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Available with prior consent of the CELT programme for purposes of academic research and teaching only. CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts The electronic text represents the edited version. Editorial footnotes are included using The text has been checked and proof-read twice. The electronic text represents the edited text. Direct speech is rendered Soft hyphens are silently removed. When a hyphenated word (hard or soft) crosses a page-break or line-break, the page-break and line-break are marked after the completion of the hyphenated word. There are no dates. Names of persons are tagged. This essay showcases Sheehan's talents as a writer and philosopher at their best. From considering the poetry of Robert Browning, through a discussion on Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, to delineating their optimism or pessimism through a discussion of their outlooks in the world, Sheehan presents a case for looking at the world through the lenses of writers and philosophers. However, he does not satisfy himself from considering theoretical issues alone; as he says, he will Throughout much of his writings, and indeed in most of his novels, Sheehan exhibits a tension between the progressive and conservative. The first of his Sheehan's reference to the idea that science and theology were in conflict was regarded as offensive by many learned Catholics. There was an implied irrationality to the doctrines of the Church. However Sheehan did not argue this at all; in fact, quite the opposite. In his essay The second of his In the article, Sheehan outlines the condemnations of the Instrumentary model: Sheehan concludes, therefore, that Finally, Sheehan turns to politics. The spirit of the Parnell split of 1890-91 infuses the thought of the In conclusion, Sheehan makes the case for seeing the current state of science, education and politics from a pessimistic (that is, conservative but revolutionary) viewpoint: The clever agent of a circus-troupe — sent in advance with bills and flaming posters, to excite the curiosity of the young, and it may be, of the old — generally has some latent charm hidden away under some obscure and unknown phrase, to stimulate all the more the curiosity of his future clients, and assure himself of their sixpences. Somewhat in the same way I was greatly tempted to call this paper by some mysterious name, so that, if the reader did not turn to it for the writer's sake, he might do so through that universal and insatiable little vice — curiosity. And I had no trouble in finding such a phrase: for as Now, it happens, as she goes along, four distinct groups of persons, unseen by her — four groups, who are contemplating
Now, the burden of her song: —
is the burden of all The same spirit pervades all his poems. Where others spell failure, despair, despondency, In strange contradiction to all this, is the melancholy, the despair, the pessimism that is the key-note of all other philosophers and poets. And, as I have here introduced a new word, let me define it, or rather let me define my contradictories. Optimism is the theory that, It runs like a black warp through all I think I could forgive this in the philosophers. But how can you pardon it in the poets — the world's singers and prophets? What a frightful deordination it is, that they, whose music should lift up the weary heart of humanity, sing but to depress it, and bring into the lives of men not the songs of gladness and hope,
but how can you forgive him for this:—
And if you protest and say: He rose above all that, even in that poem from which you have quoted (come down from the Olympians for a moment, and challenge the man in the street.
(p. 45) Considerations of the march of technology (even if a little far-fetched, even from a twenty-first century perspective), education, and social progression make up the remainder of the essay.debates
between optimism and pessimism in daily life
concerns science. In the Ireland of Sheehan's time, science was treated with mistrust and adverse scepticism: being associated with Protestantism, agnosticism, and foreign influence. During his early career, though, Sheehan seems to have had a positive outlook towards science and how it could advance human behaviour. For example, he gave a lecture to the inimical to the Christian faith.
The God's in his heaven/And all's right with the world
.
queen of all the sciences
— therefore any potential conflict between branches of that knowledge would result in the position of theology being under serious threat. Thus, with a possible tension between progressives and conservatives over the progression of scientific discoveries in the offing, the Church must be forearmed in countering this.debates
concerns education in Ireland. Like many other countries in Europe, Ireland (even within the confines of the British state) at this time faced economic and social challenges which came as a consequence of the rapid industrial growth in countries such as Germany and the USA during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. New developments in social provision — such as improved housing, welfare and health — also had an effect on the perception of education, creating a movement towards so-called New Education.
Analysts of the German economic miracle
(which recurred after the Second World War) pointed to the significant contribution of reforms in technical and higher education as the driving force. This was contrasted with the stark complacency and falling capacity of the British (including Irish) economy. The reason for this faltering economy was, it was reasoned, the narrow curriculum and prescribed methods provided for by the Instrumentary Education.
The New Educationalists rejected this model of education as placing a premium on rote learning, passivity, examination performance and payment [of teachers] by results
.Your systems of education are a mockery, a delusion, and a snare. You cram for examinations, as turkeys are crammed for Christmas: and your boys and girls are consequently suffering from intellectual plethora and indigestion, resulting in mental atrophy and paralysis.
