The Most Dangerous Words

The most dangerous words are the ones that you think you understand. This is a trap of old books, where familiar words often hold strange meanings. Sometimes it is not the word, but its definition, that becomes archaic; the definition is discarded, the word acquires new meaning and endures.

It is often possible, when words change meaning, to see the connecting ideas, or to see the definition growing more general or more specific. Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, written in the middle of the fifteenth century, contains an abundance of such changed words. In each following example, I will give the familiar word, the archaic definition, and a quotation demonstrating the old use. All quotations are from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, Volume I, published by Penguin Classics in 1986; the archaic definition was usually given in the glossary or footnotes of that book. The editor modernized spelling and punctuation.

1. Maims, wounds. This is a word that has grown more specific, indicating now a certain type of injury rather than injury in general; note as well that it is used, by Malory, as a noun rather than a verb.

“When King Lot had espied King Bors, he knew him well, then he said, ‘O Jehu, defend us from death and horrible maims!’ ”

2. Lightly, quickly. There is an obvious connection between (physical) lightness and swiftness of movement.

“Then the King of the Hundred Knights voided the horse lightly.”

3. Doubt, a fearful thing. There are two possible relations between the modern and archaic definitions. First, doubt breeds fear; second, doubt can itself be a thing to be feared or dreaded.

“Then they went to battle again so marvellously that doubt it was to hear of that battle.”

4. Bounty, excellence. Excellence is a bounty–an abundant amount–of some positive quality. This quotation (spoken by Merlin to King Arthur) is interesting for the idea expressed, too.

“A man of your bounty and noblesse should not be without a wife.”

5. Fault, lack. Even today, every fault is a lack of something, but it has a connotation of guilt, of commission rather than omission.

“I fault fifty [good knights], for so many have been slain in my day.”

6. Careful, mournful. Before its current use as a synonym for a worry, concern, or responsibility, care was a synonym for grief.

“And so he ascended up into that hill till he came to a great fire, and there he found a careful widow wringing her hands and making great sorrow, sitting by a grave new made.”

7. Warn, prevent. When we warn someone, it is to prevent something. The evolution of this word’s meaning is from prevent to attempt to prevent, in a specific way.

“I may not warn people to speak of me what it pleaseth them.”

8. Dissever, distinguish. To distinguish one thing from another is to understand that they are different—separate from each other, in some way. You are, intellectually, splitting them apart. Dissevering them.

“All men of worship may dissever a gentleman from a yeoman, and from a yeoman a villain.”

This final quotation offers a bonus lesson on the evolution of language. “A man of worship” is a man who has worship, in the old sense—honor or worth. Gentleman (man of gentle, or noble, birth), yeoman (freeholder beneath the nobility), and villain (a serf or peasant) are all used according to their original, class definition.

The Feast of Hallowmas

You can tell the strange disconnect between the holidays of October 31 and November 1 by the fact that the first is popularly called Halloween, and the second All Saints’ Day. Hallowmas and All Hallows’ Day are among the other names for the church feast of November 1, and from these names, of course, Halloween is derived. Yet the holidays have parted ways, and so have their names.

The feast of Hallowmas was founded in honor of all the saints. The holiday’s antecedent was a day of commemoration for the martyrs, later broadened to honor all the saints in Heaven. Saints, as a religious term, has two meanings—first, that of dead Christians canonized by the Church, and sometimes the object of prayer or worship; second, that of all Christians, without qualification. I must note that the Bible uses saints in this second sense.

Because it was established under the Catholic Church, All Saints’ Day was probably intended to celebrate saints in the first, qualified definition. Since the Protestant Reformation, some churches have broadened the holiday to commemorate all Christians who have died—who would together be called, in an old phrase, the Church Triumphant. In its broadest sense, Hallowmas is a holiday in which the Church Militant (in the world) honors the Church Triumphant (in Heaven). The only vestige of Hallowmas in Halloween, as it is currently celebrated, is the thought of death.

