the American hier- 
 archy ; and the advance of education, wherein our 
 Catholic schools take a leading place, is gradually 
 acting as a solvent on ancient prejudices brought 
 from the mother country, and fostered by designing 
 and militant controversialists. 
 
 But you will reasonably ask, what has all this to do 
 with us who are destined to work within the four seas 
 of Ireland ? Tell us something about our own country, 
 its wants, its aspirations, its capabilities, its dangers. 
 We pity the world, stranded there on^the mountain 
 heights, unable to go backward, afraid to go forward, 
 
134 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 its guides dumb and impotent under the spell of 
 modern agnosticism. But we are more deeply con- 
 cerned about our own people with whom all our best 
 interests are identified. Well, you have a right to 
 ask the question, although, as I shall show you, you 
 have need, too, to be much interested in the attitude 
 of the intellectual world beyond the seas. 
 
 I have said; that the breath of a new life has been 
 breathed on our old land. The eternal vitality of our 
 race, not to be extinguished by rack or gibbet, Penal 
 Law or Grecian gift, has broken out these last few 
 years in a vast intellectual revival, the consequences 
 of which it would be difficult to measure to-day. It 
 would seem as if whilst the population waned, the 
 intellectual forces of the country became concentred 
 in a great effort towards national regeneration. All 
 the best elements of the country seem to unite in a 
 forward movement that promises well for the future 
 of our country and our race. Our poets have given 
 up the ballads and battle-songs which were so famiUar 
 a half-century ago, and gone back to Pre-Christian 
 times for inspiration. A National Theatre has been 
 established for the stage reproduction of dramas, 
 founded on the epics, or history, or legends of the 
 past ; and the race is more interested with the wars 
 of the Firbolgs and Danaans than with the struggles 
 of the Gael and the Pale. And the attempt to save 
 from extinction that greatest heirloom of the race — 
 our National language— has eventuated in an all-round 
 revival of national sports and pastimes, music and 
 literature, w^hich, to one who witnessed the apathy 
 of a dozen years ago, must seem phenomenal. Yet, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 135 
 
 there is a discordant and dangerous note even here. 
 If some Hellenists in England and France have raised 
 the cry : Back to Greece from Christianity 1 Back 
 to the beautiful physical life, the arts, the drama, the 
 music, the freedom of ancient Hellas, from the re- 
 straints and asceticism of Christianity, there are not 
 wanting amongst ourselves, a certain class of art- 
 worshippers and nature -worshippers who seem to 
 prefer the free unlicensed Pagan freedom of our fore- 
 fathers to the sweeter influences which Christianity 
 introduced. I do not regard this, however, as a 
 dangerous symptom. I do not think the work of 
 St. Patrick and fourteen centuries of Saints and 
 Scholars is Ukely to be frustrated by a few Neo- 
 Pagans and i^sthetes in our time. 
 
 Then, of course, with the advance of education, and 
 the creation of the class of the ''educated-unemployed," 
 there must be a certain amount of restlessness, and 
 chafing under control, and a spirit of criticism and 
 censoriousness, which can only be dissipated by 
 larger educational training, or the judicious employ- 
 ment of those who have won distinction in our colleges 
 and intermediate schools. A few weeks ago, on the 
 occasion of the apostasy of a certain realistic novel- 
 writer, one of our Irish papers had the following 
 paragraph : — 
 
 The personality of Mr. Moore would not be worth 
 even a contemptuous reference, were it not that 
 there are thousands of young Irishmen in some of 
 our big cities, whose minds are being slowly and 
 gradually, and very surely, poisoned by influences 
 which lead directly towards the abysmal gulf of 
 
136 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 George Mooreism. Speeches have been delivered 
 and paragraphs have been printed quite recently, 
 which indicate that the speakers and writers are 
 drifting, perhaps imperceptibly, but none the less 
 steadily, towards a frame of mind, doubting, carping, 
 hypercritical, which will not in the end be distinguish- 
 able from Continental Atheism. 
 
 And as if to emphasize and corroborate these words, 
 we had, a few days after they appeared, an expression 
 of opinion from the highest quarters to the same effect 
 — that there were probably here amongst ourselves 
 certain thinkers, too small of stature and too limited 
 in numbers to form a school, but whose antipathies 
 and desires seem to run parallel with those of the 
 unhappy men who are bringing ruin upon Catholic 
 France. These things are not alarming, but significant. 
 They are symptoms which we cannot disregard. 
 
 Such then is the vision of the world as it is shown to 
 us here in the dawn of our century. But I should 
 not have travelled one hundred and eighty miles to 
 reveal to you what might be unfolded from every 
 page of modern literature, if I had not the larger 
 object of applying to your own needs the lessons that 
 may be derived from such a review of modern fact 
 and thought, and of forecasting your own part in 
 their future developments. In making such a prac- 
 tical application, I should feel less scrupulous if I 
 were speaking to older heads than yours. Mind I do 
 not say ''wiser heads," for I am one of those who think 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 137 
 
 that sometimes the splendid disdain of youth is more 
 than the cautious and careful feeHng forward of age. 
 But I should feel then that my words were merely 
 tentative and experimental. But here I feel I am 
 casting seminal ideas into souls whose principles have 
 not yet hardened in the mould of experience ; and 
 which, therefore, owing to this very plasticity, need 
 to be formed on lines that shall be drawn altogether 
 right and fair and well-proportioned. I feel, too, 
 that, as time goes by, each of you will be perforce 
 compelled to try my words at the bar of experience ; 
 and there are many counsellors there, and in the 
 multitude thereof there is not much wisdom. Nay, 
 you will be tossed hither and thither by every wind 
 of opinion in your latter lives. You will have to see 
 principles which you deemed irrefragable, ruthlessly 
 challenged and set aside ; and you will have to face 
 the worst of all mental trials — the adjustment of your 
 conduct to lofty ideals, which, however, will be 
 altogether inconsistent with your interests and imme- 
 diate happiness. Amidst this eternal fluctuation of 
 human opinion, and rushing together of thoughts, 
 feelings, and principles, chaotic and confusing enough 
 — one star shines, ever fixed, immovable, shedding 
 its soft, lambent light across your life-way, fixed as 
 the Polar Star, and bright as Phosphor — the Star of 
 Duty. There is no drawing the curtains across its 
 light, no seeking to shut out its piercing rays. It 
 will shine through darkness as of Erebus ; and 
 pierce even through recesses where the soul seeks to 
 hide itself from itself. And what is that Duty ? 
 I doubt if there be a more dramatic scene in all 
 
138 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 human history than that which took place on a certani 
 mountain in Jud^a some twenty centuries ago. A 
 young man, apparently a mere carpenter's son, had 
 just dismissed a wondering, admiring crowd, who had 
 began to speak of Him as the '' Prophet of Nazareth; " 
 and had gathered around Him a few of His disciples 
 to whom He had to say more solemn and sacred things. 
 They, that handful of men, were raw, illiterate, 
 unkempt, half-naked ; their hands rough from toll, 
 their scanty clothes glistening with the scales of the 
 fish they had pulled from the lake beneath them. 
 And what was His message ? After quietly setting 
 aside all hitherto-recognised principles of human 
 wisdom, He suddenly addressed them : — 
 
 You are the light of the world ! You are the salt of 
 the earth ! 
 
 What ! A lot of half- clad, semi -savage Israelites — 
 the light of the world ? Hear it, O ye sophists over 
 there in i\thens, listening to the calm, cultured wisdom 
 of one of your rhetoricians, as he expounds and 
 develops the ever-new beauties of the master-minds 
 of Greece ! And hear it, O ye Romans, Hstening in 
 your white togas in the Forum to the greatest of your 
 orators, and the most profound of your philosophers ! 
 Hear and wonder at this sublime audacity — a young 
 tradesman in one of your conquered provinces is 
 telling a handful of fishermen that they are " the light 
 of the world." Not you Plato, nor you Socrates ; 
 not you Cicero or Seneca ; but Peter, the fisherman, 
 and Matthew, the pubHcan ; and this boy whom 
 they call John — these are the light of the w^orld ! 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 139 
 
 Who could believe it ? Well, we, taught by Revela- 
 tion, by history, by the subversion of an intellectual- 
 ism that was Pagan, and the substitution of a folly 
 that is Divine — we believe it, and we know it. 
 
 And if our Lord were justified in pronouncing and 
 prophesying such a sublime vocation for His disciples, 
 am I not right in saying to you, the future priests of 
 Ireland : You are the Light of the World ! You are 
 the Salt of the Earth ? Yes ! the pure white light 
 that strikes here from Rome is broken up into a 
 hundred, a thousand rays that penetrate even to the 
 ends of the earth. Maynooth is the Propaganda of 
 the West, and you are its Apostles ! Now what does 
 that connote ? 
 
 Although primarily intended for the training of 
 priests of the Irish mission, this great College has 
 become of late years as much a Foreign College as 
 All Hallows — it is, let me repeat it, for I glory in 
 the title and all its vast significances — the Western 
 Propaganda ! Yes ! we cannot suppress our instincts 
 — we cannot deny our vocation — we cannot refuse 
 our mission. We are the Apostles of the world to-day. 
 Even in my own remote village, within the last few 
 months, we had three or four deputations of nuns 
 from Cape Colony, from Dakota, from Los Angeles, 
 seeking amongst our Irish children what apparently 
 cannot to be found elsewhere on this planet — those pure 
 minds, that keen inteUigence, and that personal love 
 of God, that are the constituents of a reUgious voca- 
 tion. The same is true all over Ireland. And you, 
 gentlemen, many of you, may — must go abroad, to 
 other countries, and amidst a people different from 
 
140 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 your own. Instead of the happy, religious, sunny 
 children of Faith, you will have to speak to the people 
 on the gloomy hill-side, their feet in the hot ashes, 
 the desolation of unfaith around them, and their 
 guides as dumb and panic-stricken as themselves. 
 You will meet them everywhere. They will come to 
 hear your sermons in some English church, and to 
 challenge you about your faith on Monday morning. 
 They will cry to you through the Press ; and half 
 insolently, half pleadingly, they will ask for light. 
 You will meet them at dinner tables in country 
 houses, and they will ask you, amid the dinner courses, 
 strange questions about modern beliefs or disbeliefs. 
 And if you are the light of the world remember the 
 solemn injunction : Let your light shine before men ! 
 Now, these strange, sad people, to whom you, a 
 Catholic priest, are a mysterious, solemn, unintelli- 
 gible anachronism, will speak to you, not in j^our 
 language — the language of faith, but in their own 
 tongue ; and that you must set yourselves to under- 
 stand and interpret. If you care to influence them 
 you must go over to their side, stand on their platrfom, 
 look through their eyes. They know nothing of you 
 — your philosophy, your theology ; but if you let 
 them see that you know all about them, it gains their 
 confidence, lessens their pride, shows them that you 
 have seen all, understand all, and that your light is 
 not a shaded lamp, but a sun that penetrates every 
 corner and recess of the human heart. Hence, in 
 pursuing your philosophical or theological studies, 
 you need to have an objective before your mind. 
 Rid yourselves of the idea that yours is routine work. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 141 
 
 Study that you may know, know that you may under- 
 stand, understand that you may communicate your 
 knowledge to others. " Let your Hght shine before 
 men ! " 
 
 In one of Rudyard Kipling's earliest books he tells 
 of how a raw regiment of British troops was brought 
 up from the lowlands to the Afghan hills to break up 
 and destroy an Afghan horde that were hidden in a 
 gut or ghaut of the mountains. They marched gaily,, 
 to the sound of fife and drum, into the valley, de- 
 ployed, advanced in close formation, saw the enemy 
 grouped ahead, were ordered to fire. They shut 
 their eyes and fired — a half ton of lead into — the 
 bodies of the Afghans ? No ! Into the ground ! In 
 an instant the Afghans were upon them, slashing 
 them, right and left, with their terrible triangular 
 knives, and in a moment the British regiment was 
 in full flight, whilst the Colonel tore his hair and 
 cursed freely from an adjacent height. 
 
