Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 26, 5 July 1923, Page 7

Evening Memories

(By William O’Brien.)

CHAPTER XXlV—(Continued.) It was in this stone-walled Arcadia I found the rarest luxury of all — Its longs et silencieux loisirs (to use the words of M. Burdeau) in which I composed the only two romances I was destined ever to write — When We Were Boys, and A Quern of Men. Mr. Sexton once made the remark: “There is one thing I envy you, that wherever you go you can carry your workshop with you.” I was now to realise how much this fairy-godmother’s gift was to lie valued. 11 hen We Were Boys occupied the brightest months of my first two sojourns in Galway and A Queen of Men was the delicious “hard labor” of my last. The works were written on sheets of official blue foolscap, stamped with the Royal lion and unicorn, and marked with the red ink initials of the Governor at the head of every page. The Governor was also solemnly directed to act as Censor of the contents of each page as it was completed. No. prison task could well have seemed more burdensome than that imposed on the unfortunate Governor of deciphering the mysterious inscriptions of a handwriting as puzzling for most people as any on the stones of Nineveh. To my amazement he not only discovered the key to the mystery, but would spend his evenings poring over the manuscript with the fondness of the faithful John Forster hanging over the first reading of a page of Dickens. That no trait of absurdity should to the last he wanting to Mr. Balfour’s Draconic Prison rigors, the Prison Board confiscated my writings on the official foolscap they had supplied me with, and only consented to surrender the manuscript under the threat of a lawyer’s letter. When We Were Boys was planned, so far as it was planned at all, as a. transcript of life in Ireland in the ’sixties, with special relation to the conflict between the young idealism of the patriots and the selfless but shortsighted ecclesiastical powers whom Cardinal Cullen induced to range themselves on the side of England and of the Parliamentary corruptionists. The book literally wrote itself, without any “plot” beyond the workings of Irish life as it was lived, and the graces of pure literature were, no doubt, neglected for the ''passionateness of a political appeal, at a moment when the sympathies of the British Democracy for a sturdy Irish independence, “neither Saxon nor Italian,’ were already as good as conquered. The hope was to conjure down the superstition that “Home Rule” meant “Rome Rule,” by depicting the youth of Ireland to be capable of holding its own against aggression in the political sphere from any power • no matter how worshipped in its proper sanctuary, and better stll, by proving the dotcrines of civic freedom to be cherished no less bravely by the most powerful school, of Irish ecclesiastics themselves. The most ticklish topic in Ireland, no doubt; but it was for the very reason that my soul was aflame with admiration for the order of splendid Irishmen •I had been admitted to study by Archbishop Croke’s fireside, in their prison cells, and by their people’s side in many a moving scene of famine or oppression that I felt bold enough to believe that the truth would not be found to do injustice to the Irish priests, while it would-be of inestimable value to their nation. It was the impossible that happened. The book that was for many months the

pleasant companion >of my prison home, did, indeed, come ’ to exercise a lasting and most potent influence in the life or a generation of my countrymen, lay and cleric, but it aroused among a too considerable section of the Irish Bishops and priests an unsleeping anger and an implacable opposition to its author, to,which the politicians who led Parnell’s Parliamentary movement to destruction, owed ' that support in the country which alone could have given them maleficent power. And the poison worked all r the more subtly that the attacks upon When We Were Boys as an anti-clerical libel, were made in secret, and were never subjected to the test of public criticism. In the Introduction to a Re-issue of the novel thirty years after (Maunsel, 1919), I have endeavored to throw some light upon this amusing aberration of judgment. “The mystery is,, fortunately susceptible* of a whimsically simple explanation. The greater part of those who raged most furiously against the book had never read it, or had only read a few grotesquely misleading passages forced under their eyes by a slipshod, and not even malicious newspaper reviewer. It so happened that, at the request of the book-critic of the Freeman's Journal , he was furnished with advanced proofs,, in order to enable him to prepare an extended and understanding notice of the book for the day of its publication. With the indolence of his tribe, his matured judgment took the form of a pageful of extracts strung together by a few sentences of golden j laudation on his part. Worse still, being himself as mischance would have it, a man of marked anti-clerical bias, he with a special relish scissored out those passages which threw into a strong light Monsignor McGrudder’s [> haughty contempt for insular politics in comparison with I eternal things, and the passionate protests with which'the fiery patriotism of his young countrymen paid him back. * Not so. much as a hint was given of the main argument * and purpose of the book, which was to depict the mischief wrought in the religious even more than in the patriotic sphere, by that divorce between the two vitialising energies of the Irish sold decreed by Cardinal Cullen’s* superb, but as time has long proved, near-sighted conception of the interests of his Emancipated Church. I pleaded for the homogeneity of priests and people as the essence of wholef some Irish life, and lo! to a thousand clerical breakfasttables I was presented as though I had fulminated some * decree chasing the priests from all influence in the business of their country. The false impression thus stupidly started, it has required a quarter of a century of bitter experience to overtake. The average plain-going rural priest, little addicted to the reading of romances, wanted to know no more, and either never dipped into the book at all, or as soon as the Parnell Split tore the country asunder, a few months after the book was published, only dipped into it in search of political explosives against its author. The poison of faction finished what honest ignorance had begun. , “There was something of the humiliation of falling a victim to some coarse practical joke in finding oneself girded at as an anti-clerical in the most secret recesses of whose being there had never lurked any feeling but one almost of worship for an influence which was as the oxygen of the Irish air, the fragrance of our Irish countryside, the bringer of good tidings hero and hereafter, the consoler who ‘ turneth the' shadow of death into the morning.’ ” (To be continued.) ■