Irish Jesuit Province

The Wild Geese. Pen-Portraits of Famous Irish Exiles by Gerald GriffinReview by: F. MacM.The Irish Monthly, Vol. 66, No. 780 (Jun., 1938), pp. 437-438Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20514356 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 487

interesting to see a F renchman taken aback by the heartiness of Chesterton, a heartiness that was English as Falstaff, Dr. Johnson and Dickens. It is

amusing to see Mr. Belloc's The Four Men being treated with scientific solemnity, while his main historical theses, to the establishment of which he has devoted his life, become a kind of side-line. The book, therefore, is weakened in judgment by the national peculiarities of the author; and further, it is falsified in proportion by author's inadequate acquaintance

with the mass of the men's writings. HIowever, he provides three excel lent introductions to the " three Papists ", and also an excuse for the translator's excellent essay.

F. MAcM.

The Wild Geese. Pen-portraits of Famous. Irish Exiles. By Gerald Griffin. With 16 illustrations. Jarrolds (Londlon). 12/6.

For entertainment that does not strain the judgment excessively, this book would be hard to beat. Interviews andi chance encournters with eminent Irishmen abroad, the new " Wild( Geese ", are the material, with much knowledge drawn from reading in addition. The title is used on account of

the alleged analogy between the Irishl exiles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the Irishi exiles of the last fifty years. Happily, the author, a distinguished journalist, (does niot labour the tenuous analogy, nor does he make it the foundatioi of ecriticisi. lie uses it as a mere label. But even as a label, he ill-uses it occasionally. l)r. Gogarty, for example, seems to have been press-ganged ink) to e comipany.

About half of the flock are writing mien, suchi as Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, Stephens, Clarke, O'Flaherty, and O'Casey. rrhe sketches are uneven. The one on Clarke is hardly a pen-portrait at all, but an appreciation of the poet's great verse. But any anecdotes, sayings, or descriptions of men that Mr. Griffin provides are delightful. How Dr. Gogarty brought Mr.

W. B. Yeats for a swim, by subterfuge and by quoting heroic antiquity as an incitement, is a thoroughly humorous story. The only one of the writers who is criticised adversely is George Moore, and he is criticised ironically as an individual. Literature and literary men seem godly to Mr. Griffin, or rather deified, and he offers incense, to Mr. James Joyce especially. Seldom, and then only hesitantly, does he lift a scrutinising torch to their human faces, as indeed he does raise a blistering cremative flame to the military reputations of Kitchener and Wilson. His, a literary man's reluc tance, to pass judgment on other literary men, makes his judgment of soldiers suspect. He has, however, provided some of the lighter material of future literary histories and biographies.

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488 THE IRISIS MONTHLY

I found some errors which are not important, because they will not mis lead any reader as to history, but they collectively give an air of inaccuracy to the book. " Fontenoy " is not an old Jacobite ballad; it was written

by Thomas Davis. Lord Ashbourne's Gaelicised name is not " Mac Giolla Bridh ", nor is a famous historian's spelled " Macneill ". Did the sub marine, U-19, from which Casement landed, start from Wilhelmshaven? He did start in another, the U-20, which broke down. Was it not Sarah Purser who wrote the cutting chastisement about Moore's pro testations of gallantry, and not Alice Milligan? It was in Brugh na Boinne that Moore and A: had the subterranean adventures, and not in

Mitchelstown Caves. The story is told in Hai and Farewell. Mr. Yeats

tells a different version of Dr. Gogarty's swan-gifting swim in the Liffey in the preface to the Oxford Book on Modern Verse. And, finally, with

a last pin-prick, a noun has been omitted on p. 258.

F. MACM.

Poems. Eileen Duggan. Preface by Walter de la Mare. (Allen and Unwin. 5/-.)

I met a very cultivated and interesting American recently whose works

necessitated his interviewing everyone in Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States, who had one or two titles to be called a poet. He poured out cataracts of names upon me;JI had to cudgel my brains to name-a dozen

poets of whom he had not heard. The point I wish to make here (one of

them, anyway) is that there are cataracts of names of poets writing in English; and scarcely any of them but has at least three or four genuine poems to his credit. That is shown in another way by the frequency with which a new name meets one's eye, even when that eye reads poetry almost

daily.

My American's thoroughness reached out to the published but unreviewed first books; someone had told him of (Miss?) Eileen Duggan before I men tioned her book to him. That makes three people at least who agree on its ,excellence: Walter de la Mare, who contributes an Introduction, another

Englishman-the critic Geoffrei Grierson, I think-and myself. There has not yet been time for more than three strangers to the author to join in applauding: there should be many more when the book begins to make its way about.

One gathers that Miss Duggan is a New Zealander (of Irish extraction ?). Here is how she wr'ites of her country:

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