 Well, you must not waste your forces thus ; but 
 always have a clear and well-defined objective before 
 you in all your studies. And to-day, as in the century 
 just dead, you will find that those whom you have 
 to contend with, and those you have to enUghten, 
 divide themselves into the easily recognised classes of 
 Transcendentalists and Empiricists — the mystic and 
 the scientist, the vague dreamer of dreams, and the 
 hard, unimaginative reasoner. And if it pleases God 
 that abroad you shall be called upon to defend your 
 faith in pubHc or in private, by sermon, lecture, or 
 newspaper, see that you quit yourselves like men ; 
 and give honour to God, your country, and your 
 
142 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 m 
 
 faith. But here in these sacred halls your preparation 
 must be made. This is your gymnasium, your 
 training-ground. And if you prove worthy of your- 
 selves you will have your reward even here below. 
 That was a sublime moment when Ingersoll, the 
 Atheistic lecturer, was suddenly called to account by 
 a young Irish Catholic in his audience. He was going 
 on gaily demolishing Churches and Revelations and 
 Christianity when the young man shouted : *' What 
 does Father Lambert say to that ? " And the hardened 
 atheist stopped suddenly and after a long pause 
 replied : " Yes, friend, I admit that if there be any 
 Revelation it is that which Father I^ambert has de- 
 fended ; and if there be any Christianity, it is that 
 of the Church he represents ! " And that was another 
 sublime moment when another young Irish priest in 
 another American city took up the cause of Holy 
 Church against six or seven ministers, and defended 
 hinmself, week after week, against their combined 
 assault. It was a brave, nay, almost, a perilous act. 
 For every day the city was moved as at a Presidential 
 election. The labourers, at their dinner hour, cut 
 short the time and rushed the cafes, hotels, and 
 
 newspaper offices with the cry : ''Is Father on 
 
 to-day ? " And when they found he was " on," one 
 mounted a barrel and read the priest's defence to 
 the admiring multitude. And when at last, in spite 
 of every effort to compromise and condemn the 
 Catholic Church with the old stock objections about 
 Galileo, Inquisitions, St. Bartholomew's massacres, 
 etc., attack after attack was resisted and beaten back 
 by this young priest, and his adversaries, one by one, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 143 
 
 slunk from the field, and one, an Episcopalian minister, 
 was actually compelled to close his church ; then, in 
 the moment of victory, his countrymen gathered 
 around their young champion, collected a sum of 
 j£6,ooo to help him to decorate his church ; the tram- 
 conductors of the city, Irish to a man, presented him 
 with a service of silver plate ; and even the Protestant 
 community honoured his valour, and the President 
 of the State appointed him regent of the State Uni- 
 versity, an unprecedented honour for a Catholic 
 priest. 
 
 But, with all that, I must not forget that the great 
 majority of you, gentlemen, are destined to spend 
 your lives in the service of your own people, and in 
 your native land. Happy are you beyond the apostles 
 of your race abroad, for you will have the most faithful 
 and deeply-religious people on earth to minister to 
 — a people who will look up to you with a kind of 
 idolatry, as the representative of all they revere in 
 time and eternity. I am speaking now of the great 
 masses of the people, especially the poor. There is 
 nothing like them on the earth. Your chief work 
 will be to lead them on to the higher life ; and I am 
 rather sorry that this part of our ministry is not so 
 well understood. What I mean is, that the people 
 need only direction, I mean ascetic direction, to 
 spring at once into the highest and miost heroic 
 sanctity. And I earnestly hope that some at least 
 of you, gentlemen, will find time from other studies 
 to examine the principles and practices of ascetic 
 theology, the direction of souls into the higher life, 
 and such holy mysticism as you will find in the works 
 
144 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 of St. Teresa or St. John of the Cross. This is the 
 transcendentaUsm which the Church acknowledges, 
 and which has been the practice of all the saints. 
 
 But, as I warned you before, you will have another 
 class to deal with — the semi- educated, the critical, 
 the censorious. Some of these will dislike you, 
 because their lives are not modelled on Christian prin- 
 ciples, and your life is a perpetual protest against 
 theirs. Your sermons, your life, your insistence on 
 the great Christian Verities fret them beyond endur- 
 ance, and they hate you. Odit vos mundus I There 
 is another class, which is not irreligious, but which 
 seems to blot out of their mental horizon any one 
 under the rank of an Archdeacon. These may be 
 good CathoHcs, but they do not concern us here. 
 They are not an appreciable quantity, so far as we 
 are concerned. There is a third class, and to these 
 I direct your special attention, as they touch closely 
 on that intellectual, godless world of which I have 
 already spoken. There is no use in our trying to 
 close our eyes to the fact that many of our young 
 Catholics have imbibed the Continental spirit, and 
 set themselves up as judges, not only of individuals, 
 even those in the highest offices in the Church, but 
 even of the dogmas of Catholic Faith. These are the 
 people who will tell you that the Dreyfus case was 
 urged on by the Catholic Bishops of France, that 
 persecution of the Religious Orders to-day is not the 
 work of Combes, but has arisen from the jealousies 
 between the regular and the secular clergy in France, 
 that the Bishops were even compelled to call in the 
 aid of the Government to save them from the en- 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 145 
 
 croachments of monks and nuns. The same class 
 will coolly tell you that all the evils of Ireland can be 
 traced to the action of the CathoHc Church ; and if 
 you question them about their authorities, they will 
 quote the infidel papers of Paris ; or such a historian 
 as Froude. Then they pass to dogma. Indulgences, 
 Prayers for the Dead, the sacramentals of the Church, 
 the little devotions of the faithful, are anathema 
 maranatha to these highly cultivated folk, who con- 
 descend to go to Mass, and, under a certain tacit 
 coercion of public opinion, to attend to the Easter 
 Duty. 
 
 With that class, and, indeed, with all others, one 
 safe principle may be laid down — that the Irish priest 
 m.ust be in advance of his people, educationally, by 
 at least fifty years. The priests have the lead, and 
 they must keep it. But the right of leadership, now 
 so often questioned, must be supported by tangible 
 and repeated proofs ; and these proofs must concern 
 not only your spiritual authority, but your intellectual 
 superiority. The young priest who has lectured on 
 " Hamlet " in the Town Hall on Thursday night is 
 listened to with deeper respect on Sunday morning. 
 The priest who conducts a long and laborious experi- 
 ment before a literary and scientific society in any of 
 our cities is, henceforward, an acknowledged and 
 unquestioned guide in his village. And the priest 
 who, quietly and without temper, overthrows one of 
 those carping critics at a dinner-party, may confirm, 
 without the possibility of its being disturbed again, 
 the faith of many who are present, and whose beliefs, 
 perhaps, were rudely shaken by the impertinence of 
 L 
 
146 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 the shallow criticism to which they had just been 
 listening. No, in Ireland at least, gentlemen, we 
 must not hide our light under a bushel. Our national 
 Church must be the " city built on the high moun- 
 tains." And we must not grovel, nor make excuses, 
 nor apologise for our existence. We have the lead, 
 and we must keep it ! What all that connotes and 
 signifies I must leave to yourselves to imagine and 
 develop. 
 
 But there is one thing in which, above all others, 
 we must keep ahead of our people — the supreme 
 matter of priestly hoHness. And this takes me away 
 from your outer duties to address yourselves. I 
 have kept the good wine to the last ; and, alas ! I 
 have left you but little time to drink it. But, probably, 
 these, my first, will also be my last words to you ; 
 and I desire to throw into them all the emphasis of 
 which I am capable. In after life you will increase 
 your intellectual stores ; you will enlarge your in- 
 tellectual horizon. By large reading and much 
 reflection you will find yourselves, in ten or twenty 
 years, in quite a different sphere of thought from that 
 in which you are placed to-day. Your education will 
 only commence the day you leave college and enter 
 the larger life. But in one department you shall never 
 advance or improve — I mean the department of 
 spiritual science. The principles taught now by 
 your professors and spiritual guides are fixed and 
 unchangeable ; if ever you change or abandon them, 
 it will be to your temporal detriment and eternal 
 ruin. What do I mean ? 
 
 You are taught now that on the day when the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 147 
 
 Pontiff places his hands on your heads, and your 
 fingers clasp the chalice, you are raised to the highest 
 dignity on earth. That is true. You are taught that 
 you are more than kings on their thrones, or ministers 
 in their cabinets. That is true. You are taught that 
 you are more than the angels or archangel. That is 
 true. Furthermore, you are instructed that it is by 
 no choice of yours, or your parents, that you are raised 
 to the sacerdotal dignity. That is true. For you are 
 instructed that the Divine Master appHes to you the 
 words He applied to His Apostles : " You have not 
 chosen Me ; but I have chosen you." You are also 
 warned that no sanctity, however great, can be deemed 
 commensurate with so high an office ; and that your 
 lives, and all that is connected with them, your talents, 
 abilities, mental and spiritual faculties, are also placed 
 in pledge with Christ for the fulfilment of your sub- 
 lime vocation. Why do I insist on such patent and 
 palpable truths ? Because you will be tempted to 
 deny them. Experience, so much lauded as a success- 
 ful master, is also a most dangerous master. It 
 teaches, we know ; but often it teaches perilous and 
 subversive doctrines. And the worst and most deadly 
 temptation of your lives will come from experience 
 the day that, looking around you and watching the 
 ways and lives of men, you will utter that word of 
 the Psalmist : Omnis homo fnendax I or the more 
 melancholy verdict of St. Paul : ''All seek their own 
 interests ; not the interests of Jesus Christ ! ' ' Beware 
 of that moment ; for it is in that moment you will be 
 tempted to forget, or deny, the sacred principles you 
 have learned in these halls. You will be tempted to 
 
148 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 believe that your sacred office is not a mission and 
 vocation, but a mere profession ; and that you are 
 at hberty to introduce the language, and the customs, 
 and the principles of the world into that sanctuary, 
 where the maxims of the Gospel alone should be 
 recognised and accepted. You will stand for a moment 
 half-paralysed with the spectacle of men rushing 
 wildly into forbidden paths, and then, panic-stricken, 
 you will be tempted to follow the herd with its treason- 
 able cry : Ego et rex Mens ! If you harbour that 
 temptation for a moment, in that moment you have 
 bartered and forfeited your birthright ; you have 
 cancelled the charter of your nobility ; you have 
 revoked your oath of ordination ; and from being a 
 miles et amicus Christi you have descended to be the 
 slave and sycophant of self. 
 
 Hence the necessity of acquiring here, and develop- 
 ing hereafter, a certain phase of character, which 
 I can only designate as " individualism." You must 
 study to be self-centred, self-poised on the strong 
 summits of conscience, not moving to left or right 
 at every breath of opinion. This is quite compatible 
 with that modesty, that humility, that gentleness that 
 always characterize thoughtful minds — minds that 
 move on a high plane, and that will not descend to 
 the vulgarities or common-places of ordinary men. 
 Priests of this class or calibre never forget their 
 college lessons. But whilst striving in remote hamlets, 
 as workhouse chaplains, or even in the slums of large 
 cities, to develop themselves intellectually by whole- 
 some and judicious studies, they are ever sensible of 
 the gentle whispers of their Master, first heard here, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 149 
 
 never to be stifled in after life — " You are the light of 
 the world ! You are the salt of the earth/' " You 
 have not chosen Me ; but I have chosen you ! " "I 
 do not any longer call you servant but friend." 
 *' Filioli mei." Ah, these are the " burning and shin- 
 ing lights " of the Church of Christ, within whose rays 
 men shelter themselves for warmth and illumination ; 
 who cannot be extinguished in life by envy or hatred 
 or criticism ; who even in death leave behind them 
 in memory a certain twilight or aurora, for their words 
 and works survive them ; and many a soul, recalling 
 them from the peace of eternity, justifies the pre- 
 sumption in the words of the Psalmist : — 
 
 " Thy Word was a lamp to my feet ; 
 And a light along my waj's ! " 
 
 Here is what you have to strive after ; here is what 
 you have to attain, if you desire to maintain the tra- 
 ditions of the Irish Church ; and to be, in very deed, 
 the leaders of your people, the shepherds of your 
 flock! 
 
 And so I, passing rapidly into the evening of life, 
 say this farewell word to you in the morning of your 
 days, and in the dawn of the century, where your 
 life-work shall be placed. The intellectual and 
 spiritual energies, gathered into this hall to-night, 
 must exercise a tremendous influence in that future, 
 when emancipated, they will have free play, and a 
 boundless sphere of action. It is a pathetic, yet con- 
 soling thought that, when, far out in the century, 
 our faces shall be upturned to the stars, you will be 
 
150 THE LITERARY LIFE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 striving for the same eternal cause as that for which 
 we shall have spent ourselves. Nor have I a moment's 
 doubt, that when the torch falls from our feeble hands, 
 you will take it up and carry it forward through all 
 those years that are sweeping towards us from Infinity, 
 and that come fraught with such solemn issues for 
 the country we love, the Faith to whch we cUng, the 
 Church, which is our Mistress and our Queen, and 
 Him, who is our Captain and our King, 
 
NON-DOGMATIC RELIGION 
 
 VIII. 
 
 It has been well said that a new heresy is to-day 
 an impossibility. It cannot even be imagined. The 
 world has so completely passed beyond that stage of 
 antagonism, that it can never recur to it. It regards 
 the great controversies of the past, which we consider 
 were Divinely- appointed or Divinely-permitted trials, 
 which were destined to make compact the whole body 
 of Christian tradition, as childish, because meta- 
 physical. It stands forth in all the bareness of its 
 agnosticism, naked and unashamed. 
 
 It is an evil symptom and a good symptom. Evil, 
 because it argues, nay, as we shall show, professes 
 a certain indifference to all Christian traditions and 
 beliefs. Good, because it clears the ground and 
 simplifies the issues between the great protagonist of 
 Revelation — the Church, and its traditional and 
 hereditary antagonist, the world. 
 
