In a preface to the French translation of Sienkiewicz’s works, M. de Wyzewa, the well-known critic, himself a Pole, makes a suggestive comparison between the Polish and the Russian natures. The Pole, he says, is quicker, wittier, more imaginative, more studious of beauty, less absorbed in the material world than the Russian in a word, infinitely more gifted with the artistic temperament; and yet in every art the Russian has immeasurably outstripped the Pole. His explanation, if not wholly convincing, is at least suggestive. The Poles are a race of dreamers, and the dreamer finds his reward in himself. He does not seek to conquer the world with arms or with commerce, with tears or with laughter; neither money tempts him nor fame, and the strenuous, unremitting application which success demands, whether in war, business, or the arts, is alien to his being.

The same observation and the same reasoning apply with equal force to the English and the Irish. No one who has lived in the two countries will deny that the Irish are apparently the more gifted race; no one can deny, if he has knowledge and candour, that the English have accomplished a great deal more, the Irish a great deal less. Nowhere is this more evident than in the productions of that faculty which Irishmen have always been reputed, and justly reputed, to possess in peculiar measure the faculty of humour. Compare Lever, who for a long time passed as the typical Irish humorist, with his contemporaries Thackeray and Dickens. The comparison is not fair, but it suggests the central fact that the humour of Irish literature is deficient in depth, in intellectual quality, or, to put it after an Irish fashion, in gravity.

‘Humorous’ is a word as question-begging as ‘artistic,’ and he would be a rash man who should try to define either. But so much as this will readily be admitted, that humour is a habit of mind essentially complex, involving always a double vision a reference from the public or normal standard of proportion to one that is private and personal. The humorist refuses to part with any atom of his own personality, he stamps it on whatever comes from him. “If reasons were as plenty as blackberries,” says Falstaff, achieving individuality by the same kind of odd picturesque comparison as every witty Irish peasant uses in talk, to the delight of himself and his hearers. But the individuality lies deeper than phrases: Falstaff takes his private standard into battle with him. There is nothing more obviously funny than the short paunchy man, let us not say cowardly, but disinclined to action, who finds himself engaged in a fight. Lever has used him a score of times (beginning with Mr. O’Leary in the row at a gambling-hall in Paris), and whether he runs or whether he fights, his efforts to do either are grotesquely laughable. Shakespeare puts that view of Falstaff too: Prince Hal words it. But Falstaff, the humorist in person, rises on the field of battle over the slain Percy and enunciates his philosophy of the better part of valour. Falstaff’s estimate of honour “that word honour” ("Who hath it? he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it?"), the “grinning honour” that Sir Walter Blunt wears where the Douglas left him is necessary to complete the humorist’s vision of a battle-piece. Lever will scarcely visit you with such reflections, for the humorist of Lever’s type never stands apart and smiles; he laughs loud and in company. Still less will he give you one of those speeches which are the supreme achievement of this faculty, where the speaker’s philosophy is not reasoned out liked Falstaff’s, but revealed in a flash of the onlooker’s insight. Is it pardonable to quote the account of Falstaff’s death as the hostess narrates it?

“How now, Sir John, quoth I, what, man! be of good cheer. So a’ cried out God, God, three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a’ should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.”

Humour can go no farther than that terrible, illuminating phrase, which is laughable enough, heaven knows, but scarce likely to make you laugh. Contrast the humour of that with the humour of such a story as Lever delighted in. There were two priests dining with a regiment, we all have read in Harry Lorrequer, who chaffed a dour Ulster Protestant till he was the open derision of the mess. Next time they returned, the Protestant major was radiant with a geniality that they could not explain till they had to make their way out of barracks in a hurry, and found that the countersign (arranged by the major) was “Bloody end to the Pope.” Told as Lever tells it, with all manner of jovial amplifications, that story would make anyone laugh. But it does not go deep. The thing is funny in too obvious a way; the mirth finds too large an outlet in laughter; it does not hang about the brain, inextricable from the processes of thought; it carries nothing with it beyond the jest. And just as tears help to an assuaging of grief, so in a sense laughter makes an end of mirth. Give a feeling its instinctive vent, and you will soon be done with it, like the child who laughs and cries within five minutes; check it, and it spreads inward, gaining in intellectual quality as it loses in physical expression. The moral is, that if you wish to be really humorous you must not be too funny; and the capital defect of most Irish humour is that its aim is too simple it does not look beyond raising a laugh.

