AN BUSH HEROINE.* Mits. HINICSON has given us a volume
which is as difficult to describe as it is delightful to read. Her reminiscences have few dates and scarcely a pretence at arrangement. At one moment they deal with the past of Irish Nationalism. At another they carry the reader into the atmosphere of the Gaelic League. At a third they place him in the London of the later "eighties." And then in the final chapters the whole passion of the writer's nature comes out in the tragedy of Mr. Parnell's death. Yet if any one is tempted to put aside Twenty-five Years as simply a history of the Home Rule move- ment he will be wholly wrong. It is a book full of poetry and charm from end to end. The people among whom this part of Mrs. Hinkson's life was passed have an individuality of their own which has not before been painted. The nest of Irish girls in which she grew up and the passionate friendships she formed have hardly a parallel in any other country. It is a book to be commended for this special reason to every English reader. He will put it down with no change in his views of Irish polities, but with a new understanding of past and present in Ireland, and, it may be, with a new distrust of his own ability to judge them. Mrs. Hinkson starts with a chapter devoted to her father. "His mind in later years was an epitome of old Dublin. You could scarcely talk of any famous person or happening that it would not set him off on a reminiscence." It was from him that his daughter learned to live among "the tragical shades that elbow each other" in the streets about the Old Parliament House and Trinity College, about Daly's Club House and Dublin Castle. But well as he knew Dublin, he bad been brought up in the glens of Wicklow, and he loved to tell his children of an Ireland beyond their memories, "the Ireland of the dances at the cross-roads, and all the old customs before the famine brought the death into the hearts of the people and the emigrant ships had carried them away." In the Land League he took little interest. He bad belonged to the old '48 party, and later on "was more in sympathy with Isaac Butt's movement than with anything agrarian." He was the right father for "Katharine Tynan," and, unlike those among whom she grew up, he was greatly pleased with her early ventures into poetry, and proposed to frame the first half-guinea cheque that she received for some verses in the Graphic.
Literature early played a large part in Mrs. Hinkson's life, and a part which met with much opposition. "In the late sixties and early seventies an extraordinary wave of puritanism passed over the Catholic Church in Ireland." Under Cardinal Cullen the clergy set themselves to discourage the amusements of their flock. They swept away the old rural gaieties and put nothing in their place. It is to this that Mrs. Hinkeon attributes the growth of the manage de convenance in Ireland. Where young men and women have few or no opportunities of meeting marriages tend to be arranged by the parents. It was not only the "cross-road dances "that were forbidden, but all dancing except quadrilles, even in private houses, and under this limitation" it maybe imagined what a blight fell upon social life in Catholic Ireland." The new movement affected even the little Katharine's reading. Aurora Floyd was taken away from her, and her mother forbade all secular reading in Lent and dis- couraged it at other times. Here, however, her father stood her friend. He went on bringing books into the house, chiefly " miscellaneous lots pinked up at auctions," and to these Katharine had usually free access. She read Miss Edge- worth, of whom her memory "is of a faded fashionable eighteenth-century atmosphere," stories by Mrs. Gore and
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Mrs. Trollops, and, she thinks, Mansfield Park and Emma. But at that age "the great Jane was wasted" on her. In some interval when her mother's eye was more than commonly withdrawn she even made acquaintance with Eugene Sue. W hen books failed her she seized on the Family Herald. "I used to pass under my mother's unsuspecting gaze, stiff with papers which I had pushed up between any frock and my stays." When thus laden she was usually on her way to a loft over a stable at the end of a narrow town garden. "There was generally a horse in the stable, but he was too much accustomed to the sight of a small girl ascending and descending by the small aperture above his head to take much notice." The years from ten to fourteen were spent at a convent school in Drogheda. Here her secular reading was limited to such light literature as was admitted to the school library. This mainly consisted of Lady Georgina Fullerton's novels, Miss Yonge's Heir of fiedrlyre, Newman's Cellist; Wiseman's Fabiola, and Adelaide Procter's poems. These were read aloud by a nun for an hour or half-hour at night before prayers, and when she came to a passage of love-making "she would turn very red and laugh. or she would say with contempt that what followed was great nonsense." The school-books were what had been in use a generation before. On one occasion, when the most capable of the teachers told her class that the source of the Nile had never been discovered, Katharine broke in with "Oh yes, Dr. Livingstone discovered its source in Lake Victoria Nyanza." Mother Alphonsus, "shaking her veil in contemptuous indig- nation," asked: "And pray who is Dr. Livingstone ?" (The fact that Speke, not Livingstone, discovered the source need not detain us here.) At Christmas the girls acted plays, male costume being represented by a short petticoat, a jacket, and a burnt-cork moustache. The more accurate the impersonation was the less the nuns liked it, and in one case "a somewhat daring swagger caused the greatest distress to the Reverend Mother and made a little scandal in the school." But even in Irish convents there are changes. Mrs. Hinkaon was lately present at a meeting of a girls' debating society attached to a Hostel conducted by nuns for girl students at the National University, at which a paper was read on Coventry Patmore. This was followed by a discussion, which mainly turned on his theory of love. "One of us said to the delightful nun who bad us in charge : 'They seem to know a great deal about Love.' Ali, sure, they don't,' she said, her face twinkling ; they only think they do.' " At the end of 1881 the young poetess became a politician. The Land League gave her no inspiration, but when a Ladies' branch of it was started she became interested in it and soon found other girls like-minded with herself. They visited the political prisoners in Kilmainham and were introduced to Mr. Parnell. Then came the Black Sunday which saw the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke. Two of her family had a strange accidental association with the crime. On that fatal evening a young brother and sister of hers were walking home through the quiet winding lanes which then lay between Dublin and Clondalkin, when they were nearly run down by a car-load of men, driven at a furious rate, and later, coming upon a little river, they found the same car pulled up on the bank and the men washing something in the stream. "They said afterwards that the clear water had been slightly tinged with blood. They had seen the washing of the knives."