Some Christians, if belonging to traditions that incorporate All Saints’ Day, remember the recently departed on November 1. Following on that thought, I am going to conclude with a brief verse written by Alfred Tennyson; the friend mentioned is dead, and Tennyson is grieving for him.

 

CXXVI

of In Memoriam A. H.H.

Love is and was my Lord and King,
      And in his presence I attend
      To hear the tidings of my friend,
Which every hour his couriers bring.

Love is and was my King and Lord,
      And will be, tho’ as yet I keep
      Within his court on earth, and sleep
Encompass’d by his faithful guard,

And hear at times a sentinel
      Who moves about from place to place,
      And whispers to the worlds of space,
In the deep night, that all is well.

An Icon of Melodrama

If you consider the facts from a certain distance – objectively, even analytically – you would have to conclude that the image of a woman tied to the railroad tracks is grim. Tragic, even, if the evident intention is realized. We take it to be comical, but we’re not really to blame. The damsel in distress, tied to the railroad tracks, is an icon of melodrama burlesqued into a joke. Even more, it is a symbol of cartoon villainy and melodramatic storytelling.

The melodramatic, in modern use, is drama so excessive it becomes absurd. The phenomenon was wonderfully expressed by Oscar Wilde in his jibe that no one without a heart of stone could read the death of Little Nell and not laugh. But though it gets no respect now, melodrama was a reigning art form in its day. Because we are interested in all art forms here – at least all the art forms we are presently thinking of; don’t test us – we’re going to consider the most marked characteristics of melodrama. Hat tip to Robert M. Lewis’ From Traveling Show to Vaudeville, an excellent review of American entertainment.

Melodrama was, first of all, sensationalist. Well, yes, you say. By definition. And this is so. But melodrama brewed a distinct flavor of sensationalism. Melodrama was firmly grounded in the present day and in next-door locales. There was no once upon a time, no exotic, far-off lands. Nor were there the more or less than human – elves or aliens, superheroes or sorcerers. Melodrama was populated by at least the types of real people, cads and country boys and salesgirls.

And that made it, perhaps, all the more wrenching when drama burst through the familiar with violence, both literal and metaphorical. Improbable dangers and extravagant disasters charged melodrama. Acts of God, bloody deeds of villainy, and blind, mechanical violence were all conjured to create excitement and robust physicality. Think of unpleasant yet unlikely ways to die, all of which require vigorous action to escape, inflict, or both. The writers of the melodramas did. That is why their heroes braved bullets and earthquakes, and their heroines were pushed off bridges and thrown beneath freight elevators and, yes, tied to railroad tracks.

Yet the danger that stalked the heroines of melodrama was not only physical. It was also moral. The popular melodrama Rosina Meadows (1841) was the tragedy of a young woman robbed of her virtue by an urbane scoundrel. (To catch a little of the spirit of melodrama: Both of them die in the last scene – Rosina for no particular reason, her erstwhile lover at the hands of her avenging father.) Rosina exemplifies the idea of young female innocence menaced by male villainy, ever-recurrent in melodrama. For all its full-hearted plunge into violence and crime, melodrama was intensely moralistic. So was its audience. The playwright Porter Emerson Browne marked with vague fondness how devotedly melodrama’s spectators hated the villain and loved the hero and heroine. The journalist Rollin Lynde Hart marked it with acid.

Doubtless there is a great deal of acid that might be spilled on an art form symbolized by a man in a black suit tying a woman to the railroad tracks. Absurdity, histrionics, and stereotypes thread through the image. But there must be something to be said for it as well. It is a striking image, and an indelible one. And if we could receive it as artlessly as the Bowery audiences once did, we might even see pathos within the schmaltz, and human longing beyond the absurdity.

Lazarus, Come from the Dead

I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all.

