FICTION.
THE RACE OF CASTLEBAR.•
No record of Irish letters in the last thirty years will be complete or adequate which does not take into account the contributions in prose and verse of Miss Emily Lawless, whose last novel, written in collaboration with Mr. Shan Bullock, has appeared since her death. Her place is hard
to define, for she stood apart from schools and movements, though there was nothing inhuman in her detachment. Her gifts were great, but they did not make for popularity. She could engross those who yielded to her spell, but her best work was suffused with an autumnal atmosphere of elegy, like the romances of Turgenieff, and her finest novel, Crania, is one of the saddest that were ever written. No living writer of fiction excelled her in the art of reconstituting the life and conditions of bygone Ireland, and it is on record that her historical romance, With Essex in Ireland, was mistaken for a record of facts. Maelcho, again, is another signal instance of her revivifying power. She studied the past in a spirit of pity and compassion, for her sense of the inevitableness of Irish failure never impaired her deep affection for Ireland. In what proved to be the last pages she wrote, in the closing chapter of the novel before us, she summed up this point of view in words which could not be bettered, words put into the month of Colonel Byrne after the defeat and dispersal of Humbert's invading force in 1798 :—
" It really seems as if this island of ours—blighted from the start, actually before the start, before man set foot on it— defrauded by Nature herself of those advantages in which its neighbour is so rich—it seems as if it had been endowed to make amends with a double portion of that capacity for inspiring affection which is possessed, I suppose, to a greater extent by every country over its own sons and daughters. So at least I have always explained the matter to myself. It clutches, grips, and draws one, as a child is drawn to its mother."
Miss Lawless's verse was marked by the same high elegiac quality. Some of it was collected in a volume entitled With
the Wild Geese, but much must remain ungaruored; in par- ticular we may mention a singularly beautiful poem which
appeared in the Spectator under the heading " Upon a Western Beach,' beginning "Is it love ? Is it hate ? this clasp of the sea by the land." Work of this sort, as we have already hinted, does not appeal to the idle readers of the hour. The honorary degree of Litt.D. conferred on Miss Lawless in 1905 by the University of Dublin was a fitting recognition of the abiding qualities which mark the work of this true and richly endowed Irishwoman.
The story of The Race of Castlebar is that of the abortive invasion of Ireland by General Humbert in 1798, in which, after a resounding initial success, the small French force were hemmed in and overwhelmed by superior numbers. The narrative is from the pen of a young Englishman, and is addressed to his brother, an attaché at the British Embassy at Florence. John Banbury, the writer, is the eldest son of a choleric English baronet, and has been despatched by his father, on the news of the threatened invasion, to assist
and if necessary rescue his sister, married to Sir Owen Byrne, and resident in the danger zone on the West Coast of Ireland. John Banbury is far from being a paladin. He would much rather stay at home and pursue his suit for the hand of *Me Race of Castlebar. By Emily Lawless, Litt.D., and Shan F. Bullock. London: John Murray. [65.]
Lady Lavinia in the leisurely method suited to his temperament, but there is no gainsaying the peremptory orders of his father. The discomforts of the journey to the coast and across St. George's Channel are vividly set forth, but the Ireland of 1798, as seen by the eyes of a young English country gentleman, affords more congenial scope to Miss Lawless's reconstructive talent. He found Dublin "fuller than full and at least twice as gay," and enjoyed the exhilarating unconventionality of Lady Gloriana O'Shea's rout. But his ride across Ireland brought him into contact with the realities and squalors of Irish life, truculent bullies, obsequious innkeepers, dirty rooms, and coarse fare. His arrival at Castle Byrne, after losing his way and being piloted across a bog by a crowd of barefooted retainers, ends his immediate discomforts only to add to his perplexities. His sister is well and unmolested, her husband being a genial but bibulous chieftain who dispenses profuse hospitality in his ramshackle castle. But though Sir Owen is to all intents and purposes the head of the house, he and his wife placidly acquiesce in the presence of an aged French lady—the representative of a branch which has never acknowledged the claim of Sir Owen—who, with her suite, occupies a wing of the build- ing in an attitude of scornful aloofness. Young Banbury, being English and logical, finds it impossible to understand such tolerance, nor is his bewilderment lessened when be learns from his sister that the claim of the interlopers is perfectly sound, and is supported by every man on the estate. Here is a situation which could only occur in Ireland, and which is immensely complicated by the arrival on the scene of a French officer who turns out to be none other than the rightful heir. As Colonel Byrne, if captured, would in virtue of his name and claims be undoubtedly treated as a rebel, Lady Byrne despatches her cousin to seek counsel with Sir Owen, who has joined his regiment at Castlebar. Banbury arrives in time to see the rout of the loyalist forces, is captured by the French, and sent off to Killala. There he is quartered with a number of other Protestants and refugees in the palace of the Protestant Bishop Stock, who had been captured by Humbert, but subsequently proved of great service to the French general as an interpreter and intermediary. The narrative is here founded on that remarkable document, pub- lished by Stock in the following year, in which he described the events of his captivity with an impartiality and liberality which, according to Holland's Memoirs of the Whig Party, stood in the way of his promotion. In this " simple, yet lively pamphlet" the Bishop drew
"a very spirited picture of a town and district in the power of an enemy, describing, without reserve and without exaggeration, the sensations of a man unused to such scenes, on the various events which occurred in the neighbourhood. This pamphlet was little noticed at the time, and some pains were taken to deprive it of the celebrity to which it was entitled. Many were offended that republican Frenchmen should be described, and that by a bishop too, as they really were, and not as it had suited the purposes of ministerialists to represent them—monsters of impiety. treachery, and inhumanity. Dr. Stock was never promoted, and this publication was, it is said, urged as an objection—when Mr. Fox, however, in 1806, considered it as an additional recommenda- tion to his acknowledged learning for translating him to a better bishoprick, other reasons were found to counteract his liberal intentions."—Memoirs of the Whig Party, VoL L, p. 317.
The handling of this curious situation follows closely the lines indicated in Lord Holland's summary : the Bishop is the good genius of the plot, but the French officers, excellently contrasted types, play their difficult parts with courage and toleration, the task of controlling the native levies being greatly complicated by their distrust of the anti-clerical attitude of the republican French.
The brief preface describes how Miss Lawless was hampered in the carrying out of her scheme by inveterate ill-health,
and generously acknowledges the loyalty of her collaborator. No one who reads The Race of Castlebar is likely to gainsay
the justice of the tribute to Mr. Shan Bullock's skill and sympathy.
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