 Henceforth, and for ever, we are done with local 
 and partial controversies about the Invocation of 
 Saints, the veneration of rehcs, the devotion of 
 Catholics to our Blessed Lady, the utility and neces- 
 sity of Confession, the supreme homage of the 
 Sacrifice of the Mass. Much more may we regard 
 as antiquated, and out of date, the historical questions 
 that agitated past generations. It is quite possible 
 
 151 
 
152 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 that even yet in far places on the outskirts of civiliza- 
 tion there may be found preachers or readers, brought 
 up in all the narrowness of Sunday-school traditions, 
 who try to save their sHppery footholds by catching 
 at the ancient phantoms of GaUleo, and Inquisitions, 
 and all the other horrors of the three-volume novels 
 of the eighteenth century. These little skirmishes 
 must go on for a while, just as freebooting and guerilla 
 warfare continue long after the defeated general of 
 a great army has handed up his sword to the Con- 
 queror. But in the great centres of intellectual 
 thought in the world — London, Paris, Rome — these 
 minor issues are now completely set aside ; and the 
 mighty forces on both sides are being sifted and re- 
 arranged along the two great lines of Faith and Un- 
 faith. Dogma and No-Dogma, Life as it presents 
 itself to our bare senses, and Life as it is revealed to 
 us with all its vast issues and tremendous respon- 
 sibilities by Him, Who sitteth above the stars. 
 
 And before we pass away to witness the attitude 
 the Church is likely to assume when confronted with 
 the new, yet already well-organized systems of un- 
 belief, it is hardly unworthy of us, her children, to 
 feel a strange thrill of pride for her marvellous and 
 superhuman triumphs over all the heresies that have 
 assailed her for nineteen hundred years. To all 
 human reasoning, and according to all human ex- 
 perience, she should have gone down before the 
 repeated assaults of heresies that were based on human 
 passion, that sprang from human pride, and appealed 
 to the instinctive desire of men to Hve untrammelled, 
 both in intellect and desire, by any external and 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 153 
 
 arbitrary authority. We know from history and 
 personal experience how passion sways the heart of 
 man, and carries it into excesses where it is unbridled 
 by reason. Given those passions, supported by 
 human power — by arms, politics, governments, and 
 the people's wills, and we can conjecture what a 
 conquest of humanity the Church has made, although 
 unbending in her eternal teaching, that the flesh must 
 yield to the spirit, and that all the interests of time 
 and human things pale into insignificance before the 
 grand and paramount interests of eternity. 
 
 The newest development of Protestantism (for 
 Protestantism being negation, finds its logical outcome 
 here) is the denial, not of one particular dogma or 
 article of belief, but the denial of all dogma, and the 
 substitution of a system of ethics, whose foundations 
 rest upon Chaos. All this was to be foreseen, because 
 the principle of Dogma having been denied, when 
 the principle of authority was set aside, it naturally 
 followed that all certitude would sooner or later be 
 called in question, and that that questioning should 
 end first in universal scepticism, then in blank deniaL 
 
 Theologically this radical change from the Christian 
 ideal of revealed doctrines, entailing by their belief 
 a long train of ethical or moral consequences, was 
 inevitable. The numberless sects, generated in the 
 great Rebellion of Reformation, self-contradictory and 
 mutually repellent, acted as a solvent of all belief in 
 the minds of thinking men. It needed only time to 
 make the world, divorced as it was from the centre 
 of dogmatic truth, disgusted with the pretensions of 
 sectaries, who ranged along the whole line of hys- 
 
154 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 terical fantasies, from the " conversions " and " gift 
 of tongues " of some London Bethel to the Apo- 
 calyptic visions of Swedenborg. But it is not 
 sufficiently recognised that the pretensions of Science 
 aided this growing unbelief. It was not the dis- 
 coveries of Science, but the refutations of these 
 discoveries, that have really plunged the world in 
 infidelity. Science, with all its insolence, could not 
 deny the existence of God. Nay, by its very insistence 
 on the truth of facts, and its deductions, as well as 
 by the tremendous insight it gave into the stupendous 
 workings of Nature, it certainly enlarged men's 
 vision. And when that vision fell short of the super- 
 natural, the minds of men, annoyed by this discovery 
 of their limitations, and, as it were, dashing themselves 
 against the blank wall of the Infinite, gave utterance 
 to the wailings of Agnosticism — " We cannot know." 
 ** We can see no further." But, when, in our own 
 days. Science itself has the ground cut from under its 
 feet by fresher and more recent revelations, when 
 every new discovery disproves some preceding theory 
 that was regarded as beyond disproof ; when the views 
 of the greatest thinkers of past generations are now 
 regarded as childish and absurd ; and the most 
 common and reasonable ideas about space and time, 
 colour, sound, light, are now proved to be absolutely 
 puerile ; when the philosophy of atoms has been 
 revised, disproved, reconstructed, and still remains 
 enigmatic ; and when no scientist can yet say whether 
 matter is a condition of force, or force a condition of 
 matter, the world, that leaned its faith on the dog- 
 matism of Science, has ceased to be even sceptical ; 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 155 
 
 and in rejecting or disbelieving its dogmas, has come 
 to reject all doctrines of every kind. 
 
 Hence, the formulas of disbelievers in our days — 
 " A religious life compatible with disbelief in dogma "; 
 " Religion, but not Churches " ; " Ethics without 
 doctrine " ; " Christianity without Christ " ; "the 
 decay of sectarian doctrines is the revival of religious 
 life " ; " the very decline in church-attendance, a 
 sign of greater religious vitality " ; *' Christianity, 
 not belief in Christ's Divinity, but living according 
 to the maxims of Christ." 
 
 It is specious. Most of the Protean forms of 
 disbelief have been so. It appeals to a large and ever 
 growing class, because it flatters that human pride 
 that seeks unbounded license of thought. It is an 
 impossible theory of morals. It is illogical and absurd. 
 
 It is specious. It appeals to a moral sense, the 
 existence of which, even in the worst of times, men 
 have not controverted, although they might have 
 been uneasy under its restrictions. The Schools and 
 Universities might contend about propositions ; but, 
 however evil men might violate the moral sense and 
 secretly rebel beneath its precepts, it is only a Rousseau 
 here and there, or a Whitman once in a century, can 
 be found to argue a return to Nature. Social safety, 
 political well-being, the preservation of the Common- 
 wealth, the sanctity of the home, the safeguarding of 
 individual rights, demand the acknowledgment, if 
 not the careful cultivation, of the moral sense. The 
 world could not get on without the commandments 
 fulminated on Sinai. If the eternal and imperative 
 precepts : " Thou shalt not kill," " Thou shalt not 
 
156 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 steal," " Thou shalt not bear false witness," could be 
 defied with impunity, civilization would end in a 
 cataclysm, and all social life would perish without the 
 possibility of being reconstructed on any other basis. 
 But (so it seems to modern non- dogmatics) propo- 
 sitions, doctrines, decrees, emanating from Churches, 
 can be repudiated without any such result. Nay, 
 would it not be all the better that the wars of sects 
 should cease, and that the ears of the world should 
 be no longer tormented with disputations about 
 dogmas, or controversies about abstruse and meta- 
 physical questions, which the human mind will never 
 solve ; and that we should be left at peace to pursue 
 the avocation of life within the limits of the moral 
 law, about which there can be no question ? 
 
 Again, although it restricts human freedom, this 
 theory gives the widest latitude to that libertinism of 
 thought, which is claimed as the dearest privilege of 
 human Hberty. We admit, it is said, the necessity 
 of curbing human passion, of restricting desires 
 within bounds compatible with the safety and com- 
 fort of others. But our thoughts must be free. We 
 must be at liberty to believe, or not believe. Society 
 may tie our hands and lock our lips ; but no human 
 authority shall, or can restrict, the God-given 
 privilege of intellectual liberty. What is it to any 
 man whether in the secrecy of my own soul I believe 
 there is a God, or no God ; a Trinity, or no Trinity ; 
 a God-man, or a mere sage or philanthropist ; a 
 soul within me with eternal destinies before it, or I, 
 a mere animal, with just the instincts, desires, and 
 end of the brute creation } 1 shall allow no man to 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 157 
 
 put shackles on my intellect. The law will punish 
 me if I do wrong. Quite sufficient for me then is 
 the moral law, the laws of society, my own conscience. 
 What are the disputations of sects, or Churches, or 
 schools to me ? For three hundred years in the 
 beginning of the Christian era the whole Eastern 
 Empire was torn asunder by wars, treachery, revolu- 
 tions ; Emperor fighting against Emperor, Pope with 
 Patriarch, Councils torn asunder. Churches warring 
 with Churches, and nations with nations ; for 
 what ? One single vowel in the Creed. And since 
 that time has not all European civilization been 
 threatened with extinction through religious wars ? 
 Nay, Protestants though we are, we cannot help 
 condemning Luther for that he revived an interest 
 in dogmatic religion by defying its central authority, 
 just at the time when Europe was slowly, but surely, 
 drifting back from the misery and squalor of the 
 Dark Ages to the sweetness and light, and natural 
 lives and happiness of the ancient Paganisms. Yes, 
 let us alone ! We want to hear no more about 
 dogma or disputation — Arian and Anglican, Cal- 
 vinist and Socinian, High Church and Low Church, 
 Irvingite and Swedenborgian. We bend our neck to no 
 man, no church, no creed. We claim the privilege of 
 unshackled freedom. W^e pin our faith to no for- 
 mulas. We subscribe to no articles. Within us is 
 the light of reason. Without us the laws of society 
 that we shall follow ; these, we obey. But Churches, 
 Creeds, Confessions of Faith, we shall have none 
 of them. If we want to worship, the expanses of 
 Nature will be our sanctuary, the dome of Heaven 
 
158 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 our Temple ; the interchange of courtesies with our 
 kind will be our Ritual ; the poets will be our 
 Apostles ; History our Evangelist. We shall worship 
 in Temples not made of hands ; and our Apotheosis — 
 our final return to inorganic creation ! We are 
 content to be merged in the Universe of Matter ! 
 
 So say — in speech, and book, and pamphlet, from 
 Press and platform, in prose and verse, essay and 
 lecture — the adherents of this, the newest, the most 
 widely spread, and the most specious and attractive 
 form of Atheism which has appeared in our time. 
 
 Yet, the absurdity of the thing is apparent. Its 
 consequences would be, if pushed to logical conclu- 
 sions, calamitous. 
 
 This '' moral sense," innate or acquired, must rest 
 on some principle. If the precept, " Thou shalt not 
 kill," is accepted, the principle on which it depends 
 must be accepted also. Surely, it is not a mere whim 
 or caprice of humanity that keeps men's hands from 
 being imbued in the blood of their fellow-men. It 
 is not a sentiment of mercy, or compassion, or mere 
 humanitarianism that saves the world from promis- 
 cuous murder. How valueless such sentiments are 
 in a whirlwind of rage and passion, such as is let 
 loose in war, or in a panic, we know well. There 
 must be then some underlying principle, tacitly 
 acknowledged by the entire race, and which is formu- 
 lated in the theory or statement, in which all men 
 acquiesce, "It is wrong and criminal to shed the 
 blood of another." But this is dogma. Therefore, 
 in accepting this common religious and social prin- 
 ciple, you put the yoke of dogma about your neck. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 159 
 
 The same rule applies to every moral prfnciple 
 by which Society is cemented and solidified. The 
 Church says : " Whosoever declares or holds that 
 it is right to steal, or murder, or rob, or bear false 
 witness, let him be anathema." The non-dogmatist 
 says : '' Every man possesses a moral sense ; and this 
 declares that it is criminal in se^ and subversive of 
 all moral order to steal, or murder, or bear false 
 witness ; and whosoever holds this criminal theory 
 is only fit to be put outside the pale of civilization.'* 
 Where is the difference in the formula ? The veriest 
 non-dogmatist has " anathema '* on his Hps as well 
 as the dogmatic Church. 
 
 Yes, but we are not speaking now of moral precepts, 
 is the reply. There we are at one. We admit that the 
 basis of all moraHty is dogmatic principle. What we 
 repudiate is, your Councils, your Decrees, your fine- 
 drawn Definitions and Distinctions about articles of 
 Faith, of whose inner meaning you can know nothing, 
 much less teach us. We admit that the moral teach- 
 ings of Christianity are beautiful ; and we try to 
 fashion our lives thereon. But, as to the person of 
 Christ, His origin, His Nature, His mission, His 
 miracles, His power, we know nothing. We accept 
 His moral teaching. We reject all dogmas connected 
 with His Person. 
 
