10

Canon Patrick A. Sheehan, The Graves at Kilmorna (1913)

In Canon Sheehan’s last completed novel The Graves at Kilmorna, set in Tipperary and Cork in the years around the Fenian rising of 1867, Halpin, a Fenian village schoolmaster, sees that the growing materialism of modern Ireland can only be countered by heroic self-sacrifice and violence. The country is becoming indifferent to everything but ‘bread and cheese’ and needs ‘blood-letting a little’. The Fenian rebels are not so much soldiers as ‘preachers, prophets and martyrs’. Their message is to be not principally in words but rather in the form of heroic acts.1

The hero, Myles Cogan, does time in solitary for rebellion against the Crown and returns to Ireland from prison in time to see the country in the middle of the Land War of 1879–81. Amid the greed for land, there is no room for Fenian idealism, and Cogan dreams of an Ireland preserved from the materialism of other nations. An honest man, he cannot be a successful businessman in this degenerate modern world; his rivals outstrip him by means which the writer gives us to understand are unfair and dishonest. Cogan sees that democracy brings with it cultural and moral decay; democracy will inevitably lead to socialism, uniformity and cosmopolitanism. In his despair, he is comforted by a visionary monk who prophesies that Ireland will become industrialised and prosperous in the future and will inevitably undergo moral degeneracy in the process; the beloved land will be polluted by industry. Eventually the Irish will become disgusted with themselves and will revert to the ancient Irish anti-materialist and monastic ideal admired by people like Geoffrey Keating in the early seventeenth century. Myles stands for election and is killed by a stone thrown by a drunken activist while on the hustings.2 The book was never out of print in Ireland and Irish-America for half a century after Sheehan’s death in 1913. As late as the 1950s, it was serialised for children on Radio Éireann. As an early biographer remarked, ‘There were not a few who held that The Graves at Kilmorna was the bible of Sinn Fein.’3

Patrick Sheehan was born in Mallow, County Cork, in 1852. His parents died in 1863–64, leaving him an orphan and the ward of the parish priest of St Mary’s; he was surrounded by the world of priests all his life. His best friend as a child was William O’Brien, later to become a well-known nationalist politician who urged a conciliatory line toward unionists in the 1900s. As priest and patriot together, or perhaps as two bright and energetic Corkmen, Sheehan and O’Brien became life-long allies. Sheehan was to become a secular priest, having his vocation awakened by encountering a young seminarian from Maynooth and experiencing an adolescent feeling of hero worship. He was fascinated by the glamorous cloak and general costume of the young man. He was a dreamy boy, much given to reading but alert to the political life around him, particularly the growing popularity of Fenian insurrectionism.4 He was ordained in 1875 and spent some time in parishes in England and various parts of Cork, before becoming parish priest of Doneraile, County Cork, in 1895. He became a canon in 1903 and died ten years later in 1913. Sheehan made quite a reputation for himself in his later years as an essayist and novelist, writing tales of Irish Catholic and rural life of a kind that appealed to the popular taste of a newly educated and literate Irish Catholic and English-speaking public. He started writing in earnest around 1888.5 Between 1895 and 1913, he published ten novels and several works of religious and philosophical thought.

Several prominent themes run through his writings. One is a fervent Catholic piety, often mixed with a horror of the emerging urban, secular English-language world that he saw around him; a world of scepticism and secularism that had triumphed in England and which he saw as threatening his beloved Catholic Ireland. Another theme is an equally fervent Irish nationalism, sometimes taking the form of a sympathy for, if not always agreement with, the passions that lay behind the romantic nationalism of the Fenian movement, later normally referred to as the Irish Republican Brotherhood or IRB.6 A further theme was a firm belief in the duty of the Catholic priests of Ireland to lead the Catholic people, not just as spiritual guides, but in effect as political and social leaders of the community. A last major feature of his writing was a wish to reconcile the chronic divide between landlord and tenant, typically by means of achieving the religious conversion of the former.

