LIBELLING A NATION.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 216, 15 June 1877, Page 17

LIBELLING A NATION.

(From the Nation.) British writers are honouring Irish themes fast now with a good deal of particular attention. In spite of the great topics and pet whims of the day — the Eastern embroglio, the Ritualist rebellion, the Indian famine, the price of meat, the pranks of Spiritualism, and so on — these active penmen who cater for the minds of the British public, find leisure to say their say about this island and Jts people, and, no doubt, find plenty of readers to believe in their of us and to admire the style of the narration. Last Summer Mr. Punch had one of his humourists here for the holidays, and this gentleman, considerately combining pleasure and business, "did" the emerald isle by rail from the capital to Killarney, and sketched the impressions produced by his tour for the London Charivari, in a series of scrappy papers, intended, of course, to be funny, but, in truth, so excessively dismal, that, as a certain critic declared, to read one, or to hear it read, was enough to make a man " take to drink." And the example of Mr. Punch sheds a genial ray which the press of the Modern Babylon by no means fails to borrow. From the Times to the halfpenny Echo, and form the Graphic to the Penny Illustrated Paper, all the organs, whether serious or comic, or only dull, keep us Irish pretty continually in their eyes and before their minds, and the consequence is, a constant fire of leading articles, which, if not actually insulting, are insultingly condescending ; an inexhaustible series of sketches of a sort of " Irish life " which Irishmen, strange to say, can never discover for themselves, and a perpetual flow of cartoons, of the Baron Munchausen school of fancy, explained and adorned by letterpress, expressed in such a dialect as never yet was heard on land or sea. Nay, even the new sixpenny weeklies, a class of high-and-niighty organs, manufactured by the deftest hands for the cream of British readers, deign to trouble themselves a little now and then with our affairs, and whilst the Whitehall Review makes society in Dublin the target of its high-toned scorn, May/air discourses of Mr. Butt, the ins and outs of the Home Rule party, and the salient personal traits of Waterford's new member and the Major. Plays, too, and books are written to represent us to the Saxon. An ex-editor of Punch makes a drama out of the story of a Lord Clancarty. A couple of obscure tourists penetrate to the heart of Connaught, and, after a few weeks spent in studying the country folk-— from a side-car or the window of a hotel — produce a brace of novels, intended to point the moral that Irishmen are a shocking erew — a horde of reckless drunkards, wildly boisterous in their cups, but cool and cunning enough when an act of sneaking treachery, or of blood for revenge or greed, recommends itself to their degraded natures. The sort of literary assassin who writes such books as these would have it believed by his readers that the very few decent persons to be met with in Ireland are Englishmen. One of the two novels just referred to has been cast in the shape of a play, and is occupying at present the boards of a London theatre. Its ignorance is intense, and its ferocity is savage. It strives to substitute for the Irish peasant of life and of Boucic.iult's drama — the bright, generous, witty, and affectionate Cclt — a besotted and ruthless creature whose only pleasure is drink and whose only mode of enterprise is murder. Had any other people been so dealt with in book or play, the spirit of condemnation would rise in strength j but since it is only the Irish who are attacked by a nameless liar, the few voices of honest anger are drowned in the chorus of praise. The malignant novel is sought after at all the libraries. The absurd and fantastic play draws crowded houses. Another stab in the dark at Ireland is applauded by the worthy Briton, and another cause for mutual alienation and distrust is added to the many between the peoples. {Concluded in oui' next.)