There are brilliant exceptions in the century that lies between Sheridan and Mr. Bernard Shaw, between Maria Edgeworth and Miss Barlow. But serious art or serious thought in Ireland has always revealed itself to the English sooner or later as a species of sedition, and the Irish have with culpable folly allowed themselves to accept for characteristic excellences what were really the damning defects of their work an easy fluency of wit, a careless spontaneity of laughter. They have taken Moore for a great poet, and Handy Andy for a humorist to be proud of. Yet an Irishman who wishes to speak dispassionately must find humour of a very different kind from that of Handy Andy or Harry Lorrequer either, to commend without reserve, as a thing that may be put forward to rank with what is best in other literatures.

Taking Sheridan and Miss Edgeworth as marking the point of departure, it becomes obvious that one is an end, the other at a beginning. Sheridan belongs body and soul to the eighteenth century; Miss Edgeworth, though her name sounds oddly in that context, is part and parcel of the romantic movement. The “postscript which ought to have been a preface” to Waverley declared, though after Scott’s magnificent fashion, a real indebtedness. Sheridan’s humour, essentially metropolitan, had found no use for local colour; Miss Edgeworth before Scott proved the artistic value that could be extracted from the characteristics of a special breed of people under special circumstances in a special place. Mr. Yeats, who, like all poets, is a most suggestive and a most misleading critic, has declared that modern Irish literature begins with Carleton. That is only true if we are determined to look in Irish literature for qualities that can be called Celtic if we insist that the outlook on the world shall be the Catholic’s or the peasant’s. Miss Edgeworth had not a trace of the Celt as I conceive that rather indefinite entity about her; but she was as good an Irish woman as ever walked, and there are hundreds of Irish people of her class and creed looking at Irish life with kindly humorous Irish eyes, seeing pretty much what she saw, enjoying it as she enjoyed it, but with neither her power nor her will to set it down. Castle Rackrent is a masterpiece; and had Miss Edgeworth been constant to the dramatic method which she then struck out for herself, with all the fine réticences that it involved, her name might have stood high in literature. Unhappily, her too exemplary father repressed the artist in her, fostered the pedagogue, and in her later books she commits herself to an attitude in which she can moralise explicitly upon the ethical and social bearings of every word and action. The fine humour in Ormond is obscured by its setting; in Castle Rackrent the humour shines. Sir Condy and his lady we see none the less distinctly for seeing them through the eyes of old Thady, the retainer who narrates the Rackrent history; and in the process we have a vision of old Thady himself. Now and then the novelist reminds us of her presence by some extravagantly ironic touch, as when Thady describes Sir Condy’s anger with the Government “about a place that was promised him and never given, after his supporting them against his conscience very honourably and being greatly abused for, he having the name of a great patriot in the country.” Thady would hardly have been so ingenuous as that. But for the most part the humour is truly inherent in the situation, and you might look far for a better passage than the description of Sir Condy’s parting with his lady. But it is better to illustrate from a scene perhaps less genuinely humorous, but more professedly so Sir Condy’s wake. Miss Edgeworth does not dwell on the broad farce of the entertainment; she does not make Thady eloquent over the whisky that was drunk and the fighting that began and so forth, as Lever or Carleton would certainly have been inclined to do. She fixes on the central comedy of the situation, Sir Condy’s innocent vanity and its pitiable disappointment is it necessary to recall that he had arranged for the wake himself, because he always wanted to see his own funeral? Poor Sir Condy! even Thady, who was in the secret, had forgotten all about him, when he was startled by the sound of his master’s voice from under the greatcoats thrown all atop.

“‘Thady,’ says he, ’I’ve had enough of this; I’m smothering and can’t hear a word of all they’re saying of the deceased.’ ’God bless you, and lie still and quiet a bit longer,’ says I, ’for my sister’s afraid of ghosts, and would die on the spot with fright if she was to see you come to life all on a sudden this way without the least preparation.’ So he lays him still, though well-nigh stifled, and I made haste to tell the secret of the joke, whispering to one and t’other, and there was a great surprise, but not so great as he had laid out there would. ’And aren’t we to have the pipes and tobacco after coming so far to-night?’ said some one; but they were all well enough pleased when his honour got up to drink with them, and sent for more spirits from a shebeen house where they very civilly let him have it upon credit. So the night passed off very merrily; but to my mind Sir Condy was rather upon the sad order in the midst of it all, not finding there had been such great talk about himself after his death as that he had always expected to hear.”