(p. 48) A lack of proper material training, a poor grasp of the basics in many subjects, and confusion were the hallmarks of many who passed through the Intermediate Education in Ireland: He [the graduate, for it is invariably a male] will talk of Homer, and believe that Troy was in North America; he will tell you that Mount Parnassus was in Ireland, and that the Nile flows into St George's Channel; that Caesar was killed at Clontarf, and that the battle of the Pyramids was won by Brian Boru.
(p. 49) Sheehan is perhaps closer to the pessimistic argument on education, as this passage shows: These were the times when Irishmen knew well what they did know, when every Irishman knew three languages perfectly, Voster from cover to cover, the six books of Euclid, the science of mensuration — how to season a hurley for the Sunday game, and how to polish the pike-head for the muster in the valley, beside the singing river, at the rising of the moon.
(p. 49) This prefigures the scene in Sheehan's final novel the boys could not bear such application, and we have no time.
And later the master concludes: With twenty-three subjects to teach, and four hours secular instruction each day, we cannot think out problems, as if we were chess-players.
Any system of education is a dismal failure that does not supply the means towards the end [...] the end of education is to fit pupils for the spheres they shall occupy in life [...] the education of your children should be a literary education, by accident, but a technical education by necessity.
(p. 49) The rising numbers in the professional classes which the Irish education system to this time produced concerned Sheehan and his contemporaries. Rising numbers of clerks, secretaries, teachers, etc.
left cities such as Dublin and Cork decadent, devoid of business men and skilled artisans
. In contrast, Belfast (a half-Scotch, half-American city
) was advancing by leaps and bounds
. (p. 50) The undertones of Protestantism playing a key role in the development of Belfast, and the corollary that Catholicism led to a decline in other Irish cities, is evident here, in an echo of the future analysis of Max Weber.political pessimist
, who argues: The country gone to the dogs — Ireland once more on the dissecting table — the spirit of faction dominant — the world laughing at us — the country flung back fifty years, etc. etc.
(p. 50) The optimist (presumably an Anti-Parnellite) rebuts: We don't want mechanical unity. Better Ireland free, than Ireland united.
(p. 50) In this Sheehan echoes the views of fellow Cork man Tim Healy, who would publish a polemic entitled Better one sharp struggle, though it end in failure, than the ignoble fate of those who stand up with folded arms, and witness the eternal tragedy that is going on around them.
(p. 51) However, there are a number of reservations in this. And in quoting Browning at the end, Sheehan perhaps makes his point clearer than he possibly could in prose: All service ranks the same with God — With God, whose puppets, best or worst, Are we; there is no last, nor first.
Pippa passes.
Not to keep you too long on the tenter-hooks of expectation, let me say at once that Pippa is a little Italian girl, working in a silk factory, in Asolo, and Pippa has got a holiday. It is a rare event; and she is determined to enjoy it to the uttermost. She will not squander a wavelet
of it; no, not one mite of her twelve hours' treasure.
Now, Pippa, like all Italians, can sing; and she goes around the vine-clad hills, and down the singing valleys, with a carol on her lips, and lightness in her heart; and the burden of her song is this: —
All's right with the world.
This note runs through all his poems. In nature, in man, in science, in social life — everywhere there is either some good, or some tendency towards final good. He will not see gloom anywhere; and should a passing cloud darken his sunlight, he looks only at the silver lining. You remember the melancholy of all that is, is right,
that it is a glorious world, full of all fine possibilities; and that mankind is ever moving onward, onward, to the goal of perfect happiness. Pessimism, on the other hand, is the sad and terrible doctrine, that life is, at best, a miserable business to be terminated as soon as possible by annihilation, that all this thing, called progress, is really retrogression, and that the sooner it is all over the better. Of course, this dismal teaching was known to the philosophers of old; but in our century, it has permeated all literature, the poem, the novel, the historical work, the treatise on philosophy; and its chief apostles were England consists,
he says, of thirty million people — mostly fools.
And such expressions as everlasting falsities and negations, want of verity in public men, windbags, and all the rest of the intolerable coarseness of a poor diseased mind, which the world will have us believe was a philosophic one, force themselves on you at every page, and make you believe at last that if ever there was a sham philosopher, it was It is better to fight for the good than rail at the ill; I have felt with my native land. I am one with my kind; I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assigned
— yet he retracted again in his extreme old age, and passed his final sentence of eternal reprobation against humanity in the very last extended poem which he wrote.
The same is true in even a more intense sense of a still more delicate and refined nature —
and so on, through pages of most musical, most melancholy
verse.
Of course I have not quoted
All the valleys of the Meuse and Moselle are sullied with factory smoke and blasting powder.
The Bay of Amalfi and the shore of Posilippo are defiled by cannon foundries.
All the Ardennes are scorched and soiled and sickened with stench of smoke and suffocating slag.
