BOOKS.

LAURENCE BLOOMFIELD IN IRELAND.* Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland is both very pleasant poetry and very good social philosophy, odd as the combination of the two characteristics may seem. It takes off the true impress of rural life in Ireland with local colour enough and sufficient power of &awing to awaken the imagination, puts before us distinctly and in detail the life it describes, and it also touches the root of the great difficulty of Ireland without didacticism, or in any way transgressing the natural limits of poetic delineation. The Social Science Association might publish it with much more profit to Ireland than many of their papers on Irish land laws, and those who read. would have the great advantage that it would present one principal root of Irish misery to their eyes, instead of merely appealing to their understandings. The fault of the poem is that it does not culminate in any overmastering individual interest. Mr. Allingham paints the scenes and prepares the stage with a careful and graphic hand, but he brings no figures of adequate interest on to the scenes thus prepared. It is a picture of individuals, only so far as the individuals illustrate society, and just where we hope that the interest is to deepen and the admirably-sketched figures which flit about the stage are to become subservient to some one central and more deeply-studied character, the threads of the tale are suddenly drawn together, and we find that the work is done. It may be argued that, just as Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" was a mere effort to illustrate a false political economy by appeal- ing to the reader's sympathies against that visionary condition of

* Leurence Bloomfield in Ireland. A liOiCr PJ01711. My William Ailing London Macmillan. MI. things in which "wealth accumulates and men decay," so Mr. Allingham's oliject is only to illustrate a truer social principle by showing the blunder of the ordinary English landlordism in Ire- land. But the whole power of Goldsmith's poem is in the beauty with which he expresses his own personal feelings, humorous memories, and kindly ideals. It is Goldsmith's sublimate of village life, and not the life itself, for which we care ; Goldsmith's lament over evicted peasants and emigrating families, rather than any verisimilitude in his picture. The strain of blended pathos and humour in the "Deserted Village" is everything, and the sim- plicity of the political economy even adds to the effect. Gold- smith's fancied purpose may have been to illustrate what he be- lieved to be a truth, but the mellow beauty of his poem arose in no small degree from the unfitness of his mind to discuss such subjects. Mr. Allingham's power is of a very different kind. He tells us modestly enough who has been his model :—

"I have sometimes cried,

'Afford my verse a little touch of aid,

Thou grave, good-humoured, venerable Shade,

Who once Comptroller of the Customs wart Edwardo Rege.' But my prayer is lost ; For though our modern telegraph extends Into that Other World's extremest ends, Old Chaucer deigns no syllable to say, And I must only do the best I may."

And though we may admit that Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland ;is far too emphatically "a modern poem," as it iscalled on the title- page, to be very like Chaucer,—too widely ranging and allusive in its thought, too full of that metaphysical flavour in its treatment of the commonest things which belongs particularly to our own time,—yet certainly there is more of the observant shrewdness of the old Collector of Customs than of the mellow Cuyp-like sunsets which Goldsmith wraps round his memories of the past, or the mingled wit and fun which seems in Goldsmith to combine the artificial pungency of France with the light-hearted laughter of Ireland. Yet Chaucer would never have written his sketches of the Canterbury pilgrims except as framework to the tales which he evidently regarded as the essence of the whole, though modern -criticism lays perhaps quite as much store by his introduction as by the tales so introduced. The less lyrical a poem is, and the more it depends on the shrewdness and delicacy of its delineations of real life, the more it seems to need genuine narrative interest. When poetry approaches life thus from the outside, its charm depends in great measure on growing fuller and more eager, draw- ing on tributary interests, and running with a stronger current, as it goes on. Poetry of this sort is nearer to the novel than the lyric, and though it is rightly less dependent on mere story than the novel (because it should be saturated with beauty of form), yet it always, to be perfectly satisfying, reaches the heart of a deep individual interest before it concludes. Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland barely does this. It is a skilful and poetic picture of rural society, and little more.