In the end Sir Condy died, not by special arrangement. “He had but a poor funeral after all,” is Thady’s remark; and you see with the kindly double vision of the humorist Thady’s sincere regret for the circumstance that would most have afflicted the deceased, as well as the more obviously comic side of Thady’s comment and Sir Condy’s lifelong aspiration. Indeed, the whole narrative is shot with many meanings, and one never turns to it without a renewed faculty of laughter.

If it were necessary to compare true humour with the make-believe, a comparison might be drawn between Thady and the servant in Lady Morgan’s novel O’Donnell. Rory is the stage Irishman in all his commonest attitudes. But it is better to go straight on, and concern ourselves solely with the work of real literary quality, and Carleton falls next to be considered.

Of genius with inadequate equipment it is always difficult to speak. Carleton is the nearest thing to Burns that we have to show; and his faults, almost insuperable to the ordinary reader, are the faults which Burns seldom failed to display when writing in English. But to Burns there was given an instrument perfected by long centuries of use the Scotch vernacular song and ballad; Carleton had to make his own, and the genius for form was lacking in him. Some day there may come a man of pure Irish race who will be to Carleton what Burns was to Ferguson, and then Ireland will have what it lacks; moreover, in the light of his achievement we shall see better what the pioneer accomplished. Every gift that Carleton had and pathos and humour, things complementary to each other, he possessed in profusion every gift is obscured by faulty technique. Nearly every trait is overcharged; for instance, in his story of the Midnight Mass he rings the changes interminably upon the old business of the wonderful medicine in the vagrants’ blessed horn that had a strong odour of whisky; but what an admirably humorous figure is this same Darby O’More! Out of the Poor Scholar alone, that inchoate masterpiece, you could illustrate a dozen phases of Carleton’s mirth, beginning with the famous sermon where the priest so artfully wheedles and coaxes his congregation into generosity towards the boy who is going out on the world, and all the while unconsciously displays his own laughable and lovable weaknesses. There you have the double vision, that helps to laugh with the priest, and to laugh at him in the same breath, as unmistakably as in the strange scene of the famine days where the party of mowers find Jimmy sick of the fever by the wayside and “schame a day” from their employer to build him a rough shelter. That whole chapter, describing the indefatigable industry with which they labour on the voluntary task, their glee in the truantry from the labour for which they are paid, their casuistry over the theft of milk for the pious purpose of keeping the poor lad alive, the odd blending of cowardice and magnanimity in their terror of the sickness and in their constant care that some one should at least be always in earshot of the boy, ready to pass in to him on a long-handed shovel what food they could scrape up, their supple ingenuity in deceiving the pompous landlord who comes to oversee their work, all that is the completest study in existence of Irish character as it came to be under the system of absolute dependence. There is nothing so just as true humour, for by the law of its being it sees inevitably two sides; and this strange compound of vices and virtues, so rich in all the softer qualities, so lacking in all the harder ones, stands there in Carleton’s pages, neither condemned nor justified, but seen and understood with a kindly insight. Carleton is the document of documents for Ireland in the years before the famine, preserving a record of conditions material and spiritual, which happily have largely ceased to exist, yet operate indefinitely as causes among us, producing eternal though eternally modifiable effects.

But, for the things in human nature that are neither of yesterday, to-day, nor to-morrow, but unchangeable, he has the humorist’s true touch. When the poor scholar is departing, and has actually torn himself away from home, his mother runs after him with a last token a small bottle of holy water. “Jimmy, alanna,” said she, “here’s this an’ carry it about you it will keep evil from you; an’ be sure to take good care of the written characther you got from the priest an’ Squire Benson; an’, darlin’, don’t be lookin’ too often at the cuff o’ your coat, for feard the people might get a notion that you have the banknotes sewed in it. An’, Jimmy agra, don’t be too lavish upon their Munsther crame; they say ‘tis apt to give people the ague. Kiss me agin, agra, an’ the heavens above keep you safe and well till we see you once more.”

Through all that catalogue of precautions, divine and human, one feels the mood between tears and laughter of the man who set it down. But I think you only come to the truth about Carleton in the last scene of all, when Jimmy returns to his home, a priest. Nothing could be more stilted, more laboured, than the pages which attempt to render his emotions and his words, till there comes the revealing touch. His mother at sight of him, returned unlooked-for after the long absence, loses for a moment the possession of her faculties, and cannot be restored. At last, “I will speak to her,” said Jimmy, “in Irish; it will go directly to her heart.” And it does.

