IRISH STUDIES
Irish Holiday. By Dorothy Hartley. (Lindsay Drummond. 7s. 6d.)
I Follow Saint Patrick. By 0. St. j. Gogarty. (Itch and Cowan. i6s.)
In Praise of Ulster. By Richard Hayward. (Arthur. Barker. zis.) The New Ireland. By J. B. Morton. (Sands. 3s. 6d.) The Last Lords of Ormond. By Dermot Gleeson. (Sheed and Ward. 7s. 6d.) L 'Influence des Huguenots francais en Irlande aux XVIIe et XVIIIe slecles. Par Albert Carre. (Paris : Les Presses
Universitaires de France. Oxford : Blackwell. 7s. 6d.) King of the Beggars. By Sean O'Faolain. (Nelson. I2S. 6d.) IRELAND has recently been once more in the news, and the usual trickle of books on a subject of which publishers are normally shy has consequently swollen to a flood. On the flood is borne an occasional piece of work whose hitherto slender chances of getting into print it is admirable to see expanded, but also, inevitably, much that might as usefully have remained in manuscript. -Irish Holiday is typical of one kind of book whose loss would not impoverish the world. Miss Hartley had an idea which provided the basis of what appears to have been an enjoyable, and perhaps to her instruc- tive, holiday ; she followed the itinerary which Geraldus Cambrensis took on his travels in Ireland. But was it necessary to make the journey again on paper ? And, if it was, was it desirable to make it so archly, so sentimentally, with so little useful information and so many conventional raptures ? Irish Holiday carries a heavier ballast of synthetic and highly improbable Anglo-Irish than any book I can recall reading : it is hard, for example, to believe that Miss Hartley really heard someone explain the high price of poultry in a certain part of Ireland by saying that chickens there were always wanted " to be laying .eggs, except in spring when they do be killing off the surplus cockerels." Incidentally anyone who thinks of following Miss Hartley and Geraldus Cambrensis to Ireland should be warned that an attempt to use her suggested method of getting there will elicit the inconvenient discovery that the mode of transport for car and owner which she describes does not exist.
Dr. Gogarty also follows in historic (or fabulous) footsteps —those of Saint Patrick, and in another sense (his publisher's name-suggests) also in those of Mr. H. V. Morton. His book is in a different dass from Miss Hartley's ; it bears the imprint of a character whose ways are always unexpected, it is by turns vivid, subdued, sprightly, solemn, suggestive, exas- perating. It is not a full and consecutive biography of Saint Patrick, so much as a digressive essay on the more important phases in its subject's life, which .manages almost by accident to sift the obviously fabulous from the probably true and to be though informal yet comprehensive. But what is the author of the most original book of Irish memoirs of our time doing at all in the hagiographicalgaiere ? As I Was Walking Down Sackville Street is that rarity, a book that could bear a sequel even if it covered some of the same ground as 'its predecessor. I Follow Saint Patrick is not an unduly conven- tional book, but it is not an adequate substitute for a proper exercise of Dr. Gogarty's talents in his proper field.
Mr. Hayward and Mr. Morton divide Ireland between them—with .a little encroachment on the part of Mr. Hayward, since his subject is the historic province and not merely the area now controlled by what it would be most accurate to call the Government of Eastern Ulster. Mr. Hayward has apparently been moved to his pious task by annoyance at finding his own province ignored when Ireland. is discussed. Presumably he can share this concern with only a minority of his fellow-provincials, since the mass of them apparently continue to support political leaders who are at continued pains to disassociate their province from the rest of their country. It is certain though that he has chosen the best way to remedy a state of affairs which is unfortunate even if it is not unjust. In Praise of Ulster is an accurate and com- prehensive guide-book, which deals agreeably with the scenery, history, industry, agriculture and architecture (what there is of it, worth noting) of the province, is entirely free from political prejudice, and almost ,from the banal rhapsodising to which such publications are prone. Mr. Morton's subject is not the scenery but the social structure of the rest of the country. He writes as a Catholic, and accords to the militant Catholicism of the regime an approval whose fervour not all his co-religionists in Ireland, let alone those who subscribe to other faiths, will share. But with the greater part of his book any one at all in touch with Irish affairs will agree, and it has an unimpeachable value as the only up-to-date and accurate study of the social fabric of modern Ireland.
The remaining three books—the most valuable on this list—are historical studies. M. Carre's somewhat inclusively titled monograph will be found useful chiefly for its very able survey, of the introduction of French technique into the Irish linen trade. It is in no sense a book for the general reader, but it will be of considerable service, both for its text and its bibliography, to the student of Irish economic history. Mr. Gleeson's book, like M. Cure's, will presumably reach only a select audience, though its scope is somewhat more broad and it contains a great deal of material that will fascinate anyone with an interest in the period. It tracks the forttu4s of the Baronies of Upper and Lower Ormond through the successive crises of the seventeenth century—the Tyrone Rebellion, the Strafford Survey, the Cromwellian Plantations, and the Forfeitures of 1688. The history of Ormond at that time is the history of Ireland in miniature ; and while Mr. Gleeson's book cannot be recommended for frivolous reading, it should interest many more people than those for whom its appeal can be assumed.
Mr. O'Faoliin's biography of O'Connell is the only one of these books which combines importance with an obvious promise of popularity. Judged by formal standards, it is not a good biography. It does not arrange the sequence of events in an orderly manner, it leaves strange (and to the iminformed,prob- ably baffling) gaps between O'Connell's appearances in the lime- light of politics, it may be thought culpably digressive. But O'Connell has already been more than once uncomfortably con- fined in a prim conventional biography. The interest of this book is that it is the first interpretation of O'Connell by a citizen of the new Ireland of which O'Connell, a hundred years ago, sowed the first all-important seeds. He earned the title of The Liberator. But in immediate political results he did not after all achieve so much. His achievement was that he liberated his people from slavish pessimism and cringing, profitless resent- ment, and made them look forward to a future. It is thus and not as a romantic hero that Mr. O'Faolain sees him ; and since O'Connell's reputation has latterly been under a cloud, in accordance with his country's tradition of retrospectively excommunicating those of her leaders whose policies have been abandoned, his book will serve valuably in Ireland as a work of rehabilitation. In this country, where the act of reading does not impose the obligation of taking one side or the other in a political and moral controversy, it can be enjoyed simply as a thoughtful, instructive and admirably written book.
DEREK VERSCHOYLE.
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