Mad Grandeur
MAD GRANDEUR $2.75 By LIPPINCOTT
THE title of this book is taken from one of the author’s poems: —
It surely cannot be that I, alone of men, remember
The old mad grandeur and the days of glory gone to waste.
The old mad grandeur and the days of glory gone to waste.
The days are those of Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century, and the glory is that of the aristocratic civilization of the great homes of Ireland which was later to work so deeply on the imagination of Yeats, and the spirit of ‘the old heroic sons of the immemorial warrior land,’ the patriots of all classes and callings who died so gallantly and defiantly in rebellion against the English. It is a tale of heroisms and hatreds, of the finenesses and follies of the aristocrats and the miseries and rages of the peasantry, centring in the story of Hyacinth Martyn-Lynch of Galway, who lives through the destruction of his house and the laying waste of his estate, and sets forth at the end with his wife and his race horses for a new life in Virginia.
But the characters are secondary to the picture of the times and the descriptions of individual scenes. It was a full-blooded, brutal age, and Gogarty does not prettify it. The picture of the boxing match, or that of the Dublin crowd playing football with the head of a man who has just been hanged, are strong meat; but no less well told is the story of the horse race at The Curragh, or the tragicomedy of an aristocratic duel. ‘The Toucher was a born storyteller, alter the tradition of the Dublin teller of tales,’ says the author of one of his Irish types, and Gogarty himself is in the same tradition.
E.D.