Carleton never could speak to us in Irish; the English was still a strange tongue on his lips and in the ears of those he lived among; and his work comes down distracted between the two languages, imperfect and halting, only with flashes of true and living speech.

When you come to Lever, it is a very different story. Lever was at no lack for utterance; nobody was ever more voluble, no one ever less inclined to sit and bite his pen, waiting for the one and only word. Good or bad, he could be trusted to rattle on; and, as Trollope said, if you pulled him out of bed and demanded something witty, he would flash it at you before he was half awake. Some people are born with the perilous gift of improvisation; and the best that can be said for Lever is that he is the nearest equivalent in Irish literature, or in English either, to the marvellous faculty of D’Artagnan’s creator. He has the same exuberance, the same inexhaustible supply of animal spirits, of invention that is always spirited, of wit that goes off like fireworks. He delighted a whole generation of readers, and one reader at least in this generation he still delights; but I own that to enjoy him you must have mastered the art of skipping. Whether you take him in his earlier manner, in the “Charles O’Malley” vein of adventure, fox-hunting, steeple-chasing, Peninsular fighting, or in his later more intellectual studies of shady financiers, needy political adventurers, and the whole generation of usurers and blacklegs, he is always good; but alas and alas, he is never good enough. His work is rotten with the disease of anecdote; instead of that laborious concentration on a single character which is necessary for any kind of creative work, but above all for humorous creation, he presents you with a sketch, a passing glimpse, and when you look to see the suggestion followed out he is off at score with a story. In the first chapter of Davenport Dunn, for instance, there is an Irish gentleman on the Continent, a pork-butcher making his first experience of Italy, hit off to the life. But a silhouette and a very funny silhouette is all that we get of Mr. O’Reilly, and the figures over whom Lever had taken trouble for in that work Lever did take trouble are not seen with humour. Directly he began to think, his humour left him; it is as if he had been funny in watertight compartments. And perhaps that is why, here as elsewhere, he shrank from the necessary concentration of thought.

There is always a temptation to hold a brief for Lever, because he has been most unjustly censured by Irishmen, even in so august and impartial a court as the Dictionary of National Biography, as if he had traduced his countrymen. Did Thackeray, then, malign the English? The only charge that may fairly be brought against him is the one that cannot be rebutted the charge of superficiality and of scamped work, of a humour that only plays over the surface of things a humour which sees only the comic side that anybody might see. And because I cannot defend him, I say no more. Lever is certainly not a great humorist, but he is delightful company.

One may mention in passing the excursions into broad comedy of another brilliant Irishman Le Fanu’s short stories in the Purcell Papers, such as the Quare Gander, or Billy Molowney’s Taste of Love and Glory. These are good examples of a particular literary type the humorous anecdote in which Irish humour has always been fertile, and of which the ne plus ultra is Sir Samuel Ferguson’s magnificent squib in Blackwood, Father Tom and the Pope. Everybody knows the merits of that story, its inexhaustible fertility of comparison, its dialectic ingenuity, its jovialty, its drollery, its Rabelaisian laughter. But, after all, the highest type of humour is humour applying itself to the facts of life, and this is burlesque humour squandering itself in riot upon a delectable fiction. Humour is a great deal more than a plaything; it is a force, a weapon at once sword and shield. If there is to be an art of literature in Ireland that can be called national, it cannot afford to devote humour solely to the production of trifles. Father Tom is a trifle, a splendid toy; and what is more, a trifle wrought in a moment of ease by perhaps the most serious and conscientious artist that ever made a contribution to the small body of real Irish literature in the tongue that is now native to the majority of Irishmen.

Of contemporaries, with one exception, I do not propose to speak at any length, nor can I hope that my review will be complete. There is first and foremost Miss Barlow, a lady whose work is so gentle, so unassuming, that one hears little of it in the rush and flare of these strident times, but who will be heard and listened to with fresh emotion as the stream is heard when the scream and rattle of a railway train have passed away into silence. Is she a humorist? Not in the sense of provoking laughter and yet the things that she sees and loves and dwells on would be unbearable if they were not seen through a delicate mist of mirth. The daily life of people at continual handgrips with starvation, their little points of honour, their little questions of precedence, the infinite generosity that concerns itself with the expenditure of six-pence, the odd shifts they resort to that a gift may not have the appearance of charity, all these are set down with a tenderness of laughter that is peculiarly and distinctively Irish.

