HURRISH.*
Ix is one of the irremovable grievances of Ireland, although one never touched upon by agitators, and of which her most sensitive sons are unconscious, that among all the gifts of genius bestowed upon her there has never been a Scott. She has had many lesser minstrels to fire her blood and keep warm that wrath which has unfortunately become her ruling passion, but not one great enough to set her individuality, her character, her scenery, prominently before the world. The race is, like all Celtic races, lyrical, musical, full of the emotions and perceptions that go to the making of poetry,but yet has produced—save in twitterings of song full of spirit and fire, but of nothing greater —no worthy contribution to those arts by which, more than by any other, the differentnations come to know each other. Miss Edgeworth made a fine and instructive beginning. But even Miss Edgeworth fell away from Castle Rackrent and the records of the Absentee into tales of fashionable life, breaking her own spell ; and nobody—with the exception of Gerald Griffin in his memorable Collegians—since has been able to strike again that silent note. We hear, heaven knows, enough of Ireland, but we have learned little more of her—of her intimate ways of feeling, of how it really is that the good-nature and sweet temper and natural geniality of her people have turned to wormwood and bitterness —than if she lay in the South Seas.
The book now before us will not, perhaps, do much to explain how this came about ; but it sets forth a picture of the Irish peasant as he is which is more striking and extraordinary than anything, so far as we know, that has been told of him before. Hurrish is a study evidently made in love, and not with any hostile feeling. It is full of appreciation of the higher qualities of the race, and of understanding of their ways of thinking, and the prejudices and ignorane,es which have clouded their bright per- ceptions, and made the world so narrow to them, and twisted their moral sense so fatally. It is not, the reader will perhaps be glad to hear, an episode in the struggle between landlord and tenant, nor an exhibition of class hostilities. The action all takes place within themselves, so to speak ; the wrongs done, the vengeance taken, are between peasant and peasant, and the wonderful moral atmosphere which envelopes them, and which we are made to feel penetrating all the circumstances of their lives and all the fashion of their thoughts, has nothing to do with either politics or injured nationality. A larger and more funda- mental question, that of the strange perversion of every prin- ciple of social safety, which makes lawlessness a virtue in the eyes of the Irish peasant, even when himself full of natural good-feeling, honesty, and truthfulness, is the matter chiefly involved, and reveals a danger more profound and terrible than even the strife between a subject and a dominant race.
The characters in this powerful book are few, but very strongly indicated. They are none of them of high pretensions intel- lectually, any more than they are elevated in position. The hero, Hurrish O'Brien, is a peasant-farmer, living in the midst of the rough plenty, misery, and squalor which mean comfort in his class ; and the story concerns itself chiefly with the members of his immediate honsehold,—his mother, a terrible old hag, whose appearance, even in fiction, curdles one's blood—a young orphan girl, who has been taken in for kind- ness; and an ambitious youth of the same origin, but of higher education, and such hopes as have sprung into reality under the fostering care of Mr. Parnell and the Irish Party. This little
group, however, is enough for the development of the highest tragic -passion, and a quite original study of circumstance and feeling. They are planted in a scene as original as them- selves, a wild district in the wildest West of Ireland,—that
portion of North Clare known to its inhabitants as "the Burren." The description of this land of rock and stone is very vivid. It slopes upward from the Atlantic, "a succession of low hills, singularly grey in tone, deepening often towards evening into violet or dull reddish plum-colour, sometimes after sunset to a pale, ghostly iridescence," but not clothed with
• Hurriph : a Study. By the Hon. Emily Lawless. Edinburgh and London : William Blackwood and Bons.
sheep or pasture, as the spectator at the first glance might suppose :—
" These Bnrren bills are literally not clothed at all. They are startlingly, I may say scandalously, naked. From their base up to the battered turret of rock which serves as a summit, not a patch, not a streak, not an indication even of green, is often to be found on the whole extent. On others, a thin sprinkling of grass struggles upwards for a few hundred feet ; and in valleys and hollows where the washings of the rocks have accumulated, a grass grows, famous all over cattle-feeding Ireland for its powers of fattening. So, too, in the long vertical rifts or fissures which everywhere cross and recros.s its surface, maiden-hair fern and small tender-petalled flowers unfurl out of the reach of the cruel blasts. These do not, however, affect the general impression, which is that of nakedness personified --not comparative, but absolute. The rocks are not scattered over the surface as in other stony tracts, but the whole surface is rock. They are not hills, in fact, but skeletons—rain-worn, time-worn, wind-worn : starvation made visible, and embodied in a landscape."
