BRYAN COOPER By Lennox Robinson
Mr. Lennox Robinson, in his hook on Bryan Cooper • (Constable, 7s. 6d.), has 'done a difficult thing 'admirably.' He had to write the life of a man who died at the age of forty- six, and who till his thirty-ninth year never found the chance to give a measure of his abilities : and for whom even then nothing offered itself but the subaltern role of an unplaced member of Parliament. Yet he has wisely treated Bryan Cooper as a type rather than an individual, and his book is a sketch of Anglo-Irish history from the time when religion became a dividing line between the two racial strains. The Coopers of Markree date from Cromwellian times and were heirs of the confiscation : but like many another family they were made Irish by their environment—yet always Irish with a difference. The significance of Bryan Cooper's life is that he set himself to obliterate that difference, when the old loyalties ceased to have a meaning. He had been not only an Irish landlord and a British officer in pre-War days ; he had been a Unionist member of Parliament and a supporter of Sir Edward Carson. Yet after the War, in which he served at Gallipoli as a Connaught Ranger with the Tenth Irish Division, . and after the revolution, he threw in his lot with the neworder, stood as Independent member for South County Dublin, and was elected. His services in the Dail were such that at his second candidature his place on the poll rose from seventh to second ; at the third he headed it, but by that time he had unreservedly joined President Cosgrave's party: Mr. Lennox Robinson has had the skill to show this whole historic curve as a natural development, and his book is much more than the sketch of a genial personality, or a tribute to the work of a cultivated booklover who was also a born politician. It is in reality a review of modern Irish history seen in relation to a figure whose significance it does not overestimate.
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