What, however, Mr. Allingham does do, he does with much insight. Nothing can be more true to nature than his sketch of the principal landlords of the neighbourhood,—the best of all perhaps being that of the O'Hara, the shy, proud, thin- minded, Celtic aristocrat, whose misfortune it is, like the Celtic aristocracy in general in France and the Scotch Highlands, no less than Ireland, to be exceedingly ill fitted for the task of turning to any good account the personal reverence with which they are regarded by the lower class :—

"One other Landlord, to conclude our list : O'Hara,—The O'Hara, some insist,—

Of princely Irish race, which sounds full well ; But what an Irish prince was who can tell ?

It more imports to study wisely how They rule the world who stand for Princes now, The present Chief, a thin-faced man of care, Keeps here his Bailiff, but resides elsewhere; A widower he, some fifty-two years old, A rigid Catholic, mild, formal, cold.

Children he had, but death removed his sons, He lock'd his youthful daughters up as nuns ; An heir for half his wealth he may select ; His Clergy use him with profound respect.

O'Hara, once ambitious all in vain, And indisposed for action or for gain, Disgusted long since with a public life, Hates England's name, but censures noisy strife; Is proud, dyspeptic, taciturn, and shy, Learn'd in forgotten trifles, dead and dry ; Secluded from the troublous world be lives, And secret help to church and convent gives.

Low-let, ill-till'd, and unimproved, his lands Are left in lazy, sneaking flatterers' hands, Most of them of his Bailiff-steward's tribe, Nor any who withhold that rascal's bribe."

The picture of Sir Ulrick Hervey, Bloomfield's uncle and guardian, is not less able ; nor does Mr. Allingliam's art at all fail him when he comes to men of quite different rank and cul- ture,—the agent Pigot, for instance, of whom

" Twas taught as part of Bloomfield's early creed, Pigot in-val-uable man indeed!"

is, though only sketched, admirably sketched in the following passages :—

"Fat Pigot tmm'd to every one who spoke, And laugh'd when each was done, as at a joke. His fun is somewhat threadbare, but you half Believe it rich, so hearty is his laugh; And not ill-furnish'd he with jest and tale, Beetroot beside his glowing cheek were pale. Kind to his household, jolly with his friends, . Business begun, all Pigot's feeling ends ; With jovial voice and look, his hand, like Fate's Can freeze the dwellers upon four estates, Whose slavish flattery finds a self-redress, A sort of freedom, in its own excess."

"Still, Pigot knows, though discontentment lurk,

He's most at ease in his habitual work, Within his line, courageous, strong, and tall, Beyond it, even timid, weak, and small; His narrow education, flowerless mind, By no artistic faculty refined, Are then exposed, himself can partly see.

Like ancient groom or stableman is he, At home on horseback, spite of prance and bound, A waddling cripple, place him on the ground."

Nor are the peasants on the estate or the Ribbouist Lodge at all less -well outlined.

The conclusion to which Mr. Allingham evidently wishes us to come, is that Ireland is not so much in need of new laws as of a new aristocracy,—that the Irish are a people whose defect it is perhaps, but also their charm, to depend too much on personal influence and guidance,—so that no law, however just, sternly administered, or stupidly administered, or administered without much delicate tact and sympathy with the feelings of the peasantry, will ever succeed in bringing them up to the full stature of Irish manhood. The English capitalists, he seems to say, however just according to their own ideas of a capitalist's duty, mismanage the Irish as much as their own proud, thriftless, and indolent aristocracy ; and the whole object of the poem is to substantiate the criticism of the following paragraph on the past of Ireland, while it repudiates its spirit of hopelessness as to the future. The speaker is a kindly parish surgeon, who despises utterly the Irish character, but does all in his power to alleviate the sufferings of the peasantry, even when smarting from the results of their own thriftlessness :— " Ireland, forsooth, "a nation once again!" If Ireland was a nation, tell me when ? For since the civil modern world began What's Irish History ! Walks the child a man ? Or strays ho still perverse and immature, Weak, slothful, rash, irresolute, unsure ; Right bonds rejecting, hugging rusty chains, Nor one clear view, nor one bold step attains ? What Ireland might have been, if wisely school'd, I know not ; far too briefly Cromwell ruled. We see the melting of a barbarous race, Sad sight, I grant, Sir, from their ancient place ; But always, everywhere, it has been so ; Red Indians, Bushmen, Irish,—they must go ?' "