Galway of the Races E-Book

Robert Lynd

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1990

Beschreibung

Born of a Belfast manse, Robert Lynd (1879-1949) became one of the most graceful and favoured writers of the early century, and had some thirty books published in his lifetime. The essays in Galway of the Races represent his writings on Ireland (Protestant and Papish, with accounts of Connolly, Kettle, Griffith, Shaw, Yeats and Joyce), on literature (from Donne to Hazlitt, Keats, Turgenev and Chekhov) and on life at large (the Great War, the British Museum, smoking, sport, walking and other pleasures). A biographical introduction underpins the selection. After two posthumous collections Lynd's reputation declined, but forty years on the work of this autobiographer, critic and social observer re-emerges with all its original vitality. These diverse and entertaining essays will give enduring pleasure to a new generation of readers. 'At times humorous, reflective and anecdotal, bearing witness to the political and cultural events of his day and yet, withal, holding a timeless appeal. It is an excellent selection of Lynd at his most forceful... Here is the voice of a truly great Ulsterman.' - Peter Berresford Ellis, Irish Democrat 'This selection of essays covers a host of topics with zest and elegance and humour.' - Robert Greacen, Irish Independent 'It can't have been easy to choose the essays, since they all attain a high degree of competence and readability.' - Patricia Craig, The Irish Times

Leseprobe

GALWAY OF THE RACES

SELECTED ESSAYS

ROBERT LYND

EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY Sean McMahon

THE LILLIPUT PRESS 1990

CONTENTS

Title Page

Robert Lynd: An Introduction by Sean McMahon

THE PUBLISHED WORKS OF ROBERT LYND

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART ONE IRELAND AND HER AUTHORS

1. The Orange Idealist

2. Hibernia Rediviva

3. Galway of the Races

4. James Connolly: An Appreciation

5. The Work of T. M. Kettle

6. Arthur Griffith: The Patriot

7. G. B. S. as Idol

8. William Butler Yeats

9. James Joyce and a New Kind of Fiction

10. The Critic as Destroyer

PART TWO WRITERS AND THEIR TRADE

11. John Donne

12. Molière

13. Henry Fielding

14. Boswell

15. Charles Lamb

16. Hazlitt

17. Keats in His Letters

18. Turgenev

19. Tchehov: The Perfect Story-Teller

20. The Labour of Authorship

PART THREE THE WITNESS

21. ‘The Witness’

22. White Citizens

23. On Never Going to the British Museum

24. Farewell to Tobacco

25. The Promenade

26. Arguing

27. The Draw

28. Aunts

29. Railway Stations I Have Loved

30. Spade and Bucket

Copyright

ROBERT LYND: AN INTRODUCTION

An English examiner once wryly suggested that, much as he admired Robert Lynd, the young men and women of Ulster should be made aware that there were other essayists. This recommendation in a report of the late 1940s on the Northern Ireland Senior Certificate illustrates Lynd’s fame and popularity as a writer by the time of his death in 1949, and the degree to which he has been forgotten in the forty-odd years since.

It is also a reminder of the central place once occupied by the essay in the study of English literature. A promenade from Bacon to Priestley took in Addison and Steele, Goldsmith, Lamb and Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Dickens in the ‘Boz’ of his sketches, De Quincey, Robert Louis Stevenson, Chesterton and Belloc, and E. V. Lucas. The form was popular with teachers and pupils alike, and young people were encouraged to practise it. Lynd was the most agreeable and emulated of models, and contemporary attitudes were reflected in examination questions in which polemical and scientific topics were heavily outnumbered by subjects such as ‘Butterflies’, ‘Detective Stories’, ‘Trains’ and ‘Birthdays’.

The essay form pre-dated the novel and enjoyed recurrent periods of popularity, its most recent ‘silver age’ culminating in the Harmsworth revolution of the late 1890s. A new literacy had been created by the 1870 Education Act in England, periodicals needed copy, and many who never would have read a novel became regular readers of these popular journals. Not all the material was of the highest standard and one can sense a weariness and a perfunctoriness in the genre that incensed Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf, herself an essayist, used to refer in her letters and diaries to ‘scribblers and second-rate writers in second-rate clothes’. Her husband, Leonard Woolf, did Lynd more justice, however, when he described him as ‘one of those impeccable journalists who every week for thirty or forty years turn out an impeccable essay … like an impeccable sausage about anything or everything or nothing’.

The popular essay largely disappeared with the popular magazine. Lynd’s career with the New Statesman from 1913 to 1945 and his personal following probably preserved a little the life of the form. In 1964 Michael Hamburger wrote, ‘The essay is just as outmoded as the art of letter-writing, the art of conversation and the art of walking for pleasure,’ but it remains a healthy and idiosyncratic expression of personality, and is even regaining some of its old strength in the work of modern practitioners such as P. J. Kavanagh of the Spectator, Hubert Butler, Edward Hoagland, and in the higher reaches of modern critical discourse. Few contemporary writers, however, have the opportunity or the leisure that enabled Lynd to compose his impeccable pieces, let alone have them preserved in thirty printed books, as his were. He served the essay at its best, a minor art-form, a dialogue between writer and reader, unselfconsciously popular. He could count on a shared culture, an appreciation of the idiosyncratic and certain standards of behaviour. Even in his purely literary essays he disdained footnotes or references, and in the personal ones such glossing would have seemed an impertinence to reader and writer alike.

The thirty collections, published between 1908 and 1945, contain not only a store of excellent writing but an oblique social history of the period and components of an informal autobiography. All three aspects are represented in this spare selection. Yet because the man and his work have largely disappeared from view, the following sketch of Lynd’s life and professional career is needed by way of an introduction to the writings.