Yet, though we may find a finer quality of humour in those writers who do not seek to raise a laugh for instance, the subtle pervasive humour in Mr. Yeats’s Celtic Twilight still there are few greater attractions than that of open healthy laughter of the contagious sort; and it would be black ingratitude not to pay tribute to the authoresses of Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. a book that no decorous person can read with comfort in a railway carriage. These ladies have the keenest eye for the obvious humours of Irish life, they have abundance of animal spirits, and they have that knack at fluent description embroidered with a wealth of picturesque details that is shared by hundreds of peasants in Ireland, but is very rare indeed on the printed page. And, mingling with the broad farce there is a deal of excellent comedy for instance, in the person of old Mrs. Knox of Aussolas. But there is the same point to insist on and since these witty and delightful ladies have already the applause of all the world one insists less unwillingly this kind of thing, admirable as it is, will not redeem Irish humour from the reproach of trifling. But in the novel, The Real Charlotte, there is humour as grim almost as Swift’s and as completely un-English; it is a humour which assuredly stirs more faculties than the simple one of laughter.

There is indeed a literature which, if not always exactly humorous, is closely allied to it the literature of satire and invective; and in this Ireland has always been prolific. In the days of the old kings the order of bards had grown so numerous, that they comprised a third of the whole population, and they devoted themselves with such talent and zeal to the task of invective that no man could live in peace, and the country cried out against them, and there was talk of suppressing the whole order. The king spared them on condition that they would mend their manners. We have those bards still, but nowadays we call them politicians and journalists; and frankly I think we are ripe for another intervention, if only in the interests of literature. So much good talent goes to waste in bad words; and, moreover, an observance of the decencies is always salutary for style. And it seems that as the years have gone on, humour has diminished in Irish politics, while bad humour has increased; and therefore I leave alone any attempt to survey the humour of the orators, though Curran tempts one at the beginning and Mr. Healy at the close. Of purely literary satire there has been little enough, apart from its emergence in the novel; but there is one example which deserves to be recalled. I have never professed enthusiasm for Thomas Moore, but I am far indeed from agreeing with a recent critic who would claim literary rank for him rather in virtue of the Fudge Family than of the Irish Melodies. That satire does not seem to get beyond brilliancy; it is very clever, and not much more. Still, there are passages in it which cannot be read without enjoyment; and one quotation may be permitted, since it puts with perfect distinctness what it is always permissible to put the English case against Ireland.

I’m a plain man who speak the truth.
And trust you’ll think me not uncivil
When I declare that from my youth
I’ve wished your country at the devil.
Nor can I doubt indeed from all
I’ve heard of your high patriot fame,
From every word your lips let fall,
That you most truly wish the same.

It plagues one’s life out; thirty years
Have I had dinning in my ears
Ireland wants this and that and t’other;
And to this hour one nothing hears
But the same vile eternal bother.
While of those countless things she wanted,
Thank God, but little has been granted.

The list of writers of humorous verse in Ireland is a long one, but a catalogue of ephemera. Even Father Prout at this time of day is little more than a dried specimen labelled for reference, or at most preserved in vitality by the immortal Groves of Blarney. But neither that work, nor even The Night before Larry was stretched, nor Le Fanu’s ballad of Shemus O’Brien, can rank altogether as literature. About the humorous song I need only say that, so far as my experience goes, there is one, and one only, which a person with no taste for music and some taste for literature can hear frequently with pleasure, and that song of course is Father O’Flynn. To recall the delightful ingenuity and the nimble wit shown by another Irishman of the same family in the Hawarden Horace, and in a lesser degree by Mr. Godley in his Musa Frivola, leads naturally to the inquiry why humour from Aristophanes to Carlyle has always preferred the side of reaction a question that would need an essay, or a volume, all to itself.

But the central question is after all why in a race where humour is so preponderant in the racial temperament does so little of the element crystallise itself in literature. Humour ranks with the water power as one of the great undeveloped resources of the country. Something indeed has been done in the past with the river of laughter that almost every Irish person has flowing in his heart; but infinitely more might be done if these rivers were put in harness.