— T.S. Eliot, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

In the last glimpse we catch of Lazarus, he is sitting at a dinner held in Christ’s honor, the object of the crowd’s curiosity and the target of a murder plot. People were going over to Jesus because He had raised Lazarus from the dead, so the Pharisees decided to kill Lazarus. They could be very straightforward in their problem-solving. Their solution would only have worked, however, if Lazarus stayed dead. One wonders if they detected a potential pitfall in this.

We are never told what became of the murder plot. Presumably it never came off. I am more impressed by the image in the Gospel of the people flocking to see Lazarus. I think I would have been more interested in hearing him. Lazarus, come from the dead, back to tell us all – But as far as the narrative reports, he tells nothing. Lazarus returns from the dead and silently vanishes.

He is not the only one. Other people rise from the dead, in both Testaments: the widow’s son in Nain, Jairus’ daughter, Dorcas, Eutychus, the Shunnamite’s son, the son of the widow in Zarephath. None of them is given a voice in Scripture to tell their story or make a statement. None of them tells all, or even anything. And it’s possible they had nothing to tell. Maybe rising from the dead was like waking up from sleep. We wouldn’t know.

There was another Lazarus, the beggar carried by the angels to heaven in Jesus’ parable. Later the rich man, in hell, asked Abraham to send Lazarus to his brothers, a messenger from the dead to bring truth to the living. Abraham dismissed the idea: They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them. If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.

Let them listen to Moses and the prophets. We already have been told what we need to hear; the dead have nothing more to add. They will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead. Strangely enough, the dead can’t even tell the truth better than it has already been told. And this, maybe, is what lies behind the loud silence of the Bible’s returned dead. Lazarus was raised as a sign and not as a messenger; the widows’ sons returned for love and not revelation.

One did return from death and speak. Jesus Christ is the only resurrection among all the risen dead. Everyone else returned to life before the grave, still to die for good and all. Only Christ traveled through death and beyond, to life in eternity – death not only reversed but conquered, never to be suffered again. The creeds say that Christ descended into hell. He Himself told no tales. What did He say? I think we should notice that He told the disciples that they should have seen this one coming, what with Moses and the prophets and all. And beyond that?

He gave a command, a commission, a blessing. He gave a promise that we would never be alone, and a brotherhood. I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. He gave hope, in more than words. We still haven’t torn down the veil of death. But we have – out of the darkness, the cold, the emptiness, above all grief and fear – the blazing glory of the Risen Son.

The Departure From Normality

Two weeks ago, life was normal. Back then you could go to the theater, or set up camp in a Starbucks with a laptop and a latte, or go to the store with breezy confidence of finding toilet paper. The churches were open. Remember that?

Now we are all waiting for a return to normalcy. Even if you’re lucky enough to have both your health and your finances sound, even if your own life has changed only in altered routines and negligible inconveniences – even so, you want that return. There is an uneasy uncertainty in the atmosphere, a question waiting for an answer. We move about life with a wary eye on the news, on the world, watching for the answer to appear. How bad will it be?

These are interesting days. People will write books about them. But it’s the duller days you want to live in, the tranquil epochs between history’s watersheds. What makes good reading, after it’s all done, is not what makes a good life in the moment. The same paradox is at work in our stories. The sort of stories we want to read or watch are not the sort we actually want to live.

There are exceptions, I know. The adventures are thick with danger and privation, but some people really would take them anyway; the romances are fraught with painful drama, but some people really would live them. Still, I am sure that the idea of such things is more appealing than the fact of them. The things that make stories good – danger, difficulties, villains, misfortune, loss – are the things that make life bad. Our lives are a quest for well-being and happiness. Who really wants the apocalypse or the crisis, the danger or the pain?

Some people want to be heroes, a noble impulse. But if heroes are to be admired, the necessity of heroism is to be avoided. Nobody needs to be a hero when things are going well. The first suggestion of anything that would require heroism – whether personal tragedy or public calamity – sets us longing for what we call normal life. We would rather be happy.

