A NOVEL BY A FENIAN.*
WE have not read Mr. Kickham's other book, Sally Kavanagh, or the Untenanted Graves, but if we may trust the opinions of the Press quoted at the end of the volume before us, it is "one of the most powerful appeals ever made in behalf of the Irish tenant." Of Mr. Kickham we are told that his name "has become the loving property of his country," which we presume to be Irish for 'the property of his loving country.' The "aim and dream" of his life is, says the Waterford News, "the exaltation of our [Irish] national character, and the placing in the light of day the terrible grievances which, alas ! so often turn the love of the peasant's heart to direst hate." In the story of the Untenanted Graves this aim was prosecuted" with exquisite judgment." On some occasions, however, at least when tried by the tests of the blood-thirsty Saxon, Mr. Kickbam's activity has been characterised by judgment not quite so exquisite, and the result has been the inscription of his name in the roll of Fenian martyrs. Knowing this fact, we looked for some hot work in the new novel,—new, we mean, to us, for there is nothing on the title-page or elsewhere to show when it was published: Fenianism, one would think, with its midnight drillings and its secret conclaves, its attacks on police vans, blowings-up of prison walls, and attempted invasions of Colonies, might yield the novelist something in the way of melodramatic effect. It has not yielded anything of the kind to Mr. Kickham. The book is drearily inoffen- sive. The author, we suppose, had no intention of inditing a Fenian romance, and what he has given us is a succession of pictures of quiet life in Ireland, executed in water-colours. Judging from its pages, we should say that Mr. Kickham was a simple-minded, good-natured man, unlikely in the extremeat degree to be dangerous to any Government. If Fenians in general think and speak in the mildly sentimental and platitudi- narian manner of Mr. Kickham, it seems probable that greatly too much has been made of the whole Fenian business.
• Knorknagote ; or, the Homes of Tipperary. By Charles J. Kickham, Author of "Sally Kavanagh; or, the Untenanted Graves." Dublin: Sullivan. In the first chapter of Knocknagow, Mr. Henry Lowe, English- man, becomes the guest of Mr. Maurice Kearney, tenant of the Tipperary farm so named, and in the sixty-six chapters by which the first is succeeded we are informed of the sayings and doings of the dwellers in Knocknagow and the Tipperary homes in its vicinity. The time, at the commencement of the tale, is Christmas, and Mr. Lowe, who is a Protestant, and who, strange to say, had never been in a Roman Catholic place of worship, attends divine service with the Kearneys. The sermon strikes Mr. Lowe as "a torrent of barbaric eloquence," and he is surprised—why such a thing should surprise him we cannot imagine—that the figurative passages move the people most. "For instance, when the preacher depicted the Virgin wandering through the streets of Bethlehem, seeking for shelter and finding every door closed against her, and proceeded The snow falls, the cold winds blow—and the Lily of Heaven is withered,' a cry burst from the congregation, and the sobs were so loud and frequent that the preacher was obliged to pause till the emotion he had called forth had subsided." It does not seem to have struck Mr. Lowe as in the slightest degree absurd to represent Christmas in Palestine as pre- cisely similar to Christmas in Tipperary, or to speak of snow-storms withering lilies anywhere. In the second chapter, we are intro- duced to the heroine, or one of the heroines, of the book. Mr. Kearney's eldest daughter "was tall, though not of the tallest. The driven snow was not whiter than her neck and brow. A faint blush at that moment tinged her usually pale cheek, which, together with a pair of ripe, rosy lips, and eyes of heavenly blue, imparted a warmth to what otherwise might be considered the marble coldness of her almost too ideal beauty." This description has the fatal defect of not being characteristic. Rosy lips and heavenly-blue eyes are the property of penny-a-liners and of twelfth-rate poetasters everywhere, and Mr. Kickham ought not to have put us 'off with them, instead of telling us how pretty Irish girls really look. Better—indeed, one of the best things in the book—is the description of a wren-hunt :— " Mr. Lowe was astonished to see an excited crowd of men and boys armed with sticks, and running along on either side of a thick, briery fence, beating it closely, and occasionally aiming furious blows at he knew not what. After a while, he caught a glimpse of the tiny object of their pursuit, as escaping from a shower of blows, it flitted some ton yards along the fence, and disappeared from view among the brambles. The crowd, among whom Mat, the Thrasher, and Wattletoes were con- spicuous, rushed after ; and as they poked their sticks into the withered grass and beat the bushes, the poor little wren was seen creeping through the hedge, and the blows rained so thick and fast about it that its escape seemed miraculous. It did escape, however, and after a short flight had just found shelter in a low sloe-bush, when Mat, the Thrasher, leaped forward, and with a blow that crashed through the bush as if a forest-tree had fallen upon it, seemed beyond all doubt to have annihilated his kingship. Grace, who could only see the ludicrous side of the scene, laughed till she had to catch at Mary's cloak for support, while Mary turned away with an exclamation of pain. But though she kept her head tamed away to avoid seeing the little mutilated representation of the proto- martyr, even she was forced to laugh when the huge Thrasher shouted, 'I struck her ! I struck her ! and knocked my hat full of feathers out of her !' After a minute of complete silence, during which all eyes, except Mary's, were fixed upon the sloe-bush, a scream of delight from Grace surprised her into looking round. When, lo ! there was the wren, safe and sound, high up in the air! Instead of taking refuge in the briery fence, it changed its tactics altogether, and flew right across the field into a quarry overgrown with brambles, followed by all its pursuers except Mat, the Thrasher, whose look of amagement, as he stared with open mouth after the wren, elicited another peal of laughter from Grace, in which iMary and the young men could not help joining."