Mrs. Hinkeon aptly describes her connexion with the Ladies Land League as being "in its friendships and affections, but not in its counsels." Her devotion to Parnell was of a different order. Of personal knowledge of him she had hardly any. Her only interview with him, after Kilmainharn was in May, 1889, when she met him at an evening party at Sir Charles Russell's house. It was an historical occasion, for he, Gladstone, and Randolph Churchill bad dined there after the memorable breakdown of the Pigott forgeries. "I would not have approached him," she writes, "only Wilfrid Meynell led me up to him. His eye fell upon me and I am quite sure his face brightened. . . . Was it with some premonition of the passionate loyalty that would have died for him in a day to be P " He told her that he remembered her perfectly, and had been reading her poems. In the November of the following year came the O'Shea divorce case. "It was no great sur- prise to anyone who had their ears and eyes open. . . . It appeared to us that this great and lonely man had had, for him, the irreparable misfortune of falling in love with a woman who was a wronged and deserted wife. There was no betrayal of a friend, no breaking up of a home, none of the bad features that usually accompany such cases." Strange as it may seem, this essentially sophistical view kept " many derout Catholic Irish women, to whom the sensual sin is the one thing abhorred," true to their hero. It certainly had this effect on "Katharine Tynan." She quotes from some American newspaper the impressions she wrote for it of the meeting at the Rotunda on December 10th, 1890, to welcome Parnell back to Dublin after the struggle in Committee Room No. 15, and from memory the alternate captures and recaptures of United Ireland, with Father Healy's joke about the forcible expulsion of Matthew Bodkin, the Anti-Parnellite editor. " ' Sure it was foretold in Scripture,' he said when he heard the news. 'Not really, Father?' Oh, bedad it was. Don't you remember, And the lot fell upon Matthias I'" " Her excite- ment was stimulated and maintained by much anonymous abase, and by a resolution passed at a country meeting, with the parish priest in the chair, recording the "condemnation and scorn of brazen-faced Katharine Tynan for having joined Parnell's infamous League." But it was a bad time for a Parnellite who was also a good Roman Catholic. The great body of the clergy were on the other side. Anti-Parnellite sermons were preached in many churches every Sunday morn- ing, and sometimes the Parnellite men in the congregation walked out. On one occasion seven men stood up and left the church, whereupon the priest " remarked while they were still within hearing, There go the Seven Deadlies." Still, Mrs. Hinkson can say, as she looks back at them, "Ah, they were good days. One lived every hour of them," and she is always anxious to find any trace of better feeling in an opponent. She forgave one Anti-Parnellite " because during all the bitter time he was bringing Parnellite papers to a nun who was an ardent Parnellite." But what gave her moat joy was Sir William Butler's declaration : " The people who have betrayed a leader like Parnell will never make a nation" !—unless it were the chambermaid at a Dublin hotel who, when she was staying there a couple of years ago on a wet October Sunday —the anniversary of Parnell's funeral—said : "I was only a slip, but I followed him all the same. The skies were cryin' for him and they've cried ever since. Sure, why wouldn't they It was the worst day we ever bad when we lost him."
We have dealt only with the Irish part of Mrs. Hinkson's volume because it is the most original element in her reminiscences. But readers who care more for literary matters will find much that is interesting about them both in Dublin and in London.
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