Читать книгу Ireland - The Rock whence I was Hewn - Brian Oswald Patrick Donn-Byrne - Страница 3

FOREWORD
BY
The Right Hon. T. P. O’Connor

Table of Contents

The name of Donn Byrne first attracted me by its picturesqueness. Byrne is a fairly common name in Ireland, but Donn Byrne was a new form to me. I was prepared to admire him, because long before I had made his personal acquaintance I had read one of his early books, in which Marco Polo was the central figure. The subject seemed somewhat unpromising, because Marco Polo is dead long enough not to excite especial interest in the world of to-day; but when, turning over the pages, I found the whole epoch of the great discoverer so vivid that it seemed a story of men and things of but yesterday, I marked Donn Byrne as a writer to be watched ever afterwards.

Then came the long series of books dealing with Ireland, and the discovery that Donn Byrne—especially in America—was among the best sellers of his time. His fame went up rapidly, mainly in America—I am afraid they are not even yet great readers of books in Ireland. But in America I made a somewhat remarkable discovery during one of

A smile for the stranger over the half door of one of the quaint little thatched cottages of the Claddagh, the ancient fishing village of Galway City.

my visits—that there is a large group of Americans who, although not all nor indeed even the majority, connected with Ireland by birth or by descent, read voraciously modern novels about that country.

But Donn Byrne was their favourite; and the result, of course, was that I looked eagerly for every new book of his as it came out. Personally, I am afraid I am a little too much of a realist and have seen too much in political controversy of the dark as well as the good side of Ireland, for Donn Byrne’s pictures of that country to make the same appeal to me as to those who know it less from the inside. The land bathed in poetry and universal good-will was not quite the Ireland that was brought home to me—especially by the bitter controversy in its politics, in which unwillingly I had to take part—and I could not accept as a complete picture of Ireland this land of wandering and popular bards and romantic love. However, there it was. Mr. Donn Byrne had found his public.

At last one day he came to see me. His personal appearance made as immediate an appeal to me as his books, for he was a singularly handsome specimen of a genuine Irishman. He was tall, he had a face of

Blarney Castle, County Cork. “There is a stone there, that whoever kisses, oh! he never misses to grow eloquent.”

classic regularity of feature, he had a modest and winning manner, made perhaps the more so by the Irish accent which he maintained amid his many changes of fortune and residence; above all, he was utterly unpretentious. He brought along with him a delightful wife, as Irish as he, very handsome, very modest, very intelligent. I never saw a pair that seemed to me so instinctively and happily mated. I have not seen him since. He lived very little in London, but my recollections of him are pleasant in every way.

I have not a complete knowledge of all the facts of his life, except the general impression that he had had many vicissitudes, many hard hours of struggle and of poverty, and that he was years travelling the hard path of the occasional contributor to newspapers and magazines. I believe he was actually born in New York, though when he was but three years of age he went back to the glens of Antrim, from which his ancestors came and which are the background of so many of his stories.

The chief quality of his writing is his extraordinary power of bringing out the poetry and the pathos of everybody and everything in the land of his fathers. He was helped a good deal in his understanding of the people by the fact that he spoke the old Irish language, which was, and is, pretty generally used in the part of Ireland whence he came. He had an extraordinary power of giving vitality and poetry to every being and every scene he had to describe. They are all dramatised by a man who saw more of the drama, the poetry and the romance of these personages and scenes than the ordinary observer.

In the year 1911 at the age of twenty Donn Byrne returned to New York, where he was married. Here it was that his father, an architect, had come to direct a great building.

One day he sent a poem to Harper’s Magazine: the editor was wise enough to realise the poetic skill of this little ballad. I reproduce it here, because in it you can trace all the main qualities that made the greatness and the popularity of all Donn Byrne’s books.

DONN BYRNE’S FIRST POEM
Published in Harper’s Magazine, 1911

Table of Contents

I will take my pipes and go now, for the bees upon the sill

Are singing of the summer that is coming from the stars.

I will take my pipes and go now, for the little mountain rill

Is pleading with the bagpipes in tender, crooning bars.

A Grandmother of Glasses Land, Athlone.

I will go o’er hills and valleys, and through fields of ripening rye,

And the linnet and the throstle and the bittern in the sedge

Will hush their throats and listen, as the piper passes by

On the great long road of silver that ends at the world’s edge.

I will take my pipes and go now, for the sandflower on the dunes

Is a-weary of the sobbing of the great white sea,

And is asking for the piper, with his basketful of tunes,

To play the merry lilting that sets all hearts free.

I will take my pipes and go now, and God go with you all,

And keep all sorrow from you, and the dark heart’s load;

I will take my pipes and go now, for I hear the summer call,

And you’ll hear the pipes a-singing as I pass along the road.

There is scarcely anything in any of his books that followed in which you cannot trace the tone of the genius of this little poem.

Luck then came the way of the young couple. Prosperity came with the publication of Messer Marco Polo, and the first story of Donn Byrne was at once hailed by all the critics and the public as a work of genius.

From that time forward he was a bit of a wanderer, spending some part of his time in America, and a good deal in Kent or Surrey in England; but nearly always drifting back for some time at least to the land of his birth which he understood

The ruins of Donegal Castle. Donegal City.

so well and loved so dearly. I fancy there was scarcely a spot in Ireland which he did not know. He was able to see in the prosaic and sometimes the squalid surroundings immediately before his eyes the picturesque and moving history that lay behind in the chequered story of his country.

These years of travel had given him an insight into the inner character of many other lands beside his own. The first thing that ever struck me in his writings was his description of Marseilles, a city very often described and known to all the world; but I do not think I ever read anything which gave me such a vivid and brief description as Donn Byrne’s picture:

“Along the quays, along the Cannebière, was a riot of colour and nationality unbelievable from on board ship. Here were Turks, dignified and shy. Here were Greeks, wary, furtive. Here were Italians, Genoese, Neapolitans, Livornians, droll, vivacious, vindictive. Here were Moors, here were Algerians, black African folk, sneering, inimical. Here were Spaniards, with their walk like a horse’s lope. Here were French business men, very important.... A queer town that, as familiar

The National Library, Dublin, forms a part of the National University.

as a channel marking, teeming as an ant-hill, and when darkness came over it, and he viewed it from the afterdeck, mystery came, too.... For a while there was a hush, and around the hills gigantic ghosts walked.... One thought of the Phocæans who had founded it, and to whom the Cannebière was a rope-walk, where they made the sheets for their ships.... And one thought of Lazarus, who had been raised from among the silent dead, and who had come there, so legend read, a grey figure in ceramic garments, standing in the prow of a boat.”

Ultimately he was able to find a home in his native land, in Coolmain Castle, a picturesque old place which is believed to have been built in the thirteenth century.

This is not the place for a study of his many works. Suffice it to say that his lately published book, Destiny Bay, has already had a triumphant reception. It is one of the great tragedies in the story of literature that—at the moment when he was rising high in fame with each succeeding book, and happy with a beautiful family—driving in a faulty motor car in his Irish estate, Donn Byrne was killed in a wretched accident, and the brain that conceived and the hand that wrote such lovely things will produce no more. It is a tragedy too deep for words.

I send with these few lines a sketch which summarised his views of the land of his birth; terse, mordant, enthusiastic; it is a worthy adieu to the world of letters which he left too soon.

Looking east from Lismore Castle. The beautiful Blackwater is often called “The Irish Rhine.”