The Peak country and the Derwent vales are being scarred and charred for railway lines, mines, and factories.
What has been done to Venice is such outrage, that it might wake
The finest torrent in Scotland is about to be deviated from its course and used for aluminium works.
The fumes of these aluminium works will, when they are in full blast, emit hydrofluoric acid gas which will destroy all the vegetation on Loch Ness for miles.
The lakes of Maggiore, of Como, and Garda, are all being defiled by factories and steam-engines. Thirlmere and Loch Katrine have been violated; and all the other English and Scotch lakes will be similarly ravaged. Fucina has been dried up as a speculation, and Thrasymene has been threatened. The Rhone is dammed up, and tapped, and tortured, until all its rich alluvial deposits are lost to the soil of Provence.
So says Ouida
in the
And so the litany of despair goes on. In science, in literature, in the relations of great powers towards each other, in the impending and inevitable cataclysm that will rend Europe from the Ural mountains to the Atlantic seaboard, in the total absence of honour and sincerity amongst nations as among individuals, in the new ideas that are being advanced about social, parental and marital relations, in the lust of the rich for more wealth, which is so insatiable, in the subterranean thunders that herald a terrible revolution amongst the working classes — above all, in the ever growing indifference to religion in protestant lands, and the substitution of some new code of ethics for the eternal gospel of Christ: in all these things the prophets of despair, — and they are legion — forecast a future, pregnant with possibilities that may not be imagined, and full of doubt and gloom that should make sick at heart anyone who thought well of his race, or yet entertained a lingering regard for a humanity that appears to be bent on destruction. Where now is little Pippa?—
Where is the great optimist poet who sings: —
You will ask however, very naturally here, where is the point for discussion: what is your thesis, which we are to support or contradict? It is simple, apparently, a very easy question for solution; yet I venture to say, that you never discussed a question in this hall, which is so many-sided, or which leaves the decision so uncertain. The thesis is:—
The optimistic, the hopeful view of the world and humanity, is the view that commends itself to us, as fraught with the larger and higher possibilities for our race.
The contradictory thesis is:—
The pessimists are the thinkers that really, and in very deed, by their criticism, their dissatisfaction, their sublime restlessness, are pushing on the race towards the very perfection in which they do not believe.
But, before you argue the question, it may well be asked what practical bearing has such a discussion on daily life, or the real progress of the race. It would be unkind in us, who owe so much to our poets and philosophers, to ask what influence do they exercise on the first movements and the generic ideas which are the wellsprings of all human actions. There are thinkers who trace every resolution, progressive or reactionary, to our sages of the attic and the closet, on the theory: Give me the making of a nation's ballads, and I will give you the making of a nation's laws. But, apart from all that, does not this vital question enter into our daily life, colouring all our ideas, and giving a bias towards all our emotions and actions? You will say: But we never have met your optimists and pessimists in daily life.
Have you not? Let me come down from the Olympians for a moment, and challenge the man in the street.
When you are down below zero in spirits, unable to meet that little bill at the bank, with your sick child at home — when you walk under dripping December skies, your hands stuck deep in your pockets, a picture of misery and despair, do you know the man, that comes up with a smile, slaps you on the back till you gasp for breath, shouts at you to cheer up — that the banker will be considerate, that your child's sickness is a trifle, that the sun is
Do you know the man, who tells you just as you are starting on that picnic in the middle of June, with high hopes and presages of the good time you are going to have, that it will rain cats and dogs before twelve o'clock, that you will eat your muddy sandwiches and watery pies under dripping umbrellas, and that you need take no water to dilute Jameson, Heaven will supply it by the gallon? There's your social pessimist.
Do you know the man that buttonholes you on the street, when you are rushing for a train, asks you how many miles to Sirius, and would trouble you to calculate how long an express train (just coming in to your station) at 45 miles an hour would take to reach the nearest fixed star? Do you recognise the same idiot, who asks you how many microbes there are in a spoonful of milk; and how many will there be if you leave it standing for twenty-four hours in a temperature of 77 Fahrenheit? Do you remember your delight, when he informed you that you have 24,176,348 microbes waltzing around your mouth, and that is only the advance guard, lying in ambush for the countless legions that you swallow every time you sit down to a meal, for that innocent spoonful of milk contains 10,548,000 microbes, and in twenty-four hours, if you have the courage to swallow it, you will add to the population of your interior 17,402,000,000 of the same fertile and interesting subjects? Is it not the same individual who informs you that early in the 20th century, you can carry all your meals in your waistcoat pocket — breakfast, luncheon, dinner and supper; and that, when you wish to breakfast, you just take out a capsule, as you now take a pinch of snuff, and presto, here is the concentrated essence of a beefsteak, two rashers of bacon, two poached eggs, two cups of tea, and several cuts of toast? And, when you invite your friend to dine, no more courses, no more waiters, no more napkins, nor knives and forks, nor flowers, nor glass, nor silver — no toasts, no after-dinner speeches! You touch an electric button, and lo! you have a delicious heat, and a soft lambent light playing around the room; you take out your silver box, tap it, ask your friend to take a pill, and — he has done, in a moment and in a simple way, all that we do through the long hours and exquisite tortures of an eleven course dinner
But don't you know that man that damns science, wishes back the good old times when it took four days to go to Dublin, dilates on the morning coaches sick man
in Constantinople. Don't you know him — the scientific pessimist?