Besides his literary activities, Sheehan attempted to put his ideas on leadership into effect, becoming a very successful organiser of his parish in Doneraile. He helped set up little factories and commercial concerns to keep the young of the parish at home, with particular emphasis on discouraging the emigration of young women from the villages to the big towns of Ireland, Britain and America. In this he was something of a forerunner of later priestly leaders, a more recent example being Father James McDyer of Glencolumbkille, County Donegal, who similarly did parish work in England before embarking on his well-known experiment in village-building in his native county during the late 1960s.

Sheehan’s first novel, Geoffrey Austin: Student was written quite late in his life, in 1895, and published anonymously apparently because of the general distrust of publication that ran through much clerical culture in the Ireland of that time.7 His fear of censure was not totally unfounded; around the same time, his contemporary, Father Walter McDonald of the Dunboyne Establishment, was to get into hot water with the bishops for publishing a philosophical treatise entitled Motion. He was forced to go around Dublin and buy up copies of his own book and burn them because of some fear of possible heresy.8 While, Geoffrey Austin did receive some Catholic hostility, as it seemed to contain an anonymous attack on Catholic education, its sequel, The Triumph of Failure, which narrates the further progress of Austin, got a friendlier reception.9 Unlike McDonald, Sheehan suffered no humiliation and his works became very popular, remaining staple favourites of Irish Catholic readers in the British Isles and the United States for two generations after his death.

Geoffrey Austin is evidently partially autobiographical; the familiar theme of horror at the emergent secular world gripping the mind of its young protagonist, a Catholic student who spends some time in London, very evidently seen as the Great Wen and centre of urban evil. Austin is introduced by a genial German teacher to the wonders of German romantic thought, in particular the writings of Schiller and Novalis. In The Triumph of Failure, published five years later, Austin lives in Dublin as a poor man and comes under the influence of Charles Travers, who is leading a religious revival. Travers is destroyed by powerful people using dishonest means, and Travers dies. However, his heroic failure sparks a spiritual awakening in Austin, who eventually becomes a monk. The title of this book became also the title of Ruth Dudley Edwards’ classic study of Pearse, the title being suggested by her mother, Sheila Edwards, wife of Professor Robert Dudley Edwards of UCD. Mrs Edwards evidently saw the Sheehan connection. Strangely, there is no further reference to Sheehan or his novel in the book.10

Like many other priests in Ireland at the time, Sheehan was appalled at the character of both the popular and the intellectual literature that was being churned out by the London printing presses and was pouring into Ireland. Unlike some extremists in the Gaelic League, he did not propose the killing off of the English language in Ireland and its replacement by Irish, seen as a more Catholic language than English. English was, after all, the language of a highly successful but overwhelmingly Protestant civilisation. Instead he proposed that ‘Christian idealism’ be tried in Irish English-language literature instead, and that this cultural experiment would be tried in Ireland as a means of counteracting English post-Christian thought. He was not very optimistic about success, and felt that Ireland had suffered a great moral and cultural degradation due to English cultural influence and the coming of popular and democratic modes of thought, styles, songs and reading:

The literary instinct has died out in Ireland since ’48. Our colleges and universities, with one or two exceptions, are dumb. The art of conversation is as dead as the art of embalming. And a certain unspeakable vulgarism has taken the place of all the grace and courtesy, all the dignity and elegance of the last century.11

Sheehan was much influenced by German romanticism and linked this perceived decay in culture and manners with the general European tendency to desert Christianity; a trend which he saw as stemming from the French Revolution and ultimately, from the Reformation. Materialism was the motivating power behind this process of ‘retreat towards Paganism’. He was willing to see in Irish Catholicism and even in the various reformed versions of Christianity, a potential core of resistance to this apparently diabolical encroachment of modernism and secularism:

The intense devotion, the sweetness, the delicacy, the elevation of thought, that belong to Catholicity are beginning to pall on a world that is every day becoming more egotistic, more selfish, more sensual. But to all pure and lofty minds … in every one of the dissolving creeds that spring from the fatal Reformation, the divine and holy spirit which breathes through the testaments of Christianity, will still appeal 12

