Some Elements of Truth in the Short Stories of Somerville and Ross: An Appreciation

-IC 16 SOME ELEMENTS OF TRUTH IN THE SHORT STORIES OF SOMERVILLE AND ROSS: AN APPRECIATION By Harold Orel University of Kansas The thirty-four stories of Somerville and Ross have been reprinted in one volume under an omnibus title, The Irish R. M. and his Experiences (1928). For three generations the authors have been censured for adopting wholeheartedly and uncritically the prejudices of the Ascendancy class (to which, indeed, Somerville and Ross belonged), but the fact that their narratives bubbled over with good cheer, and had little or nothing bad to say about the English who were grinding down the Irish remorselessly in everybody else's fictions, does not change the bases of their continuing appeal. The accusation deserves re-examination, nevertheless. Most of the historians of Irish literature who omit E. OE. Somerville and Martin Ross from consideration—for example, Herbert Howarth's The Irish Writers I Literature and Nationalism 1880-1940 (1958) has no index-entry for two of the most popular writers of the period he is considering—forget (or perhaps are ignorant of the fact) that Major Sinclair Yeates, the Resident Magistrate who tells all the stories in the first person, says that he is Irish himself. Major Yeates—educated at Sandhurst—has seen service in India, and is in his middle 30s when we first meet him; the time covered by the stories runs from shortly before the Boer War to a few years following the Great War, in other words, from the last of his bachelor days to at least the ninth birthday of his son. It is true, of course, that Major Yeates is seldom wholly absorbed by the riotous events that take place in a Petty Sessions Court in southwestern Ireland. If Somerville and Ross had so chosen, they could have alluded more directly to the major events affecting Ireland between 1890 and 1920. Florence McCarthy Knox, or Flurry, Major Yeates's landlord and perhaps the most picturesque single character of the entire series, goes off to serve with the Irish Yeomanry during the South African War, but neither while fighting overseas nor after he returns to his "Black Protestant" tribe do we hear the slightest hint of a moral stance taken toward that particular conflict. Home Rule, so far as we can tell, is not an issue Major Yeates wants to think about. The one casual mention it receives is somewhat like thunder heard on a distant horizon; it is, at any rate, a long way from Shreelane, the Major's home, and from Skebawn, the nearby town. Indeed, if it were not for the Major's wife— Philippa—who has a lively sympathy for Irish problems, and who even tries to learn the Irish language from the National schoolmaster, we would not know that the Celtic Movement has infiltrated to this remote corner of Ireland. "My own 17 Orel: Somerville and Ross attitude with regard to the Celtic movement," the Major writes in "The Last Day of Shraft," "was sympathetic, but a brief inspection of the grammar convinced me that my sympathies would not survive the strain of tripthongs, eclipsed consonants, and synthetic verbs, and that I should do well to refrain from embittering my declining years by an impotent and humiliating pursuit of the most elusive of pronunciations." The Major does not demur when Joseph Francis M'Cabe, in "The Shooting of Shinroe," points out that the English are different from the Irish because they like to arrange things. But it is not clear that "arranging" things improves anybody's temper, or contributes to the good life. There is a logic inherent in the chaos of Irish life. In "The Friend of her Youth," the point is made that signposts do not exist in this remote corner of the world: "The residents, very reasonably, consider them to be superfluous, even ridiculous, in view of the fact that everyone knows the way, and as for strangers, 'haven't they tongues in their heads as well as another?' It all tends to conversation and an increased knowledge of human nature." Who can gainsay the conclusion? The English need to be educated, since they know so little about Ireland. One of...