An Irish Song Night

New Zealand Tablet, 27 April 1922, Page 19

An Irish Song Night

(By Jessie Mackay.)

An Impression of the Paris Conference

The songs of Innisfail—is there any spot on earth that their plaintive charm cannot turn into a grove of the Muses? How much more this magnificent Parisian hall, a stone throw from the garden of the Tuileries, a block from the Louvre? The bright daughters of Innisfail are met there and her dark-haired sons. There are faces there that will be talked of in other years, as now statesmen, scholars, thinkers who have their safe hands on the brakes of Ireland's chariot-wheels. Men will talk of de Valera—tall, stately, courtly,—collegiate and constructor, kindness and s integrity stamped on every line of the thin, noble face. Men will talk of Professor John Mac Neill, none so tall, and nowise vivid, with a laughing face, half that of a boy who won't grow old, and half that of a schoolmaster who will never crystallise out of being young—'till he speaks and lets the Irish world-philosopher and reconciler flash out of himself. They will remember this dark son of Anak and of Alma Mater, Dr. (Coffey, of Dublin, who speaks reluctantly and seldom, but never without weight and wisdom. There is the portly, personable Presbyterian divine. Dr. Irwin, from Ulster, who was imprisoned for Ireland's sake. There were stalwarts from the Dominions; firm, radical, though courtly Americans; scholars, business experts, churchmen, poets, such as chivalrous, beetlebrowed Dr. Douglas Hyde, the man of Gaelic. But look the world through and see if you can find a stronger, cleaner, higher, handsomer, or a more intelligent man anywhere. Good gracious, where are we? Place aux Dames, of course. So many fair Parisians have come to-night that it is hard to distinguish the not too numerous Irish ladies The foreground is always held by two of the Irish delegates (five for the treaty, and five not). These are Countess Markiewicz and Mary McSwiney, both members of the Dail— an ex-Cabinet Minister. They are always together. The Countess is tall, fair, and piquant, her delicate yet sharply outlined features sparkling with esprit She is the rainbow of the Conference, with a gown for every session. Patrician, though she is, socialist of the socialists and Marxian of Marx, Miss Mary McSwiney is a short, robust well complexioned typical Irish woman with blue eyes Her dress is plain. She wears black always and everywhere As a speaker she is as easy and as fluent as the Countess, and swayed by emotion. They are very fearless women Here, too—not a delegate but a visitor—is a dark distinguished, sweet-voiced grand dame, in stately weeds of widowhood. It is Mrs. Teeling, who bears the name of ■ Bartolome Teeling, a notable victim of '9B (The "Black-and-Tans" smashed his monument before leaving Ireland.) Who is this who comes suddenly like an apparition, with a face so sweet, sad though hopeful, the wasted lines of it yet stamped with a beauty that sent Ireland wild five-and-twenty years ago. She was Maud Gonne loveliest of actresses, most original of painters, herself the dream of Ireland's young poets. She, named Gonne McBride now, mother, widow, and soul of Ireland's rebirth as a nation. So slowly grind the mills of God, but surely at last! With a start we remember we saw this still lovely Sybil sitting this afternoon beside a man as dark and almost as slender, as sweet to hear, and in the awed impression, as like a gliding shadow as herself— Butler Yeats. Many a time these two had sat and talked together, dreaming and planning of the new soul they and Irish art were giving to bankrupt Ireland in the darkest recoil of her despair-to Kathleen Na Houlihan, whose day of redemption has now dawned. He is gone but we heard his brother— Yeats—to-night on the'Arts of Ireland. He is younger, fairer, less assured of speech and oddly touched with Americanisms-absent from the voice of William—but he has in him the soul of Ireland's Art. t ■. Madame Fay Sergent, with fire and spirit, first sings "5 1 r °Jin I s °P r l ano s " Mar Bannon," a wondrous ballad of the 500 ghostly men Mary saw in the Glen-a haunting thing, so- new that even Dr. Hyde does, not know it A