I

Robert Wilson Lynd (the ‘Wilson’ was his paternal grandmother’s surname) was born in Belfast on 20 April 1879, the elder son and second of seven children of the Rev. Robert John Lynd DD, a Presbyterian minister who served his year as Moderator of the Church in Ireland in 1888. The Lynds were of Huguenot extraction, refugees from the St Bartholomew’s Night Massacre of the late sixteenth century in France. Once settled in Scotland each generation produced its divine. Those in the paternal line were nearly all ministers from the time Robert’s great-great-grandfather, Charles, blown off course enroute for Larne, landed in Lough Swilly and settled in Rathmullan. His son, also Charles, was born in 1681 and ordained minister for ‘Fannet’ (Fanad) in 1708. He became fluent in Irish for pulpit and propaganda (a linguistic skill his great-grandson also acquired for similar purpose, though he never preached). He moved to Coleraine in 1728 and published an anti-Seceder tract, ‘A Short and Plain Vindication of Several Spiritual Principles, especially of the Conditionality of the Covenant of Grace’, in 1749. Lynd’s father, Robert John, born in 1833 at Killure, near Coleraine, was the son of a farmer, John Lynd. He was educated at Queen’s College, Belfast, and the Presbyterian Assembly College, and ordained at Whiteabbey, Co. Antrim, in 1856.

The Belfast Street directories for the period give his home addresses as The Manse, Whiteabbey; 3 Brookhill Avenue, Cliftonville Road; 34 Elmwood Avenue; and Viewmount, Windsor Avenue. His business addresses, so to speak, were Whiteabbey, Berry Street and, finally, May Street Presbyterian churches. The last was regarded as a plum appointment though in time the middle-class move to the suburbs depleted his congregations. The church, city-centred and grandiose, had been built by subscription for the Rev. Henry Cooke (1788-1868). This charismatic leader had almost single-handedly destroyed the radical ’98 tradition of the Belfast Presbytery and established the Presbyterian Church as a supporter of unionism every bit as stalwart as the Church of Ireland. In his 1907 booklet The Orangemen and the Nation, Lynd, writing as ‘Riobárd Ua Fhloinn’, observed:

Why is it then that Orangemen are less national today than they were a hundred years ago? I can see no reason for it except that they are less consciously Irish than they used to be. And this, I believe, is largely owing to the influence of the Reverend Dr Cooke. The people of Belfast put up a statue to Dr Cooke. But Dr Cooke, as far as I can see, did as much to de-Irishize the Protestant North of Ireland as Daniel O’Connell did to de-Irishize the Catholic South.

This memorial statue stands in College Square right at the gates of Lynd’s school, ‘Inst’, and he would have had a daily reminder of the baneful power and influence of ‘The Black Man’, as the statue has been known to generations of Belfast citizens.

Lynd père was more liberal and gentle and little given to political involvement, though his obituary in the Belfast NewsLetter (19 November 1906) praised his public stand against Home Rule. Even his year of Moderatorship was uncontroversial. His one recorded public pronouncement was on welcoming the newly appointed Assistant Professor of Hebrew at Assembly College. He urged the man, Thomas Walker, to remember that the Bible was the inspired word of God and admonished him not to follow ‘the wild and improbable theories of the higher critics nor reject the old merely because it is old’. (This, properly laicized, might well have summarized his son’s attitude to literary criticism.) Two years later, at the Jubilee Assembly, he read a paper on ‘The Place and Work of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland’. A typical admonition occurs near the close:

The unholy flame of party and sectarian strife has too often burned in the midst of us. We have forgotten our responsibilities to our country and our countrymen, and the commission which we have received to conquer this land for Christ has too often remained for us a dead letter.

Lynd was born in the Brookhill Avenue house, but it is Elmwood Avenue that is the scene of his earliest memories. This street of tall Victorian houses lies very close to the Queen’s College which became his university and which in 1946 awarded him the degree of D. Litt. (honoris causa). He was living there as a child when a mad bull raged loose and had to be shot. He remembered his nurse being sent to fetch him home from kindergarten on the occasion:

It seems to me, as I look back on it, curiously illogical to have hurried us off home in this fashion, now that the bull was dead…. Some days afterwards, when I went round the shops with my mother, we called at the butcher’s to order a sirloin…. ‘Tell him, not from the mad bull,’ I asked her earnestly…. I went about for a time in almost as great dread of mad bulls as of Papists. (‘School’, 1924)

In the same essay, he describes how at the age of five ‘I was taken to a kindergarten run by two German ladies and asked to read something about a spider from a Nelson’sRoyal Reader, so that it might be seen for what class I was fitted.’ It was in Elmwood Avenue too that on nights of storms the children were brought down to the safety of the sitting-room for fear the chimney would be blown through the roof. Lynd writes so feelingly about wind-strengths and storms that he seems to have remained a confirmed anemophobe all his life.

His mother was Sarah Rentoul, the daughter of the Rev. John Rentoul of Ballymoney, Co. Antrim. She and her sisters ran a private school for girls at Knock, Belfast, where, in keeping with the social attitudes of the time, good manners and deportment took precedence over examination success. Her forebears had come from Manorcunningham, Co. Donegal, but Lynd’s rustic memories seem to be all of counties Derry and Antrim.

In those days a city lad was regarded as very deprived if he had no country cousins. Lynd returned in his later essays to the farms at Killure and Beleeny and to his experiences of Sabbath journeys by trap along the Lower Bann river. In ‘Looking for an Ancestor’ (1924), he recalls his pride in reading the speeches at the dedication to his grandfather of the Rentoul Clock in Ballymoney. It was in uncles’ farms that he formed his abiding love of chickens and horses: ‘I used to go up to the house of God seated behind a dark brown horse with a star on his forehead, holding the reins and clicking him into a trot with my tongue’ (‘Horses’, 1925). In the essay ‘Aunts’ (1937), included in this selection, the country memories reach a paradisal level with expertly driven gigs and farmhouse feasts ‘with three kinds of jam, four kinds of baked bread and all manner of cakes’. A less happy memory of childhood was that of the Presbyterian Sabbath. He was very glad of any means of mitigating the severity of the long, unco pious day.