Like many other Irish provincial intellectuals in the period between the Famine and the end of de Valera’s isolationism in the 1950s, Sheehan felt isolated, even lonely. Francis MacManus described a similar set of emotions vividly, writing a generation later in an account of Sheehan’s correspondence in 1910 with his friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes of the US Supreme Court:

‘The great want of my life is lack of intellectual intercourse; and your letters are a stimulus that drives me from the superficialities of daily life into depths of thought where I have no temptation otherwise to plunge …’ … It was not mere courtesy to his distinguished friend. It was the controlled cry of loneliness in an ageing man who could deal with all the frustrating powers only in the privacy of his study and on paper. ‘The infirmities of age are creeping down on myself,’ he wrote, ‘and I am becoming more home-tied every day, working on and trying to get in as much useful travail as I can before the night falls.’ … The priest-citizen would show, ‘that there are no invincible antagonisms amongst the peoples who make up the commonwealth of Ireland, no mutual repugnances that may not be removed by a freer and kindlier intercourse with each other.’13

Toward the end of his life, which coincided with the rise of the Gaelic League, the failure of constitutional politics in Ireland and the rise of military volunteering, Sheehan began to see a connection between the ideology of anti-materialism and the cult of violence which was growing stronger in Ireland, much as it was elsewhere in Europe.

Sheehan saw the priests as the main line of defence against materialism and neo-paganism. He also counted heavily on the womenfolk, as Irish women were more virtuous and spiritual than their English sisters. He recounts with evident approval and hope an anecdote of a lady and her two daughters who visit the National Gallery in Dublin, evidently for the first time, ‘with that eager look which people assume when they expect something delightful’. However, when they see the classical nude statuary, they seem ‘transfixed themselves, so tense are their surprise and horror’. The three rush out of the Gallery ‘into the open air’.14 Sheehan certainly valued innocence, an innocence he seems to have shared; he was apparently unaware that his great friend Holmes was having an affair with the wife of the revered landlord of Doneraile.

The weak point in the Catholic defences, he felt, was a menace within the gates. This was the growth of a new breed of semi-educated young men who, in Ireland as elsewhere, were looking for a place for themselves in the scheme of things and were suffering certain characteristic frustrations. Many of these would become the ‘educated unemployed’ of the future, he warned, writing in 1903–04. These young men were commonly discriminated against by employers on account of their Catholicism, although Sheehan did not make that specific point about sectarianism in hiring practices; it was difficult for a Catholic to get employment in the banks, the railways or business, and even in the public sector. Various glass ceilings ensured that few Catholics rose beyond subaltern status. Sheehan argued that the young men would not be like their fathers, who accepted clerical restraint; the sons would try to throw these restrictions off. He suggested that their inevitable tendency to complain should be countered by further education and the ‘judicious employment’ of some of them. The young men (and some of the women) were showing worrying tendencies of paying attention to non-Catholic or even anti-Catholic writers. He saw George Moore as a particularly dangerous influence. In 1903–04 Sheehan urged the student seminarians of Maynooth to ensure that they retained the intellectual leadership of Ireland which they enjoyed; in view of the inevitable anti-clericalism of the laity, the priests would have to retain that intellectual leadership for half a century.15

Canon Sheehan’s own life experience both as a child and as an older man suggested the theme of what became his best-known and liked book, My New Curate, published in 1899.16 This rather sentimental work portrays the priest as an old man; a benign patriarchal father of his parish who welcomes a young and inexperienced curate parachuted in on him unexpectedly. The young man introduces new practices and increases devotionalism; the young men go to him for confession and political advice. The new curate also tries to improve local industry in the form of fisheries and shirt-making. A strike wrecks the shirt factory and a trawler sinks, leaving the curate legally responsible for the financial losses. However, the village rallies to him, the local landlord converts to Catholicism, a local saint is created, and all ends happily. In a way, the book can be seen as the old Sheehan interviewing, supervising and advising his younger self, being his own father, befriending his admirable but occasionally wayward son; a father he scarcely knew in real life. Old Father Hanrahan (‘Old Daddy Dan’) reflects on his new curate:

