Lynd / Mcmahon Galway Of The Races

Selected Essays
1. Auflage 1990
ISBN: 978-1-84351-374-2
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 296 Seiten

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lynd, Robert

Mcmahon, Sean

Leseproben

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 en route 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 News Letter (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’s Royal 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....