I had an aunt, I remember, who liked to encourage her nephews and nieces to learn the psalms in the metrical versions by heart, and who would offer me a shilling if I had learnt a psalm by the end of a Sunday afternoon. As play was forbidden on Sunday, this seemed to me a not quite intolerable way of passing the time away. (‘Pocket Money’, 1936)

II

Lynd went to the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (known to all as ‘Inst’) in September 1890 when he was nearly eleven and left in June 1896. The school had been founded in 1810 and had a record of excellence and egalitarianism. Lynd remained fond of his old school, and at least two essays were specifically in praise of it: ‘The School Cap’ (1926), and ‘The Old School Tie’ (1936), a title then without pejorative connotation. In this second essay he writes, ‘… the love of school was in my blood. Years before I went to it, I longed to go to it, as I afterwards longed to go to Rome and Florence.’ He loved Latin and Greek, subsequently his degree subjects, but

never found it easy to sit in a room in the evening and read school books and write stuff in exercise books. I always knew that there were several of my fellow-schoolboys roaming about the streets and I could not bear to be wasting time over a grammar when there was better company to be had outside.

He was clever without being intolerably industrious. Perhaps the best summary of his approach to the business of school was in the judgment made at the time that his friend Sam Porter’s Greek proses were more accurate but Lynd’s more like what a Greek would have written. His teacher was Robert Millar Jones, who afterwards married Lynd’s eldest sister, Laura.

He was not a perfectly behaved student. The Opera House and the Theatre Royal had Friday matinées and he could often be found sitting in one or other of the galleries entranced but not entirely free from Presbyterian prejudice against the stage. It was here that a great, unconsummated love affair began. His heart was completely lost to Marie Studholme, one of the most popular actresses of the nineties. Her grandest part was in TheToreador, the last play put on at the Gaiety Theatre before it closed in 1902. Lynd, then among other things a drama critic, saw its closing production.

Of music-hall artistes first enjoyed as a truant, from Marie Lloyd and Lottie Collins to Little Tich and Vesta Tilley, he wrote:

Their songs are the only poetry that many of us remember. I myself know scarcely twenty lines of Shelley or Wordsworth by heart but my head is full of such lines as Eugene Stratton’s:

My gal she’s a high-born lady.

She’s black but not too shady,

Feathered like a peacock, just as gay;

She’s not coloured, she was born dat way.

(‘Enchantment in the Music Hall’, 1923)

They were days of innocence, indeed.

In the Inst School News for Christmas 1949, the year of Lynd’s death, some reminiscences are printed by way of memorial tribute. In one by ‘J Y’ (identified by the present principal, Tom Garrett, as J. Young, Christian names counting for little to school annalists), he is described as having

a slim boyish figure in a pepper and salt suit, the Inst cap on the back of his head, and his hands (generally) in his pockets…. He was an omnivorous reader – not a student – and we both haunted the Linenhall Library…. In his conversation he was Socratic, a questioner of all conventions, already a personality.

The description of the reader who was not a scholar is a recurring one and may explain some of the characteristics of his later literary criticism. It is clear, however, that he could have been a scholar, had he wished. In his final year, when he was a prefect, he won the Steen Prize for Greek.

At Inst he met James Winder Good (1877-1930), who became his closest friend, and as a kind of adopted ‘uncle Seumas’ was a lay godfather to each of Lynd’s daughters, Sigle (b. 1910) and Máire (b. 1912). He was older than Lynd, the son of an RIC head constable who had come to Belfast. He was an eminently suitable companion for Lynd: they shared a passion for the works of Stevenson and Kipling. (As a boy, Lynd had waited impatiently for books by ‘Tusitala’ as they were published. His favourite was Treasure Island which appeared when he was four.)

I noticed a boy with a grave face and hair of a Munster blackness looking on and, under his arm, one of those grey paper-backed volumes in which the early work of Rudyard Kipling first reached the West. I cannot remember whether I spoke to him, but it was impossible at that time to remain unacquainted for long with a fellow-schoolboy who read Kipling or Stevenson. (‘Nostalgia’, 1941)

Good was an aficionado of riots and he had come to live in the best place, for Belfast, then as now, was the riot capital of Western Europe. He was a born journalist and, as his friends realized, his description was ‘ten times better than any riot’. On night wanderings through the otherwise safe city both discovered their nationalism, but it was a non-partisan, non-violent nationalism which they maintained all their lives. Good was a Parnellite at school and when that cause was lost remained a Redmondite. After work with the Northern Whig he joined the staff of the IrishIndependent and was Irish correspondent of the New Statesman, the radical journal for which, as ‘YY’, Lynd wrote his weekly essay.

Inst also confirmed in Lynd his love of sport. Each of his collections of non-literary essays has sporting elements. One, published in 1922, was called The Sporting Life and OtherTrifles, the ‘other trifles’ forming a decided minority. His apostrophe of Sam Lee, J. H. Robb and Alec Montgomery in ‘The School Cap’ is simply a communicated statement of excited approval. When he went to Twickenham he used to shout at the top of his voice, ‘absolutely inaudible to everyone but himself’, as his sometime assistant, the novelist and television executive Norman Collins, recalled in a 1966 BBC programme (‘Portrait of Robert Lynd’, produced by the Ulster author John Boyd). Rugby was his favourite sport but he loved them all and was to write sparklingly about boxing, soccer, cricket, hurling and tennis. He especially loved racing (see his classic ‘Galway of the Races’ below) and gambled regularly. A copy of Ruff’s Guide to the Turf was always to be found destroying, with much other paraphernalia, what should have been the impeccable line of his expensive suit.

III

Lynd matriculated in June 1896 and became a student at the Queen’s College, Belfast, in October of that year. He seems not to have opted for honours but used the system of ‘narrowing the field’ that was current then. In his first year he took Latin, Greek, English, maths and experimental physics. In the second year, 1897-8, the scientific subjects gave way to the compulsory ‘philosophic’ subject, with Lynd opting for logic. In his final year he dropped English and graduated with an ordinary degree in Classics in 1899. He was twenty years old and he knew his career was to be literary. In the circumstances the dismissal of English Literature may seem strange. At Inst, too, he figures not at all in the prize-lists of the English department. Then as now Eng. Lit. was not a highly regarded subject but for different reasons: it was marginal compared with the ancient classics which were still thought of, not without reason, as the best preparation for any career.