Yet, take away two Irish names from the field of modern comedy in the English language written during the nineteenth century, and you have uncommonly little for which literary merit can be claimed. The quality of Oscar Wilde’s is scarcely disputed. There is the more reason to dwell on Mr. Bernard Shaw’s plays, because they have not even in the twentieth century been fully accepted by that queer folk, the theatre-going public. But I never yet heard of anyone who saw You Never can Tell, and was not amused by it. That was a farce, no doubt, but a farce which appealed to emotions less elementary than those which are touched by the spectacle of a man sitting down by accident on his hat; it was a farce of intellectual absurdities, of grotesque situations arising out of perversities of character and opinion; a farce that you could laugh at without a loss of self-respect. But it is rather by his comedies than by his farces that Mr. Shaw should be judged. If they are not popular, it is for a very good reason: Mr. Shaw’s humour is too serious. His humour is a strong solvent, and one of the many things about which this humorist is in deadly earnest is the fetish worship of tradition. To that he persists in applying in Candida as in half a dozen other plays the ordeal by laughter an ordeal which every human institution is bound to face. Candida will not only make people laugh, it will make them think; and it is not easy to induce the public to think after dinner on unaccustomed lines. They will laugh when they have been used to laugh, weep when they have been used to weep; but if you ask them to laugh when they expect to weep, or vice versa, the public will resent the proceeding. The original humorist, like every other original artist, has got slowly and laboriously to convert his public before he can convince them of his right to find tears and laughter where he can.

Whatever Mr. Shaw touches, whether it be the half-hysterical impulse that sometimes passes current for heroism, as in Arms and the Man, or, as in the Devil’s Disciple, the conventional picturesqueness of a Don Juan that maker of laws, breaker of hearts, so familiar with the limelight, so unused to the illumination by laughter, who finds himself in the long run deplorably stigmatised as a saint there is a flood of light let in upon all manner of traditional poses, literary insincerities that have crept into life. There are few things of more value in a commonwealth than such a searching faculty of laughter. Like Sheridan, Mr. Shaw lives in England, and uses his comic gift for the most part on subjects suggested to him by English conditions of life, but with a strength of intellectual purpose that Sheridan never possessed. Irishmen may wish that he found his material in Ireland. But an artist must take what his hand finds, and there is no work in the world more full of the Scottish spirit or the Scottish humour than Carlyle’s French Revolution. If it be asked whether Mr. Shaw’s humour is typically Irish, I must reply by another question: “Could his plays have conceivably been written by any but an Irishman?”

Is there, in fact, a distinctively Irish humour? In a sense, yes, no doubt, just as the English humour is of a different quality from the Greek or the French. But nobody wants to pin down English humour to the formula of a definition; no one wants to say, Thus far shalt thou go, and beyond that shalt cease to be English. Moreover, a leading characteristic of the Irish type is just its variety its continual deviation from the normal. How, then, to find a description that will apply to a certain quality of mind throughout a variable race; that quality being in its essence the most complete expression of an individuality, in its difference from other individualities, since a man’s humour is the most individual thing about him? Description is perhaps more possible than definition. One may say that the Irish humour is kindly and lavish; that it tends to express itself in an exuberance of phrase, a wild riot of comparisons; that it amplifies rather than retrenches, finding its effects by an accumulation of traits, and not by a concentration. The vernacular Irish literature is there to prove that Irish fancy gives too much rather than too little. One may observe, again, that a nation laughs habitually over its besetting weakness; and if the French find their mirth by preference in dubious adventures, it cannot be denied that much Irish humour has a pronounced alcoholic flavour. But it is better neither to define nor to describe; there is more harmful misunderstanding caused by setting down this or that quality, this or that person, as typically French, typically English, typically Irish, than by any other fallacy; and we Irish have suffered peculiarly by the notion that the typical Irishman is the funny man of the empire. What I would permit myself to assert is, first, that the truest humour is not just the light mirth that comes easily from the lips that, in the hackneyed phrase, bubbles over spontaneously but is the expression of deep feeling and deep thought, made possible by deep study of the means to express it; and secondly, that literature, which through the earlier part of last century never received in Ireland the laborious brooding care without which no considerable work of art is possible, now receives increasingly the artist’s labour; and consequently that among our later humorists we find a faculty of mirth that lies deeper, reaches farther, judges more subtly, calls into light a wider complex of relations. After all, laughter is the most distinctive faculty of man; and I submit that, so far as literature shows, we Irish can better afford to be judged by our laughter now than a century ago.

1901.