WAS HE BURIED IN KILLARHEY ?

Evening Star, Issue 22805, 13 November 1937, Page 12

WAS HE BURIED IN KILLARHEY ?

If all the big lies were taken out of the literature of the work! there would, indeed be little left except the;: bare hones of the alphabet. In a sense, of course, literature is all lies or invention, except that part of it called.'history, which is intended to be; at least % version of the truth. Mr H. G. Wells will have it that his. tory even is in large part a poor fiction,, badly co-ordixAtea, He would abolish most of it in the' same, way as an_oldl graveyard in our crowded cities is often abolished and converted into a parlc with flowers and swings so that life rejoices literally in the place of the dead,But this desire to get the past‘nub of the way is a, piece of sentimentalism, as if man was made only for hanging gardens and swings rather than for a fall off them into the waste spaces. I| would be more logical perhaps if our histories were written by rogues, so that the rogueries of the past should be analysed by an expert rather than by an honest idealist incapable of understanding the great rackets on which so much of acquisitive civilisation: ha® been built. . “ Herr Raspe, who was a rogue, ' says Viscount Castlerosse in the ‘ Sunday Express,’ “ wrote the life of Baro® Munchausen.” That is a simple and . ® moving , phrase, for ; of course, Munchausen is the classic pictorial “ liar, and what better than that a rogu# should embalm him. _ Viscount Castlerosse, who never visits his native Jvularney without adding an epigram to it, reminds us that Herr Raspe i* buried in that delightful place and that “ a deputation of serious Germans has conic over to discover his grave.” ■ _ II looks like the old rhyme having a justification at last:

Some say the devil is dead, ttys devil is dead, the devil is dead. Some .sav tbe devil is dead and buried in Killarney! ; Though, of course, to avoid international complications, the devil here must be used only figuratively, as we should say a “ merry devil.”