It was at Queen’s that Lynd’s socialism and nationalism were forged. Though economic conditions were somewhat better than in Dublin, the plight of the unskilled workers and the unemployed was sufficient to make any sensitive young man anxious to seek a social remedy in socialism. A majority of unskilled workers, and almost all the skilled, were Protestant; conditions for Catholics were grim. This polarization began as a tactic in the 1850s and developed during the next three decades. Catholics formed about one-third of the urban population and it was expedient to keep them depressed. During the 1860s and ’70s the number of Orange Lodges in the city trebled and they were the source of well-organized resistance to amelioration of any kind. The sectarian rioting which was sparked off again in 1886 occurred not as a result of Randolph Churchill’s playing of the threatened ‘Orange card’ or his inflammatory visit to Belfast but because of a cocky remark by a Catholic in the shipyards. When Arthur Balfour played his Orange card in 1893, the Order responded with blind, atavistic loyalty.

In opting for ‘Irish solutions to Irish problems’ Lynd was simply reverting to an old Presbyterian tradition, lost due to the persuasive powers of Cooke and such firebrands as Johnston of Ballykilbeg. Redmondism held little appeal so Sinn Féin, Arthur Griffith’s party, eventually proved the most congenial.

The Ulsterman who had the greatest effect upon Lynd was four years his junior. Bulmer Hobson (1883-1969) was a Quaker from Co. Down who was imbued with the doctrines of Wolfe Tone and had a genius for organization. He lost several jobs as an apprentice printer because of his membership of the Gaelic League (begun in 1893) and he founded the youth movement that became Na Fianna Éireann. He was also one of the fathers of the Ulster Literary Theatre, famous for his remark, as he and a friend left Dublin by train after a theatre visit, ‘Damn Yeats! We’ll write our own plays.’

Another prominent literary nationalist figure was Alice Milligan (1865-1953), who with her friend Anna Johnston (‘Ethna Carbery’) ran the periodical Shan Van Vocht. This became James Connolly’s best advertising medium as he strove to organize Labour in the North. It was in response to one such advertisement that Lynd, James Good and Sam Porter came to meet the Labour leader at the sparsely attended initial meeting of the Belfast Socialist Society.

In his essay ‘On Wearing a Collar’ of twenty-five years later, laughing at the House of Lords for reminding its guests to wear their collars and trousers, Lynd wrote:

I do not remember ever to have forgotten to wear a collar, except deliberately. That was when I was nominally a student and shortly after I had become a passionate advocate of democracy. I do not know why at the age of eighteen it should seem democratic to wear a neck-cloth instead of a collar, and a corduroy cap, and to smoke plug tobacco in a clay pipe with the red hand of Ulster embossed on the bowl. It was certainly a dubious advertisement for socialism and merely served to convince anyone who took notice that one’s creed was the result of mental disorder.

I remember also making it a point never to shave on Sundays. It seemed to me monstrous that the middle classes should all look so extremely respectable on Sunday that no one who was not equally respectable would dare to be seen in the same church with them. Hence I decided to make my tiny contribution to the brotherhood of man by reducing the respectability of the church I attended as far as was in my power. I could think only of two ways – to turn up late and to turn up unshaved. I carried out my programme with all the greater ardour because I detested early rising on any day, and particularly on a Sunday, and as for shaving, even now, if there were any alternative to it except growing a beard, I should never let a razor into the house.

Times have changed, however, and I with them. You will no longer see me on a Sunday morning standing up in the back pew, like a long, cadaverous gaol-bird who has just recovered from a wasting illness in a Bolshevik hospital.

What is not made clear in this excerpt is that the church was May Street Presbyterian and that the minister was his father. Such behaviour in the eyes of a Presbyterian congregation must have had the same quality of heinousness as when, in Haworth, ‘t’Vicar’s Pat’ was carried home nightly to the Rev. Patrick Brontë, late of Annalong, Co. Down.

Robert John had a further affront to countenance. By this time almost all the Lynds, Annie and Ina, Dolly and Laurence the twins, and Lucie, the youngest, had become firm republicans too. When the anti-Home Rule father came into the living-room the conversation, which was usually about Irish culture and politics, would cease. Only Laura, the eldest of the family and wife of Lynd’s old classics master, R. M. Jones, remained unionist but, as she insisted, liberal unionist. Probably to their mutual relief it was not until 1888, when Lynd had left, that Jones became principal of Inst, serving with such distinction until 1925 that he became known as the ‘second founder of Inst’.

Politics aside, Lynd was still a lover of literature and the classics without necessarily loving the writing of Greek proses. In ‘The Student’ (1924), he recalls ruefully how his regularly resolved night-watch ambition of becoming a master of knowledge and character faded with the morning:

There would be someone in the porch of the college who would meet one in an idle mood and insist on a walk along the tow-path of a canal or who had been reading a book and wanted to argue that no one existed but himself, or who believed that Thoreau was a better writer than Emerson, or that TheShop Girl was a better musical comedy than The Geisha.

His favourite poetry at the time was Browning’s and ‘he used [to] read it aloud and talk about it till all hours. I often wondered how he managed to rise in the morning for lectures.’ The memoirist for his Queen’s days was W. R. (‘Daddy’) Gordon, who afterwards became art master at Inst, made a bust of James Good that according to Lynd made him look a bit like Oliver Goldsmith, and was the sort of character that only a school with the magnanimity of Inst could tolerate. Gordon’s short memoir in School News recalls, almost inevitably, a riot in which he and Lynd were caught up. It was Mafeking Night, nearly a year after Lynd’s graduation, and they found themselves in a baton charge in York Street. Lynd had learned survival techniques from James Good but Gordon was only a tyro.

Though the noise was terrific I was unaware that anything was wrong when Lynd shouted in my ear, ‘Run, for God’s sake!’ I’ll never forget the tall lanky figure in front of me with the tails of his long, heavy overcoat flying in the wind: then he gave me a dressing down for not keeping my eyes about me.

Belfast matter for a May evening! In tribute to that friendship Lynd grafted on to Gordon an odd literary fame. Some years later, when he needed to write a Daily News review and wished to preserve the appearance of editorial non-participation, he invariably used the name W. R. Gordon. It was done with his old friend’s permission, of course, but Lynd often ascribed to him knowledge and opinions that Gordon might not have recognized.