In the midst of this stony desert lies the valley of Gartnacoppin, the lower part of which is a little oasis of green and flowering fertility, and here stands the dwelling of the tender-hearted Hurrish or Horatio O'Brien, a gentle giant who would not hurt a fly, and would, indeed, "hardly have cared to kill an English- man unless some very good purpose would have been served by so doing "—although his hatred of England was a creed, and his belief in the utter wickedness of her sway undoubting. "Had he been assured that, like Herod of old, an order had just been issued by Government for all infants under two years of age to be slaughtered, I doubt if it would have struck him as at all incredible, or even out of character with what he supposed to be the normal nature of its proceedings." But notwithstand- ing this rooted belief, and though he would have readily taken his part in any insurrection, Hurrish had no heart for murder. His objection would seem to have been rather con- stitutional than a matter of principle; but still he did object —to the scorn and indignation of his mother, whose furious delight in the murder of a poor process-server, and exultation in every deed of blood, are drawn with remorseless force. The orphan girl, the niece of Hurrish'e deceased wife, Ally Sheehan, is in everything the opposite of the terrible old woman ; yet this gentle, pure, and simple creature, full of sensitive refinement of mind, though brought up in all the rough- ness of an Irish cabin, with that inheritance of modesty which belongs to the very lowest of Irish girls (got for them by the praye:s of St. Bridget,—great be her reward !), and the intense poetic, ascetic spirituality which also belongs to the Irish blood, is entirely characteristic of her race. In her red petticoat, with her bare feet, with no "laming," and no mind to speak of, nothing but love, and tender, inarticulate thoughts, this girl goes through the tragic tale, never in any way elevated above her natural capacities, in all her native ignorance, weakness, and simplicity, set before us with an admirable delicacy and power. The picture altogether of their cottage, with its little background of "two solemn black pigs ;" three children, and an indefinite number of cocks and hens ; the universal untidiness, disorder, dirt, and plenty ; the wild virago of a mother, with her elf-locks, her black eyes, "bright still, amid the multiplicity of wrinkles which surrounded them as cracks a half-dried pool ;" the visionary, gentle girl, with her little instincts of cleanliness, the only impulse of the kind in the place; the good-humoured, big fellow going about his work, looking after his fields, rowing his coracle over the big Atlantic waves, trolling forth seditious songs in pure gaiety of heart, and meaning harm to no one ; all stand out before us against the rocky slopes, with their stony fissures deeply lined with sweet grass and flowers. No picture could be more vivid ; and its mixture of human life and feeling of the purest and most genial kind with ferocious passion and all that is most horrible in a state of affairs where law exists only to be defied and broken, and where all generous sentiment is connected with the committal or the concealment of crime—is striking in the highest degree. How Hanish himself is drawn unawares into bloodshed, and how he escapes and how he suffers, and the noble self-abnegation of his end, a most touching and elevated scene in its absolute simplicity, the reader must learn for himself.
The villain of the story—though it is circumstances and a wild impulse rather than any natural leaning to crime that make him a villain—is the younger brother of one of the small farmers of the Barren, with a little education and a gift of natural eloquence such as so many Irishmen possess ; and fills, when we see him first, a situation in a draper's shop in the nearest town, which gives him brevet rank as a gentleman with the peasants from among
whom he has sprung. He has his eye already fixed upon West- minster (en attendant College Green), and every likelihood of succeeding in his aspirations, when, in a sudden impulse of revengeful rage, he accuses the man whom he believes to be his brother's murderer ; and then and there loses popularity and prospects at a blow, and becomes in a moment, in the eyes of the strange community, an informer, and consequently worthy of neither tolerance nor sympathy. This revolution in the life of Maurice Brady, and his own amazed and despairing perception of it, is told with remarkable power. Nowhere we imagine, out of Ireland could it have been possible to exhibit so very distinct an example of the instantaneous transference of all sympathy to the supposed criminal's side. The triumph and delight of the weird old woman, the mother who has hitherto felt, with a sense of humiliation, that her son's horror of blood- shed was a weakness in him—when she believes him to have killed his enemy—a triumph quite unmixed with any sensation of regret or alarm—are equally original, but almost too horrible for the imagination.
In the midst of these powerful and impassioned scenes, an excellent sketch of a landlord and of his relations with the constabulary comes in almost incidentally, and lightens with a gleam of humour the sombre picture of the great house, in a state of semi-siege, where to light a candle before the shatters are shut is to provoke a chance bullet, and possible murder, scarcely less disagreeable than ostentatious protection, lurks behind every hedge; although the object of popular antipathy is himself an O'Brien of an old Irish family, and true to all the traditions of his race. The blaze of resent- ment which lights up in the honest bosom of this harassed and threatened squire, when the Cockney inspector of police takes him to task for the imprudence of his movements, and insists on the awful condition of the country, is extremely natural and lifelike, and expresses with great justice that genuine national sentiment which, whatever it may itself be forced to say, resents with indignation the criticisms of a stranger upon the little peculiarities of the dear mother-country, with all her faults beloved still. The introduction of Mr. O'Brien's pert young heir, who is happily persuaded that all that is said is nonsense and exaggeration, and that he him- self could soon, with his superior management, restore the natural order, is the only one in which we are conscious of any redundancy disturbing the self-restrained closeness of the con- struction. Young Thomond is a very clever sketch in himself, but he was not needed. Except in the two or three short scenes where he appears, the sequence of events is clear and rapid; and the characteristic musings, the" night thoughts," of Maurice in the tumult of revenge and dismay with which he finds himself displaced from his popular position, and of Ally in the horror of her gentle soul brought into contact with crime in the person most dear to her, and of Hurrish in the unwonted solitude and silence of his prison, are touched with the hand of a true artist. Miss Lawless has preluded, with more commonplace themes and in more ordinary methods, in her previous produc- tions. Here she has found a sphere in which she need fear no competition, and has produced a study of national character and circumstances to our mind singularly impressive, and well worthy the attention of the world.
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