There is nothing human that does not interest me. All the waywardness of humanity provokes a smile; there is no wickedness so great that I cannot pity; no folly that I cannot condone; patient to wait for the unravelling of the skein of life till the great Creator willeth, meanwhile looking at all things sub specie aeternitatis, and ever finding new food for humility in the barrenness of my own life. But it has been a singular intellectual revival for me to feel all my old principles and thoughts shadowing themselves clearer and clearer on the negatives of memory where the sunflames of youth imprinted them, and from which, perhaps, they will be transferred to the tablets that last for eternity. But here God has been very good unto me in sending me this young priest to revive the past. We like to keep our consciousness till we die. I am glad to have been aroused by so sympathetic a spirit from the coma of thirty years. It is quite true that he disturbs, now and again, the comforts of senile lethargy. And sometimes the old Adam will cry out, and sigh for the leaden ages, for he is pursuing with invincible determination his great work of revival in the parish.17

Sheehan was an able writer and a good psychologist. Like all successful psychologists, he understood himself rather well and could generalise from his own interior experience to other people’s. He was obviously better on priests than laypeople, and far better on men than he was on women; women he idealised, demonised and sentimentalised in classic Victorian fashion. How laymen actually made a living seems to have been something of a mystery to him. However, he articulated an ethos which was to become extremely common in the clericalised Ireland of the early twentieth century and which was not without its attractions. Much of the modern revulsion from the commercialised life and the cosmopolitanism of contemporary life is prefigured brilliantly in his writings, as this Irish nineteenth-century country priest tried to come to terms with the English and American commercial and democratic world that was overwhelming the allegedly benign and patriarchal feudalism that he grew up with and came to idealise. Also there is in the books the idea of an eternal repetitiveness of a benign process that should never be interrupted: the Catholic parish as a tiny Platonic polity, led by its priests, united by love against landlord, policeman, bailiff and government. The idea is unreal, but not contemptible.

TG

Notes

1P.A. Sheehan, The Graves at Kilmorna [1913] (Dublin: Phoenix, n.d.), pp.66–8.

2Ibid., pp.268–70, 339–41.

3M.P. Linehan, Canon Sheehan of Doneraile (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1952), p.155. See in general, Ruth Fleischmann, Catholic Nationalism in the Irish Revival: A Study of Canon Sheehan, 1852–1913, (London: Macmillan, 1997).

4Francis MacManus, ‘The Fate of Canon Sheehan’, The Bell, XV, 2 (November 1947), pp.16–26.

5Ibid., p.24.

6Herman J. Heuser, Canon Sheehan of Doneraile (London: Longmans, Green, 1918), passim. Owen McGee, The IRB (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005) is the standard work on the IRB.

7Geoffrey Austin: Student [1895] (Dublin: Phoenix n.d.).

8Walter McDonald, Some Ethical Questions of Peace and War [1919] (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998), pp.xi–xv.

9P.A. Sheehan, The Triumph of Failure [1899] (London and Dublin: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1945).

10Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Triumph of Failure (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1977).

11P.A. Sheehan, Literary Life (Dublin: Phoenix, n.d.). pp.1–34 and passim; quote from p.64.

12P.A. Sheehan, Under the Cedars and the Stars (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1903), p.292. See in general, W.F.P. Stockley, Essays in Irish Biography, (Cork: University Press, 1933), pp.93–130.

13See MacManus, ‘Fate of Canon Sheehan’, pp.25–6.

14See Sheehan, Under the Cedars and the Stars, pp.322–3.

15Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 15 (Jan–June 1904), pp.5–26, at 22–3.

16P.A. Sheehan, My New Curate [1899] (Boston, MA: Marlier, Callanan, 1900).

17Ibid., p.170–1.