(‘Daddy’ Gordon later set up a professional art studio. He was in great demand as a painter of processional banners, working with non-sectarian zeal for both Orangemen and Hibernians. Once, when some nationalists came to collect a finished banner, they looked at work in progress on an Orange one. ‘You know, Mr Gordon,’ said one, examining King Billy’s white steed, ‘I don’t think you’ve got that horse’s leg right.’)

In ‘The Professor’ (1925) and ‘Dislike of Professors’ (1939), Lynd has left a pen-portrait of his Greek teacher, Sir Samuel Dill. Dill had been an old boy of Inst but seemed in Belfast to have ‘the air of a banished man. If he talked to you about yourself he had but one message – “Escape. Fly while there is time!”’ – a message which Lynd was not at the time disposed to heed, finding a walk down North Street on a Saturday night as exciting and as satisfying as ‘most of the things that used to happen under the shadow of the Parthenon’.

Dill, like Lynd’s other academic hero, his professor of English, Samuel James McMullen, despised examinations and those hapless people whose presence in lecture-halls was only for that mundane purpose. He found it hard to conceal his contempt for the theological students who needed a pass in Greek; McMullen was equally offensive to his mathematical students who were dismissed to their faces as ‘intellectual barbarians’. These men were useful, perhaps necessary, counters to the rigorous piety and instinctive pragmatism of the milieu in which Lynd had grown up. Typically, as a student he hated note-taking, just as, as a writer he eschewed the blemish of annotation. This suited McMullen, whose lectures on Gray might end with Turgenev and for whom Macbeth prompted an account of the Newtownstewart murder case. Dill, on the other hand, required not only note-taking but palpable evidence of note-taking. Lynd, with typical oblique courtesy, used to make many illegible scrawls on paper and throw them into the fire when he got home.

Lynd was lucky to have such guides to the greater and the lesser Parnassus, and he knew it. Certainly they provided him with the knowledge and love of literature that informed his whole life and left him ready and able, like that other Irish Grub Street denizen, Oliver Goldsmith, to adorn anything he touched.

IV

When he left Queen’s in 1899 Lynd’s first job was with the Northern Whig, an independent Protestant paper whose banner motto was ‘Pro rege saepe, pro patria semper’. Belfast had not much to offer and Lynd was not really a reporter. His radicalism, too, would inevitably have jarred on his editor, however liberal he may have been by Belfast standards. Soon he left for London, the Mecca of all who would live by the pen, though a man so acquainted with Dr Johnson should have been under no illusions about the facts of the hack’s way of life.

His route to London was via Manchester, where for three months at the end of 1900 he worked on the Daily Dispatch. His style proved ‘too flowery’ for a daily paper. In London from 1901 to 1908 he ‘lived hungrily on freelance journalism and the conversation of friends’, as his first regular chief, R. A. Scott-James, later wrote of him in the Dictionary of National Biography. One of these friends was Paul Henry, the landscape artist, with whom Lynd shared a studio in Kensington and to whom TheSporting Life, his 1922 volume of essays, was dedicated with the words, ‘… because of the amusing days when we lived together in the same studio and owed money to the same milkman’. Henry gave the following account of the young Lynd:

He was tall and growing rapidly. His careless and shambling gait had early indicated the student’s stoop that was so marked in his later years. I noticed him first as a boy with a fund of merry laughter indicated by his wide and sensitive mouth. This mood in him gave way to a brooding languor which never left him during his long life. At that time Robert looked like a young colt whose legs had not yet grown properly used to the weight of its long body. At times his young mind speedily outdistanced its fellows in the quality of his mental awareness. I had never heard him called a brilliant student: he was too busy living. Being intensely alive was all that was to be demanded of young colts. (Further Reminiscences, 1973)

This capacity for awareness was the quality which, according to his brother-in-law Alex Foster, husband of his favourite sister, Annie, most characterized Lynd. In the 1966 broadcast Foster said:

I sometimes think about Robert that it’s the same thing as Bagehot said about Shakespeare, he had an experiencing mind. Things that perhaps you and I wouldn’t notice, would register in Robert; he would have a vivid impression of it. And then, of course, he could write … like an angel.

His angelic writing brought in at the start little cash. His first regular job was for Today, a twopenny weekly in which he was paid thirty shillings a week for writing essays, dramatic criticism and gossip – a salary raised to £2 when he also contributed short stories. This wage, adequate by Edwardian standards, was supplemented by book reviews for a journal called Black and White.

He had been asked to write for Today by a remarkable character, Ladbroke Black, who had been appointed co-editor of the weekly which had been run by Jerome K. Jerome of ThreeMen in a Boat fame. Black had met Paul Henry in Paris, and, calling at the Kensington basement studio, discovered that Lynd was ‘nominally a journalist but was in fact doing nothing’. He immediately asked him to send contributions to a feature called ‘Club Chatter’. Lynd said he had never been in a London club in his life and that ‘Pub Chatter’ was more within his reach. ‘That’ll do all right, old chap; we’re a democratic paper!’

He took all the copy Lynd sent, accepting even a piece on a savage tribe that ate sand (found by the random picking of a book from the card index of the public library) and called ‘The Dirt Eaters’. Once, he asked Lynd to do a piece on the Boat Race: ‘We go to press before the race but you can do it from your imagination.’ Even Lynd was unequal to that task. Instead he did a piece on street preachers which so impressed Frank Rutter, Black’s co-editor, that he took him on the staff to do all those journalistic chores. He may never have seen the Boat Race, but a sixth-former whose pleasure it was to roam the streets of late-nineteenth-century Belfast was a very Boswell of street preachers. His favourite was Sammy Thompson, whose cry was ‘There’s no laughing in Hell, boys!’ and who was a master of such rhetorical tricks as groaning, ‘Here am I denouncing high pocrisy and me wearing a dickey and pretending it’s a white shirt’ (‘The Street Preacher’, 1924).

Lynd’s responsibility for drama criticism meant that he saw, among the drift of Edwardian melodramas, the early work of his countryman Bernard Shaw. Those were the years of John Bull’sOther Island, Man and Superman, Major Barbara and Caesar andCleopatra. Lynd had more than a patriotic fondness for Shaw, as the essay ‘G. B. S. as Idol’ (included in this volume) shows. (A decade later, when Shaw proved too rationally anti-war for British opinion, Lynd wrote in the Daily News that the lines drawn seemed to be: the Allies versus Germany, Austria, Turkey and Shaw.) Encouraged by Black, he also ghosted a number of books including the autobiography of a convict and a veterinary manual on training horses.

