NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, 21 July 1921, Page 26

NOTES

The Sheridan Strain

There are people who attach such importance to heredity that they would make wooden legs a disqualification for the matrimonial market. But whatever there be in it, it is remarkable how the literary strain ran in the Sheridan blood for generations. The brilliant Richard Brinsley Sheridan inherited from his mother his poetic taste and from his father his talent as a dramatist. Even his grandfathera friend of Swift’s—was a noted writer. His son, Tom, had his brilliant wit, and Tom’s children, Caroline Sheridan (afterwards the Hon. Mrs. Caroline Norton) and Lady Dufferin, made names that still live. Alice, Richard Brinsley’s sister, became Mrs. Le Fanu, and her branch of the family kept up its reputation for imagination and genius. Lady Dufferin’s beautiful, touching song, I’m Sit tin’ on flic Stile, Mari/,” and also The Bay, of Dublin will never be forgotten by Irishmen. Sheridan Le Fanu’s reputation is thus estimated by T. W. Rolleston: “In Uncle Silas, in his wonderful tales of the supernatural, such as The Watcher, and in a short and less known but most masterly story, The Doom in the Dr ay on Volant, he touched the springs of terror, as perhaps no other writer of fiction in the language has been able to do. His fine scholarship, poetic sense, and strong, yet delicate handling of language and of incident give these tales a place quite apart among works of sensational fiction.” There is no need to recall that he was also the author of that racy poem, Shamus O’Brien. His brother, William Le Fanu, wrote a delightful volume of memoirs, Seventy Tears of Irish Life. Sheridan Knowles, the dramatist, was another of the stock to win distinction as a writer.

Winifred Letts

Here is a poem by a Wexford lady, and it will make readers anxious for more:

I think if 1 lay dying in some land Where■ Ireland is no more than just a name. My soul would travel hack to find that strand From whence it came.

I’d see the harbor in the evening light. The old men staring at some distant ship, The fishing they fasten left and right

Beside the slip.

The sea-wrack lying on • the wind-swept shore, The grey thorn bushes growing in the sand;

Our Wexford coast from Arldow to Cahore — My native land.

The little houses climbing up the hill. Sea-daisies growing in the sandy grass, The tethered goats that wait large-eyed and still

To watch you pass.

The women at the well with dripping pails, Their men colloguing by the harbor wall ,

The coils of rope, the nets , . the old brown sails, I’d know them all.

And then the Angelas — l'd surely see The swaying bell against a golden sly,

So God, who kept the love of home in me. Would let me die.

Aeh du lie.ber himmell And the foxes on Carrigruadh, and the grouse on Slievewee, and, between them, Tubberneerin, where the long, bright pike of Father Murphy’s boys drove the filth of Orangedom and the brutality of Saxondom to the deaths they deserved ! There is no past or present there and only one long day of waiting for the new dawn that is rising fast, in which we shall see the bursting of the “galling chain.” How Vinegar Hill, Boulavogue, the Three Rocks, and Ross will blaze with bonfires one of these days. Hy Kinsellagh, Abu !

Hard Hit

We all know Hazlitt as an enlightened critic and as a scholar of high reputation. His essays on Shakspere have delighted us time and again, and they are always fresh and luminous. Who would have thought that this able critic could wield also a pen that smashed an opponent as effectively as ever a blackthorn at Donnybrook broke a skull ? Take this attack on Gifford, the editor of the Quarterly Review-.

“Sir, you have an ugly trick of saying what is not true of anyone you do not like ; and it will be the object of this letter to cure you of it. You are a little person, but a considerable cat’s-paw ; and so far worthy of notice. Your clandestine connection with persons high in office constantly influences your opinions, and alone gives importance to them. You are the Government Critic —a character nicely differing from that of a Government spy —the invisible link that connects literature with the police. It is your business to keep a strict eye over all persons who differ in opinion with his Majesty’s Ministers, and to measure their talents and attainments by the standard of their servility and meanness.

“There is something in your habits and nature that fit you for the situation into which your good fortune has thrown you. In the first place, you' are in no danger of exciting the jealousy of your patrons by a mortifing display of extraordinary talents, while your sordid devotion to their will and to your own interest at once ensures their gratitude and contempt. “Raised from the lowest rank to your present despicable eminence iu the world of letters, you are indignant that any should attempt to rise into notice, except by the same regular trammels and servile gradations, or should go about to separate the stamp of merit from the badge of ■ sycophancy, 1 “From the difficulty you yourself have in constructing a sentence of common grammar, and your frequent failures, you instinctively presume that no author who comes under the lash of your pen can understand his mother-tongue; and again, you suspect everyone who is not your very good friend ’ of knowing nothing of the Greek or Latin, because you are surprised to think how you came by your knowledge of them. “Such, sir, is the picture of which you have sat for the outline:- all that remains is to fill up the little,

mean, crooked, dirty details. The task is to me' rib very pleasant one for I can feel very little ambition to follow you through your ordinary routine of petti- 1 fogging objections and barefaced assertions,' the only difficulty of making which is to throw aside all ’regard to truth and decency, and the only difficulty in answering them is to overcome one’s contempt for the writer. But you are a nuisance and should be abated.”

He who runs may read in that terrible picture ■ a likeness of the New Zealand dav-lie man who 'has thrown truth and decency to the winds and sold his soul to Lloyd George and Greenwood, whose crimes he is ready to applaud and to palliate. No truer picture of the ignoble race could be drawn: it is lifelike in many details. Government spy; sycophant: arrogant ignoramus ; cat’s-paw devotion to the will of the bosses and to self-interest : and all the other “crooked, dirty details” : verily it is drawn to the life.