lightning change comes with Alice Milligan's "Wee Fiddle I Bought for Ninepence— and it was Irish, Too.'? "Ballinderry," another bewitching ballad, follows, and then one of Samuel Ferguson's fine old songs. A violin fantasia follows, rendered by the great Arthur Darley, from Dublin. It opens with "O'Donnell Abu," in honor of the little Spanish nobleman with the kindly Irish face, who remains to grace the occasion, delighted this week to be known to his fellow countrymen not as the Duke De Tetuan but rather as O'Donnell, the descendant of the exile Bed Hugh O'Donnell. The vocalist is now the vivacious contralto, Miss Terry O'Connor, gowned in pink, who can be as tender as she is sprightly elsewhere. Tender she is in the "Ballad of Glen." But what more melting thing is this that arrests the ear and memory, telling of trust betrayed, and a wandering mother with her babe in the snow, crooning of cruel parents and a crueller lover. Outside this warm shining room, the snow is actually falling over Paris, and as she sings the flakes seem to cleave the enervating air, till we see that mound they saw next day covering a dead child on a dead mother's breast. "Fanid Geove," by Padraic Colum? No, not written, only arranged, for, before Padraic Colum was born that song was sung—seventy years ago in the Scottish Highlands; fifty years ago it was sung amidst the Southern Alps of New Zealand by one whose voice is heard no more on earth. Tears and laughter, laughter and tears; what is this mad, jolly, whirling patter song, "Ballynure"?—an old song of the north, they call it. A break, an interlude, and then a violent quartette, a mournful harmony, dedicated to the memory of Terence McSwiney—sad, slow, yet changing into triumph, and intertwined with old Irish airs we know. It is a solemn moment when the composer, a man well up in years, comes forward and grasps the hand of Mary McSwiney on the dais, sister of Ireland's and the world's martyr most beloved. But it is "Dark Rosaleen" herself that pours from the lips of this vivid, vital, young Michael Gallagher, himself as dark of hair and eyes as Rosaleen—" Dark Rosaleen," given with all the matchless passion of that 17th century lover who left the English of it to Mangan and later to Pearse—"Dark Rosaleen" that has borne away the souls of lovers of two and a half centuries on a river of tears that is already in our time changed to a flood of triumph. Sweetly that superhuman melody drops into the merely human, though melting impulse that fired him who loved Una Bhan—Fair Una. That, again, drops into tho wailing pathos of an old street song, "The Harper of Armagh," finally whirling into the mad abandon of Winifred Letts' song, "The Terrible Child." There is a moment's hush before the last singer appears—Gerard "Crofts. He is not vivid, not outwardly vital, this Gerard Crofts, but has something of paleness, emaciation, shadow of greyness about him, as if he had been where vividness and vitality are crushed out of all. He has been there. The low, wailing, yet assured and resurgent "Hymn of Repentance" holds everyone in this Irish hall in the heart of this gay, flashing, sounding city. Then the pale singer is all wild mischief, dashing merriment in "Spalpine Arunc." And ah, then! conies that unique hymn of a nation's agony and trust—" Lord, J Will Carry Thy Cross for Ireland"—the music and the words both by Thomas Ashe, who carried that Cross to the grave, as we must needs remember. Did the singer carry it, too? We have heard women's words about us low, unhesitating, simple: "He was in prison; he wears gloves always now." The hymn begins. Something in the music enters the arcanum of every soul present. Once we heard it before. But this time, as the last note dies and the singer steps down, the white gloved hand flashes for a moment over the sunken eyes as if 'to shut out something. And again we hear women's voices say with a sort of detached finality: "He was in prison;, he always wears gloves now." He carried the Cross for Ireland, he is carrying it still a little way. And we have to carry it with him in our souls, in patience, in reverence, in silence. It was for something so stupendous that we have had to cross the world to realise —this unprecedented world union we have met to inaugurate, this immense racial peace ideal in which Ireland is to be blessed, and by Ireland, and through Ireland, all the peoples of the world are to be blessed with a new visionand yet a very old vision, too. The soul of this singer, the spirit there'. is in him!

He will not let us part on a sad note, in which only a few of us discern the triumph. It is not pathos, this wild galloping song of the boys, "Follow Me Up to Carlow." It makes the blood tingle and gallop, too, with the echo of it. He has us breathless at the end of it as if ho were the "Pied Piper" himself, piping us over uncounted leagues, all on the road to Carlow. It has been a rare safety-valve, this concert. We have felt that all who truly love Ireland must be grave, ready, vigilant, restrained. That neessity will hold us still on the highest lines of duty, vision, and world peace. We can all easily be so held, now we have let off steam.on the road to Carlow.