Mr. Kickham does not tell us, as he ought to have done, whether the wren finally escaped or no ; but it is evident that, from its minuteness and nimbleness, it had good enough chance to make the sport quite as fair as the hunting of foxes or hares.
Irish priests, if we may believe Mr. Kickham, address their people in a practical, personal, home-thrusting manner which might offend the Bishop of Oxford. In his "regular discourse," indeed, Father Hannigan appears to have confined himself to those abstract spiritualities and generalities which Sir Stafford Northcote thinks most consonant with the dignity of the pulpit ; but he made a point, before quitting the chapel after mass, of saying something which no one could find too grand to be useful. There are clergymen, not a few, in England who might do worse than follow Father Hannigan's example :—
" He now tamed round and began, in his deep, big voice, with : 'Now, what's this I was going to say to ye?' He pressed the fore- finger of his left hand against his temple, as if trying to recall something that had escaped his memory. Mr. Lowe thought he was about giving up the attempt in despair, when he suddenly jerked up his head, exclaiming,—' Ay! ay! ay! D'ye give up stealing the turf in the name o' God! Everyone,' he continued, after a panne, 'must steal turf such weather as this that hasn't it of their own. But sure if ye didn't know it was wrong, ye wouldn't be telling it to the priest And ye think it would be more disgraceful to beg than to steal it. That's a great mis- take. No decent man would refuse a- neighbour a hamper of turf such I weather as this. And a poor man is not a beggar for asking a hamper ' of turf such weather as this, when he can't get a day's work, and the Easter-water bottles bursting. Ye may laugh ; but Judy Managua stopped me on the road yesterday to know what she ought to do. Her bottle of Easter-water that she had under her bed was in a lump of ice, and the bottle—a big, black bottle that often gave some of ye a head-ache, an' maybe lwasn't without giving more of you a heart-ache. before Judy took my advice and gave up that branch of her business—well, the big, black bottle was split in two with the fair dint of the frost, under the poor woman's bed. And the Lord knows no Christian could stand without a spark of fire to keep the life in him,—let alone looking at a houseful of children shivering and shaking, and be able and willing to work, and not a. stroke of work to be got. But ye all know that stealing is bad, and yo ought fitter make your cases known to the priest, and maybe some- thing might be done for ye. Pride is a good thing—daeent, manly pride—and 'twill often keep a man from doing a inane act oven when he's sorely tempted. Spent is a good thing. But, take my word for it, there's nothing like HONESTY. And poverty, so long as it is not brought on by any fault of his own, need never bring a blush to any man's cheek. So, in the name o' God, d'ye give up stealing the turf.'" We shall be glad if our extracts from Mr. Kickham's novel lead readers to form a more favourable idea of its character than we have been able to attain to, and induce them to read the book for themselves. The worst we have to say of it is that it is rather dull,—it seems to be in a high degree veracious. The picture drawn of Irish society in Tipperary has an attestation of its correctness in its flatness. Our difficulty is to imagine how wars and rumours of wars, seditious and plots and insurrectionary hatchings, should have place among a population so pacific, so simple, and with reference at least to every thing and person that is Irish, so feebly senti- mental. Mat, the Thrasher, the strong man and peasant hero of the book, has been seen figuring in the hunt of a wren. and the feats in which he exhibits his dexterity and strength are holding the plough and hurling the hammer. The most alarming character, or one of the most alarming, among the dramatii. personw, is "an old Croppy," whose notions of security of tenure are certainly energetic. Five years ago," remarks this old gentleman, "I could count three-an'-twenty houses, big an' little, between the cross of Liscorrig au' Shanbally Bridge ; an' to-day you couldn't light your pipe along that whole piece uv a road, barrin' at wan house,—and that's my own. An' why am I left. there? Because they knew I'd do id,' he muttered through hie clenched teeth, as if he were speaking to himself." What they knew he would do was to give any man that came to tarn him out on the road "the length of id," using for the purpose a pike that had seen hot work in '98. Mr. Kickham earnestly protests against classing men who revenge themselves, in the old Croppy's way, upon persons who fling their wives and children as "homeless out- casts" upon the world, with common murderers. "And surely, he adds, "no one will for a moment class" them "with the human wild beasts with whom the writer of these pages was doomed to herd for years." We must say -that we should never have gathered from this book that Mr. Kickham was a dangerous- person, or that it could be necessary to imprison him. Possibly it would have been better to let him and his friends play at rebellion till they were tired. Britannia Mater ought not to be startled by every noise in the nursery.
Previous page