 But do you not see that all the force of the supreme 
 moral teaching of Christ comes from the fact that 
 He was a Divine Teacher. Why do you not accept 
 the teachings of Confucius, of Siddartha, of Seneca, 
 of Marcus Aurelius, of Epictetus ? Because they 
 were mere men, were liable to error, and did err ; 
 
i6o THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 and because they spoke without authority. What 
 has given weight to the words of Christ, such weight, 
 that even to-day, after nineteen hundred years, they 
 are accepted as the supreme embodiment of all 
 ethical teaching ? The answer is. His authority. 
 The authority of a mere sage or philosopher ? Cer- 
 tainly not. This would bring Him down to the level 
 of a Socrates. What then ? His authority, as God. 
 There is no denying it. There is no possible suppres- 
 sion of the faith, latent and dormant in some minds, 
 but existent in all minds, that Christ was the Son 
 of the Living God. The very hatred that men bear 
 to Him, their blasphemies against His adorable name, 
 prove this. If He were a mere sage, the world would 
 bow its head, and pass Him by. But the world knows 
 He is much more ; and hence it rages against Him. 
 It cannot separate His teachings from His mission. 
 It cannot separate His mission from His person. It 
 cannot separate His person from His Godhead. 
 Whether it accepts His teachings as the supreme 
 moral code of humanity, or rejects with hatred His 
 teaching and His person aUke, it admits, unconsciously 
 and unwillingly, the Dogma of the Incarnation. 
 
 In the same way, professing non- dogmatists 
 announce their belief in God, His attributes. His 
 perfections. The moment they accept the natural 
 law, or the guidance of reason, they profess their 
 faith in the goodness and omniscience, the mercy 
 and justice of God. For if there be a moral code, 
 innate to the human soul, it cannot spring from mere 
 animal nature ; nor from instinct ; nor from ex- 
 perience ; nor from advanced civilization, without 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS i6i 
 
 external illumination — that is, the dogma of Divine 
 Providence. If there be a moral law, directing the 
 will, there must be some dogmatic influence control- 
 ling the intellect. Law is universal, inexorable. 
 In the organic and inorganic creations, it is the one 
 thing that is most clearly in evidence. All things are 
 controlled by Law, and bow to its behests. Shall the 
 intellect of man alone break away from the Universe, 
 and be uncontrolled ? Is it the one exception to the 
 Cosmos that reigns throughout the Universe ? Who 
 emancipated it from the Universal Order, and gave 
 it the charter of unlicensed liberty ? Or who flung 
 the reins over its neck and bade it go forth, uncurbed 
 and unbridled, whilst all things else, even the superior 
 will of man, have to suflfer themselves to be dragged 
 into discipline and obedience by that tremendous 
 centripetal force which we designate as Law in the 
 inorganic and animal creation, as conscience or the 
 moral sense in man. The suggestion can be advanced 
 only to be repudiated. Such an irregularity would 
 be opposed to all known laws. It would be a deor- 
 dination in a world of Order. 
 
 But, if the Intellect has to be curbed like all things 
 else, it is quite clear that from its very nature that 
 curb must be intellectual ; that is, it must submit 
 to accept some primary truths of propositions, for- 
 mulated by some authority, external to itself. And 
 these truths, being addressed to the intellect, can 
 take but one shape — that of Dogmatic Truth or 
 Dogmatic Fact. What Law is therefore to the 
 organic or inorganic creation, universal, inexorable, 
 imperious, and even necessary, what the " moral 
 
 M 
 
1 62 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 sense," ** conscience,'* is to the will of man ; even 
 that is Dogma to the Intellect. You may reject 
 Nicene or Athanasian creeds ; you may spurn the 
 Thirty-Nine Articles or other formularies. You 
 cannot rid yourselves of dogma. Even Carlyle, who 
 rang the changes of unlimited scorn on the early 
 controversies of Christianity, was compelled to admit, 
 that on the acceptance or non-acceptance of that 
 one word in the Creed of Nicaea, the whole of Christi- 
 anity depended. 
 
 But if we suppose, per impossibili, that dogma 
 could be suppressed, the consequences to human 
 society would be disastrous. Nay, we are witnesses 
 in these latter times of such disaster coming down 
 upon society from the denial of dogma, and the 
 repudiation of Authority. For what is Saint- Simon- 
 ism, with its ugly brood of Socialists, Nihilists, 
 Communists, French " SoHdaires," Italian '* Anarch- 
 ists," etc., but the denial of any dogma binding the 
 intellect, and the denial of moral law binding the 
 will of man ? It is easy for a modern doctrinaire, 
 seated at his writing-desk, surrounded by his books, 
 or loHing in his reading-chair, to sweep away creeds 
 and formularies, and ridicule rites and rituals that 
 really belong to humanity, and must take form in 
 some shape to satisfy man's needs. But, when the 
 apparently harmless, speculative denunciations of 
 existing beliefs or governments takes root in the minds 
 of the vast army of the disappointed and discontented, 
 and altars are overturned and thrones upset, men 
 begin to perceive how easily theories pass into prac- 
 tice, and how evil a crop may develop from poisonous 
 seed. Between Carlyle, fulminating from his sound- 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 163 
 
 proof attic in Chelsea against all existing creeds, 
 governments, social life, and Karl Marx, accepting 
 all this denunciation as the righteous condemnation 
 of existing shams and chimeras, where is the differ- 
 ence ? The appeal to " Veracities " and ** Unveraci- 
 ties," when men are told that there is nothing true, 
 nor genuine, nor honest, under the sun, will have the 
 effect of sharpening the hunger and quieting the 
 conscience of a mob, that demands an equahty which 
 it will not concede, and a common proprietorship in 
 goods that are not its own. And when all fear, and 
 hope, and reverence are removed from the minds of 
 men by the deliberate denial of every dogma, and 
 therefore of all moral law, what can be expected but 
 atheism in theory, and anarchy in practice ? 
 
 There is no getting over that logical and peremp- 
 tory sequence — no Dogma — no Ethics ! There is 
 no binding the consciences of men by shadowy 
 abstractions and vague appeals to phantom virtues, 
 undefined by doctrinal truths, and unsupported by 
 some supreme authority, that makes the practice of 
 those virtues imperative. It lends but sanction to 
 human vice and passion to say : Live noble lives, 
 and quit yourselves like men in the fight ! The 
 question will recur : What are noble lives ? and 
 what means, ** to quit ourselves like men ? " Robin 
 Hood and his merry men had their own code of 
 morals : — 
 
 ** Because the good old rule 
 Sufficed for them. The simple plan. 
 That they shall take who have the power, 
 And they shall keep, who can." 
 
1 64 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 But Robin Hood, and every pirate and freebooter 
 that ever lived, thought they were living noble, free 
 lives, and certainly that they '' quitted themselves 
 like men in the fight." And who shall deny that the 
 world, in spite of its Pharisaism, has always had a 
 secret sympathy with them, or the footpads — on a 
 larger scale, whom the world calls its heroes and 
 conquerors ? But will that do ? Can society hang 
 together on such theories ? Or must not there be 
 some voice, as of Sinai, to pronounce first, the ever- 
 lasting Dogma : 
 
 " I am the Lord, thy God," 
 
 and then the inexorable precepts : 
 
 '* Thou shalt," and '' Thou shalt not." 
 
 Yes ! It is perfectly futile to say that men must lead 
 clean, just, honourable lives, unless someone defines 
 what are purity, justice, honour. But behind that 
 definition there must be authority ; and behind that 
 authority must be its credentials, founded on 
 dogmatic truth. 
 
 It may be said that all this is so clear, that, whilst 
 the multitude still clings to its pleasant formula 
 " Religion without creed or church," the leading 
 thinkers amongst unbelievers willingly admit that 
 this idea is neither logical nor reasonable. Hence, 
 the curious change that has come over the tone and 
 temper of unbelievers in our time. Instead of the 
 fierce, bitter scorn cast upon religious belief by the 
 whole French school, and imitated, to their eternal 
 shame, by English scientists, there appears now a 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 165 
 
 quiet, half-apologetic, wholly deprecatory tone, as of 
 men who boasted incontinently of their security, 
 and have found the ground slipping from beneath 
 them. We have already seen how Carlyle modified 
 his fierce, scornful invectives against the Fathers of 
 the early Councils ; and now we find in Herbert 
 Spencer's Autobiography ^ which may be accepted as 
 his last word, and the expression of his most mature 
 convictions, the following significant, if half-hearted, 
 declaration, that religious creeds or cults of some 
 kind is a necessity. Coming from the pen of so 
 thorough an evolutionist, who has been preaching 
 all his Ufe the progression of mankind by " evolution " 
 and '' natural selection," and the " survival of the 
 fittest," to the imaginary perfection of some millen- 
 nium, they bear their own lesson : — 
 
 " While the current creed was slowly losing its 
 hold on me, the whole question seemed to be the 
 truth or untruth of the particular doctrines I had 
 been taught. But gradually, and especially of later 
 years, I have become aware that this is not the sole 
 question. Partly, the wider knowledge obtained of 
 human societies has caused this. Many have, I 
 believe, recognised the fact that a cult of some sort, 
 with its social embodiment, is a constituent in every 
 society which has made any progress. The masses of 
 evidence, classified and arranged in the Descriptive 
 Sociology, have forced this belief upon me indepen- 
 dently, if not against my will ; still, without any 
 desire to entertain it, there seems no escape from the 
 inference, that the maintenance of social subordination 
 has peremptorily required the aid of some such agency. 
 
i66 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 Thus I have come to look more and more calmly 
 on forms of religious belief to which I had, in earlier 
 days, a profound aversion. Holding that they are 
 in the main naturally adapted to their respective 
 peoples and times, it now seems to me well that they 
 should severally live and work as long as the con- 
 ditions permit ; and further, that sudden changes 
 of religious institutions, as of political institutions, 
 are certain to be followed by reactions. Largely, 
 however, if not chiefly, this change of feeling towards 
 religious creeds and their sustaining institutions has 
 resulted from a deepening conviction that the sphere 
 occupied by them can never he an unfilled sphere ; but 
 that there must continue to arise afresh the great 
 questions concerning ourselves and surrounding 
 things ; and that, if not positive answers, then modes 
 of consciousness standing in place of positive answers, 
 must ever remain. By those who know muchj more 
 than by those who know little ^ is there felt the need 
 for explanation. Thus religious creeds, which in 
 one way or other occupy the sphere that rational 
 interpretation seeks to occupy and fails, and fails the 
 more the more it seeks^ I have come to regard with a 
 S3rmpathy, based on community of need, feeling that 
 dissent from them results from inability to accept the 
 solutions offered, joined with the wish that solutions 
 could be found." 
 
 Why Herbert Spencer did not move a step further 
 and perceive that if the laws of right and wrong are 
 eternal and unchangeable, the cultus which sub- 
 ordinates human passion to such laws must be 
 formed and based on eternal and unchangeable truth. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 167 
 
 and not allowed to change, and shift, and modify 
 itself to suit merely human exigencies, is a problem 
 that his Autobiography does not solve ; and remaining 
 insoluble now for ever, it is another proof of the 
 limitations that will always surround the highest 
 philosophic conceptions when unilluminated by 
 Divine Faith. But his testimony is at least valuable 
 as a corroboration of our thesis — and all the more 
 valuable as the result — the unwelcome result — of an 
 experience of eighty years. 
 
THE MOONLIGHT OF MEMORY 
 
 IX 
 
 ** The moonlight of memory ! " 
 
 The phrase is not mine. It is a favourite expression 
 of that greatest of German humanists — Jean Paul 
 Richter. And it is a very beautiful one ; because 
 memory undoubtedly does cast a strange, uncanny, 
 wistful Ught over events which, in the broad sunlight 
 of experience, had sometimes very little of poetry or 
 tenderness in them. And it is very strange that, as 
 we advance in years, old times, old faces, old scenes, 
 that seemed to have been blurred over or entirely 
 blotted out in our adolescence, have a new resurrec- 
 tion in our memory and stand out clear and 
 distinct as the figures in a stereoscope against the 
 dark background of the past. How beautifully, for 
 example, do the plain, prosaic, limestone walls of the 
 old Market-House in Mallow, which crowned and 
 terminated the New Street in which I was born, 
 stand out in the diorama, which memory unrolls 
 from out the side-scenes of the little theatre of my 
 existence ! How well I remember it in the sunlight 
 and in the moonlight — the exact flat stone which we 
 singled out for our balls ; the niches which were 
 such a sore trouble to us ; the old weighing-machine ; 
 the vast and tremendous circuses whose splendours, 
 
 168 
 
THE LITERARY LIFE AND OTHER ESSAYS 169 
 
 as of Arabian Nights, were hidden within under 
 locked and closed gates. How romantic now, seen 
 in the light of memory, was the dear old glen, where 
 we first learned the art of poetry in its wild flowers : 
 the primroses and the cowslips, and the wild hya- 
 cinths, whose fragrance, like the perfume that hangs 
 around old letters, comes back to us across the years ; 
 and the brook, narrowing and broadening, which we 
 leaped in the summer time, and whose flags we wove 
 into tiny boats, and where we fished for collies and 
 sticklebacks ; and where we wondered at the gor- 
 geous dragon-flies that swam and sang in the air on 
 the hot summer-days ; and the Httle chalet on the 
 cUfl", with its fringe of firs, which looked so beautiful 
 and poetical against the sunset ; and the song of the 
 cuckoo, echoing the lines of Wordsworth ; and the 
 ditch overhead, where many a summer evening we 
 watched and envied the little batches of Fenians 
 going up to drill in the dark recesses of Buckley's 
 wood. For that sublime and sacred feeHng that took 
 these tradesmen away from work and pleasure, was 
 also the passion of our youth. The shadow of '48, 
 and the wild music that came out of the shadow, 
 were upon us ; and we were watching with beating 
 hearts and kindling eyes the prelude of '67. 
 