In the wake of World War I, and the Spanish influenza, Warren Harding campaigned for president under the slogan ‘Return to Normalcy’. (We’ve had about a century of nitpicking over whether normalcy is, in fact, a word, but Harding indelibly marked American culture and got to be president in the bargain, so the win to him.) Harding declared that America needed healing instead of heroics, restoration instead of revolution, and the dispassionate instead of the dramatic. He won in a landslide. And what, after all, is the purpose of any heroics or revolution except to protect, save, or make better normal life? The purpose of the stories is not, perhaps, much different.

As we wait for the return of normalcy, we are spending more time with our stories than ever. Never before has binge-watching felt like a contribution to society. And you know something? It helps. So may your stories be exciting, and your life tranquil, and may interesting days soon pass.

Art Under Negotiation

One of the purposes of this site is to explore the meeting of Christianity with culture broadly, and with art particularly, whether that meeting is synthesis, negotiation, or conflict. That exploration grows more and more relevant as our society transforms into a post-Christian culture. Still, the meeting of Christianity and art is as old as the Church Universal. It is interesting to consider how the early Christians made their own negotiations in a pre-Christian culture.

Ancient Christian art, some of it dating from the second century, is preserved in the Catacombs.1In the 1800s, when the serious scientific study of the Catacombs began, the oldest artwork was dated to the first century AD. But modern estimates place it a century later. The Catacombs, as you know, is the collective name given to a web of underground Christian cemeteries excavated around Rome when the emperors were still pagan. Christianity was, in those days, an infant religion in an old civilization. The Greeks and the Romans had brought to a high state the arts of sculpture, painting, and architecture. These arts served causes of which the Christians could not have approved: the glorification of pagan emperors and pagan gods, an endless proliferation of images and temples. Yet Christians brought those arts, as they were able, down into the Catacombs, in frescoes and paintings and sarcophagi.

It’s not surprising. Humans must have art. Humans must especially have art in their sacred places. What is more notable is that the early Christians borrowed not only Rome’s art forms but, to a limited extent, its pagan imagery. The classic image of Orpheus taming the wild animals frequently appears in the Catacombs, doubtless as a type of Christ.2W.H. Withrow, The Catacombs of Rome (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1888), 266. Other pagan representations include Ulysses and Mercury, curiously placed in the scene of Elijah’s ascension into heaven.3Withrow, 267-68. In the Early Church, Ulysses was taken as an allegory for the soul’s journey home. There is no allegorical explanation for Mercury. There is some evidence, however, of pagan images being hidden or destroyed, indicating that not all Christians of that early time were sanguine about this artistic syncretism.4Ibid.

Symbols were very common in the Catacombs, etched onto countless graves. Some, such as the fish or the Christogram, were exclusively Christian in their significance. Others, like the ship, the crown, and the palm branch, were shared with the dominant pagan culture of Rome. As Withrow comments in his book, however, the common pagan symbols of serpent and dog are largely rejected, with the former appearing only in depictions of Eve’s temptation and the latter used only as an accessory in hunting scenes.5Withrow, 298. Dogs were symbolic of fidelity in Roman culture. It is easy to understand why the serpent was rejected, and perhaps Withrow is right in his speculation that early Christians shared the Jewish conception of dogs as unclean. Whatever the reason, the pertinent fact is that Christian art did not include all Roman motifs.

The symbols of the Catacombs encapsulate the early Christian use of the art that, created by pagans, surrounded them. They added much that was new, and infused much that was old with new meaning (the laurel wreath did not mean quite the same thing to Roman pagans as it did to Roman Christians). They retained cultural symbols and even nakedly pagan imagery. And some elements of pagan art they excised entirely. (Withrow also notices the far greater modesty of human figures portrayed in the Christian Catacombs than in pagan art.6Withrow, 264.)

