Bits of Blarney. By Robert J. Martin (" Ballyhooly ").
(Sands and Co. 3s.)—The stage Irishman dies so hard that we fear he is immortal ; and, at all events, it is annoying to find Mr. Martin, who bears a well-known Irish name, doing his best to keep him alive. This particular kind of clowning is harmless enough, no doubt, in some ways, but it is vulgar and vulgarising. Mr. Martin apparently lies awake at night trying to discover new permutations and combinations of this sort of thing, "I scattered all the features of his face," "Tom Walsh lifted a three- legged stool to enable the pedlar's head to count two on a division." He endeavours to amplify and add to the various ways of saying that a man is drunk, and deals largely in the attendant pleasantries. It is humour, no doubt, for it makes a great many people laugh, and there is a boisterous joviality about the run of his verses quite sufficient to account for a popular success ; but the mischief is that a great many people believe that this is the true and characteristic Irish humour, and form their estimate of the Irish people accordingly. One could get a great many persons to swear upon oath that the humour of the Sporting Times is very good humour, perhaps the best going ; but no educated human being takes the Sporting Times as representative of English humour in the same sense as Shakespeare is. Un- fortunately, Ireland has not got a Shakespeare, and it has a great many Mr. Martins. There is nothing more characteristic in this volume, nor more vulgar, than the poem which concludes it, and describes how a whole street. in Dublin was converted from "patriotism" by the fact that the Prince of Wales shook hands with an old woman. However, sentiment of this sort is always vastly popular in the music-halls, and no doubt it is profit- able to evoke it.
Previous page