 I have quoted elsewhere a little experience of mine 
 on one of the dark winter nights of the year '65 . 
 I see now, as clearly as I saw then, the short well-knit 
 figure of a ballad singer in the Main Street ; I see 
 the gas-light from the shop flickering on his coat ; 
 I see the coat shining and gUstening because the rain 
 was pouring in cataracts on his clothes ; I see his 
 
170 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 face, pale but stern-looking, his black hair falling 
 down in ringlets on his shoulders ; the short black 
 moustache ; the right hand hidden away in his 
 breast ; I hear his fine voice ringing up along the 
 deserted street that fine ballad (I often wonder who 
 is the Innominatus that wrote it), called in Irish 
 Anthologies, " The Fenian Men." I remember how 
 it thrilled us to hear the words : 
 
 " But once more returning, within our veins burning 
 The fires that illumined dark Aherlow's glen ; 
 We raise the old cry anew. Slogan of Con and Hugh, 
 Out and make way for the bold Fenian men ! " 
 
 And how we agreed to tear ourselves away from the 
 fascination, and post ourselves as vedettes up along 
 the street from Tuckey's corner to Fair Lane, lest 
 the poHce should come on him unawares and arrest 
 him. For we knew that he was a Fenian emissary, 
 and that he had work on hands that night, besides 
 singing. 
 
 There was another agent of the Brotherhood, who 
 came and went in a secret, but to us, most fascinating 
 manner, who used gather us boys into a corner of 
 that old Market-House, and pour floods of hot 
 rebellion into our eager minds. It was from his lips 
 I first heard those noble ballads of Thomas Davis : 
 " When on Ramillies' bloody field ; " and that superb 
 song that ought to be familiar to every Irish boy and 
 girl : " The Battle-eve of the Brigade." It was not 
 only that he hummed and recited and taught us these 
 fine songs ; but he dramatised them. He showed u^ 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 171 
 
 the French lines stretching along one side of the glen, 
 the Irish Brigade in the centre ; he showed us the 
 men sleeping around their camp-fires, the remnants 
 of the Wild Geese who had fought on the walls of 
 Limerick ; he showed us the mess-tent in the centre, 
 the canvas flapping, the lamps hanging down from 
 the poles ; the swords and shakoes of the officers 
 on pegs at the sides ; the long table, loaded with 
 glasses and decanters ; the Irish officers with un- 
 buttoned uniforms, drinking and carousing till the 
 dawn. We saw the tall figure of Count Thomond at 
 the head, *' straight as an uplifted lance." We heard 
 the toasts. 
 
 '* Mark the words ! " our strange and fugitive 
 mentor used to say ; *' mark the toasts and how the 
 captains received them : 
 
 * Here's a health to King James ! and 
 they bent as they quaffed ! * 
 
 That was Shemus the coward ! the fellow that ran 
 away from the Boyne, and left behind him the men, 
 who cried : ' Change kings, and we'll fight you 
 again ! * But there's the Irish always, making fools 
 of themselves about kings and queens, and leaders 
 who betray them I ' They bent as they quaffed ! ' 
 They didn't cheer ! Oh, no ! They couldn't do that ! 
 But you see they had a soft corner in their hearts 
 for the Stuarts who betrayed them ! But look at the 
 second toast : — 
 
 * Here's to George the Elector ! and fiercely they 
 laughed ! ' 
 
172 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 Of course they did ! That was George, the English 
 king ! How they wished they could meet him on 
 the morrow ! Look at the third toast : — 
 
 * Good luck to the girls we loved long ago, 
 Where the Shannon and Barrow and Blackwater 
 
 flow/ 
 
 " What do they do now ? Nothing at all. They 
 had something else, besides girls, to be thinking 
 about that night, those warriors and captains of the 
 Brigade ! Ah, but now look at the last toast : — 
 
 * God prosper all Ireland ! ' 
 
 " What did they do now ? Did they rise up and 
 throw their helmets in the air, and shout and make 
 fools of themselves, as you see men doing to-day ? 
 NO ! But they put down their glasses in silence on 
 the table ; and their faces grew as white as a girl's 
 who has seen a ghost, and they covered their eyes 
 with their hands. What does Davis say ? 
 
 * You'd think them afraid 
 
 So pale grew the chiefs of the Irish Brigade I * 
 
 ** That's just it ! That's the finest dramatic touch 
 in all poetry ! Look at them, boys ! Look at them ! 
 The forty captains of the Irish Brigade, their faces 
 white, the?r hands trembhng, their hearts throbbing ! 
 And why ? Because the sorrow of Ireland and the 
 sadness of Ireland, and her eternal hopes always and 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 173 
 
 ever defeated, have come down on them ! And 
 because they remember what a Httle thing was 
 between them and victory ! And because they think, 
 if they had listened to the voice of their Bishop and 
 the Franciscan Friar, who told them hold out to the 
 end, all would have been different ! Ah, yes ! 
 Look at them ! Look at them ! and beUeve me, boys, 
 you needn't much mind the man who flings his 
 caubeen in the air and yells and shouts, and says 
 he*ll shed the last drop of his blood for Ireland ! 
 But whenever you hear : God save Ireland ! or God 
 prosper old Ireland ! and you see a man's fingers 
 twitching, and his teeth clenching, and the lines 
 drawing down on his face, and the colour flying from 
 his cheeks ; ah, yes, boys, mind him ! " 
 
 Strange to say, it was an exact picture of the men 
 in whose Brotherhood he was enrolled. For that 
 was one characteristic of those Fenians. They were 
 silent, strong men, into whose character some stern 
 and terrible energy seemed to have been infused. 
 There were no braggarts amongst them. Their 
 passion was too deep for words ; and that passion 
 was an all-consuming, fierce, unswerving and un- 
 selfish love for Ireland. They did not love their 
 motherland because she gave them a scrap of her 
 bogs, or fields, or mountains, or because they could 
 sell her interests at a brigand's valuation ; but because 
 she was Ireland, and she had wrongs to be avenged 
 and sorrows to be redressed ; and, because they 
 hoped, every man and boy among them, to see the 
 day when they would help to crown that dear old 
 motherland with the royal symbols of independence. 
 
174 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 Yes ! in truth, the blood runs freely in the veins of 
 youth, and our veins ran fire under the stimulus of 
 that glorious passion. With what scorn we drowned 
 some wretched music-hall song about " A dark girl 
 dressed in blue " with the ringing notes of 
 
 " Viva la ! the New Brigade ! 
 Viva la ! the old one too ; 
 Viva la ! the rose shall fade, 
 And the Shamrock shine for ever new ! " 
 
 And how we whispered amongst ourselves awful 
 secrets about certain places along the Railway 
 Embankment, where coffins, filled with well-greased 
 rifle barrels were stored. At that time in Mallow 
 football was almost unknown. Hurling and handball 
 in winter, cricket in summer, were the universal 
 games. Every lane, every street had its cricket-club ; 
 and high above all, and dominating all, was the 
 M.C.C., the magic letters that floated on the flag 
 that hung above the little shanty in the cricket field 
 that lies to the east of the monastery. That club 
 was then the most formidable in the South of Ireland. 
 It had won victories everywhere ; beaten military 
 and city clubs beyond number ; and its members 
 were heroes in our sight — Curtin, the Captain ; 
 George and Harry Foote, demon bowlers ; Pat 
 Kelly, the slow bowler, whose deadly " twists '* were 
 feared more than the cannonading of the Footes ; 
 Joss Mullane, the famous backstop ; Micka Roche, 
 the favourite batsman, and Bill O'Brien, the genial 
 giant, whose mighty feat of sending a ball over the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 175 
 
 Courthouse walls from the centre of the cricket- 
 grounds is remembered to this day. What then 
 must have been the mighty attraction that took us, 
 schoolboys, away from such an arena on a certain 
 hot summer afternoon, and flung us, a wild dis- 
 ordered mass, into the public streets ? Nothing but 
 the report that the police had surrounded the house 
 of John SulHvan, at the corner of Carmichael's Lane, 
 had placed him under arrest, and were searching 
 every room for papers. We were not disappointed. 
 The whole town was out ; and there, inside his shop 
 window, we could see the prisoner, erect as usual 
 and unconcerned, and chatting gaily with the crowd 
 of constables that filled the house. He had on his 
 usual white coat (he was a baker), and was stroking 
 his short American-cut beard. Presently, the District- 
 Inspector came down stairs. He had found nothing 
 to compromise the prisoner. No wonder. Every 
 second man amongst the constables present was a 
 sworn Fenian. 
 
 One beautiful August night the following summer, 
 1866, a group of four young lads walked up and down 
 the Main Street from Tuckey's Hill to Chapel Lane 
 and back. It was a glorious night, the moonlight 
 flooding the whole street without throwing a shadow 
 from the houses. They were chatting about a hundred 
 things. Then the Town Clock struck ten ; and 
 just at Tuckey's Hill they paused, and the central 
 figure said to the present writer, who was then home 
 from St. Colman's for his first holidays : 
 
 " What are you going to do with yourself ? " 
 
 ** I suppose the Church ! " I said. 
 
176 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 " Ah ! " he said, with a sigh, " that was my idea 
 also ; and I haven't had much happiness since I 
 abandoned it." 
 
 It was James O'Brien, the Captain in the Revolu- 
 tionary Forces, although he cannot have been more 
 than eighteen years old. How well I remember him — 
 the strong, square face, dimpled all over with curious 
 lines, when he smiled ; the tall, sinewy, athletic 
 figure ; the broad shoulders ; the erect figure and 
 military gait of the boy — Ay de mi ! what might have 
 been ? 
 
 A few months later, when the snow was some feet 
 thick upon the ground, he put aside his civilian jacket 
 and, like Emmet, donned his green uniform ; slung 
 his revolvers around his neck ; slipped unobserved 
 from the house, and trudged along the six miles to 
 Ballynockin, where he met Captain Mackey and a 
 contingent of absolutely unarmed men from Cork. 
 They brought out the women and children from the 
 police barrack ; and as the men refused to surrender, 
 they instantly set fire to the place. The sergeant 
 and four constables were only saved from a terrible 
 death by the intervention of the curate (Canon 
 Neville), who commanded the police to surrender 
 at once, and he would exonerate them from all blame 
 before their superiors. Then a detachment of military 
 stationed at Purcell's of Dromore came up, and the 
 unarmed Fenians dispersed. I'he next day James 
 O'Brien was arrested and lodged in Mallow Bridewell 
 for three weeks awaiting his trial. 
 
 A pitch dark night the following winter, somewhere 
 before or after Christmas, I found myself in Cork. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 177 
 
 It was an awful night, the rain falling in torrents. 
 For some reason I wished to see Mrs. O'Brien — what 
 the reason was I cannot remember now. I hired a 
 covered-car, and bade the driver take me to Mrs. 
 O'Brien's, Nile Street. He seemed reluctant ; but 
 he gave way. Half-way down King Street he stopped 
 and tapped at the window. I let it down. He put 
 his face through the aperture, and whispered : 
 
 *' Do you mane the Captain's, sor ? " 
 
 I said, yes ! and we drove on ; and James O'Brien, 
 the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, passed 
 out of my life. Once afterwards I heard that at a 
 certain Commercial Ball in Cork he created quite 
 a sensation as he walked into the room, a green 
 rosette on his breast, and a fair young girl hanging 
 on his arm. I wonder could it have been " Brigid " 
 of the Nation, the hidden and unappreciated writer 
 of the best dramatic poem, " Sentenced to Death," 
 and the best piece of Irish humour, *' How Tom 
 Bourke became a Zouave," that we possess in Anglo- 
 Irish literature. 
 
 Like many another genius, which has needed years 
 and a theatre for its development, his brother William, 
 the great tribune of after years, was comparatively 
 obscured ; but even then, slow of speech, he was 
 known to be desperately tenacious of purpose. The 
 first man, curiously enough, to recognise his hidden 
 talent was a Mr. Wright, a Protestant classical 
 teacher, who foretold brilliant scholarship from the 
 pages of Latin composition that his young pupil 
 presented to him. 
 
 The following March, that of ever-memorable '67, 
 
 N 
 
178 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 was unusually severe. F At the middle of the'month 
 the snow was thick upon the ground, and the long 
 flanks and high peaks of the Galtees were a mass of 
 glistening crystals. It amused us, young rebels in 
 St. Colman's, to see or pretend we saw the dark files 
 of the Fenians silhouetted against the virgin back- 
 ground of the hills, and the red patches of the British 
 regiments in the rear. But then one day came in a 
 report that the Fenians had been surrounded in 
 Kilclooney wood, and had been overpowered and 
 annihilated. Gradually the news filtered down until 
 it touched reality, that Peter O'Neill Crowley had 
 been killed with English bullets on the banks of the 
 mountain stream ; that he had previously ordered 
 his companions to flee and save themselves ; that it 
 was only at his earnest entreaties Captains Kelly and 
 McClure consented to fly ; and that then the brave 
 man fought a whole British regiment and a posse of 
 poHce, dodging from tree to tree, and firing steadily 
 on the advancing enemy, until his ammunition was 
 exhausted ; and he fell pierced with bullets, God 
 having given him time enough to receive the last 
 Sacraments at the hands of Father Tim O'Connell, 
 then curate at Mitchelstown. 
 