Art is not Christian. Art is not pagan. Art is human. Like all things human, Christianity puts it in negotiation with the divine to find its expression and meaning. As illuminated in the Catacombs, Christians have from the beginning attempted the synthesis of faith with culture: the addition, the retention, the rejection.

And if the defaced pagan images are any clue, we have always been disagreeing about it, too.

Review: Tarzan of the Apes

It is the rare but glorious lot of writers to create a cultural icon that lasts generations, one of those things that everybody just knows even if they’re not sure how. Tarzan is one such icon. Who doesn’t know the image of the handsome, wild, muscular man swinging through the jungle with the agility of an ape? Sometimes there’s a girl in his arm, but to tell the truth, she’s not really necessary.

Like many such icons, Tarzan has been unmoored from his ultimate source. Everybody knows Tarzan, but most haven’t read Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. When I picked up Tarzan of the Apes, I was driven more by curiosity than the hope of a good story.

Tarzan of the Apes was first published in 1912, and a century is more than enough to make a novel historically interesting. Even the novels that were radical unconsciously reflect the ideas and attitudes of their era (no one lives entirely free of his time). In this respect, Tarzan is interesting, even though what it reflects can be quite bad. The crude racist stereotypes are obvious blemishes, but the more subtle eugenicist ideas are the same poison – refined and intellectualized and so more pernicious.

This book surprised me. It is darker and more violent than I anticipated, with a surprising dose of cannibalism from both white and black characters. Tarzan’s jungle divides itself pitilessly into killer and killed, and he himself is a wholehearted participant. Most of the characters, of whatever race or species, are scum. At the same time, it is far more thoughtful than I would have guessed. In the best tradition of speculative fiction, Burroughs uses fiction to explore an idea. He takes up the nature vs. nurture debate by putting a child of the best hereditary (in an eugenicist touch, the son of English aristocrats) in the worst environment (raised by savage apes in a virgin jungle).

To Burroughs’ credit, he doesn’t offer a quick, cut-and-dried answer. Tarzan, the subject of his fictional experiment, is deeply influenced by both hereditary and environment. At the same time, Burroughs’ treatment of the question is generally unconvincing, occasionally ridiculous, and undermined by eugenicist assumptions. Burroughs explicitly grounds the explanation of Tarzan’s superhuman physicality in evolution, in the logic that human muscles and senses atrophied as we learned to rely on reason and would rejuvenate in an environment that demanded it for survival, but I didn’t buy it. Nor did I buy that Tarzan’s aristocratic genes made him instinctively gracious or chivalrous, or that he could become fluent in any language quickly. In a very real way, Tarzan of the Apes is a book of ideas. It’s just that the ideas are mostly claptrap.

As much as eugenics, as an idea, deserves to die, its presence in Tarzan is part of the novel’s scientific bent. So, too, are the references to evolution, the nature vs. nurture debate, and the way an important plot point turns on this new thing, fingerprinting. If you don’t know what that is, the book explains it. A good part of the book’s darkness comes from its more realistic portrayal of apes in particular and African jungles in general. The portrayal is not really scientific; Burroughs attributes to the apes a language (however limited) and customs and laws (however savage). But unlike Disney’s Tarzan and The Jungle Book, which were developed out of a desire for fun, child-friendly stories with animals that talk and sing and occasionally even dance, Burroughs’ jungle society was developed in the spirit of the real jungle. The apes in this novel are violent, but so are apes in real life.

To take Tarzan of the Apes strictly as art, the plot was well-constructed and the author unafraid of making decisive change in his hero and story. The love story, for once, was not completely predictable. The old professors were funny. I was still ready for the book to end in the neighborhood of page 150, and I got tired of the phrase “forest god”.

Not much of the real Tarzan of the apes survives in his icon – not his propensity to kill, his blue blood, his superhuman strength. But the image of him in his jungle is enduring. Tarzan of the Apes may be good fare for those interested in culture, history, and old-fashioned pulp romps. Reader discernment is needed, however, and the novel is emphatically not for children.