The one flaw that Lynd found in Black was a virtue that he himself was never to possess: Black liked all copy to be in punctually. In this respect Lynd was the bane of all his editors:

I have often trembled as I lay in my Hampstead lodgings [by then Lynd lived at 9 Gayton Road] on the morning of going-to-press day and heard him rushing up the stairs to put the inevitable question: ‘Got your article finished?’

‘It’s under way,’ I would quaver from beneath the blankets.

‘You mean you’ve got the title written,’ he would say disgustedly. Then, suddenly, the reign-of-terror frown would vanish, and he would leave the room laughing at his own perspicacity and the hopelessness and the helplessness of his friends.

The essay on Black is called ‘Over the Stile’ (1941). He had, as Lynd says, a genius for helping lame dogs. ‘Black was not only a man who helped lame dogs over stiles: he pushed them and, if necessary, carried them, over stiles.’ The essay ends with the meditative sentence: ‘I have often wondered what would have happened to me if I had never met him.’

As it happened it was another essayist, A. G. Gardiner, who, prompted by one of Lynd’s London Irish friends, Alice Stopford Green, employed him in 1908 on the paper that was to be his permanent place of employment for the next forty years. As ‘Alpha of the Plough’, Gardiner had published a number of books of light essays, but it was as editor of the Quaker DailyNews that he was persuaded by Mrs Green that his literary editor, R. A. Scott-James, needed an assistant. The days of living on ‘bread and jam and whiskey’ were over. He and his girl were not after all going to marry on ‘a disappearing income of a guinea a week’. He became literary editor in 1913 and stayed with the paper when it became the News Chronicle in 1930, continuing to work for it until the year of his death.

V

Edwardian London had its share of indomitable Irishry: Yeats, when he was not at Coole Park; T. W. Rolleston, like Lynd a journalist; their friend Alice Stopford Green, whose TheMaking of Ireland and its Undoing (1908) enraged many English reviewers, and who was a kind of queen in exile, her house a rallying place for those Irish who felt the burning of a national ideal after years of despairing somnolence. Pádraic Ó Conaire worked for the Ministry of Education; Michael Collins and P. S. O’Hegarty were employed by the Post Office; Frank Fahy, who founded the Gaelic League in London, was also a civil servant. The League was the unifying factor and those who were not students of Irish were teachers. Another Irish institution was the Irish Literary Society which grew out of Fahy’s Southwark Irish Literary Club. It was established by Fahy and Alice Green and served as a kind of London office of the Irish Literary Revival. Margery Foster, in her book MichaelCollins – The Lost Leader (1971), records how Collins invariably greeted Lynd at meetings of the ILS with the friendly jibe, ‘And how is the non-conformist conscience today?’

(There is a story, which may not be apocryphal, that Ó Conaire, who like Fahy was a native speaker and a tireless Gaelic League teacher, was asked to sit an examination for promotion in the civil service. He offered Irish as one of his subjects and the Commissioners with charming assent arranged that their Patrick Conroy should be supplied with a paper of appropriate standard. The League teacher Pádraic Ó Conaire was suggested as an appropriate setter and marker. He was happy to oblige for the fee and, finding a mistake in a síneadhfada [accent: lit. ‘long stretch’], gave Patrick Conroy only 99 per cent.)

Ó Conaire and Lynd were to remain friends. One of the papers preserved by Lynd’s daughter is a note in Irish written on 21 May 1915, inviting him to an evening out:

A Riobáird, a chara,

An féidir thú mhealladh as an teach

aon oidhche? Beidh suipéir & greann

againn san Cheshire Cheese wine cellar

an 6adh lá de mheitheamh & béadh fáilte

mhór romhatsa & roimh do bhean: an dtiocfaidh

tú? Cáirde liomsa & leatsa an comhluadar bhéas

ann. Beidh aithne agat ar a bhfurmhór.

Mise

Pádraic Ó Conaire.

(Dear Robert,

Can I coax you out of the house for a night? We’re having supper and crack in the Cheshire Cheese wine cellar on 6 June and you and your wife would be very welcome. Will you come? The company will consist of friends of us both. You’ll be acquainted with most of them.

Yours

Pádraic Ó Conaire.)

One of the main League venues was St Andrew’s Hall behind Oxford Street, where Lynd learnt Irish with such skill and success that he soon became a teacher. As was the custom, he spent some time in one of the newly established coláistísamhraidh (summer colleges). His choice was Cloughaneely, near Falcarragh in Co. Donegal, and there he met a fellow-student who had none of the same linguistic skill but had invented an Irish name for himself, Ruairí Mac Éasment. Casement later became Lynd’s pupil at the League classes. Another who learnt his first Irish from Lynd was the English-born Aodh de Blacám (Hugh Black), who later put his knowledge to good use in Gaelic Literature Surveyed (1929).

Meanwhile, at home in Belfast, a movement known as the Dungannon Club had been founded by Bulmer Hobson. He had joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1905 and with a fellow-member, Denis McCullough, he established the movement which ‘set itself the task of uniting Protestant and Catholic Irishmen to achieve the independence of Ireland’. The name recalled the Tyrone town’s association with the activities of the Irish Volunteers of the 1780s which had led to the establishment of Grattan’s Parliament. The organ of the Dungannon Club was The Republic, a weekly which began publication on 13 December 1906. It was started with a total capital of £60 and it lasted till May of the next year. Lynd wrote most of it and like all contributors was unpaid. A feature of the publication was its use of satirical cartoons that were sold separately as postcards. The main artists were the four Morrow brothers, one of whom, George, afterwards became art editor of Punch. Lynd is credited by Hobson with two excellent cartoons: one, captioned ‘The Wild Geese’, shows MPs of the Irish Parliamentary Party heading to Westminster to agitate for an Irish parliament at home; the other, ‘John Bull’s Famous Circus’, has John Bull as ringmaster and barker offering such attractions as Redmond’s ‘Sleight of Hand’, ‘Wire Pulling’ by Sir Anthony MacDonnell and Birrell’s ‘Comic Clowning’.