 I remember well the evening on which that remark- 
 able funeral took place. It was computed that at 
 least fivQ thousand men took part in the procession 
 and shouldered the coffin of the dead patriot over 
 mountain and valley and river, until they placed the 
 sacred burden down there near the sea and under the 
 shadow of the church at Ballymacoda. I remember 
 how a group of us, young lads, shivered in the cold 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 179 
 
 March wind there on the College Terrace at Fermoy, 
 and watched the dark masses of men swaying over 
 the bridge, the yellow coffin conspicuous in their 
 midst. We caught another gUmpse of the funeral 
 cortege as it passed the Sergeant's Lodge ; then we 
 turned away with tears of sorrow and anger in our 
 eyes. 
 
 A great strength and fierce force lay in all these men. 
 They were in desperate and deadly earnest. They 
 seldom smiled or jested during those momentous 
 years. They always wore the same grim look of 
 settled determination. It was life or death that was 
 in the balance. They walked under the shadow of 
 the scaffold. 
 
 Two years later, one of these men, who had been 
 sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, James 
 F. X. O'Brien, visited the Presentation Convent in 
 Fermoy to see his sister, who was a nun there ; and 
 the Bishop, who was in Fermoy at the time, had 
 asked the liberated patriot to dine at the College. 
 Probably at that time Dr. Keane was the most popular 
 and well-beloved Bishop in Ireland. He deserved 
 it. He had the reputation of being a strong, almost 
 an extreme Nationalist. I was too young to under- 
 stand. I only knew that the newspapers were fond 
 of quoting some words which he addressed to the 
 students at the Irish College, Paris. 
 
 " Gentlemen, remember that your first duty is 
 to your God ; the second to your country ! " 
 
 The Irish memory was then tenacious, and fond 
 of treasuring up the words of its great men. A few 
 words in another direction sent another Bishop (a 
 
i8o THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 very great and a very holy^man) down to his grave 
 under a storm of obloquy and hate. 
 
 This evening Mr. O'Brien was late for dinner, 
 which was half gone through when he arrived. The 
 little quiet figure dressed in gray had stolen half-way 
 up the hall when he was observed. The whole body 
 of priests and students sprang to their feet, and gave 
 him an ovation that a king might envy. 
 
 During these vacations from our seminary course, 
 we had to witness sometimes strange scenes. Probably 
 the most pathetic, if we had known it, were the borough 
 elections. It was then, and up to 1882, when William 
 O'Brien broke the evil spell for ever, a mere contest 
 between two landlords, one Liberal, one Conservative, 
 both caring equally little for the country or the people. 
 Sir Denham Norreys, the local magnate, held the 
 borough for thirty years. To my imagination, he 
 was the embodiment and impersonation of the 
 haughty aristocrat. He was an old man then ; but 
 his slight figure, his gold glasses, and, above all, his 
 magnificent gait and carriage, as he walked up the 
 Main Street, seemed to my youthful fancy the type 
 of old-world haute noblesse ^ in whom it would be a 
 condescension to speak to an ordinary mortal. I 
 remember how everyone stepped oflt the sidewalk 
 as he approached, and how he looked neither to the 
 right hand nor to the left, and never spoke to the 
 commonality. He came in for a good deal of rough 
 handling at the elections ; and it was remarkable that 
 even then he never seemed to lose that splendid 
 hauteur of manner. Once a local solicitor, and a 
 very clever man, was speaking from the broad window 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS i8i 
 
 at the left-hand corner of Fair Lane, and he said, as 
 I well remember : 
 
 '* He calls himself Sir Denham Norreys ; but I 
 call him Sir Damn Nonsense ! " 
 
 We thought the stars would fall. But there it was — 
 Norreys v. Longfield for years ; and a squadron of 
 huzzars, sabres drawn, marching two and two up 
 along the street the whole day long ; and three 
 hundred police massed around the Court House the 
 day of the polling — all to keep these poor Irish fools 
 from murdering one another ! But the secret fires 
 were burning also in young hearts at the time. 
 
 It was quite a revelation in after life to find that 
 the proud aristocrat, the seeming embodiment of 
 racial and sectarian ascendancy, was the same Sir 
 Denham who was O'Connell's chief supporter during 
 his many conflicts in the House of Commons ; and 
 that later on he served under the banner of Gladstone. 
 
 Just before the Fenian rising in '67, Serjeant 
 Sullivan was made SoHcitor- General for Ireland, 
 and he had to find a seat. And where but in his 
 native Mallow ? He came, saw, and conquered. 
 He was made Attorney-General, and had to be re- 
 elected. He came, saw, and conquered again. But 
 the elections were hotly contested ; and party feeling 
 ran very high. He was a good popular speaker ; 
 and he had some clever tricks in catching the popular 
 imagination. The ballad-singers sang : 
 
 " Hurrah for Sullivan ! He's the man 
 That will chase the fox through Duhallow. 
 He's now come forth to lead the Van. 
 He's one of the Rakes of Mallow." 
 
iSz THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 Small boys wrote orders (unlimited) for porter on 
 copy-book leaves, which orders were honoured by 
 every publican. The successful lawyer leaped from 
 the backs of a poor, servile people, from the bar to 
 the bench, from the bench to the Woolsack. And 
 then — passed into oblivion. For it is a remarkable 
 fact, and one that I should like to impress on the minds 
 of our youthful generations, that the Muse of Irish 
 History has a curious knack of blotting out with her 
 thumb every name, no matter how illustrious for a 
 moment, that has not served the cause of the mother- 
 land, while she embalms for ever in her pages the 
 very humblest who have given their lives to the 
 sacred cause. I suppose not one man in a million 
 to-day could tell the name of the judge who sen- 
 tenced the Manchester martyrs to death ; and every 
 schoolboy knows the names of Allen, Larkin and 
 O'Brien. Who can tell the names of all the distin- 
 guished Judges, Attorney- Generals, Crown Advocates, 
 Serjeants-at-Law, who prosecuted or sentenced the 
 patriots of '98, or '48, or '67 ? And who can forget 
 Emmet, Wolfe Tone, the Shears, Mitche!, Martin, 
 Kickham ? And so, too, the little town there by the 
 Blackwater has given men to the Woolsack and the 
 Bench ; to the Church ; to medicine ; to art ; and 
 to history. Yet, no one asks where these men are 
 buried ; or cares to see the places where they were 
 born. But every schoolboy can point out where 
 Thomas Davis first saw the light ; and the high house 
 in Ballydahin where William O'Brien spent his early 
 days. And I often wondered whether that distin- 
 guished lawyer from Mallow, who wore the Lord 
 
AND OTHER J ESSAYS 183 
 
 Chancellor's robes, was able to shut out altogether 
 that terrible name " Scorpion Sullivan," that made 
 a hissing in all men's ears after the State Trials of 
 '67 in Cork ? For I remember well that even while 
 the mob were shouting '* Hosannas ! " after his 
 carriage on the eve of his election in Mallow, I heard 
 some bitter things said by white-faced young men 
 about '* castle-hacks " and " purchased slaves " ; 
 and I knew that these young fellows turned away 
 in disgust from the porter-sodden and degraded 
 canaille of the streets to grease their rifles up there 
 in Carmichael's Lane, or speculate, as they watched 
 the dragoons passing by, how easily the axe of the 
 croppy-pike could cut the bridles, and how easily 
 the steel hook could bring the trooper to the earth ; 
 and how easily the pike with its rudle-point could 
 do the rest. They were dreamers of dreams, of 
 course ; but they were superior to the poor slaves, 
 whose hands had closed down on ill-gotten gold, or 
 the poor wretches who debauched themselves with 
 cheap drink, and thought they were serving their 
 country ! 
 
 The relations between Protestants and Catholics 
 were all this time exceeedingly happy and cordial. 
 The only occasion on which some little friction took 
 place was when the Protestant Rector or church- 
 wardens first attempted to close the burial-ground 
 around the Protestant Church and in the interior of 
 the ruins of the old CathoHc Church dedicated to 
 Saint Anne. The attempt made on this occasion was 
 frustrated in a singular manner, although in after 
 years, on sanitary grounds, it succeeded. 
 
1 84 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 During the summer evenings, a little man, clad 
 like a sailor in blue blouse and white nankeen or linen 
 trousers, used put in an appearance just at the corner 
 of Fair Street and right opposite the entrance gate to 
 the Protestant church. His face was deeply marked, 
 and he looked insignificant enough ; but his feats of 
 strength, for it was these he came to exhibit, hoping 
 to earn a few pence thereby, were very remarkable, 
 and showed uncommon muscular and nervous power. 
 One of the feats was the lifting of a half-hundred 
 weight to the level of his head, and holding it aloft 
 in that position whilst he walked rapidly along the 
 streets to the great bridge that spanned the Black- 
 water, and back again to the point from which he 
 started, altogether a distance of three-quarters of a 
 mile. 
 
 This evening, just before giving the usual exhibition 
 of strength, an immense funeral was seen slo^vly 
 coming up the Main Street. It halted at the church 
 gate, which was locked and bolted. Clearly this was 
 expected. The sexton, acting under orders, refused 
 to allow the funeral cortege to pass. There was deep 
 anger and indignation written on the faces of the 
 people ; and after some moments of indecision, it 
 was clear they were about to take the law into their 
 own hands. Amongst them were the Mallow butchers 
 — the Gracchi of their age — the fiercest, strongest, 
 loyalest men that ever took up a cause. Just whilst 
 they were hesitating, the Httle sailor athlete pushed 
 his way through the crowd, and struck the gate one 
 violent blow straight from the shoulder. Whether 
 it was that the lock was worn and rusty, or the impact 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 185 
 
 very great, the great iron gate yielded and swung 
 back ; and the tumultuous crowd, with a suppressed 
 cheer, broke into the avenue. No legal action was 
 taken, but probably the little sailor got sixpences 
 for pennies that night. 
 
 And may I not embalm, and preserve from utter 
 oblivion, in these hot and hasty times, the names of 
 the humbler, yet picturesque celebrities, who haunted 
 the streets of Mallow during these days, and who 
 came prominently to the front during election times, 
 and were well known at fair, market, and cross — Bill 
 Shehane, the giant, who always inherited the boots 
 and cast-off integuments of another giant, old Homan 
 Haines ; Bill Shehane, who knocked down with one 
 blow a furious and dangerous bull in the Big meadow, 
 and then cried chivalrously : '* Get up you, you son 
 of a gun, I never struck a man down " ; Stephen the 
 Fool, who once swallowed a live mouse for the pre- 
 mium of sixpence and the delectation of the Club 
 gentleman ; Jack the Manager ; Davy the Lady ; 
 Biddy Black ; Peg Mack ; Ellen Gorman, of the 
 Cakes ; and last, not least, Kitty Moss, the terror of 
 our childhood. 
 
 And in higher circles of society, there were that 
 giant priest, the typical soggart of the past, Justin 
 McCarthy, mighty in stature, and great of heart, the 
 hero of two tithe wars, the foe of felonious landlordism, 
 who revenged an eviction in his parish by putting a 
 price of one shilling per head on every fox^s head 
 that was brought to his hall- door. And the gentle 
 Abbe Moriarty, with the seraphic face and the long 
 white hair, who, we firmly believed, saw the heavens 
 
i86 THE LITERARY LIFE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 opened, when, on Sunday mornings, he preached, 
 and the beautiful vestments which he had brought 
 from Dieppe shone in the sunlight, and the magnifi- 
 cent chalice glittered on the altar. And Father Danger 
 (Murphy), theologian and catechist without rival or 
 equal, whom we looked at with such awe and venera- 
 tion ; and the saintly Denis O'Connell, just passed 
 to his reward ; and Father P. Horgan, young, gifted, 
 accomplished, who trained our choir on the one hand, 
 and was inexorable to Sunday-school truants on the 
 other. He is still, happily, with us ; but the others — 
 alas ! all gone, swallowed up in the night of oblivion 
 or rather shall we say, basking in the eternal sunshine 
 of an eternal day ? 
 
