THE IRISHMAN OF FICTION.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXXX, Issue 10106, 3 August 1893, Page 2

THE IRISHMAN OF FICTION.

At the last meeting of the Irish Literary Society, Mr Lionel Johnson lectured on the " Irishman of Fiction.” He contended that English writers, with a few notable exceptions, from Shakspere’s time to the present day, had pourtrayed the Irish character with extrema unfairness and misunderstanding, and that tha Irishman in literature had been made to take the place of clowns and buffoons on the stage. Ireland had not for ages been in a normal condition, and the Irishman, as literature knew him, was a man swayed by influences which were not natural. All sorts and conditions of men, the Irish of Protestant ascendency and the Irish of Catholic servitude, had suffered alike. Unless a writer looked upon the Irish with real respect, and not aa a curious, outlandish, unaccountable race, all his comic Irish characters, with their brogue and blackthorns, would not make him a really good writer upon Ireland. He never saw the poetry of the Irish character, but the squalor and the misery. Thera was more than the pig in the cabin, and more outside the door than the dunghill. There was the heroic endurance of the people, their beautiful faith, and their memories full of dreams, and legends, and music. While touching on the latter subject, Mr Johnson incidentally referred to the decay of old country songs among the English peasantry, and of the village fiddler who kept tfce old country dances going, and said it was positively painful to him, when tramping in the moat primitive parts of England, to hear children in the country lanes singing, not the old country songs that their mothers sung, but last year’s ditties from the music-hall. Mr T. D. Sullivan, M.P., who proposed a vote of thanks to Mr Johnson, observed that the London representation of the Irish brogue was vulgar and false, the Irish, as a matter of fact, having retained the early English pronunciation of the Anglo-Norman invaders of Ireland. Aa to Irihh bulls, he confessed that the best bulls he ever heard were made in the House of Commons, not by Irish members, but by English and Scotch. Ho was glad to observe that the hideous caricatures of the Irishman in the comic papers had been greatly modified of late, and hoped they would soon disappear.