The Making of ‘Us’

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice … Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things. G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

I open with this quotation for two reasons. The first is that today is July 4, and it is appropriate to Independence Day. The second is that, like Independence Day, it points to the creation of a nation. Nations, though somewhat maligned as, for example, a proximate cause of World War I, stand as the largest cohesive group yet formed by humanity. (Empires, though generally larger, possess unity no deeper than the edge of a sword – hence the inevitable dissolution of all empires, usually in short order.) Groups are defined by common identity. National identity is only an unusually modern way of defining us

The oldest method of creating a broad us is through blood, through a concept of family expanded to include thousands. Clans, tribes, kinship groups: all have been societies unto themselves, holding political power and social organization within a web of kinship. Common ancestry, real or invented, is an effective way of forging identity and unity, and a tenacious one. Even today, ethnic violence is often a reversion to tribal divisions, whose bonds prove stronger than overlying national identities.

Religion also forms a basis for groups and for identity. Some religions (it isn’t true of all) transcend divisions by ancestry to create a broader identity. Islam, at its birth in the Arabian peninsula, did this; the Koran specifically forbids violence against fellow Muslims of different tribes. Christianity used to be a powerful force of cohesion in the West, a common source of moral standards, metaphysical beliefs, and – in such forms as music and literature – culture.

National identity followed the rise of the nation-state. National identity encompasses any attribute or characteristic people wish to claim, from speaking Gaelic to fine cuisine to the Declaration of Independence. It often includes common ancestry or religion but often transcends them as well. The Reformation broke the religious homogeneity of Europe, and America never had much in the way of ethnic homogeneity; national identity is another avenue to unity.

By all these things we forge identity, and by identity we create the us, and Man must have the us. The trick of it all is that if there is an us, there must also be a them. What bridges one gap may deepen another; if the presence of a commonality is reason to spare someone, the absence of it may be a reason not to spare him. Nations have broadened beyond tribes, but not risen above tribal impulses.

So where do we go from here? Maybe you see evolution in all this and, with happy optimism, imagine that identities will grow broader and broader until they merge, in some distant utopia, into one universal identity. Maybe you think that that would be very nice, but unfortunately people aren’t, so it’s more likely that a regression into primitive loyalties and narrow identities will create a dystopia. Maybe you think that another basis of common identity is possible, whether culture or secular creeds or social class (Workers of the world, unite!).

Whatever you think or imagine about the thorny issue of communal identity, of this – as of everything else – stories are made.

Never Forget

(Excerpts from President Bush’s address at the National Cathedral on September 14, 2001.)

 

 

We are here in the middle hour of our grief. So many have suffered so great a loss, and today we express our nation’s sorrow. We come before God to pray for the missing and the dead, and for those who loved them. On Tuesday, our country was attacked with deliberate and massive cruelty. We have seen the images of fire and ashes and bent steel.

Now come the names, the list of casualties we are only beginning to read:

They are the names of men and women who began their day at a desk or in an airport, busy with life.

They are the names of people who faced death and in their last moments called home to say, be brave and I love you.

They are the names of passengers who defied their murderers and prevented the murder of others on the ground.

They are the names of men and women who wore the uniform of the United States and died at their posts.

They are the names of rescuers — the ones whom death found running up the stairs and into the fires to help others.

We will read all these names. We will linger over them and learn their stories, and many Americans will weep. …

War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others; it will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing. Our purpose as a nation is firm, yet our wounds as a people are recent and unhealed and lead us to pray. In many of our prayers this week, there’s a searching and an honesty. At St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, on Tuesday, a woman said, “I pray to God to give us a sign that He’s still here.”

Others have prayed for the same, searching hospital to hospital, carrying pictures of those still missing. God’s signs are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that His purposes are not always our own, yet the prayers of private suffering, whether in our homes or in this great cathedral are known and heard and understood. There are prayers that help us last through the day or endure the night. There are prayers of friends and strangers that give us strength for the journey, and there are prayers that yield our will to a Will greater than our own.