And the educational optimist — with his piles of statistics about the Intermediate Examinations — 5,340 boys and girls passing in Botany, Mineralogy, Metallurgy, Trigonometry, Physiology, Differential and Integral Calculus, Latin, Greek, Italian, German, French, Gaelic, etc. Ah! my dear sir, what advantages young people have now that we never enjoyed! And what a glorious future lies before our country, when these young people grow to manhood and womanhood, and form the commercial and professional classes — the backbone of the country! Educate ! educate! educate! Take your stand amongst the nations of the earth, and sweep away the curse of illiteracy. We are doing it. In Primary, Intermediate, and very soon in University Education, we will come into line with the best intellects of England, Germany, and America; and then the rest is easy. Ireland's future is assured!
But here suddenly as the stream of optimistic eloquence flows on, a big block is flung across it by the no less fervid, but denunciatory eloquence of the pessimist: —
Education! there's no such thing in Ireland! There are not ten educated men in Ireland from Malin Head to Cape Clear. Your systems of education are a mockery, a delusion, and a snare. You cram for examinations, as turkeys are crammed for Christmas: and your boys and girls are consequently suffering from intellectual plethora and indigestion, resulting in mental atrophy and paralysis. Take any of your gold medallists or exhibitioners three months after examination; and he cannot translate a line or sentence in the very books in which he passed with glowing colours. And if
There is your educational pessimist. Who does not know the political pessimist?
The country gone to the dogs — Ireland once more on the dissecting table — the spirit of faction dominant — the world laughing at us — the country flung back fifty years, etc., etc.
It's all well, if he does not quote poetry, and tell us: —
Banished for ever.
Who does not know him, particularly in these latter days when hardly a rift appears in an ever ominous and darkening sky?
But, is there not a political optimist, who tells you to cheer up? The darkest hour is just before the dawn. We don't want mechanical unity. Better Ireland free, than Ireland united. Woe is me!
Here, Sheehan alludes to Lord Byron's poem '
I have now drawn portraits of these two classes, into which,
We feel a powerful attraction towards these bright sunny souls, who hold their heads aloft, with an eternal Can't you let well alone?
Aren't we just as well where we are?
What was good enough for our fathers, is it not quite good enough for us?
etc., etc. And is there not something inspiring ever in the despairful, yet lofty dissatisfaction which protests: Certainly not! Everything is not right, in your stagnancy and self-possession. You must rise up, and onwards.
Troublesome fellows, dangerous fellows, revolutionaries,
says the optimist, these fellows will upset all decent society, ruin our digestions, bring down our stocks and shares, and scatter to the winds all our dreams of present and possible happiness.
No matter,
says the pessimist, anything is better than to live a lie. Come, you sleek hypocrite, and look at the world. Here, in the midst of your civilisation, human beings are rotting in misery and hunger, whilst their souls are in the grasp of the Evil One. Can you sit down to your comfortable dinner and know that thousands of your fellow beings are starving? In want and ignorance, in sin and sorrow, half mankind live out their weary
Yes! but you say you cannot correct it?
says the optimist. Where's the use in beating the air?
Where indeed? And so the eternal discussion goes on: the one side maintaining that it is best to let well alone, and enjoy life as best you can — the other, that the progress of the race is due to the sublime dissatisfaction, the eternal restlessness, issuing in healthy or unhealthy revolution. For out of the black smoke cometh flame,
say they; and out of the brooding thunder-cloud the lightning that breaks the burden of the storm; and from the hot hearts of angry men the thoughts that shape themselves into burning words. And from the words come deeds, fraught with the germs of all the great things, and all the noble things, and all the inspirement, that drew man from the beast, and pushed him ever higher and higher, until now he can see in the future that looms before him —
What?
says the optimist.
And he must acknowledge with bent head and faltering tongue that all his visions and dreams, all the vivid splendours of his hopes and fancy, are blotted out, like a shower of fireworks on a black, frowning sky, on which is written in lurid lights one word, Despair!
Meanwhile Pippa, tired out, lies down to rest.