Lynd was already a socialist but his nationalism was not fully realized until he was living in England. He described his ‘conversion’ in ‘Arguing’ (1936):

My conversion to nationalism was more rational, but, even so, it was not the result of other people’s arguments. I had come to England from the north of Ireland, believing in my simplicity that the English spent their days and nights thinking out plans for the welfare of Ireland – for improving the land system and the education system, and for draining the regions of the Bann and the Barrow. To my surprise, I found that the English were a very practical people who had enough problems of their own to solve without spending sleepless nights over the drainage of the Bann. Most of them seemed to look on the Irish as a pampered people living largely at the expense of the English taxpayer. Finding that they regarded Ireland mainly as a nuisance, I concluded in the course of a few months that it would be better for the country to be governed by people who were, at least, interested in it.

The alignment of The Republic with the emerging Sinn Féin movement was certainly due to Lynd’s influence. His was the voice claiming in the second issue that ‘compared with Sinn Féin, every other Irish agitation is the merest squib’.

The most significant publication of the Republican Press, an offshoot of The Republic, was the 38-page pamphlet The Orangemen and the Nation, previously mentioned. It is an elegant piece of persuasion, logical and reassuring:

If the Orangemen would only let the scales of sectarian prejudice fall from their eyes, and would only open their ears to the voice of the country instead of to the voices of false-tongued lawyers and ambitious politicians, would they not feel equally insulted, as Irishmen today, at being considered ‘so weak, helpless and ignorant that they can neither support nor legislate for Ireland without British aid’?

(The quotation marks enclose part of a resolution made against the Act of Union in 1800 by Loyal Orange Lodges Nos. 382 and 390.) The sentences, unusually strong and lapidary for Lynd, are like hammer-blows:

England’s game in Ireland has always been to whisper one suspicion in the ear of the Protestant and another suspicion in the ear of the Catholic, until the two of them become irritated with each other, almost to the point of murder.

And later, returning to the theme of the Irish language:

The Irish language and the Irish people are the products of the same air and the same soil. The Irish language belongs to the people of all races who inhabit Ireland just as the English language belongs to the people of all races who inhabit England…. If a country imports a language from abroad it will import everything else from abroad.

The pamphlet reads remarkably like the essays that Thomas Davis used to write for the early numbers of The Nation and probably shared the same fate of being read and valued almost entirely by the converted. That Lynd was influenced by Davis is clear not only from the mimetic style but also from this account in his third published book, Rambles in Ireland (1912):

And of the small towns there was none to which I looked forward more eagerly than Mallow. I wanted to go there, not out of veneration for the memory of the Rakes of Mallow, immortalized in the song, but because the prophet of all that is best in modern Ireland was born there.

His sketch of Davis’s life and thought is masterly, probably because they had so much in common, including an unrelenting pursuit of freedom and an abhorrence of physical violence:

the Phoenix Park murders … are the sort of crime which a school of nationalists educated in the lofty principles of Davis could only commit if they were driven temporarily mad.

His other political mentor was Arthur Griffith, the subject of one of his essays, ‘Arthur Griffith: The Patriot’ (1934), included here, written a dozen years after Griffith’s death. Lynd was absolutely convinced that it was passive resistance, allied to the ‘national parliament set up in Dublin, national law courts set up and obeyed throughout the country, national police parading the streets within sight of the official police’, that had brought the last insurrection to its successful conclusion.

Lynd and P. S. O’Hegarty became the London delegates of Sinn Féin though they were irregular attenders at meetings. Lynd continued to advocate a Gandhian approach. He felt that non-violent struggle would not only preserve the unity of the country but provide a greater problem for the British, who could easily suppress an armed uprising but who were no match for an Irish character stronger than guns. He also knew that violence would further alienate the unionists.

Lynd continued to admire and respect those people he knew who felt that armed struggle was the only way, while remaining convinced that they were misguided. His friendship with Casement continued after Cloughaneely, and ‘Hibernia Rediviva’ (1908), contained herein, describes a visit they made to Toome Feis in 1906. He was among the most active petitioners for Casement’s reprieve in 1916. In a letter to The Nation of 13 May of that year he wrote:

As the case of Sir Roger Casement is at present sub judice I do not propose to discuss the question of his guilt or innocence in regard to the accusations made against him. But I must protest when one of the least self-seeking, most open-handed of men – a man who has lived not for his career but for the liberty of those who are oppressed and poor and enslaved – is dismissed with all the clichés of contempt…. Even those who, like myself, have been diametrically opposed to his recent policy, can never lose our admiration and affection for everything in him that is noble and compassionate.

In organizing the petition for Casement’s release Lynd found that the evidence of Casement’s homosexuality produced in court made it difficult to get signatories. Joseph Conrad was one previous admirer who declared himself revolted by the revelations from the Black Diaries. Alice Green established a fund to fight the case, contributing £400 herself. Lynd gave four guineas, a considerable sum for a working journalist. Cadbury, the Quaker owner of the Daily News, sent £400 and Arthur Conan Doyle an admirable £700.

Lynd and Mrs Green visited Casement in Brixton Prison and were in court during his trial. There was nothing that could be done to save him. When the execution was carried out on 3 August 1916, Lynd was grief-stricken. (It was, according to his surviving daughter, one of three things that nearly broke his heart; the second was the Civil War in Ireland, the last a more private grief.)

As the Irish troubles continued some of Lynd’s English friends began to lose patience. Scott-James, his chief until 1913, was one who quarrelled with him over Ireland. Another was E. C. Bentley, the inventor of the clerihew and author of the classic detective story Trent’s Last Case (1913). However, his writings (and presumably his conversations) about Ireland were utterly rational. He describes his most specifically political book, Ireland a Nation (1919), as a ‘cold-blooded appeal to reason on behalf of Irish nationalism’. It was dedicated to Clifford Sharp, his editor on the New Statesman, a friend who could take on the logic of the Irish argument. In the chapter on ‘The Insurrection of 1916’ Lynd stated:

The courts-martial converted the revolt of a minority into an episode of national history. They made people who had looked on the insurrection with detestation see the leaders in the blazing light of martyrdom…. Probably … not a single one of the soldiers who sat on the fatal courts-martial had ever read a line of Irish history. If they had they would never have dared to order a shot to be fired.