This world He created is of moral design. Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance and love have no end, and the Lord of life holds all who die and all who mourn.

It is said that adversity introduces us to ourselves. This is true of a nation as well. In this trial, we have been reminded and the world has seen that our fellow Americans are generous and kind, resourceful and brave. …

America is a nation full of good fortune, with so much to be grateful for, but we are not spared from suffering. In every generation, the world has produced enemies of human freedom. They have attacked America because we are freedom’s home and defender, and the commitment of our Fathers is now the calling of our time.

 

On this national day of prayer and remembrance, we ask Almighty God to watch over our nation and grant us patience and resolve in all that is to come. We pray that He will comfort and console those who now walk in sorrow. We thank Him for each life we now must mourn, and the promise of a life to come.

As we’ve been assured, neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities, nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth can separate us from God’s love. May He bless the souls of the departed. May He comfort our own. And may He always guide our country.

God bless America.

Review: The Story of the Irish Race: A Popular History

There are many stereotypes of the Irish, and no doubt most of have some antecedent in reality: the policeman with a brogue, the corrupt politician of Tammany Hall, the talker, the fighter, the drunk, the priest. Behind all these figures, familiar and sometimes even comic, shimmers a history of tragedy and of glory. Often this history is neglected. To remedy this neglect, Seumas MacManus wrote The Story of the Irish Race: A Popular History (first published in 1921, with later editions covering until the end of the 1930s).

On the first page of this book, the author calls it a “crude compendium” and “a rough and ready sketch.” Perhaps so, but at 725 pages and a historical span of nearly three thousand years, it is quite a sketch.

To his credit, the author makes no pretensions to neutrality. He declares on the first page that the purpose of this rough and ready sketch is to provide a history of Ireland for her people and exiles (and descendants of those exiles – of whom I am one). This is a book of the Irish, by the Irish, and for the Irish.

A more rigorous book might have been written, as the author acknowledges at the outset. The opening chapters consist greatly of speculation about the historical basis of Irish legends, especially those of the Tuatha De Danann. The later chapters are strong and unequivocal in their anti-British viewpoint. They are not, however, hateful. (And reading the accounts of Britain’s conquest and keeping of Ireland – including atrocities of murder, rape, and torture – and the ruthless self-interest with which Great Britain ruled the Irish, and the oppressive laws with which it sought to disenfranchise and degrade an entire people … well, I could see why many of the Irish have hated the English. I felt I could come to hate them myself.*)

The book’s clear Irish viewpoint, once recognized, is valuable in understanding the Irish viewpoint. There is also a kind of richness that flows from this viewpoint, from reading of Ireland from someone who loves Ireland. The author’s pleasure in the lore and songs and poetry of Ireland, his love of it through every defeat and misfortune, his delight in its glories – all of this shines through the pages.

The author may well be biased (and his expressed opinions are, of course, not infallible). Yet this is not propaganda. The author means to provide history. He recounts events that reflect poorly on the Irish and provides support for anti-English or pro-Irish statements from sources that have no bias in favor of Ireland (and perhaps some in favor of England).

This book is flavored with deep emotion, sharpened with strong opinions. It is also filled with apt quotations, powerful details, and colorful sketches of great characters. The author shows great skill in what he chooses to relate and how, and wholly avoids the dryness that comes of too much attention to statistics and too little attention to the individual stories that make up the great arc of history.

The Story of the Irish Race is not a definitive history of Ireland, but probably no single book could be. Whatever its limits, it is written with respect for the truth and love for Ireland. It reprises Irish history too little known in America and reflects the Irish spirit that has so doggedly resisted domination down through the centuries.

And it quotes poetry in the footnotes and sometimes in the text itself. What more could you want?

 

*In case the tone of this statement is misunderstood, let me clarify: I don’t hate the English.