LENTEN TIME IN DONERAILE 
 
 X 
 
 The Stations are over ; and we are in Holy Week. 
 Like all other human things, if laborious, the memory 
 of them is pleasant. It is no joke to get up at an 
 unearthly hour in the morning, and to speed, in very 
 variable weather, seven or eight miles to the house 
 where the Station is to be held. Sometimes, after 
 snow, the ground is so slippery we have to pick our 
 steps. Sometimes Boreas thunders from the north, 
 out between the mountain chasms, and across the 
 bleak March landscape. Sometimes the south wind 
 comes up, with its soft, sweet, heavy burden of rain. 
 But at all times one is glad to get in sight of the 
 farmers' cottage, known and recognised afar off by 
 its fresh coat of white- wash, and the Httle group of 
 men waiting in the haggart before the door There 
 is a cheery welcome from the master — the husband 
 or the eldest son ; a careful picking of our footsteps 
 across the muddy yard, carpeted with fresh straw ; 
 a bark of warning from the vigilant colUe ; a still more 
 warm welcome from the vanithee, and then we settle 
 down to work. I generally leave the " parlour " to 
 my curate. I prefer the seat by the open hearth, 
 where piles of timber and coal, and occasionally a 
 heap of mountain turf, light and heat the whole 
 
 187 
 
i88 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 kitchen. And here is the " sugan " chair, made of 
 twisted hay ; but the vanithee rushes out with a grand, 
 new, horse-haired, well-springed one, and snatches 
 the humble seat swiftly away. Right opposite me, 
 a withered, venerable woman stoops to catch a little 
 heat for her poor congealed veins. Her beads hang 
 down as they roll through her fingers. Here, quite 
 close, are the three junior scions of the house, their 
 faces shining from soap and the fire, their pinafores 
 spotless, and with great wonder in their eyes at the 
 awful apparition of the priest. Silently and reverently, 
 one by one, the penitents come and kneel on the hard 
 paving stones, bend their heads till their hair touches 
 your face, and make their simple confession. Then 
 the little lecture, the Holy Mass, heard so reverently 
 and humbly. All is still as death, save the cackling 
 of a hen in the yard, or the swift carol of a blackbird 
 out on the ash tree beyond. The station Ust is called ; 
 the " pleasant word " is said ; and then the breakfast. 
 It is a pretty poor business in Lent, though since we 
 got the dispensation for butter, it is not quite so bad. 
 And the vanithee, with great pity for the young 
 priests, sidles over and whispers : — 
 
 ** Wisha, yer reverence, what about a couple of 
 eggs ? It is a long drive, and a cowld morning." 
 
 We shake our heads ; and the talk goes round, 
 with one or two of the neighbours who have come 
 in to help us ; and it is all about the ** Lague,'* or 
 the Landlord, or the new taxes, or the Land Courts. 
 And it is sad and almost desperate to see these poor 
 people toiling from dawn to dark to make the ** rint " ; 
 but ** Hope springs eternal in the human breast,** 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 189 
 
 and there is a perennial fountain of hope in the hearts 
 of these people.^ " Well, sure God is good ! " There 
 is the ultimate syllable on the Irish tongue — faith, 
 deep, profound, unshakable in the eternal clemency 
 and protection of God. 
 
 And so, cheerful enough after our cup of tea, we 
 bid " Good-bye ! " to our good hosts, until 
 
 " Give Mary your blessin', your reverence ; she's 
 goin' to America next week." 
 
 My heart sinks down into my boots. America ! 
 America ! draining the life-blood of Ireland. All 
 that is fair, and beautiful, and healthy, going ; and 
 all that is old, and decrepit, and imbecile, left behind. 
 I cannot help saying angrily : — 
 
 " Why can't she stop at home ? " 
 
 *' Wisha, yer reverence, what's there for her ? 
 We have enough to do ; and sure the sisters in Boston 
 have paid her passage, and will meet her whin landin'." 
 
 There is no use replying. With a surly look and 
 bad grace I place my hand on the thick auburn hair 
 of the poor child ; and my curate wonders all the 
 way home why I am so silent and distracted. I 
 cannot help it. This whole modern and universal 
 
 * Their trust in Providence has been vindicated. The above 
 lines were written while the old evil system of dual ownership 
 was still in operation. Under the beneficent influence of the 
 Land Purchase Act of 1903, the landlord system has now quite 
 disappeared from the parish, and the soil has become the people's 
 own property. The results are abundantly evident already in 
 their greater cheerfulness and comfort, the neatness of their 
 homes and their increased enterprise in developing the resources 
 of the soil. " The Lague " is still a power in the parish, but it 
 is a League for completing the pacification of the country by 
 combining Irishmen of all creeds in the cause of their common 
 native land. 
 
190 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 exodus from their native land is maddening. I know 
 it is the genius of the race. We were always exiles 
 and wanderers. We got the evil impetus from our 
 Scythian forefathers, who struck and pitched their 
 tents of skins from the Balkans to the Urals, and from 
 the Danube to the Ganges. It was the same nomadic 
 spirit that drove Dathi and his soldiers across Europe 
 in their terrible crusade of fire, until their mighty king 
 was smitten, from Heaven, under the snows of the 
 Alps. It was the same spirit that bade Brendan seek 
 the Western World ; and his companions the forests 
 of France and Germany. Down there on the Kerry 
 coast, near Smerwick, where Grey de Wilton mas- 
 sacred the four hundred Spaniards who laid down 
 their arms, depending on his word of honour, you 
 still may see the beehive cells where the ancient 
 Irish monks rested on their couches of rushes — cells 
 so constructed for this race of mighty ascetics that 
 the monk could neither stand nor he. And there is 
 the same eternal sea, where they found their choir- 
 stalls, for there up to their armpits in the freezing 
 waters they stood at midnight, and sent up their 
 penitential chaunts to Heaven, with no organ accom- 
 paniment but that of howling winds and thundering 
 waves. But were these ascetics of the Irish Thebaid 
 content with this ? No ! After thirty or forty years 
 of this violence to Heaven, the old Celtic spirit seized 
 them, and '' peregrinari pro Christo ! "^ on their lips, 
 up they arose, and on these frail coracles, such as 
 those you may still see in Kerry and Arran — poor, 
 fragile, Nautilus-boats, canvas stretched on a few 
 
 * To go abroad for Christ's sake. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 191 
 
 planks, they went forth to France and Germany ; 
 and the weaker races shuddered before their Libyan 
 austerities, and clamoured for the milder rules of 
 Benedict, in place of the awful penalism of these 
 Irish Culdees. And that is the reason, you know, 
 why the Benedictines have never thriven in Ireland. 
 
 Well ! " peregrinari ! peregrinari I " there is still 
 the destiny of the race. Alas ! that we should say 
 it : It is no longer '^peregrinari pro Christo ! " but 
 " peregrinari pro Mammona ! " Ah ! yes ! the dear 
 old Spartan simplicity of Irish peasant life is yielding 
 to the seductions of the Zeitgeist : we want the city, 
 and the electric light, and the saloon, and the ball- 
 room. There's the secret of Irish emigration ! 
 
 Well, weVe finished the rounds of Stations. We 
 have trodden on historic, or semi-historic ground. 
 We have passed by the two Danish moats under the 
 old frontier keep of Shinagh, near Waterdyke ; have 
 skirted Ballinamona, the ancient seat of the Nagles, 
 one of whom, Elizabeth Nagle, married Spenser, 
 the poet (see Lowell on the English poets). In this 
 house, too, lived George Bond Lowe, who was fired 
 at eighty years ago, whence originated the famous 
 ** Doneraile Conspiracy Trial," in the evolutions of 
 which O'Connell won his brightest laurels. Who 
 has not heard of his journey by coach from Cahir- 
 civeen, his relays by the way, his appearance in Cork 
 Courthouse, to the utter dismay of the Solicitor- 
 General, his breakfast on the dry loaf of bread, 
 interrupted between every bite by his exclamation : 
 " That's not law, sir ! " the saving of the poor victims 
 from the gallows, by his marvellous eloquence ; their 
 
192 
 
 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 transportation — ah, yes ! it all comes back, for here 
 are their grand-children in my parish to-day. And 
 down there across the Awbeg, whose silver is now 
 gleaming in the morning sunlight, is the spot where 
 Father O'Neill was horsewhipped by Captain St. 
 Leger ; and when the old priest shrank from pro- 
 secution, Curran forced him into it, took up the cause 
 of the old man without fee or reward, except that it 
 laid the first stone of an immortal reputation. Here, 
 too, is Carker (career, a prison), where my prede- 
 cessor. Father Tighe Daly, lived in 1688, one of the 
 priests who had to be duly registered, and his good 
 conduct guaranteed by two solvent securities. Here 
 is the copy of his registration, culled from the Rolls 
 Office, Dublin Castle : 
 
 No. 
 
 Name 
 
 Age 
 
 Where 
 Ordained 
 
 By Whom 
 
 Place of 
 Residence 
 
 Of what parishes 
 
 is he the pretended 
 
 Parish Priest 
 
 Tighe 
 Daly 
 
 67 
 
 Rheims 
 
 The 
 Archbishop 
 of Rheims 
 
 Carker 
 
 Caherduggan, 
 
 Doneraile, 
 
 Templersan. 
 
 Securities — Arthur O'Keeffe, Ballymohill, 
 
 and 
 
 Another 
 
 1^0 each. 
 
 Back here in the defiles of the black mountains is 
 a favourite spot of mine, Tooreen. You can see it 
 gleaming — a little green patch against the sombre 
 setting of the purple hills ; — and it stretches deep 
 down into the brown valleys, where the stream, turbid 
 with flood-wrack, wine-coloured from the peat, or 
 crystal in the mild summer time, forever break the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 193 
 
 silence and monotony of these wilds. And here dwell 
 a simple, hardy race, leading a kind of monastic life 
 in their solitudes, and rarely venturing beyond the 
 seclusion of their valleys, except to Mass on Sundays 
 or holidays. I had heard of them long before I ever 
 thought I should be their pastor. From far before 
 the famine years, when the population was ten times 
 what it is to-day, their reputation has come down 
 unbroken, as being the very first, winter and summer 
 alike, to enter the Church on Sunday morning. They 
 are seven miles away — no roads from the inner fast- 
 nesses of the mountains — yet here they are at half- 
 past seven on Sunday morning, eager for the Mass 
 that is to cast its halo of blessing over their labours 
 of the coming week. I tell them they ought to be 
 holy — they are so near to God. Yet here, too, the 
 fever of emigration has penetrated ; and in New York 
 and Indiana, up and down the cities of the States, 
 are the children of the mist and the cloud, thinking, 
 perhaps, sometimes of the purple heather and the 
 bracken, and wondering will they ever see it again. 
 
 " From this spot, yer reverence," says old Dan 
 Magrath, the woodranger, '' you can see the five 
 counties." 
 
 So you can. The sea to the south, the Shannon to 
 the West ; and in the east Knoclvmeldown, beneath 
 whose conical summits nestles the Mecca of the 
 Irish — the Monastery of Melleray. And far in front 
 stretches a vast landscape, broken by ridges that run 
 parallel to one another, but transverse, here from 
 the mountains to the sea. It is dotted all over with 
 white farm houses, from v/hich the blue smoke, this 
 
 M 
 
194 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 calm March morning, curls upwards to the sky. 
 The smell of Spring is in the air, blended with the 
 pungent aroma of peat and wood fires, carried to us 
 across the wide lowlands ; the cattle are browsing 
 lazily in the far meadows ; now and again you can 
 hear the bark of a watch dog far away, or the song of 
 some colleen or bouchal, as they pass down to the 
 creamery ; and all Heaven over your head is resonant 
 with the raptures of the larks, who fling down the 
 dews from their exultant wings and the pearls of 
 music from their throats that gasp with exuberant 
 melody. And this is Ireland ? Yes ! And there, 
 down there in the lowland, and here in the mountain 
 defiles, are Celts ? Yes, every one ! But was it not 
 here, even in this very valley of Tooreen, that Spenser 
 saw the ghosts coming out of their caverns ; and was 
 it not of this very country he wrote, that its population 
 was exterminated ? Hear his words, written just 
 there below, where the black ruin of Kilcolman Castle 
 makes a blot upon the landscape : — 
 
 " Out of every corner of the woods and glens they 
 came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs 
 could not bear them ; they looked anatomies of 
 death ; they spake like ghosts crying out of the 
 graves ; they did eat of the carrions, happy when 
 they could find them, yea, and one another soon 
 after, insomuch as the very carcases they spared not 
 to scrape out of their graves ; and, if they found a 
 plot of water cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked 
 as to a feast for the time ; yet not able long to continue 
 wherewithal ; that in short space there were none 
 almost left, and a most populous and plentiful 
 country was suddenly left void of man or beast." 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 195 
 
 Yet a few years ; and through these very files 
 swept down the stalwart Rapparees, who surrounded 
 Kilcolman Castle, and put the brand to this keep of 
 the robber and the stranger ; and then with character- 
 istic Irish chivalry dashed through the burning rooms 
 to rescue a babe, whom, too late, they had heard was 
 left behind by the Saxon servants. And here, after 
 three hundred years confiscation and burning, exile 
 and death, Connacht plantations and West Indian 
 expatriation, here still are the Celts apparently as 
 indomitable as ever. Surely, if Rome is the " Eternal 
 City," the Irish are the " undying race." 
 