In his essay ‘Valediction’ (1936), Lynd recalls Sharp’s reaction to the executions of the 1916 leaders: ‘What could rebel leaders expect?’ Yet he listened to the ‘martyrdom’ argument and logically denounced the executions in the next edition of the journal.

The introduction (included here) to James Connolly’s book Labour in Irish History, which was published in 1916 after Connolly’s death, epitomizes Lynd’s nationalism. The opening sentence, ‘James Connolly is Ireland’s first socialist martyr,’ is uncompromising. It shows Lynd first as the friend faithful in spite of disagreement about policy, second as a fearless speaker-out about Ireland, and lastly as a logician. Just as Carson’s and the UVF’s facing-down of the Asquith government in 1912 made, he believed, Easter Week inevitable, so, as AE put it, the employers in the 1913 lock-out became the ‘blind Samsons pulling down the pillars of society’.

In one oblique way Lynd made a direct contribution to the Rising. An essay he wrote in 1915, ‘If the Germans Conquered England’, described the resulting Teutonism of the free country: the gradual erosion of English history and destruction of its heroes with replacement by German equivalents.

Gradually it would become an offence to use English as the language of instruction; in another generation it would become an offence to use it at all…. Thus if England could only be got to submit, would she be gradually warped … she would be a nation of slaves, even though every slave in the country had a chicken in his pot and a golden dish to serve it on.

It was fine, close-argued, hard-hitting stuff. A reprint was made compulsory study for officer cadets at Sandhurst. It was, after all, a statement of the principles of patriotism. And what the obtuse War Cabinet did not realize, but the Irish Volunteers clearly did, was that it described England’s treatment of Ireland in every detail, mutatis mutandis. The Easter Week rebel newspaper, Irish War News, printed the piece almost in full.

In the 1920s Lynd continued to plead Ireland’s case in the New Statesman and the Daily News. During the Black and Tan campaign Dublin Castle used to publish a kind of score sheet of outrage and counter-outrage called the Weekly Summary. It had advised the new force to make Ireland ‘an appropriate hell for the Sinn Féiners’ (a Sinn Féin which Lynd was not part of and one which, in his view, was untrue to its earlier principles). He was literary editor of the Daily News and as ‘YY’ in the NewStatesman wrote a weekly essay, which in the words of his last editor, Kingsley Martin, ‘was neither wholly literary nor political but almost as good as Lamb’. When stung to instant response, however, he wrote to the papers like any other indignant reader but with, perhaps, a better hope of having his letters printed. He wrote to the Daily News about the Weekly Summary incitements and said that they had the desired result of making the Black and Tans feel towards their Irish enemies as men feel towards wild beasts.

When the Civil War was over and the Free State established he kept in close touch with his Irish friends, was a frequent visitor and holiday-maker there and returned regularly to Irish themes in his essays. He had great love for the Ulster unionists whom he knew through and through, but felt great sadness at their rejection of a nationhood and expressed sharp though muted contempt for the politicians who continued to manipulate them. His fellow-Ulsterman, St John Ervine, whose unionism had been reinforced by the events of 1916, recognized him as a worthy adversary. They regularly crossed swords in print with Ervine ending up by admitting Lynd’s ‘intolerable tolerance’.

Lynd understood like few other commentators just how resolute the Civil War, with its internecine violence, had made the Ulster unionists; while remaining a republican he had a sympathetic understanding of his Ulster Protestant brothers. He may have been, in his wife’s phrase, ‘an escaped Presbyterian’, but as that escaped son of the Church of Ireland Louis Mac-Neice has said: ‘The woven figure cannot undo its thread.’

VI

Lynd met Sylvia Dryhurst in September 1904 at St Andrew’s Hall. He was twenty-five and she was sixteen and they fell in love. She lived in Hampstead and was the younger daughter of Alfred Robert Dryhurst ISO, administrative secretary of the British Museum, and Nannie Robinson, a talented governess from Dublin. NFD, as she was known, was artistic, supplementing her income by selling objets d’art and hand-painted Christmas cards. She was a suffragette, an anarchist, founder with Gordon Craig, Ellen Terry’s son, of the Purcell Operatic Society – very much the Shavian New Woman. (Indeed Shaw was a regular visitor to her Hampstead home as he had been to her mother’s house in Dublin and it is not too fanciful to see her as one of the models for Ann Whitefield in Man and Superman.)

NFD was wooed by Roy Dryhurst, an early Fabian, and had two daughters, Norah and Sylvia. By the time that the girls had reached grammar school age she was deeply in love with Henry Nevinson, editor of The Nation. When this came to light her husband insisted only that he should be responsible for the education of Norah, who was sent to the conventional South Hampstead High School for Girls, while Sylvia, under her mother’s care, went to the new and unorthodox King Alfred School. There she realized her artistic capacity and went on to the Slade, a perfect grounding for the future poet, novelist and reviewer. She never quite learnt to spell, like another former art student, W. B. Yeats, and had occasion to be glad of Inst’s emphasis on classical accuracy as Robert corrected her copy and proofs. She also had an interest in the stage, attended RADA and won a small part in a Beerbohm Tree production. This provided the background for a novel, written in her early thirties, called The Swallow Dive (1921). Gordon Craig, who described Sylvia as ‘a strange and beautiful child’, was moved to do a drawing of her. She was to put this perfectionist into her earlier novel, The Chorus, published by Collins in 1916. During her teens she exchanged a series of charming letters with the poet and playwright Padraic Colum, with whom she had fallen in love briefly.

The Dryhursts lived for all of their married life at 11 Downshire Hill. Lynd was in digs in 9 Gayton Road, Hampstead, when he met Sylvia. He was on good terms with his future father-in-law and in the essay ‘I Am Taken for a Pickpocket’ (1922) describes an amusing incident on an Italian holiday that they shared.

Arthur Ransome, in his posthumously published Autobiography (1976), writes about visiting the Dryhursts and meeting Lynd: