Books About Ireland
(from Some Sixty Years of Lifo in Ireland.) (Londe I fs. 6d.)
The Lady of the Cromlech. By Hugh do Discern. (Murray. is. lid. ) The Lady of the Cromlech. By Hugh do Discern. (Murray. is. lid. ) HERE are three books about Ireland. I grieve to say that an Irishman looking at one of them, Carleton's Country, asked " But who was Carleton ? " Very well ! here is a book to tell him about the man whom Mr. Shane Leslie and Mr. W. B. Yeats put first of Irish story writers. Mr. Leslie writes the Preface of this book, and though good wine needs no bush, it is pleasant to have a man write of his own country- side. It soon becomes plain that, while they write of Carleton's country, both Mr. Leslie and Miss Shaw have made this bit of Northern Ireland their own. But Miss Shaw follows Carleton faithfully from one poor house to another, for ho was a peasant boy, one of a large family. When he wrote his own record of life in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, he wrote of the life he knew among the hills and glens about the Clogher Valley. Ile had lived, loved, fought, danced among his own people. He had sought learning in hedge schools and posed as a classical scholar. lie was great enough for that fair fame—" his own country." But Miss Rose Shaw, setting forth in Carleton's footsteps, has wandered up the mountains further and further till she has made this land her own.
With faithful love and the exquisite artistry of her camera, Miss Shaw has produced a treasure of a book about Tyrone and its mountainy people with their old rich speech, their customs and folk tales. The Talbot Press of Dublin is to be. congratulated on producing such a book for five shillings, a price which puts it in easy reach. Still as regards these beautiful photographs (one would take them for reproductions of pictures), the price can hardly give them the printing they deserve.
One chapter in the book has already appeared in the Spectator, and I would advise all Spectator readers to sit by the fire and hold " Kailyee," as Miss Shaw does, with Ann Holland, the gamekeeper, and with old formic O'Hollund, prince of storytellers. But for all its fun, this book has serious worth for scholars of old ways and speech, as well as the charm of " those blue remembered hills." It has added one to the valuable books about Ireland.
Here is another book from Ireland to cheer the heart, the Reminiscences and Reflections of Canon Kingsmill Moore. It is stimulating reading, for the author has gone his own busy way for sixty years in Ireland working for education and civilization—no easy matter in that period. Neither rain nor bullets dismayed him. He went about his business as- Diocesan Inspector of Schools, going into the heart of loneliness on the south-west coast. And here that quiet faculty for interested enjoyment was with him as it had been in his Balliol days in the brilliant time when Jowett was Master, among such men as Myers, Walter Sichcl, W. II. Grenfell, Asquith, and Alfred Milner.
This book holds a side of Irish life which too often passes unnoticed. There is nothing of Croppy-Boy romance about ' it. It shows the quiet struggle for education and order which some men have kept up through all the years of disorder, through the " Troublesome Times," in fact. One hopes that Kathleen-ni-Houlihan has sound sense enough to recognize and love these dutiful sons.
The book has one regrettable flaw—the author's modesty. He refuses to talk about his home life or -his -lovely hobby of fern cultivation Yet in how many Irish gardens and at the Horticultural Shows one sees the loveliness of ferns, and hears—" They came from Canon Kingsmill Moore." Perhaps the Canon will now consider a book of home life and ferns. The third book is the Lady of the Cromlech, a novel by Hugh de Blacaun. If you like to pursue an amber-haired lady from Paris (she has left no name with the hero, only a snapshot of herself near her own home with a cromlech in the foreground), and if you like to follow her all over the Free State, you will see and hear a good deal of Mr. de Blacam's Ireland. I should not advise admirers of the Real Charlotte to tackle this book, but I dare say some English and Ameridan readers would like to find it in an Irish hotel. It has plenty of atmosphere of a sort, and you meet colleens and jovial boxers and kind old priests and—in the heel o' the hunt—the amber-haired lady at her own Cromlech on Christmas Eye.
W. M. LEres.
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