 Let us go down from the hill-top in our course of 
 Stations, and visit the low-lands. We pass at once 
 under the shadow of another mighty frontier fortress, 
 also belonging to Spenser, for he held three thousand 
 acres of land here, confiscated from the Earl of 
 Desmond. It is a splendid old keep, still well pre- 
 served — a square, embattled tower, like that which 
 suggested to Dante the simile of masculine fortitude 
 — Sta come tone ferma. You can see it for miles 
 around. Sometimes, when the sun shines, it is 
 almost invisible, for the white face of it does not 
 show against the sunlit mountains. But, generally, 
 it stands out clear, distinct, well defined, a solid 
 square of mediaeval m.asonry against the everlasting 
 hills. It is Castlepooke — the keep of the Phooca or 
 Witch ; for you must know that once on a time, a 
 famous witch, and a malignant one, took up her 
 quarters here, and wrought dire distress amongst the 
 people around. She burned the corn in the fields, 
 until the wheat ears vrere filled with soot instead of 
 
196 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 grain, sterilised the milk in dairies until no amount 
 of churning could produce cream, brought dread 
 diseases on the cattle, etc., and alas ! there was no 
 benevolent fairy to counteract the evil doings, or 
 bring blessing for curse to the afflicted people. But 
 there was a hope — a promise — a tradition, that if 
 the habit of a Grey Friar could be flung over her in 
 her sleep she would rise up and vanish in a flame 
 of fire. And, one day, the emancipation came. A 
 poor mendicant called at a farmer's house in the 
 neighbourhood, and begged for alms and a night's 
 lodging. It was freely given in this land of hospitality. 
 The stranger slept, and lo ! curiosity led the vanithee 
 to open and inspect the bundle the poor man brought. 
 It was all he had, but the staft' for his hand. And 
 she drew out the long grey habit of a friar. It was 
 rash, perhaps sacrilegious ; but the time had come. 
 God had sent His messenger. But who would dare 
 face the tigress in her den ? Not one w^ould volunteer ! 
 At last, a little child was requisitioned. She knew 
 no fear, probably because she knew no sin. Care- 
 lessly she ascended the high mound of the Castle, 
 carelessly entered, carelessly threw the garment over 
 the sleeping woman, who instantly rose in the air, 
 angry and threatening, and passed away for ever- 
 more in a flash of fire towards the West. So goes 
 the legend ; and of course it is true ; but I do not 
 vouch for it. 
 
 Our next Station takes us down into the plain to 
 Kilmacneesh — church and graveyard of St. McNeese, 
 a disciple of St. Patrick's. Thence to Inchnagree 
 (the island of the cattle pens), where quite lately a 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 197 
 
 pathetic little incident took place. One day the very 
 intelligent farmer who holds the land received a 
 letter from a lady in England, asking was there any 
 tradition of her family in that neighbourhood. She 
 had a dim recollection that she was born somewhere 
 there under the mountains of Mole. He at once wrote 
 to say that he could point out the exact place where her 
 father's house stood. She came over immediately 
 and drove from the railway station to this remote place. 
 The good farmer accompanied the trembHng lady 
 along the road to where the house stood near a 
 plantation of fir trees. '* There," he said, pointing 
 to the spot from which time had now swept away 
 even the ruins, ** there is where your house stood, 
 and there you were born." The lady sat down on 
 the broken edge of the fence, and wept. So do human 
 hearts turn to their homes and cradles. Across 
 Bawntigeen (the green field of the little house) we 
 pass ; and our next Station is Kilcolman, Ardeen, 
 and Bally vonare. Here was a church, built to St. 
 Colman, one of St. Patrick's disciples ; and here in 
 a little field is the Church of Rossdoyle or Rossdale,^ 
 mentioned in the same page as Doneraile in the 
 assessment made by Pope Nicolas in 1291 for the 
 Crusades in the Holy Land. But St. Colman's 
 Church and Priory are gone ; yet here, dating from 
 1387, is the Castle of Kilcolman, famous for ever 
 as the place where the " Faerie Queen " was written. 
 It is now a solid stump of masonry, but must have 
 extended far and wide across the meadow and above 
 
 ^ This little church is the oldest Christian Church in Ireland, 
 if we except one near Bray. 
 
198 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 the bog, there beneath, once an ornamental lake. 
 How the imagination travels back across centuries 
 to the old Desmond lords who built it ; to the 
 Elizabethan usurper, who never preached but one 
 solution of the eternal Irish question, and that the 
 Cromwellian one of wholesale massacre ! 
 
 Spenser, who would exterminate the native Irish 
 like vermin, died a beggar in London, in a lane 
 near the great new Cathedral of Westminster ; 
 and Kilcolman Castle is now held by the Celto- 
 Catholic Barrys ; and there, right under the old keep, 
 is the white-washed cottage of the Secretary of the 
 Land League — an unmistakable Celt of Celts — 
 William O'Toole. 
 
 And how the centuries glide into each other ; for 
 here a few years ago the most popular representa- 
 tive the great Republic of the W^est ever sent to 
 Ireland, J. J. Piatt, wrote sonnets on the blackened 
 ruin, and on the more modern structure beneath. 
 
 Across the Awbeg, our course has taken us through 
 Cahirmee, where, for three hundred years, the greatest 
 horse fair in the world is held, on the nth and 12th 
 July ; by Caherduggan, whose village (depopulated 
 by plague), church and castle, are swept away ; by 
 Cornahinch (hill of the island), Ardanaffron, which 
 is either hill of the Mass, or Saffron Hill, its modern 
 appellation, for here grew acres of yellow crocuses, 
 which yielded the saffron with which the Irish in- 
 variably dyed their outer garment ; by Bally-na-Dree, 
 the town of the Druids, and Croagh-na-cree, where 
 there still may be seen the sulphur and lithia well 
 that wrought marvellous cures in pre-Patrician times ; 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 199 
 
 and back to By-bloxe towne (the ancient name, for 
 Doneraile is quite modern, dating only from 1291), 
 to find the black pall of mourning hung over church 
 and people, for this is Holy Week, and to-night the 
 sweet Rosary, Sermon, and Benediction, always so 
 bright and glorious and triumphant, give way to the 
 solemn office of Tenebrae and its mournful lamen- 
 tations. 
 
 Holy Thursday : — 
 
 Yes, indeed, my incredulous reader, we had the 
 office of Tenebr^ last night here, even here, in this 
 remote village ; and we sang the solemn dirges of 
 Jeremias, and my good little choir did harmonise 
 the '* Benedictus " and the " Miserere." It was not 
 quite so impressive, perhaps, as what you have heard, 
 so many times, in the Sistine Chapel ; but it was 
 well sustained, and correct, and sure ; if our poor 
 people only followed it in their heads and in their 
 hearts, well, it must have left sweet and soothing, 
 and penetential feelings there. 
 
 Good Friday : — 
 
 It falls cold, and chill, and mournful upon us all : 
 yesterday was so bright and joyous we forgot we 
 were in Lent. And the altar was so beautiful, with 
 its red candles (are not candle flames always red in 
 daylight }) and huge masses of flowers — spring 
 flowers, narcissi, and tuUps, and hyacinths, and the 
 lily of the valley — all throwing out the incense of 
 their humble hearts before the feet of the hidden 
 Creator. And, all day long, our Children of Mary, 
 
200 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 in their blue cloaks, divided the hours among them, 
 so that there never was a fear that our dear Lord 
 should be left even for a moment alone. But there 
 was no danger of that ; for all day long, the people 
 thronged and dwelt in the little church, until very 
 late at night, when, with a kind of pang, as of a 
 parting with a beloved one, the candles were extin- 
 guished, and the doors closed, and God left alone 
 with His angels ! But this morning, there was a flash 
 of lights for a moment again, which was instantly 
 darkened after the procession of the Blessed Sacra- 
 ment ; and the deep gloom of black drapery, hushed 
 bells, mourning vestments, and the solemn figure on 
 the cross, fell on our hearts and senses. 
 
 Holy Saturday :~~ 
 
 We had Tenebraj again last evening ; and, of 
 course, a Passion Sermon. In one sense, the Passion 
 Sermon is the greatest oratorical event of the year 
 in Ireland. Men go to hear the Passion Sermon who 
 won't go to Mass. Protestants attend. The priest is 
 chosen for the office as far back as Ash Wednesday; and 
 if he is young, and has not yet learned that the breath 
 of popular applause, called fame, is a very futile and 
 fugitive thing, he is naturally nervous and appre- 
 hensive. The lines of the sermon, too, are strictly 
 limited. It must extend to an hour at least. Anything 
 short of that is a disappointment. And it must follow, 
 detail after detail, the Gospel narrative. Any de- 
 parture from that is viewed with great displeasure 
 by the people, and is gravely censured hy the older 
 priests. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 201 
 
 " 'Twas a good sermon enough ; but it was not 
 a Passion Sermon," is the verdict. 
 
 If the young priest has physical endurance to carry 
 him over two hours, he is immortalized. Every one 
 feels that real justice has been done to that sacred 
 and ineffable theme. And, dear me ! how it touches 
 their Catholic hearts ! And how they crowd around 
 that pulpit. Here, just behind me, two or three 
 are leaning over the altar rails ; beneath, the children 
 have poked in their heads to get a better view of the 
 " strange priest." The women, with hooded heads, 
 are rocking themselves to and fro, under the magic 
 of the eloquence ; now and again, some young girl 
 covertly takes out her handkerchief, and, wiping her 
 eyes hastily, tries to look impassive and unconcerned. 
 Ah, me ! 'tis no use. That story of infinite suffering, 
 infinite patience, and infinite love, will continue to 
 touch the human heart until the dread time comes 
 when the selfishness of modern life shall dry up all 
 the springs of human affection, and the divinest ex- 
 amples of self-surrender and abnegation cease to 
 touch the films of eyes that stare blindly and un- 
 knowingly at them. 
 
 Ah, well ! the sermon is over, the Tenebrae 
 concluded ; the little children have gone home in 
 the dark, clinging to their mothers, and wondering, 
 wondering in their own minds at the mighty preacher. 
 And Holy Saturday has dawned — the brightest day 
 in the year in my reckoning. For, after all, Easter 
 Sunday is but a second and revised edition of Holy 
 Saturday. Surely, all the joy and exultation of the 
 Resurrection has spent itself, when, after the blessing 
 
202 THE LITERARY LIFE 
 
 of the. font and the Paschal fire (always reminiscent 
 of St. Patrick and Tara), and the mighty candle, and 
 the prophecies and litanies, we flung off our plain 
 albs and purple vestments, and tore away the violet 
 veils from the statues, and the organ pealed out at 
 the Gloria, and the great bell rang, and the acolytes, 
 on tiptoe of expectation, pealed out a salvo of bells 
 at the word ! And then that glorious Regina Coiliy 
 by Lambilotte, is it not ? I don't know, and I don't 
 care ; nor do I know or care whether it is strictly 
 classical, or Cecilian, or what not. I leave all that to 
 the dreadful people who laugh and cry by rule. All 
 I know is this — that that splendid accompaniment 
 seems to my uncultivated senses to harmonize with 
 all the Rubrical requirements of this great mornings 
 It would not be out of place as the orchestral rendering 
 and resurrection-song of the great final day. Then 
 Magnificat, short Vespers ; and Holy Week is over ! 
 There is one drawback. The Lenten fast should 
 close on Good Friday night at twelve o'clock. It is 
 not congruous that after the mighty exultation of the 
 Holy Saturday ceremonies we should have to sit 
 down to a Lenten breakfast. 
 
 Easter Sunday : — 
 
 Well, I repent of and retract what I said above. 
 Easter Sunday is not a replica or second edition of 
 anything else on earth. It stands alone. This 
 morning the children got up early to see the sun 
 dancing ; for in Ireland the sun dances with joy 
 on the Resurrection-morning. And all the neigh- 
 bours, thronging to Mass, are joyful ; and ** A 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 203 
 
 happy Aisther ! " is going all round. We had an 
 immense Communion ; and at High Mass an im- 
 mense congregation. 
 
 ** 'Twas aiqual to any two Masses I ever heard 
 before," says a farmer from a neighbouring parish, 
 who saw High Mass for the first time. And the 
 Victimae Paschali was lovely ; and again, my heart 
 leaped at the Regina Cobli ; and I thought I heard 
 all Heaven tumultuously echoing that mighty psean 
 of triumph to their great Queen. And the boys 
 bolted at the Alleluias of the Ite Missa Est., as is usual 
 all the world over. But they made up for it. For 
 here, under my window, all the week, they are 
 shouting Alleluia ! whenever they peg a top or hit 
 a marble ; and all Nature is singing Alleluia ! for 
 it is springtime, and the green buds are hanging on 
 the trees, just ready to burst forth ; and the incense 
 that hangs around the garments of the virgin season 
 is afloat in the air ; and the river, there under the 
 bridge is murmuring Alleluia ! and the red-beaked 
 blackbirds and the speckled thrushes are shouting 
 Alleluia ! And the noisy larks are filling the heavens 
 with Alleluia I and, oh, dear me, all Ireland would 
 ring with Alleluia ! from sea to sea, and from cliff 
 to cliff ; but, alas ! it is as yet only a feeble prelude, 
 for her resurrection-day has not dawned ; and no 
 one has yet arisen to answer the mournful question : — 
 
 " Who will roll back for us the stone at the Mouth 
 of the Sepulchre ? For it is very great." 
 
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